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In order to fully examine the ideology of “audacity” here, and to head off in advance any charges of “acontextualism,” I shall quote a lengthy passage (three full paragraphs) from MacCabe’s foreword. It is worth noting that since the petty charge of “acontextualism” is itself only a defensive tactic within rhetorical ludic textualist ethics, the “guiltiness” of “reading out of context” is never, ever, fully avoidable: “text” is infinite, in other words, and means in the last instance a total “network.” Ideologically, however, this implicit unendingness of “staying in context” is the ludic postmodern articulation of liberal humanism again, for it means (as Spivak herself is most concerned to tell her audiences) “keep talking,” keep “negotiating,” keep the peace. Derrida of course takes exactly the same line in his return volley with Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon on apartheid. Says Derrida: “Reading you, I very quickly realized that you had no serious objections to make to me…. So I began to have the following suspicion: what if you had only pretended to find something to reproach me with in order to prolong the experience over several issues of this distinguished journal [Critical Inquiry ]? That way, the three of us could fill the space of another twenty or so pages. My suspicion arose since you obviously agree with me on this one point, at least: apartheid, the more it’s talked about, the better” (“But, Beyond…,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry L. Gates, Jr., 1986, 355, emphasis in original). In another more recent “context”—that of the now “legitimate” Social Text—in her vociferous tirade against Aijaz Ahmad’s text, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), Benita Parry, in her closing statements reveals that what’s really on her mind is whether somebody can have a good, long “discussion”: “A book [like Ahmad’s]… is unlikely to turn the discussion toward the brand of Marxism it advocates. However, the debate that it will certainly provoke should stimulate further cultural materialist analysis of imperialism” (“A Critique Mishandled,” Social Text 35, 1993, 133).
Actually it matters very, very little where one begins reading a text
like MacCabe’s or a “self-reflexively” mystical one
like Spivak’s, although, of course, deconstructivists committed
to “vigilance” and “detailed”
“accuracy” would denounce such a position as
“unethical”; this is because it is precisely the
naturalization of “contradiction” under the pluralist
banners of “heterogeneity” or
“différance” which is their stock and trade. By
policing the space of “context,” ludic rhetorical
textualism conceals its ideological containment and repression of
radical theory. As I suggested earlier, Spivak just
“doesn’t seem to get anywhere,” she’s
“indeterminately” chic. This is itself the hallmark of her
ludic conservatism which not only feigns “doubt” about the
historical possibility of “progressive” politics, but
undermines it at every moment. Here is MacCabe:
Marxism is, however, an urgent concern [i.e., unlike
psychoanalysis: “But, as I have said, psychoanalysis is not
one of Spivak’s most urgent concerns…”], one
that insists throughout these pages. But it is a Marxism which
will be alien to at least a few Marxist critics. For this is a
Marxism crucially grounded in Third World experience and is
therefore a Marxism which concentrates on imperialism and
exploitation, one that is both critical of, and finds no use for,
the normative narrative of the modes of production. While most
recent Marxist cultural criticism in the developed world has been
occupying itself with revising the crude economistic models of
base and superstructure, it has also been prone to a repression of
economics; it has conveniently forgotten the necessity of locating
those cultural analyses within the organization of production and
its appropriation of surplus. Often Marxism now means nothing more
than a commitment to a radical or socialist politics and the
adoption of the classic mode of production narrative—the
transitions from slave, to feudal, to capitalist orders. This, it
must be stressed, is not meant simply as a condemnation but as a
description of the difficulty of analyzing contemporary developed
countries in the terms elaborated in Capital: the problems posed
by the analysis of the enormous middle class; the decline in
factory production; and, above all, the growth of computerized
production in the last ten years. In this context the claim that
labor power is no longer the major productive element within the
developed economies becomes plausible.
From a Third World perspective, such a plausibility is
itself seen as a management of a crisis and the classic Marxist
analysis of exploitation, as expanded to account for imperialism,
makes more sense—as Spivak indicates in many telling
asides. In the essay “Scattered Speculations on the Theory
[wrong: “Question”] of Value” these asides are
located within a thoroughgoing argument which fully retains
Marx’s account of exploitation grounded in the theory of
surplus value. The argument is both extraordinarily complex and
interesting, and all I can hope to do here is indicate its major
vectors.
Spivak clearly realizes that to retain the theory of surplus value
it is necessary to retain its basis, which Marx had adopted from
classical economics: the now much questioned labor theory of
value. She accomplishes this by a thorough re-reading of the first
section of Capital volume I, supplemented by
the Grundrisse. Her most audacious move is to
deny that Marx ever adopted the labor theory of value in that
“continuist” reading which proceeds in relations of
representation and transformation from labor to value to money to
capital. Instead, Spivak argues, we have to understand
Marx’s account of value not as indicating the possibility of
labor representing itself in value but as an analysis of the
ability of capital to consume the use value of labor power. By
concentrating on use-value as the indeterminate moment within the
chain of value-determinations, Spivak breaks open that chain,
redefining labor within a general account of value, which makes
labor endlessly variable both in relation to technological change
and to political struggles, particularly those around
feminism. Even if I have understood it correctly, the argument is
too complex to do full justice to it here…. What is clear,
however, is that while Marx has perfectly grasped the constitutive
crisis of capitalism, he has not provided an account of any other
mode of production; for if there is no fixed relation between
value and labor it is impossible to understand the appropriation
of surplus value outside a full understanding of the organization
of value within a particular community. This consequence may be
seen as endorsed by Spivak because, for her, normative accounts of
mode of production have impeded third world struggles (xiv-xv).
This is surely a tough couple of pages for MacCabe, committed as he is to “do full justice” to Spivak’s “argument”—“scattered speculations,” “telling asides,” but still “thoroughgoing.” “Theory” or “Question”? Going “thoroughly” where? Who is one finally to “respect” here, whose (fore)word? Who speaks? For(e) what do MacCabe’s words stand?