can the subaltern speak?

"Can the subaltern speak?" So Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wondered in a seminal essay of twenty years ago, only to answer the question with a resounding no. For Spivak, the "continuing construction of the subaltern" exercised by the hegemonic culture appeared sufficiently powerful to foreclose the possibilities of self-articulation by the subaltern subject. ¹ But shifting from the British commonwealth context to the American context, one might shift Spivak's question from "can the subaltern speak?" to "should the subaltern speak?" along with the necessary corollary, "speak to whom?" These questions prove especially pertinent to the wide range of Native American cultures that remain relatively under-represented and understudied even within a diversifying contemporary academy, whether this neglect comes as a consequence of hegemonic neglect or subaltern indifference.

 

"They cannot represent themselves; they must be spoken for”

 Containing this bold speaking Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" originally published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg's Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture reflects Spivak's interest in the processes by which postcolonial studies reaffirm neocolonial discourses.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was born to a metropolitan middle-class family in Calcutta, West Bengal, on February 24, 1942. Gayatri Chakravorty  Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" questions  the notion of the colonial (and Western) "subject" and provides an example of the limits of the ability of Western discourse, even postcolonial discourse, to interact with disparate cultures. This article suggests that these limits can be (partially) overcome. Where much commentary on Spivak focuses on her reading of Marx through the prism of Derrida, and on her contention that the "native informant" is simultaneously created and destroyed,

In summary, the reaction to Spivak's essay can be generalized as taking three major forms: as

      an attempt to enable or allow the speech of the subaltern;

       an attempt to find the authentic subaltern "self"; and

      an effort to search for a "universal" or "cosmopolitan" subject. 

To do so Spivak gave some of the examples regarding to the studies of subaltern. She discussed about the definition of the subaltern. According to her “Subaltern” refers to the people who have been as equally instrumental in history as the Europeans, but have been under-represented, their hidden history, and to the historiographers who study them. Subaltern can be broken up into sub, meaning under, and altern, meaning alternative or marginalized. Spivak’s main concern is with the people of India, and repressed females in Asia. Spivak’s main argument concerning the subaltern is that there is no way the subaltern can ever be heard. She addresses this problem in one of her most influential essays, Can the Subaltern Speak?. The answer, according to Spivak, is no. As soon as the subaltern tries to acquire a voice, they must move into the dominant discourse to be understood. Therefore, they must remove themselves from the subaltern position, which also means that they are no longer speaking from that position. Since there is no way to get out of this cycle, Spivak has concluded that the subaltern is a silent position.

In this essay, Spivak questions the notion of the colonial (and Western) "subject." She argues that European intellectuals have assumed that they know the "other" and can place it in the context of the narrative of the oppressed: "Intellectuals must attempt to disclose and know the discourse of society's Other."

Spivak notes that Deleuze's focus on the "workers' struggle" is characteristic of his Eurocentrism. It is a "genuflection."  There is no way, for example, in which Deleuze can account for ideas, culture, or ideology. This problem is also seen in the trendy "claiming" of Chairman Mao by the perennially "new" Left: to use the term Maoist in the European context is to cause Asia to be transparent.
Additionally, on Spivak's account, the microlevel histories of Foucault glorify only the personal nature of resistance. These histories ignore the macrohistorical trends that might place the subaltern as a key player. Looking at the larger concentrations of power--an approach almost antithetical to Foucault's whole project--would expose the oppressive nature of colonialism in a way that Foucauldian histories cannot. Foucault cannot "see" the intellectual continuity of history; he sees only the disjuncture. Yet the struggles of the colonial people are "played out in the context of global capitalism and imperialism."

She focused on the Foucault and Deleuze, According to their conversation  First World intellectuals, share with the subaltern studies group is the notion no less dangerous for being naive that "the oppressed . . . can speak and know their conditions." And thus to the general plague of essentialism which in truly internationalist fashion circulates freely between the First and Third Worlds, Spivak proposes the antidote of a single question: can the subaltern speak? It is a testimony to the power of Spivak's essay that this question has come to dominate an entire theoretical field to such an extent that the vast majority of responses have consisted of answers to, rather than examinations of, her question. It is as if there exists a simple dilemma before us: either we argue that the subaltern can indeed speak, in which case according to one's perspective we have either brought agency back in or, in contrast, lapsed into essentialism; or we argue with Spivak that the subaltern cannot speak, which means for some that we have silenced the oppressed, which for others we have refused the myth of the originary subject. Few have ventured to question the question itself, to ask how such a question functions and what are its practical effects. Spivak seeks to drive a Derridean wedge between the two thinkers.

Spivak wants to expose the complicit nature of literature and the intellectual elite, which often appears innocent in the political realm of oppression

To scrutinize Marxism's relation to the subaltern, Spivak analyzes Marx's notion of "representation," This "usable Marx" cannot be based on antediluvian notions of representation. Marx, on Spivak's account, uses two German terms for the verb to represent. They are vertreten, which means something like "to fill in for" or "to stand in the place of," and darstellan, which implies a "re-presentation." These terms are confused (in translations) when Marx writes: "The small peasant proprietors cannot represent themselves; they must be represented."  However, in other languages both terms are characterized generally as represent. Yet "[t]hese two senses of representation--within state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subject-prediction, on die other--are related but irreducibly discontinuous."

Spivak argues against essentialism because the subaltern cannot be easily or neatly categories. "Leftist intellectuals who romanticize the oppressed...essentialize the subaltern and thus replicate the colonialist discourses they purport to critique." "A person's or group's identity is relational, a function of its place in a system of differences." She does argue for a "difference feminism" "which stresses alliances among women across their differences." She introduces the concept of "strategic essentialism": "In some instances, she argued, it was important to strategically make essentialist claims, even while one retained an awareness that those claims were, at best, crude political generalizations."

Vertreten implies a total understanding of the subject being "represented." It is almost as if the representative has the total "agency" of the subject--a complete "filling in." In contrast, dartelling is about representing a "constituency." "[I]t is not about giving voice but is concerned with constituting, working for, representing for and with, the marginalized group."  Hence, the Western approach to the subaltern is either to speak for or to silently let them speak for themselves. Both strategies silence the subaltern because they ignore the positional relations of the dominant to the subaltern.

Thus the amalgamation of the two notions of representation establishes a silencing of the subaltern. They can never speak because they are both being "stood in for" and "embodied" by others in the dominant discourse. Using "Marxist" terms, the relationship between global capitalism and national alliance cannot explain the "textures of power."  In other words, the Marxists silence the subaltern by representing them in discourse in which they have no speaking role. Spivak writes that "the banality of leftist intellectuals' lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent."  In other words, the representation of the other destroys the subjectivity of the subaltern.

Applying this mode of deconstruction, Spivak argues that the case of Indian sati is illustrative of how the subaltern cannot speak. She asks, "What did Sati say?" Can the subaltern be understood? Or is it always a "speaking for?" Sati was understood either, through the English, as the slaughter of innocent women or, through the male Hindus who spoke for the female Indians, as a voluntary act. In other words, the subaltern in this instance, the Indian women, have no voice: 

In fact, Spivak points out that the British ignored that sati was often motivated by widows' inheritance of property. Hence, sati was understood as the "noble Hindus" versus the "bad Hindus," or as the civilized British versus the primitive dark-skins.  The widow's act is never considered a form of martyrdom, "with the defunct husband standing in for the transcendental One." It was just considered a crime. The nationalist Indians accepted the British reading of sati, and made it a point to reclaim the practice. "Caught in the relay between 'benevolent' colonial interventions and national liberation struggles that both construct her will for her, the subaltern," Spivak suggests, "cannot speak."

Spivak elaborates on this concept in her excellent discussion of the Western films portraying the Third World versus movies with a "native" location. Spivak argues that one can rarely tell the time period of a Third World film, yet the temporal details of a "period piece" set in the West are almost always readily evident on the celluloid. Spivak's language, using Frederick Jameson as an intellectual backdrop, is so insightful it is appropriate to quote her at length: 

Almost from the start, she emphasized how deconstructions interest in the 'violence' of traditional hierarchical binary oppositions (between male and female, the West and the rest, etc.) afforded a passage from literary theory to radical politics." Spivak herself writes that "the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self's Shadow."

She sees postcolonial studies as a new instance of this attempt to liberate the other and to enable that other to experience and articulate those parts of itself that fall outside what the dominant discourse has constituted as its subject hood."
Spivak argues against essentialism because the subaltern cannot be easily or neatly categories. "Leftist intellectuals who romanticize the oppressed...essentialize the subaltern and thus replicate the colonialist discourses they purport to critique." "A person's or group's identity is relational, a function of its place in a system of differences." She does argue for a "difference feminism" "which stresses alliances among women across their differences." She introduces the concept of "strategic essentialism": "In some instances, she argued, it was important to strategically make essentialist claims, even while one retained an  awareness that those claims were, at best, crude political generalizations."

Spicak turns to Frued's analysis of colonialism. "She remains leery of any attempt to fix and celebrate the subaltern's distinctive voice by claims that the subaltern occupies the position of victim, abjected other, scapegoat, savior, and so on." Spivak notes that her analysis offers an acknowledgement of the the dangers of "interpreting and representing the other."

"The subaltern is not privileged (within the dominant discourse), and does not speak in a vocabulary that will get a hearing in institutional locations of power. The subaltern enters the official and intellectual discourse only rarely and usually through mediating commentary of someone more at home in those discourses. If the problematic is understood in this way, it is hard to see how the subaltern can be capable of speaking."

Spivak then tries to recover the speech of the subaltern through an analysis of an Indian woman's suicide.

 

·         Feminisms: In many societies, women (like colonized subjects) have been relegated to the position of Other.  Thus women and colonized subjects have an intimate experience of the politics of oppression and repression.  Both Feminism and Post-Col seek to reinstate the marginalized in the face of the dominant.Both also gave up simple inversion of traditional views in favour of a more generalized questioning of forms and modes.  Feminism has highlighted a number of unexamined assumptions within Post-Col discourse.  Conversely, recent Post-Col interrogation of Western Feminist scholarship has provided timely warnings and led to new directions.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Applied these approaches in her article

·          Marxisim: The theories and concepts given by karl Marx is known Marxist approachs.In the article -"Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak discussed the theory of Karl Marx

·         Deconstruction: The influence of Deconstruction: Subvert the binary opposition between Subjects / object, Self / the other, the Occident / the Orient, Center / Marginal, and Majority / Minority. Spivak's central motif is always very deconstructive .Much more influenced by Derrida's 'the trace', 'under erasure', 'difference', Spivak can explicitly manipulate cultural discourses in terms of deconstruction.

·         Psychoanalysis: psychological teachings of Sigmund Freud, method for treating mental illness by studying unconscious mental processes. In this section Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak use the example considering a text by two great practitioners of the critique: ‘Intellectuals and power: a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’.

·         post-colonial theories. : The-third-world background intellectuals. Searching for individual, cultural, and national identity. Post-Colonial theory is a sustained attention to the imperial process in colonial and neo-colonial societies, and an examination of the strategies to subvert the actual material and discursive effects of the process.  It begins from the very first moment of colonial contact, and is the discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being.  Although it is almost hopelessly diverse, there are some identifiable characteristics of Post-Col theory;

-Rejection on master-narrative of Western imperialism.

-Concern with the formation (within Western discursive practices) of the colonial and post-colonial “subject”.

 

In the article “can the subaltern speak?” I Found some notable issuses.

      Spivak completed the article remembering three attempts that are

 (1) an attempt to enable or allow the speech of the subaltern;

(2) an attempt to find the authentic subaltern "self"; and

 (3) an effort to search for a "universal" or "cosmopolitan" subject. 

      Spivak encourages but also criticizes the efforts of the subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that has reappropriated Gramsci's term "subaltern" (the economically dispossesed) in order to locate and re-establish a "voice" or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India. Although Spivak acknowledges the "epistemic violence" done upon Indian subalterns, she suggests that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech invariably will encounter the following problems:

1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people, and

2) a dependence upon western intellectuals to "speak for" the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves.

      I Think by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe their subordinate position in society. The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an ethnocentric extension of Western logos--a totalizing, essentialist "mythology" as Derrida might describe it--that doesn't account for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic.

      Spivak's description of the Third World becoming a "signifier that allows us to forget that 'worlding'" resembles in many ways Marx's notion of the commodity fetish that he describes in volume one of Kapital. In "The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret," Marx suggests that commodity products become part of an obfuscating network of signs that obscure the history of labour that went into their production. Spivak suggests that the Third World, like the commodity fetish, becomes a sign that obscures its mode of production, thus making Western dominance appear somehow given or natural.

      In Spivak's paper, the subaltern appears as a woman of some resource, but whose specific situation in British-colonized India results in her being, in some ways, silenced.

      Spivak's essay tackles the complex politics of widow self-immolation (sati) and the less familiar suicide in 1926, for political reasons, of the young woman Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri (revealed at this event as a member of her own family). Some of the speakers at the symposium took up the issue of death directly, others addressed more general issues of indigenous political movements, and the current state of 'post-colonial theory'. I came away from the event with some very useful responses to my 'subalterns at war' talk, on the Indian Army and the First World War.

      "almost from the start, she emphasized how deconstructions interest in the 'violence' of traditional hierarchical binary oppositions (between male and female, the West and the rest, etc.) afforded a passage from literary theory to radical politics." Spivak herself writes that "the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self's Shadow."

      Spivak argues against essentialism because the subaltern cannot be easily or neatly categories. "Leftist intellectuals who romanticize the oppressed...essentialize the subaltern and thus replicate the colonialist discourses they purport to critique." "A person's or group's identity is relational, a function of its place in a system of differences." She does argue for a "difference feminism" "which stresses alliances among women across their differences." She introduces the concept of "strategic essentialism": "In some instances, she argued, it was important to strategically make essentialist claims, even while one retained an awareness that those claims were, at best, crude political generalizations."

      Spicak turns to Frued's analysis of colonialism. "She remains leery of any attempt to fix and celebrate the subaltern's distinctive voice by claims that the subaltern occupies the position of victim, abjected other, scapegoat, savior, and so on." Spivak notes that her analysis offers an acknowledgement of the the dangers of "interpreting and representing the other."

      Spivak explores the relationship between the "S/subject" and the other and the subaltern's identity in terms power and discourse. The subaltern subject is unable to "know and speak itself" because it exists only within imperialist histories and is characterized by its unconsciousness of its conditions of existence. Because the subaltern cannot speak, social texts must be examined for "what the work cannot say"

 

One of the most controversial claims in this article comes when Spivak claims that 'the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self's shadow'. She dubs this idea 'epistemic violence', and uses the example of the far-flung project to constitute the colonial subject as Other in order to emphasise this point. Essentially, as Spivak notes, this is the same as Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education from 1835, which claims '[w]e must at present do our best to form a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.' After considering all this, Spivak finally comes to the question at the heart of her essay: Can the Subaltern Speak?

It may be worth first defining what Spivak  mean by "subaltern". Rather than just being a term for the oppressed class, Homi Bhaba provides this definition in 'Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism':

Oppressed, minority groups whose presence was crucial to the self-definition of the majority group: subaltern social groups were also in a position to subvert the authority of those who had hegemonic power.
 

Spivak's question, therefore, about the consciousness of the subaltern, becomes quite pertinent when set against Bhaba's definition. The problem comes to a head when we consider that whatever we read of the subaltern is usually set through the prism of an "intellectual" historian, who, despite their best efforts, necessarily transform the subaltern's consciousness into, at best, 'serv[ing] as a counterpossibility for the narrative sanctions granted to the colonial subject in the dominant groups.'
Whilst discussing the subaltern, it is important to remember that this does not only apply to racial groups, but can also be used as a term when discussing feminism. Spivak says that '[i]f, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.' 

Another criticism coming regarding to the famoys article are describing below

v  In fact, he questions the whole notion of postcolonial criticism, implying that is a sham marketing tool that enables lazy scholarship. He notes that few thinkers will embrace the term themselves:

v  There are several difficulties to the traditional approach to Spivak. A pressing problem, as implied above, is the Spivakian bias toward "action" or, at least, active speaking. The search for the subaltern voice pretends that there is a "true" subaltern into which the careful Western can

tap. The poverty of this position is revealed by Spivak's own analysis, which used the (de)centered Derridean self as a (non)starting point. Yet the decentered self has a trace of the universal subject, and it is often limited by its subordinate position to a notion of the centered self. The Derridean/Spivakian self is--to a certain extent--a "new universal structure of subjectivity-as-difference."In other words, Kant is creeping around every corner.

v  This article is often described as one of the seminal pieces in a rather distinguished career. I found it incredibly difficult to decipher. I've tried, though, and this is what I've gleaned from it. Luckily my favourite critic (if it's not too nerdy to have one of those),

Terry Eagleton, has said that Spivak attempts to be 'as obscurantist as you can decently get away with', so I don't feel too inadequate.  

In her essay, Spivak begins by considering two other critics, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and begins by asserting what she considers the most important contributions of French Postructuralist theory:First, that the networks of power/desire/interest are so heterogeneous, that their reduction to a coherent narrative is counterproductive--a persistent critique is needed; and second, that intellectuals must attempt to disclose and know the discourse of society's Other.

v  Neither Deleuze nor Foucault seems aware that the intellectual within socialized capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labour.

By arguing for this concrete experience (in factories, schools etc.), these theorists are actually contributing to the artificial formation of different classes. This is problematic, especially, as Spivak contends, that the idea of representation and re-presentation (the difference between a proxy and a portrait) is insufficient as it does not allow a place for the 'oppressed subject to speak, act and know for themselves'. This is where the problem arises. Quoting Marx, Spivak notes that:

 The small peasant proprietors 'cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Their representative must appear simultaneously as their master, as an authority over them, as unrestricted governmental power that protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above.

Groups without a voice are therefore given a voice by those above them. This leads to a continuing cycle where '[c]lass consciousness remains with the feeling of community that belongs to national links'. This is problematic when considering that the intellectuals, purporting to critique this system, are actually just "reporting" it.

v  The most obvious example of oppression comes when considering nineteenth-century territorial imperialism. For once, Spivak's own words explain this in the clearest manner:

A group of countries, generally first-world, are in the position of investing capital; another group, generally third-world, provide the field for investment  In the interest of maintaining the circulation and growth of industrial capital  transportation, law and standardized education systems were developed--even as local industries were destroyed, land distribution was rearranged, and raw material was transferred to the colonizing country.

The problem, Spivak contends, is that we produce a 'homogeneous Other' which reflects our Self. By confronting this issue we are not representing them, but ourselves. In order for the subaltern to speak, the postcolonial intellectual has to undergo a process of 'unlearning'. Spivak relates the Indian nativist argument: 'The women actually wanted to die.' Whether this is true or not, it highlights an important aspect of women as subaltern: the white men are "saving" brown women without assent from a single woman. In practice, however, Hindu women had a free choice in the matter (Spivak does concede that they were often talked into it by their family). What seems to the West to be a heathen practice is actually shown to be 'one diagnosis of female free will substituted for another.'  Put another way, this is Spivak's arguing against an "essentialist" reading of the subaltern class, race or gender. She hones in on Freud's use of women 'as a scapegoat', transforming her into the voice and 'subject of hysteria.'  

v  Finally, after a lengthy discussion of the idea of the subaltern through the practice of sati (the widow throwing herself on her husband's funeral pyre, discussed briefly above),

 and recounting a young woman's suicide, Spivak reaches the conclusion to her essay: 'The subaltern cannot speak'. It is only heard when one of the dominating classes speaks for it, and as her examples show, they present the subaltern's situation through the discourse of their society. 

 

The famous article has multiple dimensions and makes a major contribution to South Asian historiography. It is not only well grounded in theory but also in social, cultural, and gender history of the nineteenth century colonial India. At its core, this scholarship is a stringent Subaltern critique of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity. In the end it even becomes critical of elitism in the Subaltern School itself. The artiiclecle is well documented with thorough research but replete with subaltern and feminist jargons. Once the reader moves past this murkiness, the art begins to unravel with enormous force of language and interpretation.

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     “Can the subaltern speak?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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