Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Grey Room, No. 1.(Autum……

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GreyRoom,No.1.(Autumn,2000),pp.8-25.

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system remains to be investigated.) Between 1971 and 1981, the growth rate of Bangalore was 76%, the fastest in Asia. Software companiesamong them Digital, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Verifone-re-evaluated India as a desirable place for software investment. Foreign companies who wanted to get their software developed in the Third World because of the"cheapness of laborw-a phrase that must be persistently unpacked by all global cultural studies persons-began to buy it in India instead of doing it themselves. The relationship between this and the European recession of 1973, as well as the electronification of the great international stock exchanges, is now the prehistory of"virtual money." In 1987 Texas Instruments moved in. It was the first company in India to use satellite communications. The cost of uplinking (my informant's word)-$300,000 a year to operate a"circuitu-was prohibitive for indigenous capital. To lower this was the competitive lure. Here the plot of"secession from society" thickens. It was helpful that movements"internal to the industryu--another phrase open to cultural unpacking-brought the cost down, in his own words, dramatically, to about$30,000 per half-circuit. (This actual player in the field, my informant, brought up"cheap labor." When the"culture" of Bangalore in cyberspace is studied as a disciplinein what is now called"Cultural Studiesu-a tiny shift in phrase says a lot about the changing times. A left-inclined Cultural Studies activist from Bangalore, putting new databases together for study abroad, said in New York City in March 2000 that there was"no working class" in the cyberindustry in India because it was"all software." Th

is is of course correct if you are thinking nation-state."No working class" can be compatible with"cheap labor" if"cheap labor" means software engineers who are working for onetenth the salary of their American counterparts, but are middle-class by Indian standards. The problem is that cyberconsciousness is supposed to globalize nation-think into post-nationalism. The fact that Southeast Asia doeshave a hardware-related, mostly female working class means nothing to Cultural Studies in Bangalore, located in South Asia.) To resume his narrative: In 1991 the Karnataka State Department of Electronics-in other words the public sector-established what my informant called an Earth Station. And, already in the late 1980s, development financial institutions-"private" companies coordinated by the World Bank but with some government shares-began to set up venture capital by financing fifteen-year loans as seed capital for startup software companies. Thus spoke a representative of the secessionist culture of Bangalore's Silicon City. There are several thousand software managers in the city,

10

Grey Room 01

mobile among the companies, who do not resemble the"average Indian," that impossible figure. (By silencing the anguished question that a woman, broadly from this community, put to me during a discussion session-"Why do our children want an American identity rather than an Indian one?"-I am of course cutting off an immensely important question about the gender division of labor in the culture of the megacity: for the husband, business and globalization, for the wife, childrearing and Americanization. The connection remains unmade.) My informant, this relaxed, good looking man, going slightly thick in the middle with stress and easy living, described himself, in effect, as a member of the secessionist culture: very good telecom links overseas, traveling abroad incessantly, making a dollar salary but living in India, free to be globally mobile in skills, with corresponding aspirations. If such persons seem to live only virtually in the real space called Bangalore, the words"real" and"virtual" belong to an earlier semiotic. Every rupture is also a repetition. . . . No doubt software development is virtual; people in different places can"work together" without physical dislocation. Yet, this in itself is not virtuality in a completely new sense. The fact of working without physical dislocation is, after all, the selling point of homeworking, post-Fordism, and the breaking of the working class through the dismantling of the actual factory. Looking at it another way, communication has always been telecommunication. Today its instrumentality has become indistinguishable from the circuits of finance capital. I have recently written of this elsewhere.2 In Capital I Marx described the entailed subject structure of capitalFoucault would call this an"assigned subject positionu-by way of Goethe's Faust:"an animated monster which begins to 'work' as if its b

ody Marx's solution to this was a reconstellation of were by love pos~essed."~ the position in the interest of redistribution, not a Luddite ego-idealism, as famous post-Marxists have been known too easily to suggest, so much so that a footnote reference would be risible. Call it a"dominant theoretical trend" and let it go. Marx wrote about industrial capitalism. Lenin shifted the base to point at the importance of commercial capital. Recently, Saskia Sassen has suggested that authority and legitimacy have passed to the finance capital market, which she calls the"economic citizenF4If Marx was describing the subject-structure of industrial capital, we are here describing the subject of electronic secessionist culture, the economic citizen as"person," as a displacement of the Marxian system. Sfhe carries the entailed subject