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.
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