Postcolony+(BB)

This book speaks about Africa. And Africa is made to speak. Yet Africa is a product of discourse.

Mbembe explained in an interview more concisely than in the book what the "Africa" //is// in his book, the Africa that (in the introduction) //speaks.//


 * “… the reality with which I have been concerned throughout the book exists only as a set of sequences and connections that extend themselves only to dissolve. It is a reality that is made up of superstitions, narratives and fictions that claim to be true in the very act through which they produce the false, while at the same time giving rise to both terror, hilarity and astonishment. Indeed, I define the postcolony as a timespace characterized by proliferation and multiplicity. As a temporal formation, the postcolony is definitely an era of dispersed entanglements, the unity of which is produced out of differences. From a spatial point of view, it is an overlapping of different, intersected and entwined threads in tension with one another. Here, the task of the analyst is to tease out those threads, to locate those intersections and entwinements. This can only be done if, from the start, we take seriously the very compositeness of the postcolony. **


 * “…what is called Africa is first and foremost a geographical accident. It is this accident that we subsequently invest with a multitude of significations, diverse imaginary contents, or even fantasies, which, by force of repetition, end up becoming authoritative narratives. **


 * “As a consequence of the above, what we call 'Africa' could well be analyzed as a formation of desires, passions and undifferentiated fantasies. It is a subjective economy that is cultivated, nurtured, disciplined and reproduced. To nurture it, to police it and to reproduce it involve an intensive work of the imagination. But it also entails a tremendous labor of bad faith social science discourse does not know how to deal with.” **

Africa Dialogue Series interview by Christian Hoeller

What is Africa as a figure?

"African human experience" is apparent in discourse. This experience "can only be understood through a //negative interpretation//." Africa and human nature are distinct except when human nature is relegated "lesser value, little importance, and poor quality." Africa is the prime example of elementariness and primitiveness. Africa is "incomplete, mutilated, and unfinished." Africa as a figure functions as a "meta-text about the //animal//."

"...Africa unfolds under two signs":


 * 1) "the strange and the monstrous"
 * 2) "intimacy".... "an object of experimentation"

The Otherness of Africa is also a product of the idea of "common human nature", because its qualities cannot be shared with the West. Africa functions "as an idea, a concept" and "has historically served, and continues to serve, as a polemical argument for the West's desperate desire to assert its difference from the rest of the world." It thus functions as the mechanism to resolve the problem of humanity -- it's absolute Otherness resolves the difference among Humanity: Africa is all that is animal, inhuman. (pages 1-2)

"Three major features" that characterize "traditional societies" in the discourse about Africa:
 * 1) "facticity and arbitrariness"... "facticity" = acc to Hegel "the thing is; and it is merely because it is... and this simple immediacy constitutes its truth." ... "arbitrariness" = "in contrast to reason in the West, myth and fable are seen as what, in such societies, denote order and time." ... "nothing in these societies requires...justification"
 * 2) they live "under the burden of charms, spells, and prodigies, and resistant to change."
 * 3) "the person... is predominant over the individual"..."there are entities, captives of magical signs, amid an enchanted and mysterious universe in which the power of invocation and evocation replaces the power of production, and in which fantasy and caprice coexist not only with the possibility of disaster but with its reality." (p. 4)

"...recent historiography, anthropology and feminist criticism inspired by Foucauldian, neo-Gramscian paradigms or post-structuralism problematize everything in terms of how identities are 'invented,' 'hybrid,' 'fluid,' and 'negotiated.' On the pretext of avoiding single-factor explanations of domination, these disciplines have reduced the complex phenomena of the state and power to 'discourses' and 'representations,' forgetting that discourses and representations have materiality." (p. 5) "...no one asks any more about the market and capitalism as institutions both contingent and violent." (p. 6)

"...**socially produced and objectified practices....are not simply matters of discourse and language**, although of course the existential experience of the world is, here as elsewhere, symbolically structured by language; the constitution of the African self as a reflexive subject **also involves doing, seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, and touching**. In the eyes of all involved in the production of that self and subject, **these practices constitute what might be called //meaningful human expressions//**. Thus the African subject is like any other human being: he or she engages in //meaningful acts//. (It is self-evident that these meaningful human expressions do not necessarily make sense for everyone in the same way.) .... the African **subject does not exist apart from the acts that produce social reality, or apart from the process by which those practices are, so to speak, //imbued with meaning//**." (p. 6)

"....the //subject// emerging, acting effectively, withdrawing, or being removed in the act and context of //displacement// refers to two things:"
 * 1) first "to the forms of 'living in the concrete world,'"... " first a subject...has an // experience // of 'living in the concrete world,'"
 * 2) "then to the subjective forms that make possible any validation of its contents -- that objectify it. ... She/he is a subject of experience and a validating subject, not only in the sense that she/he is a conscious existence or has a perceptive consciousness of things, but to the extent that his/her 'living in the concrete world' involves and is evaluated by, his/her eyes, ears, mouth -- in short, his/her flesh, his/her body. " (p. 17

COMMANDEMENT = COLONIAL (MODE OF THE) SOVEREIGN

"Under colonization, the object and the subject of commandement combined in a sinle specific category, the native. Strictly speaking the 'native' is one born in the country under discussion. As such, the term is close to another, indigene -- that is, a 'son or daughter of the soil,' not someone who has settled as a result of immigration or conquest." (p. 28) The colonized, as a "productive agent," "was in effect marked, broken in, compelled to provide force labor, obliged to attend ceremonies, the aim being not only to tame and bring him/her to heel but also to extract from him/her the maximum possible use. The colonial relation, in its relation to subjection, was thus inseparable from the specific forms of punishment and a simultaneous quest for productivity. On this last point, it differs qualitatively from the postcolonial relation. One characteristic of commandement in the colonies was the confusion between the public and the private; the agents of the commandement could, at any moment, usurp the law and, in the name of the state, exercise it for purely private ends. But what marked violence in the colony was, as it were, its miniaturization; it occurred in what might be called the details. It tended to erupt at any time, on whatever pretext and anywhere. It was deployed in segmentary fashion, in the form of micro-actions which, becoming ever smaller, were the source of a host of petty fears." (p. 28)

Commandement...
 * 1) "...was based on a regime d'exception...a regime that departed from the common law. This departure from the principle of a single law for all went hand in hand with the delegation of private rights to individuals and companies and the constitution by those individuals and companies of a form of sovereignty drawing some features from royal power itself." (p. 29)
 * 2) "...involved...a regime of privileges and immunities." The ancien regime endowed consessionary companies "with vast powers, called at the time, privileges. These consisted mainly of rights to levy and raise taxes, collect rents, mint coinage, arm and maintain troops, make war and peace, make treaties, and grant titles and honors. In addition, there was a range of special favors; for example, goods transported by the company might be exempted from certain customs or license duties... they alone could sell or grant land...[and] enjoyed the privilege of having the sole right to trade between the metropole and the company's territory." (p. 30)
 * 3) Lacked a "distinction between ruling and civilizing... **Colonial arbitrariness notoriously sought to integrate the political with the social and the ethical, while closely subordinating all three to the requirements of production and output. Improving the lot of the colonized, and making equipment and goods (trade or non-trade) available to them, was justified by the fact that they were to be enrolled into the structures of production.**" (p. 31)
 * 4) had "circularity....The institutions with which it equipped itself, the procedures that it invented, the techniques that it employed, and the knowledge on which it rested were not deployed to attain any particular public good. Their primary purpose was absolute submission. The objective of this sort of sovereignty was that people obey. In this sense, and beyond ideological justifications, colonial sovereignty was circular."

"…the commandement defines itself as a cosmology or, more simply, as a fetish. A fetish is, among other things, an object that aspires to be made sacred; it demands power and seeks to maintain a close, intimate relationship with those who carry it (Coquet, 1985). A fetish can also take the form of a talisman that one can call upon, honor, and dread. In the postcolony, fetishistic power is invested not only in the person of the autocrat but also in the persons of the commandement and of its agents—the party, policemen, soldiers, administrators and officials, middlemen, and dealers. It turns the postcolonial autocrat into an object that feeds on applause, flattery, lies. By exercising raw power, the fetish, as embodied in the autocrat and the agents of autocracy, takes on an autonomous existence. It becomes unaccountable—or, in the words of Hegel, arbitrary to the extent that it reflects only upon itself. In this situation, one should not underestimate the violence that can be set in motion to protect the vocabulary used to denote or speak of the commandement, and to safeguard the official fictions that underwrite the apparatus of domination, since these are essential to keeping the people under the commandement’s spell, within an enchanted forest of adulation that, at the same time, makes them laugh." (p. 111)

“…the public affirmation of the “postcolonized subject” is not necessarily found in acts of “opposition” or “resistance” to the commandement. What defines the postcolonized subject is the ability to engage in baroque practices fundamentally ambiguous, fluid, and modifiable even where there are clear, written, and precise rules. These simultaneous yet apparently contradictory practices ratify, de facto, the status of fetish that state power so forcefully claims as its right. And by the same token they maintain, even while drawing upon officialese (its vocabulary, signs, and symbols), the possibility of altering the place and time of this ratification. This means that the recognition of state power as a fetish is significant only at the very heart of the ludic relationship. It is here that the official “sign” or “sense” is most easily “unpacked,” “disenchanted,” and gently repacked, and pretense (le simulacre) becomes the dominant modality of transactions between the state and society, or between rulers and those who are supposed to obey. This is what makes postcolonial relations not only relations of conviviality and covering over, but also of powerlessness par excellence—from the viewpoint both of the masters of power and of those they crush.” (p. 129)

"The basic question, of the emergence of a subject with rights, remains unresolved. The history of other regions of the world shows that taxation was what, apart from interpersonal allegiances, defined the bond between ruled and rulers. The state surely had the means to “oblige” subjects who had rights, but, at least in theory, it could only impose an obligation on them by putting itself under one. It only had the right to levy taxes to the extent that its subjects, represented in assemblies, exercised rights over the tax and how it was levied or expended. It was through this process that the state could define itself as a common good, as no longer simply a relationship of domination. It was also through this process that it converted its power to impose an obligation by placing an obligation on itself, into a power to state the law. And finally, it was through this process that subjects took for themselves a status in the political order—in that, by paying tax and exercising rights over its destination, they gave legal force to their political capacity and capacities as citizens. They did so by entering into the play of rights and claims with the state, which, in so doing, provided itself with public credit, precisely because it was using its sovereign power in a way that respected what was a matter of right. This is what is at stake in the ongoing struggles in Africa." (p. 93-4)

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“…to account for both the mind-set and the effectiveness of postcolonial relations of power, we need to go beyond the binary categories used in standard interpretations of domination, such as resistance vs. passivity, autonomy vs. subjection, state vs. civil society, hegemony vs. counter-hegemony, totalization vs. detotalization. These oppositions are not helpful; rather, they cloud our understanding of postcolonial relations. In the postcolony, the commandement seeks to institutionalize itself, to achieve legitimation and hegemony (recherche hégémonique), in the form of a fetish. The signs, vocabulary, and narratives that the commandement produces are meant not merely to be symbols; they are officially invested with a surplus of meanings that are not negotiable and that one is officially forbidden to depart from or challenge.” (p. 103)

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"Again, we see language at work. This does not consist primarily in an exchange of speech acts intended to communicate, but serves essentially to translate orders, impose silences, prescribe, censure, and intimidate. Its function is to break down life, to freeze it the better to reproduce it by trampling it. Does this function always succeed? Nothing could be less certain, and not always because of the recurring gap between colonial design and the recalcitrance of the colonized, but primarily because this fragment of the world called a colony is in reality made up of disparate times, overlapping sequences, hiatuses. This fragment of the world is a disparate tangle of random happenings that encourage the dispersal of language and its collapse into the silence of the void—one reason why, in a colony, one function of language is to distort everything. To exist, separately and together, colonizer and colonized distort whatever comes to hand, anything. Indiscriminately, they assign a burden of fiction to places, events, people, to everything and nothing. They move constantly, offhandedly, from one moment to its opposite. And it is this endlessly repeated game of disguise—rendering hidden things apparent while making every presence simulate an absence and vice versa,—that, at least in the colonizer, provides the basis for a very particular enjoyment, a very special satisfaction—a conjuring trick." (p. 179-180)

"As an animal, the native is supposed to belong to the family of eminently mechanical, almost physical things, without language, even though endowed with sense organs, veins, muscles, nerves, and arteries through which nature, in its virginal power, manifests itself. Placed at the margins of the human, the native, with the animal, belongs to the register of imperfection, error, deviation, approximation, corruption, and monstrosity. Not having attained the age of maturity, natives and animals cannot stand on their own two feet; this is why they are put firmly in the grasp of another." (p. 236)

"Colonization as an enterprise of domestication includes at least three factors:
 * 1) the appropriation of the animal (the native) by the human (the colonist);
 * 2) the familiarization of man (the colonist) and the animal (the native);
 * 3) and the utilization of the animal (the native) by the human (the colonist)." (p. 237)

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“…answering the question as to what remains of the promise of African self-determination has required a return to two major events of the century just closed: on the one hand, the relationship established, in the colony and //after the colony//, between the exercise of power and //the process of becoming savage//; on the other hand, the mirror effect resulting from the entrance into the era of unhappiness.” (p. 238)