Читать книгу The Disorder of Things - John Masterson - Страница 9

Throughout this contrapuntal study, I explore how Foucault’s reflections on power, body, resistance, disciplinary institutions and biopower might be seen in productive conjunction with some of the most urgent concerns of Farah’s oeuvre. These preoccupations have endured since From a Crooked Rib to Crossbones, a text that appeared in South Africa in 2012. Whilst my analytical approach builds on the idea that there are a series of ‘uncanny links’ between their respective projects, it is important to foreground the book’s commitment to investigating sites of potential convergence and divergence. In what follows, therefore, I focus on some of the key theoretical coordinates of the study as a whole. I consider how pioneers working in predominantly postcolonial and feminist fields have readily accepted the challenge to salvage rather than savage Foucault for their own ends. The lessons taken from their work are salutary, inspiring me too to make Foucault groan and protest in what, at first sight, may seem unfamiliar settings. As I claim throughout this book, many of the ‘open-ended’ qualities that characterise Foucault’s speculations are analogous with Farah’s work. Whilst the latter has been the subject of fine single-author studies and critical compendiums, The Disorder of Things strives for something different. For a writer who is often spoken about in the same breath as Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, Farah warrants the same theoretically substantive engagement afforded to them. My contention, therefore, is that the at-once ethical and political imperatives underpinning Farah’s writing, fictional and non-fictional, invite his readers to situate it within more interdisciplinary, Foucauldian-inflected frameworks.

As such, my approach, here and throughout The Disorder of Things, takes its lead from Sam Binkley’s sense of multiple Foucaults: ‘[h]ave changing times required that we discard our old Foucaults and invent new ones, or are there parts we can save, parts we should revise, or previously neglected parts we should draw to the fore and emphasize?’ (Binkley 2010: xi). Building on this, I argue that both Farah’s fictive and Foucault’s discursive concerns morph and evolve as they shift from one key text to another. As such, Foucault’s more identifiably ‘literary’ concerns, such as the ‘death of the author’, are less significant for the purposes of this study than his privileging of particular sites, spaces and discourses concerning discipline and power. Whilst, particularly when it comes to engaging with Farah’s Blood in the Sun trilogy (comprising Maps, Gifts and Secrets), I consider contentious issues of authorship, its premature or otherwise demise and readerly responsibility, the analyses that follow are inspired by Foucault in a broader sense. This is the figure whose interventions and legacy have proved critical catalysts for writers and thinkers as diverse as Edward Said and Ann Laura Stoler, V.Y. Mudimbe and Alexander Butchart, to name only a few of those who inform this discussion. My primary interest, therefore, lies in exploring the extent to which the comparative reader can map certain key developments within Farah’s oeuvre in relation to similarly key negotiations in Foucault’s thinking and writing. When it comes to examining Farah’s first trilogy, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (1979–1983), for instance, I suggest how its claustrophobic, quasi-Orwellian portrait of life under autocratic rule can usefully be read in light of early Foucauldian interventions. In drawing on Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization in particular, I argue that an awareness of Farah and Foucault’s respective concerns with the use and abuse of power within what can be seen as carceral societies need not result in an airbrushing of contextual or other crucial differences. As my engagement with a range of secondary sources suggests, the manifest blind spots that, for many, blight Foucault’s vision have not prevented succeeding generations of scholars, in fields as diverse as anthropology and the medical humanities, from engaging with and taking his work in provocative new directions. At the outset, therefore, I suggest the success, or otherwise, of this book can be judged by how effectively it operates in such a discursive spirit.

If carceral concerns haunt Farah’s first trilogy, I consider the ways in which a reading of his second might be enlivened by reflecting on the shift away from predominantly spatial and disciplinary preoccupations in Foucault’s early work to those of biopolitics and normalisation. I maintain that similar negotiations, away from the carceral and towards the bio-political, take place as readers cross from Farah’s Variations to his Blood in the Sun cycles. The indepth discussion of opening instalment Maps provides a case in point. Whilst the novel’s dramatic action centres on what will become Somalia’s defeat in the Ogaden War with Ethiopia over disputed geo-political boundaries, it is just as preoccupied with the ways in which the conflict is both conceived and fought in terms of an equally contentious series of bio-political lines. Accordingly, I draw on Foucault’s The History of Sexuality as well as his provocative lecture series ‘Society Must Be Defended’. I use them to argue that this shift away from a concern with the use and abuse of sovereign power as well as its protection to a position where the governing dictum for Foucault ‘consists in making live and letting die’ provides a compelling way to approach Maps as well as to consider the key reorientations, in terms of thematic and political focus, that take place between Farah’s first and second trilogies (Foucault 2003: 247). My analyses of Gifts (1992) and Secrets (1998) are also filtered through bio-political prisms.

In Gifts, omnipertinent debates concerning the complexities and complicities of international aid are set against a backdrop of famine. Accordingly, I explore how and why a host of Foucauldian speculations, from those taxonomies of individual and collective bodies upon which international fiscal and other policies are based, to discourses of normalisation and the treatment of those designated as ‘bare life’ within certain humanitarian situations, have inspired scholars working in fields such as development and post-development studies. Moving on from the novelistic exploration of war, its escalation and fallout in Maps, to that of famine, international aid and cycles of dependency in Gifts, Secrets provides a fitting conclusion to Blood in the Sun for the comparative reader. At one of its many narrative levels, Secrets functions as a continuation as well as an intensification of what has taken place in the two earlier instalments. Once again, it focuses on those scars that mark the Somali body politic as the demise of Barre’s regime precepitates a brutal civil war. Whilst this in itself invites a bio-political reading, it is Farah’s decision to pursue a transnational AIDS narrative alongside that of domestic atrophy that is most intriguing. I argue that a more substantial engagement with the novel can result from considering Foucault’s later work and the ways its legacy has been employed by others. One of the central thrusts of this book, therefore, is that the opening up and out of Farah’s preoccupations, from what at times appears to be a hermetically sealed Somali narrative to a position where this very national thread is viewed in terms of a much more entangled, confused and often confusing (dis)order of things, finds a discursive counterpart in Foucault’s work as well as the ways in which it has been negotiated.

Building on this, the final section of The Disorder of Things considers how and why the notion of ‘entanglement’ is increasingly useful when it comes to engaging with Farah’s more recent work. This includes his journalistic study, Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora (2000) as well as the recently completed Past Imperfect trilogy, comprising the aptly titled Links (2004), Knots (2007) and Crossbones (2012). In this section, I am more concerned with showing how and why Foucault’s work has been put to use in a globalised context, framed by everything from an ongoing ‘War on Terror’ to the global credit crunch. If the following survey and analyses of earlier novels draws from figures such as Edward Said, Jana Sawicki and Ann Laura Stoler, all of whom rise to the Foucauldian challenge of revisioning his work for their own ends, these later chapters refer to the critical interventions of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek, amongst others, to explore how and why they too carry Foucault’s legacy into our twenty-first century. It is an era in which debates concerning national sovereignty, patterns of transnational migration, networks of international terrorism and the processes by which they are monitored have emerged as the defining issues of our time. Whether it be his study of Somali refugees, his fictional exploration of Operation Restore Hope and its aftermath or his counter-hegemonic representation of piracy, Farah provides alternative narratives in order to promote alternative perspectives.

In light of the above, I suggest that Farah’s work in the roughly ten-year period from Yesterday, Tomorrow to Crossbones synthesises many of the preoccupations of the Variations and Blood in the Sun trilogies. Whether in journalistic or novelistic form, Farah offers a sustained exploration of the significant ways in which carceral and bio-political paradigms and practices have fused. It is on this globalised stage that the (dis)order of things plays itself out. As some of the most pioneering, Foucauldian-inspired scholarship has demonstrated, a concern with the various intersections of sovereign power and disciplinary societies, as well as bio-political discourses and norms, frames the agendas and practices of everyone from politicians to media providers. These and associated preoccupations cast a significant shadow over Farah’s latest work. They also correspond with something that has motivated his authorial career from the outset. This is the sense that that which appears specific to one geo-political space is in fact entangled in much more complex, often complicit and confusing, networks of power, genealogy and vested interests. As Farah emphasises at strategic points throughout his fiction, if this was the case during Somalia’s peculiarly intense experience of colonisation, so it remains in the globalised present.

As I illustrate in the remainder of this introduction, the almost all-engrossing Eurocentrism of Foucault’s work has been singled out and seized upon by a host of commentators. Yet, staying true to the generosity of discursive spirit that imbues many of his own pronouncements on his thought and its potential legacy, these critical voices have transposed its significance onto much broader geo-political and epistemological maps. This same impulse, I argue, has informed and continues to inform much of Farah’s most stimulating writing. My closing speculations, therefore, imagine what directions his work might take next. This in turn provides a final opportunity to consider how and why more substantial engagements with Farah’s oeuvre might be inspired by the kind of rich, endlessly stimulating discourse that has grown up around Foucault and of which The Disorder of Things is a direct product. It is to the ‘uncanny links’ between them that I now turn.