ENTRY: THE PROBLEM OF BEING THERE
THE Collective was not secret. Its conferences appeared on university calendars, members published under its affiliation and its annual symposium had recently received funding from two humanities centers and an initiative for transformative interdisciplinarity. What the Collective for the Interrogation of Hegemonic Speech, Representation and Epistemic Location did not welcome was observation by people who had not first established their right to observe.
This was why I arrived at its Thursday meeting as a prospective member rather than a journalist.
The address led to an ordinary university seminar room. There was no sign outside, although I later learned that this was deliberate: identifying the room as the place where the Collective met would impose a spatial identity generated from outside. Members preferred to say that the Collective occurred there.
I knocked twice before a woman opened the door and asked what I wanted. I told her I had been invited to attend. She introduced herself as Amara and asked who had invited me, what I worked on and where I located myself in relation to the work.
I had prepared for the first two questions. The third required documentation.
Several weeks of genealogical research had produced two potentially useful facts. One-eighth of my ancestry was Irish. Another eighth appeared to descend from the Merriboola people, a small Indigenous community once located somewhere north of Melbourne and now known principally through a disputed reference in a 1911 ethnographic survey.
I had assumed the second fact would settle matters. It did not.
Amara asked whether I possessed documentary evidence of the Merriboola connection. I explained that there was a family story, an elderly relative, two surnames appearing under different spellings in nineteenth-century records and a photograph of a formidable-looking woman whose identity had been lost. Amara reminded me that blood quantum was a colonial technology, before observing that one-eighth was nevertheless “quite distant.”
Another member joined us. For several minutes they considered whether skepticism toward my claim would reproduce the evidentiary demands of the settler archive. This seemed promising until I was asked whether I had ever publicly identified as Indigenous. I said I had not, largely because I had discovered the connection three weeks earlier. This was considered simultaneously responsible and suspicious.
The claim was referred to the Committee on Indigenous Claims, Genealogical Uncertainty and the Violence of Verification, which had not issued a determination in fourteen months because several members objected to the concept of determination.
I assumed my application had failed. Then someone noticed County Clare.
My Irish eighth prompted a rapid consultation involving Cromwell, plantations, famine, partition, linguistic suppression and the historically unstable relationship between Irishness and whiteness. One member argued that my great-grandfather’s eventual migration to Australia had incorporated his descendants into settler privilege. Another replied that subsequent assimilation could hardly retroactively decolonize Ireland. When somebody asked which county he came from and I answered Clare, several people nodded without explaining why.
Amara eventually intervened. “We have to allow complexity.” Nobody was prepared to argue against complexity.
My Irish eighth carried the motion, my possible Merriboola eighth remained under review, and the remaining three-quarters of me were admitted provisionally subject to positionality monitoring.
Inside, twelve chairs surrounded an empty thirteenth. On the wall was a framed sheet of paper:
CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK? Someone had added underneath: PLEASE DO NOT ANSWER.
NOVITIATE: LEARNING TO LISTEN
Newcomers began as Unexamined Positionalities, a status permitting attendance, access to the reading list and participation in tea preparation, provided the distribution of domestic labor had first been problematized. What newcomers could not initially do was speak.
I assumed this was an initiation ritual. Amara explained that allowing someone to enter an established discursive space and immediately assume a speaking position would reproduce precisely the structures the Collective existed to interrogate. When I asked how long the restriction lasted, she said it depended on whether I could stop needing to know when I would be allowed to speak.
During my first week I mistook this for evasion. By the end of the month I understood it as governance.
The intellectual center of the Collective was Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?, which functioned as foundational text, methodological warning and conversational emergency brake. Members were emphatic that Spivak’s argument was not the crude proposition that oppressed people literally could not talk. Their concern was with the structures through which subordinated speech becomes legible, translated, represented and appropriated by others.
It is a serious problem. The Collective had developed it into a comprehensive system for making ordinary conversation nearly impossible.
At one meeting a visiting lecturer began, “I think what Spivak is basically saying—”. Amara stopped her and asked the group to notice what was happening. The next twenty-five minutes were devoted to the violence involved in reducing a difficult text to what its author was “basically saying.” The lecturer’s original point was never recovered. Afterwards, she thanked everyone for challenging her.
The weekly ritual of Listening extended the principle to members themselves. Readers described occasions on which they might inadvertently have represented another person: a taxi driver in Delhi described as “friendly,” rural women said to “want” improved healthcare, a conference paper beginning “Local communities believe…”. The last confession caused visible distress before the sentence was completed.
Over time I understood the institutional logic. Members had cultivated an extraordinary sensitivity to the point at which description becomes representation but possessed no corresponding procedure for determining when description remained permissible. Almost any proposition could therefore trigger an inquiry into the conditions under which the proposition had become possible.
The minutes were extremely short.
FIELDWORK: THE ETHICS OF NOT ASKING
The Collective’s suspicion of representation reached its most developed form in fieldwork. Several doctoral researchers had concluded that the safest way to avoid extracting marginalized voices was not to ask anyone anything.
Brother Jonathan was researching fishing communities in Kerala and had visited India six times. He had interviewed no fishermen. Interviews, he explained, transformed another person’s account into data organized around questions generated by the researcher. His fieldwork therefore consisted principally of reflexivity, observation of his own desire to know and consideration of whether observing fishermen would itself constitute surveillance.
His dissertation was already 312 pages. Chapter Four, The Violence of the Question Mark, ran to sixty-seven.
The same caution governed outreach. The Collective sent delegations to disciplines considered epistemically underserved, with Economics a priority and Business Schools classified in one internal document as UNREACHED COMMUNITIES. I accompanied a visit during which members distributed copies of Can the Subaltern Speak? A finance professor picked one up and asked what it was about.
Nobody wanted to speak for the text.
After a prolonged silence, Amara asked why he needed them to tell him.
The professor looked at the book and said that he didn’t.
The Collective’s annual report later described the encounter as productive engagement with disciplinary alterity.
THE SCHISM: AND THEN SOMEBODY RESISTED
The Collective had once been doctrinally unified. Older members remembered a period when disagreement concerned only the interpretation of Spivak rather than whether Spivak had become part of the problem.
The rupture began with an incident still known as the Parry Affair.
During a postgraduate seminar on colonial resistance, a senior Reader cautioned against imagining that scholars could recover an authentic native voice from colonial archives. A woman at the back raised her hand and asked what happened if colonized people had actually resisted.
The Reader explained that resistance itself reached the scholar through representational structures conditioning its intelligibility.
The woman persisted. There was evidence, she said, that people had resisted.
Within weeks a faction had formed around the work of Benita Parry and a proposition that sounded modest outside the Collective but proved revolutionary within it: postcolonial criticism could become so preoccupied with colonial discourse and the dangers of representation that it ceased adequately to recognize the oppositional agency of colonized people.
The dissidents became known as Parryites. They met on Tuesdays.
Parryite meetings were noticeably shorter. Members used archives, discussed evidence and were permitted to say that things happened. At my first meeting, a historian stated that colonized people resisted colonial rule. Nobody interrupted her. After several weeks with the orthodox Collective, I found the experience unexpectedly disorienting.
The orthodox position was more substantial than its caricature. Readers worried that the Parryites treated resistance as something scholars could simply retrieve and restore to historical subjects without confronting the structures through which both became available. The Parryites replied that anxiety about representation could itself become a sophisticated mechanism for rendering colonized people theoretically mute.
Between them were the Bhabhaites, who rejected the suggestion that they were between anything. They occupied a Third Space in which the opposition between orthodoxy and dissent became unstable through hybridity, ambivalence and mimicry.
They met on Wednesdays. This had not escaped comment.
Their attempt to reconcile the dispute by declaring both positions mutually constitutive irritated both sides, which the Bhabhaites regarded as confirmation.
My own status shifted with the argument. During British Imperialism Week, my Irish eighth moved me one chair toward the center. During Settler Colonialism Week, someone discovered that my Irish great-grandfather had eventually acquired property in Australia and I moved back. The Merriboola claim remained unresolved. During the week on hybridity, the Bhabhaites described my ancestry as “a particularly generative site.”
It was the most theoretically desirable I had ever felt.
DISCIPLINE: THE HERESY OF CLARITY
The gravest internal offense was simplification.
During my tenth week I attended a disciplinary proceeding involving Brother Michael, who taught undergraduates. A student had asked him to explain epistemic violence. Michael gave an example.
The student understood it.
At the hearing, an Elder asked whether Michael was claiming that the example had made the concept transparent. He rejected “transparent” but conceded that it may have made the concept accessible. Several members of the tribunal wrote something down.
His punishment was two semesters of Derrida without secondary literature.
Michael has since returned to teaching. Student evaluations report that his lectures are considerably less clear. The Collective considers him rehabilitated.
THE MIRACLE: THE SUBALTERN SPEAKS AT 8:43 P.M.
The crisis occurred during my final Thursday.
Listening had begun shortly after eight when a member of the university’s cleaning staff entered carrying a roll of bin liners. He apologized for interrupting and asked whether we were still using the room. If we were, he said, he could return later.
Nobody answered.
For nearly three months I had watched the Collective examine the conditions under which marginalized speech becomes audible to institutions and to those authorized to produce knowledge about it. Now a man performing low-paid labor inside the institution had entered without invitation and articulated an uncomplicated request concerning his work. He wanted to know whether twelve academics had finished talking so that he could empty their bins.
When he repeated the question, a Parryite attending as part of the Collective’s ecumenical dialogue whispered to me, “He spoke.”
Amara overheard her and objected that this was precisely what could not simply be assumed. The Parryite pointed out that everyone present had heard him. Amara replied that audibility was not the same as speech in the sense at issue: the question concerned the conditions under which an utterance entered a structure of recognition without being appropriated by it.
The cleaner waited while the Bhabhaite representative suggested that perhaps the important issue was neither whether he had spoken nor whether we had heard him, but the ambivalent space produced between utterance and reception.
The cleaner looked at him.
“What?”
For the first time during my investigation, a theoretical intervention had been subjected to immediate empirical review by the person whose situation had prompted it. The Bhabhaite tried again, explaining that he was interested in what happened between the cleaner’s intention and the group’s capacity to receive it.
The cleaner explained that his intention was to empty the bins.
The Parryite regarded this as decisive. An orthodox Reader cautioned against treating the apparent clarity of the answer as politically innocent. The Parryite replied that nobody was claiming innocence; she was claiming that the man wanted to empty the bins.
Eventually the cleaner put down the bin liners.
“Look,” he said. “Are you finished or not?”
It was the only moment during my three months with the Collective when every theoretical tendency in the room agreed that something important had happened. They disagreed entirely about what it was.
Amara proposed a short adjournment. The cleaner emptied the bins during it.
EXIT: WHO GETS TO TELL THE STORY?
By the following morning, the Parryites had circulated an account arguing that the encounter exposed an orthodoxy so vigilant about mediation that it could fail to recognize agency occurring directly in front of it. The orthodox response cautioned against treating an apparently transparent speech event as resolving the problem of representation.
An emergency meeting followed. Discussion had been underway for almost an hour when a junior Reader asked whether anyone had invited the cleaner.
The proposal generated difficulties. Inviting him because his employment had made him theoretically significant might instrumentalize his class position. Asking him to recount the encounter could convert speech into testimony. Expecting him to attend without payment reproduced academic extraction; paying him risked commodifying his account.
By the end of the meeting nobody had contacted him.
Before leaving, I underwent a final positionality review. The Irish eighth remained recognized for British colonial history but now carried an annotation concerning settler incorporation. The Merriboola claim remained before committee.
Amara asked what I had learned.
I told her that I had entered expecting an eccentric academic cult built around an exaggerated version of postcolonial theory. What I found was more interesting: a community organized around genuinely difficult questions about representation, colonial knowledge and the ease with which intellectuals convert other people’s experiences into their own expertise. Its peculiar achievement was to take those questions so seriously that they sometimes prevented members from recognizing the occasions when people were already speaking for themselves.
Amara considered this.
“That sounds like a very external account.”
She was right.
Three days later, as I left the building, I passed the cleaner in the corridor. He recognized me and asked whether the Thursday group had finally finished its meetings.
I told him I thought it had.
He looked through the glass panel in the seminar-room door.
“They’re in there now.”
Inside, twelve people were sitting in a circle. The thirteenth chair was still empty.