In Other Worlds

Essays In Cultural Politics

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135070816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this classic work, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading and most influential cultural theorists working today, analyzes the relationship between language, women and culture in both Western and non-Western contexts. Developing an original integration of powerful contemporary methodologies – deconstruction, Marxism and feminism – Spivak turns this new model on major debates in the study of literature and culture, thus ensuring that In Other Worlds has become a valuable tool for studying our own and other worlds of culture.

Part I

Literature

1

THE LETTER AS CUTTING EDGE

If one project of psychoanalytical criticism is to “submit to this test [of the status of speaking] a certain number of the statements of the philosophic tradition,”¹ the American common critic might well fix her glance upon Chapters Twelve and Thirteen of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. These two chapters are invariably interpreted as an important paradigmatic statement of the union of the subject and object in the act of the mind, of the organic Imagination, and the autonomous self. Over the last fifty years New Criticism—the line of I. A. Richards, William Empson, and then of Brooks, Ransom, Tate, and Wimsatt has “founded [itself] on the implicit assumption that literature is an autonomous activity of the mind.”² It is not surprising that this School, which has given America the most widely accepted ground rules of literary pedagogy, is also often a running dialogue with the Coleridge who is taken to be the prophet of the sovereign subject. I quote a passage from Richards, as he proposes to discuss Chapters Twelve and Thirteen: “In beginning now to expound Coleridge’s theory of the Imagination, I propose to start where he himself in the Biographia … really started: that is, with a theory of the act of knowledge, or of consciousness, or, as he called it, ‘the coincidence or coalescence of an OBJECT with a SUBJECT.’”³

The testing of these two chapters of the Biographia by the American common critic by the rules of new psychoanalysis is therefore not without a certain plausibility, not to say importance. As I describe that testing, I shall imply its ideology—an ideology of “applying” in critical practice a “theory” developed under other auspices, and of discovering an analogy to the task of the literary critic in any interpretative situation inhabiting any “science of man.” At the end of this essay, I shall comment on that ideology more explicitly. For reasons that should become clear as the essay progresses, I shall make no attempt to “situate” Coleridge within an intellectual set, nor deal with the rich thematics of his so-called “plagiarisms.”

The Biographia Literaria is Coleridge’s most sustained and most important theoretical work. It is also a declared autobiography. The critic who has attended to the main texts of the new psychoanalysis has learned that any act of language is made up as much by its so-called substance as by the cuts and gaps that substance serves to frame and/or stop up: “We can conceive of the shutting [fermeture] of the unconscious by the action of something which plays the role of diaphragm-shutter [obturateur]—the object a, sucked and breathed in, just where the trap begins.”⁴ These problematics might play interestingly in a declared autobiography such as Coleridge’s. Armed with this insight, the critic discovers, in Coleridge’s text, logical and rhetorical slips and dodges, and what looks very much like a narrative obturateur. The text is so packed, and thoroughly commented upon, that here I outline the simplest blueprint of these moments.

The entire Biographia inhabits the narrative structure of pre-monition and post-ponement (today we might say difference—certainly avoidance and longing) that so many Romantic works share. “Intended in the first place as a preface to the Sibylline Leaves (a collection of poems), it grew into a literary autobiography, which came to demand a preface. This preface itself outgrew its purposed limits, and was incorporated in the whole work, which was finally issued in two parts—the autobiography (two vols.) and the poems.”⁵

The Biographia Literaria, then, is not a bona fide book at all, for it was intended only as a preface, pointing to what would come after it. Only because it failed in its self-effacing task did it become a full-fledged book. Even as such it is unwell-made, for, among other reasons, it contains within it its own failed preface. One cannot situate the book in its own place. It looks forward to its promise and backward at its failure and, in a certain way, marks its own absence: autobiography by default, prefaces grown monstrous. And, even beyond this, the work as it stands is often still presented as a preface: “In the third treatise of my Logosophia,” never to be written “announced at the end of this volume, I shall give (deo volente) the demonstrations and constructions of the Dynamic Philosophy scientifically arranged” (179–180). “Be assured, however,” Coleridge writes to himself, “that I look forward anxiously to your great book on the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have promised and announced” (200).

The narrative declaration of the status of the Biographia Literaria is thus deliberately evasive, the writing reminder of a gap. Within such a framework, the celebrated chapter on Imagination (XIII) declares its own version of absence. Coleridge tells us that the burden of argumentation in that chapter has been suppressed at the request of a friend, (who is, as is well-known, “a figment of Coleridge’s imagination,” another way of saying “Coleridge himself”: “Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received the following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment I have had ample reason to estimate and revere … In consequence of this very judicious letter, … I shall content myself for the present with stating the main result of the Chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume [a fruitless promise]” (198, 201–202).

It would perhaps be more precise to say that the chapter declares its own inaccessibility rather than its proper absence. For it is supposed to exist, and Coleridge’s friend, its privileged reader, has read it, but, because the BIOGRAPHIA is an autobiography and a preface, it must be suppressed: “For who, he [your reader] might truly observe,” Coleridge’s “friend” observes, “could from your title-page, viz. ‘My Literary Life and Opinions,’ published too as introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or even conjectured, a long treatise on ideal Realism …” (200–201). We are assured of the chapter’s massy presence in the least refutable way; in terms of money and numbers of pages: “I do not hesitate in advising and urging you to withdraw the Chapter from the present work … This chapter, which cannot, when it is printed, amount to so little as a hundred pages, will of necessity greatly increase the expense of the work” (200). Those paragraphs, beginning “The IMAGINATION then, I consider,” that have been quoted so frequently as “Coleridge’s theory of the Imagination,” are merely “the main result of the Chapter, which I have reserved [held back] for the future publication, a detailed prospectus [which looks forward] of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume” (201–202).

The greatest instrument of narrative refraction in these chapters, the obturateur, if you like, is, of course, the letter that stops publication of the original Chapter Thirteen. The gesture is about as far as possible from “the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM,” (202) the most abundantly quoted Coleridgean formula, descriptive of the primary Imagination. It is a written message to oneself represented as being an external interruption. And, the critic cannot forget that it is this that is presented in the place of the organic process and growth of the argument leading to the celebrated conclusions about the nature of the sovereign imagination. Why should a false disowning (since the letter is by Coleridge after all) of the name of the self as author, a false declaration of the power of another, inhabit the place of the greatest celebration of the self? It is a question that her psychoanalytical studies have prepared our critic to ask.

“I see clearly that you have done too much and yet not enough,” Coleridge writes to Coleridge. In these chapters, in addition to the general narrative motif of declared and stopped-up vacancy, the reader encounters this particular sort of rhetorical oscillation between a thing and its opposite, sometimes displacing that opposition (as here, what is too much is presumably what is not enough, the two can never of course be the same), which artfully suggests the absence of the thing itself, at the same time, practically speaking and thanks to the conventions of rhetoric, suggesting its presence. The typical hiding-in-disclosure, the signifier creating “the effect of the signified” by rusing anticipation—that psychoanalysis has taught her to recognize. Here are some of these rhetorical gestures.

Consider the title of Chapter Twelve. “Requests”—looking forward to a future result—and “premonitions”—knowing the result beforehand, concerning the “perusal” or “omission” of “the chapter that follows.” The first two pages are taken up with “understanding a philosopher’s ignorance” or being “ignorant of his understanding.” The connection between this and what follows is not immediately clear in the text. The distinction seems to be invoked simply to reinforce the rhetorical oscillation. We move next to the request that the reader “will either pass over the following chapter altogether, or read the whole connectedly” (162). Even if we overlook the fact that Coleridge will set up numerous obstacles to reading these chapters connectedly, and that this request is advanced not in its own proper place, but “in lieu of the various requests which the anxiety of authorship addresses to the unknown reader,” (162) we might quite justifiably ask, “which following chapter?” Chapter Twelve, the chapter that has just begun and will immediately follow, or Chapter Thirteen, the chapter that comes after this one? I am not suggesting, of course, that common-sensically, we cannot make our choice; but that rhetorically, the request seems to blur the possibility of the presence of the matter under discussion.

Upon the rhetoric of oscillation, Coleridge now imposes the rhetoric of condition. He tells us what kind of reader he does not want. “If a man receives as fundamental fact, … the general notions of matter, spirit, soul, body, action, passiveness, time, space, cause and effect, consciousness, perception, memory and habit,” et cetera, et cetera, “to such a mind I would as courteously as possible convey the hint, that for him this chapter was not written” (163). After this sentence, with its significant breakdown in parallelism once it gets to “cause and effect,” Coleridge plunges into the language of “more and less” where, if we read closely, we will see that the “not more difficult is it to reduce them” and the “still less dare a favorable perusal be anticipated” do not match: “Taking [these terms] therefore in mass, and unexamined, it requires only a decent apprenticeship in logic, to draw forth their contents in all forms and colours, as the professors of legerdemain at our village fairs pull out ribbon after ribbon from their mouths. And not more difficult is it to reduce them back again to their different genera.… Still less dare a favorable perusal be anticipated from the proselytes of that compendious philosophy …” (163) The rhetoric of “more and less” is there to beguile us. In itself a device to announce the absence of a thing in its proper measure, here deflected and defective, it leads us into further dissimulative plays of presence and absence.

“But,” writes Coleridge in the next paragraph, “it is time to tell the truth.” A negative truth, presented in halting alternatives: “it is neither possible or necessary for all men, or for many, to be PHILOSOPHERS” (164). After this divisive move, Coleridge leaves the place of spontaneous consciousness vacant of or inaccessible to human knowledge: “we divide all the objects of human knowledge into those on this side, and those on the other side of the spontaneous consciousness” (164).

Coleridge then assumes what is recognizably the language of philosophical exposition. And here the reader repeatedly meets what must be called logical slippages.

In Chapter Twelve, simply breaking ground for the grand demonstration of Chapter Thirteen, Coleridge submits that “there are two cases equally possible. EITHER THE OBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, … OR THE SUBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST.” For “the conception of nature does not apparently involve the co-presence of an intelligence making an ideal duplicate of it, i.e. representing it” (175). So far so good. Yet a few pages later, Coleridge designates the ground of the first alternative as prejudice, and that of the second simply as ground. The reason being one of compulsion; otherwise thought disappears.

THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT US … remains proof against all attempts to remove it by grounds or arguments … the philosopher therefore compels himself to treat this faith as nothing more than a prejudice … The other position … is groundless indeed … It is groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other certainty. Now the apparent contradiction … the transcendental philosopher can solve only by the supposition … that it is not only coherent but identical … with our own immediate self-consciousness (178; italics mine).

Upon this fundamental, compulsive, and necessary desire, the philosopher’s desire for coherence and the possibility of knowledge—the desire for the One, Coleridge lays the cornerstone of his argument. And then suggests that to demonstrate the identity of the two positions presented in the passage above is “the office and object of philosophy!” (175–178). An office and object, as the reader sees in the next chapter, that can only be performed by deferment and dissimulation.

Indeed, in this section of Chapter Twelve, Coleridge is preparing us systematically for the analysis of Chapter Thirteen, the chapter to come, and giving us the terms for its analysis—a chapter which he warns most of us against reading, and which is not going to be there for any of us to read anyway. And all through Chapter Twelve, Coleridge grapples with the most patent contradiction in his theory: The possible priority of the object must be rejected out of hand and the identity of the subject and object, althoug...