The Cultural Studies Reader Second Edition The Cultural Studies Reader is the ideal introduction for students to this exciting discipline. A revised introduction explaining the history and key concerns of cultural studies brings together important articles by leading thinkers to provide an essential guide to the development, key concerns, and future directions of cultural studies. This expanded second edition offers: = = = = = = = thirty-eight essays including eighteen new articles an editor’s preface succinctly introducing each article comprehensive coverage of every major cultural studies method and theory an updated account of recent developments in the field articles on new areas such as science and cyberculture, globalization, postcolonialism, public spheres, and cultural policy a fully revised introduction and an extensive guide to further reading suggestions for further reading at the end of each article and a comprehensive bibliography Combining major thinkers from other disciplines with cultural studies pioneers such as Raymond Williams and key contemporary figures, The Cultural Studies Reader is essential reading for any student wanting to know how cultural studies developed, where-it is now, and its future directions. Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Theodor Adorno, Arjun Appadurai, Roland Barthes, Tony Bennett, Lauren Berlant, Homi K. Bhabha, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, James Clifford, Michel de Certeau, Teresa de Lauretis, Richard Dyer, David Forgacs, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser, Nicholas Garnham, Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, Dick Hebdige, bell hooks, Max Horkheimer, Eric Lott, JeanFrançois Lyotard, Angela McRobbie, Meaghan Morris, Hamid Naficy, Janice A. Radway, Andrew Ross, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Edward Soja, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Peter Stallybrass, Carolyn Steedman, Will Straw, Michael Warner, Cornel West, Allon White, Raymond Williams. Simon During is Robert Wallace Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. His articles have appeared in numerous journals including Cultural Studies, Textual Practice and Critical Inquiry, and he is the author of Foucault and Literature (Routledge 1992) and Patrick White (Oxford 1994). The Cultural Studies Reader Second Edition Edited by Simon During London and New York First published 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Second edition first published 1999 by Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.  1993, 1999 Simon During – the collection  1993, 1999 the contributors – individual chapters All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The cultural studies reader / edited by Simon During. — 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Culture. 2. Culture—Study and teaching. 3. Popular culture. I. During, Simon HM101.C8928 1999 306—dc21 98–51656 CIP ISBN 0-415-13753-5 (hbk) 0-415-13754-3 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-13217-3 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-18538-2 (Glassbook Format) Contents Acknowledgments 1 x Simon During INTRODUCTION 1 PA R T O N E Theory and method 2 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer T H E C U LT U R E I N D U S T R Y: E N L I G H T E N M E N T A S MASS DECEPTION 3 Roland Barthes D O M I N I C I , O R T H E T R I U M P H O F L I T E R AT U R E 4 57 Angela McRobbie T H E P L A C E O F WA LT E R B E N J A M I N I N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 7 46 James Clifford O N C O L L E C T I N G A RT A N D C U LT U R E 6 42 Carolyn Steedman C U LT U R E , C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D T H E H I S T O R I A N S 5 31 77 Stuart Hall C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D I T S T H E O R E T I C A L L E G A C I E S 97 vi CONTENTS PART TWO Space and time 8 Edward Soja HISTORY: GEOGRAPHY: MODERNITY 9 Michel de Certeau WALKING IN THE CITY 10 134 Jean-François Lyotard DEFINING THE POSTMODERN 12 126 Michel Foucault S PA C E , P O W E R A N D K N O W L E D G E 11 113 142 Ackbar Abbas BUILDING ON DISAPPEARANCE: HONG KONG A R C H I T E C T U R E A N D C O L O N I A L S PA C E 146 PA R T T H R E E Nationalism, postcolonialism and globalization 13 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak S C AT T E R E D S P E C U L AT I O N S O N T H E Q U E S T I O N O F C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 14 169 Homi K. Bhabha THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN: THE QUESTION OF AGENCY 15 David Forgacs N AT I O N A L - P O P U L A R : G E N E A L O G Y O F A C O N C E P T 16 189 209 Arjun Appadurai DISJUNCTURE AND DIFFERENCE IN THE GLOBAL C U LT U R A L E C O N O M Y 220 PA R T FOUR Ethnicity and multiculturalism 17 bell hooks A R E V O L U T I O N O F VA L U E S : T H E P R O M I S E O F M U LT I C U LT U R A L C H A N G E 233 CONTENTS vii 18 Eric Lott RACIAL CROSS-DRESSING AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AMERICAN WHITENESS 19 241 Cornel West T H E N E W C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S O F D I F F E R E N C E 256 PART FIVE Science and cyberculture 20 Donna Haraway A CYBORG MANIFESTO 21 271 Andrew Ross THE CHALLENGE OF SCIENCE 292 PA R T S I X Sexuality and gender 22 Teresa de Lauretis UPPING THE ANTI (SIC) IN FEMINIST THEORY 23 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick A X I O M AT I C 24 320 Judith Butler SUBJECTS OF SEX/GENDER/DESIRE 25 307 340 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner SEX IN PUBLIC 354 PA R T S E V E N Carnival and utopia 26 Richard Dyer E N T E R TA I N M E N T A N D U TO P I A 27 371 Peter Stallybrass and Allon W h ite B O U R G E O I S H Y S T E R I A A N D T H E C A R N I VA L E S Q U E 382 viii CONTENTS PA R T E I G H T Consumption and the market 28 Meaghan Morris THINGS TO DO WITH SHOPPING CENTRES 29 391 Raymond Williams ADVERTISING: THE MAGIC SYSTEM 410 PA R T N I N E Leisure 30 Pierre Bourdieu HOW CAN ONE BE A SPORTS FAN? 31 Dick Hebdige T H E F U N C T I O N O F S U B C U LT U R E 32 427 441 Will Straw C H A R A C T E R I Z I N G R O C K M U S I C C U LT U R E : T H E C A S E O F H E AV Y M E TA L 33 451 Rey Chow L I S T E N I N G O T H E R W I S E , M U S I C M I N I AT U R I Z E D : A D I F F E R E N T TYPE OF QUESTION ABOUT REVOLUTION 462 PA R T T E N Culture – political economy and policy 34 Tony Bennett P U T T I N G P O L I C Y I N T O C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 35 479 Nicholas Garnham P O L I T I C A L E C O N O M Y A N D C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 492 PART ELEVEN Media and public spheres 36 Stuart Hall E N C O D I N G, D E C O D I N G 507 CONTENTS ix 37 Nancy Fraser RETHINKING THE PUBLIC SPHERE: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE C R I T I Q U E O F A C T U A L LY E X I S T I N G D E M O C R A C Y 38 518 Hamid Naficy T H E M A K I N G O F E X I L E C U LT U R E S : I R A N I A N T E L E V I S I O N I N LOS ANGELES 39 537 Janice A. Radway T H E I N S T I T U T I O N A L M AT R I X O F R O M A N C E Bibliography Index 564 577 601 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Lisa O’Connell and Chris Healy for helping me clarify and organize the introduction to this collection; Rebecca Barden at Routledge for her encouragement and patience; and my helpful colleagues, too many to name, whom I consulted throughout the project. Most of the essays in this collection have been edited both for reasons of space and to make them more accessible for readers new to cultural studies. Permission given by the following copyright holders and authors is gratefully acknowledged. Ackbar Abbas, ‘Building on disappearance: Hong Kong architecture and colonial space,’ extracted from Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997). © the Regents of the University of Minnesota 1997. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception,’ extracted from Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: The Seabury Press, 1972). © S. Fischer Verlag GmbH 1969; translation © Herder & Herder Ltd 1972. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy,’ in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990). © Arjun Appadurai 1990. Roland Barthes, ‘Dominici, or the triumph of literature,’ from Mythologies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). © Editions du Seuil, Paris 1957; translation © Jonathan Cape 1972. Tony Bennett, ‘Culture and policy,’ extracted from Culture: A Reformer’s Science (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998). © Tony Bennett 1998. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘Sex in Public,’ Critical Inquiry, 24/2 (winter 1998). © University of Chicago Press 1998. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The postcolonial and the postmodern: the question of agency,’ extracted from The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). © Homi K. Bhabha 1994. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘How can one be a sports fan?,’ extracted from Social Science Information, 17/6 (1978). © the author and Sage Publications 1978. Judith Butler, ‘Subjects of sex/gender/desire,’ in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1994). © Routledge, Chapman & Hall 1994. Rey Chow, ‘Listening otherwise, music miniaturized: a different type of question about revolution,’ from Discourse, 13/1 (winter 1990–1). © Rey Chow 1990. James Clifford, ‘On collecting art and culture,’ extracted from The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). © the President and Fellows of Harvard College 1988. Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the city,’ extracted from The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1984). © Regents of University of California Press 1984. Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Upping the anti (sic) in feminist theory,’ extracted from Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990). © Routledge & Kegan Paul 1990. Richard Dyer, ‘Entertainment and Utopia,’ from Movie, 24 (spring 1977). © Richard Dyer and Movie 1977. David Forgacs, ‘National-popular: genealogy of a concept,’ from Formations: Of Nations and Peoples (London: RKP, 1984). © Formations Editorial Collective 1984. Michel Foucault, ‘Space, power and knowledge,’ an interview with Paul Rabinow translated by Christian Hubert, extracted from The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984). © Paul Rabinow 1984. Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy,’ extracted from Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). © Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1992. Nicholas Garnham, ‘Political economy and cultural studies: reconciliation or divorce?’ in Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1995. © the Speech Communication Association 1995. Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding, decoding,’ extracted from Culture, Media, Language, (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). © Stuart Hall 1990. xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies,’ from Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996). © Routledge & Kegan Paul 1996. Donna Haraway, ‘A cyborg manifesto,’ extracted from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). © Donna Haraway 1991. Dick Hebdige, ‘The function of subculture,’ extracted from Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979). © Dick Hebdige 1979. bell hooks, ‘A revolution of values: the promise of multicultural change,’ in Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994). © Gloria Watkins 1994. Eric Lott, ‘Racial cross-dressing and the construction of American whiteness,’ in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). © Duke University Press 1993. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Defining the postmodern,’ from Postmodernism ICA Documents, ed. Lisa Appignesi (London: Free Association Books, 1989). © Jean-François Lyotard 1989. Angela McRobbie, ‘The place of Walter Benjamin in cultural studies,’ in Postmodernism and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). © Angela McRobbie 1994. Meaghan Morris, ‘Things to do with shopping centres,’ extracted from Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism, ed. Susan Sheridan (London: Verso, 1988). © Meaghan Morris 1988. Hamid Naficy, ‘The making of exile cultures: Iranian television in Los Angeles,’ extracted from The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). © the Regents of the University of Minnesota 1993. Janice A. Radway, ‘The institutional matrix of romance,’ extracted from Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). © University of North Carolina Press 1984. Andrew Ross, ‘The challenge of science,’ in Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, ed. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (New York: Routledge, 1996). © Routledge 1996. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Axiomatic,’ extracted from Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1990). © Regents of University of California Press 1990. Edward Soja, ‘History: geography: modernity,’ extracted from Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). © Edward Soja 1989. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii Gayatri Spivak, ‘Scattered speculations on the question of cultural studies,’ extracted from Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993). © Routledge, Chapman & Hall 1993. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, ‘Bourgeois hysteria and the carnivalesque,’ extracted from The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986). © Peter Stallybrass and Allon White 1986. Carolyn Steedman, ‘Culture, cultural studies and the historians,’ in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992). © Routledge, Chapman & Hall 1992. Will Straw, ‘Characterizing rock music culture: the case of heavy metal,’ in On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 1990). © Will Straw 1990. Cornel West, ‘The new cultural politics of difference,’ extracted from October, 53 (summer 1990). © Massachusetts Institute of Technology and October magazine 1990. Raymond Williams, ‘Advertising: the magic system,’ extracted from Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980). © Raymond Williams 1980. Chapter 1 Introduction n T Simon During H IS B O O K C O L LE C TS R E P R E S E N TAT IV E essays in cultural studies as an introduction to this increasingly popular field of study. Yet, as will become clearer after the essays have been read, cultural studies is not an academic discipline quite like others. It possesses neither a well-defined methodology nor clearly demarcated fields for investigation. Cultural studies is, of course, the study of culture, or, more particularly, the study of contemporary culture. But this does not take us very far. Even assuming that we know precisely what “contemporary culture” is, it can be analyzed in many ways – sociologically, for instance, by “objectively” describing its institutions and functions as if they belong to a large, regulated system; or economically, by describing the effects of investment and marketing on cultural production. More traditionally, it can be studied “critically” by celebrating either large forms (like literature) or specific texts or images (like Waiting for Godot or an episode of Cheers). The question remains: does cultural studies bring its own orientation to these established forms of analysis? There is no easy answer, but to introduce the forms of analysis developed by the discipline we can point to two features that characterized it when it first appeared in Great Britain in the 1950s. It concentrated on “subjectivity” which means that it studied culture in relation to individual lives, breaking with social scientific positivism or “objectivism.” The book that is often said to inaugurate the subject, Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), is a very personal work: it describes changes in working-class life in postwar Britain through Hoggart’s own experiences. Hoggart wanted to show how those changes affected an individual’s “whole way of life.” For him culture was an important category because it helps us recognize that one life-practice (like reading) cannot be torn out of a large network constituted by many other life-practices – working, sexual orientation, family life, say. 2 SIMON DURING The second distinguishing characteristic of early cultural studies was that it was an engaged form of analysis. Early cultural studies did not flinch from the fact that societies are structured unequally, that individuals are not all born with the same access to education, money, health care etc., and it worked in the interests of those who have least resources. In this it differed not only from the (apparently) objective social sciences but from the older forms of cultural criticism, especially literary criticism, which considered political questions as being of peripheral relevance to the appreciation of culture. For cultural studies, “culture” was not an abbreviation of a “high culture” assumed to have constant value across time and space. Another founding text of cultural studies, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958), criticized the consequences of uncoupling “culture” from “society,” and “high culture” from “culture as a whole way of life,” although Williams also conceded that it was through this uncoupling that modern culture acquires its particular energy, charm and capacity to inform. These two defining features of early cultural studies were closely connected because it is at the level of the individual life that the cultural effects of social inequality are most apparent. Most individuals aspire and struggle the greater part of their lives and it is easier to forget this if one is just interpreting texts rather than thinking about reading as a life-practice, for instance. Cultural studies insists that one cannot just ignore – or accept – division and struggle. We can ask, how did an engaged discipline of this kind emerge within higher education? This is the question that lets us approach cultural studies most effectively, so let us turn to the historical conditions which made the discipline possible. A brief history of cultural studies Cultural studies appeared as a field of study in Great Britain in the 1950s out of Leavisism, a form of literary studies named after F. R. Leavis, its most prominent member. Leavisism was an attempt to re-disseminate what is now commonly called, after Pierre Bourdieu, “cultural capital” – though this is not how it saw itself. Leavis wanted to use the educational system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely. To achieve this, the Leavisites argued for a very restricted canon, discarding modern experimental works like those of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, for instance. Instead they primarily celebrated works directed towards developing the moral sensibility of readers such as the works of Jane Austen, Alexander Pope or George Eliot – the “great tradition.” Leavisites fiercely insisted that culture was not simply a leisure activity; reading “the great tradition” was, rather, a means of forming mature individuals with a concrete and balanced sense of “life.” And the main threat to this sense of life came from the pleasure offered by so-called “mass culture.” In this, Leavisism was very much in tune with what cultural studies has come to call the “social-democratic power bloc” which dominated postwar Britain. After the war, Britain was administered by a sequence of governments that intervened in the private sector both socially (in areas like health and housing) and culturally (in education and the arts). When the INTRODUCTION 3 education system expanded radically through the 1950s and 1960s, it turned to Leavisism to form citizens’ sensibilities. Cultural studies developed out of Leavisism through Hoggart and Williams, whose writings were taken up in secondary schools and tertiary colleges soon after they were written. Both came from working-class families; both had worked as teachers in post-compulsory education though, importantly, in workers’ education. Thus they experienced Leavisism ambivalently. On the one hand, they accepted that its canonical texts were richer than contemporary so-called “mass culture” and that culture ought to be measured in terms of its capacity to deepen and widen experiences; on the other, they recognized that Leavisism at worst erased, and at the very least did not fully come into contact with, the communal forms of life into which they had been born. So Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy in particular is a schizophrenic book. Its first half contains a heartfelt evocation of traditional industrial working-class communities, relatively untouched by commercial culture and educational institutions, while its second half mounts a practical-critical attack on modern mass culture. When Hoggart went on to found the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (henceforth CCCS), a postgraduate and research institute designed to further his work, it began by having to deal with this tension. Hoggart was able to believe that the celebration of old high culture could fit alongside an evocation of the culture of his youth because both stood apart from contemporary commercial popular culture and, so, were under threat. The threat to, and final disappearance of, traditional British working-class life needs to be considered at a little length because it was crucial for the early development of cultural studies. (See Laing 1986 for a good account of this history.) Before the war, since the early 1920s, the British economy had been dominated by unemployment – there were never fewer than a million people unemployed over the period. This was the background of Hoggart’s “traditional” working class. By the end of the 1940s, however, Britain had a full employment economy, and by the end of the 1950s further shifts in the British economy were well under way. Jobs were moving into the state sector (in 1955 government expenditure had been 36.6 per cent of GDP as against 52.2 per cent in 1967 [K. Robbins 1983: 369]); small plants were being replaced by larger ones using “Fordist” production techniques – that is, simplifying workers’ tasks on assembly lines – which meant that labor became increasingly deskilled (between 1951 and 1973 the percentage of the workforce working in plants which employed over 1500 people increased by 50 per cent [Wright 1979: 40]). Simultaneously, the differential between lower-paid white-collar and blue-collar workers was decreasing, and large-scale immigration from the colonies during the 1950s meant that many indigenous workers were no longer called upon to take the least desirable jobs. Workers, then, were becoming increasingly “affluent” (to use a media term of the time) at least in so far as they were increasingly able to buy consumer goods like cars (numbers of which increased fivefold between 1950 and 1975), clothing, washing machines, refrigerators, record players, telephone services (they increased fourfold between 1945 and 1970) and, most important of all, television sets (commercial television did not become widely available in Britain until 1957, the year Hoggart’s 4 SIMON DURING book was published). Finally the large state rehousing program, compulsory national service in the army (which ended in 1958) and, to a lesser extent, educational reform making higher education available to a fraction of the working class also helped to break up the culture that Hoggart described. As the old working-class communal life fragmented, the cultural studies which followed Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy developed in two main ways. The old notion of culture as a whole way of life became increasingly difficult to sustain: attention moved from locally produced and often long-standing cultural forms (pub life, group-singing, pigeon-fancying, attitudes to “our mum,” dances, holidays at camps, and close-by seaside resorts etc.) to culture as organized from afar – both by the state through its educational system, and by what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (in the essay included here) called the “culture industry,” that is, highly developed music, film, and broadcasting businesses. This shift of focus could lead to a revision of older paradigms, as when Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel in The Popular Arts (1964) gave the kind of status and attention reserved by the Leavisites for canonical literature to new forms (such as jazz and film) while devaluing others (especially television and rock music). Much more importantly, however, the logic by which culture was set apart from politics, already examined by Raymond Williams, was overturned. The historian E. P. Thompson, in his seminal book The Making of the English Working Class (1968) and elsewhere, had pointed out that the identity of the working class as working class had always had a strongly political and conflictual component – that identity was not just a matter of particular cultural interests and values. But the fragmentation of the old proletarian culture meant that a politics based on a strong working-class identity was less and less significant: people decreasingly identified themselves as workers (see Roberts et al. 1977). It was in this context that cultural studies theorists began seriously to explore culture’s own political function and to offer a critique of the social democratic power bloc which was drawing power into the state. From the early 1970s, culture came to be regarded as a form of “hegemony” – a word associated with Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist of the 1920s and 1930s. “Hegemony” is a term to describe relations of domination which are not visible as such. It involves not coercion but consent on the part of the dominated (or “subaltern”). Gramsci himself elaborated the concept to explain why Mussolini’s fascism was so popular even though fascism curtailed the liberty of most Italians. For him, hegemonic forces constantly alter their content as social and cultural conditions change: they are improvised and negotiable, so that counter-hegemonic strategies must also be constantly revised. In the same spirit, if somewhat less subtly, culture could also be seen as what Michel Foucault was beginning to think of as a form of “governmentality,” that is, a means to produce conforming or “docile” citizens, most of all through the education system. As culture was thought about less as an expression of local communal lives and more as an apparatus within a large system of domination, cultural studies offered critiques of culture’s hegemonic effects. At first such critique leant heavily on forms of semiotic analysis (represented in this collection in a sophisticated INTRODUCTION 5 form by Stuart Hall’s and James Clifford’s essays). This meant in effect that culture was broken down into discrete messages, “signifying practices” or “discourses” which were distributed by particular institutions and media. To take a rather simplified example: a semiotic analysis of cigarette-smoking among workers would analyze smoking not as a life-practice, that is, in terms of its importance as a rite of passage, its use in structuring the flow of time and so on, but in terms of its being a signifier produced by images like the “Marlboro Man,” which connote masculinity, freedom and transcendence of work-a-day life. Semiotics’ capacity to extend its analysis beyond particular texts or signs is limited: it remained an analysis of “codings” and “recodings” not of uses, practices or feelings (though Stuart Hall’s essay included here, which emphasized the concept “decoding,” has been influential because it articulates relations between uses and meanings). It would be wrong to insist too strongly on the purity of, and opposition between, what were called the “culturalist” (emphasizing forms of life) and “structuralist” (or semiotic) strands within the cultural studies of the period. But in the 1970s, a hard form of structuralism did emerge, one that called upon the work of Louis Althusser, backed up by psychoanalytic notions developed by Jacques Lacan. For this theory, individuals were constructs of ideology, where ideology means not beliefs we disapprove of (as in “racist ideology”) but the set of discourses and images which constitute the most widespread knowledge and values – “common sense.” Ideology, so the argument went, is required so that the state and capitalism can reproduce themselves without the threat of revolution. Here, as for Hoggart and Williams, the state’s claim to neutrality is false, but this time for more classically Marxist reasons – because it protects the exploitative “relations of production” (i.e., class differences) necessary to capitalism. For Althusser, dominant ideology turned what was in fact political, partial and open to change into something seemingly “natural,” universal and eternal. However, dominant ideology is not limited to politics or economics so, though it may present a particular view of economic relations (as in the common idea that trade unionism is a brake on economic competitiveness), its primary role is to construct an imaginary picture of civil life, especially the nuclear family as natural and, most of all, each individual as “unique” and “free.” Ideology fragments real connections and inter-dependencies, producing a picture of social relations which overemphasizes individual freedom and autonomy. For Althusser, individuals can be sucked into ideology so easily because it helps them make sense of the world, to enter the “symbolic order” and ascribe power to themselves. They identify with ideology because they see themselves pictured as independent and strong in it – as an adolescent boy (or, indeed, adult) might picture himself, in a fantasy, as the Marlboro Man. Dominant social values are internalized through this kind of identification. At this point, psychoanalysis was called upon to gird the theory. Once again to state the argument very simply: individuals see themselves mirrored in dominant ideology and identify with it as a way of “taking the father’s place” in a process which is fuelled by the “fear of castration,” that is, anxieties that true autonomy or unique individuality can never be reached. So ideology provides a false resolution to private, familial tensions, a resolution that is, for Lacan if not 6 SIMON DURING for Althusser, finally made possible by the fact that no symbolic structure can offer final meaning or security. Its lure is always imaginary: the promise of a full “I-ness” which can exist only where “I am not.” But politico-psychoanalytical structuralism of this kind never made as much headway in cultural studies as it did in film studies, say. It did not concede enough space to the capacity of the individual or community to act on the world on their own terms, to generate their own meanings and effects. It was too theoretical in the sense that it offered truths which took little or no account of local differences; indeed, its claims to be scientifically true lacked support from scientific method. And it did not pay enough heed to the actual techniques and practices by which individuals form themselves and their lives. But another strand of semiotic thought was able to enter the culturalist tradition with more vigor. This emphasized the concept of polysemy. “Polysemy” is a technical word for the way in which a particular signifier always has more than one meaning, because “meaning” is an effect of differences within a larger system. This time the argument went: it is because meanings are produced not referentially (by pointing to specific objects in the world) but by one sign’s difference from another, that signs are polysemous. One sign can always both be replaced by another (in what is called the “paradigmatic” relation), and enter a sequence of other signs (the “syntagmatic” relation). More loosely, a sign can “connote” any number of others: the Marlboro Man, for instance, connoting “toughness” in one context and “cancer” in another. The notion of polysemy remains limited in that it still works at the level of individual signs as discrete signifying units. It did, however, lead to more dynamic and complex theoretical concepts which help us to describe how cultural products may be combined with new elements to produce different effects in different situations. In this way, cultural production is conceived of as a process of “hybridization,” “re-production,” and “negotiation.” For instance, the Marlboro Man might be made into a shiny, hard-edged polythene sculpture a la Jeff Koons to achieve a postmodern effect in an expensive Manhattan apartment; an ad using the image might be cut out of the magazine and used to furnish a poor dwelling in Lagos as an image of Western affluence and liberty, or parodied on a CD or album cover. Concepts like hybridization, as they developed out of the notion of “polysemy,” return us to a renewed culturalism because they enable us to see how particular individuals and communities can actively create new meanings from signs and cultural products which come from afar. Yet a concept like “hybridization” still does not account for the way that the meanings of particular signifiers or texts in a particular situation are, in part, ordered by material interests and power relations. The tobacco industry, the medical profession and a certain stream within the women’s movement might struggle over the meaning of “Marlboro Man” for political and commercial reasons: the first in order to sell more product; the second to promote health, as well as their own status and earning power; the last to reject an insensitive mode of masculinity. Cultural studies has been, as we might expect, most interested in how groups with least power practically develop their own readings of, and uses for, cultural products – in fun, in resistance, or to articulate their own identity. INTRODUCTION 7 This brief historical account of cultural studies’ key concepts has not focused on particular works at particular dates. The richness of the research promoted by the CCCS during the 1970s makes that research impossible adequately to represent here. But three particularly influential texts – Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977), David Morley’s The “Nationwide” Audience (1980) and Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain (1976), each of which was written from a different space in the spectrum thrown open by the history I have just sketched – can rewardingly be described. First, Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour. Willis used participant observer techniques to describe a group of disaffected boys in a working-class school (the “lads”). He showed how they create a “counter-school culture” in which they reject the official logic which legitimizes their education, that is, “you obey the teachers because they teach you knowledge which will help you get a better job.” They reject this exchange for several reasons: partly because “better jobs” (i.e., low-paid whitecollar or apprentice jobs as against unskilled laboring jobs) involve moving out of the traditions of mateship, hard drinking, excitement and strong male-bonding passed down in their families; partly because those jobs were not necessarily “better” financially at least in the short and medium term, and didn’t require the kind of knowledge on offer at school anyway; and partly because the lads had a strong sense that the economic system ultimately required the exploitation of some people’s labor power so that the “shit jobs” they would take were in fact necessary rather than worthless. Willis’s work remains close to Hoggart’s in that it involves a certain celebration of traditional working-class culture and it shows how that culture contains a quite accurate political understanding of the conditions of life, even though the lads have little conventional classconsciousness and absolutely no interest in formal political institutions. What is striking about the study, though, is how important both sexism and racism remain to this segment of British working-class culture. Unfortunately, Willis does not address this head-on. Whereas Willis’s Learning to Labour is a culturalist book in the traditional sense, David Morley’s The “Nationwide” Audience is one of the first ethnographic studies not of a community (defined in terms of locale and class) but of an audience (defined as a group of viewers or readers), in this case the audience of Nationwide, a BBC news-magazine program widely watched through the late 1960s and 1970s, and which broadcasted mainly local, rather than national or international, stories, somewhat like a US breakfast show. Morley’s study was ethnographic in that he did not simply analyze the program, he organized openended group discussions between viewers, with each group from a homogeneous class or gender or work background (trade unionists, managers, students etc.). Indeed his book begins by contesting that image of a large audience as a “mass” which had often been assumed by earlier sociological theorists of the media. His ethnographic approach was all the more a break within cultural studies work on media because, along with Charlotte Brunsdon, he had offered a conventional semiotic “ideology-critique” of the program in an earlier study, Everyday Television: “Nationwide.” There, he and Brunsdon had argued that the program presented an image of the world in which gender, class and ethnic differences were massively downgraded, and which assumed that “we” 8 SIMON DURING (the program’s implied audience) possess a shared “common sense” based on a practical view of the world, as against “intellectual,” political or culturally adventurous views. The program’s style or “mode of address” was anchored in authoritarian but chatty presenters who embodied its values. For Morley the textualist approach began to seem limited because it could not fully deal with polysemy. He had to go out into the field to discover what people actually thought about Nationwide. But this does not mean that, for him, the program can be interpreted anyhow, precisely because its ideological orientation – that “everyday life” view of the world – is the code which the program itself presents as “preferred.” To use Stuart Hall’s phrase, the program is “structured in dominance” because it skews and restricts its audience’s possibilities for interpreting the material it claims to present without bias. Though viewers need not accept the preferred code, they must respond to it in some way. Morley divides the possibilities of decoding Nationwide into three categories: first, an acceptance of the preferred reading, second, flat opposition to it (mainly, as it turned out, by being extremely bored by it); and third, negotiation with it. His fieldwork findings were somewhat unexpected, though: there was no clear correlation between the socio-cultural position of the groups and their response to the program although those, like a group of Caribbean young women, furthest away from the common sense “we” embodied in the white (and mainly male) presenters, were least able to respond to it. Also some groups (especially students and trainee managers) understood that the program was biased (or “structured in dominance”) but still accepted its dominant code. Knowing how it worked, not being “cultural dupes,” did not mean refusal of its values. And last, those groups with least social and cultural capital – like the Caribbean women – found the program too distant from their own lives, preferring less newsy programs with more “human” stories – like those transmitted by the more market-orientated ITV companies. Though Morley makes little of it, for these groups it was the market rather than the state (through the state-funded BBC) that provided them with what they wanted. In a paradox that helps us understand certain problems at work at the heart of the socialdemocratic power bloc, those who are most vulnerable to market forces respond most positively to its cultural products. The third, and earliest, book, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain, is a collection of essays, each by different authors, each of which comes to grips with the fragmentation of traditional working-class culture in a different way. In general, the authors accepted that the working class was being split: one section being drawn into skilled jobs that would enable them to live like certain elements of the middle classes, another into deskilled, low-status and often service jobs. However, they argued that jobs of this latter kind were especially taken by disadvantaged youth, who, inheriting neither a strong sense of communal identity nor values transmitted across generations in families, develop subcultures. These subcultures negotiate with, and hybridize certain hegemonic cultural forms as modes of expression and opposition. Dick Hebdige (in an earlier essay than the one included here), for instance, shows how the Mods fetishized style itself as an element of life, borrowing elements from fashions, old and new, turning cultural consumption (the crucial element in the life-practices of INTRODUCTION 9 the “affluent” worker) to their own ends. These subcultures are much more creative than Willis’s lads or Morley’s audience, and, at least in some cases, they use commodities, the primary products of the system that disadvantages them, as forms of resistance and grounds on which to construct a communal identity. Yet while Learning to Labour allowed the “lads’” voices a great deal of space in the text, and Morley too transcribed actual voices, Resistance through Rituals is primarily concerned to develop a theory of hegemony under the conditions it encounters. This more theoretical approach, characteristic of an earlier phase of cultural studies, has its limits. It means that the writers find resistance to “hegemony” in subcultural styles rather too easily. The book does not emphasize the way in which newly developed “youth markets” influenced and promoted subcultural systems – especially in the music and fashion businesses. It also underestimates the impact of the education system which streamed children after eleven and kept them at school until they were fifteen (sixteen after 1972), generating intense inter-generational bondings unknown before the war. Neither are the Mods, Teds, Hippies and so on seen as trying to have fun or to construct a mode of life for themselves; they are primarily viewed as being engaged in symbolic struggle with the larger social system. But, as we are about to see, categories like “struggle” and resistance against the “dominant” become increasingly difficult for cultural studies to sustain. Despite their use of semiotic and Gramscian concepts, Learning to Labour, The “Nationwide” Audience and Resistance through Rituals remain within the tradition established by Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. In the late 1970s things changed. Cultural studies came increasingly under the influence of forms of thought associated with French theorists, in particular Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault. I will present their work in a general model – though it is important to remember that this model is an abstraction and presents no specific individual’s work. For French theory, individuals live in a setting constituted by various institutions, or what we can call, following Bourdieu, “fields” – families, work, peer groups, educational apparatuses, political parties, and so on. Each field takes a particular material form, most having a characteristic space and time attached to them (the private home for family life and most media reception, weekdays for work etc.). The relation of space to social fields is the theme of the essays by Foucault and Edward Soja collected here. Each field is future-directed and contains its own “imaginary,” its own promise and image of satisfaction and success, its own possibilities for pleasure. Family life, for instance, depends upon images of the perfect family (mum, dad and a newborn baby, say) and members may feel pleasure when they reproduce that image, even if only for a moment. This “imaginary” is imaginary because of the limits and scarcities which organize fields – family life is constrained by finances, aging and intergenerational conflict, for example. Because of these limits too, fields are suffused by power relations and tend to be structured hierarchically. After all, not everyone can have equal experience, knowledge, money or authority. Very hierarchical fields (like schools 10 SIMON DURING and offices) are most disciplined and rationalized: in them all activities are directed to a fixed purpose – education in a school, profit in a business. Further, each field has characteristic signifying practices more or less tightly attached to it: the same person may well talk, walk and dress differently at school (or work) to the way they do in the family, and differently again when socializing with their peers. These signifying practices are structured through scarcity as well. Dick Hebdige has pointed out that punks worked on their body rather than consumption as a means of expression because it was one of the few materials that they could afford. Each field also contains a variety of styles of belonging: one can be this kind of student or that kind, for instance, a casual filmgoer or a film buff. These fields, then, contain choices of “self-formation” or what Foucault called “selfgovernment,” though in highly disciplined and rationalized fields like schools or businesses these choices are more directed from above than in others. Likewise individuals can work out strategies by which to advance in a field or to reconcile themselves to their current position: Bourdieu famously showed how members of the working class, unable to afford certain goods or tastes, made a virtue of necessity by saying that they didn’t like them anyway. On the other hand, possibilities exist for “transgressive” undermining or “festive” overturning of routines and hierarchies through passive resistance, ironical mimicry, symbolic inversion, orgiastic letting-go, even daydreaming – as the essays by Richard Dyer, Allon White and Peter Stallybrass, and Michel de Certeau here show. Especially in societies where hierarchies in many fields are rigid, these forms of transgression may themselves become institutionalized – as in Brazil today with its carnival samba schools, or early capitalist Europe with its pantomimes. Finally, each field, to some degree, both defines itself against and is suffused by others: for instance, relations in the workplace may be modeled on the family (“paternalism”) though the family is simultaneously a “haven” from work. However, highly rationalized fields (like schools and factories) interact least directly with other fields – they form their own “world.” None the less it is where fields are most rationalized and disciplined that positions held in one internal hierarchy may be converted into a position held in another. Reaching the “top” of the education system helps you start “higher” in the world of work. What about subjectivity in this schema? The important point is that actual individuals are not “subjects” wholly positioned by the system these fields constitute or the strategies the fields provide. There are several reasons for this: in theory at least individuals can always make choices which take into account, and thus avoid, the forces they know to be positioning them. Also, because human beings exist as “embodied social subjects” (as Teresa de Lauretis puts it in her essay in this volume), an individual’s relation to the fields continually incorporates and shifts under the impact of contingent givens (skin color, physical appearance and so on) and material events (weather, illness, technological breakdowns and so on) which are not simply determinants of social or cultural forces. Third, language itself intervenes between the individual and the socio-cultural fields that construct his or her positions. Our sense of uniqueness is grounded on our sense INTRODUCTION 11 that we can say what we like – at least to ourselves – and we have that sense because language is both a resource that costs nothing (a basic but often ignored point) and complex enough to make possible an infinite number of individual speech acts. As deconstructive theorists have pointed out, this is true because of, rather than despite, the fact that private discourse always comes from somewhere else and its meanings cannot be wholly mastered by those who use it. Last, given that individuals live first, in symbolic structures which let them (within limits) speak for themselves; second, in bodies that are their own but not wholly under control; third, in a temporality which flows towards the unknowable and uncontainable, they may find in themselves “deep” selves which cannot be reduced either to the managerial self that chooses styles, strategies, and techniques of self-formation or to the subject positioned by external fields and discourses. Modern Western culture in particular has given a great deal of value to this form of subjectivity, and cultural studies’ insistence that subjectivity primarily consists of practices and strategies has been targeted against it. The French model breaks from earlier forms of cultural studies. To begin with, it downgrades the way that economic scarcities operate systematically across many fields. Because it conceives of social fields as “partially autonomous,” the French model cannot affirm a central agency that might direct a number of fields to provide a more equitable distribution of resources. In this, it is remote from traditional social-democratic politics. Instead there is a drift to affirm both culture’s utopian force and those forms of resistance (such as de Certeau’s “walking in the city” in this collection) possible only in the cracks and gaps of the larger, apparently impregnable, system. Somewhat paradoxically, that system is impregnable just because it is less centered on an isolatable and “dominant” set of institutions or ideology. Why did cultural studies accept relatively depoliticized analyses of this kind? The reasons are to be found in the decline of the social-democratic power bloc from the mid-1970s onwards which made possible the so-called “new right’s” emergence – in the US under Ronald Reagan (1981) and in the UK under Margaret Thatcher (1979). Furthermore, it was in the context of the new right’s emergence that (as we shall see), after absorbing French theory, the discipline orientated itself towards what Cornel West in his essay here calls the “culture of difference” and became a genuinely global movement. The new right (or “Thatcherism” as I shall often call it, following Stuart Hall) countered the social democrats by arguing, first, that the state should intervene in citizens’ lives to the minimum possible extent so that market forces can structure as many social relations and exchanges as possible, and, next, that internal differences (especially between classes, ethnic groups, and genders) were threats to national unity. The nation was defined in terms of traditional and popular national-cultural images of “Englishness” in Thatcher’s case and “Americanness” in Reagan’s. This was a politics that appealed at least as much to the “affluent worker” as to traditional Conservative (in the US, Republican) voters. As long ago as 1957 Richard Hoggart had noted how, with increased spending power, the working class were increasingly evaluating the world in economic, rather than 12 SIMON DURING class, terms. Thatcherism was also the product of the social-democratic interventionist state’s failure to manage the economy without playing inflation off against unemployment, a failure which itself followed increasing economic globalization (especially of the financial sector) and the appearance of economic powers outside the West. (The most prominent events in the process of economic globalization were the 1971 end of the old Bretton Woods agreement by which all major currencies had been pegged against the US dollar; the 1973–4 OPEC cartel; the radical increase of Japanese competitiveness in key consumerdurable markets; the increased movement of Western manufacturing “off-shore” through the 1970s and 1980s, and the immense increase of capacity for information about commodity and money markets to be disseminated quickly and globally.) In these terms, Thatcherism is the political reflex of an affluent but threatened first-world society in a postcolonial world order. As Stuart Hall pointed out (Hall 1988), it was able to counter a widespread sense of fragility by taking advantage of a mass of “popular knowledge” which put the family, respectability, hard work, “practicality,” and order first – a “popular knowledge” which, as Morley demonstrated, had been, for years, transmitted in shows like Nationwide and its US equivalents. At this level at least, Thatcherism does not draw on the values of traditional high culture; instead it appeals to the social imaginary produced by the market-orientated media. Thatcherism contains an internal contradiction – between its economic rationalism and its consensual cultural nationalism. The more the market is freed from state intervention and trade and finance cross national boundaries, the more the nation will be exposed to foreign influences and the greater the gap between rich and poor. Thatcherite appeals to popular values can be seen as an attempt to overcome this tension. In particular, the new right gives the family extraordinary value and aura just because a society organized by market forces is one in which economic life expectations are particularly insecure (as well as one in which, for some, rewards are large and life exciting). In the same way, a homogeneous image of national culture is celebrated and enforced to counter the dangers posed by the increasingly global nature of economic exchanges and widening national, economic divisions. The new right image of a monoculture and hard-working family life, organized through traditional gender roles, requires a devaluation not just of other nations and their cultural identities but of “enemies within”: those who are “other” racially, sexually, intellectually. It was in this situation that the Birmingham school focused more intensely, on the one hand, on feminist work (as by Charlotte Brunsdon, Angela McRobbie, and Dorothy Hobson) as well as on the analysis of racism and a counter-celebration of black cultures (most painstakingly in Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, 1987); and, on the other hand, to a more straightforward critique of Thatcherism itself, as in the essays collected in Stuart Hall’s The Hard Road to Renewal (1988) as well as the earlier collectively written Policing the Crisis (1979). This last book latches on to the mechanisms by which law-and-order issues and racism were gaining ground in the last days of the social-democratic power bloc, convincingly demonstrating that law-and-order panics in Britain in the 1970s were produced by tacit alliances between the media and the police – being, in that sense, organized. INTRODUCTION 13 As cultural studies responded to the conditions surrounding the new right’s emergence, the discipline became internationalized. The main reasons for this are simple: analyses of racism, sexism, and the culture industry possessed a wider appeal than analysis of the British working-class culture, particularly in the US or Australia (“new world” states which fancied themselves relatively “classless” societies). But, when cultural studies gave up its Marxian and classist approach, it began to approach, if in a different spirit and register, certain Thatcherite themes. After all, both movements were strongly anti-statist; both affirmed, within limits, a decentered view of social organization. What were the analogies between Thatcherism and cultural studies, politically so opposed to one another? Perhaps most importantly, where new-right discourse argued that no state institution could transcend particular interests and legitimately control individual choices best represented in the market, cultural studies criticized the notion that any theory could stand outside the field it claimed to tell the truth about as if it were a “metadiscourse.” For French theory, “theory” itself was a discursive practice produced in a particular field with particular power effects: it offers, for instance, the ability rhetorically to master other people’s values and “common sense.” That there could be no transcendental “meta-discourse” was a crucial thesis in what is sometimes also called theoretical “postmodernism” – the end of any appeal to those “grand narratives” by which institutions and discourses bearing the modernizing values of universal liberty, equality, and progress were affirmed in the name of a transhistorical, meta-discursive subject. (See the essay by Lyotard below for a description of postmodernism.) The new mode of cultural studies no longer concentrated on reading culture as primarily directed against the state. Mainly under the impact of new feminist work at first, it began to affirm “other” ways of life on their own terms. Emphasis shifted from communities positioned against large power blocs and bound together as classes or subcultures to ethnic and women’s groups committed to maintaining and elaborating autonomous values, identities, and ethics. This moment in cultural studies pictured society as much more decentered than either the CCCS had in its earliest work or than the French theorists had, as they focused on discipline, rationalization, and institutional fields. However, an immediate problem confronted this new model as it broke society down into fractions united by sexuality, gender, or ethnicity: how to conceive of relations between these dispersed communities? Two solutions were offered, both rather utopian and future-directed: first, new “rainbow” alliances and cross-identifications could be worked out for particular and provisional social or “micro-political” ends; second, relations between these groups would be “dialogic” – a concept borrowed from Mikhail Bakhtin and in which the otherness of each interacting participant remains intact. Whatever the effectiveness of these solutions, celebrations of the “other” sounded a powerful oppositional note where governments attempted to encourage or enforce monoculturalism and traditional gender models on the nation. None the less the affirmation of “otherness” and “difference” in what is sometimes called a “politics of survival” belongs to a looser, more pluralistic and postmodern, conceptual model than those which insist that capitalism and the 14 SIMON DURING free market produce interests that are structurally unequal and in conflict with each other. Unlike social-democratic thought, the new cultural studies no longer aimed at a radical transfiguration of the whole system of social fields. Cultural studies’ affirmation of otherness and negation of meta-discourse must be understood also in terms of the accelerated globalizing of cultural production and distribution from the 1970s on. This is the theme of the essay by Arjun Appadurai (as well as, less explicitly, those by Gayatri Spivak and Hamid Naficy) in this volume, and, at the very least, they show how multidirectional the process of “globalization” has been. In some areas, it has involved a breakdown of distinctions between “first” and “third” world nations: new technologies (such as satellite broadcasting) produced international audiences as for Bob Geldof’s “LiveAid” 1985 concert in the emergence of what might be called the “global popular” while, to similar ends, and on the back of the global popular, nongovernmental organizations like Greenpeace established new transnational networks and interfaces. The globalization of the media had one especially important consequence: it accelerated the concentration of the cultural industry largely because the global market requires increased investment in marketing and distribution. By the early 1990s, for instance, the international recording industry was an oligopoly consisting of six majors: three European, one American and two Japanese. But in other ways globalization has produced new local “vertical” differences – as where, for instance, first-world encouragement to modernize and develop led not just to massive third-world indebtedness and an increase in poverty but to urbanization, severe ecological degradation, and deculturalization, as in rainforest areas around the world. In other ways still, however, globalization has generated diversity and autonomy – as when sophisticated cultural and media industries began to develop outside the West in places as different as Brazil and Hong Kong (increasing the amount of local news worldwide, for instance) or when, as James Clifford points out in his essay in this collection, non-Western communities were able creatively to commodify or museumify their cultures. One effect of the large and very various process of globalization has been especially important to cultural studies: Eurocentric concepts of “primitive,” “underdeveloped” or superstitious peoples (that is, socalled “fourth-world” people) became difficult to sustain on a variety of registers. In his influential essay “On ethnographic authority” (Clifford 1988b), Clifford again showed that anthropologists’ “native informants” could now speak for themselves to “us” without the mediation of the anthropologists and their “science.” To somewhat similar ends, Edward Said drew attention to “Orientalism” – the history of those images of the “Orient” produced to help the West dominate the East, and in which what non-Westerners said about themselves was systematically discounted. As cultural studies became the voice of the other, the “marginal” in the academy, it absorbed a radical wing of anthropology, just as it had earlier absorbed a wing of sociology in Britain. The literary world threw up another case in which the processes of globalization were shown to trouble any simplistic or conventional analysis: protests against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (started by migrant communities in Britain) undercut assumptions about the INTRODUCTION 15 naturalness (or dominance) of Western notions of how particular cultural formations relate to one another, in particular the Western sense of literature’s transcendence of religion and politics. In sum, globalization meant that the role that subcultures and the working class played in earlier cultural studies began to be replaced and transformed by communities outside the West or migrant (or “diasporic”) communities within the West – in a move which involved new theoretical and political problems and intensities. Conceiving of cultural studies as the academic site for marginal or minority discourses had another, very different but no less visible and globalizing consequence, one which took it further from its original attack on mass culture. The discipline began to celebrate commercial culture, in a move we can call, following Jim McGuigan, “cultural populism” (McGuigan 1992). Cultural populism became possible within the cultural studies anti-hegemonic tradition because, despite the new right’s reliance on values disseminated through the cultural market, the right also buttressed its monoculturalism by traditionalist appeals to the canon. (This play between popular knowledge and celebration of the canon marks another tension within contemporary conservative thought.) In its turn, cultural populism helped cultural studies to become global just because, as we have seen, commercial culture has an increasingly transnational reach. What form has cultural populism taken in cultural studies? It too turned away from the highly theoretical attacks on hegemony so important in the 1970s, this time by arguing that at least some popular cultural products themselves have positive quasi-political effects independently of education and critical discourse. For instance, in his 1987 essay, “British cultural studies and television,” John Fiske, after reading the television show Magnum P.I. through the classic distinction between “preferred,” “negotiated” and “oppositional” readings developed by Hall and Morley, goes on to claim that Madonna (circa 1986) offered fans her own form of feminist ideology-critique. Madonna “calls into question” “binary oppositions as a way of conceptualizing women” (Fiske 1987a: 275). Elsewhere Fiske emphasized that popular culture provided “pleasure in the processes of making meanings” (Fiske 1987b: 239) in a move that relied on Roland Barthes’s later view that markedly polysemous texts generate particularly intense and liberating pleasures. Such work is refreshing because it rejects the hierarchies that support monocultures, as well as because, unlike the “hegemony” theorists, it does not condescend to actual popular-cultural practices. But it leaves many questions open. The theorist is still telling the “popular” audience how their pleasure works in terms which owe much more to the history of theory than they do to what people actually say or think. It also passes over the question of co-option too rapidly. For instance, Madonna’s later work shows us that “needs of capital” (i.e., the requirement for investments to make profits) have not been exactly irrelevant to her career. By calling herself a “material girl,” by daring to screen us some familial truths in Truth or Darel In Bed with Madonna she once again goes to show that what is daring and transgressive in the context of media oligopolies makes money. But as Madonna keeps the industry working, her transgression becomes blander. That is what co-option is. In this light a comparison between Madonna 16 SIMON DURING and even a star as musically mainstream as Sinead O’Connor, who has sinned more openly against American patriotism, might be revealing. It would help to show how a “cultural populism” which can celebrate Madonna (whom the industry loves) as transgressive is subtly, if unconsciously, connected to the new right with its promotion of market forces. This is not to say that we can equate entry into cultural markets with co-option in any rigid or formal manner. But cultural populism requires a very nuanced account of the relations between cultural markets and cultural products in order convincingly to celebrate (some) popular culture as “progressive” – perhaps along the lines taken by Will Straw and Janice Radway in their essays in this collection. Finally, another kind of cultural studies, which has recently emerged under the title “cultural policy studies,” responds to the decline of the social-democratic power bloc in yet other ways (see Tony Bennett’s essay in this volume which mounts the case for this mode of cultural studies). Cultural policy studies itself takes two distinguishable forms, one economically orientated and pragmatic, the other more theoretical. The first, economic cultural policy analysis, starts from the recognition that much cultural production and distribution requires allocation of scarce resources – the limits to the number of stations that can operate in the radio spectrum for instance. It also takes account of the fact that cultural labor and consumption are increasingly important to national economies, especially those of highly “advanced” post-industrial countries. For reasons like this, governments are called upon to set parameters for cultural production and distribution – to provide public broadcasting for instance, or to protect local workers against imported labor or products. (See Collins, Garnham and Locksley 1988 for an excellent example of a policy document in this spirit aimed at the debate over UK public television.) At the micro-level, local communities too may need policy advice, in order, for instance, to establish a museum that best provides for both local and tourist needs. Cultural policy studies helps us think about the frameworks and methods of articulating policy in such situations. The other branch of cultural policy theory derives from Michel Foucault’s later work, though Foucault himself, despite advising a number of French governments, was ambivalent about this development of his thought. He encouraged intellectuals to be more critical than is possible when offering policy advice, (Ian Hunter’s Culture and Government [1988] is the book which theorizes this form of neo-Foucauldianism in most detail; see Foucault’s essay “Practicing criticism” in Foucault 1988 for a rejection, in advance, of the position.) In its most radical guise, the neo-Foucauldian thesis argues that culture is neither an end in itself nor the product of autonomous agents – whether individuals or communities – but a mechanism for transmitting forms of “governmentality,” for ordering how we act, think, live. Indeed, so the argument goes, cultural work and effects exist only in relation to other governmental structures. Thus Tony Bennett has argued that “policy and governmental conditions and processes should be thought of as constitutive of different forms and fields of culture” (Bennett 1992a: 25). The implication is that the least mystified task of the cultural studies analyst is to enter into alliances with, and attempt to influence, the processes of governmentality. INTRODUCTION 17 A number of strong arguments can be urged against neo-Foucauldian cultural policy theory. In particular, such theory possesses a rudimentary account of subjectivity. For it, the individual tends to be just a product of “governmental” protocols or of “techniques of self-formation.” This matters because questions of pleasure, corporeality, fantasy, identification, affect, desire, critique, transgression, and so on disappear – which is crippling to rich analysis of cultural work and reception. The theory also relies on a reductive sense of politics. “Policy” becomes a word which, almost magically, neutralizes the more stubborn, conflictual, and critical relations between the various individuals and groups which constitute the social fields in which culture is produced, disseminated, and received. Leaving these important theoretical difficulties aside for a minute, we can say that both forms of cultural policy studies mark an acceptance of the state hitherto unknown in cultural studies. It traditionally resisted the state’s hegemony. There is, indeed, a sense in which cultural policy studies resists new right thinking by returning to statism. Cultural policy studies also breaks with the history of cultural studies in that the discipline has not traditionally produced neutral expertise. Here the difficulties just noted return. It is all the harder to see how cultural studies might provide (apparently) neutral expertise when one considers the kinds of case that cultural policy characteristically addresses. How much “local content” should a particular television industry have? What kind of museum should be constructed in this locality? From the bureaucratic point of view, questions like these require information to be gathered, costs and benefits to be projected, various economic models to be debated. In this, individuals trained in cultural studies (and in other disciplines) might, of course, have a productive role to play. But apart from that, such questions are best argued over not by experts but by (representatives of) interested parties – that is, democratically and politically. As a transnational academic discipline, cultural studies itself does not represent such an interest. And, in fact, policy advice does not uncover truths which can be immediately used and applied. On the contrary, outside the academy it tends to become a pawn in wider political engagements between such interests. Cultural studies now: some directions and problems So cultural studies is a discipline continuously shifting its interests and methods both because it is in constant and engaged interaction with its larger historical context and because it cannot be complacent about its authority. After all, it has taken the force of arguments against “meta-discourses” and does not want the voice of the academic theorist to drown out other less often heard voices. As we have begun to see, the discipline’s turn to ethnography in particular was motivated by the desire to move beyond theoretical discourses which, however insightful, have been restricted to higher education institutions. Ethnography of the kind developed by Willis and Morley was important to cultural studies because it provided a method by which the discipline could escape such restrictions, and it remains crucial to an understanding of the current and future directions of the 18 SIMON DURING discipline. It is crucial just because the turn to ethnography highlights the difficulty of either claiming or disclaiming academic and, more especially, ethnographic authority. For if we accept that the academic humanities are a field in which power and cultural capital are generated and transmitted and so do not simply articulate “true” meta-discourses, we must also accept that non-academic or “popular” cultural institutions require critique from a distance because they have their limits and power effects as well. To put it another way, cultural studies today is situated between its pressing need to question its own institutional and discursive legitimation and its fear that cultural practices outside the institution are becoming too organized and too dispersed to appeal to in the spirit it has hitherto appealed to subcultures, the women’s movement, and other “others” in its (always somewhat compromised) repudiation of statism and the new right. In this situation, we need to consider the question of ethnographic or academic authority a little more carefully. Of course ethnography has a long history in the positive social sciences. Social scientists and market researchers have traditionally employed three modes of ethnographic investigation: first, large-scale “surveys” (or “quantitative research”) using formal questionnaires on a sample large enough to provide “correlation coefficients” or measures to the degree one variable (like a taste for reading Charles Dickens) relates to another (like one’s parents’ jobs); second, “qualitative research” or in-depth or “focus” interviews which claim no statistical validity (though they are often used alongside large-scale surveys) and do not rely on formal questionnaires but on (usually group) discussion; third, “participant observation” in which researchers live alongside their subjects – this having been most common in anthropology. Cultural studies ethnography, particularly of media audiences, has mainly used qualitative research in order to avoid the pitfalls of sociological objectivity and functionalism and to give room to voices other than the theorist’s own. The problem of representative-ness has been discounted. For cultural studies, knowledge based on statistical techniques belongs to the processes which “normalize” society and stand in opposition to cultural studies’ respect for the marginal subject. In early cultural-studies ethnographic work like Morley’s The “Nationwide” Audience, the researcher played the role of a neutral narrator – using research subjects as the basis upon which to elaborate theory. Later researchers, like Paul Willis, tried to articulate their subjects’ perceptions into a more abstract and rigorous lexicon: for Willis good theory was continuous with the “practical consciousness” of those he studied. The bonding between ethnographer and subject became even more crucial when women began working with women – of which Dorothy Hobson’s work on the soap opera Crossroads is a well-known early instance (Hobson 1982). To think about the importance of the ethnographer’s gender, consider how difficult it would have been for a woman to have had Willis’s relation to the “lads”! A sense of shared values, identities and purposes between the researcher and the researched often elicits richer responses and transactions in the field. When, in a well-known ethnographic study, Ien Ang invited letters from Dutch Dallas viewers, she positioned herself as a fan (as she was) so as to encourage engaged replies (Ang 1985). But – and here INTRODUCTION 19 we strike a crucial problem – the ethnographer is not simply a fan; there is an irreducible rift between the position of being-a-researcher and that of being-a-fan, though of course a single individual can be both. There are two ways of dealing with this: one is to accept it and the ambivalence or contradiction it generates as productive – as Meaghan Morris does in her essay collected here; the other is for the researcher simultaneously to ethnographize herself in relation to her subjects and to allow her subjects as much exposure as possible to her own, more academic discourses. At this point ethnography can involve two-way transmission of information and maybe even passion. With the category “being a fan,” the question of populism reappears. But now we need to draw a distinction between cultural populism and that form of academic populism which (like Paul Willis) argues that, in cultural studies, academic knowledge ought to formalize what is already popularly known. A difficulty for both these populisms is that, when we think of either a “culture of differences” engaged in a “politics of survival” or a society as structured by various, interacting fields through which various discursive or cultural practices are transmitted, then the binary opposition “popular” versus “elite” begins to fall way. The assault on this form of binary thinking has been all the stronger because recent historical research has shown that the separation between popular and elite culture has historically been more fluid than cultural historians have believed. (See Levine 1988 and Collins 1989.) Nevertheless the “popular” as a category is unlikely to fall out of sight in cultural studies. To begin with, as we have seen, the distribution networks of concentrated cultural markets are increasingly gaining access to communities from different localities, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds to produce ever-larger popular audiences: now some stars and brands (Coke, Michael Jackson, Nike, McDonald’s . . .) belong to the global popular, at least for a while. At a more local level, notions of popular wants and desires are powerfully appealed to both by national politicians (nowhere more so than in Thatcherism) and by managers of large-scale cultural industries as they attempt to organize consumers’ tastes, desires, and pleasures. As Meaghan Morris in her essay in this collection notes, politicians construct an imaginary through figures such as “the silent majority,” or the “man (less often “woman”) in the street.” These figures are sometimes literally fake: in the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood habitually produced “documentaries” using actors as supposedly “real” interviewees. Fake or not, these figures become embodied in our national social imaginary. For the politicians, it is as if a certain kind of individual possesses the opinions, tastes, and values which polls, charts, ratings, and elections reveal to be popular. In the culture industries, the figure of the “popular” mediates between producers and audiences. Using its own sophisticated ethnographic techniques, the industry attempts to produce what the public (or at any rate the more affluent sections of it) wants. But at the same time it generates public desire by marketing its products (both hardware and software) as if they were always already popular. That “nothing sells like a hit” is more than a tautology, it is the most successful formula for cultural marketing. People will buy what other people love and desire. Through these political and commercial tactics and logics, the popular is constantly pushed towards the normal, even the universal. 20 SIMON DURING Yet, as a concept like the global popular makes apparent, no single kind of person embodies the popular. Cultural studies can provide space for, and knowledge of, the multiple audiences and communities who, in various combinations, vote, buy records, watch television and films, etc, without ever fitting the “popular,” “ordinary,” or “normal.” This is another reason to examine the techniques by which social values, attitudes, and desires are measured, as well as to demystify the political uses of representations like the “silent majority” and “ordinary American.” In this way, cultural studies can begin to intervene on the cultural market’s failure to admit full cultural multiplicity – particularly if (going with cultural populism) it accepts that, in principle, cultural markets can provide a variety of products, pleasures, and uses, including transgressive and avantgarde ones. Although cultural multiplicity is appealed to by many theoretical articles in this anthology, especially bell hooks’s and Cornel West’s, it is useful to cite a well-known recent example of how audience measurement affects cultural production and images of the “popular” within a particular nation state. When, in the US, Billboard stopped producing its music charts by measuring radio play and sales in an unrepresentative sample of shops and began using information based directly on bar-coded sales, it immediately became apparent that “genre” music – country, rap, heavy metal – was selling much better than anyone had suspected. These music forms began to enter a redefined mainstream. The sense of what was “popular” shifted. This is not to say that these new techniques perfectly represent public preferences: Billboard’s measurement of purchase doesn’t measure real consumption, let alone tastes. For example, not all social groups have the same capacity to turn their taste into purchases, not all sold products are listened to as often as others, and some music genres are more often taped than others. Images of “popular listening” based on Billboard’s information would still be awry – though this information will also allow the music-business oligopolies to restructure their production and hence (within limits) popular tastes and desires. The deeper question that quantitative market research and ratings fail to answer is how cultural products are valued and used – this is especially important because this failure, too, has important effects on our construction of the popular. Take television, for instance. Ratings are still mainly produced by measuring how many televisions are turned on each channel at any particular moment, though techniques to measure actual audience attention are also employed, including videoing viewers! But (leaving the question of VCR recorders aside) we know that television is watched in many ways: for information, for comforting background noise and flicker, as a neutral flow which helps to reduce (or increase) family tensions, for relaxation after working hours, for fans to watch a favorite program intensely, to produce a sense of cultural superiority through a careful, but ironical and distanced, mode of viewing, as a medium for programs which are received as great art, and so on. At any one time any program is available for many of these viewing practices. However, at certain times of the week certain such practices dominate. “Prime time” is the period in which most people watch for relaxation, for instance. What the ratings measure then is not one kind of viewing: like is not being compared to like. Rather a good rating is a sign that a particular television INTRODUCTION 21 use-value dominates at a particular moment within the larger rhythms of the working or schooling week. It is not the simple index of popular will or taste. Again, by turning a good rating into an expression of the “popular,” less widespread practices and preferences are marginalized as “unpopular.” Partly because the notion of the “popular” carries with it these problems, cultural studies is increasingly drawing attention to another, closely connected, category, one which does not compound divisiveness for the simple reason that (at least apparently) no one, anywhere, can avoid it. This category is “everyday life.” Ironically, however, cultural studies (as in the essay by Michel de Certeau collected here) derives the notion from an avant-garde tradition which turned to everyday life not as a basis for reassuring consensus but as an arena capable of radical transformation just because it was being increasingly disciplined, commodified, and rationalized in so-called “modernity.” In particular, Henri Lefebvre believed that intellectuals could drive the “organized passivity” and banality out of everyday life, drawing attention to its tragedies, sublimity, and magic (Lefebvre 1971 and 1991a). This was to be achieved by showing, first, that everyday life is constructed as the sphere in which, as the writer Maurice Blanchot put it, “nothing happens” (Blanchot 1987: 15), and, then, by writing about it carefully and affectionately, to defamiliarize it and reaffirm its true value. Lefebvre’s desire to play everyday life against modernity was elaborated by Michel de Certeau, who found a dream-like logic or “grammar” in overlooked and habitual acts (like walking) which countered disciplining routines. Given de Certeau’s and Morris’s marvellous essays, there can be little doubt that everyday life does provide an area where imaginative intellectual analysis and description may produce liberating effects. Partly by bringing academic analysis closer to the aims and techniques of older, non-academic essay-writing, the textualizers of everyday life help us to accept academic authority at the same time as they loosen and disseminate it. None the less, theory which grounds itself on a sense of the everyday does not avoid the problems associated with populism. Most relevantly, within a discipline that has globalized itself through affirming otherness, it is important to remember the obvious point that everyday life is not everywhere the same, despite those modernizing effects of uniformity that Lefebvre was obsessed by. Think about walking in the city: doesn’t it make a difference if one walks in Paris, downtown Detroit, Melbourne, Mexico City or Hong Kong just for starters? And, in each of these places, does a woman have the same experience as a man, a gay as a straight, a young person as an old one? The everyday, too, is produced and experienced at the intersection of many fields by embodied individuals; at times and in places it may also be a limit that cultural practices, especially those that attempt to move across cultures, aim to escape. And, as Meaghan Morris’s essay reminds us, it does not possess a single history. It exists within multiple histories, many of which escape the way the past is remembered and stored officially – in universities, for instance. Here, perhaps more than elsewhere, cultural studies merges into cultural histories which reconnect us to the world in ways that cannot be taken for granted. So it is not as though appeal to everyday life can avoid the intractable questions as to relations between social differences, life-practices and cultural expression which cultural studies began by 22 SIMON DURING addressing. But the fact that textualizing everyday life, with all its seduction, leads to these kinds of difficulties is another sign that the discipline has real vitality. There remains much work to do. Bar minor modifications, the introduction above was written in 1992. Despite its now being over five years old, it continues to provide a useful preface for the eighteen new essays added to this edition, though they were mostly written since. This is not to say, however, that cultural studies in 1999 is what it was in 1992. Not at all. To begin with, the topics it deals with have changed, or, at least, emphases have shifted. For instance, highly theorized work, especially from a structuralist or semiotic perspective, has moved to the background. So have topics like subcultures and media reception. However, a few of the new areas, scattered across the field, are worth noticing in a little more detail. First, science. Work on science has intensified in response to the increasing technologization of nature and the human body. As technology and nature merge, the upholding of a hard division between science and culture by insisting that science remains off-limits to non-scientists helps to disenfranchise those whose lives are most affected by scientific and technological innovations (or, otherwise put, by science’s colonization of the lifeworld). On the other hand, leaving science to the experts may also allow too much scope amongst non-scientists for technophobes and those who fetishize a nature out of reach of human work and intervention. Hence the interest of cultural studies intellectuals in the topic (see the essays by Andrew Ross and Donna Haraway collected here). Second, and of no less importance, sex. Sex has partly displaced gender as an area of debate and contestation (see the essay by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner). This has happened within queer theory which, in insisting that the regime of compulsory heterosexuality (or heteronormativity) shapes gender difference, has effectively rejected the earlier feminist bracketing off of sexual desire from critique of gender “roles.” Notwithstanding its avowed political program, and despite its capacity to help assemble a constituency (“queer nation”), queer theory tends to be more philosophical, and more distant from public culture as it happens in the media or official politics, than most previous work in cultural studies (see the essay by Judith Butler). At best the queer academic post-structuralist can be thought of as a vanguardist intellectual within queer nation (an “organic” intellectual in Gramsci’s sense even as she dismantles organicist thinking); at worst, unremittingly academic work in the post-structuralist vein can seem insensitive or irrelevant to the twists, wonders, and shocks of lesbian, gay, queer life over the past decade – with its political wins and losses, the ongoing carnage of the AIDS epidemic; an increasing (popular-) cultural acceptance, confidence, and inventiveness . . . Indeed the function of the cultural studies teacher in relation to “public culture” or the public sphere more generally has been much discussed. At least since Andrew Ross’s pathbreaking book, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989), such discourse has often taken the form of arguments over intellectuals. What’s an intellectual these days? Are they just professionalized INTRODUCTION 23 voices within the academy or the media; are they spokespersons for specific interest groups or communities? Can the notion of the critical intellectual survive the fragmentation of culture into an assemblage of institutions, and the professionalization and specialization of academic knowledge? For instance, are Noam Chomsky and Stuart Hall both “intellectuals,” or is Hall, who rarely appears on television, just an “academic” or “professor,” with Chomsky, for all his fame, only a media intellectual because he’s tied to old left causes, having failed to attend to contemporary academic media or cultural or social theory as expressed in cultural studies? How about Judith Butler and Camille Paglia? Cultural studies has increasingly concerned itself with such cases and questions (B. Robbins 1990 and 1993a). But perhaps the most profound topical change in cultural studies has been its focusing on cultural flow. The field is much less focused on discrete, filiative national or ethnic cultures, or components of such cultures, than it was in its earlier history, in work by Raymond Williams and the early Birmingham school, say. Cultural studies’ objects are decreasingly restricted or delimited by distance and locality at all. Rather, they move across national borders (as in the global “scapes” described by Arjun Appadurai in his essay included here); or they belong to scattered, diasporic groups (like the television shows watched by Hamid Naficy’s Los Angeles Iranians in his piece); or they are products of fluid, transnational regions like Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, peopled by men and women without “pure” identities or traditions and all the more able to improvise within their situation for that reason; or they inhabit faultlines between global powers and processes like those who live in Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong, as he describes it in his essay in this volume, caught at the interface between the communist People’s Republic of China and global capitalism. Cultural studies which addresses such cases is often called “transnational cultural studies.” It’s eroding so-called “postcolonialism,” first nurtured in literary studies, which was so important a feature of the late 1980s and early 1990s intellectual landscape. Much critiqued on the grounds that it prematurely celebrated the end of colonialist relations of exploitation and dependency, postcolonialism increasingly has had to come to terms with “globalization” – a word often heard, rarely clearly understood. What’s globalization, then? Not simply, as it often seems, Thatcherism writ large, globalization is best understood as the development of global markets and capital so as to skew highly capitalized national economies towards service, information, financial instruments, and other high value-added products away from traditional primary commodities and massproduction industries. Globalization also means more organized cross-national or “diasporic” labor-force movements, along with the amazing growth of export culture industries, including tourism. And, last, it means the accelerated development of communication technologies like the Internet which escape the tyranny of distance. Globalization has both undermined the autonomy of nation states and reduced state intervention in society and the economy – sometimes as a cause, other times as an excuse. It has also drastically transformed and punctured the old metropolitan/colony, center/periphery, north/south divisions, enabling new regions to invent themselves (notably “Asia Pacific”) alongside new 24 SIMON DURING cosmopolitanisms, elite and popular (see Cheah and Robbins 1998). Because it unifies the world and divides it, the problem of how to evaluate the consequences of globalization or transnationalism has become a central cultural studies issue (see the essays by Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha). This problem is not to be posed in the traditional fashion, i.e. “is globalization reducing global cultural differences?” – the answer to that being increasingly clearly “no, at least not in any simple way” since globalization is articulating all cultures and communities to one another in a process which also makes for new fragmentations and mixes, new niche and local markets; new opportunities for self-expression and alliance. Nor is the question “is globalization the same as Westernization?” – to which again it is generally agreed that the answer is “no, not in any simple way” – less because the technologies and capital driving globalization are not wholly owned in the West than because globalization brings benefits and power as well as costs to most localities around the world. Rather, the crucial questions are “is globalization creating new inequalities and depleting resources too unevenly and rapidly?” and, more complexly, “is globalization depriving individuals and communities of the capacity to control and know their own interests as they are increasingly called upon to produce and consume for markets driven from afar?” These questions have especial force for those – whether they live in rich or poor nations or regions – who have least capacity to direct or produce for global or national markets and flows, and hence are most likely to miss out on remunerative employment, becoming subject to demoralization and physical hardship, and objects of media stories, ethnographical research, touristic gazes, state, military or aid-organization attention . . . Transnational cultural studies attempts to produce academic knowledge and testimony across political and cultural borders which are not complicit with these gazes, stories, and attentions. For all that, it is not cultural studies’ topics, but its status in the education system which has changed most radically. And in this process cultural studies has become a soft target in the Western media. Risking academic self-absorption, I want to end this introduction by examining this crucial development a little more closely. Since the early 1990s, there has been a cultural studies boom, especially in anglophone universities. Or there seems to have been. In fact we need to distinguish between, on the one hand, a general “turn to culture” (or “cultural turn”) in the social sciences and humanities, and, on the other, the expansion of cultural studies conceived of as a discrete mode of analysis – as it is in this collection, for instance – and which, for convenience’s sake, I’ll call “engaged cultural studies.” As to the cultural turn: most, maybe all, humanities and social science disciplines have increasingly emphasized culture over the past decade or so. Cultural history has become the hot area in history; the cultural construction of space, in geography. Within criminology, representation of crime (i.e., crime’s cultural face) has flourished. Cultural anthropologists are almost as likely to do fieldwork in urban, metropolitan communities (on shopping, say) as in the world’s outposts, leaving little space to distinguish them from cultural studies ethnographers. Books with titles like From Sociology to Cultural Studies raise few INTRODUCTION 25 eyebrows. In many of the most exciting research areas of the last few years – the study of museums is a good example – historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and geographers collaborate and compete with minimal disciplinary or methodological differences apparent – more often than not they are all doing “cultural studies” as far as publishers and bookshops are concerned. Foreignlanguage departments now routinely (if not uncontroversially) think of themselves as introducing students to cultures rather than languages and literatures. English departments around the world have developed courses in non-literary cultural forms. When, in 1997, the Modern Languages Association published a number of short opinion pieces on the relation between literary studies and cultural studies, most respondents were of the opinion that cultural studies was another wave within literary studies, and that the distinction between the two, being artificial, was to be downplayed. This general turn to culture has helped to disseminate cultural studies as a form of knowledge with its own histories, methods, and programs (“engaged cultural studies”) but it also threatens to overwhelm and dilute it. In this situation, for those of us with a commitment to engaged cultural studies, it would seem that three tasks become particularly urgent: first, clearly to articulate engaged cultural studies’ specific project; second, to analyze the conditions which underpin the general turn to culture just described; third, to develop strategies to maintain engaged cultural studies as a discrete formation inside the larger cultural turn. These tasks are all the more compelling because, as I say, cultural studies, in becoming established in the academy, has been the object of public attacks – a player (and pawn) in the “culture wars” – on the grounds that it fails both to disseminate cultural value (for cultural studies, so it’s alleged, Mickey Mouse is as good as Shakespeare), and that it disrupts cultural unity (conservatives complain that cultural studies is on a mission for a multiculturalism which will undermine national pride, heritage, and consensus). Such attacks ring especially hollow when they fail to enquire into the reasons why cultural studies is expanding in the academy, both in its radical and in its more traditional forms. This is not the place to begin working through these matters in any detail – that belongs to the ongoing work I wrote of at the end of my 1992 introduction. However a very brief (and partial) indication of directions to be taken is useful. The first of these three tasks – addressing the issue of what is specific to engaged cultural studies – is probably the easiest to deal with. As this book hopes to persuade its readers, engaged cultural studies is academic work (teaching, research, dissemination, etc.) on contemporary culture from non-elite or counterhegemonic perspectives (“from below”) with an openness to the culture’s reception and production in everyday life, or, more generally, its impact on life trajectories. Engaged cultural studies encourages and takes notice of culture’s capacity to express and invoke less restricted (more “other,” counter-normative) ways of living. So it does not simply “teach the conflicts” (Graff 1992) – that is, it does not neutrally present the debates over canons, cultural value, multiculturalism, identity-thinking, and so on for students, rather it aims to produce knowledge from perspectives lost to and in dominant public culture, and to listen to far-off or marginalized voices. Yet, importantly, engaged cultural studies also 26 SIMON DURING examines its own constitutive borders and divisions – or, more simply, the relation between what it includes and what it excludes. It examines its temporal border: the separation of past from present (asking, what the role of history is in contemporary cultural studies). It examines the power barriers it assumes and contests: the division between hegemonic (“above”) and counter-hegemonic (“below”) – or, to swap terms, the borders between margins and centers. And it examines structural divisions: the boundaries between “culture” on the one hand, and “society” or the “economy” on the other (asking, for instance, to what degree is culture shaped by economic structures – see Nicholas Garnham’s essay for a discussion of this). We might add to these problems concerning boundaries, though it’s been much less discussed, that cultural studies also addresses the basic distinction between the political (or the engaged) and the non-political (or the disengaged) where it touches culture – a topic to which I will return in a moment. The second of my three tasks faces a more difficult challenge. Why has the study of culture recently become so popular across the whole range of the humanities, and even the social sciences? To sum up a very complicated situation: the turn to culture would seem to be best understood as an effect of three entangled events, each on a very different scale. First, the increasing importance of cultural industries to post-industrial national economies such as the US and the UK; second, the rise in the use of cultural heritages and cultural consumption to maintain or stabilize identities by nations, ethnic groups, and individuals (partly because socialism has been delegitimized, and people cease to identify with a class); and, finally, at the micro-level of the education system, the downsizing of the academic humanities and the social sciences relative to other faculties inside a still expanding post-compulsory education sector. To put the case in a nutshell: even in highly developed, post-industrial countries, more and more students are entering post-compulsory institutions without having, or wishing for, traditional European elite taste preferences and without the desire to form themselves ethically through their consumption or knowledge of canons. Their own everyday-life culture is increasingly that of popular culture or niches within it – this is their starting point for exploring the past, for instance. Many students from so-called “minority” communities, often the first members of their family ever to attend university, wish to affirm and learn about their own neglected or repressed cultural heritages. At the same time, many students take humanities and social sciences courses in preparation for professional graduate training or (in the case of the humanities) to enter the broader cultural industries – in both cases, courses on culture, especially contemporary culture, provide especially efficient and pertinent use-value or training. All this within an education system decreasingly supported by state funding and increasingly managed in business-sector terms of “efficiencies” and “performance” so that areas of study without high student demand are gradually likely to be diminished or let go. These pressures finally have an impact even on rich institutions, especially at graduate school level, because such graduate schools train teachers, and, despite inertia, ultimately have to be responsive to projected student demand in the rest of the system. To move from the general to INTRODUCTION 27 the particular, this is the larger logic within which books, articles, and courses on, say, the politics of seventeenth-century France or monographs on canonical literary authors tend to decrease, while books, articles, and courses on global media systems, or even, say, magical thinking in the construction of modernity, tend to increase. The last of the three proposed tasks – the need to develop strategies to maintain engaged cultural studies as a specific field, as against the turn to culture in general – is perhaps the most contentious. A main reason for this is that it exposes anxieties over avowedly political knowledge and teaching within the supposedly “objective” academy. In practice engaged cultural studies is rapidly becoming another area of speciality – a discipline, a field – able to be housed in any one of a number of departments, though most frequently in literature or communications departments. The tactic of adding speciality after speciality to departments, faculties, or disciplines, and thereby avoiding dealing with controversial intellectual-pedagogical issues, has been well discussed by Gerald Graff in his Professing Literature (1987). But because engaged cultural studies is expressly political, it does not settle easily into a pattern of accretion and liberal tolerance. So we need to spell out that there are compelling reasons why students, not least those from elite backgrounds, might be exposed to it. As a field, it accepts that studying culture is rarely value-free, and so, embracing clearly articulated, left-wing values, it seeks to extend and critique the relatively narrow range of norms, methods, and practices embedded in the traditional, past-fixated, canon-forming humanities. It does so in order to provide students (in this case, especially elite students) with a point of entry into the contemporary world they are unlikely to have learned from their families, their secondary schooling or from the media, and it helps make a less blinkered and hierarchical, a fairer and more open culture for that very reason. Of course, it also often provides non-elite students and scholars with an approach they can recognize and own. None the less, I’d suggest that, for both practical and theoretical reasons, in the current situation, we need to think of cultural studies not as a traditional field or discipline, nor as a mode of interdisciplinarity, but as what I will call a field within multidisciplinarity. This means that cultural studies should aim to monopolize its students or, indeed, its teachers and intellectuals, as little as is possible within the academic-bureaucratic structures we have. Within the academy it is best regarded as an area to work in alongside others, usually more highly institutionalized disciplines – Spanish, geography, politics, economics, literature . . . whatever. The point is not so much to dismantle disciplinary boundaries as to be able to move across them; the aim is to transport methods and attitudes from cultural studies to other disciplines where they are appropriate, but also to be able to forgo them where they are not. Pragmatically, thinking of cultural studies as a field within multidisciplinarity increases its reach inside institutions committed, however problematically, to objectivity – institutions, I suspect, which are coming under mounting pressure to close down on cultural dissidence from community and media interests. We need also to recognize that a great deal of the material studied in the humanities does 28 SIMON DURING not invite political engagement, let alone political engagement which can be easily translated into the current situation. To give just one cultural-historical example: amongst Elizabethan playwrights, if we have an interest in them at all, we may prefer Christopher Marlowe to Ben Jonson on political grounds because of the way that Marlowe rebels against the sexual and religious codes of his time. But what about debates between the Stoics and the Epicureans, so important for early modern Western political and philosophical thought? What’s the current political valency there? And if these debates have little or no political valency now, is that a reason not to study them alongside engaged cultural studies? That kind of question is gaining force because the downsizing of the humanities is transforming the political force and meaning of the academic humanities. Let’s put it like this: in a situation where globalized market forces and government policy are demanding that universities should provide economically relevant practical training so as to increase productivity and efficiency, where calls for academics to make themselves over as “public intellectuals” within the restricted parameters of the mainstream media are commonplace, is studying the Stoics and Epicureans, or, for that matter, technical aspects of the seventeenthcentury English lyric, simply obscurantist or (in the case of the lyric) elitist? Such studies have a political charge, however faint, in their very incapacity to contribute to the market or media culture. (This is a version of the political charge that Theodor Adorno assigned to modernist art under industrial capitalism in his Aesthetic Theory and elsewhere.) Multidisciplinarity, which thinks of engaged cultural studies less as an academic specialism than as a critical moment within a larger, dispersed, not wholly politicized field, is, then, a way of shoring up differences and counter-hegemony inside the humanities in an epoch of global managerialism. So I’m arguing that global managerialism underpins the academic turn to culture in ways which mean that engaged cultural studies best situates itself into the humanities and social sciences as a fluid and critical moment, neither weighted down by disciplinarity nor blanded out into the interdisciplinarity of the wider cultural turn. Whether or not engaged cultural studies accommodates to globalization and managerialism in quite the way I am proposing is up to readers of this book as much as anyone to decide. PA R T O N E Theory and method Chapter 2 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer T H E C U LT U R E I N D U S T R Y E nli ghte n m en t a s mas s d ec ep t ion EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION A D O R N O A N D H O R K H E I M E R ’S E S S AY, published in the mid-1940s, remains the classic denunciation of the “culture industry.” It offers a vision of a society that has lost its capacity to nourish true freedom and individuality – as well as the ability to represent the real conditions of existence. Adorno and Horkheimer believe that this loss results from the fact that cultural production has moved from an artisanal stage, which depended on individual effort and required little or no investment, to an industrial stage. For them, the modern culture industry produces safe, standardized products geared to the larger demands of the capitalist economy. It does so by representing “average” life for purposes of pure entertainment or distraction as seductively and realistically as possible. Thus, for them, Hollywood movies, radio, mass-produced journalism, and advertising are different only at the most superficial level. Furthermore, the culture industry has become so successful that “art” and “life” are no longer wholly separable – which is the theme later theorists of postmodernity took from the essay. (See Jameson 1990; and the Lyotard essay in this volume.) Of course “high” art still exists as “mass culture”’s opposite, but for Adorno, in a famous phrase, these are two halves of a whole that do not add up. Debate about the essay continues, but it is important to remember the situation in which it was written. The Second World War had not quite ended, and Adorno and Horkheimer were refugees from Nazi Germany living in the US. Hitler’s totalitarianism (with its state control of cultural production) and the American market system are fused in their thought – all the more easily because, for them as members of the German (or rather the secularized German-Jewish) bourgeoisie, high culture, particularly drama and music, is a powerful vehicle of 32 THEODOR ADORNO AND MAX HORKHEIMER civil values. It is also worth emphasizing that when this essay was written the cultural industry was less variegated than it was to become, during the 1960s in particular. Hollywood, for instance, was still “vertically integrated” so that the five major studios owned the production, distribution, and exhibition arms of the film business between them; television was still in its infancy; the LP and the single were unknown; the cultural market had not been broken into various demographic sectors – of which, in the 1950s, the youth segment was to become the most energetic. This helps to explain how Adorno and Horkheimer neglect what was to become central to cultural studies: the ways in which the cultural industry, while in the service of organized capital, also provides the opportunities for all kinds of individual and collective creativity and decoding. Further reading: Adorno 1991; Berman 1989; Connerton 1980; Jameson 1990; Jay 1984a; Kracauer 1995; Pensky 1997. The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of precapitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialization, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centres in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, towards which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) was already hastening. Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centres look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans. Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary – the absolute power of capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers and as consumers, are drawn into the centre in search of work and pleasure, all the living units crystallize into well-organized complexes. The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular. Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed. T H E C U LT U R E I N D U S T R Y 33 Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centres and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organization and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their levelling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system. This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness. The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programmes which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal field of the ‘amateur’, and also have to accept organization from above. But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official programmes of every kind selected by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favours the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical experience – real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is crudely ‘adapted’ for a film soundtrack in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air. We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition there is the agreement – or at least the determination – of all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves. In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the hidden subjective purposes of company directors, the foremost among whom are in the most powerful 34 THEODOR ADORNO AND MAX HORKHEIMER sectors of industry – steel, petroleum, electricity, and chemicals. Culture monopolies are weak and dependent in comparison. They cannot afford to neglect their appeasement of the real holders of power if their sphere of activity in mass society (a sphere producing a specific type of commodity which anyhow is still too closely bound up with easygoing liberalism and Jewish intellectuals) is not to undergo a series of purges. The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven. All are in such close contact that the extreme concentration of mental forces allows demarcation lines between different firms and technical branches to be ignored. The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics. Market differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasized and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previous determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organization charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique is that used for any type of propaganda. How formalized the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end. That the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory strikes every child with a keen interest in varieties. What connoisseurs discuss as good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice. The same applies to the Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions. But even the differences between the more expensive and cheaper models put out by the same firm steadily diminish: for automobiles, there are such differences as the number of cylinders, cubic capacity, details of patented gadgets; and for films there are the number of stars, the extravagant use of technology, labour, and equipment, and the introduction of the latest psychological formulas. The universal criterion of merit is the amount of ‘conspicuous production’ of blatant cash investment. The varying budgets in the culture industry do not bear the slightest relation to factual values, to the meaning of the products themselves. Even the technical media are relentlessly forced into uniformity. Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only because the interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out into the open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk – the fusion of all the arts in one work. The alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect than in Tristan because the sensuous elements which all approvingly reflect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in the same technical process, the unity of which becomes its distinctive content. This process integrates all the elements of the production, from the novel (shaped with T H E C U LT U R E I N D U S T R Y 35 an eye to the film) to the last sound effect. It is the triumph of invested capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep into the hearts of the dispossessed in the employment line; it is the meaningful content of every film, whatever plot the production team may have selected. The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since the lightning takeover by the sound film. Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who are unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the massmedia consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts. Even though the effort required for his response is semi-automatic, no scope is left for the imagination. Those who are so absorbed by the world of the movie – by its images, gestures, and words – that they are unable to supply what really makes it a world, do not have to dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening. All the other films and products of the entertainment industry which they have seen have taught them what to expect; they react automatically. The might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds. The entertainments manufacturers know that their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses, whether at work or at leisure – which is akin to work. From every sound film and every broadcast programme the social effect can be inferred which is exclusive to none but is shared by all alike. The culture industry as a whole has moulded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product. All the agents of this process, from the producer to the women’s clubs, take good care that the simple reproduction of this mental state is not nuanced or extended in any way. The art historians and guardians of culture who complain of the extinction in the West of a basic style-determining power are wrong. The stereotyped appropriation of everything, even the inchoate, for the purposes of mechanical reproduction surpasses the rigour and general currency of any ‘real style’, in the sense in which cultural cognoscenti celebrate the organic precapitalist past. No Palestrina could be more of a purist in eliminating every unprepared and unresolved 36 THEODOR ADORNO AND MAX HORKHEIMER discord than the jazz arranger in suppressing any development which does not conform to the jargon. When jazzing up Mozart he changes him not only when he is too serious or too difficult but when he harmonizes the melody in a different way, perhaps more simply, than is customary now. No medieval builder can have scrutinized the subjects for church windows and sculptures more suspiciously than the studio hierarchy scrutinizes a work by Balzac or Hugo before finally approving it. No medieval theologian could have determined the degree of the torment to be suffered by the damned in accordance with the ordo of divine love more meticulously than the producers of shoddy epics calculate the torture to be undergone by the hero or the exact point to which the leading lady’s hemline shall be raised. The explicit and implicit, exoteric and esoteric catalogue of the forbidden and tolerated is so extensive that it not only defines the area of freedom but is allpowerful inside it. Everything down to the last detail is shaped accordingly. Like its counterpart, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry determines its own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the use of anathema. The constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old pattern) serves merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions when any single effect threatens to slip through the net. Every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with approval at first sight. And the star performers, whether they produce or reproduce, use this jargon as freely and fluently and with as much gusto as if it were the very language which it silenced long ago. Such is the ideal of what is natural in this field of activity, and its influence becomes all the more powerful, the more technique is perfected and diminishes the tension between the finished product and everyday life. The paradox of this routine, which is essentially travesty, can be detected and is often predominant in everything that the culture industry turns out. A jazz musician who is playing a piece of serious music, one of Beethoven’s simplest minuets, syncopates it involuntarily and will smile superciliously when asked to follow the normal divisions of the beat. This is the ‘nature’ which, complicated by the ever-present and extravagant demands of the specific medium, constitutes the new style and is a ‘system of non-culture, to which one might even concede a certain “unity of style” if it really made any sense to speak of stylized barbarity’. The universal imposition of this stylized mode can even go beyond what is quasi-officially sanctioned or forbidden; today a hit song is more readily forgiven for not observing the thirty-two beats or the compass of the ninth than for containing even the most clandestine melodic or harmonic detail which does not conform to the idiom. Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system. The constraint of the technically conditioned idiom which stars and directors have to produce as ‘nature’ so that the people can appropriate it, extends to such fine nuances that they almost attain the subtlety of the devices of an avant-garde work as against those of truth. The rare capacity minutely to fulfil the obligations of the natural idiom in all branches of the culture industry becomes the criterion of efficiency. What and how they say it must be measurable by everyday language, as in logical positivism. The producers are experts. The idiom demands an astounding productive power, which it absorbs and squanders. In a diabolical way it has T H E C U LT U R E I N D U S T R Y 37 overreached the culturally conservative distinction between genuine and artificial style. A style might be called artificial which is imposed from without on the refractory impulses of a form. But in the culture industry every element of the subject matter has its origin in the same apparatus as that jargon whose stamp it bears. The quarrels in which the artistic experts become involved with sponsor and censor about a lie going beyond the bounds of credibility are evidence not so much of an inner aesthetic tension as of a divergence of interests. The reputation of the specialist, in which a last remnant of objective independence sometimes finds refuge, conflicts with the business politics of the church, or the concern which is manufacturing the cultural commodity. But the thing itself has been essentially objectified and made viable before the established authorities began to argue about it. Even before Zanuck acquired her, St Bernadette was regarded by her latter-day hagiographer as brilliant propaganda for all interested parties. That is what became of the emotions of the character. Hence the style of the culture industry, which no longer has to test itself against any refractory material, is also the negation of style. The reconciliation of the general and particular, of the rule and the specific demands of the subject matter, the achievement of which alone gives essential, meaningful content to style, is futile because there has ceased to be the slightest tension between opposite poles: these concordant extremes are dismally identical; the general can replace the particular, and vice versa. Nevertheless, this caricature of style does not amount to something beyond the genuine style of the past. In the culture industry the notion of genuine style is seen to be the aesthetic equivalent of domination. Style considered as mere aesthetic regularity is a romantic dream of the past. The unity of style not only of the Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses in each case the different structure of social power, and not the obscure experience of the oppressed in which the general was enclosed. The great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave what was expressed that force without which life flows away unheard. Those very art forms which are known as classical, such as Mozart’s music, contain objective trends which represent something different to the style which they incarnate. As late as Schoenberg and Picasso, the great artists have retained a mistrust of style, and at crucial points have subordinated it to the logic of the matter. What Dadaists and Expressionists called the untruth of style as such triumphs today in the sung jargon of a crooner, in the carefully contrived elegance of a film star, and even in the admirable expertise of a photograph of a peasant’s squalid hut. Style represents a promise in every work of art. That which is expressed is subsumed through style into the dominant forms of generality, into the language of music, painting, or words, in the hope that it will be reconciled thus with the idea of true generality. This promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. It unconditionally posits the real forms of life as it is by suggesting that fulfilment lies in their aesthetic derivatives. To this extent the claim of art is always ideology too. However, only in this confrontation with tradition of which style is the record can art express suffering. That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually 38 THEODOR ADORNO AND MAX HORKHEIMER realized, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure in which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with others – on a surrogate identity. In the culture industry this imitation finally becomes absolute. Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy. Today aesthetic barbarity completes what has threatened the creations of the spirit since they were gathered together as culture and neutralized. To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematization and process of cataloguing and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And it is precisely the industrialized, the consequent, subsumption which entirely accords with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labour process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture. The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape. Of course works of art were not sexual exhibitions either. However, by representing deprivation as negative, they retracted, as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what was denied. The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfilment as a broken promise. The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance. There is no erotic situation which, while insinuating and exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakably that things can never go that far. The Hays Office [the film censor of the time] merely confirms the ritual of Tantalus that the culture industry has established anyway. Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. Love is downgraded to romance. And, after the descent, much is permitted; even licence as a marketable speciality has its quota bearing the trade description ‘daring’. The mass production of the sexual automatically achieves its repression. Because of his ubiquity, the film star with whom one is meant to fall in love is from the outset a copy of himself. Every tenor voice comes to sound like a Caruso record, and the ‘natural’ faces of Texas girls are like the successful models by whom Hollywood has typecast them. The mechanical reproduction of beauty, which reactionary cultural fanaticism T H E C U LT U R E I N D U S T R Y 39 wholeheartedly serves in its methodical idolization of individuality, leaves no room for that unconscious idolatry which was once essential to beauty. The triumph over beauty is celebrated by humour – the Schadenfreude that every successful deprivation calls forth. There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at. Laughter, whether conciliatory or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes. It indicates liberation either from physical danger or from the grip of logic. Conciliatory laughter is heard as the echo of an escape from power; the wrong kind overcomes fear by capitulating to the forces which are to be feared. It is the echo of power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practised on happiness. Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baudelaire is as devoid of humour as Hölderlin. In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at something is always to deride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, selfassertion prepared to parade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all dedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everyone else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity. What is fiendish about this false laughter is that it is a compelling parody of the best, which is conciliatory. Delight is austere: res severa verum gaudium. The monastic theory that not asceticism but the sexual act denotes the renunciation of attainable bliss receives negative confirmation in the gravity of the lover who with foreboding commits his life to the fleeting moment. In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme law is that they shall not satisfy their desires at any price; they must laugh and be content with laughter. In every product of the culture industry, the permanent denial imposed by civilization is once again unmistakably demonstrated and inflicted on its victims. To offer and to deprive them of something is one and the same. This is what happens in erotic films. Precisely because it must never take place, everything centres upon copulation. In films it is more strictly forbidden for an illegitimate relationship to be admitted without the parties being punished than for a millionaire’s future son-in-law to be active in the labour movement. In contrast to the liberal era, industrialized as well as popular culture may wax indignant at capitalism, but it cannot renounce the threat of castration. This is fundamental. It outlasts the organized acceptance of the uniformed seen in the films which are produced to that end, and in reality. What is decisive today is no longer puritanism, although it still asserts itself in the form of women’s organizations, but the necessity inherent in the system not to leave the customer alone, not for a moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is possible. The principle dictates that he should be shown all his needs as capable of fulfilment, but that those needs should be so predetermined that he feels himself to be the eternal consumer, the object of the culture industry. Not only does it make him believe that the deception it practises is satisfaction, but it goes further and implies that, whatever the state of affairs, he must put up with what is offered. The escape from everyday drudgery which the whole culture industry promises may be 40 THEODOR ADORNO AND MAX HORKHEIMER compared to the daughter’s abduction in the cartoon: the father is holding the ladder in the dark. The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are predesigned to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget. Amusement, if released from every restraint, would not only be the antithesis of art but its extreme role. The Mark Twain absurdity with which the American culture industry flirts at times might be a corrective of art. The more seriously the latter regards the incompatibility with life, the more it resembles the seriousness of life, its antithesis; the more effort it devotes to developing wholly from its own formal law, the more effort it demands from the intelligence to neutralize its burden. In some revue films, and especially in the grotesque and the funnies, the possibility of this negation does glimmer for a few moments. But of course it cannot happen. Pure amusement in its consequence, relaxed self-surrender to all kinds of associations and happy nonsense, is cut short by the amusement on the market: instead, it is interrupted by a surrogate overall meaning which the culture industry insists on giving to its products, and yet misuses as a mere pretext for bringing in the stars. Biographies and other simple stories patch the fragments of nonsense into an idiotic plot. We do not have the cap and bells of the jester but the bunch of keys of capitalist reason, which even screens the pleasure of achieving success. Every kiss in the revue film has to contribute to the career of the boxer, or some hit song expert or other whose rise to fame is being glorified. The deception is not that the culture industry supplies amusement but that it ruins the fun by allowing business considerations to involve it in the ideological clichés of a culture in the process of self-liquidation. Ethics and taste cut short unrestrained amusement as ‘naïve’ – naïveté is thought to be as bad as intellectualism – and even restrict technical possibilities. The culture industry is corrupt; not because it is a sinful Babylon but because it is a cathedral dedicated to elevated pleasure. On all levels, from Hemingway to Emil Ludwig, from Mrs Miniver to the Lone Ranger, from Toscanini to Guy Lombardo, there is untruth in the intellectual content taken ready-made from art and science. The culture industry does retain a trace of something better in those features which bring it close to the circus, in the self-justifying and nonsensical skill of riders, acrobats and clowns, in the ‘defence and justification of physical as against intellectual art’. But the refuges of a mindless artistry which represent what is human as opposed to the social mechanism are being relentlessly hunted down by a schematic reason which compels everything to prove its significance and effect. The consequence is that the nonsensical at the bottom disappears as utterly as the sense in works of art at the top. In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely because of the standardization of the means of production. He is tolerated only so long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned. Pseudo individuality is rife: from the standardized jazz improvization to the exceptional film star whose hair curls over her eye to demonstrate her originality. What is individual is no more than the generality’s power to stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such. The defiant reserve or elegant appearance of the individual on show is massproduced like Yale locks, whose only difference can be measured in fractions of T H E C U LT U R E I N D U S T R Y 41 millimetres. The peculiarity of the self is a monopoly commodity determined by society; it is falsely represented as natural. It is no more than the moustache, the French accent, the deep voice of the woman of the world, the Lubitsch touch: finger prints on identity cards which are otherwise exactly the same, and into which the lives and faces of every single person are transformed by the power of the generality. Pseudo-individuality is the prerequisite for comprehending tragedy and removing its poison: only because individuals have ceased to be themselves and are now merely centres where the general tendencies meet, is it possible to receive them again, whole and entire, into the generality. In this way mass culture discloses the fictitious character of the ‘individual’ in the bourgeois era, and is merely unjust in boasting on account of this dreary harmony of general and particular. The principle of individuality was always full of contradiction. Individuation has never really been achieved. Self-preservation in the shape of class has kept everyone at the stage of a mere species being. Every bourgeois characteristic, in spite of its deviation and indeed because of it, expressed the same thing: the harshness of the competitive society. The individual who supported society bore its disfiguring mark; seemingly free, he was actually the product of its economic and social apparatus. Power based itself on the prevailing conditions of power when it sought the approval of persons affected by it. As it progressed, bourgeois society did also develop the individual. Against the will of its leaders, technology has changed human beings from children into persons. However, every advance in individuation of this kind took place at the expense of the individuality in whose name it occurred, so that nothing was left but the resolve to pursue one’s own particular purpose. The bourgeois whose existence is split into a business and a private life, whose private life is split into keeping up his public image and intimacy, whose intimacy is split into the surly partnership of marriage and the bitter comfort of being quite alone, at odds with himself and everybody else, is already virtually a Nazi, replete both with enthusiasm and abuse; or a modern citydweller who can now imagine friendship only as a ‘social contact’: that is, as being in social contact with others with whom he has no inward contact. The only reason why the culture industry can deal so successfully with individuality is that the latter has always reproduced the fragility of society. On the faces of private individuals and movie heroes put together according to the patterns on magazine covers vanishes a pretence in which no one now believes; the popularity of the hero models comes partly from a secret satisfaction that the effort to achieve individuation has at last been replaced by the effort to imitate, which is admittedly more breathless. It is idle to hope that this self-contradictory, disintegrating ‘person’ will not last for generations, that the system must collapse because of such a psychological split, or that the deceitful substitution of the stereotype for the individual will of itself become unbearable for mankind. Since Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the unity of the personality has been seen through as a pretence. Synthetically produced physiognomies show that the people of today have already forgotten that there was ever a notion of what human life was. For centuries society has been preparing for Victor Mature and Mickey Rooney. By destroying they come to fulfil. Chapter 3 Roland Barthes DOMINICI, OR THE TRIUMPH O F L I T E R AT U R E EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION T H I S E S S AY, W H I C H O R I G IN A L LY appeared as a column in a newspaper, was first published in book form in Mythologies in 1957. Mythologies has been such an important book because it begins to examine, concretely, how ideology works. It is the founding text of practical ideologycritique. And “Dominici, or the triumph of literature” is especially interesting because it points forward to a later-period Barthes, for whom the concept of “mythology” would be replaced by that of discourse (see Barthes 1977). Here Barthes shows that “literature” is not separate from everyday life and its powerflows. On the contrary, he analyzes a case in which an inarticulate rural laborer is condemned in terms of a discourse which is profoundly literary: the judges describe Dominici’s motives in terms borrowed from literary clichés; they gain their sense of superiority because they speak “better” French than he – where “better” means more like written prose. And, in reporting the trial, the journalists turn it into more literature – where “literature” does not just mean the literary canon but the conventional system of writing and representation in which the canon remains uncontested. Although the essay does not use the term, this remains a classic account of how hegemony is produced through interactions between various institutions and discourses – in this case, literature, the law, and journalism – over the body of those who can hardly talk back. In a later overview of his journalistic columns, published at the end of Mythologies, Barthes theorized the mode of analysis he had used. He argues that the way discourse (or “mythology”) is circulated through society makes a particular representation of the world seem natural and universal, so that an outside to it cannot be imagined except as “unnatural,” D O M I N I C I , O R T H E T R I U M P H O F L I T E R AT U R E 43 “perverse,” “exotic,” “abnormal,” “stupid,” and so on. This analysis is finally of a piece with Adorno and Horkheimer’s line of thought, though, in his description of the Citroën also published in Mythologies, the young Barthes expressed his belief that mass-produced commodities can be beautiful. One cannot imagine Theodor Adorno, in particular, conceding that. Further reading: Barthes 1972, 1977; Belsey 1980; Bennett and Woollacott 1988; Ray 1984; Williamson 1978. The whole Dominici trial 1 was enacted according to a certain idea of psychology, which happens to be, as luck would have it, that of the Literature of the bourgeois Establishment. Since material evidence was uncertain or contradictory, one had to resort to evidence of a mental kind; and where could one find it, except in the very mentality of the accusers? The motives and sequence of actions were therefore reconstituted off-hand but without a shadow of a doubt; in the manner of those archaeologists who go and gather old stones all over the excavation site and with their cement, modern as it is, erect a delicate wayside altar of Sesostris, or else, who reconstitute a religion which has been dead for two thousand years by drawing on the ancient fund of universal wisdom, which is in fact nothing but their own brand of wisdom, elaborated in the schools of the Third Republic. The same applies to the ‘psychology’ of old Dominici. Is it really his? No one knows. But one can be sure that it is indeed that of the Presiding Judge of the Assizes or the Public Prosecutor. Do these two mentalities, that of the old peasant from the Alps and that of the judiciary, function in the same way? Nothing is less likely. And yet it is in the name of a ‘universal’ psychology that old Dominici has been condemned: descending from the charming empyrean of bourgeois novels and essentialist psychology, Literature has just condemned a man to the guillotine. Listen to the Public Prosecutor: Sir Jack Drummond, I told you, was afraid. But he knows that in the end the best way to defend oneself is to attack. So he throws himself on this fierce-looking man and takes the old man by the throat. Not a word is spoken. But to Gaston Dominici, the simple fact that someone should want to hold him down by both shoulders is unthinkable. It was physically impossible for him to bear this strength which was suddenly pitted against him. This is credible like the temple of Sesostris, like the Literature of M. Genevoix. Only, to base archaeology or the novel on a ‘Why not?’ does not harm anybody. But Justice? Periodically, some trial, and not necessarily fictitious like the one in Camus’s The Outsider, comes to remind you that the Law is always prepared to lend you a spare brain in order to condemn you without remorse, and that, like Corneille, it depicts you as you should be, and not as you are. This official visit of Justice to the world of the accused is made possible thanks to an intermediate myth which is always used abundantly by all official institutions, 44 ROLAND BARTHES whether they are the Assizes or the periodicals of literary sects: the transparence and universality of language. The Presiding Judge of the Assizes, who reads Le Figaro, has obviously no scruples in exchanging words with the old ‘uneducated’ goatherd. Do they not have in common the same language, and the clearest there is, French? O wonderful self-assurance of classical education, in which shepherds, without embarrassment, converse with judges! But here again, behind the prestigious (and grotesque) morality of Latin translations and essays in French, what is at stake is the head of a man. And yet the disparity of both languages, their impenetrability to each other, have been stressed by a few journalists, and Giono has given numerous examples of this in his accounts of the trial. Their remarks show that there is no need to imagine mysterious barriers, Kafka-like misunderstandings. No: syntax, vocabulary, most of the elementary, analytical materials of language grope blindly without ever touching, but no one has any qualms about it (‘Êtes-vous allé au pont? – Allée? il n’y a pas d’allée, je le sais, j’y suis été’).2 Naturally, everyone pretends to believe that it is the official language which is common sense, that of Dominici being only one of its ethnological varieties, picturesque in its poverty. And yet, this language of the president is just as peculiar, laden as it is with unreal clichés; it is a language for school essays, not for a concrete psychology (but perhaps it is unavoidable for most men, alas, to have the psychology of the language which they have been taught). These are in actual fact two particular uses of language which confront each other. But one of them has honours, law and force on its side. And this ‘universal’ language comes just at the right time to lend a new strength to the psychology of the masters: it allows it always to take other men as objects, to describe and condemn at one stroke. It is an adjectival psychology, it knows only how to endow its victims with epithets, it is ignorant of everything about the actions themselves, save the guilty category into which they are forcibly made to fit. These categories are none other than those of classical comedy or treatises of graphology: boastful, irascible, selfish, cunning, lecherous, harsh, man exists in their eyes only through the ‘character traits’ which label him for society as the object of a more or less easy absorption, the subject of a more or less respectful submission. Utilitarian, taking no account of any state of consciousness, this psychology has nevertheless the pretension of giving as a basis for actions a pre-existing inner person, it postulates ‘the soul’: it judges man as a ‘conscience’ without being embarrassed by having previously described him as an object. Now that particular psychology, in the name of which you can very well today have your head cut off, comes straight from our traditional literature, that which one calls in bourgeois-style literature of the Human Document. It is in the name of the human document that the old Dominici has been condemned. Justice and literature have made an alliance, they have exchanged their old techniques, thus revealing their basic identity, and compromising each other barefacedly. Behind the judges, in curule chairs, the writers (Giono, Salacrou). And on the prosecution side, do we see a lawyer? No, an ‘extraordinary story-teller’, gifted with ‘undeniable wit’ and a ‘dazzling verve’ (to quote the shocking testimonial granted to the Public Prosecutor by Le Monde). Even the police are here seen practising fine writing: Police Superintendent: ‘Never have I met such a dissembling liar, such a wary gambler, such a witty narrator, such a wily trickster, such a lusty D O M I N I C I , O R T H E T R I U M P H O F L I T E R AT U R E 45 septuagenarian, such a self-assured despot, such a devious schemer, such a cunning hypocrite . . . Gaston Dominici is an astonishing quickchange artist playing with human souls, and animal thoughts . . . This false patriarch of the Grand’ Terre has not just a few facets, he has a hundred!’ Antithesis, metaphors, flights of oratory, it is the whole of classical rhetoric which accuses the old shepherd here. Justice took the mask of Realist literature, of the country tale, while Literature itself came to the court-room to gather new ‘human’ documents, and naively to seek from the face of the accused and the suspects the reflection of a psychology which, however, it had been the first to impose on them by the arm of the law. Only, confronting the literature of repletion (which is always passed off as the literature of the ‘real’ and the ‘human’), there is a literature of poignancy; the Dominici trial has also been this type of literature. There have not been here only writers hungering for reality and brilliant narrators whose ‘dazzling’ verve carries off a man’s head; whatever the degree of guilt of the accused, there was also the spectacle of a terror which threatens us all, that of being judged by a power which wants to hear only the language it lends us. We are all potential Dominicis, not as murderers but as accused, deprived of language, or worse, rigged out in that of our accusers, humiliated and condemned by it. To rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first step in all legal murders. Notes 1 2 Gaston Dominici, the eighty-year-old owner of the Grand’Terre farm in Provence, was convicted in 1952 of murdering Sir Jack Drummond, his wife and his daughter, whom he found camping near his land. ‘Did you go to the bridge? – A path? There is no path, I know, I’ve been there!’ Allé = ‘gone’, allée = a path, but Dominici uses été, ‘been’. Chapter 4 Carolyn Steedman C U LT U R E , C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S AND THE HISTORIANS EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION I N T H I S PA P E R , first delivered at the 1991 Illinois conference which helped to trigger the US cultural studies boom, Carolyn Steedman, speaking as historian, poses a series of crucial questions. How historical is cultural studies? If it is historical, what historical methods will it use? Can it take account not just of texts (that is, writing, like novels, deemed to “represent” external, historical reality) but of documents (archival material, constitutive of history)? Does the turn to culture and cultural history as against political, economic, social history iron out the past by erasing important material transformations? Is cultural studies’ rather reductive narrativization of its own past a sign that the discipline is historically crippled – more interested in consciousness-raising than in truth-telling? While Steedman does not claim fully to answer these questions, her sympathies are clear. Cultural studies requires a historical sense – this it inherits from its Marxian legacy. And, for Steedman, history is to be encountered in the archives not just in texts. It is in the archives that abstracted narratives, like those provided by Raymond Williams, can be tested and contested so that, to take the instance that Steedman gives, Williamsesque stories about the formation of modern culture can be rewritten in ways that acknowledge the centrality of women and children. And (though this is not a point she makes) it is in the archives that alternatives to history as presented in the increasingly powerful heritage or “public memory” industries can be uncovered. But the big question remains unanswered. How today does the past engage the present? Cultural studies is not a nostalgic, heritage-orientated discipline – not concerned to maintain old ways and traditions or to shore up inherited identities, or to succumb to the fascination of the antiquarian, or even to follow the C U LT U R E , C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D T H E H I ST O R I A N S 47 path of “new historicism” which has dominated literary history over the past decade. It’s a discipline determined to remain active in, and sensitive to, the cultural flows and ruptures of the contemporary world system. So what has history, and especially scholarly history, to do with it? As Steedman reminds us, at the very least the answer is not “nothing.” Further reading: Abu-Lughod 1989; Chakrabarty 1994; Denning 1997; During 1996; K. Jenkins 1997; Ohmann 1991; Pickering 1997; Prendegast 1995; Steinberg 1996a. This paper is about the idea of ‘culture’ itself; about cultural studies in Britain now, and in the recent past; and about the connection of both of these to the practice and writing of history. The account I give (the story I tell) will be partly institutional in focus, to do with forms of school-based and higher education in Britain since the last war; and it will also be text-based. Here, I follow a historiographical tradition laid down by British cultural studies itself: histories of cultural studies, written by its practitioners, usually organize themselves in a particular way, rendering up their own account in terms of the books – always three key-texts: Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957); Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). To make this observation is to use the most compelling device in the historian’s rhetorical repertoire: the historian can always, in this manner, present a plot that seemingly had to be shaped in a particular way, according to what the documents used for its composition authorized, or what they forbade: can always present herself as the invisible servant of her material, merely uncovering what already lies there, waiting to be told. It is as well that readers are alerted to the fact that the historian is able in this way to appropriate to herself the most massive authority as a narrator. And of course, I have not innocently followed these histories of British cultural studies along their textual path; rather, have chosen to do so, so that I am enabled to say something about text-based studies of history, within cultural studies, and without; and about the text as a historical reality, not simply a representation of an alterior reality, but also constituting a reality, in and of itself. As I complete this prolegomenon, I should make two other points. First, I am one of those whom the definite article in my title so rudely excludes, one of them ‘the historians’; and as one of them I know that there is nothing deader and colder than old history. We can read Gibbon, or Thierry, or Michelet for the elegance of their prose, in order to observe their rhetorical structures of explanation and persuasion, in order perhaps, to see in Gibbon’s work the very mark of that late eighteenth-century historical purpose: philosophy teaching by example; or in Michelet, watch the Romantic historian insert himself in the text in order to convey that great distance that separates the living from the dead. But we cannot read any of it as we read the new secondary source published last week, as an account that informs about its overt subject matter. The life of the written history is not very long; the written history is the most unstable of written forms. The historical component 48 C A RO L Y N ST E E D M A N of the trinity of texts that formed British cultural studies – The Making of the English Working Class – is in its transitional stage now, between being a quarry of information about class formation, the actual meeting of actual men under cover of darkness on moors six miles beyond Huddersfield, and the language they used in consciousness of their making a new political world – to being (among all these other things, which it still, of course, remains) an epic telling of a history that we watch with wonder and pity, that is also now, in our reading, about us, and our lost past. Too much has happened for this to operate as a simple historical source; there are too many new items of information – about what women were doing, at that moment, back in Huddersfield, about all the men who were not present at their own class formation, all those who did not especially want it to happen; about recent events in Eastern Europe; about all our lost socialisms. This is to say that history is the most impermanent of written forms: it is only ever an account that will last a while. The very practice of historical work, the uncovering of new facts, the endless reordering of the immense detail that makes the historian’s map of the past, performs this act of narrative destabilization, on a daily basis. The written history does, of course, reach narrative closure all the time, for manuscripts have to be delivered to publishers and papers given; but that is only its formal closure. Soon, the written history rejoins – has to rejoin – the insistent, tireless, repetitive beat of a cognitive form that has no end. The written history is a story that can be told only by the implicit understanding that things are not over, that the story isn’t finished, can never be finished, for some new item of information may alter the account that has been given. In this way, history breaks the most ordinary and accepted narrative rule, and in this way also, the written history is not just about time, doesn’t just describe time, or take time as its setting; rather, it embeds time in its narrative structure. And it really doesn’t matter how much historians may know this, or not know this; know or do not know that at the center of the written history is the invitation to acknowledge its temporariness and impermanence. It may matter, however, when text-based historical knowledge is removed from the narrative and cognitive frame of historical practice, and used within another field. It has been observed before what can happen to the written history in these circumstances: it loses its impermanence (and the potential irony that derives from its impermanence). The historical item (the bit of written history) taken out of its narrative setting in order to explain something else (an event, a development, a structure) is stabilized, made a building block for a different structure of explanation. This has been observed, for the main part, in the use of the written history within sociological explanation. It is probably the case that within British cultural studies, formed and shaped within undergraduate degrees in polytechnics and universities (and dramatically historical as a pedagogy in comparison with cultural studies in the US, as far as I can tell), that history meets the same fate as it has within sociology. That was the prolegomenon. Now I shall proceed for a few minutes by way of illustrative anecdote: I spent a strange year, this last academic year. In the hours of gloomy reflection accompanying the reading I did for this conference, it occurred to me that I passed it doing nothing more than producing long, elaborate, historical C U LT U R E , C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D T H E H I ST O R I A N S 49 footnotes to Raymond Williams’s accounts of ‘culture’ in his Culture and Society, Keywords, and Marxism and Literature. I published a book, which is a description of the use and development of nineteenth-century cultural theory within British socialism, and the reorganization of its key components around the figure of the child and the idea of childhood, in the period 1890–1920. I was thus able at the end of the book, and with some satisfaction, to suggest that Williams’s radical philology is missing something: that an explosion of growth studies from the middle years of the century and a consequent theorization of those social subjects – children – who demonstrate growth (who embody growth), within many forms of writing (from the novel to neurological physiology), may align a late nineteenth-century understanding of ‘culture’ with an older one, with that earlier meaning that Williams outlines in Keywords (1983), of the actual material improvement and cultivation of bodies and minds in society. There are those blank pages at the end of the 1983 edition of Keywords, the sign, as Williams wrote, ‘that the inquiry remains open’; but my notes of contribution are three hundred pages long . . . (In order, as a good Freudian, to deal with my very deep anxieties about what I might really be up to, I tell a joke to myself about this obsessive footnoting of Williams: I have invented an all-girl backing group of the very early 1960s: the Rayettes, who accompany Raymond’s now disembodied voice . . .). My other footnote to Williams’s work of the academic year 1989–90 was planning, with a colleague, a new undergraduate option course at the University of Warwick, where I teach. The course is called ‘Learning Culture’, and takes as its central preoccupations first, a history of subjectivity (a history of the kinds of subjectivity that people have felt obliged to construct for themselves over the last three hundred years or so); and, second, the connection of subjectivity to the idea of culture; and, third, the organization of both of these around women, particularly, in a wide variety of texts, around the figure of the teacher. Again and again, we have returned to those passages in Marxism and Literature (1977), where Williams describes, first, ‘the notion of “civilising”, as bringing men within a social organisation, then the way in which the aim of ‘civilisation’ was expressed in the adjective ‘“civil,” as orderly, educated, or polite.’ We have returned to the pages that tell how. ‘“civilisation” and “culture” . . . were . . . in the late eighteenth century, interchangable terms’, how their eventual divergence came through the attack on ‘civilisation’ as superficial, on all things ‘artificial’ as distinct from those in a ‘natural’ state. We have returned the students to those texts (which Williams does not mention) in which the ideas he works with were actually carved out: to Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education, and his Two Treatises on Government, to Rousseau’s Emile, and to other strange hybrids of the eighteenth century which have not achieved their canonical status: to conduct books, household and educational and etiquette manuals, chap-books, folk and fairy tales. We have tried hard to make the students see that the attack on artificiality through into the nineteenth century, was indeed, as Williams claims, ‘the basis of one important alternative sense of “culture” – as a process of “inner” or “spiritual” as distinct from “external” development.’ We have expressed our astonishment (there is the teaching of response as much as there is of content) at this description of an actual historical process that is inexplicable without some knowledge of this history of women and children in European society, 50 C A RO L Y N ST E E D M A N but that never, ever mentions women and children. ‘The primary effect of this alternative sense of the term “culture,”’ says Williams, ‘was to associate it with religion, art, the family and personal life . . . .’ In those five words, we have said, is occluded a whole history: of women and children in English society, between about 1680 and the middle of this century. But without the history, Williams still manages to say that through these processes, ‘culture’ came to be related to ‘the “inner life” in its most accessible, secular forms; came to be related to “subjectivity,” to “the imagination.”’ At points like these, and because there is simply nothing else to be done at the moment, in our present state of knowledge, we have boldly followed Nancy Armstrong, in asserting out of the pages of her Desire and Domestic Fiction that the first bourgeois individual was not ‘economic man’ but rather ‘domestic woman,’ and that she – this figure, born of the conduct books, educational manuals and maybe, above all, from Samuel Richardson’s pen – was the first to possess a subjectivity: a consciousness of depth and space within, a sensibility, an interiority. One of my worries about all of this is of course, the edgy but certain knowledge that writing footnotes to Raymond Williams (being a Rayette) is not at all what a girl ought to be doing with her life. A more serious worry is my very strong suspicion that Raymond Williams was probably right. What I mean by the problem of his probably being right is this: in Marxism and Literature, in Keywords, and in his many other discussions of ‘culture,’ it is impossible to tell if Williams is giving us an account that has been abstracted away from the history that informs it, or whether it has been constructed in some other manner. I can put the problem in another way: it is quite possible (indeed, I have spent since October 1989 doing this) to insert (reinsert?) the history – Some Thoughts Concerning Education, its authorship, its readership, a sociology of the gendered reader of the first half of the eighteenth century, a history of the family and childcare, the many imitations of Locke, the startling appearance of this particular text of Locke in the very last part of Richardson’s Pamela – to put all of this and more into Williams’s account, and still end up with the same one. I can turn the problem around, talk in the future tense, and say that in the same way, it is quite possible to draw up a program of reading and archive research that will track down the historicized subjectivity, locate it first in the feminine; then move on, see Freud at the end of the last century, as one of the first to theorize human inwardness, interiority: the lost past within each one of us – which he did by using the many nineteenth-century rewritings of the child-figure that were available to him from sources as diverse as neurological physiology and realist fiction: to see Freud writing a theory of history in his account of repression and childhood sexuality. It would (it will) take some years to do the historical work (and I have to do it, otherwise I will not, in my terms, know it) but it will then still be possible to extract from the detail that will have been amassed the schema that Williams published in 1977, in Marxism and Literature, and probably in the same words (though I think that by 1995 the words ‘woman’ and ‘child’ will be there too; and so, I guess, the account might be most profoundly changed). Patient friends and colleagues to whom I have confessed this worry have not been able to understand what I’m bothering my head about; or have told me that there is anyway ‘the connectedness of everything’ to explain Williams’s rightness: that because everything is joined up to everything else, it really does not signify that C U LT U R E , C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D T H E H I ST O R I A N S 51 Raymond Williams may never have read Some Thoughts Concerning Education, because the ideas it contains (which are expressed in schematic form in his accounts of culture) would be available from the very historical air he breathed, the moment he set to write about the late seventeenth century (and this holds even though he might not have known he was writing about the late seventeenth century). On the question of the connectedness of everything, I have brooded a lot on the 1990 issue of New Literary History where Carolyn Porter writes about what might happen ‘After the New Historicism.’ In order to expose the underlying formalism of a critical practice that purports to be historical, she comments on the tendency of the new historicists to deploy ‘riveting anecdotes’ in their explorations of texts and contexts. This anecdotal technique, she claims, reflects a principle of arbitrary connectedness, by which it is assumed that any one aspect of a society is related to any other. This is what Dominick LaCapra (1985), in different manner, and being rude about social historians rather than literary historicists, has called their trancelike reliance on the concept of culture in their work, where everything connects to everything else and ‘culture’ is the primordial reality in which all historical actors have their being, do their thing, share discourses, worldviews, ‘languages’ where everyone (I repeat the joke because I enjoy it so much) ‘is a mentalité case’; and where it is not possible to write the exception: to write about the thing, event, relationship, entity, that does not connect with anything else. The social historian’s reliance on the notion of ‘culture’ as the bottom line, the real historical reality, has, of course its own (rather short) history, and can be seen in the academy’s elevation of nineteenth-century historians like Burkhardt and de Tocqueville to canonical status in the post-Second-World-War period. What Burkhardt’s history did was to put together the disparate and fragmented elements of social life under the heading of cultural coherence. I know from experience that his work provided the first alluring figure of cultural totality in many undergraduate history courses of the early 1960s in Britain; and Carl Schorske, writing in the same issue of NLH as Carolyn Porter, tells me that this attention to nineteenth-century texts of cultural history started earlier here, in the US of the 1950s. He says of Burkhardt’s and de Tocqueville’s writing, that ‘time did not stop’ in it, ‘but it was . . . slowed down. Not transformation but cultural coherence became the focus of attention.’ For LaCapra this particular concept of ‘culture’ – ‘the culture concept’ – shatters chronology and dissolves the very ordinance of time. Cultural studies in Britain has intersected with these questions of culture, the culture concept, history, and time. I want to consider some of these intersections now, intersections that actually reveal (in a historical sense) a more general social and institutional shaping of history and historical knowledge in Britain over the last thirty years. The following account shows British cultural studies shaped by teachers and taught, by their particular educational histories and their purchase on different forms of historical knowledge, quite as much as a shaping by theoretical questions. I shall start where I started before, by considering cultural studies’ writing of its own history. Cultural studies in Britain is extremely nervous of what Richard Johnson (1987: 38) has called ‘codification of methods of knowledges’, and of attempts at institutionalization. Alan O’Connor (1989) in his interpretation of the British field 52 C A RO L Y N ST E E D M A N for academics in the United States, calls it a practice, a cultural form, an intellectual tradition (never, ever, a discipline). Tony Dunn (1986) starts out by refusing any position for cultural studies at all, by celebrating its polymorphic perversity: ‘Cultural studies,’ he wrote, ‘is a whirling and quiescent and swaying mobile which continuously repositions any participating subject. Cultural studies is a project whose realization – absolute integrity through fragmentation and disassembly – is forever deferred’ (Dunn 1986: 71). They all start like that, but within a few paragraphs are well into that most conventional claim for disciplinary orthodoxy – the writing of their own history. (What they are also doing, the historiographically informed observer notes, is defining themselves, finding themselves, through an act of consciousness-raising: telling their own story, reaping all the social and psychic benefits of autobiography and oral history.) The story goes like this: sprung from native texts, the account of its evolution propelled by key theoretical moments (the existence of the Communist Party Historians Group, from 1946 to 1956; Perry Andersen’s editorship of New Left Review from 1962 onwards), institutionally established at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, cultural studies is ‘interrupted by the arrival on the intellectual scene of the “structuralisms”’. This historical account of the early period, and of later accommodations made to continental theory, is available from many secondary sources, and I do not intend to rehearse it for you here. I want instead to explore some of the history that is missing from the account so far, by making some observations about forms of teaching and learning that have been embodied in the cultural studies degrees institutionalized at British polytechnics (to a far lesser extent, at British universities), and about the connection of this educational practice in higher education with ‘the culture concept’ in schools. I suspect that ‘the culture concept’ in England has much to do with the organization of historical knowledge for young children and adolescents in the British school system, at least since the 1950s; and I want to suggest too, that organization of historical knowledge in British cultural studies has been about questions of education, a question of accommodation to constituencies of learners and the allure of certain models of teacher–student relationship that higher education saw operating in the schools, in the 1970s. Moreover, the teaching force in cultural studies has had its own relationship to historical knowledge orientated by the economics of a historical education, and by the cost of historical research. I want to deal with the schools, but I shan’t start there. Rather, I shall begin at the other end, with the practice of history in university-based cultural studies – on the MA program at Birmingham – from the late 1960s onwards. When Alan O’Connor (1989) tells North American audiences that ‘the characteristic cultural form of cultural studies is a certain kind of collectively produced book’, and that ‘the best examples of English cultural studies are all of this kind’, he is describing work done at the Birmingham Centre, and work that was, at least on a reading of the texts produced out of it and various descriptions of their production available, inimical to the conventional practices of historical research. The Centre’s Popular Memory Group, on its own account, spent a good deal of time wrestling with history’s empiricism and resistance to ‘Theory’. What the historian must do with this account, in the historian’s prosaic and deflationary way, is point out that the C U LT U R E , C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D T H E H I ST O R I A N S 53 educational form within which they did their wrestling is actually inimical to conventional historical practice, particularly to the processes of archive research. Group practice is collective; archive research involves the lone historian, taking part in an undemocratic practice. Archive research is expensive, of time and of money, and not something that a group of people can do practically, anyway. Within this educational form, it is not surprising to find historical work at the Centre based on the analysis of text. The kind of text generally used (government documents and fictions) does deserve some comment, as do the structuralist models of reading that were a major influence on their analysis. The use of structuralist linguistics, and the notion of ‘discourse’ itself (which had among its enticements a ready critique of empiricism) dictated a particular choice of texts for the purposes of historical analysis. Government reports, printed and widely distributed in the nineteenth century, are the most readily available of British historical documents; fictions (prose fictions) from the past get put on reading lists everywhere because they are available in mass-produced paperbacks; and every person growing up literate in twentiethcentury Britain has massive experience of reading continuous fictional prose, brings to it a most sophisticated (though unarticulated) repertoire of reading techniques. These are good (and necessary) reasons for concentrating on these particular kinds of texts; but if there really is no ‘connectedness of everything’ (if there were this connectedness, then the Report of a Commission of Inquiry would give access to the same primordial whole of reality as a cookery book, and one bit of writing does as well as another) then a textual reading of the nineteenth century that omits other forms of writing (poetry, for instance, and an understanding of the meaning of different poetic forms to different audiences) is going to produce a very odd account. The model of language available in these textual approaches was, as well, quite inadequate to the task in hand, first, making no distinction between spoken and written language; and second, having no recognition of language as a form of cognition and a process of development that is actively acquired by human beings in a social and psychological process; and, third, also being without a range of strategies for analyzing the literary form as a negotiated form, wrought, used, written, read, abandoned within specific societies. (All of this must be seen as a pointer to future and necessary work, rather than as a digression.) The structuralist model of language was quite inadequate for the historical task it was set. History’s most urgent need is indeed, for an adequate model of both spoken and written language; and whether this model is developed within historical studies, or by students of cultural studies working on the past, does not seem to me to matter half as much as the fact that it might be done. There are many accounts of curriculum change in systems of national education by which to interpret the particular use of texts and choice of methodology that I have been discussing. In Britain, the establishment of English literature as the foundation of a national system of education between 1880 and 1920 was also the getting of education on the cheap, for each child already had his or her own resource in the possession of the English language, and a long and expensive linguistic training of teachers was unnecessary (Baldick 1983; Doyle 1989). Practical criticism in the universities in Britain after 1930 (for which each undergraduate had a resource in his own sensibility) and New Criticism in the US – its capacity, in 54 C A RO L Y N ST E E D M A N Porter’s words, ‘to provide a pedagogically functional solution to the problems posed by the numbers and kinds of new college students poured into the American academy by the G. I. Bill after World War Two’ (Porter 1990) – are only two recent examples of the reorganization of education in terms of cheapness and practicality, and around accessible texts. A historical education in Britain was never as expensive as a linguistic one, but the patient laying down of a fantastically detailed historical map over the ten years before a student entered higher education at the age of eighteen, demands a teaching force in the schools that is able to do the laying down: the amount of history taught in British society has steadily diminished over the last thirty years – a point to which I shall return in a moment. The cheapness and practicality of text-based historical inquiry could also be seen as a theoretical propriety. The academy observed the last great flowering of English progressive education in the schools in the 1970s, and in some cases, certainly within cultural studies, tried to take that flowering as its own. This flowering was seen to take place in both the English departments of secondary schools, and in the practice of integrated topic work in many primary schools. The breaking down of barriers between teachers and taught, common involvement in a common project, a text or groups of texts making enquirers of them all – all of this was most movingly described throughout the 1970s, particularly in the journal of the National Association of the Teaching of English, and in the journals Teaching London Kids, and The English Magazine. This is to suggest what the influence of pedagogical forms on the organization of historical knowledge in the early days of British cultural studies might have been. I would make suggestions as well, about the practice of history (which could also be called the disappearance of history) in the primary school and in the lower forms of the secondary school as exercising a particular shaping force. Here, I have to rely on government publications (those most easily obtained of historical documents) and the series of reports by Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools, which chart the virtual disappearance of history as a subject taught to children, its integration into topic and project work, and the abandonment of the cognitive form of the chronology, from the late 1960s onwards. Particular theories of the child-mind and application of Piagetian psychology dictated that children should ‘discover’ the past through a study of its artefacts (clothes, houses, food) and through their identification and empathy with people living in the past. Was ‘the culture concept’ as used by historians, and in some of the models for acquiring historical knowledge within cultural studies, actually invented in the schools, between about 1955 and 1975? In Britain, we do not even have a social and cultural history of education that allows us to think that this might be a question. Recently, the focus of cultural studies has moved from Masters teaching to the undergraduate degree. If the history of history in cultural studies is to be written, it will involve taking account of the institutional setting yet again, the particular alignment of humanities subjects under departmental reorganization in the polytechnics, and the need of historians for students to teach. At the same time, those historians are bound to do less history, as recession (which recession? – all our recessions) imposes constraints of time as well as money on conventional historical practice. Existing history courses and options have fitted into many new cultural studies degrees in the polytechnics, and we need to ask particular questions of them, C U LT U R E , C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D T H E H I ST O R I A N S 55 about the interface of different knowledges, brought together in undergraduate teaching. Super-ordinate to all these reorganizations of pedagogy and the uses of historical knowledge within a particular society over a span of some thirty years is a paradigm shift observable across all academic culture (and in the commonplace and secular world of which the academy is a part) in the way in which, since the 1950s, ‘one discipline after another in the human sciences [has] cut its ties to history, strengthened its autonomy with theory, and produced its meanings without that pervasive historical perspective that in the 19th century had permeated the selfunderstanding of almost every branch of learning’ (Schorske 1990: 416). The discipline of history itself has taken part in this general flight from the historical: in the abandonment of time in favor of ‘the culture concept’; or in favor of what Raymond Williams (1983) noted in Keywords when he wrote of a specific twentieth-century form of the term ‘history’ as a tale of ‘accidents, unforeseen events, frustration of conscious purpose . . . an argument especially against hope.’ It is in this particular historical moment – to be intensely parochial for a moment – that British cultural studies needs to think about what it will do with history, and what kind of historical thinking it will ask its students to perform. It has no choice, I think, but to have history, for by my reckoning, very soon more history (historical topics, history options) will be taught to undergraduates taking interdisciplinary degree courses than to those doing history in the conventional manner, in polytechnics and universities. And this will be – strange conjunction – in a dehistoricized intellectual world in which all children in the society (including that very small percentage of eighteen-year-olds who enter higher education in the UK) will be taught exactly the same set of historical knowledges, from the age of five to sixteen. Then, after the parochialism, I was going to be polite, for I wanted to be polite, as a guest of the conference and of cultural studies. It was going to be a politeness that would be, in its turn, a response to the politeness that historians often experience: for there is a common and accommodating reflection that is found in many moments of disciplinary niceness where they will tell you this: that any rigorous theoretical form or mode of enquiry needs a historical perspective, a proper historicity. So, knowing that this would be said, and wanting to be polite, I was going to say something like this: If British cultural studies really does operate in the ‘reflexive and even selfconscious mood’ that Richard Johnson claims for it, then it seems to me that it just might, in these times, be able to achieve what history cannot; for the history of a pedagogical practice and educational forms (in Britain at least) puts cultural studies in a position to do its own historiography (to deconstruct itself?) as it goes along. But I came to understand that I was thinking about a British situation, a situation of enforced cross-disciplinarity, in times of economic hardship for the academy. Instead, after those conference days I would ask – politely – a series of questions: Why does cultural studies want history? What does wanting it mean? What new acts of transference will items from the past help cultural studies – or make it – perform? How will it be done? How taught? Will there be any room for detailed historical work; or are students of cultural studies bound to rely on great schematic and secondary sweeps through time? Will there be any room for the historical case study in its pedagogy? What good is it all to you, anyway? Perhaps no good at all . . . 56 C A RO L Y N ST E E D M A N W. H. Auden had a conversation with Clio, sometime in the 1930s, in his ‘Homage to Clio’; or rather, not a conversation at all, for the blank-faced girl said nothing back to him. He watched her watch the world’s alteration, unique disaster, longue durée, everything, all of it, and commented: ‘You had nothing to say and did not, one could see / Observe where you were, Muse of the unique / Historical fact.’ What all our students will need is an understanding that the texts and documents that they use for historical study are themselves historical facts, not just repositories of facts . . . and that the past that the texts and sources configure is not carved in stone simply because texts and sources go on being used as representatives of a real historical reality. They need to grasp its impermanence even as they read it, and write it. ‘Observe where you are,’ but that is the historian’s instruction to herself, as much as a suggestion made to you. Chapter 5 James Clifford ON COLLECTING ART A N D C U LT U R E EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION J A ME S C LI F FO R D ’ S B R I LL I A N T E S S AY describes an “art–culture” system in which art, as something to be possessed and collected by individuals, becomes the pivot around which culture, as a seemingly communal and transcendental tradition, turns. He analyzes the system using both structural and historical techniques and comes to the conclusion that it has been crucial to the formation of “Western subjectivity.” For him, however, the system is suprisingly open and fluid. Though it transforms sacred and utilitarian objects from distant cultures into art to be owned and contemplated, it also exoticizes home cultures. Further, the system allows all kinds of groups to use art for their own ends: for instance, new kinds of museums are being created by postcolonized peoples all over the world. This is a much more optimistic and vibrant representation of cultural practices than Adorno’s or Barthes’s. But it is worth asking: what has happened to categories like exploitation or even power here? – or, in the particular case of collecting so-called “tribal artefacts,” what about the sacred? After all, the Maori exhibition Clifford mentions took place only against protests against the exportation of sacred taonga (treasures) to foreign museums. As an essay at the forefront of contemporary cultural studies it demands more study and debate. Further Reading: Appadurai 1986; Bourdieu 1993, 1996; Clifford 1988a, 1988b; Haraway 1984; Karp and Lavine 1991; Michaels 1994. 58 JAMES CLIFFORD There is a Third World in every First World, and vice-versa. Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Difference’, Discourse, 8 This chapter is composed of four loosely connected parts, each concerned with the fate of tribal artefacts and cultural practices once they are relocated in Western museums, exchange systems, disciplinary archives and discursive traditions. The first part proposes a critical, historical approach to collecting, focusing on subjective, taxonomic, and political processes. It sketches the ‘art–culture system’ through which in the last century exotic objects have been contextualized and given value in the West. This ideological and institutional system is further explored in the second part, where cultural description is presented as a form of collecting. The ‘authenticity’ accorded to both human groups and their artistic work is shown to proceed from specific assumptions about temporality, wholeness, and continuity. The third part focuses on a revealing moment in the modern appropriation of nonWestern works of ‘art’ and ‘culture’, a moment portrayed in several memoirs by Claude Lévi-Strauss of his wartime years in New York. A critical reading makes explicit the redemptive metahistorical narrative these memoirs presuppose. The general art–culture system supported by such a narrative is contested throughout the chapter and particularly in the fourth part, where alternative ‘tribal’ histories and contexts are suggested. Collecting Ourselves Entering You will find yourself in a climate of nut castanets, A musical whip From the Torres Straits, from Mirzapur a sistrum Called Jumka, ‘used by Aboriginal Tribes to attract small game On dark nights,’ coolie cigarettes And mask of Saagga, the Devil Doctor, The eyelids worked by strings. James Fenton’s poem ‘The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford’, from which this stanza is taken, rediscovers a place of fascination in the ethnographic collection. For this visitor even the museum’s descriptive labels seem to increase the wonder (‘attract small game / On dark nights’) and the fear. Fen ton is an adult–child exploring territories of danger and desire, for to be a child in this collection (‘Please sir, where’s the withered / Hand?’) is to ignore the serious admonitions about human evolution and cultural diversity posted in the entrance hall. It is to be interested instead by the claw of a condor, the jaw of a dolphin, the hair of a witch, or ‘a jay’s feather worn as a charm/ In Buckinghamshire’. Fenton’s ethnographic museum is a world of intimate encounters with inexplicably fascinating objects: personal fetishes. Here collecting is inescapably tied to obsession, to recollection. Visitors ‘find the landscape of their childhood marked out / Here in the chaotic piles of souvenirs . . . boxroom of the forgotten or hardly possible’. O N C O L L E C T I N G A R T A N D C U LT U R E 59 Go As a historian of ideas or a sex-offender, For the primitive art, As a dusty semiologist, equipped to unravel The seven components of that witch’s curse Or the syntax of the mutilated teeth. Go In groups to giggle at curious finds. But do not step into the kingdom of your promises To yourself, like a child entering the forbidden Woods of his lonely playtime. Do not step in this tabooed zone ‘laid with the snares of privacy and fiction / And the dangerous third wish’. Do not encounter these objects except as curiosities to giggle at, art to be admired, or evidence to be understood scientifically. The tabooed way, followed by Fenton, is a path of too-intimate fantasy, recalling the dreams of the solitary child ‘who wrestled with eagles for their feathers’ or the fearful vision of a young girl, her turbulent lover seen as a hound with ‘strange pretercanine eyes’. This path through the Pitt Rivers Museum ends with what seems to be a scrap of autobiography, the vision of a personal ‘forbidden woods’ – exotic, desired, savage, and governed by the (paternal) law: He had known what tortures the savages had prepared For him there, as he calmly pushed open the gate And entered the wood near the placard: ‘TAKE NOTICE MEN MEN-TRAPS AND SPRING-GUNS ARE SET ON THESE PREMISES.’ For his father had protected his good estate. Fenton’s journey into otherness leads to a forbidden area of the self. His intimate way of engaging the exotic collection finds an area of desire, marked off and policed. The law is preoccupied with property. C. B. Macpherson’s classic analysis of Western ‘possessive individualism’ (1962) traces the seventeenth-century emergence of an ideal self as owner: the individual surrounded by accumulated property and goods. The same ideal can hold true for collectivities making and remaking their cultural ‘selves’. For example Richard Handler (1985) analyses the making of a Québécois cultural ‘patrimoine’, drawing on Macpherson to unravel the assumptions and paradoxes involved in ‘having a culture’, selecting and cherishing an authentic collective ‘property’. His analysis suggests that this identity, whether cultural or personal, presupposes acts of collection, gathering up possessions in arbitrary systems of value and meaning. Such systems, always powerful and rule governed, change historically. One cannot escape them. At best, Fenton suggests, one can transgress (‘poach’ in their tabooed zones) or make their self-evident orders seem strange. In Handler’s subtly perverse analysis a system of retrospection – revealed by a Historic Monuments Commission’s selection often sorts of ‘cultural property’ – appears as a taxonomy worthy of Borges’s ‘Chinese encyclopedia’: ‘(1) commemorative monuments; (2) 60 JAMES CLIFFORD churches and chapels; (3) forts of the French Regime; (4) windmills; (5) roadside crosses; (6) commemorative inscriptions and plaques; (7) devotional monuments; (8) old houses and manors; (9) old furniture; (10) “les choses disparues”’. In Handler’s discussion the collection and preservation of an authentic domain of identity cannot be natural or innocent. It is tied up with nationalist politics, with restrictive law, and with contested encodings of past and future. Some sort of ‘gathering’ around the self and the group – the assemblage of a material ‘world’, the marking-off of a subjective domain that is not ‘other’ – is probably universal. All such collections embody hierarchies of value, exclusions, rulegoverned territories of the self. But the notion that this gathering involves the accumulation of possessions, the idea that identity is a kind of wealth (of objects, knowledge, memories, experience), is surely not universal. The individualistic accumulation of Melanesian ‘big men’ is not possessive in Macpherson’s sense, for in Melanesia one accumulates not to hold objects as private goods but to give them away, to redistribute. In the West, however, collecting has long been a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture, and authenticity. Children’s collections are revealing in this light: a boy’s accumulation of miniature cars, a girl’s dolls, a summer-vacation ‘nature museum’ (with labelled stones and shells, a hummingbird in a bottle), a treasured bowl filled with the bright shavings of crayons. In these small rituals we observe the channellings of obsession, an exercise in how to make the world one’s own, to gather things around oneself tastefully, appropriately. The inclusions in all collections reflect wider cultural rules – of rational taxonomy, of gender, of aesthetics. An excessive, sometimes even rapacious need to have is transformed into rule-governed, meaningful desire. Thus the self that must possess but cannot have it all learns to select, order, classify in hierarchies – to make ‘good’ collections. Whether a child collects model dinosaurs or dolls, sooner or later she or he will be encouraged to keep the possessions on a shelf or in a special box or to set up a doll house. Personal treasures will be made public. If the passion is for Egyptian figurines, the collector will be expected to label them, to know their dynasty (it is not enough that they simply exude power or mystery), to tell ‘interesting’ things about them, to distinguish copies from originals. The good collector (as opposed to the obsessive, the miser) is tasteful and reflective. Accumulation unfolds in a pedagogical, edifying manner. The collection itself – its taxonomic, aesthetic structure – is valued, and any private fixation on single objects (rule-governed possession) presupposes a ‘savage’ or deviant relation (idolatry or erotic fixation). In Susan Stewart’s gloss, ‘The boundary between collection and fetishism is mediated by classification and display in tension with accumulation and secrecy’ (1984: 163). Stewart’s wide-ranging study On Longing traces a ‘structure of desire’ whose task is the repetitious and impossible one of closing the gap that separates language from the experience it encodes. She explores certain recurrent strategies pursued by Westerners since the sixteenth century. In her analysis the miniature, whether a portrait or doll’s house, enacts a bourgeois longing for ‘inner’ experience. She also explores the strategy of gigantism (from Rabelais and Gulliver to earthworks and the billboard), the souvenir, and the collection. She shows how collections, most O N C O L L E C T I N G A R T A N D C U LT U R E 61 notably museums, create the illusion of adequate representation of a world by first cutting objects out of specific contexts (whether cultural, historical, or intersubjective) and making them ‘stand for’ abstract wholes – a ‘Bambara mask’, for example, becoming an ethnographic metonym for Bambara culture. Next a scheme of classification is elaborated for storing or displaying the object so that the reality of the collection itself, its coherent order, overrides specific histories of the object’s production and appropriation (162–5). Paralleling Marx’s account of the fantastic objectification of commodities, Stewart argues that in the modern Western museum ‘an illusion of a relation between things takes the place of a social relation’ (165). The collector discovers, acquires, salvages objects. The objective world is given, not produced, and thus historical relations of power in the work of acquisition are occulted. The making of meaning in museum classification and display is mystified as adequate representation. The time and order of the collection erase the concrete social labour of its making. Stewart’s work brings collecting and display sharply into view as crucial processes of Western identity formation. Gathered artefacts – whether they find their way into curio cabinets, private living rooms, museums of ethnography, folklore, or fine art – function within a developing capitalist ‘system of objects’ (Baudrillard 1968). By virtue of this system a world of value is created and a meaningful deployment and circulation of artefacts maintained. For Baudrillard collected objects create a structured environment that substitutes its own temporality for the ‘real time’ of historical and productive processes: ‘The environment of private objects and their possession – of which collections are an extreme manifestation – is a dimension of our life that is both essential and imaginary. As essential as dreams’ (1968: 135). A history of anthropology and modern art needs to see in collecting both a form of Western subjectivity and a changing set of powerful institutional practices. The history of collections (not limited to museums) is central to an understanding of how those social groups that invented anthropology and modern art have appropriated exotic things, facts, and meanings. (Appropriate: ‘to make one’s own’, from the Latin proprius ‘proper’, ‘property’.) It is important to analyse how powerful discriminations made at particular moments constitute the general system of objects within which valued artefacts circulate and make sense. Far-reaching questions are thereby raised. What criteria validate an authentic cultural or artistic product? What are the differential values placed on old and new creations? What moral and political criteria justify ‘good’, responsible, systematic collecting practices? Why, for example, do Leo Frobenius’s wholesale acquisitions of African objects around the turn of the century now seem excessive? How is a ‘complete’ collection defined? What is the proper balance between scientific analysis and public display? (In Santa Fe a superb collection of Native American art is housed at the School of American Research in a building constructed, literally, as a vault, with access carefully restricted. The Musée de l’Homme exhibits less than a tenth of its collections; the rest is stored in steel cabinets or heaped in corners of the vast basement.) Why has it seemed obvious until recently that non-Western objects should be preserved in European museums, even when this means that no fine specimens are visible in their 62 JAMES CLIFFORD country of origin? How are ‘antiquities’, ‘curiosities’, ‘art’, ‘souvenirs’, ‘monuments’, and ‘ethnographic artefacts’ distinguished – at different historical moments and in specific market conditions? Why have many anthropological museums in recent years begun to display certain of their objects as ‘masterpieces’? Why has tourist art only recently come to the serious attention of anthropologists? What has been the changing interplay between natural-history collecting and the selection of anthropological artefacts for display and analysis? The list could be extended. The critical history of collecting is concerned with what from the material world specific groups and individuals choose to preserve, value, and exchange. Although this complex history, from at least the Age of Discovery, remains to be written, Baudrillard provides an initial framework for the deployment of objects in the recent capitalist West. In his account it is axiomatic that all categories of meaningful objects – including those marked off as scientific evidence and as great art – function within a ramified system of symbols and values. To take just one example: the New York Times of 8 December 1984 reported the widespread illegal looting of Anasazi archaeological sites in the American Southwest. Painted pots and urns thus excavated in good condition could bring as much as $30,000 on the market. Another article in the same issue contained a photograph of Bronze Age pots and jugs salvaged by archaeologists from a Phoenician shipwreck off the coast of Turkey. One account featured clandestine collecting for profit, the other scientific collecting for knowledge. The moral evaluations of the two acts of salvage were sharply opposed, but the pots recovered were all meaningful, beautiful, and old. Commercial, aesthetic, and scientific worth in both cases presupposed a given system of value. This system finds intrinsic interest and beauty in objects from a past time, and it assumes that collecting everyday objects from ancient (preferably vanished) civilizations will be more rewarding than collecting, for example, decorated thermoses from modern China or customized Tshirts from Oceania. Old objects are endowed with a sense of ‘depth’ by their historically minded collectors. Temporality is reified and salvaged as origin, beauty, and knowledge. This archaizing system has not always dominated Western collecting. The curiosities of the New World gathered and appreciated in the sixteenth century were not necessarily valued as antiquities, the products of primitive or ‘past’ civilizations. They frequently occupied a category of the marvellous, of a present ‘Golden Age’. More recently the retrospective bias of Western appropriations of the world’s cultures has come under scrutiny (Fabian 1983; Clifford 1986). Cultural or artistic ‘authenticity’ has as much to do with an inventive present as with a past, its objectification, preservation, or revival. Since the turn of the century objects collected from non-Western sources have been classified in two major categories: as (scientific) cultural artefacts or as (aesthetic) works of art. Other collectables – mass-produced commodities, ‘tourist art’ curios, and so on – have been less systematically valued; at best they find a place in exhibits of ‘technology’ or ‘folklore’. These and other locations within what may be called the ‘modern art–culture system’ can be visualized with the help of a (somewhat procrustian) diagram. O N C O L L E C T I N G A R T A N D C U LT U R E 63 A. J. Greimas’s ‘semiotic square’ (Greimas and Rastier 1968) shows us ‘that any initial binary opposition can, by the operation of negations and the appropriate syntheses, generate a much larger field of terms which, however, all necessarily remain locked in the closure of the initial system’ (Jameson 1981: 62). Adapting Greimas for the purposes of cultural criticism, Fredric Jameson uses the semiotic square to reveal ‘the limits of a specific ideological consciousness, [marking] the conceptual points beyond which that consciousness cannot go, and between which it is condemned to oscillate’ (1981: 47). Following his example, I offer the following map (see diagram) of a historically specific, contestable field of meanings and institutions. Beginning with an initial opposition, by a process of negation four terms are generated. This establishes horizontal and vertical axes and between them four semantic zones: (1) the zone of authentic masterpieces, (2) the zone of authentic artefacts, (3) the zone of inauthentic masterpieces, (4) the zone of inauthentic artefacts. Most objects – old and new, rare and common, familiar and exotic – can be located in one of these zones or ambiguously, in traffic, between two zones. The system classifies objects and assigns them relative value. It establishes the ‘contexts’ in which they properly belong and between which they circulate. Regular movements toward positive value proceed from bottom to top and from right to left. These movements select artefacts of enduring worth or rarity, their value normally guaranteed by a ‘vanishing’ cultural status or by the selection and pricing mechanisms of the art market. The value of Shaker crafts reflects the fact that Shaker society no longer exists: the stock is limited. In the art world work is recognized as ‘important’ by connoisseurs and collectors according to criteria that 64 JAMES CLIFFORD are more than simply aesthetic (see Becker 1982). Indeed, prevailing definitions of what is ‘beautiful’ or ‘interesting’ sometimes change quite rapidly. An area of frequent traffic in the system is that linking zones 1 and 2. Objects move in two directions along this path. Things of cultural or historical value may be promoted to the status of fine art. Examples of movement in this direction, from ethnographic ‘culture’ to fine ‘art’, are plentiful. Tribal objects located in art galleries (the Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum in New York) or displayed anywhere according to ‘formalist’ rather than ‘contextualist’ protocols move in this way. Crafts (Shaker work collected at the Whitney Museum in 1986), ‘folk art’, certain antiques, ‘naive’ art all are subject to periodic promotions. Movement in the inverse direction occurs whenever art masterworks are culturally and historically ‘contextualized’, something that has been occurring more and more explicitly. Perhaps the most dramatic case has been the relocation of France’s great Impressionist collection, formerly at the Jeu de Paume, to the new Museum of the Nineteenth Century at the Gare d’Orsay. Here art masterpieces take their place in the panorama of a historical-cultural ‘period’. The panorama includes an emerging industrial urbanism and its triumphant technology, ‘bad’ as well as ‘good’ art. A less dramatic movement from zone 1 to zone 2 can be seen in the routine process within art galleries whereby objects become ‘dated’, of interest less as immediately powerful works of genius than as fine examples of a period style. Movement also occurs between the lower and upper halves of the system, usually in an upward direction. Commodities in zone 4 regularly enter zone 2, becoming rare period pieces and thus collectables (old green glass Coke bottles). Much current non-Western work migrates between the status of ‘tourist art’ and creative cultural–artistic strategy. Some current productions of Third World peoples have entirely shed the stigma of modern commercial inauthenticity. For example Haitian ‘primitive’ painting – commercial and of relatively recent, impure origin – has moved fully into the art–culture circuit. Significantly this work entered the art market by association with zone 2, becoming valued as the work not simply of individual artists but of Haitians. Haitian painting is surrounded by special associations, with the land of voodoo, magic and negritude. Though specific artists have come to be known and prized, the aura of ‘cultural’ production attaches to them much more than, say, to Picasso, who is not in any essential way valued as a ‘Spanish artist’. The same is true, as we shall see, of many recent works of tribal art, whether from the Sepik or the American North-west coast. Such works have largely freed themselves from the tourist or commodity category to which, because of their modernity, purists had often relegated them; but they cannot move directly into zone 1, the art market, without trailing clouds of authentic (traditional) culture. There can be no direct movement from zone 4 to zone 1. Occasional travel occurs between zones 4 and 3, for example when a commodity or technological artefact is perceived to be a case of special inventive creation. The object is selected out of commercial or mass culture, perhaps to be featured in a museum of technology. Sometimes such objects fully enter the realm of art: ‘technological’ innovations or commodities may be contextualized as modern ‘design’, thus passing through zone 3 into zone 1 (for example, the furniture, household machines, cars, and so on displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York). O N C O L L E C T I N G A R T A N D C U LT U R E 65 There is also regular traffic between zones 1 and 3. Exposed art forgeries are demoted (while none the less preserving something of their original aura). Conversely various forms of ‘anti-art’ and art parading its unoriginality or ‘inauthenticity’ are collected and valued (Warhol’s soup can, Sherrie Levine’s photo of a photo by Walker Evans, Duchamp’s urinal, bottle rack or shovel). Objects in zone 3 are all potentially collectable within the general domain of art: they are uncommon, sharply distinct from or blatantly cut out of culture. Once appropriated by the art world, like Duchamp’s ready-mades, they circulate within zone 1. The art–culture system I have diagrammed excludes and marginalizes various residual and emergent contexts. To mention only one: the categories of art and culture, technology and commodity are strongly secular. ‘Religious’ objects can be valued as great art (an altarpiece by Giotto), as folk art (the decorations on a Latin American popular saint’s shrine), or as cultural artefact (an Indian rattle). Such objects have no individual ‘power’ or mystery – qualities once possessed by ‘fetishes’ before they were reclassified in the modern system as primitive art or cultural artefact. What ‘value’, however, is stripped from an altarpiece when it is moved out of a functioning church (or when its church begins to function as a museum)? Its specific power or sacredness is relocated to a general aesthetic realm. While the object systems of art and anthropology are institutionalized and powerful, they are not immutable. The categories of the beautiful, the cultural, and the authentic have changed and are changing. Thus it is important to resist the tendency of collections to be self-sufficient, to suppress their own historical, economic, and political processes of production. Ideally the history of its own collection and display should be a visible aspect of any exhibition. It had been rumoured that the Boas Room of Northwest Coast artefacts in the American Museum of Natural History was to be refurbished, its style of display modernized. Apparently (or so one hopes) the plan has been abandoned, for this atmospheric, dated hall exhibits not merely a superb collection but a moment in the history of collecting. The widely publicized Museum of Modern Art show of 1984, ‘“Primitivism” in TwentiethCentury Art’, made apparent (as it celebrated) the precise circumstances in which certain ethnographic objects suddenly became works of universal art. More historical self-consciousness in the display and viewing of non-Western objects can at least jostle and set in motion the ways in which anthropologists, artists and their publics collect themselves and the world. At a more intimate level, rather than grasping objects as cultural signs and artistic icons, we can return to them, as James Fenton does, their lost status as fetishes – not specimens of a deviant or exotic ‘fetishism’ but our own fetishes. This tactic, necessarily personal, would accord to things in collections the power to fixate rather than simply the capacity to edify or inform. African and Oceanian artefacts could once again be objets sauvages, sources of fascination with the power to disconcert. Seen in their resistance to classification they could remind us of our lack of self-possession, of the artifices we employ to gather a world around us. 66 JAMES CLIFFORD Culture collecting Found in American Anthropologist, n.s. 34 (1932): 740: Note from New Guinea Aliatoa, Wiwiak District, New Guinea April 21, 1932 We are just completing a culture of a mountain group here in the lower Torres Chelles. They have no name and we haven’t decided what to call them yet. They are a very revealing people in spots, providing a final basic concept from which all the mother’s brothers’ curses and father’s sisters’ curses, etc. derive, and having articulated the attitude toward incest which Reo [Fortune] outlined as fundamental in his Encyclopedia article. They have taken the therapeutic measures which we recommended for Dobu and Manus – having a devil in addition to the neighbor sorcerer, and having got their dead out of the village and localized. But in other ways they are annoying: they have bits and snatches of all the rag tag and bob tail of magical and ghostly belief from the Pacific, and they are somewhat like the Plains in their receptivity to strange ideas. A picture of a local native reading the index to the Golden Bough just to see if they had missed anything, would be appropriate. They are very difficult to work, living all over the place with half a dozen garden houses, and never staying put for a week at a time. Of course this offered a new challenge in method which was interesting. The difficulties incident upon being two days over impossible mountains have been consuming and we are going to do a coastal people next. Sincerely yours, Margaret Mead ‘Cultures’ are ethnographic collections. Since Tylor’s founding definition of 1871 the term has designated a rather vague ‘complex whole’ including everything that is learned group behaviour, from body techniques to symbolic orders. There have been recurring attempts to define culture more precisely (see Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952) or, for example, to distinguish it from ‘social structure’. But the inclusive use persists. For there are times when we still need to be able to speak holistically of Japanese or Trobriand or Moroccan culture in the confidence that we are designating something real and differentially coherent. It is increasingly clear, however, that the concrete activity of representing a culture, subculture, or indeed any coherent domain of collective activity is always strategic and selective. The world’s societies are too systematically interconnected to permit any easy isolation of separate or independently functioning systems. The increased pace of historical change, the common recurrence of stress in the systems under study, forces a new self-consciousness about the way cultural wholes and boundaries are constructed and translated. The pioneering élan of Margaret Mead ‘completing a culture’ in highland New Guinea, collecting a dispersed population, discovering its key customs, naming the result – in this case ‘the Mountain Arapesh’ – is no longer possible. O N C O L L E C T I N G A R T A N D C U LT U R E 67 To see ethnography as a form of culture collecting (not, of course, the only way to see it) highlights the ways that diverse experiences and facts are selected, gathered, detached from their original temporal occasions, and given enduring value in a new arrangement. Collecting – at least in the West, where time is generally thought to be linear and irreversible – implies a rescue of phenomena from inevitable historical decay or loss. The collection contains what ‘deserves’ to be kept, remembered, and treasured. Artefacts and customs are saved out of time. Anthropological culture collectors have typically gathered what seems ‘traditional’ – what by definition is opposed to modernity. From a complex historical reality (which includes current ethnographic encounters) they select what gives form, structure, and continuity to a world. What is hybrid or ‘historical’ in an emergent sense has been less commonly collected and presented as a system of authenticity. For example in New Guinea Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune chose not to study groups that were, as Mead wrote in a letter, ‘badly missionized’; and it had been selfevident to Malinowski in the Trobriands that what most deserved scientific attention was the circumscribed ‘culture’ threatened by a host of modern ‘outside’ influences. The experience of Melanesians becoming Christians for their own reasons – learning to play, and play with, the outsiders’ games – did not seem worth salvaging. Every appropriation of culture, whether by insiders or outsiders, implies a specific temporal position and form of historical narration. Gathering, owning, classifying, and valuing are certainly not restricted to the West; but elsewhere these activities need not be associated with accumulation (rather than redistribution) or with preservation (rather than natural or historical decay). The Western practice of culture collecting has its own local genealogy, enmeshed in distinct European notions of temporality and order. It is worth dwelling for a moment on this genealogy, for it organizes the assumptions being arduously unlearned by new theories of practice, process, and historicity (Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1979; Ortner 1984; Sahlins 1985). A crucial aspect of the recent history of the culture concept has been its alliance (and division of labour) with ‘art’. Culture, even without a capital c, strains toward aesthetic form and autonomy. I have already suggested that modern culture ideas and art ideas function together in an ‘art–culture system’. The inclusive twentiethcentury culture category – one that does not privilege ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture – is plausible only within this system, for while in principle admitting all learned human behavior, this culture with a small c orders phenomena in ways that privilege the coherent, balanced, and ‘authentic’ aspects of shared life. Since the mid-nineteenth century, ideas of culture have tethered up those elements that seem to give continuity and depth to collective existence, seeing it whole rather than disputed, torn, intertextual, or syncretic. Mead’s almost postmodern image of ‘a local native reading the index to The Golden Bough just to see if they had missed anything’ is not a vision of authenticity. Mead found Arapesh receptivity to outside influences ‘annoying’. Their culture collecting complicated hers. Historical developments would later force her to provide a revised picture of these difficult Melanesians. In a new preface to the 1971 reprint of her three-volume ethnography The Mountain Arapesh Mead devotes several pages to letters from Bernard Narakobi, an Arapesh then studying law in 68 JAMES CLIFFORD Sydney, Australia. The anthropologist readily admits her astonishment at hearing from him: ‘How was it that one of the Arapesh a people who had had such a light hold on any form of collective style – should have come further than any individual among the Manus, who had moved as a group into the modern world in the years between our first study of them, in 1928, and the beginning of our restudy, in 1953?’ (Mead 1971: ix). She goes to explain that Narakobi, along with other Arapesh men studying in Australia, had ‘moved’ from one period in human culture to another as ‘individuals’. The Arapesh were ‘less tightly bound within a coherent culture’ than Manus (ix–x). Narakobi writes, however, as a member of his ‘tribe’, speaking with pride of the values and accomplishments of his ‘clansfolk’. (He uses the name Arapesh sparingly.) He articulates the possibility of a new multiterritorial ‘cultural’ identity: ‘I feel now that I can feel proud of my tribe and at the same time feel I belong not only to Papua–New Guinea, a nation to be, but to the world community at large’ (xiii). Is not this modern way of being ‘Arapesh’ already prefigured in Mead’s earlier image of a resourceful native paging through The Golden Bough? Why must such behavior be marginalized or classed as ‘individual’ by the anthropological culture collector? Expectations of wholeness, continuity, and essence have long been built into the linked Western ideas of culture and art. A few words of recent background must suffice, since to map the history of these concepts would lead us on a chase for origins back at least to the Greeks. Raymond Williams provides a starting point in the early nineteenth century – a moment of unprecedented historical and social disruption. In Culture and Society (1960), Keywords (1983), and elsewhere Williams has traced a parallel development in usage for the words art and culture. The changes reflect complex responses to industrialism, to the spectre of ‘mass society’, to accelerated social conflict and change. 1 According to Williams, in the eighteenth century the word art meant predominantly ‘skill’. Cabinet-makers, criminals, and painters were each in their way artful. Culture designated a tendency to natural growth, its uses predominantly agricultural and personal: both plants and human individuals could be ‘cultured’. Other meanings also present in the eighteenth century did not predominate until the nineteenth. By the 1820s art increasingly designated a special domain of creativity, spontaneity, and purity, a realm of refined sensibility and expressive ‘genius’. The ‘artist’ was set apart from, often against, society – whether ‘mass’ or ‘bourgeois’. The term culture followed a parallel course, coming to mean what was most elevated, sensitive, essential, and precious – most uncommon – in society. Like art, culture became a general category; Williams calls it a ‘final court of appeal’ against threats of vulgarity and levelling. It existed in essential opposition to perceived ‘anarchy’. Art and culture emerged after 1800 as mutually reinforcing domains of human value, strategies for gathering, marking off, protecting the best and most interesting creations of ‘Man’. In the twentieth century the categories underwent a series of further developments. The plural, anthropological definition of culture (lower-case c with the possibility of a final s) emerged as a liberal alternative to racist classifications of human diversity. It was a sensitive means for understanding different and dispersed ‘whole ways of life’ in a high colonial context of unprecedented global interconnection. Culture in its full evolutionary richness and authenticity, formerly reserved for the best creations of modern Europe, could now O N C O L L E C T I N G A R T A N D C U LT U R E 69 be extended to all the world’s populations. In the anthropological vision of Boas’s generation ‘cultures’ were of equal value. In their new plurality, however, the nineteenth-century definitions were not entirely transformed. If they became less elitist (distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture were erased) and less Eurocentric (every human society was fully ‘cultural’), nevertheless a certain body of assumptions were carried over from the older definitions. George Stocking (1968: 69–90) shows the complex interrelations of nineteenth-century humanist and emerging anthropological definitions of culture. He suggests that anthropology owes as much to Matthew Arnold as to its official founding father, E. B. Tylor. Indeed much of the vision embodied in Culture and Anarchy has been transferred directly into relativist anthropology. A powerful structure of feeling continues to see culture, wherever it is found, as a coherent body that lives and dies. Culture is enduring, traditional, structural (rather than contingent, syncretic, historical). Culture is a process of ordering, not of disruption. It changes and develops like a living organism. It does not normally ‘survive’ abrupt alterations. In the early twentieth century, as culture was being extended to all the world’s functioning societies, an increasing number of exotic, primitive, or archaic objects came to be seen as ‘art’. They were equal in aesthetic and moral value with the greatest Western masterpieces. By mid-century the new attitude toward ‘primitive art’ had been accepted by large numbers of educated Europeans and Americans. Indeed from the standpoint of the late twentieth century it becomes clear that the parallel concepts of art and culture did successfully, albeit temporarily, comprehend and incorporate a plethora of non-Western artefacts and customs. This was accomplished through two strategies. First, objects reclassified as ‘primitive art’ were admitted to the imaginary museum of human creativity and, though more slowly, to the actual fine arts museums of the West. Second, the discourse and institutions of modern anthropology constructed comparative and synthetic images of Man drawing evenhandedly from among the world’s authentic ways of life, however strange in appearance or obscure in origin. Art and culture, categories for the best creations of Western humanism, were in principle extended to all the world’s peoples. It is perhaps worth stressing that nothing said here about the historicity of these cultural or artistic categories should be construed as claiming that they are false or denying that many of their values are worthy of support. Like any successful discursive arrangement, the art–culture authenticity system articulates considerable domains of truth and scientific progress as well as areas of blindness and controversy. By emphasizing the transience of the system I do so out of a conviction (it is more a feeling of the historical ground moving underfoot) that the classifications and generous appropriations of Western art and culture categories are now much less stable than before. This instability appears to be linked to the growing interconnection of the world’s populations and to the contestation since the 1950s of colonialism and Eurocentrism. Art collecting and culture collecting now take place within a changing field of counterdiscourses, syncretisms and reappropriations originating both outside and inside ‘the West’. I cannot discuss the geopolitical causes of these developments. I can only hint at their transforming consequences, and stress that the modern genealogy of culture and art that I have been sketching increasingly appears to be a local story. ‘Culture’ and ‘art’ can no 70 JAMES CLIFFORD longer be simply extended to non-Western peoples and things. They can at worst be imposed, at best translated – both historically and politically contingent operations. Before I survey some of the current challenges to Western modes of collection and authentication, it may be worth portraying the still-dominant form of art and culture collecting in a more limited, concrete setting. The system’s underlying historical assumptions will then become inescapable. For if collecting in the West salvages things out of non-repeatable time, what is the assumed direction of this time? How does it confer rarity and authenticity on the varied productions of human skill? Collecting presupposes a story; a story occurs in a ‘chronotope’. A chronotope for collecting Dans son effort pour comprendre le monde, I’homme dispose donc toujours d’un surplus de signification. Claude Lévi-Strauss The term chronotope, as used by Bakhtin, denotes a configuration of spatial and temporal indicators in a fictional setting where (and when) certain activities and stories take place. One cannot realistically situate historical detail – putting something ‘in its time’ – without appealing to explicit or implicit chronotopes. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s pointed, nostalgic recollections of New York during the Second World War can serve as a chronotope for modern art and culture collecting. The setting is elaborated in an essay whose French title, ‘New York post-et préfiguratif ’ (1983), suggests its underlying spatio-temporal predicament more strongly than the published English translation, ‘New York in 1941’ (1985). The essay falls within a microgenre of Lévi-Strauss’s writing, one he developed with virtuosity in Tristes tropiques. Specific places – Rio, Fire Island, new Brazilian cities, Indian sacred sites – appear as moments of intelligible human order and transformation surrounded by the destructive, entropic currents of global history. In what follows I have supplemented the essay on New York with passages from other texts written by Lévi-Strauss either during the war years or in recollection of them. In reading them as a unified chronotope, one ought to bear in mind that these are not historical records but complex literary commemorations. The time–space in question has been retrospectively composed by Lévi-Strauss and recomposed, for other purposes, by myself. A refugee in New York during the Second World War, the anthropologist is bewildered and delighted by a landscape of unexpected juxtapositions. His recollections of those seminal years, during which he invented structural anthropology, are bathed in a magical light. New York is full of delightful incongruities. Who could resist the performances that we watched for hours at the Chinese opera under the first arch of the Brooklyn Bridge, where a company that had come long ago from China had a large following. Every day, from midafternoon until past midnight, it would perpetuate the traditions of O N C O L L E C T I N G A R T A N D C U LT U R E 71 classical Chinese opera. I felt myself going back in time no less when I went to work every morning in the American room of the New York Public Library. There, under its neo-classical arcades and between walls paneled with old oak, I sat near an Indian in a feather headdress and a beaded buckskin jacket – who was taking notes with a Parker pen. (1985: 266) As Lévi-Strauss tells it, the New York of 1941 is an anthropologist’s dream, a vast selection of human culture and history. A brief walk or subway ride will take him from a Greenwich Village reminiscent of Balzac’s Paris to the towering skyscrapers of Wall Street. Turning a corner in this jumble of immigrants and ethnic groups, the stroller suddenly enters a different world with its own language, customs, cuisine. Everything is available for consumption. In New York one can obtain almost any treasure. The anthropologist and his artistic friends André Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson, Georges Duthuit, Yves Tanguy, and Matta find masterpieces of preColumbian, Indian, Oceanic or Japanese art stuffed in dealers’ closets or apartments. Everything somehow finds it way here. For Lévi-Strauss New York in the 1940s is a wonderland of sudden openings to other times and places, of cultural matter out of place: New York (and this is the source of its charm and its peculiar fascination) was then a city where anything seemed possible. Like the urban fabric, the social and cultural fabric was riddled with holes. All you had to do was pick one and slip through it if, like Alice, you wanted to get to the other side of the looking glass and find worlds so enchanting that they seemed unreal. (261) The anthropological flâneur is delighted, amazed, but also troubled by the chaos of simultaneous possibilities. This New York has something in common with the early-century Dada–Surrealist flea market – but with a difference. Its objets trouvés are not just occasions for reverie. This they surely are, but they are also signs of vanishing worlds. Some are treasures, works of great art. Lévi-Strauss and the refugee surrealists were passionate collectors. The Third Avenue art dealer they frequented and advised, Julius Carlebach, always had several North-west Coast, Melanesian or Eskimo pieces on hand. According to Edmund Carpenter, the surrealists felt an immediate affinity with these objects’ predilection for ‘visual puns’; their selections were nearly always of a very high quality. In addition to the art dealers another source for this band of primitive-art connoisseurs was the Museum of the American Indian. As Carpenter tells it: The Surrealists began to visit the Bronx warehouse of that Museum, selecting for themselves, concentrating on a collection of magnificent Eskimo masks. These huge visual puns, made by the Kuskokwim Eskimo a century or more ago, constituted the greatest collection of its kind in the world. But the Museum Director, George Heye, called them ‘jokes’ and sold half for $38 and $54 each. The Surrealists bought the 72 JAMES CLIFFORD best. Then they moved happily through Heye’s Northwest Coast collection, stripping it of one masterwork after another. (Carpenter 1975: 10) In 1946 Max Ernst, Barnett Newman, and several others mounted an exhibit of North-west Coast Indian painting at the Betty Parsons Gallery. They brought together pieces from their private collections and artefacts from the American Museum of Natural History. By moving the museum pieces across town, ‘the Surrealists declassified them as scientific specimens and reclassified them as art’ (Carpenter 1975: 1). The category of primitive art was emerging, with its market, its connoisseurship, and its close ties to modernist aesthetics. What had begun with the figure for l’art nègre in the 1920s would become institutionalized by the 1950s and 1960s; but in wartime New York the battle to gain widespread recognition for tribal objects was not yet won. Lévi-Strauss recalls that as cultural attaché to the French Embassy in 1946 he tried in vain to arrange a trade: for a massive collection of American Indian art a few Matisses and Picassos. But ‘the French authorities turned a deaf ear to my entreaties, and the Indian collections wound up in American museums’ (1985: 262). The collecting of Lévi-Strauss and the Surrealists during the 1940s was part of a struggle to gain aesthetic status for these increasingly rare masterworks. Modern practices of art and culture collecting, scientific and avant-garde, have situated themselves at the end of a global history. They have occupied a place – apocalyptic, progressive, revolutionary or tragic – from which to gather the valued inheritances of Man. Concretizing this temporal set-up, Lévi-Strauss’s ‘post- and prefigurative’ New York anticipates humanity’s entropic future and gathers up its diverse pasts in decontextualized, collectable forms. The ethnic neighbourhoods, the provincial reminders, the Chinese Opera Company, the feathered Indian in the library, the works of art from other continents and eras that turn up in dealers’ closets: all are survivals, remnants of threatened or vanished traditions. The world’s cultures appear in the chronotope as shreds of humanity, degraded commodities, or elevated great art but always functioning as vanishing ‘loopholes’ or ‘escapes’ from a one-dimensional fate. In New York a jumble of humanity has washed up in one vertiginous place and time, to be grasped simultaneously in all its precious diversity and emerging uniformity. In this chronotope the pure products of humanity’s pasts are rescued by modern aesthetics only as sublimated art. They are salvaged by modern anthropology as consultable archives for thinking about the range of human invention. In Lévi-Strauss’s setting the products of the present-becoming-future are shallow, impure, escapist, and ‘retro’ rather than truly different – ‘antiques’ rather than genuine antiquities. Cultural invention is subsumed by a commodified ‘mass culture’. The chronotope of New York supports a global allegory of fragmentation and ruin. The modern anthropologist, lamenting the passing of human diversity, collects and values its survivals, its enduring works of art. Lévi-Strauss’s most prized O N C O L L E C T I N G A R T A N D C U LT U R E 73 acquisition from a marvellous New York where everything seemed available was a nearly complete set of volumes 1–48 of the Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology. These were, he tells us in another evocation of the war years, ‘sacrosanct volumes, representing most of our knowledge about the American Indians . . . It was as though the American Indian cultures had suddenly come alive and become almost tangible through the physical contact that these books, written and published before these cultures’ definite extinction, established between their times and me’ (Lévi-Strauss 1960: 50). These precious records of human diversity had been recorded by an ethnology still in what he calls its ‘pure’ rather than ‘diluted’ state. They would form the authentic ethnographic material from which structuralism’s meta-cultural orders were constructed. Anthropological collections and taxonomies, however, are constantly menaced by temporal contingencies. Lévi-Strauss knows this. It is a disorder he always holds at bay. For example in Tristes tropiques, he is acutely aware that focusing on a tribal past necessarily blinds him to an emergent present. Wandering through the modern landscape of New York, far from encountering less and less to know, the anthropologist is confronted with more and more – a heady mix-and-match of possible human combinations. He struggles to maintain a unified perspective; he looks for order in deep ‘geological’ structures. But in Lévi-Strauss’s work generally, the englobing ‘entropological’ narrative barely contains a current history of loss, transformation, invention, and emergence. Towards the end of his brilliant inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, ‘The Scope of Anthropology’, Lévi-Strauss evokes what he calls ‘anthropological doubt’, the inevitable result of ethnographic risk-taking, the ‘bufferings and denials directed at one’s most cherished ideas and habits by other ideas and habits best able to rebut them’ (1960: 26). He poignantly recalls a Kwakiutl visitor, hosted in New York by Franz Boas, transfixed by the freaks and automats of Times Square, and he wonders whether anthropology may not be condemned to equally bizarre perceptions of the distant societies and histories it seeks to grasp. New York was perhaps Lévi-Strauss’s only true ‘fieldwork’: for once he stayed long enough and mastered the local language. Aspects of the place, such as Boas’s Kwakiutl, have continued to charm and haunt his anthropological culture collecting. But one New York native sits with special discomfort in the chronotope of 1941. This is the feathered Indian with the Parker pen working in the Public Library. For Lévi-Strauss the Indian is primarily associated with the past, the ‘extinct’ societies recorded in the precious Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Reports. The anthropologist feels himself ‘going back in time’ (1985: 266). In modern New York an Indian can appear only as a survival or a kind of incongruous parody. Another historical vision might have positioned the two scholars in the library differently. The decade just preceding Lévi-Strauss’s arrival in New York had seen a dramatic turnaround in federal policy. Under John Collier’s leadership at the Bureau of Indian Affairs a ‘New Indian Policy’ actively encouraged tribal reorganization all over the country. While Lévi-Strauss studied and collected their pasts, many ‘extinct’ Native American groups were in the process of reconstituting themselves culturally and politically. Seen in this context, did the Indian with the Parker pen represent a ‘going back in time’ or a glimpse of another future? That is a different story. 74 JAMES CLIFFORD Other appropriations To tell these other stories, local histories of cultural survival and emergence, we need to resist deep-seated habits of mind and systems of authenticity. We need to be suspicious of an almost-automatic tendency to relegate non-Western peoples and objects to the pasts of an increasingly homogeneous humanity. A few examples of current invention and contestation may suggest different chronotopes for art and culture collecting. Anne Vitart-Fardoulis, a curator at the Musée de l’Homme, has published a sensitive account of the aesthetic, historical, and cultural discourses routinely used to explicate individual museum objects. She discusses a famous intricately painted animal skin (its present name: M.H. 34.33.5), probably originating among the Fox Indians of North America. The skin turned up in Western collecting systems some time ago in a ‘cabinet of curiosities’; it was used to educate aristocratic children and was much admired for its aesthetic qualities. Vitart-Fardoulis tells us that now the skin can be decoded ethnographically in terms of its combined ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ graphic styles and understood in the context of a probable role in specific ceremonies. But the meaningful contexts are not exhausted. The story takes a new turn: The grandson of one of the Indians who came to Paris with Buffalo Bill was searching for the [painted skin] tunic his grandfather had been forced to sell to pay his way back to the United States when the circus collapsed. I showed him all the tunics in our collection, and he paused before one of them. Controlling his emotion, he spoke. He told the meaning of this lock of hair, of that design, why this color had been used, the meaning of that feather . . . This garment, formerly beautiful and interesting but passive and indifferent, little by little became meaningful, active testimony to a living moment through the mediation of someone who did not observe and analyze but who lived the object and for whom the object lived. It scarcely matters whether the tunic is really his grandfather’s. (Vitart-Fardoulis 1986: 12) Whatever is happening in this encounter, two things are clearly not happening. The grandson is not replacing the object in its original or ‘authentic’ cultural context. That is long past. His encounter with the painted skin is part of a modern recollection. And the painted tunic is not being appreciated as art, as an aesthetic object. The encounter is too specific, too enmeshed in family history and ethnic memory. Some aspects of ‘cultural’ and ‘aesthetic’ appropriation are certainly at work, but they occur within a current tribal history, a different temporality from that governing the dominant systems I diagrammed earlier. In the context of a presentbecoming-future the old painted tunic becomes newly, traditionally meaningful. The currency of ‘tribal’ artefacts is becoming more visible to non-Indians. Many new tribal recognition claims are pending at the Department of the Interior. And whether or not they are formally successful matters less than what they make O N C O L L E C T I N G A R T A N D C U LT U R E 75 manifest: the historical and political reality of Indian survival and resurgence, a force that impinges on Western art and culture collections. The ‘proper’ place of many objects in museums is now subject to contest. The Zuni who prevented the loan of their war god to the Museum of Modern Art were challenging the dominant art–culture system, for in traditional Zuni belief war god figures are sacred and dangerous. They are not ethnographic artefacts, and they are certainly not ‘art’. Zuni claims on these objects specifically reject their ‘promotion’ (in all senses of the term) to the status of aesthetic or scientific treasures. I would not claim that the only true home for the objects in question is in ‘the tribe’ – a location that, in many cases, is far from obvious. My point is just that the dominant, interlocking contexts of art and anthropology are no longer self-evident and uncontested. There are other contexts, histories, and futures in which nonWestern objects and cultural records may ‘belong’. The rare Maori artefacts that in 1984–5 toured museums in the United States normally reside in New Zealand museums. But they are controlled by the traditional Maori authorities, whose permission was required for them to leave the country. Here and elsewhere the circulation of museum collections is significantly influenced by resurgent indigenous communities. What is at stake is something more than conventional museum programmes of community education and ‘outreach’. Current developments question the very status of museums as historical-cultural theatres of memory. Whose memory? For what purposes? The Provincial Museum of British Columbia has for some time encouraged Kwakiutl carvers to work from models in its collection. It has lent out old pieces and donated new ones for use in modern potlatches. Surveying these developments, Michael Ames, who directs the University of British Columbia Museum, observes that ‘Indians, traditionally treated by museums only as objects and clients, add now the role of patrons’. He continues: ‘The next step has also occurred. Indian communities establish their own museums, seek their own National Museum grants, install their own curators, hire their own anthropologists on contract, and call for repatriation of their own collections’ (Ames 1986: 57). The Quadra Island Kwakiutl Museum located in Quathraski Cove, British Columbia, displays tribal work returned from the national collections in Ottawa. The objects are exhibited in glass cases, but arranged according to their original family ownership. In Alert Bay, British Columbia, the U’mista Cultural Centre displays repatriated artefacts in a traditional Kwakiutl ‘big house’ arranged in the sequence of their appearance at the potlatch ceremony. The new institutions function both as public exhibits and as cultural centres linked to ongoing tribal traditions (Clifford 1997 provides a fuller account). Two Haida museums have also been established in the Queen Charlotte Islands, and the movement is growing elsewhere in Canada and the United States. Resourceful Native American groups may yet appropriate the Western museum – as they have made their own another European institution, the ‘tribe’. Old objects may again participate in a tribal present-becoming-future. Moreover, it is worth briefly noting that the same thing is possible for written artefacts collected by salvage ethnography. Some of these old texts (myths, linguistic samples, lore of all kinds) are now being recycled as local history and tribal ‘literature’. The objects of both art and culture collecting are susceptible to other appropriations. 76 JAMES CLIFFORD Note 1 Although Williams’s analysis is limited to England, the general pattern applies elsewhere in Europe, where the timing of modernization differed or where other terms were used. In France, for example the words civilisation or, for Durkheim, société stand in for culture. What is at issue are general qualitative assessments of collective life. Chapter 6 Angela McRobbie T H E P L A C E O F W A LT E R B E N J A M I N I N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION w A LT E R B E N J A M I N , PA R T M Y S TI C , part Marxist, part modernist, was a German-Jewish victim of Nazism, who continues to cast a spell. In her response to Susan Buck-Morss’s English account of Benjamin’s major project, the Passagenwerk (an incomplete, experimental, montage-like history of nineteenth-century urbanism in Paris), Angela McRobbie carefully ponders Benjamin’s possibilities for cultural studies. She argues that his value lies as much in his relation to the world, his example as a cultural intellectual, as in what he wrote. Benjamin’s work pivots around four poles: first, his rejection of history as rationally cumulative or progressive; second, his messianic faith that human endeavors exist in relation to the promise of eternal redemption; third, his acceptance that culture, as the world people make, is a form of mortal dreaming, a phantasmagoria in which death, ruin, and redemption cannot be separated from one another, but which may be renewed by revolution; fourth, his thesis that modern technologies like film and photography are to be welcomed because of their democratic force, and because, in them, nature becomes increasingly absorbed into culture. On the face of it, these propositions run counter to the spirit of contemporary cultural studies. McRobbie makes the point that “living people” are eerily absent from Benjamin’s work. And yet Benjamin is seductive because he took his intellectual work so seriously. For him, research and critical writing were not a profession, not a career, not a vocation even, but a form of activism aimed, despite everything, at bridging revolutionary practice, his Jewish spiritual heritage, his elite philosophical and literary tastes and the cultural life of the populace. All this 78 ANGELA McROBBIE in a context where, as a freelance Jewish exile, he came to have almost no audience, and hence accountability, at all. Unlike an English contemporary such as George Orwell, with a nation to preach at, he was able to engage in the European avant-garde; unlike his colleagues Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno he was not circumscribed by the conventions of academic philosophy and social science. Thus he came to revalue the detritus of the modern world. And, as McRobbie suggests, it is for his spiritual and political revaluation of what’s left out of, or behind by, official or chic culture that he matters most for cultural studies. Further reading: Buck-Morss 1989; Friedberg 1993; G. Smith 1988; Steinberg 1996b. Walter Benjamin has occupied an ambivalent place in cultural studies since the early 1970s when his two seminal essays written in the 1930s, ‘The artist as producer’ and ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, were first published in English. They were rightly hailed as key contributions to the development of Marxist theories of art, as well as to what has since become known as cultural politics. The influence of Brecht is particularly noticeable in ‘The artist as producer’; and in cultural studies generally, as well as in journals like the New Left Review, the names of Brecht and Benjamin were frequently mentioned together. Both writers were looked to for their committed but unaligned Marxism which was far removed from that of the official Marxism of the communist parties of the 1930s and later of the Stalinist era. Both Benjamin and Brecht recognized, with some urgency, the need to extend the role of the intellectual in order to engage with the people and to do this through transforming the existing mass media while simultaneously making use of their technological advances. While this might seem commonplace now in the 1990s, the simple insistence by Benjamin (who was writing against the backdrop of Nazism with all that entailed politically and culturally) that ‘The rigid, isolated object [of art] . . . is of no use whatsoever. It must be inserted into the context of living social relations’ (Benjamin 1970: 52) was a remarkably radical statement even in the early 1970s when in the British university system there were almost no interdisciplinary studies in the humanities, where politics was still something which rarely if ever entered the seminar room or lecture theatre, where the social sciences were narrowly positivistic and empirical, and where theory was equated with the history of ideas. That moment in the 1970s when Benjamin’s writings were warmly embraced, albeit in the marginalized enclaves of cultural studies in Birmingham, did not last long. What was available of Benjamin’s other work was too obscure and mystical, or else too literary, to be of much use to those areas of study such as film or television which were rapidly developing and which found instead in Althusser’s writing a much more useful set of concepts, particularly ideology. This was followed, a couple of years later, by the interest in Gramsci’s work and in the concept of hegemony. It was left to the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton (1981) to explore in greater depth Benjamin’s less accessible writings and at the same time to reclaim him as an impeccable Marxist theorist, despite the messianic threads running T H E P L A C E O F W A LT E R B E N J A M I N 79 through much of his work. Apart from Eagleton’s book, the bulk of Benjamin scholarship has been carried out in Germany and in the US. With the exception of Dick Hebdige (1979, 1988) and lain Chambers (1985, 1986), both of whom have consistently looked to Benjamin for the exceptionally lucid, even poetic flashes of insight found in many of his less well-known essays, and who have also perhaps empathized with Benjamin’s intellectual sadness, his despair at the outcome of events around him, Walter Benjamin had throughout the 1980s been more or less laid to rest in cultural studies. Recently, in the 1990s, there has, however, been a flicker of renewed interest. This has involved returning to Benjamin through a highly circuitous route. Two things have happened at once. There has been a shift away from the kind of foundational vocabulary established in cultural studies in the 1970s and summarized under the twin headings of culturalism and/or structuralism (Hall 1981b) and with this there has been a critique of the assumptions which underpinned the Marxism which played such a key role in cultural studies during that time, including the working class as an emancipatory force, the notion of history as moving inexorably to socialism, the belief in social progress and the leadership role of the organic intellectual. In place of these there has emerged (also under the influence of post-structuralist critiques of meaning) a much looser, even literary vocabulary. Cultural studies has shown itself able to read across the signs of everyday life without having to restrict itself to the search for pure or perfect meaning (Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler 1992). At the same time, the loss of faith in Marxism has been replaced by a concern for the previously uninvestigated broad cultural setting for the texts and images whose analysis took up so much time precisely because they were seen as being the privileged sites of ideology. The two terms modernity and postmodernity have been taken up as supplying the framework for this broader context. Whether or not they are opposing or interrelated concepts, they have each insisted on the integrated experience of everyday life including the urban environment, architecture, consumer culture and the ‘passage’ of the individual at whatever precise historical moment in time through these forms, whether he or she, for example, is the flâneur of urban modernity, or the insulated walkman of postmodernity. To the extent that Walter Benjamin can be understood as responding to modernity as it moved towards social catastrophe, and where some of his work other than the two essays mentioned above can be seen as feeding directly into the documentation of urban modernity, it is not surprising that cultural studies might now look back to One Way Street or Illuminations. What interest there has been in the UK is also very much thanks to the cultural sociology of the journal Theory, Culture and Society, which has been responsible for the renewed theoretical interest in figures like Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias and Siegfried Kracauer as well as Walter Benjamin. Finally, it should be remembered that it was feminism which insisted on the place of biography and autobiography in cultural studies. This too has accounted for a different kind of object of study emerging in the field of culture, one which makes it possible to incorporate into the field a piece of autobiographical writing like ‘A Berlin chronicle’ (published in One Way Street, Benjamin 1979). In Germany we find an unbroken interest in Benjamin since the late 1960s, including the publication of letters, manuscripts and catalogue material to 80 ANGELA McROBBIE accompany exhibitions drawing on his life and work. In German scholarship, particularly in social history, we find the continual influence of Benjamin’s writings on historiography and on the practice of history. And in both Germany and the USA there is a great interest in Benjamin’s contribution to ‘modern Jewish Messianism’ (Rabinbach 1985). Alongside this, for those working in the field of German studies on both sides of the Atlantic, there is Benjamin’s work itself as a literary and historical object of study. One Way Street, for example, is generally seen as a kind of literary montage strongly influenced by the visual work of John Heartfield [a communist artist who helped to invent photomontage] rather than a critical essay in the traditional sense. There is also Benjamin’s critical writing, on Baudelaire, Kafka and Proust, on the historian and collector Edward Fuchs, on Karl Krauss, as well as the essays on literary and cultural practices and pursuits such as translating, collecting books, and telling stories. Finally there are the few fragments of autobiographical material. Memory for Benjamin was a struggle to recall, not a process of remembering or a linear development, but a set of flickering images. The work of remembering, and the form that memory takes, shows Benjamin to be engaging with Proust, whom he translated, and less directly with Freud. The nonlinearity of memory and the availability, as a prompt to memory, of the reproduced image were to prove vital in Benjamin’s understanding of history and in the method of writing he tried to develop in the Passagenwerk. The question to be asked is what more sustained value this body of work has, or might now have, for those working in the field of cultural analysis, particularly in Britain where cultural studies has defined itself as more separate from other related fields (such as social history, literary studies, sociology, European studies, and even film and television studies). Why was Benjamin important but marginal? Why did he suddenly drop from the reading lists of cultural studies? One of the most straightforward reasons for this is that the mode of writing employed by Benjamin, including the autobiographical fragments, was not considered as somehow appropriate to the methods of cultural studies as they developed through the 1970s and into the 1980s. While Benjamin continued to possess a kind of subterranean image as a figure of historical interest, he belonged somewhere else. This somewhere else lay in the history, not of the cultural left in Britain but of the European cultural left. (It might be suggested that, even regarding Europe, British cultural studies has displayed the kind of narrow Anglocentrism many black critics now accuse it of (Gilroy 1994).) I want to suggest that a more detailed reconsideration of Benjamin’s work is long overdue. What we find is a model for the practice of being a cultural intellectual. This comprises an inability to conform to the traditional requirements of the scholarly mode. Whatever personal pain his failure to get a tenured post might have caused Benjamin, it positioned him on the edge of intellectual life. (It is unlikely, for example, that any university appointments committee would have taken seriously his interest in the photographic image, the shopping arcades of Paris, or the fashions displayed in the windows of the new department stores.) There is nothing comfortable about anything Benjamin ever wrote. Instead it is shot through with difficulty and urgency. He was, of course, writing in a time more overshadowed by fear than our own. But what he was doing was new and inventive in every way. He was not a writer of fiction, or, like his friend Brecht, a playwright. T H E P L A C E O F W A LT E R B E N J A M I N 81 Within the realms of what might be called non-fiction or the essay form, he was, however, an experimentalist. (I will say more on this later.) Equally important was the passion Benjamin displayed politically. As his ‘A Berlin chronicle’ records, he was, as a student, as much an activist as a young intellectual, organizing debates and making speeches in the meeting house which he and his friends in the youth movement rented. Later on he never got the permanent job he so much needed in a university and this consigned him to great financial insecurity. It also pushed him into the world of freelance writing which in turn meant that he had to be responding quite immediately to changes in the world around him. He was writing, from a critical perspective, about culture, and, in an underdeveloped field of study, he was grappling for the kinds of concepts and vocabulary which would best serve this purpose. What we find in this work is by no means restricted to journalistic comment, or indeed to what today might be called cultural journalism. There is instead a sustained critique of culture as a great unfolding history of ideas, and we also find a critique of culture as something cut off and separate from everyday life, which can be parcelled off for study in the traditional mode of, say, art history. In ‘The artist as producer’ Benjamin is using and extending an explicitly Marxist vocabulary in an attempt to understand not just how art relates to the world of production but how it is a form of production. He wants to demystify art by demonstrating those skills and practices which constitute the work of the artist. New technology also provides the means of overcoming the traditional boundaries which have separated the artist from the audience. It is here, in this space, that art can change itself. These ideas were immensely influential to critics and writers of the new left like John Berger, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and, in the US, Susan Sontag, and they also prefigured much of Barthes’s early writing, particularly his concern with the photographic image, with aspects of popular culture and of course with ‘the death of the author’. There are other small but important ways in which Benjamin opened up for study areas which had been ignored as having little if any cultural value. In this way too his work can be seen as an important precursor of cultural studies. In the essay on Edward Fuchs, the historian and collector (Benjamin 1979), Benjamin argues that Fuchs’s interest in caricature, erotic art and ‘manners’ (what we would now call popular taste) pushed him into developing a language which was at odds with the official language of art criticism. The objects which Fuchs was interested in were not reconcilable with the vocabulary of high art. Fuchs’s hobby (he had ‘a Rabelaisian joy in quantity’ (1979: 373) as a collector allowed him insight into the world of the trivial, the popular, the subordinate world of mass culture. ‘It was the collector who found his way into grey areas . . . caricature, photography’ (1979: 361). And, because he was also a powerful editor of an influential journal, Fuchs was able to undertake the ‘popularization of knowledge’ by using the mass media to address the masses. The way in which Fuchs’s work reflected on culture as a living historical process encouraged Benjamin to develop a clearer conception of historical materialism as a critical force which ‘conceives historical understanding as an after-life of that which is understood, whose pulse can still be felt in the present’ (Benjamin 1970: 62). ‘A small history of photography’ (Benjamin 1979) is equally packed with the kind of insight and analysis which have been so influential on cultural studies. In 82 ANGELA McROBBIE less than eighteen pages and with astonishing density Benjamin introduces what were to become the major thematics in the analysis of photography in the 1970s, including the destruction of ‘aura’ as a result of reproducibility of the image, the challenge of art which photography mounts and the extent to which it poses the question, not whether it counts as an art but if art can itself still exist after photography. Benjamin also considers the relation between the photograph and the caption anticipating Barthes’s seminal work on text and image (Barthes 1977) and even the title of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is taken from this essay, when Benjamin suggests that photography brings about a revolution in how we see. The close attention to the technology of photography and its effect on the image also fore-shadows much of Barthes’s later work in Camera Lucida, and the whole curious, fascinated and even enchanted tone of the essay proved inspirational to Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1979). Most important perhaps is Benjamin’s refusal to be constrained by the kind of academic mode which insists on conventional scholarship, on precise periodization, on the accumulation of facts, on naming, dating and conferring value. Instead Benjamin ruminates on photography. He explores the world of the photograph, not only suggesting the way in which the image could now be mass produced and could thus be everywhere in culture, but also evoking his own pleasure in the photographic image, the sense in which, as he was later to explain in the Passagenwerk, it epitomizes his notion of the ‘dialectical image’. ‘It is the illumination of these sparks that the first photographs emerge, beautiful and unapproachable, from the darkness of our grandfathers’ day’ (Benjamin 1979: 257). The photograph connects the past with the present by supplying the ‘pulse’, the rhythm and the motion of historical process, not as an unbroken chain but as a jumble of fragments and ‘snapshots’. History is therefore connective but not linear, contingent but not without a pattern, a momentum, a force which could be challenged or transformed. Many of these ideas are further developed in ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. The cult of genius and of creativity is exposed and the emergence of a mass market for art, as a result of technological reproducibility, allows Benjamin to celebrate the final sundering of the ties which have linked ideas of art with those of ritual, originality, aura and eternal value. From now on, argues Benjamin, the work of art can be designed for, rather than against, reproducibility. Benjamin in effect created here the possibility of a non-canonic language of cultural criticism which, set against the rapid rise of fascism, also recognized the urgency of attempting to understand the politics of mass art and mass communication. In such circumstances there is no looking back with nostalgia for a moment when art could afford to be socially or politically unconnected, and when value could be debated in a more leisurely academic mode. Finally there is in Benjamin’s work a thread which is perhaps more evident now, in retrospect, than it was in the 1970s. As ‘A Berlin chronicle’ shows with great clarity, Benjamin was himself politicized not just by the broad social events which were happening around him, by the growth of anti-Semitism, for example, but by the constraints and the hypocrisies of bourgeois society as they imposed themselves on the life of the young adult. The youth movement which Benjamin belonged to was greatly concerned with the ‘brutalities’ of middle-class family life, with the T H E P L A C E O F W A LT E R B E N J A M I N 83 absurdities of sexual decorum which made it impossible for young people of both sexes to mix freely together and with the rigid authoritarianism of the education system. In this context the city itself (and the public sphere of freedom which it opens up in the form of entertainment and display), the prostitute, and the proletariat, play the role of the ‘other’ to whom and to which Benjamin inclines himself. He describes the pleasures of crossing the ‘threshold of one’s class’ by procuring the services of a prostitute on the street for the first time. Later, in the Passagenwerk, this is an image and an experience which is at the heart of Benjamin’s understanding of modernity. But in ‘A Berlin chronicle’ it is a fleeting, symbolic escape from his class of origin. It acquires heroic stature in his writing just as the prostitute and the brothel are key landmarks in his mapping of the modern metropolis. Both of these identifications and inclinations, for the proletariat and the prostitute, had meaning and significance for the new left of the late 1960s. That is to say, they registered in the dominant political vocabulary of the moment. But on both counts, it is a good deal more complicated now. Benjamin’s relationship to the world of prostitution might be seen, after twenty years of feminist debate and scholarship, as no different from that of any of his middle-class counterparts of the period. The prostitute remains a shadowy, anonymous figure in his writing. As in the writing of Baudelaire (on whom Benjamin wrote at least one volume and copious articles and notes) she is, at most, a fellow deviant, another outsider. Benjamin notes that she is a commodity, a ‘mass article’, but he takes this no further, preferring to remember the more pleasurable function of the prostitute and the even greater excitement of seeking her out. In ‘The image of Proust’ he writes, ‘Anyone who has tried to get the address of a brothel in a strange city and has received the most long-winded directions . . . will understand what is meant here . . . and last but not least Proust’s intransigent French spirit’ (1969: 209). The critique of bourgeois society (and Benjamin shows no influence of feminism in his writing); the turning to the proletariat and to the politics of class as a means of overthrowing the old order; the links with the Communist Party particularly through the influence of his lover Asja Lacis but the rejection of the party in preference for a concern with culture and with political independence; the refusal to side with those on the left who underestimated the power of fascism, and the recognition on his part of the ‘powers of enchantment’ which Nazism offered; the refusal perhaps to believe in Marxism as a redemptive force which could at the last moment change the tide of history as it was slowly closing in upon him; the small pleasures which could rally his spirits and rescue him, if temporarily, from despair and helplessness; the forms of these pleasures (small objects, fleeting sexual encounters), the place of these pleasures (in the city, on long walks, surrounded by the signs, landmarks and technologies of modernity) and the sheer excitement and sociability of these excursions: all of these describe not just a man, but the makings of a left culture, very different from the one we now inhabit, but one which we none the less have inherited and which we have looked to for a sense of our own place in history. It is, then, as a cultural intellectual that Benjamin plays so important a role, a figure who in every way experienced, sought to understand, and suffered at the hands of modernity. As Zygmunt Baumann has recently argued, the Holocaust and the rise of Stalin were as much part of modernity as the palaces of 84 ANGELA McROBBIE consumption (Baumann 1989). Walter Benjamin occupies the space of modernity. White, male, middle-class and European, he is both a representative of and a critic of that moment which was so formative for the new left generation of the late 1960s who turned away from the anti-intellectualism of the 1950s and 1960s, and away from the conservative world of establishment high culture, and went back instead to the time of Brecht and Benjamin where the politics of art was fiercely debated, and where low culture was already recognized as a powerful force offering many opportunities for political intervention. Precisely because none of the ‘advantages’ of being white, middle-class and male saved Benjamin from the forces of history and from fascism, he might be seen as a symbol of European modernity in all its complexity. While some might now argue that the entire edifice of cultural studies was erected around the Eurocentric values of a small number of writers and intellectuals who had no interest in or understanding of their sexual or ethnic subordinates, this should not mean that we expunge their work from our own intellectual history and formation. To do so would be to refuse the challenge and the contradictions of history and to participate in the same kind of wilful forgetfulness which Benjamin frequently warns us against. The Passagenwerk and The Dialectics of Seeing Benjamin offered a more constructive way forward for the study of mass culture and popular culture than many of his counterparts, particularly Adorno (Adorno 1967). Despite the difficult circumstances of his life, he displayed, in his writing, a distinct enjoyment of the pleasures of urbanism, a particular enjoyment of place, and of getting lost or straying in the city, a love of café culture as well as a fascination with shop windows and with the commodities they so proudly displayed. This capacity for enjoyment intensified rather than blunted his critical faculties and led him to examine the historical processes which gave the items, the objects and the urban areas or districts, their cultural meaning. Benjamin was also pioneering a new way of writing about culture characterized by a sense of uncertainty, a welcome rejoinder to the more emphatic Marxist orthodoxy on art and culture which held sway at that moment. Looking back, this sense of uncertainty, this force of prevarication, could be seen, not as pessimism or faint-heartedness but rather as an unwillingness to profess a faith in Marxism, to embrace it as something which would somehow come to his rescue. A major part of Benjamin’s critique of commoditization lay in the way in which it naturalized the process of its own production and presented itself as synonymous with progress. Benjamin disputed the idea of progress, historically and philosophically. He could not therefore participate in that account of Marxism which saw history as moving, progressively, towards socialism. As a result, his writing bears the mark, almost always, of the present or of the recent past. As many critics have since pointed out, it is the discarded ruins, the recent remains, the small trinkets and souvenirs of consumer capitalism and modernity which interested Benjamin and which were his raw materials. Benjamin sought out the older shops and café corners and the crumbling arcades of the cities in which he lived, rather than the magnificent boulevards or T H E P L A C E O F W A LT E R B E N J A M I N 85 great buildings which so clearly expressed the bold modernist confidence of their architects. From watching and walking ‘botanizing on the asphalt’ (Benjamin quoted in Buck-Morss 1989) he developed a cultural vision of the city as layered and labyrinthine rather than as being simply the highest expression of bourgeois civilization. It is this circumspect, convoluted and sometimes seemingly perverse mode of analysis which makes Benjamin a figure towards whom writers on postmodernity have recently turned. Susan Buck-Morss’s The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989) is, as she points out, a work of reconstruction. For over thirteen years, between 1927 and 1941, Walter Benjamin had thought about, talked about and prepared in note form what was to be one of his major pieces of work. The arcades project was to be a theory of modernity, a philosophy of history, a verbal montage of urban imagery, and a reflection on the meaning of consumer culture from the viewpoint of memory and experience. But this ambitious project which also came to represent a kind of unifying umbrella for Benjamin’s entire oeuvre was destined not to come to fruition but to remain as fragments, notes, ideas and a series of longer pieces. What remains of the arcades project has been known about and discussed among Benjamin scholars in the UK, in the US and in Germany for some time, but the work of translation and publication has been hindered by precisely the difficulty in assembling the material in book form. In Germany, it is available, but US and British publishers have been less certain of a market for this kind of work. The Passagenwerk notes and fragments were first brought together and edited by Rolf Tiedemann in 1982. Susan Buck-Morss set herself the task of assembling these fragments for publication in English while retaining a commitment to the original fragmented ‘montage’ method of argument. It is in the arcades project that Benjamin’s more ambitious theoretical aims are pursued. As various critics have pointed out, a good many of the ideas in this work owe more to his earlier work on German baroque tragedy than to the Marxist ideas found in the two seminal essays mentioned earlier, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ and ‘The artist as producer’. The arcades project has to be seen as a work which not only remained incomplete but which shifted and changed over the years in which it was being formulated. In some ways it is more like a diary, or a record of Benjamin’s responses to history, philosophy, modernism and surrealism, as well as an attempt to theorize aspects of mass culture in the context of Europe on the brink of fascism. What we find in Buck-Morss’s book is an exposition not just of the Passagenwerk but also of the other fragments and shorter pieces which have been referred to by critics but not as yet put into the context of Benjamin’s larger project. Buck-Morss achieves an admirable balance between coherence and looseness in her reworking of the Passagenwerk material. She has managed to remain faithful to the method pioneered by Benjamin while also extending it into a commentary on contemporary urban life in the late 1980s, by drawing on images, photographs and other source material including advertisements which reflect now what Benjamin described then as ‘dialectical images’. There is a point, however, beyond which Buck-Morss goes no further. While Benjamin exists as a writer in The Dialectics of Seeing, his work is not seen as it 86 ANGELA McROBBIE might be, that is, as a kind of performance art. Precisely because his work resists the search for meaning and understanding which might be expected in more conventional cultural writing or literary criticism, it is, I would suggest, more productive to see Benjamin as fulfilling the role of the writer in the Barthesian sense (Barthes 1977), as one who moves beyond and between genres, and who quite consciously breaks with the distinction between art and criticism, rather as Barthes himself does, who ushers in a new way of writing and a new way of seeing writing. Without this The Dialectics of Seeing is forced into seeking some kind of intellectual resolution in the concepts and ideas found in the Passagenwerk which the work itself is incapable of providing. This is particularly true of the ‘dialectical image’ which Benjamin developed as a means of condensing, into a verbal flash, a few brief sentences or phrases which are simultaneously a representation of and a critique of a cultural event or item. This ambition grew out of Benjamin’s admiration for montage techniques in the arts and in photography, and especially in the work of John Heartfield. As his notes suggest, he was as much interested in exhibiting as in writing: ‘Method of this work: literary montage. I have nothing to say, only to show’ (Benjamin quoted in Buck-Morss 1989: 73). This illustrates Benjamin’s aim to create a visual image out of words. The transcendent quality of these verbal images, the possibility of creating in a few words the kind of complex analysis and statement which John Heartfield produced in his photomontage work, requires on the part of the critic a conceptual leap. It means seeing Benjamin not only as a cultural theorist and as a historian but as a cultural practitioner. Benjamin is creating and practising a new and more active mode of cultural analysis and criticism. The analysis takes place inside his verbal images and aphorisms. The problem is that even if we demystify art from notions of talent or genius, doing ‘art work’ still requires its own techniques and skills, learned and practised over the years. In the case of Benjamin, sometimes his method works with quite startling results – for example, in the image of the angel of history; but just as often it results in infuriatingly pretentious and self-important sets of statements. Despite this, a case can none the less be made for Benjamin as an experimentalist, a writer endlessly trying to adjust in language to the irreversible advances which have taken place in the visual mass media. It seems as though Benjamin wants to work with words as though they were images. This has repercussions for how we respond to the work. If the Passagenwerk is in part a compilation of prose images, then the conventional work of exposition and critique is no longer appropriate. The Passagenwerk instead asks of us that we sit back and read it as a series of often disconnected fragments, an exhibition or a performance, not as a conventional academic text. That Benjamin became a practitioner in words of the kind of art work whose methods and strategies he most enjoyed and discussed at great length, should be no real surprise. He disliked the academy even though he sought, unsuccessfully, to earn a living there. His closest friends and the figures who influenced him most were creative artists. He occupied exactly that space of the writer which Barthes was later to espouse and himself represent where, as a point of principle, criticism and creative writing merge into each other and dissolve as separate categories, where fiction and non-fiction also overlap, and where the death of the author coincides with the birth of a different kind of writing and writer. The Passagenwerk should T H E P L A C E O F W A LT E R B E N J A M I N 87 be read then like a modernist novel whose major influences were the growth of the cinema and photography, a series of speculations and reveries on urban culture, a surrealist documentary, a creative commentary. This still leaves the critic with the difficult job of trying to evaluate the work. Buck-Morss reminds us of Adorno’s disappointment with die project and his hostility to its unconventional methods. It is certainly difficult, if not impossible, to categorize it neatly as philosophical history, or as a sociology of consumer culture, or even as a lengthy piece of journalistic reportage. At many points in Buck-Morss’s text there are repetitions and passages that simply do not make sense. The value that the work might have for cultural studies depends therefore on how we view it. While it certainly yields no unified account of modernity, it does exist, in my opinion, as a text of modernity, a lengthy, rambling, unedited piece of footage with a repetitious, irritating but compelling voice-over. The form which Buck-Morss’s compilation document of the Passagenwerk takes is as follows. Parts One and Two trace through the appearance in the work of four main threads. These are the fossil, the fetish, the wish-image and the ruin. Part Three examines the broader context of the work including its political and philosophical achievement, and Part Four takes the form of a visual homage to Benjamin’s work comprising images and art work drawing on the contemporary world of mass culture. In Part One, Buck-Morss considers the temporal and the spatial origins of the Passagenwerk project. First there is the context within which Benjamin embarked on the arcades work. One Way Street, first published in German in 1928, is seen as a key influence on what he was going to do. The Origin of German Tragic Drama also reflects what was to be for Benjamin a lifelong interest in the idea of allegory. In the second chapter Buck-Morss describes the cities in which he lived during the late 1920s and the way in which he wrote about them. She shows him to be strongly influenced by Proust, by the work and ideas of his friend Franz Hessel, by the work of the Surrealist movement, and by the politics of his Russian lover Asja Lacis who at the time was working for an experimental children’s theatre in Moscow and was also a colleague of Brecht. Part Two of the book brings the reader more directly into the heart of the arcades project, with Buck-Morss acting as a guide and interpreter. In ‘Natural history: fossil’, the fossil is where, according to Benjamin, nature and history merge together so that they cannot be prised apart. The symbiotic way in which historical change is subsumed under the guise of natural change also leads Benjamin to reflect on the real rather than the mythic relation between the two. This interest in natural history was to run through the arcades work, in part a reflection of Benjamin’s concern with the recent past, and in particular with the late nineteenth century when a more widespread fascination with natural history created a profusion of ‘natural’ images whose reproduction was made possible by advances in technology. Two additional concerns arise here: the notion of how Germany’s ‘natural history’ might be alternatively constructed and the way in which John Heartfield’s photomontage work represented an example of such a non-linear historical method, i.e. the creation of a modern-day emblematics, a visual rendering of the ‘natural history’ of Germany by allegorical means. Benjamin then takes up and adapts the photomontage form for his own purposes in the arcades project by pointing to the presence of the ‘montage effect’ already in existence in the cities through the ‘piling up’ and layering of neon and advertising 88 ANGELA McROBBIE which in turn become part of the architecture, and part of the visual experience of urbanism. As in so much of his work, Benjamin sees, in what has recently come into existence through new technology (what Buck-Morss calls the ‘new nature’), a kind of dialectics at work. The effect is both fettering and emancipatory. Technology secures old relations while unleashing new ones which are as yet unimagined and hence unincorporated into the existing social arrangements. Drawing also perhaps on Brechtian ideas, Benjamin claims montage (itself the product of technological innovation) to be progressive because it ‘interrupts the context into which it is inserted’. In the section on the ‘fetish’, Buck-Morss introduces the complexity of Benjamin’s thought in relation to consumerism. It is the vision of urban brilliance which pushes Benjamin to compare the city with the ‘enchanted forest’ of children’s fairy tales. The new consumer goods displayed in abundance, as well as the new urban experiences dreamt up to celebrate these forms, including the world expositions, the arcades, the panoramas and the lavish window displays, transform the city beyond the realms of the imagination and at the same time create a new public sphere produced not by artists and writers but by designers, commercial artists, copywriters, photographers, engineers and technicians. The sheer scale of their work (the toothpaste advertising billboard ‘toothpaste for giants’) contributes to the grandeur of this new dream world, a monumentalism which for the first time incorporates at a ‘dream level’ not just the aspirations of the ruling classes but also, in the form of the mass-produced commodity, a kind of popular utopia. The contents of the wish-images of consumer capitalism (outlined in chapter 5 of The Dialectics of Seeing) are similar to the utopias of pre-industrial folklore or fairy tales. Their dialectical character exists in the way they are, on the one hand, products of a class-divided society, but on the other they also look forward to a more equal society free from scarcity and conflict. Benjamin’s aim is to find a way of making conscious this ‘desire for utopia’ by somehow unleashing the potential of technology to make it work for social transformation rather than working as it does at present merely for the maintenance of the soporific ‘dream state’ brought about by the fairy-tale luxury of this new image world. The dialectic exists in that space between what Buck-Morss labels the sign and the referent. Fashion, for example, is a ritual of commodity worship, yet it is also progressive in its irreverent attitude towards tradition and in its vivid dramatization of change. Similarly, as Buck-Morss describes later in the book, the dream state cuts the individual off from others while at the same time creating a shared or collective experience by virtue of the mass availability of the dream material. The ruin, the fourth of Benjamin’s thematics, reminds us of the other side of consumer splendour, that which is deadly, repetitious and even hellish in its endless evocation of novelty. The image of the ‘ruin’ is also a symbol of the fragility of capitalist consumer culture; the transitoriness of fashion, for example, precisely because of its increasingly desperate attempts to preserve youthfulness and thus also halt the flow of time, ends up evoking death and decay. There is then a ruinous quality lurking just beneath the surface smiles of the fashionably dressed mannequins, the show girls and of course the prostitutes. Capital festers and decays from within and, as it does so, so also does it continually attempt to ‘tart itself up’. Much of this section draws on a combination of Baudelaire’s poetry and Benjamin’s T H E P L A C E O F W A LT E R B E N J A M I N 89 work on the baroque. If, as Buck-Morss says, ‘Dialectical images are a modern form of emblematics’ then ‘in the Passagenwerk the devaluation of the new nature and its status as ruin becomes instructive politically. The crumbling of the monuments that were built to signify the immortality of civilisation become proof rather of its transiency’ (Buck-Morss 1989: 170). Of the remaining chapters of Buck-Morss’s volume it is the ‘Dream world of mass culture’ which draws together the fragments of the argument. She suggests that the Passagenwerk does indeed manage to convey the quality of historical experience through the dialectical image and the theory of montage even though the work itself frequently takes a literary or poetic rather than a critical or analytical mode. This ‘mode of enchantment’ which comes through in Benjamin’s writing is also central to his argument which is that underneath the rationalization which creates the possibility of urban modernity, underneath the planning and the bureaucracy, lies a much more mythical landscape, a kind of undergrowth of chaos and abundance, of new consumer goods which quickly take on the character of ancient, pre-industrial symbols to the extent that the whole landscape can be viewed as a series of heavily iconographic signs and symbols. It was both the mundane objects and the extraordinarily endowed ‘stars’ of mass culture which the Surrealists brought together in their own unique dream landscapes. Benjamin seeks to do something else with these same evanescent objects and images. He wants to use them as a means of waking up the masses from the slumber which, in their conventional representation, these wish-images invoke. With some difficulty Benjamin embarks on the work of explaining how, with the help of these objects (already overloaded with historical and mythical meaning), ‘the collective’ can empower itself by ‘reconstructing the capacity for experience’. It is never quite clear in Benjamin’s work how this can happen. But there are, however, the potentialities for change, including first, that ‘technical reproduction gives back . . . what technical production takes away’, second, that the availability of technically produced images allows a ‘new capacity to study modern existence reflectively’, third, that the unconscious wish-images hidden deep in the structure of the objects of consumer culture can be somehow brought to the surface, and, fourth, that it is also possible to read into and from the other discarded images, those which have only recently gone out of fashion, something useful and important about the conditions of their historical production. The potential for unlocking a kind of ‘popular memory’ lies in the substance and materiality of the childhood toy, or the now old-fashioned item of clothing. There is, of course, a huge amount of other material included in The Dialectics of Seeing which cannot be summarized here. What remains to be done is to assess the significance for cultural studies of the highly condensed, heavily imagistic, highly imaginative but frequently cryptic ideas put forward by Benjamin in the Passagenwerk. Part of Benjamin’s plan was to challenge the immediacy of the present and the ‘dream state’ which mass culture induced, by recovering a sense of history. But what history and how? Benjamin was well aware of the power of what we would now call the ideologies of history, transmitted through culture and through generations, and of the role these play in creating a mystified understanding of contemporary reality. Without the aid of the concept of ideology but with a clear sense of the need for constructing an alternative history and an alternative 90 ANGELA McROBBIE historiography, Benjamin proposed that the everyday objects of industrial culture, particularly those entering a kind of twilight age in terms of their usefulness or attractiveness, could be rediscovered and rendered useful again in what he envisaged as a project of remembering and understanding the dynamics of the moment of their creation. This was indeed a radical proposal reflecting an outright rejection of conventional history in favour of a non-linear history, one which corresponded to the definition of history offered by his friend and colleague Bloch: ‘A polyrhythmic and multi-spatial entity, with enough unmastered and as yet by no means revealed corners’. For Benjamin the task was to unravel the meanings of the discarded items lying in these dusty corners. The Paris arcades, already in Benjamin’s time well past their ‘sell-by date’ and replaced in grandeur by the new and luxurious department stores, could be looked to as a ‘precursor of modernity’, a set of buildings which the everyday life of the present rendered almost invisible in their unfashionable status but which precisely because of this eclipsing by progress could be returned to and dwelt upon afresh. In this sense the arcades become emblems, icons of an ‘unmastered’ past moment not yet defined as historical. The arcades become Benjamin’s symbol for not one but a variety of social processes. The grandiosity and scale of their architecture tell us something about the confident way in which premodernity anticipated the rise of consumerism, at the same time their cathedral-like ceilings, the dim light from the windows, and the long passageways like church aisles, flanked on either side not by small chapels to pray in but by chapels of consumption, demonstrated exactly what Benjamin recognized as a recurring theme in the conception of new cultural forms; that is, the tendency to incorporate at some unconscious level familiar and comforting reminders of those things which new technology and social progress and indeed which the new object itself make redundant. This looking back to the noncontemporary signifies not simply nostalgia but rather a stirring of discontent or dissatisfaction with the present, a deeper anxiety which cannot be extinguished even by the brilliance, the luxury and the apparent mass availability of the new. This dimension does indeed draw us into a deeper level of thought, one which is continually present in Benjamin’s work but which remains difficult to extrapolate. Benjamin is concerned with the way in which the present bears traces of the recent past within it and with how popular sentiments are embedded into the materiality of the objects which themselves are evidence of and embody the process of historical change. His interest is not then in how great architects, urban planners and designers combine their imaginative skills with the technology and political and ideological power at their disposal, but rather with a more dispersed, more general ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1965) which brings to bear on these forms and environments a more popular strain, a vernacular. But this is not a question of bricolage, it is not just how ‘they’ (the collective) add their imprint to an environment, an economy, and a mode of production not of their own choosing. Instead it is about how utopian hopes for emancipation come to be embedded right inside the cultural objects and artefacts, from the point of their inception and design, and how these ‘wishes’ have to be heeded in the act of refashioning the future. Benjamin is here providing us with a kind of prehistory of urban modernity through the currency of the commodity. There is, in the commodity form and underneath the glossy packaging and all the promises of the new, a pre-history T H E P L A C E O F W A LT E R B E N J A M I N 91 which includes a ‘backward’ anti-capitalistic impulse. It is only very recently that theorists like John Fiske and Michel de Certeau have attempted to unravel a similar dynamic in contemporary consumer culture. As Fiske writes, ‘The commodities produced and distributed by the culture industries that are made into popular culture are those that get out of control, that become undisciplined . . . The economic needs of the industries can be met only if the people choose their commodities as adequate resources for popular culture . . . and they will choose only those texts that offer opportunities to resist, evade, or scandalise’ hegemony (1989: 104–5). Modernity desperately seeks to deny the presence of volatile and unstable elements. One way of doing this is by attempting to stifle their memory by simply producing more and more objects for more and more people. It is this aspect, along with the simultaneous rapid change and deadly repetition brought about by modernity, which leads Benjamin to describe it as ‘hell’. Fashion, according to Benjamin, is hellish because, despite its irreverent attitude towards tradition (mentioned above), it intensifies and accelerates the act of social forgetting, indeed is predicated on it. Benjamin returns repeatedly to fashion, though it is significant that he links fashion with prostitution and that he also takes it as emblematic of the trivial and of course of the feminine. Fashion, he claims, is both the invention and the archetypal symbol of modernity. Its denunciation of the recent past (i.e., of last season’s styles) must be challenged if we are to understand the way in which utopian or emancipatory ideals manage to find some latent expression in mass culture. There are problems and inconsistencies in Benjamin’s ideas on fashion, as there are in his whole understanding of the cultural meaning of the commodity form. There is no point in pretending these can be easily explicated and then found a place in cultural studies alongside existing work on this area. In Benjamin’s favour, however, it could be said that in his own way he recognized, long before popular culture existed as a topic of any academic or political debate in Britain, what since has been called the ‘multi-accentuality’ of the sign, the instability of meaning, its capacity for change and the extent to which historical change itself was condensed and encapsulated in the forms and the meanings of the consumer goods which filled the display shelves of the shops and arcades. He also recognized that the commodity worked, for the mass of the people, primarily as an image. They could look but not buy, or at least the rate of buying lagged far behind the opportunities for looking. What they were looking at, whether ‘window-dressed’ or photographed and put on the pages of the magazines, were texts replete with meanings which were activated, however, only at the point of reception. In fashion Benjamin also, and not surprisingly, brings to bear the baffled, fascinated but also patronizing gaze of the male writer. He looks in bewilderment, finds some cause to retrieve positive elements, but remains more firmly on the side of disapproval as bourgeois culture celebrates itself by so lavishly renewing itself in fashion each season. Benjamin’s uneasy relation to women, the absence of any sense of sexual politics in his writing and the constant references to the charms of the prostitute, make it unlikely that in discussing fashion he might consider the fact that here ‘disruptive’ elements exist all the more forcefully. Benjamin does not consider, for example, that, for women, fantasies of emancipation might well take shape in and, through the language of fashion. 92 ANGELA McROBBIE Benjamin’s aim in the Passagenwerk remained incomplete. It is, in effect, to develop a theory of culture, which is also a form of cultural practice. But the people or the masses possess only a metaphorical presence here. Even as a flâneur (the emblem of the emptiness of modernity) Benjamin exists in a strangely depopulated urban landscape where only the prostitutes, pathetic in their state of physical decay, and as such entirely appropriate to their chosen business environment, the upper floors of the deserted arcades, hang out. They too are discarded ‘mass articles’. Benjamin’s turning away from the people or from the interactive dimension of consumer culture was no doubt a philosophical as well as a methodological decision. His cultural theory is one of objects rather than of social relations. As a consequence it makes it even more difficult to unravel or extend the meaning of this shadowy presence of living people and their utopian impulses in everyday goods and artefacts. Where exactly do these come from, what do they mean? Is it the idea of an abundance where there is enough for everybody, which provides the antielitist, democratic spark? If so, is this a kind of nascent or transcendent class consciousness? Or is it a historical residue, a reminder of an earlier folk culture where the fruits of the land were not entirely controlled by the laws of bourgeois property? Or, is Benjamin relying on the Marxist idea that capitalism contains within it the seeds of its own destruction and that signs of this transcendence can indeed be caught sight of in everyday life? The problem of clarity here is compounded not just by the note form in which so many of the Passagenwerk ideas are jotted down but by the fact that, having gone so far, Benjamin leaves off and continues his analysis by casting his gaze back to childhood. There is the way in which consumer culture enters into our unconsciousness by providing the raw material for our dreams. We do not just dream of any old tie or any old pair of shoes, but of those shoes or ties which are themselves emblematic of a particular social moment. In this sense fashion enters into and gives shape to our internal and unconscious thought processes. Likewise in memory, the fondly remembered moment where the child is clutching at the mother’s skirt, contains not just some archetypal skirt but a skirt of that moment, a commodity of consumer capitalism for which the passage of time is as merciless as it is for its wearer. It is like saying that commodities chart part of our lives, they constitute our reality, they are the fabric of the culture in which we live, they are not just commodities. But it is to childhood which Benjamin repeatedly returns, and to many of the ideas and experiences recorded in his ‘Berlin chronicle’ which are given a more theoretical treatment. These include remembering the shopping expeditions with his mother, the huge variety of luxury goods delivered to their Berlin apartment as a result of his father’s business contacts, and also the way in which his family was socially positioned at the forefront of modernity, a position which was later to prove so tragic for them. Before the rise of Nazism, Benjamin’s father had a financial stake in the first artificial ice rink in Berlin which Benjamin also remembered as being both an ‘ice palace’ and a nightclub where he caught sight of a prostitute dressed in a sailor suit, a figure who subsequently became a source of fantasy and desire. Benjamin was fascinated by the often unnoticed but daily signs of contemporary urban life, the sandwich men, the gas stations, the neon signs, the women’s fashions, the brightly lit shop windows. He was most drawn by those recently discarded objects existing still in what Buck-Morss describes as a ‘half- T H E P L A C E O F W A LT E R B E N J A M I N 93 life’. Such commodities seemed to be emblematic of the passing of time which was peculiar to modern capitalism. To Benjamin their place in the history of modernity was particularly important in that they represented an earlier moment, where modernity was just in sight, and where it was more possible, as a result, to recognize some of those utopian elements which existed alongside, but were not as yet wholly taken over by, consumer capitalism. It was these impulses which gave Benjamin some hope that through the object and the commodity form there could be expressed wishes and ideals other than those merely of acquisition, wealth and private property. In approaching consumer culture from this angle Benjamin was also trying to pull back from the grip of ‘bourgeois capitalism’ its hegemony over all that it produced and the historical conditions of that production. If the objects possessed the ability to enchant and be forgotten, then Benjamin would describe another mode of enchantment which occurred in and through these same objects and which in the process of being revealed and remembered could play an active role in the reenchantment of society (i.e., through the revolutionary process). Benjamin therefore offers another history of place, space and culture through reading its objects backwards. Hence the arcades project itself. By the 1920s and 1930s the arcades existed as exemplary symbols of the ever-changing experience of modernity. Their crumbling façades, their ornate glass ceilings, the lavish ironwork, the atmosphere of the luxury of the recent past, the forlorn items left standing in the windows, once the epitome of fashion but now hopelessly old-fashioned, all of these provide Benjamin with a rich source of raw materials from which he was to produce his verbal slide show of ‘cognitive images’. There are a number of points which remain to be made in relation to Benjamin as looked at from the perspective of cultural studies. Some of these have been mentioned already, in passing, and require a few further words, others are more open-ended, questions which Benjamin, in his own indirect way, might ask of cultural studies now. Benjamin’s distinctive and imaginative mode of argument coheres around the idea of ‘looking back’. While he too is entranced by many of the signs and sights of urban modernity, he obstinately insists that we hold the tide of rapid change at bay by looking at the recent past. However, he is not proposing a full or a linear historical account of the late moment of pre-modernity. Instead, his method is to work in and through the ‘dialectical image’. Thus he chooses the painting by Paul Klee titled Angelus Novus as an opportunity to reflect on the process of historical change. Where capitalism celebrates itself and its achievements and victories with ‘great monuments to mythic progress’ (BuckMorss 1989: 93) Benjamin looks to this painting as a representation of a different way of seeing. Here the ‘angel of history’ who ‘looks as if he were about to move away from something at which he is staring’ sees not a ‘chain of events’ but a series of catastrophes which appear like a pile of wreckages in a scrapyard. Progress is that ‘storm’ which is carrying the angel forward through space and time, against his will. With his back towards the future he fixes resolutely on the scale of the damage below him. It is characteristic of Benjamin to look to a small, delicate and modernist work, like Klee’s painting, to demonstrate the power of the image itself and to use it as a means of illustrating his historiographical approach. 94 ANGELA McROBBIE Not only does Benjamin continually remind us of the need for history but his method proves particularly appropriate to cultural studies. A more radical use of history like that developed by Benjamin would complement existing work on popular images and textuality. If the precise way in which this might be done is clouded by his use of poetic language, where his own ‘text’ is condensed almost to the point of obscurity, then this should not, as perhaps it has in the past, lead us to dismiss the value of Benjamin’s ‘other work’. Of course he was influenced by Baudelaire, of course he was sitting in the street cafés of Paris and Berlin composing prose images which he then set to work in the name of cultural history, theory, or philosophy. What he was doing was a kind of archaeology on the commodities and images of consumer culture. But this is not so far removed from our own contemporary practice of semiology. It is a cultural history in the most literal of senses, a style of writing and a mode of work which could perhaps be compared with Dick Hebdige’s many ‘readings’ of images drawn from the world of contemporary pop culture, in particular the skinheads photograph which is the focus of attention in the essay entitled ‘Hiding in the light’ (Hebdige 1988). It is also strongly reminiscent of Hebdige’s use of the image of the car in his run-down inner-city street, transformed by its owner into a kind of temple, ‘a cathedral among hovels’. The second way in which Benjamin’s interest in history is of value to cultural studies in the 1990s is in the challenge he poses to the way in which history is actually done. He is arguing for a sense of recent history to be continually with us in our inhabiting of the present. This requires some effort for the reason that we live in a consumer culture predicated on forgetting or else on highly selective remembering, e.g. through nostalgia or the ‘heritage industry’. But it also raises a number of additional questions. Which recent history? How is that history to be chosen? According to what criteria? The Passagenwerk is a history and documentation of selected items drawn from the ‘window’ of urban life as seen by Benjamin. What characterizes his chosen images is that they have become less visible as a result of their age. However, they are by no means old. It is rather that the pace of historical change has accelerated as a result of the technological and social changes brought about by this later stage of industrialization. These ‘emblematic’ goods have been outmoded by the abundance of the new. History is then doubly a fiction. It is not the passing of time but the pacing of capitalist production manifest in the language of consumer culture. Most important to Benjamin’s work is the immediate history of the time in which he himself was writing. Fascism too had an unnatural, almost magical ability to naturalize itself. It had quickly understood the power of the mass media and the power of myth and ritual. Benjamin’s historical method was also a riposte to the grandiosity of fascism, to its claims of universalism, to its monumental vision. Declining the redemptive, grand narrative of communism, Benjamin persevered against the odds with his modest, imagistic practice of cultural history. Benjamin tightly grips on to the past, like a child clinging on to his mother’s hand. He carefully records and analyses the small pleasures and enjoyments of the present in which he feels the ‘pulse’ of the past. Benjamin’s best work is fuelled by a love of culture, a love of collecting cultural items, including books and picture postcards, and by a love of those urban experiences which are not conventionally the subject of academic study (e.g. walking, café culture). These strands of thinking T H E P L A C E O F W A LT E R B E N J A M I N 95 put him at odds with the left in Germany at the time (with a few exceptions, including Bloch, to whom he owed a great deal in his conception and writing of the Passagenwerk). It often seems as though he was writing against the inexorable forces of history and fascism rather than in favour of socialist revolution. Uncertain of Marxism as a political practice or as a theory of history, Benjamin pursues his own singular path, drawing on Marxist ideas, and influenced by Brecht and Lacis on questions of art and culture, but concerning himself in the Passagenwerk with modernity as a multilayered social reality, one which could be grasped only in the form of the philosophical fragment, the ‘dialectical image’, or in the note form itself. This kind of writing was also a literary experiment, an attempt to create a new practice of theory, history and philosophy which could be compressed into a series of tightly worked prose images. These fragments become the hallmarks of Benjamin’s style. For the Passagenwerk to be of use to cultural studies it would be necessary for those working in cultural studies to remember the value of experimentation, the importance of interdisciplinarity, the breaking down of the distinctions not just between philosophy, history, literary criticism and cultural analysis, but also between art and criticism, not for the sake of the new, but for social change and transformation. During the time I was living in Birmingham, one of my closest friends and neighbours was the feminist Soviet historian Lizzie Waters. Because she was married to a Soviet citizen Lizzie was able to travel to and from Moscow regularly, although she had to publish her work under an assumed name. After a long winter in Moscow Lizzie returned to Birmingham with stories of queues and no fruit or vegetables for months. One day she had waited several hours because she had heard that there were frozen chickens available. When she got home with the chicken, a treat for academic friends visiting from Australia, she discovered from the small print on the wrapping that it had come from Germany and that its sell-by date had expired two weeks earlier. A few weeks later (and still many years before perestroika, never mind the coup of August 1991), I dreamed that I did eventually make it to Moscow to visit Lizzie. But when I arrived the city centre was thronged with smiling, well-dressed men and women. There was a festive feel in the air. The architecture was dark and magnificent, like the great gloomy tenements and municipal buildings of my childhood in Glasgow. The shops were full of clothes and domestic gadgetry, but most of all it was the cafés whose light flooded out through the frosty windows on to the street, which seemed like the heart of the city. I eventually caught sight of Lizzie, who waved me over to join the group of friends she was with. The place was awash with colour and warmth. Steaming coffee, hot chocolate and cakes were ordered. I remember this as a profoundly political dream. The so-called socialist society which I was visiting, contrary to my expectations, provided me with many of the consumer goods and items around which I organise my own everyday life: coffee, for instance, city lights and clothes. (In Moscow Diary Benjamin also writes: ‘The scarcity of living quarters here creates a strange effect: unlike in other cities, here 96 ANGELA McROBBIE the streets in the evening are lined with large and small houses with almost every window lit up . . . you might imagine you were looking at an illumination.’ Sociability and friendship also flourished in this loud, crowded dream environment. There was no fear, no silence, no guarded words. Perhaps, in the end, it is not insignificant that one of the ways Benjamin exists for left intellectuals today is, as Susan Sontag has shown, as an image. We look back to the many photographs of him, and see what looks like a stubborn scholar, a reluctant refugee, a critical intellectual. Benjamin understood the pressing need for change and, more immediately, for the struggle against fascism, but he was not politically didactic. He was non-dogmatic and non-authoritarian in his thinking and in his practice. One of the values of his work to cultural studies today is that while Benjamin, like the contemporary postmodernists, rejects the notion of progress and rejects history as a straight line, he argues all the more forcibly for the place of history in the study of culture. For this reason, the sadness and the suicide are not simply biographical notes. They are part of a recent history which cultural studies must continue to remember. Chapter 7 Stuart Hall C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D I T S THEORETICAL LEGACIES EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION T H IS S H O R T E X ER C I S E in intellectual autobiography by Stuart Hall, arguably the most influential figure in contemporary cultural studies, is surprisingly downbeat. That’s because it was written at the moment when cultural studies was taking off as an academic discipline in the US, attracting money and notoriety, and triggering an extraordinary theoretical “fluency” or textual “ventriloquism” as Hall puts it. This called into question the discipline’s seriousness – read its political commitment – and its history. Here Hall reaffirms the first, using the example of AIDS to argue for theory’s “deadly seriousness,” and recapitulates a personal version of the second. While recognizing that cultural studies has many histories and legacies (he has particular difficulty with the “Britishness” of “British cultural studies”), Hall insists that, for him at least, the field emerges out of the 1950s disintegration of classical Marxism in its Eurocentrism and its thesis that the economic base has a determining effect on the cultural superstructure. (Hall does not mention the decline of class as an identity-forming category amongst the young in Britain at that time.) Hall acknowledges that cultural studies has been, and must be, formed in interruptions to its trajectories and perceived mission – notably, early on, by feminism and anti-racism. Nevertheless, he argues, what is stable in cultural studies is a Gramscian understanding of “conjunctural knowledge” – knowledge situated in, and applicable to, specific and immediate political or historical circumstances; as well as an awareness that the structure of representations which form culture’s alphabet and grammar are instruments of social power, requiring critical and activist examination. It is this kind of examination that is at jeopardy in a professionalised cultural studies, Hall implies. 98 ST U A R T HA L L It is interesting to think about the relation of this essay to the work of cultural studies dissidents such as Tony Bennett, or to the work of openly philosophical theorists such as Judith Butler, or finally of US critics closer to Hall’s understanding of radical intellectual practice but who write in a conjuncture he does not quite share, such as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (all collected in this volume). Further reading: Bennett 1998; Dworkin 1997; Morley and Chen 1996; Morris 1990; Mouffe 1979. My title suggests a look back to the past, to consult and think about the Now and the Future of cultural studies by way of a retrospective glance. It does seem necessary to do some genealogical and archaeological work on the archive. Now the question of the archives is extremely difficult for me because, where cultural studies is concerned, I sometimes feel like a tableau vivant, a spirit of the past resurrected, laying claim to the authority of an origin. After all, didn’t cultural studies emerge somewhere at that moment when I first met Raymond Williams, or in the glance I exchanged with Richard Hoggart? In that moment, cultural studies was born; it emerged full-grown from the head! I do want to talk about the past, but definitely not in that way. I don’t want to talk about British cultural studies (which is in any case a pretty awkward signifier for me) in a patriarchal way, as the keeper of the conscience of cultural studies, hoping to police you back into line with what it really was if only you knew. That is to say, I want to absolve myself of the many burdens of representation which people carry around – I carry around at least three: I’m expected to speak for the entire black race on all questions theoretical, critical, etc., and sometimes for British politics, as well as for cultural studies. This is what is known as the black person’s burden, and I would like to absolve myself of it at this moment. That means, paradoxically, speaking autobiographically. Autobiography is usually thought of as seizing the authority of authenticity. But in order not to be authoritative, I’ve got to speak autobiographically. I’m going to tell you about my own take on certain theoretical legacies and moments in cultural studies, not because it is the truth or the only way of telling the history. I myself have told it many other ways before; and I intend to tell it in a different way later. But just at this moment, for this conjecture, I want to take a position in relation to the ‘grand narrative’ of cultural studies for the purposes of opening up some reflections on cultural studies as a practice, on our institutional position, and on its project. I want to do that by referring to some theoretical legacies or theoretical moments, but in a very particular way. This is not a commentary on the success or effectiveness of different theoretical positions in cultural studies (that is for some other occasion). It is an attempt to say something about what certain theoretical moments in cultural studies have been like for me, and from that position, to take some bearings about the general question of the politics of theory. Cultural studies is a discursive formation, in Foucault’s sense. It has no simple origins, though some of us were present at some point when it first named itself in C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D I T S T H E O R E T I C AL L E G A C I E S 99 that way. Much of the work out of which it grew, in my own experience, was already present in the work of other people. Raymond Williams has made the same point, charting the roots of cultural studies in the early adult education movement in his essay on ‘The future of cultural studies’ (1989). ‘The relation between a project and a formation is always decisive’, he says, because they are ‘different ways of materializing . . . then of describing a common disposition of energy and direction.’ Cultural studies has multiple discourses; it has a number of different histories. It is a whole set of formations; it has its own different conjunctures and moments in the past. It included many different kinds of work. I want to insist on that! It always was a set of unstable formations. It was ‘centres’ only in quotation marks, in a particular kind of way which I want to define in a moment. It had many trajectories; many people had and have different trajectories through it; it was constructed by a number of different methodologies and theoretical positions, all of them in contention. Theoretical work in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was more appropriately called theoretical noise. It was accompanied by a great deal of bad feeling, argument, unstable anxieties, and angry silences. Now, does it follow that cultural studies is not a policed disciplinary area? That it is whatever people do, if they choose to call or locate themselves within the project and practice of cultural studies? I am not happy with that formulation either. Although cultural studies as a project is open-ended, it can’t be simply pluralist in that way. Yes, it refuses to be a master discourse or a meta-discourse of any kind. Yes, it is a project that is always open to that which it doesn’t yet know, to that which it can’t yet name. But it does have some will to connect; it does have some stake in the choices it makes. It does matter whether cultural studies is this or that. It can’t be just any old thing which chooses to march under a particular banner. It is a serious enterprise, or project, and that is inscribed in what is sometimes called the ‘political’ aspect of cultural studies. Not that there’s one politics already inscribed in it. But there is something at stake in cultural studies, in a way that I think, and hope, is not exactly true of many other very important intellectual and critical practices. Here one registers the tension between a refusal to close the field, to police it and, at the same time, a determination to stake out some positions within it and argue for them. That is the tension – the dialogic approach to theory – that I want to try to speak to in a number of different ways in the course of this paper. I don’t believe knowledge is closed, but I do believe that politics is impossible without what I have called ‘the arbitrary closure’; without what Homi Bhabha called social agency as an arbitrary closure. That is to say, I don’t understand a practise which aims to make a difference in the world, which doesn’t have some points of difference or distinction which it has to stake out, which really matter. It is a question of positionalities. Now, it is true that those positionalities are never final, they’re never absolute. They can’t be translated intact from one conjuncture to another; they cannot be depended on to remain in the same place. I want to go back to that moment of ‘staking out a wager’ in cultural studies, to those moments in which the positions began to matter. This is a way of opening the questions of the ‘wordliness’ of cultural studies, to borrow a term from Edward Said. I am not dwelling on the secular connotations of the metaphor of worldliness here, but on the worldliness of cultural studies. I’m 100 STUART HALL dwelling on the ‘dirtiness’ of it: the dirtiness of the semiotic game, if I can put it that way. I’m trying to return the project of cultural studies from the clean air of meaning and textuality and theory to the something nasty down below. This involves the difficult exercise of examining some of the key theoretical turns or moments in cultural studies. The first trace that I want to deconstruct has to do with a view of British cultural studies which often distinguishes it by the fact that, at a certain moment, it became a Marxist critical practice. What exactly does that assignation of cultural studies as a Marxist critical theory mean? How can we think cultural studies at that moment? What moment is it we are speaking of? What does that mean for the theoretical legacies, traces, and after-effects which Marxism continues to have in cultural studies? There are a number of ways of telling that history, and let me remind you that I’m not proposing this as the only story. But I do want to set it up in what I think may be a slightly surprising way to you. I entered cultural studies from the New Left, and the New Left always regarded Marxism as a problem, as trouble, as danger, not as a solution. Why? It had nothing to do with theoretical questions as such or in isolation. It had to do with the fact that my own (and its own) political formation occurred in a moment historically very much like the one we are in now – which I am astonished that so few people have addressed – the moment of the disintegration of a certain kind of Marxism. In fact, the first British New Left emerged in 1956 at the moment of the disintegration of an entire historical/political project. In that sense I came into Marxism backwards: against the Soviet tanks in Budapest, as it were. What I mean by that is certainly not that I wasn’t profoundly, and that cultural studies then wasn’t from the beginning, proudly influenced by the questions that Marxism as a theoretical project put on the agenda: the power, the global reach and history-making capacities of capital; the question of class; the complex relationships between power, which is an easier term to establish in the discourses of culture than exploitation, and exploitation; the question of a general theory which could, in a critical way, connect together in a critical reflection different domains of life, politics and theory, theory and practice, economic, political, ideological questions and so on; the notion of critical knowledge itself and the production of critical knowledge as a practice. These important, central questions are what one meant by working within shouting distance of Marxism, working on Marxism, working against Marxism, working with it, working to try to develop Marxism. There never was a prior moment when cultural studies and Marxism represented a perfect theoretical fit. From the beginning (to use this way of speaking for a moment) there was always-already the question of the great inadequacies, theoretically and politically, the resounding silences, the great evasions of Marxism – the things that Marx did not talk about or seem to understand which were our privileged object of study: culture, ideology, language, the symbolic. These were always-already, instead, the things which had imprisoned Marxism as a mode of thought, as an activity of critical practice – its orthodoxy, its doctrinal character, its determinism, its reductionism, its immutable law of history, its status as a metanarrative. That is to say, the encounter between British cultural studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement with a problem – not a theory, not even C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D I T S T H E O R E T I C A L L E G A C I E S 101 a problematic. It begins, and develops through the critique of a certain reductionism and economism, which I think is not extrinsic but intrinsic to Marxism; a contestation with the model of base and superstructure, through which sophisticated and vulgar Marxism alike had tried to think the relationships between society, economy, and culture. It was located and sited in a necessary and prolonged and as yet unending contestation with the question of false consciousness. In my own case, it required a not-yet-completed contestation with the profound Eurocentrism of Marxist theory. I want to make this very precise. It is not just a matter of where Marx happened to be born, and of what he talked about, but of the model at the centre of the most developed parts of Marxist theory, which suggested that capitalism evolved organically from within its own transformations. Whereas I came from a society where the profound integument of capitalist society, economy, and culture had been imposed by conquest and colonization. This is a theoretical, not a vulgar critique. I don’t blame Marx because of where he was born; I’m questioning the theory for the model around which it is articulated: its Eurocentrism. I want to suggest a different metaphor for theoretical work: the metaphor of struggle, of wrestling with the angels. The only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency. I mean to say something later about the astonishing theoretical fluency of cultural studies now. But my own experience of theory – and Marxism is certainly a case in point – is of wrestling with the angels – a metaphor you can take as literally as you like. I remember wrestling with Althusser. I remember looking at the idea of ‘theoretical practice’ in Reading Capital and thinking, ‘I’ve gone as far in this book as it is proper to go’. I felt, I will not give an inch to this profound misreading, this superstructuralist mistranslation, of classical Marxism, unless he beats me down, unless he defeats me in spirit. He’ll have to march over to me to convince me. I warred with him, to the death. A long, rambling piece I wrote on Marx’s 1857 ‘Introduction’ to The Grundrisse, in which I tried to stake out the difference between structuralism in Marx’s epistemology and Althusser’s, was only the tip of the iceberg of this long engagement. And that is not simply a personal question. In the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, for five or six years, long after the anti-theoreticism or resistance to theory of cultural studies had been overcome, and we decided, in a very un-British way, we had to take the plunge into theory, we walked right around the entire circumference of European thought, in order not to be, in any simple capitulation to the Zeitgeist, Marxists. We read German idealism, we read Weber upside down, we read Hegelian idealism, we read idealistic art criticism. So the notion that Marxism and cultural studies slipped into place, recognised an immediate affinity, joined hands in some teleological or Hegelian moment of synthesis, and there was the founding moment of cultural studies, is entirely mistaken. It couldn’t have been more different from that. And when, eventually, in the 1970s, British cultural studies did advance – in many different ways, it must be said – within the problematic of Marxism, you should hear the term problematic in a genuine way, not just in a formalist-theoretical way: as a problem; as much about struggling against the constraints and limits of that model as about necessary questions it required us to address. And when, in the end, in my own work, I tried to 102 STUART HALL learn from and work with the theoretical gains of Gramsci, it was only because certain strategies of evasion had forced Gramsci’s work, in a number of different ways, to respond to what I can only call (here’s another metaphor for theoretical work) the conundrums of theory, the things which Marxist theory couldn’t answer, the things about the modern world which Gramsci discovered remained unresolved within the theoretical framework of grand theory – Marxism – in which he continued to work. At a certain point, the questions I still wanted to address in short were inaccessible to me except via a detour through Gramsci. Not because Gramsci resolved them but because he at least addressed many of them. I don’t want to go through what it is I personally think cultural studies in the British context, in a certain period, learned from Gramsci: immense amounts about the nature of culture itself, about the discipline of the conjunctural, about the importance of historical specificity, about the enormously productive metaphor of hegemony, about the way in which one can think questions of class relations only by using the displaced notion of ensemble and blocs. These are the particular gains of the ‘detour’ via Gramsci, but I’m not trying to talk about that. I want to say, in this context, about Gramsci, that while Gramsci belonged and belongs to the problematic of Marxism, his importance for this moment of British cultural studies is precisely the degree to which he radically displaced some of the inheritances of Marxism in cultural studies. The radical character of Gramsci’s ‘displacement’ of Marxism has not yet been understood and probably won’t ever be reckoned with, now we are entering the era of post-Marxism. Such is the nature of the movement of history and of intellectual fashion. But Gramsci also did something else for cultural studies, and I want to say a little bit about that because it refers to what I call the need to reflect on our institutional position, and our intellectual practice. I tried on many occasions, and other people in British cultural studies and at the Centre especially have tried, to describe what it is we thought we were doing with the kind of intellectual work we set in place in the Centre. I have to confess that, though I’ve read many, more elaborated and sophisticated accounts, Gramsci’s account still seems to me to come closest to expressing what it is I think we were trying to do. Admittedly, there’s a problem with his phrase ‘the production of organic intellectuals’. But there is no doubt in my mind that we were trying to find an institutional practice in cultural studies that might produce an organic intellectual. We didn’t know previously what that would mean, in the context of Britain in the 1970s, and we weren’t sure we would recognize him or her if we managed to produce it. The problem about the concept of an organic intellectual is that it appears to align intellectuals with an emerging historic movement and we couldn’t tell then, and can hardly tell now, where that emerging historical movement was to be found. We were organic intellectuals without any organic point of reference; organic intellectuals with a nostalgia or will or hope (to use Gramsci’s phrase from another context) that at some point we would be prepared in intellectual work for that kind of relationship, if such a conjuncture ever appeared. More truthfully, we were prepared to imagine or model or simulate such a relationship in its absence: ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. But I think it is very important that Gramsci’s thinking around these questions certainly captures part of what we were about. Because a second aspect of Gramsci’s C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D I T S T H E O R E T I C A L L E G A C I E S 103 definition of intellectual work, which I think has always been lodged somewhere close to the notion of cultural studies as a project, has been his requirement that the ‘organic intellectual’ must work on two fronts at one and the same time. On the one hand, we had to be at the very forefront of intellectual theoretical work because, as Gramsci says, it is the job of the organic intellectual to know more than the traditional intellectuals do: really know, not just pretend to know, not just to have the facility of knowledge, but to know deeply and profoundly. So often knowledge for Marxism is pure recognition – the production again of what we have always known! If you are in the game of hegemony you have to be smarter than ‘them’. Hence, there are no theoretical limits from which cultural studies can turn back. But the second aspect is just as crucial: that the organic intellectual cannot absolve himself or herself from the responsibility of transmitting those ideas, that knowledge, through the intellectual function, to those who do not belong, professionally, in the intellectual class. And unless those two fronts are operating at the same time, or at least unless those two ambitions are part of the project of cultural studies, you can get enormous theoretical advance without any engagement at the level of the political project. I’m extremely anxious that you should not decode what I’m saying as an antitheoretical discourse. It is not anti-theory, but it does have something to do with the conditions and problems of developing intellectual and theoretical work as a political practice. It is an extremely difficult road, not resolving the tensions between those two requirements, but living with them. Gramsci never asked us to resolve them, but he gave us a practical example of how to live with them. We never produced organic intellectuals (would that we had) at the Centre. We never connected with that rising historic movement; it was a metaphoric exercise. Nevertheless, metaphors are serious things. They affect one’s practice. I’m trying to redescribe cultural studies as theoretical work which must go on and on living with that tension. I want to look at two other theoretical moments in cultural studies which interrupted the already interrupted history of its formation. Some of these developments came as it were from outer space: they were not all generated from the inside, they were not part of an inner-unfolding general theory of culture. Again and again, the so-called unfolding of cultural studies was interrupted by a break, by real ruptures, by exterior forces; the interruption, as it were, of new ideas, which decentred what looked like the accumulating practice of the work. There’s another metaphor for theoretical work: theoretical work as interruption. There were at least two interruptions in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies: the first around feminism, and the second around questions of race. This is not an attempt to sum up the theoretical and political advances and consequences for British cultural studies of the feminist intervention; that is for another time, another place. But I don’t want, either, to invoke that moment in an open-ended and casual way. For cultural studies (in addition to many other theoretical projects), the intervention of feminism was specific and decisive. It was ruptural. It reorganized the field in quite concrete ways. First, the opening of the question of the personal as political, and its consequences for changing the object of study in cultural studies, was completely revolutionary in a theoretical and practical way. Second, the radical expansion of the notion of power, which had 104 STUART HALL hitherto been very much developed within the framework of the notion of the public, the public domain, with the effect that we could not use the term power – so key to the earlier problematic of hegemony – in the same way. Third, the centrality of questions of gender and sexuality to the understanding of power itself. Fourth, the opening of many of the questions that we thought we had abolished around the dangerous area of the subjective and the subject, which lodged those questions at the centre of cultural studies as a theoretical practice. Fifth, ‘the re-opening’ of the closed frontier between social theory and the theory of the unconscious – psychoanalysis. It’s hard to describe the import of the opening of that new continent in cultural studies, marked out by the relationship – or rather, what Jacqueline Rose has called the as yet ‘unsettled relations’ – between feminism, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, or indeed how it was accomplished. We know it was, but it’s not known generally how and where feminism first broke in. I use the metaphor deliberately: as the thief in the night, it broke in; interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies. The title of the volume in which this dawn-raid was first accomplished – Women Take Issue – is instructive: for they ‘took issue’ in both senses – took over that year’s book and initiated a quarrel. But I want to tell you something else about it. Because of the growing importance of feminist work and the early beginnings of the feminist movement outside in the very early 1970s, many of us in the Centre – mainly, of course, men – thought it was time there was good feminist work in cultural studies. And we indeed tried to buy it in, to import it, to attract good feminist scholars. As you might expect, many of the women in cultural studies weren’t terribly interested in this benign project. We were opening the door to feminist studies, being good, transformed men. And yet, when it broke in through the window, every single unsuspected resistance rose to the surface – fully installed patriarchal power, which believed it had disavowed itself. There are no leaders here, we used to say; we are all graduate students and members of staff together, learning how to practise cultural studies. You can decide whatever you want to decide, etc. And yet, when it came to the question of the reading list . . . Now that’s where I really discovered about the gendered nature of power. Long, long after I was able to pronounce the words, I encountered the reality of Foucault’s profound insight into the individual reciprocity of knowledge and power. Talking about giving up power is a radically different experience from being silenced. That is another way of thinking, and another metaphor for theory: the way feminism broke, and broke into, cultural studies. Then there is the question of race in cultural studies. I’ve talked about the important ‘extrinsic’ sources of the formation of cultural studies – for example, in what I called the moment of the New Left, and its original quarrel with Marxism – out of which cultural studies grew. And yet, of course, that was a profoundly English or British moment. Actually getting cultural studies to put on its own agenda the critical questions of race, the politics of race, the resistance to racism, the critical questions of cultural politics, was itself a profound theoretical struggle, a struggle of which Policing the Crisis was, curiously, the first and very late example. It represented a decisive turn in my own theoretical and intellectual work, as well as in that of the Centre. Again, it was accomplished only as the result of a long, and sometimes bitter – certainly bitterly contested – internal struggle against a C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D I T S T H E O R E T I C A L L E G A C I E S 105 resounding but unconscious silence. A struggle which continued in what has since come to be known, but only in the rewritten history, as one of the great seminal books of the Centre for Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back. In actuality, Paul Gilroy and the group of people who produced the book found it extremely difficult to create the necessary theoretical and political space in the Centre in which to work on the project. I want to hold to the notion, implicit in both these examples, that movements provoke theoretical moments. And historical conjunctures insist on theories: they are real moments in the evolution of theory. But here I have to stop and retrace my steps. Because I think you could hear, once again, in what I’m saying a kind of invocation of a simple-minded anti-theoretical populism, which does not respect and acknowledge the crucial importance, at each point in the moves I’m trying to renarrativize, of what I would call the necessary delay or detour through theory. I want to talk about that ‘necessary detour’ for a moment. What decentred and dislocated the settled path of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies certainly, and British cultural studies to some extent in general, is what is sometimes called ‘the linguistic turn’: the discovery of discursivity, of textuality. There are casualties in the Centre around those names as well. They were wrestled with, in exactly the same way I’ve tried to describe earlier. But the gains which were made through an engagement with them are crucially important in understanding how theory came to be advanced in that work. And yet, in my view, such theoretical ‘gains’ can never be a self-sufficient moment. Again, there is no space here to do more than begin to list the theoretical advances which were made by the encounters with structuralist, semiotic, and poststructuralist work: the crucial importance of language and of the linguistic metaphor to any study of culture; the expansion of the notion of text and textuality, both as a source of meaning, and as that which escapes and postpones meaning; the recognition of the heterogeneity, of the multiplicity, of meanings, of the struggle to close arbitrarily the infinite semiosis beyond meaning; the acknowledgment of textuality and cultural power, of representation itself, as a site of power and regulation; of the symbolic as a source of identity. These are enormous theoretical advances, though of course, it had always attended to questions of language (Raymond Williams’s work, long before the semiotic revolution, is central there). Nevertheless, the refiguring of theory, made as a result of having to think questions of culture through the metaphors of language and textuality, represents a point beyond which cultural studies must now always necessarily locate itself. The metaphor of the discursive, of textuality, instantiates a necessary delay, a displacement, which I think is always implied in the concept of culture. If you work on culture, or if you’ve tried to work on some other really important things and you find yourself driven back to culture, if culture happens to be what seizes hold of your soul, you have to recognize that you will always be working in an area of displacement. There’s always something decentred about the medium of culture, about language, textuality, and signification, which always escapes and evades the attempt to link it, directly and immediately, with other structures. And yet, at the same time, the shadow, the imprint, the trace, of those other formations, of the intertextuality of texts in their institutional positions, of texts as sources of power, 106 STUART HALL of textuality as a site of representation and resistance, all of those questions can never be erased from cultural studies. The question is what happens when a field, which I’ve been trying to describe in a very punctuated, dispersed, and interrupted way, as constantly changing directions, and which is defined as a political project, tries to develop itself as some kind of coherent theoretical intervention? Or, to put the same question in reverse, what happens when an academic and theoretical enterprise tries to engage in pedagogies which enlist the active engagement of individuals and groups, tries to make a difference in the institutional world in which it is located? These are extremely difficult issues to resolve, because what is asked of us is to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at one and the same time. It asks us to assume that culture will always work through its textualities – and at the same time that textuality is never enough. But never enough of what? Never enough for what? That is an extremely difficult question to answer because, philosophically, it has always been impossible in the theoretical field of cultural studies – whether it is conceived either in terms of texts and contexts, of intertextuality, or of the historical formations in which cultural practices are lodged – to get anything like an adequate theoretical account of culture’s relations and its effects. Nevertheless I want to insist that until and unless cultural studies learns to live with this tension, a tension that all textual practices must assume – a tension which Said describes as the study of the text in its affiliations with ‘institutions, offices, agencies, classes, academies, corporations, groups, ideologically defined parties and professions, nations, races, and genders’ – it will have renounced its ‘worldly’ vocation. That is to say, unless and until one respects the necessary displacement of culture, and yet is always irritated by its failure to reconcile itself with other questions that matter, with other questions that cannot and can never be fully covered by critical textuality in its elaborations, cultural studies as a project, an intervention, remains incomplete. If you lose hold of the tension, you can do extremely fine intellectual work, but you will have lost intellectual practice as a politics. I offer this to you, not because that’s what cultural studies ought to be, or because that’s what the Centre managed to do well, but simply because I think that, overall, is what defines cultural studies as a project. Both in the British and the American context, cultural studies has drawn the attention itself, not just because of its sometimes dazzling internal theoretical development but because it holds theoretical and political questions in an ever irresolvable but permanent tension. It constantly allows the one to irritate, bother and disturb the other, without insisting on some final theoretical closure. I’ve been talking very much in terms of a previous history. But I have been reminded of this tension very forcefully in the discussions on AIDS. AIDS is one of the questions which urgently brings before us our marginality as critical intellectuals in making real effects in the world. And yet it has often been represented for us in contradictory ways. Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point of cultural studies? What is the point of the study of representations, if there is no response to the question of what you say to someone who wants to know if they should take a drug and if that means they’ll die two days later or a few months earlier? At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we’ve been able C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D I T S T H E O R E T I C A L L E G A C I E S 107 to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don’t feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook. On the other hand, in the end, I don’t agree with the way in which the dilemma is often posed for us, for it is indeed a more complex and displaced question than just people dying out there. The question of AIDS is an extremely important terrain of struggle and contestation. In addition to the people we know who are dying, or have died, or will, there are the many people dying who are never spoken of. How could we say that the question of AIDS is not also a question of who gets represented and who does not? AIDS is the site at which the advance of sexual politics is being rolled back. It’s a site at which not only people will die, but desire and pleasure will also die if certain metaphors do not survive, or survive in the wrong way. Unless we operate in this tension, we don’t know what cultural studies can do, can’t, can never do; but also, what it has to do, what it alone has a privileged capacity to do. It has to analyse certain things about the constitutive and political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects of language, about textuality as a site of life and death. Those are the things cultural studies can address. I’ve used that example, not because it’s a perfect example, but because it’s a specific example, because it has a concrete meaning, because it challenges us in its complexity, and in so doing has things to teach us about the future of serious theoretical work. It preserves the essential nature of intellectual work and critical reflection, the irreducibility of the insights which theory can bring to political practice, insights which cannot be arrived at in any other way. And at the same time, it rivets us to the necessary modesty of theory, the necessary modesty of cultural studies as an intellectual project. I want to end in two ways. First I want to address the problem of the institutionalization of these two constructions: British cultural studies and American cultural studies. And then, drawing on the metaphors about theoretical work which I tried to launch (not I hope by claiming authority or authenticity but in what inevitably has to be a polemical, positional, political way), to say something about how the field of cultural studies has to be defined. I don’t know what to say about American cultural studies. I am completely dumbfounded by it. I think of the struggles to get cultural studies into the institution in the British context, to squeeze three or four jobs for anybody under some heavy disguise, compared with the rapid institutionalization which is going on in the United States. The comparison is not valid only for cultural studies. If you think of the important work which has been done in feminist history or theory in Britain and ask how many of those women have ever had full-time academic jobs in their lives or are likely to, you get a sense of what marginality is really about. So the enormous explosion of cultural studies in the United States, its rapid professionalization and institutionalization, is not a moment which any of us who tried to set up a marginalized Centre in a university like Birmingham could, in any simple way, regret. And yet I have to say, in the strongest sense, that it reminds me of the ways in which, in Britain, we are always aware of institutionalization as a moment of profound danger. Now, I’ve been saying that dangers are not places you run away from but places that you go towards. So I simply want you to know that my own feeling is that the explosion of cultural studies along with other forms of critical theory in the academy represents a moment of extraordinarily profound danger. 108 STUART HALL Why? Well, it would be excessively vulgar to talk about such things as how many jobs there are, how much money there is around, and how much pressure that puts on people to do what they think of as critical political work and intellectual work of a critical kind, while also looking over their shoulders at the promotions stakes and the publication stakes, and so on. Let me instead return to the point that I made before: my astonishment at what I called the theoretical fluency of cultural studies in the United States. Now, the question of theoretical fluency is a difficult and provoking metaphor, and I want only to say one word about it. Some time ago, looking at what one can only call the deconstructive deluge (as opposed to deconstructive turn) which had overtaken American literary studies, in its formalist mode, I tried to distinguish the extremely important theoretical and intellectual work which it had made possible in cultural studies from a mere repetition, a sort of mimicry or deconstructive ventriloquism which sometimes passes as a serious intellectual exercise. My fear at that moment was that if cultural studies gained an equivalent institutionalization in the American context, it would, in rather the same way, formalize out of existence the critical questions of power, history, and politics. Paradoxically, what I mean by theoretical fluency is exactly the reverse. There is no moment now, in American cultural studies, where we are not able, extensively and without end, to theorize power – politics, race, class and gender, subjugation, domination, exclusion, marginality, Otherness, etc. There is hardly anything in cultural studies which isn’t so theorized. And yet, there is the nagging doubt that this overwhelming textualization of cultural studies’ own discourses somehow constitutes power and politics as exclusively matters of language and textuality itself. Now, this is not to say that I don’t think that questions of power and the political have to be and are always lodged within representations, that they are always discursive questions. Nevertheless, there are ways of constituting power as an easy floating signifier which just leaves the crude exercise and connections of power and culture altogether emptied of any signification. That is what I take to be the moment of danger in the institutionalization of cultural studies in this highly rarified and enormously elaborated and well-funded professional world of American academic life. It has nothing whatever to do with cultural studies making itself more like British cultural studies, which is, I think, an entirely false and empty cause to try to propound. I have specifically tried not to speak of the past in an attempt to police the present and the future. But I do want to extract, finally, from the narrative I have constructed of the past some guidelines for my own work and perhaps for some of yours. I come back to the deadly seriousness of intellectual work. It is a deadly serious matter. I come back to the critical distinctions between intellectual work and academic work: they overlap, they abut with one another, they feed off one another, the one provides you with the means to do the other. But they are not the same thing. I come back to the difficulty of instituting a genuine cultural and critical practice, which is intended to produce some kind of organic intellectual political work, which does not try to inscribe itself in the overarching meta-narrative of achieved knowledges, within the institutions. I come back to theory and politics, the politics of theory. Not theory as the will to truth, but theory as a set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges, which have to be debated in a dialogical way. But also as C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S A N D I T S T H E O R E T I C A L L E G A C I E S 109 a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect. Finally, a practice which understands the need for intellectual modesty. I do think there is all the difference in the world between understanding the politics of intellectual work and substituting intellectual work for politics. PA R T T W O Space and time Chapter 8 Edward Soja H I S T O R Y: G E O G R A P H Y: M O D E R N I T Y EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION E D WA R D S O J A P R E S E N T S a lucid defence of the demand for “geographical and spatial imagination” in theoretical work. He argues that academic study has, in the modern era, privileged time and history over space and geography. This has meant that modernity has been interpreted too quickly and simply as destroying and replacing traditions – whereas, Soja argues, it is more sensitively to be interpreted as a complex reorganization of temporal and spatial relations. For instance, a crucial feature of modernity is how change itself becomes increasingly globally synchronous, especially in the technological and economic spheres. Postmodern social transformations, in particular, involve a reordering of space: speed and accessibility triumph over distance, though the shrinking of the world can lead to strong barriers being placed between margins and centers from either side. In this selection from a longer piece of work, Soja gives a brief account of Michel Foucault’s demand for a “history of space” and of Marshall Berman’s description of modernity’s embrace of speed and simultaneity. Berman and Foucault, however, do not quite lead in the same direction. As the interview with Foucault in this collection makes clear, he is interested in making changes reversible by emphasizing the gaps between the intentions behind, and the effects of, the reorganization of space by planners, architects and so on; Berman, on the other hand, has a stronger sense of an increasingly impregnable global system moving in an irreversible direction. Further reading: Berman 1982; Foucault 1986; Harvey 1989; Jameson 1990; Jameson and Miyoshi 1998; Kern 1983. 11 4 EDW ARD SOJA Did it start with Bergson or before? Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic. (Foucault 1980b: 70) The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world . . . The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and the determined inhabitants of space. (Foucault 1986: 22) The nineteenth-century obsession with history, as Foucault described it, did not die in the fin de siècle. Nor has it been fully replaced by a spatialization of thought and experience. An essentially historical epistemology continues to pervade the critical consciousness of modern social theory. It still comprehends the world primarily through the dynamics arising from the emplacement of social being and becoming in the interpretive contexts of time: in what Kant called nacheinander and Marx defined so transfiguratively as the contingently constrained ‘making of history’. This enduring epistemological presence has preserved a privileged place for the ‘historical imagination’ in defining the very nature of critical insight and interpretation. So unbudgeably hegemonic has been this historicism of theoretical consciousness that it has tended to occlude a comparable critical sensibility to the spatiality of social life, a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the lifeworld of being creatively located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes: social being actively emplaced in space and time in an explicitly historical and geographical contextualization. Although others joined Foucault to urge a rebalancing of this prioritization of time over space, no hegemonic shift has yet occurred to allow the critical eye – or the critical I – to see spatiality with the same acute depth of vision that comes with a focus on durée. The critical hermeneutic is still enveloped in a temporal master-narrative, in a historical but not yet comparably geographical imagination. Foucault’s revealing glance back over the past hundred years thus continues to apply today. Space still tends to be treated as fixed, dead, undialectical; time as richness, life, dialectic, the revealing context for critical social theorization. As we move closer to the end of the twentieth century, however, Foucault’s premonitory observations on the emergence of an ‘epoch of space’ assume a more HI S T ORY: G E OG R AP H Y: M O D E RN I T Y 11 5 reasonable cast. The material and intellectual contexts of modern critical social theory have begun to shift dramatically. In the 1980s, the hoary traditions of a spaceblinkered historicism are being challenged with unprecedented explicitness by convergent calls for a far-reaching spatialization of the critical imagination. A distinctively postmodern and critical human geography is taking shape, brashly reasserting the interpretive significance of space in the historically privileged confines of contemporary critical thought. Geography may not yet have displaced history at the heart of contemporary theory and criticism, but there is a new animating polemic on the theoretical and political agenda, one which rings with significantly different ways of seeing time and space together, the interplay of history and geography, the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ dimensions of being in the world freed from the imposition of inherent categorical privilege. It remains all too easy for even the best of the ‘pious descendants of time’ to respond to these pesky postmodern intrusions with an antidisestablishmentarian wave of a still confident upper hand or with the presumptive yawns of a seen-it-allbefore complacency. In response, the determined intruders often tend to overstate their case, creating the unproductive aura of an anti-history, inflexibly exaggerating the critical privilege of contemporary spatiality in isolation from an increasingly silenced embrace of time. But from these confrontational polemics is also arising something else, a more flexible and balanced critical theory that reentwines the making of history with the social production of space, with the construction and configuration of human geographies. New possibilities are being generated from this creative commingling, possibilities for a simultaneously historical and geographical materialism; a triple dialectic of space, time, and social being; a transformative re-theorization of the relations between history, geography, and modernity. Locating the origins of postmodern geographies The first insistent voices of postmodern critical human geography appeared in the late 1960s, but they were barely heard against the then prevailing temporal din. For more than a decade, the spatializing project remained strangely muted by the untroubled reaffirmation of the primacy of history over geography that enveloped both Western Marxism and liberal social science in a virtually sanctified vision of the ever-accumulating past. One of the most comprehensive and convincing pictures of this continuously historical contextualization was drawn by C. Wright Mills in his paradigmatic portrayal of the sociological imagination (Mills 1959). Mills’s work provides a useful point of departure for spatializing the historical narrative and reinterpreting the course of critical social theory. The silenced spatiality of historicism Mills maps out a sociological imagination that is deeply rooted in a historical rationality – what Martin Jay (1984b) would call a ‘longitudinal totalization’ – that applies equally well to critical social science and to the critical traditions of Marxism. 11 6 EDW ARD SOJA [The sociological imagination] is a quality of mind that will help [individuals] to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. (Mills 1959: 11) The first fruit of this imagination – and the first lessons of the social science that embodies it – is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances . . . We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove. (1959: 12) He goes further: The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations of the two within society. This is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst . . . No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within society, has completed its intellectual journey. (1959: 12, emphasis added) I draw upon Mills’s depiction of what is essentially a historical imagination to illustrate the alluring logic of historicism, the rational reduction of meaning and action to the temporal constitution and experience of social being. This connection between the historical imagination of historicism needs further elaboration. First, there is the easier question of why ‘sociological’ has been changed to ‘historical’. As Mills himself notes, ‘every cobbler thinks leather is the only thing’, and as a trained sociologist Mills names his leather after his own disciplinary specialization and socialization. The nominal choice personally specifies what is a much more widely shared ‘quality of mind’ that Mills claims should pervade, indeed embody, all social theory and analysis, an emancipatory rationality grounded in the intersections of history, biography, and society. To be sure, these ‘life-stories’ have a geography too; they have milieux, immediate locales, provocative emplacements which affect thought and action. The historical imagination is never completely spaceless and critical social historians have written, and continue to write, some of the best geographies of the past. But it is always time and history that provide the primary ‘variable containers’ in these geographies. This would be just as clear whether the critical orientation is described as sociological or political or anthropological – or for that matter HI S T ORY: G E OG R AP H Y: M O D E RN I T Y 11 7 phenomenological, existential, hermeneutic, or historical materialist. The particular emphases may differ, but the encompassing perspective is shared. An already made geography sets the stage, while the wilful making of history dictates the action and defines the story line. It is important to stress that this historical imagination has been particularly central to critical social theory, to the search for practical understanding of the world as a means of emancipation versus maintenance of the status quo. Social theories which merely rationalize existing conditions and thereby serve to promote repetitive behaviour, the continuous reproduction of established social practices, do not fit the definition of critical theory. They may be no less accurate with respect to what they are describing, but their rationality (or irrationality, for that matter) is likely to be mechanical, normative, scientific, or instrumental rather than critical. It is precisely the critical and potentially emancipatory value of the historical imagination, of people ‘making history’ rather than taking it for granted, that has made it so compulsively appealing. The constant reaffirmation that the world can be changed by human action, by praxis, has always been the centrepiece of critical social theory whatever its particularized source and emphasis. The development of critical social theory has revolved around the assertion of a mutable history against perspectives and practices that mystify the changeability of the world. The critical historical discourse thus sets itself against abstract and transhistorical universalizations (including notions of a general ‘human nature’ which explain everything and nothing at the same time); against naturalisms, empiricisms and positivisms which proclaim physical determinations of history apart from social origins; against religious and ideological fatalisms which project spiritual determinations and teleologies (even when carried forward in the cloak of human consciousness); against any and all conceptualizations of the world which freeze the frangibility of time, the possibility of ‘breaking’ and remaking history. Both the attractive critical insight of the historical imagination and its continuing need to be forcefully defended against distracting mystifications have contributed to its exaggerated assertion as historicism. Historicism has been conventionally defined in several different ways. Raymond Williams’s Keywords (1983), for example, presents three contemporary choices, which he describes as: first, ‘neutral’ – a method of study using facts from the past to trace the precedents of current events; second, ‘deliberate’ – an emphasis on variable historical conditions and contexts as a privileged framework for interpreting all specific events; and, third, ‘hostile’ – an attack on all interpretation and prediction which is based on notions of historical necessity or general laws of historical development. I wish to give an additional twist to these options by defining historicism as an overdeveloped historical contextualization of social life and social theory that actively submerges and peripheralizes the geographical or spatial imagination. This definition does not deny the extraordinary power and importance of historiography as a mode of emancipatory insight, but identifies historicism with the creation of a critical silence, an implicit subordination of space to time that obscures geographical interpretations of the changeability of the social world and intrudes upon every level of theoretical discourse, from the most abstract ontological concepts of being to the most detailed explanations of empirical events. 11 8 EDW ARD SOJA This definition may appear rather odd when set against the long tradition of debate over historicism that has flourished for centuries. The failure of this debate to recognize the peculiar theoretical peripheralization of space that has accompanied even the most neutral forms of historicism is, however, precisely what began to be discovered in the late 1960s, in the ragged beginnings of what I have called a postmodern critical human geography. Even then, the main currents of critical social thought had become so spatially blinkered that the most forceful reassertions of space versus history, had little effect. The academic discipline of modern geography had, by that time, been rendered theoretically inert and contributed little to these first reassertions. And when some of the most influential social critics of the time took a bold spatial turn, not only was it usually seen by the unconverted as something else entirely, but the turners themselves often chose to muffle their critiques of historicism in order to be understood at all. The ambivalent spatiality of Michel Foucault The contributions of Foucault to the development of critical human geography must be drawn out archaeologically, for he buried his precursory spatial turn in brilliant whirls of historical insight. He would no doubt have resisted being called a postmodern geographer, but he was one, malgré lui, from Madness and Civilization (1965) to his last works on The History of Sexuality (1980a). His most explicit and revealing observations on the relative significance of space and time, however, appear not in his major published works but almost innocuously in his lectures and, after some coaxing interrogation, in two revealing interviews: ‘Questions on geography’ (Foucault 1980b) and ‘Space, power and knowledge’ (see Foucault below; see also Wright and Rabinow 1982). The epochal observations which head this chapter, for example, were first made in a 1967 lecture entitled ‘Des Espaces Autres’. They remained virtually unseen and unheard for nearly twenty years, until their publication in the French journal Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité in 1984 and, translated by Jay Miskowiec as ‘Of Other Spaces’, in Diacritics (1986). In these lecture notes, Foucault outlined his notion of ‘heterotopias’ as the characteristic spaces of the modern world, superseding the hierarchic ‘ensemble of places’ of the Middle Ages and the enveloping ‘space of emplacement’ opened up by Galileo into an early modern, infinitely unfolding, ‘space of extension’ and measurement. Moving away from both the ‘internal space’ of Bachelard’s brilliant poetics (1969) and the intentional regional descriptions of the phenomenologists, Foucault focused our attention on another spatiality of social life, an ‘external space’, the actually lived (and socially produced) space of sites and the relations between them: The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be coloured with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (1986: 23) HI S T ORY: G E OG R AP H Y: M O D E RN I T Y 11 9 These heterogeneous spaces of sites and relations – Foucault’s heterotopias – are constituted in every society but take quite varied forms and change over time, as ‘history unfolds’ in its adherent spatiality. He identifies many such sites: the cemetery and the church, the theatre and the garden, the museum and the library, the fairground and the ‘vacation village’, the barracks and the prison, the Moslem Hammam and the Scandinavian sauna, the brothel and the colony. Foucault contrasts these ‘real places’ with the ‘fundamentally unreal spaces’ of utopias which present society in either ‘a perfected form’ or else ‘turned upside down’: The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible . . . they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory . . . Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. The latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner. (1986: 25, 27) With these remarks Foucault exposed many of the compelling directions he would take in his lifework and indirectly raised a powerful argument against historicism – and against the prevailing treatments of space in the human sciences. Foucault’s heterogeneous and relational space of heterotopias is neither a substanceless void to be filled by cognitive intuition nor a repository of physical forms to be phenomenologically described in all its resplendent variability. It is another space, what Lefebvre would describe as l’espace vécu, actually lived and socially created spatiality, concrete and abstract at the same time, the habitus of social practices. It is a space rarely seen for it has been obscured by a bifocal vision that traditionally views space as either a mental construct or a physical form. To illustrate his innovative interpretation of space and time and to clarify some of the often confusing polemics which were arising around it, Foucault turned to the then current debates on structuralism, one of the twentieth century’s most important avenues for the reassertion of space in critical social theory. Foucault vigorously insisted that he himself was not (just?) a structuralist, but he recognized in the development of structuralism a different and compelling vision of history and geography, a critical reorientation that was connecting space and time in new and revealing ways. Structuralism, or at least that which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually structuralism does not entail a denial 120 EDWARD SOJA of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history. (1986: 22) This synchronic ‘configuration’ is the spatialization of history, the making of history entwined with the social production of space, the structuring of a historical geography. Foucault refused to project his spatialization as an anti-history but his history was provocatively spatialized from the very start. This was not just a shift in metaphorical preference, as it frequently seemed to be for Althusser and others more comfortable with the structuralist label than Foucault. It was the opening up of history to an interpretative geography. To emphasize the centrality of space to the critical eye, especially regarding the contemporary moment, Foucault becomes most explicit: In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space. (1986: 23) He would never be quite so explicit again. Foucault’s spatialization took on a more demonstrative rather than declarative stance, confident perhaps that at least the French would understand the intent and significance of his strikingly spatialized historiography. In an interview conducted shortly before his death (see Foucault below), Foucault reminisced on his exploration ‘Of other spaces’ and the enraged reactions it engendered from those he once identified as the ‘pious descendants of time’. Asked whether space was central to the analysis of power, he answered: Yes. Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power. To make a parenthetical remark, I recall having been invited, in 1966, by a group of architects to do a study of space, of something that I called at that time ‘heterotopias’, those singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functions are different or even the opposite of others. The architects worked on this, and at the end of the study someone spoke up – a Sartrean psychologist – who firebombed me, saying that space is reactionary and capitalist, but history and becoming are revolutionary. This absurd discourse was not at all unusual at the time. Today everyone would be convulsed with laughter at such a pronouncement, but not then. Amidst today’s laughter – still not as widespread and convulsive as Foucault assumed it would be – one can look back and see that Foucault persistently explored what he called the ‘fatal intersection of time with space’ from the first to the last of his writings. And he did so, we are only now beginning to realize, infused with the H I S TO RY: GE O GR A P H Y: M O DE R N IT Y 121 emerging perspective of a post-historicist and postmodern critical human geography. Few could see Foucault’s geography, however, for he never ceased to be a historian, never broke his allegiance to the master identity of modern critical thought. To be labelled a geographer was an intellectual curse, a demeaning association with an academic discipline so far removed from the grand houses of modern social theory and philosophy as to appear beyond the pale of critical relevance. Foucault had to be coaxed into recognizing his formative attachment to the geographer’s spatial perspective, to admit that geography was always at the heart of his concerns. This retrospective admission appeared in an interview with the editors of the French journal of radical geography, Herodote, and was published in English as ‘Questions on Geography’, in Power/Knowledge (Foucault 1980b). In this interview, Foucault expanded upon the observations he made in 1967, but only after being pushed to do so by the interviewers. At first, Foucault was surprised – and annoyed – at being asked by his interviewers why he had been so silent about the importance of geography and spatiality in his works despite the profuse use of geographical and spatial metaphors. The interviewers suggested to him: If geography is invisible or ungrasped in the area of your explorations and excavations, this may be due to the deliberately historical or archaeological approach which privileges the factor of time. Thus one finds in your work a rigorous concern with periodization that contrasts with the vagueness of your spatial demarcations. Foucault responded immediately by diversion and inversion, throwing back the responsibility for geography to his interviewers (while remembering the critics who reproached him for his ‘metaphorical obsession’ with space). After further questioning, however, he admitted (again?) that space has been devalued for generations by philosophers and social critics, reasserted the inherent spatiality of power/knowledge and ended with a volte face: I have enjoyed this discussion with you because I’ve changed my mind since we started. I must admit that I thought you were demanding a place for geography like those teachers who protest when an education reform is proposed because the number of hours of natural sciences or music is being cut. . . . Now I can see that the problems you put to me about geography are crucial ones for me. Geography acted as the support, the condition of possibility for the passage between a series of factors I tried to relate. Where geography itself was concerned, I either left the question hanging or established a series of arbitrary connections. . . . Geography must indeed lie at the heart of my concerns. (Foucault 1980b: 77) Foucault’s argument here takes a new turn, from simply looking at ‘other spaces’ to questioning the origins of ‘this devaluation of space that has prevailed for 122 EDWARD SOJA generations’. It is at this point that he makes the comment cited earlier on the postBergsonian treatment of space as passive and lifeless, time as richness, fecundity, dialectic. Here then are the inquisitive ingredients for a direct attack on historicism as the source of the devaluation of space, but Foucault had other things in mind. In a revealing aside, he takes an integrative rather than deconstructive path, holding on to his history but adding to it the crucial nexus that would flow through all his work: the linkage between space, knowledge, and power. For all those who confuse history with the old schemas of evolution, living continuity, organic development, the progress of consciousness or the project of existence, the use of spatial terms seems to have an air of an anti-history. If one started to talk in terms of space that meant one was hostile to time. It meant, as the fools say, that one ‘denied history’, that one was a ‘technocrat’. They didn’t understand that to trace the forms of implantation, delimitation and demarcation of objects, the modes of tabulation, the organisation of domains meant the throwing into relief of processes – historical ones, needless to say – of power. The spatializing description of discursive realities gives on to the analysis of related effects of power. (1980b: 77) In ‘The Eye of Power’, published as a preface to Jeremy Bentham, La Panoptique (1977) and reprinted in Power/Knowledge (Foucault 1980b: 149), he restates his ecumenical project: ‘A whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers [both of these terms in the plural] – from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat.’ Foucault thus postpones a direct critique of historicism with an acute lateral glance, at once maintaining his spatializing project but preserving his historical stance. ‘History will protect us from historicism,’ he optimistically concludes. The deconstruction and reconstitution of modernity In All that Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982), Marshall Berman explores the multiple reconfigurations of social life that have characterized the historical geography of capitalism over the past four hundred years. At the heart of his interpretive outlook is a revealing periodization of changing concepts of modernity from the formative sixteenth-century clash between the ‘Ancients’ and the ‘Moderns’ to the contemporary debates that herald still another conceptual and social reconfiguration, another reconsideration of what it means to be modern. In this concatenation of modernities is a history of historicism that can now begin to be written from a postmodern geographical perspective. Berman broadly defines modernity as ‘a mode of vital experience’, a collective sharing of a particularized sense of ‘the self and others’, of ‘life’s possibilities and perils’. In this definition, there is a special place given to the ways we think about and experience time and space, history and geography, sequence and simultaneity, H I S TO RY: GE O GR A P H Y: M O DE R N IT Y 123 event and locality, the immediate period and region in which we live. Modernity is thus comprised of both context and conjuncture. It can be understood as the specificity of being alive, in the world, at a particular time and place; a vital individual and collective sense of contemporaneity. As such, the experience of modernity captures a broad mesh of sensibilities that reflects the specific and changing meanings of the three most basic and formative dimensions of human existence: space, time, and being. Herein lies its particular usefulness as a means of resituating the debates on history and geography in critical social theory and for defining the context and conjuncture of postmodernity. Just as space, time and matter delineate and encompass the essential qualities of the physical world, spatiality, temporality and social being can be seen as the abstract dimensions which together comprise all facets of human existence. More concretely specified, each of these abstract existential dimensions comes to life as a social construct which shapes empirical reality and is simultaneously shaped by it. Thus, the spatial order of human existence arises from the (social) production of space, the construction of human geographies that both reflect and configure being in the world. Similarly, the temporal order is concretised in the making of history, simultaneously constrained and constraining in an evolving dialectic that has been the ontological crux of Marxist thought for over a hundred years. To complete the necessary existential triad, the social order of being-in-the-world can be seen as revolving around the constitution of society, the production and reproduction of social relations, institutions, and practices. How this ontological nexus of space– time–being is conceptually specified and given particular meaning in the explanation of concrete events and occurrences is the generative source of all social theory, critical or otherwise. It provides an illuminating motif through which to view the interplay between history, geography, and modernity. Sequences of modernity, modernization and modernism In the experience of modernity, the ontological nexus of social theory becomes specifically and concretely composed in a changing ‘culture of time and space’, to borrow the felicitous phrase used by Stephen Kern (1983) to describe the profound reconfiguration of modernity that took place in the previous fin de siècle. From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space. Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile and airplane established the material foundation for this reorientation; independent cultural developments such as the stream of consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly. The result was a transformation of the dimensions of life and thought. (1983: 1–2) During this expanded fin de siècle, from the aftermath of the defeat of the Paris Commune to the events which would lead up to the Russian Revolution (to choose 124 EDWARD SOJA somewhat different turning points), the world changed dramatically. Industrial capitalism survived its predicted demise through a radical social and spatial restructuring which both intensified (or deepened, as in the rise of corporate monopolies and mergers) and extensified (or widened, as in the global expansion of imperialism) its definitive production relations and divisions of labour. Accompanying the rise of this new political economy of capitalism was an altered culture of time and space, a restructured historical geography taking shape from the shattered remains of an older order and infused with ambitious new visions and designs for the future as the very nature and experience of modernity – what it meant to be modern – was significantly reconstituted. A similar reconstitution took place in the prevailing forms of social theorization, equally attuned to the changing nature of capitalist modernity. But before turning to this restructuring of social theory, there is more to be derived from Berman’s conceptualization of modernity and the recognition of the parallelism between the past and present fin de siècle. As so many have begun to see, both fin de siècle periods resonate with similarly transformative, but not necessarily revolutionary, socio-spatial processes. As occurred roughly a century ago, there is currently a complex and conflictful dialectic developing between urgent socio-economic modernization sparked by the systemwide crises affecting contemporary capitalist societies; and a responsive cultural and political modernism aimed at making sense of the material changes taking place in the world and gaining control over their future directions. Modernization and modernism interact under these conditions of intensified crisis and restructuring to create a shifting and conflictful social context in which everything seems to be ‘pregnant with its contrary’, in which all that was once assumed to be solid ‘melts into air’, a description Berman borrows from Marx and represents as an essential feature of the vital experience of modernity-in-transition. Modernization can be directly linked to the many different ‘objective’ processes of structural change that have been associated with the ability of capitalism to develop and survive, to reproduce successfully its fundamental social relations of production and distinctive divisions of labour despite endogenous tendencies towards debilitating crisis. This defining association between modernization and the survival of capitalism is crucial, for all too often the analysts of modernity extract social change from its social origins in modes of production to ‘stage’ history in idealized evolutionary modellings. From these perspectives, change just seems to ‘happen’ in a lock-step march of modernity replacing tradition, a mechanical teleology of progress. Modernization is not entirely the product of some determinative inner logic of capitalism, but neither is it a rootless and ineluctable idealization of history. Modernization, as I view it here, is a continuous process of societal restructuring that is periodically accelerated to produce a significant recomposition of space–time–being in their concrete forms, a change in the nature and experience of modernity that arises primarily from the historical and geographical dynamics of modes of production. For the past four hundred years, these dynamics have been predominantly capitalist, as has been the very nature and experience of modernity during that time. Modernization is, like all social processes, unevenly developed across time and space and thus inscribes quite different historical geographies across different regional social formations. But on occasion, in the ever- H I S TO RY: GE O GR A P H Y: M O DE R N IT Y 125 accumulating past, it has become systematically synchronic, affecting all predominantly capitalist societies simultaneously. This synchronization has punctuated the historical geography of capitalism since at least the early nineteenth century with an increasingly recognizable macro-rhythm, a wave-like periodicity of societal crisis and restructuring that we are only now beginning to understand in all its ramifications. Perhaps the earliest of these prolonged periods of ‘global’ crisis and restructuring stretched through what Hobsbawm termed the ‘age of revolution’ and peaked in the turbulent years between 1830 and 1848–51. The following decades were a time of explosive capitalist expansion in industrial production, urban growth, and international trade, the florescence of a classical, competitive, entrepreneurial regime of capital accumulation and social regulation. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, however, boom turned largely into bust for the then most advanced capitalist countries as the Long Depression, as it was called, accentuated the need for another urgent restructuring and modernization, a new ‘fix’ for a capitalism forever addicted to crisis. The same rollercoaster sequence of crisis-induced restructuring leading to an expansionary boom, and then to crisis and restructuring again, marked the first half of the twentieth century, with the Great Depression echoing the conflictful systemwide downturns of the past and initiating the transition from one distinctive regime of accumulation to another. And as it now seems increasingly clear, the last half of the twentieth century has followed a similar broad trajectory, with a prolonged expansionary period after the Second World War and a still ongoing, crisis-filled era of attempted modernization and restructuring taking us toward the next fin de siècle. Chapter 9 Michel de Certeau WALKING IN THE CITY EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION I N TH I S R E M A R K A B LE E S S AY, carefully poised between poetry and semiotics, Michel de Certeau analyses an aspect of daily urban life. He presents a theory of the city, or rather an ideal for the city, against the theories and ideals of urban planners and managers, and to do so he does not look down at the city as if from a high-rise building – he walks in it. Walking in the city turns out to have its own logic – or, as de Certeau puts it, its own “rhetoric.” The walker individuates and makes ambiguous the “legible” order given to cities by planners, a little in the way that waking life is displaced and ambiguated by dreaming – to take one of de Certeau’s several analogies. This is a utopian essay: it conceives of the “everyday” as different from the official in the same way that poetry is other to a planning manual. And it grants twentieth-century urban experience, for which walking is a secondary form of locomotion (usually a kind of drifting), the glamor that a writer such as Walter Benjamin found in the nineteenth-century leisured observer or flâneur. “Walking in the city” has been very influential in recent cultural studies just because of the way that it uses both imagination and technical semiotic analysis to show how everyday life has particular value when it takes place in the gaps of larger power structures. Further reading: Ahearne 1995; de Certeau 1984; Harvey 1985; Lefebvre 1971; Morris 1990; Rigby 1991. WAL KING IN THE CIT Y 127 Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide – extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday’s buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today’s urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it are inscribed the architectural figures of the coincidatio oppositorum formerly drawn in miniatures and mystical textures. On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, cut out between two oceans (the Atlantic and the American) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production. Voyeurs or walkers To what erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading such a cosmos belong? Having taken a voluptuous pleasure in it, I wonder what is the source of this pleasure of ‘seeing the whole’, of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts. To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic. When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators. An Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more. Must one finally fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth, crowds that, though visible from on high, are themselves unable to see down below? An Icarian fall. On the 110th floor, a poster, sphinx-like, addresses an enigmatic message to the pedestrian who is for an instant transformed into a visionary: It’s hard to be down when you’re up. The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it. Medieval or Renaissance painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed. This fiction already made the medieval spectator into a celestial eye. It 128 MICHEL DE CERTEAU created gods. Have things changed since technical procedures have organized an ‘all-seeing power’? The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today the utopia that yesterday was only painted. The 1370-foot-high tower that serves as a prow for Manhattan continues to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text. Is the immense texturology spread out before one’s eyes anything more than a representation, an optical artefact? It is the analogue of the facsimile produced, through a projection that is a way of keeping aloof, by the space planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer. The panorama-city is a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices. The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible. Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions. These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations (‘ways of operating’), to ‘another spatiality’ (an ‘anthropological’, poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city. From the concept of the city to urban practices The World Trade Center is only the most monumental figure of Western urban development. The atopia–utopia of optical knowledge has long had the ambition of surmounting and articulating the contradictions arising from urban agglomeration. It is a question of managing a growth of human agglomeration or accumulation. ‘The city is a huge monastery’, said Erasmus. Perspective vision and prospective vision constitute the twofold projection of an opaque past and an uncertain future on to a surface that can be dealt with. They inaugurate (in the sixteenth century?) the transformation of the urban fact into the concept of a city. Long before the concept itself gives rise to a particular figure of history, it assumes that this fact can WAL KING IN THE CIT Y 129 be dealt with as a unity determined by an urbanistic ratio. Linking the city to the concept never makes them identical, but it plays on their progressive symbiosis: to plan a city is both to think the very plurality of the real and to make that way of thinking the plural effective; it is to know how to articulate it and be able to do it. An operational concept? The ‘city’ founded by utopian and urbanistic discourse is defined by the possibility of a threefold operation. First, the production of its own space (un espace propre): rational organization must thus repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it; Second, the substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system, for the indeterminable and stubborn resistances offered by traditions; univocal scientific strategies, made possible by the flattening out of all the data in a plane projection, must replace the tactics of users who take advantage of ‘opportunities’ and who, through these trap-events, these lapses in visibility, reproduce the opacities of history everywhere; Third and finally, the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it gradually becomes possible to attribute to it, as to its political model, Hobbes’s State, all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects – groups, associations, or individuals. ‘The city’, like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties. Administration is combined with a process of elimination in this place organized by ‘speculative’ and classificatory operations. On the one hand, there is a differentiation and redistribution of the parts and functions of the city, as a result of inversions, displacements, accumulations, etc.; on the other there is a rejection of everything that is not capable of being dealt with in this way and so constitutes the ‘waste products’ of a functionalist administration (abnormality, deviance, illness, death, etc.). To be sure, progress allows an increasing number of these waste products to be reintroduced into administrative circuits and transforms even deficiencies (in health, security etc.) into ways of making the networks of order denser. But in reality, it repeatedly produces effects contrary to those at which it aims: the profit system generates a loss which, in the multiple forms of wretchedness and poverty outside the system and of waste inside it, constantly turns production into ‘expenditure’. Moreover, the rationalization of the city leads to its mythification in strategic discourses, which are calculations based on the hypothesis or the necessity of its destruction in order to arrive at a final decision. Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e., time), causes the condition of its own possibility – space itself – to be forgotten; space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions; a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity. 130 MICHEL DE CERTEAU Today, whatever the avatars of this concept may have been, we have to acknowledge that if in discourse the city serves as a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for socio-economic and political strategies, urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded. The language of power is in itself ‘urbanizing’, but the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power. The city becomes the dominant theme in political legends, but it is no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations. Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer. The return of practices The Concept-city is decaying. Does that mean that the illness afflicting both the rationality that founded it and its professionals afflicts the urban populations as well? Perhaps cities are deteriorating along with the procedures that organized them. But we must be careful here. The ministers of knowledge have always assumed that the whole universe was threatened by the very changes that affected their ideologies and their positions. They transmute the misfortune of their theories into theories of misfortune. When they transform their bewilderment into ‘catastrophes’, when they seek to enclose the people in the ‘panic’ of their discourses, are they once more necessarily right? Rather than remaining within the field of a discourse that upholds its privilege by inverting its content (speaking of catastrophe and no longer of progress), one can try another path: one can analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization. This pathway could be inscribed as a consequence, but also as the reciprocal, of Foucault’s analysis of the structures of power. He moved it in the direction of mechanisms and technical procedures, ‘minor instrumentalities’ capable, merely by their organization of ‘details’, of transforming a human multiplicity into a ‘disciplinary’ society and of managing, differentiating, classifying, and hierarchizing all deviances concerning apprenticeship, health, justice, the army or work. ‘These often miniscule ruses of discipline’, these ‘minor but flawless’ mechanisms, draw their efficacy from a relationship between procedures and the space that they redistribute in order to make an ‘operator’ out of it. But what spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space? In the present conjuncture, which is marked by a contradiction between the collective mode of administration and an individual mode of reappropriation, this question is no less important, if one admits WAL KING IN THE CIT Y 131 that spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life. I would like to follow out a few of these multiform, resistant, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised, and which should lead us to a theory of everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity of the city. The chorus of idle footsteps The goddess can be recognized by her step. Virgil, Aeneid, I, 405 Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city’. They are not localized; it is rather they that spatialize. They are no more inserted within a container than those Chinese characters speakers sketch out on their hands with their fingertips. It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or ‘window shopping’, that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten. Walking rhetorics The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns (tours) and detours that can be compared to ‘turns of phrase’ or ‘stylistic figures’. There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of ‘turning’ phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path (tourner un parcours). Like ordinary language, this art implies and combines styles and uses. Style specifies ‘a linguistic structure that manifests on the symbolic level . . . an individual’s fundamental way of being in the world’; it connotes a singular. Use defines the social phenomenon through which a system of communication manifests itself in actual fact; it refers to a norm. Style and use both have to do with a ‘way of operating’ (of speaking, walking, etc.), but style involves a peculiar processing of the symbolic, while use refers to elements of a code. They intersect to form a style of use, a way of being and a way of operating. 132 MICHEL DE CERTEAU A friend who lives in the city of Sèvres drifts, when he is in Paris, toward the rue des Saints-Pères and the rue de Sèvres, even though he is going to see his mother in another part of town: these names articulate a sentence that his steps compose without his knowing it. Numbered streets and street numbers (112th St., or 9 rue Saint-Charles) orient the magnetic field of trajectories just as they can haunt dreams. Another friend unconsciously represses the streets which have names and, by this fact, transmit her – orders or identities in the same way as summonses and classifications; she goes instead along paths that have no name or signature. But her walking is thus still controlled negatively by proper names. What is it then that they spell out? Disposed in constellations that hierarchize and semantically order the surface of the city, operating chronological arrangements and historical justifications, these words (Borrégo, Botzaris, Bougainville . . .) slowly lose, like worn coins, the value engraved on them, but their ability to signify outlives its first definition. Saint-Pères, Corentin Celton, Red Square . . . these names make themselves available to the diverse meanings given them by passersby; they detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve as imaginary meeting-points on itineraries which, as metaphors, they determine for reasons that are foreign to their original value but may be recognized or not by passers-by. A strange toponymy that is detached from actual places and flies high over the city like a foggy geography of ‘meanings’ held in suspension, directing the physical deambulations below: Place de l’Étoile, Concorde, Poissonnière . . . These constellations of names provide traffic patterns: they are stars directing itineraries. ‘The Place de la Concorde does not exist,’ Malaparte said, ‘it is an idea.’ It is much more than an ‘idea’. A whole series of comparisons would be necessary to account for the magical powers proper names enjoy. They seem to be carried as emblems by the travellers they direct and simultaneously decorate. Linking acts and footsteps, opening meanings and directions, these words operate in the name of an emptying-out and wearing-away of their primary role. They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: ‘I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name.’ People are put in motion by the remaining relics of meaning, and sometimes by their waste products, the inverted remainders of great ambitions. Things that amount to nothing, or almost nothing, symbolize and orient walkers’ steps: names that have ceased precisely to be ‘proper’. Ultimately, since proper names are already ‘local authorities’ or ‘superstitions’, they are replaced by numbers: on the telephone, one no longer dials Opera, but 073. The same is true of the stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But their extermination (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a ‘suspended symbolic order’. The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here ‘there isn’t any place special, except for my own home, that’s all . . . There isn’t anything.’ Nothing ‘special’: nothing that is WAL KING IN THE CIT Y 133 marked, opened up by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only ‘places in which one can no longer believe in anything’. It is through the opportunity they offer to store up rich silences and wordless stories, or rather through their capacity to create cellars and garrets everywhere, that local legends (legenda: what is to be read, but also what can be read) permit exits, ways of going out and coming back in, and thus habitable spaces. Certainly walking about and travelling substitute for exits, for going away and coming back, which were formerly made available by a body of legends that places nowadays lack. Physical moving about has the itinerant function of yesterday’s or today’s ‘superstitions’. Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different. What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, ‘an exploration of the deserted places of my memory’, the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the ‘discovery’ of relics and legends: ‘fleeting visions of the French countryside’, ‘fragments of music and poetry’, in short, something like an ‘uprooting in one’s origins’ (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one’s own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic, like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, of being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces. From this point of view, their contents remain revelatory, and still more so is the principle that organizes them. Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris. Even if the literary form and the actantial schema of ‘superstitions’ correspond to stable models whose structures and combinations have often been analysed over the past thirty years, the materials (all the rhetorical details of their ‘manifestation’) are furnished by the leftovers from nominations, taxonomies, heroic or comic predicates, etc., that is, by fragments of scattered semantic places. These heterogeneous and even contrary elements fill the homogeneous form of the story. Things extra and other (details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. One thus has the very relationship between spatial practices and the constructed order. The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order. Chapter 10 Michel Foucault S PA C E , P O W E R A N D K N O W L E D G E EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION THIS INTERVIEW, IN WHICH Michel Foucault talks to Paul Rabinow, makes its most general point last. Foucault argues that material changes cannot be used to explain changes in subjectivity. For instance, when, in the Middle Ages, chimneys were first walled and placed inside, rather than outside, houses, interpersonal relations were transformed. New interactions flourished around chimneys. But the building of chimneys is not enough to explain these changes – if, for instance, different discourses and values had been circulating at the time then chimneys would have produced different kinds of changes. Generalizing from this point, Foucault argues that abstract (and in the West highly valued) words like “liberty” and “rationality” refer neither simply to ideas nor to practices but to sets of complex exchanges between the two. None the less, it has been the “practices” of liberty and reason that have been neglected by intellectual and cultural historians. This line of thought has an important consequence. It means that architects and other social managers cannot guarantee that their designs will secure liberty or rationality. What matters is the fit between the material reorganization of space, life-practices, values, and discourses: only if the fit is right will social managers be able to augment what Foucault calls “practices of liberty.” In this light Foucault argues that intellectuals have a particular function when society is being modernized and rationalized by managers and experts: they are to remain critical of nostalgic, utopian and overly abstract thought. Further reading: Burgin 1990; Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983; Foucault 1980b, 1988; T. Mitchell 1988 (a book which uses Foucault’s work to describe the construction of colonial space). S PA C E , P O W E R A N D K N O W L E D G E 135 Q. Do you see any particular architectural projects, either in the past or the present, as forces of liberation or resistance? M.F. I do not think that it is possible to say that one thing is of the order of ‘liberation’ and another is of the order of ‘oppression’. There are a certain number of things that one can say with some certainty about a concentration camp to the effect that it is not an instrument of liberation, but one should still take into account – and this is not generally acknowledged – that, aside from torture and execution, which preclude any resistance, no matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groupings. On the other hand, I do not think that there is anything that is functionally – by its very nature – absolutely liberating. Liberty is a practice. So there may, in fact, always be a certain number of projects whose aim is to modify some constraints, to loosen, or even to break them, but none of these projects can, simply by its nature, assure that people will have liberty automatically, that it will be established by the project itself. The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee them. This is why almost all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around. Not because they are ambiguous, but simply because ‘liberty’ is what must be exercised. Q. Are there urban examples of this? Or examples where architects succeeded? M.F. Well, up to a point there is Le Corbusier, who is described today – with a sort of cruelty that I find perfectly useless – as a sort of crypto-Stalinist. He was, I am sure, someone full of good intentions and what he did was in fact dedicated to liberating effects. Perhaps the means that he proposed were in the end less liberating than he thought, but, once again, I think that it can never be inherent in the structure of things to guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom. Q. So you do not think of Le Corbusier as an example of success. You are simply saying that his intention was liberating. Can you give us a successful example? M.F. No. It cannot succeed. If one were to find a place, and perhaps there are some, where liberty is effectively exercised, one would find that this is not owing to the order of objects, but, once again, owing to the practice of liberty. Which is not to say that, after all, one may as well leave people in slums, thinking that they can simply exercise their rights there. Q. Meaning that architecture in itself cannot resolve social problems? M.F. I think that it can and does produce positive effects when the liberating intentions of the architect coincide with the real practice of people in the exercise of their freedom. Q. But the same architecture can serve other ends? 136 MICHEL FOUCAULT M.F. Absolutely. Let me bring up another example: the Familistère of Jean-Baptiste Godin at Guise [1859]. The architecture of Godin was clearly intended for the freedom of people. Here was something that manifested the power of ordinary workers to participate in the exercise of their trade. It was a rather important sign and instrument of autonomy for a group of workers. Yet no one could enter or leave the place without being seen by everyone – an aspect of the architecture that could be totally oppressive. But it could only be oppressive if people were prepared to use their own presence in order to watch over others. Let’s imagine a community of unlimited sexual practices that might be established there. It would once again become a place of freedom. I think it is somewhat arbitrary to dissociate the effective practice of freedom by people, the practice of social relations, and the spatial distributions in which they find themselves. If they are separated, they become impossible to understand. Each can only be understood through the other. Q. Yet people have often attempted to find utopian schemes to liberate people, or to oppress them. M.F. Men have dreamed of liberating machines. But there are no machines of freedom, by definition. This is not to say that the exercise of freedom is completely indifferent to spatial distribution, but it can only function when there is a certain convergence; in the case of divergence or distortion, it immediately becomes the opposite of that which had been intended. The panoptic qualities of Guise could perfectly well have allowed it to be used as a prison. Nothing could be simpler. It is clear that, in fact, the Familistère may well have served as an instrument for discipline and a rather unbearable group pressure. Q. So, once again, the intention of the architect is not the fundamental determining factor. M.F. Nothing is fundamental. That is what is interesting in the analysis of society. That is why nothing irritates me as much as these enquiries – which are by definition metaphysical – on the foundations of power in a society or the self-institution of a society, etc. These are not fundamental phenomena. There are only reciprocal relations, and the perpetual gaps between intentions in relation to one another. Q. You have singled out doctors, prison wardens, priests, judges, and psychiatrists as key figures in the political configurations that involve domination. Would you put architects on this list? M.F. You know, I was not really attempting to describe figures of domination when I referred to doctors and people like that, but rather to describe people through whom power passed or who are important in the fields of power relations. A patient in a mental institution is placed within a field of fairly complicated power relations, which Erving Goffman analysed very well. The pastor in a Christian or Catholic church (in Protestant churches it is somewhat different) is an important link in a set of power relations. The architect is not an individual of that sort. S PA C E , P O W E R A N D K N O W L E D G E 137 After all, the architect has no power over me. If I want to tear down or change a house he built for me, put up new partitions, add a chimney, the architect has no control. So the architect should be placed in another category – which is not to say that he is not totally foreign to the organization, the implementation, and all the techniques of power that are exercised in a society. I would say that one must take him – his mentality, his attitude – into account as well as his projects, in order to understand a certain number of the techniques of power that are invested in architecture, but he is not comparable to a doctor, a priest, a psychiatrist, or a prison warden. Q. ‘Postmodernism’ has received a great deal of attention recently in architectural circles. It is also being talked about in philosophy, notably by Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas. Clearly, historical reference and language play an important role in the modern episteme. How do you see postmodernism, both as architecture and in terms of the historical and philosophical questions that are posed by it? M.F. I think that there is a widespread and facile tendency, which one should combat, to designate that which has just occurred as the primary enemy, as if this were always the principal form of oppression from which one had to liberate oneself. Now this simple attitude entails a number of dangerous consequences: first, an inclination to seek out some cheap form of archaism or some imaginary past forms of happiness that people did not, in fact, have at all. For instance, in the areas that interest me, it is very amusing to see how contemporary sexuality is described as something absolutely terrible. To think that it is only possible now to make love after turning off the television! and in mass-produced beds! ‘Not like that wonderful time when . . .’ Well, what about those wonderful times when people worked eighteen hours a day and there were six people in a bed, if one was lucky enough to have a bed! There is in this hatred of the present or the immediate past a dangerous tendency to invoke a completely mythical past. Second, there is the problem raised by Habermas: if one abandons the work of Kant or Weber, for example, one runs the risk of lapsing into irrationality. I am completely in agreement with this, but at the same time, our question is quite different: I think that the central issue of philosophy and critical thought since the eighteenth century has always been, still is, and will, I hope, remain the question: What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and what are its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practising a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers? One should remain as close to this question as possible, keeping in mind that it is both central and extremely difficult to resolve. In addition, if it is extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical questioning of this rationality risks sending us into irrationality. One should not forget – and I’m saying this not in order to criticize rationality, but in order to show how ambiguous things are – it was on the basis of the flamboyant rationality of social Darwinism that racism was formulated, becoming one of the most enduring and powerful ingredients of Nazism. This was, of course, an irrationality, but an irrationality that was at the same time, after all, a certain form of rationality. . . . 138 MICHEL FOUCAULT This is the situation that we are in and that we must combat. If intellectuals in general are to have a function, if critical thought itself has a function, and, even more specifically, if philosophy has a function within critical thought, it is precisely to accept this sort of spiral, this sort of revolving door of rationality that refers us to its necessity, to its indispensability, and at the same time, to its intrinsic dangers. Q. All that being said, it would be fair to say that you are much less afraid of historicism and the play of historical references than someone like Habermas is; also, that this issue has been posed in architecture as almost a crisis of civilization by the defenders of modernism, who contend that if we abandon modern architecture for a frivolous return to decoration and motifs, we are somehow abandoning civilization. On the other hand, some postmodernists have claimed that historical references per se are somehow meaningful and are going to protect us from the dangers of an overly rationalized world. M.F. Although it may not answer your question, I would say this: one should totally and absolutely suspect anything that claims to be a return. One reason is a logical one; there is in fact no such thing as a return. History, and the meticulous interest applied to history, is certainly one of the best defences against this theme of the return. For me, the history of madness or the studies of the prison . . . were done in that precise manner because I knew full well – this is in fact what aggravated many people – that I was carrying out a historical analysis in such a manner that people could criticize the present, but it was impossible for them to say, ‘Let’s go back to the good old days when madmen in the eighteenth century . . .’ or, ‘Let’s go back to the days when the prison was not one of the principal instruments . . .’ No; I think that history preserves us from that sort of ideology of the return. Q. Hence, the simple opposition between reason and history is rather silly . . . choosing sides between the two. . . . M.F. Yes. Well, the problem for Habermas is, after all, to make a transcendental mode of thought spring forth against any historicism. I am, indeed, far more historicist and Nietzschean. I do not think that there is a proper usage of history or a proper usage of intrahistorical analysis – which is fairly lucid, by the way – that works precisely against this ideology of the return. A good study of peasant architecture in Europe, for example, would show the utter vanity of wanting to return to the little individual house with its thatched roof. History protects us from historicism – from a historicism that calls on the past to resolve the questions of the present. Q. It also reminds us that there is always a history; that those modernists who wanted to suppress any reference to the past were making a mistake. M.F. Of course. S PA C E , P O W E R A N D K N O W L E D G E 139 Q. Your next two books deal with sexuality among the Greeks and the early Christians. Are there any particular architectural dimensions to the issues you discuss? M.F. I didn’t find any; absolutely none. But what is interesting is that in imperial Rome there were, in fact, brothels, pleasure quarters, criminal areas, etc., and there was also one sort of quasi-public place of pleasure: the baths, the thermes. The baths were a very important place of pleasure and encounter, which slowly disappeared in Europe. In the Middle Ages, the baths were still a place of encounter between men and women as well as of men with men and women with women, although that is rarely talked about. What were referred to and condemned, as well as practised, were the encounters between men and women, which disappeared over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Q. In the Arab world it continues. M.F. Yes; but in France it has largely ceased. It still existed in the nineteenth century. One sees it in Les Enfants du Paradis, and it is historically exact. One of the characters, Lacenaire, was – no one mentions it – a swine and a pimp who used young boys to attract older men and then blackmailed them; there is a scene that refers to this. It required all the naïveté and anti-homosexuality of the Surrealists to overlook that fact. So the baths continued to exist, as a place of sexual encounters. The bath was a sort of cathedral of pleasure at the heart of the city, where people could go as often as they want, where they walked about, picked each other up, met each other, took their pleasure, ate, drank, discussed. Q. So sex was not separated from the other pleasures. It was inscribed in the centre of the cities. It was public; it served a purpose. . . . M.F. That’s right. Sexuality was obviously considered a social pleasure for the Greeks and the Romans. What is interesting about male homosexuality today – this has apparently been the case of female homosexuals for some time – is that their sexual relations are immediately translated into social relations and the social relations are understood as sexual relations. For the Greeks and the Romans, in a different fashion, sexual relations were located within social relations in the widest sense of the term. The baths were a place of sociality that included sexual relations. One can directly compare the bath and the brothel. The brothel is in fact a place, and an architecture, of pleasure. There is, in fact, a very interesting form of sociality that was studied by Alain Corbin in Les Filles de Noces. The men of the city met at the brothel; they were tied to one another by the fact that the same women passed through their hands, that the same diseases and infections were communicated to them. There was a sociality of the brothel, but the sociality of the baths as it existed among the ancients – a new version of which could perhaps exist again – was completely different from the sociality of the brothel. 140 MICHEL FOUCAULT Q. We now know a great deal about disciplinary architecture. What about confessional architecture – the kind of architecture that would be associated with a confessional technology? M.F. You mean religious architecture? I think that it has been studied. There is the whole problem of a monastery as xenophobic. There one finds precise regulations concerning life in common; affecting sleeping, eating, prayer, the place of each individual in all of that, the cells. All of this was programmed from very early on. Q. In a technology of power, of confession as opposed to discipline, space seems to play a central role as well. M.F. Yes. Space is fundamental in any form of communcal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power. To make a parenthetical remark, I recall having been invited, in 1966, by a group of architects to do a study of space, of something that I called at that time ‘heterotopias’, those singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functions are different or even the opposite of others. The architects worked on this, and at the end of the study someone spoke up – a Sartrean psychologist – who firebombed me, saying that space is reactionary and capitalist, but history and becoming are revolutionary. This absurd discourse was not at all unusual at the time. Today everyone would be convulsed with laughter at such a pronouncement, but not then. Q. Architects in particular, if they do choose to analyse an institutional building such as a hospital or a school in terms of its disciplinary function, would tend to focus primarily on the walls. After all, that is what they design. Your approach is perhaps more concerned with space, rather than architecture, in that the physical walls are only one aspect of the institution. How would you characterize the difference between these two approaches, between the building itself and space? M.F. I think there is a difference in method and approach. It is true that for me, architecture, in the very vague analyses of it that I have been able to conduct, is only taken as an element of support, to ensure a certain allocation of people in space, a canalization of their circulation, as well as the coding of their reciprocal relations. So it is not only considered as an element in space, but is especially thought of as a plunge into a field of social relations in which it brings about some specific effects. For example, I know that there is a historian who is carrying out some interesting studies of the archaeology of the Middle Ages, in which he takes up the problem of architecture, of houses in the Middle Ages, in terms of the problem of the chimney. I think that he is in the process of showing that beginning at a certain moment it was possible to build a chimney inside the house – a chimney with a hearth, not simply an open room or a chimney outside the house; that at that moment all sorts of things changed and relations between individuals became possible. All of this seems very interesting to me, but the conclusion that he presented in an article was that the history of ideas and thoughts is useless. S PA C E , P O W E R A N D K N O W L E D G E 141 What is, in fact, interesting is that the two are rigorously indivisible. Why did people struggle to find the way to put a chimney inside a house? Or why did they put their techniques to this use? So often in the history of techniques it takes years or even centuries to implement them. It is certain, and of capital importance, that this technique was a formative influence on new human relations, but it is impossible to think that it would have been developed and adapted had there not been in the play and strategy of human relations something which tended in that direction. What is interesting is always interconnection, not the primacy of this over that, which never has any meaning. C h a p t e r 11 Jean-François Lyotard DEFINING THE POSTMODERN EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION T H E C L A I M T H AT W E L IV E in the postmodern era has three separate grounds: first, that the ideas of progress, rationality, and scientific objectivity which legitimated Western modernity are no longer acceptable in large part because they take no account of cultural differences; second, that there is no confidence that “high” or avant-garde art and culture have more value than “low” or popular culture; and, third, that it is no longer possible securely to separate the “real” from the “copy,” or the “natural” from the “artificial,” in a historical situation where technologies (including technologies which produce and disseminate information and images) have so much control and reach. Jean-François Lyotard, who has been responsible for influential critiques of modernist and universalist ideas of progress and rationality, as well as illuminating defences of the avant-garde, here argues against a historical reading of the “post” in “postmodernism.” For him, the postmodern does not follow the modern in time: rather, modernity had always contained its “postmodern” moments. Further reading: J. Collins 1989; Connor 1989; Docherty 1993; Harvey 1989; Hutcheon 1989; Jameson 1990; Lyotard 1986. DEFINING THE POSTMODERN 143 I should like to make only a small number of observations, in order to point to – and not at all to resolve – some problems surrounding the term ‘postmodern’. My aim is not to close the debate, but to open it, to allow it to develop by avoiding certain confusions and ambiguities, as far as this is possible. There are many debates implied by, and implicated in, the term ‘postmodern’. I will distinguish three of them. First, the opposition between postmodernism and modernism, or the Modern Movement (1910–45), in architectural theory. According to Paolo Portoghesi (Dell’architectura moderna), there is a rupture or break, and this break would be the abrogation of the hegemony of Euclidean geometry, which was sublimated in the plastic poetry of the movement known as De Stijl, for example. According to Victorio Grigotti, another Italian architect, the difference between the two periods is characterized by what is possibly a more interesting fissure. There is no longer any close linkage between the architectural project and socio-historical progress in the realization of human emancipation on the larger scale. Postmodern architecture is condemned to generate a multiplicity of small transformations in the space it inherits, and to give up the project of a last rebuilding of the whole space occupied by humanity. In this sense, a perspective is opened in the larger landscape. In this account there is no longer a horizon of universalization, of general emancipation before the eyes of postmodern man, or in particular, of the postmodern architect. The disappearance of this idea of progress within rationality and freedom would explain a certain tone, style or modus which are specific to postmodern architecture. I would say a sort of bricolage: the high frequency of quotations of elements from previous styles or periods (classical or modern), giving up the consideration of environment, and so on. Just a remark about this aspect. The ‘post’, in the term ‘postmodernist’ is in this case to be understood in the sense of a simple succession, of a diachrony of periods, each of them clearly identifiable. Something like a conversion, a new direction after the previous one. I should like to observe that this idea of chronology is totally modern. It belongs to Christianity, Cartesianism, Jacobinism. Since we are beginning something completely new, we have to re-set the hands of the clock at zero. The idea of modernity is closely bound up with this principle that it is possible and necessary to break with tradition and to begin a new way of living and thinking. Today we can presume that this ‘breaking’ is, rather, a manner of forgetting or repressing the past. That’s to say of repeating it. Not overcoming it. I would say that the quotation of elements of past architectures in the new ones seems to me to be the same procedure as the use of remains coming from past life in the dream-work as described by Freud, in the Interpretation of Dreams. This use of repetition or quotation, be it ironical or not, cynical or not, can be seen in the trends dominating contemporary painting, under the name of ‘trans-avantgardism’ (Achille Bonito Oliva) or under the name of neo-expressionism. I’ll come back to this question in my third point. The second point. A second connotation of the term ‘postmodern’, and I admit that I am at least partly responsible for the misunderstanding associated with this meaning. The general idea is a trivial one. One can note a sort of decay in the confidence placed by the last two centuries in the idea of progress. This idea of progress as 144 J EAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD possible, probable or necessary was rooted in the certainty that the development of the arts, technology, knowledge and liberty would be profitable to mankind as a whole. To be sure, the question of knowing which was the subject truly victimized by the lack of development – whether it was the poor, the worker, the illiterate – remained open during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There were disputes, even wars, between liberals, conservatives and leftists over the very name of the subject we are to help to become emancipated. Nevertheless, all the parties concurred in the same belief that enterprises, discoveries and institutions are legitimate only insofar as they contribute to the emancipation of mankind. After two centuries, we are more sensitive to signs that signify the contrary. Neither economic nor political liberalism, nor the various Marxisms, emerge from the sanguinary last two centuries free from the suspicion of crimes against mankind. We can list a series of proper names (names of places, persons and dates) capable of illustrating and founding our suspicion. Following Theodor Adorno, I use the name of Auschwitz to point out the irrelevance of empirical matter, the stuff of recent past history, in terms of the modern claim to help mankind to emancipate itself. What kind of thought is able to sublate (Aufheben) Auschwitz in a general (either empirical or speculative) process towards a universal emancipation? So there is a sort of sorrow in the Zeitgeist. This can express itself by reactive or reactionary attitudes or by utopias, but never by a positive orientation offering a new perspective. The development of techno-sciences has become a means of increasing disease, not of fighting it. We can no longer call this development by the old name of progress. This development seems to be taking place by itself, by an autonomous force or ‘motricity’. It doesn’t respond to a demand coming from human needs. On the contrary, human entities (individual or social) seem always to be destabilized by the results of this development. The intellectual results as much as the material ones. I would say that mankind is in the condition of running after the process of accumulating new objects of practice and thought. In my view it is a real and obscure question to determine the reason of this process of complexification. It’s something like a destiny towards a more and more complex condition. Our demands for security, identity and happiness, coming from our condition as living beings and even social beings appear today irrelevant in the face of this sort of obligation to complexify, mediate, memorize and synthesize every object, and to change its scale. We are in this techno-scientific world like Gulliver: sometimes too big, sometimes too small, never at the right scale. Consequently, the claim for simplicity, in general, appears today that of a barbarian. From this point, it would be necessary to consider the division of mankind into two parts: one part confronted with the challenge of complexity; the other with the terrible ancient task of survival. This is a major aspect of the failure of the modern project (which was, in principle, valid for mankind as a whole). The third argument is more complex, and I shall present it as briefly as possible. The question of postmodernity is also the question of the expressions of thought: art, literature, philosophy, politics. You know that in the field of art for example, and more especially the plastic arts, the dominant idea is that the big movement of avantgardism is over. There seems to be general agreement about laughing at the avantgardes, considered as the expression of an obsolete modernity. I don’t like the term DEFINING THE POSTMODERN 145 avant-garde any more than anyone else, because of its military connotations. Nevertheless I would like to observe that the very process of avant-gardism in painting was in reality a long, obstinate and highly responsible investigation of the presuppositions implied in modernity. The right approach, in order to understand the work of painters from, say, Manet to Duchamp or Barnett Newman is to compare their work with the anamnesis which takes place in psychoanalytical therapy. Just as the patient elaborates his present trouble by freely associating the more imaginary, immaterial, irrelevant bits with past situations, so discovering hidden meanings of his life, we can consider the work of Cézanne, Picasso, Delaunay, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Malevitch and finally Duchamp as a working through – what Freud called Durcharbeitung – operated by modernity on itself. If we give up this responsibility, it is certain that we are condemned to repeat, without any displacement, the modern neurosis, the Western schizophrenia, paranoia, and so on. This being granted, the ‘post’ of postmodernity does not mean a process of coming back or flashing back, feeding back, but of ana-lysing, anamnesing, of reflecting. Chapter 12 Ackbar Abbas BUILDING ON DISAPPEARANCE Hong Kong architecture and colonial space EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION A C K B A R A B B A S ’ S W O N D E R FU L E S S AY on Hong Kong architecture (or, really, its urbanism in general), extracted from his book Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, combines a detailed grasp of the city’s political economy with a flair for theory as developed by postmodernists like Paul Virilio. Hong Kong is seen as a “para-site” – dependent on flows, in and out, of people, commodities, capital, marketing strategies, fashions, ideas . . . – a worldhub of what Arjun Appadurai in his essay collected here calls “scapes,” but also possessed of a strengthening will for preservation and identity. Hong Kong is disappearing in three senses: its past is ceaselessly lost to it: erased, absorbed, and transformed by export market forces; its built environment is constantly being constructed, demolished, reconstructed again; and, at the time of writing, it was facing the 1997 handover from Britain to the People’s Republic of China. What Abbas does in this essay is use his analysis of Hong Kong as “disappearing” to account for how space and building is organized there. It’s a piece that can profitably be read alongside Meaghan Morris’s essay on Australian shopping centers in this volume. Hers is a less “top down” analysis, more interested in examining the relation between space and lived experience (especially of working-class women). What both texts share though is a belief that theory can help provide access to vernacular experience, and maybe more to the point, that history (or its disappearance) is lived through and in civic spatiality. Further reading: Abbas 1997; Davis 1992; Hannertz 1996; Ivy 1995; Jameson 1990; Lefebvre 1991b; Sassen 1991; Vidler 1992; Virilio 1991a. BUILDING ON DISAPPEARANCE 147 The remark that Hong Kong reinvents itself every few years becomes quite credible when we look at the changing skyline of the Central District. This skyline may not yet rival that of New York or Chicago, but it is none the less highly impressive in its own way, with its growing number of signature buildings by international architects like Norman Foster, I. M. Pei, and Paul Rudolf. Such a skyline not only underlines the domination of the marketplace, with the architect’s signature functioning as a brand name; it also takes to an extreme Sharon Zukin’s argument that ‘market’ erodes ‘place’ (Zukin 1992). The combination of rising land prices, property speculation, and the presence of large corporations vying for prime space results in a constant rebuilding that makes the city subtly unrecognizable. The most spectacular example of this might have been the Ritz Carlton Hotel, located in the heart of Central. When it was nearing completion in early 1993, the original owners sold it to a multinational consortium, who reportedly played quite seriously with the idea of razing the luxury hotel to the ground before a single guest was registered, and putting in an office building instead because of the potentially higher income that might be generated. Buildings in Hong Kong suffer the fate of any other commodity, an insight that Walter Benjamin arrived at more than half a century ago: ‘In the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognise the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled’ (Benjamin 1978: 162), an insight that is finally coming into its own. Property speculation means that every building in Hong Kong, however new or monumental, faces imminent ruin, on the premise of here today, gone tomorrow – a logistics that, by contracting time, dispenses even with the pathos of decay. The political slogans of the day – ‘Prosperity and stability’ and ‘Fifty years without change’ – are thus belied by an urban landscape that mutates right under our noses, making the question of spatial identity particularly problematic. Architecture, because it is always assumed to be somewhere, is the first visual evidence of a city’s putative identity. In this regard, the symbolic landscape of Central exerts a particular fascination, not only for film-makers and photographers but also for the domestic workers from the Philippines who take it over on Sundays when it is closed to traffic. But can the architecture of Central, or even the whole of Hong Kong architecture, represent the city? As Diana Agrest has pointed out, it is one thing to look at the city from the point of view of architecture and quite something else to look at architecture from the point of view of the city. The city from the point of view of architecture may be associated with painterly modes of looking derived from classical tradition, but architecture from the point of view of the city can be associated only with film, ‘the visual art that developed alongside the modern city’, that is to say, the art that problematizes the visual as stable because it is film that gives us, in Jean-Luc Godard’s words, truth twenty-four times a second. In the case of Hong Kong, there is indeed an important relation between architecture and cinema that goes beyond including shots of impressive buildings on film. Not only are they the two most developed cultural forms in Hong Kong, but they are also the most dependent on the market and the most pre-eminently visual. Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference, and it concerns their relation to the visual. The Hong Kong cinema, in the work of its more interesting practitioners, uses the visual to problematize visuality itself and in this way contributes to a 148 ACKBAR ABBAS critical discourse on colonial space. The case of Hong Kong architecture, at least up to the present moment, is somewhat less sanguine. It constructs a visual space that to a large extent resists critical dismantling. In the cinema, the subject is surrounded by moving images, which requires even in its simpler forms a certain amount of critical attention to construe. By contrast, in the case of architecture, it is the subject itself that moves, around an image that is seen to be stationary (hence Agrest’s point about the need to destabilize architecture through a cinematization of space). Architecture therefore has the dangerous potential of turning all of us, locals and visitors alike, into tourists gazing at a stable and monumental image. Insofar as it encourages a process of unreflective visual consumption, architecture in Hong Kong is the main material support of a space that can still be called colonial, in spite of official avoidance of the term colony. Colonial space can be thought of as the projection of a colonial imaginary that maps out a symbolic order in whose grids the real appears and disappears for a colonial subject. This amounts to saying that the formulation of a spatial problematic is becoming increasingly necessary to an analysis of colonialism exactly because colonial space in Hong Kong is quite specifically a space of disappearance. In such an analysis, architecture has a crucial, if so far still negative, role to play. What this underlines, therefore, is the urgent need to develop a critical discourse on Hong Kong architecture and urban space, where the dominance of visuality is put into question, as in the case of the new Hong Kong cinema. Let me elaborate on this notion of disappearance and the colonial gaze by referring to urban phenomena in Hong Kong that seem at first sight to stem from postcolonial sensibilities. The notion of disappearance I am alluding to does not connote vanishing without a trace. In fact, it can go together very well with a concern for presence and projects of preservation. In recent years, since the early 1980s in particular, there has been a growing interest in what is self-consciously being called Hong Kong culture, which many read as Hong Kong’s acquiring a sense of identity. For example, there has been a continuing vogue for photographic exhibitions about old Hong Kong; an archive of old Hong Kong films is just being established, studies of Hong Kong customs, traditions, and folklore are gaining all the time in academic respectability. It is in this context of preserving a cultural identity through preservation of cultural and urban forms that the strong response to the demolition of the Kowloon Walled City, that inner city of inner cities, must be understood. Because of a historical anomaly, the Walled City was a no-man’sland that fell outside British jurisdiction and beyond the administrative reach of China. The result was that it became a haven for all sorts of illegal and clandestine activities, although it was also just ‘home’ to a number of ordinary people. When it was finally razed to the ground quite recently, an action made possible only through the approval of the Chinese authorities, there was a brief hue and cry, followed by the appearance of a glossy and expensive volume of essays and photographs commemorating it in all its seedy glory. What can we make of this example? If colonialism goes together with a devaluation of local culture and identity, then it would seem that this new interest in the local is the symptom of an emerging postcolonial awareness. However, the situation is much more ambivalent than this, if we remember what Frantz Fanon pointed out a long time ago: ‘It is the colonialist BUILDING ON DISAPPEARANCE 149 who becomes defenders of the native style’ (Fanon 1967a: 195). When the native style and culture are bracketed and separated out as a special category, they are effectively recontained and lose whatever potential they might have had to stir memory. Preservation, it should be noted, is not memory. Preservation is selective and tends to exclude the dirt and pain. Culture as preservation, which is what a lot that currently passes in Hong Kong for postcoloniality amounts to, can only be a form of kitsch. The preservation of old buildings gives us history in site, but it also means keeping history in sight. A critique of preservation is therefore also a critique of visual ideology. Let me take this argument about colonialism as a politics of the gaze a little further with the help of three examples of architectural preservation. It should be noted that the argument is not directed so much against preservation per se, which has its legitimate uses, as against the use of preservation as history to bring about the disappearance of history. The first example is the Hong Kong Cultural Center, built on the site of the old Hong Kong–Canton railway terminal. The design of the Cultural Center offered an opportunity to imagine a community, but, in the event, the opportunity was largely lost. The main structure that houses the auditoria is one of those modernist placeless structures that could be from anywhere, looking like nothing so much as a giant ski slope. As if to compensate for the neglect of the local, one significant design detail was introduced. The clock tower in red brick from the demolished railway station was saved and incorporated into the overall design. On one level, this ‘quotation’ from Hong Kong’s architectural history is the expression of a sense of historical moment, giving to the Cultural Center a patina of local history. But on another level, this patina of history is no more than decorative, an image of history meant for visual consumption. In its relation to the overall design of the Cultural Center, the clock tower can be compared to that strange-looking, hard-to-construe, anamorphic object floating on the bottom of Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors (National Gallery, London), a painting that Jacques Lacan analyzed in his discussion of the gaze (Lacan 1977a). However, the difference between them is very significant and tells us something about how colonial space controls desire. Faced with The Ambassadors, the viewing subject caught in the gaze, that is, in the perspectival space that dominates most of the painting, cannot construe the anamorphic object as the representation of a skull. That is because the gaze is a channelling and socializing of desire, and it is such a desire that makes one space, the perspectival one, recognizable and turns the space of the anamorphic image into a hallucination. In the Hong Kong example, we have the opposite situation: the clock tower, unlike the skull, is seen too easily and is too quickly assimilated into the overall spatial ensemble (as an instance of ‘Hong Kong history’). Space is homogenized in the colonial gaze, as ‘old’ and ‘new’ are placed together in contiguity and continuity. There is also a spatial programming and socializing of desire, but it consists of making us accept, without shock or protest, the most blatant discontinuities as continuities. Any image preserved from the past may serve as a sign of a communal history. Such spatial practices are not very different from the practices of Disney theme parks, which also specialize in providing images of history. We are beginning to find equivalents of such theme parks in Hong Kong, like the Sung Village in Kowloon and the more recently opened Middle Kingdom – 150 ACKBAR ABBAS a re-creation in miniature of architectural monuments from China, which forms part of the Ocean Park complex. In these examples, as in the Cultural Center clock tower, an imaginary community takes the place of an imagined community. Culture as preservation leads not to the development of a critical sense of community but works to keep the colonial subject in place, occupied with gazing at images of identity. The second example of preservation is Flagstaff House, an impressive colonialstyle building constructed in the 1840s. First used as the headquarters of Jardine, Matheson, and Company and then as the headquarters of the British military, it was later converted into a residence for the commander of the British forces. More recently, with the withdrawal of the British military presence in Hong Kong, there was some debate on what to do with the building. Eventually, the government’s Architectural Services Department decided to preserve it by turning it into a museum to house a magnificent collection of Chinese teaware. This was done in 1984, and in 1989 the building was declared a monument. In this way, a historically significant building is saved from the bulldozers and the general public gets an education in Chinese culture. All sides, it would seem, stand to benefit from such an arrangement, and there is some truth in this. However, there is a certain presumably unintended irony here, not only in the dates 1984 (the year of the Joint Declaration) and 1989 (the year of Tiananmen) but also in the historical associations that tea has with the Opium Wars and the British gunboat diplomacy that secured Hong Kong for Britain in the first place. This reincarnation of a British military establishment in the form of a museum of Chinese teaware skims over the monumental barbarisms of the nineteenth century by aestheticizing them out of existence. Flagstaff House could be read therefore as an example of the disappearance of history: not in the sense of history having come to an end, but in the sense of its persistence along certain ideological guidelines. Disappearance here implies the substitution of one thing for another, a displacement of attention from the sometimes conflictual colonial history of Hong Kong, to the harmonious accommodation of Chinese culture in colonial architecture. The third example is the Repulse Bay Hotel. This example may seem a little different from the first two, as it comes from the private sector, but the implications of preservation we find here are largely comparable. The original Repulse Bay Hotel, built in 1920, was a grand colonial-style building that became a famous Hong Kong landmark. With its wide veranda overlooking the bay, it was a fashionable meeting place for Sunday afternoon tea. In early 1982, at the height of land speculation, the hotel was torn down to make way for the building of luxury apartment blocks. The timing could not have been poorer because later in the year came Margaret Thatcher’s visit to China. The immediate effect on the property market was a catastrophic slump in property prices, and the construction of the apartment blocks was delayed. Enter a movie director, Ann Hui, who wanted a few background shots for a film. A quick replica was built on the original site. This may have given someone the idea that a full-scale replica was a viable business proposition. As market confidence returned to Hong Kong in 1985 (as it has always done so far, no matter what the catastrophe), construction of the Repulse Bay apartment complex was taken up again, and a replica of the old hotel was included as an integral part. The project was completed in 1989, and it won Hong Kong’s BUILDING ON DISAPPEARANCE 151 premium architectural award, the Hong Kong Institute of Architects’ Silver Medal, partly for its successful integration of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. However, the relation between old and new is very much like what we find in the Cultural Center, with much the same implications, except that, in the case of the Repulse Bay apartment complex, the old is very clearly a remake, something that comes out of a movie set. The replica is not even, strictly speaking, an example of preservation, which is precisely what allows it to make more explicit what is only implicit in the two previous examples: how preservation is posited on the disappearance of the historical site. These instances of preservation are significant, even though preservation is unlikely to be a major factor in Hong Kong’s built space, because they exemplify the argument that the more abstract and ungraspable space becomes, the greater the importance of the image. Accordingly, in a space of disappearance, in the unprecedented historical situation that Hong Kong finds itself in of being caught between two colonialities (Britain’s and China’s), there is a desperate attempt to clutch at images of identity, however alien or clichéd these images are. There is a need to define a sense of place through buildings and other means, at the moment when such a sense of place (fragile to begin with) is being threatened with erasure by a more and more insistently globalizing space. The complication, of course, is that ‘place’ and ‘space’ cannot be opposed in any simple way, nor can they be considered separately. It is clearly not possible to think of place merely in terms of definable physical characteristics and situatedness because the changing nature of space – that results from information technology, for example – inevitably entails a changing idea of place. Paul Virilio points out that the limits or boundaries of the city itself have come into question, largely because of new informational and communicational technologies that introduce a novel idea of space: space, in an important sense, as non-physical and dematerialized. He makes the point by asking how one now gains access to the contemporary city and answering: not through a city gate but rather through an electronic audience system: ‘The sound of gates gives way to the clatter of data banks. . . . the urban wall has long been breached by an infinitude of openings and ruptured enclosures’ (Virilio 1991a: 13). All major contemporary cities are thus ‘overexposed’ as the idea of boundary is gradually replaced by the idea of interface. In the case of Hong Kong, it would seem that it has been primed for overexposure since its inception in 1841 as a British colony and a free port, where accessibility is an overriding consideration – a consideration that produces its own aporias. The large number of illegal immigrants in the city shows how easily the border with China can be breached by land and sea. The difficulty of controlling smuggling (recently, of stolen luxury cars to the mainland) shows it is as easy physically to get out of the city as it is to get into it. Finally, the colony’s by now definitive insertion into global networks of capital and information can therefore be seen as simply the latest episode in the relative devaluation of a physical idea of space and place. On the other hand, even as place is being problematized by the new global space, it is nevertheless not the case that this space necessarily carries all before it. In this regard, Manuel Castels makes an essential point: ‘New information technologies do have a fundamental impact on societies and therefore on cities and 152 ACKBAR ABBAS regions, but their effects vary according to their interaction with the economic, social, political and cultural processes that shape the production and use of the new technological medium’ (Castells 1989: 2). In other words, there is a whole range of spatial and historical mediations to be accounted for, and this leaves room for a politics of built space, even if it is a question of building on disappearance. This amounts to saying that architecture cannot be separated from the spatial or ideological context in which it is produced. Let me begin then by presenting some of the idiosyncrasies of Hong Kong’s urban space, which is that peculiar kind of colonial space that I call a space of disappearance as a necessary preliminary to a discussion of its spatial politics. Spatial histories The theoretical implications of disappearance have been explored most thoroughly in the writings of Paul Virilio, where disappearance is a consequence of processes of speed and digitalization that deprive forms and figures – whether paintings and sculptures or monoliths and architectural constructions – of their material support and physical dimensions. ‘Where once the aesthetics of the appearance of an analogical, stable image of static nature predominated, we now have the aesthetics of the disappearance of a numerical, unstable image of fleeting nature, whose persistence is exclusively retinal’ (Virilio 1991a: 36). In relation to Hong Kong, however, a space of disappearance has specific local and historical references, which makes it possible to conceptualize it in several other ways as well. In the first place, disappearance can be seen in relation to a recent cultural and political mood. There is something highly ambivalent about disappearance. It does not refer simply to the anxiety that the Hong Kong way of life will come to an end once Hong Kong is returned to China. It does not signify historical catastrophe tout court but is something more double-edged, the way an unprecedented and in many cases newfound interest in local culture and politics appears at the moment when catastrophe, real or imagined, threatens. The ‘end of Hong Kong’, to reiterate an important point, is therefore what inaugurates an intense interest in its historical and cultural specificity, a change from the hitherto almost exclusive fascination with its economic success. This is very precisely a culture of disappearance because it is a culture whose appearance is accompanied by a sense of the imminence of its disappearance, and the cause of its emergence – 1997 – may also be the cause of its demise. The affective state of disappearance can be compared to that deliberately created by a cigarette company when it displayed in a public space in Hong Kong a sign that read, ‘No smoking. Not even Viceroy.’ In both cases, a negative situation, or one perceived as such, functions to provoke a desire for the quick fix of a smoke or of an identity. Such a concern for ‘Hong Kong culture’ will indeed extend to an interest in its architecture and in the preservation of old buildings, but such an interest will have to be situated in turn within a space of disappearance. A second sense of disappearance concerns representation. In disappearance there is a gap or hysteresis between the city and its representations, that is to say, between the city’s erratic historical fortunes and the attempts to explain its itinerary BUILDING ON DISAPPEARANCE 153 in terms of available models like modernization, dependency or development. The way the city has been made to appear in many representations in fact works to make it disappear. Let me offer two examples to illustrate this paradoxical relation between representation and disappearance, one positive and one negative. Consider the representation of Hong Kong as an East–West city, mixing tradition and modernity like memory and desire. We see this idea enshrined in one of the most durable images of Hong Kong, which shows a Chinese junk in Victoria Harbor against a backdrop of tall modernistic buildings. This image has gone beyond kitsch and stereotype, being promoted to, and promoted as, an urban archetype. We not only see it reproduced on countless postcards, but a stylized red junk is also the chosen logo of the Hong Kong Tourist Association. Whether the image ‘misrepresents’ Hong Kong or not (is Hong Kong really no more than the world’s largest Chinatown?) is not the issue here. What is at issue is how an image of Hong Kong’s architecture and urban space are used to support a narrative that implicitly attributes the colony’s success to the smooth combination of British administration and Chinese entrepreneurship. Such a narrative also mobilizes ethnic and psychologistic assumptions that cannot bear scrutiny: the dogma that Hong Kong people are by nature hardworking, that they have a high tolerance for crowded living conditions by genetic design, that they will do anything for money. Peeping out from under this narrative is a master discourse that, seeing only its own mirror reflections, inscribes the primacy of the economic everywhere in the most literal-minded fashion. This is a discourse that elsewhere I have called decadent. This discourse manages to make a complex space disappear into a one-dimensional image, structured on a facile binarism. Such a binarism not only tends to domesticate differences and restabilize change; it also avoids the spatial issues, to give us only a copulation of clichés (Vladimir Nabokov’s excellent definition of pornography). Consider now a negative representation of Hong Kong, the obvious one of the city as a colony and dependent territory of Britain. It is true that the recent British decision to issue passports only to a relatively small number of Hong-Kong-British citizens giving them the right of abode in Britain clearly shows the small colonial mentality at work, but on the whole the effects of British colonization on Hong Kong would seem on the surface to have been relatively benign. However, to say this is not by any means to whitewash the history of British imperialism or to forget the Opium Wars. If the British could point with some justification to a record of nonexploitation in Hong Kong, it would be largely because there was to begin with little of substance to exploit, neither natural resources nor, until after 1949 when the city was swelled by refugees from China, human resources. In these respects, the Hong Kong case is very different from that of British India, a situation much easier to analyze in terms of dependency theory. As for Hong Kong, its very lack of resources or means of being independent was always curiously enough a factor in its favor: it meant that more could be gained all around by making the city work as a port city – by developing infrastructure, education, international networks. This was a position that both the colonizer and the colonized could agree on, a position of cute correspondence or collusion – hence the relative absence of political tensions or demands for ‘democracy’, until recently. Again and again in the history of Hong 154 ACKBAR ABBAS Kong, we see how lack and dependency were somehow advantages. For example, when the colony went into textile manufacturing, it was able to develop an international market ahead of Taiwan or Korea because, unlike these countries with their larger populations, Hong Kong lacked a significant domestic market. The way ahead was never toward independence, but always toward hyperdependency. To call Hong Kong a colony is hardly a misrepresentation, it merely leaves out how dependency has been turned into a fine art. These examples do not define at what point Hong Kong moved ahead of its cultural representations, but at least they tell us that for some time it has been somewhere other than where it is represented to be. Other cities like Los Angeles or Tokyo were built on seismic fault lines or volcanic soil: Hong Kong seems to have been built on contingency, on geographic and historical accidents, shaped by times and circumstances beyond its control and by pragmatic accommodation to events. The harder we try to categorize it, the more the city mocks the available categories and remains, in spite of its overwhelming presence, a peculiar kind of ‘invisible city’ – it appears in the moment of disappearance (first sense), and it disappears in appearances or representations (second sense). Yet cutting across the ambivalences of appearance/disappearance is always a specific historical situation – how can it be otherwise – and this suggests a third way in which a space of disappearance could be conceptualized: as a space that is historically produced. Yet to say this is not to imply that there is a historical narrative that, however it twists and turns, can nevertheless be definitive. A history of disappearance cannot but be inflected by the problematics of disappearance itself because, if a space of disappearance can elude familiar representations, it can also elude historical descriptions. Hence the need to say something about the complex relation between space and history in Hong Kong, that is, to speak of spatial histories, not least because such histories will tend to modify some common assumptions about the forms that both colonialism and postcolonialism would take. As I have tried to show, the new Hong Kong cinema’s ability to link history, space, and affectivity is what accounts for its privileged position. A space of disappearance challenges historical representation in a special way, in that it is difficult to describe precisely because it can adapt so easily to any description. It is a space that engenders images so quickly that it becomes nondescript. For example, even a text as programmatically antirealistic and nonhistorical as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Maison de rendezvous, set tongue-incheek in Hong Kong, still captures something about the city’s historical quality; it captures the way the nondescript heightens fantasy and gives rise to promiscuous images. We can think about a nondescript space as that strange thing: an ordinary, everyday space that has somehow lost some of its usual systems of interconnectedness, a deregulated space. Such a space defeats description not because it is illegible and none of the categories fit, but because it is hyperlegible and all the categories seem to fit, whether they are the categories of the social sciences, of cultural criticism or of fiction. Any description then that tries to capture the features of the city will have to be, to some extent at least, stretched between fact and fiction, somewhat like what we find in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story Emma Zunz. If this is the case, then there can be no single-minded pursuit of signs that BUILDING ON DISAPPEARANCE 155 finishes with a systematic reading of the city, only a compendium of indices of disappearance (like the non-descript) that takes into account the city’s errancy and that addresses the city through its heterogeneity and parapraxias. A spatial history of disappearance will attempt to evoke the city rather than claim to represent it, in the sense of giving a definitive account of what it is ‘really’ like. Histories of Hong Kong tell a story of successful development, depicting the colony’s gradual gains in material substance with an appeal to statistics. Conversely, some recent histories that are more politically conscious emphasize the colony’s relative absence of democratic institutions and right to self-determination. Such stories, valid though they may be on one level, require some qualification because they leave out the way the colony’s fortunes follow not just a logic of development or a logic of ‘oppression’ but also a more paradoxical spatial logic where lack and dependency could somehow be advantageous. For example, statistics indeed show that at the last estimate Hong Kong is now the world’s eighthlargest trading nation, an international city that has come a long way from the days when it was described in Palmerston’s famous words as ‘a barren island with hardly a house upon it’. But for all the discontinuities this new role implies, it has continued to be a port in the literal sense of the word: a door, a threshold, a conduit through which goods, currencies, and information flow; a kind of nodal point, an in-between state, therefore more of an inter-national city than an international one. It is true that the nature of the port or gateway has changed today: it connotes not just a good harbor but also an efficient communications system. The nature of the port may have changed, but Hong Kong has not changed as a port. In contrast to international cities like New York, London or Tokyo, which are in relation to their respective regions central sites for the production of goods and culture, Hong Kong is primarily a space of facilitation. It is less a site than a para-site, in that its dominance in its region is due largely to its geographic proximity to China, together with its accessibility to the rest of the world. It is easy to see the economic opportunities that stem from being in such a unique geopolitical position. The para-site therefore connotes a position that in some strange way is both autonomous and dependent at the same time, a position in which autonomy is paradoxically a function of dependence. In the inter-national city and the para-sitic city, something happens to the sense of time, of chronology. Consider once again how the space of Hong Kong has been formed: as a result not just of rapid changes but of an accelerated rate of change produced by historical events whose epicenters are elsewhere. Hong Kong by now has become so inured to change, to ‘progress’, that it can be taken as the perfect example of the situation that Gianni Vattimo describes as the experience of ‘the end of history’, a situation where ‘progress becomes routine’, which does not imply that ‘progress’ has been absorbed, much less understood (Vattimo 1988: 7). Nevertheless, one crucial effect of such routinization is a weakening of the sense of chronology, of historical sequentiality, so that ‘old’ and ‘new’ are easily contemporaneous with each other, and ‘continuities’ and ‘discontinuities’ can exist side by side, without being integrated. Perhaps the most powerful symbolization of this is in cinema, particularly in Stanley Kwan’s figure of the ghost in Rouge that returns after fifty years to seek her lover, a revenant stepping out of freeze-frame. But other examples could be cited. For instance, it is not anomalous to see a high- 156 ACKBAR ABBAS rise building, including Norman Foster’s Hong Kong Shanghai Bank building with its space-age materials, surrounded by the traditional Chinese bamboo scaffolding during construction – a kind of spatial palimpsest. A palimpsest of another sort was the fantastic sum of HK$9.5 million paid recently by a property developer for the ‘lucky’ automobile licence number ‘2’: lucky because 2 in Chinese is a homonym of the word ‘easy’ and because the number 2, shaped like a rooster (if we are willing to stretch our imaginations a bit), was purchased in the year of the rooster. On one level, we can see this as simply old-fashioned superstition, a case of ‘numeracy’ and a waste of money. But we could also see it, on another level, as money well spent in the purchase of what amounts almost to a company logo, a smart investment in the society of the spectacle. ‘Premodern’ and ‘postmodern’ join hands without having to acknowledge each other. Or take the example of built space. We have seen how high-investment buildings in Hong Kong are threatened by demolition, how what looks very permanent is in fact very temporary. But by the same logic, the temporary can also have a relative permanence. One example, by no means isolated, that comes to mind is a licensed food market in Western at the entrance of which is a sign that says ‘Smithfield Road Temporary Market’. But the market has been there for as long as anyone can remember, and it seems to all intents and purposes very much like a permanent fixture of the neighborhood. What remains, it seems, are places that are as yet unmarketable. These examples suggest that the space of Hong Kong is a space of ‘uneven development’ in a specific sense: it is a space traversed by different times and speeds, where change has no clear direction but is experienced as a series of anticipations and residues that jostle each other for position. These are not examples of anachronisms, as anachronisms are perceived as chronology violated, rather, they are examples of what might be called achronicities, where past and present disappear in each other. One main implication of the discussion so far is that disappearance pulls in different directions. It is heterogeneous and contradictory, not a seamless web. On the one hand, Hong Kong as a space of disappearance shows how the city dealt with dependency by developing a tendency towards timelessness (achronicity) and placelessness (the inter-national, the para-sitic), a tendency to live its own version of the ‘floating world’ without the need to establish stable identities. On the other hand, disappearance also alludes to the new cultural mood that registers, with a high degree of urgency, the need to have some kind of cultural identity in place before Hong Kong reenters the Chinese fold. This confrontation with history within a space of disappearance will have an effect on how we look at Hong Kong’s urban space and on what we understand by a Hong Kong architecture. Ways of seeing the city Writing in the 1950s, the Situationists already noted that ‘the visual aspect of cities counts only in relation to the psychological effects which it will be able to produce’. The remark itself can only have come out of a contemporary experience of the city. The movement away from the visual shows how problematic our visual experience of the city has become. Cities bombard us with a profusion of signs in various states BUILDING ON DISAPPEARANCE 157 of motion that distract and confuse, from traffic to advertisements to televisual media, all of which compete for attention with buildings. Hong Kong is said to have the largest Marlboro Man sign in the world, the size of a multistorey building. Bilingual, neon-lit advertisement signs are not only almost everywhere; their often ingenious construction for maximum visibility deserves an architectural monograph in itself. The result of all this insistence is a turning off of the visual. As people in metropolitan centers tend to avoid eye contact with one another, so they now tend also to avoid eye contact with the city. When the visual becomes problematic because it is too complex, too conflicting, too unfamiliar, or too manipulative, then different ways of seeing the city – different scopic regimes – have to be brought into play. We can relate the different ways of seeing the city to a typology of urban space recently proposed by Arata Isozaki and Akira Asada (Isozaki and Asada 1992: 16– 17). In their typology, Isozaki and Asada distinguish between three kinds of urban space, each defined according to an increasingly attenuated relationship to its historical context. Thus real cities are those that have preserved their historical contexts; surreal cities are metropolitan centers like Tokyo where urban elements are mixed up and hybridized without regard for historical context; and hyperreal/ simulated cities are theme-park cities like Walt Disney, devoid of context and based on fiction and artifice. We could now construct a typology of scopic regimes that would roughly correspond to Isozaki and Asada’s urban typology: ‘real’ cities encourage a regime of the visible or seen, ‘surreal’ cities a regime of the subliminal and uncanny or half-seen; ‘hyperreal’ cities a regime of the televisual or quickly seen. Both typologies and the relation between them become useful if we bear in mind that they give us only examples of ‘ideal types’. Actual cities of a certain magnitude and complexity – like Tokyo or Hong Kong – tend to be a mixture of all three kinds outlined in Isozaki and Asada’s typology: they are real, surreal and hyperreal all at once and can be seen in different ways. This mixed nature of the metropolis is important because it means that there is always a choice of scopic regimes available, so that the choices that are actually made are historically significant. We can see now how these remarks might apply in the case of Hong Kong. For better or for worse, it is almost impossible to get any sense of Hong Kong’s urban space through the merely visible. Perhaps the only people who still ‘see’ the city are the tourists. But then what is visible to them are only landmarks and monuments pointed out in guidebooks, while local history means only the exotic. The more ‘historical’ a city, the more it falls prey to the tourist’s gaze. As Henri Lefebvre reminds us, a purely visual space ‘has no social existence . . . that which is merely seen (and merely visible) is hard to see – but it is spoken of more and more eloquently and written of more and more copiously’ (Lefebvre 1991b: 286). In this regard, it is interesting to note how a number of Hong Kong films made recently, which concern themselves with the city’s present historical situation, attempt to identify the city by rendering it visible, particularly by shooting what is most visible of all, its architecture. These films range from Evans Chan’s highly serious To Liv(e) to Tsui Hark’s tongue-in-cheek Wicked City. But because architecture is seen as a purely photogenic set of objects, we get the same familiar shots of the same wellknown buildings, taken from the same angles: looking down towards the harbor 158 ACKBAR ABBAS from the Peak, looking up towards the Peak from the harbor. It is as if it were necessary to hold on to the familiar for reassurance that the city is real. In any case, no identity emerges. Like a docile child, the city is seen but not heard. Changing cities produce many sights that are unfamiliar. But rapidly changing cities, cities without brakes like Hong Kong, produce something else as well: the unfamiliar in the familiar, that is, the unfamiliar that is half-seen or seen subliminally behind the seen/scene of the familiar. This is the experience of the uncanny when the sense of ‘I am here’, of the familiar and the homely, shades into a sense of ‘I have been here before’, of the Unheimlich, when what is seen is mixed up with a feeling of the already seen, of déjà vu. It was Louis Aragon, the Surrealist poet, who captured the uncanny and subliminal nature of the rapidly changing city best, with its ‘disquieting atmosphere of places . . . peopled with unrecognized sphinxes’. On the Paris arcades that were fast disappearing as a result of modern city planning, he wrote: ‘It is only today, when the pickaxe menaces them, that they have at last become the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral . . . Places that were incomprehensible yesterday, and that tomorrow will never know.’ The subliminal that Aragon evokes so well problematizes the visual, but it has not broken with it. That is why the subliminal is experienced in part visually, but also in part allegorically, that is, in terms of a spatio-temporal delay that prevents sign and meaning from coinciding. In allegory, signs are allowed their errancy; they become provocative: disquieting and sphinx-like, they provoke the making of narratives, including narratives of identity. It would seem, therefore, that allegory is an appropriate mode for experiencing the peculiar realities of Hong Kong’s urban space – except for one overriding consideration. As the city moves from manufacturing towards a greater concentration on service and finance, the regime of the televisual becomes increasingly dominant, introducing a new experience of space that Paul Virilio associates with what he calls the ‘tele-conquest of appearance’ (Virilio 1991a: 31). This televisual space is characterized by visual overload, the fusion and confusion of the fast and the slow, the absence of transition between the big and the small, the breakdown of the analogical in favor of the digital. The result is a ‘tele-observation in which the observer has no immediate contact with the observed reality’. The effect of the televisual is that it destroys allegory as defined, by the same process in which the delays of time and space are canceled out by the speed of electronic media. But in this regime of insistent and quick visibility, the unfamiliar is no longer a provocative dimension of the familiar. The unfamiliar, through instant replays and ‘real time’ transmissions, itself becomes all too familiar, and the strange madness of the déjà vu turns into the ordinary madness of the déjà disparu, as the regime of the televisual threatens to supplant all other ways of looking at the city. The question is how to see the city? Which scopic regime should we choose? The choice is a difficult, if not impossible, one as none of the ways of seeing the city seems appropriate to the situation of present-day Hong Kong. If the tourist’s gaze gives us ready-made images of the city that have no social substance, and if the allegorical gaze is destroyed by the televisual, then we are left with the latter, which serves only to promote a sense of placelessness. At one time, in the shadowless days before the anxieties of 1997 and Tiananmen, a sense of BUILDING ON DISAPPEARANCE 159 placelessness – which went together with an absence of strong local identities – was an asset, as it allowed Hong Kong to capitalize on its being a space-inbetween. Now faced with the possibility of having an alien identity imposed on it from China – Hong Kong, British Dependent Territory may be as different from Xiang Gang China, as Paris, Texas is from Paris, France – there is immense pressure to develop an identity instantly. The danger, as I suggested earlier, is that in the representation of disappearance, even ersatz images may be found acceptable. It is at this juncture that the question what is Hong Kong architecture? becomes particularly relevant. What is Hong Kong architecture? If we take Hong Kong architecture at face value, we will see it merely as a sign of Hong Kong’s growing prosperity. It is necessary to stress, when we pose the question of Hong Kong architecture, that built space bears more than one inscription, that built space is overinscribed. If there is a message, it is a jumbled one, not reducible to one meaning. The built space of the city not only evokes financial progress and the spatial appropriations of power but also gives us cultural residues, dreams of the future, as well as intimations of resistance. Built space therefore must not be understood as spatial forms but also as something that both produces and is produced by cultural practices. In the case of Hong Kong architecture, these will be the practices that relate to a culture of disappearance. We may begin by identifying three features. The first concerns Hong Kong’s receptivity to architectural styles. Architecture as buildings may always be situated in a place, but architecture as style and ideology is eminently transposable. In its architecture as in so much else, Hong Kong is an ‘open city’, exposed to all styles and influences: from the vernacular to the colonial, from modernism to postmodernism. This extreme receptivity is unusual and could be related as much to its ‘floating’ identity as to its growing affluence and accelerated development. In other words, space has as much to do with subjectivity as with economics. Many accounts of the city point out that Hong Kong does not look very different from other Asian cities, with its indiscriminate mix of drab and grandiose buildings. However, all we have to do is compare Hong Kong with a city like Taipei, which is quite as affluent, to see the difference. Taipei also displays a mixture of architectural styles, but the overall feeling is not quite the same. One of Taiwan’s strongest claims to political legitimacy has always been to present itself as the true custodian of ‘Chinese culture’. As a result, there is a kind of hesitancy in its employment of contemporary architectural forms, which stems from the implicit ideological interference of its image of Chinese identity. Hong Kong has neither a fixed identity nor the inhibitions that come from it. Hence the sharp contrast – to take one example – in the two cities’ respective Cultural Centers. The Chiang Kaishek cultural complex is a pastiche of Chinese architectural styles, while the Hong Kong Cultural Center is committed to contemporaneity. Besides its receptivity to architectural styles, a second feature that is hard not to notice about Hong Kong is the constant building and rebuilding which might 160 ACKBAR ABBAS remind us of that old joke about the colony: ‘A nice city – once it is finished.’ The building and rebuilding suggest that space is almost like a kind of very expensive magnetic tape that could be erased and reused. Here again, economic factors dovetail with subjective responses. What is erased are cultural memories; what is rebuilt are more profitable buildings. This applies to Hong Kong as a whole, but it is particularly true of Central, which is not only Hong Kong’s business district today but also the area that historically was the first to be developed. There are almost no vestiges of this past history in Central, except for the old colonial-style Supreme Court building, which has been preserved from the bulldozers and is now used for Legislative Council meetings. In fact, one of the more paradoxical aspects of colonial space as a space of disappearance is the way in which ‘preservation’ itself, as I have suggested earlier, could be part of the process of this erasure of cultural memories. But perhaps the most noticeable feature of all is the city’s hyperdensity, estimated at more than forty thousand people per square mile. Even this high figure is only an overall average; there are indeed many areas like Mongkok and Shumshuipo that have considerably higher densities, or the recently demolished Walled City which, with an area of one-hundredth of a square mile, had a population of thirty-three thousand, giving it a density of more than three million per square mile, by far the highest in the world. Building expanded in two directions: horizontally, following the flat land along the coastline and areas reclaimed from the sea; vertically, in the form of high-rises that are like new kinds of walled cities. Finally, because high-density space has to serve a variety of purposes, form does not necessarily follow function, and there is in most districts no neat separation of commercial from residential use. I shall come back to this question of hyperdensity in a moment. These features – heightened receptivity to stylistic influences, constant rebuilding, hyperdensity – do not in themselves define Hong Kong architecture for us. However, what the thematics of susceptibility to influence and the erasure of cultural memory suggest is that the question of Hong Kong architecture is intimately related to the question of Hong Kong’s cultural self-definition, which in a space of disappearance can only be problematic. I propose, therefore, to approach Hong Kong architecture indirectly by considering different kinds of built space in the city and the urban issues they raise: issues about preservation and memory, about political allegory, about subjectivity. A full survey of Hong Kong architecture will have to use many different categories and include the discussion of many different architectural examples. For the present purpose, however, we can divide Hong Kong’s built space into three main types. Each type can claim to represent some aspect of Hong Kong, and in this sense to be regarded as ‘local’ – which merely serves to show how difficult it is to locate the local. On the one hand, there is what I will call the merely local, which consists of all those buildings largely belonging to another historical era, existing now, if they exist at all, mainly on the economic margins of the city. These include the indigenous architecture that has roots in the Qing dynasty; the buildings in the urban vernacular style resembling that in Guangzhou and Shanghai; and the colonial-style constructions found also in Malaysia and India, one gracious BUILDING ON DISAPPEARANCE 161 example of which is the Main Building of the University of Hong Kong. On the other hand, we have the placeless, all those impressive multinational hotels and office buildings with no local memories, concentrated mainly in Central but now also moving eastwards toward the reclaimed land north of Gloucester Road on harborside Wanchai. These buildings could be found almost anywhere in the world, and they seem to have just landed on their sites out of nowhere. In between the merely local and the placeless, acting somewhat like a buffer zone, is the anonymous, all those non-descript commercial and residential blocks that seem to replicate themselves endlessly. These buildings may not inspire a second look, but they constitute the majority of built space in Hong Kong. The merely local have a close link with Hong Kong’s history and topography. Besides temples and shrines, they include those dwellings built on water that remind us that Hong Kong was once a fishing village. One example would be the sampan boats adapted as live work space still found in Aberdeen and Causeway Bay. However, the number of sampans is now dwindling, as more of the (literally) floating population is ‘repatriated’ to dry land to look for more conventional work and more conventional living space. Another example are the houses built on stilts near the sea, still found, for example, in the fishing village of Tai O to the north-west of Lantau Island. This once thriving village is now getting quite run-down, turned into a receiving center for smuggled goods; its main product, a preserved salted fish, is an ironic emblem of the village itself. In the New Territories can be found a number of villages of another kind, the indigenous Chinese-style walled village. One example is the Tsang Tai Uk in Shatin, still inhabited, and coexisting as in a time warp with and within sight of the government public housing blocks close by. The urban-vernacular-style buildings have largely gone except for a few scattered examples in Western, but a number of colonial-style structures can still be seen, like the previously discussed Flagstaff House and a much-gentrified Western Market, which has been turned into a kind of museum or mall on the model of Covent Garden and which now houses a number of Chinese restaurants and boutiques. The merely local may have been structures rooted in a time and place, but it is a time and place that is no longer there. These structures may have interesting stories to tell, but they have no real voice in the present-day life of the city, which has moved elsewhere. However, they do raise an important and difficult issue about cultural memory and preservation, particularly about the difference between them. While one could certainly accept the rationale of preserving old buildings as a counterweight to the placelessness and anonymity of the rest of the city, there is in present-day Hong Kong another factor to consider: the way the impetus to preservation partly arises, as I suggested earlier, out of the ambivalences of a culture of disappearance. Even in more straightforward colonial situations like the ones analyzed by Anthony King, preservation is marked by ambiguity. For example, King describes what he calls ‘the “preservation” syndrome’: ‘in the colonial context, this has a double irony. Not only does planning effort go into inculcating the colonized culture with similar values but the criteria of the colonial power are used to define and “preserve” “buildings of architectural and historic importance”, while remnants of the indigenous culture are left to disappear’ (King 1990: 56). In any case, preservation is not the same as memory: it is a memory without pain. In 162 ACKBAR ABBAS preserving what was there, there is a danger of blotting out of memory what was not there, which is just as important. Preservation in its selectiveness is the disappearance of memory, and this disappearance, like the kinds of representation discussed earlier, can be very significant politically at this particular juncture of Hong Kong’s history. It is surely not accidental that so many of the examples of preservation end up implicitly giving us history as decoration, as nostalgia. Nostalgia, we can say, is not the return of past memory: it is the return of memory to the past. Nostalgia is déjà vu without the uncanny. In sharp contrast to the merely local are those placeless international buildings that usually get the most attention. They are buildings that are meant to be read, and according to Henri Lefebvre, such spaces made to be read are the most deceptive and tricked up imaginable . . . Monumentality, for instance, always embodies and imposes a clearly intelligible message . . . monumental buildings mask the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought. In the process, such signs and surfaces also manage to conjure away both possibility and time. (Lefebvre 1991b: 143) More and more, monumental buildings are no longer only found in Central. The newest one, cheekily calling itself Central Plaza, is located in Wanchai and is now (but not for long) the tallest building in Asia. The placeless do not look local, but they are highly vocal. They do not so much tell a story as make a point, a rhetorical, usually phallocentric point: I am the tallest or the smartest or the most contemporary or the most expensive. Exchange Square, which houses the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and the offices of major international banks, used to be one of the smartest buildings around; nowadays, it is getting stiff competition from new arrivals like the Citibank Plaza in Central. The China Bank was Hong Kong’s tallest building when it was built, now that title goes to Central Plaza, although the bank can still think of itself as being more elegant. The recently completed Number 9 Queen’s Road was perhaps the first building in Hong Kong to pride itself on being ‘postmodern’ and hence very ‘contemporary’, because it played with architectural period styles. The most expensive and technologically advanced is still the Hong Kong Bank. And so it goes. All this architectural rhetoric seemed ripe for deconstruction. When Zaha Hadid took part in an international competition to build a luxury club in Hong Kong’s Peak area, she produced a design that was quite antirhetorical. One chief feature of the design consisted of having four huge beams laid flat and driven into the hillside – an image of horizontally embedded skyscrapers to deconstruct the general rhetoric of verticality and phallocentrism. The two most impressive buildings in Hong Kong are still the two banks, the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank built by the British architect Norman Foster and the Bank of China Tower by the overseas Chinese architect I. M. Pei. It is possible to see a political allegory emerging as we watch these two buildings stand in all their monumentalism close to each other in Central, locked in a relation of spatial and political rivalry, even if it is an allegory of disappearance, as we shall see presently. BUILDING ON DISAPPEARANCE 163 The Foster building is reputed to be the world’s most expensive piece of real estate. Constructed of space-age materials by a multinational team, its form is a brash celebration of high technology. By contrast, the more elegant Pei building is a kind of architectural ode to verticality and visuality. Its basic geometric form is that of the prism: from an arrangement of four prisms that form the solid lower sections it rises, twisting and becoming more ethereal, in successive arrangements of three, two and finally a single prism that forms its topmost stories, the whole structure surmounted by two poles pointing it still further upward: I like to think of it as the Toblerone building, after the distinctively shaped Swiss chocolate bar. To what extent, we might ask, do these two buildings connote ‘China’ and ‘Britain’ in Hong Kong, and, on that basis, solicit the loyalties of its citizenry? The interesting point to note is that however different the architectural rhetoric of these two buildings may be, both can be regarded as simply examples of contemporary architecture, two variations within a single system. That may be why in an attempt at ‘localization’ we see both buildings as incorporating design elements that have little to do with the formal logic of their structure. For example, the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank has retained as a kind of historical relic the two bronze lions that used to guard the entrance to the old bank building, two fierce lions of British imperialism. The problem, however, is that in the new building, there is no formal entrance as such, the ground floor now flowing into the roads on both sides, so that these two deterritorialized lions now look like harmless pussycats. In a similar effort at localization, the lower part of the otherwise unornamented glass-and-steel Pei building is decorated with black-and-white marble to give it a quasi-Chinese effect, while its twisting glass structure is often compared – with considerable contrivance – to bamboo. However, these efforts at differentiation only feebly disguise the fact that the spatial logic of these two buildings belongs to the same internationalist architectural system. This should force us to rethink the often repeated formula of ‘one country, two systems’ as the political model for Hong Kong after 1997, the view of a future Hong Kong as a special capitalist enclave within a socialist country. What the city’s built forms themselves tell us is the very different story of ‘one system’ (that of international capital) at different stages of development. We find here a double set of disappearances, an allegory of disappearance, where the coziness implied by the phrase ‘one country’ disappears in the global economic system, and, by the same token, where the idea of ideologically differentiated socioeconomic systems disappears as well. In contrast to the architectural showpieces, the majority of the commercial and residential buildings in Hong Kong are not distinguished in any way. We find the same standardized forms replicating themselves whenever there is a site available. The huge residential estates, whether built by the government as public housing or by private enterprise, are like so many vertical walled villages. The result is that the present-day form of the urban vernacular presents us with a visual anonymity that spreads to most parts of the city and deprives it of architectural character. Yet for a number of reasons, the anonymous may be the most articulate and significant of all. To begin with, there is a relation between architectural anonymity and the question of hyperdensity. It could be argued that the only solution to the problem of hyperdensity was the instant high-rise and the enormous estate block. For example, 164 ACKBAR ABBAS the story is often told about Hong Kong’s first housing estate at Shek Kip Mei, which was built very quickly in 1953 to house the thirty-three thousand people – mainly refugees from China – who were made homeless by a disastrous fire. Units in the estate – the Mark I model – were very basic, but it was at least an improvement on the shantytown-like conditions in which the inhabitants of Shek Kip Mei were living before. At present, 2.8 million people (about 50 per cent of the population) live in government-subsidized housing, and the authorities are building forty thousand new flats a year to meet the demand. For a city with a reputation for social ruthlessness, these are surprising and praiseworthy figures that present us with a conundrum – until we realize, as a number of critics have pointed out, that the government’s motivation for building these resettlement estates did not come entirely out of a concern for social welfare. Resettlement was a means of acquiring valuable development land; cheap housing reduced upward pressure on wages, thus allowing for the reproduction of cheap labor power, and it preempted and defused squatters’ resistance to clearance. There is yet another (though related) side to the story. Hyperdensity is partly the result of limited space, but it is also a result of how this limited space could be exploited for economic gain. On the one hand, the colonial government deals with the problem of hyperdensity by constructing cheap housing estates. On the other hand, the government policy of releasing Crown land bit by bit at strategic moments and its prerogative, which it duly exercises, of designating land as rural (where strict building restrictions apply) or urban, ensure that building space remains scarce and property prices remain high. Complementing this is the banks’ policy of giving preferential mortgage conditions to clients purchasing property less than ten years old and refusing to extend mortgages to property more than thirty years old, which means that developers are encouraged to build new properties, creating once more a demand for land. The anonymous high-rise block, both public and private, must therefore be seen not simply as a necessary solution to the problem of hyperdensity; it is also a way of turning the problem to the owner’s advantage and exists as an index of the problem. As long as this is the case, the urban vernacular will retain its one-dimensional character. In the face of the placeless landscape of power and the anonymous urban vernacular, we might ask where, then, are the erotic spaces of pleasure and encounter, the heterotopic spaces of contestation, the liminal spaces of transition and change? There are not many examples that come to mind, and even those that do are somewhat ambiguous. Take the area around Statue Square on Sundays. The square is a small and not particularly attractive concrete park in Central, opposite the Hong Kong Bank and adjacent to the world-class Mandarin Hotel. It is one of the few open spaces in an intensely built-up area. On weekdays, Central is Hong Kong’s no-nonsense business district, but on Sundays the migrant domestic workers from the Philippines, almost entirely female, congregate around the square, taking it over and turning it into something like a festive space. There they chat, exchange news and information, share a meal or a hometown newspaper. Some small-scale entrepreneurial activities also take place: there are part-time beauticians and manicurists, vendors of magazines in Tagalog, and so on. At one time, the authorities made some half-hearted attempts at discouraging these weekly meetings, but now they have made the area into a traffic-free zone on weekends. Is BUILDING ON DISAPPEARANCE 165 Statue Square on Sundays an example then of the détournement or diversion of a space of power into a space of pleasure? This is unfortunately not entirely the case because the weekly congregations take place only by permission, and come Monday everything returns to ‘normal’. No contestation has taken place. Perhaps the takeover of Central is more clearly an example of the fascination that the symbolic spaces of power exert on those excluded from them. The powerless are allowed to see Central – like looking at so many goods through a shop window – but not to touch it. A somewhat different example is the area that takes its name after an old street in Central, Lan Kwei Fong. The area is situated in the hilly and less accessible part of Central, which therefore made it much less prestigious and desirable as commercial space. Not too long ago, Lan Kwei Fong was just an unremarkable and unfashionable bit of space on the commercial periphery, with its narrow streets, little shops and low-grade offices, local restaurants, flower stalls and street cobblers. It was just part of Hong Kong’s anonymous urban vernacular. But as even this description already suggests, the area has its picturesque aspects that could be turned to advantage, it could be gentrified, as some business minds began to see. A string of smart restaurants began to appear, followed by European-style beer halls serving special brews, coffee bars, Hong Kong’s only jazz club, art galleries, and generally stylish meeting places. The flower stalls and street cobblers are still there, next to high-tech chrome and Plexiglass shop fronts. The streets themselves have been repaved with cobblestones to give them a certain ‘Ye Olde’ look. The atmosphere is American (particularly Californian), European and local all at the same time. This cheekily mixed space makes the area instantly appealing to those who like to think of themselves as hip and arty; it certainly appeals to the young and affluent, the upwardly mobile who do not mind the hilly location and the steep prices. However, as a space of pleasure and encounter, which it clearly is, Lan Kwei Fong has one major drawback: the high cost of admission, although teenagers can and do stroll around its streets for free. Lan Kwei Fong may have some of the appearance of a liminal space, but it turns out to be just a variant of the dominant theme of capital. To use Sharon Zukin’s terms, the plain ‘vernacular’ is appropriated by capital and transformed into desirable ‘landscape’ (Zukin 1992). But this process of transformation is entirely determined by commercialism and is ultimately indifferent to the urban vernacular at large, which remains untransformed by this example. In this regard, the space of Lan Kwei Fong can be compared to that of the more recently built mall-and-entertainment complex that calls itself Times Square, although the two look very different. Times Square, situated between Causeway Bay and Happy Valley on Russell Street, which was once a local market street, was designed as an autonomous inner-looking space, indifferent to its surroundings (like the ‘postmodern’ spaces Fredric Jameson has described). Thus visitors to the mall can ride up and down on its glass-cased elevators and, protected by the mall itself, look out with a certain pleasure straight into the interiors and rooftops of the rundown apartment houses just a few meters away on the other side of Russell Street. Lan Kwei Fong displays a comparable spatial indifference. It is a much appropriated vernacular space that has forgotten that it is vernacular. The third example takes us back to the question of the vernacular response to the problem of hyperdensity. A team of Japanese architects who recently did a study 166 ACKBAR ABBAS of Hong Kong’s urban space focused precisely on this issue of hyperdensity and came up with some surprising conclusions. They began by contrasting two ways of dealing with it. One way is suggested by modernist ideas of town planning derived from Le Corbusier’s vision of the ‘contemporary City for 3 million people’, which put the stress on a separation of functions, a segregation of commercial and residential spaces. But would separation lead to the mutual enhancement of these spaces, or to the creation of a boring homogeneity? The other way is that of ‘Hong Kong, the Alternative Metropolis’, which consists of aggressively mixing up the functions, of not rigidly separating public and private, commercial and residential space. The result, it is argued, is heterogeneity, vitality, complexity. For example, Hong Kong may be one of the few cities in the world where one finds people in pyjamas strolling in shopping malls. Even when ideas are taken over from modernist town planning, they are changed in the process. Take the idea of the pedestrian walkway, whose rationale was to separate automobiles from people. We find a system of walkways in Central and in some of the new towns, but their function is changed. In Central, for example, walkways do not separate people from cars: they simply provide an additional or alternative path, while in the new towns themselves we often find walkways lined with shops and boutiques. The tendency then is not towards specialization and separation, but towards the multiplication and concentration of different functions in the same space. But perhaps the most characteristic way of all of dealing with hyperdensity is to transform the façades of anonymous apartment blocks by the construction of illegal and semi-legal structures: balconies, indoor gardens, additional storage space, and so on. It is as if the flat surface of these anonymous buildings were now covered in pleats or folds, multiplying in volume and interest and providing a zone of mediation between inside and outside. In the argument of these Japanese architects, hyperdensity becomes positive, as anonymity is transformed into something that almost gives us the aesthetic pleasures of a baroque space, even if it is baroque by necessity rather than by design. Diversity, too, reappears, not in terms of a profusion of architectural styles but in the internal modification of standardized forms, comparable perhaps to the new Hong Kong cinema’s use of genre. Such an argument, attractive and hopeful though it is in some respects, nevertheless contains one serious flaw. It largely ignores the politics and economics of hyperdensity discussed earlier and accepts the proliferation of anonymous high-rise blocks as the only solution. The question then understandably becomes how to deal with this anonymity, for which they came up with a very elegant answer: make the vernacular baroque. But the very attractiveness of such an analysis of Hong Kong’s urban space would serve only to ensure that no more radical transformation of the vernacular need take place. PA R T T H R E E Nationalism, postcolonialism and globalization Chapter 13 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak S C AT T E R E D S P E C U L AT I O N S O N T H E Q U E S T I O N O F C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION I I N TH I S D I FF I C U LT B U T R E WA R D I N G essay Spivak subtly asks two questions: what is it to be an American, and: what kind of cultural studies should exist in the US. These become closely related to one another once we accept, with Spivak, that Americanness is partly defined through what is taught about culture at school. For Spivak, to be an American legally and politically is to enter into relation to that founding document, the Constitution, and therefore, more accurately, into changing and negotiable narratives about the Constitution. She argues that such narratives need to be globalized, to be connected to other national moments of origin, especially non-Western ones. This is a way of provincializing the West and of managing “sanctioned ignorance” – for instance (to use an example not given in the essay) the way in which it is acceptable to be ignorant of Indonesian massacres of the Chinese but not of German massacres of the Jews. Likewise cultural studies – which for Spivak is a synonym for the general study of culture rather than a discipline in itself – needs to move out of its Eurocentrism, to become transnational and historical, while retaining a base in the society for which it is helping to educate citizens. Transnational cultural studies must remain focused on language (and the problems of translation) as well as on history, especially in two senses – history as used to legitimate the status quo, and history as a record in which the powerless or subaltern are only heard with difficulty. But cultural studies also needs to acknowledge the transformative power of capital, legal rights, and education upon the lives of the non-metropolitan unprivileged, a power that “development” models and practices merely use to bolster Western hegemony (as well as to denature the worlds of “developing” peoples – a theme that later Spivak essays take up). 170 G A Y A T RI C H AK R A V OR T Y SP I V A K Spivak obliquely inserts her essay into US debates over multiculturalism and the canon, exposing them to a subaltern and cosmopolitan perspective such as that explored, in different and various ways by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bruce Robbins, and James Clifford, for instance. For those who wish to pursue further Spivak’s understandings of her project as a radical intellectual, I recommend the interview in Osborne 1996. Further reading: Chatterjee 1993; Cheah and Robbins 1998; Clifford 1997; Guillory 1993; C. Kaplan 1996; B. Robbins 1993b; Sangari 1987; Spivak 1988b, 1993. It is through a critique of ‘development’ ideology that we can locate the migrant in the First World in a transnational frame shared by the obscure and oppressed rural subaltern. Otherwise, in our enthusiasm for migrant hybridity, Third World urban radicalism, First World marginality, and varieties of ethnographically retrieved ventriloquism, the subaltern is once again silent for us. It is here that we track the appropriation of ecology. I turn briefly to the work of Vandana Shiva, a powerful figure in feminist-subalternist-ecology, to attend to her cautions: ‘Environmentalism’ has finally become part of the dominant discourse. ‘Development’ has given way to ‘sustainable development’, and ‘growth’ has given way to ‘green growth’. Yet the ruling paradigm about environmental issues continues to be biased in favor of the North, and the elites of the South. (Shiva 1991: 10) It is the remoteness of the connections that allow the elite of the South to ignore their importance. Thus rural ecological problems, when noticed, are perceived as peripheral and precapitalist, and concern for their solution considered nonprogressive in other quarters; as sentimental, or subjective. And, as Shiva points out, we see each cluster of issues, if we see them at all, as individual ‘sets’, ‘antisystemic movements’, rather than operative moments in the functioning system of transnational capitalism determining itself through development, as in a prior dispensation through imperialism. As I have indicated, that other, largely urban or metropolitan, subaltern, the homeworker, remains invisible for comparable reasons. Both our support of culture and/or race identity and our distrust of general narratives stand in the way of this holistic perception. We will not understand that these movements, although local, are fully non-local in their impact, in order that transnational money-lending can be dissimulated as interest for the poor. Here the Derridean isolation of commercial capital as the object of criticism can perhaps be utilized; but even so the homeworker’s relationship to women’s waged and unwaged labor will skew our thought towards the surplus value of the human body, not only revenue and profit on the body of the earth. Be that as it may, if we dismiss general systemic critical perception as necessarily totalizing or centralizing, we merely prove once again that the subject of Capital can inhabit its ostensible critique as well. T H E Q U E S T I O N O F C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 171 This expansion of the subjectship of Capital, as its post-Marxist, or feminist, or culturalist critique, is so pervasive that we might stop to think about it whenever spurious binaries arise: Third World Issues Must Be Kept Separate from Multiculturalism (director of a Women’s Studies Institute in the EED); the Study of Postcoloniality Is Not Feminist (white feminist professor in the US). There is interest, often unperceived by us, in not allowing transnational complicities to be perceived. There Capital is not the narrative of reference (Jameson) or subindividual (Foucault). If anything, it can be compared to Foucault’s imagining of the field of force: ‘these then form a general line offeree that traverses the local oppositions and links them together; to be sure, they also bring about redistributions, realignments, homogenizations, serial arrangements and convergences of the false relations’ (Foucault 1980a: 94). Shiva’s call for ‘lipservice’ (from radical intellectuals) to make this thinking ‘fashionable’ shows us that careful cognitive mapping (Jameson) with the deconstructive awareness of complicity can have its uses for the internationalist activist, even if, in the intellectual’s own circuit, it leads merely to self-perpetuating discourse at the mercy of the forces of reaction. At best I can write as one such intellectual. In that spirit, writing these words in the offices of an Alternative Development Research Collective in Dhaka (Bangladesh), let me tell a few stories before we enter the next section. I will let the reader draw her own conclusions, knowing the risks on both sides. In a series of videos made by Christian Aid, John Marshall, an activist priest working in Hackney, a poor multi-ethnic area of London, makes the point that although their absolute standard of living is higher, the rehabilitation of these disenfranchized migrants would help forge links with the bottom layers of society in postcolonial countries. As one who constantly shuttles on the cheap flights favored by migrants on visits home (rather unlike the sensationalism of migrantwoman thrillers), I would, with respect, differ. The trajectories of the Eurocentric migrant poor and the postcolonial rural poor are not only discontinuous but may be, through the chain-linkage that we are encouraged to ignore, opposed. This is not an accusation. The migrant poor are certainly victims of racism. But, in a nonEurocentric frame, disavowal of their hope of insertion into a developed economy is of no use; although this hope is only a discolored, rejected, and broken fragment of the materials that build the edifice of development. I came upon the video by chance in a rural health center in Bangladesh and watched it in the house of a resident woman doctor. In another context, and in a rather inaccessible interior village, I was chatting with another woman (an office holder in the government’s program of Women’s Development) about the Bangladeshis of London’s East End and the white Londoner’s racist contempt. My friend, speaking from the perspective of an educated provincial middle-class woman government worker, exclaimed, of these London Bangladeshis, ‘But they’re rich!’ And indeed, the ‘although their absolute standard of living is higher’ of John Marshall shows once again a set perception, not a systemic one. On the other hand, the fact that these migrants might send money home is not their critique of development. With the lapse of time, even this connection becomes tenuous. Both separations and false continuity are therefore part of the problem. In the name of transnationality, let us enter the United States. 172 G A Y A T RI C H AK R A V OR T Y SP I V A K 1 I wrote the first part of this paper in response to a hundred-odd manuscript pages of Bruce Ackerman’s book Discovering the Constitution [published in book form as We the People]. Fleshing it out, I have come to sense that the paper shares some of the occupational weaknesses of the new and somewhat beleaguered discipline of a transnational study of culture, especially if that study steps back from what is perceived as contemporary. Conceptual schemes and extent of scholarship cannot be made to balance. Once again, then, the following pages must be offered as possible directions for future work. I hope this will satisfy those friendly critics who have remarked that my point is that one needs to know nothing in order to do Culture Studies! Here is a summary of my understanding of what I read in Ackerman’s manuscript pages: A dualist view of US political practice is true to American political philosophy and history. Legitimizing it in terms of foreign (read European) models is incorrect. The dualism is between normal everyday politics where We the People are not much involved. Contrasted to this are the great changes in political practice – constitutional politics – where We the People are mobilized and involved in the process of change through higher lawmaking. Professor Ackerman is aware that by thus naming the letter and the spirit of the law, so to speak, as normal and constitutional, he is taking the view that the role of We the People in the American polity is activated in ‘exceptional’ cases. Ackerman’s historical account discloses that these revolutions in the law are also managements of crisis. Although We the People were mobilized at the time of Reconstruction, it was the crisis of a possible impeachment of the President that brought the Constitutional amendments. Similarly, in spite of the electoral mobilization of We the People, it was the crisis of a possible court-packing that brought in the welfare state of the New Deal. Thus the changes from a federalist division of powers through a nationalist separation of powers to the consolidation of presidential power can be inserted into a continuation of normal political practice. Indeed, if I understand right, Ackerman comes close to suggesting that, in the modern context at least, the electoral mobilization of We the People provides an alibi for domestic crisis-management among the powers by allowing the party to claim ‘A People’s Mandate’. We are, in other words, hearing the story of the gradual constitution (small c), normalization, and regularization of something called the People (capital P) as a collective subject (We) in the interest of crisis-management. Ackerman acknowledges that ‘the Constitution presupposes a citizenry’, and calls this process the ‘popular cultivation of the arts of liberal citizenship’. And if you will forgive a slightly tendentious phrase, ‘the ideological state apparatus’ does work to this end. Here, for trouble-free normal politics, is the making of a collective ‘We the People’ in the high school classroom: Mr. Bower’s American Government class had been studying the US Constitution. He has designed a rich multiple-ability groupwork task to help his students understand the relationship among the three branches T H E Q U E S T I O N O F C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 173 of the federal government. To reach his objectives, he wants to challenge the students to think metaphorically and to produce insights that allow students to use their critical thinking skills. . . . The task will require many different abilities. Some students will have to be good conceptual thinkers; some will need to be good artists; at least one person will have to be able to quickly find the relevant passages in the Constitution; and someone will need to have strong presentation skills . . . [This] example . . . demonstrate[s] the advantage of group work that may be gained with the proper preparation and structure necessary for success. In fact, if not in intent, Mr Bower is preparing a General Will where the signifier ‘People’, seemingly remaining constant as a referent, is being charged with a more and more distanced and mediated signification, as actual agency passes from the popularly elected House of Commons model to today’s electoral securing of the noun implicit in the adjective ‘Popular’ in ‘Popular Mandate’. I do not question the astuteness of Ackerman’s analysis or the efficiency of the gradual reconstitution of the signifying phrase ‘We the People’. I do however question the conviction that this reading gives America back to the people in the American way. I dare to say this because such an unexamined view of the academic’s social task (that would in fact be dormant and uncritical in everyday politics) is currently laying waste our own field of humanistic education – the proper field of the production of something called a ‘People’. If we move from the techniques of knowledge production to the techniques of the electoral securing of the Popular Mandate, this becomes even clearer. Editorials in all major newspapers have commented extensively on the fact that, under media management, candidates at all levels are becoming detached from local or popular constituencies. Jean Baudrillard has called this the electronic production of the ‘hyper-real’, which is simulated by agencies of power as the way things really are. ‘Simulation’ here means declaring the existence of something that does not exist. Derrida has pointed at the ceaseless effort to construct the simulacrum of a committed and participatory public through talk show and poll, thus apparently (but only apparently) freezing the irregular daily pulse of democracy. Attention to the details of meaning-making might describe the mechanisms of securing a higher law as a spectacular and seamless exercise in simulation. I have taken a dualist, exceptionalist, and crisis-management reading of the Constitution as instrument of higher lawmaking through Popular Mandate to its logically rather unsettling consequences to highlight an obvious point: constitutional victory operates within a calculus that does not correspond to the possibility or even the guarantee of justice in the name of any personalized picture of a collection of subjects called ‘We the People’. In fact, as I will insist later in this paper, a constitution can operate only when the person has been coded into rational abstractions manipulable according to the principle of reason. The presupposed collective constitutional agent is apart from either the subject, or the universal-insingular ethical agent. Yet the narrative guarantee of justice in the name of a collection of subjects is perennially offered as legitimation to the people who will secure the ‘Popular 174 G A Y A T RI C H AK R A V OR T Y SP I V A K Mandate’. And the authority behind this narrative legitimation – the Constitution as the expression of the general will to justice exercised in time of crisis – is itself secured with reference to an origin-story: the original documents left by the Founding Federalists, Reconstruction Republicans, New Deal Democrats. It seems to me that an innovative and flexible text for use such as the US Constitution can only be given what Jean-François Lyotard has called a paralogical legitimation. In other words, it provides occasion for morphogenetic innovation – innovations leading to new forms. Strictly speaking, paralogical legitimation is not teleological. Yet the legitimizing debates at times of crisis impose closure by claiming faithfulness to original intent, even if only the intent to keep the document historically flexible, and thus restoring its origin by gaining its end. The more ‘accurate’ guarantee, not of justice as the expression of a general will of We the People but of a persistent critique of originary legitimations, by the very people who supply the Popular Mandate for the electoral machinery, can be precariously fabricated if the paralogical is kept in mind. One of the counter-narratives that can help as a reminder of the paralogical is that of the contingency of origins. Let us consider an example. Ackerman correctly states that the American origin was not simply ‘an escape from old Feudalism’, as de Tocqueville would have it, but a new start. Is it banal to remind ourselves that this new start or origin could be secured because the colonists encountered a sparsely populated, thoroughly precapitalist social formation that could be managed by pre-political manoeuvers? Robin Blackburn’s recent compendious book The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery has argued that the manipulation of chattel slavery as an item of political economy was also effective in securing a seemingly uninscribed slate in a space effectively cleared of political significance in the indigenous population. No discussion of the historical development of the mode of operation of the Constitution can afford altogether to ignore this rusing at the origin: The key slogan in the struggle against the British had been ‘no taxation widiout representation’. . . . The acceptance that slaves as wealth should entitle Southern voters to extra representation built an acknowledgment of slavery into the heart of the Constitution. . . . The text of the Constitution resorted to shamefaced circumlocution rather than use the dreaded words ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’: ‘Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons’. Later in this essay I will present Derrida’s discussion of the originary ruse that produces all signatories: the politics of the proper name. Here the origin of the ‘Good People’ of these colonies guaranteeing as they are guaranteed by the signatories is secured by staging the ruse in a theater of violence. T H E Q U E S T I O N O F C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 175 Since I am an Indian citizen, let me offer you a counter-narrative of what, in Ackerman’s vocabulary, may be called a ‘failed originary moment’. ‘After much hesitation . . . Elizabeth [I] . . . granted a charter of incorporation on December 31st 1600’ to the East India Company. As is well known, there was increasing conflict between the British government and the Company until, by Pitt’s India Act of 1784, ‘the control of the Company was brought under the House of Commons’. Of course it is absurd to offer a fable as fact, or attempt to rewrite history counterfactually. But let us remember that Ackerman has the integrity to admit that he too is retelling a story. Let us also remember that, in the eighteenth century, economists such as Adam Smith, functionaries of the East India Company, as well as the British popular press, were exercised by the failed parallel between the American and Indian examples. Let me therefore ask you to imagine that, because the East India Company was incorporated, and because India was not a sparsely populated, thoroughly precapitalist social formation easily handled through pre-political manoeuver and the manipulation of chattel slavery, in other words because it was not possible for a group of British merchants to establish a settlement colony there, no apparent origin could be secured and no Founding Fathers could establish the United States of India, no ‘Indian Revolution’ against Britain could be organized by foreign settlers. I admire the United States greatly, so much so that I have made it my second home, lived and worked here over half my life. Speaking as a not-quite-not-citizen, then, I would submit to you that Euramerican origins and foundations are secured also by the places where an ‘origin’ is violently instituted. In the current conjuncture, when so much of the identity of the American nation state is secured by global economic and political manipulation, and when the imminent prospect of large-scale fence-making beckons and recedes into a New World Order, it is not disrespectful of the energy of We the American People to insist that domestic accounts that emphasize America as a self-made giant illegally wrenching the origin of freedom from merely a moribund Europe has its own political agenda. 2 Constitutional talk is normally a tale of transactions between Europe and America. Transnational Culture Studies must put this transaction in an international frame. If, for example, the project of recovering or discovering the true structure of the national discourse from ideas of foreign manufacture is taken as a general principle of the study of the constitutions, the enterprise would become productively problematic as soon as we move outside Euramerica. One cannot substitute ‘native’ for ‘national’ in that undertaking. A transnational study of culture will not neutralize or disciplinarize the problem by defining it away as ‘comparative’ work, assimilate it by considering the last great wave of imperialism as basically a part of metropolitan history, or yet, however implicitly, bestow upon colonialism what Bernard Williams has called ‘moral luck’ in the context of ethical philosophy. Turkey is a most interesting case in point. If we take the Conquest of Istanbul (1453) as a dividing line, we can see parallel but highly differentiated formations developing in Mediterranean and Western Europe on the one hand and the Ottoman 176 G A Y A T RI C H AK R A V OR T Y SP I V A K Empire on the other. What characterizes the latter is the extraordinarily active and vastly heterogeneous diasporic activity that is constantly afoot on its terrain. There is still an unfortunate tendency, in the ‘comparativist’ arena, to represent the Ottoman Empire as governed by the static laws of something like ‘the Asiatic Mode of Production’, with its change-inhibiting bureaucratic hierarchy and absence of private property in land. If, however, Western Europe is not taken as a necessary norm, the successes and vicissitudes of the Ottoman Empire can be seen as an extraordinary series of experiments to negotiate questions of ethnicity, religion and ‘national’ identity upon a model rather different from the story of the emergence of nationalism in the former space. How much of the events of the 1990s in Eastern Europe retain the lineaments of the non-teleological (tactical) nature of those ceaseless negotiations, suppressed for almost a century under the ferocious teleology of the Bolshevik experiment, and now emerging into a completely different field of strategy? The staging of the fragments of Islam in that region is today under question once again. By citing an inter- or multinationality whose control was Islamic, I am of course not interested in legitimizing the Eurocentric model by endorsing an ‘Islamic Revival’, where an ‘Islam’ contained in diversified nation states, in postcoloniality and migrancy, is demonized or sacralised as a monolith. It has been argued by contemporary scholars that the economic formations of late eighteenth-century Western Europe began to shift the balance within the Ottoman Empire so that its Muslim component began increasingly to slip or remain contained in a precapitalist mode. Kemal Kerpat has argued that what was a curiosity about the West was gradually receded as the necessity to imitate. Religious nationalism began to grow as ‘the ideal of impartiality which insulated the bureaucracy’ began to break down. The Ottoman trade monopoly on the Black Sea came to an end in 1774. The Mediterranean trade had been dominated by the West. Now ‘for the common good of the two Empires’, Russia stepped into the Black Sea trade. In 1798 Napoleon invaded Egypt, threatening the British trade route to India. ‘The Ottoman economy gradually entered a period of total submission to the industrial giants of Europe’. In this transforming society, religious difference gradually gets politically receded as majorities and minorities, until, in a century’s time, ‘the Ottoman government [is] increasingly called “Turkish”, and “Turkish” [now] means a dominant Muslim majority’. This is not merely a demographic change imposed from without. It is a discursive shift making possible certain kinds of statements, ultimately making possible a Turkish nationalist who ‘finds it “in vain to offer resistance” to European civilization’, the ‘visionary mimic man as father of the nation’, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. We are speaking of the same period – 1774, 1798 – as in the cases of the US and India. But the narrative is different again. In the case of the United States, an originary claim is secured. In the case of India, colony and empire step forth as place-holders for a ‘failed originary moment’. Here the question of origin is settled differently. Let us consider secularism without the moralistic fervor with which we contemplate its ‘organic development’ in the West, just as we thought of ‘nations’ a moment ago without necessarily checking them against the story of the rise of T H E Q U E S T I O N O F C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 177 nationalism in the West. In a practically multinational empire like the Ottoman, the separation of church and state was practically effective in the interest of the overarching state. This secularism was not the name of the socializing of Western Christianity which has something like a relationship with the rise of industrial monopoly capitalist imperialism. It was rather a precapitalist practical (not philosophical) secularism which was given loose ideological support by a communitarianist universalism taken to be present in the Islamic umma. (Any suggestion that this can be suddenly injected into ‘Islamic’ politics today is to work in the ‘naive conviction that the Muslim masses are still living in the religious atmosphere of the Middle Ages’. The impact of a shift in world trade begins to reconstitute the habitus (Pierre Bourdieu’s term) of the region into the Western European discursive formation at the end of the eighteenth century. In other words, things begin to ‘make sense’ in Western European terms. The Ottoman example is now a ‘deviation’. And now, in a reconstituted Muslim-majority Turkish state, it is possible for Western Europe to offer an originary model. Turkey begins to constitute itself as a nation state. The Constitution of 1876 is its first inscription, the general ‘balkanization’ of the empire after the First World War its necessary military-political consolidation. I have argued elsewhere that the peculiar play of contingency in the narrativization of history should not be construed as the Laws of Motion of History. My argument has been developed in the context of presenting a contrast between the circumstances contingent upon two great monotheisms – Christianity and Islam – in the possibility of their reinscription as secularism as such. Here I offer an example from recent Indian history. The Khilafat movement (1918–25) in India, launched in the name of a multinational unitarian universalist Islam supporting the Ottoman Caliphate, was out of joint with the times. It was in fact an anti-imperialist nationalist attempt at the consolidation of the minority rights of Islam in India. Here too, the reconstitution of the Imperial Mughal State and the independent principalities of India through (more direct) contact with industrial monopoly capitalist imperialism had established a new habitus: majority–minority. In the sphere of decolonization it was European-style nationalism that was on the agenda. (In fact, that was the subtext of the Khilafat movement.) Thus, although the Khilafat movement lent support to the rise of Mustafa Kemal, the creator of ‘modern Turkey’, it was by Kemal’s Constitution, in early 1924, that the actual Khilafat or Caliphate was abolished. For the Indians, after a negotiated Independence, in 1947, Western European codes and English Common Law offered models of origin. The constitution of the secular state of India was launched under the auspices of Lord Mountbatten, although the voice of Islam and a semitized Hinduism as alternatives to the European Enlightenment were still heard. Let us look now at the question of origin in the Turkish case. A simulated alien origin or source, from which to draw ‘modernization’ and constitutionality appears, politically and philosophically cognizable, facing a terrain reterritorialized in response to the global release of industrial capital. The ideological vision of a Turkish ‘nation’ now effaces the incessantly negotiated multinationality that was the Ottoman Empire because that can no longer be recognized as multi- 178 G A Y A T RI C H AK R A V OR T Y SP I V A K ‘nationality’. The gap can be measured by the distance between Midhat Pasha’s Constitution of 1876 and Mustafa Kemal’s Constitution of 1924. 1876: Art. 1. The Ottoman Empire comprises present countries and possessions and semi-dependent provinces. It forms an indivisible whole from which no portion can be detached under any pretext whatever . . . Art. 8. All subjects of the Empire are called Ottomans, without distinction, whatever faith they profess; the status of an Ottoman is acquired and lost, according to conditions specified by law. 1924: Art. 2. The Turkish State is republican, nationalist, populist, etatist, secular and reformist . . . Art. 68. Every Turk is born free, and free he lives. Whatever the discrepancy, in the US or in Turkey, ‘between constitutional norms and political realities’, between empire and nation, by 1924 ‘the free Turk’ is coded into constitutional rationality as a person, as opposed to the Ottoman. ‘The free American’, comparably coded, can disavow the contingent securing of his origin, and present his felicitous connection with world trade at the moment of origin (compounded by domestic simple commodity production with ‘organic’ links to industrial capitalism) as only a bold rupture. ‘The free Turk’ is obliged to a perennial acknowledgment of European debt. I should like to look at the ‘free Turk’ in a sharper focus. In the brief first section, entitled ‘Declarations of Independence’, of Otobiographies, Derrida points out that ‘the good people of these Colonies’ in whose name the representatives sign the American Declaration of Independence do not, strictly speaking, exist. As such they do not yet have the name and authority before the Declaration. At the same time, they are required to produce the authority for a Declaration which gives them being. ‘This unheard-of thing [is] an everyday occurrence’. That fact does not, however, authorize us to ignore it as trivial. This undecidability between, let’s say, a performative structure and a constative structure is required in order to produce the sought-after effect . . . The signature [on the Declaration] invents the signer [the name and authority of ‘the good People’] . . . in a sort of fabulous retroactivity . . . [T]his fabulous event is only possible in truth thanks to [par] the inadequation to itself of a present. . . . The constitution . . . guarantee[s] . . . your passport . . . marriages . . . checks . . . [by] the signature of each American citizen [which] depends, in fact and by right, on this indispensable confusion . . . [The ‘good People’] sign in the name of the laws of nature and in the name of God, creator of nature . . . and present performative utterances as constative utterances. (Derrida 1985: 10) This confusion guarantees the identity of the national agent – passport, marriage, check. But this originary ‘hypocrisy’, entailing the involvement of the laws of nature, guarantees/produces the national agent as such, who is also the guarantor of the guarantee. The first is seen in the constative/performative in ‘every T H E Q U E S T I O N O F C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 179 Turk is born free’ (1924). The second is seen in the guarantor/guaranteed in the selfinadequate present of ‘the system is based on the principle that the people personally and effectively direct their own destinies’ (1921). If the series of Turkish constitutions are read with Derrida’s extraordinary attention to detail, we would, again and again, trace this disclosure or effacement of the trace, at the origin of the founding of modern constitutions. Undecidability secures the agent’s ability to decide as a free national agent. Why do we need to remember this? So that the possibility of agency is not taken to guarantee the self-proximity of the subject, and national or ethnic identity do not become fetishized. Nationalism in the context of metropolitan countries can then become the justification for the founding racist ideology of imperialism and neocolonialism, ‘the end of history’, declaring ‘the triumph of the West’, predicated upon being ‘turned off by [the] nihilistic idea of what literature was all about [taught by] Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’. In the context of the Third World, if the undecidable and slippery founding of agency is seen to be the birth of a new man or woman, the act of the founding, celebrating political independence, comes to be seen as an end in itself. Some remain outside this constative/ performative ruse. By contrast, the transplanting of nationalities in migrancy shows up the negotiability of the Constitutional subject. Responding to the US reception of his Islam and Capitalism, so staunch a Marxist as Maxime Rodinson is obliged to renounce both economics as the last instance and access to scientific truth: I merely hold that the translation of the popular will into political decisions requires something else than free parliamentary elections, quite other arrangements differing according to the social condition of the population under consideration . . . My struggle [is] precisely against faith in the panacea of political independence. That does not mean that I scorn political independence, that I renounce my support of the struggle for decolonization . . . Just as it is important to perceive, behind the scenes in the representative institutions, the reality of the forces of economic pressure, so too is it necessary to understand that a world of independent political units, each with an equal voice at the U.N., even endowed with representative institutions, does not, in itself, make a ‘free world’. That is undoubtedly obvious to the most naïve observer of the international political game, but the ideology that sacralizes political institutions impedes acknowledgment of all the consequences . . . The whole truth is no more accessible to man than full freedom or complete harmony of social relations. (Rodinson 1978: xxiii) In the mid-1960s, writing for a French rather than a US audience, Rodinson had told his readers that ‘there remain[ed] a very large area of the field of learning that can and must be explored with . . . philosophical presuppositions provisionally suspended . . . and the positivist procedure is the one to follow’. The American Preface, quoted above, shows the suspension of assurances of positivism as well. Activist thinkers of the third or any world, not merely anxious ‘to shine in some 180 G A Y A T RI C H AK R A V OR T Y SP I V A K salon, lecture-theatre or meeting-hall’, repeatedly come up against the call to suspension when questions of originary justification for labels of identity confront them. Having acknowledged that basing collective practice on the ground of identity begs the question in the very house of self-evidence, how do we reopen the distinction between the US and Turkish cases? It is in the area of the origin from which the new nation separates itself, an issue, as we have noticed in Ackerman’s discussion, that is not without a certain importance: ‘In this case, another state signature had to be effaced in “dissolving” the links of colonial paternity or maternity’. As the Declaration states: ‘it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another’. It is here that the laws of God and Nature provide the necessary last instance that can accommodate ‘the hypocrisy indispensable to a politico-military-economic, etc. coup de force’. And stand behind the Constitution as pretext. The difference between this confident dissolution of origin and the cultural confusion and disavowal attendant upon migrancy is the difference between colonialism and migrancy. Here we are discussing a historical version of the precursor of modernization which will not fit the colonial discourse model too easily. Like the US Declaration, what the Turkish Constitution separates itself from is its own past, or rather it secures a separation already inaugurated by the Ottoman Constitution of 1876. In terms of the access to agency, the earlier constitution had not yet fully coded a coup (blow) as a coupure (cut). The irreducible performative or constative confusion sustaining Art. 3 (1924) – ‘sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the nation’ – depends on the abolition of the Caliphate. And this is not declared in the name of the Good People of Turkey; merely in the unwritten name of Europe. The ‘national’ is already catachrestic, ‘wrested from its proper meaning’. It might therefore be politically useful to consider whether Euro-American origins are also not catachrestic, secured by other places; to consider, in Derrida’s words, ‘the politics of the proper name used as the last instance’. God/Nature in the case of the United States, Europe in the case of Turkey. The two must be read side by side. Turkey is especially interesting because it is not a case of decolonization but rather an obligatory self-de-imperialization. For a transnational study of culture, the ‘comparative’ gesture cannot be docketed in a comfortable academic subdivision of labor; but rather, the inexhaustible taxonomy of catachreses – how a constitution begs the question of origin – must at least be invoked at every step. Culture studies must therefore constantly risk (though not flaunt) a loss of specialism. 3 It is perhaps unrealistic to expect transnational literacy in the high school classroom. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that even the undergraduate classroom might be too early to broach true transnational literacy. It was, however, interesting to find that, although ‘Constitutional Convention’, ‘constitutional monarchy’, and ‘Constitution of the United States’ were three items listed under ‘What literate T H E Q U E S T I O N O F C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 181 Americans know’ in E. D. Hirsch’s provocative book Cultural Literacy, the Constitution was not an index entry. In other words, constitutional matters did not form part of Hirsch’s own thinking in the making of his argument. There is nothing in his index between ‘Conservatism’ and ‘Constructive Hypothesis’. In sections 1 and 2 above, I have tried to build towards the argument that, if one is going to speak for or plan for that complicated thing, an ‘American’, one must think of his or her relationship to the Constitution. If the high school social sciences class gives America to the people in the American way, and if the American way is divided into the normal and the constitutional, and the high school humanities class is restructuring itself by way of books such as Cultural Literacy, humanities teachers on the tertiary level ought perhaps to ask what the cultural politics of the production of the ‘American Way’ might be. Like E. D. Hirsch, Jr, I am a teacher of English. I must take into account that English is in the world, not just in Britain and the United States. Yet, English is the medium and the message through which, in education, Americans are most intimately made. And, first, the history of higher lawmaking, the reality of normal politics, and changes in electoral mechanics show us that the connection between ‘We the People’ and a General Will is constantly negotiable; second, a making of Americans that would be faithful to American origins is not just a transaction with Europe; third, as teachers in the humanities, and as teachers of English, our role in training citizens should not ignore this. I entered a department of English as a junior in 1957 in another world, in Presidency College at the University of Calcutta. Yet, such is the power of epochs or eras that I did not come to the slow thinking of other worlds choreographing the march of English until about the mid-1970s, when I had already been teaching in the United States for about a decade. Thus here too my perspective is of the not-quitenot-citizen, an economic migrant with a toehold in postcoloniality. As such, I must speak from within the debate over the teaching of the canon. There can be no general theory of canons. Canons are the condition of institutions and the effect of institutions. Canons secure institutions as institutions secure canons. The canon as such – those books of the Bible accepted as authentic by the church – provides a clear-cut example. It is within this constraint, then, that some of us in the profession are trying to expand the canon. Since it is indubitably the case that there is no expansion without contraction, we must remove the single-author courses from the English major curriculum. We must make room for the co-ordinated teaching of the new entries into the canon. When I bring this up, I hear stories of how undergraduates have told their teachers that a whole semester of Shakespeare, or Milton, or Chaucer, changed their lives. I do not doubt these stories, but we have to do a quality/quantity shift if we are going to canonize the new entries. I have given something like a general rationale for this expansion in the first part of my paper. And, to be consistent with this resolve, even the feminist approaches to Shakespeare, the Marxist approaches to Milton, and the anti-imperialist approaches to Chaucer (are there those?) will have to relinquish the full semester allowed on the coat-tails of the Old Masters of the Canon. The undergraduates will have their lives changed perhaps by a sense of the diversity of the new canon and the unacknowledged power-play involved in securing the old. 182 G A Y A T RI C H AK R A V OR T Y SP I V A K The world has changed too much. The least we can do to accept it is to make the small move to push the single-author courses up into the terminal MA. The matter of the literary canon is in fact a political matter: securing authority. In order to secure authority we sometimes have to engage in some scrupulous versions of ‘doctrinaire gesture polities’. But, in the double-take that the daily administering of that authority entails comes the sense that there can be no ‘knowledge’ in political practice . . . Political practice involves the calculation of effect, of the possibilities and results of political action, and that calculation rests on political relations [in this case within the institutional network of United States tertiary education] which condition the degrees of certainty of calculation and the range of the calculable. (Hindess and Hirst 1987: 58) A well-known paragraph in Capital, III, stages this double-take impressively. First the tremendous gestures toward the Realm of Freedom and the Realm of Necessity, the entire span of the human being in Nature and in social action; finally, the brief concluding sentence of the range of the calculable: ‘The reduction of the working day is the founding condition’. A model for emulation: a lot of gesture politics, talk of other worlds. But the reduction of the space and time spent on the old canon is the founding condition. What comes to fill the released space and time? Even the most cursory look at the publishers’ catalogues that cross our desks, and the ever proliferating journals concerned with the matter of the counter-canon, convinces us that there is no shortage of material. What I will say will seem to leave out many subtleties of approach. But please bear with me, for that is the hazard of all overviews. Let me then tabulate the ‘others’, at least keeping in mind that the lines cross, under and over one item to another: women; women of color; gays, lesbians; Afro-America; immigrant literature; literature of ethnicity; working-class literature; workingclass women; non-Western literature; and, in peculiar companionship, something called ‘theory’. I am not the only feminist who thinks that the situation of women’s literature as such is rather particular here. Some women had made it into the general canon. ‘A gentleman’s library’, wrote H. P. Marquand, a thoroughly sexist genteel American novelist writing in 1958 in his particularly sexist novel Women and Thomas Harrow, ‘as the [small-town, New England, nineteenth-century] Judge very well understood, comprised the British poets, the works of Bulwer Lytton, the Waverley Novels, Dickens and Thackeray, Austen and the Brontë sisters and Trollope’. We can update this list by at least Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison and perhaps Edith Wharton. With regard to these writers, even more than with the old masters, it is a question of restoration to a feminist perspective. But outside of this sphere, there were all the certainly-as-good-as-the-men women writers who did not get into the canon because the larger grid of social production would not let them in. In this broad sweep, and speaking only from the angle of bursting into the canon, how can the institution be obliged to calculate the literature of gender- T H E Q U E S T I O N O F C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 183 differentiated homosexuality? Only with the assumption that, since sexuality-andsexual-difference is one of the main themes and motors of literary production, this literature, in its historical determinations, continues to complicate and supplement that network, not only by giving us the diverse scoring of ‘the uses of pleasure’ but also by showing us how, by the divisive logic of normalizing the production of reproductive heterosexuality, we work at the continued securing of even the enlarged canon. Two such different scholars and critics as bell hooks and Hazel Carby have shown that the moment the color black is injected into these calculations, the structures of exclusion that have to be encountered appear much less accessible, much more durable. We need an approach here that is more than an awareness of the contemporary culture of white supremacy, of the fetishization of the black body, of the histories of black heroism in the nineteenth century that complete the list. The work on slave narratives done by women like Mary Helen Washington and others begins to give us a sense of what has been called ‘the reverse side’ of the mere ‘trac[ing] back from images to . . . structure’, a tracing that constituted the selfrepresentation of the American literary canon since its inception. By comparison, the restoration and insertion of the white-majority feminist canon is a matter of correcting and altering the established image-structure line of representation as if it restrained the garment of the body politic. With the able editorship of Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and others, explosive quantities of material for study are being made available. Gates’s own work, tracing figurations of Africa, takes us out of the strictly English canon into the area of culture studies. This literature, the literature of slavery, struggle, freedom, social production is different from the narratives of migrant ethnicity inscribed on the body of something called ‘America’. There cannot be a general concept of the other that can produce and secure both. In the interest of solidarity and gesture politics, we must forget these differences. For the painstaking task of training students and teachers within the institutional obligation to certify a canon, however, we must remember them. It seems right that the literature of the working class should form a part of disciplinary preparation. Yet in this parade of abstract figures on the grid of canonical calculation – woman, gay, lesbian, black, ethnic – the class-subject is aggressively more abstract as a concept. And on that level of abstraction, there may be a contradiction between embattled class consciousness and the American Dream. Perhaps in Britain the situation is different; both because of its earlier entry into the organised left and its later entry into something resembling the American Dream, through Thatcher’s brilliant maneuvers. One cannot not commend the study of the writing of the exploited in struggle. Yet is there something particularly disqualifying about ‘working-class’ becoming a canonical descriptive rather than an oppositional transformative? Certainly the basic argument of Jonathan Rée’s Proletarian Philosophers would seem to suggest so. This could in fact be the problem with all noncanonical teaching in the humanities, an implicit confusion between descriptive canonical practices within an institution and transformative practices to some ‘real ’ world. It is this area of confusion that can be depolemicized and made productive, through deconstructive strategies of teaching. With this in mind, I will soon touch upon the need for 184 G A Y A T RI C H AK R A V OR T Y SP I V A K deconstructive, power/knowledge-based, generally post-structuralist, preparation for our faculty. My cautions about the undergraduate teaching of post-structuralism relate to the breeding of recuperative analogies or preprogrammed hostility toward post-structuralism within the institutional calculus. Let us, for the moment, avoid this problem and go back to our English major, strung tight with the excitement of learning to read the diversity of the new canon: a bit of the old masters in new perspectives, women’s literature, black women’s literature, a glimpse of Afro-America, the literature of gendered homosexuality, of migrant ethnicity, of the exploited in struggle. We are taking good teaching for granted, a teaching that can make the student grasp that this is a canon, that this is the proper object of study of the new English major. Teaching is a different matter from our list of ingredients. The proof of the pudding is in the classroom. And, as I will say again, pedagogy talk is different from conference talk. Let us then return to our well-taught undergraduate and look at the last two items on our list: theory, and the literature of the rest of the world. Theory in the United States institution of the profession of English is often shorthand for the general critique of humanism undertaken in France in the wake of the Second World War and then, in a double-take, further radicalized in the mid1960s in the work of the so-called post-structuralists. I believe this material has no claim to a separate enclave in our undergraduate major. The critique of humanism in France was related to the perceived failure of the European ethical subject after the War. The second wave in the mid-1960s, coming in the wake of the Algerian revolution, sharpened this in terms of disciplinary practice in the humanities and social sciences because, as historians, philosophers, sociologists and psychologists, the participants felt that their practice was not merely a disinterested pursuit of knowledge, but productive in the making of human beings. It was because of this that they did not accept unexamined human experience as the source of meaning and the making of meaning as an unproblematic thing. And each one of them offered a method that would challenge the outlines of a discipline: archaeology, genealogy, power/knowledge reading, schizo-analysis, rhizoanalysis, non-subjective psychoanalysis, affirmative deconstruction, paralogic legitimation. At the end of the Second World War, the self-representation of the United States, on the other hand, was that of a savior, both militarily and, as the architect of the Marshall Plan, in the economic and therefore socio-cultural sphere. In fact, given the nature of United States society, the phrase ‘failure of the ethical subject felt by humanist intellectuals’ has almost no meaning. And, given the egobased pragmatism in the fields of history, philosophy, sociology, psychology and, indeed, literary criticism in the United States, the majority of United States teachers in the humanities saw and see the relevant French intellectuals as merely being antihumanists who believe that there is no human subject and no truth. As Pierre Bourdieu makes clear in his Homo Academicus, this group of intellectuals did not have an impact on the protocols of institutional pedagogy in France either. I think therefore it is absurd to expect our undergraduate majors to clue into this package called ‘theory’ as part of the canon. There is often a required history of criticism course for them. I suppose the impact of ‘theory’ in literary criticism can find a corner there. If they can understand Plato against the poets, or Coleridge on the imagination, and Freud on Hoffman, they can understand Barbara Johnson on Poe. T H E Q U E S T I O N O F C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 185 And the critique of the subject that they can learn from the counter-canonical new material is that the old canon conspired, only sometimes unwittingly, to make the straight white Christian man of property the ethical universal. Because the use of what is called ‘theory’ is in ‘educating the educators’, it is the doctoral student – the future teacher – who can be carefully inserted into it. And although I see no harm in introductory courses in theory on this level, I feel its real arena is an elected sequence, where interested students are prepared to resonate with something so much outside their own thoroughly pragmatic national tradition. By ‘preparation’ I do not mean just chunks of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger. I mean practice in analyzing critical prose. I have limited experience in long-term teaching at elite institutions. In my experience doctoral students in English are generally encouraged to judge without preparation. This is lethal in the critique of the canon, and doubly so in the study of so-called ‘theory’, for the practitioners there are writers of historical, sociological, philosophical, psychological prose who rely on rhetoric to help them. These students must also take seriously their foreign language requirement, which is generally a scandal. The intellectual-historical difference between Western Europe and the Anglo-United States in the postwar and Cold War years and indeed the difference in the fate of liberal humanism in these spaces is such that the most conscientious translators have often destroyed and trivialized the delicacy as well as the power of the critique, not knowing what to preserve. These students must learn that it is possible to be ‘wrong’ on a certain restrictive level and take that as an incentive for further inquiry. I know the bumper sticker says ‘Kids need praise every day’, but doctoral students, who are going to reproduce cognitive authority soon, might be encouraged to recognize that acknowledgment of error before texts from another tradition need not be disabling or paralyzing. I emphasize this because here we are attempting not merely to enlarge the canon with a counter-canon but to dethrone canonical method: not only in literary criticism but in social production; the axiom that something called concrete experience is the last instance. The canon is, after all, not merely the authentic books of the Bible, it is also, the OED tell us, ‘a fundamental principle . . . or axiom governing the systematic or scientific treatment of a subject’. Why is it necessary to gut the canon in this way? But I also hope that those students in the doctoral stream who choose to follow this counterintuitive route will acquire some notion of its usefulness. I have kept the rest of the world till the end. I think a general acquaintance with the landmarks of world literature outside of Euramerica should be part of the general undergraduate requirement. On the level of the English major, especially if we keep the single-author courses, a survey course is an insult to world literature. I would propose a one-semester senior seminar, shared with the terminal MA, utilising the resources of the Asian, Latin American, Pacific, and African studies, in conjunction with the creative writing programs, where the student is made to share the difficulties and triumphs of translation. There is nothing that would fill out an English major better than a sense of the limits of this exquisite and supple language. The division between substantive expansion of the canon and a critique of canonical method is most rigorously to be kept in mind in world literature 186 G A Y A T RI C H AK R A V OR T Y SP I V A K studies on the graduate level: colonial and postcolonial discourse, studies in a critique of imperialism. As long as this line of work is critical of the canon it can remain conscientiously researched straight English: Laura Brown’s work with Swift and Gauri Viswanathan’s on T. S. Eliot come to mind. One can think of the role of the navy in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, or of Christianity in Othello, and so on. But as soon as it becomes a substantive insertion into the canon, we should call a halt. There has been a recent spate of jobs opening up in the anglophone literature of the Third World. This is to be applauded. But the doctoral study of colonial and postcolonial discourse and the critique of imperialism as a substantive undertaking cannot be contained fully within English, although the first initiative might well come from there. In my thinking, this study should yoke itself with other disciplines, including the social sciences, so that we have degrees in English and History, English and Asian Studies, English and Anthropology, English and African Studies, where the English half of it will allow the student to read critically the production of knowledge in the other discipline, as well as her own all-too-easy conclusions. Mutatis mutandis, metropolitan national literature departments can also serve as bases. I think this speciality should carry a rigorous language requirement in at least one colonized vernacular. What I am describing is the core of a transnational study of culture, a revision of the old vision of Comparative Literature. Otherwise: Colonial and postcolonial discourse studies can, at worst, allow the indigenous elite from other countries to claim marginality without any developed doctorallevel sense of the problematic of decolonized space and without any method of proper verification within the discipline. If this study is forever contained within English (or other metropolitan literatures), without expansion into fully developed transnational culture studies, colonial and postcolonial discourse studies can also construct a canon of ‘Third World Literature (in translation)’ that may lead to a ‘new orientalism’. It can fix Eurocentric paradigms, taking ‘magical realism’ to be the trademark of Third World literary production, for example. It can begin to define ‘the rest of the world’ simply by checking out if it is feeling sufficiently ‘marginal’ with regard to the West or not. We cannot fight imperialism by perpetrating a ‘new orientalism’. My argument is not a guilt and shame trip. It is a warning. Indeed, the institutional imperatives for breaching the very imperium of English, even with its revised canon, cannot be fully developed from within English departments, for in its highly sophisticated vocabulary for cultural descriptions, the knowledge of English can sometimes sanction a kind of global ignorance. 4 Arrived here, it seems to me that institutes and curricula for a historically sophisticated transnational study of culture have become an item on the agenda. They can help us undo disciplinary boundaries and clear a space for study in a constructive way. They can provide the field for the new approach. T H E Q U E S T I O N O F C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 187 The point is to negotiate between the national, the global, and the historical as well as the contemporary diasporic. We must both anthropologize the West and study the various cultural systems of Africa, Asia, Asia Pacific and the Americas as if peopled by historical agents. Only then can we begin to put together the story of the development of a cosmopolitanism that is global, gendered, and dynamic. In our telematic or micro-electronic world, such work can get quite technical: consideration of the broader strategies of information control, productive of satisfactory and efficient cultural explanations; consideration of the systems of representation for the generated explanations; mapping out the techniques of their validation and deployment. This can disclose an inexhaustible field of connections. A discipline must constrain the inexhaustible. Yet the awareness of the potential inexhaustibility works against the conviction of cultural supremacy, a poor starting point for new research and teaching. This last paragraph is grant proposal talk. How does this type of prose translate to teaching talk? Let us move from high tech to humanism. Let us learn and teach how to distinguish between ‘internal colonization’ – the patterns of exploitation and domination of disenfranchised groups within the United States – and the various different heritages or operations of colonization in the rest of the world. The United States is certainly a multiracial culture, but its parochial multicultural debates, however animated, are not a picture of globality. Thus we must negotiate between nationalism (uni- or multicultural) and globality. Let us take seriously the idea that systems of representation come to hand when we secure our own culture – our own cultural explanations. Think upon the following set: First, the making of an American must be defined by at least a desire to enter the ‘We the People’ of the Constitution. There is no way that the ‘radical’ or the ‘ethnicist’ can take a position against civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment or great transformative opinions such as Roe v. Wade. One way or another, we cannot not want to inhabit this great rational abstraction. Second, traditionally, this desire for the abstract American ‘we’ has been recoded by the fabrication of ethnic enclaves, artificial and affectively supportive subsocieties that, claiming to preserve the ethnos or culture of origin, move further and further away from the vicissitudes and transformations of the nation or group of origin. If a constitution establishes at least the legal possibility of an abstract collectivity, these enclaves provide a counter-collectivity that seems reassuringly ‘concrete’. Third, our inclination to obliterate the difference between United States internal colonization and the dynamics of decolonized space makes use of this already established American ethno-cultural agenda. At worst, it secures the ‘they’ of development or aggression against the constitutional ‘we’. At best, it suits our institutional convenience and brings the rest of the world home. A certain double standard, a certain sanctioned ignorance, can now begin to operate in the areas of the study of central and so-called marginal cultures. There is a lot of name-calling on both sides of the West-and-the-rest debate in the United States. In my estimation, although the politics of the only-the-West supporters is generally worth questioning, in effect the two sides legitimize each other. In a Foucauldian language, one could call them an opposition within the same 188 G A Y A T RI C H AK R A V OR T Y SP I V A K discursive formation. The new culture studies must displace this opposition by keeping nation and globe distinct as it studies their relationship, and by taking a moratorium on cultural supremacy as an unquestioned springboard. I am not speaking against the tendency to conflate ethnos of origin and the historical space left behind with the astonishing construction of a multicultural and multiracial identity for the United States. What I am suggesting is that if, as academics in the humanities, we take this as the founding principle for a study of globality, then we are off base. In the most practical terms, we are allowing a parochial decanonization debate to stand in for a study of the world. A slightly different point needs to be made here. I am not arguing for an unexamined nativism as an alibi for culture studies. To keep the rest of the world obliged to remain confined within a mere ethnic pride and an acting out of a basically static ethnicity is to confuse political gestures with an awareness of history. That confinement was rather astutely practiced by the traditionally defined disciplinary subdivision of labor within history, anthropology, and comparative literature. Cultural studies must set up an active give-and-take with them so that it gains in substance what it provides in method. And, the educators must educate themselves in effective interdisciplinary (postdisciplinary?) teaching. As a practical academic, one must be thinking about released time for faculty and curricular development in the newly instituted programs. These endeavors must ask: How can models of reasoning be taken as culture-free? How can help and explanation be both culture-specific and ‘objective’? If there are answers to these questions, how can they remain relevant across disciplines? Chapter 14 Homi K. Bhabha THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN T he que sti on of a gency EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION H O M I B H A B H A’S W O R K B E LO N G S more to cultural and literary theory than to cultural studies as narrowly understood. History and everyday life appear in his writing not so much as objects on their own account but as examples inside a mode of dense, semiotically orientated philosophical analysis – which, however, has been very influential in cultural, and especially in postcolonial, studies. In this essay Bhabha explores congruences between the postmodern and the postcolonial by way of a post-structuralist theory of language. The classical structuralist distinction between langue (language as a system) and parole (individual speech acts) is interpreted as a temporal lag between thought and expression, between daydreaming and writing, between the intention to express meaning and the verbal performance in which meaning is articulated. Bhabha argues that each of the second moments in this series is a revision of the first – a revision in which exists the possibility for openness and contingency; the possibility, in short, of a certain freedom. For victims of colonialism, culture means strategies of survival as much as heritage, so that the gap between inherited or official meaning (ideology) and its individual performance provides room for resistance and individuation. Drawing upon Ranajit Guha’s researches, the concrete example Bhabha points to is the hybrid, improvised “rebel consciousness” in the Bengali struggle against British imperialism. Bhabha also suggests that his account of semiotics provides a theoretical basis for a radically multicultural society able to incorporate cultural “incommensurability” (that is, internal cultures which share no values or projects). This is also, he contends, what a postmodern society is. 190 HOMI K. BHABHA Bhabha’s theory is finally both anti-racist and counter-historical: the kind of cultural temporality he endorses eludes the determining pressures of ethnicity and race as well as the weight of tradition, indeed of history itself. That is what the “contingency” and “incommensurability” of his subaltern or postmodern cultural acts of signification imply. But, however valuable, this move also involves, or at any rate risks, a blanding out of differences – like those between poor rural workers in South Asia and London multicultural artists and theorists, for instance. It is because it carries this risk that “postcolonialism” as a general concept has been questioned by critics such as Anne McClintock – and why the work of a postcolonial theorist like Gayatri Spivak (including her essay in this volume) can be read as negotiating the huge (incommensurable?) distance between the lifeways of the subaltern and the privileged theorist. Further reading: Bhabha 1994; Dirlik 1994; During 1998; Fanon 1967a, 1967b; Gilroy 1994; McClintock 1994; Young 1995; Zizek 1986. The survival of culture Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South. They intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples. They formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the ‘rationalizations’ of modernity. To bend Jürgen Habermas to our purposes, we could argue also that the postcolonial project, at the most general theoretical level, seeks to explore those social pathologies – ‘loss of meaning, conditions of anomie’ – that no longer simply ‘cluster around class antagonism, [but] break up into widely scattered historical contingencies’ (Habermas 1987: 348). A range of contemporary critical theories suggest that it is from those who have suffered the sentence of history – subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement – that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking. There is even a growing conviction that the affective experience of social marginality – as it emerges in non-canonical cultural forms – transforms our critical strategies. It forces us to confront the concept of culture outside objets d’art or beyond the canonization of the ‘idea’ of aesthetics, to engage with culture as an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and practices, produced in the act of social survival. Culture reaches out to create a symbolic textuality to give the alienating everyday an aura of selfhood, a promise of pleasure. The transmission of cultures of survival does not occur in the ordered musée imaginaire of national cultures with their claims to the continuity of THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN 191 an authentic ‘past’ and a living ‘present’ – whether this scale of value is preserved in the organicist ‘national’ traditions of romanticism or with the more universal proportions of classicism. Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational. It is transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement, whether they are the ‘middle passage’ of slavery and indenture, the ‘voyage out’ of the civilizing mission, the fraught accommodation of Third World migration to the West after the Second World War, or the traffic of economic and political refugees within and outside the Third World. Culture is translational because such spatial histories of displacement – now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of ‘global’ media technologies – make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue. It becomes crucial to distinguish between the semblance and similitude of the symbols across diverse cultural experiences – literature, art, music, ritual, life, death – and the social specificity of each of these productions of meanings as they circulate as signs within specific contextual locations and social systems of value. The transnational dimension of cultural tranformation – migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation – makes the process of cultural translation a complex form of signification. The natural(ized), unifying discourse of ‘nation’, ‘peoples’, or authentic ‘folk’ tradition, those embedded myths of culture’s particularity, cannot be readily referenced. The great, though unsettling, advantage of this position is that it makes you increasingly aware of the construction of culture and the invention of tradition. The postcolonial perspective departs from the traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment or ‘dependency’ theory. As a mode of analysis, it attempts to revise those nationalist or ‘nativist’ pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and First World in a binary structure of opposition. The postcolonial perspective resists the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation. It forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres. It is from this hybrid location of cultural value – the transnational as the translational – that the postcolonial intellectual attempts to elaborate a historical and literary project. My growing conviction has been that the encounters and negotiations of differential meanings and values within ‘colonial’ textuality, its governmental discourses and cultural practices, have anticipated, avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signification and judgement that have become current in contemporary theory – aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy, the question of discursive closure, the threat to agency, the status of intentionality, the challenge to ‘totalizing’ concepts, to name but a few. In general terms, there is a colonial contramodernity at work in the eighteenthand nineteenth-century matrices of Western modernity that, if acknowledged, would question the historicism that analogically links, in a linear narrative, late capitalism and the fragmentary, simulacral, pastiche symptoms of postmodernity. This linking does not account for the historical traditions of cultural contingency and textual indeterminacy (as forces of social discourse) generated in the attempt to produce an ‘enlightened’ colonial or postcolonial subject, and it transforms, in the 192 HOMI K. BHABHA process, our understanding of the narrative of modernity and the ‘values’ of progress. Postcolonial critical discourses require forms of dialectical thinking that do not disavow or sublate the otherness (alterity) that constitutes the symbolic domain of psychic and social identifications. The incommensurability of cultural values and priorities that the postcolonial critic represents cannot be accommodated within theories of cultural relativism or pluralism. The cultural potential of such differential histories has led Fredric Jameson to recognize the ‘internationalization of the national situations’ in the postcolonial criticism of Roberto Retamar. This is not an absorption of the particular in the general, for the very act of articulating cultural differences ‘calls us into question fully as much as it acknowledges the Other . . . neither reduc[ing] the Third World to some homogeneous Other of the West, not . . . vacuously celebrat[ing] the astonishing pluralism of human cultures’ (Jameson 1989: xi–xii). The historical grounds of such an intellectual tradition are to be found in the revisionary impulse that informs many postcolonial thinkers. C. L. R. James once remarked, in a public lecture, that the postcolonial prerogative consisted in reinterpreting and rewriting the forms and effects of an ‘older’ colonial consciousness from the later experience of the cultural displacement that marks the more recent, postwar histories of the Western metropolis. A similar process of cultural translation, and transvaluation, is evident in Edward Said’s assessment of the response from disparate postcolonial regions as a ‘tremendously energetic attempt to engage with the metropolitan world in a common effort at re-inscribing, re-interpreting and expanding the sites of intensity and the terrain contested with Europe’ (Said 1990: 49). How does the deconstruction of the ‘sign’, the emphasis on indeterminism in cultural and political judgement, transform our sense of the ‘subject’ of culture and the historical agent of change? If we contest the ‘grand narratives’, then what alternative temporalities do we create to articulate the differential (Jameson), contrapuntal (Said), interruptive (Spivak) historicities of race, gender, class, nation within a growing transnational culture? Do we need to rethink the terms in which we conceive of community, citizenship, nationality and the ethics of social affiliation? Jameson’s justly famous reading of Conrad’s Lord Jim in The Political Unconscious provides a suitable example of a kind of reading against the grain that a postcolonial interpretation demands, when faced with attempts to sublate the specific ‘interruption’, or the interstices, through which the colonial text utters its interrogations, its contrapuntal critique. Reading Conrad’s narrative and ideological contradictions ‘as a canceled realism . . . like Hegelian Aufhebung’, Jameson represents the fundamental ambivalences of the ethical (honour/guilt) and the aesthetic (premodern/postmodern) as the allegorical restitution of the socially concrete subtext of late nineteenth-century rationalization and reification (Jameson 1981: 266). What his brilliant allegory of late capitalism fails to represent sufficiently, in Lord Jim for instance, is the specifically colonial address of the narrative aporia contained in the ambivalent, obsessive repetition of the phrase ‘He was one of us’ as the major trope of social and psychic identification throughout the text. The repetition of ‘He was one of us” reveals the fragile margins of the concepts THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN 193 of Western civility and cultural community put under colonial stress; Jim is reclaimed at the moment when he is in danger of being cast out or made outcast, manifestly ‘not one of us’. Such a discursive ambivalence at the very heart of the issue of honour and duty in the colonial service represents the liminality, if not the end, of the masculinist, heroic ideal (and ideology) of a healthy imperial Englishness – those pink bits on the map that Conrad believed were genuinely salvaged by being the preserve of English colonization, which served the larger idea, and ideal, of Western civil society. Such problematic issues are activated within the terms and traditions of postcolonial critique as it reinscribes the cultural relations between spheres of social antagonism. Current debates in postmodernism question the cunning of modernity – its historical ironies, its disjunctive temporalities, its paradoxes of progress, its representational aporia. It would profoundly change the values, and judgements, of such interrogations, if they were open to the argument that metropolitan histories of civitas cannot be conceived without evoking the savage colonial antecedents of the ideals of civility. It also suggests, by implication, that the language of rights and obligations, so central to the modern myth of a people, must be questioned on the basis of the anomalous and discriminatory legal and cultural status assigned to migrant, diasporic and refugee populations. Inevitably, they find themselves on the frontiers between cultures and nations, often on the other side of the law. The postcolonial perspective forces us to rethink the profound limitations of a consensual and collusive ‘liberal’ sense of cultural community. It insists that cultural and political identity are constructed through a process of alterity. Questions of race and cultural difference overlay issues of sexuality and gender and overdetermine the social alliances of class and democratic socialism. The time for ‘assimilating’ minorities to holistic and organic notions of cultural value has dramatically passed. The very language of cultural community needs to be rethought from a postcolonial perspective, in a move similar to the profound shift in the language of sexuality, the self and cultural community, effected by feminists in the 1970s and the gay community in the 1980s. Culture becomes as much an uncomfortable, disturbing practice of survival and supplementarity – between art and politics, past and present, the public and the private – as its resplendent being is a moment of pleasure, enlightenment or liberation. It is from such narrative positions that the postcolonial prerogative seeks to affirm and extend a new collaborative dimension, both within the margins of the nation-space and across boundaries between nations and peoples. My use of poststructuralist theory emerges from this postcolonial contramodernity. I attempt to represent a certain defeat, or even an impossibility, of the ‘West’ in its authorization of the ‘idea’ of colonization. Driven by the subaltern history of the margins of modernity – rather than by the failures of logocentrism – I have tried, in some small measure, to revise the known, to rename the postmodern from the position of the postcolonial. 194 HOMI K. BHABHA New times The enunciative position of contemporary cultural studies is both complex and problematic. It attempts to institutionalize a range of transgressive discourses whose strategies are elaborated around non-equivalent sites of representation where a history of discrimination and misrepresentation is common among, say, women, blacks, homosexuals and Third World migrants. However, the ‘signs’ that construct such histories and identities – gender, race, homophobia, postwar diaspora, refugees, the international division of labour, and so on – not only differ in content but often produce incompatible systems of signification and engage distinct forms of social subjectivity. To provide a social imaginary that is based on the articulation of differential, even disjunctive, moments of history and culture, contemporary critics resort to the peculiar temporality of the language metaphor. It is as if the arbitrariness of the sign, the indeterminacy of writing, the splitting of the subject of enunciation, these theoretical concepts, produce the most useful descriptions of the formation of ‘postmodern’ cultural subjects. Cornel West enacts ‘a measure of synechdochical thinking’ (my emphasis) as he attempts to talk of the problems of address in the context of a black, radical, ‘practicalist’ culture: A tremendous articulateness is syncopated with the African drumbeat . . . into an American postmodernist product: there is no subject expressing originary anguish here but a fragmented subject, pulling from past and present, innovatively producing a heterogeneous product . . . [I]t is part and parcel of the subversive energies of black underclass youth, energies that are forced to take a cultural mode of articulation. (West 1988: 280–1) Stuart Hall, writing from the perspective of the fragmented, marginalized, racially discriminated-against members of a post-Thatcherite underclass, questions the sententiousness of left orthodoxy where ‘we go on thinking a unilinear and irreversible political logic, driven by some abstract entity that we call the economic or capital unfolding to its pre-ordained end’ (Hall 1988: 273). Earlier in his book, he uses the linguistic sign as a metaphor for a more differential and contingent logic of ideology: [T]he ideological sign is always multi-accentual, and Janus-faced – that is, it can be discursively rearticulated to construct new meanings, connect with different social practices, and position social subjects differently . . . Like other symbolic or discursive formations, [ideology] is connective across different positions, between apparently dissimilar, sometimes contradictory, ideas. Its ‘unity’ is always in quotation marks and always complex, a suturing together of elements which have no necessary or eternal ‘belongingness’. It is always, in that sense, organized around arbitrary and not natural closures. (Hall 1988: 9–10) THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN 195 The ‘language’ metaphor raises the question of cultural difference and incommensurability, not the consensual, ethnocentric notion of the pluralistic existence of cultural diversity. It represents the temporality of cultural meaning as ‘multi-accentual’, ‘discursively rearticulated’. It is a time of the cultural sign that unsettles the liberal ethic of tolerance and the pluralist framework of multiculturalism. Increasingly, the issue of cultural difference emerges at points of social crises, and the questions of identity that it raises are agonistic; identity is claimed either from a position of marginality or in an attempt at gaining the centre: in both senses, ex-centric. The authority of customary, traditional practices – culture’s relation to the historic past – is not dehistoricized in Hall’s language metaphor. Those anchoring moments are revalued as a form of anteriority whose causality is effective because it returns to displace the present, to make it disjunctive. This kind of disjunctive temporality is of the utmost importance for the politics of cultural difference. It creates a signifying time for the inscription of cultural incommensurability where differences cannot be sublated or totalized because ‘they somehow occupy the same space’. It is this liminal form of cultural identification that is relevant to Charles Taylor’s proposal for a ‘minimal rationality’ as the basis for non-ethnocentric, transcultural judgements. The effect of cultural incommensurability is that it ‘takes us beyond merely formal criteria of rationality, and points us toward the human activity of articulation which gives the value of rationality its sense’ (C. Taylor 1985: 145). Minimal rationality, as the activity of articulation embodied in the language metaphor, alters the subject of culture from an epistemological function to an enunciative practice. If culture as epistemology focuses on function and intention, then culture as enunciation focuses on signification and institutionalization; if the epistemological tends towards a reflection of its empirical referent or object, the enunciative attempts repeatedly to reinscribe and relocate the political claim to cultural priority and hierarchy (high/low, ours/theirs) in the social institution of the signifying activity. The epistemological is locked into the hermeneutic circle, in the description of cultural elements as they tend towards a totality. The enunciative is a more dialogic process that attempts to track displacements and realignments that are the effects of cultural antagonisms and articulations – subverting the rationale of the hegemonic moment and relocating alternative, hybrid sites of cultural negotiation. My shift from the cultural as an epistemological object to culture as an enactive, enunciatory site opens up possibilities for other ‘times’ of cultural meaning (retroactive, prefigurative) and other narrative spaces (fantasmic, metaphorical). My purpose in specifying the enunciative present in the articulation of culture is to provide a process by which objectified others may be turned into subjects of their history and experience. My theoretical argument has a descriptive history in recent work in literary and cultural studies by African American and black British writers. Hortense Spillers, for instance, evokes the field of ‘enunciative possibility’ to reconstitute the narrative of slavery: [A]s many times as we re-open slavery’s closure we are hurtled rapidly forward into the dizzying motions of a symbolic enterprise, and it 196 HOMI K. BHABHA becomes increasingly clear that the cultural synthesis we call ‘slavery’ was never homogenous in its practices and conceptions, nor unitary in the faces it has yielded. (Spillers 1989: 29) Paul Gilroy writes of the dialogic, performative ‘community’ of black music – rap, dub, scratching – as a way of constituting an open sense of black collectivity in the shifting, changing beat of the present. More recently, Houston A. Baker, Jr. has made a spirited argument against ‘high cultural’ sententiousness and for the ‘very, very sound game of rap (music)’, which comes through vibrantly in the title of his essay, Hybridity, the Rap Race, and the Pedagogy of the 1990s. In his perceptive introduction to an anthology of black feminist criticism, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, describes the contestations and negotiations of black feminists as empowering cultural and textual strategies precisely because the critical position they occupy is free of the ‘inverted’ polarities of a ‘counter-politics of exclusion’: ‘They have never been obsessed with arriving at any singular self-image; or legislating who may or may not speak on the subject; or policing boundaries between “us” and “them”’ (Gates 1990: 8). What is striking about the theoretical focus on the enunciatory present as a liberatory discursive strategy is its proposal that emergent cultural identifications are articulated at the liminal edge of identity – in that arbitrary closure, that ‘unity’ . . . in quotation marks’ (Hall) that the language metaphor so clearly enacts. Postcolonial and black critiques propose forms of contestatory subjectivities that are empowered in the act of erasing the politics of binary opposition – the inverted polarities of a counter-politics (Gates). There is an attempt to construct a theory of the social imaginary that requires no subject expressing originary anguish (West), no singular self-image (Gates), no necessary or eternal belongingness (Hall). The contingent and the liminal become the times and the spaces for the historical representation of the subjects of cultural difference in a postcolonial criticism. It is the ambivalence enacted in the enunciative present – disjunctive and multiaccentual – that produces the objective of political desire, what Hall calls ‘arbitrary closure’, like the signifier. But this arbitrary closure is also the cultural space for opening up new forms of identification that may confuse the continuity of historical temporalities, confound the ordering of cultural symbols, traumatize tradition. The African drumbeat syncopating heterogeneous black American postmodernism, the arbitrary but strategic logic of politics – these moments contest the sententious ‘conclusion’ of the discipline of cultural history. We cannot understand what is being proposed as ‘new times’ within postmodernism – politics at the site of cultural enunciation, cultural signs spoken at the margins of social identity and antagonism – if we do not briefly explore the paradoxes of the language metaphor. In each of the illustrations I’ve provided, the language metaphor opens up a space where a theoretical disclosure is used to move beyond theory. A form of cultural experience and identity is envisaged in a theoretical description that does not set up a theory–practice polarity, nor does theory become ‘prior’ to the contingency of social experience. This ‘beyond theory’ is itself a liminal form of signification that creates a space for the contingent, THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN 197 indeterminate articulation of social ‘experience’ that is particularly important for envisaging emergent cultural identities. But it is a representation of ‘experience’ without the transparent reality of empiricism and outside the intentional mastery of the ‘author’. Nevertheless, it is a representation of social experience as the contingency of history – the indeterminacy that makes subversion and revision possible – that is profoundly concerned with questions of cultural ‘authorization’. To evoke this ‘beyond theory’, I turn to Roland Barthes’s exploration of the cultural space ‘outside the sentence’. In The Pleasure of the Text I find a subtle suggestion that beyond theory you do not simply encounter its opposition, theory/ practice, but an ‘outside’ that places the articulation of the two – theory and practice, language and politics – in a productive relation similar to Derrida’s notion of supplementarity: a non-dialectical middle, a structure of jointed predication, which cannot itself be comprehended by the predicates it distributes . . . Not that this ability . . . shows a lack of power; rather this inability is constitutive of the very possibility of the logic of identity. Outside the sentence Half-asleep on his banquette in a bar, of which Tangiers is the exemplary site, Barthes attempts to ‘enumerate the stereophony of languages within earshot’: music, conversations, chairs, glasses, Arabic, French. Suddenly the inner speech of the writer turns into the exorbitant space of the Moroccan souk: [T]hrough me passed words, syntagms, bits of formulae and no sentence formed, as though that were the law of such a language. This speech at once very cultural and very savage, was above all lexical, sporadic; it set up in me, through its apparent flow, a definitive discontinuity: this non-sentence was in no way something that could not have acceded to the sentence, that might have been before the sentence; it was: what is . . . outside the sentence. (Barthes 1975: 49) At this point, Barthes writes, all linguistics that gives an exorbitant dignity to predicative syntax fell away. In its wake it becomes possible to subvert the ‘power of completion which defines sentence mastery and marks, as with a supreme, dearly won, conquered savoir faire, the agents of the sentence’. The hierarchy and the subordinations of the sentence are replaced by the definitive discontinuity of the text, and what emerges is a form of writing that Barthes describes as ‘writing aloud’: ‘a text of pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat . . . a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the tongue, not the meaning of language’(Barthes 1975: 66–7). Why return to the semiotician’s daydream? Why begin with ‘theory’ as story, as narrative and anecdote, rather than with the history or method? Beginning with the semiotic project – enumerating all the languages within earshot – evokes 198 HOMI K. BHABHA memories of the seminal influence of semiotics within our contemporary critical discourse. To that end, this petit récit rehearses some of the major themes of contemporary theory prefigured in the practice of semiotics – the author as an enunciative space; the formation of textuality after the fall of linguistics; the agonism between the sentence of predicative syntax and the discontinuous subject of discourse; the disjunction between the lexical and the grammatical dramatized in the liberty (perhaps libertinism) of the signifier. To encounter Barthes’s daydream is to acknowledge the formative contribution of semiotics to those influential concepts – sign, text, limit text, idiolect, écriture – that have become all the more important since they have passed into the unconscious of our critical trade. When Barthes attempts to produce, with his suggestive, erratic brilliance, a space for the pleasure of the text somewhere between ‘the political policeman and the psychoanalytical policeman’ – that is, between ‘futility and/or guilt, pleasure is either idle or vain, a class notion or an illusion’ – he evokes memories of the attempts, in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, to hold fast the political line while the poetic line struggled to free itself from its post-Althusserian arrest. What guilt, what pleasure. To thematize theory is, for the moment, beside the point. To reduce this weird and wonderful daydream of the semiotic pedagogue, somewhat in his cups, to just another repetition of the theoretical litany of the death of the author would be reductive in the extreme. For the daydream takes semiotics by surprise; it turns pedagogy into the exploration of its own limits. If you seek simply the sententious or the exegetical, you will not grasp the hybrid moment outside the sentence – not quite experience, not yet concept; part dream, part analysis; neither signifier nor signified. This intermediate space between theory and practice disrupts the disciplinary semiological demand to enumerate all the languages within earshot. Barthes’s daydream is supplementary, not alternative, to acting in the real world; Freud reminds us that the structure of fantasy narrates the subject of daydream as the articulation of incommensurable temporalities, disavowed wishes, and discontinuous scenarios. The meaning of fantasy does not emerge in the predicative or prepositional value we might attach to being outside the sentence. Rather, the performative structure of the text reveals a temporality of discourse that I believe is significant. It opens up a narrative strategy for the emergence and negotiation of those agencies of the marginal, minority, subaltern, or diasporic that incite us to think through – and beyond – theory. What is caught anecdotally ‘outside the sentence’, in Barthes’s concept, is that problematic space – performative rather than experiential, non-sententious but no less theoretical – of which post-structuralist theory speaks in its many varied voices. In spite of the fall of a predictable, predicative linguistics, the space of the nonsentence is not a negative ontology: not before the sentence but something that could have acceded to the sentence and yet was outside it. This discourse is indeed one of indeterminism, unexpectability, one that is neither ‘pure’ contingency or negativity nor endless deferral. ‘Outside the sentence’ is not to be opposed to the inner voice; the non-sentence does not relate to the sentence as a polarity. The timeless capture that stages such epistemological ‘confrontations’, in Richard Rorty’s term, is now interrupted and interrogated in the doubleness of writing – ‘at once very cultural and very savage’, ‘as though that were the law of such a language’. This disturbs what THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN 199 Derrida calls the occidental stereotomy, the ontological, circumscribing space between subject and object, inside and outside. It is the question of agency, as it emerges in relation to the indeterminate and the contingent, that I want to explore ‘outside the sentence’. However, I want to preserve, at all times, that menacing sense in which the non-sentence is contiguous with the sentence, near but different, not simply its anarchic disruption. Tangiers or Casablanca? What we encounter outside the sentence, beyond the occidental stereotomy, is what I shall call the ‘temporality’ of Tangiers. It is a structure of temporality that will emerge only slowly and indirectly, as time goes by, as they say in Moroccan bars, whether in Tangiers or Casablanca. There is, however, an instructive difference between Casablanca and Tangiers. In Casablanca the passage of time preserves the identity of language; the possibility of naming over time is fixed in the repetition: You must remember this a kiss is still a kiss a sigh is but a sigh the fundamental things apply ^ë=íáãÉ=ÖçÉë=ÄóK= (Casablanca) ‘Play it again, Sam’, which is perhaps the Western world’s most celebrated demand for repetition, is still an invocation to similitude, a return to the eternal verities. In Tangiers, as time goes by, it produces an iterative temporality that erases the occidental spaces of language – inside/outside, past/present, those foundationalist epistemological positions of Western empiricism and historicism. Tangiers opens up disjunctive, incommensurable relations of spacing and temporality within the sign – an ‘internal difference of the so-called ultimate element (stoikheion, trait, letter, seminal mark)’. The non-sentence is not before (either as the past or a priori) or inside (either as depth or presence) but outside (both spatially and temporally excentric, interruptive, in-between, on the borderlines, turning inside outside). In each of these inscriptions there is a doubling and a splitting of the temporal and spatial dimensions in the very act of signification. What emerges in this agonistic, ambivalent form of speech – ‘at once very cultural and very savage’ – is a question abut the subject of discourse and the agency of the letter: can there be a social subject of the ‘non-sentence’? Is it possible to conceive of historical agency in that disjunctive, indeterminate moment of discourse outside the sentence? Is the whole thing no more than a theoretical fantasy that reduces any form of political critique to a daydream? These apprehensions about the agency of the aporetic and the ambivalent become more acute when political claims are made for their strategic action. This is precisely Terry Eagleton’s position, in his critique of the libertarian pessimism of poststructuralism: 200 HOMI K. BHABHA [It is] libertarian because something of the old model of expression/ repression lingers on in the dream of an entirely free-floating signifier, an infinite textual productivity, an existence blessedly free from the shackles of truth, meaning and sociality. Pessimistic, because whatever blocks such creativity – law, meaning, power, closure – is acknowledged to be built into it, in a sceptical recognition of the imbrication of authority and desire. (Eagleton 1991: 38) The agency implicit in this discourse is objectified in a structure of the negotiation of meaning that is not a free-floating time lack but a time-lag – a contingent moment – in the signification of closure. Tangiers, the ‘sign’ of the ‘nonsentence’ turns retroactively, at the end of Barthes’s essay, into a form of discourse that he names ‘writing aloud’. The time-lag between the event of the sign (Tangiers) and its discursive eventuality (writing aloud) exemplifies a process where intentionality is negotiated retrospectively. The sign finds its closure retroactively in a discourse that it anticipates in the semiotic fantasy: there is a contiguity, a coextensivity, between Tangiers (as sign) and writing aloud (discursive formation), in that writing aloud is the mode of inscription of which Tangiers is a sign. There is no strict causality between Tangiers as the beginning of predication and writing aloud as the end or closure; but there is no free-floating signifier or an infinity of textual productivity. There is the more complex possibility of negotiating meaning and agency through the time-lag in-between the sign (Tangiers) and its initiation of a disclosure or narrative, where the relation of theory to practice is part of what Rodolphe Gasché termed ‘jointed predication’. In this sense, closure comes to be effected in the contingent moment of repetition, ‘an overlap without equivalence: fort:da’. The temporality of Tangiers is a lesson in reading the agency of the social text as ambivalent and catachrestic. Gayatri Spivak has usefully described the ‘negotiation’ of the postcolonial position ‘in terms of reversing, displacing and seizing the apparatus of value-coding’, constituting a catachrestic space: words or concepts wrested from their proper meaning, ‘a concept-metaphor without an adequate referent’ that perverts its embedded context. Spivak continues, ‘Claiming catachresis from a space that one cannot not want to inhabit [the sentence, sententious], yet must criticize [from outside the sentence] is then, the deconstructive predicament of the postcolonial.’ This Derridean position is close to the conceptual predicament outside the sentence. I have attempted to provide the discursive temporality, or time-lag, which is crucial to the process by which this turning around – of tropes, ideologies, concept metaphors – comes to be textualized and specified in postcolonial agency: the moment when the ‘bar’ of the occidental stereotomy is turned into the coextensive, contingent boundaries of relocation and reinscription: the catachrestic gesture. The insistent issue in any such move is the nature of the negotiatory agent realized through the time-lag. How does agency come to be specified and individuated, outside the discourses of individualism? How does the time-lag signify individuation as a position that is an effect of the ‘intersubjective’: contiguous with the social and yet contingent, indeterminate, in relation to it? THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN 201 Writing aloud, for Barthes, is neither the ‘expressive’ function of language as authorial intention or generic determination nor meaning personified. It is similar to the actio repressed by classical rhetoric, and it is the ‘corporeal exteriorization of discourse’. It is the art of guiding one’s body into discourse, in such a way that the subject’s accession to, and erasure in, the signifier as individuated is paradoxically accompanied by its remainder, an afterbirth, a double. Its noise – ‘crackle, grate, cut’ – makes vocal and visible, across the flow of the sentence’s communicative code, the struggle involved in the insertion of agency – wound and bow, death and life – into discourse. In Lacanian terms, which are appropriate here, this ‘noise’ is the ‘leftover’ after the capitonnage, or positioning, of the signifier for the subject. The Lacanian ‘voice’ that speaks outside the sentence is itself the voice of an interrogative, calculative agency: ‘Che vuoi? You are telling me that, but what do you want with it, what are you aiming at?’ (For a clear explanation of this process, see Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology [1986].) What speaks in the place of this question, Jacques Lacan writes, is a ‘third locus which is neither my speech nor my interlocutor’ (Lacan 1977b: 173). The time-lag opens up this negotiatory space between putting the question to the subject and the subject’s repetition ‘around’ the neither/nor of the third locus. This constitutes the return of the subject agent, as the interrogative agency in the catachrestic position. Such a disjunctive space of temporality is the locus of symbolic identification that structures the intersubjective realm – the realm of otherness and the social – where ‘we identify ourselves with the other precisely at a point at which he is inimitable, at the point which eludes resemblance’. My contention, elaborated in my writings on postcolonial discourse in terms of mimicry, hybridity, sly civility, is that this liminal moment of identification – eluding resemblance – produces a subversive strategy of subaltern agency that negotiates its own authority through a process of iterative ‘unpicking’ and incommensurable, insurgent relinking. It singularizes the ‘totality’ of authority by suggesting that agency requires a grounding, but it does not require a totalization of those grounds; it requires movement and manoeuvre, but it does not require a temporality of continuity or accumulation; it requires direction and contingent closure but no teleology and holism. The individuation of the agent occurs in a moment of displacement. It is a pulsional incident, the split-second movement when the process of the subject’s space of contingency. In this ‘return’ of the subject, thrown back across the designation – its fixity – opens up beside it, uncannily abseits, a supplementary distance of the signified, outside the sentence, the agent emerges as a form of retroactivity. It is not agency as itself (transcendent, transparent) or in itself (unitary, organic, autonomous). As a result of its own splitting in the time-lag of signification, the moment of the subject’s individuation emerges as an effect of the intersubjective – as the return of the subject as agent. This means that those elements of social ‘consciousness’ imperative for agency – deliberative, individuated action and specificity in analysis – can now be thought outside that epistemology that insists on the subject as always prior to the social or on the knowledge of the social as necessarily subsuming or sublating the particular ‘difference’ in the transcendent homogeneity of the general. The iterative and contingent that marks this 202 HOMI K. BHABHA intersubjective relation can never be libertarian or free-floating, as Eagleton claims, because the agent, constituted in the subject’s return, is in the dialogic position of calculation, negotiation, interrogation: Che vuoi? Agent without a cause? Something of this genealogy of postcolonial agency has already been encountered in my expositions of the ambivalent and the multivalent in the language metaphor at work in West’s ‘synechdochical thinking’ about black American cultural hybridity and Hall’s notion of ‘politics like a language’. The implications of this line of thinking were productively realized in the work of Spillers, Baker, Gates and Gilroy, all of whom emphasize the importance of the creative heterogeneity of the enunciatory ‘present’ that liberates the discourse of emancipation from binary closures. I want to give contingency another turn – through the Barthesian fantasy – by throwing the last line of the text, its conclusion, together with an earlier moment when Barthes speaks suggestively of closure as agency. Once again, we have an overlap without equivalence. For the notion of a non-teleological and a nondialectical form of closure has often been considered the most problematic issue for the postmodern agent without a cause: [Writing aloud] succeed[s] in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear. . . . And this body of bliss is also my historical subject; for it is at the conclusion of a very complex process of biographical, historical, sociological, neurotic elements . . . that I control the contradictory interplay of [cultural] pleasure and [non-cultural] bliss that I write myself as a subject at present out of place. (Barthes 1975: 62, 67) The contingency of the subject as agent is articulated in a double dimension, a dramatic action. The signified is distanced; the resulting time-lag opens up the space between the lexical and the grammatical, between enunciation and enounced, in-between the anchoring of signifiers. Then, suddenly, this in-between spatial dimension, this distancing, converts itself into the temporality of the ‘throw’ that iteratively (re)turns the subject as a moment of conclusion and control: a historically or contextually specific subject. How are we to think the control or conclusion in the context of contingency? We need, not surprisingly, to invoke both meanings of contingency and then to repeat the difference of the one in the other. Recall my suggestion that to interrupt the occidental stereotomy – inside/outside, space/time – one needs to think, outside the sentence, at once very cultural and very savage. The contingent is contiguity, metonymy, the touching of spatial boundaries at a tangent, and, at the same time, the contingent is the temporality of the indeterminate and the undecidable. It is the kinetic tension that holds this double determination together and apart within disclosure. They represent the repetition of the one in or as the other, in a structure of ‘abyssal overlapping’ (a Derridean term) which enables us to conceive of THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN 203 strategic closure and control for the agent. Representing social contradiction or antagonism in this doubling discourse of contingency – where the spatial dimension of contiguity is reiterated in the temporality of the indeterminate – cannot be dismissed as the arcane practice of the undecidable or aporetic. The importance of the problematic of contingency for historical discourse is evident in Ranajit Guha’s attempt to represent the specificity of rebel consciousness. Guha’s argument reveals the need for such a double and disjunctive sense of the contingent, although his own reading of the concept, in terms of the ‘universalcontingent’ couple, is more Hegelian in its elaboration. Rebel consciousness is inscribed in two major narratives. In bourgeois-nationalist historiography, it is seen as ‘pure spontaneity pitted against the will of the State as embodied in the Raj’. The will of the rebels is either denied or subsumed in the individualized capacity of their leaders, who frequently belong to the elite gentry. Radical historiography failed to specify rebel consciousness because its continuist narrative ranged ‘peasant revolts as a succession of events ranged along a direct line of descent . . . as a heritage’. In assimilating all moments of rebel consciousness to the ‘highest moment of the series – indeed to an Ideal Consciousness’ – these historians ‘are ill-equipped to cope with contradictions which are indeed the stuff history is made of (Guha 1983: 39). Guha’s elaborations of rebel contradiction as consciousness are strongly suggestive of agency as the activity of the contingent. What I have described as the return of the subject is present in his account of rebel consciousness as selfalienated. My suggestion that the problematic of contingency strategically allows for a spatial contiguity – solidarity, collectivite action – to be (re)articulated in the moment of indeterminacy is, reading between the lines, very close to his sense of the strategic alliances at work in the contradictory and hybrid sites, and symbols, of peasant revolt. What historiography fails to grasp is indeed agency at the point of the ‘combination of sectarianism and militancy . . . [specifically] the ambiguity of such phenomena’; causality as the ‘time’ of indeterminate articulation: ‘the swift transformation of class struggle into communal strife and vice versa in our countryside’; and ambivalence at the point of ‘individuation’ as an intersubjective affect: Blinded by the glare of a perfect and immaculate consciousness the historian sees nothing . . . but solidarity in rebel behaviour and fails to notice its Other, namely, betrayal . . . He underestimates the brakes put on [insurgency as a generalized movement] by localism and territoriality. (Guha 1983: 40) Finally, as if to provide an emblem for my notion of agency in the apparatus of contingency – its hybrid figuring of space and time – Guha, quoting Sunil Sen’s Agrarian Struggle in Bengal, beautifully describes the ‘ambiguity of such phenomena’ as the hybridized signs and sites during the Tebhaga movement in Dinajpur: Muslim peasants [came] to the Kisan Sabha ‘sometimes inscribing a hammer and a sickle on the Muslim League flag’ and young maulavis ‘[recited] 204 HOMI K. BHABHA melodious verses from the Koran’ at village meetings ‘as they condemned the jotedari system and the practice of charging high interest rates’. (Guha 1983: 39) The social text: Bakhtin and Arendt The contingent conditions of agency also take us to the heart of Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s important attempt, in speech genres, to designate the enunciative subject of heteroglossia and dialogism. As with Guha, my reading will be catechrestic: reading between the lines, taking neither him at his word nor me fully at mine. In focusing on how the chain of speech communication comes to be constituted, I deal with Bakhtin’s attempt to individuate social agency as an after-effect of the intersubjective. My cross-hatched matrix of contingency – as spatial difference and temporal distance, to turn the terms somewhat – enables us to see how Bakhtin provides a knowledge of the transformation of social discourse while displacing the originating subject and the causal and continuist progress of discourse: ‘The object, as it were, has already been articulated, disputed, elucidated and evaluated in various ways . . . The speaker is not the biblical Adam . . . as simplistic ideas about communication as a logical-psychological basis for the sentence suggest’ (Bakhtin 1986: 93). Bakhtin’s use of the metaphor of the chain of communication picks up the sense of contingency as contiguity, while the question of the ‘link’ immediately raises the issue of contingency as the indeterminate. Bakhtin’s displacement of the author as agent results from his acknowledgment of the ‘complex, multiplanar’ structure of the speech genre that exists in that kinetic tension in-between the two forces of contingency. The spatial boundaries of the object of utterance are contiguous in the assimilation of the other’s speech; but the allusion to another’s utterance produces a dialogical turn, a moment of indeterminacy in the act of ‘addressivity’ (Bakhtin’s concept) that gives rise within the chain of speech communion to ‘unmediated responsive reactions and dialogic reverberations’. Although Bakhtin acknowledges this double movement in the chain of the utterance, there is a sense in which he disavows its effectivity at the point of the enunciation of discursive agency. He displaces this conceptual problem that concerns the performativity of the speech act – its enunciative modalities of time and space – to an empiricist acknowledgment of the ‘area of human activity and everyday life to which the given utterance is related’. It is not that the social context does not localize the utterance; it is simply that the process of specification and individuation still needs to be elaborated within Bakhtin’s theory, as the modality through which the speech genre comes to recognize the specific as a signifying limit, a discursive boundary. There are moments when Bakhtin obliquely touches on the tense doubling of the contingent that I have described. When he talks of the ‘dialogic overtones’ that permeate the agency of utterance – ‘many half-concealed or completely concealed words of others with varying degrees of foreignness’ – his metaphors hint at the iterative inter subjective temporality in which the agency is realized ‘outside’ the author: THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN 205 [T]he utterance appears to be furrowed with distant and barely audible echoes of changes of speech subjects and dialogic overtones, greatly weakened utterance boundaries that are completely permeable to the author’s expression. The utterance proves to be a very complex and multiplanar phenomenon if considered not in isolation and with respect to its author . . . but as a link in the chain of speech communication and with respect to other related utterances. (Bakhtin 1986: 93) Through this landscape of echoes and ambivalent boundaries, framed in passing, furrowed horizons, the agent who is ‘not Adam’ but is, indeed, time-lagged, emerges into the social realm of discourse. Agency, as the return of the subject, as ‘not Adam’, has a more directly political history in Hannah Arendt’s portrayal of the troubled narrative of social causality. According to Arendt the notorious uncertainty of all political matters arises from the fact that the disclosure of who – the agent as individuation – is contiguous with the what of the intersubjective realm. This contiguous relation between who and what cannot be transcended but must be accepted as a form of indeterminism and doubling. The who of agency bears no mimetic immediacy or adequacy of representation. It can be signified only outside the sentence in that sporadic, ambivalent temporality that inhabits the notorious unreliability of ancient oracles who ‘neither reveal nor hide in words but give manifest signs’. The unreliability of signs introduces a perplexity in the social text: The perplexity is that in any series of events that together form a story with a unique meaning we can at best isolate the agent who set the whole process into motion; and although this agent frequently remains the subject, the ‘hero’ of the story, we can never point unequivocally to him as the author of its outcome. (Arendt 1958: 185) This is the structure of the intersubjective space between agents, what Arendt terms human ‘inter-est’. It is this public sphere of language and action that must become at once the theatre and the screen for the manifestation of the capacities of human agency. Tangiers-like, the event and its eventuality are separated; the narrative time-lag makes the who and the what contingent, splitting them, so that the agent remains the subject, in suspension, outside the sentence. The agent who ‘causes’ the narrative becomes part of the interest, only because we cannot point unequivocally to that agent at the point of outcome. It is the contingency that constitutes individuation – in the return of the subject as agent – that protects the interest of the intersubjective realm. The contingency of closure socializes the agent as a collective ‘effect’ through the distancing of the author. Between the cause and its intentionality falls the shadow. Can we then unquestionably propose that a story has a unique meaning in the first place? To what end does the series of events tend if the author of the outcome is not unequivocally the author of the cause? Does it not suggest that agency arises in the return of the subject, from the interruption of the series of events as a kind of 206 HOMI K. BHABHA interrogation and reinscription of before and after? Where the two touch is there not that kinetic tension between the contingent as the contiguous and the indeterminate? Is it not from there that agency speaks and acts: Che vuoi? These questions are provoked by Arendt’s brilliant suggestiveness, for her writing symptomatically performs the perplexities she evokes. Having brought close together the unique meaning and the causal agent, she says that the ‘invisible actor’ is an ‘invention arising from a mental perplexity’ corresponding to no real experience. It is this distancing of the signified, this anxious fantasm or simulacrum – in the place of the author – that, according to Arendt, indicates most clearly the political nature of history. The sign of the political is, moreover, not invested in ‘the character of the story itself but only [in] the mode in which it came into existence’. So it is the realm of representation and the process of signification that constitutes the space of the political. What is temporal in the mode of existence of the political? Here Arendt resorts to a form of repetition to resolve the ambivalence of her argument. The ‘reification’ of the agent can only occur, she writes, through ‘a kind of repetition, the imitation of mimesis, which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is actually appropriate to the drama’. This repetition of the agent, reified in the liberal vision of togetherness, is quite different from my sense of the contingent agency for our postcolonial age. The reasons for this are not difficult to find. Arendt’s belief in the revelatory qualities of Aristotelian mimesis are grounded in a notion of community, or the public sphere, that is largely consensual: ‘where people are with others, and neither for nor against them – that is sheer human togetherness’. When people are passionately for or against one another, then human togetherness is lost as they deny the fullness of Aristotelian mimetic time. Arendt’s form of social mimesis does not deal with social marginality as a product of the liberal state, which can, if articulated, reveal the limitations of its common sense (inter-est) of society from the perspective of minorities or the marginalized. Social violence is, for Arendt, the denial of the disclosure of agency, the point at which ‘speech becomes “mere talk”, simply one more means towards the end’. My concern is with other articulations of human togetherness, as they are related to cultural difference and discrimination. For instance, human togetherness may come to represent the forces of hegemonic authority; or a solidarity founded in victimization and suffering may, implacably, sometimes violently, become bound against oppression; or a subaltern or minority agency may attempt to interrogate and rearticulate the ‘inter-est’ of society that marginalizes its interests. These discourses of cultural dissent and social antagonism cannot find their agents in Arendt’s Aristotelian mimesis. In the process I’ve described as the return of the subject, there is an agency that seeks revision and reinscription: the attempt to renegotiate the third locus, the inter subjective realm. The repetition of the iterative, the activity of the time-lag, is not so much arbitrary as interruptive, a closure that is not conclusion but a liminal interrogation outside the sentence. THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN 207 Revisions The concept of reinscription and negotiation that I am elaborating must not be confused with the powers of ‘redescription’ that have become the hallmark of the liberal ironist or neo-pragmatist. I do not offer a critique of this influential nonfoundationalist position here except to point to the obvious differences of approach. Rorty’s conception of the representation of difference in social discourse is the consensual overlapping of ‘final vocabularies’ that allow imaginative identification with the other so long as certain words – ‘kindness, decency, dignity – are held in common. However, as he says, the liberal ironist can never elaborate an empowering strategy. Just how disempowering his views are for the non-Western other, how steeped in a Western ethnocentricism, is seen, appropriately for a nonfoundationalist, in a footnote. Rorty suggests that liberal society already contains the institutions for its own improvement [and that] Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs in J. S. Mill’s suggestion that governments should optimize the balance between leaving people’s private lives alone and preventing suffering. (Rorty 1989: 92) Appended to this is the footnote where liberal ironists suddenly lose their powers of redescription: This is not to say that the world has had the last political revolution it needs. It is hard to imagine the diminution of cruelty in countries like South Africa, Paraguay, and Albania without violent revolution . . . But in such countries raw courage (like that of the leaders of COSATU or the signers of Charta 77) is the relevant virtue, not the sort of reflective acumen which makes contributions to social theory. (Rorty 1989: 63) This is where Rorty’s conversation stops, but we must force the dialogue to acknowledge postcolonial perspective: ‘Bourgeois culture hits its historical limit in colonialism’, writes Guha sententiously, and, almost as if to speak ‘outside the sentence’, Veena Das reinscribes Guha’s thought into the affective language of a metaphor and the body: ‘Subaltern rebellions can only provide a night-time of love . . . Yet perhaps in capturing this defiance the historian has given us a means of constructing the objects of such power as subjects.’ In her excellent essay ‘Subaltern as perspective’, Das demands a historiography of the subaltern that displaces the paradigm of social action as defined primarily by rational action. She seeks a form of discourse where affective and iterative writing develops its own language. History as a writing that constructs the moment of defiance emerges in the ‘magma of significations’, for the ‘representational closure which presents itself when we encounter thought in 208 HOMI K. BHABHA objectified forms is now ripped open. Instead we see this order interrogated’. In an argument that demands an enunciative temporality remarkably close to my notion of the timelag that circulates at the point of the sign’s seizure or caesura of symbolic synchronicity, Das locates the moment of transgression in the splitting of the discursive present: a greater attention is required to locate transgressive agency in ‘the splitting of the various types of speech produced into statements of referential truth in the indicative present’ (Das 1989: 316). This emphasis on the disjunctive present of utterance enables the historian to get away from defining subaltern consciousness as binary, as having positive or negative dimensions. It allows the articulation of subaltern agency to emerge as relocation and reinscription. In the seizure of the sign, as I’ve argued, there is neither dialectical sublation nor the empty signifier: there is a contestation of the given symbols of authority that shift the terrains of antagonism. The synchronicity in the social ordering of symbols is challenged within its own terms, but the grounds of engagement have been displaced in a supplementary movement that exceeds those terms. This is the historical movement of hybridity as camouflage, as a contesting, antagonistic agency functioning in the time-lag of sign or symbol, which is a space in-between the rules of engagement. It is this theoretical form of political agency I’ve attempted to develop that Das beautifully fleshes out in a historical argument: It is the nature of the conflict within which a caste or tribe is locked which may provide the characteristics of the historical moment; to assume that we may know a priori the mentalities of castes or communities is to take an essentialist perspective which the evidence produced in the very columns of Subaltern Studies would not support. (Das 1989: 320) Is the contingent structure of agency not similar to what Frantz Fanon describes as the knowledge of the practice of action? Fanon argues that the primitive Manichaeanism of the settler – black and white, Arab and Christian – breaks down in the present of struggle for independence. Polarities come to be replaced with truths that are only partial, limited and unstable. Each ‘local ebb of the tide reviews the political question from the standpoint of all political networks’. The leaders should stand firmly against those within the movement who tend to think that ‘shades of meaning constitute dangers and drive wedges into the solid block of popular opinion.’ What Das and Fanon both describe is the potentiality of agency constituted through the strategic use of historical contingency. Chapter 15 David Forgacs N AT I O N A L - P O P U L A R Genealogy of a concept EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION T H I S E S S AY D E S C R I B E S S O M E ID E A S first formulated by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, when he was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist government. Unlike most other essays in this collection, it is mainly intended to offer an interpretation of an important past theorist. But it is an appropriate essay for a cultural studies reader because Gramsci has been the thinker that the Birmingham school, in its immediate post-Hoggart/Williams phase, turned to most often. As David Forgacs notes, his ideas remain important because they help us think about the emergence of a popular new right. The reason for this is not that the new right is an equivalent to fascism but that alternatives to the new right are as dispersed and fragmented as they were to fascism. In this situation, “educative alliances” which call upon minority and “subaltern” (but not “unpopular”) cultural values and discourses rather than monocultural and scientific/expert values and skills have real potential. It is these alliances which constitute the “national popular.” Gramsci, unlike Louis Althusser, thought about culture and power more than ideology and science. David Forgacs describes the conditions in Italy that made this possible – in particular the absence of a national culture and language. Again these historical conditions are especially worth recalling because they anticipate the multicultural condition in which most post-industrial nation states now exist. Further reading: Bhabha 1990; Gramsci 1971, 1978; D. Harris 1992; Holub 1992; Laclau 1977; Laclau and Mouffe 1985. 210 DAVID FORGACS 1 The term ‘national-popular’ is a relatively new addition to the conceptual luggage of the British left and, of concepts originating in the work of Gramsci, it has been one of the slowest to arrive here. Its presence in the late 1970s and 1980s can be partly explained, I believe, by the toughening of the political climate which has taken place in this period and by the weakening of the grip of Althusserian Marxism upon certain sectors of the new left. In the mid-1970s, the Gramsci being discussed was mediated through the filter of Althusser, whose writings became widely known in English during the same period (the early 1970s) and who had drawn on the Italian communist’s work in several important respects. Yet the figure that emerged through this ‘French connection’ was one that was sanitized by Althusserian scientism. One paid this Gramsci due homage for having brought ideology from heaven to earth by incarnating it in material institutions and social practices and for having developed a non-economistic model for analysing conjunctures as asymmetrical relations of forces not reducible to a single all-englobing contradiction. But his ‘absolute historicism’, his collapsing together of philosophy, politics, religion and ideology, and his conception of Marxism as involving an intellectual and moral reformation were considered too embarrassingly primitive to be given serious attention by rigorous Marxist theoreticians. For as long as Althusserianism retained its cultural prestige as a kind of orthodoxy, the distinguishing wedge that Althusser and Poulantzas had driven between Gramsci’s positive work of political analysis and his historicist Marxism remained operative and effectively served to suppress parts of his writings. The turn-about that is now taking place, by which these suppressed parts are coming to the fore, involves a reaction against the political impasse towards which Althusser’s later formulations on ideology, science and the subject tend. For Althusser’s radical anti-historicism and anti-humanism make problematical the moment of acquisition of mass revolutionary consciousness by implicitly polarizing on the one hand a mass of subjects-in-ideology and on the other the bearers of science, the intellectuals working in the van of the party. The moment of a liberatory mass action against oppression is thus radically deferred, taken off the agenda. Yet, at a time when the tough and flexible ideological resources of Thatcherism have proved capable of mobilizing a large popular base, the dangers of this kind of impasse become clear. Moreover, the late 1970s and early 1980s in Britain have seen a renewed spate of militancy among groups and social elements without a strict party or uniform class collocation – the women’s movement, black people, lesbians and gay men, unemployed youth, students, nuclear disarmament, community pressure groups and so on – which the traditional left has been uncertain of how to relate to itself or to channel, and which have tended to jostle together in a relatively loose and uncoordinated way beneath or alongside the ideological umbrella of the Labour Party. It is these two things arrayed against one another – the new state formation and the heterogeneous oppositional forces – which produce the need for a concept like the national-popular. NAT I ON A L - P OP U L A R 2 11 2 In Italy, where published extracts of Gramsci’s prison writings began circulating immediately after the end of the Second World War, the national-popular was treated largely as a cultural concept and associated with progressive realist forms in literature, cinema and the other arts, which the Italian Communist Party (PCI) began to back in the 1940s and 1950s. ‘National-popular’ became a sort of slogan for forms of art that were rooted both in the national tradition and in popular life, and as such it became identified with an artistic style or styles. In this form, the term was to become the symbolic target of stringent criticism in the 1960s from the Italian new left, who interpreted it as the cornerstone of a ‘typically idealist operation’ by which Gramsci had allegedly cast the intellectuals and their collective incarnation, the PCI, in the role of inheritors of nineteenth-century radical bourgeois culture. ‘Gramsci’s national-popular’, a critic wrote, ‘ends up . . . being the cage within which all attempts at renewal turn out to be constrained by the iron laws of tradition and the Italian social “status quo”’. The concept was seen as involving a double terminological slide – national replaced international and popular replaced proletarian. This in turn was symptomatic of a political elision of revolution into reformism, the parliamentary road and a form of political democracy based on broad class alliances: in short, the strategy of the PCI since the end of the war. In Britain, the national-popular has been received and used as a political concept and identified with the notion of popular-democratic struggles without a specific class character which can be articulated in relation to the struggle of labour against capital. In this form, the concept has been involved in discussions of whether certain ideologies have a necessary class-belonging or whether an economistic perspective can be transcended and a broad ideological front theorized in its stead. It has also been involved in debate about how various forms of oppression are related to each other and to the class struggle, about whether the state in capitalist society is an instrument of bourgeois class rule or a site of class compromises with space for expansive democratization, and about how statist models of socialist struggle might be overcome by a broader theorization of struggle on several fronts in civil society and the state. These two applications or interpretations of the national-popular concept make curious bedfellows. Although in each case practices of class alliance are involved, there is a substantial difference of emphasis: the first is cultural, the second political. How did this come about? And how is it that, in its cultural form, it was accused of being a conservative notion, inhibiting cultural change? I suggest that Gramsci’s concept is in fact an integral one, whose cultural and political faces overlap and fuse; that not to understand this is to make only a partial reading and therefore to lay oneself open to a misreading of it (as the early, culturalist, reading was); and that the only way to reappropriate the concept in full is to make an excursus through Gramsci’s writings, to see how the term emerges and the meanings it assumes within them. The present article is intended to do no more than provide the spade-work of textual reconstruction that will make this reappropriation possible. 212 DAVID FORGACS 3 It was in response to the conjuncture of ascendant fascism in Italy and the ebbtide of revolution in the West that Gramsci began to elaborate the concept of the national-popular. The period was between 1924 and 1926. Within these two years leading up to his arrest, he returned from Moscow and Vienna, took over the leadership of the PCI from Amadeo Bordiga, and imposed a new strategic line on the party. This involved an implicit self-criticism of his own earlier ‘workerism’, his concentration, in the period 1919–21, on the factory councils in northern industry as organs of workers’ control and as political units of socialist democracy. Gramsci identified in Italy a highly advanced, but very small, industrial proletariat concentrated in the north-west of the peninsula; a large but often ideologically backward peasantry, much of it located in the south and islands; a large stratum of petty-bourgeois intellectuals who exercised a degree of ideological control over the proletariat and peasantry and who, although themselves traditionally hegemonized by the bourgeoisie, tended to waver in the way they identified their class interest. By the time Gramsci launched his turn against Bordiga’s leadership, fascism had installed itself in power by a class alliance between the northern industrial bourgeoisie and the large landowners with the crucial support of the petty bourgeoisie. Although it had not yet outlawed the PCI and other opposition parties, it had been conducting systematic repression of Communist activities and arresting Communist personnel. On Gramsci’s reckoning, a political strategy based exclusively on the proletariat led by a vanguard party in isolation from other social forces was quite inadequate as a strategy to defeat fascism. It was necessary, rather, to construct a class alliance between three principal groups – the northern proletariat, the southern peasantry and the pettybourgeois intelligentsia – under the hegemony of the proletariat, in order not only to provide a mass base for political action but also to prise open the interstices of the north–south industrial–landowner alliance. For Gramsci, an immediate transition from fascism to socialism was improbable, not least because ‘the existing armed forces, given their composition, cannot at once be won over’ (Gramsci 1978: 406). An interlude was therefore necessary in which the liberal-democratic political structures were restored to power. It is thus in a context of a disarticulation and ideological disintegration of consent for fascism, a context in which, nevertheless, direct seizure of power is ruled out because ‘the state apparatus is far more resistant than is often possible to believe’ (Gramsci 1978: 409), that Gramsci puts forward the concept of the national-popular in an embryonic, tactical form: For all the capitalist countries a fundamental problem is posed – the problem of the transition from the united front tactic, understood in a general sense, to a specific tactic which confronts the concrete problems of national life and operates on the basis of the popular forces as they are historically determined. (Gramsci 1978: 410) N AT I O N A L - P O P U L A R 213 In the prison notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935, the national-popular concept is closely bound up with that of Jacobinism, which in Gramsci means a form of political domination based on the ability to overcome a narrow economiccorporate conception of a class or class-fraction and form expansive, universalizing alliances with other classes and class-fractions whose interests can be made to be seen as coinciding with those of the hegemonic class. Hegemony, in turn, differs from Lenin’s conception of proletarian dictatorship because it involves ideological and not just political domination – in other words a coming to consciousness of a coincidence of interests. Only by breaking with an economistic correlation between ideology and class was Gramsci able to think this expansion of the concept of hegemony. Only one of the two fundamental classes – bourgeoisie and proletariat – can, however, be hegemonic. In the French Revolution, the radical bourgeoisie became hegemonic in the phase of Jacobin domination by universalizing and expanding its class interests to incorporate those of the urban artisans and the peasantry. The same process must be repeated in Italy, for Gramsci, by the proletariat in a socialist revolution. The class must secure hegemony over the peasants and the other intermediate social strata by making them conscious of a shared interest. Hegemony is thus a process of radiating out from the Communist Party and the working class a collective will which is national-popular: Any formation of a national-popular collective will is impossible, unless the great mass of peasant farmers bursts simultaneously into political life. That was Machiavelli’s intention through the reform of the militia, and it was achieved by the Jacobins in the French Revolution . . . All history from 1815 onwards shows the efforts of the traditional classes to prevent the formation of a collective will of this kind, and to maintain ‘economic-corporate’ power in an international system of passive equilibrium. (Gramsci 1971: 132) In his notes on the Risorgimento, Gramsci observed how the democratic republican leaders around Mazzini and the Action Party failed to generalize their struggle beyond the radical bourgeoisie and win the support of the peasantry. They were thus subsumed and defeated by the Moderates under Cavour, who were able to construct a hegemonic alliance of the bourgeoisie with the southern landowners, an alliance whose continuation was secured in the state through transformism (ad hoc ministerial coalitions) and by the economic subjection of the South to the North in a colonial relationship offset for the big landowners by protectionist policies. This ‘chapter of past history’ bears on the concrete relations of force in the 1920s and 1930s because of its historical parallel with the PCI at the time of the rise to power of fascism. This party too had failed to become hegemonic because of its inability to carry out the Jacobin task of linking countryside to city – peasantry to proletariat, south to north – to form a national-popular collective will. In its place, the Fascist Party had carried out a reform-revolution or passive revolution, based on the defensive, transformist alliance of the industrial bourgeoisie, big landowners and petty bourgeoisie, which involved no fundamental reorganization of the economic 214 DAVID FORGACS structure – only its technical modernization along rational ‘Fordist’ lines – coupled with an increase in state coercion and the securing of mass popular consent in civil society. At a political level, then, there are four points to be noted about the nationalpopular concept. It was elaborated in response to fascism, a conservative social bloc made up of heterogeneous economic groups with a permanently mobilized mass base, possessing organizational reserves (military, ideological) which rule out a frontal attack (war of manoeuvre) and favour a construction of hegemony (war of position) as the correct strategy to defeat it. It was dependent on the relative numerical weakness of the Italian proletariat. It involved the formation of a collective will through the building of a mass party, where a number of social classes and class-fractions are successfully hegemonized by the party and the proletariat. It was conceived of as a transitional stage leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat, to socialist democracy (soviets) as opposed to bourgeois democracy (parliament). These concepts underwent no substantial modification at a political level, as a strategic perspective, between the period in which they were first formulated (1924–6) and the time of Gramsci’s death in 1937. They were, however, qualitatively deepened by being developed in cultural and ideological terms. 4 The entry in the prison notebooks headed ‘Concept of national-popular’ has no overtly political content. It discusses, instead, the problem of why Italian literature did not, with a few exceptions, have a wide popular readership in Italy and why Italian newspapers, which since the late nineteenth century had adopted the practice of serializing fiction to increase circulation, were publishing predominantly French and not Italian authors. Gramsci’s answer is that in Italy neither a popular artistic literature nor a local production of ‘popular’ literature exists because ‘writers’ and ‘people’ do not have the same conception of the world. In other words the feelings of the people are not lived by the writers as their own, nor do the writers have a ‘national educative’ function: they have not and do not set themselves the problem of elaborating popular feelings after having relived them and made them their own. (Gramsci 1985: 206–7) Italian readers therefore turn to French writers, who had this national function, because in France there existed a ‘close and dependent relationship between peoplenation and intellectuals’ which Italian readers feel. In several notes containing the phrase ‘national-popular’ (or ‘popularnational’, ‘people-nation’, ‘nation-people’) one finds this theme of the separation between intellectuals and the people in Italy (which is often, as here, contrasted with France). This separation was traditional both in that it went back a long way into Italian history and in that it had been traditionally remarked upon, notably in the Risorgimento where it had become a leitmotif among democratic intellectuals N AT I O N A L - P O P U L A R 215 (Mazzini, De Sanctis and so forth) who had seen the Renaissance as producing a cleavage between culture and the people, between knowledge and popular life. In fact, much of what Gramsci writes about the national-popular is a materialist recasting of these abstract and idealist formulations by a re-reading of Italian cultural history. In a long discussion of the Renaissance in notebook 5, he traces the dualism back to a separation, occurring in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of a literary and philosophical elite from the commercial, manufacturing and financial bourgeoisie. The latter had acquired political domination in the period of the Communes (from the twelfth to the fourteenth century) but had been unable to consolidate it because it had failed to go beyond its economic-corporate limits and become hegemonic as a class. The return at a cultural level to classicism – humanism – was therefore a restoration which like every restoration . . . assimilated and developed, better than the revolutionary class it had politically suffocated, the ideological principles of the defeated class, which had not been able to go beyond its corporate limits and create the superstructures of an integral society. Except that this development was ‘abstract’, it remained the patrimony of an intellectual caste and had no contact with the people-nation. (Gramsci 1985: 234) Humanism and the Renaissance in Italy were thus ‘the phenomenon of an aristocracy removed from the people-nation’. Whereas in the other European countries the exported Renaissance produced a progressive scientific intelligentsia which played a crucial role in the formation of the modern national states, in Italy itself it led to the involutionary Counter-Reformation and the ideological triumph of the Catholic intellectual hierarchy. This outcome was itself linked to two factors to which Gramsci’s analysis assigns great importance. The first was the fact that Italy had been the centre of the Roman Empire and then, by ‘translation’, of the Catholic church, both of which exercised their power through cosmopolitan (international) intellectual castes. The second was the failure of a common national vernacular to develop in the peninsula, where instead two culturally prestigious written cosmopolitan languages (first Latin and then, after the sixteenth century, literary Tuscan) had dominated over a large number of less prestigious spoken dialects. The political disunity of Italy, of which Machiavelli complained in The Prince, was compounded by these factors. In the sixteenth century, the Papacy blocked the Protestant Reformation and with it the possibility of forming a modern national state. In the nineteenth century, it again constituted a major obstacle to national unification by its anti-liberalism and by jealously guarding its temporal power over central Italy. At the same time, the regional and cultural heterogeneity of the peninsula could be read off from the multiplicity of dialects, which acted as a practical obstacle to the diffusion of any national culture. The Italian nation had thus been more a rhetorical or legal entity than a felt cultural reality, existing at most for the intellectual and ruling elites but not for the masses. ‘Nation’ and ‘people’ did not coincide in Italian history: 216 DAVID FORGACS One should note that in many languages ‘national’ and ‘popular’ are either synonymous or nearly so (they are in Russian, in German, where völkisch has an even more intimate meaning of race, and in the Slavonic languages in general; in France the meaning of ‘national’ already includes a more politically elaborated notion of ‘popular’ because it is related to the concept of ‘sovereignty’: national sovereignty and popular sovereignty have, or had, the same value). In Italy, the term ‘national’ has an ideologically very restricted meaning, and does not in any case coincide with ‘popular’ because in Italy the intellectuals are distant from the people, i.e. from the ‘nation’. They are tied instead to a caste tradition that has never been broken by a strong popular or national political movement from below. (Gramsci 1985: 208) What is the aim of these meanderings through Italian history and culture, meanderings that make up a substantial proportion of the prison notes as a whole? The answer is that they flow into Gramsci’s political project. They are readings of Italian cultural history undertaken in order to understand the structural reasons for the lack of any organic national-popular movement in the past and thus in order to work out the preconditions for such a movement in the present. ‘Culture’ in Gramsci is the sphere in which ideologies are diffused and organized, in which hegemony is constructed and can be broken and reconstructed. An essential part of the process by which the party builds the apparatuses of its social power is the molecular diffusion of a new humanism, an intellectual and moral reformation – in other words a new ideology, a new common sense based on historical materialism. A popular reformation of this kind is what has been lacking in Italian history, and Gramsci’s notes on the national-popular reveal the extent to which the cosmopolitan traditions of the Italian intellectuals had impeded the molecular ideological activity by which such a reformation could be brought about: The lay forces have failed in their historical task as educators and elaborators of the intellect and the moral awareness of the peoplenation. They have been incapable of satisfying the intellectual needs of the people precisely because they have failed to represent a lay culture, because they have not known how to elaborate a modern ‘humanism’ able to reach right to the simplest and most uneducated classes, as was necessary from the national point of view, and because they have been tied to an antiquated world, narrow, abstract, too individualistic or caste-like. (Gramsci 1985: 211) When the prison notebooks were first published in Italy between 1948 and 1951, there was much talk on the left there about a ‘national-popular culture’ and the need for the intellectuals to contribute to the production of such a culture. As I have mentioned, this culture was identified with realism, and thus the nationalpopular slogan was neatly inserted into the discussions on socialist realism and progressive or critical bourgeois realism that were common currency among left literary circles around that period. Yet, though Gramsci’s prison notes on literature N AT I O N A L - P O P U L A R 217 certainly reveal that his own personal tastes ran to progressive realism, such as the nineteenth-century Russian novel, and that he tended to see modernist writing as intellectualistic, coterie art, it was a fundamental misappropriation of the nationalpopular concept to identify it with a particular type of art in this way. When Gramsci wrote that the model of national-popular literature was constituted by the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare and the great Russian novelists, he did not mean that an Italian national-popular literature would have to resemble those kinds of text. ‘National-popular’ designates not a cultural content but, as we have seen, the possibility of an alliance of interests and feelings between different social agents which varies according to the structure of each national society. A future Italian national-popular literature, which will result from a socialist transformation of society in which the working class creates it own organic intellectuals, cannot therefore resemble the national-popular literature that developed in the era of bourgeois revolutions elsewhere in Europe. It has clearly been one of the hardest points for Gramsci’s interpreters to grasp that he cannot specify the content of a national-popular culture that has not yet formed, but only the social preconditions of its formation. It is, as he points out, an idealist error to think that a nationalpopular culture will resemble any hitherto existing cultural style, because those past styles have all been the product of social formations in which culture has been stratified into high and low and dominated by specialist intellectuals without organic links with the broad popular masses. ‘Popular culture’ has thus been constructed as the culture of the dominated classes in antithesis to ‘artistic culture’, a division that is perpetuated and reproduced daily by capitalist control of the organs of both high and popular culture. The theoretical break Gramsci made with his contemporaries in Marxist cultural theory was to think of a whole culture formation or cultural space as a unity in which to intervene. As he points out, discussing the question of how to create a new literature: The most common prejudice is this: that the new literature should be identified with an artistic school of intellectual origins, as was the case with Futurism. The premiss of the new literature cannot but be historical, political and popular: it must work towards the elaboration of what already exists, whether polemically or in other ways does not matter. What matters is that it sink its roots in the humus of popular culture as it is, with its tastes and tendencies and with its moral and intellectual world, even if it is backward and conventional. (Gramsci 1985: 102) The formation of a national-popular culture in Italy would mean confronting and overcoming the same obstacles (dialects, folklore, local particularisms) as the formation of a national language. Because of this, what Gramsci says about language gives us the clearest example of how he conceptualized cultural change as a whole. In the prison notebooks, parallels are implicitly established between a series of dominant–subordinate couplings: language–dialects, philosophy– common sense (or folklore), high culture–popular culture, intellectuals–people, party–masses. The point in each case is not to impose the former on the latter but to construct an educative alliance between them (‘Every relationship of “hegemony” 218 DAVID FORGACS is necessarily an educational relationship’) so that one establishes an ‘organic unity between theory and practice, between intellectual strata and popular masses, between rulers and ruled’ which constitutes democratic centralism. The spreading of a national language is the paradigm for all these other relationships: Since the process of formation, spread and development of a unified national language occurs through a whole complex of molecular processes, it helps to be aware of the entire process as a whole in order to be able to intervene actively in it with the best possible results. One need not consider this intervention as ‘decisive’ and imagine that the ends proposed will all be reached in detail, i.e. that one will obtain a specific unified language. One will obtain a unified language, if it is a necessity, and the organized intervention will speed up the already existing processes. What this language will be, one cannot foresee or establish: in any case, if the intervention is ‘rational’, it will be organically tied to tradition, and this is of no small importance in the economy of culture. (Gramsci 1971: 350) As well as being a paradigm for the other hegemonic relationships, language is also their social medium. Thus what Gramsci is talking about here is a process of constructing ideological hegemony among a wide range of social strata. Just as, at present, ‘the national-popular mass is excluded from learning the educated language, since the highest level of the ruling class, which traditionally speaks standard Italian passes it on from generation to generation’, so the popular masses are excluded from high culture and ‘“official” conceptions of the world’ and possess instead the unelaborated and unsystematic conceptions of folklore and common sense. Hence in order to be hegemonized, these strata must be addressed through a medium adapted to their different cultural positions. There will not, for instance, be a single party newspaper but a whole party press whose various organs can adapt their tone and content to different readerships. 5 With these cultural dimensions, then, the national-popular concept clearly developed beyond the immediate conjunctural considerations from which it had originated in 1924–6, where it was linked to the Comintern tactic of the united front with the socialists (1921–6), and beyond the political expedient of inter-class and inter-party alliances as a temporary anti-fascist strategy – the Popular Front line of 1935, to which it has often been reductively and polemically assimilated. It became a historical strategy, dependent both on the historic absence in Italy of a revolution from below, on a specifically Italian, economic and social structure with special disequilibria (combining advanced and third world characteristics, for example) and also on the development of capitalist societies in the West generally, as Gramsci witnessed them being transformed by American forms of social and economic management and elaborating extensive ideological resistances. N AT I O N A L - P O P U L A R 219 Nor is it hard to see why, at a general level, the concept retains its validity. It recognizes the specificity of national conditions and traditions. It valorizes civil society as a key site of struggle. It emphasizes the role of ideological reorganization and struggle. It identifies struggles common to more than one social class, fraction or group which can be strategically linked together. It recognizes that different social elements can, and do, act in terms not only of economic or ideological selfinterest but also in terms of shared interests. Yet it also leaves a number of problematical questions very much open. By what means does one initially win the consent of other forces and movements? How can what Gramsci called the economic-corporate interests of a class or social group then be transcended in a higher collective will? How can this will, once established, be secured and prevented from disintegrating back into competing sectoral interests? For Gramsci these problems were, after 1926, posed largely in theory, and they tended to be resolved in the notebooks within the formula of party centralism and the belief in the transitional nature of any form of interclassist alliance: in other words within a still essentially Leninist perspective of the single party and the replacement of parliament by soviets. The crucial practical problem of the national-popular lies in this: that there is often a narrow distinction between class alliances that are effectively hegemonic for the working class, class alliances that are merely federative groupings around particular issues or at particular times (for instance elections), and class alliances that can be tipped the other way and reorganized under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. The PCI in the 1944–8 period, after Gramsci’s death (1937), not only conceded too much to its alliance partners in terms of the restoration of the old economic and political infrastructures and the maintenance of fascist personnel, notably in the police and militia. It also failed to radiate a collective will of a genuinely oppositional type into the rank and file at a time when the relations of forces were regrouping to the right, and it thus ended up excluded from the executive in 1947 and defeated at the polls in 1948. That these practices were not simple realizations of Gramsci’s theories but political choices overdetermined by all sorts of strategic choices need not be spelt out. Gramsci had not only stressed, as we saw, the essentially transitional nature of the constituent assembly under proletarian leadership but he had also emphasized that the assembly was to have been a site of struggle against ‘all projects of peaceful reform, demonstrating to the Italian working class how the only possible solution in Italy resides in the proletarian revolution’. Nevertheless, the questions of when a class alliance contains or does not contain a collective will and of when it lays itself open to reorganization under bourgeois hegemony were posed starkly by the Italian Communists’ practical development of Gramsci’s theories. And they remain of great actuality in the West today. Chapter 16 Arjun Appadurai DISJUNCTURE AND DIFFERENCE I N T H E G L O B A L C U LT U R A L ECONOMY EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION D O E S G L O B A L IZ AT I O N M E A N T H AT local cultures are becoming more homogeneous? Firmly answering “no” to the “homogenization thesis,” Arjun Appadurai goes on to make a series of path-breaking and exhilarating suggestions which have reconfigured theories of postcolonialism, postmodernism, and globalization. He argues that we need to let go the old oppositions like “global/local,” “North/ South,” “metropolitan/non-metropolitan” which divided the world in two. We need to think rather of distinct flows or “scapes” which ceaselessly sweep through the globe carrying capital, information, images, people, ideas, technologies. The content of these flows constantly mutates; their relation to one another is increasingly distant and antagonistic. As they pass through national boundaries, in each country they intensify the division between the nation (the country’s cultural identity and unity) and the state (the country’s public, governmental institutions). Reading between the lines of this essay, I would suggest that for Appadurai this globe of scapes contains much more possibility than the old world of colonies and centers, and of nations firmly bound to states. His is a celebratory globalism. The question is: how utopic is it? Who is losing out in this mobile new world of mutating, disjunct flows? Gayatri Spivak’s essay in this volume is one place to look for an answer; Hamid Naficy also provides a case study which brings the new globalism closer to everyday life. Further reading: During 1997; Ginsburg 1991; Jameson and Miyoshi 1998; Morley and Robins 1995; Virilio 1991a, 1991b. DISJUNCTURE AND DIFFERENCE 221 The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. A vast array of empirical facts could be brought to bear on the side of the ‘homogenization’ argument, and much of it has come from the left end of the spectrum of media studies. Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization or an argument about ‘commoditization’, and very often the two arguments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or other way: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacles and constitutions. The dynamics of such indigenization have just begun to be explored in a sophisticated manner, and much more needs to be done. But it is worth noticing that for the people of Irian Jaya, Indonesianization may be more worrisome than Americanization, as Japanization may be for Koreans, Indianization for Sri Lankans, Vietnamization for the Cambodians, Russianization for the people of Soviet Armenia and the Baltic Republics. Such a list of alternative fears to Americanization could be greatly expanded, but it is not a shapeless inventory: for polities of smaller scale, there is always a fear of cultural absorption by polities of larger scale, especially those that are nearby. One man’s imagined community (Anderson 1991) is another man’s political prison. This scalar dynamic, which has widespread global manifestations, is also tied to the relationship between nations and states, to which I shall return later in this essay. For the moment let us note that the simplification of these many forces (and fears) of homogenization can also be exploited by nation states in relation to their own minorities, by posing global commoditization (or capitalism, or some other such external enemy) as more ‘real’ than the threat of its own hegemonic strategies. The new global cultural economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre–periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries). Nor is it susceptible to simple models of push and pull (in terms of migration theory) or of surpluses and deficits (as in traditional models of balance of trade), or of consumers and producers (as in most neo-Marxist theories of development). Even the most complex and flexible theories of global development which have come out of the Marxist tradition (Mandel 1978; Wallerstein 1974; Wolf 1982) are inadequately quirky, and they have not come to terms with what Lash and Urry (1987) have recently called ‘disorganized capitalism’. The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture and politics which we have barely begun to theorize. I propose that an elementary framework of exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship between five dimensions of global cultural flow which can be termed: first, ethnoscapes; second, mediascapes; third, technoscapes; fourth, finanscapes; and fifth, ideoscapes. I use terms with the common suffix scape to indicate first of all that these are not objectively given relations which look the same from every angle of vision, but rather that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected very much by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as 222 ARJUN APPADURAI well as sub-national groupings and movements (whether religious, political or economic), and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighborhoods and families. Indeed, the individual actor is the last locus of this perspectival set of landscapes, for these landscapes are eventually navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger formations, in part by their own sense of what these landscapes offer. These landscapes thus, are the building blocks of what, extending Benedict Anderson, I would like to call ‘imagined worlds’, that is, the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe. An important fact of the world we live in today is that many persons on the globe live in such imagined ‘worlds’ and not just in imagined communities, and thus are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the ‘imagined worlds’ of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them. The suffix scape also allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes which characterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles. By ‘ethnoscape’, I mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups and persons constitute an essential feature of the world, and appear to affect the politics of and between nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree. This is not to say that there are not anywhere relatively stable communities and networks, of kinship, of friendship, of work and of leisure, as well as of birth, residence and other filiative forms. But it is to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion, as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move, or the fantasies of wanting to move. What is more, both these realities as well as these fantasies now function on larger scales, as men and women from villages in India think not just of moving to Poona or Madras, but of moving to Dubai and Houston, and refugees from Sri Lanka find themselves in South India as well as in Canada, just as the Hmong are driven to London as well as to Philadelphia. And as international capital shifts its needs, as production and technology generate different needs, as nation states shift their policies on refugee populations, these moving groups can never afford to let their imagination rest too long, even if they wished to. By ‘technoscape’, I mean the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology, and of the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries. Many countries now are the roots of multinational enterprise: a huge steel complex in Libya may involve interests from India, China, Russia and Japan, providing different components of new technological configurations. The odd distribution of technologies, and thus the peculiarities of these technoscapes, are increasingly driven not by any obvious economies of scale, of political control, or of market rationality, but of increasingly complex relationships between money flows, political possibilities and the availability of both low-and highly skilled labor. So, while India exports waiters and chauffeurs to Dubai and Sharjah, it also exports software engineers to the United States (indentured briefly to Tata-Burroughs or the World Bank), then laundered through the State Department to become wealthy ‘resident aliens’, who are in turn objects of seductive messages to invest their money and know-how in federal and state DISJUNCTURE AND DIFFERENCE 223 projects in India. The global economy can still be described in terms of traditional ‘indicators’ (as the World Bank continues to do) and studied in terms of traditional comparisons (as in Project Link at the University of Pennsylvania), but the complicated technoscapes (and the shifting ethnoscapes), which underlie these ‘indicators’ and ‘comparisions’ are further out of the reach of the ‘queen of the social sciences’ than ever before. How is one to make a meaningful comparison of wages in Japan and the United States, or of real estate costs in New York and Tokyo, without taking sophisticated account of the very complex fiscal and investment flows that link the two economies through a global grid of currency speculation and capital transfer? Thus it is useful to speak as well of ‘finanscapes’, since the disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid and difficult landscape to follow than ever before, as currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move mega-money through national turnstiles at blinding speed, with vast absolute implications for small differences in percentage points and time units. But the critical point is that the global relationship between ethnoscapes, technoscapes and finanscapes is deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable, since each of these landscapes is subject to its own constraints and incentives (some political, some informational and some techno-environmental), at the same time as each acts as a constraint and a parameter for movements in the other. Thus, even an elementary model of global political economy must take into account the shifting relationship between perspectives on human movement, technological flow and financial transfers, which can accommodate their deeply disjunctive relationships with one another. Built upon these disjunctives (which hardly form a simple, mechanical global ‘infrastructure’ in any case) are what I have called ‘mediascapes’ and ‘ideoscapes’, though the latter two are closely related landscapes of images. ‘Mediascapes’ refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios, etc.), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world; and to the images of the world created by these media. These images of the world involve many complicated inflections, depending on their mode (documentary or entertainment), their hardware (electronic or pre-electronic), their audiences (local, national or transnational) and the interests of those who own and control them. What is most important about these mediascapes is that they provide (especially in their television, film and cassette forms) large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and ‘ethnoscapes’ to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of ‘news’ and politics are profoundly mixed. What this means is that many audiences throughout the world experience the media themselves as a complicated and interconnected repertoire of print, celluloid, electronic screens and billboards. The lines between the ‘realistic’ and the fictional landscapes they see are blurred, so that the further away these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct ‘imagined worlds’ which are chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects, particularly if assessed by the criteria of some other perspective, some other ‘imagined world’. 224 ARJUN APPADURAI ‘Mediascapes’, whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places. These scripts can and do get disaggregated into complex sets of metaphors by which people live as they help to constitute narratives of the ‘other’ and proto-narratives of possible lives, fantasies which could become prologemena to the desire for acquisition and movement. ‘Ideoscapes’ are also concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counterideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it. These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a concatenation of ideas, terms and images, including ‘freedom’, ‘welfare’, ‘rights’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘representation’ and the masterterm ‘democracy’. The master-narrative of the Enlightenment (and its many variants in England, France and the United States) was constructed with a certain internal logic and presupposed a certain relationship between reading, representation and the public sphere (for the dynamics of this process in the early history of the United States, see Warner 1990). But their diaspora across the world, especially since the nineteenth century, has loosened the internal coherence which held these terms and images together in a Euro-American master-narrative, and provided instead a loosely structured synopticon of politics, in which different nation states, as part of their evolution, have organized their political cultures around different ‘keywords’. As a result of the differential diaspora of these keywords, the political narratives that govern communication between elites and followings in different parts of the world involve problems of both a semantic and a pragmatic nature: semantic to the extent that words (and their lexical equivalents) require careful translation from context to context in their global movements; and pragmatic to the extent that the use of these words by political actors and their audiences may be subject to very different sets of contextual conventions that mediate their translation into public politics. Such conventions are not only matters of the nature of political rhetoric (viz. what does the aging Chinese leadership mean when it refers to the dangers of hooliganism? What does the South Korean leadership mean when it speaks of ‘discipline’ as the key to democratic industrial growth?). These conventions also involve the far more subtle question of what sets of communicative genres are valued in what way (newspapers versus cinema for example) and what sorts of pragmatic genre conventions govern the collective ‘readings’ of different kinds of text. So, while an Indian audience may be attentive to the resonances of a political speech in terms of some key words and phrases reminiscent of Hindi cinema, a Korean audience may respond to the subtle codings of Buddhist or neo-Confucian rhetorical strategy encoded in a political document. The very relationship of reading to hearing and seeing may vary in important ways that determine the morphology of these different ‘ideoscapes’ as they shape themselves in different national and transnational contexts. This globally variable synaesthesia has hardly even been noted, but it demands urgent analysis. Thus DISJUNCTURE AND DIFFERENCE 225 ‘democracy’ has clearly become a master-term, with powerful echoes from Haiti and Poland to the Soviet Union and China, but it sits at the center of a variety of ideoscapes (composed of distinctive pragmatic configurations of rough ‘translations’ of other central terms from the vocabulary of the Enlightenment). This creates ever new terminological kaleidoscopes, as states (and the groups that seek to capture them) seek to pacify populations whose own ethnoscapes are in motion, and whose mediascapes may create severe problems for the ideoscapes with which they are presented. The fluidity of ideoscapes is complicated in particular by the growing diasporas (both voluntary and involuntary) of intellectuals who continuously inject new meaning-streams into the discourse of democracy in different parts of the world. This extended terminological discussion of the five terms I have coined sets the basis for a tentative formulation about the conditions under which current global flows occur: they occur in and through the growing disjunctures between ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes. This formulation, the core of my model of global cultural flow, needs some explanation. First, people, machinery, money, images, and ideas now follow increasingly nonisomorphic paths: of course, at all periods in human history, there have been some disjunctures between the flows of these things, but the sheer speed, scale and volume of each of these flows is now so great that the disjunctures have become central to the politics of global culture. The Japanese are notoriously hospitable to ideas and are stereotyped as inclined to export (all) and import (some) goods, but they are also notoriously closed to immigration, like the Swiss, the Swedes and the Saudis. Yet the Swiss and Saudis accept populations of guestworkers, thus creating labor diasporas of Turks, Italians and other circum-Mediterranean groups. Some such guestworker groups maintain continuous contact with their home nations, like the Turks, but others, like high-level South Asian migrants, tend to desire lives in their new homes, raising anew the problem of reproduction in a deterritorialized context. Deterritorialization, in general, is one of the central forces of the modern world, since it brings laboring populations into the lower-class sectors and spaces of relatively wealthy societies, while sometimes creating exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home state. Deterritorialization, whether of Hindus, Sikhs, Palestinians or Ukranians, is now at the core of a variety of global fundamentalisms, including Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism. In the Hindu case for example, it is clear that the overseas movement of Indians has been exploited by a variety of interests both within and outside India to create a complicated network of finances and religious identifications, in which the problems of cultural reproduction for Hindus abroad has become tied to the politics of Hindu fundamentalism at home. At the same time, deterritorialization creates new markets for film companies, art impresarios and travel agencies, who thrive on the need of the deterritorialized population for contact with its homeland. Naturally, these invented homelands, which constitute the mediascapes of deterritorialized groups, can often become sufficiently fantastic and one-sided that they provide the material for new ideoscapes in which ethnic conflicts can begin to erupt. The creation of ‘Khalistan’, an invented homeland of the deterritorialized Sikh population of England, Canada 226 ARJUN APPADURAI and the United States, is one example of the bloody potential in such mediascapes, as they interact with the ‘internal colonialisms’ (Hechter 1974) of the nation state. The West Bank, Namibia and Eritrea are other theaters for the enactment of the bloody negotiation between existing nation states and various deterritorialized groupings. The idea of deterritorialization may also be applied to money and finance, as money managers seek the best markets for their investments, independent of national boundaries. In turn, these movements of money are the basis of new kinds of conflict, as Los Angelenos worry about the Japanese buying up their city, and people in Bombay worry about the rich Arabs from the Gulf States who have not only transformed the prices of mangoes in Bombay, but have also substantially altered the profile of hotels, restaurants and other services in the eyes of the local population, just as they continue to do in London. Yet, most residents of Bombay are ambivalent about the Arab presence there, for the flip side of their presence is the absence of friends and kinsmen earning big money in the Middle East and bringing back both money and luxury commodities to Bombay and other cities in India. Such commodities transform consumer taste in these cities, and also often end up smuggled through air and sea ports and peddled in the gray markets of Bombay’s streets. In these gray markets, some members of Bombay’s middle classes and of its lumpenproletariat can buy some of these goods, ranging from cartons of Marlboro cigarettes to Old Spice shaving cream and tapes of Madonna. Similarly gray routes, often subsidized by the moonlighting activities of sailors, diplomats, and airline stewardesses who get to move in and out of the country regularly, keep the gray markets of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta filled with goods not only from the West but also from the Middle East, Hong Kong and Singapore. It is this fertile ground of deterritorialization, in which money, commodities and persons are involved in ceaselessly chasing each other around the world, that the mediascapes and ideoscapes of the modern world find their fractured and fragmented counterpart. For the ideas and images produced by mass media often are only partial guides to the goods and experiences that deterritorialized populations transfer to one another. In Mira Nair’s brilliant film, India Cabaret, we see the multiple loops of this fractured deterritorialization as young women, barely competent in Bombay’s metropolitan glitz, come to seek their fortunes as cabaret dancers and prostitutes in Bombay, entertaining men in clubs with dance formats derived wholly from the prurient dance sequences of Hindi films. These scenes cater in turn to ideas about Western and foreign women and their ‘looseness’, while they provide tawdry career alibis for these women. Some of these women come from Kerala, where cabaret clubs and the pornographic film industry have blossomed, partly in response to the purses and tastes of Keralites returned from the Middle East, where their diasporic lives away from women distort their very sense of what the relations between men and women might be. These tragedies of displacement could certainly be replayed in a more detailed analysis of the relations between the Japanese and German sex tours to Thailand and the tragedies of the sex trade in Bangkok, and in other similar loops which tie together fantasies about the other, the conveniences and seductions of travel, the economics of global trade and the brutal mobility fantasies that dominate gender politics in many parts of Asia and the world at large. DISJUNCTURE AND DIFFERENCE 227 While far more could be said about the cultural politics of deterritorialization and the larger sociology of displacement that it expresses, it is appropriate at this juncture to bring in the role of the nation state in the disjunctive global economy of culture today. The relationship between states and nations is everywhere an embattled one. It is possible to say that in many societies, the nation and the state have become one another’s projects. That is, while nations (or more properly groups with ideas about nationhood) seek to capture or co-opt states and state power, states simultaneously seek to capture and monopolize ideas about nationhood. In general, separatist, transnational movements, including those which have included terror in their methods, exemplify nations in search of states: Sikhs, Tamil Sri Lankans, Basques, Moros, Québécois, each of these represent imagined communities which seek to create states of their own or carve pieces out of existing states. States, on the other hand, are everywhere seeking to monopolize the moral resources of community, either by flatly claiming perfect coevality between nation and state or by systematically museumizing and representing all the groups within them in a variety of heritage politics that seems remarkably uniform throughout the world. Here, national and international mediascapes are exploited by nation states to pacify separatists or even the potential fissiparousness of all ideas of difference. Typically, contemporary nation states do this by exercising taxonomical control over difference; by creating various kinds of international spectacle to domesticate difference; and by seducing small groups with the fantasy of self-display on some sort of global or cosmopolitan stage. One important new feature of global cultural politics, tied to the disjunctive relationships between the various landscapes discussed earlier, is that state and nation are at each other’s throats, and the hyphen that links them is now less an icon of conjuncture than an index of disjuncture. This disjunctive relationship between nation and state has two levels: at the level of any given nation state, it means that there is a battle of the imagination, with state and nation seeking to cannibalize one another. Here is the seedbed of brutal separatisms, majoritarianisms that seem to have appeared from nowhere, and micro-identities that have become political projects within the nation state. At another level, this disjunctive relationship is deeply entangled with the global disjunctures discussed throughout this essay: ideas of nationhood appear to be steadily increasing in scale and regularly crossing existing state boundaries: sometimes, as with the Kurds, because previous identities stretched across vast national spaces, or, as with the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the dormant threads of a transnational diaspora have been activated to ignite the micro-politics of a nation state. In discussing the cultural politics that have subverted the hyphen that links the nation to the state, it is especially important not to forget its mooring in the irregularities that now characterize ‘disorganized capital’ (Lash and Urry 1987). It is because labor, finance and technology are now so widely separated that the volatilities that underlie movements for nationhood (as large as transnational Islam on the one hand, or as small as the movement of the Gurkhas for a separate state in the north-east of India) grind against the vulnerabilities which characterize the relationships between states. States find themselves pressed to stay ‘open’ by the forces of media, technology, and travel which had fueled consumerism throughout the world and have increased the craving, even in the non-Western world, for new commodities and spectacles. On the other hand, these very cravings can become 228 ARJUN APPADURAI caught up in new ethnoscapes, mediascapes, and eventually, ideoscapes, such as ‘democracy’ in China, that the state cannot tolerate as threats to its own control over ideas of nationhood and ‘peoplehood’. States throughout the world are under siege, especially where contests over the ideoscapes of democracy are fierce and fundamental, and where there are radical disjunctures between ideoscapes and technoscapes (as in the case of very small countries that lack contemporary technologies of production and information); or between ideoscapes and finanscapes (as in countries, such as Mexico or Brazil, where international lending influences national politics to a very large degree); or between ideoscapes and ethnoscapes (as in Beirut, where diasporic, local and translocal filiations are suicidally at battle); or between ideoscapes and mediascapes (as in many countries in the Middle East and Asia) where the lifestyles represented on both national and international television and cinema completely overwhelm and undermine the rhetoric of national politics: in the Indian case, the myth of the law-breaking hero has emerged to mediate this naked struggle between the pieties and the realities of Indian politics, which has grown increasingly brutalized and corrupt. The transnational movement of the martial arts, particularly through Asia, as mediated by the Hollywood and Hong Kong film industries, is a rich illustration of the ways in which longstanding martial arts traditions, reformulated to meet the fantasies of contemporary (sometimes lumpen) youth populations, create new cultures of masculinity and violence, which are in turn the fuel for increased violence in national and international politics. Such violence is in turn the spur to an increasingly rapid and amoral arms trade which penetrates the entire world. The worldwide spread of the AK-47 and the Uzi, in films, in corporate and state security, in terror, and in police and military activity, is a reminder that apparently simple technical uniformities often conceal an increasingly complex set of loops, linking images of violence to aspirations for community in some ‘imagined world’. Returning then to the ‘ethnoscapes’ with which I began, the central paradox of ethnic politics in today’s world is that primordia (whether of language or skin color or neighborhood or kinship) have become globalized. That is, sentiments whose greatest force is in their ability to ignite intimacy into a political sentiment and turn locality into a staging ground for identity, have become spread over vast and irregular spaces, as groups move, yet stay linked to one another through sophisticated media capabilities. This is not to deny that such primordia are often the product of invented traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) or retrospective affiliations but to emphasize that because of the disjunctive and unstable interplay of commerce, media, national politics and consumer fantasies, ethnicity, once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality (however large) has now become a global force, forever slipping in and through the cracks between states and borders. But the relationship between the cultural and economic levels of this new set of global disjunctures is not a simple one-way street in which the terms of global cultural politics are set wholly by, or confined wholly within, the vicissitudes of international flows of technology, labor and finance, demanding only a modest modification of existing neo-Marxist models of uneven development and stateformation. There is a deeper change, itself driven by the disjunctures between all the landscapes I have discussed, and constituted by their continuously fluid and DISJUNCTURE AND DIFFERENCE 229 uncertain interplay, which concerns the relationship between production and consumption in today’s global economy. Here I begin with Marx’s famous (and often mined) view of the fetishism of the commodity, and suggest that this fetishism has been replaced in the world at large (now seeing the world as one, large, interactive system, composed of many complex subsystems) by two mutually supportive descendants, the first of which I call production fetishism, and the second of which I call the fetishism of the consumer. By production fetishism I mean an illusion created by contemporary transnational production loci, which masks translocal capital, transnational earningflows, global management and often faraway workers (engaged in various kinds of high-tech putting out operations) in the idiom and spectacle of local (sometimes even worker) control, national productivity and territorial sovereignty. To the extent that various kinds of free trade zone have become the models for production at large, especially of high-tech commodities, production has itself become a fetish, masking not social relations as such but the relations of production, which are increasingly transnational. The locality (both in the sense of the local factory or site of production and in the extended sense of the nation state) becomes a fetish which disguises the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process. This generates alienation (in Marx’s sense) twice intensified, for its social sense is now compounded by a complicated spatial dynamic which is increasingly global. As for the fetishism of the consumer, I mean to indicate here that the consumer has been transformed, through commodity flows (and the mediascapes, especially of advertising, that accompany them) into a sign, both in Baudrillard’s sense of a simulacrum which only asymptotically approaches the form of a real social agent; and in the sense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer but the producer and the many forces that constitute production. Global advertising is the key technology for the worldwide dissemination of a plethora of creative, and culturally well-chosen, ideas of consumer agency. These images of agency are increasingly distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser. The globalization of culture is not the same as its homogenization, but globalization involves the use of a variety of instruments of homogenization (armaments, advertising techniques, language hegemonies, clothing styles and the like), which are absorbed into local political and cultural economies, only to be repatriated as heterogeneous dialogues of national sovereignty, free enterprise, fundamentalism etc. in which the state plays an increasingly delicate role: too much openness to global flows and the nation state is threatened by revolt – the China syndrome; too little, and the state exits the international stage, as Burma, Albania and North Korea in various ways have done. In general, the state has become the arbiter of this repatriation of difference (in the form of goods, signs, slogans, styles etc.) But this repatriation or export of the designs and commodities of difference continuously exacerbates the ‘internal’ politics of majoritarianism and homogenization, which is most frequently played out in debates over heritage. Thus the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the mutual effect of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another and thus to proclaim 230 ARJUN APPADURAI their successful hijacking of the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular. This mutual cannibalization shows its ugly face in riots, in refugee flows, in state-sponsored torture and in ethnocide (with or without state support). Its brighter side is in the expansion of many individual horizons of hope and fantasy, in the global spread of oral rehydration therapy and other low-tech instruments of well-being, in the susceptibility even of South Africa to the force of global opinion, in the inability of the Polish state to repress its own working classes, and in the growth of a wide range of progressive, transnational alliances. Examples of both sorts could be multiplied. The critical point is that both sides of the coin of global cultural process today are products of the infinitely varied mutual contest of sameness and difference on a stage characterized by radical disjunctures between different sorts of global flows and the uncertain landscapes created in and through these disjunctures. PA R T F O U R Ethnicity and multiculturalism Chapter 17 bell hooks A R E V O L U T I O N O F VA L U E S The promise of multicultural change EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION I N T H I S E S S AY, W H I C H B E G IN S as reminiscence of her schooldays during the 1960s’ black liberation struggles, bell hooks moves effortlessly from her experiences as a young woman dealing each day with the affronts of patriarchy and racism (affronts which white liberals are unable effectively to combat) to her current situation as a teacher and writer working on behalf of a cultural diversity which recognizes not just equality and difference – in a word, not just pluralism – but the continuing presence of exploitation and conflict. It’s an essay which explicitly draws sustenance from Martin Luther King’s teachings. What makes it very relevant to contemporary cultural studies is that it provides not simply a confessional and self-analytical perspective which bears witness to experiences but also a practical will for change that cultural theory often assumes and, in assuming, obscures. Further reading: Chambers 1994; Gilroy 1994; Goldberg 1994; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; P. Williams 1991. Two summers ago I attended my twentieth high school reunion. It was a last-minute decision. I had just finished a new book. Whenever I finish a work, I always feel lost, as though a steady anchor has been taken away and there is no sure ground under my feet. During the time between ending one project and beginning another, I always have a crisis of meaning. I begin to wonder what my life is all about and what I have been put on this earth to do. It is as though immersed in a project I lose all sense of 234 BELL HOOKS myself and must then, when the work is done, rediscover who I am and where I am going. When I heard that the reunion was happening, it seemed just the experience to bring me back to myself, to help in the process of rediscovery. Never having attended any of the past reunions, I did not know what to expect. I did know that this one would be different. For the first time we were about to have a racially integrated reunion. In past years, reunions had always been segregated. White folks had their reunion on their side of town and black folks had a separate reunion. None of us was sure what an integrated reunion would be like. Those periods in our adolescent lives of racial desegregation had been full of hostility, rage, conflict, and loss. We black kids had been angry that we had to leave our beloved all-black high school, Crispus Attucks, and be bussed halfway cross town to integrate white schools. We had to make the journey and thus bear the responsibility of making desegregation a reality. We had to give up the familiar and enter a world that seemed cold and strange, not our world, not our school. We were certainly on the margin, no longer at the center, and it hurt. It was such an unhappy time. I still remember my rage that we had to awaken an hour early so that we could be bussed to school before the white students arrived. We were made to sit in the gymnasium and wait. It was believed that this practice would prevent outbreaks of conflict and hostility since it removed the possibility of social contact before classes began. Yet, once again, the burden of this transition was placed on us. The white school was desegregated, but in the classroom, in the cafeteria and in most social spaces racial apartheid prevailed. Black and white students who considered ourselves progressive rebelled against the unspoken racial taboos meant to sustain white supremacy and racial apartheid even in the face of desegregation. The white folks never seemed to understand that our parents were no more eager for us to socialize with them than they were to socialize with us. Those of us who wanted to make racial equality a reality in every area of our life were threats to the social order. We were proud of ourselves, proud of our willingness to transgress the rules, proud to be courageous. Part of a small integrated clique of smart kids who considered ourselves ‘artists’, we believed we were destined to create outlaw culture where we would live as Bohemians forever free; we were certain of our radicalness. Days before the reunion, I was overwhelmed by memories and shocked to discover that our gestures of defiance had been nowhere near as daring as they had seemed at the time. Mostly, they were acts of resistance that did not truly challenge the status quo. One of my best buddies during that time was white and male. He had an old gray Volvo that I loved to ride in. Every now and then he would give me a ride home from school if I missed the bus – an action which angered and disturbed those who saw us. Friendship across racial lines was bad enough, but across gender it was unheard of and dangerous. (One day, we found out just how dangerous when grown white men in a car tried to run us off the road.) Ken’s parents were religious. Their faith compelled them to live out a belief in racial justice. They were among the first white folks in our community to invite black folks to come to their house, to eat at their table, to worship together with them. As one of Ken’s best buddies, I was welcome in their house. After hours of discussion and debate about possible dangers, my parents agreed that I could go there for a meal. It was my first time eating together A RE V O L U T I ON OF VA L U E S 235 with white people. I was sixteen years old. I felt then as though we were making history, that we were living the dream of democracy, creating a culture where equality, love, justice, and peace would shape America’s destiny. After graduation, I lost touch with Ken even though he always had a warm place in my memory. I thought of him when meeting and interacting with liberal white folks who believed that having a black friend meant that they were not racist, who sincerely believed that they were doing us a favor by extending offers of friendly contact for which they felt they should be rewarded. I thought of him during years of watching white folks play at unlearning racism but walking away when they encountered obstacles, rejection, conflict, pain. Our high school friendship had been forged not because we were black and white but because we shared a similar take on reality. Racial difference meant that we had to struggle to claim the integrity of that bonding. We had no illusions. We knew there would be obstacles, conflict, and pain. In white supremacist capitalist patriarchy – words we never used then – we knew we would have to pay a price for this friendship, that we would need to possess the courage to stand up for our belief in democracy, in racial justice, in the transformative power of love. We valued the bond between us enough to meet the challenge. Days before the reunion, remembering the sweetness of that friendship, I felt humbled by the knowledge of what we give up when we are young, believing that we will find something just as good or better some day, only to discover that not to be so. I wondered just how it could be that Ken and I had ever lost contact with one another. Along the way I had not found white folks who understood the depth and complexity of racial injustice, and who were as willing to practice the art of living a non-racist life, as folks were then. In my adult life I have seen few white folks who are really willing to go the distance to create a world of racial equality – white folks willing to take risks, to be courageous, to live against the grain. I went to the reunion hoping that I would have a change to see Ken face-to-face, to tell him how much I cherished all that we had shared, to tell him – in words which I never dared to say to any white person back then – simply that I loved him. Remembering this past, I am most struck by our passionate commitment to a vision of social transformation rooted in the fundamental belief in a radically democratic idea of freedom and justice for all. Our notions of social change were not fancy. There was no elaborate postmodern political theory shaping our actions. We were simply trying to change the way we went about our everyday lives so that our values and habits of being would reflect our commitment to freedom. Our major concern then was ending racism. Today, as I witness the rise in white supremacy, the growing social and economic apartheid that separates white and black, the haves and the have-nots, men and women, I have placed alongside the struggle to end racism a commitment to ending sexism and sexist oppression, to eradicating systems of class exploitation. Aware that we are living in a culture of domination, I ask myself now, as I did more than twenty years ago, what values and habits of being reflect my /our commitment to freedom? In retrospect, I see that in the last twenty years I have encountered many folks who say they are committed to freedom and justice for all even though the way they live, the values and habits of being they institutionalize daily, in public and 236 BELL HOOKS private rituals, help maintain the culture of domination, help create an unfree world. In the book Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King, Jr told the citizens of this nation, with prophetic insight, that we would be unable to go forward if we did not experience a ‘true revolution of values’. He assured us that the stability of the large world house which is ours will involve a revolution of values to accompany the scientific and freedom revolutions engulfing the earth. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing’-oriented society to a ‘person’-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy. Today, we live in the midst of that floundering. We live in chaos, uncertain about the possibility of building and sustaining community. The public figures who speak the most to us about a return to old-fashioned values embody the evils King describes. They are most committed to maintaining systems of domination – racism, sexism, class exploitation and imperialism. They promote a perverse vision of freedom that makes it synonymous with materialism. They teach us to believe that domination is ‘natural’, that it is right for the strong to rule over the weak, the powerful over the powerless. What amazes me is that so many people claim not to embrace these values and yet our collective rejection of them cannot be complete since they prevail in our daily lives. These days, I am compelled to consider what forces keep us from moving forward, from having that revolution of values that would enable us to live differ ently. King taught us to understand that if ‘we are to have peace on earth’ that ‘our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation’. Long before the word ‘multiculturalism’ became fashionable, he encouraged us to ‘develop a world perspective’. Yet, what we are witnessing today in our everyday life is not an eagerness on the part of neighbors and strangers to develop a world perspective but a return to narrow nationalism, isolationisms and xenophobia. These shifts are usually explained in New Right and neoconservative terms as attempts to bring order to the chaos, to return to an (idealized) past. The notion of family evoked in these discussions is one in which sexist roles are upheld as stabilizing traditions. Not surprisingly, this vision of family life is coupled with a notion of security that suggests we are always most safe with people of our same group, race, class, religion, and so on. No matter how many statistics on domestic violence, homicide, rape and child abuse indicate that, in fact, the idealized patriarchal family is not a ‘safe’ space, that those of us who experience any form of assault are more likely to be victimized by those who are like us rather than by some mysterious strange outsiders, these conservative myths persist. It is apparent that one of the primary reasons we have not experienced a revolution of values is that a culture of domination necessarily promotes addiction to lying and denial. A RE V O L U T I ON OF VA L U E S 237 That lying takes the presumably innocent form of many white people (and even some black folks) suggesting that racism does not exist any more, and that conditions of social equality are solidly in place that would enable any black person who works hard to achieve economic self-sufficiency. Forget about the fact that capitalism requires the existence of a mass underclass of surplus labor. Lying takes the form of mass media creating the myth that the feminist movement has completely transformed society, so much so that the politics of patriarchal power have been inverted and that men, particularly white men, just like emasculated black men, have become the victims of dominating women. So, it goes, all men (especially black men) must pull together (as in the Clarence Thomas hearings)1 to support and reaffirm patriarchal domination. Add to this the widely held assumptions that blacks, other minorities and white women are taking jobs from white men, and that people are poor and unemployed because they want to be, and it becomes most evident that part of our contemporary crisis is created by a lack of meaningful access to truth. That is to say, individuals are not just presented untruths but are told them in a manner that enables most effective communication. When this collective cultural consumption of and attachment to misinformation is coupled with the layers of lying individuals do in their personal lives, our capacity to face reality is severely diminished as is our will to intervene and change unjust circumstances. If we examine critically the traditional role of the university in the pursuit of truth and the sharing of knowledge and information, it is painfully clear that biases that uphold and maintain white supremacy, imperialism, sexism, and racism have distorted education so that it is no longer about the practice of freedom. The call for a recognition of cultural diversity, a rethinking of ways of knowing, a deconstruction of old epistemologies, and the concomitant demand that there be a transformation in our classrooms, in how we teach and what we teach, has been a necessary revolution – one that seeks to restore life to a corrupt and dying academy. When everyone first began to speak about cultural diversity, it was exciting. For those of us on the margins (people of color, folks from working-class backgrounds, gays, and lesbians and so on) who had always felt ambivalent about our presence in institutions where knowledge was shared in ways that reinscribed colonialism and domination, it was thrilling to think that the vision of justice and democracy that was at the very heart of the civil rights movement would be realized in the academy. At last, there was the possibility of a learning community, a place where difference could be acknowledged, where we would finally all understand, accept and affirm that our ways of knowing are forged in history and relations of power. Finally, we were all going to break through collective academic denial and acknowledge that the education most of us had received and were giving was not and is never politically neutral. Though it was evident that change would not be immediate, there was tremendous hope that this process we had set in motion would lead to a fulfillment of the dream of education as the practice of freedom. Many of our colleagues were initially reluctant participants in this change. Many folks found that as they tried to respect ‘cultural diversity’ they had to confront the limitations of their training and knowledge, as well as a possible loss of ‘authority’. Indeed, exposing certain truths and biases in the classroom often created chaos and confusion. The idea that the classroom should always be a ‘safe’, 238 BELL HOOKS harmonious place was challenged. It was hard for individuals to grasp fully the idea that recognition of difference might also require of us a willingness to see the classroom change, to allow for shifts in relations between students. A lot of people panicked. What they saw happening was not the comforting ‘melting pot’ idea of cultural diversity, the rainbow coalition where we would all be grouped together in our difference, but everyone wearing the same have-a-nice-day smile. This was the stuff of colonizing fantasy, a perversion of the progressive vision of cultural diversity. Critiquing this longing in a recent interview, ‘Critical multi-culturalism and democratic schooling’ (in the International Journal of Educational Reform), Peter McLaren asserted: Diversity that somehow constitutes itself as a harmonious ensemble of benign cultural spheres is a conservative and liberal model of multiculturalism that, in my mind, deserves to be jettisoned because, when we try to make culture an undisturbed space of harmony and agreement where social relations exist within cultural forms of uninterrupted accords we subscribe to a form of social amnesia in which we forget that all knowledge is forged in histories that are played out in the field of social antagonisms. Many professors lacked strategies to deal with antagonisms in the classroom. When this fear joined with the refusal to change that characterized the stance of an old (predominantly white male) guard it created a space for disempowered collective backlash. All of a sudden, professors who had taken issues of multiculturalism and cultural diversity seriously were backtracking, expressing doubts, casting votes in directions that would restore biased traditions or prohibit changes in faculty and curricula that were to bring diversity of representation and perspective. Joining forces with the old guard, previously open professors condoned tactics (ostracization, belittlement and so on) used by senior colleagues to dissuade junior faculty members from making paradigm shifts that would lead to change. In one of my Toni Morrison seminars, as we went around our circle voicing critical reflections on Morrison’s language, a sort of classically white, blondish, J. Crew coed shared that one of her other English professors, an older white man (whose name none of us wanted her to mention), confided that he was so pleased to find a student still interested in reading literature – words – the language of texts and ‘not that race and gender stuff. Somewhat amused by the assumption he had made about her, she was disturbed by his conviction that conventional ways of critically approaching a novel could not coexist in classrooms that also offered new perspectives. I then shared with the class my experience of being at a Hallowe’en party. A new white male colleague, with whom I was chatting for the first time, went on a tirade at the mere mention of my Toni Morrison seminar, emphasizing that Song of Solomon was a weak rewrite of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Passionately full of disgust for Morrison he, being a Hemingway scholar, seemed to be sharing the often-heard concern that black women writers or thinkers are just poor A RE V O L U T I ON OF VA L U E S 239 imitations of ‘great’ white men. Not wanting at that moment to launch into Unlearning Colonialism, Divesting of Racism and Sexism 101, I opted for the strategy taught to me by that in-denial-of-institutionalized-patriarchy, self-help book Women Who Love Too Much. I just said, ‘Oh!’ Later, I assured him that I would read For Whom the Bell Tolls again to see if I would make the same connection. Both these seemingly trivial incidents reveal how deep-seated is the fear that any decentering of Western civilizations, of the white male canon, is really an act of cultural genocide. Some folks think that everyone who supports cultural diversity wants to replace one dictatorship of knowing with another, changing one set way of thinking for another. This is perhaps the gravest misperception of cultural diversity. Even though there are those overly zealous among us who hope to replace one set of absolutes with another, simply changing content, this perspective does not accurately represent progressive visions of the way commitment to cultural diversity can constructively transform the academy. In all cultural revolutions there are periods of chaos and confusion, times when grave mistakes are made. If we fear mistakes, doing things wrongly, constantly evaluating ourselves, we will never make the academy a culturally diverse place where scholars and the curricula address every dimension of that difference. As backlash swells, as budgets are cut, as jobs become even more scarce, many of the few progressive interventions that were made to change the academy, to create an open climate for cultural diversity are in danger of being undermined or eliminated. These threats should not be ignored. Nor should our collective commitment to cultural diversity change because we have not yet devised and implemented perfect strategies for them. To create a culturally diverse academy we must commit ourselves fully. Learning from other movements for social change, from civil rights and feminist liberation efforts, we must accept the protracted nature of our struggle and be willing to remain both patient and vigilant. To commit ourselves to the work of transforming the academy so that it will be a place where cultural diversity informs every aspect of our learning, we must embrace struggle and sacrifice. We cannot be easily discouraged. We cannot despair when there is conflict. Our solidarity must be affirmed by shared belief in a spirit of intellectual openness that celebrates diversity, welcomes dissent, and rejoices in collective dedication to truth. Drawing strength from the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr, I am often reminded of his profound inner struggle when he felt called by his religious beliefs to oppose the war in Vietnam. Fearful of alienating conservative bourgeois supporters, and of alienating the black church, King meditated on a passage from Romans, chapter 12, verse 2, which reminded him of the necessity of dissent, challenge and change: ‘Be not conformed to this world but be ye transformed by the renewal of your minds’. All of us in the academy and in the culture as a whole are called to renew our minds if we are to transform educational institutions – and society – so that the way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love of freedom. 240 BELL HOOKS Note 1 Clarence Thomas was nominated by Ronald Reagan as a Supreme Court judge and, during the US Senate’s ratification of the nomination, he was examined in relation to sexual harassment charges made against him by Anita Hill. Reagan’s nomination was upheld. Chapter 18 Eric Lott RACIAL CROSS-DRESSING AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AMERICAN WHITENESS EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION E R IC LO TT ’ S E S S AY I S A contribution to white studies, which is the study of whiteness as a historically constructed ethnic or cultural identity. The field was first defined in left-wing US labor history (e.g. Roediger 1991), for it was in the difficult past of white working-class Americans that the contingencies and strategies involved in establishing oneself as white became impossible for American academics to ignore. In conventional historiography and social theory, whiteness had been a universal rather than an identity. Being white, having white values and status, was the standard of humanness in general, to which others aspired and in relation to which they were judged. For Lott, though, whiteness is a constructed and imagined identity which, especially in the US, requires continual effort to sustain. The effort is made by whites performing whiteness in all kinds of ways – performances which are addressed, not necessarily explicitly, to blacks. The construction and performance of whiteness is best unpicked through an analysis of white impersonations of blackness, so-called “blackface,” a term which Lott extends beyond the familiar theatrical genre to a quite widely dispersed white desire to be black, or at least to simulate blackness. Lott argues further that the invention of whiteness cannot be disentangled from questions of sexuality and gender. The white will to blackness is usually a performance of masculine mastery, but not just that. Pulling off a black mask may glorify the whiteness beneath, but putting on the mask may be a means of expressing repressed forms of homosocial or homosexual desires, as his analysis of Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me shows. And the whiteness of the white in black-face is always shadowed and made fragile by its inverse: the blackness of the black in whiteface. 242 ERIC LOTT Lott’s essay suggests a number of important questions. One obvious one is: if white men have to negotiate their masculinity in relation to black masculinity, what about women? Is there a tradition of female blackface/whiteface? And if less so, why? Into what imbrications of sexuality, gender and race does this question lead? Further reading: Dyer 1997; Frankenberg 1993; Hall 1996a; McClintock 1995; Roediger 1991; Ross 1989. At the start of a journey into the ‘night side of American life’, which would furnish the material for his Black Like Me (1961), John Howard Griffin strikes up a relationship with a black shoe-shine boy (Griffin 1961: 14). Griffin, a white investigative journalist turned black by medical treatments, sunlamp sessions and black stain, asks for lessons in the ways of Negro life. The shine man, Sterling Williams, ‘promised perfect discretion and enthusiastically began coaching me’. ‘“You just watch me and listen how I talk”’, says Williams. ‘“You’ll catch on”’ (p. 27). Apparently he does catch on, for Williams soon certifies Griffin’s racial transmutation. ‘Within a short time [Williams] lapsed into familiarity,’ Griffin writes, ‘forgetting I was once white. He began to use the “we” form and to discuss “our situation”. The illusion of my “Negro-ness” took over so completely that I fell into the same pattern of talking and thinking. It was my first intimate glimpse. We were Negroes and our concern was the white man and how to get along with him’ (p. 28). Griffin’s narrative is only one relatively recent example of a blackface tradition that is fundamentally concerned with a forbidden ‘lapse into familiarity’ between black and white men. No disembodied affair, the ventriloquizing or indeed purloining of black and other cultures has in many instances taken the form of a homosocial dance of white men and black. Whether blackface performers’ fascination with slave singers and dancers, Carl Van Vechten’s mimicking and brokering of Harlem Renaissance writers or white-Negro Norman Mailer’s pursuit of Muhammad Ali and others, white men’s intercourse with black men has been fraught with masculinist rivalry as well as ‘compromising’ desire. These instances have injected potent fantasies of the black male body into the white Imaginary – and thence into the culture industry. In thus giving shape to the white racial unconscious, such homosocial scenarios found the color line even as they witness that latter’s continual transgression. Griffin’s ‘We were Negroes’ is the perfect summation of this dynamic: renegades together on the ‘night side’, Griffin and Williams enact a racial encounter that is both age-old and implicitly affirming of the Berlin Wall they have momentarily agreed to scale. For me, this instance raises the question of why and under what circumstances a blackface tradition emerged and continues intermittently to re-emerge, if only briefly and in more or less ironized form. My assumption is that blackface is a charged signifier with no coincidental relationship to the racial politics of culture in which it is embedded. Why, we might ask, this literal inhabiting of black bodies as a way of interracial male bonding? There are, after all, alternatives to such a RACIAL CROSS-DRESSING 243 practice; as Griffin’s civil-rights-era contemporary Leslie Fiedler argued in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), our white male writers have been stubbornly preoccupied with white male/dark male dyads (Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim) which apparently fulfill a white need to be ‘Negroes’ together. The historical fact of white men literally assuming a ‘black’ self, the eternal and predictable return of the racial signified of blackface, is another matter entirely; and I would argue that it began and continues to occur when the lines of ‘race’ appear both intractable and obstructive, when there emerges a collective desire (conscious or not) to bridge a gulf that is, however, perceived to separate the races absolutely. Griffin’s Black Like Me and blackface minstrelsy both exemplify this structure of feeling, the former in its earnest anti-segregationist politics, the latter in its derisive but transparently obsessive attempts to try on the accents of ‘blackness’. Blackface acknowledges a racial relationship which to whites seems neither satisfactory nor surmountable; this acknowledgment owes in turn to perceptions of ‘race’ and its signifiers that we would now term ‘essentialist’. To ‘black up’ is to express a belief in the complete suturing together of the markers of ‘blackness’ and the black culture, apparently sundered from the dominant one, to which they refer. John Szwed observes of the withering-away of blackface: ‘The fact that, say, a Mick Jagger can today perform in the [blackface] tradition without blackface simply marks the detachment of culture from race and the almost full absorption of a black tradition into white culture (Szwed 1975: 27). Blackface, then, reifies and at the same time trespasses on the boundaries of ‘race’. I see this doubleness as highly indicative of the shape of American whiteness. Indeed, in the largest terms this racial trope obliges us to confront the process of ‘racial’ construction itself, the historical formation of whites no less than of blacks. Our typical focus on the way ‘blackness’ in the popular imagination has been produced out of white cultural expropriation and travesty misses how necessary this process is to the making of white American manhood. The latter simply could not exist without a racial other against which it defines itself and which to a very great extent it takes up into itself as one of its own constituent elements. By way of several rather underhistoricized instances in the history of blackface miming and of imaginary racial transformation, I want to look at some American constructions of whiteness – in particular this curious dependence upon and necessary internalization of the cultural practices of the dispossessed. My title implies that Griffin’s Black Like Me is precisely misnamed, that what Griffin uncovers in his trip through the black South are the contours of straight Caucasian maleness. But to engage this and other post-World-War-II texts of racial crossdressing we must acknowledge the American racial histories and cultural products that implicitly structure them. By this of course I mean nineteenth-century blackface performance and other similar texts; but I mean also US imperialism and its material and cultural transactions and results. Encounters with the other both at home and abroad easily become intertwined; as Griffin puts it early on, ‘the South’s racial situation was a blot on the whole country, and especially reflected against us overseas’ (p. 8). In examining the racial unconscious of American imperial whiteness, I assume (absent the space adequately to demonstrate it) that the connection between internal and international is intimate. If national esteem in racial matters is related to international prestige – the ability to wield power among 244 ERIC LOTT foreign races – it is also (or therefore) the case that representations of national racial difference often provide displaced maps for international ones. Not to put too fine a point on it, the domination of international others has depended on mastering the other at home – and in oneself: an internal colonization whose achievement is fragile at best and which is often exceeded or threatened by the gender and racial arrangements on which it depends. ‘Brothers for the time being’ The minstrel show’s great popularity with northern white urban audiences in the middle decades of the nineteenth century has been read as a fairly pat instance of financial and cultural manipulation. With its comic darkies, ‘plantation melodies’, challenge dances, malapropistic wizardry, and general racial revanchism, minstrelsy long cried out for the revisionist critique to which it was only truly subjected in the 1960s and after. In one of the most thoroughgoing and persuasive of such critiques, Alexander Saxton surveys the social origins of certain major minstrel figures, among them T. D. Rice, Dan Emmett, E. P. Christy and Stephen Foster. Many of the major innovators were northerners of urban origin (none from New England) who were raised in families with intimations of upward mobility. All of them rejected the Protestant ethic and escaped into the latitudes of the entertainment world. In the course of such escape they came into contact with – and stole – the music and dance of slaves and free blacks and first tasted theatrical success in blackface performances. While these ‘professionals’ were sometimes class mutineers, passing up opportunities at a clerkship or better to immerse themselves in the underground world of blackface theater, they nevertheless shared with their families certain political ties to the elite of the Democratic party, the party of Andrew Jackson, antimonopoly, expansionism – and white supremacy. Henry Wood of Christy and Wood’s Minstrels was the brother of Fernando Wood, Southern-sympathizing mayor of New York; another brother served three terms as a Democratic Congressman from Buffalo and one term as a state senator. Stephen Foster belonged to a family of ardent Democrats related by marriage to President Buchanan’s brother, and Foster himself helped to organize a local Buchanan-forPresident club. Yet it seems to me that one unfortunate effect of this necessary critique has been to reify and even reinforce the cultural domination taking place in the minstrel show. And evidence from performers themselves points to a more complex dynamic, in which such dominative tendencies coexisted with or indeed depended upon a selfconscious attraction to the black men it was the job of these performers to mimic. Billy Whitlock, banjo player of Dan Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels, said that when on tour in the South he would, as the New York Clipper put it, ‘quietly steal off to some negro hut to hear the darkeys sing and see them dance, taking with him a jug of whiskey to make them all the merrier’ (13 April 1878). More revealingly, performer Ben Cotton claimed that he would sit with and study blacks on Mississippi riverboats: I used to sit with them in front of their cabins, and we would start the banjo twanging, and their voices would ring out in the quiet night air in RACIAL CROSS-DRESSING 245 their weird melodies. They did not quite understand me. I was the first white man they had seen who sang as they did; but we were brothers for the time being and were perfectly happy. Self-serving as this is, it none the less indicates that a major strain of American bohemia has its origins in blackface performers and enthusiasts. So much the worse for bohemia, perhaps; but in addition to the minor disasters bohemia has perpetrated from Walt Whitman to Carl Van Vechten to Jack Kerouac, there is in its activities an implicit tribute to, or at the very least a self-marginalizing mimicry of, black culture’s male representatives. This hardly addresses the social results of such activities, which may be more or less harmful than the exoticism that generated them. But with antebellum blackface performers a set of racial attitudes and cultural styles that in America goes by the name of bohemianism first emerged, and in this clumsy courtship of black men the contours of masculine whiteness as we know it began to take a definitive and recognizable form. Most minstrel performers were minor, apolitical theatrical men of the northern artisanate who pursued a newly available bourgeois dream of freedom and play by paradoxically coding themselves as ‘black’. Indeed if, for men, sexuality is where freedom and play meet, ‘blackness’ was for antebellum bohemians its virtual condition – a fascinating imaginary space of fun and license seemingly outside but in fact structured by Victorian bourgeois norms. This space seems to have arisen largely from encounters with black men – slave or dancer or vendor – to whom blackface minstrels had much access. For instance, according to legend – the closest we are going to get in the matter – T. D. Rice used an old black stableman’s song and dance in his first ‘Jim Crow’ act. Dan Emmett had left his Mount Vernon, Ohio, home by the age of eighteen (in 1834) and joined the military, where he learned to play the infantry drum from a man nicknamed ‘Juba’ – a black name, if not a black man, perhaps earned for the style of drum he played. Appearing as a banjo player in various circuses, Emmett was very soon teamed up with dancer Frank Brower, who had learned his dances directly from black men. Stephen Foster no doubt had contact with black wharf workers and boatmen in his hometown of Pittsburgh, but according to his brother he experienced black church singing first-hand through a family servant, Olivia Pise, ‘member of a church of shouting colored people’. Ralph Keeler ran away from his Buffalo home at the age of eleven and wrote that as a dancer with Johnny Booker’s minstrels in the 1850s he ‘wandered all over the Western country’, keeping continual company with that troupe’s Negro baggage handler, Ephraim. E. P. Christy reportedly drew material in the late 1830s from Onelegged Harrison, a black church singer in Buffalo; Christy said the two had often traded ‘down home talk’. Within the institution of minstrelsy itself, the renowned black dancer Juba (William Henry Lane) provided a link between the cultures, figuring centrally in many challenge-dance contests between black and white dancers. The tableau reiterated in many of these scenes – a white man and a black man becoming, as Ben Cotton put it, ‘brothers for the time being’ – shows up often enough to be a defining interest of these white Negroes, and we might pause over its role in the construction of American whiteness. For what appear in fact to have been negotiated in blackface performance were certain kinds of masculinity. To put on the cultural forms of ‘blackness’ was to 246 ERIC LOTT engage in a complex affair of manly mimicry. Examples of this dynamic since the heyday of minstrelsy are ready enough at hand, but in the early nineteenth century it had yet to be given an available public form. To wear or even enjoy blackface was literally, for a time, to become black, to inherit the cool, virility, humility, abandon, or gaité de coeur that were the prime components of white ideologies of black manhood. T. D. Rice, said that his friend F. C. Wemyss, in the event of a bad draw, fell into a kind of black homespun when dealing with theater managers, as though indeed into a black-white dyad that reproduced his own felicitous exchanges with black men: ‘“Lookye here, my master, this has been a bad job – I don’t think you ought to suffer to this tune; live and let live is a good motto – hand over – and I will give you a receipt in full, and wish you better luck another time.”’ How interesting that Rice should assume this humbled sense of masculinity precisely at the guilty moment of payment for expropriated goods, in the process authenticating his claim on the material; how fitting, too, that this disturbing moment of conventional masculinity in the public sphere – the hard bargain, the deal – could with a ventriloquial shift be evaded or at least better managed. It is worth remarking the way minstrelsy traded on racialized images of masculinity if only because they have become so familiar, indeed ritualized. In North Toward Home (1967), white Mississippian Willie Morris remembers ‘a stage, when we were about thirteen, in which we “went Negro”. We tried to broaden our accents to sound like Negroes, as if there were not enough similarity already. We consciously walked like young Negroes, mocking their swinging gait, moving our arms the way they did, cracking our knuckles and whistling between our teeth.’ I would maintain that this dynamic, persisting into adulthood, is so much a part of most American white men’s equipment for living that they remain entirely unaware of their participation in it. The special achievement of minstrel performers was to have intuited and formalized the white male fascination with the turn to black (manhood), which Leslie Fiedler puts this way: ‘Born theoretically white, we are permitted to pass our childhood as imaginary Indians, our adolescence as imaginary Negroes, and only then are expected to settle down to being what we really are: white once more.’ These common white associations of black maleness with the onset of pubescent sexuality indicate that the assumption of dominant codes of masculinity in the United States is partly negotiated through an imaginary black interlocutor. If this suggests that minstrelsy’s popularity depended in part on the momentary return of its partisans to a state of arrested adolescence – largely the condition to which dominant codes of masculinity aspire – one must also conclude that white male fantasies of black men undergird the subject positions white men grow up to occupy. And this is no foregone conclusion – it is full of the fiercest anxieties and potential disturbances. There is evidence, for example, that performers and audiences also found in blackface something closer to a homoerotic charge. Eve Sedgwick has argued that nineteenth-century bohemia was a space not of infinite heterosexual appetite but of ambiguous sexual definition, through which young bourgeois men passed on their way to the ‘repressive, self-ignorant, and apparently consolidated status of the mature bourgeois paterfamilias’ (Sedgwick 1990). Something of this situation applied in the case of minstrel men, certain of whose RACIAL CROSS-DRESSING 247 female impersonations appear, in the context of rough-and-tumble Jacksonian manliness, to have grown out of a sense of sexual ambiguity. Actress Olive Logan wrote that ‘some of the men who undertake this [“wench”] business are marvellously well fitted by nature for it, having well-defined soprano voices, plump shoulders, beardless faces, and tiny hands and feet. Many dress most elegantly as women.’ While she is referring here to post-Civil-War female impersonation – which as an American showbusiness tradition probably got its start in minstrelsy – there is no reason to believe that the wide renown of antebellum ‘wenches’ (George Christy, Barney Williams) owed any less to their aptitude for or predisposition to such roles. And while it is inaccurate simply to read off homosexuality from effeminacy or indeed transvestism, same-sex desire does seem to have been registered by these performers. ‘Heaps of boys in my locality don’t believe yet it’s a man in spite of my saying it was’, said a Rochester critic of Francis Leon, the most famous postwar female impersonator. Leon was authentic enough as a female, this writer remarked, ‘to make a fool of a man if he wasn’t sure’. Other performers evinced homosexual attractions more obliquely. ‘A minstrel show came to town and I thought of nothing else for weeks’, said Ben Cotton – this from the man who recalled the brotherhood of black and white singers. George Thatcher, well known later in the century, said of his first encounter with black-face performance in Baltimore: ‘I found myself dreaming of minstrels; I would awake with an imaginary tambourine in my hand, and rub my face with my hands to see if I was blacked up . . . The dream of my life was to see or speak to a performer.’ We might speculate a little as to the referent of the imaginary tambourine; the fantasy of racial conversion enacted in blackface seems to gesture at least toward sexual envy of black men (tambourine as penis), if not desire for them (tambourine as hymen). The fantasy may indeed direct us to a process in which homosexual desire is deflected by identifying with potent male heterosexuality. Perhaps the fantasy indicates only the usefulness of blackface in mediating white men’s desire for other white men. In any case it did nothing to redirect myths of black masculinity, to say nothing of white men’s attitudes toward women; and it only confirmed black men’s status as bearers of black culture, objects of exchange. But it does bring to the surface a more submerged motive for racial intercourse, and it was (and is) probably one moment of most white men’s enjoyment of black caricature. These examples suggest that blackface performance reproduced or instantiated a structured relationship between the races, racial difference itself, as much as black cultural forms. They suggest moreover that this difference was as internal as it was external. To assume the mantle of whiteness, these examples seem to say, is not only to ‘befriend’ a racial other but to introject or internalize its imagined special capacities and attributes. The other is of course ‘already in us’, a part of one’s (white) self, filled out according to the ideological shapes one has met in one’s entry into the culture. The black male and fantasies about him supply the content of the white male Imaginary, they make up its repertoire. This (racial) splitting of the subject actually makes possible one whole area of white desire – but it also insures that the color line thus erected is constantly open to transgression or disruption. Several theorists have termed this predicament ‘abjection’. Julia Kristeva writes of the abject that ‘“unconscious” contents remain . . . excluded but in strange 248 ERIC LOTT fashion’, clearly enough ‘for a defensive position to be established’ yet ‘not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object’ (Kristeva 1980: 7). This glosses very nicely the combined vigilance and absorptive cross-racial fascination of North American whiteness. Deviser of boundaries, ‘raced’ signs and practices by way of an engagement with the other, the blackface performer or white-Negro heir, in Kristeva’s words, ‘never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines . . . constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh’ (p. 8). The abjection so redolent of pre-Oedipal archaism is reactivated amid the guilty pleasure we have witnessed in blackface performance, but it is masked with a racial logic. In rationalized Western societies, becoming ‘white’ and male seems to depend upon the remanding of enjoyment, the body, an aptitude for pleasure. It is the other who is always putatively ‘excessive’ in this respect, whether through exotic food, strange and noisy music, outlandish bodily exhibitions, or unremitting sexual appetite. Whites in fact organize their own enjoyment through the other, Slavoj Zizek has written, and access pleasure precisely by fantasizing about the other’s ‘special’ pleasure. Hatred of the other arises from the necessary hatred of one’s own excess; ascribing this excess to the ‘degraded’ other and indulging it – by imagining, incorporating or impersonating the other – one conveniently and surreptitiously takes and disavows pleasure at one and the same time (Zizek 1990: 57). This is the mixed erotic economy, what Homi Bhabha terms the ‘ambivalence’ of American whiteness. In practice, this structure has meant, for one thing, that the dispossessed become bearers of the dominant classes’ ‘folk’ culture, its repository of joy and revivification. And it is here that the agenda of pleasure meets that of domination, white male meets imperial subject. Whether it precedes or follows the dominative logic of imperialism, pleasure in the other is in fact its necessary twin. In the case of blackface these two agendas consorted in extremely complex ways, performance legitimating and sometimes subverting the politics of white supremacy, politics giving rise to an obsessive entertainment of racial difference. This double bind is the bedrock reality of racial cross-dressing, whatever its local habitation and name. Elvis as metaphor Norman Mailer’s ‘The white negro’ (1959), a text whose mythologies are as telling as its analysis, is of course the post-Second-World-War reinvention of this structure of feeling. As none other than Norman Podhoretz observed in 1958 of the whiteNegro discourse of which Mailer’s essay was the centerpiece: ‘I doubt if a more idyllic picture of Negro life has been painted since certain Southern ideologues tried to convince the world that things were just fine as fine could be for the slaves on the old plantation’. Not a postdating or mere continuation of antebellum racial crossdressing but its genealogical legacy, this postwar discourse – the Beat writers, Elvis Presley’s early career, John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me and others – did (despite its racial ‘modernity’) reproduce the obsessions of certain nineteenthcentury Northern ideologues. To the extent that these obsessions weren’t wholly continuous with the dominant culture in the ensuing years of protest, they returned as farce in the late 1960s: Elvis’s 1968 comeback television special, Grace Halsell’s RACIAL CROSS-DRESSING 249 Soul Sister (1969) (a second-generation simulacrum, for it imitates Griffin’s Black Like Me), and, in a crowning blow (to which I will return), Melvin Van Peebles’s Watermelon Man (1970) – in which Godfrey Cambridge in whiteface plays a suburban racist who wakes up one morning to find himself black (too much time under the sunlamp). The almost ‘classical’ resurgence of this trope and of white Negroism generally in the late 1980s and early 1990s – the movie Soul Man (1986); black-folk-filled music videos by Sting, Madonna, Steve Winwood and many others; Lee Atwater’s blues Republicanism (R.I.P.); Vanilla Ice; True Identity (1991); Michelle Shocked’s Arkansas Traveler (1992) – is as troubling in its ubiquity as it is bewildering in its ideological variousness, but I think these texts too confirm some of the remarks with which I began. Mailer’s piece codifies the renegade ethic of male sexuality conceived out of and projected on to black men – and always ‘compromised’ by white men’s evident attraction to them – that informs the more than metaphorical racial romance underlying the construction of American whiteness: Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. (Mailer 1959: 314) Mailer and other white Negroes inherited a structure of feeling whose selfvalorizing marginality and distinction require a virtual impersonation of black manhood. It is revealing that while the specific preoccupations of Mailer’s existential errand are far from either Griffin’s Black Like Me or Elvis Presley, the shape of this white mythology looks pretty much the same in all cases. Its resonance is, for instance, succinctly articulated in white guitarist Scotty Moore’s remark to Presley at one of the mid-1950s recording sessions in which Elvis first found his voice: ‘Damn, nigger!’ As Nelson George has observed, Elvis was the historical referent Mailer missed in limning the ‘white Negro’. Bringing to the stage the sort of ‘symbolic fornication’ that for whites denotes ‘blackness’, his hair pomaded in imitation of blacks’ putative imitation of whites, Elvis illustrates the curious dependence of white working-class manhood on imitations of fantasized black male sexuality. It is true that in Elvis’s case we must be clear about the precise nature of the indebtedness; nobody who thinks with their ears can dismiss Presley as merely a case of racial rip-off. I agree with Greil Marcus that Elvis’s working-class origins placed him as close to Bobby Bland as to Perry Como – that in creating what was after all a distinctive rather than derivative sound he didn’t so much steal the blues as live up to them. Yet fantasies of ‘blackness’ were unquestionably crucial in shaping a persona capable of such a task. 250 ERIC LOTT One image in particular stands out for its greater sublimation of this racial narrative. Much has been made of Presley’s 1968 Christmas special, when after several years of silly movies and lifeless singing he roared back in black leather on network television. Marcus rightly identifies the central drama of the show as Elvis’s attempt to win back his audience, and he demonstrates the way in which Elvis pulled all the stops out to do so. We might, however, also pause over the curious form of the show, in which Broadway productions of Elvis numbers (Elvis had not yet entered his Vegas period) alternate with an ‘unplugged’ circle of Elvis and fellow musicians getting raw. In these latter scenes the black leather of his outfit defines the ambience; it refuses to slip from the viewer’s mind; Presley himself remarks upon how hot it is. Both Elvis’s look and the doubled structure of the show seem to me to call up the racial themes I have been developing. Particularly in a show dedicated to proving how fore-ordained and irrelevant is all the music since Elvis’s early triumphs (stage patter at one point has Elvis damning with faint praise ‘the Beatles, the Beards, and the whoever’), its ‘blues’ portions appear to mediate (against all odds and despite the artist’s intentions) what had been going on in the streets by the time it aired in late 1968. That is to say, the split show structure suggests the meaning of the suit and the ‘blacker’ performances: they are the ‘unconscious’ of the production numbers – white as the whale – that surround them. In the leather-suited takes, and in songs such as the following year’s ‘In the Ghetto’, Elvis reveals his reliance even for resurrection upon ‘blackness’. And his everincreasing stature as the icon of white American culture, a fulfillment of the dubious potential augured by the comeback special’s production numbers, only clinches my sense of the necessary centrality and suppression of ‘blackness’ in the making of American whiteness. Black Like Me turns this structure into social criticism. While Griffin has ‘blacked up’ to beat his forebears, his text is not a story of passing. In fact he has only spotty interest in what blacks think of him; his concern is with whites and how they will treat him in his adopted state. Whiteness is his standard: ‘“Do you suppose they’ll treat me as John Howard Griffin, regardless of my color – or will they treat me as some nameless Negro, even though I am still the same man?”’ Griffin asks some friends, among whom, incidentally, are three FBI agents (p. 10). It is the position of ‘nameless Negro’, not member of any community one might care to name, that interests Griffin. He passes less into a black world than into a ‘black’ part of himself, the remissible pleasures of abjection, triggered or made possible by white distaste and aversion. (Some of this is his own – he speaks of the idea of turning black as having ‘haunted’ him ‘for years’ before undertaking his effort [p. 7].) What he goes on to uncover are the contours of blackness for whites: contours he has externalized and thus indulges in his very disguise. This racial logic underlies Griffin’s whole enterprise. In revealing ways, Black Like Me is complicitous with the racial designs it sets out to expose. Griffin seems only dimly aware, for instance, that his disguise is an externalization, and yet there is evidence that his imagination of ‘blackness’ colors him before his blackface does. Early on, pondering the dangers of his experiment, Griffin is gratified to find his wife ready, while he is gone, ‘to lead, with our three children, the unsatisfactory family life of a household deprived of husband and father’ (p. 9). That this is an unconscious reference to the much-bruited female-headed black family that would RACIAL CROSS-DRESSING 251 soon be mythologized in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s ‘The Negro family: the case for national action’ (1965) is indicated by Griffin’s other mentions of the sadly depaternalized black family – as in: ‘[The black man’s] wife usually earns more than he. He is thwarted in his need to be father-of-the-household’ (p. 90; see also p. 42). Even when Griffin is white, that is, he is ‘black’ inside; it is this part of his ‘makeup’ that he explores in Black Like Me. One need not look far for the sources of this concern in Griffin’s text. Early in his days of blackness, Griffin, for reasons that appear as unclear to him as they do to us, walks down his hotel hallway in the early hours of the morning (he can’t sleep) to the men’s room. There he encounters two black men, one in the shower and the other naked on the floor awaiting his turn. Griffin writes that the waiting man ‘leaned back against the wall with his legs stretched out in front of him. Despite his state of undress, he had an air of dignity’ (p. 19). This rather anxious (and certainly clichéd) assurance to the reader has its counterpart in Griffin’s remark to the man: ‘“You must be freezing on that bare floor, with no clothes on”’ (p.20). As if things weren’t bare enough all around, the waiting man ‘flick[s] back the wet canvas shower curtain’ and implores the bather to let Griffin wash his hands in the shower. (A nearby sink has been discovered to have no drain pipe.) Griffin hastily interjects: ‘That’s all right, I can wait,’ I said. ‘Go ahead,’ he nodded. ‘Sure – come on,’ the man in the shower said. He turned the water down to a dribble. In the shower’s obscurity, all I could see was a black shadow and gleaming white teeth. I stepped over the other’s outstretched legs and washed quickly, using the soap the man in the shower thrust into my hands. When I had finished, I thanked him. (1961: 20) Clearly the driving force here is the simultaneously fascinating and threatening proximity of black male bodies, beckoning, stretching, thrusting. If the accident of the scene’s having occurred is not revealing, Griffin’s retrospective mapping of it surely is. Moments like this put Griffin in the position of racial voyeur, allow him to confront the ‘shadows’ of the white Imaginary. Paradoxically, as with his tutorials with the shine man, Sterling Williams, their result is to help Griffin identify with black men; ‘I fell into the same pattern of talking and thinking’, he says of Williams (p. 28). Whether or not as a defense against interracial homoerotic desire, Griffin in any case mentally assumes and impersonates – one might almost say he ‘masters’ – the position and shape of black maleness. Poised in his disguise between white subject and black object, Griffin enters ‘blackness’ according to the dictates of white desire. This indeed emerges from the many pages that are taken up with conversations that a hitchhiking Griffin has with white men who pummel him with questions about his sex life. ‘There’s plenty white women would like to have a good buck Negro’, says one (p. 86); another man, with an ‘educated flair’ (p. 86), opines that blacks ‘don’t get so damned many conflicts’: ‘I understand you make more of an art – or maybe hobby out of your sex than we do’ (p. 87). Griffin’s disgust at this predictable 252 ERIC LOTT turn of events disguises the homosocial nature of the dialogues. For in these conversations, white men’s interest in black male sexuality is mediated by but also identifies them with the white women black men are supposed to crave. In other words, the voyeuristic urge to expose the black man’s body in congress with a white women is quite cognate with fantasies of the forbidden coupling of black and white men – a coupling, after all, that Griffin has in effect been engaged in. These car scenes, of course, merely reiterate the shower scene, and implicitly place Griffin in the white male driver’s seat as well as in that of the black passenger. Griffin’s conscious distaste permits him both to distance himself from the debased discourse of which he is structurally the victim (the walking black penis that forms the object of white male desire) and to engage in that obsessive discourse through the pleasures of impersonation. Leaving to one side Black Like Me’s stated intent of showing for the first time what it was like to be black in the segregated South – as though plenty of blackauthored books had not investigated that predicament already – Griffin’s text can be read as a story of what happens when this sexualized racial unconscious of American whiteness is not, as in the foregoing instances, kept suppressed or partitioned. It is all very well to fetishize black male bodies, as Griffin does above and also when he remembers seeing black dockworkers in Mobile, ‘stripped to the waist, their bodies glistening with sweat under their loads’ (p. 99). But it is quite another thing, Griffin finds, to inhabit a black body. In a scene before the mirror that reveals his blackness to him for the first time, Griffin experiences total selfnegation: Turning off all the lights, I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I stood in the darkness before the mirror, my hand on the light switch. I forced myself to flick it on. In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger – a fierce, bald, very dark Negro – glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me. (1961: 15) The transformation, Griffin says, ‘was total and shocking’; he feels ‘imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger’; all traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence’ (p. 15). ‘White skin’, to play on Frantz Fanon, is here obliterated by ‘black mask’ – a possibility available only to someone who imagines skin color in the way Griffin apparently does, as completely constitutive of identity and entirely divisive of the races. He fears he has gone too far: ‘the black man is wholly a Negro, regardless of what he once may have been’ (p. 16). Any sense of double perspective that chances to emerge – for instance, Griffin remarks that he ‘became two men, the observing one and the one who panicked’ – melts away under the feeling of being ‘Negroid even into the depths of his entrails’ (p. 16). Fantasy here returns as frightening fact. Confronted with a ‘black’ self-image, Griffin simply empties out the self. In what is perhaps an allusion to Ralph Ellison, Griffin writes that ‘The Griffin that was had become invisible’ (p. 16). We ought, at this moment of crisis, to look at Watermelon Man, which, nine years after Black Like Me, alludes in turn to Griffin’s travails. Watermelon Man’s RACIAL CROSS-DRESSING 253 white protagonist, Jeff Gerber, awakes in the middle of the night, stumbles to the bathroom, looks in the mirror, and experiences precisely Griffin’s sense of selfnegation upon learning that he has become black. In the first part of the film Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge) is a jocular though devoted racist whose compulsive engagement with ‘blackness’ undergirds or buttresses his whiteness. He exercises while singing blackface tunes (‘Jimmy crack corn’) and stages imaginary boxing bouts with Muhammad Ali (‘you’re a credit to your race’, he says to an imaginary Ali). The film gives body to this fascination by way of Gerber’s ongoing sarcastic banter with three black men: a bus driver, an elevator operator and a lunch-counter waiter (played, in a stroke of casting genius, by an aged Mantan Moreland – the perennially frightened sidekick from the Charlie Chan movies). Disdainful of the black urban insurrections on television that comprise the film’s soundtrack, yet everywhere dropping into ‘black’ dialect and other ‘black’ affectations, Gerber reveals that white supremacy has as one of its constituent (if unconscious) elements an imaginary closeness to black culture. His sudden turn to black is thus both a logical and a scarifying one. Transfixed before the mirror, Gerber is at first frightened; he then hysterically acts out his subject/object split. He shadowboxes in the mirror the imaginary Ali he has now become; chants ‘how now brown cow’; robs his mirror image at gunpoint; drinks some milk; gets an idea and looks down his pants (but: ‘that’s an old wives tale’, he says); soaps himself; and ‘proves’ by his bridgework that the man in the mirror is really himself. The frenzied shifts in subject-position, from white to black to white again, point up what Van Peebles is ultimately after in the film – a state-of-the-race address on black self-hatred. Posed against Black Like Me, it offers, in other words, a perspective on the status of black masculinity apart from white male fantasy. No simple affirmations are forthcoming, though. Much of the impact of Watermelon Man stems from its implication that the identities of both white and black men owe a heavy debt to a sort of displaced minstrelsy. Lamenting his new color, Gerber cries that his kids won’t love him anymore, won’t understand: ‘wait till I get down on my knee and I sing “Mammy”!’ The inevitable Jolson joke is actually a rather complex figure in this context. Surely it suggests a Gerber in blackface, referring once again to the obsession with blackness. But it also puts a black Gerber in blackface, lays a burden of white-filtered black images on his shoulders. As in Fanon, Gerber undergoes the self-othering attendant upon blacks in the West and devalues and ridicules his race accordingly. Soon Gerber is tracking down all the skin lighteners, hair straighteners, facial molds, and milk baths he can find. If as a white man he had wanted to be black, and dedicated many hours under the sunlamp to attain it, as a black man he wants just the opposite. No wonder Negroes riot, he says – the facial creams don’t work. Ultimately a simple attention to the facts of everyday life forces him to sympathize with the black militants and then become one. In fantastical form, then, Gerber experiences the transmogrification into ‘blackness’ that the film perceives blacks generally to have experienced in the 1960s. Meanwhile Gerber’s blackness comes between him and his wife, Althea (Estelle Parsons); she leaves and takes the kids to her mother’s home in Indiana. The primal scene of the interracial marriage bed is crucial as well to the climax of Griffin’s Black Like Me – but in light of Watermelon Man it carries a very different meaning. For Melvin Van Peebles’s 254 ERIC LOTT Watermelon Man, the way out of black racial mimicry or minstrelsy is into a militant blackness; its consequence is a refusal of desire for the white woman’s body. (Jeff Gerber’s chief moment of black self-understanding, a foretaste of the problematic gender politics of Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song [1971], occurs as he stares into the mirror of a black bar; a topless black female dancer is visible above his head in the mirror; two white detectives conduct a vice raid in the corner.) Conversely, for John Howard Griffin, the way out of the threatening sexual return of black manhood (his own included) is into a despairing liberal whiteness; its consequence is a retreat to the politics of minstrelsy. At a pivotal moment, under a great deal of stress, beset by racist harassers and black self-haters, Griffin finds himself alone in a Hattiesburg rooming-house contemplating his family. He spots some old film negatives on the floor; they are ‘blank’. Griffin imagines a prior occupant having had them developed only to find them wasted. This negating of the negative is of course meant to be a kind of selfportrait of Griffin in extremis. The image does echo a remark Griffin earlier makes about ‘the world of the Negro’ appearing to him as ‘a blank’ (p. 12); the lexical similarity of ‘blank’ and ‘black’ and their unfortunate metaphorical association in Griffin’s mind (from negatives to Negroes) help Griffin to articulate his experience of self-cancellation. This glossing of the situation is, however, at odds with what happens next. Immediately after he spots the blank negatives, he tries to write to his wife: ‘No words would come. She had nothing to do with this life, nothing to do with the room in Hattiesburg or with its Negro inhabitant . . . My conditioning as a Negro, and the immense sexual implications with which the racists in our culture bombard us, cut me off, even in my most intimate self, from any connection with my wife’ (p. 68). The page before him remains ‘blank’ (p. 68). Griffin means this as selfconscious, anti-racist lament; the image he uses to describe himself under the reign of ‘blackness’ – blankness – accords with the uncitizenly debasement he has wanted to experience. Yet I would suggest that he is himself actively suppressing the definite shape of (his) black manhood. For, here and elsewhere, Griffin perceives the ‘immensity’ of black men to be anything but blank. Indeed the ‘blank’ page seems to loom for Griffin as a terrifying plenitude that must be sabotaged; its intimation of interracial sex, we note, ‘cut [him] off. Intoxicating if imagined, the fantasized black interlocutor is far too threatening as he rises up between white husband and wife. Griffin, haunted by a return of the racial repressed, in effect plumps for reifying or policing the color line. One suspects that the reason his family constantly feels so distant, why there is an absolute separation of self and other in the mirror, is because the transgressive racial pleasure Griffin everywhere imagines, and which he attempts to inhabit in his crossing of the line, must finally remain unbidden or refused. The rather flat film version of Black Like Me (1964) employs as one of its central cutting devices a highway’s broken center line in motion, no doubt emblematic of Griffin’s travels and transgressions. It appears that to cross the line is to encounter one’s imagined other head-on, throwing whiteness into jeopardy. Or into self-mimicry. One result of all this is that whiteness itself ultimately becomes an impersonation. The subterranean components of whiteness that so often threaten it require an edgy, constant patrolling. If Watermelon Man too easily leaves Jeff Gerber in a black, deminstrelized zone, his selfhood no longer routed through RACIAL CROSS-DRESSING 255 white fantasies of blacks, Black Like Me throws John Griffin back into a whiteness that has been decisively disrupted and must be shored up. At the end of Griffin’s book, the citizens of his home town try to run him out: ‘But I felt I must remain a while longer . . . I could not allow them to say they had “chased” me out’ (p. 155). This final imitation of white manhood, Griffin’s righteous ‘last stand’ – conceptually indistinguishable, as Richard Slotkin has shown, from notions of hegemonic whiteness and symmetrically opposed to the ending of Watermelon Man – is the goal towards which his text has tended (Slotkin 1985). ‘White like me’ precisely names the internal division, the white self impersonating itself, that is the consequence of white men’s fantasized proximity to black men. If Fanon’s work and Watermelon Man give anti-imperialist force to the racist adage that ‘good’ blacks are ‘white inside’, the texts I’ve examined suggest that whiteness harbors some secrets of its own. Chapter 19 Cornel West T H E N E W C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S OF DIFFERENCE EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION C O R N E L W E S T’ S E S SAY C A N B E R E A D as a manifesto for intellectuals who work on behalf of the “culture of difference.” It is aimed at helping us to avoid the reductive ways of thinking that endanger such work – that is, it helps us to avoid those “one-factor analyses” which “lose touch” with the complexities of thought and action in the world, and which, in their simplifications, provide props for racism, sexism, and monoculturalism. To escape such simplifications and to begin to provide an ethics for cultural workers, West turns to history. He presents a brief “genealogy” of the decline of Eurocentrism and white suprematism – “genealogy” being a word he borrows from Michel Foucault to refer to a history that supports current political practice. He argues that the task of “demystification” (or ideology-critique) can only be carried out by those whose confidence and sense of the contemporary cultural-political structures is supported by a knowledge of Eurocentrism’s history. Here cultural studies and history become indivisible. Since this essay first appeared, “black cultural studies” has developed further to produce a number of debates concerning questions of identity, sexuality and gender. It would be especially rewarding to read West’s essay in relation to socalled black British cultural studies, for instance as articulated (in importantly different ways) by Paul Gilroy and Kobena Mercer, or in relation to feminist work such as bell hooks’s in her essay in this volume. Further reading: Baker, Diawara and Lindeborg 1997; CCCS 1982; Gates 1986, 1987; Gilroy 1994; Gordon and Newfield 1996; Mercer 1994. T H E N EW C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S O F D I F F ER E N C E 257 In the last few years of the twentieth century, there is emerging a significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists. In fact, I would go so far as to claim that a new kind of cultural worker is in the making, associated with a new politics of difference. These new forms of intellectual consciousness advance new conceptions of the vocation of critic and artist, attempting to undermine the prevailing disciplinary divisions of labour in the academy, museum, mass media, and gallery networks while preserving modes of critique within the ubiquitous commodification of culture in the global village. Distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in light of the concrete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing. Needless to say, these gestures are not new in the history of criticism or art, yet what makes them novel – along with the cultural politics they produce – is how and what constitutes difference, the weight and gravity it is given in representation, and the way in which highlighting issues like exterminism, empire, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, nation, nature, and region at this historical moment acknowledges some discontinuity and disruption from previous forms of cultural critique. To put it bluntly, the new cultural politics of difference consists of creative responses to the precise circumstances of our present moment – especially those of marginalized First World agents who shun degraded self-representations, articulating instead their sense of the flow of history in light of the contemporary terrors, anxieties, and fears of highly commercialized North Atlantic capitalist cultures (with their escalating xenophobias against people of colour, Jews, women, gays, lesbians, and the elderly). The thawing, yet still rigid Second World ex-communist cultures (with increasing nationalist revolts against the legacy of hegemonic party henchmen), and the diverse cultures of the majority of inhabitants on the globe smothered by international communication cartels and repressive postcolonial elites (sometimes in the name of communism, as in Ethiopia), or starved by austere World Bank and IMF policies that subordinate them to the North (as in free-market capitalism in Chile), also locate vital areas of analysis in this new cultural terrain. The new cultural politics of difference are neither simply oppositional in contesting the mainstream (or malestream) for inclusion, nor transgressive in the avant-gardist sense of shocking conventional bourgeois audiences. Rather, they are distinct articulations of talented (and usually privileged) contributors to culture who desire to align themselves with demoralized, demobilized, depoliticized, and disorganized people in order to empower and enable social action and, if possible, to enlist collective insurgency for the expansion of freedom, democracy, and individuality. This perspective impels these cultural critics and artists to reveal, as an integral component of their production, the very operations of power within their immediate work contexts (i.e., academy, museum, gallery, mass media). This strategy, however, also puts them in an inescapable double bind – while linking their activities to the fundamental, structural overhaul of these institutions, they often remain financially dependent on them. (So much for ‘independent’ creation.) For these critics of culture, theirs is a gesture that is simultaneously progressive and coopted. Yet, without social movement or political pressure from outside these 258 CORNEL WEST institutions (extra-parliamentary and extra-curricular actions like the social movements of the recent past), transformation degenerates into mere accommodation or sheer stagnation, and the role of the ‘co-opted progressive’ – no matter how fervent one’s subversive rhetoric – is rendered more difficult. In this sense there can be no artistic breakthrough or social progress without some form of crisis in civilization – a crisis usually generated by organizations or collectivities that convince ordinary people to put their bodies and lives on the line. There is, of course, no guarantee that such pressure will yield the result one wants, but there is a guarantee that the status quo will remain or regress if no pressure is applied at all. The new cultural politics of difference faces three basic challenges – intellectual, existential, and political. The intellectual challenge – usually cast as a methodological debate in these days in which academicist forms of expression have a monopoly on intellectual life – is how to think about representational practices in terms of history, culture, and society. How does one understand, analyse, and enact such practices today? An adequate answer to this question can be attempted only after one comes to terms with the insights and blindness of earlier attempts to grapple with the question in light of the evolving crisis in different histories, cultures, and societies. I shall sketch a brief genealogy – a history that highlights the contingent origins and often ignoble outcomes – of exemplary critical responses to the question. The intellectual challenge An appropriate starting point is the ambiguous legacy of the Age of Europe. Between 1492 and 1945, European breakthroughs in oceanic transportation, agricultural production, state consolidation, bureaucratization, industrialization, urbanization, and imperial dominion shaped the makings of the modern world. Precious ideals like the dignity of persons (individuality) or the popular accountability of institutions (democracy) were unleashed around the world. Powerful critiques of illegitimate authorities of the Protestant Reformation against the Roman Catholic Church, the Enlightenment against state churches, liberal movements against absolutist states and feudal guild constraints, workers against managerial subordination, people of colour and Jews against white and gentile supremacist decrees, gays and lesbians against homophobic sanctions – were fanned and fuelled by these precious ideals refined within the crucible of the Age of Europe. Yet, the discrepancy between sterling rhetoric and lived reality, glowing principles and actual practices, loomed large. By the last European century – the last epoch in which European domination of most of the globe was uncontested and unchallenged in a substantive way – a new world seemed to be stirring. At the height of England’s reign as the major imperial European power, its exemplary cultural critic, Matthew Arnold, painfully observed in his ‘Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse’ that he felt some sense of ‘wandering between two worlds, one dead / the other powerless to be born’. Following his Burkean sensibilities of cautious reform and fear of anarchy, Arnold acknowledged that the old glue – religion – that had tenuously and often unsuccessfully held together the ailing European regimes could not do so in the mid-nineteenth century. T H E N EW C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S O F D I F F ER E N C E 259 Like Alexis de Tocqueville in France, Arnold saw that the democratic temper was the wave of the future. So he proposed a new conception of culture – a secular, humanistic one – that could play an integrative role in cementing and stabilizing an emerging bourgeois civil society and imperial state. His famous castigation of the immobilizing materialism of the declining aristocracy, the vulgar philistinism of the emerging middle classes, and the latent explosiveness of the working-class majority was motivated by a desire to create new forms of cultural legitimacy, authority, and order in a rapidly changing moment in nineteenth-century Europe. The second historical coordinate of my genealogy is the emergence of the United States as the world power (in the words of André Malraux, the first nation to do so without trying to do so). The United States was unprepared for world power status. However, with the recovery of Stalin’s Russia (after losing twenty million lives), the United States felt compelled to make its presence felt around the globe. Then, with the Marshall Plan to strengthen Europe, it seemed clear that there was no escape from world power obligations. The first significant blow was dealt when assimilated Jewish Americans entered the higher echelons of the cultural apparatuses (academy, museums, galleries, mass media). Lionel Trilling is an emblematic figure. This Jewish entrée into the antisemitic and patriarchal critical discourse of the exlusivistic institutions of American culture initiated the slow but sure undoing of the male WASP cultural hegemony and homogeneity. Trilling’s project was to appropriate Matthew Arnold’s for his own political and cultural purposes – thereby unravelling the old male WASP consensus while erecting a new post-Second-World-War liberal academic consensus around cold war, anti-communist renditions of the values of complexity, difficulty, variousness, and modulation. This suspicion of the academicization of knowledge is expressed in Trilling’s well-known essay, ‘On the teaching of modern literature’. Trilling laments the fact that university instruction often quiets and domesticates radical and subversive works of art, turning them into objects ‘of merely habitual regard’. This process of ‘the socialization of the anti-social, or the acculturation of the anti-cultural, or the legitimization of the subversive’ leads Trilling to ‘question whether in our culture the study of literature is any longer a suitable means for developing and refining the intelligence’. He asks this question not in the spirit of denigrating and devaluing the academy but rather in the spirit of highlighting the possible failure of an Arnoldian conception of culture to contain what he perceives as the philistine and anarchic alternatives becoming more and more available to students of the 1960s – namely, mass culture and radical politics. This threat is partly associated with the third historical co-ordinate of my genealogy – the decolonization of the Third World. It is crucial to recognize the importance of this world-historical process if one wants to grasp the significance of the end of the Age of Europe and the emergence of the United States as a world power. With the first defeat of a Western nation by a non-Western nation – in Japan’s victory over Russia (1905); revolutions in Persia (1905), Turkey (1908), Mexico (1911–12), China (1912); and much later the independence of India (1947), China (1948); and the triumph of Ghana (1957) – the actuality of a decolonized globe loomed large. Born of violent struggle, consciousness-raising, and the reconstruction of identities, decolonization simultaneously brings with it new 260 CORNEL WEST perspectives on that long festering underside of the Age of Europe (of which colonial domination represents the costs of ‘progress’, ‘order’, and ‘culture’), as well as requiring new readings of the economic boom in the United States (wherein the Black, Brown, Yellow, Red, White, female, gay, lesbian, and elderly working class live the same costs as cheap labour at home as well as in US-dominated Latin American and Pacific rim markets). The impetuous ferocity and moral outrage that motors the decolonization process is best captured by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth: Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is obviously a program of complete disorder . . . Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies. Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together – that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler – was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. (Fanon 1967a) Fanon’s strong words describe the feelings and thoughts between the occupying British army and the colonized Irish in Northern Ireland, the occupying Israeli army and the subjugated Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the South African army and the oppressed Black South Africans in the townships, the Japanese police and the Koreans living in Japan, the Russian army and subordinated Armenians, and others in southern and eastern Russia. His words also partly invoke the sense many Black Americans have towards police departments in urban centres. In other words, Fanon is articulating century-long, heartfelt, human responses to being degraded and despised, hated and hunted, oppressed and exploited, and marginalized and dehumanized at the hands of powerful, xenophobic European, American, Russian and Japanese imperial countries. During the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, these decolonized sensibilities fanned and fuelled the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, as well as the student anti-war, feminist, grey, brown, gay, and lesbian movements. In this period we witnessed the shattering of male WASP cultural homogeneity and the collapse of the short-lived liberal consensus. The inclusion of African Americans, Latino/a Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and American women in the culture of critical discourse yielded intense intellectual polemics and inescapable ideological polarization that focused principally on the exclusions, silences, and blindnesses of male WASP cultural homogeneity and its concomitant Arnoldian notions of the canon. In addition, these critiques promoted three crucial processes that affected intellectual life in the country. First is the appropriation of the theories of postwar Europe – especially the work of the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer), French/Italian Marxisms (Sartre, Althusser, Lefebvre, Gramsci), structuralisms (Lévi-Strauss, Todorov), and post-structuralisms (Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault). These diverse and disparate theories – all preoccupied with keeping alive T H E N EW C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S O F D I F F ER E N C E 261 radical projects after the end of the Age of Europe – tend to fuse versions of transgressive European modernisms with Marxist or post-Marxist left politics, and unanimously shun the term ‘postmodernism’. Second, there is the recovery and revisioning of American history in light of the struggles of White male workers, African Americans, Native Americans, Latino/a Americans, gays and lesbians. Third is the impact of forms of popular culture such as television, film, music videos, and even sports on highbrow, literate culture. The Black-based hip-hop culture of youth around the world is one grand example. After 1973, with the crisis in the international world economy, America’s slump in productivity, the challenge of OPEC nations to the North Atlantic monopoly of oil production, the increasing competition in hi-tech sectors of the economy from Japan and West Germany, and the growing fragility of the international debt structure, the United States entered a period of waning self-confidence (compounded by Watergate), and a nearly contracted economy. As the standards of living for the middle classes declined – owing to runaway inflation and escalating unemployment, underemployment, and crime – the quality of living fell for most everyone, and religious and secular neoconservatism emerged with power and potency. This fusion of fervent neonationalism, traditional cultural values, and ‘free market’ policies served as the groundwork for the Reagan–Bush era. The ambiguous legacies of the European Age, American pre-eminence, and decolonization continue to haunt our postmodern moment as we come to terms with both the European, American, Japanese, Soviet, and Third World crimes against and contributions to humanity. The plight of Africans in the New World can be instructive in this regard. By 1914, European maritime empires had dominion over more than half of the land and a third of the peoples in the world – almost 72 million square kilometres of territory and more than 560 million people under colonial rule. Needless to say, this European control included brutal enslavement, institutional terrorism, and cultural degradation of Black diaspora people. The death of roughly 75 million Africans during the centuries-long transatlantic slave trade is but one reminder, among others, of the assault on Black humanity. The Black diaspora condition of New World servitude – in which they were viewed as mere commodities with production value, who had no proper legal status, social standing, or public worth – can be characterized as, following Orlando Patterson, natal alienation. This state of perpetual and inheritable domination that diaspora Africans had at birth produced the modern Black diaspora problematic of invisibility and namelessness. White supremacist practices – enacted under the auspices of the prestigious cultural authorities of the churches, print media, and scientific academics – promoted Black inferiority and constituted the European background against which Black diaspora struggles for identity, dignity (self-confidence, self-respect, self-esteem), and material resources took place. The modern Black diaspora problematic of invisibility and namelessness can be understood as the condition of relative lack of Black power to present themselves to themselves and others as complex human beings, and thereby to contest the bombardment of negative, degrading stereotypes put forward by White supremacist ideologies. The initial Black response to being caught in this whirlwind of Europeanization was to resist the misrepresentation and caricature of the terms set 262 CORNEL WEST by uncontested non-Black norms and models, and fight for self-recognition. Every modern Black person, especially cultural disseminators, encounters this problematic of invisibility and namelessness. The initial Black diaspora response was a mode of resistance that was moralistic in content and communal in character. That is, the fight for representation and recognition highlighted moral judgements regarding Black ‘positive’ images over and against White supremacist stereotypes. These images ‘represented’ monolithic and homogeneous Black communities in a way that could displace past misrepresentations of these communities. Stuart Hall has discussed these responses as attempts to change the ‘relations of representation’. These courageous yet limited Black efforts to combat racist cultural practices uncritically accepted non-Black conventions and standards in two ways. First, they proceeded in an assimilationist manner that set out to show that Black people were really like White people – thereby eliding differences (in history and culture) between Whites and Blacks. Black specificity and particularity was thus banished in order to gain White acceptance and approval. Second, these Black responses rested upon a homogenizing impulse that assumed that all Black people were really alike – hence obliterating differences (class, gender, region, sexual orientation) between Black peoples. I submit that there are elements of truth in both claims, yet the conclusions are unwarranted owing to the basic fact that non-Black paradigms set the terms of the replies. The insight in the first claim is that Blacks and Whites are in some important sense alike – i.e., in their positive capacities for human sympathy, moral sacrifice, service to others, intelligence, and beauty; or negatively, in their capacity for cruelty. Yet, the common humanity they share is jettisoned when the claim is cast in an assimilationist manner that subordinates Black particularity to a false universalism, i.e., non-Black rubrics and prototypes. Similarly, the insight in the second claim is that all Blacks are in some significant sense ‘in the same boat’ – that is, subject to White supremacist abuse. Yet, this common condition is stretched too far when viewed in a homogenizing way that overlooks how racist treatment vastly differs owing to class, gender, sexual orientation, nation, region, hue, and age. The moralistic and communal aspects of the initial Black diaspora responses to social and psychic erasure were not simply cast into simplistic binary oppositions of positive/negative, good/bad images that privileged the first term in light of a White norm so that Black efforts remained inscribed within the very logic that dehumanized them. They were further complicated by the fact that these responses were also advanced principally by anxiety-ridden, middle-class Black intellectuals (predominantly male and heterosexual) grappling with their sense of doubleconsciousness – namely their own crisis of identity, agency, audience – caught between a quest for White approval and acceptance and an endeavour to overcome the internalized association of Blackness with inferiority. And I suggest that these complex anxieties of modern Black diaspora intellectuals partly motivate the two major arguments that ground the assimilationist moralism and homogeneous communalism just outlined. Kobena Mercer has talked about these two arguments as the reflectionist and the social engineering arguments. The reflectionist argument holds that the fight for Black representation and recognition – against White racist stereotypes – must T H E N EW C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S O F D I F F ER E N C E 263 reflect or mirror the real Black community, not simply the negative and depressing representations of it. The social engineering argument claims that since any form of representation is constructed – i.e., selective in light of broader aims – Black representation (especially given the difficulty of Blacks gaining access to positions of power to produce any Black imagery) should offer positive images, thereby countering racist stereotypes. The hidden assumption of both arguments is that we have unmediated access to what the ‘real Black community’ is and what ‘positive images’ are. In short, these arguments presuppose the very phenomena to be interrogated, and thereby foreclose the very issues that should serve as the subject matter to be investigated. Any notions of ‘the real Black community’ and ‘positive images’ are valueladen, socially loaded, and ideologically charged. To pursue this discussion is to call into question the possibility of such an uncontested consensus regarding them. Hall has rightly called this encounter ‘the end of innocence or the end of the innocent notions of the essential Black subject . . . the recognition that “Black” is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category’. This recognition – more and more pervasive among the postmodern Black diaspora intelligentsia – is facilitated in part by the slow but sure dissolution of the European Age’s maritime empires, and the unleashing of new political possibilities and cultural articulations among ex-colonized peoples across the globe. One crucial lesson of this decolonization process remains the manner in which most Third World authoritarian bureaucratic elites deploy essentialist rhetorics about ‘homogeneous national communities’ and ‘positive images’ in order to repress and regiment their diverse and heterogeneous populations. Yet in the diaspora, especially among First World countries, this critique has emerged not so much from the Black male component of the left, but rather from the Black women’s movement. The decisive push of postmodern Black intellectuals toward a new cultural politics of difference has been made by the powerful critiques and constructive explorations of Black diaspora women (e.g., Toni Morrison). The coffin used to bury the innocent notion of the essential Black subject was nailed shut with the termination of the Black male monopoly on the construction of the Black subject. In this regard, the Black diaspora womanist critique has had a greater impact than the critiques that highlight exclusively class, empire, age, sexual orientation, or nature. This decisive push toward the end of Black innocence – though prefigured in various degrees in the best moments of James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Anna Cooper, W. E. B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, the later Malcolm X, and others – forces Black diaspora cultural workers to encounter what Hall has called the ‘politics of representation’. The main aim now is not simply access to representation in order to produce positive images of homogeneous communities – though broader access remains a practical and political problem. Nor is the primary goal here that of contesting stereotypes – though contestation remains a significant though limited venture. Following the model of the Black diaspora traditions of music, athletics, and rhetoric, Black cultural workers must constitute and sustain discursive and institutional networks that deconstruct earlier modern Black strategies for identity formation, demystify power relations that incorporate class, patriarchal, and homophobic biases, and construct more multivalent and 264 CORNEL WEST multidimensional responses that articulate the complexity and diversity of Black practices in the modern and postmodern world. Furthermore, Black cultural workers must investigate and interrogate the other of Blackness/Whiteness. One cannot deconstruct the binary oppositional logic of images of Blackness without extending it to the contrary condition of Blackness/ Whiteness itself. However, a mere dismantling will not do – for the very notion of a deconstructive social theory is oxymoronic. Yet, social theory is what is needed to examine and explain the historically specific ways in which ‘Whiteness’ is a politically constructed parasitic on ‘Blackness’, and thereby to conceive of the profoundly hybrid character of what we mean by ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘nationality’. Needless to say, these enquiries must traverse those of ‘male/female’, ‘colonizer/colonized’, ‘heterosexual/homosexual’ et al., as well. Demystification is the most illuminating mode of theoretical enquiry for those who promote the new cultural politics of difference. Social structural analyses of empire, exterminism, class, race, gender, nature, age, sexual orientation, nation, and region are the springboards – though not landing grounds – for the most desirable forms of critical practice that take history (and herstory) seriously. Demystification tries to keep track of the complex dynamics of institutional and other related power structures in order to disclose options and alternatives for transformative praxis; it also attempts to grasp the way in which representational strategies are creative responses to novel circumstances and conditions. In this way, the central role of human agency (always enacted under circumstances not of one’s choosing) – be it in the critic, artist, or constituency, and audience – is accented. I call demystificatory criticism ‘prophetic criticism’ – the approach appropriate for the new cultural politics of difference – because while it begins with social structural analyses it also makes explicit its moral and political aims. It is partisan, partial, engaged, and crisis-centred, yet always keeps open a sceptical eye to avoid dogmatic traps, premature closures, formulaic formulations, or rigid conclusions. In addition to social structural analyses, moral and political judgements, and sheer critical consciousness, there indeed is evaluation. Yet the aim of this evaluation is neither to pit art-objects against one another like racehorses nor to create eternal canons that dull, discourage, or even dwarf contemporary achievements. We listen to Laurie Anderson, Kathleen Battle, Ludwig Beethoven, Charlie Parker, Luciano Pavarotti, Sarah Vaughan, or Stevie Wonder; read Anton Chekhov, Ralph Ellison, Gabriel García Márquez, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, William Shakespeare; or see the works of Ingmar Bergman, Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, Barbara Kruger, Spike Lee, Martin Puryear, Pablo Picasso, or Howardena Pindell – not in order to undergird bureaucratic assents or enliven cocktail party conversations, but rather to be summoned by the styles they deploy for their profound insights, pleasures, and challenges. Yet, all evaluation – including a delight in Eliot’s poetry despite his reactionary politics, or a love of Zora Neale Hurston’s novels despite her Republican party affiliations – is inseparable, though not identical or reducible to social structural analyses, moral and political judgements, and the workings of a curious critical consciousness. The deadly traps of demystification – and any form of prophetic criticism – are those of reductionism, be it of the sociological, psychological, or historical sort. By reductionism I mean either one-factor analyses (i.e., crude Marxisms, feminisms, T H E N EW C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S O F D I F F ER E N C E 265 racialisms, etc.) that yield a one-dimensional functionalism or a hypersubtle analytical perspective that loses touch with the specificity of an art work’s form and the context of its reception. Few cultural workers of whatever stripe can walk the tightrope between the Scylla of reductionism and the Charybdis of aestheticism – yet, demystificatory (or prophetic) critics must. Of course, since so many art practices these days also purport to be criticism, this also holds true for artists. The existential challenge The existential challenge to the new cultural politics of difference can be stated simply: how does one acquire the resources to survive and the cultural capital to thrive as a critic or artist? By cultural capital (Pierre Bourdieu’s term), I mean not only the high-quality skills required to engage in critical practices, but more important, the self-confidence, discipline, and perseverance necessary for success without an undue reliance on the mainstream for approval and acceptance. This challenge holds for all prophetic critics, yet it is especially difficult for those of colour. The widespread modern European denial of the intelligence, ability, beauty, and character of people of colour puts a tremendous burden on critics and artists of colour to ‘prove’ themselves in light of norms and models set by White elites whose own heritage devalued and dehumanized them. In short, in the court of criticism and art – or any matters regarding the life of the mind – people of colour are guilty (i.e., not expected to meet standards of intellectual achievement) until ‘proven’ innocent (i.e., acceptable to ‘us’). This is more a structural dilemma than a matter of personal attitudes. The profoundly racist and sexist heritage of the European Age has bequeathed to us a set of deeply ingrained perceptions about people of colour including, of course, the self-perceptions that people of colour bring. It is not surprising that most intellectuals of colour in the past exerted much of their energies and efforts to gain acceptance and approval by ‘White normative gazes’. The new cultural politics of difference advises critics and artists of colour to put aside this mode of mental bondage, thereby freeing themselves both to interrogate the ways in which they are bound by certain conventions and to learn from and build on these very norms and models. One hallmark of wisdom in the context of any struggle is to avoid knee-jerk rejection and uncritical acceptance. There are four basic options for people of colour interested in representation – if they are to survive and thrive as serious practitioners of their craft. First, there is the Booker T. Temptation, namely the individual preoccupation with the mainstream and its legitimizing power. Most critics and artists of colour try to bite this bait. It is nearly unavoidable, yet few succeed in a substantive manner. It is no accident that the most creative and profound among them – especially those with staying power beyond mere flashes in the pan to satisfy faddish tokenism – are usually marginal to the mainstream. Even the pervasive professionalization of cultural practitioners of colour in the past few decades has not produced towering figures who reside within the established White patronage system that bestows the rewards and prestige for chosen contributions to American society. 266 CORNEL WEST It certainly helps to have some trustworthy allies within this system, yet most of those who enter and remain tend to lose much of their creativity, diffuse their prophetic energy, and dilute their critiques. Still, it is unrealistic for creative people of colour to think they can sidestep the White patronage system. And though there are indeed some White allies conscious of the tremendous need to rethink identity politics, it is naive to think that being comfortably nested within this very same system – even if one can be a patron to others – does not affect one’s work, one’s outlook, and, most important, one’s soul. The second option is the Talented Tenth Seduction, namely, a move toward arrogant group insularity. This alternative has a limited function – to preserve one’s sanity and sense of self as one copes with the mainstream. Yet, it is, at best, a transitional and transient activity. If it becomes a permanent option it is selfdefeating in that it usually reinforces the very inferiority complexes promoted by the subtly racist mainstream. Hence it tends to revel in a parochialism and encourage a narrow racialist and chauvinistic outlook. The third strategy is the Go-It-Alone option. This is an extreme rejectionist perspective that shuns the mainstream and group insularity. Almost every critic and artist of colour contemplates or enacts this option at some time in his or her pilgrimage. It is healthy in that it reflects the presence of independent, critical, and sceptical sensibilities toward perceived constraints on one’s creativity. Yet, it is, in the end, difficult if not impossible to sustain if one is to grow, develop and mature intellectually, as some semblance of dialogue with a community is necessary for almost any creative practice. The most desirable option for people of colour who promote the new cultural politics of difference is to be a Critical Organic Catalyst. By this I mean a person who stays attuned to the best of what the mainstream has to offer – its paradigms, viewpoints, and methods – yet maintains a grounding in affirming and enabling subcultures of criticism. Prophetic critics and artists of colour should be exemplars of what it means to be intellectual freedom fighters, that is, cultural workers who simultaneously position themselves within (or alongside) the mainstream while clearly aligned with groups who vow to keep alive potent traditions of critique and resistance. In this regard, one can take clues from the great musicians or preachers of colour who are open to the best of what other traditions offer, yet are rooted in nourishing subcultures that build on the grand achievements of a vital heritage. Openness to others – including the mainstream – does not entail wholesale cooperation, and group autonomy is not group insularity. Louis Armstrong, Ella Baker, W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr, Jose Carlos Mariatequi, Wynton Marsalis, M. M. Thomas, and Ronald Takaki have understood this well. The new cultural politics of difference can thrive only if there are communities, groups, organizations, institutions, subcultures, and networks of people of colour who cultivate critical sensibilities and personal accountability – without inhibiting individual expressions, curiosities, and idiosyncrasies. This is especially needed given the escalating racial hostility, violence, and polarization in the United States. Yet, this critical coming-together must not be a narrow closing of ranks. Rather, it is a strengthening and nurturing endeavour that can forge more solid alliances and coalitions. In this way, prophetic criticism – with its stress on historical specificity and artistic complexity – directly addresses the intellectual challenge. The cultural T H E N EW C U LT U R A L P O L I T I C S O F D I F F ER E N C E 267 capital of people of colour – with its emphasis on self-confidence, discipline, perseverance, and subcultures of criticism – also tries to meet the existential requirement. Both are mutually reinforcing. Both are motivated by a deep commitment to individuality and democracy – the moral and political ideals that guide the creative response to the political challenge. The political challenge Adequate rejoinders to intellectual and existential challenges equip the practitioners of the new cultural politics of difference to meet the political ones. This challenge principally consists of forging solid and reliable alliances of people of colour and White progressives guided by a moral and political vision of greater democracy and individual freedom in communities, states, and transnational enterprises – i.e., corporations, and information and communications conglomerates. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow coalition is a gallant, yet flawed effort in this regard – gallant due to the tremendous energy, vision, and courage of its leader and followers; flawed because of its failure to take seriously critical and democratic sensibilities within its own operations. The time has come for critics and artists of the new cultural politics of difference to cast their nets widely, flex their muscles broadly, and thereby refuse to limit their visions, analyses, and praxis to their particular terrains. The aim is to dare to recast, redefine, and revise the very notions of ‘modernity’, ‘mainstream’, ‘margins’, ‘difference’, ‘otherness’. We have now reached a new stage in the perennial struggle for freedom and dignity. And while much of the First World intelligentsia adopts retrospective and conservative outlooks that defend the crisisridden present, we promote a prospective and prophetic vision with a sense of possibility and potential, especially for those who bear the social costs of the present. We look to the past for strength, not solace; we look at the present and see people perishing, not profits mounting; we look toward the future and vow to make it different and better. PA R T F I V E Science and cyberculture Chapter 20 Donna Haraway A CYBORG MANIFESTO EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION I S TH I S R E A L LY A manifesto? For whom? Whatever the answer, it’s an amazing “blasphemous” call for a profound change of consciousness in everyone living and working in high-tech culture. Donna Haraway’s manifesto sits dead-center within cultural studies in its radical, pleasure-seeking affirmation of an often maligned and feared feature of the contemporary world – technologization. And it also mediates in particular on women’s relation to technoscience. The essay is usefully read as an exercise in feminist post-structuralism, prefiguring both queer theory and later conceptualizations of the post-human, as well as shadowing the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari’s experimental prescriptions for contemporary thought and living. In particular, Haraway targets: first, nature fetishism which finds value in what is natural, where nature is interpreted as the opposite of artifice and technology; second, organicism which analyses society and culture in terms of organic unities, and where it does not find them, bitterly complains; third, sexualism for which sex is best as reproduction, and social bonds which are grounded in sex (“blood” ties, filiative associations) are primary; and, fourth, identity thinking for which selves are discrete wholes with specific identities. It’s a cliché: but once you have read and taken in this essay, you won’t think the same way about things again. Further reading: Bukatman 1993; Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 1988; Fox-Keller 1984; Gray 1997; Penley 1997; Penley and Ross 1991; Robertson et al. 1996; Treichler, Cartwright and Penley 1998. 272 DONNA HARAWAY This essay is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women’s movements have constructed ‘women’s experience’, as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs – creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg ‘sex’ restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C 3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984’s US defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michel Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics – the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other – the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in A CYBORG MANIFESTO 273 the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense – a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the ‘Western’, humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars. The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technologi cal polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection – they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. 274 DONNA HARAWAY I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this essay, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary breakdowns that make the following politicalfictional (political-scientific) analysis possible. By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks – language, tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace reetched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is much room for radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary. The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange. The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, selfdesigning, autonomous. They could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. Technological determination is only one ideological space opened up by the reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world. ‘Textualization’ of everything in poststructuralist, postmodernist theory has been damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived relations of domination that ground the ‘play’ of arbitrary reading. It is certainly true that postmodernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (for example, the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature – a source of insight and promise of innocence – is undermined, probably fatally. The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the A CYBORG MANIFESTO 275 ontology grounding ‘Western’ epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological determinism destroying ‘man’ by the ‘machine’ or ‘meaningful political action’ by the ‘text’. Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances as a marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the television sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the television wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile – a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence. The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness – or its simulation. They are floating signifiers moving in pickup trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch-weavings of the displaced and so unnatural Greenham women, who read the cyborg webs of power so very well, than by the militant labour of older masculinist politics, whose natural constituency needs defence jobs. Ultimately the ‘hardest’ science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure spirit, C 3I, cryptography, and the preservation of potent secrets. The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. The diseases evoked by these clean machines are ‘no more’ than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, ‘no more’ than the experience of stress. The nimble fingers of ‘Oriental’ women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with doll’s houses, women’s enforced attention to the small take on quite new dimensions in this world. There might be a cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions. So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work. One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formulations, and physical 276 DONNA HARAWAY artefacts associated with ‘high technology’ and scientific culture. From OneDimensional Man (Marcuse 1964) to The Death of Nature (Merchant 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance. Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies. From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinst orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity group in my town. (Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity.) Fractured identities It has become difficult to name one’s feminism by a single adjective – or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hardwon recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in ‘essential’ unity. There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as ‘us’ in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called ‘us’, and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women’s dominations of each other. For me – and for many who share a similar historical location in white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North A CYBORG MANIFESTO 277 American, mid-adult bodies – the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition – affinity, not identity. Chela Sandoval, from a consideration of specific historical moments in the formation of the new political voice called women of color, has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called ‘oppositional consciousness’, born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. ‘Women of color’, a name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorporate, as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic breakdown of all the signs of Man in ‘Western’ traditions, constructs a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity. This postmodernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said about other possible postmodernisms. Sandoval’s oppositional consciousness is about contradictory locations and heterochronic calendars, not about relativisms and pluralisms. Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of color. She notes that the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation. For example, a Chicana or US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities, left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial categories called ‘women and blacks’, who claimed to make the important revolutions. The category ‘woman’ negated all non-white women; ‘black’ negated all non-black people, as well as all black women. But there was also no ‘she’, no singularity, but a sea of differences among US women who have affirmed their historical identity as US women of color. This identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship. Unlike the ‘woman’ of some streams of the white women’s movement in the United States, there is no naturalization of the matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely available through the power of oppositional consciousness. Sandoval’s argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feminists out of the worldwide development of anti-colonialist discourse; that is to say, discourse dissolving the ‘West’ and its highest product – the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman; man, that is, the author of a cosmos called history. As orientalism is deconstructed politically and semiotically, the identities of the occident destabilize, including those of feminists. Sandoval argues that ‘women of color’ have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate the imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects of previous Marxisms and feminisms which had not faced the consequences of the disorderly polyphony emerging from decolonization. Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and the political/poetic mechanics of identification built into reading ‘the poem’, that generative core of cultural feminism. King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different ‘moments’ or ‘conversations’ in feminist practice to taxonomize the women’s movement to make one’s own political tendencies appear 278 DONNA HARAWAY to be the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting over time, especially those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialist feminism. Literally, all other feminisms are either incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit ontology and epistemology. Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women’s experience. And of course, ‘women’s culture’, like women of colour, is consciously created by mechanisms inducing affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certain forms of academic practice have been pre-eminent. The politics of race and culture in the US women’s movements are intimately interwoven. The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification. The theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-domination or unity-through-incorporation ironically not only undermines the justifications for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scientism, and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint. I think that radical and socialist/Marxist feminisms have also undermined their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all ‘epistemologies’ as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to build effective affinities. It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary standpoints, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of identification. The acid tools of postmodernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival. We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body. But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naïveté of innocence. But what would another political myth for socialist feminism look like? What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective – and, ironically, socialist feminist? I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of ‘race’, ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, and ‘class’. I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible. None of ‘us’ have any longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape of reality to any of ‘them’. Or at least ‘we’ cannot claim innocence from practising such dominations. White women, including socialist feminists, discovered (that is, were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the non-innocence of the category ‘woman’. That consciousness changes the geography of all previous categories; it denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein. Cyborg feminists have to argue that ‘we’ do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give latetwentieth-century people pause as well. In the fraying of identities and in the reflexive strategies for constructing them, the possibility opens up for weaving A CYBORG MANIFESTO 279 something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history. Both Marxist/socialist feminisms and radical feminisms have simultaneously naturalized and denatured the category ‘woman’ and consciousness of the social lives of ‘women’. Perhaps a schematic caricature can highlight both kinds of moves. Marxian socialism is rooted in an analysis of wage labour which reveals class structure. The consequence of the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the worker is dissociated from his (sic) product. Abstraction and illusion rule in knowledge, domination rules in practice. Labour is the pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world. Labour is the humanizing activity that makes man; labour is an ontological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge of subjugation and alienation. In faithful filiation, socialist feminism advanced by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. The main achievement of both Marxist feminists and socialist feminists was to expand the category of labour to accommodate what (some) women did, even when the wage relation was subordinated to a more comprehensive view of labour under capitalist patriarchy. In particular, women’s labour in the household and women’s activity as mothers generally (that is, reproduction in the socialist feminist sense), entered theory on the authority of analogy to the Marxian concept of labour. The unity of women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological structure of ‘labour’. Marxist/socialist feminism does not ‘naturalize’ unity; it is a possible achievement based on a possible standpoint rooted in social relations. The essentializing move is in the ontological structure of labour or of its analogue, women’s activity. The inheritance of Marxian humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me. The contribution from these formulations has been the emphasis on the daily responsibility of real women to build unities, rather than to naturalize them. Catherine MacKinnon’s version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action. It is factually and politically wrong to assimilate all of the diverse ‘moments’ or ‘conversations’ in recent women’s politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon’s version. But the ideological logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontology – including their negations – erase or police difference. Only one of the effects of MacKinnon’s theory is the rewriting of the history of the polymorphous field called radical feminism. The major effect is the production of a theory of experience, of women’s identity, that is a kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary standpoints. That is, the totalization built into this tale of radical feminism achieves its end – the unity of women – by enforcing the experience of and testimony to radical non-being. As for the Marxist/socialist feminist, consciousness is an achievement, not a natural fact. And MacKinnon’s theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into humanist revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism. MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a different analytical strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure of class but at the structure of sex or gender and its generative relationship, men’s constitution and appropriation of women sexually. Ironically, MacKinnon’s ‘ontology’ constructs a 280 DONNA HARAWAY non-subject, a non-being. Another’s desire, not the self’s labour, is the origin of ‘woman’. She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that enforces what can count as ‘women’s’ experience – anything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as ‘women’ can be concerned. Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not. Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism still has the epistemological status of labour; that is to say, the point from which an analysis able to contribute to changing the world must flow. But sexual objectification, not alienation, is the consequence of the structure of sex or gender. In the realm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and abstraction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted by another’s desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the labourer from his product. MacKinnon’s radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme; it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any other women’s political speech and action. It is a totalization producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing – feminists’ consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of men’s desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground women’s unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anticolonial discourse and practice, MacKinnon’s intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the ‘essential’ non-existence of women is not reassuring. In my taxonomy, which like any other taxonomy is a re-inscription of history, radical feminism can accommodate all the activities of women named by socialist feminists as forms of labour only if the activity can somehow be sexualized. Reproduction had different tones of meanings for the two tendencies, one rooted in labour, one in sex, both calling the consequences of domination and ignorance of social and personal reality ‘false consciousness’. Beyond either the difficulties or the contributions in the argument of any one author, neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view have tended to embrace the status of a partial explanation; both were regularly constituted as totalities. Western explanation has demanded as much; how else could the ‘Western’ author incorporate its others? Each tried to annex other forms of domination by expanding its basic categories through analogy, simple listing, or addition. Embarrassed silence about race among white radical and socialist feminists was one major, devastating political consequence. History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies. There was no structural room for race (or for much else) in theory claiming to reveal the construction of the category woman and social group women as a unified or totalizable whole. The structure of my caricature looks like this: socialist feminism – structure of class // wage labour // alienation labour, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race A CYBORG MANIFESTO 281 radical feminism – structure of gender // sexual appropriation // objectification sex, by analogy labour, by extension reproduction, by addition race In another context, the French theorist, Julia Kristeva, claimed that women appeared as a historical group after the Second World War, along with groups like youth. Her dates are doubtful; but we are now accustomed to remembering that as objects of knowledge and as historical actors, ‘race’ did not always exist, ‘class’ has a historical genesis, and ‘homosexuals’ are quite junior. It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man – and so the essence of woman – breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant and complex. ‘Advanced capitalism’ is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment. In the ‘Western’ sense, the end of man is at stake. It is no accident that woman disintegrates into women in our time. Perhaps socialist feminists were not substantially guilty of producing essentialist theory that suppressed women’s particularity and contradictory interests. I think we have been, at least through unreflective participation in the logics, languages, and practices of white humanism and through searching for a single ground of domination to secure our revolutionary voice. Now we have less excuse. But in the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. ‘Epistemology’ is about knowing the difference. The informatics of domination In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I would like to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture indebted to socialist and feminist principles of design. The frame for my sketch is set by the extent and importance of rearrangements in worldwide social relations tied to science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system – from all work to all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the following chart of transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination: Representation Bourgeois novel, realism Organism Depth, integrity Heat Biology as clinical practice Physiology Simulation Science fiction, postmodernism Biotic component Surface, boundary Noise Biology as inscription Communications engineering 282 DONNA HARAWAY Small group Perfection Eugenics Decadence, Magic Mountain Hygiene Microbiology, tuberculosis Organic division of labour Functional specialization Reproduction Organic sex role specialization Biological determinism Community ecology Racial chain of being Scientific management in home/factory Family/market/factory Family wage Public/private Nature/culture Co-operation Freud Sex Labour Mind Second World War White capitalist patriarchy Subsystem Optimization Population Control Obsolescence, Future Shock Stress Management Immunology, AIDS Ergonomics/cybernetics of labour Modular construction Replication Optimal genetic strategies Evolutionary inertia, constraints Ecosystem Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism Global factory/electronic cottage Women in the Integrated Circuit Comparable worth Cyborg citizenship Fields of difference Communications enhancement Lacan Genetic engineering Robotics Artificial Intelligence Star Wars Informatics of domination This list suggests several interesting things. First, the objects on the right-hand side cannot be coded as ‘natural’, a realization that subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well. We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess’. Or both are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics. In relation to objects like biotic components, one must think not in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints. Sexual reproduction is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment. Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no longer reasonably call on notions of sex and sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms and families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically corporate executives reading Playboy and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly unmasking the irrationalism. Likewise for race, ideologies about human diversity have to be formulated in terms of frequencies of parameters, like blood groups or intelligence scores. It is ‘irrational’ to invoke concepts like primitive and civilized. For liberals and radicals, the search for integrated social systems gives way to a new practice called ‘experimental ethnography’ in which an organic object dissipates in attention to the A CYBORG MANIFESTO 283 play of writing. At the level of ideology, we see translations of racism and colonialism into languages of development and under-development, rates and constraints of modernization. Any objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no ‘natural’ architectures constrain system design. The financial districts in all the world’s cities, as well as the exportprocessing and free-trade zones, proclaim this elementary fact of ‘late capitalism’. The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies. One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries – and not on the integrity of natural objects. ‘Integrity’ or ‘sincerity’ of the Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems. For example, control strategies applied to women’s capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decisionmakers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analysed so well. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress – communications breakdown. The cyborg is not subject to Foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations. This kind of analysis of scientific and cultural objects of knowledge which have appeared historically since the Second World War prepares us to notice some important inadequacies in feminist analysis which has proceeded as if the organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in ‘the West’ since Aristotle still ruled. They have been cannibalized. The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. The actual situation of women is their integration or exploitation into a world system of production/reproduction and communication called the informatics of domination. The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself – all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others – consequences that themselves are very different for different people and which make potent oppositional international movements difficult to imagine and essential for survival. One important route for reconstructing socialistfeminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code. Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for 284 DONNA HARAWAY women worldwide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other. Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move – the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange. In communications sciences, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic (feedback-controlled) systems theories applied to telephone technology, computer design, weapons deployment, or data base construction and maintenance. In each case, solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key operation is determining the rates, directions, and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information. The world is subdivided by boundaries differentially permeable to information. Information is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, basis of unity) which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power (called effective communication). The biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication. Any system breakdown is a function of stress. The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C 3I, command-controlcommunication-intelligence, the military’s symbol for its operations theory. In modern biologies, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolutionary theory, and immunobiology. The organism has been translated into problems of genetic coding and read-out. Biotechnology, a writing technology, informs research broadly. In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components, i.e., special kinds of information-processing devices. The analogous moves in ecology could be examined by probing the history and utility of the concept of the ecosystem. Immunobiology and associated medical practices are rich exemplars of the privilege of coding and recognition systems as objects of knowledge, as constructions of bodily reality for us. Biology here is a kind of cryptography. Research is necessarily a kind of intelligence activity. Ironies abound. A stressed system goes awry; its communication processes break down; it fails to recognize the difference between self and other. Human babies with baboon hearts evoke national ethical perplexity – for animal rights activists at least as much as for the guardians of human purity. In the US gay men and intravenous drug users are the ‘privileged’ victims of an awful immune system disease that marks (inscribes on the body) confusion of boundaries and moral pollution. But these excursions into communications sciences and biology have been at a rarefied level; there is a mundane, largely economic reality to support my claim that these sciences and technologies indicate fundamental transformations in the structure of the world for us. Communications technologies depend on electronics. A CYBORG MANIFESTO 285 Modern states, multinational corporations, military power, welfare state apparatuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabrication of our imaginations, labour-control systems, medical constructions of our bodies, commercial pornography, the international division of labour, and religious evangelism depend intimately upon electronics. Microelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals. Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures. The new biotechnologies concern more than human reproduction. Biology as a powerful engineering science for redesigning materials and processes has revolutionary implications for industry, perhaps most obvious today in areas of fermentation, agriculture, and energy. Communications sciences and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms. The ‘multinational’ material organization of the production and reproduction of daily life and the symbolic organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated. The boundary-maintaining images of base and superstructure, public and private, or material and ideal never seemed more feeble. I have used Rachael Grossman’s image of women in the integrated circuit to name the situation of women in a world so intimately restructured through the social relations of science and technology. I used the odd circumlocution, ‘the social relations of science and technology’, to indicate that we are not dealing with a technological determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured relations among people. But the phrase should also indicate that science and technology provide fresh sources of power, that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action. Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make socialist feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics. The ‘homework economy’ outside ‘the home’ The ‘New Industrial Revolution’ is producing a new worldwide working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities. The extreme mobility of capital and the emerging international division of labour are intertwined with the emergence of new collectivities, and the weakening of familiar groupings. These developments are neither gender- nor race-neutral. White men in advanced industrial societies have become newly vulnerable to permanent job loss, and women are not disappearing from the job rolls at the same rates as men. It is not simply that women in Third World countries are the preferred labour force for the science-based multinationals in the export-processing sectors, particularly in electronics. The picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption, and production. In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women’s lives have been structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating 286 DONNA HARAWAY childcare, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age. The ethnic and racial diversity of women in Silicon Valley structures a microcosm of conflicting differences in culture, family, religion, education, and language. Richard Gordon has called this new situation the ‘homework economy’. Although he includes the phenomenon of literal homework emerging in connection with electronics assembly, Gordon intends ‘homework economy’ to name a restructuring of work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to female jobs, jobs literally done only by women. Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, when performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. Deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers. However, the homework economy does not refer only to largescale deskilling, nor does it deny that new areas of high skill are emerging, even for women and men previously excluded from skilled employment. Rather, the concept indicates that factory, home and market are integrated on a new scale and that the places of women are crucial – and need to be analysed for differences among women and for meanings for relations between men and women in various situations. The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure is made possible by (not caused by) the new technologies. The success of the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men’s unionized jobs is tied to the power of the new communications technologies to integrate and control labour despite extensive dispersion and decentralizaton. The consequences of the new technologies are felt by women both in the loss of the family (male) wage (if they ever had access to this white privilege) and in the character of their own jobs, which are becoming capitalintensive; for example, office work and nursing. The new economic and technological arrangements are also related to the collapsing welfare state and the ensuing intensification of demands on women to sustain daily life for themselves as well as for men, children, and old people. The feminization of poverty – generated by dismantling the welfare state, by the homework economy where stable jobs become the exception, and sustained by the expectation that women’s wages will not be matched by a male income for the support of children – has become an urgent focus. The causes of various womenheaded households are a function of race, class, or sexuality; but their increasing generality is a ground for coalitions of women on many issues. That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a function of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively warbased economy is new. The particular pressure, for example, on US black women, who have achieved an escape from (barely) paid domestic service and who now hold clerical and similar jobs in large numbers, has large implications for continued enforced black poverty with employment. Teenage women in industrializing areas of the Third World increasingly find themselves the sole or major source of a cash wage for their families, while access to land is ever more problematic. These developments must have major consequences in the psychodynamics and politics of gender and race. A CYBORG MANIFESTO 287 Within the framework of three major stages of capitalism (commercial or early industrial, monopoly, multinational) – tied to nationalism, imperialism, and multinationalism, and related to Jameson’s three dominant aesthetic periods of realism, modernism, and postmodernism – I would argue that specific forms of families dialectically relate to forms of capital and to its political and cultural concomitants. Although lived problematically and unequally, ideal forms of these families might be schematized as, first, the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by the dichotomy between public and private and accompanied by the white bourgeois ideology of separate spheres and nineteenth-century Anglo-American bourgeois feminism; second, the modern family mediated (or enforced) by the welfare state and institutions like the family wage, with a flowering of afeminist heterosexual ideologies, including their radical versions represented in Greenwich Village around the First World War; and, third, the ‘family’ of the homework economy with its oxymoronic structure of women-headed households and its explosion of feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion of gender itself. This is the context in which the projections for worldwide structural unemployment stemming from the new technologies are part of the picture of the homework economy. As robotics and related technologies put men out of work in ‘developed’ countries and exacerbate failure to generate male jobs in Third World ‘development’, and as the automated office becomes the rule even in labour-surplus countries, the feminization of work intensifies. Black women in the United States have long known what it looks like to face the structural underemployment (‘feminization’) of black men, as well as their own highly vulnerable position in the wage economy. It is no longer a secret that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community life are interwoven with this economic structure in myriad ways which have also differentiated the situations of white and black women. Many more women and men will contend with similar situations, which will make cross-gender and cross-race alliances on issues of basic life support (with or without jobs) necessary, not just nice. The new technologies also have a profound effect on hunger and on food production for subsistence worldwide. Rae Lessor Blumberg estimates that women produce about 50 per cent of the world’s subsistence food. Women are excluded generally from benefiting from the increased high-tech commodification of food and energy crops, their days are made more arduous because their responsibilities to provide food do not diminish, and their reproductive situations are made more complex. Green Revolution technologies interact with other high-tech industrial production to alter gender divisions of labour and differential gender migration patterns. The new technologies seem deeply involved in the forms of ‘privatization’ that Ros Petchesky has analysed, in which militarization, right-wing family ideologies and policies, and intensified definitions of corporate (and state) property as private synergistically interact. The new communications technologies are fundamental to the eradication of ‘public life’ for everyone. This facilitates the mushrooming of a permanent high-tech military establishment at the cultural and economic expense of most people, but especially of women. Technologies like video games and highly miniaturized televisions seem crucial to production of modern forms of ‘private life’. The culture of video games is heavily orientated to individual competition and extraterrestrial warfare. High-tech, gendered imaginations are produced here, 288 DONNA HARAWAY imaginations that can contemplate destruction of the planet and a sci-fi escape from its consequences. More than our imaginations is militarized; and the other realities of electronic and nuclear warfare are inescapable. These are the technologies that promise ultimate mobility and perfect exchange – and incidentally enable tourism, that perfect practice of mobility and exchange, to emerge as one of the world’s largest single industries. The new technologies affect the social relations of both sexuality and of reproduction, and not always in the same ways. The close ties of sexuality and instrumentality, of views of the body as a kind of private satisfaction – and utilitymaximizing machine, are described nicely in sociobiological origin stories that stress a genetic calculus and explain the inevitable dialectic of domination of male and female gender roles. These sociobiological stories depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component or cybernetic communications system. Among the many transformations of reproductive situations is the medical one, where women’s bodies have boundaries newly permeable to both ‘visualization’ and ‘intervention’. Of course, who controls the interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneutics is a major feminist issue. The speculum served as an icon of women’s claiming their bodies in the 1970s; that handcraft tool is inadequate to express our needed body politics in the negotiation of reality in the practices of cyborg reproduction. Self-help is not enough. The technologies of visualization recall the important cultural practice of hunting with the camera and the deeply predatory nature of a photographic consciousness. Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of personal and social possibility. Another critical aspect of the social relations of the new technologies is the reformulation of expectations, culture, work, and reproduction for the large scientific and technical workforce. A major social and political danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of colour, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance. An adequate socialist feminist politics should address women in the privileged occupational categories, and particularly in the production of science and technology that constructs scientific-technical discourses, processes, and objects. This issue is only one aspect of enquiry into the possibility of a feminist science, but it is important. What kind of constitutive role in the production of knowledge, imagination, and practice can new groups doing science have? How can these groups be allied with progressive social and political movements? What kind of political accountability can be constructed to tie women together across the scientific-technical hierarchies separating us? Might there be ways of developing feminist science/technology politics in alliance with anti-military science facility conversion action groups? Many scientific and technical workers in Silicon Valley, the high-tech cowboys included, do not want to work on military science. Can these personal preferences and cultural tendencies be welded into progressive politics among this professional middle class in which women, including women of colour, are coming to be fairly numerous? A CYBORG MANIFESTO 289 Women in the integrated circuit Let me summarize the picture of women’s historical locations in advanced industrial societies, as these positions have been restructured partly through the social relations of science and technology. If it was ever possible ideologically to characterize women’s lives by the distinction of public and private domains – suggested by images of the division of working-class life into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market and home, and of gender existence into personal and political realms – it is now a totally misleading ideology, even to show how both terms of these dichotomies construct each other in practice and in theory. I prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic. ‘Networking’ is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy – weaving is for oppositional cyborgs. So let me return to the earlier image of the informatics of domination and trace one vision of women’s ‘place’ in the integrated circuit, touching only a few idealized social locations seen primarily from the point of view of advanced capitalist societies: Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, ClinicHospital, and Church. Each of these idealized spaces is logically and practically implied in every other locus, perhaps analogous to a holographic photograph. I want to suggest the impact of the social relations mediated and enforced by the new technologies in order to help formulate needed analysis and practical work. However, there is no ‘place’ for women in these networks, only geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women’s cyborg identities. If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life, we might learn new couplings, new coalitions. There is no way to read the following list from a standpoint of ‘identification’, of a unitary self. The issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora. Home. Women-headed households, serial monogamy, flight of men, old women alone, technology of domestic work, paid homework, re-emergence of home sweatshops, home-based businesses and telecommuting, electronic cottage, urban homelessness, migration, module architecture, reinforced (simulated) nuclear family, intense domestic violence. Market. Women’s continuing consumption work, newly targeted to buy the profusion of new production from the new technologies (especially as the competitive race among industrialized and industrializing nations to avoid dangerous mass unemployment necessitates finding ever bigger new markets for ever less clearly needed commodities); bimodal buying power, coupled with advertising targeting of the numerous affluent groups and neglect of the previous mass markets; growing importance of informal markets in labour and commodities parallel to high-tech, affluent market structures; surveillance systems through electronic funds transfer; intensified market abstraction (commodification) of experience, resulting in ineffective utopian or equivalent cynical theories of community; extreme mobility (abstraction) of marketing or financing systems; interpenetration of sexual and labour markets; intensified sexualization of abstracted and alienated consumption. Paid Work Place. Continued intense sexual and racial division of labour, but considerable growth of membership in privileged occupational categories for many 290 DONNA HARAWAY white women and people of colour; impact of new technologies on women’s work in clerical, service, manufacturing (especially textiles), agriculture, electronics; international restructuring of the working classes; development of new time arrangements to facilitate the homework economy (flexi time, part time, over time, no time); homework and out work; increased pressures for two-tiered wage structures; significant numbers of people in cash-dependent populations worldwide with no experience or no further hope of stable employment; most labour ‘marginal’ or ‘feminized’. State. Continued erosion of the welfare state; decentralizations with increased surveillance and control; citizenship by telematics; imperialism and political power broadly in the form of information-rich/information-poor differentiation; increased high-tech militarization increasingly opposed by many social groups; reduction of civil service jobs as a result of the growing capital intensification of office work, with implications for occupational mobility for women of colour; growing privatization of material and ideological life and culture; close integration of privatization and militarization, the high-tech forms of bourgeois capitalist personal and public life; invisibility of different social groups to each other, linked to psychological mechanisms of belief in abstract enemies. School. Deepening coupling of high-tech capital needs and public education at all levels, differentiated by race, class, and gender; managerial classes involved in educational reform and refunding at the cost of remaining progressive educational democratic structures for children and teachers; education for mass ignorance and repression in technocratic and militarized culture; growing anti-science mystery cults in dissenting and radical political movements; continued relative scientific illiteracy among white women and people of colour; growing industrial direction of education (especially higher education) by science-based multinationals (particularly in electronics-dependent and biotechnology-dependent companies); highly educated, numerous elites in a progressively bimodal society. Clinic-hospital. Intensified machine–body relations; renegotiations of public metaphors which channel personal experience of the body, particularly in relation to reproduction, immune system functions, and ‘stress’ phenomena; intensification of reproductive politics in response to world historical implications of women’s unrealized, potential control of their relation to reproduction; emergence of new, historically specific diseases; struggles over meanings and means of health in environments pervaded by high technology products and processes; continuing feminization of health work; intensified struggle over state responsibility for health; continued ideological role of popular health movements as a major form of American politics. Church. Electronic fundamentalist ‘super-saver’ preachers solemnizing the union of electronic capital and automated fetish gods; intensified importance of churches in resisting the militarized state; central struggle over women’s meanings and authority in religion; continued relevance of spirituality, intertwined with sex and health, in political struggle. The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable. Since much of this picture interweaves with the social relations of science and technology, the urgency of a socialist feminist politics addressed to science and technology is plain. There is A CYBORG MANIFESTO 291 much now being done, and the grounds for political work are rich. For example, the efforts to develop forms of collective struggle for women in paid work should be a high priority for all of us. These efforts are profoundly tied to technical restructuring of labour processes and reformations of working classes. These efforts also are providing understanding of a more comprehensive kind of labour organization, involving community, sexuality, and family issues never privileged in the largely white male industrial unions. The structural rearrangements related to the social relations of science and technology evoke strong ambivalence. But it is not necessary to be ultimately depressed by the implications of late twentieth-century women’s relation to all aspects of work, culture, production of knowledge, sexuality, and reproduction. For excellent reasons, most Marxisms see domination best and have trouble understanding what can only look like false consciousness and people’s complicity in their own domination in late capitalism. It is crucial to remember that what is lost, perhaps especially from women’s points of view, is often virulent forms of oppression, nostalgically naturalized in the face of current violation. Ambivalence towards the disrupted unities mediated by high-tech culture requires not sorting consciousness into categories of ‘clear-sighted critique grounding a solid political epistemology’ versus ‘manipulated false consciousness’, but subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game. There are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new kinds of unity across race, gender, and class, as these elementary units of socialist feminist analysis themselves suffer protean transformations. Intensifications of hardship experienced worldwide in connection with the social relations of science and technology are severe. But what people are experiencing is not transparently clear, and we lack sufficiently subtle connections for collectively building effective theories of experience. Present efforts – Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological – to clarify even ‘our’ experience are rudimentary. I am conscious of the odd perspective provided by my historical position – a PhD in biology for an Irish Catholic girl was made possible by Sputnik’s impact on US national science-education policy. I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second-World-War arms race and Cold War as by the women’s movements. There are more grounds for hope in focusing on the contradictory effects of politics designed to produce loyal American technocrats, which also produced large numbers of dissidents, than in focusing on the present defeats. The permanent partiality of feminist points of view has consequences for our expectations of forms of political organization and participation. We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, or perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction. Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos. From the point of view of pleasure in these potent and taboo fusions, made inevitable by the social relations of science and technology, there might indeed be a feminist science. Chapter 21 Andrew Ross THE CHALLENGE OF SCIENCE EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION I N TH IS E S S AY, Andrew Ross asks two questions. The first is very general: “Who is qualified to critique science?”, and the second rather more specific: “What has cultural studies to say about science?” These questions derive their energy by breaking out from the usual hands-off-science mentality which, Ross suggests, has its origins in the sociologist Max Weber’s positing of a value-free humanities in his famous 1918 address, “Science as a vocation,” largely as a riposte to German antisemitism of the time. In fact a great deal of Ross’s essay is devoted to explaining why science needs critique. For Ross, working in the United States, technoscience is the ultimate horizon of most post-Second-World-War academic work, even in the humanities. That is where the money comes from. The implications of this have not sufficiently filtered through into cultural studies, which too often still assumes a hard culture/science division, and accepts scientific resistance to non-scientists’ examining the social and cultural grounds and effects of their work. That resistance has only been increased by the various attacks on cultural studies’ supposed incompetence in the field, of which the most influential have been by Gross and Levitt (1994) and Alan Sokal (Sokal and Bricmont 1997) – Sokal becoming notorious after the scandal which followed his hoodwinking the editors of Social Text by palming off a parodic essay on to their journal. Ross’s sensible and modest essay is a riposte to claims that cultural studies is a pseudo-discipline, lacking the conceptual rigor to deal with issues like the effect of science on society and culture. He argues that because science permeates and shapes modern culture so powerfully and divisively, it would be irresponsible not to analyze it and its effects from the outside, and ask of it: what are you doing to create a fairer, less risky society? THE CHALLENGE OF SCIENCE 293 Further reading: Franklin 1995; Haraway 1991, 1997; Harding 1995; Ross 1991, 1994, 1996. 1 When future historians, as the cliché goes, survey the modern versions of the divi sion of knowledge, what will seem most anachronistic? One of the likely contenders will be the strong pact by which the empirical pursuit of reason, at one end of the field, was guaranteed immunity from socio-political scrutiny at the same time as the ethical realm of values, at the other end, was relieved of any obligation to respond to advances in scientific knowledge. This entente proved to be the source of the dominant traditions of inquiry in the natural sciences and the humanities for most of the twentieth century. Science would undertake to provide neutral, public knowledge in a value-free setting so that humanists could grapple with the corrosive, contradictory life of social, cultural, and political issues in a milieu barred to technical experts; and vice versa. For different reasons, this entente worked to the advantage of both traditions. reaffirming core elements of their respective professional ethics. Arguably, the greatest value has accrued to managerial elites, whether in the academy, in business, or in politics, who have benefited from the separation of the realm of facts from that of values: administrative control can be established with ease once employees or subjects have acknowledged the principle of ‘that’s not my department’. But the mutual pact also meant different things at different times. Robert Proctor has described, for example, how the social sciences initially sought the value-free imprimatur of science – Weber’s Wertfreiheit – in order to build a protective neutrality zone against political coercion, primarily from the right, since sociology was perceived first as a socialist, and then, by the Nazis, as a Jewish discipline. The value-free neutrality of this paradigm had an especial appeal to the American academy in the ‘end of ideology’ period of the Cold War. For its critics, the ascendancy of the principle of Wertfreiheit over the course of the next two decades came to signify political quietism in the social sciences, and selling one’s skills to the highest bidders in the natural sciences. In the humanities, a cognate set of ‘selfevident’ principles of taste – crystallized in the concept of the literary ‘canon’ – encouraged a formalist dogma whose death throes engendered the bitter spectacle of the Culture Wars in political life at the end of the 1980s. The powerful Cold War consensus that had ruled out of court any attention to the institutional arrangement or social conditions of knowledge did not end with a whimper. So when C. P. Snow issued his famous mid-century complaint about the increasing divergence of the ‘two cultures’, he was describing a condition that was not so much tendential as contractual. And since science had long since become the dominant civil authority in society, there was no real symmetry in this arrangement. While humanists preferred to think of the field of knowledge as an even spectrum, running from hard sciences to the fine arts, logical positivists of the Vienna circle reflected the much greater cultural power of abstract reason in their topographical choice of a hierarchy, with physics at the very top. Accordingly, for Snow, and those 294 ANDREW ROSS who swallowed his story about the two cultures, the burden of education fell not upon scientists but upon humanists whose alleged technophobia had made them anachronistic legatees of a Romantic past, ill-equipped to face the challenge, technocratic or otherwise, of the future. For too long, Snow’s fellow British intellectuals had followed William Blake’s thunder, and paid too little heed to what Harold Wilson would shortly come to call the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’. While Snow’s polite thesis almost immediately became part of the folklore of intellectual life, there was little evidence that science was taken any more seriously as a cultural force. Speaking from the heart of the radical science movement in the early 1970s, Hilary Rose and Steven Rose lamented that there had been virtually no discussion of science’s cultural role in central New Left history surveys like Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution or Perry Anderson’s The Components of the National Culture (Rose and Rose 1976: 13). In the more pragmatic US, things were little better. Scan the writings of the New York Intellectuals, or the more academic tracts of postmodernism and multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s, and sustained engagement with the institutions of science is thin on the ground, despite feminism’s sweeping indictment, during the same period, of the long history of biological and medical disciplining of women. In recent years, however, it is not the education of humanists but the education of scientists that has been questioned. Fears about ‘scientific illiteracy’ are now more often applied, as Sandra Harding puts it, to the ‘Eurocentrism and androcentrism of many scientists, policymakers and highly educated citizens’ with an outcome that ‘severely limits public understanding of science as a fully social process’. Such influential people, she argues, need ‘a kind of scientific education’ – rooted in social experience – ‘that has not been available to them’ (Harding 1995: 1). Indeed, the cloistered scientist, shielded from self-critical knowledge about the social origins and conditions of his or her instruments, empirical methods, and research applications, has emerged as a much greater danger to our social and environmental survival than the cloistered humanist. In view of the restructuring of our business civilization around the future of technoscience and biomedicine, the narrow, technical education of a small number of Western scientists has farreaching consequences for everyone else. The long history of science serving as the handmaiden of militarism and capital accumulation may only be a prelude to the role being cast by today’s corporations for their own technoscientific workforce and their subcontracted hands in the academy. Indeed, the social education of scientists is increasingly seen as one of the more important pedagogical tasks of the day. Does cultural studies have some part to play in this education? The knowledge that science is not only socially determined but also culturally specific has modern scholarly lineage that dates back at least to the famous paper given by Soviet historian of science Boris Hessen at a London conference in 1931, in which he demonstrated how Newton’s Principia responded to the emergent needs of British mercantile capitalism: particularly in the areas of transportation, communications and military production. This knowledge was subsequently drawn out in the work of J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, and Joseph Needham. The externalism of these British Marxists was displaced and depoliticized in the Mertonian school of the sociology of science and in Kuhn’s influential volume on scientific revolutions, and then revived in a more empirical form in the 1970s movement known as SSK THE CHALLENGE OF SCIENCE 295 (sociology of scientific knowledge), with its many factional variants (Edinburgh, Bath, Paris, York, Tremont) and recent offshoots. The radical science movement that grew out of the anti-war movement in the late 1960s established ‘science for the people’ as a rallying cry, while the US academic field of STS came to maturity with its less radical, vocational agenda of democratizing technoscience. Today’s burgeoning field of science studies is driven by assumptions and principles that are consonant with cultural studies, and includes prominent practitioners, mostly feminists, who are quite comfortable working under, or adjacent to, the rubric of cultural studies. Indeed, the watchword of ‘science as culture’ (also the name of the splendid journal that succeeded the Radical Science Journal) has come to be an eclectic rubric, including not only ethnographic attention to the minutiae of scientific culture, and the analyses of the role of science and scientific authority in the culture at large, but also interventions in matters of science policy and ideology. This is the point at which the broad tradition of cultural studies meets up with developments in science studies – when a continuum of power is established between the interests of the state and the expressive, daily realm of rituals. The most consistent origin story for cultural studies describes it as the adulterated offspring of an insurgent sociology in revolt against Parsonian functionalism, and a ‘left-Leavisite’ cultural criticism (minus the high cultural elitism), pledged against what F. R. Leavis had called ‘technologico-Benthamite civilization’ and its rule of utilitarian reason. In this account, cultural studies has always been in flight from particular forms of instrumental reason, although not from rationality as such. None the less, the cause it has primarily pursued – that of cultural politics – has often been trivialized, on the hard left, as a displacement of ‘real’ politics, and, ultimately, as a dangerous immersion in the destructive element of unreason – the stuff of nationalism, fascism, imperialism, and capitalist commodification. According to this view, which has deep roots in the doctrine of ‘scientific socialism’, the path of progressive politics is an insuperably rational development, whose objective processes are contaminated by attention to the ‘subjective’ factors posed by cultural issues. In the wake of the Culture Wars, which have propelled cultural issues and values to the forefront of the New Right’s political agenda, this position, often described as ‘unreconstructed’, seems especially untenable. Consequently, cultural politics has emerged as legitimate, unavoidable, and indispensable. At least one outcome of the face-off between mono- and multi-culturalists is the recognition that people feel their right to cultural respect and civility as strongly as they feel their right to the benefits of a social wage. Consequently, full citizenship has come to be seen as a cultural, as well as a socioeconomic, achievement. What does this account of citizenship have to learn from cultural studies of science? Adherence to scientific reason is a constituent element of cultural belief in advanced industrial societies, even in countries like the US where a vast portion of the population also believes that the world was created in six days. The authority of science is thus a central vehicle of consent in a technocratic democracy. This authority is exercised largely through appeal to expertise, from the dismal science of the economists at the commanding heights of the corporate state to the routines followed by technological dead labor in the workplace. Where scientific reason is the dominant cognitive authority, its cultural and economic role in maintaining a 296 ANDREW ROSS social system of inequalities must be open to analysis and to reform in ways that go far beyond internalist adjustments and purifications. While the value-free neutrality of the scientific method is the legitimating basis for empowered forms of technical expertise, scientists themselves rarely feel personally or professionally responsible for any of the social or political uses of the name of science. The division of labor that accompanies value-free ideology – ‘that’s not my department’ – means that scientists have been able to disavow knowledge about the social origins or applications of their research. The model for this division of labor, of course, was the archetypal example of the ‘abuse’ of science – the Manhattan Project, where the specialized allocation of research tasks pre-empted any knowledge on the part of individual participants about the overmanagers’ mission. The state’s utilitarian endorsement of the ideology of ‘value-free science’ has long been a source of criticism and activism, and most egregiously in a period when so many of the world’s scientists have been involved in military research or its spinoff industries. Yet many scientists charge that the criticism of scientific research and its results is often uninformed or non-specific. In the 1970s, this complaint met with an empirical response in the ‘descriptive turn’ of the SSK school, represented in the work of Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Steve Shapin, Michael Mulkay, and Harry Collins, and followed by Nigel Gilbert, Joan Fujimura, Ian Hacking, Eric Livingston, Trevor Pinch, Sal Restivo, Nancy Cartwright, David Gooding, and others. Rather than study the products of science, or scientists’ own representations of science, the strong program of SSK endorsed the rigorously sociological study of science in practice, through first-hand observation. This empirical approach generated research in three main genres: studies of scientific controversies; historical studies; and ethnographic accounts of laboratory procedures, such as Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (1979), Karen Knorr Cetina’s The Manufacture of Knowledge (1981), Michael Lynch’s Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science (1985) and Sharon Traweek’s Beamtimes and Lifetimes (1988). Such studies, identifying the role played by social interests in every aspect of research, demonstrated that scientific knowledge is not given by the natural world but is produced or constructed through social interactions between/among scientists and their instruments, and that these interactions are mediated by the conceptual apparatuses created in order to frame and interpret the results. The knowledge produced is often so local and context-specific that it makes sense only in relation to the laboratory instruments, modes of analysis, and specialized textual practices engineered within a specific field. The result of this kind of attention has been a more systematic description of ‘science in action’, better equipped to demystify scientists’ perception that their research laboratories and working communities are value-free zones. Each zone, in turn, came to be seen as an intersection of various belief systems, patched together to form a seemingly coherent whole. But the relativism inherent in the descriptive turn was much criticized as a theory that ultimately declared the sociological equivalence of all beliefs, whether true or false according to internal or external criteria. It did little, as Steve Fuller has argued, to dislodge the elitist perception that only scientists can do science, and it shied away from all normative or evaluative analysis that might produce change in scientific institutions (Fuller 1992: 390– THE CHALLENGE OF SCIENCE 297 428). In opting for a program of social realism that eschewed value-laden or moralistic critique, SSK’s passive ‘explanation’ of science’s social and cultural construction was open to charges of quietism. Contrary to the positivist view of science which stressed the universality of scientific knowledge, SSK demonstrated that there was little distinctive to differentiate science from other social activities. But this evidence could not in itself lead to alternative ways of doing science. Nor would it suggest alternative criteria (i.e. other than those framed by the needs of the military, capital, or the state) to judge the successes and failures of science. Only normative critiques could change the status quo. It could be argued that a similar set of concerns accompanied the ethnographic turn in cultural studies, coming, as it did, at a point where excessively abstract theorizing about ‘spectators’ and ‘readers’ had devolved attention away from the contexts in which people actually utilized culture. Turning its back on the long history, within cultural theory, of moralizing assumptions about the behavior and beliefs of ‘the masses’, cultural studies tried to relinquish patronizing valuejudgements, sought to renounce recruitism, and vowed to find out instead what real people said, thought and did in their lived environments. The powerless and disenfranchised turned out to be creative, diverse, and, yes, resistant in response to the media flow in which they had been immersed. Intellectuals found a way to salve their separation from the popular classes, and in doing so, found a refuge from the pressures of bourgeois taste. And a much greater understanding of the processes of cultural consumption emerged. As in the case of SSK, criticism of this ethnographic turn appeals to the need to recommend and exhort alternatives to the status quo. Eschewing value-judgements (suspending opinions about whether cultural texts were good or bad) meant that critics also gave up the authority to demand change, a dereliction, in some respects, of the tradition of the ‘responsibility of intellectuals’ (see Brunsdon 1990). Since normative judgements of taste were hardly absent from the realm of popular opinion itself, the cultural studies classroom, as Simon Frith recently pointed out, became virtually the only place where the act of passing valuejudgements was more or less prohibited (Frith 1996). By contrast, conservative intellectuals picked up the baton, and have been running away with the ‘values’ contest. Accordingly, this critique of the ethnographic phase of cultural studies has been largely responsible for the emergence of the new cadre of ‘public intellectuals’, pursuing the limited access available in the public, non-academic media to left-wing intellectuals. In accord with similar developments in science studies, that part of cultural studies that has concerned itself with state policy (primarily in Australia, and, to a much lesser extent, in the UK) finds itself inevitably compromised not only by bureaucratic calculation but also by accommodation to the ‘direction’ of the corporate state. Attempts to redirect science policy or cultural policy towards the public interest or the service of social relevance have been obliged to abandon or dumb down their critiques and oppositional strategies. On the other hand, the route of institutional empowerment provides opportunities for reform of policies and structures rarely open to the fiercely independent dissident. Clearly, the mutually exclusive attractions of administrative influence and prophetic opposition pull both ways for both fields. In addition, cultural studies and 298 ANDREW ROSS science studies share the position of bridge disciplines, the former crossing humanities and the social sciences, the latter crossing social sciences and the natural sciences. So much is shared between the two fields that conservatives active in the recent Science Wars have been able to group together, in a spurious ‘anti-science movement’, as their common antagonists, social constructionists and postmodernists in both cultural studies and science studies. (The eclectic mix of arraigned ‘irrationalists’ also includes astrologists, eco-feminists, Afrocentrists, New Agers, and Christian fundamentalists.) Of course, there are many significant distinctions between these intellectual tendencies, but the immediate outcome of the Science Wars, as I shall discuss below, has been not only to encourage unity and alliances among these tendencies but to highlight more clearly the ideas, assumptions, and principles that lie at the core of scientific conservatism. 2 Every time I fly these days, I remind myself that I am sitting in a slightly modified bomber. After all, that is what civilian aircraft are. Sometimes, I even imagine that I am on a combat mission, in cynical sympathy perhaps, with my fellow flyers, many of whom (on weekdays, when I mostly travel to give lectures) are invariably business people, psyching themselves up for some hardball meeting with their regional peers. Most recently, I’ve had to think about the following, infamous statement made by Richard Dawkins in a September 1994 issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement: ‘If it gives you satisfaction to say that the theory of aerodynamics is a social construct that is your privilege, but why do you entrust your air travel plans to a Boeing rather than a magic carpet . . . Show me a cultural relativist at 20,000 feet and I will show you a hypocrite.’ As Sarah Franklin has retorted, ‘Show me a person who denies that airplane design is a highly organized human social activity, and I’ll show you an unreconstructed objectivist’ (Franklin 1995). Philosophers like Wittgenstein used the desk or table as the favoured example of their ontological proofs and refutations. Currently, the airplane is a likely candidate as the object of choice in disputes within science studies. On the one hand, objectivists can invoke the irrefutability of the law of gravity, on the other, their antagonists can show how the history of entire sciences like the ‘pure’ mathematics of aerodynamics have been determined by military needs in ballistics research and technologies. We needn’t even get into the history of how Newton came to apply the metaphor of gravitas, originally a human attribute, to the principle of mutual attraction between bodies. The metaphor eventually died off into literalness. But the choice of the airplane would also be emotionally magnified, I suspect, by the complex set of fears and anxieties associated with the experience of civilian air flight, including a response to the rituals and institutions pioneered by military usage and preserved to this day in the culture of air transport. The massive surveillance at airports, the inflight physical experience of involuntary confinement and submission to centralized commands, and the rituals of national identification that accompany border crossing, are more evocative of military service than most routine civilian events. That terrorism is associated with air travel THE CHALLENGE OF SCIENCE 299 has as much to do with its continuity with the militarized cultural environment as with the fact that passengers are particularly vulnerable in mid-air. The risks and fears associated with airplanes could be characterized as technophobia in the fullest sense of the term; no longer a knee-jerk reaction to the unknown world of machines but a complex and informed response to objects and ideas within a daily environment pervaded by the sway of technoscience. This kind of technophobia has become part of our routine response to modernity, perhaps even an intrinsic feature of modernity itself. No less complex, these days, is its manifestation in the field of knowledge. If I had to say what it is that terrorizes my students most today it would be the task of engaging with technoscientific rationality and all of its imposing institutional fortifications, a task that they none the less feel more responsive to than have previous generations of cultural critics. Why do they feel more responsive to meeting the critical challenges of science? Some cynical commentators might say that it is all part of the colonizing will of cultural studies to penetrate every corner of the field of knowledge in an expansionist movement that masquerades as postdisciplinarity. Whatever truth there might be to this ambition, it would still pale beside the reductionist aspirations of science’s Holy Grail of a unified theory of the natural world. When Francis Bacon announced, ‘I have taken all knowledge to be my province’, Eurocentric science was acquiring a colonizing voice that sought universality for its particular views. Conservatives in science get nearer the mark when they see the knowledge claims of cultural studies – local, specific, and social – as contaminants, and likely to weaken and infect the core, universalist beliefs of the natural sciences in the same way as its contagion has swept through the humanities and social sciences. The viral metaphors are not mine; I cite them because they are typical of the epidemiological rhetoric utilized by science purists. My own impression is that these students are probably not acquiescent agents of either intellectual contagion or disciplinary colonialism. To my mind, they are responding, in a much more informed way, to conditions largely created in the last two decades in which technoscience has played a conclusive role in reshaping the economic and cultural composition of most people’s productive lives, especially those involving intellectual and knowledge workers. Most of these students are Internet-savvy, and are therefore proficient in the cyberculture that is emerging as the international language of the professional-managerial class, and arguably, the first lingua franca of business, government, and academic elites to be inaccessible to most of the population since preliterate, preindustrial times. They also know that the utopian trappings of that cybermedium may very soon be remembered only as a brief golden age before Disney, Murdoch, Microsoft, AT&T, and Time Warner monopolized the real estate, in accord with the privatizing rage of capital-intensive technoscience. Whatever opportunities remain for the academy and the Internet’s spectrum of independents to develop a halfway-decent public sphere are more compromised by the day, and in the scarcity climate favoured by national and global managers, resources will only dwindle. Our students, acutely aware of their tenuous future in the shrinking educational sector, are highly conscious of the factors driving the scarcity revolution. As little as twenty-five years ago, it was naive, but still tenable, to ignore the pivotal contribution of universities to emergent forms of post-industrialism – in 300 ANDREW ROSS retrospect, a socio-economic revolution driven by the commercial potential of scientific R&D, managed by technocratic cadres churned out by higher education, maintained by Third World labor pools and resources, and facilitated by global economic restructuring. Indeed, the student movements of the 1960s were, in part, prompted by a generational aversion to the prospect of being apprenticed en masse to occupy semi-professional niches in the technostructure of the corporate state and the burgeoning transnational metastate. The anti-war movements on campuses were directed at the widespread use of university facilities and resources for military research and applications – a public relations debacle for the vaunted ideology of science’s disinterested ethos. Today, your head has to be buried very deep in the sand to ignore the pervasive presence of technoscience in all of the institutional environments that house our intellectual work. I am referring not simply to the computerization of the workplace and of the professional culture of intellectual work in general. The demand for productivity at reduced wages, the erosion of benefits and job stability, the geographical dislocation of economic life, the maintenance of a swollen, reserve army of highly educated labor, widespread technological disemployment and downsizing, the privatization of public work environments and the routinization of concessions and other sacrifices at the budgetary altar of pro-scarcity politics – all of these conditions characteristic of the postindustrial economy as a whole have taken a sizeable toll upon the workplaces of higher education. While the evereccentric rituals and traditions of academic life serve to distribute the full impact of technological change unevenly across our campuses, most of our research universities resemble commercial laboratories more than they do ivory towers these days. This state of affairs is a consequence of the contractual agreements forged during the 1980s that bound academic science to the industrial marketplace, and redefined universities as public institutions doing private business, patenting genetic material today, for example, like any pharmaceutical company, or else handing the patents over to the corporate sponsors of academic research as contractually required. In the Reagan–Bush years, at the height of the Pentagon’s cashflow volume, basic science was forced onto the international marketplace in the name of competitiveness in war and in trade. Economic restructuring around science and technology has meant that industrial sponsorship of the academic scientific community is now a primary basis for corporate competitiveness where access to basic science is the driving force (Dickson 1988). Under these circumstances, it is all the more necessary for boosters to prop up the old distinction between science and technology – the idea that science is the disinterested pursuit of public knowledge made internationally available at no cost and that technology alone applies to the sector of commercial product development. But in today’s marketplace, it is the corporate bottom line, expressed, for example, in the golden rule of patent protection, that decides when public sharing of scientific information ends and when product development and monopoly control over profits takes over – very quickly, in most instances. The Human Genome Project has been the exemplary modern instance of this rule; even as it proceeds under the benign rubric of public enlightenment, only a dunce would bet that, in the current economic climate, it will not lead to the private ownership of life processes. Universities and THE CHALLENGE OF SCIENCE 301 corporations already hold private patents on all sorts of genetic material. The section on Trade-related Intellectual Property Rights in the GATT agreement has, most recently, guaranteed a future of biopiracy for the gene hunters of the North unmatched since the heyday of botanical imperialism. To cut a long story short, we live and work now in conditions and environments that demand a critique of technoscience as a matter of course, as part of a commonplace response to daily life. Our students have absorbed this critical temper, not because of their proximity to campus research environments but because it has become a normalized feature of life in an advanced industrial society. Scepticism about the artifactual power harbored within the laboratories and hitech factories is a minimal exercise of citizenship. It forms the basis for massive public anxiety about the safety of everything from the processed food we consume to a biologically engineered future often described, in popular shorthand, as ‘tampering with nature’. Knowledge about the risks surrounding us is unevenly shared, as a result of class and education, but it is a part of everyone’s daily experience of modernity. One of the touchstones of cultural studies is Raymond Williams’s maxim that ‘culture is ordinary’ – an everyday creative activity that everyone does. So, too, we might say that the critique of science is ordinary, exercised in a hundred little ways on a daily basis; from suspicion of the latest nutritionist advice to distrust of the first and second medical opinions; from doubts about the safety of the nearest chemical storage facility to apprehension about the latest biogenetic laboratory animal. These are routine responses, often made without prolonged reflection, but that does not make them mindless. They are invariably based upon a complex process of risk perception and risk assessment. In his influential book, Risk Society, Ulrich Beck has described a society increasingly characterized by the overproduction of risks, and socially organized around the power that comes from achieving and possessing a risk-free environment (Beck 1992). In such a society, popular technoscepticism has come to replace the older semi-rational fears once associated with the term technophobia. Demonizing technology is by now a campy part of retro culture, reminiscent of a B-Grade science-fiction movie. By contrast, today’s anxieties are thoroughly domestic, and so much under the skin they can no more easily be projected onto discrete objects than can boundaries be strictly maintained between the ecosphere and the technosphere. They have become part of the birthright of modernity, an offshoot of the Enlightenment rationality that fostered modern science itself. If the critique of technoscience has come to be normalized, the same cannot be said of science itself. Science is not recognized as an ordinary activity because it is practiced by highly specialized and highly credentialed experts. So too, a consideration of who is qualified to critique science leads to no ordinary conclusion. At the very least, it requires some recognition of the priestly order that obtains within scientific institutions (wielding a power that is further concentrated and sanctified as scientific and technical knowledge attains more and more importance in society), and, on the other hand, the lay status automatically accorded to all nonprofessionals who are not involved directly in the networks of prestige that determine decision-making within science communities. This is a status as readily accepted by most of us, through science envy as much as anything, as it is exploited 302 ANDREW ROSS by those seeking the name of science for their political purposes. Let me give you a succinct example of how both of these outcomes reinforce each other. In Stephen Jay Gould’s review of The Bell Curve in the New Yorker, he noted that reviewer after reviewer in the public media confessed that he or she was not a scientist or an expert in any of the empirical fields represented in Murray and Herrnstein’s book, and that they therefore did not feel qualified to judge fully the worth of the book’s arguments. Gould concludes that The Bell Curve, though only ‘a rhetorical masterpiece of scientism’, succeeds largely because ‘it benefits from the particular kind of fear that numbers impose on nonprofessional commentators’. He then proceeds to tear apart the numbers in his own incisive way. Bestowing the status of a masterpiece, even of scientism, is a little overgenerous, but Gould’s observation allows us to see how a smelly piece of racist welfare-bashing can succeed in cowing ordinarily feisty opinion-makers into silence simply by wheeling in some heavy statistical artillery and festooning its pages with references to science scholarship that has been fully discredited for decades. Of course, The Bell Curve was not written to generate debate among experts. It was designed to feed intravenously into public policy, and so few people were prepared to take a stand over its scientific validity. In the current climate, however, when the social institutions targeted by Murray are being undermined daily, it is only a matter of time before we see more concerted efforts at scientific racism, at which point critics of these ideas will be tarred with the sciencebashing brush that has been so broadly applied by conservatives in the Science Wars. 3 While science boosters have seldom missed an opportunity to scare up anti-science folk devils in order to reinforce access to resources, funding, and other privileges, the origin of the current backlash can be traced to the publication of Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science in the spring of 1994. Drawing directly upon the lessons of the Culture Wars, Gross and Levitt cut a swathe through the usual PC suspects, caricaturing multiculturalists, postmodernists, and constructionists alike. The book escalated the low-level friction between conservative scientists and the science studies community. Soon after, the National Association of Scholars took up the cause, launching and coordinating a well-funded campaign to promote the backlash. In October 1994, the NAS convened its second annual conference, ‘Objectivity and Truth in the Natural Sciences, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities’, in order to combat what it presented as the growing ‘denigration of science’. In the words of the advertisement for the conference, this denigration, hitherto confined to ‘quarters outside the academy’, increasingly now ‘comes from within’ and has to be stopped because it ‘undermines public confidence . . . alters directions of research . . . affects funding [and] subverts the standards of reason and truth.’ Another large conference, ‘The Flight from Reason and Truth’, was convened at the New York Academy of Sciences in June 1995, and by July the press campaign had worked its way up the media food chain from the glossy weeklies to the op-ed pages of the quality dailies. By this time, proponents of critical science studies were being THE CHALLENGE OF SCIENCE 303 grouped alongside astrologists, New Age cultists, Creationists, Lysenkoists, and Nazi Aryan scientists. In the meantime, Gross and Levitt (nicknamed Love-it or Leave-it by the science studies community) and their colleagues had begun what amounted to a holy war at the risk of exhibiting all the symptoms associated with the popular stereotype of the bad scientist: arrogant, insular, self-interested, and aggressively resistant to external inquiry and public accountability. Many factors have been cited for the sudden advent of this backlash, but most commentators agreed that the decline in funding of science, and the erosion of its popular authority combined to service the need for public scapegoats (Ross 1996). On the other hand, it was clearly triggered by, and targeted at, the influence of cultural studies within science studies. SSK, STS, History of Science, Sociology of Science, Anthropology of Science and other disciplinary undertakings had ruffled feathers over the years. But it was the offending combination of attention to gender, race, ethnocentrism and elite culturalism – the same potent mixture that had fuelled the Culture Wars – that raised the temperature to the boiling point. Critiques of defense funding and corporate sponsorship could always be answered by the ‘abuse of science’ argument, i.e., humans kill, not guns. So, too, SSK critiques drew the kind of response that promised to reconstruct science from within by rendering it more objective yet in its pursuit of better knowledge through less impure procedures. At bottom, it could still be maintained in both instances that the ‘scientific method’ was sound. This was less the case with the ‘science as culture’ critiques, directed, as they were, at more fundamental flaws, and suggesting changes in the very epistemology of the scientific method. If everything from the socialization of scientists to the corporate structuring of research institutions has a recognizable effect upon the shaping of science, how can the purified method of experimental objectivity be declared off-limits to social inquiry and reformation? When there are so many different versions of doing science, even within the domains of Western science (the world’s dominant paradigm of rational inquiry), who would dream of reserving an uncontested status for the truth claims of a unitary, abstract method? Consequently, there has been a wholesale challenge to the assumption that objectivity in science is best served by methods pursued at a distance from the social contexts in which science is applied and from the communities most affected by science. In a society so organized hierarchically by class, race, and sexuality, there is no prospect of real objectivity. Thus Harding argues that objectivity in science would be better ensured if antisexist, anti-racist, and pro-democratic principles were adopted as the governing assumptions of research. Only if such moral and political programs were embraced could the prevailing anti-democratic prejudices in science be expunged (Harding 1991). Against science’s God’s-eye view of nature, comprehensive and yet located nowhere in particular, Donna Haraway argues for ‘situated knowledge’ on behalf of ‘embodied’ perspectives of the natural world (Haraway 1988). Other than reiterating the bromide that science serves truth and not society, interpretations of objectivity that challenge the exclusivity of the empirical method have mostly been answered in the Science Wars by caricature and red-baiting. The more academic response – based on the charge of technical ignorance – has been selected by Gross and Levitt as the ultimate Science Wars put-down: if you haven’t solved a ‘first order linear differential equation’, then you have no business 304 ANDREW ROSS recording your opinion on any of the pressing business that science does in society. Given the arcane authority of credentialism in a technocracy, such an argument will suffice to silence many. On the contrary, it should be seen as the kind of argument that exposes the way in which technical elites protect their privileges in a society where the most valued forms of knowledge are well nigh inaccessible to most of the population. Indeed, the use of technical expertise as a criterion to intimidate, exclude and disenfranchise is a primary exercise of power in the knowledge society we now inhabit. If you are a non-professional, of course you will never know enough to satisfy your scientist interlocutors. (To do so, you have to be head of a lab, with a fistful of funding, and with a good deal of clout in other places.) But how much do you need to know about nuclear fission to know that nuclear reactors are an insane idea? On the other hand, we live in times when corporations have their eyes fixed on the patent prize. Consequently, much more is at stake in these Science Wars than the self-interested status of scientists. Given the potential rewards, critique from the non-professional public or from non-credentialed professionals is a costly risk. And so the principle of the disinterested autonomy of scientific inquiry, voiced in the past as a protection against state interference, is more often a serviceable smoke screen today, at a time when scientific knowledge is systematically whisked out of the orbit of education and converted into private capital. The question raised earlier here – Who is qualified to critique science? – already carries set answers in a culture of expertise. One of our jobs is to turn this question around. How can science qualify us to sustain a critical view of society? PA R T S I X Sexuality and gender Chapter 22 Teresa de Lauretis UPPING THE ANTI (SIC) IN FEMINIST THEORY EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION D E L A U R ET I S ’ S E SS AY contributes to the feminist debate over “essentialism.” The debate arises because, for structuralist and poststructuralist thought, identity is always articulated within a system of differences and is therefore never fixed. To take a concrete example: a signifier like “women” which is important to forming identities (in statements such as “I am a woman”) does not, for instance, refer transparently to a particular kind of body – as if that kind of body were the essence of “being-woman.” After all, individuals who do not have a woman’s body can still possess a woman’s identity, and structuralists argue that this is possible just because “woman” means something, not in relation to any essential quality of womanhood, but in distinction to other categories like, most obviously, “maleness”. The debate between essentialists and (post)structuralists had been productively elaborated during the 1970s, but, in this essay, de Lauretis proposed a new move. She turns towards what she calls feminism’s “essential differences.” This phrase brings both sides of the debate together, not in the spirit of synthesis but to point to the structure of differences in which feminism carries out its work. Feminism’s “essential difference” is to be found in its “historical specificity” and in the sites, bodies, discourses in and through which women live differently both from men and from each other. De Lauretis further suggests that analysis of feminism’s historical specificity has to begin its work not with a category as unnuanced as “woman” but with the more subtle one of the “female-embodied social subject.” By suggesting that we might return to the history and cultural formations in which “women” are constructed, de Lauretis is not so much depriving cultural studies of feminist theory as using cultural studies to make theory less routine. 308 TE R E S A D E L A U R E T I S In a later essay (de Lauretis 1991), which drew upon the theory outlined here to move beyond feminism, de Lauretis coined the phrase “queer theory” in order to point out the “difference” – the specificity and disruptiveness – of identities embodied in sexual (and racial) minorities. Though de Lauretis herself abandoned the term “queer,” as it became mainstreamed, this essay can be read as establishing a basis, within feminism, for queer theory itself. Further reading: Butler 1991, 1993; De Lauretis 1991, 1994; Fuss 1989, 1995; Gallop 1982; Jardine 1985; Mohanty 1984; Probyn 1993. Essentialism and anti-essentialism Nowadays, the term essentialism covers a range of metacritical meanings and strategic uses that go the very short distance from convenient label to buzzword. Many who, like myself, have been involved with feminist critical theory for some time, and who did use the term, initially, as a serious critical concept, have grown impatient with this word – essentialism – time and again repeated with its reductive ring, its self-righteous tone of superiority, its contempt for ‘them’ – those guilty of it. Yet, few would deny that feminist theory is all about an essential difference, an irreducible difference, though not a difference between woman and man, nor a difference inherent in ‘woman’s nature’ (in woman as nature), but a difference in the feminist conception of woman, women, and the world. Let us say, then, that there is an essential difference between a feminist and a nonfeminist understanding of the subject and its relation to institutions; between feminist and non-feminist knowledges, discourses, and practices of cultural forms, social relations, and subjective processes; between a feminist and a non-feminist historical consciousness. That difference is essential in that it is constitutive of feminist thinking and thus of feminism: it is what makes the thinking feminist, and what constitutes certain ways of thinking, certain practices of writing, reading, imaging, relating, acting, etc., into the historically diverse and culturally heterogeneous social movement which, qualifiers and distinctions notwithstanding, we continue with good reasons to call feminism. Another way to say this is that the essential difference of feminism lies in its historical specificity – the particular conditions of its emergence and development, which have shaped its object and field of analysis, its assumptions and forms of address; the constraints that have attended its conceptual and methodological struggles; the erotic component of its political self-awareness; the absolute novelty of its radical challenge to social life itself. But even as the specific, essential difference of feminism may not be disputed, the question of the nature of its specificity or what is of the essence in feminist thought and self-representation has been an object of contention, an issue over which divisions, debates, and polarizations have occurred consistently, and without resolution, since the beginning of that self-conscious critical reflection that constitutes the theory of feminism. The currency of the term ‘essentialism’ may be based on nothing more than its capacity to circumvent this very question – the nature of the specific difference of feminism – and thus to polarize feminist thought on UPPING THE ANTI (SIC) IN FEMINIST THEORY 309 what amounts to a red herring. I suggest that the current enterprise of ‘antiessentialist’ theorists engaged in typologizing, defining and branding various ‘feminisms’ along an ascending scale of theoretico-political sophistication where ‘essentialism’ weighs heavy at the lower end, may be seen in this perspective. This is not to say that there should be no critique of feminist positions or no contest for the practical as well as the theoretical meanings of feminism, or even no appeal for hegemony by participants in a social movement which, after all, potentially involves all women. My polemical point here is that either too much or too little is made of the ‘essentialism’ imputed to most feminist positions (notably those labelled cultural, separatist or radical, but others as well, whether labelled or not), so that the term serves less the purposes of effective criticism in the ongoing elaboration of feminist theory than those of convenience, conceptual simplification or academic legitimation. Taking