Timothy Brennan

"The Economic Image-Function of the Periphery"

Abstract:

This paper addresses the economic/cultural assumptions many of us employ in cultural theory. It develops from the thesis that the practice of cultural theorists (not simply in literature departments, but in anthropology and history as well) work with a set of received ideas about the economy which are never tested against the work actually being done among economists themselves, or social critics who have researched the actual economic indicators. The central question is: Is the 3-w only a threatening image of devastation (a negative persuasion)? Or is it freedom from modernity's libidos-for-sale? Do either of these important auras surrounding the metropolitan fixation on the 3-w (even though they are opposites) translate into an actual value -- one with tangible material benefits? I'm interested not only in still unresolved issues that are familiar -- e.g., whether or not western wealth is based on peripheral poverties; whether the colonies post-1492 can be said to have created capitalist modernity; but also whether the image of the third world as destitution is an important adjunct of domestic discipline? of purported inferiority (or contrarily, escape from a business- driven disciplinarity). And what of its accounting for high standards of material living in the West that do not have to do with profit-generation and imaginative escape at the same time, as passive outlet? -- the place, for example, where manufacturing goes on in the so-called "post-industrial" economy; where the messy byproducts of modernity can be dumped as toxic waste; where the air polluted in the North is scrubbed by "undeveloped" stretches of Amazonian jungle, where Salvadoran earthquake victims are given shelter provided they listen to the preaching of evangelical protestant missionaries?