Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1998 13:58:14 -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: 
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 samae "rationality' they
would most likely be in that frame, ideology, theory, whaterver already.
Marx doesn't recognize culture as such but only as a residual of all of the
other materialist articulations of history...I would suggest that there are
many "spaces" and many "times"..Young's critique that LP uses as evidence
i.e., "driven from one conceptual scheme to another" suggests to me that
the over arching frame is not acknowledged...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 is that
there are millions who "live so lightly on the land" with abstract
resources that they can distance themselves 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 simulactum 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 spaces.  Memmi I believe, speaks to this
in the colonizer/colnonized.  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.




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