Editorial Comment: On Theory's Empire

Arjun Appadurai, Carol A. Breckenridge, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, and Lauren Berlant

From its inception, Public Culture has been concerned with the cultural politics of transnational formations. This has meant that the journal has consistently had to confront the paradoxes of nation and state, not least in refusing to separate cultural practices, political forms, and economic effects. Because of this concern, and because both Aijaz Ahmad and Fredric Jameson are members of the editorial collective of Public Culture, Ahmad‘s book, In Theory: Ckzsses, Nations, Literatures, calls for a debate among readers of this journal, and others concerned with the politics of theory. One point of entry into this debate can be found in the last lines of In Theory: “In other words, the socialist project is essentially universalist in character, and socialism, even as a transitional mode, cannot exist except on a transnational basis; yet the struggle for even the prospect of that transition presumes a national basis, in so far as the already existing structures of the nation-state are a fundamental reality of the very terrain on which actual class conflicts take place.”

Like Ahmad and his critics, the editors of Public Culture are struggling with ways to interpret and critique the current crisis of the nation form. Some of us are more pessimistic about it than others, but we share the sense that the cultural crisis of late capitalism has much to do with the current and diverse terms of trade between various nation-states and the transnational ideologies, movements and formations they encounter and host. Our principal concern is to map and critique the material effects and articulations of an emergent transnational order, whose structure remains open to, but also resists, decipherment. This involves the effort to characterize this order, its global forms, its contingent logics, and the realities of the local. Since the characterization of this order is inevitably subject to struggles between knowledges, their producers and the sites of their dissemination, we are necessarily concerned with the politics of theory. As a cultural studies journal produced in the United States, but constituted by the academic and biographical experiences of scholars working throughout the world, Public Culture seeks to problematize the relationship between metropolitan theory and its multiple destinations. That very relationship is the object of Ahmad‘s critique.

Ahmad’s polemical reading of Jameson, Salman Rushdie and especially Edward Said has distracted some readers from what we take to be the overarching argument of In Theory, which is laid out in the first and second chapters and recontextualized in the last chapter. It is this larger argument which we believe is of the greatest importance to the readers of Public Culture. We take the key steps in this argument to be as follows: that the model of “Three Worlds” contains distortions; that these distortions facilitate and underwrite the category of Third World Literature”; that this latter, specious category, has drawn strength from the poststructuralist thrust of much literary criticism in the Euro-American world in the last few decades, and from the overvalued ideology of the migrant; that poststructuralist assumptions about literature and a broader stream of postcolonial discourse (including fiction), and their principal theorists and exemplars perpetuate the very “Third World” images that distract us from the profound transnational workings of capitalism, and are complicit in the conflicts between genders and classes in national cultural formations; and that the complexities of genre and voice cut across national boundaries.

The most relevant feature of this argument is the way Ahmad links a narrative of decolonization to a narrative of the history of literary theory (especially in the United States). In these narratives, Ahmad argues, genuinely emancipatory politics gets occluded by an irresponsible romance with rootless migrant ideologies and fetishized national fantasies. Insofar as In Theory has elicited heated responses, these appear to have much to do with Ahmad‘s long quotation from Raymond Williams, which distinguishes exile from vagrancy (p. 157). Ahmad‘s complaint about much poststructuralist literary theory is that it is the product of a particularly debilitating sort of vagrancy, lacking in communal solidarity, in moral purpose, and-worst of all-inclined to celebrate the pleasures of these very deficits. The power and provocation of Ahmad’s critique of Said and Jameson springs from his association of their work with the sort of unprincipled vagrancy he finds in Rushdie. It is just this association, and the tone of its formulation, that has enraged most of Ahmad’s critics.

By extension, all those whose work and thought has to any extent been affected by Foucault’s antihumanism, Derrida’s readerly scepticisms, De Man’s deconstructive strictures, Rushdie’s free-floating magical realism, Jameson’s cultural “third-worldism,” or Said’s suspicions of Western orientalisms tout court, are on trial in the pages of In Theory. This accounts for the widespread annoyance among academics with the book and for the effort, in some circles, to asphyxiate it by silence.

For our part, we wish to identify a series of questions and problems which come out of In Theory and the debate printed in the following pages. First, how are we to assess the ”politics of location,” a matter on which Ahmad and some of his critics sharply disagree? To the extent that theory is not only explanatory or historical but is simultaneously transformative and exhortatory, it has both a history and a trajectory. It has sources and objects. It has motives and desires. Ahmad is equivocal about what it means to invoke the politics of location. One troubling feature of In Theory is that it does not clarify the difference between location as a matter of solidarity and addressability, and location as a matter of personal interest and circumstance. He implies, at times, that where one is located or “coming from” (nation, city, university, profession, ethnic group, political party) somehow exhausts the question of location.

But another message of In Theory concerns the question of audience, of to whom one is speaking and what one is seeking to change. With Ahmad, we take the question of the scene of engagement to be central to any politically ambitious criticism. But we need to resist the tendency of both Ahmad and his critics to hierarchize audiences as either central or trivial to the work of social transformation as well as the tendency to judge critics according to the authenticity of their audiences. This is especially important, as Ahmad so persuasively argues, at a moment when the traditional and utopian aims of socialism seem to have become discredited by various poststructuralist (sometimes postpolitical) modes of social theory and collective activity.

What haunts these discussions is the question of professions and professionalism. One does not have to occupy the radical spaces of postmodern social theory, populated by decentered subjects and unstable objects, to recognize that both the individual author and the authorial individual are bourgeois pieties. Yet, since we recognize that our voices invariably reflect both our histories and our interests, the material conditions of our work and the horizons of transformation we hope to push (as Ahmad would have us do), we need to probe more carefully the relationships between authorship and authority, between professionalism and career building, between the settings in which we gain our livelihoods and the usually more desperate and opaque circumstances of those (including ourselves) with whose political struggles we identify. There is, in any case, a complicated set of moral challenges involved in speaking for/as others, especially when such speech is rewarded professionally for quite other reasons than the politics that animate it. As intellectuals, we are invariably products of the seductive tolerance of our professional worlds. However much we claim to speak from and to a circle of solidarities far from the rewards of tenure and adulation, book reviews and interviews, gossip and its rewards, censorship and its romance, we are creatures of reading and writing, and the vast set of professional seductions they offer. Here then is another question: how can we create a set of conditions for debate, dissent, or even polemic that will allow us to recognize the contradictions that mediate persons and positions, authors and authority, location and destinations? Harder still, how can we do so under transnational conditions of publication, publicity, career building and academic power politics?

The final question we wish to pose is the most troubling of all. In Theory argues that literary theory in the Western academy over the last few decades has not only been anaemic, self-indulgent and eclectic in the worst sense, but has also provided a distraction from the actualities of power, of violence and of repression on a worldwide scale. Ahmad is careful not to make the fetishizing error of laying the entire problem at the door of literature and literary theory. Rather, he sees a certain conjuncture of literature and theory as having, in spite of its recent tilt toward history and power, gender and class, empire and hegemony, provided a largely false picture of the way the world works and the way works about the world work. First, a major fiction has been perpetrated, which is that life itself is a representation that requires "interpretation"; second, acts of literary criticism and theorizing have come to stand for praxis.

This is a stunning indictment. But it raises, at least as a nightmare, the prospect for those of us who work the terrain of Euro-American cultural studies in the last decade of the twentieth century, that our greatest illusion is our preoccupation with the politics of representation as such, not just in matters of literature, but in politics as such.

There is no easy awakening from this nightmare. From one point of view, the business of literature is indeed distraction, the business of theory is the accumulation of professional capital, the business of culture is domination, and in a deeply commoditized world, the business of all of these things is business. Here then is the dilemma: to concede to these facts is to admit that politics has no future in theory; to deny them often leads to the professional illusion that we can simultaneously serve the global politics of interpretation and the struggle for global socialism.

Yet In Theory itself invites us to imagine (through its critique of currently dominant modes of literary criticism) a practice of theory which responds equally to the need for global emancipation and the claims of the work, the occasion, the location, the voice. This has never been an easy proposition, but it is a daunting task when transnational processes create complex, emergent links between occasions and contexts of every type. The name and the space of this paradox, in In Theory and for Public Culture, remains the nation. Theory, like the nation, has its emancipatory as well as its repressive moments and possibilities. The problem is to engage the relations between these moments and possibilities, so that the work of theory like the work of the nation generates, as it must, the energy to mobilize an engaged point of view in relation to an object that refuses to stop changing. The circle of political solidarities may be differently constituted for Ahmad and for those he criticizes, but it consists surely not only in a world of persons, in which we work and think, but also in a world of relationships we seek to build and to change.