Reading present cultural concepts only through their genealogy misses spatial and temporal context

Evidence

Young’s critique, which suggests that the new cultural theory implicitly legitimates race thinking, needs to be evaluated carefully. His line of argument insists on tieing the meaning of hybridity to the legacy of race thinking. Past discourse determines present usage like some kind of embalming agent. He thus sidesteps the relationship between past, present, and future and between the places and contexts in which cultural practices are manifest. It is important to neither reduce the present to the past as does Young’s analysis, nor suggest that the notion of hybridity constitutes a total break with the past. Novelty always has a relationship to its antecedence, but the impulse to read the present only through genealogy is to miss the significance of place and time. I want to argue for developing a more complex appreciation of the sites and times of hybridity. The genealogical approach to this debate never really tries to problematize the distinction in the theoretical imagination between figurative and literal meaning. When Gilles Deleuze uses the metaphor of “rhizome” to express lateral interconnection, no one with any sense should think he is suggesting that the properties of irises and human beings are somehow the same. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3027

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome and Foucault’s genealogy as method — a useful lens on methodological debates generally. — connects to: Objectivity of concepts rests on a collective historical subject — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 764; Spatial practices cannot be read apart from social context — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1402
• DEEPTHINKING: Not quite top-tier — it is a solid methodological point but not paradigm-shifting in itself.