Spivak

[berlitz23]

Your opinions, thoughts, digressions, endorsements, criticisms?

[JazzRemington]

What the hell is "spivak"?

[MarxSchmarx]

I know a there's mathematician by that name who wrote a popular introductory analysis/calculus textbook among other didactic texts with inane references to pigs and the like that tickle some feathers in some quarters. There might also be philosophers or two tho, so I'll hold off on moving this to science/environment The books and the problems themselves are hard but fairly well organized.

[berlitz23]

sorry for the ambiguity I am referring to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayatri_Chakravorty_Spivak)

[blake 3:17]

She's clearly really smart. I've read interviews with her that were pretty lively. I know folks who pretty much dismissed her subaltern stuff in a pretty broad way.

I'll try to find the reference for the interview (I read it about 10 years ago in a feminist philosophy course).

[berlitz23]

please do when you get the chance!

[kalu]

Spivak is brilliant. I've only read a couple of her articles, particularly "Can the Subaltern Speak?" and "Deconstructing Historiography" in the edited Subaltern Studies volume, but both essays were up to the brim with interesting ideas. For example, in "Can the Sublatern Speak?," she discusses how the pomo philosophy of French intellectuals like Deleuze and Guattari, which emphasizes the "emptying" of the subject and its replacement by "subject effects" of "desiring-machines," in fact restores the West as Subject (of History) by ignoring the spacing-timing of the imperialist project, and in particular the fact that the non-West had to cathect the role of a self-consolidating Other. This claim alone is worth a mint. In her Subaltern Studies essay, she examines how the historians of that collective critiqued "knowledge as mastery" of subaltern consciousness, particularly due to the fact that methodologically they had to work through the British and colonial archives, which always overdetermined their access to the Indian subaltern rebel, among others.

I have at the same time read several criticisms of Spivak, particularly that her theory doesn't sync with her politics (Madhava Prasad, Qadri Ismail). Prasad and Ismail argue that in "Can the Subaltern Speak?," she begins the essay by saying that she will not push her theoretical critique to its limits because of other politically-motivated desires. Concretely, she maintains something like a sympathy for "information retrieval" of subaltern issues for political ends even though she recognizes that this retrieval continues imperialist subject-constitution. Anyways, she seems like quite a brilliant thinker, though her insights are sort of spread out and scattered throughout her work. I haven't read her actual books, but that's at least the impression I get, so I think you have to dig for the nuggets of gold, especially beneath the philosophical jargon. Her prose, while at first terror-inducing, is truly legitimate though, and is "no nonsense" when it comes to articulating powerful claims through theory. Also, she loves Derrida.:lol:

[bricolage]

Yes she certainly does love Derrida, did she study under him do you know? I think I've only read the same things as Kalu and found her deconstruction of the varying narratives of Indian peasant revolts very interesting.

Another critique though is that of Bahl and Dirlik launched against the entire postcolonial project it seems which could be relevant here;


The dismissal of metanarratives in postmodernism and postcolonialism, in disguising the systemic nature of power, also makes it impossible to confront power systemically. It is not that postmodernist and postcolonialist arguments are irrelevant. The problem rather is that these arguments fail to articulate their position vis‑a‑vis the power structure which provides their context, a power structure that in its globalization finds in cultural hybridity an efficient means to the management of people and things. While the postmodernist/postcolonialist argument claims that the abandonment of "fixed" identities provides a more radical means of resistance than earlier radicalisms, in its refusal to address questions of structural power (imbedded in questions of capitalism, democracy, privatization, etc.), it in fact ends up with the disguising, if not the celebration, of contemporary forms of power.
http://www.svabhinava.org/friends/VinayBahl/History3Worlds-Introduction-frame.php

[kalu]

Spivak didn't study under Derrida, but I think she really came to prominence with her translation from the original French of Of Grammatology, which situated Derrida in the wider intellectual currents of the time (psychoanalysis, structuralism, phenomenology). She actually studied under Paul De Man, a famous deconstructionist who founded the "Yale School of Deconstruction."

As for the Dirlik quote, I think Qadri Ismail summed it up nicely in Abiding by Sri Lanka when he called out Dirlik, Ahmad, and others' attacks on postcolonialism as the "frustrated and rearguard attacks of dogmatic Marxism," having lost the last object it could claim to represent, "the Third World." From another angle, the quote you posted essentially reproduces the "cutlural/material" distinction without actually critically interrogating it, which is what the poststructuralists and postcolonialists have done. I'd highly recommend getting a copy of Judith Butler's "Merely Cultural," published in the journal Social Text, for an excellent reply to this line of thinking (it's short too, twelve pages). While postcolonialism has focused on the "decolonization of representation" and the politics of theory, it has opened a critical space to rethink colonialism and its power effects. How this places it in opposition to Marx's work is beyond me, though it's certainly opposed to the arrogant reductionism of dogmatic Marxism that claims to explain everything within its analytic framework. Anyways, with regard to Spivak in particular, it's quite insane that someone like Dirlik could say that she doesn't address questions of structural power; in fact, that's Spivak's whole point, conjoining epistemic configurations and epistemic violence with political economy. Robert Young has even criticized her on this last point for withdrawing back to a "syncretic Marxist political economy" from which to critique Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, though I think he misses her specific Marxist mode of criticism that works through an Althusserian interrogation of ideology and the subject.

For those interested, there was also a debate between Dirlik and Indian historian Gyan Prakash on the "dismissal of metanarratives." Prakash basically said that we must analyze capitalism's local histories, thus there are capitalisms in the plural, and not a single (Eurocentric) totality that can be retrieved through Universal History (cf. David Scott, "The Aftermaths of Sovereignty"). Subaltern Studies historians did an enormous amount of careful analytic work on this subject, particularly Partha Chatterjee ("More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry") and Dipesh Chakrabarty ("Rethinking Working-Class History"). The latter basically rethought Marx's arguments about the separation of the political and the economic in capitalism, and other basic issues, in the context of the postcolonial world, which forced Chakrabarty to rethink the singular narrative about the rise of capitalism and its alleged universal development according to the same teleological scheme.

[berlitz23]

Thank you everyone for the valuable and insightful information, I am proceeding at this point to excavate and delve deeper into the mines of post-colonial theory Spivak has indubitably changed my vector of thinking in regards to alterity and its egregious mis-representation in Eurocentric Philosophy. I hope her work on this board can generate more discussion!

[blake 3:17]

I can`t seem to track the interview down for sure. Therè are a bunch on line, available through a quick google search. In a vaguely similar position is Homi Bhaba. I really enjoyed his Location of Culture. I disagreed with it but it brought forward very interesting questions around states, nations, borders.