Representation's Coup

Abstract

Some 25 years after its publication, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak?” continues to cause an ethical consternation not fully explicable by its apparent political claims. This article explores the grounds for that effect by elaborating the philosophical system of representation that the original essay only partially addresses in its reading of Marx's writings. It argues for the necessity of a critical understanding of the role of the intellectual as the agent of a system of representation that dialectically produces the subaltern. Without such a critical genealogy of the function of the intellectual as embedded within the system of representation, the subaltern becomes the object of melancholy postcolonial identifications and ethical distress. The essay concludes with a re-reading of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea as a novel that stages the crisis and failure of colonial identifications.

• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• Karl Marx
• Jean Rhys
• subaltern
• postcolonialism
• representation

Notes

1 Spivak (1988a). I am using this version rather than that which now makes part of chapter 3 (‘History’) of Spivak (1999), not only because it is grafted in there with little significant alteration, but because it is the prior published essay that continues to be the text used in teaching and the one most frequently cited.

2 For this distinction, see Benjamin (1978: 284).

3 I am grateful to Heather Laird (2005: 136) for drawing my attention to this essay.

4 Bhabha (1994) is the postcolonial critic who has worked the terrains of hybridity and ambivalence most exhaustively; Arteaga (1994) draws together the concepts of hybridity and mestizaje.

5 See Lowe and Lloyd (1997: 23–5) for an elaboration of this point.

6 Amin (1995) remains for me the most compelling study of the disjunction between subaltern and nationalist practice and ideology, though there are many such instances in the archives of subaltern studies.

7 Though I have argued (Lloyd 2008) that certain nationalist Marxist thinkers like James Connolly in Ireland and J. C. Mariátegui in Peru were already able to envisage a different potentiality for radical resistance that did not have to pass through the stages of capitalist development in order to emerge but could instead be predicated on what we might now term subaltern cultural formations. The recent resurgence of radical indigenous politics in Latin America may bear out their thinking.

8 For the German text, see Marx and Engels (1960: 198–9).

9 As Marx (1954a: 108) notes, their support for the state had already been won by the uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, who parcelled out land among the peasants, transforming virtual serfs into smallholders and winning their allegiance to the state and to himself.

10 Thus, I would need to modify Spivak's translation from Capital, value ‘represents itself [sich darstellt] in the exchange relations’ (Spivak 1988a: 278), to ‘[value] is presented in the exchange relation’.

11 For the German text, see Kant (1974: 225–6).

12 See Lloyd (1989) for an elaboration of this passage and its relation to the very possibility of the political.

13 For the German text, see Hegel (1998: 13).

14 Marquard (1981: 244) elaborates on Kant's strikt vertretbare Erkenntnisubjekt. See Lloyd (1990) for further explanation on the vertretbares Subjekt of the aesthetic.

15 Lloyd and Thomas (1998: 81–90). Here, we show that it was by no means the case that British radical writers of the 1820s and 1830s accepted the generalization of representative structures across the spheres of their practice: representation demanded to be inculcated and made self-evident.

16 Though as Marx (1954a: 107) points out, ‘the Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary but the conservative peasant.’

17 Rosa Luxemburg (2003) was among the first extensively to critique Marx for failing to appreciate the impact of imperialism on the capacity of capitalism to survive and expand. More recent studies of the impact of imperialism on ideology and popular identification with nation and colonialism include Brantlinger (1983), Hoffenberg (2001) and Richards (1993).

18 I discuss the intimate link between race and representation in Lloyd (1991).

19 Fanon (1988) presents a painstaking exploration of this dilemma of the colonized intellectual.

20 ‘The postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss. In this they are a paradigm of the intellectuals’ (Spivak 1988a: 287).

21 Quigley (2003) explores this problem in the context of transcribed oral autobiography.

22 That in ‘Deconstructing Historiography’ (1988b: 12–20) Spivak proves able to turn that dilemma back on the subaltern historian while maintaining sight nonetheless of the necessity of the task is what makes that essay for me a more critically political work than ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’

23 Again, the reaction may also express itself as an insistent identification with, that is, as, the subaltern, with a corresponding affect of smugness. But one has to note the contradiction of identifying as the subaltern. As Spivak (2005: 476) puts it, ‘No one can say “I am a subaltern” in whatever language.’

24 I have commented elsewhere (Lloyd 1998: 24–5) on a similar ‘constitutive ignorance’ by which the university intellectual is rendered incapable of the teaching of difference in the classroom, a condition which produced much of the rage against ‘multiculturalism’ when it still had some as yet unrecuperated political potential.

25 Victor Li (2009), in his powerful critique of subaltern theory, ties the problem that ‘the ideal subaltern other must be seen as a figure who is inaccessible to and inappropriable by statist, hegemonic and academic knowledge’ to the pattern that ‘the subaltern dies or remains silent (a form of verbal death) in order that the concept or theory of subaltern singularity or alterity may live on.’ As he puts it, ‘Dead subalterns, in their very unrepresentability, make ideal representatives of utopian decolonized space’ (Li 2009: 277, 280). This may capture the residual epistemological violence of subaltern historiography and theory, but it does not address sufficiently the problem that this is a structural rather than an ethical problem for the intellectual and, accordingly, is one that raises the ethical stance of the theorist as a problem in itself. Li's essay still unwittingly participates, therefore, in the ethical dismay that Spivak's essay constantly provokes.

26 ‘Neither the groups celebrated by the early subalternists nor Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, in so far as they had burst their bonds into resistance, were in the position of subalternity’ (Spivak 2005: 476). I would, however, reserve the possibility that the groups in resistance as recorded by subaltern and related histories may yet be subaltern strictly speaking: the differential of subalternity lies not in the fact of resisting or not, but in the irrepresentability to the intellectual of the cultural formation or structure of resistance.

27 I am here riffing off Spivak (2005: 481).