Can the Subaltern Speak?
From Teachiwiki
From Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988, p. 271-313. All page number citations refer to this edition.
For an intellectual biography of Spivak, see this page
Spivak's contribution with "Can the Subaltern Speak" is to politicize Derridean deconstruction in order to elaborate a method for emancipatory readings and cultural interventions. She defines her project as fourfold:
1) Problematize the Western subject and see how it is still operational in poststructuralist theory (Foucault & Deleuze);
2) Re-read Marx to find a more radical decentering of the subject that also more leaves room for the formation of class identifications that are non-essentialist;
3) Argue that Western intellectual production reinforces the logic of Western economic expansion;
4) Perform a close reading of sati to analyze the discourses of the West and the possibilities for speech that the subaltern woman has (or does not have) within that framework.
Contents |
Part One
In this section, Spivak criticizes postmodern thought, singling to Foucault and Deleuze, for short-circuiting the radical implications of the 'crisis of the subject' by introducing the concept of "subject-effects" differing in name but not in function from traditional subjects. She alleges that, while much may be useful about their contributions, their political effectiveness is vitiated by an almost willful ignoring of "the question of ideology and their own implication in intellectual and economic history" (272).
Starting with Deleuze and Guattari's invocation of an undifferentiated "desire" as undergirding all kinds of revolutionary movements and acts, Spivak shows how the unspoken and uninterrogated presumptions behind these totalizing theories ends up reinforcing the subject position of the theorists themselves: "When the connection between desire and subject are taken as irrelevant or merely reverse, the subject-effect that surreptitiously emerges is much like the generalized ideological subject of the theorist. This may be the legal subject of socialized capital, neither labor nor management, holding a "strong" passport, using a "strong" or "hard" currency, with supposedly unquestioned access to due process. It is certainly not the desiring subject as Other" (273). Similarly, she faults Foucault for emphasizing the pervasiveness and heterogeneity of power while ignoring how power produces ideology as such, and instead filling the place of ideology with a generalized 'culture.' The notion that desire and interest may operate at cross-purposes under the effects of ideology seem to escape Deleuze and Foucault, and Spivak identifies their persistent belief in a unified subject, re-dubbed "subject-effect" as the cause of this blindspot.
Spivak identifies a contradiction between Foucault's and Deleuze's valorizing of the concrete experience of oppression while shedding little light on the baggage of the intellectual as a conflation of the ideas of "represent" (as in politics/speaking for the interests of) and "re-present" (when what is presented becomes fused with its signifed and takes on an immediacy of presence). She turns to Marx to demonstrate how his concept of class formation clearly differentiates between these two meaning of re(-)present. Marx sees the familiar relation and class relation as complete dissimilar; class consciousness is instead a result of dispossession and therefore a response to an artificial situation that is historical - does not reify/fix the classes OR the subject but situates it and makes it contingent on historical factors. Class is both a necessary political representation (politically) yet not a heroic re-presenting or fusion of the specific workers and their specific conditions.
Spivak most clearly identifies her intellectual call to action: "The relationship between global capitalism (exploitation in economics) and nation-state allegiances (domination in geopolitics) is so macrological that is cannot account for the micrological texture of power. To move toward such an accounting one must move toward theories of ideology--of subject formations that micrologically and often erratically operate the interests that congeal the macrologies...My view is that radical practice should attend to this double session of representation rather than reintroduce the individual subject through totalizing concepts of power and desire" (279).
Spivak closes this section by observing that, while postmodern criticism, seems obsessed with theorizing the Other, it always proceeds from the assumption that the other is constitutive of (and a shadow of) the Subject and that further work to understand how that Subject produced itself--via ideology, science, law, and economics. She alleges that postmodern 'dislocation' is not so radical a move that would render obsolete all economic analysis (as capitalism itself was born out of economic and spatial dislocations). The intellectual worker must see economics as irreducible, even if not the final determinate of the social text.
Part Two
Spivak defines her use of the term 'subaltern' here as complicated from Antonio Gramsci's because of Imperialism. She takes issue with the reliance of subaltern studies AND the colonizers on the testimony of a 'buffer' class of 'native informants'. In neither case is the subaltern really discussed or heard but rather still consituted by what it is not...
Part Three
Part Four
- in postcolonial context, terms “black,” “of colour” lose persuasive significance; necessary stratification of colonial subject-constitution in first phase of capitalist imperialism makes ‘colour’ useless as emancipatory signifier - speaking specifically about subaltern female subject
- “in seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman, the postcolonial intellectual systematically “unlearns” female privilege.”
- part of ‘unlearning project,’ to articulate masculine-imperialist ideological formation into the object of investigation - “white men are saving brown women from brown men,” in spirit of freud’s investigation of “a child is being beaten” (making woman the scapegoat): discloses politics
- “subject is text’ does not mean “text is subject”
- history of repression in sentence, double origin: British abolition of widow sacrifice in 1829, classical & Vedic past of Hindu India
- Brits: “saving brown women, Indian nativists: “women actually wanted to die’ --legitimize each other
- Protection of (third world) women, signifier of ‘good’ society
- Foucault: epestime is ‘aparatus’ which makes possible the separation not of the true from the false, but of what may not be characterized as scientific.
- Sati as proof of conformity to older norms
- General scriptural doctrine: suicide is reprehensible. But, room made for a formulaic performance that loses phenomenal identity of being suicide - May be read as simulacrum of both truth-knowledge and piety of place, as an exceptional signifier of female’s desire, exceeding general rule of widow’s conduct (but in certain periods & areas, due to population control, communal misogyny, etc, became general rule in a class-specific way)
- Within the two contending versions of freedom, “constitution of the female subject in life is the place of the differend.” Widow self-immolation not redefined as a superstition, but a crime.
- Sati could have been read in context of martyrdom or war; instead, categorized w/ murder, etc., free will of female subject effaced
- In traditional India, legally programmed asymmetry effectively defines the woman as object of one husband, therefore: sati, extreme case of general law, rather than an exception to it
- Conflation of individual & supraindividual agency
- “if the oppressed under socialized capital have no necessarily unmediated access to ‘correct’ resistance, can the ideology of sati, coming from the history of the periphery, be sublated into any model of interventionist practice?”
- a young woman kills herself for political purposes, waits for menstruation to ensure her suicide won’t be read as “outcome of illegitimate passion”: (1) reversal of interdict against menstruating widow’s right to immolation, (2) subaltern rewriting of social context of sati
- subaltern cannot speak; representation has not withered away; female intellectual must not disown circumscribed task
Questions
Why does Spivak see tools for postcolonial theory articulated by European theorists? What is the purpose of subalternity for Spivak? She says that coming to an understanding of subalternity is for the production of knowledge; this is a very Western rationalist position to take, one in which the oppressed are doing their oppressors a favor rather than challenging or dismantling their power. How does this function, anyway, when the epistemological conditions for speech are foreclosed to subalterns?
By reserving the crisis of subjectivity to Europeans and the authenticity of experience to 'subalterns,' poststructuralists end up recapitulating a number of problems:
1) foreclosing culture and theory for the oppressed who "only" have recourse to concrete experience, which gets valorized as "untouchably" authentic (double-meaning intentional)
2) giving up on even attempting to understand/speak to the experience of "others" since it is their own and unknowable
3) creating and relying on a 'native informer' class
Spivak herself is (arguably) from the 'native informant' class (though born shortly before independence) and deals with issues of translation in her work (critiqueing translatability of Western ideas of subjectivity). Since she has invited us to consider how position influences politics/theory, how does her position influence her work?
Spivak says the Subaltern can’t speak because by having a single “voice” you are being essentialist, reductionist, bipolar (“master and slave dialectic) and not looking at class. (This is a continuation of the dialogue of the Indian Subaltern Studies Project of the 1980’s.)
Links
Glossary of Key Terms in the Work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
