Epilogue: Through the Primt of an Intellectual Lif$

Transcription

1 DASPORA, GLOBALZATON AND THE POLlTlCS OF ldentlty Paul Glroy, 'Between Camps: Race and Culture n Posrmodernty'. 0. For a fuller dscusson of ths see P. Hntzen, Werl ndan n the Werl:.%/ Reprcrmlatonr n an lm~r~pnt Commvnly (New York: New York Unversty Press. 200). The materal for the ensung dscussorl ofwest ndans n the San Francsco Bay area s taken from ths work. See S. Fsher, From Morg'n lo Manstream: Tk SucelPmgr~~r of BhdA&ns, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Lttlefeld, 992); G. Horne, Fre Ths Tme: The Watlr Up"3ngand the 960s (Charlottesvlle: Unversty Press of Vrgna, 995); Meryn Dymally, 'The Rse ofblack Poltcal Leadershp n Calforna', n What Black Poltcom are Sayng?, ed. Nathan Wrght (New York Hawthorn Books, 972) ; R. Sorenshen, Pollcr n Bhck and Whe:RaceandPouern Lor Angcler (Prnceton: Prnceton Unversty Press. 993); B. Wyman. 'Roots: The Orgns of Black Poltcs n the East Bay', Erpress9, no. 43 (August 987). J.B. Justus, 'ntroducton', n magnnghome: Claw, Culture, andnalonalrm n the AfconDLrrpora, 3. Paul Glroy, 'Between Camps: Race and Culture n Posmodernty'. See C.V. Fong, 'Tracng the Orgns of a 'Model Mnorty". A study of the Depctons of Chnese Amercans n Popular Magaznes' (PhD dss., Department of Socology, Unversty of Oregon,l989); W. Young-Jn, "Model Mnorty" Strateg and Asan Amercan Tactcs'. Kmeo jrmrnal (Summer 994): 57-56; S. Stenberg, TheElhncMylh: Race, Clm ondethncly n Amerca (Boston: Beacon Press, 98). N. Glazer and P. Moynhan, &ad the MellngPol (Cambrdge, Mass.: MT Press. 963); T Sowell, 'Three Black Hstores', n A-can Ethnc Gmupr. eds. T. Sowell and L.D. Collns (Washngton, DC: Urban nsttute, 978), 4. P hntz, 'From Ghetto Elte to Servce Sector: A Comparson of Two Waves of West lrldan lrnrngranu n New York Cty', Elhnc Goups no:7 (998): 7s204; R. Farley and W. Allen. The ColmLneand oflqe n Anmca (NewYork: Russell Sage Foundaton, 987). 3 Eplogue: Through the Prmt of an ntellectual Lf$ Thnkng about Thnkng Stuart Hall cannot begn at ths pont to try to reply or respond n any detal to the many papers whch have been presented, the mportant dea whch have been crculated and the ponw whch have been rased. Snce cannot respond n detal, what on earth can do? Perhaps can start by tryng to nvoke a certan way of experencng myself over,.- the last two days of the conference. keep Lookng around tryng to dscover ths person 'Stuart Hall' that everybody s talkng about. Occasonally recognze hm. sort of know hm. He has a certan famlarty every now and agan. am famlar wth a lot of the dea people are referrng to. recognze some of the quotes, though have to confess, not all There are one or two am very grateful to have redscovered, and hope to get the references. But ths experence of, as t were, experencng oneself as both subject and oeject, of encounterng oneself from the ot~tsde, as another - an olhm- sort of person next door, s uncanny. t s le beng exposed to a seralzed set of embarrassments. And wantjust to draw from that experence a frst thought about thought. thnk theory - thnkng, theorzng - s rather lke that, n the sense that one confronts the absolute unknowngness, the opacty, the densty, of realty, of the subject one s tryng to understand. t presents tself, frst, as both too multfarous and too complcated, wth ts patterns too hdden; ts nterconnectons un-revealed. One needs the act of dstancng oneself - as Lacan would say - 'from the place of the other'. Marx once suggested that one should use concepts lke a scentst uses a mcroscope, to change the magnfcaton, n order to 'see dfferently' - to penetrate thr dsorderly surface of thngs to another level of understandng. There s a sense n whch one has to stand back, outsde of oneself, n order to make the defour fhruugh lhvughc to approach what t s one s tryng to thnk about ndrectly, oblquely, n anorher way, another mode. thnk the

2 EPLOGUE: THROUGH THE PRSM OF AN NTELLECTUAL LFE world s fundamentally resstant to thought. thnk t s resstant to 'theory'. do not thnk t lkes to be thought. do not thnk twants to he understood. So nevtably, thnkng s hard work, a knd of labour. t s not somethng that smply flows naturally from nsde oneself. Thus, one of the perplextes about dong ntellectual work s that, of course, to be any sort of ntellectual s to attempt to rase one's selfseflexver~ess to the hghest maxmum pont of ntensty. Someone - thnk Mke Rustn2earler on - referred to my early work, the subject of my putatve D.Phl, on the novels of HenryJames, andwhat a bzarre thng t s that ths s where my academc career started. One of the thngs about James was of course hs attempt to gan the maxmum ntensty of selfconscousness, to be as self-aware as possble about the fnest movements of hs own conscous thnkng - as he sad, 'to be someone on whom nothng s lost.'yet to do that s to become nstantly aware of the enormor~s unconscmcsncss of thnkng, of thought; one smply cannot and wll never be able to frllly recuperate one's own processes of thought or creatvty self-reflexvely. These provsonal thoughtsaborlt thnkng come from beng present at a conference at whch am, somehow, both beng dscussed and also dscussng f dstance myself, see myself 'from the place of the other', can see what James, n one of hs fnest short stores, called 'the fgure n the carpet' that could not see before. was often tempted durng these last two days to jon n and speak of me n the thrd person Now what wanted to say about ths strategy s that, of course, by takng the 'detour through thought', one sees all sorts of thngs about one's self and one's own thnkng, connectons n one's work, the patterns behnd the patterns, whch one could not possbly see for oneself n any other way. n that sense, one s always unconscously escapng the attempt to self-knowledge, the attempt to become dentcal wth myself. Thatsnot possble. cannot become dentcal wth myself. That s the paradox of dentty whch have tred to wrte about elsewhere - one can only thnk dentty through dfference. To thnk s to construct that nwtable dstance between the subject hat s Llnkng and the subject that s beng thought about. That sjust a condton of ntellectual work. Carbbean Forma ton The second thought about thnkng and about the 'thought' that we have been dscussng these two days was my response to the nvtaton from Bran, Tony and Rupert, to, as t were, become, at ths very late stage n my lfe, a Carbbean ntellectual. uwhat sense could possbly clam to he a Carbbean ntellectual? Certany, not n the most obvous sense of the term. My work has not been largely about the Carbbean. have not been actvely present n the enormously mportantwok of tryng to wrle the hstory of the Carbbean and Carbbean socetes n the perod of ndependence, ncludng wrtng ts past from the perspectve of an ndependent naton. Of course, my hopes have been caught up wth the fate of the natons of the regon snce decoonzaton. However, have not been party n that deep way to the project of 'natonhood'. am Carbbean n the most banal sense, n the sense that was born here. But that accdent of brth s not enough tojustfy ownngup to the ttle. have to confess, although they do not know t, that dd serously thnk of sayng to them, ' am sorry, but am not a Carbbean ntellectual n the sense n whch thnk the Centre ought to be honourng people.' The reason decded not to do that was because, reflectng on my own lfe and practce, have to say that, although n many moments of my lfe have been thnkng aboutwhat many people n the Carbbean would thnk of as other problems, other places, other dlemmas, t seems to me have always been dong so through what can only call lhepsm ojmy Carbbeanjomalon. n that sense am commtted to the dea of a poltcs of locaton. Ths does not mean all thought s necessarly lmted and self-nterested because ofwhere t comes from, or anythng lke that. mean somethng rather looser - that all thought s shaped by where t comes from, that knowledge s always to some degree 'postonal'. One can never escape the way n whch one's formaton lays a knd of mprnt on or template over what one s nterested n, what knd of take one would have on any topc, what lnkages~one wants to make and so on. Ths s true even about so-called Cultural Studes, the feld wth whch, nevtaby, my work and my careel: have been dentfed, and for whch feel a certan responsblty. have tred as far as possble to evade ths 'burden of representaton', and sometmes make rude noses about t so people thnk 'oh well t does not really belong to hm after all'. deny paternty -

3 EPLOGUE: THROUGH THE PRSM OF AN NTELLECTUAL LFE Cultural Studes had many orgns, many 'fathers', but nevertheless, one feels a certan responsblty for t Well, Cultural Studes has ts own nternal hstory as a dscplne, but when thnk about why ever got nto t, know t was because, before what s called Cultural Studes ever began at Brmngham n the eary 960s, had to confront the problem of tryng to understand what Carbbean culture was and what my relatonshp was to t. put t that way because my relatonshp to t, n terms of a naturalstc logc -'He was born here, so he must be a Carbbean ntellectual' -does not work. My relatonshp to the Carbbean was one of dslocaton, of dsplacement, lterally and fguratvely. My lfe as a young person, as a chld, as an adolescent, was spent there. left when was 8 years old. Though have never ceased to thnkof myself as n some way 'Jamacan', have never lved for long perods n the Carbbean snce then. A relatonshp then - a negatve relatonshp, you would thnk - of dsplacement and dslocaton. Dslocaton n a deeper sense, too. The reason why was so commtted to leavng the Carbbean when fnshed school at the end of the 950s and the reason why n some ways never returned to lve here, had to do wth my colonal formaton,-my formaton and experence as a colonal subject. Because there are so many young people n the audence, want to remnd you that am talkng about somethng very specfc, now more or less lost a. an mmedate experence to those who are not of or nearly my age. Most of you are chldren of the 'postcolonal'. am talkng about experencng oneself, thnkng about one's socety and one's future, from the poston of a colonal subject. left for England 2 years before ndependence. My whole formaton had been as a chld of coloured mddle-class Jamacan socety. That s to experence oneself as 'colonzed'- that s, fundamentally dsplaced from the centre of the world, whch was always represented to me as 'elsewhere' and at the same tme dslocated from the people and condtons around me. My relatonshp to that background, whch do notwant to go nto n a personal sense, was to make me feel (n the eloquent term whch the great crtc of Orentalsm, Edward Sad, used as the ttle of hs memor of a strkngly smlar chldhood half way around the world n another colonzed space) 'out of place', both n relaton to my famly and my personal formaton and n relaton to the socety nto whch had been born. hope t s not necessary to add that colonzato~, cass, race and colour were ntrnsc to that troubled story. Up to the pont where leftjamaca n 95, dd not understand what was the source of that dslocaton. thought t was a largely personal one. twas not untl much later that dscovered that ths was a feelng of dslocaton experenced by a whole generaton of ntellectual Carbbean people at the end of Empre. When went to London, there they all were, hdng out: all of them makng some knd of escape attempt from colonal socety. All of them n search for away to become modern subjects, butwth the bzarre thought that n order to do so, you had to leave the place of your brth - to go somewhere else - to become, borrowng the ttle of one of George Lammng's novels 'anatve of my person'. Not anywhere else, of course, but rght to the heart of the dslocaton tself, to that whch had,at a dstance, ds-placed, un-homed you. And when say 'dslocated', am," talkng about serous stuff. am talkng about never feelng at one wth the expectatons my famly had for me; of the sort of person should become, of what should do wth my lfe. And of dslocaton fom the people themselves - from the mass of the Jamacan people: not at home 'n the castle of my skn'. Not beng able to fnd myself 'at home' n the context n whch was born, brought up and lved. And thought, ths a recpe for dsaster. The thng to do, felt, s get out of there. There s a wonderful passage n Lammng's The Pleusure~ ofexl2 - a book whch strongly recommend to you fyou are nterested n ths. perod of Carbbean ntelectual hstory, and especally f you can apprecate and enjoy the rones of the word 'pleasures' n whch Lammng, speakng of the West ndan wrterswho all found themselves lvng n London between 948 and 958 says, 'they smply wanted lo get out of the place where they were born'. Ths s the decade whch, as he says, 'wtnessed the "emergence" of the novel as an magnatve nterpretaton of West ndan socety by West ndans. And every one of them: Mttelholzer, Red, Mas, Selvon, Hearne, Carew, Napau, Andrew Salkey, Nevlle Dawes, everyone has felt the need toga ml." As an asprng young wrter, get out dd. However, what soon dscovered was that had not and could never really 'get out' or be fully part of ths 'elsewhere' that had smultaneously made and unmade me. To make the return journey: not lterally, because for many, 'you can't go home agan', but symbolcally, n my head. had no

4 EPLOGUE: THROUGH THE PRSM OF AN NTELLECTUAL LFE alternatve but to come to terms wth and try to understand the very culture from whch had felt dstanced and, unsuccessfully, engneered an mpossble escape. And when n the md-950s after the Empre Wndrush and the begnnng of mass mgraton to England from the Carbbean, met black Carbbean men and women lookng for work and a place to lve n the grey, wet and nhosptable London streets - one more turn n the story ofthe Mddle Passage and a crtcal moment n the formaton of another dsplaced black daspora - resolved to go back, to read, read about, try to understand and to make a part of me the culture whch had made me and from whch could never - and no longer wshed - to escape. The central theme of Plennrres of Exle, Rchard Drayton says n the preface to the new edton: s 'the recovery of self - even f t can only be recovered on the other sde of the Black Atlantc. That was the personal orgns, for me, of my own 'makng' as a black ntellectual (lke manyjamacans ofmy generaton and class background, had never untl then thought of myself as 'black'); and also the frstencounterwth, what later came to be called Cultural Studes. All ths no doubt explans how my perspectve on 'beng a Carbhean ntellectual' and my conceptualzaton of 'culture' acqured from ts earlest pont so dsrupted and dasponcan nflexon. Subjectvty and Culture What we thnk of as our ndvdualty - somethng gven before culture, whch we possess as a subjectjust by beng born, after whch we learn to use the tools of culture - s qute the reverse. Ths s part of what meant by sayng that dentty s not settled n the past but always also orented towards the future. We enter culture, and by dong so, approprate a language, a culture, whch someone else - many other people - created for us, and only n thatway gradually become subjects. Men and women make hstory, not on condtons of ther own makng, but wth elements whch are provded for them from the past, and whch n some sense, are ther condtons of exstence, and they and shape and form them n ways that they have to lve subjectvely but for whch they cannot be drectly responsble. t s one of Mchel Foucault'sgreatest nsghts that n order to become 'subjects'we must be 'subjected' to dscourses whch speak us, and wthout whch we cannot speak. Of course, culture s also enablng as well as constranng, dscpl~nng. Wthu culture, we can form ntentons, make purposes, create the most extraordnary ntutons nto lfe. We can produce great works of phlosophy, of pantng, oftterature; but only because we have already subjected ourselves to the laws and conventons and meanngs of a language, the crcumstances of hstory and culture, wthout whch we could not have made ourselves. Ths process s called 'the decentrng of the subject'. t reprcsents the dslocaton of the subject from the poston of authorshp and authorty. t s the dslocaton from that humanst dream whch, thnk, s really a humanst fantasy, that actually Man (sc) s the centre of the unverse, t all proceeds from us and we are the orgn. could say more about how that fgure of the dsplacement from the poston of orgn and dentty has recurred n my own thnkng but ths s not the place or the tme. However, t represents the end ofa certan fantasy of romantc,.. ndvdualsm to whch once subscrbed ( went to England, after all, as a Romantc poet manque), and the startng-pont n my thnkng of a profound belef that 'the socal' s more than the sum of ndvduals. t s what the early socologsts - Marx, Weber, Durkhem -called 'socety su genm.c: My crtcs would say ths s how fell prey to structuralsm but t really preceded all that. t came n part fom thnkng about my own formaton, my own subjecthood. do not apply ths nsght substantvely. t s not what thnk about but rather what thnk wth. When thnk about a problem, realze retrospectvely that have done so by makng ths 'detour'. am sure ths 'methodologcal presupposton' of my thnkng has somethng to do wth my own personal 'dsplacement', but thss a connecton cannot spend tme reflectng on -t s part of the unconscousness of thought about whch was speakng earler. Transdscplnary Thought and ntellectual Actvsm am tryng to now respond or refer to thngs whch have been sad n the last couple of dayswthout actually beng able to take on drectly arguments whch have been made. am tryng to share wth you my thoughts, prompted by the last few days, about ths strange object/ subject- 'the thought of Stuart Hall'. have been descrbng a knd of 'thnkng under erasure'. What mean by that s smply that n ntellectual thought there are rarely absolutely new paradgms, whch

5 EPLOGUE: THROUGH THE PRSM OF AN NTELLECTUAL LFE nobody has ever attended to before. We thnk wthn tradtons and paradgms of thought- they thnk us -even when our ntenton s to break wth and transcend them. But there are moments when the paradgms shft, when what Davd Scott calls 'the problem space' changes. We do lve n a perod when many of the exstng paradgms establshed and developed wthn tradtonal ntellectual dscplnes ether no longer n themselves adequately correspond to the problems that we have to resolve, or requre supplementng from other dscplneswth whch they have not hstorcally been drectly connected. These are the openngs for what s called a transdscplnary feld of nqury. And speak about t because have - once agan somewhat unconscously - found myself n a transdscplnary feld. have never been able to be satsfed wth workng from wthn a sngle dscplne. t has nothng to do wth not respectng what has gone on n the work of developng ntellectual dscplnes, but am at the same tme aware of the fact that the organzaton of modern knowledge nto the dscplnary framework occurred at a specfc hstorcal moment. That hstorcal moment may have passed, or may be passng, or 'on the wane'; or that partcular way of organzng knowledge may no longer be adequate to the realty t s tryng to analyse and descrbe. feel a dsjuncture between the dscplnes, on the one hand, and the rapdly shftng and changng fragments of realty whch confront us today. Agan, am not recommendng to you an antdscplnary pathway, am smply sayng that have not found t possble to thnksmplywthn the frameworkof the gven dscplnes. started n lterature and lterary crtcsm but never became a wrter or a crtc. was a professor of socology but have no formal academc tranng n the feld. Cultural Studes s a transdscplnary feld of nqury, not a dscplne. Now, that has had profound costs on my own thought. Frst of all, really arn not an academc n the tradtonal sense at all. mean Barry Chevannes6 was very knd to refer to me as a 'scholar', hut am not really n the true sense of the word a 'scholar'. That s not what am. have lved an academc lfe and earned my lvng - not terrbly well -from dong academc work. love to teach. wanted to teach from the earlest pont that can remember.ad teachng goes on n academc worlds. respect and defend the academy to the hlt and the capacty t gves to transmt knowledge to future generatons and to pursue knowledge for ts own sake. one has to defend ths arena of crtcal thought - especally these days when t s under such attack from so many quarters -wth one's lfe. But t does not mean that want to be or thnk of myself as havng been an academc. would clam, would nsst on, my rght to the ttle of havng done ntellectual work. am an ntellectual. am an ntellectual n Gramsc's sense because beleve n the power and necessty of deas. Of course, as a sort of materalst, do not beleve deas alone make the world go round. And certarly do not mean that thnk my task s to produce theory. would do wthout theory f could The problem s cannot. You cannot. Because the world presents tself n the chaos of appearances, and the only way n whch one can understand, break down, analyse, grasp, n order to do somethng about the present conjuncture that confronts one, s to break n to that seres of congealed and opaque appearances wth the only tools you have: concepts, deas and thoughts. To break nto t and to come back to the surface of a,- stuaton or conjuncture one s tryng to explan, havng made 'the detour through theory'. Marx, n hs 857 ntroducton, whch s a wonderful methodologcal text about whch have wrtten, as Larry Grossberg7 remarked the other day, descrbes exactly ths process. am talkng-here about a workng method of Marx. am not talkng about whether one subscrbes to all the theores of Marxsm or not. That s a dfferent queston. And what Marx says s you begn wth an obvous fact: a socal system s composed of people, and ths gves us j our frst, what he calls 'chaotc' concepton - the category of j 'populaton'. How far can you take ths category of populaton? Well, you can take t qute far. But really, you have to break wth that descrptve approach at the moment when you understand that every populaton s always dvded, t s not a homogeneous or multfarous sngle object. Always wthn that populaton are relatons between captalsts and labour, men and women, masters and slaves. Relatons of dfference are what matters. The socal categores nto whch people are nserted are more mportant than the sum of the humanty- the fact 'that we are all human under the skn' -whch they consttute. And to make the move of analysng the populaton, as twere, nto ts partcular categores, and the relatons of smlarty and dfference between them, seemsan abstract movement: the necessary moment of abstracton. However, as Marx says, you cannot stop there -whch a j great deal of theory does. You know, t s leased to produce the

6 EPLOGUE: THROUGH THE PRSM OF AN NTELLECTUAL LFE : - categores and t proceeds to refne the abstractons, but, Marx says, far from t. You need to return then to the problem you really wanted to solve, but now understandng that t s the product of 'many determnatons', not of one: not of a sngular logc unfoldng through hstory; not of a teleology, a determnstc crcle whch has ts own end all-eady scrbed n ts begnnng. Not Hegel's fantasy of the 'resoluton of reason', the subsumpton of the real and the ratonal, the dalectcal resoluton whch s some moment when Thought and The Real - theory and hstorcal realty - could be dentcally the same. None of that. nstead, you return to a world of many determnatons, where the attempts to explan and understand are open and never endng - because the hstorcal realty to be explaned has no known or determned end. Well, some of the thngs that people have remarked on n my work arse from ths method of thnkng, whch am only addressng because you selected the absurd noton of spendng two days thnkng about the thought of Stuart Hall Studyng the Conjuncture So have been thnkng about the thought of Stuart Hall too, and am tellng you what seem to have found out Certan habts of thnkng, certan ways of addressng a problem. f you are not nterested n the dscplnes, and f your subject s not gven by the dscplne, what s t are you tryng to fnd out about? What s the object of your nqury, what methods can you use, and most mportant of all, when does your object of nqury - and thus the questons demandng answers - change, openng a new paradgm moment, a new 'problem space'? Davd Scott has done much, especally n hs challengng new readng of C.L.R. James's TheBlackJacobns, to make me thnk about ths dea of a problem space and to rclate t to what Althusser called 'a problematc' and Gramsc called 'the conjuncture'. Does ths cluster of concepts refer to aspects of the same thng? (ncdentally, nearly sad when Davd had fnshed hs wonderful pape* that we can go home now, because we now know all we ever need to know about the thought of Stuart Hall) Davd sad that the queston am addressng s what he called the 'contngency of the present'. Now actually, would not qute put t that way myself, although understand perfectly well why he dd. would say that the object of my ntellectual work s 'the present conjuncture'. t s what Foucault called 'the hstory of the present'. t s, what are the crcumstances n whch we now fnd ourselves, how dd they arse, what forces are sustanng them and what forces are avalable to us to change them? The 'hstory of the present', whch s a knd of Foucaultan way of talkng, brngs together two rather conh.adctory deas: hstory and the present. The present sounds as f t s very 'presentst' n ts mplcaton: rght now, what s happenng to us rght now. What confronts us mmedately now, whch s certanly what he descrbes as 'dangerous and dffcut tmes'. Yet the hstory of the present commts us to thnkng of ts anteror condtons ofexstence, what Foucault mght have called ts 'genealoges'. So the present, of course, s aforce we have to now transform, but n the lght of the condtons under whch t came nto exstence: the hstory of the present. The queston of the contngency of the hstory of the present s crtcally mportant because ths s what want to say about the presentthat t s the product of 'many determnatons' but that t remans an open horzon, fundamentally unresolved, and n that sense open to 'the play of contngency'. Contngency and dentty Here am smply gong to try to dentfy a number of deas or themes whch have emerged n the course of the last few days and make a few bref remarks about thcm before pass on. Why contngency? What s t that have been wantng to say about contngency? do not want to say, of course, that the world has no pattern, no structure, no determnate shape, no determnacy. But do want to say that ts future s not already wrapped up n ts past, that t s not part of an unfoldng teleologcal narratve, whose end s known and gven n ts begnnng. do not beleve, n that sense, n 'the laws of hstory'. There s no closure yet wrtten nto t. And to be absolutely honest, f you do not agree that there s a degree of openness or contngency to every hstorcal conjuncture, you do not beleve n poltcs, because you do not beleve that anythng can be done about t. feverythng s already gven, what s the pont of exercsng yourself or of tryng to change t n a partcular drecton? Ths s a paradox whch les, of course, rght at the heart of classcal Marxsm. f the laws of hstory are certan to unfold, who cares about the practce of the

7 EPLOGUE: THROUGH THE PRSM OF AN NTELLECTUAL LFE.. ~ class struggle? Why notjust let them unfold? There are a whole seres of Marxsms whch were precsely mechanstc and reductonst n that 'scentstc' way. Let the laws of captal unfold Contngency does requre you to say, 'of course, there are socal forces at work here'. Hstory s not nfntely open, wthout structure or pattern. The socal forces at work n any partcular conjuncture are not random. They are formed up out of hstory. They are qute partcular and specfc, and you have to understand what they are, how they work, what ther lmts and possbltes are, what they can and cannot accomplsh. As Gramsc sad, 'Pessmsm of the ntellect, optmsm of the wll'. But the outcome of the struggle between those dfferent contendng relatons or forces s not 'gven', known, predctable. t has everythng to do wth socal practce, wth how a partcular contest or struggle s conducted. Even Marx, who was too nclned to subscrbe to nneteenthxentury scentfc hstorcal laws, thought the trumph of socalsm whch was supposed to be wrtten n 'the logcof hstory', was notnevtable. He saw another alternatve -one whch unfortunately seems much closer n the days of the New World Order: 'socalsm or barbarsm,' he predcted, 'the run of the contendng classes.' My task has been to try to thnk what determnacy means-what once called 'the contradctory, stony ground ofthe present conjuncture'- but wthout fallng nto absolute determnacy. do not beleve hstory s already determned. But do beleve that all the forces at work n a partcular hstorcal conjuncture or a stuaton one s tryng to analyse, or a phase of hstory or development one s tryng to unrave, are delmnnate. They do not arse out of nowhere. They have ther own specfc condtons of exstence. So the conceptua ssue s, s there a way of thnkng determnateness whch s not a closed determnacy? And contngency s the sgn of ths effort t thnk determnacy wthout a closed form of determnaton. n the same way, people say, 'you are a conjuncturalst. You want to analyse, not long epochal sweeps of hstory, but specfc conjunctures'. Why the emphass on the conjunctures? Why the emphass on what s hstorcally specfc? Well, t has exactly to do wth the concepton of a conjuncture.the fact that very dssmlar currents, some of a long duraton, some of a reatvely short duraton, tend to fuse or condense at partcuar moments, nto a partcular confguraton. t s that confguraton, wth t5 balance of forces, whch s the object of one's analyss or ntelectual nqury. The mportant thng about thnkng conjuncturally s ts hstorcal specfcty. So, for example, to put tvery crudely. am not as nterested n racsm as a sngle phenomenon marchng unchanged through tme, but n dfferent racsms that arse n specfc hstorcal crcumstances, and ther effectveness, therways ofoperaton. am less nterested n captal or captalsm from the seventeenth century to now than am n dfferent forms ofcaptalsm. amnterested pa-tcula-ly,just now, n the enormously mportant shft n global captalsm whch occurs n the 970s. That represents theend ofwhat would callone conjunchve- the conjuncture of the perod of the postwar settlement, domnated argely - especally n Europe - by a socal democratc balance of forces and the welfare state, and the begnnng of the rse of neolberalsm, of global captalsm, and the domnance of 'market forces', whch consttutes the contradctory ground on whch new nterrelatonshps and..- : nterdependences are beng created across the boundares of natonhood and regon, wth all the forms of trans-natonal globalzatorr that have come to domnate the contemporary world. Ths s what s stampng a new rhythm on poltcs, n dfferent ways, across the face of the globe. Naton states, natonal cultures, natonal economes, renan mportant, but these 'dfferences' are heng condensed nto a new, contradctory 'world system', whch s what the term 'global' actually stands for. Ths s radcally dfferent from the world of decolonzaton - what Davd Scott has called 'the Bandung moment' - nto whch new natons, lke Jamaca, emerged. Ths s a radcally new hstorcal moment, and sets us radcally new questons, radcally new poltcal questons. That s all that s entaled n the move from one conjuncture to another. And the task of -as once put t - 'Turnng your face volently towards thngs as they really are', s what s requred by 'thnkng conjuncturally'. have also emphaszed the queston, 'why dentty?' am nterested n dentty because dentty s a source ofagency n acton. t s ~npossble for people to work and move and struggle and survve wthout nvestng somethng of themselves, ofwho they are, n ther practcesand actvtes and buldng some shared projectwth others, around whch collectve socal denttes can cohere. Ths s precsely because, hstorcally, there has been al enormous wanng and weakenng n the gven collectve denttes of the past - of class and trbe and race and ethnc group and so on, precsely because the world has now become more pluralstc,

8 EPLOGUE: THROUGH THE PRSM OF AN NTELLECTUAL LFE more open-ended, though of course those collectve denttes have not dsappeared n any sense. So those constrants are stll on any dentty formaton. But to me there s a relatvely greater degree of openness n the balance between the 'gvenness' of an dentty and the capacty to construct t or make t. That sall that was tryng to regster n the new work on dentty. thought the greater global nterdependence and nterconnectedness would undermne stronglycentred but exclusve denttes and open the possblty of more complex ways of ndvduals and groups postonng themselves n ther own narratves. And beleved that the complextes of the black and 'creole' cultures of the Carbbean and the complextes of the 'hybrd' daspora den ttes emergng n the wake of global mgraton had a great deal to teach us about thedynamcsof ths new processof denttyformaton. Paradoxcally, you mght thnk that the revval of fundamentalsms of all knds runs counter to ths thess. Actually, beleve that the pull of fundamentalsm and all types of exclusve denttes s a reacton to beng margnalzed or left out of the process of 'vernacular modernzatonq- the search everywhere for all peoples to have equal access to the means of becomng 'modern persol~s' and to lve the technologcal possbltes of modern lfe, n ther own ways, to the flll, as t were, 'from the nsde', whch thnk s hestantly, also gong on across the world -n thevery teeth of the struggle by global captal to master and hegemonze hstorcally consttuted dfferences. However, though wrote a lot about 'dentty', always refused the noton that a whole poltcs could be dentfed wth any sngle dentty poston. have tred to say that dentty s always the product of a process of dentfcaton. t s the productof takng aposton, ofstakng a place n a certan dscourse or practce. n other words, of sayng, 'Ths s, for the moment where am, who am and where stand'. Ths postonal noton of dentty enables one then to speak from that place, to act from that place, although sometme later n another set of condtons, one may want to modfy oneself or who t s that s speakng. So n that sense, dentty s not a closed book any more than hstory s a closed book, any more than subjectvty s a closed book, any more than culture s a closed book. t s always, as they say, n process. t s n the makng. t s movng from a determnate past towards the horzon of a possble flture, whch s not yet fully known. Globalzaton and Daspora want to thnk of one more set of terms, whch has arsen n the course of our dscusson. These are around the terms daspora and globalzaton. was, as you can magne, absolutely astonshed to dscover that the Jamacan government s ths week havng the very frst conference on the daspora. Snce the Empre Wndrush9a~~ded 948, there has been a massve black daspora n Brtan, and am not only thnkng about the numbers ofpeople from the Carbbean,Afrca, nda and elsewl~ere from the former colonal world, who have landed up n Brtan and the other postcolonal metropolses snce World War. What s happenng to the naton, here, cannot be nsulated from the process of globalzaton and from the formaton of dasporas elsewhere - whch s, ndeed, n my vew, the 'dark sde' of the,'< globalzaton process. do not have tme to unravel ths problem but do want to say one or two thngs, rather dogmatcally, about t. n ths new awareness of 'the dasporc' dmenson, somethng very mportant s happenng to the dea of natons and natonhood, to natonalsm, whch was the drvng force of decolonzaton, and to socal denttes. The naton cannot be taken unproblematcally as the 'gven' entty whch socal and hstorcal explanaton takes for granted. What's more, the naton cannot he any longer dentfed wth ts terrtoral boundares. Further, the naton s a terrtoral entty and a poltcal power, but t s also an 'magned commullty', and so the questons about how the naton s constructed culturally and represented are part of ts contemporary realty. These three dmensons nteract, but they are not the same and do not always concde. Now, the thnkng so far n Jamaca abo~~t ts daspora s, of course, really just emergng - thnkt s asgn of hr,w slowly but rreversbly globalzaton sdeentrng the experence of naton-buldng whch focused our mnds n the frst stage of decolonzaton. do thnk you largely thnk ofjamacanslvng abroad as just lke you, as belongng to you. thnk you largely thnk, these are really Us- only, over there. When they come back, they wll come back and redscover ther 'usness'. Ths s of course, partly true: of course, those connectons are deep and long-lastng and are constantly re-forged. Rut don't you thnk about how they made any connectons wth thereas well as wth here? Do you thnk people lve a whole lfe, survve n strange condtons, often ofpoverty, dscrmnaton

9 . EP.OGUE: THROUGH THE PRlSM OF AN NTELLECTUAL LFE and certanly ofnsttulonal and nformal racsm n Rrtan - brought up chldren, schooled them, watched them grow up n the multcultural ~netropols and t does not rub off n any way on them? Do you magne ther culture - therlamacanness - whch they took wth them just goes on throbbng, unchanged, untransformed, preservng ther culture as a fxed umblcal cord? Of course, they have roots; but don't you thnk they also had to put down newroots?how otherwse dd they survve? For Carbbean people - part of a colonal and pan-afrcan Daspora who, havng emgrated agan, have been twce 'dasporzed' -who go on beng 'translated'- ther 'routes' are as crtcal to ther denttes as ther 'roots'. Oh, they certanly survved by thnkng about home. They planned from the begnnng to go back home. They are a lttle dsturbed, when they return, that everybody says, 'But you been n 'foregn' 'Somethng about the way you stand, walk, talk, shft around, or as somebody sad, can't move the hps, marks out the dfference The problem of the daspora s to thnk of t always and only n terms of ts contnuty, ts persstence, the return to ts place of orgn, anduot always and at the same tme n termsottsscatterng, ts further gong out, ts dssemnaton. The mpossblty of ever gong home n exactly the same way as you left t. The daspol-a s always gong to be, n a certan way, lost to you. t has to be los~ to you, hecause 'they' have' a double stake, an nvestment n both here a ~ elsewhere. ~ d t s not because they love us or becausc elsewhere has been good to them, but because the materal condtons, the hstorcal necessty, of havng to 'make a lfe' means that they have to have deas, nvestments, rel;~tonshps wth somewhere else as well. Now, my wrtng about the noton of he daspora, about dentty, even about the necessary 'hybrdty' or creolzaton of all culture, has been shaped profoundly by reflectng on the Carbbean experence, even when have not drectly wrtten about t. have been tryng to thnk about these very complcated processes of contnuty and rupture, of the return to the old, of the magnary recuperaton or reconfgurng of the old, as well as the becomng - the openng to the new, to the future - and what s happenng, concretely, on the ground, n everyday lfe, n changng the culture of those people who have been 'dasporzed'. That s certanly one dmenson of the work that have been tryng to do on the daspora. The second one s to remember that n the partcular crcumstances of the Carbbean, the people are themselves 'a daspora'. We are ourselves the effect of the dslocaton and dsplacement, of the dsse~nnaton from somewhere else: and of what then happens, culturally, as, out of the cauldron of colonzaton, enslavement and plantaton socety, somethng new, somethng genunely novel, emerges. Does that mean that we do not have any connecton wth what went before? How could t possbly mean that? But t does mean that that connecton s not somethng whch can now be naturally summoned up as f t exsts n all of us, somewhere down there, n our bodes, n our genes, as aforce of nature. t has to be recreated, has to be sustaned n the culture, reconfgured, n the new hstorcal crcumstances whch confront us. t has to be sustaned n the mnd, or the connecton cannot be made. We would be wrong to adopt a noton ot tradton as somethng whch does not change, whch protects us aganst change.'" As have had to say to people before, 'Afrca s alve and well n the daspora', but the Afrca we left 400 years ago under the condtons of slavery, transportaton and the Mddle Passage has not been watng for us - unchanged - to go back to, ether n our heads or n our bodes. That Afrca, far from beng just the ancestral home, s the subject of the most brutal and devastatng modern forms of explotaton. t s the subject and the object of the most vcous forms of contemporary neolberalsm, vctm of the strateges of the new forms of geopoltcal power, a well as ravaged by cvl war, poverty, hunger, the rvalry of competng gangs and corrupt governng powers and eltes. Long after we left t, even after the war, Afrca was frst of all nserted nto a ;elatonshp wth the West n the very moment of decolonzaton, n the relatons of neocolonal subordnaton. n the second phase of the Cold War, all the dffcultes of creatng ndependent poltes and ndependent natonal economes were overrdden by the Cold War struggle between two competng world systems. All the dffcultes of the emergng socetes and the nascent postcolonal states were overrdden by the struggle between the two world powers: a struggle whch was then, paradoxcally, fought out on postcolonal terran. When next we nvoke the problem of 'faled states' n Afrca, let us remember the dstortons that the Cold War mposed on the problems of the emergng postcolonal states. Remember who s mplcated n the falure of the capacty of those states. Snce the

10 EPLOGUE: THROUGH THE PRSM OF AN NTELLECTUAL LFE md-yos, those already falng states, states wth the enormous dffculty - never resolved - of becomng postcolonal, lke the Carbbean and elsewhere n the so-called Thrd World, have been enmeshed n new consttutve relatons of geopoltcal, economc. cultural and symbolc global power - the new system, the New World Order. That s what the sgnfer, 'Afrca', so often banded about n Western meda and poltcal dscourse, means today. do not need to unpack that story for you. Now of course there s the most profound connecton between the Afrcan dasporas of the Carbbean, the US, of Brazl and Latn Amerca and the dasporas of London or Pars, but these dfferent 'Afrcas', thoughdeeply nterconnected, hstorcally, cannot be 'the same' any longer. They are not the same. There are, of course, strong and deep persstent threads whch connect them. At the same tme, each has negotated ts relaton to the West, to the surroundng world, dfferently. Ths s the complcated dalectc of 'sameness' and 'dfference' whch confronts us n today's globalzng world. So when one talks about the way n whch denttes of ths knd have been ruptured by the dfferent conjunctural breaks n post-war hstory, reorganzed and reordered by them, yeldng deep and concretely specfc, dfferentated formatons, we know we have to, not dscover, but redscoverwhat our connecton now s wth Afrca. beleve ths s the dfference between a 'cultural natonalst' approach to our Afrcan connecton, and the pan-afrcan magnary, whch has done so much over the years to keep these connectons alve. The concept of 'daspora' s - for me - central to that magnary. So daspora led me to thnk, frst of all, about what s happenng, and the complcated cultural processes gong on, n the black dasporas of the metropole. Secondly, t led me to thnk about what exactly s meant by the 'dasporc' nature of Carbbean socety and Carbbean culture. What exactly do we mean by that? And that led me to thnk about the dasporc nature of cultures themselves. became aware of the fact that, dscursvely, cultures always represent themselves as fxed, exclusve, ognary and unchangng: but, hstorcally, when you look at them. that cannot be the case. Some change very slowly, some more rapdly: but they all change. They are all nterrupted by movement, by conquest, by colonzaton, by trade, by mgraton, free and forced. They are dsrupted by external nfluences, as well as evolvng nternally. Culture - the forms through whch ndvduals and socetes make l sense of themselves and represent ther real condtons of lfe, symbolcally, to themselves - cannot be outsde of hstory. Cultures are changed wthn and changed by hstory. So the broadly dasporc nature of Culture tself s a knd of conceptual model that have derved, analogcally, from thnkng about a specfc daspora and reflectngon the dasporc nature of the culture whch thought had left behnd and had to redscover n myself and come to terms wth n, a dfferent way. Ths s my very long way of tryng to answer the queston, n what sense can be 'a Carbbean ntellectual'? Just afnal twst to that: under globalzaton, everywhere s becomng more 'dasporc'. t s not because people lke to travel. t s because the very condtons under whch the world now operates create what one can only call the astonshng late twenteth-century, early twmtyfnt-century movement of dspersed peoples. From that perspectve, go back and look at my own movement n 95, the black mgraton and the mgraton from the Asan subcontnent to Brtan n the 950s and 960s, as the begnnng of an enormous hstorcal tde. The dsrupton of people from ther settled places, from ther homes, from ther famlar surroundng, ther roots n the land and landscape, from ther tradtonal ways of lfe, from ther relgons, from ther famlal connectons - the uprootng that has become the hstory of modern 'global socety'. The fact of the homeless, of what Negr and Hardt, n ther bookonempd0call 'the multtudes'; ofpeople who only survve by buyng a tcket from some person who s tradng n bodes; hangng out on the bottom of a tran, crossng boundares at the depth of nght, runnng the gauntlet of survellance cameras and border patrols, and dsappearng nto the depths of the ctes. The economc mgrants and the asylum-seekers, the llegal mmgrants, the 'sans paperes' - the ones wthout proper papers. The ones drven nto the camps across the borders by famne, cvl war, envronmental devastaton or pandemc. A movement of people tryng never to be 'there', crossng every boundary n the world. And thnk, though we dd not know t at the tme, we were the forerunners Snce then, nto the UK alone, there have been - how many? Seven waves? Carbbean, ndans, Pakstans, people from Bangladesh, West Afrcans, Cyprots, Chnese, then the people dsplaced from North Afrca and the Mddle East - from Afghanstan, raq; the people dsplaced from ethnc cleansng n the Balkans, now the people from Eastern Europe, from the former

11 ' EPLOGUE: THROUGH THE PRSM OF AN NTELLECTUAL LFE Sovet empre. Wave after wave after wave of people lvng n the new multcultural metropole, presentng the queston of how s t possble to make a lfe where people from very dfferent hstorcal backgrounds and bearng dfferent cultural values and relgous tradtons are requred to make some knd of common lfe. People attemptng to negotate the terms of some knd of tolerant lfe wthout ether eatng one another, shootng onc another or separatng out nto warrng trbal enmty. 'That s what call the multcultural queston of modern tmes. And ths globalzaton from below s occurrng n the context of the globalzaton from above, whch s of course the movement of every sngle thng, apart from people. The movement of captal, of technologes, the 'flow' of messages and mages, the 'flow' of nvestment, the movement of entrepreneurs, of the executve corporate global class. Everybody s 'on the move' accordng to the logc of globalzaton, except the poor; except the poor. Labour - ordnary folks - s the only factor whch s not supposed to move. Why? Because how can you take compettve advantage of the translocaton of producton and consumpton, f the one-dollar a day labourer n Latn Amerca s gong to be 'free' to move to the West Coast and clam advanced salares? The functon of the dspersal of captal around the globe, of the decentralzaton of captal n the modern global system, depends on the capacty to explot labour, cheap labour, where t s So the control on the movement of how many people are allowed to cross borders s absolutely central to the new consttuent logc of contemporary globalzaton. The movement of peoples for economc purposes - escapng poverty, escapng ll health, escapng ecologcal devastaton, escapng cvl war, escapng ethnc cleansng, escapng rural depopulaton, escapng over-urbanzaton, escapng a thousand and one problems - has become llegal. Ths s the underbelly of the con temporary globalzaton system. Therefore, our new dasporas are smply one part of ths huge new hstorc movement, of a huge new geopoltcal formaton, whch s creatng the mxtures of cultures, - and peoples and hstores and backgrounds and relgons, whch s the contemporary problem of the modern world. Speakng Truth to Power So though started wth a queston of daspora n a rather lmted emprcal way, t has - here's my last reflecton on the thought of Stuart Hall - n ts usual way, undergone enormous conceptual expanson. t has llumnated somethng else of vtal sgnfcance to the Carbbean. The dea of the daspora now s oblteratng, not natons and natonhood, but the moment of the naton state, the moment of natonalsm. t s quetly subvertng t. t s quetly transcendng the project of one lfe n one naton, n one naton state, located n one - natonal economy, and superntended by one natonal culture, attached to one natonal dentty, whch was for decades the drvng vson of natonalsm. What the ultmate balance mght be between globalzaton from above and globalzaton from below, whether there s any way of,.. transformng that system, t s not my purpose at ths stage to dscuss. am tryng to suggest what t mght mean to be rveted throughout my lfe by the phrase 'unravellng the present conjuncture', by beng dsturbed by, and tryng to analyse so as to transform, systems and structures of power, of njustce, ofnequalty, whch are generated by forces that one does not fully undersrand and whose consequences one therefore cannot fully estmate and whom one cannot therefore effectvely resst. Well, commend to youwhat have to call the poltcs ofntellectual lfe. Davd Scottqute rghtly sad that, though he would not subscrbe to everythng that Edward Sad hassad about the nature of ntellectual lfe, there s a knd of vocaton there whch s smlar to my own. am honoured by the comparson, for Edward Sad's lfe and practce has been exemplary for me and mourn deeply and personally hs recentdeath. do thnktsarequrement of ntellectuals to speak a knd Maybe not truth wth a captal T, but anyway, some knd of truth, the best truth they know or can dscover - to speak that truth to power. To take responsblty - whch can be unpleasant and s no recpe for success - for havng spoken t. To take responsblty for speakng t to wder groups of people than are smply nvolved n the professonal lfe of deas. To speak t beyond the confnes of the academy. To speak t, however, n ts full complexty. Never to speak t n too smple a way, because 'the folks won't understand'. Because then they wll understand, but they wll get t 289