The location of culture

The move away from the singularities of ‘class’ or ‘gender’

as primary Conceptual and organizational categories, has
resulted in an awareness of the Subject positions – of race,
gender, generation, institutional location, Geopolitical
locale, sexual orientation that inhabit any claim to identity
in the Modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and
politically crucial, is the Need to think beyond narratives of
originally and initial subjectivities and to Focus on those
moments or processes that are produced in the
articulation of Cultural differences. These ‘in- between
spaces provide the terrain for Elaborating strategies of
selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new Signs
of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and
contestation, in The act of defining the idea of society
itself.
Terms of cultural engagement,, whether antagonistic or
affiliated, are Produced per-formatively. The
representation of difference must not be Hastily read as
the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in
the Fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of
difference, from the Minority perspective, is a complex,
on-going negotiation that seeks to Authorize cultural
hybridities that emerge in moments of historical
Transformation.
The stairwell as liminal space, in-between the designations
of identity, Becomes the process of symbolic interaction,
the connective tissue that Constructs the difference
between upper and lower, black and white. The Hither and
thither of the stairwell, the temporal movement and
passage that it Allows, prevents identities at either end of
it from settling into primordial Polarities. This interstitial
passage between fixed identifications opens up the
Possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference
without an Assumed or imposed hierarchy.
The very concepts of homogenous national cultures, the
consensual or Contiguous transmission of historical
traditions, or ‘organic’ ethnic Communities -as the grounds
of cultural comparativism – are in a profound Process of
redefinition. The hideous extremity of Serbian-nationalism
proves That the very idea of a pure, ethnically cleansed’
national identity can only be Achieved through the death,
literal and figurative, of the complex inter Weavings of
history, and the culturally contingent border lines of
modern Nationhood. This side of the psychosis of patriotic
fervour, I like to think, There is overwhelming evidence of a
more transnational and translational Sense of the hybridity
of imagined communities.
Being in the beyond, is to inhabit an intervening space, as
any dictionary will Tell you. But to dwell in the beyond’ is
also, as I have shown, to be part of a Revisionary time, a
return to the present to redescribed our cultural
Contemporaneity, to redescribed our human, historic
commonality; to touch The future on its hither side. In that
sense, then, the intervening space beyond, Becomes a
space of intervention in the here and now.