Event Title
Giving testimony and the coloniality of knowledge
Start Date
25-6-2010 1:00 PM
End Date
25-6-2010 2:30 PM
Description
This presentation is part of the Testimony and Listening track.
The coloniality of knowledge involves epistemic framings and methodologies through which colonial orderings, including racial and gendered orderings, are naturalized and thereby normalized, such that the colonizing cultures come to be portrayed as the only producers of knowledge and that knowledge the arbiter of all that is known or knowable. I want to explore this in relation to the performance of voices giving testimony on the part of those marginalized by hegemonic understanding
Recent innovative work in epistemology has involved re-valuing testimony as a source of knowledge, challenging standard methodologies of research that maintain the coloniality of knowledge by deauthorizing the testimony of the very people about whom the research is conducted. Concerns of advocacy researchers involve voices of those normally excluded from hegemonic discourse production. There are questions with regard to a researcher’s competency to hear an Other in order to be an advocate and also with regard to the relationality between the researcher and the subject (object) of knowledge; for Western scientific practice positions the researcher as a judge of credibility and a gatekeeper for its authority.
In this paper, I take up questions arising from the positions of those giving testimony, including what they/we must do in order to speak, and investigate relationality in the process of knowledge production. One issue facing someone giving testimony involves whether those receiving it are assuming the information given will be ostensive, something clearly obvious to all, external to our minds, something which when pointed to becomes clear to anyone. A related issue concerns what the authorized knower is expecting in the way of performance from those giving testimony. Is the presumption of authorized knowers that those giving testimony will engage in what Doris Sommer calls “artless confession,” responding simply to the particular questions the researcher has constructed?
A second point involves recognizing that we are interpellated in a field of meaning, that in order to speak (and be understood), we and our speaking must be recognizable in a field of meaning. As Ludwig Wittgenstein noted, if a lion could speak we would not understand him. That is, in becoming a knowing subject, someone marginalized and giving testimony must enter a frame of meaning within which the inquiry itself makes sense, and speak to an audience not normally used to hearing the sorts of things they have to say. My concern involves what marginalized testifiers are required to do to enter the field of meaning within which the testimony is to be given.
A third point, as a result, is the possibility of having the meaning of ones words reversed when giving testimony, particularly if one is operating under the assumption of ostension. Consequently, a fourth point in thinking about testimony involves considerations of the listening audience and their worldview. So as a fifth point, I want to revisit the question of lying in giving testimony, as being at times conducive to the production of knowledge.
A sixth point concerns the fact that there are multiple audiences, and more than the hegemonic domain of meaning. It is true we are never outside culture, or language, or discourse, but it does not follow that we can never move in spaces that do not carry dominant Anglo-European white phallic cultural logic, that there is no sense apart from that discourse. That is, we can and do meet each other outside the hegemonic discourse. In her paper, “On Complex Communication,” María Lugones challenges the liberal presumption of transparency and/or a shared vocabulary in communication, and argues that monologism is a way of silencing all contestatory interlocution.
Consequently, a seventh point involves a question, How do marginalized peoples approach each other? How do we epistemically engage each other? Within what field of meaning do we insist other others meet us? I am specifically interested in how we meet in the construction and performance of knowledge. María Lugones points to a paradox: as marginalized others, even if we nourish a resistant logic with respect to our own marginalization, we may nevertheless paradoxically approach other others through normalizing, dominant logic. And Michael Horswell notes, “the issue should not be, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ but, in the colonial or any historical context, how to decipher his or her voice from the multiple utterances that form hegemonic discourse.” We are positioned in relation to each other through political identities that are not always or necessarily named but which are nevertheless enacted and resisted. My concern is the relationality between various marginalized people, particularly for our purposes, people who are themselves marginalized in some way hearing testimony from or about others who are marginalized. Hearing each other into speech is the epistemic question facing feminists, critical race theorists, and postcolonialists.
Anibal Quijano argues that the coloniality of knowledge keeps us from accepting the idea of knowing subjects outside the confines of modern epistemic rationality. Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo note that within Western intellectual practice, the coloniality of knowledge is a process of translating and rewriting other cultures, other knowledges, other ways of being, presuming commensurability through Western rationality. That is, our disciplinary practices are colonizing practices. Those of us who are educated in and inhabit the academy are trained to use our disciplines to render distinct cultural notions intelligible (“made to be presented to a Western audience” (Edward Said)) through processes of interpellation into Anglo-European cultural productions—Western concepts that we hold to be universal. In this paper I explore questions of the coloniality of knowledge in relation to the question of giving testimony.
Giving testimony and the coloniality of knowledge
This presentation is part of the Testimony and Listening track.
The coloniality of knowledge involves epistemic framings and methodologies through which colonial orderings, including racial and gendered orderings, are naturalized and thereby normalized, such that the colonizing cultures come to be portrayed as the only producers of knowledge and that knowledge the arbiter of all that is known or knowable. I want to explore this in relation to the performance of voices giving testimony on the part of those marginalized by hegemonic understanding
Recent innovative work in epistemology has involved re-valuing testimony as a source of knowledge, challenging standard methodologies of research that maintain the coloniality of knowledge by deauthorizing the testimony of the very people about whom the research is conducted. Concerns of advocacy researchers involve voices of those normally excluded from hegemonic discourse production. There are questions with regard to a researcher’s competency to hear an Other in order to be an advocate and also with regard to the relationality between the researcher and the subject (object) of knowledge; for Western scientific practice positions the researcher as a judge of credibility and a gatekeeper for its authority.
In this paper, I take up questions arising from the positions of those giving testimony, including what they/we must do in order to speak, and investigate relationality in the process of knowledge production. One issue facing someone giving testimony involves whether those receiving it are assuming the information given will be ostensive, something clearly obvious to all, external to our minds, something which when pointed to becomes clear to anyone. A related issue concerns what the authorized knower is expecting in the way of performance from those giving testimony. Is the presumption of authorized knowers that those giving testimony will engage in what Doris Sommer calls “artless confession,” responding simply to the particular questions the researcher has constructed?
A second point involves recognizing that we are interpellated in a field of meaning, that in order to speak (and be understood), we and our speaking must be recognizable in a field of meaning. As Ludwig Wittgenstein noted, if a lion could speak we would not understand him. That is, in becoming a knowing subject, someone marginalized and giving testimony must enter a frame of meaning within which the inquiry itself makes sense, and speak to an audience not normally used to hearing the sorts of things they have to say. My concern involves what marginalized testifiers are required to do to enter the field of meaning within which the testimony is to be given.
A third point, as a result, is the possibility of having the meaning of ones words reversed when giving testimony, particularly if one is operating under the assumption of ostension. Consequently, a fourth point in thinking about testimony involves considerations of the listening audience and their worldview. So as a fifth point, I want to revisit the question of lying in giving testimony, as being at times conducive to the production of knowledge.
A sixth point concerns the fact that there are multiple audiences, and more than the hegemonic domain of meaning. It is true we are never outside culture, or language, or discourse, but it does not follow that we can never move in spaces that do not carry dominant Anglo-European white phallic cultural logic, that there is no sense apart from that discourse. That is, we can and do meet each other outside the hegemonic discourse. In her paper, “On Complex Communication,” María Lugones challenges the liberal presumption of transparency and/or a shared vocabulary in communication, and argues that monologism is a way of silencing all contestatory interlocution.
Consequently, a seventh point involves a question, How do marginalized peoples approach each other? How do we epistemically engage each other? Within what field of meaning do we insist other others meet us? I am specifically interested in how we meet in the construction and performance of knowledge. María Lugones points to a paradox: as marginalized others, even if we nourish a resistant logic with respect to our own marginalization, we may nevertheless paradoxically approach other others through normalizing, dominant logic. And Michael Horswell notes, “the issue should not be, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ but, in the colonial or any historical context, how to decipher his or her voice from the multiple utterances that form hegemonic discourse.” We are positioned in relation to each other through political identities that are not always or necessarily named but which are nevertheless enacted and resisted. My concern is the relationality between various marginalized people, particularly for our purposes, people who are themselves marginalized in some way hearing testimony from or about others who are marginalized. Hearing each other into speech is the epistemic question facing feminists, critical race theorists, and postcolonialists.
Anibal Quijano argues that the coloniality of knowledge keeps us from accepting the idea of knowing subjects outside the confines of modern epistemic rationality. Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo note that within Western intellectual practice, the coloniality of knowledge is a process of translating and rewriting other cultures, other knowledges, other ways of being, presuming commensurability through Western rationality. That is, our disciplinary practices are colonizing practices. Those of us who are educated in and inhabit the academy are trained to use our disciplines to render distinct cultural notions intelligible (“made to be presented to a Western audience” (Edward Said)) through processes of interpellation into Anglo-European cultural productions—Western concepts that we hold to be universal. In this paper I explore questions of the coloniality of knowledge in relation to the question of giving testimony.