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Women, Culture, and International Relations, by Vivienne Jabri and Eleanor O’Gorman (eds.)
4. Wartimeviolence: Pulping Fictions of the Subaltern
Violence—war. Violence—silence. Violence—time, space, subject.
Pulp Fiction. 1 The film’s controversy arose, in large part, from its interpretation as a blatant advocation and glorification of violence. On initial impulse, heroin chic over racy music and the (not so) usual suspects produced judgments about the film’s potential for the vicarious enjoyment of illicit and hedonistic wealth and of casual and violent death. Understandable if one takes the initial for the essential—that is, leaves without further thought, allowing sensations to dictate sensationalism, but still hasty. It turns what is a serious farce into a tasteless joke. 2
To assume that the film merely reflects the recognition of gratuitous violence and escapism as features of contemporary life in late modernity and that it works with them to an aesthetic end is not so incomprehensible given the film’s seductive stylism and fetishistic tendencies. Still, it ignores the grander discursive and ideological gesture the work makes. That gesture directs itself toward the idea of civil society as the battleground for war.
In the middle of the screenplay appears an account about a “gold watch.” 3 Worn by several generations of soldiers in such conflicts as World War II and Vietnam and having traveled vast distances in space, time, and backsides to arrive in the hands of its new owner, it symbolizes the glory and heroism of men in military battle and the timelessness of war as the ultima ratio. Once distinguished from the generic notion of violence, the idea of war as a very specific political concept begins to codify itself more visibly. This, ironically, occurs by virtue of an absence of anything resembling either what is considered to be war in traditional international relations theory or what are held to be sociolegally sanctioned forms of violence. 4 In the two instances in the film where it would be possible, we are not taken into World War II or the Cold War with the watch bearers, nor do we attend the boxing match. What we do see are different portraits of violence—variously in the forms of substance abuse, beatings, sexual and mental torture, killings, and murders. But it is not, of course, just violence. It is not left as that demonized and individualized quirk in the machinery of the liberal democratic state, that occasionally justifiable but never legitimate action, 5 that imperfect but nevertheless necessary regulatory phenomenon that is fundamental to the power of the state but never so recognized. 6 For with a watch always ticking and the time constantly telling, what we witness, for all political purposes and intents, is war.
The politicization of violence lies in the way it is named as war. On this reading, one transports the film to the terrain of political theory. Here, the notion of violence takes on a very specific meaning in relation to the political subject of modernity, if said to be constituted by the violence of human essence. 7 Violence is conceivable at the fundamental level
of human existence, according to Hannah Arendt, since it is “the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire.” 8 Once within the social contract, however, once inside the city limits, violence is relegated to the realm of the antisocial, the nonmodern, and the dehumanist. It is removed, in other words, from the order of things.
In a scene that could have been lifted right out of Pulp Fiction, Governor Mario Cuomo on the day the bomb went off at the World Trade Center declared that “normalcy” could not return “to this safest and greatest city and state and nation in the world until the culprits” were caught. This statement came in the same week in which six residents of the Bronx were lined up and shot through the back of the head. In asking himself what could possibly constitute “normalcy” under these conditions, one international relations scholar has answered, “abnormalized events such as this one.” 9 In a society that for many is nothing more than a field where life is nasty, brutish, and short, the abnormal is the norm.
Warfare, as Arendt noted, has lost much of its effectiveness and nearly all its glamour due to the technological developments of this century. 10 In Tarantino’s film, it retrieves its former glory. And this is not just by virtue of cinematographic techniques or narrative. The often humorous though brutal depictions of systematic dehumanization—of killings, murders, tortures, and narrow escapes from hallucinogenic disaster on slick urbanscape—are disturbingly familiar. Indeed, they call to mind some of the daily satellite pictures of action footage taken in the cockpits during what was, according to official U.S. government statements, one of the most cleanly executed wars of this century, the Gulf War. 11 Stylistic liberty therefore actually speaks to a very tangible historical content, and the theme of war exceeding violence aligns the film more closely to the genre of Hollywood war movies (particularly Apocalypse Now, 12 the cult status of which Pulp Fiction probably far surpasses) than to American crime films. In fact, one could say that it collapses this distinction, as war is seen to explode the boundaries of anarchy—its traditional bastion according to international relations theorists—and to expand its horizons to encompass the realm of the political. If there is an element of black humor in the film, it looms large behind this dynamic.
With the symbolic device of the watch being activated almost exactly midway through the film and the subsequent folding of the narrative back on itself, the gratuitousness of a clever filmmaker suddenly appears before us as the reality of a world driving itself into madness, with those who are able forcing themselves into oblivion at the expense of those who are unable.
The story ends in a way that is not at all foreign to American filmmaking traditions. Looping back to the opening scene of the film, a circular determinism is escaped through the narrative diversion depicting, in quietly spectacular fashion, the agency and power of the individual. The message is that all resides in the individual—for better or for worse. With it is thrown out the possibility that a “war of all against all” is intimately related to the idea that the sociopolitical ideal has been exceeded by its own technological rationalism and the logic of its individualist ontology. It is up to the morally responsible individual to rise above urban smog, blood, and ruin, to see through the ideological smoke screen of “in government we trust” and refuse complacency. It is the only way out. And it can be done. Pending, of course, a little divine—and for Tarantino, comedic—intervention, or a little pulp fiction. 13
The violent reactions Tarantino’s film has provoked are in many ways comparable to those prompted by an essay written by Gayatri Spivak a decade ago. Like the film’s director, the essay’s author turns to glitter and polemics as the means of establishing visibility for a very difficult issue. But the parallels do not stop there. If clockwork is what thematically transforms the mediocrity of violence into the profundity of war in a postmodern movie, Spivak demonstrates how it is the epistemic in social and political theorizing that commits the violence of rendering speech total silence. If Tarantino asks the difficult question of whether or not we can seriously deny the state of war that contemporary society is in, she asks a different and dangerously rhetorical question: Can the subaltern speak? For both, the answer is no. And for both, the answer is dependent upon time and social space.
What the rest of this essay engages in is an attempt to move beyond sensationalism to the issues at stake, to the matter of what it means to enter into query about whether or not the subaltern can speak.
Aporia and Aphonia
In the work of Spivak, the intersection of feminism, difference, and the global figures prominently. The Marxist insistence on keeping the economic under erasure makes visible the global division of labor and maintains the concept of “Third World” as one that describes singularly an economic condition. Spivak’s feminist position involves a radical break between the epistemological category of “woman” and the feminist agent of the ethical/political. It allows for the use of an essentialism that is always dangerous and constantly subject to critique. Difference lies in the way this configuration allows for, first, the investigation of women as very specific subjects under patriarchy—overdetermined by a reproductive economy—and, second, brings to crisis the reducibility of the metaphor/myth of “woman” with the subject of feminist politics. One of the places where all of these axes meet is in the figure of the subaltern woman. It is she who serves as the ground for identifying the occurrence of epistemic violence and the operation of strategic essentialism.
According to Spivak, the homogeneous construction of the Other by reference to our own site within the Self/Same 14 is a prevalent feature of European theorizing. 15 This process, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, inhibits any grasp of the heterogeneity of the Other.
It is impossible for contemporary... intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe. It is not only that everything they read, critical or uncritical, is caught within the debate of the production of that Other, supporting or critiquing the constitution of the Subject as Europe. It is also that, in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary. 16
For Spivak, the “remotely orchestrated, far–flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other is one of the most highly revealing examples of “epistemic violence.”” 17 Again, there is a laugh; this time it assumes the nature of a deep scepticism. It is the desire to know intimately the subaltern without affecting a shift in the relations between the knower and his object—the “meaningless piety” 18 that accompanies uncritical and unsituated theories of subaltern agency—that is the joke. In describing the site of the subaltern as being “on the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text,” 19 the uncritical assertion of agency is untenable. It is something that creates the appearance of a certain kind of conscious political action and resistance on the part of the subaltern where there is none and thus does more political damage than good, despite its ethical intentions. Rather than advancing the project of “learning to think differently” 20 it is an endeavor that merely maps the Self onto the Other and posits a reassuring identity where there must not, for quite significant reasons, be any.
A loaded statement such as this one requires some initial qualification and contextualization about the subaltern and epistemic violence. The concept of subalternity is one that arises from Antonio Gramsci’s work and refers to subordination in terms of class, gender, caste, race, language, and culture. It signified the fundamental place relationships of dominance occupy in history. The Subaltern Studies group was established with the intention to promote the study and discussion of subalternist issues in South Asian studies. It was inspired by Ranajit Guha, a distinguished Indian historian who edited the first six volumes of Subaltern Studies before a rotating editorial team drawn from the collective took over publication. Guha rejected elitist history in favor of a perspective that came from subaltern space. Elitist nationalist historiography had portrayed, for example, “the peasant rebel merely as an empirical person or member of a class, but not as an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion.” Instead, peasant rebellions were considered to be spontaneous eruptions, or reflex actions to economic and political oppression. “Either way insurgency was regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of consciousness.” Although the project of the group did resemble the work of “history from below,” developed in the West by such historians as E. P. Thompson, subaltern history writing on the Indian peasantry ran into difficulties that stemmed from two differences marking them off from these other scholars. The use of poststructuralist analysis that explicitly rejected the unified subject as the agent of history—and the absence of workers’ diaries and other recorded sources that were available to British historians—complicated the analysis of the operation of power relations in the domain of colonial South Asia. Hence the difference in approach that Subaltern Studies represents. 21
The concept of epistemic violence is directly indebted to Michel Foucault’s analysis of epistemes in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 22 It draws directly upon Foucault and his work, but I would suggest that it also functions metonymically to refer to the influential body of European–derived literature dealing with forms knowledge as political practice as well as metaphorically in relation to Europe as the Subject of Knowledge.
Foucault begins with the idea that the human sciences make man the center of all things by defining him against other marginalized groups, such as women or the mad. This organization around the figure of man brought about a unity to History. For Foucault, Marx’s totalistic notion of history was based on an anxiety about the dissolution of its unity, hence his attempt to maintain its unity by aligning it with the natural sciences. Foucault, however, points out the theoretical paradox involved: By emphasizing historicity as a mode of being, the human sciences made themselves subject to it as well, thereby destroying any possibility of formulating universal laws comparable to those of the natural sciences. Foucault’s work demonstrated that history could not be the stable ground of knowledge, that it could not claim an a priori privilege as the fundamental mode of being either. As two “countersciences,” ethnology and psychoanalysis, have shown, history is only one possibility for the discursive form of understanding. What the episteme refers to is a “cluster of transformations” that enable the substitution of “differentiated analyses for the themes of a totalising history.” The episteme is the sum of the “deviation, distances, the oppositions, the differences, the relations of its multiple scientific discourses: it is not a sort of grand underlying theory, it is a space of dispersion, it is an open field of relationships and no doubt indefinitely specifiable.” 23
Encoded within Spivak’s question is a series of issues relating to what is known as colonial discourse analysis. These include the relations of power and knowledge between the colonized and the colonizers, the recovery of the lost subjectivity of the subaltern, and the location of agency where imperialist historiography has buried it. Characteristic of her mode of critique, Spivak informs these urgent problematics with the imperative of maintaining a reflexive stance in interpretations of and dialogues with the Other if the project of reviewing the regard for the Other is to avoid a retreat into the more insidious tactics of neoimperialism.
The problematic can be seen to coalesce around two dynamics: subject–constitution and object–formation. In the theories of several European intellectuals, the latter, as Spivak’s article emphatically demonstrates, comes to the fore in the guise of the former; the self–evident, autonomously constituted subject is, she argues, a comforting myth, an object of desire.
Imperialism was marked by the endeavors of “carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance—of substituting peace for war—freedom for bondage—religion for superstition—the hope of heaven for the fear of hell.” 24 In the era of postimperialist social and political thought, desire is what drives the task of establishing the subjectivity of the Other. Critiques of imperialism—often driven by guilt, nativism, or reverse ethnocentrism—advocate the quest for the understanding, emancipation, and elevation of the Other through a reconstruction or recuperation of subjectivity. An effort is made to allow the conscious, individualized subaltern to speak, unfettered by the western Self’s political shackles, which with the legacy of colonialism had dictated not just the means of speaking (with deference) but what was heard (selective exoticism). The paternalism that abounds in such endeavors, however, is evident in the absurdity of the First World intellectual who masquerades “as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves.” 25 The problem is that since the project of imperialism has “always already historically refracted what might have been the absolute Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self,” 26 postcolonial attempts at retrieving the irretrievable involve the asymmetrical “obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subject–ivity.” 27
Spivak’s study is in many ways a parallel to Lata Mani’s study on the debate on sati in colonial India. 28 Where Spivak points out the violent implications of effectively neo– rather than anti–imperialist benevolent intentions, Mani does the same with colonial policies but also rejects the idea of benevolent intentions (it should, however, be noted that the two scholars treat subjectivity in different ways). Mani’s main argument is that the discourse on sati seemed to be about women and humanitarian approaches to them, but it was not. Rather, it was a discourse that served as the vehicle by which the British could rescue Hindu civilization (conceived, moreover, as lying essentially in its Brahmin scriptures) from the Indian fall from a prior Golden Age and return to the natives the “truth” of their own traditions. It was more about the civilizing mission—the idea of the colonizer as the Subject of all knowledge—and what constituted authentic cultural tradition than about the fate of women.
The British did not outlaw certain forms of sati because of its horrors; “On the contrary, officials in favour of abolition were arguing that such action was in fact consistent with upholding religious tradition, even that a policy of religious tolerance necessitated intervention.” 29 For Mani, women constituted not the object, not the subject of the discourse of sati, but the ground upon which the discourse could take place. The significance of this shift in the location of women is crucial to Mani’s argument. The abolition of sati by the British in 1829 has become a “founding moment” in the history of Indian women. Initiated mostly by colonial officials, it is considered to be indicative of the concern the British had for the status of Indian women in the nineteenth century. The direction of Mani’s argument is toward the situation where for too long and at “face value” the idea that colonization brings with it a more positive appraisal of the rights of women has been accepted.
It seems that one important question arises from Mani’s analysis that surrounds the idea about British motivations regarding the outlawing of sati. Although Mani’s account is convincing, it is nevertheless unclear whether the British were using the tradition–modernity discourse as a strategy to inhibit a practice that was morally reprehensible but politically volatile. By appearing to be concerned with authenticity, and by overriding custom with scripture (something Mani criticizes), it is possible that a legitimacy was being created for direct British intervention that masqueraded as the revival of Hindu tradition. That is, the most politically pragmatic way of reducing the practice of sati may not have been to outlaw it across the board without any apparent consideration of Hindu history. It may have been less practically and ideologically effective to impose a new Christian moral order, as Mani puts it, rather than be seen (ostensibly) to be recuperating and returning Hindu tradition to the people. This would have been consistent with the convenient perception of British colonialism as opposed to, say, French colonialism as having an interest in maintaining cultural diversity rather than in imposing universal values. None of this, moreover, precludes Mani’s point that the British profited greatly, ideologically and historiographically, from such maneuvering. Although the danger of such a query is obvious, the scope of Mani’s analysis does not allow for any investigation into the question of whether the tradition–modernity theme in the larger context of the issue surrounding widow immolation, like women in the discourse of sati, was the ground rather than subject or object of the debate—the red herring to the strategic attempt to abolish sati. Mani’s reply might be that satis actually increased in number after the legal prohibition of it was put in place, but this does not necessarily diminish the issue raised here.
Neither does the problem I identify undermine—logically or intentionally—Mani’s argument that the voices of satis went unheard. I think it is important—particularly when revealing the ways in which colonialism’s legacy operates in the contemporary world is an objective—to recognize the complexity of colonial domination. Linear, binary, and singular ways of viewing colonial practices (perspectives that cannot be attributed, on the whole, to Mani’s work, except perhaps by their extended implications) will never be able to separate intention from effect, or, more specifically, recognize that authoritarian benevolence can entail contradictory politics. Part of understanding the majesterial sweep of British colonialism involves addressing the way in which legitimacy was created for colonial domination along all levels of the power hierarchy. Examining that can reveal how the power and legitimacy of the colonizers has historically been generated and maintained by the ambiguity surrounding the intention and strategy of authorial benevolence; that is, how emancipated subjugation under colonial domination contains numerous meanings and effects, each of which has a distinct politics and temporal momentum. It is precisely the dynamic among these contingencies that produces the (other) contention to which Mani’s analysis alludes, and the ambiguity and ambivalence about which Homi Bhabha 30 (more fashionably and, coincidentally, with more political slipperiness) has written.
This is where Spivak enters. Where Mani argues that benevolent desire was not only absent but totally neglected the subject–position of the subaltern sati, Spivak elaborates on the way that it enacts a form of violence in the postcolonial era and, moreover, in the name of a critique of empire. What the nuance and sophistication of the work of both these scholars suggests (to varying degrees of overtness) is that these two conditions are not mutually exclusive but often intermingle to produce an extremely complex politics, one that is not easily countered with either the erasure of desire or its polemicization.
To return to the question of the way in which the subaltern voice gets lost, another instance is provided by Spivak, although I would suggest that it is not as effective an illustration as Mani’s. Despite the fact that Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri was not a particularly subaltern figure, given her middle–class standing and limited subject status, her life serves to illustrate Spivak’s argument. Bhuvaneswari was a young woman who hanged herself in Calcutta in 1926. The suicide was difficult to explain, as she had been menstruating at the time of her death and was thus not illicitly pregnant. Bhuvaneswari may have rewritten “the social text of sati–suicide in an interventionist way” by displacing and denying the “sanctioned motive for female suicide.” In generalizing this motive by waiting for the onset of menstruation and excluding the possibility of extramarital pregnancy, illegitimate passion by a single male that traditionally imprisons this motive was erased by the “physiological inscription of her body.” 31
Bhuvaneswari’s act nevertheless was read as absurdity by delirium. Upon much later discovery of her involvement in the armed struggle for Indian independence, however, her sati–suicide was assimilated by the hegemonic account of the “fighting mother” and preserved through the discourse of male leaders and participants in the independence movement. Thus, the story of nonrational “femininity” gives way to an account surrounding a quite modernist rationality; delirium is elided by nationalism. A generation later, Spivak’s personal investigation revealed (by account of Bhuvaneswari’s nieces) a return to the original motive of her suicide: illicit love. Political rationalism again becomes erstwhile traditional culture–based rationalization, realigned with expectations surrounding gender roles, rituals, and obligations.
The point that Spivak is at great pains to make in her circuitously written and sometimes convoluted essay is that in the figure of Bhuvaneswari, “one diagnosis of female free will is substituted for another.” 32 In her analysis of the British rewriting of sati, Spivak notes the following:
In the case of widow self–immolation, ritual is not being redefined as superstition but as crime. The gravity of sati was that it was ideologically cathected as “reward,” just as the gravity of imperialism was that it was ideologically cathected as “social mission.” 33
Reading Bhuvaneswari’s sati–suicide against this backdrop, Spivak concludes that “between patriarchy and imperialism, subject–constitution and object–formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third–world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization.” Within the two conflicting versions of freedom, “the constitution of the female subject in life is the place of the diffèrend.” No space exists from which the subaltern female subject can speak. 34
Yet her muteness is “something other than silence and nonexistence,” 35 an important assertion given the kind of critiques Spivak’s article has illicited. It is not that the subaltern cannot “talk”—that she has nothing to say, nor any desire to be able to speak (metaphorical aphonia); it is a much more complicated and at the same time simpler argument than that. It lies in the notion that it is speaking as well as hearing that complete the speech act; 36 thus, on its own, the gravity of life–and–death efforts to speak do not necessarily make the subaltern woman audible. To claim that the gendered subaltern cannot be heard or read, contrary to those who have heard Spivak silence the subaltern, is to make a highly provocative but also specific observation about the “violent aporia between subject and object status.”
There have been outraged responses from those working in the area of postcolonial studies to Spivak’s “complicated” piece—one that, she admits, was “uncontrolled” and bears the marks of “struggle,” “crisis,” and a lack of “the courage of [her own] convictions.” 37 One, I would add, whose important argument is not assisted by its exhibitionist intellectual acrobatics. The implications of Spivak’s well–known query have been deemed totalizing, antinativist, elitist, and essentialist. Benita Parry’s reply has been exemplary. According to Parry, Spivak presents a disabling theoretical position, one that is, moreover, at variance with the “evidence”:
Where military conquest, institutional compulsion and ideological interpellation was, epistemic violence and devious discursive negotiations requiring of the native that he rewrite his position as object of imperialism, is; and in place of recalcitrance and refusal enacted in movements of resistance and articulated in oppositional discourses, a tale is told of the self–consolidating other and the disarticulated subaltern. 38
For Parry, Spivak’s illustration of the obliteration of the native’s subject position within colonial discourse effectively dismisses the two–hundred–year history of resistance under British colonialism in India and “writes out the evidence of native agency.” 39
The Subject of Europe
Parry’s point is crucial in its persuasiveness. It suggests an elitism and conservatism generating from Spivak’s account that reflects at least two things. At best, it reveals more of an interest in demonizing the West than in looking at how the colonized have managed to resist their dominators; at worst, it highlights a desire for theoretical integrity that leaves behind the commitment to social change. Second, the exposure of the delusory nature of the endeavor to recuperate subaltern subjectivity furthermore threatens a paralysis over how to proceed with regard to undoing some of the legacies of colonial oppression without repeating them in other forms. Third, and most ironically, the seemingly totalistic (non)expression of subaltern subjectivity—the notion of its elusiveness—produces implications that reverberate with the idealism inherent in quests for native authenticity at the same time as they reject any nativist position. On the one hand, the claim that the subaltern cannot speak is based on the notion that her authenticity is never retrievable and relies on a valorization of the idea of authenticity. On the other hand, authenticity itself is a ruse. One might conclude that what Spivak has produced is an argument that adheres to the primacy of the epistemic over the political and the techno–theoretical over the historico–material—a position whose strategy is to combat uncritical totalizations with reactionary ones.
To stop here and go no further would be to forestall the polemic rather than allow it to do its job—to provoke investigation. It would also ignore the politics of theory, which, as I will indicate later, are not confined to academe. To begin, therefore, the “first–world intellectuals” to whom Spivak initially directs her critique are Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. Making a subversive and uncompromising link between some of the “most radical” contemporary criticism originating from the West and the desire to maintain the subjectivity of the West, or “the West as Subject,” she identifies the neglect of the international division of labor, the rendering of Asia and Africa “transparent,” and the reinstatement of the “legal subject of socialized capital” as problems that mark both poststructuralist and structuralist theory. 40 With specific reference to Deleuze and Guattari, she notes that, failing to consider the relation between desire, power, and subjectivity, they are left incapable of developing a theory of interests. This arises out of their indifference to ideology. 41 In the conversation between Foucault and Deleuze, there is an unrecognized contradiction: The elevation of the “concrete experience” of the subjugated exists parallel to an uncritical view of the historical role of the intellectual. Neither is aware that “the intellectual within socialized capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor”; they seem oblivious to the way in which their position “helps only the intellectual anxious to prove that intellectual labor is just like manual labor.” 42 Forcing Spivak to the point, these two thinkers believe that their theorizations can produce social changes that are comparable to those effected by laboring for and with the subaltern. It has to be said that in putting the economic under erasure—that is, in retaining its fundamental importance for social change regardless of the kind of critiques it is subjected to—and in aligning herself with the Subaltern Studies group, she avoids making herself the direct target of the same charge.
An expansion of this critique begins with the recognition of the way the critique of the sovereign subject has severely damaged the idea that the subject is the self–conscious author of its agency and that the Subject par excellence is the rational, white, male European. It has exposed the fiction that the agent of History—conceived as technologically rational progress—is Europe. To then turn around and say, as the intellectualizations of Foucault and Deleuze effectively do, that European theory can dictate how to conceptualize non–European agency is hypocritical. Furthermore, it reveals the desire to maintain the upper hand politically on the global scale (the assumptions being that any practice is always related to theory and that theory itself is always a practice) while simultaneously being critical of the epistemes that allowed the European belief in the right to world dominance. The obligation to internally deconstruct the foundations of legitimacy of the Subject sits alongside the desire to maintain those foundations in external relation to the rest of the world. As Deleuze and Foucault fail to see the neo–imperialist dangers such desires, combined with the economic and political power of Europe and the contradictory treatment of the Subject, produce, it prevents them from including in their hypotheses any account of the interest Europe has in advocating this combination of theoretical elements. It inhibits any theory of ideology. This (presumably unrecognized) crisis of the “radical intellectual in the West” is thus the “deliberate choice of subalternity, granting to the oppressed either that very expressive subjectivity which s/he criticizes or, instead, a total unrepresentability.” 43
This is an interesting statement, given that Spivak’s use of the term silence is suggestive of precisely the same unrepresentability. The contradictions and hypocrisies that lurk in the background of Spivak’s essay dissolve, to some degree, upon further examination of the argument. It is instructive, first of all, to note what exactly Spivak considers her own project to be. It is, she says, the attempt to identify the “positivist–idealist variety” of the nostalgia for the Other. 44 It was her insistence on “imperialist subject–production,” “the imperialist subject and the subject of imperialism,” that occasioned her confrontation with subaltern speak; it was what disclosed her politics. 45 The political agenda is made even more specific when Spivak asserts that “the ‘subject’ has a history and that the task of the first–world subject of knowledge in our historical moment is to resist and critique ‘recognition’ of the Third World through ‘assimilation,’” a process that is apparent in “the ferocious standardizing benevolence of most US and Western European human–scientific radicalism.” 46 Locating the subaltern was not as difficult as entering into a relationship of responsibility with responses flowing both ways: “Learning to learn without this quick–fix frenzy of doing good with an implicit assumption of cultural supremacy which is legitimized by unexamined romanticization, that’s the hard part.” 47
It was imperialism’s interest in economic exploitation that “interests, motives (desires), and power (of knowledge) be ruthlessly dislocated” within the subjectivity of the oppressed. Even though her entire article is devoted to elaborating the problems associated with this dislocation—the problematic of epistemic violence—Spivak nevertheless warns against prioritizing dislocation over the economic, because to do so may be to perpetuate that rupture and unknowingly create “a new balance of hegemonic relations.” 48 (The epitome of such prioritization in my opinion is exemplified in Homi Bhabha’s conceptualization of the unity of the colonial subject whereby both colonized and colonizer embody a similar quality of ambivalence and ambiguity, such that the issue of the economic is subsumed in the interests of weakening the coherence of imperialism’s agents while strengthening the subversive potential of its subjugated. Here the dislocation of which Spivak speaks is prioritized over the problem of the economic dichotomy created by imperialism. 49 ) In the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intellectual would be to put the economic “under erasure,” to see the economic factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased—however imperfectly—when it claims to be the final determinant or the transcendental signified. 50 In other words, class must be critiqued when it claims to be the structural basis of social life, but it must be preserved at all costs as a fundamental category of analysis—that is, as something that cannot be subsumed by another, such as gender—when examining the processes and legacies of empire.
Subaltern Historiography
The project of retrieving the consciousness of those who reside in the space that is severed from the lines of mobility in a colonized country 51 is what marks an entry into the social, rather than the more idealized libidinal, 52 text of the subaltern. European intellectuals, says Spivak, may be attentive to the problems of neocolonialism in their own national domains, but they have little knowledge about the history of imperialism and its particular mode of epistemic violence. 53 Their “nostalgia for lost origins can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities within the critique of imperialism.” 54 This in itself is indicative of the dire inconsistencies and contradictions that one may run into if one draws uncritically upon their work to theorize colonial subjectivity:
[To] buy a self–contained version of the West is symptomatically to ignore its production by the spacing–timing of the imperialist project. Sometimes it seems as if the very brilliance of Foucault’s analysis of the centuries of European imperialism produces a miniature version of that heterogeneous phenomenon: management of space—but by doctors, development of administrations—but in asylums, considerations of the periphery—but in terms of the insane, prisoners, and children. The clinic, the asylum, the prison, the university, seem screen–allegories that foreclose a reading of the broader narratives of imperialism. 55
The appropriation by “Third World” scholars, namely the Subaltern Studies group, of the work of “First World” intellectuals is of particular concern with regard to an uncritical use of theories of European origin and content. The element of complicity in the strong tendency by the Subaltern Studies group toward totalization is particularly difficult for Spivak. 56 The problems across the divide are not identical, however, as the Subaltern Studies group faces “a predicament rather different from the self–diagnosed transparency of the first–world radical intellectual.” The assumption of subalternist work—contrary to that of Deleuze and Foucault, who maintain that “the oppressed... if given the chance... can speak and know their conditions” 57 —is that the mode of subalternity disallows such (western) self–knowledge and its corresponding articulation of subjectivity. 58
The subaltern is important for the project of the Subaltern Studies group, which is attempting to rewrite the consciousness of the Indian nation. Writing subaltern history means, fundamentally, attributing to subaltern subjectivity a supplement—an agency—that in imperialist traditions of historiography is denied. The whole point of identifying something as “subaltern insurgency” is to recognize an attempt to engage in a kind of representation that does not function “according to the lines laid down by the official institutional structures of representation.” Even as the subaltern attempts insurgency—something that would bring to crisis subalternity itself and make a possible shift toward a so–called political movement—“the Cambridge historian’s argument” (following Hobsbawms’s definition of what is political) is that it is not worthy of study because of the failure of the attempt. 59 The subaltern will therefore always “necessarily” be elusive to history since history narrates “success” not “failure.”
This question of failure is precisely related to the genre of non–speakingness, hence the idea of a “not–speakingness in the very notion of subalternity.” 60 The subaltern’s (non)location within the trajectory of history in turn can prevent the subaltern from entering (written) history. Since the subaltern is viewed as having no agency because agency is defined in terms of historical forward movement—that is, successful struggle—the group’s strategy is to shift the location of agency from the indigenous elite (bourgeois nationalist) to the insurgent or subaltern. Unlike the French theorists under scrutiny who claim to know the subaltern and engage themselves in its subject–constitution, the group is attempting the challenging task of rewriting the conditions of impossibility of their own text as the conditions of its possibility. 61 Where in European theorizing the subaltern was ultimately unknowable—because even when it has been given a space on the basis of the assumption and construction of a consciousness or a subjectivity through the idea of the sovereign subject it is “as mute as ever” because its agency is cast as failure and thus emptied—the Subaltern Studies group attempts to restructure what is considered to be failure.
Thus, where Foucault and Deleuze only manage to cohere with the imperialist counterproject, “mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of learning and civilization,” 62 the group, on the other hand, challenges imperialism’s monopoly on knowledge—and therefore its conceptualizations of politics—to rewrite the subaltern as nonsubaltern. What has been considered by both colonialist and nationalist historiography as being failure or irrelevance (encoded as “the discontinuous chain of peasant insurgencies during the colonial occupation”)—as having no “permission to narrate”—thus becomes the mark of success through a functional change in sign–systems. 63
Nevertheless, and not surprisingly, it is usually not registered, which is why Spivak, among others, presumably has found it her task to draw attention to the potential of the work of the Subaltern Studies group for not only Indian historiography but social and political theory globally.
In identifying its attempt “to investigate, identify and measure” subaltern consciousness, Spivak names the essentialism of the endeavor. She also defends it on the basis that “the violence of imperialist epistemic, social, and disciplinary inscription” means that “a project understood in essentialist terms must traffic in a radical textual practice of difference.” 64 For the subaltern scholars, the essentialist notion of a unified conscious subaltern must be part of their strategy, just as the concept of the nonmonolithic or situated subject must characterize the antihumanist critique “on the other side of the international division of labor.” 65 Historiography is also a matter of timing; it is politically unproductive to adopt a deconstructive position toward a subject that has no history. Theory is historically situated as much as the subjects about which it theorizes. This point deserves further elaboration.
Spivak claims that her critique of the project by the subaltern scholars that seeks to (re)construct the consciousness or subject is not an appeal to an essentialist identity or to the privileging of experience. 66 The significance of the implications of this statement is that it undermines the notion that she is engaging in a totalizing enterprise that draws upon illegitimate forms of essentialism to render theoretical integrity dominant over social and political progress. Spivak attempts to explain.
The political necessity and pragmatism of adopting or identifying with a particular subject position is not mirrored by the process of knowledge production. Pure identity does not produce knowledge; difference does. Knowledge and its object are never each other’s limits; the latter always exceeds the former.
The theoretical model of the ideal knower in the embattled position we are discussing is that of the person identical with her predicament. This is actually the figure of the impossibility and non–necessity of knowledge. Here the relationship between the practical—need for claiming subaltern identity—and the theoretical—no program of knowledge production can presuppose identity as origin—is, once again, of an “interruption” that persistently brings each term to crisis. 67
Spivak’s “reinscription” of the project of the Subaltern Studies group is one that draws out this dynamic. It weakens the totalizing tendencies the work displays by the “lawful naming” of the subaltern as such through an appeal to the “critical force of anti–humanism.” What is important to remember about the group’s work is that the object of its examination is an “irreducible... essentializing moment”; 68 its approach involves the “strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest.” It is “the usefulness of a dangerous thing.” 69
In this regard, Spivak refers analogously to a variety of “internationalist” Marxism that believes in a pure, retrievable form of consciousness only to dismiss it. This she identifies as the origin of the critical motivation of the Subaltern Studies scholars, something that is apparent in the constantly present suggestion in the group’s work “that subaltern consciousness is subject to the cathexis of the èlite, that it is never fully recoverable, that it is always askew from its received signifiers, indeed that it is effaced even as it is disclosed, that it is irreducibly discursive.” 70
Being a historian of the subaltern means that the attempt to articulate the subject–position of the subaltern involves the simultaneous dissolution of that position: “Working for the subaltern means the subaltern’s insertion into citizenship.” 71 Spivak speaks of the “interventionist value,” the “translating back” that occurs with the alignment of the subaltern historian with the subaltern. Indeed, Spivak suggests that the subalternity of the Subaltern Studies group arising out of their claiming a “positive subject–position” for the subaltern might be “reinscribed as a strategy for our times”:
What good does such a re–inscription do? It acknowledges that the arena of the subaltern’s persistent emergence into hegemony must always and by definition remain heterogeneous to the efforts of the disciplinary historian. The historian must persist in his efforts in this awareness, that the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic. It is a hard lesson to learn, but not to learn it is merely to nominate elegant solutions to be correct theoretical practice.... This is the always asymmetrical relationship between the interpretation and transformation of the world which Marx marks in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. 72
What must be attempted is the systematic unlearning of privilege through “seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern.” This “systematic unlearning” means acquiring the skill “to critique postcolonial discourse with the best tools it can provide and not simply substituting the lost figure of the colonized.” Paradoxically, these are the conditions in which “the postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss” and by which “they are a paradigm of the intellectuals.” 73
Spivak as critic is included among those whom she critiques. This is evident in her account of the importance of viewing the subaltern as being “out of reach” and her assertion that this is “more than a strategic exclusion”: she freely admits that this notion is something that would destroy her generalizations. 74 One would even go so far as to say she encourages this step. Thus, when Robert Young observes of Spivak’s Marxism that it operates as an “overall syncretic frame” in her work as a whole, that it acts as a “transcendentalizing gesture to produce closure,” and that therefore “Spivak’s supplementary history must itself be supplemented,” 75 he is right; but it is also the case that this process is already in motion in her intellectual production. For already in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” there is a plea to regard certain formulations—ones that could lead to the closure of grand essentialisms and totalizations—as persistently critiqued while nonetheless being found useful.
The assumption, prevalent in the United States, that there is a desire to preserve subalternity on the part of the Subaltern Studies group is false. 76 The group does not hold any romantic attachment to pure subalternity. This, it would seem, is the result of the work of the group being read through—not just being informed by—the liberal utopianism of thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze. 77 Although by Spivak’s account Foucault and Deleuze uncritically accept the negativity of the subject–position known as subalternity yet insist on attributing the “positive” qualities of the sovereign subject in all its rationality—consciousness and autonomy—the Subaltern Studies group undertakes the more radical endeavor of allowing positivity via a shift in the logic of historical agency. Foucault and Deleuze posit social and political presence in the larger context of a History that asserts its absence. On the other hand, in retheorizing what can be considered “success,” and in actively retrieving a consciousness in the name of a highly visible political interest, the Subaltern Studies group engages in the more difficult and precarious, but at the same time less idealistic and illusory, task of tracking a subjectivity that, in its elusiveness, is a constant reminder of its inherent unknowability and thus of the (necessarily) hear impossibility of the group’s project. This is vastly different from the idea espoused by European thinkers Spivak focuses on, who ignore the difficulty encountered by the subaltern in entering into “organic intellectuality” in their overwhelming desire to have cake and eat it too: to remain the Subjects of Europe and at the same time be in touch with the speaking subaltern. 78
Back to the Essentials
If the task of the Subaltern Studies group is to engage in “measuring silences,” 79 it also does not escape the problems attending the use of essentialism without an “against the grain” reading. Understanding how
essentialism can, indeed must, be used is something that has pervaded Spivak’s work, particularly that concerning feminism and gender analyses as well as figures constructed by oppression.
Within the context of Spivak’s methodological and theoretical techniques, essentialism has very little political use outside the insights of deconstruction. Deconstruction, however, has very little political value as an enterprise in and of itself. The greatest gift of deconstruction is to be critical of the interrogator without rendering him or her paralyzed. 80 Paralysis occurs only when the “enterprise of deconstruction” itself becomes the exclusive interest. 81 Quoting herself from Of Grammatology, Spivak illustrates how practitioners who become idolators of deconstruction specifically as a theory or blueprint for politics miss the point:
Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work. 82
If strategy works through a persistent (de)constructive critique of the theoretical, as Spivak maintains, it entails an impossible risk, for the idea of a lasting strategy is a contradiction. 83
One instance of a formulaic treatment of politics involves Spivak’s conception of the use of essentialism as it has been drawn upon to endorse academic posturing. 84 In retrospect, Spivak has recognized how the “artifice or trick designed to outwit or surprise the enemy,” encoded in her own idea of “strategic essentialism,” has alternately become “an alibi for proselytizing academic essentialisms” or a means of “self–differentiation from the poor essentialists.” But it is precisely the “critique of the ‘fetish–character’” that allows strategy to remain true to itself, that allows for the preemption of solidification into essentialism. At its most dangerous—as a theoretical design—it is reduced to a ploy that ultimately empties the generative productivity of the politics of subject–positions and their constitutive characteristics. What was a contingent approach to politics has become the mark of intellectual identity. As such, Spivak’s cautionary pragmatics has contributed to the (de)moralization of the participants in the surrounding debate. 85 The notion of strategic essentialism has turned out to be complicitous in creating the foundations for a new rivalry, particularly within feminist theorizing.
It is a situation Spivak herself finds unhelpful to criticism. Hence the reconsideration of her previous call for what by now would not be too inaccurate conceived as an hygienic essentialism—one that names a “scrupulously visible” political interest at work—and the “concept–metaphor” strategy employed alongside it.
I, myself, had thought I was saying that since it is not possible not to be an essentialist, one can self–consciously use this irreducible moment of essentialism as part of one’s strategy. This can be used as part of a “good” strategy as well as a “bad” strategy and this can be used self–consciously as well as unself–consciously, and neither self–consciousness nor unself–consciousness can be valorized in my book. 86
Politics, Spivak reminds her readers, is asymmetrical, “provisional,” and one must face the burden of having “broken the theory” when one becomes political. There can be no escape from essentializing tactics (“if you escape in the end, you lose”); and the attempt to maintain theoretical—and, failing that, moral—purity amounts to political stagnation and polemics. 87
Deconstruction presents final and total positions because this is unavoidable; “to make your arguments stick for the next half an hour” you must presuppose final and total positions. Speaking elsewhere of situational unity (which has affinities with the problems that may be generated by universalism and essentialism), Spivak speaks of the “travesty of philosophy, a turning of philosophy into a direct blueprint for policy making, to suggest that the search for a situational unity goes against the lesson of deconstruction.” Treating as dictum Jacques Derrida’s warning in “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” she insists that since “imperatives arise out of situations and, however unthinkingly, we act by imagining imperatives we must therefore scrupulously imagine a situation in order to act. Pure difference cannot appear. Difference cannot provide an adequate theory of practice.” 88
In an interview with Spivak, Ellen Rooney has pointed out that to be theoretically weary of the debate does not excuse being wary of it outside in the teaching machine. For her, essentialism is “a kind of initial question, politically and intellectually, when students discover the possibility of a feminist discourse.” Spivak’s response is that one can use the terms of the debate as part of a strategy to teach “rather than talk about it ad infinitum.” 89 The tedium and sterility of the debate over essentialism is understandable. Yet one cannot help thinking of Spivak’s analogy about decolonization. Once it is won, she says, the people want to enter into “the haunted house inhabited by the colonizers, a house that ‘the best people’ think is not such a grand hotel.” 90 What springs to mind within the context of the academic debate at hand is that the “best” were, more often than not, the very ones who created the myth of the “grand hotel.” For Spivak, however, this is truly a fact of life; there is nothing outside the text (of complicity).
Related to this is the charge that Derridean deconstruction remains trapped in the metaphysics of western philosophy. If essentialisms are part of the production of practice, epistemology, and ontology, deconstruction gives no clue as to the real. “The real in deconstruction is neither essentialist nor antiessentialist.” 91 Rather, this form of rereading encourages the investigation of the “counterintuitive position that there might be essences and there might not be essences.” Hence the deconstructive lesson on the impossibility of antiessentialism. 92 In terms of feminist critique, since there is no “discursive continuity among women,” the fundamental goal is “situational anti–sexism.” Without denying the importance or excellence of some of the work being done with regard to tracing the figure of women geopolitically or otherwise, Spivak maintains that it is the recognition of heterogeneity, rather than “positing some kind of woman’s subject, women’s figure, that kind of stuff,” 93 that matters most.
Spivak’s reassertion of the importance of the critique of essentialism is therefore one that is somewhat different from and much less theoretically rigid than a simple antiessentialist position. The point is not to engage in the exposure of error by way of the critique of essentialism. The critique of essentialism is not to be viewed in the negative “colloquial, Anglo–American sense of being adversely inclined,” but productively, as critique “in the robust European philosophical sense.” 94 It is a stance that Spivak would support “as one stand among many.” Clarifying with an example, Spivak notes that within the context of mainstream U.S. feminism, the concept of the relationship between the personal and the political is quite often reduced to the notion that the personal alone is the political. From there the voice from one’s own ground or standpoint is given emphasis over “matching the trick to the situation.” Identitarianism, specifically as something drawing upon a theory subjectivity, solidifies into an approach that cannot escape the negative that inevitably accompanies the positive. Its commitment to itself disallows shifts to more politically advantageous positions that, although never completely nor even nearly uncomplicitous, engage with the historical shifts of value coding in progressive rather than regressive ways. “The most serious critique in deconstruction is the critique of things that are extremely useful, things without which we cannot live on, take chances; like our running self–identikit. That should be the approach to how we are essentialists.” 95
Spivak even goes so far as to advocate doing politics “according to the old rules” while remembering the dangers and recognizing the inevitable contingency of such an approach. “Since one cannot not be an essentialist, why not look at the ways in which one is essentialist, carve out a representative essentialist position,” and then proceed? 96
Essences, it seems to me, are just a kind of content. All content is not essence. Why be so nervous about it? Why not demote the word “essence,” because without a minimalizable essence, an essence as ce qui reste, an essence as what remains, there is no exchange. Difference articulates these negotiable essences. There is no time for essence/anti–essence. There is so much work to be done. 97
If so in deeds, so also in theory. Just as agency is not always in the interest of “progressive” change (the move from “identity” to “agency,” as Spivak notes, says nothing about whether that agency is good or bad), so the journeys into the impossibility of subaltern space do not produce useful formulas. “The possibility of subalternity for me,” says Spivak, “acts as a reminder. If it is true that when you seem to have solved a problem, that victory, that solution, is a warning.” As soon as the possibility of subalternity is apparent, it is time to look for things to “upset the apple cart.” 98
Postcolonial Paradox
What actually happens in a typical liberal multicultural classroom “at its best”? On a given day we are reading a text from one national origin. The group in the classroom from that particular national origin in the general polity can identify with the richness of the texture of the “culture” in question, often through a haze of nostalgia.... People from other national origins in the classroom (other, that is, than Anglo) relate sympathetically but superficially, in an aura of “same difference.” The Anglo relates benevolently to everything, “knowing about other cultures” in a relativist glow. 99
“Can the subaltern speak?” is about the warm glow that does harm even as it claims to do good. The response is never a resolute answer. It depends on who is listening and how they hear her.
The work of the Subaltern Studies group, which, says Spivak, is much more complicated than her own, cannot abdicate the responsibility of refusing to represent the oppressed. 100
Not only because of their devotion to semiotics, but also because they are trying to assemble a historical bio–graphy of those whose active lives are only disclosed by a deliberately fragmentary record produced elsewhere, the Subaltern Studies group... must remain committed to the subaltern as the subject of his history. As they choose this strategy, they reveal the limits of the critique of humanism as produced in the West. 101
The responsibility that comes with such endeavors brings with it the inevitability of error. On the other hand, “the alternative of not attending to the subaltern past with all of its difficulties would be not to attend to it at all.”
Three conclusions arise out of Spivak’s work on subalternity that seem ironic in light of the insistence on historical knowledge and specificity, subject–positioning, and the politics of theory. There is the assertion that “the historical predicament of the colonial subaltern can be made to become the allegory of the predicament of all thought, all deliberative consciousness.” 102 We are, in other words, all subaltern to some degree and in some capacity: We must all work to be heard accurately, whether it be in terms of experience (the gender and race issues figure prominently), politics (the representation of children is a highly relevant example), the psychoanalytical (do we even know ourselves who we are?), or whatever. What is surprising in this admission is that it seems to undermine the importance of the main argument in Spivak’s dense essay, particularly given her decision to put the economic under erasure. In its radical antiessentialism, it threatens to undo all the emphatic arguments about the crucial significance of class and gender, location, and (privileged) place. On the other hand, it makes the work of the Subaltern Studies group extend in relevance to any field of thought concerned with social change. And it undoes the privilege of Europe as the all–knowing and primary signifier.
The second conclusive point Spivak makes is about how history is larger than personal goodwill: 103 “You are, to an extent, distanced from it with humility and respect when you ‘build for difference,’” 104 since history and language do not offer many choices in the way of strategy. For all its poststructuralist rhetoric, the argument under scrutiny defers quite explicitly to the deeply entrenched structures history has produced; what is important is that it does so without being deterministic, fatalistic, or, ultimately, even totalistic. The totalizations with which Spivak engages are usually contingencies that achieve their power through situated universalisms, essentialisms, and irreducibility, although they are shrouded in jargon and hyperbole.
Finally, and most revealingly, Spivak acknowledges that to act with responsibility requires potentially the existence of intention, even the privilege of subjectivity in order to be responsible. 105 If “Can the Subaltern Speak?” could have been retitled “One or Two Things the European Subject Cannot Know About the Other,” 106 with its themes of ethically motivated politics working with the heterogeneity of historical contexts and the homogeneousness of internationalism, it could, with the position outlined now, be formulated as “Space, Time, and the Posthumanist Political Subject.” It engages with the idea that, to quote Bruce Robbins, “we can neither deny representation nor self–effacingly make ourselves transparent so that others can fully and immediately represent themselves. While working toward greater democracy of representation over another.” It is to recognize, in the words of another critic, that “people do it all the time, and the crucial issue is by what means, to what purpose, to what effect.” 107
Over the years since the 1988 essay, there seems to be a pragmatism that characterizes Spivak’s theorizing. It is something that cools the rhetoric and situates the argument in a way that makes it much more productive, if one is still willing to endure its intellectual contortions and exhibitionism. But rather than being simply a matter of pragmatism, to admit the sovereign subject back into her poststructralist analyses is to reflect the concern to undermine the misguided authority of an extremely influential figure such as Foucault, rather than to adhere dogmatically to the notion of the eternally fragmented subject and to flow with the history of theory. (It also, incidentally, illustrates the way poststructalist critique works most productively—when it acknowledges structures rather than ignores them.) 108
Spivak now emphasizes the need to “learn how to attend.” And what about mistakes? “Big deal. One is making mistakes all the time.” 109 One of her more recent advocations has been to move beyond the task of grasping otherness to recognizing agency in the Other 110 in the “emerging dominant” and the idea of solutions in an impossible future. In an era where the ostensible “open–mindedness” of multiculturalism is producing policies in business where comprehending the Other—through, for example, language courses and briefings on cultural difference—is absolutely necessary for the seduction by capital to take place successfully, the radical intellectual has little choice but to accept that operative knowledge of the Other may not be expert knowledge, but it still allows one to register rejection. 111
If by teaching ourselves and our students to acknowledge our part and hope in capitalism we can bring that hope to a persistent and principled crisis, we can set ourselves on the way to intervening in an unfinished chapter of history that was mired in Eurocentric national disputes. 112
If, despite and no doubt in spite of this long investigation, it was tempting to conclude that if we could only recognize the limits and location of theory, perhaps we would be able to mobilize its (contingent) truths in the interests of inhibiting violence in the sphere of the social rather than remaining preoccupied with the way in which violence is committed through our epistemes. I hope this essay shows that to query the notion of subaltern speak is to imply that the first task cannot be accomplished apart from the second. Representation, as Spivak observes, is not about representing “them” (vertreten) but about learning to represent (darstellen) ourselves. 113
There are reasons for being transported through the corridors of Pulp Fiction to enter and exit Gayatri Spivak’s study on the subaltern. The most significant one has to do with heuristic analogy. Important things are being said; some say them better than others. The vision of one writer can enable the screening of another’s.
Once again, both the film and the essay harbor a fetishizing tendency that obscures the fundamental message: visual and thematic sensationalism on the one hand, and blinding intellectual and theoretical glare on the other. 114 The danger is that style may be mistaken for content—something that is not as much a problem for the film, given the implicit political possibilities of the link between real war and screen war, as it is for the essay. It is tempting to say, however feeble it may sound, that the complexities of theorizing about theories of the subaltern mirror the many difficulties in the endeavor to write the subaltern into history.
If both works suggest unacceptable ideas, different elements in each of them respectively undermine and exacerbate this condition. The message is that social and political change requires that we must always be aware of what (historical) time, (sociopolitical) space, and (libidinal) subject–position we occupy. The lack of glamorous and unexpected destinies of all the (male) (anti)heroes of the film subvert the theory of glorification on, at the very least, the subconscious level. Nothing is as it should be, according to the formulas of stereotype: The heroes do not live in palaces and the women are just promises. This is also the case in the essay; however, its lack of elegance, its convoluted and scattered nature, and its insistence on always plunging both reader and writer into the deep end threaten to convince some audience members to walk out before the final scene. In this context, the metaphorical nature of the argument is in danger of being taken literally, and the radical is at risk of sliding toward the reactionary.
The last and most relevant overlap between film and essay as it has been presented here has to do with wartimeviolence. In transporting generic violence to the level of war in the screenplay, urban conflict is transformed from being a pathology of individualist society to the status of origin and ontology of society itself. In so doing, what could be neglected before (the gold watch) cannot be ignored afterwards, because the gravity of war demands a response. Similarly, the aggressive and oppressive language of violence and silence in relation to the subaltern is virtually immune to indifference.
The politicization of “violence” lies in the way it is named as war/benevolence. What narrative symbolism does in a film, poetic polemic achieves in an essay. As a watch tells of times of war, “subaltern silence” narrates the blindness of postcolonial desire. And where a little divine intervention, a little pulp fiction, shows up in one arena of social and political critique, what occurs in another is the deconstruction of the machinations of sovereign subjectivity in the ghost that is the subaltern.
Endnotes
Note 1: Quentin Tarantino, director; Tarantino and Roger Avary, writers; Miramax Films, A Band Apart/Jersey Films, 1994. Back.
Note 2: Other examples include Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa,” and Trainspotting, directed by Danny Boyle, screenplay by Hon Hodge, Polygram and Noel Gay Motion Picture Company, 1995, after a novel by Irvine Welsh. Back.
Note 3: I would like to thank Dominic Marner for his elaborations on the relationship between the gold watch and war in this film. Back.
Note 4: Examples of the latter would include corporal punishment, child abuse, legal executions. Back.
Note 5: Arendt, On Violence, pp. 6, 52. Back.
Note 6: Arendt said that violence may appear where power is in jeopardy (Arendt, On Violence, p. 56). Power, on the other hand, gains legitimacy and authority where violence needs to be controlled. Back.
Note 7: This is the political theory problematic of the collection edited by Campbell and Dillon, The Political Subject of Violence. Back.
Note 8: Cited in Arendt, On Violence, p. 9. Back.
Note 9: This example and its quotes were taken from Der Derian, “A Reinterpretation of Realism,” p. 364. Back.
Note 10: Arendt, On Violence, p. 3. Back.
Note 11: See Virilio, War and Cinema. Back.
Note 12: Coppola, Apocalypse Now. Back.
Note 13: This is a reference to the return to the opening murder scene where a “miracle” has allowed bullets to pass through “our heroes.” Back.
Note 14: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” p. 288. Back.
Note 15: In Spivak’s essay, this generalization generally refers to the work of Foucault and Deleuze and occasionally Guattari. Back.
Note 16: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” p. 280. The intellectuals Spivak is referring to are Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, but her point has wider significance in the context of this analysis. The texts of interest in this regard are “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” in Foucault, Language, Counter–Memory, Practice; and Deleuze and Guattari, Anti–Oedipus. Back.
Note 17: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” p. 281. Back.
Note 20: Cited in the commentary by Jon Bird on the exhibition by Alfredo Jaar in which Spivak collaborated, “Two or Three Things I Imagine About Them,” Lower, Upper and New Galleries, February 14March 29, 1992, Whitechapel, London. Back.
Note 21: This account of the theoretical approach of the Subaltern Studies group, along with the citations from Guha, is taken from Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism” (pp. 14771478), an excellent articulation of the Subaltern Studies project. Back.
Note 22: Trans. anonymous (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970). Back.
Note 23:
This brief introduction to Foucault’s idea of epistemes is derived from Young, White Mythologies, pp. 7476. All citations in this paragraph are
from Foucault in Young. Back.
Note 24: Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” p. 268. Spivak cites St. John Rivers in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (New York: 1960). Back.
Note 25: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” pp. 288, 292. Back.
Note 26: Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” p. 272. Back.
Note 27: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” pp. 280281. Back.
Note 28: Mani, “Contentious Traditions,” pp. 90, 95, 111, 112, 115, 117, 119. Back.
Note 30: Bhabha, The Location of Culture. Back.
Note 31: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” pp. 307, 308. Back.
Note 32: Ibid., pp. 300, 308. Back.
Note 34: Ibid., pp. 301, 306, 307. Spivak notes that if a more privileged subaltern, such as the middle–class Bhuvaneswari, can still not be heard, then the most oppressed in subalternity are even further in the depths; the idea of the subaltern as woman, as one salient example, thus becomes contaminated. If the subaltern is too buried to be able to emerge with an audible voice, the gendered subaltern is a figure that is doubly displaced and “more deeply in shadow” (pp. 287, 295, 306, 307). The notion of irretrievability seems to have affinities with the idea of the indeterminacy of the “feminine” within deconstructive criticism and certain forms of feminist criticism. Nonetheless, the two concepts operate in vastly different ways within each respective intellectual domain. It is the subject–positioning that differentiates the dynamics; subaltern historiography as an approach that is specifically concerned with one particular kind of subjectivity raises methodological questions that disallow the move toward indeterminacy. “For the ‘figure’ of woman, the relationship between woman and silence can be plotted by women themselves; race and class differences are subsumed under that charge. Subaltern historiography must confront the impossibility of such gestures” (p. 287). Back.
Note 35: Ibid., pp. 286, 306, 308. Spivak draws upon Pierre Macherey’s idea that what a work cannot say is important (p. 286). Back.
Note 36: Spivak, in Landry and Maclean, The Spivak Reader, p. 292. Back.
Note 37: Ibid., pp. 287290. Back.
Note 38: Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” p. 38; originally published in The Oxford Literary Review 9(1/2), 1987. Back.
Note 40: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” pp. 271, 272. Back.
Note 43: Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 209. The negation of this position occurs with the discourse of postmodernism, which leads to an “emptying” of the subject–position. This phrase is rather complicated by Spivak’s accidental (?) use of the term either twice, with the first being misplaced. The first part of the sentence reads: “The radical intellectual in the West is either caught in a deliberate choice of subalternity, granting to the oppressed either that very expressive subjectivity which s/he criticizes or, instead, a total unrepresentability.” This renders her statement about postmodernism ambiguous. Is the issue one of representation, where one seeks to arrive at the point where one can still say “I” and, in the crisis of the radical intellectual, oscillate from complete representability to none at all? If so, how does postmodernism inform the crisis of these intellectuals with specific regard to their ignorance of the history of imperialism? If the choice, on the other hand, is one between representation (regardless of its own conundrum)—where the “I” matters—and annihilation of the subject—where the “I” does not matter—this makes more sense but still leaves a lot to be untangled. Back.
Note 44: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” p. 281. Back.
Note 46: Ibid., pp. 292, 294. Back.
Note 47: Spivak, in Landry and Maclean, The Spivak Reader, p. 293. Back.
Note 48: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” p. 280. Back.
Note 49: Bhabha, The Location of Culture, especially the essays “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” and “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” Back.
Note 50: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” p. 280. Back.
Note 51: Spivak, in Landry and Maclean, The Spivak Reader, p. 288. Back.
Note 52: The reference is to Deleuze. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” p. 285. Back.
Note 53: Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 209. Back.
Note 54: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” pp. 290, 291. Back.
Note 55: Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 210. Back.
Note 56: She refers to the “‘law [that] assign[s] a[n] undifferentiated [proper] name’... ‘to the subaltern as such’” that is drawn upon by the Subaltern Studies group. Ibid., p. 201. Back.
Note 57: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” p. 283. Back.
Note 58: Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 253. Back.
Note 60: Spivak, in Landry and Maclean, The Spivak Reader, pp. 289, 290, 306. Spivak distinguishes this moment from what she calls the general condition of subalternity where speech acts are captured by oral history or a discursive formation that is different from investigation. Back.
Note 61: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” p. 285. Back.
Note 63: Ibid., pp. 283286; Spivak, In Other Worlds, pp. 197221. Spivak draws upon the work of Paul de Man to assert the Subaltern Studies group’s scrupulous annotation of the double movement involved in the shift: “The movement of signification adds something... but this addition... comes to perform a vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified.” De Man cited by Spivak. Back.
Note 64: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” p. 285. Back.
Note 65: Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 210. Back.
Note 66: Spivak follows Jonathan Culler in this particular formulation. Back.
Note 67: Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 254. Back.
Note 69: Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, pp. 5, 15. Back.
Note 70: Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 203. Back.
Note 71: Spivak, in Landry and Maclean, The Spivak Reader, p. 307. Back.
Note 72: Spivak, In Other Worlds, pp. 207208. Back.
Note 73: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” pp. 287, 295. Back.
Note 74: Spivak, in Landry and Maclean, The Spivak Reader, p. 293. Back.
Note 75: Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, p. 173. Back.
Note 76: Spivak implies by the use of the word we that it is to the group to which she herself belongs that she is referring. Back.
Note 77: This is Spivak’s criticism of Deleuze and Foucault. She does, however, generalize it to include western intellectuals interested in tracking the subjectivity of the “Other.” Back.
Note 78: Spivak, in Landry and Maclean, The Spivak Reader, p. 292. Back.
Note 79: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” p. 286. Back.
Note 80: Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 201. Back.
Note 81: This, according to Seung, Structuralism and Hermeneutics, is a common—and destructive—phenomenon.
The eruption of post–structuralist irrationalism can be accepted as a necessary reaction and even be used as a healthy antidote to the naive scientific optimism and dogmatism that have nurtured the various structural programs. But to exalt this irrationalism as the guiding spirit of a new era is to invite and establish an intellectual anarchy.
As long as this anarchy is confined within a few professional journals, it may not exact any tolls heavier than deranging a few feeble–minded pedants. But when it invades classrooms and ravages the tender minds of young students, it can produce disastrous consequences. (p. xii) Back.
Note 82: Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 201. Back.
Note 83: Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 3. Back.
Note 84: Spivak refers to the sloganizing of strategy. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 9. Back.
Note 85: Citations from the following discussion are derived from Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, pp. 3–7, except where otherwise indicated. Back.
Note 86: Spivak, in Harasym, The Postcolonial Critic, p. 109. Back.
Note 87: Spivak uses the terms counterproductive, paralysis, negative metaphysics. See ibid., pp. 11–13, 45, 47, 52, 122. Back.
Note 88: Spivak, “Teaching for the Times,” p. 181. The essay by Derrida that she cites is from “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice,” Cordoza Law Review 11 (July/August 1990). Back.
Note 89: Spivak adds that, in any case, students at this point are “not ready to take sides.” See Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 18. Back.
Note 90: Spivak, in Landry and Maclean, The Spivak Reader, p. 27. Back.
Note 91: Spivak departs from Derrida where he distinguishes “woman,” described genitally, from the figure and question of “woman,” insisting on her antisexist stance “which is against a sort of purity of the deconstructive approach.” See Spivak in Harasym, The Postcolonial Critic, p. 14. Back.
Note 92: Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 10. Back.
Note 93: Spivak, in Harasym, The Postcolonial Critic, p. 58. Back.
Note 94: Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 5. Back.
Note 96: Spivak, in Harasym, The Postcolonial Critic, p. 45. Back.
Note 97: Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 18. Spivak also notes the tendency to conflate empiricism with essentialism. The careful construction of an object of investigation is not essentialism. The main concern is to be aware that there is, for example, no feminine essence, no essential class subjects, etc. (p. 16). Back.
Note 98: Spivak, in Landry and Maclean, The Spivak Reader, pp. 293, 294. Back.
Note 99: Spivak, “Teaching for the Times,” p. 183. Back.
Note 100: This, according to Spivak, is what Foucault did during his influential last period. The term influential is crucial in this context to Spivak’s argument. Back.
Note 101: Spivak, In Other Worlds, pp. 207–208. Back.
Note 102: Ibid., p. 204. Back.
Note 103: Spivak, in Landry and Maclean, The Spivak Reader, p. 296. Back.
Note 104: Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 7. Back.
Note 105: Spivak, in Landry and Maclean, The Spivak Reader, p. 294. Back.
Note 106: This is derived from the title of Jaar’s exhibition, “Two or Three Things I Imagine About Them,” commentary by Jon Bird. I found that the extremely difficult–to–avoid problems of representing the Other nonhierarchically were apparent in some parts of the installation, as was the attempt to displace, or at least minimize, the visibility of authority (the prominence and size of Spivak’s albeit inverted image on looped videotape being one such instance). Back.
Note 107: The first citation is from Bruce Robbins, the second from Jonathan Arac, both in Robbins, “The East Is a Career,” p. 51. Back.
Note 108: Hence Spivak’s supposedly antithetical position as a Marxist, feminist, deconstructivist, poststructuralist Back.
Note 109: Spivak, in Landry and Maclean, The Spivak Reader, p. 307. Back.
Note 110: Spivak, “Teaching for the Times,” p. 182. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women (pp. 15, 22–23, 31, 35), is a novel and radical attempt to formulate a theoretical way of seeing agency in, specifically, women who commit sati (suicide usually by burning or live burial alongside the male body in order to exonerate the sins of the recently deceased husband and guarantee the entry of both into heaven). Although it only barely sketches out any such formulation, I find it a problematical but intriguing idea. Consider the following thematic statements made by Rajan. The study “explores, tentatively, how a western meditation on the subject of the body in pain may be appropriated for and contested by a specific historical and feminist project in the interests of the female subject as agent.”
“It is important... to recognize that an inherent resistance to pain is what impels the individual or collective suffering subject towards freedom. It is therefore as one who acts/reacts, rather than as one who invites assistance, that one must regard the subject in pain... the sati is understood not psychologically, in terms of a predisposition to or a disregard of pain, but as a contingent self.”
“By abandoning the commitment to construct the subjectivity of the woman who performs sati in terms of her motivation we may be enabled to break out of a methodological impasse. Since those who claim that the sati embraces death do not also claim that she embraces pain, but instead argue that she knows no pain, it is necessary and possible to contest the latter argument.” “The sati is not a dead woman, but a burning woman seeking to escape, not a spectacle but the subject of action and agency.”
“To conclude, while I am sympathetic to a feminist politics that seeks to resist intervention [Rajan here refers to the work of Chandra Mohanty, Lata Mani, and Spivak] I am also anxious, like many feminists in this part of the globe, to discover what might make intervention possible. If ‘victim’ and ‘agent’ are adopted as exclusive and excluding labels for the female subject, and if, further, victimhood is equated with helplessness and agency with self–sufficiency, all feminist politics will be rendered either inauthentic or unnecessary. To view the ‘victim’ as subject in my argument about sati (to anchor the argument once again within its specific social and historical context) is to maintain that pain is the very condition of a move towards no–pain, without, at the same time, obviating the need for the operation of sympathy.” This is obviously a complex argument that requires very methodical and unambiguous elaboration if it is to avoid being misapprehended. Back.
Note 111: Spivak uses the term literacy instead of knowledge and is speaking more specifically about education; but juxtaposing her two statements allows a useful point to be made. See Spivak, “Teaching for the Times,” pp. 183, 193. Back.
Note 112: Ibid., p. 184. We can hopefully move beyond the question of ability to that of desire on the part of the marginalized of history rather than its center–stage participants. In a recent paper by Ann Stoler, the theme was “will the subaltern speak,” one that is fraught with another set of complexities and frustrations but is as deeply significant as that discussed by Spivak. It must be said, as a reminder to those who would imagine that the issue investigated in this essay is now dead, that Stoler received criticism from a few of her colleagues for presuming to be able to step into a culture (albeit one that she has studied for decades and has lived in bi– and trilingually for several years) and retrieve its hidden histories. Stoler, “Memory Work and Postcolonial Studies,” paper delivered to the joint literature and sociology seminar held in the Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK, February 5, 1998. This is the paralysis referred to earlier. And it is a problem whose accompanying pressures often reduce the issue of “what to do” to the choice of either continuing on in unreflexive and unreflective nineteenth–century–style “observation” and “interrogation,” or critiquing oneself and one’s work out of any productive potential at all. True, there is an increasing number of nuanced studies arising out of the study of colonialism, postcolonialism, and their overlapping discourses, but this is not indicative of the evaporation of the problem of how to proceed in the least damaging of ways. And, as the whole point of Spivak’s essay illustrates, the instructiveness of nuance can hide narrow narcissism. Back.
Note 113: Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” pp. 288–289. Back.
Note 114: Here, as before, I am reducing Tarantino’s film to one narrative for the purposes of argument. Back.
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