ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter is devoted to a more systematic inspection of the precarious relationship between ‘situated’ knowledge, the topology of strangerhood, and the opportunities for intellectual originality, creativity and innovation. Its purpose is to weigh the time-honoured Sorelian adage that ‘one must be outside in order to see properly’ (cf. Berth 1926:25) against the epistemological vigilance which we have come to adopt as a result of the foregoing studies of intellectual spokespersonship, which have illustrated the depth of the ambiguity of speaking for the social and of defining the situation for situated knowledges. Performances of identity (of the proletariat, of the intellectuals, of women, of ethnic belonging), we noticed, imply a circular play of definition which co-produces what it names; and this logic also reflexively extends to the role of the outsider or the condition of strangerhood itself (cf. Bauman 1991:75ff). Normality and strangeness, centre and margin, are not objective placings but relational performances or forms of classificatory ordering which require an incessant work of definition in order to be held steady. Centres may be redefined as peripheral, while peripheries may be centralized; marginal people may redefine themselves as central, while ‘centrals’ may pose as ‘eccentrics’; the polarization itself is probably too crude to accommodate the various tangles, permeations, and liminal shifts (the various ‘third’ positions) which I have tried to identify in my preceding studies. Instead of being mythified as a counter-hegemonic space, a place of resistance against the concentrated normality of the centre, the margin could be a far more complex ‘heterotopian’ zone where order meets and mingles with disorder (cf. Hetherington 1997; 1998:123ff; Soja 1966). In view of these uncertainties and circularities of the work of (de) centering, what precisely is left of our Sorelian intuition about privileged vision and ‘making a difference’ from an ex-centric position?
