Recently, I have re-read a couple of essays by Spivak, which has been surprisingly compelling and productive. Specifically, I have returned to “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.” What will follow will be some notes on her project in general and particular comments on these text.
- A central question I had with Spivak was: what is the value of deconstruction to Marxism? Some orthodox Marxist would probably say that deconstruction is not just unproductive to a Marxist project but actually counter-productive to it insofar as deconstruction mystifies the material underpinning of social organization. I think this can be valid criticism since some deconstruction can displace the problem of exploitation and inequality into the problem of language. Yet, I would not say that she is doing this kind of move but rather engaging with the difficult issue abstraction. Specifically, how can one work on a high level of abstraction while simultaneously being attentive to particularity?
To ask this question is not to fall into a material/symbolic split but rather engage with the particular historical materiality of abstraction. For example, Stuart Hall points out Marx’s idea of “mode of production” operates on the highest level abstraction in that the concept encompasses a vast historical period and spans across the entire globe. To produce such abstractions is not necessarily intellectually irresponsible but instead it signals the necessity to grasp a political and historical totality. That is to say one needs a name for something to make interventions into it. For example, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique calls the anomie of domestic life “the problem that has no name.” This naming of an experience that assumes a universal subject of the experience renders socially intelligible the structural inequality between men and women in social life, which precipitated second wave white liberal feminism. The point therefore, is not about a material/symbolic dichotomy since the indexing of particular names have claims to materiality and symbolism but rather the historicity of knowledge. In short, it is question of epistomology.
Returning to Spivak, what deconstruction seems to offer for Marxism is a way to index the semi-autonomy of epistomology and history rather than a simple base and superstructure dichotomy. I want to make it clear that this is not a dialectic but instead the disjunct between the particular historical moment that gave rise to a mode abstraction and the history of a mode of abstraction delinked from its particular historical context. Spivak calls this disjunction between particularity and abstraction a “textual indeterminancy.” Once again, these “textual indeterminacies” should not be understood through a Lacanian gap between the symbolic and the real but rather the linguistic effect of historical overdetermination. For this reason, Spivak writes, “Textual criticism of this sort assumes, a) in the narrow sense, that even ‘theoretical’ texts are produced in language, and, b) that ‘reality’ is a fabrication out of discontinuities and constitutive differences with ‘origins’ and ‘ends’ that are provisional and shifting.” In using the concept-metaphor of text, Spivak is highlighting the social and historical contingencies that undergird the power of these categories. In that way, the scare-quoted words are important. First, by stressing how “‘theoretical’ text are produced in language,” she is not suggesting that all texts are the same under language but instead the form of a text’s appearance that render it to be socially intelligible as theory endows the text with the social power of theory, which, on the one hand, it can be “mere” theory, a hypothesis, or, on the other hand, it can be Theory, the accurate representation of the social forces that organize reality. Second, “reality” is not an unmediated relation to the world, as if it is just “out there,” but instead a contested social idea with material effects that is constituted through the conflicts of other ideas that are always historically, materially, and socially contingent. More importantly, these contingencies are narratives in that the “origins” and “ends” establish social legitimacy. Obviously, then, these “textual indeterminacies” are not neutral but instead mark the space of a particular knowledge/power configuration. This leads me to my next point.
