"In concert with these globe-girdling movements (or at least in attempting not to subvert their actions), the academic project of learning to be transnationally literate becomes the ethical and political imperative for cultural studies, an imperative that plays out in the space and time of classroom teaching as well as in the broader conception of pedagogy: “From our academic or ‘cultural work’ niches, we can supplement the globe-girlding movements with ‘mainstreaming’ somewhere between moonlighting and educating public opinion.” Here, Spivak’s intertwined notions about the value of transnational cultural studies as a mode of academic labor—first, that various forms of academic and cultural work might productively supplement the transnational movements aligned against the [World] Bank and global capitalism, and, second, that such a thing as public opinion still exists and therefore persuasion and communicability remain essential political tactics for mobilizing such opinion—represent important interventions into the ways in which postcolonial studies positions itself in relation to the Bank."
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Bret Benjamin, Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank. Pg. xxvii
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Some great affirmations here for me. First, academic labor must to be transnational in scope and action. Second, such global aims heighten, not absolve, the importance of the classroom and pedagogy as a mode of political alignment with other acts and actors. Third, Spivak’s affirmation of “public opinion,” as Benjamin notes, supplements pedagogical and research projects so that scholars cannot get away from the world or its rhetoric by simply rejecting the existence of a ‘communicative reason’. Although I agree that ‘rationality’ is not self-evident, accessible or even desirable, I refuse to concede the battle for ‘public opinion,’ or what I would call commonsense. We don’t get off that easy.
