Alternatives and the Return of the Repressed

Posted on Jan 04, 2010 - 12:29 PM

Fredric Jameson sums up the spirit of the present when he points out that “it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.” He goes on to suggest that “the word postmodern ought to be reserved for thoughts of this kind.”²⁹ Many of us know the sinking feeling that the postmodern situation does not really allow for alternatives any more. Since the days of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, we have been told over and over again that there is no alternative to capitalism. This position seemed only to be confirmed in the late 1980s when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed mainly under its own weight. What is left, except the straightjacket of one economic system and the cultural hegemony that goes with it?

In this situation, transformation appears to be restricted to minor improvements within that system. The postmodern appetite for otherness and difference is so convenient because it does not promote a real alternative. Rather, it fits in with the needs of the system to broaden its power base. Even the most prestigious institutions and corporations are now promoting a certain level of diversity in their leadership. It is often overlooked, however, that most of these changes work for the good of the capitalist market economy and strengthen its foundations: the free circulation, the mobility, and the diversity of sources of capital.³⁰ Little wonder that even multiculturalism often remains within the system and serves the status quo. Multiculturalism is one of the pillars in the creation of new markets. While exotic people and places help revitalize old markets and sell old things like beer, multiculturalism in advertising also helps to explore new markets. In some parts of town even the language of the billboards shifts—from English to Spanish. On the whole, the market is no longer as monolithic as in the industrial age and grows by adjusting to the needs of various subgroups. Fordism is out, “Toyotism” is in: production is no longer “one size fits all” but pays ever closer attention to what different customers want.^3l Some of the churches are not far behind when they embrace multicultural perspectives out of the sheer recognition that their membership base is threatened due to demographic changes.

One of the paradoxes of postmodernity is that in some ways the margins are part of the picture and are recognized as never before. But those margins are also more strongly pulled into the system than ever before. In this situation, options for the margins that hope to break out of the system appear as a thing of the past. Having become part of the system, people on the margins go under in a sea of pluralism. Everything and everybody is thought to be other, suspended in a metonymic web of difference and existing on the surface only; nothing is underground. Neither privilege nor oppression seem to exist any more. No specific place is left for the repressed. The homeless, the unemployed, the undocumented workers in sweatshops, and a whole new group of people sucked into the phenomenon of a new slavery are made to blend in and thus drop from the screens of postmodern consciousness.³² There is no alternative.

Yet while even the thirty thousand children that die of hunger and preventable diseases every day do not matter on the postmodern maps of otherness, this may be precisely the place where we can start over. The fault lines and tensions that postmodernity tries to integrate pose a challenge that is hardly recognized at present. Those of us whose social location is not restricted to the underside might start by reminding ourselves that the free flow of money, for instance, is not just a game that can be played more or less well (as those high-school programs that invite students to play the stock market and see how far they get). As my friends from El Salvador, whose currencies have recently been replaced by the U.S. dollar remind us, there is a close connection between “dollarization” and “dolor-ization,”³³ between the rule of the global economy and the infliction of severe pain for many people at the grassroots. There is a significant difference between postrnodern differentiation and repression. Everything changes once we come to realize that some forms of otherness produced on the underside are clearly the result of repression and that nothing is romantic or exotic about them.³⁴ If otherness is not just a harmless differentiation of things that are not the same, this might be precisely the place where resistance finds new roots and new sources of energy. Daring to take a closer look at what is repressed in postmodernity—at what has been pushed underground, despite the claim that no such space exists any more—helps in devising some alternative strategies for breaking out of the system where even the more radical alternatives are easily assimilated.

In the realm of theology and the church, few have dared to take an extended look at the underside. The various liberation theologies have been at the forefront of this enterprise, but more needs to be done. This perspective is more important than ever in postmodernity, where it is commonly assumed either that the underside does not exist any more or that that underside is just another normal manifestation of the system. No matter how hard we try, the fault lines of the system—severe poverty, increasing gaps between rich and poor, misuse of power, and even massive death—cannot easily be done away with and keep haunting us.³⁵ One ally for a contemporary effort to take a closer look at the lives and struggles of people on the underside is subaltern studies. Subaltern studies, in the words of proponent John Beverley, “is not so much preoccupied with the articulation of multiculturalism as a value in itself as with bringing to a critical point the antagonisms created by the social relations of inequality and exploitation inherent in multicultural difference.”³⁶ Multicultural dynamics can be integrated into the status quo only if the tensions are overlooked and the repressions remain hidden. Alternatives emerge precisely at the point when we go beyond multiculturalism as fun and diversion to the darker regions that do not make their way to public awareness. Here, a whole new process begins. Repression, exploitation, and exclusion are never the last word. In repression a “surplus”³⁷ is created that can never be quite controlled by the powers that be and which therefore presents us with two important new openings: on the one hand, the repressed might help develop a critique ofthe status quo;³⁸ on the other hand, the repressed might aid us in looking beyond the status quo to new alternatives.³⁹

While there is no easy escape, alternatives emerge when we encounter those places in postmodernity where the pressure is greatest, a location that Christians believe is shared by God in Christ. In some African cities, there is a distinction between “high-density” and “low-density” neighborhoods. The distinction refers to wealthy and poor neighborhoods: poor people are forced to live within the boundaries of very limited space, and only the rich can afford a low-density lifestyle. But it is precisely the high-density worlds of the margins across the globe, for all the repression that they endure, that cannot easily be controlled and subvert representation.⁴⁰ For such reasons, in this book we search for new sources of energy and resistance precisely in the places of high density. There are alternatives.

ENDNOTES

29. [Frederic Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected
Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (New York, NY: Verso, 1998)] , 50.

30. [Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)], 150: “Many of the concepts dear to postmodernists and postcolonialists find a perfect correspondence in the current ideology of corporate capital and the world market. The ideology of the world market has always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity, and mixture are its very conditions of possibility. Trade brings differences together and the more the merrier! Differences (of commodities, populations, cultures, and so forth) seem to multiply infinitely in the world market, which attacks nothing more violently than fixed boundaries.”

31. Jameson, [Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991)], 325, sums it all up, wondering: “Is not the production of the appropriate new group-specific products the truest recognition a business society can bring to its others?”

32. For the phenomenon of the new slavery—more vicious than any form of slavery in history—see Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy                (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Cautious estimations say that the lives of twenty-seven million people are affected.

33. The phrase plays with the Spanish word for pain, “dolor.”

34. The difference between differentiation and repression is also reflected in the difference between the postmodern concern for “metonymy” and a concern for “metaphor.” See Rieger, [Remember the Poor: The Challenge to Theology in the Twenty-First Century (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998)], 78 n. 6.  Hardt and Negri, Empire                      , 156, sense a similar problem without, however, distinguishing between different forms of difference: “The only non-localizable ‘common name’ of pure difference in all eras is that of the poor. The poor is destitute, excluded, repressed, exploited—and yet living!. . .It is strange, but also illuminating, that postmodernist authors seldom adapt this figure in their theorizing. It is strange because the poor is in a certain respect an eternal postmodern figure: the figure of a transversal, omnipresent, different, mobile subject; the testament to the irrepressible aleatory character of existence.”

35. In my God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology         (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), I deal with these fault lines in regard to the way theology has shaped up since Schleiermacher.

36. John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory       (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 165. Not surprisingly, Beverley considers subaltern studies as the secular manifestation of liberation theology’s option for the poor (38).

37. See Rieger, Remember the Poor, 79, with reference to Lacan. In a similar vein, Hardt and Negri, Empire            , 397, remind us that “the kinds of movement of individuals, groups, and populations that we find today in Empire, however, cannot be completely subjugated to the laws of capitalist accumulation.”

38. Beverley, Subalternity and Representation  , 101-2, talks about the “deconstructive function of the subaltern.”

39. These two elements are combined in Rieger, Remember the Poor. See also Hardt and Negri, Empire          , 157: “The poor is a subjugated, exploited figure, but nonetheless a figure of production. This is where the novelty lies.”

40. We cannot expect to be able to represent the subaltern: “Subaltern studies registers…how the knowledge we construct and impart as academics is structured by the absence, difficulty, or impossibility of representation of the subaltern.” Beverley, Subalternity and Representation, 40.

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