Working through Spivak

I had a lot of trouble reading Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak." As a result, I'm going to use this post to attempt to unpack some of her claims, particularly the three points she puts forth toward the end of her essay.

Spivak is using this essay to critique one of her former essays which concluded that the subaltern could not speak. In this essay, Spivak claims that the subaltern is "the sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space." Peoples outside of the hegemony do not belong to one identifiable group; each individual person may have his/her own ethnicity or gender, traits which define their own groups. Subaltern doesn't refer to a particular group of  people but rather an "identity-in-differential" (802). The subaltern is a collection of heterogeneous traits which define the limitation of the hegemony in that they can not be specified in terms of the dominant language. They cannot be separated and grouped, instead they are united by the terministic screen, subaltern. The term implies their voices without giving them a particular voice because to do so would be to imbue one voice on a multiplicity of differing groups. The identity of the subaltern is not an identity in itself but a space which holds the pathways to becoming certain identities existing in terms not yet expressible.

To claim that the subaltern can be expressed works through essentialism; ideas categorizing the subaltern put forth by hegemony produced intellectuals are considered to be the natural principles which have always existed governing subaltern groups.

"When a line of communication is established between a member of subaltern groups and the circuits of citizenship or institutional, the subaltern has been inserted into the long road to hegemony" (808).  Once former subaltern groups gain the power of expression, they are no longer subaltern but instead a part of the hegemony. Or, at least, the possibility of their group's attributes becoming fully expressed and recognized is  feasible. Imagine if the subaltern term was a circle. The groups of the subaltern are pathways made up of numerous attributes. The attributes which cannot be expressed through dominant language make up the circle. When a group gains a traceable history (the path previous to this point of intersection) and a possible future (the length of the path extending beyond the point), it is no longer subaltern. The acquired ability for a group's history to be written marks it as working through hegemony.

 The  process of attempting to voice the subaltern, Spivak recalls the term "moral love", is instrument to restructuring hegemony. To succeed at voicing the subaltern would be to eliminate the term's ability to hold and move together heterogeneous groups. Though the process works toward a goal (voicing the subaltern) that would undermine its intent (imbuing a hegemonic one-voice on multiplicity), the process must continue in order to question and make apparent the hegemony's limitations. To say that the subaltern can be voiced is to say that remaining complacent with the limitations of hegemony-produced language is OK.