Gayatri Spivak's ' Can the subaltern speak' An Analysis.

In the essay ‘can the subaltern speak’? Gayatri spivak criticizes the western model of class consciousness and subjectivity. She challenges and opposes the radical claims made by 20th century intellectuals such as Foucault and Deleuze. She claims that to obtain their materialistic needs , western literature and academic thinkers worked with the thinking of justifying colonialism by perceiving it as a civilizing mission. She argues that it is the utopian politics that works behind the thinking of intellectuals to represent the subaltern class keeping in mind to maintain the hegemony. Hence she asks the fundamental question that can subaltern speak for themselves?. Even if a space is created for them to speak , they are not heard since according to the intellectual world they are not “knowledgeable”. She claims that the knowledge is used as a medium to justify the enslavement of third world societies and colonize them. She says that in representing the “Subaltern” these intellectuals actually silenced them because it was always in the interest of western economy and politics and never really In the interest of subaltern to rise above their class and to become independent. Spivak clarifies this criticism by discussing the political representation of karl marx’s “The eighteenth brumaire.”(1852). In the eighteenth brumaire marx describes the situation of small peasant proprietors of 19th century French society. Marx explains that these people do not collectively form as class because their conditions of economic and social life prevent them from having class consciousness. Therefore the small peasants are defined by political representatives who ‘speak’ on their behalf. It is clear that without class consciousness these people cannot speak for themselves but the political intellectuals who tend to speak for them deceive them and rather use their lack of consciousness for their benefit which end up in silencing them. For Marx representation of peasantry has a double meaning which is explained in the German terms as Darstellen (representation of aesthetic portrait) and vertreten (representation through politics). In the Foucault-deleuxe conversation she argues that disempowered groups are often treated as political subjects and they tend to speak on their behalf. For this reason the representation of disempowered is influenced by political desires and interests which in turn exploit the subaltern. Spivak argues that this act of rhetorical conflation is injurious to the oppressed groups that certain left wing intellectuals claim to represent since by this process the oppressed group is not given a chance or space to represent itself and often has no voice of its own. In the case of Foucault and Deleuze , these groups include factory workers and people who are in prisons or psychiatric institutions. When the same model of representation is acted on the third world the results are more pronounced since the westerners look at the third world as an object to drain the financial and other types of gain in lieu of their “knowledge” where knowledge is treated as any other commodity. It is in order to justify the colonialism by calling it a civilizing mission. In the second half of the essay she deals with the women as subaltern class and cites an example of sati pratha that was carried out in hindu traditionalist system where a woman was burnt alive on pyre with his dead husband and such a practice was called sacred in traditional hindu texts by claiming that it is an act of sacrifice and an act of sacrifice of woman in the sacred rites is being closer to divinity. Spivak says that by claiming it as sacred and accepted by the authoritarian knowledge of veda, it was not considered as “suicide” but a sacrifice made by a widow as per her “free will”. She then talks about the Brahmanic – Hegemonic india that shared the same interests as the codifying british. They also preserved the knowledge and wrote rigid texts in order to access power over the subaltern and deceived them by representing “their” interests in those traditions whereas served themselves and formed the basis of feudalistic society. This feudalistic society encouraged women to die with their husband and she had to do it under the religious code whereas the women’s “choice” to die is further recoded as her free will and not something imposed on her. For Britishers the practice of sati was an abhorrent and inhuman act characterizing the hindu society. By representing sati as a barbaric practice, Britishers found an opportunity to justify colonialism as civilizing mission where white Britishers believed that they were saving brown women from brown men, though the practice was indeed outlawed by britishers in 1829, spivak argues that this was not in interest of women but was a masquerade where their own political interests were covered up inside this interest of representing the subaltern brown women. Spivak means to say that ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ also kept the patriarchy alive and women were again subjected to male domination. The claim is as similar as the claim made by Indian traditionalist that the women “chose” to die on their husband’s pyre leaving no space therefore for women to speak and therefore in representing the Indian women the western intellectuals in reality silenced their voices as they earlier were silenced by the hindu traditionalists. Women still couldn’t speak against the patriarchy and under colonial rule were doubly oppressed as they were the part of the colonized section as well as women under patriarchy. Through such arguments gayatri spivak raises a question that can the voice of subaltern really be represented by the intellectual. Spivak suggests that it is impossible for subaltern or oppressed to speak for themselves since there is no space left for them to speak. Criticizing Foucault she says that his belief that the subaltern can speak for themselves is wrong because he has no idea of the repressive power of colonialism and the way it intersected with patriarchy. Even if the subaltern speaks he/she is often not heard because of lack of will to hear them. The crucial point however becomes that these disempowered subalterns receive their political and discursive identities whereas the post colonial intellectuals must help these people to attain that identity in society so that one can represent oneself and not fall prey to the representing power of a more knowledgeable and conscious intellectual who actually aims at fulfilling political and economic interest by deceiving the subaltern.

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