Four notes on the periphery of a speculative morphology

1. "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" is, perhaps, for those who arrive at it from literature, cultural studies, philosophy or similar, Spivak's most 'difficult' or elusive of essays. It seems to be the one that, more than any other, makes readers blink, their eyes glaze over.

Sometimes, at best, this is expressed as a bewilderment as to what might be at stake in the argument or, as a slightly different question, as a consideration of what is at put at stake in reading at a particular conjuncture. At other times, with a more or less implicit embarrassment that Spivak herself notes, the readers' gaze is averted from the discussion of 'economics', or better: labour-power and value - which is to say, that which is least familiar and proper to the aforementioned disciplines but which, as it turns out, the essay is about.  Other times, still, the confusion that results from Spivak's indisciplined writing cuts the other way. But, indeed, "before there is language, there are languages", as someone would say  (though, it remains to ask whether this statement exists in its temporal, integrative sense, as the hope or promise of a lingua franca).

At worst, there is trivialisation, borne I would hazard of an anxiety that one's sight might become impaired - because, after all, one is already, always and immediately possessed of sight, of that particular contraction of sense to the ocular that the Enlightenment - whatever else might be said of it - sought validity upon. And it's this insistence on clarity and resolution that will most readily turn to exasperation or preoccupation with style, tacitly declaring this to be, by turns, prosthetic, kitsch, irritant, or ornament to what should otherwise be a transparent (ie., realist) form of signification, or at least one that manages to assert its adequacy and currency.

2. And yet, much as Freudian jokes can be fun - and who could deny there's enjoyment to be had here - it is the inconvertability, the discontinuity and difference that is at stake in "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value". Which is also to say that while the discussion might - according to a certain economy - turn out to be no fun at all unless someone loses an eye, it's Spivak's argument against analogising theories of ego-formation and signification that requires some careful consideration. Or perhaps it's this aspect of the essay that makes it, for me, the most interesting of all Spivak's work.

To draw an adequate analogy between the emergence of the money-form and the Oedipal scenario is also to conserve the European Marx. [...] the question of the historical differential

In other words, its emphasis on geopolitics and the differentia specifica, put in such a way that it is not a question of reasserting, with either a socialist pathos or maoist bluster that tends to accompany such, that subalternity (or use-value) might serve as an onto-theological anchor. Both Dominic and pom have already discussed this admirably, and in slightly different ways, but I'd like to linger a little on what it raises for me.

Before I turn to that, I'd just like to note that, in expunging or setting aside the question of labour-power, one risks domesticating "Scattered Speculations" by, among other things, reasserting the boundaries between 'economics' and 'philosophy' (as well as related 'humanities' disciplines, such as cultural studies) in a particularly conservative way, that is, with their accompanying inscriptions as 'men's' and 'women's work. And, as a correlate, it risks being played out as an instance of appropriating Marx (and Spivak) for the purposes of canon-formation in the university, and in the manner of proper names, as if this does not involve any question of and anxieties about the very appropriations (and expropriations) of labour-power, both in and outside the university.

3. Spivak begins "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" with a distinction - albeit provisional or uneasy - between two forms of the predication of value, namely: consciousness and labour-power. She goes on to note: "I remain bound by the conviction that subject-predication is methodologically necessary." I find myself wondering what this subject-predication means, how one might be bound to this as a methodological, as distinct from, say, grammatical, necessity. That is, how one might distinguish between the Aristotelian sense of subject-predication, in which adequacy between subject and predicate provides validity (values), and the sense in which it comes to mark the difference between the 'idealist' and 'materialist' predications of value, which is to say, the very differentia specifica by which the hic et nunc is not granted its absolutist pretensions accomplished precisely through homologisation and homogenisation.

development proceeds at all times on the side of the predicate. [...] an explanation which does not give the differentia specifica is no explanation" - Marx, "Notes for a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right".

It may be worth noting here that if Aristotle derives value by way of logic, by way of categorical propositions which relate subject to predicate and therefore assign value according to the class to which x belongs (eg, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is not a slave, a woman or a child), Marx's reading of Hegel (and of Aristotle) suggests, conversely, that both explanation and movement (the trajectory) - and as it pertains to the differentia specifica of capitalism - proceeds by way of the differences and relations that pronounce themselves through copula and conjunction (ie., composition), but in no way fix the common noun. Being-with, rather than being, to put it otherwise. Nevertheless, one can only ride the hyphen so far. The differences between niche market (pluralism, hybridity, the eclectisism of tastes) and antagonism will have to be sustained as a gap, and as a refusal.

To be sure, it's not a matter here of removing those scare quotes that would unsettle any resolute distinction between materialism and idealism, insofar as Marx's materialism remains, at its best, and to use Spivak's term, a speculative morphology. Spivak is I think quite right to note that the question of value "necessarily receives a textual answer". But I am not so convinced that importance of Spivak's critique of adequation can be elevated above, or distinguished from (as perhaps I read Jon as intimating) that of the critique of continuist theories of labour. The connection, here, seems rather pivotal to me.

To put this another way, (and Spivak's comments on the "forgotten Althusser" are, here I think, quite pertinent, recalling for me his remarks on a certain inaccessiblity of 'the Real', on that which cannot be fully appropriated through language, and on contingency), it is a matter of insisting, alongside Marx's proposition that value "establishes itself not only as a representation but also as a differential". That is, not all labour is textual, including that which might be called cognitive labour. Here, among other things, is the basis of a critique of Negri's and Hardt's appropriation of the theme of affective labour as a means by which they make rather epochal assertions about new subjectivities, as well as others for whom the sense of labour becomes magically and self-importantly restricted to its informational aspects.

4. The work - or the morphology - takes place though both cut and the relation, not simply as the difference and relation between Marx and Hegel, or as the the differentia specifica of value itself, but also as an ongoing work on the differences of time and of space (geopolitics).

And here, I suppose, I come to the rather blunt edge of a difference that preoccupies me, but also relevant to the discussion of "Scattered Speculations", and perhaps a provocation. Elsewhere, I mentioned that I tend to vacillate between the philosophers of the desistance and the theoreticians of the refusal, so, to amplify the connection and the cut, here's Werner Hamacher, as he develops an argument on the promise as the critical allocategory, the specific difference, that he reads from Marx's critique of 'political economy', informed of course by Derrida's Spectres of Marx:

[Commodity-language regularly purports] that a particular quantum of one thing is equal to a particular quantum of another thing, regardless of whether this thing currently exists or not. [...] They can thus at any time contain the suggestion that is in fact never made good by reality of that can never be made good. [...] commodity-language is structured as a functional suggestion of equality [...] and it knows no propositions that cannot be reduced to equivalence. [...] In speaking with one another, commodities promise their exchangeability. [...] In order to state the difference - the very difference of its value from its body - the commodity states its equality with something else.

But if, by this reading, the promise of communism might just as well be renamed the promise of democracy, with no difference registered, then it seems to me that it's precisely this difference of value from the body - from bodies and the differences between them that are irreducible to any numerical cast, whether binary or multiplied - that risks disappearing into the infinite chatter of commodities which, politically at least, gives form to the oscillations between the regular electoral, individuated count of the demos and its naturalised determinations.  Which leads, rather inexorably but nevertheless as a question, to this:

[...] the ghost of Marx that Derrida is most haunted by returns to the bosom of Abraham, shorn of all specificity, mark of a messianism without content, carrier of merely the structure of a promise which cancels out the difference between democracy and Marxism. - Spivak, "Ghostwriting".

[resubmitted as per request, and xposted to the archive]

Comments

[Jon]

"In other words, its emphasis on geopolitics and the differentia specifica, put in such a way that it is not a question of reasserting, with either a socialist pathos or maoist bluster that tends to accompany such, that subalternity (or use-value) might serve as an onto-theological anchor."

Can you unpack this? I'm finding it hard to figure out.

[s0metim3s]

It does run, doesn't it?

But it's extremely late in this part of world at the moment, so I'm going to sleep, and then perhaps read over the discussion that's occured thus far about value tomorrow, and get back with something less dashed.

[Matt]

But, indeed, "before there is language, there are languages", as someone would say (though, it remains to ask whether this statement exists in its temporal, integrative sense, as the hope or promise of a lingua franca).

At worst, there is trivialisation, borne I would hazard of an anxiety that one's sight might become impaired

recalls for me something of this:

...the metaphysician, to say what he wants to say, needs to view matters from a standpoint outside language, a standpoint in principle inaccessible to him. As Derrida puts it, 'it is impossible to dominate philosophical metaphorics as such, from the exterior, by using a concept of metaphor which remains a philosophical product' ('WM', p. 228)

The anxiety belongs to 'hearing' (or even 'music') as well. Anyway it'd be nice (if a bit ridiculously ambitious) to hear more on this lingua franca, as spectral revenant, say, or even a certain 'disaster' (cf "The Eyes of Language")

[s0metim3s]

Jon,

Maybe if I put it this way: I'm not sure it's possible to disassociate pity from an enobling voyeurism and an accompanying missionary approach; nor the turn to the peasantry from assertions of a presumably non-capitalist,or pre-capitalist, authenticity. I'm sure there are sincere attempts to do just that, but I don't find them persuasive. Actually, I'm inclined to be repelled by evocations of pity as much as claims of authenticity, and this likely has as much to do with biography as with anything else.

Pity acknowledges a difference and establishes relation as benevolence; authenticity knows difference only so far (the cuts of gender, for one, being deemed secondary), or asserts it as a kind of self-sufficiency.

Anyway, the senses in which use-value assumes an ontological status and acquires transcendental propulsion for the trajectory, seems, to me, to be expressed along those axes. I don't think, politically or analytically, that the sense of use-value can be detached from exchange-value, and certainly not through the presentation of figures, more or less pityable or authentic.

Does that make what I was getting at clearer?

And, to segue on, via the ghostly revenant of a dislocated third world nationalism ...

Matt, you might find Gareth Williams' "Subalternity and the Neoliberal
Habitus: Thinking Insurrection on the El Salvador/South Central Interface" of interest. (Nepantla, 1:1, 2000) Up on Muse, or I can reproduce it somewhere if asked.

[pomegrenade]

I read this (as usual with your posts) by many asterixes flickering on the margins. It was "re-constellating," I guess.

The anxiety of the philosopher of truth when faced with the grained, textured, not quite transparent... And is this not one's way of desisting within the currency of the given language after all?

I share also that oscillation between refusal and desistance. Trying to think this I realized how (at least for me) the former is associated with a more definite form (a knowing-where-to-go), whereas the latter leaves room for multiplicity of strategies, styles yet to be developed. But isn't there something wrong here? What is so definite about refusal after all, except it being the act of a definite cut? To take up Jon's vocabulary, can the cut be independent of the trajectory that follows from it? So does not refusal imply at least as diversified a range of strategies as the desistance? The "working out" of which will still require labor?

By the way, it could be a good idea to go back here to Spivak's "Revolutions that as yet have no model," which I'd read quite some time ago..

[s0metim3s]

Pom, I'm glad it sparked.

I'm not at all sure that I'd associate the theoreticians of refusal with the politics of 'What is to be Done?'.

It can be, of course, but what I take from the philosophers of desistance is (both you and Jodi have pressed upon this term) indeterminacy, contingency. And of capitalism, as well as any strategy or trajectory.

What I don't take from the philosophers of the desistance is their willingness to tarry with the politics of rights and democracy - which I think tends to flow from a kind of dehistoricised, indifferent sensibility, at times.

So, yes, I agree very much that the only thing definite about refusal is the cut? Minimally, this is the cut of time, between the now and the not-now.

[pomegrenade]

Politics of rights and democracy as at best where politics is subsumed by ethics..?

I'd read your co-authored article on Nancy and Tronti, where the brief criticism of Chris Fynsk also stood out for me cause although I never really became his student i'd come to this department thinking i would. I thought your criticism was apt. But i'd like to have another chat on Lacoue-Labarthe's version of desistance, at a more convenient time, perhaps..

The problem with the cut seems to be that it "recovers" too soon. Or, there's always someone willing to make themselves home in the empty center.

To protect the "not-now" from the projections of the "now" cannot be entrusted, I feel, to the western subject. It can only come in ruptures of the subaltern, with whatever the strength left in her/him.

[s0metim3s]

Politics of rights and democracy as at best where politics is subsumed by ethics..?

Something very much like that.

I take your point about making one's home in the empty centre. But, then, potentia is not, quite, empty (even if it is indeterminate). I think that's where I'd make some parallels between, or reconceive, the subaltern (in the way that you mention it here), labour and the trajectory.

I was also thinking we might return to the desistance, and the cut. You, me, definitely Amie, and perhaps Matt, (and others).

[pomegrenade]

I'd look forward to a roundtable (or picnic) on desistance. Probably along with the whole question of quietism that haunts some of our favorite thinkers--whether it is inevitable or contingent...etc.

(And by which time I'll hopefully have a laptop and more continuous internet access..

[s0metim3s]

A picnic would be lovely.