The Question of Cultural Identity
Stuart Hall
脚为什么会抽筋It is now a commonplace that the modern age gave ri to a new and decisive form of individualism, at the centre of which stood a new conception of the individual subject and its identity. This does not mean that people were not individuals in pre-modern times, but that individuality was both 'lived', 'experienced' and 'conceptualized' differently. The transformations which ushered in modernity tore the individual free from its stable moorings in traditions and structures. Since the were believed to be divinely ordained, they were held not to be subject to fundamental change. One's status, rank and position in the 'great chain of being'--the cular and divine order of things--overshadowed any n that one was a sovereign individual. The birth of the 'sovereign individual' between the Renaissance
humanism of the sixteenth century and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century reprented a significant break with the past. Some argue that it was the engine which t the whole social system of 'modernity' in motion.
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Raymond Williams notes that the modern history of the individual subject brings together two distinct meanings: on the one hand, the subject is 'indivisible'--an entity which is unified within itlf and cannot be further divided; on the other, it is also an entity which is 'singular, distinctive, unique'.1 Many major movements in Western thought and culture contributed to the emergence of this new conception: the Reformation and Protestantism, which t the individual conscience free from the religious institutions of the Church and expod it directly to the eye of God; Renaissance humanism, which placed Man (sic) at the centre of the univer; the scientific revolutions, which endowed Man with the faculty and capacities to inquire into, investigate and unravel the mysteries of Nature; and the Enlightenment, centred on the image of rational, scientific Man, freed from dogma and intolerance, before whom the whole of human history was laid out for understanding and mastery.
Tho who hold that modern identities are being fragmented argue that what has happened in late-modernity to the conception of the modern subject is not simply its estrangement but its dislocation. They trace this dislocation through a ries of ruptures in the discours of modern knowledge. In this ction, I shall offer a brief sketch of five great advances in social theory and the human sciences which have occurred in, or had their major impact upon, thought in the period of late-modernity (the cond half of the twentieth century), and who main effect, it is argued, has been the final de-centring of the Cartesian subject.
The first major de-centring concerns the traditions of Marxist thinking. Marx's writing belongs, of cour, to the nineteenth and not the twentieth century. But one of the ways in which his work was recovered and re-read in the 1960s was in the light of his argument that 'men (sic) make history, but only on the basis of conditions which are not of their own making'. His re-readers interpreted this to mean that individuals could not in any true n be the 'authors' or agents of history since they could only act on the basis of the historical conditions made by others into which they were born, and using the resources (
material and culture) provided to them from previous generations.
Marxism, properly understood, they argued, displaced any notion of individual agency. The Marxist structuralist, Louis Althusr (1918-89) argued that, by putting social relations (modes of production, exploitation of labour power, the circuits of capital) rather than an abstract notion of Man at the centre of his theoretical system, Marx displaced two key propositions of modern philosophy: '(1) that there is a universal esnce of man; (2) that this esnce is the attribute of "each single individual" who is its real subject':
早间励志语录The two postulates are complementary and indissoluble. But their existence and their unity presuppo a whole empiricist-idealist world outlook. By rejecting the esnce of man as his theoretical basis, Marx rejected the whole of this organic system of postulates. He drove the philosophical category of 同时冻结行和列the subject, of empiricism, of the ideal esnce from all the domains in which they had been supreme. Not only from political economy (rejection of the myth of homo economicus, that is, of the individual with definite faculties and needs as the subject of the classical economy); not just from history; ... not just from ethics (rejection of the Kantian ethical idea); but also from philosophy itlf.2 大型历史剧
This 'total theoretical revolution' was, of cour, fiercely contested by many humanistic theorists who give greater weight in historical explanation to human agency. We need not argue here about whether Althusr was wholly or partly right, or entirely wrong. The fact is that, though his work has been extensively criticized, his 'theoretical antihumanism' (that is, a way of thinking oppod to theories which derive their argument from some notion of a universal esnce of Man lodged in each individual subject) has had considerable impact on many branches of modern thought.
龙伯高The cond of the great 'de-centrings' in twentieth-century Western thought comes from Freud's 'discovery' of the unconscious. Freud's theory that our identities, our xuality, and the structure of our desires are formed on the basis of the psychic and symbolic process of the unconscious, which function according to a 'logic' very different from that of Reason, plays havoc with the concept of the knowing and rational subject with a fixed and unified identity--the subject of Descartes's 'I think, therefore I am'. This aspect of Freud's work has also had a profound impact on modern thought in the last three decades. Psychoanalytic thinkers like Jacques Lacan, for example, read Freud as saying
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that the image of the lf as 'whole' and unified is something which the infant only gradually, partially, and with great difficulty, learns. It does not grow naturally from inside the core of the infant's being, but is formed in relation to others; especially in the complex unconscious psychic negotiations in early childhood between the child and the powerful fantasies which it has of its parental figures. In what Lacan calls the 'mirror pha' of development, the infant who is not yet coordinated, and posss no lf image as a 'whole' person, es or 'imagines' itlf reflected either literally in the mirror, or figuratively, in the 'mirror' of the other's look, as a 'whole person'. This is clo in some ways to Mead's and Cooley's 'looking glass' conception of the interactive lf; except that for them socialization was a matter of conscious learning, whereas for Freud subjectivity was the product of unconscious psychic process.家常黄花鱼
