TRADITION AND THE MODERN

Workshop Three:
Modernity and Its Disciplines

4-5 November 2004

BG04 & BG05, SOAS

Project Leaders:
Professor Timothy Mathews (French, UCL)
Research Assistant:
Dr Ross Forman

CORE READINGS

In this workshop, our discussions will focus around a common body of readings.
All participants are encouraged to familiarise themselves with as many of these
texts as possible. Although this list is more extensive than we originally had
anticipated, we have decided not to edit it to allow a wide-ranging and
stimulating dialogue to take place.

Readings associated with individual papers are indicated in the speakers’

abstracts.

Core Readings:

• Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1971)

• Michel Leiris, Afrique noir (1968); L’Afrique fantôme (1981)
• Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness (1996)
• Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation
(1996)
• Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other (translated 1998)
• Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: escaping texts (translated 1998)
• Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)
• Slavoj Zizek, Zizek's Plague of Fantasies (1997); The Sublime Object of
Ideology (1989); The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory
and Post-theory (2001)
• Leo Ou -Fan, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in
China, 1930-1945 (1999)
• Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (1993)
• The Practice of Cultural Analysis : Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation,
edited by Mieke Bal with the assistance of Bryan Gonzales (1999)
 • G. S. Rousseau’s ‘Riddles of Interdisciplinarity’ (1999)
• Mary Field Belenky et al., Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of
Self, Voice, and Mind (1986)
• Marie Campbell, “Dorothy Smith and Knowing the World We Live
in,”Journal of Soicology and Social Welfare (March 2003).
• Michel Foucault, Power Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972-77 (1986)
• Mary C. Grey, Redeeming the Dream: Feminism, Redemption and Christian
Tradition (1989)
• Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (2000)
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000)
• Frantz Fanon (Works Not Specified)
• Khatibi (Works Not Specified)
• Homi Bhabha, ‘DisseminNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the
Modern Nation’ (1990)
• The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Ana del Sarto, Alicia Rios
and Abril Trigo (2004)
• Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)
• Paul Rabinow French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment
(1989) and French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (1999)
• Bruno Latour We Have Never Been Modern (1993)
• Hélène Cixous, ‘My Algeriance’ in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (1998)
• Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art,Architecture and Film
(2002)
• Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (2004)
• F. Solanas and O. Gettino, “Towards a Third Cinema” (1976)
• S. Jalal al-‘Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse” (1984).

ABSTRACTS

Alda Blanco (Spanish and Portuguese, Wisconsin)

Under Erasure: Writing Cultural History and Reading Cultural Artefacts

This piece explores the problematics of reading cultural artefacts that no longer
exist because the historical process in which they were inscribed has been erased
from historical discourse and historiography. Thus, these cultural artefacts are
only accessible through the complex mediations of other texts. While reading
texts about objects can reveal the cultural and historical discourses that intersect
in the artefact, the text itself is elusive. The question, then, becomes how do we
re-construct the text, and is this critical gesture even a possibility?

June Boyce-Tillman (Applied Music, King Alfred’s)

Unconventional Wisdom

Building on the work of Foucault and feminist researchers such as Mary Field
Belenky, Mary Grey and Dorothy Smith, a model is developed of ways of
knowing that have become subjugated in Western culture. Examples will be
drawn from various musical traditions and the presentation will show the way in
which power systems have been inextricably linked with criteria for excellence in
various contexts.

Readings:

Belenky, Mary Field, McVicker Clinchy, Blythe, Rule Goldberger, Nancy,

Mattuck Tarule, Jill (1986), Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self,
Voice, and Mind, New York, Basic Books.

Campbell, Marie (2003), “Dorothy Smith and Knowing the World We Live
in,”Journal of Soicology and Social Welfare , March.
www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_mOCYZ/is-1_30/ai_99018712

Foucault Michel/ Gordon, Colin ed. (1980) Power Knowledge: Selected

Interviews and Other Writings 1972-77, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Grey Mary C. (1989) Redeeming the Dream: Feminism, Redemption and Christian
Tradition, London: SPCK.

Haim Bresheeth (Media and Cultural Studies, UEL)

Negotiating the Modern: Palestinian Cinema, Silence and Storytelling

Some critiques of Said’s Orientalism have argued that his assumptions about the
nature of the Orient are in themselves orientalist, as they seem to accept a passive
positioning of the Arab subject. The interest in strategies of negotiating both
modernity and the Western narratives connected to it from within the orient is of
special interest here – if silence is assumed or enforced, what are the options for
the orientalised Arab voice? While in the rest of the Third World, and especially
in Latin America, the concept of a modernist, militant and political cinema (Third
Cinema) had some serious consequences, this has never taken root in the Arab
East. In determining the options for (post) modernist resistance to orientalising
discourses and practices, an examination of recent Palestinian cinema aims to
point out some new strategies of those who were silenced by both the West, and
the powerful narratives of Zionism and the Holocaust.

Reading:

Solanas, F. and Gettino, O. “Towards a Third Cinema”, in Bill Nichols (ed)

Movies and Methods, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976.

Jalal al-‘Azm, S. “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse”, in Forbidden Agendas:

Intolerance and Defiance in the Middle East, selected and introduced by Jon
Rothscild, Al Saqi Books, London 1984.

Said, E. Culture and Imperialism, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1993.

Helena Buescu (Letters, University of Lisbon)

Modernity, Borders, Crystallization

Why is the notion of border interesting in the context of the present workshop?
Why do I find it to be a central issue in respect to modernity? One of the reasons
may be that the unresolved dialectics between “tradition” and “novelty”, or
between “old” and “new”, which may already be seen in Baudelaire, and which
A. Compagnon has termed “the superstition of the new”, seems to be
significantly re-staged under several forms. I will deal with one of them: the way
this modernity thinks of itself through the clash with many other things from
which it wants itself distinct. Because this is still a form of dialogue. The
“disciplines of modernity” are therefore central to thi s issue, and the book by
Michel Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme, is an excellent example of the set of problems I
would like to address.

Martin Crowley (French, Cambridge)

Modernity’s Concepts: Exhausted and Persistent

With specific reference to the notion of the human and the work of Jean-Luc
Nancy, I will seek to pose some questions about an apparent impasse in our
contemporary relation to some of modernity’s key concepts. I will be suggesting
that the necessary critique of some of these concepts—of which the human is a
prime example—has not always been accompanied by a corresponding
elaboration of terms or values which might meet the ethical or political demands
to which such concepts, at their best, responded. It is the resulting situation -- in
which these concepts remain, both exhausted and necessary -- that I will be
seeking to sketch.

Reading:
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural.

Patrick ffrench (French, Kings)

‘Nous autres’: Hypotheses on Multitude

The hypotheses I will propose engage with the question of how helpful the idea
of the modern is in addressing issues in the contemporary world. Broadly the
thesis will be that modernism (in the broadest sense) is haunted by the figure of
global multitude, but that this figuration is subject to limitations, principally in
terms of geography and culture, to Europe, and secondly, by the concept of the
Subject. Through reference to Louis -Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit
(Journey to the end of Night, 1932) and to the contemporary essay Empire by
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri¸ I will seek to identify the potential and the
limitations of the idea of the modern for a contemporary conceptualisation of the
notion of global multitude.

Texts of reference:

Louis Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit ({aris: Gallimard Folio, 1932)
translated as Journey to the End of Night (new Directions, 1983)

Micheal Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP,
2000)

Azzedine Haddour (French, UCL)

Tradition, Translation, Decolonisation

In this paper, I will initially probe Fanon’s views on reclaiming history as a

central agency in the business of nation building and as a necessary step towards
decolonisation. I will then examine: i) Khatibi’s critique of the Fanonian project;
ii) his theorisation of the ambivalent nature of the colonial relation and of
language; the significance of translation in Khatibi’s view of decolonisation.

Stephen M. Hart (Spanish, UCL)

The Rewind of Slow Motion: Modernity in Peru

This discussion-paper seeks to investigate, from the perspective of cultural

theory, the ways in which ‘perceived traditions in societies and cultures have or
have not made them receptive to ideas of modernism’, offering Peru as one test-
case of this phenomenon. Homi Bhabha, in ‘DisseminNati on: Time, Narrative,
and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, Nation and Narration (London:
Routledge, 1990), pp. 291-322, proposed that the political unity of the nation
consists in ‘a continual displacement of its irredeemably plural modern space,
bounded by different, even hostile nations, into a signifying space that is archaic
and mythical, paradoxically representing the nation’s modern territoriality, in
the patriotic, atavistic temporality of Traditionalism’ (p. 300). This paper seeks to
draw out the implications of Bhabha’s observation for the portrayal of Peru’s
nationhood as a sequence of shock-cuts including: the syntax of forgetting (Incan
historiography via Irene Silverblatt); lettered ventroloquism (the duplistic
narrative position in El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries [1609] via
Darcy Ribeiro and Walter Mignolo); schizoid liberationism (Lima as the only
viceregal city in Latin America to have been ‘officially’ liberated from the
Spanish on two separate occasions; via Ángel Rama); the metonymic minus
underlying Republicanism (the Incan Emperor Huayna-Capac in José Joaquín de
Olmedo’s The Victory of Juíin [1825]; via Beatriz González Stefan); mestizaje’s
linguistic double-bind (the paradox of writing Quechua in Spanish in José María
Arguedas’s Deep Rivers [1958]; via Antonio Cornejo Polar); and the postmodern
instability of the people (shanty towns in Lima as dystopic geographies of
modern-day Peru; via José Joaquín Brunner, Néstor García Canclini and Jesús
Martín-Barbero). References are to The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, ed.
Ana del Sarto, Alicia Rios and Abril Trigo (Durham: Duke UP, 2004).

Christopher Johnson (French, Nottingham)

Tristes tropiques: The Extinction of Cultures and the Residue of Language

This contribution looks at one of the ‘ethnographic’ chapters of Tristes tropiques,

describing the younger Lévi-Strauss’s brief stay with the Mundé Indians (east of
the Matto Grosso, Brazil) in 1938. As in the book’s other ethnographic chapters,
thematically the description is characterized by a quest for a society untouched
by modernity, in other words a kind of degree zero of cultural contact — the
Mundé appear to be an exemplary case of this — and a recognition of the
essential transience of these societies: like many of the other groups evoked in
Tristes tropiques, as a culture the Mundé are on the verge of extinction.
Unfortunately, the encounter is a failed encounter: the ethnographer does not
know the Mundé language and has no interpreter. My reading of this passage
looks at the movement of recuperation that simultaneously accompanies this
failure. On the one hand, the Mundé are impenetrable to an outsider who does
not know their language, and this lost chance is something of a last chance —
this is an experiment which, in a number of ways, cannot be repeated. On the
other hand, the ethnographer is nevertheless able, it is claimed, to say something
meaningful about Mundé material culture and social organization. My
discussion focuses on the implicitly ‘structuralist’ dimension of this recuperation,
and asks more generally what such a recuperation says about structuralism’s
relationship with language (la langue) and languages (les langues).
Passages for discussion:

Tristes tropiques, chapter 31 (‘Robinson’), pp. 393-7; Weightman translation: pp.

330-5. Also chapter 34 (‘La Farce du Japim’), pp. 429-31 (‘Ainsi s’écoulaient les
jours’, etc.); Weightman: pp. 358-60 (‘Thus, as the days went by’, etc.). Finally,
chapter 20, first paragraph, p. 205; Weightman: p. 178.

Nicola Miller (History, UCL)

Epistemology as Resistance: Rethinking Culture and Imperialism
in Latin America

Drawing on Edward Said’s arguments about the importance of culture in the

resistance to imperialism, this paper will illustrate how twentieth-century Latin
American writers sought to elaborate an alternative epistemology that
challenged assumptions about knowledge that were fundamentally imperialist.
Said questioned many of the conventional assumptions of Western intellectual
discourse, but one aspect that he did not explore was the idea of criticism. The
view that criticism necessarily implies distance, suppression of passion and
rigorous logic—as in Western practice—is implicitly taken for granted
throughout Culture and Imperialism. Said touched on this issue when he
commented on the tone of anti -imperialist works, contrasting their political
urgency with the Western scholarly pursuit of objectivity, but I would like to
take this further by focusing on methodology. Many twentieth-century Latin
American intellectuals argued that effective criticism depended not upon
distance but upon closeness, not upon detachment but on engagement, not upon
logic but upon thinking by analogy. These were intellectuals who sought to
escape from what Said referred to as ‘the prison of nativism’, in the hope of
seeing their countries develop a non-chauvinistic sense of national identity
compatible with ‘community among cultures’, thereby opening up the possibility
for realising ‘the real human liberation portended by the resistance to
imperialism’. I hope to suggest how Said’s arguments, which mostly operated at
the level of representation, can fruitfully be extended into a new area, namely,
post-colonial redefinitions of imperial categories of knowledge and strategies of
scholarship. These intellectuals were trying to unsettle not only the images we
see but also the very processes by which we envisage them. They challenged not
only the idea of an objective truth (as Said discussed) but also the methodology
of critical distance. They were not only rewriting myths and histories, but they
were challenging the very distinction between the two. As Said argues,
resistance was not just a reaction to imperialism but an alternative way of
understanding human history; I would add that full liberation, as these Latin
American writers conceived it, entailed also a different epistemological approach
to the world.
Guido Podesta (Spanish and Portuguese, Wisconsin)
The Predicaments of Inconsequential Theories: Landscapes of Tradition
and Enclaves of Modernity

I will discuss the problems derived from the translation of theories,

like theories of modernity. It is not only a linguistic challenge but
a cultural challenge as well, particularly with colonialism is in some
shape and form historically present.

Nanneke Redclift (Anthropology, UCL)

Fugitive Modern? Dilemmas of Social Analysis from the Invention of Tradition to
‘Onco-mouse’

Problems of time, space, knowledge and representation have been central for
social theorists who have attempted to grapple with definitions and descriptions
of modernity. Are there any wider conclusions to be drawn from these debates
and have they been enhanced or hindered by disciplinary specialisation? My
remarks will draw on a bricolage of contemporary examples and will attempt to
identify a few of the diverse approaches in this discussion and the questions they
raise about identity, ‘sociality’ and the imagination.

Relevant books include: Arjun Appadurai Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions

of Globalisation (1996, U. Minnesota Press), Paul Rabinow French Modern: Norms
and Forms of the Social Environment (1989 Chicago: U. Chicago Press), Paul
Rabinow French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (1999 Chicago: U. Chicago Press), B.
Latour We Have Never Been Modern (1993 London, Harvester.

George Rousseau (Modern History, Oxford)

Modernity and Interdisciplinarity: Methodology and the
Ongoing Debates about Our Practices

I shall discuss three items on the Core Reading List: the chapters by Germano
and Culler in The Practice of Cultural Analysis subtitled Exposing Interdisciplinary
Interpretation, andand G. S. Rousseau's 'Riddles of Interdisciplinarity' ['A Reply
to Stanley Fish,’ in Heinz Antor et al. (eds.) Intercultural Encounters - Studies in
English Literatu re (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999), pp.111-130] which responded to
Stanley Fish’s attack on interdisciplinary interpretation and then became the
basis for a debate about interdisciplinary methodologies in the late 1990s. I shall
consider these three positions in the light of their similarities, differences and
conclusions. It would enhance our discussion if the participants can have read
these core texts before we meet. I shall also consult the implicit interdisciplinarity
of Modernism itself by asking to what degree, and in precisely what ways, late
nineteenth-century arts calling themselves ‘innovative’, ‘revolutionary’ or
‘modernist’ - especially literature that drew on painting, music that drew on
poetry, and vice-versa - were (in our contemporary constructions) reciprocally
‘interdisciplinary’ or implicitly ‘interdisciplinary’. The economic and institutional
arrangements of interdisciplinarity then and now will be addressed but to a
lesser degree than the methodological issues involved when more than one
discipline - literature, the visual arts, music - is being interpreted.

Marci Shore (History, Indiana)

When God Died: Zizek on Modernity and Revolution in Eastern Europe

Modernity arrived somewhat later for Europe’s eastern half. A belated

experiment with liberalism in Austria-Hungary had ended in failure by the fin-
de-siècle; and East European artists and intellectuals experienced this failure and
the radically new political world that came into being on the ashes of the former
empires (Ottoman, Habsburg, Prussian and Russian) with particular poignancy.
The East European avant-garde’s responses to a perceived crisis of civilization
ranged from nihilism and catastrophism to utopianism and Revolution. The
Slovenian writer Slavoj Zizek has been among the most perspicacious (and
idiosyncratic) theorists of ideology. I will discuss how his work opens
possibilities for exploring the tension between subjectivity and telos in East
European modernity, and in particular the avant-gardists’ leap from radical
nihilism and radical contingency to radical utopianism and radical determinism.
More specifically, how useful is Zizek’s blend of Marxism and psychoanalysis
and his understanding of Lenin and Leninism as essentially a matter of audacity?
How useful are his ideas about the essential differences between right- and left-
totalitarianism, and between public and private spheres? His understanding of
love, jouissance, and totality?

Judith Still (French and Critical Theory, Nottingham)

Hospitality, Gender and ‘My Algeriance’

My intervention will focus on the article, ‘My Algeriance’ in Hélène Cixous,

Stigmata: escaping texts, first published in Les Inrockuptibles as part of a series by
members of the Parlement international des écrivains. It will use this essay to
draw out a number of general points about modernity and post-modernity.
Cixous evokes the fragmentation of identity; she makes us think about categories
such as nationality, race, culture, sex, class, and their relationship both to our
own sense of identity and the way in which others identify and categorise us in
particular contexts. Typically for Cixous the piece is both a highly wrought
aesthetic creation, and a text that is explicitly crossed by the economic, the
political and the social in various guises. She places great weight both on the
power of language (and the name in particular) to create and to damage and
destroy, and also on the power of the sensual. Mind and body interpenetrate as
we read our sense experiences (e.g. the taste of food in our mouths) and feel
words (e.g. tongues on our tongue). (Lack of) belonging and belongings,
property and properties, education, death haunt the text. If time permits I shall
refer out to other texts by Cixous and to Jacques Derrida including
Monolingualism of the Other. I am particularly interested in the ways in which
Derrida and Cixous use the classical, indeed ancient, structure of hospitality to
theorise or narrate stories about modern movements of population and inter-
subjective relations in a modern colonial and postcolonial world. The question of
gender, often overlooked in contemporary analyses of hospitality, is critical to
this.

Reading: ‘My Algeriance’ in Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts, pp. 153-
172.

Emma Wilson (French, Cambridge)

Stigmata/Lilya 4-ever

Hélène Cixous’s Stigmata: Escaping Texts is described as “a collection of texts that

get away.” Within the essay “My Algeriance, in other words to depart not to
arrive from Algeria,” following her work in Photos de racines and elsewhere,
conjuring an image of herself as restless child, Cixous sets running a series of
threads linking departure, displacement, movement between countries and
cultures (conjuring, in her words, “passporosity”, “passance”). I will explore
possible correlations, or collisions, between Cixous’s poetico-philosophical
writing and the documentary/realist and dream images of Lucas Moodysson’s
Lilya 4-ever (2002). These correlations allow a creative mapping of perceptions of
Algeria and France, of post-communist Russia and contemporary Sweden. Lilya
4-ever is a film about trafficking and the entrapment of a Russian child with an
international sex trade. As such it uses movement and removal as one its
primary motifs. Looking at Stigmata and Lilja 4-ever in tandem, allows me to
open questions specifically about the representation of child identity, as jolted
and unsettled by literal and metaphoric experiences of exile, migration,
uprooting and homelessness. Here, Cixous’s poetic and corporeal play with
language will be brought into contact with Moodysson’s appeal to the senses, the
haptic and kinaesthesis. Through such sensory and expressive means, through
the play of language and sensation, these very different cultural artefacts reflect
on migration as embodied experience, on its affect and, by extension, on its
politics.

Suggested reading:
Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998).

Additional texts:

Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art,

Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002).

Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge,

Mass: MIT, 2004).

Slavoj Zizek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-
theory (London: BFI Publishing, 2001).