Una hipótesis a propósito de Spivak

1 Contexto

En Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice,

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Lección de 1983 publicada en la revista Wedge a 1985 y en la antología Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture a 1988, ampliamente expandida en A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present 1999.

desde el marco de los estudios literarios en su enfoque derridiano, Gayatri Spivak reivindica a la ideología como objeto de estudio

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Tradición iniciada con Marx (La ideología alemana 1846, publicada en 1932, y Una contribución a la crítica de la economía política 1859) y continuada con Mannheim Ideología y utopía 1929, Gramsci Cuadernos de la cárcel (escritos entre 1929 y 1935, y publicados en 1947), Adorno y Horkheimer Dialéctica de la Ilustración 1947 (expandiendo sobre Fragmentos filosóficos 1944), Althusser Ideología y aparatos ideológicos de Estado 1970, Žižek El sublime objeto de la ideología 1989. Para una retrospectiva, me remito a Darin McNabb Dogmatismo, ideología, conocimiento 2020 (yt).

«in aligning feminism with the critique of positivism

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«which is seen here as identical with “essentialism.”»

and the defetishization of the concrete

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«Foucault often seems to conflate “individual” and “subject”». Contra esto, los tipos ideales de Weber pueden verse como ejemplos de sujetos no individuados (o deindividuados), si bien no debemos perder de vista que los mecanismos de ontologización, subjetivización, individuación, atomización, fetichización, objetivización, instrumentalización, momificación... están íntimamente relacionados entre sí y remiten en el fondo a lo mismo, más allá de matices de contexto sobre la naturaleza del resultado del respectivo proceso; matices que, no obstante, pueden tener implicaciones profundamente diferentes, como refleja el distinto tratamiento entre colectividades e individuos en Simone Weil Echar raíces 1943.

Siendo aún más específico, cuando el tratado Burckhardt La cultura del Renacimiento en Italia 1860 periodiza y tematiza por primera vez el Renacimiento, produce con ello el parto de un nuevo sujeto, así como una nueva ontología (e ideología) asociada a este derivada de la manera particular en la que dicho sujeto ideal concibe la realidad. Y tal parto queda objetivado en su misma descripción (que trasciende al plano de lo ilocutivo), al homogeneizar y concretizar (e.g., mediante la individuación de artistas separados de sus talleres, comunidades y sociedad, y la atomización de obras escindidas de su diálogo con la tradición, la técnica y las estructuras y sistemas que la hicieron posible, en un proceso de fetichización) la heterogeneidad e indefinición (f)actual de la realidad (pues nadie en su propio tiempo tiene una autoconsciencia transversal de su presente, ni acceso a un consenso sobre sus hitos), lo cual se consigue mediante el uso de una cierta y prefijada axiología, criterio, fijación, idea, concepto, razón... (la semilla más o menos etérea que supedita la susodicha ontologización, fetichización...) instrumental (e instrumentalizante, de modo intencional o no, en tanto que su resultante «tecnificación» del mundo empuja una cierta forma de representación que legítima la relevancia original de dicho concepto) contra la cual se mide y contrasta la realidad de manera previa a su definición (pues es este proceso el que construye las etiquetas, a su vez enmarcadas en paradigmas, con las que la describimos), historificandola retrospectivamente (a menudo imprimiendo una sensación de progreso y retroceso respecto del concepto instrumental), en una suerte de cierre categorial momificador.

A esta segunda clase de sujetos Spivak los denota en mayúsculas, y es su estudio (y metaestudio) el que está reivindicando.

», pues tal estudio «is necessary for an understanding of interests» y, por extensión, «marking the positionality of the theoretician»

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Parafraseado propio.

, en contraposición a la postura de Foucault y Deleuze:

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La primera vez que leí el artículo tenía la constante sensación de sentirme superado por el texto y no estar entendiendo nada (¿a qué se refiere y a dónde quiere llegar?), así que, además de mi pequeña introducción, voy a ofrecer aquí un pequeño esquema de mi extracto: en los tres primeros párrafos, y los cuatro siguientes, Spivak expone y cuestiona dos puntos por los que FD desdeñan la noción de ideología, y a continuación desdobla a partir de Marx el concepto de representación para profundizar en su crítica, exponiendo por el camino la noción de clase de Marx, a partir de la cual contrasta la diferencia entre deseo (individual y desarticulado, caracterizando la heterogeneidad factual de la clase) e interés (colectivo y articulado, caracterizando su artificiosa o construida homogeneización instrumental, en la línea del esencialismo estratégico). (En este sentido, de hecho, hasta se puede leer antes la sección sobre Marx.)

The failure of Deleuze and Guattari to consider the relations between desire, power, and subjectivity renders them incapable of articulating a theory of interests. [...] Foucault’s commitment to “genealogical” speculation prevents him from locating, in “great names” like Marx and Freud, watersheds in some continuous stream of intellectual history. [...]

When Foucault considers the pervasive heterogeneity of power, he does not ignore the immense institutional heterogeneity that Althusser here attempts to schematize. Similarly, in speaking of alliances and systems of signs, the state and war-machines (mille plateaux), Deleuze and Guattari are opening up that very field. Foucault cannot, however, admit that a developed theory of ideology recognizes its own material production in institutionality, as well as in the “effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge” (PK, 102). Because these philosophers seem obliged to reject all arguments naming the concept of ideology as only schematic rather than textual,

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Aunque por contexto creo que se entiende bien, posiblemente 1.1 clarifique el uso del término.

they are equally obliged to produce a mechanically schematic opposition between interest and desire. Thus they align themselves with bourgeois sociologists who fill the place of ideology with a continuistic “unconscious” or a parasubjective “culture.” The mechanical relation between desire and interest is clear in such sentences as: “We never desire against our interests, because interest always follows and finds itself where desire has placed it” (FD, 215). An undifferentiated desire is the agent, and power slips in to create the effects of desire: “power ... produces positive effects at the level of desire —and also at the level of knowledge” (PK, 59).

This parasubjective matrix, cross-hatched with heterogeneity, ushers in the unnamed Subject, at least for those intellectual workers influenced by the new hegemony of desire. The race for “the last instance” is now between economics and power. Because desire is tacitly defined on an orthodox model, it is unitarily opposed to “being deceived.” Ideology as “false consciousness” (being deceived) has been called into question by Althusser. Even Reich implied notions of collective will rather than a dichotomy of deception and undeceived desire: “We must accept the scream of Reich: no, the masses were not deceived; at a particular moment, they actually desired a fascist regime” (FD, 215).

[...] Foucault articulates another corollary of the disavowal of the role of ideology in reproducing the social relations of production: an unquestioned valorization of the oppressed as subject, the “object being,” as Deleuze admiringly remarks, “to establish conditions where the prisoners themselves would be able to speak.” Foucault adds that “the masses know perfectly well, clearly” —once again the thematics of being undeceived— “they know far better than [the intellectual] and they certainly say it very well” (FD, 206, 207).

What happens to the critique of the sovereign subject in these pronouncements? The limits of this representationalist realism are reached with Deleuze: “Reality is what actually happens in a factory, in a school, in barracks, in a prison, in a police station” (FD, 212). This foreclosing of the necessity of the difficult task of counterhegemonic ideological production has not been salutary. It has helped positivist empiricism —the justifying foundation of advanced capitalist neocolonialism— to define its own arena as “concrete experience,” “what actually happens.” Indeed, the concrete experience that is the guarantor of the political appeal of prisoners, soldiers, and schoolchildren is disclosed through the concrete experience of the intellectual, the one who diagnoses the episteme. Neither Deleuze nor Foucault seems aware that the intellectual within socialized capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor.

The unrecognized contradiction within a position that valorizes the concrete experience of the oppressed, while being so uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual, is maintained by a verbal slippage. Thus Deleuze makes this remarkable pronouncement: “A theory is like a box of tools. Nothing to do with the signifier” (FD, 208). Considering that the ver- balism of the theoretical world and its access to any world defined against it as “practical” is irreducible, such a declaration helps only the intellectual anxious to prove that intellectual labor is just like manual labor. It is when signifiers are left to look after themselves that verbal slippages happen. The signifier “representation” is a case in point. In the same dismissive tone that severs theory’s link to the signifier, Deleuze declares, “There is no more representation; there’s nothing but action”—“action of theory and action of practice which relate to each other as relays and form networks” (FD, 206–7). Yet an important point is being made here: the production of theory is also a practice; the opposition between abstract “pure” theory and concrete “applied” practice is too quick and easy.

If this is, indeed, Deleuze’s argument, his articulation of it is problematic. Two senses of representation are being run together: representation as “speaking for,” as in politics, and representation as “re-presentation,” as in art or philosophy. Since theory is also only “action,” the theoretician does not represent (speak for) the oppressed group. Indeed, the subject is not seen as a representative consciousness (one re-presenting reality adequately). These two senses of representation—within state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subject-predication, on the other—are related but irreducibly discontinuous. To cover over the discontinuity with an analogy that is presented as a proof reflects again a paradoxical subject-privileging. Because “the person who speaks and acts ... is always a multiplicity,” no “theorizing intellectual ... [or] party or ... union” can represent “those who act and struggle” (FD, 206). Are those who act and struggle mute, as opposed to those who act and speak (FD, 206)? These immense problems are buried in the differences between the “same” words: consciousness and conscience (both conscience in French), representation and re-presentation. The critique of ideological subject-constitution within state formations and systems of political economy can now be effaced, as can the active theoretical practice of the “transformation of consciousness.” The banality of leftist intel- lectuals’ lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent.

If such a critique and such a project are not to be given up, the shifting distinctions between representation within the state and political economy; on the one hand, and within the theory of the Subject, on the other, must not be obliterated. Let us consider the play of vertreten (“represent” in the first sense) and darstellen (“re-present” in the second sense) in a famous passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [...]

“in so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of exis- tence that cut off their mode of life, their interest, and their formation from those of the other classes and place them in inimical confrontation [feindlich gagenüberstellen], they form a class.” There is no such thing as a “class instinct” at work here. [...] the formation of a class is artificial and economic, and the economic agency or interest is impersonal because it is systematic and heterogeneous. This agency or interest is tied to the Hegelian critique of the individual subject, for it marks the subject’s empty place in that process without a subject which is history and political economy. [...] My point is that Marx is not working to create an undivided subject where desire and interest coincide. Class consciousness does not operate toward that goal. Both in the economic area (capitalist) and in the political (world-historical agent), Marx is obliged to construct models of a divided and dislocated subject whose parts are not continuous or coherent with each other. A celebrated passage like the description of capital as the Faustian monster brings this home vividly.

[...] on the structural principle of a dispersed and dislocated class subject: the (absent collective) consciousness of the small peasant proprietor class finds its “bearer” in a “representative” who appears to work in another’s interest. The word “representative” here is not “darstellen”; this sharpens the contrast Foucault and Deleuze slide over, the contrast, say, between a proxy and a portrait. There is, of course, a relationship between them, one that has received political and ideological exacerbation in the European tradition at least since the poet and the sophist, the actor and the orator, have both been seen as harmful. In the guise of a post-Marxist description of the scene of power, we thus encounter a much older debate: between representation or rhetoric as tropology and as persuasion. Darstellen belongs to the first constellation, vertreten—with stronger suggestions of substitution—to the second. Again, they are related, but running them together, especially in order to say that beyond both is where oppressed subjects speak, act, and know for themselves, leads to an essentialist, utopian politics.

[...] Not only does such a model of social indirection —necessary gaps between the source of “[political] influence” [...], the “representative” (Louis Napoleon), and the historical-political phenomenon (executive control)— imply a critique of the subject as individual agent but a critique even of the subjectivity of a collective agency. The necessarily dislocated machine of history moves because “the identity of the interests” of these proprietors “fails to produce a feeling of community, national links, or a political organization.” The event of representation as Vertretung (in the constellation of rhetoric-as-persuasion [through our pregiven cognitive schemes]) behaves like a Darstellung (or rhetoric-as-trope), taking its place in the gap between the formation of a (descriptive) class and the nonformation of a (transformative) class [...]

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Aunque la discusión dentro del propio marco de Marx es curiosa, con comentarios como «it is in the area of this intercourse [commerce] that the feeling of community leading to class agency must be developed.», «In the context of the development of a strategic, artificial, and second-level “consciousness,” Marx uses the concept of the patronymic, always within the broader concept of representation as Vertretung», voy a omitirla por limitada.

Representation in the economic [instead of the political] context is Darstellung, the philosophical concept of representation as staging or, indeed, signification, which relates to the divided subject in an indirect way. [...]

the relationship between global capitalism (exploitation in economics) and nation-state alliances (domination in geopolitics) is so macrological that it cannot account for the micrological texture of power. To move toward such an accounting one must move toward theories of ideology —of subject formations that micrologically and often erratically operate the interests that congeal the macrologies. Such theories cannot afford to overlook the category of representation in its two senses. They must note how the staging of the world in representation —its scene of writing, its Darstellung— dissimulates the choice of and need for “heroes,” paternal proxies, agents of power —Vertretung.

My view is that radical practice should attend to this double session of representations rather than reintroduce the individual subject through totalizing concepts of power and desire. It is also my view that, in keeping the area of class practice on a second level of abstraction, Marx was in effect keeping open the (Kantian and) Hegelian critique of the individual subject as agent. This view does not oblige me to ignore that, by implicitly defining the family and the mother tongue as the ground level where culture and convention seem nature’s own way of organizing “her” own subversion, Marx himself rehearses an ancient subterfuge. In the context of poststructuralist claims to critical practice, this seems more recuperable than the clandestine restoration of subjective essentialism.

Y bajo este marco de trabajo, propone en la sección IV que «In seeking to learn to speak to [and with] (rather than listen to [as in darstellung] or speak for [as in vertretung]) the historically muted [and irretrievably heterogeneous] subject of the subaltern woman, the postcolonial intellectual systematically “unlearns” female privilege [i.e., their own privilege and ideology, reenvisioning themselves as other than those entitled to help]. This systematic unlearning involves learning to critique postcolonial discourse with the best tools it can provide and not simply substituting the lost figure of the colonized.»

1.1 Extra

«A subject-effect can be briefly plotted as follows: that which seems to operate as a subject may be part of an immense discontinuous network ("text" in the general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on. (Each of these strands, if they are isolated, can also be seen as woven of many strands.) Different knottings and configurations of these strands, determined by heterogeneous determinations which are themselves dependent upon myriad circumstances, produce the effect of an operating subject. Yet the continuist and homogenist deliberative consciousness symptomatically requires a continuous and homogeneous cause for this effect and thus posits a sovereign and determining subject. This latter is, then, the effect of an effect, and its positing a metalepsis, or the substitution of an effect for a cause. Thus do the texts of counterinsurgency locate, in the following description, a "will" as the sovereign cause when it is no more than an effect of the subaltern subject-effect, itself produced by the particular conjunctures called forth by the crises [...]

Reading the work of Subaltern Studies from within but against the grain, I would suggest that elements in their text would warrant a reading of the project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive historiographic metalepsis and "situate" the effect of the subject as subaltern. I would read it, then, as a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest. This would put them in line with the Marx who locates fetishization, the ideological determination of the "concrete," and spins the narrative of the development of the moneyform; with the Nietzsche who offers us genealogy in place of historiography, the Foucault who plots the construction of a "counter-memory," the Barthes of semiotrophy, and the Derrida of "affirmative deconstruction." This would allow them to use the critical force of anti-humanism, in other words, even as they share its constitutive paradox: that the essentializing moment, the object of their criticism, is irreducible.

The strategy becomes most useful when "consciousness" is being used in the narrow sense, as self-consciousness. When "consciousness" is being used in that way, Marx's notion of unalienated practice or Gramsci's notion of an "ideologically coherent" "spontaneous philosophy of the multitude" are plausible and powerful. For class-consciousness does not engage the ground level of consciousness—consciousness in general. "Class" is not, after all, an inalienable description of a human reality. Class-consciousness on the descriptive level is itself a strategic and artificial rallying awareness which, on the transformative level, seeks to destroy the mechanics which come to construct the outlines of the very class of which a collective consciousness has been situationally developed. "Any member of the insurgent community"—Guha spends an entire chapter showing how that collective consciousness of community develops—"who chooses to continue in such subalternity is regarded as hostile towards the inversive process initiated by the struggle and hence as being on the enemy's side" (EAP, 202). The task of the "consciousness" of class or collectivity within a social field of exploitation and domination is thus necessarily self-alienating. [...]

It is within the framework of a strategic interest in the self-alienating displacing move of and by a consciousness of collectivity, then, that self-determination and an unalienated self-consciousness can be broached. [...]

For readers who notice the points of contact between the Subaltern Studies group and critics of humanism such as Barthes and Foucault, confusion arises because of the use of the word "consciousness," unavoidably a postphenomenological and postpsychoanalytic issue with such writers. I am not trying to clear the confusion by revealing through analysis that the Subaltern Studies group is not entertaining "consciousness" within that configuration at all, but is rather working exclusively with the second-level collective consciousness to be encountered in Marx and the classical Marxist tradition. I am suggesting, rather, that although the group does not wittingly engage with the poststructuralist understanding of "consciousness," our own transactional reading of them is enhanced if we see them as 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 Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography, en Subaltern Studies IV 1985.

2 Relectura individualista, y ejemplos

Concediendo que el individuo es tan heterogéneo («contengo multitudes») e inaccesible (problema de las otras mentes) como la colectividad, la sugerencia de Spivak puede leerse como una advertencia contra el paternalismo, infantilización y desagenciación

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Nulificación o negación del sentido de agencia de un sujeto.

del vertretung, que trabaja en íntima conjunción con el silenciamiento (en su encasillamiento, encorsetamiento o reducionismo momificante) del darstellung, abogando en su lugar por una conversación proactiva (bidireccional) genuina con el otro.

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Curiosamente (no leí a Spivak hasta el 14/1/2023), esa es también, en esencia, la conclusión de mi ¿Por qué ya no nos vemos? 12/2022.

Lo que parece una perogrullada hasta que se examinan ciertos guiones sociales:

Las machoexplicaciónes (y acciones similares)

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Como interrumpir una discusión bajo la presunción de que se trata de violencia interpersonal.

pueden entenderse como un feminismo performativo que pretende actuar como representante-protector (vertretung) de quién se representa-interpreta (darstellung) víctima, subrogando su agencia incluso si no conocemos a la persona de nada y esta ya era perfectamente capaz de defenderse por sí misma.

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Por supuesto, no estoy diciendo que no se deba intervenir cuando hay maltrato flagrante, sino que a veces tendemos a leer las situaciones en caliente con demasiada ligereza, sin prever matices y contingencias que sin embargo resultan obvios para la persona inmersa en la acción; en lo posible, opino, no habría que involucrarse sin preguntar antes por el consentimiento.

Leer (darstellung) cierto gesto como amoroso (a lo Quijote con Dulcinea) y realizar en consecuencia en su nombre (vertretung) acciones entendidas (darstellung) como caballerosas creyendo (el Quijote de turno) que ello le confiere algún derecho sobre «su» Dulcinea, incluso si esta no tiene ningún interés ni en él ni en sus quijotadas, que no ha pedido en ningún momento.

Comprar algo a alguien que ni lo quiere ni lo necesita, pero que se cree (darstellung) que sí, bajo el pretexto (vertretung) de que es por su bien.

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Por poner un ejemplo menos etéreo, si yo no sé nada sobre Star Wars, es fácil que me vendan la moto de que cierto producto no puede faltar en la colección de ningún fan de Star Wars (como podría ser el destinarlo de mi compra), tipo una edición especial de la trilogía original, a pesar de que la versión más purista no es comercializable (Harmy's Despecialized Edition 2011 o, más recientemente, 4K77, 4K80 y 4K83 de 2018-22). (Típica situación de relación parento-filial, he de decir.)

3 Una hipótesis y dos paradojas

Desde la pura ingenuidad de mi experiencia mayormente asocial (¿y neurodivergente?), y acorazado con las racionalizaciones de la filosofía escéptica, anti-esencialista y heraclíta (procedural-dialógica),

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Graciosamente, esto mapea relativamente bien con el trilema de Gorgias, teniendo que reconocer que la filosofía de procesos está intrínsecamente ligada con el anti-esencialismo, como dos caras de la misma moneda de «el ser no es».

diría que no es posible conocer totalmente a nadie. O no, al menos, sin mantener en el tiempo (para dar cuenta del cambio) un vínculo continuo en el que se explore proactivamente su alteridad, aunque desde afuera su inmensidad me parece inagotable, tanto por la finitud del espeólogo como por la incesante expansión de la cueva.

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Huelga decir que el tiempo de exploración y el de expansión no son mutuamente excluyentes.

Bajo este marco, pues, afirmar conocer a una persona, incluso si una amistad íntima de la infancia, una pareja 60 años «in the making» o una misma, me parecería idéntico a anularla, lo mismo que cuando se dice de una celebridad que es tal o cual sólo a partir de un comentario pasajero suyo o una fuente secundaria:

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Obvio, hay una diferencia de grado, pero mi punto es que no llega a ser de tipo. Otro ejemplo de este tipo de caricaturas puede verse en la divulgación, como me recuerda Sabine Hossenfelder Earth's Core Didn't Stop Spinning. Here's What's Happening. 2023 (yt).

hablar en nombre de otro humano (en cualquiera de los dos sentidos, darstellung o vertretung)

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Cuando referido de sí, estos se pueden interpretar como hablar en nombre de mi yo pasado o de mi yo futuro, cayendo, en jerga de Sartre y Beauvoir, en mala fe.

supondría asumir que no ha habido ningún cambio de opinión desde la última vez que se exploró dicho tema, y que dicha exploración copó toda su profundidad; o, en otras palabras, que ya no hay cabida para las sorpresas. Todo lo cual hace a este conocimiento un tanto paradójico, con indiferencia de su calado, pues no es del tipo que nos permite tomar (informar) nuestras decisiones (salvo en situaciones límite en las que se deba asumir el riesgo de sobreescribir a la otra persona), sino sólo autotransformarnos.

Sea como fuere, planteada la hipótesis, y queriendo testearla preguntando al respecto a quienes parecían tener tan genuinas relaciones en su vida, me di cuenta de esta segunda paradoja: si le haces una pregunta personal a alguien, en la medida en la que no puedes saber si te está mintiendo, o se está mintiendo a sí mismo, o está siendo ingenuo, o está interpretando la cuestión de otra manera, etc., salvo que tengas la suficiente confianza como para ponerte a escarbar, el valor de su respuesta nunca cumplirá una función referencial-informativa, sino sólo emocional-interpersonal.