SubStance, Issue 109 (Volume 35, Number 1), 2006, pp (Article) DOI: /sub For additional information about this article

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1 D th f D pl n (r v Roland Arthur Greene SubStance, Issue 109 (Volume 35, Number 1), 2006, pp (Article) P bl h d b n v r t f n n Pr DOI: /sub For additional information about this article Access provided by Pondichery University (20 Jan :13 GMT)

2 154 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, Pp Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak s book belongs to a short but dense tradition of retrospectives, proposals, and jeremiads on the topic of Comparative Literature, a discipline always in search of itself. Delivered in 2000 in the Wellek Library lecture series at Irvine, Death of a Discipline is one of the obligatory books of this decade for comparatists. While I cannot imagine anyone endorsing it in large, many readers will find much to agree with in little, including brilliant observations and suggestions that are scattered throughout the book s one hundred pages. The utopian aspect of Spivak s critique of Comparative Literature does not diminish its urgency or its impact. The premise of Spivak s argument is that, as of 2000, most academic programs in Comparative Literature in the United States centered their attention on Europe and the extracurricular Orient (6), in an unprincipled denial of the discipline s claim of worldwide scope. At the same time, programs in area studies usually interdepartmental committees in Asian Studies, African Studies, Latin American Studies, and so on found themselves in search of a renewed mission, having prospered with the Cold War and declined in its wake. Accordingly, Spivak first proposes an alliance between Comparative Literature and area studies, with the goal of making these enterprises resemble each other. Comparative Literature would gain from the linguistic and political coverage, institutional alliances, and rigor of area studies, while area studies would learn to think conceptually about things that are better understood through close reading of all kinds of texts than through empirical observation for instance, in what ways cultures come to be imagined as others (the imagination is the great inbuilt instrument of othering [13]). Area studies, she believes, should learn to approach the language of the other not only as a field language (9). Comparative Literature (represented for her in large part by the report prepared by the late Charles Bernheimer s committee for the American Comparative Literature Association and published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1994), committed to a national and territorial model of the world, must, in turn, attend to the new demographic frontiers of the postcolonial and globalized era. The disciplines would find common ground in language comparatists because they would learn languages outside the conventional ambit, area scholars because they would be exposed to languages with literary depth rather than only social scientific fluency (106).

3 155 Spivak s second chapter makes a provocative case that collectivities the question of who are we? mark one of the most difficult issues for comparatists. Haun Saussy s recent report to the ACLA, soon to be published by Johns Hopkins, begins with a brief consideration of this question from an institutional standpoint: Who are comparatists? Spivak, however, raises the more elusive question of who constitutes the human of humanism (23), the cultural collectivity of and for whom Comparative Literature speaks. Perhaps in the continuing conversation taking place in the field, the question of collectivity has been pushed aside by an insistent focus on the objects of Comparative Literature; perhaps the matter of collectivities has seemed both too obvious and too difficult. Spivak s approach in this chapter is complex, with several extensive digressions, but the core of her argument here can be summarized in two points. The first is that comparatists should take account of what Jacques Derrida calls teleiopoeisis. Defined here as to affect the distant in a poeisis an imaginative making without guarantees (31), the term refers to acts of the imagination that cross time and space with uncertain outcomes and that are essential to the making of discontinuous collectivities. 1 Spivak proposes that teleiopoeisis will be one of the decisive literary and critical modes of the globalized world, that a copying (rather than cutting) and pasting (34) across cultural zones is fashioning the works and readers of the present. It is hard to disagree, and one supposes that a sustained project on teleiopoeisis and Comparative Literature, both historical and contemporary, is overdue. Spivak s forays into the concept are uneven but illuminating: the most successful is an intermittent reading of Virginia Woolf s A Room of One s Own that reappears through the chapter, charting Woolf s making of textured collectivities (46) that depend on teleiopoeisis as a corrective to the predictable feminism that has often been applied to the two lectures. The chapter also includes two encounters with novels by Tayib Salih and Mahasweta Devi as teleiopoietic displacements (31) of Joseph Conrad s Heart of Darkness, an angle of approach that does as much to undermine prefabricated postcolonial understandings of those novels as Spivak s reading of A Room of One s Own does for feminist interpretations. Spivak s second major observation under the heading of collectivities is more indistinct, in that it is barely articulated when it disperses into several close readings of prose fictions by Woolf, Salih, and Devi. Her chief injunction is that comparatists should become engaged with the social sciences in ways that seem irregular and perhaps

4 156 counterproductive at present. She imagines an open-plan fieldwork (36) for comparatists that would entail several practices: undertaking community-based projects to train not only readers but citizens; acting as interpreters and agents of cultural change in settings that will mitigate the hegemony of U.S.-style world literature (39); and in general learning to learn from below (36). I think one has to imagine adding a dimension to comparative literary training that would be loosely modeled on the field work of the social sciences, taking place out in the world where works and readers are being made, but with a full measure of attention to the matters of disciplinary consciousness for instance, the cultivation of close reading, a thinking through the figure, entertaining undecidability that at present are topics of mostly theoretical interest to comparatists. The object of Spivak s intervention here is not so much the old-fashioned European humanist model of Comparative Literature that is no more than a ghost, albeit sometimes a noisy ghost but the pieties in circulation through the discipline over the last twenty years or so, to the effect that Comparative Literature must become involved with the world beyond Europe and the United States. Most of the chapter on Collectivities, including the readings of fictions demonstrating available or imaginable collectivities some of which predate or counterpose those authorized by nationalism and capitalism ought to be read as a consideration of how such an involvement might take root in the productive space between two disciplines in different kinds of crisis, namely Comparative Literature and area studies. The third and final chapter of Death of a Discipline concerns the horizon that Spivak proposes to install as an alternative to the global, namely the planetary. Like certain terminological diversions Spivak used earlier in her career, planetarity is a seemingly trivial semantic ploy masking a far-reaching ambition, namely the defamiliarization of globality and globalization, and it evokes a set of values oriented toward responsibility ( we inhabit [the planet], on loan [72]), rather than control ( no one lives on the globe [72]). Moreover, a model of planetary Comparative Literature enables Spivak to make a place for some of the cultures often consigned to the margin of the discipline Hispanic, African as well as still others not so much on the margin as unseen and unheard ( the scandal of Comparative Literature [is to be] unable to access First Nation orality ). Enumerating these omissions and more, she observes: Postcolonialism remained caught in mere nationalism over against colonialism. Today it is planetarity that we are called to imagine to displace this historical alibi, again and again (81). She argues that previous notions of a reformed Comparative Literature, including the

5 157 Bernheimer report, remain caught within varieties of cultural relativism, specular alterity, and cyber-benevolence.... The time for producing historically thin theory describing the feeling of migrants in pseudopsychoanalytic vocabulary is over (81, 85). If planetarity as a heuristic concept cannot deny globalization, it can perhaps offer an alternative horizon that will remind comparatists to challenge and resist some of the forces exerted by the capitalist-globalist ethos on the discipline, for example the tendency of the dominant to appropriate the emergent (100). Who then can serve as a model for planetary thinking? Here Spivak s weakness for associative (not to say impulsive) explanations produces not illuminating examples but near-useless ones. First she adduces passages from novels by Toni Morrison and Diamela Eltit in which the logic of identity politics is seemingly exhausted and in response, the novelists reach for something larger and more inchoate, the lineaments of the planetary (91). Then she proposes to adopt José Martí and W. E. B. Du Bois as precursors, against the grain of most historically informed readers who likely see these figures as interested in registers (race, class, hemisphere) other than the planet. While it seems patent to me that her main point here is correct, that there is an emerging discourse of planetarity with exponents and precursors, these readings are not patient enough to draw us in. In fact, Spivak concludes the chapter by conceding that precapitalist cultures might offer the best approach to a planetary horizon for intellectual work and recalling the texts collected and interpreted by scholars such as Gordon Brotherston and Jerome Rothenberg, one wants to agree. Far from a radical diagnosis of the state of the field, Death of a Discipline gives names to several of the questions that underlie present debates in Comparative Literature and, in a thought experiment, urges impractical but provocative measures in response. In assessing Spivak s position among recent arguments, consider this book s attitude to the Bernheimer report. Bernheimer and his committee conceived the challenge of the discipline in view of the confrontation between, on the one hand, the established orientation of the field to literary works, and on the other hand, Cultural Studies. The most disputed sentence in the report benign, it was conceived to accommodate (without surrendering to) a Cultural Studies model, but provoked endless complaints from traditionalists is this: Literary phenomena are no longer the exclusive focus of our discipline. 2 Less than a decade later, in contrast to Bernheimer s committee, Spivak is disillusioned about U.S.-style Cultural Studies because it colludes in reproducing a picture of an undifferentiated

6 158 world outside the metropoles, scarcely different from the world of oldfashioned Comparative Literature, not to mention less sophisticated in literary analysis. Meanwhile, globalization a concept not mentioned but implied in Bernheimer s report, and treated as a salutary force in some of the essays published in the same volume has been understood in far more complex terms since the mid-1990s. What seemed the economic, social, and cultural promises of globalization in 1995 have been countervailed by the hazards of inequality it entails, and for comparatists, the implications of this condition are clearly troubling: while old-fashioned Comparative Literature made little pretense of inclusiveness beyond its European core, a globalized Comparative Literature claims to speak for the world under the rubric of liberal multiculturalism. Alert to the shortcomings of the approaches (especially cultural and ethnic studies) that run through Bernheimer s document and in fact all of the 1990s-era conversation about Comparative Literature, Spivak calls attention here to several works such as Condé s Heremakhonon in which an interpretation inflected by area-specific knowledge would open portals not available to multiculturalist readings. She argues, in effect, that only the knowledges of the social sciences can unsettle the linguistic, interpretive, and conceptual power of the metropoles in this discipline, and that the irreducible virtue of Comparative Literature, its cultivation of reading closely in the original (6), would join with those knowledges to bring about a method well adapted to the needs of the present. Among other values, this renovated Comparative Literature would be trying to live up to the ethical imperatives of the field. The ethical dimension of Bernheimer s project, while constructive, was finally self-centered training ourselves as comparatists to encounter more and different literary and cultural situations. Neglecting to account for how collectivities are made, it responded only to the unexamined culturalism of... the stereotyped producers and consumers of Cultural/Ethnic Studies (15). Spivak s urge is more broadly ethical to recover the literary specificity of the autocthone (15), a challenge for Comparative Literature that the discipline has not often faced squarely, and to see ourselves as citizens, as people, through the eyes of those autocthones at the other end of the globalized world, to imagine them reading us, and to read with that reading in mind. Recently someone called my attention to a graduate-level course in theory and methodology for comparatists in which the professor cites Spivak s book on the syllabus as the infamous Death of a Discipline. Aside from the questionable pedagogy of prejudging a text, this epithet obscures

7 159 what the book stands for not the death of comparative literature but its renewal. While its largest proposal is impractical at the level of institutions (area studies and Comparative Literature are not likely to collaborate, though practitioners in these fields might), and while a few of its observations are unconvincing, Death of a Discipline is one of the most passionate defenses in this decade of the intellectual (as opposed to the academic) enterprise of Comparative Literature. It introduces concepts (such as teleiopoeisis and planetarity) that remind us of the continuities between the discipline s past and future, and it finds a place for comparative-style close reading at the center of not only literary studies but the humanities and the social sciences together. Above all, the book argues for the power of fiction (49) without conditions or compromises a claim that Spivak, famously impatient with unexamined humanist platitudes, is well prepared to make. Death of a Discipline ought to be received not as a book of answers but as a guide to the hard questions for comparatists in the next several years. Roland Greene Stanford University Notes 1. Introducing the term in Politics of Friendship, Derrida explicitly invokes two senses of teleiopoiesis. First, it describes utterances in which the beginning witnesses the end and the end is itself a beginning. Second, it identifies the mode Spivak recognizes as a poetics of distance and the far-removed (Spivak, 32). See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997). 2. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) 42. Swearingen, James E. and Joanne Cutting-Gray, eds. Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death. New York: Continuum, Pp Feeling Pretty and Queer I feel pretty, oh so pretty, I feel pretty, and witty, and gay. It is perhaps the conceit of the camp queen that makes me feel that these lines sung by Maria in West Side Story were written just for me. In fact, in their association of feeling and aesthetics (the pretty), these lines might be said to define camp (to the extent that it can be defined) in addition to exemplifying it. For as Susan Sontag describes in her now canonical Notes on Camp, camp is above all a way of feeling sensibility is the word she uses a feeling about the aesthetic: It is one way of seeing