Page 156 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 147

The cultural politics of difference

play, most obviously Gramsci and Williams (Said, 1995). For
Spivak, however, the issue became much more pressing, if only
because she is not only the translator into English of Derrida’s
Of Grammatology, but also a famously ‘obscure’ deconstruction-
ist critic in her own right (Derrida, 1976; Spivak, 1999; Eagleton,
1999). Hence her tortuous discussion of the (im)possibility of
‘subaltern’ speech and its equally tortuous rewriting in A Critique
of Postcolonial Reason. In both versions, Spivak argued for the
theoretical superiority of Derridean deconstruction over
Foucauldian genealogy and Deleuzian rhizomatics. But in the
earlier essay she had been much more explicit: ‘Derrida...is less
dangerous...than the first-world intellectual masquerading as
the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for them-
selves...he articulates the European Subject’s tendency to
constitute the Other as marginal to ethnocentrism and locates that
as the problem of all logocentric... endeavors’ (Spivak, 1988,
pp. 292–3; cf. Spivak, 1999, pp. 279–81). Hence the conclusion that
the ‘subaltern cannot speak’, which is neither explicitly reaffirmed
nor withdrawn in the rewritten version (Spivak, 1988, p. 308;
Spivak, 1999, p. 308–11).
One way out of the dilemma is suggested by Spivak’s notion
of ‘strategic essentialism’: ‘strategically adhering to the essentialist
notion of consciousness, that would fall prey to an anti-humanist
critique, within a historiographic practice that draws many of
its strengths from that very critique’ (Spivak, 1987, pp. 206–7).
Which means, in short, that whatever deconstruction’s theoretical
purchase when directed at European, white, male, bourgeois
humanism, postcolonial theorists must nonetheless proceed as if
humanism were still valid, as if the subject had still not been
decentred, as if deconstruction had failed, if ever they are
adequately to represent insurgent, or subaltern, consciousness.
As Spivak continued: ‘the Subaltern Studies group... must
remain committed to the subaltern as the subject of history. As
they choose this strategy, they reveal the limits of the critique of
humanism as produced in the West’ (p. 209). This resort to a kind
of ‘strategic’ humanism is neither as shocking nor as original as
Spivak believed. It is reminiscent, at one level, of Derrida’s
decision to exempt Marxism from deconstructive critique in his

147