Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Can the Subaltern Speak?

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. London, 1993, 66-111.

Spivak starts with a critique of Foucault and Deleuze, arguing that their inattentiveness to their own intellectual position and stance made them at certain points blind to the role of ideology in reproducing of oppressive and hegemonic social relations of production between West and the rest of the world. She, in particular, focuses on the fact that when intellectuals take the task of representing “subalterns,” they actually represent those images of subalterns which they created themselves, falsely pretending to be “transparent,” that is, speaking for oppressed groups without changing meanings of their  message.

Spivak then explores how Marx speaks of a Subject: it not a canny individual with undivided personality, but rather “a divided and dislocated subjects whose parts are not continuous or coherent with each other.” (71) Subjectivity, thus, not only is not individual; neither it is collective: while capital/power imposes on oppressed classes interests which actually do not belong to them, this operation fails to create any kind of unity (a feeling of community, political organization). If economic conditions form a class as a socio-economic category, but it does not exist as a political-cultural category, power structures and intellectuals come in and act to “represent” the class, failing to acknowledge that this class still doesn’t have its own interests.

Thus, Spivak attacks an implicitly promoted in contemporary critical theory distinction between a totalizing Subject of desire and power and “the self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject of the oppressed.” (74) She claims that intellectuals, even such critical as Foucault and Deleuze, have deep roots in socialized and institutionalized capital and their emphasis on discourses and ignoring of the role of economics, class warfare, etc. is misleading. She sees the problem of this “blindness” in the fact that European (and a priori American) philosophers belong to “the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor” (75) and their intellectual baggage is part of European production of the Other, so their writing only reinforces “the constitution of the Subject as Europe” (ibid). In this process, they stood on the side of West as a kind of oppressor of the rest of the world, in the way that they participated in taking away the original forms of speaking from colonized nations.

Spivak then looks at the ways the British codified Hindu law in order to ask a question: the international division of labor created a situation when Third World territories don’t have socialized capital operated by intellectuals (such as Foucault), which had been subordinated through political violence, education and similar forms of discipline and control, and, most importantly, economic exploitation: are there possibilities for the subaltern to speak? Spivak addresses the problem of “epistemological violence”: how imperialist powers created structures of knowledge which silenced actual experience of colonized people, reinterpreted it in case of open confrontation (“mutinies,” “riots”) and imposed their meanings which facilitated colonial exploitation. Contemporary situation is not principally different, she argues, only that direct colonial exploitation is replaced with international division of labor. Exploited classes in colonial countries are not “trained” in the ideology of consumerism, class mobility is almost non-existent, women are subordinated through cultural patterns of patriarchal social relations. And there are people outside of the international division of labor who are in an even deeper silence (Third World farmers or unemployed).

Thus, Spivak mostly accuses Foucault and Deleuze for ignoring “the epistemic violence of imperialism and the international division of labor” (84). Foucault is, in particular, criticized for not making a difference between exploitation and domination, which makes his analysis of power flawed in terms that he doesn’t draw parallels between modern power and structures of colonial exploitation. His concept of subject and subjectivity is, consequently, also pretty closely tied to a specific time and place (modern First world), so while its analytical potential is pretty high in the field of European studies, it is more useless elsewhere.

To overcome the pro-Western bias in contemporary scholarship, Spivak suggests that Derrida’s approach to textual analysis should be rehabilitated. “The question is how to keep the ethnocentric Subject from establishing itself by selectively defining an Other” (87). Derrida gives tools and insights into criticism of European ethnocentric tradition of constituting Others; his research also provides an understanding that historical and geographic position of European intellectuals doesn’t allow them for “transparent” representation of the Others, no matter by what benevolent desires this representation is driven. “Yet the assumption and construction of a consciousness or subject sustains such work and will, in the long run, cohere with the work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advantage of learning and civilization.” (90)

Spivak takes an artificially constructed sentence “White men are saving brown women from brown men” to deconstruct possible meanings related to hegemony and oppression underlying it, to look for silences which serve the oppression and to identify meanings which reinforce intellectual and cultural trends (western intellectuals as playing on the part of the oppressor) she had described above. Analysis of 19^th-century ideological debate over sati as an example of situation when two “male” visions were involved in a conflict where women remained silent subalterns. Analysis of jauhar as another phenomenon by which men reinforce their rule and possession of women, objectify them: patriotic stories of mass self-immolation serve to impose these gender categories from early childhood in a very effective way. But British abolition of sati was imposed in such terms and cultural categories that it didn’t liberate them, but simply changed modes and models of male domination.