RE-VISITING IMPERIAL CULTURAL
STUDIES AND ETHNIC WRITING:
A Subaltern Speaks from the
Boondocks
By E. San Juan, Jr.
After
the mammoth anthology Cultural Studies edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and
Paula Treichler appeared 1992, the death-spasms of an anti-Establishment social
movement began without so much fanfare. Conceived as a challenge to bourgeois
high culture, Cultural Studies (CS) challenged Cold War ideology and
monopoly-capitalist hegemony. Its practitioners promised the construction of a
democratic, een socialist, renaissance of thought and sensibility in the public
sphere and quotidian life. With the end of the Vietnam War, the ascendancy of
the neoliberal program of Thatcher, Reagan and their counterparts in Europe and
Latin America, that promise ended in an anarchist cul de sac. Not even the formidable
sub-Commandante Marcos, the veterans of the Battle of Seattle, and the World
Social Forum could forge a way out. Could one have predicted this exhaustion of
massive oppositional energies initially kindled by the Marxist revival embodied
by E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, inspired by Gramsci,
Althusser, C.L.R. James, and others?
A recent anthology edited by
Paul Smith (2011) seeks to renew CS by asserting its resistant, transformative
potential, its political efficacy, within the disciplinary production of
knowledge. But prioritizing this epistemological function over against its
dimension as social bloc or public consciousness has proven futile. Once
institutionalized as an academic discipline in North America, subsumed within
the commodifying apparatus of the market, CS was appropriated by the
instrumental rationality of the neoliberal market and converted into a nostrum
to resolve the legitimation-crisis of neoconservative, social-Darwinist
politics. It seems that however triumphalist its libertarian pluralist
approach, CS could not overcome positivism, empiricism, reification and
pervasive commodification. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the onset of
the Gulf War signaled the phenomenal ascent of this fin-de-siecle barbarism.
While
the founding of the World Social Forum at the advent of the new millennium may have
revived visions of a fugitive egalitarian utopia, September 11, 2001
intervened. It will take a whole decade of carnage and torture, genocidal
onslaught and assassinations by drones, to resurrect those visions in the
September 2011 “Occupy Wall Street” mobilization following the “Arab Spring.”
But that is the topic of another essay. Here I want to record speculations of
renewing classic CS themes and modes of sign-reading (Peirce’s triadic
semiosis, in particular) in order to infer possible solutions to the
predicament of nominalism and Nietschean nihilism confronted by humanists in
the wake of insidious humanitarian-esque globalization. Descriptive
exploration, not moralization, is my modest intent here.
After
9/11, ineluctable Guantanamo torture chambers, the Chernobyl-like Fukushima disaster, and total surveillance of
everyday life by the Homeland Security agencies, is literary study still worth
pursuing? That question seems a nostalgic reprise of Theodor Adorno’s hard
query: After Auschwitz, can one still write a lyric poem, much more do a
line-by-line hermeneutic gloss on it? Annual conferences on the crisis of the
humanities and the war of antagonistic blogs in cyberspace have made the
question anticlimactic, if not moot. An empty ritualized gesture of Cartesian
doubt, or Derridean melancholia, can not be easily sidetracked by the erudite
antics of Zizek, Badiou, Agamben, etc. Perhaps the answer is: Yes, but not in
the old way, as always, if we want to connect the classroom and the fabled
boudoir with the outside world, assuming that the binary opposition,
inside/outside, has not already been rendered useless by the intellectual
ferment of the last three or four decades. Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze are all
dead, but their Doppelganger and avatars still haunt the corridors of corporatized
academe and think-tanks. Can the “Occupy Wall Street” activists and their
worldwide ramifications exorcise these ghosts?
Desiring
Cultural Studies
One way of elucidating the crisis
of the humanities (rehearsed as “the death of the author,” the refusal of
meta-narratives and ideas of progress, vertigos of multiple and incommensurable
meanings) has been through a passage in the site of laissez-faire “desire”
called CS. The exemplary discourses
of Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris, John Fiske, Lawrence Grossberg, Tony
Bennet, Manthia Diawara, Antony Easthope, and others are the key figures
invoked by CS. While CS has remained open, loose, unfinished, without any fixed
methodological procedures or protocols, it seems that a convergence of
interests has outlined at least a “problematic” or area of investigation. As
director of the initiating force centered in the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK, Hall (1996) himself reminds us that “there
is no single unproblematic definition of culture.” True, CS avoids codification or reduction into privileged
paradigms, but the protocols of interpretative reading and historicizing
metacommentary on the “social text” have been tutorial examples. Various
experimental modes of reading have of course been invented and applied on
diverse artifacts, processes, events, practices, and so on. CS as new field of interdiscplinary,
cross-cultural inquiry has burgeoned as an attempt to expand and refine the
tools for interpretation and evaluation of texts, the principal focus or target
of analysis being “culture” itself. Indeed, contexts—social, political,
economic, historical, etc.—determine the cultural object or text being examined
and comprehended.
Everything
then becomes grist to the CS mill. Departing from the book-centered realm of
traditional cultural authority, the target domain now includes not only
canonical literature but every signifying or performative practice. Everything
becomes a sign, not just written or spoken discourse. The scope of CS covers so
wide a range of texts, discourses and meaning-making activities that it has
offered more problems than solutions. If we can accept, for now, Hall’s
definition of culture as “infinite semiosis, sense-making without end,” and
qualify it by locating semiosis within determinate historical formations and
socioeconomic structures, then we can arrive at a position in which our concern
with form, aesthetic pleasure, and other traditional criteria of worth can be
reconciled with our new interest in agency or identity and knowledge-production
linked with ideology, power, and institutions. Epistemology will now
synergestically interact with ethics and politics to produce a feasible
scenario for the fusion of theory and practice not just for scholars/experts
but for the laity and proles.
What
a CS orientation ultimately strives to accomplish is somewhat complex,
all-encompassing, and amorphous. But it is not arbitrary nor totalitarian in
the pejorative sense. One way to formulate it is to say that it endeavors to
move beyond a merely deconstructive semiotics such as that performed by
deconstructionists, Foucaultian discourse-analysis, and Heideggerian
metaphysics. It seeks to do this by inducing a permanent “suspension of disbelief”
which is often susceptible to a cynical or hedonistic inflection, to a point
where the “final interpretant” (to use C. S. Peirce’s concept) involves a
critical intervention in the epochal crux of historical experience. This can be
achieved only by a community of inquirers, within a collective process of
knowledge-production to transform social life (Liszka 1996). It is thus not
only an interpretive activity of articulating meaning but also a revolutionary
act of rebuilding whole patterns of practices, structures, ways of communal
living
Since
the controversies over the nature and direction of CS are ongoing and
inexhaustible, suffice it for me to make a few observations. I hope that CS as
a project of critical pedagogy and cultural democratization is not simply
identified with the fashionable populism of Lyotard, de Certeau, Negri, and
others who seek to destroy the boundaries between high and popular/mass culture
by offering courses on the art of shopping, how to wear condoms, beauty
pageants, and so on. Populism finds its limits in self-complacent repetition.
What follows is more by way of a reading exercise invested with a heuristic
proposal. The discovery of meanings via sign-interpretation (semiosis) becomes
prologue to the inquiry into the tactics and strategy of revolutionary mass
struggles, given the inscription of the concrete text/reader in historically
specific arenas of multi-sectoral conflicts and popular-democratic struggles.
Toward
a Semiotic Critique
Reading/knowing
a text is intially a process of contextualization. Its end is the formation of
a habit of action. If CS is taken to be “a process, a kind of alchemy for
producing useful knowledge,” as Richard Johnson (1996) puts it, let us see what
is at stake if we call attention to the conditions of the production of
knowledge that surrounds the reading of literary texts. We pursue one concrete
goal of pedagogy in this exercise: the “elucidation and problematization of
first principles” (Fuery and Mansfield 1997), one first principle being the
supposed self-sufficiency of a formalist reading. Our model artifact here is
ethnic literature. In its rejection of the canonical standards of aesthetic
judgment in which form occupies
the privileged center, as New Critical formalism once pontificated, ethnic
writing foregrounds the process of ethnicity as a dynamic relationship between
the hegemonic order and resistance from the subjugated and colonized. This
overturns the centrality of form and the rational coherent subject-citizen of
the racial polity.
Ethnic
writing opens up for interrogation the mechanisms and apparatus of
subject-making or identity formation, the codes for the production of subjects,
in a hegemonic market-dominated formation. Ethnic writing endorses the aim of
CS to break habits, alter or change social dispositions—habitus, in Bourdieu’s (2000)
terminology, enhancing “the production of a desire to become another kind of
subject, to live another kind of life” (Osborne 2000, 51). Such alteration has
been the permanent goal of methods such as the romantic attempt to
defamiliarize what is conventional and normalized, or the Brechtian technique
of alienation and narrativization of what has been dehistoricized, frozen and
mystified. Awareness of ethnicity blasts the continuum of the norm of “white
supremacy” as the unmarked, conventionally accepted habit of social life.
An
example of unorthodox CS interpretive reading might be instructive here. In rhe
past I have taught numerous courses on U.S. multi-ethnic literature which
includes, among others, Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. The customary mode of reading,
never really abandoned, is still geared toward the elucidation of form or the
verbal icon, as confirmed by Harold Bloom, for example, in his introduction to a collection of
critical essays on Morrison.
Bloom advises us to focus on
“style, stance, tone, prose rhythm, and mimetic mode, and these do stem from an
amalgam of Faulkner and Woolf, the father and mother of Morrison’s art, as it
were” (1990, 4). No doubt such formal properties are important, but what is
their function in constituting the reading experience and the over-all
appreciation of the work? Unlike the old New Critical fetishizing of “organic
form,” we surely want to explore what is being formed or shaped and the effects
produced, effects once dismissed by scholarly gatekeepers as unwarranted
intentional and affective fallacies. Needless to say, the beliefs/ethos of
formalism, individualism, and humanism are not necessarily shared by all
audiences, in particular those victimized by Western “civilizing missions.”
Bloom’s putative universal axioms have been exposed as specific to a formalist
canon of criticism and interpretation geared to uphold Western capitalist
values and norms, but masquerading as global, transcendental, authoritative for
all time. No need to argue this further in this postmodern epoch of
proliferating differences and nomadic multiple subjects floating in cyberspace
and transnationalized megamalls.
Morrison
herself urged us to locate her work within the African American archive that,
for her, is richer, modern, and more complex. Her view in Playing in the
Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) is dialectical and comparativistic. She
urges us to consider how “the much celebrated themes of American literature—individualism,
masculinity, the conflict between social engagement and historical isolation,
an acute and ambiguous moral problematic, the juxtaposition of innocence with
figures representing death and hell—are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding,
signing Africanistic presence” (2000, 310). Morrison questions the frames of intelligibility deployed by
the Herrenvolk
arbiters of taste. She reads Huckleberry Finn through a cultural-studies prism
sensitive to “rationalizing power grabs” that condition readers’ sensibilities
and value-judgments. She instructs us to examine how literary artifacts
“redistributes and mutates in figurative language the social conventions of
Africanism” (2000, 322). Reading is here effectively contextualized, historicized,
socialized.
One
convention that has been refracted and certainly manipulated in Tar Baby is the folktale of Brer Rabbit
and the tar baby ascribed to Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus narratives. In one reading, Morrison’s
characterization of her protagonist Son as the trickster rabbit who falls for
and then evades Jadine, the seductive bait, overturns the Walt Disney 1948
version founded on the plantation myth. We can certainly appreciate this
subversive re-staging of the West African material and its plausible
re-articulation as an allegory of racial and class liberation.
Unmasking
and displacement punctuate every point of crises in the narrative. All the
characters, except for the white master Valerian Street, can re-read the texts
of experience and create their own “brier patch,” their utopian destination, by
altering emphases and perspectives. This is how Craig Werner apprehends
Morrison’s modernism: “Morrison explores the is-ness [of contemporary
Afro-American experience] as a texture of competing myths and understandings of
myths…. Son/Brer Rabbit provides an image of process, of a flexible encounter
with the is-ness of the island which includes myth and history, repressed
Afro-American history and the Euro-American ‘plantation…the ever-present,
ever-changing tar baby that tempts him to remove his eyes from the woman who
can help him forge a unified mythic consciousness… For Morrison, the tar baby
is everywhere. The briar patch remains to be seen” (1988, 166). This liberal
interpretation ironically imposes an arbitrary closure on the text, terminating
the open-ended semiosis of meanings.
Can we reverse this and pursue a materialist stance in unraveling the
signifying fabric?
Dialectics of Black Intervention
Let
us reflect on the parameters of Son’s open-ended journey. The location is
important: the Caribbean island of Isle de Chevaliers colonized by Europeans
and Americans. It was Therese, the ostracized black inhabitant, who
purposefully misleads Son away from the plantation of L’Arbe de la Croix and
deflects his search for Jadine, the “tar baby” of voluntary servitude—“She has
forgotten her ancient properties,” as Therese remarks. Therese directs him to
join the blind horsemen, phantom warriors descended from the escaped slaves of
the historical past, who remain symbols of a future (not mythic) renewal. If
Son trusts Therese—perhaps he has no alternative, then Morrison is suggesting
that the brier patch is not forever suspended, permanently deferred, but is
actually a product of human choices and collective decisions, even though the
choice is to withdraw into the utopian realm of myth (Christian 1985). Who is
doing this interpreting, and what is the agenda behind it?
We
need at the outset to specify concretely drawn coordinates and configure their
dialectical linkages. A CS reading would allow a more all-encompassing grasp of
the Caribbean setting and the geopolitics of colonialism and subaltern
resistance that subtends the conflicts between the white (in particular, the
white “landlord” Valerian Street) and the black characters (in particular,
Gideon and Therese, “re-colonized” by their dismissal from work for stealing
apples). Attention on the last
scene alone can distort our grasp of the complex social totality depicted in
the novel. The ambivalence that critics have drawn from the failure of black
community may be re-shifted or remapped if we recall Son’s angle of vision as
he charts the “subject-position” of Valerian Street and his power to determine
the fates of the black indigenous peoples.
In this context, I quote from the middle of the
narrative this powerful critique of capitalist exploitation and racist
colonialism which is not without its subtle aesthetic sublimation in the
character’s protean sensibility:
Son’s mouth went dry as he
watched Valerian chewing a piece of ham, his head-of-a-coin profile content,
approving even of the flavor in his mouth although he had been able to dismiss
with a flutter of his fingers the people whose sugar and cocoa had allowed him
to grow old in regal comfort; although he had taken the sugar and cocoa and
paid for it as though it had no value, as though the cutting of cane and
picking of beans was child’s play and had no value; but he turned it into
candy, the invention of which really was child’s play, and sold it to other
children and made a fortune in order to move near, but not in the midst of, the
jungle where the sugar came from and build a palace with more of their labor
and then hire them to do more of the work he was not capable of and pay them
again according to some scale of value that would outrage Satan himself and
when those people wanted a little of what he wanted, some apples for their Christmas, and took some, he dismissed them with a flutter of
the fingers, because they were thieves, and nobody knew thieves and thievery
better than he did and he probably thought he was a law-abiding man, they all
did, and they all always did, because they had not the dignity of wild animals
who did not eat where they defecated but they could defecate over a whole
people and come there to live and defecate some more by tearing up the land and
that is why they loved property so, because they had killed it soiled it
defecated on it and they loved more than anything the places where they shit. Would fight and fill to own the
cesspools they made, and although they called it architecture it was in fact
elaborately built toilets, decorated toilets, toilets surrounded with and by
business and enterprise in order to have something to do in between defecations
since waste was the order of the day and the ordering principle of the
universe. And especially the
Americans who were the worst because they were new at the business of
defecation spent their whole lives bathing bathing bathing washing away the stench
of the cesspools as though pure soap had anything to do with purity (1981,
202-03)
The
dynamic force of that passage will make even Faulkner , or Woolf with her
stream-of-consciousness tricks, gasping for breath. The resonance and allusions
built into this powerful discourse cannot be weighed properly without
understanding the historical record of predatory capitalism in the Caribbean,
the role of the sugar plantations utilizing slave and serf labor, the function
of religion as apologetic instruments of rule, the technological subjugation of
the environment, and the ideology of commodity-exchange and necessary waste. We
are engaged here with inscribing both characters and plot in the larger script
of imperialism and its plot of racial/ethnic subordination. Semantics becomes
embroiled in geopolitics and and the pragmatics of class struggle.
The
historical genealogy of the US empire needs to be kept in mind. The larger
script of collective positioning in the formation of the U.S. racial polity was
of course inaugurated by the slave narratives, the foundational matrix of U.S.
literary production. It informs all the works of W.E. Du Bois, Richard Wright,
James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and so on, up to the Autobiography of Malcolm
X, Soledad
Brother, King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,”
and the writings of Angela Davis, and other activists. It is the enabling
paradigm or template for the lucid eloquence of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s prison writings, Live from Death Row
and Death
Blossoms, part
of a border-crossing genre that mixes autobiography, slave testimonies,
psychological analysis, and empirical witnessing. We encounter here the genre
of the testimonio adapted
to local circumstances, a genre that departs profoundly from the exemplary
monumental life-histories that one scholar, Fred Inglis (1993), considers the
proper subject-matter of the discipline of CS. Plutarch’s account of parallel
lives does not include Spartacus and thousands of slaves that built the Roman
empire, nor do the Federalist Papers and sacrosanct Americana allow the voices of the Native
Americans and African slaves to interrupt the discourse of empire-making. Nor
the 1.4 million dead Filipinos who resisted U.S. aggression in the
Filipino-American War of 1899-1914.
Resurrecting Master-Narratives
We
are engaged here with decoding the underlying master-narrative that enables the
text’s production of knowledge/meaning. This historicized grammar and syntax of
the racial polity, the quasi-Hegelian dispositioning of master and bondsman in The
Phenomenology of Spirit, also provides the enabling framework of Asian American writing such
as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, Frank Chin’s plays and fiction,
and Chang Rae-Lee’s Native
Speaker. One
cannot conceive of an intelligent appraisal of Woman Warrior, for instance, without interfacing the syncretic
narrative of the artist’s maturation with the youth revolt and civil-rights
struggles of the sixties. The
splicing of the narrative voice of the young Chinese American woman in
California with those of anonymous women in feudal China, the immigrant mother,
and the legendary figures of Mulan and Tsai Yen, among others, generates a
multifaceted artifact that allows the readers diverse subject-positions for
critique and transgression. This approach to intertextuality, construing the
“social text” as the space for the production of multiple enunciations, is designed to provide the occasion, or
horizon of expectations, when readers can construct subject-positions that will
make intelligible and useful (as practical knowledge) the signs/directions of
the literary artifact. Without exploring the possible master-narrative or hypothetical
totality of social development, we are left with atomized particles of words
that remain unintelligible.
We
need to devise our own way of deriving emancipatory energies from ethnic texts.
Surely this is the most productive way in which to appreciate such works as
David Henry Hwang’s M Butterfly as a play of contexts and discourses. In this drama, we
find elements from Puccini’s opera, the newspaper reports about the trial of
the erring French diplomat, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the heterogeneous
archive of the Vietnamese people—fragments combined into a pastiche, collage,
or multilayered theatrical spectacle. We begin to decode the palimpsest as the
varying points of gravity or intensities in a historical continuum. We can then
discern the pattern that renders the parts intelligible, sources of possible
enllightenment and alternative pleasures.
The
same holds for Native American cultural practices and its versatile repertoire
of indigenous and adapted devices, exemplified by N. Scott Momaday’s The Way
to Rainy Mountain
and the collection of short fiction by Sherman Alexie such as The Lone
Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. In Alexie’s practice, we find the modalities of parody
and satire structuring a rich and complex assembly of quotations from media
discourse, epistolary devices, court testimonies, mock chronicles, journalistic
accounts, and so on. What this Native American style of postmodernist narrative
seeks to do, in my judgment, is to invent a counterhegemonic discourse to
thwart all conventional expectations about the American Indian “way of life”
monumentalized in Hollywood movies and public consensus. These writers challenge the received
transcendentalizing standard of literariness and its normative aura of
multicultural harmony prevailing in the academy. Abstract form becomes informed
by Spinoza’s conatus, by will, hopes, dreams.
Meanwhile, the performance art of
the Latino community offers a dazzling intertextuality of speech-acts for
interpretation. Take Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez Pena’s production of the
videofilm Couple in a Cage. This videodocumentary is based on their actual performance
of “a reversed anthropology,” “The Guatinaui World Tour (1992-93)” which took
place in various selected sites from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
DC to the Columbus Plaza in Madrid, Spain, and the Fundacion Banco Patricios in
Buenos Aires. This meta-fiction has been mounted to deconstruct or transvalue
the Columbus Quincentennial celebrations by evoking the suppressed
“other”history, what Gomez-Pena calls the official ethnography of “authentic
primitives, the mass media and pop cultural depictions of the Latin
“other.” This is not only an art
of resistance but an artifice to overthrow the illusions of the ruling system,
a subtle Rabelaisian, carnivalesque assault on the aura of domination and
oppression.
The
recent Chiapas uprising led by Sub-Commandante Marcos might have derived
inspiration from the anti-mimetic, parodic performance of our Latina comrades.
After all, magic realism practiced by Garcia Marquez, Borges, and others
originated from the mixed genre of parody and satire dating back to the Middle
Ages. Gomez Pena describes a series of theatrical demonstrations in his book, New
World Border, as
a kind of metacommentary on the need for a more politicized multiethnic
pedagogy amid the intractability of “common-cultural” doxa and stereotypes.
Here is his report:
The meta-fiction of “The Guatinaui World Tour”
was as follows: Coco and I lived for three-day periods in a gilded cage, on
exhibition as “undiscovered Amerindians” from the (fictional) island of Guatinau
(Spanglishization of “what now”).
I was dressed as a kind of Aztec wrestler from Las Vegas, and Coco as a
Taina straight out of Gilligan’s Island. We were hand-fed by fake museum docents, and
taken to the bathroom on leashes.
Taxonomic plates describing our costumes and physical characteristics
were displayed next to the cage.
Besides performing “authentic rituals,” we would write on a laptop
computer, watch home videos of our native land, and listen to Latin American
rock music on a boom box. For a
modest amount, we would perform “authentic” Guatinaui dances, and chant or tell
stories in our (made-up) Guatinaui language. Visitors also had the option to take a souvenir snapshot
with the primitives. For the ’93
Whitney Biennial, we added another activity to the menu: for $5.00, the
audience could “see the genitals of the male specimen”—and the well-heeled
Whitney patrons really went for it….
As [the performance] traveled from site to
site, it became more stylized, staged, and whimsical. Sadly, over 40 percent of our audience, no matter where we
were, believed that the exhibit was real (at least during their first visit),
and did not feel compelled to do anything about it (1996, 97-98).
The
pathos of his last statement registers the seeming ineffectuality of
performance art of this type. Gomez-Pena’s art of cognitive mapping seeks to
prepare us for the complex challenges of living in the “multiracial borderless
society of the next century.” But unfortunately the habits of past centuries
persist to re-establish borders unrelentingly where you least suspect. The
misunderstandings occurring at the border zone continue to muddle the
boundaries or limits internalized by the artist himself, leading to an aporia
that can only be resolved by a community of interpretants geared for collective
action—the subject of reasoned action “which grounds the interpretive process,
pragmatically, giving shape to what would be an indeterminate and infinite
semiosis” (Osborne 2000, 50). Knowledge for whom? For what?—these questions
remain to be answered by CS practitioners.
Symbolizing the Collective Agon
Let
us take another text which I have recently assigned: the novel Shark
Dialogues by
Hawaiian-born Kiana Davenport. This novel has been usually deciphered as a
realist epic saga of seven generations of one family. It covers the principal
events in the history of Hawaii from independent island to colony and U.S.
state/neocolony. It centers on one heroic woman who, to quote one reviewer,
“gathers her four granddaughters together in one erotic tale of villains and
dreamers, queens and revolutionaries, lepers and healers.” The habit of
searching for a unifying principle of consistency and design centered on a
major protagonist, is fulfilled:
the Polynesian matriarch becomes the focus of most commentaries,
vindicating with it the transparency, versimilitude, and plausibility of the
literary artifice.
Something
is flagrantly wrong with that commentary since in that hermeneutic maneuver,
ethnicity becomes reified. Cultural differences and values become naturalized
in the seemingly convincing actions and language of “true-to-life” individual
characters. The knowledge of Hawaiian society and history generated by this
reading only folds back into the order and logic of imperial conquest against
which the theme of revolt by the colonized indigenous peoples has been mounted
by the narrator. The novel precisely subverts this centering procedure that
represses possibilities and alternatives to the iniquitous status quo.
A
CS approach would modify this search for a unifying principle and call
attention instead to those moments in the narrative where the logic of
market-exchange, of the commodity-system, breaks down. Those moments can be
conceived as an allegorical transcript of group antagonisms, the anatomy of
subject-positions and their reproduction, which, to my mind, constitutes the
proper subject of CS as an oppositional and contestatory practice. The struggle over representation thus
moves from the field of semiotics, of the differential networks of language and
discourse, to that of cultural politics and social practice, indeed, to that of
class struggle between the Native Hawaiians and the occupiers.
At this juncture, I conceive of
CS as an intervention in reconceptualizing culture as the field where literary
texts like Shark Dialogues can be rescued from the realm of apologetics and
appreciated for its pedagogical and conscientizicing (to use Freire's overused
term) qualities. This is not meant to reduce art to programmatic and didactic
ends, rather it is to re-situate the act of reading in the field of cultural
practices where the final interpretant foregrounds habits, patterns of
behavior, ethos, ideologemes, as Peirce theorized the culminating telos of
signifying-production.
Following
Jameson's suggestions, CS can be more effective when culture is viewed more as
the site par excellence of ideological struggle.
In this arena of discursive practice and reflexive critique, group
antagonisms are represented and fought through with the interpretive process or
experience itself posing ethical questions to the reader/audience and, more
urgently, political imperatives. Culture dramatizes the idea of the Other, the
forms of relations among groups characterized by envy and loathing. CS allows
us to interpret prestige as an emanation of group solidarity, the object of
collective envy and struggle, which underlies racism and the ethnic conflicts
that are thematized and dramatized by the writers and works I have mentioned. The investment in group fantasies,
particularly in stereotypes (so evident in the customary book reviews and
public responses), often results in a sublimation of the reader’s response in
the institution of the market and of consumption, leading to the resolution of
ethnic antagonisms in the figure or subject-position offered to the reader:
that of universal consumer.
We
are not just engaged in liberating texts from the consumerist-spectatorial
stranglehold. In my judgment, another alternative is possible, or feasible,
when we see the text as the space in which the symbolic moves of groups, here
ethnic collectives personified as individual protagonists, are rewritten in
another modality. That is, if they are transcoded as dialogically antagonistic
processes emblematizing the tensions between forms of social relations,
configurations of the synchrony/diachrony social production and reproduction,
thus rendering them intelligible to the community of interpreters and amenable
to resolution via the radical transformation of the whole system. The final
interpretant here is the habitual subject (to use Peirce’s construal again)
whose regular routine is interrupted by the recognition of something new, a
discovery of something shocking or alarming, which ushers a sense of
discomfort, unease, anxiety. What is at stake is a renewed self-consciousness
of the knowledge we act on and insight into possibilities for transforming
modes of perception as well as patterns of social practice in everyday
life. This is a history that
students/readers of literature can make as subjects and movers/shapers of
CS-in-process.
Across the Pacific, to the Tropical
Outpost of Empire
Meanwhile,
let us examine the situation of CS in the Philippines, a former U.S. colony and
now, though nominally independent, subsisting as a neocolonial outpost of
globalized Wall Street/Washington/Pentagon. Note that the Philippines is not in
the Caribbean or in Latin America, but in southeast Asia, near China, Vietnam
and Indonesia—a geopolitical reality not registered in most cultural baedekers.
Practically a faux mimesis of Hawaii or Puerto Rico, the
Philippines is now distinguished as the largest exporter of migrant labor in
the world—more than 10 million Filipinos work as contracted labor around the
planet—and recently as the burgeoning call-center headquarters of most
transnational corporate firms. Apart from this, the Philippines boasts of one
of the enduring terrorist groups, the Abu Sayyaf, that sprang from the
US-trained mujahideens in Afghanistan (like Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda
contingent) which lends justification to the permanent stationing of US
“Special Forces,” CIA agents, etc. all over the islands. Unfortunately, just as
CS has not given due attention to the post 9/11 “war on terrorism,” CS has also
ignored the plight of the Moro peoples who have been subjugated and exploited
for centuries by Spanish, American and Christian-Filipino colonialisms. This is
perhaps a project or agenda for the next decades, or even century.
As
already indicated, CS originating from UK and North America focuses on the
complex relations of “power” and “knowledge” (knowledge-production) at a
specific historical conjuncture (Seventies and Eighties). Its axioms include
the rejection of Enlightenment modernity/progress, metanarratives (paradigms;
world-views), premised on the rational subject. Symptomatic of the alienation
of Western intellectuals from technocratic market-society during the Cold War,
CS reflects the crisis of finance/monopoly capitalism in its imperialist stage.
It seeks to transcend reified systems
by way of privileging the differend,differance (Lyotard; Derrida), diffuse
power (Foucault; Deleuze), life-world or everyday life (Habermas; de Certeau)
inspired by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, and Saussure.
Orthodox
CS identifies modernity with capitalism, hence its postmodernist temper.
Despite acknowledging the historicity of the discipline, postmodernist
academics (Geertz, Grossberg, Clifford) give primacy to “the flow of social
discourse” and the “essentially contestable” genealogy of culture. Engaged with
the singularity of events centering on love, sentiments, conscience, and the
existential or ethical moment in order to “bring us in touch with strangers,”
with Others, postmodern CS seeks to interrogate the foundational aims of
linguistics (Jackobson), psychoanalysis (Freud), philosophy (Kant, Hegel)
and political economy (Marx) by
substituting the ambivalence, contingency,
and hybridity of “lived experience” for labor/social praxis as the focus of
investigation. Focused on what escapes language and thought, CS has fallen into the dualism it
ritualistically condemns, complete with the mystique of a neoliberal
individualism enabled by presumably value-free, normative “free market”
absolutism.
Nihilism’s Siren Song
Anti-foundationalism
and anti-metanarratives distinguish orthodox CS today. Rejecting classical
reason, CS refuses any grounding in political or social action as a perversion
of knowledge for the ends of power. Valuing negative critique as an antidote to
ideology, CS leads up to a fetishism of the Void, the deconstructive “Sublime”
as a substitute for a thoroughgoing critique of the authority of received
values and institutions. By various ruses of irony, uncanny cynicism and “sly
mimicry,” It ends up apologizing for the status quo. Anti-authoritarianism is
trivialized in careerist anecdotes,
and CS becomes reduced to conferences and publicity about fantasies of
revolutionary social movements.
Submerged
and eventually displaced, the critical dimension of CS drawn from Western Marxism (Gramsci,
Althusser, Lukacs) has disappeared in the neoconservative tide that began with
Reagan/Thatcher in the Eighties.
This neoconservatism continues to this day under the slogan of the “global war
on terrorism.” Meanwhile, attention to racism, gender, sexism and other
non-class contradictions, particularly in the colonized and peripheral
formations, sharpened with the Civil Rights struggles in the US, the youth
revolt, and the worldwide opposition to the Vietnam war and the current if
precarious hegemony of the Global North.
Mainstream
CS today still focuses on consumption, audience response, Deleuzian desire,
affects, irony, avoidance of the critique of ideology, the culture industry,
and unequal division of social labor.
However, some versions of CS invokes Simone de Beauvoir, Fanon, CLR
James, W.E.B.Du Bois, Rosa Luxemburg, Paulo Freire and other “third world”
activists in an effort to renew its original vocation of contributing to
fundamental social change. Its Foucaultian notion of “specific intellectuals”
addressing a “conjunctural constituency”
may call attention to the need to address state violence and hegemonic
apparatuses of public control and repression.
Like any
global trend, CS can be “filipinized” by the creative application of its
original radical critique to our conditions. Various forms of CS, as mediated
by “subalternists” and other “third world” conduits, have influenced such
historians concerned with the marginalized Others (peasants, women, religious
and ethnic communities, etc.). But except for the Latin American “theology of
liberation” as a form of CS, they have all wrongly assumed that the Philippines
is no longer a neocolonial, dependent formation, replete with diverse contradictions
centering on the oligarchic-comprador domination of the majority of the people
(workers, peasants, OFWs, Moros and other indigenous groups). The question of a
singular Filipino modernity—genuine national sovereignty, autonomous
individuals free from Spanish or American tutelage, a bourgeois public
sphere—has been conflated and transmogrified by insidious postmodern
mystifications legitimized by the illusory promise of emancipation by avid
consumption epitomized in megamalls, Internet/Facebook celebrity culture, and a
predatory commodifying consumerist ethos.
The
examples of what I consider the inventors of Filipino cultural studies—Jose
Rizal (in “The Indolence of Filipinos” and “The Philippines a Century Hence”),
Isabelo de los Reyes (folklore and ethnic studies), counteless vernacular
novelists, poets, and playwrights; and memoir-writers (Mabini, veterans of 1896
and the Huk uprising)—applied criticial principles derived from Europe to the
specific political and socioeconomic situations in the colony/neocolony. In the
process, the power/knowledge complex acquired concrete elaboration in terms of
how “everyday life”—culture as ordinary habits or patterns (Raymond
Williams)--cannot escape its over-determination by the historical institutions
and practices imposed by the colonial powers and mediated by regional/local
ruling bloc. Time and space offer intelligible meanings by way of the
contradictions between the colonial/neocolonial hegemonic institutions and the
acceptance/resistance of the colonized natives. Such meanings can be found in
the narratives of individuals/collectives in which the notion of subjectivity
defined by various levels of contradictions (Filipino versus American,
patriarchal power versus women, “civilized” versus indigenous,etc.) can be
discerned embedded in the totality of social relations at specific historical
moments. I am thinking of a “knowable community” with institutions and habitus,
structure of power relations, not just a “structure of feeling” constituted by
heterogeneous experiences
Arguments for Indigenizing CS
In Philippine CS, the question of
language assumes primacy because intellectual discourse and exchanges cannot
sidetrack the problem of communicating to the larger public. Democratizing the
means of communication is apart of the process of overthrowing the oligarchic
elite and the reproduction of class and gender inequality. Such a public needs
to be developed by the pedagogical program of a developing CS curriculum. The
prevalence of English as an elite marker/imprimatur of privileged status will
prevent this public sphere from emerging. Linked to this is the position of
popular culture which has always radicalized CS by eliminating the divide
between the elite/canonical culture and the proletarian/mass culture. Control
of the means of communication needs to be addressed as well as the
participation of a wider public in dialogues and exchanges.
CS,
if it aspires to actualize its critical potential and transformative, needs to
always address the major and minor contradictions of each society within a
globalizing planet. The neoliberal market ideology that pervades everyday
life/consciousness militates against the growth of a critical sensibility and
the development of the faculties/powers of the species, hence CS needs to focus
its analytic instruments on the commodification of the life-world and everyday
life by the oligopolistic capitalist order. In the Philippines, the
unprecedented diaspora of domestics and overseas contract workers (OFWs)
constitute the prime specimen for study and critique. This involves not only
the symbolic violence of language use but also the material violence of hunger,
disease, State torture and extrajudicial killings.
In
this critique mainly focused on the aborted promise of CS in the Global North,
it is neither strategic nor propitious to describe in detail what the
adaptation--or indigenization, if you like--of a Eurocentric CS paradigm would
look like attuned to the needs and demands of neocolonized subjects in the
Global South. Parts of that description may be found in my previous works (San
Juan 1996, 2000, 2008). It would
certainly require a longer, sustained mapping of the sociopolitical terrain of
six decades after the 1946 formal independence. A political economy of group
consensus and habits of belief such as, for example, the inventory of
contradictions drawn up by social scientist Kenneth Bauzon (1991) would be
useful to calculate the scale and degree of continued Filipino mimicry of
inhumane models to perpetuate inequity and underdevelopment.
My
task here is circumscribed: to indicate in broaf strokes the limitations and
inadequacies of that paradigm for subjugated or dependent constituencies of the
Empire. It is foolhardy to
undertake this task until we have cleared up crucial theoretical hurdles. The
first is the problem of naming the subaltern agency. Obviously the
identification of "Filipino" and "Filipino nation" remains
contentious, unsettled, intractable. At best we can only handle the "interpretants"
(both denoted and connoted items) of those signifiers provisionally, given not
only the existence of heterogeneous components of that ethnic signified
"Filipino" but also the fact that the whole ethos (moral, aesthetic,
evaluative) of Filipino culture, not to speak of its cognitive and existential
aspects, remains suspended in the undecided battlefields of the
national-democratic revolution. Mutating modes of inclusion and exclusion of
group actors prevail. We can only stipulate our parameters of discourse in the
light of what has been accomplished so far in liberating ourselves,
neocolonized subjects, from imperialist political, sociocultural, economic
strangleholds.
For
now, suffice it to remark on the need to adhere to the axiom of historical
specificity (Korsch 1971) and a measure of philosophical rigor in defining such
parameters. Above all, the question of ideology and the political economy of
knowledge-production cannot be ignored. We cannot escape both the rules of our
own communities and that of the totalizing diplomatic-technological state
apparatuses of empire that modifies, coopts and sublimates those rules. The dialectical laws of motion
of interlocked asymmetrical nation-states cannot be dismissed as simply
reactive or aprioristic. In this light, Virgilio Enriquez's project of
inventing sikolohiyang Pilipino during the nationalist resurgence of the 1960s and early
1970s may be symptomatically read as a culmination of all previous decolonizing
initiatives (from Rizal and the Propagandistas to Recto, Constantino, and
Sison) to articulate a program and world-view for the masses struggling for
social justice, popular democracy, and genuine independence. It was institutionally predictable but
also serendipituous.
An
analogous clarification can be offered for the roles that Filipino historians
adopted before, during, and after the Marcos dictatorship. While inspired by
Indian subalternist historians (laboring under the aegis of
Foucaultian/post-structuralist thought) to de-center what was perceived as
bourgeois-oriented chronicles such as those by Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato
Constantino, Rafael Ileto (1998) succeeded to some extent in assaying the value
of popular culture (the pasyon, etc.) and other marginal practices in the construction
of a “non-linear” narrative of Filipino events before and after the 1896
revolution. It is doubtful whether Agoncillo or Constantino really pursued a
linear, one-directional bias. Nevertheless, the revisionist method is not an
original “native” discovery. Even before the late-twentieth century diaspora,
the Filipino intelligentsia has been open-minded, highly susceptible to global influences. Subalternist
historiography is the product of a long record of countering the positivist,
Comte-Rankean version of historicism, from the British social-history tradition
(Samuel 1981) to the French Annales school and its evolutionist/functionalist
offshoot in the Alfred McCoy-Ben Kerkvliet interventions in re-writing
Philippine history in a more sophisticated way than Stanley Karnow's apologetic
product, In Our Image (1989). Meanwhile, the Marcos Establishment historian Zeus Salazar
tried to retool Enriquez's sikolohiya by purging it of its liberatory impulse and anchoring a
populist version of the past in an evolving Filipino idiom via his pantayong
pananaw scheme.
It may be premature to judge the reformist efficacy of this effort in renewing
or rehabilitating the fields of local historiography and moribund anthropology.
Salazar’s disciples seem resigned to the neoliberal dispensation of the
post-Marcos order, ensconced in the academic commerce of fabricating
idiosyncratic terminology for archaic ideas.
Ramon
Guillermo (2003) has provided us a useful inventory of Salazar's heroic effort,
together with proposals for improving its method and scope. But both Salazar
and Guillermo have so far sidestepped the fundamental issue (which transcends
the old emic/etic binary) of how the notion of rationality--communicative
action, in another framework--central to the intellectual metier of a global community of
scientific inquirers to understand and appraise cultures can be surpassed or
transcended. This issue has been elaborated in the volume Rationality (Wilson 1970)—just to cite one
compilation--in which a survey of the conflicting arguments prompted Alasdair
MacIntyre's observation that "the understanding of a people in terms of
their own concepts and beliefs does in fact tend to preclude understanding them
in any other terms" (1970, 130).
MacIntyre
does not fully endorse the functionalist view that institutions must be grasped
not in terms of what they mean for the agents, but in terms of what necessary
needs and purposes they serve; however, he does not fully agree with Peter
Winch's untenable belief that communities can only be properly understood and
judged in terms of their own internally generated norms and beliefs--a
proposition that pantayong pananaw advocates seem to favor, despite earnest denials (see
Sta. Maria 2000). But even
assuming that isolated communities in a capitalist-gobalized world is possible,
long after Max Weber took time off from “value-free” pursuits to distinguish
explanation from interpretation, proponents of the primacy of hermeneutic
understanding still need the benefit of analytic explanation if they want to
avoid circularity and self-serving solipsism. After all, why bother
understanding Others? Oppositional American thinkers such as Marcus Raskin,
Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Susan Buck-Morss and others have begun to engage
with the antinomies of knowledge-production faced earlier by the British in the
context of the challenges of the postmodern era (Raskin 1987), an engagement
coopted by the debates on terrorism, Islamophobia, and other alibis of Empire.
Filipinization as A Concrete-Universal Project
My
own position strives to be a dialectical-materialist stance that privileges
historical specificity and counterhegemonic imperatives on the question of
adapting ideas originating from other sources (San Juan 2007). In my view,
language is only one of the criteria for hypothesizing the nation as
"imagined community,” to use Benedict Anderson’s formula. However, the
quest becomes more problematic when the language at issue,
"Filipino," is still a matter disputed by other participants of the
polity such as the Cebuanos, the various Moro groups, and by the
English-speaking intelligentsia and bureaucracy. More seriously, it is not
possible to conceive of the notions of "pantayo" and "pangkami" without the whole dynamic network of differences first
outlined by Saussure but complicated by the wide-ranging semiotic principles
explored by C.S. Peirce, Lev Vygotsky, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, and Roman
Jakobson, far beyond the findings of Whorf, Sapir, Humboldt, Frobenius, etc.
The linguistic symbol, as Jakobson reminds us, is not only a vehicle of the
sedimented past (icons) or the present (indices) but also of the future. He
quotes Peirce's speculation premised on the triadic theory of the sign:
"The being of a symbol consists in the real fact that something surely
will be experienced if certain conditions be satisfied....The value of a symbol
is that it serves to make thought and conduct rational and enables us to
predict the future" (1987,427).
Language is, to be sure, only one
signifier of national identity, not an absolute qualifier, whose correlation
with other practices and collective actions needs delicate orchestration
(Yinger 1976, 200-02). Earlier (San Juan 2008), I registered my discomfort with
the logocentric tendency in Enriquez's otherwise conscientious indigenization
attempt. In the total program of liberating the majority of Filipinos (workers,
peasants, women) from market exploitation and alien oppression, a nationalist
ideology as such should prioritize the act of foregrounding democratic national
rights and collective welfare. Hence we need an internationalist worldview such
as that provided by Marxism (articulated, of course, to our specific
conditions) with its universalistic, critical position grounded on a
"concrete universal," with all the richness of the particular
social-formation in the Philippines, in creating a sense of Filipino nationhood
(Lowy 2000).
Filipinizing
CS thus requires not merely linguistic readjustment but, more importantly,
reconceiving the sense of rationality, justice, equality and democratic
participation that cannot be hermetically encapsulated within the bounds of a
single Filipino language-in-the-making. My firm conviction is that no
indigenization project will fully succeed unless it includes a program of systematic
decolonization, particularly an uncompromising indictment of U.S.
colonialism/neocolonialism in its totality, together with its complicit
transnational allies. Neither postcolonial hybridity, modernizing technocratic
pragmatism, nor transnational flexibility will do; we need dialectical cunning
and a bricoleur’s
resourcefulness in taking advantage of what our forebears--Rizal, Recto,
Agoncillo, Constantino, Hernandez, and others--have already won for us. After
all, the enemy can also speak in Filipino and even dance the tinikling and sing "Dahil sa
Iyo" in more seductive, innovative, postmodernist ways. We need to combine
specifics and universals in both strategic and tactical ways that precisely
cannot be learned at this time from orthodox CS and its postcolonial.
transnationalist variations.
To
recap: Conceived as a reaction to capitalist high culture in the late twentieth
century, CS initially challenged
Cold War norms and Western hegemony.
It promised a democratic, even radical, renaissance of thought and
sensibility inside and outside the academy. Its early practitioners drew
heavily from the Marxist and socialist traditions. But when it became
institutionalized in the Eighties and Nineties, CS distanced itself rapidly
from mass political struggles in the metropoles and the “third world.” It
reverted to ethical individualism, aestheticism, Nietzschean performative
displays, and the fetishism of differences/hybridity, becoming in the process a
defensive ideology for predatory finance capitalism and technocratic
globalization. If we want CS to be meaningful to the majority of Filipinos, it
needs to address the urgent realities of our society and contribute to the
democratic and egalitarian ideals of our history.
Prophetic Cognitive Mapping
The current war
on terrorism by the imperial powers led by the United States exhibits its
exemplary form of “epistemic violence” in its attack on national-liberation and
popular-democatic struggles everywhere. One example is the US attack on Moro
insurgents, including the group stigmatized as the terrorist “Abu Sayyaf.”
Working through neocolonial instrumentalities, as well as regional alliances,
Western hegemony continues to delegitimize this Moro demand for
self-determination into a dangerous conspiracy that needs to be coopted or
suppressed. Exploiting splinter groups utilized by local compradors and elite
bureaucrats, the US tries to convert the age-old class conflicts in the
Philippines into the discourse of war between civilizations. Mixing outright
propaganda and vestiges of cold-war rhetoric and counterinsurgency policies,
finance-capitalism seeks to resolve its accumulation crisis by intensifying
ideological-cultural conflicts that hide the historical material grounds of
injustice and oppression. The Moro struggle in the Philippines will remain a
crucible for U.S. “manifest destiny” after 9/11, but no serious and substantive
CS inquiry has been devoted to it.
And so far,
except for notable instances such as Lauren Berlant’s (1996) “The Face of
America and the State of Emergency,” I know of no serious and wide-ranging CS
study of “terrorism”—except perhaps Naomi Klein’s invaluable The Shock
Doctrine--as the new
ideological-political strategy of global capital to maintain its hegemonic
stranglehold on the planet (contrast Berlant with the scholasticism of Tsing
2011). This is a symptom of a profound malaise afflicting the intellectual public sphere of the
Global North. Unless CS pays attention to what Fanon called “the wretched of
the earth,” in particular the situation of peoples of color fighting for
survival, with dignity and freedom, such as those in the Philippines, CS cannot
renew its radical or oppositional beginnings, much less revive the proverbial
“speaking” virtue of the much deconstructed postcolonial subaltern. We can see
how, in two recent surveys of British Cultural Studies (Morley and Robbins
2001) and French Cultural Studies (Forbes and Kelly 1995), this new
country-oriented CS has incorporated a reflexive, more critical optic on its
nationalist provenance and shifted focus on the imperialist encroachments of
the elite, as well as the impact of the “natives” and migrants on the nativist
codes and ethos.
It
may be redundant to rehearse what we have elaborated in various earlier
discourses (1998; 2002), but the capacity to remember (the historical sense or
imagination) in consumer society is all but stultified and dessicated. So allow
us this excess. In the Philippines and other subordinated formations, CS can be
regenerated by renewing its anticolonial, popular and democratic inspiration
and re-engaging in a radical, transformative critique of oligopolistic
corporate power, the political economy of global finance capital and its
commodified/commodifying culture.
It can challenge US imperialism and its agent-satraps in its current
modality of warring against “terrorism” or extremism (codewords for
anti-imperialists) by returning to, first, the primacy of social labor; second,
the complex historical articulations of the mode of production and social
relations; and, third, the importance of the materialist critique of norms,
assumptions and premises underlying existing inequalities, injustices, and
oppressions.
The
radical critic Teresa Ebert notes that CS capitulated to conservatism by
abandoning Marxism and indulging in textual play, discursivity, the ‘troping of
reality” and textualizations of ethnography” (2002, 47). We thus need to
rehabilitate if not remodel the inherited CS to conform to the needs and
pressures of the Philippine situation. To Filipinize CS is to reconfigure the
modality and thrust of Western CS in order to address the persistent and urgent
problems of the exploitation of Filipino labor worldwide, the lack of genuine
sovereignty and national independence, and the profound class, gender and
ethnic inequalities that have plagued the country for so long. In short,
intellectuals engaged in CS need to situate their practice and vocation in the
actual society that underwrites their labor and provides it some measure of
intelligibility and significance. Otherwise, they will continue to serve the
interests of the capitalist Leviathan and undermine their own claims to
integrity and independence, not to speak of “academic freedom,” humanistic
ideals, and scientific objectivity. This is urgently the case today when the
advanced putrefaction of global capitalism, with its putatively postmodern
cosmopolitan culture being offered as a panacea, characterized by enclosures,
the “privatization of the global commons and the exploitation of wage laborers
in the vast cultural corporations” (Denning 2011, 141). Given the truth that
every cultural accomplishment is also a document of barbarism, we concur with
Walter Benjamin that “no cultural history has yet done justice to this
fundamental state of affairs, and it can hardly hope to do so.” Nor can CS do
it. De te fabula.
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