Page 222 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies
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210 IAIN CHAMBERS
truth, and the appealing purity of transforming the once negative into a
positive counter-image, is to refuse the proposal of reducing the world to a
single centre of meaning and authority, whether ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’, black or
white. It is to attempt to learn to live without the edicts of a prescribed
homeland and to dwell in the traumatic region of Unheimlich (Freud,
Heidegger).
Denied the possibility of returning home to a unique house of truth we
are made painfully aware that there is no escape from the histories and
powers that disrupt and perturb such a desire. There is no exit, no cure.
Our only ‘choice is not to sublimate and not to negate the condition of
10
precariousness and crisis but to know it.’ This promotes the disquieting
disturbance of a perpetual interrogation that destabilizes us all. Re-citing
and re-siting our critical traditions and inheritances in the languages of
historical configuration, beyond the silent dream of pure alterity or the
theoretical redemption of an absolute truth, we are forced to speak and
reveal ourselves in a world that does not always and necessarily respect the
scriptural authority of the Word or of the West. Our histories become
vulnerable (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). In the passage from the visual
acknowledgement of the other’s face to the other’s voice, from my gaze to
the other’s locution, from the categorizing power of my look to the
disturbing intonation of the stranger’s body, I pass from a politics of sight
to one of listening in which what I hear exceeds the idea of the other in me. 11
Here, trying to decipher the opaque, the cartographer’s pen splutters into a
smudge and my reading is disabled. Here I sometimes catch in the silence
of language the breath of a body that is not my own. The text, language,
the world, is punctuated by this opening, is now lacerated by voices, bodies
and narratives that a previously unsuspecting reason can no longer dispose
of.
NOTES
1 See the two classic volumes by Raymond Williams: Culture and Society,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, and The Long Revolution,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
2 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’ in H.Foster (ed.), The
Anti-Aesthetic, Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983.
3 This potential had of course already been starkly brought home by Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, New
York: Herder & Herder, 1972.
4 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978.
5 Norman O. Brown, ‘Dionysus in 1990’, in Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse
and/ or Metamorphosis, Berkeley and Oxford: University of California,
1991, 190.