CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?

CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK? by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
0018922 - Feb.2006

The conclusion seems to be, no they cannot [subaltern speak], though it would be better if they did.

I am beginning to sympathise with these incomprehensible writers. There is so much background required to understand what they are talking about, it is difficult writing. Certainly my own writing here would be equally indecipherable to the outside reader since I will not bother to elaborate all of the context for the essay I'm responding to. Still, I don't understand what's with all the "..."s? Spivak also uses big compounded words like postrepresentationalist, historiography and subproletariat among others. Was he German? Because, in German, you can just put any words together to make bigger words. Fun!

I'll try and start with definitions of parts of the essay I didn't understand so as to be as enlightening as possible. These are passages that I've gathered from the essay and then tried to define the words in boldface using Google, Wikipedia, Wikitionary, Altavist.babelfish and other internet sources:

cathect, as in "the subject could cathect, could occupy [invest] its itinerary"
to inject or focus libidinal, mental, and emotional energy, to perk up. Similar to cathexis from Freudian psychology and originating from the idea of occupation, in a non-military non-job sense.

"under erasure"
erasure is total blankness, "like a cow watching a train go by," not a positive term.

"transcendental signified"
this is Derrida's term related to phallocentricism, and logocentricism that privileges the signified over the signifier. I think it is quite bizarre that we have to tie it somehow to the penis, even though we are rejecting that Freudian outlook and so much else.

"epistemic violence"
related to epistemology, theory of knowledge. I guess this means the violence inherent in the system.

"palimpsestic narrative of imperialism"
a document that has been rewritten. Derived from the history of European manuscripts written on animal skins paper which were quite valuable. Thus, some paper was reused/rewritten after the old writing was scraped clean. Sometimes, the reasons for doing this were political rather than material; Christian text was written over Pagan, to erase the history.

"the required level of cognition or scientificity"
Foucault uses this term to be critical of science. It reminds me of a word I sort of invented a meaning for myself, Scientifical, which means kind of falsely attributing credibility to something by associating it with Science.

"urban subproletariat"
I'm guessing this is the people who don't have jobs - living under the proletariat - and in cities.

"can the subaltern speak?"
subordinate, lower rank, class or position. Kind of a one up term that is even more hardcore than oppressed or proletariat.

"Indian colonial historiography"
the epistemology of written history. A good concept to recognise. People write history for the present that they live in and will therefore always have bias in reading the past.

"practical historiographic exigencies"
demand, necessity, urgency is basically what exigency means, but to combine that with practical and historiographic?!

"antre" Derrida's term
cave, in French? A place of in-betweenness

"situational indeterminacy"
I couldn't find anything except to presume that when you live in a cave you situation is indeterminate.

"postrepresentationalist"
Well, that's an obvious one isn't it: That mute man over there without a camera is a dogmatic postrepresentationalist.

"Name-of-the-Father imagery in The Eighteenth Brumaire"
refers to a writing by Marx about Napoleon I and later and his Grandson Napoleon III coming to power as dictators. It's often cited in understanding Fascism. Brumaire is the name of a month from the 10 month French republican calendar

"patronymic"
name of the father

"'rendering visible the medical and juridical mechanisms that surround the story [of Pierre Riviere].'"
juridical is relating to the law and its administration. In something Foucault wrote about crime, he used the name Pierre Riviere as his protagonist murderer example. I have yet to read the story however.

"concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern"
following as a consequence

"semioses of the social text"
a misspelling of semiosis perhaps? Meaning, production of meaning. [tee, hee]

"minimal predication as indeterminate"
dependency

"race and class differences are subsumed under that charge"
take under the above idea

"general violence that is the possibility of an episteme"
sort of like a paradigm, what we see as truth collectively

Who is Deleuze?
he was a philosopher who said desire is productive, and was connected to Guha and Spivak intellectually.

So apparently Guha wrote about peasant uprisings. I find that topic a lot more exciting than Spivak.

Spivak seems to be saying that by writing a history of peasants we are stealing their voice to articulate their own needs. We have a kind of fetish interest in the peasant uprising but that is not enough, the subaltern has an "irretrievable consciousness" which we can't connect to because we use the "elaborations of insurgency" in place of their genuine "utterance." The elaborations are merely historians products, historiography - not what the peasants truly intended to express by revolting. We should know the limits of what we can say for a group we are not a part of.

Spivak notes how there is a kind of buffer group in between the elite class and the subaltern, called group number 3. These people live in antre, a French cave of in-betweenness. By focusing on group 3 instead of the subaltern we are proving that continuing the perspective of elites who do help the subaltern speak for themselves, but focus on the middle class group 3 that are similar to the academic elites - except they're in India, and we're in France. Group 3 is "irretrievably heterogeneous," and this is important to Spivak. I think this is because he implies that the subaltern is also heterogeneous.

Finally Spivak connects this all rather vaguely to identity. Heterogeneous is a way of saying the group is made up of different minority identity groups. He says that women subaltern are even more oppressed than men subaltern, and subsumes the other racial and other kinds of minority groups in that statement. Much earlier in the article he says that the margins are the silent centre "easily." I agree that diversity is what makes up groups such as the subaltern and number 3. I agree that we should support people in these groups to speak for themselves. However, I don't think diversity by itself is a totally functional idea without unity balancing with it. Spivak kind of implies a unity by calling all the heterogeneous groups as subaltern and implying a kind of Marxist liberation purpose. However, I think that unity stuff is more important and should be emphasised or articulated more than it is in his writing.

When I think about these issues I think it would be more useful to have dialogue not among young impressionably university students only, but also with people like my Grandma who have the perspective of living out these ideas over the course of time. My Grandma was married into the British army and was a bit of a colonialist herself. It would be a deeper conversation if we talked about putting these ideas of justice versus exploitation into practice. My Grandma believes in justice and not exploiting people, yet, she still was a part of perpetrating a lot of things that have left a terrible scar. I don't think she thinks of it that way, even if my schoolbooks do.

What is this Radical Criticism coming out of the West Today? Is that in 1988? and where?
What is the difference between the oppressed, the subaltern and the notion of feminine?