spivak

Key points of Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

Thesis:

"My view is that radical practice should attend to this double session of representations rather reintroduce the individual subject through totalizing concepts of power and desire [as Foucault and Deleuze do]" (74).

Section I I. Following Marx, Spivak distinguishes between

1st constellation	Re-presentation (darstelleng )	rhetoric as trope	class as a descriptive concept, class in a system	class consciousness
2nd constellation	Representation (vertreten)	rhetoric as persuasion	class as a transformative concept; thru' stubstitution/representative	transformation of consciousness

"Here is Marx's passage, using 'vertreten' where the English use 'represent', discussing a social 'subject' whose consciousness and Vertretung (as much a substitution as a representation) are dislocated and incoherent: The small peasant proprietors 'cannot represent themselves; they must must be represented. Their representative must appear simultaneously as their master, as an authority over them, as unrestricted governmental power that protect them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. . . .'" (p. 71 )

"Not only does such a model of social indirection -- necessary gaps between the course of 'influence' (in this case the small peasant proprietors), the 'representative' (Louise Napolean), and the historical-political phenomenon (executive control) -- imply a critique of the subject as individual but a critique even of the subjectivity of collective agency." (72)

II. Representation of labor power thus should be theorized/specified as "exploitation as the extraction (production), appropriation and realization of (surplus) value" (74). This is to pay attention to "the micrological texture of power."

III. Spivak's critique of the Foucault-Deleuze conversation:
". . . the constitutive subject on at least two levels: the Subject of desire and power as an irreducible methodological presupposition; and the self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject of the oppressed. Further, the intellectuals, who are neither of these S/subjects, become transparent in the relay race, for they merely report on the nonrepresentedsubject and analyze (without analyzing) the workings of (the unnamed Subject irreducibly presupposed by) power and desire. (p. 74)

[here she shifts to her focus of the Third-World Other]
. . . It is impossible for contemporary French intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe."

Section II