By contrast, philosophy can only stand around holding its limp little dick, proving against itself that Violence is the only possible Virtue Ethics.
Consider the following exchange in the NYT between a naive white interviewer and our own Gayatri Spivak who is so ignorant of India that she thinks it is named Bharat coz that was Lord Ram's younger brother's name and that there was a Pathan King of Delhi at the same time as a Mughal Emperor.
Brad Evans: Throughout your work, you have written about the conditions faced by the globally disadvantaged, notably in places such as India, China and Africa. How might we use philosophy to better understand the various types of violence that erupt as a result of the plight of the marginalized in the world today?So Spivak is a pacifist who grants everybody the right to use violence provided they believe they are resisting violence. Now, if Philosophy could have a prescriptive theory of justified true belief- i.e. if Derrida was utterly and completely wrong- then it might be able to say something substantive which could have salience in this context. But, it would also be able to tell us- on a priori grounds- which hedge fund would do best or which Research Program in Physics should get more funding so as to achieve a particular technological breakthrough. In other words, Philosophy could only have salience in seeking to understand violence by 'marginalised people' if it also had salience in deciding how to invest one's pension pot or whether String Theory should get less funding than Quantum Gravitation. Clearly, this is not the case. Indeed, people like Derrida served a purpose only because Soviet style Communist parties had salience in the Sixties and early Seventies. His worthless guff was an antidote to the mischievous certainties of the Stalinists or the murderous ravings of the Maoists. It permitted academics to survive on radicalised campuses by pretending to be Lefties without actually participating in kidnappings or assassinations or, more boringly, being subject to 'Party Discipline' with regard to their sex lives.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: While violence is not beyond naming and diagnosis, it does raise many challenging questions all the same. I am a pacifist. I truly believe in the power of nonviolence. But we cannot categorically deny a people the right to resist violence, even, under certain conditions, with violence. Sometimes situations become so intolerable that moral certainties are no longer meaningful. There is a difference here between condoning such a response and trying to understand why the recourse to violence becomes inevitable.
Spivak says that there are situations where 'recourse to violence becomes inevitable'. Why? It is sufficient for the outcome of a violent agon to be known in advance for no violence to actually occur. Expanding the 'common knowledge' information set- dissipating the 'fog of war'- providing alethic Aumann signals so as to establish a correlated equilibrium- these are things which are already being done at the State level. Something similar is required at the micro-level in the case of 'marginalised people' who may well be at the wrong end of information asymmetry.
Philosophy could a priori say- nutjobs who get a hard on when they hear the word 'Revolution' need to be disintermediated both by the Academy and the Media. Name and shame the cunts. Charge them with 'hate speech' or conspiracy or whatever and lock them up. These fuckers aint Socrates they are murderous scum.
Karl Popper is an example of this sort of philosopher. He said 'essentialism' is the hallmark of these worthless shitheads. Chase the fuckers away. Don't give them air-time. Tackle genuine problems. Do it now.
Spivak- of 'strategic essentialism' fame (i.e. lying about your supposed 'identity' for some purely tactical advantage)- is the opposite of this sort of philosopher. So she is a 'pacifist' who licenses every sort of violence. Why?
When human beings are valued as less than human, violence begins to emerge as the only response.I'm a human being. The check-out girl at KFC, however, treats me just as a source of revenue for her employer. I explained to her that I needed to eat a kilo of chicken nuggets immediately because of the Kantian categorical imperative but, instead of handing them over, she asked me for money! This atrocious insult caused me to grab her hair and smash her head against the till. Well, that's what would have happened if my oppressor really had been a tiny little teenage girl. Instead it turned out to be my old nemesis Sanjay Subhramaniyam who said 'I'm the ghost of Vasco da Gama! I will smack the black off your President Obama! Ha ha ha ha!' That's when I woke up.
When one group designates another as lesser, they are saying the “inferior” group cannot think in a “reasonable” way.It is obvious that Po-Co shitheads can't think in a reasonable way. STEM subject Professors think these colleagues of theirs to be an 'inferior' group. But they don't beat the shite out of them. Why? They'd get arrested and have to pay a lot of money in legal fees.
It is important to remember that this is an intellectual violation, and in fact that the oppressed group’s right to manual labor is not something they are necessarily denied.Right to manual labour? WTF! Kids don't have the right to manual labour- they are forced to waste time in School. Is this an intellectual violation?
Rights are linked to Remedies by a bond of law. There is no 'general right to manual labour'. If I turn up at your home and proceed to do manual labour without your express authorisation, you call the police and get me arrested. I might still demand money for digging up your garden or painting your house with vomit but all I will get is jail time.
In fact, the oppressed group is often pushed to take on much of society’s necessary physical labor.Oppression means being forced to do stuff you don't want to do. That's what happens in jail or the Gulag or under Slavery.
It is certainly possible that an oppressed group does manual labour for the oppressor. Post '67, this has been the plight of many Palestinians. However, the moment some resorted to violence, many lost even access to those low paying jobs. The Israeli economy seems immune to any Palestinian boycott- whether official or arising spontaneously through Intifada. The sufferings of the Palestinians, on the other hand, only increases under such circumstances. It now appears that the Israelis will simply strip any 'treasonous' Palestinian in Jerusalem of his citizenship and deport him.
Clearly, there was some better way forward for the Palestinians other than the violence of the intifada or unilateral action of the Governing Authority. Edward Said, famously, joined the kids in throwing stones at one time. Ghalib says 'I too, in boyhood, threw stones at Majnun (the Mad) till I remembered my own head.' It seems Po-Co grey-beards are more infantile than even luckless street urchins. The former throw stones forgetting their own rock for a brain.
Hence, it is not that people are denied agency; it is rather that an unreasonable or brutish type of agency is imposed on them.Agency can't be imposed and still be agency. One can treat human beings like horses or cows. But this involves culling the less biddable amongst them till mimetic effects ensure compliance. Even under these conditions- for example that of the Gulags or Nazi Concentration Camps- such agency as human beings retain is known to be, in many instances, the opposite of 'brutish'.
And, the power inherent in this physical agency eventually comes to intimidate the oppressors.Nope. That's not the 'Hegelian struggle for recognition' at all. It is only at the margin that some oppressors get intimidated. If the oppressive structure is incentive compatible and 'pays for itself' then there is a robust response from the centre such that the balance of intimidation, at the margin, tips the other way.
The oppressed, for their part, have been left with only one possible identity, which is one of violence.Why? A superior alternative is constructive, collective, investment in human and social capital and the building up of trust based 'in-group' commercial and entrepreneurial networks. At the socially atomised, individual level, sly acts of sabotage or 'Good soldier Svejk' type, simulated imbecility is the only alternative. That way you keep your life and wait it out. However, if social and human capital formation has not occurred, it is a bleak future you inherit.
Nevertheless, this is the self-defeating strategy pursued by Po-Co theorists like Spivak. They turn their subject to shit by their imbecility in the hope that Western Literature and Historiography- now even Philosophy- will all collapse so that...urm... the epistemic violence of the White gaze is rendered purblind which would be swell because the Chinese wouldn't step in and force us all to pretend to know Confucius the way we currently pretend to know Aristotle.
That becomes their politics and it appropriates their intellect.Where has this happened? Have the Palestinians turned into brutish thugs? Nope. Far from it. They have shown extraordinary altruism and ability to work together under increasingly adverse material conditions. A young Palestinian cab-driver with a primary school education can teach me plenty because a lot of his education has been of a wholly moral kind.
This brings us directly to the issue of “reasonable” versus “unreasonable” violence. When dealing with violence deemed unreasonable, the dominating groups demonize violent responses, saying that “those other people are just like that,” not just that they are worth less, but also that they are essentially evil, essentially criminal or essentially have a religion that is prone to killing.The dominating group- like every other group- has some worthless shitheads who talk hateful shite because they like hearing the sound of their own voice. But these worthless shitheads don't change the pay-off matrix of the underlying game unless, by some act of collective folly, one of their number gets a hand on the levers of power.
And yet, on the other side, state-legitimized violence, considered “reasonable” by many, is altogether more frightening. Such violence argues that if a person wears a certain kind of clothing or belongs to a particular background, he or she is legally killable. Such violence is more alarming, because it is continuously justified by those in power.Why is state-legitimized violence more frightening? The answer is because, speaking generally, States have more power and persistence. But, if this is 'common knowledge', it would be the case that the quanta of violence will be less to achieve any given level of compliance.
In general, such 'common knowledge' is a good thing. It means non-violent, incentive compatible 'repeated game' type correlated equilibria become Schelling focal. We get a positive sum game. Philosophy could, following David Lewis, say- okay, guys, we are seeing a fresh type of 'norming' here ; let's do our bit by showing, in our different ways, that this norming could be on the basis of 'overlapping consensus'. Let's help dissipate 'the fog of war' and disintermediate the worthless shitheads who get a hard-on when they hear of poor people cutting off slightly less poor people's heads.
B.E.: At least some violent resistance in the 20th century was tied to struggles for national liberation, whether anti-colonial or (more common in Europe) anti-fascist. Is there some new insight needed to recognize forces of domination and exploitation that are separated from nation states and yet are often explained as some return to localism and ethnicity?The interviewer is asking about evil MNC's or Basil Zaharoff type tycoons manipulating things behind the scenes, who, it may be, are being fought by poor people in foreign countries who use ethnic or chauvinist slogans to increase esprit de corps within their ranks.
In this narrative, a bunch of guys cutting off the heads of another bunch of guys in some remote forest or mountain are actually battling hydra headed Capitalism rather than keeping alive a traditional pastime.
Spivak does not rise to the bait- or doesn't know it is being dangled.
G.C.S.: This is a complicated question demanding serious philosophical thought. I have just come back from the World Economic Forum, and their understanding of power and resistance is very different from that of a group such as the ethnic Muslim Rohingya who live on the western coast of Myanmar; though both are already deeply embedded in global systems of power and influence, even if from opposing sides. The Rohingya have been the victims of a slow genocide as described by Maung Zarni, Amartya Sen and others. This disrupts an Orientalist reading of Buddhism as forever the peace-loving religion. Today, we see Buddhists from Thailand, Sri Lanka and Myanmar engage in state-sanctioned violence against minorities.Muslim Rohingyas wanted to join Pakistan. The Buddhist majority in the Chittagong Hill Tract of East Pakistan did not have sufficient Voice to make any similar demand though Patel did make a stink about Mountbatten handing over the district to the tender mercies of the Muslim League. Buddhists (like Spivak's own Hindu brethren) got and are getting ethnically cleansed from Bangladesh. Between 1974 and 1991, as a result of military and other action, the proportion of Bengali speakers in the area increased from 11 % to 48 % and, by now, the Buddhists are a minority in their own land.
Similarly, all Indian origin people have been subject to cleansing from Burma. This has been going on for longer than I've been alive. What caused the current crisis was violent action directed and financed by the Rohingya diaspora which is believed to have been radicalised in Saudi Arabia. This terrorism, quite predictably, back-fired spectacularly.
The fact is that when the pro-democracy spokesperson Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest there, she could bravely work against oppressive behavior on the part of the military government.What 'work' did she do? She was under house arrest. She could do nothing.
But once she was released and wanted to secure and retain power, she became largely silent on the plight of these people and has sided with the majority party, which has continued to wage violence against non-Buddhist minorities.A diaspora based terrorist outfit committed a cack-handed atrocity. No power on earth would have prevented a violent backlash. Aung San Suu Kyi considers herself to be her father's heir. As such, she wants the Burmese Army to monopolise the power of, not just legal, but all manners of physical coercion.
Most Karens are Buddhist- their Christian leadership however exposed them to a lot of violence. This isn't a story about some Religions being peaceful and others being violent. It's about Power and Money.
One school of thought says that in order to bring democracy in the future, she has to align herself with the majority party now. I want to give Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi the benefit of the doubt. But when the majority party is genocidal, there is a need to address that. Aligning with them cannot possibly bring democracy.Democracy can go hand in hand with genocide. America, in the nineteenth century, is the prime example. Why does Spivak believe otherwise? Did she think that when Pakistan held its first free elections, her own Hindu brethren would be safe from ethnic cleansing? Surely, what happened next should have disabused her.
However, rather than retreating back into focused identity politics, resistance in this context means connecting the plight of the Rohingya to global struggles, the context of which is needed in order to address any particular situation. Older, national, identity-based struggles like those you mention are less persuasive in a globalized world. All of this is especially relevant as Myanmar sets up its first stock exchange and prepares to enter the global capitalist system.In other words, the way to help the Rohingyas is to say- 'the problem isn't a bunch of Al Qaida type diaspora nutjobs whom regional powers could agree to capture and lock up. No. The real problem is that the Rohingyas are fighting against Globalised Capitalism. They aint Osama bin Ladin type nutters- whom the Saudis have shown the world how to tame- but rather Pol Pot type nutters who can't be tamed at all (since drone strikes are counter productive)save by an invasion and extermination campaign.
In globalization as such, when the nation states are working in the interest of global capital, democracy is reduced to body counting, which often works against educated judgments. The state is trapped in the demands of finance capital. Resistance must know about financial regulation in order to demand it. This is bloodless resistance, and it has to be learned. We must produce knowledge of these seemingly abstract globalized systems so that we can challenge the social violence of unregulated capitalism.So Spivak is saying that guys with PhDs in Fintech who have worked for Hedge Funds should be our tutors. She herself, being ignorant of Economics, can't do or say anything useful.
B.E.: What are the implications when the promotion of human rights is left to what you have called “self-appointed entrepreneurs” and philanthropists, from individuals such as Bill Gates onto organizations like the World Bank, who have a very particular conception of rights and the “rule of law?”Why is it 'just' that the law exist? The greater part of our lives involve interactions which are not justiciable- yet, we recognise that they must be just.
G.C.S.: It is just that there be law, but law is not justice.
The passing of a law and the proof of its existence is not enough to assure effective resistance to oppression.So the existence of the law is not in fact a requirement for Justice to obtain.
Some of the gravest violations of rights have occurred within legal frameworks. And, if that law governs a society never trained in what Michel Foucault would call “the practice of freedom,” it is there to be enforced by force alone, and the ones thus forced will find better and better loopholes around it.Sheer nonsense! Laws don't govern a Society, people do. What Foucault called 'the practice of freedom' is utter shite- it involves having unprotected sex in bath-houses and, as the slogan had it, 'dying of ignorance'. What possible benefit can any Society derive by harkening to a moral imbecilie who says stuff like- “Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics; but ethics is the deliberate form assumed by freedom”. Historically, we know that a lot of teachers of Ethics were slaves. We also know that enslaved people often had superior morality to their oppressors. Consider the Zoroastrian in Nineteenth Century Iran. Though condemned as 'impure' (najis) their high moral worth was recognised by their oppressors and so, when given the opportunity, they could thrive in business.
The 'Free, White and over 21' Americans were not morally superior to African Americans. Spivak has lived in America for almost 60 years. Why is she quoting the idiot Foucault?
Force does not matter- what matters is expectations about whether or not force will be applied and what the outcome will be. Expectations create Social Reality. Any system can be gamed. Mechanism design is not 'once and for all' but an adaptive, co-evolving, process. We know that 'cognitive biases' mislead our intuitions- that is why we follow regret minimizing, not utility maximising, heuristics. But this means that 'Freedom' is a topology whose knight's tour we forbid ourselves both individually and collectively. It would be stupid to- like Foucault in the bath-house- 'practice' it.
That is why the “intuition” of democracy is so vital when dealing with the poorest of the poor, groups who have come to believe their wretchedness is normal. And when it comes time to starve, they just tighten their nonexistent belts and have to suffer, fatefully accepting this in silence. It’s more than children playing with rocks in the streets. It takes over every aspect of the people’s existence. And yet these people still work, in the blazing heat, for little or next to nothing for wealthy landowners. This is a different kind of poverty.So Spivak is living in a 'do bigha zamin' fantasy world where the poor starve to death while toiling for wealthy landlords. Yet, she often tells us, she visits rural Birbhum every year. Where are these 'wealthy landlords' in Birbhum? Certainly there are cases of hunger and even starvation. Why don't people simply move somewhere else? Generally, the answer is that an existing entitlement proves illusory. There can be a political angle to this. Politicians promise a dole to keep their vote-bank intact but may have no incentive to deliver. This can happen anywhere. A lot of people in South Italy, who voted for the 5 star Party are now queuing up at Job-centres demanding the 'Basic Income' they were promised. Who knows? Maybe they will get it- briefly.
Against this, we have this glamorization of urban poverty by the wealthier philanthropist and aid agencies. There is always a fascination with the picture-perfect idea of poverty; children playing in open sewers and the rest of it. Of course, such lives are proof of grave social injustice. But top-down philanthropy, with no interest in an education that strengthens the soul, is counterproductive, an assurance that there will be no future resistance, only instant celebrity for the philanthropist.Where does Spivak think the urban poor comes from? These are the guys who fled starvation in their villages. Clearly, there are economies of scope and scale for effective altruism focused on the urban poor. History has taught us that improving their lot can be incentive compatible and, what's more, lead to endogenous growth.
Agriculture can't sustain a large percentage of the population nor do people want to remain in 'rural imbecility'. Most third world peasants want their children to leave the land. Politicians, on the other hand, want them to stay where they are.
I say “self-appointed” entrepreneurs because there is often little or no regulation placed upon workers in the nongovernmental sector. At best, they are ad hoc workers picking up the slack for a neo-liberal state whose managerial ethos cannot be strong on redistribution, and where structural constitutional resistance by citizens cannot be effective in the face of an unconstituted “rule of law” operating, again, to protect the efficiency of global capital growth. The human rights lobby moves in to shame the state, and in ad hoc ways restores rights. But there is then no democratic follow-up, and these organizations rarely stick around long enough to see that.Sheer fantasy. Human Rights lobbying has lost all salience. Nobody cares a fart about them anymore. Trade sanctions won't arise under TIFF's human rights clause but will from Trump's selfish stupidity.
'Self appointed entrepreneurs' garner a reputational rent. Sometimes this is linked to some 'objective' statistic which initially looks impressive but which, in the end, will turn out to be a case of Rossi's iron law- i.e. ineffective. More rarely, a self-interested 'social entrepreneur' is doing R&D which may yield Intellectual Property by using tax-free philanthropic dollars. This may be a good thing but there is a superior alternative- rationalizing the taxation of 'Charitable' Trusts.
Another problem with these organizations is the way they emphasize capitalism’s social productivity without mentioning capital’s consistent need to sustain itself at the expense of curtailing the rights of some sectors of the population.Very true. Spivak's own academic productivity never mentions her consistent need to sustain her own career as a pedagogue by pretending she knows from shit.
Why do people emphasise the good things they have done rather than mention the fact that they just farted? The answer is that people have not learnt the Foucauldian 'practice of Freedom'.
This is all about the removal of access to structures of reparation: the disappearance of the welfare state, or its not coming into being at all.Structures of reparation? Where are they? Does Spivak mean the Law Courts? Is she saying 'cuts in Legal Aid' reduce access to the Courts? No. That would be a sensible thing to say. Spivak can't say anything sensible. What she is doing here is pointing to some imaginary structure and saying it was 'foreclosed' by phallogocentrism or some such paranoid shite and that's why it doesn't exist.
A Welfare State- like Chavez's- may crash because of a resource crunch or, rather, some fundamental incentive incompatibility arising from imbecilic mechanism design. Spivak, however, thinks that it appears or disappears because of some epistemic revelation or occultation. In other words, she believes in a type of Magic where Howgarts teaches worthless Continental psilosophy and Foucault is actually Dumbledore's beard.
If we turn to “development,” we often see that what is sustained in sustainable development is cost-effectiveness and profit-maximization, with the minimum action necessary in terms of environmental responsibility. We could call such a thing “sustainable underdevelopment.”Why? Sir Partha Dasgupta says these ecological systems will crash. Even this poverty won't be sustainable. Unlike Spivak, Dasgupta actually knows Development Economics. Why does she not quote him?
Today everything is about urbanization, urban studies, metropolitan concerns, network societies and so on. Nobody in policy circles talks about the capitalization of land and how this links directly to the dispossession of people’s rights. This is another line of inquiry any consideration of violence must take into account.Every Economist in Development policy circles talks about the capitalization of land. The Left didn't want peasant proprietors to have fungible title plus 'due process' protection from unfair compulsory purchase. That's why the Left has collapsed in Spivak's native Bengal- and now even Tripura.
Agrarian violence backfired completely because though peasants could seize land, they couldn't realise its capital value through the market, nor- worse yet- get the equilibrium price for their product. Under the Bolsheviks, this lead to 'Scissors crises' which in turn meant the enslavement or massacre of the peasants.
Why, at this late hour, is Spivak babbling this worthless shite? Has she truly learnt nothing, seen nothing, since her days at Presidency College?
B.E.: While you have shown appreciation for a number of thinkers known for their revolutionary interventions, such as Frantz Fanon, you have also critiqued the limits of their work when it comes to issues of gender and the liberation of women. Why?Fanon had zero influence. He didn't live to see the misdeeds of the regime he ignorantly supported. The fact is the French licked the Algerians. Repression, nor resistance, worked. But it was costly both economically and politically. The pieds noirs and harkis were more valuable to France working in their new factories than growing grapes, or tending goats, in Africa.
Violence is about guys who are good at violence. Issues of 'gender and the liberation of women' may arise- as in Ocalan's ideology- if women are good cannon fodder. But men can always make better guns- so it's pretty obvious why Fanon type nutters should be denounced as nutters- not genuflected to- by women.
G.C.S.: I stand by my criticism of Fanon, but he is not alone here. In fact he is like most other men who talk about revolutionary struggle. Feminist struggle can’t be learned from them. And yet, in “A Dying Colonialism,” Fanon is really trying from within to understand the position of women by asking questions about patriarchal structures of domination.So he was trying to do something which he signally failed to do. There is a lesson here all who run may read. Psychiatrists with a literary bent write worthless shite because...urm... they are psychiatrists and spend their days with nutters more incontinent than themselves. The same point may be made about pedagogues. Teaching young people is demoralising. You get stupider and stupider as the years drag by. Worse, you become totally disinhibited about spewing up a schizophrenic word salad when you are in grown up company or being interviewed by some earnest young gora.
After the revolution, in postcolonial Algeria and elsewhere, those women who were part of the struggle had to separate themselves from revolutionary liberation organizations that were running the state in order to continue fighting for their rights under separate initiatives.This is unfair. Women did occupy prominent positions in the new regimes and used their power to create a new educated, professional, female class which did reach out to their less fortunate sisters.
Separating oneself from the regime carried great personal risk and little reward in terms of advancing the Feminist cause. Still, there is no question that Algerian and other such women have demonstrated tremendous moral strength and resilience. However, the fact that it was only the Islamists who could mount a challenge to sclerotic or tyrannical regimes did mean they got far less than their just deserts.
Gender is bigger and older than state formations and its fight is older than the fight for national liberation or the fight between capitalism and socialism. So we have to let questions of gender interrupt these revolutionary ideas, otherwise revolution simply reworks marked gender divisions in societies.Why bother with 'revolutionary ideas'? There is no country in the world which would be made better off by a Revolution- even North Korea. That is the lesson we have learned from the Arab Spring. Get rid of despots by all means. But don't call it a Revolution or else a couple of years down the line the tumbrils will roll for you.
B.E.: You are clearly committed to the power of education based on aesthetic practices, yet you want to challenge the canonical Western aesthetic ideas from which they are derived using your concepts of “imaginative activism” and “affirmative sabotage.” How can this work?Did the 'disruption' of literary paideia in the '60's produce anything or relevance to me? Suppose , I were into S&M or had developed drug induced paranoia. I might say 'Bataille & Foucault' are relevant to me". However, every culture has produced literature that panders to perverts and paranoid nutters. There was nothing special about '60's shite. All that happened was that, because of the baby boom, some worthless shitheads like Spivak got tenure and, because they weren't actually drug addled perverts, lived long enough to continue to clutter up a wholly worthless Credentialised Ponzi Scheme of an Academy.
G.C.S.: Imaginative activism takes the trouble to imagine a text — understood as a textile, woven web rather than narrowly as a printed page — as having its own demands and prerogatives. This is why the literary is so important. The simplest teaching of literature was to grasp the vision of the writer. This was disrupted in the 1960s by the preposterous concern “Is this book of relevance to me?” which represented a tremendous assault on the literary, a tremendous group narcissism. For literature to be meaningful it should not necessarily be of obvious relevance. That is the aesthetic challenge, to imagine that which is not immediately apparent. This can fight what is implicit in voting bloc democracy. Relevant to me, rather than flexible enough to work for others who are not like me at all. The inbuilt challenge of democracy – needing an educated, not just informed, electorate.s
Democracy does not need an 'educated' electorate because education may be about credentialised rent seeking based on inutile signals. It does need an informed electorate. Making more of the universal information set common knowledge improves sustainable, non coercive, outcomes for everybody.
I used the term “affirmative sabotage” to gloss on the usual meaning of sabotage: the deliberate ruining of the master’s machine from the inside. Affirmative sabotage doesn’t just ruin; the idea is of entering the discourse that you are criticizing fully, so that you can turn it around from inside. The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it.Sabotaging the master's machine is stupid because you lose your pay packet. Affirmative sabotage is even more stupid because it means pretending some worthless and hateful discourse has salience when you of all people know it is ignorant shite.
What sort of Feminism is it that fraudulently cashes the pension cheques of Dead White Men? This is not 'affirmative' of anything but careerist mendacity and it doesn't sabotage anything except the young mind's exposed to such drivel.
This is particularly the case with the imperial intellectual tools, which have been developed not just upon the shoulders, but upon the backs of people for centuries.'Imperial intellectual tools' concerned with Naval doctrine and Specie flow. Some pedants could make a living by pretending that their philological, antiquarian, anthropological or economic research could be useful in lowering the cost of governance and boosting returns from the Colony. Morevover, learning subject people's languages and legal codes and social mores meant the 'native informant' could be disintermediated- a good thing because it curbed a source of corruption.
This is not to say that genuine research is worthless. It is still necessary, if you want to write something worthwhile about India, to know the relevant languages and history and sociology and so forth. That's why an Israeli academic writes perspicaciously about the Guleri Rani while Spivak's essay on that same subject is worthless shite.
Let’s take as a final example what Immanuel Kant says when developing his “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.” Not only does Kant insist that we need to imagine another person, he also insists for the need to internalize it to such an extent that it becomes second nature to think and feel with the other person.Kant says no such thing. King Rantideva does say such a thing but only because he believed he could take on the suffering of the other by doing so. This makes sense in an occassionalist universe with a personal Deity for whom affects are effects. Otherwise it makes no sense whatsoever. Suppose I come to you asking for food or water. I want you to feel pity for my famished state. I don't want you knowing that I had a wank yesterday or that I harbour lustful thoughts for the neighbor's goat.
Leaving aside the fact that Kant doesn’t talk about slavery whatsoever in his book, he even states that women and domestic servants are incapable of the civic imagination that would make them capable of cosmopolitan thinking. But, if you really think about it, it’s women and domestic servants who were actually trained to think and feel like their masters. They constantly had to put themselves in the master’s shoes, to enter into their thoughts and desires so much that it became second nature for them to serve.Spivak thinks 'women and servants' have a full mental model of their employer. This is not the case. Such mental models are cognitively costly. It is sufficient to have a limited model- related to the employer's appetites and moods- so as to anticipate relevant desires and thus escape a beating from the brute.
So this is how one sabotages. You accept the unbelievable and unrelenting brilliance of Kant’s work, while confronting the imperial qualities he reproduces and showing the contradictions in this work.WTF? A Chinese woman- Madam Wu- designed an experiment which showed Kant was wrong about 'incongruent counterparts' back in the Fifties. In any case, even a low IQ shithead like me, could see, at the age of 17, that Einstein's theory of Relativity had overthrown the entire foundations of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant, poor fellow, bet on the wrong horse. He is not 'unbelievably and unrelentingly brilliant'. He is a silly fellow.
What 'imperial qualities' did poor old Kant 'reproduce'? None. He lived in a corner of a still quite freshly minted Kingdom. No one then thought it would (briefly) be the centre of a Germanic Empire.
How has Spivak 'sabotaged' Kant? Wu had already fucked over the last 'scientific' prediction of his system. What has Spivak achieved?
It is, in effect, to jolt philosophy with a reality check.Yeah right, coz according to Spivak's theory, Kant's man-servant knew the entire contents of his mind so as to be able to anticipate what he'd want for his breakfast. What a swell 'reality check' Spivak has come up with! Philosophy sure got one hell of a jolt from this discovery of hers.
It is to ask, for example, if this second-naturing of women, servants and others can be done without coercion, constraint and brainwashing.Wow! Apparently, in the old days, women and servants were able to duplicate all the mental processes of their husbands or employers because some system of coercion, constraint and brainwashing existed capable of such a feat. We must recover that system. Then I could become Terence Tao's butler and, having been subject to that 'coercion, constraint and brainwashing', I would become as great a mathematician- if not as elegant a writer of English prose.
And, when the ruling race or class claims the right to do this, is there a problem of power being ignored in all their claimed benevolence? What would educated resistance look like in this case? It would misfire, because society is not ready for it. For that reason, one must continue to work — to quote Marx — for the possibility of a poetry of the future.A ruling class may claim the right to do something impossible- e.g. damn our souls for eternity. Our response should be laugh at them. 'Educated resistance' of Spivak's sort consists of saying 'yes, these guys can for sure damn our souls to eternity but isn't it a teensy bit racist or sexist for them to do so?'
Contra Spivak, Society is ready for this sort of 'educated resistance' - ready, that is, to kick it in the goolies and micturate mightily into its credulous and gaping mouth.
The future will come with the passage of time. It will feature poetry. We must continue to work otherwise Time won't pass and thus that future poetry won't get uttered. At this very moment, Spivak is working very hard so that the second hand on her watch moves fractionally. We should all be grateful for her labours in this regard.
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