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124 one can open just about any page in the work of Antonio Gramsci and find a vocabulary of progress and historical development that establishes teleology for comparative purposes. Gramsci’s terms include “historical places,” “emergence ,” “conditions of transformations,” “levels of development,” “degrees of homogeneity,” “levels of political consciousness,” “historical maturity,” and so on. There is a vanguardism in his call for subaltern studies, if this is what Gramsci would have called his studies of dominance and subordination. Note that the terms of the teleology have more to do with the complexity of political organizations than with the stagist models characteristic of transition to capitalism narratives. If the passages I cite from Gramsci could be read as limited to his time, my argument concerning the comparative framework of subaltern studies traces the teleological reasoning in more recent articulations of the past twenty years. Implicit in the very concept of the subaltern is a notion of the subaltern’s lack of political agency by comparison with more evolved political forms. But I wonder if the use of the term “subaltern” does not constitute a socius or a collectivity by attributing the deficiencies of subalternity. To my mind, subaltern studies should address the processes of subordination, rather than assume subalterns exist in some unproblematic fashion. The subaltern as a relational term always entails a comparative frame with respect to other subjects or groups manifesting a more or less degree of subalternity. In this regard, already in Gramsci, the concepts of the people, popular culture, and the national popular give form and agency to subalterns. Moreover, the concept of the subthe Comparative Frame in subaltern studies 7 Rabasa-text-final.indd 124 4/27/10 9:57 AM thE CoMPArAtiVE FrAME iN suBALtErN stuDiEs 125 altern, at least in the initial formulation in Ranajit Guha’s call for a subaltern studies project, is synonymous with the people.1 In recent debates in political theory and cultural studies, the concept of “the people” has been opposed to that of “the multitude.”2 The rationale for the unitary power of the people to subordinate the force of the multitude can be traced back at least to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Now, do the concepts of “the popular” and “national popular” conflict with the multitude ? Does the multitude carry the elements for imagining a way out of the epistemic violence that underlies the category of the subaltern and the domesticating function of the people? Does the plurality of the multitude correspond to forms of subalternity inasmuch as it resists being reduced to the people and a vanguard ideology? Does the standard Marxian differentiation, between forming a class as determined by socioeconomic determinations and forming a class as a political organization, entail the need to reduce the former to a unitary identity defined by the intellectual and political vanguard? Is there an aporia between the spontaneity of the Paris Commune of 1871 in The Civil War in France and the strict definition of class in the Eighteenth Brumaire? Is this a subtext in current debates in subaltern studies? Is this aporia also manifest in Lenin’s theories of the Soviets in the April Theses and the theory of the vanguard in What Is to Be Done?3 Is the critique of spontaneity circumscribed by the model of phases and of history as emerging from a capitalist society? Does Marx suggests that the Paris Commune exemplifies historical immanence when he writes: “It was only the working class that could formulate the word ‘Commune’—and initiate by the fighting Commune of Paris—this new aspiration”?4 Does Marx avoid Lenin’s concept of the “withering away” of the state when he specifies that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”?5 These complex questions cannot be suitably addressed, let alone answered in the space of this chapter. Here I examine the aporia of spontaneity and vanguardism in the context of Gramsci, the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group, and the Zapatista project in Chiapas.6 My point is not to compare different historical moments or geopolitical formations but to elaborate a critique of the comparative frame in subaltern studies and to propose a form of conducting subaltern studies that avoids teleological subordination and subsumption of political expressions and movements .7 This essay forms part of series I have written since 1994 in which I explore the relationship between theoretical academic work and the Zapatista insurrection in...

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