Cultural Studies to Come Mahmut Mutman (The Renewal of Cultural Studies, Ed.

Paul Smith, Temple University Press, 2011, Ch. 22, pp. 196-206. Please do not cite or quote without the permission of the author. For correspondance: mahmutmutman@sehir.edu.tr) Cultural studies emerged in response to a logic of difference appeared in metropolitan cultures at a certain moment in history. This response came largely from the immigrant, marginalized or disadvantaged groups in society. I do not aim to analyze this particular historical, political and intellectual conjuncture in this essay. Instead I would like to focus on a certain aspect that has become definitive of the highly contested field of cultural studies, and this aspect is what I have called logic of difference rather than identity. No doubt, today the field of cultural studies has gained universal legitimacy on the basis of a relatively abstracted and loosely defined cluster of theoretical and methodological approaches. Its interdisciplinary nature and its pluralism are perhaps its strongest aspect rather than a sign of weakness (as it is sometimes assumed). Yet this does not mean that the emergent field of cultural studies is without problems. Indeed, I would like to argue that the most serious challenge it has to meet comes from the internal yet problematic link between the concepts of identity and difference. The question of essentialism has always been the definitive danger the cultural studies has identified for itself.1 I would like to demonstrate that the question might be more intricate than a mere methodological refusal of essentialism, and that it can and should be argued by a detour through the concept of cultural difference. Cultural Difference: Native Speaker vs. Master Audience? Cultural difference is a paradoxical concept. The white male students complaint that he does not have culture is, in some sense, not untrue. Anthropologically speaking (and anthropology is part of our cultures), culture belongs to the other. It is itself a term of other-ing different peoples. The place from which culture is named is produced in the same movement as the naming itself. Gayatri Spivak has argued that this naming is an encrypting of the name of the native informant as the name of Manthe name that carries the inaugurating affect of being human.2 Western Subject/Man erases his origin by writing it into the space of the native informant. In knowing the other colonized culture, the colonizer did not only accumulate knowledge but also produced himself and his history and subjectivity as the norm, the universal place of knowledge in the supposedly blank or uninscribed natural space of the other as his distant origin. If, in response to this other-ing, again in Spivaks words, cultural studies was founded by the colonized in order to question and correct their masters,3 the danger that awaits it is, once more, playing the native speaker for a master audience. Given that the social and historical context of cultural studies has been the metropolitan migrants political struggle for recognition, and given that the academia is a space of upward mobility, cultural studies is unavoidably a political staging and instituting of culture/difference where the structural complicity of Darstellung (aesthetic/cultural representation) and Vertretung

2 (political representation) works in ways that might continue to reproduce the name of Man in the place of the other, and this time as an essentially displaced subject whose social metaphor is the migrant. If to say this is not to say that the people from that culture who have remained in the nation of origin in social strata separated from the general academic culture are more authentic representatives of the culture in question,4 then the question is perhaps not so much the what of cultural studies, but the how of it. As Spivaks short description of cultural studies above involves the notions of questioning as well as correcting, I should like to dwell on these two aspects of the work of cultural studies. To begin with the latter, how can the work of correction of stereotypes and misconceptions take into account the fact that what it is fighting is already an apparatus of knowledge whose main presupposition is the unquestionable unity, homogeneity and stability of its object? Taking this into account is no simple task and requires a further move that should supplement the corrective work with a critical interruption. I would like to give an example from my own context. A Case of Orientalism: Ottoman Historiography The stereotype of despotism has been widely employed in Ottoman historiography. One corrective strategy might be working on the strategic institution of Islamic legal apparatus, court cases and jurisprudential practices. There is no point in denying that the Ottoman political and economic system was centrally organized, in comparison with classical European feudalism, and can be seen as an instance of the tributary mode of production in Samir Amins sense.5 The significance of the legal apparatus is that it allowed, to some degree, both local dominant powers (tax-collectors, tax-farmers and notables) and peasant producers exercise their own forces in a complex field of social struggles. Contrary to Max Webers biased notion of arbitrary kad justice in Islam6, this legal institution was essential for the central power to represent itself on the ground and center its power by ensuring the conditions of production of surplus product. The ruling class had to have local representatives, which it formed by appointment from the center as well as by negotiating with local powers, and it also had to give some room (however limited) to the direct producers, through the institution of the kad, in order to prevent over-exploitation by local powers and continue to appropriate the better part of the surplus product. If, we, therefore, focus on legal apparatus and practices with an awareness of its social context, then we can produce a historical scene in which there is constant struggle and negotiation between various social forces, even though almost always at the expense of peasant producers. We would have replaced the stereotype of a static society of peasant dupes under despotic rule with a dynamic social field of ongoing struggle and negotiation.7 We know that this most useful work is confronted with all kinds of difficulties in the hegemonic academic world and subjected to subtle mechanisms of exclusion and compartmentalization. But as a work of correction, as a production of knowledge on an empirical (historical or anthropological) level, it is also welcome. The rationale of an apparatus of knowledge is to accumulate knowledge and to accommodate criticism rather than simply denying these. There is increasing pressure for more and better knowledge

3 about Islamic societies, history and culture. But there is also a kind of noncommunication between this kind of factual knowledge and ideological stereotypes in the culture at large. Although it is necessary, this kind of work is perhaps not sufficient to challenge the stereotype of despotism. One might ask then if this is due to the nature of the study and the object that is chosen. Although when this kind of work is carefully conducted a dynamic history might appear including the struggles of peasant producers, this will still be history as it appears within the field of state and law. Assuming that the subordinate subjectivity is separate than the dominant one, where can we find its historical inscription outside the state? We will perhaps go beyond the stereotype of despotism in the initial sense of a reduced and distorted image, but, as we remain within the field of the state, we take the risk of despotisms re-inscribing itself qua the notion of state. For, responding to a question of desire rather than truth, a stereotype cannot simply be corrected by a demonstration of facts and its complex mechanism of distortion is usually fed by bits and pieces of real reference. It is because despotism is not a simple, homogenous referent out there, but exists in a network of family resemblances with other concepts such as the state that an ultimate, once-and-for-all solution does not appear. Since all power is in some sense despotic, and since the Ottoman social and political organization was centralist (or tributary), it is not difficult for a despotic Western imperial desire to find those bits and pieces of information that enable it to maintain its projective work of distortion. Hence one could turn, for instance, to the peasant uprisings in Ottoman history. I will give here the example of the famous Bedreddin uprising in the Aegean and the Balkans in the early 15th century. This mass rebellion is associated with the name of the great mystic, scholar and judge Sheikh Bedreddin, but there is controversy among historians over two points: first, it is not clear whether the Sheikh ordered a popular rebellion or he found himself in a de facto situation once his over-zealous followers started it; and secondly, it remains debatable if the whole episode was a peasant uprising or part of the struggle of local powers (represented by the Sheikh) with the central power. 8 Especially the second point prioritizes intra-class struggle over class struggle, maintaining a wellknown feature of the notion of Asiatic despotism.9 Although the rebels were poor peasants whose typically millenarian movement depended on a principle of collective appropriation of land and posed a serious threat to the Ottoman ruling class and the state (which suppressed it in bloodshed), it is interesting that the historians focus on the Sheikhs involvement or leadership rather than the peasant uprising itself.10 This is setting the research agenda on the basis of an unquestioned elitist assumption which excludes the subjectivity of the peasants who did not only start a mass rebellion but actually held a certain region under their control for a certain period of time. It is not entirely implausible to look for the possibility of a different reading of the religious inscription of land as belonging to the God. While such a religious inscription was instituted by the tributary state as representing the sacred authority, there is a change of idiom, an inscriptive displacement, when a new Godmystical or millenarianis affected on the peasant communal body, as the latters subjectivity (language, culture, memory, belief, etc.) cannot be entirely absorbed by the imperial hegemony and is always

4 already in touch with what remains other to its religious-tributary arrangement.11 This is not the identitarian concept of moral economy, i.e. the idea of the essentially egalitarian nature of the subsistence economy of rural communities, but an emergent idiomor, an idiom that perhaps never emerged full-fledged, but was pre-emergent, to use Raymond Williamss well-known vocabulary.12 It is certainly possible that the peasant movement could have been captured, neutralized and manipulated by the local dominant forces in their struggle with the central group. There is always a degree of indetermination or ambivalence. But this is no reason not to recognize the autonomy of the peasant will and judgment. Under certain political, historical and cultural circumstances, the peasants might develop independent political initiatives against the state and the ruling class as a whole, in the hope of another world. The Object and the Subject of Knowledge In recognizing and demonstrating the autonomous will and movement of the oppressed, we have moved outside the field of the state and the ruling elite. As a scholarly activity, the best of cultural studies is characterized by this kind of move, whatever the topic at hand or field of research is: figuring a space of the resistant oppressed other outside the state or capital. In my above example, this attitude can shed new light on the first kind of research as well: by keeping in mind that the space/time of the oppressed remains separate, the researcher can focus on the irreducible rift between law and justice rather than a historically given legal or ideological arrangement in itself. If, however, this methodological move is merely external as if its object is simply out there, that is to say, if it does not at the same time question the conditions of its own production and undo its object as well as the very production of its object, it will fall short of its aim. In order to be able to introduce peasant subjectivity into the domain of historical knowledge, I had to accept as given a historical object called Ottoman history. How is this object produced in the first place? In a well-known article on the role of archives in historiography, Gayatri Spivak has described the imperialist project as the worlding of the world on a supposedly uninscribed earth. 13 It is a constitutive assumption of the imperialist project that the world that it worlds is not worlded before, i.e. it is uninscribed. Spivak writes: the necessary yet contradictory assumption of an uninscribed earth that is the condition of possibility of the worlding of a world generates the force to make the native see himself as other.14 My object of knowledge, Ottoman history, was produced by an orientalist worlding (or spacing) in the 19th century and was re-constituted in reversal by the nationalist discourse in the 20th century. My will to know is cathected by this historical production in a particular way which should make me (the subject of knowledge) necessarily overlook its continual and structural working and assume a pure and authentic beginning which remains outside this historical worlding/spacing (a simple, homogenous, natural object called Ottoman history). A number of results follow from this observation. First of all, orientalist stereotypes and clichs can only be fought on the ground, and cultural studies should co-operate with area studies in a minimal negotiation that is necessary and

5 productive. The point is that, although corrective work is necessary, orientalism cannot be confined to an error of representation (that is to say, the referential field cannot be controlled absolutely and the stereotypes cannot be exorcised by epistemological good will).15 As orientalism has been an active as well as passive (or minor) practice of spacing and worlding the world, all corrective work must be supplemented by a radical questioning of the ways our objects of knowledge have become present to us and have produced us in this presentation before we begin to correct them. Nationalist historiography cannot achieve a radical questioning and destabilization of the object of knowledge called Ottoman history. Since it is dependent on the methodological assumption of a pure and clean beginning, it cannot conceive the disciplines as force fields formed of complex historical relations of power and knowledge which are contaminating as well as enabling. Undoing the unitary there-ness and obviousness of the object goes beyond the methodology part where the scholar develops the correct (non-ideological, non-stereotypical) approach to the very same object (under the problematic assumption that the field of reference is homogenous). The undoing in question is internal to the totality of the work; it is an affirmative unworking of the work itself and it involves an interruption by means of which the critical scholar refers to a difference.16 This leads us to the second consequence that is the difference in question. Ironically, the only knowledge we have of the peasant rebels ideas on collective property comes through the work of a chronicler of the Byzantinian state named Ducas, who described it as a perverse belief: the rebels are said to have formulated a new principle of common property. Was the peasant millenarianism, for instance, outside the law of patriarchal gendering? The space outside the state was certainly not outside the law conceived as pure form and as desire. In the final analysis, it might be this aspect that makes peasant movements subject to a kind of structural ambivalence and open to manipulation by local powers. Nevertheless, if the uprising might have been interrupted or complicated by multiple forces of local politics and gender difference, it also refers to another history, another time that is not readily available because it was already a departure from what had become Ottoman history as we know it. The act of rebellion implies a nonrepresentational past which refers to a future that is not lived but inscriptive in its effect. If I therefore refer to these rebels trace in history, such a trace can only be read as heterogeneous to the very discourse in which I become capable of pointing to it in my intellectual capacity. Accordingly, my own discourse cannot constitute itself as a transparent representation of such a discontinuous trace. For a Cultural Studies to Come As there are many ways of doing cultural studies, many ways of entering and leaving it, there must also be various different strategies and tactics of avoiding co-optation in the territory of disciplinary knowledge production. I do not mean that history is necessarily a more appropriate ally than anthropology. Rather than letting the Other speak (as if she is not already produced in this very move), anthropology undoes itself by resisting to appropriate the difference it is called to represent as knowledge.17 Cultural studies is able to interrupt its staging by opening itself up to what resists it in its data. It is not a matter of merely questioning attention to the instituting conditions of production of objects and

6 subjects of knowledge (a form of attention which only aims to restore them better), but of seeking for forms of intellectual performance that will enable the scholar of cultural studies to interrupt his/her own production and to affect in his/her discourse a radical outside or otherness that cannot be contained in representation. The question is not one of correct method narrowly conceived but recognizing that cultural difference is, in fact, always conceived in terms of the homogenizing and essentializing force of knowledge whereas what comes with it is historically inscribed, essentially complex, multiple and fleeing; in other words, inaccessibly pluralized by the languages of class, gender and race, enabling and disabling each other. As soon as it gets named (Ottoman-Turkish history), I am already produced by the inaccessible history of such naming, which is an encrypting of the grand narrative of Man, i.e. by a history of struggles buried as data and put in my mouth as discourse, on my screen as the mirror of my knowledge-producing self. Subverting this theater of production so that my historically, socially and culturally instituted positioning as native academic in the place of Man/Subject (the place of knowledge and truth) will not be (re)produced unquestioned, is the difficult task of a cultural studies to come.
1

See for instance, Stuart Hall: Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms in Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, Eds. Richard Collins, James Curran, Nicholas Garnham, Paddy Scannell, Philip Schlesinger and Colin Sparks (London: Sage, 1986), pp. 33-48. 2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward A History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Massachusetts. London, England: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 5. 3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Culture Alive Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 23, No. 2-3, 2006, pp. 359-360. 4 Spivak, Culture Alive, p. 359. 5 Samir Amin: Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, trans. Brian Pearce (Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1976), pp. 13-58. See also John Haldon: The State and the Tributary Mode of Production (London and New York: Verso, 1993), pp. 158-188. 6 Max Weber: Economy and Society Vol. 2, Eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 976-978. 7 I must refer here to a number of recent historical studies which move in this direction: Huri slamolu: State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire: Agrarian Power Relations and Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia during the Sixteenth Century (London, Brill, 1994); Suraiya Faroqhi: Coping with the State: Political Conflict and Crime in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1995); Boa A. Ergene: Local Court, Provincial Society and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Cankiri and Kastamonu (1652-1744), (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Judith E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003). 8 That the Empire was going through the period of Interregnum (after the Moghul army defeated the Ottomans in Ankara in 1402) is another fact in support of this interpretation. Shaikh Bedreddin worked as the chief justice for one of the brothers who were fighting for the throne during the Interregnum. The peasant rebellion followed the defeat of the brother he supported, when Bedreddin was under surveillance. Soon after the defeat of the Aegean rebels, he had to escape and re-organized a new force in the Balkans, but he was defeated by the new Sultans army and sentenced to death after a highly controversial trial. 9 For the thesis that Shaikh Bedreddin represented the local powers in the Balkans, see the work of the cultural historian Ahmet Yaar Ocak: Osmanl Toplumunda Zndklar ve Mlhidler [Unbelivers and Heathens in Ottoman Society] (stanbul: Tarih Vakf Yurt Yaynlar, 1998). For more balanced views which underline the role of Bedreddin without completely excluding the possibility of his being a representative of local powers, see Ernst Werner: eyh Bedreddin ve Brklce Mustafa [Shaikh Bedreddin

and Brklce Mustafa] (Istanbul: Kaynak, 2006) (Brklce Mustafa was one of the two leaders in the Aegean uprisings); and Michel Balivet: eyh Bedreddin: Tasavvuf ve Isyan (stanbul: Tarih Vakf Yurt Yaynlar, 2000 [Islam Mystique et Rvolution Arme Dans Les Balkans Ottomans vie du Cheikh Bedreddin le Hallaj du Turcs 1358/59-1416, Istanbul: ISIS, 1995]. Balivet underlines the fact that the rebels included both Muslim and Christian peasants. In this context, he refers to Bedreddins version of Sufi Islam and his visits to Christian centers as well as a universalist undercurrent in the Middle Eastern and Meditteranean historical cultural world that might have influenced the rebels. 10 Apart from the historical work that must be done, Sheikh Bedreddins own writing is also an important source. His Neo-platonic and Sufi philosophical masterpiece, Varidat (Inspirations) argues for an immanent notion of God which had continued to irritate the Ottoman ulama (religious clergy) for centuries; but much more importantly, the significant amount of jurisprudential work he left is still not studied. He is not an unlikely candidate for a social reformist intellectual with a strong passion for justice. 11 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write: And God, who designates none other than the energy of recording, can be the greatest enemy in the paranoiac inscription, but also the greatest friend in the miraculating inscription (Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem. H. R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 78). It is not unlikely that this was the role played by Sheikh Bedreddin in the eyes of the rebels, miraculating another sense of God, as this Sufi thinker-judge had an enormous credibility and popularity among both Muslim and Christian peasants in Anatolia and the Balkans. 12 For the concepts of emergence and pre-emergence, see Raymond Williams: Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 121-127. For the concept of pre-emergence, see especially pp. 126-127. 13 Spivaks argument was a delicate re-thinking of Heideggers well-known concept of the worlding of the world. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives History and Theory, Vol. 24, No. 3, (October, 1985), pp. 247-272; for the concept of worlding, see especially, pp. 253-254. Martin Heidegger: The Origin of the Work of Art in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Spivak re-worked this important argument later in her book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, pp. 211-215. In an earlier article, I have also developed a notion of orientalist spacing by elaborating on Saids definition of Orientalism as a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and [most of the time] the Occident (Said, Orientalism, p. 2). See Mahmut Mutman: Under the Sign Orientalism: West vs. Islam Cultural Critique, 23, Winter 1992-93, pp. 165-198. 14 A Critique, p. 212. 15 Reducing orientalism to an error of representation was the major problem with Edward W. Saids paradigm-constituting work, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). 16 I borrow the notion of unworking from Maurice Blanchot: The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 357-359. 17 For the dialogical and textual versions, see: Johannes Fabian: Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); James Clifford: Introduction: Partial Truths and On Ethnographic Allegory, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, pp. 127 and 98121. For the impossibility of the mutuality or at the same time of anthropological encounter, see: Smadar Lavie: The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998), especially pp. 304-308. For a wider discussion, see Mahmut Mutman: Writing Culture: Postmodernism and Ethnography Anthropological Theory, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 153-178.