V

Spivak’s In Other Worlds includes her text, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.” It should be noted that MacCabe misreads Spivak’s title as “Scattered Speculations on the Theory of Value,” not the “Question.” In the present text, rather than engaging in a detailed critique of Spivak’s “Scattered Speculations,” I think it is more important to continue to pursue MacCabe’s conservative tale of Spivak, thereby to establish a strong framework for inquiring into Spivak’s “speculations.” I take this route because, for MacCabe, Spivak’s “most audacious move is to deny that Marx ever adopted the labor theory of value…” (xv). What is at issue here is the way MacCabe reveals himself to be a quite (in)competent reader—i.e., a commonsensical one—not just of Spivak but virtually the entire frame of intelligibility set in motion with poststructuralism. His is a “symptomatic” text, in other words, I argue, not only of the “adoption” by the American academy of poststructuralism, but the “adoption” of Spivak the postcolonial pedagogue, and also (as marked in MacCabe’s enthusiastic endorsement of her “audacity”) Spivak’s “adoption” of what Marx supposedly “adopted.” What MacCabe offers, in short, is a kind of “family values” narrative of the ludic postmodern academy in the moment of the New World Order of Late Capitalism.

Doubtless MacCabe’s (sloppy) intellectualism plays a role in his trivial “respectfulness,” and the regrettable contribution to American anti-intellectualism which this furthers. When MacCabe so enthusiastically announces that Spivak’s “most audacious move is to deny that Marx ever adopted the labor theory of value,” his own (pre-deconstructive) essentialist common sense raises its head once more, assuming, as this joyful proclamation does, that Spivak “herself” “got back to Marx (himself)” and “found out” that “he” never “really” “adopted” “the labor theory of value” in the “first place,” the “origin,” the “primal scene” of idea-getting.

MacCabe’s cognitive idealism in this move coincides with Spivak’s textualist idealism so as to keep the focus on the realm of hermeneutics. The question is not, in other words, whether Marx “adopted” the labor theory of value (which is a humanist-idealist question), but rather why the “denial” by Spivak of “the labor theory of value” would be so “audaciously” praiseworthy in the first place.

What gets broadcasted as “audacious” by MacCabe, in other words, will be exactly that “urgent concern” which Spivak’s Marxism handles so well. By inspecting MacCabe’s bourgeois pleasures in the audaciousness of the postcolonial critic, one can delineate still more clearly what’s at stake in “alienating” those “few” Marxist critics.