White Mythologies

Robert J.C. Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134384549
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

We must, many now argue, `get back' to history. but which one? History has always been a problematical concept in Western theory, particularly for Marxism. In the wake of postmodernism, its status has become ever less certain. Is it possible to write history that avoids the trap of Eurocentrism?
Robert Young's investigation of 'the history of History', from Hegel and Marx to Althusser and Foucault, calls into question the Eurocentrism of traditional Marxist accounts of a single 'World History', in which, as he shows, the `Third World' appears as an unassimilable excess, surplus to the narrative of the West.
Young goes on to consider recent questionings of the limits of Western knowledge. He argues that the efforts of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha to formulate non-historicist ways of thinking and writing history are part of a larger project of a decolonisation of History and a deconstruction of 'the West'.

1
WHITE MYTHOLOGIES

If so-called ‘so-called poststructuralism’ is the product of a single historical moment, then that moment is probably not May 1968 but rather the Algerian War of Independence–no doubt itself both a symptom and a product. In this respect it is significant that Sartre, Althusser, Derrida and Lyotard, among others, were all either born in Algeria or personally involved with the events of the war. But let us begin instead with Hélène Cixous’ remarkable account of what it was like to grow up as an Algerian French Jewish girl at that time:

I learned everything from this first spectacle: I saw how the white (French), superior, plutocratic, civilized world founded its power on the repression of populations who had suddenly become ‘invisible’, like proletarians, immigrant workers, minorities who are not the right ‘colour’. Women. Invisible as humans. But, of course, perceived as tools–dirty, stupid, lazy, underhanded, etc. Thanks to some annihilating dialectical magic. I saw that the great, noble, ‘advanced’ countries established themselves by expelling what was ‘strange’; excluding it but not dismissing it; enslaving it. A commonplace gesture of History: there have to be two races–the masters and the slaves.¹

Cixous has been criticized for lacking a politics and a theory of the social.² According to some criteria perhaps, but if so they would have to exclude from ‘the political’ considerations such as those described here. Which is precisely the point: if there is a politics to what has become known as poststructuralism, then it is articulated in this passage which unnervingly weaves capitalist economic exploitation, racism, colonialism, sexism, together with, perhaps unexpectedly, ‘History’ and the structure of the Hegelian dialectic.

A lot has been said already in the English-speaking world about poststructuralism and politics, much of it in the accusatory mode voiced from the opposing class-based verities of ‘tradition’ or ‘History’. Such apparently secure grounds of objection amount to two narratives: their intriguing similarity brings out the extent to which poststructuralism challenges not just the politics and institutions of the right but also the politics and theoretical systems of the left. Disturbing conventional assumptions about what constitutes ‘the political’, poststructuralism is correspondingly difficult to place itself.

In the passage just cited for example it is striking that Cixous includes the Hegelian dialectic in the forms of political oppression which she describes. It is not a question of showing that such an allegation misinterprets or simplifies Hegel’s texts.³ Of course it does. The problem involves rather the ways in which Hegel has been read, absorbed and adapted. Nor is it just the Hegelian dialectic as such: Cixous includes ‘History’, and by implication therefore Marxism as well. This cannot simply be dismissed as another New Right invocation of the Gulag, for Cixous is arguing something much more specific: that Marxism, insofar as it inherits the system of the Hegelian dialectic, is also implicated in the link between the structures of knowledge and the forms of oppression of the last two hundred years: a phenomenon that has become known as Eurocentrism.

To this extent, Marxism’s universalizing narrative of the unfolding of a rational system of world history is simply a negative form of the history of European imperialism: it was Hegel, after all, who declared that ‘Africa has no history’, and it was Marx who, though critical of British imperialism, concluded that the British colonization of India was ultimately for the best because it brought India into the evolutionary narrative of Western history, thus creating the conditions for future class struggle there.⁴ Such an arrogant and arrogating narrative means that the story of ‘world history’ not only involves what Fredric Jameson describes as the wresting of freedom from the realm of necessity but always also the creation, subjection and final appropriation of Europe’s ‘others’. This is why ‘History’, which for Marxism promises liberation, for Cixous also entails another forgotten story of oppression:

Already I know all about the ‘reality’ that supports History’s progress: everything throughout the centuries depends on the distinction between the Selfsame, the ownself …and that which limits it: so now what menaces my-own-good …is the ‘other’. What is the ‘Other’? If it is truly the ‘other’, there is nothing to say; it cannot be theorized. The ‘other’ escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside: absolutely other. It doesn’t settle down. But in History, of course, what is called ‘other’ is an alterity that does settle down, that falls into the dialectical circle. It is the other in a hierarchically organized relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines, and assigns ‘its’ other. With the dreadful simplicity that orders the movement Hegel erected as a system, society trots along before my eyes reproducing to perfection the mechanism of the death struggle: the reduction of a ‘person’ to a ‘nobody’ to the position of ‘other’–the inexorable plot of racism. There has to be some ‘other’–no master without a slave, no economico-political power without exploitation, no dominant class without cattle under the yoke, no ‘Frenchmen’ without wogs, no Nazis without Jews, no property without exclusion–an exclusion that has its limits and is part of the dialectic. (70–1)

Not that Hegel himself is responsible. Rather the problem, Cixous argues, is that unfortunately Hegel wasn’t inventing things. The entire Hegelian machinery simply lays down the operation of a system already in place, already operating in everyday life. Politics and knowledge have worked according to the same Hegelian dialectic, with its ‘phallo-logocentric Aufhebung’–whether it be Marxism’s History, Europe’s colonial annexations and accompanying racism or orientalist scholarship, or, in a typical conflation of patriarchy and colonialism, Freud’s characterization of femininity as the dark unexplored continent (‘within his economy, she is the strangeness he likes to appropriate’ [68]). For even Freud, according to Cixous, has not helped in any project to separate history from the history of appropriation or that of phallocentrism. The patriarchal structures of psychoanalytic theory have often been defended on the grounds that they only describe the current customs of a patriarchal society. But this does not alter the fact that psychoanalysis therefore repeats the same masculine ‘Empire of the Selfsame’, and that as soon as such descriptions become institutionalized–as a structure of knowledge, or as psychoanalytic practice–then they become agents of the system they describe.⁵ The point is to change it.

But why this emphasis on Hegel? The problem of the Hegelian model, particularly of a historicism which presupposes a governing structure of self-realization in all historical process, is by no means confined to post-war French Marxism, but the dominance of Hegelian Marxism from the thirties to the fifties does explain the particular context for the French poststructuralist assault.⁶ Here it is not a question of suggesting that Hegel is somehow answerable for the excesses of capitalism or even socialism in the past two hundred years: rather what is at stake is the argument that the dominant force of opposition to capitalism, Marxism, as a body of knowledge itself remains complicit with, and even extends, the system to which it is opposed. Hegel articulates a philosophical structure of the appropriation of the other as a form of knowledge which uncannily simulates the project of nineteenth-century imperialism; the construction of knowledges which all operate through forms of expropriation and incorporation of the other mimics at a conceptual level the geographical and economic absorption of the non-European world by the West. Marxism’s standing Hegel on his head may have reversed his idealism, but it did not change the mode of operation of a conceptual system which remains collusively Eurocentric. It is thus entirely appropriate that Hegelian Marxism has become generally known as ‘Western Marxism’.

As Cixous suggests, the mode of knowledge as a politics of arrogation pivots at a theoretical level on the dialectic of the same and the other. Such knowledge is always centred in a self even though it is outward looking, searching for power and control of what is other to it. Anthropology has always provided the clearest symptomatic instance, as was foreseen by Rousseau from the outset. History, with a capital H, similarly cannot tolerate otherness or leave it outside its economy of inclusion. The appropriation of the other as a form of knowledge within a totalizing system can thus be set alongside the history (if not the project) of European imperialism, and the constitution of the other as ‘other’ alongside racism and sexism. The reaction against this structure has produced forms of politics that do not fit into traditional political categories. Here the problem rests on the fact that for orthodox Marxism there can be only one ‘other’, that of the working class, into which all other oppressed groups, so-called ‘minorities’, must in the last instance be subsumed.

Such a position is by no means confined to a Marxism of a Stalinist past. In Making History, published in 1987, for example, Alex Callinicos argues that the so-called poststructuralist critique of the category of the subject can be avoided by shifting the subject out of the problematic realm of consciousness into a theory of human agency. This provides something closer to historical Marxism, although it does mean that he quickly becomes involved in assumptions about rationality and intentionality, and has to propose a ‘Principle of Humanity’, that is a common human nature, to hold them all together. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the ‘Principle of Humanity’ also turns out to involve the assumption that class is the primary form of collective agency, because, we are told, it is more fundamental than any other interests or forms of social power. Callinicos writes:

Feminists and black nationalists [sic] often complain that the concepts of Marxist class theory are ‘gender-blind’ and ‘race-blind’. This is indeed true. Agents’ class position derives from their place in production relations, not their gender or supposed race. But of itself this does not provide grounds for rejecting Marxism, since its chief theoretical claim is precisely to explain power-relations and forms of conflict such as those denoted by the terms ‘nation’, ‘gender’ and ‘race’ in terms of the forces and relations of production. The mere existence of national, sexual and racial oppression does not refute historical materialism, but rather constitutes its explanandum. The only interesting question is whether or not Marxism can actually explain these phenomena.⁷

The only interesting question? So as long as gender and race can be satisfactorily subordinated to class then Marxism does not need modifying, and history can be reasserted as the single narrative of the Third International.⁸

Conversely, as Callinicos implicitly recognizes, the problem with contemporary politics for the left is that the dialectic of class depends on a historicist History and vice versa; any failure of the former necessarily also involves a waning of the latter. Marxism’s inability to deal with the political interventions of other oppositional groups has meant that its History can no longer claim to subsume all processes of change. The straightforward oppositional structure of capital and class does not necessarily work any more: if we think in terms of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, then rather than the working class being the obvious universal subject-victim, many others are also oppressed: particularly women, black people, and all other so-called ethnic and minority groups. Any single individual may belong to several of these, but the forms of oppression, as of resistance or change, may not only overlap but may also differ or even conflict. As soon as there is no longer a single master and no single slave, then the classic Hegelian reversal model on which Marxism depends and on which it bases its theory of revolution (literally, an overturning) is no longer adequate. In fact it is arguable whether such dualistic conditions ever existed anyway: marginal groups which could not be assimilated into the category of the working class were merely relegated by Marx to the Lumpenproletariat. Even the formulation of a dualistic class division, Laclau and Mouffe have argued persuasively, is itself nothing less than a nostalgic attempt to recreate for the nineteenth century the imagined simplicity of the conditions of the aristocracy/bourgeoisie conflict of the French Revolution which had originally inspired Hegel.⁹ A similarly straightforward opposition also provides much of the attraction which has fuelled the recent growth of interest in the historical analysis of colonialism–in which you apparently have the simple binary of master and slave, colonizer and colonized. With colonialism it’s easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, which makes it tempting to substitute the colonized for the lost working class. Already in 1957 Roland Barthes was claiming that ‘today it is the colonized peoples who assume the full ethical and political condition described by Marx as being that of the proletariat’.¹⁰ But politics today are much more complex, much more difficult to disentangle. The dialectical structure of oppositional politics no longer works for the micro-politics of the post-war period in the West. This is the context of Foucault’s critique of what he calls the sovereign model of power, of the idea that power has a single source in a master, king, or class–and can thus easily be reversed.

This shift from a conflictual dyadic political structure is not simply a question of historical change, of the recent appearance of ‘minorities’: after all the slave was already constituted simultaneously according to different groups (for example male or female), the Lumpenproletariat always had to be excluded. The problem begins at a conceptual level with the initial division between master and slave as such, as if relations of power work according to the binary opposition of Hegel’s fight to the death between two individuals.¹¹ This structure is not, as might at first be imagined, derived from a fantasy of power relations modelled on a medieval joust but from the phenomenological account of the constitution of knowledge that works according to the structure of a subject perceiving an object, a same/other dialectic in which the other is first constituted by the same through its negation as other before being incorporated within it. No possibility of dialogue or exchange here. As Cixous argues, nor can there be any place in this schema for the other as other, unless it becomes, like God, an absolute other, literally unknowable. The difficulties which arise from this structure are familiar from the debates in feminism, where ‘woman’ seems to be offered an alternative of either being the ‘other’ as constituted by man, that is, conforming to the stereotypes of patriarchy, or, if she is to avoid this, of being an absolute ‘other’ outside knowledge, necessarily confined to inarticulate expressions of mysticism or jouissance. The only way to side-step these alternatives seems to be to reject the other altogether and become the same, that is, equal to men–but then with no difference from them. Exactly the same double bind is encountered in any theorization of racial difference.

In his influential Le Même et l‘autre Vincent Descombes has described the entire history of twentieth-century philosophy in France as a succession of moves which attempt to get out of this Hegelian dialectic: the recent phenomenon of poststructuralism is part of a long philosophical story and distinguished only by what appears to be a certain success, or at least an avoidance of failure to the extent that it has at least managed to keep the game with Hegel in play.¹² The real difficulty has always been to find an alternative to the Hegelian dialectic–difficult because strictly speaking it is impossible, insofar as the operation of the dialectic already includes its negation. You cannot get out of Hegel by simply contradicting him, any more than you can get out of those other Hegelian systems, Marxism and psychoanalysis, by simply opposing them: for in both your opposition is likewise always recuperable, as the workings of ideology or psychic resistance.

Nor can you get away from Hegel by simply removing him, like the excision of Trotsky from the side of Lenin in certain official Soviet photographs. This is the lesson of Althusser. Althusser’s historical interest derives from the fact that he represents the only orthodox Marxist theorist who has tried to get out of Hegel while remaining a Marxist–though for many Marxists he did sacrifice Marxism in the process, which only suggests how closely Marxism and Hegelianism are intertwined. Althusser’s theoretical interest, on the other hand, is that he demonstrates the impossibility of any attempt simply to exclude, excise or extirpate Hegel. Other strategies are required.

I HISTORICISM AND IMPERIALISM

Metaphysics–the white mythology which reassembles a...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
• NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION
• WHITE MYTHOLOGIES REVISITED
• 1: WHITE MYTHOLOGIES
• 2: MARXISM AND THE QUESTION OF HISTORY
• 3: SARTRE’S EXTRAVAGANCES
• 4: THE SCIENTIFIC CRITIQUE OF HISTORICISM
• 5: FOUCAULT’S PHANTASMS
• 6: THE JAMESON RAID
• 7: DISORIENTING ORIENTALISM
• 8: THE AMBIVALENCE OF BHABHA
• 9: SPIVAK: DECOLONIZATION, DECONSTRUCTION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY