Karatani's post-colonial amendment to the Kantian question of beauty posits that what is really at work is "bracketing," or the process of separating, or pushing aside, certain issues to focus on a few in particular. Specifically, aestheticentricism happens when a person or a group looks at one culture by bracketing their people, their lifestyle, and their other contributions solely to examine their art. A colonizing culture often will forget to "unbracket" the colonized culture, minimizing their importance to that of their aesthetic contributions.
I'd like to examine the idea of bracketing and unbracketing when it comes to a quote from Spivak. Spivak inserts herself into the archive by telling the story of her experience searching for the Rani, and on page 239, claims, "Unlike the archives, where the past is already digested as the raw material for history writing, the past here is a past of memory, which constitutes something differently in different subjects interconnecting." She goes on to say that her Rani "can be invoked," and is at the "shadow-border of the prehistory of this colonial/postcolonial (dis)continuity," but that she cannot be "commemorated" (240). Spivak distinguishes, then, between the past of the archive, of the physical, scholarly iteration of the past, and the memory. In fact, it is the archive which has already been "digested," or interpreted, processed until it fits within the dominant discourse. But memory cannot be fit into the hegemonic discourse in the same way. It is interconnected, not digestible in the same way. This is how the Rani remains. And in that sense, memory avoids bracketing. Memory's interconnectivity makes it unable to be bracketed successfully; it is impossible to simplify and restrict the memory, cultural or individual.
The archive, however, is where the issue is truly raised. The archive is bracketing incarnate-- it has already been bracketed before one has the chance to do it oneself. The archive then already enacts aestheticentricism and already enacts a colonizing force upon the reader. It must be, then, through memory that we avoid bracketing, simplifying cultures to their aesthetic or other contributions. Memory "invokes" the other against the hegemonic discourse, and in some way, may give the subaltern a brief representation against the voicelessness perpetuated by the archive.
I'd like to examine the idea of bracketing and unbracketing when it comes to a quote from Spivak. Spivak inserts herself into the archive by telling the story of her experience searching for the Rani, and on page 239, claims, "Unlike the archives, where the past is already digested as the raw material for history writing, the past here is a past of memory, which constitutes something differently in different subjects interconnecting." She goes on to say that her Rani "can be invoked," and is at the "shadow-border of the prehistory of this colonial/postcolonial (dis)continuity," but that she cannot be "commemorated" (240). Spivak distinguishes, then, between the past of the archive, of the physical, scholarly iteration of the past, and the memory. In fact, it is the archive which has already been "digested," or interpreted, processed until it fits within the dominant discourse. But memory cannot be fit into the hegemonic discourse in the same way. It is interconnected, not digestible in the same way. This is how the Rani remains. And in that sense, memory avoids bracketing. Memory's interconnectivity makes it unable to be bracketed successfully; it is impossible to simplify and restrict the memory, cultural or individual.
The archive, however, is where the issue is truly raised. The archive is bracketing incarnate-- it has already been bracketed before one has the chance to do it oneself. The archive then already enacts aestheticentricism and already enacts a colonizing force upon the reader. It must be, then, through memory that we avoid bracketing, simplifying cultures to their aesthetic or other contributions. Memory "invokes" the other against the hegemonic discourse, and in some way, may give the subaltern a brief representation against the voicelessness perpetuated by the archive.
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