Undoing Gender (38 page)

Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so. It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone, as a passion must be undergone. It may also be that life itself becomes foreclosed when the right way is decided in advance, or when we impose what is right for everyone,without finding a way to enter into community and discover the “right” in the midst of cultural translation.

It may be that what is “right” and what is “good” consist in staying open to the tensions that beset the most fundamental categories we require, to know unknowingness at the core of what we know, and what we need, and to recognize the sign of life—and its prospects.

Beyond the Subject with Anzaldúa and Spivak In the United States, there were and are several different ways of questioning the foundational status of the category of the subject. To question the foundationalism of that category is not the same as doing away with the category altogether. Moreover, it is not to deny its usefulness, or even its necessity. To question the subject is to put at risk what we know, and to do it not for the thrill of the risk, but because we have already been put into question as subjects. We have already, as women, been severely doubted: do our words carry meaning? Are we capable of consent? Is our reasoning functioning like that of men?

Are we part of the universal community of human kind?

Gloria Anzaldúa, in her work
Borderlands/La Frontera
, writes in both Spanish and English as well as native Indian dialects and compels her reader to read all of these languages as they attempt to read her book. She clearly crosses the border between academic and nonacademic writing, emphasizing the value of living on the border, living as the border in relation to an array of different cultural projects. She says that in order to have social transformation one must get beyond a “unitary” subject. She is in favor of social transformation, has struggled for it her whole life, has taught in the university, and has struggled in the movements. Do we say that she belongs to the group called “academic feminists”? Well, it would be ridiculous to exclude her from that group.
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Her work is read in the academy. She sometimes teaches at the University of California. She struggles with different movements, especially for Latin American women, who suffer in the United States from lack of health care, exploitation within the labor market, and often with immigration issues as well. When she says, for instance, that she is no unitary subject, that she does not accept the binary oppositions of modernity, she is saying that she is defined by her very capacity to cross borders, as a Chicana. In other words, she is a woman who was compelled to cross the border from Mexico to the United States and for whom that border constitutes the geopolitical imaginary within which (across which) she writes her fiction. She struggles with the complex mix of cultural traditions and formations that constitute her for what she is: Chicana, Mexican, lesbian, American, academic, poor, writer, activist. Do all of these strands come together in a unified way, or does she live their incommensurability and simultaneity as the very meaning of her identity, an identity culturally staged and produced by the very complex historical circumstances of her life?

Anzaldúa asks us to consider that the source of our capacity for social transformation is to be found precisely in our capacity to mediate between worlds, to engage in cultural translation, and to undergo, through the experience of language and community, the diverse set of cultural connections that make us who we are. One could say that for her, the subject is “multiple” rather than unitary, and that would be to get the point in a way. But I think her point is more radical. She is asking us to stay at the edge of what we know, to put our own epistemological certainties into question, and through that risk and openness to another way of knowing and of living in the world to expand our capacity to imagine the human. She is asking us to be able to work in coalitions across differences that will make a more inclusive movement. What she is arguing, then, is that it is only through existing in the mode of translation, constant translation, that we stand a chance of producing a multicultural understanding of women or, indeed, of society. The unitary subject is the one who knows already what it is, who enters the conversation the same way as it exits, who fails to put its own epistemological certainties at risk in the encounter with the other, and so stays in place, guards its place, and becomes an emblem for property and territory,
refusing self-transformation, ironically, in
the name of the subject.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has a similar view, although she would say, has said, that whereas Anzaldúa maintains a notion of a multiple subject, she has a notion of a fractured subject. Indeed, her view is that we cannot appreciate the oppression that women of color have experienced within the global political and economic framework of first world imperialism without realizing that “women” as a unitary category cannot hold, cannot describe, that this category must undergo crisis and expose its fractures to public discourse. She asks, time and again throughout her work, what does it mean not only to listen to the voices of the disenfranchised but also “to represent” those voices in one’s work.

On the one hand, it is possible to treat the disenfranchised as if they were voiceless and to appoint oneself as the voice of the disenfranchised.

I think we saw this, quite problematically, when the American feminist Catharine MacKinnon announced at the Vienna Human Rights Forum several years ago that she “represented the women of Bosnia.” Perhaps she thought that the women of Bosnia were voiceless, but she certainly learned otherwise when they made plain their clear public opposition to her effort to appropriate and colonize their position.

Given the history of the missionary, of colonial expansion that takes place in the name of “cultivation” and “modernity” and “progress” and “enlightenment,” of “the white man’s burden,” feminists as well must ask whether the “representation” of the poor, the indigenous and the radically disenfranchised within the academy, is a patronizing and colonizing effort, or whether it seeks to avow the conditions of translation that make it possible, avow the power and privilege of the intellectual, avow the links in history and culture that make an encounter between poverty, for instance, and academic writing possible.

Spivak has translated the work of Mahasweta Devi, a fiction writer who is also an activist, whose work, thanks to Spivak, appears in the academy, at least the English speaking one. Devi writes as a tribal woman, for and about tribal women, but the “tribal” is precisely what becomes complex to identify in the course of her writing. Her voice arrives in the first world through a translation, a translation offered by Spivak, in which I, as reader, am asked to respond. Spivak insists that this writing, the tribal South Asian writing of Devi, cannot simply be called “tribal” or made to represent the “tribal” because in this writing there is also, and by way of the tribal, a vision of internationality at stake. In Devi’s stories, women suffer in part because the land is exploited and ravished, because the traditional means of labor are systematically effaced or exploited by developers. In this sense, it is a local story. But those developers are also linked to broader currents in global capital. As Spivak puts it, “a strong connection, indeed a complicity, between the bourgeoisie of the Third World and migrants in the First cannot be ignored.”
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If we read Devi closely, we see that she is making connections, living connections, between the tribal and the global, and that she is herself, as an author, a medium of transit between them. We should not think, however, that this transit is smooth, since it takes place via a rupture in representation itself. Devi comes to me through Spivak, which does not mean that Spivak authors her, but only that authorship is itself riven; what emerges from this translation, however, is a political vision that maintains that the possibilities of long-term global survival, of long-term radical environmental politics and nonviolence as a political practice depend
not
on a disembodied “reason” that goes under the name of universality but on elaborating the sense of the sacred. Spivak thus writes, “large-scale mind change is hardly ever possible on grounds of reason alone. In order to mobilize for non-violence, for example, one relies, however remotely, on building up a conviction of the ‘sacredness’ of human life” (199). Spivak also accords Devi the name of “philosopher” and offers the following advice for radical thinking and activism: “I have no doubt that we must
learn
to learn from the original ecological philosophers of the world, through the slow, attentive, mind-changing (on both sides), ethical singularity that deserves the name of ‘love’—to supplement necessary collective efforts to change laws, modes of production, systems of education, and health care. This for me is the lesson of Mahasweta [Devi], activist/journalist and writer” (201).

For Spivak, the subaltern woman activist has been excluded from the parameters of the western subject and the historical trajectory of modernity. That means that for the most part, the tribal woman is a spectator to historical advance. Similarly, if we consider the traditions of Afro-Caribbean writings, we can ask as well whether these writings are inside the traditions of modernity, or whether they are, always, and in different ways, commenting on what it is to live “outside of history.”

So it should be clear that I think a critical relation to modernity is necessary.

We have witnessed the violence that is done in the name of the west and western values, as public skepticism in the United States and Europe has been stoked by questions such as: did Islam have its modernity? Has Islam yet achieved its modernity? From what point of view do such questions become possible, and in what framework are they sensible? Can the one who poses such questions know the conditions of his or her own asking? Without the Arabic translations of classical Greek texts, some of those texts would be lost forever. Without the libraries in Islamic cities throughout the world, the history of western values would not have been transmitted. It is telling that the preservative function of cultural translation is precisely what is forgotten here when we question whether Arabs have anything to do with modernity.

Clearly, we do not know our own modernity, the conditions of its own emergence and preservation, when any of us ask this question.

Or rather, we are showing that what we call “modernity” is a form of forgetfulness and cultural erasure. Most importantly, we see the violence done in the name of preserving western values, and we have to ask whether this violence is one of the values that we seek to defend, that is, another mark of “western-ness” that we fear might be lost if we agree to live in a more culturally complex and hybrid world?

Clearly, the west does not author all violence, but it does, upon suffering or anticipating injury, marshal violence to preserve its borders, real and imaginary.
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For those of us in the United States, there is some doubt whether there will ever be a significant public discourse outside of Left journalism and the countermedia, for instance, on the question of how a collective deals with its vulnerability to violence. Women know this question well, have known it in nearly all times, and nothing about the advent of capitalism made our exposure to violence any less clear.

There is the possibility of appearing impermeable, of repudiating vulnerability itself. There is the possibility of becoming violent. But perhaps there is some other way to live in such a way that one is neither fearing death, becoming socially dead from fear of being killed, or becoming violent, and killing others, or subjecting them to live a life of social death predicated upon the fear of literal death. Perhaps this other way to live requires a world in which collective means are found to protect bodily vulnerability without precisely eradicating it. Surely, some norms will be useful for the building of such a world, but they will be norms that no one will own, norms that will have to work not through normalization or racial and ethnic assimilation, but through becoming collective sites of continuous political labor.

11. Can the “Other” of Philosophy Speak?

I write this essay as someone who was once trained in the history of philosophy, and yet I write now more often in interdisciplinary contexts in which that training, such as it was, appears only in refracted form. So for this and surely for other reasons as well what you will receive from me is not a “philosophy paper” or, indeed, a paper in philosophy, though it may be “on” philosophy but from a perspective that may or may not be recognizable as philosophical. For this I hope I will be forgiven. What I have to offer is not exactly an argument, and it is not exactly rigorous, and whether or not it conforms to standards of perspicacity that currently reign in the institution of philosophy is difficult for me to say. This may well have a certain importance, even philosophical importance, that I did not originally intend. I do not live or write or work in the institution of philosophy and have not for several years, and it has been almost as many years since I have asked myself the question: what would a philosopher make of what I have to offer?

I understand that this question is one that troubles those who work within that institution, especially doctoral candidates and junior faculty.

We might pause to note that this is a perfectly reasonable worry, especially if one is trying to get a job within a department of philosophy, and needs to establish that the work one does is, indeed, properly philosophical. Philosophers in the profession must, in fact, make such judgments, and those of us outside philosophy departments hear those judgments from time to time. The judgment usually takes one of these forms: “I cannot understand this or I do not see the argument here, all very interesting… but certainly ‘not’ philosophy.” These are all voiced by an authority who adjudicates what will and will not count as legitimate knowledge. These are voiced by one who seems to know, who acts with the full assurance of knowledge. It is surely impressive to be in such a situation and to be able to know, with clarity, what counts and what does not. Indeed, some might even say that it is one of the responsibilities of philosophers to make such decisions and abide by them.