Subalternity and the Neoliberal Habitus : Thinking Insurrection on the El Salvador/South Central Interface

It is not enough to try to get back to the people in that past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called in question. Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come; and it is here that our souls are crystallized and that our perceptions and our lives are transfused with light.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963

… trying to be South in the South, North in the North, South in the North and North in the South.

—Rubén Martínez, The Other Side: Fault Lines, Guerrilla Saints, and the True Heart of Rock ’n’ Roll, 1992

Subaltern studies uncovers a critical practice that necessarily hesitates before its objects. This political, epistemological, and philosophical hesitation is the direct product of the unresolvable tension between the historical fabrication of modernity’s dominant narratives—cultural discourses and forms of knowledge production that gathered themselves invariably around the fabrication of state hegemony and of nation formation both in Latin America and beyond—and the position within such power/knowledge configurations of subaltern subject positions that challenge hegemonic projects by representing and reproducing themselves as “the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic” (Spivak 1988, 16). This unresolvable tension between history’s dominant logics (and representations) and the subaltern specters that haunt, challenge, and undermine them from within both upholds the possibility of subalternist reflection and simultaneously undermines it as a productive site for conclusive argumentation and/or resolution. After all, the notion of a possible site of resolution within the thought of subalternity merely transforms the subaltern subject position into a nodal point of social intelligibility around which hegemonic programs or populist political solutions can be articulated. Such practices, however, tend to reflect little more than a thought invested in the neohegemonic stabilization of the subaltern’s destabilizing force. As such, it is a thought grounded in the constitution and maintenance of social intelligibility and of translatability over and above the destabilizing promise of subaltern heterogeneity and difference. The question, of course, is how to think subaltern heterogeneity and difference from within institutional thought.

In “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today,” Gyanendra Pandey (1997, 9) calls attention to the foundational tension within subaltern studies between subaltern knowledge and institutional knowledge by pointing out that reflection on the history and representation of social violence in contemporary India is seriously hampered by the fact that very often it is impossible to establish anything like the “facts,” never mind the “nuts and bolts,” of the stories of contemporary insurrection.^{1 The knowability and representability of subaltern experience—of its moments of violence, of suffering, and of many of the scars left behind by the histories of domination—is actively suppressed within the time horizon of capital itself, while the subaltern’s spectral part-narratives continue to circulate in often unknowable fashion among more or less reticent subaltern populations (19).2 As such, Pandey notes, reflection on historical processes, and on subaltern experience of those processes, hesitates before the insufficiency of the fragmentary subaltern discourses that it has before it and which the historian is, in one way or another, bound to regenerate. Through the fragments of subaltern discourses and agencies, in other words, “official” historiography confronts an abyssal foundation at which the constructability of a historiographical discourse grounded in the maintenance of critical distance, or in the fabrication of omniscience, becomes unhinged and ungrounded.}

Subaltern histories can be represented only through what is available at the limits of hegemonic narratives, and this, says Pandey, means opening up historiographical discourse...