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Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Discipline/Field: postcolonial studies, critical theory, subaltern studies
Year: 1983
Main Arguments & Concepts
In this essay, Spivak explores the question of if the subaltern class can speak, and comes to the conclusion that they cannot. Speaking in this sense means that they are not heard. Structures of global capitalism and power have created discourses that totalize subaltern stories. Spivak uses the example of the sati, widows in India who join their husbands’ funeral pyre, to illustrate her point. So many other people (particularly colonizers, but she also points out the structures of power withing a colonized society) have taken on Subject positions to describe self-immolation practice, there is no room for the objectified, subaltern woman, the person actually having the experience, to speak to it -- other people step into their subject positions.Positionality
European theorists, again, particularly French post-structuralists, have fallen into the drop of the “neutral investigator,” behaving as if they are observing the world from an indifferent position. Spivak points out the inherent blindness that comes from writing from Western viewpoint.
Spivak uses Deleuze and Foucault as her main reference in critiquing Europeans (particularly French) post-structuralism for reifying a unified, European subject position. Foucault thinks that oppressed people can make sense of and act against their own oppression. Spivak argues that that is not universal -- there is a difference between working class/oppressed people and the subaltern. A French post-structuralist schema does not figure in the complexities of global capitalism.
Derrida
A secondary goal of the essay seems to be making a case for Derrida (Spivak also did the first English translation of Derrida’s On grammatology). In her criticism of Deleuze and Foucault, Spivak suggests that Derrida is a more useful philosopher (104) because he does not aim to be political, and therefore does not appropriate oppressed peoples’ subject-positions in the same way: “he is less dangerous when understood than the first-world intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves” (87).
Quotes
“In the name of desire, they [French poststructuralists] reintroduce the undivided subject into the discourses of power ... animating an effectively heliocentric discourse, fills the empty place of the agent with the historical sun of theory, the Subject of Europe” (69).“The relationship between global capitalism (exploitation in economics) and nation-state alliances (domination in geopolitics) is so macrological that it 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” (74).
“According to Foucault and Deleuze ... the oppressed, if given the chance (though problems of representation cannot be bypassed here), and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a Marxist thematic is at work here), can speak and know their conditions” (78).
“White men, seeking to save brown women from brown men, impose upon those women a greater ideological constriction by absolutely identifying, within discursive practice, a good wifehood with self-immolation on the husband’s pyre” (101).
Notes
I found some really useful contextual information in The Spivak Reader, edited by Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean. In particular, there is an interview with Spivak called “The Subaltern Talk.”On her definition of subaltern: “In the essay I made it clear that I was talking about the space as defined by Ranagit Guha, the space that is cut off from the lines of mobility in a colonized country” (288).
She clarifies that the woman who created suicide in the essay was not completely subaltern because she was able to “narrate” to some extent (289). She made her own choices, like choosing to commit suicide while she was menstruating to clarify that she was not killing herself because she was pregnant.
To “speak” references the notion of “speech act” (289), meaning that something happens as a result of the utterance.
Related
Foucault, The Archaeology of KnowledgeDeleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
