For culture—the weaker, more secular version of that thing called religion—is not a “substance” or a phenomenon in its own right, it is an objective mirage that arises out of the relationship between at least two groups.1 This is to say that no group “has” a culture all by itself: culture is the nimbus perceived by one group when it comes into contact with and observes another one. It is the objectification of everything alien and strange about the contact group: in this context, it is of no little interest to observe that one of the first books on the interrelationship of groups (the constitutive role of the boundary, the way each group is defined by and defines the other) draws on Erving Goffman’s Stigma for an account of how defining marks function for other people: in this sense, then, a “culture” is the ensemble of stigmata one group bears in the eyes of the other group (and vice versa). But such marks are more often projected into the “alien mind” in the form of that thought-of-the-other we call belief and elaborate as religion. But belief in this sense is not something we ourselves have, since what we do seems to us natural and does not need the motivation and rationalization of this strange internalized entity; and indeed the anthropologist Rodney Needham has shown that most “cultures” do not possess the equivalent of our concept, or pseudoconcept, of belief (which is thus unmasked as something the translators illicitly project back into nonimperial, noncosmopolitan languages).
Still, it happens that “we” also often speak of “our own” culture, religion, beliefs, or whatever. These may now be identified as the recuperation of the Other’s view of us; of that objective mirage whereby the Other has formed a picture of us as “having” a culture: depending on the power of the Other, this alienated image demands a response, which may be as inconsequential as the denial whereby Americans brush off the stereotypes of the “ugly American” they encounter abroad, or as thoroughgoing as the various ethnic revivals whereby, as in Hindu nationalism, a people reconstructs those stereotypes and affirms them in a new cultural–nationalist politics: something which is never the “return” to an older authentic reality but always a new construction (out of what look like older materials).
Culture must thus always be seen as a vehicle or a medium whereby the relationship between groups is transacted. If it is not always vigilantly unmasked as an idea of the Other (even when I reassume it for myself), it perpetuates the optical illusions and the false objectivism of this complex historical relationship (thus the objections that have been made to pseudoconcepts like “society” are even more valid for this one, whose origin in group struggle can be deciphered). Meanwhile, to insist on this translation program (the imperative to turn concepts of culture back into forms of the relationship between collective groups) offers a more satisfactory way of fulfilling the objectives of the various forms of a sociological Heisenberg principle than does the current individualistic recommendation to reckon back in the place of the observer. In reality, the anthropologist-other, the individual observer, stands in for a whole social group, and it is in this sense that his knowledge is a form of power, where “knowledge” designates something individual, and “power” tries to characterize that mode of relationship between groups for which our vocabulary is so poor.
For 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 or violence: for the only positive or tolerant way for them to coexist is to part from one another and rediscover their isolation and their solitude. Each group is thus the entire world, the collective is the fundamental form of the monad, windowless and unbounded (at least from within).
But this failure or omission of a plausible, let alone a “natural” set of attitudes whereby group relations might be conducted, means that the two fundamental forms of group relationship reduce themselves to the primordial ones of envy and loathing, respectively. The oscillation back and forth between these poles can at least in part be explained by prestige (to use one of Gramsci’s categories): an attempt to appropriate the culture of the other group (which as we have already seen in effect means inventing the “culture” of the other group) is a tribute and a form of group recognition, the expression of collective envy, the acknowledgment of the prestige of the other group. It seems likely that this prestige is not to be too quickly reduced to matters of power, since very often larger and more powerful groups pay this tribute to the groups they dominate, whose forms of cultural expression they borrow and imitate. Prestige is thus more plausibly an emanation of group solidarity, something a weaker group often needs to develop more desperately than the larger complacent hegemonic one, which nonetheless dimly senses its own inner lack of the same cohesion and unconsciously regrets its tendential dissolution as a group as such. “Groupie-ism” is another strong expression of this kind of envy, but on an individual basis, as members of the dominant “culture” opt out and mimic the adherence to the dominated. (And after all that has been said, it is probably not necessary to add that groupies are thus already in this sense potential or proto-intellectuals.)
As for group loathing, however, it 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 (as opposed, in other words, to postmodern or “neo” 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 on 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. 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. But the inevitability of the stereotypical—and the persistence of the possibility of group loathing, racism, caricature, and all the rest it cannot but bring with it—is not thereby laid to rest. Utopia could therefore, under those circumstances, only mean two different kinds of situations which might in fact turn out to be the same: a world in which only individuals confronted one another, in the absence of groups; or a group isolated from the rest of the world in such a way that the matter of the external stereotype (or “ethnic identity”) never arose in the first place. The stereotype is indeed the place of an illicit surplus of meaning, what Barthes called the “nausea” of mythologies: it is the abstraction by virtue of which my individuality is allegorized and turned into an abusive illustration of something else, something nonconcrete and nonindividual. (“I don’t join organizations or adopt labels,” says a character in a recent movie. “You don’t have to,” replies his friend, “You’re a Jew!”) But 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.
Groups are thus always conflictual; and this is what has led Donald Horowitz, in the definitive study of international ethnic conflict, to suggest that although what he takes to be Marxism’s economic or class account of such conflicts is unsatisfactory. Marx may have unwittingly anticipated a fundamental feature of modern ethnic theory in his notion of the necessarily dichotomous structure of class conflict as such: ethnic conflicts, indeed, are for Horowitz always tendentially dichotomous, each side ending up incorporating the various smaller satellite ethnic groups in such a way as to symbolically reenact a version of Gramscian hegemony and Gramscian hegemonic or historic blocs as well. But classes in that sense do not precede capitalism and there is no single-shot Marxian theory of “economic” causality: the economic is most often the forgotten trigger for all kinds of noneconomic developments, and the emphasis on it is heuristic and has to do with the structure of the various disciplines (and what they structurally occult or repress), rather than with ontology. What Marxism has to offer ethnic theory is probably, on the contrary, the suggestion that ethnic struggles might well be clarified by an accompanying question about class formation as such.
Fully realized classes, indeed, classes in and for themselves, “potential” or structural classes that have finally by all kinds of complicated historical and social processes achieved what is often called “class consciousness,” are clearly also groups in our sense (although groups in our sense are rarely classes as such). Marxism suggests two kinds of things about these peculiar and relatively rare types of groups. The first is that they have much greater possibilities for development than ethnic groups: they can potentially expand to become coterminous with society as a whole (and do so, during those unique and punctual events we call revolutions), whereas the groups are necessarily limited by their own specific self-definition and constitutive characteristics. Ethnic conflict can thus develop and expand into class conflict, whereas the degeneration of class conflict into ethnic rivalry is a restrictive and centripetal development.
(Indeed, the alternation of envy and loathing constitutes an excellent illustration of the dialectic of class and group in action: whatever group or identity investment may be at work in envy, its libidinal opposite always tends to transcend the dynamics of the group relationship in the direction of that of class proper. Thus, anyone who observed the deployment of group and identity hatred in the 1992 Republican National Convention—the race and gender hostility so clearly marked in the speeches and the faces of characteristic “cultural counterrevolutionaries” like Pat Buchanan—understood at once that it was fundamentally class hostility and class struggle that was the deeper stake in such passions and their symbolisms. By the same token, the observers who felt that symbolism and responded to the Republican Right in kind can also be said to have had their smaller group-and-identity consciousness “raised” in the direction of the ultimate horizon of social class.)
The second point follows from this one, namely that it is only after the modulation of the ethnic into the class category that a possible resolution of such struggles is to be found. For in general, ethnic conflict cannot be solved or resolved; it can only be sublimated into a struggle of a different kind that can be resolved. Class struggle, which has as its aim and outcome, not the triumph of one class over another but the abolition of the very category of class, offers the prototype of one such sublimation. The market and consumption—that is to say, what is euphemistically called modernization, the transformation of the members of various groups into the universal consumer—is another kind of sublimation, which has come to look equally as universal as the classless one but which perhaps owes its success predominantly to the specific circumstances of the postfeudal North American commonwealth, and the possibilities of social leveling that arose with the development of the mass media. This is the sense in which “American democracy” has seemed able to preempt class dynamics and to offer a unique solution to the matter of group dynamics discussed above. We therefore need to take into account the possibility that the various politics of Difference—the differences inherent in the various politics of “group identity”—have been made possible only by the tendential leveling of social Identity generated by consumer society; and to entertain the hypothesis that a cultural politics of difference becomes itself feasible only when the great and forbidding categories of classical Otherness have been substantially weakened by “modernization” (so that current neoethnicities may be distinct from the classical kind as neo-racism is from classical racism).
But this does not spell a waning of group antagonisms but precisely the opposite (as can be judged from the current world scene), and it is also to be expected that Cultural Studies itself—as a space in which the new group dynamics develop—will also entail its quotient of the libidinal. The energy exchanges or ion formations of “articulation” are not, indeed, likely to take place neutrally, but to release violent waves of affect—narcissistic wounds, feelings of envy and inferiority, the intermittent repugnance for the others’ groups.