The Postcolonial Aura

Third World Criticism In The Age Of Global Capitalism

Arif Dirlik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367318901
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429975585
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The essays in this volume range from questions of cultural self-representation in China to more general problems of reconceptualizing global relationships in response to contemporary changes. Although the new era of global capitalism calls for the remapping of global relations, such remapping must be informed both by a grasp of contemporary structures of economic, political, and cultural power and by memories of earlier radical visions of society. Without these two conditions, Arif Dirlik argues, the current preoccupation with Eurocentrism, ethnic diversity, and multiculturalism distract from issues of power that dominate global relations and that find expression in murderous ethnic conflicts. Dirlik offers multi-historicalism, which presupposes a historically grounded conception of cultural difference, seeks in different histories alternative visions of human society, and stresses divergent historical trajectories against a future colonized presently by an ideology of capital. Arguing that the operations of capital have brought the question of the local to the fore, he points to indigenism as a source of paradigms of social relations, and relationships to nature, to challenge the voracious developmentalism that undermines local welfare globally.

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Introduction: Postcoloniality and the Perspective of History

The essays below are contributions to the ongoing effort in contemporary cultural criticism to comprehend the reconfiguration of global relations under conditions of what might be described synoptically as global postmodernity. The essays examine from a diversity of perspectives problems in the new ideological formations, or the critiques of ideology, that have accompanied the economic, social, political and cultural remapping of the world, especially that part of the world that was encompassed earlier by the term Third World. An underlying premise of the essays, of which they may be viewed as demonstrations in a variety of locations, is the existence of a structural resonance between postmodernity as a historical condition generated by transformations in capitalism, and postmodernism as a way of speaking about that condition. Some of the essays trace this connection through an examination of ideological transformations in the Asia-Pacific region, which happens to be my area specialty, but is also important in its own right as a generator of postmodernity because of the crucial role it has come to play in the globalization of capitalism. The majority of the essays engage from this same perspective of a global capitalism the theoretical and ideological questions raised by contemporary reconceptualizations of global relations that are informed by a variety of postmodern perspectives; but especially the one offshoot of postmodernism that goes by the designation of postcolonialism.

In the preface to his collection of essays on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson writes that, “I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters are inquiries into the nature of … ‘postmodernist theory,’ or mere examples of it.”¹ In the indecision is an acknowledgment that in the process of subjecting postmodernism to critical scrutiny, his own Marxist theoretical stance has been infiltrated, disturbed and reconfigured by postmodernism, blurring the distinction between a Marxist discourse on postmodernism and an appropriation of Marxism into the discourse of postmodernity.

A consistent Marxist materialism may be an important contributing factor in the blurring of boundaries between the two discourses. Jameson’s seminal contribution to the discussion of postmodernism was his grounding of postmodernism in the transformations of everyday life under Late Capitalism, as “the cultural logic” of the latter. The same procedure, however, confronts Marxism not just with the discourse of postmodernity, but with the material circumstances to which that discourse speaks, presenting theory with the necessity of accounting for historical circumstances, the novelty of which defies efforts to contain them within its received categories. If it is to be something other than a nostalgic escape into the past or a utopian avoidance of the present, the Marxist critique of postmodernism must also account for the radical transformations reshaping the world, and ways of speaking about it. A thoroughgoing materialism requires that the theory which informs the critique of postmodernism must itself undergo self-criticism and reconfiguration in the very process of its critical operations, assuming at least some features of postmodernism—provided that there is indeed some structural connection between postmodernism and its historical circumstances.

There is a similar confounding in the essays below of boundaries between postmodernism and Marxism in their enunciations or applications within Third World contexts. Marxism appears in the discussions as an indispensable theoretical resource for understanding the forces structuring “the condition of post-modernity,” which is not to be divorced from the structural changes brought about by Global Capitalism. On the other hand, the very affirmation of postmodernism as an equally indispensable way of speaking about that condition calls into question the spatial and temporal premises of Marxism as a theory of modernity. It is important to sustain these seemingly contradictory stances, I think, in order to speak about the world in new ways, while avoiding ideological entrapment in its aura of novelty.

It is for this same reason that I retain the designation “Third World” in the title of the volume, as well as in some of the essays below. I argue in one essay below that the Third World may never have had any significance other than as a discursive category, and may be quite meaningless presently with the transformation of the conditions to which an earlier discourse referred (“Three Worlds or One, or Many? The Reconfiguration of Global Relations under Contemporary Capitalism”). It is important nevertheless to recall the idea of a Third World against the currently fashionable notion of the postcolonial, which is equally discursive, not because the idea of Three Worlds has any descriptive relevance presently but because there were political meanings embedded in the ideal of a Third World that may still be relevant, and that carry with them a perspective of the past on the present, with the critical possibilities that such a perspective affords. In an ideological situation where the future has been all but totally colonized by the ideology of capital, we can ill afford to overlook the critical perspectives afforded by past alternatives that have been suppressed by the history of capital. I take the recovery of these alternatives in memory to be not regressive, but rather as a means to keeping alive alternative visions of society that may yet open up the future in new ways.

This is a theme that appears in all the essays below, gaining in emphasis in the progression of the essays (which are presented here in the order in which they were originally written) which in their unfolding should provide some indication of my own gropings toward possible answers to questions raised by my critique of existing critical positions. I take history to be crucial to a critical hermeneutic that seeks to sustain contradictions between the present and the past, so as to keep open the possibilities they may offer by way of living in the world, without resorting to ideological or metaphysical resolutions that nourish off a distant and uncertain future. As contributions to cultural criticism, the discussions below share a common ground in a concern to affirm the centrality of history against a tendency to its marginalization in much of contemporary cultural criticism. It is not that cultural critics do not speak about history; indeed, they speak about it a great deal, but in ways that, for methodological reasons, preempt the possibility of serious confrontation between the present, the past and the future; the postmodernist “naturalization of the language paradigm,” John O’Neill writes, “is the ideological counterpart to the dehistoricization and the depoliticization of the capitalist process.”² Given my own disciplinary location, the effort to foreground history may be construed as an attempt to recover a disciplinary domain from the intrusions of cultural critics who happen to be for the most part literary historians and critics. It is not. I hope it is sufficiently clear from the discussions below that my critique of cultural criticism where it falls short of a sufficient recognition of questions of history and historicity is accompanied by a recognition of value to new ways of reading history that it has brought to the fore, to which, unfortunately, historians have been conspicuously oblivious. My concern is not with disciplinary delineations of history, but rather with history as epistemology, the marginalization of which deprives us of a crucial dimension to be accounted for in any serious consideration of human liberation.

It is history and historicity as they have been reworked under the sign of the postmodern that guides the analyses below. One of the fundamental contributions of postmodernism—indeed a defining feature of postmodernity—is the questioning of the teleology of the modern, and of other teleologies imbedded in economic, political and cultural narratives that have constituted the idea of the modern; so that it becomes possible once again to conceive the past not merely as a route to the present, but as a source of alternative historical trajectories that had to be suppressed so that the present could become a possibility. While this questioning has opened up new possibilities in understanding the past, and has been equally important in opening up the past as a reservoir of multiple political possibilities, it has not eliminated therefore the forces that constituted modernity historically which persist as a burden of the past over the present. While it has undermined the claims of modernity on historical consciousness, it has been less successful in accounting for the contradictory consequences of repudiating the modern, and even for the ways in which the modern continues to inform the postmodern. Above all, the multiplicity of historical trajectories that have resurfaced in historical consciousness with the dethroning of the modern, and as both generators and beneficiaries of the postmodern, present contradictions that point to novel political possibilities as well as new political dangers. At the precise moment when a “pathos of novelty” (in Hannah Arendt’s words) makes the past seem irrelevant to the present, the proliferation of such contradictions calls for an accounting of those forces shaping the present which is no more immune than earlier ages to the burden of history. The recognition that what we call history may be no more than an aggregate of interactive and contradictory histories, in the multiplicity of choices it presents, may indeed have increased the burden of history by eliminating the familiar landmarks provided by earlier teleologies. No longer merely a route to the present that may be relegated to the past as soon as it has been traversed, history confronts us as a source of conflicting choices, with all the intellectual and political responsibilities implied by the ability to choose without the benefit of teleological legitimation. To make matters worse, the evidence of daily life and politics provides constant reminder that, however we may pretend otherwise, the same history limits choice by providing the conditions under which we may make those choices.

Before I proceed to elaborate on the different ways in which I deploy history in the essays to confront some of these problems and contradictions, it is necessary to emphasize that with one exception that addresses the question of the relationship between postmodernism and contemporary corporate power, the essays below are not concerned with general problems of postmodernism. Neither am I concerned with postmodernism in literature or the arts, where it may have the most concrete and precise meaning. The postmodernism that is of primary interest here is that which represents a new mapping of problems of economic, social, political and cultural development; the immediate referents are modernity and modernization, rather than modernism. This is the sense also in which I view the term “postcolonialism,” which is the version of postmodernism that is of the greatest relevance in the essays below.

What I suggested above of cultural criticism may be said with equal validity of postcolonial criticism: that the same epistemological premises that account for its insights into history may be responsible also for fundamental problems in its representation of the past and its relationship to the present. It is necessary, before going on to discuss the problem of history in relationship to postcolonial criticism, to spell out what I understand by the epistemological claims of postcolonialism. Given the diffuseness and residual quality of much of the postcolonial argument, these claims may not apply equally to all those who would describe themselves as postcolonial critics; conversely, others may share in some of these premises without necessarily describing themselves as postcolonial critics. Suffice it to say that the summarization of the postcolonial position here is based primarily on the orientations of those postcolonial critics who have been most anxious to liberate cultural criticism from its subjection to historical narratives that presuppose structural contexts of one kind or another; and whose works eschew any significant incorporation of such larger narratives into the explanatory schemes that they employ. It is my impression that this version of postcolonial criticism has exerted enormous influence in redirecting cultural criticism away from earlier orientations, associated mostly with Marxism but also with feminism, although some feminists seem to have been able to appropriate it for their own problems. I will return in the conclusion to other postcolonial orientations which do not deny structural contexts but rather see in postcolonialist epistemology a corrective to an earlier preoccupation with structures, that is much closer to the position that informs these discussions.³

The Epistemology of Postcolonial Criticism

The affirmation of “difference” is basic to a postcolonial epistemology. Difference is important not just as a description of a situation, but more importantly because it shapes language, and therefore, the meaning of identity: every representation of the self carries upon it the trace of the “other.” Identity, it follows, is never “essential,” but the product of relationships. Whether informed by Bakhtin’s dialogics or Derrida’s “differance,” difference and the negotiation of difference becomes crucial to the construction of identity and, by extension, of culture. The difference here, of course, is not a difference that divides but one that unites the self and the other in a mutual dependency.

Three aspects of this epistemological premise are worth emphasizing. First is that the production of meaning in linguistic encounters becomes a metaphor for all encounters, rendering the economy of discourse into a paradigm for all encounters, including the encounters of political economy. A subsidiary consequence of this metaphorization of social encounters seems to be a conviction that literary works suffice as evidence of what goes on in the world. Methodologically, one of the interesting byproducts of postcolonial criticism seems to be that there is little significant difference between the world and its representations in fiction. While I would not care to argue, as a professional historian, that historians do better than the producers of fiction in representations of the past, it is necessary still to raise the distinction as an epistemological problem. Contrary to the promise of a “new historicism,” that wished to historicize literature, historical thinking over the last decade has been converted into a subfield of literature, with emphasis shifting from questions of evidence to questions of narrativization and representation, with consequences that undermine epistemologies in both literature and history.⁴ The linguistic turn, if I may put it that way, has obviated the need to confront contrary evidence of great significance that may seem marginal from a perspective that is focused, parochially, on questions of narrative representation.

Secondly, and in a somewhat contrary direction, postcolonial criticism conceptualizes such encounters in the language of the marketplace, with meanings being negotiated as if the negotiators held equal power in the negotiations, each side seeking maximum advantage. I will have something to say on the political implications of these premises below. A third aspect, more immediately relevant here, is the stress on the porosity of boundaries, which may account for the proliferation of the terminology of “border crossings” in the literature of cultural criticism over the last decade. Boundaries that divide by essentialized notions of self and the other must be rejected in favor of “border crossings” which underline mutual dependency in the conceptualization of identity, which “enshrines syncretism and hybridity.”⁵ Hybridity and in-betweenness are signature words of postcolonial criticism, along with heterogeneity, difference and multiplicity.

One of the fundamental consequences of these premises is that the most significant politics is the politics of identity, how identity is constructed at the level of local encounters and according to local circumstances. Since the individual is not a mere expression of “essentialized” group identity, but an active participant in the formation of group identity in numerous localized encounters with others, these encounters, rather than structures that may confine the “heterogeneity” of the individual must provide the point of departure for analysis—as well as meaningful politics. Indeed, insistence on structures, or master narratives of any kind (from capitalism to imperialism, from nationalism to revolution to ethnicity, class, and gender) implies an essentialism that subordinates the local to imagined and invented categories that reproduce the categories that hegemonic structures of power have imposed upon the world. The persistence of hegemony is evident in the suppression not just of the local politics of identity, but in the negation of the subjectivity of the oppressed who have at their disposal means of resistance to oppression that are not necessarily expressed at the level of politics, but in cultural appropriations that subvert hegemony. Political radicals, who insist on the necessity of politics, including revolutionary politics, by implication, are part of a structure of hegemony, because they perpetuate assumptions of structural oppression that replicate assumptions of the dominant culture. Somewhere in the course of the argument, it is necessary to point out, the debate over oppositional politics becomes a debate over oppositional cultures, as if there is no need to distinguish the one from the other. What the abolition of this difference between culture and politics means politically is revealing, as I will comment on later, of the politics of postcoloniality.

The politics of identity, finally, has found favor with feminism, which has enhanced significantly the popularity of postcolonial criticism. Third World women and women of color in general have found in postcolonial criticism an epistemology with which to counter universalized (and hegemonic) notions of gender. This same epistemology could...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Credits
• 1 Introduction: Postcoloniality and the Perspective of History
• 2 Culturalism as Hegemonic Ideology and Liberating Practice
• 3 The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism
• 4 The Global in the Local
• 5 Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism
• 6 There Is More in the Rim than Meets the Eye: Thoughts on the “Pacific Idea”
• 7 Three Worlds or One, or Many? The Reconfiguration of Global Relations Under Contemporary Capitalism
• 8 Postcolonial or Postrevolutionary? The Problem of History in Postcolonial Criticism
• 9 The Postmodernization of Production and Its Organization: Flexible Production, Work and Culture
• 10 The Past as Legacy and Project: Postcolonial Criticism in the Perspective of Indigenous Historicism
• About the Book and Author
• Index