Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 09:14:40 -0800
From: "Marlene R. Atleo" <maratleo-AT-island.net>
Subject: Re: Homi K. Bhabha's Writing -Reply


Etymology....as a social product would suggest that the sociohistorical
development of persons and language go hand in glove....
so it would depend on whose hand in whose glove...
>...... I sometimes tell students really good theory is akin to
>poetry, because it opens the mind to as-yet unexplored cognitive >spaces.
> 
>But If I have to choose between Bhabha and Douglas R. Hofstadter, who
>writes about great complexities in limpid, supple, playful and quite lovely
>prose, I'll take Hofstadter any day. (On the evidence, here, of *Le Ton
>Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language*.)
But lets face it, Hofstadter....plays with western patterns of logic....
western etymologies of logic that would be intuitively much less disturbing
that "other" logics...isn't that the point of Bhabha's writing....Said's
project is quiet different....he comes to the Western mind...Bhabha make it
reach....work....keeps you on the "verge of developing an understanding"

>I have occasionally caught myself doing something almost like Bhabha
>does, which for me is well described by the idea of "catacombing" --
>writing oneself deeper and deeper into a regress, and dropping further
>and further away from a contract of "reasonable explication" with the
>imagined reader, until there's just no way out anymore. The play just
>becomes too cool to worry about that reader. Let the reader make >whats/he
will of this, I'm grooving here. 
personal subjectivity and "group subjectivity" are just a little
different....I don't think what Bhabha is doing is as self indulgent as
your 'grooving'...in fact that I think is one of the issues....
Bhabha's "shuffling" into English makes room for people....navel gazing
grooving its not.....well....he may not be talking to you....he may be
talking to those who are like him....making their way in a strange country....

>Well, that no longer satisfies me, personally. The analogy with poetry is

>instructive. A writer like Bhabha would never get away with that kind of

>writing if his contract with the reader was to make poetry. Why?
>Because, I think, even "obscure" poetry has to carry an intensive >load of
>"work", something like Freud's dream-work in condensing >the latent in the
>manifest.

latent in the manifest.....what is manifest.....Bhabha is eliciting
something that is possibly pre-latent in the western mind....totally
underdeveloped and it chaffs, chaffs, chaffs....



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