SPAT_05_LN

“More than any other region, Africa thus stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of “absence,” “lack,” and “non-being,” of identity and difference, of negativeness – in short, of nothingness” (Mbembe 4) ** “meaningful human expressions”

** “[…] 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”// (M 6)

“Social theory has failed also to account for //time as lived,// not synchronically or diachronically, but in its multiplicity and simultaneities, its presence and absences, beyond the lazy categories of permanence and change beloved of so many historians” (Mbembe 8).

Objectification of the colonized, becoming of thing – What are the implications here regarding object oriented ontologies? People as just another object – Does that end up making colonialism and other forms of domination ‘OK’? Is that one of the reasons people push up against ANT so much? Am I reading too much into this quote? (Probably) “He/she was a tool subordinated to the one who fashioned, and could now use and alter, him/her at will. As such, he/she belonged to the //sphere// //of objects//. They could be destroyed, as one may kill an animal, cut it up, cook it, and, if need be, eat it. It is in this respect that, in the colony, the body of the colonized was, in its profanity, assimilated to all other things. For being simply a “body-thing” the colonized was neither the substratum nor the affirmation of any spirit” (26-27)

Politics/labor/sociality of Colonization : “Since the notion of citizen overlaps that of nationality, the colonized, being excluded from the vote, is not being simply consigned to the fringes of the nation, but is virtually a stranger in his/her own home. The idea of political or civil equality— that is, of an equivalence among all inhabitants of the colony—is not the bond among those living in the colony. The figure of obedience and domination in the colony rests on the assertion that the state is under no social obligation to the colonized and this latter is owed nothing by the state but that which the state, in its infinite goodness, has deigned to grant and reserves the right to revoke at any moment” (M 35)

“It is necessary to examine the failures recorded within the trinity of violence, transfers, and allocations—a trinity constituting the foundation of postcolonial African authoritarian regimes. I have spent some time discussing violence; I must now briefly look at the other two dimensions of this trinity” (M 46).

More important, economic activity is increasingly like war activity. Roads are cut, cargoes highjacked, convoys escorted, security services hired—making clear that the boundaries between production, extortion, and predation have been blurred. No one knows very clearly any longer what belongs to whom, or who has a right to what, still less who must be excluded and why. The immediate consequences of institutional violence and the logic of rioting are to prevent any effective consolidation of so-called civil society while rendering the state totally impotent (50-1)

“As we have seen, too, postcolonial African regimes had attempted to integrate and discipline the bulk of the urban population through the mechanism of the salary—a gift, when examined closely, allocated for the purposes of institutionalizing a form of domination having its own rationality” (M 54) – coercion and control through involvement. Creation of power not through force, but through gifts and a different kind of disciplining, as in Foucault’s “Discipline & Punish”

One weird note of interest: I had never thought about the changing of the Eastern European Economy and the fall of the wall in terms of African economics…what are the implications now? What of the coalescing of the European Union?

ENTANGLEMENT & FISCALITY Entaglement […] must not only include the coercion to which people are subjected, and the sufferings inflicted on the human body by war, scarcity, and destitution, but also embrace a whole cluster of re-orderings of society, culture, and identity, and a series of recent changes in the way power is exercised and rationalized” (66)

“Taken together, this appropriation of means of livelihood, this allocation of profits, the types of extraction thus required, and concentration of coercion involved will be described here under the general term //fiscality” (//66).

“More starkly, the developments now under way combine—and, in Africa, are // creating systems // in such an original way that the result is not only debt, the destruction of productive capital, and war, but also the disintegration of the state and, in some cases, its wasting away and the radical challenging of it as a “public good,” as a general mechanism of rule, or as the best instrument for ensuring the protection and safety of individuals, for creating the legal conditions for the extension of political rights, and for making possible the exercise of citizenship” (73)

So how might one rethink the state? How to break this zombification cycle?

The postcolony is characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion, as well as by distinctive ways identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation (102)

The familiarity of sharing the same living space, of familiarity of domesticity within post-colonialism in regards to those in power and those dominated: “Instead, this logic has resulted in the mutual “zombification” of both the dominant and those apparently dominated. This zombification means that each has robbed the other of vitality and left both impotent ( // impouvoir // )” (104)

It is this practice that enables subjects to splinter their identities and to represent themselves as always changing their persona; they are constantly undergoing mitosis, whether in “official” space or not.Hence, it would seem wrong to continue to interpret postcolonial relationships in terms of resistance or absolute domination, or as a function of the binary oppositions usually adduced in conventional analyses of movements of indiscipline and revolt (e.g. counter-discourse, counter-society, counter-hegemony, “the second society.”)” (104-5)

“theophagy” – “where the god is devoured by the worshippers” (112).

THING AS DOUBLE – IMAGERY & INTERPRETATION/TRANSLATION

Yet, in spite of its claim to represent presence, immediacy, and facticity, what is special about an image is its “likeness”— that is, its ability to annex and mime what it represents, while, in the very act of representation, masking the power of its own arbitrariness, its own potential for opacity, simulacrum, and distortion. (142)

Connections to Derrida – spoken language and performativity as text, as record, which is a traditional basis of keeping thought going. An oral/design/meaning-in-artifact tradition. Pictures and drawings continuing to speak, speaking to hidden/blatant banal issues at hand: “The pictographic sign does not belong solely in the field of “seeing”; it also falls in that of “speaking.” It is in itself a figure of speech,and this speech expresses itself, not only for itself or as a mode of describing, narrating, and representing reality, but also as a particular strategy of persuasion, even violence. (142)

In these conditions, the great epistemological—and therefore social— break was not between what was seen and what was read, but between what was seen ( // the visible // ) and what was not seen ( // the occult // ), between what was heard, spoken, and memorized and what was concealed ( // the //// secret // ). To the extent that reality had each time to be transformed into sign and the sign constantly filled with reality, the problem for those whose main activity was publicly to decipher the world was to interpret simultaneously both its obverse and what might be called its negation, its reverse. (145)

It was to this extent that the world of images—that is, the other side of things, language, and life—belonged to the world of charms. For having the power to represent reality (to make images, carve masks, and so on) implied that one had recourse to the sort of magic and double sight, imagination, even fabrication, that consisted in clothing the signs with appearances of the thing for which they were the metaphor. (145)

In this respect, he manages to abolish and maintain distance at one and the same time, since he is both remoteand close, the obverse and the reverse, that “something” that // is present for us // not only because it is displayed and we experience it—we // experience the thing // —but, more decisively, because it is the very thing of our // experience: // tangible, palpable, and visible, but at the same time secret and distant—in short, a “non-localized universal presence.” (153)

Does anything change? Is anything really different? Or is it just chains down the line of translation? Reinforcing dominant structures at play, but just through different modes of power:: “More prosaically, we sought to define the // quantitative // and // qualitative // difference, if any, between the colonial period and what followed: have we really entered another period, or do we find the same theater, the same mimetic acting, with different actors and spectators, but with the same convulsions and the same insult? Can we really talk of moving beyond colonialism?” (237)