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Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities
By Iain Chambers Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2017 Iain Chambers
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78660-333-3
CHAPTER 1
The Algebra of Power
Returning recently to the beautifully woven text and images of John Berger and Jean Mohr's prescient work on migration, A Seventh Man, published some forty odd years ago, I came across this significant judgement:
History, political theory, sociology can help one to understand that 'the normal' is only normative. Unfortunately these disciplines are usually used to do the opposite: to serve tradition by asking questions in such a way that the answers sanctify the norms as absolutes.
I feel this is the case, and even more so today. The contemporary organisation of awareness and knowledge overwhelmingly serves to establish an uninterrupted language of conformity. It leads to structural change being obfuscated. Interrogation is silenced in a consensus that refuses to consider our language, position and the making of meaning. Disagreement and disturbance, and not the procedures that seek to crush them, are merely considered 'ideological'. Whatever troubles the status quo is rapidly labelled an anomaly or deviancy: transitory instances of local emergencies on the flat plateau of agreed procedures.
Opposed to this critical foreclosure, I would like to suggest that contemporary migration, or the racism that precedes and accompanies it, is precisely not, as we are taught to believe, about a set of exceptions or emergencies. Both are woven deeply into the web of Western democracy, into its historical and cultural life. With death spilling out of the headlines — from drownings in the Mediterranean to racial shootings in America's inner cities, the violent surveillance of territories and lives in Palestine, bomb attacks and mass shootings in European capitals — I would also argue that the limits and hypocrisies of the moral economy of the Occident are being continually exposed. The enemy — invariably non-European, non-white, and non-Christian, fundamentally 'queer' with respect to the normative — is immediately identified and externalised. These are the limits of a precise history and its structures of power. They speak of the critical and political responsibilities for those processes that have brought us to where we are today. This pushes us to understand the present movement of migration from the multiple souths of the planet, the consistency of racism and the rendering of certain ethnic groups, minorities and associated cultures as second class citizens or not yet modern, as a historical condition. These are not temporary phenomena or accidental pathologies; they involve structured, historical processes and apparatuses of power. Insisting that such questions are central, and not peripheral, to modernity is not simply of economical, sociological or anthropological importance. What we touch here are the very mechanisms of knowledge and power that legitimate the present order.
MODERNITY AS HEGEMONY
It is also here that we are forced increasingly to recognise that the democracy inherited from the liberal state — now fundamentally blocked in the abstract grammar of eighteenth-century constitutionalism and caricatured in the superficial sensationalisms of the mass media — is increasingly gutted and reduced to the state of oligarchy. An accentuated individualism, legally extended and secured in private property rights, increasingly cancels social space and public responsibilities. The accentuated utilitarianism of neoliberalism and the absolute valorisation of the individual today produces an immanent order in which there are apparently no longer external relations and forces. As Margaret Thatcher succinctly summed it up in 1987: 'There is no such thing as society'. Everything is now domesticated and individualised as the factor of life itself. Here the historical antagonism between the prospects of democracy and individual self-realisation have slipped far beyond their earlier and more restricted confines. Ideas connected to the fair distribution of resources and opportunities have been crushed by the ideological triumph of responsibilities that serve only to confirm the individual. The autonomy of the self now reaches into the sinews of public government: policing and security, like health and education, are not only atomised in response to restricted individual access and personal wealth, they also become autonomous agencies, increasingly only answerable to their budgets, agendas and language. If the United States today is the most blatant example, it is not alone. As in so many areas of modern life, it sets the trend for a wave washing through the West and the world.
The presumptions that surround and sustain such concepts as the 'individual', 'citizenship', 'democracy' and 'freedom' are themselves the products of such mechanisms. While they continue to be presented as neutral and abstract ideals, their practices tell us a very different story. What has been repressed in the representation points us to other maps and temporalities in a planetary modernity that is not merely 'ours' to define. If the politics of explaining and managing the modern world can only be sustained though the violent maintenance of unequal relations of power and the associated negation of other voices and histories, then perhaps we should ask ourselves what precisely does this universality, its democracy and modernity, consist of? This is to entertain seriously the idea that modernity itself is historically and culturally the precise mode of Occidental hegemony and that we need therefore to confront and unpack its premises and practices. At the same time, this modernity cannot simply be cast aside or cancelled. It is, after all, the matrix in which we all move, are positioned, and work to find ourselves and other promises and prospects.
COLONIAL FALL-OUT
It is this rough, undone and frayed web that sustains the arguments in this book. Their gestation occurs very much in a European ambient. There exists no pretence to explain or speak in the name of the non-Occidental world. Here, where my words deliberately fall short, the presumed distinctions between the West and the rest, centre and periphery, are rather problematised and exposed. Altogether more fluid geographies and transitory territories now encroach upon inherited understandings and views. Hierarchies of power and command are increasingly multiple and heterogeneous. This is to begin to register the limits of a knowledge formation that operates as though it were the unique global paradigm, whose history is History tout court. So, to insist on gaps in the account means to listen to other accents and rhythms, to register resonance and dissonance. This is deliberately to disband the particular form of historical reasoning that secures Occidental thought and practices in a theology of 'progress' and its linear conquest of space and time. In a word, it is to slip away from the colonial imperatives that made the West the West. Here, in the break-up of European historicism — where only the West is warranted to tell the tale — the subterranean tempos of deeper times and longer rhythms are rendered proximate. The colonial past, conquests, racist slavery and the division of the world among imperial powers are never simply 'back there'; they are constitutive of the present. They live on and continue to mould our comprehension of the existing world. This situation urgently implies changing the conditions of knowledge and posing the 'problem of writing critical histories of the postcolonial present'.
Engaged with the mixing and mutation of time and space, other cultures and lives translate our coordinates from the presumed stability that reflects our passage into a heterogeneous scene seeding different histories and multiple trajectories. The world is crossed and cut-up. It is folded into diverse narratives that refuse to be blocked in a uniform accounting of time. It is precisely in this sense that contemporary migration and racism open an archive; an archive that is not so much an institution as a site of ongoing historical processes and the location of continuing social and political antagonisms. Here colonialism, migration and racism can no longer be contained in the categories of economical or sociological phenomena. Rather, they become instances of epistemological and ontological inquiry. As structures of historical violence they challenge the placid presumptions of both our knowledge and our everyday lives. They produce a modernity incorporated and imagined by other bodies and histories; in particular, by the so-called non-Western world which in being 'worlded' by the Occidental turns out to be both internal and central to the West that considers itself to be the unique measure of the planet.
The Industrial Revolution, misleadingly figuring in popular consciousness as an autochthonous metropolitan phenomenon, required colonial land and labour to produce its raw materials just as centrally as it required metropolitan factories and an industrial proletariat to process them, whereupon the colonies were again required as a market. The expropriated Aboriginal, enslaved African American, or indentured Asian is as thoroughly modern as the factory worker, bureaucrat, or flâneur of the metropolitan centre.
Such intimacies are directly distilled in the intricate relationships of the formation of the modern European nation state, its cultures, cities, and its unilateral fashioning of the world where modernity, colonialism and capitalism became one. This is not about adding the equations of culture and power to the economic formula. It is about an altogether more complex coming together in a precise political economy. Here, to extend the map of the modern nation and include the colonial spaces over which it exercised its military, political and economic authority, is to change our very understanding of what constitutes the contemporary polity, its wealth, culture and population. This is to chart its making and practices on a very different map where the colonial periphery turns out to be integral to the making of metropolitan life and culture. Genocide, massacres and all the brutal violence of colonial appropriation and territorial aggression come now to be registered within the making of the modern European nation state. They are not unfortunate incidents, terrible tragedies, taking place far from home. They are constitutive of home itself.
CRUEL COMBINATIONS
This leads to unwinding the claims of democracy and citizenship, of rights and the rule of law, in an altogether more extensive and unauthorised space. For if European states sought to establish their authority in the singularity of the nation, their rivalry remains persistently colonial in continuing to contest the spoils of the planet. Decolonialising this inheritance does not merely mean finally to pay attention to the so-called colonial periphery of yesterday, recovering its histories and registering injustice. Bomb attacks, mass shootings and civilian deaths in Madrid, London, Paris and Bruxelles, render dramatically proximate similar events in Tunis, Beirut, Baghdad, Kabul, Lahore and Peshawar. Here the colonial concoctions that configured modernity (the European carve-up of Africa and the invention of the 'Middle East') take their revenge on the present. In more immediate terms, raging continual warfare on Muslim countries for almost three decades, from Iraq to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, leading to the death of more than 500,000 civilians, inevitably leads to what political commentators call blowback. As the writer Hanif Kureishi put it in the aftermath of the London bombings of 2005: 'Modern Western politicians believe we can murder real others in faraway places without the same thing happening to us, and without any physical or moral suffering on our part'. This is to forcibly remind ourselves of the cruel combinations of colonial histories and postcolonial proximities that come to be stitched into the very fabric of the modern metropolis. Pulled through these examples into a deeper historical trough we confront the brutal evidence of Occidental colonialism being involved in a perpetual war on the rest of the planet for the last five centuries.
When Europeans arrived in what is now Latin America in 1492, the region may have been inhabited by between 50 million and 100 million indigenous people. By the mid 1600s, their population was slashed to about 3.5 million. The vast majority succumbed to foreign disease and many were slaughtered, died of slavery or starved to death after being kicked off their land. It was like the holocaust seven times over.
Tzevtan Todorov has referred to this history as humanity's greatest genocide.
It is in this precise sense that the urgency of a postcolonial perspective is not simply about rescuing forgotten histories and denied lives, and finally adding them to the previous account. The other voices and visions that arrive from the so-called margins of modernity, once directly colonised, today bracketed in the categories of the developing and underdeveloped world, promote a sharp epistemological challenge. The very premises of a modernity no longer guaranteed by a unique universalism is disrupted and dispersed. The exercise of scientific neutrality and critical distance fall apart in a worldly space in which power, no matter how complex, multifaceted and subtle its exercise, exposes a geopolitical provenance, a series of cultural agendas, a historical will; that is, a series, intricate and unintended, of hegemonies at work. It is precisely through this heterogeneous complexity, even when exposed in scholarly subtleties and sensitive attention to detail, that hegemony, as opposed to mere instrumental domination, is reproduced. Its manner of narration, no matter how liberal or 'multicultural' it may seek to be, structurally excludes whatever seeks to challenge its manner of recognising itself and registering others. This, is what the Peruvian anthropologist Anibal Quijano calls the coloniality of power rendered as knowledge. The methodology legitimates the dominion of the discourse. What I will be arguing here, against that dominion, is that the pieces of an increasingly fragmented tradition can no longer be put back together again. They now constitute a broken archive. Historically inherited elements can only be reassembled in an ongoing configuration where the old binaries of south and north fall away to be replaced by an altogether more heterogeneous and overlapping set of relations. When the once excluded and elsewhere is also in here, then the proximities of dissonance and resonance within an increasing conviviality of languages and localities touches the complexities of all the components.
So, the break-up of empire is not about its immediate cancellation; the colonial inheritance cannot simply be wiped off the slate. It is rather about the emerging assemblage of what has been subordinated or simply excluded from the existing framing and explanation of modernity. This implies engaging with spaces and practices that propose other rhythms and reasons. In the present circumstances these may well be negated, subordinated and reduced to marginal cultures and local histories, unable to claim the universal validity of the West. Nevertheless they exist, persist and resist within that very same modernity as a sore, a wound, a persistent interrogation; what the anthropologist Tarek Elhaik refers us to as an 'incurable image'. These are the other histories, and not exclusively human, that ghost our present. They hold Occidental modernity up to the light, exposing its shadows. They propose a re-membering of the world that evokes other manners of narrating, other shapes and figures that support understandings of the past-present-future. The archive slips beyond unique control. Modes of classification and meaning multiply. Worldly coordinates loom into view and another universalism begins to emerge: one not dictated and scripted solely by us.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities by Iain Chambers. Copyright © 2017 Iain Chambers. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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