Homi Bhabha "The Commitment to Theory" (aka "Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences")

Bhabha’s goal in this essay is to "rethink our perspective on the identity of culture" (207) in the Post-colonial world. He begins by distinguishing between what some such as Kamau Brathwaite (in Contradictory Omens) have termed "cultural diversity" (206) and what he terms "cultural difference" (206) in an allusion to the term ‘différence/différance’ so central to Post-Structuralist thinking. The following chart shows what Bhabha perceives to be the play of difference (rather than pure distinction) between these two terms:

• Any given culture is an "object of empirical knowledge" (206), that is, it preexists the knower and can be simply known for what it is.
• Culture is a "category of comparative ethics, aesthetics, or ethnology" (206).
• Culture is pre-given and consists in the "recognition of pre-given cultural ‘contents’ and customs, held in a time-frame of relativism; it gives rise to anodyne liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange, or the culture of humanity. Cultural diversity is also the representation of a radical rhetoric of the separation of totalized cultures that live unsullied by the intertextuality of their historical locations, safe in the Utopianism of a mythic memory of a unique collective identity" (206)

• Cultures are discursively constructed: hence, Bhabha speaks of the "process of the enunciation of culture as knowledgeable, authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification" (206)
• Culture is a function of a "process of signification through which statements of or on culture differentiate" (206) cultures from each other.
• Culture is a function of cultural translation: the "problem of the cultural emerges only at the significatory boundaries of culture, where meanings and values are (mis)read or signs misappropriated" (206)

Bhabha’s goal in pointing out the différance between these two terms is to stress the need to rethink the traditional notions of cultural identity which have informed the process of decolonisation (what Bhabha alludes to as an antagonistic view of "culture-as-political-struggle" [207]) and the concomitant growth of nationalism (what Bhabha terms "constant national principles" [207]) in the Post-colonial world. These he describes as the "restrictive notions of cultural identity with which we burden our visions of cultural change" (208). In a nutshell, his point here and elsewhere is that both these notions, although ostensibly radical, have ironically been derived from archaic and antagonistic notions of identity and cultural conflict which reached its apogee in nineteenth century Europe and which are predicated on a belief in the possibility of the purity of cultural identity, the organic notion that a given community is united by its common ‘roots,’ and the possibility of ‘self-expression.’ Bhabha offers in their stead a "critique of the positive aesthetic and political values we ascribe to the unity or totality of cultures, especially those that have known long and tyrannical histories of domination and misrecognition. Cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in relation of Self to Other" (207). Bhabha believes this to be true, he hastens to emphasise, not because he believes in "some humanistic nostrum that beyond individual cultures we all belong to the human culture of mankind" (207). Rather, the "reason a cultural text or system of meaning cannot be sufficient unto itself is that the act of cultural enunciation--the place of an utterance--is crossed by the différance of writing or écriture (207). In other words, influenced by the views of Émile Benveniste, Bhabha is arguing that identity, individually or en masse, is never pre-given: it must be enunciated. Moreover, subjectivity is less the origin of any utterance about the self than its product (hence, Bhabha’s reference to the "disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (énoncé) and the subject of enunciation" [208]).

In short, what is at stake in any attempt to articulate the identity of a culture in the Post-colonial region is the "structure of symbolic representation" (207) itself, to be precise, the "‘différence’ in language that is crucial to the production of meaning and ensures, at the same time, that meaning is never simply mimetic and transparent" (207). However, Bhabha expands Derrida’s focus on langue to include Benveniste’s and Bakhtin’s focus on ‘discourse’ or parole: he coins the term the "Third Space" (208) to denote the fact that the "production of meaning requires . . . both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot ‘in itself’ be conscious" (208): by the latter, Bhabha means the "discursive embeddedness and address [of the subject of enunciation], its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and space" (208). The "intervention of the Third Space . . . makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process" (208) and "destroys this mirror of representation" (208) with which we mistakenly equate language.

The Third Space which informs any utterance consequently "challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People" (208), whether this be European or Post-colonial nations. The Third Space, which "constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation" (208), "displaces the narrative of the Western (and indeed Post-colonial] nation which . . . [is] written in homogeneous, serial time" (208) by virtue of the "disruptive temporality of enunciation" (208). All "cultural statements and systems are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation" (208) as a result of which "hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or ‘purity’of cultures are untenable" (208). The discursive conditions of enunication ensure "that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew" (209).

As a result, Post-colonial peoples are the bearers of a "hybrid identity" (208) and "caught in the discontinuous time of translation and negotiation" (208) as a result of which they are "now free to negotiate and translate their cultural identities in a discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference" (208). As a result of this, the "native intellectual who identifies the people with the ‘true national culture’ will be disappointed" (208-9). In short, the "recognition of the "split-space of enunciation" (209) will open the way to "conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism or multiculturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity" (209). We should remember that it is the

‘inter’--the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between, the space of the entre that Derrida has opened up in writing itself--that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, antinationalist, histories of the ‘people’. It is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others. And by exploring this hybridity, this ‘Third Space’, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves. (209)