Having just returned from Spivak's lecture at Durham University's Castle Lecture Series (which has produced an exciting lineup for this year - Pogge and Chomsky, two that I look forward to. I'll post a few of the recorded videos from last year's lineup as well), the talk is still very much on my mind. The lecture hall was at max capacity and I'm going to guess at least 300 were in attendance. Students sat on tables that lined the walls and people were actually denied entrance to the lecture. The room buzzed with chatter. But when Gayatri Spivak entered, the room immediately fell silent. Like a classroom going quiet when the teacher walks in.
Spivak touched on a great deal of things but I'ld like to key in on a few that stood out for me (*I have to add the caveat that I might have misheard or misinterpreted her lecture but will post the video of her lecture once it is up.)
In many respects, I thought her lecture could easily have come from a cultural anthropologist, who has done fieldwork with the marginalized and the illiterate, and is critiquing the neoliberal agenda of implementing resources or buildings that do not actually help the society; how NGOs and certain Human Rights campaigns fail because they fail to consider the embodied habits of mind that make up the epistemology of a culture. Many campaigns go and create a superficial change and the well-intentioned volunteers witness a song and dance about how the people have changed their ways but after the well-intentioned first-world people leave, cultural habits return; these well-intentioned people only go to enjoy themselves than create any meaningful change in structure. In this sense, her talk was very much about the utility of the humanities and its ability to foster critical thought - something that anthropology also does when thinking about other cultures. She was quite critical of the abandonment of education and life span as criterion for the Human Development Index. She argued that the humanities were not only valuable in critiquing statisticians but also in deconstructing new and old paradigms of thinking. For Spivak, she likes to think things through "other people's children" and those who are illiterate and speak in an 'uncoded' language in India (I can't remember the exact name or where); a community she has been engaged with for more than thirty years (I think...). By "uncoded" I think she was referring to languages that have not been translated into a world language - English or French.
The value Spivak placed on first languages and "mother tongues" is also,
in part, the reason why anthropologists learn local dialects and
conduct fieldwork (although I have my criticisms of those who only spend
several months as opposed to years). Language and culture provide the
"mature content" that has developed over centuries into the "ethical
trajectory" of cultures. This emphasis is also quite important because
the emphasis on the "first language" we learn is also an emphasis on the
habits of mind and body. The mental furniture we begin to equip
ourselves with and the behavioural habits (postures, gestures, etc) we
begin to learn through the interaction between the structures of our
biology and socialization.
I interpreted her talk primarily through, a phrase I like to use, a critique on the culture and habits of power. I've discussed this as the next step from Foucault's critique that we should be focusing on "seemingly neutral institutions". For me, not only should we be looking critically at non-neutral and neutral institutions but the habits of power within them that create their own culture i.e. a habitus of structured power. Spivak states that she is convinced the current culture of global policy is "sustainable underdevelopment" and too many accept the idea that the State is not accountable (here's looking at you colonial countries of the past). She spoke about changing the minds of policy makers and rearranging their desires. That is, changing the hierarchy of priorities. Building up to this point, she talked about the folded complicit nature of the present top-down system in which the world operates. Too much of the discussion is focused on the bottom. How do we change the bottom, the global poor? But change is never unidirectional and the top must change as well. Something I agree with as well. By 'complicit' she seemed to be pointing at the inevitability of working within the system. That protesting for more welfare is still complicit within the state's system of providing welfare. Protesting change for whatever policy is complicit within the state's system of laws on changing policy. Spivak acknowledges that she too is complicit within the human rights paradigm. All action seems to be caught in one or more of the many folds of the whole. We are always working within some kind of system. Because of this, Spivak says, we should acknowledge limits.
If the humanities becomes an imaginitive activism, it must take this into account and critique the conditionals by which unconditionals operate. If I understood her correctly, unconditionals are abstract concepts like 'justice', 'peace', 'love', 'development', 'humanities' and so on. However in reality, these unconditionals are always bound by conditions. They are bound by the way these concepts are appropriated and utilized. Bound by conceptual tool-kits of how to frame and re-package the same problems for superficial solutions. Bound by to-do lists and not to-do lists. They are bound by the English language, by translation and finding synonyms (something reminiscent of Rodney Needham's critique of 'belief' in anthropology). The task of critical thought is to problematize these conditionals and carefully read what those conditionals are actually doing to these unconditional concepts. In other words, critique the culture and habits of power. This is the "imaginative training" that students must engage in "for epistemological performance" that Spivak talked about. That we should not self-trivialize the humanities; that we should not accept 'powerlessness' as normal. We should not accept futility and the trivializing language of us v. them because then we fall into another complicit fold of simply pointing the finger without actual access to the tools of power (this last point is a bit hard to swallow considering Oxfam's recent report that 85 persons have more wealth than 3 billion of the global poor and that most companies are conglomerated under a few major corporations).
*Oh yea, she did make reference to a film at the recent Sundance Film Festival:
'Concerning Violence'
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