Postcolonial Narratives

7/30/2019 Postcolonial Narratives

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The following excerpt is from a seminar led b7 susafl Buch'Morss, in whicb rue dis-,oord. prartir6 ofreading euents and reconfguring historical narratiues fiom postco'lonial persPectiues.

we discussed susan Buck-Morss! essay "Hegel and Haiti" (now part of herHegel, Haiti, and Universal History) and her interuiew for the Journal of visualC,rlture, titled "Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, Politics, and tbe Citizen'"' Her"Hegel and, Haiti" retdraws the intellectual history of Hegeli much interpreted dia'lrcial formulation offreed.om. Ratber than reading Hegel's mdster'slaae dialecticwithin the lineage oi ir*pron liberal political discourse and in the corutext of thereuolutionary d.rrrlipmrnts of late eighteenth-century Europe, she hcates the concep'tion of Hegel! Phenomenology of Spi it in the empiri.cal context of the r79r-t804Haitian Reuolution, dt the historical beginnings of the anticolonial reuolutionarym4uements. while her essay deuehps a ?\stc\l\nial critique of tbe notion offeedomas it is articulated. by the English and Freruch liberal thinkers during the seuen'teenth and. eightrenti centuries, it radically se?drates tbe German pbilosopher fromtbe French Enlightenmeftt traditi\n and phces hls phllosoph\ at the foundationsof twentieth-rrrr'rury porrrolonial thought. Buck-Morssi lecture, which preceded thisseminar, presented. her historical research on the Haitian dnticolonial mouement irtrelation to a collectiue-empdthetic ruotion of uniuersal humartity.

MTCHELE GREEr: In your lecture last night you talked about emotional involvement andthe commonality of human experience of the lived moment. How does thatrelate to the task ofhistorical research?

suSAN BUCK-MoRSS: The emphasis is not on emotional involvement, although, I ad-mit, I may have become emotional in defending a project that is today quiteunpopular, because it opposes ideas of alternative modernities, hybridity, andmulticulturalism. I "* -rkirrg a case for universality by focusing on the dangersthat human beings face when they experience the limits of collective belonging'The project ",,.ripr. to rescue from long-time disrepute the idea of universalhistory, not as wirld. history, not even as the history of global capital, but asempathic identification with historical actors when they find themselves aban-dorr.d by their cukures, exposed and vulnerable because they have slipped out,or been pushed out, of the ambiguous shelter of collective identities, all ofwhich

Journal of Visual Culture l, no' 3 (zoo6):325-4oi Buck-Morss, Hegel, tlaiti, and UniversalHlstory (Pittsburgh : Un iversity of PittsburghPress, zoog).

6. POSTCOLONIAL NARRATIVES

r. Susan Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti,"Critical tnquiry 26, no. 4 (zooo): 8zl-65;"Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, Politics, andthe Citizen: lnterview with Susan Buck-Morss,"


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75 POSTCOLON IAL NARRATIVESslave from distant Haiti would demand and fight for what the philosophes articu-lated from their posh salons. Yet I find this politics of recognition leading to anultimate radiance and final reconciliation profoundly problematic. After FanontBlacle Skin, lYhite Masks, it is no longer possible to think of the problem of raceunder colonialism as a sociological matter of exclusion/inclusion: the politics ofrace cannot be contained within the humanist myth of Man or the (meta)narra-tive of historical progress. The colonial condition renders it impossible to speakin rerms of a commonality of human experience: there, everyday life exhibits a"constellation of delirium."'

The colonial state of emergency, as elaborated by Fanon, interrupts the dia-Iectic of deliverance by interrogating presence as such (Man, Thuth, Self, Prog-ress). Practices rhat are endemic under colonialism-violence, paranoia, self-hate, treason, madness-are not mere alien presences which the dialectic seeksto explain away as the ultimate misrecognition of Man. These are what reveal thepresence of the other in the time of our own consciousness.

susAN BUCK-MoRSS: Fanont conception of history is far more Hegelian than my own.I am skeptical of the implication that the solution to Hegel's Eurocentrism is adifferent variant of the same dialectical overcoming. But philosophical relativ-ism gets us nowhere, and it is counterproductive to give up on the philosophicalconcepr of truth. If you imagine yourself in the same place as those who havebeen betrayed by their cukure, yoLr are likely to discover a different truth, onethat is more material, more corporeal, out of play of culture and its meanings.No collective can claim possession or control of such truth. Of course, you re-main sarurated by parricular cultural traces, but that is a different issue.

KErrH MoxEy: Maybe the distinction would be berween truth with a capital Iand truthwith a small r. i think that the small truth is namely that there is always going tobe a truth that is for you, that you believe in something. This is different fromrelativism-relativism is always brought out as a red herring. There are perspec-tives that are irreconcilable'

susAN BUCK-MoRSS: I agree about the noncommensurabilities, but I would want to ar-gue for the universaliry of affective reaction to events, a sense of collectivity thatemerges with the experience of human vulnerability.

2. Fanon the existentialist-humanist has toconfront this delirium at every turn. A fright-ened, confused white child cries out on thestreet, "Look, a Negro . . . Mama, see the Negro!l'm frightened." Or, "Our women are at themercy of the Negroes . . . God knows how theymake love." What's so disturbing about Fanon'swritings on the psychological conditions of colo-niatism ("Manichaean delirium") is that, in shift-ing the focus of cuttural racism from the potiticsof nationalism to the politics of narcissism, heopens up a space of engagement "between

ourselves as others." "l had to meet the whiteman's eyes . . . I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibatism, inte[lectual deficiency, fetish-ism, racia[ defects . . . I took mysetf far off frommy own presence." Here Fanon is not talkingabout colonialism as a violation of some humanessence or the btackiwhite binary as foundingterms ("The Negro is not. Any more than thewhite man"). The white gaze breaks up thebtack man's body, and in that act of violence itsown frame of reference is transgressed. lt is notthe Self and the Other but the otherness of theis revealed under colonial conditions'


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77 POSTCOLONTAL NARRATIVESfrom various disciplinary perspectives. That's "uninteresting interdisciplinariry"in Steve Melvillet sense.'

This book series is planned to end in zorr with a conference and book calledFarewell to Visual Studies, and part of the reason for that farewell is the disso-lution of interesting conversations on interdisciplinarity within visual studies.a\(hat is at stake in our event this week is, in a way, part of that. Zhivka and Iwanted rhese conversations to be intermittently irucomprehensible in hopefullyproductive ways, and for that purpose your texts and your interventions arewonderful models-but wonderful, partly, because I dont think they can beused as models.

susAN BUCK-MoRSS: Here is an example that might be new to art history's discussionof globalization (I think a similar proposal was brought up in Tom Kaufmanntseminar). It involves having medieval art history begin with a consideration ofAfrica, where method becomes a means of constructing the past not as a nar-rative of political collectives, but as traces of human borrowing and local in-novarion. Historians like Jan Vansina trace the cross-continental movement ofarrifacts among Africans of different cultures, including across sub-Saharan Af-rica, an area impenetrable for Europeans until the nineteenth century.t Artifactsmove among people nor as the spread of imperial cultural forms, but as theconsequence of intercultural connections. Sryles have a way of escaping politi-cal boundaries. Art not only emanates from power centers but disregards them.The Department of Art History at Cornell has come up with a brilliant wayof doing global art history. \X/hen there was an opening for baroque art, ratherthan hiring a European baroque specialist, they advertised for an expert in SouthAmerican baroque. And when there was an opening in medieval history, theyhired someone who works on the entire Mediterranean basin and writes on theinfuences of Muslim architectural traditions on European architecture and art,and vice versa. This is one way of doing global art history that manages not toreproduce the Eurocentric art-historical narratives.

JAMES ELKTNS: Yes, it is possible that art history can expand beyond its regional andnational specialties-but I meant, in a more personal way, that what happensacross disciplines in "Hegel and Haiti" and your newer work is not itself usableas a model. It follows that this discussion today is not an ordinary seminar aboutinterdisciplinariry in which texts and practices can become recipes and models.I think that is wonderful.

ANGELA MILLER: I think that "Hegel and Haiti" is an example of global history and theways in which a global perspecrive fundamentally redraws the very substance ofsuch disciplines as history. Take the history of ideas-intellectual history; it hastoo often been segregated from history, a discipline that has the tools to examinethe widest possible web of inrerconnections between different locations, com-

3. This is etaborated in chapter r of my 5. lan Vansina, The Children of Woot: A His-Visual Studies: A Skeptical lntroduction (New tory of the Kuba Peoples (Madison: University ofYork: Routledge, zoo3). wisconsin Press, 1978); Paths in the Roinforest

4. See www.imagehistory.org. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, l99o).


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79 POSTCOLONIAL NARRATIVESIs this what you are looking for? Is this the cognitive value or the affect value

of your fragmented j uxtapositions ?susAN BUCK-MoRSs: Perhaps the argument in "Hegel and Haiti" is not based primarily

on the interpretation of images, but images still play a crucial role throughout-from my critique of Simon Shamas history writing, to the sections on the spreadof freemasonry. The use of images has to do with method more than anything.The discovery of certain images is key to formulating questions with which toapproach the historical sources. They provided clues as to where, and how tolook. In Dreamworld and Catastrophe, the method was to build sections of textout of clusters of images..When I was writing The Dialectics of Seeing, finding the objects that entered\Talter Benjamin's visual field was fundamental to the interpretive process. Iwenr ro Paris and followed Benjamint footsteps around the city, traversing, as hedid, its many arcades. I found catalogues of exhibitions and world's fairs that heartended, and images from magazines rhat he might have read-an1'thing thatmight help me encounter fragments of the past about which he wrote, so thatI could see how these things happened to bim.Images do methodological work.Very rarely do I use them as illustrations for what I already know needs to besaid. And I try to let their ambiguities speak.

JAMES ELKTNs: There is a very complex question lurking here, which I don't think we canopen now. (I hope you Il forgive me if I'm thinking ahead: the second conferencein this series, which we'll have in these same rooms this same time next year, ison the subject What Is an Image?) So I'd just like to mark this moment. tWe ap-proach the question of images in our texts in a very curious way, by asserting thatthey work in unexpected ways in our rexts, and occasionally-as youre saying,Susan, and as I ve said and some others have said-that they can even createtheir own narratives. That is a strangely truncated rhetoric. It stops well short ofsaying what exactly happens when images like the ones in Dialectics of Seeing arepermitted, for a while, to be something more complicated than either cognitivetools or affective opportunities.6

MTcHAEL HoLLy: V/hat about \Warburg? tVhat about really strange similarities and dif-ferences that had points? They seemed that they were repossessed by the samehistorical sensibility. Warburg's and Benjamin's notions of eruptions through

6. To ctarify that: like some other histori-ans, I have also written books that began assequences of images, with no nanative. But I donot think that the pictures are as undeterminedor as potentially independent of our intentionsas we may hope. And I am especially interestedto notice that conversations on this sublect, inand around visual studies, tend to stop withthe assertion ofthe potentiaI independence ofimages. (That is what happens in lhe Journalof Visual Culture interview that was set forthis seminar.) lt's like saying an employee is

free to choose: after that assertion, it's time toget back to work. Next year's Stone SummerTheory lnstitute witl be partly on this subject. Ihave tried several times to write books whosestructure grew in surprising ways from imagesI had cotlected. One is Ihe Obiect Stares Back(New York: Harcourt Brace, ry97), and anotheris Six Stories from the End of Representation(Stanford: Stanford University Press, zoo8). Eachtime the apparent freedom evaporated: it wasn'tmuch more than a desire I had in retation towriting and images.


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8r PosrcoLoNtAL NARRATIVESFrom my point of view, the Haitian images in Susan's essay "Hegel and Haiti,"the images in Dreamruorld arud Cata*rophe, the images in Tim Clarks book, theimages in \Tarburg's Mnemosyne, and the images in Schefer's books are all dif-ferenr cases. At the moment I dont see any of them as models for writing aboutconremporary global arr, for two reasons: first because in each case I think nar-rative does dominate, even in \Tarburg; and second because the art world has aninfinite capacity to dilure serious experiments into impressionistic pastiches."

sHELLy ERRINGToN: If I may go back to the idea of breaking ths v256-JAMES ELKTNS: Michael introduced that metaphor, of art history as a beautiful vase thatnow lies broken, in fragments-sHELLy ERRTNGToN: One of the reasons that I like the idea of shards is that "we" are

shards among others. \7e can no longer count on just one whole totalizing storylike the beautiful vase of traditional art history that could contain everythingand that will be the answer ro ever)'thing, but there are lots of bits and piecesthat dont cohere. My question is: how do you use these bits and pieces withoutgluing them together to a mosaic of the whole, reconstituting them as anothervase with another shape and design, but still an all-comprehensive story?

My favorite globalization theorists address this issue, of how to make a big andeven global storywithout making it totalizing or linear. One is my colleague AnnaTsing, whose ethnographic work was mainly in Borneo. She published a bookcalledFriction,whichis really about globalization, and her idea was to let the struc-tural order of these stories and interviews emerge from their undisturbed multiplic-ity. I told her before it was published she might have called it "taction," becauseit is about how ideas, often misunderstood, land in alien places and get tractionin these new conrexrs-they stick and produce something new. To her question ofhow we can engage in an ethnography ofglobal connections, she talks about grasp-ing the productive moments of misunderstanding, both in what we narrate and inhow we understand what's going on. In other words, she has a way of putting theseexperiences together nor into a totalizing and bounded whole but in a way thatIeaves them contingently connected and open. Theret breathing space, and even ifher story is big and comprehensive, it is an1,'thing but inexorable'"

SUSAN BUCK-MORSS: Of course, you do have to know the canon, otherwise you aredominated by it without knowing it-there is no way around that, no shortcut.There would not be the disciplines as they are today without the neo-Kantian

Schefer, Ihe Deluge, the Plague, translated byTom Conley (Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 1995).ro. Saying narrative dominates in Mnemo-syne is saying that the reception of Warburg isa series of texts. Even Georges Didi-Huberman'sinterventlons are textuaL (atthough at the timeof writing, fall zoo7, he is said to be at workon a purely visuaI response). There is virtualtyno visual criticism or visual history. Around

2oo3-4, the lrish art magazine Circa slaged anexperiment in visuat criticism, inviting anyoneto revlew an exhibition with an image insteadof a text. Almost no one votunteered. All this isto say, in a telegraphic fashion, that the issuesraised here are peculiar to Buck-Morss's texts,and misused as potential models for art writing.rr. See Anna Lowenhaupt fsing, Friction: AnEthnography of Globol Connection (Princeton:Princeton University Press, zoo5).


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8l POSTCOLONIAL NARRATIVESsuzANA MTLEVSKA: tWhen we were talking about temporalities, I kept thinking about the

Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky, who, in his work lconostasis, offers a reallyunique inuerse conception of time, which he grasps in the inverse perspective ofthe Byzantine medieval iconographic tradition but also through experimentalpsychology of dreams." In addition to the issue of translation, these conceptscome with all this baggage of different cultural conceptualization of time where-in cause-efrect relarion may be inversed both in space and time and thereforesuch mystical temporality is difficult to be communicated.

DARBv ENGLTsH: As Shigemi said in his seminar, some translations produce losses.'r Iwas wondering if we can look at this loss as something that can be productiverather than as a rhreat. Perhaps if we think about how we respond to that loss,when we see in the loss an opportuniry to attempt a recuperation, to accept thedisorientation Susan is talking about and see where it leads.

zHryKL vALrAVrcHARsra: I would also caution against foreclosures, and return to theidea of how imagining certain possibilities, rather than losses, within our givenglobal conditions becomes a politically enabling practice. Benjamin has an essayon translation, where he focuses on the "translatabilif' of the work as its highestdimension, and understands translation not as a loss, but rather as a way of en-1i6hmsn1-lather than looking at how a certain meaning is lost, he looks at howthe language it is translated from "expands."'+ So translation has possibilities forreconciliation and it is also a deeply ethical, if not explicitly political, practice.In a very similar way, postcolonial thinkers such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o have putforward a certain norion of humanism in the incommensurabiliry of languagesand the experiences they contain. But in their accounts, these incommensura-bilities also harbor a radical possibility within: that of their communicabiliry.'s

susAN BUCK-MoRSS: If cultural languages are incommensurate, what is said in these lan-guages ar times converges despite their differences. \fhen experiences are new,language needs to be stretched to articulate it. So the translation is not onlyacross discrete languages, but within every cultural language, over time. Andthe need to translate local idioms, local traditions, into a global context is justsuch a new experience. Not all of our experiences are understandable in terms ofidentifiable cultures. Experience can cause cultural languages to be pushed to thebreaking point. Between and beneath cultural languages, subterranean solidari-ties among people takes form. It is this process, threatening to existing cultures,that makes human progress possible in history.

rz. Pavel Florensky, lconostosis, translatedby Donatd Sheehan and Olga Andreiev (Crest-wood, N.Y.: St. Vladimils Seminary Press, 1996).r3. See Section z ofthe Seminars.

14. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of theTranslator," in llluminations, edited by HannahArendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York:Schocken Books, 1968), 75-82.

r5. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonizing theMind: The Politics of Language in AfricanLiterature (London: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP;Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, t986)i Movingthe Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms(London: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Ports-mouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993).

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