A child may display developmental disorders- e.g. fail to learn to walk or talk or play or learn. The parent or other guardian may feel a responsibility to take corrective action. Equally, a child may have rare potential. The parent may wish to ensure that the child achieves what she is capable of.
Clearly there is a normative aspect to the word 'development'. Moreover, there may be a plurality of essentially incommensurable values or norms in this connection. Perhaps not all kids should learn to walk and talk. Some may be happier making growling noises and scampering about on all fours. Who is to say Mowgli, in the Jungle, is not better off than he would be laboring in the Village where the Imperial Majesty of the Raj is represented by the patwari, or tax assessor?
This raises two questions- one of 'subject formation'- how do you create a good subject of the Raj and is it always desirable to do so? This is Gayatri Spivak's question. The subaltern may be happier scampering around in the forest on all fours making growling noises. But Globalised Capitalism has other plans for the subaltern. Under the guise of Neo-Liberalism, it wants to make a profit on the potential labor power of the subaltern without first doing 'subject formation'. In contrast, as Niradh Chaudhri had famously pointed out, the British Raj, though denying citizenship to its Mowglis, did confer subjecthood on them for which Chaudhri, who emigrated to the UK and took British citizenship, was profoundly grateful. In contrast, Neo-Liberalism isn't even prepared to do Colonial type 'subject formation'. It is taking subalterns- like Satya Nadella- out of their native jungles and expecting them to make big profits for Bill & Melinda Gates who are wasting money on fighting viruses in Africa and South Asia. Why can't those greedy bastards do 'subject formation' instead? Teach Satya to walk on two legs and to talk proper English, not just keep making growling noises and biting people.
The perversity displayed by Neo-Liberal plutocrats in seeking to profit from the labor potential of subaltern wolf-boys like Nadella is matched by Neo-Liberal administrations in countries like India which- as Amartya Sen has pointed out- are trying to make a very poor country rich without first ensuring that its citizens have adequate health care, education, and degrees in Development Studies from Oxbridge or Ivy League. The fact is Development must be viewed as Freedom. To say Development will lead to Freedom is to put the cart before the horse. How can a country 'develop' if its people are not free from poverty and underdevelopment? No advanced country in the world started off with an uneducated, sickly, impoverished population- with the exception of those countries currently described as advanced- only to rise in prosperity as a result of people sacrificing various types of Freedom and engaging in various types of market activity. On the contrary, only a wealthy, highly educated population can properly engage in the project of Development as Freedom, though, obviously, they may soon become too poor to continue to do so. However, Public reasoning will certainly have occurred in the interim. That's what's truly important.
If 'subject formation' is one side of the coin of 'Development', the other- most copiously addressed by Amartya Sen- is how do you take account of the capabilities of different people? Granted Satya Nadella is capable of walking on all fours and of making growling noises and biting people incessantly. But will the working of the free market actually allow him to exercise these capabilities? Might it not turn him into a typical Silicon Valley CEO? This could easily cause him to starve to death because, as much recent research shows, Silicon chips are not as nutritious as Potato chips.
It is important to remember that Bengal famine was not caused by any lack of food. This is easily proved by using made up statistics. Imaginary food was literally showering down from the skies. Yet, there was an exchange entitlements failure of a sort which, as Sen pointed out, could easily cause mass starvation in Thatcher's Britain. Only a proper Rights based approach to Development which takes account of Capabilities and a plurality of essentially incommensurable values- e.g. the value Satya places on growling and biting people as opposed to the value some stupid fools place on the money the guy gets paid- can permit a proper burgeoning of Public Reasoning in this field. Obviously, by 'Public', Sen does not mean just the people of a particular country. Everybody else should be consulted as well- more particularly if they live on distant planets.
Sen & Spivak were unusual in that rather than getting a job- preferably with the Government of India- after graduating, they set out for the West, paying a lot of money to pursue their passion. Sen's father probably shelled out big bucks for this because Sen's cancer treatment had reminded his family that his health was by no means secure. Let him do what he wanted in a life that might be too brief. Spivak, more daringly, borrowed money on a 'life mortgage' to escape India probably because she was warned that she might get a lower grade in her MA and thus might be unfairly prevented from becoming a lecturer and then gaining a scholarship.
Both Sen and Spivak worked hard and pursued their passion with such entrepreneurial zeal & networking elan that their investment in a foreign credential more than paid for itself. They were early examples of factor-mobility in a globalized, yet thoroughly oligopolistic, Higher Education Sector which could dictate the terms of trade and extract surpluses through price, wage and service provision discrimination. Sadly, Sen & Spivak's passions were adolescent not utile. Their scholarship proved to be bogus- if not wholly and mischievously absurd. Still, they were heroes to Indians like me because, after all, it was only Western cretins whom they were fucking up. Then, sadly, India started to re-import their shite and suddenly our attitude to Sen & Spivak changed. It suddenly occurred to us that they hadn't been fooling the West at all. They had been retained so as to illustrate the congenital imbecility of beggarly brown people.
As a case in point consider Spivak's take on Sen & Dreze's recent shite-
Development / Gayatri Spivak A gradual unfolding, a bringing into fuller view; a fuller disclosure or working out of the details of anything, as a plan, a scheme, the plot of a novel. Also quasi-concr. that in which the fuller unfolding is embodied or realized. . . .
The economic advancement of a region or people, esp. one currently under-developed.
1902 Daily Chron. 25 Nov. 4/5 This consideration leads us to what is the supreme need for all parts of that country, namely, economic development. ‘Development first’ was the formula for the moment used by Lord Milner in his latest speech. What South Africa. . . needs above all is. . . the primary plant of civilized development.
1945 Polit. Q. Oct.–Dec. 359 Economic development has benefited large sections of the people in Anatolia.
1982 Dædalus Spring 133 All African countries lack sufficient managerial, administrative, and technical skills to undertake the massive task of development contemplated at independence. (OED)
Why is “development” a political concept?
It isn't. It is an economic concept. It has to do with lower factor productivity by reason of lack of know-how or some other impediment. Politics could play a role in removing that impediment. But 'development' is not a political concept. It may feature in a political theory as an explanation for why a particular political regime obtains in a particular place. It may also feature in a political manifesto. But the concept is not political in itself save in the sense that Tardean mimetics features in the life of competing polities.
The historical answer might well be that we should plot it on a chain of displacements beginning perhaps with the notion of the possibility of the perfectibility of humankind, a conviction not necessarily confined to Europe, but most publicly associated with the Encyclopaedist strain of the French Enlightenment.
This is nonsense. The aim of Ephraim Chambers and his various imitators was the spread of useful knowledge of a secular kind. This meant an amelioration of material conditions not the perfectibility of Man as envisioned by theologians or purveyors of different brands of 'virtue ethics'.
Upon this chain of displacements, Kant has been marked as inaugurating modernity.
No he hasn't. He has been marked as inaugurating phenomenology- which however was discovered to be useless. Newton was empirically proved to be wrong. Thus there could be no true 'synthetic a priori' judgments.
In our reading, Kant binds free will as a human programmed necessity within practical reason; the need or necessity for rational freedom is taken as constituting human agency at the very moment that nature, in its new Newtonian understanding, is conceived of as nothing but causal necessitation.
But this could be said of Hutcheson or Malebranche or Duns Scotus or virtually anybody else. The fact is Kant came from a backward part of the world. Coleridge may have liked his shite but everybody dismissed this aspect of Coleridge as wearisome nonsense. William Whewell was the first academic to take an interest in Kant but whereas a Hegelian tradition did develop at Oxbridge, Kant never really took off. Even Whewell was generally regarded as an anti-inductivist, not a Kantian.
This Anlage or program is irreducible
in which case it can't be called anything
and can be called a nuanced “fatalism,” freedom without the possibility of world transformation, within which the Kantian critique exemplifies the acting out of an unavoidable desire for philosophy, the all too human desire to “save” freedom as a practical necessity.
In other words, Spivak is saying Kantian critique is an unavoidable desire to do stupid, futile, shit.
This declaration of free will by a structurally determined necessity leaves fatalism as such unguarded in the persistent structures of history.
In the opinion of a cretin. The fact is Kant- for people who bothered with him- stood for Scientific inquiry on the basis of intuitions of a commonsense sort thus saving savants from epistemological quarrels.
The force of the Kantian critique is counter-intuitive and has idled as a guide to practice.
No. Kant says our intuitions re. things like Absolute Time and Space and Freedom and Necessity etc are perfectly proper. True, his more extreme claim that they are necessarily true have to be discarded. But, meanwhile, Science has become much more useful. It can more than pay for itself and so we are content to take a pragmatic or instrumentalist view of its epistemic status. By contrast, Spivak tells stupid, ignorant. lies.
In the lay reading, he has been seen only as an implacable moralist.
There is no 'lay reading' of Kant anymore than there is a 'lay reading' of the Mochizuki proof.
Rather than Kant’s taxonomy of Anlage and “fatalism”
God alone knows what Spivak is getting at. Anlagen means basic predisposition which Kant divides into animality, personality and humanity. Kant isn't saying 'animality' is evil but that choosing to obey, not fatalistically acquiescing in, the categorical imperative saves us from being evil.
we have fallen back or into or yet forward to a race-class-determined binary opposition of free will and fatalism that writes our world today.
Spivak is a dark skinned woman. Thus she is fatalistically writing some stupid shite coz she herself is a four letter word meaning stupid cunt which, for some reason, features in the schizophrenic word-salad of whoever it is that 'writes our world today'. Why not simply say- 'boo hoo! I'm Bengali! What's more I don't got a dick! I am truly shite!'
The so-called abstract workings of capital operate a deconstruction – fatalists to be folded together (made com-plicit, a typical deconstructive move) with capitalist petty bourgeois ideology (everyone can be a captain of industry) – which is called “development.”
Who is doing this 'deconstruction'? Spivak. So she is the concrete aspect of the 'so called abstract working of capital'. In other words, she is writing this shite coz she believes she will profit by doing so. She is complicit with the petty pedagogue's ideology (everyone can be Kant!) which is called 'higher education'.
Ranajit Guha has allowed us to plot development in a chain of displacements applying to India, as I have noted recently, in the following way:
the converted Buddhist Emperor Asoka (304-232 B.C.)’s new imperial-universal notion of dhamma, not to be found in the Arthasastra (150 B.C.- 300 A.D.) – the classic text of Indian economic and military practice – was in its turn miscast into the older Hindu notion of dharma, both instruments of class reconciliation between sovereign and subject.
But both the memory of Ashoka and that of the Arthashastra- save in the shape of hostile Jain references- were lost to Hindu India till the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Historical change, class accommodation, not “Indian” psychological essence. A chain of displacements again: dharma-dhamma-dharma; with colonialism, “Improvement,” “civilizing mission;” in general theory, today “Development.” All these words utilize invented “tradition” for the sake of reconciling established class/caste convictions in the lower social strata.3
I suppose Guha was thinking of Nehru's soft spot for Ashoka. But it wasn't one other Indians shared. Why? The guy kept killing Jain monks- whom the rest of us like and admire. Moreover, his Empire turned to shit because its military might collapsed. We blame cunts like him for India's decline. Enough with this Ahimsa shite! Our army should be kicking ass and taking names.
I believe one could find corresponding chains and linkings in other parts of the world.
Only if they possess pedants as utterly mad as Ranajit Guha (who however had the good sense to take British citizenship a few years before Niradh Chaudhri).
In the last century, Michel Foucault taught us to think about politics as a heterogeneous insertion into the play of power.
Speak for yourself, Spivak. Sensible people think politics is a game whose prize is power.
Although Foucault was not specific about race and class, I can summarize his position as follows: access to power positions is not initially deliberate but rather an “insertion” by virtue of what an older language would call “social formation.”
Yet, history shows that guys who deliberately killed their rivals so as to gain power created 'social formations'. It is crazy to say first there were Generals and then armies appeared and then Generals used those armies to play hide and seek. Then some social formation called 'war' inserted itself and those armies fought other armies and took control of territories.
Within a single social formation, such access is necessarily heterogeneously determined by race-class-gender as the condition and effect of inequality.
No. The original 'social formation' was the clan of hunter-gatherers which might evolve into a tribe which didn't have much class differentiation and no race differentiation whatsoever. There was less gender dimorphism, though- no doubt- it did exist. It is only a complex civilization which will be multi-racial and which will feature complex social stratification.
In my estimation, the diversity involved in the field of application of “development” pulls Foucault’s analysis beyond its own empirical limits.
In Spivak's estimation Foucault was a cretin who thought Generals could exist before Armies did. The fucker thought hunter gatherers were constantly discriminating against each other coz of color and class.
One can come to this conclusion by attending to questions Foucault himself famously posed about conceptualization: “conceptualization should not be founded on a theory of the object
which is why modern physics and biology and chemistry are so crap
—the conceptualized object is not the single criterion of a good conceptualization. We have to know the historical conditions which motivate our conceptualization.
But to know about history, you have to actually study history- lots and lots of it. Foucault was completely ignorant of even school boy French history- e.g. the story of the vase of Soissons- but the real reason he wrote paranoid shite was because he was a paranoid shithead, and, anyway, stupid Americans would pay him handsomely for his shite.
We need a historical awareness of our present circumstance. The second thing to check is the type of reality with which we are dealing.”4
Paranoid nutters need to keep checking that the Government is indeed, as they claim, watching them poop.
I think in our reality, wherein states have been usually undermined with reference to capitalist globality, some of us might think of politics by going back to the word politeia or, roughly, constitutionality.
Why? If the State has been undermined, why bother with how constitutionality is exercised?
Although most new nations are tremendously interested in new constitutions,
No. That was a hobby-horse for a few barristocrats and Law professors.
and European nations are also concerned about constitutions because of the precariousness of the euro zone,
There is no relationship between the one and the other. The UK, New Zealand and Ireland don't have written constitutions. So what?
in fact we know that the charge of the state for redistribution and constitutionality has been taken elsewhere: the human rights lobby, the various United Nations organizations from peacekeeping to language protection, and the international civil society in general.
Spivak was writing this in 2017 when the tide had already turned against that shite.
The state now operates by the unconstituted “rule of law” required for the management of global capital, preserving its ideological frame: neo-liberalism.
But the State also now operates on Spivak's skull replacing its unconstituted 'rule of some shite or the other'- which is required for her self-management under global capital- with some other shite which is more or less neo-liberal and not pseudo-lefty at all.
On this agreement, it is economic growth that is the main index of what is called “development.”
Nope. Economic growth is measured by whether the economy has grown. Development is measured by factor productivity growth- in particular that of the median worker.
The measuring site of economic growth, nonetheless, remains the state,
Nope. It may be any enterprise which finds it worthwhile to gather information of that sort.
and with it there is also an increasing awareness across the political spectrum that economic growth is not an adequate gauge for development in the qualitative/affective sense.5
So what? Alternatives have been available since the Seventies.
The historical conditions of our conceptualization of “development” must take into account a change in the electronic capitalist management of capital,
in which case Spivak can't do it coz she knows shit about FinTech and IT.
where economically re-structured states take on a managerial role.
Which State does not have a 'managerial' role? Where do economic forces not lead to restructuring? Who can afford to run things without using 'electronics'? Not even Bhutan.
Thinking capital’s social productivity as “development” is now more apposite than “improvement” or “civilizing mission.”
But the whole thrust of Spivak's essay is predicated on the opposite- i.e. 'Development' is a Racist plot by sneering White peeps determined to make brown women from Bengal feel horrible about themselves. Did you know those bastards made me read books by White peeps just to get a PhD and then I had to pretend to teach kids about those books just to get my salary? Fuck you neo-liberalism! Fuck you very much! If I hadn't taken out a 'life mortgage' to get the money to go study at Cornell, I wouldn't have had to read these shitty books dead White shitheads kept shitting out!
The contradiction between state-by-state measurement of economic growth and the decimation of the stately function (neoliberal governance by unconstituted “rule of law”)
Spivak means that the Police aren't under the control of the good gangbangers in the ghetto. Obviously, this means they are in the pay of Wall Street. Furthermore, Big Tech is filming you poop and then charging Japanese billionaires loads of money for Blue-Ray discs of your anal sphincter. Wake up sheeple! Don't you get it? All them richie riches are making money out of the shit coming out of your asshole!
, the increasing use of “cheap labor” (heterogeneity of labor)
previously, people would only hire very expensive labor. That's how come babysitters all drove Porsches.
leading to massive labor export understood as migration, legitimized by tremendously expensive tax-dodging “V.I.P. migration”
as opposed to the sort of migration Sen and Spivak went in for
required by the same “rule of law,”
which is preventing neo-Nazis beating up and deporting Sen and Spivak
the preservation of differences in foreign exchange
Will Spivak exchange her Dollars at parity for Rupees? I don't think so.
to protect one of the mainstays of finance capital and innumerable other details in order to grasp that “development” as a word covers over the gap between a statistical measure and a trained epistemology.
Development has statistical measures which are themselves the product of 'trained epistemologies'. There is no 'gap' between them. There is a gap between shite Spivak writes and any thing true about this world.
This is supported by private sector voluntarism of heterogeneous sorts: from international civil society through corporate social responsibility into the antics of the World Economic Forum
where Spivak happily strutted her stuff
and its reactive double, the World Social Forum.
Which I've never heard off.
This constellation enables the word “development” repeatedly to cross the aporia between mathemata and pathemata, statistics and affect.
If it does so there is no aporia. Development can certainly take 'affect' into account through 'Happiness' indices of various sorts.
Marx’s use of the word “social” shares the same problem – a quantified definition that seemed useful and a fuzzy qualitative idea.
Actually, Marx defines 'social' in relation only to class which however is fuzzy. Marx didn't actually know the Law of any country- let alone Capitalist England.
Consider the following-
Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers’ own labour, the other on the employment of the labour of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only.The first leads to the hope that “socialization” – using abstract average labor power with worker-owned means of production
which can't be quantified at all for Mathematical reasons Spivak is too stupid to understand. Furthermore, there can't be 'worker owned means of production' in the sense of a given number of workers who utilize particular plant & machinery actually having full, unqualified, ownership over it. Why? They'd just sell everything off and go work somewhere else and do the same thing again. All you can have in practice is notional 'worker ownership' with the State possessing a lien over physical capital.
– would lead to a just society; the second to an unexamined and vague idea of a humanistic good society that Marx himself left untheorized as “the realm of freedom.”
No. He said that once scarcity ceases to exist then people will only make stuff because they feel like it. Anyone who wants their stuff would be welcome to just pick it up and take it away. The problem here is that guys who make real nice jeans because they like making real nice jeans won't want to give those nice jeans to me coz I gotta big fat ass. People want attractive and nice people to use the things they make. Still, Marx was saying something important- which the Chinese Communists have grasped- not till scarcity ends should you give to each according to his needs. Till then, give to each according to her contribution.
Some of us are trained into an intellectual style that welcomes such openings,
but then sticks its head into those openings or orifices and gets stuck
but the traditional imperative to theorize considers all openings to be loopholes to be closed off.
Which is how come all those Quantum theorists haven't contributed anything to humanity except advanced electronics and lasers and stuff of that sort.
Hence the unexamined fuzzy connotative field is simply taken for granted or ignored, ripe for political mobilization and poetry, sometimes indistinguishable, that cannot be satisfactorily thought through and therefore can destroy the clear outlines of a conceptual field.
In other words, Spivak can write this sort of shite without being laughed at.
It is because this muddle between affect and statistics cannot be satisfactorily theorized –– that we can have moralistic descriptive books, but no discussion of solutions.
Reviewing Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen’s An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions,8 Jyoti Thottam writes:
Drèze and Sen might have devoted more thought to how to make India’s existing social-welfare initiatives work better. They describe successes in a few forward-thinking states, but it is not clear how to replicate those results on a national scale. The section on discrimination against girls — an issue on which Sen is an unquestioned expert — also cries out for a more prescriptive analysis.9
Jyoti is a journalist. She was posted in India. She, quite rightly, points out that this book is empty. But she is wrong to say Sen knows about the problems of Indian women. The fact is, to get gender balance you have to ban abortion, save in hard cases- which all religious people want to do. This then creates the incentive for gender neutral inheritance and educational and employment reform.
And Robert Shiller makes the same complaint in the pages of the same newspaper:
In his monumental new book, Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics documents a sharp increase in such inequality over the last 25 years, not only in the United States, but also in Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa, with people with the highest incomes far outstripping the rest of society.10 The book is impressive in its wealth of information but it is short on solutions.11
The book is nonsense. Essentially, Piketty is saying 'inequality is rising! The sky will surely fall on our heads!' This has allowed Piketty to make some money for himself. Good for him. That's how Globalized markets work.
Put another way, “development” is insertion into the circuit of capital, without developing the subject of its ethical, or even appropriate social, use.
Fuck off! Development was a big feature of the insertion into the circuit of Stalinism. Indeed, Development is what happened when a tribe with higher factor productivity occupied the land of a tribe which they exterminated or enslaved. This had nothing to do with Capitalism.
No doubt, there were people back then who might gas on about how this could be done more ethically- or indeed why it might be more pleasing to God not to do the thing at all- but virtue signalers we shall always have with us, unless killing and eating them become de rigueur.
The development of the subject is apparently in the self-interest of the “underdeveloped,”
No it isn't. That subject may start gassing on in a Gandhian or Sen-tentious vein about how an emaciated Bengali peasant not currently addicted to crack cocaine is better off than an American gangbanger who does have that addiction and who keeps shooting peeps from other gangs and who thus isn't going to live very long- unless he gets locked up under 'three strikes'.
but the larger pattern is the interest of developed capital,
and peeps who think other peeps should have a good life
as will be clear from the clinching concluding module of this sample of a “sustainable development” syllabus:
Module 1: Introduction to sustainability management: What is it? How can we achieve it?
Module 2: The public policy and regulatory framework of sustainability: How can this speed transition to sustainability?
Module 3: A sustainably built environment: how can we plan for, design, and operate green workplaces, buildings, and infrastructure?
Module 4: Sustainable financing and investment: how can we fund sustainability initiatives?12
This is designed for the subject of developed capital,
No it isn't. A wealthy country can just throw money at the problem. A poor country has to do sustainability otherwise the thing is not scalable. Sure, you can have one 'model' green commune but because all the tech is coming in from Japan and the Norwegians are paying for it, the thing can't be replicated. The thing isn't really a model because it can't give rise to Tardean mimetics.
whose force is larger than the undoubted personal goodwill of teacher and student. But the underdeveloped hastily trained into self-interest or self-interested income-production remains incapable of capital-management, especially in its global form.
Sen & Spivak were 'hastily trained into self-interested income production' in the West. The re-export of their stupid shite back into poor countries like India is a calamity. Spivak is right to say 'don't you dare try to talk my type of shite you ignorant desis!' But what she and Sen have done is not epistemic growth or development. Their u.s.p is extreme retardation. Sen's misprisions have reached back to Adam Smith. Spivak is shitting not just on Marx but now also Kant. Plenty in India want to emulate these two cretins. But India can't afford this luxury. Higher Education to be sustainable must get kids thinking about how to set off endogenous growth in their own neck of the woods. There is already an ecological crunch and a fiscal crunch will soon be upon us. Stop studying the sort of worthless shite which drove Rohith Vemula to suicide. Join together with other young people and set up an enterprise which can grow indigenously and endogenously.
Therefore, if we credit the abstract power of largely more and more unregulated capital, what is ultimately sustained is minimum “development” and “maximum” accumulation and surplus for financialization. Let us call this “sustainable underdevelopment.”
Let us not. Why? We know there will be a haircut on sovereign debt. The thing isn't sustainable at all.
In a popular essay on “development,” a successful transformation of the gendered subject in Peru is described as follows:
Between 200,000 and 300,000 persons have been sterilized in the course of the program, 90 percent of whom were women. The government thus managed to restructure the field of action predominantly of its female population in the area of reproduction in a way that led to the desired change in behavior—not through the direct use of force, but through positive reinforcement and disciplinary measures (incentives offered for compliances and sanctions used against dissident conduct).”13
Spivak is quoting Aram Ziai who has helped prevent the World Bank doing for India what it did for China. What good has that cunt ever achieved?
“Gendering,” also the subject of micro-credit, is always the paradigm case of the inefficient production of the subject of development,
Spivak is an 'inefficient production' for which Cornel should hang its head in shame. But then she paid to study there. Anyway, she was bleck and lacked a dick. Who seriously expected anything much from her?
whereby the provision of unmediated economic independence—let us forget global control—is a guarantee of victory in the gender struggle.
Mad! Women lending each other small sums of money aren't thinking of global control or 'victory in the gender struggle'. On the other hand a very poor Dalit woman with no education is now a successful entrepreneur worth 200 million dollars thanks to a small Government loan scheme.
At the developed end, the management of subject production in the citizen
is a paranoid fantasy. It simply isn't the case that the Government, for some fell reason, is turning America into a predominantly white, heterosexual, Christian country. On the other hand, it is certainly true that Narendra Modi invented Hinduism so as to brainwash 80 per cent of India's population into believing he himself is one of them. The truth is Nicholas Maugham (Modi's true name) is a senior partner at Goldman Sachs. Also he is watching you poop. That's how he gets his jollies. Wake up sheeple! Are you really so naive as to think that Biden isn't an African woman who is plotting against Wakanda? She is secretly smuggling Vibranium as part of a global Neo-Liberal conspiracy. Also, she likes watching you poop.
— as well as the global citizen, an oxymoron — is guided by timid invocations of behaviorist economics, assuming a pre-critical theory of the subject that takes a step or two beyond rational choice.
Whereas a post-critical theory of the subject can tell you which world leader is currently watching you poop.
A “global citizen” is an oxymoron in the strict sense because there is no constituted global state.
No it isn't. A global state is possible. An oxymoron involves a contradiction in terms- e.g a fat thin person or a truthful liar.
It uses the fuzzy connotative field around the word “citizen” as if it is conceptualizable.
It is. We can conceptualize a global state.
“Behavioral” economics, like behaviorism itself, conceptualizes the affects as leaders of “motivation”
Rubbish! Behavioral econ is about bounded rationality, cognitive biases, 'nudges' etc. Behaviorism was about conditioned reflexes. Neither take any particular stand on affects because they are plastic and context dependent with respect to observable behavior.
and thus ignores the complexities of the human mind.
Of which Spivak knows nothing.
I use the term “pre-critical”
incorrectly. The thing either means 'dogmatic' or prior to a crisis- as of an existing epistemic paradigm. Such was not the case for behaviorism and behavioral economics. They built upon philosophical arguments against vitalism and teleology on the one hand, or informationally and cognitively unaffordable substantive rationality on the other.
in relationship to the outlines of the Kantian critique that I attempted to summarize above, because these motivations are argued by mere reason,
as opposed to what? Either an argument is reasoned or it isn't an argument at all. It may be 'inspired' prophesy or an oracular intuition. But, if it is an argument it must be the product of reason. Spivak, of course, has never presented an argument in her life. Her magpie mind plays hopscotch in some imaginary topos where she is the equal of Kant and Hegel.
behaviorist economics seems a modest modification of rational choice, reason defined by its lowest common denominator.
Nonsense! Rational choice means you just plug in your own theory into the parameter re. expectations and thus quickly gain ergodicity. Behavioral econ predicts hysteresis effects of a substantial type.
Thus, the attempt to solve the problem of the muddle between statistics (rational choice) and affect (behavior) is inadequate to its enormity.
Statistics is not Economic theory. An Econometric model is said to be R.E if Expectations match those of the underlying theory. Affect is not behavior. I may be angry or sad but my routine behavior does not change. Cognitive biases have nothing to do with 'affect' though, no doubt, contexts where a particular affect is normative will see convergence to different types of behavior. I may be bored out of my skull at both Church and a frat party but I conform to the very different norms of behavior characteristic of each.
I am still with Foucault’s warning about the conditions of conceptualization.
No you aren't. He was mad. You are merely stupid.
Among the many implications of explicit electronification of globalization is
stuff smart peeps study and make money out of
the setting-to-work of the rising potential of language in its normal mode of existence:
Fuck off! Language doesn't matter. Big Data does. We have machine language based algorithms which are 'black boxes'. We simply don't know how to describe their inner workings in natural language. This may change.
“development” – as “improvement” and “civilization” in previous formations.14
This stupid cretin doesn't get that development, for much of the world- including the place she chose to migrate to- meant genocide and demographic replacement. This was national and racial, not civilizational at all.
One of the conjectural contradictions thus glossed over by the nature of words is the obvious existential impoverishment of abstract calculation
Spivak must be the only person in the world who thinks 'abstract calculation'- i.e. the sort of stuff Bezos pays his Economists to do- has become impoverished. Everybody else thinks it has advanced by leaps and bounds. Already there are computer generated proofs- e.g. of the falsity of Godel's proof of God. Voevodsky's univalent foundations project captures the spirit of our age. Meanwhile, Professors of Eng Lit write like shit.
— the distance between capital measurement and the task of subject-formation that defines “development” in our conjuncture, as I have already suggested.
The distance is the same as that between something which exists- viz. measurements of capital- and something which is just a paranoid fantasy.
What follows is an example of advancement in statistics inadequate even to understanding the task of subject-formation:
nothing is adequate to understanding paranoid shite save raving lunacy.
The Human Development Index, devised by Mahbub-ul-Haq, and used by the United Nations since 1990, has fallen upon bad days, as I have pointed out on various occasions, since the last report of the Human Development Index came out.
Nonsense! What it was it remained though some small changes were made to get rid of perverse effects- e.g. some populations having a few very long lived individuals or some stupid nutters who just stayed in school all their fucking lives- but nobody greatly cared. Basically, it had become obvious that a country which made rapid HDI gains could turn to utter shit- e.g. Venezuela.
The two items which transformed mere development into human development—education and life expectancy—were about to be discarded by the statisticians who put together the HDI, because they wanted to try for more efficient statistical production.15
HDI was silly. Smart people look only at factor productivity. If this is rising for the median worker- then you have sustainable development. Otherwise, there may be a resource curse on the one hand or, on the other hand, this is a country which is preparing itself for a leap out of the 'middle income trap'.
Thus indirectly we get a critique of the sentimental obstreperousness of affect-measurement by statistics;
There are some statisticians who go around doing 'affect-measurement' so as to write shite papers about why the French are happier than the Americans and so forth. But this has nothing to do with HDI.
although to prove my point was not the statisticians’ goal of course.
Yet, amazingly, they have not just proved Spivak's point they have also discovered that Joe Biden is actually an African woman who is secretly smuggling Wakanda's vibranium to a Neo-Liberal Mafia. Also s/he is watching you poop. Wake up sheeple!
“Development,” with the affective paleonymy of the word,
which only exists in Spivak's addled brain
invariably taken seriously by top and bottom alike, cannot be conceptualized
by stupid shitheads who were hired to teach Eng Lit not pretend they understood Econ
without theories of democratic subject-formation that require alternative disciplinary formations.
so as to stop the Government from watching you poop through the invisible cameras they have fitted into every toilet bowl.
We must now confront the fact that “development” might top the list of a generic change in global index-making since the tremendous advance in statisticalization brought in by the silicon chip: the measure of affect by numbers, as it affects our everyday: please “like” this, please be my “friend.” Presidents blog and twitter. Development is on the cusp of this loosening of the conceptualization of the political.
No. People get that development is what happens when you mimic people similar but smarter than you. Sure, this could happen through YouTube videos of farmers in Wakanda showing farmers in Wyoming how to get better yields through hydroponics or whatever. But this is mimetics and peer to peer communication not some stilted 'conceptualizations of the political'.
When such measurement began, in the aftermath of the Great Depression
America began GDP measurement in 1934 during the Depression. However, for fiscal purposes- especially during war time- all countries had some system of establishing National Income and tax yield.
and World War II, the idea was, as Yeats put it, “Measurement began our might.”16
Yeats was speaking of both the poet's attention to meter and the architect and sculptor's interest in geometry. His poem features Pythagorean and neo-Platonic notions or reincarnation with a typically Irish, tuirgen, twist. Spivak thinks Yeats's appeal to his fellows to re-establish 'indomitable Irishry' has something to do with Statistics.
After Bretton Woods, “GDP becomes the standard tool for sizing up a country’s economy.”17 Now, as we notice in the module for sustainable development training, we must consider investment, for finance capital is more important than industrial.
No. Sustainable development must generate its own funds for reinvestment so as to capture economies of scope and scale. 'Finance Capital' involves currency risk. The safer course is to ensure high enough internal r.o.i from the get go.
And, the bull market is constantly dependent upon affect: not even the most mathematical textbooks can escape the fact that the bull market is dependent upon investor confidence.
Which is based on market fundamentals. Institutional investors in Tokyo don't have the same 'animal spirits' as those in New York. But they have equal mathematical nous.
It is therefore dependent upon an interested subject-production.
Not if the financial market is Globalized. It is crazy enough to say that the New Yorker is 'produced'. It is completely bonkers to suggest that Singapore and Shanghai and Frankfurt all conveniently decided to produce the same sort of subject.
The relationship between affect and its statistical legislation can also be seen as
anything you like because there is no true relationship here at all. You may posit a false relationship but then you get an ex falso quodlibet explosion of nonsense.
a displacement of the concept-metaphor argument made in Derrida’s “White mythology,” that the concept erases within itself the fabulous scene that persistently produces it.
But this is not true of any mathematical or scientific concept precisely because, as Derrida recognized, it has a representation within a non linguistic semiotics. You can deconstruct what a mathematician says about his own theory- generally the guy misunderstands or misspeaks in this regard- but not its mathematical representation.
Derrida does not see this erasure as sequential.18
But since seeing is sequential, we are welcome to do so.
Although worldwide policy on many angles is made on these existentially impoverished statistics,
Fuck off. There is no worldwide policy- as opposed to endless virtue signaling and some actual triage.
the word “development” is used and felt by people even at the bottom of the pile to describe a general condition of human value.
No it isn't. When life shits on you, the word that rises to your lips is not 'Development' but 'Help!'.
It is this that the concept erases by the general law of abstract measurement.
Very true! My dick is actually really really big. But my erection gets erased by the general law of abstract measurement.
For whom is the definition to be made?
Why would ordinary people be interested in measures of development? The answer is you want to see who was once like you but has now gotten way ahead. It's like what happens at school. You discover that the spotty kid with braces has won a scholarship. Yet he and you were level just a year or two ago. How did he pull ahead? You ask around and discover his Dad sent him to a crammer. You tell you parents and they get you into the same crammer. Suddenly you start doing well.
The way in which the policymakers use it?
Not just them, everybody in that society- teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs- they all look at what the more successful country is doing and they imitate it.
The way in which among the policymakers there is still a group that thinks economic growth is not, in the human sense, development?
Policymakers need to ensure there will be enough tax revenue to fund their policy instruments. This means they ultimately do have to pay attention to economic growth. The alternative is cutting back on some cherished policy objective.
The efforts at nuancing the concept simply by adding myriad items is an example of Kant’s long ago indication that “mere reason” reduces responsibility to Zurechnungfähigkeit or reckoning.
But the word also means 'sanity'. Kant is referencing Aristotle's use of logizomenos as thinking and calculating to some particular practical end. However, Kant was trying to establish a 'categorical imperative' which a free mind might legislate for itself. Interestingly, in the Bible 'logizomenos' has to do with God's uncalculating mercy. In contrast, 'kategoros' is a name Rabbi's apply to the Devil because the Devil is the accuser or prosecutor. Kant wants us to adopt his stupid maxim not from fear or calculation but in a noble and generous spirit.
Spivak is saying that Bengali economists who gassed on about Human Development and Capabilities etc were mercenary, Machiavellian, cunts. She may not know this is what she is saying- but, being Bengali, she is probably very happy that she has got off this dig at Amartya Sen.
Similarly, the desire to measure “happiness” ignores the condition of subalternity: the subaltern as such – not yet in crisis/struggle – thinks objective wretchedness is normal; how shall we measure “happiness” here?
By getting the subaltern to say how much happier she feels after we give her lots of nice things to eat and an indoor toilet and a chance to read Spivak and laugh at her stupidity and ignorance.
Spivak paid good money to get away from a shithole about 60 years ago. But she has made good money by pretending that the subaltern can't speak and this means her own worthless drivel should be rewarded. No doubt, she is very pleased with herself. But her happiness depends on her being too stupid and ignorant to understand that she has been writing stupid shite so as to prove to Whitey that Bengollywogs be as stupid as shit.
(Let us remember Kant’s displacement of “fatalism” in his bound conception of freedom – the misfired mark of a misfired philosophical modernity which was replaced by a race-class-determined binary opposition of free will and fatalism that runs our world today.)
Spivak remembers her own misologies. But that is all she remembers. She doesn't recall that there were plenty of Bengali philosophers who taught that Kant, like Advaita, dismissed fatalism as arising out of the 'maya', the delusive appearance, of causality. As for 'race-class-determined binaries', they don't run shit in Mamta's Bengal. It seems Spivak left India to become more ignorant than the average Bengali.
I refer the reader to the more extended discussion above. These then are the “fatalists” at the bottom. Should the definition accommodate the way in which large sections of the population use it at present, as what Raymond Williams would call a “residual,” hanging on from the sense of being a second-class culture that came with colonialism?
I think Williams was invoking Pareto's notion of 'residues' and 'derivations'. However, Nehruvian 'Development' discourse was, in his terms, an 'emergent' phenomena. Gandhian shite was 'residual'
If you think I am beginning to suggest that this is a word which would be better off without the convenience of adequate conceptualization, you are correct. (I realize I am interdisciplinary here. No doubt the qualitative social sciences must aim to conceptualize seamlessly; the quantitative ones statisticalize; it is most often a combination of the two. The humanities break them open to consider the incalculable when we speak “development.” Can a lexicon allow for this?)
Yes. The 'qualitative social sciences' do 'Structural Causal Models' which in turn yield better instruments. The quantitative side checks they work and what the costs and benefits are. The humanities shit themselves and are hosed down by the groundskeeper after which they have to wait in the Vice Principal's office till Mummy comes to pick them up.
The task is to translate the word into many different languages and see how it is understood and internalized by the class that cannot access worldwide quantification
in other words everybody with a PhD in some cutting edge branch of Big Data manipulation
– and by gender singled out as an alibi for intervention.
This stupid cunt has got it into her head that the Brits only conquered India to put an end to suttee or, more radically, to stop wimmin from fisting each other non-consensually in mosques and temples and churches across the land.
For this persistent opening up, the baseline concept will suffice: the economic transition into the circuit of capital with insufficient attention to subject-formation.
In plain terms, a bunch of darkies were brought into the global market place before they were weaned off cannibalism and coprophagy and wimmin fisting each other vigorously in every place of worship.
It is really very very fucking annoying for Spivak to have to listen to Americans moan about how good I.T jobs have been transferred to Bangalore. She is saying to them 'I was born in India. The place is a complete shithole. Wimmin are constantly being subjected to suttee and thugee and vigorous, non consensual fisting by other wimmin. Furthermore, Indian men are very very fucking stupid. Why pretend they can do the sort of jobs White Americans can do? Don't you understand- there is no place called Bangalore. You probably mean Ballygunge where my Daddy built a house using gold mohurs given to him by the King of Nepal. Let me tell you, they don't have no fucking computers there. They are a bunch of cannibals who can't even speak due to they are subaltern. What has really happened is that your jobs were stolen by Neo-Liberalism which is watching you poop. Foucault has explained all this. Kant tried to argue otherwise but I gave him a tight slap and told him to fuck off. Wake up sheeple! Biden is watching you poop!
It is the task of such a supplementation of the word “development” to make the apologists or organic intellectuals of capitalist globalization
how can a Gramscian 'organic intellectual' belong to 'capitalist globalization' while speaking for the subaltern? It is not possible to hold down a job at Goldman Sachs while remaining a landless peasant or victim of sweated labor.
think development as subject-formation and dismiss this “real” definition of development as only “economistic.”
There is nothing economistic about Spivak's paranoid theory of how countries like India which now export IT services are actually backward shitholes whose people are probably eating each other or vigorously fisting themselves in places of worship because they simply don't know any better. Don't you see we must first educate the Indians- e.g. explain to them why they should stop eating their own shit- before doing any sort of business with them. Why does Bill Gates not understand this? Does he not realize that you can't appoint a guy named Satya Narayana Nadella- i.e. one of those stupid Hindu cannibals- as head of a Capitalist Corporation? That fool has probably bitten off and eaten his own arms! Before you can bring Indians into the circuit of Capital you have to ensure India does proper 'subject formation'. But that can't be done, for reasons I fully explain in my next book, till I figure out what the fuck I was trying to say in my last pile of shite. Till then, just stop it with all this Development bullshit. India is a shit-hole and must always remain so. Take it from me. I was born there.
Development as such moves at best toward fostering the justified self-interest of groups often in opposition.
So does everything else in the Social sphere. Spivak's shite moves at best towards justifying the self-interest of stupid cunts like her.
As Marx already knew, it is not enough to wish to end exploitation for one’s own group.
Marx knew nothing of the sort- or at least never said anything so stupid. It is enough for you to wish to end exploitation of your own group and then to do so. This may involve working with other groups- it may not. What's important is that you achieve your wish rather than talk endless bollocks.
The point is to foster an international will for social justice in general.
No it isn't. It is not the Will but the means of production which must be changed. Even if everybody is brimming over with goodwill to all men, nothing will change till the substructure is changed.
There are many reasons why this does not happen. The failure does not require us to fall back into unexamined liberalism. I can repeat here what I said to the World Economic Forum: knowledge depends on cooking the soul with slow learning, not the instant soup of a one-size-fits-all toolkit.
No. Stupidity may depend on such shite. Knowledge depends on getting smart people to work to a common standard or use the same toolkit. Thus, to defeat COVID, we rely on guys who have a one-size-fits-all toolkit which involves DNA and RNA and other such stuff. Nobody thinks giving money to a guy with a slow cooked soul, or baked brain, will do any good whatsoever.
The world is not populated by humanoid drones.
She means androids.
You cannot produce a toolkit for “a moral metric,” or if you do you will be disappointed.
Contracts have morality clauses and some lawyers specialize in toolkits which generate favorable 'moral metrics' for their clients. They get paid big bucks and aren't disappointed at all if their clients win.
It is a different matter that, currently, a universal 'moral metric' is inaccessible or too difficult to specify with respect to any actual problem. But Physics too doesn't yet have a Grand Unified Theory. What matters is that for any specific purpose, there is a SCM and associated metric which improves outcomes.
Cooking the soul=subject-formation.
Spivak's erudition is half baked- 'katcha'- she is neither a 'pucca'- well cooked- Europeanist, because she missed out on a Classical Paideia and thus makes howlers- e.g thinking Aesop mentioned a guy who jumped from Rhodes to the mainland- nor does she know shit about India- she thinks the country is named Bharat after Lord Ram's younger brother.
She doesn't understand the subject she teaches but with a lot of chutzpah and a bit of intellectual affirmative action, she has done well for herself.
“Development” as a political concept ignores this. That the World Economic Forum has no interest in this does not mean that the readership of this critical lexicon also should not!
This shite was published in some 'handbook' which no one will read. It was produced by shitheads for shitheads who must know the credentials they aspire to are a joke.
“Development” as a concept is understood by ordinary people differently from the statistical understanding available to competitive national governments and international finance. The word in my mother tongue is unnayan.
Which means 'upliftment'.
As a noun, it works fine – it is understood as various good things like schools, bridges, hospitals, or trees coming our way. For “developing” there is no colloquial word. For “undeveloped,” a word routinely chosen for self-description, we have: anunnoto.
This is right, but the word has come to mean 'backwardness' of a distinctly casteist type- i.e. primitive savages.
Paradoxically, this adjective is usually applied by my clients – landless and ill-educated, often illiterate, men, to describe India – of which they have a somewhat vague idea.
Why is this 'paradoxical'? They are abiding by the reigning linguistic convention. Also they know Spivak thinks of herself as high caste and 'developed'. They have to be obsequious if they are going to get any money out of her more or less bogus Trust or Foundation or whatever.
To represent themselves, they use the colloquial version of this adjective – pichhiye pora – held back – which is also routinely used by so-called radical intellectuals to describe them.
Why does Spivak mention these poor men? Also, how come they are still so abject? Is it because they are the clients of a cretin?
Where, in the year 2017, is there any fucking radical intellectual in Bengal? Mamta's goons have beaten them black and blue. They are quietly voting for the BJP only to discover, to their chagrin, that Mamta's goons also beat BJP cadres with vim and vigor.
Many years ago we read Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
It was stupid shit. Rodney was killed 40 years ago- probably on orders from Burnham who had persuaded the West to back him against Cheddi Jagan who was in fact slightly less Leftwing. Guyana has a good reason to repudiate its horrible Afro-Communist legacy.
I am proposing that that story, although signaling a rupture,
Rodney ruptured right enough after Burnham's bomb exploded in his car. Sad.
could take hold because it is also a displacement of the general dominating practice of pre-colonial conjunctures.
It was a bunch of stupid lies which kept a corrupt, sadistic, regime in power while the people suffered- or ran away.
Benevolent or malevolent or in-between or indeed not-bothered-to-be-violent-pre-colonial power groups unevenly enriching themselves at the expense of the postcolonial groups inheriting older hierarchies, shares that logic.
If this is English, what is goobledegook?
This gives us a pre-modern clue to the word “underdevelopment” as it spread to varieties of the class- apartheid present in all polities, cutting across gender-apartheid and group-apartheid, where the usual overflowing of something like “class” in the everyday must be allowed to contaminate the disinfected house of scientific socialism.20
I suppose Spivak means, 'I iz Brahmin- i.e. cultured and refined. But lots of peeps back in India are primitive cannibals who contaminate the house of scientific socialism because we are no longer permitted to practice untouchability.'
The Dalit leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar suggests, in a graduate seminar paper written by him as a student at Columbia, and intended therefore for a non-Indian audience, that the difference in the treatment of surplus-men and surplus-women, present in all societies, is the motor of group-formation, including caste.21
Ambedkar spoke of 'broken' men and women- i.e. the remnants of defeated and dispersed tribes- who became a permanent under-class.
In other words, the essay acknowledges reproductive heteronormativity as the matrix within which the history of all apartheid is held.
No it doesn't. Bisexuality too can lead to babies as can rape. However, apartheid's history is not held in the matrix of reproduction. It can function just fine by shipping in adults of a different color or ethnicity and sending them back periodically to reproduce on their own soil so as to continue the chain.
But Apartheid is the exception not the rule. It appears to be costly and inefficient to enforce. Thus it hasn't really lasted. Caste, however, is not apartheid. A slave caste may live side by side with a master caste which also spreads its seed amongst them.
If we allow the concept of development to overflow the interplay of capital and colony, we will see this matricial role more clearly.
But 'development' is a post-colonial concept and involved Rostowian stages to an equal or greater affluence. It couldn't overflow something which no longer existed.
This requires allowing reproductive heteronormativity itself to overflow the outlines of sexual reproduction and be thought as the possible unacknowledgeable antonym of the autonormativity that is the authoritative self-representation of ideology as Idea.
But it could be thought as the possible acknowledged synonym of any shite whatsoever. The fact is all normativity overflows biology in the sense that words when misused can mean anything or nothing or both or both and neither or neither because both.
I will unpack this by way of Marx’s discovery of surplus-value.
He didn't discover it. It was a Ricardian Socialist term first used in 1824.
Marx describes the secret of surplus-value in Capital I as the Sprengpunkt or “the ‘pivot’ of his critique.”
It is his 'entry point'. But it was no secret that employers paid workers less than the market value of what the employer sold. This 'profit' however, Marx thought, would disappear because of competition and diminishing returns. Poor chap, he didn't have the mathematical chops- or practical business experience- to see that if Scientific innovation is possible then his theory fails. Capitalism we will always have with us.
In surplus-value, discovered during the composition of the Grundrisse – he discovered the secret of reproductive heteronormativity, that everything human and upper primate emerges out of the differences between needing and making.
Sexual reproduction also occurs among birds and little fishies. No doubt this secret was kept from Spivak who only found out about it while reading the Grundrisse and underlining the dirty bits.
He described it in human terms – the worker advances the capitalist his labor-power and the capitalist repays less than he gets out of it; and he also describes it in rational terms – laborpower is the only commodity which, when consumed, produces value.
But it can also produce worthless shite when 'consumed'. That what happened at the University Department where Spivak teaches.
Yet, this discovery of human and top primate hetero-norm (that the contingent surplus produced in the difference between need and the capacity to make runs the world),
Why is Spivak so obsessed with 'top primates'? Is it because some of her students are monkeys?
If a guy needs stuff and has the capacity to make it and there is a difference between the two then either he will also have a surplus which he can sell or give away or else his needs will be unfulfilled. Either he starves or is a charity case or he must take a job with a guy who has a superior 'capacity to make' by getting stupid peeps to do boring and repetitive stuff while himself concentrating on high value adding organizing and marketing activities. Guys like this may indeed get to 'run the world' if they can command sufficient coercive or persuasive power. But this is because of their superior 'capacity to make' the world run better. It has nothing to do with needs.
What Spivak is getting at is that women are needy. Men have the capacity to make stuff- including babies whom a lot of women are greedy for. Thus Men dominate Women even though Men is of Woman born! Similarly, workers, driven by need, work for Bosses who extract their surplus value and use the money to hire yet more needy workers and thus get even richer. Just as Men have thousands or millions of wives whom they continually impregnate, so too does the Boss class continually extract surpluses even from very poor and backward people in shitholes like India. This is very naughty. Judith Butler should give these naughty Bosses one good tight slap! I'm not saying all Bosses belong to Butler's ancestral religion- but, lets face it, some people are just better at making money. Butler should krav maga their sorry asses.
was seen subsequently as lodged in the autonormative idea, identical with itself, scientific socialism.
Marx was a Jew. He didn't get that in India you have lots of very primitive and backward peeps. They shouldn't be allowed into the house of scientific socialism. Anyway, I'm glad I was able to escape that horrible country. Shame so many White peeps are so ga ga about Ambedkar. Just because he had a couple of PhDs from top schools doesn't mean he wasn't a...well you know what I mean.
Hence Gramsci’s word, gnoseological –neither “psychological,” for the logic of the psyche is at the mercy of the individuated contingent, nor “moral,” although consciousness and morality are at issue.
The term is Leninist, but Lenin succeeded whereas Gramsci failed. Thus Lenin had 'gnoseology' (an Orthodox theological term which Lenin used to signify a type of 'kairotic' leadership with a superior intuition as regards dialectical opportunities) whereas poor old Gramsci moldered away in a prison cell. Italian Communism did have its moment in the Sun after the War, but it wasn't Gramscian and has since faded away.
The tremendous discovery of the heteronormative as the source of simple as well as expanded reproduction was put in the service of autonormative gnoseology – gnosis, diagnosis, prognosis: scientific socialism.
Which died everywhere 30 years ago. Yes, there is a Leninist party in China. But it doesn't talk about 'heteronomativity' or 'gnoseology'. It focuses on fucking up dissidents and those who don't get with the program.
Mummies, it is true, are the source of babies- but they can buy jizz quite cheaply. Capitalist reproduction does not require a class of workers which is separate from the class of owners. The employee's pension fund owns shares in a number of companies, including the one he works for. This creates no great scandal. The fact is, at different times in our life, we are dependent on Mummy and Daddy's labor power, or that of our own, but after retirement, we are Capitalists drawing dividends. Many people have both dividend income as well as earned income. The thing really is no big deal.
Marx gives enough signs that he is aware this can go beyond the economic sphere. However, tying it to the economic has prevented us noticing that this is how all intuitions of the transcendental also come forth, including any possible acknowledgement of complicity with the anthropocene.
Plenty of economists have intuitions which go from econ to biology to physics to theology etc, etc. Why would tying an intuition to one discipline prevent a rational person from seeing how it might apply in other contexts? Spivak may reply 'have you met my students? They are stupider than monkeys.' Our rejoinder is 'those are monkeys. This is the Bronx Zoo. Your students are waiting for you in the lecture hall. Should of gone to Specsavers innit? '
Here, however, we are on the track of the rich potentiality of Ambedkar’s early reckoning of reproductive heteronormativity as the matrix within which the history of apartheid, consistent in race, caste/class, and gender – most damagingly marked in access to educational quality – subject formation – is held.
There is no such nonsense to be found in Ambedkar. He merely said that in tribal societies, broken men and women- i.e. survivors of defeated and dispersed tribes- become an underclass. They may become endogamous at a later stage, though initially there is miscegenation, but they may retain a lower social status unless they take very active steps to raise up their collective prestige- e.g. by adopting Buddhism and getting Reserved seats in Parliament and doing well in Business and the Professions and so on and so forth.
If we open up this autonormative drive
why not simply say that it was stupid, paranoid, shite which fucked over the good people of the USSR and Eastern Europe and so forth?
to deny the heteronormative – that everything emerges in the difference of self-adequate need-satisfaction and excessive capacity to produce –
why bother to deny something nobody believes? Everybody else thinks 'heteronormative' means being nasty to Gay people. Spivak alone thinks it mean Women and Workers are very needy and thus get fucked over incessantly by Bossy Men who have 'excessive capacity to produce'. Take jizz. Did you know that one ejaculation from a 15 year old boy could give 500 million women babies?
the trivial Euro-sequential truism that time moves from the pre-modern to modern through colonialism into globality (spiced up by “culture” as invented by Anthropology and now bowdlerized by UNESCO and the Nara Document of 1994) that runs the world can be revised.
Why revise nonsense?
To conceptualize development as freedom in capitalism without the task of subject-formation will then have to acknowledge the incalculable in what is in excess rather than narrow it down only to the economic sphere.
There are 600 million men in India each of whom could ejaculate enough sperm to give a 1200 million million women a baby each! Not only is India a shithole but the whole place is dripping with cum. Now you understand why I took out a life mortgage to get the fuck away from Calcutta.
It is clear that this acknowledgement requires the rethinking of political concepts.
Fuck 'political concepts'. If you acknowledge this shit you have bigger problems to worry about- like how to walk down the street with getting coated in cum.
To make the possibility of the anthropocene visible
just open your eyes. The thing aint just a possibility. It's a real thing. Humans have already affected the planet greatly.
in the ceaseless turning of capital into capitalist implementation is well-nigh impossible.
If Sir James Goldsmith could see it, why can't Spivak? Goldsmith knew a lot about 'capitalist implementation'. He was a billionaire who gave evidence before a Senate committee- which was greatly impressed by his lucidity though, back in Blighty, everybody thought he was a moron who had to go to Millfield coz he wasn't smart enough for Eton. (He was dyslexic).
Here socialism and capitalism are themselves complicit in their will to knowledge, full control through concept.
Everybody is 'complicit' in their own will. But no 'concept' yields 'full control'. This is also the reason magic doesn't really work.
With colonialism came, unevenly, the social productivity of capital and the inbuilt mechanism for the disavowal of the imbricated increased subalternization.
No. Capital was already 'socially productive'. Colonialism didn't need to 'disavow' shit. If anyone said- 'yes, but your niggers are starving', the Colonial hegemon would reply 'that's a step up for them. Previously they devoured each other ceaselessly. We banned cannibalism but it will take them some time to get used to the idea that they need to grow food to nourish themselves.'
I am asking for an acknowledgement of “development” as a task – understood from the subject-formation rather than the capitalization angle – diversely neglected also in pre-colonial time and space worldwide.
Why? This stupid, evil, cunt wants to get money and fame as somehow helping the disgusting cannibals back in her home country to turn into less shite pieces of shit. She is also pretending to be some sort of Commie and to care about the Environment but what her spiel really comes down to is 'I'm as stupid as shit- but a fucking genius compared to the cannibals back home. Invite me to Davos more often. Gimme a fucking Nobel already. Other peeps can do the economic side of Development. I'll do the subject-formation side- i.e. tell those fucking cannibals to stop eating each other. Thank you for listening. Y'all have a nice day, now.'
It is not “individualistic” to teach
stuff that is useful. It is 'individualistic' to teach worthless shite you just pulled out of your arse
elite and subaltern/proletarian to think, in a complicit and gendered manner, that “development” is not necessarily tied to that Euro-sequential truism,
which exists only in Spivak's shitty brain. The fact is Development means being more like China which is trying to be more like South Korea and Japan. Nobody wants to go in for Euro-sclerotic shite.
that interested underdevelopment rather than development has forever made the world turn
Because rich White peeps wake up in the middle of the night and sneak into the huts off very poor Black peeps and steal all their non-existent wealth.
and inhabits the persistent structures of contemporary globality, that rogue capitalization, as it is now indicated by more and more people at the center, could inhabit those structures not only as rupture but as repetition.
Spivak does repetition very well, but her sentences represent the rupture of every known rule of grammar.
Once again, then, I am asking us to allow the concept of development to overflow the interplay of capital and colony.
But colonies disappeared long ago. Why not ask us to allow the concept of development to overflow the interplay between the Spanish Armada and the Holy Inquisition?
This makes room for an acknowledgement of complicity – folded-togetherness – rather than see “development” to be conceptualized as good or evil or both after colonialism.
This does not make room for anything though if you think this sentence is grammatical you belong in a padded cell.
I am asking for us to see that development as sustainable underdevelopment has a longer history and perhaps even that this history is beginning to make itself visible as the pattern of globalization explodes economic growth into developing inequality.
What good would this do? Why not simply say- 'ex-colonies are shitholes. Take it me, I was born in Calcutta.'
I am suggesting that the conceptualization of development must be unevenly interdisciplinary – statistics and political science folded together – complicit – with the disciplines of subject-formation, the humanities.
But everybody is suggesting that Spivak's chief function is to show why Communism, as an ideology, was bound to collapse in Bengal. Its 'buddhijivis' have shit for brains.
Globalization requires a change in ourselves as instruments of knowing.
Sadly, Globalization- i.e. Spivak's spending money to get out of Calcutta into Cornel- turned her into an instrument of stupidity, ignorance and colossal conceit.
Those wonderful historical approaches, “culture wars” approaches, critique of Eurocentrism approaches, the modernity/tradition approaches, post-colonial approaches, will not serve if you’re doing the contemporary as such. That’s the epistemological challenge: “how do we construct our objects of knowledge now, in the moving global now-time?”
Is it by saying Bossy Men are impregnating 1200 million billion women every day?
The question, for us, is, how to “determine” a “people,” in order to decide development.
No it isn't. Bengalis have chosen Sheikh Hasina or Mamta to 'decide' development. They want no part of Spivak. Nor are the Americans clamoring for her to decide their destiny as a people.
I use “determination” in the sense of Bestimmung, and I thank Werner Hamacher
a cretin who translated Paul de Man into German
for long ago endorsing enthusiastically my emphasis on die Stimme (tune or voice) in Bestimmung.22
Did Germans think this dude was smart? No. So why should anyone else bother with what he endorsed?
Determination is also a resonance, as in a keynote: “The unfolding of the qualities or capacities of a musical phrase or subject by modifications of melody, harmony, tonality, rhythm, etc., esp. in a composition of elaborate form, as a sonata [or a raga]” (OED).
Does this cretin think her cacophonous shite is a fucking sonata?
To conceptualize development, the intellectual must be in tune with, enter the Bestimmung of “the people,” from top to bottom, elite to subaltern, capitalist to client, and rearrange desires, our own among them.
But this conceptualization would still achieve nothing whatsoever. On the other hand to achieve Development, simple Tardean mimetics coupled with 'local arbitrage' has proven to be a necessary and sufficient condition.
There may well have been Left Front 'organic intellectuals' who were doing this shite. Then Mamta took over and beat them till they started voting for the BJP.
This supplementation is so slow and painstaking, the world has such a wealth of languages, that it is impossible for this to be a general agenda, such as the globalization of capital or the social must be. This is why, once again, this kind of linguistic commitment must work as an unceasing supplementation of the work of the qualitative social sciences, which must in turn supplement the quantifying work of sociology and economics, continuing on to the development indices.
But nothing would change if this 'supplementation' were omitted altogether. True, Spivak would be out of a job. But the world would be better off.
Practically speaking, as a woman persuaded of the humanities’ supplementary potential,
but not actual utility
I must think that development might be a word which would be better off without strict conceptualization.
Or this sort of loose motion.
With the inauguration of this new genre, where the affective part is socially mediatized, we might rather engage in an admittedly (rather than disguised as correcting others’ mistakes) persistent effort at the questioning of conceptualizations in this stage of capital.
Or we could just not inaugurate this stupid genre or tell it to fuck off if it shows up at a faculty meeting.
Concepts of development are needed here and now as methodological practical necessities, not as governing ideas. In the area of “development,” if you stick to classical concept-production, you remain with the fiscal and the juridico-legal, tax reform and enforcement; and, of course, the sentimental statisticalization of affect.
No you don't. You begin and end with factor productivity while keeping an eye on the SCM's behind such mechanism design as purports to deliver better than mimetic outcomes.
We should rather recognize that development is in complicity with what it endangers, that “[t]he opposition of intuition, the concept, and consciousness at this point no longer has any pertinence.”23
No. Development, of any utile or meaningful sort, has a mathematical representation. Thus it is impervious to deconstruction.
Resist the will to conceptualize as you develop yourself.
Unless you are doing useful work or are engaged in STEM subject research
To misquote a classic: “Conceptualization is its own resistance.”24
If it is useless and stupid- sure. Not otherwise. Incidentally, Paul de Man was a crappy little fraudster. On the other hand, he gave this refugee from Calcutta a leg up. Or, it maybe, that old Racist was engaged in a leg pull. Who knows? But for him, Spivak might have learned to write grammatical English. I'm kidding. You can take the girl out of Calcutta but you can't get her to think coherently coz Bossy Men are jizzing all over the place due to heteronormativity and so, because of Globalized Neo-Liberalism, the entire globe is dripping with cum. Fuck you Amartya Sen! Fuck you and your fucking Capability to jizz on everything! Fuck you very much indeed!
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