Gayatri Spivak on Democracy

7-2015

               Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, like a number of other feminists from the global south, approaches democracy as subject to critique as part of the legacy of imperialism. From this perspective, democracy is not a simple solution to the needs and desires for the subaltern and other poor of the global south, but serves as a type of dystopia for subalterns, tribals, and other outcastes under decolonized India, the War on Terror, and postcolonial socio-political relations.

The refusal of some transnational feminists to be taken in by political victories measured in rational abstractions (democracy, citizenship, rights) results in a persistent critique of the “reasonable” dogmas that turn out to serve “the few in the name of the many.” As in much of Spivak’s other work, such persistent critique leads to what might be called the productive unease of questioning “what one cannot not want,” such as constitutional rights and democratic social relations.(Spivak, Power/Knowledge, 42-49)

Spivak has developed some of her more concrete analysis of democracy in her translations and commentaries on the non-fiction advocacy journalism and fiction of Mahasweta Devi, a Bengali feminist author. In Devi’s advocacy and fiction, democratic constitutional rights are among the most urgent political claims for Indian tribals and outcastes, yet they cannot take their ends as unquestioned goods. Critique is necessary since such urgent political claims in decolonized space must be tacitly recognized, in the view of Gayatri Spivak, as an authoritative regulative logic “coded within the legacy of imperialism: nationhood, constitutionality, citizenship, democracy, socialism, even culturalism…secularism…[and capitalist] development.” (Power/Knowledge 48).  Devi’s advocacy and fictional writings emphasize the subaltern space that do not share in the modes of “agency” available through traditional left labor organizing, nor do they share in the “freedom” of decolonization (as a reversal of colonialism and imperialism), since Indian independence had little material effect on scheduled tribals or outcastes and other subalterns. (Devi, “Draupadi”; Devi, Dust on the Road; Devi, “Pterodactyl”; Huq)

In Spivak’s view, grassroots feminist activists in the global south must “use what is at hand,” rather than “sit around and decide which individual rights are native,” including models that are capitalist in order to fight the multinationals or constitutional rights when “they know that the constitution is … something that …doesn’t belong to tribal law and culture.” (Spivak, Neocolonialism, 20) In the view of Spivak, “you cannot fight something if you do not acknowledge that what is poison has also historically been medicine.”(Neocolonialism 17-18). In her constructive contributions to writing about democratic work among subalterns, Spivak emphasizes the need for infrastructural change as a baseline for evaluating feminist movements, in order to problematize large NGOs or INGOs and transnational organizations like the UN that advocate feminist practices which reinforce capitalist development and exploitation. (Death; Popular; Resistance; Not Properly) Members of aboriginal and tribal groups, subalterns, rural women and others largely cut off from social mobility under global financial capital, along with some immigrants, networked activists and possibly rural literacy teachers and some literary critics are among the prime movers of this type of democratic praxis in Spivak’s view (Sanders 71, 92).

Spivak has centered much of her work on advocacy for the desires and demands of the subaltern, another way to conceptualize the Other of democracy. The subaltern is one term used to name the space outside of the political, “the structured place from which the capacity to access power is radically obstructed” (Morris 2010, 8), the democratic, or the modern social space that claims mobility and freedom economic and otherwise (Spivak), the space inhabited by those who will not be heard by the elected representatives of indirect forms of democracy. They are an Other to the space of the democratic procedures that claim equal representation, since they are constituted through the inequalities that betray those claims.

Spivak’s notion of democracy for the subaltern, like Lyotard’s argument about the pervasively present differend, gives us a vocabulary to name the unnamable and to recognize those who all democracies have not been able to recognize as citizens. Several other theorists have attempted to make recognizable the experiences of those that come to the body politic in different idioms, ethics, and practices than those of the Eurocentric democratic social order that claim a monopoly on democracy. Gayatri Spivak works with Derrida’s notion of the supplement and with Lyotard’s notion of the differend (Differend 13, ctd. Morton 118-20) to discuss this issue, while developing her own conception of the subaltern not defined in terms of class demographics but as the space of the unknown for those “educated in the terms of liberal humanism.”

For those who have not benefited from constitutional governments or development or other “modern” institutions, they find that the modern means a “constitutive exclusion from the political whose form is inaudibility/unintelligibility” (Morris, 63 n28). These populations have so long been accustomed to exclusion from the public sphere and from government services (health care, education, human rights, social safety net protections) that they have come to inhabit what some commentators have termed a distinctive social sphere, the subaltern (Guha; Spivak 1988; Spivak 1996; Spivak 2000; Morris). While the notion of the subaltern has classically been developed to name those outside of the circuits of the modern capitalist or socialist labor markets (Power/Knowledge 48-9), Spivak has come to apply the category to a wide range of political topics, including democracy. In this sense these groups and their social norms by definition are unable to be effective participants in the democratic public sphere, so-called civil society, since they practice social norms that are not recognized by bourgeois participants in the public sphere as belonging to the political.

For Spivak working with democracy through critique is part of practices which “claim rights as [citizens] with a difference,” tacitly recognizing that modern democratic logics or institutions do not recognize one as having those rights yet working strategically with this mistaken logic in social struggle to deal with problems on the ground. In this practice supposedly authoritative logics and narratives written elsewhere (e.g., Europe, the global civil society of NGOs and the UN) are displaced so that subalterns may “claim entrance into this story [of rights] with a difference” through renegotiation in struggle, as Angela Davis has done for young African Americans in the U.S. (Spivak, Neocolonialism, 29-30).

               To claim entry into narratives and logics locally and at the level of the nation-state that do not recognize subalterns and other excluded groups as full citizens requires “resistance that cannot be recognized as such.” (Resistance) This resistance works through what Spivak sees as a type of interruption of the assumption of a performative role, specifically an intervention that exposes the foreclosure of humanity or citizenship by a “speaking otherwise.”(Sanders 16-18). Concretely speaking, this entry requires not only subaltern agency and activism, but also the institutionalization of organizations and infrastructure that allows the demands of the subaltern to be heard within the political limits and liberal assumptions of the public sphere. (In Response; Popular 440; Resistance; Subaltern Talk)

               To put this problem more generally, we might follow Spivak in asking how democracy may come to function as an institutionalized collectivity ethically, responsibly, without what may seem to be the necessary limits and the possibility of exclusivist violence that installs inequalities, such as friend/foe, citizen/non-citizen, colonizer/colonized, majority/minority, elected representative/ordinary citizen, modern/primitive, leader/follower, man/woman, brother/sister, member/non-member (Death 27-32). Only by tracking the exclusions at work in each momentary formation of the collective polity may we retain some vigilance about their violences, redirecting them constantly to an undecidability that rejects such exclusivist violence coded as unquestioned implicit hierarchies. This work allows for inviting into the polity those who might otherwise be named as unwelcome, outsider, subordinate, other, and for recognizing their wisdom and agency even as the polity moves to reduce them to external to the collective. This democratic work takes as its center interruptions in the closure that “reason” seems to require as limits that exclude in order to retain the ability to imagine collectivities that do not already exist. It is through this work that ontological politics comes to the fore, so that the “real” will fail to determine our ethics and politics in the present and especially in our futures. (Death 34-8, 51-4)

The key to organizing democratic work for Spivak is the recognition that the subject might become a full participant in the democratic public sphere. Such a recognition is consistently blocked by many democracies not only as individuals but infrastructurally, as Marx argued (Spivak Popular 432), meaning that subaltern resistance is not located or heard by modern democracies. Being a full participant in democracy means that “the state is in the citizen’s service,” (Popular 439). Spivak notes that in modern liberal politics this goal is hopelessly idealistic, it remains possible if the subaltern or other excluded subjects form a collectivity that lays claim as part of the larger whole subject to democratic rights.(Popular 437-9) This is how Spivak understands the citizen, with recourse to the sovereignty of the state as derived from citizens; Spivak is opposed to seeing these citizens as “the people” because of the danger of turning the term “people” into a slogan. (Popular 432).

               Instead, the key moment for the opening into democracy for subaltern and other excluded populations is when the subaltern claims their own place as part of the whole of democratic community, no longer presumed to be excluded as liberal humanist history has taught them by the persistent refusal of the nation-state to recognize them as fully human, as citizens. Spivak’s own work with the subaltern has been focused on a pedagogical effort to noncoercively rearrange the desires of the subaltern so that they may begin to see themselves as possessing a relation to constitutionality and as having an intuition of the public sphere. By learning to imagine such absent relations, the imagination may begin to “engender possibilities that are not necessarily contained in their dominant versions, radical or conservative.” (Other Asias 4).  In this view the impossible, i.e., full humanity and citizenship for the subaltern, becomes possible in the future over the long term, without guarantees, a vision of democracy that includes the subaltern in the public sphere, among those with full constitutional rights, and among the electorate.

               This rupture of modern national logics of democracy is caused by an interruption from below, when those who are excluded begin to see themselves as full citizens with a claim on the state to serve them, so that the term citizen is no longer a “name for hegemony” but a claim on the state and its “habits… or rituals of democratic behavior.” (Popular 438)  This intervention does not take place spontaneously, but only after a weaving of “rights thinking into the torn cultural fabric of responsibility” (Popular 440; Righting Wrongs) and the careful infrastructural work to “establish, implement, and monitor structures that allow subaltern resistance to be located and heard” (Popular 440). The cultural fabric of responsibility has been torn by the long histories of imperialism and the destructive impact on indigenous and subaltern cultures of the nation-state, of capitalist development, of modern technocratic bureaucracy, of modern schooling, and other practices.

By advocating for infrastructural change and building collectivities aimed at gendered social relations not suitable for servicing capital, these forces may produce a democratic general will that will be difficult to appropriate under capitalist-centered democratic practices (Sanders 92). This practice is close to what Paolo Freire called organizers to consider: how we might organize so that and those who rise from below become subjects opening alternatives to that of becoming “themselves oppressors” or “sub-oppressors.” (Spivak Najibullah 149 qtg Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 29-31) To practice this form of democracy requires for many of us, in the words of a Thai activist, Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, that we “search for and relearn new modes of knowing which allow other types of knowledge and experience to be imagined,” types of democracy that have been pushed out of our awareness in middle class societies (qtd. Morris 2002).

Sources:

Devi, Mahasweta. “Draupadi,” Trans. and Foreword, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critical Inquiry, 8.2 (1981): 381-402.

---, Dust on the Road: The Activist Writings of Mahasweta Devi, ed., Maitreya Ghatak, Seagull Press, 1997.

---, “Pterodactyl,” in Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps, Gayatri Spivak trans. & intro., Routledge, 1995, 95-205.

Freire, Paolo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Trans. Maya Bergman Ramos, Continuum, 1970.

Guha, Ranajit, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed., Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, Verso, 2000, 1-7.

Huq, Hasan Azizul,  “Through Death and Life”, in Kalpana Bardhan, ed., Women, Outcastes, Peasants and Rebels, 1990, 304-21.

Lyotard, Jean-François, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele, Manchester University Press, 1988 (1983).

Morris, Rosalind, “Populist Politics in Asian Networks: Positions for Rethinking the Question of Political Subjectivity,” positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 20.1 (2012): 37-65.

Sanders, Mark, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory, Continuum, 2006.

Spivak, Death of a Discipline, Columbia University Press, 2003.

 ---. “1996: Foucault and Najibullah,” Other Asias, Blackwell, 2008,  

Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Grossberg and Nelson, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988 (1985)); classic version of influential article; repr. in R. Morris, ed. _Can the Subaltern Speak?

---. ”Neocolonialism and the Secret Agent of Knowledge, an interview with Robert J.C. Young,”in Robert J.C. Young, ed., Neocolonialism, Oxford Literary Review 13 (1991).

---. “Foreword,” Other Asias, Blackwell, 2008, 1-13.

---. In Response: Looking Backward, Looking Forward, in Rosalind Morris, ed., Can the Sublatern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, Columbia University Press, 2010, 227-36.

---. “More on Power/Knowledge,” in Outside in the Teaching Machine, Routledge, 1993.

---.  “The New Subaltern: A Silent Interview,” in Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed., Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, Verso, 2000.

---. “Not a Properly Intellectual Response,” Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Seagull Books, 2006.

---. “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular,” Postcolonial Studies, 8.4 (2005): 475-86; repr. Aesthetic Education, 429-42.

---. “Resistance that Cannot be Recognized as Such,” Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Seagull Books, 2006, 57-85.

---. “Righting Wrongs – 2002: Accessing Democracy Among the Aboriginals,” in Other Asias, Blackwell, 2008, 14-57.

---. Subaltern Talk, in Donna Landry, ed., The Spivak Reader (1996

---. *"Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Donna Landry, ed.,  The Spivak Reader (1996 (1985)).