Terry Eagleton's talk of Spivak/ 大唐与后殖民主义

大唐那会儿，怎么没有扶桑、新罗或安南的文人写一篇类似的文章来解气呢？

在中华帝国文武鼎盛的时候，“白环西献，楛矢东来，夜郎滇池，解辫请职，朝鲜昌海，蹶角受化”，有许多扶桑、新罗、安南人留学长安。就如同当今来自天竺的 Spivak 是先留学再执教美利坚一样，历史上的他们虽然与大汉不同文不同种，却都想在长安讨口饭吃。虽然是“长安居，大不易”，那些来自扶桑、新罗、安南的留学生到底是舍不得长安的，况且日子久了，也有成“腕儿”的可能。

Eagleton 这篇文章，快人快语，对美利坚这座“长安”城和里面的外来腕儿们并不另眼相看。不过 Eagleton 有这样做的本钱：他是“大”英帝国的人，与大美利坚同文同种，却又偏隔着海。

Terry Eagleton/ In the Gaudy Supermarket

A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak · Harvard, 448 pp, £30.95

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It might just be, of course, that the point of a wretched sentence like 'the in-choate in-fans ab-original para-subject cannot be theorised as functionally completely frozen in a world where teleology is schematised into geo-graphy' is to subvert the bogus transparency of Western Reason. Or it might be that discussing public matters in this hermetically private idiom is more a symptom of that Reason than a solution to it. Like most questions of style, Spivak's obscurantism is not just a question of style. Its duff ear for tone and rhythm, its careless way with verbal texture, its theoretical soundbites ('Derrida has staged the homo-eroticity of European philosophy in the left-hand column of Glas'), spring quite as much from the commodified language of the US as they do from some devious attempt to undermine it. A sentence which begins 'At 26, graphing himself into the seat of Aufhebung, Marx sees the necessity for this critical enterprise' combines the vocabulary of Hegel with the syntax of Hello! Spivak's language, lurching as it does from the high-toned to the streetwise, belongs to a culture where there is less and less middle ground between the portentous and the homespun, the rhetorical and the racy. One whiff of irony or humour would prove fatal to its self-regarding solemnity. In the course of this book, Spivak writes with great theoretical brilliance on Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys and Mahasweta Devi; but she pays almost no attention to their language, form or style. Like the old-fashioned literary scholarship it despises, the most avant-garde literary theory turns out to be a form of good old-fashioned content analysis.

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What some might call dialectical thinking is for others a pathological inability to stick to the point. The line between post-colonial hybridity and Post-Modern anything-goes-ism is embarrassingly thin. As feminist, deconstructionist, post-Marxist and post-colonialist together, Spivak seems reluctant to be left out of any theoretical game in town. Multiplying one's options is an admirable theoretical posture, as well as a familiar bit of US market philosophy. For Spivak to impose a coherent narrative on her materials, even if her title spuriously suggests one, would be the sin of teleology, which banishes certain topics just as imperialism sidelines certain peoples. But if cultural theorists these days can bound briskly from allegory to the Internet, in a kind of intellectual version of Attention Deficit Disorder, it is partly because they are free from the inevitably constricting claims of a major political project. Lateral thinking is thus not altogether easy to distinguish from loss of political purpose.

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If she rightly distinguishes between ethnic minority and colonised nation, she fails to drive home the point that a good deal of post-colonialism has been a kind of 'exported' version of the US's own grievous ethnic problems, and thus yet another instance of God's Own Country, one of the most insular on earth, defining the rest of the world in terms of itself. For this exportation to get under way, certain imports known as Third World intellectuals are necessary to act as its agents; yet though Spivak has reason to know this better than most, she never pauses long enough in this book to unpack its implications. To do so would require some systematic critique; but systematic critique is for her more part of the problem than the solution, as it is for all those privileged enough not to stand in need of rigorous knowledge. These individuals used to be known as the gentry, and are nowadays known as post-structuralists. If she can be splendidly scathing about 'white boys talking post-coloniality', or the alliance between cultural studies, liberal multiculturalism and transnational capitalism, these wholesome morsels surface only to vanish again into the thick stew of her text.

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There are some kinds of criticism - Orwell's would do as an example - which are a good deal more politically radical than their bluffly commonsensical style would suggest. For all his dyspepsia about shockheaded Marxists, not to speak of his apparent willingness to shop Communists to the state, Orwell's politics are much more far-reaching than his conventionally-minded prose would suggest. With much post-colonial writing, the situation is just the reverse. Its flamboyant theoretical avant-gardism conceals a rather modest political agenda. Where it ventures political proposals at all, which is rare enough, they hardly have the revolutionary élan of its scandalous speculations on desire or the death of Man or the end of History. This is a feature shared by Derrida, Foucault and others like them, who veer between a cult of theoretical 'madness' or 'monstrosity' and a more restrained, reformist sort of politics, retreating from the one front to the other depending on the direction of the critical fire.

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Deconstruction can indeed be a politically destabilising manoeuvre, but devotees like Gayatri Spivak ought to acknowledge its displacing effect, too. Like much cultural theory, it can allow one to speak darkly of subversion while leaving one's actual politics only slightly to the left of Edward Kennedy's. For some post-colonial theorists, for example, the concept of emancipation is embarrassingly old-hat. For some American feminists, socialism is as alien a territory as Alpha Centauri.

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Marxism, for Spivak if not for its founder, is a speculation rather than a programme, and can only have violent consequences if used for 'predictive social engineering'. Like the thought of strangling your flat-mate, in other words, it is all very well as long as you don't act on it. The current system of power can be ceaselessly 'interrupted', deferred or 'pushed away', but to try to get beyond it altogether is the most credulous form of utopianism.

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