The following is a read of the literature section of Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak's "A Critique of Postcolonial Reason."
*
As any person who has ever had the chance pleasure of gibbering into the umbra that falls during the ceaseless fury of endless night might know, being is squishy. Cosmic horror is always mired in embodiment and embodied by the mire. So, with pleasure I must say,If we want to start to something, we must ignore that our starting point is, all efforts taken, shaky. If we want to get something done, we must ignore that,all provisions made, the end will be inconclusive. This ignoring is not an active forgetfulness; it is, rather, an active marginalizing of the marshiness, the swampiness, the lack of firm grounding in the margins, at beginning and end. Those of us who “know” this also know that it is in these margins that philosophy philosophizes. These necessarily and actively marginalized margins haunt what we start and get done, as curious guardians. (175)
So, recognizing our frailties, may we walk without fear or trepidation amongst the ruins today, noting all the while the life that erupts from this swamp. Furthermore, I’d like to hope to invoke a similar performativity of declaration unto the suggestions of Spivak’s own framing of her critiques, such that this initial suggestion be taken as the spell-ing of text as a whole, such that these mossy intonings are cast upon as the den of today’s seminar so as to make the forthcoming sequence a comfy concatenation of occult-urated crimes, as opposed to a stony stockade of stupidity.
Of central importance to Spivak’s discussion is the construction of that which we will later find to be ruinous, noting a tendency “to monumentalize something we call ‘margins,’ where the distinction between North and South is domesticated” (Spivak 170). In this moment, we can note the symmetry of our taming of the inanimate world—stone carved—and the taming of the animate—flesh, also carved up, by the pound. The objectifying of these terms for the sake of debate does need necessarily lead to the reality of their constituents, but, instead, generates new inanimate bodies to accumulate sentiment and to be discussed without becoming a return to their means, a new catachrestic entity. This attempt to even begin a discussion is further hampered by the fact that “the metropolitan anti-imperialist cannot teach the native the proper name of his nation or continent,” for who can remark on “the mysteriousness of the space upon which we are born?” (188). Again we must face down the catachrestic fault in any process of naming, that the sign becomes an echo that we cannot secure to the referent itself so that it must instead go wild in the abstract.
But our linguistic sensibilities are already at fault for a sense of the abstract. Spivak notes that, “by phonocentric convention a sign means something other than itself whereas a person is self-proximate, even self-identical,” against “the laws of everyday phonocentrism—the privileging of voice-consciousness over any system of mere signs” (149). In this moment, I may be vainly dogpaddling to traverse the schism between term and meaning, rotating in a space that is wrought in highly relieved inscriptions that we may catch on or be caught by. Perhaps it may be the latter since, “whatever remove from phonocentrism we throw the dice, and however phonocentrism is critiqued, the ontic differential between the poet-operating-as-controlling-subject and the woman-manipulated-as-sign will not disappear” (149). This fault line in conversation is quite likely innate in the patronizing function of most poets, who seem more often than not to be closed off in their own language and choose instead to talk at as opposed to speaking with an individual. In the service of art, a certain sacrifice of the world may be made at an alter to a sunken world of knowledge, but do we descend as Ishtar, leaving beyond our shiny trinkets, or do we dredge ourselves up from the abyss festering with wounds from the assault of Tiamat?
Now, of course, we have been assuming that this underworld can and is willing to engage with us. This other world is none too alien, though, since, as I have suggested, it is a ruinous place upon which life has crept, so its removal is a matter of forgetting for a moment. In our descent, we must be willing to observe, that “for every territorial space that is value coded by colonialism and every command of metropolitan anticolonialism for the native to yield his “voice,” there is a space of withholding, marked by a secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked. The “native,” whatever that might mean, is not only a victim, but also an agent. The curious guardian at the margin who will not inform” (190). As we have already discussed, though Spivak puts forth again early in this chapter, the “Northwestern European male philosophers foreclosed the “native informant” in order to establish the Northwestern European subject as “the same,” whether from above or below” (113). But the literary world in its own formations does not deserve much more credit, for it to has sealed off the speech of others in refusing to imagine harder upon the wills of their cast of characters, choosing instead to offer the tongues of those who did the actual heavy lifting necessary to the construction of their narratives. Friday is offered no respite, no rest, no Sabbath for he must be sacrificed at every day, so as to allow the imperial psyche to consolidate itself for a regal presentation of a man of great will and mind dictating to a fool who cannot understand him, a pyrrhic victory at best since “it is a longstanding topos that barbarians by definition do not speak language” (187). Of particular interest in this moment of Spivak’s tropology is the singularity of language that she invokes, provoking the possibility that the barbarian trope is not merely unaware of the subject’s language, but that this raw other does not know any concept of the lingual dance. Of course, we find that our man Friday is more capable than he is given credit for, since “he learns his master’s speech,” and “does his master’s work,” but I would dare to go farther and say that we might excise the comma separating these two phrases and recognize that Friday learns that his master’s speech does his master’s work, a lesson one presumes evident when he commands a bear in English and brings it into motion (187). This might even suggest in part that Friday may be even more aware than we give him credit for since he might have some conception of the great chain of being.
There is still also a problem in the aforementioned concept of performativity, which one supposes as a linguistic function requires an audience unto its actors. From the outside invades a thought cutting off the natural projection of another people, a deterritorializtion of a fundamental sort such that “a full literary reinscription cannot easily flourish in the imperialist fracture or discontinuity, covered over by an alien legal system operating as Law as such, alien ideology established as only Truth, and a set of human science busy establishing the “native” as a self-consolidating other” (131). The universal purported in capitalization—Truth, Law—is but a pure stitching in the flesh of man to overcome the innate cosmic horror of his own internal abyss. Relegated to his own isolation, the play of his being is actualized in a tact more vengeful and childish than he can recognize. This situation would be merely pitiable if he was willing to allow this to be performed in the privacy of his own internality, but we have the misfortune of bearing as witness in blood and being. So in the pursuit of the hierarchy of his will, others are faced with a tellurian turn and made into his own ground, so much so that he debases his own language to make “the word, “native,” which is supposed to mean “autocthonous,”…paradoxically recoded as an unindividuated parahumanity that cannot aspire to a proper habitation” (161). The reterritorialization concomitant of that earlier grab is done unto the native informant, a character who by Spivak’s own terminology one imagines is brought to stand for the trial of these magisterial crimes…and is he not also this curious guardian?
It is my interest in these “curious guardians” which guides this essay. These titans, who are no doubt the native informant, who remain silent and watching, but waiting and wondering at us as well. We can observe their imperialized entelechia in Spivak’s dissection of Shelley, “Shelley’s emancipatory vision cannot extend beyond the speculator situation of the colonial enterprise, where the master alone has a history, master and subject locked up in the cracked mirror of the present, and the subject’s future, although indefinite, is vectored specifically toward and away from the master” (140). The agency robbed of the native informant has given the master two minds and so a living dialectic within, but this process perhaps instead turns him into his own object while the disposed instead must lie in wait, guarding the knowledge of this split without necessarily a split in their own consciousness, until they too must act. In motion, these guardians are all too aware of what Spivak has placed in a footnote, to be exhumed: “the (ab)-use of the Enlightenment in the interest of building a civil society brings the subaltern discursive formation into crisis, makes it deconstruct” (142). On one hand, we have a silent consciousness who has already been forced to undergo a process of xenogenesis and to incorporate the hoary dust of another; while our other hand must embrace the neurotic who is not able to comprehend his spor-atic potential, his fungal bloom that breeds only in the wild, but which also empties out his own vision.
A transcription error has occurred throughout the genetic cosmos; an im-materialized schism has become the substrate for nominal generation. In Spivak’s quotation of de Man, we might find the incantation when so inscribed animates our golems:
“The faithful translation, which is always literal, how can it also free? It can only be free if it reveals the instability of the original, and if it reveals that instability as the linguistic tension between trope and meaning. Pure language is perhaps more present in the translation than in the original, but in the mode of trope” (162).
Substituting trope for truth, we can appreciate the fallacy of the raw man, of the philosophical fault lines that subsume texts that make proclamations of Truth—capital T—not into science but science fiction. A common mistake upheld is to raise a banner of enlightenment for having slain the millenarian, all the while ignoring that this declaration stinks of evangelion, of victorious message as much as anything else has. The schism in the quality of the discourse we have been entertaining is a derivation of a failure to appreciate the troping of living beings, to appreciate how the ground gives, to fail to see that one is not walking but wading and that shortly thereafter one maybe sinking rather than swimming, preserved in either mode but one seems closer to the truth wished than another. The problem of course is that we have taken the tongue of the life guard, and so who is there to whistle?
