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The comparative frame in subaltern studies1

One can open just about any page in Gramsci and one will 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 organisations than with the stagist models characteristic of transition to capitalism narratives. If the passages I will cite from Gramsci could be read as limited to his time, my argument concerning the comparative framework of subaltern studies will trace the teleological reasoning in more recent articulations of the last 20 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 subaltern, at least in the initial formulation in Ranajit Guha’s call for a subaltern studies project, is synonymous with the people. In recent debates in political theory and cultural studies, the concept of the people has been opposed to that of the multitude. The rationale for the unitary power of the people to subordinate the force of the multitude can be traced back at least to 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?