A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
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A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

Toward a History of the Vanishing Present

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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eBook - ePub

A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

Toward a History of the Vanishing Present

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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About This Book

Are the "culture wars" over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world's foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave."We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban, " Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the "native informant" through various cultural practices—philosophy, history, literature—to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant's analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on.A major critical work, Spivak's book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.

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Year
1999
ISBN
9780674504172

CHAPTER ONE

Philosophy

I

Postcolonial studies, unwittingly commemorating a lost object, can become an alibi unless it is placed within a general frame. Colonial Discourse studies, when they concentrate only on the representation of the colonized or the matter of the colonies, can sometimes serve the production of current neocolonial knowledge by placing colonialism/imperialism securely in the past, and/or by suggesting a continuous line from that past to our present. This situation complicates the fact that postcolonial/colonial discourse studies is becoming a substantial subdisciplinary ghetto. In spite of the potential for cooptation, however, there can be no doubt that the apparently crystalline disciplinary mainstream runs muddy if these studies do not provide a persistent dredging operation. Because this dredging is counterproductive when it becomes a constant and self-righteous shaming of fully intending subjects, deconstruction can help here. (It is not accidental that, in spite of Derrida’s repeated invocations of disciplinary matters and the crisis of European consciousness, the few attempts at harnessing deconstruction to these ends are not considered germane to deconstructive literary or philosophical critique.)1
The mainstream has never run clean, perhaps never can. Part of mainstream education involves learning to ignore this absolutely, with a sanctioned ignorance. Therefore in this opening chapter I read three central texts of the Western philosophical tradition, texts that sanction.
In conclusion to “The Three Worlds,” Carl Pletsch writes
Our challenge is not merely to cast aside this conceptual ordering of social scientific labor [into three worlds], but to criticize it. And we must understand the task of criticism in the Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist sense here. We must, in other words, overcome the limitations that the three worlds notion has imposed upon the social sciences as a matter of course.2
It is beyond the scope of this book to demonstrate how the new North-South divide in the post-Soviet world imposes new limitations, although my argument will constantly seek to escape that caution.3 We may, however, suggest that our grasp on that process is made more secure if we in the humanities (Pletsch writes of the social sciences) see the “third world” as a displacement of the old colonies, as colonialism proper displaces itself into neocolonialism. (By neocolonialism I always mean the largely economic rather than the largely territorial enterprise of imperialism. The difference between colonialism and imperialism, crucial to historians, is not of the last importance here.) The post-Soviet situation has moved this narrative into the dynamics of the financialization of the globe.4 These “great narratives” are becoming increasingly more powerful operating principles, and we in the U.S. academy are participants in it. This is also why it may be interesting to read Kant, Hegel, Marx as remote discursive precursors, rather than as transparent or motivated repositories of “ideas.”5 I keep hoping that some readers may then discover a constructive rather than disabling complicity between our own position and theirs, for there often seems no choice between excuses and accusations, the muddy stream and mudslinging.
As the century spanning the production of Kant and Marx progresses, the relationship between European discursive production and the axiomatics of imperialism also changes, although the latter continues to play the rôle of making the discursive mainstream appear clean, and of making itself appear as the only negotiable way. In the course of this unceasing operation, and in one way or another, an unacknowledgeable moment that I will call “the native informant” is crucially needed by the great texts; and it is foreclosed.
I borrow the term “foreclosure” (forclusion) from Lacanian psychoanalysis. I read psychoanalysis as a technique for reading the pre-emergence (Raymond Williams’s term) of narrative as ethical instantiation.6 Let me sketch this technique briefly by way of the entry for “Foreclosure” in a still useful general lexicon of the passage between Freud and Lacan, The Language of Psycho-Analysis.7 My implied reader, who figures herself forth in Chapter 4, will be obliged to consult lexicons.
As Language points out,
[t]he sense brought to the fore by Lacan, … [is to be found] for instance, in [what] Freud writes … [about] “a much more energetic and successful kind of defence. Here, the ego rejects [verwirft] the incompatible idea together with the affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all.” … The work from which Lacan has most readily derived support for his … idea of foreclosure is the case-history of the “Wolf-Man.” (Emphasis mine.)
The idea of the rejection of an affect can direct us into the dis-locating of psychoanalytic speculation from practical science (for which specialized training is recommended) to ethical responsibility (a burden of being human). It is also useful to remember that it was the history of the Wolf-Man analysis that led Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok into the thinking of cryptonymy, the encrypting of a name.8 Derrida, who works this dis-location by disclaiming “responsibility” within the circuit of the production and consumption of psychoanalytic practice, mimes the encrypting of the patronymic and the search for the impossible matronymic in a text of mourning for his father.9 In this chapter, I shall docket the encrypting of the name of the “native informant” as the name of Man—a name that carries the inaugurating affect of being human. We cannot diagnose a psychosis here, but we can supplement the ethical Freud who wrote The Un-ease [Unbehagen] of Civilization with this thought: that this rejecion of affect served and serves as the energetic and successful defense of the civilizing mission.
As the lexicon traces the development of the idea in Freud, it mentions that the idea comprises an inner-outer switch: an internal withdrawal of cathexis [Besetzung] that becomes a “‘disavowal [Verleugnung] of the real external world.’”10 “How, in the last reckoning, are we to understand this sort of ‘repression’ into the external world…. [T]he withdrawal of cathexis [Besetzung] is also a withdrawal of significance [Bedeutung].”
Taking this inside-outside two-step as his guide, “Lacan defines foreclosure … a translation [of Freud] into his own language…. [as] ‘what has been foreclosed from the Symbolic reappears in the Real.’” Thus foreclosure relates to a Freudian “‘primary process’ embodying two complementary operations: ‘the Einbeziehung ins Ich, introduction into the subject, and the Ausstoßung aus dem Ich, expulsion from the subject.’” The Real is or carries the mark of that expulsion.
I think of the “native informant” as a name for that mark of expulsion from the name of Man—a mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical relation.
I borrow the term from ethnography, of course. In that discipline, the native informant, although denied autobiography as it is understood in the Northwestern European tradition (codename “West”), is taken with utmost seriousness. He (and occasionally she) is a blank, though generative of a text of cultural identity that only the West (or a Western-model discipline) could inscribe. The practice of some benevolent cultural nativists today can be compared to this, although the cover story there is of a fully self-present voice-consciousness. Increasingly, there is the self-marginalizing or self-consolidating migrant or postcolonial masquerading as a “native informant.” I am discovering the native informant clear out of this cluster. The texts I read are not ethnographic and therefore do not celebrate this figure. They take for granted that the “European” is the human norm and offer us descriptions and/or prescriptions. And yet, even here, the native informant is needed and foreclosed. In Kant he is needed as the example for the heteronomy of the determinant, to set off the autonomy of the reflexive judgment, which allows freedom for the rational will; in Hegel as evidence for the spirit’s movement from the unconscious to consciousness; in Marx as that which bestows normativity upon the narrative of the modes of production. These moves, in various guises, still inhabit and inhibit our attempts to overcome the limitations imposed on us by the newest division of the world, to the extent that, as the North continues ostensibly to “aid” the South—as formerly imperialism “civilized” the New World—the South’s crucial assistance to the North in keeping up its resource-hungry lifestyle is forever foreclosed. In the pores of this book will be the suggestion that, the typecase of the foreclosed native informant today is the poorest woman of the South. But the period and texts under our consideration in this chapter will produce—to cite Gramsci’s uncanny insight—the native informant(s) as a site of unlisted traces. To steer ourselves through the Scylla of cultural relativism and the Charybdis of nativist culturalism regarding this period, we need a commitment not only to narrative and counternarrative, but also to the rendering (im)possible of (another) narrative.
As my opening quotation from Pletsch betrays, our sense of critique is too thoroughly determined by Kant, Hegel, and Marx for us to be able to reject them as “motivated imperialists,” although this is too often the vain gesture performed by critics of imperialism. A deconstructive politics of reading would acknowledge the determination as well as the imperialism and see if the magisterial texts can now be our servants, as the new magisterium constructs itself in the name of the Other.11
Foucault’s historical fable locates the breakdown of the discourse of sovereignty and the emergence of the micrology of power at the end of the French and British eighteenth century. In the same fabulating spirit, one might suggest that the end of the “German” eighteenth century (if one can speak of “Germany” as a unified proper name in that era) provides material for a narrative of crisis management: the “scientific” fabrication of new representations of self and world that would provide alibis for the domination, exploitation, and epistemic violation entailed by the establishment of colony and empire.
As we move within the great narratives of cultural self-representation, it is appropriate to note that Germany’s imperialist adventures did not consolidate themselves until the latter part of the nineteenth century.12 The narrative of “German” cultural self-representation, within the Western European context, is therefore one of difference. Its very singularity provides a sort of link with that earlier scenario of self-representation that would not allow the name “German,” a lack of unified nationhood that could only find a fuller founding through the rediscovery of a German antiquity; a lack of participation in the European Renaissance that would nonetheless allow a modern and active reenactment of the Renaissance.13
It is hard to plot the lines by which a people (metonymically that group within it that is self-consciously the custodian of culture) construct the explanations that establish its so-called cultural identity. Yet it cannot be denied that such lines are drawn and redrawn. If we think of the ways in which our own cultural identities and rôles are negotiated and renegotiated, implicitly and explicitly, by way of great narratives ranging from the popular to the scholarly, it is not implausible to make the following suggestion. Cultural and intellectual “Germany,” the place of self-styled difference from the rest of what is still understood as “continental” Europe and Britain, was the main source of the meticulous scholarship that established the vocabulary of proto-archetypal (“comparative” in the disciplinary sense) identity, or kinship, without direct involvement in the utilization of that other difference, between the colonizer and the colonized; in the nascent discourses of comparative philology, comparative religion, even comparative literature. The difference in tone between a William Jones (1746–1794) and a Herder (1744–1803)—taxonomizing Sanskrit and thinking alterity by way of language/culture, respectively—will bring home my point. “Africa” remained a place apart on this network of possible identity, a place that provoked bafflement or hysteria.14
The field of philosophy as such, whose model was the merging of science and truth, remained untouched by the comparative impulse. In this area, Germany produced authoritative “universal” narratives where the subject remained unmistakably European. These narratives— Kant’s cosmopolitheia, Hegel’s itinerary of the Idea, Marx’s socialist homeopathy—neither inaugurated nor consolidated a specifically scholarly control of the matter of imperialism.
Carl Pletsch’s admonition to us to be Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist in our dismantling of third-worldist talk is yet another example of their influence in the formation of the European ethico-political subject. In my estimation, these source texts of European ethico-political selfrepresentation are also complicitous with what is today a self-styled postcolonial discourse. On the margins of my reading is the imagined and (im)possible perspective I have called the native informant. Ostentatiously to turn one’s back on, say, this trio, when so much of one’s critique is clearly if sometimes unwittingly copied from them, is to disavow agency, declare kingdom come by a denial of history.
On the other hand, to imagine that the positioning of the other remains the same in all their work is to assume that the only real engagement with the other is in the “objective” social science disciplines, after all. My point is that we in the humanities, dealing with the position of the other as an implied “subject”(ive) position, must also vary our assumptions depending upon the text with which we are dealing. Paradoxically, every questioner who enters the book trade does so as a species of “native informant” or has been trained from infancy, for hours every day, even if reactively, in some version of an academic culture that has accommodated these three fellows, often in their radical margins but sometimes also in their conservative centers. I write in the conviction that sometimes it is best to sabotage what is inexorably to hand, than to invent a tool that no one will test, while mouthing varieties of liberal pluralism.
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