It is just that there be Law, but Law is not Justice-2

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

[This Keynote lecture was delivered at the History for Peace annual conference titled ‘The Idea of Justice’ in Calcutta on August 3, 2023]

Marx knew that the difference between good and bad can be perceived through the fact that human beings make more than they need. State formations made Marxism into a formula–hence, Marx and Engels say in the 1872 Introduction to The Communist Manifesto that the revolution parts of that text are outdated because, in the last 25 years, between 1848 and 1872, big business has gone, so far that all that has been said in the revolution section has become useless. Therefore, when Marxist ideals are taken to be a unified formula–which is not impossible to do–you get totalitarianism. So, to an extent, it ignores the senses of justice. Mao Zedong tried to do it by a quick cultural revolution, so justice as cultural practice would be communistic, but of course he could not accomplish it, for it can only be done through a persistent rearrangement of desire of a collective composed of individuals. That would supplement the idea-based inclination to totalitarianism. To supplement is to question the totality of any system by identifying a lacuna which the supplement attempts to fit as exactly as possible, indefinitely.

So it is in imperial-language high schools that the remote consequence of planetary justice begins. The imperative today is to reimagine the possibility of a monstrous future. We are now being played out by greater planetary narratives. Human accountability is way short of trivial. In the context of that, everything is impossible, but as long as we are alive, there’s the other necessary part which is: knowing that it is seriously impossible. One of the extraordinary things about ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’ by Mahasweta Devi is that she is one of the very few people–there are other literary folks imagining–who distinguish between the fact that although planetary justice will be extinct anyway and is impossible, it is necessary also for us to strive towards it.[4] Nationalism divides and India will not achieve anything by way of exceptionalism–as prophesied by current political figures. Phrases such as ‘One World’ and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is my family) hold no meaning except as ideas. It is within this context that Mahasweta Devi in ‘Pterodactyl’ distinguishes between the fact that pterodactyl’s extinction is due to planetary or global law, rather than cosmic law; at the same time, Puran Sahay must do human things. The Sea Wall, a 1950s novel by Marguerite Duras, distinguishes between two kinds of planetary justice: possible; and necessary but impossible.[5]

We have to realise that just a little restraining of our greed is not going to do anything. One has to have the power and force of imagination. When Marx was writing about the possibility of social justice, he spoke of a form, the value-form, which is empty, contentless–inhaltslos. This was because you can measure everything by the value form–it is the general possibility of measurement. Workers can combat capitalism if they perceive the sum of private labour in the value-form, that is, labour power. At the same time, he is so moved by the fact that demands such as private labour and private suffering be denied in preparing for this combat, that he writes in Section IV of Chapter 1 of the first volume of Das Kapital that one must also forget that everything must become like a single form, or exist in the value form. And the only time that Marx describes the content of revolution and not the form is in 1852, after he witnessed the revolution of 1848. Marx was 30 years old during the 1848 revolution. While he describes the content of the proletarian revolution of the nineteenth century, he says, ‘It will take its content from the poetry of the future.’ The impossibility of being able to do it now cannot be ignored. Justice as cultural practice: tragedy, farce, dance, poetry.

In one of Aesop’s Fables, ‘The Boasting Traveller’, the traveller claimed to have leapt great distances while at Rhodes and that eyewitnesses would bear testimony to this. A listener promptly replied, ‘Hic Rhodus, hic salta’–this is Rhodes, jump here. This is an example of false promise, a failure. Such promises are impossible to be fulfilled, yet necessary to be made. This is how Marx describes the imperatives of the proletarian revolution in the Eighteenth Brumaire. This is the idea of justice I put forward: A sense of justice that is divided, refraining from teaching surveys and encouraging intellectual labour. It has to be kept in mind that malpractice/misuse of the idea of justice is the beginning of class prejudice, people taking over the right to help others, and thus subalternise the people below through legalized cheating. This cultural practice divided against itself is not what the idea of justice or the sense of justice stands for.

Question and Answer Session
GCS: Let me just say: this concept of vaadi, samvaadi, going into mother tongue, etc., and calling it decolonization, is the worst among so-called diasporics, so I’m glad you are the first one to ask a question. Carry on.

Audience Member 1: I am Subhradeep, a graduate student at Rutgers. My question is: if we understand idea by imagination–I am thinking of the word ‘Begriff’ when you speak about ‘sense’–is there a suggestion that imagination should overpower justice–akin to culture–to the extent that the meaning of justice as culture is turned around from the inside?

Audience Member 2: I am Satish. I have been an educator formally for ten years now. I am a visiting faculty at the Department of English at Ashoka University. As an educator, what I repeatedly confront is a sense of despair. So I was wondering if this sense of justice accommodates an empathy for despair as well.

Audience Member 3: My name is Akhila and I am a high-school teacher from Chennai. I teach in an English-medium school and my students mostly come from well-off backgrounds. There is not much disparity; by and large, their backgrounds are uniform. The question I have is: How do I help them and help myself understand the connection between entitlement, one’s own capacity and justice, as people who are quite privileged?

GSC: There’s nothing wrong with English medium. I adore English. You think I would’ve taught English for so long if I would have never loved it? And when I teach here, among the landless illiterates–the tapsilis and Adivasis (scheduled castes and scheduled tribes)–I teach them to love English by pointing out the immense range of just 26 letters that can create different sounds simply by positioning the vowels differently. You would need to love English in an extra-moral sense. And this, for me, is a way to undermine the fact that English is a class privilege–not by rejecting English because that would be like committing suicide. In today’s world, you have to acknowledge that English is a mother tongue and as a language, altogether well elaborated. This is why the English language is learnt and lexicalized by people who don’t know English. Tribals would rather say ‘harassment’ than nirjaton, although they understand the English word as little as the elite Bengali. Mahasweta Devi’s ‘conter’–encounter or death in police custody without charge–is another example of lexicalization. Such lexicalizations are important but so is standard English. It’s no use saying that Indian English is another variety of English. English, that has gone so far in Japan, is the standard English and not Indian English. I respect the presence of local Englishes, but it is important to hang on to standard English. You should invite high school students into thinking this.

Nothing in the high-school classroom should be superficially political. This is an age that is extremely vulnerable and so, the teacher has a responsibility to accept their class privilege as normal and not encourage them to do good to the poor, etc., which would intensify the idea of privilege one way or other.

They can certainly think of English as a wonderful language that unifies, but they should also be able to think that it divides us from the world’s wealth of languages as well as languages in India. Perhaps they can have a collective project of making a language map of the world in a broad and general way. And so, if you are doing justice, then the sense of justice will have to come by way of English, actively, not simply as a survey of other people’s thinking. But they must also be able to produce a cultural practice of justice through their mother tongue. With the teacher’s help, of course, since they have never done such a thing before.

About idea and imagination being thought of together–why do it? Keep the difference alive. We have seen how ‘imagination’ is different from the unifying force of the ‘idea’. And as for the word Begriff: yes, it is held by the metaphor of grasping, but we are talking of the discipline of philosophy owning the idea of justice. Whereas the sense of justice leads to cultural practice where to focus on the trivial truth that the word idea is also a metaphor refuses to tangle with the diversified predicament of the practice of justice, marshalled by the law as the instrument of enforcement of the law as conceived by the idea of justice. To put idea and imagination together would solve a problem so easily that you wouldn’t have to think about the difference. Here, as in most cases, it is the difference that pushes us forward.

Another thing which also addresses the Ashoka University English faculty is that thinkers have thought that extra-moral sense and stasis is good. I mean, nirvana is not life. My friend MaungZarni, a Burmese person who is against the military situation in Burma and supports the Rohingyas, talked about his father who refused nirvana because, nirvana–not in the Buddhist sense, but as a colloquial idea–although it seems very good, is just stasis. Freud was himself bored by the pleasure principle where one was constantly looking at trauma. He writes that the ego always balances the pleasure and un-pleasure, so that normality can be maintained and we can live. His interest was in the more complex concept of the death drive, normality being just a glitch in the middle of it. Marx, when describing a just society, says that if everybody was rational, there would not be the need for a revolution or a social contract. When he describes a just, socialist society, he lists seven ‘ifs’–wäre in German. Although impossible, if all of the listed things happened, then in the end there would be no distinction between community and society–the old anthropological difference that Marx learnt from Lewis Morgan. Now the question is: If the idea that when everybody is rational we would not need a social contract is in reality impossible, why would we want to use this concept for ourselves?

In order to deal with the students’ despair, I would have to know the group well. That is the requirement for the uncoercive rearrangement of desire. I would then perhaps focus on groups that are in greater despair and ask for solutions. I am myself very doubtful about the word ‘empathy’ because one should be aware of the fact that going into another’s space in order to share affect is an extremely difficult thing. It cannot be defined by an easy word. Sympathy is good enough, although difficult. Empathy is an American word where this pretence has to remain. That is not my philosophy and I don’t particularly like the human being. Therefore, let’s take that word away. I don’t see why we need to focus on that word. Despair is itself a big word. Remember: I was saying rearrangement of desires. If one hangs by his own desire to help, etc. . . . if one can in the classroom try and get into the desire pattern. Individuals are different, but they are in your classroom. You can’t teach one-on-one tutorials, because most of the countries chose the German education system rather than the British one, in the eighteenth century. So, in that situation, you have to make some kind of a conglomerative desire. One has to turn this despair into some pattern of desire, because despair can be anything, such as a price hike, like people at my village school say. So despair at inflation is very different from the despair of the mortality of human beings or inequality in education. So you have to have different senses.

I sometimes wonder: Who wants to learn history? Most of the youth want to learn legalized cheating or computers. Therefore, for so-called artificial intelligence, they forget the word ‘artificial’. It becomes a labour-saving device. But what kind of labour does it intend to save? Intellectual labour. Intellectual labour is not meant to be saved. Rather than empathize with their despair, and turn it into that kind of a formula and simply agree, why not make it a problem for yourself? Of course, you are in a university situation. I remember someone from Ashoka University wanted a man from Hong Kong to talk on elections. The first thing I asked was: What did he understand by democracy? The Hong Kong guy, of course, simply understands that democracy is not China. But the woman from Ashoka University said: if there is a clean election, that is democracy. That’s the way to keep the vote banks moving. So therefore, at universities and colleges, there are much more advanced problems–they are already pre-professionalized. That’s why I am so keen on high schools. Because before that they are too young and after . . .

I don’t have much faith in just empathizing with despair. I am not a good teacher but a very sincere teacher, and the students who can learn from me can take this harshness and extra-moral madness in their stride, unless it is only Brahminical arrogance, as my recent humiliator seemed to think.

Audience Member 4: I am Garima Sharma. I teach middle school. I am an educator from Shiv Nadar, Gurugram. The sense of justice is very fluid and varied, and it differs from one person to another. Even when we interact with children, we find that they have different understandings of justice. Do you think it is necessary to have a sense of uniformity or the same form of justice in a society? And, do you think it is possible?

GCS: Yes, of course. What I have been trying to say is that that rational sense of uniformity must be seen as always compromised by phenomenal difference. So the students should be carefully introduced to heterogeneity, as long as they know, by way of careful examples, that the homogenous is also and absolutely necessary. (Modi worshiping at the new Ram temple would be a good social text.) There should be–however few or maybe just one, as Rawls has given us–a formula of fairness. I proposed another one, although not originally mine: Justice as not revenge. There has to be some kind of uniformity. I was using the word Sinne which is a German word and locates phenomenal heterogeneity, and the one that makes it to the other side, to uniformity, is Bedeutung or signification–meaning, which is in a system, and so you can understand the meaning. But sense is not something you can understand perfectly. In fact, you cannot understand the Bedeutung either, but let’s not go there.

Edmund Husserl, who introduced the sense of perspective that Sinne or sense caries, also says that Sinne can be understood only in a ‘noematic’ way. ‘Noematic’ means the format of someone knowing something. This is why Sartre says, in a less profound sense later, that consciousness is vectored–visé–and is always moving/proceeding/advancing towards that knowing structure, rather than being infinitely repeatable by itself. That is why you have to go in all different directions, still remembering the rational unicity of justice.

There is such bad teaching in the rural schools, so different from the way you folks teach in your schools, that one doesn’t know what to do. The two teachers at my two schools are from an Adivasi community. One of them has a BA and the other has a high-school diploma. They had no idea what it really meant to say that the world is round. They have some pictures in their books which say it spins like a top, and so they think it goes round and round, fast. When I sat them down some weeks ago and said: Look, now that you are sitting down, what do you see? The further you see across the fields, it is flat, isn’t it? It is so big that you will never see it as round, but it actually it is so. And people on the other side are hanging. We are sitting on top and they are hanging down in outer space. Imagine how big it is. That is uniting, that is uniformity, humanity on the planet, yet we are also different.

Then, I hold a stick, and as the sun moves, I can show them how much the earth has gone round.

Planetary justice, yet heliocentric heterogeneity of time.

From the book, they think it is like a top. I told them that it moves very slowly and with it, we all move. So the young woman with the BA asks if houses and trees and everything move. I said: Yes, they move, and then I told them Galileo’s story. And I always choke up when I have him stamp on the earth and say after the recant-enforcers have moved on: E pursimuove.

Why they don’t fall off, she asked. Imagine how badly taught they are in their undergraduate degree. I said: They don’t fall off but move together–just like when I go upstairs, my shoes also go upstairs.

The difference between teaching down there and teaching in your school is huge. One ought to be able to discuss the structural and multifaceted aspect of education, and its heterogeneity. And that here, planetarity is the uniformity, the extramoral justice that holds us together.

Notes
[1]  Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–67. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926 (Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings eds) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 236–52.
[2]  Francis Bacon, ‘Of Revenge’ (1625) in The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans. Available online at: www.gutenberg.org/files/575/575-h/575-h.htm (last accessed on 22 June 2024).
[3]  Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
[4]  See Imaginary Maps (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak trans.) (Calcutta: Thema, 2001).
[5]  Marguerie Duras, The Sea Wall [New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985[1952). Translated from the original French, Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950). 

[Concluded] 

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