DIFFERENCE AND COMMUNITY

Identity, Difference and Community

Identity, Difference and Community

Introduction

Gayatri Spivak's now-famous question on whether the subaltern can speak, addresses the issue of subaltern representation in a diverse array of epistemic fields: contemporary historiography, social theory and indeed, the very heart of the knowledge-production project. In doing so, Spivak delineates two distinct understandings of “representation”- representation as proxy (vertreten) and representation as re-presentation (darstellen)- exposing the danger inherent to conflating the two notions, a lapse that she identifies inter alia during 'the unguarded practice of conversation' between Foucault and Deleuze (Subaltern, p. 272).

Such a conflation, argues Spivak, obviates the need for representation in the first sense, through a false understanding of the world as operating- “being staged”- by way of darstellen. In so far as the Western intellectual places implicit faith in the ability of the oppressed to know and speak for themselves, he renders himself invisible and in so doing, misses the inherent inaccessibility of the Other as Subject (Subaltern, p. 282). However, the problem extends beyond the Western intellectual- for the Subaltern Studies collective, who seek to give voice to the subaltern/oppressed, Spivak makes the argument that by virtue of catachresis at the very origin of the colonial encounter's node of translation, the subaltern subject is destined to remain mute (Bhabha, 1996, 191-207).

She draws upon Derrida in elucidating this notion, with reference specifically to the sexually subaltern subject: 'the task of recovering a (sexually) subaltern subject is lost in an institutional textuality at the archaic origin (Subaltern, p. 303. Furthermore, Spivak makes a stronger point than one that simply underlines the aporia inherent to the Subaltern Studies project- she sketches out the danger accompanying such an effort, one that in some sense reproduces the epistemic violence of imperialism, with the additional endorsement of institutionally sanctioned ignorance. Spivak's alternative is to proceed from the vertreten-darstellen distinction towards a theory of representation that recognizes the need for the subaltern subject to be spoken for, while simultaneously acknowledging the inaccessibility of the self-conscious voice of the subaltern; indeed, ultimately acknowledging that the subaltern cannot speak.

Discussion

Can be crudely parsed out into two strands, one that questions the very understanding of “representation” invoked by these two theorists, and another that questions their 'produced transparency' (Subaltern, p. 279); given that the latter proceeds from the former, I begin with an elaboration of Spivak's complication of the term “representation”. She identifies the running together of 'two senses of representation…representation as “speaking for”, as in politics, and representation as “re-presentation,” as in art or philosophy' (Subaltern, p. 275); this first understanding of representation is vertreten, while the latter understanding is darstellen. The contention is that F & D run these two related conceptions together, placing the liberated realm of the erstwhile-oppressed subject beyond both, where the subaltern can engage in self-conscious speech and knowledge for themselves (Spivak, 1998, 271-313).

Spivak's argument begins by first attacking the very notion that the oppressed groups have the ability to speak as a coherent, homogeneous ...