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Arresting Deconstruction:
Observations on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Cultural Criticism
Deconstruction, for Spivak, is neither a conservative aesthetic
nor a radical politics but an intellectual ethic which enjoins a
constant attention to the multiplicity of determination. At the
same time, Spivak is absolutely committed to pinpointing and
arresting that multiplicity at the moment in which an enabling
analysis becomes possible. (MacCabe 1988: xii)
Thus Colin MacCabe in the preface to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s In Other
Worlds: Essays on Cultural Politics (Spivak 1988a). But are the commitments
McCabe points out compatible with each other? Should we not assume, rather,
that their tension offers the very paradigm of undecidability? How does Spivak
negotiate the transition from one commitment to the other?
Before she became one of the leading voices in postcolonial criticism, readers
were acquainted with Gayatri Spivak’s work mainly as the author of the long
introduction prefixed to her translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology.
Her book In Other Worlds, a collection of essays written in the ten-year period
1977-1987, takes deconstruction from rhetorical criticism to cultural studies. Here
the concepts of the margin and the supplement become embodied in women, the
working classes, the Third World. Derrida’s (“non-”)concepts become the
instruments to analyze ideology, hegemony and the position of the subaltern.
Deconstruction is oriented towards materialist critique and feminism,
contemplated from a cross-cultural perspective. A convergence of these currents
of thought is fruitful and reciprocally beneficial, and In Other Worlds was a
welcome and influential volume.
The issues at stake, however, are complex, and the difficulties of the
convergence are great. Spivak’s perspective is bound to endorse only certain
Marxist or feminist doctrines; likewise, it favours a given version of
deconstruction. The “undecidability” school of (ex-)Yale deconstructivist critics
(Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Barbara Johnson) does not seem to interest Spivak
very much. The integration (or collaboration, or fruitful interruption) of
deconstruction with Marxism and feminism requires instead some specific point at
which deconstruction is arrested. Spivak claims to find this point in the logic of
deconstruction itself, through
3
the recognition, within deconstructive practice, of provisional and
intractable starting points in any investigative effort; its disclosure of
complicities where a will to knowledge would create oppositions; its
insistence that in disclosing complicities the critic-as-subject is herself
complicit with the object of her critique. . . . (1988a: 180)
Mark this well: the critic-as-subject . Self-deconstruction in the void will not do:
it is always done by someone, a subject, with an aim (conscious or unconscious),
and from a specific institutional situation. A subject is for Spivak the effect of a
complex overdetermination, the convergence of ideological, economic, historical
and other strands. It is not a free agent, “a sovereign and determining subject”
(Spivak 1988a: 204). But the (subject-)effect becomes now the cause whereby
deconstruction can be arrested. No doubt this move could itself be deconstructed.
What matters, however, is that Spivak does not wish to deconstruct it—a
categorical imperative, if you will, or rather a political one, a commitment to
materialist analysis. The situation of the feminist or the Marxist critic may be
questioned strategically, but that is in order to define it with more precision. In
the last analysis it is a given with which she must work.
1
Such a move is bound to
be reminiscent of the Sartrean concept of “situation,”
2
although I imagine Spivak
would reject Sartre’s humanist perspective.
Fixing the limits of deconstruction thus, with respect to the critic’s situation, is
not without its problems. A “deconstructive authority” for this move can be found
in Derrida, when he remarks that deconstruction always begins in a somewhat
arbitrary way:
We must begin wherever we are and the thought of the trace, which
cannot not take the scent into account, has already taught us that it was
impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely. Wherever we are: in
a text where we already believe ourselves to be. (Derrida 1976: 162)
However, Derrida is not referring here specifically to a social or institutional
situation. These can of course be said to be encompassed in the question of
method, but I can’t help thinking that introducing the critic’s personal situation in
the analysis cannot but lead towards a new version of humanism.
Following this direction in a rigorous way, Spivak applies deconstructive
concepts both to texts and to the contexts in which they are analyzed. She
denounces, for instance, the academy’s practice of tokenism, through which “the
putative center welcomes selective inhabitants of the margin in order better to
exclude the margin” (1988a: 107). The examples where Spivak links her theory
and her situation as a third-world feminist in the metropolitan academia abound in
4
her writings. “Spivak’s theme here,” MacCabe observes, “is large: the micro-
politics of the academy and its relation to the macro-narrative of imperialism”
(1988: x). Indeed, it could be said that Spivak’s theme is her own circumstance,
but defined as a subject-position which is the result of multiple social
determinations: gender, race, nationality, profession, political agenda, intellectual
background. Her whole approach to theory is feminist in a way which is not
always obvious; it is deeply marked by “a certain program at least implicit in all
feminist activity: the deconstruction of the opposition between the private and the
public” (Spivak 1988a: 103). This self-staging of the critic is dangerous in the
sense that sometimes it can sound like an ad hoc justification:
The only way I can hope to suggest how the center itself is marginal is by
not remaining outside in the margin and pointing my accusing finger at the
center. I might do it rather by implicating myself in that center and sensing
what politics make it marginal. Since one’s vote is at the limit for oneself,
the deconstructivist can use herself (assuming one is at one’s own
disposal) as a shuttle between the center (inside) and the margin (outside)
and thus narrate a displacement. (1988a: 107; cf. also 134, 221)
Spivak seems to be apologizing for choosing to stay as a professor in an American
university instead of returning to her native India. Still, the academy offers endless
opportunities for self-justification, endless strategies to do so, and what they all
have in common is not very interesting. We might as well concentrate on their
face value. In this sense, Spivak’s ‘self-justification’ is quite convincing. To see
her theory as the product of an individual self-justification would be, I think, the
shallowest way to apply her teaching that “the exclusivist ruses of theory reflect a
symptom and have a history.”
3
Spivak’s justification of her activity certainly
deserves to be seen in the wider context she sets it in, a world of subject-positions
whether there is no such thing as a sovereign subject or a genuinely individual
interest.
A displacement can be narrated. In the first essay of In Other Worlds, “The
Letter as Cutting Edge” (1977), the issues of feminism and the third world, or
Spivak’s characteristic reflections on her own personal position in the academy
and her agenda, are conspicuously absent.
4
Spivak reads Coleridge in the way
Barbara Johnson (or, again, the early Barbara Johnson) might do, showing how
Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria deconstructs itself, how its rhetorical structure
undoes what the philosophical side of the theory is attempting when taken at face-
value. Like Paul de Man or J. Hillis Miller, Spivak at this point claims that
“textuality keeps intelligibility forever at bay” (1988a: 11). But already there are
signs of a certain dissatisfaction with deconstruction. In the reflection on the
5
future proliferation of deconstrutive readings (1988a: 11), a metatheoretical
distancing of Spivak from her own analysis is apparent. And she also shows an
interest in the possible ways of arresting deconstruction (whose “philosophical
rigor . . . renders it quite useless as a passport to psychoanalytic literary criticism”
[1988a: 13]) through the use of “frontier-concepts” (1988a: 13) and playing other
disciplines (in this case, psychoanalysis) against the threat of perpetual
deconstruction. Spivak defines this as gaining some “elbow room” (1988a: 13) or
“turning room” (1988a: 14); she is nearly apologetic for this new turn given to
deconstruction when she observes that “the critic might have to admit that her
gratitude to Dr. Lacan would be for so abject a thing as an instrument of
intelligibility” (1988a: 14).
Which instruments of intelligibility is Spivak ready to use? She will certainly
use deconstruction. Spivak emphasizes the value of the analyses enabled by
deconstruction, notwithstanding the inherent contradictions of the method, as
recognized by Derrida himself (MacCabe 1988: xiii). But orthodox literary
criticism is not lacking in instruments of intelligibility either (nor in other kind of
contradictions), and the moment we step outside of deconstruction we are bound
to land in more familiar regions—for instance, an intentionalism that Spivak
would like to avoid.
Spivak’s commentary of the story “Stanadayini” (by the Indian writer
Mahasweta Devi) is apparently yet another addition to the list of anti-intentionalist
critical theories.
5
Apparently, since there are several confusing moves in Spivak’s
attitude towards authorial meaning. For instance, she claims that “the fear of a
critical reading that would question the writer’s direct access to his or her meaning
is related to the received dogma of the illusion of freedom” (1988a: 97). It seems,
however, that what Spivak is aiming at here and in her analysis at large is not the
author’s access to his or her meaning, but rather his or her access to the meaning
unearthed by the critic. That meaning is “the writer’s” only through the critic’s
representation of the author’s ideology and unconscious determinations. It is of
course necessary for critics to show that the meanings they find can be said to be
the author’s in some way (and not the product of the free creativity of the critic),
but this does not mean that the author does not have his or her own representation
of the meaning of the text. It is obvious that Spivak assumes that Mahasweta Devi
has such a representation which can be known and critically evaluated. An
intentionalist theory does not ask for much more.
Also, I do not see how, in the “author’s reading” of “Stanadayini,” “the ‘effect
of the real’ must necessarily be underplayed” (1988a: 244). Mahasweta Devi’s
fiction (a paradigm of post-colonial engagé political correctness, as I see it),
6
presents Jashoda, the protagonist, as a mythical mother of multitudes and a
patriotic allegory of India; Spivak prefers to focus instead on the literal meaning
which conveys that allegory, and analyzes the figure of Jashoda as an instance of
the exploited subaltern. The effectiveness of the allegory (the “tenor”) in
Mahasweta Devi’s story would seem to depend on the effectiveness of the literal
sense (or “vehicle”), rather than draw attention away from it. What Spivak really
wants is to rewrite the story. She even chides the author for giving a false turn to
the story and forcing an allegorical meaning into it. I happen to agree with Spivak
on this particular point; however, I think that what she is rejecting is not merely
“the author’s reading,” but also (certain aspects of) the author’s writing —not
merely Mahaswetha Devi’s free-floating intention, but the textual authorial
intention. And it is clear that in her reading Spivak does not “put aside” the
author’s “reading,” as she claims; rather, she sets it in the wider perspective of the
conflict between nationalism and subaltern resistance movements.
In the second essay of the book, a certain “conversion” to feminist criticism is
narrated, and it is significant that it occurs in response to the inadequacy of the de
Manian doctrine that “the text deconstructs itself” when it comes to articulate an
intelligible concept of textual authorial intention.
6
Ignoring this question turns the
radical potential of deconstruction into conservatism. The list of authors in the
traditional literary canon, for instance, is left untouched by the de Manian
approach to deconstruction. Spivak does not speak of the need to deal with the
authorial intention in so many words, but I do not see any other way to interpret
her call for a critical methodology which recognizes “the articulated specificity of
the ‘somethings’ that the text wishes, on one level, to mean, and with which it
ruses” (1988a: 15). The distinction of these two levels of interpretation, the
interpretation of the textual authorial meaning and its deconstruction, would
therefore be “the ‘minimal idealizations’ which constitute the possibility of
reading” (1988a: 15). In fact, this is a matter of emphasis; the same distinction is
found in Derrida (e.g. 1976: 158) even if he usually plays it down. As to Spivak,
she often is all too ready to read the author’s role as a historical ideological
statement (cf. 1988a: 74).
The commentary of “Stanadayini” is an instantiation of Spivak’s rule on where
to start and what to deconstruct: “You can only read against the grain if misfits in
the text signal the way” (1988a: 211). Woman or subaltern modes of
representation are the starting points chosen by Spivak.
Spivak analyzes the subaltern as the “absent center” of historiography, “the
absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic” (1988a: 207).
In his analysis of Orientalism, Edward W. Said observes that the subaltern is
7
present as an element of the self-image of the elite: “European culture gained in
strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate
and even underground self” (Said 1979: 3). Spivak takes this view one step
further, by emphasizing the heterogeneous and fragmented positions that the
subaltern colonial subjects are forced into in such an economy—the infiltration of
the colonizer in the very self of the colonized.
7
These analyses are extremely
suggestive and useful, and they open whole new avenues for deconstruction.
A desire not to arrest deconstruction leads Spivak to arrest deconstruction
through feminism, to posit as a center of attention for feminist criticism the
autobiographical motivation of feminist readings themselves (1988a: 17).
Feminist issues evaporate in deconstruction in the “narrow” sense, deconstruction
that systematically undermines its own practice or that ignores the position of the
reader vis à vis the ideology of the text. Commenting on how Wordsworth’s
Prelude erases the issues of gender and class which stood at its genesis, Spivak
further voices her misgivings about an unqualified notion of “self-deconstructing
texts”: “If one pulled at a passage like this, the text could be made to perform a
self-deconstruction, the adequacy of The Prelude as autobiography called into
question. But then the politics of the puller would insert itself into the
proceeding” (1988a: 76). Here it seems clear that Spivak can conceive a self-
deconstruting text only by conceiving at the same time a critic who “self-
deconstructs” it. The interpretive issue is especially relevant for a Third World
feminist. Spivak shows that the position of woman (both within and without the
text) is not neutral and cannot be safely ignored. I find especially interesting her
analyses of how women function in male texts as signs or objectified vehicles for
a transmission of meaning between male figures (1988a: 15-29; 215-217). The
detailed analysis of the intertextuality of Yeats’s “Ego dominus tuus” is a
fascinating demonstration of the tremendous ease with which such “transmissions
of responsibility” are inherited and perpetuated through allusion and stereotype,
“from Homer to Virgil to Dante to Milton to Yeats” (1988a: 25). Surely this is
one of the best uses which a feminist approach can make of Lacanian
psychoanalysis.
The deconstructive moment is therefore a fundamental one in Spivak’s
analysis, both as a practical strategy of undoing a conceptual construction and as a
kind of intellectual imperative not to rest on simple solutions: “It is . . . the
deconstructive view that keeps me resisting an essentialist freezing of the issues of
gender, race, and class” (1988a: 84). But she despairs of finding a wholly
“legitimate” way to stop deconstructing. “It is not possible to attend to the trace
fully” (1988a: 47), and her reading must ultimately rest on “one possible alibi,”
8
psychological or historical (1988a: 47), which is not logically derived from the
deconstructive activity. In the later essays there does not seem to be any
conclusion reached on this matter. The project of an unending deconstruction is
one by which “I [Spivak] am still moved” (1988a: 84) but which will not lead by
itself to any political decision. At a certain point,
the investigator seems herself beckoned by the circuit of ‘absolute
transitivity.’
Without yielding to that seduction, the following question can be
asked.... What is the use of pointing out a that a common phonocentrism
binds subaltern, élite authority and disciplinary-critical historian
together...? (1988a: 214-215)
We can imagine here Derrida as the seducteur manqué whom Spivak sends
packing, but it may be telling that eventually it is Terry Eagleton (the original
author of the question she asks) who is accused of oversimplification and maybe
even a smallish measure of bad faith (1988a: 215). If Spivak is committed to
arresting deconstruction, she is even more clear on the subject of arresting a
certain kind of Marxism. Not Marx, though. Together with Derrida, Marx is
usually invoked by Spivak as a model of rigor and sure critical instinct.
8
In Other Worlds provides something that did not find in Derrida until his later
Spectres of Marx—a deconstructive reading of Marx. Spivak identifies in the
Marxist theories of the creation of value that moment favoured in deconstructive
readings, the transitional or marginal element, which makes possible the work of
the system while remaining itself problematically involved with the system. The
concept in question is that of use-value, which “in the classic way of
deconstructive levers, is both outside and inside the system of value-
determinations” (1988a: 162). The relation between labor and value is thus not
mechanical, but free-floating. According to Spivak, the non-continuist conception
of use-value is to be found in Marx’s own text in Book One of Capital. Spivak’s
Marx, therefore, is somewhat of a deconstructionist himself. Unlike later
Marxists, he abounds in moments of “productive bafflement” (Spivak 1988b: 286)
and, like Spivak, he exerts a “prudent” self-restraint by strategically eluding those
aspects of his theory that lead to a deconstructive “open-endedness” or an
“insertion into textuality” (1988a: 161). Now this move is ambivalent enough.
Spivak wants to show that we can recuperate Marx by reading him
deconstructively, but that very reading shows how Marx backs down from
potentially deconstructive moments.
The coherence of Spivak’s project is compromised by her adherence to
deconstructive doctrines of dubious validity, for instance the claim that as we are
9
structured by languages we therefore cannot “possess” those languages (1988a:
78). This assertion is often found in deconstructive critism, usually in order to
negate the validity of structuralist approaches (in a wide sense of the term
“structuralist”). It is, for instance, the objection Derrida raises against speech act
theory (Derrida 1988: 39). The problem with this kind of argument is that it is
partially true, and it is therefore given an unwarranted scope. Metalanguage may
represent language. It does not thereby jump outside of language to present an
objective view of it. But it does enable many semiotic manoeuvres that would
remain unexplainable if we stick to the deconstructivist claim. A dictionary, for
instance, uses words to explain words, and its definitions will ultimately found to
be circular. But that does not prevent it from being useful as an instrument of
communication between speakers. A dictionary does not “possess” language in
any definitive way, nor does it attempt to. Rather, it is an instrument that can be
used to solve practical problems in specific circumstances. A similar claim, I
think, can be put forward in the case of structuralist models and semiotic theories.
The space thus opened between the circularity entailed by the use of existing
codes (or their representations) and the practical effectiveness of this use should
not be easily dismissed, since it is the space that justifies the existence and utility
of theory. Spivak herself articulates elsewhere such a justification of her own
activity as a theorist:
My explanation cannot remain outside the structure of production of what I
criticize. Yet, simply to reject my explanation on the grounds of this
theoretical inadequacy that is in fact its theme would be to concede to the
two specific political stances (masculist and technocratic) that I criticize.
(1988a: 110; cf. also 221)
The duplicity of theory does not justify abandoning the enterprise, because it does
not invalidate the effectiveness of its results. This is a move which is certainly far
removed from the views usually associated with deconstruction. Or with a
particular school of deconstruction—Spivak is fighting for her version of
deconstruction and the direction it should take. MacCabe observes that Spivak’s
approach “lacks the defining features of deconstruction in America” (1988: xi).
Still, some family resemblances linger on. Another rash equation common in
deconstructive writing is the analogy between fiction and other discourses, e.g.
fiction and history:
In this view [the early Foucault’s], it is as if the narrativizations of history
are structured or textured like what is called literature. Here one must re-
think the notion that fiction derives from truth as its negation. In the
context of archival historiography, the possibility of fiction cannot be
10
derived. (1988a: 243).
In Time and Narrative Ricœur has criticized similar positions, arguing that they
attribute to fictionalization what they should attribute to narrativization. A
comparable analogy, between theory and fiction, is found in other critics like
Frank Kermode or T. S. Kuhn; Spivak refers at this point to Derrida’s “Limited
Inc abc.” In a similar vein, Stanley Fish and Barbara Johnson speak of the
fictional nature of law and institutions.
9
This analogy between fiction and other
discourses is easily overstated. Fiction and scientific discourse have much in
common—precisely those elements of fiction which do not belong exclusively to
fiction and therefore can hardly “fictionalize” other discourses in which they also
appear. The difference between history and literature is not a mere difference of
“effect of the real,” as Spivak would have it (“What is called history will always
seem more real to us than what is called literature”; 1988a: 243). That is, unless
we understand the effect of the real to be no mere optical illusion on the perceiver,
but rather the very inaugural structuration of the discourse in question, its
pragmatic characterization and social use (this is not the sense of “effect of the
real” in Barthes, nor the sense in which Spivak uses it on p. 244 of In Other
Worlds). The difference between these two perspectives must be defined in terms
of the use to which the discourse is designed to be put in the society that produces
it. It may be significant that when Spivak further specifies the “fictive” quality of
history, she does not refer to the use of discourse (the pragmatics of enunciation)
but to “the mechanics of representation” (1988a: 244)—i.e. narrativization. If
Spivak’s purpose in adhering to this “pan-fictionalist” doctrine is to preserve the
fluidity and the strategical quality of theory, I would argue that this aim does not
necessitate the premise that theory is a form of fiction; this premise is a false one
which would defuse the theory.
Another weak point of Spivak’s theory is the articulation between
consciousness, agency and ideology, and her reluctance to introduce a concept of
false consciousness. Spivak adheres to the philosophical tradition which from
Peirce and Nietzsche through Voloshinov and Bakhtin to Derrida affirms that
there is no outside of ideology; that human consciousness is inherently semiotic, a
continuous chain of signs and systems of signs in a process of endless translation
and transformation (1988a: 198). In Voloshinov (1986: 9-10) the Marxist concept
of ideology, which originally referred to a hegemonic superstructure, in the sense
of false consciousness, has already been identified with semiotic production. As a
result, we are left with no adequate concept of false consciousness: if all semiosis
is ideological, how can Marxism lay claim to knowledge which is more real than
others? Spivak inherits this problem, and does not solve it. Her aim is
11
not so much to provide a true theory as to oppose a set of representations against
another, to counter the representations produced by the elite with representations
formulated from a position which, while it is not that of the subaltern as such, is
related to it.
10
Spivak denounces in several American approaches the lack of a concept of
ideology which transcends the individual consciousness and will. But when she
defines such a concept the role of the individual consciousness and will within it
remains problematic. She opposes, for instance, Wayne Booth’s concept of
ideology as a system with conscious elements and unconscious elements in which
“consciousness and the unconscious are understood with reference to a pre-
psychoanalytic model, as if they belonged to a continuous system where the mark
of good practice was to raise the unconscious into consciousness” (Spivak 1988a:
122). I confess that I thought that this assumption belonged to Marxism as well,
and not just to the liberal approach Spivak criticises.
11
Surely it is possible and
desirable to increase the reflective awareness of the practices and relationships
which are at work both in us and between us? Spivak’s strictures on the role that
Booth allows to the concept of free choice may be correct, but certainly the
concept of “raising the level of consciousness” is central in Marxist theory. A few
pages before, Spivak herself offers her own version of individual agency, which as
far as I can see involves much the same assumptions on the role of awareness,
however qualified, and even the moral imperative that we be “responsible”:
One cannot of course ‘choose’ to step out of ideology. The most
responsible ‘choice’ seems to be to know it as best one can, recognize it as
best one can and, through one’s necessarily inadequate interpretation, to
work to change it. (1988a: 120)
Spivak’s quote-choice-unquote still seems to have an element of plain choice,
even if it takes place in heavily determined contexts. I suspect that the moral
imperative that surfaces here is not at all alien to other moments of Spivak’s
writing, such as her complex attitude towards deconstruction, her rejection of
Hayden White’s conception of the meaninglessness of history as facile (Spivak
1988a: 129), or her contention (directed against Deleuze and Guattari) “that
subject-predication is methodologically necessary” (1988a: 154), with the
subsequent introduction of “subject-effects” (1988a: 155, 204), “I-slots” and
“subject-positions” (1988a: 243) or strategical adherences to the doctrine of
essentialist consciousness.
12
She is at pains to demonstrate that the essentialist
ideology of the “Subaltern Studies” group of leftist historians can be read as if it
were deconstruction,
13
and introduces to that effect the conception of “affirmative
deconstruction,” taken from Derrida’s Spurs. In the midst of
12
deconstruction, “affirmative deconstruction” pops out of the blue:
the emphasis upon the “sovereignty, . . . consistency and . . . logic” of
“rebel consciousness”
[
14
].
. . can be seen as “affirmative deconstruction”:
knowing that such an emphasis is theoretically non-viable, the historian
then breaks his theory in a scrupulously delineated “political interest.”
(Spivak 1988a: 207)
This is undoubtedly affirmative action, but I do not see why it should be called
deconstruction. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988b: 271f.), on the other hand,
Spivak warns against the theory of “subject-effects” in Foucault and Deleuze;
there it is seen to lead back to essentialism.
Apparently this double standard is related to the different situations where the
concept of subject is used. But in this case it is the notion of situation that has
become essentialist and non-negotiable in Spivak’s theory (as indeed it would be
from the point of view of classical Marxism). Be that as it may, Spivak’s theory is
not the more rigurous for leaving the nature and the reasons of these ethico-
political choices undiscussed.
15
In Spivak’s account, theories are always caught within the ideology which
produces them, and the privileged position of the theorist is inscribed in them.
This is the case even in theories of resistance, whose well-meaning authors are co-
opted through tokenism, nationalism or male chauvinism. It is also the case with
her own theory: “A theory which allows a partial lack of fit in the fabrication of
any strategy cannot consider itself immune from its own system” (1988a: 207).
Spivak is torn between the need to formulate a theory of liberation for the women
of the third world, escaping the crypto-colonialist assumption that “one must not
question third-world mores,” and the knowledge that such a theory is bound to
objectify the women, and will be self-serving in unsuspected ways:
I should not consequently patronize and romanticize these women, nor yet
entertain a nostalgia for being as they are. The academic feminist must
learn to learn from them, to speak to them, to suspect that their access to
the political and sexual scene is not merely to be corrected by our superior
theory and enlightened compassion. (Spivak 1988a: 135)
Spivak has italicized corrected. But if we italicize merely we may get a more
accurate picture of the dilemma faced by the theorist. A Marxist theory cannot
renounce intervention, or completely relinquish its privileged position.
16
Spivak
walks here along the borderline where Marxism dissolves into something else.
Although I believe she does not quite cross it, it is significant that her effective
intervention in these essays is not directly on the issues relevant to Third World
feminism; it is rather a criticism of the self-centeredness of First World
13
representations of the Third World. Spivak justifies this indirect strategy: “today
the discourse of the world’s privileged societies dictates the configuration of the
rest” (1988a: 151). From this perspective, however, there is no way to address the
lag between the dictation and the configuration. And isn’t this lag precisely the
proper area where the activist can work? I admit I would like to know her views
on the way specific Third World issues should be addressed, both from the inside
and the outside. Spivak’s dealing with clitoridectomy in “French Feminism in an
International Frame” is both suggestive and deeply unsatisfactory: the conclusion
that cliterodectomy is “a metonym for women’s definition as ‘legal object as
subject of reproduction’“ (1988a: 152) is hardly an agenda for third world
feminism (indeed, Spivak rejects the idea of suggesting such an agenda). Even as
the article traces “the suppression of the clitoris in general,” relating Sudanese
practice to French feminist theory, its move from the literal excision of the clitoris
to the symbolic one seems to suggest that the differences between them are not
significant, or should not be a matter of concern for First-World feminists. In the
absence of any sense of direction, paralyzed by her desire not to perpetuate
colonialist attitudes, Spivak’s article comes back full circle to rest on the
“structural functionalist” approach which she derided at the beginning of her
article.
Not that I think that there is a simple answer to the questions that Spivak
addresses or fails to address. Whenever there is an overdetermination of the
subaltern by means of conflicting hegemonic structures, such as imperialism and
patriarchy, or racism and patriarchy, a theory formulated from a hegemonic
position is bound to be self-serving in both obvious and subtle ways. This, I think,
is the most definite lesson which can be extracted from Spivak’s articles on this
subject.
Spivak’s most definite calls for action occur in her own professional area,
pedagogy. She calls for an “alert pedagogy” (1988a: 116), and declares her faith
in teaching the élite how to read their canon in a different way as a valid mode of
intervention (1988a: 92). Much of her later work has focused on multiculturalist
education (Spivak 1990 and 1994a, Spivak and Gunew 1993). Spivak considers
“the pedagogy of the humanities as the arena of cultural explanations that
questions the explanations of culture” (1988a: 117). In my view, this conception
cannot be more than a reminder that teachers of humanities must be aware of the
political assumptions and circumstances of their activity. It cannot be understood
as a definition of the activity of the humanists (as such, it would be narrow and
even circular), and it should not be understood as meaning that the practitioners of
other disciplines (law, medicine, business) should be less self-conscious about
14
their own positions. In my view it is wrong (although maybe it is realistic) to
privilege the humanities in this respect.
17
Many of the earlier concerns of the New Criticism and of structuralism are
transcended in Spivak’s criticism in an illuminating way, and articulated with her
postcolonial-Marxist-feminist-deconstructive project. For instance, the
structuralist interest in metafiction and in the mise en abyme of a work’s
textuality is also a concern of Spivak’s analysis of Virginia Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse, but here it is far from aseptic; instead, it is used to articulate a reading
from a deconstructive feminist perspective in which the attitudes of the characters
towards each other are also a debate on how to define a text from differently
gendered subject-positions. “I introduce To the Lighthouse into this polemic,”
Spivak says, “by reading it as the story of Mr. Ramsay (philosopher-theorist) and
Lily (artist-practitioner) around Mrs. Ramsay (text)” (Spivak 1988a: 30). Reading
something “as,” Spivak makes clear in relation to Derrida’s practice, must be
thought of as a strategical move whose validity is not absolute, but derives instead
from the assumption that there is not “a ‘true’ explanation where the genuine
copula (‘is’) can be used” (Spivak 1988a: 106). “Since a ‘reading against the
grain’ must remain forever strategic, it can never claim to have established the
authoritative truth of a text, it must forever remain dependent upon practical
exigencies, never legitimately lead to a theoretical orthodoxy” (1988a: 215).
In moments such as these, Spivak offers genuine examples of how earlier
critical assumptions can be transcended and successfully incorporated into a
different project. However, while she often offers convincing deconstructive
analyses of Marxism, or deconstructive feminist approaches, or participates in the
debate on how to articulate Marxism and feminism, the four perspectives
(Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, postcolonial criticism) finally fail to become
integrated into a unified theory; they are not even consistently used in one given
analysis, to the same extent that the kind of structuralist approach I just mentioned
is aufgehoben into a wider perspective. This imperfect integration is also
apparent in the subject matter of her analyses. The range of the issues which are
brought together in these essays is impressive, but sometimes their articulation is
shaky, and does not repay the conceptual effort required. It may indeed be the
case that the problems Spivak is trying to deal with “do not yet . . . have the clarity
of the already understood” (MacCabe 1988: x). Maybe of the already
understandable? Anyway, the exploratory quality of these essays must not be
underestimated.
Spivak seems to regard the relative disjunction of her essays as the inevitable
result of the contingency and situationality of the uses of theory. A
15
salutary theory of theory-making as bricolage is proposed
18
Accordingly, she
always follows a “circuitous route,” she fits earlier papers into later frames, and
explains her approach as a way to cope with a specific situation. She also rejects
the notion of a definitive and totalizing theory (of feminism, for instance, 1988a
84) or a grand sublating synthesis of aesthetics, politics and philosophy in the
manner of Kant or Hegel. This aspect of her criticism is directly related to the
steps she takes out of deconstruction, and, like them, it is not sufficiently
theorized. We do not get a clear picture, for instance, of how bricolage is to be
made compatible with intellectual rigor. For instance, Spivak reproaches the
members of the Subaltern Studies group for their commitment to the so-called
earlier or “structuralist” Barthes: “Any use of the Barthes of the first period would
have to refute, however briefly, Barthes’s own refutation and rejection of his early
positions” (Spivak 1988a: 212). But she does not feel obliged to refute Foucault
before she dismisses Foucault’s own rejection of his earlier views on how to
define the positioning of the subject (Spivak 1988a: 243).
This very question, the positioning of the subject, stands precisely at the point
at which deconstruction is to be articulated with Marxism and feminism. As I
have indicated, its role is problematic. According to Spivak, concrete experience
is to be mistrusted (and analyzed); her position is in the last analysis a contingent
part of her theory: “that accident of birth and education has provided me with a
sense of the historical canvas, a hold on some of the pertinent languages that are
useful tools for a bricoleur” (1988b: 281). But in fact many things revolve around
this adventitious “effect.” As a Marxist and a deconstructivist, she mistrusts the
recourse to individual experience; as a Third-World person and a feminist, she
uses it. She has it both ways, and the tensions are not always resolved. The
question is, can they be resolved?
I am not sure whether in some instances Spivak’s emphasis on the contingent
is not a way of making the best of the present state of the debate between
Marxism, feminism, postcolonial studies and deconstruction. I agree that no
comprehensive or “true” theory, a theory which would not need to be revised, can
be formulated, but still some theories are, here and now, more explanatory than
others. Radical deconstruction will probably never become subservient to (or
even cooperative with) another theory. But the question remains open whether
and to what extent deconstructive techniques or deconstructive moves can be used
by other theories. Spivak’s most successful interventions have helped open the
way for a more integrated approach between cultural critique and deconstruction,
and sometimes she really succeeds in giving us a taste of what such an approach
works. In the meantime, the dialogue between deconstruction and the theories of
16
resistance has already led to a reassessment of that strange visitor, deconstruction.
Notes
1.
E.g.: “The making-visible of the figure of woman is perhaps not a task that the [“Subaltern Studies”]
group should fairly be asked to perform. It seems to this reader, however, that a feminist historian of the
subaltern must raise the question...” (1988a: 219).
2.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?”
3.
Spivak 1988a: 113. Not all are prepared, however, to accept Spivak’s version of her agenda. In Benita
Parry’s view, “The disparaging of nationalist discourses of resistance” in Spivak’s work “is matched by the
exorbitation of the role allotted to the post-colonial woman intellectual” (1987: 35).
4.
Cf. her comment on the first version of a later article: “What seems missing in these earlier remarks is
the dimension of race” (1988a: 81). Read as a novel, In Other Worlds presents us with a critic-protagonist
developing an increasing sensitivity and alertness to multiple determinations. It may be significant that in
Spivak’s preface to Of Grammatology, the most explicit linking of deconstruction to feminism, presenting it
as “a shift from the phallocentric to the hymeneal” occurs precisely while discussing question of how the
critic must choose a subject starting from his or her contingent situation (1976: lxxiv-lxxv).
5.
Aestheticist versions of anti-intentionalism (like the one in Wimsatt and Brooks 1967) must be
distinguished from the deconstructive pronouncements of Barthes (1977) and Derrida (“Signature Event
Context”, in Derrida 1988). In Spivak, these converge with the Marxist notion (developed in fact by Engels
17
and Lukács) that a work’s reflection of social conditions may go beyond the conscious ideology of the writer.
For further discussion of anti-intentionalist theories see García Landa 1991b, 1992, 1997.
Spivak has translated and edited other stories by Mahasweta Devi (Spivak 1994b); In Other Worlds
also
includes a translation of Devi’s “Breast-Giver.”
6.
Spivak 1988a: 15, 18. By “textual authorial intention” I am referring to an organizing principle “inside”
the text—the historical authorial meaning as inscribed in the text and inferred by the reader, not the prior
intention of the author which is dismissed by Wimsatt and Beardsley in “The Intentional Fallacy.” For a
critique of de Man’s notion of “self-deconstruction” see García Landa 1998a.
7.
Homi Bhabha also emphasizes the ambivalent relationship between the colonizer and the colonized,
which “makes the boundaries of colonial positionality—the division of self / other—and the question of
colonial power—the differentiation of coloniser / colonised—different from both the master / slave dialectic
or the phenomenological projection of ‘otherness’“ (“Signs Taken for Wonders” 93-94; qtd. in Parry 1987:
28).
8.
Like most Marxists, Spivak is anxious to protect Marx’s original formulations from the interpretations of
other Marxists—a last-ditch refuge of individualistic prejudice and authorial authority, or a question of
strategy?
9.
Fish 1982; Johnson 1985: 60.
10.
Spivak 1988a: 203. Her strategy at this point resembles that of Edward W. Said in Orientalism. Said,
however, is less diffident when it comes to oppose the “real” subaltern to the false image produced by the
hegemonic discourse. My view on ideological analysis is that “the ideology of a work is not a given or a brute
fact—it must be constructed or unveiled by the work of reading, being an interpretive relationship between
the author, the work and the reader” (García Landa 1998b: 429; translation mine). On ideology in Peirce,
Voloshinov, et al., see my 1991a article.
11.
According to Spivak, Marx has been interpreted inadequately in this respect; “Marx is not working to
create an undivided subject where desire and interest coincide” (1988b: 276). But is not a collective subject
where desire and interest coincide, a non-alienated working class, made of non-alienated individuals?
12.
Spivak 1988a: 206. Donna Landry (1987) applauds this move: anti-essentialism, she argues, is not
necessarily useful to feminists, who must “take the risk of essence.” The same endorsement is found in Alice
18
Jardine (1985: 27). Spivak is more ambivalent on this matter than these critics seem to think.
13.
This move is reminiscent of Bhabha’s “deconstructivist” interpretation of Frantz Fanon’s writings (cf.
Parry 1987: 30ff.).
14.
Spivak is trying to show that these concepts are not necessarily essentialist in the way they are used by
Ranajit Guha (1983: 13).
15.
Perhaps they are not to be discussed? Spivak’s interpretation of Marx is curiously reminiscent of
Kantian ethics: “If pursued to its logical consequence, revolutionary practice must be persistent because it can
carry no theoretico-teleological justification” (1988a: 161). Or again: “the political subject distances itself
from the analyst-in-transference by declaring an ‘interest’ by way of a ‘wild’ rather than theoretically
grounded practice” (1988a: 174). However, in her only joint discussion of Kant and Marx, Spivak affirms: “I
do not myself see how a continuous line can be established between Marx’s own texts and the Kantian ethical
moment” (1988b: 310 n.22). Maybe the subject is worth pursuing.
16.
I do not see that Spivak really addresses this question, in spite of her sarcasms on the inescapable
colonialism of the First World when thinking about the Third World (“in Senanayak I find the closest
approximation to the First-World scholar in search of the Third World. . . . we grieve for our Third-World
sisters; we grieve and rejoice that they must lose themselves and become as much like us as possible in order
to be ‘free’“ [1988a: 179] ). Viewed like this, the situation of the First World scholar studying the Third
World is a catch-22.
17.
Spivak herself opposes Said’s privileging literary criticism over the other humanistic disciplines in this
respect (1988a: 126).
18.
E.g., “The only way that I can see myself making definitions is in a provisional and polemical one: I
construct my definition as a woman not in terms of a woman’s putative essence but in terms of words
currently in use” (Spivak 1988a: 77). Strategical bricolage is also applicable to less speculative matters:
“We should work to implement the changes even as we prepare our students to fit into the job market as it
currently exists” (1988a: 102). As Spivak points out (1988a: 171), the radicalization of the concept of
bricolage in this direction is already effected by Derrida.
***
I am grateful for the financial aid provided by the Spanish Secretaría de Estado de Universidades,
Investigación y Desarrollo, Dirección General de Enseñanza Superior (DGES PB97-1022)
19
which has allowed me to carry out this and other related projects.
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