1.Full

Why Study the Past?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

The short answer to this question is because we must. Whether we want to study the past for academic validation or not, constructing a per-

sonal and then a public past (however peculiar the version of “the pub-lic”) protects us from the horror and randomness of planetarity. It may not sound particularly horrifying if you quickly read what I quote from myself, but I invite you to meditate on it; we construct continuity (most speci�cally a past) so that there can be a future in the face of the plan-etarity that I invoke in the following words: “In spite of our forays into what we metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner space, what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us, as it is not, indeed, speci�cally discontinuous.”1 The present is a vanishing relationship. It is constituted by its vanishing. “The past can be seized only as an image which �ashes up at the instant of its recognizability, never to be seen again [auf Nimmerwiedersehen im Augenblick seiner Erkennbarkeit]. . . . His-tory is the object of a construction [Gegenstand einer Konstruktion] whose site forms [bildet] not with homogenous, empty time, but time �lled [erfül-lte] with the now time [Jetztzeit].”2 We know only a passing, and, studying in the present, we construct a past thing: epistemology at work.

Modern Language Quarterly 73:1 (March 2012)

DOI 10.1215/00267929- 1459697 © 2012 by University of Washington

1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Planetarity,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Phil-osophical Lexicon, ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

2 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 254, 261. Transla-tion modi�ed according to the excellent founding argument of Samuel Weber, Benja-min’s - abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

2 MLQ March 2012

MLQ � December 2011� Performing a New France

Why, then, study the past? Because we must.But that is not really the question that Marshall Brown put to me

in 2010. He meant why study what seems separated from the contempo-rary by a seeming epistemic barrier. For different people, for different generations of lettered men and women, for different races and classes of men and women, this barrier has been �xed at a greater or lesser distance. Some have a bigger “present,” always past- ing, of course. It is within this diversity that we �x the vaguely racist — working both ways — history- tradition divide.

Let us think of an answer to this revised question. It is hard, for those of us who think that, even in this revised formulation, “the past” should, of course, be studied, to think of reasons that don’t seem self- evident. I hope there are many such persons left in the world. Yet I have heard that an eminent colleague asked a brilliant student to “cut out the chronology”; I know that the iPod generation lives in the moment, that students inclined toward social benevolence feel that history ended to produce them; and I have myself occasionally been accused of selling comparative literature out to what is called presentism, when I am not accused of killing it. So let me give it a try.

The past, then, as event, is present- ing, Jetztzeit and, as task, is to be studied, epistemologically constructed. I will not develop this dis-tinction, since it does not relate to the question “Why study the past?” But I always have the distinction in mind; a fuzzy distinction, past- and present- ing bleeding into each other.

We often think our times are special because of the silicon chip. The differentiating characteristics of the chip seem to be that it gives quick access and that it creates virtual reality. I believe these two char-acteristics of what we envisage as our present oblige us to study the past as task. The past as task is of course held within past- ing as an event that necessarily escapes — the point with which I began my remarks. I will use two texts to illustrate.

First, a moment in Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, and sec-ond, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s old call for nomadology.

Spivak Why Study the Past? 3

Quick Access and Primo Levi

Through the quick access provided by the silicon chip, globalization has introduced a kind of accessible contemporaneity to us and placed us within it, which has not taken away but has rendered obsolete the established ways of knowing the historical. Even as modernity/tradition methodologies, colonial/postcolonial methodologies remain appropri-ate in their own place, these ways of thinking are no longer useful for understanding this new situation. Rather than offer arguments about multiple or countermodernities, this situation invites us to empiricize what has always been true in heliocentric time: imagine the present as modern and then compute the modern as a relief map. Not only to understand the temporal unrolling of a continuous Jetztzeit but also to grasp the contours of our common space, we are obliged to learn the principles that make and govern this new contemporaneity rather than Americanize chosen bits of the world by the old rules of moderniza-tion. To stave off the horror of planetarity, if you like, the here and now of what we perceive as our present obliges us to rethink the past as contemporaneous diachronies. I will give an altogether simple example from Levi.

I will call this way of reading a “broad reading.” Some of my col-leagues are opposed to close reading and propose something called “surface reading” instead.3 This broad reading, attempting to restore contemporaneity and simultaneity to history, should be acceptable to them.

Levi (1919 – 87) was in Auschwitz from 1944 to 1945 and was released with the Soviet invasion. In the concluding section of his last book, The Drowned and the Saved, he deplores the mean spirit of World War II and incidentally corroborates Carl Schmitt, the Nazi political theo-rist, who relocated the friend- enemy distinctions into an extra- affective catachresis (I use “extra- affective” in an analogy with Nietzsche’s “extra- moral”).4

3 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Repre-sentations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1 – 21.

4 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab et al., enl. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of Truth and Lie in an Extra- moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976), 42 – 46.

4 MLQ March 2012


Here is Levi: “Even in the midst of the insensate slaughter of World War I there survived the traits of a reciprocal respect between the antagonists, a vestige of humanity toward prisoners and unarmed citi-zens, a tendential respect for treaties: a believer might say ‘a certain fear of God.’ The adversary was neither a demon nor a worm. After the Nazi Gott mit uns, everything changed.”5

Suppose we did our rethinking of this in the context of a broader past, as I have been suggesting? We would then have to remember that World War I was also playing itself out in the much larger geopolitical theater of de- Ottomanization, with narrativizable origins in a con�ict that I have elsewhere summarized somewhat poetically as follows:

Byzantium is not for us a place of taking sides. It is a site of struggle. Sep-timus Severus Romanizes it. Diocletian divides it. Constantine Chris-tianizes it. From 800 a tug- of- war with the Holy Roman Empire to the West. Orthodoxy refused to join with Catholicism, East wouldn’t join West, and Byzantium became Ottoman. The tradition of tremendous regional strife continued for 600 years. Genocides, pogroms, as empire turned to state. In 1916, Messrs. Sykes and Picot, by secret understand-ing, wrote the “Middle East” upon the body of Byzantium, so that “the Holy Land” could become a violent and violating Utopia.6

More prosaically, the events of the last sentence above may be described as follows:

In 1916, anticipating victory, France, Russia, and Britain created the “Middle East” out of the remains of the 600- year- old Ottoman Empire. Lebanon and Iraq were directly controlled, others kept in spheres of in�uence. Haifa, Gaza, and Jerusalem were an Allied “condominium.” Arms control was strictly European. The Arab powers learned of this at war’s end (1917). Agreements assuring Arab independence had disappeared.

Such are the ingredients for a future cultural memory.7

5 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1988), 201.

6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subduing Byzantium,” forthcoming in a collec-tion edited by Jolán Orbán.

7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Power of Memory,” in pt. 3 of “Why Do They Want to Do Us Harm?,” In These Times, April 2, 2010, www.inthesetimes.com/article/5713/why_do_they_want_to_do_us_harm_part_three.


As you can see, this story, even if it were seen only as a breaking of promises to the Muftis, would undo Levi’s vision of World War I as a “sporting event” (201). A sportsman doesn’t break promises. But of course, the story also has deep implications for “our present,” down to airport searches, the latest bull from Homeland Security, and the use of the silicon chip to intrude into lives; and deep implications for situat-ing feminisms, a work I have already begun. A sample, below.

A Feminist Digression

Collective hatred comes from narratives of cultural memory. The Otto-man Empire was corrupt but, except for focused examples such as the Armenian genocide, or anti- Semitic pogroms as empire turned to state, generally carried an attitude of con�ictual coexistence toward religious difference. In 1948 arrived a master race that thought itself justi�ed in controlling and systematizing the locals, without any social contract, often by remote control. An inchoate resentment stirred in people at ground level who could not combat this transformation. Women, especially in traditional enclaves of societies, felt it strongly, feel this strongly, thinking of their dignity as contained in their men. The skel-eton of a cultural memory �eshes out affectively in this way.

Quick- �x gender politics simply attempts to abolish this and trans-form it into feminine self- interest, although in the Middle Eastern the-ater, especially Palestine, there is not much room for such interference, for the wrong reasons. If we understood, however, that reproductive heteronormativity offers us a complicated semiotic system of organiz-ing the sexual/gendered differential, we might be able to see that this placing of speci�cally one’s dignity in one’s partner, so that it is her or his public indignity that cannot be borne, is not necessarily male- identi�ed, and not necessarily a direct re�ection of social oppression. Indeed, this desire can be rearranged through education that encour-ages broad readings of the past.

But of course the spectrum of forces — from mere social confor-mity all the way to variously inscribed and active passions — that deter-mine the placing of one’s dignity in one’s partner can also accommo-date violence. But what isn’t medicine and poison if you are teaching use rather than doing good, epistemological involvement rather than

6 MLQ March 2012


material succor? The problem here is one of indeterminacy, because violence is part of desire, pleasure, education, but acknowledgment of violence distorts the mechanism unless framed — and in the matter of feminism this is where the intuition of the transcendental comes in.

I use this phrase to mean the arguer’s sense that she or he cannot provide adequate evidence for a conviction. Kant theorizes this as the necessity for a transcendental deduction. Most of us are convinced of the evidentiarity of our convictions but still have inchoate feelings (gen-erally disavowed, hence “intuition” in the colloquial sense) that there is something other than the evidentiary. Without this we can neither mourn nor judge.

Abstract structures, such as democracy and the state, and indeed capital, cannot accommodate this as such. The state is thoroughly compromised into managing global capital. Multicultural democracy (a contradiction in terms) and international civil society both applaud only the social productivity of capital, and all structural constraints are lifted as obstacles, and the needy are seen as individual occasions. “Normal” behavior toward women and the queer ranges from violence to alibi. It is the asymmetries between these alternatives that constitute the socius.

Today, with the abstractions of capital commanding social move-ment, violence and alibi coexist in a chiasmus rather than as a critical pair that would be an asymmetrical riddle that must leave space for an intuition of the transcendental. Whether Foucault is right or wrong, they seem to organize themselves into an irréductible vis- à- vis.8 A broad study of the past can swing chiasmus to critique — balance to double bind — persistently. Any extended study of how rather than why to study the past must open up these aphorisms.

I wish I could share with you Leila Ahmed’s excitement when I ran this by her. Called on constantly as the appropriate person basi-cally to apologize for women in Islam, she said to me, with considerable urgency: “Gayatri, you must write this up immediately.”

8 Discussed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge Classics, 2009), 27 – 57.


9 My earlier urgings for transnational literacy, focused more on space than on time, can be displaced into broad history and its emphasis on the contemporaneity of the past. One can undertake this displacement, for example, with my treatment of PLATO here and in South Korea in “Feminism and Critical Theory,” in The Spi-vak Reader, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (New York: Routledge, 1995), 68 – 71.

10 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

Back to Levi

This has taken us far away from Levi, because gendering is usually not part of the baggage of male intellectuals in that era, as mostly it is not in ours as well. We must always carry that baggage, in order to think history in its broad contemporaneity, for gender drives social produc-tion, writes cultural self- representation. My digression is a tiny example of how to think the gendered past as a different diachronic line of our contemporaneity. We will keep this in mind as we consider the seem-ingly ungendered consequence of looking at 1916 broadly.

If we look at Levi’s invocation of the sporting constitution of World War I broadly and go to the highly unsporting Sykes and Picot, then, we have to take into account the history of the Balkans as part of “Europe,” Turkey’s entry into Europe, Greece’s menace to the Euro- zone. As we reread Levi — neither by super�cial nor by symptomatic reading tech-niques but by studying the past as the past- ing present demands — I hope that we can convince ourselves that access to our global present invites this broadening.

Levi knows something of the story, of course. “Desperate,” he writes, “the Jewish survivors in �ight from Europe after the great ship-wreck have created in the bosom of the Arab world an island of Western civilization, a portentous palingenesis of Judaism, and the pretext for renewed hatred” (201). We notice that the subject and the object of hatred are unclear here. A broad reading of history would bring clarity to the political syntax.9

Indeed, we can place Orientalism within the narrative of de- Ottomanization.10 Like Levi’s, Said’s book is a geopolitical autobiogra-phy. Sykes and Picot are two separate index entries in this epoch- making book. Read Orientalism with this broader reading of the past, read it with Khaled Ziadeh’s Neighborhood and Boulevard, which narrates the suppression of Ottoman modernity and a putting in place of “Islamism”

8 MLQ March 2012


by the French, and the book recodes itself beyond the Orient- Occident debate, which generates low- grade symptomatic readings forever.11

Virtual Reality

Let us move now to the second point: creation of virtual reality as one mark of the contemporary. I will turn to a few pages in A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari try to rethink time/space as nomadological/rhizomatic.12

Let us not immediately come back with the knee- jerk academic reaction to any mention of the stalwarts of that group. “She went back to the seventies.” This reaction is actually part of a bigger point: so- called virtual reality, except when used by performance artists, gen-erally empiricizes the “real virtuality” of what in a previous conjunc-ture seemed accessible through the imagination.13 It is Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology/rhizomatics, which the silicon chip apparently empiricizes into a seeming simultaneity, that issues the call for a study of the past as past- ing present.

Here is Deleuze and Guattari’s plangent prose. I have chosen two bits from the introduction:

History is written, but has always been written from the point of view of those who sit long hours [du point de vue des sédentaires] and in the name of a unitary State apparatus. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history . . . a single uninterrupted sentence . . . with circles of convergence — the important thing [l’important ] is not whether the �ows are “One or multiple” — we’re past that point: there is a collective organization [agencement ] of enunciation, a machinic organization of desire, one inside the other and plugged into a prodigious [prodigieux] outside that is a multiplicity in any case. . . . A rhizome does not begin and does not come to an end [ne commence et n’aboutit pas], it is always in

11 Khaled Ziadeh, Neighborhood and Boulevard: Reading through the Modern Arab City, trans. Samah Selim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

12 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit, 1980). Translations from this work are my own.

13 The most extraordinary example, of course, is Alan “Turing’s famous com-puter . . . a machine made of logic [in the early 1940s]: imaginary tape, arbitrary symbols. It had all the time in the world and unbounded memory, and it could do anything expressible in steps and operations” ( James Gleick, The Information: A His-tory, a Theory, a Flood [New York: Pantheon, 2011], 265).


the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is �liation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. (23 – 25)

I will not offer a detailed reading. Most of the examples are of verbal texts of little interest today, acting out, according to Deleuze and Guat-tari, the principle of converging simultaneity. The master model, how-ever, is historiography, how to write history while moving from place to place rather than sitting down. The silicon chip has made it empirically possible to access many places while sitting down, or walking machine in hand, where the machine — the digital — is an empirical representa-tion of the theory: desire is machinally organized (for Kant, the phi-losophizing machine; for us, the abstract gender machine). History as “a single uninterrupted sentence . . . with circles of convergence” is the challenge of global contemporaneity, instant access by way of informa-tion command inviting Googling (googlana — to Google, now a verb in Hindi) the convergence of Sykes and Picot with World War I imagined after Auschwitz. History not from the point of view of one state at a time but “a prodigious outside that is a multiplicity,” the digital global moving capital and data. I could go on.

Of particular interest to me here is the machinal organization or “agencing” (agencement) of collective utterances and desire. The machi-nality is a post- Kantian topos shared by the Marxian theory of ideology and the Freudian unconscious, made vivid in Lacan’s “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire” through the picture of the unconscious as an information theory – style conveyor belt where the subject’s machinal agency can be seized as history only as a signi�er “which �ashes up at the instant of its recognizability, never to be seen again” except as imported into the machined ego: Wo es war soll ich werden “metonymized” as ich bin.14

These thinkers are pondering the separation of the intending subject from its production. Spotting the possibility of this in Marx, Althusser rescued ideology from “false consciousness” by introducing

14 Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 671 – 702. The idea of the “metonym” used in this sense is found on page 685: “The ego is only completed . . . as a metonymy of [the ‘I’s’] signi�cation.”

10 MLQ March 2012


Freud and Lacan.15 None of these thinkers is dismissing the importance of human reason. What they are doing, rather, is protecting the fragil-ity of human reason, so that we do not confuse mere reasonableness with Reason as such. Such insights are not popular when the silicon chip seems to enhance the intending subject in every way. With this in mind, let me ask: when we access the seemingly simple simultaneity on our democratic webpage, where does all the plangency of this manda-rin activist thinking of earlier epochs go? Has it really all been defeated because the intending subject has the computer as prosthesis? Was Ayn Rand the prophet of the philosophy of computation when in the �nal issue of the Objectivist she described Kant as “the most evil man in man-kind’s history”?16 The answer is that the theorizing disappears into the programming of the computer hardware. Programming severs the con-nection between intending subject and its text much more successfully, empirically, than the theorists ever imagined could be done, and it still keeps the con�dence of the intending subject intact as the digital world gets more and more user- friendly. This separation is structur-ally necessary even when programmer and software user are the same person. Surface reading disallows symptomatic reading here, abyssally. The metapsychological allows the symptom to emerge. Programming as such is impervious to the possibility of such emergence. The ready access to contemporaneity, seemingly available to all intending subjects of a certain class, and therefore calling for a new way of studying the past as the now, is itself therefore a grounding error.

Let me quote my recent answer to my friend Ben Conisbee Baer in the matter of “grounding error.” The analogy that we must drive here is that we must deny the relationship between programming and the intending (computing) subject in order to take up the past as task:

15 For his interaction with psychoanalysis see Louis Althusser, Writings on Psy-choanalysis: Freud and Lacan, ed. Olivier Corpet and François Matheron, trans. Jef-frey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). The signature essay on ideology remains “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127 – 86, although Althusser does not draw out the psychoanalytic line in it.

16 Quoted in Leonard Peikoff, “Fact and Value,” in The Intellectual Activist 5, no. 1, 1989 (see www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_fv).


GCS: The �eld of work, the �eld of life, is best described by a double bind, contradictory instructions coming at once. You acknowledge that this description must be immediately converted into a single bind — strictly speaking an “erroneous” description — so that a choice can be made. You cannot not decide if you are actually in the �eld of social justice. What on earth are we going to base this mistake on, the mistake of necessarily transforming double binds into single binds, which will have a certain kind of sequentiality? How will the practice of freedom be programmed? That’s the real question, isn’t it? The schizo’s “and then . . . and then” stands as a reminder of the double bind, but it’s not agentially useful.BCB: Yes.GCS: You can’t just say for the practice of freedom that Kant shows us that the production of the discourse of freedom is always programmed by the lack of access to pure reason, so we say “ok, we wash our hands, just let’s make mistakes.” That’s not the thing. The most useful and powerful phrase in deconstruction, as to whether it’s post- modern or not — you know, many of us have argued that deconstruction is not post- modernist . . . — but if deconstruction has one incredibly impor-tant activist description of af�rmative deconstruction, if you like, a description of grounding errors. It is: “in a certain way.” Because just any grounding error is not O.K. You have to choose between structures of violence, structures of violating the double bind of life and work and thinking, and so on, you have to choose, and that’s the democratic choice. The rational abstractions of democracy, which would qualify as science in this broader understanding, are useful as these grounding errors. These grounding errors are un- derived from the correct — they are “ground”- ing. This is a hard thing to understand, but in fact people who are completely unlettered have a certain inchoate understanding of this if they are in fact trying to work collectively.17

Derrida often remarked that Freud’s imagination of the psychic apparatus would have been greatly enhanced if he had worked with the computer rather than merely the Magic Writing- Pad. Let me add to that conviction a codicil: programming is an empirical representation, empirically accessible — at a removal from the simulacrum of simulta-neity produced for the unspeci�ed intending subject — of what Freud daringly de�ned as the metapsychological. Programming is an empiri-

17 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ben Conisbee Baer, “Post- Its: A Conversation on Postcolonialism and Postmodernity” (unpublished conversation).

12 MLQ March 2012


cal representation of the metapsychological, the machinal organization of desire that is inaccessible to the psychology of the intending subject. As such, it makes imperative the call to study the past as we celebrate seemingly interactive simultaneity.

Conclusion

Why study the past? Because we must. The computer seems to offer us access to simultaneity. We must therefore study the past broadly. Levi offers us an example. But the access to simultaneity is a simulacrum, for the computing (intending) subject is determined by computer pro-gramming. In earlier times theorists wrote of the determination of the intending subject. Deleuze and Guattari offer us an example. Such elite theory has not disappeared. Programming does empirically what they talked about sociologically, historically, psychologically. Yet we must study history broadly. Like all practice, it must ground itself on speci�c errors.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor at Columbia University, tries to teach reading in the most robust way. She has translated Song for Kali, by Ram-proshad Sen. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization appeared in early 2012.

Documents

1.Full