Unlike Daniel and nearly all other postal scholars, Spivak took one strand of Eagleton's criticism of postmodernism rather seriously; in fact, she agrees with him in part & uses it to ward off a likely pointless post-Marxist criticism of Subaltern Studies scholars' proposal to focus on "the unified consciousness of the subaltern" (Spivak) as their "central theme, because it is not possible to make sense of the experience of insurgency merely as a history of events without a subject" (Ranajit Guha), while adding a qualification to Eagleton's criticism:
***** ...What is the use of pointing out that a common phonocentrism binds subaltern, elite authority, and disciplinary-critical historian together, and only a reading against the grain discloses the espousal of illegitimacy by the first and the third? Or to quote Terry Eagleton:
Marx is a metaphysician, and so is Schopenhauer, and so is Ronald Reagan. Has anything been gained by this manoeuvre? If it is true, is it informative? What is ideologically at stake in such homogenizing? What differences does it exist to suppress?...If what is in question for deconstructionism is metaphysical discourse, and if this is all-pervasive, then there is a sense in which in reading against the grain we are subverting everything and nothing. [Terry Eagleton, _Walter Benjamin: or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism_ (London: Verso, 1981), p. 140]
Not all ways of understanding the world and acting upon it are _equally_ metaphysical or phonocentric. If, one the other hand, there _is_ something shared by elite (Reagan), colonial authority, subaltern and mediator (Eagleton/Subaltern Studies) that we would rather not acknowledge, any elegant solution devised by means of such a refusal would merely mark a site of desire. It is best to attempt to forge a practice that can bear the weight of that acknowledgement. (Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," _Selected Subaltern Studies_, eds. Ranajit Guha & Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1988) *****
Where Spivak errs (besides the fact that she assumes it is true that Marx is a "metaphysician") is her belief that it makes any practical difference whether one makes this or that acknowledgement of what postal scholars are fond of calling "complicity." Such rituals of "acknowledgement" -- forced upon Marx, Eagleton, etc. as if they were "alcoholics in denial," as AA devotees say -- merely serve to obscure the practically important political & epistemological differences between historical materialism and ideology, while reinforcing "confession" as a moralist technology of the self. It doesn't do anything, except it makes postal scholars feel morally superior to others (postally represented as morally deficient "subjects in denial").
Yoshie