Page 176 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

170 CULTURAL STUDIES

same time implying the impossibility of ever completely obliterating the former
set of relations. This leads to a postmodern politics of difference in which
subversion is understood in terms of the ‘disruption’ of dominant regimes of
meaning rather than dominant power or property relations, as becomes even clearer
in Alcalay’s claim that

[i]n a world governed by ‘indeterminacy and the code,’ words and sites
become whatever one invests in them. It is up to the reader, the ‘seer,’ to
declassify the material, renegotiate the signs and produce intelligible and
defensible meaning. Ideologies of power, on the other hand, assure secure
returns by suppressing, denying, or co-opting the ambiguities and particulars
of experience that stand in contradiction to the ideology.
(p. 59)

The lines of political struggle drawn here are not between classes and nations, but
rather between ‘ideologies of power’ (which classify, exclude, and suppress
experience), and the particulars of experience as rearticulated through narrativized
memory, an ‘excess’ which cannot be contained within the ideologies of power
which seek to control or extirpate it. This is why, for Alcalay, the accumulation
and concentration of antagonisms in the current Middle East situation can be
transformed into a rearticulated series of reciprocally sustaining differences
without any decisive actual resolution of the material oppositions along class and
national lines: that is, through the ‘complexification’ and dispersion of
antagonisms rather than through oppositional concentrations of social forces. In
fact, a cultural re-ordering of the Middle East of the type indicated in Alcalay’s
title would be possible only through a supersession of the Jew/Arab antagonism
by way of a class struggle which would unite Jewish (mostly of Arabic origin) and
Arab workers and which will be made possible by the regionalization of the Middle
East as a site of transnational capitalist exploitation (as Israeli élitists like Shimon
Peres hope for). According to the postmodern logic of Alcalay’s argument, though,
any such resolution (involving a revolution which would produce and mobilize
historically new collective agencies for the purpose of overthrowing a state) could
only be the result of the hegemony of one or another ‘ideology of power’ which
denies the particulars of experience in favor of the concepts that any revolutionary
movement requires. This is why, I would argue, Alcalay’s text cannot really enable
us to understand the contradictory possibilities that are emerging out of the
processes his text is responding to and to some degree accurately describing: the
crisis in the respective national projects which have defined the region since 1948,
as a result of their own internal class contradictions and the ongoing ‘liberalization’
of global economic, political and cultural relations (rather than the ‘exhaustion’ of
modernity). Alcalay’s argument, that is, tries to facilitate this process, to make it
‘smoother’ by displacing it on to cultural negotiations, rather than seize upon its
contradictions to advance a collective political project.