The dialectic is back on the agenda. But it is no longer Marx's dialectic, just as
Marx's was no longer Hegel's. . . . The dialectic today no longer clings to historicity
and historical time, or to a temporal mechanism such as 'thesis-antithesis-synthesis' or
'affirmation-negation-negation of the negation' . . . . To recognise space, to recognise
what 'takes place' there and what it is used for, is to resume the dialectic: analysis
will reveal the contradictions of space.
- As my epigraph from Henri Lefebvre signals, my intention here is to present a
materialist critique of Homi Bhabha's controversial collection of essays The Location
of Culture. Such a project must follow very much in the wake of Benita Parry's
trenchant materialist analysis of the same work. However, as the second of my epigraphs
indicates, my approach will recognise that Marxist analysis must develop beyond what
Bhabha characterises as the reabsorption of "historical difference" into
"the base-superstructure division" (Bhabha 1994: 221) to also recognise
subjective experience. Yet the 'location' from which Bhabha frames this criticism (and
dismissal) reflects his disingenuous stance towards materialist analysis. This stance
refuses to recognise that Marx himself appreciated that developments in ideology and
art--Bhabha's own chosen field of analysis, culture--were far from simplistically
determined by the socio-economic base. Rather, the development of art (culture) can be
"out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the
material foundation" (Marx 1973: 110). This disjunctive, ambivalent relation between
'culture' and the socio-economic base has produced a rich seam of work broadly termed
cultural materialist, which Bhabha wilfully ignores by supplanting materialism entirely
with the discursive abstraction that Parry terms "the linguistic turn in cultural
studies" (Parry 1994: 5).
- Given this penchant in Bhabha's work "for in between states and moments of
hybridity" (Bhabha 1994: 208) that he locates in cultural articulation, the elision
of Marx's recognition that culture can be "out of all proportion" is all the
more troubling. Indeed, disingenuous. This brings into question the political 'location'
of Bhabha's work. However, the very nature of Bhabha's discursive technique presents a
vista of ever shifting theoretical terminology, punning and neologisms, that tend to
deflect a consistent line of rigorous questioning traceable across the entirety of the
collection. As Robert Young observes by reversing Bhabha's criticism of Fanon on its
originator: he is driven "from one conceptual scheme to another" (Young 1990:
146). Young is rather too eager to praise this tactic as the subversion of universalist
Western theory, recognising some congruence with his own brand of anti-Marxist
deconstruction. Yet Bhabha's critics (including both Parry and Young) seem to ignore the
one consistent terminological lexicon to which Bhabha invariably resorts: space.
- This is an especially unfortunate oversight by Bhabha's materialist critics since this
identifies a site where the expression of what is "out of proportion" in
cultural production can be interrogated through materialist analysis. Indeed, as Lefebvre
demands: "To recognise space, to recognise what 'takes place' there and what it is
used for, is to resume the dialectic; analysis will reveal the contradictions of
space" (Lefebvre 1976: 17). It is only within the last decade that the importance of
Lefebvre's work in this respect has been recognised, reasserting the importance of space
to critical studies. An importance that was always present in Marx's work if only there
were eyes to see it. Indeed, it betrays "an astonishing spatial sensibility"
which, as Foucault notes "has been left practically fallow for the sake of endless
commentaries on surplus value" (Foucault 1980: 77). This is not to denigrate the
importance of surplus value to Marxist analysis, but simply to recognise that capital
accumulation takes place in a space; a space that has been produced and is acutely
sensitive to social relationships.
- "Space" writes Lefebvre "and the political organisation of space express
social relationships but also react back on them" (Lefebvre 1970: 25). Such a spatial
analysis extends Marx's original observation of what might be called the dialectical
relationship between culture and the material base, to encompass the entire realm of the
social. Lefebvre's subtle reformulation is of the utmost relevance to contemporary
cultural criticism: here he is positing that the production and reproduction of social
space exists in dialectical relationship with the material base. Not only is the 'social'
responsive to changes in economic relations, but the material base is responsive to
changes in social praxis which must shape the material and imaginary social landscape.
This is very much the focus of Fredric Jameson's work on postmodernism/late capitalism
(Jameson 1991). Yet it is this link to material effects in lived space that is invariably
lost in Bhabha's disturbing slippage between actual and abstract spaces, especially in
relation to colonialism: very much a lived social landscape in terms of violence and
repression, Bhabha's own ostensible subject . One can plot the movement away from
Jameson's attempt to maintain the ambivalent connection between material and abstract
space in the following passage:
The radical discontinuity that exists between bourgeois private life and the
'unimaginable' decentring of global capital does not find its scheme of representation in
the spatial position or the representational visibility of the
free-standing, disjoined sentences, to which Jameson insistently draws our attention. What
must be mapped as a new international space of discontinuous historical realities is, in
fact, the problem of signifying the interstitial passages and processes of cultural
difference that are inscribed in the "in-between," in the temporal break-up that
weaves the "global text." (Bhabha 1994: 216-217)
- Bhabha responds here to Jameson's attempt to connect the radical discontinuities,
juxtapositions and gaps of the post-modern social spaces of lived experience and cultural
expression (what Lefebvre would call lived "representational spaces" and
abstracted, cultural, "representations of space" Lefebvre 1991: 41), with
structural, material, reformulation. Thence "bourgeois private life"; the
"decentring of global capital"; the "so-called death of the self"; the
"enormous tactical difficulties of co-ordinating local . . . political actions with
national or international ones." Above all, for Jameson, "Such spatial
peculiarities [are] symptoms and expressions of a new and historically original
dilemma" (Jameson 1991: 413). This is an attempt to trace the contradictions of this
shifting, developing, space through a dialectic that avoids temporal reductionism. This
ambivalent, disjunctive moment hesitates as dilemma. It is historical change taking place
in, and affecting, space. Process, in a word. Of course, the specific co-ordinates of
Jameson's analysis remain open to question. What I want to emphasise here is the method of
analysis itself; one that recognises that historical change takes place in both material
and abstract space, indissolubly tied together in social space and the praxis that gives
it form. To perhaps belabour the point, Harvey observes that capital builds up a physical
landscape--to which I would add a mutually responsive abstract landscape, i.e. social
space--"in perpetual struggle . . . appropriate to its own condition at a particular
moment in time, only to have to destroy it, usually in the course of crisis, at a
subsequent moment in time" (Harvey 1974: 124).
- What, then, does Bhabha seek to posit in place of this model? First of all, he rejects
Jameson's proposition that the disjunctive characteristics of this social space can be
found in the "spatial position" or "representational visibility" of
the fragmented social 'text' (Bhabha 1994: 217). Neither expression is actually used by
Jameson, who refers to "spatial peculiarities" and ideological frames and
practices, e.g. "bourgeois private life." In fact, Jameson is speaking of positions
and representations and Bhabha's reductionism here is important. For it is such
plurality that he wishes to claim for his own argument, thereby recasting Jameson's
Marxism as both monolithic and totalising. This is where he characteristically resorts to
a series of spatially derived metaphors conjoined with a poststructualist "linguistic
turn" (Parry 1994: 5). For Jameson's "discontinuous historical realities"
are supplanted by 'mapping' "the problem of signifying the interstitial passages and
processes of cultural difference that are inscribed in the 'in-between,' in the temporal
break-up that weaves the global 'text' (Bhabha 1994: 217). Yet the 'difference' he wishes
to plot here is reduced to a purely textual effect. In this contextualisation,
'interstitial' and 'in-between' seem to be merely gaps and discontinuities in the 'text.'
How does one measure "temporal break-up" when material space and the history
inscribed on and in it, has been shunted into a textual abstraction?
- Elsewhere in the collection, it is clear that Bhabha relies heavily on a particular
reading of Derrida--especially supplementarity and différance--and Lacan to achieve
discursive manoeuvres of this sort. These are both areas I wish to examine, but for the
moment we need to consider further this 'primary scene' by which material space is
'translated' (to appropriate one of Bhabha's own terms) into an entirely abstracted
linguistic metaphor. Lefebvre forcibly describes the dangers of this sort of strategy:
To some degree, perhaps, these ideas are deformed or distorted in the process, but the
net result is that a particular 'theoretical space' produces a mental space which
is apparently, but only apparently, extra-ideological. In an inevitably circular manner,
this mental space then becomes the locus of a 'theoretical practice' which is separated
from social practice and which sets itself up as the axis, pivot or central reference
point of knowledge. (Lefebvre 1991: 6)
This observation is astonishingly prescient (Lefebvre was writing in 1974) in relation
to the concluding remarks Bhabha prepared for the collection. Here Bhabha claims to have
unearthed the "spatial boundaries" of a "spatial time" of modernity.
And what does this amount to? but a "postcolonial archaeology" (Bhabha 1994:
254). Clearly, what Bhabha is suggesting a field of knowledge and a 'theoretical practice'
predicated on an 'in-between,' 'interstitial space' that is always 'beyond' the boundaries
of whatever discursive, ideological and material practices he wishes to escape. In effect,
it is boundless, unrestrainable; a field of endless play. Yet he also claims a certain
solidity for this 'space'; an actual political practice, an experiential history, a
utopian ontology perhaps, enabled by an epistemology of continual escape routes or, at
least, escape from 'roots' to reformulate Paul Carter's pun (Carter1987).
- The problem here is the very indeterminacy of 'location', which generates what appears
to be an unintentional irony in relation to the title of the collection. Unintended
because of the seriousness with which the following claim can be made: "I have
attempted to constitute a postcolonial, critical discourse that contests modernity through
the establishment of other historical sites, other forms of enunciation" (Bhabha
1994: 254). Of course, the question is where this history manifests itself, where is this
site of enunciation? The answer is the inevitably circular logic foreseen by Lefebvre,
which Bhabha attempts to enable at one point by conflating Lacan and Toni Morrison:
"Lacan calls this kind of inside/out/outside/in space a moment of extremité: a
traumatic moment of the 'not there' or the indeterminate or the unknowable" (Bhabha
1994: 206). A place/space that is 'not there,' 'indeterminate' and 'unknowable' has no
existence, a utopia, a 'no-where.' Yet on closer examination, even the theoretical
practices drawn on here seem to circle back on his assertion. As Lacan notes:
[Desire] is an effect in the subject of that condition which is imposed upon him by the
existence of the discourse to cause his need to pass through the defiles of the signifier.
(Lacan 1977:264)
- "Even the most traditional historical narrative" Bhabha observes,
"accedes to the language of fantasy and desire" (Bhabha 1994: 97). Yet in
Bhabha's textual practice it is not the desire of the coloniser's narrative that betrays,
but his own. One is led inexorably to question whether the Western located and
theoretically informed postcolonial theorist is displacing his own desire and fantasy in
relation to the object of his own narrative. An object that he shares with the colonial
texts that he criticises: the generalised, stereotyped, colonial/postcolonial subject. As
Spivak observes, "exploitation is abstract" (Spivak 1994: 296) and Bhabha's
theoretical gymnastics create an unlocateable, abstract discursive space into which his
own exploitative epistemological voyeurism can be displaced. Despite Bhabha's own claims
to subvert and displace "the ontology of [the] white world [and] its assumed
hierarchical forms of rationality and universality" (Bhabha 1994: 237), there is no
doubt that he dominates the discursive space that he creates. It is not a space of a
powerful egalitarian postcolonial critique, but a personal 'play'/ground.[2] A practice that expropriates and incorporates the other, reproducing
"at a conceptual level the geographical and economic absorption of the non-European
world by the West" (Young 1990: 3). Here, Young's criticism of Marxism can be located
in the work of a theorist of whom he approves. The estrangement of this discursive space
from any experiential connection to lived-in space, reduces whatever is sited, or cited
from, there to a textual abstraction. Subjectivity and agency remain as handicapped and
'subjected' to surveillance in this 'space' as in the most repressive colonial discourse.
It is not the spatial metaphor itself that achieves this, but Bhabha's choice to sever all
connection to materiality. A spatial critique can be enabling through the interconnection
of the abstract and material, as Kathleen Kirby observes:
. . . Ideas about space form a kind of philosophical palimpsest for descriptions of
politics, epistemology, and subjectivity; they are theory's substrate or foundation, upon
which the whole critical edifice stands; but they also provide a kind of 'guarantee,' a
solid referent outside language to which the intended line of argument can refer for
stability, credibility, substantiality. (Kirby 1996: 1)
- Yet one must also consider this question: does the deployment of this spatial metaphor
work discursively and coherently as an abstract analytical tool? This would provide a
counter argument for theoretical abstraction: whenever have such tools been material, yet
their efficacy is in no way diminished? This brings us back to the work of Jacques
Derrida, one of Bhabha's principal theoretical touchstones and perhaps the source of some
of his spatial abstractions, although Bhabha does not share Derrida's awareness of the
"limits of spatial logic as it relates to intelligibility." Yet attempts to
interrogate such limits present their own difficulty. As Barbara Johnson notes: "some
measure of the difficulties involved may be derived from the fact that 'to break out of'
is still a spatial metaphor" (Johnson 1979: 481). Derrida's anxiety about spatial
metaphors may be traced in Lefebvre's observation that "an abstract form . . . can
easily be perceived as atemporal and therefore non-produced--that is, metaphysical"
(Lefebvre 1991: 68). An obvious anathema to Derrida, but is this the case with Bhabha?
- Bhabha adopts/adapts two key concepts from Derrida: différance and the
'supplement.' He on occasion uses others, although they are generally subordinated to
these two which are crucial in the formulation of his discursive spaces. Accordingly, it
is worth exploring in some detail Bhabha's own explanation for their deployment in his
work. First différance[3]:
It unsettles any simplistic polarities or binarisms in identifying the exercise of
power--Self/Other--and erases the analogical dimension in the articulation of sexual
difference. It is empty of that depth of verticality that creates a totemic resemblance of
form and content (Abgrund) ceaselessly renewed and replenished by the groundspring
of history . . . [It] is nothing in itself; and it is this structure of difference
that produces the the hybridity of race and sexuality in the postcolonial discourse.
(Bhabha 1994: 53)
Bhabha seems to suggest here that history is not made or lived as a temporal process in
material space, but as the fluctuation of meaning that characterises the signifier's
displacement along the chain of signification. This can be recognised as a temporal
process yet history, in this formulation, must be analogous to the deferral of absolute
signification. Since the deferral is limitless, or at best circular, history itself can
never signify absolutely; have any absolute meaning. Nor can it exist in any other form
than flux. This is where such abstractions betray their ambivalent political consequences.
For despite the rhetoric of movement and growth, nothing can happen within such a
conceptual frame other than endless difference and deferral. When applied to lived,
material experience, the model becomes moribund and potentially fascistic in its
structural rigidity. Analogous to what Lefebvre describes as fascism's fascination with
the façade and its apparent solidity (Lefebvre 1991: 275). Indeed, Bhabha drifts
perilously close to what Walter Benjamin warned is fascism's aestheticisation of politics
(Benjamin 1970). What he seems to propose is that his "structure of difference"
is immutable and, by implication, the experiential space to which he applies it equally
unchangeable. All that is possible is a politics of positionality and, hence, struggle for
power over the mechanisms of domination. As Adorno and Horkheimer--again with astonishing
prescience--noted long ago, "There is no longer any available form of linguistic
expression which has not tended toward accommodation to dominant currents of thought; and
what a devalued language does not do automatically is proficiently executed by societal
mechanisms" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1989: xii).
- One can see the reason for his reluctance to countenance any form of historical
materialism, since it would expose the paucity and, no doubt unintended, political
consequences behind his conceptual frame. "When we evoke 'time'" writes Henri
Lefebvre, "we must immediately say what it is that moves or changes therein. Space
considered in isolation is an empty abstraction; likewise energy and time" (Lefebvre
1991: 12). To talk of a "groundspring of history" within such a frame is mere
gesturism, since history has been hollowed to leave only a metaphorical shell that deploys
the language of "renewal" and "replenishment." Yet this discursive
space reduces its transformative energy to a hermeneutic difference and sterile deferral
of change/meaning. The only energy that can fuel activity in this space is that brought by
the theorist by whom it is dominated. As I have already noted, it is impossible to discern
any real difference between this discursive strategy and that of colonial discourse.
- The problem with this model is not restricted to temporality, but also sexual and racial
difference. There is of course a superficial seductiveness to Bhabha's use of this
linguistic metaphor for those who experience the yoke of domination most acutely. If the
structure is immutable, but its apex occupied by the Western, male, white colonial
subject, oppression would be overcome simply by a discursively disabling/displanting it.
However, whilst Bhabha castigates Western theoretical dabbling with difference for its own
institutional purposes, within a "certain cultural space . . . a form of theoretical
knowledge that deconstructs the epistemological 'edge' of the West" (Bhabha 1994:
31). What does Bhabha's own strategy achieve? The epistemological structure remains,
merely suffering a change of overseer. The structure that produces and inscribes
difference would simply produce another abjected other, whereas the challenge of a
progressive criticism should be to tackle the process of abjection itself. There is within
this model no place for flexible subjectivities, no place for the hybridity that Bhabha
claims. Only permanent differences and deferral as each new dominating alignment is
displaced in turn, which is the only movement guaranteed by such a conceptual structure
imposed over experiential space. This is to miss a lesson expounded by Michel Foucault:
that the overthrow of a power apparatus leaving its disciplinary mechanisms intact, fails
in its revolutionary intent (Foucault 1980).
- This brings us to the 'supplement':
What takes (the) place, in Derrida's supplementary sense, is the
disembodied evil eye the subaltern instance, that wreaks its revenge by circulating, without
being seen. It across the boundaries of master and slave; it opens up a space in-between
. . . the Southern Hemisphere of slavery and the Northern Hemisphere of diaspora and
migration, which then become uncannily doubled in the fantasmic scenario of the political
unconscious. (Bhabha 1994: 55)
- Again we can see here the insistence on deferred meaning represented by another
expression that implies movement--circulation--without temporal progress. An absent,
emptied history. Bhabha writes elsewhere that his deployment of such temporalised
metaphors implies a "passage" that disrupts the linear history of Western
hegemony in a form of "postcolonial time-lag" (Bhabha 1994: 253). He quite
rightly attacks the Enlightenment notion of progess, recognising its complicity with
colonialism. Thence the 'time-lag' reminds 'Western history' of its own discontinuous
anterior of colonial aggression. This is all very well, but 'progress' and 'history' are
not synonymous terms. That is what Western ideologies present as 'truth'. In a surprising
way Bhabha seems to accept this ideological formulation--that progress is Western
history--and bases his own critique on an oppositional anti-history. The concept of
history itself must be undone rather than "the myth of progress" that
colonialism conjoined with it. What this leaves for the postcolonial subject, is an
enunciatory position which volunteers the self-effacement of historical
specificity--"circulating without being seen." As with the
"structure of difference" this leaves the Western discursive
field--progress/history--intact. All that seems to be achieved is the
evacuation/abandonment of the postcolonial subject/theorist from that structure into an
indeterminate space 'in-between.' What Bhabha might call after Fanon a "zone of
occult instability" (Fanon 1967: 182-3). Yet this is not a place of dwelling, it
seems, but rather one of self-exile.
- To return to the 'supplement', this certainly provides Bhabha's escape route. He quotes
Gasché to emphasise the positive reading he desires: "supplements . . . are
pluses that compensate for a minus in the origin" (Bhabha 1994: 155 / Gasché
1986: 211). Clearly, he envisions the postcolonial subject/theorist positively abandoning
the 'minus' of the colonial ship, thence disrupting its balance by eliding the validation
given by the binary self/other that the 'colonised subject' completes. However, Derrida's
use of 'supplementarity' is as a critical tool to describe a condition of language and the
Western philosophical tradition, not a positive path of self-empowerment.[4] The function of the 'supplement' for Derrida does not lead to an
enabling "third space" (Bhabha 1994: 37ff), but is symptomatic of that action of
language which perpetuates Western metaphysics. "One cannot determine the
centre" observes Derrida, "and exhaust totalisation because the sign which
replaces the centre, which supplements it, taking the centre's place in its absence--this
sign is added, occurs as a surplus or as a supplement" (Derrida 1992: 119).
Thence the supplement stands in for the centre that closes off play, stands in for the
metaphysical centre that exists simultaneously both within and without the text. What
Bhabha relies on in his adoption of this concept is Derrida's insistence that it must
ultimately fail to do so under the weight of the contradiction it supports: a centre both
inside and outside the text. Yet the point that he misses is that the invisibility of the
contradiction is ensured by extra-textual, material, mechanisms of power.
- For Bhabha this supplement is the "subaltern instance", standing in, or out,
as a centre that delimits the play of difference. Just as with his deployment of différance,
the theoretical movement that is intended to create the "ambivalent space" (for
Western discourse) of subaltern enunciation (Bhabha 1994: 37), merely reproduces the
discursive structure of Western colonial domination. But worse here, the supplement which
closes off play--the possibility of hybrid significations--is not the notion of God or
universalist Enlightenment progress, but the "subaltern instance" itself.
Bhabha's use of supplement is not the master key (un passe-partout) of
deconstruction, but the closed door of totalising metaphysical abstraction. Precisely what
he purports to unravel.
- It is this tendency towards totalisation, even as he denies the universalism of Western
theorisation, which invites repressive political consequences. Further, Bhabha's language
of 'circulation'--abstract spaces of exchange, an ideological structure that operates
"without being seen" (Bhabha 1994: 55)--is redolent of the circulation of
capital itself: capital is always in a state of 'in-between.' A capitalism that created
the conditions for colonialism here finds its 'late' refinement: subjectivity--or more
specifically the postcolonial instance/subject/theorist--is commodified in a moment of
infinite exchange and 'translation.' Indeed, as Adorno and Horkheimer observe, we have
reached a state "in which thought inevitably becomes a commodity, and language the
means of promoting that commodity" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1989: xi-xii). This brings
us back to Bhabha's attack on Jameson's materialism. One might begin to recognise the
political unconscious of his own work in this observation from Jameson's essay
"Cognitive Mapping":
. . . a certain unifying and totalising force is presupposed here--although it is not
the Hegelian Absolute Spirit, nor the party, nor Stalin, but simply capital itself . . .
It is at least certain that the notion of capital stands or falls with the notion of some
unified logic of this social system itself [and the spaces generated by it], that is to
say in stigmatised . . . that both are irrecoverably totalising concepts. (Jameson 1988:
348)
- If one of the consequences of Bhabha's adaptation of Derridean techniques is the
reduction of subaltern subjectivity into commodified 'translation' across a totalising
discursive space structured by capital, what of his more direct uses of Freud and Lacan?
Bhabha utilises Lacan's notion of the Imaginary which forms in the subject during the
formative mirror phase. His intent is to claim that this moment is analogous to the
"scopic space" of colonial surveillance (Bhabha 1994: 76-7). Specifically, he
draws a comparison between the colonist's construction of the colonial other as a
simulacrum of 'himself' yet marked by a disjunctive difference: "white but not
quite" (Bhabha 1994: 86). In this "scopic space," the idealised self-image
of the mirror stage is inscribed and marked as other; fearful and different it threatens
to undermine the fiction of the narcissistic unified subject--the imaginary reflection of
the consciousness. Certainly, Lacan (and Freud before him) are creating an elaborate
spatial metaphor to present their own theories "by materialising the interior of the
psyche." Kirby continues: "[Freud] studied the psyche as an interior space,
seeing is not as solid or object, but as an open bounded environment occupied by warring
factions" (Kirby 1996: 77).
- As a mode of explication, the metaphor works well. This interior space is not preceding
the material subject as such; theoretical space is not producing a material space, to
return to the terms of Lefebvre's critique (Lefebvre 1974: 6). At least, not
intentionally. Indeed, Lacan especially shared Derrida's concern over spatial abstractions
by seeking to "displace the Euclidean model of understanding (comprehension, for
example, means spatial inclusion) by inventing a 'new geometry' by means of the logic of
knots" (Johnson 1979: 481). However, Bhabha takes Lacan's abstraction, tears it from
its theoretical context and then attempts to redefine a material relationship. That is,
the aggression of colonial space and the master/slave binary this involves is displaced
again into one of Bhabha's 'in-betweens.' The discursive benefits of such a conceptual
manoeuvre is that Bhabha can re-read this relationship as in some way auto-resistive. That
is, resistance is inherent to the theoretical structure that he imports into the complex
relationship between coloniser and Westernised 'native.' A colonial identity that is
"played out . . . in the face and space of this disruption and threat from the
heterogeneity of other positions" (Bhabha 1994: 77).
- Yet once again, whilst this has clear discursive benefits, one cannot escape the
conclusion that the horror and sheer injustice of the original, lived experience has been
somehow lost in an indefinable, unlocatable abstract textual space. The implication seems
to be that what is being displaced is some sort of discursive guilt, a desire to overcome
or de-stigmatise the complicity of Bhabha's own writing with Western discourse. I want to
be clear here about what I am criticising. As a white, male, Western academic writing from
the postcoloniality of a formerly imperial country, I am hardly free from possible charges
of guilt displacement. Such disabling charges can only be levied by those intent on
marginalising radical postcolonial theorists and writers. That is not my intent here. What
I am focusing on here, is the need Bhabha seems to feel to do this through the maintenance
of what is, effectively, the discursive vestiges of colonial mechanisms of power: Western
academic discourse. Yet even here I must qualify my own position to pin down exactly the
angle of my critique, otherwise I am at risk of reproducing the somewhat reactionary
politics into which Bhabha's anti-materialist approach unfortunately drifts--or, rather,
never seems to escape.
- I am in agreement with Bhabha's view that theory and politics are inseparable. The
illusion of separation is the tendency of Western discourse to ideologically naturalise
itself as universalistic truth. Likewise, one might incorporate the equally illusionary
boundaries between history and culture. Where he and I must part company, however, is
located in the following statement:
Is our only way out of such dualism the espousal of an implacable oppositionality or
the invention of an originary counter-myth of radical purity? Must the project of our
liberationist aesthetics be forever part of a totalising Utopian of Being and History
seeks to transcend the contradictions and ambivalences that constitute the very structure
of human subjectivity and its systems of cultural representation. (Bhabha 1994: 19)
This passage resonates with Foucault's critique of Western epistemology, and the
oppositional structures that appear to be complicit with it: 'the logic of contradiction'
(Foucault 1980). And much like Young's more explicit stance, it is an attack on the
principal formulation of Western political and theoretical radicalism: Marxism. This is
not to suggest that Marxism should eschew critical engagement with its fundamental tenets,
but Bhabha's (and Young's) outright hostility seems to preclude them form considering
materialist analysis. The premise of such an epistemology, observes Lefebvre, is to
"transfer onto the level of discourse, of language per se--i.e. the level of
mental space--a large proportion of the attributes and 'properties' of what is actually
social space" (Lefebvre 1991: 7). Social space becomes 'unlived,' ahistorical and
apolitical at best, conservative at worst. As my introduction suggested, it is necessary
to recognise that Marxism needs to develop away from its totalising inheritance from
Western epistemology. Yet in seeking to reject material opposition, one runs the risk of
complicity or, worse, self-effacement. Even Young recognises this difficulty: "The
only way to side-step these alternatives seems to be to reject the other altogether and
become the same" (Young 1990: 6).
- This appears to be the source of both Bhabha's theoretical play and his discursive need
to displace an anxiety of complicity into blacked-out spatial abstractions that just
cannot be located, or relocated, and dissipate/disappear as they are approached. Young's
'side-step' has its risks as Bhabha demonstrates. By only opposing those who hold the
reins of power without simultaneously attempting to dismantle the mechanisms of power
which gives the Western subject its power (here Western ontology and epistemology),
results in the repetition of those power structures and that subjectivity: "to become
the same.' In other words, presenting back to that subjectivity an untroubled, secure
mirror-image of unified selfhood that Bhabha failed to destabilise through Lacanian
psychoanalysis.
- Alternatively, one side steps into a non-corporeal abstract space conjured from
language; to simply disappear or to shout one's opposition from a sideline that provides
an illusion of security and empowerment but no direct participation: i.e. beyond 'play.'
Meanwhile, the physical atrocities of colonialism and late/global capitalism continue. It
is a sobering reflection that however many abstract spatial boltholes are
(con)textualised, such discursive practices would not prevent one Falklands War enabled by
the persisting mechanisms of British colonialism (to which the Irish can attest). Nor a
Gulf War conducted with lethal vigour whilst Global Capitalism (and U.S. economic
imperialism) was in periodic crisis and supported, in part, by no few formerly colonised
nations and individuals.[5] It is not enough to discursively
displace or deny textual space to the Western subject. The mechanisms of power that exist
in experiential space must also be opposed. Otherwise différance merely operates as
an epistemological 'cat and mouse' chase, as the western subject continues to produce its
other and the realisation of that Other as a corporeal subject is deferred. To reiterate
Lefebvre's assertion: "To recognise space, to recognise what 'takes place' there and
what it is used for, is to resume the dialectic: analysis will reveal the contradictions
of space" (Lefebvre 1976: 17). There is still time and space, in fact an overwhelming
need, for a materialist critique.