PORTRAITS OF CONTEMPORARY INDIAN INTELLECTUALS: GAYATRI SPIVAK
Gayatri Spivak was born in Calcutta, British India in 1942. She is recognized as one of the foremost intellectuals of our time, winning the 2012 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy.
Her pedigree is Western, since she first gained renown as the translator of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology into English and for writing a notable introduction to his work for the English-speaking world. A person of two continents, she taught at Columbia University in New York but, since the 1980s, she has also spent a significant part of every year promoting education in rural India.
Her writing is considered difficult, yet she has had great reach outside mainstream circles all over the world, although restricted mostly to intellectuals and activists. Many have benefited from her work, seeing her as worthy of trust, fair and nuanced. A leading postcolonial theorist, Spivak has both worked together with the Subaltern Studies group and critiqued their approach from the perspective of deconstruction and feminism.
Deconstruction and Criticism
Although Spivak’s background is feminist and Marxist, her outlook is often viewed as postmodern, due to her reliance on deconstruction which she describes as “constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced.” She also says deconstruction is “a persistent critique of what one cannot not want.” Although Spivak uses deconstruction to uncover hidden assumptions, its role is not merely to negate, since it questions the ideas that prevent subalterns, the marginalized and excluded people, from speaking and being heard. She wants to open up a space in the public sphere into which they can insert themselves, be empowered, and disrupt the hegemonic discourse. Emphatically, deconstruction is an ethical practice that has important political consequences.
For Spivak, love allows people to reach out toward those whom they have been conditioned to see as different from themselves. Love is another name for ethical responsibility toward unique others whose measure we can never take. In this sense, love is like translation, since, as deconstructive practice shows, there is always an excess of meaning. We never fully get right what the other means, whether we are talking about communication between people or interpreting a work in another language. Yet this practice is highly valuable since we get better at attuning ourselves to different points of view while expanding our imagination.
The humility of Spivak’s deconstruction is appealing because she knows what an enormous task she is taking on. The structures that are in place, language most of all, encompass us and are much more powerful than we are. There are patterns of thinking and social institutions of an oppressive kind that have been in place for generations, for centuries. When we say we are going to do good and to help the oppressed, whether workers, indigenous people, or women, we have to be willing to embody the ethics of deconstruction. That involves shedding our privilege, being uncomfortable, admitting we do not know, and being willing to learn. But in India, the wealthy have used the caste system to keep poor people down for two thousand years so that they can never rise above their birth. People of good will who want to help have to honestly face the heavy weight of this history when trying to make a difference. There must be a reality check.
Exposing Reason’s Agendas
The skirmishes with Western and Indian orthodoxies that Spivak initiates do not involve direct confrontations but are more like raiding parties that unsettle the complacent proponents of unexamined conventional notions. For her, there is a danger in being oppositional, since we are all caught in what we oppose; by not acknowledging this, our complicity makes matters worse. She also pointedly mentions that the three wise men whom she criticizes in Critique of Postcolonial Reason for creating the foundations of postcolonial reason, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, have more value and greater subtlety than either their followers or those who criticize them.
Spivak treads a path that avoids the opposite pitfalls of embracing enlightenment reason, capitalism, and imperialism on the one hand and of celebrating the native culture and national identity on the other. Instead of focusing on the guilt of the perpetrators of “orientalism” and/or racism, Spivak investigates the ways in which colonial ideas have penetrated the Indian independence movements and the ways in which the postcolonial state has continued the exploitation of subaltern peoples.
The founding moment in reason’s modern triumphal march, according to Spivak, is the work of Kant, and enlightenment reason leads to imperialism. For Kant, the closeness to nature of the “primitive” made it impossible for indigenous people to exercise aesthetic and practical judgment. This excludes them from civilization, since possession of reason marks the separation of the civilized from the not fully human. At its enlightenment origin in Kant, reason defined the aboriginal as savage and wild so that Western people could view themselves as civilized and enlightened. For Spivak, this pronouncement of Kant is the symbolic birth of enlightenment culture.
Spivak’s criticisms of postcolonial reason cut deeply, since she includes herself, a leading postcolonial critic, among the targets. It is not that she believes we can or even should let go of the enlightenment ideal of rationality. But we do need to be vigilant, locating its blind spots, its exclusions, its violence, and the suffering it causes. One huge blind spot of postcolonial thought is its focus on cultural issues rather than economic ones, for example, on the types of cultural resistance to Western dominance but not on global capitalism as a primary source of worldwide inequality.
Can the Subaltern Speak?
In her early work, Spivak made the provocative statement that the subaltern cannot speak, a theme she often returns to. Her subtle argument is that the efforts of Western progressives to put forward the needs and desires of Third World women end up affirming the international class system. The subaltern is not allowed to speak because she cannot enter the arena of civilization where enlightened speech occurs. If she were to enter that domain and assume the role of the modern woman, then she would no longer be herself. And, as an aboriginal, her way of knowing and communicating, not being “rational,” has no place within “civilized” discourse.
When Spivak was teaching in Hong Kong in the mid-1980s, she went to the office of Asia Labour Monitor and asked how exploited women workers could resist. She was told that nobody wanted to know about these women from the inside and understand why they work the way they do. But if she really wanted to encounter them and to be part of their group, she would have to learn Cantonese, the language of their hearts. Speaking with them in Cantonese would establish a different relationship because it was something she could not do as well as them. And that is what she did. Spivak expresses her gratitude for this advice. From these women, she really learned something very important that she still finds valuable, that is, to empower subalterns by putting matters into their own hands.
Spivak is very aware of history and writes a lot about the situation of Indian women in colonial times. As in colonial times, Western people today use the need to liberate local women as a reason for perpetrating wars or for undertaking humanitarian assistance in which local women are silenced just as they were in colonial times. As part of her critique of international civil society, she asserts that Western people often have no clue that there are many in the global South who are resisting the violence that targets women.
If civilization has brought advances, Spivak believes they have come at a cost, and she states that every record of civilizational accomplishment is also a record of barbarism, noting that the carriers of civilization are unaware of the violence that they bring with them.
To illustrate Spivak’s claim that the technological civilizing mission serves as a cover for the globalizing of capital, Dina Al-Kassim offers the 2002 example of an American minority broadcast journalist who tells the story of women in Muslim Bangladesh whose faces are disfigured by acid thrown at them by local men. One of these women was taken to the United States for reconstructive surgery, thanks to American charity, a dream come true. These stories of salvation justify America’s spreading civilization to the less fortunate. What is left unsaid is that humanitarian assistance is given out to those whose labor is being exploited in a highly unequal globalized society, and the highly unequal distribution of wealth is not questioned. Such conditions rob the subaltern of a better life, creating the image of the global North with its prosperity as a sought-after paradise.
