Resistance with irony

The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, blogger at the irregular Life During Wartime.

1. ‘Triumphant global finance capital/world trade can only be resisted with irony.’ I am simultaneously drawn and worried by this claim from Spivak’s 2000 essay ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory.’ Perhaps this is because the work of irony is never done. Reaching on the one hand toward insubordinate refusal and on the other toward an unbearable ontological lightness, irony holds forth a promise it cannot keep. As such, it provides no chart of programmatic action--no twelve steps for overcoming global capitalism. Its tactics are inevitably polluted with ideological longings that, as Spivak’s teacher Paul de Man points out, it can know but never quite overcome.

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world

Is this precisely the impossibility that drives Spivak to rewrite her observations on reading Marx after Derrida so many times?

Here is her own restatement of the problem, via Dominick La Capra, in ‘Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value’:

If and when we ask and answer the question of value, there seems to be no alternative to declaring one’s ‘interest’ in the text of the production of Value. I offer this formula because the problem of ‘how to relate to a critique of "foundationalism," which like its object is interminable and may always go astray, to a critique of ideology that allows for at least provisional endings and ends in research and "political" practice’ remains with us.

Spivak’s ‘scrupulous declaration of interest’ (as much a matter of ‘capital appreciation’ as the disavowal of ‘academic disinterest’) comes, by her own admission, out of ‘the most problematic effect of the sovereign subject, the so-called deliberative consciousness.’ At stake is ‘the complicity of idealisms and materialisms in the production of theory … even as one distances oneself from idealism’.

Spivak acknowledges that the passage ‘through the seemingly deliberative’ can ‘only be resisted rather than fully avoided’. And this resistance requires from ‘the political subject’ a declaration of interest ‘by way of a "wild" rather than theoretically grounded practice’.

2. This wildness (elsewhere glossed as bricolage, eclecticism or style) is not simply a matter of breaking away from the triangulations of the ‘transferential situation’. In ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom’, Spivak writes: ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s fantastic insight, that capital was … the abstract as such and capitalism codes it—is no longer sufficient … Finance capital cannot operate without interruption by the empirical’. Here, the empirical stands for indigenous/rural land and the embodied female subject, while interruption is identified as ‘the "irony" of the main text of global regularization … the systematic undoing, in other words, of the abstract’.

In ‘Scattered Speculations’ this ‘systematic undoing’ is the fleshing of the ‘seething chain’ of value. Spivak argues against Sraffa and other critics of the labour theory of value by questioning their assumption ‘that, according to Marx, Value represents Labour’. Here, it is use-value that serves as the ‘deconstructive lever’ that opens the ‘system of value determinations’ to an indeterminacy that eludes the logic of representation and dialectical synthesis.

Women’s labour, ‘third world’ labour, child domestic labour, and so forth, are never fully represented in the value form -- they are supplements to value as we usually conceive it and thus shaped by practices of domination and exclusion that might be understood in other registers as well as or instead of the purely economic. Furthermore, the complexity of the value relation relays all the way up the chain (from labour to value, money and capital), introducing the possibility of an indeterminacy where others see only contradiction.

It is important, I think, to see this indeterminacy in the mode of interruption or irony. Spivak does not seek merely to negate the economic/materialist determination and to understand change as simply indeterminate. She does not seek to construct a universe of value structured either by total order or absolute chaos. Rather she explores the oscillation between determinacy and indeterminacy. And she reads this movement as precisely temporal. Thus the problem with high Marxist theory that contests the labour theory of value (in the context of instantaneous telecommunication) is that it brackets ‘time as a vehicle of change’.

3. One of the strengths of ‘Scattered Speculations’ is the way it explores how economic conceptions of value connect to other notions of value (such as the linguistic, aesthetic and moral) while disavowing arguments that seek either to efface Marx’s conception of value or reduce it to a merely determining factor (as in the conception of the economic base). Key to this process is the questioning of the analogical relations between the money-form and narratives of psycho-sexuality or language production that inform the work of writers like Marc Shell and Jean-Jospeph Goux. Writing of Goux’s comments about Marx’s metaphorisations of money as monarch, for instance, Spivak warns that this ‘seems to elide the important differences between value-theory and theories of state formation’.

Without falling back on Goux’s isomorphisms or ignoring the ‘important differences’ mentioned by Spivak, it seems important to me to return to the relation between value-theory and state formation precisely because the opening of representation to difference is a problem that animates them both (and not merely via the rhetorical bridge of analogy). While it is usual to distinguish between linguistic representation and political representation, there is an important tradition of political thought that emphasises their common borne and mutual implications.

In Romischer Katholizismus und politische Form, Carl Schmitt argues that the technical-institutional mechanism of political representation cannot be separated from the symbolic-evocative mechanism of linguistic representation insofar as the former cannot function without the transcendental horizon that the latter affords it. What Schmitt has in mind is the conferral of symbolic authority (or what he calls the ethos of conviction) upon juridical mechanisms of representation through a process of linguistic representation that invests theological power in the sovereign. While this transcendental surveillance seems distant from Spivak’s textualization of the chain of value, it is worth remembering that Schmitt’s theorisation of sovereignty as the exception that lies both inside and outside the text of law bears (at least in the reading of Agamben) the same deconstructive mark as Spivak’s location of use-value with respect to the system of value determinations.

Not by accident does Spivak’s ‘scrupulous declaration of interest’, the very device that bespeaks her methodological commitment to subject predication, fail to escape what she calls ‘the most problematic effect of the sovereign subject’. Indeed, in note 20 of ‘Scattered Speculations’, she makes recourse to De Man’s definition of textuality in Allegories of Reading to explain this inevitability: ‘We can call a text any entity that can be considered from … a double perspective: as generative, open-ended, non-referential grammatic system and as a figural system closed off by a transcendental system that subverts the grammatical code to which the text owes its existence’.

I think this swerve to the transcendental (precisely as the subversion of the literal) goes a long way toward explaining why, as Ange puts it, Spivak remains bound to subject predication ‘as a methodological, as distinct from, say, grammatical, necessity’. In recognising that value in Marx establishes itself not only as representation but also as differential, Spivak does not escape the shadow of the sovereign (even as she resists the allure of the reductio ad unum).

It is not, or can no longer be, simply a matter of declaring with the early Derrida that ‘deconstruction falls prey to its own critique’. Nor can the mere declaration of a metonymic desire without a symptom (the path of the latter day grammarians of the multitude) vouchsafe an escape from constituted power. Spivak’s irony names precisely a bind or ‘double perspective’, forever oscillating between determinacy and indeterminacy, grammar and rhetoric, desistance and refusal. It remains one way of resisting the capitalism we cannot avoid. But if its movement is restricted to the chain of value and stays away from the democratic compact itself, its sovereign moments will never face the force of the irrepresentable. Perhaps this is why I remain undecided.