the interruption of referentiality_ chow

7/28/2019 The Interruption of Referentiality_ Chow

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Rey Chow

The Interruption of Referentiality:

Poststructuralism and the Conundrum

of Critical Multiculturalism

In the increasingly globalized realm of theoreti-cal discourse, a habitual move may be readily

discerned in critical discussions regarding mar-ginalized groups and non-Western cultures: the

critic makes a gesture toward Western theory,

but only in such a way as to advance the point

that such theory is inadequate, negligent, and

Eurocentric. As a consequence, what legitimates

concern for the particular group, identity, or

ethnic culture under discussion (which for the

purposes of this essay I will simply call X) is itshistorical, cultural, gendered difference, which

becomes, in terms of the theoretical strategies

involved, the basis for the claim of opposition

and resistance. Epistemologically, what is spe-cific to Xthat is, local, history-bound, culturallyuniqueis imagined to pose a certain challenge

to Western theory; hence the frequent adoption

of the vocabulary of contestation, disruption,

critique, and so forth. I refrain from references

to particular authors whose works fall into such

critical patterns because the point is not to show

individuals up for their theoretical shortcomings.

Rather, it would be more productive to delineate

a general picture of the predicament we face

The South Atlantic Quarterly:, Winter .Copyright by Duke University Press.

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collectively as scholars whose intellectual lives have been deeply affected

both by the presence of theory and by the reactions to theory in the past few

decades.

I use the term theoryto mark the paradigm shift introduced by poststruc-turalism, whereby the study of language, literature, and cultural forms be-

comes irrevocably obligated to attend to the semiotic operations involved in

the production of meanings, meanings that can no longer be assumed to

be natural. Obviously there are other types of theories that have had great

impact on large numbers of academic intellectualsone thinks of the cul-

tural writings of the Frankfurt School critics, various forms of historicisms,

or sociological and anthropological theories, for instancebut it is arguably

poststructuralism, with its tenacious attention to the materiality of human

signification, that has generated someof the mostfar-reaching ramificationsfor the ways we approach questions of objectivity and questions of subjec-

tivity alike.

The one indisputable accomplishment of poststructuralist theory in the

past several decades has been its systematic unsettling of the stability of

meaning, its interruption of referentiality. If such meaning had never been

entirely stable even in pretheory days, what poststructuralist theory pro-

vides is a metalanguage in which it (meaning) can now be defined anew

as a repetitive effect produced in the chain of signification in the form of

an exact but illusory correspondence between signifier and signified.While

referentiality as such may continue to exist, for the new metalanguage it

is the movements in the realm of signification that matter, that command

critical interest as the (shifting) basis for meaning. Henceforth, meaningisa term that occurs within scare quotes. With the emphasis on material sig-

nifiers comes the determining function of differenceto be further differ-

entiated as both differing and deferringwhich would from now on take

the place of sameness and identity as the condition for signification. Ferdi-

nand de Saussures summary statementsmay be conveniently recalled here:

In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference

generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but

in language there are only differences without positive terms. Language is aform and not a substance.1 The foregrounding of differencing means that itis no longer possible to speak casually about any anchorage for meaning.

If intelligibility itself is now understood as the effect of a movement of dif-

ferencing, a movement that always involves delays and deferrals, then no

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The Interruption of Referentiality 173

longer can the old-fashioned belief in epistemological groundedness hold.

In its stead the conception of (linguistic) identity becomes structurally de-

fined, with (linguistic) signifiers mutually dependent on one another for the

generation of what makes sense. Rather than being that which follows iden-

tity, difference now precedes identity. It is difference that creates an object

of study.

It is necessary, in any consideration of the vicissitudes of theory, to ac-

knowledge the substantial impact made by poststructuralisms landmark

demotion and refusal of referentiality. The exercise of bracketing referen-

tiality is enormously usefulbecause adherence to referentiality hasoften led

to a conservative clinging to a reality that is presumed to exist, in some un-

changing manner, independently of language and signification.This a priori

real world is, moreover, often given the authority of what authenticates, ofwhat bestows the value of transcendental truth on language and significa-

tion.The dismantling of such a metaphysics of presence is hence most effec-

tive in disciplines in which the presumption of a factographic form of know-

ing has traditionally gone uncontested (as in some practices of history, for

instance), but it is groundbreaking also in areas in which the naturalness of

an object of knowledgesuch as literature, for instancehas seldom been

put into question. By intensifying our awareness of (linguistic) signification

as first and foremost self-referential, poststructuralist theory opens a way forthe ingrained ideological presuppositions behind such practices of knowl-

edge production to be rethought.

From these fundamental revelations of poststructuralism, many critics

have gone on pragmatically to explore differencing and its liberating egali-tarianism in various social and historical contexts. They do so, for instance,

by translating the open-endedness of linguistic signification into thefluidity

of the human subject. When transplanted into the tradition of individual-

ism, significatory differencing quite logically means the multiplication of

selves. Nowadays, what is commonly referred to as identity politics typically

takes as its point of departure the problematizing andcritiquing of essential-

ist notions that are attached to personhood, subjectivity, and identity forma-

tion.2 Such branching off from high theory into democratic investigations

of selfhood (through a thematization of differencing) is in many cases justi-

fiable, but it has also left certain problems intact. In this regard I think it is

important not simply to practice antiessentialist differencing ad infinitum

but also to reconsider such a practice in conjunction withthe rejection of ref-

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erentiality that lies at the origins of poststructuralism. Exactly what is being

thrown out when referentiality is theoretically rejected? I hope the signifi-

cance of this point will become clear as I move through my arguments, for it

bears on what I think is the conundrum in the critical study of marginalized

groups and non-Western cultures today.

To begin, let me briefly revisit the question of how poststructuralist

theory has methodologically radicalized the very production not only of

the subject but also of the notion of an object of study. Albeit discussed

much less frequently these days (simply because objectivity itself, it is as-

sumed, can no longer be assumed), the issues that surround this topic re-

main instructive.

Consider the discipline of literature, for which one ongoing concern on

which poststructuralist theory has helped to shed light is the problem of lit-

erariness, of what is specific to literature. At one level, this is of course pre-

cisely a question about referentiality. What is literature all about? To what

does it refer? What reality does it represent? Old-fashioned though it may

sound, such a preoccupation with literariness has surprising affinities with

the contemporary cultural politics that clusters around identity. Let us re-

trace some of the well-known attempts at approaching this problem.

Marxs and Engelss discussion of literary writing and aesthetic represen-

tation provides a good instance of this because it is contextualized in their

more general concern for social revolution and radical political practice. In

their exchanges with authors seeking advice on writing fiction, Marx andEngels, we remember, made some rather startling statements.3 Albeit theo-

retically forward looking, they were careful to warn these writers against

turning literature into socialist propaganda in which fictional characters

simply become mouthpieces for revolutionary doctrines. The solution of

the problem, writes Engels, must become manifest from the situation and

theaction themselves without being expressly pointedout and. . . theauthor

is not obliged to serve the reader on a platter the future historical resolu-

tion of the social conflicts which he describes. 4 Embedded in these brief

remarks is an intuitive sense that theoretical and literary discourses are dis-

tinguished from each other by an essential articulatory difference, and that

literary discourse, which specializes in indirection, can only become dull

and mediocre should one turn it into a platform for direct proletarian pro-

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nouncements. Even where the subject matter cries out for justice to be done

on some peoples behalf, literary writing, they suggest, tends to accomplish

its task more effectively when it does not explicitly solicit the readers sym-

pathy as such. In literature, the modus operandi is not to speak about some-

thing expressly even when one feels one must, in a manner quite opposite

the clarity and forthrightness of theoretical argumentation. The more the

opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art;5 in

other words, a very different kind of power for producing change is in play.

David Craig summarizes this point succinctly: Surely, if literature affects

action or changes someones life, it is not by handing out a recipe for the

applying but rather by disturbing us emotionally, mentally, because it findsus . . . , so that, after a series of such experiences and along with others that

work with it, we feel an urge to do something or at least to ask ourselvesthe question (the great question put by Chernyshevsky, Lenin, and Silone):

What is to be done?6

What remains illuminating in these discussions is a perception of the

work of indirection that seemed, to Marx and Engels at least, to be the

unique characteristic of literary discourse; this is remarkable especially in

light of their political belief in asserting the necessity to reform and revolu-

tionize society, a belief that, in discursive terms, would be more in line with

direct, straightforward, clear-cut expressionthe very antithesis of their ob-

servations about literary writing. As political theorists, Marx and Engels

nonetheless recognized that literary production could not be reduced to a

mechanical mirroring of some reality out there, and that whatever literature

is about, such referentiality occurs, by definition, in a refracted mannerrather than by straightforward declaration.7

In subsequent debates it was the critics who were overtly concerned with

form (rather than with politics) who would continue the elaboration of this

observation of literature-as-indirection, even though indirection was now

theorized in different terms. For instance, the Russian Formalists effort in

defining the defamiliarizing capacity of art and literatureof arts capacity

for presenting something familiar in such a manner as to call attention to

its artfulness, or its capacity for taking readers by surprise through the

process of de-formationcan in retrospect be understood as an attempt to

identify, perhaps to construct, a kind of rupture and distance from within a

conventional discourse, so that the shock and alienating effect produced can

be described as what is specific to art and literary expression. Such shock

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and alienation, again, are not a matter of direct expression but, rather, of

a sensitively perceived differentialthe more implicitly the differential is

grasped, the greater the effect of artfulness and literarinessso much so

that the art object itself takes on only secondary importance.

In the Anglo-American world the literary-theoretical avant-garde of the

twentieth century was represented by New Criticism, which specializes

in the discernment of a literary works specificity through close reading.

The contradiction between the aim and the practice of New Criticism has

been well noted. Between the nostalgic desire to produce a complete, in-

trinsic reading that would exemplify the literary work as a self-sufficient

world with rules that apply only to itself,8 on the one hand, and the ambigu-

ous open-endedness of meaning that results ironically from such desire-

in-practice, on the other, lies the aporia that becomes, for a deconstructivecritic such as Paul de Man, New Criticisms unwitting self-undoing. De Man

demonstrates this by reintroducing the dimension of temporalityhence

of postponements, deferrals, and belatednessin the process of coming

to terms with literary discourse: The temporal factor, so persistently for-

gotten, should remind us that the form is never anything but a process on

its way to completion. 9 Whereas New Criticism is still invested in a kind

of time-less reading of the work of literature, a reading that circumvents

temporality by the ideological projection of the works organic wholeness,

deconstruction would distinguish its comparable interest in literary speci-

ficity by underscoring the effects of time as manifested through the nega-

tive momentum of language. In de Mans hands, the previous attempts to

get at literatures indirectness culminate in a sophisticated reformulationby way of the originary constitutive role of temporal difference, one that

consistently undermines textual presence and plenitude. If literature is in-

direct, defamiliarizing, ambiguous, ironic, allegorical, and so forthif, in

other words, it is never straightforwardly referentialit is because human

linguistic signification itself is always already mediated by the slow but in-

dismissible labor of temporality.

But the perception of time alone does not necessarily account for the de-

railing of reference. One is reminded of the great humanist literary critic

Erich Auerbach, for instance, for whom the noticeable temporal shifts in

modernist literary representation, shifts he describes with animation and

verve, nonetheless do not challenge the basic idea that there exists some-

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thing common to all of our lives even in the midst of diversities.10 From a

poststructuralist, difference-oriented perspective, this statement from the

end of Auerbachs Mimesis is quite astonishing, particularly in view of thesensitive close readings he has performed:

The more it is exploited, the more the elementary things which our

lives have in common come to light. The more numerous, varied, and

simplethe people are whoappear as subjects of such randommoments,

the more effectively must what they have in common shine forth. In

this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation we cannot but

see to what an extentbelow the surface conflictsthe differences be-

tween mens ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened.

The strata of societies and their different ways of life have become in-

extricably mingled. There are no longer even exotic peoples. A centuryago (in Mrime for example), Corsicans or Spaniards were still exotic;

today theterm would be quite unsuitable forPearlBucks Chinese peas-

ants.11

Inspite of hisgraspof thechangesin literary, representationaltime, refer-

entiality itself is not a problem for Auerbach because he remains convinced

of a universal something called human reality. Mimesis is simply a way of

accessing it; accessibility itself is not an issue.

The contribution made by poststructuralist theory, then, lies not merely

in its articulation of temporality but also in its insistence that time does

not coincide with itself. This recurrent slippage and intrinsic irreconcil-

abilitybetween speaking and writing, between sign and meaning, and be-tween fiction and realityallows deconstructionist critics to assert that de-

construction is a rigorously historical process. As Geoff Bennington writes,

Deconstruction, insofar as it insists on the necessary non-coincidence of

the present with itself, is in fact in some senses the most historical of dis-

courses imaginable.12 For Marian Hobson, the point of deconstruction-as-

history is precisely that identity is never possible and that such impossi-

bility is itself plural: It is trace, track, which makes identity impossible. But

this impossibility is itself plural, not simple. It is not a straight negative

not simple, identical, non-identity. Trace, lack of self-coincidence, is on the

contrary a plurality of impossibilities, a disjunction of negatives.13 If con-

ventional practices of history may be criticized on the basis of a premature

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projection of the referent, deconstructions response is that history resides,

rather, in the permanently self-undermining process of differentiation, a

process that, by the sheer force of its logic, need not have an end in sight.

This potential alliance between the lack of (temporal and ontological) self-

presence and differentiation-as-historicity is one major reason poststruc-

turalism has left such indelible imprints on those areas of knowledge pro-

duction that do not at first seem to have much to do with semiotics or,

for that matter, with the revamping of metalanguages, but that are inti-

mately linked to empirical issues such as culture and group identity. It is

not difficult to see that the basic tenets of structuralist linguistics and semi-

oticsdifference, identity, value, arbitrariness, convention, and systema-ticitycarry within them connotations that have resonances well beyond

the terrain of a narrow sense of language. With the bracketing of the object

of knowledge and the foregrounding of the process of signification, as intro-

duced by poststructuralism, it is inevitable that the certitude of the identi-

ties involvedepistemological, subjective, or collectivecan no longer be

safely taken for granted. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the most

prevalent uses of the poststructuralist metalanguage of differencing is to be

found in areas in which existential identity is most at stake: multicultural-

ism, postcoloniality, and ethnicity.14

If this is the case, how is it that in these areas of study there is currently

also a persistent refrain that non-Western subjects and subject matters are

oppositional and resistant to Western theory? About fifteen to twentyyears ago, even though the same ambivalent gesture toward the West might

have been made, theory itself was not an issue. Nowadays, as can be sur-

mised from journals, conferences, anthologies, and single-author publica-

tions, not only are more trendy topics such as transgender politics, Asian

pop music, Third World urban geography, or cultural translation obligated

to gesture toward one kind of Western theory or another; even the study

of ancient ethnic poems and narratives must, in order to argue the case of

their uniqueness, their beyond-comparison status, somehow demonstrate

an awareness of the background of Western theoretical issues. If all this is

testimony to the hegemony enjoyed by Western theory, why are claims of

resistance and opposition at the same time so adamant?

If the exploration of literary difference was in order to ground literary

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specificitythat is, to define literature as an object with its essential at-

tributes, attributes that make literature definitively unlike anything else

then one of the consequences of such exploration is, ironically, the dissipa-

tion of this object altogether. From the nineteenth-century perception of

its essence (in Marx and Engels) as indirection to the late-twentieth-century

assertion (by deconstructionist critics) of its noncoincidence with itself,

the object of literariness seems to have become theoretically unsustainable

exactlyat the momentof itsconcrete definition: it iswhat it alwaysis not. If

the ongoing efforts to define literary difference have brought to light all that

hasbeen repressed, neglected, or ignored, such efforts have also shown how

literature does not and cannot stop at the mere restoration or redemption

of such difference. Inevitably, difference as such will continue to fragment

and dismantle whatever specificity that may have been established throughit, once again rendering the goal of stable objectification impossible.

Permanent differentiation and permanent impermanence: these are the

key features of poststructuralist theoretical practice as we find it today. The

example of literature has simply demonstrated the Pyrrhic victory of the sci-

entific or social scientific attempt to produce an object of knowledge by way

of differencing. If literariness is that which tends to disappear into some-

thing else at the moment of its being objectified, then literature is, ulti-

mately, a historically mobile, changing relationship (of writing) rather than

a concrete essence. Might this lesson about literariness be extended beyond

the discipline of literature?

Consider now the study ofX, those areas that,as I mentioned at the begin-

ning, often attainvisibilityby gesturing towardand resistingWesterntheoryat the same time. As in the case of literariness, we may set out to define Xasan object with certain attributes. But we already know from the example of

literariness that such an attempt at discovering the specificity of Xwill leadfirst to theprocess of differencing and eventually to the dissipation ofXitselfas a stable referent. Should we then say that, ultimately, Xas such does notexist, that X, like literariness, is a permanently shifting, non-self-identicalrelationship? What might be the implications of proclaiming, let us say, that

African American, Asian American, and gay and lesbian specificities do not

exist? Such proclamations are, to be sure, intolerable to many, but it is per-

haps less because these people really do exist than because the theoreti-

cal claim for their existence is inseparable from the hierarchical politics of

race, class, gender, and ethnicity that structure Western and non-Western

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societies alike. In the face of the practical struggles that go on daily against

different forms of social injustice, it is, for many, unacceptable to declare, in

accordance with poststructuralist theoretical logic, that these versions of Xdo not exist. Yet the alternativethe insistence that they are real, that they

are out there, that their empirical existence is absolutely incontestable, and

that they are thus a core from which to stage resistance to the virtual claims

of high theoryis equally untenable because it is theoretically naive.

The conundrum we face today in the wake of theory may thus be de-

scribed as follows: In their attempts to argue the specificity of their objects

of study, critics of marginalized historical areas often must rhetorically as-

sert their resistance to or distrust of Western theory. But what exactly is the

nature of that which they are resisting and distrusting? As these critics try

to defend the viability of their proposed objects, they are compelled, againsttheir own proclaimed beliefs, to set into motion precisely the poststruc-

turalist operation of differencing, of making essentialist categories of iden-

tity disintegrate. Indeed, differencing is often the very weapon with which

they mount their criticisms of Western theory. While they criticize Western

theory, then, these critics are meanwhile implementing the bracketing of

anchored, referential meanings that constitutes one of contemporary West-

ern theorys most profound influences. Since there is nothing inherent in

the methodological mechanism of structural differentiation that calls for re-

sistance or differentiation at a level beyond the chain of signification, the

objects to which these critics clingin resistanceinevitably dissipate over

time in a manner similar to that in which the object of literariness dissi-

pates. To truly argue for resistance, they would in fact need to go against orabandon altogether the very theoretical premises (of poststructuralist dif-

ferencing) on which they make their criticisms in the first place.15

Put in a different way, the attempt to argue the specificity of Xas such,even as it discredits Western theory, tends to reproduce the very terms

and the very problemsthat once surrounded the theoretical investigation

of literariness. Like literature, X is often constructed (negatively) as whatdefamiliarizes, what departs from conventional expectations, what disrupts

the norm, and so forth, terms that are invested in constructing specificity

by way of differentiation. Like the attempt to define literariness also, the at-

tempt to define Xseems doomed to destroy its own object in the process ofobjectification. More disturbing still, if representation of Xas such is rec-

ognizable in these similar theoretical terms, does it not mean that there is

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no essential difference between X and high theorythat the articulationofX, however historically specific it may be, is somehow already within thetrajectory mapped out by high theory?

This is the juncture at which a rethinking of poststructuralist theory is

in order, not once again by way of temporal differencing but, more sig-

nificantly, by way of reexamining theorys interruption of referentiality. By

bracketing referentiality, separating it from the signified, and making the

signified part of the chain of signification and an effect produced by the play

of signifiers, poststructuralism has devised an epistemological framework

in which what lies outside can be recoded as what is inside. There is hence

no outside to the text. At the same time, however, this also means that post-

structuralismreallydoes notoffer a wayof thinking about anyoutside except

by reprogramming it into part of an ongoing interior (chain) condition.Thisis not exactly the same as saying that poststructuralism is a closed system

of permutations; rather, it is simply that its mechanism of motility, which

provides a set of terms that redefines referentiality effectively as the illu-

sion produced by the play of temporal differences, also tends to preclude

any other way of getting at the outside than by directing it inward. My point,

then, is this: rather than systematicity per se (which was the problem char-

acteristic of structuralism), the problem here is perhaps none other than

temporality rendered as nonpresence.

Although it constitutes what is arguably poststructuralisms most radi-

cal intervention in European thought, the notion of times noncoincidence

with itself may nevertheless have a substantially contrary set of reverbera-

tions once we go beyond the parameters of Europe. Where otherness standsas an empirical and a cultural as well as a theoretical issue, the assertion of

temporal disjunction as such (as an absolute force that structures all signi-

fication) may coincide, or become complicit, with the anthropological prob-

lematic that Johannes Fabian has called, in his well-known phrase, the de-

nial of coevalnessa persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s)of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropo-logical discourse.16 In other words, whereas the insistence on the noncoin-cidence of the present with itself may indeed be a revolutionary charge

within the philosophicaland epistemological terrains from which poststruc-

turalism stems, such an insistence, when seen in light of Europes history

with its colonized others, may turn out to be no more than another cur-

rent of what Fabian calls allochronic discourse, in which other peoples who

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are our contemporaries are discursively confined each to their culture gar-

dens/ethnic ghettos, in the name, precisely, of difference. Be it temporal,

ontological, linguistic, or identitarian, noncoincidence can hardly be con-

sidered groundbreaking in the global circuits of colonialism and imperi-

alism because the non-Western others are already, by definition, classified

as noncoincident, discontinuous, and fundamentally different (from popu-

lations in the West, from the times and languages of Western ethnogra-

phers). To emphasize noncoincidence as such is thus merely to reify and

raise to the level of metalanguage a rather conventional anthropological at-

titude toward the others othernesswhich is often unproblematically up-

held as a factwithout actually confronting the conditions that enable such

assumptions of noncoincidence to stand in the first place. Referring to the

relevance of Fabians work for the study of colonial America, for instance,Carlos Alonso comments on one such manifestation of the (principle of )

noncoincidence inherent to the rhetoric of temporalitythe expression of

amazement: Europes rhetoric of amazement vis--vis America . . . necessi-

tates the ceaseless deferral of total cognitive mastery. But rather than being

deployed in order to maintain an irreducible alterity, the European figura-

tion of the New World as new posited a continuity between itself and the

new territories that made possible European appropriation of the recently

discovered lands while simultaneously affirming their exoticism. 17

Let me push my point one step further: the definition of time as non-

coincidental with itself, I would like to suggest, means that poststructural-

ism ultimately does not offer any viable way of thinking about an actof exclu-

sion except by recoding it as a (passive) condition of exteriority. Once recoded(in the form of an always already), this condition is channeled into an

existing interior in such a manner as to become part of this interiors infi-

nite series of differentiations over time, always open ended and incomplete,

always ready for further differentiation to be sure, yet never again directed

at the primary, originary moment involving the as yet unresolved outside.

At the level of metalanguage, this outside, or what has been banished there,

is none other than referentiality, which must henceforth live the life of the

exiled, the exotic, and the exorcisedthat which is barred once and for all

from entering, from migrating into theinterior of, the chain of signification.

It followsthat when oneis dealing withsexual, cultural, andethnic others,

it is always considered premature in poststructuralist theory to name and

identify such references as such; instead, deconstructions preferred be-

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nevolent gesture is to displace and postpone these others to a utopian, un-

realizable realm, to a spectral dimension whose radicalness lies precisely

in its spectrality, the fact that it cannot materialize in the present. Again,Alonsos observations about the discursive place occupied by America in the

European imagination during the colonial epoch are pointedly on the mark.

From being perceived as novel, he writes, America gradually shifted into the

position of the future:

Almost imperceptibly, the coevalness that the narrative of newness re-

quired was replaced by a narrative paradigm in which America occu-

pied a position offuturityvis--vis the Old World. This transformationfrom novelty to futurity was significant because, among other things,

it created the conditions for a permanent exoticization of the New

Worldthe sort that cannot be undermined or dissolved by actual ex-perience or objective analysis: safely ensconced in an always postponed

future, America could become the object of a ceaselessly regenerating

discourse of mystification and perpetual promise.18

This inability to deal with the other except by temporal displacement re-

turns us to the scenario with which I began this essay. When scholars of

marginalized groupsand non-Western subjects rely on notions of resistance

and opposition (to Western theory) in their attempts to argue the specificity

ofX, they are unwittingly reproducing the epistemological conundrum bywhich the specificity of an object of study is conceived of in terms of a dif-

ferentiala differential, moreover, that has to be included in the chain of

signification in order to be recognized. However, by virtue of its mechanismof postponement and displacement, this kind of logic implies the eventual

dissolution of the object without being able to address how Xpresents notjust a condition (exteriority) that has always already existed but more impor-

tantly an active politics of exclusion and discrimination.Within the bounds

of this logic, the more resistive and oppositional (that is, on the outside)

X is proclaimed to be, the more inevitably it is to lose its specificity (thatis, become incorporated) in the larger framework of the systematic produc-

tion of differences, while the circumstances that make this logic possible

(that is, that enable it to unfold and progress as a self-regulating interior)

remain unchallenged. This is one reason why so many new projects of ar-

ticulating alternative identities, cultures, and group formations often seem

so predictable in the end. Whether the topic under discussion is a particular

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ethnic work or the identity of an ethnic person, what has become predict-

able is precisely the invocation of ambivalence, multiplicity, hybridity,

heterogeneity, disruptiveness, resistance, and the like, and no matter

how new an object of study may appear to be, it is bound to lose its novelty

once theplay of temporal difference is set into motion. Themoves permitted

by the rules of the originary exclusionthe difference that makes the dif-

ference, as it werehave already been exhausted, and critics dealing with

Xcan only repeatedly run up against the incommensurability between theexperience of temporality as self-deconstruction (with its radical theoretical

nuances) and the experience of temporality as allochronism (with its racial-

ist anthropological ramifications).

In sum, contemporary uses of poststructuralist theory have tended to

adopt poststructuralisms solution, differencing, without sufficiently re-flecting on its flip side, its circumvention of exclusion. Yet contemporary

issues of identity and cultural conflict almost invariably involve the politics

of exclusion.Can these mutually incompatible states of affairs be reconciled

witheach other? How canthey be reconciled? Can specificity be imagined in

terms other than a naturalized differential, an automatized discontinuity?

Are there perhaps forms of closure, limits, and references that should not

be prematurely disavowed, because the act of disavowing them inevitably

becomes a self-contradictory move, leading only to a theoretical impasse?

(That is, the act of reprogramming everything as part of an interior inevi-

tably becomes an act to exclude, with what is excluded being, first and fore-

most, the assertion of the violence of exclusion itself.)

The reference that is social injusticeitself a type of differential but adifferential hierarchized with valuecannot be as easily postponed or dis-

placed, because the mechanisms of postponement and displacement do not

by themselves address the hierarchical or discriminatory nature of the differ-

ential involved.As a result, however permanently the issue may be deferred,

the originary differential of inequality will not and cannot go away.The kind

of theoretical mechanism that works by dissolving specificities into differ-

ences is therefore incapable of addressing the concerns implied here, be-

cause there is nothing inherent in such a mechanism that would necessitate

the recognition of the inequality and injustice that may indeed, for lack of

a better term, be out there yet that may not be immediately or entirely

incorporable into the chain of signification. Referentiality, reformulated in

this manner, may in the end require us to accept it precisely as the limit,

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the imperfect, irreducible difference that is not pure difference but differ-

ence thoroughly immersed in and corrupted by the errors and delusions of

history.

For similar reasons, an awareness of historical asymmetries of power, ag-

gression, social antagonism, inequality of representation, and their like can-

not simply be accomplished through an adherence to the nebulous concept

of resistance and opposition. That concept itself is often constituted with

the logic of differentiationof disruption and departurewithin a theo-

retical framework whose success lies precisely in its perennial capacity for

including and absorbing that which is on the outside. Resistance that imag-

ines itself as purely premised on the outside is thus a futile exercise in the

wake of poststructuralist theory. In its stead, it would be more productive

to let referentiality interrupt, to reopen the poststructuralist closure on thisissue, to acknowledge the inevitability of reference even in the most avant-

garde of theoretical undertakings, and to demand a thorough reassessment

of an originary act of repudiation/exclusion in terms that can begin to ad-

dress the scandal of domination and exploitation of one part of mankind

by another. 19

Notes

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, intro. Jonathan Culler, ed. Charles

Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin

(Glasgow: Collins, ), , ; emphases in the original.

The greatly influential work of Judith Butler is exemplary in this regard.

For useful discussions of the problematic of (aesthetic) reflection in Marxist theory, see,

for instance, Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (Lon-

don: Routledge, ), and Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology(London: Verso, ).

For related discussions, see Henri Arvon, Marxist Esthetics, trans. Helen R. Lane, intro.

Fredric Jameson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ); Marxism and Art: Essays Clas-

sic and Contemporary, selected and with historical and critical commentary by Maynard

Solomon (New York: Knopf, ); and Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch,

Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukcs, Aesthetics and Politics, afterword by Fredric Jameson,

trans. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, ), as well as the essays in David Craig, ed.,

Marxists on Literature: An Anthology(New York: Penguin, ).

Friedrich Engels, Letter to Minna Kautsky, in Craig, Marxists on Literature, . See

also chaps., (Marxsand Engelss letters to Lasalle), and (Engelssletter to Margaret

Harkness), all reprinted from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence

(Moscow: n.p., n.d.).

Engels, Letter to Margaret Harkness, in Craig, Marxists on Literature, . David Craig, introduction to Craig, Marxists on Literature, .

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Pierre Machereys discussion of Lenins reading of Leo Tolstoy (and the question of re -

flection in Tolstoys works) remainsone of the most illuminating accounts in this regard.

See Macherey, Theory of Literary Production, , .

See John Bender and David E.Wellbery, Rhetoricality:On theModernistReturn of Rhe-

toric, in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, ed.John Bender and DavidE.Well-

bery (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ),.The authors see modernist

rhetoricality, with its emphasis on the groundlessness of truth, as a legacy of Friedrich

Nietzsche.

Paul de Man, Form and Intent in the American New Criticism, The Rhetoric of Tem-

porality, and The Dead-End of FormalistCriticism, in Blindnessand Insight: Essays in the

Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, d ed., rev., intro. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, ), , , . The quotation is on p. .

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.

Willard R.Trask (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). See especially his per-

ceptive discussion of Virginia Woolf, in whose work, as he notes, external events often

have only the vaguest contours while the rich and sensitively registered internal time of

the characters has led to the abdication of authorial objectivity and hegemony.

Ibid., .

Geoff Bennington, Demanding History, in Post-structuralismand the Question of History,

ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (New York: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, ), .

Marian Hobson, History Traces, in Attridge, Bennington, and Young, Post-structuralism

and the Question of History, .

I discuss this in greaterdetailin The Secretsof EthnicAbjection, in Traces ():

. A few passages from that essay have been incorporated with modifications into the

present one.

For a succinct critique of the contradictions that accompany poststructuralist theory and

that have had a profound impact on the multiculturalist trends in the humanities, see

Masao Miyoshi, Ivory Tower in Escrow, boundary . ( ), in particular . Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York:

Columbia University Press, ), ; emphasis in the original.

Carlos J. Alonso, The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish

America (New York: O xford University Press, ), .

Ibid., ; emphasis in the original.

Fabian, Time and the Other, x. In Miyoshis terms, this would mean restoring the hitherto

discreditedfunctionof so-calledmetanarratives:The academicswork in thismarketized

world . . . is to learn and watch problems in as many sites as they can keep track of, not

in any specific areas, nations, races, ages, genders, or cultures, but in all areas, nations,

races, ages, genders, and cultures. In other words, far from abandoning the master nar-

ratives, the critics and scholars in the humanities must restore the public rigor of the

metanarratives (Ivory Tower in Escrow, ).

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