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eqqtqq "X nuoH.
mst lut'u o loolsodlmst'uaa'Pomaso d
University of Chicago Press, 1996)
(Σικάγο και Λονδίνο: The
(επιμ.), Critical Terms for Art History 0ALIXINgJWI
Robert S. Nelson και Richard Shiff
 rIOMI K. BHABHA

If the Benjaminian./7a#rz/r ambling melancholically.along the Paris arcades,

becamea representativefigure of a fledgling modernity, then postmodemity
had its own' immediately recognizable street culture. Roller bladers, garland
yourselves with Sony Walkmans; power walkers, bedeck yourselves with ba)m
boxes. and set out to meet the world. Shrouded in circles of self-selected sounds,
screamloudly if you must speak or are spoken to,. for.it is.no easything to
penetrate these protective skins that form . 'personalized'. public spheres.Stay
tuned, and make your way down metropolitan streetsbristling with postmod-
ernist signs. A skyscraperclad in polished aluminum.or sheet glass dizzUy re:
fiects the vortex of the world around it in a free-fining mae rm file'me--and
then the ironic, postmodern signature: what appears to be a mock-medieval
castle keep at the very crown of the building is no more.than a decorative
coiling tower. Presson toward the water's edge,approachingVenice Beach,
where the roller bladers work out and hang out. In the late aRernoon, a palpably
Mediterranean feel and an oddly French, P opamfdlight prevails that is at odds
with the glare of sand and sea,the flat metaHic bands of.beige and blue, bor-
deredby greenverges.And suddenly,in the midst of the display of musculature,
a quiet meeting takes place. Almost archaic in its decorousness, there is some-
thing ironic about this event, something in the air fhmihar and suggestivein
an iconic way. Two portly gentlemen greet each other, one resting on .acane:
the other leaningon an outsizedpaint-brush,a third standsaside,his head
bowed. A closer view reveals the trick in the tableau: a staged meeting between
Me artistsPeterBlake,David Hockney,and Howard Hodgkin atVenice Beach
(as portrayed in Blake's painting Tbe .Merf£2tg, or .fiaPr a Nice .Da7.Mr. .fiockHg
(1981--83) is a translation/transposition of Courbet's TbaMffff#g, ar gangar
Momsfear Caz/raff(1854). In the move from the p ap 7zf;d landscape to Santa
Monica, from realismto a kind of post-pop'postmodemism, there is a recasting
of the figure of the artist. Where once Courbet looked arrogantly askanceat
the respectful, awed greetings of the collectors.Bruyas and Fajon,,now the
British expatriate Hockney greets the "English" .artists Blake and Hodgkin.
Their studied poses,replicating the Courbet painting, recall.a European paint-
erly past surprisingly restagcdin the midst of tbe southern Californian landscape
of youth, lust, and leisure that has largely been invented, in the pictorial imagi-
nary, by David Hockney. It is this palimpsestof Courbet/Blake/Hlockney that
Charles Jencksusesas the cover picture ior his book WBaf & rofl.Madrmfsm?
which announcesthat "the Post-Modernworld is the ageof quotation marks,
the 'so-called' this and the 'Neo' that, the self-consciousfabrication, the transfor-
mation of the past, and recent Modern present" (Jencks1990). Neo this?
What's that about fabric? . . . fabrication?'Don't miss the women dressedby
Vivienne Westwood,strolling down in their mock-Victorian corsetsand bus-
tieres worn to be seen,brushing past the grungcd-out oatmeal-and-slatedis-
tressedlinens worn by wan, beautiful boys who are almost indistinguishable--
give or take a combe al .garzas vest or a /hZcea gf aa#a loose-limbed

308
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 HOMI K. BHABHA

jacket--from the grungy, Salvation Amiy--handout-clad young, homelessmen

and women sheltering by the subway, shyly selling stale copies of Sa'eea4.clh#.
So ubiquitous and indulgent was the naming of the present as postmodern in
the mid-1980s that the artist Donald Judd complained that the term "includes
more everyday,. . . claiming a presentnessand.apopularity suppose?dly
superior
to that of acknowledgedart"(Judd 1992, 1032) And it is hardly surprising
that in the early 1990s Hal Foster was not the only.one askingl "Whatever
happened to postmodernism?The darling of journalism, it has become the
BabyJaneof criticism"(Foster 1993b)
However, my hyperreal mockup of a postmodern streetlife makes a larger
point about the' nature of representationin the discourseof postmodemism--
the conceptof "simulacral" signi6cation. To introduce the conceptof the post-
modern by meansof a fr&/ea d a t is my.attempt to capture:omething quite
speci6cabout the postmodern aestheticasthe representationof the "unpresent-
able in the presentable." For the fa&Zea a as a living picture captures
somethingof the uncanny, repetitious, or "retro"(to.usc a "polmo'".buzzword)
structure of the simulacrum.'The representational desire of the frMZea dPa zl
lies in the pleasureof producing a copy that elidesand eludesthe original not
simply by displacingit but by doubling it; an image that "catchesits breath"
to appearstill, dead, fixed, in order to inline the tableau with life and exceed
the presenceof imaging itseU; a reproduction of similitude where the sudacc
of the scenario is the signifying site of a "diHerence" that consists in substitution
and subversionat the sametime. The fa&Zeadpa#t is a genreparticularly
suited to the epistemologyof the postmodem, where "the referent is lifted but
referenceremains:what is leR is only the writing of dreams,a fiction that is
not imaginary, mimicry without imitation, without verisimilitude. . ..[Ojn
that side of the lustre where the 'medium' is shining" (Derrida 1981, 211).
The discourse of postmodernism is at once a posanortem. report on the
end(s) of modernity and a postpamun report on the origins of dle present,our
own epoch, still struggling to be born. This temporal.indeterminacy, here the
repetition of the past(Freud's Nmbn'l@Zfrhfra, or deferred action).is unrclin-
quishablewhile the restitution of the future is .neverfully realizable,wagesa
war on conceptsof "meaning" and "history" envisagedas dormsof synchronous
or serial"totality." The temporality that I've describedfocusesour attention on
the realm of aestheticvalue as constituted by Me liminal and partial locations
that structurethe art object itseK."Appropriation, site-speficity,impermanence,
accumulation, discursivity, hybridization- these diverse strategies characterize
much of the 2rt of the present and distinguish it from its modemist predeces-
sors"(Owens 1992b, 1056). The alternative to historicist holism in poststruct-
uralist thought is not, as is often popularly. clauned,a.runaway social atomism
or a libertarian fragmentation of the subject. The disjunctive and. doubling
grounds of the discourseinitiate a lateral or metonymic movement that elects
a shift in the question of value as it featuresin cultural and aestheticjudgment.
And this is how I describedthe processin Tba-Locaffaaf CK/fare:

310
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 HOMI K. BHABHA

heart of the postmodern discussion, which is the struggle for the soul of the
"subject." For Jameson, Munch's painting represents the high modernist "aes-
thetic of expression"and its dependenceon a subject--figure, author, intention,
agency, "centredness"--that presupposes a metaphysics of lif@£a.The depth-
chargc of this hermeneutic requires four fundamental concepts: the dialectics
of essenceand appearance,and its effects on theories of ideology and mediation;
the Freudian model of latent and manifest, with its possibilities of "symptom-
atic" reading;the existentiahstmodel of authenticity and inaudienticity(alien-
ation and disalienation); and the semiotic opposition between signi6er and
signi6cd(ibid.). Munch's screamis man at the perilous edgeof this fourfold
schema;yet it is symbolic of the survival of its li6eworld and part of its "expressi-
vist" ethics of authenticity and disalienation. For despite the howling silence of
the scream, the painted surface bears the marks of "those great concentric circles
in which sonorousvibration becomes Z Zmae/ylf&Ze ason the surfaceof a
sheet of water--in an infinite regress which fans out from the suHerer to become
the PTT .grog/:aPbW of a universe in which pain itself now sped a d dbp'ares
f&raugb fbf mafeMM sunset and the landscape"(ibid., my emphasis). The "deaf-
ness"of the screamturns into a perspectiveof depth that generatesthe fourfold
schema,even at the point of its extremefragility.
With the Sonywalkpcrson,Jamesonwould argue,it is quite odlerwise.Here
the concentric circles of sound do not resonate and reverberate through the
material universe. The silence does not translate into a pAf&Zrmateriality that
makes possible the subject's expressive articulation through essence/appearance,
authenticity/disalienation,to find its signihcation in the stabilization of the sign,
which would enablethe fate of walkperson to becomegeneralizableand would
reachout toward a human "geography." The silent, introjectcd sounds of the
Walkman hit up against the shrill, sheer reflective surfacesof postmodern sim-
ulacra and are caught "in play," in a double act of historical contingency, some-
where between the spaceof personhood and the spaceof the io Zzls.Here, there
is no assumption dial the "subject is a monad-like container, within which
things are felt which are then expressed by@'g a Ma?.#' (ibid., 1080; my
emphasis).
In the absence of this dialectic of inside/outside, and its metaphysics of
depth, postmodernism announces the death of the subject. But in anodler
defining moment in the postmodern debate, Hal Foster's essay"Postmodern-
ism in Parallax," there is a revision of this Jamesonisanobituary. Foster's
startingpoint is closerto my own: it restson the assumption
that the
defining "diHerence" of postmodernity lies at the level of its disjunctive
temporal structure.Forster acknowledgesthe "never complete transition to
the postmodern"(1993b,6), which then demandsa detour through the
Freudian theory of "deferred action" in order to arrive at the history of the
presentasa "non-synchronousmix of diHerenttimed"(ibid., 5). This instance
of historicalffezmedfiW,
with its "continualprocess
of anticipation
and

312
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 HOMI K. BHABHA

I have dreamed of Zion I've dreamed ofjworld revolution

I'm a corpsedredged hom a canal in Berlin
A river in Mississippi. lam a woman standing
I am standing here in your poem. Unsatisfied.
AdrienneRich, "EastemWartime," in Rich 1991,44

It would be a minimal reading of Rich's rendition of transnationalevents,

.ent. iterative "l'm a . . . I'm a . . ' I am . . . ," as.in some bleak counting song
of a monstrous dHd or our times, finds its spatial extension in an object, an

314
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 HOMI K. BHABHA

«.««y.i«'.lesn«w.«e«tb«n tbebu««,an
b«a,««,that ««. th' "H'""Mate sph"'; of
I zol ca#rem"(Appiah 1994; my emphasis).
It is this borderline--narrower than the human horizon--that attracts mc,
a social space that somehow stops short(but does not fill short) of the transcen-
dent human universal, and 6or that very reason provides an ethical entitlement
to. and enactmentof. a senseof community as both an ethical practice and an
aestheticidea. It is art's capacity to reveal the almost impossible, attenuated
limit whereauraandagoraoverlap,Rrt'sabilityto find a language
for the
high horizons of humanity itself:--its finest selves,its inspired othcrncsses,its
visionary styles, its vocabularies of vicissitude--which then reveal its own tabu-
lation,its fragility, at fbe/mmf f afitJ a fcz&Zaf.

It could be argued, however, that the project of postmodern aesdieticsis princi-

paHyconcernedwith what ca sfif z:es the moment of art's articulation. Is post-
modernity, as Lyotard suggests,the moment Tdf&f#modernity from which
the "unrepresentablein presentation" emerges,thus pushing modernity to its
representationallimit, its signi$'ing margins?if. then, we brought this thought
to bear on Peter Blake's Tbf -Meeffng as a postmodern picture, would it be
appropriate to suggestthat its moment of articulation consistsin the palimpsest
of displacedlayers of referentiality and meaning that inform Blake's"presenta-
tion"? The fierce intentionality of Courbet's realism, its aggressiveantiacademi-
cism, is now ironically recaHcdin the context of a congregation of camp and
even kitsch artists, Hockney and Blake, whose work plays particularly with
surfaces, superficies, and beatific ephemera. The figures retain the precise pos-
ture and position of Courbet's subjects--even the dog is theres--but the mise
en scdnchaschangedto California, where the culture of "nature" is represented
as being a kind of antirealist, nonnaturahst performance that strives for the
endlesssculpting of the "body" and landscapein pursuit of the ultimate a#@ce
of natural penectibMty--itseH ' a double irony. In this witty twist betweenCour-
bet's figure and Blake's ground, we discover once more the absenceof "depth
perspective,"which Jamesonconsidersto be the defining quality of the post':
modern moment of articulation. The celebration of surface, the collapse of
epistemologicaland perspectivaldistance,the foreshortening of historical depth
in a collage of contingencies--these characteristicsof postmodern culture, in
Jameson'sview, locate the moment of articulation in the "deadi of the subject."
But what of that "moment of articulation" that embodies the experienceof the
spectatorconfronted will postmodern art as collection or display? if the ab:
fenceof the dialecticof depth--inside/outside--is now replacedby a lateral
"side-by-sideness"(collage,bricolage) of the postmodern as palimpsest, how
does it change our practice as viewers and PWewn?
The moment of spectatorship that lwant to focus on is not so much art's
sublime addressto an individual spectator as connoisseur as it is Me more

316
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 HOMI K. BHABHA

art or experiencelies in the circulation and intersectionof imagesand signs

that are ironically and dinerentiaUy disposed to each other--widlout the inher-
ence of "deep structure" that holds them together--and that therefore need
to be performativcly and strategicaHy enunciated. It is with this process of
representationin mind that Iturn to my final display, which is the exhibition
or art show itself as the object of a postmodern or poststructuralist critical
scrutiny.
As )lou enter the first gallery of "Circa 1492," your Acoustiguide leadsyou
to a cabinet of late-medievaltreasures:an ostrich egg, brought to Europe from
North Africa in classicalantiquity and turned into a gold jug sometimein the
Fourteenthcentury; a rock crystalelephant,carvedin India in the fiReenth
century, caparisoned wiki gold and enamel mounts somewhere in Europe dur-
ing the sixteenth century, and made up as a salt cellar. In these exotic transfor-
mations, wide geographical distances conjure cunningly with historical circum-
stance.The creation of a global culture circa 1492, as it emergesin the
"sciences"of mapping and measurementand in the fantasyof cultural expan-
sion, is a major narrative of this exhibit.
Immediatelyafter thesegilded Oriental treasures,your Acoustiguidedraws
you to the dark testimony of Hlieronymus Bosch's Tmpfaf af Szr. ..{mfbo#7,
1500--1505. Bosch's "absurdist" images play out the drama of evil, which alley
set in a theaterof the dreamsymbol. In testing the limits of the senseof
community and its pictoria] conventions, they explore the problematic proj.fac-
tion of the "human;' as it struggles, at the very threshold of early modemity,
to becomethe representativefigure in the arts. This is the other central focus
of the show.
"Circa 1492" is an exhibit with a double vision: the eyeexpandingto hold
the world in one space;the eyeaverted,awq', attenuated,trying to seethe
uniquenessof eachspeci6ccultural tradition and production. The show is
crafted from a creative tension deep within the early modern moment. On the
one hand, art is Map, striving to calculatethe world picture on one continuous
surface in two dimensions. On the other, Man conjures restlessly to break up
fiat surface, to deepen it wiki dark dimensions, to personiB ' it with perspective.
The exhibition's unique messagein "this year of Discovery-Pride," as Daniel J.
Boorstin writes in the catalogue's framing essay, "is to become aware of the
limits of the kinds of ftl1611ment
that dominate our consciousness
in an ageof
science."
l C
This dynamic of Discovery and Creation certainly goes a way toward ques-
tioning the idea of progress as a universal ethic of cultural development. There
is an attempt here to revise the linear perspectiveupon which the West makes
its claimsto cultural supremacy,claimsthat its roots lie in a narrativethat
establishesRenaissanceperspectiveas the natural one for the arts. The structur-
ing principle of "Circa 1492," as curator Jay A Levenson.informs us, is the
"horizontal survey." Yet the show aims at a uni6cd erect: from the eHort "to

318
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 HOMI K. BHABHA

spective of "Circa 1492" is to allow cultural heterogeneity at the individual

level so long asthe homogeneityof the(Western) notion of the humanis lea:
relatively uncomplicated widlin a universal aestheticrealm. The parallel begins
to look distinctlycircular.
Let us imagine that as Cecilia looks away, hcr distracted gaze fans upon
Diirer's portraits of a black man(circa 1505 6) and of the enslavedwoman
Katherina (1521), to be found a few feet hom the Leonardo. Suddenly I am
caught between the master and the enslaved.The Acoustiguide tells me of
Dtirer's interest in the diversity of nature--"in exotica imported from around
the world." Then Iturn to the portraits, trying to decipherthe "intentions
of the subject'smind": dle blackman dressedin what lookslike a Venetian
cape, die black woman who has had her hair "confined within a European
headdress."in its spirit of paraHelism,the catalogsuggeststhat Dilrer goes
beyond artistic and cultural stereotypesand shows himself "sensitiveto the
personalityas well asthe exotic potential of his sitter." Can the two bc compati-
ble when exoticism erasesradler than enhancespersonality?Since that is the
case,can theseportraits of DU'er's be more than naturalist studies?Can the
"mean and measureof aHthings" frame this radical heterogeneity of the human
condition when the catalogentry statesthat circa 1492 there were between
140,000 and 170,000 African slavesin Europe?
Where Cecilia's gaze and Katherina's downcast look cross, there is no paral-
lelism,no equidistance.
We areat the critical point of contestinghistoriesand
incommensurable subjects of humanity. Histories of the master come to be
reinscribed in terms of. or in contention with, the enslaved or the colonized.
By the mid-1990s, this will be the spectatorialposition of the non-Europeans,
the half-Europeans, the African-Americans, the Chicanas and Chicanos, the
Asian-Americans,
the Latin Americans--to nameonly someof the hyphenated
and hybridized peoples among other visiting Americans and Europeans
now may visit the National Gallery and who are now a signi6cant part of the
"national" scene. These are, after all, the very peoples whose histories were
most graphically and tragically made and unmade in the wake of the Age of
Exploration, circa 1492. It is clearly in their direction plat the organizers aim
their laudable attempt to staunch the "nationalist '' sentiment of "Discovery-
Pride" and to complicate the Eurocentric celebration of Columbus. But the
show is complicated by another kind of historical paraHelism that is somewhat
lessmarvelous, and much more melancholic.
This is not principally an academicor art-historical issue.By the mid 1990s,
the internationalor global art show hasbecomethe prodigious exhibitionary
mode of Western "national" museums. Exhibiting art from the colonized or
postcolonialworld, displayingthe work of the marginalizedor the minority,
disinterring forgotten, forlorn "pasts"--such curatorial pro)ectsend up sup-
porting the centrality of the Western museum. Parallelismsuggeststhat there
is an equidistant moment between cultures, and where better to stage it--who

320
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 HOMI K. BHABHA

tableau, mise-cn-sane, or staging in dle discourseof the postmodern, is often

understood to be an antiessentialist procedure, emphasizing the constructedness
of social or artistic reality. Such self-reflexivearguments, claiming that .'experi-
ence" or identity are not a priori intuitions but are co ff fed as image, ideol
ogy, narrative,or discourse,becomesignificant only when we can move beyond
ontological or epistemologicalissuesto confront the ethical question: blow do
we usethe rules and rusesof historical contingency and cultural indeterminacy
to transform the inequitable and injurious #acfxliliexof history. It is oren hastily
suggestedthat a "decentered" subject(to use a theoretical cliche) is. a s.ubject
that disavows history, a subject whose loss of sovereignty leads to a dereliction
of social and political responsibility. What Ihope to have shown is that the
forces of contingency--historical and narratorial--plat place the human subject
af a angleto what is seeminglythe centerof lice, or of history, does not drain
human action of its social agency.Hluman inter-est, the politics of community
and the possibility of communication that lies betweenhuman subjects,Hannah
Arendt remindsus in Tbe.H#ma#Ca#dffh#(1958), is constitutedinterroga-
tively as an act of l#fe@refafa#.The "web of human relationships" emergesin
the interstitial, elliptical moment where the narrative of human history reveals
an agent, a subject who is the actor and the suaerer,. but dle.agent is not the
"author ' of the story of life. The enduring political lesson of postmodernism
is to urge us to think of socialagencywithout the masteryor sovereignityof
an author. And in dle indeterminate relationship betweenactor and author we
are served the aesthetic and ediical challenge to live in disjunctive temporal
landscapes that lead us to restructurethe past,so that the history of the pres-
ent--of our late modernity and/or postmodcrnity--can entertain the possibili-
ties of the future as an open question, a negotiation with the passionsand the
pidhUsof freedom.

SUGGESTED READ INGS

Attridge, D., and G. Bennington. 1989. Pa#-Slmdwxd&m a d fbf 2zelian af/{fstaT-
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. Tbe I,acaffamaf Cw/tyre.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981. "The Double Session." in Dhifmf afar, translated by Barbara
Johnson.
Foster, Hal. 1993. "Postmodernism in Parallax." Oao&er no. 63(Winter) .
f
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. 1992. .A# Tbeopy /900--.1990: .A# .4mfba/o97
]fCba«gi*g I'ie";.
Jameson, Fredric 1991. ] aslpml&mim, or bf C#/[#l.d I,qgfc ofLafe Capita/ZJm.
Jencks,Charles.1990. Mbaf is Pa#-Afadfm m?
Mosquera, Gerardo. 1995. Beta d l#e Fa fast : CamfrlmPornT
.A# CHffc&m#om Z,aff#
.America.
Lyotard, J. F. 1988. Tbe D€f?b'e#d;Pbr esin DIKPw&e.
Translated by GeorgesVan Den
Abbeele.
Rich, Adrienne. 1991. .Af/m afa D Pc Zf Wm/d: / af lzr /988--/99.1

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