#jonathan rutherford

[thesociologicalcinema]

Identity marks the conjuncture of our past with the social, cultural and economic relations we live within. 'Each individual is the synthesis not only of existing relations but of the history of these relations. He is a precis of the past.

Jonathan Rutherford, "Identity: Community, Culture, Difference," 1990

[kanlage-blog]

homi bhabha, jonathan rutherford's interview with homi bhabha (1990)

i try to talk about hybridity through a psychoanalytic analogy, so that identification is a process of identifying with and through another object, an object of otherness, at which point the agency of identification - the subject - is itself always ambivalent, because of the intervention of that otherness. but the importance of hybridity is that it bears the traces of those feelings and practices which inform it, just like a translation, so that hybridity puts together the traces of certain other meanings or discourses. it does not give them the authority of being prior in the sense of being original: they are prior only in the sense of being anterior. the process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.

[kanlage-blog]

homi bhabha, jonathan rutherford's interview with homi bhabha (1990)

the sign of the 'cultured' or the 'civilised' attitude is the ability to appreciate cultures in a kind of musée imaginaire; as though one should be able to collect and appreciate them. western connoisseurship is the capacity to understand and locate cultures in a universal time-frame that acknowledges their various historical and social contexts only eventually to transcend them and render them transparent.

[sharpened--edges]

Richard Seymour, New Left Project