It can seem that every time I return to Bhabha after an interval of time, or -- to use a more Bhabha'esque phrase -- after a "temporal disjunction," it's as if for the first time. Reading it can seem akin to this kind of processing: "Blah blah blah ambivalence blah blah blah hybridity blah blah blah third space." But I'm also being too hard on him, because inevitably I do come back to him, and I find that if I put in the work (arduous though it may be) in trying to assemble and follow the argument, the payoff is often nearly exciting. And you all? What do you think of "Sly Civility"? The idea I always struggle to clarify in this particular essay is that "less than one and double" notion: help?!
It is nice to officially post on the blog! As I was absent last week, I wanted to provide some areas that I found interesting in the reading last week, specifically about new historicism. One point in Parker’s article about new historicism that drew we was this statement: “New historicists argue that what makes a fact depends on the perspective we look from; it is a construction, not an essence” (220). I find this extremely interesting. Looking at history as a set of cemented facts prevents other perspectives from forming and leads to only one specific lens of interpretation. By understanding that history is diverse and, though set in the past, ever changing, a broader mode of communication can open between readers and literature.
ReplyDeleteThis enters White’s conversation about “The Value of Narrativity.” In one section, White states: “Once we note the presence of the theme of authority…we also perceive the extent to which the truth claims of the narrative and indeed the very right to narrate hinges upon a certain relationship to authority” (22). This quotation builds on how important it is to try to look at history through multiple perspectives. It is that concept that the dominator is writing the history and the defeated figure is not. In terms of postcolonialism, which we will be discussing today, this point can be seen in the relationship between Columbus and the natives, connected with the ‘other,’ whose voices are lost to the dominant figure. Furthermore, it is really interesting to see how the historical period influences literature of that time. I enjoyed Baktin’s article for this reason, particularly the section about grotesque realism in which “all forms of grotesque realism degrade, bring down to earth, turn their subject into flesh” (688). I find this interesting because it connects to the carnival as a means of creating a type of equality within the hierarchal system for a small length of time. In terms of my past education, I connect grotesque realism and carnivals to ancient religions—specifically the Bacchae rituals. While not always accepted, these secret rituals held at certain points during the year allowed a social deconstruction to occur between genders. Overall, I enjoyed this reading and am glad to have what feels like a firm grasp on new historicism. I look forward to our conversation about postcolonialism today!
I want to write something brilliant about “Sly Civility” but find that I am a bit stumped. “Less than one and double”? Our brief discussion last week shed a bit of light upon Bhabha’s cryptic prose, but I find myself still puzzling over it. The “less than one” bit is obvious within the context of (post)colonialism. We need look no further than our own government’s curious and shameful “Three-Fifths Compromise” at the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 to understand what Bhabha means by “less than one.” Bhabha’s “and” and “double,” of course, are more problematic. He spends a good deal of time expounding upon the “and,” and the subtext is that we have yet another critical binary on our hands to explore and explode. What he means by “double,” on the other hand, is (for me) the crux of that phrase. When I reread “Sly Civility,” I was struck by just how many times he references the act of “doubling.” I feel that one of the most intriguing mentions of “doubling” is a passage at the top of page 97; here Bhabha says that the “subject of colonial discourse” is “splitting, doubling, turning into its opposite, [and] projecting.” Bhabha explains “projection” on page 100, but I cannot find a further reference to “turning into its opposite.” I can’t help but wonder if “turning into its opposite” could in fact be related to W.E.D. DuBois’s idea of double consciousness. DuBois felt that marginalized—and in this case, colonized—people cannot help but see themselves through the eyes of their oppressors because of an imposed plurality of self-perception. He writes, “it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others” (citation unavailable since I am trapped in my office and my book is at home, but it’s a fairly famous quotation). I once thought that double consciousness must simply be an effect, passing from the colonizer to the colonized with little resistance. Yet being able to see this way suggests agency, especially if Bhabha’s “turning into its opposite” phrase is considered.
ReplyDeleteI’d better stop, in case I’m misinterpreting Bhabha. What do you all think?
I’m excited to have the opportunity to use this blog space in order to attempt to sort out some of Bhabha’s ideas in a little summary. I think that Bhabha is arguing that under the guise of valuing the “sign of civility” or the “spirited sound of the [voice of the people]” engaged in discussion, the colonizing so-called democratic government sweetly substitutes authoritarian “recordation” for this ideal form of representative government. However, this substitution only occurs in the convenient-strategic happenstance that the colonizing country doesn’t have the “advantage given by representative government of discussion by persons of all partialities, prepossessions and interests.” To me, this means in countries where there is a (willful on the part of the colonizer?) lack of communication and fair transaction between colonized and colonizer, the colonizing country replaces its own notions of democratic public discussion with a combination of “better-than-nothing” recordation (or despotic orchestration, a pseudo-democracy of partial liberty) and a justification for this substitution centered around the colonized country’s expected “progress” at the result of its colonization. I read recordation as a strategy of colonist regulation, the attempt of the authority to “throw themselves into the mental positions of those who think differently from them” in order to preserve their Western governmental ideals of liberty and police the colonized space (94). In other words, they feed their own delusion of serving democratic causes while also feeding their tyrannical tastes by substituting authoritarian self-interested writing, made by the colonialist about the colonized, for the public discussion they claim is impossible so that one may “govern one country under responsibility to the people of another” (96).
ReplyDeleteUltimately this whole dynamic is captured by what Bhabha sees as the distinction between the Western sign (alienated civil enunciation) and the actual colonial signification (colonialist address), which doubles into the contradictory father and oppressor identities of the colonizing country. He describes this as less than one and double. I think what Bhabha means by less than one and double is that where the Western sign is first created, off in the colonizing country, alienated from the colonized country, the authority in the name of freedom and progress uses the tool of recordation in order to control and speak for the other individuals of the country. So in other words, there are no complete or whole democrats, only partial “freedom fighters”…self-interested writers that dispatch kitten disguised tyrannical plans that are a little “less than liberty” (97). This contradictory delusion originating from the home country roots into the colonized country and sprouts into double headed contradictory impulse that it truly is in the form of both supposed paternal care and despotic consumption. This is my best guess at what less than one and double could mean. I’m sure we’ll talk more about this in class and perhaps come to more of a clear conclusion about these ideas. Ugh. Bhahba blah blah is quite right.
Wow, these comments are very helpful -- and thanks (to everyone) for being willing to do battle with this often opaque but still somehow beguiling and compelling essay: ambivalence in this operative word, in many respects, isn't it? Even if the overall argument (or parts of it) remains elusive at times, I hope that you sense the presence of Lacan and Derrida as you read Bhabha's assessment of the Colonizer/Colonized dynamic, as well as the presence of Foucault and Said.
ReplyDeleteLindsay, I think your DuBois connection is a very interesting and perceptive one. It has been years since I read DuBois, but I'd be curious to see how these two deployments of doubleness match up. The idea of "turning into its opposite" makes me think of the colonial project carried through to its ultimate end (which can only ever occur in theory, of course) with the Self and the Other becoming one and the same (I think it's in that context that I used that example last week of Frankenstein's monster reading Paradise Lost); the Colonizer becomes fearful of having lost the Self/Other opposition as the mimic relentlessly "acts" to become the object of imitation.
And, Sydney, in addition to your clarifying comments here, I liked (and am persuaded by) your idea in class last night about the title phrase referring as well to the Colonizer (especially since "the sign of civility" is prominently in play in the essay's opening moments). I've always associated it primarily with the colonized, mostly because the phrase itself (i.e., "sly civility") shows up in full only once, in that excerpt from the Archdeacon Potts sermon in the essay's latter stages: there the phrase relates to "the incalculable native," who in appearing to submit to hegemonic influence in fact subtly undermines it.
And "less than one and double." Well, for starters, Bhabha sees the Colonizer/Colonized relationship governed by a "conflictual economy": "both colonizer and colonized are in a process of miscognition where each point of identification is always a partial and double repetition of the otherness of the self." At least at this moment, I think of the Other (the colonized) as the Self's (Colonizer's) double, potentially, but when the gaze gets turned around, and when "the narcissistic demand of colonial authority" is thwarted (by "sly civility" or what have you), the whole notion of identity is imperiled and alienated from its essence (and thus becomes, in a sense, "less than one"). In another Bhabha essay ("Of Mimicry and Man"), he writes about that unsettling moment that "shatters the unity of man's being through which he extends his sovereignty." That makes the Colonizer/Colonized relationship sound like it's part of a Lacanian unfolding, doesn't it? The Colonizer's response to this might be to try to shore up his authority, which, by maintaining a "narcissistic inverted other," perhaps "stills, for a while, the supplementary signifier of colonial discourse."
Well, I'm just rehearsing all this stuff, so let me know if it's even partially helpful/intelligible!