Spivak's Native Informant in Philosophy

What does this mean? 

My aim, to begin with, was to track the figure of the Native Informant through various practices: philosophy, literature, history, culture. Soon I found that the tracking showed up a colonial subject detaching itself from the Native Informant. After 1989, I began to sense that a certain postcolonial subject had, in turn, been recoding the colonial subject and appropriating the Native Informant's position.

 With respect to India, there is no 'Native Informant'. There are Philologists at Nabadwipa who teach Sir William Jones Sanskrit and he praises them and describes the place as an alma mater comparable to Oxford. There are wealthy merchants, some of who go into partnership with British officials. There are Princes whom they negotiate treaties. There are clerks and accountants and soldiers and servants. But no 'Native Informants'. Why? The British were smart. They learned languages. Before the East India Company was started, already there was an Englishman who had translated the Bible into Konkani. A few years later we find Thomas Coryate- a court jester and author- has mastered the languages of India so well that the natives consult him when faced with a slave girl who speaks a foreign language and won't shut up. He listens to her, identifies her language and then scolds her so sharply in her own tongue that she falls silent.

If the British had listened to 'Native Informants' they would have been swindled. There would have been no British Raj. This is not to say that Western researchers did not use Indian assistants. H.H Wilson took the help of boys from Hindu College. Monier Williams took the help of Shyamji Krishnavarma. James Woods invited Acharya Kosambi to Harvard. What happened next? The Hindu College boys went in the direction of Henry Derozio. Shyamji Krishnavarma became a Radical by way of Spenserism. Kosambi learnt Russian at Harvard and went off to Leningrad as a Professor before returning to India and the Gandhian freedom struggle. Interaction between the 'Oriental' and the Western intellectual was about the former developing distinct philosophical voices and the latter gaining a humanistic or cultural depth which was not philosophical at all.

Philosophy has always been despised by sensible people. It is a subject fit only for stupid pedagogues. The 'Native Informant' may feature in it but nobody reads it anyway. Literature is just another word for tall tales. Only children and invalids bother with it. History, in England, has always been partisan and written to order. It too has little importance. Culture does not exist during office hours- which is when worthwhile work gets done.

Why did Spivak find a 'Colonial subject' detaching itself from 'the Native informant'? There was no Native informant. Some people came and settled in Company territory and became compradors. But their story can be traced in the annals of the Law and the story of Commerce. It requires a good knowledge of history and a willingness to sift Indian, not British, archives. It has nothing to do with Philosophy or Literature.

Spivak is simply telling lies at the very commencement of her book. She isn't going to point to even a single Native informant. Nor will she actually show such a being turning into a 'Colonial Subject'. As for this 'postcolonial subject' Spivak found after 1989 who could it be except herself and people like Bhabha? The only people talking about 'postcolonial subjects' were her colleagues. No one in India was doing so. There was no money in it for them. Thus this entire subject is just the self-serving fabrication of a couple of ex-pat Professors bucking for promotion by playing the race card and pretending to know about their country of origin.

That isn' quite enough for Spivak. She must pose as some sort of activist. What sort?

Today, with globalization in full swing, telecommunicative informatics taps the Native Informant directly in the name of indigenous knowledge and advances biopiracy.

OMG! Spivak is pretending to be Vandana Siva who was bluffing everybody that she had a PhD in Quantum Mechanics (her qualification was in Philosophy) and that she knew about organic farming and was about to do battle with Monsanto.

Therefore the foreclosure that I see operative in Chapter 1 continues, rather more aggressively. The Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems projected by UNESCO "defines" the Aboriginal period of human history as the "timescale of the for past •.. associated with inactive approaches in which there is no concern for environmental degradation and sustainability." It was of course as impossible for the Aboriginal to think sustainability as it was for Aristotle to "decipher ... the secret of the expression of value," because of "the historical limitation inherent in the society in which [they] lived."1 Yet the practical philosophy of living in the rhythm of the ecobiome must now be dismissed as "no concern." 

Aristotle's theory of value is as good as Marx's- i.e. it is as misleading but why is Spivak mentioning him? The answer is he was a white man. Spivak doesn't get that White people too were once aborigines. Spivak's sarcasm misses the mark.  Talk of foreclosure is paranoid nonsense. Who is doing this foreclosure? UNESCO? They were the bad guys for Reagan's White House. Why is Spivak pointing the finger at them? Is she genuinely crazy? No. It is all a pretense of paranoid 'activism'.

Spivak says- 'The first chapter looks at philosophy: how Kant foreclosed the Aboriginal; how Hegel put the other of Europe in a pattern of normative deviations and how the colonial subject sanitized Hegel; how Marx negotiated difference.'
Kant had no power or influence. He was a pedant. We have known his philosophy is wrong since Einstein's General theory of Relativity was proved empirically. What he foreclosed doesn't matter. Hegel too had no salience till the Communist Revolution. There were some British Hegelians but this merely joined up with some vague Unitarian/Brahmo/Radhakrishnan type Advaita which nobody cared a jot about. 'Normative deviations' is an oxymoron. Colonial subjects didn't 'sanitize' anything- least of all Hegel whose country had no colonial possessions. Marx did not 'negotiate difference'. He was a Communist. Negotiation aint exactly their strong suit.

Does Spivak actually do what she promises? No of course not. She is lying.

What she actually does is whine about her own shitty little job.

 Postcolonial studies, unwittingly commemorating a lost object, can become an alibi unless it is placed within a general frame.

WTF does this mean? PoCo studies is daft. It doesn't know what it is doing. It lost something but doesn't know what. It can become an alibi. For what? Spivak won't tell us- she flees where none pursue- but mentions some 'general frame' into which it should be put.

Why not just shoot the thing in the head as useless to man or beast?

Colonial Discourse studies, when they concentrate only on the representation of the colonized or the matter of the colonies, can sometimes serve the production of current neocolonial knowledge by placing colonialism/ imperialism securely in the past, and/or by suggesting a continuous line from that past to our present.

Utter shite! How does talking about colonial Bengal cause 'neocolonial knowledge'? The thing can't be done. In any case, no one wants to colonise Bengal. It's a...what is that word Trump uses? Shithole. That is the mot juste. Anyway, Niradh Chaudhri had already written a book- when little Gayatri was playing with her dolls- inviting the Americans to come and recolonise Bengal but nobody was enthused by the prospect.

This situation complicates the fact that postcolonial discourse studies is becoming a substantial subdisciplinary ghetto.

There speaks the heart! Yup. It's a shitty little ghetto you guys have created for yourself. That is true enough.

 As the century spanning the production of Kant and Marx progresses, the relationship between European discursive production and the axiomatics of imperialism also changes, although the latter continues to play the role of making the discursive mainstream appear clean, and of making itself appear as the only negotiable way.

Kant is eighteenth century. Marx was nineteenth century. School kids know this. Spivak doesn't. She thinks they belonged to the same century. She also thinks 'European discursive production' had something to do with the 'axiomatics of imperialism'. This is foolish. The English were ahead of the Germans. Their imperialism was empirical. It had no axiomatics. The French tried but failed to imitate and keep up with them. They too did not succumb to German philosophy during their Imperial period because, once again, they were ahead, not behind, Germany.

Nobody has ever accused Germans of making 'discursive mainstreams appear clean'. Those guys write like shite. Negotiation is a word in Bacon's lexicon. It doesn't feature in Kant or Hegel or Marx.

In the course of this unceasing operation, and in one way or another, an unacknowledgeable moment that I will call "the native informant" is crucially needed by the great texts; and it is foreclosed.

So there is no such moment but you think it should exist even though it can't.

I borrow the term "foreclosure" (forclusion) from Lacanian psychoanalysis. I read psychoanalysis as a technique for reading the pre-emergence (Raymond Williams's term) of narrative as ethical instantiation.

This is meaningless. Lacan was a psychiatrist. He charged money for treating patients. Foreclosure was a type of repression associated with some mythical castration complex. Raymond Williams was talking about something wholly literary which must evolve to capture lived life and which teachers of literature must learn to follow and elucidate. Spivak has jumbled together these very different ideas so as to say 'I think there should be some darky- a Native informant- capering around the feet of Kant and Hegel and Marx. This darky doesn't exist. So that's like repression- right? So I'm just gonna go ahead and write about the repression of that non existent nig-nog coz I iz blek.'

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.

You think that you have written an impressive sentence which captures the terrible sorrows of your ancestors who were enslaved and subjected to genocide- except they weren't really, were they Gayatriji? You are stealing the sorrows of other people to make yourself important.

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 (codename "West"), is taken with utmost seriousness.

Worthless lies. Blacks and Indians- like Equiano and Sheikh Deen- did write autobiographies in Eighteenth Century England. They sold well.
In 1734, Anton Wilhelm Amo- a black man from Ghana- got a Phd in Philosophy from a German University and became a Professor. His books were well received but after the political climate changed the public mood turned against him. He returned to his family in Ghana and died in obscurity.

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.

Utter nonsense. Spivak hasn't researched this at all. She is just making it up. When a foreigner learns our language and tells us something, chances are they will set up as an author with an individual view.

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.

Stop whining about them horribly patronising white bitches you have to put up with. They really aren't comparable to Hitler. Get over yourself.

Increasingly, there is. the self-marginalizing or self-consolidating migrant or postcolonial masquerading as a "native informant."

Yeah! Those guys are the pits. But you're one of them aren't you?

I am discovering the native informant clear out of this cluster. 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.

No they don't. You haven't read them because you are lazy. You are assuming they are as you say because you think you should be allowed to say anything you like and it must be true because it was 'foreclosed' and thus can be proved to be true thanks to all the evidence for its non existence.

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 reflexive judgment, which allows freedom for the rational will

rubbish! Kant did say some racist things but that wasn't the basis of his philosophy

; in Hegel as evidence for the spirit's movement from the unconscious to consciousness;

again, the role was minor

in Marx as that which bestows normativity upon the narrative of the modes of production.

utterly false. Modes of production don't have 'normative narratives'.

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.

How were the OPEC oil price rises an example of foreclosure? Does Spivak think Oil Sheikhs live in hovels? Does she not know that these guys own a lot real estate in New York and London and Geneva and so on? What is wrong with her?

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.

The poorest reasoner from the South- that's you- maybe.

Does Spivak actually find any Native informant needed by Kant?

 There is, however, one and only one example of what a legally adjusted and grounded determinant judgment would produce: 

Grass is needful for the ox, which again is needful for man as a means of existence; but then we do not see why it is necessary that men should exist (a question which is not so easy to answer if we cast our thoughts by chance [wenn man et:wa ... in Gedanken hat] on the New Hollanders or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego). Such a thing is then [alsdem ist ein sokhes Ding] not even a natural purpose; for it (or its entire species [ Gattung-the connotation of "race" as in "human race" cannot be disregarded here]) is not to be regarded as a natural product. (CJ 225)

So, there is no Native informant at all in Kant. He says we don't know the final purpose of a thing by looking at a thing- whether it is a leaf or an ox or a man. Leaves can't speak, nor can oxen but men can and may have their own views of their final purpose. Think then of some remote people whose language we can't understand. Simply by looking at them could you tell their final purpose? It is useless to say, 'their final purpose is to wear hats and go to Church' because, according to some accounts current at the time, these people preferred to be naked and amongst their own people living a strenuous but healthy life. The same point might be made about the Highland Scots observed by Dr. Johnson. They were poor but they preferred their own style of life. By eighteenth century Romantic convention, they perhaps better fulfilled the final purpose of human life than courtiers in the City. Kant, however, merely points to the impossibility of knowing that final purpose just by looking at a thing or a man from some far of realm with different customs.
Contra Spivak's claim, Kant is offering 'no legally adjusted and grounded determinant judgment' here. Why? Because the form of a thing can't reveal its final purpose. Judgement has to be suspended.

Spivak, posing as a race warrior, however is determined to find racism here (though the canonical example is elsewhere in Kant's writing)

Here the raw man of the Analytic of the Sublime-stuck in the Abgrund-affect without subreptitiously shuttling over to Grund-is named. Not so. A man with a different material culture is named to drive home the point that there is no man anywhere of whom we can say, just by looking at him, such and such is his final purpose. He is only a casual object of thought, not a paradigmatic example. No. He is a paradigmatic example. It was believed that his material culture was such that warm clothes, boots, hats, churches etc, were impediments to a successful life, rather than the means towards to it. The reason he is mentioned is to drive home the lesson- the things we assume are meant for us, the things which appear to go together with our achieving our purpose, don't in fact necessarily do so. There is a final purpose to things, but also to beings, which no mere appearance can disclose. He is not only not the subject as such; he also does not quite make it as an example of the thing or its species as natural product. If you happen to think of him, your determinant judgment cannot prove to itself that he, or a species of him, need exist. But Kant explicitly says that these men belong to our species. No determinant judgement applied to them is not applicable to us. No doubt, he also thought Blacks were stupid- but then there were also plenty of stupid Germans. Of course, the "proper" reading of philosophy will dismiss this as an unimportant rhetorical detail. But if in Kant's world the New Hollander (the Australian Aborigine) or the man from Tierra del Fuego could have been endowed with speech (turned into the subject of speech), he might well have maintained that, this innocent but unavoidable and, indeed, crucial example-of the antinomy that reason will supplement-uses a peculiar thinking of what man is to put him out of it. It was not known, at that time, that disease would wipe out a large portion of such peoples.

We find here the axiomatics of imperialism as a natural argument to indicate the limits of the cognition of (cultural) man. You find it because you put it there. Nobody else does. Prussia had no colonies. There was no 'axiomatics of imperialism'. Had there been some, then Kant would not have used the example. Why? The proper purpose of a black man would be to a slave or subject. His form would reveal his purpose. Kant would have defeated his own argument.  The point is, however, that the New Hollander or the man from Tierra del Fuego cannot be the subject of speech or judgment in the world of the Critique. Sez you. Kant's text cannot quite say this and indeed cannot develop this argument But its crucial presence in The Critique of Judgment cannot be denied. Yes it can. 'Proper' philosophers do deny it.

Having failed to find a Native informant in Kant, Spivak moves on to Hegel-

On the track of the native informant, my interest drives me to deconstruct the opposition between Hegel and the Gita rather than undo the human agent Arjuna's sense of "lived timing" in the text. The Gita is not in opposition to Hegel. There is nothing to deconstruct. He didn't know the text and said some foolish things. That is all. Also what is this shit about 'undoing the human agent Arjuna's sense of 'lived timing' in the text? Either the guy is dead or he was fictional. You can't undo his sense of anything. 

Since Spivak is as stupid as shit, she does not know that Arjuna has the boon of chaksuchi vidya which allows him to visualise anything he wishes in the form best fitted for him. This boon only comes into play when he is in 'vishadha' (abulia) because he had not accepted it though it came to him when his volition was in abeyance. However, Arjuna wishes to be a Yogi of a particular type- viz a disciple of the Lord of Yoga. This means his 'vishada yoga' though giving him the ability to see the divine theophany nevertheless can only be dispelled by bhakti yoga when the Lord grants him special eyes to receive this vision.

 In Canto 11, Arjuna's reaction to the entire "transcendental" or "exceptionalist" supra-historical first part of the narrative is one of acknowledged error and a prayer for indulgence: evam etad yathattha tvam atmanam paramesvara drastum icchami te rupam aisvaram purushottama The strongest burden of this couplet is the most emphatically implied "yet" between the two lines. The first line says, "Yes, Lord, you are as you say'': by the mechanics of transcendental non-representability you are the holder of, and the singular example of, a special law. The second line says, "I want to see this divine form." The relation between the two lines is, "Sorry, I know it's wrong (a category mistake? lack of faith? human frailty?) but ... "

Nonsense! Arjuna says 'O Divine & Perfected Lord! Seeing you as you are, I yet wish to see your transcendental form as the Supreme Lord'. The listener knows that Arjuna can just exercise 'chaksuchi vidya' to get the vision- but then it would not be received as the pure Grace of the Lord. There is a rising sense of excitement for the devotee in what follows. Will Arjuna's 'boon' lead to his taking the Divine Vision without waiting for the bestowal of divine eyes? If so, he is denied that free Grace of the Lord which is even more important than the theophany. Krishna only recognises that Arjuna is not seeing him after a couple of shlokas and bestows the divine eyes. This shows Arjuna has risen from Vishada to Bhakti Yoga. This is important because initially the Yogi may want marvellous visions and so forth. However, Love is the true Lord. This Love wishes Serve and to behold only to be beholden.Thus the Vaishnav gives up 'jivan-mukti' as a petty goal preferring to serve the Lord eternally in a humble capacity.

It is in response to this important self-excusing request that the text stages Krishna showing himself as cosmograph and indeed, in a peculiar way as an ontograph that can contain a historiograph. (fhis is the other passage that Hegel.quotes as proof of the monotonous repetition of the same monstrous representation in millennia of static "Indian" aesthetic representation.) In apparent indulgence to the history-bound human insistence on timed verification, here in a somewhat unreally prolonged present, Time as exceptionalist graph must be negated into this more vulgar graphic gesture (showing himself)-the famous viswarupadarsana (the vision of the universal form) in the Gita

What is interesting is that this visvarupa does not disclose that which Arjuna's chaksuchi vidya boon would not want to be disclosed to him- viz. the true identity of his eldest brother. This permits the war to go ahead as that is the will of the true head of the family.

 Of much greater interest to me is the move that makes Krishna contain all origins, all developments, and also the present moment. Here is Arjuna in the battlefield. He is watching the two sides. There are his own people-there are his cousins on the other side. All these sons of Dhrtarastra [.Arjuna's uncle, the father of his enemies], with hosts of kings, Bhisma, Drona, [Kama] the Suta-son, as well as our own chief warriors, are hastening into your terrifying and tusky mouth. Some can be seen sticking in the gaps between your teeth with their heads crushed to powder. This vivid and memorable passage is a description of the actual phenomenal present in which Arjuna is standing. He is seeing an alternative version of this Krishna as chewing up all these people in his mouth. Krishna as a graphic representation of (a) transcendental Being [ontograph] contains the fluid present-in-time [historiograph]. No explanation is needed here: the graph is evidence, as required. Being is being-eaten. The graph of Time is a devouring of time as timing. 

If Spivak is right then Arjuna sees that Karna is his eldest brother. He tells Yuddhishtra. The Battle has to be called off. This does not happen because Krishna's Grace supervenes such that Arjuna is not disadvantaged by his refusal to use chaksuchi vidya.

Has Spivak shown any Native informant in Hegel? No. She has quoted his ignorant remarks about India and displayed her ignorance of the Gita. That is all.

What about Marx? Any Native informant there? Nope. Not one- which is strange because Marx was in London and could have met Indians. Spivak gasses on about Marx's throwaway line re. 'Oriental despotism' but no Native informant shows up nor gets transformed into a colonial subject.
The irony, that after Independence, the only Indians who took orders from white people were Communists is one Spivak does not reflect upon. By then however, India was such a shithole, the Soviets didn't want to see it go Red. Even the Chinese started backing away from their Bengali would be clients.