THEORIZING THE SUBJECT: TEEODOR ADORNO, EDWARD SAID, GAYATRI SPIVAK AND CONTEMPORAFtY CRITICAL DISCOURSE A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH National Library Bibliotheque nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliograp hiques 395 Weilington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaON K1AON4 Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Canada Canada Yourme VOuenilidraKs Our lDe mer$tBreme The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive pennettant a la National Library of Canada to Bibliotheque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, preter, distnibuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/fih, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format electronique. 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Requests for permission to copy or to make any other use of material in this thesis in whole or in part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of English University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to acknowledge the Department of English, University of Saskatchewan, for financial support during my graduate career as well as to express my gratitude for the generosity of spirit which characterizes its members. Memorial University of Newfoundland and Queen's University have also contributed to material necessities. Dr. El Epperly of the former and Dr. L. Monkman of the latter have, in the course of attending to financial matters, also been sources of moral support and encouragement. My supervisor, Dr. L.M. Findlay, has been a sustaining and challenging presence during my graduate career at the University of Saskatchewan. I can only hope that this thesis reflects in some small way his theoretical rigour, the wit (in Jane Austen's sense of the word) and panache that distinguish his own expression, and, crucially, his ethical and political vigilance. His patience and editorial skills did much to ease the difficult circumstances under which this thesis was produced. Sheila Steele, Mary Lou Jones and Laura Jones have, over the years, remained kindred spixits. My delightful and courageous students at Memorial University made me re-think privileged claims to marginality. Michelle Mahoney gave unstintingly of her energy and love, for which I am grateful. My colleagues at Queen's have been concretely but unobtrusively supportive--they know who they are l April Anderson ' a vitality and humorous debunking of intellectual pretensions have illuminated my darkest hours, while my personal debt to Rhonda Anderson is inseparable from my intellectual one. Her uncompromising friendship (she is no fan of what passes for "theoryn) inspired the difficult task of disentangling knowledge from power, and her insights pepper the salient moments of this work. This project is dedicated to my grandmothers, Kanthimathi, Madhurambal, and Kamala (scarred survivors of a colonial and Brahmin past) and to the women of a post-colonial future, Deepa, Pooja, and Arielle. I hope the women and men of the present in my family recognize their traces in this tribute to their clear-eyed love. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I: The End(s) of (Wo)Man or, The Limits of Difference.23 CHAPTER 11: Rethinking the Object ............................. 59 CWTER 111: Theodor W. Adorno................................83 SECTION I: Theory and Praxis: The Case of the Frankfurt School SECTION 11: "... an objectless inwardnessu: Philosophies of Identity SECTION 111: .... the preponderance of the object": Negative Dialectics SECTION IV: "Frankfurters and French Friesn: Adorno and Post-structuralism CHAPTER IV: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: The "curious guardian at the marginu. ...........................................165 CHAPTER V: Edward We Said..........e.................e........e218 SECTION I: "Secularw Criticism: (Dis)placing the Post-colonial Intellectual SECTION 11: In Search of we.o new objects for a new kind of knowledgew CONCLUSION: "... the inextinguishable color from non-being "....247 WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED......................................254 ABSTRACT The notion of the subject has come to replace that of the individual because critical discourse (at least within the domain of post-modernism) has become increasingly aware of "the necessity of understanding consciousness as something produced rather than as the source of ideas and the social world-ae constituted and not constitutivew (Chanaina the Subiect: Psvcholow, Social Requlation and Subiectivitv 7-8). If either self or world constitutes the "privileged beginning" (Chanainu the Subiect 9) of analysis, one is in danger of casting the individual in the role of the rational author of his/her destiny, while simultaneously treating social processes as the workings of immutable necessity, Such an analysis leaves no room for an understanding of the complex interactions between self and world and does not explain the often contradictory and constraining nature ofthose interactions, The aim, then, of contemporary critical analysis has been to treat "interior and exterior as problematic [indeed fluid] categoriesn (Chancrinu the Subiect 9) and to suggest an approach which both situates the subject and determines the conditions of its possibility (see John Mowitt's foreword to Paul Smith, Discerninu the Subiect xi). Post-modernism's denial of the constitutive power of consciousness has had consequences too for the claims of occidental reason. Friedrich Nietzsche was, of course, one of the first to demonstrate the inexorable manner in which the stability of the self becomes inseparable from the "will to know." Post-modernism envisages its task, therefore, as the exposure of the continuing predication of the legitimacy of knowledge upon the instrumentality of power. The post-modern subject, in representing itself as constituted rather than constitutive, has enabled the analysis of systemic relations which govern the constitution of subjects and which determine the possibilities for self-representation. This sensitivity to economies of power, desire, and knowledge which traverse and engender subjects has given post-modernism its undeniable edge, Nevertheless, precisely the political import of its strategy of displacement must be re-thought when the critical gaze shifts to the object or the other who is no longer content (if she or he ever was) that the erstwhile sovereign subject has abdicated its throne. My interest is in the subject which constitutes as its object the feminine and ethnic other of the discourse of Western patriarchy and Empire. This object functions as the guarantor of the subject's self- sufficiency and difference. Given this state of affairs, the self- effacement of the subject seems a necessary prelude to the appearance of a visible and voluble object, Paradoxically, however, the very process of self-effacement which exposes the illusory mastery of the subject simultaneously denies the resistance of the object. The displacement of the subject can all too easily become a convenient ploy for withholding subjectivity from those for whom it has never been anything but an illusion. The critique of essence, identity, and authenticity does not adequately account for the experience of being bereft of all three; indeed, such a critique appropriates that experience and transforms it into a moment of self-discovery for the critic rather than a recognition of otherness. In other words, if the sovereignty of the subject is only a necessary illusion, is the power exerted in the name of that fiction of mastery equally illusory? Whom shall the other hold accountable for its suffering? This revelation of the nexus of knowledge and power calls precisely for, in Michel Foucault's words, "... the usurpation of power [and] the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it" ("Nietzsche, Genealogy, Hiatoryn 88). Instead, critical discourse seems to have reached a kind of impasse in which theorists can do no more than bemoan the inherent violence of knowledge and its product-orepresentation. This thesis attempts, theref ore, to conceive of another knowledge that involves not the annihilation of the subject but its reformulation in confrontation with a resistant object. I wish to discover a mode of representation in which the colonized or the feminine functions as more than the West's "limit-textw (Homi Bhabha's phrase). I want to ensure that "the discovery of [Western and masculine] assumptions" does not preclude an investigation into the history and materiality of other cultures [and of femininity] (Bhabha, "Difference, Discrimination..." 196 and 197).