Metonymy Not Fragments

“Richard Rorty suggests that ‘ solidarity has to be constructed out of little pieces, rather than found already waiting, in the form of an ur-language which all of us recognize when we hear it.’ (Bhabha p. 336)


Foucault suggests that the sign of modernity is a form of decipherment whose value must be sought in petit recits, imperceptible events in signs apparently without meaning and value - - empty and eccentric - - in events that are outside the ‘great events’ of history. (Bhabha p. 348).


“. . . the figure of the ‘human’ comes to be authorized.” (Bhabha p. 339)



For years, and since I am 49 years old I mean decades, I have sensed that there is something to be found in the minutia of life which when pieced together allowed a meaning to unfold which provided a deeper understanding of the world than one would expect. I will show you fear “in a handful of dust,” as Eliot pontificated. Or Blake’s more positive eternity in a grain of sand. And this might be a mundane story, but then that is the point: When I was in elementary school, I felt there was some kind of grand meaning maker (a godlike creature) because whenever we were studying something in class, like Greek Gods, or looking at how prisms fragmented light into rainbows, then somewhere else in the world I would see the same thing or something similar. On TV there would be a show about the Gods (Clash of the Titans kind of thing) or I would notice in “The Golden Book Encyclopedias” my parents had bought for us a picture of Newton with a prism, so I would read the entry on Newton. The godlike creature I have come to realize was me. (No, I am not being narssisistic; yes I know I have that tendancy). It was just my brain taking notice of the patterns presented to it. The brain is a pattern seeking organ; and mine was working just fine at the time. I was beginning to piece together the meaning of my world with what I had at hand: a bricoluer to use a fancy academic word.

It is in the small events; the atoms and molecules that slip through the membrane seperating one space from another, where the meaning, the difference, occurs. The cumulative whole of the details create the meaning, not neccessarily the frame of the “great events of history” although that as well can be seen as one of the petit recits. Although in many ways it is the great events that become the dominant force through which we, as individuals and as a culture, become (in that incredibly violent expression) authorized. We are written into existance by the empty and eccentric signs that we read; a language that no one speaks but ‘which all of us recognize when we hear it.’ And it is this ur-language we (italics mine) all recognize that is the third space, it is neither created by us or upon us as individuals or hegemonic culture onto the colonial (interpreted) culture, but rather it is all of the bits, all of the atoms, and quarks and Clash of the Titans and pictures of Newton in interaction with one another where the Location of Culture resides. “Every atom of me is an atom of you,” -- Walt Whitman.