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

[Glen]

Keith: Oh, I was being silly. Yeah, literature! Yay! Go team!

There is a mega bias towards literature and music in the nerd/scholar circles in which I sometimes circulate. Such bias is largely irrelevant to my research and my own tastes. I knew I'd get a rise out of someone ;)

On a more serious note, and this is getting off topic so I apologise, part of what I am thinking about is how to approach particular popular assemblages and the 'several regime of signs' through which they signify beyond the privileged place of language (let alone literature). Here I mean assemblages populated by magazines, websites, and commodified events. The everyday cinematic (yeah the Spectacle, but also what Virilio called the proliferation of screens) is a real problem for the argument of _Kafka_. The major language is one form of expression and/or content for the majoritarian assemblages. Kafka does something to language which transforms it. However, if there are 'several regimes of signs' then majoritarian expression does not only take words and language as its content, which can be picked up and transformed by the minoritarian literature-machine. An easy example can be found in the punks and the semiotics of the safety pin ie 'style' is not necessarily expressed in language or literature and yet it may constitute a 'new earth'.

Maybe Deleuze explains the 'cinematic' problem (rather than the 'cinema' problem) in his CInema books, but I could never understand them sufficiently (or his examples) to figure out if he is actually talking about something relevant.

I think I might be extra dyslexic today.

[pomegrenade]

Jon, regarding your initial point:

"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?"

Concerning segmentarity, D&G's spotting of the "local absolute" as heterogenizing the "relative global" map seems important to me. Capitalism assembles the discontinuous fragments by relativizing them, that is by "predicating" each as measurable against the other. Local difference becomes coded as discrepency (in wages, cost of prod...etc) that is immediately trans-coded by capital (as profit or loss).
The local absolute is a break with such transcoding. It's the persistence—better call it, as does sometimes desistance—of value that cannot be evaluated except in the breaking of the value-chain. But to regard the local absolute as solipsistic would be to judge it from the point of view of transcoding. For the local absolute has and goes on to create other forms of relating with an other local absolute, without recourse to the global currency, or through a reconstellation of that value system.

A simple example could be the dialogue of (certain, not all) third world students/intellectuals that encounter one another in the US… the US in this case being (for them, or whomever they may become) an abstract machine, a plane of immanence… US as the plane plays a crucial role, for such a plane is yet to be forged across the third world, and in fact has no clues on the horizon (that I know of).

pom