Socratic Enunciations: Renegade Speech, Counterfeit Enlightenment

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF Bhisma Mago for the degree of Master of Arts in English presented on June 10, 2019. Title: Socratic Enunciations: Renegade Speech, Counterfeit Enlightenment. Abstract approved: ______________________________________________________ Elizabeth Sheehan In this two-article thesis, I argue that an opposition to Eurocentrism may be articulated without ethnic or identarian determinisms but through a critical engagement with the categories of ethics and truth in a global frame. I build upon the work of Frantz Fanon and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to accomplish a search for ethico-political subjectivities in the midst of deterministic and coercive discourses. In Article 1, I examine recent theories that have been formulated in response to postcolonialism. In rejecting identity as a matrix of resistance, I take pause to account for the specific burden of race and racialization in the west. I conclude by demonstrating that disavowal of determined identities may become a foundation to construct a counter-hegemonic global community. In Article 2, I attempt to theorize a solution for the high cost of ethico- political subjectivity by suggesting that classrooms may become sites where ethical self-articulation may be fruitfully practiced in a community. By closely looking at Lauren Cantet’s film The Class, I argue for the primacy of autonomy and intellectual freedom in enabling the emergence of ethico-political subjectivities. ©Copyright by Bhisma Mago June 10, 2019 All Rights Reserved Socratic Enunciations: Renegade Speech, Counterfeit Enlightenment by Bhisma Mago A THESIS submitted to Oregon State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Presented June 10, 2019 Commencement June 2019 Master of Arts thesis of Bhisma Mago presented on June 10, 2019 APPROVED: Major Professor, representing English Director of the School of Writing, Literature, and Film Dean of the Graduate School I understand that my thesis will become part of the permanent collection of Oregon State University libraries. My signature below authorizes release of my thesis to any reader upon request. Bhisma Mago, Author ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis is the result of the many conversations that I've had with the people sitting in this room today. I'd like to begin by thanking my advisor Elizabeth Sheehan, for her patience and careful guidance through what became an iterative thesis writing process. I want to thank Evan Gottlieb whose initial feedback during the prospectus meeting proved to be extremely valuable; the questions he raised helped me to reformulate the stakes of my work. I want to thank both Richmond Barbour and Yuji Hiratsuka for stepping into my committee on relatively short notice. I am extremely grateful for the friends I've made during this program. Much of what concerns this work was born in our private conversations. I am thankful for your brilliance but mostly for your willingness to listen to me endlessly complain. Specifically, Austin, for being a remarkable friend, never unwilling to have a 3am conversation. Brooke, for reminding me that the world indeed is batshit crazy and that our radical imagination is never quite radical enough. Jade, for our conversations on faith, the cosmos, mysticism. I have appreciated by-passing all the doom and gloom with hope. Finally, Kalli, who has endured the past few months with me as I worked on this project. Thank you for binge watching spy shows, driving me for late night hot chocolate, and for reminding me that graduating is indeed a good idea. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page 1 Introduction...………………………...………………………………………………………..1 A Seat in the Abandoned Theater...……………………………………………………...7 Overview………………………....……………………………………………………...11 2 After Postcolonialism: A Mad Man in No Man’s Land…………………………….................14 Ethical Subjects in Racist Societies……………………….……………….……...……..21 The High Cost…………………………………………………………….….……….….23 3 The Pedagogical Imperative…………...…………………….…………….…………………..28 Critique and Affect………………………….……………….…………………………..29 The Problem of the Head-Heart Binary…………………………………….……….…...32 Teaching Voltaire to “Ethnic” Kids……….……….……………...……………………..35 Maybe Your Books Are Shit…………………………………………….……………….40 4 Coda ……………………….………………….…………………………………………….....43 Works Cited ……………………….………………….…………………………………………44 1 Introduction “it is much easier to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.” —Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism The awareness that we live in a Eurocentric world posits ethical and epistemological burdens. Many theories that seek to account for present day globalization recognize these burdens. However, to actually overcome Eurocentrism, we must first note the empirical givenness of the world, what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls, its “contemporaneity” (2). That is, the first step toward abolishing Eurocentric frameworks is to disrupt and dismantle the opacity of Europe. Colonial discourse depends upon this opacity, a counterfactual belief that western traditions have developed and announced themselves independently from the forces of the globe. Many benevolent theories of globalization re-inscribe this counterfactual point by situating their analysis as if it were a crime scene. According to these theories, European traditions, canons, and ideas occupy the site of oppression that must be overcome through the centering of other traditions, canons, and ideas. In such an imagination, the globe is rearranged into polycentric factions, some villainous, other innocent. Not only is this vision factually erroneous, it is in fact also surreptitiously Eurocentric. According to these theories, the category of universalism, truth, and the human are European legacies that need to be dismantled. However, by apparently neutralizing these categories and giving way to ethnic and cultural identifications, the European subject reemerges as the only subject who may avail the possibilities of disavowal. Frantz Fanon pointed out in Black Skin, White Masks that it is through the “renunciation” (206) of cultural categories that one approaches the possibility of human community. But if this renunciation is 2 pragmatically permitted exclusively to the European subject, the Others of Europe becomes reduced to their cultural identity. Of course, in many examples, these cultural identities were formulated by the European colonial project as a displacement of European fears and desires. To become determined according to the rules of these cultural categories is to become subservient to a surreptitious and present Eurocentrism. This thesis seeks to undo such a surreptitious Eurocentrism by reclaiming the category of ethical subjectivity that is free to trespass cultural determinisms and investigate any philosophical value or claim. Bluntly then, this thesis argues against intellectual colonialism and for discursive freedom. Through the two articles, I situate and analyze ethical subjects who refuse identarian determinisms, instead choosing to articulate a vision of their individuality, their right to intellectual labor, their commitment to grieve the cultural other, etc. These choices have high political stakes and so I use the descriptor ethico-political to name this subject. I derive the foundations for the formulation of ethico-political subjectivity through a Fanon-Spivak trajectory of thought. Fanon, perhaps more than any other thinker, understood the desperate fatalisms that mark the lives of colonial subjects. By resolutely rejecting Negritude,1 Fanon embarks upon the formulation of ethico-political subjectivity. In “Can the Subaltern Speak,” Spivak famously asserts that “the subaltern cannot speak” (93) and that romanticizing subaltern epistemologies and politics reveal a subject who is “monolithic” and “mute” (66). In her later work, Spivak begins to clearly develop an ethico-political theory of the subject by announcing a framework of an aesthetic education. Here, she asserts the importance of approaching European ideas through “affirmative sabotage” (4) and of grasping the “vanishing 1 Negritude refers to the Francophone intellectual and artistic movement that celebrates Black culture and identity. At times, Fanon had an ambivalent relationship with negritude. For the bulk of time, he fiercely disavowed it as a compromised and limiting movement. 3 outlines” (2) of globalization. These foundations help me witness ethico-political subjects who renounce and disavow determined identities. Eurocentric determinisms lead to two modes of examining the world. One may simply be unapologetically Eurocentric; this mode is easier to recognize and overcome. However, a surreptitious Eurocentrism at times passes under the descriptor postcolonialism. Here, one may choose to examine the works of scholars like Fanon and Spivak but only through the presuppositions and concerns of the western subject. Deeply nuanced theoreticians are quickly romanticized and tokenized which in effect renders them “monolithic” and “mute.” The presumption here remains that because categories like universalism and truth must be exclusively European that postcolonial scholars must reject these categories uncritically. This leads to presumptuous reading practices that situate postcolonial scholars as exclusively reacting to European thought. I am not suggesting that my conception of the ethico-political subject exactly matches Fanon’s and Spivak’s formulation. My point is that postcolonial thought does not need to be monolithic, in its claims or stakes. This is

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