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Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

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The face of foreclosure

Dina Al-Kassim Published online: 01 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Dina Al-Kassim (2002) The face of foreclosure, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 4:2, 168-175, DOI: 10.1080/13698010220144171 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13698010220144171

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THE FACE OF FORECLOSURE

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Dina Al-Kassim

University of California at Irvine

The face of foreclosure summarizes the central figure of Gayatri Spivaks A Critique of Postcolonial Reason , namely the parabasic trope of transnational literacy in motion. In addition to offering a concise explanation of the rhetorical, ethical and political framework of Spivaks book, the essay also provides a definition of the concept of foreclosure that orients Spivaks reading practice of parabasis in the opening chapter on philosophy. The essay describes the effect of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason s amplification of the famous essay Can the subaltern speak?, and, through this emphasis on foreclosure as one of the cultural impasses facing the transnational critic, The face of foreclosure offers an account of this trenchant criticism of postcolonial studies.

parabas is foreclosure Lacan Spivak representation postcolonial subaltern feminism

A recent episode of a television news magazine provides a succinct example of the complex textual web of transnational exploitation that increasingly wears the mask of universal feminism. Connie Chung, playing the metropolitan minority, goes abroad with the task of saving Bangladeshi girls, often described within the story as children, from the irredeemably violent Third World men who victimize and, in this case, literally dis gure them by throwing sulfuric acid in their faces. The ABC 20/20 website carries both the TV

interventions Vol. 4(2) 168174

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Dina Al-Kassim transcript and Chungs piece, a rst-person travel narrative containing such gems as I had heard of barbaric acts of violence against women in the Third World and when I visited the burn unit all I could think of was how fortunate we are in America. As we watch Chungs travelogue, Bina Akhter, a victim turned activist, is trans gured from organizer, counsellor, and advocate working against the power of social shaming and abjection that dis gures the public faces of these young women, into a migrant Native Informant, whose evident needs she travels to Cincinnati to undergo facial reconstructive surgery come to serve as an alibi for the continuation of the technological civilizing mission that underwrites the project of globalizing capital. That Akhter must turn to the west is itself never questioned, for the global distribution of goods and knowledge, here speci cally inscribed as charity and access to plastic surgery, is assumed. Instead, the tabloid expos takes the salvation narrative as its plot despite the fact that Akhter herself is reported in other sources (e.g. Ms. website, November 1999) as saying that violence against women is global; thus, the possibility that Akhter might hold views at odds with the project of civilization or that those views might rise to the occasion of a politics is utterly excluded by the universalist feminism of the tabloid tale. Akhter becomes an advertisement for American medical superiority and compassionate charity, as she is shown frolicking in a manicured Ohio park while another South Asian womans voice translates Akhters speech in an arti cially higher pitch, Its a dream! In other words, Chungs tale of Bangladesh dramatizes what Gayatri Spivak in her recent book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, calls a UN-style universalist feminism, which simulates a womens collectivity, unwittingly, one hopes, to use the needs of the needy in the interests of the greedy.1 Spivaks accomplishments in the elds of feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, and literary studies set the standard for critical vigilance with respect to the network of advocacy, universalist feminism, subalternity and violent erasure at work in this television example, where, despite the particular focus and locality of her activism, Akhter is made to serve as a mouthpiece for universality and the essential privilege and rightness of American civilization. Spivak teaches us to situate the condescending moves of Chungs feminism sceptically without therefore requiring Akhter to represent herself in the terms of a universal subject; or, from another angle, Spivak might have us hear Akhters dreaming as something other than a desire to belong to the suburban landscape at which she marvels. The text of Critique would suggest, instead, that Akhter identi es the dreams origin in the exclusion of everything she might call real. In fact, according to the analysis of global capital found in the pages of Critique, Akhters comment correctly identi es Third World labour as the unrepresented real centre of a transnational distribution of wealth that siphons off the dream to the west while, simultaneously, the marvelling and dis gured

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1 Gayatri Spivak (1999: 361).

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face of a Third World female child re ects back to Chungs imagined audience a luckier America. To be dreaming in and of Ohio is one representation of the dominant [that] also trace[s] a subliminal and discontinuous emergence of the native informant: autochthone and/or subaltern (Spivak 1999: xi). This media example re ects a more intractable problem, one that Spivak analysed long ago in her ground-breaking essay Can the subaltern speak?, where she argued that western liberal and radical efforts to represent the interests of Third World women have the unwitting effect of reinscribing a global class system precisely through the unexamined politics of speech. The representative intellectual, in wanting to/attempting to speak for the other, inevitably rebounds into a descriptive and representational depiction of that others speech and interest because the subaltern is denied the right of entry. To demand or make room for the subalterns speech is equivalent to demanding that the subaltern adopt the discourse of political agency and enter into that enlightenment space of self-representation. This demand effectively censors those others who cannot assume their own image in the space cleared for an enlightenment politics by perversely asking that the subaltern cease to be herself as the price of becoming a modern subject. Thus the subaltern other is never presented and does not speak in her own name or her own voice because to do so would mean ceasing to be that aboriginal whose knowledge and memory is a priori excluded from the domain of Reasons cultivation. Critique raises the problem of the subaltern differently by rst locating her ancestor in the strange invocation of an Aboriginal man, a native of Tierra del Fuego at a key moment in Kants Third Critique. This Fuegan appears as an example of a wildness from which the civilized cultivation of reason departs. According to the analysis that sustains the entirety of Spivaks Critique this Native Informant enters only to be immediately ushered off the scene of Enlightenment history. In essence, the Aboriginal/Fuegan/Native Informant is threatened both with disappearance and representation, and the latter in at least two ways: rst as the gure of the aboriginal pre-modern so useful to the self-re ection of the enlightenment subject and second by the later substitution of another gure, and this as a perverse effect of freedom, that of the postcolonial critic who comes to stand in for the subaltern Native Informant (1999: 35864).
My aim, to begin with, was to track the gure of the Native Informant through various practices: philosophy, literature, history, culture. Soon I found that the tracking showed up a colonial subject detaching itself from the Native Informant. After 1989, I began to sense that a certain postcolonial subject had, in turn, been recoding the colonial subject and appropriating the Native Informants position . . . today with globalization in full swing . . . the foreclosure that I see . . . continues, rather more aggressively. (Spivak 1999: ix)

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Dina Al-Kassim Culture, alive and at work in a play of differences, can be tracked only in the series of the many gures that orient and frame knowledge. Calling these gures and the relations that materialize them folds in the social textile, Spivak analyses the many folds of power and knowledge, even knowledge of the limits of what we know, from Enlightenment philosophy through many heterogeneous texts and several elds, humorously named for us as History, Literature and Culture. The transnational critic reads a mobile text and from a point of view itself in motion, with the result that we seem more directly gured in the textile of the social, and in the social folds of textile. The negativity of foreclosure is, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, not turned towards the positive terms of a realer, righter substance but becomes itself the possibility of an insubordinate practice of reading variously theorized in her earlier essays as allegorical insubordination or as permanent parabasis. Permanent parabasis, as a gure for a lawful abuse that retrieves a critical perspective by bringing the margin on to the stage, demands of reading that it be a movement, a doing and turns the metaphor of motion into a mode of political address that grounds the activism of the book in the reading of foreclosure. Imagining the Aboriginal, Spivak performs a quasi- ctional speech, what she calls speaking otherwise, spoken in the shadow of the Aboriginals forced departure from the project of Enlightenment philosophy. Such a speaking is no knowing substitution of that banished Others speech. Projecting the perspective of the Native Informant back into the foundational texts of Enlightenment Reason, Spivak restores neither the Native Informant nor his image but the ghostly act of dematerialization that conserves him in the margins of western Reason. To speak otherwise, here, in the fringe of Kants text is neither to accept Kants founding exclusion from the civilizing mediation of reason nor is it to pretend to speak in the name of the Aboriginal. Rather, the name of the Aboriginal/Native Informant is spoken again, taken up as the occasion, even the alibi, for a disruptive retelling of our most enabling ctions. Such insubordinate speech remembers the ghost of the Aboriginal foreclosed, while simultaneously refusing to presume to know in any nal way, what the Native Informant may or may not know.2 This critical position does not speak for others but, instead, imagines a speech that takes stock of the violent proscription of those others. Her restrained sidestepping of appropriative certainty regarding the Aboriginals knowledge resists the reduction of the Native Informant to mere mascot of counter-hegemonic activism while it also preserves the critical commitment to an old-fashioned Marxism reworked within the frame of the present nancialization of the globe. This ethical problematic is referenced in Spivaks habit of placing brackets around a key term like the (im)possible perspective of the native informant, where the possibility of re guring the Aboriginals point of view depends upon a clear-headed understanding that

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2 See Laplanche and Pontalis (1973: 1669), also cited in Spivak.

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this perspective comes to the forefront of our concern with race and gender by dint of its original exclusion in the text of empire as of philosophy. This point is worth labouring because Spivaks claim is not simply that patriarchal imperial philosophy banished the Aboriginal other to unrepresentablity, i.e. that the raw man of Kants Third Critique was silenced, but that philosophy preserved the image and the name of the Aboriginal, the Fuegan as the representation of a savage basis from which the cultivation of Reason withdraws. In the idiom of the text, the Aboriginal is foreclosed at the origin of Enlightenment philosophy. I am proposing to situate rather than expurgate the anthropomorphic moment in Kant. Such a moment is irreducible in his text (Spivak 1999: 16). According to Spivaks unlicensed reading, the Aboriginal/Native Informant continues to perform this labour of representation at the edge of our reason for we are inescapably situated within (ibid.: 25) the domain of Reason, nor could we want to give it up. As Spivak put it earlier (1993), we cannot not want to reason with Reason though we must offer an account of our complicity with the exclusionary logic that subtends it. The gure of the Native Informant takes her even further. The brackets she places around her own representational activism are just as evident in her approach to the varied forms of culturalist and developmental typologies and taxonomies she analyses. Discussing the effects of postmodernist recapitulations of hegemonic literary and art critical periodization, her text weaves in the almost imperceptible, subliminal features of the Native Informant to register his (im)possible perspective . . . as a reminder of alterity, whose trace can disclose the irregular commonality of foreclosure and permit an imaginative and ethical openness to difference rather than remain[ing] caught in some identity forever (ibid.: 352). One might wonder if this work of rememoration leaves us building memorials to the lost Aboriginal. Far from it, though a certain pathos of mourning colours Spivaks text and anchors even the peals of wild laughter that echo through the book. Instead, one nds that the trace of the Aboriginal binds the reader within an ethical relation constituted by the awareness of that foundational banishment and the captive haunting still under way. This exposure leads the transnational feminist critic to identify with the work of imagining and projecting a foreclosed gure as something more than a gure of foreclosure (i.e. he is not just a conceptmetaphor). The critic of philosophy, global capital, womens work, development aid, and modernist ction is moved by the trace of the Fuegan, moved to track his presence and trans guration in the history of his marginalization and to put her own imaginative resources to work in the place left to the Native Informant. I gather that this ethical inspiration toward Reasons captive aboriginal is one means of retying the affect to the concept. A far cry from a politics of identity, such a work must anxiously return to the complicitous space of the Aboriginals dislocation. The Native Informant and the ethical relation established by a critique that

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Dina Al-Kassim takes up his ghostly positionality are not the whole story of Critique, for, as Spivak says throughout the book, culture is on the move. Accordingly, Spivak revamps Can the subaltern speak? to thematize the historical shift from Native Informant to postcolonial critic. In brief, the postcolonial critic prefers to dwell on cultural forms of resistance at the expense of a needed criticism of global capital. In order to pull off this culturalist sleight of argument, the postcolonial critic masquerades as the subaltern other in the American intellectual scene by performing the work of Native Informant herself. Elite postcolonialism seems to be as much a strategy of differentiating oneself from the racial underclass as it is to speak in its name (Spivak 1999: 356). Softening somewhat her severe reading of postcolonial studies, Spivak adds that this dissimulation is an inherent pitfall of feminist attempts to displace the ordering narratives of global power. Against the postcolonial critic she proposes a transnational feminist practice of ethical critique that does not settle into the universalist conventions of Third World salvation, or substitute itself in the place of the subaltern other, but seeks out, instead, the contradiction of its own position in the interests of a greater transnational literacy, entailing a series of troubling self-re ections. By the end of the book we are back at the beginning where the author rst leapt ahead to nd her reader: The implied reader whose face I discover . . . is too diversi ed to be assigned a de nite interest, a de nitive preparation (Spivak 1999: x). Critique seems to hold out a hope for the reparative work of gure to return (im)possible affects to the enabling concepts of reason or history.
The new immigrant is as much the name of a gure as the native informant or indeed the postcolonial . . . if a gure makes visible the impossible, it also invites the imagination to transform the impossible into an experience, a role . . . the Fuegan and the New Hollander could not read Kant. The person from Burkina Faso or Albania can refuse Fukuyama by playing the new immigrant liberally or critically.

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This passage suggests that guration can exhibit the foreclosed in such a way as to transform the lost life, affect or mode of being in the world into another assumable arti ce, that of a role. To claim such a transformative, even performative, power for guration would seem to imply that a founding foreclosure can become a textual symptom to be played in the critical mode. And, while the graphematic character of such symptoms must always admit the possibility of a perverse performative, it seems to me that the concept of foreclosure itself destines even the transnationally literate critic to the impossibility of knowing ones positionality fully or even adequately. For if the coherent outline of the discourse is cut by a relation to non-knowledge, refused in the subject, this repudiated knowledge becomes the well-spring of the subjects negative attachment to the social world. If we read foreclosure

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3 For a discussion of this conceptual relay, see Judith Butler (1993, 1999: esp. 13368) and, for an extended treatment of Lacans handling of foreclosure and the symbolic, Antigones Claim (Butler 2001). 4 This scene is played twice in Lacans rst two seminars. For a reading of this gure, see my On Pain of Speech, forthcoming.

as the social regulation of intelligibility, it would seem that subjection in and by this discursive frame constitutes a limit to the possibilities of play, even critical play.3 It is no accident that, in the text where Lacan nds himself occupying the vulnerable and even primitive position of inaugurating a new conceptual tool, that of the concept of foreclosure, he suddenly must conjure a Muslim patient whose more innocent and archaic inscription by and of the sacred law, and thus of the symbolic, will serve to ground the analytic discovery under way.4 In this respect the psychoanalyst repeats Kant in the text that authors the very concept of that repetition. When Spivak refolds the philosophical text to nd the Aboriginal in Kant she highlights the continual performance of a foreclosure haunting the very possibility of freedom within the universalist framework. And, while allegorical insubordination is Spivaks textualist redress of the recursive foreclosure of the wild, such an ethics destines itself to continual motion or, in the idiom of her earlier work, a permanent parabasis that changes distance into persistent interruption (1999: 430). Why make so much of the gure/face/folds of her text? Because in chapters devoted to canonical and Third World ction, to philosophys exclusions, to the struggle for womens autonomy in the frame of global power, the text bets on its readers readiness to investigate the possible link between her freedom and a bondage elsewhere on the knowledge that an advance in civil rights here may mean, in the transnational scheme of things, that the cost is paid there. The text bets on this willingness to unlearn the lessons of US UN universal feminism, and with it the imperative of universal development, through attention to the increasingly globalized scene of class division. To do this without conjuring a portrait or representational identity that inevitably transforms a potentially ethical and political literacy into a justi cation for a project of exchange is the goal of uncovering our complicity or, as the author has said elsewhere, unlearning your privilege as your loss.

R e f e re n c e s
Butler, Judith (1993) Arguing with the real, in Bodies that Matter, London: Routledge. (1999) Excitable Speech, London: Routledge. (2001) Antigones Claim, New York: Columbia University Press. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973) The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Norton. Spivak, Gayatri (1993) Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.