wrenching them out of their assigned function

I'm going to jump in here with a brief note on continuity and discontinuity in Spivak's text, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value."

The nub of Spivak's argument is this: she presents a critique, first, of what she terms "the continuist version of Marx's scheme of value" (In Other Worlds 155), but second and more importantly, also of "all ideologies of adequation and legitimacy" (171).

The notion of value as continuity (of unruffled exchange, or even a series of more or less orderly exchanges and transformations) is at best mistaken, at worst ideological, and so complicit.

Hence Spivak's recourse to "the concept-metaphor of the text" (171) and textuality, to indicate the overdeterminations, the loose ends, the "situation of open-endedness" that characterizes the process by which value is produced as "an insertion into textuality" (161).

But the point is that there are discontinuities and then there are discontinuities.

For if capitalism puts forward ideologies of continuity, the latest of which is the dream of unregulated world-wide instantaneity effected in globalization, in fact it functions always by means of a series of ruptures, of breaks in that flow. Globalization can only be a tendency, another version of the same basic ideology of continuity. In practice, "even as circulation time attains the apparent instantaneity of thought (and more), the continuity of production ensured by that attainment of apparent coincidence must be broken up by capital" (166). Here, maintaining a distinction between productive center and comprador periphery, between the First World and "the dark presence of the Third" (167), is crucial. But also even immediately in the production process: value arises from the discrepancy between use and exchange, from the super-adequation of labour power. It is discontinuity, not continuity, that constitutes the ruse of capital.

Yet Spivak will have no truck with any notions of flow and immanence counterposed to capitalist segmentarity. From the outset she brackets off "the anti-Oedipal argument" of Deleuze and Guattari as "but a last-ditch metaphysical longing" (154). Moreover, and for all her agreement with the notion of capital's liberating aspects, its "'freeing' of labor-power" (161), she is harsh in her critique of any utopian faith in what we might call the deterritorializing powers of Empire. "Telecommunication" (for which we could substitute now the powers of cognitive or communicational labour) only "seems to bring nothing but the promise of infinite liberty for the subject" (167; my emphasis). And this is because "economic coercion as exploitation is hidden from sight in 'the rest of the world'" (167).

No. Against discontinuity: more discontinuity, or perhaps better, other modes of discontinuity. Against the capitalist ruse of extracting surplus in the discrepancy between labour power and exchange value, Spivak defends what she describes as the "radical proto-deconstructive cultural practice" of "bricolage, to 'reconstellate' cultural items by wrenching them out of their assigned function" (170). This is, no doubt, a defence of eclecticism. And here, incidentally, Deleuze and Guattari somewhat surprisingly reappear, now applauded for their concept of desiring-machines as "originarily unworkable" (170).

But here's the question, and in some ways it's a question for Deleuze and Guattari too: can in fact these two modes of discontinuity, the one governed by capitalist expansiveness, the other by a principle of avant-garde defamiliarization, really be distinguished so easily? Can we still say so unreservedly that "the computer, even as it pushes the frontiers of rationalization, proves unable to achieve bricolage" (170)?

Or to put it another way: Spivak recognizes a certain ambivalence in the word-processor, and so in the machinic and the collaborative communicational labour it enables; but does she explore that ambivalence far enough?

Cross-posted from Posthegemony.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Can we still say so unreservedly that 'the computer, even as it pushes the frontiers of rationalization, proves unable to achieve bricolage'"?

I don't think that many people would say so now, but Spivak wrote the piece in 1985 -- both DOS and the TCP/IP protocol were invented in 1981. I think that there are important differences, in terms of bricolage, between a word processor and an Internet-connected PC.

I would guess that Spivak has since written about Indian telework -- that might illuminate what she thinks about this issue now.

[Jon]

"I would guess that Spivak has since written about Indian telework."

Not to my knowledge, but I could well be wrong.

[Keith]

Jon: Yet Spivak will have no truck with any notions of flow and immanence counterposed to capitalist segmentarity. From the outset she brackets off "the anti-Oedipal argument" of Deleuze and Guattari as "but a last-ditch metaphysical longing"

I had trouble with (and am still having trouble with) this assessment of D&G, and especially when reading chapters of Critique of Post Colonial Reason, where Spivak takes D&G along with Foucault and rejects, applauds, rejects, salutes. I find it hard to figure Spivak's postion with regard to their work, and am still completely baffled that she considers Deleuze and Foucault to be instituting and "undivided subject" (which seems so opposed to Deleuze's entire project [though I do have a sense for why she takes this approach, I suppose I just don't agree]).

As for whether we can still unreservedly say that the computer is unable to achieve bricolage...of course not.

[Dominic Fox]

Computers still don't do bricolage all by themselves, by and large. That is, there aren't many programs out there that go and look for components that they can "exapt" to their own purposes, then dynamically construct new software artifacts from those components.

UDDI was proposed as a step in that direction - the idea was that "discovery" of web services providing desired functionality could be automated, and that applications would then spring into existence to choreograph such services into new processing chains - but never really got off the ground.

On the other hand, programmers (and to an increasing degree "amateur" technologists, although not end-users in general) act as bricoleurs all the time, creating new software artifacts out of bits and pieces of existing code.

There are many interesting examples to be found in the domain of "web 2.0" applications, where people are taking the public interfaces of services offered by Google and Amazon and combining them with other services to create new hybrid web applications; for example, flagging the locations of crimes reported on a police news-feed on Google Maps.

[Keith]

And then there is this kind of stuff

[Matt]

completely baffled that she considers Deleuze and Foucault to be instituting and "undivided subject" (which seems so opposed to Deleuze's entire project [though I do have a sense for why she takes this approach, I suppose I just don't agree]).

a veritable can of worms, there (cf. Derrida Work of Mourning)

[Keith]

Ah, yes...Derrida. Well Spivak's problem with the Foucault/Deleuze exchange had to do with (among other things) this statement by Foucault:

"In the most recent upheaval, the intellectual discovered that the masses
no longer need him to gain knowledge: they _know_ perfectly well, without
illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of
expressing themselves."

Spivak maintains that both Foucault and Deleuze flounder where they have "no theory of ideology" to work with, and that they can't or don't think the Other or otherness. Again, not exactly sure at this moment what to do with Spivak's "productive mis-reading" there...

[Matt]

haha, yes, well...Is Spivak saying they both somehow fall short of conceiving the other as (irreducibly) other (I'm assuming, in the manner Derrida specifically draws out - The Ear of the Other, for instance, seems to be one of Spivak's favorite texts...)? She might have a point.

DELEUZE: Yes, and the reverse is equally true. Not only are prisoners treated like children, but children are treated like prisoners. Children are submitted to an infantilization which is alien to them.

For reasons entirely other, this phrase of Deleuze's has always struck me.

Sorry to be so off-topic. Then again, maybe it's related. I like Jon's question, but must say I'm sympathetic to Spivak's criticisms of D&G.

'Bricolage'...is Levi-Struass's term, is it not, the bricoluer as opposed to (the myth of) the theological engineer?

[Jon]

For what it's worth, I think that Spivak's relation to Deleuze and Guattari is not unlike Fred Jameson's: they continually re-appear, only to be brushed off, but never, apparently, with sufficient force. They constitute some kind of theoretical anxiety or itch that has to be scratched.

And so it does seem a legitimate question to ask: well, if this is essay is at root concerned with (dis)continuity, what would result were we to restranslate its concerns into the language of flow, segmentarity, conjunctive/disjunctive synthesis and the like?

Meanwhile, the question of Empire and the difference that may or may not be constituted by the Third World in these times of globalization and electronic communication is crucial (also, I'd mention, for Jameson).

[Matt]

Jon,

you're totally over-dignifying them with this itch thing. Have you considered they might be more like flies, one must occasionally, half-heartedly swat away, lest they get in one's eyes.

Just something to consider.

[Craig]

Keith: "Spivak maintains that both Foucault and Deleuze flounder where they have "no theory of ideology" to work with, and that they can't or don't think the Other or otherness."

This is entirely strange as a reading of D&G, at least. Can't Anti-Oedipus be read as an elorataion upon Althusser's "I & ISA" article? And Foucault, certainly, in the governmentality phase was dealing with "ideologies" in a positive sense -- it's all about liberalism as a political program!

[Rich Puchalsky]

"The nub of Spivak's argument is this: she presents a critique, first, of what she terms "the continuist version of Marx's scheme of value" (In Other Worlds 155), but second and more importantly, also of "all ideologies of adequation and legitimacy" (171)."

Jon asked me to elaborate on whether Spivak's claims are self-evident, and wrote that this "nub" paragraph (and presumably the next one) are his characterization of Spivak's claims.

Well, to start with, Spivak addresses the continuist version of Marx's scheme of value mostly through a sustained engagement with Goux. I haven't read Goux, so I'm unable to say whether Spivak does his argument justice or not. But as presented in Spivak's essay, would anyone really hold to it? Spivak says that Goux forgot that "Marx's critique of money is fundamentally different from Freud's attitude towards genitalism or Lacan's toward the phallus." Did anyone really think that they were the same? OK, I have to admit that I think it would be a funny jape to go up to someone in literary studies and announce deadpan that X is structured like a language, where X is anything from "the money market" to "shoes" or, perhaps, "clouds", and then see if they agree enthusiastically or try to work out what this means. It's like a Rorschach blot. (Rorschach blots are structured like a language, by the way.) But pointing out that Marx is not Freud is not Lacan and that they considered different things has to fall under "self-evident", I think.

Next, the continuist theory of value more generally. I don't think that the phrase "market failure" appears in Spivak's essay, though I think that it was a highly theorized concept in economics by 1985. For Spivak to find someone who presents the market as a smooth illusion, she has to turn to a business administration prof writing a public propaganda piece. But very few economists really believe this. Again, self-evident, if Spivak had gone beyond her Marxist focus.

Next, "all theories of adequation and legitimacy"? I think you're overreaching. Spivak doesn't make anything like a general case of this nature; in addition, she uses Marx's writing as her own adequating / legitimizing theoretical basis despite her disclaimers.

"The notion of value as continuity (of unruffled exchange, or even a series of more or less orderly exchanges and transformations) is at best mistaken, at worst ideological, and so complicit."

I don't know of many economists who think that the notion of value is even meaningful, much less unruffled or orderly. Perhaps the specific "European Marx"ists that Spivak was arguing against did. Well, "self-evident" necessarily becomes a value judgement here (if that wasn't obvious already.) But Spivak is setting up and demolishing something that most people would say had already been demolished.

[Jon]

Rich, first and briefly, the following struck me:

"I don't know of many economists who think that the notion of value is even meaningful"

Given that you earlier had so much trouble with the following observation of mine:

"And the theory of value is [. . .] much ignored by neoclassical economists."

Second and more importantly, in order to argue for Spivak's self-evidence, you disagree with me as to what her claim is. Which is fine, I suppose. (And at least you've given up suggesting nobody will dare to say what her claims are.) But it's again a disciplinary move on your part: you want to keep everything strictly within the economic; I suggest that her concern is "adequation and legitimacy" much more generally. Including in literature and philosophy.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jon, I think that I've offered an adequate account of why neoclassical economists turned from value to utility, and how value is in some sense meaningless according to neoclassical economics; in another, folded into the concept of utility. The two statements that you're comparing really are consistent with each other. Economists of this type don't *ignore* the concept of value, they have subsumed it within the concept of utility, which makes value more or less meaningless by itself.

As for the "no one will dare to say what her claims are" bit, I was referring to comments made by Amish, Craig, and az in the "Eating At Gayatri's" thread.

As for your characterization that in addressing your claims, I've disagreed with them by restricting their disciplinary focus, I don't see textual evidence that Spivak has a general concern with all of adequation and legitimacy. Do you have any? If she really offered a general critique of ideologies of adequation and legitimacy in philosophy, I agree that that would not be a self-evident conclusion. But does she? Only if ideologies of adequation and legitimacy in philosophy are based on a materialist subject-predication such as Marx's.

[Jon]

"Economists of this type don't *ignore* the concept of value, they have subsumed it within the concept of utility, which makes value more or less meaningless by itself."

Well, one might quibble as to whether or not this is choosing to "ignore" value, but more to the point isn't precisely the possibility of subsuming value within utility what's at issue in Spivak's argument?

As for evidence that Spivak has a more general, and not simply economic, "concern with all of adequation and legitimacy," I'd start by pointing you to the first two sentences. And then to footnote four. And then to page 166, the paragraph beginning "The binary opposition between the economic and the cultural is so deeply entrenched..."

[Keith]

Craig: "This is entirely strange as a reading of D&G, at least. Can't Anti-Oedipus be read as an elorataion upon Althusser's "I & ISA" article? And Foucault, certainly, in the governmentality phase was dealing with "ideologies" in a positive sense -- it's all about liberalism as a political program!"

Well, yes, it can be seen as an elorataion (?) on Althusser's text there. But Spivak's point is they dismiss ideology (remember that for Deleuze there is no ideology only "organizations of power") and install unity at the level of the worker, as in the workers' struggle. I think Spivak is doing a disservice to Deleuze's philosophy here, taking only the conversation between him and Foucault as a "site of betrayal" (like the conference, or the symposium...). This is not entirely off-topic, and it does have to do with questions of value, I'll see if I can scatter some speculations about it tomorrow when I post - Spivak's giving me a bit of a headache, in spite of her text's being "easy to understand".

Matt - sure Spivak has some points about their work, but it is her view, and I'm just not sure that I would share it entirely. As for Derrida, I can't respond to that end of things as I've not read enough of his work, especially the texts you are referring to. But I did see the movie...And D&G are more like pollen than flies or an itch really, since they fill the head causing blurred vision, irritation, and reduced function - but if you're allergic, you more or less have to deal with it if you have any intention of venturing outside.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I don't see it, Jon. (That could just be my problem, of course.) The first two sentences are part of Spivak's binary-setting-up paragraphs that she uses to restrict her field of consideration ("The better part of my essay will concern itself with what the question of value becomes when determined by a 'materialist' subject-predication such as Marx's.") Footnote 4 talks about Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. The sentence that you half-quote ends with "...that the full implications of the question of Value posed in terms of the 'materialist' conception of the subject are difficult to conceptualize." It's not me who keeps restricting Spivak's field of inquiry; she continually does it herself.

"isn't precisely the possibility of subsuming value within utility what's at issue in Spivak's argument?"

No. Insofar as I understand "the materialist conception of the subject", utility, being "idealist" according to Spivak's binary (i.e., subjective), does not exist within it.

[Matt]

Keith, touché, though I suspect you saw the wrong movie (and just between us, I know a guy who will samizdat 'n send the right one, if asked nicely).

[Craig]

Sorry, Keith, "elaboration"! "Theoretical elaboration," at that -- possibly even in the structuralist marxist sense of the term (Althusser & Poulantzas). Pointing back to comments made by Jon elsewhere who, while reading D&R, was surprised to find a base/superstructure model in Deleuze... I think it is quite clear that Deleuze is, in some sense, a "marxist" and working on "marxist" categories, albeit in his traditional sense of fucking up the ass. Or, as he puts it more politely, a shaven Marx. Which brings me back to Althusser's "I & ISA" article -- the concept of ideology employed there is clearly significantly different from previous marxist uses of the term; including Althusser's own previous use of the term (for instance, in "Contradiction and Overdetermination" and "On the Materialist Dialectic") where ideology is contrasted with science (and, indeed, "Theory" -- that is, "the Theory of theoretical practice"). D&G are very much talking about interpellation and the production of subjects in their own way.

[Glen]

re: the ideology/deleuze thing. It pays to be careful with which moment in the D&G or D or G trajectory you are engaging with. In _ATP_ they write "There is no ideology and never has been." In _AO_ they emphatically state (paraphrasing) "there is nothing but belief and desire". If I have time I'll find a reference.

from jon's piece:

"can in fact these two modes of discontinuity, the one governed by capitalist expansiveness, the other by a principle of avant-garde defamiliarization, really be distinguished so easily?"

Indeed this is, in part, the problem that Zizek has with D(&G), disscussed in _OwB_ through the notion of 'intensities' and transforming robots. It is only 'in part' however, because the dimension of the assemblage [agencement] (which Spivak translates as 'arrangement' in a footnote) that Zizek misses out on is the 'abstract machine' because of his problematic focus on the machinic assemblage of desire. What happens to the collective assemblage of enunciation? Does not the materialist 'arrangement' of order-words in part determine the distribution of difference -- perhaps, sub-altern, but at least 'valued'. Spivak's example of the word processor is slightly more interesting that Zizek's silly comments because it is possible (ala Kitler) to imagine how the word processor affects language and thought. (Or how blogs are currently affecting critical scholarly discourse.)

I am currently working on D&G's _Kafka_ and the question you raise, jon, is crucial for understanding what they mean by a 'minor literature'. I couldn't care less about 'literature' so my task is thinking it more in terms of the image-saturated climate of today's 'cinematic' everyday life. One way to read the three parts outlined by D&G in the "What is a minor literature?" chapter is that Kafka allegedly pushes (intensifies or potentialises?) a major language to the point of becoming an 'arrangement' of images. What happens to the potentialisation of language when the world is already saturated in 'images'?

Agamben answers this _exact_ question in his essay on Debord's films. Agamben's argument is useful for thinking through dis/continuity of the circulation of images.

[Keith]

Glen: re: the ideology/deleuze thing. It pays to be careful with which moment in the D&G or D or G trajectory you are engaging with.

Indeed. I think Spivak misses the relevance of the time of the conversation between Foucault and Deleuze (March of '72). I'll see if I can't get to that a bit tomorrow, if it seems relevant...

Glen: I couldn't care less about 'literature' so my task is thinking it more in terms of the image-saturated climate of today's 'cinematic' everyday life.

How on earth does one engage with D&G, Kafka, their writings on Kafka, all the while not caring less about 'literature'? (Though I suppose it matters just what one means, or means to be thinking, with 'literature'/"literature"/literature.)

[Nate]

Keith, Glen, can you provide work/page refs for these please, when you have a chance? My interest is piqued.

"for Deleuze there is no ideology only "organizations of power""

"in _ATP_ they write "There is no ideology and never has been." In _AO_ they emphatically state (paraphrasing) "there is nothing but belief and desire"."

Thanks!

[Craig]

Nate -

A-O: Glen might be mis-remembering, or I can't find the passage he's referring to, but on page 29 I have, "There is only desire and the social, and nothing else."
ATP: page 4

[Keith]

Nate - See “On Capitalism and Desire” in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 264

[Glen]

indeed, I am misremebering!!! ooh la la! spot the faux pas! Hmm, it was never going to be that easy. Hold onto craig's cite from _AO_ and then turn to the discussion of Tarde in _ATP_ (p. 219)(the below is scanned and cut and pasted):

"The Durkheimians answered that what Tarde did was psychology or inter-psychology, not sociology. But that is true only in appearance, as a first approximation: a microimitation does seem to occur between two individuals. But at the same time, and at a deeper level, it has to do not with an individual but with a flow or a wave. **Imitation is the propagation of a flow; opposition is binarization, the making binary flows; invention is a conjugation or connection of different flows.** What, according to Tarde, is a flow? It is belief or desire (the two aspects of every assemblage); a flow is always of belief and of desire. Beliefs and desires are the basis of every society, because they are flows and as such are "quantifiable"; they are veritable social Quantities, whereas sensations are qualitative and representations are simple resultants. I I Infinitesimal imitation, opposition, and invention are therefore like flow quanta marking a propagation, binarization, orconjugation of beliefs and desires. Hence the importance of statistics, providing it concerns itself with the cutting edges and not only with the "stationary" zone of representations. For in the end, the difference is not at all between the social and the individual (or interindividual), but between the molar realm of representations, individual orcollective, and the molecular realm of beliefs and desires in which the distinction between the social and the individual loses all meaning since flows are neither attributable to individuals nor overcodable by collective signifiers. Representations already define large-scale aggregates, or determine segments on a line; beliefs and desires, on the other hand, are flows marked by quanta, flows that are created, exhausted, or transformed, added to one another, subtracted or combined."
** = orig. italics

It would be interesting to know the possible meanings of the french original of the key sentence in the above re 'belief'. Did massumi translate it properly? If he did then 'belief and desire' as 'two aspects of every assemblage' could correlate to the collective assemblage of enunciation and the machinic assemblage of desire respectively. Belief would then pertain to the incorporeal transformations and order-words which pinch any given social field into distributions of intensities.

However there is a problem of scale here and so it is much better to talk about events, as events cut across scale and tackle the problem head on (rather than simply forgetting about scale of social action as it is cast into the shadow of individual belief).

So, anyway, within a single text "there is no ideology and never has been" and "belief or desire (the two aspects of every assemblage); a flow is always of belief and of desire. Beliefs and desires are the basis of every society." What critics fail to realise is the special case of the human and of language. Does a rock have a 'belief'? No, but a rock formation may be considered a machinic assemblage of desire or something like that. Maybe that is a bad example. I don't know.

The key point that I was trying to make with all my mis-citing or whatever is that it is problematic to think of D&G only as talking about machinic assemblages of desire, that is to focus on the material dimension of their material semiotics, particularly when what is at stake is something 'social' such as value. Many a scholar in cultstuds, particularly in Australia, dwell far too much on the machinic assemblages of desire aspect and it is plain annoying. (I think it may have something to do with the influence of a relatively famous Oz deleuzian who defines the assemblage as such (ie only desire & bodies) in a book.)