by Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna) and
Federico Rahola (University of Genova)
translated by by Matteo
Mandarini.
Abstract
Postcolonial
time, according to the authors, is that time in which colonial experience
appears, simultaneously, to be
consigned to the past and, precisely
due to the modalities with which its ‘overcoming’ comes about, to be installed
at the centre of contemporary social experience – with the entire burden of
domination, but also the capacity for insubordination, that distinguishes this
experience. Taking into account some of the main criticisms devoted to postcolonial studies in recent
time (A. Dirlik, Hardt and Negri, Zizek), the essay tries to reconstruct the
genealogy of the postcolonial condition, stressing the important role which is
played in this genealogy by anti-colonial movements and concluding with some
remarks on a possible politics of liberation able to match the challenges of
the present.
1.
A Global Mood?
Our time appears entirely incapable of giving itself a
positive definition. It is a ‘post’ time: post-modern, post-historic,
post-Fordist and, according to an even tiresome refrain, postcolonial. A never
accomplished transition seems to be the only possible framework to grasp the present.
At first gaze the postcolonial discourse appears merely to reflect such a
predicament. Setting aside, for the moment, the clamour around the question of what is the meaning of ‘post’ in
postcolonial, and looking at the most widespread understanding of this term
across the ‘global’ theoretical debate and public discourse, there’s little to
get excited about. It seems that the era of binary codes, so magisterially
defined by Fanon, which organised the space, the time and the experience of the
colonies, has been followed by one in which everything is entangled or
‘hybridised’. It seems that we are witnessing the inverse of the movement
described by Max Weber in the final, memorable pages of the Protestant Ethic: the “iron cage” of
colonial despotism is said by many to have turned into a “light cloak, which
can be thrown aside at any moment”.[1]
A set of displacements is said to
have transformed the world into a plane of absolute immanence, crossed by
nomadic subjects committed, on the edge of irony, to composing shifting
identities: one moment drawing fragments from the now disused warehouses of the
old colonial emporia; the next feeding on the memories of the anti-colonial
struggles. So creolisation is well on its way to becoming a global mood,
promoted by the large corporations as
it is by youth cultures; adopted by tailors as it is by architects and
restaurant menus.
So, are we faced with yet another
form of ‘weak thought’? In postcolonial studies, which, having enjoyed
extraordinary circulation in the ’90s in the Anglo-Saxon world, now begin to
seep into Italy, do we discover the umpteenth variant of the apology for the
present? That is the suspicion we see expressed, among the others, in three
rather poignant critiques directed at the category of the postcolonial. In the
first, Arif Dirlik (in The Postcolonial
Aura as well as in Postmodernity’s
Histories), in particular, has argued that postcolonial studies promote a
veritable dissolution of history, of its stratifications and opacity, issuing
into a sort of eternal postmodern present, trivializing the revolutionary
caesuras of the past and decreeing the impossibility of revolution in the
future. Secondly, and in a more refined way, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri have
dwelled in their Empire on the fact
that what many postcolonial theorists extol as the experience of liberation,
specifically hybridity and creolisation, in reality points to the terrain upon
which the contemporary dispositifs or
apparatuses of domination and exploitation operate. Thirdly, Slavoj Zizek (e.g.
in Revolution at the Gates), whose
position has recently been bolstered by Peter Hallward’s wide-ranging Absolutely Postcolonial, has identified
in postcolonialism (which he understands as merely the global projection of
multiculturalism) the operation of a logic that we might call indifference. The right to narrate in
the first person is, in postcolonial studies, conceded to the ‘other’ after
having deprived him or her of the constitutive wound that cannot be sutured by recognition but only by the
“Leninising” conquest of the partisan dimension
of truth.
Of course, each postcolonial study should be evaluated
according to its own merits. Certainly, there will be no lack of writers or
theoretical currents to confirm, along with the validity of these critiques,
the sketch we outlined at the beginning of these notes. But things change, as
we shall argue, if one takes the postcolonial
condition seriously, distinguishing it (at least to begin with) from
postcolonialism and viewing this latter as a Foucaldian archive in which images, concepts and words are deposited, enabling
one to critically reconstruct the contour of our present. It is possible then
to accept, at least in part, the substance of the criticisms that we have
mentioned but nevertheless to insist on the timeliness of giving the term
‘postcolonial’ a key role in the vocabulary of critical thought.
What becomes crucial, at this point, is the very
question related to the ‘meaning of the “post” in postcolonial’. It is worth
asserting our thesis (somewhat roughly) straight away. Postcolonial time is
that time in which colonial experience appears, simultaneously, to be consigned to the past and, precisely due to the modalities with which its ‘overcoming’
comes about, to be installed at the centre of contemporary social experience –
with the entire burden of domination, but also the capacity for
insubordination, that distinguishes this experience. Confinement, which is the true ‘epistemic’ cipher of the West’s
project of colonial exploitation[2],
and the resistance against it no longer organise a cartography capable of
unequivocally distinguishing the metropolis from the colonies since they
shatter and recompose themselves continuously on a global scale. What this category of the postcolonial suggests
is that the unity of the world, the objective of so many ‘cosmopolitical’
projects, has ultimately been realised in ambivalent forms. On the one hand,
these forms make up the material horizon within which individual identity tends
to inscribe itself[3]; on the
other, they do not provide any guarantee that this identity is not the scene in
which the capacity for emancipation of a political discourse articulated in the
language of the universal is
exhausted, finally swallowed up by the spectral objectivity of commodity and
money.
2. Decentering the Global
Let
us begin with that relationship to history that, according to many critics,
represents one of the Achilles’ heels of postcolonialism[4].
From our perspective, within the vast laboratory of postcolonial studies,
historiography – as developed for instance in the collective work of Subaltern Studies - has played a key
role in exposing the indissoluble link between anti-colonialism and postcolonialism.
Robert Young’s seminal study Postcolonialism.
An Historical Introduction is concerned with this link. In the first place,
Young enables us to re-read some classics of anti-colonial thought outside the
threadbare rhetoric of Third-Worldism. This allows us to recognise, in these
texts, the embryonic traces of an awareness of just how much, over the entire
twentieth century, the dialectic between colonialism and anti-colonialism has
broken out of the traditional confines to which it had been relegated in the
former four centuries. Paul Gilroy’s Black
Atlantic provides us further with a brilliant instance of such a strenuous
decentered attitude, emphasising the diasporic and already global dimension of
black “double consciousness”, in the time-lag of modernity.
Surely, a clear indication of this fact is the certainty
with which, in 1955, Aimé Césaire demanded that fascism be viewed as a form of
colonialism investing Europe once the overseas territories appeared to be
running out, totally saturated. But, as Robin D.G. Kelley has recently pointed
out in Freedom Dreams (175), Césaire
went one step further, suggesting the real “taboo” shuttered by nazi-fascism
consists in the very fact of applying directly to white European subjects what
was conceivable only in the colonial world[5].
What emerges from this line of reasoning, which
had been anticipated soon after the end of the war by W.E.B. Du Bois in his The Modern World and Africa[6],
is the sinister valence of postcolonialism. At the very moment when the dispositifs of domination, originally
forged in the context of the colonial experience, filter into the metropolitan
spaces, we find ourselves already, in some way, in a postcolonial time.
This transition – this movement of hybridisation, which
can in no sense be said to be emancipatory – is, perhaps, part and parcel of
modern colonialism. In an article written in 1979 (Clues. Roots of an Evidential Paradigm), Carlo Ginzburg exposed
this, in magisterial fashion, with respect to the Bengalese origin of fingerprinting[7].
But, in that case, the boundary between the metropolitan cities and the
colonies was crossed in order more effectively to control a fundamental
internal boundary, the one, so well investigated by Louis Chevalier his study
on Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, between the “working
classes” and the “dangerous classes”. This is a little like the case of the
machine-gun, which, having given a lethal demonstration of its destructive
potential in the course of the American Civil War, was banned in the wars that
took place in the ‘West’ only to take on a key role in the scramble for Africa;
this, of course, did not prevent it from being used unremittingly in the United
States in order to repress the strikes at the end of the nineteenth century and
in the final campaigns against the Native peoples[8].
Finally, when the same weapon was deployed on the battle fields in the Great
War, it produced the decisive qualitative leap: the ‘total war’ already
practiced by the Europeans in the colonial campaigns then began to expand
across the European continent itself. Not long afterwards, another typically
colonial dispositif, the
concentration camp, would stamp the seal of catastrophe upon this movement of
displacement[9].
The words of Césaire thus enable us to specify a further
decisive aspect of postcolonial historical time, one characterised by the
spilling over of typically colonial logics of domination out of the very spaces
from which they originated to the point of affecting the ‘metropolitan city’.
We are dealing with a movement that is by no means exhausted and that continues
to produce its more or less catastrophic effects on the modalities of
government, the valorisation of migrant labour and the reorganisation of the
control functions of the autochthonous citizenships of the ‘West’. But this is
only one contribution, perhaps not even the most important one, which
postcolonialism can provide to the definition of a genealogy of our present, once the link that ties it to
anti-colonialism has been emphasised. The other contribution consists in
bringing into relief the irreversible character of the radical break made by
anti-colonial struggles with their immediately global dimension in contemporary history. It is these struggles
which, despite the resounding defeats experienced by practically all the
political regimes which they engendered, qualify the times in which we live as
postcolonial. They do so to the extent that they have disarticulated, once and
for all, the idea that the time and space of the colonies were qualitatively other from that of the metropolitan
city.
In a memorable page from The Wretched of the Earth,
Fanon spoke in 1961 of the discovery of
equality as the motor of anti-colonial insurrection. This is a splendid
metaphor for the subjective aspect of a set of processes that have materially
constructed and imagined the unity of the
world, unhinging the “compartmentalised world” of colonialism in the period
before ‘neo-liberal globalisation’ extended its hegemony. From our point of
view, one can speak of a postcolonial condition only if one wagers on the persistence, on the subterranean work
of this discovery in the texture of contemporary globalisation. Elsewhere we
have argued that migratory movements bear the ambivalent signs of this
discovery[10]. We are
sure that it would be possible to show how the discovery of equality continues
to nourish the new type of social movements in what used to be defined as the
‘Third World’; movements that, though related to the anti-colonial struggles,
are able to place themselves consciously beyond the horizon of the historical
defeat sustained by the regimes born of those struggles.
The
type of postcolonial studies we are interested in, the ones consistent with the
stance that we are outlining, are those that enable us to revisit, in the age
of globalisation, Fanon, Lumumba, C.L.R. James and the tradition of ‘Black
Marxism’. Not, of course, so as to find there finished models of political
action and theory but so as to identify, in the failure of the projects to
which their names were connected, the sense of an hidden history, erased by the
“history of the winners”. In his never ending confrontation with Walter
Benjamin, Theodor Adorno stressed once that the knowledge of history has to
move beyond “the unpropitious logic of the succession of victory and defeat”,
and to address “what did not enter this dynamic, what remained on the way”. It
is precisely this, the “discarded things, the blind spots”[11],
which provide the legacy we have nowadays to recover in anti-colonial projects.
3. On Transition
Yet
the question persists: why are we still obsessed with the time of the colonies?
Is it because the overcoming of this time alludes to a fait accompli and, simultaneously, to a transition that is actually
impossible? The elements of continuity between colonialism and the present seem
indisputable. “Bloody battle in Affghanistan”: The mistake suggests that it is
not an headline of whatever current newspaper; it’s a quotation from the first
pages of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick…
Such an immediacy, however, risks leading us astray. For example, the
peremptory manner in which colonialism has materially drawn the boundaries of
modern geography is obvious. This is a geography inaugurated in the sixteenth
century, which projected across the world, firstly, the lineaments of Europe,
secondly, those of the ‘West’; a geography that, perhaps, finds its most
accomplished expression (in the language of Hegel, it realises its concept) in
the borders of Africa drawn in Berlin in 1885 with ‘ruler and compass’.
Acknowledging the extended action of those borders is
indispensable for understanding the roots of many of the tensions and failures
that weigh upon the present. On the one hand, it contributes to an explanation
of the very defeat experienced by the anti-colonial movements, to the extent
that the political imagination of these movements was forced to unfold within
the register of colonial discourse, deriving
from it the form of the nation and internalising its frontiers, as Partha
Chatterjee has shown so effectively in his Nationalist
Thought and the Colonial World. On the other hand, if one looks at the most
significant and dramatic conflicts of recent years, from the occupation of Iraq
to the ‘local’ wars, all defined in strictly ‘ethnic’ terms (Rwanda and East
Timor, Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone), the generative colonial matrix appears
evident and, in some ways, indisputable.
However, the fact cannot escape us that this reading
of current conflicts, precisely because of its insistence on their ‘ethnic’
character, ends up functioning as the mirror-image that re-establishes the
legitimacy of that old formula, hic sunt
leones, which, in the maps of the early modern era, marked out the
territories of barbarism. In other words, by exclusively attributing, once more, the responsibility for the
massacres and the genocides of the present to French colonialism or British
imperialism, it is imperial subjectivity that is installed on centre stage as
the only protagonist, thereby eliminating any possibility for action on the
part of the ‘subaltern’. What we suggest as a far more politically productive image of contemporary conflicts is one that,
while throwing into proper relief the absolute persistence of ‘vertical’ threads
of domination and of exploitation, underlines the ambivalent role played by the
failure of a set of real, historically enacted projects of liberation from
those very forms of domination and exploitation.
In fact, the feeling is that in positing, again, a
logic of absolute continuity we end up validating and perpetuating a
‘redemptive’ mechanism, whether of self-absolution (in the case of subaltern
subject) or of mere removal (in the case of ‘Western’ subject). Removal, to the extent that it dispenses
with anti-colonial struggles as a mere inconvenience (clearly positive but
actually insubstantial) along the linear and uninterrupted thread of the
history of domination and exploitation, as well as it deprives the insurgent
colonised subject, the rebellious subaltern, of all possible forms of agency or of any possibility of directly
intervening in history. Self-absolution,
to the extent that it eliminates from history all ‘direct responsibility’ that
is not identified with the colonial West and, so too, any revolutionary act
that does not belong to the West, not only hands over all responsibility from
but also – and above all – shifts action from the colonised subject to the
eternal (neo-)colonial Subject.
Within
this perspective, the present is sucked inexorably back into the vortex of the
colonial past as its re-presentation (neo-colonialism) or as a variation upon
it that is polarised geographically along the borders that divide first,
second, third and fourth worlds. The potential of the ‘post’ necessarily yields
to the iron logic of the ‘again’, iterating itself in ‘neo-colonialism’ (as
Nkrumah asserted in the immediate wake of Ghanaian independence[12]).
This potential melts like snow in the sun before the persistence of
‘underdevelopment’ and ‘dependence’ that tie each South of the world to its
respective North.
Ironically,
categories like those of ‘neo-colonialism’, ‘underdevelopment’, ‘uneven
exchange’ and ‘dependence’, regardless of the descriptive utility that they may
have with reference to specific cases, end up serving a political rhetoric such
as the one employed by the African
National Congress at the end of apartheid. They cover up the devastating
social effects of the ‘neo-liberal’ policies promoted by South African
governments in recent years in the name of the ineluctability and desirability
of ‘development’ and tend to stigmatise the extraordinary struggles against
those same policies – a paradigmatic example of what P. Chatterjee has recently
called “the politics of the governed”, so effectively described by Ashwin Desai
in We Are the Poors – as
‘reactionary’.
More
generally, to the otherwise detailed objections based upon the supposed
impossibility of a ‘post’-colonialism, one can retort that to proceed in this
manner is to end up squandering the inheritance and continuity of
anti-colonialism in its entirety and, with that, the profound sense of its
failure, of its ‘lacuna’ and, following Eric Santner’s reading of Walter
Benjamin’s Thesis on the Philosophy of History,
its character as a “symptom that insists”
in the present[13]. The
powerful, radical and subversive discontinuity that the anti-colonial struggles
have introduced, shattering that “homogeneous and empty” time that Benjamin
indicated as the constitutive dimension of the historical discourse of the West
(and of the colonial), is thereby
“sewn together again” (sutured).
For
this reason, to speak of the postcolonial is to specify the time that comes
problematically ‘after’ the colonies, after that unresolved geography that
emerged in Berlin in 1885; it means to bring to light the impossibility of that
trench drawn up on paper, the appearance of that territory upon the map,
without denying a single drop of the blood that has been shed and continues to
be shed because of that map. At the same time, it invites us to ponder again
the complexity of a world that, thanks primarily to the anti-colonial
struggles, has truly become one and
whose unity continues to be crossed by the subversive space of differences as well
as by deep inequality, patent imbalances and incessant exploitation.
4. Postcolonial Differences
Such an emphasis on the directly political dimension
of ‘differences’ enables postcolonialism to critically reconsider most of the
assumptions related to the field of identity politics. The point at stake is
first of all the connection between the colonial experience and the
conceptualization of difference. In short, it is clear that under colonialism
the trajectories of (material, political and cultural) difference have taken an
irrevocable deviation; which is to say, they have been forced to play their
part on the basis of a violently common script. Turning the problem around, we
can affirm that it is simply impossible to conceive modernity – its discourse
on difference and all the conceptual tools it has adopted in order to define,
to frame and ‘measure’ its import – without reference to the constitutive,
originary violence of the colonies.
George
Balandier, the French anthropologist who was echoed on the other side of the
Channel by Leach, Gluckman and the anthropologists of the Manchester School,
meant nothing more and nothing less than this when in his Political Anthropology he defined the ‘colonial situation’ at the
end of the sixties as the context, tout
court, of the ethno-anthropological discourse. Furthermore, all attempts to
trace a genealogy of the categories through which the discourse on difference
becomes fixed in science: race, ethnicity, culture… lead to that absolute
origin. The contribution of postcolonial studies seems to be central to this
genealogical exercise that draws upon Foucault’s work on the modern episteme, even as it compensates for
some of its lacunae (these lacunae being less innocent than they, at first,
seem[14]).
Whereas Fanon and Malcolm X, and Du Bois before them,
had asserted the impossibility of thinking ‘race’ outside the concrete
historical framework of the experience of colonial domination (exploring the
devastating effects, the veritable schizophrenia, induced by the simple fact of
being represented as a “problem”, forced to see oneself through the “eyes” of
another - ‘how do you feel about being a
problem?’), Edward Said and Valentin Mudimbe have highlighted the regimes
of truth crystallised in concepts such as ‘Orient’ and ‘Africa’. And whereas
the work of Jean-Loup Amselle and Elikia M’Bokolo, Au cœur de l’ethnie, discovered political and governmental origins
for the category of ‘ethnicity’ (which is, to say the least, central for
anthropological discourse), origins now hidden behind the ‘naturalness’ of a
term periodically employed in order to explain the character, reasons and
‘necessities’ of many postcolonial tensions, Arjun Appadurai brought to light
in his Modernity at Large the direct
nexus between the procedures of classification and the dispositifs of exploitation, relating them back to enumerative
strategies of colonial partage (division
or partition), from which not even the calendar, and thus the social
organisation of time, could consider itself immune.
But
postcolonial studies do not limit themselves to reconfirming the obvious
reciprocal implication of ‘differences’ and colonialism. Although many
postcolonial scholars focus their works on re-writing cultural transactions
implied in colonialism as well as on deconstructing the mainstream narrative of
postcolonial transition, their very object of analysis shifts them towards the
‘after’, towards the ‘global’ present. For this reason, postcolonial criticism
opens up, at least potentially, the space of a more complex attempt to grasp
the immediate political characters that differences assume in the contemporary
global arena. That it to say, to decipher the specific – often unintentional –
‘strategies’ underlying the manifestations of difference. Thus, for instance,
the use of the Derridean categories of suturing
and supplement, which have been
further elaborated by Gayatri Spivak, allows us to deepen the aporias and folds
that once operated between the lines of the official colonial discourses,
suggesting directly the continuous role they play in present time.
In other words, the idea concerns the forms and
practices of identity that continue
to define themselves in process, through a series of progressive slips that
follow the logic described by the rhetorical figure of catachresis (literally, the application to an object of a signifier
that does not denote it correctly and that, therefore, does not exhaust the
process of signification but rather extends and displaces it: for example, the
‘legs’ of a table) and that insinuate themselves in the interstices of the
colonial polarisation without reaching a possible synthesis; in opposition,
that is, to every simple and innocent image of both essentialism and syncretism.
It is no coincidence that awareness of the essentially
political and process-based dimension of difference, in its material aspects as
much as its discursive construction, should have attained what is, arguably,
its most significant developments in critical thought on gender and in the
critique of abstract universality arising in certain schools of Western
feminism. In these cases, the ability to ‘globally decentre’ all binary logic
and every potentially absolutist or ‘absolutising’ discourse confers, on
postcolonial feminist thought, a transversal political inflection that
problematises and enriches the discourse on difference, both in feminism and in
postcolonialism. The works of Chandra Talpade Mohanti (Feminism WIthout Borders), Ania Loomba (Colonialism/Postcolonialism) and other postcolonial feminists have
been specifically directed against the myth of the ‘Third World woman’, the
‘static’ paradigm of oppression that has occupied a central role in
anti-colonial nationalism and in much Western feminism. Rather than
interpreting ‘racial’, class, cultural and gender differences as discrete
factors or ones whose effects are cumulative, they propose to envisage those
elements as interacting, thus producing new and incomparable forms of
segregation and subjugation as well as new practices of difference and
resistance to patriarchy, racism and exploitation. From this interaction, the
experience of gender assumes an irreproducible dimension and ‘voice’ and, as
such, is systematically cancelled or represented as inexorably absent. This is,
perhaps, the implicit answer to the question to which Spivak dedicated her
critical intervention against a certain naivety of subaltern studies – ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak?’. This kind of repression appears to be a constant and
characterises the debates on sati (the
ritual sacrifice of Indian widows), the veil and infibulation. These practices
of ‘traditional’ power have opened up interminable ‘intercultural dialogues’ –
almost entirely circumscribed within ‘metropolitan’ spaces – for which, as Lata
Mani has stressed in her Contentious
Traditions, women have been, at best, a ‘site’ when not merely a pretext;
in any case, they have never been the subjects of this dialogue.
Beginning
from these dynamic premises, which are marked at the root by colonial
domination and the sequence of its effects (by what Gregory Bateson once called
‘schismogenesis’, as a difference produced by difference), the idea of
difference suggested by postcolonial critique takes an extremely rich
theoretical form, marking what we consider to be a substantive overcoming of
the modern relativist discourse and of its most recent political variants;
especially the multicultural ones. Indeed, this notion of difference enables us
to avoid the drift towards homologation not only, and not principally, in ‘normative’
terms but also in its analytic aspect. Against every rhetorical lament about
the ‘Westernisation’ and ‘Coca-Colonisation’ of the world, postcolonial
critique affirms the global present as a perpetual incubator of differences. At
the same time, precisely because of the constant insistence on the irreducible
colonial matrix of such differences, it emphatically denies all possible
cultural ‘authenticity’, contesting every staging of this matrix on the basis
of a logic that Edward Said and James Clifford define as the “symmetry of
redemption”.
In
the face of the rapid spread of essentialism in the debate on multiculturalism
(at least in the case of Italy), the postcolonial insistence on the categories
of creolisation, syncretism and hybridity comes as a badly needed breath of
fresh air. Yet, as we have already indicated, the semantic field constituted by
these concepts reveals itself to be as suggestive as it is hazardous. Here the
criticisms of Hardt and Negri, on the one hand, and of Zizek, on the other, hit
their target. As an example of the tendency to represent, often in apologetic
tones, a fluctuating difference, free of oppressive bonds and the blackmail of
a univocal belonging, is not hybridity, perhaps, the implicit or unsaid in the
new late-capitalist subjectivity? Conversely, does the emphasis on difference,
on the right to narrate in the first person, not exhaust itself in the demand
of a ‘right to difference’ that no one actually wants to deny and to which we
are always obliged to return?
The risk is that of a form of repression that projects
an imaginary discursive level, a level of memory, upon real tensions and
struggles and, in doing so, reproduces a twofold distance: a temporal one, to the extent that
contingency triumphs; and a spatial
one, to the extent that it separates hypostasised differences. That is to say,
the postcolonial apology of difference “keeps at a distance”, hiding the REAL
order of the present that is constructed by the domination of real capitalist
abstraction. In substance, this is Zizek’s critique. It represents a direct
accusation, especially if one bears in mind the insistence on local histories,
on the ‘truth’ of ‘decentred narratives’ to which many postcolonial studies
allude and refer. The problem that Zizek appears to ignore (indeed, Peter
Hallward’s critique of postcolonialism, which builds upon Zizek’s argument,
risks to end up proposing, once again, the nation-state as the only horizon
within which it is possible to re-inscribe practices of emancipation), is that,
generally, in anti-colonial struggles and, specifically, in postcolonial
critique, the stakes can no longer be
local, and are, it doesn’t matter whether out of necessity or choice,
unavoidably ‘immediately global’,
that is to say, necessarily and contradictorily ‘universal’. Moreover, we
are not dealing with an a priori, an abstract universality but rather with the
concrete universality imposed by colonial violence as a common discourse of
domination and exploitation.
Behind the insistence on local histories, emerge the
outlines of a more general theme of historical difference, of the plurality of
times upon which the real abstraction of capital has imposed its dominance,
arranging those times at first, through colonialism, in a succession of
‘stages’, and then, in the postcolonial present, violently synchronising them.
Indeed, it is precisely by considering the quality of historical time in our
present that, in our opinion, a final and decisive significance of the concept
of postcolonialism comes to light.
5. Seizing the Present
From this standpoint, one can forward a not so
far-fetched hypothesis about the substantive reasons for why our present
appears inclined to define itself through an inflationary usage of ‘post’.
Italian philosopher Paolo Virno’s thesis, developed in his Il ricordo del presente, on the ‘post-historical’ situation, as one
in which “the very condition of the possibility of History comes into view”,
provides a starting point. According to Virno, ‘post-historical’ is the
situation in which the tension between ‘potency’ and ‘act’, which founds the
possibility of chronological passage and temporal order, i.e. of becoming, ceases to operate behind the phenomena and rather
constitutes their perceptible framework.
Let
us attempt to interpret Virno’s reflection with the aid of categories suggested
by Reinhart Koselleck[15],
the general terms of whose analysis of ‘modernity’ are well-known. For
Koselleck, modernity is defined by an experience of the acceleration of time
that is philosophically grounded in an original gesture of reduction of the
plurality of traditional histories to the “collective singularity” of History.
The temporal vector that results from this reduction assumes the characteristics
of mono-directionality and linearity into which the tension between “horizon of
expectation” and “space of experience” is inserted. This tension, in its formal
aspects, occupies the same place as ‘potency’ and ‘act’ in Virno’s account.
According to Koselleck, this marks the origin of a movement of temporalisation
of the categories of politics, whose unifying cipher is constituted by the
concept of ‘progress’.
Postcolonial
critique intervenes on this point specifically. On the one hand, it does so
with a somewhat traditional gesture directed towards the past, or rather, to a past, that of slavery and the mute,
non-dialectical violence of colonial domination. Insofar as this past resists
to any possibility of compensation with respect to expectations, it obstinately
resists being consigned to the past, and populates the present with ghosts. On
the other hand, postcolonial criticism invests this same present with a
critique of ‘historicism’, such as the one proposed by Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe, focusing
specifically on the possibility of chronologically ordering the strata of which global time is composed.
In other words, it is the very temporal modality capital is forced to employ
today in the construction of its History, that is Benjamin’s “homogeneous and
empty” temporality, that continuously brings to the surface the plural
histories that it has matched, incorporated and overwhelmed in the process of
its becoming world.
Viewed
from this perspective, the time of the ‘post’ is one in which domination and
exploitation can by no means be said to have disappeared. On the contrary, such
a time is one in which the very possibility of distinguishing the privileged
places for transformation appears to have been suspended (it seems to us that this
is the ultimate meaning of the postcolonial insistence upon displacement). Then again, it is a time
in which every judgement on the ‘backward’ or ‘advanced’ status of a
determinate situation becomes provincialized,
in the sense that it can find its own operative criterion only in the present.
There is no model of ‘development’ that can be regarded as normative.
Outside
the ‘West’, an enduring theoretical labour to which heterogeneous intellectual
traditions have contributed has focused upon the category of transition. The analytic models that
have interpreted colonialism through the image of the transition to capitalism
have been defeated as have those political projects that, setting out from the
categories of ‘uneven exchange’, turned on the allegedly progressive virtues of
‘development’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘waged labor’. As a result of these defeats, a
plurality of historical times and thus of forms of dominance and practices of
liberation has always been a structural trait of capitalism outside the West.
Such a trait nowadays asserts itself on a global scale, penetrating the very
space that once used to be called ‘metropolitan’.
Therefore, the “provincialisation of
Europe” Chakrabarty speaks of acts in a twofold way. Firstly, it shows how
particular and non-generaliseable the experience of European (or ‘Western’)
capitalism has been, revealing (to borrow the terms used by Yann Moulier
Boutang in his seminal study De
l'esclavage au salariat) the importance of “anomalous forms” of the domination of labour in the constitution of
historical capitalism as a world-system. Secondly, it defines Europe (as well
as the ‘West’) as a province at the very moment in which the ‘Westernisation of
the world’ appears to have been achieved, to the extent that its borders become
‘porous’ to the ‘colonial’ codes that filter into what continues to think
itself as ‘the centre’.
This is the image of the present that can be
extrapolated from postcolonial criticism: a time in which the ensemble of pasts
that modern capitalism has encountered in its course re-emerges in disorderly
fashion, in a sort of ‘universal exhibition’. Here, far from being able to
define a linear tendency, what Marx
described so well as the ‘formal subsumption’ and the ‘real subsumption of
labour under capital’ hybridise and
co-exist side by side. Once the Colonial Border has definitely ceased to
organize an entire geography, it virtually proliferates everywhere, reproducing
itself on the apparently smooth surface of global present: it drives the new
delocalized logic of production; it brutally marks entire societies that once
were able to liberate themselves from colonial chains and nowadays are forced
to confront themselves with the failures of anticolonial struggles; it
introduces new radical differences of status and new forms of apartheid in
postcolonial West; it physically fortifies itself, condemning to death
potentially everyone who tries to overcome it, passing through the fences
between San Diego and Tijuana, or shipwrecking on the Mediterranean sea.
It is exactly such a logic of difference that is enacted and translated by western capital. A
logic that is able to talk the language of syncretism (as Zizek, Hardt and
Negri point out) and that is well ready even to concede a particular
sincronicity (that one of the market) to the different forms of life spreading
all around the world. That’s why equality
still sounds like the most provocative and scandalous word of late-capitalism’s
lexicon. Once we admit that new borders and new dispositifs still operate in order to implement differences, we
also recognize that yet those apparatuses are continuously defeated by the
direct agency of women and men who simply overcome them. For, in present time,
the possibility for liberation has definitively ceased to be assigned to the
secret operation of necessary, historical laws and, on the contrary, it is
entirely entrusted to the praxis of all those who live and act on the earth in
their irreducible multiplicity. In this way, the language of the universal
(that is, the language of equality), which each day must be reinvented as a
common property, also presents itself as a hybrid and mixed one. Beyond every
rhetoric, such a language forms the only basis for the articulation of a
possible politics of the multitude.
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* Translation by
Matteo Mandarini.
[1] Richard Baxter
quoted in Weber, The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism (181). Rey Chow’s recent book, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of
Capitalism provides an original point of view for rereading Weber’s classic
work in the postcolonial context, in particular related to the ubiquity of the
ethnic discourse in present time.
[2] Both Said, Culture
and Imperialism, and Thomas, Colonialism's
culture, undersocre for instance this point.
[3] As Etienne
Balibar stresses in La crainte des masses,
we directly experience today the emerging of a new concept of world, where, for the first time in
history, «humanity» rather than an abstract ideal appears «the condition of
existence for the indivduals» (430).
[4] Obviously Arif
Dirlik is not the only one to make this point. Rather strong criticism to such
a dissolution of historical time has been developed among others by Anne
McClintock (“The Myth of Progress. Pitfalls of the Term Post-Colonialism”) as
well as by Ella Shohat (“Notes on the Postcolonial”). In an even more radical
vein, San Juan, Jr.'s Beyond Postcolonial
Theory, drawing on Ahmad, envisages in the suspension of time suggested by
postcolonial theory the very negation of history.
[5] Césaire’s words are
worth quoting at length: “Oui, il vaudrait la peine d’étudier, cliniquement,
dans le détail, les démarches d’Hitler et de l’hitlerisme et de révéler au très
distingué, très humaniste, très chrétien bourgeois du Xxe siècle qu’il porte en
lui un Hitler qui s’ignore qu’Hitler l’habite
, qu’Hitler est son démon, que s’il le vitupère, c’est par amnque de logique,
et qu’au fond , ce qu’il pardonne pas à Hitler, c’est ne pas l’humiliation de
l’homme en soi, c’est le crime contre l’homme blanc, c’est l’humiliation de
l’homme blanc, et d’avoir appliqué à l’Europe des procédés colonialistes dont
ne revelaient jusqu’ici que les Arabes d’Algerie, les coolies de l’Inde, et les
nègres d’Afrique” (Césaire, Discours sur
le colonialisme, 12).
[6] He wrote: “There
was no Nazi atrocity – concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder,
defilement of women or ghastlyblasphemy of childhood – which the Christian
civilization of Europe had not been practicing against colored folk in all
parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born
to rule the world” (23)
[7] See also Parenti,
The Soft Cage: “fingerprinting
literally migrated from colonial periphery to the economic core. In the United
States the first populations to be fingerprinted en masse were convicts, petty
criminals, soldiers, and Native peoples” (49).
[8] See Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen, chap. 1.
[9] See Rahola, Zone definitivamente temporanee.
[10] See Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga, especially chap. 4.
[11] See Adorno, Minima moralia, 170
[12] Discussing
Nkrumah’s book Neocolonialism. The Last
Stage of Imperialism (first published in 1965), Robert Young correctly
points out in his Postcolonialism. An
Historical Introdction: “His stress on the continuing neocolonial dominance
has the disadvantage of suggesting a powerlessness and passivity which
underestimates what has been achieved since independence, including the
independence movements themselves, perpetuating stereotypes of helplessness
even while it implies sympathy and reinforcing assumptions of Western hegemony
with the third world being portrayed as its homogeneous eternal victim. […] As
a concept, neocolonialism is as disempowering as the conditions it portrays.
Removal of the possibilities of agency is equally a problem of more recent
theories of power operating through economic exploitation” (48-49).
[13] “Symptoms
register not only past failed revolutionary attempts but, more modestly, past
failures to respond to calls for action or even for empathy on behalf of those
whose suffering in some sense belongs to the form of life of which one is part.
They hold the place of something that is there, that insists in our life,
though it has never achieved full ontological consistency. Symptoms are thus in
some sense the virtual archives of voids or perhaps, better defenses against voids, that persists in historical
experience” (E. Santner, Miracles Happen,
quoted in Zizek's Revolution at the Gates).
[14] Probably, it is
not an hazard to envisage in Michel Foucault’s work a general removal
concerning the colonial hallmark, as a dark side of the process he refers to as
the construction of modern subject. Partha Chatterjee (in his article “More on
Modes of Power and Peasantry”) as well as Gayatri Spivak (e.g. in her seminal
essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?") have brilliantly developed such a
criticism.
[15] Both Koselleck's Futures
Past and his most recent Zeitschchten
are relevant here.