Into hybrid marshlands? Thirdspatial notes on postcolonial theory and feminist legal theory

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 59-89

  Lippens, Ronnie ^a  

^a KEELE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0001895811     PISSN: 09528059     EISSN: 15728722     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1008921410727     Document Type: Article

References (104)

1. E. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996).
2. On the 'ghost' metaphor, see further.
3. See: G. C. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice", Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), 271-313. Gayatri Spivak's reflections on the ungraspable Laws that whirl on and between the lines and planes of the practice of sati in India, and her unsettling ghostly visits to the homes of all those who dwelled in thoughts and assumptions about an alleged voice, or an alleged subject, that allegedly would be able to articulate - or who allegedly would be able to speak - sati('s Laws), or its Others, have had some seminal allures. It just might. It just might be that, imagine, the only voices that can speak or articulate sati and its Others, are those countless in-between ones that live in the self-sacrificing widow herself, accepting sati while resisting it and its Others, refusing sati, while accepting it and its Others.
4. Firm beds, yes. Solid beds? Coherent beds? Structures? Performances? Who knows actually, acting, imagining? 'Cultures'? "Merely cultures"? Yes and No, here, or: somewhere in between perhaps? Aren't "merely cultures" as 'material' as matter? But then again, isn't matter always symbolised, even if we symbolise it as that which is not symbolisable? Somewhere in between the Real and the Imagined, then? Where both are, and aren't. See on these 'matters', e.g. : J. Butler, "Merely Cultural", Social Text, 3(4) (1997), 265-277;
5. J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993).
6. See further in this text.
7. And 'feminisms'.
8. And 'postcolonialisms'.
9. Compare with Rod Giblett's Postmodern Wetlands. Giblett aims at de-colonizing and de-coding spaces and territories, especially marshes, and rewrites the latter as productive and vivacious spaces that may engender a more democratic ecological sense of multiplicity and possibility, as contrasted to the grids of a rationalised, encoding modernity.
10. See: R. Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands. Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).
11. See A. Gordon, Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). We will come back to Avery Gordon's book in the next section.
12. On this topic, see also the collection by V. Daniel & J. Peck, eds., Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). However, this sensitivity has formed the threads of Derrida's deconstructive writings on writing.
13. See especially J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
14. Never to reach it, though. There will always be thirdspaces, enfolding from/into beyonds which, in turn, hold the energies that articulate - through engulfments/encapsulatings and dilutions - the Laws that whirl in various Same/Other locations, home(s) and self(ves), subject(ivitie)s. There's only becoming hybrid marshland.
15. 'Third Space' is from Homi Bhabha. See: H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). See also the work of Ed Soja, supra, n. 1.
16. Hybrid thirdspace is constituted as a residual remainder through myriad rhizomic constitutions of locations.
17. Again 'Laws'? Can we ever be completely without Laws? According to what Laws?
18. "Somewhere" in the rhizome? Perhaps. Though that "somewhere" is not to be understood here as a fixed point. "Starting from intermezzean beyonds first"? From beyonds that are within (the lines of this text) and without. From again anOther thirdspatial zone. By way of again anOther interstitial intermezzo, that is.
19. Again Gordon's Ghostly Matters here.
20. See especially Section 4, "Not Only the Footprints but the Water Too and what is Down There", on Toni Morrison's Beloved (pp. 137-192).
21. Or, like the spirit of the child in Morrison's Beloved.
22. Paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari here. See: G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980).
23. See also: R. Lippens, "Hybrid Hopes LTD. Reflections on Hypermodernity for Rhizologists", Humanity and Society 22/4 (1998), 386-410.
24. Can one read radical democratic visits that way? Perhaps. That might well be. Who knows! See: E. Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996).
25. This might be the ghost haunting Iris Marion Young's textual home(s) and self(ves). I. M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
26. See on this again E. Laclau, supra, n. 19.
27. Compare with Kathleen Kirby's work here. See: K. Kirby, Indifferent Boundaries: Spatial Concepts of Human Subjectivity (New York: the Guilford Press, 1996).
28. Are we in Roberto Unger's worlds here? It just might be so. Unger's ghosts might be hauntingly familiar to those in this paper. Unger's ghostly visits here are not frightening. See: R.M. Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
29. Heterotopia as the zone of alter(n)ation, as the zone of experiment, as the zone of thirdspatial promise? Compare: K. Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity. Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London: Routledge, 1997).
30. Is this the door through which Derrida's ghosts are entering? His ghosts, that is, who whisper that justice is always to come, will always be 'à venir', or 'avenir', will, then never be. His ghosts who try and tell us, as Avery Gordon did, that ghosts will ever lurk in constitutive exteriors, thinking about entering, having already entered while thinking about it, that they will ever hover over the question whether to decide if they just might enter, now or later, now or in the future, uninvited, unexpected, but inevitable, inevitably unsettling. It just might. Derrida's ghosts just might. See: J. Derrida, Force de Loi. Le 'Fondement Mystique de l'Autorité' (Paris: Galilée, 1994).
31. Enter Henry Giroux' ghosts here. See: H. Giroux, Border Crossings (New York: Routledge, 1992). Inspirations from border pedagogy have already found their ways into 'criminology' and into 'legal studies'.
32. See, e.g. R. Lippens, "Alternatives to What Kind of Suffering? Towards a Border-Crossing Criminology", Theoretical Criminology 2/3 (1998), 311-343. See the works of Bruce Arrigo, who also writes from Lacanian perspectives;
33. see e.g. "Reason and Desire in Legal Education: A Psychoanalytic-Semiotic Critique", forthcoming. See also the work done by Dragan Milovanovic, who tries to forge paths in-between post-structuralism, complexity theory, structuration theory, border pedagogy and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.
34. See, e.g. D. Milovanovic, Postmodern Law and Disorder. Psychoanalytic Semiotics, Chaos and Juridic Exegeses (Liverpool: Deborah Charles, 1992),
35. in 'criminology': S. Henry & D. Milovanovic, Constitutive Criminology (London: Sage, 1996).
36. See the collection: N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
37. Here's another way of reading radical democracy: as the zone of an ethics of indifference.
38. Shackles, remember, tend to do two things at the same time: they block, hinder, or destroy, while they connect, produce, enable, form - and vice versa.
39. We will get back to Arjun Appadurai soon enough. See: A. Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy", in Global Culture, ed. M. Featherstone (London: Sage, 1990), 295-310.
40. Claudius Messner has whispered this expression here.
41. Perhaps we all have come to realise now, after Modernities and Governmentalities of (dis)ordering frenzy, that is, the ine-scape-ability of the ambivalent heart of this world, as well as the unsuturability of this world, and our contigent dwellings we inevitably have to cluster in some corners of it, somewhere. Anyway, Zygmunt Bauman has. See here: Z. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1991).
42. The 'suture' metaphor is from E. Laclau & Ch. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
43. E. Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
44. "To and fro"? Again new in-betweens?
45. This comes from: C. Columbus, The Four Voyages, ed. and transl. J.M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1969).
46. Just like his spiritual father, Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski who, as Joseph Conrad, sailed up the Congo River, in 1890, of which he wrote - "pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers" - in his classic Heart of Darkness. See: J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. R. Hampson (London: Penguin, 1995). Mr. Marlow has been haunting Conrad ever since, though, at first, they met "in the casual manner of those health-resort acquaintances which sometimes ripen into friendships". And, "For all his assertiveness in matters of opinion, he is not an intrusive person.
47. He haunts my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony; but as we part at the end of a tale I am never sure that it may not be for the last time" (quotations from the Author's Note to Heart of Darkness, pp. 9 and 10).
48. Starting from shaky in-betweens and confident still? Confident precisely because of starting from in-between land. Confident precisely because of his not knowing anything in advance. And his not knowing in advance was linked to his being in-between, already; in a zone, that is, where in-commensurabilities are already clustered loosely, in-differently, un-folded; promising uninvited and unexpected visits from thirdspatial ghosts.
49. "All of Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz". Europe, that loosely shackled, shaky collection of lines and planes. Europe, that criss-crossed, criss-crossing flow of diverging contractions, of converging frays. Europe, that hybrid marshland, churned and formed through countless tracks of pilgrimage and moles' grubbings ("Well grubbed, old mole !"). Europe, that un-stable clogging space of frantic non-identity, of difference. Europe, that exploding space of fracturing identities, of clustering topoi.
50. Perhaps these are Luce Irigaray's penetrating ghosts here, who fixed feminine experience as an experience of the not-one, as an experience of the double (remember her writings on the labial touch), as an experience of the multiple, as an experience of alter(n)ation, as the experience of ambivalence, as marshy fluidity, as fluid marshyness. Perhaps Irigaray's penetrating little steamer is sailing here in-between these very lines, and, who knows, perhaps this steamer is rubbing off some of its fixations, while (re)producing new hybrid thirdspatial zones with the lines of this paper? See, again: L. Irigaray, Ce Sexe Qui n'en Est Pas Un (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977).
51. Remember - see supra, n. 3 - Gayatri Spivak's reading of the British prohibition of sati practice in India.
52. See the recent work of Jacques Derrida here. J. Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997).
53. On page 113 of the 1995 edition (ed. R. Hampson) of Heart of Darkness.
54. Said's Orientalisms in his 'Orientalism', that is. Said's Foucauldian liberations have proven to be blocking indeed as well. E. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1995), originally written in 1978.
55. For thorough evocations and critique of Said's (and Others' im-possible fixations), see, e.g. : B. Moore-Gilbert, Post-colonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997);
56. D. Walder, Post-Colonial Literatures in English. History, Language, Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
57. From Deleuzean inspirations, see: R. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).
58. Perhaps Homi Bhabha does. See again his seminal The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
59. Or Kobena Mercer? See: K. Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994). Who, by the way, are likely to unsettle Adrienne Rich's hope for a politics of location that would prove sensitive to what whirls in locations. Whereas Rich would still think that 'what' to be more or less coherent, not to say fixed, as we will see in the next section, we would doubt this very much under conditions of chao- and rhizo-hybridity.
60. Compare with: A. Rich, "Notes Towards a Politics of Location", in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose (New York: Norton, 1986), 210-231.
61. Let us ask Gary Genosko. G. Genosko, Undisciplined Theory (London: Sage, 1998).
62. This imagined reality, these real imaginations, were, and still are, to a large extent, shared by feminisms. We already mentioned the work of Luce Irigaray, who fixed Woman as ambivalence, as fluidity. Perhaps we can refer here, in contrast, also to Slavoj Zizek's reading of Kafka's The Trial, where - in Zizek's reading - another heart of darkness, the Court, or the law, figures as a lawless/whimsical/feminine place: "Smeared by an obscene vitality, the law itself - traditionally, a pure, neutral universality - assumes the features of a heterogeneous, inconsistent bricolage penetrated with enjoyment". See: S. Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), quotation on p. 149.
63. Which is why, e.g., Drucilla Cornell allies with Derrida's Spurs in order to criticize Lacan's conceptions (Lacan's Law) on "Woman'. Quoting Derrida here - from p. 84 of Cornell's Beyond Accomodation -: "Woman (truth) will not be pinned down. That which will not be pinned down by truth is, in truth - feminine." D. Cornell, Beyond Accomodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and Law (New York: Routledge, 1991). Recall here also Derrida's writings on the force of (the) law of justice as Deconstruction, as the promise of yet still Other 'avenirs' of Justice (see his Force de Loi, supra n. 25).
64. The latter being (read as), indeed, personal, private, contextual imagined realities, or real imaginations.
65. E.g. as a space of difference, or as a space of equality, or as a space of both.
66. Catharine MacKinnon comes to mind here who, assuming 'Woman', argues for an inversion of the Laws of law - of the State -, or the Laws of Man, into the Laws of Woman, into something Other, then, yet, into the Same still. See: C. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
67. One could read these 'pregnancies' as that which fuels deconstruction(ism).
68. Or, in more Derridean words: a zone of possibility.
69. Using Deleuze's and Guattari's terminology here (see supra, n. 17).
70. No wonder that Gayatri Spivak uses catachresis as a prominent writing style.
71. In more than one sense.
72. In: G. Marcus, "What comes (just) after 'Post'? The Case of Ethnography", in Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds. N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (London: Sage, 1994), 563-574.
73. We will get back to this in the next section. Recall Ed Soja's Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989).
74. On im-possibilities and paradoxical democracy, 'in-between' universalisms and particularisms, see again E. Laclau, supra, n. 19.
75. See supra, n. 47 (quote from page 116).
76. We may perhaps be allowed here to refer, once again, to Cornell's Beyond Accomodation, where, on pp. 194-196, she reads the story of the killing by the slave mother of her daughter (in Toni Morrison's Beloved) as a fixed myth on fixities that, in more than one way, block Othered futures. We're full hybrid circle here with Avery Gordon's reading of Beloved.
77. M. Matsuda et al., Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).
78. See especially here the essay by Kimberlè Williams Crenshaw on the 2 Live Crew controversy: K. W. Crenshaw, "Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew" (111-132).
79. Most prominently: J. Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997).
80. See supra, n. 44. See, again, Drucilla Cornell's Beyond Accomodation as well (supra, n. 45),
81. Judith Butler's Excitable Speech (supra, n. 62).
82. 'Woman' as dependency? 'Woman' as dependent on 'masculine' protection? 'Woman' as dependent on 'the polity'? 'Woman' as dependent on the State? 'Woman' as dependent on Universal purities? 'Woman' as dependent on the Laws of law? 'Woman' as the Other? As the margin? As the 'remainder'? Or as the centre? 'Woman' as? 'Woman' as the eternal dependent Victim? Or 'Woman' as performer? Yes? No? Both? None? Somewhere in-between?
83. "In/ex/clusions"? The One cannot do without the Other. "Inclusions" cannot 'include' without 'excluding' (all and everything Other). "Exclusions" cannot 'exclude' without 'including' (all and everything reduced to the Same). Moreover, there will always be Other Others, im-possibilizing an ethical pulse; since "tout autre est tout autre", there will always be im-possible sacrifice. On this, see: J. Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), ch. 4, especially.
84. Let us recall here 'radical democratic' feminisms, or 'feminist' radical democracies. E.g. : J. Butler & J. Scott (eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge, 1992). There, one can feel an awareness of the im-possibility of limits: limits enable, and block, at the same time. They inevitably delimit, while de/limiting, and they limit, and impossibilize their homes; all at the same time.
85. D. Cornell, Beyond Accomodation (p. 100; see also supra, n. 47).
86. See also Cornell's subsequent Chiffonier-like deconstructions (fiddling, like a ragpicker, with/in the remainder, with/in the margins): D. Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992).
87. For 'criminological' spin-offs, see the work of, e.g., Carol Smart: C. Smart, Law, Crime and Sexuality: Essays in Feminism (London: Sage, 1995).
88. Ever resisting representations? Living in the home(s) and self(ves) of im-possible outlaw cultures? See: bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (London: Routledge, 1994).
89. Which, let us repeat here, were already there, somewhere, pondering.
90. Let us make a remark here. Note that fleets of little steamers do not converge (or diverge) necessarily. In other words: various Same/Different 'isms' do not necessarily connect (or disconnect). They do so contextually. Since they are already there, they surface in the presence of Others, or they submerge, according to contextualities. Articulations of 'isms' can be read - as any articulation can - as contextual, fragile, shaky clusters held together by energies from contextual hybridities, in-betweenishly. One moment, they can gather in one location, and the very next moment, they may splinter in myriad directions. Flexibly. And often in and through decentred, ad hoc tactics - the stuff of contemporary everyday life according to Michel de Certeau. Is that any wonder? See: M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
91. Again using Deleuzean words here (see supra, n. 17).
92. See, amongst others : L. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998), especially Section 5 therein, on postcolonialism and feminism.
93. See, on deterritorialising feminisms, also: C. Kaplan, "Deterritorializations: the Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse", in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse eds. A. JanMohamed and D. Lloyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 357-368. See also those discussions within feminisms, and within radical race theory, mostly in writings of women of Afro-American descent, that have tried to establish impossible hierarchies of suffering. See, e.g., Drucilla Cornell's notes on Regina Austin's paper Sapphire Bound!, which tried to reflect experience of Afro-American women - before the Laws of law - as an experience of 'specific femaleness', which undercuts the possibility of there being a Woman's experience, on which it would suffice to pour some experience of 'blackness' to capture what it is to find oneself where Afro-American women do.
94. See Cornell's Beyond Accomodation (supra, n. 47, on page 189 of the book).
95. Or: both fleets of little steamers.
96. Eventually putting Gandhian resistance at the centre of postcolonial resistance, next to more 'masculine' forms (see again Gandhi, supra, n. 72).
97. Eventually writing 'Subaltern' women's experiences in the centre of 'Woman', which, as such, also paradoxically might weaken/strengthen the space of 'subaltern' women. By fixing and assuming a coherence that would bind 'Third Wirld women', for example, into 'Third World Woman', as Other, and as Other. See Chandra Talpade Mohanty's key text here: C.T. Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses", Feminist Review, Autumn (1988), 65-88.
98. This 'completeness' can only come to us in its im-possibilising forms, through uneasiness, through a sense of lack, through a sense of fracture, that is.
99. The vice versa statement holds as well: all the Other is what is to be read as the constitutive remainder of those Laws.
100. How can we practice Thirding-as-Othering? (pace Henri Lefebvre, in Ed Soja's Third-space, 60 - see supra, n. 1).
101. Here's Arjun Appadurai again (see supra, n. 30). We're especially making use here of his conception of contemporary global culture as that which is constituted in and through the workings of and shifts in mediascapes, ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes.
102. And we feel, with Jacques Derrida, that the job (of radical democracy) will never be done and over. The moment we will think the job has been done, it will be done and over; and radical democracy will never be. See again Derrida's Force de Loi (supra, n. 25).
103. J. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (London: Verso, 1996).
104. 'Illusion', in Baudrillard's homes.