search_for_spivak

whenever i start to write about spivak i imagine her making this face at me

so i quote

extensively

it's funny reading spivak. she flies into heady theory that makes my blood depressurize and i start to black out. but then she comes back to these moments of just utter, pithy clarity.

" I like that, because it has no theoretical rigor." (TPCC, 141)

she's bridging these theoretical frameworks and subject positions and commitments that CANNOT POSSIBLY BE BRIDGED (or maybe a better metaphor is trying to fit all the silverware and cooking tools into the same tiny kitchen drawer so that i have to SLAM it shut a few times, or else fiddle with the spatula or simply omit the potato masher altogether in order to deal with the existence of all these tools).

but she's committed to crisis!

"As far as I understand it, the notion of textuality should be related to the notion of the worlding of a world on a supposedly uninscribed territory. When I say this, I am thinking basically about the imperialist project which had to assume that the earth that it territorialized was previously uninscribed." (1 )

"Textuality in its own way marks the place where the production of discourse or the location of language as a model escapes the person or the collectivity that engages in practice, so that even textuality itself might simply be an uneven clenching of a space of dissemination which may or may not be random. From this point of view, what a notion of textuality in general does is to see that what is defined over against 'The Text' as 'fact' or 'life' or even 'practice' is to an extent worded in a certain way so that practice can take place." (1-2)

"When one says 'writing', it means this kind of structuring of the limits of the power of practice, knowing that what is beyond practice is always organizing practice." (2)

"…there are intellectuals in Asia but there are no Asian intellectuals. I would stand by that rather cryptic remark." (3)

"If one reverses the direction, and here I am working within a very established deconstructive model of reversal and displacement, what does it say? That you reverse the direction of a binary opposition and you discover the violence. If one reverses the direction of this binary opposition, the Western intellectual's longing for all that is not West, our turn towards the West--the so-called non-West's turn toward the West is a //command//. That turn was not in order to fulfill some longing to consolidate a pure space for ourselves, that turn was a command. Without that turn we would not in fact have been able to make a life for ourselves as intellectuals." (8)

"To my students in the United States, I talk about the 'instant soup syndrome'--just add the euphoria of hot water and you have soup, and you don't have to question yourself as to how the power was produced; and to an extend all of us who can ask the question of specificity, all of us who can make public the question of feminist practice, in fact have been enabled by a long history to be in that position, no matter how personally disadvantaged we might be." (9)

"unlearn our privilege as our loss" (9) (10)

"…I would say that for me the question of the abject is very closely tied to the question of being //aboriginal//, rather than a reinscription of the object, it is a question of the reinscription of the subject. Now, it seems to me it is very useful if one can think of female subject-constitution as well, because one doesn't usually." (10)

"…I find that the limits of their theories [French intellectuals] are disclosed by their encounter with the materiality of that other of the West." (11) "…rather than define myself as specific rather than universal, I should see what in the universalizing discourse could be useful and then go on to see where that discourse meets its limits and its challenge within that field." (11)

"You see, you //are// committed to these concepts, whether you acknowledge it or not." (11)

"Since the moment of essentializing, universalizing, saying yes to the onto-phenomenological question, is irreducible, let us at least situate it at the moment, let us become vigilant about our own practice and use it as much as we can rather than make the totally counterproductive gesture of repudiating it." (11)

"You pick up the universal that will give you the power to fight against the other side, and what you are throwing away by doing that is your theoretical purity. Whereas the great custodians of the anti-universal are obliged therefore simply to act in the interest of a great narrative, the narrative of exploitation, while they keep themselves clean by not committing themselves to anything. In fact they are actually run up by a great narrative even as their are busy protecting their theoretical purity by repudiating essentialism." (12)

"...I am not interested in being pure even as I remain an anti-essentialist" (12)

"…talk about civilization and its discontents." (13)

"So, paradoxically, I would say that I find my power very much less in an interview situation, than in the classroom or when I'm writing." (35)

"[the interview] It's a wonderful way of 'othering' oneself. I like to surrender myself to the interviews, is what I'm saying!" (36)

"I'm deeply suspicious of any determinist or positivist definition of identity, and this is echoed in my attitude to writing styles. I don't think one can pretend to imitate adequately that to which one is bound. So, our problem, and our solution, is that we do pretend this imitation when we write, but then must do something about the fact that one knows this imitation is not OK anymore." (38)

i've been thinking a lot with ukeles lately; metaphors of cleaning and care...

"MJP: Can we clean up metaphor? GCS: No. It's like cleaning teeth. You know, you will never be able to clean your teeth once and for all. But cleaning one's teeth, keeping oneself in order, etc.--its not like writing books. You don't do these things once and for all. That's why it should be persistent. MJP: So political practice is like housework? GCS: And who doesn't know this? Except political theorists who are opining from the academy with theological solutions once and for all…" (41)

"Theory always norms practice. When you practice, as it were, you construct a theory and irreducibly the practice will norm the theory, rather than be an example of indirect theoretical application. What I'm more interested in now is the radical interruption of practice by theory, and of theory by practice, and to an extent my inability to produce a quick answer because it's a genuine interruption. If what I'm thinking about, in terms of the different feminist practice, were not a real interruption, then I would be able to accommodate it, consolidate it, appropriate it, define it, produce models of newspeak and so on, and be home free. But the nature of an interruption is that it really does put a monkey wrench in the whole thing. It is a genuine discontinuity." (44)

"You cannot freely play. This is one of the things that deconstruction also teaches us. If one does start, self-consciously, to engage in free play, once again one makes a very deterministic mistake, thinking that the narrating can adequately represent the philosophy. Thinking we can exactly imitate the notions of deconstruction by engaging in a little bit of free play. For even as we are supposed to be 'freely playing', we are finalizing the situation out of which we are speaking. Derrida said, at a certain point--I don't think this is in print--'Deconstruction is not exposure of error, it is a vigilance about the fact that we are always obliged to produce truth'….It's not some kind of a negative metaphysical caper because there's nothing positive in the world; it's an examination, over and over again, of the fact that we are obliged to produce truths, positive things, we are obliged to finalize, perspectives must be generalized, and so on…" (46)

"What I mean by crisis is the moment at which you feel your presuppositions of an enterprise are disproved by the enterprise itself. These are not necessarily moments of weakness. It seems to me that this is the only serious way in which crisis can become productive, when one feels, for example, that the women's movement challenges the project of feminism. On the one hand, one is not about to give up on feminism, but the relevant outcome, either from the women's movement point of view, or from the feminism point of view, is a problem and a moment when you think about negotiating. **I'm not saying we live constantly in a state of crisis--crisis management is another name for life, right?--but it seems that if you look at even an old-fashioned revolution, there is a transitional moment; in the post-revolutionary moment, it seems as if revolution is no longer necessary, and that's when things start going wrong."** (139)

"That word [subaltern], used under duress, has been transformed into the description of everything that doesn't fall under a strict class analysis. I like that, because it has no theoretical rigor." (141)

"But it seems to me that the whole of a non-narrativisable subaltern insurgency is in fact the reason why it is called subaltern by people like Guha: it is not within capital logic that these oppositions occur." (144)

"As Derrida says, and now I am quoting, "Logocentrism is not a pathology," it is the thing that enables us--except, if because it enables us, we say that is correct, it would be a mistake. That is all he is saying. So that, in fact, all that he looks at is the way in which the subject centers itself. He is not decentering the subject. The subject is--the subject must identify itself with its self-perceived intention. The fact that it must do so is not a description of what it is. That is the difference between centered and decentered. There is no way that a subject can be anything but centered. Logocentrism, phallocentrism, gynecocentrism--all of these things enable. And deconstruction--the project starts with…a misunderstanding of a rhetorical question. But the fact that the subject is centered begins with that kind of an un-endorsable error. That doesn't mean that the subject can be decenterd. **There is no such thing as the decentered subject**. " (146)

"Why on earth should we be on that impossible ahistorical quest for purist positions, that's about as non-materialist as could be. Isn't it autonomy that is suspect? Patriarchy negotiates with feminism, calls itself autonomous…" (150)

"The immediate politics of human-scientific academic movements //are// in classrooms." (152)

"That's the way I think of the margin--as not simply opposed to the center but as an accomplice of the center--because I find it very troubling that I should be defined as marginal. I don't see how I could possibly have that definition except in terms of people's longing to find a marginal who is locatable." (156)

"The subaltern is all that is not elite, but the trouble with those kinds of names is that if you have any kind of political interest you name it in the hope that the name will disappear. That's what class consciousness is in the interest of: the class disappearing. What politically we want to see is that the name would not be possible. So what I'm interested in is seeing ourselves as namers of the subaltern. If the subaltern can speak then, thank God, the subaltern is not a subaltern any more." (158)

"The subaltern is a name as "woman" in Derrida, or "power" in Foucault, and the name comes with an anxiety that if the political program gets anywhere the name will disappear. In that way I would say that women who claim alterity should see themselves--should in fact see themselves as naming rather than named. I think its really bogus to legitimize the other side by claiming alterity. It doesn't move me at all." (166) "It can certainly be advanced that one of the many scripts spelling out the vicissitudes of the diversified field of the first waves of global Marxism is the consequence of the realist compromises of reading a speculative morphology as an adequate blueprint for social justice: to treat a critical philosophy as a dogmatic." (25)

"A mother tongue is a language with a history--in the sense that it is "instituted"--before our birth and after our death, where patterns that can be filled with anyone's "motivation" have laid themselves down. In this sense it is "'unmotivated' but not capricious." We learn it in a "natural" way and fill it once and for all with our own "intentions" and thus make it "our own" for the span of our life and then leave it, without intent--as unmotivated and capricious as we found it (without intent) when it found us--for its other users." (27)

""Power" in the general sense is therefore not only a name, but a catachresis. Like all names it is a misfit. To use //this// name to describe a generality inaccessible to intended description, is necessarily to work with the risk that the word "is wrested from its //proper// meaning," that it is being applied "to a thing which it does not //properly// denote" (OED). We cannot find a proper place--it must be effaced as it is disclosed." (29)

"And the resemblance emerges when Hoy, after emphasizing the important point that power in Foucault is productive as well as repressive, then divides the necessary results into thoroughly valorized "positive" and "negative" effects. (I am encouraged by the possibility of giving these adjectives an electrical charge.)" (31)

"Les résistances … sont l'autre terme, dans les relations de pouvoir; elles s'y inscrivent comme irréductible vis-à-vis." (MF, quoted in GS 33)

"The trick is to get some of the homely verbiness of //savoir// in //savoir-faire//, //savoir-vivre// into //pouvoir//, and you might come up with something like this: if the lines of making sense of something are laid down in a certain, then you are able to do only those things with that something which are possible within and by the arrangement of those lines. //Pouvoir-savoir//--being able to do something--only as you are able to make sense of it. This everyday sense of that doublet seems to me indispensable to a crucial aspect of Foucault's work." (34)

"If this seems a little opaque, let me invite you to think of the terminals of resistance as possibilities for reflexes of mind and activity, as an athlete has reflexes of the body to call upon. And changes in //pouvoir/savoir// can make visible the repressive elements in both situations, even through "disciplinary" means…of woman's freedom on the one hand, or of woman's right to a special role in the propagation of society on the other" (35).

"The subject-position of the citizen of a recently decolonized "nation" is epistemically fractured. The so-called private individual and the public citizen in a decolonized nation can inhabit widely different epistemes, violently at odds with each other yet yoked together by way of the many everyday ruses of //pouvoir-savoir//." (48)

"There is however a space that did not share in t he energy of this reversal [from old colony to new nation], a space that had no firmly established agency of traffic with the // culture // of imperialism. Paradoxically, this space is also outside of organized labor, below he attempted reversals of capital logic. Conventionally, this space is described as the habitat of the // sub // proletariat or the // sub // altern. Mahasweta's fiction suggests that // this // is the space of the displacement of the colonization-decolonization reversal THis is the space that can become, for her, a dystopic representation of decolonization // as such // . In this context, "decolonization" becomes a convenient and misleading word, used because no other can be found." (48-9)

"Seeker, //if you need to find something//…take courses in the history of the sciences. My hope [however] does not follow the straight road, the monotonous and dreary methodology from which novelty has fled; my hope invents the cut-off trail, broken, chosen at random form the wasp, the bee, the fly." (Mahasweta, quoted on GS 50)

one must honor the [|slash]