Laclau Et Al - Discussion

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Discussion

Andreas Huyssen; Homi Bhabha; Jacques Rancière; Ernesto Laclau

October , Vol. 61, The Identity in Question. (Summer, 1992), pp. 78-82.

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Discussion

Audience: This is addressed to Andreas Huyssen. Until the very last comments

you made, it seemed that your recuperation of nationhood was not about

political, electoral expediency, but about trying to be in step with what is

happening in terms of national cultural politics in a unified Germany. My

concern is that German national culture in the twentieth century is not

just any European national culture-just as American national culture

understood, racially speaking, in its dominant hegemonic sense, is not just

any European-derived national culture. Those of us who belong to peoplesthat have been trampled over by either one or the other, or both, thus

have serious doubts about the option you're posing. I understand that the

left in Germany has historically had serious problems in terms of estab-

lishing a social base, but I don't quite see how what you're posing is a real

alternative, particularly given the dangers involved.

Andreas Huyssen: I share those kinds of concerns. At the same time-and I'mnot very far at this point in my thinking about the question of nationhood

and national identity in Germany-I have tried to critique a certain taboo

on the left and to show the necessity of opening up a debate on thequestion. No more, no less. I think this is as far as I would go. I could

argue that there should be and that there will be a different kind ofGerman national identity than the one that has been dominant in the past,

and I emphasized at the beginning of the paper that if there were a

productive discussion of national identity in Germany, then the recent

history of Germany (that's why I started by focusing on the various anni-

versaries) will have to remain strongly inscribed within it. Where such a

discussion would lead in terms of electoral politics I have no way to predict;one may very well argue that it might not lead very far. The issue, however,

has to be addressed. Evasion will only strengthen conservative definitionsof nation.

I also agree with you when you say that German national culture is



Discussion

not like any other; but one might of course ask whether there is any one

that is like any other? I don't mean that as a facile response. It just seems

to me that the question of national identity has been put on the table in a

new way by the raw facts of the political events since 1989; that it has to

be addressed publicly by the left; and that the discursive terrain should

not be left only to the conservatives and, potentially, to a new far right.

Homi Bhabha: I just wonder a bit about your discussion of the negotiating of

this sign of nationhood now: the process of opening up a discursive terrain.

The rest of your talk was so focused on the double nature of nation and

its internal boundary; but at the end, in the current Germany you describe,

how do you provide a space, even within the left, from which those

different discourses and their genealogies could be represented in a dia-

logue where negotiating power would be shared? Th at is the major prob-

lem, I think. The Turks, the East Germans-what would the representa-

tive bodies be?

Andreas Huyssen: I admit my paper is very speculative on that level and somewhat

distant from what is happening at this point in Germany. But I think that

what would have to happen, concretely, is that there would have to be a

discussion of a problem that the left has simply avoided. There wouldhave to be a discussion of what actually constitutes German citizenship.

German citizenship is still decided by blood lineage; it's based on a pre-

World War I law. Now, if citizenship were to be determined automatically

by place of birth-which would solve a major problem for many of the

second- and third-generation Turks, for instance, who live in Germany

and have lived in Germany for a long time-then the Habermasian claim,

the attempt to hook Germany up with Western liberal culture, would

perhaps be more persuasive. But instead of discussing this, the left has

focused on political asylum, where Germany, because of its history of

forced exile, has very liberal legislation. "Citizenship" would thus be aconcrete space for discussion that should be opened up. However, I'm

very pessimistic about the current political situation, where these spaces

do not seem to be expanding but actually seem to be shrinking.

Audience: My question is directed toward the first two speakers. You both used

a spatial metaphor-one of interval and the other of a space of indeter-

minacy, a gap, literally, between two words. And I wanted to know how

such indeterminacy could be a useful agent in discussing identity.

Homi Bhabha: In fact the main frame of what I was talking about was atempor-

ality, belatedness, a way of questioning acts of naming carried out accord-

ing to Enlightenment and modernist notions of progress. I think it's



OCTOBER

important to think about temporaility, instead, as the possibility of recon-

structing other kinds of histories, ones that do not require-as I said inmy comments-a kind of sovereignty of desire. And so really, as far as

I'm concerned, I wish to take to task the growing spatialization operating

in postmodern critical metaphors, metaphors which lead to saying unthink-

ingly, "New York is a new Calcutta. You know, we are now also living in

the Third World, we're all migrants, we're all diasporates." My argument

in the longer study of which this is a part ("Race, Time, and Countermod-

ernity") operates against that kind of thing. So I think that my specific

point is really about how belatedness functions to critique certain priorities

and myths about culture and modernization.

Jacques RanciZre: In answer to your question, I would say that it is really just the

opposite: the social construction of an identity must be conceived in terms

of a logic of the subject, that is, in terms of the logic of an actor who

cannot be identified with any sociological category or constituent group,

who always bears the name of the other and incorporates an impossible

identification. This is not just an abstract idea. For me, it is grounded in

my research on French workers' history. There it became obvious that one

couldn't simply apply social types and categories to this movement, be-

cause, in so doing, one dismissed the inner division that was at the veryheart of the assumption of the label worker or proletarian, both in discourse

and in practice. These subjects both assumed and did not assume the label

worker. Against those who treated them as "workersw-"their" workers-

they took on this label. So that they did not identify the name worker or

proletarian with a definite technical and social activity, but with a certain

way of being at one and the same time inside and outside the symbolic

order of the distribution of social identities. What I wanted to question by

means of this example is the deceptive appearance of self-evidence of a

"social" movement as the expression of a "social" group. A social movement

is not the movement of a sociological group. It is a movement of subjects,of people who try to find or apprehend an identity as fighters through

the very dismissal of their sociological identity, the identity given to them

by a social order.

Audience: When Andreas spoke of the libidinal investment in nationhood, he

seemed to suggest that we should shy away from those kinds of identifi-

cations. But that raises a problem (as I think Cornel said) of how the

politics of desire can operate in a world when libidinal politics tends tofragment identities, draw upon racist identifications, years of miscegena-

tion. If we look at the everyday world and the way desire is constructed,it's based on the politics of domination, the politics of oppression. So at



Discussion

the same time as we raise this question, for example, in Germany, how can

we think about drawing upon libidinal investment in nationhood in a

constructive way? Is there a way to imagine a nonracist, nonrepressive

libidinal investment?

ndreas Huyssen: That is the question I'm posing with the paper: Do we have to

identify the politics of desire with racism and oppression? I have not, as I

suggested, found an answer for this. But I'm convinced that the question

has to be asked in order to create alternatives. If it does not get asked,

then that kind of political terrain is left to those who are occupying it so

successfully now.

Ernesto Laclau: What keeps some room for hope in the question of German

nationalism is perhaps that today the ideological changes are taking place

in an overdetermined context. That is to say that German national identity

is being asserted in a context very different from that of the emerging

European nationalism of the nineteenth century. The fact that present-

day national identities are being asserted in the context of the construction

of the European Community gives to progressive forces room to maneu-

ver. I agree with you that negating the reality of a strong German identity

is nonsensical. Someone like Habermas was, I think, much happier in theFederal Republic when he was part of a "Westernized," European identity.

Today he must live with the brute fact of German nationalism, and he is

clearly uncomfortable. But I think that the assertion of a German identity

can take place in a variety of ways, not all of them producing reactionary

effects. The overdetermination of the contexts within which this identity

is asserted is what counts, and , as I said earlier, the context of the European

Community puts some important limits on the development of a purely

xenophobic politics.

Andreas Huyssen: Ernesto's comment is very pertinent here. European unificationcontains and alters the ways in which national identities in Europe will be

constructed in the future. The relationship between nation and nation-

state is already no longer what it used to be. But let us not fool ourselves.

Even if the sovereign nation-state disappears, it will only have been dis-

placed by a larger unit-"Europev-that may very well act like a tradi-

tional nation-state toward other parts of the world. And internally, I don't

think for one minute that older national identities will simply disappear

with European unification. Th e widely divergent reactions to the Gulf War

in England, Germany, France, even Czechoslovakia showed how national

histories still determine the thoughts and actions in different parts ofEurope.



82 OCTOBER

Audience: My question is related to postcolonialism and the origins of self, origins

of the other-things that Homi Bhabha addressed. In the process of

enacting equality, do you have the right, the social right, to imagine,

vocalize, and author a sense of "I"-whether collectively or individually

-that would exist in isolation from your history of racism and coloniali-

zation? Because, it seems to me, this issue of postcolonialism doesn't deal

with the whole problem of a homogeneous, postcolonial world. I just

wanted to know if you could elaborate.

Homi Bhabha: It would be precisely the response of a once-colonizing world now

to see a homogenized postcolonial world. That is why it's very important

to mark various different sites of the "1"'s enunciation, as I attempted to

do today. You can turn to Derek Walcott or Toni Morrison or Sonia

Sanchez and see how the question of race and history and identification

was being negotiated at each one of those sites. So the very idea of a

homogeneous, postcolonial response would feed yet again into a kind of

polarization. If we think of the Gulf War, we could address the example

of what appeared from a certain distance to be a coordinated, homoge-

neous response on the part of the-1'11 use the word-Third World. There

was opposition to the Gulf War from India, from Pakistan, and from most

African countries. Yet, as opposed to this, what was interesting in eachone of those responses was the way in which the Gulf War was being used

by groups of peace protesters in each country to oppose their own domi-

nant and, in many cases, undemocratic regimes. So the Gulf issue was

being used in very differently negotiated ways. Further, I think one of the

most interesting nonhomogenizing effects in many Third World countries

was the surfacing of a desire actually to identify with loss. The identifica-

tion was not with Saddam Hussein, with his kind of political regime, but

with other sorts of things: with death, with despair, with desires to mod-

ernize which would in some senses be to destroy. So there are a number

of ways in which that opposition to U.S. policy might be seen to be invar-iant, but it is not. That's the really important issue. It's too easy to homog-

enize that response.

Laclau Et Al - Discussion

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