Spring Break
Thinking About the Humanities
A Talk
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University
Issue date: 1/16/08 Section: Fall 2007
I will use here a crude analogy that I often use. The humanities exercise the mind in the same way as workouts exercise the body. Just as without exercise the body has no strength and suppleness, so does the mind wither without exercise, with respect, as I mention above, to its range and scope. To take the mind beyond the confines of self-interest, to expand its range and scope beyond itself, as it were, we need the sort of training that is institutionally provided by the humanities. And this is why, as scientists like David Botstein and John Dupr? themselves urge, we must bring to bear upon the problems raised by neurolaw and genome research an unconditional ethical model where the humanities are at full play, rather than so-called rational choice models borrowed from economic behaviorism.
But, you will ask, are there not a great many people in today's world who are interested in others, and thus reach beyond self-interest? How much, if we tally their educational records, have they been formed by the humanities? I cannot answer this question, of course. Yet, one guess I will make. A great deal of this interest in others is a top down effort to make others over in our image, make other societies over in our image. The humanities train the imagination. The imagination moves us toward entering other ways of thinking, willing, valuing. Here we are helped if we can enter these ways of thinking, willing, valuing through the language of those whom we are benefiting.
Doing good to others is a difficult thing. Just giving them the wherewithal to be rich and healthy may be resisted or the gift stolen and traded if the entire transaction is done by remote control, through interpreters and academic cultural informants. The relationship between those who know some smattering of English or a European language and our beneficiaries is at worst one of contempt and at best one of a difference in the culture of class. Academic cultural informants are almost no use at all. Their cultural difference from the lowest strata of their own society is belied by their apparent linguistic competence. We are not speaking of linguistic competence. We are thinking about deep language learning. There is no other way to access a cultural infrastructure. We proceed through mistakes. Doing good to others is a process requiring a good deal of patience, for language is learned slowly.
But, you will ask, are there not a great many people in today's world who are interested in others, and thus reach beyond self-interest? How much, if we tally their educational records, have they been formed by the humanities? I cannot answer this question, of course. Yet, one guess I will make. A great deal of this interest in others is a top down effort to make others over in our image, make other societies over in our image. The humanities train the imagination. The imagination moves us toward entering other ways of thinking, willing, valuing. Here we are helped if we can enter these ways of thinking, willing, valuing through the language of those whom we are benefiting.
Doing good to others is a difficult thing. Just giving them the wherewithal to be rich and healthy may be resisted or the gift stolen and traded if the entire transaction is done by remote control, through interpreters and academic cultural informants. The relationship between those who know some smattering of English or a European language and our beneficiaries is at worst one of contempt and at best one of a difference in the culture of class. Academic cultural informants are almost no use at all. Their cultural difference from the lowest strata of their own society is belied by their apparent linguistic competence. We are not speaking of linguistic competence. We are thinking about deep language learning. There is no other way to access a cultural infrastructure. We proceed through mistakes. Doing good to others is a process requiring a good deal of patience, for language is learned slowly.
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Omer
posted 5/16/08 @ 12:57 PM EST
You have become my new hero, Pasqualina.
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