//////// RESIDENCY
Written by JOHANNA GUSTAVSSON ©
___Like a thief in the night
Excerpts from a performative lecture held at Rum46.
In our relationship you are theory and I am practice. When I talk to you about my experiences of class you answer by referring to Gramsci’s texts, written in the beginning of the 1900. Which you, of course, have read. To understand class. I find it strange that you, when you hear me talk about my experiences, instead of asking me about it, refer me to a text you read. I really appreciate the tips but I wonder why you are not more interested in hearing what I have to say? Why you prefer consulting a man who lived about a hundred years ago instead of someone living together with you, here and now? To me, that is the whole difference between theory and practice.
Remember—there cannot be theory without practice—read theory without respect for the theorist ‘cause the philosophers have only interpreted the world—its changing it that counts.
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Gramsci means that the only way to break hegemony is creating a new one, meaning—the working class needs to create its own hegemony. This is performed through an ideological reprogramming in two steps;
1) the underprivileged group needs to admit to their position as oppressed before they can get out of the situation. Now, a position as oppressed does not automatically mean that you identify as, or are being identified as, oppressed or stigmatized, that’s the very phenomenon that is keeping us down in the first place. Oppressed groups are a “natural” part of power imbalance and this functions as long as the oppressed don’t protest and that’s why it’s so important to acknowledge and talk about the inferior position without shame or having others name it whining or jealousy when it’s really about political injustice.
2) the privileged group needs to learn to listen, understand its privileges and accept to lose them. And of course, the working class needs to create their own intellectuals. But does the working class have the voice to speak as an intellectual? Or do the two words oppose each other?
In the 80ties the subaltern study group was founded in New Delhi in an attempt to write the Indian post-colonial history from a subaltern position. Gayartri Chakavorty Spivak is an Indian literary critic, theorist and extremely important post-colonial thinker; she was part of starting the group. Neither she nor the others in the group comes from a subaltern or even underprivileged position in India but as sympathizers they give their voices to this group. In 1988 she writes a text entitled Can the subaltern speak? Does the subaltern have a voice? Could she for example be one of the intellectuals? To speak she needs to organize, to organize she needs allies in persons from above her in the system. When she have allied and is organized she is no longer subaltern. Is the answer then—no, the subaltern can’t speak because when she has a voice to speak she is no longer subaltern? Some say that the question of if the subaltern can speak is not interesting as it ones again puts the lights on the subaltern and not on the privileged. But if we agree with it not being an important question we are also saying that the possibility of activity from underneath is irrelevant.
So, the question needs its context, but since we are speaking of class, let’s ask ourselves if the working class can create their own intellectuals through maintaining an own hegemony?
The answer is yes, but we need our allies in the classes above that, like the subaltern study group, listens and are brave enough to acknowledge what we say, who has strength, intellectual scope and security to have the guts to say “this has value as knowledge” even if it goes against everything they have learned to be “real knowledge”.
In conclusion I just need to add that our revolution is not dependent on this help…
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Many of us have a substantial portion of anger that potentially could be used against oppression, institutional, structural and personal—it’s about finding a way to channel it. The important thing is to see it and confirm it and never fool ourselves to think that it is something bad or something that really shouldn’t exist. We need to name this anger and not mistake it for jealousy, hysteria or stereotypical behavior when it really is a reaction to political injustice. Anger, jealousy and bitterness are words loaded with energy and information, and expressed and formulated in practice they can free and strengthen us, give us clarity and a vision for the future. I know it can be a painful process to understand the origin of the hatred, to name it and possibly end up on the wrong side of a friend but it’s the only way we can make a difference and see who our real enemy is.
If every individual has a heart, the class as a group has not, in the sense that the pale humanism wants to assign us. No, our entire being is created by determination and nothing else.
When my brother married his wife Lotta our mother bought a beautiful dress for the festivities. She surprised us all with a classic suit, strait skirt and jacket; it had a wonderful pale blue color. On the lapel was a broach and when we leaned over to get a closer look at it we saw that the suit had a crocodile pattern and in that moment it all became logic again, the suit made sense, it was our mothers and all was normal. I think this is such a precise metaphor for the working class—one can romanticize about us at a distance but we always reveal ourselves when you get closer.___Exhausted Writing about Paradigms History, Workshop
