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CULTURE ALIVE

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak*

The following questions addressed to Professor Spivak followed her Keynote Address 'WhoClaims Sexuality in the New World Order?' to the Culture/Sex/Economies Conference inMelbourne, Australia on 17 December 1994. The Conference was organised by the AustralianFeminist Law Foundation in conjunction with the Women's Studies Program, School of Lawand Legal Studies, La Trobe University.'

Judith Grbich, Convenor:We have perhaps 20 minutes or 30 minutes for questions. Could anyone with a questioncome to the microphone and give your name please.

Patrick Wolfe:It's not a question but as nobody else is speaking, one small observation. On the question ofabortion and women's right to control their own reproduction, campaigns aroundcontraception and so on, a lot of Aboriginal women were complaining that their white sistershad no right to speak on their behalf for their right not to have children. What they wantedwas their children back, this was their primary desire. Secondly, on the question of repressivetolerance and of colonised people having to live up to stereotypes, to what extent should theyrefuse to employ those stereotypes for tactical ends?

Gayatri Spivak:It's a very important question. I don't really know the answer to it. I can only tell you howI'd go about it. I let the imperative come from the situation. If one has a blanket policy ofalways accepting, then that becomes a dodge for having a good time. On the other hand, if

* Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University,New York. Her books include: In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, The Post-Colonial Criti4 Outside in theTeaching Machine, and Imaginary Maps. She has edited Selected Subaltern Studies with Ranajit Guha and herReturn of the Native Informant will be published in 1996. She is a member of the Asian Women's HumanRights Council. She was invited by the Australian Feminist Law Foundation to present the Keynote Address atthe CultureVSexl/Economies Conference in Melbourne.The themes of this interdisciplinary conference were the cultural forms for producing economic order, sexedidentities, value, and justice. The Foundation was supported during 1994 by a grant under the NationalAgenda for Women Grants Program 1993/94, Commonwealth Office of the Status of Women, Department ofPrime Minister and Cabinet.

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one has a blanket policy of always being holier than thou then nothing gets done. I researchthe actual situation to see how much is actually going to happen in terms of involvement.When you have signed various kinds of contracts, contracts for validation by a university forexample, then you ought to also see how little you can afford to claim that your hands areclean. In this situation the only way out is to refuse repressive tolerance. I myself therefore feelthat in most cases accepting, and then talking about it, serves me well. A foolishly riskyagenda. In general let the imperatives come from the situation.

Barbara Sullivan:The question I wanted to ask you was about something you said which I found veryinteresting which was about commodity moralism. And I wonder if you could say a bit moreabout that?

Gayatri Spivak:When Marx talks about the commodity he makes it quite clear that anything, use valuesincluded, if they are to be measured in magnitude of value, must be reduced to abstraction.2

The value form which is only a form of appearance is not one which gives us this romanticanti-capitalist, nonsense of commodity bad, use good; commodity abstract, use concrete. Inthe Marxian project (for this one has to read Capital, Volume 2, on the three circuits ofcapital), the pivotal point around which the critique of capitalism will work is thecommodity character of labour power, not of individual labour, but of labour power. Andthat's what's happening to the reproductive body now. It is becoming the agent of labourpower. Labour power, average abstract labour, has the fetish character of the commodity.Derrida in Glas said that Freud makes the fetish speculative, speculates with the fetish.3

Derrida of course doesn't know that much Marx, and so in his book 4 he doesn'trecognise Marx's homoeopathy with the fetish character of labour power as commodity. It isa pharmakon: poison becomes medicine. If one realises that, then, rather than think ofoneself as the victim of capitalism, one sees oneself as the agent of production and onebegins to negotiate with the fact that the human being is predicated in a difference. Thedifference between needing and making. The human being can make more than he or sheneeds. In that difference is that homoeopathic clue, the fetish character of the commodity,use and exchange. You can exchange for good, rather than extract and appropriate forcapitalism. Now when one doesn't see this, everything bites the dust in this commoditymoralism. Commodity is then only a dirty word.

Lukacs, 5 in Balibar,6 sees Marxist feminists going for a certain kind of Engelism - thecommodity's bad. Whereas it is in the commodity form that the secret of managing the

2 Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, New York: Vintage, 1968, 129.3 Jacques Derrida, Glas Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.4 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, New York: Routledge, 1994.5 Georgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin Press, 1971.6 Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, New York: Routledge, 1994.


CULTURE ALIVE

difference between capitalism and socialism is contained, and only in the appearance in thecommodity form of human labour power. This argument does not apply in the non-eurocentric global movement for ecology, because the earth does not have the secret of thefetish character of the commodity as human labour does. So in fact the ecological movementis the one solid critique of Marxism that we have. Marx never wrote in detail about thecapitalisation of land. If one looks at the capitalisation of land today, one can't use thisargument.

The real focus, the real agent, the real subject of capitalism today is the globalsubaltern woman in home-working, and in post-fordism; and in terms of capitalistimperialism, in population control. And they are not going to be able to deal with the piouscommodity moralist talk that comes down from us. My little knowledge of their activitiesshows me that they in fact are working precisely with the notion of the homoeopathy of thefetish character of the commodity, when it is labour power. But will the socialisation of thereproductive labour power be able to use its own fetish character as commodity? That remainsto be seen.

Andrea Rhodes-Little:I wish you could give us another few hours. I'm a teacher who teaches a couple of subjects atLa Trobe University. One of them is 'Discrimination and the Law', and one of the things thatI've been really stunned and perplexed by is what happens when students finally realise thatwhat we are teaching in that subject is not how to feel sorry for people who aren't as cleverand good as us, but we're looking at how the north stages the subaltern, basically. I wonderedif you had any advice on how to deal with the rage that comes with that, with the realisationthat that's what we're doing. And also if you have any comments on why that rage is there.I'm sure that's probably the hardest question.

Gayatri Spivak:Rage on the part of the students you mean? Yes. So few people recognise that this rage comesup. Rage, resentment, all that stuff. Over the last seven years my commitment to my USstudents has become less and less. As a result I teach them with a greater sense of duty. I mustserve them well, precisely because I don't want to do a damn thing for them frankly. And Isay this to them, I level with them, I say get your money's worth, I'll be teaching to bust myguts because I don't want to teach here, to you people, so resource-rich. But if I earn myliving in the United States and work in the southern theatre I can be much more useful. So Isee myself as earning my living in the United States. The way I put it in the Cairo document,earning my living in the United States, working in the southern theatre by choice. That'show, over the last seven years, my life has changed. So the question is not absolutelyappropriate, but I do feel something for them. They're human beings, I'm a human being,and I love New York.

But when there is this rage, it is because it is always hard to understand that history islarger than personal good will. I say to my students, be careful how you act, because your


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children are going to be absolutely enraged and full of resentment because their history willnot allow them to be good. I give them the benefit of the doubt, they want to be good. Butthere is no way they can be fully good, it is absolutely aporetic because they are rentier of anexploitative economy. They'd have to make so much of a change in your lives. I'm completelyfor under-class migrant activism. Given what's happening in California, in Belgium, inFrance, I can't be against migrant activism. But one has to say that the restoration of themigrant into an exploitative economy, and the migrants insertion into the exploitative civilsociety either has no relationship to the global situation, or is aporetic to the global situation.

How can a student of mine who is sitting in my class, who is a Pakistani boy, whowants to be good, second generation American, who wants to see multiculturalism as aradical gesture against white racism, how can he like it if I tell him that in the larger globaltheatre that is not a radical position at all, but that unexamined culturalism is feedingpolitical and gendered religious violence in South Asia. How can he like this?

There is no misfortune greater than to be caught in an exploitative country as one'sown. And to be descended from exploiters.

Andrea Rhodes-Little:It is just so depressing.

Gayatri Spivak:I try to say to them that it is possible, by acknowledging complicity, to carve out a smallspace for being of service to those, to the situation, where one is in historical responsibilityrather than personal guilt. I think something can happen. I don't know what it is like inAustralia, Andrea, but in the United States the worst thing is the leadership complex. We wantto help. And of course if you take this away then there is rage and anguish. But you work at itby saying 'how about trying to undermine the exploitation in however small a way?'

Adele Murdolo:Hello, my name's Adele Murdolo. I work at a migrant women's health organisation and I callmyself a migrant activist, so I really relate to everything that you're saying here today. Thanksfor that, and it's not very often that in the Australian context we hear a speaker who's sorelevant to our situation. But I want to talk about something else. Recently in the Australiancontext the issue of so called 'female genital mutilation' has come up and that's because ofthe, sort of perception I suppose, because there is no statistical information on that, thatthere is an increasing problem in this area, in Australia with new arrivals. There has been apush by governments, and also by feminist lawyers here in Australia, to legislate against anysort of so called 'female genital mutilations'. On the other hand there have been migrantactivists, not myself but others, who are quite against this sort of legislation. I wonder if youcould talk about this issue. Perhaps in a global context.


CULTURE ALIVE

Gayatri Spivak:Yeah. Well I wrote once when I was much younger, a piece about clitorisation, 'FrenchFeminism in an International Frame'.7 I like that young person frankly. I'm very happy thatin fact she moved from where she could have remained and led me into this mysteriousthicket now. So it is in her name to an extent that I will speak. It seems to me that, what isyour name, Adele? Okay it's better for me if I know who that person is, Adele. Can I just backup a little.

Culture: this is a battle ground about culture, isn't it? Shall we legislate clitorisation,shall we legislate against clitorisation, or shall we say clitorisation is a cultural act andtherefore should not be interfered with? Mmm? So I mean we at home, the situation is veryvery different in the former colony because, we of course in the Islamic personal code, theHindu personal code, in fact old Shahbano (whose name you probably know, some of you) 8

when she in fact wanted to go to the Supreme Court to get redress, she was silenced by beingreturned into the personal code, Islamic personal code. And the same thing happens withinthe Hindu situation. So being someone who works in the former colony I fear I am for theuniform civil code as an activist person. That's a different issue. I can think the situationwith sympathy, I think differently, and now I proceed to do so.

Within migrant activist space the word culture is used in the way in which Foucaultuses the word power. I'm not saying that Foucault speaks about these groups. No, I'm justnoticing a similarity between the two uses, 'it is the name that one attributes to a complexstrategical situation in a particular society'. 9 And the particular society in general is firstworld, a group-of-seven society. What is the complex strategic situation? The complex strategicsituation is that one wants an entry into the structures of what is understood classically ascivil society (not what the World Bank is now calling international civil society.)

There is no migrant group which doesn't want civil rights and this is as it should be.Wanting to be the agent of civil society is to want to be the citizen. It is the citizen who is theagent of civitas. Yet these groups must question the bogus claim that these abstract structures,which came into being to an extent because certain kinds of industrial secrets were firstdiscovered by certain kinds of groups, necessarily have a felicitous fit with a so called cultureof the Enlightenment. That's the complex strategic situation in the particular society which isinvoked by the word culture.

Now in this situation the word culture is a kind of inchoate critique of that rationalistclaim. The word culture is used to mark a name, the place from where the individual getsmotives and ways of acting that are beyond individual reason. It marks that name, thatgroup's idea, the identity. With this word therefore, what is happening is the negotiation of

7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds, New York: Routledge, 1988, 134-153.8 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Reading the Satanic Verses' in Outside in the Teaching Machine, Routledge, 217-

241; see also Rajewari Sunder Rajan and Zakia Pathak, 'Shahbano', (1989) 14,3 Signs 558.9 Michel Foucault, History of Sexualiy: Volume I, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.


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this complex strategic problem. It has rather little to do with whatever culture might be.Culture alive is not something that you can catch. Culture alive gives you the ground of selfevidence. Culture alive is not something you think about. This kind of use of the wordculture is, as I say, the name of a complex strategic situation in a particular society.

Now what is curious is how much it is women and women's bodies that become theitems in terms of which this complex strategic situation is manoeuvred and manipulated. Ithink we women are foolish if, in the name of some essentialist notion of a real culture, wegive in to this kind of thing. This is why I have said that, you know, when internalisedconstraint masquerades as free choice, (be it with the home worker or be it with the personwho wants insertion into the civil society), it allows the female person, it allows her body, tobe the theatre on which this strategic game is manipulated. I find this to be something thatwe should really think about, the extent of our folly as women.

On the other hand, when we come to the notion of other kinds of discursiveformations, then we have to think, and not within this complex strategic situation of thiscivil society. It is as difficult for the gendered subaltern to understand the woman whowillingly undergoes abortion and says 'I want rights to my own body', as it is for us tounderstand clitorisation. This is is a discursive formation problem.

We cannot, without cultural relativism, acknowledge as a critique of phallocentrism,what the Bedouin woman said to Smadar Lavie' ° when she was asked the question about herown clitorisation. She said, 'I don't want to feel lust like men'.

In the first world culture in multiculturalism is that name for a complex strategicsituation. I think we women are dumb like brute beasts if we don't notice that it is always onour bodies that this particular strategy gets negotiated and we run behind them, and say 'justdo everything you can to us'. No. That's a very different situation from trying to understandwhere this cultural inscription is active and therefore cannot be grasped. It is as difficult tojump the discursive aporia between ethnos and ethnikos and understand abortion, describedquite correctly as 'an expression of my control over my own body', as it is to understand thatgiven the fact that the entire pre-capitalist patriarchal society within which she is, is destroyedby power associated with male lust, that she should say 'I do not want to feel lust like men.' 'Ido not want'.

I said in the case of 'Can the subaltern speak?'11 if you want to understand sati, try toput it with Christian martyrdom, try to put it with men going to war. Don't try to put itwith third world stupidity. In the same way if one wants to understand this one could doworse than Jon Elster's Ulysees and the Sirens.12 Elster, having thrown aside the notion that

10 Smadar Lavie, Politics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule,Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,'Can the Subaltern Speak?' in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxismand the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271-313.

12 Jon Elster, Ulysees and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationaliy, New York: Cambridge University Press,1979.


CULTURE ALIVE

moral systems are any good, starts reading narratives for ethical instantiation, in the popularparabolic way. He begins to read Ulysees's story in an ethical way and he says Ulysees willinglybinds himself. In fact not only does he willingly bind himself, he asks others to bind him, sothat he can resist the sirens. Now this behaviour is not ours. It is not ours. But that does notmean that we have to so universalise our rights-determined way of thinking, that we cannotentertain this idea. But it seems to me that we should only entertain this idea in terms oftheatres where this can be said. In theatres of first world multi-culturalism, I would say as adiasporic myself, that women should look again as to why the entry into civil society isalways negotiated on the bodies of women. And I think they should not, and I say this verystrongly as a senior diasporic person, they should not internalise this constraint and thinkthat it is their choice.

Lily Ling:My name is Lily Ling, I'm from Syracuse University, which is quite close to ColumbiaUniversity. But I've come all the way to Australia just to listen to you speak. If I have heardyour talk correctly today it seems to me that what you're talking about is the politicaleconomy of communication. What you're highlighting is competing and colliding systems ofcommunication which seem to pivot on the subaltern woman. Because it is on the subalternwoman that these competing systems of communication can even exist and maintain the factthat they are competing and colliding. And yet at the same time you mention that thesubaltern has a responsibility. And in fact I would say it as even more than just aresponsibility. I would see the subaltern or the post colonial subject as having no choice butto engage in these competing communicative systems. Because the post colonial has norefuge, has no haven to which to escape. Yet at the same time you seem to be very pessimisticabout the ability for communication to penetrate these competing systems of hegemony or,master narratives one could call them. So therefore what is the strategy for penetrating thesecolliding discursive systems, these colliding master narratives, and if there are no strategiesfor penetrating communication or for developing a new system of communication, thenwhat is ahead for us, and in fact what is your role here in speaking if it is not possible tomake an impact?

Gayatri Spivak:There are other reasons for impossibility. OK. Good question. Lily. When I was invited here, Isaid I'm not crazy about giving talks, but since in the summer time and in the winter time Igo to do the things that I do [in India and in Bangladesh], that I was talking about, smallthings, but nonetheless I do what I can. Give my time and skill. It's always nice if someonepays my fare. So you see me here, alright. Now, you want an answer, you have your answer.I'm not here to change any minds, but I'm doing as well as I can because I have accepted thefare, that's all. But so that's number one. I do not see myself as a hero on the conferencejunket, no. So there's that. I've enjoyed the conference very much. I've learnt a lot of things.But this is not an arena where I'm performing my political strategy, etc. So that's one.


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Number two is that I'm not someone who has anything to say to the subaltern interms of her responsibility. I'm amazed at the impossibility and the difficulty that we whohave been brought up in rights based systems, have in understanding the battered andcompromised remnants of responsibility based ethics in the lowest reaches of the formercolonies and the fourth worlds. I have absolutely no desire to, I have no right to, I never have.When I am in the subaltern theatre I'm a follower, not a leader. So I have nothing, I have nomessage for the subaltern. That is number two.

The only thing I have asked the subaltern is a permission for some time ... for me tohang out there, giving my time and skill so that I can learn how to learn from below. It's notan easy thing to do. In the last seven years I don't know if anything has come throughbecause I must suspend, I'm muscle bound by my analytical machinery. I notice a certainincrease in confidence in myself and I think it's a result of that. But believe me I have nosuggestions. The subaltern is not there for me to suggest responsibilities. No.

Now, the post colonial is not the subaltern. Good heavens, those words, especially inthe United States, we're just throwing these words around. For the subaltern, I'm sorry, Imean these are words, so I have to use them, what can we do. For the subaltern post-coloniality means a bunch of beans. You go and tell the subaltern, 'hey you know', speakingof my country for example,' by the way, did you know you were independent, that in 1947, infact a group of gentlemen went and sat down and wrote a few things and you becameindependent. You own this country, did you know that?' 'Ha ha hardy ha'. That would be,that would be the answer.

Post-coloniality has nothing to do with subalternity. The fact that there is subalternityis a proof of the massive failure of decolonisation which is certainly my life experience. I wasborn before independence and this is the only thing that I know. This is not a popularposition. I was asked to speak on academic freedom in South Africa. I was talking about theproblems that start the moment independence is declared. Who wants to hear that? The OldGrand Universities want to hear inspirational prose.

And what do I say about post-colonials? I say when we first began using the word post-colonial we used it descriptively for places like India, Algeria, Bangladesh and so on, andironically, because it was a joke. Because we all knew that post-coloniality meant this failureof decolonisation and neo colonialism. But the United States is a dangerous place. The wordcaught on and now people talk as if they are able to be after colonialism, when the entireworld today, in the new world order as I was saying, is being written much more viciously andcriminally, as the economic restructuring, the barriers between the fragile national economiesof developing states are falling one by one. All of the economic constraints are orthodox.Socially distribution is going to hell. Consumerist classes are being bred. They're comingforth and representing the country. And of course I'm being told by other diasporics that Idon't listen to Indians. I know I don't listen to Indians when this is the class that representsIndia today.


CULTURE ALIVE

We well-placed diasporics who refused post-coloniality have become the great avatars ofpost-colonialism. I find this profoundly shaming. To the subaltern I would say 'let me hangaround, teach me something'. But to the post-colonial I would say 'think again, become alittle trans-nationally literate and begin to question claims to post-colonialism'.

I have also said and I will continue to say this, that in the United States for examplethe only post-colonial model, including the start of the failure of decolonisation, is theAfrican American, not us. Because they went through from the struggles in the beginning.The kind of moves that one has in terms of internal colonisation, until 1964, '65 was likenegotiated independence, and then started the usual kind of racist backlash. Rage in themiddle, in the group itself, with classist exploitation of one kind or another. It's that kind ofa scenario. And on the other hand, generally among the well placed migrant community, theso called custodians of post-colonialism, there isn't much sympathy for a real understandingof US pan-Africanism and the post-colonial history of African Americans. So for the post-colonials, especially if they're from the US, I would say 'think it through'. Think of yourselvesas US colonialists, rather than post-colonials in the United States. Sorry, again long answer.The questions are very good, but I've got to catch a plane.


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