Reading “Can the Subaltern Speak?” – made easy: Representation versus representation (Part 1)
It’s that really important essay that we all pretended to have read at university.
no but i quoted someone who quoted from it, does that count?
You know the one: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s most famous 1988 essay, the cradle of postcolonial thought, much feared by many an undergraduate – ‘Can the subaltern speak?’
To sum up the whole essay in one word: No.
The subaltern can’t speak.
I knew that much going in. It was December 2021 when I decided to download a pdf of the text and give it another try – I was unemployed, locked down in my drafty London flat, and exceptionally bored. Even doomscrolling on social media felt like an exercise in, well, boredom.
The first three or so pages were a slog. I knew enough about poststructuralist thought to get the gist, but I absolutely could not care less about the details. Sometimes you have to power through the rest of the sentence, or paragraph, or page to ‘get it’ so I powered on, hoping that my brain would somehow and eventually unscramble the words that my eyes skipped over.
Then somewhere around the fourth page, things started to click. I grabbed a notebook and pen and started taking notes. It was starting to get good.
What’s so important about ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ – why does it matter?
Turn on the news or open a social media app anytime and you’re bound to see someone talking (sometimes ad nauseam) about representation, equity for marginalised groups, equal opportunities, erasure, and Eurocentrism – the list goes on. Yet in a way, we’re faced with the exact same predicament that Spivak identified about nearly 40 years ago: that much of the rhetoric and principles behind these calls for action and pretenders of change actually serve to reinforce the very Eurocentric, elitist structures they’re trying to take down. Verbal slippage, Spivak warns? In this age of digital mass media, we’re surrounded by it.
Let’s rewind a little because context is important. My undergraduate supervisors used to remind me again and again: never read anything without knowing when and why the author wrote it.
Some basics first: Spivak was born in Calcutta in 1942, five years before the end of the British rule in India. She attended the University of Calcutta with a specialism in English and went on to Cornell and Cambridge for her graduate work, before embarking on an academic career in the US; as of 2024, she teaches Comparative Literature at Columbia.
Here’s what Spivak was working with in 1988. Since the 1970s, there had been talk of the ‘Cultural Turn’ amongst scholars of the humanities and social sciences. It had its roots partly in the ‘Linguistic Turn’ of the early to mid-20th century, when philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein started to question if language, and by extension texts, was really a good medium for communicating meaning. In fact, they considered that language could be a breeding ground for miscommunication. Take for example the two possible answers to the question: ‘Why is the light turned on?’
- Because it’s connected to an energy source and the current carries electricity through a conductor to the lightbulb.
- Because I’m in the room reading and need light to see.
They both technically answer the question, but one can imagine that the respondents when faced with each other would be in disagreement. What’s important here is that the Linguistic Turn seemed to have flung the door wide open for thinking about societies past and present beyond the constraints of what is true and historical according to written texts and documents and the few who had access to these literary tools: the rich, the educated, and the elite. Indeed the conflation at this time had strong Christian undertones. In Greek, logos could mean ‘word’ or ‘text’ but also ‘truth’, which means, as the Church would have it, the word (of God, i.e. the Bible) is the truth – but more on that in Part 2.
By the 1970s, scholars had begun treating culture as their new texts; there were new truths and new perspectives to be gleaned from identifying social behaviours not recorded in writing. It was a way to read in between the lines and against the grain in an effort to give a voice to individuals and groups who — either because they had limited access to the literary tools for preserving their legacy or because the people who did have access to those literary instrument didn’t think their experiences were worth preserving — were ommitted from dominant histories: women, rural communities, the poor, the colonised – the Other.
What followed were studies, books, and publications one after another that claimed to finally give a voice to hitherto marginalised, and oppressed groups. Foucault is best known for his work on penal systems — more philosophical than historical, one might note — and structures through the lens of power to recover the agency of dispossessed prisoners. Elsewhere, a new generation of intellectuals had finally matured, who were colonial subjects themselves and had finally secured newfound scholarly positions from which to write about, examine, and ‘represent’ the realities of colonialism with authenticity and authority.
But for Spivak in 1988, these pretensions were all false and, worse yet, deceiving. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” lays bare the why and how.
What is the ‘subaltern’?
In short, the people with no power, no agency, and therefore no voice.
It was coined by the Italian Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci, whose work on cultural hegemony positioned the proletariat at the margins of a society moulded by the interests of a global socio-economic elite. For Spivak in ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, the subaltern are the colonised peoples who exist outside the colonial hierarchy – not the local native elite who benefit from proximity to colonial administrators, nor homegrown intellectuals who claim they have unique insight into the underworld they may come from; it’s the people who just exist.
Overall structure
The essay is broadly divided into four sections: Part 1 lays out two different kinds of representation to set up the argument that their conflation strips the subaltern of its ability to speak; Part 2 describes ‘epistemic violence’, the process by which the deprivation comes about; Part 3 constitutes a more theoretical discussion of French poststructuralists such as Foucault and Derrida on the question of Eurocentrism; and finally Part 4 is a practical application of Spivak’s theory on the question of women’s agency in the Sati ritual, examined through permutations on the hypothetical statement: ‘White men save Brown women from Brown men.’
Summary: Why the subaltern can never be truly be represented
Let’s begin – page numbers correspond to this pdf.
The text opens with the hardest part of the essay in terms of language complexity. Spivak has been criticised for her overly complicated prose, though, as Judith Butler pointed out in a defence of Spivak in 1999, her core ideas are clearly important enough to warrant over 37,000 citations (as of March 2024). Anyways, if you read the section above about why the essay matters, you’ve got the gist of the faults she’s finding in Foucault, Deleuze, and the whole French poststructuralist squad. You should recognise that Spivak makes her thesis statement clear from the very beginning, i.e. that all the existing attempts to restore agency to the subaltern by intellectuals who claim to represent the subaltern never actually succeed in escaping Eurocentrism and Western moral, intellectual, and conceptual norms.
The much-publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject. (66)
To be clear, the ‘sovereign subject’ here refers to the subaltern and by ‘Subject’, Spivak means Europe, the latent focus around which the ‘new’ analyses of her time still revolved.
Power through to about page 69, where Spivak begins to talk about verbal slippage. The point she’s making when she says that Foucault problematically conflates ‘individual’ and ‘subject’ is that he ignores the presence of a larger ideological framework that dictates a fundamental difference in access to power, and therefore them as distinct entities within the colonial hierarchy. This becomes clear when she says:
The unrecognised contradiction within a position that valorises the concrete experience of the oppressed, while being so uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual, is maintained by verbal slippage. (70)
The ‘individual’ of verbal slippage is the intellectual, and the ‘subject’ is the subaltern whose experiences the intellectual is suppposedly representing. They cannot be conflated because the intellectual, by virtue of being an intellectual, occupies a very different position in the power hierarchy than the subaltern being represented. In actual terms, Spivak anticipates a concrete example she gives later one: India intellectuals cannot claim to represent Indian dalits because however much they claim to share the same Indian-ness, they occupy an entirely different position in the hierarchy by virtue of being intellectuals. One erasure is replaced with another.
Page 70 contains the exposition of a key concept in the essay: that there are two kinds of representation, and only one would truly allow the subaltern to speak. You’ll have noticed that the feature image for this post is one of Ingres’ paintings of the odalisque genre, a popular archetype in the 19th century that distilled Western fantasies of the Ottoman court into Orientalist visions. This is one kind of representation, Darstellung or literal re-presentation; the other is what one might think of as a more political kind of representation, or Vertretung.
German is one of those languages with a modularity that makes it wonderfully specific. Both darstellen and vertreten translate into English as ‘to represent’, but the semantics do perfectly capture Spivak’s dichotomy. Dar means ‘there’, more or less — darüber means ‘over there’ (dar + über) — while stellen means ‘to put or place’, such that putting on an exhibition in German is ausstellen, or a ‘putting out’ (aus + stellen). Together, it makes sense that Darstellung is the kind of representation one would see in art, in a painting like Ingres’ odalisques. His Ottoman women are represented; to be sure, they’re re-presented, literally made of paint and put there onto a canvas. This one is flagrantly tokenistic.
The other representation, Vertretung, Spivak calls ‘speaking for’. Ver- in German usually indicates a kind of passive or completed relationship, so perhaps a better way of thinking about this second kind of representation is that one is ‘spoken for’. This is also probably a better set up for the rest of Spivak’s argument about whether the subaltern can speak – does the subaltern have a voice to speak for itself, or can it only be spoken for?
Ingre’s odalisque certainly isn’t speaking, nor is she even spoken for; she’s only re-presented. The distinction is clear enough in this example, but Spivak’s warning is that the difference is not always clear, especially when it is tempting to fall back onto the very first problem: being unable to see the enormous chasm between individual (intellectual, or the representative) and subject (the subaltern being ‘represented’ but actually only re-presented).
Spivak’s commentary on Marxist theory and capitalist superstructures from pages 71-74 veers once again into slightly-overly-technical territory, but the key takeaway is that the essay traces how a subaltern group — in Marx’s theory it’s the working class — gains consciousness and moves from ‘identity in difference’ (72) to ‘class position’ where it seeks re-presentation (Darstellung), to ‘class consciousness’ (73) where it finally demands representation (Vertretung). The challenge lies in not losing in the wide range of people and interests that need to be represented (’macrologies’, 74) and settling mistakenly for re-presentation instead.
Page 75 sets up the argument to come in Part 2, examining how the subaltern has been deprived of a voice both to speak with and by which to be spoken for. In short, it’s a two-step process that renders the Other or the subaltern: first, everything intellectuals consume and create is ultimately forced to view the subaltern in relation to Europe a reference point; and second, there’s nothing to work with to recover knowledge, ideas, and institutions that have been erased from memory altogether.
Part 2 coming soon....
By-the-page notes from the text; bolded/underlined text is my own:
* Thesis statement: 66 – ‘Although the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized by the law, political economy, and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has ‘no geo-political determinations. The much-publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject.’
66: French poststructuralist thought ignores the question of idology and its implications in intellectual and economic history
67: example of this is the neglect of desire in Marxist theory
68: ‘The failure of Foucault and Deleuze to consider the relations between desire, power, and subjectivity renders them incapable of articulating a theory of interests.’
69: Discussion of agency and desire, going beyond a dichotomy of deceived and undeceived desire
70: Deleuze is mistaken, fails to articulate that theyre are 2 senses of representation:
1. Representation, vertreten: ‘speaking for’
2. Re-presentation, darstellen: dar + stellen
71: Critique of Marxist description of the differentiated working class in 18th Brumaire – desire and interest are not coherent with each other
72: discussion of individual vs collective agency vs interest and the creation of identity-in-difference as class
73:
74: ‘Yet we might consolidate: the relationship between global capitalism and nation-state alliances is so macrological that it cannot account for the micrological texture of power.
75: There exists a twofold process that renders the Other transparent:
1. Everything intellectuals consume and produce is caught in the debate of the production of that Other, ‘supporting or critiquing the constitution of the Subject as Europe’; and
2. ‘Great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which a subject could cathect/occupy its itinerary — ideological + scientific production, plus legal institutions