2.22.2006
Spectral Nationality (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
Pheng Cheah's Spectral Nationality is a philosophical history of the concept of freedom as conceived within organismic political bodies. The book is split into two parts. The first charts the roots of the organismic metaphor for community, sorting out misconceptions of it's beginings in German Romanticism (tainting it as part of the past of fascist nationalism) and rather, situates it in the trajectory of German Idealism. As opposed to the mechanistic metaphor for community immagined by Locke or Rousseau (think social contract) the organistic metaphor is a means for individual freedom within a bounded, organically functioning whole (think body metaphors here). He begins with Kant's transcendental freedom and culture (through Bildung) as the means of realizing that freedom - "Culture is a crucial agent for the realization of freedom because of its incarnational causality...This ability to transform and improve human nature through rational endeavor, which cannot be understood solely in terms of mechanical causality, implies that humanity possesses a degree of freedom from nature." (41) Oh by the way, the deal with freedom and the organistic is that anything mechanistic has to be put into motion by something outside itself, but the organism, as self-realizing, self-powering, self-incarnating (you get the idea), is obviously (or not so obviously as we shall see in Cheah's sparkling and stunningly awesome conclusion) more free. "All political forms that rely on the organismic metaphor are different models intended to provide the optimal institutional basis for the auto-causality of freedom, these forms have as their common substrate a dynamic that subordinates death and artiface to organic life. That which has the capacity to regenerate itself spontaneously lives forever in some form or other. Hence, that which is free is that which has eternal life." (59) Anyways, I should also mention that this book is about life and death, this is premised on the basic idea that freedom is the transcendence of finitude. Ok, so culture is the process of the transcendence of finitude (the bland idea here is like, a work of art living forever even if the artist is dead) but this can extend to the idea of the nation, right? Bildung is what creates culture (bildung being reason's auto-causality) Also, should mention Aristotilean distinctions between physis and techne because this will be important - you know, that techne must always be mimic of physis. Ok, but getting back to Kant, while Cheah acknowledges the importance of his contribution to the history of the organismic metaphor, he points out the weird temporal space produced by Kant's insistence on the organism as an end in itself and yet, this is totally screwed by the teleology of bildung/reason (at least, I think that is what it is screwed by). "We need the existence of organisms so that we can postulate the purposive nature as ground for actualizing our freedom from the mechanism of nature. But such a ground is thereby also a means towards a higher end that lies beyond it. Paradoxically, we need nature to be independent of us so that it can finally be subjected to us via the technic of judgement!" (106) Ok so what does this mean to the organismic metaphor? "The organismic metaphor of the social and political body attempts to ground human transcendence in the purposiveness of organic life as a phenomenal analouge of moral reason's spontaneous auto-causality. But life itself turns out to be the gift of an inhuman techne that exceeds the causality of human reason. This means that the organism's teleological time is contaminated at its origin by a certain otherness." (113)
Cheah then has to deal with Fichte and Hegel, especially since this is the tricky part of the organismic metaphor that he will later link to anti-colonial movements (I realized that I didn't mention that at the beginning - part of this whole argument is that anti-colonial movements rely on this metaphor, also, so he is tracing its roots here, but he is also going to say that this metaphor isn't working anymore, but I'll get to that in bit) as the "fact that their [Hegel and Fichte] organismic ideas can so easily become ghost of ideology or an instrument of the machine-state suggests that the rationality of life is constutively infected by death...The border between life and death wavers because life necassarily opens itself to an other, which it has to pass through and overcome in order to be self-originating." (117) (I'm sorry, but how awesome does all this sound?) So for Hegel, reason can only actualize itself through it's "passage through otherness." (143) Cheah also discusses Hegel's statist argument that "the people out to be defined by the state (159), however, as the states finitude becomes a problem (see the similar problem of teleology and Kant - time is always a problem here) "the organic state requires the supplementation of something other in order to be itself: Voltgeist." (170) That is the nationalization of Bildung. But the problem is that Voltgeist in its vagueness becomes "habitual obedience." (174) Ok, so then on to Marx. I didn't understand the Marx chapter as well as the others, but here goes. So old Marx, he determined "the nation form as a phantomatic ideology that impedes the formation of cosmopolitan proletarian consciousness from a double perspective." (180) But even in Marxist flavored decolonialization, we still get invocations of the nation - what gives? Cheah maintians that Marxist "materialist teleology is organismic...Marx figures the conflict between labor and capital as a struggle between the actual and living and the nonactual, dead, phantom, monstrous, or magical." (197) However, Cheah points out the problem of Marx's utopian (but that isn't the problem - the paradox and the resultant haunting is the problem - or the production, I guess), "confidence in the eventual return of all prostheses to humanity...simply put, the original possibility of alienation inheres in the incarnation process itself, which is thereby haunted." (207)
The book then moves to it's second part - the part about postcoloniality and the end of the organismic metaphor and the ghosts that haunt and undo it. He looks at the national bildungsromane of Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Ngugi wa Thiong'o - In their "attempts to narrate the nation, the interruption of organismic causality is indicated by an uncontrollable recurrence of ghosts and prosthesis that possess or invade the nation's proper organic body. A ghost is that which traverses the border between life and death. The wavering of organic life is quite literarlly the becoming-indeterminate of this border...What is ultimately broached is the realization of freedom itself, of freedom as the self-directed actualization of ideals and the transcendence of finitude. This haunting, which disrupts the teleological time of reason's self actualization, is a type of finitude that blocks transcendence through rational work." (247) He traces the organism in these author's novels - in Pramoedya he notes the difference of good spectrality ("the desacralizing incarnational magic of modern knowledge" (302) and bad spectrality ("a form of techne that cannot be converted and returned back to life"(299)) - however, there is always the possibility of good spectrality going bad - "the possibility of becoming ideology irreducibly marks the nation from within." (304) Further, the nation is constituted by this very possibility as it is its limit - death, finitude. "Life, or the national body, has come face to face with deth in the shape of the colonial state and finds its path blocked. But death is not mere obstacle that can be transcended, removed and subsumed by life. It is a radical finitude that contaminates the national organism from within as its constitutive possbility."(305) So then we have it: "Spectrality, which is the mutual haunting or constitutive interpenetration of nation and state - the opening-up of the living nation to the death-dealing state and vice versa - complicates this topography. It is also the irreducible possibility of the becoming-ideological of nationalism, where the nation becomes a mystification the state deploys in the service of global capital. This should not be understood as a rejection of the decolonizing nation, the uncompleted nationalist project as a vehicle of freedom, or the necessity of the ideal of freedom itself. What it does imply is that the idea of freedom needs to be fundamentally reinvented because the transcendence of finitude or the overcoming of death through collective rational work is enabled by something other to reason and life." (346)
The book ends with an epilogue integrating the ghost of Derrida and Derrida's concept of radical finitude (however, Derrida would not be salvaging the nation from this hauntology - that is Cheah's intervention) that has been with this text the entire way through and leads to what Cheah sees as what comes after (oh, but I am not saying telelogically after) this organismic conception of nation and freedom as transcendence of finitude: "The metaphor that has replaced the living organism as the most apposite figure for freedom today is that of the ghost. It is epitomized by the postcolonial nation, whose haunted life or susceptibility to a kind of death that cannot be unquivocally delimited and transcended suggests the need to reconceptualize freedom's relation to finitude." (383)
Keywords
Nationalism, Death, Life, Freedom, Organism, Philosophy, Haunting, Phantomatic, Substrate.
Other Thoughts
I have to start by saying that this is a spectacular book. I lurved it.For starters, it looks at reason but not in Homi Bhabha's sometimes ambivalence for ambivalence's sake alterity and productive productions of products or whatever, but looks at reason and its workings, its possibilities and even reason's desires, reason here becomes a kind of magic as opposed to reason opposed to magic. That is so awesome and so needed, I think. I have been thinking a lot of time and teleology and death and magic - well, to be honest, time and teleology and death are my bread and butter. I mean, think about it - my fields are about the body that fails and narrative. I've always had this feeling that it all came down to time (ok, this is going to be the corniest writing anyone ever dribbled out to the internets, so you have been warned). But anyway, that time is obviously bound up with narrative and the ways that we can understand our very lives is all here in this book and further, so is the positing of death as fundamental to understanding how time is structured, ok, not a revelation...BUT - what I LOVE is the tying of this in with the organic incorporation of the other. And the (im)possibility of the organism. So in a way, this book is totally the jump off (whoa) because it brings me to a point where I want to look at failure and this organismic failure and further, as opposed to a new conception of freedom vis a vis time, i want to use this unbounding of narrative brought by failure, through the encounter with alterity and the other, to find a new way of thinking the body. Ok, obviously, I could never do that because my brains are too small and I am most likely full of shit (always, always, I am full of shit) but seriously, when I grow up, I want to be like this book.
And ok, also, Cheah totally sums up my ethics of organ transplants and life in general in terms of not being an asshole (or not wanting to be called out on being asshole which is why I think everyone does everything) and failure and who gives a crap we are all going to die anyway but that is precisely why we do give a crap, and must, which is almost like something Kilgore Trout might say (or at least the aliens in Slaughter House 5 - so it goes) and why in the end, I do believe in magic:
"Since spectrality also sets teleological time in motion it is not a matter of rejecting the hope that freedom can be actualized through cultural work but of understanding the conditions of the (im)possibility of incarnation. The experience of radical finitude is practical experience that gives rise to imperativity and responsibility. Without or persistence in time, no incarnational work or action and, therefore, no political event, can take place. However, we can never be guaranteed of our own persistence in time beyond any given instant. In each and every moment, we live only in and through the possibility that in another instant, perhaps the next, we might die." (389)
"Because the incarnational process is always figured in organismic terms, this internal possibility of failure is also an interminable dying, haunting that cannot be exorcised." (177)
"This understanding of freedom as the transcendence of finitude and its association with organic life and culture needs to be reassessed today along with the analytical categories that organismic vitalism informs." (230)
"It suggests that any moment of negation necessarily contains within itself that which it negates because it is defined through the act of negation. This means that negation also contains within itself its own negation. The negation of the negation is thereby promised in the future." (315)
"Death is a limit that life can know and comprehend because it has posited this limit within itself, and in its knowing of this limit as its own limit, as a limit proper to or belonging to life, life thereby transcends this limit that is death." (330)
"Reason is the prophylactic secularized humanity deploys to protect itself from finitude." (333)
"Unlike teleology, which always involves a return to the self, messianic affirmation is the sheer loss of self through exposure to an alterity that cannot be anticipated. But this exposure to an alterity that cannot be anticipated. But this exposure to the absolutely other is always presupposed by any teleology for it is the gift of time."(390)
"Given the territorial state's tenacity, dismissing the nation's radical potential for transformatively mediating between the masses' needs and the state leads either to the ludicrous celebration of the transntional migrant's resistent hybridity, or the utopian characterization of subaltern politics as a subversive negativity that disrupts institutional practices. Hybrid resistance is only feasible for arriviste formerly colonial academics." (303)
ummm...Daaaaammmnnn.
Other QE Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Film and Media Studies)
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
2.17.2006
The World Next Door (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Srikanth, Rajini. The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
"This book grows out of the question, What is South Asian American writing and what insights can it offer us bout living in the world at this particular moment of tense geopolitics and interlinked economies?...[Reading] must be a just act - doing justice to the contexts from which the writing emerges and challenging one's imagination to encounter the texts with courage, humility, and daring." (1) As such, Srikanth's book is fundamentally concerned with the politics of reading as well as writing. However, it is the writings she examines to be South Asian American (America here means North America - the US and Canada) which displaces the reader and forces her to struggle with difference and displacement - in fact, this is one of the key criteria for her judgement of the texts she engages. "[This book] offers a very specific way of reading and thinking about texts - as works of art that challenge the rigid constructions of citizenship and overly narrow perspectives of location. My discussion seeks to examine the possibilities of a discourse that reconfigures prevailing trends of viewing the world writing the antipodal frameworks: national and transnational, individual and collective, insider and outsider." (5) She finds this to mode of heterogenous reading particularly productive and important to "understanding what it means to coexist in a world of disparate others." (22) The first analyses of the book are geographically determined as Srikanth takes on the idea of the over there in diaspora, transnationality, and citizenship. She focuses on Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost and Meena Alexander's poetry (and activism) to highlight the ways in which diasporic South Asian American literature complicates notions of American nationhood and belonging. In the next chapter, Srikanth paints in broad strokes the position of gender and sexuality in writings by Shani Mootoo, Ginu Kamani, Shyam Selvadurai (and others) really more to put these works out there as contestations/complications of the usual gender dynamics assumed of South Asian Americans and their cultural representations. Chapter four, titled "Writing What You're Not: Limits and Possibilities of the Insider Imperative" is probably the most interesting chapter in the book, both for the possibilities it offers and the questions it raises. In it, Srikanth looks at the work of writers who don't choose diasporic South Asians as their subjects and encourages these "imperfect crossings" as politically important. I liked her look at Vivek Bald's Taxi-vala /Auto-biography, because it examines failure, his failure to find himself through immersion in South Asian taxi driver's lives - in all this talk about struggle and ethical reading, it seems to me that one must confront failure to do so and what are the stakes of failing. I have to say, though, Srikanth's ethics of reading seems prone to failure (very much like Atticus telling Scout she needs to walk around in a person's shoes to understand their point of view in To Kill a Mockingbird - it's all very well and good, but Jim still gets shot) and gloominess because how can you ever be good enough to be this "just" reader? But anyway, she also looks at Pico Iyer's travel writing, Abraham Verghese's My Own Country, and Bharathi Mukherjee's The Holder of the World. It is a really interesting block of works because you wouldn't expect to see them in totally neat cutesy book on South Asian American lit - Srikanth is a very generous critic and I admire that, risky in that she takes authors (like Mukherjee) who might be dismissed as sucky auto-Orientalists or assimilationists and tries to really sit down with the text - not saving it, but just figuring out what is going on. That is pretty cool. I'll quote her ethics of reading in this section at length:
"The best that one could ask of a critical engagement with South Asian American literature is that South Asian Americans, both as writers and readers, resist the seductive comfort of self-representation and open up their imaginations to the complicated nature of belonging in or arriving at a certain destination. I want to reiterate that I'm not advocating a departure from material focused exclusively on the South Asian American experience. I'm interested in the productive tension between writing stories that take us to the edges of South Asian American communities where that experience enters the realms of other people's stories, lives, and communities. I see the tension as productive because I believe it liberates our imaginations to envision bold possibilities of living and participating in the civic spaces in which we make our homes." (196)
The final chapter of the book is a look at representations of America in South Asian American writing, with particularly interesting looks at Dalip Singh Saud's Congressman from India (1960) and Ved Mehta's Sound-Shadows in the New World (1985) as forgotten works of South Asian American lit studies because they don't fit neatly into the political goals of the current Ethnic Studies project. (Ok that was a mean thing to say, but hey, it's kinda true)
Keywords
America, Humility, Discursive, Reading, Cosmopolitan, Diaspora, Challenge, Comfort, Necessity.
Other Thoughts
This book makes me think about what's up with writing a book about South Asian American lit at this moment, and not in a post 9/11 sense, but because so much of her argument is about ethical reading and particularly ethical reading of the other (I mean, all the stuff about struggling to expose yourself to difference, etc.) and how that is predicated on a sorta Orientalized exposure that makes possible all this interaction with SAA lit - she talks about it, of course, but I wonder what it is like to read the invisible other (ok, this is like a tree falls in the forrest and no one is there to hear it...I don't think I am making any sense...moving on...)
Something else she says on partial readings irks me a bit: "I seek to uncover the possible reasons for partial readings and to suggest ways of recognizing, resisting, and perhaps overcoming them by engaging South Asian American writing within a web of interlocking events, phenomena, and attitudes that span a number of locations and historical periods." (16) So when can you ever do a complete reading? When isn't a reading partial?
Ok, also, a lot of the ethics of reading, the justness of having to displace oneself and "engage intimately with peoples in other lands, to step outside the boundaries of...national self and grasp other realities and other imperatives of living" seems really awesome to me, but at the same time, there is this idea in Srikanth's writing that this is acheived through some kind of rational detachment from the boundedness of the self to some irrational body (or something like a body that holds say, "Indianness" or "straightness") and I just don't buy that. What I do buy, I am not sure, but it isn't that. I mean, of course, she talks about the difference in irreconcilable, or at least so difficult to reconcile difference of the immigrant other, she who must work and everyday is that work of fitting in that is taken for granted by the dominant...but I wonder at priveleging that kind of work as the work the reader must do for the work of art. For example, she asks and answers of Pico Iyer's travel writing: "How can one be a responsible Global Soul, leading a life of ethical committment to humankind, even as one doesn't live long enough in any one place to understand the dimensions of local urgencies or the extent to which one's involvement in them affects the environmental, political, social, or economic landscape of the place? That he [Iyer] is an outsider everywhere is a status he accepts; that this perennial outsider-ness renders his observations weightless is not something he will concede - nor should he." (178) Ok, fine. But my question (or statement, I guess) is that we don't live long enough period. So what to do?
Other QE Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Hu-Dehart, Evelyn. Introduction: Asian American Formations in the Age of Globalization in Across the Pacific. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Rhadhakrishnan, R. Diasporic Mediations (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Singh, Amritjit and Schmidt, Peter (eds.) Postcolonial Theory and the United States (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Wong, Cynthia Sau-ling. Denationalization Reconsidered (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
2.14.2006
The Location of Culture (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge Classics, 2004.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture, is, as far as I can tell, a negotiation of the ethics of difference conceived within a relentlessly contested space and time of (post)modernity. I quote him at length from the Introduction of the book:
"Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. The 'right' to signify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege does not depend on the persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are 'in the minority." (3)
Here Bhabha sets up what will be the central conceits of his book, further chapters enunciating and re-enunciating the themes and questions of hybridity and the dismantling of binaries (or at least, the binary that must disavow the production of hybridity) , non-linear temporality, the writing of the minority/subaltern, difference and representation, and performativity - of course all that I just listed informs one another and loops back on itself. In this vein, we have a discussion of "unhomeliness" and the migrant in the intro, a characteristic of Bhabha's interest in the interstitual, the inbetween and to take that further along in the absence of intentionality (or is it hyperintentionality, who knows...), his near obsession with ambivalence. Chapter one is a bit defensive, a justification of theory (but I guess if you are Homi, this is sort of the necessary starting point. It's kind of sad, really, but not in a way that I feel bad for him, more for me for having to wade into the pity party, really) He says, "I want to take my stand on the shifting margins of cultural displacement - that confounds any profound or 'authentic' sense of 'national' culture or an 'organic' intellectual - and ask what the function of a committed theoretical perspective might be, once the cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world is taken as the paradigmatic place of departure." (31) Theoretical critique is the way to take that stand on the shifting margins, opening up "a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics." (37) This hybridity is acheived in the splitting of the enunciative subject, which affects the very knowability of cultural subjects, subject formation at that (and the conception of modernity as Bhabha discusses throughout the book). Chapter two deals with Fanon and the postcolonial as disruptive to this very conception of Western modernity as a struggle to see the invisible other (there is something here about realism and modernity, the inability to deal with the dark other that is neither what you see or what you get that results in profound colonial ambivalence). "Each time the encounter with identity occurs the point at which something exceeds the frame of the image, it eludes the eye, evacuates the self as site of identity and autonomy and - most important - leaves a resistance trace, a stain of the subject, a logical problem of being but with the discursive strategy of the moment of interrogation, a moment in which the demand for identifiction becomes, primarily, response to other questions of signification and desire, culture and politics." (71) Chapter three deals with ambivalence, colonial authority and the "processes of subjectification made possible through stereotypical discourse." (95) Bhabha productively and interestingly reads the stereotype along the lines of the fetish (this is pretty neat, I think) and the way colonial discourse enacts this through metaphoric/narcissistic and metonymic/aggressive positions. Then of course the famous (at least to me) Mimicry and Man chapter, where the idea of colonial narcissism and fear is exapanded upon in the face of the manufacture of white but not quite others. A short chapter on colonial writing is pretty neat, too - here Bhabha sorts out the inability of to sort out the colonized (and vice versa) and the resultant threat : "Both colonizer and colonized are in a process of miscognition where each point of identitification is always a partial and double repetition of the otherness of the self - democrat and despot, individual and servant, native and child. It is around the 'and' - that conjuction of infinite repetition - that the ambivalence of civil authority circulates as a 'colonial' signifier that is less than one and double." (139) The next chapter is a grand continuation of this thread of the ambivalence of colonial authority and the hybridity of the subaltern position. This chapter really ennunciates (can I even say that?) the issue of hybridity and the trouble it gives to linear time due to its iterstitulity and repetition: "Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discrimintory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcisstic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated bck upon the eye of power. For the colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent spce where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory - or, in my mixed metaphor, a negative transparency." (160) Bhabha next examines this colonial anxiety at hybridity and the kind of splitting that acts as a defence agaist it in a little more depth (see a quote in my other notes section).
Dissemination is a chapter which knits together several of the themes above - nation, hybridity, the crisis of modernity in the face of the (post)colonial, and is really a chapter on historical methodology, I think, and the other times and spaces that the types of amibalence, doubling, and hybridity Bhabha discusses calls for. As Bhabha asks, "Does the incommensurable act of living - so often dismissed as ethical or empirical - have its own ambivalent narrative, its own history of theory?" (219) The next chapter takes this methodological scrutiny to postmodernism and postcolonialism, also introduces Spivak's concept of the time-lag - "the temporal break in representation" (274) - which Bhabha seems to like a lot, and a reading of the last few pages of The Pleasure of the Text which I like a lot. The next chapter is Bhabha's completely crazy take on peasant insurgency which I can't even begin to talk about because it is about flying chapatis, but ok, I'll take a crack at it - it's about panic and rumor as more examples of this weird time space that interests him and also kinda a case study of peasant insurgency vis a vis his thinking on hybridity and in-between states and stuff. So I guess it works. The next chapter brings us back to issues of globality, modernity and migrants, hybridity and community (a direct reference to the closing chapters of Chatterjee's book who Bhabha always refers to with the descriptor phrase "the Indian 'subaltern' scholar") He says of community - "Community is the antagonist supplement of modernity: in the metropolitan space it is the territory of the minority; threatening the claims of civility; in the trasnational world it becomes the border-problem of the diasporic, the migrant, the refugee." (330) Finally (oh, finally, finally), the book ends with a discussion of race (with the attendent themes of ambivalence, delayed / nonlinear temporality, hybridity, of course) and a critique of Anderson and Foucault on the topic. To reiterate: "The postcolonial passage through modernity produces that form of repetition - the past as projective. The time-lag of postcolonial modernity moves forward, erasing that compliant past tethered to the myth of progress, ordered in the binarism of its cultural logic: past/present, inside/outside. This forward is neither teleological nor is it an endless slippage. It is the function of the lag to slow down the linear, progressive time of modernity to reveal it's 'gesture'..."(364) And where does this leave us? "What is crucial to such vision of the future is the belief that we must not merely change the narratives of our hisotries, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces, both human and historical." (367)
Keywords
Cultural Difference, Hybridity, Ambivalence, Other, Doubling, Time Lag, Disavowal.
Other Thoughts
"I do not mean, in any sense, to glorify margins and peripheries. However, I do want to mke graphic wht it means to survive, to produce, to labor and to create, within a world-system pointed in a direction away from you, your country or your people." (xi)
"Globalization, I want to suggest, must always begin at home. A just measure of global progress requires that we first evalute how globalizing nations deal with the 'difference within'-the problems of diversity and representations of minorities in the regional domain." (xv)
"Our nation-centered view of sovereign citizenship can only comprehend the predicament of minoritarian 'belonging' as a problem of ontology...the vernacular cosmopolitan takes the view that the commitment to 'right of difference in equality' as a process of constituting emergent groups and affiliations has less to do with the affirmtion or authentication of origins and 'identities,' and more to do with political practices and ethical choices." (xvii)
"It is in the emergence of the interstices - the overlap and displacement of difference - that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community, interest or cultural value are negotiated." (2)
"Cultural diversity is an epistemological object - culture as an object of empirical knowledge - whereas cultural difference is the proces of the enunciation of culture as 'knowledgable', authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification." (50)
"Splitting constitutes an intricate strategy of defence and differentiation in the colonial discourse. Two contridictory and independent attitudes inhabit the same place, one takes account of reality, the other is under the influence of instincts which detach the ego from reality. This results in the production of multiple and contradictory belief. The enunciatory moment of multiple belief is both a defence against the anxiety of difference and itself productive of differentiations. Splitting is then a form of enunciatory, intellectual uncertainty and anxiety that stems from the fact that disavowal is not merely a principal of negation or elision; it is a strategy for articulating contradictory and coeval statements of belief." (188)
I am interested in this whole ambivalence thing, but I am also kinda sick of it...but I want to think about it in relationship to failure, something Homeboy doesn't really do. As far as I can tell, anyways.
I should also say that there are a lot of literary readings in this book - you probably wouldn't get that from what I wrote above. A lot of discussion of Naipal, Rushdie, Morrison, and Conrad.
Other QE Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. (Film and Media Theory)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Said, Edward. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious (Film and Media Theory)
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Narrative)
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
2.08.2006
Skin (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
The best way to start this summary is with Benthien’s opening words: “This book examines the relationship among self-consciousness, subjectivity, and skin in literature, art, and science from the eighteenth century to the present. It deals with skin as the symbolic surface between the self and the world, a surface whose status has been undergoing a striking change over the last centuries. My central thesis is that the integument of the body has become an increasingly rigid boundary in spite of the fact that medicine has penetrated the skin and exposed the interior of the body.” (1) Benthien then sets out on writing the history of skin coming into its current meanings and currency in determining the subject, the body, self and other, etc. Her methodology is one of interdisciplinary literary studies situated on one object, skin, traced fragmentarily over time – this isn’t an attempt at a comprehensive history, it sort of takes up different ways skin is interpreted, read, styled, etc. She describes these as “thematic clusters.” (13) She begins with a chapter on a sorta historical etymology of the sign of skin and notes the contradiction between skin as the outer covering of the authentic self and skin as the metonymic sign of the self…umm…itself. After tracing this duality, Benthien moves to a chapter on penetration, charting the history of medieval surgery, anatomical illustration and dissection to reveal the move from a body conceived as porous to skin as “a final body boundary.” (37) Moving into greater specificity in the penetration of the skin, the next chapter deals with flaying (this book is really great), particularly examining the various visual representations of the flaying of Marsyas (and other penal flayings and flaying in medical history to flaying in Silence of the Lambs. I want to add that this awesome archive isn’t just cool in its diversity – it is great (as are most of her thematic clusters) because it is wonderful in thinking the production of knowledge of self and body, self and other. The next two chapters delve into the distinction between skin as the barrier to the soul, as obfuscation, etc. in a close reading of Balzac’s The Woman of Thirty, Kafka’s observations in his diaries on the grotesqueness of human faces, and Sylvia Plath’s writings. (I’m sorry that I’m just outlining chapters…but it is the best way I can think to summarize this book…) Next, as Benthien begins to look at race and gender, she discusses skin that bears markers of either immunity (myths of Achilles, etc.) in the case of men or women stained by birthmarks (Toni Morrison’s Sula). Her discussion of race is based on a history of the normalizing of white skin – “the juxtaposition of ‘white’ and ‘black,’ which, historically, is paradigmatic for all thinking about skin color: both biological-physiological as well as cultural-anthropological interpretation always revolves initially around the opposition between light and dark.” (145) After setting up this sorta literary anthropology of oppositional skin color, she looks at the work of African American writers (again, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, John Edgar Wideman) – “to show the extent to which African-American literature works through, reflects, and decodes what is considered the anthropology of physical differences. The associative field connected with the theories of skin color – ‘lightness’ and ‘darkness,’ the ‘coloring’ and ‘decoloring’ of the skin, transparency and nontransparency, thickness and insensitivity – is deconstructed, not least by applying exoticizing strategies to ‘white’ skin.” (183) Benthien then moves from the skin itself to the skin as sensory organ, exploring touch and its relationship to aesthetics – “the close relationship between perception and self-image, to the felt awareness of living in the body, of the boundaries of the body, and of ego identity.” (186) – ending with a close reading of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and a chapter on new media and the skin, mostly focused on the work of Stelarc. In Benthien’s conclusion, she cops to the fragmentary nature of her work, but states that the examples she works through and the themes she selects while maintaining her interdisciplinary lit crit methodology shows “narrative literature has retained an awareness of skin, giving it considerable space not only as a means of characterizing individuals physiognomically and pathognomically but also as a place of subjectivity and connection with the world.” (236)
Keywords
Skin, boundary, penetration, fragment, self/other, subject, connection, teletactilty, thickness/thinness, identity, individual, myth, language, literature. Open body/closed body.
Other Notes
I like this book a lot. There were a lot of problems (esp with the chapter on African American literature which was an argument basically just flipping the script of the previous chapter on colonial encounters constructing whiteness and blackness - I mean, I think the readings were really excellent, but the conclusion of the chapter was weak – I quoted it above), but on the whole, I thought it was great. I liked the weirdness, the jumbly examples that somehow worked together, the chapters on penetration and flaying were incredibly rich and interesting. But I guess I liked it because it is a neat jumping off point to think about such a metaphorically rich and important organ that I think is often neglected.
“It is only the experience of the body as a monad – concretized in the image of the skin as a wall – that then gives rise to the ecstasy of stepping out of the dermis.” (237)
Other QE Works Cited
Fehrer, Michael (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body. (History and Theory of the Body)
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. (History and Theory of the Body)
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies (History and Theory of the Body)
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. (History and Theory of the Body)
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. (History and Theory of the Body)
The Nation and Its Fragments (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Title
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
The Nation and Its Fragments begins with a discussion of Anderson’s Imagined Communities – while Chatterjee agrees with the main argument of Anderson’s work (the historical naturalization of the nation through forms of imagining it into existence), it is with the positing of a modular spread of the imagined nation from the West to the rest that this books takes issue. Chatterjee asks in his introductory title, Whose Imagined Community? and objects, “Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.” (5) The body of the rest of the book is a critical look at the history of nationalist movements in the subcontinent, focusing on examples from Bengal, with the argument that rather than a modular form imported from Europe at the birth of the nation in 1947 (post WW as Anderson suggests) “anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before its political battle with imperial power.” (6) The reason this is “pre-history” of nationalism is missed is precisely because of the conditions of understanding the nation solely through public, political action. In the case of the colonial nationalism, the domain of public and private are maintained as separate as a strategic anti-colonial move to assert the very possibility and necessity of the sovereign Indian nation. This is an outcome of the logic of colonial difference. Colonial rule is justified through the irreconcilable difference between the colonizer and the colonized – but as such, the project of modernity (predicated on the modern, democratic state) could never be realized. Further, in anti-colonial struggle, the colonized must accept the terms of modernity because of their struggle against domination. But reason and modernity (or the lack there of) were the very terms of colonial domination over the subcontinent – as such, difference had to ratified as positive, if not in the necessarily modern public sphere, at least in the superior, authentically “Indian” inner space of the nation. “Here [in colonized society] for the colonized to allow the intimate domain of the family to become amenable to the discursive regulations of the political domain inevitably meant a surrender of autonomy. The nationalist response was to constitute a new sphere of the private in a domain marked by cultural difference: the domain of the ‘national’ was defined as one that was different from the ‘Western.’ The new subjectivity that was constructed here was premised not on a conception of universal humanity, but rather on particularity and difference; the identity of the ‘national’ community as against other communities. In this aspect of the political domain, then, the hegemonic movement of nationalism was not to promote but rather, in a quite fundamental sense, to resist the sway of modern institutions of disciplinary power.” (75)
The book goes on to deal with the negotiations over this dualism in the imagining of the nation and further to “trace in their [elite and subaltern politics] mutually conditioned historicities the specific forms that have appeared, on the one hand, in the domain defined by the hegemonic project of nationalist modernity, and on the other, in the numerous fragmented resistances to that normalizing project.” (13) These fragmentary resistances and problems of normalization of nationalist modernity are discussed through readings of Bengali popular drama, a close examination of the Bengali middle class as agents of the project of nationalist modernity (and indeed, the architects of the division between home and world as preservation of a crucial cultural difference from the West), and the writing/imagining of a cohesive, “true” classical history as a rooted justification for independence. As Chatterjee recounts the majoritarian writing of this history, he mentions the fragments that have been left out, but nevertheless remain conspicuous in their absence – Muslims, women, lower castes, etc. The following chapters deal with these groups and the politic of their omission and/or simultaneous folding into the narrative of the cohesive nation. Chatterjee discusses women and the nation by speaking on both women’s education reform and the memoirs written by educated women themselves on their own relationship to their new position in the home and world. In speaking on the push for women’s education by nationalists, “the new patriarchy advocated by nationalism conferred upon women the honor of a new social responsibility, and by associating the task of female emancipation with the goal of sovereign nationhood, bound them to a new, and yet entirely legitimate subordination.” (130) The new nation, in negotiating its own forms of modernity, community, citizenship, etc. based on cultural difference (a condition of its postcoloniality) institutes new/old forms of subordination, policing, and exclusion. Chatterjee’s discussion of peasant insurgency draws much from Guha’s work on the same topic, but is mostly a call for a critique of the disciplinary strictures of history – “the task is to ground one’s historical consciousness in the immanent forms of social development that run through Indian history and from that standpoint to engage our colonial experience in a process of struggle – negating and superceding that experience by appropriating it on one’s own terms.” (168) In discussing caste, Chatterjee charts the changing ways caste signifies difference and is mediated/contested in the realm of the private or the realm of the state. Finally, in moving towards a discussion of capitalism and the modern nation-state, he discusses planning and the nation in terms of a Gramscian model of passive revolution being “the general framework of capitalist transition in societies where bourgeois hegemony has not been accomplished in the classical way.” – that is, in India. (212) He says, “ What I have tried to show is that the two processes – one of ‘rational’ planning and the other of ‘irrational’ politics – are inseparable parts of the very logic of this state that is conducting the passive revolution. The paradox in fact is that it is the very ‘irrationality’ of the political process which continually works to produce legitimacy for the rational exercise of the planner. While the planner thinks of his own practice as an instrument for resolving conflict, the political process uses planning itself as an instrument for producing consent for capital’s passive revolution.” (219)
This discussion of capital culminates in a really nice circling back to a discussion of community (not so much nation, but community) and the impossibility and yet irrepressible nature of community in the capitalist state. “The possibilities of opposition as well as encapsulation [of civil society and the state] arise because the concepts of the individual and the nation state both become embedded in a new grand narrative: the narrative of capital. This narrative of capital seeks to suppress that other narrative of community and produce in the course of its journey both the normalized individual and the modern regime of disciplinary power.” (234) Community is the problem and the solution, I guess, in a way. The anti-colonial nationalist stakes its claims on community, but in making it part of the inner outer thing, domesticates it into new forms of domination. But community, predicated on love, desire (yes, he uses these words – it’s not just my silliness creeping in) refuses – and at the same time, in dealing with this refusal, we get to the problems, I think, of multiculturalism, minoritarian struggles, etc. It’s really pretty awesome. I like this book a lot (this is really my other notes part – it is bleeding into my summary, just like all those fragments of the nation…) I definitely think the arguments are strongest in the chapters on women and the nation, less so in the caste (but this could be because I don’t know that much about the caste struggles he is talking about), and really fit into this critique of capitalism he brings out at the end of the book. Good stuff.
Keywords
Indian History, Nation, State, Inner, Outer, Home, World, Fragment, Struggle, Power Relation, Discourse, Critique, Modernity.
Other Notes
“What I attempt is instead a series of interventions in different disciplinary fields, localized and bound by their own historically produced rules of formation, but thematically connected to one another by their convergence upon the one most untheorized concept of the modern world – the nation.” (xi)
“History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity.” (5)
“Here lies the root of our postcolonial misery: not in our inability to think out new forms of the modern community but in our surrender to the old forms of the modern state. If the nation is an imagined community and if nations must also take the form of states, then our theoretical language must allow us to talk about community and state at the same time. I do not think our present theoretical language allows us to do this.” (11)
“Hegemonic power is always a combination of force and the persuasive self-evidence of ideology. To the extent that the persuasive apparatus of colonial ideology necessarily and invariably fails to match the requirements of justifying direct political domination, colonial rule is always marked by the palpable, indeed openly demonstrated, presence of physical force.” (56)
“The search for a postcolonial modernity has been tied, from its very birth, with its struggle against modernity.” (75)
“In the meantime, the struggle between community and capital, irreconcilable within this grand narrative, will continue. The forms of the modern state will be forced into the grid of determinate national identities. This will mean a substantialization of cultural differences, necessarily excluding ‘minorities’ those who would not conform to the chosen marks of nationality. The struggle between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nationalism will be played out all over again.” (238)
Other QE Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
