EMILY BAUMAN

Re-dressing colonial discourse:Postcolonial theory and the

humanist project

The didactic quality of the Orientalist representation cannot be detached fromthe rest of the performance. In a learned work like [Barthelemy d'Herbelot's]BibliotheÁque orientale, which was the result of systematic study and research,the author imposes a disciplinary order upon the material he has worked on;in addition, he wants it made clear to the reader that what the printed pagedelivers is an ordered, disciplined judgment of the material. What is thusconveyed by the BibliotheÁque is an idea of Orientalism's power and effective-ness, which everywhere remind the reader that henceforth in order to getat the Orient he must pass through the learned grids and codes provided bythe Orientalist. Not only is the Orient accommodated to the moral exigenciesof Western Christianity; it is also circumscribed by a series of attitudes andjudgments that send the Western mind, not first to Oriental sources for cor-rection and verification, but rather to other Orientalist works. The Orientaliststage, as I have been calling it, becomes a system of moral and epistemologicalrigor. As a discipline representing institutionalized Western knowledge of theOrient, Orientalism thus comes to exert a three-way force on the Orient, on theOrientalist, and on the Western `consumer' of Orientalism.1

In one of the most formative books of the late twentieth century, EdwardSaid successfully inverted the gaze of a critical disciplinary apparatus,revealing its methodology to be a form of cosmology, a moral-epistemo-logical belief system worthy itself of being an object of critical study.His work suggested, not simply that there is a politics to knowledge-production, but that ways of knowing are themselves mechanisms ofpower, and implicitly that the work of exposing their function as suchconstitutes an act of opposition to that power. In so doing Said inaugurateda completely new field of study, based on the critique of colonialist dis-courses and, as a positive expansion of this critique, efforts to propose andcelebrate forms of (post)colonised subjectivity which stood on their ownand gazed back. Postcolonial studies, a new disciplinary gaze and critical-methodological apparatus of seeing, was thus defined by a contradiction.This was the contradiction between, on the one hand, an epistemological

relativism which ± often with great precision ± glared its light on the handsdrawing these `grids and codes', and, on the other, a moral foundational-ism, often unspoken and kept dark, which justified this new criticism aspolitically necessary and progressive work.

I am interested in this contradiction for two reasons. The first is that it haslargely been dealt with as a debate between two opposed philosophicalcamps ± say, between relativists and foundationalists ± which has createdan edgy tennis match between the two sides; this framing of the problem isnot necessarily wrong, but it can deflect the issues by personalising them,2

and it fails to account for ways in which both sides function as part ofthe same theoretical and political system, however unacknowledged. Thisleaves the system itself relatively unexamined, both in terms of the reasonsgiven for justifying its existence and expansion, and in their consequencesfor critical and scholarly study. What few critics seem to have lookedat is the intellectual ways in which postcolonial studies is risen from theashes of Orientalism. Individual scholars have been accused of imperialist,Orientalist agendas, of looking primarily to texts within the metropolitanWest as sources of authority or treating Third World literature as rawmaterial for First World processing, but the intellectual project of post-colonial studies is usually taken at its word. Though it arose as an overdueantithesis to Orientalism, as its `replacement' of sorts it remains imbricatedin a project that marries scholarship to an investment in cultural productionas a means of human improvement. To what degree, then, has postcolonialstudies been able to free itself from the humanist traditions which groundOrientalist discourse? How well do its own post-humanist progenitors,various forms of Marxism and poststructuralism, resolve the problem ofclaiming epistemological privilege and political significance while debunk-ing humanist systems of ethics? Is this possible, and is this even productive?

The grids and codes of humanism reach far back, in not necessarilystraight lines. The dominant ethos of humanist philosophy, however, seemsto be the belief in a cultivatable human subjectivity and the ability of anautonomous human consciousness to do the cultivating. Roughly parallel-ing the course of Orientalist scholarship that Said critiques, humanism'smost recent major expansion began in the sixteenth century and culminatedin the nineteenth with the institutionalisation of higher education. Duringmuch of the twentieth century, the justification for a liberal arts educationand for the maintenance and support of university humanities scholarshipin general, has tended to appeal to philosophies such as that of MatthewArnold, one of humanism's acknowledged representatives, and himselfan educational inspector. Arnold argued passionately for the developmentof `human perfection', i.e. the `harmonious expansion of all the powers'

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which oppose the animal and the machine, powers which constituteculture, which exist `in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, notin an outward set of circumstances'.3 In his almost psychologistic formu-lation of culture as individual self-development and perfection, Arnoldhighlights the ability of the self to conquer its environment, its outside.Redemption, culture, the fully human, exist as an `inward condition' inwhich self masters other. Here, the connection between and interdepen-dence of colonialism and humanism is evident, demonstrating the parallel,extending back to classical Greek humanism, between `cultivated' govern-ance of the self and `advanced' governance of society.4 As the perceivedmeans of effecting cultural development and transmission, the establish-ment of the humanistic disciplines in the university enabled personalmorality and imperial epistemology to join hands, notably in the latenineteenth century founding of English Literature, which was in part topropagate English culture in colonial contexts. This moral-epistemologicalsystem gained its `rigor' from a methodology and scholarship whichclaimed this national-cultural project of humanist education, devoted to`improving' the inner lives of its citizens and subjects, as the social bodyserving the idea of the individual, rather than the other way around.

The creation of a `moral and epistemological rigor' and the definition ofculture and its uses that it has produced has experienced a re-formation atthis ongoing moment of crisis in support for university humanities researchand teaching. In the United States particularly, the idea of a liberal artseducation is increasingly under attack, both polemically and financially,and in some ways postcolonial theory can be read as a response to thisshift in the goals and services of the university. Bruce Robbins makes thispoint vis-aÁ-vis the multiculturalist critical focus on agency as a means of`professional self-legitimation' in the face of dwindling public supportfor humanities study. What critics valorise in texts, they crave in theirprofessional life. `After all, why do we all value `̀ agency'' so highly?'5

Critical study thus becomes a terrain for academics' projection of insti-tutional anxieties. Arif Dirlik makes this point more specifically aboutpostcolonial studies, which he sees as `a discourse that seeks to constitutethe world in the self-image of intellectuals who view themselves (or havecome to view themselves) as postcolonial intellectuals . . . Postcolonialdiscourse is an expression not so much of agony over identity, as it oftenappears, but of newfound power'.6 This idea ± put forward earlier but lessdeveloped ± is also argued by R. Radhakrishnan in his critique of post-colonial identity theory as a metropolitan, institutional manifestation ofWestern secularism and epistemology: `Culture is set up as a non-organic,freefloating ambience that frees intellectuals and theorists from their

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solidarities to their regional modes of being. It is within this transcendentspace that postcoloniality is actively cultivated as the cutting edge ofcultural theory.'7 All these critics, to varying degrees, cast agency andidentity as effects of professional positioning ± the `real' issue at stake.I agree that institutional interpellation has a great deal to do with theconstruction of the field ± as Dirlik points out, the focus on exile, diaspora,and hybridity, for instance, is clearly appealing to the metropolitandisplacement of postcolonial intellectuals ± but this tells us nothing aboutthe intellectual philosophies themselves, nor their application to anti-colonial texts. If the institutional argument is a structural explanation forthese intellectual fascinations, it is also worthwhile I think to spend timedoing a more local examination of the theories themselves, since it is theideas as well as the people which are institutionalised in positions of power,which are taught and read, and which appeal to histories and anxieties thatextend beyond the ivory tower.

As an initial start to the project, Steven Slemon explains such academichot points as agency and identity in terms of intellectual anxieties andoppositional tensions, in his article `The Scramble for Postcolonialism'. Herehe argues that the coupling of political positioning with methodologicalchoice in effect shifts the discipline's focus from anti-colonial study tocritical-methodological correctness. The resulting `balkanization' of post-colonial study, he suggests, arises because debates about history and agency± about the assessment of historical knowledge and the assertion ofcolonised opposition and resistance ± remain unresolved within the domainof postcolonial studies. Slemon explains that this is in part because theoristscontinue to look purely within the discipline and the humanities themselvesto resolve them.

At heart what seems to structure these oppositions is a pattern in whichproponents of post-colonial archaeological work are trained to criticizeanti-colonialist articulations of counter-discourse theory for a residual neo-colonialism, and in return find themselves criticized by anti-humanist post-colonialists who have trained themselves to link that form of research to aneo-colonialist function through an allegorization of methodology.8

Slemon points out two things here: (1) the debate between empiricism andrelativism, between the claiming of nativist subjectivities as oppositionversus the deconstructing of the subject as an act of resistance, articulatesitself as a question of complicity with colonialist agendas and discourses,and (2) there is a need, on the side of the relativists, to reject humanism asbeing tantamount to colonialism. In other words, what is ultimately at stakefor both parties is articulating philosophically and politically an effective

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anti-colonial position; they disagree mainly on the means. The nativistposition, somewhat ghettoised in the field at large, immediately displaysthe contradiction of assuming the same national and racial essentialisms ascolonialist thinking; it merely inverts the value of each binary term. Therelativist position, on the other hand, is more representative of the fieldof postcolonial studies (and its contradictions) as an outgrowth of post-structuralism. Without the poststructuralist critique of humanist epistem-ologies, colonial discourse critique would merely have mainly an empirical,not a philosophical, project. What I find interesting, however, is that ±while rejecting the subject, a knowable history outside of the texts whichdefine it, a knowable morality outside of the interests of political economy,and the developmental humanist project in general ± the poststructuralistpostcolonial theorists continue to assert the value of anti-colonial position-taking. Value, theoretically unassignable, becomes taken for granted withinthe structure of colonialism: oppressing others is bad, fighting oppression isgood. The question which never gets asked ± still less answered ± is in thename of what is anti-colonialism embraced, and colonialism rejected? Whatgrounds colonial critique ± indeed, the whole project of cultural critique ingeneral ± and what definition of the moral and epistemological goodimplicitly directs the criticising of that which it is not?

What I am asking is very simple. I am asking for an analysis ofpostcolonial discourse which recognises it as a theoretical system harbour-ing an unexplicit order which authorises it to make certain kinds ofjudgments. This is an order which uses the very tools of humanism andrepresentationalism in order to deconstruct them, relying on the belief infree individual reason and in the inherent value of human self-determina-tion in order to launch its critique of colonialism. Its reliance on a selectivelinguistic transparency and free rational thought is especially apparent inwhat may be the most epistemologically (and morally) privileged form ofcritical methodology in cultural and postcolonial studies ± cultural critique.Cultural critique is many things, but essentially acts as a means of unveilingideology, of exposing the machinations and interests at work in a particularcosmology or set of beliefs ± of pointing to the weighted sleeves behind thesleight of hand. It is taking `culture', not at its word as a supreme orgrounding value, as Arnold does, but as a means of understanding what ismaterially at stake for a given social grouping at a particular historicalmoment. This, at least, is a reductive summary of the form of culturalcritique initiated by Raymond Williams and the Birmingham School as awhole. The subsequent wedding of cultural critique with critical theoryemphasised a more methodologically `rigorous' (certainly more elaborate)deconstruction of cultural values and formations, interpreting textual

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utterances as attempts to contain in representation what could not becontained in representation ± what, as the implied other, `differend', orresistant element to a desired meaning, always exceeded and undid it. Thiswas a methodology, perfected by Paul de Man, of demonstrating throughcareful analysis that a text could be interpreted to yield the meaning oppositeto that which it claimed. Homi Bhabha took up this poststructuralist projectin postcolonial studies by demonstrating that its methodology of elegantinversion and breaking-up could be applied to colonialist ideologies. Read-ing ideology not so much as a veil as a denied rupture, a rending of the veilthat existed as long as the veil itself did, Bhabha argued that hegemonicdiscourse carried within itself its own resistance, an ambivalence, a fissure,a phantom of the Other which, once recognised and articulated by thatOther, generated an endless performative play between the two poles ofbelief, a `discursive liminality' which allowed for strategic (discursive)subversion and counterhegemonic manipulation.9

Cultural critique ultimately became a linguistic game of critical revel-ation, of teasing out through ingenious close reading ± both logical andplayful ± the unsaid repressed by the said. It became a psychoanalysis oflanguage and meaning-production which, by reading counterhegemony asbeing carried within hegemonic narrative, privileged analysis as a formadequate to the revelation of an anti-colonial truth. Because nothing was`outside' the text, those who knew how to `read' it could then claim to knowmore than the coloniser, and to position themselves in antithesis to him.Postcolonial theory, finally, came to see anti-colonialism primarily as a formof critical practice, one dependent on critical distance, on the exercise ofindependent logic and reasoning and the individual imagination, and onein which access to both the perfidy of the coloniser and the resistant truth ofthe colonised must pass through the `learned grids and codes' of thepostcolonialist. The subaltern cannot speak ± at least not outside of Westerndiscourse ± because as subaltern she is necessarily imbricated in colonialistknowledges, language not being separable from epistemology.10 Colonialdiscourse critique thus takes on a particularly necessary role, as it issupposedly free of essentialist leanings and obfuscations, and of theideological illusions which blind the speaker to his own unravellings;critique is the process of unravelling. It is beyond culture, beyond ideology,beyond humanism.

In the name of what, then, does this project arise and take shape? It is notin the name of signification alone ± even Bhabha makes clear that signifyingpractices open up for political resistance ± nor is it merely in the name ofpostcolonial political and economic freedom and independence, thoughthat is also implied. Rather, it seems that what is at stake in this project of

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cultural postcolonial studies is a conflation of the two, an understanding ofcritical reading practices as inherently liberatory. Such practices `liberate'meaning from within a text, and as the subaltern is understood as being inessence a meaning in the text, she too is liberated. The critique of the subjecttextualised it ± in order to banish it, perhaps, to demonstrate its existence associally encoded, not given; but ultimately this critique was turned on itshead. The subject's reappearance as textuality no longer relegated it tobeing a mere `effect' of a social construction, but instead elevated it as afundamental part of what was now conceived to encompass the means toknowledge, and even knowledge itself. If subjectivity became textuality,textuality also reappeared as subjectivity. What these efforts at both colonialdiscourse critique and its later counterpart, anti-colonial `resistance'discourse, affirmed was an investment in a particular idea of the human.This was an idea grounded in the primacy of language, not just as thenecessary medium of thought, but as constitutive of human identity. Andultimately, like multiculturalism, colonialism has been interpreted as a warover identity.

Theoretically an anti-humanism, this postcolonial figuration of on theone hand the critical reading subject as mastering the colonial text, and,on the other, of textuality itself as a space of subjective doubling, playand expansion, cast humanism as the unacknowledged stunt man. Thedifficulty and the challenge which humanism was employed to meetconsisted of mediating the contradictory needs of (1) critiquing the claimto epistemological and moral authority made by colonial discourse,which in part rested on the assertion of a particularist universalism,11 and(2) persuasively asserting both the universal value of colonial oppositionand the universal reliability of its expression in cultural critique. Incognitohumanism has been able to account for the base importance of human lifeand identity and the consequent necessity of national and cultural freedomand independence as a precondition to a (theoretically) unrepressedexpansion and development of that human life and identity. And it hasbeen able to account for the authority of human logical, deconstructiveargument to interpret colonial texts on terms other than their own. Thesephilosophical and ideological assumptions set up, first, a moral imperative,and, second, an epistemological privilege. I am not taking issue here witheither of these claims, but merely with their being unacknowledged andeven disavowed in postcolonial theory. As a result, they remain profoundlyundertheorised, and stuck in a Eurocentric and archaic form mindless of theproductive changes made elsewhere in political and cultural theory. For itseems to me that the connection between politics and knowledge-production cannot be made without an appeal to some form of humanism

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± that is, if we oppose oppression and believe that knowledge has somefunction in opposing it. Neither can an institutionalised field of studywholly escape a certain `disciplinary order', as Said put it, a didacticism aswell as a performance. What has been glossed over, avoided, even shirked,within much of postcolonial studies, is any sustained attempt to theorisethe relation between a conception of subjective knowledge and value (onethat does not hide within the lush foliage of signification), and a conceptionof the purposes, limits and rationale for the discipline and its scholarship.This problem has been extended in the most current field of study whichpostcolonialism has transformed into ± globalism. Global studies, in manyways, has only exacerbated the indulgences and inconsistencies of post-colonial theory ± and it is with a brief examination of the most symptomaticof these that I would like to close.

Taking up the baton of postcolonial studies, which created a class oftheorists who dealt with world literature in the context of internationaloppression, global studies is a more updated and expansive version ± theWindows 98 of an earlier iconographic software revolution ± which hasredefined both the world and its mechanisms of oppression. Rejecting thecentre-periphery model of global power, globalism is committed to a post-national understanding of (neo)colonialism as the result of decentredmultinational and transnational corporations. Decentred and displaced,rootless and restless, capital, labour and culture readily cross nationalboundaries, evermore fluid and mobile. Responding to economic, politicaland technological changes, theorists have become increasingly preoccupiedwith movement, image and space. Though hybridisation and rhizomesremain favoured metaphors, in general the scientific rhetoric has shiftedfrom biology to physics, creating an intense spatialisation of culture andidentity.12 This has allowed global theory to describe cultural fragmentationand dispersal as a general, universalised process, almost random and un-predictable on the slick surface of a borderless world. Against the totalis-ing movement of global capital which is engulfing, technologising andhomogenising the world, global theory posits a human antithesis: cosmo-politanism and the diasporic subject.

Diasporic culture and subjectivity are represented in global theory asforms of globalisation also, but unlike global capital, `transnational identity'is viewed as multiple and diversifying. It exemplifies what James Cliffordcalls `nontotalizing globalization from below', a local, resistant use of`hegemonizing technologies and communications'. Together, globalisationfrom above and globalisation from below produce a `constitutive entangle-ment' of forces and processes.13 The word `entanglement' is significant forClifford ± he uses some form of it at least eleven times in his essay ± and

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suggests a jumbled, unanalysable network of power relations, of alternatingand enmeshed deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. This is anappropriate image for the kind of cultural mixing produced by diasporiccosmopolitanisms, yet it is also a way out of confronting the systemic waysin which globalisation from above uses globalisation from below in order toadvance its movement. This at least is the argument of Masao Miyoshi, whoasks of these scattered and ungrounded representations, `Who is behind allthis drifting?'14 For Miyoshi, multicultural production lends itself to com-mercialism and tourism and to the increasing stratification of global classes.Claudio Lomnitz explains this from a culturalist perspective:

What appears in the First World as an explosion of cultural diversity is, from aglobal perspective, an integration of premodern and modern cultures to aglobalized market system wherein the dominant patterns of taste areincreasingly concentrated in a few polities . . . With multiculturalism, FirstWorld markets, styles, and tastes encompass those of the Third World in amuch more totalizing way than was previously the case. So much so, that thesuperiority of the First World and its paradigms no longer need to be argued:they are simply displayed through the logic of consumption and fashion.15

Inhuman corporatism and the technological-capitalist complex usurp eventhe most homespun of efforts to assert multiplicity and difference as anti-colonial, counter-cultural movements. Globalist multiculturalism is in someways merely a failed form of humanism.

Despite the critiques, however, the endless line of conferences dedicatedto the topic of `border crossings' and the proliferation of articles on exilesand migrant cultures demonstrate that diaspora has a significant hold oncontemporary critical poetics. Caren Kaplan puts forward an interestingspeculation of why this is the case. Basing her analysis on Edward Said'swriting on exile, Kaplan argues that the fact of being situated in theborderlands, `on the boundary that marks the division between home andaway', is seen to produce a more capable critical distance as well as aheightened creativity. Exile is at once a `reading strategy' and a `redemptiveauthorial practice'.16 As with postcolonialism, globalist discourses centrecritical reading and writing practices as the basis for political insight andredemption. With globalism, however, the practice has changed from(mono)cultural critique to (multi)cultural celebration. Language, whichencodes the idea of the human and of culture, is seen itself as an exilic anddiasporic creation, at its fullest and most expressive when hybridised anddecentred, producing a proliferation of meanings. Language and sub-jectivity remain inextricable and mutually defining, if their characterisationhas shifted from the rational to the irrational, and the mechanism of culturefrom critique to creativity. Alongside these changes, the value of human

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freedom has been rearticulated as the liberation of expressivist potentialrather than the exercise of self-determination ± yet continues to appeal tothe discourse of `development'. No more explicit than the values embeddedin postcolonial discourse, those coding and gridding the `geoscape' ofglobalist discourse have if anything gotten feebler and less rigorous.

Rather than assuming that the justification for their arguments shouldbe self-evident in their choice of methodology, postcolonial theorists ± andmore than this, global theorists, who are their inheritors ± have a responsi-bility, I think, to address bluntly the values on which they base both theirimplied morality and ostensible epistemology. Such an attempt couldpermit a careful and considered reformulation of humanist thinking whichwould deal with and redress the criticisms justly levied at Eurocentric andcolonialist discourse and their conceptualisations of culture, withoutfeigning to transcend them. And it could prompt a deeper theorisation ofthe relationship between culture and politics which, having acknowledgedits subjective underpinnings, would no longer be colonised by suchentangling sublimations of subjectivity.

Notes

1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 67.2 See, for example, Aijaz Ahmad's critique of Orientalism as Said's `narrative of

personal desolation and perseverance', and an attempt to match and surpassErich Auerbach with almost Oedipal hubris ± In Theory: Classes, Nations,Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 1992), ch. 5.

3 Culture and Anarchy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 33.4 See Michel Foucault's The Use of Pleasure, where he describes classical Greek

humanism as an `ethics for free men' based on models of domestic and civiclife. `There, the ethics of pleasure is of the same order of reality as the politicalstructure . . . Individual virtue needed to be structured like a city', trans.Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985), 71±2.

5 `Comparative Cosmopolitanisms', Social Text, 10:2±3 (1992), 175.6 `The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Citizenship in an Age of Global

Capitalism', Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994), 339.7 `Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity', Callaloo, 16:4 (1993), 751.8 In Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (eds) De-Scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and

Textuality (New York: Routledge, 1994), 29.9 See especially `DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the

Modern Nation', Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 139±70.10 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, `Can the Subaltern Speak?', in Patrick Williams

and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66±111.

11 See Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy ofCulture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 3.

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12 For example, Arjun Appadurai's schematisation of `global cultural flows' into`ethnoscapes', `mediascapes', `technoscapes', `financescapes' and `ideoscapes',in which both imaginary and material global formations are landscapedonto global surfaces ± Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), ch. 2. See also LawrenceGrossberg's discussion of a `spatial economy of power', in `The Space ofCulture, the Power of Space', in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, The Post-Colonial Question (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 169±88.

13 `Diasporas', Cultural Anthropology, 9:3 (1994), 327.14 `A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline

of the Nation-State', Critical Inquiry, 19 (1993) 751.15 `Decadence in Times of Globalization', Cultural Anthropology, 9:2 (1994) 262±3.16 Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham and

London: Duke University Press, 1996), esp. 115±19.

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