Long Sunday

fast, cheap

I'll go ahead and (un)wrap the symposium here. Obviously, this shouldn't prevent anyone else from contributing further thoughts on "Scattered Speculations," on Spivak, or on any of the issues that have arisen during this symposium. I'll add any new contributions to the aggregated "Carnival of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak". But our intensive week of reading and discussion is now over. What remains is to unwrap, unravel...

As several people have noted, the idea for this symposium on Spivak arose during a discussion at the eponymous Weblog, in response to Adam Kotsko's "Theses on the 'Higher Eclecticism'". In other words, it arose in the context of what is by now a long-running debate on "Theory" that has been represented in terms of an antagonism between the two "sides": John Holbo's Valve on the one hand; and this blog, Long Sunday, in particular, on the other.

Swadeshe pujyate raja vidyan sarvatra pujyate

Before I attempt to bring some threads together, a bit of anecdotage, that may also prove illuminating about value and global communications.

A few years ago, at a time that I was working in Manchester, England, I happened to be in North Carolina for a conference. There I received an email from my friend Jean Franco, who taught for many years at Columbia (she is now emerita) and is one of Gayatri Spivak's closest friends. She'd just got back to the States from London and said she had "an immense favour to ask." Gayatri had phoned her from Hong Kong, "in a state of agitation," because she needed to get hold of a book by Tony Blair, The Third Way, in advance of her keynote at the British Sociological Association conference in Manchester at the weekend. It was now Wednesday. Jean passed along Gayatri's temporary email address in Hong Kong so we could make further arrangements.

Resistance with irony

The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, blogger at the irregular Life During Wartime.

1. ‘Triumphant global finance capital/world trade can only be resisted with irony.’ I am simultaneously drawn and worried by this claim from Spivak’s 2000 essay ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory.’ Perhaps this is because the work of irony is never done. Reaching on the one hand toward insubordinate refusal and on the other toward an unbearable ontological lightness, irony holds forth a promise it cannot keep. As such, it provides no chart of programmatic action--no twelve steps for overcoming global capitalism. Its tactics are inevitably polluted with ideological longings that, as Spivak’s teacher Paul de Man points out, it can know but never quite overcome.

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world

Is this precisely the impossibility that drives Spivak to rewrite her observations on reading Marx after Derrida so many times?

Circulation, Spivak, and The Skin of Cats

The following is a guest post by Stephen Squibb, blogger at the novel fugitive ethical.

1. Let's say there is a European staying in my apartment. Looking up from his work the other day, he asks what I am reading. I do that awkward combination of gestures and words that one does at someone who speaks mostly foreign languages, simultaneously muttering and pointing, Spivak, Scattered Speculations, etc. He replies earnestly and in broken English that it looks interesting, and goes back to work. Today, as I sit down to write this, he asks to borrow the essay when I am through. I say yes. I make no mention of its content, its difficulty, its eclecticism, indeed and honestly, how could I? He will simply understand it, or he will not, or, perhaps his encounter will defy reduction to something as simple as all that. It is not for me to speculate on his level of comfort with written English, much less with certain, hyper-syllabic theoretical vocabularies. Nor is it for me to apologize in advance for the peculiarity of the offering: he has shared with me his work, and I will share with him this essay. That, on some level, is all.

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.

Writing at Speed

The following is a guest post by carlos rojas, blogger at the revealing the naked gaze.

"I am writing [this piece] at speed," Spivak writes (at speed?) at the beginning of "Ghostwriting," her 1996 rejoinder to Derrida's long-awaited Specters of Marx (1995).

Writing at speed . . . In his subsequent "anachronis[tic]" (both "premature and belated") response, Derrida would implicitly toss this phrase back at her, suggesting in "Marx & Sons" (1999) that his most celebrated translator had, perhaps, read him too speedily, not attentively enough, identifying "misreadings," including "errors [which] stem from an outright inability to read" (223) (e.g., he notes that she quotes him critically [immediately after a somewhat bizarre interlude about watching a retrospective on Marx on the Today show while "doing my exercises"] for claiming that "We won’t repoliticize," when Derrida, in the passage in question, actually wrote the exact opposite: "There will be no repoliticization, there will be no politics otherwise").

Scattering Some Speculations About the Scattering of "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

The following is a guest post by Keith, blogger at the under-read Metastable Equilibrium.

So I have moved into another text, outside of the main text under consideration (detour has been my M.O. as of late). And besides, how can one concentrate on just one text, when so many other texts are woven into it? Interestingly Spivak only informs the reader of just what place Value holds in her theory within the pages of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: it is a Derridian "lever of intervention"--the lever of transgression and bafflement with which to turn the text.

Hoping then, that this will not appear too off-topic but fold into the on-topic, I want to begin with Spivak's treatment of an exchange between Deleuze and Foucault as a "site of betrayal." Their problematic dismissal of representation (to which I must attend to my own re-readings of certain passages in The Order of Things) through a "postrepresentationalist rhetoric" utilizes what Spivak perceives--correctly to some degree--as a "vocabulary [that] hides an essentialist agenda" (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 271). So she will then "spend some time with the hegemonic radicals" (248) in order to unpack the problematic in the full knowledge of her precarious position.

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)?

The Value of "Theory"

The issue of the theoretical enterprise in the social sciences and the humanities has been both central and marginal to the discussion thus far.  Central insofar as all the contributions and comments have oriented themselves towards the question of "Theory" -- that is, what is the use of "Theory" and how should one make sense of "Theory" texts?  The problem of rendering sense to a strange text about value, complete with pictures and references to ostensibly long-dead debates, has pre-occupied nearly everyone.  I say "pre-occupied" in a literal: we haven't yet gotten on to the real occupation of the symposium.  Or have we?  And this is the sense of marginal.  While "Theory" has been central, it has only had a shadowy, rhetorical existence.  People on one side characterize the other side as being "anti-Theory" and the "anti-Theory-ists" return accusations in which the ostensibly supporters of "Theory" are unable to recognize themselves.  Put another way, those who propose a critique of "Theory" cannot ever hit their targets because those who defend "Theory" do not recognize themselves in the critique because their alliance is elsewhere: to "Continental philosophy" or some such.

Materialist Indeterminacy

I read Gayatri Spivak's "Scatttered Speculations on the Question of Value" (Diacritics, Winter 1985, pp. 73-92) as an exercise in indeterminate (rather than dialectical) materialism. That is, I take her project in the article as one of demonstrating the possibility of a materialism that is indeterminate, open for transformation, contestation, and resignification. The steps in the argument include exposing moments of openness and indeterminacy in the representation of relations between labor, value, money, and capital (and hence the openness of what might have seemed one of the most determining of Marxian concepts) and showing the way oppositions between economy and culture don't work (and hence the falseness of idealist or culturalist attacks on economic determinism). The argument also employs a "materialist predication of the subject" as part of its overall conceptual apparatus. My questions concern the way that this concept of the subject fits within indeterminate materialism more broadly.