| "Reducing Spivak: Marxism, Deconstruction and the Post-Theoretical Mystique" critically examines a number of significant texts by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The dissertation elaborates a rigorous analysis and critique of Spivak's writings, while self-reflexively pointing up and clarifying its own theoretical grounding in the (polemical and oppositional) tradition of classical or revolutionary Marxism, i.e., most importantly the writings of Marx and Engels, but also and with special emphasis on the writings of Lenin.; The Preface ("Who 'Influences' Production?") makes clear Spivak's elite, "star" intellectual status in what may broadly be seen as the "aftermath" of classical or "high" postmodernism (roughly from the 1960s through the 1980s, predominated by the then original/translated writings of thinkers such as Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Barthes, and Kristeva) and its relatively recent reformation in the discourses of postcolonial cultural studies and so-called "post-Marxism," both trends of the 1990s of which Spivak is a leading authority. Chapter One ("Theory as Reduction: An 'Other' Introduction to Spivak (ianism) ") directly engages and counters the now common hostility to what is called "reductionism" in postmodern cultural theory, identifying Spivak (who follows Derrida) as a long-time proponent of the "irreducible," i.e., an ostensibly "subtle" mode of intelligibility, but one which is, on close inspection, itself a "reductive" reaction against critical theory in general and classical Marxist theory in particular. Chapter Two ("Chewing Rags in Her Sleep") examines Spivak's widely acknowledged postcolonial/post-Marxist contribution to "subaltern" studies, demonstrating the immense confusion underlying her (mis)conceptions of classical Marxist theory. Chapter Three ("The Titillation of the Signifier") exposes Spivak's distortion and confusion of the classical Marxist theories of the "social" and "use-value." Chapter Four ("In the Final Reduction: Spivak the Little") considers in detail the intellectual and ideological consequences of Spivak's "celebrity" status--especially in this instance as an ostensibly reliable commentator on Derrida--in terms of the production and dissemination of "knowledge" after postmodernism.; The dissertation takes Spivak as a symptomatic "example" of the "influential" intellectual in the postmodern era, employing and articulating as its primary ("reductive") frame of reference the theoretical archive of revolutionary Marxism, most notably the all too "simple" axiom that "the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas." In sum and overall, the work is itself an example of a theoretical project taking ideology seriously, rigorously calling into question the late postmodern ideology of "Spivak(ianism)" and its historical relationship with(in) late capitalist society and the culture industry. |
