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Dr. Richard Clarke LITS3304 Notes 11A

HOMI BHABHA THE COMMITMENT TO THEORY
Bhabhas goal in this essay is to rethink our perspective on the identity of culture (207) in the Post-colonial world.
He begins by drawing a distinction between (what some such as Kamau Brathwaite [in Contradictory Omens] have
termed) cultural diversity (206) and what he terms cultural difference (206) in an allusion to the term
diffrence/diffrance so central to Post-Structuralist thinking. The following chart shows what Bhabha perceives
to be the play of difference (rather than pure distinction) between these two terms:
Cultural Diversity
An object of empirical knowledge (206)
A category of comparative ethics, aesthetics, or
ethnology (206)
The recognition of pre-given cultural contents and
customs, held in a time-frame of relativism; it gives
rise to anodyne liberal notions of multiculturalism,
cultural exchange, or the culture of humanity.
Cultural diversity is also the representation of a
radical rhetoric of the separation of totalized cultures
that live unsullied by the intertextuality of their
historical locations, safe in the Utopianism of a
mythic memory of a unique collective identity (206)
Cultural Difference
The process of the enunciation of culture as
knowledgeable, authoritative, adequate to the
construction of systems of cultural identification
(206)
A process of signification through which statements
of or on culture differentiate (206)
The problem of the cultural emerges only at the
significatory boundaries of culture, where meanings
and values are (mis)read or signs misappropriated
(206)
Bhabhas point in pointing out the diffrance between these two terms is to stress the need to rethink the
traditional notions of cultural identity which have informed the process of decolonisation (what Bhabha alludes to
as an antagonistic view of culture-as-political-struggle [207]) and the concomitant growth of nationalism (what
Bhabha terms constant national principles [207]) in the Post-colonial world. These he describes as the
restrictive notions of cultural identity with which we burden our visions of cultural change (208). In a nutshell, his
point here and elsewhere is that both these notions, although ostensibly radical, have ironically been derived from
archaic and antagonistic notions of identity and cultural conflict which reached its apogee in nineteenth century
Europe and which are predicated on a belief in the possibility of the purity of cultural identity, the organic notion
that a given community is united by its common roots, and the possibility of self-expressi on. Bhabha off ers in
their stead a critique of the positive aesthetic and political values we ascribe to the unity or totality of cultures,
especially those that have known long and tyrannical histories of domination and misrecognition. Cultures are
never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in relation of Self to Other (207). Bhabha believes this to be true,
he hastens to emphasise, not because he believes in some humanistic nostrum that beyond individual cultures
we all belong to the human culture of mankind (207). Rather, the reason a cultural text or system of meaning
cannot be sufficient unto itself is that the act of cultural enunciation--the place of an utterance--is crossed by the
diffrance of writing or criture (207). In other words, influenced by the views of mile Benveniste, Bhabha is
arguing that identity, individually or en masse, is never pre-given: it must be enunciated. Moreover, subjectivity
is less the origin of any utterance about the self than its product (hence, the reference to the disjuncture between
the subject of a proposition (nonc) and the subject of enunciation [208]).
In short, what is at stake in any attempt to articulate the identity of a culture in the Post-colonial region
is the structure of symbolic representation (207) itself, to be precise, the diff rence in language that is crucial
to the production of meaning and ensures, at the same time, that meaning is never simply mimetic and
transparent (207). However, Bhabha expands Derridas focus on langue to include Benvenistes focus on
discourse or parole: he coins the term the Third Space (208) to denote the fact that the production of meaning
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Dr. Richard Clarke LITS3304 Notes 11A
requires . . . both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a perf ormative
and institutional strategy of which it cannot in itself be conscious (208): by the latter, Bhabha means the
discursive embeddedness and address [of the subject of enunciation], its cultural positionality, its reference to
a present time and space (208). The intervention of the Third Space . . . makes the structure of meaning and
reference an ambivalent process (208) and destroys this mirror of representation (208) with which we mistakenly
equate language.
The Third Space which informs any utterance consequently challenges our sense of the historical identity
of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary past, kept alive in the national tradition
of the People (208), whether this be European or Post-colonial nations. The Third Space, which constitutes the
discursive conditions of enunciation (208), displaces the narrative of the Western (and indeed Post-colonial]
nation which . . . [is] written in homogeneous, serial time (208) by virtue of the disruptive temporality of
enunciation (208). All cultural statements and systems are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent
space of enunciation (208) as a result of which hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or purityof cultures
are untenable (208). The discursive conditions of enunication ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture
have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read
anew (209).
As a result, Post-colonial peoples are the bearers of a hybrid identity (208) and caught in the
discontinuous time of translation and negotiation (208) as a result of which they are now free to negotiate and
translate their cultural identities in a discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference (208). As a result
of this, the native intellectual who identifies the people with the true national culture will be disappointed (208-9).
In short, the recognition of the split-space of enunciation (209) will open the way to conceptualizing an
international culture, based not on the exoticism or multiculturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the
inscription and articulation of cultures hybridity (209). We should remember that it is the
inter--the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between, the space of the entre that
Derrida has opened up in writing itself--that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes
it possible to begin envisaging national, antinationalist, histories of the people. It is in this space
that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others. And by exploring
this hybridity, this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others
of our selves. (209)