gayatri chakravorty spivak - globalicities

Globalicities

Terror and Its Consequences

G A Y A T R I C H A K R A V O R T Y S P I V A K

Columbia University

four models of globalization are currently in circulation. first,

that there is nothing new about it: attempts to take in the available world in

a system are as old as history. In other words, globalization is a repetition.

Second, that globalization as such can be identified with the efforts at global

governance signaled by the Bretton Woods Conference, remotely inaugurat-

ing a postcolonial and a postnational world. Third, that the entire globe is

now in a common culture fix, and its signature is urbanism. And finally, that

globalization is distinguished from world trade and world systems through

the ascendancy of finance capital, helped by the silicon chip and the Fall of

the Wall. In other words, that globalization is a rupture.

You have coined “globalicities” to focus on the limitations and implica-

tions of theoretically determining the relations of globalization. You want it

to stand in the same way that temporalities and historicities stand in rela-

tion to conventional time and history. In response to this, the keynote I want

to strike is that changes in the subject are neither isotemporal nor isomor-

phic with institutional change.

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But you can’t make words mean what you want. “Globalicities” carries a

pun: a sexy way of spelling “global cities.”

Globalization as urbanization seems to me one of the least speculative

strands in the thinking of globalization. It is yet another example of assum-

ing the most visible violence to be violence as such, an inability to perceive

(or ruse not to perceive) the invisible power lines that make and unmake the

visible. We can see cities exploding their spatial outlines and virtualizing

into nexuses of telecommunication, or indeed being halted from such easy

virtualization. That is part of our everyday; that is the canonical account of

globalization. The other scene still requires archaeology, genealogy; and, in

Derrida’s felicitous words, “Whatever one does with it, one must begin by lis-

tening to the canon.”1

In an argument connecting only incidentally to globalization, but quite

head-on to globalicities as global cities, Edward Soja has insisted that the

motor of history as synoikismos or “homes together” is urbanization as

such.2 Speaking of the Amazon Valley as the rural, he describes its transfor-

mation into data of various sorts (pharmaceutical patenting, ecological

databasing, and the like) as urbanization. Here, my argument has been, for

some time now, that when we think of the virtualization and transformation

of space to data, it is not the rural getting urbanized. City and country are

both transformed from space to data, in structurally related ways.

But today I will sound another keynote. I will ask why Kabul—behind it

Gaza, Karachi, Ulan Bator and bien d’autres encore—cannot emerge as

global cities.

The traditional Left, here and in Europe, has by and large understood the

events of September 11, 2001, as a battle between fundamentalism and

democracy. Even Noam Chomsky has suggested that “‘globalization,’ or ‘eco-

nomic imperialism,’ or ‘cultural values,’ [are] matters that are utterly unfa-

miliar to bin Laden and his associates and of no concern to them.”3 If, on the

other hand, we think of the actual actants involved, politicized graduate stu-

dents (rather unlike Chomsky’s stereotype), we do not have to withhold from

them the bitterness of understanding that, as the stakes in the Great Game

shift, and Russia and the United States maneuver to come together over the

black gold of the Caspian, bypassing the Taliban, there is no hope that their

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city will participate (to quote one of the innumerable World Bank Policy and

Research Bulletins—this one entitled “Creating Cities That Work in the New

Global Economy”) “in the changes [attendant upon world trade reaching

more than $13 trillion in 1998, that] carry the promise of large gains for

developing countries, but [only suffer from the] expos[ure] to greater risks”

promised in the same sentence.4 Why can’t Islam be a liberation theology for

leftists from the middle-class elite? I hold no brief for liberation theology. I

am just trying to imagine something different from the sorry stereotype.

The book that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have co-authored has

given us a definitive account of the politics of globalization—from imperial-

ism to empire. Within that context, they have declared the emergence of a

new pluralized subject of resistance and given it the name “multitude,”

unconnected to national liberation, confronting Empire head-on like the

net(work) that brought down Agamemnon. I would like to read the impos-

sibility of locating or grasping such subjects in the destruction of the World

Trade Center. I would like to suggest that the “irreducible vis-à-vis” (to quote

Foucault) of Empire and multitude as a felicitous binary opposition can only

be recoded as the infelicitous binary opposition between Empire and Osama

bin Laden. Such a recoding, bypassing the sublimity of the event, is an inter-

nal necessity, for every rupture is also a repetition.

The only discursive arsenal belongs, as usual, to an earlier semiotic field,

even the discourse that produces “Empire” as a rupture belonging to the truly

global. That is the banal way in which every rupture is also a repetition. The

case against Osama bin Laden must be constituted as precisely that: “a case”

for capital punishment by international law. The United States says it has evi-

dence, which it has released to its NATO allies but cannot release to the pub-

lic. Pakistan says it is convinced that there is a case against him. The Taliban

says if the United States provided enough evidence against him, they would try

him by the Shariat. None of this is the impersonal movement of data, caught

in a global network of telecommunication that we recognize as the trademark

of our world. We must realize that the discursive resources for the globalized

planet are still culled from various older axiomatics—here, the juridico-legal.

The law has never worked in its abstractions without the deployment of

power. This necessary resistance to law written in it as its own transgression

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here thematizes itself because power sees itself as absolute. Thus, the invo-

cation of the law is left unanswered. The only possible response of those

without power has been, alas, to withhold, to refuse to give in. Even when it

is perfectly clear that the question of law is irrelevant, the answer is: we will

try him when you produce evidence, by our law. But also, by the law of hos-

pitality, we will not give him up. I hold no brief for the Taliban, and indeed,

I understand they are defecting—if CNN is to be believed—as who wouldn’t

in the face of the ferocity of the United States? But one must be able to imag-

ine beyond the stereotypes.

This (non)exchange would have been possible at a time before electronic

missiles—although they too, as we have seen, are amenable to technical fail-

ure and human error. Perhaps the movements of finance capital are so

abstract that error can correct itself or constitute itself as felicity. I don’t

really think so. What we do know is that in the field of the juridico-legal, the

political, the military, the ideological, the pedagogical, and the like, the man-

agement of human and technical error—troubleshooting—is what consti-

tutes the field. When we describe globalization as seamless unification of

the globe achieved, we describe the dream of globalization as achieved.

There are other kinds of ruptures that I will go on to describe. But this con-

stitutive rupture is something that we should keep resolutely in mind as we

investigate the impossibility of tracking the loci of labor injustice because

the factory has become so thoroughly virtualized and diversified. Or when

we hear the spin doctors for globalization, on the Right or on the Left, some-

times hardly distinguishable in their consequences, dazzle us with

meganumbers and assure us of transformations in international urban cul-

ture, or of transformed subjectivities. Some of us in the humanities used to

know, theoretically and practically, that changes in the subject, as distin-

guished from modes of agency, are neither isotemporal nor isomorphic with

institutional change.

Indeed, perhaps the fall of the World Trade Center was achieved with

such success in detail because it was middle- and low-tech, as Mahmood

Mamdani reminded us in New York on 20 September: commercial airplanes

and box-cutters, in the service of human fearlessness and singleness of pur-

pose.


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Let us remain on the track of how older ways of doing and thinking are

still tangled up with what we think of as the new “global.” Indeed, the con-

frontation between the NATO allies can be seen as between two global con-

junctures, if you will cast your mind back upon the list of contending views

of globalization with which I began.

I have no ontological commitment to these globalities as actually exist-

ing social formations—“real,” isolatable globalicities. Indeed, it is my strong

feeling that in our craze for recounting the magicalities of globalicities, we

have sacrificed theoretical and practical sophistication. I have long held that,

insofar as something called “culture” can be accessible, either inside and/or

outside, either to its theorists and/or practitioners, culture is the explana-

tions of culture. As to the etiologies of contending cultural explanations, one

can no doubt plot historical narratives, themselves part of the network of

explanations; but the search for absolute etiologies is as fascinating and elu-

sive as the search for the origin of language. Please keep this in mind as I

speak of global conjunctures: Euro-U.S. globality with its well-documented

history, and the anterior globality of “Islam,” which can, unfortunately, only

carry the name of religion and offer itself as explanation by way of the dis-

cursive practice of religion. What is noticeable is that the Euro-U.S. global-

ity, which is tacitly offered as the unmarked global as such, with the endless

invocations of the transnational subject and satellite dishes in Nepalese vil-

lages, is the one that is conjuring with nation-state alliances. It is the other

globality, “Islamic” within quotes, where archaico-residual, global(izing)

frontiers on the move are in conflict with the idea of the nation-state. As in

the case of the Gulf War, it is the case of men one way and the state another.

As is my custom, I will end with the question of woman. For now, we must

complicate the global in order to get a grip upon the thighs—I quote Yeats—

of this fast-evolving situation.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Amir Abd-ur-Rahman of

Afghanistan had tried to think through such explanations between the pro-

visional globality of something called “Islam” and the urgency for the emer-

gence of a practical nation-state. I do not have access to his autobiography

in Farsi, but I have studied it carefully in its English translation, attempting

to read, as much as possible, between its lines. Not all of it is by his hand, of


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course; one is not gullible about the evidentiary strength of autobiography,

just as one is aware of the lineaments of the autobiographical under the

most “objective” organization of facts. This characteristic, of devising and

charting a course between the existing solidarity of “Islam” and the consol-

idation of the frontiers and boundaries of the state loosely established in

Afghanistan by Ahmad Shah Durani in 1727, is so pervasive in Abd-ur-

Rahman’s autobiography that it is hard to isolate a quote or two.

In the archives of the old Royal Ministry of External Affairs in Kabul

were lodged 194 “covenants,” given to Abd-ur-Rahman on 17 August 1896 by

various groups that made up “Afghanistan.” Hasan Kakar has included the

one given by the Mohammadzay Sardars (lit. headmen), since they were of

the amir’s own clan (qawm, people related by blood and “otherwise,” who can

“stand together,” to trade, to fight, to recite their genealogies).5

The Amir named the day “Festival of Unanimity.” The name names a

desire, rather than its accomplishment. Let us remember the constitutive

hybridity of that “unanimity.” The document in Kakar is no singular Declara-

tion of Independence where the performance of the signatures was rused as

the constative statement of the existence of the signatories as declarers—as

declarers specifically of a specific gesture, here unanimity, as their inde-

pendence.6 There were, after all, nearly two hundred such documents. The

example of the Mohammadzay was followed not only by “other groups

[qwams] throughout the country” but also by “Hindus, artisans, business-

men, maldars (nomads [more specifically herdsmen, roving proprietors]),

soldiers, civil and military officials.”

Let us see in this “covenant” the nonachievement of a shift from a sys-

tem of responsibilities to a system of rights, although we do so in the same

mode of approximation that we are deciphering here. (To call it a shift from

feudalism to the possibility of statehood seems too evolutionist. I am trying

to see the glass half-full.) The nonachievement is at least partially effaced in

the use of the same English word “covenant” for tahrir and taqrir in the

opening sentence, and ‘ahd-nameh in the description of the file category in

the archives. The first couple signals a proclamation—a writing and a recit-

ing—that the true definition of our birth-placing has changed because Truth

has selected our qawm-leader as king of Afghanistan; in other words, the


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qawm-leader’s true description has become “King of Afghanistan.” This

change from a previous state of truth is translated into a founding social con-

tact by an archivized collectivity. The temporization of the change thus goes

unnoticed in the English. That it has not been completely effaced—as it

would be in the colonial case—is indicated by the note left by Kakar, a mod-

ern Afghan who sought validation at the School of Oriental and African

Studies at London University, even as his text was being translated into

Russian. In my fancy, this festering of the residual under the scab of the

emergent is disclosed in the furtiveness of the gaze of the spectators before

the European photographer at the execution of the regicide-by-proxy,

Najibullah, the last Communist president of Afghanistan, as he was hanged

by the Taliban. (The real “king,” no longer a haqdar but a charming, ineffec-

tual, French-educated Afghan gentleman, whose descendant is now being

cited by the revolutionary women of Afghanistan, had of course been

“unkinged” by history.)

We are born into a “para-individual structural responsibility.” Indeed, the

word “responsibility” here is an approximation—even a catachresis. For this

structural positioning can also be approximately translated as “birthright.”

Whether it is right or responsibility, it is the truth of my being: in that not

quite English sense, my haq. The word that is translated “God” in the sec-

ond lines of paragraphs 1 and 2, “our right” in the next to the last sentence

of paragraph 1, and “real” as in “real king” and “real promise of the day” in

paragraph 6 is, equally, haq. Thus, what in the English is being staged as the

emergence of a (God-given) right is, to put it altogether approximatively, a

change in our profane truth because of a move of sacred truth in filling the

structural place of the obedience-commander (moqtada, tr. “leader”) of

sacred and profane management (din wa dawlat, tr. “religion and state”) by

the person of our qawm who is to be followed (matbu).

The “true [haq] king” and the true [haq] promise of the last day” are, of

course as “has been mentioned in Holy Writ.” That we are dealing with the cul-

ture of Islam here—which does indeed keep din and dunya, sacred and pro-

fane, church and state, resolutely together by divine decree, associated in the

only use of the word “Islam” in the Koran—is effaced by the translation, per-

haps in its zeal to record the emergence of the possibility of modernity. This is


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most evident in the translation’s rendering of the fourth vow, where the pro-

claimers speak and write as mamardom—”we the people.” We the people

swear to cultivate and not to disregard our king’s gathering up and using the

reins of our religion according to the truth [haq] of God and his prophet. This

becomes: we swear “not to dispute the right of the religion and to strengthen

our religious arrangements of God and Prophet.” It is a shift in social order:

from clan-leadership (primus inter pares) to authority. The matbu has become

a moqtador. To translate both as “sovereign” effaces the shift. The shift was

practically denied by Aman-Ullah, with disastrous consequences.

And indeed, the unconsummated shift to a declaration of new rights is

actually the declaration of an expansion: a change in the nature and order

of, approximately, obedience. By the structural truth of belonging to the

qawm, we were responsible for the mtaberat of this matbu (tr. “following”

and “sovereign”—the latter clearly in excess, since “follower” and “leader”

interdefine through the root tabe here). Now, however, with the move made

by sacred Truth, the other qawms of Afghanistan are also of his following

(tabe,’ tr. “subjects,” somewhat incorrectly because this following precisely

does not entail a king). Therefore our haq (right-responsibility-truth) has

moved into the eta’at that is a part of mtaberat (an entailment, a metonymic

rather than semantic/semiotic relationship), to the extent that, by virtue of

our qarabat (relationship by blood and standing) of clanship, the other

qawms owe us mtaberat. It is not a shift in the sense of following, as the

English translation suggests. It is a shift in social order: from clan-leadership

(primus inter pares) to authority. The matbu has become a moqtador. To

translate both as “sovereign” occludes the shift within the same discursive

formation, which could, of course, have no future. This is not unimportant,

since a real shift in meaning, what the translation suggests, might have

involved the episteme.

“Citizenship,” says Balibar, “is indissolubly linked to the nation-state.”

When Farsi creates a word for citizens (tabeyat) from “following as tabe,’” and

Mo’in, the big Farsi-to-Farsi dictionary, gives as the last definition of Millat—

the word translated as “nation” in the last line—this very word tabeyat (the

first two being the 1aw [Shariyat] and people who follow the law respectively),

the indissoluble link is displaced to another narrative structure.


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I resist the temptation of commenting on the play of sacred and profane

time in the document. A word on gendering.

I have elsewhere compared the frenzy of the soldier for his country to the

gendering that can support sati or widow suicide in India.7 The sardars prove

my point by having to designate their duty not to be unfaithful to the legiti-

mate king in the feminine (lazemeh). The king-in-his-court has the same sort

of relationship to his followers as men to women, having the latter’s honor

(namus) in their safekeeping as their right-responsibility. (If indeed Farsi

namus comes from Greek nomos, how much of the polymorphous aura of

that word traveled in that derivation? I cannot know.) In this, they are haq-

dars (truth-keepers, clumsily translated “acting in accordance with the heav-

enly dispensation”) of an attribute (approximately) that women can lose, but

men have as a ground for shame (rosva). Since reinventing the tradition as

historiography will keep women’s haq still fixed as subject-separation from

the losable object, always defined as an indeterminate yet defining predica-

tion of the tactile and fungible body, women must train for a resistant moder-

nity, elsewhere. Thus the gendered gift of writing, however private the space

of women’s learning in theocracy, applies in this theater as well.

The actants of September 11 can thus be seen as casualties of a Game

that consolidated, rather than participated in, the narrative of conquest/

colonialism/postcoloniality/globalization, which in its turn served to con-

solidate the emergence of the Foucauldian “man as object of knowledge.”

This narrative also leads to “Development” as the history of the present—

modernity virtualizing into postmodernity. But Afghanistan stalls short-

circuited in a buffer zone where the masters, masquerading (I refer to the

many photographs of white men in Afghan dress in Peter Hopkirk’s The

Great Game), did not permit the shadow play of native mimicry fully to run

its course.8 The detritus of the Bolshevik experiment, coded into the Russian

part of the Game, reached it too late and was quickly recoded into the order

of the “Cold” War, a horrible misnomer in the periphery. This is the scandal

of the enabling violation of imperialism. There is no radical anticolonial

hybrid space in the metropolis for the public sphere.

Could Abd-ur-Rahman have consolidated such a nation-state, negotiat-

ing between “Islam” and a communality of religions and ways of life (inter-


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changeable at this time), accessing the larger dimensions of right/responsi-

bility (if we can catch the nuance in English) covered or uncovered by al-

haq? Various kinds of empirical “reasons” can be advanced for this. First off,

“the Great Game.” Afghanistan could not be a peaceful independent state—

a wedge between the Russian and British empires. Secondly, in order for this

impossible peace to be possible, the head of state had to be a superb strate-

gist, a man of vision who was personally selfless and able to bear hardship—

another Abd-ur-Rahman, in short. But Habibulla, Abd-ur-Rahman’s son, was

a mean, petulant man, a pawn in the hands of his elder wife. The “world-his-

torical reason,” to use an old-fashioned phrase—systemic, in other words,

rather than empirical—may be that “Afghanistan,” the named in-between

space between great waves of colonial consolidation, did not have enough

congealed synoikismos to establish the kind of social-contract tradition out

of which the narrative of modernity grows. Here, Afghanistan can be con-

trasted to Iran, Turkey, China, Japan.

Could Abd-ur-Rahman have given woman an equal share in modernity?

Among the guests he invited was a female doctor from New England. It is at

least possible to imagine that women might have been inserted into the

class-differentiated struggle toward justice that the (capitalist) modern

opens. I will pick this up in a bit.

Let us go back to the representations of the confrontation. I want at once

to say that 9/11, as it is being called now, is not about religion. There is no

mourning without imagining the transcendental, and no execution without it

either. But that is another matter. There was of course a millennial confronta-

tion, as soon as Islam emerged out of its tribality, of which I, as a Europeanist,

know the European side rather more. George W. Bush can tap the Chanson de

Roland. Was it ever thus? I cannot know. Culture is its own explanations.

This is not the impersonal globalization of trade into capital-formation

producing as much as managing its crisis by absolute state-colony-

imperialism-empire. It is rather the ideology of thinking oneself the proper

shadow of the transcendental—hence global. Thomas Aquinas wrenching

Aristotle away from Averröes at the University of Paris in the thirteenth cen-

tury is an example of this. The Internet gives the semblance of access, speed,

momentaneity. This produced a sense of collectivity.


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Was this imaginary confrontation present and communicated among

the young men who executed the attack, and who lie, unremembered, among

the aggressively remembered 2,749? No doubt. Although common sense

would tell us that, once embarked upon the plan, it was the dream itself that

enchanted them, and the millennial confrontational imaginary became the

deepest of deep background.

Many of you have heard of the article “Temple Desecration in Pre-

Modern India” by Richard Eaton, recently published in Frontline. I am going

to quote a bit from it; but first, I want to mention a tiny but important detail

that Sayad Mujtaba Ali records in his unpublished writings: that for cen-

turies, the Balkhi Afghans came to India to learn Farsi rather than go to Iran.

Thus, even if we want to accept Chomsky’s dismissal (they knew nothing of

globalization), we can cite a cultural imaginary. In the Indian context, Eaton

writes of “the sweeping away of . . . prior political authority,” and continues

that

[w]hen such authority was vested in a ruler whose own legitimacy was asso-

ciated with a royal temple . . . that temple was normally looted, redefined, or

destroyed, any of which would have had the effect of detaching a defeated

[king] from the most prominent manifestation of his former legitimacy.

Temples that were not so identified but abandoned by their royal patrons and

thereby rendered politically irrelevant, were normally left unharmed.

“It would be wrong,” Eaton continues,

to explain this phenomenon by appealing to an essentialized “theology of

iconoclas” felt to be intrinsic to the Islamic religion. . . . [A]ttacks on images

patronized by enemy kings had been, from about the sixth century A.D. on,

thoroughly integrated into Indian political behavior. . . . In short, from about

the sixth century on, images and temples associated with dynastic authority

were considered politically vulnerable.9

Remember, I am what Mahmood Mamdani calls a “poststructuralist.” I

am not speaking of intended rational choice. I’m speaking of a cultural


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imaginary producing “reason,” somewhat like the repeated marching-band

arrangement of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the lavish use of

African-Americans in the preamble to the declaration of this altogether cat-

achrestic “war.” I wish I had the time to do a riff on the notion of dynasty dis-

placed. I will do no more now than represent the confrontation of last month

as the destruction of a temple—world trade and military power—with which

a state is associated. It may not be a referential message about the inequity

of an ideology of trade and arms at all.

The New York Times has taken pride in printing a manual that recom-

mends acts of Islamic piety for followers of bin Laden’s core. Even that may

amount to little more than saying a couple of paternosters before taking the

heroic plunge. And that was indeed a confrontation; we cannot guarantee

that it took place exactly like this, but we must learn to imagine these

actants without the all-encompassing word “terror.” That was indeed a con-

frontation between oneself and oneself: the extreme end of autoeroticism,

killing oneself as other. And in the process killing others. The scary thing is

that the destruction of the royal temple became so transcendental a task

that mere human lives became as nothing. This is the power of a training of

the imagination where the transcendental becomes self-evident. This is the

moment one cannot, in principle, imagine—but no use covering that inabil-

ity with that word again. We have no idea if these men had killed before; they

don’t seem different from foreign students anywhere. We hear from those

phone calls from the planes that one of them cut a passenger’s throat. It is a

horrible detail. Was it to bring the aura of death into this “licensed lunacy,”

not merely to think it and have it happen, but pretend to have control over

that peu profond ruisseau calomnié la mort?

Whatever it was, this act of global confrontation was neither resistance

nor multitudinous. It cannot be punished; the doers gave themselves the

death penalty. And it cannot be condoned as merely a legitimate result of

bad U.S. policy abroad. Such a gesture matches the media overkill to “mourn”

the dead with every possible sentimentality, and thus attempt to contain the

sublimity of Ground Zero. Like many of you, I saw the second plane hit the

second tower live (if that is the word) on the morning of 11 September. That

enclosed object, moving across a sunny sky quickly, with no special effects,


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and hitting the tower and bursting into thick fire, is “beyond Ate”—beyond

“the limit that human life can only briefly cross.”10 For its unremarkable

progress contained a collection of heterogeneous personal terror, connect-

ing so desperately to transcendentality, that cannot be grasped. I am a

pacifist; I cannot support violence rationally. But we must acknowledge the

sublimity of terror, as in the inadequate name of a human affect beyond

affect, rather than the catchall name for any act of violence not authorized

by the state. In the face of the many irresponsible criticisms that my posi-

tion has received, I will repeat: unless there is this imaginative reach—with-

out condonement, of course—there is no chance of peace. You cannot wall

the world to make the Euro–United States and its allies a gated community.

Indeed, bombing Afghanistan in search of the “most wanted” is asymp-

totic with September 11. Compare the silent men, consumed in the still-burn-

ing subterranean fires of Ground Zero with their incidental victims, comrades

in death, with the very vocal, fresh-faced women shown by CNN at the helm

of a U.S. aircraft carrier. One of them, unnervingly young, said to the viewers:

“If I can drive an aircraft carrier, I can drive any truck.” This was in response

to the most bizarre example of single-issue feminist patter that it has been

my good fortune to hear from the mouth of a male CNN correspondent: “No

one will be able to make sexist jokes about women drivers any more.”

Single-issue feminism. It is time now to turn to the use of women in

this war.

What would the women of RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of the

Women of Afghanistan), vocal against men’s violence toward women and con-

demning the so-called “war,” say to those well-scrubbed American soldier-

women on the carrier of death?

I leave that question open and turn to the women of RAWA, who are

indeed altogether connected to the dominant version of globalization. They

are connected to the nongovernmental-organization circuit, to the feminist

dominant of the international civil society. Their emails come from the

IWUTC (International Women’s Tribune Centre) and the Women’s Caucus

for Gender and Justice.

To repeat, the main argument of this paper is an old Foucauldian one:

that changes in the subject are neither isomorphic nor isotemporal with


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institutional change. It is only mental habits of certain classes, professions,

nations that have so far changed under that globalization that is seen as a

rupture. Here’s an anecdote from Tarun Tejpal, CEO of Tehelka.com, to prove

my point. (Tehelka was a high-level corruption scandal in the government of

India that broke on the Internet. Here’s the story:)

[In a cameraman’s village] in the crevices of eastern U.P. [Uttar Pradesh], the

denizens had no understanding of the medium the exposé had taken place in.

They had seen it on TV; they’d read it up in the papers; but they knew there was

a new kind of entity that was responsible for the story. And they were clueless

about it, clueless about the .com and the world wide web. There was absolutely

nothing in their experience or their imagination that could help them make any

sense of a website on the internet. So they had conjured up a construct. Tehelka,

for them, was a device in which subka bhrashtachar nanga ho jaata hai. A kind

of x-ray machine that exposed naked everyone’s corruption.11

Tejpal is wrong, of course. This is evidence of an active imagination, and a

bizarre complement to the promise of justice on the level playing fields of an

economically restructured globe!

Because of this conviction of the décalage between institution and sub-

ject, I do not think the international civil society, the fellowship of women,

has constituted a new legal subject. I think a new possibility for public liti-

gation has opened up, and that is all for the good. I have written elsewhere

about the limits of such litigation, and at the very end of this paper I will

strike the same note.

For now, let me suggest that Polly Toynbee’s voice, as she scolds the

NATO states for not being stern enough, comes from this civil-society ter-

rain—war as a social movement—in her recent essay, “Behind the Burka,” in

the Guardian.

Her essay is built on a clear dichotomy: feminism vs. Islam. This position

is generally countered by two kinds of argument: (a) this is not what true

Islam is really like; and (b) it is a profound injustice when “incidents of sex-

ual violence in the West are frequently thought to reflect the behavior of a few

deviants—rather than as part of our culture. In contrast, incidents of violence


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in the Third World or immigrant communities are thought to characterize

the cultures of entire nations.”12 These two positions can be collapsed into

one. George W. Bush’s spin doctors have told him to take this line in his ter-

rible frenzy of destruction: “How Islamic radicals are hijacking one of the

world’s great religions,” reads the cover of a recent U.S. News and World

Report.13 Predictably, Toynbee takes a feminist line against this position:

No letters please from British women who have taken the veil and claim it’s

liberating. It is their right in a tolerant society to wear anything including

rubber fetishes. . . . The pens sharpen—Islamophobia! No such thing.

Primitive Middle Eastern religions (and most others) are much the same—

Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust for

women’s bodies.

And so on. Her counsel therefore is to take sides and support our sisters,

especially RAWA, and continue with the war unflinchingly. “The war leaders

are coy about this mighty cultural war of the worlds that is fought out over

women’s bodies,” she writes. We must whack the Afghans out of the map, not

because they have dared to strike at America, but because they are cruel and

unjust to women—as far as Polly Toynbee is concerned, forever. And, in the

urgency of the decision to right wrongs, RAWA is right to say “a plague on

all three of your houses”: Taliban, Northern Alliance, George Bush. And

Osama is an ex-CIA bad guy. We’re sorry for the American people, but just

let the Afghan people alone.

I submit that because there are sex-gender systems in operation every-

where, women are used as an excuse for violence. I should add here that the

use of the word “gender” is not marked by cultural difference as class mobil-

ity. Sex-gender systems exist all over. To call it a “sex-gender system” is a priv-

ilege of the few. The solution is not to throw the words away, but for the ones

who supposedly use the words for the world’s good to learn how to let go of

the word as an origin that can only produce more or less faithful translations

as the languages move further and further away from English. Let us rather

learn to learn from the resistance to such analysis inbuilt in the gendered

subaltern. I will come back to this. That is the long haul: a process of relearn-


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ing human equality that goes beyond the word “gender,” if anything can do

so. The field of decision loses its horizon here. For the question is no longer

who decides, but who dictates what the choices should be, out of what

axiomatics? I think our occasional obsession with finding reference every-

where and thus delegitimizing activist approaches of a certain sort mistakes

agency for subjectship. Polly Toynbee and RAWA are used by CNN to show,

over and over again, the spectacle of the execution of women in a soccer sta-

dium. And the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the New

York Times wrote of Bill Clinton:

After a crucial moment in 1996, days after the Taliban overran Kabul in a dis-

play of brutality, the Clinton administration decided to seek friendly ties

with the Islamic movement. The plan was abandoned after the Taliban began

oppressing women, but American diplomats continued to say until the bin

Laden terror attacks became a focus of American policy that the Taliban

might be the best government Afghanistan could hope for after a generation

of conflict.14

The lines are overdetermined here. Single-issue feminisms, pro or contra

“gender,” will not work. And single-issue nationalism (”don’t speak against

Afghanistan when the enemy is destroying us”) should clearly not work.

There, in the field of immediate practice, we hear the U.S. president and the

popular media intone the politically correct messages that were seriously

offered by Leila Ahmed, Ayesha Jalal, Fatima Mernissi, Leti Volpp, and count-

less others in a previous dispensation: Islam is great; these terrorists are

deviants. Not only do they hate us, but they hate their own women. A

justification for the destruction of lives, a cruel vindication of Raymond

Williams’s insight that the dominant incessantly appropriates the emergent,

and thus renders it as merely alternative, robbing it of its oppositional

force.15 And since one characteristic of the oppositional emergent is to want

to change the dominant, this incessant appropriation is itself at least

ambiguous, I have already indicated in my discussion of the need for the

emergence of women’s resistant modernity in a space discontinuous with

Abd-ur Rahman’s “covenants.”


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Today, we have to take a step forward from the late nineteenth century,

from failed imperialism to a pact with empire, and ask: Who is the emergent

here? And we will see, every time, the narrative of class mobility. I will not

repeat here the story how, as capital clears its path, it must initiate an

abstract social productivity that creates not only a working class but also a

middle class that gives the backbone to a new world. It is the emergence of

this middle class that creates the possibility for the kind of feminist strug-

gle that gives us a RAWA. And this middle class, the agent of human rights

all over the world, is altogether distanced from the subaltern classes in “their

own culture,” epistemically.

What happens on the other side of the development of capitalism? As

the society is subalternized under the social-Darwinist assumption that to

be fit—and thus to survive—is to have the skills for capitalism, it begins to

stagnate. And the biggest stagnation is in the area of gendering, as under-

stood by way of the biological male-female divide.

We have already seen that in Afghanistan, the story of the social pro-

ductivity of capital—on the way to globalization from above or below—

could not begin. But ideological class differentiation, the phrase without the

content, was already at work. Here is an eyewitness account of Aman-Ullah’s

ideological separation from his people. I quote Mujtaba Ali, commenting on

the Islamization of the issue of women by the mullahs in 1929:

The Mullahs said, “didntcha see with your own eyes that Aman-Ullah sent

’bout five score Kabuli girls as offering to Mustafa Kamal; when they spent a

night in Jalalabad, didntcha see, they went up and down from automobiles

in the marketplace like shameless uncovered women?” It is true that many

Shinwari Khugiani had come to Jalalabad on that market day and had seen

unveiled Kabuli women there. And it is even more true that, Ghazi Mustafa

Kamal Pasha had never received a good conduct prize from Afghan Mullahs.

Apparently a “fool” still had said, that the girls were going to Turkey to study

medicine. Apparently the Shinwaris roared with laughter at this—”Lady doc-

tors! Who has ever heard of such a thing! Why not just say the girls are going

to Turkey to grow a mustache!”16


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The author brings up a class point: “Who then would have pointed it out

that Shinwari women worked in field and barn unveiled, who will reason

that, if the old grandmother is better than men at putting a turmeric poul-

tice on a wound, or setting a leech on the forehead, then why should Kabuli

girls not become doctors? But this is useless dispute, fruitless discussion.”

Aman-Ullah calls on the “long neglected, and scorned, ancient tradi-

tionalist old men—they said that they had nothing to do for the last ten

years, and so their connections with the Afghan tribes had now been sev-

ered.” The king whom the RAWA call on today lives in Italy because, at this

stage, Aman-Ullah fled for his life.

In Afghanistan, another solution was devised through the connection

with the alliance with the Soviet Union, which is always referred to as “the

Soviet Occupation” in the United States. It should be mentioned that there

were plenty of Soviets in King Aman-Ullah’s service. But the attempt at

women’s liberation was so programmatic that in the dichotomy between the

subaltern and the new middle class, a political use of religion could fester.

This predates well-known U.S. support of the so-called “Mujahedin,” or free-

dom fighters. Remember Gregory Massel’s argument: in the Soviet sphere of

influence in Central and Southwest Asia, the surrogate proletariat is women.

The roots of RAWA are there. This is a narrative of the use of women that is

deflected by the current dichotomy of good-Islam essentialism against bad-

Islam fundamentalism.

And that is the dichotomy between feminist dominant and the gendered

subaltern, which one can work to go beyond. It is not a place we claim for

ourselves. A unilateral state terror, declaring an undeclarable war so that

Article 5 of NATO can operate, has obliterated the possibility for that work.

But only in the short run. The class apartheid between RAWA in exile, inti-

mate with the royal family in Italy, and the gendered subaltern will continue

beyond the current wave of violence. In that certitude I offer the following

formulaic paragraph:

Subordinate cultural systems are creative in the invention of ritual in

order to keep a certain hierarchical order functioning. With the help of the

children and the community, the trainer must imagine the task of recoding

the ritual-to-order habits of the earlier system with the ritual-to-order habits


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of parliamentary democracy, with a teaching corps whose idea of education

is unfortunately produced by a terrible system. One learns active ritual as

one learns manners. The best example for the readership of this journal

might be the “wild anthropology” of the adult metropolitan migrant, learn-

ing a dominant culture on the run, giving as little away as possible. The dif-

ference here is that we learn from the vulnerable archaic (Raymond

Williams’s word captures the predicament better than the anthropological

“primitive”), but also without giving much away. The point is to realize that

democracy also has its rituals—exaggerated or made visible, for example,

when in our metropolitan life we seek to make politically correct manners

“natural,” a matter of reflex. This habit—of recoding ritual (always, of course,

in the interest of uncoercive rearrangement of desires) for training other

practitioners, rather than for production of knowledge about knowledge—

has to be learned by the teacher as a reflex.

The general culture of Euro-U.S. capitalism in globalization and eco-

nomic restructuring has conspicuously destroyed the possibility of capital

being redistributive and socially productive in a broad-based way. Within

this context, September 11 has had a deplorably palliative effect. Children are

sometimes being accessed into hatred. I quote a particularly prurient exam-

ple, modeled on Dr. Seuss’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas:”

Every U down in Uville liked U.S. a lot,

But the Binch, who lived Far East of Uville, did not.

The Binch hated U.S.! the whole U.S. way!

Now don’t ask me why, for nobody can say,

It could be his turban was screwed on too tight,

Or the sun from the desert had beaten too bright

But I think that the most likely reason of all

May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.17

However utopian it might seem, it now appears to me that the only way

to make the sweeping changes called for so that the subaltern can turn

Empire around, again and again, is for those who teach in the humanities to

take seriously the necessary but impossible task to construct a collectivity


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among the dispensers of bounty, as well as the victims of oppression.18

Learning from the subaltern is, paradoxically, through teaching. In practical

terms, working across the class-culture difference (which tends to refract

efforts), trying to learn from children, and from the behavior of class-

“inferiors,” the teacher learns to recognize not just a benevolently coerced

assent but also an unexpected response. For such an education, speed, quan-

tity of information, and number of students reached are not exclusive virtues.

In other words, there is no call to celebrate the formal magic of globalization

upon this terrain. Those “virtues” are inefficient for education in the respon-

sibilities in the humanities—not so much a sense of being responsible for, but

of being responsible to, before will. Institutionally, the humanities, like all dis-

ciplines, must be subject to a calculus. It is how we earn our living. But where

“living” has a larger meaning, the humanities are without guarantees.

That is my contribution to the thinking of globalicity, then. Let it con-

tain globalization, so that in it we can locate globalization’s excess. Let it

contain the strategic exclusions of globalization, so that globalization can

continue to be represented as only repetition, or as only rupture, and pro-

duce explanations in its explaining machine—while you devise ways of

attending to the excess, the exclusion, and the remains of globalization,

always in the mode of “to come.”

�

N O T E S

This paper was first presented in mid-October 2001 at the Globalicities Conference held at

Michigan State University. I have made no attempt to update it.

1. Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford,

Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 74; translation modified.

2. Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Malden, Mass.:

Blackwell, 2000), 12–18.

3. Noam Chomsky, “The Theatre of Good and Evil,” available online at http://www.zmag

.org/chomskygsf.htm.

4. “Creating Cities that Work in the New Global Economy,” World Bank Policy and


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Research Bulletin 10, no. 4 (October–December 1999): 1.

5. Hasan Kakar, Afghanistan: A Study in Internal Political Developments, 1880–1896

(Kabul: University of Kabul Press, 1971), 291–93. All the quotations are from these

pages. I am grateful to Hauman Sarshar for walking me through the text, and to Hamid

Dabashi for enriching my reading with etymological advice.

6. For the irreducible performative-constative ruse see, as always, Derrida, “Declarations

of Independence,” trans. Tom Keenan and Tom Pepper, New Political Science 15 (sum-

mer 1986): 7–15.

7. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 296–97.

8. “Most modern Afro-Asia is free, and the overwhelming majority of these nations had

been overseas colonies of European nations. Many of their problems, therefore, have

been inherited as legacies of empire. . . . An important exception to the above processes

is Afghanistan, which, although never actually a colony of an European power, did find

itself an unwilling and unwitting pawn in the nineteenth century power struggles

between Czarist Russia and Victorian England” (Louis Dupree, “Foreword,” in Hasan

Kakar, Afghanistan: A Study in Internal Political Developments, 1880–1896, 1). At this

point, Dupree could simply write that Afghanistan was “a hodge-podge of tribal and

ethnic units moving toward the creation of a modern nation-state, a process continu-

ing today.” Our faithful Mahfuz Ali showed greater prescience in 1885 and recom-

mended partition between Russia and Britain: “From the European standard, such a

partition would perhaps be looked upon as a rare blessing. The verdict would, not

improbably, go forth that, a petty State, in a miserable corner of the earth, which could

not justify its existence by acquiring civilization on its own account, was improved off

its face by two great civilized powers, bent on eradicating barbarism from such dreary,

inhospitable regions” (Muhammed Mahfuz Ali, The Truth About Russia and England:

From a Native’s Point of View [Lucknow: London Press, 1886], 56). The second volume

of Abd-ur-Rahman’s Life was probably composed by his Indian secretary. For a compa-

rable set of opinions from a colonial subject who was obliged to contain his racism, the

book makes interesting reading. Most biographers conjecture that it was as a result of

the contents of this volume that Abd-ur-Rahman’s heir Nasirullah banished the secre-

tary from Afghanistan.

9. Richard M. Eaton, “Temple Desecration in Pre-Modern India,” Frontline 17, no. 25 (9–22

December 2000), available at .

10. Jacques Lacan, “The Splendor of Antigone,” in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960,

trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 262–63.

11. Tarun Tejpal, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Seminar 502 (June 2001): 14.

12. Leti Volpp, “Feminism Versus Multiculturalism,” Columbia Law Review 101, no. 5 (June

2001): 1186–87.

13. 15 October 2001.


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14. John F. Burns, “Pakistan Antiterror Support Avoids Vow of Military Aid,” New York

Times, 16 September 2001, 5.

15. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 121–27.

16. Syed Mujtaba Ali, Deshe-Bideshe, in Rachanabali (Kolkata: Mitra o Ghosh, 1385

[Bengali date]), vol. 10. This and the following passage are from pages 29–30.

Translation mine.

17. I am grateful to Brent Edwards for this communication.

18. I have discussed the role of teaching in the formation of collectivities in “Schmitt and

Post Stucturalism: A Response,” Cardozo Law Review 21, no. 5–6 (May 2000): 1723–37.

Necessary but impossible tasks—like taking care of health, although it is impossible to

be immortal; or continuing to listen, read, write, talk, and teach, although it is impos-

sible that everything be communicated—lead to renewed and persistent effort. I use

this formula because this is the only justification for humanities pedagogy. This is dis-

tinct from the “utopian mode,” which allows us to figure the impossible.


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gayatri chakravorty spivak - globalicities

Documents

i c i t i e s

models of globalization

thinking of globalization

relations of globalization

te r r o r

consequences g aya t

world systems

postnational world