Who Sings the Nation-State?
Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler
Seagull Books, 2007
120 pages , $19.95
Who Sings the Nation-State? is a substantial book, but ultimately it is less a legitimate work of theory than a product designed to appeal to students at the Book Culture check-out counter in the same way the new John Grisham book appeals to someone at the Wal-Mart register. The book's central conceit lies more in its brand—Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, the Lennon and McCartney of postmodern theory—than in its actual content. And that's a shame, because the book's refreshingly accessible subject holds such potential.
The book is structured as a conversation between the two with no introduction, no context, and no explanation of when, where, and why this conversation is taking place. The text suggests that the conversation began prior to the first page, as a few sentences later Spivak refers to a statement by Butler that appears nowhere in the book. And in the final pages, there are anonymous questions that seem to be from an academic audience, yet previously there has been no indication that this is a public conversation. This is either lazy editing or an ill-founded stylistic choice. In the case of a book whose main strands of thought center on the performative aspects of power, context is vital.
The title refers to the problem of a national anthem. Who is entitled to sing it, and in what language are they allowed to do so? Butler says that when illegal immigrants sing the national anthem in California, they are staking a claim to inclusion and equality. Spivak, on the other hand, points to India, where the national anthem is only sung in Hindi, even though it's written in Bengali. In each country, real power is exercised through language, and the ways in which power is negotiated via language calls for close analysis.
Unfortunately, the book does not live up to its promise because it never sets the conditions for its own argument. Butler begins with a discourse on the meaning of "state" and how we should understand those who are effectively "stateless" and yet still under the control of state power. She gestures to those currently imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay and also to the Palestinians in Gaza, among others. She suggests that we might pause and consider states first simply as "the conditions in which we find ourselves" before moving on to a more juridico-political conception. "What kind of state are we in when we start to think about the state?" she asks.
In answering Butler's question, Spivak refuses to employ a binary opposition between the philosophical and the practical. This is theory aimed at practical consequence, specifically at understanding what it means to oppose a nation-state in which minorities are refused certain rights and to oppose a global capital order that has no interest in, among other things, providing clean drinking water for the poor.
For all of its problems, the book does raise several provocative questions about the meaning of states and the ways in which post-national states might someday be organized, drawing on both the European Union model and on what Spivak calls "critical regionalisms." It's worth a quick read, and it's short enough to stomach in one sitting.
