You were born in Kolkata (Calcutta), in Bengal, the Eastern part of India; how is this territory influential regarding your work?
Gayatri Spivak: It’s a very interesting part of India because the British came in through there.
No. The Brits came in through Surat and, a little later, Madras. That's where Clive got his start.
In 1757, they came through there, and they were a company, the East India Company. The real imperial presence was the Ottomans;
This crazy bint does not know the difference between Mughals and Ottomans! But the Mughals had come under the Marathas by the 1780s.
so, these British merchants didn’t know how to be imperial.
Fuck does that mean? Britain already had an Empire in America in the seventeenth century. They knew how to be Imperial. In any case, the Portuguese and Spanish and Dutch had provided a template.
And so, the British treated Bengal —which is where Calcutta is— in the wrong way. They learnt Bengali, for example;
That was very wrong of them. They should have learned Chinese instead.
they wrote Bengali grammars.
Shocking! Guys who rule Bengal should not know Bengali grammar.
They became much more Bengali,
Very true. Warren Hastings wore saree till somebody pointed out to him that he was a man not a woman and should wear dhoti not saree.
and they established the Hindu gentleman class, etc.
No. A tax farming caste already existed. Some of their poorer offshoots learned English and got rich as clerks to white officials. But they had used the same tactics under Muslim rulers.
Once Bengal was established in a certain way, in the rest of India they were much more imperial.
Perhaps the silly bint means that the native aristocracy in much of the rest of India remained traditional. Only the sons of the lower sort of Dewans (Estate Managers) learned English. That was the class from which Gandhi and Nehru came from.
So to an extent, we were different. (There’s been historical writing by Victor Kiernan, and so on, of this.)
But Kiernan knew only Western India- Bombay and Lahore- he was not qualified to write about Bengal.
So one was this, and the other was that. Bengal committed to the Second International,
But Dadhabhai Naoroji, who was from Bombay, attended the Second International. Surrender-not Bannerjee on the other hand was babbling about maybe being appointed the King of India! The Bose brothers mocked him as embodying 'Tammany Hall' politics- but Bose got sucked into ever more corrupt Calcutta municipality politics. Ultimately, his political career hit a dead-end and so the only reason we remember him is because he snuck off to Hitler's Berlin. This 'Socialist' ending up recruiting for Hitler and Tojo!
The fact is Bengal had a Muslim majority, or near majority, and thus Hindus from there would become increasingly marginal to Indian politics.
so the intellectual left was in fact, Bengali.
Quite false. It was only after the Jugantar revolutionaries failed that some ex-Nationalists from Bengal turned to the Bolsheviks for help. But, precisely because of their class basis and the religious question, the Left had less purchase among the bhadralok than among the urban middle class of Western, or even Southern, India. Saklatvala, a Parsi like Dadhabhai, was the first Indian Communist MP at Westminster. The Indian Communist party never had a Bengali head till after Independence but Ajoy Ghosh was only Bengali by birth. He was radicalized in Kanpur.
Rajani Palme Dutt, for example —who had a Bengali father— was one of Marx’s translators.
But he was British. His Mum was related to Olaf Palme. Scandinavia had a strong indigenous Socialist tradition.
And so it’s that the whole Bengal scene is a little bit different,
Communism became powerful in West Bengal only because it recruited the disaffected refugees. By contrast, it was strong enough in Telengana to launch an insurgency after Independence.
and whether I think so or not, I am no doubt influenced by the fact that I was born in Calcutta.
Where College graduates think India was ruled by the Ottomans.
Could you explain the importance of Marx in your training and your thinking?
G. S.: In this Bengali context, yes, because it’s also true that until five years ago, West Bengal was run by a left-front government. The Communist Party-Marxist was the party in power, as opposed to the old Communist Party of India, which is more pro-Moscow. Therefore, my introduction to Marxism was in an actually existing socialist state,
Nonsense! Spivak left India in the early Sixties when Bengal was Congress ruled.
which had a very peculiar kind of situation because the government of the center in India was not socialist.
Indira changed the Constitution to say India was a Socialist Republic before the Left Front took power in West Bengal.
And so, I just wrote about this man, Samar Sen influenced me very deeply. He ran a journal called Frontier,
which came into existence at least 5 years after Spivak had emigrated!
which still exists, to support secularism, socialism and democracy, and his point of view was how to be critical of the parliamentary left—as in West Bengal—when the center is not leftist.
This is foolish. Jyoti Basu enjoyed good relations with whoever was PM. Indeed he himself could have become PM in a coalition but his Politburo refused.
It’s like a left of the left critique of the parliamentary left.
But Sen was just a poet who had spent a few years in Moscow. These guys were supported by the State- given Government housing and so forth if they needed it.
This is very, very different from my introduction to Western Marxism, which was much later, and really almost without connection to any of my earlier Marxist training.
She had none. Back in 1960, Basu was in hiding from the police. His old pal, Siddhartha Shankar Ray helped him. Nobody 'trained in Marxism' would have borrowed money to go off to Amrika & study Eng Lit and write a dissertation on William Butler Yeats.
And I’ll tell you one thing: I was at Cornell as a graduate student in 1961, and there was at that time a whole kind of India thing—you know, the Beatniks before the hippies, even. This was completely unlike the India I knew, but I was a young thing, and I went into it: I sang with Allen Ginsberg on the harmonium, etc.
Ginsberg went to India in 1962. He did have some impact on the local poets. They became even more crap.
And then, in 1962, Malcolm X came to Cornell to talk to James Brown, and as I was sitting in the audience —I remember so clearly— I thought, “My God! This is like Calcutta.”
Very true. In Calcutta, Whites were not allowing Indians to dine with them. Also they were forcing Bengalis to perform thugee, suttee and agarbatti.
Because that other India that the Americans so loved was not really India;
I suppose she means 'spiritual' India and the Kama Sutra and everybody smoking charas.
it was something that I played along with, as a young person. So that’s how Marx got into my blood, as it were.
Me good girl. Me not hippy dippy. Me know Karl Marx not Kali Ma.
But it’s not an orthodox vision of Marx
It is ignorant and bizarre.
G. S.: Not at all. In fact, I was just in Shanghai giving a keynote at the International Biennial Association, and I said, “Marx is my brother.”
It was safer to say that in Shanghai than in Didi's Kolkata.
I have no interest in establishing the correct Marx so that he can be followed. And I am very fond of quoting a passage, which says that the revolution of the 19th century is going to look toward the poetry of the future. This is Marx’s actual language!
No it isn't.
The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the pastSo, I’m for the poetry of the future.
The silly bint thinks the Nineteenth Century is the future!
How would you define the critical position you occupy in postcolonial studies in particular, and in the academic field in general?
Spivak is an asshole in that field of shit.
G. S.: Postcolonial… It’s hard for me to think of myself as a postcolonial. I think, in France, I am perceived more as a postcolonial—or as we say affectionately, a ‘poco.’ Therefore, I’m opposed on grounds that do not exist for me.
She isn't poco coz she knows she isn't. Those are the grounds that exist for her.
You know, I was asked by the Romanic Review to write on Postcolonialism in France. And I am quite in sympathy with the immigrant population here, and when they take up the word ‘postcolonial,’ I’m for them. But given that I was born in India (I’m an Indian citizen), when I say “postcolonial,” it’s a kind of ironic term.
Why? She was born after power had been devolved to elected politicians in Calcutta. She grew up in independent India without any authentic personal memory of foreign rule.
For me, national liberation is not a revolution.
If it occurs by force then, by definition, it is.
The failure of decolonization begins the day after a negotiated independence—
No. Decolonization succeeds the day a place ceases to be a Colony.
and that position is really rather different. So when I was asked to write about Postcolonialism in France, I was told later that they thought that I would take a position correcting the critics in France who thought that I was a bad girl for being postcolonial. But since I don’t think of myself as postcolonial, I wrote, about Lumumba, Aimé Césaire, etc.—
who had lived under colonialism and taken a role in Government after it ceased or, in the case of Martinique, had been greatly ameliorated.
and I quite liked the piece. But later, I was asked with some disappointment by the editor, “why didn’t you confront the French critique of your Postcolonialism?”
The lady had written a book called 'Critique of Post Colonial Reason'. It was shit. Apparently some French dudes criticized it. Spivak had no interest in 'confronting' them.
And I said, “because for me, it’s absurd, because I’m not [a postcolonial].” In fact, when I began what is called ‘postcolonial,’ I didn’t know I was doing anything postcolonial. And then when I saw how it was being used in the United States, I wrote a book called, Don’t Call Me Postcolonial!
Mine was called 'Don't call me a fat nigger- Mummy'.
And then, Amartya Sen, who was, at that point, on the Syndics of Harvard University Press, called me and said: “Gayatri, this is a serious book. Do not give to it a trivial title. Since the first chapter is on Kant, you should call it A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.” And so that’s what the book is called; but basically, it is a critique of Postcolonialism.
Sen is a charlatan just as much as Spivak. Both got a good return on their investment in foreign degrees, by pretending to represent the Indian Left. We admire their chutzpah.
And the essay that I wrote called, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” —which is, for some reason, my best-known piece— is not a postcolonial piece. It’s a critique of Hinduism, and pre-colonial tradition.
She is against widows being burned alive. However kids hanging themselves while on the rag are cool.
So, you know, it’s a little hard for me to think about. Most people don’t read; they think that I’m still doing postcolonial, and there are these emails that come, asking me to do this and that in a postcolonial way.
To be fair, Spivak does whine about Whitey- especially female Whites. There was this stupid honky called Charlotte Bronte. The cunt wrote a book. I'm supposed to read that shite just to teach a fucking semester? How is that Justice? My ancestors were forced to pick cotton in Southern plantations just so them basic bitches could dress in gingham or whatever. Fuck you very much Whitey!
And about your critical position regarding the academic field in general? Because you stay in a very critical position.
G. S.: Absolutely. I think all over the world, on nearly all levels—from community schools, etc., to the elite schools—the distinction between public and private universities is almost indistinguishable.
Not in India. Public Universities are as cheap as chips.
And the general tendency is corporatization—to different degrees, but nonetheless, that is a great misfortune.
Many 'for profit' schools in the States are outright scams. But so are some private Engineering and Medical Colleges in India.
That’s one. And then, the second thing is the trivialization of the humanities in which we, ourselves, participate.
These guys participate in the sub-humanities. Still, I have to say non-STEM subjects have their uses. In the old days, in Indian movies, if a village belle was ridiculed for being uneducated she would reply 'I yam Yem Ya English from Oxpord University!' Nowadays, of course, she would say 'Catacheresis of the gud gud ki laltain se University Professor of Inglis Columbia is me haan ji haan chashme buddoor'.
You'd look up the illiterate biddy on Linkedin and find she does indeed have tenure at Ivy League.
We humanities teachers, we participate in this. And the ones who do teach humanities teach with a certain kind of sense that we are not really important in the contemporary world.
Teachers of shite subjects have never been important.
And I think that’s one of the things that I very much question, and do what I can to oppose. And finally, I would say, look, in the ‘60s, we talked about revolution in the universities; but what we didn’t know then was that just doing revolution at elite universities
none occurred. What planet was this woman living on?
and establishing these wonderful schools was not going to do anything. The education has to become holistic.
No. It has to become worth acquiring. STEM subjects continue to do well. There were plenty of Professors of Electrical Engineering or Medicine or Mathematics who became billionaires through the Tech boom.
In other words, we really have to see from the primary through the secondary, into the tertiary and post-tertiary.
No we don't. There's no need to study English at Uni if English is your mother tongue or you come from an anglophone background.
We have to have this sense, because otherwise, class apartheid in education is destroying the world.
No it isn't. If you are working class, people still think you are a cretin even if your PhD in PoCo shite is from Harvard. You should have gone to Business School. Meanwhile, your cousin, who learnt air conditioner maintenance in prison, has bought a McMansion in the burbs.
So this, briefly, is my position regarding universities.
Spivak's position is that 'holistic' Humanities education should be provided from birth to death by... urm...Kali Marx? He's a rich dude- right?
You spoke about “death of the discipline” about mainly comparative literature, it is the title of one of your books (2005, Columbia University Press). What does this expression mean more deeply?
G. S.: Other people have asked me that question. They ask, what was I doing? I was writing an elegy. An elegy is when, at the end of the whole thing, you say, “it’s alive again.”
No it isn't. In a comedy, the mourners realize the dead dude was just drunk. Finnegan's wake aint actually an elegy.
When I actually gave those lectures, I called them “new comparative literature.” So, to an extent you can say that I was perhaps not really mourning, but even celebrating, the death of the old comparative literature, and hoping that there would be one which would bring together the social sciences and literature—which would recognize that every language in the world can be a first language, and therefore it can be learnt before reason, and bring alive the ethical semiosis.
This is incredibly foolish. Only 'mother tongues' can be a first language. It takes time for a pidgin to become a Creole to become an 'i-language'. How can a language be learnt 'before reason'? Babies start reasoning as they acquire language. The two are complementary. 'Ethical semiosis' can occur absent a common language or even a sapient alterity. One may have an ethical attitude to one's surroundings while living in a forest hermitage or a cave high up in the Himalayas.
Because that’s what happens in the language that you learn before you can properly think,
but you don't have high competence in that language till you can properly think. Bengalis are not an exception to this rule. Spivak can't think but she also can't use any language in a competent manner.
“first language.” So all of that I was hoping for, and I think, therefore, the idea of death, there, is to bury the old and to celebrate the new.
In which case, she should have called her book 'the death and re-birth of the Humanities'.
Do you not believe that this situation reflects a more general situation concerning the relationship between knowledge and the disciplines that order and control both the knowledge and experience of reality?
There are no such disciplines. Even in France, the French Academy can't stop French people acquiring any type of knowledge or experience of reality. Sad.
G. S.: Disciplinarization is not something that can be avoided.
Yes it is. Specialization may be unavoidable but there is no need to pretend that stupid shite represents any type of 'discipline'.
It’s a necessary evil. I wasn’t thinking of this, but you’ve asked a nice question. What I say about disciplines is that it forms your way of thinking.
But this woman can't think.
A discipline gives you a sense of what you are as a knower, and how to construct the object of knowing.
Nonsense! Even the most rigid constructivist doesn't know how to construct some things which must exist in a Platonic, mathematical, sense.
Suppose there really was a genuine discipline of Spivak's type in her own field. Then Professors like her would know how to construct a Shakespearean sonnet or a Gothic novel in a manner indistinguishable from the canon.
It’s an epistemological preparation;
masturbation is the mot juste.
and this quite often can be imprisoning, and this happens more often than one would like. On the other hand, it has been my good fortune to meet a few people who push the frontiers of the discipline, so that for them, the discipline—the poison—becomes medicine.
She means 'the shit becomes food'.
Therefore, I would say it isn’t like there is a direct and unmediated experience of the real,
there may be. We can't prove anything either way.
which is destroyed by the discipline. I would say disciplinary preparation is an epistemological preparation.
For what? Epistemologically preparing another cohort of cretins?
On the other hand, the way in which universities or institutions of any sort — constitute disciplines— has to be persistently questioned, because
more Bengali women should get tenure
that is a little different from epistemological disciplinarization.
but institutional x can also be epistemological x because the institution can have a theory of knowledge.
I wouldn’t oppose some unmediated real-life to knowledge produced by disciplines.
Would Spivak really allow somebody who has no 'unmediated real-life' experience of performing surgery operate on her even if they had a certificate saying they had mastered all theoretical knowledge in the relevant field? We may permit a junior surgeon to operate on us if we know the senior surgeon is standing by and guiding him. But this is a mediated experience. Only if a surgeon has been certified as being able to operate alone and has 'unmediated experience' of such surgery, would we let him anywhere near us with a scalpel.
Do you believe that academic intellectuals can still exhibit real critical thinking inside the system they belong?
G. S.: I hope so, if it is inside the system. Most people want to succeed within the system, even as a radical; so I want to believe that they can. On the other hand, I move around a great deal in the world of R & D [research and development], and I go to the World Economic Forum because I am associated with them as an expert.
No. Spivak is associated with them as a token darkie. Also she wears sari and shaves her head.
So, I have a good sense of how remote the world of policy is from the academy, today. So, if you think of the inside of the system as the system that runs the world, rather than just the academic institution, then I think the possibility of actual public intellectuals is getting less and less
Macron was an insider of the French academic system. Spivak is making a fool of herself. The fact is there are always some Professors with good connections to the Private and Public Sectors.
My question includes the critics that you address to so-called French theory, Foucault, Deleuze and so forth
G. S.: Well, no. The one place where I was critical was that essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” And, you see, for most middle-class, upwardly class-mobile, metropolitan immigrants there is a certain kind of autobiographical moment. I remember Edward Saïd saying to me that there was a moment where he realized, “I was Orientalized.”
Sirhan Sirhan, a fellow Palestinian Christian, killed Bobby Kennedy. Suddenly, Said was orientalized. He was invited to publish an article on 'the Arab portrayed' in 1969 for the Arab League. That became his new shtick. If you portray Arabs as murderous bastards they will murder you coz...urm... anyway Arafat is actually quite a cool dude.
So, this kind of thing comes; and I was in that moment thinking, “how is it that I have become a specialist in French theory,
She had translated a book by Derrida.
so that Yale French Studies wants me to write on French Theory, and Critical Inquiry wants me to write on deconstruction?” (This was in the early 1980s.) And so, I had that autobiographical moment, and I wanted to go away from it —and I think my way was to look at a conversation.
In other words, Spivak didn't want to have to continue to pretend to read French shite. So she played the race and gender card. Deleuze and Foucault were white. Also they had dicks. This is like COLONIALISM! I iz bleck and I don't got no dick! Also my great-aunty hanged herself while on the rag. Fuck you Whitey! Fuck you very much!
I was not being negative about Foucault and Deleuze in terms of their theoretical production; in fact, I respect both of them greatly.
Because they enabled thousands of cretins to get PhDs in worthless shite.
But what I was seeing was that, when they just spoke to each other, they did not seem to use the generally counterintuitive theoretical positions that they had made accessible to thousands of readers in the world.
They did not torture and sodomize each other. That's true enough.
They were talking like anyone else: romanticizing the working class, and so on and so forth. But that’s not the way they wrote.
Because they were pretending to be smart when they wrote.
So that was the critique: the critique of a conversation, not their general theoretical positions.
They conversed sensibly enough. Their theoretical positions were grotesque garbage.
I have taught these people forever, and I think they are quite fine people. And, of course, I have been very close to Derrida over the years. And Lacan —I think Lacan is a poet.
He was supposed to be a Psychoanalyst.
For me, poetry is not a bad word, I’ve lived with poetry all my life. I think Freud is a body-mind philosopher
He was a Doctor
who uses narrative as ethical instantiation,
Nope. His interventions were meant to be therapeutic.
which is a very long tradition, and I think Lacan has the gift of poetry—of being able to say that Hegel, for example, was a metonym for psychoanalysis —a very powerful insight.
Only if psychoanalysis is a phenomenology. It isn't. It is either a biological theory or else pure charlatanism. There is no insight here.
So, I do not at all only criticize these thinkers of the 1960s and the 1970s, no.
You have mentioned Jacques Derrida. What was, or what is the importance of him in your own thinking?
G. S.: I’m not quite sure, because it’s so internalized that I don’t say, “Ah! That’s you being a Derridian.”
An impossible thought for a Derridian. How can you be like an author whose shtick is that no author exists?
It’s not like that. In many ways, I’m haunted by him. It’s very much internalized.
So- Derrida is Spivak's mimetic object. But this is not Girardian coz Spivak don't got no dick. Fuck you Whitey! Fuck you very much!
Of course, I’m capable of being critical, but that’s a very different thing; that’s where I’m like an academic intellectual standing outside. But basically what happened was that I was very taken by the way he thought.
But his thought amounted to nothing.
But you don’t put him on the same side as Foucault and Deleuze?
G. S.: In some ways.
The guy was an Algerian Jew. He knew that the Left would inevitably turn anti-Semitic especially if you have a nutter named Cohn-Bendit running around like a headless chicken.
I don’t quite know what the same side would be, but it is true that I don’t know Foucault and Deleuze as well as Derrida. When you translate someone, it’s the most intimate kind of reading; and then you get established in your own profession as someone who specializes on this one, so your obligation becomes a little different. On the other hand, I just gave the last talk on Foucault’s Collège de France lectures at Columbia, and I went very much into what Foucault was up to.
He was parading his ignorance of French history. That was cool, coz he was, after all, a French academician.
I wrote a piece some years ago called, “Foucault and Najibullah.” Najibullah was the last communist president of Afghanistan who was hanged from a lamppost,
No. He was castrated, tortured to death, dragged from a truck through the streets and then hanged from a traffic post. Foucault would have given his eye-teeth to watch the castration and torture. Sadly, it was an exclusive affair.
and people were watching this, and of course that’s how Foucault’s Surveiller et punir, Discipline and Punish, opens: people watching an execution.
& Foucault masturbating furiously as he visualizes all the gory details
So, once again, I got very much into Foucault’s material. There are many ways in which it is possible that that’s how I read and teach theory—that they become internalized.
That is how coprophagy works.
I don’t read or teach theory so that we can use theory as an instrument to describe what we are studying. I read theory as if the person who’s writing it —and this includes Marx— is creatively theorizing, just for its own sake.
So, Spivak reads in the irresponsible manner of a day-dreaming school girl. Das Kapital is about a hunky boy named Sumit Das who is like totes Capitalist but then there is a young communist called Kali Ma and I feel all goose-bumpy when she looks at me in a certain way. OMG, I think I'm having a final crisis! Oh sweet bliss!
And then, the material becomes part of my mental world. Then, when I read, it comes out in many eclectic ways.
shitty, not eclectic.
Now we can focus on specific concepts. Of course, we have to begin with the question of the Subaltern. Are you closed to the Gramsci meaning of this word? Originally, this term belonged to military language; can we discuss some of the consequences of that?
G. S.: First of all, I ask why it is that ‘subaltern’ is the word that I’m most associated with. It’s fine, I accept it, but I didn’t particularly think that that was what I was doing —establishing that word. Yes, I am quite closed to the Gramsci sense, and I think the military sense is also interesting, because in a general way, if you look at the whole army, the Subaltern is the one who only takes orders and doesn’t give orders.
This is not true. A second lieutenant can give orders. He is an officer and ranks above the NCO.
On the other hand, if you look at it from below the subaltern officers, they do, indeed, also give orders. So, it’s not like they are completely without any local hierarchization. So, the military metaphor is quite interesting.
It is misleading. The Army has a strict chain of command and is under military discipline. Nothing similar can be said of Civil Society or the proletariat.
You have introduced an important distinction between the terms “Subaltern” and “popular” (may be we might add another distinction with “people”), “class” and “poverty”, “race” and “colour”, “gender” and “sex”… could you explain these binomial concepts?
Indian Leftists who didn't want to join the Communist Party (which would have demanded they hand over a portion of their pay-packet) pretended to be too stupid to get Marx and so they used a Gramscian terminology which Kalecki had made respectable as possibly applying to India's rising , vernacular, 'intermediate class'. Spivak jumped on this bandwagon much later but never bothered to find out what it was about.
G. S.: In fact, we can also add things like ‘citizen and nationality.’
No we can't. Nazi Germany made a distinction between 'Aryan' citizens and non-Aryan 'nationals'. But that sort of distinction has tended to fade away.
I would say that the second ones are more fuzzy. The first ones are more theoretical and structural. Now, mind you, the world ‘people’ is very big word;
It meant Communism of the Stalinist type. That's why 'People's Democracies' were places like East Germany or North Korea.
so I can’t just say, “look, it’s different from subaltern.”
It is different. Subaltern means a class which is not proletarian and thus one which has no natural affiliation with the cunts who want to establish a Dictatorship in their name. It also refers to the sort of peeps wot keep escaping from 'People's Democratic Republics' any chance they get.
And this is true for most of those second words. But, in fact, Ranajit Guha —the South Asian historian who started the Subaltern Studies collective in Southern Asian regional history— identified the words ‘subaltern’ and ‘people’ in the first collection of that collective,
because he was Bengali- i.e. as stupid as shit. BTW he was one of the first Indian academics to emigrate and get phoren passport. Say what you like, buddhijivis have the sly instinct of survival which enabled their comprador ancestors to grow rich.
and I’ve acknowledged this. He also said that the people were the space of difference from the whole social hierarchization.
But he had been careful to emigrate to the UK before he said this. What the British people thought of him is a 'space of difference' filled with words like 'Paki' and 'nig-nog' and 'fuck off back to nigger-land you dirty nigger'. The one thing you have to say about the British Communist Party back in those days, was that you met a better class of people at their meetings.
(He was writing about India, because this is a historian of Southern Asia.) That particular treatment of ‘subaltern’ by the Subaltern Studies Group of Southern Asian historians —which began in the early 1980s— is in a piece of mine called “Deconstructing Historiography,” which is not very well written at all,
because she wrote it
but I wrote it. Then, ‘poverty and class,’ that’s of course a very solid distinction established by other people, too —that a class can only come into being if there is class consciousness.
which is how come people who think they were Napoleon in a past life constitute a class because they share the consciousness of having fucked Josephine.
So, to say that it’s just degrees of income that actually describe class would be to take away the active meaning of the word class, which is an abstract word.
unless it isn't at all- like the word 'bastard'.
Then, the idea of ‘sex and gender’ is an interesting distinction, because it’s a bit fuzzy, in itself, as a distinction.
Gender is cool coz if I get sent to prison I can put on a skirt and demand to be housed in a women's prison where, presumably, I am more likely to be inflicting, not suffering, rape.
Gender is about how the social division of labor is constructed in terms of a certain kind of physical difference, which can be perceived as difference before any other difference. That is very systematic. (The idea of a sex-gender system, that’s not mine.) But the idea of sex doesn’t have to be, in fact, systematized in terms of the whole of society; it can also have various kinds of personal use.
Involving vibrators of various sizes and lots and lots of lube.
It can be used simply to distinguish difference in genitals and secondary formations.
secondary sexual characteristics- like breasts? Cool.
It’s a more flexible word because it could be seen only as biological / physiological, whereas gender is undoubtedly like class: a more systematic thing.
a nonsense thing. Dudes claiming to be women and posh bastids claiming to the proles is a fucking nuisance.
And so on with citizenship etc. The first ones are structural, mobile, and systemic, whereas the second ones —one should really say gender-sex rather than sex-gender— are more fuzzy, and can have private and physiological meanings.
Spivak is wrong. Both 'systematized' or nomothetic as well as 'un-systematized' or ideographic terms are potentially justiciable and hence defeasible.
Indeed. Nevertheless sex, it’s maybe closer than biopolitical meaning
G. S.: Well, that is not always true. Unfortunately, the bio-political can be disguised by speaking sex. That’s one of the things that one has to keep in mind.
Why not keep it in your anus instead?
To the question: “Can the Subaltern speak?”, you answered that the Subaltern cannot speak.
But Spivak was just being 'argumentative'- right?
Due to this negative response, do you think that the reception of it, which could be heard as a provocative as well as a negative response, is representative of the closure of occidental thinking regarding the Other?
G. S.: No. I’m not completely at home with all Western thinking. (I don’t know quite what the West is. I mean, is Australia the West?)
Yes. Don't be silly.
But at any rate, I would say that some people have written about my perception of the Subaltern as the perception of radical alterity;
radical abjectness more like. These brown peeps were bucking for affirmative action on the grounds that billions of their folk back home were starving silently when not being raped or subjected to suttee, thuggee, or agarbatti.
they’re not thinking about the positive way in which philosophers like Levinas have thought about the Other,
unless the Other was Palestinian in which case the Other should just fuck off and die already.
that whole ethical philosophy where the Other, and the tout autre —the absolute Other— are positive things. That’s a very different thing. They have thought of the Other in the sense of colored people. Colored people are colonized people: natives, African… and that kind of stuff. No. See, in order to go away from being a French theoretician, I fell on a family member: my grandmother’s sister, who was part of the anti-imperial, small groupuscules that existed at that time.
None such existed in 1926. Hindus and Muslims were killing each other, not Whitey, back then.
She was 17 years old in 1926, and she was given an assassination detail.
A stupid lie! The female Bengali revolutionaries kept good records of their members. Some got elected to Parliament.
She could not kill, and therefore she killed herself. But she waited four days before she hanged herself in order to menstruate, so that she could speak with her body and oppose the traditional gendering that says a woman exists for a unique man.
Unless she is being fucked by all and sundry and ends up in a brothel. But what has that to do with assassination plots? Why not just jump in the river or let a train run over you? Why hang yourself in a cupboard?
She wanted to take a position against this.
In which case she could have joined the Ramakrishna mission. The fact is she hadn't already been married off. She was expected to complete School and maybe go to College like her sisters. Why hang yourself to protest going to skool?
The truth is there was Shastric injunction to marry off your daughter before her first menses. Otherwise the menstrual blood flows backwards and pollutes the 'pinda' oblation to the ancestors. There is only one meaning to a 17 year old Brahmin girl hanging herself while on the rag. Daddy, you fucking bastard, why didn't you pay dowry and get me married? Why did you force to go to skool? I've topped myself. Are you happy now?'
So, even in that terrible time, when she has decided she’s going to die, she’s waiting until she menstruates, because she doesn’t want anybody to think it was because of an illicit pregnancy.
But the coroner would check the hymen. That's what mattered. Anyway, Calcutta had plenty of abortionists. Indeed, the first Bengali historian, Ram Ram Basu was constantly procuring abortions for his girl friends.
And not only does she do that, she even writes a letter for her sister —my grandmother— to be opened 60 years later, because she didn’t know when India would become independent.
Spivak doesn't mention this letter in her essay. Why not? It didn't exist.
She took all this trouble to speak —with her body and with her hand. And yet, two generations later —my generation— my first cousin, who has the exact same educational background as I (I came first-class first in English honors at the University of Calcutta, she came first-class first in philosophy with honors at the University of Calcutta), she said, “why are you working on this person who just killed herself because of an illicit pregnancy?”
But Spivak just said that peeps back then commented on the fact that the girl was on the rag. A first cousin would know that. So either Spivak was lying about what the cousin said or there was no contemporary record, or memory, of the circumstance Spivak highlights.
So, I said in rage, “the Subaltern cannot speak!” Even when she spoke with her whole body, and waited for four days in that terrible time, and wrote her letter —she tried so hard to speak— her speech-act could not be completed, therefore she could not speak.
She also could not have been part of any terrorist cell. It wasn't till the end of the decade that the first female assassins appeared in Bengal.
That does not mean that they cannot talk. It’s a speech-act —it can never be fully completed.
Because it never existed in the first place. True, a Hindu woman would have a horror of abortion and might wait till her menses before killing herself but only if she wasn't a virgin. That's what mattered.
It’s always going on, it continues forever, because language is such a movable thing— it doesn’t stay in one place.
More especially if you emigrate to where you can live large.
But nonetheless, it can be completed if there’s an infrastructure that can listen.
i.e. there is somebody else who knows your language- like your first cousin.
Nobody could listen to her.
She had studied Chinese instead of Bengali. She wrote to Sun Yat Sen but he never wrote back. So she topped herself.
That’s why the way in which I said that is the rhetoric of rage —like people will say, “there is no justice.” That doesn’t mean there is no justice. It means that, although there is law, law is not justice.
More particularly in the case of imaginary crimes. If Spivak is right the people responsible for the tragedy were crazy revolutionaries who bullied and brain-washed a 17 year old kid. What she should have done is report them to Police Commissioner Tegart.
That’s what that meant; but nobody read the essay carefully enough to see that story.
Careful reading of that essay disclosed that Spivak was as ignorant as shit. Also, she told hilarious lies.
My mother was very worried that I was writing about her, and I said, “Ma, nobody will pay any attention” —especially since I didn’t say she was my grandmother’s sister. (I didn’t want people to like me because my grandmother’s sister had been in that struggle.)
But she wasn't in that struggle. She topped herself. Either she was a coward or else she didn't want to kill Whitey.
Therefore, I took a good long time to explain this. There was a conference 20 years after I’d given the talk, and I wrote a piece where I explained everything. But that’s what I mean: it’s got nothing to do with the West shutting up colored people, no.
But it is about Spivak's mummy and her aunties laughing at her and telling her not to repeat such stupid lies. Hindus reading about a girl who hangs herself while on the rag, nod their heads and say 'pindalopa'- marry off your daughter before she reaches menses or else explain to her that Studies is worship of Sarasvati Devi who creates an exception to the Shastric rule.
I wondered if, subaltern indicates not individuals, but part of the dominated group that remains incapable of using language, or more precisely, of using the discourse. Am I mistaken?
G. S.: No. When I first went away from just being a French specialist,
she was a Yeats specialist who made an entrepreneurial move into French bullshit. The strange thing is that a Bengali can add value to Yeats studies by exploring his connection with Mohini Chatterjee. But you'd need to know Sanskrit and stuff about Hinduism to succeed in that enterprise. Also, being as stupid as shit would be a marked disadvantage.
as I said, I fell on my family and I spoke about an individual. But, in fact, in Gramsci, the definition is “marginal social groups who cannot be generalized.”
save by neo-classical economics. The subaltern represents 'underemployment'.
I mean, the proletariat could be generalized through capital logic,
as working at the Pareto frontier. The subaltern are far from their most efficient employment allocation. How shift them to the frontier? The answer it turned out was by providing a 'safety net' to reduce risk aversion and creating productivity enhancing institutions to facilitate reallocation. This is stuff like vocational schools, employment bureaus etc. 'Manpower policy' was the old fashioned term.
but these people could not be. Therefore, yes, they are groups; but it isn’t as if they cannot use language. Of course they use language, but we do not have the infrastructure to hear what they’re saying,
Economists do- unless they are Bengali and utterly shite. It is easy to see who is underemployed and to develop an infrastructure so that labor reallocation is more frictionless. Manpower policy is about reducing frictional unemployment.
that’s the work that I’ve been doing for the last 30 years —to create infrastructure so that the elite, the government, can hear what they say.
That is why Mamta is constantly phoning Spivak and asking what Muslims in Howrah or Namasudras in Murshidabad are saying. But Biden too wants to know what colored folk think of Kamala. Spivak sure has used her time 'inside the teaching machine' in a manner very useful to the poor and surd.
If we play an encyclopedia game, what responses come to mind when I say… culture
G. S.: Bad faith.
Indians would say 'Vulture'.
Reason
G. S.: Fragile.
Reason is anti-fragile. What isn't robust does not stand to reason.
Postcolonial
G. S.: Democracy.
Hilarious! Most postcolonial states turned dynastic or dictatorial
Memory
G. S.: That’s a hard one. I can’t produce something quickly for that.
Hindus have the same word for Love as for Memory
Tourist
G. S.: Someone I oppose.
There speaks the immigrant! Fuck dem furriners wot come over here and take photographs of everything.
If I remember correctly, you said that your project is not to study the Subaltern, but to learn from them and devise a philosophy of education.
She certainly learned English from people who didn't know English.
More deeply, more accurately, are we sure that Subaltern is really an object or a topic of study?
Manpower policy in the West largely succeeded in the post-War years. It could have succeeded in India if Mahalanobis & Co hadn't stuck their oar in. The moral here is disintermediate stupid Bengaliwog buddhijivis unless what you want to end up with is a corrupt, brain-dead, dynasty.
G. S.: I think you’re right. On the other hand, I do believe that anything can be an object of study. There’s nothing wrong with studying something. If one studies a thing in such a way that it is nothing but an object of investigation, then it’s a problem.
Not if it expressible as a mathematical problem.
I’m a literary critic: our way of studying the singular and the unverifiable is, in fact, to want to be haunted by the text we are studying.
Why not let it live instead?
In fact, good historians and good anthropologists are this way, as well.
Useless? Fair cop, Guv.
(That is to say, the more qualitative social sciences.) So, I have no problem with objects of study. But —you’re quite right— I have no anthropological curiosity or historical curiosity about the Subaltern.
Which is purely economic. You are only subaltern if there is some 'friction' preventing you reaching your most productive use and highest real reward.
And although I am not following Gramsci, I found later that I’m very sympathetic with Gramsci, because Gramsci also talks quite a lot about producing subaltern intellectuals,
but the factory worker who becomes an intellectual is....an engineer or technologist. Fordism is their ideology which in turn is perfectly compatible with Pareto's theories. Pinpoint 'residues and derivations' to reduce friction within the economy and the subaltern disappears as Society moves to the Pareto frontier.
and the traditional intellectual being in a master-disciple relationship, where the disciple is the traditional intellectual learning from the environment of the Subaltern.
That's why Gramsci recommended girls from Bengal to go study at Cornell and teach at Columbia.
So, yes: I do believe that the work that I’ve been doing has been to learn how to actually work with these damaged mindsets —damaged by us, caste Hindus— in order to insert in the children the intuitions of democracy, because they’re going to vote. So, that’s really my project, in a nutshell.
Her educational charity has been running for more than 20 years. It hasn't produced a single notable alumni.
As you know, mainly in the West, the memory issues, manifestations, and discourses about the past have increased for the last thirty decades
thirty? I suppose she means three.
in Occident. We have talked about the Jewish genocide as the paradigm of memory;
only because a lot of Jews escaped or otherwise survived.
and today memory is a varied topic concerning the Armenian genocide, Tutsi genocide, Cambodian genocide, WWI and so forth. How can this important part of Occidental contemporary culture fit into the subaltern perspective? How can be articulated with it?
G. S.: I think that memory may be, today, kind of theorized as opposed to official historiography in the West, but this emergence of memory, rather than access to… that’s the subaltern stuff. The Subaltern does not have access to. Whereas the Western elite theorists turn their back on official historiography,
Elites have power. Western elite theorists produce Western official historiography. But people prefer Bridgerton.
the Subaltern does not have access to official historiography.
unless they have a smartphone.
Therefore, there is a memory.
A memory of stuff that didn't happen, like Spivak's great-aunt being a secret assassin. Then it turned out that the head of the Revolutionary Cell was actually Ras al Ghul. So the girl committed suicide while on the rag only to be revived in the Lazarus Pit. She changed her name to Elektra and helped Daredevil.
I’m a little troubled by Western theories of memory, because it’s not a question of hierarchizing—especially with genocidal testimony. I don’t think that diagnosing something as a genocide should use something like testimony as evidence;
just invent the thing wholesale. Trillions of Iyers were wiped out when the leprechauns colonized Iyerland and yet Taoiseach is not even sending me bottle of Jamesons by way of reparation. Fuck you Varadkar! Fuck you very much!
and it inevitably goes in that direction. I think if one wants to respect memory, one will not make it into something that wins out over historiography. In this, I’m critical of certain kinds of memorizing disciplines.
You should hear what those memorizing disciplines say about her.
On the other hand, with the Subaltern, memory, which is not to be treated by educated theorists as anything but anthropological material, is what there is.
Spivak is speaking of confabulation.
So, I do not think of subaltern memory as just something you analyze and put in place, because in some ways there is no distinction between subaltern memory and elite memory.
Nonsense! Elite memory tends to be very well documented.
That’s how memory works—acknowledge that. And, in fact, quite often subaltern memory becomes accessible through religion.
Only if you lie about it.
This is a very significant thing noticed, for example, by both Ranajit Guha in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, which he wrote about 32 years ago,
because stupid Marxists were scratching their heads about whether there was Capitalism in India before the Brits arrived. If so- and it was obviously so- why was there no proletariat? The answer Guha supplied was that guys who didn't want their rent hiked or their land stolen were actually 'insurgents' of a Maoist type. Since this wasn't true, Guha pretended that the religion of the peasants was actually Maoist. Sadly, he did not extend this analysis to monkeys. When they show you their bum they are actually engaging in Maoist propaganda.
and W.E.B. Du Bois, talking about the slave joining of the Union army as general strike in his beautiful book, Black Reconstruction, written in 1935.
But slaves genuinely were abolitionist. Du Bois wasn't pretending that they were actually Freudians or Marxists or LGBTQ activists. He was connecting African American aspirations to those of the wider working class. However, Du Bois insisted that it was not refusal to work in the plantation but determination to fight and die in the Union Army which raised up the African American to the status of a brother and an equal.
Both recognize that the way in which the Subaltern—Du Bois is not using the word ‘subaltern,’ obviously—has access to the world historical—almost the only way—is through the discourse of religion.
Du Bois made the opposite point. The African American 'talented tenth' provided high quality journalism and other types of leadership for the slave and ex-slave population. There were plenty of highly literate African American pastors. Their were also some smaller communities- e.g. the one from which Clarence Thomas descends- preserving older traditions and dialects from the African motherland.
So, collective memory forms itself. Dubois, as he writes about this business, he has the black worker, the white worker, and then the chapter is, “The Coming of the Lord,”
which has nothing to do with Religion. The chapter is about the role of African Americans in the Union Army. 200,000 of them enrolled.
because that is how the slave-Christians were understanding how slavery was in religion, because that was their access to the world historical.
This is completely the opposite of what Du Bois said. Spivak is incapable of understanding anything she reads. The plain fact is that the African Americans, quite naturally, identified with the ancient Israelites enslaved by the Egyptians or the Assyrians. On the other hand, the slaves had their own networks which kept them informed about world events- including even the Indian mutiny. Spivak thinks they were an abject people who knew nothing of the world except some stories from the Bible.
That’s why it’s so delicate.
This is not delicate. It is racist shit.
So, when the elite actually uses this as a kind of post-theoretical practice, I remain quite critical of this.
Obama is totes elite. Spivak is critical of his 'post-theoretical practice' which involved being a two term President. He should have understood he was 'subaltern' and utterly ignorant. Why was he not plucking cotton while accessing the 'world historical' by singing 'By the waters of Babylon'? I tell you, all is the fault of those cunts at Harvard Law who filled Obama's wooly head with elitist ideas. Had he attended my classes, he would have known his place. At the very least he could have hanged himself while menstruating. What? Men can menstruate. Indeed, originally only men had periods which is why it is called menstruation not womenstruation. Sadly disciplinarity of the catachresis of the scotomized subaltern is causing females to bleed from the cooch and become Chief Minister of West Bengal. Marx would so not have approved.
And so, that is how I would connect it with Subalternity.
By putting a noose around its neck and having it hanged while it is on the rag. Go thou and do likewise. Macron is right. The French Academy has indeed turned to shit.
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