Long Sunday

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.

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).

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."

Questions on and responses to the Spivak piece.

The following is a guest post by Nate Hawthorne, 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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.