The Post-Colonial Critic

Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sarah Harasym

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134710850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Gayatri Spivak, one of our best known cultural and literary theorists, addresses a vast range of political questions with both pen and voice in this unique book. The Post-Colonial Critic brings together a selection of interviews and discussions in which she has taken part over the past five years; together they articulate some of the most compelling politico-theoretical issues of the present.
In these lively texts, students of Spivak's work will identify her unmistakeable voice as she speaks on questions of representation and self-representation, the politicization of deconstruction; the situations of post-colonial critics; pedagogical responsibility; and political strategies.

1

Criticism, Feminism, and The Institution

In June, 1984, Gayatri Spivak visited Australia as one of the guest speakers of the Futur* Fall Conference, a conference on Post-Modernity held in Sydney. The following interview with Elizabeth Grosz was recorded in Sydney on August 17, 1984. First published in Thesis Eleven, No. 10/11, 1984/85.

GROSZ Questions of writing, textuality and discourse seem a major preoccupation in your published works. Could you outline what relations you see between problems of textuality and the field of politics, given that, for many theorists, these seem two disparate domains roughly divided along the lines of a theory/practice split?

SPIVAK I think that this split is a symptomatic one. To define textuality in such a way that it would go in the direction of theory, with practice on the other side, is an example of how the institution and also rivalries between and among major intellectuals actually reduce the usefulness of a concept by giving it a minimal explanation. I think the notion of textuality was broached precisely to question the kind of thing that it is today seen to be—that is, the verbal text, a preoccupation with being in the library rather than being on the street. As far as I understand it, the notion of textuality should be related to the notion of the worlding of a world on a supposedly uninscribed territory. When I say this, I am thinking basically about the imperialist project which had to assume that the earth that it territorialised was in fact previously uninscribed. So then a world, on a simple level of cartography, inscribed what was presumed to be uninscribed. Now this worlding actually is also a texting, textualising, a making into art, a making into an object to be understood. From this point of view the notion of textuality within the Western European/Anglo–U.S./international context tries also to situate the emergence of language as a model from the second decade of the twentieth century to see how the location of language or semiosis as a model was in itself part of a certain kind of worlding. Textuality is tied to discourse itself in an oblique way. Classical discourse analysis is not psychological largely because it tries to get away from the problem of language production by a subject. Textuality in its own way marks the place where the production of discourse or the location of language as a model escapes the person or the collectivity that engages in practice, so that even textuality itself might simply be an uneven clenching of a space of dissemination which may or may not be random. From this point of view, what a notion of textuality in general does is to see that what is defined over against The Text’ as ‘fact’ or ‘life’ or even ‘practice’ is to an extent worlded in a certain way so that practice can take place. Of course, you don’t think this through at the moment of practice, but a notion of generalised textuality would say that practice is, as it were, the ‘blank part’ of the text but it is surrounded by an interpretable text. It allows a check on the inevitable power dispersal within practice because it notices that the privileging of practice is in fact no less dangerous than the vaguardism of theory. 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.

The best model for it is something woven but beyond control. Since practice is an irreducible theoretical moment, no practice takes place without presupposing itself as an example of some more or less powerful theory. The notion of writing in this sense actually sees that moment as itself situatable. It is not the notion of writing in the narrow sense so that one looks at everything as if it is written by some sort of a subject and can be deciphered by the reading subject. I would also like to say that the fact that words like ‘writing’ and ‘text’ have a certain paleonymy—that is to say, they are charged within the institution and they can be given the minimal interpretation of being nothing but library-mongering—itself marks the fact that the intellectual or anti-intellectual who can choose to privilege practice and then create a practice/theory split within a sort of theory, in fact, is also capable, because he or she is produced by the institution, of giving a minimal explanation of words like writing and text and forgetting that they mark the fact that we are, as we privilege practice, produced within an institution.

GROSZ You mention the intellectual. There has been much discussion in Marxist and leftist circles since 1968 about the role of the intellectual in political struggles. Althusser, for example, in his article ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ has claimed that, in general at least, intellectuals are embroiled in ruling ideologies and act as their unwitting proponents. More recently, Foucault has suggested that the function of the intellectual is “no longer to place himself ‘somewhat ahead and to the side’ in order to express the truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘discourse’” (‘The Intellectuals and Power’, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 207–8). There seems, in other words, to be a debate between the role of the universal or the specific intellectual. What are your thoughts on this debate?

SPIVAK I want to ask the question—the rhetorical question, really—does the intellectual, the intellectual, have the some role in social production in Australia as in France? It seems to me that one of the problems here is that even as the intellectual is being defined as specific, there is at work there the figure of an intellectual who seems not to be production-specific at all. The notion of the different place of the intellectual since May 1968—May 1968 does not have the same impact outside of a certain sort of Anglo-US-French context—I am not at all denigrating the importance of May 1968 within the French context. In fact as a result of reading the material that came out in France about May 1968 ten years later, I was able to see how important the event was. But, even within the US in fact there isn’t something that can be called ‘an intellectual’. There isn’t in fact a group that can be called ‘a group of intellectuals’, that exercises the same sort of role or indeed power with social production. I mean a figure like Noam Chomsky, for example, seems very much an oddity. There isn’t the same sort of niche for him. It is a much larger, more dispersed place which is racially, ethnically, historically, more heterogenous. There, one doesn’t think about May 1968 in the same way unless it is within certain kinds of coterie groups. Having lived in the United States for some time, I would say that Berkeley 1967 makes more sense to me. Then if you think about Asia—and I notice you didn’t mention that I was an Asian in your introduction; now let me say that I am one—there are intellectuals in Asia but there are no Asian intellectuals. I would stand by that rather cryptic remark. From this point of view I think the first question—the first task of intellectuals, as indeed we are—as to who asks the question about the intellectual and the specific intellectual, the universal intellectual, is to see that the specific intellectual is being defined in reaction to the universal intellectual who seems to have no particular nation-state provenance. Foucault himself, when he talks about the universal intellectual, speaks most directly about the fact that in France, in his own time, there was no distinction between the intellectual of the Left and the intellectual. Now this particular absence of a distinction would make very little sense if one went a little further afield. Having said this, let’s look for a moment at Althusser.

I myself find safety in locating myself completely within my workplace. Althusser’s notion of disciplinary practice in the essay called ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ says that disciplines are constructed in terms of denegation. Disciplines are histories of denegation and what in fact disciplinary practice should be redefined as by the intellectual is a savage practice—a wild practice—so that the point was to transform the denegating disciplinary practice—a person within a discipline—une Pratique Sauvage.

This is the specific practice of the intellectual within his institutionality, and within it the question of science and ideology must be, Althusser says that text, asked and opened repeatedly. It seems to me sometimes because of the historical constraints upon the figure of Althusser we tend to forget the moment and tend to locate ourselves on the text that is particularly named ‘theoretical practice’. I would say that the tendency not to look at the margins, at what escapes the things with proper titles, is in itself caught within this definition of the intellectual.

Foucault, on the other hand, is not really looking at, though I think he is practicing, this kind of wild disciplinary practice, he is looking more insistently at the disciplinarisation of the discipline itself. There I think the strong moment was then recuperated within the construction of what Mike Davis has called the late American imperialism, that is to say, 1953 to 1978, when slowly the notion of power, the specific power that the intellectual must confront, is conflated into power as the same system. I am narrativizing a very complicated itinery, so clearly I will be doing some injustice to Foucault, who remains a very important figure for me. But it seems to me that at that point, when this matricial concept of power as the same system begins to emerge, is at that point that the intellectual defined in this very situation-specific way, which is then seen as ‘universal’, and against that, the intellectual begins to declare and claim a sort of specificity, that’s the moment when the intellectual begins to abdicate. We would say that that claim for specificity which is in reaction against a universality which is itself specific but cannot be given this specificity that it has—that claim for abdication is not a refusal, but a disavowal. We don’t think that the intellectual placed in that situation is free to abdicate. I think this is why the discipleship of these great figures in fact transforms them immediately into the kind of watershed intellectual, universal intellectual, that they would like not to be. It’s almost as if their desire is being given back to them and defined by the fact that the way they are taken up, the way they’re defended, the way they’re nervously followed, shows that the intellectual is imprisoned—the Anglo-US-Western European intellectual—is imprisoned within an institutional discourse which says what is universal is universal without noticing that it is specific too—so that its own claim to specificity is doubly displaced. It seems to me that their desire is being defined by their discipleship which is very quickly transforming them into universal intellectuals.

GROSZ This raises the question that if the intellectual is in part defined by the position he or she occupies within an institution, what do you think the relationship between that institution and the non-institutional environment in which it is situated should be?

SPIVAK Here in fact I say something which I have learnt from Foucault. I don’t think there is a non-institutional environment. I think the institution, whichever institution you are isolating for the moment, does not exist in isolation, so that what you actually are obliged to look at is more and more framing. And from that point of view, let me add a digression here. It seems to me that if one looks at institutionalisation within the West since the 17th century without looking at the fact that those kinds of institutionalisations are being produced by something that is being perpetrated outside of the West—precisely during these years—then the story of institutionalisation, disciplinarisation of the definition of the man within the West—remains itself caught … within the institutionalisation of the West as West, or the West as the world—that is something that needs to be said too—I don’t think there is an extra-institutional space. In a moment we might want to talk about how even paraperipheral space in terms of the Centre-Periphery definition is not outside of the institution.

GROSZ There are institutions whose definition is such that they are supposedly defined as places of ‘pure learning’, and since May ’68 in France, since ’67 in America, and around ’69 in Australia, as a result of the Vietnam War a number of academics have attempted to espouse their political commitments in places beyond the institutions in which they work. This raises possible problems. I wonder if you see any problems with this.

SPIVAK I myself see the step beyond the institution sometimes, not always, as capable of recuperation in a way that confronting the institution is not. It seems to me that within a cultural politics—and this is a phrase I will use over and over again—within a permissible cultural politics which allows enchanted spaces to be created, sometimes alternate institutions which might define themselves as ‘beyond the institution’ are allowed to flourish so that the work of the production of cultural explanations within the institution can go on undisturbed. Let me take a very specific example relating again to my own workplace. I have found over the years that whereas the whole notion of inter-disciplinary work has been allowed to flourish so that it can slowly degenerate into pretentious internationalism, if one confronts questions like distribution requirements, curricula requirements, within the structure of the institution, one meets with much more solid and serious opposition. So many more vested interests are at work within a society where repressive tolerance plays a very important function that in some ways it’s almost easier to give space for alternate activity. I am not dismissing them, but it seems to me that the whole de-glamourised inside of the institution defines our stepping beyond this.

As an academic myself I would say that if one begins to take a whack at shaking that structure up, one sees how much more consolidated the opposition is. I will go a step further, it seems to me that the definition of the institution as a place of pure learning is itself almost like a definition of the universal against which to become specific. I said a moment ago that when the Western European intellectual defines the universal intellectual and then says, “I am specific as opposed to that universal”, what he doesn’t see is that the definition of that universal is itself contaminated by a non-recognition of a specific production. In the same way if one looks at—of course the system of education is different here from the United States—if one looks at how things like fiscal policy, foreign policy, the international division of labour, the multi-national globe, the rate of interest, actually conduct the allocation of resources to institutions which take on a defining role in terms of what goes on in the institution, I think to create a straw institution which is a place of pure learning, so that we can then step beyond it, has almost the same morphology as creating a straw universal intellectual so that we can become specific.

GROSZ While you were in Australia you gave a number of lectures on the work of Derrida that were rather controversial. How would you situate Derrida’s work in the context of this debate?

SPIVAK Perhaps by the accident of my birth and my production—being born British-Indian and then becoming a sort of participant in the de-colonisation without a particular choice in the matter and then working in the United States, floating about in Europe, Africa, Saudi Arabia, Britain, and now Australia, I think I avoided in some ways becoming someone who takes on a master discourse, and I am always amused to see that I am, as you say, perhaps best known as a translator and commentator of Derrida, because the de-constructive establishment I think finds me an uncomfortable person. So I will say to begin with that I am not particularly interested in defending Derrida as a master figure and from that point of view I find it just by accident interesting that it is not possible for me to follow Derrida in his substantive projects. Within the enthusiastic Foucauldianism in the United States there is a lot of that sort of following through on substantive projects. Having said this, what I like about Derrida’s work is that he focuses his glance very specifically at his own situation as an intellectual who questions his own disciplinary production. He tries in his latest work to see in what way, in every specific situation where he is in fact being an intellectual—being interviewed, being asked to lecture, being asked to write—being asked to do all of these things which an intellectual continues to do whether he wants to or not—he sees in what way he is defined as a foreign body. This has led to some very interesting work, because it focuses not on what one’s own desire is to be specific, rather than universal—non-representing, rather than a spokesperson—it focuses on the perception of the institutionalised other as you as an intellectual are asked to opine, to critique, even to grace and to perform. He notices then specific situational contracts. He 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. At the moment his project is deeply concerned with the problem that, within hegemonic practice, a method is identified with a proper name. In spite of all the efforts to dismantle the notion of watershed or universal intellectuals within the Western context, what is happening to the work done by the powerful intellectuals against that theory is in fact a transformation of that critique into the celebration of these figures as universal intellectuals. And I find it quite useful that Derrida focuses so strongly on the problems that make a method identical with a proper name, in our historical moment. I must say something else too. Where I was brought up—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, because of course we were brought up in an education system in India where the name of the hero of that philosophical system was the universal human being, and 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 had told us what would make us human, that seemed rather interesting too.

GROSZ You have argued that “French theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze and the like have at one time or another been interested in reaching out to all that is not the West, because they have, in one way or another, questioned the millennially cherished excellence of Western metaphysics: the sovereignty of the subject’s intention, the power of prediction and so on” [‘French Feminism in an International Frame’, Yale French Studies No. 62, 157]. In what ways do you see such French theory influencing your work on the critique of imperialism? (I ask the question partly because such examples of French theory have, at least occasionally, been labeled esoteric, elitist and self-preoccupied; in which case, it may be hard to see their relevance in tackling the questions of exploitation and oppression.) What do you think about this?

SPIVAK Now, I am not going to talk about the critique of the French intellectual’s desire to do this; I am going to focus on the other side of your question—how it relates to my own kind of work on the critique of imperialism. I think wherever I have spoken about this desire on the part of intellectuals in the West, I have seen it as commemorating and marking a repeated crisis of European consciousness—and when I use the word ‘crisis’ I am thinking not only of a crisis of conscience in a limited sense, but also in the broader perspective of crisis theory, the broader perspective of the theory of the management of crisis. If one reverses the direction, and here I am working within a very established deconstructive model of reversal and displacement, what does it say? That 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 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. Now my critique of imperialism is not a principled production. I found as I was working through my own disciplinary production, the influences that I was working with, where Marxism itself must be included—I found that there was nothing else that I could do. To an extent I want to say that I am caught within the desire of the European consciousness to turn towards the East because that is my production. But I am also trying to lever it off—once again this is a deconstructive project if you like—to raise the lid of this desire to turn toward what is not the West, which in my case could very easily be transformed into just wanting to be the ‘true native’. I could easily construct, then, a sort of ‘pure East’ as a ‘pure universal’ or as a ‘pur...