***** I think of the "native informant" as a name for that mark of expulsion from the name of Man -- a mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical relation.
I borrow the term from ethnography, of course. In that discipline, the native informant, although denied autobiography as it is understood in the Northwestern European tradition (codenamed "West"), is taken with utmost seriousness. He (and occasionally she) _is_ a blank, though generative of a text of cultural identity that only the West (or a Western-model discipline) could inscribe. The practice of some benevolent cultural nativists today can be compared to this, although the cover story there is of a fully self-present voice-consciousness. Increasingly, there is the self-marginalizing or self-consolidating migrant or postcolonial masquerading as "native informant."...The texts I read are not ethnographic and therefore do not celebrate this figure. They take for granted that the "European" is the human norm and offer us descriptions and/or prescriptions. And yet, even here, the native informant is needed and foreclosed. In Kant he is needed as the example for the heteronomy of the determinant, to set off the autonomy of the reflective judgment, which allows freedom for the rational will; in Hegel as evidence for the spirit's movement from the unconscious to consciousness; in Marx as that which bestows normativity upon the narrative of the modes of production. These moves, in various guises, still inhabit and inhibit our attempts to overcome the limitations imposed on us by the newest division of the world, to the extent that, as the North continues ostensibly to "aid" the South -- as formerly imperialism "civilized" the New World -- the South's crucial assistance to the North in keeping up its resource-hungry lifestyle is forever foreclosed. In the pores of this book will be the suggestion that, the typecase of the foreclosed native informant today is the poorest _woman_ of the South. But the period and texts under our consideration in this chapter will produce -- to cite Gramsci's uncanny insight -- the native informant(s) as a site of unlisted traces. To steer ourselves through the Scylla of cultural relativism and the Charybdis of native culturalism regarding this period, we need a commitment not only to narrative and counternarrative, but also to the rendering (im)possible of (another) narrative.
As my opening quotation from [Carl] Pletsch betrays, our sense of critique is too thoroughly determined by Kant, Hegel, and Marx for us to be able to reject them as "motivated imperialists," although this is too often the vain gesture performed by critics of imperialism. A deconstructive politics of reading would acknowledge the determination as well as the imperialism and see if the magisterial texts can now be our servants, as the new magisterium constructs itself in the name of the Other....
The field of philosophy as such, whose model was the merging of science and truth, remained untouched by the comparative impulse. In this area, Germany produced authoritative "universal" narratives where the subject remained unmistakably European. These narratives -- Kant's cosmopolitheia, Hegel's itinerary of the Idea, Marx's socialist homeopathy -- neither inaugurated nor consolidated a specifically scholarly control of the matter of imperialism.
Carl Pletsch's admonition to us to be Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist in our dismantling of third-worldist talk is yet another example of their influence in the formation of the European ethico-political subject. In my estimation, these source texts of European ethico-political selfrepresentation are also complicitous with what is today a self-styled postcolonial discourse. On the margins of my reading is the imagined and (im)possible perspective I have called the native informant. Ostentatiously to turn one's back on, say, this trio, when so much of one's critique is clearly if sometimes unwittingly copied from them, is to disavow agency, declare kingdom come by a denial of history. (6-9)*****