LP+Week+7

//Critique of representation has been a trending topic within international development organizations. Below, I'm including articles/blog posts/websites where individuals in the dev community have voiced their frustrations over not being able to figure out how to represent their constituents and proposed ideas for doing something differently. I include them for a few reasons. First, the individuals speaking in these posts will be closer to "practice" than most academics will ever be. Second, individuals in these organizations produce a great deal of knowledge about the "subaltern" - probably much more than academics do. More importantly though, I've often heard development efforts essentialized as harmful. I think that it's really important to remember that there are people in the dev community talking through the same issues that we are talking through (in a language much more accessible than ours).//

Please Stop Using the Term “Beneficiaries” in ICT4D

Poverty P*rn: a reflection of deeper issues

Global Voices

Regarding Humanity

An Open Letter to African Writers, Artists, and Creators

A Piece of My Mind: Respect my Agency 2012! This post generated a great deal of response, but all of the posts on this blog are quite eye-opening.


 * Coping with Essentialism**

I think it’s absolutely on target to take a stand against the discourses of essentialism, universalism as it comes in terms of the universal – of classical German philosophy or the universal as the white upper-class male ... etc. But //strategically// we cannot. Even as we talk about //feminist// practice, or privileging practice over theory, we are universalizing – not only generalizing but universalizing. Since the moment of essentializing, universalizing, saying yes to the onto-phenomenological question, is irreducible, let us at least situate it at the moment, let us become vigilant about our own practice and use it as much as we can rather than make the totally counter productive gesture of repudiating it. (11)


 * Non-alliance with the Subaltern**

The next item, where you say that I declare myself allied to the subaltern. I don’t think that I declare myself to be allied to the subaltern. The subaltern is all that not is not elite, but the trouble with those kinds of names is that if you have any kind of political interest you name it in the hope that the name will disappear. That’s what class consciousness is in the interest of: the class disappearing. What politically we want to see is that the name would not be possible. So what I’m interested in is seeing ourselves as namers of the subaltern. If the subaltern can speak then, thank God, the subaltern is not a subaltern any more. (158)

As I was saying when you asked me, didn’t I ally myself with the subaltern. I said by no means, I noticed myself as a namer of the subaltern. The subaltern is a name as “woman” in Derrida, or “power” in Foucault, and the name comes with an anxiety that if the political program gets anywhere the name will disappear. In that way I would say that women who claim alterity should see themselves – should in fact see themselves as naming rather than named. (166)


 * Careful project of un-learning our privilege as our loss (9)**

If one reverses the direction of this binary opposition, the Western intellectual’s longing for all that is not West, our turn towards the West – the so-called non-West’s turn toward the West is a //command//. That turn was not in order to fulfill some longing to consolidate a pure space for ourselves, that turn was a command. Without that turn we would not in fact have been able to make out a life for ourselves as intellectuals. One has to reverse the binary opposition, and today of course, since there is now a longing once again for the pure Other of the West, we post-colonial intellectuals are told that we are //too// Western, and what goes completely unnoticed is that our turn to the West is in response to a command, whereas the other is to an extent a desire marking the place of the management of a crisis. (8)

But if I think in terms of the much larger female constituency in the world for whom I am an infinitely privileged person, in this broader context, what I really want to learn about is what I have called the unlearning of one’s privilege. So that, not only does one become able to listen to that other constituency, but one learns to speak in such a way that one will be taken seriously by that other constituency. And furthermore, to recognize that the position of the speaking subject within theory can be an historically powerful position when it wants the other actually to be able to answer back. As a feminist concerned about women, that’s the position that interests me more. (42)

I have no idea what I’m trying to say about this particular problem. I don’t have a very specific answer yet. I don’t see my way clear, because I don’t think one can deny history quite so easily. This is a very difficult undertaking, and it also seems to me that I’ll probably not succeed in it. On the other hand, I compare myself here sometimes to my white male students, who complain that they can no longer speak. I say to them that they should develop a degree of rage against a history that has allowed that, that has taken away from them the possibility of speaking. To an extent, in the context of women at large, that’s the kind of bind that one’s in. I have no theoretical models for what one should develop, because this is my problem – I’m speaking of myself as a representative of a certain kind of feminist – and my problem is not the important problem here. (43)

What I mean by crisis is the moment at which you feel that your presuppositions of an enterprise are disproved by the enterprise itself. These are not necessarily moments of weakness. It seems to me that this is the only serious way in which crisis can become productive, when one feels, for example, that the women’s movement challenges the project of feminism. (139)


 * Outside In**

I don’t think one can pretend to imitate adequately that to which one is bound. (38)

In a certain sense, I think there is nothing that is central. The center is always constituted in terms of its own marginality. However, having said that, in terms of the hegemonic historical narrative, certain peoples have always been asked to cathect the margins so others can be defined as central. Negotiating between these two structures, sometimes I have to see myself as the marginal in the eyes of others.

So that, in fact, all that he looks at is the way in which the subject centers itself. He is not decentering the subject. The subject is – the subject must identify itself with its self-perceived intention. The fact that it must do so is not a description of what it is. That is the difference between decentered and centered. There is no way that a subject can be anything but centered. (146)

It seems to me that I would like to re-invent this kind of marginality, which I now find: exclusion from various turfs. I would like to re-invent it as simply a critical moment rather than a de-centered moment, you know what I mean. That’s the way I think of the margin – as not simply opposed to the center but as an accomplice to the center – because I find it very troubling that I should be defined as a marginal. (156)


 * Tension in Theory and Practice**

Thus reading Foucault slashed in Derrida, let me further propose that the bestowal of the name power upon a complex situation produces power “in the general sense.” The traces of the empirical entailed by the word in the history of the language give the so-called narrow sense of power. The relationship between the general and narrow senses spans the active articulation of deconstruction in a considerable variety of ways. [...] But, and this seems to me important, this curious relationship between the narrow and the general senses is what makes for the necessary lack of fit between discourse and example, the necessary crisis between theory and practice, that marks deconstruction. If we remember that such a misfit between theory and practice is the main complaint brought by nearly everyone against Foucault – in deed, it is thematized by Foucault himself as putting discourse theory aside in this later phase – we can see how Derrida’s speculations about the general and the narrow allow us neither to look for an exact fit between theory and practice in Foucault, nor to ignore or transform the boldest bits of his theoretical writings about power. (28)

If you are actually involved in changing state policy on the one hand, and earning the right to be heard and trusted by the subaltern on the other, on behalf of a change that is both medicine and poison, you cannot choose to choose the cut-off trail, declaring it as a hope when for some it has been turned into despair. And, if, like Derrida and Foucault, you are a scrupulous academic who //is// largely an academic, you stage the crisis relationship between theory and practice in the practice of your theoretical production in various ways instead of legitimizing the polarization between the academy and the real world by disavowing it, and then producing elegant solutions that will never be seriously tested either in large-scale decision-making or among the disenfranchised. (51)


 * Uncategorized**

You cannot freely play. This is one of the things that deconstruction also teaches us. If one does start, self-consciously, to engage in free play, once again one makes a very deterministic mistake, thinking that the narrating can adequately represent the philosophy. Thinking that we can exactly imitate the notions of deconstruction by engaging in a little bit of free play. For even as we are supposed to be ‘freely playing’, we are finalizing the situation out of which we are speaking. (46)