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Abstract
In this article I seek to put into conversation two different but convergent intellectual/political projects, Lawrence Grossberg's ‘radically contextualist cultural studies’ and ‘political ontology’, an emergent analytical framework being developed by a loosely connected network of scholars. Central to both projects is the question of modernity, but while Grossberg's cultural studies focuses on the possibilities for multiple modernities immanent to the present conjuncture, the political ontology project focuses on the status of the non-modern. I argue that the parallels and the divergences between these projects contain the promise for a fruitful conversation resting on the understanding that the possibilities for multiple modernities may well rest on the recognition of the non-modern on its own terms. For this we need to do away with the concept of ‘cultures’ as the key category to think about differences.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Lawrence Grossberg, Arturo Escobar, and John Pickles for inviting me to present some of these ideas in their graduate course at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I am especially indebted to the first of them for allowing me to discuss and use in this paper his unpublished work. He has informed me that a revised version of this paper will appear in his forthcoming book, For Cultural Studies (Duke University Press, 2010). Elena Yehia provided insightful comments and critiques of an earlier version of this paper. Marisol de la Cadena and Arturo Escobar have been very close ‘accomplices’ in the formulation of some of these ideas but I am responsible for the weaknesses in this presentation.
Notes
1. The framework is being developed by a group of colleagues including Marisol de la Cadena, Arturo Escobar, Harvey Feit, Justin Kenrick, Brian Noble and the Crabgrass Collective. However, I must make clear that there are debates among ourselves on whether the term ‘political ontology’ is the most appropriate to label this emerging framework.
2. A central tenet of ANT is precisely that agency is not an exclusive attribute of humans.
3. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4636044.htmlSee http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4636044.stm
4. See http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2004/06/16/orca_drums040616.html; the story of Luna received a lot of media attention and besides news and blogs now there are two feature films about it: Spirit of the Whale, which is a dramatization, and Saving Luna, a documentary.
5. Bolivia, and the figure of Fausto Reinaga, provides a good example of why this should not be the case. Fausto Reinaga was an Indigenous intellectual who in the 1970s gave voice to a then barely audible claim, that social transformation in Bolivia had to be based on reclaiming Indigenous identities and visions of society against the projects pursued by the Euro-centric elites (from Left and Right). In a context in which the dominant language of radical social transformation was the peasant revolution, Reinaga was considered a romantic and fundamentalist and therefore silenced and marginalized. Through the years the conceptual shift that Reinaga was pushing for gained more traction (or became more visible), and 30 years down the road the re-assertion of Indigenous identities and values became undeniably central to ideas of radical social transformation in Bolivia. For a discussion of Reinaga's ideas see Lucero (Citation2007).
6. Let's recall that Scott distinguishes between a ‘public transcript’ (which is readily available to any observer) where, given power asymmetries, the terms of the discourse are shaped by the dominant group. Thus, much of the subordinated group critical discourse never appears in the ‘public transcript,’ rather it appears in the ‘hidden transcript,’ the space where the subordinated groups are secluded from the gaze of the dominant group.
7. The arrow of time was mainly understood as a progression, although it could be understood as a sort of regression as well, as the Romantics did. Not surprise then that any contestation to dominant notions of progress are still labeled ‘romantic’ and often equated to a desire for the past. It is important to highlight, however, that the groups that self-defined as modern (and therefore superior) have been historically variable albeit not arbitrary, the invariable element has been that the story of modernity (in its Euro-modern version) is enacted through those human groups’ practices and institutions. Thus, Euro-modernity is not restricted to Europeans but rather exists/extends as far as one can trace that its version of the story of modernity is being enacted.
8. Of course, the ‘ontological turn’ is itself a symptom of certain occurrences that are key to understand the current conjuncture. I will expand on this point in the Conclusions.