> G'day Kelley,
>
> You write:
>
> >for me, as a white working class person in the academy to claim some
> >status as >subaltern is outrageous!
>
> Well, I'm one, too - and I do often cringe when some sleek Harrods-frocked
> lefties confine their rhetoric to those all-too-easy appeals to victimhood
> - but I reckon a working class person is, by most important definition,
> certainly 'subaltern'. We may not be privates, but lieutenants are
> subalterns too
Hey, 'subaltern' was first used by Antonio Gramsci as a term to describe, amongst other things, the working class, not?
I think the one thing I appreciate about what people have been saying about Spivak's critique of 'speaking for the subaltern' is that doing so stands the danger of allowing groups of leaders to sort out the relations between people as the relations between terms (of language, that is).
A classic case of this is, of course, the various groups (e.g. trade union leaders in the UK) who take it upon themselves to be 'the voice of the working class'. Not that I love Ken Livingstone much, but I think it is significant that Tony Blair is using the union block vote against Livingstone in the fight over who gets to be Labour candidate for Mayor of London.
Gramsci famously said that we're all intellectuals, but we don't all function as intellectuals. I don't think it is too far off to think that it seems odd to be from the working class, but blessed with the label of 'intellectual' - given that the role of intellectuals in our society is always to substitute for the intellectual function of the 'subaltern groups'.
One thing I won't accept from Spivak though, is the excuse that she can't write a simple sentence. Looking at the stuff from her book that Yoshie posted, I think I can safely say that you can only fully understand her work if you understand a whole pile of other things first - things that only people with academic training are likely to understand. Is her intention to only speak with other academics?
In this respect, I don't see a lot of difference between Spivak and Eagleton - Eagleton ends off his little book on ideology with a blurb about how in times of mass movement, ideological chains can be thrown off pretty fast. That's about all the space he gives to consider anything but the 'movement of ideas' in the whole book.
The difference for me between Spivak's prose, and say the impenetrable economic chatter of Doug and co. on this list, is that Doug writes articles which I can understand, and which help me understand the world. Doug clearly can write a simple sentence (although a lot of the stuff in LBO is still a bit impenetrable - but within the bounds that I think people's ability to understand the jargon can develop within a reasonably short amount of time).
I'll read Spivak's stuff if I get my hands on it, and maybe I will learn something. The problem is, I've got a lot of comrades back in SA who don't even have the scraps of academic training that I have. Will anything that Spivak writes be anything but utterly impenetrable to them?
Peter -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.