Outside in the Teaching Machine

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Spivak, one of the most influential scholars in critical theory today, addresses the issues of multi-culturalism, international feminism, and post-colonial criticism, in an exciting new collection of her recent work.

Genres: Philosophy, Academic, Nonfiction, Theory, Education, Feminism, Sociology

350 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University. She is known for her English translation of Jacques Derrida's seminal work Of Grammatology, and her own philosophical writings on the postcolonial condition that introduced the term "subaltern" into the philosophical lexicon.

Reviews

[Jared Colley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always struggled with Spivak's work. Her post-deconstructionist tendencies towards skepticism and obscurantism both frustrate and challenge me as a thinker. Writers like Spivak - by the very method of their presentation -seem to repeatedly face certain inevitable contradictions and obstacles that doom their very criticisms to inefficacy. Terry Eagleton articulates this well when he writes:

"Post-colonial theory makes heavy weather of a respect for the Other, but its most immediate Other, the reader, is apparently dispensed from this sensitivity. Radical academics, one might have naively imagined, have a certain political responsibility to ensure that their ideas win an audience outside senior common rooms. In US academia, however, such popularising or 'plumpes Denken' is unlikely to win you much in the way of posh chairs and prestigious awards, so that left-wingers like Spivak, for all their stock-in-trade scorn for academia, can churn out writing far more inaccessible to the public than the literary élitists who so heartily despise them."

Sorry for the lengthy quote, but Eagleton has a gift for clear, to-the-point expression. It is ironic that thinkers like Spivak attempt to critique the history of Western 'arrogance' and elitism by way of more lofty, academic language that significantly narrows its audience to a marginal group of academics.

I haven't reviewed the book - once again, sorry - But I say all this to express my frustration for Spivak's 'more original' work. However, as an academic, I have found Spivak's more exegetical work (her 'readings' of other texts) profoundly helpful and beneficial. Her essay "More on Power/Knowledge" helped me understand the perplexities of Foucault's thought more than any other secondary text on the French thinker. I recommend this book with enthusiasm just for that essay. She explains the workings of power in relation to the subject in a way more accurate (I think) than most English texts on the topic. This is because she takes serious Foucault's claim to be a 'Nominalist' and because she reads Foucault in the context of the European continental tradition of philosophy. Specifically, she cleverly reads his notion of power/knowledge against the work of Heidegger and Derrida.

I would say that this text assisted my understanding of Foucault in a way similar to how her famous 'preface' to Of Grammatology has helped so many students understand the significance of Derrida as a 20th century thinker. Once again, this is ironic - her ability to simultaneously make other thinkers so comprehendible while making her own thought so obscure.

My recommendation of this essay does not warrant purchasing this over-priced academic book. But if one is reading Foucault -especially his work on power- I recommend finding this book in the library and reading "More on Power/Knowledge."

[Luis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could hardly spot a reason, but this is my favorite Spivak book. Maybe it is the style, often personal, far from academic writing. Maybe it is the themes, a good deal of post-colonial and post-structuralist criticism. Maybe it is just because the questions it brings about, but it has actually captured my mind since I first read it in 2008.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A spattering of ruminations from one of our foremost contemporary intellectuals: nevertheless, there are throughlines that run throughout the text. We begin with an interview where Spivak clarifies her use of the phrase strategic essentialism, and we will follow this thread throughout the myriad of topics covered in the various chapters, in a set of (somewhat oppositional) twin figures: catachresis and paleonymy. In a sort of gesture towards endorsing a certain form of "nominalism," we cannot follow the term "woman" back to some sort of literal referent: in a clarificatory reading of Derrida on Nietzsche (in Spurs), Nietzsche's virulent misogyny becomes rehabilitated as his understanding of sexual difference as "prepropriative"—Spivak hesitates before this recuperation (as do I), even if she understands it (she laters reads Irigaray's ciphering of Levinas as a similar move: attempting to undercut his heterosexism by refiguring the gendered nature of his active/passive dichotomy, to find fecundity in the caress). But what comes out of this discussion is that woman, (qua metonymy,) becomes the condition of possibility of the signifier-signified relation as such—literal women, of course, are elsewhere (but unexcavatable). Catachresis becomes the strategy of the concept-metaphor in this world of the "broken middle" (to appropriate Rose: this "split" is also mobilized in Spivak's reading of the other Rose, as that between the theoretical and the ethical/political). Paleonymy, then, (taken from Derrida,) becomes the necessary sedimentation of history that follows the name via its etymology, which nevertheless can be mobilized in its figuration (its catachresis). We also see this in her reading of Derrida's reading of Marx: use-value is similarly elusive, only constructed retroactively once exchange-value bursts onto the scene. She charges Derrida with confusing money and capital, general and restricted economy. Spivak attempts a more charitable cipher of Foucault via the pouvoir/savoir dichotomy, power as "moving base of force [(]fields[)]." A couple more motifs: the disjunct between the diaspora and the "native" subaltern, oft-conflated in the academy, and the postcolonial situation as a reversal which is nevertheless simultaneously a maintenance. Also: a rejection of "magical realism" as the paradigm par excellence of the "Third World," paired with an insistence on the disjunct between Latin America and the rest of the global South: due to its geographic proximity to the imperial center, it has not even (been allowed to) participate/d in the (partial) decolonization process undertaken by Africa, Asia, etc. Readings: of Sen's Genesis, Frears/Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid; Devi's "Douloti the Bountiful;" Hassan's art installation on the works of Rushdie. On Rushdie: instead of that straightforward "death of the author" of Barthes, a displacement: in the overpowering of the narrative (of Rushdie's supposed victimhood), Ayatollah Khomeini becomes the "author," Rushdie reduced to the figure of the writer (in this staged battle between Islam and the anti-Iranian forces of colonization, aimed at the audience of the Islamic diaspora). Lost in this narrative: the majority of the deaths that actually resulted from the aftermath of the publication of The Satanic Verses: anti-Rushdie Muslim Indian protestors killed by State forces. But, Spivak asks, why did India ban The Satanic Verses in the first place? An attempt to quell the backlash in the face of the Shahbano case: a ruling supposedly in favor of Shahbano, awarding her an alimony which she rejects because it does not conform to the dictates of Shari'a. That elusive figure of the subaltern woman therefore underlies the proceedings (reminiscent of her move in "Can the Subaltern Speak?"). Taking a cue from Nancy: in readings of Hinduism, "polytheism" is a Western imposition, as is the monism/dualism dichotomy as a cipher of advaita/dvaita. Also: the masculinism of Kāli-as-model (a misfired attempt at male feminism). Translation: reading the postcolonial is itself a translation, redoubled in the literal translation of the work. This puts the lie to wa Thiong'o's Decolonising the Mind, as does this quote by Derrida: "I must speak in a language that is not my own because that will be more just." An attempted reparative reading of de Beauvoir (via Cixous): instead of a biologist reading of her passage on maternity, a rethinking of the body in relation to its alterity/outside.

[Yvonne]

I just picked this up last night. I was really intrigued by her foreword, she describes the first chapter in the book as showing "the shift in my work from a 'strategic use of essentialism' to considerations of institutional agency that accompanied the explosion." She professes to not have been aware of her own use of strategic essentialism.

This book promises to think through that shift from (anti-) essentialism to agency.

I'm looking forward to reading this.

[Jessica Bebenek · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only read chapter 9 (The Politics of Translation), but it was interesting and written in a surprisingly accessible tone for an academic book. More of a feminist interpretation than I had anticipated, but that seems to be the overall tone.