The multicultural has itself become a 'floating
signifier' whose enigma lies less in itself than
in the discursive uses of it to mark social
processes where differentiation and
condensation seem to happen almost
synchronically.
cultural criticisms has left the prose
plainer, less adorned with the props of the
argument's staging.
The first is to observe
something distinctive about
the de constructive critique The critique of the self-sustaining partial culture, is the contaminated yet
to which many of these subject at the centre of post- connective tissue between cultures - at once
essentialist concepts have Cartesian western metaphysics the impossibility of culture's containedness
Identification turns out to be one of the least well-understood been subjected has been comprehensively Culture In- and the boundary between. It is indeed
concepts- almost as tricky as, though preferable to, 'identity'
Introductio something like culture's 'in-between', bafflingly
itself; and certainly no guarantee against the conceptual advanced in philosophy. Between By Homi K. both alike and different.
difficulties which have beset the latter. It is drawing meanings is the need for a further debate about 'identity'?
nWHO NEEDS Bhabha
from both the discursive and the psychoanalytic repertoire, CONCLUSION Who needs it? and Why ? 'IDENTITIY' ? Jurgen Habermas's work suggests something of the
without being limited to either. stressed terrain of culture in the face of social
The references to the term which describes differentiation. Once we give up the universalizing
It seems to be in an attempt to rearticulate
the hailing of the subject by discourse -
the relationship between subjects and. sense of 'the self-referential subject-writ-large,
interpellation - remind us that this debate has
discursive practices that the question of
a significant and uncompleted pre-history in QUESTION OF encompassing all individual subjects', Habermas
identity recurs - or rather, if one prefers to suggests, the risky search for consensus results in the
stress the process of subjectification to the arguments sparked off by Althusser's CULTURAL IDENTITY
'Ideological state apparatuses' essay (1971). kind of differentiation of the life-world of which loss of
discursive practices, and the politics of BY STUART HALL AND
exclusion which all such subjectification meaning, anomie and psychopathologies are the most
appears to entail, the question of PAUL DU GAY obvious symptoms.
identification.
Multiculturalism - a portmanteau term for
anything from minority discourse to
postcolonial critique, from gay and lesbian
studies to chicano/a fiction - has become the
most charged sign for describing the
scattered social contingencies that
characterize contemporary Kulturkritik.
The migrations of modern times. . .
have transplanted themselves
according to some social, religious,
economic or political determination,
or some peculiar mixture of these.
