Spivak urges readers to deconstruct texts by acknowledging their complicity. She agrees with Said that literary writing reproduces Western hegemonic power over the Other and is interested in the way knowledge and power intersect. From colonization to globalization, socio-economic inequality has created texts that allow the West to ‘know’ the Third World. (What about the Second World?) However, although Spivak recognizes Said’s Orientalism and Guha’s conception of the heterogeneity of subaltern groups, she does not agree that this means that the subaltern subject as represented in dominant discourse can be read as existing outside it.

What about the women who refuse to sleep with their men if they go to war with the neighbouring tribe? (True story) Or, what about the chief that decides he wants the Canadian government to build a bridge at no cost, and protests outside the embassy until he gets it built? 

Using Derrida’s theory of desconstruction, where change occurs from within the difference of the sign, and “self” is itself always production rather than ground, she claims that our sense of self is structured like writing. In other words, the iterability of identity, or the irreducible nature of identity precludes the existence of the agented subject outside of dominant discourse.

I still have problems with this! It seems that dominant discourse homogenizes the West, so that welfare mums in Vancouver, for example, are not part of the equation.

We are all subject-effects positioned in various discourses whose interests are written into our texts. This does not mean that we can escape these discourses completely, but that we can be aware of them (of subaltern silences) when we look at texts so that perhaps in time we can hear the voices of Others. We can transform “impossibility into possibility.”

Is it enough only to be aware of the mute Other? Is there nothing else readers and writers can do? Spivak doesn’t talk about action.

Her point is that there is no resistance or subaltern consciousness completely separate from dominant discourse. Guha seeks to avoid essentializing the subaltern group by pointing to its plurality, but Spivak argues that he still assumes that there is a subaltern consciousness.

Looking at the role of women in patriarchal communities, Spivak comes to the conclusion that if female subaltern consciousness is a “red herring” then so must be the subaltern subconscious.

The position of women in various communities “syntaxes patriarchal continuity even as she is herself drained of proper identity.” Similarly, the heterogeneous subaltern groups “syntaxes” hegemonic discourse. Therefore, only by working within discourses and acknowledging “the complicity between subject and object investigation” can women and men be producers of signs in Derrida’s process of propriation.

Questions:

Why do I still feel that the world is divided into the First and Third World without any in-between?

What practices go along with her theory? Yes, we should read texts carefully to see how they create inequality in the world, but what can the peasant girl do?

Are there different kinds of complicity, i.e. the International Monetary Fund vs. CUSO?

Guha

Guha’s analysis of the discourse of history ties in very nicely with Said’s Orientalism.

In hegemonic discourse on colonial history, the peasant insurrections of India are spontaneous and unpremeditated affairs in which agency, either individual or collective, played no role. In other words, in orientalist texts revolt occurs outside the consciousness of subaltern insurgency, which is therefore irrational, instinctive, and uncivilized.

The primary, secondary, and tertiary discourses of official history all serve to silence the subaltern voice in history. The immediacy of the official primary discourse, and the distance of the secondary public histories written as personal or ‘impartial’ accounts of administrators’ documentation of events function as indicative and interpretative texts that together produce an historical ‘truth’. This imbrication of discourses reveals an ambiguity in which, a la Barthes, the indices of language (metaphor/being/adjectives) disrupt its functions (metonymy/doing/verbs). The result is ‘loosely cobbled segments’ of meaning that contain gaps or moments of risk that open up alternative possibilities of meaning. (This has Derrida’s iterability and irreducible meaning of the mark written all over it!) Gaps!

Thus dystaxia and Barthes’ ‘organization shifters’ which historiographers use to write history produce both messages and counter-messages in which authors are equally complicit. “The discourse of history, hardly distinguished from policy, . . . becomes a form of colonialist knowledge . . . a discourse of power,” and this takes Guha to the tertiary discourse.

In tertiary discourse, which ostensibly provides a new perspective of past events, writers also create an imaginary past for the Other. As rebelling citizens they do not participate in history, for the causes of rebellion are part of a grander scheme of a universal struggle for freedom from colonial oppression. Adopting the insurgents’ position, the writer of tertiary discourse hopes to support their struggle. However, by claiming an understanding of their cause as one caused by imperialism as a whole as opposed to injustices unique to particular communities, these writers reinforce dominant discourse. Even the insurgent’s religion as part of her/his political consciousness, which is dismissed as fanaticism in secondary discourse, is described as only a tool to manipulate the masses. As with the other two discourses the rebel is not the conscious subject of her/his own history.

I am always suspicious of dividing the world into finite numbers. Are there really only three types of discourse?

I am interested in Guha’s notion of the ambiguity inherent in armed struggle. The historian’s blindness to nuance in the desire to create a monolithic, fixed Other negates the possibility of a frightening, heterogeneous collectivity of insurgents whose history cannot be controlled. GAPS for the subaltern?