1.

Culture's in between - concept of culture

Homi K. Bhabha

A recent change in the writing of cultural criticism has left the prose
plainer, less adorned with the props of the argument's staging. Where
once "scare quotes" festooned the text with the frequency of garlands at
an Indian wedding, there is now a certain sobrety to semiotic and post-
Structuralist celebrations. The "isms" and "alities"--those tails that
wagged the dogma of critical belief--no longer wave new paradigms or
problematics into being. The death of th eauthor, or the interral of
intention, are occurrences that arouse no more scandal than the sight of
a hearse in a Palermo suburb. Critical practices that sought to detotalize
social reality by demonstrating the micrologies of power, the diverse
enunciative sites of discourse, the slippage and sliding of signifiers, are
suddenly disarmed.
Having relaxed our guard, hoping perhaps that the intellectual modes we
sought to foster had passed into the common discourse of criticism, we
are now caught with our pants down. Deprived of our stagecraft, we are
asked to face the full frontal reality of the idea of "Culture" itself--the
very concept whose mastery we thought we had dissolved in the
language of signifying practices and social formations. This is not our
chosen agenda, the terms of debate have been set for us, but in the
midst of the culture wars and the canon maneuvers we can hardly hide
behind the aprons of aporia and protest histrionically that there is
nothing outside the text. Wherever I look these days I find myself
staring into the eyes of a recruiting officer--sometimes he looks like
Dinesh D'Souza, sometimes like Robert Hughes--who stares at me
intensely and says "Western Civ. needs you!" At the same time, a limp
little voice within me also whispers, "Critical theory needs you too!"
What is at issue today is not the essentialized or idealized Arnoldian
notion of "culture" as an architectonic assemblage of the Hebraic and the
Hellenic. In the midst of the multicultural wars we are surprisingly closer
to an insight from T. S. Eliot's Notes towards the Definition of Culture,
where Eliot demonstrates a certain incommensurability, a necessary
impossibility, in thinking culture. Faced with the fatal notion of a self-
contained European culture and the absurd notion of an uncontaminated
culture in a single country, he writes, "We are therefore pressed to
maintain the ideal of a world culture, while admitting it is something we
cannot imagine. We can only concevive it as the logical term of the
relations between cultures."[1] The fatality of thinking of "local" cultures
as uncontaminated or self-contained forces us to conceive of "global"
culture, which itself remains unimaginable. What kind of logic is this?
It seems to me significant that Eliot, at this undecidable point in his
argument, turns to the problematic of colonial migration. Although
writing in the main about settler colonial societies, Eliot's words have an
ironic resonance with the contemporary condition of third world
migration:
The migrations of modern times. . .have transplanted themselves
according to some social, religious, economic or political determination,
or some peculiar mixture of these. There has therefore been something
in the removements analogous in nature to religious schism. The people
have taken with them only a part of the total culture. . . . The culture
which develops on the new soil must therefore be bafflingly alike and
different from the parent culture: it will be complicated sometimes by
whatever relations are established with some native race and further by
immigration from other than the original source. In this way, peculiar
types of culture-sympathy and culture-clash appear.[2]
This "part" culture, this partial culture, is the contaminated yet
connective tissue between cultures--at once the impossibility of culture's
containedness and the boundary between. It is indeed something like
culture's "in-between," bafflingly both alike and different. To enlist in the
defense of this "unholemly," migratory, partial nature of culture we must
revive that archaic meaning of "list" as "limit" or "boundary." Having
done so, we introduce into the polarizations between liberals and
liberationists the sense that the translation of cultures, whether
assimilative or agonistic, is a complex act that generates borderline
affects and identifications, "peculiar types of culture-sympathy and
culture-clash." The peculiarity of cultures' partial, even emtonymic
presence lies in articulating those social divisions and unequal
developments that disturb the self-recognition of the national culture, its
anointed horizons of territory and tradition. The discourse of minorities,
spoken for and against in the multicultural wars, proposes a social
subject constituted through cultural hybridization, the overdetermination
of communal or group differences, the articulation of baffling alikeness
and banal divergence.
These borderline negotiations of cultural difference often violate
liberalism's deep commitment to representing cultural diversity as plural
choice. Liberal discourses on multiculturalism experience the fragility of
their principles of "tolerance" when they attempt to withstand the
pressure of revision. In addressing the multicultural demand, they
encounter the limit of their enshrined notion of "equal respect"; and they
anxiously acknowledge the attenuation in the authority of the Ideal
Observer, an authority that oversees the ethical rights (and insights) of
the liberal perspective from the top deck of the Clapham omnibus. In
contemplating late-liberal culture's engagements with the migratory,
partial culture of minorities, we need to shift our sense of the terrain on
which we can best understand the disputes. Here our theoretical
understanding--in its most general sense--of "culture-as-difference" will
enable us to grasp the articulation of culture's borderline, unhomely
space and time.
Where might this understanding be found?
Despite his susceptibility to consensus, for which he is so widely
criticized, Jurgen Habermas' work suggests something of the stressed
terrain of culture in the face of social differentiation. Once we give up the
universalizing sense of "the self-referential subject-writ-large,
encompassing all individual subjects," Habermas suggests, the risky
search for consensus results in the kind of differentiation of the life world
of which loss of meaning, anomie, and psychopathologies are the most
obvious symptoms.[3] As a result, "the causes of social pathologies that
once clustered around the class subject now break into widely scattered
historical contingencies."[4] The effect of this scattering--migratory
difference once more--produces the conditions for an "ever more finely
woven net of linguistically generated intersubjectivity. Rationalization of
the life world means differentiation and condensation at once--a
thickening of the floating web of intersubjective threads that
simultaneously holds together the ever more sharply differentiated
components of culture, society and person."[5]
Multiculturalism--a portmanteau term for anything from minority
discourse to postcolonial critique, from gay and lesbian studies to
chicano/a fiction--has become the most charged sign for describing the
scattered social contingencies that characterize contemporary
Kulturkritik. The multicultural has itself become a "floating signifier"
whose enigma lies less in itself than in the discursive uses of it to mark
social processes where differentiation and condensation seem to happen
almost synchronically. To critique the terms in this widely contested,
even contradictory terrain one needs to do more than demonstrate the
logical inconsistencies of the liberal position when faced with racist belief.
Prejudicial knowledge, racist or sexist, does not pertain to the ethical or
logical "reflectiveness" of the Cartesian subject. It is, as Bernard Williams
has described it, "a belief guarded against reflection." If requires a
"study of irrationality in social practice . . . more detailed and
substantive than the schematic considerations of philosophical
theory."[6] Multiculturalists committed to the instantiation of social and
cultural differences within a democratic socius have to deal with a
structure of the "subject" constituted within the "projective field" of
political alienation."[7] As Etienne Balibar writes, the identificatory
language of discrimination works in reverse: "the racial/cultural identity
of 'true nationals' remains invisible but is inferred from...the quasi-
hallucinatory visibility of the 'false natioonals'--Jews, 'wops,' immigrants,
indios, natives, blacks."[8]
Thus constructed, prejudicial knowledge is forever uncertain and in
danger, for as Balibar concludes, "that the 'false' are too visible will
never guarantee that the 'true' are visible enough."[9] This is one reason
why multiculturalists who strive to constitute nondiscriminatory minority
identities cannot simply do so by affirming the place by occupy, or by
returning to an "unmarked" authentic origin or pre-text: their recognition
requires the negotiation of a dangerous indeterminacy, since the too
visible presence of the other underwrites the authentic national subject
but can never guarantee its visibility or truth. The inscription of the
minority subject somewhere between the too visible and the not visible
enough returns us to Eliot's sense of cultural difference, and intercultural
connection, as being beyond logical demonstration. And it requires that
the discriminated subject, even in the process of its reconstitution, be
located in a present moment that is temporally disjunctive and
affectively ambivalent. "Too late. Everything is anticipated, thought out,
demonstrated, made the most of.
My trembling hands take hold of nothing; the vein has been mined out.
Too late!" Frantz Fanon, clearly, is speaking from his time lag[10] in the
place of enunciation and identification, dramatizing the moment of racist
recognition. The discriminated subject or community occupies a
contemporary moment that is historically untimely, forever belated. "You
come too late, much too late. There will always be a world--a white
world--between you and us. . . . In the face of this affective
ankylosis . . . it is understandable that I could have made up my mind to
utter my Negro cry. Little by little, putting out pseudopodia here and
there, I secreted a race."[11]
By contrast, the liberal dialectic of recognition is at first sight right on
time. The subject of recognition stands in a synchronous space (as befits
the Ideal (Observer), surveying the level playing field that Charles Taylor
defines as the quintessential liberal territory: "the presumption of equal
respect" for cultural diversity. History has taught us, however, to be
distrustful of things that run on time, like trains. It is not tht liberalism
does not recognize racial or sexual discrimination--it has been in the
forefront of those struggles. But there is a recurrent problem with its
notion of equality: liberalism contains a nondifferential concept of
cultural time. At the point at which liberal discourse attempts to
normalize cultural difference, to turn the presumption of equal cultural
respect into the recognition of equal cultural worth, it does not recognize
the disjunctive, "borderline" temporalities of partial, minority cultures.
The sharing of equality is genuinely intended, but only so long as we
start from a historically congruent space; the recognition of difference is
genuinely felt, but on terms that do not represent the historical
genealogies, often postocolonial, that constitute the partial cultures of
the minority.
This is how Taylor puts it:
The logic behind some of these [multicultural] demands seeems to
depend upon a premise that we own equal respect to all cultures.... The
implication seems to be that . . . true judgments of value of different
works would place all cultures more or less on the same footing. Of
course, the attack could come from a more radical, neo-Nietzchean
standpoint, which questions the very status of judgments of worth. . . .
As a presumption, the claim is that all human cultures that have
animated whole societies over some considerable stretch of time have
something important to say to all human beings. I have worded it in this
way to exclude partial cultural milieux within a society as well as short
phases of a major culture [my italics].
Or again:
Merely on the human level, one could argue that it is reasonable to
suppose that cultures that have provided the horizon of meaning for
large numbers of human beings, of diverse characters and
temperaments, over a long period of time . . . are almost certain to have
something that deserves our admiration and respect [my italics].[12]
Obviously the dismissal of partial cultures, the emphasis on large
numbers and long periods, is out of time with the modes of recognition
of minority or marginalized cultures. Basing the presumption on "whole
societies over some considerable stretch of time" introduces a temporal
criterion of cultural worth that elides the disjunctive and displaced
present through which minoritization interrupts and interrogates the
homogeneous, horizontal claim of the democratic liberal society. But this
notion of cultural time functions at other levels besides that of semantics
or content. Let us see how this passage locates the observer--how it
allows Taylor to turn the presumption of equality into the judgment of
worth.
The partial, minority culture emphasizes the internal differentiations, the
"foreign bodies," in the midst of the nation--the interstices of its uneven
and unequal devlopment, which give the lie to its self-containedness. As
Nicos Poulantzas brilliantly argues, the national State homogenizes
differences by mastering social time "by means of a single,
homogeneous measure, which only reduces the multiple
temporalities . . . by encoding the distances between them."[13] This
conversion of time into odistance is observable in the way Taylor's
argument produces a spatial binary between whole and partial societies,
one as the principle of the other's negation. The double inscription of the
part-in-the-whole, or the minority position as the outside of the inside, is
disavowed.
Yet something of this "part-in-the-whole," the minority as at once the
internal liminality and the "foreign body," registers symptomatically in
Taylor's discourse. It is best described as the desire for the "dialogic"--a
term he takes from Mikhail Bakhtin. But he deprives the "dialogic" of its
hybridizing potential. The most telling symptom of this is that despite his
"presumption of equality," Taylor always presents the multicultural or
minority position as an imposition coming from the "outside," and
making its demands from there: "The challenge is to deal with their
sense of marginalization without compromising our basic political
principles" (my italics).[14] In fact the challenge is to deal not with
"them/us" but with the historically and temporally disjunct positions that
minorities occupy ambivalently within the nation's space. Taylor's
evaluative schema, which locates the presumption of equality and the
recognition of value (the before and the after of liberal judgment) in the
longue duree of major national and natinalizing cultures, is in fact
antithetical to the Bakhtinian hybrid, which precisely undermines such
claims to cultural totalization:
The . . . hybrid is not only double-voiced and double-accented . . . but is
also double-languaged; for in it there are not only (and not even so
much) two individual consciounesses, two voices, two accents, as there
are [doublings of] socio-linguistic consciousnesses, two epochs . . . that
come together and consciously fight it out on the territory of the
utterance. . . . It is the collision between differing points of view on the
world that are embedded in these forms . . . . such unconscious hybrids
have been at the same time profoundly productive historically: they are
pregnant with potential for new world vies, with new "internal forms" for
perceiving the world in words.[15]
Indeed Bakhtin emphasizes a space of enunciation where the negotiation
of discursive doubleness--by which I do not mean duality or binarism--
engenders a new speech act. In my own work I have developed the
concept of hybridity to describe the construction of cultural authority
within conditions of political antagonism or inequity. Strategies of
hybridization reveal an estranging movemen tin the "authoritative," even
authoritarian inscription of the cultural sign. At the point at which the
precept attempts to objectify itself as a generalized knowledge or a
normalizing, hegemonic practice, the hybrid strategy or discourse opens
up a space of negotiation where power is unequal but its articulatin may
be equivocal. Such negotiation is neither assimilatin nor collaboration. It
makes possible the emergence of an "interstitial" agency that refuses the
binary representation of social antagonism. Hybrid agencies find their
voice in a dialectic that does not seek cultural supremacy or sovereignty.
They deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct
visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give
narrative form to the minority positions they occupy: the outside of the
inside; the part in the whole.
In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, 1987, cultural and communal
knowledge comes as a kind of selflove that is also the love of the
"other". It is an ethical love, in that the "inwardness" of the subject is
inhabited buy the "radical and an-archical reference to the 'other.'"[16]
This knowledge is visible in those intriguing chapters[17] where Sethe,
Beloved, and Denver perform a ceremoney of claiming and naming
through intersecting an dinterstitial subjectivities: "Beloved, she my
daughter"; "Beloved is my sister"; "I am beloved and she is mine." The
women speak in tongues, form a fugal space "in-between each other"
which is a communal space. They explore an "interpersonal" reality: a
social reality that appears within the poetic image as if it were in
parenthesis--esthetically distanced, held back, yet historically framed. It
is difficult to convey the rhythm and the improvisation of those chapters,
but it is impossible not to see in them the healing of history, a
community reclaimed in the making of a name. As I have written
elsewhere,
Who is Beloved?
Now we understand: She is the daughter that returns to Sethe so that
her mind will be homeless no more.
Who is Beloved?
Now we may say: She is the sister that returns to Denver, and brings
hope of her father's return, the fugitive who died in his escape.
Who is Beloved?
Now we know: She is the daughter made or murderous love who returns
to love and hate and free herself. Her word are broken, like the lynched
people with broken necks; disembodied, like the dead children who lost
their ribbons. But there is no mistaking what her live words say as they
rise from the dead despite their lost syntax and their fragmented
presence.
"My face is coming I have to have it I am looking for the join I am loving
my face so much I want to join I am loving my face so much my dark
face is close to me I want to join."[18]
The idea that history repeats itself, commonly taken as a statement
about historical determinism, emerges frequently within liberal
discourses when consensus fails, and when the consequences of cultural
incommensurability make the world a difficult place. At such moments
the past is seen as returning, with uncanny punctuality, to render the
"event" timeless, and the narrative of its emergence transparent.
Do we best cope with the reality of "being contemporary"--its conflicts
and crises, its losses and lacerations--by endowing history with a long
memory that we then interrupt, or startle, with our own amnesia? How
did we allow ourselves to forget, we say to ourselves, that the nationalist
violence between Hindus and the Muslims lies just under the skin of
India's secular modernity? Should we not have "remembered" that the
old Balkan tribes would form again? These questions emphasize an
observation that it becoming increasingly commonplace: the rise of
religious "fundamentalisms," the spread of nationalist movements, the
redefinitions of claims to race and ethnicity, it is claimed, have returned
us to an earlier historical moment, a resurgence or restaging of what
historians have called the long 19th century. Underlying this claim is a
deeper unease, a fear that the engine of social transformation is no
longer the aspiration to a democratic common culture. We have entered
an anxious age od identity, in which the attempt to memorialize lost
time, and to reclaim lost territories, creates a culture of disparate
"interest groups" or social movements. Here affiliation may be
antagonistic and ambivalent; commonality is often negotiated through
the "contingency" of social interests and political claims.
Narratives of historical reconstruction may reject such myths of social
transformation; communal memory may seek its meanings through a
sense of causality, shared with psychoanalysis, that negotiates the
recurrence of the image of the past while keeping open the question of
the future. The importance of such retroaction lies in its ability to
reinscribe the past, reactivate it, relocate it, resignify it. More significant,
it commits our understanding of the past, and our reinterpretatin of the
future, to an ethics of "survival" that allows us to work through the
present. And such a working through, or working out, frees us from the
determinism of historical inevitability--repetition without a difference. It
makes it possible for us to confront that difficult borderlione, the
interstitial experience, between what we take to be the image of the past
and what is in fact involved in the passing of time and the passage of
meaning.

[1.] T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, New York: Harcourt Brace and
Company, 1949, p. 62.
[2.] Ibid., pp. 63-64.
[3.] Jurgen Habermas, "The Normative Content of Modernity," The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. G. Lawrence, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1987, p. 348.
[4.] Ibid.
[5.] Ibid., p. 346.
[6.] Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1985, p. 116.
[7.] Etienne Balibar, "Paradoxes of Universality," in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy
of Racism, Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, p. 284.
[8.] Ibid.
[9.] Ibid., p. 285.
[10.] See my "Race, Time, and the Revision of Modernity," The Location of Culture, to be
published by Routledge later this year.
[11.] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lamb Markmann, New York:
Grove Weidenfeld, 1967, pp. 121-22.
[12.] Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition", Princeton:at the
University Press, 1992, pp. 66-67.
[13.] Nicos Poulantzas, State Power and Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller, London: NLB,
1978, p. 110.
[14.] Taylor, p. 63.
[15.] Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Nove," The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael
Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: Univeristy of Texas Press,
1981, p. 360.
[16.] See Emmanuel Levinas, "Reality and Its Shadow," Collected Philosophical Papers,
trans. Alphonso Lingis,; Dordrecht, the Netherland,s and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987,
pp. 1-13.
[17.] Toni morrison, Beloved, New York: Plume/NAL, 1987, pp. 200-217.
[18.] From my essay "The Home and the World," in Social Text 10 nos. 2 and 3, 1992,
pp. 141-153, in which I develop this line of argument concerning Morrison's Beloved at
greater length.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
2. Halfway house - art of cultural hybridization
Homi K. Bhabha

Whose house is this? Whose night keeps out the light In here? Say, who
owns this house? It's not mine. I had another, sweeter, brighter With a
view of lakes crossed in painted boats; Of fields wide as arms open for
me. This house is strange. Its shadows lie. Say, tell me, why does its
lock fit my key?
- Toni Morrison, "Whose House is This?" 1992
What does it mean to be at home in the world? Home may not be where
the heart is, nor even the hearth. Home may be a place of estrangement
that becomes the necessary space of engagement; it may represent a
desire for accommodation marked by an attitude of deep ambivalence
toward one's location. Home may be a mode of living made into a
metaphor of survival: Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?
The general drift of Morrison's lyric may evoke the precarious political
displacements, the poignant psychological and cultural disjunctions, that
too frequently underlie the claim to "world" citizenship: according to the
latest report of UNESCO'S World Commission on Culture and
Development, recent decades have seen greater movement and
settlement across national frontiers than ever before. "The number of
foreign workers is estimated at over 40 million, the number of refugees
at about 15 million and the number of people who had to leave their
country because of political upheaval since the Second World War at no
less than 37.5 million." Forced and unforced migrants form a scattered
nation unto themselves, a state without sovereignty whose population is
almost twice that of Britain, France, or Italy. Morrison's song, however,
is much more than a hymn to the "homeless" or a dirge for the
displaced. Her concluding question - Say, tell me, why does its lock fit
my key? - changes the tenor of the discussion to the contingent forces of
survival: perhaps, an existence unfolding through a quotidian quest for
what may be, day by day, the experience of transition without seamless
transformation. Or learning to survive in a new landscape of
identification where anguish becomes a way of working through
alienation toward a tryst with history - for when "this house is strange"
you encounter a shadow of yourself that is nonetheless animated and
creative as shadow puppets can be, concealing their secrets from the
light, casting their darkness into a profound suggestibility. The door
opens onto a room that is not my own, the window unlatches to display a
country that hurts the eyes, this is neither my locale nor my lock, but in
this milieu of mischance, suddenly my key turns . . . and I have no
choice but to choose to belong.
Such choosing is not free, as the freedom of choice purports to be; nor
does such estranged belonging endow authenticity, in the manner to
which "national" belonging accustoms us. For those who bear the mien of
the minority freedom is paradoxical, and choice is the contingency of
claiming one's subaltern presence as it is projected in and through the
power of another's possession. To choose to belong in this peculiar
sense, with its double consciousness and split identifications, is also to
commit oneself or one's community to an agonistic existence: "Each, in
his own way, rages against the dread requirement to represent; against
the demands of 'authenticity,'" writes Henry Louis Gates. "People who
have been vested with meaning [define themselves] by struggling
against other meanings, other allegories. . . . Somehow the choice is
always between alternate inauthenticities, competing impostures.
Another approach toward the question: How does it feel to be a
paradox?"
In Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, a recent collection that
brings together the profiles he has written over the past few years for
The New Yorker, Gates lavishly illustrates the paradox of the
representation, and representativeness, of "blackness." This paradox is
embodied in a norm raging against itself, a paradox of racialized
subjectivity forever playing Freud's fort/da game in the space between
what can be symbolized and what must remain spectral. Gate's
argument, as I understand it, does not suggest that, somewhere over
the rainbow, behind or beyond the "inauthentic," lies the aura of the
sincere and the true. What emerges most forcefully for me from his
portraits of black men bearing the "burden of representation" (including
James Baldwin, Albert Murray, Anatole Broyard, Bill T. Jones, Louis
Farrakhan, Colin Powell, and Harry Belafonte) is the stark confrontation
between the "social fantasy" of race or masculinity that projects them
into the public sphere - fort! - and the eerie awareness that a sense of
"agency," any deliberative or subversive action, must be derived from
working, at once, within and without those very mechanisms of
"representation," or strategies of regulation and discrimination - da! It is
as if home is territory of both disorientation and relocation, with all the
fragility and fecundity implied by such a double take: Say, tell me, why
does its lock fit my key?
Such an anxiety of belonging moves beyond both the black American and
the national contexts to become embedded in particular forces at the
heart of the old empires and the thresholds of new ones. 'The anxiety of
belonging," Toni Morrison writes in the recently published The House
That Race Built, "is entombed within the central metaphors in the
discourse on globalism, transnationalism, nationalism, the break-up of
federations, the rescheduling of alliances, and the fiction of sovereignty."
As we make our global leap - a leap in technology as well as faith - we
must return to that early form of globalization that we have known for at
least the last 250 years in its different phases as the histories of
imperialism, neocolonialism, or postcolonialism. Can the inequalities of
power and wealth between First and Third Worlds, North and South in
each nation itself, allow us to celebrate the global as if we are all
participants in the same local festival? What these ambiguities in the
global condition produce are profound anxieties about the way in which
we see ourselves as part of a "shared" history of human civilization and
barbarism.
Britain, for instance, has had a complex and contentious history of
transnational intimacy, partly as a consequence of its colonial heritage,
partly thanks to the global reach of the English language and its cultural
and media institutions. The anxiety of "Englishness" is most acutely felt
along its internal borders - Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales -
where relations become sensitive to what Freud once called "the
narcissism of minor differences." But let me explore the moral of a
certain postcolonial intimacy in a tale of two paintings. Remember Peter
Blake's "The Meeting" or "Have a Nice Day, Mr. Hockney," 1981-83, that
icon of "English" art and artists, a signature work of the British Pop
generation that hangs at the Tate? Two portly gentlemen greet each
other, one resting on a cane, the other leaning on an oversized
paintbrush; a third stands aside, his head bowed. Of course, the staged
meeting between the artists Peter Blake, David Hockney, and Howard
Hodgkin at Venice Beach, California, is a translation/transposition of
Courbet's The Meeting, or "Bonjour Monsieur Courbet," 1854. In the
move from provencale to LA landscape, the figure of the British artist is
recast in an international frame. The studied poses, replicating those in
the Courbet painting, recall a European painterly past that is surprisingly
restaged in the midst of a Southern California of youth, lust, and leisure
that has been exhaustively explored elsewhere by Hockney. In this
palimpsest of Courbet/Blake/Hockney/Hodgkin - these interlocking
landscapes - that argues for a "tradition" of Western painting, the West
Coast ambience, the endless azure and lilac horizon looking out over the
ocean, has a marked "Pacific Rim" light about it: Out there lies Asia,
Australia. From a late '90s perspective, Blake's peculiar facture gives the
painting the appearence of computerized image transfer avant la lettre,
an artifice of the anxiety of relocation and inauthenticity. For there is an
edginess about Blake's transnational staging of both art history and
cultural history, an edginess that suggests that these very "English"
artists find themselves culturally or exploratory and innovative space
between the national and the international.
Might this hybrid, culturally diverse landscape then make visible the
rough edges, the complex negotiations of aesthetic values that find
themselves not only "outside" the artwork in the social problematic of its
production but "inside" the work itself, both formally and affectively?
Cultural contradictions, disjunctive historical spaces, identifications
created on the crossroads - these are the issues that the arts of cultural
hybridization seek to embody and enact rather than "transcend." It is an
art that is no less valuable because it takes what is unresolved,
ambivalent, even antagonistic, and performs it in the work, underlining
the struggle for translation.
Such a perspective becomes clearer if we look at a picture by an Indian
artist named Vivan Sundaram who lives in Delhi but shows and works
internationally. People Come and Go, 1981, shown at the Royal
Academy, is just such a work of the crossroads: awkwardly intersected
picture planes, edgy surfaces, a burst of mottled pointillist light flooding
one corner, while another corner emphasizes the heavy glare of Indian
sunlight, flat, overturned illumination reminiscent of a Hodgkin canvas.
The mise-en-scene is unmistakably "Indian": a dhoti-kurta-clad artist
squats on the floor, while behind him, in a space analogous to that
behind Peter Blake, where Hodgkin stood, in "The Meeting," is a laconic,
lavender-suited foreign visitor. Bathed in a pool of light, oddly at home
and out of place, this figure is in fact none other than Howard Hodgkin. A
Hodgkin-like canvas beside him, the artist is now to be found in Baroda,
in western India, in the studio of his painter friend, Bhupen Khakhar,
whose playful postprimitivistic figures are part of a narrative that is both
quotidian and "proverbial."(1) The interlocked gazes of Hodgkin and
Khakhar are fixed on a canvas that is turned away from us. What are
they thinking? Where do those two very different visions meet - and
necessarily part?
Let us not be persuaded, with all the goodwill in the world, that this is a
simple celebration of cultural borders and boundaries collapsing before
the transcendence of the artistic vision - an international coterie of the
inspired auguring well for the multicultural millennium. The last time
such an assumption was made by Aziz, in E. M. Forester's Passage to
India, his carefully laid plans to host what he called an "international
picnic" at the Marabar Caves went, as we are aware, badly wrong. The
title of Sundaram's painting, People Come and Go, especially when used
by a postcolonial artist, is too ironic and informed to be either
celebratory or nostalgic. The hybrid nature of the work, with its citations,
imitations, and enigmatic, unreadable canvas that hits the sightline at a
peripheral, even anamorphic angle, raises for us the issue of identity and
cultural authenticity.
This is a question related to the art of hybrid translation rather than
transcendence, which is not to suggest that such cultural practices need
sacrifice anything in the way of elegance or sublimity. What it does
suggest is that we have overemphasized, even fetishized, the relation
between culture and national identity, or traditional, customary
community. There is, of course a link between territory, tradition, and
"peoplehood" that serves certain functions of state and governance and
bestows an important sense of belonging. But the strong, nationalist
version of this relationship can lead to a limiting collusion that returns us
to the dominant sociocultural paradigms of the nineteenth century. To be
overly focused on the authenticity of national identity leads to an
"authoritarian" or "paternalist" gaze - however well-meant - toward
those who are part of the great history of migration. Authenticity
unleashes a restrictive sense of indigenous or native "belonging" that can
only calm itself by thinking of cultural or racial differences, and the
products of those histories, as being "appropriateable," naturalized into
the national myth itself.
What both "Have a Nice Day, Mr. Hockney" and People Come and Go
demonstrate is the power of a secular creativity that emerges when
culture is seen as the crossroads for articulating different landscapes,
histories, genres, styles of perception, and performance. Hybridity is a
gesture of translation that keeps open the question of what it is to be
Indian in Britain or a gay British artist in California - not open in the
facile sense of there being "no closure" but in the revisionary sense that
these questions of home, identity, belonging are always open to
negotiation, to be posed again from elsewhere, to become iterative,
interrogative processes rather than imperative, identitarian designations.
Or viewed from the other side of the globe, such thinking bears witness
to Sundaram's "translating" Hodgkin by placing an imitation of his
signature style beside the ironic primitivistic-proverbialism of Khakhar, in
the process producing an art of the interstices. Let us end with this iconic
image of an intersective cultural narrative of the history of the
contemporary "global" moment. The disjunctive locations and displaced
temporalities that formally structure the world of the work - people come
and go - enable us to envisage the picture plane as inscribed in a
movement that shifts the perceptual and evaluative balance between the
canonical and the hybrid, peripheral and central, refusing to settle the
question one way or another. The anxiety of belonging encourages us to
choose to live in a house whose shifting walls require that stranger and
neighbor recognize their side-by-sideness, their lateral living, because
"This house is strange. / Its shadows lie. / Say, tell me, why does its lock
fit my key?"
1. Geeta Kapur, Introduction to Contemporary Indian Art, catalogue to
"Festival of India," London, Royal Academy of Art, 1982, p.7.
Homi K. Bhabha is Chester B. Tripp Chair in the Humanities at the
University of Chicago.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
3. Queen's English - Ebonics, nonstandard
vernacular or hybridized order of speech
Homi K. Bhabha

[Gary Dauphin]: So Black English is for secret stuff?

Reesie: It's not secret secret. But it's private.
- "Schoolyard Sages: New York City School Kids Weigh In on Ebonics,"
The Village Voice
Returning this winter to Chicago from Bombay with the sweet singsong
of my native Bombay Bazaar English still sounding in my ears, I'm
confronted with the latest American cultural brouhaha - the Ebonic
plague. Like my friend and quasi-compatriot Mr. Rushdie, I am now quite
convinced that writing about something can actually make it happen - to
you. So there I am, Ms. Respected Reader, Dear Madam, as we are
politely saying always in Bombay. So I'm trying too too hard to speak
without mistake, sounding totally like polite, proper BBC English, not
yankee crude, "ya" this, "gonna" that, always opening bigmouth and
talking through nose. No, I'm trying for pure Westminster-Oxford-
Waterloo English when I'm dispatched to write about Ebonics! Ebonic-
bubonic plague, I thought, OOOOhhhh, my good god, why I should write
and spoil more my English - nothing be cool or phat in dat. Out damn
spot! If something wrotten (or written) in state of Oakland, why drag
that damn disease here? So I picked up only one lovely lovely bombay
poetry, to forget all this hopeless culture wars and culture whores, and
calmly read:
Friends, our dear sister is departing for foreign in two three days, and we
are meeting today to wish her bon voyage.
You are all knowing, friends, what sweetness is in Miss Pushpa. I don't
mean only external sweetness but internal sweetness. Miss Pushpa is
smiling and smiling even for no reason but simply because she is feeling.
Whenever I asked her to do anything, she was saying, "Just now only I
will do it." That is showing good spirit. I am always appreciating the good
spirit. Pushpa Miss is never saying no. Whatever I or anybody is asking
she is always saying yes, and today she is going to improve her
prospect, and we are wishing her bon voyage.
(Nissim Ezekiel, "Good-bye Party for Miss Pushpa T, S." From Collected
Poems, 1952-1988, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1989. Reprinted by
permission of Oxford University Press.)
Reesie Otulana, nine, from Cambria Heights, Queens, New York, and
Miss Pushpa T. S., nineteen, of Laburnum Buildings, Hanuman Vihar,
Bombay, are hardly soul sisters. They come from vastly different cultural
backgrounds: their social worlds are equally strange to one another.
Reesie (as we have been repeatedly reminded by the ethnographers of
Ebonics) is the descendant of West African slaves, suspended in the
lower depths of urban American society. She is in danger of becoming
just another percentage point in a deadening survey of the growing body
of semi-literate and underemployed youth that come out of underfunded
public schools located in areas of economic attrition. ("One half of all
African-American youth are born into poverty": Jesse Jackson, The New
York Times, Dec. 31, 1996; "71 percent of Oakland's 28,000 blacks are
in special education classes. . . [the] average grade point-, on a 4.0
system is 1.8": Courtland Milloy, Washington Post, Dec. 22, 1996.)
Reesie may well turn out to be "Baad!" in the nonstandard, "black
English" sense of the word. Miss Pushpa, on the other hand, is
undeniably good. As a clerical cog in the archaic wheel of Bombay's
Byzantine bureaucracy, her "low" economic status has kept her from an
improving, Westernized "convent" education. Her cute and creaky
English has been picked up at a deeply disciplinary state school through
the rote repetition of cliches, commonplace idioms, and readings out of
Victorian-style "self-help" primers. Infantalized and exploited both at
home and work, she is poised to escape this pervasive patriarchy, to
better her prospects, by being "diasporized," going "to foreign" where, as
a Non-Resident Indian in the United States or the Gulf States, she will, of
course, be the good daughter and continue obediently to support her
family back home. Miss Pushpa T. S. Is "internal sweetness itself!" in
Bombay Bazaar English - as the poet says, "Pushpa Miss is never saying
no."
Reesle, the great-granddaughter of slaves; Pushpa T. S., the stepchild of
the postcolonial state: What do they have in common? As their divergent
"colonial" histories - of American slavery and British imperialism -
circumnavigate the globe in opposite directions, they meet on the
margins of nonstandard "vernaculars" or hybridized orders of speech.
These are twisted versions of the language of the master, alienating the
syntactical "eloquence" and intonational "elegance" through which
"standard" English naturalizes itself as a national cultural norm. Whether
or not these hybrid speech genres are a species of African-American
Vernacular English (AAVE) or something like Bombay Bazaar Hindi-
English (BBHE), whether the grammatical structure of "Ain't nobody sing
like Chaka Khan" comes from the Niger-Congo Basin, or the rhetorical
particularity of "Miss Pushpa is smiling and smiling/ even for no reason"
can be traced back to Hindi speech patterns common to Bombay's Bhindi
Bazaar, the world of these utterances cannot be reduced to the
description of speech as an "object" of linguistic study or a functionalist
form of verbal communication without doing violence to the living
tongue.
The sociolinguistic descriptions and definitions of vernacularization
certainly have an important pedagogical contribution to make. Who could
deny that a knowledge of the deep structure of black English would not
assist teachers in their attempts to assess performance and to elicit the
best results from those who are educationally disadvantaged? In The
Village Voice's "Schoolyard Sages: New York City School Kids Weigh in
on Ebonics," sixteen-year-old Keith Meyers, also from Cambria Heights,
put it succinctly: "Teachers could make some room for different ways of
speaking. Not teach it, but at least understand what we're saying." But
rather than draw wide and increasingly general circles around the
"academic" issue of what is black English, I want to deal with its more
demotic address: What are Keith and Reesie and their friends doing
when they act cool and "be all like, 'Yo, what's up?'"
These communal forms of utterance resemble what Roland Barthes
describes as an "idiolect" in his influential early work Elements of
Semiology. Ingeniously broadening the notion beyond its customary
focus on an individual's given linguistic repertoire, Barthes defines the
idiolect as the whole set of speech habits of a linguistic community that
reflect "the need for a speech which Is already institutionalized but not
yet radically open to formalization, as the language is." The idiolect - as
an Intermediate practice between speech and language - resists
"formalization," as Barthes put it, because its ability to confer a shared
totemic identity on those who "miss-peak," those who are phat, is a
process of cultural performance rooted in the passing, transitory moment
of utterance itself. The idiolect is, quite literally, informal because it
depends for its communal effect on rhythm, slang, gesture, dress - signs
that express its particularity. Black talk certainly fits this description, but
as the speech act of a minority, its particularity further connotes its
sense of peripherality - of the eagerly guarded "privacy" that Reesie and
her friends talk about. Listen, for instance, to Keith:
"We all have our individual way of speaking. It doesn't hurt anybody
most of the time. You can do what you want on your personal time, but
when you're getting paid to do something, you want to speak
properly. . . . The slang comes in when you talk with your friends."
Keith's ventriloquism, the act of switching between "proper English" and
"black English," redraws the public/private distinction through the
medium of language, making both audible and visible the ways in which
minorities are positioned as, at once, insiders and outsiders within the
society of their belonging. "Privacy," in this context, is not the essential
liberal virtue of having "a room of one's own," in Virginia Woolf's
felicitous phrase, a sign of the sovereignty of self-hood, a place for
meditation and reflection. This much more communal "privacy" - lived
out, ironically, in public - is a way of establishing a kind of cultural
intimacy, even indegeneity, for a minority group that is too often in the
public eye for its lack of commercial success, its educational failure, its
high ratings in the crime statistics. Surveyed and punished, measured
and mapped, the desire for privacy on the part of the kids of Cambria
Heights is a way of claiming a linguistic territory that is playful, rude,
riffy, ironic, and, above all, their very own. For Keith and his teenage
friends, however, the division between the private and public spheres
seems, at this stage, to be as fluid and pliable as the passage between
the playground and the schoolroom. But as legal theorist Patricia J.
Williams reminds us on the December 29, 1996 Op-Ed page of The New
York Times, such ventriloquism, a verbal practice common to us all,
exacts a special price in a racialized cultural context. The real argument,
she writes, is not the genteel one about the structure and origin of a
language. It is the ambivalent and antagonistic ways in which the
vernacular comes to be socially valued within the ideological structure of
mainstream culture that constitutes a major class - and race -
contradiction. "Perhaps the real argument is not about whether ebonics
is a language or not. Rather, the tension is revealed in the contradiction
of black speech simultaneously being understood yet not
understood. . . . Colorfully comprehensible. . . in sports and
entertainment, yet deemed so utterly incapable of effective
communication when it comes to finding a job."
Some elements of black "underclass" culture, from the worlds of sport
and entertainment, are readily transformed into "style" via the yuppie
collaboration with the culture industry (MTV, Rupert Murdoch's Fox
Broadcasting Company, Time Warner, Inc.) and commodity fetishes
(mile-high Nikes, low-slung Levis, "prison style" laceless boots). Then,
suddenly, just as the melting pot or "tossed salad" models of cultural
assimilation seem to be yielding to the apparently mixed (read
Integrated) metaphors of the pulled-pork "po' boy," the running buffet of
bicultural (read multi-cultural) options and choices suddenly dries up. In
an ambivalent reversal, those very icons of incorporation become the
barriers to a creative cultural hybridization when the unlaced rapping
classes come off the video screen or the vinyl track to claim their place
within those market institutions that control the conditions of economic
and cultural "choice," while shaping the menu of social mores. What you
see or hear is not what you get.
Nobody could be more foreign to this world of diss and dat than the
sweet child that is Miss Pushpa T. S. Except, of course, that she is about
to leave for "foreign" where, as a migrant belonging to a minority
culture, her own idiolect will, no doubt, be open to all kinds of symbolic
readings and status responses. If one of the marks of "Ebonics" is the
use of the "habitual be" - she be reading - then such a sense of the
ongoing nature of actions or states is curiously close to Pushpa's present
continuous: Whatever I or anybody is asking/she is always saying yes.
But her connection with Reesie is, I believe, best seen on home territory,
in the vernacular world of Bombay's low-paid clerical workers and the
hybrid languages that the public world of business and bureaucracy
demands of them.
The poet's ironic mode of address frames Bombay Bazaar English (BBC,
uh, E) and reveals its contradictory cultural connotations. Miss Pushpa
hardly speaks in the poem, except in parentheses ("Just now only/I will
do it"). Ever compliant, she lets both her employer and the poet speak
for her. And it is because she is "spoken for" while in fact becoming the
only realized persona in the poem that the language actually seems to
circulate around her - as her speech - although she is not the speaker.
Framed in this way, Miss Pushpa's idiolect is open to two forms of irony.
First, in the very foregrounding of BBE, the well-versed "English" poet
inscribes the bazaar vernacular as a figure of fun and irony - a little
cruel, no doubt, but sufficiently part of the repertoire of Bombay "in"
jokes to count as the irony of an insider, something like the equivalent of
Jewish humor. But, beyond that, there is a more reflective, sadder irony
involved in this portraiture of a group of speakers whose working lives
demand that they speak a language in which they always come off like
awkward "poreigners," as they would say, with the aspirated p sound of
BBE, always already diasporic without even leaving home. Such an irony
is compounded by a poignant reality: the vernacular that enables Pushpa
and her class to survive economically is what severely limits her
prospects for social advancement. She is going "to foreign" to "improve
her prospect" and to improve her English, too. To the extent that
Reesie's black talk is a sign of the informality of the "private" in the
world of the minority, Pushpa's Bazaar English is the other side of the
same coin: the official language of a public sphere that is, in part,
"poreign." Her idiolect's vernacular culture - an awkwardly blended
Hindi-English milieu - is part of a wider public ambivalence through
which strategies of inclusion and exclusion, opportunity and
discrimination, are set in motion. If there is a deeper, mocking laugh
buried in the poem's lines, it is aimed at the arrogant and restricted
vision that often accompanies social and linguistic propriety outside the
schoolhouse. Are we to be blind to the sincerity and solidarity, the
playfulness and privacy, through which people build their lives and words
under conditions of duress, just because the poem got the grammar
wrong?

Homi K. Bhabha is Chester D. Tripp Chair in the Humanities at the

University of Chicago.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
4. Making difference: Homi K. Bhabha on the legacy of
the culture wars - Writing the '80s
"Catch the spirit of the decade?" she said. "Like how?"
"Maybe," I urged her, pouring some fizzy water, "just think back..."

At first it was easy. Dates. Times. Places. Facts. The whole Afghanistan
business started with the Soviet invasion in December and Zbigniew Brzezinski
exhorting the mujahideen in the early 'Sos to fight back in the name of their
God. The space shuttle Columbia was launched in '81 followed some years
later by the Challenger disaster--shades of our times. Qaddafi was the much
feared terrorist czar of those days, the pre-Sadaam on everybody's wanted
list. In presidential parlance, we had much to fear from the "evil empire"
(1983) rather than the "axis of evil" (2002). And, on the domestic front, the
meteoric rise in the ownership of telephone answering machines (from 2
percent of the American population in '8o to 2.5 percent in '89) did much more
to affirm Baudrillard's reflections on the simulacral surfaces of postmodern life
than the weighty scribes who popularized prosthetic personhood in the pages
of Artforum.

"Bottled water took off like crazy in the early '80s," she said, high on the game
of guessing, her face distorted in the soft curves of the Perrier flask (the
Absolut icon of the '80s), her aquatic voice rising from behind the vitrine as if
she were lip-synching (an '8os fad) a refrain that came from far away and long
ago... "And remember all that 'gaze' stuff? The male gaze...and the gaze of the
Other...until we were all eyeless in Gaza..." We went back and forth a little on
the importance (and import) of French thought--Barthes, Kristeva, Lacan,
Foucault--crossing the Atlantic like a message in a bottle (hermetic, hieratic)
until the genie of critical theory escaped into the very air itself and was reborn
as "cultural studies," "theory," "media studies." Mixed messages as macaronic
as Barthesian mythologies. Which led us to observe that while wine and milk
were, to Barthes, national totems, he was all but silent on water, the medium
of illusion and transition. Deceptively transparent, almost glassy, water d
istorts the senses; it is the source of life and succor, but it is also the
destructive element that throws you off balance. Water suspends reality. There
was definitely something about Perrier.

And then it came to her like a flash. "People didn't drink water-they drank
Perrier." Water diviner. It was the label that signified the sign of the times, as
Tom Wolfe had so ably detected in Bonfire of the Vanities, that encyclopedia of
an age of simulacral futures and bonds and derivatives that "insulated"
(Wolfe's word) the Masters of the Universe from the stenches and "trenches of
the urban wars": "himself, with his noble head, his Yale chin, his big frame,
and his $1,800 British suit, the angel's father, a man of parts." And lables--Jeff
Koons's Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding
NBA Tip-Off), 1985 comes immediately to mind-were also the legends that
some in the art world lived by:

Klaus Otmann: How do you see advertisement?

Koons: It's basically the medium that defines people's perceptions of the
world, of life itself, how to interact with others. The media defines reality. Just
yesterday we met some friends. We were celebrating and I stated to them:
"Here's to good friends!" It was like living in an ad. It was wonderful, a
wonderful moment. We were right there living in the reality of our media.'

Recalling the '8os brings another kind of labeling to mind. It is the decade
most readily tagged with terms associated with the culture wars-political
correctness, the politics of identity, the postmodern, the postcolonial. The
Eighties Club, a website devoted to the period, remembers only too well that
"conservatives felt the nation had veered too far left since the '60s and hoped
that Reagan's election heralded their victory in the 'culture wars.' Many were
disappointed with the results by the decade's end." The culture wars were a
consequence of the conservative fear that the liberal left had staged a
bloodless coup on campuses, in the media, and in the art world. In The Closing
of the American Mind (1987) Allan Bloom attacked the "spiritual
detumescence" of the Academy populated by students and professors enslaved
to sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll; Roger Kimball took on the "tenured radicals"
while Hilton Kramer punctured public intellectuals, and between them this
redoubtable duo tilted at the winds of change with such regularity that despite
their healthy provocation they were in danger of sounding like windbags of
woe. But there was a gale blowing in the direction of "differences," and the
museum and the art world were protagonists in this cultural display:
"Difference: On Representation and Sexuality" (1984-85) and "The Decade
Show" (1990) in New York, "Magiciens de la Terre" (1989) in Paris, and
"America: Bride of the Sun" (1992) in Antwerp were only the most prominent
exhibitions born of this impulse. To interrogate "identity" rather than assert its
inviolability represented the best version of this minoritarian move. Identity art
could, of course, be dogmatic and declarative in a way that was too desperate
to become truly resonant. But the desire to open up issues of "subjectivity" as
they were expressed in the pluralist political culture of the '80s also gave rise
to enigmatic and exploratory artistic practices. Adrian Piper, for example, was
famously intolerant of stereotypical images even when thei r content was
politically progressive, because they often led to identitarian assertions of
nationalism and separatism. Anish Kapoor rejected images altogether in favor
of an elusive quest for sculptural transformations that delved deep into the
cultural traditions of the "void"--sacred and secular--to rise with new insights
on the profound surfaces of perception and personhood. And a bit later,
Damien Hirst's early vitrine pieces--sharks and sheep pickled in
formaldehyde--turned a demonic eye on the "Englishness" of still-life
traditions, while also riffing on the iconic, allegorical works of the Pre-
Raphaelites (e.g., William Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat, 1854-56). What was
ignored in the ire of the culture wars has, on reflection, become its major
contribution: a concept of cultural community based on shared and negotiated
affiliations.

The "politics of difference" (as the culture wars were called by aficionados) was
indeed an attempt at creating cultural or political associations based on the
articulation of a range of diverse interests rather than on the assertion of
separatist group identities (be they race-, ethnicity-, or gender-based). When
essentialist claims to identity become the organizational grounds for separatist
or quasinationalist forms of sovereignty, we enter the realm of the politics of
identity. In contrast, the politics of difference suggests that the playing field on
which equality is negotiated cannot be leveled merely by equalizing or
universalizing differences. This is because the pursuit of fairness and justice is
a matter of judging between "cases" of oppression and acknowledging the
specificities and contingencies of the historical "causes" of domination and
discrimination. Freedom, equality, fairness, and recognition are not simply
given ideals or ultimate goals; these "goods" come to be defined and
transformed as forms of ethical and political progress in the process by which
dialogue, negotiation, and affiliation make their claims on resources and rights
"in the name of difference." Such a complex aspiration to equality without
equalization--to which I shall return at the end of this essay--is open to
instability because it demands a continual adjustment of advantage and
disadvantage, from a vantage point of judgment whose scales must be
continually calibrated. Are those of us who still utter the shibboleth of
"difference," with something of an '80s accent, foreigners to the decade in
which we live today?

In every decade there are events that transcend their times and others that
survive their histories. This is not a distinction between triumph and failure; it
may be better understood through an oceanic metaphor, as the difference
between a wave that rises above the horizon, coming to light as it catches the
eye, and a deep current that moves under the surface, a forceful undertow felt
inchoately as pressure rather than presence. Were the culture wars of the '80s
an epochal occurrence or an emergent event? Such a question, it used to be
said, could only be answered in the fullness of time; but perhaps ours is now
that threadbare time, insecure and anxious, filled with the fear of violence,
terrorized. For the '8os inaugurated a dream of difference which is now being
haunted by horror and doubt: abhorrence of the "deterritorialized flows" of
global terror networks; doubts about the feasibility of global politics with the
increase in "homeland" security and international surveillance; doubts about
preemptive st rikes; doubts about war; doubts about our rights and
responsibilities for the world and ourselves. What happened to the dream?

IN EMPIRE, MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI'S ENCOMIUM TO a

deterritorialized global politics of the present, the authors provide an
impassioned response to the proclivities of the politics of difference that
emerged in the '80s. The wide influence of this polemical work is a
consequence of its commitment to understanding the emergent force of the
"multitude" as it constructs a world that "continually transgresses territorial
and racial boundaries." (2). From the perspective of Empire, the '80s represent
a moment of transition, an opening up of quests, and questions, beyond the
static sovereignties of the "essentialist" modern "subject" and the
"foundationalist" nation-state. Postmodernism and postcolonialism, the twin
peaks of '80s theoretical thinking, were symptomatic discourses of the period,
providing a critical perspective on its immanent structures while being unable
to keep up with the rapid transformations of globalized capitalism. They
bravely battled against the Manichaean master narratives of moder n
sovereignty, Hardt and Negri concede, unsettling the binary logic of "Self and
Other, white and black, inside and outside, ruler and ruled." (3) However,
despite their fine intentions and critical intelligence, these post-masters who
deployed postmodernism and poststructuralism in their critique of global
capitalism failed to realize that corporate capital and the global markets
operated programs of economic power that were themselves, in most respects,
"postmodern" and had absorbed the lessons of mobility, indeterminacy, and
hybridity avant la lettre: Patriotism is an enemy to profitability, once money
takes on the multifarious colors of the multinational state. The butt of the
postmodern or postcolonial attack on global corporate power loses its point
because global markets have presciently absorbed the truths of postmodern
and, in their turn, butt these time-warped theories in the ... ocks. "Power has
evacuated the bastion that they [postmodernists and postcolonialists] are
attacking and has circled arou nd to their rear to join them in the assault in the
name of difference." (4) Is the work of the '80s done and finished with, as
Hardt and Negri suggest, and is the politics of difference hoist by its own
petard?

It would be heartening to believe--as Empire would have us--that global power

has deserted the bastions of binary thinking. The aftermath of 9/11 has, I
believe, made even more urgent the '80s endeavor to think of issues relating
to political and cultural difference beyond the polarities of power and identity.
The reasons for such a revival of '80s thinking are close at hand. Immediately
after the World Trade Center attacks there was a worldwide resurgence of
Samuel Huntington's thesis on the "clash of civilizations," with righteous Islam
ranged against the liberal, Christian West--an argument that the author
himself was in the process of revising. More recently, with Iraq in our sights,
there is another ruling binary in our midst--this time known as the bipolarity of
global power. In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times (February 16,
2003), Thomas L. Friedman argues that 9/11 has introduced a new division of
the globe--the World of Order and the World of Disorder:

The world of order is built on four pillars: the U.S., E.U.Russia, India and
China, along with all the smaller powers around them. The World of Disorder
comprises failed states (such as Liberia), rogue stares (Iraq and North Korea),
messy states--states that are too big to fail but too messy to work (Pakistan,
Colombia, Indonesia, many Arab and African stases)--and finally the terrorist
and mafia networks that feed off the World of Disorder.

There has always been a World of Disorder, but what makes it more dangerous
today is that in a networked universe, with widely diffused technologies, open
borders and a highly integrated global financial and Internet system, very
small groups of people can amass huge amounts of power to disrupt the World
of Order. Individuals can become super-empowered. In many ways, 9/11
marked the first full-scale battle between a superpower and a small band of
super-empowered angry men from the World of Disorder.

There is no old-style polarity here of East and West or North and South;
nevertheless, the presence of a networked universe and diffused technologies
doesn't prevent the discourse of world power from becoming bipolar: the World
of Order and the World of Disorder. Why the differences between superpowers
and the super-empowered should somehow naturally assume a pattern of
polarity is a question for another time. What is relevant in remembering the
'80s is that the critical labor of interrogating the binary bastions of world power
still has an important role to play if we want to understand why the World of
Order elicits such deep anger, anxiety, and ambivalence from those who
belong to failed, rogue, or messy states. Why the failure? What is the history
of the mess? To suggest that the world has moved decidedly into "global
networks of power consisting of highly differentiated and mobile structures" (5)
is at best only half true. True perhaps for the Al Qaeda network and its
operative nodes. But hardly true for much of the rest of the world; not true for
the US and the UK; nor for that matter, of the worldwide demand, on the
streets and in secretariats, that any hostile action should be undertaken under
the supervision of the UN, fully ratified by international law, and supported by
the community of nations. The two sides of the global truth amount to
something less than a whole truth: First, that the specter of binary or bipolar
explanation rises to exert order and meaning when we are confronted by
realities that seem partial and indeterminate, in conditions that are contingent,
contradictory, and fearsome. And secondly, that national territories and
network societies coexist in relations that are conflictual and collaborative,
problematic and proximate. It is to this latter issue, the life world of
contemporary globalization, that I now want to turn, with a backward glance to
the '80s.

Has the bad old world of nation-stares been subsumed, perhaps suborned, into
a world order of global markets that make our attention to national
hegemonies--both their interests and injustices--somehow irrelevant?

The global cunning of world markets must not be underestimated; nor,

however, must the world's trade zones be celebrated as a bricolage of
borderless bazaars. ("Differences [of commodities, populations, cultures, and
so forth] seem to multiply infinitely in the world marker....") (6) Financial
markets and capital flows have been disproportionately globalized in
comparison with other important sectors of the world economy, but nowhere
near the extent to which the rhetoric of globalization claims. At a rough
estimate, almost 90 percent of trade policies and tariffs worldwide are still
controlled by nation-states rather than interregional bodies. The European
Union and MERCOSUR are exceptions to this global trend, setting their tariffs
according to "customs union" regulations, but this represents only a modest
variation in the persistence of trade barriers across the world. The rhetorical
zeal with which it is claimed that world markets are now postnational needs to
be tempered by historical reality. A much more mixed, and complex, picture
emerges in which the sovereignty of national control is only partially and
strategically compromised.

When cultural-studies critics argue (with increasing regularity) that

"postmodernism" is the logic of global capital or that "the world market
establishes a real politics of difference," (7) they seem to turn the world into a
metaphor of mondialisation in which the persistence of national or international
governance is wrongly seen as the remnant of an archaic, atavistic force. Such
arguments work through analogy by equating the conceptual language of
cultural globalization with select aspects of the political economy--
commodification, financial flows, capital transfers, outsourcing, flexible
accumulation--that seem to resonate with the semiotic vocabularies of cultural
studies. For the economic processes I have mentioned above can be
appropriated into the spatial language of cultural description and
representation. The circulation of commodities, the opening up of freetrade
zones, the technological transfer of financial flows bear a certain formal
resonance with (if not resemblance to) the circulation of im ages, the exchange
of cultural signs, the excess of signification, and intertextual transfers of
meaning. The elements of the global economy and polity that can be read
under the sign of semiotic "circulation" are then mobilized for a wider political
and ethical argument that suggests that the goal of global citizenship lies in
"the struggle against the slavery of belonging to a nation, an identity and a
people, and thus the desertion from sovereignty and the limits it places on
subjectivity--is entirely positive. Nomadism and miscegenation appear here as
figures of virtue, the first ethical practices on the terrain of Empire." (8)

Such an emanciparory ideal-so affixed on the flowing, borderless, global

world--neglects to confront the fact that migrants, refugees, and nomads don't
merely circulate. They need to settle, claim asylum or nationality, demand
housing and education, assert their economic and cultural rights, and come to
be legally represented--represented, that is, in certain legal jurisdictions; and
in that sense monetary policy and taxation, which are more conjunctural or
contextual than "circulatory," provide the immanent infrastructure for enabling
the ethic of free movement, It is salutary, then, to turn to less "circulatory"
forms of the economy like tariffs, taxes, and monetary policy, which are much
less open to metaphoric appropriation. And yet taxation and trade tariffs are
no less a matter of concern for cultural globalization, which places the
problems of migration and the accelerated movement of peoples and things, at
the heart of the new global polity. Indeed, to the extent to which global
equality and justice d emands the free flow of peoples and goods, taxation has
a crucial role to play in providing migrants and the with social welfare, public
goods, medical care, and educational benefits at the national level. Positive
global relations depend on the protection of these nation-based resources. To
suggest that "the very idea of a [national] economy is becoming meaningless"
or that the "world market is liberated from the kind of binary division that
nation-states had imposed" (9) is to claim too much too soon. For, as Saskia
Sassen has repeatedly argued, the global economy is a transitional category
that only becomes meaningful in a process whereby the national and the global
are articulated in an intersectional and interstitial relation to each other. It is
the "insertions of the global into the fabric of the national [that create a]
partial and incipient denationalization of that which has historically been
constructed as the national." Our experience of the global is nor a face to face
encounter with a "new" soc ial or cultural phenomenon: Global culture only
assumes a representational form when the nation-space cedes its sovereignty
in order to accede to the transnational or global reality that embeds itself, or
intercedes, in the ongoing life of the nation.

TO THE EXTENT TO WHICH THE INTERESTS OF POST-colonialism and

postmodernism coalesced as strategies of critical knowledge in the '80s, their
interest lay in giving shape and significance to forms of social agency and
cultural identity that emerged from the "partial and incipient" conditions of
minoritarian life. Such conditions do not belong exclusively to the margins of
society or peripheries of the globe. They exist wherever there is an attempt to
deny the choice of freedom, or to refuse the recognition of equality, on the
grounds that there must be a normalization or neutralization of "difference" in
order to ensure social order. In such circumstances the minority, always a
partially denationalized political subject, emerges as a "partial and incipient"
social force that seeks to recognize itself and represent its freedom through an
identification with the other's difference--its claims, interests, and conditions of
life. Such a tentativeness in the description of the minority must sound strange
in the ligh t of the noisy debates about "political correctness" and the "culture
of complaint" that became the Babel of the '80s. The polemics of the "politics
of identity" often misunderstood the desire for public recognition and respect
as the quasi-nationalist demand of ethnic autonomy. This legitimate hope for
cultural and political legitimation through a reversion to cultural authenticity or
"essentialism" was poignantly misplaced--as if the discourse of racial or sexual
discrimination, profoundly phobic and physical, had any sense of history or
poetry at all.

At its best, I believe, the politics of difference seeks to rethink the minority not
as an "identity" but as a process of affiliation (rather than autonomy) that
eschews sovereignty and sees its own "selfhood" and interests as "partial and
incipient" in relation to the other's presence. This form of minoritarian
identification converts the liminal condition of the minority--again, always
partly denationalized--into a new kind of strength based on the solidarity of the
"partial" collectivity rather than sovereign mastery. In this sense, as Etienne
Balibar brilliantly suggests, seeking liberation is a right to difference in
equality,' that is, not as a restoration of an original identity or as a
neutralization of differences in the equality of rights, but as the production of
an equality... [as] the complementarity and reciprocity of singularities." (10)
The dream of the '80s was no more than this: the desire for the production of
equality and tights--not their prior presumption--as a process of freedom and
sel f-expression claimed "in the name of difference." For such rights and
equalities to exist in the midst of a world of diverse peoples and things, we
must possess the cautious virtue of political tolerance, but we must also go
beyond it to cultivate the virtuosity of cultural poesis that allows us to speak of
the world as we make it in tongues that are not our own.

Notes:

(1.) Klaus Ottmann, interview with Jeff Koons in the Journal of Contemporary Art [online] 1, no. 1 (1988).
Available at www.jca-online.com/koons.html.

(2.) Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000): 363.

(3.) Ibid. 139. (4.) Ibid. 738. (5.) Ibid. 151. (6.) Ibid. 150. (7.) Ibid. 151. (8.) Ibid. 361-62. (9.) Ibid. 151.

(10.) Etienne Balibar, "'Rights of Man' and 'Rights of the Citizen': The Modern Dialectic of Equality and
Freedom," in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx (New York:
Routledge, 1994): 56.

Homi K. Bhabha is Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and chair of the
Program in History and Literature at Harvard University. (See Contributors.)
COPYRIGHT 2003 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

5. On Minorities: Cultural Rights

Homi K. Bhabha

After the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we

still need to ask: what is the human `thing itself'? Who is `one of us' in the
midst of the jurisdictional unsettlements of migration, minoriti-zation, the
clamour of multiculturalism? To whom do we turn in neighbourly embrace or
alien embarrassment?
In The Politics of Recognition, Charles Taylor proposes a global mode of
cultural judgement that has become a landmark of liberal multiculturalism.
`Merely on the human level,' he writes, ` one could argue that - whole
societies - cultures that have provided the horizon of meaning for large
numbers of human beings of diverse characters and temperaments over a long
period of time ... are almost certain to have something that deserves our
admiration and respect.' At this point Taylor introduces an evaluative caveat, a
qualified disavowal: `I have ... excluded partial cultural milieux within a
society as well as short phases of a major culture. There is no reason to
believe that, for instance, the different art forms of a given culture should all
be of equal, or even of considerable, value; and every culture can go through
phases of decadence.' What is the significance of this exclusion of the `partial
milieux' in making a case for cultural value on the grounds of `whole
societies'?
Could it be that in the influential, humane language of communitarian
liberalism, `whole societies', however universal their aspirations, are
fundamentally imagined to be nationalist cultures? Is there an inability to
conceive of societal or `cultural options' outside the national, even nationalist
frame? As the Mexican social and legal historian Rodolfo Stavenhagen has
aptly reflected in the recent UNESCO publication Cultural Rights and Wrongs:
`the conveniently ambiguous term of "national culture", leaves open the
question of whose nation and what kind of nation is to be developed ... the
development of modern states have been more a process of `nation-
destroying' than one of nation building, in view of the fact that in the name of
the modern nation-state peoples have in fact been destroyed or eliminated.'
An excess of `identity'?
The restrictive and prescriptive `nationalist' impulse disguised in the `global'
horizon of the `merely human' and its cultural measure, the `whole society', is
further borne by Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights. Article 27 is one of the two main implementing conventions of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights: it protects `the right of minorities, in
community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture,
to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language'. As
such Article 27 is the most significant international instrument for the
protection and implementation of `cultural rights'. Over the years, various
member states have proposed amendments in order to prevent migrants and
diasporic peoples from being considered minorities. These states have held
that `The very existence of unassimilated minorities would be a threat to
national unity; and hence, the provisions relating to the rights of minorities
should not be so applied to encourage the emergence of new minority groups,
or to thwart the process of assimilation and so threaten the unity of the State.'
Spain, Peru, India, Brazil and other representatives have suggested that the
`rights' of minorities should only be conceded to those who over `long periods
of times' have enhanced the historical stability and the integrity of the `whole'
society of the state, all of which adds up to the fact - I quote from the
Commission's working papers - that `loyalty [is] an element in the [very]
definition of minority'.
A study of these working papers submitted by member-states suggests that
the underlying fear here, once again, is the `creation of new minorities'. What
I have identified as the extrusion of the `partial cultural minority' and the bias
towards `a large number of persons ... over a long period of time' should be
read in the resonant context of what it means in Article 27 for minorities to
`enjoy their culture'. The insistence in Article 27 that minorities should
`preserve' their cultural identity rather than emerge as new formations of
minoritization, or `partial cultural milieux', emphasizes the fact that minorities,
amongst others, are regulated and administered into a position of having an
excess of `identity', which can then be assimilated and regulated into the
state's conception of `the common good'. As Seyla Benhabib has pointed out,
`historically the strong pursuit of collective goals or "goods," commonly
referred to as nationalism, has usually been at the cost of minorities - sexual,
cultural or ethnic.' Minorities - both national and `migrant or diasporic' - are
too frequently imaged as the abject `subjects' of their cultures of origin
huddled in the gazebo of group rights, preserving the orthodoxy of their
distinctive cultures in the midst of the great storm of Western progress.
Such proscriptions on the creation of new minoritarian subjects ignore the fact
that, in our times, `partial cultural milieux' and `non-state' social actors are
increasingly relevant, nationally and internationally, in the fight for cultural
rights and social justice. `The frontlines in the battle for racial justice for
African Americans', Manning Marable recently argued, `are increasingly located
in prisons, in community-based coalitions struggling against political brutality
and in efforts to organize the unemployed and welfare recipients forced into
workfare programmes.' The partial decentralization of the state in the global
context opens up the theatre of international law to what Saskia Sassen has
described as `a space where women ... can come out of the invisibility of
aggregate membership in a nation-state ... by partly working through non-
state groups and networks [where] the needs and agendas of women are not
necessarily defined by state-borders'.
Just history
The creation of new minorities reveals a liminal, interstitial public sphere that
emerges in-between the state and the non-state, in-between individual rights
and group needs; not in the simpler dialectic between global and local.
Subjects of cultural rights occupy an analytic and ethical borderland of
`hybridization' in a partial and double identification across minority milieux. In
fact, the prevailing school of legal opinion specifically describes minority
cultural rights as assigned to `hybrid' subjects who stand somewhere in-
between individual needs and obligations, and collective claims and choices, in
partial cultural milieux. While the law moves uneasily and uncomfortably on
these new terrains, the proleptic grace of poetry has the power to align the
anxiety of speaking from within the `partial cultural milieux' of minority rights,
with the aspirational vision of the formation of `new minorities.'
Listen to Adrienne Rich:
Old backswitching road bent toward the ocean's light
Talking of angles of vision movements a black or a red tulip
opening
Times of walking across a street thinking
not I have joined the movement but I am stepping in this deep current
Part of my life washing behind me terror I couldn't swim with
part of my life waiting for me a part I had no words for
I need to live each day through have them and know
them all
though I can see from here where I'll be standing at the end.
...
When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?
How do you know you're not circling in pale dreams, nostalgia, stagnation
but entering that deep current malachite, colorado
requiring all your strength wherever found
your patience and your labour
desire pitted against desire's inversion
all your mind's fortitude?
Maybe through a teacher: someone with facts with numbers with poetry
who wrote on the board: IN EVERY GENERATION ACTION FREES OUR DREAMS

Maybe a student: one mind unfurling like a redblack peony

...
And now she turns her face brightly on the new morning in the new classroom
new in her beauty her skin her lashes her lively body:
Race, class ... all that ... but isn't all that just history?
Aren't people bored with it all?
She could be
myself at nineteen but free of reverence for past ideas
ignorant of hopes piled on her she's a mermaid
momentarily precipitated from a solution
which could stop her heart She could swim or sink
like a beautiful crystal.
(`Inscriptions', Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991-95)
`Race, class ... all that ... but isn't all that just history?' This preoccupation
with what is `just' history - both historical justice and historical justification -
gives the poem a particular relevance for the pedagogy of our times. The
`subject' of the poem is, literally, the sphere of the proximity of differences -
race, class, gender, generation - as they emerge in a range of intersecting
public spheres - the street, the academy, the political party, the private diary -
to claim a right to representation. As the nineteen-year-old mermaid turns her
back on `all that history' - the poem itself, `redblack peony', moves restlessly
back and forth in a double-movement that relives and revises: the sixties in
the nineties, mothers-and-daughters; race-within-the-claims of gender and
class. Article 27 and its potentially hybrid subject of inter-cultural rights is
caught in the colorado of the `partial cultural milieux' of minority
identifications and their metonymic representations: `Part of my life washing
behind me.../ part of my life waiting for me...' The repetition of `part of me ...
part of me ...' threads the ambivalent, anxious subject of poetic-psychic
affiliation with the hybrid legal subject of cultural rights, often agonistically
poised between individual and group: `not I have joined the movement but I
am stepping in this deep current/ ... malachite, colorado.' Can poetry think the
problem that legal discourse can only describe?
In embodying the spirit of the hybrid subject of Article 27, Rich suggests that
individual and group, singularity and solidarity, need not be opposed or aligned
against each other. They are part of the movement of transition or translation
that emerges within and between minority milieux. For an international
community of rights cannot be based on an abstract inherent `value' of
humanness; it requires a process of cultural translation that, each time,
historically and poetically inquires into the conflictual namings of `humanity'.
What is being defended in the name of the individual `right'? What freedom is
denied in the designation of the collective culture of the group? `While rights
are always attributed to individuals, in the last instance, they are achieved and
won collectively', Étienne Balibar has argued. The `human' is identified not
with a given essence, be it natural or supranatural, but with a practice, a task.
The property of the human being is the collective or the transindividual
construction of her or his individual autonomy; and the value of human agency
arises from the fact that no one can be liberated by others, although no one
can liberate herself or himself without others.
Rich's insistence on the partial identification of the minoritarian subject - no
whole persons or whole societies - makes her aware that individual and group
are not the two faces of human rights, but its chiasmatic doubles. As in the
disjunctive yet proximate temporality of the poem itself, individual and group
stand at the hybrid intersectionality of rights; just as the minority stands
doubly within and across the national boundary; and the psyche has an
agonizing rendezvous with history.
6. The Right to Narrate: Interview with Homi Bhabha
By Kerry Chance, 3/19/01

As part of the Human Rights Project's ongoing lecture series, leading theorist in
postcolonial studies, Homi Bhabha, presented a paper entitled, "Looking Global."
Throughout his work, from Nation and Narration (1990) to the Location of Culture (1994),
Bhabha has consistently questioned stable notions of culture, nationalism, and human
rights, notably by applying poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories to these concepts.
His ideas about the nation as narrativized, cultural dominance as ambivalent, and borders
as liminal, have contributed to the way in which postcolonial studies approaches its object.
Bhabha is presently a Chester D Tripp professor of the Humanities at University of
Chicago, where he teaches in the Departments of English and Art.

In the following interview, he discusses the complex relationship between neo-nationalism

and globalization, and the "right to narrate."

Kerry Chance: In an interview with the Free Press three weeks ago, Edward Said
remarked that some nations have become increasingly nationalistic partially in response to
globalization. In the Location of Culture, you discuss the social articulation of difference in
terms of the negotiation that occurs in the liminal space between boundaries. Globalization
seems to widen this liminal space, contributing to that articulation. Can you speak to the
trend of nationalism, and how it may change the dominant paradigm through which
globalization is conceptualized?

Homi Bhabha: I think there are two forces at play in the world today, and they play against
each other in a kind of tension or dialectic. One is, as you said a moment ago, are the
forces of global inter-nationalism. These are visible in international conventions, regional
economic bodies, the European Union, international treaties, so on and so forth. They are
also visible in the global economy and the global media economy, and of course the global
market. Also, in the increase of commodification and consumption, the culture of goods.
So you have this span of everything from what we recognize in a kind of early or post War
sense of international to a rapid and increasing globalization.

And the difference between internationalism and globalization some say is the whole
question of speed, some say it is the extent of permeation, and some consider this to be
an effect of the compromised sovereignty of national economies of the nation state itself.
However, in response to this global, international complex, there has been an increasing
xenophobia, a kind of nationalism - and we have got to examine quite carefully what we
mean by this. In some cases, it's the kind of genocidal nationalism that we see. Groups
rape countries that were once under the yoke of the Soviet Union for instance, and
demand autonomy for themselves in ways in which they cannot be sustained. I mean this
is not nineteenth century nationalism, this is not a sense of e pluribus unum. This is really
a response to years of oppression and a desire to have a sense of national sovereignty.
And they cannot support it economically, or in terms of civil society. That is why you get
ethnic cleansing and such.
7. Laughing stock - epistemological hoax
perpetrated by New York University professor Alan
Sokal
Homi K. Bhabha

Historical coincidences can hardly compare with the strange synchronies

Nature sometimes throws up. Think back to last spring and summer, try
to take a binational view, and wonder aloud why, suddenly, on both
sides of the Atlantic the air is heavy with the unpronounceable words and
mystifying acronyms of the Science Wars. March in London, and even
the crocuses are going crazy. There is something rotten in the beef of
Olde England (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or BSE, more
prosaically known as Mad Cow Disease), and while the politicians are
desperately hiding behind the latest scientific "evidence" and the media
are going for broke busily stoking instant panic, the scientists
themselves are quite undecided about the links between BSE and
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, known to rot the human brain. Now, look
across the water. . . . May in New York, the early blossom barely
breaking out, and the killing fields of academe are already rife with
shepherd's blight. Serious outbreaks of foot-in-mouth disease rage
around Washington Square, where the Commissars of Scientific
Rationality (CSR) are busy bum-rapping the Concerned Comradely
Collective of Cultural Studies (CCCCS). All the wee "little magazines" are
in a state of high excitement, and all because of that infamous Sokal
Text - the parodic "deconstruction" of the "canon of mathematics" that
N.Y.U. physicist Alan Sokal managed to slip by the editors of the leading
cultural studies journal Social Text. Roger Kimball of The New Criterion
has once again displayed his zeal for the "ideal of objectivity [sic]" with
the furious enthusiasm of a Genghis Khan; while Social Text has got its
Red diapers in a twist. More is involved in running these two stories
together than Nature's prescience "red in tooth and claw."
Differences of scale and political urgency should prevent us from drawing
easy analogies. The largely parochial, academic context of the Sokal
hoax, with its almost paranoiac fixation on academic "culture," a
continuation of the culture wars by other means, bears little initial
resemblance to the national and international implications of the BSE
scare (e.g., 12,000 estimated job losses in the first week of the scare,
the proposed culling of 11.8 million heads of cattle, the prospect of
killing off a [pounds]500,000,000 export industry).
Is it worth pursuing a comparison between Sokal's epistemological hoax
and the British agricultural scare? At the level of content and implication
the exercise seems most unpromising. But I find it intriguing that these
latest eruptions over the public status of scientific "truth" should emerge,
on both sides of the Atlantic, as events set apart from "ordinary life" and
described in the affective language of hoax and scare. "Hoaxes" and
"scares" are not simply forms of experience: they emerge through print
and the visual, virtual media as social narratives whose efficaciousness
lies in the disturbance, even distortion, of "rationality"; their relation to
"external reality" is necessarily displaced, diversionary, and inescapably
figurative. Put it down to my innate distrust of "literal meaning," blame it
on my belief in the significant role played by "social and linguistic
constructs" in the designation of physical reality (apologies in advance to
Messrs. Kimball and Sokal), but I remain convinced that these forms of
address are obviously more than merely rhetorical gestures (in the case
of the hoax) or the manifestations of the media (in the case of the
scare).
Sokal's hoax purports to adopt the language of "epistemic relativism"
and post-Modern literary theory - "allusions, metaphors, and puns
substitu[ting] for evidence and logic," as he put it in the May/June
Lingua Franca item that revealed his scare - as a way to "prove" the
opposite case, in support of scientific "truth": "There is a real world; its
properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do
matter. What sane person would contend otherwise." Precisely. Methinks
the laddie doth protest too much - and with nothing positive to show for
it. If the scientist's new metacritical clothes leave him so hopelessly
bereft of ideas, then no wonder he needs to pass in post-Modern "drag."
It's these banal and naive "epistemic" conclusions Sokal arrives at in the
name of Science that lead me to believe that his hoax is not simply
"hokey," nor is its worst sin the betrayal of the "good practice" of
academic trust and integrity. Sokal's hoax is a form of "acting out": an
ingenious, labile play with post-Modern or post-Structuralist building
blocks in order to produce a primary pastiche that he readily
acknowledges is without "reasoned argument" or "a logical sequence of
thought." To condemn the terms of his parody too readily, or acquiesce
with it too easily, is to collude with Sokal's simplistic fantasy of a pure
polarity between science's reasoned arguments and the inherent illogic
and obfuscation of cultural languages of allusions, metaphors, puns, and
rhetorical strategies. We must not allow Sokal to force upon us his banal
version of the binarism of science (as the ready reference of external
reality) and literary studies (as the hocus-pocus of cultural
hermeneutics), not because we literary and cultural analysts are so
fragile in our knowledge, but because his confreres, the most thoughtful
members of the scientific community itself, will not have it either. The
point has been beautifully made in the July/August Lingua Franca by
Evelyn Fox Keller, professor of History and Philosophy of Science at MIT,
in what remains by far the pithiest and wisest comment on the whole
affair:
Scholars in science studies who have turned to postmodernism have
done so out of a real need: Truth and objectivity turn out to be vastly
more problematic concepts than we used to think, and neither can be
measured simply by the weight of scientific authority, nor even by
demonstrations of efficacy. Yet surely the ability to distinguish argument
from parody is a prerequisite to any attempt at understanding the
complexities of truth claims, in science or elsewhere. . . .
On the other side, Keller continues, "It saddens me that my scientific
colleagues so readily confuse the analysis of social influence on science
with radical subjectivism, mistaking challenges to the autonomy of
science with the 'dogma' that there exists no external world."
There is no easy comfort here for anybody - Right or Left, scientist or
cultural critic - but it does provide the occasion for a completely different
reading of the Sokal hoax. While the received wisdom is that Sokal
wanted to expose the post-Modern flakes - and subsequent events have
played right into his hands - may I suggest that Sokal's perverse
pleasure probably lay elsewhere. It was as a committed leftist, Sokal
claimed, desperate to protect the lunatic left from itself, that he resorted
to his little scam. I believe in his sincerity, but distrust his ready gift of
providing such glowing comfort to the forsworn enemies of the left (e.g.,
Kimball et al.). Sokal's gloating at his own gibberish, his bloomers that
any "undergraduate physics or math major" would have readily detected,
his repeated reproach that the spoof he "intentionally wrote" was not
sent out for evaluation by a scientist - all this convinces me that Sokal's
real desire (in that way in which something unconscious can also be
quite real), was to have been found out himself.
I would be the last person to argue in that "subjectivist" mode so
roundly damned by our scientific "objectivists": I am therefore not
suggesting that Sokal did not intend to dupe the editors of Social Text.
Rather, apart from (or alongside) his petulant mischief, I detect in
Sokal's essay - in his rhetorical strategies, in his linguistic constructions -
a displaced anxiety about the contested "autonomy" of science, an
anxiety that works, as Keller suggests, by distancing "science" from its
own epistemic uncertainties and contingencies. This process involves the
defenders of Science representing their own anxiety as an aggressive
attack upon scientific truth from the perceived "post-Modern" dogma
"that there exists no external world." All is "social constructionism." To
echo Sokal's words: What sane post-Modernist would believe this? Did
he check the facts with a literature or philosophy major?
But my perverse reading of scientific anxiety goes beyond the
controversy around epistemological claims - whether relativist or
rationalist - to the question of the status of science as public authority.
The contingency and uncertainty that afflicts scientific authority when its
"autonomy" is most eagerly sought in the public domain demonstrate the
inadequacy of scientific rationality and social constructionism as concepts
that describe the role of science in performing and deforming social
reality. return fleetingly to hoaxes and scares in the public theater of
science, in order that deluded professors may finally learn something
from mad cows.
Now a hoax is not a scare. Hoaxes, though they may get out of hand,
are deliberate ruses for premeditated ends, inverting the assumptions
and priorities of the object of parodic attention. Scares, though they may
be manipulative and strategic, are often moments that confound
direction and intention; they are fraught with uncertainty, risk, anxiety,
panic. But what the Sokal hoax and the BSE beef scare share is what
they reveal about the "risky" place that science occupies in the public
world. The concept of the "risk society" is Ulrich Beck's contribution to
the discussion around the science wars. Beck is our tangible link between
the Sokal hoax and the BSE scare, having been cited liberally in both
discussions. In his introduction to the infamous "Science Wars" issue of
Social Text, Andrew Ross invokes Beck's concept of "reflexive
modernity": to wit, late, "techno-scientific" modernity performs a
reflexive turn upon itself, a revision of its assumptions, when it questions
the scientific rationality on which industrial capitalism was historically
founded. Once there is a breach of faith in the ameliorative and
progressive nature of scientific systems, and the loss of confidence in the
"neutrality" of science's rationalist methodology, there emerges what
Beck calls a "risk society": As he put it in the Independent on March 26:
At the heart of the politics of this risk society is the relationship of
politics and science. . . . If you ask who is responsible for creating and
managing risks, the reply is "nobody." We live in a state of organized
irresponsibility. . . . In case of risk conflicts, politicians can no longer rely
on experts to adjudicate.
The concept of a risk society is central to our understanding of the public
role of science. Where settled scientific opinion once calmed the nation's
nerves, now science is itself afflicted by the "risk" and contingency that
inhere in the "causes" of those very scares to which science has to
administer its salve. "In the risk society," Beck writes, "politics and
morality must be given priority over shifting scientific reasoning."
Science itself becomes involved in the process of the scare mechanism;
it emphasizes the governmental disjunctions between decision making,
knowledge production, and adjudicative activity in a social context that is
fraught with "organized irresponsibility." As such, the crisis of the public
status of science is inseparable from the larger crisis of democratic
accountability in late modernity. Despite the advantages of the
decentralization of technoscientific production, there is a risk that forms
of "local" authority and resistance are often considered to be obsolete;
they are replaced by highly individuated and atomized concepts of
communal representation and regulation.
It has been argued by John Gray, professor of politics at Oxford, that the
organizational irresponsibility of BSE can be traced to the Thatcherite
decade of deregulation, and its deadly success in "privatizing"
environmental risk. "In such a climate," he writes in the March 26
Guardian, "it was easy to confuse risks that are unquantifiable with risks
that are insignificant. The risk to human health posed by the
transmission of disease-bearing pathogens across animal species to the
human species . . . is not exactly quantifiable; but given the enormity of
the danger posed by . . . CJD [Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease], it is not at all
insignificant." The calculation of risk based on cost-benefit analyses - a
favorite approach among the New Right that still exerts its influence -
has other things to answer for: the large proportion of meat and bone
meal (4 to 5 percent) in cattle feed in a country where there is a
significant presence of the scrapie infection associated with BSE; the
unusually low temperatures used in rendering carcasses - 30-40 degrees
lower than the comparable French and Italian regulations; the severe
cuts in research funding and facilities related to cattle diseases right
through the '80s, when the BSE risk was brewing. But Gray's
observations notwithstanding, who will answer for all this?
And that is precisely the point: it is the very dispersal of causes and
responsibilities that produces the state of "organized irresponsibility." In
her March 28 column in London's Evening Standard, Anne Applebaum
graphically illustrates this process as it played out in the British
government's obfuscation during the BSE scare: "How many believed
that the Prime Minister wasn't looking at opinion polls, that the
Chancellor wasn't looking at economic data, that the Agricultural Minister
wasn't thinking of his own political future?" Applebaum continues: "It is
not the truth" that is at issue, "but rather belief in the truth which is
needed now." The critical distinction - and potential crisis - for the risk
society today lies in attempting to articulate the distance between the
"truth" and "belief in the truth." The distinctions between fact and value,
subjective and objective - the keywords of the science wars - will not
save us now. After all a hoax acknowledges no distinction between fact
and value - its "reality" lies not in what it says, but entirely in the parodic
form in which it says it. A "scare" is neither rational nor irrational - it is a
peculiar form of social panic that reminds us of the undecidability that
defines our political rationality. In these times of risk, what we must
acknowledge is our need fur a kind of disorganized responsibility.
When the voice of authority speaks in the name of Science, as indeed
the British health secretary Stephen Dorrell did (after repeatedly
contradicting himself) in order to assure the British people, on the
testimony of scientific opinion, that beef is "safe in the common usage of
the term" (emphasis mine), I for one find my external world being
fabricated from words, words, words. I have no option but to believe -
against the best advice of my cherished Commissars of Scientific Reality
- that physical reality may be significantly constituted through language
and discourse. Who am I to argue with Mr. Dorrell? Especially since,
having taken his own advice on the matter of the bloody morsel, on the
best scientific authority I presume, he is now perhaps beyond the reach
of "a logical sequence of thought" (pace Sokal), in a mental state where
he can no more make a claim to having "a radical subjectivist position"
(pace Kimball) than those poor cows who were never told the truth
about what they were eating.
COPYRIGHT 1996 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group