December, 2000 Volume 3, Issue 3 Past Issues About dis/content Editorial Collective Contributors Contact Us Submissions Links Home   Reviewing Spivak and Sandoval Reading the Wor(l)d by Azfar Hussain Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 449. Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 241. 1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present is a massive (re)intervention in the field of contemporary theory in general but particularly in the domain of what has come to be known as postcolonial studies today. This book does not inaugurate a complete epistemological break with her earlier works: Spivak repeats, rehearses, expands, nuances, and clarifies some of her earlier formulations. For instance, she seeks to re-trace the track of the “native informant” – a term she borrows from ethnography. And thus she again draws our attention to what she calls, invoking Gramsci, “a site of unlisted traces” (6). Also, she revisits different production-circuits of what she repeatedly calls in her earlier works “epistemic violence” – violence perpetrated on the “other” by the very production of the European subject and knowledges including their “sanctioned ignorance” (2).     Then, of course, we have Spivak’s provocative re-readings of Marx, her re-writing of certain contours of political economy, and her re-tooling of the Marxian analytics of value – all differentially vectored by her feminism. Moreover, Spivak re-stages with full force her critiques of the mainstream Eurocentric poststructuralist project as represented by the works of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. She also advances critiques of contemporary development discourses, liberalist multicultural rhetorics, and metropolitan pedagogical practices in the contexts of the political and cultural economy of global capitalism. One notices Spivak’s repeated-yet-different turns to Derrida and Deconstruction as well as to Mahasweta Devi and Bangladesh, while there returns her (in)famous question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In fact Spivak raised this question much earlier vis-à-vis the Indian subaltern historiographical project that aimed to recuperate the voice and consciousness of the subaltern, absent or lost as they are in elitist-colonialist-nationalist historical narratives. Given such engagements, Spivak’s work appears relevant not only to feminist, Marxist and postcolonial critics, but also to pedagogists, political economists, historians, and cultural theorists working in the metropolitan academy today.     In her “Preface” Spivak begins by spelling out her general purpose: “My aim, to begin with, was to track the figure of the Native Informant through various practices: philosophy, literature, history, culture” (ix). Her book, thus, is divided into four chapters respectively called “Philosophy” (1-111), “Literature” (112-197), “History” (198-311), and “Culture” (312-422). What she calls “Appendix” is titled “The Setting to Work of Deconstruction” (423-432), although deconstruction for Spivak never remains an appendage but is persistently instanced as her incurable habit of reading.     Spivak is a superb reader. For more than three decades now, she has been mostly reading, on her own note, “mainstream texts” (xi) but not at the expense of “other” texts. Her first chapter “Philosophy” is an instance of her rigorous readings of three mainstream Western “discursive precursors” (3) – Kant, Hegel, Marx. She immediately describes them as “remote precursors” (3). But her readings suggest that those precursors are not remote, really. For they continue to inhabit and inflect contemporary discursive spaces and other territories in which “we” remain implicated with various degrees of complicity and resistance. In her reading of Kant, Spivak’s characteristic interest in the (re)production and constitution of the subject in Western mainstream texts returns with full force. And in her reading she demonstrates how the European Subject always clearly and cleanly turns out to be the norm, while suggesting that the normalization and cleanliness of such subject is a function of what she repeatedly calls “foreclosure” –  the foreclosure of “the Aboriginal” or the “other” or the native informant herself. Spivak then offers a reading of Hegel’s epistemically violent “Indian readings” – particularly Hegel’s remarks on Srimadbhagavadgita, while she also looks at “other” readings of the Gita produced from within India. In all this, as Spivak tells us, she seeks to avoid the trap of a binary opposition between “master” and “native.” She therefore moves in the direction of analyzing – to some degree – a certain imbrication of Hegel in the Gita in the high Hindu contexts in such a way that the indigenous and nationalist politics of reading can be problematized in the face of “the complicity between native hegemony and the axiomatics of imperialism” (37).     While I find Spivak’s readings of Kant and Hegel politically useful at a time when Kant and Hegel keep returning under multiple masks and also keep naming and norming both the European subject and its other (among other discursive practices), I find her reading of Marx most significant on more scores than one. Spivak does not merely offer a sustained reading of Marx in her “Philosophy” chapter but continues to bring Marx back in a number of ways in her subsequent chapters. She admits, “As far as I can understand it, my agenda remains an old-fashioned Marxist one” (357). Of course Spivak’s decisive returns to the Marxian analytics and apparatuses of political economy –particularly the analytics of value – radically distinguish her from numerous postcolonial critics, including their celebrated gurus such as Said and Bhabha, who all have more or less skirted round the issues of political economy and value. Even Spivak’s own followers (mostly blind as they are) as well as postmarxist cultural theorists in the metropolis have remained largely indifferent to the question of value – a question which constituted a fundamental and abiding concern for Marx himself by his own estimation. In her book Spivak rightly voices her complaint about such an indifference (99).     Spivak’s reading of Marx instructively begins with her re-writing – a re-writing that foregrounds the subaltern woman as the predominant support of global production in the narrative of political economy that otherwise tends to “foreclose” the gendered international division of labor. Spivak calls attention to what she calls the “global-homeworking mode of production,” while also arguing that capital’s exploitation of the use-value of the subaltern woman’s labor as well as “the coded discursive management of the new socialization of the reproductive body” (68) continue to drive the motor of contemporary international political economy.     Spivak particularly chooses to read Marx’s Capital, Volumes 2 and 3. But in so far as her general aim is to “track the figure of the Native Informant,” Spivak appropriately turns to the chapter called “Foreign Trade” in Capital Volume 3 – particularly the issue of colonial trade. This is an area in which the traditional analytics of value – as Spivak seems to suggest – require a certain reconfiguration. Spivak rightly maintains, “In Marx’s account of ‘Foreign Trade,’ it is an analysis based on the money-form that is shown to be inadequate or misleading in the context of colonial trade” (102). Spivak tries to supplement Marx’s analysis by suggesting that, “especially in that branch of foreign trade which is ‘colonial trade,’ one of the reasons why the ‘money-form’ as explanatory model is misleading is because relative to the social productivity of ‘the privileged country,’ the ‘total or expanded form of value’ is still operative in the colonies” (101).     But I think Spivak does not fully unpack the aforementioned form of value. She does not adequately enunciate the nature of the production or expression of value in colonial contexts. Such contexts historically mark a complex network of production relations – contexts in which colonial labor, colonial labor-time, and colonial exchangeability deserve full accounting. In other words, to account for the form of value – expanded or not – in colonial contexts, it is important to address a number of political-economic questions – questions concerning production relations – in so far as value and use-value, for both Marx and Spivak, do not obtain outside the circuits of production, exchange, and consumption. In other words, value is a relational category that involves both continuous and discontinuous relationships among labor, commodity, and capital in the processes of production, exchange, and consumption at a given historical moment.     Therefore, my questions – admittedly categorical – are: What is the relationship between agrarian labor in the colonies and metropolitan industrial capital or even money capital? Also, how does the historically specific form of agrarian labor in the colonies enact both tensions and transactions with metropolitan industrial labor? Further, what is the relationship between agricultural capital and agricultural labor in the colonized site itself? Then, what is the nature of contact and conflict between industrial capital/money capital in the metropolis and agricultural capital in the colonies? And how do all these relationships differentially involve yet “foreclose” the gendered subaltern labor in the colonies? Such questions themselves suggest that the very political economy of colonialist capitalism or capitalist colonialism turns out to be a theater of multiple levels and layers of production relations differentially affecting – but not always causally determining – exchange and consumption in a variety of ways. To bypass or short-circuit all such relations is indeed to further mystify value in ways in which the possibilities of advancing what I may call a colonial labor theory of value seem to remain foreclosed or remain only a matter of scattered speculations.     Spivak, then, is interested in pushing value-thought in several fields of discursive productions. And it is in this context that she is interested not only in value per se but also in what she calls “value-coding” (103). She charts different trajectories of value-productions, and reads different value-codings for that matter, such as “cognitive, cultural, political, or affective” (103). But she does not forget to underline the economic as the last instance: “the economic is the last instance in the sense that it is the most abstract” (104). But it is also arguable, as Gramsci tells us, that the economic is the most concrete. I think it is more useful to envisage and engage the economic as a dialectically nuanced field of the interplay between the abstract and the concrete. Also, while to rethink value-coding in different discursive fields – as Spivak surely does – is important, I think her readings tend to push this category of value-coding a little too far to the point of more textualizing and even tropologizing value than making sense of it in terms of the historically specific social relations of production, exchange, and consumption.     I am aware that Spivak’s tropic energy in this instance has proven commendable to many contemporary metropolitan Marxists who have by now decisively re-written their names as postmodernists. But I wonder if such energy forges a foggy field of theoretical shadow-dancing around the notion of value. And I also wonder if Spivak’s textualization of value gets in our way of negotiating value in specific worldly terms of praxis and resistance. Spivak seems to be fashioning and circulating her own brand of what I wish to call value-tropologics. Such logics at least occasionally tend to obscure the materiality of value by the metaphoricity of value or even by its metaphorical excesses and surpluses instead of enacting a productive dialectic between the material and the metaphorical as such (I want to keep a distinction between the two alive, although I am aware that such a distinction might immediately fall prey to certain kinds of deconstruction).     I think the revised and expanded version of the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” – now a substantial part of Spivak’s “History” chapter – is one of her most challenging discursive-theoretical interventions in the field of politics – the politics of reading, writing, voicing, silencing, and representation. This chapter perhaps provides one of the most exemplary textual spaces in which Spivak’s feminist, Marxist, and “postcolonial” agendas – persistently aided and animated as they are by her own deconstructively interventionist and performative reading tactics and strategies – come together almost all at once, but not in any unproblematical concert or unity. In fact, those agendas come together variously inflecting and informing one another and also bringing one another into productive crisis, while forging spaces for further critical interventions on the part of Spivak’s readers.     It is virtually impossible here to undertake a thorough reading of Spivak’s difficult and complex but useful essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” However, I intend to tabulate a couple of high points. Among scores of her interwoven readings, Spivak’s tracing or tracking of the itinerary of the native informant prompts her to name and rename an entire network of institutional, legal, cultural, and political-economic relationships that historically obtained and operated – and continue to work even today – in a range of space-and-time-specific displacements. Such relationships for Spivak of course encompass both continuous and discontinuous transactions among apparently scattered yet systemic networks of power and production such as patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism, and post-fordist postmodern micro-electronic globalized capitalism. Given such relationships – which not only produce the subaltern themselves but also produce at least the mute complicity of the consciously resistant and “radical” middle-class male historian – a Foucault-inflected subaltern historiographical project, despite its contestatory agendas, cannot claim to retrieve the lost voice of the subaltern, as my reading of Spivak would suggest. It is in this sense (not the only one) that the subaltern cannot speak.     And, of course, both Spivak and the Subaltern Studies Group would agree that the subaltern cannot speak – and have not really spoken at all – in the spaces of colonialist-nationalist historiography. But, then, in the space of so-called subaltern historiography? Spivak seems to say “no.” However, by no means does she suggest that history has decisively silenced both the subaltern and the historiographer so that one can do nothing but only continue to mourn the death of agency. Rather I see Spivak negotiate the absences, limits, and (im)possibilities of speech and agency – and by extension resistance – under specific historical circumstances. Thus she also seems to be suggesting that oppositional struggles within those historical parameters can only continue through a persistent re-historicization, re-theorization, and re-strategization of subjects and re(-)presentations, differentially implicated as they are in global political economy.     The question of global political economy is simultaneously the question of culture itself, suggests Spivak in her final chapter “Culture.” For Spivak, then, culture is decisively political-economic, while the political-economic is in turn cultural. Thus she seems to be contesting contemporary metropolitan postmodern culturalism that underlies and underwrites micro-site identity-politics and so-called critical pedagogies in the United States. Spivak always keeps Foucault in check, suggesting that his microphysics of power cannot account for territorial colonialism and imperialism – or the body of the female subaltern of color located on the other side of the international division of labor – a point Spivak also takes up earlier in her “History” chapter. Curiously then, Spivak’s running critique of Foucauldian microphysics seems to be resulting in her at least unconscious revival of Lenin, one who however receives virtually no explicit or sustained attention in Spivak’s undertaking. But to the extent that Spivak continues to zero in on the “financialization of the globe,” I think that Spivak’s analytics of political economy remain inflected by a certain Leninization of Marx’s M-C-M' and M-M'. I also think that Spivak’s relentless attention to the financialization of the globe provides a necessary and enabling political-economic framework within which she ably looks at the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, NGOs and other development agencies in the third world, neoliberal multicultural practices in the metropolitan classroom, human rights interventions, and child-labor in Bangladesh as well as their interconnectedness in today’s fully globalized world. I think the title of Spivak’s last chapter could very well be “The Political Economy of Culture and the Culture of Political Economy.”     I am aware that I have so far quickly provided nothing more than a partial account of Spivak’s wide-ranging theoretical and critical preoccupations. But then, like any review, my present undertaking is overly selective. In fact, admittedly, I wished to focus on a few selected issues with an uneven distribution of emphasis. Now I will close this piece with a few more general observations. It is perhaps in the contexts of Spivak’s sustained political-economic and value-theoretical engagements that her own relationship to the entire postcolonial project in the metropolis can be rigorously re-thought, but not completely or uncritically severed. Certainly Spivak’s critique of what she calls “postcolonial reason” is productively informed by her nuanced Marxism and thus her critique also persistently points up the postcolonial project’s dangerous lack of attention to political economy in general. In all this, one even might argue – as Spivak herself does – that she has been identified wrongfully with postcolonial theory.     But, then, to the extent that Spivak ardently aligns herself with such feminist critics as bell hooks, Sara Suleri, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chandra Mohanty, Ketu Katrak, and others – critics who variously underwrite and underline postcolonial theory itself, while advancing postcolonial feminist studies in general –Spivak seems to be producing her critique(s) from within the field itself. In other words, Spivak produces her critiques not to mark a complete epistemological break with the continuing postcolonial project as such, but to problematize and complicate this project in ways in which it can be increasingly strengthened theoretically and politically. In a certain sense, then, Spivak’s “Marxism” – not quite “old-fashioned” –  simultaneously critiques and serves postcolonial studies, whose limitations are also the limitations of the metropolitan academy itself. Next Section     Table of Contents