Bhabha's initial question may be summed up: "Are the interests of "Western" theory necessarily collusive with the hegemonic role of the Wester as a power bloc?" Within this statement, Bhabha means to uplift the tendentious nature of each system to be self-contradictory. Interestingly, Bhabha notes the social use of each, noting that worth and given meaning to each of these fields depends on attention garnered from society. How each functions is important to Bhabha. For the functionality of each suggests meaning and position within a society, culture, nation and so on:
They are both forms of discourse and to that extent they rpoduce rather than reflect their objects of reference. The difference between them lies in their operational qualities. The leaflet has a specific expository and organizational purpose, temporally bound to the event; the theory of ideology makes it contribution to those embedded political ideas and principles that inform the right to strike. The latter does not justify the former; nor does it necessarily precede it. It exists side by side with it--the one as an enabling part of the other--like the recto and verse of a sheet of paper, to use a common semiotic anlogy in the uncommon context of politics. My concern here is with the process of "interveneing ideologically', as Stuart Hall describes in the role of "imaginging" or representation in the practice of politics in his response to the British election of 1987. For hall, the Notion of hegemony implies a politics of identification of the imaginary.
Continuing, Bhabha illustrates the relationship between politics and ideology, bringing out important points of encounter. There is a sort of space, where discourse and ideology, language and the representation of such lie--this space--is where Bhabha means to place focus, and put attention.
This approach, as I read it, introduces us to an exciting, neglected moment, or movement, in the 'recognition' of the relation of politics to theory; and confounds the traditional division between them. Such a movement is initiated if we see that relation as determined by the rule of repeatable materiality, which Foucault describes as the process by which statments from one institution can be transcribed in the discourse of another.
Here, Bhabha means to speak to the relationship between politics and theory, and the manner in which they depend on each other. Calling back to Derrida's differance, Bhabha sums up this relationship as "the difference of the same." This is where Bhabha begins to elaborate on the relationship itself. He beings by looking at the nature of theory: language, ideology, semiotics, representation, and so on. Theory, "in a doubly inscribed move, simultaneously seeks to subvert and replace." Theory's attempt to supplant, replace, re-present and so on exists in relation to the very thing that it striving to remove. This relationship, though obvious, puts forth a proposition that Bhabha requests: he wants us to "rethink the logics of causality and dterminacy through which we recognize the 'political' as a form of calculation and strategic action dedicated to social transformation." Further, the 'political' that theory calls attention to is delegated through an identification of the logics of causality: it seems that Bhabha is asking us to rethink how we approach and understand political discourse and the political subject as determined by systems of identification that are bent on alterity, otherness, heterogeniety. By rethinking these categories as determined and intimately connected with history we may begin to see the relationship between political and ideological discourse as developing side by side, as opposed to preceeding and following.
The rethinking of the logics of causality, politics and then the strategic action of either the political or ideological discourse leads to the obvious troubling of the representation of either of these categories:
The textual processof political antagonism initiates a contradictory process of reading between the lines; the agent of the discourse becomes, in the same time of utterance, the inverted, projected object of the rgument, turned agaisnt itself. ... What the attention to rhetoric and writing reveals is the discursive ambivalence that makes 'the political' possible. From such a perspective, the problematic of political judgment cannot be represented as an epistemological problme of appearance and reality or theory and practice or word and thing. Nor can it be represented as a dialectical problem or a symptomatic contradiction constitutive of the materiality of the 'real'. on the contrary, we are made excruciatingly aware of the amvinalent juxtaposition, the dangerous interstitial realtion of the factual and the projective, and, beyond that, of the curcial function of the textual and the rhetorical.
With this troubling of these categories, through the assertion of rethinking the logics of causality (understanding the importance of writing and textuality), which leads us to understanding that the 'political' as a calculated form of societal transformation and affection (meaning maintaining purpose to cause effect in society) Bhabha leads us to a good explanation of the troubling of these categories:
It is this to-and-fro, the fort/da of the symbolic process of political negotiation, that constitutes a politics of address. Its importance goes beyond the unsettling of the essentialism or logocentrism of a recieved political tradition, in the name of an abstract free play of the signifier.
Stemming from this call to rethinking and re-evaluating our categories concerning political and ideological discourse, Bhabha leads us to the fact that these categories as now understood depend on alterity, on a agonisitic environment of "cultural difference" and "cultural diversity." Simply, it seems to me that an initial difficulty with understanding these issues arises from the idea of one emerging before another, and thus one being pre-established. Here Bhabha means to focus on the fact that much of the acceptance of these categories has depended upon a sort of understanding that one category may negate or supercede the other. Instead, Bhabha calls for a sort of third space: a negotiation that he called to earlier in referring to a sort of "to and fro." Bhabha seems to critique a singleness of terms. Instead, he asks for a heterogeneity of categories.
Such identikit political idealism may be the gesture of great individual fervor, but it lacks the deepr , if dangerous sense of what is entailed by the passage of history in theoretical discourse. The language of critique is effectivenot because it keeps forever separate the terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the extent ot which is overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a polticial object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and the changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics.
This third space, which is neither one category or the other, results as a rethinking of the logics of causality and recognition of political discourses relationship to social transformation.
Throughout the rest of his essay, Bhabha elaborates on the terms of cultural difference and cutlrual diversity. He upholds an argument for thnking of things in multiplicity, in heterogeneity, of thinking of cultures, peoples, histories, politics and ideology as developing together, of simultaneously sustaining one another, and all of this opperating within a certain amount of ambivalence.
The concept of cultural difference focuses on the problem of the ambivalence of cultural authority: the attempt to dominate in the name of a cultural spuremacy which is itsle fproduced only in the moment of differentiation. And it is the very authority of culture as a knowledge of referential truth which is at issue in the conpet and moment of enunciation. The enunciative process introduces a split in the performative present of cultural identification; a split between the traditional culturalist demand for a model, a tradition, a community, a stable systemo f reference, and the necessary negation of the certitude in the articulation of new cultural demands, meanings, startegies in the political present, as a practice of domination or resistence.
What seems to be at stake here, is the issue of cultural identification in a post-colonial world. Much of what Bhabha speaks to deals with representation, of historical emergence, enunciation of identity that is in turn simultaneously created only out of a sort of alterity. Yet this creation, this enunciation is qualified by the process of writing, or textuality that prohibits it from any sort of ability to stand alone. The relation here is the signfier to the signified and the fact that Bhabha questions to the notion of given concetps, as opposed to simultaneously created subject, objects only in the process of alterity. Here, Bhabha offers a final clarification of cultural diversity and cultural difference.
If cultural diversity is a category of comparative ethics, aesthetics or ethnology, cultural difference is a process of significtion through which statements of culture or on culture differentiate, discriminate and authroize the production of fields of force, reference, applicability and capacity.
In a round about sort of way, Bhabha's emphasis on the differentiation between cultural difference and cultural diversity entails his concepts of hybridity, along with this assertion of rethinking the logics of causality, and furthermore, this rethinking puts forth the fact that of maintaining any single notion of cultural identity and so on is extremely troublesome when one looks at the truth of polticial and ideological discourse.
No comments:
Post a Comment