VIII

Still it is indeed quite urgent to interrogate in further detail the “audacity” of Spivak’s ideology as registered through MacCabe’s “indication” (“description”) of “its major vectors.” Given the crisis set out above (in sum: Spivak must “retain the theory of surplus value,” but to do so must also “retain its basis, which Marx had adopted from classical economics: the now much questioned labor theory of value”), MacCabe writes: “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.” In other words, for MacCabe, Spivak’s grand audacity is to “re-read” a break, an interruption, an aporia, a dis-continuity into “the labor theory of value”: the “audaciousness” being the thesis of the im-possibility of “labor representing itself in value.”

Labor, to put this succinctly, is “alienated” from value and is unable to be represented in value. SO WHAT? This is not Spivak’s “audacity.” It is merely a rudimentary formulation of Marx’s critique of the exploitation of labor under capitalism: the “dis-continuity,” “gap” or “contradiction” between the labor actually performed and the “value” actually granted to it through wages, prices, “fashionability” and so forth is explained by Marx through the theory of exploitation, according to which the capitalist class steals the labor (and the rewards of that labor) from the working class by only paying workers for but a fraction of their actual work. Through the accumulation of such profits, or “surplus,” or manipulated “excess,” the ruling class engineers the under-development of the working class. In short, the former’s gain comes at the expense of the calculated losses and miseries of the latter. It is quite important to keep in mind how utterly “literary” and “poetic” MacCabe and Spivak make all of this seem: as Patricia Williams so perfectly puts it (albeit completely unconsciously), they “exploit rhetoric” so as to divert attention from class conflict.[1] What becomes absolutely clear here is that “rhetoric” is precisely the ideological mystification of material contradictions. When MacCabe praises Spivak for “starting from” as well as “working toward” contradictions, he is, in my articulation of the unconscious mode of production, rewarding her for “accepting” historical contradictions rather than contesting them.[2] In the ideological unconscious, when MacCabe bows out of being able to “explain” or even really “understand” what exactly Spivak does, he is in reality marking the division of labor between his casually controlling “supervisory” position as First World boss, and Spivak’s petty managerial position as one who “respects” the “details” of her underlings, who are none other than her “audience” and “class.” Since she “accepts” them, in other words, her labor line is “multicultural”: she “hires” them no matter their degree of “experience”; she trains them, not to “change the world” but “how to read their own texts, as best I [she] can.”

Although it is indeed quite “interesting” that it is Spivak somehow, and not Marx, who gets the credit of “audaciousness” for this “move,” it is more important to examine further the kind of “value” that MacCabe derives from this “accomplishment.” “Instead” of seeing (“continuistically”) any “possibility of labor representing itself in value,” rather “Spivak argues, we have to understand Marx’s account of value 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…” The truly “audacious move” at stake here is the very idea that Spivak could ever, in whatever eclectic jumble of designations, be called a “Marxist” anything. This is the most heinous kind of “name calling” imaginable: for her “move” is ultimately to “adopt” an updated version of the “classical economics” which Marx critiqued by overturning. In other words, Spivak overturns Marx in the interest of late capitalism.

To get to the root of it, the question, again, is not what Marx did or did not “adopt,” as MacCabe assumes, but rather the underlying account of exploitation produced by that which gets “adopted” in the final instance. As I pointed out earlier, Spivak’s “audacity” does not lie in the “denial” that Marx “ever adopted the [classical economics] labor theory of value,” but rather in the “re-reading” of the kind of “labor theory of value” which Marx “adopted.” Spivak’s re-reading of the adoption scene is one in which a “dis-continuous” or “indeterminate” or “endlessly variable” “labor theory of value” gets adopted. Hence, this presents not “the possibility of labor representing itself in value” but rather the “analysis of the ability of capital to consume the use value of labor power.” The question becomes really why this “analysis” could be seen to serve as any kind of “account” of the “ability” of “capital” to “consume” the use value of labor.

What lies behind MacCabe’s entire congratulatory rigmarole is the basic assumption that Marx merely “adopted” anything at all from the classical political economists: Marx critiqued them! By this totally “audacious” bungle, MacCabe is able himself to construct “Marxism” as setting out from the very same “basis” as classical liberal economics and all of its superstructuralist quests for the meaning of “value.” The ideological underpinning of the entire “adoption” fantasy is revealed when MacCabe (“hoping” to do Spivak full justice) “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.” His anxiety, which is registered through the mis-naming of Spivak’s text (not to mention the larger issue of continuing to call Spivak a “Marxist” when in fact she is merely a “re-reader” of the texts of Marx), turns precisely around “the now much questioned” aspect of this classic “theory”: that is, its “continuist” assumptions.

When Spivak updates this “theory” (it is she herself who “adopts” it, not Marx, and gets adopted precisely for doing so) by articulating it in ludic dis-continuist terms, the “theory” becomes an unending “analysis” through the deconstructive rhetorical “questioning” of all “values.” The reversal of ideology here is that, 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.” The key move is: labor is reunderstood within value. Historical materialist critique, to the absolute contrary, theorizes the bourgeois value system within the general account of labor as the material basis of exploitation. It is necessary, in other words, to turn Spivak back around: value must be understood within a general account of labor.

When MacCabe hails Spivak’s “thoroughgoing argument which fully retains Marx’s account of exploitation grounded in the theory of surplus value,” this “praise,” and the fact that the “argument is both extraordinarily complex and interesting,” is all premised upon the fact that in the very next sentence this entire historical materialist “ground” will be supplanted by the ideological “basis” of “values.” Hence, the outcome is that exploitation, which is made possible by fundamental class divisions of labor, is seen as having a “basis” in “the chain of value-determinations,” which Spivak “breaks open.” Exploitation in the ludic postmodern political imaginary, then, is based upon the indeterminacy of values. And the task of rendering all values indeterminate, of course, is precisely the ideological role of deconstruction. This is indeed the rhetoric of exploitation: that is, its ideological persuasivity, not the theoretical critique of exploitation.