Response+to+Spivak


 * “If the lines of making sense of something are laid down in a certain way, then you are able to do only those things with that something which are possible within and by the arrangement of those lines. //Pouvoir-savoir//—being able to do something—only as you are able to make sense of it” (OTM 34).**

Knowing puts limitations on doing; or, the contours of knowledge define the area in which action is possible. How does //pouvoir-savoir­// form?

It must be local. It must depend somehow on the position of the subject.


 * “‘You must begin where you are’” (PCC 44).**

Walter Mignolo was clearly thinking of this when he discussed the importance of “being where one thinks and does.” All thinking, as well as all political action, is necessarily rooted in one’s native soil, so to speak.

But there is a tension in deconstructivism, a tension Spivak discusses frequently, On the one hand, **“deconstruction suggests that there is no absolute justification of //any// position” (PCC 104).** On the other hand, **“deocnstruction, also in insistently claims that there cannot be a fully practicing deconstructor. For the subject is always centered as a subject” (PCC 104).** One must always “think and do” where one is.

Expressing this tension in another way, Spivak says:


 * “Deconstruction says to us over and over again that it is not possible to have positive sciences—on the other hand, it is always abundantly possible!” (PCC 45).**

Not only is it possible, it is inevitable: **“What deconstruction looks at is the limits of this centering, and points at the fact that these boundaries of the centering of the subject are indeterminate and that the subject (being always centered) is obliged to describe them as determinate” (PCC 104).**

We know that “positive sciences” are possible because we see them everywhere. To be positivist is to a certain extent inevitable; the subject is obliged to describe its boundaries as determinate. A better question for deconstructivism is in what sense being positivist, describing boundaries as determinate, is //not// possible. I think the sense in which positive sciences are “not possible” is the sense in which they //want// to be possible—that is, as absolutely grounded in an axiomatic and undeniable truth. //This// is not possible. Their existence, however, is quite undeniable, and even unavoidable. It is impossible not to “be an essentialist,” although, when you reflect on your essentialism, you realize it is not grounded in anything.

When aware of the simultaneous ungroundedness and unavoidableness of having a perspective, when, practicing deconstruction, you “look at the limits of centering,” how can you take action with confidence, or at all? But beyond this, could there even be a way in which deconstructivism is actually //productive//, actually makes action //better//, more effective? That is another problem Spivak speaks to often.


 * “Since one cannot not be an essentialist, why not look at the ways in which one is essentialist, carve out a representative essentialist position, and then do politics according to the old rules whilst remembering the dangers in this? That’s the thing that deconstruction gives use; an awareness that what we are obliged to do, and must do scrupulously, in the long run is not OK” (PCC 45).**

This describes what we must be thinking as we take action, as we “do politics”: there are dangers. But beyond that awareness:


 * “Since it is not possible not to be an essentialist, one can self-consciously use this irreducible moment of essentialism as part of one’s strategy. This can be used as part of a ‘good’ strategy as well as a ‘bad’ strategy and this can be used self-consciously as well as unself-consciously, and neither self-consciousness nor unself-consciousness can be valorized in my book” (PCC 109).**

Acknowledgement of the necessity of essentialism in a way //permits strategic use// of that essentialism. But how?

Somehow, I feel like this ties into issues that have been on my mind o what I can and can’t say and do, considering the native soil in which I am rooted. Spivak discusses this issue often:


 * “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 or rage against a history that has allowed that, that has taken away from them the possibility of speaking” (PCC 43).**


 * “I’m speaking of myself as a representative of a certain kind of feminist—and my problem is not the important problem here. So if I were to try to produce a new speech, etc., I would still really not be of any interest to the kind of people I’m thinking about. To an extent, the solution of this one is going to come from elsewhere. I’m not trying to pre-empt that because I could appropriate it only too easily” (PCC 43).**


 * “‘Feminism,’ the named movement, is also part of this heritage of the European Enlightenment” (PCC 48).**

As one who has passed through and lives in the Western intellectual tradition, who considers herself a “feminist,” Spivak is fundamentally not one of the “subaltern,” those who are **“displaced even from the catachrestic relationship between decolonization and the Enlightenment, with feminism inscribed within it” (PCC 48).** She cannot speak //as// one of them. What she has to say, from where she is, would “not be of any interest” to them. Yet she thinks //about// them. She is concerned with them. She suggests that the white male students might be concerned about others, that white female Americans with lots of unexamined good intentions may also be sincerely concerned about others. But how can they speak?

One must think and do where one is. But Mignolo claims that **“Eurocentrism…is Western localism…with a global design that become synonymous with universalism” (DWM 330).** This would suggest that no one from the West can speak or do without contributing to an attempt, subconscious or conscious, of spreading the oppressive “universalism.” Westerners should shut up and sit still or we’ll just screw everything up more. **“To an extent, the solution of this one is going to come from elsewhere” (PCC 43).** Only those who have suffered the “colonial wound” can engage in “**epistemic disobedience, in independent thoughts, in decolonial thinking” (DWM 97).**

What does Spivak do to regain the ability to speak? **“One must be conscious of the struggle to win back the position of the questioning subject in specific 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” (PCC 42).**