The insane mechanics of the 'fear ritual' of capitalism

The following is a guest post by Aren Airuza, blogger at the moving going somewhere?.

I've spent the last week trying to decide whether to engage––as may be expected on a 'literary' blog––in 'close reading' in a philosophical/literary manner, or to get eclectic on your asses, and tie some questions Spivak asks to questions I'd like people to think more about.  I ended up going with the latter, and at length.  But first, prefatory caveats.  Part of the oddness of my response to "Scattered Speculations", I think, is that capitalism has never seemed that coherent or smooth to me.  It has always seemed crazy.  Now, I am not a scholar of Marx, and I lack skills in parsing the distinctions in debates about use-value, exchange-value and surplus-value unless they are explained to me very slowly.  But it still seems 'intuitive' that capitalism runs on crisis.  There's an interview in Hatred of Capitalism where Jack Smith calls capitalism (or rather, landlordism, but he saw landlordism as an extension of capitalism) a fear ritual, completely counterintuitive:  "We have to spend the rest of our time struggling against the uses we make of our money against us."  This might be about antagonism rather than indeterminacy, I know, but I will come back to Jack Smith later.  (I also committed to blogging against heteronormativity today, and later I'll try to address that in regard to value.)  What I get from "Scattered Speculations" is yet another insight into the precise mechanics of that insanity; and, more importantly, the role of imperialism and 'culture' in that mechanics.

It strikes me as ironic that in the original discussion about doing a symposium evaluating a 'bad academic writer', Butler was proposed before Spivak.  Of course, Judith Butler, that odd dykey nerd that no-one really gets (except queer theory heads), although everyone wants to––and if they don’t get it, they see it as some obscure insult.  Last week on qstudy-l, a US-based queer studies listserv I'm on, someone posted a link to Butler's 1999 award of the Fourth Annual Bad Writing Contest, as if it had just happened yesterday.  The resulting replies were like the qstudy equivalent of "OMG thats so cool!!!!1! butler is such a moron!!1!"  Someone else pointed out that the contest was seven years ago, but it didn't stop an outpouring of anti-Butler sentiment.  It's like time stopped for Butler at that moment, and she can never live the episode down.  The article circulates around the web like a deranged meme, trading on the gullible Schadenfreude of procrastinating graduate students.   But that's beside the point.  People hate Butler, and Spivak, for similar reasons:  the fact that a woman is speaking in a language one may not immediately understand means, for some, that she is speaking nonsense.  A lesbian woman, a non-white woman:  oh, she must be stupid.  But the problem also relates (particularly with Spivak) to the impossibility of branding:  the impossibility of knowing to which discipline a writer properly belongs and her refusal to stay within the bounds of the 'discipline' per se; her demand that a reader travel across rather than inside philosophical or theoretical zones and learn by traveling.

There's an important moment in this lecture where Spivak claims her first working definition for the condition of subalternity was not as a categorisable identity, but those who are, at any given moment, “without access to the lines of social mobility.”  While both Spivak and Butler may be geographically mobile, as conference-hopping academic superstars, Butler is forever freeze-framed as the blinking butt of a frathouse joke awards night, and Spivak is constantly equated with exotic food, the everpopular medium through which anti-colonial or non-colonial practices are consumed, spewed back up as ‘indigestible’, re-digested as fetish, and finally assimilated into “Western” economic and cultural hegemony as, say, a McDonald’s Tasty Tandoori Chicken Wrap.  (By engaging in the gumbo joke, I merely repeated that mistake, it seems, and unnecessarily.)

Here I risk being accused of conflating and comparing 'sexuality' and 'geography/ethnicity' as if they were comparable or as if the laws governing each category were the same.  What I'm trying to say is, no, they are not the same:  but in the dynamic of 'universal equivalence' (capitalism/democracy) they circulate as such, and within that dynamic, certain strategies may repeat themselves.  Neither theorist is permitted to move past her ‘background’, or her supposed grounding in a visibly different identity.  Social mobility here grinds to a halt.  But maybe this is also a fragmented potential subaltern resistance strategy, in which you could read 'incomprehensibility' also as the deliberately broken cog that grinds the machine itself to a halt.  (Here I’m gesturing towards a ‘strategic incomprehensibility’:  a style not premised on being clear, or ‘common-sensical’, strategically, as a way of resisting the hegemonic call to “make sense! Speak!”)  Because in the moment where marketability and identity converge, social mobility is also the circulation of a particular kind of value.  In the same way that products are made to be consumed, books are supposedly written to be understood, people say; books are written (supposedly) to be summarised in first-year courses on philosophy, deconstruction, sexuality, feminism, "the postcolonial", etc.  Not for themselves.

Here a question arises:  how, then, does the discontinuity so central to Spivak's thinking in "Scattered Speculations"––discontinuity, crisis, rupture as management and as reproduction of the chain of value––intervene on the scene where Spivak herself ruptures the smooth progress/processing of contemporary philosophical history?  "[For Spivak] the notion of value as continuity," Jon writes, "is at best mistaken, at worst ideological, and so complicit."  Because if Spivak herself ruptures continuity, she herself also reproduces the chain of value (or rather, not 'she', the person, but 'Spivak' the name.)  Again, I am having a hard time keeping within the bounds of the Marxological calculus of [economic] capital and not simply talking about value, as such.  But isn't this the point?  Any idea of value is about economics, just as any idea of economics can be about values.  I'll try to think both at the same time.

When a Spivak blogweave was first proposed, I momentarily confused "Scattered Speculations" with another essay, "Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value" (1990).  This was a productive moment of confusion.  In the 1990 essay, Spivak talks about how 'marginality' suddenly began to circulate as a buzzword in academia.  She also returns to the subject of value, in what I think is a far more compact or 'portable' consideration than "Scattered Speculations", at least for me:

A word to name the margin.  Perhaps that is what the audience wanted to hear:  a voice from the margin.  If there is a buzzword in cultural critique now, it is 'marginality'.  Every academic knows that one cannot do without labels.  To this particular label, however, Foucault's caution must be applied, and we must attend to its Herkunft or descent.  When a cultural identity is thrust upon one because the centre wants an identifiable margin, claims for marginality assure validation from the centre.  It should then be pointed out that what is being negotiated here is not even a 'race or a social type' ... but an economic principle of identification through separation. (200)

And later:

'Value' is the name of that 'contentless and simple' thing by way of which Marx rewrote not mediation, but the possibility of the mediation that makes possible in its turn all exchange, all communication, sociality itself. (205)

From all that begs for commentary there, right now I can only take on the ‘contentless’ part:  the insight that the actual content of a category, or commodity-form, in circulation within capital does not matter.  (I'm trying to figure out if this means that the use-value of the commodity doesn't really matter, only exchange-value.  Advice?)  The content, per se, of the 'marginalised' does not matter (for example, which marginal and from where, and what hir life is like).  What does matter is that the entry of 'the marginalised' into debate sends the existing economy into momentary crisis:  at that conjuncture in the mid-1980's, and in every moment in a group or collective or 'democratic' situation in which people say, "We're all too white here, we need some diversity," or, "We have to start addressing the needs of 'the marginalised'."  Hence, tokenism.  Ange has talked about the irrelevance of content under capitalism and democracy a lot, and my thinking is very influenced by hers, here.

This ties in an anti-identity politics strategy quite nicely with a critique of capitalism.  But, so what?  In response to Ange's differentia specifica post, Danny asks, "How does one process or hybridise the labour of the Other that is incorporated in one's own cognitive labour?".  Aside from how that's an awesome question in itself, it calls for attention to be paid to the specificity and difference of labour, how labour is not all the same (neither in a temporal, epochal sense or a horizontal, democratic sense):  how, as Spivak notes, the earning of $2 million for 15 minutes of labour is only made possible by Sri Lankan women for whom a buying a t-shirt costs 2287 minutes at work (171).  Attending to that incorporation of the Other's labour might also involve seeing how the subject, 'we', of the statement, "We need more marginality," is shaped as a homogeneity through the positioning of others as valuable only because of their 'marginality', and as a call to attend to the levels of coercion under which anyone deemed 'marginal' must labour:  both to stay there, and to escape or refuse that appellation.

I'm going to finish really soon, I promise, but I also promised to return to Jack Smith, and to talk about heteronormativity.  I can't really talk about heteronormativity without also critiquing 'the gay and lesbian community', since that particular value crisis has resulted, here and elsewhere, in a new nearly-smooth sexual economy in which gayness is nearly as accepted, and just as boring, as heterosexuality.  (I said, nearly smooth.  Don't get excited.)  In the same interview I cited above, Jack Smith talks about how the 'gay movement' had become a ghetto and how the industry of 'gay' subject-production was "just one of the unexpected bad side developments ... that's making it possible to be so happily ghettoized." (249)  This was in 1978.  Gay rights talk is also, it seems, one of the bad side-effects.

A couple of weeks ago, Jasmyne Cannick wrote an article in the Advocate 'coming out' against the massive open borders marches that some are calling a 'new poor people's movement' in the US.  Her logic goes like this:  if hard-working, tax-paying gay and lesbian citizens still don't have all of their rights, then why should 'illegal immigrants' be given more rights than 'us'?  They're not citizens.  They should wait their turn.

I won't go into the dangers of the 'scarcity' model of rights here, but I will touch on how 'gay rights' fought for at the expense of 'other' rights––particularly the rights that relate to freedom of movement and labour––merely bolster heteronormativity through reproducing queers as the equivalents of straight people.  Why?  Because when the goal becomes 'to have the same rights as straight people', who are the straight people one wants the equivalent rights of?  Not, I assume, undocumented migrant heteros living in constant danger of deportation.  Heterosexuality is not a mass identity in which no difference subsists; it shores up some, important, apparatuses of differentiation (among them the reproduction of labour, and labouring subjects) but it cuts across others.

This anti-immigration stuff probably gets published in the Advocate all the time by white gay male writers and no-one gives a crap.  Post Andrew Sullivan, we expect it.  The key difference here was that Cannick circulated her ideas speaking as a 'Black lesbian.'  A flurry of responses ensued from non-white, pro-migration queers saying, in essence (and angrily), "This woman does not speak for us."  It seems pertinent here to consider how much labour must go into that calculus of distancing, and the context in which that labour takes place.  It's a context in which different rhetorics of blame and racism position themselves against and through each other; and in which subalternity does not have the option of shrugging off its 'bad representatives', because one representation might result in everyone queer and non-white being targeted (however ironically) for being "anti-migration".  It's also a context in which white, male middle-class subjects always already inhabit unmarkedness.  They are not required to speak for anyone except themselves.  They are almost always permitted the great invisible privilege of "just expressing an opinion."

To bring it full circle, I ask this:  if Spivak were permitted that privilege, would people find her work so difficult to comprehend?

Comments

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

The food metaphor's apt, perhaps, because it's a cultural practice with tangible, material consequences which make the logics of assimilation easier to think through. Also, it introduces the possibility of arousing disgust, therefore bringing to the fore, "on a gut level," deep-seated anxieties about other cultures. (This isn't my argument, mind you.)

[Amardeep]

Thanks for bringing up some concrete political questions -- which have, for the most part, been absent from these discussions.

I like thinking of Jack Smith as the abject foil for the tanned/gym-happy log cabin crowd.

Incidentally, there was some more discussion of the black community's resistance to the Latino-led protests on NPR last week. Another factor in that resistance is the sense that the positioning of immigrants as "hard-working" reinforces the negative historical stereotypes of African-Americans.

And now to your question:

To bring it full circle, I ask this: if Spivak were permitted that privilege, would people find her work so difficult to comprehend?

I gather you're pointing to the overlap between what might be the difficulty of her jargon and the rhetorically "impossible" position she's trying to occupy: deconstructing the center's need for a margin from a position that is neither fully "outside" nor "inside" that center.

On the one hand, the question is kind of unanswerable, because if she were an upper-middle class white man with three kids and a devoted wife supporting 'his' career, she might never have gotten interested in feminist, Marxist, postcolonial deconstruction.

On the other hand, one could point to people who have come from backgrounds similar to Spivak's, but who have simply chosen to write differently: Kum Kum Sangari and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, for instance. Both are feminist critics who have spent time in the American academy, and who have at times made arguments similar to Spivak's about the complexity of the postcolonial position. But they have done so without sounding like Spivak. (Incidentally, in recent postcolonial scholarship, the citation of Spivak has dropped precipitously.)

I grant that some arguments are harder for western academics to hear because they tend to be uncomfortable (like your question about how our intellectual labor is dependent on other people's physical labor). But I think it's possible that this is all an elaborate defense mechanism against the charge of unintelligibility that is specific to Spivak as opposed to generalizable to the position she occupies.

[jholbo]

"People hate Butler, and Spivak, for similar reasons: the fact that a woman is speaking in a language one may not immediately understand means, for some, that she is speaking nonsense."

This is a common assumption in these debates, i.e. that the dispute can be psychologized away with a dismissive gesture in the direction of 'hatred of difficulty', but I've never seem much in the way of defense of this position. Why do you assume that hostility to Butler and Spivak proceeds from a general hostility to things that are not immediately understood? For rather obvious reasons, this is psychologically implausible. Many of those who critique 'Theory' - Spivak, Butler, et. al. - spend their days reading difficult works of philosophy, after all.

Also, the original proposal wasn't to discuss a 'bad writer', but to discuss a generally acclaimed Theorist - one who could not be dismissed as a lightweight. The proposal of Butler's name came from CR, who can hardly be dismissed as a knee-jerk anti-Theorist. And the proposal of Spivak came from Matt (I think); likewise, hardly a knee-jerk anti-Theorist. So the hint you drop that somehow this debate shows that bad writer = butler/spivak (women!) is just a confusion about how the debate got started.

[pomegrenade]

It also sounds curious: is Butler regarded (in the Anglo-American academy) as a "diffficult" theorist? To the third world readership she is more often a "synthesizing" thinker, who reads Foucault in a productive, yet a little pedagogizing manner. That is, she is regarded as smoothing the grainy French theory for the US academy. Rendering it more pragmatic.
If anything, she is criticized for making things slightly too easy...

[az]

Well, I seem to have paintd myself into a corner sufficiently :)

Amardeep:

I gather you're pointing to the overlap between what might be the difficulty of her jargon and the rhetorically "impossible" position she's trying to occupy: deconstructing the center's need for a margin from a position that is neither fully "outside" nor "inside" that center.

Yes, and the impossible position is (often) the only viable place; there is no place to locate oneself that isn't impossible or incoherent at some point. And of course, there's a long list of writers who say similar things to Spivak or who are similarly 'postcolonial' (although postcolonial is not a great way to describe it, I think) but are not 'difficult'. What's specific to Spivak is that she doesn't believe in 'recognition', doesn't believe in producing herself as easily readable. So there's a sese in which she gets critiqud in the same way that Derrida might be. And yet it's also different, and I think gender and race stuff makes an entry here.

John, I didn't mean to imply that CR or Matt were proposing Butler or Spivak as 'bad theorists'. But from the comments way, way back on the weblog, and that 'original' discussion about Higher Eclecticism, I got the impression that Butler and Spivak were mooted because they may be respected theorists, but they also have reputations as 'difficult' and fit into your definition of HE. Which, you've said yourself, is (at least partially) about 'bad writing'.

But this is a curious thing: any critique that points out how gender and race are deployed in order to dismiss someone as hopelessly difficult is psychologising? I'm not at all sure I claimed this reading problem was just about difficulty. Difficulty comes into it, though. And perhaps that wouldn't come up if, for example, you'd engaged with Spivak's reading of Marx instead of focusing on her literary style in your post.

Pomegrenade, I agree that Butler is a synthesiser and for that reason, perhaps a bad example here. But yes, where I'm at (the Anglo-Australian academy, not the Anglo-American, and it might be different here) she's regarded as horrendously difficult and annoying.

And hey, Amardeep, I was trying to frame that question about the cost of labour slightly differently than posing a distinction between the physical labour of the margins and the 'intellectual labour' of the centre. That formulation is certainly the easiest moment to recognise, and yet paying attention only to that runs the risk of ignoring the whole crazy raft of 'intellectual' and affective labours that are expected and demanded of 'margins' in different moments and in different ways.

[jholbo]

az writes: "any critique that points out how gender and race are deployed in order to dismiss someone as hopelessly difficult is psychologising?" But the point is that you are making a strong and unargued assumption about HOW gender and race are deployed, in connection to issues of 'difficulty'. (How on earth could you possibly be in a position to know whether I am reacting the way I do to Butler and Spivak because I am hostile to their gender/race? Simply assuming I am mildly racist and sexist seems rather noteworthy, after all. You should DEFEND these claims, if you really want to make them.) In general, this sort of psychological assumption is exceedingly familiar in these debates. (I feel about this sort of claim the way you no doubt feel about people circulating news of Butler's win in the Bad Writing contest. Must we always party like it's 1999?) The problem isn't the psychologizing, per se, it's begging the question concerning the philosophical issues at stake by spiking the debate with unargued psychological assumptions.

"And perhaps that wouldn't come up if, for example, you'd engaged with Spivak's reading of Marx instead of focusing on her literary style in your post." I was invited to contribute something about my ideas on Higher Eclectism in relation to Spivak. That would be a stylistic question, more or less. I have no particular speciality as a Marx scholar. Is it so suspicious that I didn't just change the subject and talk about something I'm not really going to be the best person to talk about? (My impression is that Spivak's Marxism is impressionistic, but I'm not the one to demonstrate that point by point.)

[Jodi]

Interesting post, az. I'm glad that you pointed out and linked to the moments of Spivak dismissal in this 'discussion.' For me, your post suggests that difficulty is not the issue--it seems a different kind of dismissal, one possibly linked to sex and race, one that doesn't want to hear/acknowledge some voices/ As Steve Shaviro points out, the text is not particularly difficult even as it does rely on specific references.

[s0metim3s]

My impression is that Spivak's Marxism is impressionistic

And your impression is, methinks, very wrong.

But why you opt for pursuing this as an assertion (of Spivak's lack) rather than acquaint yourself of, say, the debates that underpin "Scattered Speculations" (from Althusser to Derrida to Baudrillard to Goux to Negri to Lacan and more besides) before you assume the gesture of dismissal/critic is precisely why there is something to be explained regarding your and others' disinclination to talk about something other than tone and style.

Which makes it kind of dull for those of us who would prefer to move beyond the anxieties that 'difficult' texts seem to provoke, for some.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Interesting assertion, s0metim3s. I remember, from a discussion of Spivak's Marxism unlinked to questions of style in Jon's and Nate's posts, that you showed yourself to be highly confused about what was being said. Are those who are inclined to "move beyond" questions of style (interesting phrasing of a binary, there) thereby assumed to understand what they're talking about?

[az]

John: I have no particular speciality as a Marx scholar. Is it so suspicious that I didn't just change the subject and talk about something I'm not really going to be the best person to talk about? (My impression is that Spivak's Marxism is impressionistic, but I'm not the one to demonstrate that point by point.)

Weeeelll.... I'm no Marx scholar either, but I had a crack at it.

The preoccupation with style obscures the obvious: that, evidently, some of "Scattered Speculations" is comprehensible and maybe even useful in terms of a Marxian critique of value. If your impression is merely your impression, why make the claim? Or if you want the claim to sound like more than hot air, then get in there and demonstrate it point by point.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jodi: "For me, your post suggests that difficulty is not the issue--it seems a different kind of dismissal, one possibly linked to sex and race, one that doesn't want to hear/acknowledge some voices"

By all means, let's further examine this connection to sex, race, and dismissal. To my knowledge, the form of "dismissal" that sparked the symposium was connected to the phrase "Higher Eclecticism", which in turn in connected with two specific essays that could be characterized as dismissive of the work of Eagleton and Zizek -- both white males, I believe. Someone who objected to the concept of the Higher Eclecticism said that Butler should be considered; others who also objected to this concept disagreed with Butler and suggested Spivak as a sort of cognate. az points out the connection between Butler and Spivak. Who, exactly, is making this connection?

And Jodi, what would be the reaction if someone who criticized Spivak's work posted an anecdote about her sex life? Wouldn't this be seen as evidence of such a connection? Certainly the Butler linkage would not go unnoticed: comments like "Now that's what I call eclecticism" assert it.

[T.S.]

(Careful Rich, methinks you conform to the stereotype of hysteria too quickly, and may cause someone to ask if the performance is maybe meant to be so tiredly ironic, &c.)

[Jodi]

Rich--I don't quite follow you. My sense of az's post was that az was setting out some very specific, rather odd dismissals of Spivak and Butler, dismissals that seem linked to not reading them or taking them seriously and that seem to have a specific dimension of race and sex (ethnicity/sexuality).

I'm not sure what you mean by linking to the haloscan comments--Jon had said something to Scott in that thread about swapping anecdotes, so I threw one in. The anecdote wasn't connected to a point or anything so I don't get what you are trying to say here. I would think that making a theoretical point on the basis of such an anecdote would be a very risky venture and would quite likely be inappropriate. I can, for example, think of inappropriate remarks about specifities of the bodies (faces, actually) of some very mainstream white male philosophers and their theories, but this kind of remark is pretty lowbrow and not analytically very useful.

But maybe I've misunderstood you?

[Rich Puchalsky]

It was clear when this started that the assertion "People who have a problem with Spivak's writing do so because of her sex and/or race" was bound to be made. It's very predictable. So there is a certain element of tired irony, yes.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jodi, would you mind specifying which specific, rather odd dismissals you're talking about? For instance, do you mean the link to "Eating at Gayatri's", by Craig?

As for "The anecdote wasn't connected to a point or anything so I don't get what you are trying to say here" -- really. The first anecdote that just happens to come to your mind about Spivak, and it has nothing to do with anything about your reaction to Spivak's work? No theoretical revelations at all; it would even be "inappropriate" to see this reaction of yours as indicative of anything?

Hmm. Maybe I'm, in turn, misunderstanding you. Because if someone else had come out with that anecdote, it sure seems like it would be taken as evidence of az's thesis.

[Jodi]

Rich--again, in the thread on posthegemony, Scott had said something Spivak's writing in his book and the word anecdote reminded me of the little story (I got my PhD at Columbia, so this isn't particularly far fetched.) It doesn't make sense re her work and, as I said, wasn't connected to a comment on it.

In the az post, I had in mind the link to holbo on conference hopping superstars and the link to the stuff about food. The larger gesture of inclusion around "bad academic writing" which wasn't simply made in the az post but has been floating around in the conversation for a while works as well. But the first two make sense to me, particularly in the way that they seem to linger (as in az's example of the 1999 award circulating stuff).

[Craig]

Jodi, would you mind specifying which specific, rather odd dismissals you're talking about? For instance, do you mean the link to "Eating at Gayatri's", by Craig?

It would be strange for me to discover that I was read as dismissing Spivak. If there was any dismissal -- and Kotsko is free to point out the irony -- it is my dismissal of those unwilling to engage with her text; those who are relunctant, so to speak, to "smell what the Spivak is cooking".

(I'd also point to a different articulation: the pre-occupation on Holbo's blog with what I, a vegetarian, take to be extremely repulsive food -- pig's head, salmon pate, etc -- and his relunctance to transfer his taste for eclectic "food" to "eclectic" thought.)

[Jodi]

It may well make more sense to consider az's point about the impossibility of branding and the urge to discipline. These connect with circulation and value and their discontinuties--so, that what appears as an ease as circulation in one sense (celebrity) is accompanied by a kind of stopping or failure or attempt to control/tax (speaking as marked). I think az's points here are interesting and worth thinking about rather than reducing into soundbites (into precisely the brand names az criticizes and uses as a way of thinking about the question of value in the text).

[Rich Puchalsky]

Thanks for specifying, Jodi. From your description of which links you were referring to in az's post, they appear to be this sentence:

"While both Spivak and Butler may be geographically mobile, as conference-hopping academic superstars, Butler is forever freeze-framed as the blinking butt of a frathouse joke awards night, and Spivak is constantly equated with exotic food, [...]"

The first link is to a post of Amardeep's. You wrote that this was one of the links to "some very specific, rather odd dismissals of Spivak and Butler, dismissals that seem linked to not reading them or taking them seriously and that seem to have a specific dimension of race and sex (ethnicity/sexuality)." Would you mind specifying which dimension of Amardeep's post concerns ethnicity/sexuality?

The second link, is, as I thought, to Craig's post. I think that I can understand part of your reasoning there. az complained about people analogizing Spivak's work to exotic food; much of Craig's post is a set of food metaphors for Spivak's work, and he makes the same comparison in the comment above (eclectic food as electic thought, Spivak's work as pig's head dish). In addition, Craig's post noteably didn't really address Spivak's work in itself -- Amish's reaction was "Is anyone going to comment on the text?" So I think that I understand what you mean there.

We don't appear to be communicating well about the anecdote bit. Your assertion of the unconnection to anything of why you heard the anecdote as rumor in the first place, why you thought it the most entertaining Spivak anecdote, and why people reacted as they did puzzles me, theoretically. Didn't az write about memes/stories going around the Internet, and make the same connection to sexuality that you refer to above? You seem to be saying that since you did not later dismiss Spivak's work, the connection in this case does not pertain. Can we agree that if, John, say, had been found to make the same remark before the symposium, that it would be held to be quite relevant? And if so, I ask once again: who is making the connection here?

[Craig]

The second link, is, as I thought, to Craig's post. I think that I can understand part of your reasoning there. az complained about people analogizing Spivak's work to exotic food; much of Craig's post is a set of food metaphors for Spivak's work, and he makes the same comparison in the comment above (eclectic food as electic thought, Spivak's work as pig's head dish).

I didn't compare Spivak's work to a pig's head dish, but thanks for trying. Instead, I wondered if Spivak was required to, so to speak, prepare a dish for her guests that they enjoy; in this case, a pig's head. I also throw out an "Extra Value Meal" and foie gras from the Boxwood Cafe as other meals a hostess might be required to prepare for a finicky guest.

If we are to believe Jon, the answer might be the second.

To be clear: is the reader expected to read what is written (that is, does the author's style trump the reader's preference) or is the author supposed to write to her audience (that is, does the reader's preference trump the author's style). Food and cooking, of course, go along well with reading and writing -- we, afterall, digest what is published in digests. Or, we find the essay indigestable and, thus, unpalatable.

[Jodi]

Rich--here is a question for you: what do you think the anecdote means or points to or might indicate? What kind of link or relevance are you implying, particularly since you find it impossible to take me at my word? So, spell out what you think is going on, your suspicions, or recognize it as an anecdote (potentially apocryphal).

To be clear: other than Scott's story on the margins, it's the only anecdote I can recall. It may not be particularly entertaining, but I found her boldness really inspiring and cool.

[s0metim3s]

Rich, the question is still begging, irrespective - or perhaps because - of the implication that confusion might be unrelated to questions of languages and what passes for or is valued as knowledge.

I have no idea why you think I was posing a 'binary' between style and argument. Seems to me, the claim that Spivak's writing is an empty performance does just that.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jodi, of course I take your word that it's an anecdote. As for whether it's *just* an anecdote, that is a degree of charitability that would clearly not be granted to anyone who disagreed with Spivak. You pointed, in specific, to Amardeep as writing one of two examples of posts that you thought "[set] out some very specific, rather odd dismissals of Spivak and Butler, dismissals that seem linked to not reading them or taking them seriously and that seem to have a specific dimension of race and sex (ethnicity/sexuality)." For the purposes of this characterization, it was not necessary for Amardeep's post to have any easily discerneable dimension of concern with ethnicity/sexuality -- at least you haven't pointed one out. It was sufficient that he was dismissive. Yet your anecdote, which explicitly concerns sexuality, is taken to be meaningless because you are not dismissive of her work.

I'll be more clear about what I think this means. az wrote:

"It's also a context in which white, male middle-class subjects always already inhabit unmarkedness. They are not required to speak for anyone except themselves. They are almost always permitted the great invisible privilege of "just expressing an opinion.""

Who is denying Spivak the great invisible privilege of "just expressing an opinion", here? Why, you are. You and az are claiming that dismissal of her work may be motivated by "a dimension of race and sex (ethnicity/sexuality)" instead of because of the characteristics of her work as text. She is not "unmarked", because you are marking her. In fact, every such connection so far suggested has come back to someone who approves, in general, of Spivak's work. Why do you think that az refers to "painting himself into a corner" above? Because he was setting up for an attack based on Spivak being chosen for critique because of race/sex, and then was informed that the choice of Spivak was due to Matt and Jon. Why do you think that you refer to Spivak's purported posting of her list of partners as "boldness really inspiring and cool"? I would bet that you wouldn't think so if we were discussing Eagleton, say -- instead it would be seen as a sign of creepiness. Why do you think that in a discussion of stories and memes that people like to repeat, you can't seem to wonder about why that anecdote about Spivak is the only interesting one that you were told and can remember? I'm not saying that you're doing this *consciously*, of course.

For your own purposes, there is a Spivak-author of this text, inseperable from it, that you must construct. Because you wish to blame dismissal on "a specific dimension of race and sex (ethnicity/sexuality)", you must create such a dimension. You don't find this to be theoretically interesting?

[Matt]

No.

[az]

No, again.

Gee, I didn't even sleep for very long. I'm not even going to try to 'defend' myself here' I have much better things to do with my time. On food and cooking: the cooking reference is initiated in "Scattered Speculations"; and yet, there have been multiple significations at work about cooking, food, palatability, eating etc and not all of them have to do with that particular scene. Some, I think, reflect the politics of consumption of an 'exotic' other. Maybe I was really referring to Terry Eagleton, who knows. I do wonder how Rich and John can be so unreflective as to not see the gendered/raced markers of their desire to send the food, and Spivak herself, Spivak 'back to the kitsch/en'.