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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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").

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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.

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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)?

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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.

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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.

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Briefly on The Canon (and its straw discontents)

You'd think that issues of Canon-formation and feminism would be of great interest to those concerned with the future of literature.

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Four notes on the periphery of a speculative morphology

1. "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" is, perhaps, for those who arrive at it from literature, cultural studies, philosophy or similar, Spivak's most 'difficult' or elusive of essays. It seems to be the one that, more than any other, makes readers blink, their eyes glaze over.

Sometimes, at best, this is expressed as a bewilderment as to what might be at stake in the argument or, as a slightly different question, as a consideration of what is at put at stake in reading at a particular conjuncture. At other times, with a more or less implicit embarrassment that Spivak herself notes, the readers' gaze is averted from the discussion of 'economics', or better: labour-power and value - which is to say, that which is least familiar and proper to the aforementioned disciplines but which, as it turns out, the essay is about.  Other times, still, the confusion that results from Spivak's indisciplined writing cuts the other way. But, indeed, "before there is language, there are languages", as someone would say  (though, it remains to ask whether this statement exists in its temporal, integrative sense, as the hope or promise of a lingua franca).

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Your episteme is my abstraction, and we'll keep it

Nobody is invested here, it is said.  Nobody wants to risk taking a firm stand for Spivak.  As Terry Eagleton once announced, in post-colonial studies this dilemma is itself practically a cliché.  One must renounce just in order to belong (meanwhile "individualization belies a collective lifestyle," Ulrich Beck has muttered).  Very well though, let me play the role, or play at the role, at least (we are all role players here, to some degree, as everyone surely knows; bloggers are not serious).  There is a sort of enviable gravity to the sacrificial victim, after all.  Still, I've very little genuine desire to play at being, as Eagleton also gibes, "that ultimate source of embarrassment, [the] devoted acolyte."

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Questions on and responses to the Spivak piece.

The following is a guest post by Nate Holdren, blogger at the militant What in the hell .....

First, thanks to Jon and the Long Sundayista crew for holding this symposium. This is not a text I would have otherwise read. I look forward to reading the other contributions in order to understand it better.

Second, while I'm glad to have read it and grateful for the opportunity to participate in the symposium, it is unfortunately the case that I'm not sure what to do with this text. Much of the idiom and at least one of the major writers it references--Derrida--is very unfamiliar to me. I also find some of the philosophical uses of Marx in the essay bring out a proprietorial response on my part. I'd like to claim that it's because I prefer treatments of Marx to stick closer to the letters of blood and fire in which the history of capitalism is written, but that would be dishonest. I like a lot of abstract treatments of Marx. I don't know what it is about this text that doesn't click for me, maybe it's just that I don't really understand chunks of it. Hopefully some of you lot can and will help sort me out.

In any case, below is what I have to contribute to the symposium on Spivak's "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value." I have organized my contribution into three categories. There are two items under each category. I have numbered these items according to category.

The three categories in my contribution, in order of appearance, are:
- Questions that are nothing more than questions (QTANMTQ)
- Questions that are maybe a bit snarky and which are just as much comments as they are questions (QTAMABSAWAJAMCATAQ)
- Responses (R)

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Eating at Gayatri's

1. This symposium was originally framed as a discussion of the utility or coherence of John Holbo's concept of "Higher Eclecticism", a concept that has, on the one hand, been favourably received by those who are suspicious of "Theory", that is, how "Continental philosophy" gets deployed, primarily, in literature and humanities departments and, on the other hand, rather skeptically by those, such as myself, who are inclined to see this concept as unintentionally operating in the context of the "Cultural Wars" -- that is, an attempt by certain political forces to close avenues of discussion, especially those that have attracted the attention of 'Continental philosophers' and their supporters in the United States.  Thus, in a sense, the debate is overdetermined: any questioning of "Theory" is bound to be interpreted as a contribution to the "Cultural Wars" and, thus, political rather than intellectual in orientation.

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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.

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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.

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The Invaluable

The following is a guest post by pomegrenade, a dissertator in Comparative Literature, and state school teacher in upstate New York, who is starting to set foot on the shores outside the academy...

Let me start with the end of the first scene from Jean Genet’s The Screens--as it kept coming back to me while reading Spivak on Marx, for which I had to constantly defer the preparation I had to do for a Wednesday class on Genet’s play. In this scene, Said and his mother, very poor Algerians in the period immediately before the war of liberation, are carrying a suitcase of dough to the house of Said’s prospective wife, for the wedding. The end of the scene comes with a frantic/incestuous(?) dance of mother and son in a state of exhaustion from the long walk carrying the dough in the hot sun:

SAID: Take a look at my mother, see how beautiful and proud she is beneath her sweat and on her high heels! THE MOTHER keeps smiling and dancing. You’re beautiful. I’ll carry the valise. Whee!...

He imitates lightning. He reaches for the valise, but THE MOTHER grabs it first. A brief struggle. They burst out laughing, imitate thunder and lightning. The valise falls to the ground and opens, and everything falls out: it was empty. SAID and THE MOTHER fall to the ground and sit there roaring with laughter.

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Spivak symposium

A reminder that the Spivak symposium starts next week. Schedule and other details are still at Posthegemony.

Over here on Long Sunday, however, we now have a new page where all the various contributions will be woven together: Carnival of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Some preliminary thoughts have already been posted, not least by John, Matt, and crojas. But we start in earnest on Monday.