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Fragments from the interview with Gayatri Spivak
RESISTANCE THAT CANNOT BE RECOGNISED AS SUCH
Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Questions: Suzana Milevska
8 July, 2003, Skopje
 1.
S.M.: Prof. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, I propose to begin this
interview with the question related to the term ‘postcolonial
critique’. I find this term highly contingent. In the interview ‘In
a word’ with Ellen Rooney (1994) you have made a distinction between
the American and European understanding of the concept of
‘critique’; you preferred to accept the European ‘acknowledgment of
its usefulness’. Do you think that the notion of critique is
inevitably understood even more ‘adversely inclined’ due to the
latest conflicts worldwide, and can you extrapolate more on what
would be according to you the possibilities for a positive critique
(or criticality) in theory after the political and war conflicts
after the events of September 11th events, or after the Balkan
conflicts?
Gayatri C.
Spivak: ‘Postcolonial
critique’ is a highly contingent term like all terms. In my view
there are no terms that are not contingent. I think in English, in
the former British Empire, in Global English, and of course in the
hegemonic places, United States and Britain, it is commonly
understood as adversely proclaimed. I have no control of it.
Language behaves as it behaves. On the other hand, as a teacher I
can point out that there is a change made in thinking by many
accounts and use of the word critique. I cannot ask anybody to use
it in that way. That's all I was doing since I am a European scholar
of French, German and English. I don't think that words belong to
anyone. No word belongs to anyone. A critique as I was explaining in
one interview is neither positive nor negative, although by the
majority of native speakers of English it is understood in a
negative way. Critique seems to me is descriptive or it is a careful
description of the structures that produces an object of knowledge.
So, for me there is no problem whether positive or negative critique
because it is a descriptive word. As to what positive work can be
done in theory I feel that the states of the global South should try
to re-think the state as a site of constitutionality rather than as
a companion to a nationalism on its way to a fascism. I think only
on a global South, not for the group of seven states. So this is my
idea about the positive work because I think all the weak countries
that got embroiled in nationalist conflicts have been fooled, that's
my idea. They are not paying attention to the fact that the powerful
countries are not really much interested in them in one way or
another; they are more interested in how to portion out the emergent
markets, whose economies should be quote ‘stabilised’ and made
stagnant, and whose economies in Africa usually can be made
emergent. And they look upon the nationalist conflicts either with
contempt or disguised sympathy. So I think that this is going to be
my positive idea, and I think in this idea feminists can be useful
because for a very long time they have found state mechanisms useful
in a way that does not give to either nationalism or, of course to
fascism.
3.
S.M.: One of the famous phrases that were coined after your texts
was the phrase ‘strategic essentialism’. Since its first formulation
you claimed that it has been misunderstood and later you have
withdrawn from its usage, although not from its concept. Knowing the
fact that this was one of the rare challenges posed in front of
‘constructivists feminism’ it would be interesting to hear what were
the theoretical problems that you’ve faced through its
interpretation and application that forced you to give up on such a
seductive notion?
Gayatri C. Spivak:
It is true I
withdrew my support for the phrase strategic essentialism although I
think I cannot withdraw a phrase once it entered the language, it
circulates forever until it stops circulating, it is there. On the
other hand, having said that, and I believe I heard Jacques Derrida
clamed that he said it first in Alabama once, and I have also heard
people saying that Steven Heath said it first. I don't want to claim
anything because I have disassociated myself from it. Why? Because
it has been taken as an excuse for just essentialism which is an
excuse for just identitarianism. When you are an essentialist you do
not think about the essence of the vegetables. You are always
thinking of the essence of your own group and I think
identitarianism ignores what is most interesting about being alive
that is to say being angled towards the other. So, therefore, and
because of that use I found that it was unfortunate that people
liked that phrase. It wasn't misused that is what the phrase is good
for, that's why I was unhappy that I used it, it was not misused, it
is something that can be used that way, and than also nobody paid
the slightest bit of attention to the word strategy, this is what I
emphasized in my interview with Ellen Rooney. That is number two.
And number three, and I believe this too I said to Ellen Ronny, that
I used the phrase for the very first time because I felt that the
Subaltern studies group were essentialist about consciousness but
because that was my first contact with them and I do not want to be
too critical in colloquial sense I said, oh world, they are just
using it and I coined the phrase ‘strategic essentialism’. So it was
in fact the first use was in bad faith trying to be too nice to a
group of men who have not in return been to nice to me. I did not
have the courage to say something I thought.
4.
S.M.: Can you try to answer why identifying with the position of
‘subaltern’ is so seductive but the profound attempt to hear and
understand is not? Or more precisely, why the academics and
intellectuals from various ‘marginalised’ cultural backgrounds so
easily identify with the ‘subaltern’ although coming from the most
elitist classes of academics and other technocratic, cultural or
ethnic power positions? Is there a kind of cry for compassion hidden
behind such aspiration, a kind of deliberately taking the position
of victim, or wanting to become its ventriloquist claiming that it
cannot speak, instead of admitting that there is nobody to hear?
Gayatri C.
Spivak: Well, you have answered the question yourself. It is
always more interesting to be seemingly a victim or there is another
variation of this: seemingly completely sympathetic to you as a
victim. That is also a claim of common subalternity. I re-quote
Theodore Roosevelt who certainly was not a subaltern but that
remark: "Speak softly but carry a big stick" relates. So the big
stick carriers would like not to acknowledge that they are carrying
big sticks. Here comes forth the ‘speak softly’ part because,
paradoxically, no subaltern claims subalternity. The subaltern
thinks either that this is normal to have no access to lines of
mobility (I see enough of them feeling that), it is really
frightening, or they want to get the hell out of subalternity.
Whenever you hear someone claiming subalternity you know that this
is all that it is, that they are speaking softly because somewhere
they are carrying a big stick. Maybe not getting tenures, but they
are carrying a big stick insofar as they are at the U.S. University,
very far from subalternity. The attempt is not as I understand it
now only to hear and understand subalternity; it is really to earn
the rights which is a very effortful thing to be in subaltern
normality in such a way that you can intervene in it and be heard
yourself. That is the challenge to what the so called international
civil society does which is take advantage of the big stick, some of
them are even calling themselves subaltern which is incredibly
meretricious and really criminally wrong, you know they are calling
themselves minoritarians and subalterns, the powerful ones, who are
going quickly throw help and go away. So I won't say the attempt is
to hear and understand, anthropologists did that quite well. My
project is a bit different, the academics and intellectuals are all
from "marginalized background", to think of an academic and an
intellectual is to be able to think as of either marginalized, or
oppositional, and I think the second one is much better than the
first one. And here I will invoke someone whom I admire greatly,
that is Raymond Williams. When he said that the emergent can either
just be alternative or oppositional he was saying something
extremely forth-sightful, looking forward in a very important way.
And I think this business of easy identification with the imagined
subalternity rather than getting into the hegemonic space, as they
can and being oppositional is something we should think about it,
because the so called radical strong, the powerful states of Europe
and its competitor, The United States, they are only too happy for
example to empathise with, let's say, Macedonians. But I would be
very distant from such sympathy; I would rather see that behind
their ‘speaking softly’ is a big stick.
I
don't find it very interesting when academic from somewhere tells me
that he or she is from marginalised cultural background.
6.
S.M.: If we start from the notion of ‘hybrid identities’ can we
still say that the subaltern is isolated from the dominant,
hegemonic identity in itself? Besides the need for its speech to be
heard by the agent of dominant force I want to ask a question that
would be related to the need that the subaltern speaks to itself
first, a kind of performative act through which while the subaltern
speaks it becomes a ‘not-so-subaltern-subject’ anymore?
Gayatri C. Spivak:
We are talking
about two different things here. You know when you eat apples and
oranges, when you do, let's say nation-state, nation is fuzzy, state
is abstract. When you do identity citizenship, identity is fuzzy,
citizenship is abstract, when you do ethics and politics, or ethics
and law, ethics is positive and politics is calculus. When we are
talking about subaltern isolation we are not talking some fuzzy
hegemonic identity, we are talking about the abstract structures of
civil society to which the subaltern has no access. The subaltern is
not one of those whishy - washy weepy, whimsy hybrid identities type
concept at all. So this way, and I am giving you an example, in the
beginning of the year 2000 we won in Calcutta High Court a victory,
un-preceded victory. The state lost a case against the two states
human rights commissions, public investigations etc. because a
tribal of aboriginals had died in police customs. So in Calcutta
everyone was very happy, including me, the party kind of apologized,
etc. But once you went into the rural backwards area, the police saw
this as a defeat, and they defeated the tribal, there was no one to
follow up anything and since this is the one of the area where I
have a school for the last up to 2003, for the last three years, the
government guy that was supposed to be punished - nothing has
happened to him. And someone from the tribal is supposed to go to
the court - I don't know the details, I just see it is happening -
to have some kind of a legal procedure in order for this to happen.
When a woman from this place goes to court, not in Calcutta but to a
small country town, she loses a day work, she has to pay for the
bus, I loose a teacher from my school because she is not literate -
she does not know to read the bus name so that my teacher has to go
with her, etc. and for three years, and if she does not go there she
will be punished, at every notice the guy from the government has
not turned up and the police laughed. That is subalternity. No
access to the abstract lines of social mobility. Even after the
evenly class won a victory. It is not someone waiting about hybrid
identity. Hybrid identity is upper class migrant concept. You know
to assume that you have ‘irreducible cultural translation’ in your
identity. I have written about it elsewhere. Translation is not that
easy. It is quite precise if you look where hybridity is described.
In an interview of Homi K. Bhabha it is said that there is always an
irreducible translated other culture in the consciousness of the ID
and that is not just philosophically and theoretically but also
practically and politically not at all an interesting concept and
Homi and I are allies and very good friends and therefore based on
that friendship we can also be critical and in this respect I am
deeply critical of the political implication of it. If you look at
it you would see it is quite precise. And in its precision it is, I
think, indulgent towards a class subject. Subalternity has nothing
to do with cultural translation of any kind. In is much more
practical idea of not having access. And as I said before women and
men are unevenly justice distributed.
8.
S.M.: In your book The Critique of Postcolonial Reason you
reflected on the Marxist concepts of ‘unequal exchange’ and ‘surplus
value’ as still viable issues to be taken into account. I find it
necessary that the same concepts are to be discussed in the Balkans.
Why these terms are not obsolete more than 100 years of their
conceiving?
Gayatri C. Spivak:
I believe, and I have written this a number of times, that the
characteristic of the human body in labour is that it can make more
than it needs. And this difference which I have called it in a heavy
language, the super-eradication of the subject to itself because you
can make more than you need, upon this difference the extraction of
surplus value through an unequal exchange is based as you may know
and I am saying it for the sake of the interview, the socialist
dream and you know it better than I do, but I know it too, is that
this dream is not directly translatable into the reality anyway one
has a very strange idea of dream and reality one thinks the dreams
can be translated into reality, but the socialist dream was that
since this difference is a basic definition of a definitive
eradication of the human body in labour, the labour in subject of
whatever kind including the women and child that sees the mother all
of that. Why not harness this definition, this anthology of labour
into creating a just society. So that it is not that surplus value
should not be produced and not that the exchange should not be
unequal but it should be deliberate, consensual and unequal in a
planned way to produce a just society for those who could not be in
that situation. We know this as a scheme is fine but like most
schemes it is too schematic. That s why I said you can't use theory
for a specific situation. That is one of the best examples. So don't
ask me to produce a theory that would be good for you, no theories
are generally good: when you are norming them you have to
internalize them so that it changes. In gendering, in general, this
is very peculiar thing, and it is a wonderful question, and I am
writing much more about it. In gendering, millennially, the
extraction of surplus value through an unequal exchange is taken to
be not just an economic or political fact but an ethical norm. This
is what kills women. I am talking now about very remotely
precapitalist situation because I thought the possibility of human
being making more than he or she needs didn't happen with
capitalism. This is something which is a fact of being human and so
the creation of an unjust society as a good society, unjust as good,
is based upon establishing gendering that takes this unequal
exchange, imposed fear as a norm and bases the women’s ethical
practice upon this norm. So the story of capitalism is way down the
line from this and in fact capitalism, you are quite right in this,
in areas where there is no self-consciousness about this, especially
in the up and down classes, that is the problem. But in fact there
is awareness among feminists, paradoxically, that just as it was the
capital relation that ‘freed’ labour because you exchanged unequally
nothing but your labour, supposedly, in the same way it was the
capital relations but more indirectly that it also freed "gender",
and this is something that has to be worked out. So it's a longer
story than just capital and gender. I cannot develop it further
right now but look for it in my immediate and future writings
because I am talking about this in good deal now.
9.
S.M.: You come from the discipline of comparative literature
studies, but you often claimed that you like to break the rules of
the discipline. Moreover, in you latest book you announced the
‘death of the discipline’. Is this another attempt of Gayatri C.
Spivak to re-invent the position from which she speaks? What are the
reasons and more important what can be the dangers of such
extinction of this discipline? And finally can any discipline as
such overcome the continuous tension between its language and the
reality?
Gayatri C. Spivak:
I don't break the rules of just Comparative literature. In fact,
within literature criticism I break the rules less frequently
because I am trained in this discipline. The rules that I break are
in disciplines where I don't know anything. It's really more in
philosophy, economics, in history, where I have had no disciplinary
training that I am obliged to break rules. When I talk about the
death of the discipline I am not trying to re-invent my position. I
was giving three lectures as a member of Comparative literature
department at the University of California describing how: 1.
through this incredible demand of the big conglomerate publishing
companies for huge multi volume editions of world literature in
translation for which there is an immense market in places like
Taiwan, Nigeria, and so on. So that is why I was saying that the
comparative literature discipline as we knew it is going to die,
because there's are the money, and we would have to train students
who can teach this books. So that was very precise, you might even
say specific. And second, there is another kind of death announced
by many people from the milieu that Cultural studies, the
interdisciplinarity anything goes is killing the disciplinary rigor
of Comparative literature. I am suggesting in that text that this is
not right, what we should do is we should repair the Cultural
studies by taking Comparative literature which was completely
Eurocentric, the big national literatures of Europe, and
infiltrating, and I have been saying this since 1980-es what in the
United States is called area studies. So in north-western Europe,
Britain, you have nations, national literatures and in every part of
the world you have areas, area studies turned to be, after the
second World War, when a U.S. Congress passed an act called
"National Defence Education Act", and by this act the area studies,
interdisciplinary studies of East Asia, South Asia, they were put in
place in great Universities in National Resource centres, Columbia
is one such centre. So therefore I am suggesting that this is the
way in which we might de-celebrate and kill all Eurocentric
disciplines and make it rise in this other way. So it has rather
little to do with me re-inventing position of myself. I am really
singularly uninterested in position for me although I talk about my
life in a representative way. You would be surprised to know that I
give away almost nothing, I mean I am constantly asked to publish
memoirs, I am supremely uninterested in writing about my life.
10.
S.M.: After you gave the series of lectures at the Stanford
University on human rights and humanities you didn’t stop developing
the attempt to establish the missing link between the human rights
as solely legal discipline and humanities as a theoretical framework
in which the human rights should be thought. How do you explain the
need for such over bridging of the obviously existing gap,
especially in situations as in the Balkans where the human rights
are not only absent from humanities, but also from the legal studies
and therefore become only excuse for many decisions made by the
either local or the foreign authorities?
Gayatri C. Spivak:
This is a very
important question: the use of human rights as an alibi for
self-styled moral entrepreneurs, the so called minoritarian
subalternists. And this is completely like crazy talk, absurd to
give them an alibi for, you know even in the old imperialism, not
the very old but this imperialism of late nineteenth century and
twentieth, you have this idea of civilizing mission, now you have
this moral enterprise, and it seems to me that human rights across
the board is an alibi for this kind of intervention without any
social contract, any democratic procedure, I now that democratic
procedure is too idealistic to think that there is anything in it
but at least there is the vague possibility of constitution to
address whereas there is nothing in this civil social forum crowd
that are out of the moral outrage and out of the forms of injustice
from the UN countries in the name of human rights. They go out to
intervene without any kind of real preparation, without earning the
right because this doing ‘good’ quite important is in fact on the
same spectrum with George W. Bush going out to kill people to give
them human rights. And because of this social forum folks talking
sustainability there are connections to big trans-national agencies,
the IMF, the World Bank, sometimes they don't even know what it is
and sometimes knowingly they think that this is good, that
development is freedom, that I think is a very scary thing, so I do
believe that although it is not bad to use human rights when it is
appropriate, it is much more important, that is why I began by
talking re-inventing abstract state as the ‘site of
constitutionality in the global South’. It is much more important to
think about this apartheid of people who have human rights in their
hands and people who are always visiting Europe. I would refer the
reader to read a peace of mine called ‘Rigthing Wrongs’. It is
published by Oxford University Press in a book called: Human
Rights, Human Wrongs. And I have asked Obrad Savic to translate
it and I hope that the readers would be able to read it. There I was
trying to find alternatives for human rights as a general excuse for
one group without a social contract intervening in all different
kinds of ways in the rest of the world and than reducing the world
into domestic politics like refugees and immigrants.
S. M.:
We have the latest example in Macedonia with the signing the
bilateral agreement for immunity of the US peace keepers and every
US citizen from the 1998 Rome Statute from 2002 of the International
Criminal Court (ICC). It was allegedly signed with the statute name
of the country – Republic of Macedonia, only afterwards to be
revealed that it was actually signed with ‘The Government of
Macedonia’ – which obviously is not the same thing.
Gayatri C. Spivak: Yes that's it. A way of recognition that this
human rights business is nonsense. Country after country was forced
to sign this agreement - they are giving the carrot in which they
are completely uninterested, but at the same time holding the stick.
Here I am trying to join my voice with yours. National liberation is
o.k. when it is only a means, but once it becomes an end, there is
no possibility of decolonization at all. In this case it is obvious
that US is treating Macedonia with contempt.
11.
S.M.: At the end I would like to ask you a question about the
problems of forced inclusion and representation and
self-representation. Since we live in a society that yet has to
learn to function according to the rules of multiculturalism I want
to ask you whether you think is possible to avoid the problems that
already Thomas Nagel discussed in his ‘The Mortal Questions’, the
problems of false, mascot or simulated representation of
minorities. What is to be learnt from postcolonial studies in
regard to multiculturalism?
Gayatri Spivak: This is a very difficult question, Suzana. The
problem is that all calculative, juridical practice, unfortunately,
and you know this very well as I, is predicated upon its
possibilities of transgression. This is why it moves, this is why it
is revised, this is why persistent critique is our model and not in
the sense of just negative adversarial. That is why our model is not
an end to things but a continuation of the work through education,
trough a non-classy rearrangement of desires. And it seems to me we
should again to go back to Raymond Williams whose book Marxism
and Literature from 1977 is still so powerful.
S.M.: Prof. Spivak, thank you very much for coming to Macedonia and
for sharing your profound and critical thoughts with us.
Transcripts: Robert Alagjozovski
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