Incredulity towards meta-narratives

Heavily influenced by Edward Said, Bhabha identifies as problematic the relationship between two totalising concepts of “culture” and the “state”, and this association, “often aggressive”, engendering a “degree of xenophobia” - He affirms that cultures are tolerated but within a kind of Althusserian ideological “grid” which effectively marginalises minorities by never ceasing to define them in terms of some dominant order.

In Deconstruction however this dominant order is illusory. Taking the Male/Female opposition in D.H Lawrence’s Son’s and Lovers as an example, where Mrs Morel plays a fully domesticated role in contrast to Walter Morels aggressively masculine working class depiction. For Derrida these “dichotomous categories” are intertwined because nothing can be purely distinct. It follows therefore that the male identity is inextricably bound up with the female identity. What Deconstruction is directly challenging is the Saussaurian idea of “difference” which assumes that one signifier is clearly distinct from the other.

This “theoretically innovative” approach in both feminist and postcolonial theory includes refusing to accept the “dialectical structure of European ideological confrontations”, (and in the case of postcolonialism) “borrowed from the very components of its racist syllogism” and represents a profound shift. For theorists to develop a more effective understanding of systems of patriarchy and imperialism, Bhabha proposes going beyond narratives of “orginary and initial subjectivities” and explore “cultural hybridities” and “new signs of identity” in society. Where theorists like Edward Said employed underlying binaries of East/West which are difficult to go beyond, Bhabha attempts to dismantle this and form an understanding of human culture as fluid and constantly being influenced by mutual “collaboration” and “contestation”. In this sense Bhabha demonstrates “incredulity toward metanarratives” a typical trend in poststructuralist thought.

Since it imports ideas of philosophy, psychology and history in order to understand literature, poststructuralism engages texts at different levels. Bhabha locates culture in a history of the world based on cosmopolitanism and continuous migration influencing all societies. This idea of culture being “hybrid” and multi-dimensional can be captured by the status of Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The fact that the text has little or no engagement with Heathcliff’s origins despite his background displays a tacit acceptance that “hybridity” is a part of culture.

It is here where Bhabha seems to depart from Edward Said. Where Said tends to focus on the mechanics of power in imperialism and the imposed stereotypes of the Orient, depicted by the West as ancient, mysterious and despotic; Bhabha, recalling Derridean deconstruction, both co-operates and contaminates these ideological binaries by showing how, through writers like Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, increasingly “‘national’” cultures are “being produced from the perspective of disenfranchised minorities”.

Uprisings against colonialism are not necessarily a result of, as Said would put it, the “grand-narratives of Emancipation and Enlightenment”, but represent instead the disassociation or deterioration of the “narrative function” and the empowerment of the “beyond” or ‘present’, “that moment blasted out of the continuum of history”. Frantz Fanon, a champion of the Algerian revolution, echoes this disillusionment with the humanist grand narratives of Europe, a Europe for Fanon that is “never done talking of Man, yet murders men everywhere they find them”. The sentiment captures one aspect of the “crisis” of grand narratives which poststructuralism tends to address and solidify.


The paradoxical nature of post-structuralism might be its own undoing. It will inevitably undermine itself by claiming no inherent privilege or validity even as it simultaneously undermines all other belief systems which do claim essential validity. As such we see this break down of moral and authorial absolutism the implications of which are vast and varying. It may be more effective to subvert meta-narratives of Capitalism for instance which is currently under profound pressure, by uncovering the contradictions in the overall structure and undermining it from within. Alternatively a rejection of any totalising belief system, by placing meaning in a “mobile, decentred location”, a kind of atopia, may stifle any endeavour to propose serious alternatives to our understanding of the world, of literature and notions of history and ‘truth’. What is apparent is that through poststructuralism, ‘theory’, “having deconstructed just about everything else”, had “finally succeeded in deconstructing itself”.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable."
George Orwell - Politics and the English Language

One of the funniest things about the internet is that no matter how much better it gets, how much more intellectual or culturally valuable, its primary use will always be pornography. I think of the web as an encyclopedia with a dirty magazine shoved inside.

I worked in a fish packing plant in Massachusetts, on the line with a sincere Jewish poet from Harvard and three lesbians; one was beautiful, one grim; both loved the other, who was intelligent. I loved her, too. I dreamed of violating her purity. They taked among themselves, in creepy whispers, always about Jung. In a dark corner, away from our line, old Portuguese men slit fish into open flaps, flicking out the bones. I could only see their eyes and knives. I’d arrive early every morning to dash in and out until the stench became bearable. After work I’d go to bed and pluck fish scales out of my skin.

PURISTS are already up in arms about the title of Harald Zwart’s remake of John G. Avildsen’s 1984 crowd-pleaser, which did much to popularise martial arts among children in the West. Strictly speaking, this new film has nothing to do with karate, so it should really be called The Kung Fu Kid. Or we could just bite the bullet and call it Will Smith’s Son Goes to China.

Yes, it was low budget. Yes, it was promoting China as a tourist destination!
A black kid - there has been skin-colour based racism in China for a long time. As a brown-skinned girl, I've seen it. But the Chinese know it's wrong, and what better way for the government to correct their ways than to make a movie promoting friendship between different skin colours.
Second of all, where did karate come from, I wonder? From whom did the Japanese inherit their martial arts? Could one argue that the original Karate Kid movies were little more than "Americans can indeed learn something from the people they obliterated in WWII? Peace, man!" propaganda?

Private Eye – always a useful source of behind the scenes chatter about the BBC – has an interesting little titbit in the current issue about Democracy Live, the BBC’s answer to TheyWorkForYou.com.

Ever willing to muscle in where others have already beaten a pioneering path the BBC, fat with our money, launched DL a few months ago. At it’s core it provides live video feed from parliament and national assemblies plus a search function linking video with Hansard.

DL, despite being developed by Autonomy and Blinkx (both closely associated with the iconic IT guru Mike Lynch) somehow appears unable to deliver data on MPs attendance and voting records – how convenient....

Any suggestion that the fearless BBC, by not including information about voting and attendance, is cosying up to MPs, can clearly be dismissed as totally without foundation...

Extract from Conrad- Politics, Subversion and Anarchy.

One of the effects of the Professor is to reflect the role of language and narrative function in the emergence of conventional wisdom. Whilst the reader is not inclined to endorse the Professor’s politics, his character speaks to the nature of conventional morality itself in that such a radical perspective can be elaborately articulated as to sound even vaguely comprehendible. He speaks of his opponents - “they depend on life, which, in this connexion is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and considerations, a complex, organized fact open to attack at every point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident.”

The conventional order in The Secret Agent is not an organic moral constant being attacked at the periphery by rebel forces, but a social metropolis of questionable morality itself. It consists of an establishment complicit in a horrendous crime (the foreign embassy’s false-flag operation which claims Stevie’s life); Heat’s unconventional policing methods, and instinctive view of thieving as appearing as “normal as property”. This is a vague allusion to the imperfections of industrial capitalism and its innate exploitative nature. Inspector Heat himself experienced a kind of “evil freedom” which was “rather pleasant”, upon entering an anarchist enclave with its inherent enigma. All these things constitute more of an open ended engagement with conventional thinking than is posited by Leavis. Furthermore the conventional criminal classes tend to have an ambiguous status as victims of circumstance. Heat displays a liberal sympathy with thieves, “they were his fellow citizens gone wrong because of an imperfect education”, and Winnie explains the role of the police to Stevie as being one of essentially protecting the rich from the poor. The fact that these perspectives can be traced through both sides of the political divide, (an establishment figure and the wife of a provocateur with anarchist ties) is significant and the moral nature of the text is left somewhat more nebulous.

This theme of isolation from the conventional extends even to “murderers”, indeed our sympathy with Winnie’s plight after murdering her husband stems from the fact that she is not a ‘conventional’ murderer, she has no criminal network to aid her – she “was the most lonely of murderers that ever struck a mortal blow” – it is this careful extraction from the mundane and the conventional of the spectacular and the unconventional which evokes, for Aaron Fogel, the “strong confusion of detachment and empathy” amongst the reader. This is also the reason for the multiplicity of potential readings making it difficult to argue that the novel has a potent moral message. For Fogel it is the “dramatisation of art as a non-transcendental process of inquiry, itself caught up within other inquiries” that is one of the main points of the novel.

Leavis’ reading of the text as a serious moral work perhaps neglects the element of fascination which is the residual effect of characterising the Anarchists as somehow outside the dominant conventional order. The fear of the revolutionaries amongst law enforcers is illustrated by Heat’s thoughts; “The perfect anarchist was not recognised as a fellow creature… he was impossible… to be left alone”. He is disarmed of the superiority which he would have enjoyed had he encountered any other member of the criminal classes. Here Conrad sets up a dynamic where the police officers and the criminal classes are part of an inter-dependant system whereas the revolutionaries occupy there own terrain engendering an aura of fascination and intrigue around a set of people Leavis characterises as “repugnant”. It is not clear that this is the perception Conrad intended. Irvin Howe in Politics and the Novel recounts a letter that Conrad wrote declaring that the ‘professor’ was not necessarily meant to be “despicable” but that he wanted him to possess “a note of perfect sincerity”. He goes on to say that he does not believe this came across. Nonetheless as long as this ambivalence exists it is an example of how Leavis’ approach precludes this kind of interpretation. Being opposed to literary theory he neglects the assumptions and values that the reader or critic may bring to the text.

With typical irony Conrad presents the novel’s most evocative political point through the medium of the atypical, inarticulate Stevie. Whilst in the cab Stevie sees the horse being whipped and then has to process the poor driver’s impossible situation. He says “Bad, Bad” then “Poor, Poor”, and finally “He got it at last. He hung back to utter it at once. ‘Bad world for poor people’”. It is difficult for the reader to process a response to a statement which simultaneously says so much yet so little. The sentence’s veracity cannot be denied, but as Fogel notes, it has no “verb”. Its fragmented status is suggestive of an absent ideological commitment. Stevie is yet another example of isolation from conventional society. The fact that he is evidently incapable of being in the throws of ideology and dogma, being unreceptive to normal thought processes, his innocence and sincerity is unquestioned. He is the only character untouched by the novel’s satirical tone. His outcry represents the most sincere and effectively apolitical message in the novel, which is ironically one of the novels most powerful political points. Namely whatever it is that “holds persons together, giving the political world the form it has, it is not accessible to sympathy’s verbless syntax.” This confirms the novel’s status as a “complex political” work “not reducible to political ideology”. His simplistic dialogue is also contrasted with the rich preponderance of the anarchists which despite their linguistic acumen are diluted of seriousness by the “thick fog of irony” that engulfs the novel.

Although there is this reluctance in the Secret Agent to embrace a coherent political perspective, stationed above all others, Irving Howe posits that the general impetus of both anarchism and conservatism is at bottom very similar and this is conveyed in much of Conrad’s political fiction. Both positions, from a philosophical standpoint, endorse a society where individuals are free to enter “direct relationships without the mediation of the state” . The novels political ambiguity stems from this “kinship of apparent opposites” . This is a characterisation which contests Leavis’ notion of the novel as an “organic” tapestry of “moral significances” . This is how the novel succeeds in depicting moral and political struggle in the face of alienation without a coherent resolution (the suicide of Winnie Verloc is an example of this trend).

One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel is Conrad’s acute ability to display the revolutionary mind. While the Professor’s ideals are nihilistic he demonstrates a logic and cynicism comparable to that of any political figure. He argues, “nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half the battle would be won then, the disintegration of the old morality would have set in its very temple, that is what you ought to aim at”. There are two things to note about this statement, first it is an example of what Leavis describes as the “obtuse assurance with which habit and self-interest assert absolute rights and wrongs”. Secondly it explicitly sets up Western morals and values as a distinct barrier to Marxist/Anarchist goals (a prescient allusion to the Frankfurt School and the cultural Marxists who recognised this problem and set about investigating it) . It leads on to the notion that moral perspectives in the novel are not just “contrasting” , as Leavis puts it, but incompatible. Conrad’s prose registers this oxymoronic aspect. He describes the city of London as representing the “majesty of inorganic nature”, and Winnie’s “disorderly formality” before she confronts her husband and meets her tragic demise. These themes of isolation and the struggle of incompatible currents (authority/anarchy, idealism/Realpolitik, revolution/order) foment a wide range of potential readings which are not easily reconciled. Marxist critics like Terry Eagleton are drawn to the text’s apparent lack of central moral or political ideology - moral “values” are “forced beyond the frontiers of the world, exiled beyond what can be articulated” – and this, for Eagleton, gives the novel its subversive aspect. Leavis on the other hand has precisely the opposite take, seeing its moral dimension expressed through its attack on self-interest and its “adequacy” in dealing with the “complexities of the real”. There is much traction in both readings and equally some difficulties, both of which have been made use of in this chapter.


Having discussed some of Conrad’s most politically infused novels and looked at a range of critical perspectives there is a sense that the general divergence of opinion still governs mainstream discourse on Conrad. Whether the critic endorses a kind of Leavisite moralism or Marxist cultural politics, it is a polarity that is difficult to transcend completely. Christopher Miller may represent a third strand of thought which incorporates disenfranchised voices by recognising a la Edward Said’s Orientalism, an Africanist discourse for example, in Heart of Darkness. Nonetheless this is an area where the “allegiance of the critic is likely to condition their argument” . I have discussed in my introduction why critics from different strands of thought are drawn to Conrad’s work. This is to do with its distrust of finalities and its political themes not constituting an overall ideology. At the same time I think I have demonstrated that this divergence of critical opinion is still useful in analysing the different aspects of Conrad’s political fiction. This speaks to its complex nature in being politically anti-political and anti-ideological while dealing powerfully with important political themes. Conrad’s most succinct and compelling statement about the interdependence of the artists’ and humanity’s concerns is highly instructive in this regard: For him, “the only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous, so full of hope”.