symploke, Volume 11, Numbers 1-2, 2003, pp.

167-182

"Marginalist" Criticism: An Infantile Disorder?

Peter McCarthy

At the close of Donald Cammell's last film Wild Side (1995), the female lead Alex (Anne Heche) crosses the Mexican border in the arms of a woman, Virginia (Joan Chen). Having worked as a merchant banker and confronted with the option of having to "turn tricks" with her male clients in order to keep her job, Alex turns hooker of her own accord. She wants her lifestyle and, she says, on her terms. But in the doing she falls into a web of criminal intrigue and she wants out. Succumbing to the wiles of Virginia, the money-laundering pawn of her gangster husband Bruno (Christopher Walken), Alex finds herself stitched into an elaborate scam from which, it appears, there is little chance of escape. But Alex and Virginia hatch a scam of their own, ultimately escaping to the margin Alex had always longed for. Casting a glance over her sleepy new "oriental" lover as they escape over the border into Mexico, Alex comes to the realisation that she belongs at the margin of her own existence; that she belongs in exile. And so goes the closing interior monologue: "Anyway, I'm finally crossing over, into the Third World, where I've always known I've belonged. I don't know why." While Alex was indeed heading south in the arms of a woman, this was not the film Cammell had in mind. Feigning failure to comprehend the film, arguing it made no apparent structural or commercial sense, financial backers NuImage were already well at work cutting it as a straight-to-video lesbian exploitation flick when Cammell put a gun to his head in 1996. "They were excited by the fact that there was a lot of lesbian sex," says Frank Mazzola, Cammell's editor and long-time collaborator. "They were probably thinking, great . . . we've just got to get rid of all the extraneous stuff, i.e., the intelligence" (MacNab 26). [End Page 167] Now here's a scenario: Cammell's final film, while of some interest if only for the director's notoriety, especially for his collaboration with Nicolas Roeg on their cult 1970 film Performance (but also for his own taste for young women, drugs, and counterculture) is itself of little importance here. It does however provide a neat paradigm for the emergence of a new, cynical, and similarly exploitative system or industry in Academe. We have here a narrativea sort of modernist marginalised versean author (here a director, an auteur, even), a subject marginalised in her own homeland and a system of representation (film industry) based on exploitation. We have a nice modernist plot and various interested positionsthat is, author, subject, a distributor, a viewer, and a milieu in which all are imbricated in the very same corrupted subject-position. The narrative is calculated to take us away from the hearth and down a course of existential and representative transcendence. The plot points are tied; we are with her all the way. And herein lies the problem. This very same representative transcendence obtains in near to all cultural and avowedly critical theory in the Humanities today. I want to take a look here at something of a fork in the road of Theory and its various diluted and bastardised forms that have emerged transcendent and even victorious (if lamely so) in the Humanities and social sciences in recent years. Key to this transcendence is a rising chorus of marginalist, minority cant pitched in the (often plausible)

discursive manner of its progenitorthat which once was "high" Theory. This move to transcendence, this apparent transgression of the normativea kind of voluntarist cultural exile appears in what may be termed the "new marginalism," a kind of "marginalist verse" that has been emerging with conspicuous faddishness over the past couple of decades or so (viz., cultural studies and its consanguine theoretical "disciplines" born variously of schools of philosophy and comparative literature). This is, of course, in itself nothing new to the Academy. Philosophical and political posturing have been happy residents here for centuries, their avatars succoured (and now often found preening) in the warm glow of post-Enlightenment institutions. The twist here is the fact the new marginalist, while no doubt still posturing, sidles up to a position so tenuous it serves only the renunciation of position: the marginalist must refuse to take up any real position in the self-conscious manner of one who is privileged enough to choose. But as these discourses compete for critical ascendancy, jockeying for position in a burgeoning industry of academic liberalisma positionality, of sorts their particular liberal disposition serves to abnegate any notion of real positionality, political, theoretical, or otherwise. This is, at best, paradoxical given the political cachet this tenuity proffers in current academic climes and so it is no coincidence that indeed some positionalitya certain "distanciated" identification, the politics of [End Page 168] identityis eked from this tenuity. These relatively recent theories and readings of culture and criticism (again born, by and large, of various incantations of continental philosophy, postmodern and post-colonial theorising) have lauded this sort of marginalised verse, courting its authors in what now amounts to an institutionalised Third Worldisma cultural, political, and theoretical minoritarianism now itself next-door to normative in its scope and influence. So, we have a new campus and in its crux the materialisation of a perfidious and inverted rendition of real marginal experience, of exile, alienation, migration, dispersion, and dispossession. Paradox notwithstanding, the marginalist seeks first to relate to and identify with some figure of alienation or extraordinary "otherness." These are invariably drawn from the ranks of the meek, the alienated, and the vanquishedlost souls staring from innumerable galleries and exhibitions of (mostly modern) horror. Having identified, adopted, and ultimately usurped the very subjectposition of their lost or victimised "other" (and so, perversely, erasing their own), the marginalist transcends the mantle of their own subject-position (dull, less than onerous, mediocre?) and raise themselves to the position of their "host" subject, simultaneously privileging the place of their own identification while silencing it. While the real subjects of these diasporic experiences will at all costs hold to some position, even a tenuous foothold at the edge of some desired homeland or other, the marginalist advances by means of a thorough-going disavowal of such a position: eschewing the very positionality they hold (real subject-position, responsibility, reflexivity) in favour of one with which they will come only to identify. Any potential position of critical enunciationthe apparent reason for identification in the first placeis simply null: the proud new doves of cultural studies fulminating in the shadow of their own reflection. In his well-worn tract Orientalism (doubtless one of the starting blocks for much of the theory postcolonial Academe presently sponsors), Edward Said touched on a sort of "orientalist dream-work" motif, drawing after Freud a (fruitful) distinction between what he called manifest orientalism"the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology," etc.and latent Orientalism: what he called an "unconscious (and certainly untouchable) positivity"the

expression (or repression) of a fantasy or a desire for the Orient's "feminine penetrability" and "supine malleability" (1991a, 206). Following Said's line of argument, a similar discursive pattern can be seen in certain declaratively "post-colonial" or marginalist intellectual positions. Here we have a manifest marginalism"the various stated views about marginalised cultures, minority discourses, literatures, history," etc.and, more importantly, a latent marginalism: the unconscious expression of a fantasy or a desire to be or to have the deracinated other's "feminine penetrability" and "supine malleability." [End Page 169] Here, the miscegenation of which the (distanciated) post-colonial or marginalist critic speaks and writes so often can be seen for what it truly is: a means of critical penetration, a pathology of inversion, not unlike what Julia Kristeva termed a "fantasy of incorporation . . . by means of which I attempt to escape fear" (39). But fear, it must be asked, of what? This affectivity is at the core of a certain meta-exile: the marginalist is confronted with a vast array of new sexual, racial, existential, and/or geo-political territory, an embarrassment of minoritarian riches from which he or she duly chooses, adapts to, and swiftly adopts. But this positionality is, again, tenuous: an inversion of truly marginalised experience as the marginalist negotiates the encroaching terrain of a psychopathological homeland and one, at that, which can be maintained only in the infantile privilege of bad faith. And with it comes a certain anguish before the realwerk of their exilic hosts, they who paid the price. Here, the marginalist is in danger of becoming the "downside" of an exilic equation. In seeking to flee from the stare of this down-side (the posited "other," the object-ego of reflective philosophy), the marginalist consciousness in fact incorporates the very anguish from which it unwittingly takes flight. Sartre argued here that "the nihilating power at the heart of anguish" is "disposed of" by means of a radical renunciation, a repressive turn that while having the potential to "decentre" plays at filling the void that confronts it: "I am anguish in order to flee it" (44). 2 The one who seeks to identify with the margin (particularly other subjects who still live or subsist there) renders the viewer's homeland itself the site of alienation; and the margin, the myth of an impossible realisation. While subjectivity, like all narrative, appears as a labour of reconstruction of fundamentally irreconcilable opposites, its ambiguous emergence is that of a kind of "exilic homeland" which neither it nor its truly marginalised brethren will ever experience. It is fantasy which projects plenitude in the face of representational failure, and for the marginalist this fantasy is one of exile or displacement. But against the odds of tenuity, the fantasising subject must maintain a foothold; perform its own representative closure in order to maintain that all-important perspective on self. The machinations of the voyeur here are signaturein the elimination of distance they forge subjective closure and therefore the possibility of their (the viewer/theoretician's) very existence. The marginalists' fantasy is assayed against their own febrile attempt to scrutinise the formation of this tenuous subject, Third World or First. 3 [End Page 170] Important here is the appearance or masking of a certain fantasy of rupture: a kind of projection on a subject divided and alienated by the very centre and logic that defines such division. The metaphysical lures of post-Enlightenment thinking hold, even for the marginalist at hand. The question remains: what, precisely, are they all looking for? Or, again, what precisely are they afraid of?

Few have described it better than American director, George Stevens (notable American classics: Woman of the Year, A Place in the Sun, Shane, and Giant) who, as Lt Col. in the Special Coverage Unit of the U.S. Army Signal Corps during WWII, documented much of the U.S. military effort from 1943, from the landing of Allied forces at Normandy on D-Day to the division of Berlin in 1945. It was his experience of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Dachau that affected him most. He recorded these words: All of the outrages of human nature bring these latent and deep-rooted emotions to the surface, but nothing like a concentration camp. Everything evil will be exposed in a day. It's deplorable, because it undercuts one terribly. I would examine it on the basis of what would happen if I was in the other army, the German Army. I mean, I hated the bastards, what they stood for was the worst, worst possible thing that's happened in centuries, and yet, when a poor man, hungered and unseeing, because his eyesight is failing, grabs me and starts begging, I feel the Nazi, in any human being, I don't care whether I'm a Jew or a Gentile, I feel the Nazi, because I abhor him and I want him to keep his hands off me. And the reason I abhor him, is because I see myself being capable of arrogance and brutality, to keep him off me. That's a fierce thing to discover within yourself, that which you despise the most. (in Stevens, Jr. 1984) Now this testimony is hardly mute yet touches on something rarely done in witness narrative. Stevens does more than put himself in the picture, reflecting not just on his experience but the very subject-position of that experience. This is interesting. While no doubt his particular disposition was critically different from those he would document, Stevens's own reflexive, critical turn here plumbs the depths of moral life in a manner less than usual, in his time or ours. Primo Levi, in his landmark testimonials to his own experience of Auschwitz, also undertook something unusual in the annals of witness testimony, particularly that of the Holocaust. Seeking not so much to describe or to give further account of the "atrocity exhibition" genre of the Nazi Konzentrationslager, his avowed endeavour rather was "to [End Page 171] furnish documentation of a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind" (1999, 15). While this no doubt understates his project, Levi's distinction lies in his attempts to render neither simple witness testimony nor savage indictment but in his analyses of the "concentrationary universe" of the Lager which, he argued, "may be considered an excellent 'laboratory': the hybrid class of prisoner-functionary constitutes its armature and at the same time its most disquieting feature" (1996, 27). The camp is a "grey zone" of privilege and collaboration, he argued, plied by all who survived its nebular world where all the extremes of any given culture are both steeped and confused. In this squalid realm, "studded with obscene or pathetic figures (sometimes they possess both qualities simultaneously)" (1996, 25), he wrote, prisoners adapted to and adopted the barbaric and bestial logic of the very power that beset them. 4 Levi pressed the unpopular point, arguing that "privileged prisoners were a minority within the Lager population, but they represent a potent majority among survivors" (1996, 26). Only in these grey recesses, he argued, where simplification is as inadequate to any understanding as mere description, could be found the germ of some appropriate or proper judgement of tormentor and tormented alike. For Levi, this was saliently true of "him who survived" as the badlands of the camp experience came to visit the moral life of the mind. He put the question: "Are you ashamed because you are

alive in place of another? And in particular, of a man more . . . worthy of living than you? You cannot exclude this," he was careful to elaborate" (1996, 62). Levi here is yet to fully explore this "grey zone" of the "concentrationary world," and we can already evince possible reasons for the relatively late rising of his star among a legion of camp testimonials "his book came and went relatively unnoticed during the period directly following the war, a time," suggests Tzvetan Todorov, "when people preferred the security of clear-cut positions and radical solutions . . . (I am not sure this era is entirely behind us)," he concludes (261). And here's the rub, as Levi would have it: It is no more than a supposition, indeed the shadow of a suspicion; that everyone is his brother's Cain, that everyone of us (but this time I say "us" in a much vaster, indeed universal [End Page 172] sense) has usurped his neighbour's place and lived in his stead. It is a supposition, but it gnaws at us; it has nestled deeply like a woodworm; it is not seen from the outside but it gnaws and rasps . . . . I might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another; I might have usurped, that is, in fact killed. The "saved" of the Lager were not the best, those predestined to do good; the bearer's of a message. What I had seen and lived through proved the exact contrary. Preferably the worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the "grey zones," the spies . . . I felt innocent, yes, but enrolled among the saved and therefore in permanent search of a justification in my own eyes and those of others. The worst survivedthat is, the fittest; the best all died. (1996, 62-63) In 1987, shortly after writing these words, Levi suicided, leaving these questions unanswered but little doubt as to their affect on his capacity to continue living among "the saved." Todorov has argued that Levi's position is "characterized by a double transcendence: he is beyond both hatred and resignation" (261). His refusal to countenance blanket and summary denunciations of the Germans, even his camp tormentors, and his assumption of a reflective, almost circumspect disposition towards the camp experience sits uneasily with the vanquished narratives of other survivors and most that would come to read or listen. Levi wrote of a certain "easy" positionality adopted by people and nations after WW II, where they "find themselves holding, more or less unwittingly, that 'every stranger is an enemy'. For the most part," he argued, "this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason" (1999, 15). Levi is speaking of age-old chauvinism here, a politic apparently and avowedly at odds with that of the new critic. But, as he continues, we can see how this very chauvinismcommodified, disguised, sublatedlives and breathes in the new positionality of the new marginalist. When this latency emerges, writes Levi, "when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager" (1999, 15). Herein lies the baleful paradox of the new marginalism: its privileging of particular and yet avowedly disinterested theories of culturethose, in the main, still advanced by means of the interested positionality of postmodern theorising and post-colonialismbelies residence within a simplistic Manichaeism of its own, a simple mechanism still wound with a simplistic movement between "us and them." Despite this theoretical and reflexive myopia, the privileging of this marginalised verse rides on an argument of some "new [End Page 173] metaphysical critique" in which any possibility of a grounded subject is rejected by means of a relatively old philosophical nihilism, an erasure of

subjectivity including, and paradoxically, the very subject (object-ego) they seek to occupy. Such a critique, of course, necessitates (at least) a cursory reading of philosophyviz., the philosophy of reflection, phenomenology, metaphysics, the Greeks. 5 Metaphysics here is but residual and serves only the theoretical ruse of a nihilism born of infantile impatience and theoretical laziness. Yet this marginalist disposition needs an alibi, a theoretical underpinninga rock, of sorts, on which its church may be founded. But this marginalist disposition has more often than not stumbled on the difficult theoretical "rock" between Nietzschean and Hegelian readings of culture and philosophy. 6 Nietzsche's theoretical "down-going" (Untergehen) on metaphysical enterprise and Hegel's expression of the "dialectical overcoming" (Aufhebung), the sublative spirit which strives for the Absolute, that forges the subject in History, have doubtless exerted a critical influence on readings of culture, particularly in the political and theoretical wash-up of the sixties. When Nietzsche brings Zarathustra down from his mountain cave, the move is prescient: "Behold! I am weary of my wisdom," he says, "like a bee that has gathered too much honey. . . . I should like to give it away and distribute it, until the wise among men have become happy in their folly and the poor happy in their wealth. To that end I must descend into the depths . . . Like you," he declares, "I must go downas men, to whom I want to descend, call it . . . . Thus began Zarathustra's down-going" (1974, 39). 7 As he descends into the rabble, Zarathustra hails an apparently opposite turn to Hegel's philosophical ascendencyZarathustra's "down-going" is expressed as the truly human condition, a reversal of the sublative spirit (Aufhebung), [End Page 174] of the "ossified" philosopher of metaphysics. Nietzsche, it appears, must go down (Untergehen) on Hegel. 8 Hegel saw the human intellect in its ability to "set limits," and in this capacity it "erects a building" placing "it between man and the Absolute, linking everything that man thinks worthy and holy to this building, fortifying it through all the powers of nature and talent and expanding it ad infinitum. The entire totality of limitations is to be found in it, but not in the Absolute . . ." (1997, 262). Where Hegel saw "[d]ichotomy [Entzweiung] as the source of the need of philosophy. . . and the sole interest of Reason [as] to suspend rigid antitheses" (1997, 264)in a sense, to bring them home Nietzsche (particularly, it seems, the "new Nietzsche," the received Nietzsche of cultural studies) is viewed as the wandering bard, homeless and unbound by System or stricture. These boundaries, and their affect on this subject as it meets its history, as that which define or appear to define our perceptual and ideological limits, are well-articulated by Nietzsche when he posits that "[i]f he [man] were able to get out of the prison walls of this faith, even for an instant only," and here comes the premise for the Platonic reversal (an impossible project, even for Nietzsche),"his 'self-consciousness' would be destroyed at once" (1996, 510). While Hegel is the builder, maybe like Ibsen's Solness, Nietzsche and his acolytes remain the harbingers of the doom of this house he would build; a cultural studies blitz of sorts which threatens to bring it down, to raze it. In fact, they probably have. And this, despite the actual, fundamental symmetry between their projectsI wonder if they really want to go down on Hegel? [End Page 175] This brings me to the subject, or do I say object, of marginalist discourse: almost invariably the fictions or narratives, be they literature, film, art, of some Third World brethrena kind of "frenzied infatuation" with the "house of fiction." Now this is a critical juncture, if not for the marginalists themselves; we are after all talking about cultural studies which imbricates life in art. But what exactly is this "house of fiction" and how are its ramparts threatened or even shaken by these spruikers of "rupture"? For Homi Bhabha, and a significant coterie of post-colonial and "committed

critics," this house finds its foundations "shaken" in literal renderings of exilic writings, minority discourses, and other representations that find themselves, at least look for themselves, at the margin. This marginalised "house of fiction," with its many windows and multivious perspectives resides, however, inextricably with the "mansion" of the literary canon that is most often the object of their scorn. For Bhabha, the "house of fiction," contains the means of its own invasion, division, or dispossessionthe "home" containing its very own "unhomeliness," the "deep stirring" that portends the "sites for history's most intricate invasions" (141). Bhabha here points, perhaps predictably, to Freud's unheimlichkeit. For Freud, "the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; 'the prefix "un"["un"] is the token of repression'" (Bhaba 146). 9 Freud, speaking of Schelling's use of the term, points out that "all is unheimlichkeit that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light" (224). "Home," like the culture that bears it, always and inherently contains what is "unhomely" and to this extent they are effectively interchangeable. In 1947, Heidegger had put it that "[l]anguage is the house of Being" and that in "its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home" (1996, 217). This "dwelling," for Heidegger, is the space in which Being meets its subject in history (1996, 344-63). 10 While Heidegger runs with the metaphysical metaphor as a means to declare Being, defining language as the space where Being comes to the subject, it is a space marked by boundaries, and as he argues, "the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding" (1996, 356). On the transition from simple consciousness to self-consciousness, Hegel wrote that "we have now passed into the native land of truth, into that kingdom where it is at home" (219). But this emergence to the self-conscious clearing of selfhood is not without its pitfalls since "absolute" selfknowing, even for Hegel, remains elusive. As Heidegger points out the "absolute remains the extreme for self-consciousness. Knowing itself thus, self consciousness knows itself as a [End Page 176] knowledge which essentially struggles for the absolute, but in this struggle fights its way to a constant subjugation" (1994, 140). For Hegel, self-consciousness is only anguish over its existence and experiencean "unhappy consciousness" which "is itself the gazing of one self-consciousness into another . . . but is not yet the unity of both" (1967, 251). Heidegger affirms this selfconsciousness as "the knowledge of failure in what drives its own essence. So, self-consciousness is unhappy, just at a place where it unfolds unto its own essential character; it is the unhappy consciousness"unhappy because its grip on home is tenuous, because it is, in Heidegger's terms, "knowing's restlessness" (1994, 140). Speaking on the "history of metaphysics" as part of the defining moment of Derrida's deconstructive announcement to the Americas (and one might add, therefore, the theoretical "West"), Spivak points out that "Derrida never really finished, or even undertook, that much promised deconstruction. He hasn't been son of Heidegger in that respect. As for how deconstruction actually operates, it fixes on small things: margins, moments, etc. But something unifying is needed . . . ." "As a fiction?," she is asked by one of her Resident Indian interlocutors: "As a necessary theoretical fiction, which is a methodological presupposition," she responds, stressing here that "the possibility of this fiction cannot be derived from some true account of things. If you take the theoretical formulation of deconstruction, you have a stalling at the beginning and a stalling at the end

(diffrance at the beginning, and aporia at the end), so that you can neither properly begin nor properly end. Most of the people who are interested in deconstruction are interested in these two things. But," she concludes, "I'm more interested in what happens in the middle . . . " (1990, 136). And Spivak is onto something here, which is more than we can say for the proprietors of the new marginalism. It is precisely this stuff of the middle (die Mitte), the middle term, the mediating terms of history, of metaphysics of texuality and of "dwelling," which defines the margin as well as the Heimat. It must be put; the "West" to which these critics refer is no more Centre than frontier, inside than out, here than there. While maybe once, at the height of its dubious distinction, having the status of the Imperium (as if in absolute contradistinction to its counterparts in the East), and perhaps, stood ground as some pan-logicist perspective; in strict terms its designation is as arbitrary as the Orient, that nebulous other by which it is in fact defined. The terms are mutually inclusive, even by the very fact of their apparent opposition. No doubt, the West is the bearer of "centrist themes," of structures and institutional machinery that assist in its advancementthis is its culture, the force of its history, and this it shares, to the back teeth, with its other term. But in this very advancement, East or West, inheres this middle ground, defining a [End Page 177] certain proximity inherent in the very difference between the two. When Hegel enunciates the problem of self-consciousness as the reflexive relation of self to other, of Being to the Real of its existence in History, he speaks of a "double entente," "a play of forces" at the centre of their distinction: the "middle term . . . which breaks itself up into the extremes; and each extreme is this interchange of its own determinateness, and complete transition into the opposite" (1967, 230-231). And Heidegger, mindful of this "play of forces" between extremes, brings them even closer: "The true is the play, the middle, not the extremes . . . " (1994, 116). So, this is where it unfolds, at the site of a "relation," articulated elsewhere by Heidegger as intimacy . . . (1971, 202). It is precisely this desire for intimacy, for an unattainable reflexive contiguity, that is at the core of this fantasy of the marginalist. It must be put, the impulse of this liberal intellectual tendency to identification lies in this fantasy not of the margin but of the Centrethat is, a fantasy of a true homeland. The impossibility of (a heimlich) plenitude is masked or re-rendered by the very possible solidity of such a homeland, fleshed out (through fantasy) of a basic impossibility and a necessary void. In a desperate, clambering attempt to hold onto their fantasy structure, of a true subjective homelandthis very hearth that nurtures and at the same time allows for the very possibility of a subjective outlandthe liberal intellectual finds solace in the Third World otherness of the subaltern and it is in their interest to keep them there. Billy Wilder's film The Big Carnival (a.k.a. Ace in the Hole) (1951) tells the story of Chuck Tatum, a New York journalist on the rails in Albuquerque. On his way to cover a rattlesnake hunt after a year in this New Mexico backwater, Tatum (Kirk Douglas) comes upon Leo Menoza, a service station cum souvenir shop proprietor trapped in an old Indian cave. While Leo could perhaps be extricated without much danger, Tatumthe only one of the gathering willing to enter the cavedecides to keep him there in order to get a story and boost his career. A true subaltern with identity "hyphenated" across several boundariesHispanic-American, working-class, ex-servicemanLeo is Tatum's "ace in the hole." People come from miles around for this human interest storyTatum is in control and in constant touch with Leo. He gets close to his subaltern but it's too lateLeo dies before they can save him. But, while this example serves to illustrate the position of the marginalist

critic, it also serves their position in that, again, their identification here lies with the figure of the subaltern, not the star who truly represents them. Their "critical faculties" allow them to suspend the usual narrative norms of identification and to engage with the minority stare of the marginalised, the trapped. It is therefore in danger [End Page 178] of falling into the same victimology that is the narrative stuff of the marginalist.Minoritarianismas a form of neo-colonialism. Said, interestingly, would find himself on the receiving end of a "hostile" intervention (doubtless motivated, again, by a certain "anxiety of influence"his!) while delivering a lecture on his proposed sequel to his Orientalism at a prestigious U.S. academy. In discussing the Western canon in relation to the culture of imperialism, he found himself confronted by a phalanx of dissenters, purportedly more marginal than their visiting Professor, accusing him of propagating the very same "orientalism" he'd spent the best part of his career critiquing. In his defence, he articulates here the dangers of an "impoverished politics of knowledge based only upon the assertion and reassertion of identity, an ultimately uninteresting alternation of presence and absence" (1991b, 25). 11 Descending, through this uncritical affirmation of identity, this "politics of knowledge," he argues, merely "asserts a sort of separatism that wishes to draw attention only to itself" (1991b, 26). Ultimately neglecting a true consciousness of self in the process of engagement (with self, with world), the critic tends to the same "unreconstructed nationalism" they uniformly decry. Importantly, Said argues that "our point . . . cannot be simply and obdurately to reaffirm the paramount importance of formerly suppressed or silenced forms of knowledge and leave it at that, nor can it be to surround ourselves with the sanctimonious piety of historical or cultural victimhood as a way of making our intellectual presence felt. Such strategies," he rightly affirms, "are woefully insufficient" (1991b, 26; my emphasis). Spivak too, herself a burger of the NRI community in the "West," is harsh on this kind of "subaltern identification" by Western intellectualsof what she has called "the hyperbolic admiration. . . or pious guilt that today is the mark of a reverse ethnocentrism" (Spivak in Young 167). 12 While she argues that to ignore the political and discursive position of the subaltern is tantamount to the perpetuation of imperialism, we can see that critical attention to the subject-position of the subaltern is far from identification with it. Spivak is savage on what she calls the "banality of leftist intellectuals' lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns," arguing that in this banal representation of the subaltern, their own positionhere she is referring to the positions adopted by Deleuze and Foucault"stands revealed; [and, in] [End Page 179] representing them [the subaltern], the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent" (Spivak 1993, 70). Pasolini painted something of the problematic of the "engaged" intellectual in his 1963 elegy "A Desperate Vitality." Here, the contradictory forces of history and subjectivity, and the very possibility of engaging in the process which forges them is touched on with a prescience more than germane to the decades that would follow: You will descend into the world, and you will be nive and gentle, balanced and faithful, you will have an infinite capacity to obey and an infinite capacity to rebel. You will be pure. For that, I curse you. (173, translation modified)

I put it that the impact on politics of this relatively recent marginalist jockeying and the "culture industry" of which some of its avatars have become patrons represents the failure of politics, of a true positionality. The failure of the new marginalism to accommodate the ever-present fantasy of rupture in their own intellectual Heimat, is at the root of a crisis in recent critical theory that seems little recognised in the currently fashionable "posts" of Theory and Politics. Writing in 1949 on the "flagrant contradictions" of the very cultural criticism (Kulturkritic) for which he himself was lauded, Adorno wrote that the "cultural critic is not happy with civilization, to which alone he owes his discontent. He speaks as if he represents unadulterated nature or a higher historical stage. Yet," he fiercely contended, "he is necessarily of the same essence as that to which he fancies himself superior . . . . But what makes the content of cultural criticism inappropriate is not so much lack of respect for that which is criticised as the dazzled and arrogant recognition which criticism surreptitiously confers on culture" (1997, 19). In such criticism, argues Adorno, inheres a "predominant social tendency, [in which] the integrity of the mind becomes a fiction. Of its freedom it develops only the negative moment, the heritage of the planless-monadological condition, irresponsibility" (1997, 21; my emphasis). And herein lies the problematic: the pathetic, parasitic reasoning behind this diminishing positionality of theory and politics, of the need for the new marginalism (just one creed among the Kulturkritik), to "go down" on the realwerk of theory and politics in order to find its own paradoxical place in the sun. And so goes the closing interior monologue: "Anyway, I'm finally crossing over, into the Third World, where I've always known I've belonged. I don't know why."

University of Technology, Sydney [End Page 180] Peter McCarthy writes social policy for the Government of his home state of New South Wales (Australia). He is a Research Associate at the University of Technology, Sydney where he teaches cinema studies and critical theory. References Adorno, Theodor. "Cultural Criticism and Society." Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1997. ___. The Jargon of Authenticity. Trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. London: Routledge, 2003. Bhabha, Homi. "The World and the Home." Social Text 31/32 (1992): 141. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London: Athlone P, 1983. Freud, Sigmund. "The 'Uncanny.'" The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XVII. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1971. George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey. Dir. George Stevens, Jr. Castle Hill Films, 1984. Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967.

___. "The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy." German Idealist Philosophy. Ed. Rdiger Bubner. Trans. Walter Cerf and H. S Harris. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1997. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. ___. "Letter on Humanism" and "Building Dwelling Thinking." Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge, 1996. ___. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. London: Abacus, 1996. ___. If This is a Man and The Truce. Trans. Stuart Woolf. London: Abacus, 1999. Lilla, Mark. The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. New York: New York Review Books, 2001. MacNab, Geoffrey. "Hooker's Magic." Sight & Sound 27 (1999): 26. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1974. ___. "On Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense." The Philosophy of Nietzsche. Ed. Geoffrey Clive. Trans. Oscar Levy. New York: Meridian, 1996. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. "A Desparate Vitality." Selected Poems. Trans Norman MacAfee and Luciano Martinengo. London: John Calder, 1989. Said, Edward W. (1991a) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin Books. ___. (1991b) "The Politics of Knowledge." Raritan (Summer 1991): 25. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1966. Spivak, Gayatri. "Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice." Wedge 7/8 (1985): 121. ___. "Interview with Radical Philosophy." The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym. London: Routledge, 1990. [End Page 181] ___. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Todorov, Tzvetan. Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollack. London: Phoenix, 2000. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1993.

Footnotes 1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 10th Annual Conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia"What's Left of Theory"Hobart, December 2001. 2. Sartre here is speaking of the "down-side," the "nihilating power" of all consciousness. 3. This is, of course, just another theoretical thorn in the side of the critic in question. "Subjectivity"like numerous other sides to this cultural and critical issueis a slippery path, leading inexorably to some engagement or other with philosophical and political questions already explored by a frightening array of rigorous thought and its thinkers. And besides, it is no longer fashionable . . . . 4. Strangely here, Levi takes filmmaker Liliana Cavani to task for words she used to describe her notorious film The Night Porter (1973), about the post-war resuscitation of a sado-masochistic relationship between a camp survivor (Charlotte Rampling) and her former SS Commandant tormentor (Dirk Bogarde). Cavani is cited as saying: "We are all victims or murderers, and we accept these roles voluntarily. Only Sade and Dostoevsky have really understood this . . . in every environment, in every relationship, there is a victim-executioner dynamism more or less clearly expressed and generally lived on an unconscious level." Levi uses Cavani's explanation of her film against her, arguing plainly that he does not profess to be "an expert of the unconscious and the mind's depths. . . but I do know I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer" (1996, 32). 5. When asked for revolutionary inspiration by the radical student movement in Berlin in 1967, Alexandre Kojvenotoriously the motivating force behind the Hegelian Marxism of radical political and philosophical movements in Europe post-after WW IIhe reportedly replied: "Learn Greek" (Lilla 123). 6. Writing of the highly overdetermined language of German existentialism (Heidegger) and the extent to which its "jargon of authenticity" ultimately sponsored authoritarianism (Fascism) through its very claims to "authenticity" (yes, in "the Greek," in metaphysics), Adorno argued: "Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were a salvation" (2003, 3). So, first time as history, second time as farce . . . 7. See also translator's note (1974, 339). It should be put that the diametrical or the oppositional is not essentially dialectical, showing only the extremes of dialectical schemata, opaque as form to content. The dialectic takes in all angles, all perspectives and huesits reduction to the simply dichotomous glosses over the very structural and textual interstices that keep it in flux. Contrary to the violent and, it is often argued, undemocratic afflictions apportioned to it in current trends in cultural studies (its systematic sway is variously posited as anathema to the more desirable and purportedly more dialogical movements of democracy, liberalism, etc.), its movements are only as violent or as subtle as its history and its fellows will allow. 8. This sort of theoretical down-going on the dialecticfounded as much on a certain "anxiety of influence" (to use Harold Bloom's phrase) and fear of historical affiliation (its detractors were almost to a person at one time vigorous cheerleaders for dialectical thought) as an espoused move toward a more "democratic" epistemologyis nothing short of a bland erasure of the vicissitudes of history, a history replete with masters and slaves, despots and sycophants, and a litany of others who refuse

to put up their hands and show themselves. Deleuze is just one fashionable case in point. Refusing the affective potential of reflexivity, of the dialectic of recognition in Hegel's master-slave relation, he argued forcefully: "The one who says: 'I am good,' does not wait to be called good. He refers to himself in this way, he names himself and describes himself thus to the extent that he acts, affirms and enjoys" (1983, 119). Outside of the affect of the megalomaniac, this denial of the force of recognition in human relations is untenable. A most tangible and suitably popular example of this may be seen in the relation between the characters of the Nazi Amon Goeth (Ralph Feines) and Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) in Spielberg's film Schindler's List (1994). Goeth's essential power resides in the recognition he finds in Schindler, the identification necessary for his very functioning. The narcissistic-homosexual implications here serve only to underpin this relation of recognition and identification, this relation of master-slave (designated Untersturmfhrer, Goeth represents something of the underbelly of the bermensch). The one who says "I am good" may only reap the power of his statement should he be given the nod of affirmation by the one who recognises him: recognition by another and for another. (The almost universal entreat of the retiring lover to his pensive partner"What are you thinking?"is nothing if not a circumlocution of the real question: "Am I good?") 9. See Freud (245). 10. See also Heidegger (1971) for the full and appropriate "poetic" context of this essay. 11. "It is risky, I know," Said wrote of this experience, "to move from the realm of interpretation to the realm of world politics, but it seems to me true that the relationship between them is a real one, and the light that one realm can shed on the other is quite illuminating" (1991b, 25). 12. From an earlier version of Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice" (1985).