Empire (27 page)

project can be conducted to destroy the binary structure ofpower

and identity. In summary form, then, Bhabha’s logic of liberation

runs like this: Power, or forces of social oppression, function by

imposing binary structures and totalizing logics on social subjectivi-

ties, repressing their difference. These oppressive structures, how-

ever, are never total, and differences are always in some way ex-

pressed (through mimicry, ambivalence, hybridization, fractured

identities, and so forth). The postcolonial political project, then, is

S Y M P T O M S O F P A S S A G E

145

to affirm the multiplicity of differences so as to subvert the power

ofthe ruling binary structures.

The utopia Bhabha points toward after the binary and totalizing

structures ofpower have been fractured and displaced is not an

isolated and fragmentary existence but a new form of community,

a community ofthe ‘‘unhomely,’’ a new internationalism, a gather-

ing of people in the diaspora. The affirmation of difference and

hybridity is itself, according to Bhabha, an affirmation of commu-

nity: ‘‘To live in the unhomely world, to find its ambivalences and

ambiguities enacted in the house offiction, or its sundering and

splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound

desire for social solidarity.’’8 The seeds ofthe alternative community,

he believes, arise out ofclose attention to the locality ofculture,

its hybridity, and its resistance to the binary structuring ofsocial hier-

archies.

We should be careful to recognize the form of the dominating

power that serves as the enemy (and really the negative foundation)

in this postcolonialist framework. Power is assumed to operate

exclusively through a dialectical and binary structure. The only

form of domination Bhabha recognizes, in other words, is that of

modern sovereignty. This is why, for example, he can say ‘‘hierarchi-

cal or binary’’ as ifthe two terms were interchangeable: from his

perspective hierarchy as such is necessarily grounded in binary divi-

sions, so that the mere fact of hybridity has the power to destroy

hierarchy
tout court.
Hybridity itself is a realized politics of difference, setting differences to play across boundaries. This is where the

postcolonial and the postmodern most powerfully meet: in the

united attack on the dialectics ofmodern sovereignty and the propo-

sition ofliberation as a politics ofdifference.

Like the postmodernist theorists, postcolonial theorists such

as Bhabha interest us primarily insofar as they are symptoms of the

epochal shift we are undergoing, that is, the passage to Empire.

Perhaps the discourses themselves are possible only when the re-

gimes ofmodern sovereignty are already on the wane. Like post-

modernists too, however, postcolonialist theorists in general give

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a very confused view of this passage because they remain fixated

on attacking an old form ofpower and propose a strategy oflib-

eration that could be effective only on that old terrain. The post-

colonialist perspective remains primarily concerned with colonial

sovereignty. As Gyan Prakash says, ‘‘The postcolonial exists as an

aftermath, as an after—after being worked over by colonialism.’’9

This may make postcolonialist theory a very productive tool for

rereading history, but it is entirely insufficient for theorizing con-

temporary global power. Edward Said, certainly one ofthe most

brilliant to go under the label ofpostcolonial theory, manages to

condemn the current global power structures only to the extent

that they perpetuate cultural and ideological remnants ofEuropean

colonialist rule.10 He charges that ‘‘the tactics ofthe great empires

[that is, the European imperialisms], which were dismantled after

the first world war, are being replicated by the U.S.’’11 What is

missing here is a recognition ofthe novelty ofthe structures and

logics ofpower that order the contemporary world. Empire is not

a weak echo of modern imperialisms but a fundamentally new form

ofrule.

Fundamentalism and/or Postmodernism

Another symptom ofthe historical passage already in process in

the final decades ofthe twentieth century is the rise ofso-called

fundamentalisms. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the great

ideologues ofgeopolitics and the theoreticians ofthe end ofhistory

have consistently posed fundamentalisms as the primary danger

facing global order and stability. Fundamentalism, however, is a

poor and confused category that groups together widely disparate

phenomena. In general, one might say that fundamentalisms, diverse

though they may be, are linked by their being understood both

from within and outside as anti-modernist movements, resurgences

ofprimordial identities and values; they are conceived as a kind of

historical backflow, a de-modernization. It is more accurate and

more useful, however, to understand the various fundamentalism

not as the re-creation ofa premodern world, but rather as a powerful

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147

refusal of the contemporary historical passage in course. In this

sense, then, like postmodernist and postcolonialist theories, funda-

mentalisms too are a symptom ofthe passage to Empire.

Often today in the media the term ‘ fundamentalism’’ reduces

the variety of social formations that go by that name and refers

exclusively to Islamic fundamentalism, the complexity of which is

in turn reduced to a violent and intolerant religious fanaticism that

is above all ‘‘anti-Western.’’ Islamic fundamentalism itself, of course,

takes various forms and has a long history extending throughout

the modern era. Islamic revivalism and reformism were strong at

different times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the

current forms of Islamic radicalism bear distinct similarities to those

previous movements. Islamic fundamentalisms are most coherently

united, however, in their being
resolutely opposed to modernity and

modernization.
Insofar as political and cultural modernization has been a process ofsecularization, Islamic fundamentalisms oppose it

by posing sacred texts at the center ofpolitical constitutions and

religious leaders, both priests and jurists, in positions ofpolitical

power. In terms, too, ofgender roles, family structures, and cultural

forms, an unchanging, traditional religious norm is commonly

meant to stand against the progressively changing secular forms of

modernity. Counter to modernism’s dynamic and secular society,

fundamentalism seems to pose a static and religious one. In this

light, then, as an anti-modernism, Islamic fundamentalisms seem

to be engaged in an effort to reverse the process of social moderniza-

tion, separate from the global flows of modernity, and re-create a

premodern world. The Iranian revolution of1979, for example,

would from this perspective be seen as an anti-revolution, resurrect-

ing an ancient order.

Christian fundamentalisms in the United States also present

themselves as movements against social modernization, re-creating

what is imagined to be a past social formation based on sacred texts.

These movements should certainly be situated in line with the long

U.S. tradition ofprojects to create in America a new Jerusalem, a

Christian community separate from both the corruption of Europe

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and the savagery ofthe ‘‘uncivilized’’ world.12 The most prominent

social agenda ofthe current Christian fundamentalist groups is cen-

tered on the (re)creation ofthe stable and hierarchical nuclear family,

which is imagined to have existed in a previous era, and thus

they are driven specifically in their crusades against abortion and

homosexuality. Christian fundamentalisms in the United States have

also continuously been oriented (in different times and different

regions more or less overtly) toward a project ofwhite supremacy

and racial purity. The new Jerusalem has almost always been imag-

ined as a white and patriarchal Jerusalem.

These common characterizations offundamentalisms as a re-

turn to a premodern or traditional world and its social values,

however, obscure more than they illuminate. In fact, fundamentalist

visions ofa return to the past are generally based on historical

illusions. The purity and wholesomeness ofthe stable, nuclear het-

erosexual family heralded by Christian fundamentalists, for example,

never existed in the United States. The ‘‘traditional family’’ that

serves as their ideological foundation is merely a pastiche of values

and practices that derives more from television programs than from

any real historical experiences within the institution ofthe family.13

It is a fictional image projected on the past, like Main Street U.S.A.

at Disneyland, constructed retrospectively through the lens ofcon-

temporary anxieties and fears. The ‘‘return to the traditional family’’

ofthe Christian fundamentalists is not backward-looking at all, but

rather a new invention that is part ofa political project against the

contemporary social order.

Similarly, the current forms of Islamic fundamentalism should

not be understood as a return to past social forms and values, not

even from the perspective of the practitioners. According to Fazlur

Rahman: ‘‘Actually it is even something ofa misnomer to call

such phenomena in Islam ‘fundamentalist’ except insofar as they

emphasize the basis ofIslam as being the two original sources: the

Qur’an and the Sunna ofthe Prophet Muhammed. Otherwise

they emphasize ijtihad, original thought.’’14 Contemporary Islamic

radicalisms are indeed primarily based on ‘‘original thought’’ and

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149

the invention oforiginal values and practices, which perhaps echo

those ofother periods ofrevivalism or fundamentalism but are really

directed in reaction to the present social order. In both cases, then,

the fundamentalist ‘‘return to tradition’’ is really a new invention.15

The anti-modern thrust that defines fundamentalisms might

be better understood, then, not as a
pre
modern but as a
post
modern project. The postmodernity offundamentalism has to be recognized

primarily in its refusal ofmodernity as a weapon ofEuro-American

hegemony—and in this regard Islamic fundamentalism is indeed

the paradigmatic case. In the context ofIslamic traditions, funda-

mentalism is postmodern insofar as it rejects the tradition of Islamic

modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimila-

tion or submission to Euro-American hegemony. ‘‘Ifmodern meant

the pursuit ofWestern education, technology and industrialization

in the first flush ofthe post-colonial period,’’ Akbar Ahmed writes,

‘‘postmodern would mean a reversion to traditional Muslim values

and a rejection ofmodernism.’’16 Considered simply in cultural

terms, Islamic fundamentalism is a paradoxical kind of postmodernist

theory—postmodern only because it chronologically follows and

opposes Islamic modernism. It is more properly postmodernist,

however, when considered in geopolitical terms. Rahman writes:

‘‘The current postmodernist fundamentalism, in an important way,

is novel because its basic eĺan is anti-Western . . . Hence its con-

demnation ofclassical modernism as a purely Westernizing force.’’17

Certainly, powerful segments of Islam have been in some sense

‘‘anti-Western’’ since the religion’s inception. What is novel in the

contemporary resurgence of fundamentalism is really the refusal of

the powers that are emerging in the new imperial order. From this

perspective, then, insofar as the Iranian revolution was a powerful

rejection ofthe world market, we might think ofit as the first

postmodernist revolution.

This marriage between postmodernism and fundamentalism

is certainly an odd coupling considering that postmodernist and

fundamentalist discourses stand in most respects in polar opposition:

hybridity versus purity, difference versus identity, mobility versus

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stasis. It seems to us that postmodernists and the current wave of

fundamentalists have arisen not only at the same time but also in

response to the same situation, only at opposite poles ofthe global

hierarchy, according to a striking geographical distribution. Simpli-

fying a great deal, one could argue that postmodernist discourses

appeal primarily to the winners in the processes ofglobalization

and fundamentalist discourses to the losers. In other words, the

current global tendencies toward increased mobility, indeterminacy,

and hybridity are experienced by some as a kind ofliberation but

by others as an exacerbation of their suffering. Certainly, bands

of popular support for fundamentalist projects—from the Front

National in France and Christian fundamentalism in the United