Making difference: Homi K. Bhabha on the legacy of the culture wars - Writing the '80s

IN EMPIRE, MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI'S ENCOMIUM TO a deterritorialized global politics of the present, the authors provide an impassioned response to the proclivities of the politics of difference that emerged in the '80s. The wide influence of this polemical work is a consequence of its commitment to understanding the emergent force of the "multitude" as it constructs a world that "continually transgresses territorial and racial boundaries." (2). From the perspective of Empire, the '80s represent a moment of transition, an opening up of quests, and questions, beyond the static sovereignties of the "essentialist" modern "subject" and the "foundationalist" nation-state. Postmodernism and postcolonialism, the twin peaks of '80s theoretical thinking, were symptomatic discourses of the period, providing a critical perspective on its immanent structures while being unable to keep up with the rapid transformations of globalized capitalism. They bravely battled against the Manichaean master narratives of moder n sovereignty, Hardt and Negri concede, unsettling the binary logic of "Self and Other, white and black, inside and outside, ruler and ruled." (3) However, despite their fine intentions and critical intelligence, these post-masters who deployed postmodernism and poststructuralism in their critique of global capitalism failed to realize that corporate capital and the global markets operated programs of economic power that were themselves, in most respects, "postmodern" and had absorbed the lessons of mobility, indeterminacy, and hybridity avant la lettre: Patriotism is an enemy to profitability, once money takes on the multifarious colors of the multinational state. The butt of the postmodern or postcolonial attack on global corporate power loses its point because global markets have presciently absorbed the truths of postmodern and, in their turn, butt these time-warped theories in the ... ocks. "Power has evacuated the bastion that they [postmodernists and postcolonialists] are attacking and has circled arou nd to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference." (4) Is the work of the '80s done and finished with, as Hardt and Negri suggest, and is the politics of difference hoist by its own petard?

It would be heartening to believe--as Empire would have us--that global power has deserted the bastions of binary thinking. The aftermath of 9/11 has, I believe, made even more urgent the '80s endeavor to think of issues relating to political and cultural difference beyond the polarities of power and identity. The reasons for such a revival of '80s thinking are close at hand. Immediately after the World Trade Center attacks there was a worldwide resurgence of Samuel Huntington's thesis on the "clash of civilizations," with righteous Islam ranged against the liberal, Christian West--an argument that the author himself was in the process of revising. More recently, with Iraq in our sights, there is another ruling binary in our midst--this time known as the bipolarity of global power. In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times (February 16, 2003), Thomas L. Friedman argues that 9/11 has introduced a new division of the globe--the World of Order and the World of Disorder: