VII

So far as “complexity” goes, MacCabe-the-confused and/or Spivak-the-“model” are equally “open-ended” (as Spivak likes to say, “texts open…” [“French Feminism” 55]); in different terms, they are absolutely pointless. Rather than mirroring the “model,” as MacCabe attempts to do (“full justice”), my critique-al reading will rather insist upon that “crude” mode of “doing justice” against bourgeois ideology which MacCabe most unquestionably presumes to lie beyond the pale (even of “most recent Marxist cultural criticism”). My reading, that is, shall “insist” throughout the following pages on the radicality of that other “model” of ideology critique and base/superstructure binarity which in the final instance “limnes” those “few Marxist critics” that MacCabe so urgently needs to alienate.

There is an entire system of ideology being constructed here. At the most general level, the “urgent concern” of MacCabe/Spivak is to “relieve” the Marxist theory of labor of its systemic explanatory power as a revolutionary weapon for the self-conscious (class conscious) grounding and planning of world social struggle, and to set in its place a ludic pluralist “Marxism” based in statusquoist experientialisms and localist, communitarian ethics. There are several interconnected levels of articulation, which I shall enumerate, moving gradually toward my theorization of the ideology of “audacity.” Contrary to MacCabe’s idealism, I do not “hope to do full justice” to the entire wealth of ideology of the three paragraphs set out above. Ideology, as I try to dis-play its details and effects, is what can be called the unconscious mode of production: its differently articulated and accented forms can not be “totally exhausted” through ideology critique because the historical material life force of the unconscious mode is of course the capitalist mode of production, which itself must first be “totally exhausted” in revolutionary social praxis. Ideology critique as a pedagogy of class consciousness-raising, however, is an inaugural movement in this direction.

THE IDEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE. When MacCabe points up Marxism as an “urgent concern,” and immediately hails it (Spivak’s) as “alien” to “at least a few Marxist critics,” his following rationale for this alien-ness turns out to be that “this is a Marxism crucially grounded in Third World experience…” In other words, as opposed to this nebulous “few,” Spivak’s Marxism is not theoretical but rather grounded in her particular, detailed (“alien”?) Third World “experience.” This is an experiential Marxism. In this way, MacCabe’s own residual humanism joins up smoothly with Spivak’s deconstructive family feud with humanism, metaphysics and so forth. Emphasizing her “grounding” in “experience,” then, not only reveals the bankruptcy of the entire war against the “epistemic violence” of the “metaphysics of presence,” but moreover conceals the historico-social necessity of theory as a politically situated and constructed means of making sense of any “experience” whatsoever. There is no such thing as “experience” outside of a theoretically constructed frame of intelligibility (see Zavarzadeh, “Theory as Resistance,” in Pedagogy is Politics, ed. Maria-Regina Kecht, 1992, 25-47). By asserting “experience” as self-authorizing or auto-intelligible, MacCabe is in reality providing an alibi for ideology as the “natural” sense of things as they are in the Third World, according to the “indigenous,” “native,” “local,” “community-knowing” individual as (alien-ated) consciousness.

THE IDEOLOGY OF THE OFTEN. Yet again one of the main ideological tactics of diversion in MacCabe’s discourse is the lure of the “often.” By the time he disappointingly says that “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… ,” he has already quickly slipped “beyond”—as “crude economistic”—the very mode of strong Marxist theory as the critique of ideology, which I am employing here, and which precisely demystifies his seemingly ever-beyondness as hardly more than a confused jumble of chic bourgeois trends. As I noted earlier, MacCabe is even quite cannily aware that he can’t really “understand” Spivak, but still his celebration is unequivocal: in this way, his own consciousness of “uncertainty”—which serves to mark his discourse as “respectful”—is repackaged into the general endorsement which is set underway by the foreword. MacCabe’s discourse is a mobile accumulation of bourgeois designs. In short: he looks good in front of the mirror (of ideology). He is the “Foreword” to ludic imperialist ideology. If MacCabe is so concerned to be more than “often,” what really is his quarrel with the “few”? The answer is that he merely needs a “new” often-ness: that is, a new common sense.

THE IDEOLOGY OF DIS-STRESS. While he clearly always desires more than the “nothing more” of the “often,” MacCabe must— identically with fellow academic ideologue Jane Thompkins in “The Pedagogy of the Distressed” (College English 52.6, 1990, 653-60; see also the numerous commentaries published subsequently in the journal)—at the same time display his (seemingly) infinite pluralist capaciousness in these trying times when “critics” are so doubtful about so many things. When he’s not sitting on his hands he’s “throwing up his hands.” It “must be stressed”— (MacCabe leans foreword in the classic postmodern trauma of political paralysis)—that his momentary snipe at “most recent Marxist cultural criticism” (itself not “crude” but indeed “revising the crude”) was really only a quip: “not meant simply as a condemnation but as a description of the difficulty of analyzing contemporary…” (and so on). Such apologies have no doubt been fully accepted. MacCabe only seeks to please. Through the depths of his pleasure, however, he reveals, once more and on another level, the radical other of bourgeois intellectual pleasures: “theory” is that which would be “meant simply as a condemnation” as opposed to his “description of the difficulty of analyzing.” Silently he himself condemns the possibility of simply condemning—taking an uncompromising, non-negotiable stance against—the historic atrocities committed daily, without warning, ignoring rudimentary precepts of international law, by the First against the Third World. “Description of difficulty” is the alibi of the First World “information” monopolies. What he wants is not the “often” but the “news.”

THE IDEOLOGY OF CONTEXT. Through the equivocal move of first marking the supposedly exhausted space of the “often,” only to relieve any pressure this may have produced by “stressing” that this is merely a “description of the difficulty of analyzing contemporary developed countries in the terms elaborated in Capital,” MacCabe the genteel has already reduced the historical materialist theory of labor to nothing more than a regionalist “contextualist” analytics: that is, a crude empiricism which once more blends (“negotiates”) experientialism and textualism. “In this context the claim that labor power is no longer the major productive element within the developed economies becomes plausible.” What gets enthroned as “plausible,” however, is itself an historical “becoming”—an effect of historically produced frames of intelligibility—and not simply a matter of “context” or technocratic “difficulties” of “description.” The very “claim that labor power is no longer the major productive element within the developed economies” is a “claim” which “becomes plausible” to bourgeois apologists precisely at the expense of the under-developed economies in the world capitalist system. “Context” is a fabrication which operates ideologically to erase from intelligibility questions/theories of labor and class on a global, dialectical scale—as elaborated, for instance, in The Communist Manifesto. “Context” has nothing to do with “the terms elaborated in Capital” and everything to do with why those terms are made intelligible through “contextualism,” why such terms are an “urgent concern,” and why Spivak’s very willingness to “re-read” such terms (in bourgeois terms) makes her so pleasurable.

THE IDEOLOGY OF PERSPECTIVE. Having rendered “Marxism” a geo-experiential textualism, the notion of “plausibility” (“truth”) in MacCabe’s tale may now itself be safely produced as “indeterminate” due to the (“alien”) “perspective” of the postcolonial critic, who must, of course, be “respected.” The effect of this indeterminacy indeed now is to equivocate still further the pressure on the “often” by declaring—“perspectivally”—that “the classic Marxist analysis of exploitation… makes more sense.” And indeed, Spivak’s “many telling asides” (scattered speculations) to this effect constitute nothing less than “a thoroughgoing argument.” Like Spivak, of course, this “argument” is “both extraordinarily complex and interesting.” So while this “classic Marxist analysis of exploitation… makes more sense,” according to MacCabe, it is apparently so “complex” that all he can do is bow down before it and “hope to… indicate its major vectors.” These are certainly impressive words for somebody who just moments later has to relieve himself from even the hope of making sense: “Even if I have understood it correctly, the argument is too complex to do full justice to it here.” You’ve got to “experience it”! Do Spivak! At this point MacCabe could use a consultation with Dr. Said on Orientalism.

THE IDEOLOGY OF AUDACITY. Here is the crux of the matter. Several key “speculations” are set in place. First, from the “Third World perspective” the “classic Marxist analysis of exploitation, as expanded to account for imperialism, makes more sense.” Second, Spivak’s “thoroughgoing argument [therefore] fully retains Marx’s account of exploitation grounded in the theory of surplus value.” Third, however, as MacCabe had hinted earlier, one of the main “problems” with oftenistic Marxism involves “the adoption of the classic mode of production narrative—the transitions from slave, to feudal, to capitalist orders.” And thus, fourth, the quandary is this: “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.” It “makes more sense” now that MacCabe should confuse what is actually Spivak’s rhetorical text, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value,” for a political text, “Scattered Speculations on the Theory of Value.” MacCabe’s crisis is that he needs (historically) a “theory,” but because ideologically “theory” would produce the very “condemnation” of the entire enterprise he speaks on behalf of, he must conjure up Spivak’s “most audacious move” as “theory” when in reality it is nothing more than the experiential denial of theory through ludic rhetoricality: it is, in short, the resistance to theory, not theory as resistance (see Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, Theory as Resistance: Politics and Culture After (Post)Structuralism, forthcoming).

“Question of Value” is ideologically converted into “Theory of Value,” just as, on the more general level, the Marxist theoretical contestation of liberal pluralism is swallowed-up by a liberal pluralist “Marxism,” i.e., bourgeois, careerist, professionalist opportunism. Still on a more general material level, these ideological inversions are determined in the last instance by the global “network” of patriarchal capitalism—which, at the imperialist height of the late twentieth century, “adopts” the “postcolonial.” The “post” of the postcolonial, in other words, is the sign of “difference within” the New World Order of Capitalist Labor.