Contradiction

In this blog post, I would like to address some of the issues that we discussed in class on Thursday concerning Lisa Lowe’s chapter “Imagining Los Angeles in the Production of Multiculturalism,” specifically her use of the term “contradiction.” I had no trouble following Lowe’s argument about Blade Runner, or her criticisms of the celebratory multiculturalism of the 1990 Los Angeles Festival of the Arts. However, what I am still trying to work out is exactly what kind of relationship to texts/cultural productions Lowe imagines as ideal. If multiculturalism “levels the important differences and contradictions within and among racial and ethnic minority groups” as a means to maintain the “consensus that permits the present hegemony” (Lowe 86), how do we manage to articulate culture without supporting the power structure and status quo? The solution that Lowe purposes is to understand culture, “not in terms of identity, equivalence, or pluralism but out of contradiction, as a site for alternative histories and memories that provide the grounds to imagine subject, community, and practice in new ways” (Lowe 96). According to Lowe, a text that operates “through contradiction” would “begin to address the systemic inequalities built into cultural institutions, economies and geographies” (Lowe 96). I think what is clearest about the term “contradiction” is the relationship between the critic and the text: a “contradictory” critic should focus on texts that restore history to the discourses of immigrant/ethnic minorities. However, I am uncertain about what qualities might make a text “contradictory” or worthy of “contradictory” interpretation.

Perhaps Anne Anlin Cheng’s book The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief provides us with a way to gage the “contradictoriness” of a text: a “contradictory” cultural production would emphasize grief rather than grievance. According to this logic, both Sa-I-Gu and Twilight would fit neatly in Lowe’s category.

Ultimately, my biggest problem with “contradiction” is that it reduces cultural productions and critical readings to ethical imperatives: a text is only deemed worthy if it is “contradictory.” I prefer Jodi Kim’s term “unsettling hermeneutic” to Lowe’s “contradiction” because Kim’s term addresses the aesthetic and formal experience of text in addition to the ethics of interpretation and readership.