an aesthetic education in the era of globalization

312 Pages·2012·18.39 MB·English

AN AESTHETIC
EDUCATION IN
THE ERA OF
GLOBALIZATION
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2012
MAITREYI CHANDRA
Copyright© 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
and
Printed in the United States of America
the memory of
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
LORE METZGER
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty.
An aesthetic education in the era of globalization I Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
p. em.
Sisters
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-05183-6 (alk. paper)
1. Aesthetics-Study and teaching-Philosophy.
2. Literature-Study and teaching-Philosophy.
3. Culture and globalization-Philosophy. I. Title.
BH61.S67 2011
111'.85-dc22 2011013286
Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
1. The Burden of English 35
2. Who Claims Alterity? 57
3. How to Read a "Culturally Different" Book 73
4. The Double Bind Starts to Kick In 97
5. Culture: Situating Feminism 119
6. Teaching for the Times 137
7. Acting Bits/Identity Talk 158
8. Supplementing Marxism 182
9. What's Left of Theory? 191
10. Echo 218
11. Translation as Culture 241
12. Translating into English 256
13. Nationalism and the Imagination 275
14. Resident Alien 301
15. Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and
Certain Scenes of Teaching 316
16. Imperative toRe-imagine the Planet 335
VIII CONTENTS
17. Reading with Stuart Hall in "Pure" Literary Terms 351
18. Terror: A Speech after 9/11 3 72
Preface
19. Harlem 399
20. Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular 429
21. World Systems and the Creole 443
22. The Stakes of a World Literature 455
23. Rethinking Comparativism 467
24. Sign and Trace 484
25. Tracing the Skin of Day 500
Notes 509
Acknowledgments 591
Index 595 HIS IS A COLLECTION spanning at least twenty-three years.
Looking back, I discover in them what Derrida called a theorie
distraite in the introduction to Psyche, when he discovered shared
theoretical motifs in the essays collected in his book.1 In this book, after
writing the Preface, I have actively looked for a distracted theory (poor but
accurate translation) of the double bind. Following the rule of "In literary
criticism, when you look for something, you find it," I've found it. The
point is, of course, that now I feel that a double bind is rather more than
the suggestion that having found it, you can play it. (That, incidentally, was
the problem with "strategic use of essentialism.")
As I say in the Introduction, there is often the suggestion in them that the
humanities can somehow learn to resolve double binds by playing them. I
have often suggested that "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperi
alism" (springing up out of teaching an undergraduate class in 1978 at the
University of Texas-Austin), "French Feminism in an International Frame,"
and the translation of "Draupadi" with a critical introduction (both writ
ten in reaction against recognition of my "French" expertise), and, finally,
"Can the Subaltern Speak?," represented the start of a new direction in my
thinking.2 The first essay here, "The Burden of English," represents there
sponsibility of such a turn, looking homeward, my first professional pre
sentation at an institute of tertiary education in India. The double bind
here is between caste and class, necessarily also understood as race and class.
The hope at the end of the piece refuses to acknowledge that certain con
tradictions between the preserved performatives of indigeneity and civili
zationism cannot even enter the security of a double bind. Doubt rather
X PREFACE PREFACE XI
than hope, or, archaic rather than residual. Couldn't see it or say it then. I think "Acting Bits/Identity Talk," the seventh essay, was written for a
But the Introduction brings us there. conference arranged by the National University in Singapore. That visit
This first foray into Indian tertiary education was immediately fol is forever marked for me by the death of my friend Bimal Krishna Mati
lowed by the second essay in this book, "Who Claims Alterity?," written lal. I was coming to Singapore from Bangladesh (my "activist" life began
in 1987 by invitation for The Statesman) the oldest daily newspaper in my in 1986). I had spoken to Bimal before leaving the United States. It was
hometown of Calcutta, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Indian not possible to phone from Bangladesh, since I was in rural areas. I called
Independence. For some vague reason, I think this is not quite what the as soon as I got to Singapore. He was already dead.
paper wanted. I expanded the piece for presentation in the series called There is a bit about flatulence in the essay. This is of course embarrass
"Remaking History" for the Dia Art Foundation. Many people had ing. I remember a South Asian professor commenting after my talk that it
bought tickets. I used to live in Pittsburgh then. The American write1; film had resembled a series of farts. I am used to the hostility of men (some
maker, and visual artist Gary Indiana was in the audience, I remember. times women) of my own cultural inscription. I did not say then what I
That with-it crowd in Chelsea, when it still retained its attractively lugu feel I can write now.
brious streetfrontage, was puzzled by the auto-critique of a member of the Bimal Matilal died of multiple myeloma. Toward the end his rib cage
model minority, before the term was invented. Did these two rather dispa had collapsed and was pressing on his lungs. We would work together as
rate hosts mind the double bind: between metropolitan minority and long as he could but then his mind would cloud and he would ask me to
postcolonial majority perspectives in a tug of war in the same subject? sing. All through this time, I think because of the pressure on his lungs,
"How to Read a 'Culturally Different' Book," the next piece in the he was constantly flatulent and this embarrassed him considerably. To ease
book, was written in response to an individual request. Badrel Young, him I had brought up the passage in G/as-"Ontology cannot lay hold
Pakistani-British, who taught at the time at a Council school in Hackney, of a fart" -commenting on Genet, who writes on farts, and Bimal had
was assigned R. K. Narayan's Guide as a text for the multicultural class brought up the discussion of bodily winds in the pranayama. This is the
room. She asked me to give some "Hindu mythology" as background. This double bind between body and mind, the place of an impossible ethics
essay emerged in response. Barish Trivedi, Professor of English at Delhi for the mature Levinas, the baby marked for death as it is born.3
University, who remains critical of my postcolonial stance, complained The semester I gave "Teaching for the Times," the sixth essay, I was a
that I don't treat Guide as an "Indian" novel. I don't know how to. Is that a visiting professor at the University of California at Riverside. The air there
double bind? In the fifth essay, "Culture: Situating Feminism," chronologi was full of Derrida. The eighth essay, "Supplementing Marxism," was writ
cally askew upon the Table of Contents, I spell it out: "Culture is its own ten there. It was a very special audience. I hope to write a book on Derrida
irreducible counter-example." after I put the slim book on DuBois in press. "Touched by Deconstruction"
Ruedi Kuenzli asked me to keynote at the Midwestern Modern Lan (2000) and "Notes toward a Tribute to Jacques Derrida," written with this
ii
:; guage Association in 1991. Ruedi is a tremendously conscientious per audience in mind (my "school-mates"}, will find their place there.4 Here the
ii
son. In response to his call, all I felt was a desperate honesty, thinking to double bind is self and other. I've put "What's Left of Theory?" next to it
inhabit the double bind between being a Calcuttan and being a New because it gives the tremendous double bind between the counter-intuitive
Yorker. I had just come to Columbia then but I already felt the seduction and the intuitive in the learning of a theory made for changing the world.
of New York. By March 2011, I have lived longer in New York than in It was written in response to Judith Butler's invitation to present a pa
Calcutta. I remember my Columbia colleague Leonard Gordon in the per at the English Institute, at rather short notice. It was a busy semester.
I audience. I knew he was in touch with' the Bengali academic community But my tremendous loyalty to Butler, which has led to, and will lead to,
in the United States. Quite unreasonably, I wanted him to see that, in my much work together, made me respond to this first call. I should, however,
prepared remarks, there was no trace of Bengali identitarianism. also mention that I have an overblown respect for the Institute. I continue
In the lineaments of globalization, to recognize this cultural predica to believe that it is the scholarly apex of the profession. I have carried
ment as a performative double bind rather than the "double bind" repre around a burden of intellectual insecurity since my undergraduate days as
sented so that it can cover over the contemporaneity of capital is to re a consequence of everyday sexism, especially applied to seemingly charis
fuse to acknowledge damage control. matic females. An invitation to the Institute I could not refuse.
XII PREFACE PREFACE XIII
Yet I had little time to prepare. I took therefore the lesson that I was unexpected asymmetries of this deliberate shift in voice, merely cited. The
teaching at the time in my Marx seminar and let it carry me where it would. first part was given as a keynote at the Annual Convention of the Inter
It led me outside the classroom, not surprisingly. This repeated gesturing national Association of Commonwealth Literature (IACL) in Oviedo, Spain.
toward the outside of the teaching machine from the inside is my rise and The provenance of the second is explained within the text.
fall. I have placed "Translating into English" next, where the double bind is
I have been teaching this course on Marx since the late 1970s when how to inhabit the readerly position when one is the published implied
'
I started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin. We read about a reader and, of course, the scary double bind of betraying the mother
thousand pages of selections from various texts, German and English tongue into the global idiom. I have put "Nationalism and the Imagina
side by side. The brief is to think "Marx" as a textual figure in the writing tion" next to that, because that brought these asymmetries home; for that
and not to read the text because one will need it for some project of cul meeting of the IACL was upon homeground, in Hyderabad, India. (A ver
tural theory. Although I have written bits and pieces of my class experi sion revised for delivery in Bulgaria, Nationalism and the Imagination, was
ence here and there, I cannot imagine writing the book that I always say published by Seagull Books in 2010, and translated into French and pub
will rise from there: Can there be a socialist ethics? I cannot, yet, "imag lished by Payot in 2011.) The double bind there described is between the
ine that which I know."5 underived private and the tremendous public function of nationalism. The
In 1981, ravaged by the departure of a beloved partner, I gave a talk at problem here is that we do inhabit that unacknowledged double bind; to
the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale on the gender injustice of Christo acknowledge it would destroy that habitation. One of the reasons why this
pher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism. 6 A couple of years later, in re must be used to supplement globality. Hope against hope.
sponse to Ralph Cohen's invitation, I gave a more extended version of it In my first seminar with Paul de Man in 1961, I gave a paper on Rabin
("Echo," the tenth essay) at the University of Virginia. I knew Jacqueline dranath Tagore. He is an invariable resource for Bengalis abroad and at
Rose would be in the audience. I read my Freud as carefully as I could. I home. In my first lecture in India, you will have noticed, I spoke of Tagore.
had established my profound friendship with Bimal Krishna Matilal in Given all the double binds I have been describing, it is not surprising that
1985. My intellectual exchange with Professor Matilal, who believed that of all Tagore's prose fiction, I am most moved by Cora. It seemed to me im
Indic rational critique was an instrument for philosophizing rather than possible, of course, not to attempt the Kim/Cora couple. It always irritates
merely a cultural artifact, allowed me to understand (or imagine) Freud in me when Cora is taught in indifferent English, simply as a narrative of nation
the context of Ovid in a more generous way. I could begin to read Freud as alism, exemplary outside ofTagore's varied itinerary in prose and verse. Yet,
a body-mind philosopher. without a tradition of Bengali teaching, can it be otherwise?
In 1992, another friendship began. Assia Djebar and I acknowledged a Valiantly trying, I taught Cora/Kim in an undergraduate narrative class
resonance with each other. It was this writer of Mediterranean Algeria, a at Columbia. I have no doubt that I was not able to convey very much
feminist Muslim who has been fascinated by the history of the Berber beyond the usual cliches of colonial discourse.
language, who gave me a sense of "echo at the origin." We have encoun The Society of Fellows at Columbia is a fairly traditional organization
tered her already in "Acting Bits." and, as such, has, quite correctly, not sought to involve me in its workings.
Muslim Europe, but only by way of France. Can I call this theory? I feel Ann Waters, a student of Nicholas Dirks at Michigan, was a member of
that my use of psychoanalysis in this essay is different from its use as a de the Society one year. At her invitation, I presented a paper at the Society for
scriptive taxonomy. The double bind here is more obvious, having to do the first and the last time. The paper was an account of the class on Goral
with the imperative to ab-use, of which I speak in the Introduction. Kim.
One consequence of this one I've already introduced as looking home When Sugata Bose at Tufts asked me to give a paper at a valedictory
ward. The next essay, "Translation as Culture," thematizes this double conference for Amartya Sen (he was leaving Harvard to be the only Mas
bind, in its very structuring suggesting that it can be played both ways. On ter of color at Trinity College, Cambridge, for a bit), "Resident Alien,"
the one hand a "diasporic" teacher of English at a university and on the the fourteenth essay, was the only appropriate thing to hand. I suppose it
other hand an upper-class, caste-Hindu, radical-minded Indian citizen must have crossed my mind that Sen and I were both resident aliens in
'
both a dime a dozen, so to speak. It is, of course, up to readers to catch the the United States. In that crowd of South Asianist historians and social
XIV PREFACE PREFACE XV
-------- -~ -~~---- --- - ---
scientists, the paper seemed embarrassing. I have brought forward "Ethics lows is an account of how the class read that novel. If "How to Read a
and Politics" here, for it situates both Sen and Tagore. The double bind 'Culturally Different' Book" reads in the imagination-retrieval mode "for
of history is lodged in the future anterior, the unexpected results of activist the multicultural classroom," "Thinking Cultural Questions" reads in the
education; but also in the swing between coercion and consent in teach formalist mode for the student of English. It was written in the British Li
ing. This is the biggest double bind, the biggest proof against the possibil brary in London, in the nine planned days that I had to wait for the flood
ity of a just society, and it holds my life as an unanswered question: Can waters to recede from Dhaka so that I could fly to Bangladesh. In its pres
vanguardism be supplemented? ent form, "Reading with Stuart Hall in 'Pure' Literary Terms," it is related
In Cora, Tagore thematizes the supplementation of vanguardism by re to the work of Hall because it was subsequently published in a Hall Fest
moving Cora from the Hindu vanguard; but Cora remains the representa schrift. It was in 1996 that I began reclaiming the undergraduate teaching
tion of a resident alien from above. In the next essay, "Imperative to Re of English literary criticism. It was what my teachers at the University of
imagine the Planet," I attempt to imagine those from below, who would be Calcutta trained me for. You will judge if it was a good move. The double
citizens. This is a different imagining from "Teaching for the Times," in re bind here is between "truth" and rhetoric.
sponse to a different kind of call. "The Double Bind Starts to Kick In," earlier called "Moral Dilemma,"
In December 1997 my dear friend Willi Goetschel paid me the extraor frames this more teacherly turn. It should interest the general reader that
dinary compliment of asking me to give the lecture inaugurating the turn I have been able to read bits of it to my History of Literary Criticism
of a foundation named Stiftung Dialogik from Holocaust asylum to mi undergraduate class in order to explain to them why I cannot teach a
grant multiculturalism, in his native Zurich. Goetschel is now the Presi regular survey. I should also like to thank Emily Donaldson, a student of
dent of the Stiftung, but at that time the founding President Hermann this class in 1998, who inspired me by saying "Professor Spivak, you are
Levin Goldschmidt, whose wife, Mary, had been the initial founder of this not even a hard A, you are a hard B." Students have explained to me sub
particular asylum route, was still alive. There too, I did not say quite what sequently that, when my more famous colleagues teach undergraduate sur
the group wanted. But, as I recount in the piece, Goldschmidt's genius al veys, they teach them as "easy courses with few requirements," so that
lowed me to respond to that gap. students with "harder" majors, or pre-law and pre-medical students, can
I repeat that I find it tedious to go on endlessly about my particular dia skate through them and earn credits. This gave me a clue to how close to
sporicity. Come what may, I cannot think of what used to be called "the home are those operations of the trivialization of the humanities and the
brain drain" as either exile or diaspora. I feel that as a literary intellectual, privatization of the imagination. I would also like to thank Christopher
I am here to use my imagination, not only to imagine the predicament of Brady, the only science major (Biology), who lasted the class, although he
diaspora, exile, refuge, but also to deny resolutely that the manifest des was obliged to drop to a pass-fail grade, because the class was too demand
tiny of the United States is (to appear) to give asylum to the world. As such, ing. That you cannot inhabit this double bind, change it into the single
I often have to confront the question of "speaking for" groups that are not bind of course descriptions, should be obvious.
my own. The essays that follow have crept into the kind of doubt that finally
I have responded to this question so many times that a particular refer emerges in the Introduction. I can tabulate more easily here. "Terror: A
ence would be silly. Yet I seem never to be heard. Let me repeat, then. Why Speech after 9/11": between existing models of secular law and the need
has this Enlightenment model of parliamentary democracy (representing for accommodating the intuition of the transcendental. "Harlem": be
a constituency, "speaking for" them) become the master-model for rejec tween development and impulse to resistance (this will find a fuller state
tion of diasporic academic work? Why has the imperative to imagine the ment in my DuBois lectures, delivered at Harvard in November 2009).
other responsibly been lifted? Ponder the answer, please, as you read this "Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular": between sub
section. This plea was already there in the decade-old first version of this alternity as a position without identity and the massive identitarian affect of
book. Today I locate the double bind as between the uselessness of human an epistemological engagement with specific cases of subalternity. "World
life (planetarity) and the push to be useful (worldliness). Systems and the Creole" and "Rethinking Comparativism" spell out the
In the spring of 1998, I taught a senior seminar on reading. The class double bind at the heart of comparativism; I think of the death of the dis
was exceptionally focused, very smart, small. The reading of Lucy that fol- cipline, precisely because of that more extreme sense of a double bind. In
XVI PREFACE
"The Stakes of a World Literature" it is a subaltern song that spells out the
double bind and will repeat it as all the other double binds in the book.
"Sign and Trace" and "Tracing the Skin of Day" are catalog essays, both
Introduction
of which spell out the double bind in wanting to sign the trace-which
finds a way out in renouncing verbality altogether, but never with complete
success.
Gender is the last word. Figure out the double binds there, simple and
forbidding.
1/''<l
lj LOBALIZATION TAKES PLACE only in capital and data. Every-
\! '~lthing else is damage control. Information command has ruined
~.~knowing and reading. Therefore we don't really know what to
do with information.1 Unanalyzed projects come into existence simply
because the information is there. Crowd sourcing takes the place of de
mocracy. Universities become adjuncts to what is called international
civil society; the humanities and imaginative social sciences bite the dust.
At this point, some of us remind ourselves that the .legacy of the European
Enlightenment is Doubt. Hope (or lack of hope) and sentimental national
ism (or sentimental postnational globalism) are where much of our world
stands now. This book is about productively undoing another legacy of
the European Enlightenment-the aesthetic. Productive undoing is a dif
ficult task. It must look carefully at the fault lines of the doing, without
accusation, without excuse, with a view to use. That is never far from my
thoughts, but I must confess, in this era of the mantra of hope, undoing
the Aesthetic that was the cousin of Doubt has made this Introduction less
upbeat than the chapters in this book, where, in dark times-hope still
seemed a valuable alternative.
The chapters themselves are in praise of learning the double bind-not
just learning about it. Given the humanities' need to be supported in the
academic world, this consistent praise often led to the conviction that
the humanities could somehow learn to resolve double binds by playing
them. But the fact that such convictions are shared, on different registers,
not only by the humanities, and that the other ways of knowledge man
agement can be made more consistent with the axiomatics of electronic
capitalism has shifted the grounds of this conviction.
2 AN AESTHETIC EDUCATION IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION INTRODUCTION
----~····----···----~-·--·~~ -----·---~ --~···--··-·---------····--------·--··----
The most pernicious presupposition today is that globalization has hap In the body of the book, there is also, occasionally, an unexamined con
pily happened in every aspect of our lives. Globalization can never happen viction in the history-defying originality of the aboriginal. I have since
to the sensory equipment of the experiencing being except insofar as it al come to realize that it might have come from a "feudal" protection and
ways was implicit in its vanishing outlines. Only an aesthetic education preservation that were no more than a ruse of primitivist benevolence.
can continue to prepare us for this, thinking an uneven and only appar The reconsiderations and realizations that I have here outlined are
ently accessible contemporaneity that can no longer be interpreted by such reflected in this Introduction, and not always in the body of the book. I
nice polarities as modernity/tradition, coloniallpostcolonial.2 Everything ask, as usual, for an interactive reader. The Introduction opens with the
else begins there, in that space that allows us to survive in the singular and double bind: learning to live with contradictory instructions. It traces a
the unverifiable, surrounded by the lethal and lugubrious consolations of Kant-Schiller-Marx-de Man trajectory, where the European proper names
rational choice. Other kinds of institutional knowledge assume this base are metonyms for epochal changes. Toward the end, the Introduction
implicitly. What is the nature of this aesthetic education? There can be no moves on to a place that contradicts the virtue of acquiring the skill of
global formula for it. I, most at home in institutions of tertiary education, playing the double bind: schizophrenia as figure, reterritorialized and re
give an idea in this book that can be described as sabotaging Schiller.3 coded. The Introduction ends with Gramsci's exhortation: instrumental
When knowledge management tries to undo the double bind on these ize the intellectual, in the interest of producing epistemological change,
shifting grounds and calls it the practice of sustainability: doing the mini rather than only attending upon the ethical, in subaltern and intellectual
mum of something in order to do the maximum of something else, it is a alike. 6 I have invoked the world, as an unexamined empirical given, in
displacement of Schiller's transformation of Kant's critical philosophy, the interstices of the Introduction.
about which more later. Such top-down, balancing-out calculations may The most pervasive double bind undoes the individual-collective di
also be why Kant calls "mere reason" morally lazy. The world needs an epis chotomy by way of a thinking, of death, that would undo the human
temological change that will rearrange desires.4 Global contemporaneity animal dichotomy as well. "The general future of mankind has nothing
requires it. This too will be part of our concern in this book. to offer to individual life, whose only certain future is death."7 If I had the
The humanities version of sustainability, in the early days, was to maxi book to write over again, I would include readings of Tillie Olsen's Tell
mize imaginative training and minimize the mind-numbing uniformization Me a Riddle and Christine Brooke-Rose's Subscript and Life, End of.8
of globalization. (Clues can be found for this in the British Romantic These are novels that dare to stage the ethico-political in general, to
Movement.) As we were trying to achieve this, the increasingly corpora gether with aging and dying, relating without a relationship to textual
tized and ambitious globalist university in the United States supervised practice. Is it because of the Baubo-factor-that women past reproduc
the minimalization of the humanities and the social sciences-in order to tion can cast a cold eye upon reproductive normativity-that these are old
achieve the maximum of some version of globalization. 5 When these es women's texts? A post-normative queeredness? Is this why J. M. Coetzee
says were crafted, that tendency had not found its full flowering. Some of chooses old woman protagonists as trace of the author in The Age of
us were at the beginning of institution building at two ends of the spec Iron, and the Elizabeth Costello texts?9 Maybe on this register, the liter
trum, with hope and cautious confidence. Although the Gulf War (1991) ary can still do something. Maybe not.
and then the war in Iraq (2003-) were happening, the peculiar "end" of the Please work at this double bind between Introduction and book as you
Cold War, a conclusion perhaps too quickly drawn from the implosion of read. I have provided a Preface that charts an intellectual trajectory: Should
the Soviet Union, seemed something still to work with. Today the con we credit the pessimism of the intellect of the Pre-Post-face weighted by the
juncture has moved along-global soCial movements have fully interna conjuncture, or the optimism of the will of the essays? No sustainability
tionalized into an alliance with feudality in the North. The humanities here; given the times, who wins loses.
and social sciences are peripheral at the top. The only hope for me lies at In 1992, asked to give the first T. B. Davie Memorial lecture at the Uni
the subaltern end; and that cannot inform a university press book! The versity of Cape Town after the lifting of apartheid, I suggested that we
only link here may be work with a certain Gramsci, but that work post learn to use the European Enlightenment from below.10 I used the ex
dates these essays. I will refer to it here. It will be the readers' task to scan pression "ab-use" because the Latin prefix "ab" says much more than
it between the lines of the book. "below." Indicating both "motion away" and "agency, point of origin,"
4 AN AESTHETIC EDUCATION IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION INTRODUCTION
- --- ----
~---
"supporting," as well as "the duties of slaves," it nicely captures the dou speaking of "dilemma[s] ... not confined to the contexts of schizophre
ble bind of the postcolonial and the metropolitan migrant regarding the nia" (EM, p. 258), he distinguishes between "people and ... robots in
Enlightenment. We want the public sphere gains and private sphere con the fact of learning ... from passing on from solution to solution, always
straints of the Enlightenment; yet we must also find something relating to selecting another solution which is preferable to that which preceded it"
"our own history" to counteract the fact that the Enlightenment came, to (EM, p. 240). He "enlarge[s] the scope of what is to be included within
colonizer and colonized alike, through colonialism, to support a destruc the concept of learning" by way of "hierarchic series [that] will then
tive "free trade," and that top-down policy breaches of Enlightenment consist of message, metamessage, meta-meta message and so on" (EM,
principles are more rule than exception.11 This distinguishes our efforts pp. 247-248). This "training," the bulwark of an aesthetic education,
from the best in the modern European attempts to use the European habitually fails with religion and nationalism: "Up in the dim region
Enlightenment critically, with which we are in sympathy, enough to sub where art, magic, and religion meet and overlap, human beings have
vert!12 But "ab-use" can be a misleading neographism, and come to mean
evolved the 'metaphor that is meant,' the flag which men will die to save,
simply "abuse." That should be so far from our intentions that I thought to and the sacrament that is felt to be more than 'an outward and visible
sacrifice precision and range and simply say "from below." This too ran sign, given unto us' " (EM, p. 183 ); it is interesting that Freud mentions
Ides, for it assumes that "we," whoever we are, are below the level of the the same two items-"Throne and Altar"-in "Fetishism," as the moni
Enlightenment. A double bind, again.13 tors of fetishistic illogic.16
The phrase "double bind" comes from Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Play training, an aesthetic education, habitually fails with flag and sac
Ecology of Mind, first published in 1972.14 To begin with, the double rament, throne and altar. Bateson described habit altogether unsentimen
bind was a way for him to understand childhood schizophrenia qualita tally. A practitioner's line connects him here to the Wordsworth of the
tively. Bateson was, however, aware that "both those whose life is en Lyrical Ballads, interested in undoing the bad episterna/affective conse
riched by trans-contextual gifts and those who are impoverished by trans quences of nascent capitalism, and to Gramsci looking to produce the
contextual confusion are alike in one respect: for them there is always or subaltern intellectual out of "the man [sic] of the masses" in a place and
often a 'double take.'" In other words, inhabiting thus the two ends of time where clan politics were not unknown.17 Here is Bateson:
the spectrum, the double bind could be generalized. At one end, the need
In the field of mental process, we are very familiar with this sort of econom
for cure; at the other, to recognize the healer. He was also aware of the
ics [of trial and error adaptability], and in fact a major and necessary saving
need for the catachrestic concept-metaphors for which there can be no
is achieved by the familiar process of habit formation. We may, in the first
literal referent. In his essay on "A Theory of Play and Fantasy" he defines
instance, solve a given problem by taking them out of the range of stochas
"the play of two individuals on a certain occasion"-play and therapy
tic operation and handing over the solutions to a deeper and less flexible
never distant from what we are calling an aesthetic education-by way of mechanism, which we call "habit." (EM, p. 257)
"a set-theoretical diagram.'' It is when "the mathematical analogy breaks
The passage above was written in 1959. Ten years later, at a sympo
down" that he systematically outlines how the therapist must work at
sium on the double bind, Bateson generalizes habit. Here the practitio
the limits of the double bind of the "abstract" and the "concrete" (EM,
ner/philosopher's connection is with the Freud who attempted to go beyond
pp. 186-187). In the contemporary context, we can call this the double
the pleasure principle to a more general "organic compulsion to repeat
bind of the universalizability of the singular, the double bind at the heart
[that] lie[s] in the phenomena of heredity and the facts of embryology"
of democracy, for which an aesthetic education can be an epistemological
(SE 18, p. 37). Here, again, is Bateson:
preparation, as we, the teachers of the aesthetic, use material that is his
torically marked by the region, cohabiting with, resisting, and accommo By superposing and interconnecting many feedback loops, we (and all other
dating what comes from the Enlightenment. Even this requires immense biological systems) not only so~ve particular problems but also form habits
institution-changing initiatives, thwarted by the bureaucratic spirit ac which we apply to the solution of classes of problems. We act as though a
whole class of problems could be solved in terms of assumptions or prem
cepted above and below. And yet, there is "the good teacher," "the good
ises, fewer in number than the members of the class of problems. In other
student," on the way to collectivity. Doubt and hope ... 15
words, we (organisms) learn to learn .... [The] rigidity [of habits] follows
In his essay Bateson spelled out the training of the imagination in
as a necessary corollary of their status in the hierarchy of adaptation. The
terms of a mise-en-abyme, an indefinite series of mutual reflections:
very economy of trial and error which is achieved by habit formation is only