Subjects That Matter

Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory

Namita Goswami

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438475684
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In this ambitious book, Namita Goswami draws on continental philosophy, postcolonial criticism, critical race theory, and African American and postcolonial feminisms to offer postcoloniality as a model for philosophical practice. Moving among and between texts, traditions, and frameworks, including the work of Gayatri Spivak, Theodor Adorno, Barbara Christian, Paul Gilroy, Neil Lazarus, and Hortense Spillers, among others, she charts a journey that takes us beyond Eurocentrism by understanding postcoloniality as the pursuit of heterogeneity, that is, of a non-antagonistic understanding of difference. Recognizing that philosophy, feminism, and postcolonial theory share a common concern with the concept of heterogeneity, Goswami shows how postcoloniality empowers us to engage more productively the relationships between these disciplines. Subjects That Matter confronts the ways Eurocentrism, an identity politics that considers difference as inherently oppositional, relegates minority traditions to a diagnostic and/or corrective standpoint to prevent their general implications from playing a critical and transformative role in how we understand subjectivity and agency. Through unexpected, often surprising, and thought-provoking analytic connections and continuities, this book's interdisciplinary approach reveals a postcolonial pluralism that expands philosophical resources, confounds and limits our habitual disciplinary lexicons, and opens up new areas of inquiry.

PART ONE

HETEROGENEITY

Chapter One

Objects Behaving Like Subjects

Because We’re Way Past the Post

Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

[H]ow does our sense of the West distort our sense of ourselves and of our traditions?

—Emmanuel C. Eze, “Toward a Critical Theory
of Postcolonial African Identities”

I’m the last Jewish intellectual. … The only true follower of Adorno. Let me put it this way: I’m a Jewish-Palestinian.

—Edward Said, Power, Politics, Culture

[D]o not accuse, do not excuse, make it ‘your own,’ turn it around and use.

—Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

I. Past-ing the Post

As Edward Said attests, postcolonial scholars find Adorno to be a kindred spirit because of his criticisms of modernity. They use his work to further questions of identity and contemporary global reality while also challenging Adorno’s Eurocentrism, which sustains a violent and hegemonic western culture. This chapter builds on these versatile conversations with Adorno by reorienting postcolonial theory from cultural criticism to the philosophical charge of its enterprise. It tries to get past the reversal implied by the “post” by unsettling the conventional and/or traditional dialectic of western philosophy and postcolonial criticism, which allots to the latter a derivative and marginal rank. The chapter reads postcolonial works that enlist Adorno to confront a post-independence era marked by continued depredation via globalization and the international division of labor.1 I suggest that this compelling and bridge-building recruitment of Adorno nevertheless dispels postcoloniality to a diagnostic and/or corrective standpoint in relation to the former’s apparently self-evident claim to the constructive frame. Affixing postcolonial criticism to a diagnostic and/or corrective standpoint maintains postcoloniality’s adherence to belatedness and marginality, and cements a critical stance that runs the risk of leaving one of Eurocentrism’s fundamental premises untouched: difference as inherently oppositional and antagonistic. Postcoloniality gauges how identitarian conceptual cultures ward off heterogeneity to secure jurisdiction by virtue of category alone. As the striving for a non-antagonistic understanding of difference, it confounds and limits our habitual disciplinary lexicons, and, hence, is an intrinsic part of philosophical understanding.

II. Adorno and Postcolonial Theory

In Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Spivak, and Said (1995), Asha Varadharajan carries out a postcolonial analysis of Adorno’s conceptual contributions. She makes a comparison between Adorno, Spivak, and Said possible by characterizing the formidable scope of their work as differing cultural approaches to subjectivity. For example, she uses Adorno’s criticism of progressive dialectical synthesis to resist fixed definitions that automatically serve colonial interests (xxii). Simultaneously, she protests that the postcolonial theorist is coy about her attempts to avoid a political encounter with the subaltern, even as this political encounter is inevitable (xxv). The postcolonial theorist is subject to a Manichean (not aporetic) fate: she struggles between her alleged political fidelity to her “origins” and her felicitous adroitness with major metropolitan theory (xvii). In Varadharajan’s challenge to metropolitan interests, which continue colonial interests in a postcolonial guise, the polarity she creates between fidelity and adroitness is a rendition of the colonial/postcolonial divide: instead of the native in the colony, the site of this battle is the metropolitan feminist in the Euro-US academy. And, the inaugural paradigm, in her estimation, of this newly minted academic’s coyness about avoiding a political encounter with the subaltern, is the work of Gayatri Spivak.

Varadharajan suggests that Spivak neglects the privileges that allow the metropolitan feminist “to roam the corridors of power at will, all the while proclaiming her marginality” (85). She asks whether Spivak’s emphasis on women “[without] access to the culture of imperialism as objects of knowledge … impl[ies] that resistance can only come from those lucky enough to be ‘shuttles’ than victims” (85). (The distinction she makes between shuttles and victims is unclear because the shuttling in Spivak’s account produces the victimization.) Be that as it may, she warns that Spivak’s focus on the subaltern assumes that victimization necessarily leads to awareness and action (xxvii). She criticizes Spivak, moreover, for not recognizing that sheer survival requires the subaltern to evaluate social, political, and cultural epistemés and their concomitant truth-claims (86). To sum up: subalterns resist; victimization does not automatically prompt rebellion; and, survival itself drives victims to be perspicacious. With these somewhat impuissant pronouncements that rely on positivistic notions of representation, Varadharajan alleges that Spivak’s distinction between shuttle and subaltern turns the latter into the insubstantial object of theory. She may be objecting to the presumption that the subaltern is of such epistemological interest that she can be made to shuttle between subject- and object-status, but she registers Spivak’s effort to track how subject- and object-status enact silence as the subaltern’s further curtailment. This stunting of subaltern insubordination—that is, a politically motivated disregard for actual subaltern defiance—allows for self-indulgent musings on theory’s inevitable groundlessness (xxiv). On the basis of this other category of subaltern victimhood, which has not materialized owing to Spivak’s concept of subalternity, Varadharajan brands the migrant Euro-US feminist academic as the native subaltern’s metropolitan nemesis.

Against Spivak’s recalcitrance in light of this other subaltern’s dissent, Varadharajan puts forward what can be described as a determinate-philosophical approach versus a theoretical-postcolonial approach (each attributed to Adorno and Spivak, respectively). Observing that the postcolonial theorist in her depiction is caught between fidelity and adroitness, she begins with the object’s political desire: if theory is inevitably groundless, why did the object suffer (20)? To answer this question, she applies Adorno’s philosophy to Spivak’s politics to betoken Adorno’s conceptual contributions as far more politically valid than what she surmises as postcolonial theory’s claim to universality. Thanks to her valorization of substantive rather than theoretical discourses of subjectivity (27), Varadharajan ratifies a conventional and/or traditional dialectic: philosophy is universal, postcoloniality is particular; philosophy’s universality yields substantive politics, postcoloniality’s particularity yields theoretical inconclusiveness. By virtue of these predications of universal (substantive politics) and particular (theoretical inconclusiveness), which oust postcolonial theory from the realm of knowledge production and ideology critique, Varadharajan applies Adorno’s “(merely) philosophical discourse” (82) to the specific case of a masculine Eurocentric Self and its feminine Ethnic Other: the feminist academic secures metropolitan interests (in cahoots with/via mimicry of a masculine Eurocentric Self), but the feminine Ethnic Other’s ontological negativity questions the dualistic process of definition (83).2

At this point in Varadharajan’s narrative, the feminine Ethnic Other (interchangeable with the native subaltern) holds the metropolitan feminist accountable for her suffering through an actual political encounter between them. (She does not explain how this political encounter takes place.) Irrespective of this profession of her political desire, however, the feminine Ethnic Other still seems to shuttle between a constitutive silence (radically other) and a derivative sameness (negatively other). Varadharajan rebukes Spivak for ignoring subaltern resistance to buttress her position in the Euro-US academy (89) without considering how her own differentiation between radical otherness and negative otherness mirrors Spivak’s differentiation between alterity and identity, respectively. Varadharajan can only dispute the ethereality that ensues from the metropolitan feminist’s avoidance of a political encounter with the feminine Ethnic Other by an overt politicization of subaltern subjectivity. The feminine Ethnic Other’s doubtlessly transparent and readily accessible political interests counteract the metropolitan feminist’s disavowal of culpability when the latter reduces subalternity to a theoretical problem par excellence. To resuscitate this abstract subaltern via an infusion of determinate politics, therefore, she cannot grant any substantive basis to Spivak’s concept of subalternity, when political interests (colonial or metropolitan) generate the subaltern’s ethereality in the first place. Varadharajan applies the determinate-philosophical to the theoretical-postcolonial for the feminine Ethnic Other’s political desire to gain priority over metropolitan interests precisely because Spivak’s reputedly self-interested discourse eclipses subaltern protest.

Having established a distinction between the substantive subaltern (universal determinate-philosophical) and the abstract subaltern (particular theoretical-postcolonial), Varadharajan reinstates a gendered subaltern whose body is the site of political remonstration against historical processes. Since this seemingly fit to purpose subaltern signifies radical otherness and negative otherness, she embodies the immaculate (radical) and the immanent (negative); the radical has the quality of pristine other-worldliness, the immanent the quality of destitute this-worldliness. This tension is resolved by recourse to the heterogeneity of both materiality and subalternity, which allows for surprise (99, 101) and epistemological dissent (108). In this manner, Varadharajan’s subaltern becomes the locus of an immaculate, radical, pristine materiality and an immanent, negative, destitute materiality. Contra progressive dialectical synthesis (Spivak sublates the subaltern’s political force by rendering her theory’s insubstantial object), negative dialectics produce refusal: of the determinate and the theoretical, the substantive and the abstract, the negative and the radical, the immanent and the immaculate, and the political and the inconclusive.

Varadharajan contends that Spivak ignores counterhegemonic ideological production when she holds the political encounter with the subaltern in perpetual abeyance. In fact, she goes even further and suggests that Spivak infantilizes the subaltern, as she makes the experience of oppression itself a “matter of gullibility” (95). When Spivak extols the vertiginous potential for cultural explanations released by theory’s inevitable groundlessness (93), she annexes subaltern activism to an ineluctably metropolitan point of reference. The feminist academic’s identity-based pursuits, which include a theoretical understanding of constitutive privilege, supersede the problem of subaltern subjectivity (95). She censures Spivak’s susceptibility to a “jargon of authenticity” (97), a particularly low blow because Adorno used this neologism to criticize Heidegger’s genocidal romanticization of German identity, despite Varadharajan’s own admission that political action inexorably has ambiguous outcomes (96).3 Spivak is reproached for procuring her third world bona fides by dissipating the “particularity of the subaltern woman in the seeming inexhaustibility of the category” (98–99)4 to the effect that theoretical-postcolonial practice unlike determinate-philosophical politics becomes an exotic parody of liberal humanism.

In her critique, Varadharajan rightly regards Adorno as a valuable resource for postcolonial criticism because negative dialectics, as a utopic mode of substantive cognition, aims for particularity without recourse to the dogmatic or arbitrary—that is, particularity underived from the façade erected by identity and difference. What remains unclear is why she charges postcolonial theory with lack of substantive content given that concrete engagement with material realities (including those that mediate its own existence) is one of postcolonial theory’s hallmarks. Discounting postcolonial theory’s characteristic rejection of discursive detachment to assert Adorno’s exemplarity undermines the critical force of Adorno’s conceptual contributions against a long standing European philosophical tradition. It also projects this long standing European philosophical tradition’s worst impulses—abstraction, political irrelevancy, tribalism, culturalism, occlusion of material conditions, etc.—onto postcolonial theory. Even so, Varadharajan’s use of Adorno to check postcolonial theory’s theoretical proclivities presumes a coherent and identifiable subaltern. This positivistic move permits her to sidestep the representational issues that institute subalternity. To accuse Spivak of delivering the feminine Ethnic Other to the very metropolitan interests that orchestrate her insubstantiality, she must conflate irretrievability with inexhaustibility. She must also distill negative dialectics into a postcolonial—that is, not metropolitan—feminist practice that plucks the subaltern out of obscurity so that she may prevail over her subject- and object-status by (finally) professing her political desire.

Her poignant essay, “ ‘On the Morality of Thinking,’ or Why Still Adorno” (2007), similarly applies Adorno’s conceptual contributions to postcolonial criticism but, here, postcoloniality results in (pejoratively understood) politics and not philosophy. To counter Adorno’s relative absence in postcolonial theory in comparison to other philosophers, Varadharajan fuses postcolonial practice with thinking or the philosophical. She takes at face value metropolitan efforts that either subject Adorno to a hermeneutics of suspicion due to his Eurocentrism or apply Adorno’s criticisms of modernity to the political problem at hand, which, in turn, is abbreviated to an almost singular preoccupation with the politically exhausted but unsuitably represented issue of difference and minority...