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Angelaki

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SUBALTERNITY AND AFFECT

Jon Beasley-Murray; Alberto Moreiras Online publication date: 09 June 2010

To cite this Article Beasley-Murray, Jon and Moreiras, Alberto(2001) 'SUBALTERNITY AND AFFECT', Angelaki, 6: 1, 1

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ANGELAKI
journa l of the the oretical humani tie s v olum e 6 num ber 1 april 200 1

his special issue of Angelaki arises in part from a preoccupation with the culturalisation of the concept of hegemony, a concept that is, in its way, something like hegemonic within cultural criticism and theory. Our preoccupation with the concept, or rather with its extension and culturalisation, soon manifested itself as a dissatisfaction, though perhaps (as some of the essays in this collection also indicate) it continues to be indispensable, if not always in the ways that one tends to assume. The prevalence of the concept of hegemony coincides with an increasingly unreflexive culturalism in mainstream cultural studies; indeed, it coincides with cultural studies becoming mainstream, as its assumptions and its terminology come to constitute what goes without saying in much of academia and many places beyond. Thus, for instance, the assertion that the domain of culture extends far beyond what has traditionally been regarded as legitimate or high culture is now taken for granted almost everywhere. Likewise, no one now is taken aback by the assertion that power can be seen at work in this expanded realm of culture as much as (if not more than) in the traditional corridors where power was once said to reside. Indeed, it is precisely because the concept of hegemony seems to accord so easily with our natural concept of this new, media-driven and globalised world that we might begin to doubt that the concept has much scope left in it for the articulation of a critique (as opposed to a description of the rationality) of that world. Elsewhere, therefore, we have called for a re-examination of the workings of the state and the relation of culture to its institutional outside as a way to think beyond the concept of hegemony. Here, however, we take another tack. Perhaps the most important innovation provided by the South Asian Subaltern Studies group has been their reconceptualisation of the relation between

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EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION jon beasley-murray alberto moreiras SUBALTERNITY AND AFFECT

hegemony and subalternity. Whereas for Gramsci (and for cultural studies in the Gramscian tradition which is a great part of cultural studies today), the relation between hegemony and subalternity was positive, for the Subaltern Studies group, that relation is negative. Indeed, it is at best a relation of non-relation. What is perhaps at issue now is the status of that at best. Here is where the question of affect, as explored by the essays in this collection, comes into play. But let us explain this in a little more detail. By suggesting that the relation between hegemony and subalternity has usually been understood as a positive relation, we mean that hegemony has been understood as a strategy of incorporation, co-optation, or inclusion whereby the subaltern has been persuaded to lend his or her support to a social order that (objectively) maintains him or her in a position of inferiority. Hegemony is a form of articulation (and this is

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/01/010001-04 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/0969725012005672 9

editorial introduction
the point that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe make) that is forever expansive, forever making new subalterns who are always subsumed within the relations it establishes, if always at the price of some compromise (on both sides, to one extent or another, but always more on the side of the subaltern). Women, for instance, are subaltern according to this conceptualisation in so far as they accede to the contract of marriage or the ideology of femininity, which offer them some legal or emotional pay-off, but which also and at the same time entrench them in a position of relative social subservience. Subalternity, in short and according to this conception, is a situation of relative inferiority within a social order, structured according to the principle of hegemony, which defines and calibrates that relation of inferiority. The Subaltern Studies collective, by contrast, and perhaps not so much in direct opposition to the understanding just described, but rather in a relation of supplementarity with it, has by and large grounded its work on the notion that subalternity is precisely what is excluded from any such relations of hegemony. The relation between hegemony and subalternity is negative in that one (analytically) arrives at the category of the subaltern by a process of subtraction: all those groups that, for whatever reason (resistance on the part of the subaltern or ignorance, incompetence, or wilfulness on the part of the hegemon), remain outside of the mechanisms of co-optation are, then, subaltern. Subalternity is a social residuum, necessarily misrepresented in that the subaltern does not enter into social structures of representation (and when he or she does, he or she is no longer subaltern; hence, in Gayatri Spivaks famous formulation, the subaltern cannot speak). Subaltern Studies overlaps with postcolonial theory in that the relation between coloniser and colonised has been more often and more profoundly one of incomprehension or misrepresentation at best (and brute force at worst) rather than one of co-optation, and as such seems to differ from the modes of subordination historically taken to be characteristic within the European and US metropolis. Hence, for Ranajit Guha, colonial India, governed as it was by a logic of dominance above all, served as the limit for the expansive and universalising tendency of capitalist hegemony. Subalternity marks hegemonys limit. Yet a non-relation may still very well be a relation. A founding move of deconstruction, after all, is to point out that what is excluded from a particular relation may also turn out to constitute that relation (and so to permeate the order that relation itself institutes). If subalternity lies outside hegemony, at its limit, does it also constitute hegemony by marking that limit? Laclaus notion of the constitutive outside must of course be remembered here as a key concept that mediates the two understandings of hegemony we are considering. Though Subaltern Studies, in its own way (like cultural studies in its), may be tempted towards a romanticism of the subaltern, is in fact the most that subalternity provides a (theoretical?, abstract?) constitutive, and hence foundational, limit to hegemony? We will not answer these questions here, because many of the essays that follow (starting with Alberto Moreirass considerations of separation and the (non)relation between inside and outside) attempt to answer them, or imply answers to them, in rather different ways. These answers turn, however, on the question of affect. The premise of our call for papers on subaltern affect was, in part (and even though we may not have realised it fully at the time), that a focus on affect made questions of subalternity (more) concrete. A focus on affect, in other words, might enable a translation of these problems of subalternity and hegemony into other terms and so allow a resolution or at least rearticulation of these problems on another plane, always bearing in mind that the translation itself would be likely to introduce new problems and new questions. One could start with the relation between hegemony, representation, and speech established by the Subaltern Studies collective and Gayatri Spivak. If there were a privileged (indeed, exclusive) relation between hegemony and speech, would there be a privileged (if not, perhaps, exclusive) relation between subalternity and affect? Is, in short, the (positive) relation between hegemony and speech shadowed by a (similarly positive?) relation between subalternity and affect? And, therefore, is the (negative) relation

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beasley-murray & moreiras

between hegemony and subalternity shadowed by a (similarly negative?) relation between affect and speech, discourse, hegemony as an articulatory practice? Again, we do not want to pre-empt the various, different answers (or implied answers) to these questions provided by the essays that follow this introduction. It is clear that this is terrain on which diverse theoretical approaches both meet and part company, but not without certain modulations in the process. Thus, for instance, if the concept of the constitutive outside invokes deconstruction, several of the analyses here (such as David Huddarts) that invoke deconstruction show also that the common accusations that deconstruction is simply a theory of textuality ignore both the affect that can pervade deconstructive criticism (for Huddart, an affect generated by the appeal to autobiography), and such criticisms concern with affect as, precisely, the possible, particular limit to textuality. Likewise, if the concept of affect invokes Gilles Deleuze and F lix Guattaris notion of affect as a weapon of the nomad war machine, other contributions here (such as John Kraniauskass) demonstrate the difficulties of disentangling state and war machine (here in an analysis of that formidable state icon, Eva Pern) and the ways in which affective weaponry can be appropriated by an incorporative state machinery. Other divergences among the essays that follow include the choice between seeing affect as sometimes an alternative economy in which subalterns may try to resist or escape attempts at hegemonic control (in Eva Cherniavskys analysis of Leslie Marmon Silkos Almanac of the Dead, for instance) or a focus on the management and display of affect as a means by which subalterns may compensate for and even inveigle their way into hierarchies established by hegemony (in Samir Dayals interpretation of Ramakrishnas performative ecstasies). Or, again, there is the shift of focus between a (dialectical?) play between affect and hegemony (with Paul Gormleys discussion of the way in which the construction of an affective American-Africanism colludes with the occlusion of white American rage); an approach that sees affect and hegemony as radically distinct (Jon Beasley-Murrays outline of an affective politics that lies beneath political discourse); or an examination of the way in which affect may subtend all politics and, indeed, all being (in Kenneth Surins argument for affects necessary primacy). And this is to trace the lineaments of just some of the arguments ahead. We do not believe that any of these approaches are necessarily radically incompatible; but it may take some time to sort the overlaps from the divergences. Particular cases necessarily seem to reoccur: beyond the coordinates of Laclau and Mouffe and the South Asian Subaltern Studies group, or deconstruction and Deleuze and Guattaris nomadology, Althussers theory of interpellation (revisited from a subalternist perspective here by Brian Carr) and Gramscis notion of the relation between subaltern and hegemon (which Brett Levinson re-reads against the grain of much contemporary cultural analysis) also now demand revision in the light of subaltern affect. Equally, our current historical situation within a period of neoliberal globalisation is cited repeatedly as a spur to posthegemonic thinking, not least in Gareth Williamss argument arising from postnational, post-dictatorial Argentina, and Arthur Reddings reflections on what we might term post-Yugoslav Europe. At the same time, Patrick Dove reminds us that even analysis of one of modernitys most sustained and most successful projects of hegemonic rule (Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party, whose politicocultural project, which came to power with the Revolution, only lost control of the state last year) prompts consideration of something like posthegemony. There is no single conclusion possible. However, what we do believe this collection demonstrates (and at the risk once again of putting subalternity and affect into a (non-)relation with a discourse of hegemony) is that, whereas hegemony is usually seen as a concept that would explain some aspect of social order, in fact (now at least) the burden of proof rests with those who would justify and explain this hegemony of hegemony. In the meantime, subaltern affect opens up as a terrain still in need of further investigation.

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editorial introduction cover art

The cover art is a reproduction of Malui (1999), a screen print by the New Zealand-based artist Dagmar Vaikalafi Dyck. Dycks work fuses the three aspects of her heritage Tongan, German, and New Zealand focusing on what she terms the beauty of functional Pacific Art, which includes fish hooks, baskets, necklaces, brooms, and so on. This semi-representational art, edging into and out of representation via household objects, whose use of colour fields also tries to conjure something like a Pacific affect, seemed appropriate to an issue dedicated to outlining the boundary of affect and representation at points of post-national cultural fusion.

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acknowledgements
We would like to thank those who helped peer review essays for this collection, who include Malgosia Askansas, Susan Brook, Alessandro Fornazzari, Nick Groom, Ryan Long, and Neelam Srivastava. Above all, many thanks to Gerard Greenway, for his patience and belief in this issue.

bibliography
Beasley-Murray, Jon and Alberto Moreiras. After Hegemony: Culture and the State in Latin America. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 8.1 (June 1999): 1720. Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone, 1988. Guha, Ranajit. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics . London: Verso, 1985. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271313. Jon Beasley-Murray Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL UK E-mail: jon.beasley-murray@man.ac.uk Alberto Moreiras Department of Romance Studies Box 90257 Duke University Durham NC 27708-0257 USA E-mail: moreiras@duke.edu