Final Comments

Abstract

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• Final Comments
• Gayatri Spivak (bio)

Thank you. Our task is to think about the possible role of the humanities and qualitative social sciences in the context of the climate disaster.

I teach the humanities. My entire intellectual efforts are focused on the distinction that I have learned, that even the qualitative social sciences must make some kind of truth claim, that is to say produce verifiable knowledge; whereas the humanities—non-analytic (qualitative) philosophy and literature—are about the practice of learning. The repeated practice of learning is what we see in the cultures that are based on mnemic languages, that is to say—languages that are written on the memory rather than on material things like paper. We generally call them oral languages, and today we call the people who use only mnemic languages illiterate, but in fact one might say that the digital has finally caught up with them, writing on “memory.”

Speaking speculatively, one might say that these mnemic languages can possibly produce social formations and cultural formations that are contaminated by no more than the practice of learning, because with a mnemic language you can’t leave material evidence. This is not Plato’s position against writing that Jacques Derrida undid. I am speaking about an epistemological practice where the humanities may be said to have a methodological affinity with the mnemic languages.

I ask my students not to take notes because I want to see how much I have been able to teach so that they retain something the next day, so that something gets written on memory. The practice of learning.

This simply emphasizes that the worst victims of climate disasters are quite often dependent upon mnemic languages and training in the humanities’ epistemological practice might help us to approach them.

This invites us to rethink the academy’s role in making lasting change. Not just material policy changes to undo the Anthropocene while sustaining smart capitalism, but sustaining climate reversal epistemologically as well.

When my students come into my class these days, they’re reading mangas. Graphic material is fantastic, of course. But to pick up language signals so that you identify with what you’re reading, gives you practice to “read” the mnemic subaltern. It is only thus that the humanities classroom gives you a practice of learning where you surrender rather than control, summarize, relate to historical examples, codify, recommend, defend, apply.

We have to rethink the academy. If we start from where we are—with the humanities trivialized—we will not be able to read deep history, geological history rather than our own, in any way but as an object of knowledge. [End Page 115]

This is the way in which today’s major world change calls on us to rethink the academy: production of knowledge held in the epistemological practice of the humanities. Another thing that we really have to fight as academics against climate disaster is smart capital. Greed, the basic human affect, lost us our world.

Over against the smart rationality of greed-turned-capital, Thangam Ravindranathan gives us the protection of the epistemology of superstition, it’s a wonderful word, she’s got a wonderful idea there. Here is a paragraph by her on superstitious reading, sent by email:

There is a whole constellation of thinkers who have sensed the critical potential in the notion of superstition, not for any particular contents or postulates it may describe but for the claim to “unreasonable thought” that such a category names, and names precisely from without and as something defeated by reason. To read superstitiously is to read the novel not as blindly bound to the concerns of the productive and interiorized bourgeois human, but as stubbornly, “unreasonably” alive with other kinds of attentions and attachments to places and things. Superstitious reading understood in this sense may in fact be a mode of reading that all novels, on some level, ask of us.

We must remember that it’s a romance European word. A rethought Comparative Literature would be mindful that in the world’s wealth of languages we seek the difference between a sustained practice of superstition and rationality. Superstitious reading is a difficult thing to simply...