revolution | fleurmach

Photo: Paul Botes, M&G

“Quite simply – and this is what I wish to discuss tonight in relation to the question of rage and violence – we are living in different times. Or at least, our time is disjointed, out of sync, plagued by a generational fault line that scrambles historicity.

“The spectre of revolution, of radical change, is in young peoples’ minds and politics, and it is almost nowhere in the politics of the anti-apartheid generation. In fact, even as they criticised young people just five years earlier for being apathetic and depoliticized, they have now thought student activists misguided, uninformed, and mad.

“You would think that it might be possible to resolve this difference in time by means of a careful reading of what is called the ‘objective conditions for revolution’: are we in fact in a time in which revolution is immanent? No matter the subjective experience of time – there must be a way of determining who has the better bearing on history, who can tell the time. What time is it? Yet to tell the time is a complex matter in this society.

“We are, to some degree, post-apartheid, but in many ways not at all. We are living in a democracy that is at the same time violently, pathologically unequal. Protest action against the government – huge amounts of it, what in most other places would signal the beginning of radical change – often flips into a clamour for favour from that very government. Our vacillations, contradictions and anachronisms are indication that what time it is, is open to interpretation.

“I want to argue that the comrades I have worked with in the student movement are not so much mad as they are time-travellers. Or rather, that their particular, beautiful madness is to have recognised and exploited the ambivalence of our historical moment to push into the future. They have been working on the project of historical dissonance, of clarifying the untenable status quo of the present by forcing an awareness of a time when things are not this way. They have seen things many have yet to see. They have been experimenting with hallucinating a new time…”

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Read the rest of this paper, delivered at the 13th annual Ruth First Memorial Lecture at Wits University in Johannesburg last night.

The Institute for Creative Arts is proud to present internationally renowned theorist, Professor Gayatri Spivak.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the most significant and influential literary theorists of our time.

Having first come to prominence with her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology in 1976, Spivak has since applied deconstructive readings to theoretical engagements and textual analyses including feminism, Marxism, literary criticism and postcolonialism – capturing complex theories that transgress disciplinary boundaries.

The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA, formerly GIPCA) in collaboration with UCT’s Black Academic Caucus (BAC) is honoured to present this esteemed academic and philosopher as part of the ICA’s Great Texts/Big Questions lecture series.

Of her address, entitled “Still hoping for a revolution”, Spivak writes:

Now that the first wave of “revolution” against decrepit empires, leading to state capitalism and vanguardism, is showing its deep fault lines, I reopen the question of Marx’s real project and focus on holistic education into citizenship – as the conjuncture has moved from the central agency of the industrial proletariat – as a robust substitute for both vanguardism and techniques of pre-party formation.

This is particularly interesting for me because I have myself learned from many mistakes made since 1992, when I presented the T.B. Davie Memorial Lecture in Cape Town on “Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality.” The general response, as I heard it reported, was “we already do this.” Yet, in 2002, Joan Vincent included the piece in her The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique, commenting that I had been “prescient.” I therefore hope that my audience, which will be different, will also have learned from past “mistakes.”

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is currently professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University where she founded the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her critical writings include Of Grammatology (1976), In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), The Post-Colonial Critic (1990), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1992), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), and Other Asias (2005).

The lecture, followed by an open question and answer session, will take place from 17:30 – 19:00 on Friday 22 July 2016 at Jameson Hall, University Avenue, University of Cape Town Upper Campus.

Refreshments will be served from 17:00.

No booking is necessary and all are welcome.

For more information, contact the ICA office: +27 21 650 7156 or ica@uct.ac.za