Page 219 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

WAITING ON THE END OF THE WORLD? 207

Japanese: …the temptation is great to rely on European ways of
representation and their concepts.
Inquirer: That temptation is reinforced by a process which I would
call the complete Europeanization of the earth and of man.
Martin Heidegger 6

The previous sentiments were formulated some time ago. To return to them
today, however, is still to return to a crisis in the languages of criticism,
now increasingly concentrated in the earlier claims of the West to represent
the rest. Once more there is both a shift and an accentuation. For it is again
to take up those journeys into language that have simultaneously located
there, in language itself, the essence of the West and its crisis. This is
encountered in the celebrated Nietzschean transvaluation of all values, in
the Heideggerean recovery of ‘being’, as well as, in an altogether more
resigned register, in the gloomy announcement of the exhaustion of
occidental energies. But before we take sides on this point, and thereby
blithely accept the story of the unwinding of the springs of western
metaphysics, perhaps we need to dwell a little longer among the questions
that this event, whether real or imagined, foregrounds. If the West is
undone, what forces and what circumstances have led to the dispersal of its
power? And what if the West has, in a strange, asymmetrical manner, also
become the ‘world’, what does this mean? For if the West is in decline there
have also unmistakably emerged from its shadows others who speak its
languages while simultaneously signalling their provenance elsewhere: both
in but not completely of the West, as C.L.R.James and Paul Gilroy point
out. These voices, along with those who have been historically defined as
its internal Other, called upon to represent the obscured and denied side of
occidental reason that resides in being a woman, a Jew, apparently flaunt a
disturbing excess. In this complex rendez-vous within the languages of the
West there emerges a supplement that becomes irreducible to the imperious
unity that its languages were once presumed to embody.
Such a transvaluation of language might persuade us then to think not so
much in terms of absolute rupture, contrastive division, breakdown and
overthrow, but rather in terms of radical reconfigurations, rewritings and
re-routings that lead to sharp, frequently dramatic, alterations in accent,
tone, cultural sense and the political accounting of time. In this act of
dispersal the European subject is potentially displaced within the languages
s/he is accustomed to employ. This may not mark the end of the ‘real’ but
perhaps inaugurates the termination of the epistemological pretensions that
once elevated western ‘realism’—whether in the camera lens, the
anthropological notebook, or literary, historical and sociological narratives
—to the role of providing a privileged access to truth. Glossing Nietzsche,
Michel Foucault once pointed out that it is not error, illusion, alienated
consciousness or ideology but the question of truth itself that is the central