Gayatri Spivak ‘They, the People’
I am old-fashioned, younger than Negri. But I think we must learn to wait until people tell us what we are doing. Especially if we are in the academy. Speaking in a situation of power – the powerful playing at milkmaids. Self-declared ruptures. Accessing Beijing on your computer does not change the way you think. you can’t diagnose epistemic difference on the basis of changes in machines. When I mention the empirical I am not falling into it. The empiricisation of the virtual I am very critical of. I am not merely speaking empirically. I want you to question the determinant to the reflexive. There is a difference between academia and activism. Naswami 2004 vs. Monsanto. imprisoned for destroying KFC. Linguistic diversity is not an obstacle to international socialism but rather its double-bind.
Speaking as an activist the notion of the multitude does not match up to the reality. The world’s people is constructed by constructed epistemic position. It is well known that Gramsci thought of the party as the modern prince, hegemony and party are pharmakoi. In Foucault and Negri you have one model of the state and the state is bad. Gramsci’s political imagination is big enough that we can use him. We need to wait, let others use us, the philosophers of the future. Citizenship has not become denationalised. parties are still important in local and national politics. The mood of the left is in favour of anti-systemic movements, not parties. But what is called terrorism is also extra state collective action. Parallel between war on terror and control of immigration.
The World Social Forum is a necessary outcome of state and revolution but internal and external forces. Let us not forget Marx’s simplicity. The difference between another Europe and another world is possible is important. International civil society: social as opposed to political. non-government as opposed to party in power. Alterglobalisation depends on globalisation. The difference introduced by gendering; we must also realise the possibility of claiming queerness is also linked to globalisation. Originary queerness, a position without identity is not something that can just pass because the Italians are speaking about it. We have now learnt the formula ‘race-class-gender’ but none of the terms we have been using proletariat multitude acknowledge this. Capitalism as it freed labour also produced what we recognise as feminism. There is an older sense of ‘we the people’ – ideological feudality, go back to Luxembourg and Dubois. Why Marx doesn’t have a philosophical account of originary accumulation… Difference between agency and theories of the subject – if you cannot shift perspectives, you don’t get it. If you walk in and offer to help then it doesn’t work, Borders must not be universalised. You cannot wash your hands of the empirical. Activists have to learn to inhabit the lingual memory of where they’re working. Metropolitan singular universalism should not reduce languages. We need to listen to Gramsci’s notion of historical linguistics in notebook 29. Earned bitterness in relation to northern radicalness. Tobin tax. Global tax revenue fund. We the left shouldn’t say we have gone beyond the state, it is in terms of the state that crisis is managed. In the ‘transnational’ issue of Signs journal the word was only used to describe the US feminists. The oppressed will engage with the state, not world governance. Freedom from oppression does not automatically lead to redistribution.
Gramsci talks about education, action-oriented education. Models of pedagogy of the oppressed. Access to sub-altern language is extremely important. If we want to change the world, globalisation must think sub-altern educational action. The alter-globalisation movement is insufficiently oppositional. We need Gramsci – ideology practical, instrumentalising organic intellectual. Love affair with digital. Intellectuals develop slowly, far more slowly than other group. State structure as transition to the globe. We the people must be persistent fractures.
Toni Prug: which technology are you talking about? What about open access?
GS: This movement takes advantage of the internet when necessary, but digitalisation is Eurospecific.
Some woman: Romany as global south within Europe today. Subaltern educational activism. Issue of the state. Attacking state but also triple and quadruple binds with critique of use of state.
GS: Subaltern educational activism, learn the language! Learn to learn. Don’t go in with your own ideas. There are unnameable differences. Has to be collective. NGOs have made it almost impossible to engage with the state. It’s time and skill not fundraising. On the state – it does matter what kind of state structure. You cannot take the French state for the state everywhere! You have to look at the details. One cannot remain identified with a group. You can try and change epistemologies, it’s really more teaching how to teach.
Etienne Balibar: I have a speculative question with perhaps some practical implications. To differentiate between subject and agents. Even a queer or nomadic subject remains self-identical. An agent a political agent is always hybrid, combined. This is why there is a double bind.
GS: In what way does the subject self-identify? The subject is out of the grasp of the agent. Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power makes a comparable distinction. Didn’t I once send you an email about this?! Because the agent is composed through socio-economic ways it is about to metonymise itself. I can metonymise myself as someone who has one vote in India so I can work with anyone else who has one vote in India. Or I can metonymise myself as a philosopher born in 1942. The composition of the agent in terms of activism is also a kind of warning to people who buy the smile of the subaltern.
Some guy: with the emergence of a transnational elite would you say that Gramscian strategy of capturing the state should be transformed into capturing the transnational state?
GS: We are not following Gramsci orthodoxly. You just move where you can. Barthes’ death of author is birth of reader, we are still in macho culture of authority of author. Even Marx must be changed.
Some person: glad you mentioned Joseph Massad.
GS: the critique that I offer comes from within a movement. By critique I do not mean negative dismissive criticism. Massad is seen as a homophobe sometimes. But non-identitarian queerness not derived from straight if it constitutes itself in terms of certain kinds of cultural evidence. Massad’s language is too precipitous. I tell him, don’t say Deleuze and Derrida are racists, look at the real racists! There is an originary queerness I can’t write about. Women who enter into marriage because I have not entered into it, I feel a continuous difference with them. In the weight of friendship I feel a kind of originally queerness which heteronormative reproductivity nestles in. I feel a kinship with Virginia Woolf who glimpses this idea.
Some guy: what about role of state, I agree that state has not ended, yet the legitimacy of the state continual has to be called into question. Is there a possibility to conduct politics which does not address the state at all but yet is not naïve about the role of the state? Can we not change the state by leaving it to one side.
GS: I don’t think so. The Human Rights lobby does this. The dangerous nature of the state may be useful. The structure of teacher-student must be constantly overturned, see the 3rd thesis on Feuerbach. Overturn should not be translated as revolution. You cannot deny that there is an inbuilt power structure so you must constantly try to overcome it. Otherwise it becomes babysitting. Critical regionalism is our engagement with the state. It’s real work, not something you can just write about.
