“But it is a Marxism which will be alien to at least a few Marxist critics”
Learning from the Foreword to In Other Worlds
Jerry Leonard
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Spring 1994 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 3 (pp. 27-33) | ||
| • October 5, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
“What aid to the reader, then, is proposed by a foreword?” | ||
| --Colin MacCabe (“Foreword” ix) | ||
“… we must at all costs set out, first, to learn, secondly, to learn, and thirdly, to learn, and then see to it that learning shall not remain a dead letter, or a fashionable catch-phrase… that learning shall really become part of our very being, that it shall actually and fully become a constituent element of our social life…. We must follow the rule: Better fewer, but better.” | ||
| --Lenin (“Better Fewer, But Better,” The Lenin Anthology, ed. R.C. Tucker, 736) | ||
I
In this text I wish to contribute to the construction of a critical social arena for the retheorization of the conflictuality of “difference” in postmodern cultural studies. As Maria Mies argues in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (1986), I believe that the problematics of differential conflictuality need to be examined in terms of the relationship between “the subject” and history, the subject of history: neither a passive nor a “free” subject, but rather in a certain sense an actively situated subject in/of the historical configurations of “capitalist patriarchy” as Mies theorizes this concept. Quoting as well as translating from an unpublished text by Roswitha Leukert entitled “Weibliche Sinnlichkeit,” Mies writes: “‘The beginning of human history is primarily not a problem of fixing a certain date, but rather that of finding a materialist concept of man [the human being, M.M. (the subject, J.L.)] and history’” (48).
More specifically, in this text I engage in a “detailed” critique of ideology in the postmodern moment of capitalist patriarchy as this ideology is symptomatically inscribed through Colin MacCabe’s “Foreword” to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s text, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1988). Ideology critique—after Marx, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Spivak, and Mies—cannot rest with what is ultimately the “local” historical articulation of late capitalism, but rather must examine the ideology of late capitalism as itself the “late-est” historical organization of patriarchal exploitative relations on a world scale. “These relations are based on exploitation and oppression… these relations are also dynamic ones in which a process of polarization takes place: one pole is getting ‘developed’ at the expense of the other pole, which in this process is getting ‘underdeveloped’” (Mies 39, emphasis in original).
Still at a further level of specificity, I shall engage these broad problematics of the praxis of postmodern ideology critique in terms of the pedagogy of “reading otherwise”: that is, learning from the dominant postmodern practices of “close reading” or “reading in detail” as elaborated in the work of Jane Gallop, Naomi Schor, Alice Jardine, and of course Gayatri Spivak, who is in virtually every way imaginable—and very similar to Barbara Johnson—the Third World tutor par excellence in the classical Derridean lineage of disSEMENation. But as Lenin contends, such “learning” must not be understood as a “dead letter” but rather as an uncompromising intervention in the dominant protocols of “reading” as “textualism.”
“Reading” in radical critical pedagogy is not the same as it is in the dominant ludic psychoanalytic pedagogies. Hence, “reading” must not be “accepted” as the specialist province, the “expertise,” of ludic pedagogues, ludic classrooms, ludic semenar tables, ludic texts, books or conferántial arenas of bourgeois pleasure. Detailed reading as radical critique is therefore an urgent historical praxis in which the social intelligibility of “the text” can be transformed into the class struggle at the level of theory. “Texts” and “books” are not “dead letters” but active sites of social unrest. Thus it is, of course, that Spivak’s celebrated inscription as “feminist Marxist deconstructivist” demands “close attention” in the most ruthless sense.
Intellectuals of the postmodern social arena—like that space which is offered by The Alternative Orange—who proclaim their commitment to bringing about social justice, I argue, must not compromise so much as one single inch in their theoretical principles, but on the contrary demonstrate their commitment through the clarification of their political and intellectual positions. The contesting discourses of the postmodern polis in this sense become “representative,” not merely of a network of signifiers, but of the entire world historical “ensemble of the social relations” under capitalist patriarchy (Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R.C. Tucker, 1978, 145). I mean, therefore, that it is not sufficient and it is not justified for my intellectual critique (or any other intellectual’s critique) of MacCabe/Spivak (or any other ludic theologians), as set out here, to be dismissed out of hand as “anti-feminist” or in any other similarly monological and commonsensical terms (“you’ve just got a problem with women”). This is ignore-ance. The question is otherwise: what kind of “feminism,” what kind of “Marxism,” and even what kind of “deconstruction” are offered today as “learning”?
