Abstract
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak claims that while hiring cultural diversity is an improvement in comparison to all white male businesses, diversity policies applied in both the context of global capitalism and in particular of societies claiming to adhere to democratic principles need to be amended by more reflective notions of difference and by a consistent focus on those “who cannot be the subject or object of cultural pluralism, cultural diversity.” She insists that to become an advocate of social justice and “good globalization” we have to comprehend cultural diversity as going beyond mere identity politics. Spivak thus argues for a mind-set change—with the relevant question being: “how to construct oneself (as Knower) and the world (as known) in order to participate in the possibility of democracy.”
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Notes
- 1.
Adrienne Rich, “What Does a Woman Need to Know?” (Rich 1986, 1–10); I can no longer trace the “French Journal.”
- 2.
Like Donald Trump, Rutherford Hayes was elected by votes from the electoral college. In order to remain President, he had to come to an agreement with the Southern Democrats, to bring Reconstruction to an end. Incidentally, Anthony Appiah has recently suggested, in a meticulously researched book entitled Lines of Descent: W. E. B. DU Bois and the Emergence of Identity (Appiah 2014), that the idea of “Folk” came to Du Bois from Volk, when he studied at the Frederick-Williams University of Berlin (now Humboldt) in 1892–1894. Hans-Georg Gadamer said in 1988 that to speak of “being” with the definite article before it [das Sein] “is already a falsification.” Jean-Luc Nancy comments brilliantly that such a move would situate the Heidegger who was obliged to express “the most banal doxa upon the subject of capitalism and technology, the exhausting of the West and of the designation of a pernicious agent named ‘Jew’ …” (Derrida et al. 2014, 13, translation mine). We can show how this correction is operated by capital and thus forge a practice for using our complicity with capitalism to a good end. What difference does it make that English cannot use the definite article in the false Heideggerian way? Incidentally, if global capital simply emphasizes social productivity while hiding subalternization, this cannot happen. Marx knew this in “Trinity Formula:” those who promote the unlimited social productivity of capital alone can fortunately forget the theft of “surplus value” (Marx 1981, 3:953).
- 3.
“Just as nature has wisely divided the peoples from one another, whom the will of any state would seek to unite under it through deception or violence, even on the basis of international right, it also unites, by means of mutual self-interest, peoples whom the concept of cosmopolitan right would not have secured against violence and war. It is the spirit of trade, which cannot coexist with war, which will, sooner or later, take hold of every people. Since, among all of the powers (means) subordinate to state authority, the power of money is likely the most reliable, states find themselves forced (admittedly not by motivations of morality) to promote a noble peace and, wherever in the world war threatens to break out, to prevent it by means of negotiations, just as if they were therefore members of a lasting alliance. For the great alliances for the purpose of waging war, as is the nature of the matter, can arise only very rarely, and even more seldom can they succeed—In this way nature guarantees perpetual peace through the mechanism of human inclinations itself. To be sure, it does this with a certainty that is not sufficient to foretell the future of this peace (theoretically), but which is adequate from a practical perspective and makes it a duty to work toward this (not simply chimerical) goal” (Kant 2006, 92).
- 4.
Here is the theft of surplus-value described in strictly Marxian terms: “He discovered the secret of reproductive heteronormativity, that every excess in the human and upper primate emerges out of the differences between needing and making. Marx described it in human terms: the worker advances the capitalist his labor and the capitalist repays less then he gets out of it since the worker needs less than s/he makes. He also describes it in rational terms: labor power is the only commodity which, when consumed, produces value” (Spivak 2018b, 192).
- 5.
I felt the same gratitude on the occasion of the Kyoto Prize in 2012: “The stream of art – within which is included literature and music, today the filmic and the hypertextual – must flow forever; the practice of philosophizing must be passed on from generation to generation, so that the human mind is prepared to use the technological setting-to-work of science for the betterment of the world. Today, this is particularly urgent because the digital has all the power and beauty of the wild horse. Without adroit handling, it can be destructive. This is why the Inamori Foundation is altogether wise to include us among the much more powerful categories of Science and Technology.” https://www.kyotoprize.org/en/laureates/gayatri_chakravorty_spivak/; and for the invitation from the Coimbra University Centre for Social Studies, where I was able to speak on the following title: “Study, Know, Learn, Hear, Listen, Do? Humanities for Social Studies.”
- 6.
Reprinted in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation reprinted in Spanish translation in Criterio (Cuba); “A Borderless World?” Inaugural Lecture, Dabur Cluster of Excellence Series, Institute of Advanced Communication, Education, and Research, Pokhara University, Nepal, December 21, 2011; extensively revised version given at the Edward Said Memorial Conference, Treaty of Utrecht Commemoration Events, Centre for the Humanities, University of Utrecht, April 16, 2013; (2016, 47–60); reprinted in Shuddhashar online (2018c).
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Spivak, G.C. (2020). Scattered Speculations on Business and Cultural Diversity. In: Lütge, C., Lütge, C., Faltermeier, M. (eds) The Praxis of Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26078-1_8
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