sketches from the subaltern: poetics of seeing
“the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” - ways of seeing, john berger
gramsci coined the term subaltern. i read that he couldn’t/didn’t want to use “proletariat” so he invented a different word. one that spivak would use in writing about post colonialism and the Indian caste system. spivak would warn us that subaltern isn’t just another word for the oppressed, or marginalized. i was introduced to spivak through my friend howard, an older quaker from Iowa who is a lifelong marxist and whose former teacher was one gayatri chakravorty spivak. i read spivak on a bus that i would often take to work, in the days i lived in austin. its hard to say that i understand it any better now than i did then.
in my day to day life, i rarely think about intellectual discourse. the subaltern is not a concept that exists in my real life. i have citronella seeds to plant. my father asks me to mow the grass. five days a week i drive 20 minutes to work where no one knows anything about me, except that i have no children. most nights i get home close to midnight. the roads are dark and flat and full of semi trucks. sometimes i see deer or predatory birds and every now and then, a jackrabbit darting across the highway. once i think i saw a bat.
am i a surveyer or the surveyed? there are cameras inside the place i work. a train runs fifty feet behind us. we don’t have skyscrapers. we have silos. the only person who ever buys an actual brewed coffee is an older Ukrainian who comes in during the evening. i wipe dust every day off the tables and counters.
everyone online is talking about AI. everyone around me in real life is talking about their kids, aging, health care. there is nothing mystical about any of this. berger says that “we only see what we look at.”
so what am i looking at? does that looking then make me a spectator? and if i am in public, do i become part of a performance? i am not myself in public. this is not a question of mechanics. it is simply survival and i am in a position to survive. i am however thinking in relation to everything around me. touch is not static, but active. we want to know and perhaps understand what is around us. the heaviness of wet soil in my hands. the griminess of coffee grounds i use to feed a garden. textures stuck to my palm and the combined smell, and though i feel at this moment present, i envision the seedlings in a few weeks, gently popping out from below, taking their time before being seen, a naked gift from the future.