Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

80 reframing latin america
of universal knowledge, suddenly appears as just another episteme. To use
Foucault’s words, just another regime of truth. Or Nietzsche’s, not absolute
Knowledge, not total Truth, just another particular form of knowledge
harnessed to particular forms of historical power. The linkage between
knowledge and power is what made that regime True, what enabled that
regime to claim to speak the truth about identity for everyone else across
the globe.
When that installation of Western rationality begins to go and to be seen
not as absolute, disinterested, objective, neutral, scientifi c, non-powerful
truth, but dirty truth—truth implicated in the hard game of power—that is
the fourth game that destabilizes the old logic of identity.
Post-Identity? Cover Stories
There is some language for the notion of doing without identity all together.
That is my somewhat unfavorable reference to the extreme version of postmodernism.
The argument is that the Self is simply a kind of perpetual
signifi er ever wandering the earth in search of a transcendental signifi ed
that it can never fi nd—a sort of endless nomadic existence with utterly
atomized individuals wandering in an endlessly pluralistic void. Yet, while
there are certain conceptual and theoretical ways in which you can try to
do without identity, I’m not yet convinced that you can. I think we have to
try to reconceptualize what identities might mean in this more diverse and
pluralized situation [. . .].
Identity, far from the simple thing that we think it is (ourselves always
in the same place), understood properly is always a structure that is split; it
always has ambivalence within it. The story of identity is a cover story. A
cover story for making you think you stayed in the same place, though with
another bit of your mind you do know that you’ve moved on. What we’ve
learned about the structure of the way in which we identify suggests that
identifi cation is not one thing, one moment. We have now to reconceptualize
identity as a process of identifi cation, and that is a different matter. It
is something that happens over time, that is never absolutely stable, that is
subject to the play of history and the play of difference [. . .].
If I think about who I am, I have been—in my own much too long
experience—several identities. And most of the identities that I have been
I’ve only known about not because of something deep inside me—the real
self—but because of how other people have recognized me.
So, I went to England in the 1950s, before the great wave of migration
from the Caribbean and from the Asian subcontinent. I came from a highly