remembrance / forgetting
should by no means be equated either with self-grandeur or deindividualization
In order for an obfuscated polyphonic communicational
tunnel to be transformed into the green communication channel, it takes a
glimpse of what constitutes cultural flows at a particular instant. Britain’s capital, as depicted in Temple’s
vernacular, is partly a story of the reconfiguration of political powers and repositioning
in the world as empires have been being remapped from the inside and externally
alike. British is among those whose cultural significance might not be
proportionate with heyday of its supremacy. Yet, the way its postcolonial
identity is being (re)shaped is likely to be in accord with its redescribed
sense of an unrivaled political and economic giant. The image of the sovereign
in the global arena of power colossuses has been massively informed by the postvictorian
reawakening into cultural realities that required allowing dawns and sunsets in
other parts of the world. Thus, it was duly revised.
Further, the unprecedented atrocities of
the First World War brought to the United Kingdom an awareness that can hardly
justify being so called, given the manifestation of its affinities to the
patterns more related to denial and oblivion in encounters with global
policies. It was after the Second World War when dramatic shifts in power
relations occurred. For Great Britain, it meant facing the ruins in the
aftermath of the four-year agony which climaxed in Germany’s merciless
demonstration of the survival impulse: something that can be taken as an
extreme version of how McKenzie Wark in The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of
the Situationist International (2011), albeit differently
contextualizing it, observes the situation in which “[o]ne way communication
has usurped the space of civil dialogue” (85).
More specifically Caryl Phillips writes
about the reconfiguring in question. The collection of essays entitled The European Tribe (1987), is a travelogue
based on his visits to European countries ripening towards what was later to be
known as post-Berlin-Wall-Europe. The essay of the same title shows Phillips’s
return to his native Britain after considerable stretches of time colored in bleak
insipidness of hotel rooms, scarce communication, cultures in contact,
individuals in search for a disposal of excessive skepticism, corrosive
cynicism, and a scant sense of home. He sees newly arisen British
socio-economic realities as follows:
Since
the Second World War Britain has had to make a major reassessment of her
position in the world. Empire involuntarily gave way to Commonwealth, which in
turn gave way to Common Market. This reductive pattern appears to be causing much
anguish in the bosom of the British nation, as it ushers in a new age in which
Britain will have both collaborate and co-operate with others. This process of
reassessing her status will continue to prove painful. Involvement in
discussions about a Channel tunnel, a common European currency, and freedom of
movement across borders is a sad step down from the aloofness of just two
generations past. There are those, however, including people in the highest
Government positions, who find it difficult to accept this state of affairs.
For them it is useful to imagine that Empire still exists, in order that they
may occasionally fan nationalistic pride and galvanize the nation, in war if
necessary. (The European Tribe 120)
Thus, time and again, one is prone to wonder
what nation it is that some individuals invest in with such an unthinkable pride.
One would persist to ask what national identity they are so blindingly trying
to reestablish. Needless to say, of vital importance seems to be the questions
of the value governing the denial of the restructured powers after the Second
World War, when the techniques of looting underwent a specific redescription
towards more sophisticated means of obtaining materialist wealth. Or, so
obfuscation in the communication channel speaks.
Part
of the distorted message informing a nation’s positioning its body polity and
political imagination is an image of a world’s leading military power sustained
through the role of an ally of the military power supreme. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (2006):
“Indeed, the evasive meanings of colonial history and its potential value to
the multiculturalism of the future are pending inside the new global role of
the United States as a successor to the European empires that were defeated and
transformed during the twentieth century” (3).
As if the fading of its glory from the
past were being desperately prevented from surfacing. Instead, it seems to
still demonstrate its significance,
albeit in a somewhat shadowy fashion. Terry Eagleton, After
Theory (2003): ”Meanwhile,
the
craven
overseas
lackeys
of
United
States
power,
most prominent among whose ranks is an off-shore US aircraft carrier once known as the United Kingdom,
are rather more coy and hypocritical about the whole affair (225).
It is no wonder that Phillips rightly
recognizes the eroding glamour of what once seemed to be an uncontested rule of
the unbeatable powers. Somewhat degrading positions and roles appear to be, in
fact, aptly regained modesty from the
perspective of understanding one’s country as remixable as the other countries
are: “Britain’s and Western Europe’s days of imperialistic glory are history” (The
European Tribe 120).
Philips is prone to emphasize the
falsity and selfishness of the history inherited through manipulative societal
institutions (The European Tribe 121).
Expropriation of history is integral to the omnipresent production of
knowledge. Rightly so, it seems. As if as the whole globe was granted with the
permission to host dawn and sunset, the sense of the four cardinal directions
had been destabilized, at least where it was previously believed that the whole
kingdom encompassed the world’s geography. Such a self-absorbed political
profile could only be a result of an uncritical investment in imperial power. For
that reason, it is not difficult to imagine west, alongside the whole of
Britain, recuperating its shameful past. Yet, it may find itself engaged in quite
probably an unnecessary enterprise. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:
The
West, then, may need to come up with some persuasive-sounding legitimations of its form of life, at exactly the
point when laid-back cultural thinkers are assuring
it that such legitimations are neither possible nor necessary. It may be forced to reflect on the truth and
reality of its existence, at a time when postmodern thought
has grave doubts
about both
truth and reality. It will need, in short,
to sound deep in a progressively more shallow age. (73)
Unnecessary because noone is interested
in acknowledging its reassessment, or, just because there is no need for such a
troublesome mix of a guilt trip and an abysmal sense of insecurity. Unnecessary
because there are other, gentler ways of soothing the seemingly troubling
interplay between forgetting and remembrance. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:
This
is a pity, since unless
the United States is able to do some hard thinking about the
world,
it is not
at
all certain that the world
will be around
for that much
longer. This would certainly save us all the
unpleasant necessity of hard thought,
since there would then be nothing
to think about; but there are probably
less
drastic ways of making
thinking
less rebarbative. (223)
Eagleton’s critique elucidates cultural self-centeredness
manifested in a delusional idea of mythical grandiosity. Simultaneously, the
thoughts presented exude a highly provocative invitation to resist such an
attitude as a fruitful form of interaction with other cultures. One can read in
such criticizing an appeal to oppose reductionist and / or deviant versions of the
mutually conditioning relationships between discourse and cultural realities.
In an age when an objective standpoint
is still ascribed to certain vocabularies, and yet, it is also being severely
challenged by a plurality of truths, no vocabulary is a sacred cow, but none
seems to be vigorous enough either to justify destabilizing of
objectivity. Traditions, speaking of the
obsolete belief that there is or should be a privileged vocabulary in sync with
the language of the world, is a remnant of a mistaken thinking that such
affinities may exist. We’ve been told that such atavism merely reflects a blind
spot precluding cognizance about there being no reverberation where there is no
linguistic means to ensure it. In other words, there is no language of the
world underpinning the convergence between the world and a particular
description of it. Descriptions are many. Ethics is among them. According to
the linguistic situation within which any voice appears to matter, but their
interconnectivity is of a highly questionable character, moral values seem to have
reached the level of arbitrariness that render traditions dismissible. Terry Eagleton,
After Theory:
Not many thinkers are
bold-faced enough to go entirely relativist on such issues and claim that if
torture happens to be in your tradition, then more power to your elbow. Most of
them would claim, with varying degrees of reluctance and liberal guilt, that
torture is wrong for such people, too. Most people, if they had to choose,
would rather be seen as cultural imperialists than champions of cruelty. It is
just that for the anti-theorists, reality itself has no views about whether
torture is admirable or repulsive. In fact, reality has no views about
anything. Moral values, like everything else, are a matter of random,
free-floating cultural traditions. (57-8)
Eagleton asserts the awareness of there
being the necessary distance between the world and how we speak about it. His
perseverance in portraying the indifference of the world to verbalizations
about it is the statement against the tendency that in a psychoanalytic sense
may be perceived as fetishization, in literary theory as personification, in a broader
theoretical parlance as subjectification of discourse, while in sociological,
or, even loosely taken marxist terms, it may signal dominance-submission based
relations. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:
There is no need to
be alarmed about this, however, since human culture is not really free-floating. Which is not to say that it is firmly
anchored either. That would be just the flipside of the same misleading
metaphor. Only something which was capable of being anchored could be described
as having floated loose. We would not call a cup ‘floating loose’ just because
it wasn’t clamped to the table with bands of steel. Culture only seems
free-floating because we once thought we were riveted in something solid, like
God or Nature or Reason. But that was an illusion. It is not that it was once
true but now is not, but that it was false all along. (57)
Needless to say, such a bewildering conquest
of false convictions caused a pervasive sense of unreliability, suspicion, and
insecurity. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:”We
are like someone crossing a high bridge and suddenly being seized by panic on
realizing that there is a thousand-foot drop below them. It is as though the
ground beneath their feet is no longer solid. But in fact it is” (57).
But, because of distorted messages, we
sometimes seem to be oblivious of it. Thus, some are quite unshakably prone to
maintain that because of such crude authoritarian impulses, traditions are
worthy of being dismissed, to say the least. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:
This
is one difference between modernism and postmodernism. Modernism, or so it
imagined, was old enough to remember a time when there were firm foundations to
human existence, and was still reeling from the shock of their being kicked
rudely away. This is one reason why so much modernism is of a tragic temper.
The drama of Samuel Beckett, for example, has no faith whatsoever in
redemption, but presents a world which still looks as though it is in dire need
of it. (57-8)
No nostalgia should be taken as a clue
for reading history from the perspective of Eagleton’s critique. Because there
is nothing to be longed for with respect to the epochs soaked in inequity.
Because each voice matters, and yet, one could hardly claim that all are valid.
Although the thought indisputably radiates the strong antisupremacist belief, there
is perhaps no persuasive enough argumentative way to support such a statement.
Perhaps, it is for this reason that Eagleton’s sublimely unpretentious remark
speaks volumes. Terry Eagleton, After Theory: “There is nothing
retrograde about roots” (21).
As Phillips points out, it is probably
in the realms divested of a demand for continuous reinstatement of political
power where genuine source of social currency can be found:
The
crisis of a second-generation black British community, with no viable
alternative to offer in either language or religion, will deepen in direct
proportion to the vigour with which Britain tries to ignore the gross inequity
of opportunity, thus further aggravating socio-cultural differences by
unwittingly encouraging people to waste precious energy on the cultivation of
conflict, energy which should be harnessed and used in the cause of mutual
understanding. (The
European Tribe 125-6)
There might be other, traditional names
for the exchange in questions, as Eagleton observes elsewhere. Maybe it’s
precisely those capacities to understand exceeding, yet not diminishing, the relevance
of merely cognitive activities that can alleviate political tension and ensure resuming
reasonable social dynamics in the light of the notion of wholesome roots, as
Eagleton's statement is suggestive of, not excluding, but rather enhancing the idea of the purity of
aerials, as McKenzie Wark’s ruminations in A
Hacker Manifesto (2004) inspire one to think.
