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Toward a Narrative Epistemology of the Postcolonial Predicament
Vivek Dhareshwar
Le Détour n’est ruse profitable que si le Retour le féconde: non pas retour au rêve d’origine, à l’Un immobile de l’Étre, mais retour au point d’intrication, dont on s’était détourné par force; c’est là qu’il faut à la fin mettre en oeuvre les composantes de la Relation, ou périr.
–Edouard Glissant [*]In order to clarify the relationship of theory with those procedures that produce it as well as those that are its objects of study, the most relevant way would be a storytelling discourse …. Stories slowly appear as a work of displacements, relating to a logic of metonymy. Is it not then time to recognize the theoretical legitimacy of narrative, which is then to be looked upon not as some ineradicable remnant (or a remnant still to be eradicated) but rather as a necessary form for a theory of practices? In this hypothesis, a narrative theory would be indissociable from any theory of practices, for it would be its precondition as well as its production.
–Michel de CerteauBut, all the same, the accumulation of dreams, projects, or notes must weigh upon what one writes in the present .
–Jacques Derrida
To pose the question of identity at the intersection of theory and narrative is to invent a zone, a threshold, which, belonging to neither, takes shape only in the critical negotiation between the two. This essay is concerned with the need for inventing an idiom for postcolonial identity; it attempts a negotiation between metropolitan theories and postcolonial narratives.
The problematic that frames the rather unsystematic reflections offered here is the political and epistemological relationship between theory and narrative, between theoretical identity and narrative identity. But this frame itself will be overlaid with, become an allegory of, or be inscribed into a whole range of issues: post-colonial self-fashioning and the limits of the postcolonial space in the First World; the politics of cultural descriptions and of self-descriptions; the tension between the epistemic authority of theory (its revisionary claims) and non- or pre-theoretical politics, the social identity of intellectuals (I will be concerned primarily with postcolonial intellectuals), and the role that theory plays in the elaboration of their affiliations; and lastly, the problems involved in self-positioning or self-implicating discourses. The problematic of identity, then, has no single description; one must approach it by showing the intersections between issues that may appear to be discrete. This essay is an attempt to draw a line through a cluster of dots; the line often breaks off to be taken up elsewhere. Narrative epistemology, which is neither a new discipline nor a new method, comes into being as an active and critical negotiation and mutual interruption of theory and narrative. In this process of negotiation and interruption, “links, discontinuities are established between problematics, questionings, places, memories decomposed and recomposed” (Glissant 117).
Theory and Narrative
The problematics that I am trying to pull together under the rather awkward (perhaps even oxymoronic sounding) name “narrative epistemology” have their provenance in the recent “turn toward narrative.” It is not possible here to outline the complex story of this “turn toward narrative”(Rorty xvi). Instead, let me discuss some of the heterogeneous theoretical and political impulses that have made such a “turn” both possible and desirable.
Drawing out the significance of Greimasian narrative semiotics, Fredric Jameson thinks that it “argues for something like the primacy of narrativity.” “Narrativity,” he goes on to explain,
… is here something a little more than a new object of study, or even a privileged, or the privileged, object of study; were this a question of philosophical or metaphysical propositions, the implication would be that of the primacy of narrative as a mode of thinking, or of a claim as to the profound narrativity of all thinking, including the apparently cognitive or abstract-specialized.
The reason for Jameson’s cautious formulation (“Were this a question of …”) is that it would not do to make narrative the basis of yet another foundationalism. However, to regard narrative as something more than an object of study is to complicate the relationship between theory and narrative. Instead of a simple opposition between theory and narrative, between figure and concept, Jameson argues for “a more complex dialectic between the narrative and the cognitive” (xi).
In this dialectic there is no absolute priority of the cognitive over the narrative, and vice versa: In the negotiation between the two, “the one is ceaselessly displaced by the other, until this last, become dominant in its turn, is ripe for its own inverse and reciprocal humiliation” (Jameson xiii). A difficulty remains, however. What gets left out in Jameson’s account of the apparently reciprocal transaction between theory and narrative is the epistemic authority of the metalanguage of theory. Jameson is aware of the problem but thinks that it resolves itself when we grasp the “twofold or amphibious reality” of ideology:
That “ideology” in the narrower sense is a mass of opinions, concepts, or pseudoconcepts, “worldviews,” “values,” and the like, is commonly accepted; that these vaguely specified conceptual entities also always have a range of narrative embodiments, that is, indeed, that they are all in one way or another buried narratives, may be less widely understood and may also open up a much wider range of exploration than the now well-worn conceptual dimension of the ideology concept. Yet it was not to replace the cognitive by the narrative that my proposal was made but rather to coordinate both by way of a definition that insisted on their necessary alternation: Ideology is then whatever in its very structure is susceptible of taking on a cognitive and a narrative form alternately. (xiii) [emphasis added]
In offering what seems to me a rich characterization of ideology, Jameson has simply shifted the problem onto another plane. I recognize the usefulness of this new conception of ideology for analyzing narrative texts. And, of course, most routine analysis of texts consists in rewriting (or, to use Jameson’s term, transcoding) the narrative text in the language of theory.
The problem of the metalanguage of theory arose, however, because the revalorized sense of narrative could not be accommodated within the Jamesonian view of the relationship between theory and narrative. In that view, theory is what unravels the “strategies of containment” operative in narratives, reveals the imaginary of narrative, rewrites (or transcodes) the character-systems or subject-positions mobilized in the narrative in terms of social positionings or social identities. A first step toward, if not reversing, at least destabilizing, this model would be to raise the possibility of a narrative unravelling of theoretical identities. To put it another way, how can one get at the “strategies of containment” operative in theory which determine its field of possibilities; how to grasp the social imaginary of theory that structures and orients the subject-position of those who identify with the theory? The trouble here, of course, is not that these questions cannot be asked of theory, but that the form in which they are posed open up an infinite regress. How else, then, might we conceive of a narrative unravelling of theoretical identity?
We need to think of the relationship between theory (or structure or morphology) and narrative other than as an alternation, other than as a version of the Wittgensteinian rabbit/duck puzzle. We (here I am speaking of the “ordinary consciousness”) inhabit both narrative space and theoretical space. Our identities are structured by the tension between the theoretical moment and the narrative movement. Roland Barthes, discussing Proust’s (and his own) search for a “third form” which would be neither theory nor narrative, explains this tension in terms of Jakobson’s celebrated distinction between metaphor and metonymy:
Metaphor sustains any discourse which asks: “What is it? What does it mean?”- -the real question of any Essay [which stands for theory here]. Metonymy, on the contrary, asks another question: “What can follow from what I say? What can be engendered by the episode I am telling?”; this is the Novel’s question. Jakobson cited the experiment conducted in a classroom, where schoolchildren were asked to react to the word hut; some said that a hut was like a cabin (metaphor), others that it had burned down(metonymy). Proust is a divided subject, like Jakobson’s class; he knows that each incident in life can give rise either to a commentary (an interpretation) or to an affabulation which produces or imagines the narrative before and after: to interpret is to take the Critical path, to argue theory (siding against Sainte-Beuve); to think incidents and impressions, to describe their developments, is on the contrary to weave a Narrative, however loosely, however gradually. (278-79)
In exploring Proust’s “hesitation’ between Essay and Novel, and in positing, if only as a hypothesis, a “third form” which would be neither Essay nor Novel, or both at once, Barthes is alerting us (and himself) to the reifying powers of critical language or what he elsewhere calls “figures of system.” Barthes is struck by the apparent paradox of even a “language-system of demystification, of criticism, which in principle aims at de-leeching language, itself becom[ing] a stickiness by which the militant subject becomes a (happy) parasite of a specific type of discourse” (353). Barthes’ examples of such systems are Marxism and psychoanalysis.
The same criticism, however, can be extended to what has now come to be called theory, for what Barthes is trying capture are certain operations of theoretical forms. Thus, Barthes suggests that we make an inventory of “figures of system” analogous to “figures of rhetoric.” These “figures of system,” he explains,
… would have the same function, from one system to the next (thus we would be dealing with a ‘form’): to assure the system in advance as to the answer one could make to its propositions; in other words, to integrate into its own code, into its own language, the resistances [my emphasis] to that code, to that language: to explain these resistances, according to one’s own system of explanation…. (353)
What Barthes offers us here is a precise formulation of the totalizing tendency of theoretical vocabulary. A theory tends to be totalizing not because–or not necessarily because–of the scope of its subject matter nor because of the structures that it deploys. It tends to be totalizing when it effects a reduction of all that resists it and recodes that resistance into its own language. Let, for the time being, narrative stand for what resists theory in this negotiation between theory and narrative.
The fact that the figures of system (whatever may be the system in question–Marxism, psychoanalysis, or deconstruction) have a tendency to totalize does not mean we should simply reject them; in fact, we cannot do without them, any more than we can do without “figures of rhetoric.” That is why I said earlier that it is not a matter of choosing between theoretical identity and narrative identity, for to do so would be to dissolve the tension between the theoretical moment and the narrative movement: The result would be aphasia. As Barbara Johnson reminds us:
What has gone unnoticed in theoretical discussion of Jakobson’s article is that behind the metaphor/metonymy distinction lies the much more serious distinction between speech and aphasia, between silence and the capacity to articulate one’s own voice. To privilege either metaphor [theory] or metonymy [narrative] is thus to run the risk of producing an increasingly aphasic critical discourse.(104)
Johnson is discussing Zora Neale Hurston’s attempt to “narrate both the appeal and injustice of universalization, in a voice that assumes and articulates its own, ever-differing self-difference” (emphasis mine). To conceive of identity as self-difference, to articulate one’s own voice not as an expression of self-identity but as self-difference, the narrative must come to terms with the appeal and injustice of universality, that is, with theory. Dominant culture institutes theory and a certain theoretical identity as a norm of universality which assigns difference as deviation from this norm, as nonparticipation in universality. But to claim a narrative identity is not simply to refuse this norm in favor of an acceptance of the identity of difference, but to come to terms with the “appeal,” “the seductions” of universality “through a progressive de-universalization”–a process that “can never, universally, be completed” (Johnson 171-72).
If in an epistemological sense there is no question of privileging one over the other, politically the relationship between narrative and theory thus turns out to be a complex process of contestation, convergence, and divergence. That this is the case becomes even more clear if we turn to the situation of contemporary theory. By “theory” I refer to the discursive/intellectual field that emerged in the late 1960’s and consolidated itself institutionally in the past two decades. [1]
There is, on the face of it, something paradoxical in characterizing theory as either universalizing or overtotalizing, since this theory emerged as a critique of the universalizing humanism of the West and of totalizing theories such as Marxism. But as I remarked previously in my discussion of Barthes, the paradox is only apparent. The figures of the new theory too have been totalizing, have been, that is, effecting a reduction of narrative and recoding the resistance to them in their own language. This has given rise to considerable unease or anxiety amongst feminists, minority theorists, and postcolonials–precisely those who were formerly excluded from the discourse of universality and who had hoped to use the de-universalizing thrust of theory to invent an idiom for identity, to produce knowledge that would be local and noncentralized; that would not, unlike a reductive humanism, fatally impose itself as the model for the subjects of knowledge.
The vocabulary and the argumentative strategies (in Barthes’ phrase “figures of the system”) that theory invented in order to critique the founding concepts of Western humanism have now tended to become foundational themselves. There is, of course, considerable pleasure and mastery in becoming, as Barthes puts it, the happy parasite of such discourse, in claiming, that is, an identity that fully coheres with the normative force of theory. But to claim such an identity is to really make, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, a storyline out of the figures of the system–for example, undecidability as the name for “woman” (Spivak, Between Feminism), decentered subjectivity as post-modern reality, dissemination as “immigritude” (my word for the whole narrative of displacement which has become a normative experience in metropolitan politics of cultural descriptions). To “naturalize” the figures of the system in this way is to attempt a reduction of narrative, understood here as the whole field of contingencies and historical coagulations that resist such reduction. On the other hand, one cannot–in the name of some ascetic anti- intellectualism–reject theory as such, since its figures and vocabularies have also enabled the formerly disempowered to invent a space from which to contest imposed descriptions.
We are confronting a problem here that has no straightforward theoretical resolution: namely, when is it legitimate to submit one’s beliefs, descriptions, practices to the revisionary claims of theory; when does that revisionary force become authoritarian and totalizing? For an initial clarification of the problem, let us turn to Edward Said’s seminal essay, “Traveling Theory.” In that essay Said proposes something like a chronotope of theory to map the trajectory of its travel in space and in time:
I am arguing … that we distinguish theory from critical consciousness by saying that the latter is a sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory, and this means that theory has to be grasped in the place and time out of which it emerges as part of that time, working in and for it, responding to it; then consequently, that first place can be measured against subsequent places where the theory turns up for use. The critical consciousness is the awareness of the differences between situations, awareness too of the fact that no system or theory exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported.
This mapping, Said goes on to suggest, would enable us to resist theory’s tendency to closure by putting it in tension with experiences that are discrepant with its prior aims and claims, its prior area of effectivity:
[C]ritical consciousness is awareness of the resistances to theory, reactions to it elicited by those concrete experiences or interpretations with which it is in conflict…. [I]t is the critic’s job to provide resistances to theory, to open it up to historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality that lie outside or just beyond the interpretive area necessarily designated in advance and thereafter circumscribed by every theory. (241-42) [emphasis added]
Looked at from the perspective of the relationship of the theorist to the theory he or she is using, from the perspective, in other words, of the location in theory, Said’s strategy of narrativizing he travel of theory raises a serious problem. Can one make sense of a “critical consciousness” somehow hovering above theory? Let me clarify lest this objection be mistaken for terminological squeamishness. Said’s strategy would pose no problems if we were dealing with the history of a theory that made no epistemic claims on us, whose problematics and normative presuppositions did not govern us–in short, if we were dealing with a dead theory. But if we are, so to speak, standing within theory and if our interrogation of it cannot be immune from its “theory-effect,” we cannot have recourse to a critical consciousness that remains outside of theory’s field of effectivity. So the task, which Said formulates so lucidly, of providing resistances to theory while remaining within its field of effectivity and using the power of its figures requires a different strategy. I have been setting it up as the negotiation between theory and narrative, between theoretical identity and narrative identity. Let me try to specify it further by explicitly addressing the problematic of postcolonial identity.
The traveling problems of contemporary theory have a special significance for postcolonial intellectuals who have traveled to the metropolis to see how their part of the world gets mapped. Despite the fact that theory has enabled the emergence of a postcolonial space in the intellectual field of the First World, there has been no significant attempt on the part of the metropolitan theorists to address the asymmetry, the “silent and incorporated disparity,” as Said puts it, “that persists in variety of forms” between the former colonies and the metropolises. Said formulates this asymmetry as: “They, the colonials, must always take us, the European conquerors, into account: for us, however, they are an episode we experienced, before we went on to other things” (58).
For Said, this asymmetry is reflected in the fact that there have been no full-scale studies of the effects of colonialism on metropolitan culture. What should be more disturbing, especially to postcolonial intellectuals working in the field of theory, is the fact that there has been no significant attempt to understand the effects of colonialism on every aspect of the social and cultural life of the former colonies. Without such an understanding, it is not clear what the prefix in postcolonial signifies, unless, of course, one takes it to indicate a chronological break, an empirical cut.
The task of making theory travel to postcolonial spaces (rather than confining oneself to “representing” the latter) thus requires an examination of the relationship between the object of theory and the political objectives of postcolonial intellectuals working within the field of theory. At a very abstract level, the issue has to do with the question: What is at stake for postcolonial intellectuals in the institution of theory? What sort of knowledges are “we” aiming to produce by participating in this First World institution? What does it mean for “us” to be located in the institution of theory, with its specific structuring of positions and address?
Western or First World theorists privilege their subject-positions unreflectively, for they do not (cannot?) theorize the background practices and the institutional authority that enables their theoretical productions, their “statements.” Postcolonials cannot help noticing the conditions of possibility of their theory. We do, however, insert ourselves in that discursive space, thereby assuming a subject-position that necessarily suppresses the questions we need to ask, the questions which, however vague or unarticulated they may be, led us in the first place to an encounter with metropolitan theories. How, then, to regain the history of those questions, to narrate the trajectory of that accidence? We need to probe and define our relationship to the place we come from, the place that we know all too well to have a history, a history from which we are trying, unwittingly or otherwise, to escape, but of which we are inescapably a part. The kind of political identity–which is inseparable from the kind of work we undertake–we seek to question, form, or make possible, is bound up with our positioning in the symbolic or propositional space of the institutions of the First World. To remain at a distance, to keep alive those other questions, is a difficult task, but one that remains to be carried out if the invention of postcolonial space is to remain the political horizon of our theoretical or intellectual work, if we are not to lose sight of, or render transparent, the opacities of the other spaces, the exigencies of the other temporalities. The issue is not merely or, even, not at all, one of theoretical distance or distance from theory. Rather, what is at stake is the possibility and necessity of an entirely different theoretical practice.
Postcolonial Self-Fashioning
One’s interpretation of a particular narrative (in the narrow sense) depends on the poetics of narrative one is employing. A structuralist/ post-structuralist poetics of a certain kind–for example, Greimasian or de Manian–would consider questions about narrative self-fashioning to be irrelevant or invalid. A Greimasian reading would be interested in constructing a model of the text to show how the various linguistic elements in it are interarticulated. A de Manian reading would show how the rhetoric of the text consistently undoes the thematic/constative claims of the text. But a strictly Greimasian or a strictly de Manian reading would rigorously exclude questions of agency or any question that, in the terms of their respective theories, involves considering extra- or nonlinguistic entities.
Questions regarding self-fashioning would, on the face of it, appear to be throwbacks to the now discredited concerns of humanist theories. I would claim that that is not necessarily the case. For, in raising issues like narrative self-fashioning, I am not trying to relate the narratives solely to the intentions of the author, nor am I concerned with explaining the narrative events by the biographical facts of the author. I am, however, interested in constructing a poetics of narrative that takes account of the agency of the author not to reduce the narrative to the intentions of the author but to insert the text and the author into the larger poesis of the culture itself. This does not involve positing a unified subject; on the contrary, the purpose is to explain the different subject- positions and their cultural logics. I do not wish to claim that such a task is necessary for all narratives. Narrative is not a homogeneous category. There is, in any case, no a priori way of discovering what questions it is useful to ask a given narrative or a cluster of narratives. The Greimasian logics and pragmatics of narrative and the de Manian insights into the rhetorics of literary and philosophical texts are formal theories that are applicable to any narrative (and, in the case of de Man, philosophical) texts. But they do not by themselves raise any substantive questions regarding the sociohistorical semiosis and poesis of texts. The post- structuralist attention to ecriture has certainly displaced the metaphysical and humanistic approaches to narratives. But it has not freed us from the obligation to rethink and reformulate questions of identity and power that are at the heart of cultural poesis and semiosis.
Narratives are now produced, circulated, and consumed within a cultural habitus and social space. Narratives are part of cultural poesis and social semiosis. Therefore, the social and cultural problematics are not simply reflected in them: They take part in the articulation of those problematics. One of the central problematics in the colonial/postcolonial context is that of self-fashioning. The literature–and other intellectual and cultural products–in the postcolonial social space is concerned with narrativizing the problematic of self-fashioning. But this problematic is not only an object of intellectual concern. For a postcolonial writer (or intellectual), the problematic of self-fashioning is not only an object of inquiry; it is at the same time a self-interrogation. And that is one of the reasons–I will come to the other related reasons in a moment–that the question of agency cannot be ignored.
To be a subject, as Lacan and Foucault have shown, is at the same time to undergo subjection. Being a colonial subject meant (means) being formed by what Edouard Glissant terms “la Relation” [2] –a term that designates the several ways in which the metropolitan culture dominates the colonies or the former colonies. The very abstractness of the term “la Relation” serves in a way to indicate the founding nature, as it were, of the asymmetries, their persistence and constant reproduction, between the two terms of the relation. In fact, the two terms cannot be thought of as relating to each other externally. The two terms do not refer to geographical entities; “la Relation” has its symbolic effectiveness, its force-field in the (post) colonial space. It is what structures the colonial habitus.
A Poetics of Detour
The interpellation of the colonial subject qua subject takes place within the colonial habitusc-the symbolic structures embedded in the colonial institutions and practices that subject the colonized to an internalization of the asymmetries, both material and ideological, between metropolis and colony. [3] It is not that a preformed subject is inserted into or subjected to “la Relation.” Rather, the subject-positions are the effects of “la Relation.” That is why one can speak of the colonial subject, his/her desire, as being turned towards the metropolitan gaze. The gaze describes and prescribes. It is, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, a command. But the command would not be a command without the desire to obey. The language of command and obedience, however, should not mislead us into seeing the structure of “la Relation” in terms of the master/slave dialectic. The two terms of “la Relation” are not to be conceived of as two distinct selves locked in a mortal combat. “La Relation” inheres in or subtends the subject-positions of the colonial subject, but even there not as two distinct moments or positions. I have discussed “la Relation” in very abstract terms, inevitably because, in a certain sense, the violence inherent in the (self-)constitution of the colonial subject is due to the abstract quality of the asymmetry. The “epistemic violence” involved in the constitution of the colonial subject as the self-consolidating Other of the West is an abstract violence. [4] Therefore, the identity achieved by colonial subjects often has the quality of an abstraction; it is the result of a process of dis-location, of detour. The experience of detour, of being forced to turn away, however, has its effects on the colonial subject’s relationship to his or her language; to the landscapes; to, in short, the whole local narratives that had embodied the colonial subject’s subjective space. To chart the experience of detour is to mark the disjunctive effects of the epistemic violence on the inventions of postcolonial identity. The work of postcolonial intellectuals has been a poetics (in the sense of making, doing, participating, saying) of detour, a constant negotiation with the structures of violence and violation.
There is a paradoxical sense in which one can see these structures of violence as having been enabling structures, especially for postcolonial intellectuals. Having been subjected to the theories and narratives of the West, the postcolonial intellectuals’ access–however limited–to the institutional and symbolic space of the metropolis has given them the means to deconstruct those theories and narratives. But this access–and the kind of work it has enabled–has turned out to be a further instance of the detour. For the frame of reference for colonial intellectuals has always been the metropolitan culture; intellectually, being colonized meant having to view themselves from the symbolic positions in the metropolis, whether or not they were actually located there. As Derek Walcott once put it:
The urge towards the metropolitan language was the same as political deference to its center, but the danger lay in confusing, even imitating the problems of the metropolis by pretensions to its power, its styles, its art, its ideas, and its concept of what we are. (Dream 27)
The situation has radically changed since Walcott wrote this in 1970. What has not changed are the institutional and discursive asymmetries between the metropolis and the former colonies. Even a discourse that claims to deconstruct the West’s constructions of the Other has to still circulate in the discursive space, of the West; it remains positioned in that discursive space and its problematics get defined by the structure of address available in that space.
The consequence of this intellectual detour–which is neither entirely voluntary nor entirely involuntary–has been that in the postcolonial space itself decolonization has come to seem, to adapt a phrase from Wilson Harris, more legendary than true. [5] To interrogate the identity of postcolonial intellectuals, then, is to ask: What sort of knowledges are they aiming to produce? How is this production tied to their location–geographic and symbolic?
Starting with some speculations regarding theories and narratives of self-fashioning in the colonial or postcolonial context, I have ended up with questions about the identity of postcolonial intellectuals. Along the way, my reflections, I hope, have made clear the connection–more or less contingent, more or less necessary–between theorizing or narrativizing identity and how that activity is part of what is being theorized or narrativized. What makes the connection– methodologically at least–more or less necessary or more or less contingent is that although one need not see such an activity as self-implicating or self-positioning, nevertheless it will be so. This essay can be seen as autobiographical only in that complicated sense. To say it is autobiographical is to open up or recognize a problematic, not to close it or explain it.
It is possible to theorize/narrativize “la Relation” in ways other than through questions of identity– for example, through social or cultural history, through analysis of popular culture, through institutional analysis, through political economy. And these ways are no less necessary. To confront “la Relation” through the question of identity or postcolonial self-fashioning, however, is not only to confront it at a level where it is most opaque, hidden, or elusive but also, more importantly, to find oneself in something of a predicament. If the production of colonial identity is marked by “la Relation,” how can one deconstruct it through theories that reiterate the detour set in motion by “la Relation”? The question becomes all the more pressing when one rejects any recourse to relativism or to essentialism. The problem here is not one of figuring out how to understand or preserve a pregiven “non-Western” cultural identity (“Indian” or “Caribbean” or “African”) while having to deploy “Western” theories. The very concept of “la Relation” designates a space that emerges as a result of what Gayatri Spivak calls “epistemic violence.” Or, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, “la Relation” designates a hybridized space (that is why earlier on we refused to understand it in terms of master/slave or self/other model). How, then, do we reformulate the question of identity? Or does the problem of identity simply disappear once one acknowledges the hybridity of colonial space? Is the problematic of identity, in other words, essentially tied to essentialism, such that it is only in need of antimetaphysical therapy?
The critique of essentialism that we associate with contemporary theory has been invaluable in clarifying the intellectual confusions of authenticity. There has been, however, something like an overkill in the process of articulating that critique. Or, rather, the overkill has come about because there really has been no systematic attempt to map the scope of the critique. Its force is considered to apply to all claims involving identity. Some theorists have expressed their unease about the way the critique of essentialism has tended to subvert the categories of resistance such as “women” and “race.” They have tried to salvage such categories by defending what they call “strategic essentialism.” [6] The problem with that concept is, of course, that it is unable to specify the difference between the strategic and nonstrategic use of essentialism. Whatever argument is going to justify strategic essentialism should be available to the nonstrategic version as well, unless one constructs a version of essentialism to which no one is likely to subscribe.
The foundationalist project of discovering what Richard Rorty calls “the final vocabulary” that tells us once and for all what we are, that project is indeed essentialist and needs to be deconstructed. However, as Rorty rightly cautions us: “To say that there is no such thing as intrinsic nature is not to say that the intrinsic nature of reality has turned out, surprisingly enough, to be extrinsic” (8). The critique of essentialism, it seems to me, has been interpreted as making both of the above claims. If the critique of essentialism did not imply some ideal of nonessentialist (non)identity (whatever that may be) or, at any rate, a nonessentialist way of being, it is not clear why anyone would want to be essentialist even for strategic reasons. The strategic essentialist subscribes in principle to the critique of essentialism and the unspecified and unspecifiable ideal that it posits but feels that to act on that ideal would mean deserting struggles of resistance organized around essentialist categories. Strategic essentialism turns out to be an awkward resolution of a false problem generated by the theorist’s attempt to use the vocabularies and figures of theory as foundational. It is this neofoundationalism that makes postcolonial theorists wary of any issues that involve questions of identity.
A Poetics of Re-turn?
The negotiation between metropolitan theory and postcolonial narrative is itself an instance of the detour that the postcolonials have been living, that has been their destiny. Speaking of his own “destiny,” while offering both a revaluation and a prospective of his own work, Jacques Derrida says, “But with destiny, which is a singular way of not being free, what interests me, precisely, is this intersection of chance and necessity, the ‘life line,’ the very language of one’s own life, even if it is never pure.” He claims that his involvement with philosophy has been a “detour” in his search for “something” which he calls “idiomatic writing” and which “literature accommodates more easily than philosophy.” The definition of “idiomatic writing” that Derrida goes on to offer is worth quoting in full, since it allows me to inscribe into it my own problematic of inventing an idiom for identity. So, Derrida on the meaning of “idiomatic”:
A property you cannot appropriate; it somehow marks you without belonging to you. It appears only to others, never to you … not the attributes of an “ego,” but rather, the accentuated flourish, that is, the musical flourish of your own most unreadable history. I’m not speaking about a style, but of an intersection of singularities, of manners of living, voices, writing, of what you carry with you, what you can never leave behind. What I write resembles, by my account, a dotted outline of a book to be written, in what I call–at least for me–the “old new language,” the most archaic and the newest, unheard of, and thereby at present unreadable…. Such a book would be quite another thing; nonetheless, it would bear some resemblance to this train of thought. In any case, it is an interminable remembering, still seeking its own form: it would be not only my story, but also that of the culture, of language, of families, and above all, of Algeria….(Derrida 73-74)
This passage is remarkable for at least two reasons. First, Derrida is attempting here to invent a space, indicate a direction, for raising the problematic of identity, when it had seemed that the whole deconstructive critique of self-presence, propriety, and “properness” made “identity” irredeemably essentialist. Second, I read this passage in the context of and as a response to the predicament that theory finds itself in–a predicament that Derrida himself has characterized as resulting “from the invention of the same and from the possible, from the invention that is always possible.” [7] In the essay from which I take this characterization, Derrida seeks to break out of this economy of the same by invoking “an entirely other that can no longer be confused with the God or Man of onto-theology or with any of the figures of the configuration (the subject, consciousness, the unconscious, the self, man or woman and so on)” (Reading 61). But Derrida had also sought to show how deconstruction could be inventive in the sociohistorical field. We were not told how the latter could come about, and the former–the invocation of the entirely Other–was a repetition of the figures or morphologies of deconstruction–an invention of the same. However, in his conception of an idiomatic writing as a story of intersecting singularities, of an identity that would be “mine” without belonging to me, we can glimpse a different way of staging the predicament and the way out of it.
The problematic of postcolonial identity, then, does not involve a search for essences. Nor does it involve a desire to escape the hybridization that is the result of the global process of “la Relation.” To raise the problematic of postcolonial self-fashioning, to fashion an idiom of postcolonial identity, is to initiate a poetics of what Glissant calls “retour” (re-turn). How do we articulate what this requires when we are still involved in the poetics of detour?
The question of postcolonial self-fashioning brings us to another spiral in the negotiation between theory and narrative. If a theory of narrative self-fashioning must begin with Stephen Greenblatt’s question, “Why would anyone submit to another’s narrative at all?” (237) could one propose that a narrative of theoretical identity or self-fashioning must begin with, Why would anyone submit to another’s theory at all? Both theory and narrative, as technologies of representation, are technologies of identity. [8] Both are involved in the process of description and redescription. If theory, in the philosophical sense, has been an attempt to find the “final vocabulary” that would tell us, once and for all, who we are, narrative is the whole process of self-fashioning or “self-creation” through which one “becomes autonomous by redescribing the sources of heteronomous descriptions” (Rorty 100). The sources of these heteronomous descriptions, Rorty suggests, could be either people or ideas. Proust, for example, freed himself from the authority figures he had encountered by redescribing and recontextualizing those figures and their descriptions of him. The antimetaphysicians such as Nietzsche or Heidegger were redescribing entities such as “Europe” and “the Enlightenment.” Both Proust and the antimetaphysicians were engaged in “replacing inherited with self-made contingencies.” Rorty, however, prefers the Proustian attempt to rearrange little contingencies and urges us to give up rearranging big things like “Europe.” For him, self-fashioning is, or should be, a private affair. This is not the place to criticize Rorty’s distinction between private and public. What I find useful in Rorty are his ideas of “redescription” and “contextualization” which are not tied to that distinction.
The distinction between private and public is hard to draw especially in those cases when the attempt to reinvent oneself by freeing oneself from other people’s narratives makes one realize that those narratives are powerful because they are institutionally embedded. [9] When V. S. Naipaul writes that as a schoolboy “I had no idea of history–it was hard to attach something as grand as history to our island” (143), he is attesting to the power of narrative–in this case, the power of History as the Metanarrative of the West. Postcolonials have yet to come to terms with all the implications of their subjection to that Narrative (which initiated their detour) even though the Metanarrative and the hegemonic power of the West that had made the Narrative stick are increasingly contested. In the intellectual field of the First World today, theory has come to stand for that contestation. Postcolonial intellectuals have a special interest in and a special affinity for theory, since the language of that theory allowed them to redescribe and recontextualize the hegemonic narratives of the West. If that affinity has come to seem problematic to me, it is not because the interests of theory are sutured to the economic and political interests of the West, but because the identification with the figures of theory seems to be preempting any inquiry into what it means to talk about postcolonial space.
I have been using the term “detour” to designate the sociohistorical experience of postcolonials. Detour can also be used as a privileged name for the whole movement of delay, relay, delegation, differance, discontinuity, dissemination, etc., which theory has deployed to undermine the metaphysics of presence or logocentrism. But to make the latter detour a storyline and thus to recuperate or recode the narrative of the former “detour” is to close off any inquiry into the effects of “la Relation” in the cultural institutional space of the former colonies. The West may indeed have contracted into the west; however, to confine theory to a mapping of that contraction is to refuse to theorize/narrativize not only the impasses but also the uncertain possibilities in the postcolonial space. So instead of celebrating the pleasures of finding themselves in the tropics of metropolitan theory by theoretically recuperating the narratives of their detour, postcolonial theorists must narrativize the dissonance of that detour, and out of that dissonance, outline a new theory, a new practice of theory that would initiate a poetics of re-turn, which will undoubtedly be as complex and ambiguous as the poetics of detour that the postcolonials have been living, narrating, and theorizing. For, without such a poetics, we are left with the question that Derek Walcott asks himself:
What if the lines I cast bulge into a book
that has caught nothing? Wasn’t it privilege
to have judged one’s work by the glare of greater minds,
though the spool of days that midsummer’s reel rewinds
Comes bobbling back with its question, its empty hook?(Midsummer 29)
Acknowledgments
Based on my presentation at the “Predicaments of Theory” conference, this is, in large part, an extract from the introductory chapter of my dissertation, “Detours: Theory, Narrative and the Inventions of Post-Colonial Identity.” I would like to thank James Clifford, Satish Deshpande and Mary E. John for their help and encouragement.
Notes
*Edouard Glissant, Le Discours Antillais (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981), 36. Selections from this important book have been recently translated as Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989). Where available, I have used Dash’s translation, except when the translation seemed misleading. This is the case with the passage quoted above which Dash translates: “Diversion in not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by reversion: not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish” (26). The choice of “diversion” and “reversion” instead of the obvious “detour” and “return” seems particularly unjustified given the dominant connotation of the first two in contemporary usage. And the rendering of the deliberately abstract concept “la Relation” by “creolization” is equally problematic. I hope the broader significance of these concepts will become clear in my use of them below. Back to main text
1. For a characterization of both the institution of theory and the predicament that it finds itself in, see my “The Predicament of Theory,” in Theory Between the Disciplines: Authority/Vision/Politics, ed. Martin Kreiswirth and Mark Cheetham (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, forthcoming, June 1990). Back to main text
2. Glissant never attempts to define this term. Without giving it a negative or positive connotation, he uses it to analyze the effects of colonialism on all aspects–linguistic, intersubjective, economic, artistic, etc.–of Martinique society. J. Michael Dash translates it sometimes as “creolization” and sometimes as “cross-cultural.” The latter term is clearly inadequate as it implies an exchange between cultures existing separately, whereas Glissant is trying to convey a process that is constitutive of the enunciation of cultural difference. Creolization, in the broader sense of cultural hybridity, is certainly valid in some contexts. But again, creolization is also one of the effects of “la Relation” that Glissant analyses. So it seems to me that there are good reasons to retain the abstractness of the term by translating it simply as “the Relation.” Back to main text
3. For a more detailed treatment, see my “Self-Fashioning, Colonial Habitus and Double Exclusion: V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men,” Criticism 1.31 (1989): 75-102. Back to main text
4. On “epistemic violence” (and the related notion “negotation with the structures of violence”), see Gayatri Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur,” Europe and Its Others, Vol. 2, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Essex: University of Essex Press, 1985); “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988). Back to main text
5. Discussing the detours of the radical intellectuals from the Caribbean (Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Frantz Fanon), Glissant notes: “Enfin, les intellectuels antillais ont mis à profit cette nécessité du Detour pour aller quelque part, c’est-à-dire lier en la circonstances la solution possible de l’insoluble a des résolutions pratiquées par d’autres peuples” (Le Discours Antillais, pp. 34-35). [Ultimately, Caribbean intellectuals have taken advantage of the necessity of detour to go somewhere: that is, in such circumstances, to link a possible solution of the insoluble to the resolution other people have achieved” (Caribbean Discourse, p. 23) (translation modified).] As his moving discussion of Fanon’s detour makes clear, Glissant is not simply deploring the detour of intellectuals. He is drawing out the consequences of detour even in cases where it has been productive, has, as he puts it, led us somewhere. “La parole poétique de Césaire, l’acte politique de Fanon nous ont menés quelque part, autorisant par détour que nous revenions au seul lieu où nos problem nous guettent” (p. 36). [“The poetic word of Césaire, the political act of Fanon, led us somewhere, authorizing by detour the return to the point where our problem lay in wait for us” (p. 25) (translation modified).] The poignancy and the urgency of Glissant’s discussion of these two Martinican intellectuals who have inspired anti- colonial struggles everywhere in the world derive from his sense that, as far as Martinique is concerned, his own “le discours du discours (le retour sur soi)” may have “come too late and that as a community we have lost the meaning of our own voice” (p. 12). Martinique still remains a department of France. Back to main text
6. The concept was introduced by Gayatri Spivak. She has addressed the problem most usefully in “Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Thesis Eleven 10/11 (1984/85): 184-86. Back to main text
7. Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” Reading de Man Reading, 60. I have discussed this essay and Derrida’s invocation of the Other in my “The Predicament of Theory.” Back to main text
8. The terminology is, of course, Foucauldian; however, I began to entertain the possibility of raising such a question after reading Teresa de Lauretis’ discussion of theory as a technology of gender in the title essay of her Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana Press, 1987) 19. Back to main text
9. As Hayden White puts it in his discussion of Jameson: “[T]he crucial problem from the perspective of political struggle is not whose story is the best or truest but who has the power to make his story stick as the one that others will choose to live by or in.” “Getting Out of History: Jameson’s Redemption of Narrative,” The Content of the Form 167. Back to main text
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