hdh-spivak


 * The Post-Colonial Critic**
 * Interviews with Gayatri Spivak**

//my comments in italics//

2. "When one says 'writing', it means this kind of structuring of the limits of the power of practice, knowing that what is beyond practice is always organizing practice."
 * __Interview 1- 1984__**

Grosz: "Foucault has suggested that the function of the intellectual… it to struggle against forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of 'knowledge', 'truth', consciousness' and 'discourse'."

3. Spivak: "there are intellectuals in asia but there are no asian intellectuals" (questioning the universalizing 'intellectual')

5. "I don't think there is a non-institutional environment." (there is just framing and more framing)

7. "He (Derrida) will not allow us to forget the fact that the production of theory is in fact a very important practice that is worlding the world in a certain way."

"When I first read Derrida I didn't know who he was, I was very interested to see that he was actually dismantling the philosophical tradition from //inside// rather than from //outside//… we were taught that if we could begin to approach an internalization of that universal human being, then we would be human. When I saw that in France someone was actually trying to dismantle the tradition which has told is what would make us human, that seemed rather interesting too."

8. "You reverse the direction of a binary opposition and you discover the violence. 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 t 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 a life for ourselves as intellectuals. One has to reverse the binary opposition, and today of course, since thee is now a longing 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 toward 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."

//I am really intrigued by the tone here, how almost-banal this comment is, almost as if to say, we all need to work, we all need to pay the bills. In order to be a non-western intellectual in this moment in which I lived I was commanded to do so in a certain way. It's really interesting to think about in relation to our romantic notions of the maverick, the outlaw, the artist, the poet, working from somewhere on the fringes of society to critique it. No, she says, I was commanded to work in this very specific way, with a very specific language. But also of course acknowledging being caught in this frame://

"But I am trying to see how much in fact I am caught within the European desire to turn towards the East; but how it has become doubly displaced."

9. "My project is the careful project of un-learning our privilege as our loss."

//I love this sentence. I could think about it for hours. So poetic but poignant and pointed. I think we could spend a whole class discussing this. I think the choice of the word "loss" is very important. It moves away from a feeling of blame and guilt, towards a sense of pathos, something I actually think is uniting, empathy. I think it is very strategic.//

"and to an extent all of us who can ask the question of specificity, all of us who can make public the question of feminist practice, in fact have been enabled by a long history to be in that position, however personally disadvantaged we may be."

11. "I think we have to choose again strategically, not universal discourse but essentialist discourse. I think since as a deconstructivist - see, I just took a label upon myself - I cannot in fact clean my hands and say, 'I'm specific.' In fact I must say I'm an essentialist from time to time. There is, for example the strategic choice of a genitalist essentialism in anti-sexist work today. How it relates to all of this other work I am talking about, I don't know, but __my search is not a search for coherence__, so that is how I would answer that question about the discourse of the clitoris."

//choice of essentialism vs. universalism [interesting if quite contentious point for discussion]//

12. "jettison your own purity as a theorist"

"You pick up the universal that will give you power to fight against the other side, and what you are throwing away by doing that is your theoretical purity. Whereas the great custodians of the anti-universal are obliged therefore simply to act in the interest of a great narrative, the narrative of exploitation, while they keep themselves clean by not committing themselves to anything. In fact they are actually run by a great narrative even as they are busy protecting their theoretical purity by repudiating essentialism."

//[slight tangent into the personal]// //feminism is the subject of a future class, but as this reading deals with it explicitly so will I.// //I agree with Spivak here I think. In order to grapple with the nitty gritty you do have to say some **specific** things.You can't be afraid to make some statements.// //ie. women are underrepresented in computing.// //That's a statement from experience. I will stand by this statement!// //In order to address this problem we need to be able to state it, to articulate it, to get angry and passionate about it, to care about it. We can't care about something we don't believe in (or can we???? do we in fact care deeply about the very things we question the foundations of? is our deep questioning a symptom of our very devotion?)[conflicted]// //And it matters. People write off programming as grunt work but programmers actually have a lot of power in the minute everyday decisions they make that frame our mediated experiences. So it matters that programming be representative...//

feminism vs. anti-sexism

"Anti-sexism is reactive in the face of where we are thrown." //this whole section at the bottom of p. 12 is very good.// //strategic essentialism?// //is there a dialogue between Spivak and Haraway?//

//all this calls to mind a quote I posted earlier from Derrida in the documentary. Of everything I have read of Derrida this spoken passage has stuck with me the most these past weeks:// //The question is, if you had a choice, what philosopher would you like to have been your mother?// //Derrida acknowledges it is "a good question in fact"// //"It's impossible for me to have any philosopher as a mother. That's the problem. My mother couldn't be a philosopher. A philosopher couldn't be my mother. That's a very important point. Because the figure of the philosopher is for me always a masculine figure. This is one of the reasons I undertook the deconstruction of philosophy. All the deconstruction of phallogocentrism is the deconstruction of what one calls philosophy which since its inception has always been linked to a paternal figure."//

14. anti-sexism v. purity of deconstruction

"i think it is important to be an anti-sexist"

15. "the irreducible but impossible task is to preserve the discontinuities within discourses of feminism, Marxism and deconstruction."

__**Interview 3 - 1986**__ 37. "Don't try and bind me" //This (and much of her writing) is very applicable to the idea of the artist having a cohesive "body of work" that one should develop a style and refine it by ie. painting the same thing over and over and over. Even though we are "post" everything in art there is still very much a feeling of "bodies of work" a need to talk about these unities of our practice. It is very hard to talk about artists who work in many disparate media with different modes and ideas and even styles. It is hard to package.//

"genuine criticisms are in fact a gift"

38. "one needs to be vigilant against simple notions of identity which overlap neatly with language or location"

39. "'India' for people like me, is not really a place with which they can form a national identity because it has always been an artificial construct. 'India' is a bit like 'Europe'. When one is talking about a European identity, for example, one is obviously reacting against the United States."

MJP: "It seems India is often positioned as the 'other' of the west"

//This interview is from 1986. I wonder how differently we might talk about India as 'other' today? Certainly we have grown closer in some ways though the relationship is still othering.//

40. "I find the demand on me to be marginal always amusing."

41. "I'm never defined as marginal in India I can assure you."

42. "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."

43. "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."

44. "Theory always norms practice" discontinuity of theory and practice genuinely interrupting each other //[what are theory and practice here? or rather what is the practice here?]//

45. "Once you are aware that the only way in whch you can deconstruct is by making the structure of that which you critique the structure of your own criticism, then you become conscious of the limitations of total escape. The kind of use I make of deconstruction is this resolute stand against the vanguardism of theory."

"That's the thing that deconstruction gives us; an awareness that what we are obliged to do, and must do scrupulously, in the long run is not OK. But this is not, and could not be, a political theory."

46. 2 phases of Derrida's thoughts: 1. keeping the question alive, 2. the call to the wholly other [ushered in by his interest in questions of sexual difference la carte postal

47. "So a political program cannot base itself upon affirmative deconstruction, because then it will very quickly come to resemble pluralism, and I think pluralism, as a political program, has already shown its dark side, especially in the United States." (that's us!) http://www.udel.edu/htr/American/Texts/pluralism.html

the footnote is the responsibility to trace the other in the self

__**Interview 8 - 1987**__

97-98. interesting stuff on international students in education and the IMF etc. revisit this.

__**Interview 11 - 1987**__ 138. "In order to become really useful these things must lose their proper names. The moment of the proper name is a transitional moment."

143 crisis theory gets mentioned a few times

Baudrillard hyperreality

//some of this stuff is a little too insider marxist/80s culture wars for me...//

__**Interview 12 - 1989 - new historicism**__ 153. "What are we doing here now?"

1. "We are not discussing actual political commitment but our fear that students and colleagues will think we are old-fashioned if we produce a coherent discourse about political commitment after the postwar critiques of Modernism and, indeed, of Sartrean humanism" [do I detect a hint of sarcasm?]

2. "because of this fear or unease we tend to conflate post-modernism and post-structuralism." [good topic for discussion]

"The subject is always centered" -> this calls to mind Derrida from "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences": "up until the event which I wish to mark out... structure-or rather the structurality of structure... has always been neutralized or reduced... by a process of giving it a center ." What is this center? what is its history? What does it signify? It seems to be quite important.

154. 3. In my judgment, then 2 is produced by the fear and unease in 1

"politics" here is allegorical for turf battles "history" is a catachresis here, heavily charged with symbolic significance… My usage: a metaphor without an adequate literal referent, in the last instance a model for all metaphors, all names

155. In postmodernity "Knowledge is power" has shifted to information-command, and the pedagogy of the high humanities, or the appropriation of the popular into the pedagogic format of the h h's has become trivialized, or banalized.

//-> where are we today in respect to what seemed to be a crisis in the humanities?//

156. //It sounds like she has spent a lot of time being attacked from many angles. I feel sympathy for her.//

163. //Feeling again like this insider discussion is really isolating me... seems rather out of touch with things outside academia (I realize that is probably the point, to meditate on the internal politics of academia circa the late 80s but it just seems very isolated from my or my families experiences of this time! Meaning, I have no point of reference here.)//

"Basically I learned first from de Man and the from Derrida the importance of reading absolutely literally. And of course the word 'literally' is like the word 'history'. Like any master word, it is a catachretical word."

164.
 * "So, in fact, do not go into a text thinking to diagnose the absences because you leave a lot outside the door when you enter as a doctor. And after all, a doctor cannot read the text as the body of her mother, his wife, or her husband, or their lovers. This relationship of love, which is a deconstructive relationship - you cannot deconstruct something which is not your own language."

"My work is not really on colonial discourse. It is very much more sort of the contemporary cultural politics of neocolonialism in the US"

168 "look, I'm a literary critic"