Page 166 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

160 CULTURAL STUDIES

That is, what the postmodern understanding of civil society cannot recognize is
the global effects of the reconstruction of social relations in post—‘essentialist’
terms (that is, ‘beyond’ the conflict between freedom and totalitarianism, as
articulated by the right, and capitalism and socialism as advanced by the left, and
between self-determination and national oppression as anti-colonial movements
insisted). In other words, the ‘beyond’ of left, right and center proposed, for
example, by Kobena Mercer (who claims that the ‘vocabulary of right, left and
center is no longer adequate’ (1992:424)) conflates the formulation of the social
in essentialist terms proposed by the right (dependent upon liberal humanist modes
of subjectivity) with the radical insistence upon addressing historically determined
conflicts over the production and distribution of resources by stigmatizing both as
essentialist. This aids in the construction of a new cultural and political center better
equipped to regulate global, transnational modes of capital accumulation.
Within this context, a series of recent books, which inquire into the stakes for
Jews and ‘Jewish discourse’ in emergent arenas of knowledge and politics like
identity politics, cultural studies, and postmodernism takes on some interest. The
current crisis in mainstream Jewish politics (largely an effect of the liberal self-
definition of this politics and its growing conservatism) has been anticipated by
recent discourses of dissent from an increasingly rigid orthodoxy: progressive
organizations like the New Jewish Agenda (which was recently accepted into the
American Congress of Presidents of Jewish organizations), and the Journal
Tikkun (founded in 1986) are now well prepared to stop carving a space at the
margins of American Jewish organizations and move toward the center. This
internalization of conflicts over ‘Jewishness’ enables a foregrounding of the
historicity of the ‘Jewish’ as a site of struggle. The question now is, will these
tendencies work to hold together an increasingly fragile and crisis-ridden center
(by producing a postmodern annex to the modern regime of Jewishness), or will
the accumulation of contradictions involved in the reorganization of the center
serve to produce a breach in the apparently seamless move toward a New World
Order governed by an economic rationality which renders ‘essentialized’
antagonisms obsolete? That the stakes involved are recognized by those poised to
exploit the post-essentialist regime in Israel/Palestine in the wake of the Israel-
PLO agreement can be seen from the following remarks of Steve Grossman,
president of AIPAC:
[I]t will be a tremendously exciting period. We face the prospect of an
explosion of investment in the entire region by both public and private
entities. If these changes in the peace process become reality, you’re going
to see unprecedented economic progress in that part of the world, in which
Israel will be at the center of the board. AIPAC is going to play a very central
role in that.
(Quoted in Besser, 1993:15)