On The Question of A Theory of Third World Literature

On the Question of a Theory of (Third World) Literature Author(s): Madhava Prasad Source: Social Text, No.
31/32, Third World and Post-Colonial Issues (1992), pp. 57-83 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466218 Accessed: 13/08/2010 05:06
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On the Questionof a Theory of (ThirdWorld)Literature

MADHAVA PRASAD
I. Critical theory, by opening up a field of inquiry into the production and reproduction of subjectivities, transformed the object of literary/cultural studies. It became possible to think cultural studies not as a means of selecting and preserving the quintessence of a society's cultural production by lavishing a fetishistic labour of veneration upon it, but instead as an investigation of the cultural domain for the purpose of making visible the ideological processes by which meaning in culture is naturalized. This work posed a serious challenge to the orthodoxies that reigned in cultural studies, and many ways of escaping the consequences of theoretical knowledge have since been devised. One "grand narrative" which has served this increasingly hostile tendency well is the one that posits an epic battle between conceptuality and its unnameable opposite. In the recent debate about "Third World literature" which began in the pages of Social Text and has since spread to other spaces, this conflict over the aims, consequences, and origins of theory surfaced once again and seemed to have produced a consensus of sorts about the need to "live and let live," so to speak. This idiomatic English expression captures well the ideological role of anti-theory today. My purpose in what follows is to raise some questions about the conditions of possibility of the new neighbourliness in the cultural academy by reading some texts implicated, directly or indirectly, in the debate mentioned above. Of the many objections that Aijaz Ahmad raises to Fredric Jameson's attempt to produce a theory of Third World literature, those based on empirical evidence contradicting Jameson's claim that "all" Third World literature is national allegory are the easiest to deal with. He points out, for instance: "I cannot think of a single novel in Urdu between 1935 and 1947...which is in any direct or exclusive way about 'the experience of colonialism and imperialism"'(Ahmad, 21). This remark conceals a common assumption that the object of a theory must exist in its fullness prior to its theoretical articulation, the latter being understood as the restatement of a latent meaning in another language. But theory's project is to bring to the surface the naturalized, concealed frames of intelligibility that enable cultural enunciation and also to produce new conceptual 57
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frames which, by providing new perspectives on the problem, enable (re)thinking in the service of social transformation. But the really significant contention in Ahmad's text is that, besides being impossible, such a theory is objectionable on political grounds. "[C]ognitive aesthetics rests ... upon a suppression of the multiplicity of significant difference among and within both the advanced capitalist countries and the imperialist formations" (4). This argument comes with a declaration of allegiance to Marxism. And indeed, Ahmad's essay offers an extended critical account of global political economy, only to return, immediately, to a nationalist position on the question of cultural theory. The conditions that make possible the co-existence of these two opposed positions have themselves something to do with Jameson's claim that all Third World literature is national allegory. Before we turn to that matter, it would be useful to note that a theoretical proposition such as Jameson's cannot simply be verified by reference to an existing body of texts directly or indirectly dealing with the question of national identity or of the experience of colonialism. If we begin with the premise that what is at stake is the (re)production of subject positions, the point to be made is not only that texts betray a preoccupation with nation/collectivity, but also that a labour of comparison accompanies cultural production and reception so consistently as to form an integral element of "Third World" subjectivity. The "Third World" also needs to be defined: again, it is understood as a time-space of subject formation, necessarily determined by imperialism, colonialism, developmentalism, and experimentation with bourgeois democracy and other forms of nationstatehood. Not just a geography with its millennia of cultural historynot, for instance, "India," from the Vedic past to the neo-Vedic presentbut India after its occupation and transformation by imperialist rule (although the pre-capitalist determinations continue to play a part in this time-space). "[W]hen I was on the fifth page of [Jameson's] text...I realized that what was being theorized was, among other things, myself" (Ahmad, 3-4). This common postcolonial nightmare is a very important factor in Ahmad's resistance to the idea of a theory of "Third World literature." To examine its implications it will be useful to turn to a more dramatic fictional representation of it, in a short story by A. K. Ramanujan called "Annayya's Anthropology." The chief figure in this story, a native of a South Indian Brahmin village, arrives in the United States as a student, thereby gaining access to a whole body of knowledge that was out of reach of the former "native." Of course, this passage to America has the "allegorical" significance of an accomplished re-formation of a pre-capitalist subject into a bourgeois individual; the physical relocation is not a necessary condition of such knowledge. Access to the archive also implies that the subject is a fully formed self capable, in the global political
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economy of knowledge, of occupying the position of producer as well as consumer. But while fulfilling the role that this position enables, the protagonist finds himself forced to recall and to reoccupy the position of an object of knowledge. To be precise, he discovers, in a journal devoted to anthropology, an article dealing with Brahmin ritual practices - illustrated with photographs of his family, including his mother. It is not necessary to dismiss the trauma associated with that moment in order to recognize its class origins. Nor would such a recognition preclude a critique of the systems of representation- anthropological, historical, literary, scientific - developed and deployed by the imperialist west as part of its machinery of control and domination. On the other hand, the native, as native, has no access to that position from which the trauma can be encountered.' It is only through acquiring the privileged position of producer/consumer within the dominant economy of knowledge that it is possible to encounter a former "self" alienated from the current one by the representational apparatus whose tools are now within the latter's reach. But once those systems of representation have been encountered, there are two ways in which a critique of them could proceed. On the one hand, critique could take as its aim the reclamation and protection of a lost identity, in which case what is being defended is privacy, a space beyond the limits of the public discourses, to which reason has no access. The moment of revelation shatters the illusion of self-possession and exposes the fragility of the postcolonial subject's assumption of sovereignty. In response, the subject compensates for this disillusionment by projecting a lost sovereignty onto the (re)discovered past. "Postcoloniality" thus is signalled by the historic moment in which the coveted "private" realm is created as the zone of "non-interference" that is off limits to the "public." The public realm, in this case, is the international sphere, a neutral space, real or hypothetical. The defence of this privacy would be a defence of that very position which rendered visible the contradictions involved in the erasure of multiple subjectivities, for it is that position which gives to the figures of the past an "identity" which the intellectual now defends against it. The alternative to such a surrender (which is what it is, in spite of a strong connotation of resistance) would be an interrogation of the very history which, by providing access to the "neutral" position of knowledge, enables the critique. But this requires the abandoning of the quest for an unattainable self-possession and the resolve to rethink identity without sovereignty. Literature, in which the "self" is produced and elaborated, is the particular domain that Ahmad wants to protect from the encroachments of theory: "what was being theorized was myself." Ahmad's claim that the differences between nations/ literatures in the Third World are beyond the reach of a single theory, in its repetition of a poststructuralist truism, is faithful to a fantasy on which all national cultural identities are based.
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Ahmad claims that "this phrase,'the third world,' is, even in its most telling deployments, a polemical one, with no theoretical status whatsoever." Thus he will argue "that there is no such thing as a 'third world literature' which can be constructed as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge" (4). But, is there one capitalism or are there several, depending on regions, primary industries, raw materials used, eating habits of the working class, etc? Is, for instance, "the aesthetic," of which there exist innumerable theoretical explanations, a more stable concept than the "third world"? Ahmad's argument here rests on the fact that the countries that are together designated the Third World have nothing in common with one another. The suggestion that "the experience of colonialism and imperialism" has commensurable material effects on the future of a people does not impress Ahmad at all. His first major objection to this is that while the First and Second worlds are defined in terms of modes of production, the Third is defined in terms of an experience. This is indeed problematic not because it is a matter of cultural justice but because of a lack of clarity and consistency in the definition. The term "Third World," by positing three discrete entities, caused this third entity to be seen as a world in itself with its own defining characteristics. The relational aspect of the global divisions was lost in this process. However, in Jameson's text the signifier "Third World," appropriated from another discourse, receives a new signified. A scholastic insistence on the "pure" meaning of the term is less useful than a demand for a clearer elaboration of the new meaning assigned to it. And if the latter approach is taken, there are enough indications in Jameson's text that the term is meant to signify a brief time-space with specific features associated with the history of the unification of the globe by, and in the interests of, capitalism. Ahmad proceeds to examine the case of India. By the criterion supplied (experience of imperialism), there is no problem of identification. But Ahmad serves up a vision of political and economic progress which, while complicating the analysis, does absolutely nothing to explain hundreds of observable phenomena: the nation-state, the parliamentary system, the laws inherited from the British, by which the people continue to be governed, the continuing effects of "divide and rule" policy, the dress codes in clubs inherited from military cantonments, the role of English (which partially explains the occurrence of this debate in the United States), the role of capitalist literary forms in reforming precapitalist subjectivities, the 'transfer of power' from a foreign power to the traditional indigenous elite, neo-Brahminism's meritocracy, and so on. Ahmad's narrative is not incorrect, but the developments he mentions have not wiped out the legacy of imperialism. This is not a "presumably pre- or non-capitalist third world" (7) but a part of the capitalist world marked by "uneven and combined development."
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Ahmad is right to insist that "we live not in three worlds but one." But this is somewhat contradictory coming after a call to acknowledge radical heterogeneity on the cultural plane. In Ahmad's terms, the world is one because, for instance, one would pose similar questions to several different literatures. This in turn can be done because each is characterized by the same class differentiation, the same aspiration to socialism, etc. In other words, the world is one because one social structure repeats itself in almost identical fashion across the globe! This is the picture of abstract equality, the same abstract equality that the "social contract" bestowed on "all" adults, while real inequality was blamed on the fact that, as Marx put it, "long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals...." (Marx, 873). What Ahmad finds objectionable is Jameson's suggestion that the independent nation states of the world, who all sit side by side in the United Nations, are nevertheless linked to each other by a complex structure of hierarchization enabled by primitive accumulation. Ahmad claims, in his haste, that the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America have "historically" had no close ties. This is not entirely true: the world before European hegemony was still an actively interdependent world. While Ahmad admits that metropolitan mediation is the common element of these countries' relations with each other, he does not regard this as significant enough to be constitutive of enunciatory possibilities. Where subjectivity is the object of investigation, the importance of metropolitian mediation cannot be overstated. Indeed, even as he denies any reality to non-positive factors, Ahmad's mode of enunciating the critique reproduces the effects of metropolitan mediation: the argument is inscribed in the comparative space of the discourse of the colonized, here figured as the injured party presenting a case before a court. Of course, there is as yet no space for the colonial subject outside this space of comparison and competition. But to begin the work of undoing it, it is imperative to make that ground itself the constant object of investigation.2 The differences among nations that Ahmad invokes are suspiciously similar to the arguments for the uniqueness of individual texts offered by neopragmatist anti-theorists against the possibility of a theory of literature. Neo-pragmatists, by privileging a theological notion of (the author's) intention, attempt to preserve the "self" as the sole source of meaning and teach the reader to read the text "on its own terms" and in search of an intended meaning. Any theoretical attempt to overcome the literal, physical autonomy of a text from other texts or an author from other authors is deemed "illegitimate" by a school whose concepts are derived predominantly from legal discourse.3 The reductive pragmatist definition of theory is that it is "the attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an account of interpretation in general" (Mitchell, 11). The real is composed of "particular texts" each of which
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must generate its own principles of interpretation (although, paradoxically, all of them will bear their producer's intention). Theory does not respect the distinction between texts, or in Ahmad's case, between national literatures. Bourgeois individualism thus finds an ally in nationalist arguments for the autonomy of national cultures.4 Ahmad is aware of the possible linkages here. He says, for example: "But there is, I believe, a considerable space where one could take one's stand between (a) the postmodernist cult of utter non-determinacy and (b) the idea of a unitary determination which has lasted from Hegel up to some of the most modern of marxist debates" (Ahmad, 22-3). In this formulation the difference between the two "extreme" positions is one of degree, as if there were a spectrum of choices ranging from total fragmentariness to an exhaustive unity. But the celebration of difference remains an ideological move which is directly opposed, not distantly related, to the theoretical realm. Besides, Marxisms do not negate all differences any more than festive postmodernisms undo unity when they proclaim the finality of fragmentation. What is unitary is not the determination but the system of social relations, whose unity is not already given but needs to be theorized. What postmodernisms rely on is a theory of difference; Marxisms, on the contrary, have produced more or less successful theories of the interrelatedness of apparently distinct and autonomous zones of the social. A theory of cultural autonomy along national or linguistic lines is disenabling because it is blind to the function of the nation-state in the hierarchization of the globe along class lines. Theories of dependency are useful in understanding this aspect of the nation-state. Enrique Dussel, for instance, has recently elaborated a theory of the transfer of surplus value from one national capital to another as the basis of dependency. When two national capitals of unequal strength confront each other on the world market, the transfer, as opposed to the creation, of surplus value takes place "because the average international price is less than the national value of the same commodity."5 This is possible wherever different values reside in the same product in different places due to the difference in the organic composition of capital and in wages. The national determination is indispensable, for it alone enables the transfer of surplus value. Even in the context of the rise of transnational corporations, what is involved is not the fading of national boundaries but their consolidation in new ways: "These corporations do not suppress national entities; rather they assume them, to such a degree that if there were not total national capitals of different levels of development they could not exist" (Dussel 90). Dussel is not an internationalist in politics, for he argues that a national popular struggle is the only viable means to economic and political liberation. This makes his analysis all the more significant.6
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In order for individual capitals to transcend national boundaries, those boundaries must remain in place. National capitals can be identified only on the basis of the reach of state power. Thus the nation-state is an administrative unit that is integral to capitalism. "Nations" enter this order only by attaining statehood, which can now be defined as a prize in the competition of capitals. Nations may not even emerge except in the shadow of a struggle to establish a state or to challenge an established distribution of state power. To come back to Ahmad's text, the interdependency of nation-states and their inscription in a single world order, whatever the regional and cultural differences, is lost sight of in the anxiety to preserve inviolate an interiority that the nation-state claims for itself and which Ahmad grants to it uncritically. Ahmad's is the first in a series of texts to be considered below, all of which are characterized by the understanding that the notion of a dominant system implies that its limits are to be found outside it, in an alternative that resides elsewhere and is resistant to the encroachments of the dominant system. This outside is also endowed with its own inside, that being the true mark of autonomous existence. But as we have seen above, such an outside is itself a product of the dominant system's machinery of representation which then becomes reified.7 Henry Schwarz's contribution to the debate, "Provocations Toward a Theory of Third World Literature," is more vividly illustrative of the problem. While Schwarz's text is critical of Ahmad for some of the same reasons as above, it finds its own "limit" to theory ready-made in the postmodern theme of unintelligibility via a reading of the manifesto of the Subaltern Studies project. The notion of the object's "own" identity, the theme that runs through Ahmad's text and neopragmatist theory, is also a concern of this manifesto, from which Schwarz derives his theory of the Third World text. Bourgeois historiography, the main target of the Subaltern Studies critique, inscribed the bourgeois leadership of the independence movement as the Subject of Indian history and the masses as their faithful followers. Historians of the empire had even earlier engaged in an elaborate and systematic coding of events in India in accordance with colonial interests. Against these two trends the Subaltern Studies project sought to foreground the underside of the anti-colonial struggle - the unwritten history of the struggle of peasants, tribes and other groups against domination by both external and internal masters. This project, as presented in Ranajit Guha's introduction to the first volume, involves the critique of problematic existing conceptual frameworks as well as (and this is where the trouble begins) the resolve to avoid developing new ones. While subaltern historians employed a Marxist discourse, the theory posited a realm of struggle which was outside all rational systems and was resistant not only to existing conceptual frames but to conceptualization per se. Enabling the subaltern to speak and to be heard was itself to be the
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political intervention. In place of the bourgeoisie and the elusive working class as the competing subjects of the history of the new nation, Subaltern Studies historiography offered multiple, localized sites of resistance. The subaltern historian therefore finds him/herself in the self-effacing role of a facilitator unwilling to articulate a counter-hegemonic project that is "extraneous" to the histories unearthed. By default, the nationalist frame of reference, which was the target of the project, becomes the order of meaning in and against which these histories operate. The demand for authenticity which the histories make on their material is symptomatic of the persistence of the nationalist frames of reference and of a faith in the discovery of an already existing political program in the rebel consciousness of the subaltern.8 This is not an exhaustive description of the great variety of research undertaken under the Subaltern Studies banner. I have only summarized that part of its inaugural spirit which now finds a welcome in the postmodern regime of unintelligibility in the US academy. Schwarz's misreadings of the early Subaltern Studies texts are suggestive of the ways in which the failure to explicitly retheorize the Marxist paradigm as the basis of the subalternist intervention has led to its appropriation by a kind of politics that finds its meaning and effectivity in self-effacement and regards celebration of the other as the only possible source of a new politics. Schwarz writes, for instance, in a summary of Guha's introduction to the first volume, that "both Marxist and bourgeois accounts of nationalism and anti-colonialism write the story of rebellion 'from above'" (Schwarz,185). To write a story from above is to write it from the point of view of the elite. Guha's introduction begins with this statement: "The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism - colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism" (SS I, 1). Schwarz, in a symptomatic gesture, reads colonialist to mean Marxist (or fails to read colonialism and reads Marxism in its place). Guha's text itself does not mention Marxism (by any name) nor is the claim made anywhere else that Marxist historiography wrote the story of rebellion "from above," even though a strong critique of idealist tendencies in Marxist historiography is part of the general Subaltern critique of existing historiography.9 This overreading is a symptom of the knee-jerk anti-Marxism which is a constant presence behind anti-theoretical projects, and surfaces occasionally in such unexpected places. The point of mentioning this is to show that anti-Marxism plays a meaningful role in the elaboration of a discourse of unintelligibility. It is on the basis of a reading of "subaltern politics" as "largely unknowable" (Schwarz 186) that Schwarz proceeds to read the literary texts of Mahasweta Devi as representations of the unrepresentable or unintelligible, which leads him to the conclusion that the political object
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of a theory of Third World literature is to enable the First World to contemplate its own mistakes as they unfold in that literature: "The thematics of this story revolve around two systems of unintelligibility" (193). "Like the jungle's blackness, the insurgent mind is impenetrable by the rationality of the Army Handbook followed by the police" (195). "Dopdi, as an allegory of the inscrutability of the sign, is reduced and constrained to rational signification by her capture, interrogation, and representation at the hands of the expert" (197). Before looking at the shared desire of Guha's and Schwarz's texts to render their own systems of representation invisible along with the historical origins of those systems, it is necessary to recognize that Guha's text does not ascribe inscrutability to the subaltern's actions. Guha's critique of left historiography is quite specifically a question not of indeterminacy, but of knowledge:
The purpose of...tertiary discourse is quite clearly to try and retrieve the history of insurgency from that continuum which is designed to assimilate every jacquerie to 'England's Work in India,' and arrange it along the alternative axis of a protracted campaign for freedom and socialism. However, as with colonialist historiography, this, too amounts to an act of appropriation which excludes the rebel as the conscious subject of his own history and incorporates the latter as only a contingent element in another history with another subject. Just as it is not the rebel but the Raj which is the real subject of secondary discourse and the Indian bourgeoisie that of tertiary discourse of the History-of-the-Freedom-Struggle genre, so is an abstraction called ality of the insurgent, made to replace him in the type of literature discussed above (SS II, 33; emphasis in original).
an ideal rather than the real historical personWorker-and-Peasant,
The "abstraction" called Worker-and-Peasant, when adopted as the subject of history, is problematic insofar as by that means the past is redefined in terms produced in the present, as if the past in its entirety were the missing content of those terms. Thus, since the Ideal Consciousness of the Worker-Peasant "is supposed to be one hundred percent secular in character, the devotee tends to look away when confronted with the evidence of religiosity as if the latter did not exist or explain it away as a clever but well-intentioned fraud perpetrated by enlightened leaders on their moronic followers - all done of course, 'in the interests of the people'!" (SS II, 39). The revolutionary working class, in other words, which has to be produced in the political realm, is "discovered" in history by a certain idealist historiography. But in the course of this passage Guha has slipped in two counter-assertions: (1) that history can be written without the aid of any "abstractions" (and subaltern historiography is an example of such writing); and (2) that the subaltern groups are agents of their "own" history which is recoverable and must be recovered as such.
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If there is a suggestion that the discourse in/through which this rescue will take place is transparent, it is rendered very complicated by the very next paragraph:
To say this of course is not to deny the political importance of such appropriation. Since every struggle for power by the historically ascendant classes in any epoch involves a bid to acquire a tradition, it is entirely in the fitness of things that the revolutionary movements in India should lay a claim to, among others, the Santal rebellion of 1855 as a part of their heritage. But however noble the cause and instrument of such appropriation, it leads to the mediation of the insurgent's consciousness by the historian's - that is, of a past consciousness by one conditioned by the present. The distortion which follows necessarily and inevitably from this process is a function of that hiatus between event-time and discourse-time which makes the verbal representation of the past less than accurate in the best of cases.... There is nothing historiography can do to eliminate such distortion altogether, for the latter is built into its optics.... (SS II, 33).
This and the previous passage together give us, first, a contrast between an ideological distortion and the aspiration to be free of distortion that marks the Subaltern Studies project and, second, as we proceed, the mutation of distortion into a purely non-ideological, "necessary" one that cannot be avoided. It is very unclear what is being conceded and what defended here. Is Guha conceding that the "Subaltern" is as much of an "abstraction" as the "Worker-and-Peasant"? That the shift in terminology represents, not the movement towards a more accurate representation but a different representation with a different political agenda? If the imposition of a "Worker-and-Peasant" mold on the material of the past constitutes an "appropriation" indistinguishable from the appropriative gestures of the national bourgeoisie, in what way does the imposition of the "Subaltern" mold on the same material not constitute an appropriation? Guha's text makes no attempt to answer such questions and is content to regard "discursive appropriation" as somehow unjust in itself, an assumption which, interestingly, does not come into operation when Subalternist discourse is in question. The neopragmatists, as we have seen, object to a general theory which attempts to "govern" the reading of particular texts, while retaining "authorial intention" as the only general principle. Guha's critique of abstractions similarly fails to acknowledge the "abstract" (i.e., conceptual, conceptuality being the real target here) character of the term "subaltern." Gayatri Spivak's "Deconstructing Historiography," along with "Can the Subaltern Speak?", remains the most thoroughgoing critique of the Subaltern Studies project yet undertaken. Spivak, however, reads the "subject-effect" produced by the writing "as a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest" (Spivak, 205). The difficulty here stems from the implicit suggestion that strategy is
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necessarily one step behind theory, that theory itself is not a strategic necessity. "I am suggesting ... that although the group does not wittingly engage with the poststructuralist understanding of 'consciousness,' our own transactional reading of them is enhanced if we see them as strategically adhering to the essentialist notion of consciousness, that would fall prey to an anti-humanist critique, within a historiographic practice that draws many of its strengths from that very critique" (206-7). "Strategy" is at work at two levels here: the group's strategic backward step into essentialism is matched by Spivak's own strategic negotiation of a co-existence between poststructuralism and strategic essentialism. Spivak's text is acutely aware of its location at the intersection of two complexly related intellectual traditions and it insists on the necessity of a critical operation that brings these traditions into a productive conflict. But an "unwitting" tendency to position historians as themselves "subaltern" in the intellectual field intervenes to produce the effect of a contrast between two kinds of writing, one taking place in the trenches and the other in a more leisurely space of philosophical speculation.10 In the new mode of intellectual contestation that has emerged in recent years, the contest is over which groups are the true subjects of history. Imperialist forces and bourgeois nationalists write themselves as subjects, against which left historiography inscribed the working class in the same place. The current tendency is to find new and multiple subjects of fragmented histories, so that history itself is divided up into any number of independent, self-propelled trajectories, each with its own share of the "homogeneous, empty time" of capitalism. If the subject in all these instances is understood as the locus of an intention, we see how the smallest intention-bearing unit, the neopragmatist "author," is the logical precursor of all the other intentional formations, large or small. Behind the theological "intention" of any specified entity lies, of course, the more strictly relevant notion of "property," of possession, which defines the entity. Intention is simply the theological verification of secular possession. Poststructuralist theoretical advances often seem to "overtake" political struggles and produce "academics supposedly 'marginated' by the 'advanced' state of their intellectual sophistication" (Morton 101). Political intervention thus always requires a strategic climbdown from the advanced state. And since new conceptual frameworks are to be avoided at all costs, celebration of others' struggles is the only option. In this way poststructuralism often comes to rest beside pragmatism and other statusquoist tendencies as a reluctant but helpless ally. Some of the contributors to a new volume entitled PostmodernismlJamesonlCritique offer poststructuralist defences of intentional units which are helpful in mapping the wider anti-theoretical network in which the texts we are here concerned with are situated.
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One of these, by R. Radhakrishnan, claims for a start that "contemporary realities themselves are marked by a certain poststructuralist 'difference'"(Radhakrishnan, 302). Thus poststructuralism is offered to us not, as it used to be, as a theory that problematizes the real and the "natural," but as the expression of the spirit of the age, the natural discursive reflection of a "differentiated" reality. In place of what he calls Jameson's "universal and anthropological Subject of history," Radhakrishnan posits "the realities of different and globally unequal histories" (305). Once again, one subject has been replaced by many subjects. But in addition to their "difference" from each other, Radhakrishnan acknowledges something called inequality. Unlike difference, however, inequality is far more resistant to reification, and preserves its relationality. How to reconcile, then, these two contradictory effects? Is there difference in spite of inequality? Is there difference in order to conceal inequality? What is the basis of the decision to focus on difference, to the exclusion of inequality? Is it the belief that the achievement of difference will automatically erase inequality? If the regime of difference has already been inaugurated in the reality that is itself poststructuralist, has inequality, then, ended? On the assumption that there are many autonomous histories, Time itself is said to be fragmented accordingly, with each group possessing its own time. In a footnote commenting on Jameson's theory of Third World literature, Radhakrishnan elaborates this notion:
During the course of this essay, Jameson talks all too glibly about 'the return of nationalism' in the Third World as though nationalism were enjoying a re-run in the Third World. The confident use of the term 'return' suggests that within the universal synchronicity of Western time, nationalism is repeating itself in the Third World, whereas, historically, 'nationalism' is new to the Third World. Throughout this essay (in spite of an initial gesture of unease), Jameson has little difficulty in maintaining his official conviction that the Third World histories are a predictable repetition of the histories of the 'advanced world'; hence, the masterly confidence with which he 'allegorizes' the Third World on its own behalf" (329).
According to one way of reading world history - a totalizing one nationalism, having emerged in the west as a mechanism of post-feudal integration of contiguous populations under an authority with monopoly over foreign policy and trade, repeats itself in the struggles of the colonized against the colonizers. But Radhakrishnan proposes another model, whereby nationalism will forever maintain its novelty - every time a new geographical space claims national identity, it is making a new claim from its own perspective. A deliberate erasure from memory of the global history of nationalism has to be effected in order to arrive at this liberating position. But this is a classic instance of commodity fetishism: my Ford, once it is in my possession, is no longer just like any other model T.
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The fact of mechanical reproduction has its reality outside of the individual consumer's perceptions. The task of intellectuals according to this approach is to keep the demystifying knowledge about nationalism from ever reaching the ears of the nationalists. Later in the essay Radhakrishnan recommends a coalition politics based on the example of the Rainbow coalition. But there are some "unwitting" assertions elsewhere, as in the passage above, which indicate the correct approach to politics. The quotation marks around "advanced world" above and, in a part of the same passage that I have not quoted, the reference to a "so-called First World" are the first clues. Add to them the attribution of "the best of intentions" to Jameson's project (305); his applause for a "rare, inaugural generosity " (emphasis added); and finally, this interim conclusion: "Unfortunately then, Jameson ends up dehistoricizing the very constituencies that he had set out to befriend and understand" (306; emphasis added). These are the symptoms of a coalitionism that wants relations based on "generosity," "goodwill," and "understanding." Whose generosity? For whom? Is it not, on the other hand, the "generosity" of the liberal pluralist sanctioning of "difference" that poses the greater danger today - the danger that representative elites will accept this generosity "on behalf of" their "natural" constituencies and "forgive" out of a reciprocal generosity, the oppression and exploitation that continue elsewhere? By way of a critique of the natural, of an "attack on identity and totality," once more, we arrive at a very old bourgeois solution to all crises - coalitionism. But what, in any case, is the rationale of the coalition? The contemporary situation demands "the creation of a non-aggressive, non-coercive, and generous space where different and multiple constituencies may meet collectively" (323; emphasis added). The Rainbow Coalition is just such a space, besides being an instance of the practical implementation of the theory of poststructuralism. Coalitions are "opportunistic structures" to be used and discarded "as soon as power is seized" (326). But here, following upon that vision, is another one: Built into the coalition is the insight thata commonworld is thinkable only when we can divest ourselves [throughthe operation of free will?] from intereststhataremerely andobsessively regionaland that it is the ethical and political responsibilityof the advanced[no deprecatoryquotationmarksthis time round]and developed sectors within a countryor the world to practice someform of sacrifice and askesis so that the underdeveloped sectors may catch up and be redressedof theirgrievances. I say 'responsibility'since underdevelopment in one area has always the result of overdevelopment elsewhere [an interesting inversion of the cause-effect relation as usually understood:uncauses - "hasthe resultof" - overdevelopment: no derdevelopment doubt because of sacrifices made voluntarily and 'ethically' by the autonomoussubjects of the underdeveloped nations?];we need only
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A Theoryof ThirdWorldLiterature to look briefly at the history of colonialism, imperialism, racism, and sexism to reach this conclusion (326-7; emphases added).
This is the real meaning of coalition: no occasion here for any "seizure of power." All autonomous underdeveloped subjects must await the charity of their overdeveloped neighbors whom they will continue to love in true Christian spirit till they begin to make the necessary sacrifices. Developed and underdeveloped, bourgeoisie and working class, can and must enter into coalitions.12 Haynes Home, another contributor to the same volume, builds the case for fragmentation on a Lyotardian foundation. "Only when it will be possible to speak of Marxist philosophies of histories and be understood, without being accused of some [any?] liberal pluralism, will Marxism have emerged from the hegemony of enlightenment schemes of totality and offered itself anew as a vehicle for transforming - not reproducing - the given social order" (Horne, 269). This is the place to take up again Radhakrishnan's notion of "western time" and "other times," which was left unexamined above. For Home's notion of multiple philosophies of histories refers to the same desire for a plurality of homogeneous empty times. Home's vision of the world is stated with equal vehemence, as when, against Jameson's notion of history, he intones melodramatically:
there is a...question Jameson utterly fails to ask, namely, "whose history?" Africa's or China's? No, Euramerika's! Blacks' history or Orientals'? No, Caucasians'! Women's History? No, Men's! What Jameson reduces to 'practitioners of alternate codes' are more properly in his own terms 'livers of alternate histories.' As such they have every reason to expect that their histories be taken seriously by Jameson, which however, will not be possible under the regime of a metanarrative in which the single 'logic of capital' dictates the temporality as well as the space of each narrative" (283; emphasis added).
Note the unwitting deification of "Jameson" in the words emphasized, before we move on to the question of time. The discourse of the supplicant, the injured party, once again serves as the identifying mark of the postcolonial Other, as in Ahmad and Radhakrishnan. When, soon after this, Horne criticizes Jameson's problematic notion of the "sectoral validity" of various "alternate codes" for the signs it bears of a paternal attitude, he does not remember the demand that he makes here for precisely such paternalism. To return to "time" however: it is clear from Radhakrishnan's and Home's formulations that autonomous histories can only be theorized in the context of a developmental model of the globe where backward but autonomous sectors will be able, thanks to someone's generosity, to "catch up" with the advanced sectors. Why all these autonomous sectors should want to catch up with the same model of economic well-being is a question that does not occur to the specialists of difference. In any case, "western time" or the global capitalist "philosophy of history" is there, in that developmental model that lies at the base of
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Lyotardian fragmentation and its repetitions. The grand narratives are not pure discursive formations but philosophies whose material existence is the institutionalized developmental logic of capitalism in which "autonomous" nation-states are the primary institutions. It is within one, single, unidirectional capitalist Time-Space that all existing differences are recognized. To celebrate that order of difference, then, is to celebrate that Time-Space as the eternal ground of existence. It is only through the destruction of that Time-Space that a new order, enabling new conceptions of heterogeneity, can be produced. That Time-Space, in which is inscribed the History of all histories, whose representational machinery asserts its pre-eminence at every site (so that, for instance, all histories will have to posit, for themselves, a Subject of history as the very condition of their autonomy) is the signified of the concept of totality, which requires from the intellectual the work of critique. 13 Ahmad's argument against a theory of "Third World" literature is an instance of the return, by complicated ways, to an ultimately nationalist position that falls within the above developmental philosophy of history. By claiming that "there is no such thing as a 'third world' literature," (4) Ahmad implies that there is in unproblematic ways a French, an Indian, an Urdu or a black American literature. This assertion is by no means self-evident: it depends on a naturalized understanding of "literature" as a random body of work produced in specific linguistic, cultural, national domains. Such a definition, assuming as it does that because it refuses to theorize, it is free from theory, participates in the naturalizing ideology of bourgeois nationalist cultural understanding. If there is a determinable institutionalized "Urdu literature," which Ahmad's text asserts by adopting without explicit acknowledgment a position of linguistic nationalism, its status as a representational apparatus, its institutional role in culture as a machinery of social cohesion, has to be examined. In formulations like the following, the contradictions of a Marxist position moored in nationalist/essentialist "cultural soils" becomes clear: "These various countries, from three continents [Africa, Latin America and Asia] have been assimilated into the global structure of capitalism not as a single cultural ensemble but highly differentially, each establishing its own circuits of (unequal) exchange with the metropolis, each acquiring its own very distinct class formations" (Ahmad, 10). "These various countries" however are constructions that do not necessarily possess a natural rationality or internal coherence - their constitution as nation-states is determined by many factors but their principal common feature is that they predominantly constitute themselves or are constituted as structures of administration by representation on the model of the bourgeois democracies of Europe. The nation-state, with a representative rule approximating in varying degrees to the primary models, is the politically, economically and ideologically privileged unit of participation in the global order.
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Literature, or a national culture in general, is one of the representational machineries that serve to consolidate the nation-state. Its historical emergence in Europe is tied to the rise of the primary capitalist nationstates; in this sense literature is "national." Of course this claim is of little value by itself but a Marxist theory of literature cannot begin anywhere else. Ahmad's own arguments point in this direction (12-13), but a residual nationalist disdain for globalizing theories prevents him from attempting a more rigorous, extensive and complex theorization of literature than the one Jameson has put forward. II. A concern that the very possibility of agency is dependent on the existence of irreducible, autonomous selves seems to be shared by the texts of Guha, Schwarz and Ahmad. The threat to such agency is variously seen as arising from the incursions of theory (Ahmad), historiography (Guha), and (instrumental) reason (Schwarz). But there is a point of divergence: while Guha and Schwarz, positioned on the familiar side of the epistemological barrier, are anxious to avoid doing violence to the objects on the other side, Ahmad positions himself as that object, protesting the violence done to it by theory. In other words, while Ahmad's text marks a resistance to theory on the part of a subject who considers it an attempt to objectify him, Guha's and Schwarz's texts, as if in response to this complaint, are anxious to eliminate from their intellectual operations the offending theoretical apparatus. In Guha's text the failure to specify adequately one of its concerns - the need for a materialist historiography to overcome the tendency to impose an ideal of worker-peasant on the class struggles of the past - leads to an equally idealist faith in the rebellious groups' "internal principle of elaboration." In Schwarz there is an equation of the (instrumental) reason of the Army Handbook (196) with Reason or with the very attempt to comprehend. This leads him to conclude: "As Guha remarks on the impossibility of fully knowing the consciousness of the Other, the distance between these two perspectives can never be reconciled, but rather it must be acknowledged that the 'distortion is parametric'; reading Third World literature can only be a political practice of reflection on our own situation, a reflection that makes us aware of the gaps and blind spots within the strategic model we have developed, and of what we are doing about them" (Schwarz, 198). The call for a self-critique that is heard in this passage is one thing; quite another is the imperative to produce and protect an unintelligibility as the measure of "our" failures and crimes. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that this charitable gesture of withdrawal and contemplation is a concession to Ahmad's demand. If the institution of literature is closely bound up with the history of the nation-state, there is no reason to take, as Jameson does, the predomi-
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nance of "private" "libidinal" preoccupations in the literature of advanced capitalist nations as indicative of a loss of that capacity for collective expression which, it would seem, distinguishes Third World literature.14 Another way of thinking about the differences between these two categories has to be found. The concept of "national allegory" that Jameson has introduced can be a useful component of such a rethinking, but first it has to be freed from its moorings in an Orientalist paradigm (as Ahmad recognizes) which some Marxist theory has shared with the dominant intellectual tradition. As Bryan Turner has shown, drawing on the extensive debates over the theory of modes of production, Marxism owes the notion of an "Asiatic mode of production" to the Orientalist tradition (Turner 31-2). Ahmad's charge against Jameson is that "a literary theorist who sets out to formulate 'a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of thirdworld literature' shall be constructing ideal types, in the Weberian manner, duplicating all the basic procedures which orientalist scholars have historically deployed in presenting their own readings of a certain tradition of 'high' textuality as the knowledge of a supposedly unitary object which they call 'the Islamic civilization"' (Ahmad, 4). Jameson takes the Weberian route, but in a different sense than Ahmad seems to imply. One can turn to Turner again for his account of the internalist (Weberian) and externalist explanatory models that compete with each other in the social sciences. Internalist explanations are theories of development which treat "the main problems of 'backward societies' as a question of certain characteristics internal to societies considered in isolation from any international societal context.... Another important dimension of internalist theory is that development is conceptualized in terms of a set of contrasts between dichotomous ideal types - GemeinschaftlGesellschaft, tradition/modernity, religious/secular. Alternatively, development is treated as a process through a series of necessary stages- primitive, pre-modern, modern, post-industrial - which lead to an end-state society.... The outcome of development is the achievement of a stationary end-state which is a faithful replica of the liberal democracies of Western capitalism" (Turner, 10-11).15 What we are dealing with in the case of Ahmad and others is a sort of internalized internalism: In Ahmad we have a cultural internalism, in Radhakrishnan and Home an unreconstructed general internalism and in Jameson an internalism of modes of production, all three purporting to serve oppositional intellectual projects. In thus internalizing libidinal preoccupations as "western" and collective awareness as "Third World," each locates the "limits" of the libidinal are outside the "west." It would be more accurate to reinscribe all literatures in their national context, and then begin the analysis of the invisibility of the national framework in the western context and its hyper-visibility in the Third World context.
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The argument in this case would be, not that Third World literature is more expressive of the political realities of this world, but that for historical reasons, its critical focus is on a collective social reality more than on (say) an individual's existential crisis. And further, that even the literary representations of existential crises in the Third World context cannot be read in isolation from the national/collective framework. What all this means is that there cannot be two distinct theories of literature, one specific to the Third World and the other to the First World. In this sense, the turn in the revised version of Jameson's text to "world," rather than "Third World" literature, may be an advance (though still restricted to the title) towards the proper point of departure in the general that would enable a theoretically productive approach to the concrete. The question of the proper place to begin is important enough to require further elaboration. It is curious that, at the moment of producing a theory of Third World literature, Jameson should find it necessary to embrace the essentialist self-image of the West as a homogeneous entity and, in existentialist terms, lament "our" failure to keep alive a sense of collectivity. We have seen this gesture in Schwarz to be partly the result of a caution exercised against the easy tendency to presume to speak for the Third World. But as we also noted above, that gesture at once locates the resistance to the "West" outside it. Even Jameson temporarily forgets the class struggle in the West. (Indeed in this particular essay Jameson's argument goes against almost every important theoretical proposition in The Political Unconscious.) On the question of the status of the political, Jameson finds that in the First World the split between private and public ("Freud versus Marx") has a powerful hold over "individual and collective lives" (141). In the Third World, on the other hand, an allegorical dimension makes even the personal political. Of course Jameson is making the latter argument only about Third World texts while the former is extended to cover First World lives as well as texts. But when the extra emphasis on the line from life was based on the principles of Sembene Ousmane's novel-"Its recalled (Jameson, 152), it becomes community interdependence" -is clear that the allegorical dimension of textual representations is being extended to the non-discursive realm as well. Thus, Jameson locates the limits of individualism in the pre-capitalist societies which, as we noted above, were invoked as the limits of "economic man" as well. Indeed, here these two arguments come together, because economic man and individualist ideology are aspects of the same social formation. Jameson's argument thus falls into the mold of some of the other texts that we have been considering; it evokes a certain nostalgia for the cohesiveness of precapitalist communities (this is not the case in the reading of Lu Xun, where "nation" is used in a more strictly modern sense). Jameson is using two models of difference, one based on modes of production, which
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perforce invites internalist explanations, and the second based on the split within the capitalist mode of production between exploiter and exploited. Because of this the distinguishing features of the West, the once imperialist East, and Africa become inherent differences. On the other hand, like Schwarz, Jameson reads Third World literature as a mirror in which "a more unvarnished and challenging image of ourselves" can be discerned (140). The question of the nation and community has to be investigated further. In the nation-states of the West, the destruction of "community interdependence" in feudal society preceded the formation of the national collection of individual citizens that was the achievement of the bourgeois revolution. The nation-state's citizenry, whose private and public domains were constituted for them by the bourgeois revolution, already contained the principles of new forms of solidarity - class solidarity in the main. The class for whom politics is a pistol shot in the middle of a concert is most at home the idea of a nation as a community of private individuals. All classes, however, do not find that position of free, selfinterested citizen as hospitable as the bourgeoisie. For the new nationstates, whose survival depends on participation in the international economy "voluntarily," the adoption of a hierarchical structure of representative administration brings conflicts which are read by a Weberian sociology as the result of a clash of modern and precapitalist consciousness. While such analyses have hitherto tended to look for ways to hasten the march into modernity, certain postmodernisms read the conflicts in celebratory ways as signs of the resistance to modernity. Jameson's reading is partly informed by this latter strategy, but the more valuable part of his text is the one which suggests that the reassertion of precapitalist communal solidarity is an oppositional deployment of collective identity as a weapon of class struggle. To which we must add that the question of its adequacy remains to be asked. A theory of (Third) World literature cannot be produced from any already available position. This specific question of theory, moreover, affords an opportunity to rethink the question of the locus of articulation of theory in general in the postmodern world. Here it would be useful to recall the epistemological barrier and the positions that the theorists we have considered so far have taken up on either side of it. Ahmad, for instance, like the anthropologist in the story, finds himself on both sides, even though he speaks, for the most part, from one side. Schwarz, Guha and the poststructuralist theorists find themselves on the more privileged side of the barrier, attempting to conceal or neutralize the privilege by strategies of self-effacement and celebration of the other side's autonomy from their conceptual frameworks. A somewhat unusual version of this latter dilemma is what Jameson is also stuck with and what leads his theoretical project into orientalist pitfalls. To make the problem clear, a
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brief detour into Edward Said's understanding of the role of the intellectual will be useful. In an interview with Bruce Robbins, Said talks about his notion of intellectual "affiliation." BR: Since you mentionRaymondWilliams, he makes an interesting
distinction, as I'm sure you know, between alignment and commitment, the latter being more intentional. Alignment is what you are stuck with. I wonder whether you could locate "affiliation" in relation to that distinction. ES: The point is of course intention. If you want to put it in a Freudian context, it's the move from unaware alignment to active commitment that he's interested in, the bringing of social relationships to consciousness. BR: I didn't ask my question well. I guess I always wondered how much intention there was in affiliation, how close it was to alignment and how close it was to commitment. ES: Oh I see. That's a tough one. Well, I suppose it's closer to the notion of alignment than it is to commitment. It has also to do with larger degrees of involuntary association, complicity, and so forth than it does with active commitment. The problem of commitment is a very difficult one. It's not difficult in England, where there's a settled political tradition. Here, the notion of commitment is necessarily tactical. There is really no discourse of the left here. There is no left formation of any sort, unless you think the Democratic Party is the left. So the notion of commitment becomes a very difficult one to use. That's why it struck me as not possible to employ it in the American context, except within a very limited compass (Robbins, 48).
The significance of this passage lies in the way in which Said's response collapses the distinction that Raymond Williams' terms are meant to signify. Williams would seem to be distinguishing between a relationship to a cause which is theorized, as opposed to one that is taken for granted, one that one finds oneself in. In pointing to the absence of a "left formation," a settled political tradition, in the United States, Said effectively thinks commitment itself as a form of alignment/affiliation. To be part of an already existing constituency, whether it is race, nation, gender or a left formation, is to be not committed at all but affiliated. On the other hand, any of these affiliations, when historicized and retheorized, would give us, in Williams' sense, the basis for a commitment. The difference lies in the historicizing break that the intellectual has to make with natural affiliations. In a way Jameson can be understood to be in search of "already existing" left formations. For this reason when he sets out to produce a theory, he ends up with a left literary anthropology or a typology of collective struggles. Thus an unexpected but real affinity between Jameson and Ahmad begins to reveal itself, which I would suggest is the chief obstacle in the way of Jameson's theoretical project. The dominant modes of knowledge production thus get reproduced in the most unlikely spaces,
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a fact which indicates of the immensity of the task of re-thinking given versions of the concrete. For the anthropologization of the left also proceeds from the continued occupation of the western humanist subject position as the point of articulation of the theory. Thus it is as a disillusioned western reader of libidinal literary texts that have exhausted their interest for him, that Jameson launches his search for a theory. But a theory of literature in the late capitalist world, like a theory of capitalism in general, cannot proceed from one position in capitalist discourse and take as its object another region also within it: the structure of anthropology is already evident in this schematic formulation. The critique of political economy was undertaken by Marx neither from the position of bourgeois political economists nor from some real or hypothetical "existing" working class position. There the position occupied by the theorist was itself produced by the theory and elaborated at the same time as it is occupied. In the same way, a theory of (Third) World literature cannot be produced either from the position of a Western reader or from that of a "native," for even the former is a kind of nativism. The theory has to overcome both of these and produce a new position, which for the present can only be a potentiality, that it will occupy and elaborate. Thus it is only after an analysis of literature as a nationalist institution and accounting for the different degrees of visibility of the national framework in various clusters of national literatures, that a global theory of literature as a "repeatable" institution becomes possible. The first task, then, is to investigate the reasons for the greater visibility of the national frame of reference in Third World literatures than in those of the European and American advanced capitalist nations. The extension of the primary capitalist nations' frame of reference to universal proportions in the imperialist era and the consequent fragmentation and reconstruction of this overstretched frame at the moment of withdrawal forced by anti-imperialist movements may be at the heart of the effect of "freedom from national determinations" that is widely installed in those nations. Another direction taken by nationalism in the west is towards a historically determined redefinition of a European cultural identity as subsuming and preserving French, English or other national identities. This cohesion of nationalities takes place in the imperialist era in a sort of second mirror stage, when the colonies in their perceived despotic/primitive homogeneity as other reflect back to the west its essential unity in spite of economic competition. The First World comes into being in this way as a recognizable concentration of globally dominant forces enjoying privileged access to a very large portion of the global surplus value through what Dussel has called the process of transfer of surplus value. This factor is the cohesive force that enables the production
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A Theory World Literature of Third
of the west as a self-identical cultural entity. The west, in other words, is a name for the class solidarity of imperialist capital. Third World nationalisms, on the other hand, are primarily counter-nationalisms, which produced national identities on the model of, but also against the domination of, the primary capitalist nation states. Their efforts to attain subjecthood (the effect of a self-generated historical momentum) were not due to any internal necessity but to external pressure - it is a requirement for "voluntary" and "self-interested" participation in the global economy. For this reason, the nation as a frame of reference is a constant presence in cultural production. As Ahmad points out, the indigenous bourgeoisies of Third World nations do achieve the private/public, libidinal/political differentiation characteristic of western social formations. And as he also argues, such divisions need not prevent the reading of the "libidinal" text as a cultural-expressive system of signification. But a reading of, say, an Indian "libidinal-private" text on its own terms is only possible from within a nationalist framework, i.e., from a position in which the national framework is invisible as a result of complete assimilation into the nationalist ideology or the kind of deliberate forgetting Radhakrishnan recommended above. What appears as libidinal/private to the hypothetical (and in the case of the counter-nationalities, never wholly realizable) fully assimilated citizen-subject would necessarily seem, to the "western" reader equipped with Orientalist and developmentalist frameworks, to be expressive of the nation's essence. The institutionalization of developmentalism ensures this effect. While defining counter-nationalities in collective terms, the centre defines itself as a "free" space occupied by free individuals. The post-colonial intellectual, moreover, shares this perspective because of his/her location in a ground of comparison which is inescapable without a radical transformation of the global order. It is a partial adoption of this developmental apparatus of representation that leads to Jameson's division of world literature into national allegory on the one hand and "libidinal-private" on the other. The only way out of this model is to begin by redefining the libidinal/private in its allegorical status (its relation to particular nations but especially to particular classes - a class allegory) and collapsing the distinction which originates in capitalist ideology. The greater visibility of the national frame of reference in Third World literature may be a function primarily of the historical conditions under which these nations came into being. The developmental paradigm under whose aegis "independence" for colonized regions became possible in the capitalist era creates the temporal order (Radhakrishnan's "western time" and Benjamin's homogeneous empty time) in which the contemporaneity of various social formations appears to be structured by a time-lag. The appearance of a fortuitous developmental gap that serves to conceal the necessity of the uneven and combined development of regions of the
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globe for capitalism, is part of the nation-state's ideology. Moreover, in so far as a global order, with its implicit value allocations, is a constant and active element of postcolonial subjectivity, internal comparison/competition is always accompanied by a comparison/competition at the international level. The tension between these two levels of articulation is a constitutive element of Third World literature - whether that tension is itself part of the representation (giving rise to allegory) or whether it functions as a determinant of reading practices - that the term "national allegory" may usefully signify. This is where the contemporary interest in allegory might prove to be of some interest. Craig Owens, in "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," argues that there was a "critical suppression of allegory" which is "one legacy of romantic art theory that was inherited uncritically by modernism" (Owens, 209).
From the [French] Revolution on, [allegory] had been enlisted in the service of historicism to produce image upon image of the present in terms of the classical past. This relationship was expressed not only superficially, in details of costume and physiognomy, but also structurally, through a radical condensation of narrative into a single, emblematic instant...in which the past, present, and future, that is, the historical meaning, of the depicted action might be read.... Syntagmatic or narrative associations were compressed in order to compel a vertical reading of (allegorical) correspondences (Owens, 210).
Without falling into the trap of siding with one of these opposed tendencies against the other, as inherently good or bad, we can see that Owens' characterization of a historic conflict of aesthetic modes suggests that the issues were clearly political. Owens goes on to suggest, through a reading of Benjamin on Baudelaire, that "in practice at least, modernism and allegory are not antithetical, that it is in theory alone that the allegorical impulse has been repressed" (212). In this theory, allegory and symbol are distinguished with a positive valence to the latter term, as in Coleridge: "The Symbolical cannot, perhaps, be better defined in distinction from the Allegorical, than that it is always itself a part of that, of the whole of which it is the representative" (Owens, 213). This "expressive theory of the symbol" relates "the symbol with aesthetic intuition and allegory with convention" (214). In Benedetto Croce, a further advance towards the total aestheticization of the art work is made by treating allegory as a supplement, in order to preserve the unity of form and content. What is valuable for our analysis in Owens' discussion is the suggestion that allegory's capacity for including (self)critical layers of discourse is one of the main reasons for its suppression. If this is linked to the role Owens regards romantic art theory as playing in the suppression, a strong suggestion emerges that the suppression of allegory was necessary for the successful institutionalization, in our case, of the study of literature. The critical function is reserved for art's superstructure, that
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discipline which makes the art work its object. It is not just that romantic art theory aestheticizes the art work, de-allegorizes it: after all, as Owens points out, this can only occur in theory and does not always affect the allegorical dimension of the text itself (which remains dependent on the artist's and the viewer/reader's positions). The more important conclusion is that in the process of theorizing the symbolic rather than allegorical status of the text, art theory creates itself as a legitimate and necessary domain. In insisting on the artistic text's unity with its context, theory claims its own autonomy from it. The extent to which the national-allegorical dimension of a literary text is visible can now be seen as a function of a variety of factors. What we call the "libidinal/individualist" text is one whose historical meaning is the responsibility of the institution of literary studies. Which is not to say that that text is free of allegorical signification, but that the very idea of a text being free of "allegory" and therefore "individualistic" is an idea that only arises with the division of the aesthetic from the theoretical/critical functions. An important consequence is the isolation of the aesthetic function from the political. In contrast to the global bourgeois solidarity whose emblem is the "First World," the absence of solidarity among the "differentially integrated" and exploited peoples of the Third World is painfully evident. Such a solidarity has been attempted by the Third World nations in reformist forums such as the Non-Aligned Movement. If, as Ahmad points out, "an average Nigerian who is literate about his own country would know infinitely more about England and the United States than about any country of Asia or Latin America or indeed about most countries of Africa," the reasons may lie in the reality of metropolitan mediation, in the fact that competitive nation-states have to concentrate all their efforts on "catching up" with the West, which has yet to heed Radhakrishnan's call to make sacrifices. And the compulsive collective mediation of individual utterances that is characteristic of this condition of postcolonial competitive nation-statehood may prove to be a suitable point of departure for a global cultural critique. Works Cited
Ahmad, Aijaz. "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory.' Social Text 17 (Fall, 1987). 3-25. Dhareshwar, Vivek. "Toward a Narrative Epistemology of the Postcolonial Predicament." Inscriptions 5(1989). 135-157. See also, the essay in Theory between the Disciplines. Dussel, Enrique. "Marx's Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63 and the 'Concept' of Dependency." Latin American Perspectives 65(17.2) (Spring 1990). 62-101. Guha, Ranajit. "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency." Ranajit Guha, ed. Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society (SS II). Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.1-42. -, "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India." Ranajit Guha, ed. Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982. 1-8.
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Home, Haynes. "Jameson's Strategies of Containment." Douglas Kellner, ed. Postmodernism/JamesonlCritique. Washington D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 268-300. Jameson, Fredric. "World Literature in an Age of Multinational Capitalism." Koelbe and Lokke, eds. The Current in Criticism. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1987. 139-158. Revised version of "Third World Literature in an Age of Multinational Capitalism." Social Text 15 (Fall 1986). 65-88. Marx, Karl. Capital Vol.1 New York: Vintage, 1977. Mitchell, W.J.T. ed. Against Theory:Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Morton, Donald. "The Politics of the Margin: Theory, Pleasure, and the Postmodern Conferance." The American Journal of Semiotics 5.1 (1987). 95114. Owens, Craig. "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism." Hal Wallis ed. Art After Modernism. 203-235. Patnaik, Arun K. "Reification of Intellect." Economic and Political Weekly: Review of Political Economy. January 27, 1990. PE-12-19. Pines, Jim and Paul Willemen. Questions of Third Cinema. London: BFI, 1989. Prasad, Madhava. "The New International Party of Order: A Critique of the Neo-Pragmatist Alliance in the Literary Academy. (forthcoming) Radhakrishnan,R. "Poststructuralist Politics: Towards a Theory of Coalition." Douglass Kellner ed. Postmodernism/ Jameson/ Critique. Washington D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 268-300. Robbins, Bruce. "American Intellectuals and Middle East Politics: An Interview with Edward Said." Social Text 19/20 (Fall, 1988). 37-53. Schwarz, Henry. "Provocations Toward a Theory of Third World Literature." Mississippi Review 49/50 (1989). 177-201. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour. Humanities Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. Turner, Bryan S. Marx and the End of Orientalism. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978. Volosinov, V.N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.Trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Williams, Raymond. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso.
Notes
I wish to thankDonald Mortonfor his critiqueof earlierversions of this text. 1. Adherentsof psychoanalyticreadingpracticesmay seize upon the potentialhere for a reading in terms of Oedipal politics, with the First World anthropologistand the native intellectualfiguring as rivals in a struggleover the mother(land)'s body. But while such a narrativecould well be a structuringelement in the microsocial manifestationsof the conflict, the reality of class strugglecannot be capturedby means of this mythical grid of intelligibility.However, such an analysis, if pursuedagainst a historicalbackground,with attentionto questionsof propertyand sovereignty,would certainlythrowadditionallight on the patriarchal roots of nationalistculturalstudies. 2. Jameson'sproject,in its essentials, closely resembles anothertheoreticalundertaking, this time in cinema -the third cinema movement, whose theory was written by Latin Americanintellectuals.Indeedboth the projectscan be said to belong to thathistoryof the Third World as political concept that may only now be ending, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the important thing hereis thatJameson'sprojectsharesmuch more with its counterpart drive for dominion to which Ahmad in cinema than with the metropolitan seems to want to link it (See Pines and Willemen,esp. 1-64). It is problematic,to place this projecton the wrong side of racialand genderpolitics (as Ahmad does on page 24) on the basis of speculationsconcerningthe trueinclinationsof oppressedsubjects. 3.See Mitchell, esp. 11-30, 48-52, 95-105, 106-131. 4. I have investigatedthe class alliance that seems to come about "naturally" between in a critiqueof neopragmatist ThirdWorldprotectionistsand poststructuralists pragmatists,
82
alliance politics in its international phase, entitled"The New International Partyof Order: Alliance in the LiteraryAcademy"(forthcoming). A Critiqueof the Neo-Pragmatist 5. Marx, Manuscriptsof 1861-63, quoted in Dussel, 85. thatthis theoryhadalreadybeen 6. Anotherpoint of interestof the text is its demonstration of 1861-63, which arecurrently being partiallydeveloped in Marx'sEconomicManuscripts published. 7. Arun Patnaik puts forward a similar critique of the currenttendency to situate the "limits"of capitalismoutside the capitalistcentre, in those pre-capitalist formationswhich resist the encroachments of capital.Patnaik'scritiquepointsout, first,thatMarxrecognized the "limits" of economic (Smithian, self-seeking, individualistic)man to lie within the formationsareintegrated into capitalistsystem andnot outsideit, secondly,thatprecapitalist the capitalist system through alliances between the respective elites, that "a substantial section of the newly formed economic man emerges from within the pre-capitalist sectors which co-exist with the capitalistsector,"etc. (Patnaik,PE-13,14). This analysis brings us back to the inside/outsidedivision, the notion of an identity that consists of a substantial interioritywhich we found in operationin Ahmad'stext. 8. But nationalisthistory is not content to projectany single elite vision as the true one. As Raymond Williams pointed out in his discussion of the history of Hyde Park (see his Problems in Materialismand Culture),the fact thatHyde Parkbecame a place for political struggleagainstthe legal/ parliamentary machinerydoes gatheringsonly aftera protracted into a progressivisthistoryof liberaldemocracyas a not preventit from being incorporated symbol. The spiritual narrativeof bourgeois democracy does not always agree with the interestsof the rulingclasses, otherwisethey wouldn'tbe claimingthatKarlMarxis a jewel in the crown of "westem civilization"! 9. In the other text that Schwarzquotes from extensively, "The Prose of Counter-Insurcategory of historiographythose writings which gency," Guha includes, in his "tertiary" present "an ahistorical view of the history of insurgency" in which "all moments of in the name of consciousness are assimilated to...an Ideal Consciousness,""regrettably, Marxism"(SS II, 39). essentialism"see Dhareshwar, whose conclusionsI quote 10. On the questionof "strategic here: "The strategicessentialist subscribesin principle to the critiqueof essentialismand the unspecified and unspecifiableideal thatit posits but feels thatto act on thatideal would mean deserting struggles of resistance organized aroundessentialist categories. Strategic essentialism turns out to be an awkwardresolution of a false problem generatedby the theorist's attempt to use the vocabularies and figures of theory as foundational" (Dhareshwar152). The casualtyin this oscillation between theoreticaladvancesand political compromises,is the domain of explanation,where the interestin strugglesderives not from a desire to adequatethem to an independentlydeveloped theoreticalknowledge but from the necessity of explaining their historicalconditions of possibility and, througha critique,producingnew knowledges thatmight enable these strugglesto move forward. 11. See Marx, The EighteenthBrumaireof Louis Bonaparte. 12. The symptomatic appearancehere of charity as a mechanism for achieving global economic balanceshouldremindthe readerof the role of charityas an institution(beginning in the nineteenth century) for producing and preserving an "other"as separate in an economic sense (because no obligation is recognizedtowardsthis foreign entity) but one's own in a moral sense. What is denied at the political-economiclevel is the basis of what is acknowledged,in a compensatoryfashion, in the "moraleconomy"of charity. were pioneeredand 13. In any case, well before Lyotard,certainkinds of fragmentation "implemented"by multinationalcompanies and other regulatorybodies of the capitalist because "the "liberatory" economy. When Home, following Lyotard,finds fragmentation of social life itself' by meansof thevery fragmentation possibilities for resistanceproliferate not speakingof somethinglike whathappened,to takejust one recent (273) he is presumably example, to the British National Union of Teachers'decision to preparefor nation-wide strikes in supportof retrenchedteachers.The general body of the union voted 105,000 to 78,000 (See the LondonDaily Telegraph,April 17, 1990) against"the executive's attempt to block a motion opening the way to illegal [national]strikes."The executive committee refused to endorsethe decision of the generalbody andclaimedthatonly the teachersin the particularschools/zones affected may legally go on strike. The majoritywho voted for nationwide action, the executive said, were "deceived by people wanting a head-on clash
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with government." Here is a case of proliferationof possibilities for resistance! The seek to producesimilar effects in culture. ideologues of differenceand fragmentation 14. Here one may recall Volosinov's remarks on individualism: "A special kind of character marksthe individualisticself-experience....The individualisticexperience is fully differentiated and structured. Individualismis a special ideological form of the "we-experience" of the bourgeois class (there is also an analogous type of individualisticself-experience for the feudal aristocratic class).... The structure of the conscious, indivldual personality is just as social a structureas is the collective type of experience"(Volosinov, 89). 15. The American ruling class, for instance, has found Moynihan's famous internalist explanationof black poverty well-suited to their interests.
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On the Question of a Theory of (Third World) Literature Author(s): Madhava Prasad Source: Social Text, No.

On the Questionof a Theory of (ThirdWorld)Literature

A Theory World Literature of Third

an ideal rather than the real historical personWorker-and-Peasant,

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