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Can the Subaltern Speak?
Ms Aarti Jindal
Email: aj0694@yahoo.com
M.A English Literature, SCD Government College for Boys, Ludhiana
B.A English Honors, Khalsa College for Women, Ludhiana
Abstract
In the present paper a research has been done on
the essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ by’ Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak’. It has been explained into
much simpler language about what the author
conveys for better understanding and further
references. Also the criticism has been done by
various critiques from various sources which is
helpful from examination point of view. The paper
has been divided into various contexts with an
introduction and the conclusions. Als o the
references has been written that depicts the sources
of criticism.
Keywords
Epistemic Violence, Socialized Capital, Identity-in-
Differential, Political Interests.
1 Introduction
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the
Subaltern Speak?” is one of the key theoretical
texts in the field of postcolonial studies, by one of
its most famous figures. It was first published in
the journal Wedge in 1985, as “Can the Subaltern
Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice”;
reprinted in 1988 as “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Considered "one of the most influential
postcolonial intellectuals", Spivak is best known
for her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" and for
her translation of and introduction to Jacques
Derrida's De la Grammatologie. Spivak was born in
Calcutta, India. In "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
Spivak discusses the lack of an account of the Sati
practice, leading her to reflect on whether the
subaltern can even speak. Spivak recounts how Sati
appears in colonial archives. Spivak demonstrates
that the Western academy has obscured subaltern
experiences by assuming the transparency of its
scholarship. Spivak writes about the process, the
focus on the Eurocentric Subject as they disclaim
the problem of representation; and by invoking the
Subject of Europe, these intellectuals constitute the
subaltern Other of Europe as anonymous and mute.
She has often referred to herself as a "practical
Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist.” In "Can the
Subaltern Speak?" Spivak highlights how Gilles
Deleuze and Michael Foucault confine the subject
to the West, which problematizes the non-western
other as real and knowable. In concluding her
essay, she refuses Deleuze and Foucault for making
it impossible to conduce with the subaltern in a
discursive practice, and suggests the possibilities
Jacques Derrida offers for thinking about the
subaltern insomuch as he relate to a classically
philosophical interpretation of the subject, rather
than a socio-political, cultural or historical
interpretation, which might assume that the subject
is always already the subject of the West.
2 Epistemic Violence
“It is well known that Foucault locates epistemic
violence, a complete overhaul of the episteme, in
the redefinition of sanity at end of European
eighteenth century”
Subaltern in here Spivak explains it in term’s
nuances. Subalterns are the never who never adopt
the dominant point of view or vocabulary.
Subaltern in India’s context are the ones who did
not consist of elite class or rich landlords or the
peasants. Here Foucault expresses or locates
epistemic violence that is the violence of
knowledge where he redefines the sanity of Europe
in eighteenth century. According to Spivak,
episteme occurred through the marginilization of
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the certain voices that are within Western
discourses. These voices are of the "subaltern."
Spivak then talk about the subtext of the narrative
document that has been removed due to forcefully
extending nation’s authority to be recognized as
forcibly imposed obedience of knowledge. The
whole set of knowledge has been disqualified for
being inadequate or insufficiently elaborated which
was beneath the level of cognition. It is not to
explain how the things were but rather how the
narrative of reality was established or built as to
prescribe a norm.
Critic
Her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?” (which
exists in several forms - I'll be examining the
longest version, which appears in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture) displays a dazzling array
of tactical devices designed to ward off or pre-
emptively neutralize the attacks of critics. We
might say of Spivak what Althusser said of Lacan -
that the legendary difficulty of the essay is less a
consequence of the profundity of its subject matter
than its tactical objectives: "to forestall the blows
of critics to feign a response to them before they
are delivered" and above all, to resort to
philosophies apparently foreign to the endeavor "as
so many intimidating witnesses thrown in the faces
of the audience to retain the respect."To
acknowledge this does not automatically imply a
criticism of Spivak (which is precisely why I cited
the case of Lacan the importance of whose work
for me at least is unquestionable after all, tactics
are dictated by the features of the concrete
situation.
3 Socialized Capital
“According to Foucault and Deleuze the oppressed,
if given the chance, and on the way to solidarity
through alliance politics can speak and know their
conditions”
Here Spivak talks of the margins that draw out the
silenced center which is marked out by the violence
of knowledge, illiterate men and women, the
tribal’s and the urban lower working class. Marx
here speaks for the feminists, proletariats, the
oppressed and the third world people. According to
Foucault and Deleuze if the oppressed are given a
chance through uniting politics they can speak and
become aware of their conditions. Spivak criticizes
Foucault and Deleuze as they ignore the fact that
power produces ideology and instead filling its
place with the notion of culture. In this, she means
an identification of the subaltern with the colonial
subject who then functions as an agent of change.
She remains critical of the subaltern
historiographical projects in so far as it attempts to
retrieve un-differential subaltern consciousness,
which, according to her, is problematized by
notions of class and gender. There are two
important areas where Spivak demonstrates the
operation in the conceptions about the "Third
World" and the "Third World Woman". It is
impossible to recover the "authentic" voice of the
subaltern. Spivak's well-known argument is that the
subaltern cannot speak for him or herself because
the very structure of colonialism prevents the
speaking. For the colonized woman, this is even
more impossible because the double bind of
colonialism represses her completely. She simply
cannot represent herself, For example, in the case
of dowry, which, we cannot refuse to give or deny.
However, Spivak argues that the intellectual project
must try to make visible the position of the
marginalized. The subaltern must be spoken for,
but not romanticized. Subaltern is that identity that
has no possibility at social mobility.
Critic
Spivak doesn’t hold back in criticizing Foucault
and Deleuze, and turns to especially insulting
allegations, accusing them in cooperating with
capitalism and imperialism, in essentialism,
positivism, in false claims to objectivity and
transparency, institutionalism and chauvinism.
Spivak uses Marx and through rereading him
criticizes those that to a large extent work within
the tradition founded by him. Spivak employed a
deconstructionist tactic which reads the objects of
her criticism "against themselves". Finally, to add
insult to injury, she appeals to their eccentric "black
sheep" of the family, Jacques Derrida, whose
method she favors over that of Foucault and
Deleuze. And all through her offensive Spivak
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makes sure to raise the shield of subject position
that is supposed to neutralize the meaning of the
words at the bottom of "Can the Subaltern Speak?”
4 Identity-in-Differential
“Against possible charge that his approach is
essentialist, Guha constructs a definition of the
people that can be only an identity-in-differential”
Guha says that there are most of Indian elites who
are at their best interested in the voices of the other
but never to insist that colonized subaltern subject
is irrecoverably diverse in kind or nature. A
dependence upon western intellectuals to "speak
for" the subaltern condition is woman as a subject.
Brown woman oppressed as structural necessity.
Saving brown woman is also a structural necessity.
Gayatri Spivak in 'Can the Subaltern Speak' show
the connection with the colonized people who are
not made to speak for themselves rather the
colonizers speak on their behalf. It presents the
point that woman is not able to speak. Marx breaks
the classes in Society on the basis of the economic
conditions. There is isolation of classes. It is
working on the structural principle of a dispersed
and dislocated class subject. The classification falls
into dominant foreign group and dominant
indigenous groups-the subaltern classes. Western
feminist opinion is a battle over the right to
individualism between women and men. Our effort
is to give the Subaltern a voice in history. The
white profess to save the brown women from the
inhumanity of brown men. Bhubanes wari who
committed suicide because as a freedom fighter she
couldn't perform the work entrusted to her. In fact
the Subaltern as female cannot be heard or read.
That is why Spivak is concerned with the basic
questions 'Can the Subaltern speak?'
Critic
It seems that Spivak's (and Said) answer to this
question is a definite no, at least not without having
their ethnocentrism and economical interests
effecting the way they speak and eventually being a
repressive act. The inability, or invalidity, of
westerners to speak about the other is derived, so is
implied by Spivak, from their inability to listen to
the other and understand him without enforcing
their own western consciousness and values upon
him. In the circle drawn by Spivak the colonial
oppressor cannot speak about the Subaltern that he
cannot hear since the subaltern cannot speak since
the oppressor cannot listen to him. With everybody
interlocked in this deaf-dumb cycle, it seems that
Spivak leaves room for only one voice to speak –
her own ,the female hybrid researcher that now
poses the same claim for transparency and
objectivity for which she criticized Foucault and
Deleuze.
5 Conclusion
Spivak then turns to Sigmund Freud in an effort to
develop an appropriate model of intellectual work.
Freud furthers the analysis of colonialism by
helping us see how the very identity of whiteness
itself is created in part through the self proclaimed
benevolence of colonial action. Neither Freud nor
Spivak is silent. They each make various
determinate claims and Spivak says, reveal their
$political interests in those claims. The subaltern is
not similarly privileged and does not speak in a
vocabulary that will get a hearing in institutional
locations of power. The subaltern enters social and
intellectual discourse only rarely and usually
through the mediating commentary of someone
more at home in those discourses. If the
problematic is understood this way, it is hard to see
how the subaltern can be capable of speaking.
References
(i) "Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak." Wikipedia.
Wikimedia Foundation, 06 Mar. 2017. Web. 07
Mar. 2017.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayatri_Chakravort
y_Spivak>.
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