Spivak's "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value"

The following is a guest post by whispering dave, blogger at the stylish Mountain*7.

In his translator's introduction to Writing and Difference, Alan Bass refers to an interview in which Derrida notes that Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference could be inserted into each other to form two different versions of yet another text. This seems to signify the manner in which he always appears to be (re)writing the same text but arriving at it from endlessly varying perspectives. In a similar vein although Spivak’s "Scattered Speculations" reads as the beginnings of her strategy for encountering Marx, it frequently arrives at specific conjunctures in the subalternist strands of her work.

With this in mind, Spivak’s economic essay appears to touch upon themes of bodily inscription, cutting, scoring, marking, and effacement. She is asking questions of the relationship between the subject (predications of), consciousness, labour-power and theories of value: In what way is labour-power scored or marked onto consciousness? What is the effect of this cutting? What is left behind? What does the traversal across or intersection between such predicates of subjectivity look like (and potentially, sound like)?

"Scattered Speculations" sets in motion an attempt to locate the effect of the movement of trace in Marx’s discourse on value. Spivak wants to "put the economic text 'under erasure'" (85). Her point of departure is a reverberation that Marx had already begun to feel between the "concept-phenomenon money" and Value: "the pot of the economic is forever on the boil. What cooks is Value. It is our task also to suggest that . . . in this uncovering value is seen to escape the onto-phenomenological question" (74). Value, it appears, is always on the move, in constant deferral. The chain of value is irreducibly broken allowing it to oscillate and escape its own use, exchange, surplus, etc.

Spivak's notion of value's escape of the question "what is it?" points towards the kineticism at the close of her "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" piece, where she turns to Derrida’s Spurs. The "process of propriation" is at play here, a movement between giving and possession in which

the woman is woman by giving, giving herself, while the man takes. . . . As a sexual operation propriation is more powerful, because undecideable, than the question ti esti (what is it), than the question of the veil of the truth, or the meaning of being . . . because [it] organises the totality of the process of language and symbolic exchange in general, including therefore all ontological statements. (Derrida, Spurs; qtd "Subaltern Studies" 30)

The undecideable movement that echoes (for sexuality between giving/possession and for Marx within the value chain) is part of what Dominic identified as parcours or pathways that Spivak attempts to keep open. But also at stake in the strategic refusal of foreclosure is the positioning of a crisis. Moments of (textual) crisis provide the time, space for a movement of propriation, and in the case of Marx, theories of value, labour-power, and consciousness one such site of breakage is the affect of the work: "The question of affectively necessary labour brings in the attendant question of desire and thus questions in yet another way the mere philosophical justice of capital logic without necessarily shifting into utopian idealism" (80).

Affect of work, affectively necessary labour--they converge as a critical encounter between the worker, the subject (who’s predicates are consciousness and labour-power) and the opened movement of the value chain. Marx's "economic text" or "the textuality of Marx's argument" is brought to a point of crisis, the value-chain ruptures and disappears. But where does the economic text go, what marks or trail does it inscription leave, can we trace its disappearance?

In terms of strategies for such a manoeuvre, we could once again turn to "Subaltern Studies" and the "subaltern subject effect":

that which seems to operate as a subject may be part of an immense discontinuous network ('text' in the general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on. . . . Thus do the texts of counter-insurgency locate….a 'will' as the sovereign cause when it is no more than an effect of the subaltern subject effect, itself produced by the particular conjunctures called forth by the crises meticulously described in the various Subaltern Studies. ("Subaltern Studies" 12-13)

Reading between the lines and between the essays, the critical effect of Marx’s economic textuality is that which is left over, in excess of the theories of value--that which is (paradoxically) irreducibly marked by its disappearance in the networks of value-chain, labour-power, and consciousness.

What I have in mind here--and I think what Spivak potentially had in mind--in terms of the effect of (marked) disappearance for the economic text, is the scene we encounter at the close of "Can the Subaltern speak?" It is the critically important revision of her original essay which appears in A Critique of Post Colonial Reason. The call for a radically different text, a call for writing/body/subaltern/woman that is so far outside and cuts so deep inside that we may not even recognise it as inscription: "Bhubaneswari attempted to 'speak' by turning her body into a text of woman/writing" (Critique 308).

 

A question that I posed briefly above, but which I have as yet to face, concerning the issue of what a scoring of labour-power onto consciousness would sound like. How could Marx’s economic texts as (un)marking onto subaltern body be sounded? Time and energy are against me now, but a brief word none-the-less.

The opening chapter of Fred Moten's In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition is essentially another meditation on Marx's theories of value, the commodity, the subject, and consciousness through the prism of black performance.

It is difficult to offer an exegesis of Moten's intricate, improvised gestures, but at the centre of this chapter lies a tension between Marx's chapter on "The Commodity" in Capital vol. 1 and what Moten views as his refusal to recognise "the historical reality of commodities who spoke--of labourers who were commodities before, as it were, the abstraction of labour power from their bodies and who continue to pass on this material heritage across the divide that separates slavery and 'freedom'" (In the Break 6).

Moten’s intimation is that there exists a series of critical blind spots in Marx’s discussion of the commodity. He points to the way in which a discourse of the commodity, exchange-value and use-value is severely disrupted and distorted by the fact of blackness as sound--a speech, scream, or shriek produced by black bodies violently cut and refigured as commodities. This is an irreducible sound that has and continues to be endlessly replayed and re-recorded as the performative essence of blackness:

These material degradations--fissures or invaginations of a foreclosed universality, a heroic but bounded eroticism--are black performances. There occurs in such performances a revaluation or reconstruction of value, one disruptive of the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter. It moves by way of the (phono-photo-porno)graphic disruption the shriek carries out. This movement cuts and augments the primal. If we return again and again to a certain passion, a passionate response to passionate utterance, horn-voice-horn over percussion, a protest, an objection, it is because it is more than another violent scene of subjection too terrible to pass on; it is the ongoing performance, the prefigurative scene of a (re)appropriation – the deconstruction and reconstruction, the improvisational recording and revaluation – of value, of the theory of value, of the theories of value. (In the Break 14)

Somewhere in there, between the open tracks of both Moten’s sounded event (which speaks to the wail fire relentlessness of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor and Abbey Lincoln) and Spivak’s subaltern bodily inscription, lie some interesting possibilities for the question of value.