ANALYTICAL EVALUTION

Analytical Evaluation

Analytical Evaluation

Introduction

Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"--originally published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg's Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988)--perhaps best demonstrates her concern for the processes whereby postcolonial studies ironically reinscribe, co-opt, and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure. In other words, is the post-colonial critic unknowingly complicit in the task of imperialism? Is "post-colonialism" a specifically first-world, male, privileged, academic, institutionalized discourse that classifies and surveys the East in the same measure as the actual modes of colonial dominance it seeks to dismantle? According to Spivak, postcolonial studies must encourage that "postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss" (Saks, 2006, 148).

In "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Spivak encourages but also criticizes the efforts of the subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that has reappropriated Gramsci's term "subaltern" (the economically dispossesed) in order to locate and re-establish a "voice" or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India.

Although Spivak acknowledges the "epistemic violence" done upon Indian subalterns, she suggests that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech invariably will encounter the following problems: 1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people, and 2) a dependence upon western intellectuals to "speak for" the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. As Spivak argues, by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe their subordinate position in society.

The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an ethnocentric extension of Western logos--a totalizing, essentialist "mythology" as Derrida might describe it--that doesn't account for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic.

Discussion and Analysis

Althusser insisted throughout his work that a philosophy must be judged by the effects that it produces, all the effects, whether internal or external to whatever disciplinary boundaries might be thought to impose their jurisdiction on it. For Althusser history no more forgives the "misunderstood" or "misinterpreted" philosopher than it does the defeated revolutionary. From a materialist standpoint there is no more a "court of final appeal," as Machiavelli put it, in philosophy than in politics. To grant philosophy a material, practical existence in this way is to admit that "misinterpretations" are not subjective errors (whether malicious or benign) in the minds of one's readers but are rather the objective effects of one's own work, not of course of the intentions behind it but in its real existence and in its unforeseeable encounters with other works, and other forces.

It hardly needs to be said that few philosophers have openly endorsed such a position, just as few philosophers have ever written books with the phrase "self-criticism in the title. And more disturbing than the narcissistic injury that results from the recognition that one is not entirely master of one's words and arguments, no matter how painstakingly constructed, is the idea that truth is not enough, that false and harmful ideas are held in place by relations of force that can be changed only by opposing force...