Death of a Discipline

Abstract

Reviewed by: Death of a Discipline Roland Greene Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Pp. 136. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's book belongs to a short but dense tradition of retrospectives, proposals, and jeremiads on the topic of Comparative Literature, a discipline always in search of itself. Delivered in 2000 in the Wellek Library lecture series at Irvine, Death of a Discipline is one of the obligatory books of this decade for comparatists. While I cannot imagine anyone endorsing it in large, many readers will find much to agree with in little, including brilliant observations and suggestions that are scattered throughout the book's one hundred pages. The utopian aspect of Spivak's critique of Comparative Literature does not diminish its urgency or its impact. The premise of Spivak's argument is that, as of 2000, most academic programs in Comparative Literature in the United States centered their attention on "Europe and the extracurricular Orient" (6), in an unprincipled denial of the discipline's claim of worldwide scope. At the same time, programs in area studies—usually interdepartmental committees in Asian Studies, African Studies, Latin American Studies, and so on—found themselves in search of a renewed mission, having prospered with the Cold War and declined in its wake. Accordingly, Spivak first proposes an alliance between Comparative Literature and area studies, with the goal of making these enterprises resemble each other. Comparative Literature would gain from the linguistic and political coverage, institutional alliances, and rigor of area studies, while area studies would learn to think conceptually about things that are better understood through close reading of all kinds of texts than through empirical observation—for instance, in what ways cultures come to be imagined as others (the imagination is "the great inbuilt instrument of othering" [13]). Area studies, she believes, should learn to approach "the language of the other not only as a 'field' language" (9). Comparative Literature (represented for her in large part by the report prepared by the late Charles Bernheimer's committee for the American Comparative Literature Association and published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1994), committed to a national and territorial model of the world, must, in turn, attend to the new demographic frontiers of the postcolonial and globalized era. The disciplines would find common ground in language—comparatists because they would learn languages outside the conventional ambit, area scholars because they would be exposed to languages "with literary depth rather than only social scientific fluency" (106). [End Page 154] Spivak's second chapter makes a provocative case that "collect-ivities"—the question of "who are 'we'?"—mark one of the most difficult issues for comparatists. Haun Saussy's recent report to the ACLA, soon to be published by Johns Hopkins, begins with a brief consideration of this question from an institutional standpoint: Who are comparatists? Spivak, however, raises the more elusive question of who constitutes "the 'human' of 'humanism'" (23), the cultural collectivity of and for whom Comparative Literature speaks. Perhaps in the continuing conversation taking place in the field, the question of collectivity has been pushed aside by an insistent focus on the objects of Comparative Literature; perhaps the matter of collectivities has seemed both too obvious and too difficult. Spivak's approach in this chapter is complex, with several extensive digressions, but the core of her argument here can be summarized in two points. The first is that comparatists should take account of what Jacques Derrida calls teleiopoeisis. Defined here as "to affect the distant in a poeisis—an imaginative making—without guarantees" (31), the term refers to acts of the imagination that cross time and space with uncertain outcomes and that are essential to the making of discontinuous collectivities.1 Spivak proposes that teleiopoeisis will be one of the decisive literary and critical modes of the globalized world, that a "copying (rather than cutting) and pasting" (34) across cultural zones is fashioning the works and readers of the present. It is hard to disagree, and one supposes that a sustained project on teleiopoeisis and Comparative Literature, both historical and contemporary, is overdue. Spivak's forays into the concept are uneven but illuminating: the most successful...