Theory and Practice

     We conceive of practice and theory as opposites where one can occur before the other and pave way for the other (practice that leads to theory and theory to practical application). This distinction becomes much more complicated when it comes to Foucault and Deleuze’s conversation about it. Theory is not just born out of practice but theory too is practice. This can then be extended to representations and signifiers as well.

      For Spivak, representation is then not just a “speaking for” (akin to theory born out of some practical experience) rather it is a re-presentation. To understand this, let’s return to Derrida’s ideas about speaking and writing. For Derrida the spoken word has been privileged over the written word because there is a spatial and temporal presentness associated with logos while writing is considered a representation of that speech (thereby it is logocentric system which becomes important in the absence of speech). Derrida complicates the relationship between writing and speech by saying that speech too is characterized by absence and distance in the form of difference as much as writing is. In the same way in this piece, Spivak tries to complicate the relation between theory and practice. Let’s look at some of the examples that she provides (not the challenging ones, I consciously want to avoid using jargon).

       A woman performs Sati. The narrative written records that the woman actually wanted to die. The “post-colonial woman intellectual” (Spivak) as well as her readers would ask that what does this statement mean. Based on scriptural analysis Spivak and her readers (you and I) find that this is a non-suicide. After an extensive historical analysis, Sati we discover “is a woman’s proper name”.  After analyzing the story of the non-suicide of the woman one moves to the story of the suicide that was a puzzle. For Spivak, Bhuvaneswari's confusing suicide is a rewriting of the Sati-suicide. Through her own writing, Spivak removes that distance between theory and practice by moving constantly from one to another till any relationship of causality (that uninformed readers like us might imagine) becomes extremely complicated and the various strands of theory, history and representation cannot be separated from practice. This is done very consciously and in a similar way to which Derrida  interludes and refigures the relationship between the written and the spoken word.
       Spivak’s task is not important because of the conclusion reached. The subaltern cannot speak indicates more then what it literally means. Rather it is a critique leveled at the practice of theory that paves the way for subaltern studies. The end, with a new-found intimacy of theory and practice is a hopeful one where what the glorious female intellectual who we witnessed earlier in the essay (Spivak) is still very much relevant. This female intellectual, inspite of all of this and mostly because of what she writes, must not “disown” the task that is set before her. Neither can we.