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| III |  2003-10-29 | V |
| The Alternative Orange (Vol. 3): An Alternative Student Newspaper | ||
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While MacCabe’s narrative of Spivak’s circuitousness, just in the first four sentences of his (stumbling) foreword, is itself fairly indicative of the kind of “feminism” and/as “deconstructivism” Spivak engenders, it is important to go further and examine in detail exactly the kind of “Marxist” teletheory which is at stake here. Not only, of course, is this identification (“limning”?) at the very center of Spivak’s network, “feminist Marxist deconstructivist,” but MacCabe is acutely aware as well that “Marxism is… an urgent concern, one that insists throughout these pages” (xiv). He immediately adds: “But it is a Marxism which will be alien to at least a few Marxist critics” (xiv).
MacCabe here is relying upon an essentialist notion that there could ever be a thing called “Marxism” (a construct of signifying practices and codes) which could be itself “beyond” intellectual, political, and historical contestation. Hence, from the very outset his nod to “a few Marxist critics” is ideologically calculated to render any radical opposition to (whatever is) Spivak’s Marxism simply idiotic. The ideology of this move is to invisibly en-frame Marxist theory generally with a laissez faire (noninterference) pluralism: if one finds Spivak’s Marxism “alien,” that’s not her “problem,” but rather the “problem” of whomever would seriously contest her conceptualizations, analyses and so forth. Again, she is merely “different,” and if some “few” won’t “accept” it, they (?) must be completely unreasonable.
It is MacCabe’s feigned “essentialist” naiveté which is really naive here, however, and it is well worth pointing up in some more detail the extent of his own subtle ignorance regarding the politics of “Marxist” theory. By suggesting that Spivak’s version of Marxism may be “alien” to a “few,” MacCabe is already reducing historical materialist theory to an epistemology rather than a theoretical praxis forged in social history; in other words, he is quietly, efficiently plugging readers into a “professionalized” view of Marxism, the political effect of which is of course to make “Marxism” simply another hermeneutic “hat” which any minimally competent academic theoretician (an “expert” at “application”) may freely try on and parade around for a while, play “devil’s advocate” in the already (neo)McCarthyist-spirited American academy. The “entertaining” pedagogy of the pluralist theoretician pleasurefully inculcates students into the ideological line that “ideas don’t really hurt anybody, it’s the bad old world ‘out there’ that hurts people…”: hence rendering all “ideas” superfluous on condition that the underlying liberal pluralist world view itself not be contested in the manner that I have just suggested. Nobody “gets angry” or hardly even “uncomfortable” in this kind of classroom, because “deep down,” “everybody knows” that ideas are just for fun—like “signifiers,” they “play”!
In any event, “Marxism” deployed in this manner is but another “way of talking,” i.e., a “rhetoric.” There’s nothing behind it, no substance or content, no political or even rigorously theoretical commitment. It’s temporary. This is a commodification of “Marxism” which is itself grounded in the “free market” ideology of capitalism. And moreover, this reveals a blatant and quite crude inability to “read” one of Marx’s own most crystalline theses: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (“Theses on Feuerbach,” The Marx-Engels Reader 145). A pedagogy to change the world requires more than merely “various” “readings” of it: it entails “getting angry” over why it needs to be changed and critique-ally reunderstanding the ways “ideas” “variously” get in the way of, or promote, world change. As far as this goes, MacCabe’s “delightful” parting quotation from Spivak-the-pedagogue is enormously illuminating. MacCabe quotes Spivak: “I think less easily of ‘changing the world’ than in the past. I teach a small number of the holders of the can(n)on male or female [sic?], feminist or masculist, how to read their own texts, as best I can” (xix).
MacCabe thus slides around such issues at the very center of Marx’s writings, and in doing so instructs his readers that any political Marxist project, rather than simply a “variously” hermeneutical (“philosophical”) one, is hopelessly beyond the pale. What he really does, then, is removes “politics” from Marxist theory, just as Spivak removes “politics” from feminism and replaces it with bourgeois ethics. Spivak’s own parting shot, in her “French Feminism Revisited: Ethics and Politics” (1992), at the “vastness” of political theorizing makes quite “good sense” now.[1]
| [1] | Spivak’s closes this text with the following farewell gesture: “To theorize the political, to politicize the theoretical, are such vast aggregative asymmetrical undertakings; the hardest lesson is the impossible intimacy of the ethical” (1992 81). This is of course included in a collection edited by Judith Butler and Joan Scott which proudly heralds this title: Feminists Theorize the Political. |