Weekly Readings #67 (05/15/23-05/21/23)

subaltern empire

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week, Part One of my four-part serialized novel Major Arcana wrapped up with its eighth chapter, “Beautiful Boy.” On Wednesday, Part Two begins: the narrative will now drop back almost 50 years and set out toward darkest New England for the childhood of my occult comic-book writer, Simon Magnus. Literary social media was consumed this week with a debate about whether or not authors should, ethically speaking, allow their main characters to smoke cigarettes. My characters are about to do a lot worse than smoke cigarettes—though they’re going to do that, too. One used to read novels to enjoy the spectacle of lives lived on a grander scale, whether better or worse, than one’s own. It used to be called entertainment. I’m bringing it back.

Speaking of, the consummate literary entertainer, Martin Amis, has died. In memoriam, I have posted to Substack my review of his elegiac final novel, Inside Story, with long asides of my own about liberalism, leftism, war, the history and purpose of the novel, the gender of power, and more. I’m currently reading London Fields—everyone seems to agree that this or The Information is his best novel; London Fields is a better title—and will report back eventually. So far, I can’t help but be struck by this:

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.

Those commas! I got it. For our essay this week, I take the occasion of a resurrected 1984 debate about postmodernism to reflect on what else but the politics of literature and the literature of politics. Please enjoy.

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Subaltern Empire: (Re)Viewing the Politics and Aesthetics of Postmodernism

This week a fascinating video was uploaded to YouTube: a one-hour televised debate about postmodernism from 1984. Mainly what happens in the video is that an early-to-mid career Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, both literally and figuratively smoking,¹ schools a self-righteous American Marxist and a self-satisfied English liberal on the counter- and super-Enlightenment style of thinking Spivak once elsewhere defined as “the persistent critique of what one cannot not want.”²

Ironically, given her philosophical school of deconstruction’s strictures against the supposed superiority of speech and presence over writing and absence, Spivak is as clear and charismatic a speaker—and I’ve seen her live as well as on video—as she is unreadable as a writer. I’ve basically never read her, though I have, in some measure, read her. The translator’s introduction to Of Grammatology is comprehensible enough, if I recall my first year of graduate school correctly, but the rest of what I’ve seen tends toward an intolerable sublime of over-allusive jargon endlessly larded with untranslated German.

Called upon to substitute as the instructor for the last few weeks of a literary theory class once, I had to teach her most famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—or, not the essay itself, but the revision thereof Spivak made for her 1999 book, The Critique of Postcolonial Reason, which The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism includes in lieu of the first version. I’ve never actually read the first version, it occurs to me. The Postcolonial Reason version is a kind of rewriting (“re-presentation” or “re-vision,” as they would have said in 1984) of the first version with much reflexive commentary and replies to her critics, though I assume the first version is also thick with metacognition and anticipatory ripostes, since part of the deconstructive program is learning to understand authentic origins as retrospective constructions always already scored and crossed by second and third thoughts, not to mention political agendas.³

Hence Derrida’s notorious thesis in the aforementioned Of Grammatology—if I rightly remember a book I read, didn’t understand, and wrote a 20-page seminar paper on 15 years ago—that writing, considered as a system of signs defined only by their differences from every other sign and therefore never stably defined nor coincident with their external referent, precedes the supposedly more primordial and authentic speech. It is for all of us as it was for the neurotic Prufrock: impossible to say just what we mean. Such a philosophical program necessarily makes a virtue of never managing to get its discourse started, since it reveals the very notion of a “start” to be a pernicious fiction of the kind promoted by authenticity-mongers who (and here we come to the political) always want to to tell you who does and doesn’t belong properly to their nation or their race or their gender.⁴

The “Subaltern” essay’s thesis, insofar as one can reconstruct its deconstruction, is worthwhile, even necessary: a caution against the intellectual’s imagining that she can speak on behalf of the oppressed even when she shares a race or a gender with the oppressed, since acculturation into the intelligentsia opens a discursive chasm neither side can easily cross. The subaltern—in this essay’s case, a distant relative of Spivak’s who died by sati—cannot speak because there is no institutional language in which she might be heard. It’s a point against the politics of representation, essentially, whether liberal or Leninist, which accounts for the perennial hostility to Spivak from those left of center.

Of the trinity of great turn-of-the-millennium anti-theory essays for the educated common reader—James Miller’s “Is Bad Writing Necessary?,” Martha Nussbaum’s “The Professor of Parody,” and Terry Eagleton’s “In the Gaudy Supermarket”—the third took Spivak as its target. Reviewing The Critique of Postcolonial Reason with withering Marxist disdain, Eagleton wrote:

There are some kinds of criticism – Orwell’s would do as an example – which are a good deal more politically radical than their bluffly commonsensical style would suggest. For all his dyspepsia about shockheaded Marxists, not to speak of his apparent willingness to shop Communists to the state, Orwell’s politics are much more far-reaching than his conventionally-minded prose would suggest. With much post-colonial writing, the situation is just the reverse. Its flamboyant theoretical avant-gardism conceals a rather modest political agenda. Where it ventures political proposals at all, which is rare enough, they hardly have the revolutionary élan of its scandalous speculations on desire or the death of Man or the end of History. This is a feature shared by Derrida, Foucault and others like them, who veer between a cult of theoretical ‘madness’ or ‘monstrosity’ and a more restrained, reformist sort of politics, retreating from the one front to the other depending on the direction of the critical fire.

Derrida – a consecrated figure for this book, about whom hardly a breath of criticism seems permissible – can sometimes make deconstruction sound like such an ordinary, affirmative, innocuous sort of affair that one wonders why Christopher Ricks and Denis Donoghue do not instantly rush to embrace it. At other times, and for other audiences, it becomes a far more menacing, subversive matter: nothing less than a radicalised form of Marxism, a claim which must come as a mighty surprise to most deconstructionists and all Marxists. Deconstruction can indeed be a politically destabilising manoeuvre, but devotees like Gayatri Spivak ought to acknowledge its displacing effect, too. Like much cultural theory, it can allow one to speak darkly of subversion while leaving one’s actual politics only slightly to the left of Edward Kennedy’s.

This impressed me when I read it as an undergraduate. 20 years later, it seems obviously wrong in at least one respect. Difficult writing—writing whose significance keeps drifting away from you in the very air-current of your attempt to grasp it—is charismatic. When you understand a piece of it, it flatters; when you can’t grasp another piece, it withdraws, even insults. These are the moves of seduction. No wonder Butler’s and Spivak’s form of politics has conquered global culture, leaving plain-spoken traditional left-liberals like Nussbaum and left-conservatives like Eagleton in the dust, if not the dustbin of history.

Eagleton was correct, on the other hand, about the crypto-liberal politics of postmodernism, even its crypto-conservatism, its greater affinity, let’s say, for Johnson and Burke than for Paine and Wollstonecraft in the severely diminished picture it offers of human agency as against the structures that enmesh us. In the video, the two white men pragmatically charge Spivak with being the conservative on the panel, and, pragmatically, they’re correct. A total and disabling humility about one’s every word freezes the political status quo in place as it freezes Spivak’s prose. Her politics, therefore, have proven to be those of the American empire aggrandizing its own power in the very act of claiming to disavow it.

I’ve pointed this logic out before with reference to land acknowledgments: since the land acknowledgement does nothing to restore the sovereignty of those it names the legitimate holders of the land, it effectively discredits the popular sovereignty of the current occupants and empowers in their place the expert class of politically enlightened imperial administrators who manage the now doubly unceded territory. Replacing Old Glory with every latest iteration of the Pride flag works the same way. In the name of the mute subaltern, empire subdues the citizenry.⁵

It’s an old logic, an old story, and wouldn’t have surprised our national bard, Walt Whitman. He conceived of America not as a nation but as liberty’s multinational, even global empire.⁶ Why else did he propose a “passage” to Spivak’s own homeland almost 100 years before she made her passage to his?—and this in a poem that gave its name to a great liberal novel, itself incipiently queer and postcolonial in spite or because of its famous concluding deferral (“No, not yet”) of the East/West rendezvous.

Passage to India!
Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?            
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,                  
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,            
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.  

Enough of this; I am not a political scientist; I’ve never understood one word of theory; and if I am ethically skeptical of liberalism’s empire, I am also aware of how much the actually existing alternatives leave to be desired. My forebears didn’t flee the backwater of Europe, and in living memory, for nothing.

I want to say something now about literature instead. If Marxists miss the point when they claim that Spivak’s complicating and recomplicating of the text, intended to perform the humility that must be part of the postmodern intellectual’s suit after the discrediting of grand narratives, cuts her off from mass politics, I wonder myself if it’s not too literal a way to take the theory that the signifier and the signified—never mind the referent!—will never wholly coincide.

This awareness of inherent polysemy is built into literature, however. It is, in fact, definitive of the literary as against the propagandistic, especially in the Anglophone tradition.⁷ The English language is inherently self-divided between the Latinate and the Germanic and therefore impossible to purify, as they sometimes dream of purifying French. This has always been my own case against French Theory or High Theory or deconstruction or postmodernism or whatever we should call it. What can a mistrust of language or suspicion of grand narratives teach a tradition whose first major poet wrote a scabrous metafiction and whose central poet’s primary verbal obsession was the pun? Some French Theorists understood this. It’s why Deleuze proclaimed “the superiority of Anglo-American literature” and what Derrida meant when he said “America is deconstruction.” As a dry academic codification of insights already interior to our lively and always already pluralist canon, it has little to offer Anglo-American literature.

To cite an example already given by Eagleton, Orwell didn’t join the ranks of the literary immortals on the basis of his plain style—anybody with enough discipline can write in a plain style—but because he used that style to compose two unforgettable myths (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four) the meaning of which we are still debating. “Make Orwell fiction again,” the liberals cried when Trump was elected; the second the next election was called for Biden, we heard the exact same words from the conservatives. This is a triumph for the life-giving plurality of fiction itself; it exposes as just one more necessary and impossible desire Orwell’s ideal of prose like a window pane. Even the simplest utterance fails the test of transparency; two people standing at a window have two different views. No amount of choosing short words over long ones—Orwell’s stupidest piece of advice—could have prevented this political confusion because it’s built into the poetic nature of language and narrative.

As long as politics doesn’t have one directly under threat—and sometimes, alas, politics does—one learns to have an aesthetic appreciation even of this.

1. Insert here, as it were, a deconstructive-feminist critique of the sexuality that at once necessarily and condemnably mar(k)s the rhetoric issuing from my (male) subject position. Incidentally, I once performed an extended parody of Spivak’s style, in footnote three of my review of Mark Z. Danielewski’s experimental (and academia-spoofing) cult horror novel House of Leaves. The footnote is impossible to read not only because it mimics Spivak’s recondite style but also because I took the send-up of deconstruction one step further and put the whole thing “under erasure”—under erasure being the deconstructive device par excellence, canceling yet preserving the discourse, announcing our desires as at once necessary and impossible.

2. Because the debate’s main occasion is the nuclear threat, which Spivak alone doesn’t seem to take very seriously (again marking her least the then-leftist of the panel), the video seems like a parody that might play in the background of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation.

3. The students in the class didn’t know what to make of Spivak’s essay—probably my fault—and all ended up writing essays about (I exaggerate for effect) how Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence explains why The Dark Knight is the best Batman movie.

4. Curiously, Spivak’s formal mentor, the later disgraced Paul de Man, wrote in an astringently lucid style of gentlemanly nihilism bearing more resemblance to a Cioran or a Borges than to a Derrida. As with Cioran and even Borges, of course, de Man’s arch manner of skepticism had later to be reinterpreted as a misdirection from fascist politics. For whatever it’s worth, I’ve always taken de Man’s nihilism to be more an overcorrection away from totalitarian politics than a concealment of the same, that understandable “after Auschwitz” moral hypochondria typifying critical theory as a whole.

5. I discovered the video, I should say, on Twitter, where a right-wing anon posted it with some admiration of Spivak for steamrolling the Marxist and the liberal. She does have one moment in the video of pure proto-“wokeness” where she calls out the white men for their “privilege.” In fairness, however, Spivak has always denounced liberal guilt and viewed privilege as paradoxically disempowering to the privileged—“learning privilege as loss,” she calls it—even to the white man, since it curtails what he may knowledgeably speak about. As what I have elsewhere labeled the “polemical, even belligerent omniscience” of my novel-in-progress indicates, I think she’s right, but that’s because I also understand her to be right when she says or at least implies that every discourse, no matter how omniscient, is also inherently incomplete, crying out for reply. I think there are rights of reply, but also rights of omniscience: a sketch, perhaps, of the postmodern case for free-speech maximalism.

6. Spivak’s first media appearance, incidentally, was on a 1963 cover of Newsweek magazine, where she was pictured among other “foreign students” studying in the U.S. as part of a program of “diplomas and diplomacy.” The cover’s date is too late for it to have included Barack Obama, Sr., but the point stands: postmodern politics are the postwar politics of the CIA and the Ford Foundation far more than they are an adaptation of orthodox Marxism, except insofar as inciting always somewhat fictional claims to national self-determination as an empire-building strategy was also occasionally part of Marxism’s program. Spivak’s later disavowed concept of “strategic essentialism” may apply.

7. The paranoid left and paranoid right alike, hungry for a propaganda of their own, will take this as another example of theory’s crypto Cold War liberalism, the correlate in philosophical prose of Jackson Pollock’s CIA-supported spatters.