Page 178 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

166 LAWRENCE GROSSBERG

or effects outside of the determinations of particular contexts. Foucault’s
radical contextualism is built upon the same ground as Hall’s
conjuncturalism. (And it is significant that neither camp has quite figured
out how to produce a convincing local analysis.) At the same time, both
sides reject the deconstructionists’ dismissal of all essences or identities
(whether of contexts or elements) with its emphasis on polysemy and
undecidability, arguing instead that such moments of identity and
difference are both historically effective and contextually determined. To
deny that a structure is necessary or universal is not to deny its concrete
reality. Nor does it entail that there are no connections across contexts;
neither position embraces an absolute nominalism since the question of the
constitution of the relevant context or level of abstraction must itself be left
open. Both positions are concerned, therefore, less with questions of origin
and causality than with questions of effectivity, conditions of possibility,
and overdetermination. Power is located precisely in the struggle to forge
links, to direct the effective identity and relations of any practice, to
articulate the existence, meanings, effects and structures of practices which
are not guaranteed in advance.
Thus, for example, neither position is content to simply dismantle the
subject nor to see it as a simple fragmentary collection of determined
subject-positions. Although both begin by problematizing the claims of a
unified, stable and self-determining subject, they also recognize the
historical specificity and effectivity of such ‘subjects’. Rather than
merely dismantle these claims, they seek to account for them and to account,
as well, for the possibilities of alternative constructions of the subject (and
not merely for alternative subject-positions). In both camps, it apparently
does matter who is acting/speaking, and from where. Rather than a
dispersed subject, they argue for what we might describe as a migratory or
nomadic subject. This ‘post-humanistic’ subject does not exist with a
unified identity (even understood as an articulated hierarchical structure of
its various subject-positionings) that somehow manifests itself in every
practice. Rather, it is a subject that is constantly remade, reshaped as a
mobilely situated set of relations in a fluid context. The nomadic subject is
amoeba-like, struggling to win some space for itself in its local situation.
The subject itself has become a site of struggle, an ongoing site of
articulation with its own history, determinations and effect.
Finally both positions are also committed to the same epistemological
and political strategy: the truth of a theory can only be defined by its
ability to intervene into, to give us a different and perhaps better ability to
come to grips with, the relations that constitute its context. If neither
history nor texts speak their own truth, truth has to be won; and it is,
consequently, inseparable from relations of power. Similarly, the viability of
a political strategy can only be defined by its engagement with local
struggles against particular relations of power and domination. This means