Re: [-empyre-] Curatorial Dynamics

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

dear LIst,

just to bring up again, the quote from Spivak to which Eduardo refers  
is one that Raul has supplied:


"If one looks at the history of post-Enlightenment theory, the major 
problem
has been the problem of autobiography: how subjective structures can, in
fact, give objective truth.  During these same centuries, the Native
Informant, who  was found in these other places, his stuff was
unquestioningly treated as the objective evidence for the founding of
so-called sciences like ethnography, ethno-linguistics, comparative
religion, and so on.  So that, once again, the theoretical problems only
relate to the person who knows.  The person who knows has all of the
problems of selfhood.  The person who is known, somehow seems not to 
have a
problematic self.  These days it is the same kind of agenda that is at 
work.
Only the dominant self can be problematic; the self of the Other is
authentic without a problem, naturally available to all kinds of
complications.  This is very Frightening."

Gayatri Spivak, "Questions on Multiculturalism," The Post-Colonial 
Critic
(New York: Routledge, 1990), 66.

,as Eduardo writes:
> this is a dynamic that plays up not to far off from Spivak's position I
> previously described.  How can subjects who constantly rewrite their
> autobiographies approached?  Silence may be the answer...
>
> Thoughts, reproaches--but hopefully approaches are the hopes for this
> message.  We have until Sunday, so I do hope others join in.
>
> Raul's e-mail made me realize what this discussion is about, no matter 
> how
> busy we may all be.  So after saying goodbye less than 24 hours agod, 
> I am
> now admitting to be active on the list until the end of the week

Meanwhile I also note in passing, that Gayatri Spivak has also been 
quoted by Danny Butt, who may have been  thinking of both threads in 
our discussion when he quoted Gayatri here:
> ... Cixous has recently written: 'I believe the text should
> establish an ethical relationship to reality as well as to textural
> practice.' The task here is to not suspend reading until such time as 
> the
> text is our of quarantine.
>
> All precautions taken, then we can say that Cixous is staging the 
> thought
> that, even as we are determined in all kinds of other ways - academic,
> philosopher, feminist, black, homeowner, menstruating woman, for 
> example -
> we *are* also *always* in the peculiar being-determination that 
> sustains
> these. She is staging that dimension in the name of the place of
> mother-and-child. This is not really a space accessible to political
> determinations, or to specific determinations of mothering in specific
> cultural formations. ...

> - Gayatri Spivak, "French Feminism Revisited", Outside in the Teaching
> Machine, p155.
> .

So it would appear that for Spivak, there is no 'non probematic ' self. 
 I suggest we are all in this interchange space as co-subjects and as 
such  we are all inauthentic.  The ethical demand, as Spivak interprets 
Helene Cixhous,  is to establish a text / or one might say, a syntax, 
in the political/cultural realm, and that this is done, par excellence, 
by art.

Christina