60 ' SOCIAL SCIENTIST "potentially reflective and self-critical". This manner of formulating the question of subaltern consciousness, which incidentally is entirely Javeed's own and is not adopted, as far as I can tell, by any of the authors in Subaltern Studies 7, has the effect of denuding that consciousness of all specific content. It is reduced to an emptiness, a nullity. It lacks every element which can make the subaltern a subject of redl history. His consciousness is merely "archaic", "pre-reflective", "acriticar', a sort of zero point. Real history can begin only after he has moved beyond that point. How then are we to "make a judgment" about the various "sporadic" and "spontaneous" acts in which this child-like creature, possessed—poor thing!— with only a "pre-reflective acritical" consciousness, engages? By looking, Javeed says, at the "historical consequences" of those acts. That is the only way the subaltern can enter the sphere of real history. His acts can "play varied roles", they can either "weaken or strengthen the existing basis of people's unity". It is by judging the "historical direction" of these acts that we can decide whether they contribute to "progressive historical tendencies" or to "backward reactionary pulls". Intrinsically the acts do not mean anything at all; in the historical sense, they are literally meaning-less, signifying nothing to us. It is only in terms of their "historical consequences" that they acquire a meaning. That is to say, it is onlyin terms of their specific connections with the structures of a more comprehensible world of politics, the "real" historical structures shaped by and understandable to a "reHective and self-critical consciousness", that the acts of the subaltern classes become meaningful. Their meanings, in other words, are only given extraneously, from the domain of "real" politics. In their own domain, they are incomprehensible, "spontaneous". What is the difference between this presupposition and the one of elitist historiography which Subaltern Studies criticises? None. For this framework is, in the purest form, a functional!'sm. We should not be surprised to discover that just as there is a functionalism of the neo-Weberian kind, so can there be a functionalism of the Marxist variety, which merely substitutes for an indeterminate concept of "interests" which are then "articulated" and "aggregated" a concept of "class interest", and for the concept of "system maintenance" a notion of "historical progress". The latter substitution does not, as is claimed on its behalf, turn a "static" framework into a "dynamic historical" one, for the so-called dynamism is extraneously given, by History with a capital H. And so we get a framework in which, like the distinction between the "functional" and the "dysfunctional", every action can be immediately marked as either "progressive" or "reactionary", either contributing to or detracting from the "historical direction of progress". Since the actions of the subaltern classes have no historical