grossberg el txt de 1996

Bueno cierro con esto, no la lista pero si la lectura lenta. Grossberg tiene una densiadad que me mata, pero una densidad que me hace pensar mucho y se pone a discutir cosas que siempre me quedan colgadas de mucho planteos. De alguna forma el tipo se hace cargo de todas esas preguntas que quedan despues de lecturas varias desde foucault a los estudio de identidades en general, toma todo y las piensa simultaneamente y con una lucidez enorme. Lo que no me daja tan contenta ahora es que arme un esquema tan complejo pero que cierre tanto. Es una maquina complejisima, pero una sola cosa, me parece, lo que propone. Hay algo del proceso que se me pierde en su postura, por ejemplo con la idea de movilidades estructuradas que vengo usando, y que siento que no me da mucho espacio para pensar movilidades no tan organizadas, o que se estan constituyendo y quizas sea eso algo que me intereza especialmente (aunque tampoco de certau sea una respuesta creo) . Tampoco la idea de inversion de afecto en lugares de pertenencia me trmina de convenser como unico foco (esta es una critica que otros, no me acuerdo quienes, le hacen). Me interesaria probablemente pensar en afectos del espacio y energias que se ponen en movimiento y se activan unas a otras sin necesariamente deslizarse sobre una estructura previa, aunque por momentos si lo haga.
Y mas fotos de Adams en Manzanar Relocation Centre


Grossberg, Lawrence 1996 'Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?'. In: Stuart Hall and du Gay, Paul (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity. pp. 88-107. London: Sage.

Grossberg starts by questioning why have cultural studies reduced its focus mostly to the studies of identity and difference. He proposes a need to restructure the concept of identity and resituate it in the broader power configurations, by focusing in the concept of articulation and overcoming the idea of resistance. Multiculturalism does not only present historical tensions, but generate need for a ethic and normative re-articulation. A reconsideration of identity would demand to rethink three logics: of difference, of individuality and temporality. But to situate a critique within this logic form within modern logics implies failing to generate a critic of the broader normative systems of modernity. Thus he reframes identity in regards to the logics of: otherness, productivity and speciality. Cultural studies distinguish two modes of production of political identities as resulting from historical processes of configuration (not the theoretical frames). Identities is thus explored as: 1) processes of struggle for presenting positive aspects of identities, 2) multiple, complex, and unstable the way in which multiple lines of identification come together and the ways they are represented in particular contingencies are a focus of interest – point in which discourses as producers of identities are main centres of interest-, 3) it does not necessarily imply a unique theory, but a group of concepts that are loosely employed by different analysts. Some concepts. The notion of difference implies a dominant identity that is constituted in the negation of the subaltern, the subaltern is both necessary and destabilizing. This other can be either a supplement, in which the other is outside the field of subjectivity, a total exteriority, an excess (said, Llyotard), or a negative other within the field of subjectivity fixed as an exotic incomprehensible other (Bhabha). The notion of fragmentation points to the multiple lines of identification transversing any give subject position and the impossibility to predict articulations, the subject as a dis-membered and re-membered (Harraway). Hybridity, implying the simultaneous coexistence within two conflicting identities, is used at least in three ways: 1) subalternity as a third space always in-between identities, 2) as a permanent state of liminality a location in the frontier, 3) border crossing, in which identity is in the movement of transversing (Anzaldua). Diaspora is linked to this but focuses on the particular diachronic experience of transnational migration and the political struggles of maintaining a distinctive identity in the hosting society.
The concepts above have been criticized for: a) ignoring the diversity, contradictory and fragmented forms in which power and its discourses operate, b) ignoring the positivity of the subaltern with particular cultural production, c) ignoring the forms of power and subalternity within the subaltern, d) assuming the subaltern as generator of a particular and distinctive subjectivity, e) assuming subalternity (as other) as a model of all forms of domination, implies knowing subalternity is in advance, not needing to understand the specific configurations. Grossberg critiques these perspectives as they fail to produce a critique to modernity as it falls into its logics.
If identity is always constituted against an other, then these other identities are confined to produce their identities by mirror image of what is modern, then there is no escape to modernity. But modernity itself has constituted in base of difference rather than identity, as a difference always different to itself in time and space. The logics of production of difference are then fundamental aspects of the definitions of modernities. Theories of difference are traped in the discussion of negativity (derrida: a negative that threatens reason form within) and positvity (foucault, an autonomous other that affects reason)
He proposes to think through theories of otherness, in which the other does not need to be defined in regards to essential or transcendent terms, but rather by the contextual capacities of affecting and being affected. Theories of difference are then based in structuralist and post structuralist logics, while otherness uses a notion of difference as an effect of economies of power. Otherness allows to think both of difference and identity as historical constructions.
He critiques their readings of Foucault of Laclau and Mouffe and of Said, the former for assuming fixed subject positions from Foucault’s notion of “dispersion”, and the latter for presenting the other just as a form of representation, a means of separating self , and a form of knowledge that creates this other. The problem is that the relation between power and knowledge does not imply the inexistence of the other, is the reduction of that what is now the other with all its heterogeneity, into a semantic terms, a singularity that constitutes self. Theories that define post colonial subjectivity in terms of power effects (Spivak), loose the possibilities of thinking the correlation between subject, identity and agency. Thinking otherness form a positive, non-essentialist perspective allows to consider problems of effectivity, belonging, and change.
The problem of thinking culture as productive (following Renato Rosaldo’s provocation) has been to assume a the modern and singular logic of individuality and individuation as universal (generating the humanist figure of individual as a viril agent). This figure of individuality opens three dimensions that are taken unproblematized: 1) subject as a position that defines possibilities of experience and knowledge, 2) agent as source of activity, 3) self as a mark of social identity. The unification of these dimensions in the subject has given place to a series of paradoxes: how can the individual be an effect but also a cause, subjected and a subject, what is the capacity of agency. But according to Grossberg the unification of these dimensions is one of the operations in which power is shaped in modernity.
To unpack this problem we need to understand each of this dimensions of individuality (considering the bodies as well) as produced by distinct machineries, operating in different planes of the power effects. In this way the subject as the capacity to experience the world and know it, is universal, but as a capacity subjectivity is unequally distributed, as some people have the possibility to occupy different positions or to defend and authorize their existence. This last aspect is what Grossberg sees as a product of stratifying machineries, one that operate producing a relation between content – bodies and expression – subjectivity as value. Subjectivity is thus abstract, even if it is always codified in culture as difference. Self, as an embodiment of this codification, only comes to be after the process of inscription of difference, as the product of differenciating machines. Both structures articulate to possibilities of agency and power, but there is o direct correlation, agency is thus related to changing configurations, capacities of transformation under particular configurations.
In this sense subalternity is not a social position but a capacity of exercising power. Marginality is the vector that traces the possibilities of access, mobility and generating belonging to a particular configuration. Agency is thus a political problem, of how access and participation are distributed among the fields of self and subjectivity but not a question of identity. Agency is not an individual movement but rather the trace of trajectories that open fields of possibilities, agency results form what he calls territorilyzing machines.
The relation of identity and temporality is not based in the philosophical question of the relation of individual and reality, but in the question of consciousness as a mediation between experience and knowledge. When mediated by textuality, ‘the non temporal synchronicity of discourse (Bhabha) each of the planes of individuality is thus result of temporality subjectivity (consciousness of internal time), self (as a temporal construction of identity) and agency (as temporal movement of difference. To generate an alternative to modernity Grossberg proposes to rethink in terms of space.
This means that people experience the world from particular positions. A good example are the studies of diaspora in which movement and settlement generate multisided relations, which are more relations of belonging than of identification. These relations of closeness and separation are spatially constructed. In the same way the access to knowledge is partially determined by spatial positions, as the subject is always situated within a geopolitical organization of places. The subject can be considered as having a spatial existence defined in the vectors of movement, articulation likewise could be better understood as the intersection of different trajectories and the relations of habitation and empathy. The subject thought as spatialized can be fixed to space, have a many possibilities of movement, be able to access or not to particular places. Thus agency is the result of the relation between subjects and places, places that do not pre-exist but are the result of attempts to organize space. If subjectivity constitutes places as belonging, agency organizes the spaces and action form which people make strategic moves. Again, agency does not a result form the self, but is the product of the way space and movement are organized or mapped.
Grossberg is interested in making these shifts towards a spatial frame for subjectivity, not so much to rethink agency and change, but rather to think in the possibilities opened by forms of belonging based on singularity (Agamben) rather than identity, what Agamben calls the “coming community”. This implies al so a form of producing knowledge about the other without turning it into sameness or a radical other, that turn politics of difference into a fetishization or a celebratory relation with the other.
He takes Agamben’s notion of singularity as a mode of existence that is neither universal, nor particular, is not based on a concept nor in an individual, it is better an example that exists as within and outside the case it is supposed to belong. This belonging is in itself a production, an appropriation of the class. The example is defined in its capacity to be substituted is always replaceable, as such is always unrepresentable. The community is thus totally undetermined, it is defined not by specific qualities the absence of them, but by belonging itself. The examples have a metonymic relation with the totality. As such any term can be an example of the totality. He exemplifies with a Chinese demonstration in a park, it is not any quality nor a particular form of negation, but the fact of being there in that space in that moment, we can think the same of some movements for civil rights. A politics of singularity demands a definition of the places people can get to or access to places. In this way we can also redefine citizenship as an elective community, constituted within a variety of practices and which constitutes structured mobilities.