Bhabha: The Other Question: The stereotype and colonial discourse

In this essay, Bhabha (B), addressing the ambivalence found within the process of stereotyping within the colonial discourse. He primarily looks at the process of colonial discourse and then analyzes the structure of stereotyping itself. Claiming that stereotypes operate out of ambivalence, through the usage of skin as the signifier within a schema that is heterogeneous, B claims that the stereotype is a act that is self-contradictory, and in fact does not exist.

B begins by looking at how the stereotype is currently understood through a notion of fixity: stereotyping, and "othering" is a process by which individuals, or groups are given identities and societal positions, values and so on through certain and specific qualities. Yet, B means to trouble this notion of stereotype:

"Yet the function of ambivalence as one of the most significant discursive and psychical strategies of discriminatory power--whether racist or sexist, peripherla or metropolitan--remains to be charted."

To begin, he looks at the idea of colonial discourse within itself, and the power relations that coincidingly exist in this schema. He begins by setting up the idea of creating the colonial subject and object. This relationship is dependent upon a basic otherness:

"Only then does it become possible to understand the productive ambivalence of the object of colonial discourse--that 'otherness' which is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity."

Colonial discourse then, is a schema dependent upon the notion of difference yet enacted through an "economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power."

From these points, B means to draw attention to the fact that colonial discourse is a productive process of othering, through a schema of colonial fantasy and power. Within this system, there are signifiers and signs. B goes on to draw a line between previous conceptions of stereotyping, which seems to be essentializing and B's constructed differences within a schema of heterogeneity, and ambivalence of identities. B goes on to point out that skin, the most obvious sign is deeply connected to power, and the process of othering. This is what is interesting, is the work done by B demonstrating that the stereotyping is related to the imaginary process within individuals. The act of identifying and understanding that object:

"The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the bassi of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction. Despite the play of power within colonial discourse and the shifting positionalities of its subjects (for example effects of class, gender, ideology, different social formations, varied systems of colonization and so on), I am referring to a form of governmentality that in marking out a 'subject nation', appropriates, directs and dominates its various spheres of activity. Therefore, despite the 'play' in the colonial system which is crucial to its exercise of power, colonial discourse produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an 'other; and yet entirely knowable and visible."

This fact leads the reader nicely into B explication of how the stereotype is formed and then rationalized within an overtly ambivalent environment of meaning and identification.

From this point, B goes on to address Said and Foucault's conceptions of intentions of polarities as well as use of power within the colonial discourse. Through this critique and commentary B means to uplift the role of ambivalence within discourse (within representation). Here, one of the main issues that he points out is the fact that both Said and Foucault's assumption that colonial discourse produces a system that is closed, and complete: albeit opperating through subject-object narratives and oppressive power systems. B means to once again bring out the importance of, and obviousness of the heterogeneity that characterizes the process of stereotyping. Much of this work is important for B's argument because it raises the groundwork where B can focus and point his argument to the system of colonial discourse. He looks at how colonial stereotyping involves fetishizing and power within the discourse. This inherently involves a identification process that B means to eventually connect to the Lacanian imaginary stage.

"My anatomy of colonial discourse remains incomplete until I locate the stereotype, as an arrested, fetishistic mode of representation within its field of identification, which I have identified in my description of Fanon's primal scenes, as the Lacanian schema of the Imaginary. The Imaginary is the transformation that takes place in the subject at the formative mirror phase, when it assumes a discrete image which allows it to postulate a series of equivalences, sameness, identities, between the objects of the surrounding world. However, this positioning is itself problematic, for the subject finds or recognizes itself through an image which is simultaneously alienating and hence potentially confrontational."

From this point B delves into the fact that the stereotype pivots on this notion of ambivalence denied through identification and fixity of the stereotype. Through specific signs, (race, history, class, ethnicitiy and so on), the colonial object is given meaning and a position. However, this process is not done in isolation, but rather the subject is involved too. Here the subject goes through the imaginary phase where she sees the colonized and identifies it with a specific meaning. However, this process of similarity, yet simultaneous projection of meaning and othering, is tainted and constantly infused with a notion of "lack": "Like this mirror phase 'the fullness' of the stereotype --its image as identity--is always threatened by 'lack.' This lack is qualified and understood as an ambivalence of fixity of meaning due to a heterogeniety of meaning for the colonial object. B help clarify this all:

"Although the 'authority' of colonial discourse depends crucially on its location in narcissism and the Imaginary, my concept of stereotype-as-suture is a recognition of the ambivalence of that authority and those orders of identification."

In the end, B asserts that stereotyping is:

"a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, overdetermination, guilt, aggressiveity; the masking and splitting of 'official' and phantasmatic knowledges to construct the positionalities and oppositionalitys of racist discourse."

And again, upholding the notion of ambivalence and misidentification within a heterogenous system, and bringing all of these points to a whole:

In the objectification of the scopic drive there is always the threatened return of the look; in the identification of the Imaginary relation there is always the alienating other (or mirror) which crucially returns its image to the subject; and in that form of substitution and fixation that is fetishism there is always the trace of loss, absence. To put it succinctly, the recognition and disavowal of 'difference' is always disturbed by the question of its re-presentation or construction. The stereotype is in fact an 'impossible" object. For that very reason, the exertions of the 'official knowledges' of colonialism--pseudo-scientific, typological, legal-administrative, eugenicist--are imbricated at the point of their production of meaning and power with the fantasy that dramatizes the impossible desire for a pure, undifferentiated origin.