Page 106 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE

The politics of difference:
post-structuralism, post-colonialism
and multiculturalism

If a post-structuralist semiotics no longer assumes an epistemology of
truth, and can thereby no longer guarantee a science of demystification,
it does not therefore follow that it need necessarily become “apolitical”.
As we have seen, it can readily lead to a micro-politics of the kind
advocated by Bennett. Moreover, the more general post-structuralist
insistence on the indeterminate openness of meaning threatens to subvert
the pretensions to textual authority of all authoritarianisms, be they
epistemological, ethical or political. The result can be a politics of
demystification through relativization, its central achievement and
aspiration the discovery not of hidden truths, but of marginalized
inconsistencies within dominant discourses. Such pre-occupations have
proved especially pertinent to the emergence of new “psycho-semiotic”
feminisms, and to recent debates over multiculturalism and post-
colonialism. A detailed discussion of post-structuralist feminism must
await the chapter that follows. But let us here briefly examine some
of the issues involved in the debates over “post-colonialism” and
“multiculturalism”.
Both post-colonial and multi-cultural theories share in the
characteristically post-structuralist ambition to “decentre” the
dominant—white, metropolitan, European—culture. The central “post-
colonialist” argument, as advanced in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s
The Empire Writes Back, for example, or in the more recent collection
85
86
of essays edited by Adam and Tiffin, is that post-colonial culture
entails a revolt of the margin against the metropolis, the periphery
against the centre, by which all experience becomes “uncentred,
pluralistic and nefarious”. The post-colonial can thus be characterized
87
by a supposedly “inevitable tendency towards subversion”. Somewhat
88
analogously, multicultural theory very often invokes ethnic “difference”
as in itself a discursively and politically subversive category. Sneja
Gunew, for example, has argued that multiculturalism can
“deconstruct” the dominant unitary national narratives, that it can
become “a strategy which interrogates hegemonic unities”, and that
it might thereby establish the “basis for constructing ‘signifying
breakthroughs’, the pre-conditions for a revolutionary, non-repetitive,
history”. 89

97