Commitment to Theory

Here an attempt has been made to explore and define the notions about cultural identity following the turn of events in the 19th century Europe.

The main points factored here are:

• To rethink on the "perspective of identity of our culture" in the post colonial world.
• Begin by differentiating 'cultural diversity' and 'cultural identity'
• Culture- as a strategy for survival in transnational and transrational. 

Bhabha’s goal in this essay is to “rethink our perspective on the identity of culture” in the Post-colonial world. He begins by drawing a distinction between (what some such as Kamau Brathwaite [in Contradictory Omens] have termed) “cultural diversity” and what he terms “cultural difference” in an allusion to the term ‘différence/différance’ so central to Post-Structuralist thinking. The following chart shows what Bhabha perceives to be the play of difference (rather than pure distinction) between these two terms:

Cultural Diversity	Cultural Difference
An object of empirical knowledge	The process of enunciation of culture as knowledgeable, authoritative, adequate to the construction of the systems of cultural identification.
A category of comparative ethics, aesthetics, or ethnology	A process of signification through which statements “of” or “on” culture differentiate.
The recognition of pre-given cultural ‘contents' and customs, held in a time frame of relativism, it gives rise to anodyne liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange, or the culture of humanity.	The problem of the culture emerges only at the significatory boundaries of culture, where meanings and values are (mis)read or signs misappropriated.
Cultural diversity is also the representation of a radical rhetoric of the separation of totalized cultures that live unsullied by the intertextuality of their historical locations, safe in the Utopianism of a mythic memory of a unique collective identity

Bhabha’s point in pointing out the difference between these two terms is to stress the need to rethink the traditional notions of cultural identity which have informed the process of decolonisation (what Bhabha alludes to as an antagonistic view of “culture-as-political-struggle”) and the concomitant growth of nationalism.

Bhabha's basic theory is to suggest a need to "rethink cultural identity."   For Bhabha, the Postcolonial setting is one in which there is still an oppositional relationship between previously "dominant cultures" and "the other."  The imperialism might be understated and surreptitious, but it is still there.  Bhabha's theory is to demand a reconfiguration of this relationship.  There needs to be a zone in which the cultural relationship between former colonizers and nations that were formerly colonized transcends the historical antagonism between them.  "The Other" should not be perceived as a force to be submissive.  It should not be one in which "First World capital" translates into "Third world labor."

The fundamental call that Bhabha makes is that the identity formation should be as wide as possible for Postcolonial nations.  Enunciation of this identity should outstrip what former imperialistic nations still perceive "the other" to be.  Cultural diversity is called here in to exist in its purest and freest form and it is here where the "commitment to theory" must be upheld in the modern setting.

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Bhabha's basic theory is to suggest a need to "rethink cultural identity."   For Bhabha, the Postcolonial setting is one in which there is still an oppositional relationship between previously "dominant cultures" and "the other."  The imperialism might be understated and surreptitious, but it is still there.  Bhabha's theory is to demand a reconfiguration of this relationship.  There needs to be a zone in which the cultural relationship between former colonizers and nations that were formerly colonized transcends the historical antagonism between them.  "The Other" should not be perceived as a force to be submissive.  It should not be one in which "First World capital" translates into "Third world labor."

The fundamental call that Bhabha makes is that the identity formation should be as wide as possible for Postcolonial nations.  Enunciation of this identity should outstrip what former imperialistic nations still perceive "the other" to be.  Cultural diversity is called here in to exist in its purest and freest form and it is here where the "commitment to theory" must be upheld in the modern setting.

One theme in Bhabha's writing is how the relationship between nations needs to be reconfigured to ensure that there is a "commitment to theory."  In this case, the theory that is being examined is whether that we have escaped the colonial or imperialist condition in which nations relate to one another.  This theme takes on different forms, but drives the article.  Bhabha's notion of exploring the relationship in which the theory of internationalism is merely used to prop up "First World capital to Third World labor" is a part of this exploration.

For Bhabha, the commitment to theory has become a new way to pursue the ends of colonial control.  "The Other" has become relegated to a condition in which control is being advocated through new and surreptitious means.  Bhabha's example of the film festival in which the entry from India depicts the most hopeless and destitute helps to enhance the condition in which "First world" nations feel little in way of reticence to ensure that messages are communicated that suggest that national identities should be formed in accordance with "Western" ideals.  The relationship between both "the other" and those who benefit from this configuration is a significant theme in his work.

In "The Commitment to Theory," an essay collected in The Location of Culture (1994), Homi K. Bhabha foregrounds the unfortunate and perhaps false opposition of theory and politics that some critics have framed in order to question the elitism and Eurocentrism of prevailing postcolonial debates:

There is a damaging and self-defeating assumption that theory is necessarily the elite language of the socially and culturally privileged. It is said that the place of the academic critic is inevitably within the Eurocentric archives of an imperialist or neo-colonial West.

What's ironic is that Bhabha himself--perhaps more than any other leading postcolonial theorist--has throughout his career been susceptible to charges of elitism, Eurocentrism, bourgeois academic privilege, and an indebtedness to the principles of European poststructuralism that many of his harshest critics portray as his unknowing replication of "neo-imperial" or "neo-colonial" modes of discursive dominance over the colonized Third World. By means of a complicated repertoire of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Postmodern notions of mimicry and performance, and Derridian deconstruction, Bhabha has encouraged a rigorous rethinking of nationalism, representation, and resistance that above all stresses the "ambivalence" or "hybridity" that characterizes the site of colonial contestation--a "liminal" space in which cultural differences articulate and, as Bhabha argues, actually produce imagined "constructions" of cultural and national identity.

Whereas Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak uses deconstruction as a critical tool to rethink the oversimplified binary opposition of "colonizer" and "colonized" and to question the methodological assumptions of postcolonial theorists (herself included), Homi K. Bhabha uses deconstruction to dismantle the false opposition of "theory" and "political practice"--a distinction reminiscent in many ways of Marx's distinction between superstructure and base. Bhabha advocates a model of liminality that perhaps dramatizes the interstitial space between theory and practice--a liminal space that does not separate but rather mediates their mutual exchange and relative meanings. Bhabha argues (perhaps in defense of himself) that European theoretical frameworks are not necessarily intellectual constructs that ignore the political situation of the dispossessed Third World. A critic cannot choose between "politics" and "theory" because the two are mutually reciprocal; "theory," an instrument of ideology, narrates and in so doing creates the "political" circumstance of Third World oppression. In other words, much as he treats the the "liminal" space between national constituencies, Bhabha is interested in juxtaposing "politics" and "theory" in order to find where they overlap and how the tension between them in turn produces their hybridity:

The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot 'in itself' be conscious. (The Location of Culture36)

According to Bhabha, the "third space"--another way of framing the liminal--is an ambivalent, hybrid space that is written into existence. In other words, what mediates between theory and politics is writing--not merely theoretical discourse but cultural exercises such as novels, cinema, music. As Jacques Derrida suggests in Writing and Differance, writing does not passively record social "realities" but in fact precedes them and gives them meaning through a recognition of the differences between signs within textual systems. Bhabha, then, re-appropriates Derrida's notion of differance to suggest cultural difference and its representation and negotiation in the form of writing. Having already posed the question of "what is to be done" about the precarious pedagogical legitimacy of postcolonial debates, in the following passage Bhabha conceptualizes writing as a productive way of conceptualizing the differences between cultures:

Within this essay Bhabha accomplishes many things, yet he seems to focus upon two main subjects and issues: the troubling of political and ideological discourse and then the differentiation between culture difference and culture diversity.  Bhabha illustrates the relationship between politics and ideology, bringing out important points of encounter. There is a sort of space, where discourse and ideology, language and the representation of such lie--this space--is where Bhabha means to place focus, and put attention.

Bhabha means to speak to the relationship between politics and theory, and the manner in which they depend on each other. Calling back to Derrida's differance, Bhabha sums up this relationship as "the difference of the same." This is where Bhabha begins to elaborate on the relationship itself. He beings by looking at the nature of theory: language, ideology, semiotics, representation, and so on. Theory, "in a doubly inscribed move, simultaneously seeks to subvert and replace." Theory's attempt to supplant, replace, re-present and so on exists in relation to the very thing that it striving to remove. This relationship, though obvious, puts forth a proposition that Bhabha requests: he wants us to "rethink the logics of causality and dterminacy through which we recognize the 'political' as a form of calculation and strategic action dedicated to social transformation." Further, the 'political' that theory calls attention to is delegated through an identification of the logics of causality: it seems that Bhabha is asking us to rethink how we approach and understand political discourse and the political subject as determined by systems of identification that are bent on alterity, otherness, heterogeniety. By rethinking these categories as determined and intimately connected with history we may begin to see the relationship between political and ideological discourse as developing side by side, as opposed to preceeding and following.

The rethinking of the logics of causality, politics and then the strategic action of either the political or ideological discourse leads to the obvious troubling of the representation of either of these categories:

With this troubling of these categories, through the assertion of rethinking the logics of causality (understanding the importance of writing and textuality), which leads us to understanding that the 'political' as a calculated form of societal transformation and affection (meaning maintaining purpose to cause effect in society) Bhabha leads us to a good explanation of the troubling of these categories:

Stemming from this call to rethinking and re-evaluating our categories concerning political and ideological discourse, Bhabha leads us to the fact that these categories as now understood depend on alterity, on a agonisitic environment of "cultural difference" and "cultural diversity." Simply, it seems to me that an initial difficulty with understanding these issues arises from the idea of one emerging before another, and thus one being pre-established. Here Bhabha means to focus on the fact that much of the acceptance of these categories has depended upon a sort of understanding that one category may negate or supercede the other. Instead, Bhabha calls for a sort of third space: a negotiation that he called to earlier in referring to a sort of "to and fro." Bhabha seems to critique a singleness of terms. Instead, he asks for a heterogeneity of categories.

This third space, which is neither one category or the other, results as a rethinking of the logics of causality and recognition of political discourses relationship to social transformation.

Throughout the rest of his essay, Bhabha elaborates on the terms of cultural difference and cutlrual diversity. He upholds an argument for thinking of things in multiplicity, in heterogeneity, of thinking of cultures, peoples, histories, politics and ideology as developing together, of simultaneously sustaining one another, and all of this operating within a certain amount of ambivalence.

What seems to be at stake here, is the issue of cultural identification in a post-colonial world. Much of what Bhabha speaks to deals with representation, of historical emergence, enunciation of identity that is in turn simultaneously created only out of a sort of alterity. Yet this creation, this enunciation is qualified by the process of writing, or textuality that prohibits it from any sort of ability to stand alone. The relation here is the signifier to the signified and the fact that Bhabha questions to the notion of given concepts, as opposed to simultaneously created subject, objects only in the process of alterity. Here, Bhabha offers a final clarification of cultural diversity and cultural difference.

In a round about sort of way, Bhabha's emphasis on the differentiation between cultural difference and cultural diversity entails his concepts of hybridity, along with this assertion of rethinking the logics of causality, and furthermore, this rethinking puts forth the fact that maintaining any single notion of cultural identity and so on is extremely troublesome when one looks at the truth of political and ideological discourse.