Spivak’s value
The Spivak Carnival, the sequel of sorts to the Tronti blogweave, is going on this week; the page at Long Sunday for it is here. The piece under consideration is “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value,” and the participants so far have focused on (limited themselves to considering?) Spivak’s sui generis style and idiosyncratic structuring, though I have not yet read s0metim3s’s, Nate’s, or Matt’s contributions. So far I have particularly liked pomegrenade’s interpellation of the Third World and the value chain.
I’m not participating in this carnival, mostly because my &*^% day job isn’t right now allowing me time to devote a proper amount of attention to the text, but I have a couple of small comments after my scattered reading of the piece. First, in her opening lines, Spivak makes a point of dismissing Deleuze and Guattari’s thought as a “last-ditch metaphysical longing.” But then there’s this, from pomegrenade:
I also find [Spivak’s] formulation on page 83 excellent, where she maintains that the question for Marx is not an ontological or phenomenological one of “What is value?” He is not concerned with the coining, or the originary emergence, of value. His concern is rather with moments of separation from the value chain: when and how does labor get separated from capital logic (through reproduction, affective labor, Third World labor, precarious work, etc.)? Similarly, how does the commodity become separated at the moment of consumption as gratification?
As Jon points out, it’s difficult to see how Spivak’s emphasis on separation is really that different from Deleuze and Guattari’s break-flows and segmentarity. This is meant less as a defense of D&G than as a hint at the possibilities of reading Spivak and D&G together, to perhaps read some of Spivak’s insights on value through a D&G immanence rather than Spivak’s occasional transcendent dialectic, which I notice most in her positing of an outside-inside.
Which leads to my second comment. I’m ending this post with a long quote from “Speculations” (or should the shortened title be “Scattered”?) that touches on the “immigration debate” happening in the U.S. (as well, perhaps, as the, ahem, discussion happening here and here). I point to it because here, unlike in other places, Spivak posits capitalism as a plane on which boundaries are continually drawn, erased, and redrawn rather than employing metaphors of center-periphery, First-World-Third World, etc. In other words, the quote insists on a reinsertion of the value question, which is mostly elided today, into the political nexus of immigration, borders, culture, and race without insisting on an inside-outside duality. (more…)
