----- Original Message ----- From: Abu Nasr <abu-nasr at usa.net> To: <leninist-international at buo319b.econ.utah.edu> Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 3:19 PM Subject: L-I: Forwarded literary criticism
> Dear everybody!
>
> I have received the following article by a Bengali writer-researcher Azfar
> Hussain, courtesy of Mine Aysen Doyran who asked that I forward it to the
> list.
>
> Revolutionary greetings!
>
> Abu Nasr.
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
>
> Here is an interesting piece by a critical Bangali scholar, Azfar, on the
> relationship between Lenin, political economy and post-colonial theory.
> Azfar is studying literary theory in connection to Marxian political
> economy. I have recently seen the article on IPE, and was very much
> excited by it because, generally, post-colonial scholars are largely
> under-represented in global forums due to dominance of eurocentric,
> western, pomo perspectives. To say that post-colonial people, third-world
> marxists, and their knowledges exist, I am posting the piece for your
> attention.
>
> Forwarded by the permission of the author!
>
> Mine Aysen Doyran
> Phd Student
> Political Science
> SUNY/Albany
>
> >Dear listserv and azfar:
>
> >Azfar may not be a member of this list but his piece below came my way
> >and I
> >thought that it might be of interest to some folks in this group! If you
> >have reactions, please include his email as a courtesy as I am sure he
> >will
> >appreciate various reactions to his piece.
>
> >Alexandra
>
> I suspect this post might sound terribly odd to many pomo-poco folks on
> this massive--rather "global"--listserve. But I'll take the risk--the risk
> of sharing a few things, particularly with those who might be interested
in
> political economy in the Marxist-Leninist sense(s) of the field. Please
> forgive me for trying your patience with this rather long note.
>
> I'm currently working on my article tentatively titled "Lenin, Political
> Economy, and (Post)colonialism" for the Bengali journal called _Anushtup_.
> I advance several arguments about Lenin's usefulness in the contemporary
> crtico-political contexts, while particularly contesting some pomo
readings
> of the mediatized and even mythologized Lenin(s) in the metropolis.
>
> That Lenin is elitist; that Lenin is all empiricism; that Lenin is
> positivist and essentialist; that Lenin is deaf or blind to questions of
> nationalism and colonialism, and so on and so forth--all such
formulations,
> informed and inspired by what Garcia Marquez interestingly calls "the
> hermeneutical delirium" of some pomo-poco enterprises, have been contested
> by way of looking at Lenin's engagements with "political economy." I
> argue--through a re-reading of Lenin's _Imperialism_ and other texts--that
> it was Lenin who first nuanced and povocatively "put under erasure" the
> "possible Enlightenment linearism" supposedly inherent in Marx's famous
> circuit of Capital-- M--C--M' -- in ways in which Lenin still enables us
to
> conceptualize "globalization"--particularly its political economy on the
> "glocal" scale even today. Baudrillard's jubilant and repeated
> declarations of the death of Marxist political economy in favor of the
> birth of his (Baudrillard's) "new" (?) political economy of signs,
> simulations, and simulacra don't simply fly, of course if Lenin is brought
> back to show that the very logic of the "C" in the circuit of M--C--M'
> transforms "signs" themselves into commodities or even into finance
capital
> (read multinational capital also), depending on the nature of the specific
> geo-historical site(s) from which--or within which--those signs keep
> circulating. After all, signs do not fall from the skies!
>
> I also argue that Lenin does not necessarily underwrite any singular logic
> of capital (of course some orthodox Marxists do), while he seems
> theoretically alive to the differential, uneven, genealogical (even in the
> "Nietzschean-Foucauldian" sense of being multiplily branched--not in the
> sense of being "originary"), and "invisible" ("spectral") movements of
> "capital"(s) [mark the plural here] at different historical conjunctures.
> My use of the "spectral" here is not meant to be understood as a tribute
to
> the pun(k)ster Derrida's formulation of "spectro-capitalism" as such,
> simply because the "spectral" in Derrida marks a decisive move in the
> direction of de-materializing both capitalism and marxism, while the
> "spectral" in Lenin is specifically historicized and materially grounded,
> all "semiotic playfulnesses" of the circuit of M--C--M' notwithstanding.
>
> I further argue that the kind of political economy Lenin envisages and
> engages is not merely the political economy of capitalism as such but also
> the political economy of colonialism (or colonialist capitalism or
> capitalist colonialism, to use Lenin's own terms here)--something from
> which Frantz Fanon himself takes his cues and clues in _The Wreteched of
> the Earth_.
>
> Now this Lenin, as I keep arguing, is certainly not positivist, not
> essentialist! (An aside: the notion of "strategic essentialism," however,
> comes straight from Lenin and subsequently gets taken up by Gramsci in his
> "Notes", while Spivak's return to it, without any acknowledgement of Lenin
> of course, raises some important political questions in the face of the
> semioclastic dance of signifiers and simulacra in today's pomo "world").
>
> But please don't get me wrong! By no means am I trying to "postmodernize"
> Lenin. I am only suggesting that at a time when "globalization-talks" are
> copiously circulating in terms of "globalization"'s
> semiological-cultural-discursive implications and effects without any
> rigorous engagement with political economy as such, it might be
> theoretically and politically useful to bring back Lenin--yes, I emphasize
> this point with full force--bring back the kind of Lenin who does not
> merely "think State" (as Spivak, however, would have us think in her most
> recent book _A Critique of Postcolonial Reason_) but thinks differential
> movements of capital and (neo)colonial productions on both local and
global
> scales--rather in terms of the "glocal." And of course Lenin thinks and
> re-thinks that very political economy in the service of various kinds of
> anti-capitalist movements (not merely socialist-class-struggles but also
> "decolonization" and "national" movements).
>
> While foregrounding Lenin in the face of some hip pomo-poco attempts to
> pooh-pooh him with relish or with their "pleasures of the text" (just
think
> of the Michael Ryan of _Marxism and Deconstruction_, whose reading of
Lenin
> seems to be sinking into an idiocy that has no past!), I also draw
> attention to what I wish to call contemporary culturalist "Gramsciology"
or
> ("Gramsci-mania"?) that brutally wipes all traces of "Leninism" off
> Gramsci's formulations. As if, like those working-class folks so
> instructively described by Garcia Marquez in his _One Hundred Years of
> Solitude_, "Lenin didn't exist."
>
> Of course, Gramsci the "superstructuralist" or Gramsci the
non-foundational
> and non-positivist cultural theorist is more than welcome in the
privileged
> metropolitan theoretical spaces but, as they say (the "your-most-trulys"
of
> some pomo-poco industries), the Leninist Gramsci of political economy or
> for that matter the Leninist Gramsci of programmatic, organized, and
> organic socialist struggles must be killed in their deep, dense discursive
> jungles. I can't simply hip-hip-hooray for their
> writing-degree-zero-kind-of-adventures with Gramsci--a Gramsci brutally
> yanked from his Leninism.
>
> As I was working on the Leninist analytics of political economy (on which
> I've to work more of course), I thought I should read Spivak's _A Critique
> of Postcolonial Reason_. I did. I found this work absolutely fascinating,
> profoundly disturbing, and certainly problematical. As I say this, I
should
> not be taken to endorse that metropolitan academic "Marxist" --Terry
> Eagleton--who had already proven his own kind of Frankfurt-schooling in
> Marxism. Eagleton's sweeping and over-generalizing review of Spivak is
also
> a classic instance of his gruff, glib, gossipy Marxism.
>
> That Spivak is a sell-out or that she has completely succumbed to the
> captalist logic of commodification or that she is fashioning and packaging
> her discourses and languages in response to the demand-and-supply curves
> dictated by the capitalist markets and so on and so forth don't simply
wash
> with me, because Spivak herself is rigorously forging and re-forging
> theoretical spaces of resistances within by way of tracking the itinerary
> of what she calls "the native informant." Spivak's work also exhibits a
> tremendous amount of what Gramsci calls "critical elaboration," part of
> which is of course well-exemplified in her continuous self-questioning--in
> her continuous awreness of the complicitous metropolitan sites (dangerous,
> tempting, trapping sites indeed) in which she is implicated and from which
> she produces her discourses. But of course that doesn't mean that one
> should let Spivak off the hook when it comes down to the question of her
> complicity. That doesn't mean that Spivak begins to share the spaces
> inhabited by landess peasant women in Bangladesh. No, really. In fact
> Spivak herself moves towards that very zone of "No" time and
again--without
> the least bit of dramatics--in her book in ways in which the singular
> essentialist logic of commodification itself gets strategically and
> repeatedly deconstructed in the service of anti-capitalist moves.
>
> But what about Eagleton? The questions that he raises about Spivak can be
> raised about Eagleton himself, no? If Spivak is a sell-out, what the fuck
> is Eagleton doing? Bringing about revolution? (maybe he's not televizing
> it, right?) Or spelling out decisive deaths to capitalist markets? Well, I
> think I shouldn't harp on these strings here because those are the
> Eagletonesque questions themselves, but I can't help noticing that
Eagleton
> simply ends up spitting out his shit against many of the crucial issues
> Spivak is trying to raise in her book.
>
> Of course, in her book, Spivak rehearses some of her earlier and
> by-now-familiar formulations (the "subaltern," the category of the "native
> informant" itself, telematic-electro-postfodist capital, liberal
> multicultural academy, and so on). There are also extensions of those
> formulations, while there is a massive traversal across a range of
> discourse-zones and figures from the "great" German classical
> transcendental metahysicist Kant through Spivak's favorite Marx down to (I
> see that my own colleagues from Bangladesh are engaged here) Farhad Mazhar
> and Farida Akhter.
>
> I've a number of local disagreements with Spivak, particularly (if not
> exclusively) vis-a-vis Bangladesh (I'm preparing an essay to talk about
> those disagreements), but I must say that I find Spivak's reading of
> Marx--in particular--quite significant in that she goes back to one of the
> most problematical areas in Marxist theory--the Asiatic mode of
production.
> Also, Spivak's plea for foregrounding political economy (particularly with
> regard to another productively problematical area in Marxist
> theory--"value") in both Marxist cultural theory and postcolonial studies
> (generally indifferent as they are to the analytics of political economy,
> as I keep arguing these days) is entirely salutory. In fact I must say
that
> of the trinity of the metropolitan poco theorists--Said-Spivak-Bhabha--it
> is Spivak who appeals to me most, particularly for the kind of active
> interest she demonstrates in Marxist political economy. (On the other
hand,
> both Said and Bhabha have no fucking clues about that kind of political
> economy).
>
> But the analytics of political economy in Spivak's hands, as I can see, do
> not give a rap about the concrete political histories of Marxisms in the
> "Third World." I feel terribly uncomfortable here. Also, while inserting
> "ruptures" into the chain of value-codings (or into the linear logic of
> production or political economy) via her provocative readings of those
> texts of Marx which have hitherto remained relatively unheeded, Spivak's
> theorizing of political economy evinces rather "eltist" and
"pomo"-kinds-of
> leaps by way of bypassing Lenin, as if Lenin, like Garcia Marquez's
> "plantation workers in Macondo," "didn't exist!" In her entire book,
Lenin
> receives half a line and Stalin another half: "Lenin thinks State, and
> Stalin Nation" (83). And that's it.
>
> Lenin thinks State, eh? What about his own ruptures inserted into the
chain
> of value-codings when Lenin speaks of the subtle slips-and-slides as well
> as the deluge of "financial capital" that give rise to breakages as well
> configured blocs of all sorts in various geo-historical spaces?
>
> Finally, in her Marxist-yet-deconstruction-infected political-economic
> move, when Spivak reaches Bangladesh and tries to point
up--condescendingly
> of course--the radicalism of "Prabartana" (which is again a kind of NGO in
> Bangladesh, an organization which, despite its occasionally lefty
> rhetorical clap-traps, is not immune to developmentology-syndromes as
> such). Mark what Spivak says here: "As a result of the foreign direct
> investement related to the international garment industry, the long
> tradition of Bangladeshi handloom is dying. Prabartana not only subsidizes
> and "develops" the weavers' collective, but also attempts to undo
epistemic
> violation suffered by the weavers by rcognizing them as artists" (414).
>
> Ah, that's is news to me. I wonder if Spivak here is paying attention to
> the political economy of the production of the weavers and also the
> specific "production relations" between "Prabartana"--run by
> middle/upper-middle class educated Bengali folks occasionally funded by
> white donors--and the weavers themselves. "Attempts to undo epistemic
> violation" on Prabartana's part, eh? Just when the middle-class folks,
> having the sanctioned taste for the "artistic," recognize the weavers as
> "artists" (condescendingly or not), the "undoing of epistemic violation"
> begins, eh? This formulation appears both hasty and heavy for me; for the
> matter of "undoing" is decisively a matter of organic struggle--not just
an
> upper-class posture, as Bengali Marxists like Badruddin Umar and
> Akhtaruzzaman Elias kept telling me (Does Spivak know them?).
>
> By the way, Spivak time and again uses terms like "epistemic violence" or
> "epistemic violation" and I time and again keep thinking of Fanon. But
> Spivak's engagement with Fanon? Virtually nil in her book.
>
> Sorry, I can see that I simply couldn't resist the temptation of writing
> quite a long note. I'd certainly appreciate more discussions on political
> economy and postcolonialism. Thanks very much for your time.
>
> Regards,
>
> Azfar
>
>
>
>
> Azfar Hussain
> Department of English
> Washington State University
> Pullman, WA 99164-5020
> USA
> Phones: 509-335-1331 (office)
> 509-332-3344 (home)
> E-mail: azfar at wsu.edu
>
>
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