Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 13:45:33 +0800
From: E.Rossiter-AT-cowan.edu.au (Ned Rossiter)
Subject: Re: real topics


>Please understand that by subaltern, Spivak does not seem to be referring
>simply to people who are not among the elite, but to the very least of the
>indigenous native population--people who are living in poverty, under
>oppresion, and who are illiterate and unable to politically make their
>presence known.


Dipesh Chakrabarty has a bit of a different spin on the 'subaltern', one
that suggests that the subaltern needs to be thought not as singular
entity, but in terms of [dependency??, or just 'dialogic' as DC states]
*relations* with another  who is in possession of a cultural capital [or a
*pouvoir-savoir*, "ability to know", capacity for action, as Spivak
discusses in  ch 2, _OitTM_] that enables, holds the potential for,
(self)improvement:

"Guha's insurgent peasants, for instance, fall short intheir understanding
of what is required for a 'comprehensive' reversal of the relations of
power in an exploitative society .... For Gramsci ... the subaltern named a
political position that, by itself, was incapable of thinking the state:
this was a thought to brought to that position by the revolutionary
intellectual.  Once the subaltern could imagine/think the state, he
transcended, theoretically speaking, the condition of subalternity." (DC,
'Radical histories and the question of Enlightenment rationalism' _Economic
and Political Weekly_ 30.14 (April 8, '95), 751-59.)

thus, it seems useful to supplement Tina's statement on the subaltern by
acknowledging that the subaltern articulates itself through the elite;
hence, i guess, the return of the problem/impossibility of representation
(of an other within dominant discourses). Although such an account of the
dependency/dialogic relation of the subaltern and the educated
'revolutionary' supposes a desire on the  part of the subaltern *to be*
represented; and while a generalisation such as the one i've just made
needs to be matched by a certain empirical attentiveness, it seems to me,
following studies done on colonial/social discourses, that it is rather the
"coloniser's" [to harness a rather blunt category]
epistemoligical/ontological/capital impulses which demand the subaltern to
be spoken. and this chicken/egg narrative doesn't really go anywhere

no doubt i'm plodding over well trod territory here, and i'm throwing it in
nonetheless

Ned

Ned Rossiter
Department of Media Studies
Edith Cowan University
2 Bradford St
Mt Lawley 6050
Perth, Australia
tel. 61-8-9370 6684
fax. 61-8-9370 6668
email: E.Rossiter-AT-cowan.edu.au




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