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scrupulous ends’ (251). What gives this formula its charge is the recognition of
what Spivak calls, in the opening interview with Ellen Rooney, ‘the full share of…
ambivalence toward the culture of imperialism’ (10). This is not only a case of one
of ‘midnight’s children’ warily eyeing freedom’s morning and announcing in the
manner of Faiz Ahmed Faiz: ‘This stained brightness, this morning marked by
night/This is not the dawn we had waited for.’ If Spivak’s ambivalence is more
than another name for the dilemmas of the postcolonial negotiating the limits of
nationalism, it can perhaps best be described as the productive unease of the
migrant intellectual in the Western academy who occupies a space she ‘cannot not
want to inhabit and yet must criticize’ (64). There is no disavowal of the
institutional positioning of the subject here, even while there is an incessant
fretting, or even fighting, at its limits. The postcolonial question in this context is
a very specific one: how will one teach ‘Shahbano’ in the classroom? In
remembering Shahbano, one struggles with Spivak because Outside in the
Teaching Machine is, in a very certain sense, a response to that pedagogical
question.
As ‘the post-colonial critic’, as ‘a highly commodified distinguished professor’,
as Rushdie’s ‘tall, thin Bengali woman with cropped hair’ (‘Society was
orchestrated by what she called grand narratives,’ Rushdie writes of that character
he names Swatilekha in The Satanic Verses), as the one who can be reduced to a
token for all diasporic folk, for all Indians in the US, for all Indians, period, all
Third World women, or for all high-profile, tenured faculty with an investment in
multiculturalism or the feminist battles—Spivak knows very well that she is
trading in identities. That is why she often repeats in this book that, inside the
academy, ‘names like “Asian” or “African” (or indeed “American” or “British”)
have histories that are not anchored in identities but rather secure them’ (53). The
goat of cultural criticism is quite clearly tethered to the pole of non-identitarian
work. Here, Spivak knowingly treads on shaky ground: the founding basis for her
work is the instability of language itself, its fundamentally catachrestical nature.
The question, of course, is ‘Why is this lesson about proximate naming a very
useful thing to teach your students?’
The OED defines catachresis thus: ‘Improper use of words, application of a term
to a thing which it does not properly denote, abuse or perversion of trope or
metaphor.’ In Spivak’s writing, the idea of catachresis as a metaphor without an
adequate literal referent becomes a model for all metaphors, all names. In the
heavier air of the post-colonies, that is to say in that air heavier with history, the
concept of catachresis allows Spivak to script the appeals to ‘Western’ ideas in a
challenging and novel way. The calls for proper ‘citizenship’ or ‘nationhood’ are
seen in those theaters as catachrestical claims to concept-metaphors for which no
(pre)existing adequate referent may be advanced from the postcolonial spaces.
What gives this point greater force is that the graphic of mis-naming allows Spivak
to gesture towards the female subaltern in the post-colony who occupies an
unnameable space, a position outside the easily recuperable spaces of both
benevolence and resistance.