In 'death of a discipline' (presumably, this referred to the undisciplined ravings of low IQ Comp. Lit. pedagogues ) Spivak relates the following anecdote about a meeting she attended in 1974 of the Executive Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association in Visegrad .
I wish I could regale the reader with the symptomatology of that meeting,
it had none. Even if all the attendees were mentally ill, the meeting itself did not represent a medical pathology.
but must confine myself to one detail.
The association was putting together new scholarly volumes on the periods of European literary history.
They, foolishly, assumed Spivak knew European literary history. She didn't.
We discussed the production details of the volume on the Renaissance, if memory serves. I offered to get contacts for scholars in the Indian languages so that we could enlarge the scope of the series.
Indian languages had zero connection with the European Renaissance which had to do with the revival of Greek learning which was aided by immigration from a beleaguered Byzantium.
I offered to be active in setting up committees for such investigations in the other comparative clusters of the world: Korean–Chinese–Japanese; Arabic–Persian; the languages of Southeast Asia; African languages.
But none of these 'clusters' has anything at all to do with the European Renaissance. At a previous time, Arabic had some importance for Scholasticism but this was not the case for the Renaissance.
A foolish notion, no doubt. M. Voisine of the Sorbonne, a senior member of the committee, quelled me with a glance: “My friend René Etiemble tells me,” he said, “that there is a perfectly acceptable scholarly history of literatures in Chinese.”
In other words, it was well known that there was no influence, reciprocal or otherwise, between China or India or the Turks and the European Renaissance.
Spivak's initial work was on Yeats. It so happens that the indigenous Aisling poets of Ireland claimed to have akept up a knowledge of Greek and there may, for all we know, have been a creative exchange between Gaelic bards, and their aristocratic patrons, and the new humanism filtering in from Italy and, at a later time, Holland etc. Indeed 'the flight of the Earls' may have brought this impulse back into Catholic Europe. Otherwise, of course, the usual course for an English speaking academic would be to dwell on the connection between Petrarch and Chaucer and so forth. Adding a Celtic dimension to this might be interesting. Why did Spivak not take this obvious course? Why was she foolish enough to start babbling about Indian or Chinese literature?
Memory has no doubt sharpened the exchange. And one person’s caustic remark cannot represent an entire discipline. What the exchange does vouch for, however, is my longstanding sense that the logical consequences of our loosely defined discipline were, surely, to include the open-ended possibility of studying all literatures, with linguistic rigor and historical savvy.
Historical savvy involves saying 'Indian and Chinese literature had zero influence on the European Renaissance. Also, though I like my cat, Mitzi, very much it really isn't the case that it influenced Petrarch or Erasmus or Leonardo da fucking Vinci.'
A level playing field, so to speak.
So that, if the topic is 'the European Renaissance' you get to gas on about what Mahasweta Devi said to your cat Mitzi. That would be not a 'level playing field' but one vast cesspit.
As it happened, I had also been speaking of what was not yet called Cultural Studies teaming up with Area Studies for crossing borders some time.
And thus getting to gas on about Mahasweta or Mitzi or anything else which enters your magpie head.
Selecting one example among many, I quote myself, admonishing, in 1988: “As we in the margins
the cunt was a Professor in America! She wasn't 'in the margins'.
try to shore up our defenses, we tend to leave untouched the politics of the specialists of the margin—area studies, anthropology, and the like.”
Did you know that White Men have penises? Some of those White Men are professors of anthropology. How is that politically acceptable? BTW, many White Women have privileged access to penises. Fuck them all to death!
Even from a restricted U.S. perspective, it seems obvious that the sources of literary agency have expanded beyond the old European national literatures.
Did you know America has writers? Indeed it has a lot of literary agents and some of its writers are as rich as fuck. Someone should explain this to the French. Trust me on this, they are as stupid as shit.
For the discipline, the way out seems to be to acknowledge a definitive future anteriority,
which is like acknowledging that yesterday will occur next week.
a “to come”-ness, a “will have happened” quality.
Tomorrow will have happened by the day after. But yesterday won't. The quality Spivak wants to acknowledge can't exist. But that doesn't mean she shouldn't be allowed to give a lecture on anthropology or actuarial science on how Mitzi, the cat, influenced the European Renaissance.
This is a protection from self-destructive competition for dwindling resources.
No it isn't. It is nonsense. Universities understood that they could make money getting crazy nutters to award sheepskins to credential craving cretins. In STEM subjects, if you say something false or foolish either you are forced to recant or you are ostracized. But if you teach worthless shite, nobody gives a fuck.
It is also a protection from losing the best of the old Comparative Literature: the skill of reading closely in the original.
Which Spivak does not have in any language. This is because her brain is full of shit. She doesn't even understand the meaning of 'duranta asha' (restless hope) a poem Tagore wrote in his twenties which says Bengalis are shit. Better to be a Bedouin. Obviously, the British were even more free than the Bedouin but they had brains so let's not bother with that option.
Ihar cheye hotem jodi arab-bedouin/payer toley bishal moru digontey bileen . . . (If only I’d been Arab-Bedouin rather than what I am/With the great horizon-kissing desert under my feet . . .),
The meaning is 'because I am a shitty Bengali, I wish I were a Bedouin.' Tagore knew that plenty of Brits- including women- had travelled as Bedouins. One such, Lady Hester Stanhope, became the de facto ruler of a district in Syria in the 1830s. Apparently she wanted to marry Ibn Saud so as to give birth to the new Messiah.
a line from a famous poem by Rabindranath Tagore learned as a child, long before I had any informed idea about Bedouin culture,
Nowadays, of course, Spivak is consulted by the Saudi Crown Prince because of her vast knowledge of Bedouin culture.
already established them in the formative imagination of a Bengali child as the epitome of a free life.
Which, clearly, she wanted no part of.
The new step that I am proposing ...would work to make the traditional linguistic sophistication of Comparative Literature
it has no such sophistication. It was ignorant shit.
supplement Area Studies (and history, anthropology, political theory, and sociology) by approaching the language of the other not only as a “field” language.
but also as my cat Mitzi and the nice nice Revolution we will have when yesterday occupies the anteriority of the day after tomorrow. Also White Women should all be fucked to death. I hate them.
In the field of literature, we need to move from Anglophony, Lusophony, Teutophony, Francophony, et cetera.
We should forget all languages and just make miaow miaow noises.
We must take the languages of the Southern Hemisphere
India is not in the 'Southern Hemisphere' and thus would be spared.
as active cultural media rather than as objects of cultural study by the sanctioned ignorance of the metropolitan migrant.
Everybody in the Southern Hemisphere already takes their own languages as 'active cultural media'. They aren't 'objects of study' by metropolitan migrants to Australia or Argentina or whatever. If you want to get ahead in the Southern Hemisphere you learn to speak either Portuguese (the most spoken language because of Brazil), a Malay type language or Spanish or English. Places where none of these languages are spoken are shitholes. They don't receive 'metropolitan migrants'.
We cannot dictate a model for this from the offices of the American Comparative Literature Association.
You can't dictate shit.
We can, however, qualify ourselves and our students to attend upon this as it happens elsewhere.
No. You are too stupid.
Here and now, I can only caution against some stereotypes:
the only stereotypes which matter have to do with the stupidity and uselessness of those affirmative action retards who go in for this stripe of shite.
that such an interest is antihybridist, culturally conservative, “ontopologist,” “parochial.” Indeed, I am inviting the kind of language training that would disclose the irreducible hybridity of all languages.
Literary languages are not 'hybrid'. A 'fusion' or hybrid pidgin, or Creole, may be spoken by very poor illiterate immigrant populations. Still, the good news is that I could provide 'language training' in Chinese on the basis of my ability to say 'Wu ka pooh farted Namaste?' Which means 'the catachresis of the constipation of the objective correlative is totes gay.'
As I have said elsewhere: “The verbal text is jealous of its linguistic signature
No. The verbal text has a linguistic signature. It isn't jealous of it at all. On the other hand it may be jealous of a visual text or one composed entirely of odors.
but impatient of national identity.
Nonsense! Plenty of verbal texts are ponderous celebrations of national identity.
Translation flourishes by virtue of that paradox.”
No it doesn't. It flourishes if there is a market for it and gifted writers are attracted into the field. Consider William Weaver's translation of Eco's 'Name of the Rose'. Some Italians thought Weaver's version was better.
Other stereotypes are correct but irrelevant: namely, that attention crossing borders to the languages of the Southern Hemisphere is inconvenient and impractical.
I don't think this woman understands exactly which countries are in the Southern hemisphere.
Inconvenient. There are a few hegemonic European languages and innumerable Southern Hemisphere languages.
Not really. Papua New Guinea skews things somewhat because it has more than 800 languages. But its population is small. The Malay languages are thriving as is Portuguese. They have plenty of people who can translate to and from any language in the world.
The only principled answer to that is: “Too bad.”
This woman has no principles. She is too stupid.
The old Comparative Literature did not ask the student to learn every hegemonic language;
It did expect people to know a couple of Classical language and at least four or five major modern languages. A typical example might be Annemarie Schimmel. In addition to Latin, Greek, German, English and French, she was an expert in Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Punjabi.
nor will the new ask her or him to learn all the subaltern ones!
British army officers in India had to learn Hindustani. ICS officers had to have either Arabic/Persian or Sanskrit as a classical language. In addition they would need to know the vernacular language of their own Province- e.g. Tamil, Bengali etc.
Can the “native informant” ever become the subject of a “cultural study”
You don't need to study your informant because he is helping you with your fucking study.
that does not resemble metropolitan language–based work?
It had done so long before Spivak was born. Sir William Jones, a judge in Calcutta, learned Sanskrit and Persian and Bengali and so forth. But, in the seventeenth century, Coryate had mastered all the languages of India.
If one asks this question,
one is as stupid as shit.
one sees that the destabilization offered by a merely metropolitan Cultural Studies must exclude much for its own convenience, for the cultural claims of the metropolitan migrant.
It may have to exclude stuff for which there is no fucking market.
Jacques Derrida is the rare philosopher who thinks that philosophical “concepts [cannot] transcend idiomatic differences.”
But Mathematics can. If a philosophical concept has no mathematical representation or does not correspond to an open problem in Math, then it isn't philosophical at all. It may be belles-lettristic or merely faddish but it fails to rise to the threshold of philosophy.
Such insights do not apply only to French and German or Greek and Latin. Engagement with the idiom of the global other(s) in the Southern Hemisphere, uninstitutionalized in the Euro–U.S. university structure except via the objectifying, discontinuous, transcoding tourist gaze of anthropology and oral history, is our lesson on displacing the discipline.
Why bother? They are too stupid to understand their own culture let alone that of anybody else.
This is not brought about by the reterritorialized desire of the metropolitan migrant to collaborate with the South, generally through the United Nations by way of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
Who is this crazy metropolitan migrant? Most such people just want a better paying job and a chance for their kids to rise in life. Nobody goes to drive a taxi in New York in order to lobby the fucking UN.
As I have argued elsewhere, such collaboration is generally possible only with the class, physically “based” in the global South, increasingly produced by globalization, that is sufficiently out of touch with the idiomaticity of nonhegemonic languages.
This is nonsense. Countries in the global South have 'hegemonic' national or State languages. Speaking generally, the power-elite, or their scions, speak idiomatically but not in a learned or 'literary' manner. But this is also true of the British Royal Family. But, they can chat easily enough with foreign oligarchs about super-yachts or race-horses
What I am suggesting may sound discouraging.
It sounds like you have a screw loose.
I hate to use this word, but perhaps it gives us a certain kind of honesty. It should not paralyze us. We cannot not try to open up, from the inside, the colonialism of European national language–based Comparative Literature
But this silly bint says Comp Lit only came into existence after Colonialism had ended. True, some Indians gas on about how some Brit decided that one regional dialect rather than another should be classed as 'literary' or hegemonic and thus be made the official language of a province. But those Indians are wrong.
and the Cold War format of Area Studies,
Actually 'Area Studies' was colonial- Haileybury College, SOAS etc.
and infect history and anthropology with the “other” as producer of knowledge.
These cunts produce shit, not knowledge. As for their 'other'- presumably that would be someone yet shittier and more abject.
From the inside, acknowledging complicity.
In an imaginary crime.
No accusations. No excuses.
No logic. No intelligence. Just verbal diarrhea.
Rather, learning the protocol of those disciplines, turning them around, laboriously, not only by building institutional bridges but also by persistent curricular interventions.
Resulted in the whole thing turning to shit. Suppose there is funding for a Comp. Lit initiative re. the European Renaissance. A nutter like Spivak manages to infiltrate the program by laboriously learning 'the protocols'. Then she changes them so that she can bring in Indian scholars who will explain the connection between Mitzi the Cat and Petrarch who must have had a pussy because dicks are very evil.
The most difficult thing here is to resist mere appropriation by the dominant.
E.g guys who know about the Renaissance getting to write about it thus inflicting epistemic violence on my cat Mitzi.
Indeed, the question of the old imperialisms and the new empire is
an imaginary grievance. Why not say that the local Taco stand represents the continuing hegemony of the Spanish Inquisition?
itself different if uncoupled from high-culture radicalism. While I was working on this manuscript, I was also looking at the Report of the Mayor’s Task Force on the City University of New York, undertaken in 1998.
CUNY had open admissions, a large percentage of mature students not fluent in English, and thus was not a typical Higher Education provider.
The question before us was “What is English? Literary Studies in a Public Urban University.” The City University of New York was faulted because 87 percent of its incoming undergraduate class was in remedial English.
No. The Report explains that New York benefits by ensuring remedial English is provided so that mature students could transition to better, higher value adding, jobs in the expanding knowledge economy. Spivak is pretending that the report was compiled by a bunch of racist shitheads.
The report separated the old minorities— giving them the code name of New York City public school graduates
No. It mentions African American students and explains how they can be helped. But it also stresses the need to give a person from, let us say Cambodia, currently washing dishes who, with the right help with English, could become a computer programmer.
—from the new—emergent since Lyndon Johnson lifted the quota system in 1965:
More than thirty years previously.
“During the 1990’s, the white population of New York City declined by 19.3%, while the black, Hispanic, and Asian population have risen by 5.2%, 19.3%, and 53.5%, respectively.”
New York gets a bigger tax base and more tax revenue by getting more and more of its people into the Knowledge Economy.
If you sit in on these so-called remedial classes, you perceive the institutional incapacity to cope with the crossroads of race, gender and class
No you don't. You learn English or Arithmetic or whatever else it was you previously missed out on. This means you can go on to get a skilled job and thus earn more and pay more in taxes. Spivak may say 'what is the point of remedial classes if the curse of being a Black Woman is not lifted? How is it fair that only White Men get to have White Penises? We must rewrite the protocols so that Mitzi the Cat is recognized by Mahasweta Devi as acknowledging the catachresis of the European Renaissance as the parabasis of the deconstruction of the anteriority of yesterday evening as the postcolonial sodomization of the subaltern in Singur.
—even when the teacher has the best will in the world—to come to grips with the actual play of the choice of English as tongue in the imagination of these working-class new immigrant survival artists.
Immigrants didn't know New Yorkers speak English. Moreover, many of them didn't even know twelve or thirteen of the languages of Papua New Guinea. Yet, New York was wasting tax dollars on teaching them English and Arithmetic! This proves that America is engaging in Imperialism!
Le Thé Au Harem d’Archi Ahmed.
Which is about France, not the US and features a French speaking, second generation, Arab from a former French colony. There is no similarity here between the Asian or African first generation mature student who attends CUNY so as to get a better job.
As a comparativist I would like to suggest that, just as no “literary studies” in New York City and no doubt in Los Angeles should forget that the answer to the question “What is English?” is that it is more than half the ingredient for producing human capital (the other half being mathematics),
Spivak thinks more than half plus half equals one. She truly is as stupid as shit. Remedial English or Arithmetic is maybe five percent of relevant human capital. It is merely a threshold requirement. The actual Human Capital has to do with other relevant work skills.
so also, literary studies will have to acknowledge that the European outlines of its premise and one of its tasks—positing the idea of the universality of each of the European national languages
No one has posited any such thing. French people don't display surprise and anger when they discover that the Chinese have their own language.
(the jealously guarded particular domain of the old Comparative Literature)
Nope. Comp Lit can only exist if there are different languages. Nobody bothers to guard this domain.
—have, in globality and in subaltern U.S. multiculturalism, altogether disappeared.
Nonsense! Some people can speak Spanish. Most can't. This distinction has not disappeared.
There are Haitians and West Africans in those CUNY remedial classes whose imaginations are crossing and being crossed by a double aporia—the cusp of two imperialisms.
Rubbish! Those guys want to get ahead and, ceteris paribus, that is exactly what they do. Imperialism disappeared from Haiti two hundred years ago. Spivak is as stupid as shit.
I have learned something from listening to their talk about and in Creole/French/so-called pidgin and English-as-a-second language-crossing-into-first—the chosen tongue.
Spivak has learned nothing. She talks. She does not listen.
I have silently compared
Spivak is lying. She is incapable of being silent about any stupid thought which crosses her shitty mind
their imaginative flexibility, so remarkably and necessarily much stronger, because constantly in use for social survival and mobility, than that of the Columbia undergraduate, held up by the life-support system of a commercializing anglophone culture that trivializes the humanities.
Why stop there? Why not say you admire their ability to hang from lamp-posts by their tails as they eat bananas and chatter to each other in pidgin? Can a Columbia undergraduate hang from her tail? No! This is because humanities have been trivialized. Did you know that Akeel Bilgrami doesn't even have a tail? This is what the Colonialists have done to a proud, Gay, Indian Muslim.
It is time, in globality, in New York, and no doubt elsewhere in the metropolis, to put the history of Francophony, Teutophony, Lusophony, Anglophony, Hispanophony also—not only (please mark the difference)—in a comparative focus.
CUNY has replaced 'remedial' with 'corequisite' courses for which academic credit is given. Sadly, it is too late for Spivak to be helped by any such thing.
Can Comp Lit enable the spread of human rights and help improve outcomes for 'gender and development' programs? Yes but only to the extent that Mitzi-the-cat Studies which focus wholly on making miaow miaow noises can do so.
If we seek to supplement gender training and human rights intervention by expanding the scope of Comparative Literature,
or expanding the scope of saying miaow miaow
the proper study of literature
like the proper way of saying miaow miaow
may give us entry to the performativity of cultures as instantiated in narrative.
You don't need to know a language to have entry to 'performativity'. That's why you can watch a Kung Fu film in Chinese and understand what is happening well enough. The evil guy is the who shouts at people before kicking their heads off. The good guy is the one who keeps getting beaten up till he learns a new fighting style from a drunken monkey.
Here we stand outside, but not as anthropologist; we stand rather as reader with imagination ready for the effort of othering,
why make any such effort? Just fart vociferously enough and everybody will run away.
however imperfectly, as an end in itself.
For Spivak 'othering' is an end in itself. Why?
It is a peculiar end, for “It cannot be motivated . . . except in the requirement for an increase or a supplement of justice [here to the text], and so in the experience of an inadequation or an incalculable disproportion.”
This is Derrida. But he was speaking of responsibility not 'othering' which has to do with denial of responsibility.
This is preparation for a patient and provisional and forever deferred arrival into the performative of the other,
simply naming the other as other is 'performative' even if no other exists. Thus if I say 'be gone Satan', Satan is present and 'performative' even if there is no such thing as Satan.
in order not to transcode but to draw a response.
We draw responses from things we await or imagine whether we like it or not.
Believe me, there is a world of difference between the two positions.
But that difference makes no fucking difference because the world in question is up the anus of an imaginary giraffe.
In order to reclaim the role of teaching literature as training the imagination—the great inbuilt instrument of othering
Literature does not train the imagination. It embodies a particular imagination and suggests ways of representing similar imaginings. Thus, after reading Conan Doyle, we might be able to invent a detective of our own. This is not an instrument of 'othering'. We don't think of Sherlock Holmes, or Feluda come to that, as a 'subaltern' or inferior being.
Spivak was not able to understand European literature because she thought all the White peeps depicted in it were secretly jeering at her coz she was brown and lacked a dick. Did you know Jane Austen was White? That's why, instead of writing nice books about Bengali girls who hanged themselves while on the rag, she was having too much Pride and Prejudice. This led to Queen Victoria beating and sodomizing the Nazim of Sirhind. Ranajit Guha has explained all this in his next book which will be published yesterday.
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