In Other Worlds by Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty

Author:Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty [Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-135-07081-6
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

10

SCATTERED SPECULATIONS ON THE QUESTION OF VALUE1

One of the determinations of the question of value is the predication of the subject. The modern “idealist” predication of the subject is consciousness. Labor-power is a “materialist” predication. Consciousness is not thought, but rather the subject’s irreducible intendedness towards the object. Correspondingly, labor-power is not work (labor), but rather the irreducible possibility that the subject be more than adequate—super-adequate—to itself, labor-power: “it distinguishes itself [unterscheidet sich] from the ordinary crowd of commodities in that its use creates value, and a greater value than it costs itself” [Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 342; translation modified].

The “idealist” and the “materialist” are both exclusive predications. There have been attempts to question this exclusivist opposition, generally by way of a critique of the “idealist” predication of the subject: Nietzsche and Freud are the most spectacular European examples. Sometimes consciousness is analogized with labor-power as in the debates over intellectual and manual labor. Althusser’s notion of “theoretical production” is the most controversial instance [For Marx 173–93]. The anti-Oedipal argument in France seems to assume a certain body without predication or without predication-function. (The celebrated “body without organs” is one product of this assumption—see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.) I have not yet been able to read this as anything but a last-ditch metaphysical longing. Since I remain bound by the conviction that subject-predication is methodologically necessary, I will not comment upon this anti-Oedipal gesture. The better part of my essay will concern itself with what the question of value becomes when determined by a “materialist” subject-predication such as Marx’s.2 This is a theoretical enterprise requiring a certain level of generality whose particular political implications I have tabulated in passing and in conclusion. Here it is in my interest to treat the theory-politics opposition as if intact.

Before I embark on the generalized project, I will set forth a practical deconstructivist-feminist-Marxist position on the question of value in a narrow disciplinary context. The issue of value surfaces in literary criticism with reference to canon-formation. From this narrowed perspective, the first move is a counter-question: why a canon? What is the ethico-political agenda that operates a canon? By way of a critique of phallogocentrism, the deconstructive impulse attempts to decenter the desire for the canon. Charting the agenda of phallocentrism involves the feminist, that of logocentrism the Marxist interested in patterns of domination. Yet for a deconstructive critic it is a truism that a full undoing of the canon-apocrypha opposition, like the undoing of any opposition, is impossible. (“The impossibility of a full undoing” is the curious definitive predication of deconstruction.) When we feminist Marxists are ourselves moved by a desire for alternative canon-formations, we work with varieties of and variations upon the old standards. Here the critic’s obligation seems to be a scrupulous declaration of “interest.”

We cannot avoid a kind of historico-political standard that the “disinterested” academy dismisses as “pathos.” That standard emerges, mired in overdeterminations, in answer to the kinds of counter-questions of which the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.