Bhabha's "Dissemination cont'd"
Hey all, I'm sure many of you are probably Bhabha'd out, but Katie and I put together a nice little compilation of notes and musings that serve as a very makeshift summary. I'd be happy to email them to anyone interested (unfortunately I haven't figured out a way to attach a document to blog posts (anyone know?)) so just email me at matthew1.henry@umontana.edu. Thanks!
posted by Matt Henry at 7:41 PM
11 Comments:
Thanks to Matt and Katie for making these notes and questions available. You should be able to access them here: Bhabha Notes 1 and Bhabha Notes 2.
Here is my passage from Dissemination that i feel gets at Bhabha's idea of the importance of temporality in how we develop and define the idea of Nation. "The nation's people must be thought in double-time; the people are the historical 'objects' of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past; the people are also the 'subjects' of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principles of the people as contemporaneity; as that signe of the present through which national life is redeemed and iterated as a reproductive process" (Bhabha 145). I know that seems like an unnecessarily long passage, but technically i think it is only one sentence. This section sets up the nation as something constantly under construction with no chance of ever being completed. The past influences in which direction the nation will develop, but the nation isn't solely the sum of all the different parts of its history. This all means we can't talk about the nation without thinking about the idea of temporal movement. The nation is never truly standing still. hopefully this post wasn't too long. I'm still not totally confident in the expectations for the blog.
I notice that Bhabha starts with his own experience of migrating, not to a geographic landmass, but to rather to living “in the nations of others” (139), and this fits in with his reminder that he is not, here at least, really concerned with the notion of “nationalism” (140). I think this clarification is important to his project, because it grounds his theorizing in the real. I just met my friend - one of the other few Scottish people who live in Missoula. Angela has lived in the US for over ten years, but returned to Scotland for a year’s work exchange a couple of years ago. She talked today about how that experience helped her understand why she doesn’t “fit” in the US, and about how she simply felt more comfortable in Scotland; she felt “at home.” The sense of homeness is as what’s-her’s-name (sorry!) says, central to us as humans. It’s important though, that we are aware of how we classify home – we must always strive to have an inclusive, open, and flexible, notion of nationhood and home and not, as Robert discusses above, make the mistake of thinking that “nation” is a fixed concept.
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Here's a quote I liked on the subject of exploring the space of a nation. "'Culture abhors simplification,' Fanon writes, as he tries to locate the people in a performative time: 'the fluctuating
movement that the people are just giving shape to'. The present of the people's history, then, is a practice that destroys the constant principles of the national culture that attempt to hark back to a 'true' national
past, which is often represented in the reified forms of realism and
stereotype." (152) ...I too am unsure as to what to write for a blog, so for brevity's sake I'll leave it at this.
Bhabha often focuses on the difficulty of trying to group people into a 'nation', and yet still have the individuals with their own backgrounds, cultures and stories: "The people are neither the beginning nor the end of the national narrative; they represent the cutting edge between the totalizing powers of the 'social' as homogeneous, consensual community, and the forces that signify the more specific address to contentious, unequal interests and identities within the population" (Bhabha 146). You cannot begin to define a nation beginning with one certain group of people; they shift and re-gather over time until the group, which did not come first and will not be last, has dispersed or been joined by others. This is the temporal difficulty, and the difficulty of defining a nation as a whole.
(not sure if this made any sense, and I also must apologize for the delay. It's hard to get to places with internet access).
After several class discussions regarding Bhabha's essay and the documentary film about the melding of British cultures I have been able to grasp the complex ideas a little more easily. I researched this essay a little and found an interesting lecture by a professor at Stanford. One quote that has stuck out to me in his notes on DissimiNation is, "Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all not what it seems to itself... The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions." I feel that this quote also applies to the film we watched. There will always be more than meets the eye when it comes to something as broad and complicated as defining a culture. Time passes and things change and every nation and culture's identity will change... we just need to be prepared for it.
(http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/dissemination.html)
Here are a couple of statements that particularly caught my attention:
"Both gentleman and slave, through different cultural means and to very different historical ends, demonstrate that forces of social authority and subversion or subalternity may emerge in displaced, even decentered strategies of signification."
"Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries - both actual and conceptual - disturb those ideological manuevers through which 'imagined communities' are given essentialist identities."
"Out of many one: nowhere has this founding dictum of the political society of the modern nation- its spatial expression of a unitary people- found a more intriguing image of itself than in those diverse languages of literary criticism that seek to portray the great power of the idea of the nation in the disclosures of its everyday life;" This quote really stuck out to me for some reason- I really cannot understand Bhabha, but what I got from this quote was the idea of what it means to be a "nation," which I find really relevant in today's world. Something like the election of a new president can alter the idea of the nation so much. Or, and this is digging back a ways, but the whole "Freedom Fries" epidemic after 9/11 was some ppl's way of stating ourselves as a nation seperate from France. There's something really wrong in the fact that we used french fries to unite....
The passage from Bhabha's "Dissemination" that really struck me was thus:
"Without language that bridges knowledge and act, without objectification of the social process, the Turk leads the life of the double, the automaton. ...The opacity of language fails to translate or break throuhg his silence and 'the body loses its mind in the gesture.'" (165-166)
This passage struck me because language incorporates everything. It can represent an entity shared and understood by an entire people, and at the same time, it can represent no one's speech or mode of understanding. In the discussion of language, and language barriers, one can incorporate a myriad of social issues, the least of which being Bhabha's arguments on what makes a society and what makes culture. It is easier to understand his arguments he makes when one considers language alone. In writing, and in speech, there is never a full, complete translation. Much is lost in these artificial, arbitrary symbols and is even more so when these symbols are translated to another language. Thus, when Bhabha argues that the Turk can never fully comprehend the "original" meaning of these words and their meanings, he speaks truly, for native speakers themselves can never be 100% understood by one another. Thus, the Turk follows what he interprets as being the common understanding and the common gestures of language, and he becomes the "automaton" in this process.
I was looking at a passage on page 144 in which Bhaba quotes Barrell in asserting that "the demand for a holistic, representative vision of society could only be represented in a discourse that was at the same time obsessively fixed upon, and uncertain of, the boundaries of society and the margins of the text." It reminded me (and this may just be the weird way my mind works) of a stand-up routine by an African-American comedian that I'd watched on TV earlier in the week. He was talking about the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and how it had led to a movement that, in essence, attempted to remove the label of "American" from people who had previously been thought of as part of the culture- first American Muslims, then Americans who looked like Muslims, then immigrants of all kinds. "And then I started listening," he said, "because I thought, it'll be us [African-Americans] next. Here it comes! That train's never late!" That sense of narrowing definition- of the national mania to define exactly where the border between "American" and "non-American" lies, was what Bhaba's point made me think of. People were, at the time, certainly both "obsessively fixed on" and "unsure of" those borders, and it it was indeed done in the name of searching for a "holistic, representative vision of society" (although I'd argue that what they came up with as a result was neither).
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