Page 220 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

208 IAIN CHAMBERS

political question that carries the name of the West. Put in these terms, this
represents a challenge to an institutional and psychic disposition which,
even after Nietzsche, after Freud, continues to insist on a ‘natural’, or
‘commonsensical’, set of distinctions between ‘fact’ and ‘fantasy’, between
what ‘actually happened’ and what is ‘constructed’ or construed. The
exposure of such pretensions, and the silent arrogance of its underlying
positivism, perhaps better reveals the deeper stakes involved in the diverse
political regimes of truth that are being contested along contemporary
critical divides. Here we are forced to focus sharply on the disposition of
truth that grounds and disciplines the vaguer critical gesturing towards
discussion of ‘totalities’, ‘cognitive mappings’, ‘master narratives’ and
‘epistemes’. For to contest the truth of ‘realism’ is to confute the idea that it
offers a transparent window which immediately reveals the world to my
inquisitive gaze. It suggests that what I see is ultimately what I desire and
have been taught to see: the reflection of my gaze, the embodiment of my
presence.
To delimit and locate the narcissism of this aggrandizing gesture, the
optic and vocal empires, the physical appropriation of the world, that laid
up ‘knowledge’ in this manner, means to query the inherited grammar of
an epistemology that presumes that the world commences with me, the
subject, and then proceeds outwards nominating and collating reality ‘in an
exploratory, necessarily exploitative way’. 7 This is to assume that I, the
subject, always come before language, before history. Such a ‘grammatical
fallacy’ (Nietzsche) fails to entertain the possibility that the subject comes
after language, in its wake, listening to the call of its possibilities. ‘What we
8
speak of, language, is always ahead of us.’ In the latter, anterior, sense of
history and language there lie the seeds of disruption. My coming after
language drastically removes the foundations for the accepted scenario of
linear time. The accumulation of objects by the individual subject that
contributes directly to the cultural capital of ‘progress’ is disrupted. In
displacing the presumed autonomy of the subject and its assumed teleology
of historical agency and political will, in this dispersal of the concepts with
which we have been taught to conceive of historical, political and cultural
‘reality’, not only is the confident liberal agenda of rational consensus
disrupted but also the very language of European identification
undermined.
To abandon the confident appropriation of meaning and representation,
and to acknowledge that the languages of nomination are neither neutral
nor transparent, can be particularly hard for the pragmatic formation of
Anglo-American empiricism to digest. That opening within the West
historically and culturally lies elsewhere. In the distinction between modern
analytical philosophy, with its insistence on the underlying logic of
language, and post-Nietzschean meditations on the metaphysical
opaqueness of ‘language as being and being as language’ (Heidegger) there