Recent debate on the state of British culture and society has tended to
concentrate on the power of Tradition. Accounts of the crisis of British (or
English) national traditions and cultures have described the cultural
survivalism and mutation that comes in the aftermath of an exploded empire.
As Raphael Samuel argues in his account of the pathology of Tradition,
the idea of nationality continues to have a powerful, if regressive, afterlife,
and ‘the sleeping images which spring to life in times of crisis—the fear,
for instance, of being “swamped” by foreign invasion—testify to its
continuing force’ (1989:xxxii). It is a concern with the past and future of
British Tradition that has been central to Prince Charles’ declamations on
both enterprise and heritage. A ‘new Renaissance for Britain’ can be built,
he suggests, upon a new culture of enterprise; a new business ethos,
characterised by responsibility and vision, can rebuild the historical sense
of community and once again make Britain a world actor. What is also
called for, according to the Prince’s ‘personal vision’, is the revival and re-enchantment of our rich national heritage. As Patrick Wright argues, the
Prince of Wales has been sensitive to ‘the deepest disruptions and
disappointments in the nation’s post-war experience’ (1989:27), and the
Prince’s invocation of so-called traditional and spiritual values is again
intended to restore the sense of British community and confidence that has
collapsed in these modern or perhaps postmodern times.
This prevailing concern with the comforts and continuities of historical
Tradition and identity reflects an insular and narcissistic response to the
breakdown of Britain. In a psychoanalytic account of early human
development, Barry Richards describes a state of narcissistic omnipotence.
It involves protective illusions which can stand in the place of the
overwhelming anxieties to which we would be subject if the full
helplessness of our condition were borne in upon us as infants. We
can abandon these imperial illusions only to the extent that we can
face the world without them, having been convinced that it is a
sufficiently benign place for our weakness not to be catastrophic,
and having gained some faith in our growing powers of independent
functioning. (1989:38–9)
Protective illusion, we shall suggest, has also been central to the obsessive
construction of both enterprise and heritage cultures in these post-imperial
days. The real challenge that we want to consider is about confronting
imperial illusion (in both fantasy and literal senses). It is about recognising
the overwhelming anxieties and catastrophic fears that have been born out
of empire and the imperial encounter. If, in psychoanalytic terms, ‘a stable
disillusionment’ is only achieved ‘through many bruising encounters with the
other-ness of external reality’ (ibid.), then in the broader political and cultural
sphere what is called for is our recognition of other worlds, the disillusioned
acknowledgement of other cultures, other identities and ways of life.
This is what we take Homi Bhabha to mean by the responsibility of
cultural Translation. It is about taking seriously ‘the deep, the profoundly
perturbed and perturbing question of our relationship to others—other
cultures, other states, other histories, other experiences, traditions, peoples,
and destinies’ (Said, 1989:216). This responsibility demands that we come
to terms with the geographical disposition that has been so significant
for what Edward Said calls the ‘cultural structures of the West’. We could
not have had empire itself, he argues, ‘as well as many forms of
historiography, anthropology, sociology, and modern legal structures,
without important philosophical and imaginative processes at work in the
production as well as the acquisition, subordination, and settlement of
space’ (ibid.: 218). Empire has long been at the heart of British culture and imagination, manifesting itself in more or less virulent forms, through
insular nationalism and through racist paranoia. The relation of Britain
to its ‘Other’ is one profoundly important context in which to consider
the emergence of both enterprise and heritage cultures. The question is
whether, in these supposedly post-imperial times, it is possible for Britain
to accept the world as a sufficiently benign place for its weakness not to
be catastrophic. The challenge is not easy, as the Rushdie affair has made
clear, for ‘in the attempt to mediate between different cultures, languages
and societies, there is always the threat of mis-translation, confusion and
fear’ (Bhabha, 1989:35). There is also, and even more tragically, the
danger of a fearful refusal to translate: the threat of a retreat into cultural
autism and of a rearguard reinforcement of imperial illusions.
Subject: National culture in its global context 
Fri Apr 25, 2014 1:41 am
