The reversible world and boundaries of exclusion
The world is reversible. What is socially peripheral is symbolically central. Because the
world is in reverse there is no division between the centre and margin, but there are
instead reversible, shifting and changing positions. The world is often like pendulum
which is in the position of changing same. This kind of reversibility challenges the notion
of cultural centres and corresponds to margins with greater authority. This challenge is
made through articulation. Articulation enables a certain manner of representation of
what has been repressed, which leads to manifestation emerging from the position of the
marginalized. Looking at articulation and articulate as the instrument within which the
conflicting claims of the cultural and social are mediated, arbitrated, or resolved in a
discourse, we begin to comprehend both the appeal of articulated and the ground for
refusing it. If cultural events are represented in a non-articulate form, what kind of reality
is that offers itself, or is conceived to offer itself, to come into existence? What would a
non-articulate representation of cultural reality look like?
There are many things and events which are not articulated for example, in editing,
filmmaking, or building as there are in any aspect of reality. These are what is left out,
repressed and in constant motion of returning and re-articulating. In these areas no
closure happens, although they seem at the end, but in reality there is no conclusion
made, they are just terminated at a certain point or interrupted. Certain re-articulation is
possible even in areas where the closure has happened, where the conclusion is made,
because conclusions opening the perspective for the new discourse. In this sense, there is
no closure, but reversibility. This reversibility produces the cultural interdependence. The
cultural interdependence is a possibility for the manifestation of what is returning as
formerly repressed. The important thing here is not expression, but constituency.
Rediscovering the meaning beyond the purely ideological is possible through the
connotation, which according to Barthes is the purveying of imaginary and stereotypical
idealities. Because reversibility in its most obvious form discovers the relationship
between theory and practice we can also see the ground this relationship builds for
constituency.
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Cultural discourse circulates not truth, but representations. The confusion this question
has brought is very evident in the current state of affairs. Stuart Hall and the Cultural
studies, Edward Said’s work mapped a new space for the critique of this confusion.
James Clifford questioned traveling cultures similar to Said’s notion of traveling ideas.
Janet Abu-Lighud suggested remaking the history through the re-mapping. In this reading
the world is understood as the space of invasions made around the Mediterranean, the
Atlantic and the Pacific. Lawrence Grossberg is reading the global space through the
Deleuzian reading: globalization as coding, territorializing and stratifying machines
(spatial materialism). Paul Gilroy’s work on the Black Atlantic examines the modernity
and double consciousness, Robert J.C Young’s study on hybridity suggests interesting
reading of Deleuzo-Guattarian desiring machines and the link with Fanon, connecting
“the geographical to the physical through what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the analytic
imperialism of the Oedipus complex”. Ernesto Laclau stresses the notion of particularism
via universalism, criticizing the essential inequality of universalism because of its
Eurocentrism. In music there is an interesting figure of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan who’s use
of the cultural remix disturbed the dominance of the European hegemony in popular
music, as well as shifted the English language domination in music. The reggae music,
the new way of mediating through the culture, with its power of the ‘worldliness’ gave
the world a new meaning, by rediscovering it again.
Interdependence itself is inscribed on different levels: geopolitical interdependencespatio-temporality; because of the ‘annihilation of space through time’ there is a
fragmentation of time and space, which disturbs notions of historicism and geographism.
This disturbance itself is interconnected through the geographical discontinuity. Sociosymbolic interdependence through the representation of social and symbolic enables the
breakdown of all strong cultural identities and produces fragmentation of cultural codes,
multiplicity of styles. Dispersal of ideas through migrations continue ‘shriveling up of
arts’ achieving its end through arts own self-mutation, its own destructiveness, its integral
negativity, as Lefebvre puts it. This finally transforms into synchronicity, the fusion
between cultural traditions. Cultural flows and global consumerism between nations
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create the possibilities of ‘shared identities’ as costumers for the same goods, clients for
the same services, audiences for the same messages and images-between people who are
far removed from one another in the time and space. Cultural supermarket is based on
unequal and uneven distribution in ‘power geometry’ (Doreen Massey), and
interdependence through the unequal exchange. Inequality exists between the discourse
and the ‘real’ between the theory and the practice. This unequal exchange forms the cut,
from which new processes would emerge. This process gives the one the form of the
other, combining signs of the both through symbolic means.
The world is made up and constituted through theory. Theories play a role in
constructing the constitutional space of what has been expressed. Because reversibility in
its most obvious form is discovered in the relationship between theory and practice we
can also see the ground this relationship builds for constituency. Artistic modes of
production arrange space by using theory as a toolbox. This toolbox is the means of
identifying the subjects of the world. What it is that has to be arranged, however has gone
missing, subtracted. Everything complementary or excessive is arranged, punctuated and
regulated. This general economy-complementarity is an arrangement of what is delayed
and marginalized and therefore repressed. Concepts are multiplied and one concept has
over -determined the other. There are both singular and universal concepts, but it is the
multiplied concepts which transform the multiple at the level of representation.
Conceptual, aesthetic and social instruments allow the re-appropriation of a chain of
enunciations through the powerful space of minor problematic. Theoretical issues
together with practice in the space of complementarity produce the political recognition
through the symbolic. The political significance of the symbolic is discovered in the
representation which signifies the practice. Representation often takes place in language
and media. Power is always articulated in a symbolic way through language and media.
The symbolic and the temporal are always connected because both of them constitute
present time.
Already in the use of definitions such as ‘black’ and ‘white’ in relation to ourselves it is
evident how much we became ‘fantastically codable encoding agents’. It is and the
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historical fact of the work of power, ideology and subordination. Ideology is first
constructed in the space of creation, like literature, music, and art and then transformed
into everyday reality, into cultural world or public sphere. If one reads Henry Lefebvre
and then investigates the way how the ideology is working through the encodingdecoding principles, the question concerning sexism, logocentrism, essentialism, totality
will look differently. Yet to argue that culture is today no longer endowed with the
relative autonomy it once enjoyed as one level among others in earlier moments of
capitalism (let alone pre-capitalist societies) is not necessarily to imply its disappearance
or extinction. Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of the
autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a
prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which
everything in our social life-from the economic value and state power to practices and to
the very psyche itself-can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and
untheorised sense. The emergence of such a discipline as the Cultural Studies is not an
accident.
There is no particular origin of Cultural Studies; its theoretical basis comes from different
sources, which in fact allows it to articulate the social with the cultural. (As is the case for
culture itself). The function of culture became the language of Cultural Studies. The
important thing is of course to note that Cultural Studies reflects the breakout of the
binary fix, the product of the Eurocentrism (Europe and it's other) as well as totality,
sexism, chauvinism. It also shows that there never has been such a thing as one origin and
there are always multiplicities. For example; one may think of French political
philosophy as one of the sources of the formation of Cultural Studies, but, where does
French philosophy come from, or "who is the negotiator of history" as Foucault once
asked. French theory itself is the product of an understanding of Russian formalism,
Jacobson, Psychoanalysis, Marx and German idealism among others. Then German
idealism transformed ideas originating from Scotland and England, as well as from
Nicola de Kusanski and Descartes. In their turn, Descartes and Bacon received the
forgotten knowledge of ancient philosophy from Arabic philosophy and translations. So
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ideas are in fact 'traveling' (Said) and there is always the return and the renewal. Cultural
Studies in this very sense is the 'return of the repressed'.
When in the world changes are happening and one thing replaces another thing there is
always confusion. People are carrying the old and getting paid for distraction and
becoming the other in prize of it. What is ‘in-between’ is what is signaling the next future
things to come, but never the thing itself.
With the Frankfurt School, the concept of culture acquired a new status as a critical tool
and as an integral component of the new theoretical system. According to the Frankfurt
School, culture's ideological function is lying within the creation of uniform forms of life
via Kulturindustrie not by expressing social differences, but in veiling them. From an
early effort made by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall Birmingham School has
transformed the idea of the critique of the culture industry, from one which was more
concerned with the negative dialectics of current realities, to one as a possible site for the
struggle as popular culture. This has also positioned the other in a different context. The
possibility of meaning and articulation has stressed those theories that in a celebratory
tone have demonstrated the end of everything. The question of culture as a social
production with links to language and symbolization is a notion introduced by Stuart Hall
in order to challenge the apocalyptic post-modern vision. It still seems too hard to accept
the other and to break down the illusions which imperial culture imposed with its
education system. The other is accepted as an exotic subject or only if the other speaks of
his/her own otherness. There is a shift from centre to margin, from the subject to identity
politics. Because of its constant move towards practice, I find the contemporary cultural
studies defined by Stuart Hall the most powerful. Because the world has to be made to
mean, meaning is playing the role of social production, a practice. But one cannot think
anymore of practice without understanding it in terms of symbolization. Cultural Studies
is the study of symbolic forms and meaning, combined with the study of power. Cultural
Studies has been understood as conjunctural practice rather than theoretical discipline. It
is more like a project than an academic discipline, which is positioned in the most active
areas of social and cultural life. This conjuncture is the space that composes hybrid, as "in
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between" for Bhabha, pastiche for Jameson, contrapuntal for Said, tracking of
nomadology for Deleuze and Guattari. As these invented identities negotiate with one
another, the transformations open up a new space or third landscape of emerged
positions. Where these positions have emerged is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving
behind of the past but in between spaces (...) that initiate new signs of identity, and
innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation. This "in between space is the
...hybridity, the third space which enables other positions to emerge." For Stuart Hall any
cultural identity is a matter of becoming as well as of being. It belongs to the future as
much as to the past. Cultural identities come from somewhere and have histories. They
are not something which already exist, transcending place, time, history, culture. They
are just like everything else which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far
from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous
"play of history, culture, power." Identity does, in fact, emerge from situations, which are
spatial, yet not fixed on the map, in a constant state of moving. The question here is about
the possibility of becoming the other, about being open to external influences, new social
movements, and open to ourselves, as we are after all "fantastically codable encoding
agents"(S.Hall). Decoding ourselves would mean transforming our vision from that of
being to that of becoming. New emerging structures cannot be anticipated and instead of
fixed identities we would face emerging structures, systems that are open to
environments, that which is aware of the changing contexts and which strikes a balance
between internal stability and openness to transformation. This transformation has partly
emerged from hybridity, as opposed to essentialism.
Dealing with culture is not a new issue, but with the advent of globalisation it returns to
remind us of what has been left out, what has been ignored. Encounters with the "Other",
seeing in every step cultural differences, or simply leaving questions under this category
have been made possible through the use of the terminology culture. Culture has been the
subject of discussions in literature, art and politics, much before the invention of
anthropology itself. Recent debates in biopolitics have made it once more clear. Culture,
in its turn, is mixture of events, structures, ideas, which are inseparable from biopolitics.
It is a complicated term, as complicated as our lives, which is in fact today defined by it.
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For the hermetic and limited art world, such an intervention seems appropriate in order to
become more open and articulate to problems of reality. There are often disadvantages in
the use of the term culture in particular its modification as multiculturalism. It is obvious
now that culture is not the problem and it is not the solution, because in "multiculturalists
misunderstanding it is not the culture of the other which is disdained, but the other". I am
inclined to speak of culture not for this reason, but because culture and its critique has
played the role of returning the repressed other, among which the colonial Other has a
particular place. Culture is not another name for art, but the subject of art and as such has
been defined gradually since the end of the Second World War. Among other things
issues of marginality, otherness, opposing the oppression and the way to resist those
antagonisms are what culture brought into existence. Culture is the site of contestation.
And this is particular site has opened the way to the other normally understood as exotic.
Multiplicities are taking place in societies motivated by culture. Culture has become
intrinsic to modern management. Stuart Hall observed: "You can no longer think
primarily in terms of the economic and the material and then add cultural icing
afterwards. You have to treat culture as formative of human life, human agency and of
historical process." As in Althusser's account of consciousness as ideology, the
Birmingham School's account of culture is almost a substitute for ideology, which
regulates popular consciousness. In this sense the cultural struggle is the struggle for
policy. In Cultural Studies, culture is understood as a way of life-encompassing ideas,
attitudes, languages, practices, institutions, and structures of power-and a whole range of
cultural practices: artistic forms, texts, canons, architecture, mass- produced commodities
etc. In Stuart Hall's words, culture means, "the actual, grounded terrain of practices,
representations, languages and customs of any specific historical society" as well as "the
contradictory forms of the "common sense" which have taken root in and helped to shape
popular life". Stuart Hall suggests that "Culture can become everything. You can
manipulate the symbols without altering the realities. Through language, dress or mode of
behavior, for example, they signal a new kind of egalitarianism, while in practice they
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make little dent of the underlying causes of inequality. Our times are defined by cultural
democratization."
The world is now a planet. What is happening in that end of world is known in the other
end immediately. We are discovering the real world in a real time. This is also one of the
possibilities of the elaboration of the marginalized. However the real itself is punctuated
as it comes into existence theoretically and articulates with the practice. Some theories
come across and meet at certain point and technologies punctuate them automatically.
This is where the point of the return of the repressed.
Articulation makes a spatial paradigm in circulating this return. Art is functioning ‘in
itself’ and it functions as a commodity for the market, but if it wants to satisfy the needs
of time it has to articulate with the social. Reality in whatever form-as matter or as
history, or as an experience-is not privileged referent but the ongoing (in D&G term
‘rhizomatics’) production or articulation of apparatuses (Grossberg).
Culture is a signifying practice with its own product: meaning. The product of meaning is
representation. Because of the logic of temporality and subjectivication things are
possible through the articulation with the social. Articulation is possible because the
political events are contingent. Articulation is the notion received its interesting form
within linguistic and literary metamorphosis. Earlier interest is prominent in the Russian
formalism, partially for the school of phonetics (Trubetskoy, Courtene), as well as for
Bakhtin. Bakhtin, who was fascinated by Plato’s dialogues, spoke of the dialogical
imagination as an articulation. At the same time Gramsci, the organic intellectual was
interested in the notion of hegemony. Influenced by Nietzsche and Croce at the same
time, Gramsci suggested the notion of hegemony of culture, which he considers through
the status of metaphor. “All language is continuous process of metaphors and the history
of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture: language is both living thing and a
museum of fossils of past life and civilization”. In nuovo concezione del mondo and their
articulation with the cultural Gramsci saw the hegemony which opens the way for the
different power. In the spirit of 1930’s there is the work dealing with this notion, like
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Benjamin or Brecht. Ernesto Laclau, who is fascinated by Plato’s cave and Gramsci’s
hegemony, has developed the idea in our days. Articulation has also specific importance
for the theory to carry on working and for ‘going on theorizing’ (Stuart Hall).
The world-as-exhibition. Globalisation is a punctuation of the symbolic through
multiplied differences. Globalisation is not a systematic, it is a system based on a nonsystem (contingency). The symbolic is the visible link deconstructing the
interrelationship between culture and power through the global. This link is in a constant
state of breaking down in order to give the way to ideological disposions and formations,
and it gives the status to the symbolic as it makes the globe to look ‘ the world-asexhibition’. This has happened through the construction of spatial theories and everyday
practice (migration is one example). The world as such becomes the spectacular opening
for the celebration for one, for the critique for another. The symbolization is playing a
particular role in global movements. Language and media as symbolic means are
punctuating ‘the real’ (culture) through the world space. For example, in the Universal
exhibition held in Seville in 1992 themes of culture, nationality and technology are
explored. This exhibition exemplifies the way ‘culture’ is produced and put to work by
the national and corporate participants. The relationship between the emergence of
culture as a commodity and the way which the concept is employed in contemporary
cultural theory could also be understood in the way how the recent global exhibitions
(Biennals, and Documenta) were influenced by cultural theory and cultural studies. These
institutions are linked through finance structures, they have objectified culture and
themselves have become objects of cultural theory.
The world is grasped and pushed to its limits through the terrain of migrancy. Fredric
Jameson suggested that Western culture is transmitted through the media into other
spheres of the geopolitical existence. In reality these ideas are always in reverse, form the
East to the West and back again. We are all connected. The reversibility of events
describes this connection, this cultural interdependence. This particular fact defines
certain limits of the worlds’ and opens the prospective vision of worlds’ extension. The
‘other side’ of the world is constituted through and by culture. Culture is for ever! (Stuart
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Hall). There is now a ‘world culture’ which is about the diversity and multiplicity, as it is
different from homogeneity. Looking at culture as an artwork enables us to take on
critical issues. Culture is both what makes us part of the ideology and helps us to
understand our place in it. Artwork is not the reflection of the world, but an instrument
for encoding-decoding, because it is coded by various conventions.
Zeigam Azizov
January-March, 1999, London-Grenoble
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