Refiguring the Subaltern

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718762720
• Date: 01 December 2018
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

762720PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718762720Political TheoryThomas
research-article2018
Article
Political Theory
2018, Vol. 46(6) 861 –884
Refiguring the Subaltern
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718762720
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Peter D. Thomas1
Abstract
The subaltern has frequently been understood as a figure of exclusion ever
since it was first highlighted by the early Subaltern Studies collective’s creative
reading of Antonio Gramsci’s carceral writings. In this article, I argue that
a contextualist and diachronic study of the development of the notion
of subaltern classes throughout Gramsci’s full Prison Notebooks reveals
new resources for “refiguring” the subaltern. I propose three alternative
figures to comprehend specific dimensions of Gramsci’s theorizations: the
“irrepressible subaltern,” the “hegemonic subaltern,” and the “citizen-
subaltern.” Far from being exhausted by the eclipse of the conditions it was
initially called upon to theorize in Subaltern Studies, such a refigured notion
of the subaltern has the potential to cast light both on the contradictory
development of political modernity and on contemporary political processes.
Keywords
subalternity, hegemony, Gramsci, civil society, political modernity
The subaltern is usually understood today as a figure of exclusion, represent-
ing the specular opposite of the citizen. If the citizen is defined by participa-
tion in a political community, the subaltern represents a lack of access to
institutions of rights and obligations. While citizens are subject to the hege-
monic logic of modern sovereignty, the subaltern lies before or beyond it, in
some indeterminate zone of affect and habit. Citizenship guarantees inclusion
1Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, United
Kingdom
Corresponding Author:
Peter D. Thomas, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London,
Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom.
Email: PeterD.Thomas@Brunel.ac.uk

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Political Theory 46(6)
within structures of representation, in both political and aesthetic senses, at
the limits of which subalternity begins.1 The subaltern can thus be understood
as a variant of those figures of marginality and exclusion that have marked
the borders of modern political thought, from Hobbes’s multitude, Hegel’s
Pöbel and Marx’s Proletariat, to contemporary formulations such as
Rancière’s “part that has no part” or Agamben’s homo sacer. In this sense, the
supposedly unrepresentable subaltern is ultimately represented as the literal
incarnation of the principle of exclusion as the foundation of political moder-
nity, and perhaps even of the political as such.
This understanding of the subaltern emerged from the complicated history
of development and translation of subaltern studies. Under the leadership of
Ranajit Guha, the early Subaltern Studies collective forcefully directed atten-
tion to the novelty of the figure of the subaltern in the Prison Notebooks,
which had previously been neglected in discussions of Gramsci’s thought
outside Italy.2 In particular, the collective’s suggestive if occasional refer-
ences to the partial English translation of Gramsci’s carceral writings empha-
sized the utility of this figure for the analysis of colonial and postcolonial
history in South Asia.3 For Guha, writing in the first volume of Subaltern
Studies, subalternity referred to “the general attribute of subordination in
South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age,
gender and office or in any other way.”4 Conceived as synonymous with “the
people,” the subalterns constituted “an autonomous domain,” signifying “the
demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those
whom we have described as the ‘elite.’”5
While Guha’s approach strongly influenced the early Subaltern Studies
collective’s project, particularly in terms of an effective equation of the sub-
altern with the peasantry, it was arguably Gayatri Spivak’s famous interven-
tion “Can the Subaltern Speak?” that instead became the most decisive
perspective for the figure’s subsequent globalization. Revising a text origi-
nally drafted before her encounter with the Subaltern Studies project, Spivak
argued that the subaltern was not only deprived of the capacity to speak by
the dominant order, but that the subaltern was defined by its exclusion from
representation as such, in both political and aesthetic senses.6 As an unrepre-
sentable remainder or “limit” of forms of cultural, social, and political domi-
nation, “removed from all lines of social mobility,”7 the subaltern thus
appeared to be a category suited to analyze and to problematize the experi-
ences of marginalized, oppressed individuals and groups, particularly in
colonial and postcolonial contexts.
This approach not only gave rise to what has since become effectively an
entire genre of critical writing exploring various dimensions of the subal-
tern’s “incapacity.” It also strongly influenced the translation of subaltern
studies from South Asian historiography into the literary, sociological,

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anthropological, and theoretical accents that have marked its elaboration in
Latin America, Central and East Asia, the Middle East, the USA, and Ireland.8
Despite its international success, however, key theorists in the development
of the original Subaltern Studies project have questioned the continuing rel-
evance of the figure of the subaltern, or have even suggested its historical
exhaustion (particularly in its “classical” formulation as insurgent peasant).
Spivak, for instance, argues that developments under neoliberalism since the
1990s have involved a transition to a “new” figure of the subaltern, no longer
defined by its removal from social mobility but by the invasive workings of
globalization at social, political and biopolitical levels.9 Chakrabarty, on the
other hand, suggests that the contradictory development of Indian democracy
has fundamentally transformed the conditions originally theorized by Guha,
while Chatterjee proposes that the subalterns excluded by the colonial and
postcolonial order have been superseded by “populations” “governed” in
“political society.”10 In a related but distinct way, Pandey argues that the
“peasant paradigm” of subaltern studies should be recast in term of the
“deliberately paradoxical” figure of the “subaltern citizen,” in order to com-
prehend the traces of subalternity that subsist even within the ongoing expan-
sion of institutions of modern citizenship.11
The development of Subaltern Studies was determined from the outset by
reference to a partial translation of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. The research
agendas, projects, and critiques produced by the globalization of the figure of
the subaltern now effectively constitute their own distinct research paradigm,
separate from—and increasingly citing less frequently—the formulations by
Gramsci that had initially inspired them. In this article, I aim to suggest that
a return to the integral edition of the full Prison Notebooks provides us with
a very different perspective on the figure of the subaltern.12 In particular, I
will argue that a contextualist and diachronic study of the development of the
notion of subaltern classes or social groups throughout the Prison Notebooks
reveals new resources for considering this figure’s both historical and con-
temporary relevance.
The subaltern for Gramsci is not defined by an experience of exclusion.
On the contrary, subaltern social groups are represented in the Prison
Notebooks as integrally and actively “included” or integrated into the hege-
monic relations of what Gramsci characterizes as the bourgeois “integral
state.” This integration, however, should not be thought in terms of an incor-
poration within the modern state-form of elements previously located “out-
side” it. Rather, inclusion here should be understood in terms of something
closer to an active sense of its etymological origins, that is, as an “enclosing.”
It is the enclosure of subaltern classes and social groups within the relations
of the integral state that constitutes them as distinctively modern subaltern
social groups. They are conceived not as sociological entities defined by a

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Political Theory 46(6)
prior history, but as constituted solely within and by the novel relationality of
subalternity that characterizes political modernity. Rather than their exclu-
sion or inclusion, therefore, it is more analytically useful to speak of the “con-
stitution” of subaltern social groups. Subalternity in this sense is a function of
the process of material constitution of the modern state itself. Far from being
unrepresentable, subaltern social groups in the Prison Notebooks are depicted
as the product of elaborate representative and self-representative strategies;
instead of being unable to speak, Gramsci’s historical and cultural analyses
emphasize the extent to which the subaltern continually makes its voice heard
and its presence felt in contradictory and complex cultural, social and politi-
cal forms. No exceptional or marginal case, subalternity for Gramsci is all too
quotidian and central; it describes the basic structuring conditions of political
modernity in all of its contradictory forms. This understanding of the subal-
tern does not oppose it to the figure of...