Contingency and Essentiality

My reflections on this piece: 
"The Poetics of Subalternity"

by Michelle Cahill



"The essential argument of [Gayatri Chakravorty] Spivak['s piece, "Can the Subaltern Speak"] is that when the gendered subaltern performs an act of resistance without the infrastructure that would make us recognise resistance, her act goes unnoticed, it is not registered as a sovereign speech act. Or in other words, it is not that she cannot act or speak, it is that there is nobody listening. Subalternity provides us with a powerful metaphor then. It enables us to more fully acknowledge that it is the sovereign speech act, the endorsement, the registration of identity within speech that ultimately confers agency or subjectship."


Both ‘Contingency’ and ‘Essentiality’ are themselves contingent concepts.

To privilege contingency is to also forget its also metaphorical, amorphous nature... the term itself points to no-Thing in particular, and yet... After all... contingency is also the ‘nature’ of all phenomena. In other words, we could just as easily say that “the essence of all things is their inessence, their contingency”… Which is not, therefore, to suggest that there is NO essence, but rather that there is not one discrete thing that we will find anywhere..

For the subject who has political agency, it is powerful and important to stress Contingency, or relationality… We have seen all too often the pathologies of essentialism here, or self-reification, particularly for people with power. The emphasis on relationality here brings forth a potential for transformation of the self and its antecedent social structures, which can ripple out in the service of all of us.

However, this is only and especially relevant for the subject who not only HAS political agency, but who also is conscious of the agency she has.

For the person who is experiencing a vaulted sense of his own victimhood… The emphasis on relationality may not only be painful to hear (i.e. “You have no inherent self, your sense of your own victimhood is related to others keeping power, etc. etc.”), but it is also potentially cruel.

This is not to dispense with relational language entirely… It is simply that, it needs to be more strategically deployed: The victim in relation to those who can lend their support, rather than as determined exclusively and by definition in its relationality with the oppressor/perpetrator.

As Cahill writes, "Strategic essentialism can be a useful way for minority groups to utilise their common ground to achieve political goals."

Here, to add language which stresses an independence of selfhood (such as a sense of bounded self which can rely on other ‘selves’ for support) may be as helpful as relational language. 

“I am my own person!” 
“I am strong!” 
“I can do this!” 
“I believe in myself!”

In this integration of Contingency and Essentiality, my self-identity (in both the individual and collective self-sense) needs to be made coherent, on its own terms, while resisting both the monolith of a rigid, inflexible Guardedness, as well as another extreme of a forever deeply oppositional relationship to the Privileged Other.

Here: Self-Esteem...