Subaltern speech becomes agency only within responsive resistance

Evidence

When the subaltern “speaks” in order to be heard and gets into the structure of responsible (responding and being responded to) resistance, he or she is on the way to becoming an organic intellectual. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2184 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

That is what did not happen in the case of a woman who took her own body at the moment of death to inscribe a certain kind of undermining—too weak a word—a certain kind of annulment of all the presuppositions that underlie the regulative psychobiography that writes sati. When we act we don’t act out of thinking through details; we act in something that Derrida calls, following Kierkegaard, the “night of nonknowledge.” Even the just decision thinks itself in the night of nonknowledge. We act out of certain kinds of reflexes that come through, by layering something through learning habits of mind, rather than by merely knowing something. That is the way in which her action was inscribed in her body. And even that incredible effort to speak did not fulfill itself in a speech act. And therefore, in a certain kind of rhetorical anguish after the accounting of this, I said, “the subaltern cannot speak!” This is always read as a rational remark about subalterns as such— Meaghan Morris has made the witty comment that my critics rewrite the sentence as: “the subaltern cannot talk.” — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2296 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

What John Beck and Thomas Davenport state as a law of marketing (but which was invalidated a long time ago with the industrialization of our media apparatuses) fully applies in the classroom: ‘if you want to get any attention, you’ve got to give attention’. Masterly speech will be better accepted the more the teacher endeavours to be sensitive to the feedback he can read on the faces of his listeners (surprised looks, frowns, sighs, yawns). Even if this feedback is more difficult to grasp and interpret in a lecture hall of five hundred students than in the intimacy of an Oxford tutorial, the work of any discourser also consists in cultivating what Michael Goldhaber called an ‘illusory attention […] that helps create an apparent equality of attention’. The advantage of ‘personalized’ teaching situations, like those permitted by Oxford’s traditions (and wealth), comes from the fact that ‘to get a person to pay attention to your information, the information has to be about that person’. The illusion that the teacher must aim at producing is rooted in the ideally symmetrical model of conversation: ‘turning’ to each listener as though the words were personally addressed to them. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 265 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Subaltern speech fails as a transaction between speaker and listener, not as utterance — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2296; Subaltern speech becomes political only when entering responsible resistance structures. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2184; Enunciative power asymmetry still obligates speakers to give attention to get attention — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 265 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Subaltern speech becomes political only when entering responsible resistance structures. #corroborates (0.90) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2184
• Subaltern speech fails as a transaction between speaker and listener, not as utterance #qualifies (0.80) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2296
• Enunciative power asymmetry still obligates speakers to give attention to get attention #expands (0.80) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 265