More coming soon in my current series on freshman orientation. But today, a brief interlude to bring you some choice quotes from Columbia University professor Gayatri Spivak, who recently delivered the keynote address at a conference held last June at the University of Leeds' Centre for Cultural Analysis and History (or CATH). I'll get to Spivak down below, but first it's important to look at the words of her sponsor.

Entitled "CongressCATH 2002: Translating Class, Altering Hospitality," the conference was the first of five planned annual conferences dedicated to addressing "major issues in contemporary social, economic, and political life viewed through the prism of cultural analysis." Deeply Marxist in tone, the series is organized around the premise that

The cultural turn has been a decisive one in the arts and humanities since the 1960s when attention to culture as way of life, way of struggle, praxis, subjectivity, ideology, representation, spectacle, identity, sexuality opened up both new interdisciplinary possibilities and reframed the questions that existing disciplines felt obliged or able to address. The turn to culture and its analysis through both historical and theoretical frames was not an idealist move, but a response to the concrete, in Marx's terms, a response to the changing socio-economic configurations of late capitalism, post Stalinist and post Maoist communism. The concrete determines what we must think about as well as how we can think it. History demands the effort of theorisation, that is observation, analysis, understanding. Cultural Analysis is a response across its many participating disciplines and interdisciplines to the constant challenge of historical change, trauma, possibility and commitment.

In other, less turgid words, CongressCATH seeks to keep Marxism alive in the wake of communism's fall, and it seeks to do so by theorizing contemporary world issues in Marxist terms (by "a response to the concrete"). This year, CongressCATH focussed on "class" (future CongressCATH topics are available here):

Our first theme for CongressCATH 2002 addresses the fractures of sociality and the injuries sustained by social subjects created by the potent and still critical social relation we inadequately and often uncomprehendingly name class. Conjoining this local and global relation of distribution and inequality with the social, ethical and philosophically complex notion of Hospitality addresses the wounds of solitude and human desolation inflicted on the stranger, and on the hybrid figures of movement and change, of encounter and difference that are, at the same time, the possibilities of a future world not phobically resistant to the inevitable relations to the others, no longer forced to bear the disfiguring mark of Otherness.

Reading past the jargon (and there is plenty more, thick as can be, on the conference's Welcome page), one can see where this is going. This is a conference centered on the radical, irreducible, inaccessible Otherness of those who do not move in majority circles (majority configured here, almost by default, as white, western, male, bourgeois). This is, in other words a scholarly gathering centered on sustaining and upholding one of the most singularly pernicious ideas within postmodernist and postcolonialist brands of Marxist thought--namely that the Other (or the subaltern, as Spivak likes to call him) cannot speak; that because the Other cannot communicate with, or function within, the culture, the politics, and the ideology that render him other, violence (either abjectly directed at the self or aggressively directed at others) may be the only means of political protest and even self-expression available to him.

We've seen all too clearly in recent months where this romanticized vision of violence-as-ennobling-resistance leads people--into irresponsible, often patently unethical positions on issues of pressing, planet-wide importance, among them global capitalism and terrorism. If September 11 has taught us nothing else, it has taught us about the terrifyingly sociopathic lengths to which academic theory-speak will go in the name of radical political critique. Or, at least, that's one thing it should have taught us.

But if this conference is any indication, the academic left's commitment to theorizing world problems in ways that fail to serve real people while at the same time serving careers and egos all too well is as strong, as arrogant, as misguided, and as self-righteous as ever. One last byte from the incomparably revealing welcome page, which is worth quoting at length as a stellar example of the kind of pompous political preening that has become an accepted and unremarkable norm in contemporary academe:

What changes to the political imaginary must be made for the much corrupted modernist dream of human rights to become living and secure realities for the world's peoples? What would it take to invert the crime of racism, xenophobia, genocidal and murderous fear of and rage towards the culturally and linguistically differen? Can the deeply troubled potentiality of the concept and practice of hospitality construct a 'celebration of difference' based, however not on trendy banalities of multi-culturalism but on a fully ethical acknowledgement of the histories and their violences that has brought 'us' now face to face? Tahar ben Jelloun, who unfortunately cannot be with us at the conference has written of the immigrant as historically expected and of the need to imagine how theis historically created 'we' can lern [sic]to 'live together'.

The twinned themes of this Congress are timely for both are truly a matter of life and death. They are politically urgent and ethically vital as many of our major speakers will insist [sic] offering us the brilliance of their intellectual insights and the commitments of their own involvement in issues that their academic analysis serves only to render more vivid and demanding. What can Cultural Analysis (at the intersection of art, art history, cultural studies, Jewish Studies, Islamic Studies, Postcolonial and Diaspora Studies, material culture), framed by both Theory--the highest of intellectual engagements and History--the most daring of confrontations with what has brought us to this place and this pass--offer to the radically differing experiences of globalisation within and beyond our own chosen worlds of intellectual practice, artistic practice, literature?

Thus did the intellectuals at Leeds set out to solve the world's problems in one fell pseudo-scholarly swoop, to deliver talk after talk in which they praise one another for their radically left right-thinking, and deplore everyone else for their complicity with the hegemonic structures of white, western, corporate, militarist culture that keep so many parts of the world in rank subservience today.

And who better to inaugurate such an illustrious gathering? Why, none other than the Postcolonial Critic herself, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Indian immigrant and full professor at Columbia, translator of Derrida and academic star, Marxist-feminist theorist of subalternity and critic of postcolonial reason, masterbuilder of impossibly, unnecessarily impenetrable prose. Spivak gave them what they came for, delivering a keynote address on "suicidal resistance" in which she theorized suicide bombing as the expressive, poetic, protest style of the indescribably oppressed. Some quotes:

Suicide bombing--and the planes of 9/11 were living bombs--is a purposive self-annihilation, a confrontation between oneself and oneself, the extreme end of autoeroticism, killing onself as other, in the process killing others. It is when one sees oneself as an object capable of destruction in a world of objects, so that the destruction of others is indistinguishable from the destruction of self.

[Suicide bombing] is a response of sorts to the state terrorism practiced outside of its own ambit by the United States, and in the Palestinian case additionally to an absolute failure of hospitality.

I was trained to think like this in graduate school. The first, most important lessons one learns there are that no subject is off limits to the cultural critic, everything is a form of text (including the body, upon which meaning is "inscribed"), everything thus has a poetics and can thus be "read," everything has an erotics and can thus be psychoanalyzed (even, Spivak suggests, suicide bombing, "the extreme end of autoeroticism"), and everything has a politics, and must thus be subjected to a heady, unrelenting strain of deconstructive, counterhegemonic, often marxist, criticism. What Spivak offers here is not an aberration within academic circles, but theory as usual, a textbook example of how to make a name for yourself by muddling crucial distinctions (between self and other, terrorism and noble self-sacrifice, terrorism and national defense, and so on) in the name of "sophisticated" critique (which in turn is muddled with activism).

Spivak's reasoning may well be sickening to those who are not already steeped in the culture of academe. But it is far from that within academe itself. The sort of reading Spivak offers here, in which victims of terrorism must be renamed as "killees" in order to obscure the reality she is busily distorting, and in which the terroristic act of suicide bombing is excused as an episode in a "narrativization" of history that is itself excused as a response to terrible state-sponsored oppression, is such standard procedure in the academy today that it can be offered casually, in a keynote address, as a celebratory means of setting the communal tone for a scholarly conference.

Leftist academic luminaries such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Stanley Fish have been the subject of much heated debate in the wake of 9/11. But there are others whose writing--and teaching--have similar significance in the academy, and whose ideas have a powerful, if indirect, impact on American attitudes, policies, and curricula (think: the warped NEA lesson plans for 9/11). Spivak, who helped initiate the idea that suicide may be "read" as an oppositional practice of oppressed people with her 1985 essay "Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice," is one of them. If you follow this sort of thing, she ought to be on your radar.

Thanks to Judith Weiss (blogging currently at Kesher Talk,) for the tip.