Gayatri Spivak / 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' - review

Gayatri Spivak devotes the first and main part of 'Can the Subaltern Speak' to launching a massive attack on Foucault and Deleuze – two of the main figures of contemporary critical theory, and therefore Spivak's offensive can be considered as directed at this academic field in general. 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 Derride, who's method she favors over that of Foucalt and Deleuze. And all through her offensive Spivak 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?' - 'California University, Berkeley'.

And so Spivak joins Edward Said and other researchers before her of non-western origin that employ western thought and methods in order to criticize the way in which western cultures and academic discourse are representing the third world.

This means that Spivak's title – 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' has another question folded inside of it, a question that is addresses to a larger extent in 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' than the question formulated in the title, and that question is 'Can the oppressor Speak?'. It seems that spivak's (and Said's) 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 theoppressor 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.

Gayatri Spivak / 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' - review - summary part 1 - summary part 2

As poststructuralism would have it, human consciousness is constructed discursively. Our subjectivity is constructed by the shifting discourses of power which endlessly speak through us, situating us here and there in particular positions and relations. In these terms we are not the authors of ourselves. We do not construct our identities, we have it written for us; the subject cannot be sovereign over the construction of selfhood. Instead the subject is decentered, in that its consciousness is always being constructed from positions outside of itself. It follows then that the individual is not a transparent representation of the self but an effect of discourse. Spivak argues that surprisingly for these figures, when Foucault and Deleuze talks about oppressed groups such as the working classes they fall back into precisely these uncritical notions of ‘sovereign subjects’ by restoring to them a fully centred consciousness. In addition they also assume that the writing of intellectuals such as themselves can serve as a transparent medium through which the voices of the oppressed can be represented. The intellectual is cast as a reliable mediator for the voices of the oppressed, a mothpiece through which the oppressed can clearly speak.Spivak articulates her reasons for her worries in the first part of the essay, applying MICHEL FOUCAULT's understanding of 'epistemic violence' to the 'remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to