Note on theory: I wonder if I might say that the writing around the software code is in a kind of parenthesis (define parenthesis) - or that theory is in parenthesis to practice.


Homi Bhabha 'The Commitment to Theory', in, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge 1994. 


Bhabha's work explores the interstices - the space of overlaps and displacement of difference - the '"in between", or in excess of, the sum of the parts of difference' as he puts it (1994: 2). Remember, Bhabha was important in 1994, not least, for stressing the politics of cultural difference not cultural diversity  - one that requires a process of identification over one that is simply comparative and categorised; hence antagonism over reconcilation perhaps. He draws both upon Benjamin in stressing that the 'borderline work of culture demands an encounter with "newness" that is not part of the continuum of past and present' (1994: 7). He is trying to characterise strategies for acting in the present (agency) that take account of things that appear to be out of control (that seem to be beyond agency). This is equated to the idea that an author can try to take control of social action and meanings through intention, but can never take control over the eventual meanings and range of possible outcomes. His critique clearly has implications for binary divisions but in concentrating on the 'in between' reality and the 'interstitual intimacy' between, is he not merely recasting dialectics? (He is, of course, but trying to stop short of synthesis in the Hegelian sense). In concentrating on ambiguities and ambivalences, this evokes the productive use of contradiction. Bhabha quotes Benjamin on the disrupted dialectic of modernity: 
'Ambiguity is the figurative appearance of the dialectic, the law of dialectic at a standstill.' (1994: 18, quoting Benjamin's 'On Baudelaire').

In the chapter 'The Commitment to Theory', he examines the interstices between theory and politics (praxis?), and rejects the commonly held idea that somehow theory is the realm of cultural and social privilege. Clearly this impoverished position would simply keep theory and politics separate - a self-defeating strategy. The politics of cultural production wrests this from an impasse, through a more informed sense of what 'critical theory' implies (as well as we might be reminded of its historical roots in the work of the Frankfurt School). In this way, culture and economics too cannot be separated as if either operates in its own autonomous social void. Yet this sense of pluralism certainly does not imply that Western theory should not be examined for its hegemonic resonance. Bhabha asks an important question:
'Are the interests of 'Western' theory necessarily collusive with the hegemonic role of the West as a power bloc? Is the language of theory merely another power ploy
of the culturally privileged Western elite to produce a discourse of the Other that reinforces its own power-knowledge equation?' (1994: 20-21) The incorporation of so-called post-colonial theory itself is perhaps a particularly relevant case in point.

Bhabha's use of the term 'commitment' again draws upon Benjamin (in 'The Author as Producer' although this is not explicitly acknowledged); commitment implies commitment to what and who? A simplistic separation of 'activist' and 'theorist' (and we might add 'artist') makes no sense in an overall discourse of cultural production (wherein different forms and different registers are viable in the overall context of politics. The concept of 'cultural capital' is of relevance here too). More specifically, Bhabha is drawing upon Stuart Hall's use of the notion of hegemony (from Gramsci) that uses the idea of identification, wherein different political positions are negotiated - not negated as such. In this way, positions are not simply progressive or reactionary, but subject to the conditions in which they arise and are negotiated as part of discourse. As a result, Bhabha says this:
'"What is to be done?" must acknowledge the force of writing, its metaphoricity and its rhetorical discourse, as a productive matrix which defines the "social" and makes it available as an objective of and for, action.' (1994: 23). If that sounds confusing, remember it can be reflexively qualified by a close reading of the quote itself. Herein lies a politics of address that lies at the heart of political action. 
He continues:
'The language of critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics. The challenge lies in conceiving of the time of political action and understanding as opening up a space that can accept and regulate the differential moment of intervention without rushing to produce a unity of the social antagonism or contradiction. This is 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.' (1994: 25)

In other words, he is keen to articulate contradictory forces as dialectical (perhaps more accurately hybrid or in Derridean 'diffˇrance') but 'without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History' or redemption (or an essentialist reading of Hegel and Marx). For Bhabha, there can be no closure on theory. In this way, he rejects simplistic oppositions between subject and object, but also between the 'essentialist opposition between ideological miscognition and revolutionary truth'. This could only be fully comprehended within an overall understanding of the discourse of Marxism, which is subject to the conditions of its own production as theory and practice. For Bhabha, this is a continual negotiation of the processes of translation. Commitment can only ever be seen in this way too, as a contradictory and complex operation, where a position is argued in relation to an other through translation and displacement (or 'erasure' as Derrida would have it). This is the politics of the representation of theory - both the representation of politics and the politics of representation as applied to theory. 

Politics, then, for Bhabha, is thoroughly hybrid and cannot be fought on separatist terms, nor without communities of interest. However, strategic alliances are another thing altogether to retain a sense of agency; Stuart Halls's version of this was 'symbolic identification' (1994: 28). The problem is how to force a sense a commitment from what is a symbolic identification and whether an sense of integrity can remain (New Labour is a case in point - the only way to make it electable was to transform its policies to such an extent that it became a lie. This is a good example of hegemony and counter-hegemony at work). To Bhabha, Frantz Fanon expresses this hybrid state in his description of: 
'the liberatory people who initiate the productive instability of revolutionary cultural change are themselves the bearers of this hybrid identity. They are caught in the discontinuous time of translation and negotiation...' (1994: 38) 
as they can neither rely on any sense of precolonial sense of cultural purity nor ignore that all spaces and systems are constructed 'in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation'. The liberated people cannot settle on any simple sense of culture but express 'dialectical reorganisation' of what Bhabha calls 'the third space' within which 'we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves' (1994: 39).                         
                 
It was a commonly held view to stress this enunciatory 'present' to liberate the discourse of emancipation from binary closures (1994: 185).
The problem is embedded in the idea of the subject as agent. Bhabha stresses the contigent conditions of agency and cites the work of Hannah Arendt. He describes how Arendt thought that uncertainty in political matters arose from 
'the disclosure of who - the agent as individuation - is contiguous with the what of the intersubjective realm. This contiguous relation between who and what cannot be transcended  but must be accepted as a form of indeterminism and doubling... 
"The perplexity is that in any series of events that together form a story with a unique meaning we can at best isolate the agent who set the whole process into motion; and although this agent frequently remains the subject, the 'hero' of the story, we can never point equivocably to him as the author of its outcome."
'This is the structure of the intersubjective space between agents, what Arendt terms human 'inter-est'.' (Bhabha, 1994: 189; quoting Arendt's The Human Condition, of 1958).