Is The Subaltern Speaking Yet?*

The self’s existence bows down to determinism — yet it wants to reach outside of itself. How do we channel this need when the individual is tamed by society’s exercise of confines? I will explore this question with help from two articles, Happy to Comply by Tony Scott and Reading and Writing Without Authority by Ann Penrose and Cheryl Geisler.

Happy to Comply focuses on the conflicts that arise when students, stuck in a deeply capitalistic system of control, try to balance self-expression with conforming to the rules. On the other hand, Reading and Writing Without Authority is an analysis of the works of two writers of different proficiencies in the domain they are writing in. It explores how a writer can tackle issues they face if they “lack authority.” The first article shows us how a standardized system forces students to comply with its ways, while the second article praises a product of the same system and outlines ways to navigate oneself as a novice in such a system.

I will avoid existential discussions because of my limits, both in understanding and in liberty in terms of what I can fill the pages with. But in the concrete world, taking the human condition as a presumption and doing only so much as looking around, it is not difficult to notice that hierarchies arise among mortals. Perhaps Marx was too optimistic, perhaps it is unfathomable for society to control emergence of hierarchies. Even our repositories of “believable” imagination — our myths — are never devoid of hierarchies. The utopian stories, on the other hand…