SOME of the most
radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested
desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject. The theory
of pluralized ‘subject-effects’ gives an illusion of undermining subjective
sovereignty while often providing a cover for this subject of knowledge.
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….
This S/subject, curiously sewn together into
a transparency by denegations, belongs to the exploiters’ side of the
international division of labor. It is impossible for contemporary French
intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that would inhabit the
unnamed subject of the Other of Europe. It is not only that everything they
read, critical or uncritical, is caught within the debate of the production of
that Other, supporting or critiquing the constitution of the Subject as Europe.
It is also that, in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was
taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could
cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary—not only by ideological and
scientific production, but also by the institution of the law…. In the face of
the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent
constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow, a possibility of political practice
for the intellectual would be to put the economic ‘under erasure,’ to see the economic
factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased,
however imperfectly, when it claims to be the final determinant or the
transcendental signified.
The clearest available example of such
epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous
project to constitute the colonial subject as Other. This project is also the
asymetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious
Subjectivity. It is well known that Foucault locates epistemic violence, a
complete overhaul of the episteme, in the redefinition of sanity at the end of
the European eighteenth century. But what if that particular redefinition was
only a part of the narrative of history in Europe as well as in the colonies?
What if the two projects of epistemic overhaul worked as dislocated and
unacknowledged parts of a vast two-handed engine? Perhaps it is no more than to
ask that the subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized
as ‘subjugated knowledge,’ ‘a whole set of knowledges that have been
disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive
knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of
cognition or scientificity’ (Foucault 1980).
This is not to describe ‘the way things
really were’ or to privilege the narrative of history as imperialism as the
best version of history. It is, rather, to offer an account of how an
explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one….
Let us now move to consider the margins (one
can just as well say the silent, silenced center) of the circuit marked out by
this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the
tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat. According to Foucault
and Deleuze (in the First World, under the standardization and regimentation of
socialized capital, though they do not seem to recognize this) the oppressed,
if given the chance (the problem of representation cannot be bypassed here),
and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a Marxist thematic is
at work here) can speak and know their conditions. We must now confront the
following question: On the other side of the international division of labor
from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic
violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic
text, can the subaltern speak?…
The first part of my proposition—that the
phased development of the subaltern is complicated by the imperialist project—is
confronted by a collective of intellectuals who may be called the ‘Subaltern
Studies’ group. They must ask, Can the subaltern speak? Here we are
within Foucault’s own discipline of history and with people who acknowledge his
influence. Their project is to rethink Indian colonial historiography from the perspective
of the discontinuous chain of peasant insurgencies during the colonial
occupation. This is indeed the problem of ‘the permission to narrate’ discussed
by Said (1984). As Ranajit Guha (1982) argues,
The historiography of Indian nationalism
has for a long time been dominated by elitism—colonialist elitism and
bourgeois-nationalist elitism…shar[ing] the prejudice that the making of the
Indian nation and the development of the consciousness-nationalism which
confirmed this process were exclusively or predominantly elite achievements. In
the colonialist and neo-colonialist historiographies these achievements are credited
to British colonial rulers, administrators, policies, institutions, and
culture; in the nationalist and neo-nationalist writings—to Indian elite
personalities, institutions, activities and ideas.
Certain
varieties of the Indian elite are at best native informants for firstworld
intellectuals interested in the voice of the Other. But one must nevertheless
insist that the colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous.
Against the indigenous elite we may set what
Guha calls ‘the politics of the people,’ both outside (‘this was an autonomous
domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence
depend on the latter’) and inside (‘it continued to operate vigorously in spite
of [colonialism], adjusting itself to the conditions prevailing under the Raj
and in many respects developing entirely new strains in both form and content’)
the circuit of colonial production (Guha 1982). I cannot entirely endorse this insistence
on determinate vigor and full autonomy, for practical historiographic
exigencies will not allow such endorsements to privilege subaltern
consciousness. Against the possible charge that his approach is essentialist,
Guha constructs a definition of the people (the place of that essence) that can
be only an identity-in-differential. He proposes a dynamic stratification grid
describing colonial social production at large. Even the third group on the
list, the buffer group, as it were, between the people and the great
macrostructural dominant groups, is itself defined as a place of in-betweenness,
what Derrida has described as an ‘antre’ (1981):
1.
Dominant foreign groups.
elite 2. Dominant indigenous groups on the all-India
level.
3.
Dominant indigenous groups at the regional and local levels.
4. The terms ‘people’ and ‘subaltern
classes’ [are] used as synonymous throughout [Guha’s definition]. The social
groups and elements included in this category represent the demographic difference
between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the
‘elite’
Consider the
third item on this list—the antre of situational indeterminacy these
careful historians presuppose as they grapple with the question, Can the
subaltern speak?
Taken as a whole and in the abstract this…category…was
heterogeneous in its composition and thanks to the uneven character of regional
economic and social developments, different from area to area. The same
class or element which was dominant in one area…could be among the dominated in
another. This could and did create many ambiguities and contradictions in
attitudes and alliances, especially among the lowest strata of the rural
gentry, impoverished landlords, rich peasants and upper middle class peasants all
of whom belonged, ideally speaking, to the category of people or
subaltern classes. (Guha 1982)
The task of
research’ projected here is ‘to investigate, identify and measure the specific
nature and degree of the deviation of [the] elements [constituting item
3] from the ideal and situate it historically.’ ‘Investigate, identify, and measure
the specific’: a program could hardly be more essentialist and taxonomic. Yet a
curious methodological imperative is at work. I have argued that, in the
Foucault-Deleuze conversation, a postrepresentationalist vocabulary hides an
essentialist agenda. In subaltern studies, because of the violence of
imperialist epistemic, social, and disciplinary inscription, a project
understood in essentialist terms must traffic in a radical textual practice of
differences. The object of the group’s investigation, in the case not even of
the people as such but of the floating buffer zone of the regional elite-subaltern,
is a deviation from an ideal—the people or subaltern—which is
itself defined as a difference from the elite. It is toward this structure that
the research is oriented, a predicament rather different from the selfdiagnosed
transparency of the first-world radical intellectual. What taxonomy can fix
such a space? Whether or not they themselves perceive it—in fact Guha sees his
definition of ‘the people’ within the master-slave dialectic—their text
articulates the difficult task of rewriting its own conditions of impossibility
as the conditions of its possibility.
‘At the regional and local levels [the
dominant indigenous groups]… if belonging to social strata hierarchically
inferior to those of the dominant all-Indian groups acted in the interests
of the latter and not in conformity to interests corresponding truly to their
own social being’ When these writers speak, in their essentializing
language, of a gap between interest and action in the intermediate group, their
conclusions are closer to Marx than to the self-conscious naiveté of Deleuze’s
pronouncement on the issue. Guha, like Marx, speaks of interest in terms of the
social rather than the libidinal being. The Name-of-the-Father imagery in The
Eighteenth Brumaire can help to emphasize that, on the level of class or
group action, ‘true correspondence to own being’ is as artificial or social as
the patronymic.
So much for the intermediate group marked in
item 3. For the ‘true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there
is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectual’s
solution is not to abstain from representation. The problem is that the subject’s
itinerary has not been traced so as to offer an object of seduction to the
representing intellectual. In the slightly dated language of the Indian group,
the question becomes, How can we touch the consciousness of the people, even as
we investigate their politics? With what voice-consciousness can the subaltern
speak? Their project, after all, is to rewrite the development of the
consciousness of the Indian nation. The planned discontinuity of imperialism
rigorously distinguishes this project, however old-fashioned its articulation,
from ‘rendering visible the medical and juridical mechanisms that surrounded
the story [of Pierre Riviere].’ Foucault is correct in suggesting that ‘to make
visible the unseen can also mean a change of level, addressing oneself to a
layer of material which had hitherto had no perti-nence for history and which
had not been recognized as having any moral, aesthetic or historical value.’ It
is the slippage from rendering visible the mechanism to rendering the
individual, both avoiding ‘any kind of analysis of [the subject] whether
psychological, psychoanalytical or linguistic,’ that is consistently
troublesome (Foucault 1980)….
When we come to the concomitant question of
the consciousness of the subaltern, the notion of what the work cannot say
becomes important. In the semioses of the social text, elaborations of
insurgency stand in the place of ‘the utterance.’ The sender—‘the peasant’—is
marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness. As for the
receiver, we must ask who is ‘the real receiver’ of an ‘insurgency?’ The
historian, transforming ‘insurgency’ into ‘text for knowledge,’ is only one ‘receiver’
of any collectively intended social act. With no possibility of nostalgia for
that lost origin, the historian must suspend (as far as possible) the clamor of
his or her own consciousness (or consciousness-effect, as operated by
disciplinary training), so that the elaboration of the insurgency, packaged
with an insurgent-consciousness, does not freeze into an ‘object of
investigation,’ or, worse yet, a model for imitation. ‘The subject’ implied by
the texts of insurgency can only serve as a counterpossibility for the
narrative sanctions granted to the colonial subject in the dominant groups. The
postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss. In this
they are a paradigm of the intellectuals.
It is well known that the notion of the
feminine (rather than the subaltern of imperialism) has been used in a similar
way within deconstructive criticism and within certain varieties of feminist
criticism. In the former case, a figure of ‘woman’ is at issue, one whose
minimal predication as indeterminate is already available to the phallocentric
tradition. Subaltern historiography raises questions of method that would
prevent it from using such a ruse. For the ‘figure’ of woman, the relationship
between woman and silence can be plotted by women themselves; race and class differences
are subsumed under that charge. Subaltern historiography must confront the
impossibility of such gestures. The narrow epistemic violence of imperialism
gives us an imperfect allegory of the general violence that is the possibility
of an episteme.
Within the effaced itinerary of the
subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effected. The
question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of
the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is ‘evidence.’ It is,
rather, that, both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of
insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If,
in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot
speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow….
(Abridged)
