Migration and Diaspora Cultural Studies Network (MDCSN)
Theory Reading Group
Meeting 7: Thursday 3 May 2007 4-5.30pm
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 'Can the Subaltern Speak'? in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossburg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, Il: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313.
Spivak's article moves from a critique of current Western efforts to problematise the subject to a still more radical de-centring of the subject implicit in Marx and Derrida. It makes the point that western intellectual production is complicit with Western international economic interests, and finally raises the question of how the third-world subject is represented within Western discourse, using the example of sati (widow sacrifice). The juxtapositions brought into play over the course of the article emphasise how 'benevolent' Western intellectuals can paradoxically silence the subaltern by claiming to speak for their experience (by asserting that the subaltern 'knows') in the same way that 'benevolent' colonialists silenced the voices of the women who 'chose' to immolate themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres i.e. it is in the appropriation of the voice of the subaltern that s/he is silenced.
The article begins with a critique of Foucault and Deleuze who, according to Spivak, short-circuit the radical implications of the 'crisis of the subject' by introducing the concept of 'subject effects', which differ in name, but not in function, from traditional subjects. She argues that, while many of their contributions are useful, their political effectiveness is impaired by systematically ignoring the question of ideology and their own implication in intellectual and economic history. She objects to their use of 'master words' such as 'the workers', which generalise the experience of a diverse range of people (conversely, her own use of the term 'subaltern' is emphatically multiple).
Beginning with Deleuze and Guattari's implementation of an undifferentiated 'desire' supporting all kinds of revolutionary movements and acts, Spivak demonstrates how the unspoken and un-interrogated assumptions behind these totalising theories end in reinforcing the subject positions of the theorists themselves. She criticises Foucault for emphasising the pervasiveness and heterogeneity of power while ignoring how power produces ideology, and instead filling the place of ideology with a generalised notion of 'culture.' According to Spivak, the idea that desire and interest may work in opposition to one another under the effects of ideology seems to escape Deleuze and Foucault.
Spivak finds a contradiction between Foucault and Deleuze's valorising of the concrete experience of oppression while providing little explanation of the baggage of the intellectual in the conflation of the ideas of 'representing' (as in politics/speaking for the interests of a group of people) and 're-presenting' (when what is presented becomes fused with its signified and takes on an immediacy of presence). She refers to Marx to demonstrate how his concept of class formation clearly differentiates between darstellen and vertreten.
Spivak goes on to define the way in which she is using 'subaltern', and how this differs from Gramsci's use of the term. She objects to the reliance of subaltern studies on a 'buffer' class of 'native informants', which was also a colonial practice, pointing out that the subaltern is neither discussed nor heard, but rather constituted by what it is not.
The final part of the article discusses how the body of the sati becomes an ideological battleground between religiously-informed concepts of 'good wifehood' and the exercising of colonial power, and how as a result of this battle (in which Hindu men, colonial archivists and 'benevolent' colonialists recording the experience in literature are all at odds) the voices of the women themselves are silenced to such an extent that they are now impossible to recover. Spivak then describes the set of circumstances surrounding the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, a young Bengali woman, whose attempt at self-representation through suicide failed. Spivak concludes that, here, 'the subaltern cannot speak' because Bhaduri's attempt to speak outside of normal channels and intervene in/rewrite the 'social text' of sati was, ultimately, not understood: indeed it was 'misread.' Her voice was silenced and irretrievable because of the subsequent narratives that were played out over her body.
Points of discussion included Spivak's critique of Deleuze and Foucault: particularly whether Spivak was mis-reading the Deleuzian concept of 'desire', or whether the latter articulated atypical views in his conversation with Foucault. It was also questioned whether Spivak's insistence on the divided subject (c.f. Freud and Marx, where we do not necessarily act in our own interests) resulted in a fixed idea of how one can be political. Possible interpretations of the terms darstellen and vertreten, were debated and it was concluded that darstellen was primarily aesthetic in nature, while vertreten was political. We discussed to what extent Spivak's argument depends on radical religious and cultural differences (the incommensurability of translation between cultures). It was concluded that the text raised important issues some of which remained unanswered, especially regarding responses/attitudes towards apparently 'culturally unacceptable' practices (sites of radical untranslatability, here embodied by the sati).
Rachel Ramsay and Kate Roy