The Silence of the Subaltern Student ANIKET JAAWARE It would not be improper to begin with a little story, a story significant not for its uniqueness, but for the number of times it is repeated in the lives of teachers of English. I tell this story also as a mark of gratitude to my undergraduate and graduate students in Fergusson College’. It is a common given for teachers of English in urban centres of education, to find that their classes are divided from the word go, into two groups who define themselves as essentially different from each other: the urban and the rural students. This divide is also isomorphic with some other differences—upper middle-class and lower-middle and working class students, the convent/English medium and the “vernacular” students, the “well-mannered” and the “ill-mannered”, unconsciously- spitting-in-the-class type of students, etc. This divide is a real one, in the sense that it is seen, by both the groups and by the This is a condensed version of a paper presented at the Subaltern Studies/ Anveshi Conference on Subalternity and Culture held in January 1993. I am for the comments I received from various people during the presentation and after it. I take it that the term “subalter” is to be understood differentially and contextually. I am more than open to correction here, and throughout the rest of the paper. 1 Since I have mentioned a specific college, it may seem that I am talking about “my own experiences”, empirically gathered from the various places I have worked. I submit in all humility that this would minimize, through a tion” and “subjectivization”, the enormity of the problem that [ am trying to talk about. This does not mean that I am “satisfied” with this particular formulation.108 Subject to Change teachers, as an uncrossable divide. The teacher, addressing the class as a whole, and not discrete individual students, has to acknowledge and then promptly glide over this divide somehow (since in most colleges the strength of the “Compulsory English” class is above 50—in many cases the strength on the roll-call is around 100-120 with about 60-70 regularly present in the class). This is the background to the story. Noticing that there were some “rural/vernacular” students who did seem to want to be interested in literary texts, mainly in English, in spite of the language barrier they themselves perceived, I tried to cajole and coax them into talking about what they felt about English Literature—Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Eliot—the “English” English Literature canon in short, or any element thereof that interested them. Like other teachers, I am used to students remaining silent when asked to respond, but the silence that followed my secretly desperate urging was different from the usual silence of students not wishing to answer or speak, or of students who were disinterested in the whole scenario. I had to abandon the issue quite untactfully (because the issue could not be abandoned without hurting these students somewhere), deciding to take it up at some other more opportune moment. After the class, at the door, they came up to me, so I started talking to them, switching to their mother tongue—and mine. I was hoping for some eloquent expressions, in the lively rhythms of several dialects of Marathi. These, however, were not forthcoming, and the silence resumed. The story ends this way: It so happened that one day, the “urban” group did not attend and only this group was present. Thinking I could now reopen the issue, I pressed them to talk about any aspect of the discipline, in any language, provided I too understood it. They all spoke a little, expressing their unease and mild anger at the divide. I asked them if they had received any help from the other group with their studies, whether they were helped in any way to get through the examinations. They were not. I asked them about the teachers—and of course now we were speaking in Marathi. After a silence, one of them said—and the sentence does not translateAniket Jaaware 109 well—"Sir, we are not seen by them”. Permit me to provide a Hindi equivalent: and even this does not capture the dry, matter-of-fact style in which the sentence was delivered. Taking my cue from this story, I want to explore a few ideas. But first a word about why I think this scenario is significant. It repeats, I think, the complex scene among various oppositional structures: urban/rural, dominant/subaltern, colonizer/colonized, legitimized intelligence /illegitimized-power-to-think, privileged/ underprivileged etc. It is instructive to note the reactive behaviour of these students when they have to mix with privileged students who usually belong to the upper middle-classes. One form of their reactive behaviour is an insistence on a “rural”, and more significantly, “non-western” identity. This may mean, in practice, nothing more than a particular form of dress—usually a kurta-pajama (or some regional equivalent). Another form is an overpowered attempt to be “more western” than those “convent” people—this is, say, the form of wearing a tie, or in extreme cases, a three-piece-suit. I should mention that this usually happens not in regular, quotidian classes, but in extra lectures, guest lectures and welcome and farewell parties. I want to suggest that several problems crystallize themselves around this scene, this sediment. Urban “civilization” and rural “primitivity” encounter each other, the dominant and the subaltern have to face each other, the intelligent and the unintelligent have to talk to each other here in this location. Behind the urban “civilization” stands the role that the formations of cities play in the development of capitalism (as also the role that capitalism plays in the development of cities)*, 2 What was for me a quick review and description of the problem is to be found in Holton RJ, Cities, Capitalism and Civilization (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986). I have also found useful Davis Drakakis-Smith, The Third World City (London: Methuen, 1987)110 Subject to Change behind the rural primitivity stand “agrarian” modes of production. Behind the “intelligent” stands the educational and academic infra-structure, legitimizing only certain forms of uses of brain-power as “intelligence”. Behind all that stands modernity and orthodoxy, westernization and Indian nationalism seeking support in some “Indian essence”. However, I want to try to hear the subaltern students’ silence with the oblique diaphragm, so that the spherical waves that this silence sends out are encountered at right angles, poised for maximum listening. A cautionary word is required, however, before I proceed: the situation I described is found mainly in urban centres of education to which the rural gentry sends its children for “higher education”. I think it is possible to understand the “rural” type of students as subaltern students in this particular location, presuming that subalternity is to be understood differentially. But we must not forget that in their home contexts, these students usually belong to the landed peasantry, and wish to change its future through “higher education”. In the village, then, these students are not subaltern. On the other hand, in the “urban” context these students are not merely subaltern; quite often they fall below the threshold even of alterity—they are not even experienced as the “other”, so to say. I think that “being-below-the-level-of-alterity” is one of the meanings of the sentence “We are not seen by them”. Academic Knowledges/Specialized Discourses I want to say that the silence of the subaltern student comes about through the hegemony of what I shall call “academic knowledges”, and I want to argue that academic knowledges and their special cases found in specialized discourses are constituted, not only through an exercise of power, but also through a suppression of what I shall variously and interchangeably call “everyday language”, “writing ofAniket Jaaware 111 pathemata”, or embodiment®. Let me briefly try to sketch out what I want to mean by these terms. (I shall be more than willing to change these if better ones are found for what I am trying to talk about.) If we hear a non-educated person's use of language, what is striking in it is the lack of self-reflexivity. This is not to say that the non-educated person does not, from an optical self-proximity‘, choose words, but that this person does not consider language as a problem—the various issues of referentiality, of linguisticality, of textuality even, are non-existent for this person—so immersed is she in language. The lack of self-reflexivity is what makes it possible to think of this language use as “spontaneous” or as “expression”; it is what makes it possible to understand language as a “transparent medium” that would take us directly to the “intended meaning”®. 3 1am still trying to refine the formulation of what I wanted to say, in a small presentation made to a group of friends, which I tried to refine further in an essay “The Pathemata of Everyday Life and the Academy” in the Journal of Contemporary Thought, 1992. 1 would like to believe/ pretend that I have stumbled across a problem that I cannot solve by myself, and whatever terms I use are strictly temporary. “Ttake my clue from Derrida’s treatment of “proximity” in the essay “The Ends of Man”, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 109-136; 126ff in particular. Here too I am more than open to correction and/or suggestion as to this particular usage. * b not necemery 60 ernanarste tn dale GIB specific probleme with thie notion of language as an “expression” or a “medium”. Beginning perhaps with Frege, through various detours we come to the contemporary scene dominated by an appreciation of the fact that language may not be any of these. This appreciation of the non-transparency of language is what I am trying to indicate by the term “self-reflexivity”. This is by now a fairly well-rehearsed story—of literary criticism, of philosophy, and several other disciplines. Thus the various notions of philosophy, and several other disciplines. Thus, the various notions of languages—"foregrounded” (Prague School), “centripetal symbols” (Northrop Frye), the even earlier “psuedo-statements” (I. A. Richards), and the phenomenological “quasijudgements” (Roman Ingarden); and the general structuralist axiom that the speaking subject is a function of language, all stressing that language is not “transparent”, not merely a medium. Thus Janguage becomes a thematizable entity. The various stages of a similar journey, for Anglo-American, analytical Philosophy, are welldocumented in Richard Rorty’s The Linguistic Turn, see note 7 below.112 Subject to Change When the non-educated grandmother tells us of the times of the British, the time when her husband died and how when the hair on her head was being shorn, the razor hurt the scalp, the language she uses is not self-reflexive, the mediation of language, of the signatory systems of gestures, of sobs, whispers, is not thematizable, I suspect. This is how I think her ek-sistence® overflows the boundaries of a contained, reflective, self- proximity. I cannot emphasize enough that the paradigm for language use that I have in mind here is that of the uneducated person’s use of language. A participatory and performative ethic is an integral part of this paradigm, I would even say it is a condition of possibility for it. One example that I could give, as partially illustrative of what I mean by participatory and performative ethic is the performance of a dashagvtaar, a “folk” tradition of dramatic performances. The organization of space in these performances is interesting because the space of performance and the space of the audience is not separated by any imagined or real barriers, the same organization can be found I think in the yakshagana of Karnataka. In the tamasha of Maharashtra the audience and the performers usually have a dialogue with each other, the performers improvising obscene/sexual innuendos on the spot. What this means for me is that there is no dividing line between the performance and the “real life” of the audience. It is tempting to say, so I will say, that there is no “disconnection” (aesthetic or philosophical, phenomenological or otherwise) between “life” and “art” here, they are mutually permeable, are “congenital” and coterminate. As against this, “academic | suspect that there is a fundamental relation between self-reflexivity and self proximity. For another perspective on the principle of self-reflexivity, see Foucault's essay “The Art of Telling the Truth”, in Michel Foucault, Politics, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Lawrence D Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan and others (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 86-95, and also “Critical Theory /Intellectual History”, particularly pp. 25-26. © Derrida gives, in the footnotes for “The Ends of Man” quotations from which need not be repeated here. Particularly the following footnotes: 25, p. 129; 34, p. 131.Aniket Jaaware 113 knowledges” and “specialized discourses” on/of language and knowledge can be characterized as self-reflective, and self-proximate—a condition conveniently signified by Rorty’s term, “the linguistic tumn”.” This situation and this condition can be expressed perhaps in an equation: Language of Knowledge = Knowledge of Language ‘Compared to this self-reflexivity, the grandmother's language use now seems at best “pre-critical”. The question that I wish I could formulate better is: “Does our apparently sophisticated understanding of language and semiosis help us understand and relate to—relate more than understand—the grandmother's language use?” Or to put it differently, is there a place in our academic discourses for the outflow of her ek-sistence, overflowing the boundaries of her self, whatever that is? It would not be sufficient here to say that it is language that speaks her and not she who speaks language, neither is it useful I think to explain her pathemata in psychological and/or psychoanalytical terms; for I want to be able to concentrate on her pathemata, not pull away from them. Neither is it sufficient to say that it is an onto-theology which makes her discourse what(ever) it is. How are we to understand tears, smiles, and other pathemata? It is obviously possible to see these as possessing only a differential identity—tears as differing (in terms of form and matter), from the configuration of skin moved by the muscles underneath into a rictus of laughter. But there is a problem. Tears are the pathema, are they not? Can we think of tears as signifiers of something else? Tears do not signify and /or mean suffering, or some “internal” affect of which they are an “external expression”; they are suffering. Yeats has a line which puts well what I am trying to say: “How shall we know the dancer from the dance?”®, What I want to say can also be put in this manner: 7 Rorty Richard, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967) 8 Yeats W. B., The Tower (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 60.14 Subject to Change tears and smiles are an embodiment of an overflow of a self that is not proximate or adequate to itself, and embodiment, in as much as these pathemata are actions “a man might play”, as Hamlet has it (and my allusion runs the risk of being contaminated by that androcentric phrase), of moral systems and their interpretations. The word embodiment has to be understood here with the following qualifications: that there is no precedent spirit that is descendently embodied, and that there is always a certain type of physical materiality to this embodiment, and that pathemata themselves may perhaps possess only a differential identity. In order to clearly distinguish this usage of the word, perhaps it is advisable that we put it under erasure.’ What is in a pathema, then, is a certain outflow of a self that is not proximate and adequate to itself—a self that is ek-sistent, to use Heidegger's term; a self that stands outside, perhaps ahead of itself.” I shall also use the term “everyday language” to indicate this connexus of ideas. Since my example was deliberately evocative of specific pathemata, let us return to the subaltern student, the “not-urban”, the “ill-mannered”. I think in their language use as well we will find the same connexus of ideas; the characteristics of everyday language are also the characteristics of the subaltern students’ language. As I said earlier, when confronted with academic knowledges, and those who dispense academic knowledges through specialized discourses, the subaltern student is mostly silent. There are two chief users of specialized discourses—firstly the pressure group, the “urban”, convent and/or English-medium educated students, and then of course the teachers of English. This connexus, and all that it implies, I shall indicate by the term “the discourse of English”. As to the formation of the discipline of English, the pre-history and history of it has been variously ° Not for a moment do I deceive myself that “erasure” is to be used merely for distinguishing usages. However it does seem usefully ironic while doing that—and much more. + This is an improper use of Heidegger's term perhaps, for it is possible that within the general framework of Being and Time, the “grandmother” as I describe her would be exiled to the realm of the “inauthentic”.Aniket Jaaware 115 documented; and the role the discipline plays need not be spelt out here. When confronted with the specialized discourse of English, the subaltern student tends to marginalize himself/herself. I want to say that the mega-O of the silence of the untrained is the Omega" of academic knowledges, in the sense that it is the (excluded) limit and the differential condition of possibility. (It should be noted that the problem of teaching English is embedded within the larger problem of the function of ‘educational systems and institutions in society.” I am working with the assumption that what happens in the discipline of English, with its gruesome heritage in India, will have something to tell us about these larger issues as well, at the same time I also want to keep our attention on the interaction between academic knowledges and the subaltern student.) Who does the subaltern student think of as dominant, oppressive? Amongst the teachers of English, particularly in urban centres of education, the majority of English teachers are middle-class men and women (I do not think we need a survey as evidence for this observation). Many of them are convent/ English-medium trained, in fact, in many colleges, this is one of the required qualifications for employment. It is these middle and upper-middle-class male and female teachers, who do not “see” the subaltem student. For them these students are, as I said, even lower than the excluded but perceived “other”, they are below alterity. In class, such teachers mostly ignore the 1 This isthe igus class, (X ing, populsty) I poet out the name here at the risk of sounding condescending, because it is not a figure used often. I hope I am forgiven for this. 2 An analysis of the educational institutions will have to consider them as ‘other themes and ways of analysing them. It is I think a condition of possibility of our continued and maintained existence in such institutions that we think of them as at least partly good. On the issue of academic discourse I have found Basil Bernstein’s book interesting and useful: Basic/ Bernstein, The Structuring of Discourse, Vol. IV: Class, Codes and Control, (London: Routledge, 1990).116 Subject to Change subaltem student, and teach their Miltons and Kafkas as if these students did not exist at all. If they are approached for advice, “difficulties” etc., they make short work of such students, one of the commonest manouevres being: “When you don’t even understand the basics, how can I explain these complex things to you? You can’t understand them without knowing what you were supposed to know in your 12th”. In short, “Don’t bother me with your unintelligent problems”. An equivalent of this is “Improve your grammar first, then come to me”. I cite only the more tolerant—and tolerable—versions; there are variations on the “don’t bother me” theme which are far more insulting and offensively self-righteous. Sometimes there is also the arch “I don’t understand your pronunciation” which of course closes down all communication. It would not be correct however, to speak as if oppression is the only action performed on the subaltern students. The dominant group reacts in ways that could roughly be characterized as follows. The first is what could be called indigenous neo-colonial condescension/contempt for the “unintelligent”. Having eaten of the fruits of capitalist development and having apotheosized himself/herself as the intelligent cream of society, the bourgeois conservative or liberal-humanist teacher can afford to be contemptuous of these “primitive”, “rural”, “ill-mannered” students. The other is an equally interesting action, which I would call indigenous post-colonial benevolence. There are many teachers who would help these students to improve their grammar, help them get through examinations, dictate notes to them and so on, (even go to the exceptional length of taking “extra” lectures for them!). I am not sure that this is very much better than the first condescension, for I suspect that it reproduces “First World” benevolence to the “Third World”, without questioning the notions of development, intelligence, success that go into the situation. It would not be correct, also, to portray the subaltemn students as if they were merely some kind of substance that is always acted upon. Some of their reactions I have already indicated.Aniket Jaaware 117 What I want to stress now is the fact that these students do marginalize themselves, without in fact questioning the legitimation-structure that authorizes their teachers to behave in the way they do. It would seem, prima facie, that the wearing of certain types of clothes is an act of rebellion or militancy, within the limited social situation and the limited vocabulary of action that is available to the students. But these are nothing more than default options structurally built into the program, reproductions of ideas that came up first in reaction to British rule (positing an Indian essence, usually on the basis of religious scriptures and mythology and then using that to counter the challenge, or becoming more British than the British themselves in order to ‘overcome the challenge).!3 There is a certain kind of failure on the part of these students, which I think could be called a cognitive failure, because the first thing that they could have done (from our “well-developed, individualized and individuated” point of view, of course), was to cognize that they were in an oppressive situation, first identify the oppressors, and then identify the specific mechanisms and instruments of oppression, instead of marginalizing themselves and more or less accepting their position in the class as the “unintelligent” ones. The failure on the part of the oppressive teachers is I think clear enough and could be called recognitive failure, in the sense that these teachers do not recognize the signs of unease, the face turned away, the desire to speak, almost cancelled out by the anxiety about English that charms the tongue into silence, or into stuttering. Please note that these terms (cognitive, recognitive, reactive behaviour etc.) I am more than willing to abandon, (if better ones are found) and am using them only to name the failures, so that they are recognized as such. On the other hand, imagine other kinds of ‘encounters—imagine a university teacher of English, armed with the latest in the discipline, whatever that happens to be, meeting %3 Eagleton, Jameson, Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, intro. Seamus Deane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990) has an interesting perspective on this issue. See particularly the introduction, pp. 7-17.us Subject to Change a housewife who is addicted to Mills & Boon. Simply put, in all probability there may not be any encounter at all, the teacher will not speak about his/her professional interests, and the housewife, in terrible anxiety, may avoid any mention that she reads books—she might even try to hide the Mills & Boom she got from the circulating library at the comer, hide it under the Femina or the newspaper. This anxiety I think comes from her self-marginalization—or rather—is her self-marginalization (“is”, pretending here that there is no problem in using so simply the Third Person Singular of the Present Indicative of the verb “to be”). Let me try to put the question bluntly. When we, as academics, claim to know literature (and who would cross swords with us about literature?) the claim also implies that we know more than the untrained. What are the criteria which legitimize our discourse on/of literature as knowledge? Further, presuming that there is an exercise of power too involved in the “enforcement” of these criteria, are there ways in which we can refrain from this negative exercise of power, and not disempower students? I also want to ask another question. Would it be correct to say that the auto-tritique of the discipline of English Literature, as it has emerged in India and elsewhere, this self-analysis of the discipline, has been helpful to subaltern students? Radicality in the Academy With the post-structuralist critique of disciplines and of “the subject”, indeed with the coming of post-structuralism in general, some members of the academy have been radicalized, in as much as they would like to analyse, serially or simultaneously, the historical or philosophical or politico- ideological roots of their disciplines. It is an interesting question whether this critique is accessible to those who are most likely to benefit from it. It is not an unimportant aspect of the critique that it can be embraced for its “avant-garde” qualities, or as theAniket Jaaware 19 “in-thing” in terms of academic scholarship. Be that as it may, I find it more interesting to try to understand whether those students that I have tried to speak of (please note that I am not speaking for them—but this denial may imply that it is possible to speak for them which I do not accept) can make use of the critique of power and ideology, of metaphysics etc. What are the conditions for this critique to be accessible? A prime condition is the knowledge of a Western language, English or French or German, or American. This they themselves would say they do not fulfil, to begin with. Another condition is access to books that contain these ideas, or access to persons who would talk about them. This would again require that the students be placed in centres of education where these persons are employed usually, and not all urban centres of education have such libraries or such staff. In short, I think, the critique is not available to them. When radical teachers in privileged centres of education try to hand down some of these ideas, the greatest danger is that these would be “taken down” , much in the way students are liable to “take down” as the “official”, “legitimized” view many of the things that a teacher might say about literature—taken down from what they themselves call “the exam point of view”. This may be the danger in prescribing courses in which we include, say, Foucault's essay “What is an Author”, or one of the more accessible essays by Derrida, Lacan, Althusser or Gramsci. This would make me say, temporarily, because that is how I see it right now, that the critique is contained by the political safety-valve of the academy. I do not wish to see this entirely negatively—as long as there is some place where the critique can flourish, there is always the hope that it will multiply itself (and indeed it is already beginning to—one may come across elements of an explicitly post-structuralist vocabulary in Debonair coccassionally—“phallogocentrism” is a prime candidate for such occurrence—but Debonair too is a safety-valve). All the more ¥ For an interesting account of Playboy, see Catharine MacKinnon, 1987. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) “More Than Simply a Magazine: Playboy's Money”, pp. 134-145, and passism.120 Subject to Change need, I think, to ask whether the critique is available in such a manner that it will empower the students to represent themselves more positively, without giving in to bourgeois individualism (the three-piece suit variety of resistance contains this element too), or without becoming nationalist, or religious fundamentalists? Or, equally importantly, without blocking the pathematic outflow of their selves by an act of self-marginalization which forces them into a self-reflexivity that merely reinforces their self-marginalization? I want the possibility to be considered, the allusively Nietzschean possibility, that in demolishing the specialized person we shall have demolished the lay-person too. If this is indeed possible there would be no disconnections and/or supersession amongst academic knowledges, academic radicality and the lay-person. Which would also mean that the road to social action, which is currently fairly problematic for academic knowledges, would be opened, and radicality in the academy would no longer be contained within the safety-valve of a specialized vocabulary of academic knowledges. This is how perhaps we could translate our specializations into vernacular languages and action. The demolition of the specialized person can also take the form of what Gayatri Spivak calls “unlearning our privileges”, except for the slight problem that there may be the underprivileged who wish first to learn the privileges which we would feign unlearn. Nevertheless, given the fact of our privileges, we do need to unlearn those that we wittingly or unwittingly enjoy. Let me briefly summarize what I have been trying to say. In the context of knowledge, I identified the professional academic as the dominant, and the lay person as the subaltern, of which the “rural” student in the compulsory English class in urban colleges is a subclass, so to say. I did not enumerate the dominance that academics explicitly and implicitly exercise, for it is quite obvious. I also noted that in the case of the subaltern student there are certain failures which maintain subalternity, and that this type of student does not have access to theAniket Jaaware 121 discourse of militancy which the subaltern groups studied by the Subaltern Studies Collective seemed to have. This might be a result of strengthened hegemonies in the contemporary social configuration. I also mentioned failures on the part of the dominant group of English teachers and tried to broach the issue of radicality’in the academy, and its efficacy as the nascent or not-so-nascent agent of social change. I suggested that perhaps if the distinction between academics and lay-persons is demolished, it would be possible to increase the efficacy of political interventions from specialized knowledges. This would require translations, first and foremost, I think, of our ideas into languages acceptable and accessible to the so-called lay-person, without making that lay-person into an academic. Which would mean that the onus of change is on academics rather than on the lay-persons; who in any case are trying to change themselves into academics through education. This would mean that academics would have to give up the security and reassurance of superiority, and the social position afforded to them by their specialized knowledges and the languages that they use. Which does not mean that I am suggesting that they give up their jobs (that would be too Gandhian an expectation and idea), but that in interactive situations they.could attempt to disempower themselves, and for a change, exchange power for powerlessness. I want the possibility to be considered of changing the language of academic knowledges in such a way that it helps the subaltern students represent themselves, and not remain locked in the stereotype impressed upon them by their encounter with academic knowledges. I am also saying that it would be wrong to place the responsibility for this change on these students. This leads to what I think of as the English teacher's dilemma. Lemma one, “I must help these students get through the exams. Getting through exams requires not only that they write answers in ‘correct’ English but also that their answers display the expected value-systems”. Lemma two, “I need to question the values encoded in my discipline and I must also enable the12 Subject to Change students to question these values”. The way out of this dilemma is not easily found, for it would be an injustice, I think, to deny the students their right to learn whatever they want to, even if that means an indoctrination into traditional English literature. It might seem as if the dilemma is not a real one, for what is to prevent the teacher from doing both—teaching say, Milton, in such a way that the students write what is expected of them by conventional standards, and at the same time criticizing those conventional standards? Apart from the difficulty of actually being able to do this, each time we teach in a class, day in and day out, there is the important task of being sensitive to what Derrida says about ending up reproducing the system that we want to subvert: ...But the “logic” of every relation to the outside is very complex and surprising. It is precisely the force and the efficiency of the system that regularly change transgressions into “false exits”. Taking into account these effects of the system, one has nothing, from the inside where “we are”, but the choice between two strategies: a. To attempt an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts and the original problematic, by using against the edifice the instruments and the stones available in the house, that is, equally, in language. Here one risks ceaselessly confirming, consolidating...that which one allegedly deconstructs. The continuous process of making explicit, moving toward an opening, risks sinking into the autism of the closure. b. to decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion, by brutally placing oneself outside, and by affirming an absolute break and difference....thereby inhabiting more naively and more strictly than ever the inside one declares one has deserted...the simple practice of language ceaselessly reinstates the new terrain on theAntiket Jaaware 123 It goes without saying that these effects do not suffice to annul the necessity for a “change of terrain”. It also goes without saying that the choice between these two forms of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique. A new writing must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which amounts to saying that one must speak several languages and produce several texts at «because what we need, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, is a change of “style”, and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural.'> This is where the issue of the language of knowledge and knowledge of language re-enters. Permit me to indulge in some perhaps unnecessary axiomatics, for its welcome brevity—and a low-level change of style: subversion performed in a specialized language is inherently a failure—the more subversive you want to be, the more specialized you have to be, the more specialized you are, the more you are segregated from the establishment that you want to subvert and from those who you would want to be your accomplices. You cannot subvert an establishment from which you have become segregated. It is of course possible to say that what I have been calling academic knowledges and specialized discourses are non-‘existent—in the sense that anybody can learn those languages and acquire those knowledges. Apart from the fact that the subaltern students eminently fail to do these things, there is also the question whether the difference between everyday language and specialized discourse, say, the discourse of English, is one of degree or of kind. I have throughout the paper construed it to be a difference of kind. That is a political construal, for construing it otherwise would glide over the socially operative difference that is visible in the 35 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 135. It is thus/hence that I would like to pretend, “brutally ” that it is possible to change the languages through which we relate to the subaltern student, and that it is possible to change the languages with which the conservative bourgeois teachers relate to these students.124 Subject to Change self-marginalization of the untrained, the non-specialized, the subaltern’®, 16 The other construal, wherein it is possible to argue that the difference is not of kind but degree, runs as follows: “What are you talking about? Was not Newton a common average man before he became a specialized scientist? And what is his theory but a mathematical, geometrical, dynamic description of what everybody knows, the physical properties of objects, in fact an expression of natural laws that you have always known anyway? Could all those machines that were built before Newton be built without a knowledge of dynamics? What you have been calling “specialized knowledge"/“academic discourses” are nothing more than refinements of everyday language—and this is true for all disci- plines”. ‘Apart from the fact that representations of scientists and philosophers have been deployed in culture to make brain power conform or aspire to a certain concept of “intelligence”, the political insensitivity of such a view should be obvious, for the “refinement” view does not seem to be sensitive to the fact that “refined” knowledges are oppress some people. ‘There is however, a point, implicit, in such a construal—specialized dis- ‘courses become specialized discourses in history—what was non-specialized becomes specialized through a certain course that history takes, and it is the material and cultural conditions of that history which need to be analysed, rather than positing an absolute difference between the two. I suppose I have to agree here—confessing that I find myself incapable of undertaking, that analysis. { would also like to say that shifting the source of the oppres- sion into history can often divert attention from what could be called “cur- rent” formations of oppressive systems. T have talked here mainly of the need for teachers to be sensitive to the issues. A similar responsibility lies upon students—they too would have to make sure that they behave “responsibly”—responsible to themselves, to their own future—and perhaps to the fyture in which they shall inherit the institutions which “finish” them. This look to the future could involve, for ‘example, an insistence on having a say in the formations of syllabi—at least 4s the right of consumers of education. Which would also mean that they ‘would have to be able to argue with the powers that form the syllabi, and in order to win the argument, would have to “know” more than these pow- ers, and without doubt, this “knowledge” would have to be obtained by them “outside” of the educational institutions, out of their own reading and thinking. Appropriate to the strengths of the students, their responsibility is far greater.