3. Politics and Identity

Transcription

1 Culture and Literature in the Global Context 3. Politics and Identity Professor Myung Soo Hur 1

2 Introduction The most important postmodernist ethical argument concerns the relationship between discourse and power. A discourse means a historically evolved set of mutually supporting statements, which are used to define a subject matter. In some sense, it is the language of the main intellectual disciplines like discursive practices of law and medicine. They involve politically contentious activities, not only because of the certainty with which they describe or define people just like a immigrant or criminal or mad, but also because such discourses at the same time express their political authority. The Power of Words All systematic uses of language are to be seen as having a particular power-enforcing function. You will believe whatever the young surgeon tells you and follow his directions. No matter how young he is, you will hear what he says because of his medical authority. On the other hand, it can be used to subordinate or marginalize those who are outside it, such as witches, mesmerists, homosexuals, anarchist protesters. 2

3 Michel Foucault gave the most influential analysis of this relationship between discourse and power in his studies of the history of practices in law, penology, and medicine. Such discourses are designed to control people, like those diagnosed as criminally insane or ill. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), Foucault argues that the new mode of punishment becomes the model for control of an entire society, with factories, hospitals, and schools modeled on the modern prison. He shows how techniques and institutions converged to create the modern system of disciplinary power. In the modern disciplinary society are three primary techniques of control: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. To a great extent, control over people (power) can be achieved merely by observing them. A perfect system of observation would allow one guard to see everything (a situation approximated, as we shall see, in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon). 3

4 Foucault adopts the victim s position, and analyzes power from the bottom up. He tries to show that the will to exercise power beats humanitarian egalitarianism every time. Foucault argues that power and knowledge interact: for example, when the medically trained reasonable people (doctors or surgeons) define themselves against the unreasonable people (patients) having made their judgement and locking them up in asylums. Sexists, racists, and imperialists use similar techniques, making the deviant or the marginal the other. Foucault takes homosexuals, women, the insane, not-whites, prisoners as standard examples of the other. This opposition and antipathy is happening in schools, armies, and prisons. Society suffers from a universal panopticism; we are being secretly observed and controlled. But it is Foucault s fault to fail to give anything like an ethical account of power in general. He wants struggle rather than submission, without explanations about it. Another fault in Foucault s account of power is to underestimate the importance of individual agency and responsibility. 4

5 Panopticon vs. Synopticon vs. Banopticon Jeremy Bentham(1748~1832) proposed the panopticon as a circular building with an observation tower in the centre of an open space surrounded by an outer wall. This wall would contain cells for occupants. This design would increase security by facilitating more effective surveillance. (Foucault used Bentham s idea) Synopticon is a concept of Surveillance of the few by the many, as identified by sociologist Thomas Mathiesen (1933~). (Mathiesen and Bigo developed Foucault s idea of panopticon. The Banopticon (sometimes written as Ban-opticon) is a term coined by Paris School academic Didier Bigo (1956~) used within an International Political Sociology approach to security studies to describe a situation where profiling technologies are used to determine who to place under surveillance. (a selected group or person) 5

6 Self and Identity Michel Foucault and his followers achieved one of postmodernist claims that such discourses entailed, imposed, demanded a particular kind of identity for all those who were affected by the discourses. Institutions and their discourses demand that you be a particular sort of people, to fit in. Anyone in a school or sports team or military organization is to aware of this point. But the postmodernist argument is not simple. We don t just play roles in such cases, but our very identity is at issue when we are affected by discourses of power. Those who are concerned with matters of identity in religion, therapy, and feminism, etc. All discourses put you in your place. Postmodernist critics go on to make political claims concerning the nature of the subject: conflicting languages of power constitute the self. The thoughts and expressions of the males, for example, are seen as part of a pattern of contaminated, patriarchal discourses, which are in conflict with egalitarian discourses, and of which he is the mere epiphenomenon (one of the effects of primary phenomena, the malecentered society) 6

7 Seyla Benhabib in her Situating the Self (1992) says, The subject is replaced by a system of structures, oppositions and differences which, to be intelligible, need not be viewed as products of a living subjectivity at all. You and I are the mere sites of such conflicting languages of power, and the self is merely another position in language. Postmodernist literary texts also show this view of the nature of the individual in contrast with the liberal tradition of the novels written by Angus Wilson and Saul Bellow. However, Linda Hutcheon in her A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) regards the postmodernist novels as a challenge to the humanist assumption of a unified self and an integrated consciousness: Postmodernist fiction puts into question that entire series of interconnected concepts that have come to be associated with what we conveniently label as liberal humanism: autonomy, transcendence, certainty, authority, unity, totalization, system, universalization,

8 In recent American fictions, the focus of attention has changed in this postmodernist perspective: The focus of attention has shifted from the psychology of character (something human) to the inadequacy of the concept of character, to a recognition of subjectivity as the trace of plural and intersecting discourses, of non-unified, contradictory ideologies, the product of a relational system which is finally that of discourse itself. Peter Currie in Eccentric Selves in Contemporary American Fiction (1987). Catherine Belsey in hercritical Practice (1980) states that A human being is not a unity, not autonomous, but a process [is] perpetually in construction, perpetually contradictory, perpetually open to change.

9 The postmodernist notion of human identity as constructed like a fiction is also found in the visual arts, such as in Cindy Sherman s series of photographs, Untitled Film Stills ( ). In each of the photographs, she impersonates film actresses, disguising herself more less in different clothing and in different implied situation, which are typical or stereotypical in film. So we can see all sorts of different people, but all versions of femininity in the discourses of a mass medium.

10 In the process we see Sherman adapting the discourses of film to present herself in a photographic still as all sorts of different people, but all (often satirical or parodic) versions of femininity are seen in the discourses of a mass medium. In so doing they also put into question the notion of the real Cindy Sherman. Which photographs could possibly convince us that we are seeing this? An open, sincere, emotional, or even naked one? For Roland Barthes the ideal postmodernist work of art recognizes these strategies and playful limitations on human identity and discourse. Such a postmodernist work of art rejects the Kantian unity of the person which makes for social order and moral orthodoxy. The pleasure of the text does not prefer one ideology to another. However this impertinence does not proceed from liberalism but from perversion: the text, its reading, are split. What is overcome, split, is the moral unity that society demands of every human product. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1975) 10

11 Barthes in his autobiography, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), announced that All of this must be thought of as being said by a character in a novel. There are two voices in the book, Barthes s own (or that of the author) which we might infer, and that of Barthes as a fictional character. Barthes also reviewed his own book: this time with a reviewer persona. Such deconstructions of the moral unity of the subject, and the (classically liberal) desire to help the self to evade some of the repressive ideological boundaries it encounters, are very different things. Indeed, the justification for our desire to evade or redraw such boundaries already depends on a notion of the new moral unity or integrity or autonomy we can achieve, once the restrictive boundary is removed. This becomes obvious when, for example, we are urged to recognize the different but non-fractured identities of the homosexual and the heterosexual by refusing to fall into the ideological trap of seeing the one as an inferior version of the other. (Barthes himself was a homosexual.) 11

12 What postmodern theory helps us to see is that we are all constituted in a broad range of subject positions and that all of us are combinations of class, race, ethnic, regional, generational, sexual, and gender positions. The politics of difference Postmodernists may not give a particularly convincing account of the nature of the self as it might appear in a moral philosophy concerned with responsibility, but they do very successfully adapt Foucauldian arguments to show the ways in which discourses of power are used in all societies to marginalize subordinate groups. For such discourses of power do not just contribute to the decentering and deconstruction of the self; they also serve to marginalize those people who do not partake in them. 12

13 Again, there are plenty of these eccentric marginalized figures to be encountered within postmodernist fiction, such as Saleem Sinai in Rushdie s Midnight s Children (1981). Saleem is not of any great social importance, and yet his crisis of identity is metaphorically seen as parallel to the crisis of the nation as a whole. The political history of India is deconstructed to show that the marginal can be seen as the central, indeed Sinai is diffused (like the reader following his text) into all sorts of surrounding fragmentary narratives. Bhabha (Saleem) and Siddharth (Shiva) Saleem and Parvati Salman Rushdie (1947~)

14 The novel does not try to make any sense of the emotional logic of an individual s life (as is typical of realist fiction) but uses its magic realist techniques to show the self as constituted by the conflicts and contradictions of the historical event, to the point of an absurdist hyperbole, as when Saleem remarks Nehru s death... too, was all my fault. Even his face is the Whole map of India, but by the end of the novel, he is no more than a big headed top-heavy dwarf. Postmodernist thought, in attacking the idea of a notional center or dominant ideology, facilitated the promotion of a politics of difference. Under postmodern conditions, the ordered class politics preferred by socialists has given way to a far more diffuse and pluralistic identity politics, which often involves the self-conscious assertion of a marginalized identity against the dominant discourse.

15 Postmodernists have turned against those Enlightenment ideals that underlie the legal structures of most Western democratic societies, and that aimed at universal ideals of equality and justice. But postmodernist skepticism was also directed to the very means of rational communication itself. Jürgen Habermas, one of the most eloquent of leftist critics, Jürgen Habermas (1929~) is not alone in pointing out that it is very dangerous indeed to take the postmodernist turn, and abandon the ideal of communicative or indeed consensual rationality, which he sees as the best antidote to the political abuse of power. Many think that the postmodernist position is a disabling one: postmodernists are just epistemological pluralists, with no firm general position available to them, and so, however radical they may seem as critics, they lack a settled external viewpoint, and they are passively conservative in effect.