Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1998 20:54:07 -0700
Subject: Re: Third Spaces and materialist critiques


I hope everyone has gotten Lawrence's essay by now and read it.


My reactions to the essay are on several different levels:


First, on a "gut level" - perhaps the experience of being socialized in one language, complete with oral history and then possibly learning to write that language or not but then learning to textualize oneself into another language which can in no way recognize the root language system/being except as an "error", a mis-pro-noun-ciation is psychically splitting.  To know oneself through the eyes of ones "mother tongue" and then to have to live in the "tongue of a stranger" is indeed about a materialist base....or rather a de-materializing base as the early experiences find no mirror in the "tongue of the stranger" only debasement.  Then the choice may be to develop the consciousness of the split to maintain the integrity of the "materialist base" of earliest experience or to deny that base and live in the abstraction of the language/literature/history of the other or possibly to vacillate between the two.

.................................

On theoretical and methodological levels:

One of the biggest problems in "post colonial" discussions I think is the need to bring others into the frame or the "most rational frame" in which to analyze what ever when if they were of the same "rationality" they would most likely be in that frame, ideology, theory, whaterver already. Where is the "oh, that is where you are coming from" and " while I can see your point, perspective, mine is very different from that...where do we diverge and where do we converge".....which demands something perhaps impossible...reflexivity of the "colonizing ideologies"


Marx doesn't recognize culture as such except as a mystification, as a residual of all of the other materialist articulations of history in sort of a totalizing way ....grand theorizing being what it is...possibly an attempt to place all under a rubric that can "control meanings" "for once and for all."..


I would suggest that there are many "spaces" and many "times/temporalities" besides the ones mapped and set by international convention..Young's critique that LP uses as evidence i.e., "driven from one conceptual scheme to another" suggests to me that the Bhabha's over arching frame i.e., culture as an analytic frame is never acknowledged but used in the same way that LP accuses Bhabha of using Western concepts.


Lefebvre's "subtle reformulation" of Marx's original observation of what might be called the dialectical relationship between culture and the material base" does not take into account the chicken/egg aspect of culture.

Lefebvre talks about the political organization of space expressing social relationships and reacting back on them.  It seems to me that there would be a need to go beyond the materialist base into the metaphysical which is what I think is possibly so disturbing about Bhabha's position to materialists.  Millions who "live so lightly on the land" with abstract resources, abstracting the value of materialist bases (accounting, marketing, money markets) find that they can distance themselves for a price from the ravages of materialist bases living in the "play" of abstract space.  I suggest that for many though the "play" of abstract space may be the only place where they live...a simulacrum with no "real" engagement but a parallelism that "others" "eachother" with neither wanting to move into the "third space" because the framework has not been agreed on for negotiation.  The very idea of needing to reveal the "contraditions of space" suggest that one cannot live with paradox but needs to resolve them.  Perhaps Orientalists can live with paradox without the need to resolve them.  I think we need to be able to understand the potential of the "third space" by understanding the contraditions of the other two theoretical spaces.


Memmi, I believe, speaks to this in the colonizer/colonized.  For example when LP uses "bourgeous private life" (Lefebvre) to illustrate Jameson's '.."spacial peculiarities" and ideological frames and practices." is he not concretizing (filling in the space/lower levels of analysis) of the abstraction of another?  I think that the developmental "spaces" that the colonizer and the colonized occupy are very different spaces while occupying the same space however "knotty" it may be.

In my estimation, the problem of levels of analysis and motivational modalities are not addressed convincingly in this essay.  Theoretical "play" is demonstrates that one can "do" rather than merely talk about "doing", that one can be a player rather than watch from the sidelines.  Others need to learn to "play the game" develop the cultural/social capital that resonates with their material experience before it can be folded back on the material base in institutional engagement.....a map of the back-ground so to speak, fore-grounded....

So tring to be short, from where I stand, LP's sincere materialist engagement with Bhabha's formulation of "space" brings out the major point that he denies that Bhabha's "play" is in "experiential space" because it is outside his experience......it may be a "space" that materialist analysis cannot capture in its mirroring of contradictions because it contradicts the mirror.




<color><param>ffff,0000,0000</param>?h ?h naa tuu kwiss - Ahousaht First
Nation, Nuu-chah-nulth

</color>Marlene Atleo, Doctoral student, ED Studies, UBC Canada

<color><param>0000,0000,ffff</param><bigger>In celebration of the
artifice that the artifact can only hint at.</bigger></color>


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