From: "S.C. Morton"  <zbc14-AT-cc.keele.ac.uk>
Subject: double/speak - catachreses
Date: Tue, 28 May 1996 12:08:35 +0100 (BST)


In response to Nadeem Omar's illuminating posting on 8th may (sorry for the 
delay), I want to further clarify Spivak's account of epistemology/ontology:

1. For Spivak, knowledge claims cannot be based solely on identity out of
political necessity as well as 'theoretical impossibility'.  If only women can
theorise feminism, only the proletariat can theorise revolution, etc then
the reverse can also be true. Spivak wants to elaborate a theoretical
position which does not fall prey uncritically to (what Edward Said
somewhere terms) 'possessive exclusivism'.  Put another way, knowledge
claims based on identity fall prey to the very oppositional logic they seek
to discredit. Spivak is, of course aware that this can lead to an erasure of
what you call 'other epistemologies' - that the white western male will
simply continue to reduce the other to the same.  But her insistence that
one stage one's positionality (an anti-essentialist version of identity?) at
the forefront of critical inquiry might be a way of marking the
discontinuities between epistemologies, even though Spivak would probably
reject the positivist fiction of epistemology per se.  For the editors of
'The Spivak reader' (New York and London, Routledge, 1996), it is precisely
by staging the ontological/epistemological discrepancy, by unlearning our
privilege as loss, that such 'other knowledge' can be gestured
towards:

Our privileges, whatever they may be in terns of race, class or gender, and
the like, may have prevented us from gaining a certain kind of Other
knowledge:  not simply infomation that we have not yet received, but the
knowledge that we are not equipped to understand by reason of our social
position.  To unlearn our privileges means, on the one hand, to do our
homework, to work hard at gaining some knowledge of the others who occupy
those spaces most closed to our privileged view.  On the other hand, it
means attempting to speak to those others in such a way that they might take
us seriously and, most important of all, be able to answer us back  (pp4-5).

2. Your distinction between epistemology as discursive structures of
knowledge and epistemology per se is very interesting.  In 'CSS' her quarrel
with MF/GD hinges around their residual western humanism - that the
oppressed can speak and know their own conditions - rather than their
equation of power/knowledge.  Indeed, one could perhaps say that Spivak is
being more Foucauldian than Foucault in her discussion of the double session
of re-presentation/represenation.  While she does risk 'textualising the
subaltern out of existence', however, her discussion of the postcolonial
nation state, citizenship, etc. in 'More on Power/Knowledge' and that last
essay in 'Outside in the Teaching Machine' offers a starting point for 
theorising the discontinuities between western theory and the specific 
postcolonial nation state - to those 'other epistemologies'
which are erased as palimpsest under the intellectual imperialism of western
theory.

"It is well known that the term 'Pakistan', an acronym, was originally
thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals...it was a word
born in exile which then went East, was borne across or trans-lated, and
imposed itself on history; a returning migrant, settling down on a
partitioned land, forming a palimpsest on the past.  A palimpsest obscures
what lies beneath (Salman Rushdie, 'Shame', p87)

Stephen Morton
(University of Leeds, UK)

PS Nadeem, I believe that you are reading critical theory at Nottingham. 
Are you doing the MA or the PhD?  I just completed the MA last year.  How's
it going?  If you want to continue discussion outside the group, my e-mail
address is:
zbc14-AT-cc.keele.ac.uk
just completed    
 


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