III

The intensity of MacCabe’s ideological need to render unquestionable what Spivak has herself in The Post-Colonial Critic (1990) named as her “anomaly” is evident from the very first moves of his foreword. MacCabe opens the book:

Spivak in a certain sense is the anomalogical subject of imperialist patriarchal capitalism. MacCabe’s job is exactly to invert this reality, through ideology, and make Spivak appear as the “other” (i.e., contestant) of imperialist patriarchal capitalism. In this way, just like Spivak herself, he “negotiates” with the existing order of the world so as to “accept” its new subject, make the insertion of this new subject a little less “difficult” (a notion over which he himself meditates) and more “pleasurable.” As opposed to MacCabe’s dominant tale of pleasure, I propose the following counter-tales[1] of ideology.

WHAT SHE MIGHT SEEM. When Spivak is so often called a “feminist Marxist deconstructivist,” this seems like such an awful mouthful, as if a sort of “designer” subject position which would be “all purpose” and “radical.” If it were indeed “all purpose” and “radical,” this might suggest that such an “identity” would be “total”: fit for “all” and for any conceivable “purposes,” and yet not really any one in particular, i.e., no position would ever be “prior” to any other.

What Spivak is so often called, then, suggests her “radical” pluralism. This is, however, the “call” of ideology in the late capitalist moment. This subject is indeed a “model” one; like Jacques the white father, a “designer” subjectivity which is, as with the classical Free Individual, “so different” and so much like everyone else at the same time. At this stage, the narrator is still poised on the edge of his seat. He is himself “calling all readers” to the level of his own “inquisitiveness.” By calling attention to what Spivak is “often called” he lets the reader enjoy the illusion of immediately rising “above the crowd”: the “often” is the level of the “common.”

By marking “often-ness,” MacCabe traces out the “meta” space, a realm of the postal which promises to jettison the reader “beyond” the ordinariness of the “often.” In other words, the post-call marks the possibility and the need for a “new” way of “calling” Spivak. The narrator’s narrative is in a crisis, however (as he will himself remark a little later on), because Spivak’s positionality is so utterly “edge-wise,” so “post,” that existing discourses are terribly hard-pressed to “represent” her adequately, i.e., in such a way as to respect her “differences” to the utmost degree of congeniality. WARNING: EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE WILL NOT STAND. The now common calling of Spivak as “feminist Marxist…” (whatever) now itself “might seem” crude and a “rebarbative mouthful” which indeed could itself smack of conceptual totalitarianism (“all purpose”). MacCabe will manage this crisis and “educate” readers—to a “higher” level—in doing so.

ANY (BOURGEOIS) READER CAN SEE. Although what Spivak is so often called may indeed seem brutal, any reasonable reader will readily have to acknowledge that this is simply a “necessarily complex description.” To call Spivak a feminist Marxist deconstructivist, however, is not so “limny” as it may seem, for it delineates not a stable “identity” with any firm borders or interiors, but rather traces the trajectories of the postmodern subject of/as the “network.” This is the multicultural subject of “multiple contradictions.” Such a multitudinally contradictory description is “necessarily complex.” It is this “difficulty” that reasonable readers will simply have to learn to live with—“accept” it, as Spivak herself says—as an exemplary encounter with the “other.”

MacCabe is himself once again “negotiating” a reasonable space between “publicly available discourses” and “willed esotericism” (x). “There is, therefore, some point in providing crude categorizations of these three ‘oppositional’ positions and locating Spivak’s work in terms of them” (x-xi). “Also,” says MacCabe in the negotiative move, one must “stress the provisionality of this categorization…. the fact that this homogeneity is, in each case, wrested from a heterogeneity which is forever irreducible to it but which cannot be grasped except as a limit, an excess beyond which, for a particular discourse, intelligibility fades” (xi).

Spivak herself, in other words, is ultimately “forever irreducible,” a vast network of heterogeneous “details.” Although MacCabe appears to be “negotiating” a post-call to/for Spivak, his narrative itself ultimately “fades” fast for the non-intelligible: the “heterogeneous" is in the last instance “irreducible” to any crude categorizations. The ideological message is: You can have your crude categories if you must, but ultimately, Hands Off! Respect the Differences! This is the ludic ethics of the “limit,” an “excess” beyond which one only finds the mystical, the aporia of the Heideggerian “all the way down.” “Such a thought is indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida…” (xi).

Spivak, then, is “obviously a deconstructionist. She says so herself” (xi). What is the “limit” here? For MacCabe, Spivak, Derrida… the “limit” is really when the individual just “says so.” You have the absolute right to be as “different” as you possibly can: on condition that the global system of “difference,” of “network,” never be examined. Exactly as in Spivak’s narrative, MacCabe’s is an "acceptance” of the general system under the “ethical” cloak of “respect.”

How far does this take the reader from the commonness of the “often”? Exactly nowhere. From the “often,” one only moves into an acceptance of the “seemliness” of “multiple contradictions.” Indeed, while his own narrative seems like its going to “explain” why “feminist Marxist deconstructivist” “might seem a rebarbative mouthful,” MacCabe only gets to this: “To any reader… it will come to seem a necessarily complex description….” All one can say for MacCabe is just what he says of Spivak, and what she says of others in her classrooms/audiences: he just “says so” himself, period. He doesn’t know why he “says so,” but he knows nonetheless that even to “say so” is always already a “multiple contradiction.” This is the discourse of the “limit” intellectuals; or rather, the postmodern mystics.

FADING FAST. Having pressed the reader from the too-common space of the “often” and into the inevitability of the “seeming,” MacCabe finds it once again necessary to construct an illusory “movement” for readers of Spivak: that is, to once more proclaim how Spivak “gets beyond” the common lot. Again, however, the ideology of MacCabe’s narrative is a profoundly static or conservative one. As is the case for ludic discourses generally, the postality of the “getting beyond” that MacCabe proclaims for Spivak (and he is, make no mistake about it, a “good” reader of her texts: he “accepts” everything she says. Why? Because she says so….) is in reality the same old regress to the non-intelligible, the “poesis” that passes for profundity in the ludic imagination.

Here is MacCabe laying down the law again: “The book does not merely state that we are formed in constitutive contradictions and that our identities are the effects of heterogenous signifying practices: its analyses start from and work towards contradiction and heterogeneity.” That is, Spivak’s texts are not so crude as to “tell a theory”: she doesn’t “merely state” anything of an explanatory or historical nature about the formation of subjectivities. Rather, she is “teletheoretical” or (post)theory: not only does she “start from” contradictions and heterogeneity, this is also what she “works toward.” It would seem that she doesn’t get much of anything done.

In short, by virtue of her post-calling, she doesn’t go anywhere. Spivak is in-determinate in the sense that she runs in circles: and this is exactly the sense, as I said earlier, that Spivak is the trajectory of profits and “surplus” in late capitalism. She doesn’t “merely state” but rather re-in-states “contradictions” and “irreducible” “heterogeneities” by simply taking them for granted. That’s “just the way it is,” and now she doesn’t even have to “say so”: she’ll show you.

The disturbing ideological point of MacCabe’s tale of Spivak is that, under the cloak of deep (patriarchally condescending) “respect” for her mind, she becomes nothing more than a mime on the First World stage. Just like Homi Bhabha—who makes an entire thesis out of the semiotic “freedom” of mimicry—Spivak’s tremendous “success” is ultimately based upon her labor in the global “free market” economy of signifiers: she is the premier agent in the transfer (“translation”) of ruling intellectual properties (Of Grammatology). Spivak quite “literally” gets her start in the imperialist network of deconstructive ideas. Since “The Subaltern Can Not Speak,” Spivak speaks through the white master, Derrida.