THE REY CHOW READER

. . . Among contemporary cultural critics, Fredric Jameson is the only one I know of who has unambiguously and unapologetically affirmed the inevitability of stereotypes as something fundamental to the representation of one group by another.¹ The unique stance taken by Jameson on this controversial topic is refreshing, and it deserves a closer examination. Not surprisingly, Jameson’s statements about stereotypes are situated in his long discussion of the new field of cultural studies, a field in which representations of our others are a regular and unavoidable practice². He begins with an astonishing reference to Erving Goffmann’s classic Stigma in order to remind us that what we call “culture” is really “the ensemble of stigmata one group bears in the eyes of the other group (and vice versa)” (271). In light of the fact that Goffmann’s subject is, as indicated in the subtitle of his book, what he calls “spoiled identity”— namely, the inferior sense of self experienced by people such as cripples, deformed persons, criminals, or ethnic outcasts (Goffmann’s specific example being Jews), who are considered deviant from normative society because of their peculiar physiological, sociological, or cultural conditions—Jameson’s analogy is, to say the least, provocative.³ The reasons behind this analogy are compelling. Using Goffmann enables Jameson to argue that so-called deviance or “stigma” is actually constitutive of cultural identity itself and that that is how one group is usually perceived by another. In this manner, not only does Jameson make the conventional division between normativity and deviancy irrelevant; he has also turned (the perception of) stigmatization into the very condition, the very possibility, for cross-cultural recognition. It is, then, precisely in a stigmatized state that culture becomes “a vehicle or a medium whereby the relationship between groups is transacted.”⁴

At the same time, Jameson writes, there is nothing natural about such transactions:

The relationship between groups is, so to speak, unnatural: it is the chance external contact between entities which have only an interior (like a monad) and no exterior or external surface, save in this special circumstance in which it is precisely the outer edge of the group that—all the while remaining unrepresentable—brushes against that of the other. Speaking crudely then, we would have to say that the relationship between groups must always be one of struggle and violence. (272)

This little passage is remarkable because it defines cross-cultural contact in the unsentimental terms of a brushing against the other as a mere external surface and underscores the struggle and violence inherent to this process. One finds here not the liberalist, progressivist view that different cultures together form one big multicultural family but a reminder of the uncompromised understanding about human aggressiveness advanced by Sigmund Freud in his Civilization and Its Discontents. We recall that what bothers Freud is the widespread, traditional religious belief in universal love, a belief that is epitomized in the Judeo-Christian ideal, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). Against this moralist pinnacle of human civilization, Freud argues that there is a basic antagonism, a fundamental destructiveness, within human beings that will always show up such an ideal as a mere piety and a mass delusion rather than a reachable destination. Consequently, civilization must be understood as a permanent struggle by humankind against itself in an attempt to preserve whatever it has accomplished.⁵

If the popular indictments against stereotyping our others are read in the light of Freud’s book, they need to be recognized as the contemporary, secularized reenactments of the religious dictum “love thy neighbor as thyself”: “Do not deface your neighbor with false representations; do not refer to her by wicked, demeaning names; do not stereotype her.” In terms of the arguments about ethnicity in the previous chapter, such indictments of stereotypes should also be seen as arising from the same modernist, universalist claim about ethnicity as a condition equal to all humans, who must therefore be treated with the same degree of respect (or love) around the world.

Jameson’s contrary statements about stereotypes, on the other hand, are as unpious and unflattering as Freud’s view of human aggressiveness. Like Freud, he does not think that such acts of violence are ever entirely suppressible. Rather, it is incumbent on us to come to terms with their ineluctability:

Group loathing . . . mobilizes the classic syndromes of purity and danger, and acts out a kind of defense of the boundaries of the primary group against this threat perceived to be inherent in the Other’s very existence. Modern racism . . . is one of the most elaborated forms of such group loathing—inflected in the direction of a whole political program; it should lead us on to some reflection of the role of the stereotype in all such group or “cultural” relations, which can virtually, by definition, not do without the stereotypical. For the group as such is necessarily an imaginary entity, in the sense in which no individual mind is able to intuit it concretely. The group must be abstracted, or fantasized, on the basis of discrete individual contacts and experiences which can never be generalized in anything but abusive fashion. The relations between groups are always stereotypical insofar as they must always involve collective abstractions of the other group, no matter how sanitized, no matter how liberally censored and imbued with respect… . The liberal solution to this dilemma—doing away with the stereotypes or pretending they don’t exist—is not possible, although fortunately we carry on as though it were for most of the time.⁶

In the midst of these statements, perhaps sensing that their absolute nature would no doubt offend the piously minded, Jameson makes a small concession to the “liberal solution” by adding that “what it is politically correct to do under such circumstances is to allow the other group itself to elaborate its own preferential image, and then to work with that henceforth ‘official’ stereotype.”⁷ But the qualifying tone of this remark—“what it is politically correct to do”—has the effect rather of further strengthening his predominant argument that stereotypes are virtually indispensable. Should the politically correct solution be adopted single-mindedly, it would only raise more questions: would everything be all right if we simply let our others tell us what stereotypes to use about them? Does this mean that we should simply divide stereotypes into different categories—the good and safe on one side and the bad and incorrect on the other? How do we differentiate between them in the first place?

In other words, the understanding of stereotypes that Jameson has so succinctly delineated—namely, that it is a matter of the outer edge of one group brushing against that of another, that it is an encounter between surfaces rather than interiors— cannot really be foreclosed again by the liberalist suggestion that everyone is entitled to her own stereotypes of herself, which others should simply adopt for general use. Once the inevitability of stereotypes—now clarified as relations conducted around exteriors—is understood, the liberalist solution along the lines of cultural entitlement can no longer be a solution. A chasm has irrevocably opened up between the two ends of Jameson’s discussion.

As the politically correct go about attacking stereotypes, what is usually repressed is a paradox in the very act of criticizing stereotyping: namely, that in order to criticize stereotypes, one must somehow resort to stereotypical attitudes and presumptions. For instance, in order to repudiate a certain attitude as racist stereotyping, one would, to begin with, need to have already formed certain attitudes toward that attitude, to have stereotyped it or marked it as uniformly possessing a distinguishing set of traits. In other words, any charge that others are stereotyping inevitably involves, whether or not one is conscious of it, one’s own participation in the same activity. In Mireille Rosello’s words, “there is a stereotype of the stereotype: the stereotype is always bad, simplistic, idiotic.” When “attacked as a unit of truth, it takes its revenge by forcing speaking into an act of mimesis.”⁸ This tendency of stereotypes to force even—perhaps especially—their most severe critics to inhabit or become what they are criticizing points to a fundamental discrepancy in representation—between intention and manner, signified and signifier. Insofar as stereotypes are generalizations that seek to encapsulate reality in particular forms, they are not essentially different from the artificial or constructed makeup of all representations. Where stereotypes differ is in the obviousness and exaggeration of their reductive mode—the unabashed nature of their mechanicity and repetitiveness.

Thus, behind the specific disapproval of stereotypes is, in fact, a general anxiety over the purity of language and speech (or representation) and, with that, an age-old demand for conciseness and correctness, qualities that are perpetually in conflict with the way language and speech actually operate. The demand that stereotypes be eliminated is inevitably the demand for a kind of (boundary and thus ethnicity) cleansing. As in the case of all attempts to cleanse speech, this is also a demand for the kind of violence that is censorship. But more disturbing is the fact that such a demand carries within it an implicit acknowledgment of the dangerous potential residing in that which it wants to eliminate. With stereotypes, I would argue that this dangerous potential is not, as is usually assumed, their conventionality and formulaicness but rather their capacity for creativity and originality. To put it more bluntly still, the potential, and hence danger, of stereotypes is that they are able to conflate these two realms of representational truisms—the conventional and the formulaic, on the one hand, and the creative and the original/originating, on the other—when, for obvious reasons of propriety, they ought to be kept separate.

The best instance of such a conflation is the use of stereotypes by political regimes themselves, whether or not they are recognizably repressive. Anyone who has had any experience with the operations of political regimes knows that the use of stereotypes, especially racial stereotypes, is a regular strategy for constructing a mythic other to be relied on for purposes of war, imperialism, national defense, and protectionism. Examples of such mythic others abound in history—the Jew in the Nazi regime, the Jap in U.S. propaganda during the Second World War, the Africans and South Asians who, even though previously colonized by Great Britain, must be barred from “invading” Great Britain, the Hispanic wetbacks who are said to contribute to the economic malaise of the border states in the United States, and the Arab and Turkish guest workers who are being denied basic legal rights in such European countries as France and Germany. The list can go on and on. As Richard Dyer writes, the most important function of the stereotype is

to maintain sharp boundary definitions, to define clearly where the pale ends and thus who is clearly within and who clearly beyond it. Stereotypes do not only, in concert with social types, map out the boundaries of acceptable and legitimate behaviour, they also insist on boundaries exactly at those points where in reality there are none.⁹

When a community, under the leadership of a government, decides to draw a boundary between itself and what is not itself, racial stereotypes are typically deployed as a way to project onto an other all the things that are supposedly alien. In the light of an idealized group identity to be guarded in its purity, such stereotypes (of unwelcome others) are, indeed, demons—bad figures to be exorcised.

At the same time, what the successful use of stereotypes by political regimes has proved is not simply that stereotypes are clichéd, unchanging forms but also—and much more importantly—that stereotypes are capable of engendering realities that do not exist. The fantastic figures of the Jew, the Jap, and the wetback have all produced substantive political consequences, from deportation to incarceration to genocide or ethnic cleansing. Contrary to the charge that they are misrepresentations, therefore, stereotypes have demonstrated themselves to be effective, realistic political weapons capable of generating belief, commitment, and action. His astute insight into the irreducible nature of stereotypy in cultural relations notwithstanding, Jameson has, it seems to me, stopped short of elaborating the issue of power differentials in the very deployment of stereotypes. Such an elaboration would have helped explain how and why stereotypes can be so controversial and explosive under specific circumstances, while under other circumstances the act of stereotyping can pass for acceptable or even conscionable speech. As Dyer puts it, “it is not stereotypes . . . that are wrong, but who controls and defines them, what interests they serve” (12). For instance, in the United States, there is a much higher intolerance of anti-Jewish than of anti-Islamic representations, to the extent that Bill Clinton could, in his public statements as the U.S. president, repeatedly refer to an Islamic head of state such as Saddam Hussein by his first name without raising eyebrows. (To understand the absurdity of this situation, we need only to imagine what it would be like were Clinton himself to be repeatedly referred to as “Bill” in public speeches made by other government leaders. What is disturbing, nevertheless, is not simply his irreverent use of “Saddam” but also its apparent acceptance by the American public.)¹⁰ Similarly, as Rosemary J. Coombe writes,

It is . . . inconceivable that a vehicle could be marketed as “a wandering Jew,” but North Americans rarely bat an eyelash when a Jeep Cherokee© passes them on the road or an advertisement for a Pontiac© flashes across their television screens. More people may know Oneida© as a brand of silverware than as the name of a people and a nation.

A third instance: The racist rejection of black people is equally common among Asians both in Asia and within the United States, but often it is only white people’s stereotypes of blacks that receive media attention. Could this be because it is not only the stereotypes themselves but also the power behind their use that accounts for their perceived atrocity, that really counts as it were—so that the question of who is being stereotyped becomes—in this instance, at least—subordinate to that of who is doing the stereotyping and who is accepting/endorsing it? If this is the case, then doesn’t it mean that the phenomenon of stereotyping is far more tricky than hitherto thought, because the perception or awareness of stereotypes—that is, at those times when we happen critically to notice such representations—may itself already be following a certain stereotypical pattern, the pattern of focusing predominantly on the powers that be? . . .