Page 109 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

post-structuralist high theory has become an important, perhaps even
characteristic, feature of the contemporary First World radical
academy. Aijaz Ahmad, himself an Indian academic, has recently
argued very persuasively against this entire position as tending to
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substitute textualism for activism and nation for class. Moreover,
in Ahmad’s view, much of the intellectual legitimacy attaching to
post-colonial theory actually derives from its fundamental complicity
with the structures of social privilege enjoyed by both First and Third
World intellectuals and by Third World ruling classes. “The East”,
he wrily observes, “seems to have become, yet again, a career—even
for the ‘Oriental’ this time, and within the Occident too.” 102
Any commentary on these debates from a First World source is
open, by a roughly similar logic, to the accusation of its own
complicity in the profits of imperialism. But let me here hazard the
observation that such textualist politics as post-structuralism enjoins
do generally function much as Ahmad argues: so as to defer activism
and to bestow the spurious illusion of political radicalism on what is
in fact an almost entirely conventional academic activity. Doubtless,
the possibilities for activism are peculiarly circumscribed for a
Palestinian exile in New York. Doubtless, professors of literature are
professionally obliged to a preoccupation with problems of textuality,
and doubtless Edward Said or Gayatri Spivak are as entitled to their
profession as is Aijaz Ahmad to his. Doubtless, Said’s more popular
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writings attest to a more activist political intention than Ahmad
appears to allow. But whatever these particular qualifications, the
more general logic of post-structuralism does indeed seem to lead in
the direction to which Ahmad points. As Terry Eagleton has recently
observed: “Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of
theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ’68…blending the
euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia
of its aftermath”. 104
That this is so becomes particularly apparent from some of the
more recent appropriations of post-colonial theory by First World
intellectuals. These have increasingly been premised on the dubious
assumption that the settler societies of America and Australasia and
the formerly colonized societies of Africa and Asia can meaningfully
be assimilated to each other as in some sense analogously post-colonial.
Moreover, the category of the post-colonial has typically been expanded
to include not simply the post-independence period, but all writing

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