The+Seventh+Week



Against those theoretical approaches that would reduce the range of historical choices gestating in Africa to a stark alternative of either “transition” to democracy and the shift to a market economy, or descent into the shadows of war, we must stress again //the role of contingency//, and reassert the hypothesis that the organizations likely to emerge from current developments will be anything but the result of coherent premeditated plans.

All [the state] has left is control of the forces of coercion, in a context marked by material devastation, disorganization of credit and production circuits, and an abrupt collapse of notions of public good, general utility, and law and order.

Almost everywhere, the state has lost much of that capacity to regulate and arbitrate that enabled it to construct its legitimacy.

By displacing the site where political, regulatory, and technical choices are made, not only have the very sources of power been transferred to international trustees just when some attributions of sovereignty were being “deleted.” What has also happened is that the sources of legitimacy and influence have also been displaced, and, in so doing, the criteria of accountability have been blurred, since those who impose the policies are not merely “invisible” to the eyes of the population but are also different from those who must answer for their consequences to the people.
 * The consequences of neoliberalism

To a large extent, “salary-earner,” “citizen,” and “client” reciprocally reproduce one another – or, at any event, participated in a single structure of conscious representations well described by what has been called “the politics of the belly.”

The continent is //turning inward on itself// if a very serious way – and the hackneyed notions of crisis and “marginalization” do not begin to do justice to the process at work.

It is helping alter the ways incomes are made and distributed, the forms of community, the structures for representing and mediating economic and political interests, the conditions in which are appropriated resources necessary for the reproduction of the dominant social relations, issues of citizenship, and even the very nature of the state.
 * These are the stakes of neoliberalism

The failure of adjustment policies is not the same everywhere; at least, it does not produce the same effects everywhere.

The outcome of these profound movements may well be the final defeat of the state in Africa as we know it in recent years. But it might equally well be a deepening of the state’s indigenization, – or, more radically, its replacement by dispositifs that retain the name but have intrinsic qualities and modes of operation quite unlike those of a conventional state.

Capacity for self-government and self-determination, are challenged by two sorts of threats. On the one hand, there are threats of //internal dissolution//…the risks of a general loss of control of both public and private violence.

Three pillars without which no modern social order exists: definition of prerogatives and limits of public power; codification of the rights, privileges, and inequalities tolerable in a society; and, finally, the financial underpinnings of the first two pillars.

Who is protected, by whom, against what and whom, and at what price? Who is the equal of whom? To what has one a right by virtue of belonging to an ethnic group, a region, or a religion? Who has a right to take power and govern, in what circumstances, how, for how long, and on what conditions? Who has the right to the product of whose work, and for what compensation? When may one cease to obey authority, without punishment? Who must pay taxes and where do these revenues go? Who may contract debts, and in the name of whom, and for what may they be expended? To whom do a country’s riches belong? In short, who has the rights to live and exist, and who has not, and why?
 * This is a rather imposing list of questions.

Three major historical processes at the very center of our analysis: first, the de-linking of Africa from formal international markets; second, the forms of its integration into the circuits of the parallel international economy; and third, the fragmentation of public authority and emergence of multiples forms of //private indirect government// accompanying these two processes.

Through these apparently novel forms of integration into the international system and the concomitant modes of economic exploitation, equally novel technologies of domination are taking shape over almost the entire continent.
 * Democracy itself is culturally situated. So perhaps when I, as an STS scholar, say “democracy,” what I mean is a system of authority that does not rely on the legitimation of exclusion and organized inequality.

Competitiveness of its economies on the world level. This challenge cannot be victoriously met in the current world economy without an increase in productivity – that is, in the last analysis, without putting in place effective ways of constructing inequality and organizing social exclusion.

Structural adjustment programs important…from the angle of the political and cultural effects they are producing and of how those effects are undermining the postcolonial compromise, emasculating the traditional instruments of state power, and bringing about a profound modification of social structures and cultural imaginations.

The prolonged withering away of the state, but also to an extraordinary fragmentation of the market – the two processes being disproportionately conducive to an uncontrolled upsurge of violence.

It is thus the very backbone of these modes of domination that is affected, since the system of means of livelihood and rewards on which the regimes’ legitimacy partly rested is undermined and, in most cases, no longer has ways to reproduce itself.

Privatization of public enterprises and downsizing of the civil service have involved major reductions in staff, substantial reductions in wages, or massive layoffs, and have contributed to blocking the system of intra-community transfers, thus reactivating conflicts over the distribution of wealth and calling into question the morality of the system of inequality and domination forged after independence.

Helped by the structural inertia of African economics, the bias towards speculative activities (one feature of globalization) has occurred here as elsewhere, at the expense of productive activities.

In the countries of Africa with economic potential, the general configuration of the market, the industrial base, the structure of relations between bureaucracy and local business circles, and the nature of respective alliances with multinational firms ruled out any possibility either of gaining access to new technologies and new distribution networks or of accumulating any substantial manufacturing know-how or developing an entrepreneurial dynamic that could have helped to respond creatively to the constraints of the world market, as occurred elsewhere.

In Africa both before and after colonization, state power enhanced its value by establishing specific relations of subjection, something must be said about the relationships between subjection, the distribution of wealth and tribute, and the more general problem of the constitution of postcolonial subjects.

Postcolonial African regimes have not invented what they know of government from scratch. Their knowledge is the product of several cultures, heritages, and traditions of which the feature have become entangled over time, to the point where something has emerged that has the look of “custom” without being reducible to it, and partakes of “modernity” without being wholly included in it.

The colonial model was, in both theory and practice, the exact opposite of the liberal model of debate and discussion.

Colonial sovereignty rested on three sorts of violence.

Founding violence…its supreme right was (by its capacity to assume the act of destroying) simultaneously the supreme denial of right.

Legitimation…to help produce an imaginary capacity converting the founding violence into authorizing authority.

Violence designed to ensure this authority’s maintenance, spread, and permanence…played so important a role in everyday life that it ended up constituting the central cultural //imaginary// that the state shared with society, and thus had an authenticating and reiterating function.

This violence was of a very particular sort, immediately tangible, and it gave the natives a clear notion of themselves in proportion to the power that they had lost…It eliminated all distinction between ends and means; depending on circumstances, this sovereign violence was its own end and came with its own “instructions for use.”

In regard to colonial sovereignty, right was on //one// side. And it was seized in the very act of occurring. In face of it, there could only be “wrong” and infraction. Anything that did not recognize this violence as authority, that contested its protocols was savage and outlaw.

This requires distinguishing two traditions, each according a central place to an image of the colonized that made of the native the prototype of the //animal//.

The native subjected to power and to the colonial state could in no way be another “myself”…he/she was a bundle of drives, but not of //capacities//…As such, he/she belonged to the //sphere of objects//…It is in this respect that, in the colony, the body of the colonized was, in its profanity, assimilated to all other things.

The second tradition…rested on the idea that one could, as with an animal, //sympathize// with the colonized, even “love” him or her.

Affection for the colonized could also be externalized in gestures; the colonized would have to, in return, render the master or mistress the same affection the master/mistress gave. But, beyond gesture, the master’s/mistress’s affection for the animal presented itself as an inner force that should govern the animal…familiarity and domestication thus became the dominant tropes of servitude.