TANI E. BARLOW

DEGREE ZERO OF HISTORY

ATEN YEARS AGO,  the feminist journal differences published a discussion in two parts. The editors classified as a “document” the draft of a Gayatri Spivak essay and an attached “Comment” on “Feminism in Decolonization” from Joan Scott. This publication of a “document” sought to capture one moment in an ongoing colloquy involving Spivak, some relatively open-minded disciplinary historians (e.g., Natalie Davis) at Princeton University’s Davis Center for Historical Studies where Spivak was undertaking research, and Joan Scott at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Spivak’s essay, organized around some questions of subalternity and agency, addressed various interlocutors.  Scott, for her part, used the occasion to expand on her own preoccupations with how historical practices should be restructured around specific theoretical initiatives and what historians at the time were not doing to achieve this end.

The exchange between the literary critic (preoccupied with history) and the historian (engaged with theoretical resources for history studies) stuck in my imagination. Spivak, Scott claimed, had set out “like a good historian” to gather evidence about the subject of her essay, temple prostitutes or devadasi.  But after completing the provisional work of selecting evidence Spivak had then parted with disciplinary convention in the history profession (where temporal continuity and the centrality of the common sense person or humanist subject are generally assumed) in order to write about genre, media, and disciplinary limits. Instead of presuming stable subjects (persons or groups) available to the researcher, Spivak wrote about potential agency; rather than historical “accuracy,” she wrote about plausibility through the uncanniness of imagination; reluctant to adjudicate among the historiographers, she proposed that historical representation could not expect to solve the question of what had really happened.

Scott actually shared many of Spivak’s concerns. Indeed, Scott concluded her own comment by asking, “Once we recognize the limits of representation, is history possible?”  Of course, Scott affirmed that it was, but with some equivocation. History, she argued, would survive the critique of representation because at one level history is just another Enlightened, institutional, academic discipline. But could this crisis compound the difficulty of history-writing, since it proposed the need to write “infinitely more complex” histories “than we are accustomed to thinking [about]”?  Graciously, Scott even suggested that historians of her own generation were no longer fit to produce these new sort of infinitely complex, but “accurate,” historical works.

As leftist criticism has collapsed into globalization theory, the differences document has kept alive for me a need to continue thinking of history (the discipline, the problematic, and the past) as the remainder. The problem is that the infinitely complex and accurate historical work that Scott anticipated has largely not materialized.  Scott was quite taken with Gayatri Spivak’s seeming ability adventitiously to do what “good historians” do. And yet in subsequent years this normative question of what is a “good historian” has not changed either the discipline or cultural studies very much.

Today it is clear that what Scott identified as a “crisis of representation” a decade ago was actually a harbinger of an even graver crisis. Since 1989, a host of newly configured institutional production sites have emerged within downsizing universities to straddle older disciplines in the name of globalization. Globalization has two meanings in the context of this paper. First, globalization or economic globalization describes the uneven spread of finance capital through larger and larger markets, states, regions, and corporate entities. Second, as a trend meriting the name of “globalization theory” (on the analogy of “modernization theory”), it is a serviceable blueprint to old-style disciplines and whole universities for “globalizing” or “internationalizing” their curricula (for example, the 1997 University of Washington “Report of the President’s Task Force on Internationalizing the Curriculum”). Globalization plays this role because of its ideological-institutional qualities and its indebtedness to the United Nations and large capital funds or donor-agencies. The World Bank (e.g., its focus on gender and development), the Ford Foundation (e.g., the “Crossing Borders” project in Asian Studies, and the “Global Women’s Studies” and “Women’s Global Leadership Project” in Gender and Women Studies, etc.), and other sponsors finance explicitly functional research outside the older disciplinary lines. As a university policy, then, globalization contains and fosters a rationale for “training” students to be workers in the new political economy. Allegedly, this policy attracts capital into the university from local corporations looking to hire workers who are minimally literate in international multiculturalism.  Resulting projects, sometimes under the rubric of policy studies, are logically driven to legitimate the emergent political configuration.  So globalization theory is both a policy and an institutional practice of restructuring vulnerable teaching units in a way that mirrors the opening up of the primary target of economic globalization theory: vulnerable national economies.