I am making these noises a quarter century too late (I began teaching in 1985). Perhaps the ghosts have begun to refuse, finally and definitively, to yet again return to their beds.

When I say ‘our pedagogic culture’, I mean a specific, limited and yet changing collectivity. It refers to the pedagogic culture of several (which is not ‘all’) departments of English, and particularly of the department of which I am a part. As well as a ‘parcel’ (having been ‘posted’ with a doctorate here, in Punjabi University, Patiala only).

From one pair of eyes to another, over a space of scarcely a few feet, I have often traversed vast spaces between passion and indifference and, maybe, unavowed refusal.

Are those at the receiving end of our pedagogic deliveries refusing to play the game? Or are they just plain stupid, too uncouth to appreciate the precious wares we are hawking? An impassioned response, an engagement –once in a while– comes like a hint of nirvana.

We do not ask ‘them’ (our students, our subjects): What do you need? What do you want? We do not even ask ourselves: What do they deserve? Indeed, we have majestically failed to devise a channel to enable the formulation of these questions or, for that matter, any basic questions.

Our liberal capitalist model of parliamentary democracy surely leaks quite liberally into our pedagogic models. And after neo-liberal re-engineering, the leakage has only become a flooding.

Democracy is what we will not discuss. Such horror we have of what I can only call, with a squint in the direction of Lacan and Zizek, the democratic real.

We operate between domination and hegemony, relying more on the former. If there is a word that defines our pedagogies rather honestly, it is ‘coercive’. When it comes to us, the distinction Althusser makes between the Repressive State Apparatuses and the Ideological State Apparatuses does not quite stand: we are practically less sophisticated than our counterparts in Western democracies. We weave endless funerary garments for the dead author but refuse to bury the good old ‘professor’, and would fain wear his decomposing skin like a prized gown. We admire those who speak of ‘speaking the truth to power’, but we have no ears for inconvenient and unsettling truths. We have absorbed theory –the subversive theory, revolutionary theory– like the Himalayas absorb an afternoon drizzle.

To a large extent, our ‘situated appropriations of theory’ have only demonstrated our knack for ‘globalising’ theory – by rendering it general and universal, tame and domesticated; in short, by taking all its rough, real edges off. But then this is the ineluctable punishment for the crimes of using theory as a substitute for thinking. Let me confess that I have certain rather crude suspicions about the radicalness of the Subaltern Studies project. I honestly feel, and I could be in fatal error, that Gramsci’s strategic reflections, a whole convoluted world of praxis, stands reduced to a nicely cut binary of the elite and the subaltern in the hands of Ranajit Guha and Co. I hope, and suspect, that some of the stakeholders in that Company have ears refined enough to catch the irony of their weirdly fated project. Published in English, by the Oxford University Press, the Subaltern Studies project always had a strikingly tell-tale ‘appearance’. Spivak’s suspicions were, unfortunately, too decently couched in jargon to achieve the desirable scale of impact. The very foundation of the Subaltern Studies project invited suspicion for lack of an adequate critical engagement with the complex problematic of hegemony as Gramsci articulates it. Was the project aimed at establishing in the domain of historiography the hegemony of a new ‘leading group’ over ‘the subaltern groups’ vis-à-vis ‘the ruling group/s’? If it was, who constituted this ‘leading group’? Or was it in effect so designed as to absorb resistances of the historiographically excluded (muted?) groups and to reinforce only the hegemony of the ruling group/s? I am afraid the way the conceptual framework of the project was laid out has irreparably impoverished, vulgarized and de-politicised, in a sense, the Gramscian project. As it is, instead of throwing a radical challenge to it, the Subaltern Studies project has turned out to be an extension of the hegemonic Western/colonial historiographic project. At best, it has remained an internal contestation within that project.

Theory has spawned its own mythology and its own priesthood. The reasons for this lie, arguably, in the inability of some theorists to renounce their enslavement to the metaphysics of transcendence. If theory was born of the itch (Michel Certeau’s ‘symbolic revolution’) to think thinking, the project in its several conceptions has obviously miscarried. One of those miscarriages today goes by the name of Subaltern Studies. And it is beginning to smother culture studies like the notorious congress grass.

But such fate was inevitable, given the original subalternist sin of reductively appropriating, to the point of misappropriating, Gramsci’s legacy of a struggle-in-the-making. In an ambivalent gesture of disavowal of the ‘elitist theory’, the subalternists set out on an empirical project, presided over by a diminutive and monstrous effigy of Gramsci, and they ended up reducing Gramsci’s praxis to a set of spectacles (that doubled as ‘blinkers’) in the name of theorizing, and doing so in the fashion of the pre-theory era. There is nothing, therefore, heart-breaking about the fate their project was logically programmed to enact: they had reduced and ‘globalised’ and colonized Gramsci’s legacy; their stillborn offspring had to be a monstrous cross-breed between metaphysics and empiricism, a monstrous universal of the immanent many. The subalternist machine crunched up the subaltern, vomiting forth a rather disembodied category in its name for the rites of seminarians (like us). Hostage to the mythology of theory, the Subaltern Studies project could not but have raised its own mythology on the graveyard of the ‘empirical’ subaltern.

Nevertheless, there are lessons to learn. What is ‘our’ pedagogic project in the departments of English? Did we ever map our project? Who are the subaltern in this scene? What is the character of the hegemony? Whose hegemony is it? Over whom? For what and for whom? And at what cost?

The hegemonic project in which we –the teachers, interpreters, critics– are the subaltern never succeeded in ‘hailing’ us completely and indubitably into any subject positions that would be uncontaminated by irony or parody or self-loathing concealed as self-arrogance. The wounds in these ‘subjects’ of the pedagogic apparatus, through which ‘being’ laughed at us, were never wholly sutured. We may not have explicitly protested our subalternisation, but we never really quite internalized the Western metropolitan hegemony either. In a way then, we have always been cultural translators (ambassadors? procurers?) with a bad conscience. And so we have been extraordinarily dedicated to the transmission of hegemonic pedagogies, having never really believed in them. Obviously then, we have not been wanting in the use of coercion.

However, our self-assigned project as agents of subalternisation has been often complicated and even frustrated by those at the receiving end vis-à-vis us. Indeed, ‘they’ have invited coercion to some extent. But in so doing, ‘they’ have also indicated their refusal to be ‘subjects’ of a certain hegemonic order.

If we can inscribe a strategic reading on the pedagogic scene as it obtains at this uncertain hour, we would not be paralysed by any confusion. We only have to listen to their desires, attend to their needs and help them be worthy of more and deserve better. Historical situations change: an active realization of this simple and fundamental truth (that drove Gramsci’s thought) could be enough to recall us to the battle that is gathering around us.

On the other hand, the refusal to see and actively realize this truth would be sufficient for us to flee the battlefield and seek comfort in the graveyard of our breast. But then the pedagogic scene would be not a scene of invention and birth, of rebirth and resuscitation. It would be, as it now probably is, a scene of sacrifice. Of a holocaust, with all the tearing ambivalence of the word intact and resounding.

 

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