Literary Theory 2019

• those of low economic status, outside the power structures of a given society, without access to social mobility, with an “ambiguous relation to power” – subordinate to it but never fully consenting to its rule” (2194)
• subaltern women as ‘doubly’ subaltern: women without a voice

• Roots in Marx’s 18th Brumaire, where he discusses class formation. Small, isolated, dispossessed peasants do not constitute a class for themselves and are therefore incapable of asserting their class interests: 

“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”

• Spivak notes the “mistranslation” from the German: not “cannot represent themselves”, butcannot get their interests acknowledged / made to count (im eigenen Namen geltend machen).
• Spivaks question: “On the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier text, can the subaltern speak?” (2199)
• Cp. Said’s project of Orientalism, but the strata of power at work are more multiple, less binary than in Said’s case.

1. Dominant foreign groups, which includes colonial powers such as the English and French, international powers such as the Americans and the Russians as well as international corporations;

2. Dominant indigenous groups at the national level. This includes Indian politicians and business interests: national government and national business;

3. Dominant indigenous groups at the regional and local level

4. The people: particularly, the subaltern class

• Spivak argues that female intellectuals must play the role of the organic intellectual and speak for the subaltern.
• She is aware of risk of ventriloquism (für jemand anderen reden) in this act of representation.
• Representation is always misrepresentation (cp. Said)
• “decipherment in an academic institution =/= not necessarily “speaking” of the subaltern. (this decipherment is linked to power, cp. Foucault)
• For the moment: best option available

Political action often necessitates essentialism of one sort or another. -> Important to be aware of the issue

• Young woman committing suicide
• The family considers various (unlikely) reasons, accidentally “discovering” the reason: political activism, her inability to commit the murder delegated to her)
• To Spivak’s frustration, no-one in the closer family wanted to look into the matter, they could and would not read the gesture as an act of resistance. Spivak diagnose a “failure of communication” 
• possible that the political motivation for suicide was hushed up because it was shameful
• Irregularities: Spivak was no outsider, Bhaduri was solidly middle class.
• Spivak: answers this by calling all women subaltern, but women of colour (of the subaltern class) doubly subaltern
• Criticism: Imposition? Is it really legitimate to ‘throw’ all women – regardless of class – into the same (metaphorical) box?
• Conclusion: Spivak takes many hermeneutic libertiesin deciphering what she calls the unacknowledged “physiological inscription of her body” (2205): such as rewriting of sati-suicide or a “hegemonic account of the fighting mother”-figure.
• Is the political intellectual Spivak perhaps using (and abusing) Bhaduri’s story for her own ends?

• Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
• One of the most radical proponents of the idea that gender roles are a matter of performance rather than just culturally prescribed ideology.
• To say that gender is performative is to say that it can be adapted in performance similar tothe way an actor interprets a theatrical role.
• Butler develops this idea in response to what she considers to be a misguided turn to essentializing notions of identity in US-American and European feminism.

• Men have reason, women do not = Sexism
• the statement is also philosophically wrong in Butler’s view: The relation between the sexes and between masters and slaves is not determined biologically
• it is socially determined, through repeated acts of domination and subjection as well as through performances of identity by both men and women that conform to the dominant distribution of gender roles.

• Desire to forge bonds of solidarity -> relying upon the category of woman -> false promise of eventual political solidarity
• risk of rendering visible a category which may or may not be representative of the concrete lives of women. 
• Spivak: feminists rely on operational essentialism, a false ontology of women as a universal in order to advance a feminist political program. She suggests it could be used for strategic purposes.
• Butler: it is one thing to use the term and know its ontological insufficiency and quite another to articulate a normative vision for feminist theorywhich celebrates or emancipates an essence, a nature, or a shared cultural reality which cannot be found.

• Butler counters strategic essentialism with a constructivist approach to gender
• Task: to examine in what ways gender is constructed through specific corporeal acts, and what possibilities exist for the cultural transformation of gender through such acts.  
• Strongly influenced by Derrida and Lacan, but most importantly by the late Foucault:
  cp. his History of Sexuality, where he argues that the notion of sexual identity is a very late cultural addition. Before that: sexual practices unrelated to identity (‘sodomy’, i.e., sexual practices between men, were considered as a political crime) 
• Cp. Also Cixous and Anzaldúa 

• Butler deconstructs the central assumption of feminist theory: the dichotomy between sex (as biological given) and gender (as cultural prescription),which also reflects the dichotomy between nature and culture.
• Sexed bodies cannot signify without gender -> the apparent existence of sex prior to discourse / culture is itself a cultural construct. 
• Butler’s main claim is that not even sexual identity is something natural since what counts as natural is also defined by culture: 
• naturalness is “constitutedthrough discursively constrained performative actsthat produce the body through and within categories of sex.” (2489) 
• Useful to differentiate between ‘sex’ as anatomical fact and ‘sexual identity’ / ‘sexual orientation’. 

With the quote that “being a lesbian is what I have been,” Butler argues that identity is not inherent, but performed.

The repeated performance of an identity however leads to the “sedimentation” of identity. Thus, “being” is the result of performance, of agency.

• Asked in an interview about the ‘factual,’ ’material’ differences of male and female bodies – and the fact that only the female body has reproductive capabilities, she replies: 
• “What the question (of pregnancy) does is try to make the problematic of reproduction central to the sexing of the body. But I am not sure that is, or ought to be, what is absolutely salient or primary in the sexing of the body.”
• However, Butler also challenges the distinction between gender and anatomical sex -> sex as a reification of a series of corporeal acts
• Butler disagrees with the concept of the naturalness of the body and the link of gender to culture.
• She denies the feminist assumption of a fixed identity and argues that there is no sex prior to discourse. There is no natural body; the practice of “using” one’s body is culturally determined. The naturalness is “constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within categories of sex.”

• The body as main site of an essentialized naturalism vs. the spirit / mindthat should control, overcome, sublimatebodily drives.
• The body is always the ‘sexed’ body, the body inscribed with sexual significance.
• The sexed body as ‘signified’: “What is it?”

• Butler’s (and Foucault’s) aim to subvert “compulsory heterosexuality” and homosexuality taboo
• Butler questions the general perception of heterosexuality as the “norm,” from which homosexuality deviates.
• Connected to sealing off the body as an entity and sanitizing it.
• Establishes the self as something ‘interior’ and as something that is not only distinguished from the other, but which defines the other as ‘shit’:
• “The boundary between the ‘inner’ and the ’outer’ worlds of the subject is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity- differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit.” (2495).
• Confrontation with the parts of ourselves that are negative (aka our feces)
• Drag: “sex and gender denaturalized by means of performance”, gender parody

close reading of a particular text, concrete, immersion, singular cases, small job, intrinsic, explication /evaluation

the concrete steps undertaken and tools used in the activity of theory

the whole set of these tools and steps and their organization

• The humanist concept of the individual presupposes ‘man’ as human essence that remains untouched by historical or cultural circumstances. 
• In the Renaissance this essence was called ‘reason’; in the twentieth century it is generally called ‘consciousness’.

…marks a radical departure from this philosophical tradition of consciousness by giving a more central place to the unconscious and to cultural overdetermination than it does to consciousness.

The two main theorists responsible for this departure are Freud and Marx.

literature only plays a secondary role as it cannot change the base, it can only have a mimetic function (is a passive recording) and it cannot transgress

but: good literature shows how things actually are

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

-> Sein bestimmt Bewusstsein

1. All forms to consciousness – religious, moral, philosophical, legal, as well as language itself – have no independent history but are immediately related to the material activity of men. 
   Material production is regarded as the ultimate determining factor of social existence, and class struggle is viewed as the central dynamic of historical development.
    
2.  the view that the class which is the ruling material force is also the ruling intellectual force: it owns the means of production both materially and mentally.

As part of the superstructure, the role of literature and art in shaping consciousness is limited.

-> But: Literature is exposing the reality of class struggles

• Freud’s partitioned subject: incapable of complete self-knowledge
• 3 areas: memory– unconscious– preconscious
  (early Freud)
• The conscious: a mere adjunct to the preconscious
• Driving force: experience of want -> pleasure principle
• Pleasure / relaxation vs. outlet / cultural work

• ‘dream-work’: the unconscious seeks gratification despite the censorship of culture 
  -> mechanisms of displacement and condensation
• Literary texts allowing Freud to develop and illustrate his theories (“Der Sandmann”, Oedipus Rex)
• Condensation and displacement as poetic principles -> see de Saussure & Jakobson

• Obsession with truth: power and selfhood vs. HORROR of the abyss
• Man – rather than God – as “great architect”

• The three metaphors: mental image, sound, generalization
• “legislation of language” -> artificial edifice
• literature major role as art admits that it uses metaphors, and we can only come close to the truth through the metaphoric language 

Vital. 

Two kinds of Art: The Apollonian and the Dionysian principle stand for two contrastive tendencies in art and culture.