II

One of the most significant ideological narratives—a symptomatic text of contemporary culture—of the enormous “desire” in the postmodern bourgeois humanities for a postcolonial discourse such as Gayatri Spivak’s is that provided by Colin MacCabe’s “Foreword” to Spivak’s book, In Other Worlds.[1] I shall shortly examine MacCabe’s text in detail, but I will first offer the following general-order critique.

MacCabe’s celebratory endorsement of Spivak is framed from the outset by the same “anti-totality” line which is central to ludic postmodern anti-theory. What Spivak makes possible, as MacCabe’s text makes clear (albeit in a rather self-consciously confused way), is a “globalization” of ludic neoliberalism. Most importantly, it is exactly Spivak’s eclectical “feminist Marxist deconstructivist” positionality that achieves the greatest of the bourgeois intellectual pleasures in the postmodern moment of imperialist patriarchy.

MacCabe, like virtually every other reader of Spivak, absolutely cannot get the contradictions of her eclecticism off his mind. The main ideological task of his foreword indeed is precisely to naturalize her “anomaly,” “explain” it away, and help First World readers get better acclimated to the fact that Spivak is really no “different” than they are—provided that they, like she, and he (MacCabe), are all liberals in that “political” spirit which pervades the contemporary American academy.

This is, in a nutshell, the historical raison d’être of the postmodern postcolonial intellectuals (Spivak, Said, Bhabha…), and which, in the last analysis, explains the massive success of the whole enterprise: they make the dominant ideology of liberal pluralism a global reality, a “limit text” that makes the best (common) sense of late capitalism. The main contradiction of (previously First World) liberal pluralism everywhere pervades the discourses of the postcolonial critic: the mandatory requirement of “openness.” This now truly world-view, as the basic ideology of capitalism, underwrites the main material contradiction at the level of labor and class structure: that all individuals are perfectly “free” within the limits of the regime where the vast majority are forced to sell their labor power to the ruling class minority.

Derrida’s own classic meditations on “play” within limits or “difference within” is still absolutely a perfect expression of the ideology of postmodern capitalism. The objective reality that the structure of play (“freedom”) is not itself “freely” determined, but rather monologically inherited and passed along through the legal apparatus of property rights, is the historical contradiction of systemic un-freedom which ludic[2] ideology rationalizes away. In the moment of the postcolonial, when imperialist capitalism structures the entire globe, self-proclaimed bourgeois intellectuals like Spivak—who is in MacCabe’s tale “a model product of an Indian undergraduate and an American graduate education—probably the most scholarly combination on this planet” (ix)—perform the pedagogic function of showing that the postmodern labor force must be one that “respects the differences.” This basically amounts to the idea that one had better respect that which one can’t understand or “explain”: because “difference” or “details” in ludic discourses always turns out to mean the "ultra-concrete,” the pre-symbolic, one should not “impose” “categories” of “explanation” on/around them. Just leave them alone: the ethics of relativism.

The discourse of the pre-symbolic, of course, issues from its own occluded (post)metaphysics of presence; however, after the “deconstruction” of the metaphysics of presence, now this return to the individual is registered as a kind of “irreducible” absence whose absolute opacity and aporias must not be transgressed or inquired into any further. There are basically two radically opposed ways of making such “difference” intelligible. As in ludic discourses, if one “respects” it, this is seen as a “complex” gesture, an indeterminate ethics which can withstand and endlessly contemplate the otherness of others. This “complex” intelligibility, then, in fact, renders “difference” non-intelligible and hence quite unchallengeable (this would be un-ethical, rude and so forth). In a completely different view, that of historical materialism, all of this is not “complex,” but quite simply the postmodern form of mysticism. Since “radical difference” can’t be “explained” or challenged as an historical construct, the simplistic regress to mystic “complexity” and super-subtlety paves the way for mindlessly—and historically quite dangerous—cultish followings. Suffice it to say, what gets counted as “crude” and what as “complex” is completely political and cannot be cut off for a single second from historical inquiries.

Contrary to all ludic pluralist ideologies which de-prioritize class struggle, I believe it can be argued that the basic “respect differences” ethos (which Spivak, for all her complexity, never gets away from) makes class struggle the only ultimate “difference” that makes any (transformative) difference. Marx’s core historical theory comes down to the idea that the capitalist structure always and ultimately “creates its own gravediggers”:[3] because the labor force under postmodern capitalism is necessarily so “open minded,” the fundamental divisions of labor along race and gender lines become impossible to justify, and therefore the class structure of world capitalism must become the last and most urgent crisis. Hence, class consciousness, I argue, offers the most radical—revolutionary and transformative—problematic of “identity” in/for a postmodern pedagogy of emancipation.[4]