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. 1 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 2 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 3 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 4 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 5 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. 6 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 7 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 8 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 9 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 10