Читать книгу Thinking Freedom in Africa - Michael Neocosmos - Страница 15
ОглавлениеChapter 3
Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
Insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness ... The [peasant] rebel has no place in this history as the subject of rebellion.
– Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-insurgency’, 1992 (emphasis in original)
THE IDEA OF MODERNITY AND POPULAR POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY
It is important to note that in the academic study of anti-colonial resistance movements in Africa, not only has political consciousness rarely been central, but when it has indeed been the object of study it has been regularly reduced to its social location as well as interpreted, ‘anthropologised’ and translated into an idiom comprehensible to liberal or Marxist post-Enlightenment historical science. Variously described as ‘religious’, ‘tribal’, ‘ethnic’, ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-capitalist’ in their ideologies, such forms of consciousness have been distinguished from those of ‘modernity’ precisely by relating them to their social foundations. While so-called ‘traditional’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ expressions of resistance have been seen as typical of ‘tribal’, peasant and other primarily rural-based movements, urban ones have been seen as focused on more recognisably ‘modern’ characteristics such as those of class and nation. Until the 1980s it was rarely thought that ethnic and religious subjectivities could perfectly well be ‘modern’ expressions of resistance (contemporary to capitalism) and that ethnic and religious movements, for example, could also be nationalist idioms. The dominance of historicism in social science was evidenced, for example, by Terence Ranger’s distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ forms of resistance to colonialism, the former being understood as largely peasant, ethnically circumscribed and rural-based, and the latter being urban, nationalist and modern in their thinking. Closely following the arguments of social historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, who distinguished between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ rebels (the former being characterised by a ‘pre-political’ consciousness), historians and social scientists of Africa, much like those of Haiti, have restricted their understanding of political subjectivities to their apparently recognisable Western modern forms.
In this view, modernity in political subjectivity could not take other forms than those recognisably articulating issues of citizenship and democracy, organised in political parties, unions and other interest groups, and using a language of rights within a specific domain of ‘the political’. This evident Eurocentrism was unable to come to terms with the fact that supposedly ‘ethnic’, ‘traditional’, ‘religious’ or any ‘pre-modern’ cultural idioms could be deployed in the field of politics, not to advocate a return to a supposedly glorious past, but to affirm humanistic and popular-democratic demands for a better future.1 Such a view clearly conflated subjective politics with the objectively political and also assumed a public–private distinction, in the form of an extraction of the human from spirituality, which was largely misplaced and irrelevant to African conditions.2
The problem, however, has consisted in a failure to recognise not only that ‘religious’ idioms, for example, could be in essence political, but also that history and social science have only been able to analyse forms of consciousness by reducing them to the objectively social, thereby disabling any understanding of their possible universal emancipatory content. Moreover, the categories of the social (such as tribe, ethnicity, religion, class, nation) to which colonial people were ascribed were themselves introduced by colonial (and then postcolonial) power (Landau, 2010). These were not the categories that people used to describe themselves. Inevitably, the colonial character of modernity in Africa, as in South Asia and other postcolonial locations, led to an often unrecognisable and indecipherable fusing of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ in politics, which could rarely be disentangled from within the logic of a Eurocentric scientistic discourse.
ACCOUNTING FOR REBELLIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS IN AFRICAN HISTORY: THE CASE OF THE LAND AND FREEDOM ARMY, OR MAU MAU, IN 1950S KENYA
One movement that illustrates some of these analytical difficulties is the so-called Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. ‘Mau Mau’ was the term used by the colonial state: the rebels did not use this term for themselves. They referred to themselves in Kikuyu as itungati or the ‘Land and Freedom Army’ (Lonsdale, 1994: 145). The militaristic name associated with the return of alienated land situates their subjectivity within the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics predominant at this time (it will be assessed at length in chapter 4). This uprising of peasants and workers (‘squatters’, in colonial parlance) was clearly an event for Kenyan politics because, although the movement was militarily defeated, ultimately its consequences were far-reaching, as a class of rich peasants was created by the colonial state by means of land redistribution through the Swynnerton Plan, and the country achieved its independence soon thereafter.3
Mamdani (1996a) has rightly rejected the debate between those who see Mau Mau as a tribal movement and those who see it as a nationalist one. It was evidently both, being overwhelmingly an organisation whose main adherents were peasants and workers of the Kikuyu nationality who demanded both ‘land and freedom’ and an ‘African government’, demands that were obviously nationalist in content and that could be supported by all the colonised (Barnett and Njama, 1966: 278 and passim). Obviously the distinction is quite impossible to make in this particular case, a fact that clearly illustrates the limits placed on understanding by historicist and positivist conceptions, governed as they are by their distinction between tradition and modernity. Yet we can also note that whether the literature stresses the socio-economic location of the participants or cultural characteristics, it is always their supposed ‘interests’, in the form of class, ‘tribe’, ethnicity, race or nation, which are seen to be the fundamental explanatory foundation of consciousness (e.g. Maughan-Brown, 1985; Throup, 1987; Furedi, 1989). The guerrilla rebels themselves are then simply depicted in historical accounts as ‘bearers’ of their socio-economic location within a structural context, not as subjects of their own history.
However, there has been one attempt to paint a picture of what participants themselves may have thought and of their motivations, that provided by John Lonsdale (1992). Lonsdale criticises those accounts produced by the colonial state based on tribe, atavism and socio-pathology, by nationalists founded on state nationalism, and by Marxists based on class, and proposes a ‘many stranded narrative’ that connects some of these factors, while he grounds his own account ultimately in a set of cultural practices which he refers to as ‘moral economy’ and a sense of civic virtue and reciprocity which he refers to as ‘moral ethnicity’ (1992: 403, 405, 467). While Kikuyu nationalists did not have one voice, ‘they still argued about one ideal, the civic virtue of self-mastery, some voices were light with hope, others hoarse with despair’ (p. 402). There was simultaneously, he argues, a battle for Kikuyu authority along age and class lines for which ‘the issue was civic virtue, achieved by one party but seemingly out of the other’s reach’ (p. 403). Those for whom ‘civic virtue’ was out of reach were precisely the poor, the young, particularly men without access to land, without the exercise of economic independence and political participation, and without the ability to fulfil their moral and civic duties within their ethnic domain. In the absence of these capacities they were simply excluded and could not be full ethnic citizens, for what ‘the ancestors had taught, or were said to have taught, on the relation between labour and civilization was the only widely known measure of achievement or failure in man- or womanhood’ (p. 316).
In sum, for Lonsdale, ‘Mau Mau fought as much for virtue as for freedom’ (p. 317). Asked by the colonial official, ‘Why did you join Mau Mau?’, a former guerrilla answered, ‘to regain the stolen lands and to become an adult’ (p. 326). In this manner, Lonsdale interprets the answer of the guerrilla to the colonial authority’s question as giving ‘Mau Mau’s open purpose and its inner meaning. His political language ... linked external power to internal virtue. His personal maturity depended on a public power to win land.’ Without ‘moral agency’ Kikuyu men could not achieve the full maturity exercised by elders (p. 326). Lonsdale thus distinguishes what he calls ‘moral ethnicity’ from ‘political tribalism’. The former ‘creates communities from within through domestic controversy over civic virtue’, the latter ‘flows down from high-political intrigue; it constitutes communities through external competition’ (p. 466). He concludes:
Moral ethnicity may not be an institutionalized force; but it is the nearest Kenya has to a national memory and a watchful political culture. Because native, it is a more trenchant critic of the abuse of power than any Western political thought; it imagines freedom in laborious idioms of self-mastery which intellectuals too easily dismiss. High-political awareness of the vigilance of moral ethnicity may be, as much as canny political tribalism and a lively civil society, what keeps Kenya at peace (p. 467).
The merit of Lonsdale’s argument is that it brings out quite clearly the idea that ‘ethnic identity’ is always contested, although for him it appears that the Mau Mau contestation concerned simply the position of various (age) actors within the hierarchy, though, importantly, not the character of the hierarchy itself. His distinction between an idealised moral conception of the ethnic and an authoritarian personalised and communitarian (‘tribal’) politics is welcome, as it reminds us that not all politics which use traditional and cultural idioms are of necessity communitarian. Yet, at the same time, that Lonsdale finds it necessary to explain what the response of the Mau Mau activist ‘really meant’, and thus to develop a culturalist argument that goes beyond merely pointing to the fact of cultural idioms as forms of resistance, seems to counterpose an idealised ahistorical version of ‘ethnic consciousness’ in ‘moral ethnicity’ to a despised (colonially produced) ‘tribalist’ one, while simultaneously anthropologising what could be easily read as a simple demand for dignity. The danger of Lonsdale’s argument is that it fails to completely transcend the Western colonial image of the Kikuyu as tribal or ethnic ‘subjects’, and therefore fails either to allow the militant rebel to speak for himself or herself, or to provide at least an opening for an understanding of politics as subjectivity in Africa that does not collapse into culturalism of the neo-colonial variety.
I want to suggest in what follows that this problem, illustrated here by Lonsdale’s argument, is largely inherent in what, following Foucault, could be called the ‘epistemic reason’ of the human sciences as presently constituted, and is not simply the result of bias, of the limits of Lonsdale’s choice of theory, or indeed of the scientific method itself. In order to do this, I wish to discuss some of the debates that arose within the Indian Subaltern Studies Collective, as they constitute to my mind one of the most sophisticated ways currently available of addressing this particular question of the Eurocentrism of the human sciences and the subjectivity of the subaltern. Before this, however, a few words are required on the origins of the concept of ‘moral economy’. Fortunately there is not much to say on this score as, if we put aside the normative accounts regarding what an economy should be, the expression seems to have been first popularised by the historian E.P. Thompson (1971) to refer to the idea of social justice – the defence ‘of traditional rights and customs’ (p. 50) – among the English working class in order to counterbalance economic deterministic accounts of popular riots. It was then picked up and organised into a general principle by James Scott (1979), in his study of the ‘subsistence ethic’ of peasants in Southeast Asia, in which he argued that it was precisely the violation of this ‘moral economy’ by colonial power that had turned peasants into revolutionaries. However, the idea of ‘the moral’ in the Mau Mau case seems to be a signifier of the fact that Western categories are inapplicable (or applicable only with difficulty), rather than providing a coherent alternative conceptual proposal which would allow the consciousness of the subaltern to speak for itself in its own categories.4
There are three general points to make regarding this notion that are of importance for the present discussion. Firstly, it is applied to the situation of ‘outsiders’ or those ‘marginal’ to a capitalist market economy, who, it is said, propose a distinct social ethic in the face of expanding and encroaching capitalist relations; this ethic is to be celebrated in opposition to capitalism, as it exhibits features of a ‘non-capitalist’ economy extolled as ‘virtuous’. Of course, few seriously celebrate an ethical content of the capitalist market economy; what is more, any economy is always socially embedded and this may include various moral features. Secondly, such an alternative conception is often idealised and seen as unchanging, as ahistorical, with a consequent inability to fully investigate the contradictions within it. Thus Lonsdale takes as evident that Kikuyu ‘civic virtue’ is given in a form which leaves the location, for example, of age differences uncontested; of course, younger men want to become elders – this is why they uphold such civic virtue. Finally, of course, the subaltern does not speak here, as Spivak (1998) would say. The category of moral economy is simply invented by Western intellectuals to make sense of popular consciousness in the ‘non-modern’; it is equivalent to a concept of ‘culture’ in which the Other is located. We have little sense of what the Mau Mau rebel would say, let alone think, about his or her own conception of ‘land and freedom’; if the idea is to understand popular consciousness, then we are not much closer to doing so. The Mau Mau rebel is simply said to think as an (African) peasant; she or he is simply the bearer of that structural category and hence must think access to land in primordial ‘ethnic’ and ‘tribal’ terms, and therefore in moral-cultural terms, which are to be celebrated or deplored depending on one’s political orientation. Moreover, for Lonsdale, there is no attempt to think the Kikuyu as a nationality, like the Scots or the Irish, for example; they are African, therefore they must be ethnic. There is little fundamental difference here between the prejudices of colonial and postcolonial human science. Finally, Lonsdale himself admits that he cannot speak Kikuyu and that his analysis ‘gives weight to the words of senior men’ (p. 321). He thus admits that his work ‘will not explain Mau Mau. It hopes to uncover the moral and intellectual context in which explanations may be found’ (p. 326). Of course, despite the personal diffidence and the protocols of positivist science, what Lonsdale offers is a reading of both the objective location (the Kikuyu peasantry) and the subjectivity (‘civic virtue’) of Mau Mau militants, based on his theoretical assumptions and the evidence which, as a historian, he is able and willing to muster from the archive.
SUBALTERN CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS
It is at this point that some of the debates in the Subaltern Studies Collective become pertinent, for the concern of that historical school has been precisely to understand the political consciousness of the anti-colonial peasant rebel primarily in colonial India. The emphasis here is directly placed on making sense of the political subjectivities of the subaltern. In undertaking this project, Subaltern Studies has been forced to distance itself from colonial, nationalist as well as Marxist social history, with the result that the disciplinary logic of history – what Lalu (2009) calls ‘disciplinary reason’ – has had to be unpacked. I shall draw on their work in order to elucidate the problem of accounting for the subjectivity of popular rebels through a discussion of some aspects of the work of Ranajit Guha, the founding intellectual figure of Subaltern Studies.
The whole of Guha’s intellectual enterprise, as I understand it, is to begin from the statement that if the anti-colonial peasant rebel is to be understood as the subject of his or her own history, then it is the political consciousness of the subaltern that must be the object of the discipline of history and his or her thought must be taken seriously. It is a fidelity to this axiom which, it seems to me, guides Guha’s historical work on India. This, I will argue, leads him and the Subaltern Studies project into an impasse, as the discipline of history is unable to provide the means whereby this axiom can be fully effectuated, because it comes up against the limits of its own scientism. Ultimately, Subaltern Studies is caught up in a ‘disciplinary’ or, perhaps better, an ‘epistemic’ reason which is unable to transcend a state-thought of politics from which the subjectivity of the subaltern is excluded.5 In this sense Spivak (1988) is quite right: the subaltern cannot speak from the confines of history; her voice cannot be heard without transcending the discipline of history itself, as history cannot identify political subjects, only bearers of social locations. The subaltern’s subjectivity is apprehended through and forced into categories (colonial, liberal, Marxist, nationalist, masculinist, etc.) that are not her own and, in any case, when she rebels she is no longer in a subaltern position, at least politically speaking.6
Guha’s starting point is that there existed, during the colonial period in India, a distinct domain of politics beyond the elite domain of state institutions, policies, laws and practices introduced by the British colonial power. This domain was an ‘autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter’. The ‘principal actors’ in this realm were neither the dominant groups of indigenous society nor the authorities, ‘but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country – that is the people’. It is within this parallel and autonomous domain that ‘the politics of the people’ could be found (Guha, 2000: 3, emphasis in original). One of the more important distinctions between the politics of the two domains, according to Guha, related to political mobilisation, for in the elite domain this ‘was achieved vertically whereas in that of subaltern politics this was achieved horizontally’. In the first case this meant reliance on the ‘colonial adaptation of British parliamentary institutions and the residua of ... the political institutions of the pre-colonial period’, while the latter ‘relied on traditional organization of kinship and territoriality or on class associations’; the former was more ‘legalistic’, the latter more ‘violent’; the former more ‘controlled, the latter more spontaneous’ (p. 4). In his commentary on the originality of Subaltern Studies, Chakrabarty (2002: 8) emphasises that
By explicitly rejecting the characterization of peasant consciousness as prepolitical, and by avoiding evolutionary models of consciousness, Guha was prepared to suggest that the nature of collective action against exploitation in colonial India was such that it effectively led to a new constellation of the political ... Guha insisted that, instead of being an anachronism in a modernizing colonial world, the peasant was a real contemporary of colonialism and a fundamental part of the modernity to which colonial rule gave rise in India. The peasant’s was not a backward consciousness ... Elitist histories of peasant uprisings missed the significance of this gesture by seeing it as prepolitical (emphasis in original).
Of course, it is evidently not only ‘elitist histories’ that are being criticised here but also the writings of the British and other Marxist social historians. This argument is developed at length in Guha’s justly famous piece on ‘The Prose of Counter-insurgency’. Guha starts from the observation that ‘peasant insurrections [were not] purely spontaneous and unpremeditated affairs’ (1992a: 1). Given the risks faced by peasants and how much was at stake for them, it is mistaken to see peasant insurgency in any other way than as a ‘motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses’. Yet historiography has been prepared to deal with the peasant not ‘as an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion’ (p. 2), but simply ‘as an empirical person or member of a class’.7 As a result, ‘insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness’ (p. 3). In other words, peasants were considered not as thinking subjects in the historical literature, but simply as bearers of a social location. Guha undertakes a detailed assessment of the discourse of this history from the colonial period to the present and concludes that, whether it is colonial history, liberal history, nationalist history or Marxist history that is produced, ‘the rebel has no place in this history as the subject of rebellion’ (p. 27):
Once a peasant rebellion has been assimilated to the career of the Raj, the Nation or the people, it becomes easy for the historian to abdicate the responsibility he has of exploring and describing the consciousness specific to that rebellion and be content to ascribe to it a transcendental consciousness. In operative terms this means denying a will to the mass of the rebels themselves and representing them merely as instruments of some other will (p. 38).
A major consequence of this general perspective is to fail to recognise the central role played in rebellions by the spirituality of the insurgents, which modernist historiography refers to as ‘religion’. Guha uses the example of the Santal Rebellion of 1855–7 to make his point, yet in doing so he opens up a major problem for the history of political consciousness, which he is ultimately unable to resolve.8 The leading protagonists of the rebellion express themselves in a discourse that denies their own agency and rather ascribes it to their god ‘Thakur’, who is said to do the fighting himself; as a result, it is ‘not possible to speak of insurgency in this case except as a religious consciousness ... as predicated on a will other than their own’ (p. 35). As Chakrabarty (1998: 20) asks: ‘what does it then mean when we both take the subaltern’s views seriously – the subaltern ascribes the agency for their rebellion to some god – and we want to confer on the subaltern agency or subjecthood in their own history, a status the subaltern’s status denies?’ Neither Guha nor Chakrabarty is able to find an adequate solution to this conundrum, which remains aporetic, as ‘the supernatural was part of what constituted public life for the non-modern Santals of the nineteenth century’ (p. 20). Guha distances himself from those positions that see religion as an irrational (‘superstitious’) expression of the secular, yet, as Chakrabarty notes, his position ‘becomes a combination of the anthropologist’s politeness ... and a Marxist (or modern) sense of frustration with the intrusion of the supernatural into public life’ (p. 21), which he calls a ‘massive demonstration of self-estrangement’ (Guha, 1992a: 34). Although Guha understands that we are faced with a religious idiom of politics, he is unable to attempt an analysis of it in its own terms: ‘It was this consciousness, an unquestionably false consciousness if ever there was one, which also generated a certain kind of alienation: it made the subject look upon his destiny not as a function of his own will and action, but as that of forces outside and independent of himself’ (Guha, 1999: 268). Yet that consciousness was never so false as not to recognise the real enemy or as to not sustain a mass popular rebellion of extreme importance against the colonial state. Unfortunately, the Santals’ statements are treated as ‘beliefs’ and anthropologised, with the consequence that ‘we cannot write history from within those beliefs. We thus produce “good”, not subversive histories’ (Chakrabarty, 1998: 22, emphasis added).
Guha concludes that ‘there is nothing that historiography can do to eliminate such distortion altogether ... what it can do however is to acknowledge such distortion as parametric – as a datum which determines the form of the exercise itself, and to stop pretending that it can fully grasp a past consciousness and reconstitute it’ (1992a: 33). The only way out for Guha, and indeed Chakrabarty also, is to introduce an element of ‘self-criticism’ into historical analysis so as to place the coercive content of the episteme or the discipline under scrutiny. Chakrabarty (1998: 26) thus notes that with ‘subaltern pasts ... we reach the limits of the discourse of history’, and he continues by stressing that ‘the reason for this ... is that subaltern pasts do not give the historian any principle of narration that can be rationally defended in modern public life’. He simply concludes (p. 27) that we need to take more seriously the fact that ‘other [spiritual] ways of being are not without questions of power and justice but these questions are raised ... on terms other than those of the political modern’. We are left suspended, as though we have reached the limit of what it is possible to think within the confines of history. Yet it is indeed possible to think beyond this contradiction and to give ‘non-modern’ political idioms a more important place, without abandoning rationality. In order to understand how this may be done, we need to refocus on the question of the idiom of politics.
Guha (1992b) argues that in Indian history it is centrally important to distinguish analytically the history of state power from that of capital. This largely follows from his earlier argument differentiating between two domains of politics, which leads him to maintain that capitalism dominated in India but without creating a hegemonic capitalist culture; it is this that he calls ‘dominance without hegemony’ (p. 275). Chakrabarty (2002: 13) notes that ‘the history of colonial modernity in India created a domain of the political that was heteroglossic in its idioms and irreducibly plural in its structure, interlocking within itself strands of different types of relationships that did not make up a logical whole’. Because of this, a theory of power independent of that of capital had to be developed. In his attempt, Guha argues that the power relation can be understood as composed of Dominance (D) and Subordination (S), each in turn being made up of a further relation: between Coercion (C) and Persuasion (P) for Dominance, and between Collaboration (C*) and Resistance (R) for Subordination (1992b: 229). Through the use of this double matrix, Guha is able to show how the political domain of power was structured by a number of discourses and idioms of British and Indian origin interacting to make coercion or persuasion possible. In particular, persuasion was made possible by a combination of the colonial state notion of ‘improvement’ with the Indian idea of dharma, ‘understood, broadly, as the quintessence of “virtue, the moral duty”, which implied a social duty conforming to one’s place in the caste hierarchy as well as the local power structures’ (p. 244).
Here, then, we have a political idiom not too dissimilar from, though more extensive than, that of the Kikuyu ‘civic morality’ noted by Lonsdale, yet here it is not labelled as ‘ethnic’ (the analysis is by an insider), while at the same time it is said to contribute to making persuasive collaboration with colonialism possible. Evidently the British colonialists were somewhat more successful in integrating Indian idioms into their forms of rule in the 19th century than they were in Kenya in the 20th. But, overall, we have a fundamental recognition by Guha that politics can take religious and cultural forms not always evidently ‘political’ in the modern sense, yet central to elite political subjectivity. Guha analyses these idioms ‘from the inside’ – i.e. not as an anthropologist – examining their names and political effects and noting ‘that something as contemporary as nineteenth and twentieth-century nationalism often made its appearance in political discourse dressed up as ancient Hindu wisdom’ (p. 245). We are probably here in the presence of a historically specific ‘mode of politics’, in Lazarus’s sense, yet Guha fails to take the same step when it comes to the political discourse of the Santal rebel. Why should a discourse of ‘social duty’ be more easily recognisable as ‘political’ than one that is ostensibly (crudely?) ‘religious’? Could it be that the idiom of dharma, despite its ancient origins, is more recognisably political, as it directly concerns a state politics whose main feature has universally been the maintenance and reproduction of difference and hierarchy? Could it be that the idiom of dharma is evaluated from within its own subjectivity, while that of the Santal is not?
What distinguishes the idiom of dharma from that of the Santal cannot be that the one is ‘modern’ and the other ‘traditional’, nor can it be that one is religious and the other not; it can only be that the former is ‘evidently’ a state discourse of power while the latter is not. This, it seems to me, is the nub of the fundamental problem faced by Guha’s work, by Chakrabarty’s and indeed by Subaltern Studies as a whole. Politics is equated throughout their analyses with ‘the political’, with power, the public, the civil, the state, and, as a result, it represents the social, as indeed the intellectual represents the subaltern’s voice. Politics is not consistently understood as an affirmative collective subjectivity, with the result that it is equated with that limited consciousness effectuated within the parameters of state conceptions. In their work, the subject is not conceived as prescribing a universal but is exclusively socially located; after all, it is ‘peasant subjects’ as such – the identification of a ‘peasant consciousness’ – to which Guha in particular is wedded and which he seeks to represent. Once a peasantry has been identified by the investigator – while no question is asked about how such people may have identified themselves – then it automatically follows that a subjectivity is sought that conforms to or deviates from what the investigator conceives a ‘peasant consciousness’ to be. Not surprisingly, it is the core features or ‘elementary aspects’ of the class consciousness of the peasantry that are the central concern of Guha’s (1999) work on the peasantry in colonial India. Despite the enormous step forward taken by Guha in understanding that ‘the political included actions that challenged the theorist’s usual and inherited separation between politics and religion’ (Chakrabarty, 2002: 19), the ‘religious’ idiom is still understood as an analytical deviation from the ‘obviously political’; it has to be shown to be political by analysis, while presumably the ‘obviously political’ needs no such work of analytical nomination.
The fallacy of this view can be seen through a contemporary example which is so common it is scarcely commented on. A commonplace account of the politics of ethnic, religious or xenophobic violence today in Africa and elsewhere makes reference to the poverty of those involved. I shall have occasion to mention this below in the context of South Africa, but the point to emphasise at this stage is that, within the ‘public sphere’ as in academia, the market is ultimately held to account for the political subjectivity or consciousness of the poor. Agency here is simply foreclosed. It is assumed that perpetrators of violence who are poor are unable to think for themselves; they are said to simply (re-)act as automata to their social condition, and, as a result, their agency is denied, much as the agency of the Santal rebels has been denied by the Santals themselves as well as by their historians. What indeed is the difference between maintaining that ‘God made me do it’ and ‘Poverty made him do it’? None whatsoever as far as the denial of agency is concerned. Yet there is in fact a very important difference, in that the second statement is considered a valid account of politics in modern scientific discourse, while the former is not. Even if a survey were to be conducted showing that a majority of all adults maintained that God was the active agent in xenophobic or ethnic violence today, this would be interpreted as pathological, as an indication of a ‘moral panic’ akin to the belief in ‘supra-terrestrials’, not as a ‘fact’. Yet if the same proportion of respondents stressed the perceived threat to their rights to housing or jobs as the motivation for xenophobic violence – interpreted by scholars as resulting from poverty or unemployment – this is said to constitute a legitimate finding.
The reason for this difference is that social conditions in general and economic forces in particular constitute scientifically legitimate substitutes for agency and the political subjectivities of people today, whereas ‘supernatural’ ones do not; it should be clear that such an account is objectivist and, hence, amounts to a state mode of thinking. Moreover, the emphasis placed on poverty is an inference drawn in the work of scholarly commentators, not necessarily by the perpetrators themselves, who emphasise their citizenship rights (Neocosmos, 2011b). The epistemic reason at work here is clearly apparent. We should also note in passing that ‘supernatural’ factors are not of the same order as ‘religious’ ones; it is quite possible today for the latter to be legitimately included in the list of ‘causes’ in scientific studies of inter-ethnic violence, for example. The most important point is that accounting for violence in terms of poverty (or inequality or even ‘relative deprivation’) is a political discourse of the state today; it is the state that systematically refuses to acknowledge the existence of political subjectivities, reducing them to the socio-economic or to psychology, thus denying agency. On the other hand, to say, as the Santal rebel did, that his god Thakur will do the fighting was a subjectivity totally beyond (external to) colonial state comprehension at the time in that situation (although not necessarily outside precolonial state subjectivity, incidentally), and, as a result, colonial state discourse had to locate it elsewhere: outside ‘the political’, in the domain of the ‘superstitious’ and ‘irrational’.9
What this means is, paradoxically, that the Santal’s statement can be considered as political, in Badiou’s sense of the term, in the context of 19th-century India, as it was expressive of a collective subject and existed well beyond the (scientific) parameters of state thinking, exceeding thereby the subjective configuration of the colonial world and mere agency. On the other hand, the statement about the economic account of violence today is not political, operating as it does within the ambit of state (scientific) thought and thereby simply reproducing the extant and denying subjecthood and the transcending of the extant. An internal analysis of the former in terms of its specific categories and names could possibly have elucidated the singular character of its politics; yet once it had entered the archive, such elucidation became well-nigh impossible, for it was controlled and packaged within a category of ‘atavism’ and ‘irrationality’ by the colonial discourse of power. The conclusion must then be that, whatever the idiom or discourse being investigated, its political character must be established, and it can only be established ‘from within’, as Lazarus (1996, 2001b) maintains, through an analysis of its own statements and categories. It cannot be represented from outside through a sceptical commitment by sympathetic academics. Moreover, it is not the case that just because some statements seem to belong to a realm of ‘the political’, to the ‘public sphere’, to ‘civil society’ or whatever, that because their location labels them as ‘politics’ within modernist (neo-)liberal or Marxist conceptions, they are indeed idioms of agency, whereas others that seem to occur outside such a domain – such as religion – are not to be considered as politics.
The problem here is that of historicism, which, in addition to a notion of time, holds to an idea of totality (e.g. ‘society’, ‘nation’, ‘social formation’) within which political agency is confined to a specific domain of the political. A proliferation of the number of political domains does not, unfortunately, solve the problem of the social reduction of consciousness itself; it is rather the existence of sites which can ‘exist anywhere’, and which have to be ascertained through analysis, that locates politics (Lazarus, 1996). Politics is always singular and located in sites, but is simultaneously irreducible to a social referent. Unfortunately, Guha, Chakrabarty and Subaltern Studies as a whole, because their analyses are firmly situated within the discipline of history, have been unable to move to an irreducible analysis of the purely subjective. This is quite clear from their view of politics as socially located exclusively within two domains, that of the elite and that of the subaltern.
More recently, Chatterjee (2004, 2011) has pursued this argument by noting that two domains of politics exist in contemporary India (and, by extension, in other countries of the Global South) in which the relation of people to the state differs. One, which he refers to as ‘civil society’, is ultimately determined by a relation between people and state founded on ‘sovereignty’; the other is determined by relations between state and people founded on ‘governmentality’, in Foucault’s sense of state classification for welfare and security, which he saw as ‘a particular mentality, a particular manner of governing that is actualized in habits, perceptions and subjectivity’, i.e. as a particular mode of rule as well as a way of being in society (Read, 2009: 34; Foucault, 2000: 201–22). This domain Chatterjee terms ‘political society’. In each domain, he maintains, politics differs: in the former, it is founded on rights, citizenship and administrative technical procedures; in the latter, it is popular and informal and its ‘claims are irreducibly political’ (2004).10 While he rightly recognises that politics does not only exist within the narrow confines of the state but can exist in various realms which themselves originate from the colonial encounter, it is a structural determination, namely that between people and the state established by different modes of state rule, that Chatterjee takes to be the ultimate condition of political subjectivity and that is said to account for the difference between these forms of politics. It is different modes of state rule that determine not only different connections to power but also different subjectivities so that politics are reduced to (social) agency. Popular subjectivities are given no independent effectivity; they possess little choice in effecting these connections themselves and in exceeding the social. We are thus back to considering people simply as bearers of their objective location. A proliferation of state modes of rule, therefore, does not resolve the problem posed by the social determination of subjectivity.11 Politics does not have to be located within a state domain of ‘the political’ for it to be so qualified. This failure is one that leaves no room for a subjective politics beyond the social determinations of the state. Subaltern Studies ultimately misses out on understanding (emancipatory) politics, for it is caught in, and unable to extricate itself from, a statist view of what politics in fact is.
Nevertheless, Subaltern Studies is able to illustrate that there is a seemingly unavoidable limit to historical knowledge established by what Lalu (2009) calls ‘disciplinary reason’. History, as presently constituted, is indeed a state discipline by simple virtue of the fact, as Lazarus (1996) shows, that through a concept of time it objectifies the subjective, thus leaving no room for an understanding of subjective affirmations internally. ‘It is always in the interests of the powerful that history is mistaken for politics, that is that the objective is taken for the subjective’ (Badiou, 1982: 44, translation modified). The current misrecognition by the most progressive Third World historians of the nature of politics is only marginally distinct from the manner in which colonialism saw the actions of the subaltern rebel, as Guha himself makes clear. Indeed, the disciplines of the human sciences as a whole do not currently recognise politics other than as ‘the political’, and control scientifically the thinking of political subjectivity by psychologising it in a similar fashion to the (‘anthropologising’) practice of colonial discourse, for they combine a knowledge system with power, governed by what Foucault called an episteme. Lalu concludes that ‘we might see subaltern studies as a limited field of critique that is aimed at forging the beginnings of a postcolonial episteme’ (2009: 255). This may be a valid way of proceeding; however, the forging of such an episteme, I maintain, would require an analysis in terms of historical sequences, which may indeed be quite discontinuous, as Foucault (1968) himself pointed out long ago, thus indicating a way around the problematic concept of continuous historical time. Indeed, Foucault notes that it is precisely ‘the episteme [which] is the “apparatus” (dispositif) which makes possible the separation not of the true from the false, but of what may or may not be characterised as scientific’ (Foucault, 1980: 197). To this Spivak (1988: 298) adds that it distinguishes ‘the superstitious (ritual, etc.) from the scientific’. It is this episteme that I have referred to as ‘scientism’. On the other hand, a postcolonial episteme as proposed by Lalu would have to begin from an understanding of politics as purely subjective and hence sequential in order to fully discard the scientism and historicism inherent in holding to a correspondence between the subjective and the objective.
CONCLUSION
Where, then, does this discussion leave the subjectivity of the Mau Mau rebel in Kenya in the early 1950s? For a start, we do not have to abandon the rational or embrace a distant anthropologising of difference to make sense of this. Lonsdale is caught in the trap of the liberal historian sympathetic to the oppressed, but ultimately unable to break from the scientifically neo-colonial because of an implicit superiority, which can only locate African rebels’ consciousness within a ‘tribal’ context of ‘moral ethnicity’. That the term ‘ethnicity’ is given positive attributes while ‘tribe’ is given negative ones does not overcome the neo-colonial perspective. Such is the idealisation of ethnic life that it not only irons out power contradictions within Kikuyu society, but also fails to allow for the subaltern to speak in his or her own names and categories about what he or she thought and practised in the rebellion. Lonsdale shows very well how Kikuyu ‘moral economy’ or ‘moral ethnicity’ was founded on an understanding of the individual as a ‘subject’. Political agency was seen as central to adulthood in particular; Lonsdale may refer to it as ‘virtue’, but its essence can be read as fundamentally political, not moral.
In other words, in the context of colonial domination and land appropriation, Mau Mau activists could only realise subjecthood and adulthood – their collective and individual being – through fighting the British for the return of their land. But given his liberal proclivities, Lonsdale feels obliged to link this to an idealisation of ethnic culture, something that it is not at all clear the participants themselves were doing. Indeed, it is not clear why Mau Mau political subjectivity could not simply be read as concerning the assertion of human dignity, the simple attainment of their humanity, as Fanon had stated; the kinds of idioms used should not affect recognition of this. We are provided by Lonsdale not so much with a view of what the collective consciousness of militants looked like, but rather with the anthropological context of a very complex subjective system from which we are supposed to deduce a subjectivity that combined the notion of the human as ‘subject’, spirituality, political affirmation and economic demand for land. What is said to hold all this together is ‘ethnicity’, a quite unhelpful notion in this case, as such a ‘holding together’ had to be achieved in actual practice, through collective struggle under conditions of crisis – as Fanon showed in the context of the nation – thus clearly redefining the ‘ethnic’ in the process. Of course, the human individual as ‘subject’ (and thereby culture and being) had to be (re-)created by Mau Mau; it had not been given by colonialism. What had been given in fact were evidently servitude, passivity, victimhood and the attempted destruction of the ‘human subject’. In re-creating their subjecthood, there is evidence that the Mau Mau may have exceeded their ethnic place within the confines of a colonially constructed ‘traditional society’. According to Furedi (1989: 18), the movement ‘put into question the existing socio-economic structures of society’.12 Evidently, Furedi comes to this conclusion from concentrating on the lower-class nature of the guerrillas. Yet we do not have to understand this subjectivity in such a socially reductionist manner; it is perfectly possible to understand Mau Mau’s social ‘radicalism’ as a subjective excess over ethnic consciousness during a limited sequence. The problem of wishing to stress the ethnic, national or class attributes of Mau Mau simply results from the insistence of analysts on noting exclusively the expressive character of their political subjectivities, to the detriment of popular reason.
At the same time, the colonial obscure subject would deny the assertion of humanity by the colonised by emphasising atavism, backwardness and incomprehensible brutish behaviour on their part.13 The post-independence national leadership, which actually emanated from within the same Kikuyu nationality, chose not so much to echo the colonial view, as Berman maintains (1997), as to stress that nothing of importance had really happened and that what might have occurred was pathological and simply violent, and should therefore be forgotten as quickly as possible. Thus Kenyatta was to assert in 1967: ‘We are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya. We must have no hatred toward one another. Mau Mau was a disease which had been [sic] eradicated, and must never be remembered again’ (cit. Furedi, 1989: 212). For this reason, Mau Mau is of more general import for understanding the obscure subjectivity of the imperial world and the reactive nature of postcolonial state subjectivities, as well as some of the African features of emancipatory political subjectivity in the sequence of national liberation.
African political idioms have been systematically and necessarily misrecognised and distorted by Eurocentric scientism, particularly as these have taken the form of subjective affirmations within the idioms of ‘tradition’ or ‘religion’, because, for the scientistic colonial episteme, subjectivity is always related to the objective in the final analysis. In Depelchin’s (2005) terms, silences have been produced in African history by (epistemic) ‘syndromes’, which necessarily lead to the occlusion of African agency, not to mention subjecthood. The character of scientism has meant, as Fanon recognised, that ‘for the colonized, objectivity is always directed against him’ (1990: 61, translation modified). The human sciences in general, and history in particular, are, however, Eurocentric only in a contextual and derivative sense, for they are currently governed by an episteme that ensures that they remain disciplines of state power and not of emancipation, wherever they may be deployed. In other words, it is not the colonial condition that calls forth a specific Eurocentric episteme. Scientism is already in existence and, when deployed under colonial conditions, can only silence the colonised, as it silences all subjectivities beyond objectivism. History is unable to express the subjectivity of displacement because of its epistemic configuration. It therefore cannot express the discontinuity and excess that constitute the defining characteristics of emancipatory subjectivity, with the result that it is wedded to a continuity of time. It is therefore a history of the state.
To corroborate and paraphrase Spivak’s (1988) well-known argument, the subaltern cannot be heard from within the parameters of the scientistic episteme; the only voices to be heard are the monotonous drone of the obscure neo-colonial subject and the oppressive beat of the reactive African state. What binds both today, and what blinds us to the possible political content of African idioms, are the notions of civil society, human rights and multiculturalism, for which politics is fundamentally social and cannot be understood outside of a state domain, as I shall show in later chapters. History, as it exists today, is a state discourse, as are all human sciences. To transform such disciplines means to develop new methodologies for the analysis of political subjectivities within delimited historical sequences. In this manner we can begin to develop categories for the understanding of people as reasoning beings with a will to make political choices which they and we all have to confront in thinking freedom.
NOTES
1.See Ranger (1968) and Hobsbawm (1974), among others. In the Congo, for example, a number of nationalist movements were expressed in religious idioms. The ‘antonian’ movement of Kimpa Vita (1684–1706) (Thornton, 1998) and the Radical Movement of Prophets (1921–51) led by Simon Kimbangu (1887–1951) come particularly to mind. They were spiritual and prophetic movements as well as a nationalist movement; so was the Nyabingi movement in the Great Lakes Region (Murindwa-Rutanga, 2011). I am not counting here the Muslim theocratic states, but one very interesting resistance movement, principally because it combined Islamic fervour with popular nationalism rooted in African culture, was the Somali Dervish movement (1898–1920) (see Samatar, 1982). There are many other such examples in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South.
2.I must make clear here that I am not simply referring to a distinction between the socially constituted realms of the secular and the religious à la Durkheim, but to the broader notion of separating the idea of the human being from any conception of the spiritual, a distinction that was simply non-existent in precolonial Africa; it could be argued that one of the most destructive effects of colonial domination was precisely to enforce such a separation.
3.For important introductory discussions of the land question in Kenya, see Leys (1975) and Leo (1984).
4.Lonsdale does attempt to provide an account of a debate on politics among Mau Mau activists (1994: 142–9) but feels obliged to translate this into Western idioms and hence to anthropologise Kikuyu beliefs.
5.Chakrabarty (1998: 19) rightly emphasises the fact that the original intentions of subaltern studies were both political and intellectual in a ‘modernist’ sense: ‘these original intellectual ambitions and the desire to enact them were political in that they were connected to modern understandings of democratic public life’; they did not necessarily come from the lives of the subaltern classes themselves.
6.It is worth noting that the term ‘subaltern’ itself is used inconsistently, as at some times it refers to a social category and at others to a political category in the work of these writers. This is arguably a symptom of their inability to resolve the problem of equating the subjective with the objective, politics with history.
7.We will see in a later chapter that the same problem is present in sociological accounts of the events of May 1968 in France, for example. See Ross (2002).
8.For a brief account of the rebellion, see Troisi (2000: 342–8). Santals are referred to as ‘tribals’ in the Indian literature. An interesting parallel can be drawn between the Santals and African nationalities. Troisi notes ‘that for the Santals as also for most of the tribals, land provides not only economic security but a powerful link with one’s ancestors’ (p. 346).
9. Interestingly, the current manifestation of ‘tribal’ insurgency in India is the ‘Maoists’ or ‘Naxalites’, who are addressed in the same way (militarily as well as discursively) by the democratic Indian state as the Santals were by the colonial state. See, in particular, Arundhati Roy’s brilliant pieces (2010a, 2010b).
10.It can be shown in fact that informality can be functional to state control; see Ananga Roy’s work on Calcutta (2003).
11.In fact, Chatterjee arguably misses out on another mode of rule (and its corresponding domain of politics), namely that prevalent in rural areas. Without my wishing to comment on India, it is apparent that the mode of rule in rural Africa differs fundamentally from those domains that Chatterjee recognises in the urban; in particular, the deployment of ‘tradition’, coercion and violence in rural areas in Africa is something which is not (yet?) so apparent in the urban. The classic text on this mode of rule is Mamdani (1996).
12.This point is also cited in Mamdani (1996: 189).
13.See, in particular, Maughan-Brown (1985) for a detailed textual analysis of fictional accounts of Mau Mau from different perspectives: colonial, liberal, nationalist and radical.
