-
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (review)
- The Comparatist
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 26, May 2002
- pp. 143-147
- 10.1353/com.2002.0006
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
THE COMPAKATIST GAYATMCHAKRAVOKTYSVl\AK,ACritiqueofPostcolonialReason: Towarda History ofthe Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. xiii + 449 pp. Spivak has much to tell us. Mostly, though, her book is a rigorous demonstration ofits own impossibility. The textdivides roughly into thirds—one third declarative statement, one third adversative hedging, one third deconstructive palinode—resulting in a lurching experience for the reader. If"A Critique," as the book announces itself in its title, expounds the conditions of enablement, Spivak's performance amounts to a critique ofher book's own enabling conditions. The record ofthese predicaments in this book reconfirms that Spivak is one ofthe most acute critical minds and most genuinely committed intellectuals in today's academy. She also emerges as an egregious symptom ofthe academy's inability to extricate subject agency in reflection from its own centripetal down-spiral. Having plunged into graphic reticence, Spivak can be understood less in terms of Bartleby's preference "not to" than by referring to Melville's other counterfactual narrative Benito Cereño, which is often better taught "backward" from Cereno 's affidavit at the end. Likewise, Spivak's "Appendix: The Setting to Work of Deconstruction" (423-431) might have worked better as prelude or prolepsis than as coda. Among the book's most useful (and most legible) pages, the "Appendix" serves Spivak as "the necessary experience ofthe impossible" at "the origin" (428). As it is, "the impossible" overwhelms "the origin," relegating it, Oedipally or tactically some will claim, to an "afterthought." Metalepsis, or the reversal that substitutes effect for cause and puts cause after effect, seems to be Spivak's recurrent predicament. It also emerges as her preferred strategy, and does carry some explicatory power, perhaps more than the author suspects . For ifSpivak in this respect echoes Mary Queen ofScots, who metaleptically claimed that "In my end is my beginning," neither Mary's fate in the Tower nor Spivak's in this book was much altered by such insight. Hence, the self-betrayal of the book's title. More thanA Critique, Spivak's is a symptom ofPostcolonial Reason , ifindeed such reason exists. In this "ex-orbitant" sense, as she is wont to slice the hyperbole, Spivak's endeavor is most faithful to its deconstructive gesture: it sets itselfofffrom all that it is not. Or so it would. Whatever is left in the process traces the manners ofa differential/deferential gesture and the riffof its symptoms. Not unlike that ubiquitous prosopopeia Spivak dubs "the Native Informant," a figura she never tires ofcalling "foreclosed," Spivak's persona obsessively forges her own foreclosure, now through deconstructive preferment, more often as enactment ofaporia's exemplarity, consciously and otherwise. Her initial aim, she says, was to track the figure ofthe Native Informant through various practices: philosophy, literature, history, culture. Soon I found that the tracking showed up a colonial subject detaching itself from the Native Informant. After 1989, 1 began to sense that a certain postcolonial subject had, in turn, been recoding the colonial subject and appropriating the Native Informant 's position. Today, with globalization in full swing, telecommunicative informatics taps the Native Informant directly in the name of indigenous knowledge and advances biopiracy. (Preface, ix) This incipit betrays Spivak's enterprise in strategic self-inscription: She arrogates to herself the exemplarity of a critical discourse that wound through the last two decades ofthe twentieth century. Some could see this pivotal self-positioning as Vol. 26 (2002): 143 REVIEW ESSAYS another form of"strategic essentialism," that expedient locus that Spivak leveraged for subaltem speech on her way to this book. Here, all too often, this echoic selfpositioning answers not to the most echoed, often mindlessly echoed, question Spivak set afloat, "Can the subaltem speak?" It responds, instead, to the would-be hypothesis "ifonly the Native Informant could speak . . ." As a result, Spivak's text is piled atop pylons at the foot ofthe page that would speak as subtext ofa would-be text, now stereophonically, now adversatively. Here is the author's explanation: "[M]y book charts a practitioner's progress from colonial discourse studies to transnational cultural studies. The latter position, a 'moving base' that I stand on as the text seeks to catch the vanishing present, has asserted itself...