Unsafe Text

The following is a guest post by Dominic Fox, blogger at the estimable poetix.

A brief comment on "eclecticism." Spivak is renowned for assembling a combination of marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction; by any reckoning a recipe for trouble. Possible hyphenations and bracketings abound: marxist-feminism, (feminist-marxist) "deconstructivism," feminist-deconstructionist marxism (with a Freudian twist), and so on. It's what Spivak herself might call a "differential field" with many opportunities for linking, but where the opportunity (and the discursive "opportunism" that seeks to turn it to some advantage) is itself tied to a certain constitutive fragility.

Perhaps it's because of this that I often find Spivak difficult to read, the lines of argument in her writing hard to follow. There is something about the way one discourse cathects another in her work that is the opposite of reassuring. Terry Eagleton attacks her for feckless tarrying in the "supermarket of ideas," for cooking with an incompossible mélange of ingredients. It's a crude and bullying attack, targetting a perceived weakness, but the fragility and libidinality of Spivak's text is open to such attacks as it is to more constructive responses. (Not that a "constructive" response would necessarily be without an aggression of its own; what Spivak calls "epistemic violence" takes many forms.)

Another name linked to Spivak's own, participating in its renown, is that of "post-colonial" study, which has had to concern itself with numerous questions about hybridity, trans-location, and trans-identification (I'm not mistaking her deliberately for Homi Bhabha, just noting the association). Again: blending, linking, cathexis and catalysis; processes that for Spivak do not mean an immediate lapse into confusion and inarticulation but on the contrary require minute attention. The "micro-dynamics" of the differential field have to be brought into focus. "Cognitive failure," aesthetic and categorical breakdown, is irreducible, irrecuperable; and is the beginning of thinking.

Throughout all of this, "the trajectory of the subaltern," a question being worked through, elaborated.

So there arises the temptation to try to differentiate between the "eclecticism" of Spivak's writing, its blend of idioms and terminologies, and the unicity of something like "the subaltern" as a persistent underlying theme or concern, a point of continuity. Whatever the discursive manner or mode, this "something" would be the implicit subject. The temptation would then be to try to separate out two textual layers: one stylish, well-travelled and "metropolitan"; the other autocthonous, anchored in the depths of a sincere political commitment. Style in the service of sincerity is perhaps more intuitively defensible than style as putative political praxis in its own right; that is, assuming a line of attack that is targetted at a writer's political credentials in the first place.

"The subaltern" names a certain outside, an outside that won't stay outside, that is already in a structuring position with regard to the inside: simultaneously remotely occluded and transparently mediating. Perhaps it is banal to observe that the "Western" world of word-processors and cappucinos and computerised finance depends on the exploitation of a silenced and invisible labour force "elsewhere." It is not so banal to demonstrate, as Spivak tries to do, that the virtualisation of capital, its constitution as a pure concept-phenomenon operating "at the speed of thought," depends on a series of textual moves, the management through "textualisation" of a series of crises. But such a demonstration would belong rather to the "metropolitan" register, proceeding as it does through minute rhetorical interventions rather than the construction of moral syllogisms. It is Spivak's "eclectic" purloining of Derrida's line about the dialectic's sequencing of semantemes through the exclusion of syncategoremes that authorises her to read Marx the theorist of crisis against Marx the dialectician in this way.

I would argue on the basis of Spivak's commentary on her own text in "Scattered Speculations" that "eclecticism" is precisely the wrong word for what she is doing with her "sources." When she rebukes Goux for drawing "an exact isomorphic analogy" between the Marxian "value-schema" and "the Freudian account of the emergence of genital sexuality," she is rejecting the epistemic violence through which one discourse tames and domesticates another. For the eclecticist, there is a general equivalence between discursive regimes that is guaranteed by the semantic "gold standard" of a master-discourse: Marx, Derrida and Lacan participate in a canon of "theory" that is underwritten by the domination of a specific, never fully avowed or articulated, notion of theoretical value. But Spivak emphasises the discontinuity of discursive regimes, "the fields of force that make them heterogenous": she warns specifically against the reproduction of a "pre-critical" determinism that would assimilate by force the most diverse phenomena. Of critical importance here is Spivak's quotation from Derrida on the importance of recognising "the need of a communicating pathway (parcours)" between discourses, the "wake or track" left by such pathways within the texts that they connect.

Some of the difficulty of Spivak's style arises not from an uncritical, undifferentiated absorption of multitudinous incompatible sources, but from the pains she takes to mark and keep open the "communicating pathways" between heterogenous discursive regimes: what her texts strenuously resist is the kind of all-embracing, analogising reading for which she reproaches Goux, the "pre-critical economism" that forecloses the question of value--and that, perhaps, facilitates the production of synoptic "introductions" to critical theory. Not the least interesting aspect of "Scattered Speculations" is the way it illuminates Spivak's own practice of risky linking, libidinal speculation, unsafe text.