In the paradox of the subaltern and the intellectual, Spivak
locates a dissonance between speech and identity that calls into question the
ability to “author” one’s existence, both on the level of the subject and of
the investigator. She notes a
“common phonocentrism, the
conviction that speech is a direct and immediate representation of voice-consciousness,
and writing an indirect transcript of speech…. However, over against this
restricted model of writing one must not set up a model of speech to which is
assigned a total self-identity based on a psychological model…By contrast,
post-structuralist theories of consciousness and language suggest that all
possibility of expression, spoken or written, share a common distancing from a
self so that meaning can arise—not only meaning for others, but also the
meaning of the self to the self. I have advanced this idea in my discussion of
“alienation.” These theories suggest that the ‘self” is itself always a
production” (21-22).
Spivak’s aim in defining the failures of phonocentrism is to
argue for a different model of utterance that does not immediately interpret an
individual’s attributes based on what they say and/or write. While this is
particularly sensitive to the project of uncovering subaltern consciousness
(see her discussion of rumor), her point raises questions of authorship and the
interpretative currency of authorship. If the speaker is alienated from his
text, then it is a presumption on our part to read or discern an identity
behind the text. For Spivak, the quest of a “subaltern biography” gleaned from
study of the subaltern utterances is a fallacious project.
Milton also finds a similar disconnect between an author and
his text. He asks, “And what if the author shall be one so copious of fancy as
to have many things well worth the adding come into his mind after
licensing…which not seldom happens to the best and diligentest
writers….Meanwhile, either the press must stand still… or the author lose his
accuratest thoughts” (360). Milton here envisions a fluid text, one that the
author can shape, correct, and revise—and by extension, experiment with forms
and ideas. His attack on censorship is predicated on the assumption that an
author’s texts can be explorations rather than truthful and complete representations
of an author’s interiority. Based on the idea that “a wise man like a good
refiner can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a
fool with the best book, yea or without book,” Milton argues that
government-sponsored censorship should cease, and literary evaluation should
reside in each man’s mind—or more precisely, in the minds of educated men.[1]
While both Spivak and Milton observe a separation between
author and utterance, they also run into similar paradoxes about the nature of
speaking and writing. For Milton, if texts are never fully the author’s
thoughts at “his accuratest” then censorship is a perilous exercise in
silencing the speaker while he speaks. The locus of censorship also shifts,
from a government agency to an unseen panel of elite readers, who Milton terms
“educated men”; these men become a new licensing board who referee texts—by
advocating and canonizing rather than inhibiting—and in the process silence
other texts. On the other hand,
Spivak’s concept of academic advocates for the subaltern also operates within
the speaker/non-speaker binary. In the process of drawing attention to the
subaltern’s lack of speech, Spivak’s position of speaking relies the presumed
silence of the subaltern. If the subaltern were to find a way to speak, the
voices of academics like Spivak would be silenced—or at least severely
censored.[2]
By speaking about/for/to the subaltern, Spivak gains the position of speaker in
lieu of a diversity of voices: someone is silenced for someone to speak. In
vastly different times and referring to different classes (elite readership vs.
(post)colonial population), Milton and Spivak generate similar concerns about
censoring silence and speech and seem to operate in similar binaries of speaking and non-speaking.
[1] Milton may
here be constructing several sets of subalterns—fools, uneducated people,
women—but he does not go so far in this text as to say that such people cannot
speak. Rather, that is something that early modern scholars have done, although
current scholarship may be working against such generalizing moves.
[2] We are aware
that in Spivak’s formulation it is material conditions of colonization and not
academic scholars that silence the subaltern; the idea of the subaltern and
subaltern studies is an object of study that allows for Spivak and other
academics to speak.
4 comments:
Ashley and Samantha,
I like the point you make about subaltern speech as a form of academic censorship. Lee and I were thinking along similar lines in our post. In order for academics like Spivak to speak, to write, the subaltern has to remain speechless just as the historian, at least on some level, relies on the inability of the past to talk back in order to create an ordered historical narrative.
Hi Samantha and Ashley,
As you say, "Milton and Spivak generate similar concerns about censoring silence and speech" Both your post and Spivak raise the question, "What is a voice?" Can one voice speak for many? Can many voices represent a single whole? Is anything ever uncensored? All possibilities suggest both silencing and speech. Perhaps, like Jenny and Aaron argue, self-making and self-negation are complementary processes of subject-formation. Perhaps silence is just as necessary as speech is in the formation of a subject?
I know that Spivak takes issue with historians attempting to resurrect subaltern voices. To give them speech, Spivak says is to invariably affect how those voices are presented which changes those voices somehow. But I ask, is any voice ever unmediated? Is better to not have those voices at all, even mediated as they are?
i am unsure about the putting into conversation of milton with spivak, censorship with colonial/postcolonial/decolonizing discourses.
these seems to me to be not only highly disparate writers whose intentions are markedly separated by numerous distances, but whose intentions run in different directions on different planes.
in terms of the subaltern's implicit difference from a process of canonization/textual production/textual lineage/etc, spivak's point seems, to me, to be grounded not by the fact that the subaltern cannot speak, is speechless, but that the subaltern is forced into an anglophone or western series of discourses which themselves imperialize via their allowing for the subaltern to speak only by means of an anglophone or western discourse.
this is not a literal silencing or speechlessness. it is not a mode of censorship. it has nothing to do with literacy or technological development of any kind. it is something more noticeable in the work of sartre or camus, for instance. in the work of mbembe or memmi or agamben or fanon.
this is (at least by my understanding) the paradox of the subaltern: that it exists solely within/through the cultural hegemony of the west. that this state of being/nonbeing is invariably irreconcilable, unimaginable, violent, hopeless.
I've got a question that will, maybe, extend part of Brian's critique. What do you make of the context that, to me, provides the unavoidable link between Spivak and Milton--namely, the context of Anglo colonization? I am merely speculating here, but I would think that the category "educated men" not only produces women and the "uneducated" as apparent subalterns, but also people who are not white and English, who live in the places that are becoming colonized or have been colonized during the period of Milton's writing. Does this context change your argument? Does Milton's critique of censorship assume a separation of speech and subjectivity not despite but because of a tendency to locate some kind of subjectivity only in white Englishness? Do you see the text operating inside discourses of Englishness that are bound up in discourses of colonization?
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