Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

Thirdings

Thirdings 57 Suggesting a space of translation occupied by hybrid forms of communication , the improvised meeting place outlined here naturally suggests kinship with the well-known and roughly contemporary concepts of third space (Homi Bhabha) and ThirdSpace (Edward Soja); in fact, cultural studies texts and theses regularly bracket these ideas together. This is flattering , and in seeking to differentiate the dynamics of the meeting place from their larger theorizations of a politically emancipatory intercultural domain, the object is not to prove either priority or superiority. Quite the reverse, the description of colonial encounter that discloses a postcolonial potential is probably the concrete everyday performance of encounter that Bhabha’s and Soja’s concepts subtend if and when they are translated from the abstract realm of the postcolonial to the actual conduct of intercultural relations. The publication of Communicating in the Third Space afforded these distinguished writers an opportunity to reflect on their fundamental contribution to the “spatial turn” in the social sciences.1 Their summations offer a convenient summary against which the spatiotemporal dynamics of the meeting place can be measured and differentiated. When in The Location of Culture Homi Bhabha enunciated the possibility of a third space, he identified it with a situation where colonizer and colonized were involved in an act of “cultural translation.” Examples of wilful or strategic mistranslation suggested to him the “emergence of a dialogical site—a moment of enunciation, identification, negotiation—that was suddenlydivestedofitsmasteryorsovereigntyinthemidstofamarkedlyasym metrical and unequal engagement of forces.”2 In a manner that recalls Gadamer’s advocacy of a dialogical encounter with the historical canon, Bhabha saw this third space as offering a way out 58 thirdings of European “subjectivism”: as “a challenge to the limits of the self in the act of reaching out to what is liminal in the historic experience, and in the cultural representation, of other peoples, times, languages, texts.”3 The vehicle of this revision is translation, the fact that, in passing from one language to another,allkindsofslippagesareinevitable.ThecriticalinnovationBhabha makes is to ascribe a positive value to the misreadings, inversions, and other subversions of the authoritative voice: “It is the openness or ‘emptiness’ of the signifier—the untranslatable movement between the intended object and its mode of intention—that enables a speech-act to become the bearer of motivated meanings and deliberative intentions, in situ, at the moment of its enunciation.”4 This elegant and subtle formulation certainly captures the human and political potential of first contact scenes. However, my account of, or interest in, them differs in two ways. Firstly, it is not the devising of a new mode of translation that interests me but “the untranslatable movement” itself. Secondly, I think that this suspended instant, or midstride opening toward the other, becomes available to study when its mimetic constitution is understood. The consequence of these propositions is that we can materialize the work of what might be called sign production. The echoic mimicry of repeated word sounds or the rapid, instantaneous, and almost involuntary mimicking of gestures represents an economy of communication that does not depend for its value on a later, reflective translation into cognitively apprehensible signs. Bhabha is surely right to affirm that “the specificity of signification cannot be reproduced in an imitative sense; itcanonlybere-presentedasaniterative,re-initiationofmeaningthatawakens the sign (as mode of intention) to another, analogical linguistic life.”5 The passage from locomotory mirrorings to empathetic understandings of the other’s intentions creates a stable relationship, but not one that can be abstracted and carried away or translated into pure concepts. The contract of reciprocities remains tied to, and in some sense productive of, the place ofexchange.Inshort,“themotivatedmeaningsanddeliberativeintentions” emerge and are inseparable from the choreographic structuring of the performance —whereas, as Soja points out, Bhabha’s third space is “occasionally on the edge of being a spatially ungrounded literary trope.”6 There is no question that in coining the term ThirdSpace Soja is talking about physical spaces. It may be “a metaphor for the necessity to keep the consciousness of and the theorisation of spatiality radically open.”7 Soja sees his concept contributing to “a new cultural politics of difference, thirdings 59 distinctive features of which are to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity.”8 At the same time, influenced by Lefebvre’s meta-Marxist notion of “‘spatio-analysis,’ the analysis, or better, the knowledge of the (social) production of (social) space...