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Mapping difference
a
Judy Purdom
a
Post‐graduate student in philosophy , University of Warwick ,
Published online: 19 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Judy Purdom (1995) Mapping difference , Third Text, 9:32, 19-32, DOI: 10.1080/09528829508576561

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 19

Mapping Difference*
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Judy Purdom

We are creating artistic, political, and anthropological cartography.

Guillermo Gdmez-Pena1

This paper asks how displaced peoples can forge a post-colonial identity; a 'new'
identity written in terms of their difference from the imperial power but which
acknowledges the history of the colonial experience. Such a project is necessarily
historically specific; it is one that embraces particular experiences of migration
and invasion and one which refuses both the melting-pot ideal and the nostalgia
for pure identity. It is about affirmation as well as opposition.
Central to my discussion is the idea of hybridity which Homi Bhabha introduces
in his recent book The Location of Culture.21 argue that by reading Bhabha after
reading Derrida it is clear that the notion of differance underpins Bhabha's work
and that the idea of hybridity is more than that of identity as heterogeneity or
of flux which it appears to be at first. It is an idea of identity that defies the fixity
of the Greek 'writing' that inscribes Eurocentric language and thought with its
metaphysical structure and which acts as an imperialist world/word power. With
the idea of hybridity, Bhabha places post-colonial identity in a space of differance,
a space in abeyance of signification and the oppositional system of western
thought which designates the black, the colonised and the aboriginal as Other.
By refusing the imperialist signification of metaphysics, Bhabha is left with a
vacuum of representation because a non-signifiable identity is precisely not
identity. In his anxiousness to challenge the political reality of oppressed peoples,
Bhabha introduces the idea of negotiated identity as a way of representing
hybridity. I argue that by doing this he by-passes the philosophical implications
* A discussion of how
Derrida's notion of of differance which indicate the possibility of identity construction 'beyond' the
différance underpins artefact of Greek 'writing'.
the work of Horni
Bhabha on hybridity. Possibility is one thing, reality another. It is because Bhabha is anxious for
1 Quoted by Lucy hybridity to be a politically active idea and not an abstract theoretical one that
Lippard, Mixed
Blessings, Pantheon he is concerned with its representation. Throughout his text he gives examples
Books, 1990, plate 34. of art and poetry that he thinks articulate cultural difference in its contradictory
2 Homi Bhabha, The mode and which usurp imposed identities by working in a "discursive
Location of Culture,
Routledge, London, temporality". Like Bhabha I contend that art and literature can 'show' in a way
1994. that we cannot 'speak' by presenting different things at the same time and so
 20

indicating the complexity 'behind' representation and the impossibility of non-

hierarchical signification. What cannot be represented can perhaps be performed
or enacted. To this end I too shall relate the idea of hybridity to artists who are
working with the problematic of identity and the contradictions inherent in the
idea of postcolonial identity; artists such as Guillermo G6mez-Peria, Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha, Jimmie Durham, Roger Shimomura, Yong Soon Min and Jacqueline
Fraser. Such artists succeed because they are showing, not saying; they are actively
recoding meanings in their work and refuse the significations of an imposed
language. For instance, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha spoke of her work as "looking
for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue",3 and hers
is work which directly confronts the problem and the possibility of creating a
'language' with which to show the complexity of an identity when the designation
as Other is refused. In a very direct way Jacqueline Fraser also makes the point
that the language of identity is not translatable; she presents her work to an
English speaking audience with Maori titles as if to assert a distance between
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two cultures and a disparity between the possible understandings of the work.
This is borderline art, art which does not sit easily within either culture, neither
is it a coalescence of cultures; it is something different, an 'entity' which dovetails
with the postmodern as a fragmented, complex and open representation. These
artists are not presenting their identity — Korean American, Maori or Chicano
— as biculturalism but as a historically specific heterogeneous experience of border-
culture. G6mez-Pena describes the border in a characteristically exuberant style:

The word 'border' is a multiple metaphor of death, encounter, fortune, insanity,

and transmutation. At times it is an abyss, a wall, or a spiderweb. Other times it
is an infected wound or a membrane. Some days it's more like a hole, 4even a tunnel;
and suddenly, it becomes a mirror, a bear hug, or a sudden flash.

Bhabha also provides a compelling description of what he calls "the borderline

work of culture" in art and literature;

...the borderline work of culture demands an encounter with 'newness' that is not
part of a continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent
act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause
or aesthetic production; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent 'in-between'
space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present.5 The 'past-
present' becomes part of the necessity, not of the nostalgia of living.

Renewing and refiguring, innovating and interrupting seem to me to be just what

artists like Gomez-Pena are doing and like the migrant peoples of the diaspora
in their adopted countries such work sits uncomfortably in the gallery. In its
affirmation of a specific borderline work of culture it is both contingent on and
disjunctive with the western definition of culture that gives it a place as art, yet
that affirmation of difference is inevitably also an opposition to the dominant
culture.
If we keep in mind both the affirmative and the oppositional power of borderline
3 Quoted in Abigail culture, I think that we can do more than "innovate and interrupt the performance
Solomon-Godeau, of the present". Bhabha wants art to be part of an interventionist strategy
Mistaken Identities,
University of refiguring the past and creating a new cultural tradition for the post-colonial
Washington Press, subject; but what is his criteria of 'new'? 'New' could be a 're-placing' of the
1993, p 56. postcolonial subject within the hierarchy of given identities, or 'new' could mean
4 Quoted in Lippard, op
cit, p 223. a radical rethinking of 'subject', 'identity', 'art' and 'culture'. Bhabha seems to
5 Bhabha, op cit, p 7. collate the two possibilities. Unlike him I do not think that the artist can signify
 21
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Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Aveugle Voix (Blind Voice), 1975,

performance, San Francisco. Photo courtesy The Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation, Orange, California.

'new' identities, in the second sense of the word, but rather that the artist can
show, as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha does, the possibility of identity per se by
displaying that "moment of suspense" (Derrida's phrase) 'beyond' or 'prior to'
identity, a moment which acts as a condition of identity and which is not framed
by the metaphysical 'writing' of identity. This is a moment and/or space where
the possibility of representation is shown, a possibility which shows up reality
as a construct. My difference from Bhabha is perhaps like that between an
exhibition and a show; Bhabha sees art exhibiting the instability of specific identity
by exposing it as double-sided and unfixed, as hybrid; I think that we can go
a step further than taking apart identity or breaching the frame of identity to show
the blueprint for the very idea of identity and therefore for any identity.
This breach is made on two fronts, both as a questioning of subject identity
within the work and as a subversion of the category 'art'. There is an irony in,
for instance, Jimmie Durham's work being exhibited within, and constrained by,
the gallery system when a mocking irreverence of such limitations is central to
his work. By crossing boundaries and using performance, installation and an
indefinable mix of painting, sculpture and the written word, Durham succeeds
in subverting both the idea of fixed identity and the fixed category 'art'.
Conversely, Jacqueline Fraser's reworking of Maoriness as a present, productive
social experience rather than as a fixed traditional discourse has led her work
to be absorbed into the mainstream art world and her distinctive double voice
ignored. For Durham and for Fraser, the possibility of identity and the possibility
of art are the same question. Whereas Bhabha talks about hybridity as an
encounter with 'newness' that infers 'new' identity and 'new' art, I think that
we must question the possibility of either outside the frame of Eurocentric thought.
I do not, however, want to abandon Bhabha's idea of hybridity but rather to
bring out what I think are its full implications. Bhabha proposes hybridity as a
presentation of cultural difference but there seem to be two strands to his notion
 22

of hybridity which I put down to a confusion between difference and differance.

Bhabha wants somehow to represent an identity which is not defined and which
hangs between different structures of thought or language, or which fluctuates
between the oppositions by which that identity is defined; in his words, he wants
to find a representation that "innovates and interrupts the performance of the
present", which I take to be a challenge to the idea of presence which determines
the metaphysical idea of the subject. However, he articulates hybridity as a double-
sidedness zvithin the imperialist narrative of identity and therefore could be said
to be renegotiating identity within given parameters of what identity means and
not, as appears to be his aim, challenging the metaphysical notion of identity.
I hope to show that art that "renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent 'in-
between' space" does more than show identity to be hybrid in its simplistic
meaning as double-sided or unfixed and indeed I would contend that Bhabha
wants it to do so too. The idea of hybridity uses the double-sided nature of
meaning to expose the inherent contradictions in a signification constructed an
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oppositions. However, this hybridity cannot present identity outside of that

framework but only as a flux between poles of opposition. There is a disparity
between wanting to think beyond the signs and the disavowal of colonial discourse
in order to forge 'new' identities, and being confined to a 'Greek' metaphysical
thinking which fixes the construction of identity within the frame of hierarchical
oppositions which is inevitably violent and oppressive.
This is demonstrated by that over-simplistic hybrid, the hyphenated identity.
In her book Mixed Blessings, Lucy Lippard quotes Michael M. J. Fischer:

To be Chinese is not the same as to be Chinese in America... The search or struggle

for a sense of ethnic identity is a (re)invention and discovery of a vision, both ethical
and future-oriented.6

The identity and culture of the sansei, third generation American-Japanese, or

the 1.5 generation Korean-American is not that of dual nationality; American-
Indian is a designation which ignores the different histories of the Cherokee and
the Hopi, and Chicano is not a neat blend of American and Mexican. While the
word 'hybrid' denotes the historical mix of cultures, it is deceiving in inferring
a balanced coming together of two identifiable entities. The experience of hybridity
is far more complex and more likely to be of a clash of cultures than a comfortable
union. The disturbing crossover of meanings symbols is used in work as diverse
as that of Jimmie Durham, Kay Miller and Jacqueline Fraser but I think it is most
poignant in Roger Shimomura's work. His paintings seem to be both in the style
of he Japanese ukiyo-e print and that of American pop art, or is it American ukiyo-
e and Japanese pop! Both the Japanese and the American components are forceful
yet neither are 'pure'; Disney characters and geishas seem to belong at once to
the Japanese and the American, as indeed they do; popular American culture
is a much a part of the sansei heritage as Japanese motifs, the cultures are neither
separate nor do they merge. Shimomura is creating a new culture which belongs
to the specific experience of the third generation Japanese-American. It is a culture
that draws on disparate cultures without being a crossover culture; it is one that
celebrates its schizophrenic history and embraces diversity and even conflict for
the possibility not just of mapping the connections and differences between
culture but of creating a new border culture which defies the hierarchical
boundaries of the dominant western culture. As Lucy Lippard says,
6 Quoted in Lippard, op
cit, p 45. If naming and renaming inevitably set up boundaries, crossings and mixings are
7 Ibid, p 245.
echoes of the future heading out of bounds.7
 23

I think that the use of the gerund is important here, the border is not fixed because
that would mean boundaries and hierarchical difference, it is rather a process
of mixing and, quoting Lippard again; "to mix means both to mate and to
battle".8 It is through this mixing that artists are involved in creating a society
that acknowledges and allows the border experience by denying the given
boundaries which designate the minority experience as Other. As Gdmez-Peiia
puts it:

We don't see culture as a reflection of society, but as a vehicle for making society...
the border is one cultural entity, not two.9
8 Ibid, p 151.
9 Quoted in ibid, Bhabha is involved in the same project. What Bhabha is trying to do is to intervene
plate 34.
in the process of supplementation that marks the meaning of the present. By
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Roger Shimomura, Untitkd, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 152.4 x 182.9 cm.

 24

advocating cultural hybridity he is trying to prevent the writing/supplementation

which denotes meaning and which gives identity becoming fixed hierarchical
signs. If we look back to Derrida's essay "That Dangerous Supplement...' in Of
Grammatology, Derrida makes it dear just why Bhabha would want to disrupt
the process of supplementation which is the "performance of the present".
Derrida argues that the supplement is violent and a "threat of perversion" because
in the process of supplementation each presencing and re-presencing of identity
becomes a principle of identity, as becomes a sign and a power:

In it everything is brought together: progress as the possibility of perversion,

regression towards an evil that is not natural and that adheres to the power of
substitution that permits us to absent ourselves by proxy, through representation,
through the hands of others. Through the written (par&rit). This substitution always
has the form of the sign. The scandal is that the sign, the image, or the representer,
become forces and make 'the world move'.10
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"...the sign, the image, the representer, become forces and make 'the world
move'..."; where the representer holds the power each identity has a value —
positive for the coloniser, negative for the colonised. The supplement is dangerous
and violent because the very structure of thought and language depends on this
coming to presence that demands representation through the signs which hold
power and value, signs which inevitably extol one identity and exdude others.
We can, of course, expose this violence by deconstructing the narrative of
identity to open the 'space of writing' and articulate, not the histories, but the
possibility of alternative histories as Derrida does in his own work on the
Nambikwara, "The Violence of the Letter' in On Grammatology. His commentary
on The Writing Lesson by LeVi-Strauss exposes the violent denial of difference and
the contradictions latent in the thought system imposed by a so called impartial
anthropology. LeVi-Strauss claims that the Nambikwara are a society without
proper names or writing; they are therefore seen as primitive and "the diildhood
of our race". Derrida's argument is that the Nambikwara are only seen as such
within the frame of Eurocentric definitions of writing and identity; their several
dialects and "several systems according to situations" being closed to us. In a
society where tribal identity is the unit of identity, the individual consciousness
of the proper name is not necessarily the same as where the individual subject
is the unit of identity. However, as Derrida is quick to point out, the prohibition
of the proper name expressly demands that such a system of dassification, and
therefore of differences, is possible as "the original myth of a transparent legibility
present under the obliteration". In the prohibition, the erasure of the proper name
acts as a "non-self sameness" and indicates a particular system of social difference
and value. In fact, any conscious proper name, by virtue of being a supplement
can only ever be a function of appellation and classification and therefore, in a
certain sense, not 'proper'; by telling the names of their enemies the little girls
in LeVi-Strauss' account of Nambikwara society reveal the system of linguistic
differences and not an originary 'proper name'. Likewise with writing. In
Derrida's use of the word 'writing' any dassificatory difference demonstrates the
practice of writing; there is not and could not be any society without writing.
10 Jacques Derrida, "That The Nambikwaras have no concept or use for writing in LeVi-Strauss'
Dangerous understanding but they have 'zig-zags' and a 'few dots' on their calabashes!
Supplement. . .' Of
Grammatology, Part II, However the graphic meaning of writing is not what Derrida is talking about;
trans. Gayatri Spivak, Derrida goes further with his delineation of writing as any dassificatory difference;
Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976, any delineatory system:
p 147.
 25

If writing is no longer understood in the narrow sense of linear and phonetic notation,
it should be possible to say that all societies capable of producing, that is to say of
obliterating proper names, and of bringing classificatory difference into play, practise
writing in general.11

Through writing, a system of difference comes into play, and with difference,
power and violence. By prohibiting proper names the Nambikwara could be said
to be effacing, or at least repressing, the violence of language which inscribes
difference and thus hierarchy.
If Bhabha can keep the fixing of signs at bay by presenting the two sides of
the opposition as equal possibilities and not as positive and negative, he too can
intervene in the power structure and violence of identity. Such a hybridity may
indeed "create a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation"
but it would still work within the violent structure of metaphysics. Recognition
of the double-sidedness of identity is Bhabha's starting point and he uses this
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dualism to show the instability of colonial identity and the potential for
insurrection. He recognises that every signification entails its opposition and that
this structure of meaning is explicit in the imperialist narrative of the subject with
its contradictory identities; like that of the exotic, innocent native juxtaposed
against that of the wily, wicked warrior — or, as in Durham's Caliban's Mask,
both at once!12 This duality purports to affirm what Bhabha terms "culture's
insurgent and interstitial existence". Hybridity is a deconstruction of identity and
an expose" of possible double reading of the 'native' identity but his aim is to
do more than present an ambivalent or pluralist reading. Bhabha challenges the
Eurocentric theory which perpetuates imperialist discourses of identity and culture
and which secures the interests of capital by representing and reproducing the
world in terms of an oppositional hierarchy which perpetuates exploitation and
domination by clinging to the ideal of purity in national identity. Bhabha's
argument is that oppositional categories like First and Third world, urban and
rural, east and west, north and south, do not reflect the real world of postcolonial
hybridity, a world of interweavings. By denying this actuality, Eurocentricity
denies the postcolonial history that reaps hybrid identity and instead fixes national
identity within an imagined discourse of pure identity, essential nationhood and
the arch-narrative of master-slave. As Bhabha puts it, in reference to Serbian
nationalism, "national identity can only be achieved through the death, literal
and figurative, of the complex weavings of history, and the culturally contingent
border-lines of modern nationhood".13
The aim is that of a change of consciousness and this accords with the potential
of differance as the silent promise of consciousness explained in Derrida's essay
11 Derrida, 'The Violence 'Diffe'rance' in Margins of Philosophy:
of the Letter' in ibid,
p109.
12 This double meaning Thus one comes to posit presence — and specifically consciousness, the being beside
is well documented in itself of consciousness — no longer as the absolutely central form of being but as
the photographs from
Edward Curtis' a 'determination' and as an 'effect'. A determination or an effect within a system
portfolio 'The Indians' which is no longer that of presence but of differance, a system that no longer tolerates
reproduced in C M the opposition of activity and passivity, nor that of cause and effect, or of
Lyman, The Vanishing
Race and Other indetermination and determination, etc...14
Illusions, Pantheon
Books, 1982. I think that Bhabha's language of hybridity is misleading, he is not talking about
13 Bhabha, op cit, p 5.
14 Derrida, Margins of pluralism, changing boundaries or re-framing but rather talking about a new
Philosophy, trans. Alan consciousness of 'man' or 'community' which is not one which tinkers with liberal
Bass, University of
Chicago Press, 1978, ideas about rights but does away with the frame, clearing away the oppositional
p16. structure of language which defines by difference in order to "elude the politics
 26

of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves". By examining differance as

an idea which informs Bhabha, I understand his project as one that goes beyond
resistance to show a new idea of consciousness always already there prior to the
delimiting designation of consciousness.
The quest for purity, for homogeneity, that characterises imperialist thinking
is imbued with the idea of value. It is reflected in the enlightenment preoccupation
with truth and a structuralism which delineates in reference to the apex of the
highest good. By exposing that frame as a structure of thought and not as a truth,
the postmodernist/poststructuralist and the postcolonialist challenge the narrative
discourses of purity with the possibility of heterogeneity. Rey Chow makes an
apt analogy when, in an article entitled 'Ethics After Idealism', he likens value
to writing as an architectural strategy.151 think this is useful in emphasising that
value as worth, and I want to add, truth, are assumed as primary 'natural' givens,
even within the liberal tradition. In the light of Derrida's work on writing we
can move away from the philosophical quest for transparency and unmoveable
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truths to see value functioning like writing as an architectonics, delimiting frames

and boundaries and privileging what is inside while denying what is excluded
from the structural edifice of thought and language. By seeing Eurocentric thought
and language as only one possibility of writing, the "originary openness" (Chow's
phrase) of value is exposed and 'truth' becomes heterogeneous, 'signified' by
the idea of differance. Chow neatly connects philosophy and postcolonialism; for
him, "'heterogeneity' becomes a criticism not only of economic and/or cultural
reductionalism but also of philosophy's demand for purity". It is this insertion
of Derrida's notion of writing as differance into critical discourse that ironically
enables it to be critical and to open up what Bhabha calls "a space of translation:
a place of hybridity". By aligning hybridity with differance, Bhabha places hybridity
as non-fixed identity, as process and therefore identity as a place of negotiation
and of struggle; "a dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or
transcendent history".
Though alien to the quest for truth in traditional European philosophy, the idea
that value and truth are heterogeneous is something familiar to American-Indian
culture; Lippard refers to Doueihi who points out that:

...interpretation of stories among American-Indians is an endless activity. Divergent

readings coexist without being perceived as mutually exclusive or contradictory, since
interpretation is always local, specific, and personal, and does not pretend to present,
explain, or solve the problem of the text's final, single meaning.16

This is certainly acknowledged by Durham who sees culture as the open

relationship which is our "being-in-the-world" (Heidegger's phrase), our
relationship to the land and to each other. Durham calls this our "vision" — the
value system that makes our culture, and art is an integral part of both creating
and understanding that relationship. Like Derrida, Durham uses humour and
ridicule, and juxtaposes given identities, mimicking and mocking in order to
deconstruct static relationships and move our thinking out of a fixed frame.
To me, the word 'hybridity' denotes compromise, duality, two things at once,
but Bhabha precisely means hybridity as a negative, "neither the one nor the
other"; the Afro-American is not African and American, nor both at once, but
neither, nor does s/he have an affirmative separate identity as 'Afro-American'.
15 Rey Chow, 'Ethics Bhabha's particular use of the word 'hybridity' is made dear by reading Bhabha
After Idealism',
Diacritics, Spring 1993. after Derrida.
16 Quoted in Lippard, op • Differance: "we will designate as differance the movement according to which
cit, p 205.
language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted 'historically'
 27

as a weave of differences"; "differance is no more static than it is generic, no more

structural than historical".17 Derrida's diffirance, and Bhabha's hybridity are
necessarily not conceptual; they precisely occupy a space 'between' definitions,
they represent the difference by which meaning is measured. I think this is where
Bhabha has problems; he wants 'reality', a 'new' cultural translation and 'new'
identity, and to that end he seems to compromise the radical philosophical
implications of occupying that space 'between' or 'beyond' meaning and which
defies identity as we understand it. Bhabha rather upholds the possibility of a
space of differance but articulates 'new' identity in terms of double-sidedness rather
than admitting the non-signification of differance.
Derrida's essay of 1968, 'Differance', makes it clear that differance is understood
only in terms of what it is not; it does not belong to sensibility, to intelligibility
or ideality, it is neither a word nor a concept, it exceeds the order of truth and
has neither existence nor essence. It is beyond metaphysical language and
therefore unthinkable yet the 'basis' of all possible thought though neither origin
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nor producer.
Differance is best marked by the activities of deferral and differing which Derrida
denotes by the use of the 'a' in differance. Deferring gives us the temporisation
of meaning, its bringing to presence; differing the spacing by which we distinguish
identity. Like hybridity, the moment of differance has no sign but is the play of
differences in the process of identity formation. It seems to me that it is this idea
of identity as a process that is taken up by Bhabha and is one that accords with
Derrida's definition of differance as "the process of scission and division which
would produce or constitute different things or differences".18 Derrida goes
further by making it clear that differance is non-transitive, neither active nor passive,
but a middle voice. Bhabha, despite talking about hybridity as "at once, the time
of cultural displacement, and the space of the untranslatable" and as a "space of
writing", speaks in terms of the "negotiation" of identity and of an "international
culture" as an articulation of hybridity.
Negotiation belongs to the oppositional system whereas differance is precisely
non-negotiable and 'outside' the system of signification. In his anxiety to present
a critique of imperialist discourse and present a postcolonial cultural study, Bhabha
falls into the trap of maintaining historicity and a theory articulated in the very
terms he wants to overthrow. His play of differences is just that, the negotiation
of positional differences, differences predefined by Eurocentric, metaphysical
language; his contradictory hybrids expose contradictions, present new
supplements to identity or nationhood and deconstruct identity as violence but
do not address differance and therefore cannot, indeed could not, possibly
represent identity as an egalitarian heterogeneity. Bhabha has attempted to do
the impossible and represent differance; he was doomed to failure with his notion
of hybridity.
It is not dear just what Bhabha is negotiating; is it the double of the romantic
independent past with an oppressive present; is it the mimetic identity of the
colonised with their conflictual designation as Other? Bhabha recognises the trap
of imposing a "revolutionary truth", advocating instead the subversive
"progressive reading" of first deconstruction and then re-construction of identity
within the new discourses of, for example, feminism or post-imperialism, but
recognising that these discourses have what he calls a "heterogeneous
emergence" and are not a break with metaphysics. What is crucial is to recognise
17 Derrida, op cit, 1978, that history is an activity in construction and not a given, "history is happening
p 12. — within the pages of theory, within the systems and structures we construct
18 Ibid, p 12.
19 Bhabha, op cit, p 25. to figure the passage of the historical".19 In the light of his anxiety not just to
construct an alternative theory of identity, Bhabha makes it clear that his notion
 28

of negotiation is an act of interrogation in which alterity is in the balance; it may

be an interweaving but is it a site of convergence and therefore the origin of a
new consciousness? This seems reminiscent of Heidegger's restating of the
question of Being in the introduction to Being and Time; as with Being we do not
know what 'identity' means and any questions about it entail that which is asked
about because we cannot get outside Being, or 'identity', to analyse it. In his
negotiation, I suggest that Bhabha is re-interpreting identity, re-naming but not
'thinking' as somehow prior to presenting in the Heideggerian sense.
The suspension of meaning in the process of deferral and differing seems to
echo in the wry humour and satire characteristic of many of the artists rethinking
the question of identity such as Durham, Shimomura, Adrian Piper and G6mez-
Pena, and it is perhaps only through humour that this non-representable, non-
concept can be shown. The Chicano camp humour of rasquachismo is a case in
point, it is defined by Tomas Ybarra-Fausto as an:
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...outsider viewpoint [which] stems from a funky, irreverent stance that debunks
convention and spoofs protocol... a bawdy, spunky consciousness seeking to subvert
and turn ruling paradigms upside down — a witty, irreverent and impertinent posture
that recodes and moves outside established boundaries... To be rasquache is to be
down but not out — fregado pero no jodido.20

This stance seems to me to be one that admits identity as a historical power-based

process and which therefore avoids the abstraction of theoretical differance, but
which keeps definition in abeyance as an open question. It thus bypasses Bhabha's
problem of negotiation without ignoring the real historical position of the Chicano.
Such art succeeds by showing what Lucy Lippard calls "a kaleidoscope of
disparate and often colliding influences",21 but whether humour is the medium
or whether we laugh at this work because we find its inherent conflict unsettling
and therefore funny remains a moot point; I incline to the latter.
In a world where the metaphysical form dominates, the hybrid site as one of
negotiation, rather than negation, must remain hypothetical; though we might
recognise the 'interstitial space' of differance as the determinant process of meaning,
we cannot hold meaning in abeyance, in a constant place of negotiation, fixed
as it were in a non-fixed place. What we can do, as I hope I have demonstrated
some artists are doing, is to show identity as an open question, one that is futural
in its deconstruction of the past. Differance is a non-concept, a non-word, precisely
because it is 'prior' to language which negates. It is a precondition of language,
the possibility of any meaning or value. So, what are we to negotiate? As soon
as identity is articulated it becomes exclusionary and in the real world there is
no 'non-identity' as in language identity enters the oppositional structure of
positive and negative. What Bhabha recognises is that which meaning becomes
positive and which negative is not necessarily fixed but a result of historical power,
but it must be remembered that there is no going back; we cannot reject history,
but perhaps we can refigure it. By advocating negotiation, Bhabha wants to disrupt
and resist the linear progression of western thought with an awareness of other
possibilities. Of course, one way of doing this is to disrupt the narrative form,
a technique used commonly in the visual arts but particularly effective in writing,
as indeed used by Derrida. Such a dis-narrative form is used by Gomez-Pena
in his performance poem Calif as; as G6mez-Pena says, "Performance is a very
good strategy to thaw our imposed identities". In Califas a young Chicano El
20 Quoted in Lippard, op Johnny and his friends are busted by the ethno-police:
cit, p 226.
21 Ibid, p 230.
 29

...' 'nationality?''
"I'm from Sacra but
my parents were from Merida
he's from San Fran
his parents were from Mochis
she's from East Los
her mother was from Puebla
& so on & so forth
it's confusing
we know
our nation extends
from the tip of Patagonia
to the peak of your
tortured imagination."22

G6mez-Pena constructs "ghosts" and "demons of history" as hypothetical

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identities outside the frame of western thinking which can be used, in his words,
to "force the Anglo-European other to begin a negotiation with those ghosts and
these demons that can lead to a pact of coexistence". Here it is the crossing of
borders that is important in the constructing of any identity, not the limits that
the border imposes. This borderline identity is a non-fixed, fluctuating identity
of which we can ask if it is an identity at all. Gomez-Pena ends his poem with
a toast to a borderless future;

...our Caribbean sperm

our South American legs
our Patagonian feet
jumping borders at ease
amen, hey man.

What Bhabha seems to overlook is that he is negotiating within the parameters

of given identities and not projecting hybridity in its radically interrogative mode
as a challenge to the classificatory differences like subject, self and gender that
constitute identity, as, for instance, G6mez-Pena seems to do above. Where
Bhabha is right is that his intervention in this violent process of supplementarity
must be a disruption of the temporality of the present, in the space/time that
limits meaning and reduces 'truth' to unity. For him:

...the challenge lies in conceiving of the time of political action and understanding
as opening up a space that can accept and regulate the differential structure of the
moment of intervention without rushing to produce a unity of the social antagonism
or contradiction.23

In his negotiation, Bhabha is advocating a discursive temporality in order to get

away from a consciousness that reproduces the past in the form of the present.
An awareness of differance reminds us that the 'truth' of the present is a construct,
one which "maintains our relationship with that which we necessarily
misconstrue, and which exceeds the alternative of presence and absence". 24
22 In The Politics of
Everyday Fear, Brian
Bhabha reads as if we can just opt for a discursive temporality and of course we
Massmni (ed), cannot, we are bound by metaphysical time/space. What we can do is to bring
University of an awareness of the alterity of differance into consideration and discredit power
Minnesota Press, 1993.
23 Bhabha, op cit, p 25. as an artefact of oppression. The alterity 'in' diffirance allows us to conjecture
24 Derrida, op c i t , 1978, a past that has never been present, but Derrida makes it clear that this 'past'
p 20.
can never be brought into present identity. It is a mythical, romantic past,
 30
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Yong Soon Min, Whirl War, 1987, mixed media installation,

Jamaica Art Center, New York.

irretrievable as it has never 'been'; there is no return.

In the visual arts and performance the complex layering of time and space can
be shown through bricolage in a way that cannot be said. For instance, in her
installation pieces, Whirl War and deCOLONIZATION, Yong Soon Min engages
with the differences between Korean and American culture and politics as well
as her personal history; the tension between, and the overlapping of, her
metaphors convey a sense of an identity in a process of singular, self-construction
whilst acknowledging the history of colonialism. Here the past is not reproduced,
nor is it a subject of nostalgia; it is an inheritance to be considered in the present
negotiation.
Bhabha also brings the past into consideration as part of the negotiation of a
new 'present'. He therefore refutes the romance of 'coming home' as it maintains
an essentialist identity of the native. But he does try to include that trace as the
possible point of resistance, that things could have been otherwise; but he does
not make the mistake of trying to rewrite history. He keeps the alterity of diffirance
as a 'not' and does not make the mistake of thinking he can represent that mythical
past as part of a new present. Nevertheless, this erased trace remains in reserve
provoking us to examine "the present in its presence".25
Where Bhabha is mistaken is in thinking that a negotiation of identity provides
a language of critique that in any way overcomes the oppositional structure of
language and thought; it can do no more than make us aware of that structure
and the possibility of alternatives.

The language of critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the terms
of master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the extent to which
it overcomes the given26grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation:
25 Bhabha, op cit, p 23. a place of hybridity...
26 Ibid, p 25.
 31

Bhabha does not need a new critique but rather to get away from the language
of critique and anything that is figuratively speaking. By using the idea of diffirance
and the movement of hybridity he wants to open up a space of translation and
overcome the given grounds of opposition; he looks to deconstruction for a
language which tries to expose "the structure of iteration". I agree that
deconstruction can do this but Bhabha seems to go on to infer that we can speak
the differance we are thus made aware of; we cannot. Indeed his idea of hybridity
as a movement between identities speaks of an idealistic pluralism and of non-
fixity, it does not speak diffirance.
Bhabha's initial analogy of the stairwell, "the connective tissue that constructs
the difference between upper and lower, black and white",27 illuminates for me
precisely what Derrida means by differance. But Bhabha is right and we cannot
represent this "interstitial passage between fixed identities", our only recourse
is to keep moving and avoid fixity by moving backwards and forwards between
identities in order to disjunct and displace the present. However, this would mean
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that we could only move from self to other, crossing the border but never able
to construct a border identity that challenged the metaphysical structure of
oppositions. We cannot disregard our history but we can construct a present which
acknowledges the discontinuities, contradictions and biases of the past and so
present the present as discontinuous with an idealised linear history of progress,
and so disrupt the dominant western narrative with a reading of history that
acknowledges other possibilities.
What Bhabha is doing is using a deconstruction of colonial identity to expose
the oppositions inherent in meaning and showing them as double-sided and
conflictual. He therefore could be said to be refiguring the past and bringing a
sense of differance into the present but this is not the same as representing differance.
Differance is well described as "the connective tissue that constructs the
difference", but to see this space as an in-between is to limit it; to present it as
a negotiation or as a flux between two fixed points is to fail to see differance as
the possibility of any construct. In this sense differance is not empty but an opening
pregnant with possibility; it exceeds pluralism.
In hybridity, Bhabha is recognising the tension of differences that make up
identity and does not propose pluralism or heterogeneity; rather, he sees hybridity
as exposing the double-sided nature of language, the complexity of the present
and the dispersal of meaning. He wants to present difference, not diversity; but
he seems to miss the point that difference is not differance. He is not concerned
with the existence of totalised diverse culture but with the articulation of culture
as different and that begs the question, different from what? Difference is all about
authority and domination and is determined by the violence of hierarchical
opposition. Diversity implies disunity and conflict, a differing within the same,
a 'having variety'; its root is the Latin diversus, 'turned in different directions'.
It is diversity within the same but which aspect of the diversity will determine
the signification of the whole? Compare this with 'difference', "to bear off in
different directions", "to bear apart";28 difference denotes autonomous
identities. Where diversity denotes comparison and evaluation, of relativism and
the liberal ideas of multiculturalism; cultural difference is the enunciation of
cultures within their own systems and terms of identification, and there lies the
problem: the moment we adopt a theoretical system to speak about culture, we
adopt that system of authority, an authority which translates difference as
27 Ibid, p 4.
diversity.
28 Collins English Bhabha is concerned to show the double-sided identity produced within colonial
Dictionary. discourse where the 'native' subject is not only disavowed as lack but
 32

discriminated against as difference; "where the trace of what is disavowed is not

repressed but respected as something different — a mutation, a hybrid".29 In
terms of colonialism this means that the colonised are both drawn into/under
the unitary culture and have a mimetic identity imposed upon them — become
part of the diversity of the same; and at the same time exceed that identity and
are disallowed as different and discriminated against in order to secure the identity
of the authorising power in a process Bhabha calls "negative transparency". The
colonised subject is then both mimetic of and subversive of the signifying power
and it is in this subversion that Bhabha finds the seeds of resistance. For him,
"hybridity represents the ambivalent 'turn' of the discriminated subject into the
terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification — a disturbing questioning
of the images and presences of authority."30
Hybridity is "a disturbing questioning" that interrogates the condition of the
imperialist discourse; it is the space of "neither the one nor the other",31 which
refuses the authority of the dominant power. It does this by disfiguring
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(Entstellung) the difference which maintains and reproduces the value system of
identity. Bhabha's vision of a space of cultural difference, of hybridity, is, as I've
explained, not a celebration of pluralism, of fragmentation or of bricolage; nor
is it the space of alterity. By considering differance as a space of possibility, we
can understand hybridity as the "connective tissue" that conditions difference
and avoid replacing one authority with another. It is in that affirmation of
possibility that we can start creating a new cartography.

...I purged my ethnic resentments

in the eerie cantinas
29 Bhabha, op cit, p 11.
30 Ibid, p 113. of san Fernando & San joaquin
31 Ibid, p 25. building roads for some else's thoughts
32 From Gomez-Peña's but when El Movimiento began
Califas, in Massumi,
op cit. we all began to remember 32
instead of being remembered.