Jeffreys sees contamination where I see cross-fertilisation (although even as I write that, I'm aware that gay male culture and straight culture 'learn'/take a lot less from dyke culture than the other way round).
Or, is it that, in some cases, not so much that the subordinate culture is not "learned" from or doesn't have a lot "taken" from it, but it's that the subordinate culture has to "cite" its borrowings from the dominant one, pay for the goods it uses, whereas the dominant culture can use the subordinate one as a kind of "natural resource" and not "pay" for its borrowings, i.e., "takings"? Is it the economics that's the problem and the asymmetrical rules, rather than the degree of giving and taking?
But I'm very interested in your use of that word "contamination." I've been playing for some years with the idea that the desire for purity is itself always (yes, I think pretty much always?) a kind of violence, and then along comes Kwame Anthony Appiah's argument against notions of cultural purity and in favor of a kind of modest cosmpolitanism. Here's his conclusion, which quotes one of the wisest lines ever, from Terence, and provides an interesting context for it:
Our guide to what is going on here might as well be a former African slave named Publius Terentius Afer, whom we know as Terence. Terence, born in Carthage, was taken to Rome in the early second century B.C., and his plays - witty, elegant works that are, with Plautus's earlier, less-cultivated works, essentially all we have of Roman comedy - were widely admired among the city's literary elite. Terence's own mode of writing - which involved freely incorporating any number of earlier Greek plays into a single Latin one - was known to Roman littérateurs as "contamination."
It's an evocative term. When people speak for an ideal of cultural purity, sustaining the authentic culture of the Asante or the American family farm, I find myself drawn to contamination as the name for a counterideal. Terence had a notably firm grasp on the range of human variety: "So many men, so many opinions" was a line of his. And it's in his comedy "The Self-Tormentor" that you'll find what may be the golden rule of cosmopolitanism - Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto; "I am human: nothing human is alien to me." The context is illuminating. A busybody farmer named Chremes is told by his neighbor to mind his own affairs; the homo sum credo is Chremes's breezy rejoinder. It isn't meant to be an ordinance from on high; it's just the case for gossip. Then again, gossip - the fascination people have for the small doings of other people - has been a powerful force for conversation among cultures.
The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of "mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless process of imitation and revision.
A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don't have all the answers. They're humble enough to think that they might learn from strangers; not too humble to think that strangers can't learn from them. Few remember what Chremes says after his "I am human" line, but it is equally suggestive: "If you're right, I'll do what you do. If you're wrong, I'll set you straight."
Appiah argues that much of cultural change for the better has to do with just getting used to the presence of "others" and so I think would agree with Saturn's Nod's revision of Audre Lorde, I believe it is possible to use the masters' tools to dismantle the masters' house, but only if they are thoroughly washed first.
But I've also been thinking about this metaphor for a long time. I think it does need to be tempered with thought and a dash of awareness that, like Flyboy eloquently said above, we all have blindspots. Even as we critique others, we retain them.
I'm not sure that tools dismantle the master's house, at all, or that dismantling, and the quicker the better, is the goal. The more I think about this metaphor in a literal sense, thinking about the way bombs blow up houses in Iraq in order to create "freedom," thinking about how, in order to kill a "terrorist" for this abstract goal, we have to accept a whole lot of "collateral damage," I wonder: should we be wanting to "dismantle" houses? And if so, how?
Do we know who else, besides the much maligned "master" lives in the house? To what degree *can* they all be held responsible for the goings on there? If we blow up the house and all its contents, will the others (animals, kids, workers, etc.), and maybe even the master, be able to make any kind of a life? Is our job to torture him with homelessness as some kind of expiation for his sins? If we feel even a bit tenderly to him in a homeless state, if we are aware of the fact that loss feels different for all humans from the other human experience of never having had something in the first place in complex ways, are we just sell outs?
No matter how "pure" our intentions, will we be able to communicate at all with any of the inhabitants if we've simply blown up the house? If we've blown it up and walked away? Does that matter?
Or is my idea of 'blowing up' the house itself an assumption built on a "master's" way of doing things? Is "dismantling" the house, carefully, lovingly, some kind of real alternative? Using the bits to create better houses? With "clean" tools? Or?
I want to say something about listening and talking back, "setting [the other] straight" as Terence's character says. The hardest thing about mass culture being that it's very difficult to talk back to and be HEARD, making us feel like the only way we can be heard is by "blowing things up," literally or metaphorically. |
