Cultural Studies Journal, Volume 06-03 (1990-12)

CULTURAL STUDIES Volume 6 Number 3 October 1992 Issue Editors:

JOHN HARTLEY IEN ANG

EDITORIAL STATEMENT

Cultural Studies seeks to foster more open analytic, critical and political conversations by encouraging people to push the dialogue into fresh, uncharted territory. It is devoted to understanding the specific ways cultural practices operate in everyday and social formations. But it is also devoted to intervening in the processes by which the existing techniques, institutions and structures of power are reproduced, resisted and transformed. Although focused in some sense on culture, we understand the term inclusively rather than exclusively. We are interested in work that explores the relations between cultural practices and everyday life, economic relations, the material world, the State, and historical forces and contexts. The journal is not committed to any single theoretical or political position; rather, we assume that questions of power organized around differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, nationality, colonial relations, etc., are all necessary to an adequate analysis of the contemporary world. We assume as well that different questions, different contexts and different institutional positions may bring with them a wide range of critical practices and theoretical frameworks. ‘Cultural studies’ as a fluid set of critical practices has moved rapidly into the mainstream of contemporary intellectual and academic life in a variety of political, national and intellectual contexts. Those of us working in cultural studies find ourselves caught between the need to define and defend its specificity and the desire to resist closure of the ongoing history of cultural studies by any such act of definition. We would like to suggest that cultural studies is most vital politically and intellectually when it refuses to construct itself as a fixed or unified theoretical position that can move freely across historical and political contexts. Cultural studies is in fact constantly reconstructing itself in the light of changing historical projects and intellectual resources. It is propelled less by a theoretical agenda than by its desire to construct possibilities, both immediate and imaginary, out of historical circumstances; it seeks to give a better understanding of where we are so that we can create new historical contexts and formations which are based on more just principles of freedom, equality, and the distribution of wealth and power. But it is, at the same time, committed to the importance of the ‘detour through theory’ as the crucial moment of critical intellectual work.

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Moreover, cultural studies is always interdisciplinary; it does not seek to explain everything from a cultural point of view or to reduce reality to culture. Rather it attempts to explore the specific effects of cultural practices using whatever resources are intellectually and politically available and/or necessary. This is, of course, always partly determined by the form and place of its institutionalization. To this end, cultural studies is committed to the radically contextual, historically specific character not only of cultural practices but also of the production of knowledge within cultural studies itself. It assumes that history, including the history of critical thought, is never guaranteed in advance, that the relations and possibilities of social life and power are never necessarily stitched into place, once and for all. Recognizing that ‘people make history in conditions not of their own making’, it seeks to identify and examine those moments when people are manipulated and deceived as well as those moments when they are active, struggling and even resisting. In that sense cultural studies is committed to the popular as a cultural terrain and a political force. Cultural Studies will publish essays covering a wide range of topics and styles. We hope to encourage significant intellectual and political experimentation, intervention and dialogue. At least half the issues will focus on special topics, often not traditionally associated with cultural studies. Occasionally, we will make space to present a body of work representing a specific national, ethnic or social tradition. Whenever possible, we intend to represent the truly international nature of contemporary work, without ignoring the significant dif ferences that are the result of speaking from and to specific contexts. We invite articles, reviews, critiques, photographs and other forms of ‘artistic’ production, and suggestions for special issues. And we invite readers to comment on the strengths and weaknesses, not only of the project and progress of cultural studies, but of the project and progress of Cultural Studies as well. Larry Grossberg Janice Radway *** Contributions should be sent to Professor Lawrence Grossberg, Dept. of Speech Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 244 Lincoln Hall, 702 S.Wright St., Urbana, Ill. 61801, USA. They should be in duplicate and should conform to the reference system set out in the Notes for Contributors, available from the Editors or Publishers. Reviews, and books for review, should be sent to Tim O’Sullivan, School of Arts, Leicester Polytechnic, P.O. Box 143, Leicester LE1 9EH; or to John Frow, Dept. of English, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia; or to Jennifer Daryl Slack, Dept. of Humanities, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931, USA.

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Frontispiece Ernie Bridge—‘The Great Australian Dream’ country music album/ cassette (see Preface). Available from the Hon. Ernie Bridge, 199 Flamborough Street, Doubleview, Western Australia 6018 (Aus $15 plus $3 postage).

CONTENTS

Preface: ‘Dismantling’ Fremantle? John Hartley

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Dismantling ‘cultural studies’ Ien Ang

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ARTICLES Visions of disorder: Aboriginal people and youth crime reporting Steve Mickler

308

Provincializing Europe: postcoloniality and the critique of history Dipesh Chakrabarty

324

Identity without a centre: allegory, history and Irish nationalism Luke Gibbons

346

Hegemonic irrationalities and psychoanalytic cultural critique Zoë Sofia

365

Useful culture Tony Bennett

385

(Mis)taking policy: notes on the cultural policy debate Tom O’Regan

400

Of rocks and hard places: the colonized, the national and Australian cultural studies Graeme Turner

415

Speaking trajectories: Meaghan Morris, antipodean theory and Australian cultural studies McKenzie Wark

425

Expatriation: useful astonishment as cultural studies John Hartley

442

KITES Afterthoughts on ‘Australianism’

464

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Meaghan Morris Voices from the outside: towards a new internationalist localism Kuan-Hsing Chen

473

REVIEWS Radical poetics Barrett Watten

484

The new look Pat Kirkham

492

The processed world Alec McHoul

497

Look Mum no hands Graeme Turner

501

Exploring the symbolic economy Martyn Lee

505

Notes on contributors

511

Index—Volume 6

524

JOHN HARTLEY

PREFACE: ‘DISMANTLING’ FREMANTLE?

This issue of Cultural Studies, edited by Ien Ang and John Hartley, is devoted to papers which arise from an international cultural studies conference held in June 1991 and called, oddly, ‘Dismantle Fremantle’. ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ had no deconstructive designs upon the fabric of the Western Australian port city; on the contrary, Fremantle provided an ideal venue for conference participants, as they thought about what ‘dismantling’ cultural studies might mean. This was odd too, since many of the participants were noted figures in the field of cultural studies itself—after all, one of the general editors, several of the founding editors, and an entire busload of the editorial committee of this very journal were in attendance. Dismantling that lot might prove difficult, involving more than a touch of Daliesque autocannibalism, if such participants really planned to dismantle the intellectual enterprise they had themselves helped to constitute. Why would anyone want to dismantle cultural studies anyway? It’s hardly a lethal profession, given that most of those who profess it are marginal intellectuals in marginal institutions, hedged about on all sides by forces more powerful than they; on one side by the overgrown thickets of traditional academic disciplines, on another by an indifferent wall of incomprehension known as popular culture, and over there the philistine hordes of economic rationalists and political reactionaries. In such a landscape cultural studies is an upstart intellectual enterprise, about as threatening as the militarism of a toy soldier. But there are those for whom cultural studies is not hedged but hegemonic. And Fremantle was an ideal venue to see what they meant. It is a port whose only international claim to fame during the year of 1991 was that it was used as an entrepôt f or an especially notorious case of arms smuggling, presumably on the basis that no one would notice, which they didn’t at the time. In such a town, the goings on of Anglo-American cultural studies may have about as much local significance as the passage of a foreign ship bearing dangerous cargoes. More seriously, a particular brand of Anglo-American cultural studies has recently undergone a period of rapid capitalization in institutional, intellectual and publishing sectors, with major increases in productivity and a tendency to corner the market world-wide. As a port, Fremantle is clearly dedicated to two-way traffic; local commodities

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from sheep to cultural studies, can be exported to the world, while valuable imports, from Toyotas to television, make their welcome antipodean landfall. So from here, questions of the terms of trade of the international intellectual economy take on a material force. Inequalities of international exchange, neglect of local differences in favour of standardization, and the question of whether Anglo-American dominance of the market is desirable or disastrous; such matters are hard to avoid in Fremantle. Do they apply to cultural studies as well as to container ships? An ambiguous place, then, whose identity is far from settled, whose powers are not fully developed nor fully tested, and whose purposes are not unequivocally justifiable. Here, in the huge jarrah-wood ‘A’ Shed on the quayside of Fremantle’s Victoria Harbour, in Fremantle’s historic Town Hall, and in the former Boys’ School, now Film and Television Institute of WA, ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ unfolded. Its ceremonial highlight was the visit of a cabinet minister of the Western Australian state government; but, in true ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ style, the Honourable Ernie Bridge, Minister of Agriculture, Water Resources and The North West, who is also the first Aboriginal cabinet minister in Australian history, a substantial property owner in the cattle-station country of the state’s far north, and a well-known proponent of a utopian water-irrigation scheme, did not address us in any of these capacities. Along with his two sons Kim and Noel, he appeared in his equally famous capacity as a country-and-western singer, regaling us with his ‘Great Australian Dream’, which is a song, a reference to the destiny of his continental nation, and to the said water-irrigation scheme, all in one, harmonized on a guitar made in Fremantle of indigenous jarrah wood. That was our ceremonial highlight, along with the appearance of Perth’s best didgeridoo player, Richard Walley, and his troupe of traditional Aboriginal dancers, and the award-winning Aboriginal prison-poet Graeme Dixon, whose book Holocaust Island provided exactly the right accompaniment to the ceremonial Dismantle Dinner. Well, those were our applied cultural studies, our dismantling performances; cheering and perplexing our interstate and overseas visitors in about equal measure while the conference organizers spent the evening at the door arguing with two officers from the Liquor and Gaming Branch who were minded to take a dim view of the fact that we had sought to complete our participants’ cultural education with the study of some indigenous wines, presented by the Wine Education Council of Western Australia. As the WA cabinet minister sang the praises of the state whose viticulture was being promoted to its distinguished guests, the forces of Law were proving to be as relentless, insensitive, and bloody-minded as several of the papers presented at the conference had already revealed them to be. Meanwhile, as the Law looked for grounds for prosecution, the conference organizers looked on helplessly, only to see, over the burly shoulders of the Repressive State Apparatuses, a departing concessionary conferee put a sizeable dent in the organizer’s prized Chevy,

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the very vehicle in which, en route from Perth airport eighteen months earlier, the idea for ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ was first hatched. It was a perfect setting. Amid these experiential excesses, there were intellectual highlights too. Some of them are presented in the pages that follow. Some of them, alas, are not. But, for the record, here is the full list of papers. Ang, Ien (Amsterdam University and Murdoch University, Western Australia): ‘Hegemony in trouble: hazards of a postcolonialist Europe’. Bennett, Tony (Griffith University, Australia): ‘Useful culture’. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (Melbourne University and Australian National University) ‘Provincializing Europe: postcoloniality and the artifice of history’. Chambers, Deborah (University of Western Sydney, Australia) ‘Public and private images of women and suburban culture’. Chen, Kuan-Hsing (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan) ‘Beyond the “audience”: the masses, the schizos, and/or the historical subject’. Chua Keng, Siew (Edith Cowan University, Australia) ‘Australian screen: ethnocentricity, (multi)cultural studies and Asian (re)presentation’. Craik, Jennifer (Griffith University) ‘Accounting for fashion: cultural studies and the ephemera’. Fry, Tony (Power Institute of Fine Arts, Sydney University) ‘Being by design: here and there’. Gibbons, Luke (City University, Dublin) ‘Identity without a centre: nationalism in a postcolonial frame’. Grossberg, Lawrence (University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign, USA) ‘Cultural studies: diaspora or bullish market?’. Hartley, John (Murdoch University) ‘Expatriation: the country and the critic’. Hodge, Bob (Murdoch University) ‘Opening statement’. Jayamanne, Laleen (Power Institute of Fine Arts, Sydney University) ‘Love me tender, love me true, never let me go: a Sri Lankan reading of Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries’. Lucy, Niall (Murdoch University) ‘Post/popular/culture’. Mercer, Colin (Griffith University) ‘“Little supplements of life”: cultural policy and the management of urban populations’. Mickler, Steve (Murdoch University and Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Commission) ‘Visions of disorder: Aboriginal people and the media’. Mishra, Vijay (Murdoch University) ‘Masculinity, stars, and narrative in Indian cinema’. Morris, Meaghan (independent, Bundeena) ‘Reflecting on mateship’. O’Regan, Tom (Murdoch University) ‘Two or three things I know about meaning…’. Petkovic, Josko (Murdoch University) ‘Dismantling the word’. Ruthrof, Horst (Murdoch University) ‘Closing statement’. Sofoulis, Zoë (Murdoch University) ‘The return of the expressed: ethnocentrism in psychoanalytic cultural critique’. Stratton, Jon (Curtin University, Australia) ‘Landscapes’. Turner, Graeme (Queensland University) ‘Of rocks and hard places: the colonized, the national and Australian cultural studies’.

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Wark, McKenzie (Macquarie University, Australia) ‘Perverse readings of the new world order: Meaghan Morris, cultural studies and antipodean theory’. Webb, Hugh (Murdoch University) ‘Jock Shandley’s hat: continental cultural provocations’.

‘Dismantle Fremantle’ performances: Country music: The Hon. Ernie Bridge, Noel Bridge and Kim Bridge. Didgeridoo: Richard Walley. Dance: Middar Nyoongar Dance group. Poetry: Graeme Dixon. Film/Video: Tracey Moffatt and Laleen Jayamanne. ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ was sponsored by the Communication Studies Program, the Asia Research Centre and the Centre for Research in Culture and Communication at Murdoch University, and by the Film and Television Institute of Western Australia, and supported by Desert Designs, Encore Productions, the ‘A’ Shed, Fremantle City Council. It was organized by Ien Ang, John Hartley, Niall Lucy and Zoë Sofoulis. PS. For those of you who like narrative closure: prosecution was averted, order was restored, and so was the Chevy. As for cultural studies, the jury is still out—or so it seems from the dozen or so ‘good and true’ whose thoughts on the subject follow.

IEN ANG

DISMANTLING ‘CULTURAL STUDIES’? (by way of introduction)

On St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1992, Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating —who has been keen on accenting his Irish family origins—once again expressed his dismay at what he sees as Australia’s failure to assert its national identity. In his view, Australia could learn something from Ireland: ‘We have got to be in this country like the Irish are, proud without being silly, parochial without being unworldly, culturally secure without being culturally arrogant’.1 Of course, Keating’s comparison isn’t exactly a happy one. Australia’s Irish connection is not an innocent one, certainly not in current debates about ‘multicultural’ Australia. Furthermore, although both Ireland and Australia have been British colonies, Irish history is totally different from Australia’s, the latter being an immigrant society where what is left of the indigenous population has been scandalously relegated to a position of utter marginalization and deprivation, whereas the indigenous is precisely the (symbolic) reservoir of much of contemporary Irish identity. In other words, what is a source of self-esteem in Ireland, is a source of shame in (mainstream) Australia. This serves only to point to one way that the historical construction of ‘Australian identity’ is fraught with political, cultural and moral difficulties rather different from that of ‘Irish identity’. Still, Keating’s remark is quite incisive in pointing to one problem that both nations have in common: the need to establish, maintain and assert themselves as relatively peripheral entities in an international order where the centres of power and authority lie elsewhere. Keating’s formula for Australia as a nation—the carving out of a space for pride, parochialism and cultural security while avoiding silliness, unworldliness and arrogance—reverberates quite prominently in Australian cultural studies, as will be apparent from many of the articles in this issue of Cultural Studies. Compiled here is a selection of (partly revised or entirely rewritten) papers delivered at ‘Dismantle Fremantle’, an international cultural studies ‘confest’ (conference in the style of a festival) organized by Murdoch University and held in Fremantle, Western Australia, in June 1991. What follows are some partial—in the double sense of the word— observations about this selection of papers (and some of the themes raised by

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them), which is? as Meaghan Morris rightly remarks, quite a different thing from the conference itself. In making choices for some intellectual trajectories over others, however, I do not want to invalidate any of the whole repertoire of positions and perspectives that cultural studies has been able to articulate and continues to articulate. Although cultural studies can hardly pretend to provide an ‘ideal speech situation’, fostering ongoing discussion may still be the best we have. This, at least, is one of the lessons of ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ IV an event which turned out to be an exploration in the problems— theoretical and political—of taking cultural specificity seriously. This does complicate my speaking trajectory here, given the fact that the exploration centred so much on doing cultural studies in Australia, as I write as someone who only recently chose Australia as her new ‘home’—home in Meaghan Morris’s definition: ‘not a place of origin, but an “aspect” of a process which it enables […] but does not precede […] not an enclosure, but a way of going outside’ (1991:454). One of the explicit aims of ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ was to make a breach in what some see as rapidly solidifying orthodoxies within cultural studies. The use of Fremantle as a setting, within contemporary geopolitical relations ‘a town at the end of the earth’,2 even within Australia, was designed as a geographical gambit to counter what Graeme Turner (1991:640–53), in his aim to cultivate a specifically Australian cultural studies, has called the universalizing tendencies in cultural studies, particularly British cultural studies.3 In this sense, the comparatively marginal Australian perspective could provide the leverage—balancing on the thin line between pride and silliness, parochialism and unworldliness, cultural security and arrogance—to sensitize cultural studies as an international intellectual practice more fully to its own diverse and divergent conditions of operation and intervention in different locales and circumstances. At the same time Fremantle, sometimes advertised as the ‘cosmopolitan’ port city of the Perth metropolitan area, is also not that peripheral a place for cultural studies: it was around here that the forerunner of this very journal, the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies was established and produced for a number of years, before the board decided to let Routledge turn the publication into an international journal, entitled Cultural Studies—an interesting example of reverse diffusion indeed. What is at issue then are the terms of the internationalization of cultural studies. A meaningful, critical internationalism, as Kuan-Hsing Chen remarks in his essay, can only develop if and when there is mutual acknowledgement of and serious engagement with the differences and diversity of ‘our’ specific investments in and inventions of ‘cultural studies’. What is needed, therefore, is a dismantling of unifying and universalizing definitions of ‘cultural studies’, opening up a space for meaningful conversation. In this respect, ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ can be seen as a kind of talkback exercise in response to the largest international cultural studies gathering so far, the ‘Cultural Studies: Now and the Future’ conference held at the University of Illinois,

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USA, in 1990. This conference brought together an impressive range of speakers who have made very interesting and useful contributions to the repertoire of work that can be subsumed under the label ‘cultural studies’, but the sheer ambitiousness, in scale and scope, of the Illinois conference has paradoxically evoked a sense of unease with a perceived ‘Americanization’ of cultural studies that the conference was seen to represent. And despite the fact that instances of outright cultural anti-Americanism (e.g., in relation to popular culture) have often been faulted in British and European cultural studies as a form of élitist, Eurocentric conservatism, for many the threat of cultural studies being appropriated and taken over by the Americans proves to be rather intolerable… Quite certainly this would be an unintended effect of the conference, the organization of which was motivated at least in part by an understandable desire to put ‘cultural studies’ emphatically on the US academic agenda. But the very gesture toward comprehensiveness and prestigious authority displayed by the event—as articulated in the conference’s title—has raised complex problems about its unwitting politics. For one thing, the book that emerged from the conference proceedings is bulky: 700-plus dense pages long. As it is simply titled Cultural Studies, it runs the risk of being read as an attempt at totalizing definitiveness, a politics of closure resulting in a hegemonic demarcation of what ‘cultural studies’ is, despite overt refusals in the pages of the book to come up with fixed or unified theoretical positions and agendas. One often-heard complaint about US conceptions of critical intellectual work is that it tends to confine politics exclusively within the walls of academia4 —a perspective fiercely opposed by many British cultural-studies workers, whose self-conception relies more on more socially embedded forms of intellectual struggle and activism. Stuart Hall, for example, has pointed out the danger that the very growth of, and emphasis on, ‘theoretical fluency’ in American cultural studies might lead to ‘substituting intellectual work for politics’ in the ‘highly rarified and enormously elaborated and well-funded professional world of American academic life’ (1991:286). One could add here that it is precisely theoretical fluency—rather than localized, historically specific, empirical work—which is most likely to be invested with international prestige and to travel well transcontexually. Needless to say then that rampant academicism—traditionally a privileged site of abstract internationalist objectivism—might only heighten the bias toward universalism that Turner, among others, has argued against. Of course it would be misplaced to generalize about the (lack of) politics of cultural studies in the US in this manner. However, it is significant that Larry Grossberg (one of the organizers of the Illinois conference) in his talk at ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ located the political importance of cultural studies precisely in the context of what he saw as ‘the diminishing possibilities for politics’ in the USA. In fact, what was most interesting in Grossberg’s talk

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was that he was prompted to explicate the specificity of the conditions for doing cultural studies in contemporary America. In other words, the context of ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ gave Grossberg the opportunity to deuniversalize his American speaking position. This is one way in which, as Turner has put it, ‘cultural studies has a lot to gain from the margins’ (1991: 650). It is from the perspective of the margins that ‘the radically contextual, historically specific character of the production of knowledge within cultural studies itself’ is most clearly illuminated (‘Editorial’, 1991). Grossberg’s emphasis on the increasing impossibility of politics in the USA is in fact a strategic starting point to stake out new (though admittedly limited) possibilities for politics—‘impure” forms of politics—for critical intellectuals working within the academy (see Grossberg, 1988:66–9). If Grossberg’s US speaking position is informed by a sense of limited possibilities, however, at the other extreme it is the felt urgency for politics in today’s Taiwan which drives Chen’s (dis)investment in cultural studies. A similar sense of political urgency is at work in Steve Mickler’s critique of the coverage of Aboriginal ‘crime’ in Western Australian newspapers. It is in such cases that theoretical fluency in the purely academic sense becomes of secondary importance, although it is equally clear that neither Chen nor Mickler could have done without the necessary detour through theory enabled by the legacy of a few decades of cultural studies. In other words, theory does matter, not for its fluency tout court but for its potential to instil fluency in concrete understanding and analysis.5 It is within the field of theory that Tony Bennett’s intervention in the socalled ‘policy debate’ is to be placed. In many ways, this debate is about the politics of cultural studies, or more precisely, about the political pull of the speaking positions that are and are not encouraged by the directions taken by the intellectual practices subsumed under the banner of ‘cultural studies’. Bennett’s theoretical rewriting of the history of ‘culture’—less reliant on a reading of canonical texts and more on that of the multiple policy technologies aimed at the instrumentalization of ‘culture’ in the context of modern government—strikes me as a very useful one, particularly when taking into account, as Bennett himself indicates, the increasing dominance of English and its entrenched disciplinary privileging of (narrowly defined) textual analysis in cultural studies’ academic institutionalization.6 However, Bennett’s argument against the ‘moralized enunciative position’ of the cultural critic in f avour of the more practical one of the cultural technician proved to be a rather controversial one at the ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ conference, a situation exacerbated by the ruthless oppositioning of critic and technician foregrounded by proponents of a policy orientation.7 As if Foucault could have developed his insights about culture-as-technique without the adoption of a deeply committed, morally informed cultural-critical perspective in the first place! In other words, not only are cultural criticism and cultural policy by no means necessarily opposed to each other (on the

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contrary, as Tom O’Regan shows, they often feed into each other and operate within the same social space, if at different planes); without a strongly developed cultural criticism a lot of cultural policy, with its inevitably positivist tilt, would drift into a sterile politics of pragmatism.8 My scepticism here is informed by experience in another context. Having lived in the Netherlands for a quarter of a century has predisposed me rather more ambivalently towards the presumed haven of well-managed socialdemocratic culture that the pro-policy lobbyists seem eager to buy into. In the Netherlands as well as in a number of other countries in Northwest Europe (where social-democratic visions of culture are rife), as I have remarked earlier in this journal (Ang and Morley, 1989), there is very little space for any critical intellectual engagement in cultural politics except within the constraining mould of ‘relevance for policy’, be it government policy or industry policy. The result has been a de facto hegemony of complacent, topdown, rationalist, and instrumentalist discourses of culture, an emphasis on ‘cultural planning’ which tends to treat as nuisance—or as downright superfluous—an inquiry into some of the ‘irrationalities’ (to use Zoë Sofia’s inflection of this term) of the system. In the Netherlands this has been articulated, for instance, in a f ar more centralized, hierarchical, and rationalized academic research policy (accompanied by rigorous, stateinduced, reorganizations within universities in the early to mid-eighties) than in Australia. It is my hunch that it is for these reasons that cultural studies as we know it has difficulty in thriving in these countries; it is simply too recalcitrant in its insistence, say, on the significance of unplanned forms of cultural struggle in the realm of the everyday, sometimes even as a result— unintended, to be sure—of certain policy measures. This is simply to indicate how imposition of a policy orientation, which is implicitly based on an unwarranted absolutist faith in the benevolent state, can ultimately lead to a poverty of critical discourse, unable (or unwilling) to take account of the multidimensional intricacies and contradictions of relations of culture and power in modern societies, thereby overlooking the ‘other’ side of the benevolent state: the repression and violence that underlie the idea of the modern nation-state, as both Dipesh Chakrabarty and Luke Gibbons emphasize. Against this background, I find the religious desire to impose policy relevance among some practitioners of cultural studies in Australia, to use John Hartley’s term, rather astonishing. We could even be more emphatic: in a time when the forces of global capitalism are becoming ever more totalizing, it is all the more important to retain a sense of iconoclastic ‘negativism’ associated with the critique of hegemony. Zoë Sofia’s project to develop a psychoanalytic cultural studies on the basis of a politicized concept of sublimation is extremely compelling in this respect. For one thing, psychoanalytic discourse, the plague that Freud expected to bring to America on his first trip there, can provide us with one resource for reviving critical distance in the postmodern context through an

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uncovering of the ever more refined repressions of the capitalist/ patriarchal/ Western unconscious. Contrary to the prescriptions of the pro-policy lobby (which amount to the adoption of a ‘managerial imagination’), I think that cultural studies will continue to need for its own creativity the counterpoint of (historicized and contextualized) forms of what could be called the deconstructive imagination—it is one of its lifelines, a necessary underpinning of what Chakrabarty calls a ‘politics of despair’. What made ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ so special, in my view, was precisely that it provided an explicit context for the presentation and discussion of different trajectories of deconstructive imagining that can help dismantle, from the perspective of the margins, the universalisms of international cultural studies. So what is to be done if any genuinely critical internationalism is to be fostered in cultural studies—and we may have no choice in this age of increasing globalization, as Ken Wark suggests? From a specifically Australian perspective, how can the word ‘international’, to quote Meaghan Morris again, stop being ‘a euphemism for a process of streamlining work to be “interesting” to American and European audiences’? (1991:456) It is within the margins that the serious difficulties of international communication—a longstanding central theme within anthropology (as well as in the transnational corporate world!) but still largely unacknowledged within cultural studies—are most urgently experienced. Thus, Hartley’s concept of astonishment describes the breakdown of communication when different speaking positions meet in what Morris calls ‘bizarre non-encounters between incommensurable identities’, and she usefully adds that they ‘are made meaningful only by an effort to do something with the startling fact that they can occupy the same space.’ (1991: 455–6) Indeed, astonishment has to be made useful. It is clear that what needs to be done, first of all, is a scrupulous specification of those ‘incommensurable identities’, including the power relations that they enter into. However, if it is a specification of our respective speaking (and listening!) positions which is—minimally9—required for international conversation to make sense, then it would hardly suffice to take the national as a trusted and comfortable signifier for such a specification. Not only is what constitutes the national always subject to contestation, it is also the case that the national is always already ‘contaminated’ by the international. This plight is especially strongly felt from the perspective of the marginal, the subaltern, the postcolonial. This is exemplified in differences in the key concerns which preoccupy Britain and Australia respectively, as mapped out by Hartley. As an historical centre of the international order, Britain (still) luxuriates in inner-directed concerns such as ‘class’ and ‘quality’, themes presuming an unquestioned plenitude of national self-identity, which according to Gibbons is characteristic of the classic European model of the nation-state: seen this way, the British problematization of ‘class’ and

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‘quality’, including its take-up as central themes in British cultural studies, is understandable precisely in the light of a self-assured confidence in the very possibility of national perfection through intranational education and regulation.10 On the other hand, the Australian themes identified by Hartley, ‘identity’ and ‘exchange’, reveal a fundamental tendency for the marginal (ized) to have to define its identity in exchange, as Meaghan Morris puts it. Marginalization makes any sense of a fully self-contained and internally cohesive identity impossible: the very boundaries of marginal identity are uncertain as it is under constant pressure of more powerful external forces which it has to come to terms with; it is, as Luke Gibbons shows in his essay on Irish nationalism, an ‘identity without a centre’. However, a fixation on one’s own marginality can easily degenerate into inordinate self-righteousness, where the fact of being marginal itself is used as unproblematized source of comfortable resentment toward the ‘centre’.11 It is then, to resume Keating’s fine distinctions, that pride and silliness are in danger of spilling into one another, when being parochial becomes an apology for being unworldly, and where the quest for cultural security can paradoxically end up in (reverse) cultural arrogance, triggered by an exclusive sense of ‘uniqueness’—as we have seen in the recent explosion of reactionary nationalisms all over the world. To be a truly de-universalizing force, therefore, the marginal should resist fixing itself in the nationalist frame (although there is nothing wrong with using the national as resource); instead, it should make the most of its own hybridity, much like in the ‘antipodean’ writing strategies that Wark uncovers in Morris’s work. Since, as Wark says, the antipode is not a fixed space but a relational node, an antipodean perspective—‘a question of moving tactically along one cultural trajectory and then off on another’—avoids reifying the marginal: instead, it uses the fact of marginality itself as the very weapon to (temporarily) overcome it. It therefore opens up the way for a resolutely antideterminist (although certainly overdetermined) concept of centre/margin relations. This entails, of course, a nonabsolutist conception of marginality. As a dubiously postcolonial nation,12 Australia may be positioned as marginalized in relation to the erstwhile imperial power Britain, to the post-war neoimperialist power of the USA, and to the recent economic power of Japan, but it entertains much less unambiguous relations with other world regions and cultures. Its relation to the diverse nations of Europe, Africa and Asia, for example, could certainly not be described in terms of clear-cut centre/margin relations. One dimension that puts Australia resolutely on the side of the ‘centre’, for example, is that it is a predominantly white, English-speaking country, along with the advantages that this brings with it in the global framework. Let me illustrate what this means by briefly describing another context, one that I happen to know well. The Netherlands is a country with a reputation

xviii DISMANTLING ‘CULTURAL STUDIES’?

‘where everybody speaks English’. And indeed, there is a peculiar tendency among the Dutch to take it for granted rather lightheartedly that no foreigner speaks their language. Therefore, they tend to mindlessly accept the necessity to learn other languages (predictably, those of the more central linguistic powers)—a situation which by those less enthralled with the blessings of affirmative internationalism (as significant parts of the Dutch middle class are) would easily be interpreted as an insidious form of cultural imperialism! I will not go into the complex contradictions confronting speakers of a minor language in an affluent Western country here; suffice it to point out that one of the greatest insults to hurl at Dutch people, in my view, is to casually compliment them that they speak English so well. Such ‘flattery’, while generally appreciated, is ultimately patronizing as it disregards the enormous effort (and the difficulty) that goes into learning to be fluent in a language other than the mother tongue.13 It also tends to keep Dutch peculiarities at the convenient distance of ‘otherness’, relegated to the area of the inaccessible. As Abram de Swaan has put it, ‘Nederlanders die zich tegenover buitenlanders noodgedwongen moeten uitdrukken in een vreemde taal lijken net iets trager, net iets dommer dan ze zijn. (Dutch people who of necessity have to express themselves toward foreigners in a foreign language appear to be just a bit slower, a bit more stupid than they really are [my trans.].)’ (1991: 216) Of course, this is a problem that not only the Dutch face, but a very large part of the world’s population.14 I am saying this partly as a way of articulating my protest against any easy designation of a homogenized Europe as purely and simply the metropolitan ‘centre’. Not only do the boundaries between ‘centres’ and ‘margins’ shift; it is also the case that there are margins within any ‘centre’ and centres to any ‘margin’. This doesn’t invalidate Chakrabarty’s project of provincializing ‘Europe’, on the contrary; in certain aspects this important project, in its attempt to deconstruct and demystify European modernity, may even be relevant to some of the more peripheral nation-states within Europe today, particularly in the postcommunist countries. The problem I am hinting at is the indolent kind of crude, sloganistic accusations of ‘Eurocentrism’ (as sometimes expressed by postcolonials) which often amount to nothing more than a form of ‘counter-othering’, based on as much ignorance about the actual realities of contemporary European societies as they (rightly) level against classic European attitudes to their own places. This doesn’t mean that Europe isn’t Eurocentric—in fact it is, and becoming more so in a rather troubling manner—but that modern Eurocentrism15 should be analyzed in its concrete manifestations rather than merely imputed. I come to the conclusion then that attention to the complex dynamics of heterogeneous second-world relations at the multidimensional interfaces of, say, Australia/Ireland, Australia/India, Australia/Taiwan, Australia/The Netherlands, and so on ad infinitum—to remain at the (problematically unspecified) national plane of difference—may be much more challenging

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than the until now much more attended focus on postcolonial and/or imperial relations (with Britain and the USA particularly). Such little pursued trajectories of international conversation between partners without established, a priori hierarchies between and among them may bring about forms of novel and unforeseen cross-cultural knowledge. In fact, my relatively brief Australian experience has already provided me with a more astute grasp on the peculiarities of living in a country such as the Netherlands than I have ever had before. So I recognize Meaghan Morris’s difficulty in writing about the Australian ethic and practice of ‘mateship’ for an international audience, the constantly felt need to explain to others how ‘we’ do it, and so on.16 In relation to Anglo-American intellectual practices— including cultural studies—Dutch work is at least as marginalized as Australian work, if not more so at a very basic level: the numerous courses on ‘how to write an academic article in English’ offered at Dutch universities are testimony to this. It is all the more peculiar, therefore, to realize that the typical Dutch response is one of disavowal of the predicament rather than of active recognition of it: one thing that Dutch culture pertinently refuses to see is its own contemporary marginalization—a case of severe cultural repression indeed. (The Netherlands’ very identification with being part of ‘Europe’, aided by its peculiar geographical location, may be a source of the problem here: the resulting unconscious Eurocentrism, with its deeply ingrained historical self-confidence as the centre of the world, may actually impede a clear vision of the extent of the country’s cultural marginality today.17) I could see this cultural peculiarity only, however, when I became familiar with the rather different ways in which a similar predicament is being dealt with in Australia. If this—rather arbitrary—example of cross-cultural comparison teaches us something, then it is that surprising parallels can lie beneath equally imposing incommensurabilities. Such relatively uncharted trajectories of crossculturalism thus bring up and enlighten a whole new spectre of (im) possibilities for meaningful international exchange, the terms of which we can only invent as we go along. This is the single most exciting insight that I acquired from ‘Dismantle Fremantle’—both the conference and this issue of Cultural Studies. If cultural studies in the future can draw inspiration from this insight, then it can be home, an international intellectual home: a place where one can be proud to be parochial, but secure enough to avoid silly unworldliness—a place with no room for arrogance, so that one never stops going outside. Notes This article has benefited greatly from lengthy discussions with Jon Stratton, to whom my thanks. I also thank Toby Miller for his useful comments.

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1 ‘Keating uses Irish example to raise flag issue’, The Australian, 18 March 1992, p. 2. 2 As in the ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ flier, written by John Hartley. 3 See also Turner’s article on this issue. 4 For example, in his Crusoe’s Footsteps: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (1991) Patrick Brantlinger constructs a history of cultural studies as exclusively driven and determined by academic crises within the humanities and the social sciences. 5 And, therefore, struggle within academia does matter. 6 I particularly welcome Bennett’s move away from purely textual theorizations of ‘culture’, which opens up the possibility for more genuine interdisciplinarity between traditions from the humanities and the social sciences. 7 Read paradoxically and perversely (in Ken Wark’s terms), Bennett’s intervention might in fact be refracted as a contribution to a more effective cultural criticism— one that goes beyond a preoccupation with the textual and is more fully engaged with social arrangements and technologies of ‘culture’—rather than serving as a prescription for a wholesale ‘turn toward policy’. 8 Of course, there are both good and bad forms of cultural criticism, as there are good and bad forms of cultural policy. To establish what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ is itself a necessary undertaking for a (self-reflective) cultural criticism. 9 It may sound banal, but what is even more minimally needed in this respect is an attitude of simply caring for what is happening elsewhere. This is easier said than done: indifference not to difference as such but to the specificity of differences is rampant, as is exemplified in the figure of the transnational cosmopolitan. 10 Although Britain’s entrance into the European community has brought to the surface a different, rather uncomfortable theme for the British: that of British marginalization. 11 This happens, for example, where Graeme Turner posits himself as ‘victim’ of the lack of attention to cultural specificity in British cultural studies (1991:652). A more productive image, because it recognizes the thoroughly ambiguous, mutually constitutive relationship between centre and margin emanating from the history of colonialism, is that of the ‘complicit postcolonial’, as developed by Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra (1991). 12 The term ‘dubiously postcolonial’ to describe Australia comes from Meaghan Morris (in this issue). 13 In this sense, problems around the international unsaleability of the Australian accent, as in the film and TV industry, are really of a rather different order. A popular Australian soap opera easily appears on one of the main Dutch TV channels. On the other hand, a popular Dutch sitcom will at most have a chance to be shown on SBS, the fringe ‘multicultural’ channel, in Australia. 14 The little problematized hegemony of English is also reflected in our relative ignorance about the interesting developments in Latin American cultural studies, for example. See e.g., Alan O’Connor (1991). 15 Needless to say that there is Australian Eurocentrism too. 16 I had this problem, for instance, in having to explain the Dutch cultural formation of ‘pillarization’. See e.g., Desperately Seeking the Audience, chapter 13.

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17 Dutch colonial history is another entry for understanding here. In a sense, having been a world empire still informs Dutch cultural self-assuredness today: colonialist attitudes (just as patriarchal ones) die hard.

References Ang, Ien (1991) Desperately Seeking the Audience, London: Routledge. Ang, Ien and Morley, David (1989) ‘Mayonnaise culture and other European follies’, Cultural Studies 3(2), 133–44. Brantlinger, Patrick (1991) Crusoe’s Footsteps: Cultural Studies in Britain and America, New York: Routledge. de Swaan, Abram (1991) ‘Het Nederlands in het Europese talenstelsel’, in Ton Zwaan et al., editors, Het Europese Labyrint, Amsterdam: Boom/Siswo. ‘Editorial statement’ (1991) Cultural Studies 6(1). Grossberg, Lawrence (1988) It’s a Sin, Sydney: Power Publications. Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary and Treichler, Paula (1991) editors, Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge. Hall, Stuart (1991) ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’, in Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (1991) 277–86. Hodge, Bob and Mishra, Vijay (1991) ‘What is post(-)colonialism?’, Textual Practice 5 (3), 399–414. ‘Keating uses Irish example to raise flag issue’ (1992) The Australian 18 March 1992. Morris, Meaghan (1991) ‘On the beach’, in Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (1991), 450– 78. O’Connor, Alan (1991) ‘The emergence of cultural studies in Latin America’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8(1) 60–73. Turner, Graeme (1991) ‘“It works for me”: British cultural studies, Australian cultural studies, Australian film’, in Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (1991) 640–53.

• ARTICLES •

STEVE MICKLER

VISIONS OF DISORDER: ABORIGINAL PEOPLE AND YOUTH CRIME REPORTING1

On 28 February 1990 Western Australians awoke to a troubling headline across the front page of the State’s major daily tabloid. On their way to work that morning, commuters passed posters, on the footpaths in front of suburban newsagents and on the corners of city streets, that reproduced, in large type, The West Australian’s main news of the day: ‘Aboriginal gangs terrorise suburbs’ (fig. 1). As far as Western Australian news media discourses about Aborigines go, the ‘gangs’ story, as it has come to be known, is the ‘had to happen one day’ story. For many years Aborigines in Perth have complained about what they believe to be incessant news media persecution. These complaints have been voiced strenuously to the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the Human Rights Commission National Inquiry Into Racist Violence, the Australian Press Council, the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, not to mention the chiefs of newspapers, radio and TV news programs themselves. Anti-Aboriginal media stories have led Aborigines to establish an Aboriginal-Media Liaison Group with sympathetic journalists, to campaign for the removal of a particularly offensive radio commentator,2 and have also given impetus to moves to set up Aboriginalcontrolled radio stations in Perth and other towns. So Aboriginal people are by no means passive recipients of news media visions of themselves and broader issues of race relations and representation. Indeed, they have also become active participants in setting and influencing public agendas. Aborigines are acutely aware of the power of news media to create or reproduce public knowledges about race relations, common senses about Aboriginality. Bitter experience has shown all too often how news media constructions of issues involving Aborigines establish the limits of what can and cannot be articulated about them, establish readerships positioned from within a consensus of common sense, and claim for these representations a truth grounded in an ever-present externalized power called ‘public opinion’. However artificial it may be, ‘public opinion’ is for many Aborigines real enough, a thing which governments claim to be powerless in the face of, and thence they will not support Aboriginal land rights, not respect sacred sites,

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Figure 1

not accept the need for special funding for Aboriginal programs, will scarcely lift a finger against police persecution. Nowadays Aboriginal aff airs form a staple of press and TV news, and this is in no minor way the result of Aboriginal activity itself. Certainly much media coverage exists as a kind of performance space for the ritual playing out

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of white Australian desires and anxieties, of renegotiating the bipolarity of the tribal and the modern, of revisualizing the boundaries of the deviant and the normal, Nation and Others. While it is a space in which Aborigines are increasingly active performers, pressing all the time for better roles, lines and scripts, as Christine Jennett points out, it is a decidedly white-Australiancontrolled theatre: Media images of and messages about Australian Aborigines are constructed by non-Aborigines operating within the dominant AngloEuropean cultural framework for consumption principally by those who share this framework. The reasons for this are located within the history of colonisation of Aborigines by Anglo-Europeans, whose powerful members retain cultural hegemony in Australian society; because they own the means of production, distribution and exchange they also control the dissemination of information about and images of minority groups. Nowhere has this been so all encompassing as in the case of the Aboriginal national minority (1983:28). I concur with Jennett’s position, which permits a situating of certain news media practices within an array of technologies of repression within an ongoing process of colonization. With this brief indication of the political position from which I proceed, I will move into the more specific background to the material presented here: it is a small portion of what I compiled during my work as a researcher for the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, specifically for Commissioner Patrick Dodson’s volumes on the economic, social and legal issues that underlie the deaths and the high rate of imprisonment of Aboriginal people. My brief was to examine the representation of Aboriginal people and issues by news media in Western Australia, to draw conclusions as to the significance of media representations within the cyclical reproduction of the web of hostile and exclusionary social relationships in which Aboriginal people find themselves, and to suggest a range of reforms to media policy, journalistic practices and interventionary measures to empower Aboriginal people. While there is certainly a need to analyze the full range of media discourse about Aboriginality, I have selected for this paper the emergence of a particular news discourse about Aboriginal youth in Western Australia over the past two years. Specifically, there has occurred a dramatically increased visualizing of Aboriginal youth as criminals, as major instigators of disorder, by Perth newspapers. Crime reporting, particularly where Aboriginality is identified for no apparent reason, draws the strongest criticism from Aboriginal people themselves. It is the association of Aboriginality with criminality which arguably has the most serious material implications for Aboriginal people,

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reproducing preconditions for intense police persecution, institutional discrimination and common racism. Ericson, Baranek, and Chan point out that structuring the production of news in general is an institutional desire for the visualization of deviance. Deviance, its control and its opposite, normality, are in fact the primary discursive objects of news making: Deviance and control are not only woven into the seamless web of news reporting, but are actually part of its fibre: they define not only the object and central character of news stories, but also the methodological approaches of journalists as they work on their stories (1987:4–5). It is difficult to nominate a news image more signifying of disorder and deviance in Perth than that of Aboriginal youths. In a sense, ‘reds under the beds’ has become ‘blacks behind the wheel of your car’. In 1960, at the height of assimilationism, the news media’s ‘Aboriginal problem’ was not represented as a threat to white society, but a question of assisting what were seen as a ‘primitive’ nomadic people to make the ‘transition’ into that society. State and church systems of regulation, surveillance and paternal ‘care’ were firmly in place. In the very broadest terms then, this ‘Aboriginal problem’ as visualized in media had gone from being ‘under control’ in 1960 to ‘out of control’ by the present, and thus ultimately presenting a sense of threat to established orders. The watershed marking this shift was the controversy surrounding the WA government’s political motioning to legislate Aboriginal land rights in the mid-1980s. In this period, a concentrated anti-land rights media campaign by miners, pastoralists and opposition parties—one TV ad depicting black hands building a brick wall across a map of the state—contributed to turning what opinion pollsters deemed to be ‘ambivalent public attitudes’ into what they called ‘hardened opposition’ not only to land rights, but almost any form of concession to Aboriginal demands (ANOP, 1985). From 1983 to 1989 riots and protests in country towns provided sumptuous spectacles for the frontpage imaging of disorder. Needless to say, disorder in public places were the eminently reportable events rather than the conditions for the crisis of Aboriginal life. Youth in general, of course, are traditionally available within news production, as bearers of moral panic. Throughout 1990 in Western Australia I suggest that the conflux of being black, young and so on the Other side of the Law provided the raw material for a particularly potent media-driven moral panic that has enormously increased the availability of Aboriginal youth as a signifier for certain types of crime and antisocial behaviour, a signifier historically attached to white working-class youth. From February to July 1990 Aboriginal youth were the specific objects of sensational page-one stories on four occasions. They were featured in many

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other reports on other pages over this period, and I will be looking at some of these historically, but it is these four front-pages on which I wish to focus. Their positioning made them the major news of the day, but also the circumstances of their production including the timing of their appearance provided a rare opportunity to gain a better grasp of the interplay between two powerful institutional forces—the journalistic practices of visualizing deviance and the state forces which have stakes in maintaining public agendas within which ‘Aboriginal’ crime may be not only meaningful, but useful to the agencies of social control. As Ericson, Baranek and Chan say, news is itself an active control agency. Let’s return to The West Australian headline I began with: ‘Aboriginal gangs terrorise suburbs’. The lead paragraph tells of police fears that ‘the situation is getting out of control’. Two days after the story appeared 45 ABC journalists wrote to the editor of the paper to complain that: The story proper contained no hard news link to any event or alleged event of the preceding 24 hours. The ‘suburbs’ turned out to be just three adjoining ones. Nobody identified as Aboriginal was quoted on the front page. The story reported allegations by police officers, and hoteliers, and their staff. There was just one allegation detailed which involved a serious attack on a suburbanite in a street. Otherwise the article comprised general remarks by police officers and more specific allegations by persons involved in selling liquor. Alleged crimes at liquor outlets do not amount to terrorised suburbs.3 The journalists’ letter, which The West Australian declined to publish, together with other evidence that the story was of a special kind, that it was an extreme manifestation of the more routinely deployed media discourses about Aborigines, underlined the need for further inquiry. The reporter who wrote the story told me she had ‘no idea the report was to be given front-page treatment’ and seemed a little surprised but guarded about saying much else except that she had been ‘tipped off about the story’ by a Channel 9 TV news reporter who covered a meeting of irate publicans and civic authorities the previous evening (27 February). Headlines are written by sub-editors, who also determine the positioning of a story, so the most excessive and inflammatory aspects of this story were not in fact the responsibility of the reporter who wrote it. The Channel 9 TV reporter thought The West Australian’s headline was ‘over the top’ and ‘inflammatory’. He said that the issue involved ‘six to eight or a dozen young Aborigines shop-lifting’, and could even identify a block of flats in nearby Inglewood where most of these youths lived. Indeed, interviews with suburban police, in whose areas the alleged gang terror occurred, showed that the headline was, even within news media’s own rather elastic conception of fact, groundless. I point out that the following statements are not from the senior police from Police Headquarters on whose

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statements the story was largely based. The Police Officer-in-Charge of Bayswater Police Station told me the article was ‘disgraceful’ and that the press had ‘blown that out of all proportion’.4 He also said that ‘it is actually quite quiet around here […] we only have a few incidents involving Aboriginal youth’. He described the article as ‘a piece of shit’, which he was prepared to ‘stand up in a court of law’ to refute. To me there was nothing in it. I would have thought they [reporters] would have come to talk to the Officer-in-Charge of the station here. The Aboriginal problem here is no greater than anywhere else. He strongly refuted the claims of gangs terrorizing the area, or that the ‘situation was getting out of control’. There had been some minor offences, including petty acts of shop-lifting and theft of petrol. We had a few house break-ins, but you can’t put them down to Aboriginals. I don’t know anything about ‘30 Aboriginals’. It has not been reported to us. He thought the incidents which the article turned into gang terror amounted to the theft of a cash register from a tavern by three Aboriginal youths who were later arrested by police from another station, the alleged assault on a young woman and her male partner at the Bayswater railway station by Aboriginal youths, and a brawl at the Maylands Tavern which involved Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal adult drinkers. These incidents, he said, were isolated from each other. The crime figures from the Bayswater Police Station do not support the headline. For instance, in February 1990, at the height of the alleged ‘gang terror’, not a single charge was laid against an Aboriginal youth while three non-Aboriginal youths were arrested for offences including breaking and entering, and stealing. No Aboriginal youths had been sent before the Children’s Court Panel or taken into any form of custody. In the same month five Aboriginal and seventeen non-Aboriginal adults had been arrested.5 Police at neighbouring Maylands presented a very similar picture. A woman constable described the most serious of the incidents involving Aboriginal people as ‘isolated’ and stated that the police had more trouble with ‘white street kids’ than Aboriginal youths.6 There is useful indication here as to the news shift that has occurred, from white youth to Aboriginal youth as the privileged bearers of disorder. She said there had been ‘a bit of a problem in February’ from one Aboriginal family, which had since left the area.

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This thing certainly did not deserve this sort of headline. Maylands certainly does not have the problem some people think it has. We don’t get really serious offences here. Ninety per cent of complaints relate to NPPs [No Particular Persons] and most people eventually charged are white. We have a high rate of petty crime, stealing, but the majority of those involved are white. Aboriginal crime has remained pretty standard for the past 18 months with no rise in incidents. She strongly refuted claims that ‘racial tensions were rising’ and that the ‘situation was getting out of control’ in Maylands. The only people we’ve been arresting for multiple house break-ins are white people such as drug addicts and street kids. If they [reporters] had looked at the Maylands figures [police arrest book] they would prove that. We’ve never had a call from The West Australian. Her reaction when first reading the ‘Aboriginal gangs’ story: ‘I thought… you’ve got to be joking! They’re in it for a headline.’ The Maylands police records are similarly revealing. In February 1990 only 7 Aboriginal people were arrested; 5 adults and 2 juveniles, out of a total of 35 arrests. In January, 5 Aboriginal adults were arrested and one Aboriginal juvenile within a total of 27 arrests.7 I believe these comments from police officers patrolling the streets where the alleged gang terror occurred, together with the data from the police arrest books, show that no such terror took place. At most what occurred was a series of isolated incidents involving Aboriginal people. The only hard reportable event on which to hang the story was a meeting of irate hotel owners and senior police: a production of Aboriginal youth by their adversaries, presented as page-one truth by the West. Under what conditions of possibility could this story, with patently no factual basis, appear? The circumstances of its timing are, I believe, significant. It appeared five days before the long-awaited commencement of the Royal Commission hearing into the most controversial death of an Aborigine in police custody. Sixteen year-old John Pat died in a police cell in Roebourne, Western Australia, in 1983, after being assaulted by police. In 1985 the police officers were acquitted of killing the youth, but enormous controversy has surrounded the case ever since. The ‘gangs’ story’s most authoritative sources of comment were, significantly, senior police officers based at Police Headquarters in East Perth. For instance, a Chief Superintendent is quoted in the article: ‘I don’t like picking on the Aborigines, but they are the ones creating the problems in this area’. It would not be unreasonable to suspect that such a sensational and threatening headline about Aboriginal youth could be useful to the police as a timely reminder to readers of what is frequently conceived as the ‘thin blue line’ between order and chaos. Police influence on news treatment of crime,

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Figure 2

and the dependence of news media on police and courts as a daily source of visualizable deviance has been well documented and theorized internationally. Information given to the Royal Commission by a number of Western Australian journalists suggested that the influence of WA Police on the reporting of incidents and issues involving Aborigines was extraordinary to say the least. For example, Jim Magnus of the Daily News, a reporter with some 35 years experience in Perth covering both police and Aboriginal affairs rounds, submitted that stories critical of police treatment of Aborigines were often simply spiked for no other reason than that they would offend the ‘major supplier of headlines’. So dependent were Perth newspapers on police for dramatic crime stories that police were able to affect the marketability of a newspaper by simply cutting off the supply. By this means, police could regulate the editorial positions of the paper if editors failed to exercise the normal self-regulation.8 Yet, there is another circumstance to consider. Buried down on the bottom of page four of the same edition of the paper was a small report telling of a massive financial loss by the Bell Resources group. At $860 million it constituted the greatest corporate loss in Australian business history. Bell Resources was, at the time, a Western Australian company owned by beleaguered one-time Perth billionaire and America’s Cup yachting hero Alan Bond. It was unquestionably the stuff of front-page news, and indeed it was in most of the major Eastern States’ press. Bell Resources also owned The West Australian. Indeed the West’ s headline of the very next day, good news for

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Bond, proves the point: ‘Bond victory—court removes receivers’: not a word about gangs. A financial disaster for the corporate owner of The West Australian was effectively down-played while a relatively minor and localized series of incidents allegedly involving Aboriginal people, in a few suburbs, was blown up to formidable proportions. In February 1991 the Australian Press Council cleared The West Australian of any breach of its principles over the ‘gangs’ article and dismissed a formal complaint by the Director of the Aboriginal Legal Service. Some weeks after the ‘gangs’ story on 18 May The West Australian ran another front-page headline, ‘Aborigines in half high speed chases’ (fig. 2). The accompanying article quoted figures from a ‘previously unreleased police report’ showing that ‘more than half the young criminals caught in high-speed chases by the police are Aboriginal’. The headline and story are based on a police report, which, it can be read halfway through the article, ‘was conducted from May to August last year’. It can be questioned why a report of nine-month-old police statistics was splashed across page one as if it was of burning interest and relevance to readers. The article came at the end of a week of extraordinary media treatment of high-speed car chases and juvenile delinquency, much of which, importantly, was directly attributed to Aboriginal youth. The week saw major reports with photos and headlines in Perth’s two main newspapers for four consecutive days with press and TV reporters travelling around in police cars, calls for tougher police measures and powers to deal with youth offenders, stiffer penalties from the courts and hasty reactions from government and opposition politicians. The 14 to 18 May 1990 campaign can be properly described as a police-and-media-driven ‘moral panic’ over youth delinquency, with heavy overtones of persecution of Aboriginal youth (fig. 3). The narrative of this moral panic or ‘media wave’ moved from crimes to panic by authorities, to calls for a police crack-down, to the crack-down itself. Although both black and white youth were arrested, Aboriginality was specified in numerous reports and editorials, in contravention of both the AJA’s Journalist Code of Ethics and the Principles of the Australian Press Council. The lead paragraph of an ‘on the spot’ report of the arrest of car thieves is a telling example. ‘A breathless and angry Senior Constable Mark Jenkins slapped the handcuffs on an Aboriginal youth. “What if you had killed someone’s wife and…children?”’ (Daily News 15th May 1990). This in spite of the fact that the arrested youths in accompanying photographs were not identifiably Aboriginal. Just in case the reader didn’t get the message, as figure 2 shows—police statistics piped straight through to the front page of that Friday’s West make certain they do. Again, four days before this media storm over youth car stealing and other offences, Judge Hal Jackson of the Perth Children’s Court, in an address to the Perth Press Club, was critical of police practices toward youth. He

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repeatedly drew attention to the failure of police methods in dealing with juvenile crime and called for police to adopt alternatives to charging youth offenders. He also emphasized the underlying historic and social issues associated with Aboriginal involvement with the criminal justice system.9 Two days later in an article in the Sunday Times (13.5.90) the judge criticized politicians and the media for ‘whipping up an irrational “jail-them mentality” among the public’. It so happened that immediately after these criticisms from a senior member of judiciary, the media and the police managed to create an atmosphere of civil emergency over youth crime, in support of the argument for tougher penalties and increased police powers to monitor and regulate youth behaviour. Indeed the front page of the Daily News of 15 May (‘60 Minutes of Terror: Club Wielding Gang Attacks Young Woman’), the report which heralded the beginning of this unprecedented week of mediatized war on youth, could not have been a more devastating rebuke to Judge Jackson’s criticisms made just two days later (Fig. 3). The media tirade also came before two critical State by-elections, a particularly vulnerable time for a government, when law and order issues are felt heavily to influence political fortunes. This is doubtless an opportune time for police to press for increased powers, resources, pay and conditions, and tougher sentencing of offenders, or simply to remind political parties of their influential position. It was also, I believe, significant that the Royal Commission cross-examination of police officers involved with the death of John Pat commenced in Perth on Monday 14 May. The local news media paid scant attention to this, the Daily News not covering it all and The West Australian carrying a single report on page 31 two days later on 16 May, by which time of course almost the entire Perth news media was preoccupied with the youth crime crisis. This was in marked contrast to the front-page coverage given by The West Australian to the appearance of new witnesses for the police at the beginning of the John Pat hearing on 7 March. Thus there were three distinct reasons why those police with responsibility for managing police image would have had high stakes in a such an excessive pageant of youth crime—read Aboriginal youth crime—at that moment: criticism from the judiciary; a pre-election government vulnerable to law-andorder crises; and police under the spotlight over the jail death of an Aboriginal youth. The fourth front page concerns the controversy over the public naming of a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal youth who escaped from Longmore Detention Centre on 10 July 1990. The youth had been sentenced for unlawful use of a motor vehicle and faced other charges relating to the earlier mentioned alleged gang attack on the suburban home of a woman, a case which continued to be listed in the media as part of the continuing juvenile ‘crime wave’ or ‘crisis’. The Children’s Court Act, which prohibits the public identification of juvenile offenders, was breached, both by the police, in

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Figure 3

releasing the youth’s name and photograph, and the media, for publishing and broadcasting them. The Daily News carried a large front-page mug-shot of the youth with the headline ‘Police Name Violent Boy’ which constructed the boy as ‘Public Enemy No. 1’ (fig. 4). The police claimed the release of the youth’s identity was justified on the grounds that it would assist with his

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recapture and alert an unwary public. Both the WA Minister for Police and the Attorney-General supported the identification of the youth, a move which leading Aboriginal organizations and civil-rights lawyers condemned as placing the police above the law.10 In a media statement, Rob Riley, Director of the Aboriginal Legal Service, pointed to the effect of such treatment in reproducing race hatred: One can only conclude that the police and some in the news media are joining forces to deliberately portray the image of Aboriginal youth as the major threat to the order of white society, and that this is a profoundly racist and provocative course of action on their parts. Riley called on the State government to: halt what is amounting to a racist persecution of Aboriginal youth by the police and media. Aboriginal youth are being made the scapegoats for the complete failure of the government and the wider society to redress the underlying social issues which cause young people to get in trouble with the law.11 The Premier, Carmen Lawrence, eventually voiced her ‘dismay’ over the incident publicly five days later.12 Instead of identifying the police and the news media as the creators of the youth crime ‘crisis’ she displaced the responsibility onto the ‘community’ which ‘focuses too heavily on juvenile crime’. ‘We are developing an attitude in this state which is verging on becoming hysterical’. Thus the Premier simply covered over the mediapolice-government nexus behind the intensified representation of Aboriginal youth as threatening to order and public safety. What I have attempted to demonstrate are the political conditions under which Western Australian news discourses about youth crime became racialized in 1990, to such an extent that any reference to youth-related crime, and specifically car theft, suggests to the reader, that is ‘the community’, that Aborigines are culpable. White ‘street kids’, the objects of intense media attention throughout the 1980s, virtually dropped off the news map in this period. The conditions for this shift are to be found, not in any increase in criminal activity by Aboriginal youth,13 but rather in the almost symbiotic relationship between the news media and the police concerning crime reporting, the police being under intense scrutiny at this particular time by three high-level government and judicial inquiries that were focusing on their treatment of Aboriginal people.14 Added to this are stubborn resistances within some influential sections of the judiciary to police demands for increased powers to regulate youth and for harsher court punishments. Handed to journalists and editors in this period is

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Figure 4

an unprecedented quantity of dramatic youth-crime data, tip-offs, pre-written stories on the fax machine, generous access to police operations, all of which

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combine to provide an inexpensive means of visualizing a deviance that is par excellence young, black and streetwise. The bottom-line effect of this was that within that short space of a few months, thematic news and current affairs representations of Aboriginal youth as victims of police harassment and violence, which had steadily built up around the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the other inquiries mentioned above since the mid-1980s, and which were symbolized by John Pat’s death, had shifted 180 degrees to a framing of Aboriginal youth as the greatest single threat to public safety, with police cast as embattled and under-resourced public defenders.15 I am arguing that the news production of Aboriginal youth criminals has to be seen in the context of at least an industrial relationship between police and news media within which reporting is policing, policing is reportable and reporting is policible. Police-inspired disorder I would like, as an afterword, to offer a final illustration. On the evening of 10 December 1989 the Lockridge Aboriginal camp, in the Perth suburb of Guildford, was raided by dozens of heavily armed police from the Tactical Response Group. According to witnesses, the police dragged men, women and children out of their demountable homes and terrorized them at gunpoint. Police were later to claim they acted on an anonymous tip-off that unlicensed firearms were held in the camp, although none was found and no charges were laid. An investigation into the raid was promised by the Minister for Police. The residents of Lockridge camp have taken criminal action against the police involved. It is noteworthy that the raid took place less than two weeks after the leader of the Lockridge group, Robert Bropho, had publicly given evidence of police brutality against his people to the Human Rights Commission’s National Inquiry Into Racist Violence.16 Bropho’s appearance at the hearing was reported by The West Australian. One would have thought that such allegations of police terror, especially as the police had promised an internal inquiry, and coming as it did so quickly after the hearing, would have been the subject of fairly intense media attention. Yet, press coverage was subdued, with The West Australian’s initial report appearing on page four entitled ‘Police pointed guns at us: Aborigines’.17 At the very least here was a missed opportunity for a front-page headline: ‘Police gang terrorizes Aboriginal camp.’

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Notes 1 I thank John Hartley for his helpful suggestions and editorial advice during the preparation of this article. 2 Howard Sattler, host of the ‘talk-back’ program, The Sattler File, of Radio 6PR. 3 Doug Spencer et al. of ABC Radio letter to Paul Murray, Editor of The West Australian, Perth, Western Australia, 2 March 1990. 4 Sgt Balfour Black, interviewed by S.Mickler of the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths In Custody (RCIADC), Perth, 19 July 1990, from notes. 5 Cited by S.Mickler of the RCIADC, Perth, 19 July 1990. 6 Constable Sally Holt, interviewed by S.Mickler of the RCIADC, Perth, 19 July 1990. 7 Cited by S.Mickler of RCIADC, Perth, 19 July 1990. 8 Daily News journalist Jim Magnus, RCIADC transcript, Perth, 30 May 1990. 9 Hal Jackson, Law for All and All for Law, address to the Perth Press Club, 11 May 1990. 10 Rob Riley of the WA Aboriginal Media Association (WAAMA) and Ted Wilkes of the Perth Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS) in The West Australian, 12 July 1990; Rene Le Miere of the WA Law Reform Society, The West Australian 13 July 1990; Richard Utting, lawyer, The West Australian, 14 July 1990. 11 Rob Riley, press statement, Perth, 12 July 1990. 12 The West Australian, 14 July 1990, p. 7. 13 Interesting indeed are WA Police statistics on youth crime which show that the number of apprehensions of Aboriginal youth in the Perth metropolitan area for common categories of offences in 1990 had either remained more or less the same as the previous year or, in the case of car theft, actually decreased dramatically (by 40 per cent). (In fact, the number of non-Aboriginal youth apprehensions similarly remained the same or decreased). WA Police Department—CRR9243A, Weekly Apprehensions for Youth for the Perth Metropolitan Area Only for the Period Between 01 Jan 89 to 31 Dec 89 and 01 Jan 90 to 31 Dec 90. Printed out for the author on 3 December 1991. For a revealing study of the relationship between news media’s crime waves and actual rates of crime see Mark Fishman (1981). 14 These were the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths In Custody, the Human Rights Commission’s National Inquiry Into Racist Violence and the WA Equal Opportunity Commission report on police treatment of Aboriginal people. 15 Formal public policy outcomes came, after two years of escalating public controversy, in February 1992 with the WA government’s highly contested legislating of the harshest juvenile offence penalties in Australia. The legislation, which, among other things, sets mandatory minimum prison sentences of 18 months for repeat offenders, and a mandatory 20 years for causing death associated with car theft, is seen as a clear victory for police and ‘law and order’ trumpeting political and media forces. 16 National Inquiry Into Racist Violence, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Transcripts, Perth Hearings, 29 November 1989. 17 The West Australian, 11 December 1990.

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References ANOP (January 1985) Land Rights, Winning Middle Australia, An Attitude and Communications Research Study, presented to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Canberra. Ericson, Richard V., Baranek, Patricia M. and Chan, Janet B.L. (1987) Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organization, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fishman, Mark (1981) ‘Crime waves as ideology’, in Cohen, S. and Young, J. editors, The Manufacture of News, London: Constable. Jennett, C. (1983) ‘White media rituals about Aboriginals’, Media Information Australia 30 (November).

Acknowledgment Photographs (Figs 1 and 2) by courtesy of the West Australian.

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE: POSTCOLONIALITY AND THE CRITIQUE OF HISTORY1

In the academic discourse of history—that is, ‘history’ as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university—‘Europe’ remains the sovereign, theoretical sub ject of all histories, including the ones we call ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Kenyan’, etc. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called ‘the history of Europe’. In this sense, ‘Indian’ history itself is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulate subaltern subject-positions in the name of history. That Europe works as a silent referent in historical knowledge itself becomes obvious in a highly ordinary way. There are at least two everyday symptoms of the subalternity of non-Western, third-world histories. Thirdworld historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate. Whether it is an Edward Thompson, a Le Roy Ladurie, a George Duby, a Carlo Ginzberg, a Lawrence Stone, a Robert Darnton or a Natalie Davis—to take but a few names at random from our contemporary world—the ‘greats’ and the models of the historian’s enterprise are always at least culturally ‘European’. ‘They’ produce their work in relative ignorance of, say, non-Western histories and this does not seem to affect the quality of their work. This is a gesture, however, that ‘we’ cannot return. We cannot even afford an equality or symmetry of ignorance at this level without taking the risk of appearing ‘oldfashioned’ or ‘outdated’. This problem of asymmetric ignorance is not simply a matter of ‘cultural cringe’ (to let my Australian self speak) on our part or of cultural arrogance on the part of the European historian. These problems exist but can be relatively easily addressed. Nor do I mean to take anything from the achievements of the historians I mentioned. Our footnotes bear rich testimony to the insights we have derived from their knowledge and creativity. The dominance of ‘Europe’ as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which historical knowledge is produced in the third world. This condition ordinarily expresses itself in a paradoxical manner. It is this paradox that I shall describe as the second everyday

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symptom of our subalternity, and it refers to the very nature of social-science pronouncements themselves. For generations now, philosophers and thinkers shaping the nature of social science have produced theories embracing the entirety of humanity. As we well know, these statements have been produced in relative, and sometimes absolute, ignorance of the majority of the humankind, i.e., those living in nonWestern cultures. This in itself is not paradoxical for the more self-conscious of European philosophers have always sought theoretically to justify this stance. The everyday paradox of third-world social science is that we find these theories, in spite of their inherent ignorance of ‘us’, eminently useful in understanding our societies. What allowed the modern European sages to develop such clairvoyance with regard to societies of which they were empirically ignorant? Why cannot we, once again, return the gaze? There is an answer to this question in the writings of philosophers who have read into European history an entelechy of universal reason, if we regard such philosophy as the self-consciousness of social science. Only ‘Europe’, the argument would appear to be, is theoretically (i.e., categorically, at the level of the fundamental categories that shape historical thinking) knowable; all other histories are matters of empirical research that fleshes out a theoretical skeleton that is substantially ‘Europe’. Such an epistemological proposition underlies Marx’s use of categories like ‘bourgeois’ and ‘pre-bourgeois’ or ‘capital’ and ‘pre-capital’. The prefix ‘pre’ here signifies a relationship that is both chronological and theoretical. The coming of the bourgeois or capitalist society, Marx argues in the Grundrisse and elsewhere, gives rise for the first time to a history that can be apprehended through a philosophical and universal category, ‘capital’. History becomes, for the first time, theoretically knowable. All past histories are now to be known (theoretically, that is) from the vantage point of this category, that is, in terms of their differences from it.2 To continue with Marx’s words: Even the most abstract categories, despite their validity—precisely because of their abstractness—for all epochs, are nevertheless,… themselves…a product of historical relations. Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organisation of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allow insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed significance within it, etc.…The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species…can be understood only after the higher development is already

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known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient (1973:105). For ‘capital’ or ‘bourgeois’, I submit, read ‘Europe’. Marx’s methodological/epistemological statements have not always successfully resisted historicist readings. There has always remained enough ambiguity in these statements to make possible the emergence of ‘Marxist’ historical narratives. These narratives turn around the theme of ‘historical transition’. Most modern third-world histories are written within problematics posed by this transition narrative of which the overriding (if often implicit) themes are those of development, modernization, capitalism. This tendency can be located in our own work in the Subaltern Studies project (Guha and Spivak, 1988). My book on working-class history struggles with the problem (Chakrabarty, 1989). Sumit Sarkar’s (another colleague in the Subaltern Studies project) Modern India, justifiably regarded as one of the best textbooks on Indian history written primarily for Indian universities, opens with the following sentences: The sixty years or so that lie between the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and the achievement of independence in August 1947 witnessed perhaps the greatest transition in our country’s long history. A transition, which in many ways remains grievously incomplete, and it is with this central ambiguity that it seems most convenient to begin our survey (1985a:1). What kind of a transition was it that remained ‘grievously incomplete’? Sarkar hints at the possibility of there having been several, by naming three: So many of the aspirations aroused in the course of the national struggle remained unfulfilled—the Gandhian dream of the peasant coming into his own in Ram-rajya [the rule of the legendary and the ideal god-king Ram], as much as the left ideals of social revolution. And as the history of independent India and Pakistan (and Bangladesh) was repeatedly to reveal, even the problems of a complete bourgeois transformation and successful capitalist development were not fully solved by the transfer of power of 1947 (1985a:4). Neither the peasant’s dream of a mythical and just kingdom, nor the left’s ideal of a social(ist) revolution, nor a ‘complete bourgeois transformation’—it is within these three absences, these ‘grievously incomplete’ scenarios that Sarkar locates the story of modern India. The tendency to read Indian history in terms of a lack, an absence or incompleteness that translates into ‘inadequacy’, is obvious in these excerpts. As a trope, however, it is an ancient one, going back to the hoary beginnings

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of colonial rule in India. The British conquered and represented the diversity of ‘Indian’ pasts through a homogenizing narrative of transition from a ‘medieval’ period to ‘modernity’. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, generations of élite Indian nationalists found their subject-positions, as nationalists, within this transitionnarrative that, at various times depending on one’s ideology, hung the tapestry of ‘Indian history’ between the two poles of the homologous sets of oppositions, despotic/constitutional, medieval/modern, feudal/capitalist. Within this narrative shared between imperialist and nationalist imaginations, the ‘Indian’ was always a figure of lack. There was always, in other words, room in this story for characters who embodied, on behalf of the native, the theme of ‘inadequacy’ or ‘failure’. For Rammohun Roy as for Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, two of India’s most prominent nationalist intellectuals of the nineteenth century, British rule was a necessary period of tutelage that Indians had to undergo in order to prepare precisely for what the British denied but extolled as the end of all history: citizenship and the nation-state. In nationalist versions of this narrative, as Partha Chatterjee has shown, it was the peasants and the workers, the subaltern classes, who were given to bear the cross of ‘inadequacy’, for, according to this version, it was they who needed to be educated out of their ignorance, parochialism or, depending on your preference, false consciousness (Chatterjee, 1986). Even today the Anglo-Indian word ‘communalism’ refers to those who allegedly fail to measure up to the ‘secular’ ideals of citizenship. That the British rule put the practices, institutions and the discourse of bourgeois individualism in place in the Indian soil is undeniable. Early expressions—that is, before the beginnings of nationalism—of this desire to be a ‘legal subject’ make it clear that to Indians in the 1830s and 40s, to be a ‘modern individual’ was to become a ‘European’. Later Indian nationalists, however, abandoned such abject desire to be ‘Europeans’ themselves. Nationalist thought was premised precisely on the assumed universality of the project of becoming individuals, on the assumption that ‘individual rights’ and abstract ‘equality’ were universals that could find a home anywhere in the world, that one could be both an ‘Indian’ and a ‘citizen’ at the same time. We shall soon explore some of the contradictions of this project. Many of the public and private rituals of modern individualism became visible in India in the nineteenth century. One sees this, for instance, in the sudden flourishing in this period of the four basic genres that help express the modern self: the novel, the biography, the autobiography and history.3 Along with these came modern industry, technology, medicine, a quasibourgeois (though colonial) legal system supported by a state that nationalism was to take over and make its own. The transition-narrative that I have been discussing underwrote, and was in turn underpinned by these institutions. To

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think this narrative was to think these institutions at the apex of which sat the modern state,4 and to think the modern or the nation-state was to think a history whose theoretical subject was Europe. Gandhi realized this as early as early as 1909. Referring to the Indian nationalists’ demands for more railways, modern medicine and bourgeois law, he cannily remarked in his book Hind Swaraj that this was to ‘make India English’ or, as he put it, to have ‘English rule without the Englishman’ (1909/63:15). This ‘Europe’ was of course nothing but a piece of fiction told to the colonized by the colonizer in the very process of fabricating colonial domination.5 Gandhi’s critique of this ‘Europe’ is compromised on many points by his nationalism and I do not intend to fetishize his text. But I find his gesture useful in developing the problematic of non-metropolitan histories. I shall now return to the themes of ‘failure’, ‘lack’ and ‘inadequacy’ that so ubiquitously characterize the speaking-subject of ‘Indian’ history. As in the practice of the insurgent peasants of colonial India, the first step in a critical effort must arise from a gesture of inversion (Guha, 1983: chap. 2). Let us begin from where the transition-narrative ends and read ‘plenitude’ and ‘creativity’ where this narrative has made us read ‘lack’ and ‘inadequacy’. According to the fable of their constitution, Indians today are all ‘citizens’. The constitution embraces almost a classically liberal definition of citizenship. If the modern state and the modern individual, the citizen, are but the two inseparable sides of the same phenomenon, as William Connolly argues in his interesting book Political Theory and Modernity (1989), it would appear that the end of history (shades of Fukuyama!) is in sight for us in India. This modern individual, however, whose political/public life is lived in citizenship, is also supposed to have an interiorized ‘private’ self which pours out incessantly in diaries, letters, autobiographies, novels and, of course, in what we say to our analysts. The bourgeois individual is not born until one discovers the pleasures of privacy. But this is a very special kind of ‘private’— it is, in fact, a deferred ‘public’, for this bourgeois private, as Habermas has reminded us, is ‘always already oriented to an audience (Publikum)’ (1989: 49. Indian public life may mimic on paper the bourgeois legal fiction of citizenship—the fiction is usually performed as a farce in India—but what about the bourgeois private and its history? Anyone who has tried to write ‘French’ social history with Indian material would know how impossibly difficult the task is (see Sarkar, 1985b:256–74). It is not that the form of the bourgeois private did not come with European rule. There have been, since the middle of the nineteenth century, Indian novels, diaries, letters and autobiographies, but they seldom yield pictures of an endlessly interiorized subject. Our autobiographies are remarkably ‘public’ (with constructions of public life that are not necessarily modern) when written by men, and tell the story of the extended family when written by women.6 In any case, autobiographies in the confessional mode are notable for their absence. The

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single paragraph (out of 963 pages) that Nirad Chaudhuri spends on describing his experience of his wedding night in the second volume of his celebrated and prize-winning autobiography is as good an example as any other and is worth quoting at some length. I should explain that this was an arranged marriage (Bengal, 1932) and Chaudhuri was anxious lest his wife should not appreciate his newly acquired but unaffordably expensive hobby of buying records of Western classical music. The passage is a telling exercise in the construction of memory, for it is about what Chaudhuri ‘remembers’ and ‘forgets’ of his ‘first night’s experience’. He screens off intimacy with expressions like ‘I do not remember’ or ‘I do not know how’ (not to mention the very Freudian ‘making a clean breast of’), and this self-constructed veil is no doubt a part of the self that speaks: I was terribly uneasy [writes Chaudhuri] at the prospect of meeting as wife a girl who was a complete stranger to me, and when she was brought in …and left standing before me I had nothing to say. I saw only a very shy smile on her face, and timidly she came and sat by my side on the edge of the bed. I do not know how after that both of us drifted to the pillows, to lie down side by side. [Chaudhuri adds in a footnote: ‘Of course, fully dressed. We Hindus…consider both extremes fully clad and fully nude—to be modest, and everything inbetween as grossly immodest. No decent man wants his wife to be an allumeuse.’] Then the first words were exchanged. She took up one of my arms, felt it and said: ‘You are so thin. I shall take good care of you’. I did not thank her, and I do not remember that beyond noting the words I even felt touched. The horrible suspense about European music had reawakened in my mind, and I decided to make a clean breast of it at once and look the sacrifice, if it was called for, straight in the face and begin romance on such terms as were offered to me. I asked her timidly after a while: ‘Have you listened to any European music?’ She shook her head to say ‘No’. Nonetheless, I took another chance and this time asked: ‘Have you heard the name of a man called Beethoven?’ She nodded and signified ‘Yes’. I was reassured, but not wholly satisfied. So I asked yet again: ‘Can you spell the name?’ She said slowly: ‘B, E, E, T, H, O, V, E, N.’ I felt encouraged…and [we] dozed off (1987:350–1). The desire to be ‘modern’ screams out of every sentence in the two volumes of Chaudhuri’s autobiography. His legendary name now stands for the cultural history of Indo-British encounter. Yet in the 1,500 odd pages that he has written in English about his lif e, this is the only passage where the narrative of Chaudhuri’s participation in public life and literary circles is interrupted to make room for something approaching the intimate. How do we read this text, this self-making of an Indian male who was second to no one in his ardour for the public life of the citizen, yet who seldom, if ever, reproduced in

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writing the other side of the modern citizen, the interiorized private self unceasingly reaching out for an audience? Public without private? Yet another instance of the ‘completeness’ of bourgeois transformation in India? These questions are themselves prompted by the transition-narrative which in turn situates the modern individual at the very end of history. I do not wish to confer on Chaudhuri’s autobiography a representativeness it may not have. Women’s writings, as I have already said, are different, and scholars have just begun to explore the world of autobiographies in Indian history. But if one result of European imperialism in India was to introduce the modern state and the idea of the nation with their attendant discourse of ‘citizenship’ which, by the very idea of ‘the citizen’s rights’ (i.e., ‘the rule of law’), splits the figure of the modern individual into ‘public’ and ‘private’ parts of the self (as the young Marx once pointed out in his ‘On the Jewish Question’), these themes have existed—in contestation, alliance and miscegenation—with other narratives of the self and community that do not look to the state/citizen bind as the ultimate construction of sociality (see Marx, 1975:215–52). This as such will not be disputed but my point goes further. It is that these other constructions of self and community, while documentable in themselves, will never enjoy the privilege of providing the meta-narratives or teleologies (assuming that there cannot be a narrative without at least an implicit teleology) of our histories. Partly because these narratives often themselves bespeak an antihistorical consciousness, that is, they entail subject-positions and configurations of memory that challenge and undermine the subject that speaks in the name of history. ‘History’ is precisely the site where the struggle goes on to appropriate, on behalf of the modern (my hyper-real Europe), these other collocations of memory. To illustrate these propositions, I will now discuss a fragment of this contested history in which the modern private and the modern individual were embroiled in colonial India.7 What I present here are the outlines, so to speak, of a chapter in the history of bourgeois domesticity in colonial Bengal. The material—in the main texts produced in Bengali between 1850 and 1920 for teaching women that very Victorian subject, ‘domestic science’—relates to the Bengali Hindu middle class, the bhadralok or ‘respectable people’. British rule instituted into Indian life the trichotomous ideational division on which modern political structures rest, e.g., the state, civil society and the (bourgeois) family. It was therefore not surprising that ideas relating to bourgeois domesticity, privacy and individuality should come to India via British rule. What I want to highlight here, however, through the example of the bhadralok, are certain cultural operations by which the ‘Indians’ challenged and modified these received ideas in such a way as to put in question two fundamental tenets underlying the idea of ‘modernity’—the nuclear family based on companionate marriage and the secular, historical construction of time.

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As Meredith Borthwick (1984, Ghulam Murshid (1983) and other scholars have shown, the eighteenth-century European idea of ‘civilization’ culminated, in early nineteenth-century India, in a full-blown imperialist critique of Indian/Hindu domestic life which was now held to be inferior to what became mid-Victorian ideals of bourgeois domesticity.8 ‘The condition of women’ question in nineteenth-century India was part of that critique as were the ideas of the ‘modern’ individual, ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and ‘rights’. In passages remarkable for their combination of egalitarianism and orientalism, James Mill’s The History of British India (1837) joined together the thematic of the family/nation and a teleology of ‘freedom’: The condition of women is one of the most remarkable circumstances in the manners of nations…The history of uncultivated nations uniformly represents the women as in a state of abject slavery, from which they slowly emerge as civilisation advances…As society refines upon its enjoyments,…the condition of the weaker sex is gradually improved, till they associate on equal terms with the men, and occupy the place of voluntary and useful coadjutors. A state of dependence more strict and humiliating than that which is ordained for the weaker sex among the Hindus cannot be easily conceived (Mill, 1837:309–10). As is well known, the Indian middle classes generally felt answerable to this charge. From the early nineteenth-century onwards a movement developed in Bengal (and other regions) to reform ‘women’s conditions’ and to give them formal education. Much of this discourse on women’s education was emancipationist in that it spoke the language of ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and ‘awakening’, and was strongly influenced by Ruskinian ideals and idealization of bourgeois domesticity (Borthwick, 1984). If one looks on this history as part of the history of the modern individual in India, an interesting feature emerges. It is that in this literature on women’s education certain terms, after all, were much more vigorously debated than others. There was, for example, a degree of consensus over the desirability of domestic ‘discipline’ and ‘hygiene’ as practices reflective of a state of modernity, but the word ‘freedom’, yet another important term in the rhetoric of the modern, hardly ever acted as the register of such a social consensus. It was a passionately disputed word and we would be wrong to assume that the passions reflected a simple and straightforward battle of the sexes. The word was assimilated to the nationalist need to construct cultural boundaries that supposedly separated the ‘European’ from the ‘Indian’. The dispute over the word was thus central to the discursive strategies through which a subjectposition was created enabling the ‘Indian’ to speak. It is this subject-position that I want to discuss here in some detail. What the Bengali literature on women’s education played out was a battle between a nationalist construction of a cultural norm of the patriarchal,

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patrilocal, patrilineal, extended family and the ideal of the patriarchal, bourgeois nuclear family that was implicit in the European/imperialist/ universalist discourse on the ‘freedoms’ of individualism, citizenship and civil society.9 The themes of ‘discipline’ and ‘order’ were critical in shaping nationalist imaginings of aesthetics and power. ‘Discipline’ was seen as the key to the power of the colonial (i.e., modern) state but it required certain procedures for redefining the self. The British were powerful, it was argued, because they were disciplined, orderly and punctual in every detail of their lives, and this was made possible by the education of ‘their’ women who brought the virtues of discipline into the home. The ‘Indian’ home, a colonial construct, now fared badly in nationalist writings on modern domesticity. To quote a Bengali text on women’s education from 1877: The house of any civilized European is like the abode of gods. Every household object is clean, set in its proper place and decorated; nothing seems unclean or smells foul…it is as if [the goddess of] order [srinkhala: order, discipline; srinkhal: chains] had become manifest to please the [human] eye. In the middle of the room would be a covered table with a bouquet of flowers on it, while around it would be [a few] chairs nicely arranged [with] everything sparkling clean. But enter a house in our country and you would feel as if you had been transported there by your destiny to make you atone for all the sins of your life. [A mass of] cowdung torturing the senses,…dust in the air, a growing heap of ashes, flies buzzing around,…a little boy urinating into the ground and putting the mess back into his mouth…the whole place is dominated by a stench that seems to be running free…There is no order anywhere, the household objects are so unclean that they only evoke disgust (Anon, 1877:28–9). This self-division of the colonial subject, the double movement of recognition by which it both knows its ‘present’ as the site of disorder and yet moves away from this space in desiring a discipline that can only exist in an imagined but ‘historical’ future, is a rehearsal, in the context of the discussion of the bourgeois domestic in colonial India, of the transition-narrative we have encountered before. A historical construction of temporality (medieval/ modern, separated by historical time), in other words, is precisely the axis along which the colonial subject splits itself. Or to put it differently, this split is what is history; writing history is performing this split over and over again. The desire for order and discipline in the domestic sphere thus may be seen as having been a correlate of the nationalist, modernizing desire f or a similar discipline in the public sphere, that is for a rule of law enforced by the state. It is beyond the scope of this paper to pursue this point further, but the connection between personal discipline and discipline in public life was to reveal itself in what the nationalists wrote about domestic hygiene and public

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health. The connection is recognizably modernist and it is what the Indian modern shared with the European modern.10 What I want to attend to, however, are the differences between the two. And this is where I turn to the other important aspect of the European modern, the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’. The argument about ‘freedom’—in the texts under discussion—was waged around the question of the Victorian ideals of the companionate marriage, that is, over the question as to whether or not the wife should also be a friend to the husband. Nothing threatened the ideal of the Bengali/ Indian extended family (or the exalted position of the mother-in-law within the structure) more than this idea wrapped up in notions of bourgeois privacy, that the wife was also to be a friend or, to put it differently, that the woman was now to be a modern individual. I must mention here that the modern individual, who asserts his/her individuality over the claims of the joint or extended family, almost always appears in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Bengali literature as an embattled figure, often the subject of ridicule and scorn in the same Bengali fiction and essays that otherwise extolled the virtues of discipline and scientific rationality in personal and public lives. This irony had many expressions. The most well-known Bengali fictional character who represents this moral censure of modern individuality is Nimchand Datta in Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Sadhabar Ekadashi (1866). Nimchand, who is English-educated, quotes Shakespeare, Milton or Locke at the slightest opportunity and who uses this education arrogantly to ignore his duties towards his extended family, finds his nemesis in alcohol and debauchery. This metonymic relationship between the love of ‘modern’/ English education (which stood for the romantic individual in nineteenth-century Bengal) and the slippery path of alcohol is suggested in the play by a conversation between Nimchand and a Bengali official of the colonial bureaucracy, a Deputy Magistrate. Nimchand’s supercilious braggadocio about his command of the English language quickly and inevitably runs to the subject of drinks (synonymous, in middle-class Bengali culture of the period, with absolute decadence): I read English, write English, speechify in English, think in English, dream in English—mind you, it’s no child’s play—now tell me, my good fellow, what would you like to drink?—Claret for ladies, sherry for men and brandy for heroes (Mitra, 1981:138). A similar connection between the modern, ‘free’, individual and selfishness was made in the literature on women’s education. The construction was undisguisedly nationalist (and patriarchal). ‘Freedom’ was used to mark a difference between what was ‘Indian’ and what was ‘European/English’. The ultra-free woman acted like a memsahib (European woman), selfish and shameless. As Kundamala Devi, a woman writing for a women’s magazine

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Bamabodhini Patrika, said in 1870: ‘Oh dear ones! If you have acquired real knowledge, then give no place in your heart to memsahib-like behaviour. This is not becoming in a Bengali housewife (Borthwick, 1984:105). The idea of ‘true modesty’ was mobilized to build up this picture of the ‘really’ Bengali woman.11 Writing in 1920, Indira Devi dedicated her Narir ukti [A Woman Speaks]—interestingly enough, a defence of modern Bengali womanhood against criticisms by (predominantly) male writers—to generations of ideal Bengali women whom she thus described: ‘unaffected by nature, of pleasant speech, untiring in their service [to others], oblivious of their own pleasures, [while] moved easily by the suffering of others, and capable of being content with very little’ (Devi, 1920: dedication page). This model of the ‘modern’ Bengali/Indian woman—educated enough to appreciate the modern regulations of the body and the state but yet ‘modest’ enough to be unselfassertive and unselfish—was tied to the debates on ‘freedom’. ‘Freedom’ in the West, several authors argued, meant jathechhachar, to do as one pleased, the right to self-indulgence. In India, it was said, ‘freedom’ meant freedom from the ego, the capacity to serve and obey voluntarily. Notice how the terms ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ have changed positions in the following quote: To be able to subordinate oneself to others and to dharma [duty/moral order/proper action]…to free the soul from the slavery of the senses, are the first tasks of human freedom…. That is why in Indian families boys and girls are subordinate to the parents, wife to the husband and to the parents-in-law, the discipline to the guru, the student to the teacher,… the king to dharma,…the people to the king, [and one’s] dignity and prestige to [that of] the community [samaj] (Bandyopadhyaya, 1887: 30–1).12 There was an ironical twist to this theorizing that needs to be noted. Quite clearly, this theory of ‘freedom-in-obedience’ did not apply to the domestic servants who were sometimes mentioned in this literature as examples of the ‘truly’ unfree, the nationalist point being that (European) observers commenting on the unfree status of Indian women often missed (so some nationalists argued) this crucial distinction between the housewife and the domestic. Obviously, the servants were not yet included in the India of the nationalist imagination. Thus the Bengali discourse on modern domesticity in a colonial period when the rise of a civil society and a quasi-modern state had already inserted the modern questions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ into middle-class Bengali lives. The received bourgeois ideas about domesticity and connections between the domestic and the national were modified here in two significant ways. One strategy, as I have sought to demonstrate, was to contrapose the cultural norm of the patriarchal extended family to the bourgeois patriarchal

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ideals of the companionate marriage, to oppose the new patriarchy with redefined versions of the old one(s). Thus was fought the idea of the modern private. The other strategy, equally significant, was to mobilize on behalf of the extended family, forms and figurations of collective memory that challenged, albeit ambiguously, the seemingly absolute separation of ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ time on which the very modern (‘European’) idea of history was/is based (Burke, 1969). The figure of the ‘truly educated’, ‘truly modest’ and ‘truly Indian’ woman is invested, in this discussion of women’s education, with a sacred authority by subordinating the question of domestic life to religious ideas of female auspiciousness that joined the heavenly with the mundane in a conceptualization of time which could be only antihistorical. The truly modern housewife, it was said, would be so auspicious as to mark the eternal return of the cosmic principle embodied in the goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of domestic well-being by whose grace the extended family (and clan, and hence by extending the sentiment, the nation, Bharatlakshmi) lived and prospered. Thus we read in a contemporary pamphlet: Women are the Lakshmis of the community. If they undertake to improve themselves in the sphere of dharma and knowledge…there will be an automatic improvement in [the quality of] social life (Bikshuk, 1876:77). Lakshmi, regarded as the Hindu god Vishnu’s wife by c. AD 400, has for long been held up in popular Hinduism, and in the everyday pantheism of Hindu families, as the model of the Hindu wife, united in complete harmony with her husband (and his family) through wilful submission, loyalty, devotion and chastity.13 When women did not follow her ideals, it was said, the (extended) family and the family line were destroyed by the spirit of Alakshmi (notLakshmi), the dark and malevolent reverse of the Lakshmi-principle. While women’s education and the idea of discipline as such were seldom opposed in this discourse regarding the modern individual in colonial Bengal, the line was drawn at the point where modernity and the demand for bourgeois privacy threatened the power and the pleasures of the extended family. There is no question that the speaking-subject here is nationalist and patriarchal, employing the clichéd Orientalist categories, ‘the East’ and ‘the West’.14 However, of importance to us are the two denials on which this particular moment of subjectivity rests: the denial, or at least contestation, of the bourgeois private, and, equally important, the denial of historical time by making the family a site where the sacred and the secular blended in perpetual reenactment of a principle that was heavenly and divine. The cultural space the antihistorical invoked was by no means harmonious or nonconflictual, though nationalist thought of necessity tried to portray it to be so. The antihistorical norms of the patriarchal extended family, for example, could only have had a contested existence, contested both by

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women’s struggles and by those of the subaltern classes. But these struggles did not necessarily follow any lines that would allow us to construct emancipatory narratives by putting the ‘patriarchals’ clearly on one side and the ‘liberals’ on the other. The history of modern ‘Indian’ individuality is caught up in too many contradictions to lend itself to such a treatment. I do not have the space here to develop the point, so I will make do with one example. It comes from the autobiography of Ramabai Ranade, the wife of the famous nineteenth-century social reformer from the Bombay Presidency, M.G.Ranade. Ramabai Ranade’s struggle for self-respect was in part against the ‘old’ patriarchal order of the extended family and for the ‘new’ patriarchy of companionate marriage which her reform-minded husband saw as the most civilized form of the conjugal bond. In pursuit of this ideal, Ramabai began to share her husband’s commitment to public life and would often take part (in the 1880s) in public gatherings and deliberations of male and female social reformers. As she herself says: ‘It was at these meetings that I learnt what a meeting was and how one should conduct oneself at one’ (Ranade, 1963:77). Interestingly, however, one of the chief sources of opposition to Ramabai’s efforts were (apart from men) the other women in the family. There is of course no doubt that they, her mother-in-law and her husband’s sisters, spoke for the old patriarchal extended family. But it is quite instructive to listen to their voices (as they come across through Ramabai’s text) for they also spoke for their own sense of self-respect and their own forms of struggle against men: You should not really go to these meetings [they said to Ramabai]…. Even if the men want you to do these things, you should ignore them. You need not say no: but after all, you need not do it. They will then give up, out of sheer boredom…you are outdoing even the European women (84–5). These voices, combining the contradictory themes of nationalism, of patriarchal clan-based ideology, of women’s struggles against men, and opposed as the same time to friendship between husbands and wives, remind us of the deep ambivalences that marked the trajectory of the modern private and bourgeois individuality in colonial India. Yet historians manage, by manoeuvres reminiscent of the old ‘dialectical’ card-trick called ‘negation of negation’, to deny a subject-position to this voice of ambivalence. The evidence of what I have called ‘the denial of the bourgeois private and of the historical subject’ is acknowledged but subordinated in their accounts to the supposedly higher purpose of making Indian history look like yet another episode in the universal and (in their view, the ultimately victorious) march of citizenship, of the nation-state, of themes of human emancipation spelt out in the course of the European Enlightenment and after. It is the figure of the citizen that speaks through these histories. And so long as that happens, my

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hyper-real Europe will continually return to dominate the stories we tell. ‘The modern’ will then continue to be understood, as Meaghan Morris has so aptly put it in discussing her own Australian context, ‘as a known history, something which has already happened elsewhere, and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content.’ This can only leave us with a task of reproducing what Morris calls ‘the project of positive unoriginality’ (1990:10). Yet the ‘originality’—I concede that this is a bad term—the idioms through which struggles have been conducted in the Indian subcontinent, has often been in the sphere of the nonmodern. One does not have to subscribe to the ideology of clannish patriarchy, for instance, to acknowledge that the metaphor of the sanctified and patriarchal extended family was one of the most important elements in the cultural politics of Indian nationalism. In the struggle against British rule, it was frequently the use of this idiom—in songs, poetry and other forms of nationalist mobilizations—that allowed ‘Indians’ to fabricate a sense of community and to retrieve for themselves a subjectposition from which to address the British. Colonial Indian history is replete with instances where Indians arrogated subjecthood to themselves precisely by mobilizing, within the context of ‘modern’ institutions and sometimes on behalf of the modernizing project of nationalism, devices of collective memory that were both antihistorical and antimodern.15 This is not to deny the capacity of ‘Indians’ to act as subjects endowed with what we in the universities would recognize as ‘a sense of history’ (what Peter Burke (1969) calls ‘the renaissance sense of the past’) but to insist at the same time that there were also contrary trends, that in the multifarious struggles that took place in colonial India, antihistorical constructions of the past often provided very powerful forms of collective memory (Burke, 1969; Guha, 1983). There is then this double bind through which the subject of ‘Indian’ history articulates itself. On the one hand, it is both the subject and the object of modernity, because it stands for an assumed unity called the ‘Indian people’ that is always split into two—a modernizing élite and a yet-to-be modernized peasantry. As such a split subject, however, it speaks from within a metanarrative that celebrates the nation-state; and of this meta-narrative the theoretical subject can only be a hyper-real ‘Europe’, a ‘Europe’ constructed by the tales that both imperialism and nationalism have told the colonized. The mode of self-representation that the ‘Indian’ can adopt here is what Homi Bhabha (1987, also 1990) has justly called ‘mimetic’. Indian history, even in the most dedicated socialist or nationalist hands, remains a mimicry of a certain ‘modern’ subject of ‘European’ history and is bound to represent a sad figure of lack and failure. The transition-narrative will always remain ‘grievously incomplete’. On the other hand, manoeuvres are made within the space of the mimetic— and therefore within the project called ‘Indian’ history—to represent the

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‘difference’ and the ‘originality’ of the ‘Indian’, and it is in this cause that the antihistorical devices of memory and the antihistorical ‘histories’ of the subaltern classes are appropriated. Thus peasant/worker constructions of ‘mythical’ kingdoms and ‘mythical’ pasts/futures find a place in texts designated ‘Indian’ history precisely through a procedure that subordinates these narratives to the rules of evidence and to the secular, linear calendar that the writing of ‘history’ must follow. The antihistorical, antimodern subject, therefore, cannot speak itself as ‘theory’ within the knowledge-procedures of the university even when these knowledge-procedures acknowledge and ‘document’ its existence. Much like Spivak’s (1988) ‘subaltern’ (or the anthropologist’s peasant who can only have a quoted existence in a larger statement that belongs to the anthropologists alone), this subject can only be spoken for and spoken of by the transition-narrative which will always ultimately privilege the modern (i.e., ‘Europe’) (see also Spivak, 1990). So long as one operates within the discourse of ‘history’ produced at the institutional site of the university, it is not possible simply to walk out of the deep collusion between ‘history’ and the modernizing narrative(s) of citizenship, bourgeois public and private and the nation-state. ‘History’ as a knowledge-system is firmly embedded in institutional practices that invoke the nation-state at every step—witness the organization and politics of teaching, recruitment, promotions and publication in History departments, politics that survive the occasional brave and heroic attempts by individual historians to liberate ‘history’ from the meta-narrative of the nation-state. One only has to ask, for instance: Why is history a compulsory part of education of the modern person in all countries today including those that did quite comfortably without it until as late as the eighteenth century? Why should children all over the world today have to come to terms with a subject called ‘history’ when we know that this compulsion is neither natural nor ancient?16 It does not take much imagination to see that the reason for this lies in what European imperialism and third-world nationalisms have achieved together: universalize the nation-state as the most desirable form of political community. Nation-states have the capacity to enforce their truth-games, and universities, their critical distance notwithstanding, are part of the battery of institutions complicit in this process. ‘Economics’ and ‘history’ are the knowledge-forms that correspond to the two major institutions that the rise (and later universalization) of the bourgeois order has given to the world—the capitalist mode of production and the nation-state (‘history’ speaking to the figure of the citizen).17 A critical historian has no choice but to negotiate this knowledge. S/he therefore needs to understand the state on its own terms, i.e., in terms of its self-justificatory narratives of citizenship and modernity. Since these themes will always take us back to the universalist propositions of ‘modern’ (European) political philosophy, a third-world historian is condemned to knowing ‘Europe’ as the original home of the ‘modern’ whereas the ‘European’ historian does not share a comparable predicament

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with regard to the pasts of the majority of the humankind. Thus the everyday subalternity of non-Western histories with which I began this paper. Yet the understanding that ‘we’ all do ‘European’ history with our different and often non-European archives, opens up the possibility of a politics and project of alliance between the dominant metropolitan histories and the subaltern peripheral pasts. Let us call this the project of provincializing ‘Europe’, the ‘Europe’ that modern imperialism and (third-world) nationalism have, by their collaborative venture and violence, made universal. Philosophically, this project must ground itself in a radical critique and transcendence of liberalism (i.e., of the bureaucratic constructions of citizenship, modern state, and bourgeois privacy that classical political philosophy has produced), a ground that late Marx shares with certain moments in both poststructuralist thought and feminist philosophy. In particular, I am emboldened by Carole Pateman’s courageous declaration—in her remarkable book The Sexual Contract—that the very conception of the modern individual belongs to patriarchal categories of thought (1988:184). The project of ‘provincializing Europe’ refers to a history which does not yet exist; I can therefore only speak of it in a programmatic manner. To forestall misunderstanding, however, I must spell out what it is not while outlining what it could be. To begin with, it does not call for a simplistic, out-of-hand rejection of modernity, liberal values, universals, science, reason, grand narratives, totalizing explanations, etc. Jameson has recently reminded us that the easy equation often made between ‘a philosophical conception of totality’ and ‘a political practice of totalitarianism’ is ‘baleful’ (1988:354). The project of ‘provincializing Europe’ therefore cannot be a project of ‘cultural relativism’. It cannot originate from the stance that the reason/ science/universals that help define Europe as the modern are simply ‘culturespecific’ and therefore only belong to the European cultures. For the point is not that Enlightenment rationalism is always unreasonable in itself but rather a matter of documenting how—through what historical process—its ‘reason’, which was not always self-evident to everyone, has been made to look ‘obvious’ far beyond the ground where it originated. If a language, as has been said, is but a dialect backed up by an army, the same could be said of the narratives of ‘modernity’ that, almost universally today, point to a certain ‘Europe’ as the primary habits of the modern. This Europe, like ‘the West’, is demonstrably an imaginary entity but the demonstration as such does not lesson its appeal or power. The project of ‘provincializing Europe’ has to include certain other additional moves: (a) the recognition that Europe’s acquisition of the adjective ‘modern’ for itself is a piece of global history of which an integral part is the story of European imperialism, and (b) the understanding that this equating of a certain version of Europe with ‘modernity’ is not the work of Europeans alone; third-world nationalisms, as modernizing ideologies par excellence, have been equal

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partners in the process. I do not mean to overlook the anti-imperial moments in the careers of these nationalisms; I only underscore the point that the project of ‘provincializing Europe’ cannot be a nationalist, nativist or an atavistic project. In unravelling the necessary entanglement of history—a disciplined and institutionally regulated form of collective memory—with the grand narratives of ‘rights’, ‘citizenship’, the nation-state, ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, one cannot but problematize ‘India’ at the same time as one dismantles ‘Europe’. The idea is to write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and the ironies that attend it. That the rhetoric and the claims of (bourgeois) equality, citizen’s rights, of self-determination through a sovereign nation-state have in many circumstances empowered marginal social groups in their struggles is undeniable. What effectively is played down, however, in histories that either implicitly celebrate the advent of the modern state and the idea of citizenship is the repression and violence that are as instrumental in the victory of the modern as is the persuasive power of its rhetorical strategies. Nowhere is this irony—the undemocratic foundations of ‘democracy’—more visible than in the history of modern medicine, public health and personal hygiene the discourses of which have been central in locating the body of the modern at the intersection of the public and the private (as defined by, and subject to negotiations with, the state). The triumph of this discourse, however, has always been dependent on the mobilization, on its behalf, of effective means of physical coercion. I say ‘always’ because this coercion is both originary/ foundational (i.e., historic) as well as pandemic and quotidian. Of foundational violence, David Arnold (forthcoming) gives a good example in a recent essay on the history of the prison in India. The coercion of the colonial prison, Arnold shows, was integral to some of the earliest and pioneering research on the medical, dietary and demographic statistics of India, for the prison was where Indian bodies were accessible to modernizing investigators.18 Of the coercion that continues in the names of the nation and modernity, a recent example comes from the Indian campaign to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. Two American doctors (one of them presumably of ‘Indian’ origin) who participated in the process thus describe their operations in a village of the Ho tribe in the Indian state of Bihar: In the middle of gentle Indian night, an intruder burst through the bamboo door of the simple adobe hut. He was a government vaccinator, under orders to break resistance against smallpox vaccination. Lakshmi Singh awoke screaming and scrambled to hide herself. Her husband leaped out of bed, grabbed an axe, and chased the intruder into the courtyard. Outside a squad of doctors and policemen quickly overpowered Mohan Singh. The instant he was pinned to the ground, a second vaccinator jabbed smallpox vaccine into his arm. Mohan Singh,

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a wiry 40-year-old leader of the Ho tribe, squirmed away from the needle, causing the vaccination site to bleed. The government team held him until they had injected enough vaccine…While the two policemen rebuffed him, the rest of the team overpowered the entire f amily vaccinated each in turn. Lakshmi Singh bit deep into one doctor’s hand, but to no avail (Brilliant with Brilliant, 1978:3).19 There is no escaping the idealism that accompanies this violence. The subtitle of the article in question unselfconsciously reproduces both the military and the do-gooding instincts of the enterprise. It reads: ‘How an army of samaritans drove smallpox from the earth’. Histories that aim to displace a hyper-real Europe from the centre towards which all historical imagination currently gravitates, will have to seek out relentlessly this connection between violence and idealism that lies at the heart of the process by which the narratives of citizenship and modernity come to find a natural home in ‘history’. The task, as I see it, will be to wrestle ideas that legitimize the modern state and its attendant institutions, in order to return to political philosophy—in the same way as suspect coins are returned to their owners in an Indian bazaar— its categories whose global currency can no longer be taken for granted.20 And, finally—since ‘Europe’ cannot after all be provincialized within the institutional site of the university whose knowledge-protocols will always take us back to the terrain where all contours follow that of my hyper-real Europe—the project of provincializing Europe must realize within itself its own impossibility. It therefore looks to a history that embodies this politics of despair. It will have been clear by now that this is not a call for cultural relativism or for atavistic, nativist histories. Nor is this a programme for a simple rejection of modernity which would be, in many situations, politically suicidal. I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity. The politics of despair will require of such history that it lays bare to its readers such reasons why such a predicament is necessarily inescapable. A history that will attempt the impossible: look toward its own death by tracing that which resists and escapes the best human effort at translation across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous. This, as I have said, is impossible within the knowledge-protocols of academic history, for the globality of the academia is not independent of the globality that the European modern has created. To attempt to provincialize this ‘Europe’ is to see the modern as inevitably contested, to write over the given and privileged narratives of citizenship other narratives of human connections that draw sustenance from dreamt-up pasts and futures where collectivities are defined neither by the rituals of

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citizenship nor by the nightmare of ‘tradition’ that ‘modernity’ creates. There are of course no (infra)structural sites where such dreams could lodge themselves. Yet they will recur so long as the themes of citizenship and the nation-state dominate our narratives of historical transition, for these dreams are what the modern represses in order to be. Notes 1 A larger version of this article was published in Representations 37, 1992. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Ien Ang and John Hartley f or their kind and generous assistance with editing this piece. 2 See the discussion in Marx (1973:469–512), and Marx (1971:593–613). 3 I am not making the claim that all of these genres necessarily emerge with bourgeois individualism. See Davis (1988 and 1986). See also Lejeune (1989:163– 84). 4 See Chatterjee’s (1986) chapter on Nehru. 5 See this discussion in Viwanathan (1990:128–41 passim). 6 For reasons of space, I shall leave this claim here unsubstantiated, although I hope to have an opportunity to discuss it in detail elsewhere. I should qualify the statement by mentioning that it in the main refers to autobiographies published between 1850 and 1910. Once women join the public sphere in the twentieth century, their self-fashioning takes on different dimensions. 7 For a more detailed treatment of what follows, see Chakrabarty (forthcoming). 8 On the history of the word ‘civilization’, see Febvre (1973). I owe this reference to Peter Sahlins. 9 The classic text where this assumption has been worked up into philosophy is of course Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1967:110–22). See also Hodge (1987), During (forthcoming), Landes (1988), and Ryan (1990). 10 I develop this argument further in Chakrabarty (1991). 11 I discuss this in more detail in Chakrabarty (forthcoming). 12 For a genealogy of the terms ‘slavery’ and ‘freedom’ as used in the colonial discourse of British India, see Prakash (1990a). 13 Kinsley (1988:19–31); Basu (1873:60); Bhattacharya (1951:469–71); Dhal (1978). The expression ‘everyday pantheism’ was suggested to me by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (personal communication). 14 See Chatterjee’s (1986) chapter on Bankim. 15 See Subaltern Studies, Vols 1–7, Delhi, 1982–91; and Nandy (1983). 16 On the close connection between imperialist ideologies and the teaching of history in colonial India, see Guha (1988). 17 Without in any way implicating them in the entirety of this argument, I may mention that there are parallels here between my statement and what Gyan Prakash (1990b) and Nicholas Dirks (1990) have argued elsewhere. 18 I have discussed some of these issues in a Bengali article (Chakrabarty, 1988). 19 I owe this reference to Paul Greenough.

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20 For an interesting and revisionist reading of Hegel in this regard, see the exchange between Charles Taylor and Partha Chatterjee in Public Culture, 3(1), 1990. My book (Chakrabarty, 1989) attempts a small beginning in this direction.

References Anon., (1877) Streesiksha vol. 1, Calcutta [Bengali]. Arnold, David (forthcoming) ‘The colonial prison: power, knowledge, and penology in nineteenth-century India’, in Arnold, D. and Hardiman, D. (forthcoming) editors, Subaltern Studies, Vol. 8. Bandyopadhyaya, Deenanath (1887) Nanabishayak prabandha, Calcutta. Basu, Manomohan (1873) Hindu acar byabahar, Calcutta [Bengali]. Bhabha, Homi (1987) ‘Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’, in Michelson, Annette, et al., editors, October: The First Decade 1976–1986, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 317–26. ——(1990) editor, Nation and Narration, London: Routledge. Bhattacharya (1951) ‘Minor religious sects’, in Majumdar, R.C. (ed.) The History and Culture of the Indian People: The Age of Imperial Unity, vol. 2, Bombay: Bharatiya Vidyabhavan, 469–71. Bikshuk (Chandrasekhar Sen) (1876) Ki holo!, Calcutta. Borthwick, Meredith (1984) The Changing Roles of Women in Bengal 1849–1905, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brilliant, Lawrence, with Brilliant, Girija (1978) ‘Death for a killer disease’, Quest, (May/ June). Burke, Peter (1969) The Renaissance Sense of the Past, London: Edward Arnold. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1988) ‘Sarir, samaj o rashtra—oupanibeshik bharate mahamari o janasangskriti’, Anustup, (annual no.) [Bengali]. ——(1989) Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——(1991) ‘Open space/public place: garbage, modernity and India’, South Asia, 14(1), 15–32. ——(forthcoming) ‘Colonial rule and the domestic order’, in Arnold and Hardiman, Vol. 8. Chatterjee, Partha (1986) National Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, London: Zed Press. Chaudhuri, Nirad C. (1987) Thy Hand. Great Anarch! India 1921–1952, London. Connolly, William E. (1989) Political Theory and Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell. Davis, Natalie Zemon (1986) ‘Boundaries and sense of self in sixteenth-century France’, in Heller, Thomas C. et al., editors, Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 53–63. ——(1988) ‘Fame and secrecy: Leon Modena’s Life as an early modern autobiography’, History and Theory, 27, 103–118. Devi, Indira (1920) Narir ukti, Calcutta [Bengali]. Dhal, Upendranath (1978) Goddess Lakshmi: Origin and Development, Delhi. Dirks, Nicholas B. (1990) ‘History as a sign of the modern’, Public Culture, 2(2), 25–32.

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During, Simon (forthcoming) ‘Rousseau’s heirs: primitivism, romance and other relations between the modern and the non-modern’. Febvre, Lucien (1973) ‘Civilization: evolution of a word and a group of ideas’, in Burke, Peter, editor, A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, trans. K. Folca, London. Gandhi, M.K. (1909/63) Hind Swaraj, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 10, Ahmedabad: Navjan Publishing Trust. Guha, Ranajit (1983) Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——(1988) An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth-Century Agenda and Its Implications, Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi. Guha, Ranajit and Spivak, Gayatry Chakravorty (1988) editors, Selected Subaltern Studies, New York: Oxford University Press. Habermas, Jurgen (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MA; MIT Press. Hegel, Friedrich (1967) Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M.Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hodge, Joanna (1987) ‘Women and the Hegelian state’, in Kennedy, Ellen and Mendus, Susan, editors, Women in Western Philosophy, Brighton, Sussex, 127–158. Jameson, Fredric (1988) ‘Cognitive mapping’, in Nelson and Grossberg (1988). Kinsley, David (1988) Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press. Landes, Joan B. (1988) Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lejeune, Philippe (1989) On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, Karl (1971) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. ——(1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicholas, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1975) ‘On the Jewish Question’, in his Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mill, James (1837) The History of British India, Vol. 1, Wilson, H.H., editor, London: J.Madden. Mitra, Dinabandhu (1981) Dinabandhu racanabali, Gupta, Kshetra, editor, Calcutta: Sahitya Sangsad [Bengali]. Morris, Meaghan (1990) ‘Metamorphoses at Sydney Tower’, New Formations, 11 (Summer). Murshid, Ghulam (1983) Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849–1905, Rajshahi: Rajshahi University. Nandy, Ashis (1983) The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence (1988) editors, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Pateman, Carole (1988) The Sexual Contract, Stanford: Standford University Press. Prakash, Gyan (1990a) Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labour Servitude in Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——(1990b) ‘Writing postorientalist histories of the Third World: perspective from Indian historiography’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32(2), 383–408.

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Ranade, Ramabai (1963) Ranade: His Wife’s Reminiscences, trans. Kusumavati Deshpande, Delhi: National Bank Trust. Ryan, Mary (1990) Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sarkar, Sumit (1985a) Modern India 1885–1947, Delhi: Macmillan. ——(1985b) ‘Social history: predicament and possibilities’, in Iqbal Khan, editor, Fresh Perspectives on India and Pakistan: Essays on Economics, Politics and Culture, Oxford. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Nelson and Grossberg (1988). ——(1990), interview, Socialist Review, 20(3). Viwanathan, Gauri (1990) Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India, London: Faber.

LUKE GIBBONS

IDENTITY WITHOUT A CENTRE: ALLEGORY, HISTORY AND IRISH NATIONALISM1

The state is concentric, man is eccentric. (James Joyce) In the memorable closing scene of James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’, the composure of the urbane and self-centred Gabriel Conroy is shattered when he discovers that his wife, Gretta, still pines for a young man, Michael Furey, whom she knew years earlier in the west of Ireland. The night before she left for Dublin, the seriously ill Michael Furey had risen from his bed to see her, and died a week later from a chill caught standing in the cold winter rain. As snow begins to fall outside their hotel window, Gabriel’s thoughts drift towards the west of Ireland in a trancelike reverie: The time had come for him to set out on his journey westwards. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, f alling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling on the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was f alling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns (1992a: 225). It is striking that for all its evocations of the sacred (the crosses, spears and thorns), Gabriel’s mental journey westwards is recreated in the profane image of the newspaper. According to Benedict Anderson, newspapers, and print culture in general, introduce a secular ‘transverse, cross-time’, which allows people to establish links with parts of their country they have never directly experienced, thus laying the basis for the ‘imagined community’ of nationalism (1983:30). Gabriel’s hollow, transverse relationship to the west of Ireland contrasts starkly with that of his wife, Gretta, whose memories of Michael Furey are precipitated by the chance hearing of an old Irish ballad which he used to sing, ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, as she is preparing to leave the

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dinner party on the feast of the Epiphany which forms the centrepiece of the story. For Joyce, it is this remnant of oral culture, rather than the ‘empty, homogeneous time’ of the newspaper, which is characteristic of the most resilient strains in Irish nationalism—or any subaltern culture, I would contend, which attempts to speak in the aphasic condition of colonialism. Gabriel writes for a newspaper and identifies with the latest European ideas, but this has little to do with the social milieu in which his wife, Gretta, grew up. Earlier in the story, he is upbraided by the nationalist Miss Ivors for refusing to travel to the west of Ireland and encounter native Gaelic culture at first hand, and—a related misdemeanour in her eyes—for writing in the Dublin Daily Express, which she considers an imperialist organ, and an adversary of the national revival.2 Anderson is correct in stating that the emptying out of time in print culture is constitutive of certain kinds of nationalism, but this applies mainly to forms of nationalism driven by state formation of the Western kind, characterized by centralization, unification and, one might add, colonial expansion. In contradistinction to this, as E.J. Hobsbawm points out, are those versions of nationalism intent on fragmentation and disaggregation, motivated by separation rather than unification (1977:4–7). Such good words as Hobsbawm (1991) can muster up for nationalism are reserved for the former kind, and he can scarcely conceal his contempt for those ‘fissiparous’ tendencies in nationalism which mobilize outside or against the centralized state, even for purposes of decolonization. Unlike the viable ‘ethnically and linguistically homogeneous entities which came to be seen as the standard forms of “nation-state” in the west,’ these aberrant strands in nationalism are ‘politically fluctuating and unstable.’ According to Hobsbawm, the nation must evolve under the aegis of the state: otherwise it is like a mollusc extracted from its shell, emerging in a ‘distinctly wobbly state’ (1991:164, 169, 181). It could be argued, however, that most of the justified criticism of nationalism as concealing exploitation, inventing tradition, or retreating into xenophobia and racialism, are properly directed at the classical European model rather than its more idiosyncratic peripheral variants. Literacy, and in particular print culture, is often presented as rescuing a ‘pre-political’ populace from the torpor and dogmatism of oral tradition. Yet while an alliance of print culture and Protestantism played a crucial role in laying the conditions for the Enlightenment and liberal democracy in Europe, it is worth recalling that it also consolidated logocentrism at the level of popular religious practice, establishing the immanence of the living word, the Voice of God, in the transparent text of the Bible. As Terry Eagleton puts it: Of course, for the puritan tradition, script has a privileged status. But that is no more than to say that the enigmatic materiality of the biblical text must be dispersed and deciphered by the power of grace, so that the

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living speech of its Author may be freed from its earthly encasement (1977:55). In the twentieth century, this suspicion of hermeneutics was linked to modernism itself, as part of an attempt to innoculate Western culture against the multivalence of tradition. For Susan Sontag: Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in art criticism—today…. Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced at several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principle affliction of modern life (1966:13).3 In this sense, the modernist project of the Enlightenment and advanced print cultures stands as much in need of deconstruction as many of the traditional societies it purports to bring into the contemporary world. It is true that many non-Western or ‘pre-modern’ cultures have shown a proclivity for dogmatism and fundamentalism, but it is far from clear that this is a result of their opposition to Western values. The insistence on the univocal and literal meaning of sacred texts among present-day fundamentalist movements would seem to owe more to Lockean-type conceptions of language, and scientific notions of clarity, than to the obscuranticism of traditional or so-called backward societies. As Rosemary Radford Ruether contends, summarizing recent research in this area, fundamentalist movements arise not only as a response to Western culture but may actively draw inspiration from it, ‘by selective adaptions to modern organizational and technological methods and scientific thought.’ She continues: Fundamentalism is not simply a historical conservatism. It is often militantly hostile to much of past tradition, which is seen as having become corrupted. Many fundamentalist movements see themselves as purging this corrupted tradition, but also as retrieving…some absolute truth beyond historical relativity and change. Thus most fundamentalisms claim some innerrancy of Scripture, or inf allibility of teachers, or both (1992:10–11).4 Thus in the context of Irish Catholicism, for example, it was the modernizers, the centralizing forces, in the Church who pressed the claims for Papal infallibility at the Vatican Council in 1870, an irony of progress that did not escape the attention of James Joyce. In his story ‘Grace’, one of the characters exults over the f act that of the two senior churchmen who held out against this high-handed arrogation of authority, one was the nationalist Archbishop Mac Hale of Tuam from the west of Ireland, who presided over a wayward

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popular religion that was inimical to the very idea of certainty.5 One of the main tasks of the ‘Devotional Revolution’ which swept the Catholic church in post-Famine Ireland, was to exorcise the baneful influence of traditional cultural practices (such as wakes, ‘keening’, ‘patterns’ at holy wells, and other ‘pagan’ rituals) from religious devotions, thus bringing Irish Catholicism into line with Roman Catholic orthodoxy.6 This augmentation of Catholic power was part of a wider transformation which also sought to dislodge nationalism from popular insurgency, integrating peasant culture into the institutions of state power—defined, of course, in terms of an imperial administration, at least where constitutional nationalists were concerned. The writer Sean O’Faolain was closer to the mark than even he perhaps realized, when he observed that before the Whig-inspired accommodation with state power under the leadership of Daniel O’Connell, the Irish people had ‘no absolute sense of themselves as a nation’ (1980:29, first italics mine).7 Allegory and agrarian insurgency Jacques Derrida’s contention that ‘logocentrism is a uniquely European phenomenon’ (1984:116) may be usefully extended to European conceptions of nationalism, in that the premium placed on coherence and abstraction, and the clarity of political consciousness, comes to resemble the unmediated selfpresence of the individual subject. It is this sense of unity and national integration which Western imperialism prided itself on exporting to what were referred to as the ‘discordant races’ of its empires. On 1 January 1877, the day Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, the (London) Times paid homage to the civilizing mission of English imperialism as it confronted the otherness of Asia, a continent vitiated by contingency and instability: It can hardly be to share the rapid vicissitudes of Asia, and to prove that policy is the creature of accident, that we have entered that new sphere. It is rather that we may introduce into it the deeper sentiments and grander ideas that have made Europe hitherto the leading quarter of the world. India, in itself, never had the prospect or even the thought of a political unity. Like Africa, the region was peopled with numberless races, who had their quarrels, but who were apparently capable of no grander objects than could be attained within their own territories, which were sufficient for the population…. Politically, they represent altogether one great fact, which is the single-all-sufficient of this day’s ceremony. They represent the proved impossibility of India uniting herself by her own internal development, or by any Asiatic agency. A self-made Indian union is as much an impossibility as a self-made African union.8

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—or, one might add, a self-made Irish union. According to Sir George BadenPowell, writing during the Home Rule controversy at the turn of the century, ‘Ireland does not contain the necessary elements of a separate nationality— for among the inhabitants there is no unity or individuality of blood, religion, laws, occupations, sentiments, history, or even tradition’ (1898:221). There is little trace here of the primordial unity and plenitude which Western phonocentrism is apt to visit upon pre-literate societies: a ‘self-made’ identity is decidedly the prerogative of the colonizer. In recent years, versions of this thesis, filtered through the work of modern historians such as Anderson, Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner, have surfaced in Irish cultural debates as part of a revisionist challenge to the exaggerated ancestry bestowed on the Irish nation by romantic historians of the old school. Such mythic accounts of Ireland as ‘the oldest nation in Europe’ can be seen as part of an attempt to smuggle into Irish culture the continuity and permanence of English tradition as venerated by Edmund Burke, but while notions of stability and security come readily to colonial powers, they hardly make sense in societies ravaged by the depredations of Western expansionism.9 ‘The rapport of self-identity’, as Derrida puts it, is ‘always a rapport of violence with the other’ (1984:117). This helps to place in perspective the argument of the Irish historian Tom Dunne that not alone does Irish nationalism lack an ancient pedigree, it cannot be said to have emerged as a material force until it identified with the nation-state as conceived by Anglocentric, or mainstream European, political discourse. Though he makes no explicit connection between nationalism and print culture, the main target of Dunne’s and other related critiques (e.g., Cullen, 1988) is the vernacular culture of the so-called ‘hidden Ireland’ of the eighteenth century,10 a communal culture largely oral in nature except for those poets, scribes and scholars who had regular access to written sources. According to Dunne, native Irish culture in the early modern period failed to develop a coherent nationalist ideology because it lacked the centralizing mechanisms of the absolute monarchies that provided the infrastructure of the first nation-states: A national monarchy did not emerge in Ireland to form the nucleus of a centralised state, as happened in other countries. Outside pressure failed to bring political unity also, and instead newcomers were absorbed into the system of competing lordships (1980:11). It is hardly surprising that ‘outside pressures’ did not succeed in producing a clone of the centralized state, for it was precisely such a concentration of power in the centre that native culture was resisting. The stratagem of ‘divide and rule’ is one of the bogies of the imagined community of nationalism, but in certain cases it was the amorphousness of native cultures, the mollusclike qualities excoriated by Hobsbawm, which offered the most effective long-

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term defence against conquest. While it took almost four centuries to subdue the sprawling Indian peoples of North America, historians have suggested that it was the excessive centralization of the far more powerful Aztec and Inca civilizations which brought about their rapid downfall—once the emperors Montezuma and Atahualpa fell into Spanish hands, as Richard Peet describes it, their empires became ‘bodies without heads’ (1991:122). This principle did not go unnoticed by nationalist propagandists in Ireland, and even as late as the cultural revival at the turn of the century, it was used by some leftist commentators as a pretext for forging links between traditional Gaelic culture and the syndicalist version of Marxism promulgated by James Connolly, with its declared aversion to centralized power and the state. According to Aodh de Blacam, an English-born critic who came to Irish nationalism with the zeal of a convert, ‘it was the many-headedness, as of the hydra, of the Irish constitution that perplexed the enemy, who knew not where to strike’ (1919:22). It is true, he adds that pre-invasion Gaelic culture ‘was weak in central authority’, and the lack of ‘a strong military monarchy’ ensured that ‘when the most unscrupulous and most militaristic nation of Europe sent ravaging armies into Ireland, there was a tragic want of ruthlessness in the opposition that was offered.’ And yet [he continues] this want of centralization proved, in a sense, the nation’s salvation. Had the Irish State (sic) hung upon central institutions, the destruction thereof would have meant the nation’s destruction. Thus one great battle might have ended Irish independence (23).11 What Dunne sees, then, as a weakness in native culture, and the factor which inhibited the development of national consciousness, could be interpreted as its strength. This point is more or less conceded when he argues that the introduction of a state apparatus into Irish society with its attendant cultural and ideological agencies (such as institutionalized religious authority) saw to it that the quest for a unified identity worked against Irish independence: ‘Political unity and the transformation in attitudes and identity which accompanied it were imposed by English conquest in a manner which involved the destruction of the Gaelic system and political culture rather than its “modernization”.’ Yet, having demonstrated that political unity of this kind was the Trojan horse of colonization, he nevertheless proceeds to concur with the orthodox nationalist view that its absence was the cause of the destruction of the old Gaelic order: Gaelic Ireland did have important unifying features—common social and economic systems, law-codes, literature and religion…. Yet, while all of this points to a collective sense of Gaelic identity, it was a sense which conspicuously lacked a political dimension, even on the very basic level of a commitment to unity against foreign aggression.

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Looking at the European context, this was hardly surprising. The development of ‘national consciousness’ (to call it that) was one of the products of political unity under expansionist monarchies. This was the case, for example, in sixteenth century England and such ‘national consciousness’ formed an important part of the dynamics of Elizabethan imperialism in Ireland, just as its absence in Gaelic Ireland contributed to the failure of resistance to this imperialism (1980:11–12). What this attempt to measure an emergent Irish nationalism against British or European standards fails to recognize is that the bondsman is in no position to emulate the lord, for he is already implicated in his master’s identity. This is the fatal weakness in Marx’s famous dictum, frequently quoted in defence of Marxist appropriations of modernization theory: ‘The country that is most developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’ (1976:91). If this is interpreted to mean that, say, Ireland or Scotland should have looked to England, the workshop of the world, as a prototype of their own future development, it conveniently overlooks, as Colin Leys points out, that the confidence and self-assurance of the English nation-state derived partly from the f act that its sovereignty extended to ‘not just Manchester and the Midlands, but also the Scottish “deer forests” (that is, vast regions of the “development of underdevelopment”) and the oppressed and stagnant home colony of Roman Catholic Ireland’ (1986:321). If Ireland looked to the image of England, in other words, it would end up seeing its own distorted reflection —as if in the ‘cracked looking glass of a servant’ with which Joyce liked to compare his work. One of the basic assumptions in arguments designed to rule out any semblance of nationalism before the development of the nation-state, is that members of pre-modern cultures are totally immersed in their own localities, and are not capable (as the London Times would have it) of elevating their minds to grander notions. This hypostatization of the local is simply the unified subject of the nation-state viewed through the reverse end of a telescope. As critics of Clifford Geertz’s ethnographic work have argued, the very attempt to seal of f the local f rom the wider social networks in which it is inserted is the conceptual equivalent of proclaiming a district: it is to place it in political quarantine (Pecora, 1989). For all Geertz’s careful elucidations of the local intricacies of the Balinese cockf ight, he f ails to tease out the wider implications of his own observation that the Balinese project on to the shape of their island the image of a cock taunting its more powerful neighbour Java. This is not to say that the particular and the general are fused: however, it does suggest, as William Roseberry avers, ‘that the cockfight is intimately related (though not reducible) to political processes of state formation and colonialism’ (1982:1021; cited in Biersack, 1989:82). This is how we should understand the sense of time and place in the symbolic practices of Irish culture and politics in the formative stages of

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nationalism, whether they take the form of poetry, popular ballads or agrarian insurgency. In the case of rural disorder and agrarian unrest in the pre-Famine period (1750–1845), the trend in revisionist Irish social history has been to dismiss it as an essentially local phenomenon, lacking political consciousness, and certainly operating without a wider sense of the colonial subjugation of Ireland. But while such agrarian violence was indeed ‘sporadic, local, unpredictable, continual, anonymous’ (O’Farrell, 1976:53), it also, as Tom Garvin has pointed out, ‘showed distinct signs of politicisation and articulation over long distances, although no really effective central authority emerged’ (1982:134). There is evidence to suggest that both Ribbonism (as its post-1800 manifestation is usually called) and Defenderism (the highly politicized Catholic agrarian movement of the 1780–1800 period) possessed a structure of delegate meetings, and that quite elaborate, underground intercounty structures existed, as well as extensive contacts with Irish groups overseas (140). So pervasive and clandestine were these networks that Garvin discerns in them the infrastructure of the later Fenian Organization, or Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was responsible for the Easter Rising of 1916, and which established the Irish Republican Army, or IRA, in 1919. Agrarian protest in the early nineteenth century had demonstrably acquired a complex political consciousness, in many ways more influential and certainly more subversive than the ‘official’, constitutional nationalist campaigns of Daniel O’Connell, or even the more revolutionary Young Ireland movement of 1840s, both of which helped to bring Irish nationalism into the mainstream European discourse of the nation-state. What is interesting for our present purposes, however, is the shadowy precursor of Ribbonism and Defenderism, the constellation of agrarian protest and secret societies known as the Whiteboy movement, which first came to public notice in the mid-eighteenth century. While clearly local and class-based in their immediate manifestations, the forms of material struggle in which Whiteboys were engaged had a wider remit than purely economic interests: they were also concerned, as Michael Beames puts it, ‘with the establishment and maintenance of alternative codes and values, and in defending those codes against attack from whatever source’ (1983:97). Agrarian violence not only borrowed its practices from the kind of peasant rituals associated with wakes and weddings, but outbreaks of Whiteboy activity also intensified around the time of important seasonal festivals such as Mayday, Halloween (Samhain), and the aftermath of Christmas (St Stephen’s Day, New Year’s Eve) (73; see also Wall, 1973:16). The most conspicuous evidence of the cross-over with other forms of peasant custom such as Mummers and Strawboys was the symbolic dress of male insurgents, and in particular the systematic adoption of female clothing: bonnets, veils, gowns and petticoats were pressed into service in transgressive costume drama. This was a notable feature of rural uprisings in other peasant societies but, as Natalie Zemon Davis points out, ‘in Ireland…we have the

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most extensive example of disturbances led by men disguised as women’ (1991:149; see also Beames, 1983:98–101). The assumption of a female persona was taken to the point where some of the Whiteboy organizations (‘whiteboy’ itself signifies the wearing of a white smock) masqueraded under female soubriquets: the Lady Clare boys, Lady Rock, Terry Alt’s mother and, in the nineteenth century, the Molly Maguires from the west of Ireland who later resurfaced as a militant organization in the coalfields of Pennsylvania in the 1870s. The threat posed by the anonymity and inscrutability of these societies was such that the authorities felt compelled to lift the veil, as it were, and impute some kind of organizing consciousness behind the scenes to their otherwise incomprehensible behaviour. It was as if the very fact that certain activities were imbricated in a narrative without a cohesive subject was sufficient to constitute them as ‘violent’. Given the basic assumption, moreover, that a subaltern culture was incapable of achieving unity or even intelligibility on its own terms, the organizing principle was invariably ascribed to some external agent, or form of manipulation from above. The landing of the French adventurer, Thurot, in the north of Ireland in 1760 sent shock waves into the colonial administration, and the alleged appearance of the Pretender, disguised as a woman, in the south of Ireland the following year was believed to be the immediate cause of the rise of the Whiteboys in 1761, confirming to the authorities’ satisfaction their own worst fears of an imminent Jacobite invasion. Although the Whiteboys did indeed march to the tune of ‘The Lad with the White Cockade’ and carried the white lily (both emblems of the Stuart dynasty deposed by the Williamite settlement), there is no reason to believe that they subscribed to the fully elaborated theories of paternalism and patriarchy which informed Jacobite ideology among English Tories.12 In fact, they owed their allegiance to a series of enigmatic female figures who hovered between the other world and everyday lif e in the imagination of the peasantry: ‘Shevane (Joanna) Meskill’ or ‘Sieve Oultagh’ (i.e., ghostly Sally). According to James Donnelly, these incendiary images found their way into peasant consciousness through cultural forms such as the ballad and prophetic poetry: Precisely how this usage originated is unknown, but it almost certainly derived its currency from the popular tradition in song and poetry of personifying Ireland as a woman and its people as her children…it would be wrong to interpret ‘Queen Sieve’ as a symbol of Ireland in a consciously nationalistic sense, but the common people were undoubtedly accustomed to this manner of representing the plight of the Irish poor as a collectivity (1978–9:27–8).

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Although these personifications may not meet the specifications of nationalism in an abstract or an ‘absolute sense’ (to cite O’Faolain’s terms above), they none the less provided a powerful symbolic means of lifting a set of grievances above local horizons. Natalie Zemon Davis points out with regard to peasant consciousness in France in the early modern period that: In the 1540s, the Rouen festive society could count on spectators and readers knowing the facts of local political life, but references to national or European events were usually general and even allegorical (1991:219). —the important point being, in Ireland at any rate, that it was not always possible to clearly distinguish what was factual and what was allegorical.13 Hence, the dying declaration of five Whiteboys hanged in Waterford in 1762 that by the mysterious Queen Sieve, ‘we meant a distressed harmless old woman, blind of one eye, who still lives at the foot of a mountain in the neighbourhood’ (Wall, 1973:16). Allegory here is not just a personification of an abstraction: it is part of the language of personal acquaintance. This intimate and yet otherworldly relationship with a female personification places it on a continuum with the allegorical figures of ‘Dark Rosaleen’, ‘Kathleen ni Houlihan’ in the visionary poetry and ballads of the period, who promised apocalyptic deliverance from the Williamite confiscations in Ireland.14 The instability of these images, and the absence of an unmediated concept of nationalism, proved an embarrassment to later cultural nationalists intent on establishing the kind of ‘self-present’ identity required for state-formation. One of the ways of explaining away the recourse to figuration was to construe it as a strategic device, deliberately coding information and sentiments that were already known in a factual sense, but which could not be uttered directly because of the fear of being charged with sedition.15 This explanation is on a par with functional accounts of Whiteboy dress which reduce it simply to disguise, a way of deceiving others. The French commentator Augustin Thiery was more to the point when he observed that those who had recourse to such symbolic practices also succeeded in placing a barrier between themselves and a reality that was too painful for clear and distinct ideas: The Irish love to make their country into a loving and beloved real being, they love to speak to it without pronouncing its name…it seems as if, under the veil of these agreeable illusions, they wished to disguise to their minds the reality of the dangers to which the patriot exposes himself (cited in Hayes, 1855:xxvii). It is not simply, therefore, that allegory comes after the event, a mask that can be removed at will: it is part of consciousness itself under certain conditions of

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colonial rule. ‘The very extravagance of allegory employed on these occasions’, wrote Edward Hayes, ‘is an unmistakeable index to the intensity of the persecution which produced it in the first place’ (1855:xxi). This disjunction between expression and experience, between the outward sign and its recondite meaning, reinforced the colonial prejudice that the Irish were inveterate liars, constantly reacting against the despotism of fact. In an article written in 1833 comparing Ribbonism in Ireland to the Thuggee in India, the Rev. Samuel O’Sullivan complained that even legal language, which drew on the coercive power of the state to stabilize meaning, was not immune to subversion from within: What is Ribbonism…but a species of political Thuggee, in which the conspirators are of one religion, and bind themselves by an oath of blood to the extermination of all whom opposition to their evil designs might be apprehended…if the Thugs are their superiors in the article of safe and expeditious murder, they are immeasureably beyond the Thugs in the article of skilful perjury, by which they make the very forms of law contribute to defeat the ends of justice (1853:197–8). The peasantry may have been subject to the law but they did not owe their allegiance to it: their lives were regulated by an alternative public sphere which was not allowed material expression but which was none the less capable of negating what overlaid it. The mollusc in this case could not be contained within its outer shell. As with law, so with linguistic shifts in a colonized culture. According to Edward Hayes, although ‘we are English in expression’, it is still the case that ‘we can be thoroughly Irish in thought’: ‘The fathers of the early church struck down paganism with weapons borrowed from its own armoury…and so, also, has Ireland conquered in her captivity, by her successful cultivation of the English tongue’ (1855:xxxiv). This, no doubt, is an over-optimistic reading of what was, after all, the virtual destruction of the old Gaelic order, but Hayes is correct in maintaining that it possessed what might be referred to as ‘negative capability’ (to misappropriate Keats’s phrase), acting as a vestigial, destabilizing force in the interstices of colonial discourse. As Stephen Dedalus reflects when the Dean of Studies eulogizes the English language in a well-known passage in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language (Joyce, 1992b:205).

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The secret scripture of the ‘The Dead’ In the Christmas-dinner scene in the same novel, Joyce depicts a bitter row between members of the Dedalus household over the Catholic church’s role in bringing about the fall of Parnell. The acrimony which has soured the festive atmosphere takes a turn for the worse when Mr Dedalus points to a portrait of his grandfather on the wall, and boasts to his friend John Casey, that his grandfather, for one, never let a priest sit at his table: —Do you see that old chap up there, John? he said. He was a good Irishman when there was no money in the job. He was condemned to death as a whiteboy. But he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them put his two feet under his mahogany (1992b:67). This piece of ancestry is borrowed from the history of Joyce’s own family for, as Richard Ellmann informs us, the novelist’s great-grandfather, also called James Joyce, was condemned to death in Cork f or Whiteboy activities, but was pardoned before execution (1965:10). On a later visit to Cork in the Portrait, the young Stephen meets an old man who actually knew his greatgrandfather: ‘old John Stephen Dedalus, and a fierce old fireeater he was. Now, then! There’s a memory for you!’ (Joyce, 1992b:101). The identification of the Whiteboys with ghostly forms (‘ghostly Sive’, as we have seen, was one of their avatars) found a kindred spirit in Stephen Dedalus for whom the past prefigured the present: ‘through the ghost of the unquiet father’, he states in his commentary on Hamlet in Ulysses, ‘the image of the unliving son looks forth’ (Joyce, 1946:192). It is these restless shades, and the culture of the west of Ireland imbued with the memory of the dead, which come to haunt Gabriel Conroy in the closing scenes of the story ‘The Dead’. When the thoughts of Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, turn westward, opening up an irreparable gulf between them, it is because of her hearing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, the ballad once sung by her dead lover. In the allegorical mode of both poetry and popular insurgency which followed the Williamite confiscations in the eighteenth century, the refusal to name, for all its eloquence, is akin to the silence induced by the traumatic experience of loss (Deane, 1991b). Gretta’s muteness, her Veiled and sad voice’, can be seen in this context. Though transfixed by the ballad, its name has escaped her memory: ‘Mr D’Arcy,’ she said, ‘what is the name of that song you were singing?’ ‘It’s called The Lass of Aughrim,’ said Mr D’Arcy, ‘but I couldn’t remember it properly. Why? Do you know it?’

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‘The Lass of Aughrim’, she repeated. ‘I couldn’t think of the name.’ (Joyce, 1992a:213) Aughrim, a small village near her home town Galway in the west of Ireland, was the site in 1691 of the final battle in the Williamite wars which resulted in the destruction of the old Gaelic order. Though Gabriel consciously turns his back on this shattered culture, a second, inner voice infiltrates his thought and speech, threading allusions to King William and his colonial legacy in an almost liminal manner through the text. The ballad itself has political resonances in view of the tendency to allegorize Ireland as a female, for it relates the story of a young peasant woman who is seduced, and then abandoned, by a noble lord, an emblematic encounter, in Richard Ellmann’s words, of ‘the peasant mother and the civilized seducer’ (1965:257). On each occasion as Gabriel nervously contemplates his after-dinner speech, his thoughts turn to the snow-capped Wellington monument in the nearby Phoenix Park, and the adjoining ‘white field of Fifteen Acres’ where military reviews were staged as a form of colonial spectacle. After he finishes his speech—in which he assures his listeners that he ‘will not linger on the past’ or ‘let any gloomy moralizing’ intrude on the festive atmosphere—he is drawn to relate an amusing anecdote about his grandfather Patrick Morkan, and his horse Johnny who spent his life ‘walking round and round in order to drive the mill’ where he was working. One day Morkan decided to drive up to the Phoenix Park with his horse to see a military review: ‘And everything went on beautifully until Johnny came in sight of King Billy’s statue: and whether he fell in love with the horse King Billy sits on or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow he began to walk round the statue…Round and round he went…’ (Joyce, 1992a:209). Revenants of the Williamite past make their presence felt once more when members of the dinner party cross O’Connell bridge in a cab on their journey home. One of the party remarks: They say you never cross O’Connell bridge without seeing a white horse’ (the white steed being a traditional emblem of King William’s charger). Gabriel replies that all he can see is a white man, pointing to the snow-covered statue of Daniel O’Connell.16 Public monuments are expressions of of ficial memory, and bear witness to the power of the state to legitimate its triumphant version of the past, and assert its authority over its citizens. By their imposing presence, and their control of public space, they stand in stark contrast to the memories of the vanquished which attach themselves to fugitive and endangered cultural forms such as the street ballad. Yet it may be that monuments do not embody memory but efface it, absolving the citizen of the burden of remembering by the permanence of material form: ‘The less memory is experienced from the inside,’ writes

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Pierre Nora, ‘the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs’ (1989:13). Gabriel Conroy negotiates his life through such outward signs, in the hope that they will provide direct access to what they represent. He calls love by its name, and is unsettled when, somehow, the use of the correct word does not call up the experience: ‘Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?’ (Joyce, 1992a:215). Like Patrick Morkan’s horse, he is so inured to habit that the outer shell loses its own materiality, becoming a substitute for the thing itself. It is striking that Gretta does not answer directly when Gabriel asks her (twice) if she loved Michael Furey, but looks instead to a half-remembered street ballad to come to terms with an unfathomable loss. Unlike monuments, ballads were excluded from the public sphere, and hence carried on a clandestine existence in the margins between the personal and the political, charging a personal event or memory with the impact of a political catastrophe —and vice versa. As Donal O’Sullivan points out, this was often no more the result of an accident, a patriotic song taking a familiar tune—usually that of a love song—and retaining the name of the girl in the love song, if only to indicate the original air. ‘There is nothing romantic in all this,’ he assures us, since ‘the choice of names is quite fortuitous’ (1981:130). In fact, as Gabriel admits, it can lead to a romantic intensity which he can barely comprehend: ‘So she had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life’ (Joyce, 1992a:223). For Gretta, it is not the transparency of the sign but the veiling of the voice, the dislocation between inner and outer, which enables her to break her silence. As in Joyce’s notion of an ‘epiphany’, the difference and incongruity of the surface manifestation, the maintenance of boundaries, is essential, for if it fused with the experience, there would be be no need to go beyond it: Ever mindful of limitations, [the true artistic sensibility] chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered (1961:68). In a short article surveying the political situation in Ireland in 1907, James Joyce wrote that Irish nationalism is characterized by ‘a double struggle’—the anti-imperial struggle, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an internal struggle, ‘perhaps no less bitter’, between constitutional nationalism and a dissident, insurrectionary tradition beginning with the Whiteboys and passing through to the Fenian (IRB) movement.17 Within the narrative framework of ‘The Dead’, and indeed in terms of popular cultural forms, this internal struggle is articulated through the competing strategies of the newspaper, and the popular ballad, in addressing questions of history and identity. This does not

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mean that modern media forms are confronted by a primordial oral tradition, at one with itself in an imaginary wholeness before the fall brought about by letters and universal reason. As David Lloyd (1992) has argued, not least of the reasons the popular ballad attracted the opprobrium of state-builders intent on an unproblematic ‘unity of culture’ was its ephemeral, fragmented status, its refusal to act as a source of originary plenitude for the higher self of the nation. In the construction of ‘the national’, therefore, complexity and cultural critique are not the sole preserve of the newspaper and print culture, or the type of abstract political consciousness required by state formation in advanced Western countries. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was apparent to William Thackeray that the ‘rationality’ which print culture was expected to cultivate was already skewed in Ireland by oral tradition, and popular religious practices which he dismissed as ‘lies and superstition’: Leave such figments to magazine writers and ballad-makers; but, corbleu! it makes one indignant to think that people in the United Kingdom, where a press is at work and good sense is abroad…should countenance such savage superstitions and silly, grovelling heathenisms (1880:221). By superstition here, Thackeray means the redundancy of speech, the ‘loud nothings, windy emphatic tropes and metaphors’ that abound in a recalcitrant culture traversed, but not yet fully regulated, by the book: ‘If I were Defender of the Faith’, he declares, ‘I would issue an order to all priests and deacons to take to the book again…mistrusting that dangerous facility given by active jaws and a hot imagination’ (221). It is important to bear in mind, moreover, that such indeterminacy as speech possesses in this context is historically bounded, for even though a level of undecidability is a feature of all language, some cultures are in a better position than others to stabilize the allegorical impulse in a given speech community. As James Clifford puts it: Whereas the free play of readings may in theory be infinite, there are, at any historical moment, a limited range of canonical and emergent allegories available to the competent reader (the reader whose interpretation will be deemed plausible by a specific community)…. Reading is indeterminate only to the extent that history itself is openended (1986:110, 120). It may well be that under certain conditions of relative historical continuity or legal-rational administration, such as those which obtained in the exemplary European nation-states invoked by Hobsbawm, language and identity acquired the kind of fixity that monuments confer upon memory. But this option is not open to all national cultures, particularly those on the receiving

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end of colonialism which have known otherness from the inside. Mikhail Bakhtin writes that ‘it is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses, one that cannot in principle be fitted into the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak, by its very nature full of event potential and is born at a point of contact among various consciousnesses’ (1984:81). The Hegelian standards of clarity and abstraction prescribed for political consciousness in the metropolitan centre do not exhaust all possibilities of national identity. The owl of Minerva may only fly at dusk, but Dedalus was able to wing his way through the Celtic twilight, albeit by flying close to the ground. Notes 1 I am grateful to Ien Ang, David Lloyd, and Clair Wills for their critical discussions during the preparation of this paper and to all those who responded at the ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ conference. 2 The Dublin Daily Express had an explicit editorial comment to reconcile ‘the rights and impulses of Irish nationality with the demands and obligations of imperial dominion.’ It ceased publication in 1921, the year the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed (Brown, 1937:35). 3 It is worth noting that in a recent effort to update modernism in the name of ‘antifoundationalist thought’, Michael Fried maintains that modernist works should ‘seek an ideal of self-sufficiency and what I call “presentness”…Effects of presentness can still amount to grace’ (1983:232–4). 4 According to Malise Ruthven, it is no coincidence that many fundamentalists have a scientific training: ‘For all the jeremiads that fundamentalism, Islamic and Christian, lances at Western “materialism”, it is fundamentalism that is hard, factual and philistine…Fundamentalism is the most materialistic of contemporary ideologies, a throwback to the mechanistic values of the Victorians (1991:142). It is striking that Ruthven projects on to fundamentalism the self-presence and immediacy of meaning that Sontag and Fried associate with high modernism. 5 Archbishop Mac Hale’s questioning of Papal infallibility was partly motivated by his nationalism, in that it was bound up with the dissident ‘Gallican’ movement which sought a degree of national autonomy within the church, as opposed to the ‘Ultramontanist’ tendency to centralize power in Rome. 6 Wakes, ‘keening’ (a form of ritual lamenting performed by females at wakes) and ‘patterns’ (popular, and frequently ribald, religious festivals which commemorated local patron [hence ‘pattern’] saints at holy wells) were subject to systematic interdiction by the post-Famine church. See E.Larkin (1972); S.J. Connolly (1982) and the excellent overview in his pamphlet Religion and Society in NineteenthCentury Ireland (1985). 7 For the accommodation between official Catholicism and the colonial administration in the nineteenth century, see Inglis (1987), chapter 5, and Lloyd (1987). 8 ‘The Intent of British Imperialism.’ The Times (London), 1 January 1877. Reprinted in Kohn (1968).

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9 The attempt to impose Burkean ideas of continuity on Irish history is critically analyzed in Tom Dunne (1988:72–3), and in Gibbons (1991). 10 Daniel Corkery’s classic nationalist study of eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry, The Hidden Ireland, was published in 1924. 11 I trace the development of this critical, ‘decentred’ version of Irish nationalism in two sections of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vols ii, iii (Deane, 1991a). 12 The combination of patriarchy and paternalism in the political theory which informed Jacobitism is discussed in Pateman (1988), chapters 2–4. 13 For a discussion of the impossibility of separating factual and allegorical levels in ethnography, see Clifford (1986:119). 14 As Louis Cullen remarks, for all the diffuseness of the visionary poetry of the period, some of the poems are so homely and topical that ‘we are almost listening to the conversations in some circles in Munster, in effect to the loose talk which alarmed Protestants in Cork or Clare, the two great counties of literary composition in Irish’ (1988:48). 15 See, for example, John Hand’s account: ‘Since the days when it became treason to love their country, the Irish poets usually adopted allegory, such as we find in “Dark Rosaleen”. They sang of Ireland as the “Dark Little Rose”, the “Shan Van Vocht” [i.e., the poor old woman]…and under a hundred other names’ (1904: 3266). 16 Daniel O’Connell may be seen as the first political leader to systematically align the dominant strands in Irish nationalism with the state rather than the nation, although, as we have noted above (n.7), the state in question was that of a colonial administration. The O’Connell monument is thus placed on a continuum with the other icons of colonial rule that tend to attract Gabriel’s eye on the Dublin skyline: the Wellington monument, the Fifteen Acres, and the gloomy façade of the Four Courts which ‘stood out menacingly against the heavy sky.’ 17 See James Joyce: This party under different names: “White Boys”, “Men of ’98”, “United Irishmen”, “Invincibles”, “Fenians”, has always refused to be connected with either the English political parties or the Nationalist parliamentarians. They maintain (and in this assertion history fully supports them) that any concessions that have been granted to Ireland, England has granted unwillingly, and, as it usually put, at the point of a bayonet’ (1959:188).

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Brown, Stephen, J. (1937) The Press in Ireland: A Survey and Guide, Dublin: Browne & Nolan. Clifford, James (1986) ‘On ethnographic allegory’, in Clifford, James, and Marcus, George, E., editors, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press. Connolly, S.J. (1982) Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. ——(1985) Religion and Society in Nineteenth Century Ireland, Dundalk: Dundalgen Press. Cullen, Louis (1988) The Hidden Ireland: Reassessment of a Concept, Gigginstown, Mullingar: The Lilliput Press. Davis, Natalie Zemon (1991) Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Deane, Seamus (1991a) editor, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, London: Faber & Faber. ——(1991b) ‘Silence and eloquence’, The Guardian, 12 December 1991. de Blacam, Aodh (1919) Towards the Republic: A Study of New Ireland’s Social and Political Aims, Dublin: Thomas Kiersey. Derrida, Jacques (1984) ‘Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Kearney, Richard, editor, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Donnelly, James S., jun. (1978–9) ‘The Whiteboy movement, 1761–65’, Irish Historical Studies, XXI. Dunne, T.J. (1980) ‘The Gaelic response to conquest and colonization: the evidence of the poetry’, Studia Hibernica, 20. Dunne, Tom (1988) ‘Hauntedbyhistory:IrishRomanticwriting 1800–50’, in Porter, Roy and Teich, Mikulas, editors, Romanticism in National Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 72–3. Eagleton, Terry (1977) ‘Ecriture and eighteenth-century fiction’, in Barker, Francis et al., editors, Literature, Society and the Sociology of Literature, Colchester: University of Essex. Ellmann, Richard (1965) James Joyce, New York: Oxford University Press. Fried, Michael (1983) ‘How modernism works: a reply to T.J.Clark’, in Mitchell, W. J. T., editor, The Politics of Interpretation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garvin, Tom (1982) ‘Defenders, Ribbonmen and others: underground political networks in pre-famine Ireland, Past and Present, 96 (August). Gibbons, Luke (1991) ‘Race against time: colonial discourse and Irish history’, The Oxford Literary Review, 13. Hand, John (1904) ‘Street songs and ballads and anonymous verse’, in Irish Literature, Vol. 8. New York: P.F. Collier & Sons. Hayes, Edward (1855) The Ballads of Ireland, Vol. 1. London: Fullerton & Co. Hobsbawm, Eric (1977) ‘Some reflections on “The break-up of Britain”’ New Left Review, 105 (Sept-Oct), 4–7. ——(1991) Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Inglis, Tom (1987) Moral Monopoly: The Catholic Church in Modern Irish Society, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. Joyce, James (1946) Ulysses, New York: Modern Library.

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——(1959) ‘Fenianism: the last Fenian’, in Mason, Ellsworth and Ellmann, Richard, editors, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, London: Faber & Faber. ——(1961) Stephen Hero, Spencer, Theodore, editor & introduction, London: Ace Books. ——(1992a) ‘The Dead’, in his Dubliners, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1992b) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kohn, Hans (1968) editor, Nationalism and Realism: 1852–1879, Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Company, 134–8. Larkin, E. (1972) ‘The devotional revolution in Ireland 1850–1875’, The American Historical Review, LXXVII. Leys, Colin (1986) ‘Conflict and convergence in development theory’, in Mommsen, Wolfgang J. and Osterhammel, Jurgen, editors, Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, London: Allen & Unwin. Lloyd, David (1987) Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——(1992) ‘Adulteration and the Novel: Monologic Nationalism and the Colonial Hybrid’, in Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Marx, Karl (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes, Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nora, Pierre (1989) ‘Between memory and history: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations, 26 (Spring). O’Faolain, Sean (1980) King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O’Connell, Dublin: Poolbeg Press. O’Farrell, Patrick (1976) ‘Millenialism, messianism, and utopianism in Irish History’, in Drudy, P.J., editor, Anglo-Irish Studies, ii. O’Sullivan, Donal (1981) Songs of the Irish, Dublin: Mercier Press. O’Sullivan, Samuel (1853) ‘Thuggee in India and Ribbonism in Ireland’, in Remains of Rev. Samuel O’Sullivan, D.D., Vol. 3, Dublin: McGlashen. Pateman, Carol (1988) The Sexual Contract, London: Polity Press. Pecora, Vincent P. (1989) ‘The limits of local knowledge’, in Veeser, H. Aram, editor, The New Historicism, New York: Routledge. Peet, Richard (1991) Global Capitalism: Theories of Societal Development, London: Routledge. Reuther, Rosemary (1992) ‘A world on fire with faith’, New York Times Book Review, 26 January 1992. Roseberry, William (1982) ‘Balinese cockfights and the seduction of anthropology’, Social Research, 49. Ruthven, Malise (1991) A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam, London: The Hogarth Press. Sontag, Susan (1966) Against Interpretation, New York: Delta. Thackeray, William (1880) The Irish Sketch Book and Critical Reviews, London: Smith, Elder & Co. Wall, Maureen (1973) ‘The Whiteboys’, in Williams, T.Desmond, editor, Secret Societies in Ireland, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.

ZOË SOFIA

HEGEMONIC IRRATIONALITIES AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CULTURAL CRITIQUE

Let me confine my remarks about cultural studies in general to the following observations: that the Marxisms from which it sprang were not explicitly Freudo-Marxisms. But do we detect a certain return of this repressed concern with psycho-politics amongst those works that highlight the pleasures or fantasies of cultural production, reception and mediation? An overt psychoanalytic approach is not entirely alien to cultural studies, especially where it borders with feminist film theory (strongly influenced by Freud and Lacan, especially via Laura Mulvey), or with feminist critiques of culture, science and technology informed by the (American) object-relations school of psychoanalysis (e.g., as represented by Nancy Chodorow). The collection Formations of Fantasy includes works more centrally within a culturalstudies framework, and notably a sample of Valerie Walkerdine’s illuminating investigations into the relations of pleasure, mastery and enculturation (Burgin, Donald and Kaplan, 1986; see also Walkerdine, 1981, 1986, 1990). However, I will argue that the potential value of psychoanalysis for cultural studies is greater than is apparent from the best-known psychoanalytic cultural/critical paradigms. This paper eschews making any arrogant claims about what ‘cultural studies’ is or ought be about. I do not proclaim the line of study presented here as an exemplary, best or most ‘sexy’ model of cultural studies. Rather, the aim is to outline some psychoanalytic principles and theories which could enrich and usefully complement other approaches to the study and critique of cultural formations. Psychoanalysis and cultural studies: why? why not? Where might cultural studies deploy psychoanalysis? One place is wherever questions of ‘taste’, ‘appeal’ or ‘formations of pleasure’ arise. Here, it is not enough to simply notice that pleasure is transpiring, or to confess that it does amongst critics too. Psychoanalysis can provide a vocabulary and technique for analyzing and probing the specifics of that pleasure: what kind is it? Around what erotic, semiotic, technological and phenomenological axes does it revolve? Or, to put it another way, what kinds of fantasies are being

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mobilized to invoke this pleasure? Is the pleasure an end in itself, or does it serve other purposes ? How and in whose interests are formations of pleasure (re)produced? These kinds of psycho-political questions can also be turned onto what psychoanalysis would call the ‘counter-transference’ of cultural critics ourselves, to help us become more aware of our own investments in the field, and of the irrational blind spots that distort our vision, including, for example, the androcentrism that persists even amongst those who claim to have ‘taken account of’ (or should we say, ‘swallowed up’?) feminism. More generally, the psychoanalysis of cultural formations can contribute to the critique of hegemony (and I am assuming there are still enough people interested in the task for it to be worth talking about). For psychoanalysis—as well as the deconstructive philosophy it has influenced—poses that signs and texts have ambivalent meanings, and that there are constitutive disjunctures between latent and manifest significations. Freud’s analysis of textual pleasure suggested that formal, aesthetic pleasures were like ‘foreplay’ for enjoyment of the more infantile, egoistic and erotic fantasies purveyed by the text.1 Similarly, hegemonic cultural formations do not simply secure consent through conscious appeals to readily available formal categories within ideology, or categories legitimated as ‘rational’ or ‘natural’. Ideology is also, as Marxists since Marx have recognized, highly contradictory and at times quite phantasmic in character. Indeed, to reiterate a point I have learned from Bob Hodge’s brilliant semiotic psychoanalyses of cultural practices and texts, it is precisely by deploying contradictory, ambivalence-ridden, polysemic signs that hegemonic texts can manage to appeal to, and reinforce some kind of common sense amongst a wide diversity of people(s).2 Psychoanalysis can be a powerful tool for charting the interplay of manif est and latent dimensions of cultural texts and discourses, and for naming with more precision the hegemonic irrationalities that are the intimate counterpoints of ‘official’ or rationalized positions: in short, the mythology that underlies, exceeds, and accompanies the ideology.3 By the phrase ‘hegemonic irrationalities’, I wish to indicate a dimension of culture that might elsewhere be discussed as myth, and to clarify that although as a psychoanalytic critic I may ipso facto be a ‘romantic’, I do not adhere to the kind of romanticism which would regard pleasure, fantasy, or unnameable textual excess as somehow inherently subversive. The phrase is meant to remind us that cultures produce (and endlessly transform) their own sets of fantasies, symbols, favoured stories, rituals, etc. Such excesses to more rationalized cultural forms are only unnameable if one chooses to remain in polite conspiracy with those embarrassed by too close a scrutiny of their psycho-political investments. For the fact that these irrationalities and pleasures are not necessarily ‘legitimated’ (that is, overtly expressed and sanctioned as ‘official culture’) does not mean they are counter-hegemonic or outside of history.4 Lacking the force of law, they may nevertheless be potent organizers of sense. To borrow a metaphor from chaos theory, hegemonic

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irrationalities (or myths) act like ‘strange attractors’ in a cultural field: they represent impossible states of a system whose oscillations are nevertheless configured in relation to these gravitational points. This metaphor in turn suggests that effective cultural change would require transforming the strange attractors that shape ideology and cultural practice. It is to this end that my own inquiries are ultimately directed. Why would cultural studies not want to engage with psychoanalysis? Some theorists might be unwilling to take psychoanalysis on board because it is too subjectivist or essentialist to fit within a framework whose concerns are with the historical specificity of cultural practices and struggles for meaning. Certainly this criticism could be made of the psychoanalytic orthodoxy familiar to us from feminist film theory of the seventies and eighties, which has been strongly influenced by Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Althusser’s structuralist Marxist reading of Lacan provided the political/ theoretical justification for the many subsequent interpretations of the way cultural texts (and most notably, film) construct and interpellate subjects within the order of ideology. But this rubric has worn thin; I suggest it is time for renewal of a political/critical psychoanalytic approach to culture. Those sympathetic to Lacanian theory might ask: doesn’t it constitute a ‘radical’ return to Freud that gives due weight to the operations of culture and language? My short answer: no; Lacanism is a big part of the problem. Lacan’s trickiness lies within the way that, under the cover of a supposed ‘return to Freud’, he incorporated various aspects of Kleinian revisions to Freudian theory,5 especially regarding pre-phallic and pre-linguistic forms of symbolization and the splitting of subjectivity within the pre-Oedipal period. But he reworked these to fit within a structuralist and language-centred framework that remained anchored around the problematics of the gendered, Oedipal subject and the have/have-not of the phallus. Despite concessions to Kleinian theories of pre-Oedipal subject formation—for example, in notions of projective identification, the mirror phase, the objet petit a (a development of Abraham’s notion of the ‘part-object’, central to Kleinian theory), and so on —Lacan’s insistence that the human is not a subject until it/he is inscribed within the law/language of the Father obscures these pre-Oedipal dimensions of subjectivity. The theory can reinforce androcentric common-sense notions that ignore women’s labour of socialization and claim a child isn’t a person until it’s toilet trained and can chat with its dad; or the notion that a woman can never be a ‘proper’ subject because she lacks the phallus…ideas about as new and as radical as Aristotle. Theoretical insistence that the phallus is a (linguistic) signifier not an (anatomical) organ makes little difference to the outcome of Lacan’s algebraic equations around lack, desire and subjectivity, equations that allow for only two gender positions. Thankfully, more feminist critics have come to realize how this kind of thinking leads to an impasse of theory, providing no way out of the pre-given structures of language and subjectivity—except perhaps through a modernist avant-gardism. For

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Constance Penley, Judith Butler and contributors to Formations of Fantasy, notions of ‘fantasy’ and ‘masquerade’ aid escape from the strictures of this twogender model of sexuality/textuality (see e.g., Penley, 1989; Butler, 1990). A famous Lacanian slogan, ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’, encourages analysis and interpretation in terms of the arbitrary and (quasi) phonemic binaries and inevitable absences in the more abstract (and linguistically mediated) modes of human communication. But what if the unconscious were structured like a shopping mall? What if desire were not just deferred indefinitely along a chain of signifiers, but moved through various zones where it coupled with and constituted itself through assemblages of objects: toys, tools, clothes, junk food, joysticks? Eroticism here is not just confined to the little increment of pleasure attached to the play of (verbal) signification, but is directly expressed in connection with objects, technologies and practices themselves. This is close to the model of ‘desiring production’ elaborated in Deleuze and Guattari’s studies of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983, 1988), whose work represents the most significant advance along the Freudo-Marxist front since Reich, Marcuse and Brown. The Lacanian redefinition of the unconscious as the word/locus of the cultural/linguistic Other (a redefinition inspired also by Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology) effectively closes the opening Freud had made to appreciate the productive part played by the poetic, extralinguistic, and polymorphously perverse components of the human bodymind as they enter the social collectivity as culture. After Lacan, we can speak very readily of the inscription of culture—the language from/of the Other—into the individual subject’s unconscious, but we’ve almost forgotten that part of Freud to which Lacan didn’t return, the part that stakes out a place for the productive force the unconscious has in shaping culture, especially (and this is my particular interest) shaping technologies. Specifying the field: sublimation Psychoanalytic studies of the role of the unconscious in determining culture come under the general heading of ‘sublimation’. The basic idea is that even though humans are taught to repress many desires and fantasies as part of their socialization into pre-existing structures of subjectivity and kinship (i.e., gender binaries), and are only allowed to express eroticism in certain wellcontrolled forms (usually: genitally focused reproductive hetero-sexuality), the repressed eroticism returns through (is sublimated into) cultural practices and artefacts that allow perverse and infantile fantasies to be acted out in attentuated, collective and socially useful forms. Putting it crudely, the sadist can become a surgeon, excremental eroticism can be sublimated into activities like plumbing, desires to possess and control the mother can be satisfied by activities to explore, conquer and appropriate lands, knowledge, other social ‘bodies’ and subjects (especially wives, daughters, slaves,

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employees), etc., desires to kill and supplant the Oedipal father can be expressed in religious or intellectual ‘revolutions’ that overthrow the ‘founding fathers’.6 Out of considerations of length, I will leave out an account of the history of psychoanalytic theories of sublimation, and merely assert that though there was a wealth of psychoanalytic explorations of the topic prior to and during the ‘Great Debates’ between the Kleinians and Anna Freudians in the forties, with notable but sporadic developments since then (e.g., Marcuse, Brown, Deleuze and Guattari), the full implications of this notion for cultural theory have yet to be realized.7 Interestingly, Freud points out that the energies available for sublimation are by and large the perverse components of sexual instincts, for why should we seek metaphorical or attenuated genital and heterosexual pleasures when the orgasmically literal is at hand, and moreover sanctioned by social conventions?8 It’s the perverse ones we need to sublimate (as it is to perverse gratifications that much of the apparatus of advertising arguably appeals). The (quasi)phonemic binarism associated with the phallus (you have it or you don’t) is exactly what is not needed for understanding the character of technologies. For as Róheim pointed out, following the lead of Melanie Klein, the tool is a kind of transitional object, arising as a formation midway between self and other, and conceived as a ‘brainchild’, a bit of the self projected into the world as a kind of guarantee against object loss: in the event of abandonment (e.g., by the mother), humans would still ‘have these children of their minds to love’ (1943:96). The tool’s prototype is not the (anatomically anchored) phallus but the penis-breast, an undecidable fetish object that could be thought of as formed in the turning from the maternal breast to the paternal phallus, by which the penis comes to substitute for and signify the lack of the breast.9 If the phallus is the linchpin of the Lacanian Symbolic, the penis-breast would be emblem of ‘the Mythic’, a dimension of collective enterprise that is not entirely anchored around the logic of language and the binary +/• of the phallus; an arena of expression and cultural (re) production where anatomical lacks (e.g., of the penis or womb) can be made good in fantasy objects and ritual; a mode of communication where excess is normal, and difference is plural rather than binary; an iconography whose erotic prototypes are not anatomical but oneiric—polymorphously perverse dream-bodies. A little psychoanalytic cultural theory may be worse than none at all if it penetrates no further than the canonical and easily acknowledged ‘manifest’ and anatomical associations of official symbols (e.g., Oedipus stories and phallic lacks). A psychoanalytic criticism that collapses psycho-sexuality on to sociological categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’10 can simply become another version of bourgeois subjectivism, speaking of nothing more unsettling than what was always already legitimated in the mainstream/ malestream of the Symbolic, and ignoring or remaining puzzled by the

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contradictions and ambiguities of the Mythic. Failing to push psychoanalysis to its potentially radical and iconoclastic limits, such criticism can remain trapped in the return of the expressed. To briefly illustrate the shift in perspective I am proposing: from within the officially legitimated arena Lacan calls ‘the Symbolic’, technologies like the skyscraper and gun are readily interpretable as ‘phallic symbols’, but at the mythic level, the erotic symbolism is more perverse and bisexual. The gun is interpretable as a phallic anus dentatus that farts/spits out a penetrating tooth/ turd (the gun as fart-fang?), while the skyscraper serves as an enclosing panoptic matrix—a womb with a view. Like the phallus, whose magic is enhanced by its associations with the nourishing materiality of the breast, these fetishized objects derive their power to fascinate from the extraphallic associations with which they are invested: their excremental and the uterine associations are unnamed (but not unnameable) excesses to these supposedly ‘obvious’ masculine symbols. Psychoanalytic cultural criticism can go beyond interpreting technological objects as organ-metaphors, and, following the examples of Freud, Gèza Róheim, Norman O.Brown, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio (etc.), it could identify the tendencies expressed in these objects and the institutions that generate them. Thus the gun may be read as a metonym of speedy and lethal penetration across terrain and through flesh, a tendency related to the military investments in technologies of speed (Virilio and Lotringer, 1983; Virilio, 1986, 1989). This tendency took a quantum leap this century into the Einsteinian/nuclear mode of wasting through radiant lightdeath…Star Wars technology. Technologies like skyscrapers are expressions of the alienated fantasy of separating from (Mother) Earth by constructing technological cocoons as substitutes for the given world;11 they are also one of the many devices that encode the tendency to mask and separate bosses and workers from the effects of their corporate actions, examples of institutional architectures that allow otherwise moral and well-behaved individuals to participate in collective acts of biocide without feeling any sense of personal responsibility.12 We have not decoded a hegemonic irrationality if we have not accounted for the intense ambivalences and perverse aspects of mythic and unconscious formations. In the official word on gender, there is only sexual difference, maternity is abhored, and the prospect of self/other inmixing arouses horror. Yet if mother-related penis-breast and penis dentatus monsters like the Alien aroused so much abhorrence, why are so many millions of dollars invested into producing—and viewing—images of them? As Freud has taught us, the officially feared is often the secretly desired, the revered has its loathsome underside; in Joseph Campbell’s terms myth is the everyday revealed in its monstrous aspect. For example, Mary Ann Doane’s essay ‘Technophilia: technology, representation, and the feminine’ (in the collection Body/Politics (Doane,

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1990), keeps within the binaristic model of ‘sexual difference’ conventional within feminist film theory, under which any sign of ‘femininity’ as well as any sign of excess can be equated with a sign of ‘woman’, and ‘woman’ with ‘the maternal’ and all of the above with ‘the feminine’ and/or ‘the female’.13 These slippages collaborate with the ‘official word’ by locating all monstrosity on the side of ‘woman’ and help obscure the masculine excesses (including bisexual formations) that have been sublimated into fantasies of technological reproduction. To appreciate these hegemonic monstrosities, we could take the following passage from ‘Technophilia’ and substitute affective terms with their opposites, placing ‘desire’, ‘hope’, or ‘pleasure’ wherever the words ‘anxiety’, ‘fear’, or ‘terror’ occur, and vice versa (the substitute words are in bold): Technology promises to more strictly control/deregulate, supervise/ yield to, regulate/proliferate, the maternal—to put/remove limits on it. But/For somehow the fear/hope lingers—perhaps the maternal will contaminate the technological. For aren’t we now witnessing a displacement of the excessiveness and overproliferation previously associated with the maternal to the realm of technologies of representation…? One response to such anxiety/desire is the recent spate of horror films that delineate the horror/enjoyment of the maternal —of that which harbours otherness within, where the fear/hope is always that of giving birth to the monstrous (Doane, 1990:170). By restoring ambivalence, this reading tactic discloses a mythic countersense at work. The sentence ‘For aren’t we now witnessing…?’ actually makes more sense within the alternative translation, where technological fertility appears as an effect of the (masculine, technologically mediated) desire to be maternal. For in contradiction to the official word on the difference between the female reproduction and masculine cultural production, the hope is precisely that the technological will not only be ‘contaminated’ by the maternal, but will take on its reproductive qualities. It is not the full and fecund body of the mother that inspires anxiety, but the prospect of its being entirely emptied of contents. Researchers, explorers, miners, and producers of technological half-lives desire a maternal body with secret things inside it, things that can be searched for, retrieved, incorporated, spat out as abject if need be, or reworked into new kinds of bodies. But the anxiety—and the real danger—is that all this sadistic appropriation depletes and destroys the planetary source. Hence the defensive fantasy of an infinitely plenteous Big Mother—a veritable Magic Pudding of a planet, or a seemingly self-contained and self-replenishing shopping mall—which is, far from being a freak-out, one of the central and justifying myths of technoscientific capitalism. This is one of those hegemonic irrationalities which has been normalized and dubbed ‘realistic’ (as in ‘Realistically, we have to mine in this forest’) in contrast to

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the environmentalists’ more ‘pessimistic’ concern for planetary finitude, which the developers term ‘unrealistic’, ‘idealistic’, or, as we heard recently elected Liberals in Tasmania describe anti-logging protesters, ‘irresponsible’. But who, we urgently ask, is taking responsibility for the technological monsters that are devouring the lives of future generations? Doane’s interpretations are not wrong, but partial, and insufficiently dialectical for appreciating the ambiguities of sublimation. Her claim that new reproductive technologies arouse anxiety because they ‘threaten to put into crisis the very possibility of the question of origins’ makes more sense as a statement of many women’s fears about technologies for controlling or stimulating reproduction than it does about hegemonic masculine irrationalities, which aim precisely at undermining maternal origin and surpassing it with technological fertility. Psychoanalytic anthropology offers a better starting point than cryptosociological (or anatomical) gender theory for cultural studies. Rather than centring on subjectivity and the individual unconscious, the focus would be on mythic constellations, and on the relations between cultural and individual expressions of the unconscious. One line of psychoanalytic explanation centres upon the question of early childhood training: culturally variable ways of handling and stimulating the child map on to its body and emergent psyche the patterns of allowable and non-allowable eroticism and subject-positions, shaping it to fit in with prevailing cultural norms of sublimation and repression. However, this approach, which was taken up by Margaret Mead, seems inadequate for multicultural societies, where certain irrationalities become hegemonic despite differing childrearing practices. One modification of traditional psychoanalytic theory that can make it more helpful for cultural studies is the notion that the cultural formation of the unconscious does not end with childhood, but continues throughout our life. Research along this line includes studies of the particular language, metaphors and erotic displacements cultivated in specific institutional and disciplinary sites to secure people’s unconscious investment in specific cultural practices. Sally Hacker’s (1989, 1990) sociologically based studies of pleasure and power in the training of engineers; Valerie Walkerdine’s (1981) research into desire and displacement in classroom practice; Sharon Traweek’s (1988) and Carol Cohn’s (1987) investigations of the culture of high energy physics and nuclear defense intellectuals respectively all represent significant contributions in this arena. I believe we could also develop a more historical (and possibly comparative) approach by adapting the notion of the ‘potentially universal symbol’ from the psychoanalytic anthropologist Gèza Róheim. The basic idea is that a particular symbol or symptom can crop up in the individual lives and dreams of people in any culture with potentially the same meaning (e.g., the snake as a symbol of fertility), but that its precise meaning will be inflected according to the particular cultural context of the dreamer; also, that the range

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and type of symbols taken up by a culture will be subject to historical variations (Róheim, 1950/68:22). Correlatively, I would suggest, of the wide and individually diverse range of symbols and symptoms manifested by a population—with or without common childrearing practices—a culture will pick up on, repeat and reinscribe those symbols and symptoms that accord with dominant interests. Money and time will be invested into stories, films, artworks, and technologies whose metaphorical messages reproduce constellations of desire that sustain hegemonic patterns of production and consumption.14 Studies of poetic special-effects images and sequences can also reveal close connections between techno-myth and metaphors from the history of Western philosophy (especially, of course, vision, enlightenment, irradiation).15 So like individual dreams, these collective mythic productions are multilayered in their associations. And like the interpreter of dreams, the psychoanalyst of culture must probe this polysemy as a way to decipher the often quite clear—but not always admissible—logic of ‘latent dream thoughts’, the loves, cruelties, and perversions that have been institutionalized as cultural norms. What I am outlining then is a form of psychoanalytic cultural studies that takes as its principal task deciphering the logic of myth and sublimation (where my particular interest is in the hegemonic irrationalities associated with technology). While there would certainly be some (though possibly a quite weak) causal connection between individual development and the cultural unconscious, the value of psychoanalytic case studies of individuals is primarily to serve as heuristic devices for learning to recognize constellations of symbols/desires in cultural texts. A danger lurking here is that cultural theorists—especially those not exposed to the idiosyncrasies and infinite variability of psychological formations through daily professional or clinical analytic practice—will seize on to certain psychoanalytic metanarratives (e.g., accounts of the Oedipus complex, normative models of gendered psychology, the Mirror Phase, etc.) and impose these as grids upon almost any material, where needless to say the same story is always confirmed, and anything that doesn’t fit the model appears as a troubling ambiguity.16 The psychoanalytic critic has to remain open to the variations and transformations in particular texts; reading case studies whose features have not been canonized into psychoanalytic orthodoxies or meta-narratives is a helpful assistance to this. In any event, merely identifying the infantile prototypes of a mythic formation is only the beginning of a cultural analysis. The critical/political step is to correlate these metaphorical meanings to the historical, institutional, and geopolitical circumstances of their arising.17 This perspective on culture allows one to ask questions about sublimation of the kind Foucault r aised about the distribution of pleasures: what kinds of perversions are sublimated, and into what arenas? More importantly, whose? Whose perversions and sublimations are confined to the bedroom or desk drawer and whose attract megabucks and circulate publicly? Who gets the time

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and support (e.g., financial, emotional and domestic) to go off for professional training to occupy the most creative and satisfying jobs, and who gets stuck with the shitwork at both paid and domestic workplaces: who cultures the brainchildren and who enculturates the bodychildren? Freud suggested at one point that women have less capacity for sublimation than men. However, it may be that women have less need for sublimation (e.g., childbirth fantasies can be fulfilled directly). More importantly for cultural studies, entanglement with actual children allows women less opportunity than men for transforming their/our fantasies into cultural production, even where such obstacles could be overcome (e.g., through birth control or child care). A study by Susan Stanford Friedman (1987) of women poets and writers suggests that like men inventors, some women also imagine cultural production by analogy with childbirth; further studies might investigate oral and sadistic images, or examine the awkward question of the extent to which feminine cultural fantasies also answered anatomical deficiencies with sublimated fulfilments: the dreaded penisenvy! Along other lines, future research could compare Western sublimations with other cultures’ mythic and technological formations; of particular interest to feminists would be the practices within cultures that legitimated allfemale sites of cultural production: ‘women’s business’. Another possibility that intrigues this writer is that of using the graphic, visceral and infantile terms of psychoanalysis to represent and critique Western hegemony (e.g., of thought and technology) in a form that can be translated across cultures: the language of myth. Then instead of appearing as an unquestionably rational and almost divine technological imperative, Westernization could be understood and critiqued as the attempt to institutionalize certain bizarre fantasies. Indeed, members of indigenous cultures do not need Western psychoanalytic theorists to make such analyses: to those not yet alienated from the erotic wellsprings of cultural practices the sadistically raping, greedily devouring, irresponsibly waste-full perversions of Western land usages are all too apparent, and readily contrasted with the more loving, reparative and caring approaches adopted by people unafraid of acknowledging the land as mother, origin, source. As a final example of how the shifts in analytic focus I’m proposing might be applied in the interpretation of cultural texts, I would like to discuss another selection from Body/Politics, an essay by historian and philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller (1990) on the scientific quest for secrets and associated excremental and reproductive (or fetal/fecal) imagery in twentiethcentury science. Gender, technology and reproduction in Western culture The quest for secrets of animation and extermination amongst all-male sacred/ secret societies is a key theme in Evelyn Fox Keller’s essay ‘From secrets of

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life to secrets of death’. Keller writes, as I also claim to do, in the spirit of what she calls ‘the old psychoanalysis’, one faithful to Freud’s project to ‘restore for us the connection between body and mind that Descartes had severed’ (1990:177). Her general argument is that the scientific motif of the urge to f athom the secrets of nature is double-sided and involves, on the one hand, discovering the secrets of women, nature, of life itself; on the other, the search for mastery over and possession of instruments of death. Traditionally, the secrets of life have been women’s business, but in science, men pursue the illumination or enlightenment of the female interior (metaphorical and actual) and aim to undo or unravel nature’s secrets. Keller discusses two main examples: the ‘calculated assault on the secrets of life’ in research on DNA in molecular biology, and the similarly concentrated search for ‘the secrets of death’ in the making of the first nuclear bomb in the Manhattan project. The latter involved a highly secret production of a supremely deadly machine that was described throughout in terms of gestation, and birth metaphors, as documented in Brian Easlea’s book Fathering the Unthinkable. Keller highlights the exclusivity of masculine secret cults, comparing bullroarer rituals with male research teams: Not unlike the initiation rites of the bullroarer, modern-day weapons research is generally conducted in labs that are overwhelmingly (if not exclusively) male, and highly secretive; also like the bullroarer, the bombs that are produced are likely to be associated with a provocative mix of phallic and birth imagery (1990:186). She links various stories and examples together through the concept of wombenvy, and stresses the envy, for whether the story is one of anal production of a bullroarer and/or the rebirth of a new male initiate from the company of men, or is about the supposed light-and life-giving properties of the mind (as in photocentric philosophy), women’s life-giving powers are denied or in some sense ‘spoiled’. I’m sympathetic to Keller’s general point here, which also connects with questions about the distribution of sublimations: masculine cultural (re) productivity may be achieved at the symbolic (and actual) expense of women’s productive powers. Perhaps because Keller is working with historical examples of technoscientific invention and outside the strictures of the ‘sexual difference’ model of representation, she has a better sense than Doane of the multivalence and bisexuality of sublimated masculine desires. My critique of Keller therefore proceeds along other lines. I suggest that her treatment of cross-cultural material is an example of the kind of falsely universal, ethnocentric, and ahistorical psychoanalytic framework that would lead some theorists of culture to reject psychoanalysis as a counter-hegemonic tool.

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Whereas I have criticized Doane for making slipshod equations on the side of the feminine, I’d criticize Keller’s interpretation of science for doing something similar with the notion of masculinity. Keller cites cross-cultural examples of dif f erent expressions of womb-envy, but then erases the cultural differences by describing them all as instances of some generalized ‘masculinity’. Keller’s work is representative of a rhetorical strategy common amongst ecofeminists, who often phrase critical interpretive statements about Western technoscience in terms of some generalized masculinity or phallicism. Throughout Keller’s paper (and other ecofeminist writings), masculinity is almost always associated with the technological, the paternal and, most consistently, with death. For example, citing Carol Cohn’s (1987) fieldwork on the language of nuclear weapons designers and strategists, Keller outlines how the language of reproduction and family life replaces flesh and blood referents with macabre high-tech substitutes whose lethal potentials thus become obscured. Once weapons are spoken of as beings living in their own strange world, they become thinkable as magically separate from the real human flesh that would be irradiated and wasted by the ‘orgasmic wumps’ and ‘footprints’ produced when these sexy weapons and systems ‘take out’, ‘couple’ or ‘marry’ each other (Keller, 1990:188). Drawing on Kleinian theory, Keller suggests that such language maintains the destructive tendencies it masks by ‘foreclosing the normal processes of integration and reparation’. By contrast, from my interpretation of Klein (and Róheim), through which I understand the technological brainchild as a token of reparation (i.e., a new body fashioned from the remains of the damaged maternal body), I would suggest that what makes nuclear language so powerful is the way it actually incorporates the process of reparation: through the bomb=baby equation, the destroyers of bodies are imagined as new bodies in themselves: they simultaneously destroy and make reparation for their destruction—a magical coupling of opposites indeed. But the main point I would wish to make is this: that the ‘diagnosis’ of womb-envy, however iconoclastic and unsettling it might be to some, is not in and of itself a radical or subversive one. Indeed, it is not a diagnosis at all, but an identification of a symptom. A too-smooth slippage from one masculine cult’s expressions of womb-envy to another can lead the critic to overlook what is distinctive about Western/nuclear/science-fiction culture. For the historical and environmental evidence is clear that despite the widespread occurrence of masculine cults that deploy fantasy and ritual objects to supplement men’s anatomical deficiencies in the reproductive department, while celebrating various forms of ‘mastery of death’, most traditional and non-Western cultures did not conjoin womb-envy with exterminist technologies and practices. In Róheim’s terms, womb-envy, phallic and anal pregnancies, etc., would be examples of potentially universal symbols, that is symbols which human

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biology and terrestrial experience made likely to occur in dreams of fantasies. However, the psychoanalysis of cultural formations is only partly complete when it identifies such a constellation as womb-envy: the next, and possibly more interesting set of questions might include: how, where, and with what degrees of displacement are these fantasies played out in a particular cultural context? Exactly what other kinds of desires and organ-metaphors are associated with this symbolic nexus? And what else is it about the culture, the geography, the history, the religious and philosophical associations, its mode of governance, its organizations of subsistence and production, its kinship structures and divisions of labour that have determined the particular mode of expression of womb-envy (or whatever…)? Along these lines, questions of scale and arena would be crucial. Though there may be essential similarities in symbolic associations, a tribal masculine initiation cult is not the same as a weapons lab: the gender formation may be similar, but the political economic context is quite different, and the technology is of frighteningly different genre and magnitude. One is enacted directly with and upon the bodies of those involved, often with a good deal of explicitness about the character of the masculine envy and reproductive desire entailed; the other transpires in the name of ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ science within a highly industrialized global war apparatus with effects on the bodies of beings far displaced in space and time from the weapons designers. In principle, then, the psychoanalysis of cultural formations must pay attention to their technological and philosophical as well as sexual genres. Characteristically, Western technological development has also been greatly facilitated by military concerns: war its spur, speed its principle. Also characteristic of hegemonic culture is the emphasis on metaphors of vision and light. Irigaray considers Western philosophy as photology, a lightcentred metaphysics where truth is revelation, illumination, enlightenment, where knowledge becomes, as Keller writes, a ‘drama of visibility and invisibility’. This light-centredness flowers in nuclear technologies, where matter is renatured ‘brighter than a thousand suns’, converted into energy and light. But even in ‘conventional’ (i.e., short of nuclear) twentieth-century war, photocentrism becomes a predominant organizing principle, almost undermining war’s traditional concern with territory. These developments are charted in Virilio’s (1989) study of the cinematization of war, from the reconnaissance photos, radar and flight films of modern war (e.g., World War II), to the virtual reality of an almost entirely visually and/or computermediated postmodern War (e.g., the Gulf War). 18 Read against this broader context, moments fetishizing vision and visual technologies in cinema are not (as Mulveyan theory would have it) distractions from a knowledge-seeking narrative about sexual difference, but direct indicators of the photological interests institutionalized throughout Western culture, where cinema and nukes are both examples of uncanny half-lives reborn as light. This is not the place to elaborate on these connections, but to simply note that a

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comprehensive psychoanalytic study of Western culture would need to specify ‘masculinity’ and masculine sublimations with reference to such tendencies as photocentrism and an increasingly ‘high’ (even extraterrestrial) military technology.19 Despite her professed allegiance to ‘the old psychoanalysis’, Keller is timid about claiming any causal connections between individual and collective unconscious formations. To home in on Keller’s final paragraph: Surely, the fantasies I describe can neither be seen as causal (in any primary sense) nor as inconsequential. Where then, between causal and inconsequential, are we to place the role of such fantasies? […] fantasies that are in one sense private, but at the same time collectively reinforced, even exploited, by collateral interests. What is their role in the dynamics of the overtly (and primarily) public and political crisis we find ourselves in? (1990:189). This passage raises questions about the status of psychoanalytic interpretation and about the status of the fantasies identified thereby. Keller spells out in unusually clear terms the impossible position into which psychoanalytic cultural criticism seems to have been forced in recent years. There’s an incredible reticence about claiming that psychoanalytic interpretations have any real relevance for cultural theory. As Keller puts it, unconscious fantasies are neither causal (i.e., having consequences) nor inconsequential (i.e., being a cause). In such a situation, a critic may resign herself to the bewildered contemplation of astounding parallels between the symbolic associations of Western cultural formations and the materials collected from individual case histories (or from other cultures), invoking words like ‘resonance’ or ‘curious similarity’ while disclaiming any more specific connection. However as I have already outlined, the psychoanalytic perspective forwarded in the present essay posits the ‘strange attractors’ of myth as mediators between the individual and the collective unconscious and expects to find resonances, which arise because hegemonic irrationalities present specific versions of potentially universal symbols, or because individuals supply the erotic and perverse associations to collectively valued artefacts and poetic representations. It is not in the interests of technoscience or of capitalism to pursue these lines of inquiry. If anyone knows of corporations of fering research grants for the study of masculine technological perversions, let me know about it! The leaders of Western culture have spent much effort trying to convince their own and other populations of the purposive, nonmystical, efficient, practical, and above all masculine and rational character of the Western way of life and its associated technologies, commodities, and values; the psychoanalysis of culture can expose and help delegitimize the profound irrationality of these enterprises. And needless to say, we cannot expect the ruling men to simply

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declare these interests: irrationality, envy, senses of lack, fears of abandonment, and fetishistic attachment to objects are, after all, supposedly definitive of the female psyche, and simply don’t fit available ideological definitions of masculinity. Keller poses the question of sublimation in terms of the dichotomies of public and private, individual and collective, suggesting a process of collective reinforcement of private fantasies. My hunch is that the public/ private dichotomy is a misleading basis for an account of sublimation, and that more intermediate terms may be needed to account for slippages between the individual and the technoscientific unconscious. From my readings of Keller, Hacker, Cohn, and Sherry Turkle (1984) (the latter on computer users), I gather that the kinds of joking play and metaphors which express these fantasies don’t circulate so much in broad and highly public official fora, but in smaller, more informal and semipublic gatherings and spaces. For example, the research literature on girls and computers suggests that where semipublic spaces like video-games halls give boys opportunities to familiarize themselves with computer and simulations technology, girls’ lack of access to such spaces is one of the factors inhibiting their classroom engagement with computers (see, e.g., Kiesler, Sproul, Eccles, 1985; Griffiths, 1988). My suspicion is that the general lack of culturally legitimated, nondomestic spaces where girls and women can pursue collective political, social, artistic, or technological f orms of creativity—that is, sublimate feminine perversions—is one of the defining features of sublimation in the West, where since the burning times, male-dominated culture has viewed almost any kind of female group activity with paranoia and/or defensive ridicule and trivialization. An odd thing about the kind of psychoanalytic interpretation Keller performs is the way it overtly recognizes the power of irrational desires and images in the technoscientific cult, but covertly cleaves to a rationalist framework. The implicit assumption is that somehow mere revelation of men’s eroticinvestments in technological creation—making the unconscious conscious—will be enough to ‘cure’ the cultural pathology, perhaps by shaming the technofetishists to retreat back into the Cartesian grid of reason. Within this rationalist framework, cause and effect is usually understood in terms of Newtonian, ballistic and linear sequences (as in the communications model of a sender firing a message that impacts on a receiver). To a rationalist, the causality implied by psychoanalytic interpretation is entirely puzzling, because it is not about the sequence of observable events amongst elements in a field. Instead, it describes the latent investments and forces that shape the field. The mythic and unconscious dimensions of culture provide the background pre-understanding or the horizon of sense within which events in the field are perceived or enacted. I would propose we stick with the psychoanalytic perspective and assume that

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unconscious and mythic elements—simply speaking, poetic thought—are an irreducible part of any cultural activity, including the most rational(ized). The task of psychoanalytic cultural criticism could not then be to eradicate or suppress irrationality with the enlightening force of reason, but to work with the plasticity of desire and representation: to transform, modulate, and displace along different and less dangerous paths the fantasies and metaphors that inform cultural practices; or more simply, to pay critical attention to the mythic aspects of non-dominant or emergent cultural productions. For in escaping a suffocating structuralism and the ‘always already’ of sexual difference, a repoliticized psychoanalytic cultural critique not only offers to enhance our appreciation of the historical specificity of Western myth and sublimation, it also invites us to actively direct our efforts towards forging (or revaluing) counter-hegemonic irrationalities—such as a poetics of life diversified in futurity—which in their turn become the organizers of different cultural practices and new regimes of common sense. Notes 1 Freud, 1908, ‘Creative writers and day-dreaming’, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE) 9:143; Pelican Freud Library: 14,129. 2 I’m referring mainly to lectures in the School of Humanities at Murdoch University, especially in the course ‘Language, Culture and the Unconscious’; some of these analyses appear in Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress (1988); see pp. 58–9 for one statement of this general principle. 3 Here, I bring in a semiotic distinction between ‘ideology’ as level of signification that works with fixed, recognized and often binary categories (culture/nature, woman/man, ruling class/lower class, etc.), and ‘mythology’, a signification that involves more of what Freud called ‘primary process thinking’—more fluid, not necessarily verbal, metaphorical and multilayered. This distinction is a development of the theories of mythic symbolism in relation to social categories elaborated by Mary Douglas (1966); see especially chapter 2 and chapter 6 on the ways meditation on anomalous figures (i.e., what I’m calling ‘the mythic’) can both support and call into question the (‘ideological’) binaries of normal classificatory schemata. 4 A caveat here would be that there are aspects of myth that seem transhistorical, a point I would not feel comfortable about belabouring in a cultural studies context, where the more interesting question is how those transhistorical aspects are mediated in culturally and historically specific ways. 5 Lacan’s doctoral work was very much influenced by Klein, and while his early works acknowledge Klein’s influences, his references to Kleinian theory grew more disparaging over time. Compare, for example, his positive references to Klein in the 1948 paper ‘Aggressivity in psychoanalysis’ with his disparagement of her in the 1958 ‘The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power’; both essays in Lacan (1977).

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6 These ideas come up in Freud’s general writings on culture and religion, such as 1913 Totem and Taboo, S.E. 13, 1; 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, S.E. 18, 69; 1927, The Future of an Illusion, S.E. 21:3; 1930, Civilization and Its Discontents, S.E. 21:59. A more subtle philosophical account of the structure of sublimation within an androcentric and photocentric cultural context is given in Irigaray’s mediations on the poetics and related erotic processes involved in Plato’s Cave metaphor, including the mining, appropriation and illumination of the mother/ Earth; estampage—the deceitful stealing and phallic stamping of the re-sourced mater(ial); and a specular economy that includes sodomistic ocular incorporation, and the ideal of an ex-orbital solar vision. Luce Irigaray (1985). 7 These include Klein’s own analyses of artworks, and her discussions of epistemophilic (knowledge-seeking) impulses and the femininity complex of boys, which suggested that envy of feminine reproductive and nutritive organs prompted desires to sadistically appropriate and consume the maternal body, followed by reparative efforts to restore it or emulate it through the creation of a new whole body—the artwork or technological brainchild. Many people, including Ella Sharpe, James Strachey, Edward Glover and Paula Heinmann, explored these ideas, which resurfaced more recently in Peter Fuller’s aesthetic theories elaborated in his Art and Psychoanalysis (1980). For a recent account of sublimation which accords with my own political perspective, see Stephen Robinson (1984). Occasional articles on sublimation may be found in journals of criticism and theory over the past two decades; my point is not that they are absent, but that issues around sublimation have not yet been adopted as central guides to psychoanalytic criticism to the same degree as the more ideologically convenient models of gendered identity in culture. 8 Freud, 1908, ‘“Civilized” sexual morality and modern nervous illness’, S.E. 9:189. The forces that can be employed for cultural activities are thus to a great extent obtained through the suppression of what are known as the perverse elements of sexual excitation’. 9 This notion, suggested by Abraham and developed by Klein, is a problematic one for hard-line Freudians. It implies that the phallus acquires its value not as a purely masculine symbol of paternal potency, language and law, but is initially desired as a magical substitute for the breast. It required special treatment by Lacan, who allowed that the phallus was a ‘signifier of lack’, but avoided specifying an answer to the question ‘lack of what?’. Instead of being a signifier of (the lack of) the breast, the phallus becomes in Lacan’s algebra a signifier of its own lack: the solitary sign of sexual—or indeed of any significatory—difference. For preLacanian sources see Karl Abraham (1966); especially the essays ‘Origins and growth of object love’ and ‘The influence of oral eroticism on character formation’; and Melanie Klein, The Oedipus complex in the light of early anxieties’ in Klein (1948), esp. p. 382, and other indexed references to ‘father’s penis’; and Klein, ‘Weaning’ and The early development of conscience in the child’ (1975). 10 Jacqueline Rose helpfully alerts us to the dangers of this conflation in her essay ‘Femininity and its discontents’ in Rose (1986), esp. pp. 88–93. 11 On alienation, escape, and visual culture see Robert D.Romanyshyn (1989); on technological cocoons see Don Ihde (1990), esp. p. 110.

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12 The political and social structures that simultaneously permit individual morality and collective amorality are explored in C.Fred Alford (1989). 13 The tendency to slip between the figure of the woman and the technological feminine may also be discerned in Barbara Creed’s (1986) analysis of maternal monstrosity in Aliens, cited by Doane (1990). 14 Close scrutiny of science-fiction film credits often reveals the involvement of many corporate and government agencies, including NASA and the US Department of Defense. I would not want to suggest this involvement implies a direct propagandistic control of the image; rather—and this is another topic for further research—that opportunities exist for the inventors of both real and cinematic ‘special effects’ to collaborate and reinforce each other’s technofetishes. 15 Some of these are explored in my doctoral thesis, Through the Lumen: Frankenstein and the Optics of Re-Origination, Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1988. A condensed version of some of this appeared in 1991 in the Melbourne magazine Agenda, 19:13–15. 16 A similar critique of the ‘self-fulfilling’ character of Doane’s ‘sexual difference’ model is made by Jenny Taylor (1991), esp. p. 108. 17 The narratives, scenarios and dialogue of texts—corresponding to the ‘secondary revision’ of individual dreams—usually give obvious pointers to these contexts. For example, the opening sequence of the science-fiction horror film Alien, about a suffocating/raping extraterrestrial penis-breast monster that grows up into a cannibalistic biomechanical penis dentatus, provides one indicator to the historical thematic (the cultural equivalent of what Freud called the ‘day’s residues’ incorporated into dream) in the written statement that the ship Nostromo was carrying a cargo of ore from extraterrestrial mining operations. From this (and a number of other textual indicators) we can read Alien as a story about the search for resources, and the kinds of erotic/sadistic interests sublimated into the transformation of resources into deadly but lifelike technologies. 18 The last chapter accurately describes the videology of the Gulf War before it happened. The term ‘postmodern war’ comes from Chris Gray’s qualifying essay ‘Artificial intelligence and read postmodern war’, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1988, typescript. 19 For a condensed, but highly coherent survey of some of the tendencies and formations that need to be examined in feminist culture and communications theory, see Sue Curry Jansen (1989).

References Abraham, Karl (1966) On Character and Libido Development, New York: Norton. Alford, C.Fred (1989) Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Burgin, Victor, Donald, James, and Kaplan, Cora (1986) editors, Formations of Fantasy, London: Methuen. Butler, Judith (1990) ‘Gender trouble, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic discourse’, in Nicholson, L., editor, Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge, 324–40. Cohn, Carol (1987) ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs, 12 (4), 687–718.

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Creed, Barbara (1986) ‘Horror and the monstrous feminine: an imaginary abjection’, Screen, 27(1), 44–71. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——(1988) A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Doane, Mary Ann (1990) ‘Technophilia: technology, representation, and the feminine’, in Jacobus, Keller and Shuttleworth (1990). Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Easlea, Brian (1983) Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists, and Nuclear Arms Race, London: Pluto. Friedman, Susan Stanford (1987) ‘Creativity and the childbirth metaphor: gender difference in literary discourses’, Feminist Studies, 13(1), 48–82. Freud, Sigmund (1908) ‘Creative writers and day-dreaming’, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 9. Fuller, Peter (1980) Art and Psychoanalysis, London: Writers and Readers. Griffiths, Morwenna (1988) ‘Strong feelings about computers’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 11 (2). Hacker, Sally (1989) Pleasure, Power and Technology: Some Tales of Gender, Engineering, and the Cooperative Workplace, Boston: Unwin Hyman. ——(1990) Doing It the Hard Way: Investigations of Gender and Technology, in Smith, Dorothy and Turner, Susan M., editors, Boston: Unwin Hyman. Hodge, Robert, and Kress, Gunther (1988) Social Semiotics, Oxford: Blackwell/ Polity. Ihde, Don (1990) Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Irigaray, Luce (1985) ‘Plato’s Hystera’, in her Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C.Gill, Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press [Paris: 1974], 243–364. Jacobus, Mary, Keller, Evelyn Fox and Shuttleworth, Sally (1990) editors, Body/ Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, New York: Routledge, 163–76. Jansen, Sue Curry (1989) ‘Gender and the information society: a socially structured silence’, Journal of Communication 39(3), 196–215. Keller, Evelyn Fox (1990) ‘From secrets of life to secrets of death’, in Jacobus, Keller, and Shuttleworth (1990). Kiesler, Sara, Sproul, Lee and Eccles, Jacquelynne (1985) ‘Pool halls, chips, and war games: women in the culture of computing’, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 9, 451–62. Klein, Melanie (1948) Contributions to Psychoanalysis, London: Hogarth. ——(1975) Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945, London: Hogarth. Lacan, Jacques (1977) Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, editor, New York: Norton. Penley, Constance (1989) ‘Feminism, film theory and the bachelor machines’, in her The Future of an Illusion, London: Routledge. Robinson Stephen (1984) ‘The parent to the child’, in Richards, Barry, editor, Capitalism and Infancy: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Politics, London: Free Association Books, 167–206. Róheim, Gèza (1943) The Origins and Functions of Culture, New York: Nervous and Mental Diseases Monographs. ——(1950/68) Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, New York: International University Press.

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Romanyshyn, Robert D. (1989) Technology as Symptom and Dream, London: Routledge. Rose, Jacqueline (1986) Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London: Verso. Taylor, Jenny (1991) ‘Dreams of a common language: science, gender and culture’, New Formations, 13, 103–11. Traweek, Sharon (1988) Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turkle, Sherry (1984) The Second Self, New York: Simon & Schuster. Virilio, Paul (1986) Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizotti. New York: Semiotext(e). ——(1989) War and Cinema, trans. Patrick Camiller, London: Verso. Virilio, Paul and Lotringer, Sylvere (1983) Pure War, trans. Mark Polizotti, New York: Semiotext(e). Walkerdine, Valerie (1981) The Mastery of Reason: Cognitive Development and the Production of Rationality, London: Routledge. ——(1986) ‘Video replay: families, films and fantasy’, in Burgin, Donald and Kaplan, editors (1986) 167–99). ——(1990) Schoolgirl Fictions, London/NY: Verso.

TONY BENNETT

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To work with a government implies neither subjection nor global acceptance. One can simultaneously work and be restive. I even think that the two go together. (Foucault) It is useful, in the context of the so-called ‘policy debate’ in cultural studies, to call to mind Foucault’s contention that—as Colin Gordon summarizes it— a governmental logic of and for the left ought to be possible, ‘involving a way for the governed to work with government, without any assumption of compliance or complicity, on actual and common problems’ (1991:48). For, predictably enough, the mere mention of terms like ‘government’ and ‘policy’ in connection with cultural studies sparks of f in some a yearning for a moment of pure politics—a return to 1968—in whose name any traffic with the domain of government can be written off as a sell-out. Something of this was evident in Helen Grace’s (1991) review of the Australian cultural studies conference held at the University of Western Sydney in December 1990, and especially in the oppositions which organize the discursive strategy of that review in, on the one hand, linking the turn to policy with pragmatically driven research and a yearning for money and power while, on the other, ranging against these an uncontaminated holy trinity of theory, scholarship and textual analysis. My principal concern here, then, is to suggest that viewing ‘the policy debate’ through the prism of such oppositions runs the risk of distorting the issues that are at stake in that debate.1 These, I want to argue, do not take the form of a generalized choice between theory on the one hand and policy on the other, or between textual analysis and pragmatically oriented research. Rather, they take the form of a choice between different bodies and styles of theory, between different ways of construing the relations between theoretical and pragmatic concerns, and between different kinds of textual analysis and their associated estimations of the issues at stake in the conduct of such analysis.

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This is not intended, however, as a way of pulling the policy punch, or of seeking to legitimize policy work by claiming that it, too, can lay claim to a stock of theoretical credentials of its own. Nor is it intended as a pluralist argument for relations of peaceful coexistence with other styles, paradigms or tendencies within cultural studies. This is not to suggest that all work within cultural studies (however we might want to define it) should or need be directly concerned with policy matters. What it is to suggest is that all such work is indirectly affected by policy issues and horizons. This being so, my contention is that recognition of this would, and should, make a considerable difference to the manner in which the concerns of cultural studies are broached and conceptualized as well as to the political styles and dispositions governing the ways in which work in the field is conducted and the constituencies to which it is addressed. In these respects, my presentation takes its bearings from Stuart Cunningham’s (1991) contention that the incorporation of an adequate and thorough-going policy orientation into cultural studies would see a shift in its ‘command metaphors away from rhetorics of resistance, progressiveness, and anti-commercialism on the one hand, and populism on the other, toward those of access, equity, empowerment and the divination of opportunities to exercise appropriate cultural leadership’.2 Such a project, Cunningham argues, enjoins a far-reaching theoretical revisionism that ‘would necessitate rethinking the component parts of the field from the ground up’. It is to this task that I wish to contribute here by reviewing—and suggesting alternatives to— the concepts of culture which have subtended the cultural studies enterprise.3 Histories of culture This is a timely undertaking. In Politics and Letters, Williams claimed that his motives in writing Culture and Society were mainly oppositional. His aim, he wrote, was ‘to counter the appropriation of a long line of thinking about culture to what were by now decisively reactionary positions’ rather than ‘to found a new position’ (1979:97–8). There can be little doubt that this work proved to be decisively enabling for the subsequent development of cultural studies in the new views and definitions of culture it helped establish. The limitations of the new definitional horizons Williams thus opened up, however, are becoming increasingly apparent. The respects in which Williams’s concept of culture as a ‘whole way of life’ is connected to a Romantic conception of historical process as one destined to restore us to the communal ways of living from which it has allegedly rent us asunder have already been commented on (see Hunter, 1988). So, too, have the respects in which his enthusiasm for the historical restitution of community rests on an over-sentimental attachment to the patriarchal forms of Welsh working-class culture (see Jardine and Swindells, 1989). Here, then, I shall seek to add to these perspectives by focusing on the

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limitations of the kind of historical account Williams of fers of the evolution of the range of meanings associated with ‘culture’ in its modern usage. These limitations are not ones of error; rather, they are ones of implication. I do not, that is to say, wish to question Williams’s reading of the line of descent from Coleridge and Newman to Arnold and thence to Leavis. What I do want to question, however, is the assumption—largely taken on trust within cultural studies—that an adequate definition of culture can be derived from such an analysis. In tracing the emergence of the selective definition of culture, understood as a standard of achieved perfection, Williams offers an account of its functioning as a key term in modern forms of social critique and commentary. Important though this is, there are limits to the conclusions that can be derived from such a history. In particular, there are no good reasons to suppose that such semantic shifts can be regarded as anything but symptomatic of the concurrent changes affecting the organization and social functioning of those practices which fall within the category of culture so defined. Or, to put this another way: the changing definitional contours of ‘culture’ comprise merely a part of the changing set of relations in which, in the period since the late eighteenth century, cultural forms and activities have come to be implicated. Viewed in this light, I want to suggest, the transformations we should take most note of concern less the changing semantic fortunes of ‘culture’, particularly as manifested in its development into a standard of achieved perfection, than the role which such developments played in relation to the emergence of the wider domain of ‘the cultural’ as a field of social management. This, then, is the nature of the revisionism I wish to propose, one in which the distinctiveness of culture—in its modern forms—is sought less in the specificity of its practices than in the specificity of the governmental tasks and programmes in which those practices come to be inscribed. By ‘governmental’ here, I should stress, I do not mean ‘of or pertaining to the state’. Rather, I have in mind the much broader conception of the governmentalization of social relations—that is, the management of populations by means of specific knowledges, programmes and technologies —which, according to Foucault, most clearly distinguishes modern forms of social regulation from their predecessors. An adequate genealogy of modern culture, I want to suggest, needs to take more account of culture’s practical deployment within such governmental processes than previous accounts have been wont to. The perspectives I shall draw on in support of this argument are derived from work-in-progress on the early history of the public museum and, in the British context, the rational recreations movement. These provide some rough and ready co-ordinates for a history of culture which focuses on the manner in which the practices that are so described have come to be rendered useful by being harnessed to governmental programmes aimed at transforming the attributes—mental and behavioural—of extended populations. Such a history

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would, of course, be quite different from the more familiar ones within cultural studies in that it would take its bearings from the changing forms and contexts of culture’s governmental and administrative utilization rather than from its shifting semantic horizons. It is a history, moreover, written in the institutional arrangements and programmes developed by cultural administrators like Henry Cole—the architect of the Great Exhibition and of London’s South Kensington museum complex—rather than, as Williams proposed, one contained in the texts of cultural critics. And it is a history, finally, in which policy—which, in its broad sense, I define as the governmental utilization of culture for specific ends—would appear not as an optional add-on but as central to the definition and constitution of culture and so also, therefore, equally central to the concerns of cultural studies. There is no space, here, to do more than sketch the contours of such a history. In doing so, however, I shall try to demonstrate how the arguments advanced so far undermine the intelligibility of a polarity between, on the one hand, theory, politics and textual analysis and, on the other, an unprincipled, policy-oriented pragmatism. I shall do so by means of three provocations. First, I shall seek to show how a stress on the governmental utilization of culture can suggest new approaches to some of the perennial theoretical problems and concerns of cultural studies. My contention in this regard will be that the emergence of the modern relations between high and popular culture can be viewed as an artefact of government in view of the degree to which the former was—and still is—subjected to a governmental technologization or instrumentalization in order to render it useful as a means of social management. Second, I shall endeavour to show how acknowledging the intrinsically governmental constitution of modern culture undermines the logic of a cultural politics of resistance or opposition to some generalized source of cultural domination. I shall suggest that, to the contrary, modern forms of cultural politics often have their origins and raision d’être in the governmentalization of culture: that is, that the objectives to which they are committed are a by-product of the governmental uses to which specific forms of culture have been put just as those objectives can only be met via modifications to existing governmental programmes or the development of new ones. My third provocation will be to suggest that the ends toward which textual analysis is directed, the means by which such analysis is conducted and the political issues which hinge on its pursuit are an effect of the ways in which specific regions of culture (literature, art) have been instrumentalized via their inscription within particular governmental cultural technologies or apparatuses. Culture and power As good a way as any of broaching these various issues is to suggest that cultural studies might usefully review its understanding of the relations

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between culture and power in the light of Foucault’s critique of juridicodiscursive conceptions of power. The main burden of Foucault’s critique, it will be recalled, is that Western political thought, up to and including Marxist theories of the state, has proved incapable of recognizing the capillary network of power relations associated with the development of modern forms of government because it still envisages power, on the model of its monarchical form, as emanating from a single source. The primary concern of political theory has accordingly been to specify how limits might be placed on the exercise of such power or to identify sources external to it from which it might be opposed. To cut off the king’s head in political theory, Foucault argues, means ‘that we should direct our researches on the nature of power not towards the juridical edifice of sovereignty, the state apparatuses and the ideologies which accompany them, but towards domination and the material operators of power, towards forms of subjection and the inflections and utilizations of their localized systems, and towards strategic apparatuses’ (1980:102). It also means, he argues, that we should forsake looking for a source outside power from which it might be opposed and seek instead to identify the differentiated forms of resistance which the exercise of power— through multiple and dispersed networks of relations—itself generates. Many of the views regarding the relations between culture and power still current within cultural studies suggest that an equivalent cutting off of the king’s head has yet to take place. While the dominant ideology thesis has few remaining supporters, the perspective of cultural hegemony which—by and large—has replaced that thesis remains committed to a juridico-discursive conception of power in its deployment of what Foucault calls a descending analysis of power which, in positing a centre of and for power, then aims to trace the means by which that power percolates down through the social structure so as to reproduce itself in its molecular elements. It is true that, in its more sophisticated variants, this perspective stresses the negotiated nature of this process: that is, that power is never exercised without encountering sources of opposition to which it is obliged to make concessions so that what is consented to is always a power that has been modified in the course of its exercise. None the less, it remains the case that the field of culture is thought of as structured by the descending flows of hegemonic ideologies, transmitted from the centres of bourgeois cultural power, as they reach into and reorganize the everyday culture of the subordinate classes. As a consequence, analysis is then often concerned to ascertain how far and how deeply such ideologies have reached into the lives of the subordinate classes or, per contra, to determine the extent to which their downward transmission has been successfully resisted. It is thus that studies of the mid-nineteenth century advocacy of rational recreations are usually preoccupied with assessing the degree to which bourgeois cultural and ideological values succeeded in reorganizing working-class thought and feeling, and especially with determining how far down the class structure their influence reached: only so

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far as the upper reaches of the labour aristocracy or more deeply into the ‘respectable’ sections of the working class (see, e.g., Bailey, 1987; Gray, 1976)? While not wishing to gainsay the importance of such concerns, the focus they embody is, at best, one-eyed. For the assumption that the advocacy of rational recreations was premised on their anticipated success in transforming working-class ideology and consciousness is a questionable one, and especially so if it is supposed that such a transformation was expected to result from the working-class’s simple exposure to the purely mental influence of such recreations. Rather, cultural reformers were often less concerned with questions of consciousness than with the field of habits and manners. Moreover, in so far as they did anticipate any changes in the former, it was thought that this would only come about as a result of transformations in habitual norms and codes of conduct that contact with rational recreations would effect. Such contact, however, was not envisaged as exclusively or even mainly mental in form. Rather, if access to the world of rational recreations was expected to result in changed forms of behaviour and habits of conduct, this was because that contact was planned to take place in a technologized environment—the museum or the concert hall, for example—in which the desired behavioural effect was to result not from contact with ‘culture’ in itself but rather from the deployment of cultural objects within a specific field of social and technological relations. Thomas Greenwood’s staunch advocacy of the civilizing virtues of science museums thus rested less on the intrinsic properties of the objects displayed than on the manner of their display within the specialized classificatory environment of the museum. The working man or agricultural labourer who spends his holiday in a walk through any well-arranged Museum cannot fail to come away with a deeply-rooted and reverential sense of the extent of knowledge possessed by his fellow-men. It is not the objects themselves that he sees there, and wonders at, that cause this impression, so much as the order and evident science which he cannot but recognise in the manner in which they are grouped and arranged. He learns that there is a meaning and value in every object, however insignificant, and that there is a way of looking, at things common and rare, distinct from regarding them as useless, or merely curious (1888:26). Similarly, the specific knowledge acquired in the course of such a visit is less important than the new habits to which it gives rise—ideally, a self-activating desire for the pursuit of knowledge that will serve as an antidote to less civilizing habits. Greenwood thus continues:

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After a holiday spent in a Museum the working man goes home and cons over what he has seen at his leisure, and very probably on the next summer holiday, or a Sunday afternoon walk with his wife and little ones, he discovers that he has acquired a new interest in the common things he sees around him. He begins to discover that the stones, the flowers, the creatures of all kinds that throng around him are not, after all, so very commonplace as he had previously thought them. He looks at them with a pleasure not before experienced, and talks of them to his children with sundry references to things like them which he saw in the Museum. He has gained a new sense, a craving for natural knowledge, and such a craving may, possibly, in course of time, quench another and lower craving which may at one time have held him bondage—that for intoxicants or vicious excitement of one description or another (26–7). The behavioural changes which might result from the working class’s exposure to art in art galleries were similarly often expected to derive from the opportunities for commingling with middle-class exemplars which visiting art galleries afforded as much as from the qualities of the art displayed.4 Indeed, the quality of the art displayed was often viewed as quite incidental to the prospective technological effects of art galleries in these regards. When quizzed before the 1867 Select Committee on the Paris Exhibition, for example, Henry Cole could not be budged from the view that, once placed in the environment of a museum, any art was imbued with a civilizing potential which made it preferable to no art at all: …and I understand you to state that you consider that the gift of indifferent pictures to the museum would be productive of unmitigated good; is that your opinion?—Certainly; but it is a vague term to say indifferent pictures. I could go through the National Gallery where there are many pictures which in one sense are indifferent pictures; there they are, and people go there to see them; you cannot say it is evil and not good. I say it is an unmitigated good… Do you think it is desirable that the standard of taste should be maintained in this country at its present level, at which you say that a picture like the ‘Derby Day’ would beat any Raphael hollow?—I presume to say I do not know what is the standard of taste. I understand you to say, that if the ‘Derby Day’, by Mr Frith, and a Raphael were exhibited in this country, the ‘Derby Day’ would beat the Raphael hollow in its appreciation by the people of this country; do you think that that state of things is desirable?—No; but I think it is desirable that people should be taught to look at the pictures, and to take pleasure in them. Either good or bad?—Either good or bad, unless they are indecent or bloodthirsty; but I think a picture which is harmless in its morality is a

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work of art; and I think if it attracts anybody to look at it, that is something gained to the cause of civilisation. I had much sooner that a man looked at an inferior picture than that he went to the public-house. Why do we try to purchase good works of art, if it is desirable to have bad ones?—Just in the same sense that a glass of table beer is better than nothing, but you would prefer sherry, perhaps, if you could get it (‘Select’, 1971:920–4). In the nineteenth-century advocacy of rational recreations, then, as well as in the development of public art galleries, museums and concert halls, we can see the development of a new orientation vis-à-vis culture, one in which specific forms and arrangements of culture are judged capable of being harnessed to governmental programmes aimed at the transformation of popular morals and manners. This envisaged effect, however, is anticipated in view of the way in which specific forms of culture are instrumentalized— fashioned into useful vehicles f or governing—rather than from their intrinsic properties even though, as I shall argue shortly, this inscription of culture into governmental programmes both supplies the conditions for and is assisted by the development of essentializing aesthetic discourses. I am suggesting, then, that an understanding of the relations between culture and power in modern societies needs to take account of the instrumentalization of culture which accompanies its enlistment for governmental purposes. For the culture/power articulation which results from these developments is quite distinct from the organization of such relations in earlier societies. Within the absolutist regimes of early modern Europe, for example, culture certainly formed part of the strategies of rule and statecraft. It thus formed part of a sphere of élite display through which, in prerevolutionary France, the aristocracy could be bound to, and rendered dependent on, the world of the court. Equally, so f ar as the relations between state and people were concerned, it formed part of a politics of spectacle through which the might and majesty of royal power was dramatized via its symbolic display.5 Of course, there remains a symbolic aspect to the relations between culture and power in modern societies; the ‘politics of spectacle’ did not die out with the ancien regime or Old Corruption.6 However, this aspect no longer exhausts such relations or even accounts for their most distinctive qualities. Rather, these are to be found in the respects in which culture comes to be imbricated within governmental programmes directed at transforming the mental, spiritual and behavioural attributes of the population. If culture is the servant of power within absolutist regimes, the power it serves is—if not a singular one—certainly a power which augments its own effects in being represented as singular just as it is a power whose interest in the generality of the population is limited to the need to impress it into obedience. In the early nineteenth century, by contrast, we see the sphere of culture being, quite

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literally, refashioned—retooled for a new task—as it comes to be inscribed within governmental strategies which aim less at exacting popular obedience to a sovereign authority than at producing in a population a capacity for new forms of thought, feeling and behaviour. Both relations of culture and power, of course, are productive; but their productiveness belongs to different modalities. They aim at producing different kinds of persons, organized in different relations to power, and they proceed by means of different mechanisms for distributing the effects of culture through the social body: the representational and symbolic versus the governmental and technological. If we are to write an adequate history of culture in the modern period, it is to the changing contours of its instrumental refashioning in the context of new and developing cultural and governmental technologies that we must look. This is not to say that the changing coordinates of ‘culture’s’ semantic destinies are unimportant. However, it is to suggest that these derive their significance from their relations to culture’s governmental and technological refashioning. Some pointers as to the directions which such a revisionist history might take can be indicated by briefly developing the three provocations I mentioned earlier. Culture and its discontents The differences between high and popular culture, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has argued, are becoming increasingly blurred in view of two considerations. First, the fact that virtually all forms of modern culture are capitalist means that dif ferent realms of culture can no longer easily be distinguished in terms of their relations of production while, second, modern culture tends increasingly to comprise a ‘single, intertextual field whose signifying elements are perpetually being recombined and played off against each other’ (1987:87). There is, however, a third reason. For it is also true that virtually all forms of culture are now capable of being fashioned into vehicles for governmental programmes of one sort or another—for AIDS education programmes, for example, or, as popular literary texts come to be incorporated into the literature lesson, as textual props for ethical or civic trainings of various kinds. It is, indeed, precisely these kinds of changes which form part of the material and institutional conditions of existence which have supported the development of cultural studies. In these various ways, then, the co-ordinates of the discursive field in which the modern concept of culture first emerged—a field characterized by the antinomy between the high and the popular—are being weakened. Yet these discursive co-ordinates were also practical ones in that it was precisely the production of a vertical relation between the high and the popular which established the gradient down which the ‘improving’ force of culture could flow in order to help ‘lift’ the general cultural level of the population. The point I’m after here is that it was precisely the aestheticization of high culture

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which provided the enabling conditions for the production of such a gradient. There is not, that is to say, any opposition between culture’s aestheticization and its being rendered useful as an instrument for governmental programmes of social and cultural management. To the contrary, it was only the development of aesthetic conceptions of culture which allowed the establishment of those discursive co-ordinates in which élite cultural practices could be detached from their earlier functions—of dazzling spectacle, for example—and then come to be connected to civilizing programmes in which they could function as instruments of cultural ‘improvement’ directed toward the population at large. If, today, the discursive co-ordinates which supported such conceptions and strategies are mutating, this is partly because of a tendency toward selfundoing that is inherent within them. An important characteristic of the relations between culture and power developed in the nineteenth century consisted in the degree to which forms of culture needed to be valorized as embodiments of universal norms of civilization or humanity in order to be rendered governmentally useful. Yet this process has also served to generate alternative demands and oppositions from the zones of exclusion and margins which it itself establishes. It is in this respect, to come to my second provocation, that many modern forms of cultural politics can be viewed as byproducts of culture’s governmentalization rather than as arising autochthonously out of relations of repression. Foucault has argued that the government of sexuality has given rise to a new sphere of biopolitics in which new kinds of counter-politics have been generated in view of the ‘strategic reversibility of power relations’ through which, as Colin Gordon put it, ‘the terms of governmental practices can be turned around into focuses of resistance’ (1991:5). We need also to be alert to the ways in which the utilization of culture as an instrument of government has exhibited a similar capacity to generate its own fields of counter-politics. Demands that representational parity be given to women’s art in art galleries or to the histories of subordinate social strata in history museums are thus ones which are generated out of, and fuelled by, the norms of universal representativity embodied in the rhetorics of public art galleries and museums. Earlier collections of valued objects seem not to have given rise to any similar demands—partly, no doubt, because of the limited influence of democratic and egalitarian philosophies but also because the principles of curiosity and wonder which governed the constitution of such collections meant that no general political value could be attached to the question of what was included within, or excluded from, such collections. For, where objects were collected for their curiosity value, it was their singularity that mattered, not their representativeness.7 Only the refashioning of the semiotic frames of reference of collecting institutions such that cultural objects came to be displayed and classified in terms of their representativeness of general norms of humanity lent any cogency or purpose to the view that the histories and cultures of

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different social groups should be accorded equal representational rights and weight. The first organized campaigns for more attention to be paid to women’s history and culture in collecting institutions thus took the form of a demand that such matters be accorded representational parity within the universalizing project of modernity as exemplified by the international exposition.8 Many aspects of modern cultural politics, then, are effects of the ways in which specific fields of cultural practice have been governmentally deployed. The same is true of many aspects and forms of cultural analysis. Moreover, this is so in ways which render the opposition between textual analysis and policy analysis quite disabling. For the text which analysis encounters and which must be engaged with, theoretically and politically, is never simply given to analysis. Rather, what a text is, and what is at stake in its analysis, depends on the specific uses for which it has been instrumentalized in particular institutional and discursive contexts—some of which, of course, will be governmentally constructed and organized. This being so, the development of politically self-reflexive forms of textual analysis depends precisely on adopting a policy perspective—that is, on recognizing how the textual regime in question functions as part of a technological apparatus with a view to considering the kinds of reading activities and relations through which that regime might be redeployed for new purposes. Take the modern art museum. Clearly, many forms of textual analysis—art history, for example, in its commitment to tracing intertextual relations within the archive of the museum text—are dependent on the assemblage of art within museums and on the systems that have been developed for recording, collating and exchanging information between museums. However, it can also be argued that, in view of its functioning as an institution of social differentiation, the modern art museum has fashioned a distinctive textuality for the the modern art object, one which organizes social relations of inclusion —which, of course, are also always ones of exclusion—by producing an invisible depth within the art-work (the depth, precisely, of its intertextuality) such that a line can be drawn between those who can, and those who cannot, see its ‘hidden’ significances. Questions of textual analysis—and of how to approach them—thus cannot, on this view, be posed independently of their implications f or the positions and practices they make available in relation to this specific, socially and historically produced form of textuality. Indeed, political debates within the art museum are, in essence, debates about how (if at all) this distinctive textuality of the art object might be retechnologized and for what purpose—questions whose axes are simultaneously policy and textual ones.

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From critics to technicians Government, then, is not the vis-à-vis of cultural politics. It is an abstraction to be opposed in the name of a cultural politics which imaginarily draws its nourishment from a ground outside the governmental domain: the purely economic conditions of existence of a class, say, or the somatic resistances of the body. Rather, the relations between government and modern forms of cultural politics are ones of mutual dependency. How cultural forms and activities are politicized and the manner in which their politicization is expressed and pursued: these are matters which emerge from, and have their conditions of existence within, the ways in which those forms and activities have been instrumentally fashioned as a consequence of their governmental deployment for specific social, cultural or political ends. Clearly, perspectives of this kind sit ill at ease with what have come to be regarded as the central paradigms of cultural studies. For if cultural studies is defined by it concerns—theoretical and practical—with the relations between culture and power, it has largely envisaged such relations negatively in its critiques of dominant cultures as instruments of an oppressive power. The position argued here, by contrast, attributes a certain productivity to power in contending that the modern forms of culture’s politicization are historical outcomes of the specific relations between culture and power that have been embodied in culture’s fashioning as an instrument of government. This theoretical dissonance, moreover, has far-reaching practical consequences in suggesting that cultural studies needs to devise different ways of intervening within the fields of cultural politics it identifies as relevant to its concerns. The issues that are at stake in many fields of modern cultural politics, I have thus argued, are a historical result of the ways in which cultural forms have been technologically adapted in order to be rendered governmentally useful. However, if this is so, then it follows that making a difference to how culture works—altering the fields of uses and effects within which specific forms of culture are inscribed and which they help to support—is also a technological matter requiring that close attention be paid to the nuts-andbolts mechanisms which condition the governmental uses of specific cultural practices in the framework of particular cultural technologies or apparatuses. Take the manifold political issues associated with the relations between nation, culture and identity. It is clear that this nexus of relations has been shaped into being by the activities of modern governments concerned to endow their citizens with specific sets of nationalized traits and attributes. It is also equally clear that, whatever their present configuration, there can be no reorganization of the relations between nation, culture and identity without intruding policy—and so a shift in culture’s governmental deployment—into that trinity. Such an intrusion might take different forms: the regulation of broadcast content by bodies like the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, for example, or the monitoring of the cultural resources available to minority

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ethnic groups of the kind undertaken by the Office for Multicultural Affairs. It might equally take the form of new protocols of reading which, in allowing literary or film texts to be technologized in new ways by providing readers with different exercises to undertake in relation to them, allow those texts to play a role in the refashioning of national identities. Cultural change—or, perhaps better, changing what culture does—thus emerges as a largely technical matter, not, however, in the sense that it is something to be left to specialists but rather in the sense (the good Brechtian sense) that it results from tinkering with practical arrangements rather than from an epic struggle for consciousness. For cultural studies this would mean not merely a shift in its command metaphors of the kind proposed by Cunningham (away from rhetorics of resistance, progressiveness, etc., and toward those of access, equity, and empowerment). It would also entail a shift in its conception of the kind of enterprise it envisages itself as committed to and of the means by which that enterprise might be realized. The style of intellectual work—and the associated rhetorics, modes of address, styles of pedagogy and forms of training—cultural studies sees itself as concerned to promote is of crucial significance in this respect. The model of the cultural critic—of the intellectual engaged in the struggle for consciousness by means of techniques of cultural commentary—has not been the only model of the intellectual informing the history of cultural studies. It has, however, been an influential one, and it is one that is deeply written into the tradition—at least in its British versions—given its historical affiliations with literary criticism. It is, moreover, a model of the intellectual that is now being significantly reinscribed into cultural studies as—in one of the more influential of the many guises in which it now appears within the academy— it is increasingly cast in the role of heir and successor to English. This unfortunately means that it also often takes on the moral mantle of English in supplying an institutional and discursive context in which the trainee cultural critic can become adept in using a range of moralized enunciative positions. As an alternative, then, cultural studies might envisage its role as consisting in the training of cultural technicians: that is, of intellectual workers less committed to cultural critique as an instrument for changing consciousness than to modifying the functioning of culture by means of technical adjustments to its governmental deployment. Notes 1 Especially as there are signs that this version of ‘the policy debate’ will prove an influential one within Australian cultural studies. Grace’s antinomial constructions are thus echoed by Deborah Chambers in her editorial for the June/July 1991 issue of the Australian Cultural Studies Association Newsletter. 2 Cunningham’s use of the term ‘leadership’ here is, perhaps, misleading. My sense, from the context of his discussion, is that the concept of ‘cultural facilitation’

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3 4

5 6

7

8

would have better suited his purposes given, on the one hand, the élitist associations of traditional conceptions of cultural leadership or, on the other, their association with Gramsci’s conception of the role of intellectuals in providing moral and cultural leadership for social classes and allied social movements. Clearly, neither of these meanings accords well with Cunningham’s sense that intellectuals should play more of a technical and co-ordinating role in enhancing the range of available cultural resources and facilitating more equitable patterns of access to those resources. For a complementary discussion of related issues, see Bennett (1992). For a fascinating discussion of the influence of such views in the development of art galleries and exhibitions in mid-to late-nineteenth century Leeds, see Arscott (1988). Even though the text (and not just the reception) of such spectacles was often more ambiguous than has usually been supposed. See Laqueur (1989). However, the rhetorical strategies of the politics of spectacle were significantly transformed in the nineteenth century. For a discussion of these transformations in the case of museums and exhibitions, see Bennett (1988). For an excellent discussion of the contrast between the focus on the singularity of objects in pre-modern collecting institutions and the concern with the representativeness of objects evinced by modern public museums and exhibitions, see Breckenridge (1989). For a detailed example of the pre-modern concern with the singularity of objects, see MacGregor (1983). For a full account of the most influential of these campaigns and its influence on American feminism, see Weimann (1981).

References Arscott, Caroline (1988) ‘“Without distinction of party”: the Polytechnic Exhibitions in Leeds, 1839–45’, in Wolff and Seed, editors, The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth Century Middle Class, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bailey, Peter (1987) Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885, London: Methuen. Bennett, Tony (1988) ‘The exhibitionary complex’, New Formations, 4. ——(1992) ‘Putting policy into cultural studies’, in Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary and Treichler, Paula, editors, Cultural Studies, Routledge: New York. Breckenridge, Carol (1989) ‘The aesthetics and politics of colonial collecting: India at world fairs’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 (2). Cunningham, Stuart (1991) ‘A policy calculus for media studies’, paper presented to the Fourth International Television Studies Conference, London. Foucault, Michel (1980) ‘Two lectures’, in Gordon, Colin, editor, Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, New York: Pantheon Books. Gordon, Colin (1991) ‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’, in Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin and Miller, Peter, editors, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Grace, Helen (1991) ‘Eating the curate’s egg: cultural studies for the nineties’, West, 3(1). Gray, Robert (1976) The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Greenwood, T (1888) Museums and Art Galleries, London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. Hunter, Ian (1988) Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education, London: Macmillan. Jardine, Lisa and Swindells, Julia (1989) ‘Homage to Orwell: the dream of a common culture, and other minefields’, in Eagleton, Terry, editor, Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, Cambridge: Polity Press. Laqueur, Thomas W. (1989) ‘Crowds, carnival and the state in English executions, 1604– 1868’, in Beier, A.L., Cannadine, D. and James, M.R., editors, The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacGregor, A. (1983) Tradescant’s Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, 1683, with a Catalogue of the Early Collection, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (1987) ‘Popular culture’, New Formations, 2. ‘Select Parliamentary Committee Report on the Paris Exhibition, 1867’ (1971) British Parliamentary Papers, Shannon: Irish University Press, 920–4. Weimann, Jeanne (1981) The Fair Women, Chicago: Academy Press. Williams, Raymond (1979) Politics and Letters, London: New Left Books.

TOM O’REGAN

(MIS)TAKING POLICY: NOTES ON THE CULTURAL POLICY DEBATE1

Much of the literature associated with cultural studies can be interpreted as policy analysis. This is because, historically, cultural studies has been centrally concerned with the exploration and criticism of various strategies and programmes of action and obligation, organized both discursively and institutionally. The forms of power as exercised by state and private institutions, the forms of conduct they proscribe and the accommodations and resistances they meet are part and parcel of cultural studies’ very orientation. That orientation almost constitutes a policy in itself. In this context policy tends to be understood in terms of its consequences and outcomes, and in terms of the actions of those affected by it, as they exert some measure of influence upon the process. Cultural studies has adopted a determinedly ‘bottom-up’ policy towards all this, so as to foreground negotiations to the institutions and structures which formulate and design everything from texts to the built environment to administrative programmes. Policy programmes per se were not of so much concern as were their negotiation by their intended subjects; whether the ‘wild’ viewers in media analysis (see Ang, 1991), the recalcitrant students destined for careers as labourers in the pedagogic analysis of Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977), or particular subcultural, ethnic and gender identities formed in response to social planning, media logics, or prescriptive forms of moral and social conduct (Gillespie, 1989; Hebdige, 1979; Dyer and Baehr, 1987). In accordance with this largely ‘bottom-up’ programme, the policy of cultural studies involved foregrounding the recipient, the victim and the marginal in the exercise of social and cultural power. Sometimes this entailed a strategy of providing such recipients with a voice they would not otherwise have (Krisman, 1987); sometimes it simply served as a kind of news function (Hamilton, 1990); at its best it encouraged forms of community-authorized speech or strategic intervention (Crimp, 1988). Cultural studies’ polemical practice was one which often championed the restoration of community and ritual in the face of what James Carey (1989) calls a ‘transmission’ view of culture and communication (manipulation, control at a distance on the part of government and private agencies from broadcasters to the education system). Cultural studies distanced itself, on the one hand, from political economy and

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cultural industry approaches by insisting on the degree of noise, negotiation, failure and contradiction attendant upon all social interactions in the passage from donor to recipient, TV institution to audience member, newspaper to reader, entertainer to entertained. On the other hand, it distanced itself from textual analysis approaches by situating the reading and consumption of symbolic goods into a multiplicity of audience settings—socio-cultural, ethnic, subcultural and gendered. At its best cultural studies promoted a multilayered account of social practice in which the meaning of, say, a film or TV programme would be traced not in one analytical exercise but in a series of texts where textual analysis, political economy and ethnography would all play a part (Michaels, 1990). Coupled with this multidisciplinary approach, cultural studies was characterized by a particular ethical agenda, perhaps best expressed in the work of Eric Michaels.2 His research was driven by a set of ethical concerns for the politics and conduct of research, of media practice, and of the consumption of media and artistic programming. In the process he transformed the visual anthropology of Sol Worth (1981). For instance, Michaels: • took the enterprise of ethnographic film-making, already historically fraught with problems, one stage further. In the process he articulated a new and emerging role for the European in Aboriginal Australia, as facilitator rather than creative collaborator; • overturned some traditional ‘policy’ expectations about so-called disadvantaged or non-literate audiences, concentrating instead on the way in which video and TV technologies were incorporated in a dynamic way into their culture;3 • attacked the priority given by government to ‘educating the white audience’, directing Aboriginal media priorities towards inter-and intra-Aboriginal communication (1987a: 72). • demonstrated the ethical issues of subjects’ rights, typically overlooked by documentarists (film-makers and social scientists alike), concerned as they were purely with the description of social problems (1987b): • eschewed the easy and simple divisions between audience studies, producer studies, and institutional studies; seeking instead to locate TV as part of wider social technologies, in an approach he sometimes called an anthropology of TV (1990); • actively sought community authorization of the research work which he conducted for and on behalf of a particular Aboriginal community (1985). On such grounds as these, cultural studies engaged with the policy development of the state, from the point of view of disadvantaged recipients or those who are excluded from such polices altogether, and it sought to defend or restore community. For instance, Tim Rowse, in Arguing the

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Arts (1985) rewrote Bourdieu (1980) in the Australian context of arts policy, supporting forms of community arts, the basis of social equity and community involvement. Cultural criticism in this universe entailed both cultural critique and policy engagement; some writers typically moved between both poles. Sometimes cultural critique acted as a substitute for policy, at other times it was a priority in itself—it just depended on where you were, and on the environment in which decisions were being made (whether decision-making was responsive to engagement or not). Things varied from sector to sector; in Australia, for instance, museum, art, film, and educational policy provided scope for policy engagement, while broadcasting policy presented more difficult (though not impossible) prospects. Things also varied from country to country; the Reagan and Bush years have not been conducive to even marginally left involvement in cultural policy in the USA. In Britain meanwhile, the Thatcher period saw the disruption of connections between cultural initiatives and cultural criticism. Thatcherism excluded radical criticism from the policy club altogether, as screen and arts policy were increasingly determined from the top. But in Australia, the same period saw the years of Labour ascendancy; in such a climate, progressive cultural criticism could and did ‘count’ rather more than in countries where conservatives were in office. Yet in Australia too it was a period when ‘policy’ seemed to come into its own, in the form either of a pro-active consultancy role or of a reactive political role, lobbying for the maintenance of existing programmes. Either way the 1980s increasingly saw the ascendancy of a differently constituted ‘policy’ arena— and policy increasingly became known through governmental nomenclature, such as film policy, broadcasting policy, arts policy, equal opportunity policy and the like. It has become a more central political and public issue at a time when government resources for culture have been diminishing, when the management of the public sector has been overhauled, and programmes for educational relevance have gained favour in the political arena. Enter the ‘policy debate’ in cultural studies in Australia.4 Most of the intellectual running on behalf of the pro-policy position has been made by writers associated with or close to Griffith University in Brisbane—Tony Bennett, Stuart Cunningham, Ian Hunter, Colin Mercer, Jennifer Craik, Toby Miller (and, in a previous incarnation, myself)—especially since the founding of its Institute for Cultural Policy Studies (ICPS). The Communication Law Centre at the University of New South Wales and the Centre for International Research in Communication and Information Technologies (CIRCIT) in Melbourne are also active in ‘policy’ work. For these players, there is something wrong at the heart of the whole cultural studies enterprise. They call for the double reconstitution of policy: both as an object of study in its own right and as a political site for activity and analysis. They argue that the policy process as understood by governmental and private agencies should also be the centrepiece of cultural studies itself. However, since cultural

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studies was already concerned with policy, the current debate is over its orientation, and about what can count as policy; hence, for them, cultural studies should reorient its concerns so as to coincide with top-down programmes and public procedures, becoming bureaucratically and administratively minded in the process (see Bennett, 1989). What is meant by ‘policy’ would also be narrowed in focus, towards those things which are called policy in political and bureaucratic terms—and these things, together with their agents and agencies, would constitute strategic targets for cultural policy studies. Such an orientation is therefore interested in creating a focused object with a definite inside and outside, assigning limited purposes to it, and in modifying the role of critical theorizing and polemical analysis with regard to it. The policy-maker emerges in this scenario as an intellectual agent in his or her own right, making and intervening, not simply translating or putting into effect the ideas and plans of ‘pure’ intellectual cadres. For policy proponents, adjustments in cultural criticism itself flow directly from policy activity; existing cultural criticism is criticized with reference to policy and policy analysis. Policy becomes the motor that drives cultural criticism, making it congruent with policy through impressing upon it ‘appropriate adjustments of a theoretical and practical nature’ (see Bennett, this volume). As Tony Bennett concludes ‘Useful culture’: In short we must recognize that cutting off the King’s head in cultural theory means giving up the stance of the cultural critic and embracing instead that of the cultural technician. Not in a behaviourist sense but from a recognition of the complexity of the relations between culture, government and power which means taking account of the specific natures of different cultural institutions and technologies, the textual regimes that they give rise to and the specific forms of politics that they generate (this volume). Bennett calls for a change of mind-set on the part of cultural studies practitioners to adapt to this policy object. Those espousing a policy orientation on the part of cultural studies see their task as shifting it away from its present moorings and the prevailing ‘rhetorics of resistance, progressiveness, anti-commercialism on the one hand, and populism on the other’, as Cunningham puts it, moving instead ‘toward those of access, equity, empowerment and the divination of opportunities to exercise appropriate cultural leadership’ (1991:434).5 Specifically rejected in Bennett’s words is ‘the grand-standing of the cultural critic as an acceptable mode of intellectual work’ (1989:7)6 in favour of the cultural technician. In such a policy orientation ‘cultural studies’ becomes ‘cultural policy studies’. From this vantage point the existing project of cultural studies appears to be hopelessly anarcho-romantic. Its commitment to community becomes identified as an act of faith; one which can be compromised (as in Raymond

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Williams’s patriarchal Welsh working class, according to Bennett [this volume]). The goal is no longer to celebrate and help restore the community which survives and resists manipulative social and cultural programmes; it is rather to accept the necessary lot of intervention and to recognize that such communities are themselves the by-product of policy. Such a positioning of policy sees the humanities in general and cultural studies in particular as dependent upon policy horizons. This in turn has implications for the tertiary curriculum—especially since cultural studies is actively identified as disabling student participation in cultural industries.7 Cultural policy studies analysts no longer identify, or maintain solidarity, with a broad political front operating on behalf of disorganized agencies and individuals. Instead, they accept a role as nodal points operating in the context of a set of polycentric institutional forces—i.e., they constitute themselves as policy participants in a policy process. The proponents of policy of this kind have conducted their arguments in deliberately provocative and binary terms, if only to provoke debate; setting up divisions such as: policy versus postmodernism; cultural policy versus cultural criticism; reformist versus oppositional political practice; contextualist versus textualist emphases; Foucault the theorist of ‘governmentality’ versus Foucault the libertarian. Promoted as choices, these binaries entail quite different forms of conduct and self-recognition, directing engagement towards very different ends. For those promoting this debate the central concern is with the utility, effectivity and adequacy of cultural criticism on the one hand (seen as deficient on all counts), and the kinds of emergent practices, writing and reading protocols stemming from a policy orientation on the other hand. At the very least the debate signposts as an issue the possibility of selfconsciously extending humanities work to include policy writing, advice and involvement. It also reminds us to take account of quotidian histories, techniques and strategies of cultural governance (i.e., policy) which underlie the international agenda of cultural studies itself. It suggests an alternative career—that of cultural technician as opposed to cultural critic, with a reward structure tangential to but connected with the existing transnational critical networks and their site-specific politics. Being a ‘cultural technician’—in the sense of securing policy resources, consultancies and engagements—becomes in this moment as critical to CV production enterprises as do articles in refereed journals and books. The ‘policy’ debate was in fact designed as a bid to make the humanities—its programmes, its knowledges, and its selfprojections—count in policy development and the policy process by means of ‘attached’ intellectual work rather than just through the ‘unattached’8 involvement of cultural and social commentary. The debate was about the direction of cultural studies as an academic or theoretical enterprise because those making the bid made it so. That they were taken so seriously resulted from shared perceptions of a ‘crisis in the

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humanities’, in terms of its relation to government and its curriculum (Freundlieb, 1990; Knight, 1989; Curthoys, 1991). The controversy assigns ‘cultural studies’ a centrality in discussions over the future of the Humanities that is at first glance surprising, given the tenuous hold of cultural studies as a disciplinary project in Australia and elsewhere. But in Australian cultural journals such as Meanjin, the term ‘cultural studies’ has become almost synonymous with the humanities in general, legitimating the humanities’ effectivity in relation both to aesthetics and to everyday life. In the process cultural studies has become synonymous with the humanities’ most ‘relevant’ aspects—be they study of media, criticism of contemporary texts, historical studies, social practices and the like. Cultural studies in this context comes to mean the broad mix of cultural criticism involving history and anthropology, literature and fine arts, communication and media studies. In such circumstances cultural studies becomes both a pedagogic ambition in its own right and a label for departmental and research organization—there are, increasingly, Schools of Communication and Culture, and Centres for Research in Culture and Communication, in Australian universities. Why this peculiar assignation of centrality to a vaguely defined ‘cultural studies’? It is a reaction to perceptions of the diminishing role and importance of cultural criticism generally in contemporary educational, political and social processes in Australia, which has contributed to a palpable sense of crisis of identity and practice in cultural criticism. It is also a response to the demand for cultural planning and external advice-taking in government and interest-group politics, in areas as diverse as communications, broadcasting, museum, heritage, arts, and educational policy. Under the looser kinds of policy development of the immediate past, various humanities researchers and graduates were able to find important places in policy, but with the ascendance of (‘rationalist’) economics and more centralist policy development these kinds of opportunities and competences have lost ground. The ‘main governmental game’ in policy has been transformed in social and cultural sectors, from styles of advice-taking that are accommodative of consensus formation and of diverse inputs, towards more profoundly centralist, less publicly accountable, and therefore limited styles of advice-taking, marked by the ascendance of economic knowledges in public policy (see Pusey, 1991). This ‘game’ has threatened to remove other knowledges from administrative horizons altogether, particularly those concerned with culture, forcing them at best into an accommodation with economic orthodoxy. Recognition of this governmental logic may account for the slightly desperate tone of some of the propolicy contributions to the policy debate; the fear is that cultural studies is fiddling while Rome burns. The policy bid can be seen then as a kind of reclamation exercise in circumstances where the injunction to be socially relevant has been given a significant, alternative and much more specific ‘policy’ definition. Bennett, for instance, advocates the production of ‘positive knowledges that can be effectively used within actually existing

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spheres of cultural policy formation’ (in Curthoys, 1991:387). Here work is to be regarded as ‘relevant’ insof ar as it participates in and extends administrative processes. The formerly loose and all-inclusive generality of what might count as ‘social relevance’ is radically limited, narrowed to policy practice: that which can be made governmentally or corporately actionable, can be publicly endorsed, and can be institutionally sanctioned and found useful by government, tribunal, policy-makers and interest-group lobbyists directly involved in forming policies. Of course these competing terms of ‘relevance’ are not new, but what is different here is that the propolicy position has been lent extra weight and gained powerful allies by virtue of the contemporary policy moment and adjacent changes in tertiary education. For some, like Bennett and Hunter, the turn to narrowly defined policy is also a consequence of a retheorization of the humanities in the light of Foucault’s later writings. In this retheorization the humanities as such become a cultural policy instrument, whose workings can be disclosed by a Foucauldian attention to administrative programmes and their attendant ‘technologies of the self’ (Hunter, 1990). In this respect the ‘administrative’ side of the controversy has been lent extra weight by Ian Hunter’s Culture and Government (1988), a thoroughgoing, sophisticated and ideological reading of the formation of the humanities as a technique of governance and social power. This analysis has wrong-footed certain routine justifications of nonintervention in the humanities (academic freedom, tenure, etc.), and made it difficult to assert that those promoting policy are reliant upon some untheorized pragmatic politics of the existent. Even so, it must be said that Hunter’s is a limited reading of Foucault, using his notions of governance to foreground the production of ‘well tempered subjects,’ to the exclusion of his focus upon ‘unruly subjects’ in Toby Miller’s (1991) happy phrases. Foucault’s admission of the generality of regulation and government as critical in the modern era, is reconstructed by Hunter as an injunction to participate in that regulation as if that were the only socially forceful position to take. It is worth considering Foucault’s position here. He argued that his work should be regarded not so much as providing answers but as providing resources that certain sorts of activists—like prisoners’ rights groups—might find useful in their own practice (1980:62). It was up to such groups to make Foucault’s work ‘useful’; he would not legislate how that use should occur. By contrast the current policy polemic proposes a reading of Foucault which supports not relay and mediation, and therefore a gap between policy analysis and practice, but a means of acting in the social directly on behalf of and for governmental agencies. There is no gap here between cultural criticism and concrete intervention—only applicability, and intervention is thus closely defined in terms of the occupation, consideration and development of ‘policy’. These theoretical and practical developments mirror changes in the ‘external’ economic, structural and political environment, where far-reaching

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reforms both in Australia, the US A and Britain have brought social, industry, communications and arts policy issues to the top of the public agenda. They have also encouraged its proponents to argue for the advantages that a policy orientation can confer on cultural studies and on the humanities in general. But debate about these issues has been divisive. I have been part of this debate and associated with the cultural-policy push. For I do have a certain regard for the practice of cultural policy—it is too important to remain underexamined in cultural studies. Like others who have discovered policy participation and the complexity of policy processes, I found cultural studies’ current emphases and ethical imperatives to be a barrier rather than a vehicle for analysis. Unlike those who berated cultural studies in its more utopian and gestural manifestations, I simply set up shop somewhere else, and have variously gone by the label of cultural historian, film critic, sociologist, and political scientist. My criticisms of cultural studies were every bit as unflattering as Bennett’s or Cunningham’s; they were just made in private or on Stuart Cunningham’s questionnaire (circulated as part of his research for Framing Culture), and remained at that personal level through which one’s own institutional and writing trajectory is negotiated. No wonder then that my own reluctance to endorse the cultural policy push wholeheartedly, and to take calculated distance from it, was surprising to those who expected my support. I could not give this support and was critical of the form and direction of this debate. But this was criticism within cultural policy studies about its direction and orientation, rather than a thoroughgoing defence of cultural studies. With this preamble in mind I will now propose an alternative view of policy to that proposed by Bennett. Foucauldian policy analysis can take two alternative directions: the one pursued by Bennett and Hunter which is reliant upon propositional contents and a reading of Foucauldian ‘rationalities’ as ‘technologies’; and the other, my preferred direction, in which policy is approached as a technique of information handling in much the same way as Bruno Latour (1987) approaches science—as ‘policy in action’, as a cultural technology. Such an approach has no argument with many of Bennett’s fundamental tenets. Policy is interlocked with adjacent fields of cultural criticism, intellectual debate, administration and lobbying. But I don’t think policy, seen as particular intellectual programmes for machining the social, is the structural engine room which powers everything else. Policy is a particular kind of informational practice with its own limitations, potentialities and linkages to other kinds of public discourse, including cultural criticism and journalism, over which it holds no necessary preeminence. Bennett attends to the ‘rationalities’ or ‘intellectual technologies’ of government—i.e., the specification of the policy process itself as a knowledge-producing programme designed to render the social field intelligible, calculable, and productive of certain desired effects. But equally a

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policy focus could concentrate on the ‘rhetorical’, ‘information handling’ practices of governmental and other lobbying groups; their particular techniques of verbal assemblage and attendant reading protocols, the procedures through which other groups and individuals are enlisted, the machinery for the organization of advice-taking. Each brings into relief different aspects of the policy process. The Bennett-Hunter position foregrounds the propositional contents of policy as so many ‘rationalities’; the Latourian position foregrounds the ‘rhetorical’ or persuasive aspects of the policy process—its network of actors, disposition of institutions, enunciative dimension. I don’t think that a cultural studies account of policy can do without each focus. The ‘rhetorical’ understanding of policy informs my analysis of the policy debate itself. I consider policy-making and cultural criticism as taking place in different sites and mobilizing differently organized actors. I see both sites as routinely exchanging personnel, ideas, words and phrases; additionally policy actors will typically use cultural criticism sites to secure advantages in the policy-making process, just as cultural critics will use cultural policy involvements to gain advantages for themselves and their constituents. But the focus on the information-handling practices of policy allows attention to turn to the uses made of inscriptions—the reading and writing practices undertaken, the disposition of ideas and their subsequent ‘careers’ in texts, and the networks of actors engaged in policy. Such a focus assumes that cultural policy and cultural criticism are both part of the larger political process (along with journalism). This suggests that policy and cultural criticism should not be counterposed as either mutually antagonistic forms of life, or as forms of life possessing any intrinsic conceptual, political or ethical advantage over each other. Rather a set of historically determined relations organize their differences and similarities over time rendering the form of the relation between the two unavailable to general proscription. However, in the Australian policy debate, the specificity of cultural policy as opposed to cultural criticism has been sought in terms of the character of their respective propositional contents—the words and phrases that they use. It is argued that cultural criticism could become cultural policy if it used different and more appropriate phrases and words—if it acquired a policy language and reformist orientation (Cunningham, 1991:434). I see this is a fundamental category mistake. The difference between cultural policy-making and cultural criticism consists as much in the kinds of reading, writing and manipulation that are practised upon ‘proposition contents’ as those contents themselves. Policy and cultural criticism are contiguous styles of reasoning involving shared discursive resources and reasoning procedures, but they deploy such shared resources in different ways (the same distinction holds for the ways in which politicians, journalists and interested others argue, criticize, add to, and consider policy).

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So a choice cannot be made between policy and cultural criticism—we simply do one or the other depending upon the circumstance, sometimes we do both at the same time. This is not to have it ‘a bob each way’ (as Tony Bennett suggested of my ‘Dismantle’ paper). It is simply to point out that our contemporary society has a number of different information-handling practices and ways of action and intervening in the world. Such diversity cannot and will not be ‘remedied’ by fiat, by turning cultural critics into bureaucrats, or by taking no account of the varieties of textual, critical and analytical techniques that are associated with the humanities and cultural studies. Policy needs to be understood alongside a range of other activities and sites, including cultural criticism, journalism, cultural production, capital p politics. Sometimes it may act in a command position with regard to these sites, but mostly it does not, remaining instead just another minor player, alongside the much maligned ‘cultural critic’, whose social power therefore also needs to be understood. This power may be difficult to mobilize concretely and resembles in important ways ‘star’ or ‘personality’ power. Yet such figures may shape the public agenda in ways that permit policy actors to act, providing them with valuable resources and arguments. For instance, I have shown elsewhere (O’Regan, 1983) that there simply would not have been the kind of publicly funded support for feature-film production if it were not for the cultural criticism of the late 1950s and 1960s. As far as intervention and self-conduct are concerned, the very issue of choosing between policy and cultural criticism—which to write f or, which to inhabit—must turn out to be a question admitting no general answer. There are no a priori principles for choosing policy over cultural criticism. Nor can any presumption be made about social utility and effectiveness as necessarily belonging to one or the other. Cultural policy and criticism are not hermetically sealed but are porous systems; open enough to permit transformation, incorporation and translation, fluid enough to permit a great range of practices and priorities. To put this crudely: words like ‘social class’ and ‘oppression’ (and their attendant rhetorics) may not enter the vocabulary of government policy, but without their social presence in credible explanatory systems, any policy directed towards securing equality and equal opportunity would be diminished in scope and power. The recognition of oppression informs the policy goal of access, the persistence of social class underwrites the goal of social equality. Cultural policy and criticism are different forms of life, but they often need each other, they use each others’ discourses, borrowing them shamelessly and redisposing them. Under some conditions they may clash, but normally they go happily along their more or less parallel, more or less divergent paths. It seems to me that a critical regard for policy may end up serving four different purposes:

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• state purposes—efficiency, equity, excellence, etc.; • reformist purposes—which involve working ‘within’ administrative knowledge but with the aim of effecting changes; • antagonistic purposes—which involve critique and opposition, both general and policy-specific; • diagnostic purposes—in which policy emerges as a politics of discourse in a descriptive enterprise. These are also the purposes for policy analysis, i.e., cultura