DIFFERENCE, DIVERSITY AND

NOMADIC SUBJECTIVITY
Rosi Braidotti
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1998.

Postmodernity
There is a general almost common-sensical agreement among cultural critics of the
progressive kind (feminists, post-colonial, queer and other "others") that, to quote
Appadurai 1:

The world we live in now seems rhizomic even schizophrenic, calling

for theories of rootlessness, alienation and psychological distance
between individuals and groups, on the one hand, and fantasies (or
nightmares) of electronic ubiquity on the other.
In other words, one of the paradoxes of our historical condition is the simultaneous
occurrence of contradictory trends: for instance, on the one hand the globalization
of the economic and cultural processes, which engenders increasing conformism in
consumerism, life-style and tele-communication. On the other hand, we also see the
fragmentation of these same processes: the resurgence of regional, local, ethnic,
cultural and other differences not only between the geo-political blocks, but also
within them.

The trans-national economy affects our daily life in the West at both the macro- and the
micro-levels and produces never-ending contradictions. Thus, capital-flow undeterred by
territorial constraints has turned cyber-space into a highly contested social space; more
than a place, cyberspace is a set of social relations mediated by technological flows of
information. Money circulates in cyber-space and occasionally materialises as actual
cents and bills having first appeared on a computer screen as digital data. Thus,
postmodernity is closely linked to electronics, which has a number of troublesome
aspects:

Firstly, it is unevenly distributed world-wide, in terms of access and participation.

Gender and ethnicity are major axes of negative differentiation. Secondly, technological
postmodernity freezes time and displaces the subject, allowing for deferred or virtual
2
inter-personal relations. It is about hyper-mobility . This also makes for prosthetic
extensions of our bodily functions: answering machines multiplying our aural and
memory ability; faxes; microwaves ovens; electrical toothbrushes; frozen embryos;
video-recorders and tele-communication networks amplifying other bodily capacities.
All the above spells the end of the space-time continuum of the humanist tradition. It
diffuses our bodily self into many discontinuous locations. The problem is: we already
live this way, but we cannot represent this to ourselves in a creative manner.
Schizophrenia is the only image we can come up with; which I take as a sign of our
imaginative poverty. I shall return to this.

3
Following the work of postcolonial thinkers like Gayatri Spivak , Stuart Hall, Paul
Gilroy and others, I think that - from a European perspective, one of the most significant
effects of postmodernity is the phenomenon of trans-culturality, or the coming of a pluri-
ethnic or multi-cultural context. World-migration - a huge movement of population from
periphery to centre - has challenged the alleged cultural homogeneity of European nation-
states. This new historical context requires that we shift the political debates from the
differences between cultures to differences within the same culture.

The feminist movement is especially conscious of this necessity. Spivak states it clearly
4
:

the face of global feminism is turned outward and must be welcomed

and respected as such, rather than fetishized as the figure of the Other.
Appadurai echoes this, and says:
Thus, the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the
mutual efforts of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another
and thus to proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin
enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently

particular 5
.
One of the central paradoxes of the postmodern historical condition is the shifting
grounds on which periphery and centre get pitched against each other in such a
perversely complex manner, as to defy dualistic or oppositional ways of thinking and
to require instead more subtle and dynamic articulation.

Last but not least, the postmodern predicament is about the shift of geo-political power
away from the North-Atlantic in favour of the Pacific Rim and especially South-East
Asia. Cornel West put it succinctly, from a North American perspective:

Postmodernism (...) is a set of responses due to the decentering of

Europe - of living in a world that no longer rests upon European
hegemony and domination in the political, economic, military and
cultural dimensions which began in 1492 6
.
Though slightly less optimistic about this, Spivak basically agrees, but she does raise
the suspicion that the many discourses about the "crisis" of Western humanism and
more specifically poststructuralist philosophy may actually re-assert some
universalistic posturing under the pretence of specific, localized or diffuse subject-
positions.

My position on this point is quite different. I think that this shift in geo-political power
becomes both confirmed and theorized in poststructuralist philosophy in terms of the
decline of the Euro-centred logocentric system. Philosophers such as Deleuze, Derrida
and Cacciari 7 have pointed out one interesting fact about this shift of geo-political
power relations, which makes their discourse about the end of Western European
hegemony radically different from the Right-wing nostalgic discourse about the 'decline
of the West', which was so popular at the end of the last century, in the work of the likes
8 9
of Otto Weininger and Oswald Spengler .

Euro-centrism
In a contemporary perspective, the more radical line of deconstruction of Euro-centrism
from within Europe runs as follows: what makes western philosophical culture so
perniciously effective and so seductive, is that it has been announcing its own death for
over one hundred years. Since the apocalyptic trinity of modernity: Marx, Nietzsche and
Freud (and Darwin), the West has been thinking through the historical inevitability and
the logical possibility of its own decline. So much so, that the state of 'crisis' has become
the modus vivendi of Western philosophers: we thrive on it, we write endlessly about it;
if the crisis did not exist, we would probably have to invent it. Nobody, let alone critical
thinkers, should therefore take the notion of the 'crisis' of western humanism naively or at
face value: this state of prolonged and self-agonizing crisis may be the 'soft' form Western
postmodernity has chosen in order to perpetuate itself. Again, Spivak makes the point:

Given the international division of labour of the imperialist countries, it

is quite appropriate that the best critique of the European ethico-
politico-social universals, should come from the North Atlantic. But
what is ironically appropriate in postcoloniality is that this critique finds
its best staging outside of the North Atlantic in the undoing of
imperialism 10
.
That the poststructuralist discourse about the decline of Eurocentrism be at least
partly subversive can be demonstrated by pointing to its unpopularity in
institutionalized academic circles, although this trend may be less evident in the
American than in the European university system. The relatively dismal careers of the
leading poststructuralists in their own home-country testifies to the fact that
mainstream philosophy and social science in Europe view poststructuralism with
great suspicion. Butler and Scott 11
have suggested that this may be related to the
fact that this philosophy evokes a fear of loss of mastery and a sort of cognitive
dispossession - thereby meeting with very hostile receptions.

It seems to me therefore that it is to the credit of poststructuralists that they challenge the
power of logocentric discourse and denounce the ethno-centric Western habit that
consists in passing Europe off as the centre of the world, confining everyone else to a
huge periphery. Let me tell you, it is quite crowded at the margins.

The convergence between the discourse of the 'crisis' of the West within poststructuralism
and the post-colonial deconstruction of imperial whiteness is not a sufficient, though I
would argue it is a necessary condition for a political alliance between them. At the very
least, this convergence lays the grounds for the possibility of such an alliance. Anthony
Appiah 12 reminded us of the need not to confuse the "post" of postcoloniality with the
"post" of postmodernism, but to respect instead the specific historical locations of each.
And feminists are in a very good position to know that the deconstruction of sexism and
racism does NOT automatically entail their downfall. I do however wish to stress both the
concomitance of these lines of critique and their necessary intersection over the issue of
political subjectivity and resistance; identity and sexual difference.

Do not think for a minute that I'm enjoying this proliferation of "post-ism-'s" either, (and
I have gone to great lengths to avoid the fatal and ill-advised "post-feminism"). Many
have criticized this prepositional mode of thinking.

But I think that facing up to these contradictory demands is our historical responsibility
because Europeans - as early-21st century North Atlantic people, are historically
condemned to our history, in so far as we are the ones who come after the historical
decline of the promises of the Enlightenment. Whether you choose to call our
predicament 'postmodern', 'post-humanist', or 'neo-humanist' makes little difference.
What does matter, however, is our shared awareness that we must make ourselves
accountable for the history of our culture without burying our head in the sand, but also
without giving in to relativism. Relativism is not an option, because it erodes the
possibility of both political coalitions and intellectual debates.

In the specific case of the critique of European ethnocentrism, I think a poststructuralist

feminist perspective leads us to discuss quite seriously for instance the grounds on which
we postulate (European) identity. Identity is not understood as a fixed, God-given essence
- of the biological, psychic or historical kind. On the contrary, identity is a process: it is
constructed in the very gesture that posits it as the anchoring point for certain social and
discursive practices. Consequently, the question is no longer the essentialist one: what is
national or ethnic identity?, but rather a critical and genealogical one: how is identity
constructed? by whom? under which conditions? for which aims?. As Stuart Hall put it:
who is entitled to claim an ethnic or national identity? who has the right to claim that
legacy, to speak on its behalf and turn it into a policy-making platform? These are
questions about entitlement, agency and subjectivity which rotate around the issue of
cultural identity.

In a slightly provocative move, I would like to go on west and argue that we take the
European Union as the perfect illustration of the paradoxes of postmodernity such as I
have defined it, not the least of which is European philosophy's deconstruction of what
Lyotard calls the "master-narratives" of the West. Let me explain.

I think we would all agree that the universalistic pretension of Europe, which is linked to
its colonial past - is based on the power and symbolic potency of the nation-state.
Nationalism in European history goes hand in hand with the self-appointed mission of
Europeans to act as the centre. Nowadays, the process of the trans-national economy
spells the decline of nation-states as principles of economic and political organization.
Ralph Dahrendorf among others has analyzed this great paradox of our times: that it is
capitalism itself which has brought about the demise of topologically based economies.
The decline of the nation-state also marks the historical crisis of the values it represented,
mostly masculine authority founded and embodied in the patriarchal family, compulsory
heterosexuality and the exchange of women - all articulated across the crucible of
imperial masculinity.

The decline of all this has generated an enormous wave of nostalgia which, as Frederic
Jameson 13 reminds us, is one of the key features of postmodern politics.

Speaking as an anti-racist feminist, however, I certainly cannot mourn the decline of the
nation state and the forms of nationalism and masculinism it sustained. On the contrary, I
actually rather fancy the idea of nation-states becoming kind of museums of popular
culture and folklore: they would have no function whatsoever except to embody the
symbolic capital of a country, its historical, linguistic and literary traditions and customs.
While the essence of their decision-making mechanisms would lie well beyond their
national boundaries; it is also perfectly clear that the coming of the electronic frontier and
the information highways accelerates the process of de-materialization of the nation state.

In this context, the project of the European Union is the perfect manifestation of the
historical decline of European nation-states and more specifically of the century-old virus
of European nationalism. When de Gaulle, Adenauer, de Gasperi and the American
government laid the foundations for the European Union after World War II, in fact, they
were not only attempting to stop European fascism from happening ever again - and thus
stop more intra-European civil wars (wrongly called 'world' wars) - but they were also, of
course, trying to reconstruct the economy in opposition to the Soviet block. That it
actually took so long (almost 50 years) for the issues of culture and education to be put
on the agenda of the European Union, beyond the economic and military priorities, tells
you something about how complex and potentially divisive culture is, in the broad
context of a project that ultimately aims at undoing the European nation states and to re-
group them in a federation.

I can also demonstrate this by reminding you that on the Continent, the opposition to the
European Union is led on the one hand by the authoritarian Right, especially Jean Marie
Le Pen and his cronies; on the other hand, by the nostalgic Left, which seem to miss
terribly the topological foundations for working class solidarity. The 'internationalists'
tradition of the organized left is of no assistance at the time of the transnational economy.
Speaking as a Left-wing intellectual, I must say that the Left is as unable as other
political forces to react with energy and vision to the historical evidence that is the
increasing irrelevance of Euro-centric modes of practice and thought to today's world. Its
traditional empathy with the 'third world' and especially with third world socialism
reproduces - albeit unwillingly - the centre/periphery relationship and seems unable to
subvert it. In such a context, more lucidity is needed and a renewed sense of political
strategy. The feminist, pacifist and anti-racist movements can be of great inspiration in
this process.

Thus, I have argued that, as a project, the European Union has to do with the rejection of
false etno-centrism that historically has made Europe into the home of nationalism,
colonialism and fascism. The unification project has to do with the sobering experience
of taking stock of our specific location.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, former leader of the May 68 student movement in Paris and now a
Euro-Parliament member especially active in the field of anti-racism, recently stated that
if we want to make this European business work, we really must start form the
assumption that Europe is the place where we live and that we must take responsibility
14
for it . Imagining anything else would be a repetition of that flight into abstraction
for which our culture is (in)famous: at best, it may procure us the benefits of escapism; at
worst, the luxury of guilt. We have to start from where we are at.

I want to stress this point because, given the legacy of colonialism, it is much easier for
Europeans to address social questions related to far-away places, than to stare at the
problems in our own backyard. Neither the political Left nor the feminist movement is an
exception: how much of our time and energy is spent speculating about, for instance, the
terrible status of women in other lands and other cultures, as if the status quo in our daily
practice were so incredibly perfect?

Yet, women of colour like Chandra Mohanty 15 have warned us very strongly against
the ethno-centric habit that consists in constructing the 'third world woman' as an object
of oppression that requires our support; Spivak has also equated this form of 'solidarity' to
benevolent paternalism, which has a lot to do with colonialism. It is against this flight
into abstraction, that feminists have proposed situated perspectives and applied the
politics of location: it is time to take a good, cold look at ourselves.

Mine is consequently a plea for lucidity and for embedded and embodied perspectives.
We need both political strategies and imaginary figurations that are adequate to our
historicity.

'Fortress Europe'
This is, however, only one side of the paradoxical coin of European deconstruction. The
other side, simultaneously true and yet absolutely contradictory, is the danger of
recreating a sovereign centre through the new European federation. That the two be
simultaneously the case makes European identity into one of the most contested areas of
political and social philosophy in our world at the moment. The reactive tendency
towards a sovereign sense of the Union is also known as the 'Fortress Europe' syndrome,
which has been extensively criticized by feminists and anti-racists such as Helma Lutz,
Nira Yuval-Davis, Avtar Brah, Floya Anthias, and Philomena Essed. They warn us against
the danger of replacing the former Eurocentrism with a new "Europ-ism", i.e. the belief in
an ethnically pure Europe. The question of ethnic purity is crucial and it is, of course, the
germ of Euro-fascism. That it would result in the balkanization of the entire region leaves
little doubt, especially after the events in former Yugoslavia.
"Fortress Europe" is a problem not only for the many it locks out, but also for those it
locks in. The much-celebrated "free circulation" of people hardly covers the ethnic
minorities living in Europe. As H. Lutz put it:

the boundaries between Europe and the rest of the world are
constantly being fortified. Never before has Europe been concerned so
much with legitimizing measures designed to keep out the 'alien flood'.
Since measures to exclude 'others' go together with the construction of
cultural, religious or 'racial' otherness, racial minorities within the
European Union have gradually become the targets of this 'othering'
16
.
The reason why I want to insist on the contradictions and paradoxes of the European
case is not only to bring the discussion about post-modernity/coloniality closer to
Europe, instead of leaving it conveniently buried under the American multicultural
agenda.

It also aims to approach the difficult yet crucial issue of the historical correlation between
the crisis of postmodernity, exemplified in the decline of European nation-states and the
emergence of situated perspectives, which have to do with the critical deconstruction of
whiteness. Let me explain.

I said earlier that, for people who inhabit the European region, 'the post'-condition
translates concretely into the end of the myth of cultural homogeneity, which - as Michael
Walzer 17 has argued - is the foundational political myth in Europe, much as multi-
culturalism is the central myth in the United States. Of course, European history at any
point in time provides ample evidence to the contrary: waves of migrations from the East
and the South make mockery of any claim to ethnic or cultural homogeneity in Europe,
while the persistent presence of Jewish and Muslim citizens challenges the identification
of Europe with Christianity. Nonetheless, the myth of cultural homogeneity is crucial to
the tale of European nationalism.

In our era, these myths are being exposed and exploded into questions related to
entitlement and agency. Thus, the European Union is faced with the issue: can one be
European and Black or Muslim? Paul Gilroy's work on being a Black British subject
18
is indicative of the problem of European citizenship and blackness emerging as a
contested issue.

But - I would want to add - so does whiteness. One of the radical implications of the
project of the European Union is the possibility of giving a specific location, and
consequently historical embeddedness or memory - to whites. It can, finally, racialize our
location, which is quite a feat because, until recently in Europe, only white supremacists,
nazi-skins and other fascists actually had a theory about qualities that are inherent to
white people. Like all fascists, they are biological and cultural essentialists.

Apart from this, whiteness was, quite simply, invisible, just not seen, at least, not by
whites. Located in the lily-white purity of our universalistic fantasy, dis-embedded and
dis-embodied, we actually thought we had no colour. Then Toni Morrison came along
and painted us in 19.

Representation
In his analysis of the representation of whiteness as an ethnic category in mainstream
20
films, Richard Dyer defines it as (p. 141) "an emptiness, absence, denial or even a
kind of death". Being the norm, it is invisible, as if naturalor inevitable. The source of the
representational power of white is the propensity to be everything and nothing, whereas
black, of course, is always marked off as a colour.

The effect of this structured invisibility and of the process of naturalization of whiteness
is that it masks itself off into a "colourless multi-colouredness". White contains all other
colours. Now, the immediate methodological and political consequence of this is that
whiteness is very difficult to analyze critically. Dyer states that: "whiteness falls apart in
your hands as soon as you begin". It tends to break down into sub-categories of
whiteness: Irish-ness, Italian-ness, Jewish-ness, etc. It follows therefore that non-whites
have a much clearer perception of whiteness than whites. Just think of bell hook's
important work on whiteness as terror and as death-giving force 21.

The reverse, however, is not the case: black and other ethnic minorities do not need this
specular logic in order to have a location of their own. As Deleuze argued, the centre is
dead and void; there is no becoming there. The action is at the city gates, where nomadic
tribes of world-travelled polyglots are taking a short break.

The experience of white immigrants tends to confirm the unsubstantiality of whiteness.

Cultural identity being external and retrospective, it gets defined for Europeans in the
confrontation with others - usually black - peoples. This was the experience of Irish,
Italian and Jewish immigrants in countries like the USA, Canada and Australia. Their
"whiteness" emerged oppositionally, as a distancing factor from natives and blacks.

Feminist critics like Brodkin Sacks have analyzed this phenomenon 22 of a

"whitening" process by which Euro-immigrants were constructed as citizens in the
USA.

The extent to which this kind of "whitened" identity is illusory as it is racist, can be seen
by how divided the diasporic Euro-immigrant communities actually are, all in their
respective ghettos, antagonistic to each other and locked in mutual suspicion. But all are
equally "whitened" by the gaze of the colonizer, bent on pitching them against the black
population.

Frankenberg calls upon whites for radical embodiment and for accountability: by viewing
their subject-position as racialized white people make open spaces to work towards
antiracist forms of whiteness, or at least anti-racist strategies to rework whiteness. I
would want to argue that this is - as Cohn-Bendit suggest - one of the key issues at stake
in the European integration project and the most likely to go wrong.

My own strategy in this regard is to claim European identity as a space of historical

contradictions and to stress the political necessity to develop critical resistance to
hegemonic identities of all kinds. My own choice to re-work whiteness in the era of
postmodernity is firstly to situate it, de-naturalise it and to embody it and embed it.
Secondly, to nomadize it, or to de-stabilize it, to undo its hegemonic hold. Being a
nomadic European subject means to be in transit but sufficiently anchored to a historical
position to accept responsibility for it. This definition of trans-national and rather
homeless European is a distinct improvement on claiming any specific brand of European
(Italian, Irish, etc.).

But then again, this is a whitened Italo-Australian, Franco-Dutch feminist

poststructuralist speaking.

The Politics of Figurations

Not the least of the paradoxes of postmodernity is that it foregrounds the role of the
imagination as a social practice and a highly contested social zone. Appadurai speaks of a
quest for control over the contemporary social imaginary. Cyber-space is one of the zones
where this battle is currently raging. In feminism, the struggle over the imaginary,
especially about re-naming and positive re-signification has a long history. In my work, I
have analyzed it in terms of figurations.

A figuration is no mere metaphor but a politically informed cognitive map that reads the
present in terms of one's embedded situation. Based on Adrienne Rich theory of "the
politics of location" 23, it has been redefined with the insight of poststructuralist
notions of discourse - to evolve into Donna Haraway's idea of "situated knowledges" 24
- as embodied genealogies or enfleshed accountability.

The point is really quite simple: as the feminist movement put it, well before Deleuze
philosophized it: we need to learn to think differently about our historical condition; we
need to re-invent ourselves. This transformative project begins with relinquishing the
historically-established, habits of thought which, until now, have provided the 'standard'
view of human subjectivity. We'd be better off relinguishing all that, in favour of a
decentered and multi-layered vision of the subject as dynamic and changing entity,
situated in a shifting context. The nomad expresses my own figurations of a situated,
culturally differentiated understanding of the subject. This subject can also be described
as post-modern/industrial/colonial, depending on one's locations. Those locations do
differ and those differences do matter. In so far as axes of differentiations like class, race,
ethnicity, gender, age, and others interact with each other in the constitution of
subjectivity, the notion of nomadism refers to the simultaneous occurrence of many of
these at once. Nomadic subjectivity is about the simultaneity of complex and multi-
layered identities. Speaking as a feminist entails the recognition of the priority of gender
in structuring these complex relations.

The nomadic subject is a myth, or a political fiction, that allows me to think through and
move across established categories and levels of experience. Implicit in my choice of this
figuration is the belief in the potency and relevance of the imagination, of myth-making,
as a way to step out of the political and intellectual crisis of these postmodern times.
Political fictions may be more effective, here and now, than theoretical systems. The
choice of an iconoclastic, mythic figure, such as the nomadic subject is consequently a
move against the settled and conventional nature of theoretical and especially
philosophical thinking. It reconnects to Nietzsche and a rather controversial counter-
tradition in western philosophy.

This figuration has an imaginative pull that I find attuned to the trans-national movement
that marks our historical situation.

In my last book, I have made the distinction between nomadic subjectivity and two other
figurations to which it is often - unfavourably - compared: firstly the migrant, then the
exile. The migrant's classic itinerary is contained within fixed locations: from the "home"
to the "host" countries, in a series of consecutive displacements. I have argued that the
migrant - as a figure of economic hardship - tends to hold onto the "home" values, while
adapting tentatively to those of the host environment (a frozen slab of history).

The exile on the other hand, marks the radical separation from - and the impossibility of a
return to - the point of departure. More often than not due to political reasons, the exile
knows of no periodical comings and goings back and forth from two comparatively fixed
locations.

The nomad on the other hand stands for the relinquishing and the deconstruction of any
sense of fixed identity. The nomadic is akin to what Foucault called counter-memory, it is
a form of resisting assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representing the
self. The feminists - or other critical intellectuals as nomadic subjects - are those who
have a peripheral consciousness; they forgot to forget injustice and symbolic poverty:
their memory is activated against the stream; they enact a rebellion of subjugated
knowledges. The nomadic style is about transitions and passages without pre-determined
destinations or lost homelands.

Thus, nomadism refers to the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into
socially coded modes of thought and behaviour. It is the subversion of set conventions
that defines the nomadic state, not the literal act of travelling. But more figurations come
to mind, and not only classical ones like gypsies and the wandering jews.

Within the 'ethnoscapes' of postmodernity, we are experiencing at the moment a

proliferation of alternative figurations of post-humanist subjectivity. Just think: The
itinerant-worker; the illegal alien; the cross-border sex-worker; and various brands of
displacement, diasporas and hybridity. The cyborgs of Donna Haraway and Zygmunt
Bauman's postmodern duo: the tourist and the vagabond. Homelessness and rootlessness
are powerful signifiers of our present situation.

Once again, feminist theory has a head-start in this process, having produced powerful
political fictions to re-figure Woman not as the 'Other of the Same' - to quote Luce
Irigaray - but rather as the other in her great diversity.

Irigaray 25 herself favours figurations that refer to female morphology, but the array of
available alternatives is telling: Monique Wittig 26 chooses to call the (post-woman)
feminist subject - 'lesbian'- echoed by Judith Butler's 27 'parodic politics of the
masquerade'. Nancy Miller 28 calls her woman - the female feminist subject of another
29 30
history. De Lauretis calls her "eccentric subject"; Trinh Minh Ha "the
31 32
inappropriate/d other"; Spivak "the postcolonial subject"; Alice Walker "the
33
womanist"; Gloria Anzaldua , working from the NAFTA zone, calls her "mestiza".

Other figurations have been proposed: from "fellow-commuter" to in-transit traveller.

Chantal Mouffe 34 speaks of permanent processes of hybridization and nomadization.
But even more historically specific figurations have been offered: the mail-order bride;
the illegal prostitute; the rape-in-war victim seeking political asylum in the European
Union and failing to obtain it, because rape does not confer the status of political refugee;
the live-in domestic from the Philippines who has replaced the more familiar figure of
the baby-sitter or the au-pair girl, to the cyber feminists cross-dressing electronically
while surfing on internet. The list is open.

These figurations are all materially embedded and thus not metaphorical. Helma Lutz
35
analyzes these new forms of displacement in terms of "female migration careers".

One way of defining the political stakes of the struggle for control of the social imaginary
in postmodernity, is therefore to point out the general trans-figuration that is occurring on
the horizon of our ever-shifting ethno-scapes.

In this framework, nomadism - with or without Deleuze - has come under criticism.
Stuart Hall fears a trendy use of the term, which may dis-embody the nomadic subjects
and fail to do justice to their specific historical locations.

Kaplan and Grewal express great resistance to travelling metaphors of all kinds, but
especially those of displacement that mark so much poststructuralist philosophy. In their
view, this is a form of philosophical orientalism, a way of sentimentalizing the exotic.
They are as critical of it as I am of metaphors of the feminine in the same philosophies
36
.

Zygmunt Bauman 37 rejects the nomadic figuration for entirely different reasons: it's
just not radical enough. The nomads always return and tend to follow pre-established
routes, thus not breaking away sufficiently from a flawed sense of teleological purpose.
James Clifford fears undue assimilations of nomadism by Western 'postmodernist neo-
primitivists' - which would metaphorize it into a new paradigm for their own specific
locations. He defends instead images of travel, which are historically embedded and
consequently accountable (agents, frontiers, guides, documents, visa, etc.).

Clifford also favours, like Bauman, the figuration of the pilgrim, in spite of its theosophic
over-tones. He also joins Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy in emphasizing forms of
creolization, transculturality, diasporas and hybridity. Stressing that all these mobile
social subject positions are the effect of trans-national postmodernity, Clifford states
that:

in the late twentieth century, all or most communities have

diasporic dimensions. Some, however, are more diasporic than
others 38
.
I agree entirely. And speaking from the specific geo-political and historical location I
have outlined in the first part of this paper I want to re-state my case: figurations of
mobile, complex, shifting subjectivity are here to stay. Speaking as a whitened
aniracist poststructuralist European female feminist, I favour figurations of nomadic
subjectivity to act as a permanent deconstruction of Euro-centric phallo-logocentrism.
Nomadic consciousness is the enemy within this logic.

As Nietzsche put it:

We who are homeless - among Europeans today there is no lack of

those who are entitled to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and
honourable sense. (...) We feel disfavour for all ideals that might lead
one to feel at home even in this fragile, broken time of transition. (...)
We ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice

and other all too thin "realities" 39

.
This call intersects with and is situated in a dialogic exchange with other forms of
specifically located rootlessness or diasporas. It lays the foundation for an alliance
with them.

The Ghanian poet Abena Busia, quoted by Gloria Wekker, voices it in the mode of the
40
African diaspora, when she says: "we have everywhere to go, but home" .

This is echoed, from a different location within the West, by Caren Kaplan and Inderpal
Grewal, who invite us to leave home, because home is often the site of sexism and racism
- a site which we need to re-work politically, constructively, and collectively. To which I
would add, with Deleuze and others, fixed identities must be left behind as the sedentary
site that produces reactive passions like greed, paranoia, Oedipal jealousy and other
forms of symbolic constipation.

This is something quite different from the elitist brand of cosmopolitanism which these
days is favoured by Martha Nussbaum 41 and earlier on was championed by Virginia
Woolf in her famous statement:
 As a woman I have no country - as a woman my country is the whole
world.
Much as I resist the universalistic sweep of this statement, aware that most women
on earth do not get a choice of country but rather have their national origins
tattooed or marked ferociously on their bodies - I do think that in the age of trans-
national movements and "flexible citizenship", the reality comes closer to a remark
by Aihwa Ong, quoted by Clifford:
I can live everywhere in the world, but it must be near an airport 42
.
This is a nomadic statement about travel, but it is linked to homelessness. In order to
appreciate it we have to trust to the resourcefulness of nomadic subjects and to their
specific forms of embodiment and embeddedness.
(The N.Y.Times)
About a dozen people now live permanently at Kennedy Airport,
settling down at night in the cavernous international terminals that
never close, sacking out like weary travelers in modular chairs or on
the floor. As a group, they are different from the homeless who sleep
on the streets or in the subways. They are, in fact, invisible, working
each day to blend in with the human traffic. They do not seem dirty or
aggressive, and they rarely panhandle. Most are mentally ill, but are
not a threat to themselves or others. Some are well educated. They
prefer the conditions at the heated, air-conditioned, relatively crime-
free airport to those in the street. The problem of homelessness in
airports is not unique to New York. (...) In Chicago, the city opened an
80-bed shelter four years ago to draw the homeless form O'Hare
airport after things went too far: some people brought plants to
decorate their corners 43
.
Spaces of transition require constant negotiations. Although the familiar waiting room
at the local railway station has been replaced as a nomadic home base by glossy
airport lounges, the urge to decorate them with one's own plants or drawings is just
as strong. At times of increasing high-tech electronic security in all public spaces, the
airports may be more welcoming to the homeless than the railways or suburb
stations. Partly because, paradoxical as it may sound, airports may function at a
lower pace than the average commuter train station.

In a display of immense mimetic talent, homeless people living in airports disguise

themselves as what they are: luggage-carrying individuals blending in with the passing
human traffic. Where they differ from ticketed passengers is in not having the remotest
intention - nor the financial means - of departing from the premises of the airport, which
they inhabit instead as their homesite. In a sort of "mise-en-abyme" of the travelling
situation, they emphasize the importance of location in determining what sense, if any,
can be given to the notion of mobility. Homeless people are nomads who do not travel.
As bell hooks put it (and I am answering James Clifford):

'Travel' is not a word that can be easily evoked to talk about the Middle
Passage, the Trail of Tears, the landing of the Chinese immigrants, the
forced relocation of Japanese Americans, or the plight of the homeless.
Theorizing these diverse journeying is crucial to our understanding of
any politics of location 44
.
Locations are embodied and embedded histories, whose diversity can be accounted
for and must be respected. The nomadic consciousness I have advocated stands for
the deconstruction of the phallogocentric and Eurocentric idea of a triumphant
consciousness whose task is supposed to be the supervision of human agency in all
its aspects. The sleepless eye of Reason brooding over its domains is a good
figuration of this obsessional vision of subjectivity. Another classical image is the
Biblical Tree of Knowledge allegedly encompassing all possible ramifications. Against
this fixity and this universal pretension, which I have related to European self-reflexity
and colonialism, I would support instead the vision of whitened subjectivity as
shifting, partial, embodied and consequently accountable. It defines the subject as a
complex apparatus, endowed with memory and capable of functioning within
collectively negotiated structures. Playing this image against the sedentary and
monolithic vision of classical subjectivity in the West, I have joined the call for the
deconstruction of that hegemonic view in terms of nomadism. There is nothing else
to do with that classical vision of the subject but to undo it.

The nomad is literally a "space" traveller, successively constructing and demolishing

her/his living spaces before moving on. S/he functions in a pattern of repetitions which is
not without order, though it has no ultimate destination. The opposite of the tourist, the
antithesis of the migrant, the nomadic traveller is uniquely bent upon the act of going, the
passing through.
Nomadism is a form of intransitive becoming: it marks a set of transformations without
end product. Nomadic subjects create politically informed maps for their own survival.
Nomadic travellers are oral geniuses, relying on memory and knowing places by heart.
Hence the importance of "visiting" not in the bourgeois mode, but rather as the attempt at
sharing the same embedded location.
This kind of "visiting" is the opposite of the consumeristic mode of apprehension of the
"other" in the tourist subject position. The "visit" is an exchange that calls for both
accountability and care.

Feminist nomadism marks the specific political itinerary of female feminists who favour
multiplicity, complexity, anti-essentialism and anti-racist and ecological coalitions.
Nomadic feminists are aiming to undo the power structures that sustain the dialectical
oppositions of the sexes, while respecting the diversity of women and the multiplicity
within each woman.

As a social imaginary and an expression of contemporary aesthetic as well as political

sensibility, nomadism is rampant among the riot girls, the bad girls, the guerilla girls of
the postfeminist era. Their political strategy is playful, mimetic repetition. Kathy Acker's
infinite capacity for othering herself; visual artists' occupying public spaces like streets or
squares with statements issued from women's experience of domination and intimidation.
Nomadic artists like Catherine Richards and Cindy Sherman explore their actual and
virtual enfleshment, through art-works which disengage women's carnal experience from
the male scopic regime. They cut into their own flesh, like Orlan, but also cut away from
the flesh - like Kruger and Holzer. They experiment acoustically with their embodied
sound system: voice, resonance, pitch, muscularity.
Nomadic feminists travel the Internet in identities made of digital data yet gendered
nonetheless.

They never cease to expose and explode racism, masculinism, male violence, and the
soul-destroying dullness of patriarchy, without making concessions to either essentialistic
beliefs in female superiority, nor to possible homologation in an allegedly gender-
bending postmodern flux of identities. They attempt to combine complexity with
commitment to the project of empowering the differences that feminism can make.