Timmermans and Tavory settle on, or narrow an understanding of the ab- in abduction to one sense: it "suggests" a "leading away;" abduction is "an inferential creative process of producing new hypotheses and theories based on surprising research evidence. A researcher is led away from old to new theoretical insights." (p.170) In another annotation I'll muse on the theory fixation, or centrality, which I'll ascribe uncharitably to sociologists. But here I focus on this narrowing of the ab- to its dominant meaning, away from. It's what Mike Fischer might say is symptomatic of a symbolic approach, an approach I think is also symtpomatic of the coding paradigm: ab- symbolizes "away." Or: ab- is code for "away." End of story, end of analysis -- actually, no analysis necessary.
So does abduction "suggest" abuse? It could, but the translation or substitution is far from perfect, and the difference or remainder is crucial. Let's start with the difference in the ab- for Spivak: ab-use for her is first "to use from below." (Aesthetic Education intro, p. 11). Or at greater length:
In 1992, asked to give the first T.B. Davie Memorial lecture at the University of Cape Town after the lifting of apartheid, I suggested that we learn to use the European Enlightenment from below. I used the expression "ab-use" because the Latin prefix "ab" says much more than "below." Indicating both "motion away" and "agency, point of origin," "supporting," as well as "the duties of slaves," it nicely captures the double bind of the postcolonial and the metropolitan migrant regarding the Enlightenment. We want the public sphere gains and private sphere constraints of the Enlightenment; yet we must also find something relating to "our own history" to counteract the fact that the Enlightenment came, to colonizer and colonized alike, through colonialism, to support a destructive "free trade," and that top-down policy breaches of Enlightenment principles are more rule than exception. This distinguishes our efforts from the best in the modern European attempts to use the European Enlightenment critically, with which we are in sympathy, enough to subvert! But "ab-use" can be a misleading neographism, and come to mean simply "abuse." That should be so far from our intentions that I thought to sacrifice precision and range and simply say "from below." This too rankles, for it assumes that "we," whoever we are, are below the level of the Enlightenment. A double bind, again." (p. 3-4)
So Spivak's ab- doesn't code for any one meaning; it doesn't lead "us" ("whoever we are") away from or toward any one reading, or to another place of reading. As befits a double-binding situation, an ab-use remains right where it is and endures the contradictions of that place; it tries to activate or at least acknowledge the multiplicities and dissemination of the concept/term.
