Spring Break
Thinking About the Humanities
A Talk
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University
Issue date: 1/16/08 Section: Fall 2007
IN 1929, ROKEYA SAKHAWAT HOSSAIN, a Bengali feminist, wrote a book called Abarodhbashini, published by the Feminist Press in English translation as "The Secluded Ones." (The more correct translation would be "Prisoner," in the feminine gender.) This is how she opens her book: "We have been imprisoned so long that we are quite used to it. Therefore we-and especially I myself-have nothing against imprisonment. If one asks a fisherwoman, 'Does rotten fish smell good or bad?' how will she answer?"
Some time ago, I realized that my situation regarding the humanities was comparable. I have for so long been convinced of the value of the humanities that I wouldn't smell the rot. In an attempt to see ourselves as others see us, to prepare myself to think about the humanities, I started to address strangers on the question of the humanities, without necessarily revealing that I was myself involved in teaching them. (I think people thought I was inquiring after my children's future.)
At any rate, the general answer I got from about fifty interlocutors was that in these times, the humanities were "irrelevant." That's the word that invariably turned up: "irrelevant." It is in response to that collective response that I started thinking about the humanities.
We can think many more and different things now from Classical Greece, medieval Europe, Muslim and Christian, the Age of the Enlightenment, when Europe studied the human condition-humanitas. If we charted how it moved from free man and boy to straight man of property to straight white Christian man of property we would have another story to tell. Everything I say this evening is marked by that imperative. At any rate, we seem to do things differently now. We don't do research, we Google. We don't go from store to store, we buy online. We have much more sophisticated ways of describing how we think. With genomics and neurobiology we have extended the domain of what "thinks" in us. Yet, all this immense technological paraphernalia that lends awesome speed and breadth of information to us, all the scientific calibrations that measure and heal us, are prosthetic. We think as we always have and this is where the humanities are still relevant. They train, enrich, and strengthen thinking-improve its range and scope-in its own terms, not by prosthetic devices that are out of synch with it.
Some time ago, I realized that my situation regarding the humanities was comparable. I have for so long been convinced of the value of the humanities that I wouldn't smell the rot. In an attempt to see ourselves as others see us, to prepare myself to think about the humanities, I started to address strangers on the question of the humanities, without necessarily revealing that I was myself involved in teaching them. (I think people thought I was inquiring after my children's future.)
At any rate, the general answer I got from about fifty interlocutors was that in these times, the humanities were "irrelevant." That's the word that invariably turned up: "irrelevant." It is in response to that collective response that I started thinking about the humanities.
We can think many more and different things now from Classical Greece, medieval Europe, Muslim and Christian, the Age of the Enlightenment, when Europe studied the human condition-humanitas. If we charted how it moved from free man and boy to straight man of property to straight white Christian man of property we would have another story to tell. Everything I say this evening is marked by that imperative. At any rate, we seem to do things differently now. We don't do research, we Google. We don't go from store to store, we buy online. We have much more sophisticated ways of describing how we think. With genomics and neurobiology we have extended the domain of what "thinks" in us. Yet, all this immense technological paraphernalia that lends awesome speed and breadth of information to us, all the scientific calibrations that measure and heal us, are prosthetic. We think as we always have and this is where the humanities are still relevant. They train, enrich, and strengthen thinking-improve its range and scope-in its own terms, not by prosthetic devices that are out of synch with it.
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Omer
posted 5/16/08 @ 12:57 PM EST
You have become my new hero, Pasqualina.
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