Freedom's Basis in the Indeterminate

testimony of minorities within the geopolitical division of East/West, North/ South. These perspectives intervene in the ideological discourses of modernity that have attempted to give a hegemonic normality to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, and peoples. Their critical revisions are formulated around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the rationalizations of modernity. To assimilate Habermas to our purposes, we could also argue that the postcolonial project, at its most general theoretical level, seeks to explore those social pathologies-loss of meaning, conditions of anomie-that no longer simply cluster around class antagonism, [but] break up into widely scattered historical contingencies.' These contingencies often provide the grounds of historical necessity for the elaboration of strategies of emancipation, for the staging of other social antagonisms. Reconstituting the discourse of cultural difference demands more than a simple change of cultural contents and symbols, for a replacement within the same representational time frame is never adequate. This reconstitution requires a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written: the rearticulation of the sign in which cultural identities may be inscribed. And contingency as the signifying time of counterhegemonic strategies is not a celebration of lack or excess or a self-perpetuating series of negative ontologies. Such indeterminism is the mark of the conflictual yet