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I first read Gayatri Spivak's, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," many years ago and re-reading it now offers a different context and path to making sense of this work. First, Kim Fortun's contextual introduction is a generative space from which to read this brilliant and complex critique of the Subaltern Studies collective. She provides an opening from which to re-think the place of scholarly engagement within, and as participants of, communities of practices inspired by the research Katie Cox and Angela Okune. Fortun's introduction is a pedagogical gesture, a reflection on her own teaching and learning over time. In re-reading this essay, I can see now that Spivak's essay is also a gesture, opening a place of critique as the grounds for re-imagining and reclaiming the possiblity of Subaltern voices. Spivak highlights the assumptions, the metanarratives, embedded in the collective's historiographical practice as a form of knowledge production.
I have two reflections. First, in reading Spivak's critique of historiography both specific (Guha and Chakrabraty) and more general (Western European) and her analysis of their strategic utility is persuasive. I am reminded of other forms of historiography--specifically microhistory--which also engages in the practice of reading the archive against the grain and which, by avoiding making claims about broader historical patterns and systems, is not subject to Spivak's analysis of historiography. I wonder what microhistorical work emerges from the colonial archive.
My second reflection is more broadly about critique as a generative opening. In the zoom discussion there were moments when contributors began mapping their own encounters with theory (French, German), almost as a rite of passage. I began wondering what other genealogies we bring to our work. This text is a tour de force. It is powerfully incisive. Prerna Srigyan spoke of the multiple meanings of "dangerous" within it. As a strategic text, I find the difficulty in reading Spivak exasperating. As a narrative strategy I think the difficulty is, in part, intentional, which compounds my interpretation. I cannot read Spivak and find affinity, even as I recognize her masterful critique. In a prior discussion Duygu Kasdogan introduced me to the idea of dissenus, as opposed to consensus, as a strategic goal. In reading Spivak as critique, perhaps Spivak is an author willing to position herself not as a guide for collaboration but as a figure of dissenus even as she works to create this generative opening for further work.
Bringing last week’s conversation on education into contact with this weeks’ discussion of deconstruction and post-colonial theory, I would like to ask the following question: what would it yield if we extended Spivak’s affirmative deconstruction of the subaltern studies group and their participation in historiography to the university and to process of academic publication more generally? In this text, Spivak engages in deconstruction to highlight the subalternists’ own participation in the projects of discursive displacement that they analyze and for successfully failing to incorporate post-structural theory into their method of historiography. Extrapolating from this point, both post-structural and post-colonial theory, too, have been successful as failed-discursive displacements within the university. They have achieved (somewhat paradoxically) some level of hegemony in certain disciplines within the university. However, we learn them, develop them, publish and teach them within an ecology of departments, schools, and institutions that are structured by and that reproduce antithetical values and ethical commitments. This is coming to a head. The neoliberal model of university is in crisis, both from an ideological and logistical standpoint. The question is then not if a discursive displacement will take place within the university’s current sign system, but rather when, how, and what kind of functional change this displacement (however un/successful) will engender.
The COVID-19 pandemic is implicated in both the logistical and ideological dimensions of this crisis. In short, the logistical crisis posed by quarantine is bringing to light aporias of “the social text” that rendered the university’s existence legitimate and its value legible. Both graduate and undergraduate students alike are being forced to critically reconsider the possibility and expected benefits of their pursuits of higher education. In a complementary if reactionary fashion, the leadership and public representatives of many universities are making the strategically unsound decision to double-down on defending their value in conventional terms. What could be gained by adopting the scholastic ethical commitments of deconstruction, as a first step towards “question[ing] the authority of the [academy] without paralyzing [it], persistently transforming conditions of impossibility into possibility.” (Spivak 1996, 210).
At another level, I think it is important to consider how the successes and blind spots of the Subalternists might help us to identify our own, as critical scholars of our historical moment. Spivak describes the theoretical contribution of the Subalternists as a theory of change, one that on pivots on/from the force of crisis. Living in the midst of a crisis, it is easy to look backwards from the contemporary and to feel nostalgic for what now seems to be much more endurable and sensible times. However, to do so is to fail to recognize how the germs of our current present were working in those times. Or, in Spivak’s terms, “if the space for a change (necessarily also an addition) had not been there in the prior function of the sign-system, the crisis could not have made the change happen. The change in signification-function supplements the previous function” (1996, 206). Nostalgia is not an escape, no matter how far back you go, the past always leads to this present. Secondly, it is also easy to witness the blunders of the Trump administration or to watch as lockdown protestors arm themselves for open conflict and to essentialize these characters as an origin or source of social problems. But to do so would be to deny the “instituted trace at the origin.” While Trump and lockdown-protestors may not fit the bill of the subaltern, it is important to realize that their “subject effect” has taken shape in and through contrast and conflict with the contemporary left. How can we understand the role of critical scholarship in laying the scene for anti-academic sensibilities of the more radically conservative groups to take hold? They did not take shape in a vacuum but rather as “part of an immense discontinuous network ("text" in the general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on” (Spivak 1996, 213). In other words, how might we rethink and refashion cultural critique in light of the consequences of our own history of failures at discursive displacement?
(in my very limited understanding): Spivak offers a critique of the Subaltern Studies collective by "reading with and against the grain" of the texts produced by the collective. I like this overview of the collective's history, key concepts, critiques and an annotated bibliography of their texts. The collective broadly offered a reading of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent which sought to recover a history of the subaltern (which for them is the peasant exploited alike by a colonial and indigenous elite, insurgent against both colonial and feudal domination; derived from Gramsci's Italian peasant) from the colonial archive, even though the voice of the subaltern was noticeably absent in such archives. Their intervention was primarily against an "elite historiography" that had narrated nationalism as an upper-class, upper-caste project, but had failed to represent dissent and resistance from peasant rebellions.
Their consequent move was therefore not only to offer other archives for writing a subaltern history but also to reframe key moments in elite historiography to reveal the presence of the subaltern. This, they thought, would reveal also the presence of a subaltern consciousness and solidarity, which was as much, if not more critical to decolonization in the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere. The Subaltern Studies collective's larger theoretical and political commitment thus centered around the question: How can we read absences of the archive to articulate consciousness and solidarity?
Spivak's object of analysis are the collective's texts. She argues that historans of the subaltern want to give us a theory of change (broader social change but also particular shifts and tensions between feudalism, capitalism, colonialism). But what they end up doing is offering a theory of consciousness in line with Marxist and anti-humanist thought, assuming that collective consciousness, through a recognition that things are not what they seem to be, leads to change.
Spivak argues that this is a strategic move, and that the collective must not abandon the subaltern subject as an object of analysis. But what they need to do is not speak of the subaltern as a monolith, not assume that subaltern consciousness is collective, much less a radical consciousness. Nowhere is this more lucidly expressed than in her analysis of how women are written within the collective's texts, where they are present but as passive objects of exchange over and through whose bodies class consciousness formed. It is also present in what I think is her most damning critique of the collective: "the transactional quality of interconflicting metropolitan sources often eludes the (post)colonial intellectual". Spivak is calling out the collective for not reading/citing other scholars who also attempt to articulate a radical anti-hegemonic consciousness. This is the double bind of the subaltern for Spivak: capturing it with careful historiographic work at the same time pointing to its absence. For Spivak this is not a point of paralysis, but a point to start from, acknowledging that there is no way out of the inadequacy of representation.
I think Spivak could offer two interventions:
(1) First, her notion of "cognitive failure" is helpful to understand how COVID-19 is unfolding. For her, it is not being able to grapple the object of analysis: “Unless the subject separates from itself to grasp the object, there is no cognition, indeed no thinking, no judgment.” She writes this statement to talk about the Marxist and anti-humanist tendency to abhor cognitive failure and see it as inducing paralysis. For Marx and Gramsci, for example, this has been a question of the proletariat class recognizing that they are excluded from the labor of their own bodies, through which their shared consciousness can arise.
For Spivak, however, through her critique of the Subaltern Studies collective, there is no escape from cognitive failure. Just as it is okay that the collective will not be able to speak for the subaltern as much as there is value in it, it is alright to not be able to grapple. The COVID-19 moment is instructive of failures upon failures: failure of neoliberalism, of the nation-state, of parochial activism, of scholarly projects. It is a failure of not being able to do anything even though we have a shared consciousness of failure. It is a failure of being able to be a person, or even being mourned with dignity. Spivak, through her stubborn insistence on being able to build from failure and residues, says that our usual ways of performing scholarship, activism, and subalternity will not work. We have to be able to come together from a point of exhaustion and failure.
(2) Second, Spivak opens up the question of how we construct oppression and exclusion in the archive, especially if the oppressed and excluded figure is not present. The way COVID-19 is unfolding builds upon histories of institutional and informational opaqueness. How do we read absences of the archive, or "against the grain", against institutional and informational opaqueness?
(1) I am mostly frustrated by Spivak's, and even the collective's exclusion of Dalit thought and literature. I think that the argument of: “There simply are no subaltern testimonials, memoirs, diaries, or official histories”: is both incorrect and dangerous. Both Spivak and the Subaltern Studies overdetermine the influence of bourgeois nationalism and of figures like Gandhi, who were mainstream but not necessarily radical or even the most popular. In the Spivak reader, for example, there is no mention of Ambedkar's work, who as a Buddhist Dalit scholar and the architect of the constitution of the Indian nation-state, is a subaltern figure who spoke and wrote fiercely against both colonialism and the caste system. There is now the field of Dalit Studies which writes against the grain of this exclusion. The book Decolonizing Anarchism offers an anti-authoritarian narrative of decolonization, offering accounts of social movements and anti-colonial thought that advocated for complete liberation from the British empire, a goal later appropriated by mainstream liberal politics.
(2) I wonder how to perform a comparison of recuperative scholarship like that of the Subaltern Studies collective with that of Black Radical Tradition? Is it possible to read Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism in conjunction with Ranajit Guha's Peasant Insurgency? What differences exist between articulating a shared subalternity and global Blackness?
(3) What kinds of pedagogy does Spivak point us to?
Spivak's text helps us read against methodological nationalism. I understand methodological nationalism as a problem of containment, or reading a place/scale as containers of an analytic. Arjun Appadurai has the inverse notion of "theoretical metonymy", or analytics as containers of place (if you had to study caste, you would go to India; or to study segementation, you would go to an African country). Spivak's tactic of "reading against the grain" (which questions the author and the text as authorities) of the works by Subaltern Studies tells us that even though their project comes out of a particular history of the Indian subcontinent, the figure of the voracious subaltern they build accidentally has the potential to build solidarity in similar contexts, for example, the independent peasant movement in Mexico:
"it would be interesting if, instead of finding their only internationalism in European history and African anthropology (an interesting disciplinary breakdown), they were also to find their lines of contact, let us say, with the political economy of the independent peasant movement in Mexico.”
I think Spivak's point is that such solidarities might not be collective consciousness in the way Marxist thought writes about class consciousness. Rather they would be based on "practical exigencies", allowing people to move in and out of scholarly and activist projects and to not mobilize subalternity for scholarly and activist gatekeeping. It not only allows for shifting goals and shifting subject formations, but sees this non-closure, this complicity which does not halt at the closure of an essay, as strategic to political organization.
Quotes about Spivak's stated purpose in the essay
“The chain of complicity does not halt at the closure of an essay.”
“Throughout these pages it has been my purpose to show the complicity between subject and object of investigation—the Subaltern Studies group and subalternity”
Quotes on "reading against the grain"
"since a "reading against the grain" must forever remain strategic, it can never claim to have established the authoritative truth of a text, it must forever remain dependent upon practical exigencies, never legitimately lead to a theoretical orthodoxy.” [Spivak cautions against reading that leads to fixed ideas and that sees the author as authoritative]
“You can only read against the grain if misfits in the text signal the way.”
“I read Subaltern Studies against its grain and suggest that its own subalternity in claiming a positive subject-position for the subaltern might be reinscribed as a strategy for our times. What good does such a reinscription 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” [Spivak argues that the collective has to recognize that they will never be able to come at a true “subaltern consciousness” nor is such a task desirable]
“Reading the work of Subaltern Studies from within but against the grain, I would suggest that elements in their text would warrant a reading of the project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive historiographic metalepsis and "situate" the effect of the subject as subaltern. I would read it, then, as a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest" [Spivak interrogates the collective's political stakes in recovering the subaltern from the colonial archive]
Quotes where Spivak critiques the Subaltern Studies' citational practices
"poststructuralist theories of consciousness and language suggest that all possibility of expression, spoken or written, shares a common distancing from a self so that meaning can arise—not only meaning for others but also the meaning of the self to the self. I have advanced this idea in my discussion of "alienation." These theories suggest further that the "self" is itself always production rather than ground'"
“it would be interesting if, instead of finding their only internationalism in European history and African anthropology (an interesting disciplinary breakdown), they were also to find their lines of contact, let us say, with the political economy of the independent peasant movement in Mexico.”