Rampant (Colonial) Power, Undertheorised (Native ... · Rampant (Colonial) Power, Undertheorised (Native) Resistance: Foucault, Bhabha, Said 18 worked with, by their historical interpretive,

Damascus University Journal, Vol.21, No. (1+2)، 2005 Muhammed Noor Al-Abbood

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Rampant (Colonial) Power, Undertheorised (Native) Resistance: Foucault, Bhabha, Said

Dr. Muhammed Noor Al-Abbood.*

Abstract This essay argues that in comparison with colonial power and

discourse, anti-colonial resistance has largely been inadequately theorised. This inadequate theoretical engagement with resistance to colonialism is one of the consequences of the current, especially poststructuralist, conception of colonial power and discourse in postcolonial theory. Since Edward Said and Homi Bhabha’s theorisation of colonial power and resistance draws on Michel Foucault’s paradigms of power and resistance, this essay begins by tracing the problems of theorisng resistance to Foucault’s poststructuralism. The essay concludes that Foucault’s paradigms of power attenuate his resistance claims by defining resistance as a function of power. Similarly Bhabha’s resistance claims are undermined by his dispensing with native, anti-colonial, political intentionality and consciousness. In contrast, Said offers a more nuanced account of the colonial experience, rejects a totalised conception of colonial power, and retrieves a space for anti-colonial subjectivity and agency.

It has been the substantial achievement of all the intellectuals, and of course of the movements they

*Department of English- Faculty of Arts and Humanities University of Damascus


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worked with, by their historical interpretive, and analytic efforts to have identified the culture of resistance as a cultural enterprise possessing a long tradition of integrity and power in its own right, one not simply grasped as a belated reactive response to Western imperialism.1 Edward Said The post-colonial like the feminist, is a dismantling but also constructive enterprise insofar as it implies a theory of agency and social change that the post-modern deconstructive impulse lacks.2 Linda Hutcheon

An intelligible, adequate conception of native, anti-colonial resistance is a conspicuous lacuna in the postcolonial theorisations of the phenomenon of imperialism and its historically specific form of colonialism. The rigour sought after in producing analyses of colonial discourses and practices is strikingly paralleled by an undertheorised conception of anti-colonial resistance, both as an historical moment or movement and as an analytic, discursive category. Taking Homi Bhabha’s colonial discourse analysis as a case in point, it will be my contention in this essy that such inadequate theoretical engagement with native, anti-colonial resistance issues form the particular current conception of colonial discourse as well as form the postcolonial practices which have been heavily inflected by the advances of poststructuralism in general and deconstruction in particular. Within this same framework, my essay will bring Edward Said’s work in as an alternative form of postcolonial theory, and will account for the problematics that downgrade the resistance claims made by such an alternative form of theory.

1 Edward Said, ‘Yeats and Decolonization,’ Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1990), 73. 2 Linda Hutcheon, ‘Circling the Downspout of Empire,’ Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-colonialism and Post-modernism, ed., Ian Adam, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991), 183.


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It goes without saying that colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory as developed by Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Bhabha have been problematised within frameworks derived from French critical theory. Therefore a discussion of resistance and agency within postcolonial theory can be most fruitfully invoked in relation to Michel Foucault’s conception of the problematics of knowledge and power, insofar as some current forms of postcolonial theory have been, under the tremendous political influence of Said and Bhabha, strongly Foucauldianised and, in the case of the latter, Derridianised, as well. While both Said’s and Bhabha’s approaches manifest disparate agendas and different theoretical trajectories, both theorists share a developing relationship with the work of Foucault. Said’s project of Orientalism directly draws on Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge and The Order of Things.3 Bhabha, on the other hand, has ‘refined’ Orientalism in successive theoretical moves that owe a great deal to Foucault’s theories of power/knowledge, discourse and subjectivity.4 I would like first to consider the conception of power and resistance in Foucault, and then to show how Said’s and Bhabha’s own conceptions overlap with, differ from, or, in the case of Bhabha, inflate Foucault’s.

To claim that Foucault removes the possibility of resistance as such is an ungenerous interpretive gesture. Nevertheless, given his rigorous and unrelenting analyses of power operation, he cannot be exonerated from the charge that resistance in his schemas has remained an underdeveloped category.5 For while resistance to the discourses of power/knowledge and the mechanisms of their operation is not an issue

3 See Edward Said, Orientalism (London and Henley: Routledge-Kegan Paul, 1978); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Harper Colophon, 1972); Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans., Sheridan Smith (1972; London: Routledge, 1994) 4 The word ‘refined’ is Wallace’s. See Jennifer Wallace, ‘Exiled by Foes, Silenced by Friends: Perspective on Edward Said,’ Times Higher Education Supplement 17 Jan. 1997, 17. 5 See Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 83; and Barry Smart, Foucault, Marxism and Critique (London and New York: Routledge, 1983), 86.


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explored in his early archeological work, the subsequent genealogical phase, with its emphasis on discursive and extra-discursive systems of domination and exploitation, has not allowed a clear conception of resistance even as he shifted focus to the more political question of power.6

Resistance as conceived by Foucault is, like his other concepts of power and knowledge, very complex and by all accounts an element of power itself. For the very existence and operation of power entail some form of resistance, not as an effect or consequence of the functioning of power, but as a necessary condition for its operation.7 As he argues, ‘there are no relations of power without resistances.’8 Moreover, Foucault’s argument that ‘where there is power, there is resistance,’ suggests that resistance is, like power, ‘present everywhere in the power network.’9 Robert Young argues that the ‘interaction of power and resistance ... mimes the mutual contamination and transformation of Freud’s death-drive and pleasure principle,’ since ‘the forces of domination and resistance are caught up, sometimes indistinguishably, within each other.’10 However, if power and resistance are embedded in each other like Freud’s death-drive and pleasure principle, one can add that Foucauldian power is also like the Freudian drive in the sense that it is equally non-intentional.11 For it is neither defined by its object, nor is it

6 Compare Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 85. 7 See Smart, Foucault, 90; Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), 147. 8 Michel Foucault, ‘Powers and Strategies,’ Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed., Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), 142. 9 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans., Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (1978; London: Penguin Books, 1990), 95. 10 Young, Mythologies , 85; 86. 11 All this is ironic since Foucault has so little interest in psychoanalysis.


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the product of intentionality on the part of a subject, whether individual or collective.12

What further distinguishes Foucauldian resistance is the fact that although it is an ‘element’ of power, it is also ‘a source of its perpetual disorder.’13 However, as Young explains, ‘the exercise and resistance of power work in a disruptive rather than in a dialectical relation to each other.’ This means that ‘[p]ower is a two-way process,’ that is, resistance to power is ‘heterogeneous’ inasmuch as power is itself heterogeneous.14 In one sense at least, the insistence on this model rules out the kind of total resistance - revolution for instance - whereby resistance could get a grip on the whole network of which it is part. He holds that ‘there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary.’15 More precisely, ‘broad cleavages in the social order, massive binary divisions constitute at best possible fleeting moments in the history of a society amidst a plurality of irregular resistances … for there are a multiplicity of resistances which are constantly shifting and regrouping, [such that] a binary division constitutes merely one possible and exceptional historical form.’16 As such, social change in the form of a revolution for example can only occur if resistances have been strategically ‘manipulated’ and channeled as to effect a significant rupture in the dominant order:

Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistances traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to

12 Compare Smart’s remark that ‘although power is described as having an objective or aim, it is not the product of intentionality on the part of a subject.’ Smart, Foucault, 90. 13 Dreyfus Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 147. 14 Young, Mythologies, 87. 15 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 95-6. 16 Smart, Foucault, 90.


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the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships.17

This recalls Louis Althusser’s insistence that for a revolution to take place, there must be a particular historical and political conjuncture when the contradictions within the social formation, some of which are radically heterogeneous - of different origins, different sense, and of different levels and points of application - would nevertheless merge into a revolutionary ruptural unity. This is simply what he calls ‘overdetermination.’18

Given Foucault’s conception of power and resistance, the problem is not that the possibility of resistance is diminished due to power’s having no ground and opposition’s lack of locus. Rather, it is how, why and on what grounds resistance is to be conceived, mobilised and exercised. With a few un(der)theorised, problematic answers, this question remains unanswered by Foucault: ‘Is there or is there not a reason to revolt? Let’s leave the question open.’19 Elsewhere, however, Foucault seems to imply ‘that no such philosophical motivations or justifications are necessary’ or pertinent.20 Those who resist are ‘all those on whom power is exercised to their detriment, all who find it intolerable.’21 What is ruled out here is the validity of those theories, such as Marxism, which would envisage resistance as leading to a better, more emancipatory alternative to the system that is resisted. In contrast, the pessimist Foucault goes so far as to believe that merely thinking of an alternative beyond the status quo is already a kind of extending it. In ‘Revolutionary Action: “Until Now,”’ he states ‘that to imagine another system is to extend our participation in

17 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 96. 18 See Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination” For Marx, trans., Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1979), 100-103. 19 Foucault, ‘Is It Useless to Revolt?’ trans., James Bernauer, Philosophy and Social Criticism -8.1 (1981), 8. It is Simons who writes that ‘Foucault does not answer th[is] question.’ Foucault and the Political , 86. 20 Simons, Foucault and the Political, 86. 21 Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power,’ Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed., Donald Bouchard, trans, Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 216.


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the present system.’22 This is indeed a limited and limiting view. As Jon Simons points out, Foucault is driven to this conclusion because he believes that ‘[t]here is no guarantee that the state of affairs brought about by resistance will be better than the present, as any social arrangement or definition of community may become oppressive even if it is instituted by acts of resistance against a previous regime.’ But this view fails to foreground the fact that any oppressive social formation produced by resistance can itself be resisted in the future.23

Some of these problems that we have observed can be attributed to his problematic conception of truth. For Foucault has already performed the task of ‘double-bracketing’ - dismissing all specific truth claims – at times even his own - as well as the meaning the subject gives to his or her experience.24 For sometimes he denies any privilege to his own claims. ‘I,’ he at one point says, ‘have never written anything but fictions.’25 This problem is, as far as subjectivity and agency are concerned, further exacerbated by his dismissal of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ and his disavowal of what he calls ‘the speaker’s benefit.’26 Foucault maintains that a characteristic strategy through which modern power functions is power’s representation of knowledge or truth as different from, and outside, itself. By uncritically accepting this representation, ‘the repressive hypothesis’ unwittingly colludes with and extends power.27 For Foucault, however, ‘truth’ is not inherently or ‘intrinsically opposed to power,’ and therefore cannot be accorded ‘a liberating role.’28 On this ground he rejects what Said would call ‘speaking truth to power’ as an attempt to oppose the dominant order and lift its oppression. Foucault, moreover, dismisses the ‘speaker’s benefit’ on the ground that there is no critical consciousness or a Habermasian concept of reason that can be

22 Foucault, ‘Revolutionary Action: “Until Now,”’ Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 230. 23 Simons, Foucault and the Political, 87. 24 See Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 85-7. 25 Foucault, ‘The History of Sexuality,’ Power/Knowledge, 193. 26 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 6. 27 See Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 182. 28 See Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 127.


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located outside power and within truth, such as to enable the intellectual to oppose power, ‘utter truth and promise bliss.’29

Power disguises itself ideologically by producing a discourse that is only seemingly opposed to or critical of it. In reality, however, such an oppositional discourse can be no more than a ruse within a more efficient reconfiguration of power.30 Therefore to speak truth to power is merely to surrender to one of its ploys. He writes, ‘Power as a pure limit set on Freedom is the general form of its acceptability.’31 As we can see, Foucault seems to be implacably monist here. From one monist representation in which truth would stand always outside power, he swings to another in which truth would be always an effect of power. Both representations homogenise truth. The one merely inverts the other. However, this view of power and truth undermines the very status of his own work.

Taking such an argument seriously, one is tempted to ask whether Foucault has really opened up spaces for resistance, and what advance his reformulation has represented, of the question of agency, subjectivity and determinism which, as Young warns us, ‘had beset Sartre and many others.’32 Young celebrates the demise of the Hegelian dialectic and other ‘white mythologies’ as he tells the ‘long philosophical story’ of the emergence of poststructuralism. But he acknowledges that

[t]he real difficulty has always been to find an alternative to the Hegelian dialectic - difficult because strictly speaking it is impossible, in so far as the operation of the dialectic already includes its negation. You cannot get out of Hegel by simply contradicting him, anymore than you can get out of those other Hegelian systems, Marxism and psychoanalysis by simply opposing them: for in both your opposition is

29 See Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucaul, 130; Foucault, History of Sexuality, 7. 30 See Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 130. 31 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 86. 32 Young, Mythologies, 85.


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likewise always recuperable, as the workings of ideology or psychic resistance.33

However, given Foucault’s almost metaphysical conception of power, I wonder if the following parody of mine is not also true:

The real difficulty has always been to find an alternative to the Foucauldian problematic of power - difficult because strictly speaking it is impossible, in so far as the operation of power already includes its resistance or subversion. You cannot get out of the grip of power by simply contradicting it, any more than you can get out of those other Foucauldian systems, Discourse and Knowledge by simply opposing them: for in both your opposition is likewise recuperable as the effects of power operations.

One is indeed tempted to wonder if the imagination of power (Said’s phrase) in Foucault is not also one of Young’s white mythologies.

If such are the difficulties and problems of Foucault’s models of power and resistance, surely a postcolonial literary theory that bases itself on them will be constrained to the extent to which these very models are vague and problematic. The totalised representation of the discourse of power/knowledge disallows a position outside the structures and operations of power. The critique of power can only take place ‘within the discursive parameters that power makes possible.’34 Moreover, Foucault’s concepts of power and resistance, as Young tells us, focus on ‘the possibility of making intelligible the strategies and techniques of local operations of power without relying on the dialectic of ideology and the consciousness of subjects.’ To contest the claim made by some critics that Foucault removes the possibility of resistance as such, Young retorts that ‘all that [Foucault] downgrades is a theory of resistance centered on the individual subject as sovereign agent.’35 Is not Young’s retort a tautology? What about the individual as non-sovereign agent? Marx and

33 Young, Mythologies, 6. 34 See Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said and Spivak (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1995), 12. 35 Young, Mythologies, 86.


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Freud had long before Foucault downgraded the sovereignty of the classical humanist subject. Besides, are all agents ‘sovereign’? Young does not take into consideration these questions.

As I have noted above, in Foucault’s account, the operation of both power and resistance seem to be processes without subjects or without subjects-as-agents in the sense that subjectivity is one of their effects rather that the source of them. Moreover, since for Foucault the subject is constituted by power, the power it resists can never be external to it; thus in resistance the subject can be said to collude with that power. But does not this view conflate all kinds of power? Why should power be represented so monistically? Is the form of power that constitutes subjects the same form of power that they resist? All this points out to the fact that Foucault’s ‘power’ is such an undifferentiated concept. Asha Varadharajan has rightly contended that the ‘curiously vague’ ‘relation of subjectivity to the drama of power’ ‘makes it difficult to determine who regulates whom or how (in Althusser’s terms) the differential interpellation of [subjects] would refigure the nature and mode of power and resistance.’ In other words, ‘the protean configurations of Foucault’s version of power makes resistance indistinguishable from complicity.’36

Varadharjan’s indictment also holds true with regard to Bhabha’s models of colonial power and native resistance. I want to turn now to the conception of resistance in Bhabha and show how it significantly overlaps with and inflates Foucault’s. Both theorists tend to focus on the dominant rather than the resistant discourse. In ‘Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,’ Bhabha distinguishes between colonial discourse and the discourse of the resistant revolutionary struggle. The object of his analysis, he declares, is colonial rather than anti-colonial discourse, asserting that the latter ‘requires an alternative set of questions, techniques and strategies in order to construct it.’37 Discussing Foucault’s models of power and resistance, Young also argues that the ‘analysis of how resistance actually operates, in what conditions it succeeds or fails, needs an altogether more complex 36 Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies, 12. 37 Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,’ Literature, Politics and Theory, ed., Francis Barker et al (London and New York: Metheun, 1986), 155.


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model.’38 Like Foucault, Bhabha rejects a dialectic of Self/Other in favour of a conception of otherness that is the same’s difference from itself. Bhabha also produces a totalised representation of colonial discourse, such that natives can only resist from within its discursive space and only with the tools that it makes available. Most importantly, he downplays the subjectivity and agency of the colonised by insisting, in a strongly Foucauldian accent, that their resistance to colonialism ‘is not necessarily an oppositional act of political intention.’39 And the word ‘necessarily’ is a mere tautology, as we shall soon see.

Each of these assumptions poses its own problems in articulating a theory of anti-colonial resistance. Bhabha affirms the possibility that anti-colonial discourse ‘may be historically co-present with,’ even ‘intervene in’ colonial discourse.40 Although this is an odd and contradictory claim for Bhabha to make, given his general acceptance of Foucauldian paradigms of discourse and knowledge/power, he can be most criticised for not considering this possibility of co-presence and overlap of colonial and anti-colonial discourses, a possibility that he opens and closes at the same time. Indeed, he immediately shifts his focus to colonial discourse proper, not only because anti-colonial discourse requires a different set of questions and techniques to construct it, with which Bhabha declines to engage, but also because to accept a resistant native subjectivity as such would go against his main thesis which cannot accept intervention from a space outside the structures and operations of colonial discourse. Consequently, Bhabha has to conjure up all the devices that poststructuralism and deconstruction can afford in order to demonstrate not so much a native anti-colonial resistance as a failure of colonial discourse to achieve its aims due to its ambivalence, instability and irresolution. Thus Bhabha’s position replicates in the (post-) colonial context a classic deconstructionist gesture. As Terry Eagleton points out, 38 Young, Mythologies , 87. In fact Foucault denies that there are two discourses, one of oppressor and another of oppressed. As he argues, ‘there is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it.’ See History of Sexuality, 101. 39 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) , 110. 40 Bhabha, ‘The Other Question, 155.


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“[f]or de Man, as for his colleague Hillis Miller , literature does not need to be deconstructed by the critic: it can be shown to deconstruct itself, and moreover is actually ‘about’ this very operation.” Moreover, ‘literature for the deconstructionists testifies to the impossibility of language’s ever doing more than talk about its own failure.’41 In Bhabha, for literature read ‘colonial discourse.’

Consonant with Bhabha’s totalised representation of colonial discourse is his conception of Otherness. His psychoanalytically modulated conception of Otherness is still of a piece with Foucault’s and Jacques Derrida’s. Foucault does not postulate the Other outside the same. For him madness is not reason’s dialectical other, but rather reason’s difference and deviation from itself. This is in fact the very point that Derrida made in his critique of Foucault’s earlier notion of Otherness ‘as a repressed alterity existing outside or beyond’ the same.42 Derrida also makes a similar point when he ‘identifies the “feminine” with the structure and movement of différance itself.’43 In Betty McGraw’s elaboration

The feminine is not outside the masculine, nor is it its canny opposite. It is, instead, inside the masculine, its uncanny difference from itself. The feminine inhabits the masculine as its Otherness, its own disruption. It is pure difference and can only be defined by the way in which it differentially relates to other differences.44

This is exactly the way Bhabha postulates colonial alterity. For him ‘colonial Otherness’ is not constituted by a binary of ‘Colonialist Self’ and ‘Colonised Other.’ Rather, it is formed by the Self’s splitting and doubling, a notion that ‘turns on the idea of Man as his alienated image, not Self and Other but the “Otherness” of the Self inscribed in the

41 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 145; 146, respectively. 42 See Young, Mythologies, 71-2. 43 Varadharajan, Parodies, 21. 44 Betty McGraw, ‘Splitting Subject/Splitting Seduction,’ Boundary 2 12.2 (1984), 151.


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perverse palimpsest of colonial identity.’45 In other words, sameness slips into Otherness, but it remains an Otherness that has nothing to do with any ‘other.’46 On this ground he censures Frantz Fanon for being ‘too quick to name the Other, to personalise its presence in the language of colonial racism.’47 Against Fanon, Bhabha argues that the Other must be seen as ‘the necessary negation of a primordial identity - cultural or psychic,’ because it is ‘never simply an It-Self, a font of identity, truth, or misrecognition.’48 This account of Otherness as detached from any other is commensurate with Lacan’s concept of mimicry as ‘distinctive from what might be called an itself that is behind,’49 and Derrida’s portrayal of the process of devenir-femme as having ‘little to do with woman.’50

Now this conception of Otherness curiously raises profound questions as to the political and philosophical implications of the decentring, deconstructionist practices which Bhabha himself upholds. Does this conception of Otherness really decentre the Western Self of post-enlightenment Man? Is not this Otherness, which is posed within the space of the dominant discourse as its deviation from the dominant economy of the same, still defined in terms of the dominant categories?51 Varadharajan pinpoints some aspects of this problem. She argues that if the feminine and the colonised others of the Western self are conceived as merely the difference within the self-deprecatory postmodern ego of the Western self, then otherness is enlisted as agent for the discovery and

45 Homi Bhabha, ‘Remembering Fanon,’Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon, xiv-xv. 46 This is in fact how Young describes the effects of mimicry in Bhabha. See

Mythologies, 148. 47 Bhabha, ‘Remembering Fanon’ xix. 48 Bhabha, ‘Remembering Fanon’ xviii. 49 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 120. 50 See McGraw, ‘Splitting Subject, 144; Varadharajan, Parodies, 21. 51 This is a reformulation of Varadharajan’s statement that ‘[b]oth the “supplementary strategy” Bhabha defends and the structure of seduction McGraw offers suffer from the continued insistence on Otherness as that which insinuates itself within the boundaries of hegemonic discourse, its deviation from the dominant economy of the same defined in terms of dominant categories.’ Parodies, 22.


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augmentation of Western masculine assumptions rather than ‘the investigation of the history and materiality of other cultures.’52 It is obvious here that Varadharajan is appropriating Bhabha’s own critique of Derrida and Roland Barthes and using it against him. In one of the early versions of his essay ‘The Other Question,’ Bhabha argues that ‘the critique of western idealism or logocentrism requires that there is a constitutive discourse of lack imbricated in a philosophy of presence, which makes the differential or deconstructionist reading possible.’ This constitutive ‘non-satisfaction’ is fulfilled by ‘cultural otherness.’ Deconstruction’s critique of Western metaphysics has therefore fixed and finally appropriated the other as the West’s ‘limit-text.’53 Such appropriation of otherness functions as agent of or occasion for Western self-knowledge and self-discovery. Bhabha therefore calls for another mode of representation in which the West’s other is not posited as the West’s ‘limit-text’ or ‘anti-West.’ The problem remains, however, that his own mode of representing otherness still relegates the objective existence and difference of the colonised to the mere status of Western Man’s alienated image or his ‘dark reflection.’54

The insistence on Otherness as difference within, rather than confronting dominant discourse ‘with a contradictory or negative referent,’ or ‘turn[ing] contradiction into a dialectical process,’ marks Bhabha’s formulations ‘which privilege a strategy of displacement at the expense of a search for alternatives.’55 However, ‘the continuous exposure of the lack that helps to constitute identity,’ without a concept of dialectical negation, ‘brings one no closer to modes of representation that reconstitute the relation between self and other rather than confining themselves to the limits of the self or the mystery of the other.’56 In the latter case the conception of Otherness will continue, against the vigilance of Bhabha’s doubled deconstructionist strategies, to recentre

52 Varadharajan, Parodies, 21-22. 53 Bhabha, ‘The Other Question, 151. 54 Bhabha, ‘Remembering Fanon, xiv. 55 Varadharajan, Parodies, 23, 22; and Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 155. 56 Varadharajan, Parodies, 23.


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and bolster the self of the West, such that the discourse of post-enlightened Man returns at the moment of its repudiation.57

Similar problems stem from Bhabha’s conception of native ‘resistance.’ Although he has criticised the early Said for implying that colonial power was entirely possessed by the coloniser,58 Bhabha does not suggest that the colonised possessed it either. This is one of the binary oppositions that Bhabha inherits from Foucault: the only alternative to one agency possessing power is nobody possessing it. Like Foucault, Bhabha emphasises that power is exercised in multiple ways and through diverse channels, but never in possession of a particular agent. Subversion of colonial power and loss of its authority and control occur non-oppositionally and non-intentionally through the ambivalence and inner dissension within colonial discourse itself. ‘Resistance’ is therefore the name of an agency without a ‘subject.’ For Bhabha, agency takes place at the moment of enunciation. In ‘Of Mimicry and Man,’ it is conceived, as Young explains, as ‘a process of circulation’ rather than ‘a fixed point.’ The coloniser’s strategies for maintaining power are thwarted by the ambivalence that results from the coloniser’s attempt to fix the colonised as an object of knowledge. However, if mimicry somehow reinforces colonial power structures, Bhabha demonstrates that it also produces loss of agency on the part of the coloniser. Young glosses it as such: ‘If control slips away from the colonizer, the requirement of mimicry means that the colonized, while complicit in the process, remains the unwitting and unconscious agent of menace - with a resulting paranoia on the part of the colonizer as he tries to guess the native’s sinister intentions.’59 As such, “mimicry itself becomes a kind of agency

57 See also Stuart Hall, ‘When Was “The Post-Colonial,”’ The Postcolonial Question, ed., Ian Chambers and Lidia Curti (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 252. 58 See Homi Bhabha, ‘Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,’ The Politics of Theory, ed., Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983), 200. 59 Young, Mythologies 147-8. As can be seen here and in what follows, in my critique of Bhabha’s conceptions of ‘resistance’ and their implications I am drawing on Young’s own illuminating explication and critique of Bhabha,


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without a subject, a form of representation which produces effects, a sameness which slips into Otherness, but which still has nothing to do with any Other.’”60

As I argued before, Bhabha’s account of the operation of colonial power and the strategies of colonial discourse does not allow a conception of the native subject as existing on its own outside the structures of colonial power, nor does he allow the possibility that existing native knowledges and discourses may overlap with or impinge on the operation of colonial power/knowledge. The native subject is exclusively constituted and (dis)articulated within the colonial discursive boundaries. A slight revision occurs, however, in ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ when Bhabha introduces his concept of the hybrid. Here he seems to return to the possibility that native knowledges and resistant discourses may be historically co-present with and intervene in colonial discourse, a possibility that he has affirmed but has up till now never pursued nor brought to bear upon his analysis of colonial discourse. Now through the concept of the hybrid, he argues that native knowledges transgress the limits of colonial discourse and subvert its authority. Hybridity as defined by Bhabha, “is a problematic of colonial representation ... that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority.”61 Hybridity is thus the articulation of both colonial and native knowledges. However, although this problematic is, like mimicry, a discursive condition of colonialism insofar as both are produced by colonial power, Bhabha claims that it enables native resistance by destabilising and undermining the very structures that produce it in the first place:

If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridization...[this in turn] enables a form of subversion ... that turns the discursive

although I am using Young’s argument for the purpose of a completely different one. 60 Young, Mythologies, 148. 61 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 114.


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conditions of dominance into the ground of intervention.62

On this account of hybridity, mimicry does not only produce menace and disquiet for the coloniser, but it also becomes a strategy of intervention in a process of resistance:

Mimicry marks those moments of civil disobedience within the discipline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance. When the words of the master become the site of hybridity ... then we may not only read between the lines but even seek to change the often coercive reality that they so lucidly contain.63

Bhabha’s claim for native resistance here is problematic and its political status insignificant. Because he dismisses an ‘intentionalist’ account of agency, he is left with no other option than to emphasise that the operation as well as the subversion of power occur ‘outside the conscious control of the subject.’64 Thus the further loss of colonial authority and the subversion of colonial power/knowledge turn out to be an effect of the discursive conditions and operation of colonial discourse itself, rather than an agential effort on the part of a native subject that ‘knows’ what it is doing. In other words, though the native may be the unconscious agent of the change that occurs within the colonial power structures, hybridity remains like mimicry a kind of agency without a subject. For at the moment of hybridity, native knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse unawares and the resulting change is wholly unintentional.65

So far, none of the problematics which Bhabha has articulated - whether ambivalence, mimicry or hybridity - could be accorded the political status of ‘resistance.’ For resistance implies a conscious native subject who observes the ambivalence and slippages in the discourse of the coloniser, and consciously uses them in order to destabilise the

62 Ibid, 112. 63 Ibid, 121. 64 Young, Mythologies, 152. 65 See Young, Mythologies, 148.


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coloniser’s position and control.66 The question is then: how can Bhabha account for ‘strategies of subversion’ or ‘grounds of intervention,’ and in the absence of conscious native agency, what could be their political status?67 What sense does Bhabha’s talking of strategies, interventions, subversion make without positing a subject-as-agent? In fact, in the absence of a clear differentiation between forms of politics and political analysis, Bhabha’s account of resistance seems to lodge political intervention and strategies of subversion within the very act of analysing and understanding colonial discourse at the present. What is shown and emphasised then is Bhabha’s own subjectivity and agency as interpreter when he articulates those ‘signs of spectacular resistance.’ This is obvious in his assertion that ‘[w]hen the words of the master become the site of hybridity ... then we may not only read between the lines but even seek to change the often coercive reality that they so lucidly contain.’68 Surely then ‘[w]hat such a reading reveals are the boundaries of colonial discourse and it enables a transgression of these limits from’ Bhabha’s own ‘space.’69 But does not this reading also elide the difference of the historical situation being interpreted in relation to that of Bhabha’s?70 Contrary to his earlier assertions about the self-subversability of colonial discourse, now we are told that the whole act of intervention and subversion is neither an effect of the failure of colonial power, nor an active resistance on the part of the colonised. Rather, it is the strategy and agency of the conscious writing subject. Thus, Bhabha’s desire to displace native subjectivity and agency is also a desire to replace them with his own. However, the anachronistic strategies of resistance which he claims remain problematic if not totally irrelevant to the historical situation being analysed, unless, that is, one conceives of the ‘space of critical activity [as] also that of the (re)construction of knowledge.’71 If, as Foucault argued “in his genealogical notion of the phantasm, the

66 Compare Young, Mythologies, 152. 67 See Young, Mythologies, 152. 68 Bhabha, The Location of Culture , 121; emphasis mine. 69 Ibid., 67. 70 Young asks: ‘How is the historical situation placed in relation to that of the interpreting critic?’ Mythologies, 155. 71 Ibid., 155.


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historical ‘event’ is at once everywhere and nowhere, there and here, then and now,” then Bhabha’s intervention is indeed ‘a sign that history is happening - within the pages of theory, within the systems and structures we construct to figure the passage of the historical.’72

If the problem of agency and intentionality made up Bhabha’s original grounds for complaint against Said, his own account of native agency and resistance remains, as we have seen, problematic, with hardly any political advance on what he has criticised in the latter’s representation. In fact, his criticism of Said notwithstanding, Bhabha himself is vulnerable to these very criticisms. In his insistence that ‘there is no knowledge - political or otherwise - outside representation,’73 he ends up constructing ‘The World according to The Word.’74 This ‘Word,’ however, is, as Ania Loomba argues, almost exclusively the coloniser’s. ‘[E]verything outside colonial culture is treated with remarkable fuzziness.’ Moreover, the hybridity of both coloniser and colonised is theorised largely ‘by tracing the vicissitudes of colonial discourse, or the mutations in European culture.’75

In relation to Bhabha’s claims, I want to argue now that Said’s conception of native agency and native resistance can be more useful than that of the former. Orientalism, Said’s first and perhaps last strongly Foucauldian work, ‘neglects evidence of native agency in general, and indigenous resistance in particular.’76 The project of Orientalism seems to be exclusively focused on Western discourses, Orientalist, colonial and imperial. Said himself has recently candidly admitted his neglect of native agency in Orienatalism: ‘What I left out of Orientalism was the response to Western dominance which culminated in the great

72 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 25; the reference to Foucault is Young’s. See Mythologies, 155. 73 Bhabha, The Location of culture, 23. 74 See Benita Parry, ‘Signs of Our Time: Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s “The Location of Culture”, Third Text 28-29 (1994), 9. 75 See Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 179-180. 76 See Peter Childs and Patrick Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997), 107.


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movements of decolonization all across the Third World.’77 However, immediately after Orientalism, Said started to be concerned more and more with resistance. It may be recalled that it was the question of resistance that induced him to prefer initially Foucault’s models to Derrida’s78 and to eventually part company even with Foucault. It is perhaps the urgency of Said’s work and the political question of what is to be done to oppose oppression, colonialism and exploitation that have made his relation to Foucault a difficult one. The latter’s work is not geared toward producing a politics,79 and Said is impatient with a Foucault who does not ‘commit himself to descriptions of power and oppression with some intention of alleviating human suffering, pain, or betrayed hope.’80

Said’s subsequent work engages the task of not falling within the ‘unique territory in which Foucault has imprisoned himself and others with him.’81 For him, Foucault’s conception of power is ‘a curiously passive and sterile view’ - ‘not so much of the uses of power, but of how and why power is gained, used, and held onto.’82 Indeed for Foucault as for Nietzsche, power is itself irreducible. Any claim that it serves interests beyond itself is dismissed as ‘functionalist’ or ‘teleological.’ This is one of Foucault’s major divisions with Marxism, for which power is not the ultimate term. In a related way, Said argues that Foucault’s problematic and passive view of power is ascribed to his ‘disagreement with Marxism,’ which ‘causes him to obliterate the role of classes, the role of economies, the role of insurgency and rebellion in the societies he discusses.’83 In order to go beyond Foucault’s limitations, Said moves to a

77 Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), xii. 78 See for example, Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983), 183. 79 See Young, Mythologies, 87. 80 Said, The World, the Text and the Critic 247. 81 Ibid., 244. 82 Ibid., 221. 83 Said, The World, the Text and the Critic, 244. See also Spivak’s critique of Foucault in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed., Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Educational, 1988), 271-313.


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more recognisably Marxist position that enables the possibility of critique. His departure points become Raymond Williams and Antonio Gramsci. He therefore disavows ‘Foucault’s unmodulated minimization of resistance’ in favour of the formations proposed by Gramsci and Williams of ‘an emergent or alternative consciousness allied to emergent and alternative subaltern groups within the dominant … society,’ discursively and otherwise. For although Gramsci and Williams accord, like Foucault, ‘a paramount place to ideology and cultural critique,’ they differ from the latter in their ‘positive emphasis upon the vulnerability of the present organization of culture.’ In both Gramsci and Williams, as Said points out, ‘the discursive analysis of power’ is premised on the recognition that if power ‘is constructed by humans,’ it follows then that it is neither ‘invincible’ nor ‘impervious to dismantling.’84 Like Williams, Said argues that however saturating the hegemonic systems are, they are not unassailable or omnipotent. In one of his superb formulations, Williams puts it as such:

[H]owever dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which therefore always potentially contains a space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project.85

Foucault, in contrast, is too pessimistic to accept that alternative acts or intentions could escape the totalising embrace of discursive power. ‘Power,’ he argues, ‘is co-extensive with the social body; there are no primal spaces of liberty.’86 As we have observed before, he even suggests that any proposed alternatives to present hegemony or oppression would still be filtered by the dominant discourse. For these alternatives are ‘only the inventions of our civilization and result from our class system.’ Foucault therefore plays down even the idea of a social formation based 84 Said, ‘Foucault and the Imagination of Power,’ Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed., David Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986), 154. 85 Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979), 252. 86 Foucault, ‘Powers and Strategies, 142.


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on principles of justice because the very idea of justice has been ‘invented and put to work in different societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power.’87 Ironically Foucault here comes close to Marx in one of his moods. As Eagleton points out, Marx was also suspicious of such categories as ‘rights’ and ‘justice’ ‘because he identified moral discourse with the impoverished juridical notions of the bourgeois liberal tradition, which he quite properly regarded as ideological.’ He was wrong, however, to assume that any definition of these concepts would have replicated bourgeois ideology.88

The logic of Foucault’s self-defeating argument shows in a most lucid way that the celebration of the death of grand narratives by him and by his disciples is also a celebration of the birth of grand discourses. However, as Theodor Adorno remarks, a theory of grand discourse must be resisted not least because it confers upon the dominant system too much honour. In its inadequate understanding of ideology, such a theory fails to do anything more than confirm the thing it ostensibly critiques.89 Adorno reminds us that ‘the world is systematized horror, but therefore it is to do the world too much honour to think of it entirely as a system.’90 Moreover, if truth is a problematic and complex construct, the epistemic violence or horror must be confronted by an ethical politics of truth that

87 Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, ‘Human Nature: Justice versus Power,’ Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, ed., Fons Elders (London: Souvenir Press, 1974), 187, 185, respectively. 88 See Terry Eagleton, ‘Deconstruction and Human Rights,’ in Stephen Regan, ed., The Eagleton Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 224. 89 See Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies, xviii. 90 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans., E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), 113. One has to observe that Foucault is at times monist about the system and pluralist at other times, but this seems to make no difference as far as resistance is concerned. On the first score, the system is undefeatable because it absorbs and so pre-empts resistance. On the other, the system could not be combated because there is no system as such.


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takes on board the fact that ‘the need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.’91

In these terms, Foucault’s argument seems to do the discourse of power/knowledge too much honour by subscribing to an over-totalised and undifferentiated conception of power. As Said writes,

The disturbing circularity of Foucault’s theory of power is a form of theoretical overtotalization superficially more difficult to resist because, unlike many others, it is formulated, reformulated and borrowed to use in what seems to be historically documented situations. [Gramsci] would certainly appreciate the fineness of Foucault’s archeologies but would find it odd that they make not even a nominal allowance for emergent movements, and none for revolutions, counter-hegemony, or historical blocs.92

However, Said often misses the ambiguity of Foucault, for whom, as for Nietzsche, there is one thing called power, but it actually takes myriad, decentred forms. In this sense, power is too mercurial, elusive and defuse to provide a totalised target to assault. Yet, for Said, even when Foucault does admit of the possibility of resistance, he seems unwilling ‘to take seriously his own ideas about resistance to power.’ 93

It is therefore the totalising aspect of Foucault’s conception of power and his ‘lack of interest in the forces of effective resistance’ which forms the basis of Said’s disagreement with Foucault.94 Another but no less significant point of disagreement is the related question of individual subjectivity and agency. Foucault does not deny entirely individual agency; 95 he just claims that the agent is itself constituted by power.96

91 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans., E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 17-18. 92 Ibid., 246. 93 Said, The World, the Text and the Critic, 246. 94 Said, ‘ Foucault and the Imagination of Power, 151. 95 Foucault does not advocate apathy; he himself was an activist, albeit of the pessimist sort. Yet he remains unable to provide an adequate and convincing theoretical explanation of resistance. Consider this political ethic of permanent


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This leads inevitably to downplaying the role of individual subjectivity and individual agency. For if everything is produced by power, the term then cancels all the way through, so rendering any talk of individual subject or agent meaningless. Said rejects these premises and asserts individual agency:

Unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism.97

Also in view of his politics of anti-colonial resistance, the categories of individual subjectivity and agency are too important for Said to be dismissed or deflated, not least because they are closely related to the resurgent humanist ‘move to reclaim human dignity and active historicity for the colonial and post-colonial subjects,’ a move that is ‘at the heart of resistance movements.’98 After all, ‘history is not a homogeneous French-speaking territory, but a complex interaction between uneven economies, societies, and ideologies,’99 and Said is interested in foregrounding the subjectivity and agency of non-Western subjects in relation to their own cultures and histories as well as to the West’s colonial and imperial discourses.

In keeping with his disavowal of totalising, all-inclusive systems or discourses that ultimately leave no space from which to mount critique and resistance, Said is not interested in dispensing with what Young calls resistance: ‘The ethico-political choice we have to make everyday is to determine which is the main danger … My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous … If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism.’ See Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,’ The Foucault Reader, ed., Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 343. 96 See for example his argument against Chomsky’s in Chomsky and Foucault, ‘Human Nature, 149. 97 Said, Orientalism , 23. 98 See Childs and Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory , 108. 99 Said, The World, the Text and the Critic, 222.


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disparagingly ‘the dominant inside/outside model of conventional politics.’100 He postulates that subjects can resist from a position inside as well as outside the operation of power – in the sense that subjects can resist from a different power position, for one can be ‘outside power’ in the sense of being part of another form of power. This is why Said does not claim a straightforward, simplified, oppositional kind of resistance. He is, as Varadharajan argues, cautious about ‘hasty projections of a decolonized future in which Orientalism [or imperialism] will cease to influence [the] representation [of the self or the other].’ Moreover, he acknowledges that Otherness is a discursive construct, but ‘his insistence on empirical Others who are historically constituted rather than ontologically given also implies that the “Other” is invocable if not definable.’101 This means that native subjects are constituted not exclusively by colonial discourse, as Bhabha implies, but they are also constituted in relation to their native knowledges and discourses which overlap with and impinge on the operation of colonial power/knowledge. Indeed Bhabha’s deep mistake is that he writes as though there were nothing else in the life of the colonised but the colonialist, which is what the latter would like to think. In contrast, Said does not only affirm the existence of native knowledges and discourses, but he also argues that they have their own power and integrity:

It has been the substantial achievement of all of the intellectuals, and of course of the movements they worked with, by their historical interpretive, and analytic efforts to have identified the culture of resistance as a cultural enterprise possessing a long tradition of integrity and power in its own right, one not simply grasped as a belated reactive response to Western imperialism.102

The Other inhabits different cultural and material locations. Though the Otherness of the Other is constituted within the parameters of colonial discourse, the Other exists within its own history and culture. To deny

100 Young, Mythologies, 86. 101 Varadharajan, Parodies, xviii. 102 Said, ‘Yeats and Decolonization, 73.


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this fact would mean that the native subject is a colonial discursive product, one that came into being only upon its entry into the history and discourse of the West.

Now let me draw a conclusion to this essay. In my argument above I have tried to produce an account of the reasons why resistance to colonialism on the part of the colonised social formations has been attenuated in some forms of postcolonial literary theory, particularly those informed by poststructuralism and deconstruction. I have argued that these factors are related to postcolonial theory’s conception of colonial discourse and to the problematic poststructuralist and deconstructionist practices and strategies which are proposed as the only tools for colonial discourse analysis. I started the essay by discussing Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, resistance, subjectivity and agency, and proposed to read Bhabha’s and Said’s own respective models in relation to Foucault’s.

Although Foucault nowhere denies the possibility of resistance, his models of power and knowledge attenuate his resistance claims by defining resistance as a function of power, and thus as being always in some sense complicit with it. This has serious repercussions for conceiving and mobilising resistance as an effort to introduce a new social order. His dismissal of the dialectic of ideology and individual consciousness inevitably diminishes the effectual political status of subjects-as-agents. Bhabha proffers a Foucauldian description of colonial discourse, and his psychoanalytically informed strategies can still be identified as operating within schemas that have been already demarcated by Foucault - oddly enough since the latter has little interest in psychoanalysis. However, Bhabha’s resistance claims are undermined by his dispensing with political intentionality and awareness of imperialism on the part of the native subject. In contrast, Said offers a more nuanced account of interactive and embroiled (post-)colonial experience whether for coloniser or colonised. He rejects a totalised conception of colonial discourse and power, and attempts to retrieve a space for anti-colonial subjectivity and agency.


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_____. ‘Yeats and Decolonization,’ Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1990, 69-95. _____. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. Simons, Jon. Foucault and the Political. London and New York: Routledge, 1995, Smart, Barry. Foucault, Marxism and Critique. London and New York: Routledge, 1983. Spivak, Gayatri. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Basingstoke: Macmillan Educational, 1988, 271-313. Varadharajan, Asha. Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said and Spivak. Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1995. Wallace, Jennifer. ‘Exiled by Foes, Silenced by Friends: Perspective on Edward Said.’ Times Higher Education Supplement 17 Jan. 1997, 17. Williams, Raymond. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: New Left Books, 1979. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London and New York: Routledge, 1990..

Received 10/7/2002

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Rampant (Colonial) Power, Undertheorised (Native ... · Rampant (Colonial) Power, Undertheorised (Native) Resistance: Foucault, Bhabha, Said 18 worked with, by their historical interpretive,