Week 3 Blog

Timothy Walker

I might appropriately title this post “Explaining Spivak (or her article) to Myself.” Perhaps, you’ll can relate: I found her theoretical approach wonderfully provocative, but incredibly dense (and, frankly, sometimes, beyond me!). So, I wanted to use this space to first attempt to explain Spivak (to myself), as well as to offer some further reflections on the implications such an approach may have for other marked literatures, namely queer fictions. I start by extracting and defining key terms in her article, then contextualizing her critical reading approach among some of the others we’ve read thus far, and end with my reflections and a few questions.

First things first, her terms. Spivak opens her article by telling us that she’ll be reading Kincaid’s Lucy by calling upon her powers of ‘rhetorical sensitivity’ in order to counter other insensitive readings that read Lucy as a story about a situation not a subject (351). The aims of rhetorical sensitivity, as it follows and according to Spivak, may be understood as that which seeks to ascertain the human aspects of the text, to understand the relationship fiction, by nature an untruth, has with lived subjective experience. Next, a central concept to Spivak’s argument is her use of the phrase ‘singularity of language.’ I don’t think she explicitly lays out what she means here (Maybe I overlooked this?), but the context implies that she means the specific formulation language takes in a text that makes it unique and distinct from other texts (perhaps what makes it such a productive site to look for and establish subjectivity). ‘Parataxis,’ then, functions as one of the specific features of Lucy’s singularity of language. Greek in origin, parataxis means “placing side by side,” and, linguistically, has come to denote “punctuating two or more sentences as if they were one” (354). Parataxis becomes the primary way Spivak demonstrates how Lucy’s singularity of language formulates in fragments appearing as sharp staccato on the page. She then uses the rhetorical insight to override ‘obvious’ post-colonial readings of the novel and illuminate more redemptive ways of reading Lucy, namely one that points to the possibility of unmarked subjectivity. Could we call Spivak’s way of reading a humanistic formalism?

Can we situate Spivak’s approach somewhere between Cohen’s “generic horizons” and Sedgwick’s “affective reading,” tempered, also, with a healthy dose of Jameson’s “symptomatic reading”? I bring up the “generic horizons” because Spivak, like Cohen’s reading of Lord Jim, wants to say something about Kincaid’s Lucy beyond the obvious reading that only considers the “race-class-gender predicament of the migrant situation” (“ Reading with Stuart Hall” 351). These critics do, however, differ in their approaches. Whereas Cohen, in her return to the archive, attempts to destabilize the pillars of the canon by recovering a hidden history of genre through distance reading in order to perform a re-contextualized close reading of Lord Jim, Spivak, conversely, attempts to formulate a distance-reading effect (that is, one with more ubiquitous, far-reaching implications) by performing a close reading (i.e. a rather intense rhetorical analysis of the singularity of language in Lucy). Sedgwick’s affective reading model also resonates in Spivak, who seems to be advocating for a sort of ‘humanistic formalism’ that, firstly, draws our attention to the singular language formulation in Lucy and, secondly, prompts us further to consider how a rhetorical analysis might render a fragmented subject position as a constituted, unmarked “I.” That is, these two seem to have similar aims in mind: putting the human back in humanities? Jameson, too, (and Althusser, for that matter, whom she directly references) is appropriate to mention in conjunction with Spivak, not only because her article is sprinkled with bits of Marx, but because the method she develops might characterize a form of symptomatic reading. She, herself a post-colonial theoretician, seems to question the methods of contemporary post-colonial readings. She suspects that formulaic (obvious) post-colonial critical impulses might require a re-posturing in order to effectively carry out the work of confronting past, present, and future damages of the empire. Her critical approach then, in a true Jamesonian fashion, attempts to expose the latent contradictions within post-colonial criticism itself.

I had promised at the beginning to offer some reflections and questions on how Spivak’s approach might resonate with queer fictions, but I think my reflections and questions might be the same things. Truthfully, I’m not sure if her approach can be so neatly applied to queer fictions; I only have an impression that it might. So here’s what I’m wondering: Does post-colonial reading, ironically, re-affirm and re-inscribe colonial markers of oppression and otherness as it attempts to abolish them, failing to render the colonized or diasporic subject as unmarked, but rather further mired by the residual domination of empire? In turn, do certain queer critical approaches only highlight queer ‘otherness,’ and therefore perpetuate violence against queer subjectivity? In terms of queer readings, is the point to abolish ‘otherness’? That is, the marked subject? What’s at stake by dissolving marked subjecthood, especially for queer folks? In what ways, do post-colonial and queer readings (in so much as they are related) function as a feedback loop? How might Spivak’s approach work to break the cycles of oppression and help foster a universal unmarked subjectivity? Is a simultaneous subject position that contains both marked and unmarked possible?