[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.But at other points speech is the vehicle of exclusion, separation andunmapping; it fosters not the positive and warm cosmopolitanism witnessed at theAcropolis but a negative cosmopolitanism of anomic wandering or homelessness,exemplified in the plight of Tap Axton s character, Orville Benton.18 The narrativepositioning of the Acropolis episode suggests, however, that the version of speech itoffers can be read as a nostalgic compensation for precisely this sense ofhomelessness.19 For it follows directly upon the collapse of Axton s mapping projectsand the revelation of the real extent of his inability to understand the geopoliticalconditions of his own cosmopolitan existence.First the quest for the cult peters outinconclusively in the desert, the primal encounter with death being at once deferredand multiply mediated through Brademas s reporting of his only partial witness ofthe ritual act.Then, the attempt to decode the conspiracy involving the Greeknationalist, Eliades, is bungled; Eliades slips away and the episode ends with Axtonstill unsure whether he himself, rather than David Keller, was the intended victimof the shooting.Finally, and most devastatingly, Axton learns that the corporationfor which he works has been exposed as a CIA information gathering service andthat his boss, Rowser, has been trying, in a series of heavily disguised hints, to alerthim to this fact.It is in this welter of unmapping that the world system finally becomes evident toAxton, but in negative form.The connections he has so assiduously soughtthrough the cult and through Eliades (who has come to seem to him more and morethe means of some connection ) have been present, obscure and yet determining allalong in his insertion into the complex systems, endless connections that link thecircuits of deterritorialised capital to the geopolitical agencies of state power in theglobal economy (Names: pp.225, 313).The epiphany at the Acropolis can then beunderstood as Axton s attempt to reinsert himself into an alternative, universalsynchronic system language whose reach is commensurate with that of globalcapital, but whose connections are not decentring and determining but ultimatelyhumane and reassuring.We might say that the embrace of speech is, in theterminology of Jacques Derrida, a compensatory invocation of the metaphysics ofpresence to counteract the absence revealed by Axton s encounter with thestructural conditions of his existence.Moreover, the resort to a high place the Acropolis at this moment can also beread as compensation for the crisis of Axton s professional symbolic-analytic skills.His inability to read the geopolitical machinations into which he is inserted (andwhich he unwittingly serves) belies his image of himself as someone with intellectual range , with a view that was broader than the underwriter s or thestatistician s.The belated pilgrimage to the high place according to Bruce Robbinsthe metaphorical location habitually associated with professional detachment thus represents an attempt to reassert the broadness of view that has been exposedas purblind and, as such, amenable to the manipulations of power (Robbins, 1993:pp.141 7).It is an attempt to redeem that state of professionalism that we haveseen is inescapable for Axton, to reassert professionalism as intellectual range andbreadth of vision rather than blind involvement with blind might , and toNATIONAL ALLEGORY AND THE ROMANCE OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT: THE NAMES 201reimagine its fundamental condition of estrangement positively, as analyticaldetachment and elevated perspective (Names: pp.48, 317, 330).This, however, is not easily done.For it is precisely at this moment of unmappingthat Axton s professional identity is most at issue and most paradoxical.The bungledattempt to decode Eliades s nationalist entanglements leaves Axton feeling worse than the dumbest amateur.This is not the good amateurism already discussed,but a bad amateurism defined as foolishness, ignorance, lack of symbolic-analyticexpertise.Yet while he behaves like an amateur, Axton continues to pass for aprofessional.Indeed, he is deemed to be at his most professional when his blindnessand ignorance are acutest
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]