Paresh Chandra

Introduction: Zombies beyond Zizek (and Jameson)

The following statement, often quoted, and attributed at times to Slavoj Zizek and at others to Fredric Jameson, sums up a persuasive theorization of the ubiquity of the apocalypse theme in contemporary popular culture: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”(1) The desire to go beyond the condition of capitalism hits a limit and is unable to envision an outside. The circuits of capital are so large and complicated and capital moves with such velocity that the mind boggles, unable to stabilize images; it is difficult to form a cognitive map of this totality (Jameson); sensibility is saturated, the imagination’s limits already reached (Berardi). In trying to reach beyond capital, the mind extends beyond itself and the world.

There is undeniably much to be gained by mining into this statement. But while it has the beauty of simplicity, it also suffers from simplicity’s inevitable partiality. Is not the impossibility of imagining an end to capital itself a brilliant ideological effect? In which case, should we not look upon the failed fantasy of capitalism’s end also as the wish fulfilling fiction of its continued reproduction/expansion? The Jamesonian lesson is that utopia (or, as in this case, dystopia) and ideology always exist together, verso and recto. So the project, really, is to think the text in opposite directions at the same time, see it as a disjunctive synthesis of the desire to see an end to capitalism and the one to see it reborn. Although this essay attempts such fork-tongued speech, because it addresses an imbalance in past theorization (marked by the popularity of the statement we began by quoting), it too lays more emphasis one side of the dialectic.(2)

There are two arguments this essay seeks to make, one explicit and the other implied. First, it argues that the principal lesson of the zombie apocalypse is that disaster is not simply an undesired, though inevitable outcome of capitalist development, but the remedy meant to save capitalism from collapse. Global destruction is the next logical step in the history of capitalist development and capitalism actively desires such destruction. Hence we have the paradoxical if obvious truth, that the narrative of such destruction (the apocalypse film/comic book/TV series) is essentially not about death and destruction, but survival.

This observation, notwithstanding its banality, is key. What is the nature of survival? Under what conditions will humanity survive? This survival is a return, in many ways to a state of nature from where history can begin all over again. It returns us to a basic contradiction that takes two distinct forms at two separate levels of abstraction, class struggle, and the struggle between nature and human production, and which culminates in the restoration/reproduction of capital. Should the world end then, capitalism will survive with the few survivors. In the absence of capitalist structuration reality will be disordered, a dark age of violence and naked force etc., an age that may eventually yield to a new history of capitalist becoming.

The second argument, implicit, is the real excuse for the writing of this essay. It is that while this idea – that destruction is the logical next step of capitalist development – can only be stated and examined using concepts borrowed from theory (Marx’s idea of General Intellect for example), it is clearly discernible only in the kind of texts we seek to explore. In other words the zombie apocalypse has an important lesson for radical theory, a lesson that may not be learnt anywhere else.

Primitive Accumulation and War

Thinking back to the Black Death, what surfaces is not just disorder and violence. Or rather, disorder did not limit itself to violence as its only form. Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, speaks of radical heretic tendencies in the European peasantry that had transformed that apocalyptic moment into a genuine crisis of feudalism (which was also, by instituting a likely foreclosure of the possibility of capital’s emergence, a crisis of capitalism). Federici is able to perform the difficult task of looking beyond history’s narrative of necessity, to a moment of possibility, to recover it as a moment in which the history of class struggle could have ended. History that has formed us, has been one in which the crisis of feudalism was the transition to capitalism. That was the extent of society’s recomposition. Class struggle continued to be, though in an altered condition.

The apocalypse narrative in popular culture today seems to take cue from this history of continuity, and refuses to brush it against its grain (in Federici’s style). Though according to the formulation (it is easier to imagine…) with which we began this essay, the apocalypse film/comic book/TV series tries to trace desire’s line of flight, the possibility of subtraction from capitalism, we cannot overlook the fact that but these are primarily narratives of its inevitable folding back into capitalism. (In that these narratives are quite like the kind of historiography that reads the crisis of feudalism, the heretic revolt, as the originary moment of capitalism, as primitive accumulation.) They are fantasies of capitalist refoundation. Example: In the graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Rises a Russian nuke disables all electronics, and blocks out the sun (taking out Superman’s energy source). Gotham is in disarray, riots, and criminals on a free rein. Batman mobilizes a bunch of lunatics and criminals, rides out on horseback, cowboy style, to take control of the situation. With the social and the scientific technologies that enable social control without the use of force having been rendered temporarily dysfunctional, the law needs to make use of the vigilante, who emerges to supplement the law, making use of primitive technologies of power.

In an essay published in 2008 in the New Left Review, later republished as a chapter in Distant Reading Franco Moretti had tried to forge a connection between war and narratives of adventure. Adventure, to rephrase Moretti (3), is the motif that dramatizes and mythologizes moments of exception, in which the law suspends itself to protect itself (and we know that capitalism recomposes itself and expands when it is threatened; like a shark, to survive, it has to keep moving); one symbol through which we understand these moments is the outlaw fashioned to protect the law (Batman). The outlaw signals a moment of breakdown but also the law’s recomposition. It is accepted wisdom now that capital preserves primitive accumulation; it is a path capitalism returns to when the accumulation of relative surplus value slows down and the market founders; direct but guaranteed accumulation remains a fantasy that is occasionally realized. To primitive accumulation we add war: two inseparable but not altogether indistinct methods that emerge every once in a while to preserve capitalism. Capitalism on the offensive, war, is at the same time capital on the defensive. Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” made some observations that are of interest in context of this discussion. Responding to Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, Benjamin writes

If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production…(4)

Capital, while it constantly expands its productive capacities, is also threatened by the possibility of plenty, of too much productive power. Benjamin argues that war is capital’s deployment of this plenty in an enterprise that allows capitalist relations to sustain. There is scholarship that has tried to demonstrate the relation between war, the consequent mobilization of the industry and the resuscitation of the market depressed by crisis.(5) It has been argued, for example, that the Bush II’s wars as much about reigniting industry as they were about oil. It is destruction that has pumped fuel into slowing circuits of capital.

There is still more to the apocalypse text though. Destruction is much more comprehensive and invariably of a permanent nature. In fact, it is insofar as destruction is irreversible that we can speak of a new kind of apocalypse that has increasingly begun to occupy contemporary popular culture. Destruction is not marginal; it does not just limit itself to one city, or the borders of a nation, or a foreign land. It is the generalized nature of the event that forces us beyond the primitive accumulation/war thesis, though we do not disavow it entirely; it certainly suggests a direction.

General Intellect, the Social Factory, and Revolution

In an extract from the Grundrisse, usually referred to as the “Fragment on Machine,” Marx speaks of the development of technology within capitalism and the possible advent of an automaton or organism, with whose arrival it will no longer be “the distinct individual entities of the productive workers that are useful for capitalist production, nor even their ‘work’ in a conventional sense of the word, but the whole ensemble of sciences, languages, knowledges, activities, and skills that circulate through society that Marx seeks to describe with the terms general intellect (706), social brain (694), and social individual (705).”(6)

Living labor is the determinant of surplus value and this process of automation reduces living labor “quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side”.(7) In this then capital, the “moving contradiction,” drives itself to its own dissolution.

[In this situation it is] the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labor time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself…[Now] labor time ceases and must cease to be [the] measure of [wealth], and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labor of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis…(8)

Marx goes on to speak of the expansion of free time and the possibilities that open for the free development of human creativity outside the arbitrary limits set by capital. It is a strangely utopic view of technology, a view that has been difficult to endorse in light of the lessons of the 20th century; the extent to which relations of production are immanent to the forces of production became starkly visible in the consequences of Lenin’s introduction of Taylorist production in the Soviet Union. In any case, what Marx notes is that as productivity becomes independent of the imposition of work, the capitalist valuation of life in terms of hours of labor extracted becomes superfluous. This coding of life and human production comes under threat as new possibilities based on free time become conceivable. In other words, technology, capital’s response to every cycle of the working class’s struggle, and the most important tool with which capital recomposes work and the working class, becomes a serious obstacle for its continued and expanded reproduction.

As the role of living labor decreases, a parallel process of socialization of work is also underway. Marx speaks of a “dialectical inversion,” where this “most powerful instrument for reducing labour time…becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole life-time of the worker and his family into labour time at capital’s disposal for its own valorization”. This was a thesis that Mario Tronti developed to argue that “At the highest level of capitalist development social relations become moments of the relations of production, and the whole society becomes an articulation of production. In short, all of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over all of society.”(9) The development of General Intellect has been accompanied by the emergence of the “socialized worker,” and of the “social factory” where capitalism reaches a stage of unprecedented totality, tapping into every source that everyday life can muster. This totalization is, however, another sign that the final throw of the capitalist dice comes closer. Technology continues to advance and capitalism already seems to have no outside left.(10) With no new territories and the return of the specter of moribundity in what form will the primitive return? With technology now based on microelectronics, with the expansion of the world’s nuclear armory, war too is a changed prospect. Destruction has become harder to localize. Weapons become more precise, but their circulation less restricted. What now?

Revolution. A fantasy appears, naked, in a none too sophisticated TV series baldly titled Revolution. It is 2027, fifteen years after “The Blackout” that caused the permanent disabling of electricity! All devices stop; lights, computers, vehicles, machines. In one blow all technologies of production and control are disabled. In these fifteen years people have tried to adapt to this new situation of low productivity, lack of centralization and political instability. Militias run the only governments. The problem of technology has been resolved by a quasi-magical event. The absurdity of the event is the most obvious sign of desire at work. This event is not primitive accumulation or war, but the desire that produces them is also the one that produces this event.

Apocalypse and the Resuscitation of Popular Culture

The zombie apocalypse narrative usually begins with a mutant virus, perhaps an experiment gone awry, or an out of control biological weapon. The biological weapon that attacks everybody without discriminating is but a sign that capital’s wars no longer limit themselves to the borders and to other nations. (In a sense they never have limited themselves in that fashion: war abroad, austerity measures and displacement of peoples within the borders.) But with each crisis capital expands further, productivity increases, with each recurrence capital’s war generalizes itself more and leaves fewer avenues of life untouched, more people affected.

Quarantine (2008) (there is a sequel too, Quarantine 2: Terminal (2011)) begins in a chemical weapons lab. 28 Days Later (from 2002, the sequel: 28 Weeks Later (2007)) begins in a research lab with the “Rage virus”. The virus in I am Legend (2007) too is born in medical experimentation. Resident Evil, which began as a video game in 1996, developed into a six film series about an outbreak of the “T-virus,” product of genetic experimentation by the Umbrella Corporation. The virus transforms its first victims, researchers at the Umbrella Corporation research facility (The Hive) into zombies and spreads out from here.(11)

The cause of the outbreak, while it may offer interesting interpretative possibilities, is of limited significance overall. The important thing is that the event that generates the plot occurs. Furthermore, unlike say a work of detective fiction, the plot is not moved by a desire for discovery of first cause, it does not lead back to its origin, but moves forward towards survival and reconstruction.

After the basic premise is put into place, after the meta-plot has been generated, a large number of themes and subplots that have populated popular culture over the last century and have been stretched to exhaustion begin to find fertile ground. The meta-plot is always one of survival. It traces the shape existence takes in this world and becomes the source of multiple experiences whose hollowing out the twentieth century has mourned too often. It appears as if for a humanity whose sensibility is utterly saturated (an idea that appears in Bifo Berardi’s Soul at Work, which we will discuss later) a break like this is necessary for it to be able to experience emotions that ordinarily are seen to be central to life.

In A Friend for the End of the World (2012), for example, it is the end of the world that makes love and friendship possible, and through a typically crude reversal, it is this love that makes the end of the world inconsequential. The return of rom-com humanism is signaled even better by Warm Bodies (2013), in which zombies return to life and are reaccepted by human society after the real bad zombies (Bonies) are taken care of; to be able to recognize that bodies are getting warmer a person in love is needed. Slant magazine’s comment about the film typifies what we speak of: “The ubiquity of Shakespeare’s original template allows Warm Bodies some leeway in terms of believability, where otherwise it sometimes strains against its own logic. But the film’s persistent charm encourages us to look past a few festering surface wounds and see the human heart beating inside, which is really what love is all about.”(12)

I am Legend (2007) sees the return of heroism and sacrifice, and affirmation of relationships (man and woman, man and dog). How does The Walking Dead (which debuted in 2010) fill up its seasons? The continuity of generations (Rick’s children); love and marriage (Glenn and Maggie; Sasha and Bob) wisdom (Herschel); human resourcefulness and the will to survive; more generally the power of human relations to revive society and meaning. The plot moves through a series of encounters, a series of false promises, failed socialities (the Governor and his settlement at Woodbury in Season 3, Terminus in Season 4, the Hospital and the Church in Season 5). The group contains a small number of core members and a loose circle of shifting members (characters die with each encounter, and new ones join in). The constant shifting, moving, creates the desire for stability, which is found momentarily at the Prison.(13) The safety of walls and the possibility of growing food, a settled life defines this brief period. Like in Resident Evil, violence and gore are significant features of The Walking Dead too, but the latter forages on to other sources to extend the plot. (The Resident Evil video games increasingly limit themselves to shooting and weapons upgrade.) The excess of violence, and the instability of these lives allow the show to make intermittent periods of slowness (farming, conversations, mourning, caring etc.) desirable and good entertainment for the audience.

In other words, it is destruction of capitalist reality (as we know it) that becomes the basis of the refounding of the myths of capitalist common sense. One of the key ways in which the crisis of capitalism manifests itself is the evident hollowing out of its myths – like the crisis of the myth of individuality or that of nationalism (in Europe) after WWI; hard work does not guarantee success; success does not get love; saving no longer guarantees a comfortable old age; education no longer gets jobs. Capital’s revival, at least in this case, is indicated first in the revival of key myths (mentioned in preceding passages), reinvigorated by the apocalypse, bestowed with new substance by the metaplot of survival and human ingenuity.

Killing Donna Haraway’s Cyborg

A state of nature then, a state without a state – this is the condition in which man struggles for survival. Capitalism has removed the obstacle it seemed to have created in its own path in what Marx identified as General Intellect; centuries of accumulated human labor, mental and physical, washed away.

We do not know, even now, what this tendency towards the formation of General Intellect could produce, and whether capitalism’s final crisis will ever arrive and what will be humanity after capitalism and work. Althusser, while exploring man’s alienation from nature as an essential aspect of society based on work, tries to think beyond this fundamental duality to only indicate that it is “a totality that has not achieved its concept”.(14) Concepts to think this totality appear by and by.

For example, Donna Haraway in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” theorizing in a manner that bears affinity to the Marx of “Fragment on Machine,” argues that “Taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology.”(15) She imagines a posthuman that would show “a way out of the maze of dualitys in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves”.(16) What saves this image from indeterminacy is the concept of the cyborg. The cyborg is a hybrid, part machine part human – a “cybernetic organism”. It is an “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism.”(17) Yet its lack of innocence does not scare Haraway. The cyborg that may have emerged as the culmination of the history of capitalism, (think of this history as the narrative recounted in The Dialectic of Enlightenment) as a kind of final product, could deliver us of this history. The history of man’s struggle against nature and of man’s exploitation of the environment seems to deliver the concept we needed to think beyond the contradiction that shapes this history. A new posthuman possibility is visible in the cyborg, an indication of something beyond the human-nature duality.

As we have seen already, fundamental to the post-apocalyptic reality is the removal of technology (whether we call it Cyborg or General Intellect).(18) The metanarrative of survival, scarcity and struggle against the non-human once more designates the human-nature/non-human duality as the shaper of history, the guarantor of meaning in history. To the extent that zombies become a part of the malignant landscape, an aspect of the background against which various subplots unfold, they participate in this dualist narrative. The human other will define itself by way of distinction from the zombie. In Season 5 of The Walking Dead the need to assert “we are not them” is strong; the confusion of boundaries between human and zombie is intolerable and those in whom this confusion appears have to be neutralized (even if it is a child – Lizzie). “The productive labor that post-apocalyptic survivors are forced into…works not only as a way to protect bodily integrity, but as a way to distinguish themselves from the simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar zombie horde, who are neither self-aware nor self-conscious.”(19) The dualities that Marx (in “Fragment on Machine”) and Haraway desired to escape are firmly reestablished and capitalism has begun its renewal through self-destruction.

Marc Foster’s 2013 zombie film World War Z, in addition to receiving good reviews grossed over $540 million against a production budget of $190 million; commercially, easily the most successful zombie film. The basic plot is familiar – a viral epidemic breaks out in a number of cities; it kills quickly and the dead become zombies, who by biting others spread the virus. The interesting, if not entirely novel twist the film introduces comes when Gerry, played by Brad Pitt, notices that the zombies tend to overlook the weak (diseased or old). He suggests this possibility to a group of scientists who find the idea tenable. The hypothesis is proved when on infecting himself with various disease causing microbes Gerry effectively becomes invisible to zombies. This gives the human race a chance for survival.

In an atmosphere unfit for the reproduction of the human body, the only way to sustain it is to weaken the body. In order to reproduce ourselves we must become sick. But the diseases we introduce into the body in order to escape the undefeatable enemy are diseases that we have the ability to cure. The virus does not attack the weakened human body. This weakened body can destroy the virus and those infected by it, subsequently curing itself and ensuring the survival of the species. In a much too obvious way, what we have here is an allegory for the strategy of survival that capitalism develops. In order to survive and to continue to reproduce itself capitalism will fantasize its own destruction. Much like the human body in World War Z, capitalism will sicken itself in order to survive.(20)

What is a Zombie? (I)

The zombie is not really the main thing in post-apocalyptic zombie texts. The chief problem is the disorder that is caused due to zombies; it is the collapse of technologies of production and power that produces the event proper. Once disorder has set in, zombies are just there making the survival game more complicated.

Yet zombies cannot mean nothing! The dead-living-undead sequence is too seductive to ignore when speaking in the context of capitalism. But one has to admit that there are no easy analogies to be made, structural correspondences to be traced. Dead labor, finally, refers to machines, to technology, not to people. The living in a zombie apocalypse text are the providers of labor. There is no meaning to be ascribed to the zombie in this fashion, not even the metaphorical kind that Marx projected onto the vampire. Where do we go from here? Scholarship has over the years offered interpretations.

It begins with observing that “the mythological origins of the zombie are rooted in Haitian vodou (known popularly as “voodoo”) religion, which combined West African and Lower Congo beliefs in spirits, nzambi or zombé, that could become caught between worlds, trapped in a container, as liminal beings that were neither living nor dead. Zombification was understood to be a reversible state of hypnosis, under the control of a vodou practitioner who could work with spells or potions to make the living appear as dead, a form of mind control under direction by the zombie master.”(21) It is obvious that despite these origins the zombie synthesizes many other images constitutive of contemporary social life. The idea of a zombie controlled by a master sustains in the way in which the image enters American popular culture. First it is the slave controlled by the slave master, then later the industrial worker. “This view of the living dead, which entered the American culture industry in the 1930s and 1940s, carried a critical charge: the notion that capitalist society zombifies workers, reducing them to interchangeable beasts of burden, mere bodies for the expenditure of labor-time.”(22)

Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead is by most accounts considered the inaugurator of the genre, as we know it now. It brought the zombie to the center of the American landscape; it also removed the zombie master, making the creature autonomous. Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead places the zombie in the mall: the consumer’s mindlessness, infecting and producing more consumers, consumers roaming around the mall aimlessly, purely out of habit. The emphasis in all these interpretations is clearly that the post-apocalyptic world is not a possible future but an accentuated reflection of the present. Other readings are added, most of them sensible, grounded in some aspect of capitalist reality: the zombie as the hidden truth of neoliberal capitalism, the sweatshop worker hidden behind the smooth circuits of the supply chain, representative of the real conditions behind the reflective glass exterior of the postmodern factory.(23)

Offering an interesting formulation Aalya Ahmad writes, “the zombie apocalypse stops the machine, but the machine’s effects clearly linger on in the survivors”. One can think of Charlie Chaplin, still twitching and jerking, making his way away from the conveyor belt in Modern Times. Yet this image can be as misleading as it is alluring. It pushes us to imagine the body dominated by a mechanical rhythm alien to it. While this conception remains useful in describing a large portion of the capitalist imposition of work even today, it does not address a key mutation that has emerged in the last few decades, which is also the period which has seen the emergence of the cultural phenomena we are discussing. A glance at this mutation, to my mind, goes a long way in adding precision to our understanding of the zombie.

What is a Zombie? (II)

The zombie, while it may suggest a mechanical, machine like existence with its jerky gait, is actually a creature of appetite. Which is to say that it is not simply the body that has been conquered by an alien rhythm (leaving the mind free), the mind too has been subjugated; in fact the conquest of the mind is primary. The zombie is still subject to a master, but the master is invisible, not human. It is this aspect of the zombie image that me must explore in the light of this mutation in the nature of work that comes along with microelectronics. (We should keep in mind that it is microelectronics that makes General Intellect and the Cyborg, thinkable, determinate concepts today.)

Tracing capital’s response to the politics of “refusal of work” that defined the 1960s and 1970s, Bifo Berardi, in his book Soul at Work, also explores the implications of the coming of microelectronics. In distancing himself from the language of desire and its flows that is proposed by Deleuze and Guatarri in Anti-Oedipus, Berardi argues that it is desire itself that semiocapitalism (a term Berardi uses to describe capitalism today) taps; the proletariat realizes, or tries to realize her desires within this new capitalism and brings her soul to work. In response to the worker’s refusal of work that alienates desire, capital has recomposed itself to feed off this desire.

Earlier, leisure was the site for self-realization; now an injunction is in place that pushes the worker to realize herself in work. This new worker, working under the condition of semiocapitalism, trying to realize herself in work, exhausts herself without finding fulfillment. Realization in the fluid and ever expanding networks of semiocapitalism is an impossible ask; the world of simulation, finance and deregulation begins by precluding an encounter with the real, how then real-ization? Even as he speaks the Freudian language of a “libidinal economy”, Berardi touches upon the concerns of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Man has no being without objective being, which is man’s externalization of himself in the object of labor – this externalization leaves an objectively discernible trace, which is recognized by the other etc.(24) This externalization is impossible in the simulated world of semiocapitalism, ever expanding and so, unrepresentable, incomprehensible to the human mind. The individual constantly falls short, puts in more effort and falls short again. The validation that was available to the artisan from the community is also unobtainable for this creature because her ability to form community is destroyed with the saturation of sensibility that such work causes. In the end she is exhausted, depressed etc.

Berardi goes on to speak of “a morphogenetic modeling of the living operated by the habitat with which it is required to interact [biopower]”.(25) As it feeds off it, semiocapitalism also shapes desire; it models the soul. Alongside the mindless consumer, a mind (full) worker is created – the cognitariat. Referring back to Marx’s distinction between formal and real subsumption in the “Unpublished Sixth Chapter” of Capital Berardi offers an interesting paraphrase worth quoting here.

Formal subsumption is based on the juridical subjugation of the laborers, on the formal disciplining of the bodies. Real subsumption means instead that the workers’ lifetimes have been captured by the capital flow, and the souls have been pervaded by techno-linguistic chains.(26)

We had touched upon capitalism’s swallowing up of all outsides in our discussion of General Intellect. The outside subsumed on this occasion is the worker’s soul. There is no boss breathing down the worker’s neck; the worker largely supervises herself, encourages herself (maybe she reads something from the self-help section). In her work she seeks to fulfill herself, and nothing visible structures her desires or shapes her will. While there is an injunction to find satisfaction in work, it is impossible to discern where the injunction comes from. Desire, already structured to find satisfaction in capital’s circuits takes over the person, transforming the body into little more than an interface (hands on the keyboard, eyes on the screen). What takes over the self is experienced as an aspect of the self, that nevertheless comes from the outside, something external which can never quite be comprehended as that (how can I fathom that my own desire is not my own?).

We tend to think of power in relation to the sublimity of the infinite, facing which imagination and reason both fail. But what of the infinitesimal? Nano technology, the microchip and an infinity of points through which power flows. Man is no longer the measure of all things, Berardi observes. The order of determinations is incomprehensible to the human mind, and this crisis of cognitive mapping comes with semiocapitalism, which is characterized by both infinite (the ever expanding circuits of capital) and the infinitesimal (microelectronics). Berardi speaks of Ingmar Bergman’s 1977 film The Serpent’s Egg that may be read as an attempt to represent this condition. According to Berardi the film redefines historicity as “a psychological and linguistic process” and in the process makes way toward a redefinition of alienation as a “material, chemical, or rather neuro-chemical mutation.” The social body is slowly poisoned by the Nazis, who use a toxic gas to deprive it of its will. “The metaphor of psychological submission that we find in this movie is pertinent far beyond the example of German Nazism: it can characterize other processes of collective mental pollution, such as consumerism, television commercials, the production of aggressive behaviors, religious fundamentalisms and competitive conformisms”.(27) This poisoning of the social body and its transformation into an “amorphous mass” is a useful figure for the modeling of the soul we have been speaking of. The virus that causes the zombie apocalypse can be thought of as a logical development from here.

The virus is an efficient device for representing the invisible force that controls the self as if it were internal to it. It is the organic infinitesimal, the only form possible after the network (electricity, technology, General Intellect) dies. The age old fear of epidemic and contagion, of plague, combines with the modern fear of biological weapons to deliver a perfect device, a near-perfect figure for how capital works now, representing its effects, when the machine is dead.

The cognitariat is pushed to breaking point in order to realize itself within capital’s network and underneath the promise of nourishment, the soul is poisoned, robbed of its capacity to feel, commune, robbed of its connection to the body, to sensibility. The only extension this soul possesses exists within capital’s network. Once this network is removed, once this machine is switched off what we have is uncontrollable, meaningless desire without end; a thing driven by desire but without the means to pursue or even comprehend it. A hunger that is never satiated; the body is never nourished because its demands have long been forgotten by the mind. The zombie, seemingly all body no soul, is by way of a fantastic reversal the form that the bodiless soul (the cognitariat robbed of sensibility) takes in the post-apocalyptic world.(28) The zombie bites and struggles and eats so the virus can spread itself; eating does not nourish this body. This is certainly a good image for the industrial worker who loses his body to capitalist work in the hours he spends in the factory; but it is even more appropriate for the cognitive worker who loses his mind entirely.

Conclusion: Zombie contra Cyborg

The cyborg was Donna Haraway’s way of thinking beyond the human-nature binary because it made a future of hybridity thinkable. The idealist-capitalist desire to successively subsume every aspect of nature into its logic of unending expansion suggests a second direction for history. Though, as this paper too has belabored, the thought of this end is terrifying for capital, for arrival would mean the end of expansion, end of movement and so the end. The zombie is a third possibility – the duality seems to end, but this vision of posthumanity is that of humanity’s decay into nature.

The zombies may overrun humanity, and humanity’s struggle to survive against them will reproduce the original duality and perhaps, capitalism. The image of nature consuming society to end duality mirrors the more familiar one of capital subsuming nature. In the light of the fact that the virus is invariably the product of human tampering, and of our own reading of the virus as a kind of organic metaphor for semiocapitalism, or its effects, this mirroring suggests a displaced connection. What finally is the result of this war that nature wages against human sociality but the reestablishing of the duality it evidently strives to end, and in that the resetting of history to zero, and the frightful prospect of its repetition from Odysseus to Fascism and the culture industry? Some speak of the eco-zombie, the greened zombie, “the zombie reimagined as an avenger that refuses to accept environmental destruction and ultimately rids the earth of humans”.(29) But nature’s avenger zombie merely plays a part in the prospective narrative of capitalism’s regeneration.

Lets go over the argument once: capitalism has a tendency to go into crisis every once in a while. It comes out of each crisis by recomposing itself, and the working class, whose struggles push it into crisis. This recomposition happens primarily through technological advancement, but goes hand in hand with primitive accumulation, which is capitalism’s way of subsuming new territories. Over the last two hundred years it has managed to subsume increasingly large portions of the globe and technology has expanded by leaps and bounds (microelectronics being the most recent and by far the largest leap). The increase in technology (in Marx’s terms, the increase in the organic composition of capital) means that the proportion of living labor going into production decreases and with which decreases the surplus. To make up for this capital plugs in to more and more realms of life, formerly only formally subsumed, they are now really subsumed. We reach a point where expansion becomes impossible, as does the realization of surplus. War and primitive accumulation are now ever present to prop up this late capitalism but they become less effective each moment. It is now, the zombie apocalypse teaches us, that capitalism begins to fantasize destruction, self-destruction; an odd fantasy for a system which is reputedly the only one that exists solely for production. Not quite so odd for one that cannot exist without continuously expanding production. The process of expansion can begin again once the ground has been cleared.

It is capitalism’s relentless expansion that has led us to a moment that its interests can no longer be comprehended in terms of CEOs, owners, boards, or even nations. Its interests are as simple as ever, but no individuals represent them. We find no policy makers speaking of the need for destruction, nor CEO’s dreaming of zombie hordes. Capitalism’s interests have far transcended those of individuals (even those who are apportioned humongous shares of value). But what cannot be articulated in other discourses, we argue, can still be discerned in popular cultural production. The apocalypse narrative, especially the zombie apocalypse has a lesson, a political lesson that is hard to learn any other place.

So then, what if disaster is not an undesired, though inevitable outcome of capitalist development, but the prescription that will save capitalism from collapse? Perhaps it is by destroying the products of human labor that it has historically subsumed into its logic and by reestablishing man’s struggle with nature, by reestablishing that is, the binary Donna Haraway thinks the cyborg might help us transcend, that capital will sustain its hold over human history and nature alike. What if the apocalypse is produced, an incomplete one, just so that capitalist history can continue? How does this lesson affect discourses that anti-capitalists tendencies deploy in their criticism of capitalism?

The possibility of ecological disaster is ever on our minds now, and leftists, both liberal and radical, increasingly appeal to this fear in their criticism of capitalism. Ecological crisis is a key weapon in the arsenal of the anti-capitalist today. We have come to bemoan the fact that we had been oh so anthropocentric in basing our criticism of capital on the question of exploitation. (Indeed the zombie apocalypse has been read as a critique of what Naomi’s Klein calls “disaster capitalism”(30)). In her new book, This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein argues that “There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.”(31) (This argument is part of a larger tendency to attack not capitalism, but its most recent moment: for example, it is argued ever so often that it is neoliberalism that is destroying education and health services, it is this late capitalism that is enforcing austerity measures everywhere. What is implied in all these discourses is that a capitalism with slightly different rules (say the old welfarist capitalism) is better and we must struggle to defend its remaining vestiges, if possible go back to nationalizing things.)

The idea of persuading capitalism to change its rule so that it may avert ecological catastrophe, or any catastrophe begins to seem silly if catastrophe is what capitalism seeks. Once more, the lesson that the zombie apocalypse teaches us is that capitalism has us fooled into thinking that it cares to save the environment if only a way could be found to keep profit making green. The point is not that there can be no green capitalism (although that too is true), but that it wants to not be green. In the process of fooling us into thinking that it cares, it manages to make more profit as we amuse ourselves to death, watching/reading this moral tale, deceiving ourselves into thinking that we have learnt its lesson.

Notes

(1) Both Slavoj Zizek and Fredric Jameson seem fond of quoting this statement, although nobody ever reveals whom it was who made it for the first time. For Jameson it is always “somebody” who once said it.

(2) As much as this essay is a reaction to utopic readings of the apocalypse theme, it also assumes them in a more affirmative manner, insofar its attempt to throw out the bathwater dirty with ideology, would be risky without those prior theorizations ascertaining the safety of the baby.

(3) Franco Moretti, “The Novel: History and Theory,” in Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 177.

(4) Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 242.

(5) See Andre Gunder Frank, “Third World War: A Political Economy of the Gulf War and New World Order.” (http://rrojasdatabank.info/agfrank/gulf_war.html; accessed on June 25, 2015).

(6) Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 81.

(7) Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1993), 700.

(8) Ibid., 705.

(9) Mario Tronti cited in Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics, 72.

(10) One must acknowledge Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis’s criticism of this position. They argue that lags remain central to capitalist development: there is segmentation within the working class in terms of the use of higher and lower technology, capitalism spreads both development and underdevelopment, and “capitalist subsumption of all forms of production does not require the extension of the level of science and technology achieved at any particular point of capitalist development to all workers contributing to the accumulation process”. (Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis, “Notes on the Edu-Factory and Cognitive Capitalism,” Towards a Global Autonomous University (New York: Autonomedia, 2009). They are completely correct. But we are only interested in the tendency towards totalization, and increasing pace at which capitalism is subsuming its outside. As this process accelerates, the fear of arrival begins to loom. There may always be lags and counter-tendencies, but that does not undermine the force of the tendency we here choose to emphasize.

(11) A major theme that the series also deploys in plot construction is that of the evils of monopoly. The Umbrella Corporation has no competition, no detractors. Concentration (and centralization) is another aspect of the history of capitalist development. Capitalism demonstrates its self-contradictory character in this case too by battling centralization through its conscience keeper that is the civil society, and by using laws dictating fair competition. Indeed, the Resident Evil films’ short circuiting of capitalism and monopoly makes the criticism of the two indistinguishable; actually of course they are not the same: the critique of monopoly tries to save capitalism, while a radical critique of capitalism seeks its destruction.

(12) Richard Larson, “Warm Bodies”, Slant. Accessed on Mach 6, 2015. http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/warm-bodies.

(13) The groups tries a democratic mode of self-governance, different from the earlier episodes where they decided to follow Rick as their leader, accepting that this was the form best suited for the swiftness with which the group needed to respond when threatened. Democracy collapses with the Prison, and for the next few seasons, the group returns to its “state of exception” state-form.

(14) Roland Boer, “The Ecclesiastical Eloquence of Louis Althusser,” in Marxism and Theology: Criticism of Heaven (Leiden and Boston: Brill), 157.

(15) Donna Haraway. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 181.

(16) Ibid., 181.

(17) Ibid., 151.

(18) In the context of this discussion see Alicia Kozcma, “The post-apocalyptic renunciation of technology in The Walking Dead”, in Thinking Dead: What the Zombie Apocalypse Means (London: Lexington Books, 2013) ed. Murali Balaji, 151. Kozma makes an interesting case, especially through her reading of the initial scenes after Rick wakes up in the hospital in Season 1 (Thinking Dead 151). She argues that the show renounces technology and moves towards the constitution of a parahumanity. Her argument is based on the notion of a choice between technology (which the show renounces) and human ingenuity (which it foregrounds). It is important here to reiterate Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument, and observe that this binary collapses if we see technology being rooted in precisely this notion of ingenuity of humanity struggling with nature.

(19) Alicia Kozcma, “The post-apocalyptic renunciation of technology in The Walking Dead”, in Thinking Dead: What the Zombie Apocalypse Means (London: Lexington Books, 2013) ed. Murali Balaji, 153.

(20) Another revealing analogy: In an essay from 1937, called “Constructions in Analysis” Freud draws an interesting comparison between the constructions that appear in analysis and those that appear in psychosis.

The delusions of patients appear to me to be the equivalents of the constructions which we build up in the course of an analytic treatment – attempts at explanation and cure, though it is true that these, under the conditions of a psychosis, can do no more than replace the fragment of reality that is being disavowed in the present by another fragment that had already been disavowed in the remote past. (p. 204, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis)

The desire for subtraction from the symbolic order is visible in the analysand’s constructions. The constructions of analysis do not “reduce the analysand’s linguistic production to the mechanical insistence of the signifying chain…the aim of construction would not be to resignify these nodes [of non-sense] but to re-constellate them in order to attenuate the subject’s alienation in the symbolic order.” (p. 206, ibid) What is key is that in the rejuvenation of the traumatized ego, the traumatizing situation that the ego cannot transcend is replaced by one that had already been transcended “in the remote past”. In the psychotic-analyst couple we have a useful miniaturization of the contradiction (more technology-less technology; concentration-competition) that we have been tracing in capitalism as well as the coherence it (re)produces repeatedly without resolving the contradiction.

(21) Zara Zimbaro, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” Censored 2015 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014), 272.

(22) Ibid., 272.

(23) Most of these readings can be found summarized in Zara Zimbardo’s chapter in Censored 2015.

(24) It would seem inconsistent to speak of ‘recognition’ in the same breath as Anti-Oedipus. But this inconsistency, if it exists, is rooted in Berardi’s work. The other way of thinking about it is that the break from Anti-Oedipus we mention, returns Berardi to a mode of theorizing in which this Hegelian-Marxian-Freudian category becomes productive again.

(25) Bifo Berardi, Soul at Work (MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 172.

(26) Ibid., 173.

(27) Ibid., 97.

(28) “The zombie is different from other monsters because the body is resurrected and retained: only consciousness is permanently lost. Like the vampire and the werewolf, the zombie threatens with its material form. Whereas the vampire and even the intangible ghost retain their mental faculties, and the werewolf may become irrational, bestial only part of time, only the zombie has completely lost its mind, becoming a blank—animate, but wholly devoid of consciousness.” (A Zombie Manifesto, p. 89)

Later on in the essay: “In Haitian folklore, from which all zombies are derived, the word zombie meant not just “a body without a soul” but also “a soul without a body.” (A Zombie Manifesto, p. 97)

(29) Zimbardo, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” 286.

(30) Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).

(31) Naomi Klein, quoted in Rob Nixon, “Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything,” The New York Times, accessed on March 5, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/books/review/naomi-klein-this-changes-everything-review.html?_r=0.

Cécile Winter

Returning to the Ancestors

Not for nothing did they want African unity and, to begin with, big states. Not for nothing were they all prevented from achieving those goals.

The country called “Centrafrique”, or “The Central African Republic”, is in agony. Barthélemy Boganda, who ought to have become the country’s first president, did not call what is today the Central African Republic “Centrafrique.” What he understood by that name, rather, was a country comprising what is today the so-called Central African Republic (formerly Ubangi Shari), the Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, and Chad: all “countries” visited in a single day on January 2, 2014, by the French defence minister; we shall return to this. “If Ubangi Shari had to achieve independence on its own someday,” Boganda wrote, “this would be a catastrophe”. Barthélemy Boganda died in a well-organised helicopter accident in the March of 1959. Once he had been eliminated, the dismemberment of the territories proceeded in accordance with the wishes of France.

Why is it that history – in particular, this history – of the first wave of the African struggle for liberation from the colonial yoke, and for independence, is so carefully erased? These days, the Central African Republic has the honour of appearing in the newspapers, we shall see how. In these articles, the name of Boganda never appears. On the part of the colonial rags that are the French dailies as a whole, this is perfectly normal, you will say. Yes, but what of the ‘radicals’, the progressives, the activists, those ‘outside the system’, the people with a higher degree of consciousness, and so forth? None of that even exists, you will say! Maybe. You will begin to exist once you have learned to put Africa at the centre of your world: this is a thesis we do not hesitate to propose. And, conversely, how can you, dear comrades, who are troubled, and protesting here and there, let yourselves be cut off from yesterday’s history, from that which concerns you above all? How can you let yourselves live only in the present moment?

Let us pick up that thread again: that is our only watchword. Let us pick up the thread of history, there where it was broken. What were the questions? What were the watchwords? How were we defeated? How should we pick up the cause again? Yes, “let us pick up the long debate where we left off. And you may urge your arguments like snouts low over the water: I will leave you no rest and no respite.” [trans. Mary Ann Caws]

***

But first: before speaking, potentially, internally, to those who would join us, let us pause, for everyone else as well, on the Central African Republic. Let us read the imperialist rags for them. We must know how to read them closely; in other words, how to call them into question. Le Monde, the number one colonial rag, tells us the story of how Michel Djotodia was deposed. He was forced to resign on January 10, 2014, after two days of discussion in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad.

Here’s the story the newspaper tells us in its edition of January 10, 2014. Idriss Deby, the president of Chad, receives Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French minister of defence, on January 1— in other words, a full month after the deployment of the French Sangaris forces, a month during which Chadian soldiers are patrolling with the French. Idriss Deby wants to depose Djotodia after the latter announces a plan of partition for the north of the Central African Republic. Certain compensations, the article tells us, “have been exchanged with the principal military partner of France”. Le Drian reaffirms his confidence in Idriss Deby, France’s “perfect” military ally in Mali. On January 2, Le Drian goes to Bangui, then to Brazzaville to consult with Sassou N’Guesso, then to Ali Bongo in Gabon, then back to N’Djamena that same evening just as Djotodia is arriving there, summoned by Deby. On January 3, Djotodia’s resignation is announced.

So there you have it: a deal briskly conducted by the two good Franco-Chadian friends, and the story in Le Monde dutifully congratulates itself on it.

But then:

Why wait a month after the arrival of Sangaris to depose Djotodia, while murders and other horrors are piling up? And without a single gesture in the direction of disarming the notorious Seleka? But that isn’t all. The Seleka was formed in August 2012. For months, its commandos, composed especially of Chadian and Sudanese mercenaries, advance toward Bangui, leaving behind them a path strewn with destruction, looting, arson, murder, and rape; none of this in any way troubles France, which, incidentally, has nothing to say about it to its perfect Chadian ally. Djotodia takes power in Bangui in March 2013. Still no complaints. The lootings, the murders, violent acts of all kinds continue; horrors keep piling up. Things are, as far as our Franco-Chadian friends are concerned, still for the best.

So, wasn’t Djotodia our man, as people there believe, in view of the oil recently discovered in the north of the country, and which is coveted by the Chinese, among others? Wasn’t the former president, perfectly corrupt and calamitous, by the way, therefore perfectly suitable for the rest of us, having had the weakness to request comparative studies before the exploitation of the oil-fields? But doesn’t France have a birthright there, which would explain its policy of benign understanding — to say the least — for the notorious Seleka?

Or should we believe that what is happening there is a sudden rise in temperature in a country where Christians (80% of the population) and Muslims had been living side by side without any problem? Is this just a case, as L’Express puts it blandly, of “scenes of ordinary hatred” (sic!)? “Ordinary” strikes us as particularly sickening. Since the seizure of power by the Seleka, one million people have had to flee their homes — this in a country of 4.7 million.

Nonetheless, we indeed read that it is the threat of secession of the country’s north —where the oil is — that frightened Idriss Deby, already grappling with the Darfur business and the secession of neighboring South Sudan. And is there ever an end to the carving up of oil concessions controlled by mercenaries? We also understand that the Djotodia card has so far not been entirely abandoned by the Franco-Chadian accomplices; as his lieutenant has stated, “negotiations are still going on”. Everything depends on what spare parts are available. Otherwise, wouldn’t this stooge have been handed over for punishment to so-called international law? He was allowed to go and settle in Benin, instead.

For a comparison, let us consider the fate that was reserved for Laurent Gbagbo, the former president of Ivory Coast, at the time of his arrest by the French military in April 2011. He was, indeed, delivered to the famous international court, and has remained imprisoned in The Hague since November 2011. In June 2013, a preliminary hearing took place. Its purpose was not to judge him but to determine whether or not there were, in fact, grounds for a trial. The court ruled the incriminating evidence presented by the prosecutor provided insufficient grounds for a trial. (According to what has been said among the people of Ivory Coast, the prosecution made a film intended to prove the violent acts committed by Gbagbo, but the defence was able to prove that this film was, in fact, a montage filmed in another country that even in this proceeding would have made a bad impression.) The prosecution appealed, but the court confirmed its decision on appeal, and asked the prosecution to provide it, by November 2013, with more substantial evidence that would allow it to rule on the possibility of a trial. The prosecution appealed this decision concerning the time it was granted, and the judges suspended the deadline. The prosecutor therefore, has a free hand to pursue her investigations indefinitely. The imprisonment of Gbagbo, which is supposed to be reviewed every 120 days, has just been confirmed again.

In case you are still puzzled, there has been, in the meantime, an editorial in the newspaper Le Point entitled, ‘The Central African Republic, the Risk of Partition?’. It begins with a photograph captioned: ‘Former Seleka rebels are escorted out of Bangui by Sangaris soldiers’. In the photograph the so-called rebels are clearly displaying their rifles and guns.  In no way are they disarmed. The article seriously considers the risk of secession, in this “hemmed-in, remote region, bordering Chad and the Sudan”. The region, the article continues, is extremely poor but potentially rich. It contains yet-to-be-exploited diamond mines and oilfields. The licence for this was granted to a Chinese company (China National Petroleum Corporation) in 2010 by ex-president François Bozizé. So here we are. This wasn’t just a threat, it was a work in progress. Whence the Selekian emergency.

The article continues: “a partition of the CAR would be too dangerous for Chad”. But, “more than a partition, the ‘risk’ (the quotation marks are mine) in the north of the CAR is the development, with the arrival of the Seleka rebels, of a region increasingly cut off from Bangui — one that would be a vast self-managing ‘black hole’ (their quotation marks this time) in the heart of Africa, adjacent to the Darfur region of the Sudan, in which the rebels from the entire area would be living together. In short, a golden opportunity for all the jihadist groups that are swarming there”.

And a golden opportunity for our oil tycoons too! Not a single state, not even the most embryonic hint of one, to stick its nose into their business. From off-shore to off-shore, we proceed directly from the African “black hole” to the European or American tax haven, without spilling a drop, with everything necessary right there in terms of armed bands to be corrupted, paid, and employed as mercenaries. Exactly as we are now doing in the north of Mali. This is why our soldiers are busy escorting the ex-Selekas armed with their guns.

Of course, the human cost is rather high. We are talking about nothing less than ethnic cleansing. For, up until now in the CAR, Christians and Muslims had been living together. “Muslims form only 15 percent of CAR’s population. A majority in the north of the country, they are now being joined by those people of the CAR, who are fleeing Bangui and the central cities to escape from the massacres by the anti-Balaka Christian militias”. It is, therefore, rather difficult to bring this operation to a successful conclusion; which is why Hollande needs more troops, and he has appealed for help from his European neighbours, etc…, all the while having a bit of trouble explaining what exactly is at stake.

This, then, is the Central African Republic: one million out of 4.7 million people living as refugees.  It’s this: “I went there to see and help my family, who are with thousands of people living in refuge near a church. I have neither been able to meet with them nor to bring them anything. There’s no water, and people talk about epidemics. All I’ve seen is how people I knew have grown emaciated in just a few weeks, since they can no longer go to work and have nothing to eat”. It’s this: “Entire families, including old people, women, and children, have their throats cut in their homes.”  It’s this: “My family took refuge near the airport.  My brother wanted to go see how our house was.  He was killed.” And it’s this: “My aunt sent her son to look for water; there isn’t any in their neighborhood. He was killed on the way.”

The promoters of these massacres, and those responsible for this cataclysm, ought to be looked for in Paris.

Let us stop here on the French side. You will begin to exist once you have learned to put Africa at the centre of your world, we say. Yes, because colonial complicity has been the gangrene of French society for a century now, and has brought it to the state of advanced rottenness, of mental and moral disintegration, of the paralysis and lifelessness that everyone enjoys deploring nowadays. Deploring is one thing; getting out of this state is another. Colonial complicity is the inherent mode of French society’s membership in, and consent to, the imperialist world order. We think, it is the very basis of that passion for ignorance that subjugates this entire society — from the hideouts of the intellectuals to the most distant suburban housing-projects. The disintegration of the French Communist Party and, consequently, the complete disappearance of French workers from the scene was the price of the dishonourable behaviour of this party during the war in Algeria. Since then matters have gone from bad to worse. Speaking of colonialism in the past tense, declaring that one is living in the “post”, turning it into a mere subject for history books — these are signs and symptoms of that profound complicity that feeds the passion for ignorance. The Central African Republic is today, Brazzaville is today, the de facto partition of Mali is today, the repercussions of the destruction of Libya are today.  And so on and so forth. If this is happening, it’s because everyone accepts, everyone goes along with, a situation in which some people can die so that others — we others — can continue in the security of their being. In other words, the motto of a Boganda (“Zo kwé Zo”, “every man is a man”), exactly the same as that of Aristide in Haiti (“tout moun se moun”, every man is a man and everyone belongs to the world) is, indeed, the heart of the matter: complicity consists in going along with the denial, as if self-evident, of this basic assertion, of which we are no longer even obliged to be aware. This, moreover, is precisely the meaning and function of the unspeakable nonsense known as “the humanitarian ideology”.

So what is at stake here is that you, rare potential reader of this text, might decide in yourself, indeed even only for yourself, in your soul and in your consciousness. Yes or no: should French newspapers, and among them in first place the noble Monde, be called “nauseating colonial rags”? Yes or no:  should the celebrated international penal court be called STI, that is, Stinking Tool of Imperialism? Yes or no:  should the word “humanitarian” be systematically bracketed together with the modifier “unspeakable”? Or are these just excesses on the part of the author of this text, whose ardour one understands and even forgives but by which sophisticated people, in the fairness and level-headedness of their judgment, avoid getting carried away?

It is very much our wish that, even without going further, you agree to ask yourselves the question, indeed to do a little investigating on your own side, for yourselves. And if you should ever arrive at the conclusions that we ourselves have reached, we wish that, for yourselves, you might not forget the modifiers above, even when, like everyone and all of us, you read Le Monde or contribute to some humanitarian enterprise. And then we wish that you might even make your feeling known to some of those around you, when the subject is mentioned, etc…. That really isn’t insignificant. There will already be that. One must separate oneself. Separate yourselves.

***

Having said this, let us pick up the thread, for the inside, from the inside. Let us pick up the thread as activists.

The great ancestors speak of unity and pan-Africanism. Is this just a case of cultural coquettishness, as we can read on the websites of international institutions today? Not at all. The ancestors think that there must be big states, without which there is no way to defeat colonialism. They think that it is necessary to combat, above all, ethnic, territorial, familial, and tribal divisions.

Boganda (see the attached text) wants a true Central African State (that is, what is today the Central African Republic, Chad, Gabon, and Congo-Brazzaville) as the first step toward the United States of Latin Africa. Lumumba, fights inside the Congolese National Movement against federalism (the CNM will split into two over this question in 1959). He has to deal with the centrifugal tendencies of Joseph Kasa-Vubu’s Abako (in the Bakongo region), but also in the other regions. His struggle is for the unity of the Congo; going against this struggle, the imperialists, as we know, stir up secessionism as soon as independence is proclaimed.

The Union of the Peoples of Cameroon — whose watchword is independence and the reunification of the country — takes the utmost care in all its proceedings and all its committees to mix cadres from the different regions of the country. France, of course, plays one region off against another, especially the north against the south.

Kwame N’krumah, the president of the first independent African state, writes: “Africa must unite.” His goal, too, is the United States of Africa. He attempts a union with the Guinea of Sekou Toure, before being deposed by a coup d’état and having to take refuge in Guinea as a private individual.

Modibo Keita proposes a union with Niger and Senegal, which Senghor’s Senegal opposes. Later, after he has been deposed by a coup d’état, Sekou Toure’s Guinea proposes a union to his successor Moussa Traore, but this time it is Traore who refuses.

Boganda and Lumumba are assassinated. France begins a decade of bloody war to destroy the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon. Nkrumah and Keita are deposed by coups d’état. Later, Amilcar Cabral, commanding the liberation struggle of Guinea Cape Verde, is assassinated, thanks to the stirred-up jealousy between the peoples of Guinea and Cape Verde. As a result, there is no longer a single country, but rather two pieces — Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde — in accordance with the wishes of, above all, behind Portugal, the Americans, in order to keep their military base on Cape Verde.

The first question to decide is this: were the ancestors right or not?

It seems clear to us that the future — our present — has only shown, and shows every day, how right they were. You need big states to oppose imperialism and colonialism. And for that, it is absolutely imperative to be able to overcome the division and ethnicisation that colonialism, for its part, is constantly working to cultivate. “Wanting to create little specks of states in the twentieth century is a retrograde policy…whose result will be the disappearance in short order of these very states and the loss of their independence,” wrote Boganda. Could there be a better description of what we are witnessing today?

Let us put it differently. Weren’t they right, or rather, didn’t they measure how right they were?

What Is Independence, and Do We Want It?

Revolving Door of Independence

Independence was the keyword in the struggle of the great ancestors. Behind this flag, the immense majority of the people followed them. It was time to be done with contempt, with servitude, with frenzied exploitation. Time to refuse the whole ghastly colonial period. To have one’s own country, one’s own flag. Finally, to be master of one’s own house.

However: there were quite a few opponents of independence, particularly among the educated class, the potential cadre. The shortcut that best suited them was to attach themselves to the imperialists and to reap all the rewards of this attachment, and to stay within the local chefferies. (In these countries, where access to education was rigorously forbidden to the people, where only a few could accede to the status of the “middle class”, it is obvious that the said class, dissociated from the people and in the service of the imperialists, is infinitely corrupt and corruptible, and it remains obvious to this day:  the “middle class” is the very node of the well-known “desire for the West”.) On one side, the local potentate and the imperialist service; on the other, the construction of big, truly independent states. On the basis of this watchword, the great ancestors — Nyobe, Lumumba, Nkrumah, Boganda, etc. — launch their appeal, often personally, often impelled by their verbal force alone, to the people, and the people answer them. We thus understand why, despite their different situations, Nkrumah, Nyobe, and Lumumba all issue exactly the same watchword: immediate independence.

But it is the colonialists and the imperialists who jumped at this watchword. Independence? Of course! Right away; we’re giving you the gift of independence right away; we’re even more immediate than you.

In Congo, Lumumba anticipated the formation of the first government in January 1961. At that time, he is dead. Belgium offers independence on June 30, 1960; 10 days later, on July 10, the rich province of Katanga secedes, fomented by the Belgians: troops, planes, Belgian generals descend on it and the country is set ablaze. Between Lumumba’s first trip to Katanga (in January of 1960), in handcuffs and with his face battered, before the Belgians drag him out of prison to sit him down at the Round Table to see if they can corrupt him, and his second trip to Katanga where he will be put to death (January of 1961), only a year has elapsed.

In Cameroon, the masquerade of the independence ceremony takes place in January 1961, while war is raging and supporters of independence are being tortured two streets away. Um Nyobe, the leader of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon, had been assassinated by French troops two years earlier (September 13, 1958), in the forest of the Bassa region in the south of Cameroon; his second in command, Felix Moumié, will be assassinated in Geneva by the French services two years later (on November 3, 1960).

Independence everywhere meant aggravating and accelerating the destruction of the supporters of independence, putting them to death in cases where they hadn’t already been killed. Independence meant the murder of any hope of independence, crowned by the physical death of any potential African leader who proved not to be corruptible. This is where we still are today. This is what we are just beginning to recognise.

We Are Often Ridiculously Naïve

That is a quotation from Mao Zedong. The masses are clear-sighted, whereas we (the leaders) are often ridiculously naïve.

From the perspective of today, one cannot help applying this epithet to the great ancestors, the heroes and giants of the struggle for independence. They were just, they were clear-sighed, they served their peoples, and they were upright and incorruptible. But they proved to be ridiculously naïve, and their naiveté intensified the catastrophe. On the whole, there was still something in them of the tragic greatness of the Indian chiefs of North America who signed treaties believing in their value because they saw the whites as men, although the reverse was not true. These chiefs saw the whites as men who ought, therefore, to behave like men and, they thought, like men of their word. The giants of the African struggles for independence, although they had had time to get to know “the whites”, although they had the horror and brutality of the colonial experience behind them, committed the same error. This suggest the colonial experience was not enough to make them see clearly. In fact, it was thanks to the brutality and horror of that experience that too many things were left out of sight, in the shadows; the motive for the whole business, its driving force, was not so clear.

Fundamentally, we have to consider that the colonial relation as such is also a screen. Whence the element of the imaginary, so important especially in the history of Congo, and which deserves a lengthy study in its own right (from Congo to Fanon to the young girls of Abidjan today who inject themselves with corticosteroids to whiten their skin); whereas the cold monster of capital has neither odour nor colour. And “Piraeus is not a man”. We, therefore, need to rethink colonialism as, at once, instrument and lure, including for its agents themselves.

For sure, at that time the illusion was contingent on its context – the world situation then. The end of the Second World War, and with it the bursting forth of a new era: the weakening of the two great colonial empires, England and France to the benefit of the US, which, not having colonies but wanting to open up new markets for itself, had little difficulty in declaring its support for the end of the colonial system; the existence of the “socialist camp”, the counterpart of American power. All these factors contributed to the sense of an open space, of a possible play among nations capable of recognising new nations, and there were big new nations (like India); and the assembly of the United Nations bringing all of this together in the representation of a space of rational speech, judgment, and law.

They thus believed that they could rely on a space of law and avail themselves of a time for building. Besides, the goal, and already the result, of a mobilisation and a victory over the colonialists, was to go and express oneself in the forum of the United Nations. All this was conducive to the belief that the contradiction was, indeed, between the old, the colonial, and the new, the right to independence, the right of Africa to enter into “the chorus of nations”. To be more precise, all this led to the belief that the contradiction existed in itself, “all things otherwise being equal”. Therefore, Um Nyobe devotes all his energy to arguing precisely and passionately in terms of law; while Lumumba asks “that we merely be permitted to rid ourselves of colonialism (and of imperialism)”, “without jeopardizing Belgian interests”. Fundamentally, this was the idea that the world could recognise “everyone”, its division into two blocs opening up space for a third term — the “third world”, the “non-aligned”, etc. — where it would no longer be obligatory to think in antagonistic terms but where, to the contrary, a time of peace and building was opening up, beyond antagonism. (Hence the care they took to refute the “accusation” of communism, which in effect served to justify the immediate reconstitution of the space in antagonistic terms, those of a fight to the death. You should go on the internet and watch the video of Messmer, a minister of De Gaulle’s and a member of the Académie Française, calmly declaring 30 years later that, yes, his practice of bombing with napalm, of torture, of decapitated heads displayed at the gates of the villages of Cameroon, was entirely justified, since “these weren’t independence fighters, these were revolutionaries”; “independence,” he says, “was us”.)

Independence has, indeed, been recapture and annihilation. The United Nations immediately proves to be the tool of the US, the spearhead of subjection. No time has been allowed for a process of disillusionment and for drawing up lessons of experience. Kwame Nkrumah, who tells us how he took office — in the governor’s palace where yesterday it was all congratulations and the handing-over of power, there is not even a light-bulb in the ceiling, or a chair, or a ream of paper, maybe in the corner a broken chair — understands that a much more terrible war is now declared. He writes his biography, from his school years until the proclamation of independence, then, immediately afterward, ‘Africa Must Unite’, then, immediately after that, ‘On Neo-Colonialism’, a catalogue of the multinational companies that are squeezing the African continent with their tentacles, with their branches and their boards of directors where the same people sit not only in multiple companies but also in the ministries of the “developed” countries. When he writes his final book, Consciencism, he is already in exile: everything must be thought and picked up anew, at a much deeper level, a much more radical one.

Picking Up, Then:  Two Big Mountains, Not Just One

Naivety, therefore, consisted in believing in a contradiction between colonialism and the desire for independence, “all things otherwise being equal”. The illusion was to imagine that the world, as it was, could recognise new states; the actual experience was that of a war aimed at the immediate annihilation of the supporters of independence, in order to safeguard the imperialist stranglehold over the natural riches of Africa against any risk of interruption.

But then, we must, at least, expand (hear?) the lesson: getting to know imperialism…but what is imperialism? Capitalism at its highest stage, none other than the definition given by Lenin in 1916; imperialism, then, cannot do without zones of looting, of free looting, the end of the old colonial system having signified the opening up of looting zones for free competition among imperialists. (This is the reason why the US proved so supportive of the much-celebrated decolonisation process, all the while cooperating so actively in the annihilation of the supporters of independence.).

Consequently, if this is true, there was not and is not a “path of development”. Just as capitalism needs constant access to new “labor-power”, exploitable at low cost, in order to counteract the downward trend of profit rates (and this roughly explains the move toward Asia), so it needs direct access to raw materials; and at its highest, “imperialist” stage, the dismemberment of the world having been completed, competition is all about this access.

We should note that the socialist camp — we could even say the progressive camp as a whole — played an extremely harmful role at the time by propagating the idea, which is to say the illusion, of a “third way”, of an autonomy of so-called national liberation struggles; and we should include as well the Chinese theory of “three worlds”, with the idea of the relative autonomy of the level of the states (independence being assigned to the level of states, etc.). All this implies a topological view of the world, with a “centre” and a “periphery”, the struggles for anti-colonial liberation taking place on the periphery.

The experience has proven that this was wrong, that exactly the opposite was the case. From the point of view of imperialism, in other words of capitalism in its current stage, in other words of the world today, Africa, the site for the looting of raw materials and for the fierce struggle to get the loot, is central. And it has to deal with the beast at its very heart.

A young friend from the Central African Republic tells us everyone there accuses Idriss Deby, but often stops at that point without going as far as Paris. That, according to her, is the case even though everyone knows Paris is the instigator and that what is at stake are the oil and diamonds in the north of the country. She says by way of explanation: “But it’s because we don’t understand what France wants.” What don’t you understand? On the contrary, you have a very clear understanding of everything. Here is her answer: “No, we know we’re still colonised, but then, they should just take their oil and their diamonds, but why kill poor peasants or send them to death? That’s what we don’t understand.”

What is to be understood then is that decolonisation meant the passage from a relatively stable consensus in sharing of the world among imperialists (the result of the wars among them in the preceding period) to a predominance of competition among them, which made Africa into their battlefield, where they are now fighting through African intermediaries. This is why some people are capable of missing the old colonial times, which, although horrible, were endowed with a certain stability, compared to the lawless savagery of imperialism at a more advanced stage — one of greater rottenness, in which the earth of Africa is only a space for brawling among bandits, with the peoples of Africa as pawns in the struggle.

But there is no going back. And imperialism is indeed the outcome of capitalism according to its own internal law.

One must, therefore, figure out how to confront the beast itself. This is why the great majority of Africans, who have had this experience, who have seen and understood this (in itself a source of power, a great step forward, an end to drifting in dubious imaginary battles), are so pessimistic about any possibility or opening, in any case in the short term. There is no independence and there will be none for quite a while; and they are convinced at the same time that the decisive struggle will take place in the long term.

So, in order to achieve clarity on this point, we propose from now on to call colonial anything having to do with the consensus among imperialists that Africa should remain a zone for looting, with concerted action and mutual aid to maintain this situation, and with a western ideological consensus on this point, particularly by means of ad hoc international agencies, while imperialism strictly speaking is the looting itself and the looting-war among the imperialists. And this is what makes Africa a battlefield: the battlefield of intra-imperialist competition and war for access to raw materials.

There is colonialism: the consensus and the agreement among imperialists that Africa should remain a looting zone. A good example would be the following excerpt from Le Monde, France’s number one colonial rag about the Congo (note its striking peroration): “China, the United States, and Europe need the treasures housed in the country’s subsoil; they cannot lose interest in what is happening on its surface.” Only the African continent, in particular the Congo, the object of such tender solicitude, must have no use of the riches of its subsoil.

But colonialism is the envelope and the outer garment of imperialism in action, in other words as the practice of looting and the fierce competitive struggle for the loot. Colonialism and imperialism are therefore inseparable. Colonialism is nothing more than the envelope of ideological consensus of imperialism as such. To take up the anti-colonial struggle in its first period was to go face to face with the beast without having anticipated it or even having known it in advance. In the end, this was the naivety. Today, however, after having had this experience, we would be not naïve but guilty if we did not know how to learn lessons from the past and to think truly about the present.

We said, for “the other continent”:  you will begin to exist once you have learned to put Africa at the centre of your world.

We can now say a bit more about this somewhat paradoxical statement. For of course, the alleged thesis, in the labor-union style, which in the preceding period claimed a “convergence of interests” between the colonised peoples and the poor of the rich countries, has been proved to be a complete failure. Experience has proven that there was no such convergence, and at the time Frantz Fanon very precisely denounced this thesis as the hoax that it was. What we can add is that, in today’s imperialism, not only is there no “convergence of interests”, but the interests in fact diverge radically. With the worsening of the competition for access to raw materials, poverty is increasing in the western imperialist countries and it will keep on increasing. Thwarted in its hunger for external expansion, capitalism can only regress to an older, 19th-century type of configuration, by excluding from the redistribution of what used to be called “crumbs” larger and larger zones of the old metropolitan states. Fewer and fewer crumbs:  that is what we are witnessing today. And this clearly explains the almost unanimous colonial consensus that reigns supreme in a country like France — and which can only get worse in a time of crisis. It also explains the fascist-leaning subjectivity developing all over Europe, which also can only increase as time goes on. Not to see this would not be naivety: it would be pure madness.

No convergence also means no unity negatively constituted around a supposed common enemy. Any supposed negative unity must quickly prove to be an illusion.

Consequently, if you must put Africa at the centre of your world, you must do so from a disinterested point of view. Indeed, it is precisely here, considering what has just been shown, that the touchstone of disinterestedness will lie. Now, any real politics — in other words, really incompatible with the existing capitalist order — is disinterested. For what is at stake is precisely not to submit to rule of private interests, but rather to intervene from another point of view, which we could call the point of view of humanity as a whole, or the point of view of equality, the point of view of the right of everyone to exist: “Every man is a man.”

It is from this point of view that we can say that your relation to Africa serves as a touchstone of your capacity to be free, or to make yourself an effective exception to the existing order.

Let us clarify another point. Serving the interests of capital or serving the interests of humanity:  serving private interests only being a variant of the first term. But this having been said, of course, it is the duty of everyone to survive, in other words to make his or her place in the world as it is, while avoiding as much as possible hurting others in the process. The whole question is thus to know, on the one hand, if one knows it, according to the phrase of Martin Singap, leader of the underground forces of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon in the Bamileke region, quoted in the book Kamerun. “At the end of the terrible summer of 1960”, the underground troops are attacked ferociously, and the chief of staff of the ALNK (the Army for the National Liberation of Kamerun) has ordered the exhausted elderly, women, and children to return to the “secured” villages on the model of the French army in Algeria, for it has become impossible for Singap to keep alive, in the backwoods, thousands of families exposed to bombing and to the general precariousness of the life of the underground. “In a huge meeting of militants organized by the UPC on September 5th, 1960 in Mangui, from 7:30 until midnight, at which no fewer than 1500 people were present, a leader explained Singap’s order to his comrades: ‘all of you are going to return to your native villages…. The enemies of our country will take you for supporters, but it is you who will know who you are. Know who you are. Know, moreover, which is even more important, whether that is all you will do, or whether you will do something “in addition”, something beyond. And it is on this point that we arrive at real politics, that is to say, politics incompatible with the capitalist order; that is to say, communist politics. Politics is already communist insofar as it is “in addition”, insofar as it is, as we used to say, free labour. Communism; in other words, the point of view of “all humanity”, finally depends on the extra half-hour that one can snatch from an already busy day, when one does not participate in the bourgeois world. To understand this thing that looks so simple, but that is not so easy to put into practice, is really to learn the lesson of the past century. With this point, we get to questions of activism, questions of politics.

What Is to Be Done

First, let us agree on the basic theses; if they are true, we must speak them. In other words, affirm them:

As the great ancestors wished, there must be big states. This has become even truer insofar as Africa is more than ever the looting zone of global imperialism and has become the stake in the competition among imperialist groups and the site of their battle. It definitely takes a big state to be able to expropriate a multinational company and to kick out of one’s home the armed gangs in its pay. Big states as a proposal, a watchword, a line to follow, an objective. This means states that completely transcend borders of ethnicity, religion, and nationality in the narrow sense of the term. That will be one of their great virtues, and it is moreover a direction for work that can begin immediately: completely separate political questions from all questions of identity, which, we will posit, come under the heading of free association, adding that states must guarantee this freedom but that the politics that interests us, intervening on questions of general interest and from the point of view of general interest, is indifferent to questions of identity, is diagonal to them, and does not exist on the same register, except in intervening to require states to guarantee the right of free association and even to encourage it in every way possible. (This politics goes completely against the contemporary trends that preach, on the contrary, that politics simply is questions of identity; also against the worn-out discourses along the lines of “everything is political” – discourses by the same people who, not afraid as they are by contradiction, also complain that political organisations victimize their identity. No, politics is about concerning oneself with political questions, and not with the rest. Let us be clear. From the point of view of politics, which needs energetic subjects, the more of “the rest” there is, that is, the more singular identities there are (the more ramified and solid symbolic constructions there are), the better things will be. Imperialism needs individuals who are defeated and exhausted, which is why it makes sure that beginning in their most tender years children are forbidden any possibility of symbolic construction; in so doing, imperialism threatens to destroy any civilisation, and gets busy making good on the threat. For us, exactly the opposite is the case. The more subjects there are, and the more singularities there are, the more humanity there will be and the more chances for humanity there will be. Mobilising around cultures, musics, languages, testimonies, and memories, going to places of worship: this does not contradict the work of political unification, quite the contrary. But it is not at all the same thing. Claiming that it is the same thing, or that one should rule over the other, would be catastrophic.)

Unity, around and through political proposals and watchwords, is an essential theme, and it is a goal for work that is always possible here and now, whatever the scale of this work may be. It requires maintaining that political unification is a process independent of questions of identity and indifferent to them, constructing itself on the basis of its own themes, perhaps in sympathy with questions of identity but in any case at a distance from them.

Where to find the strength to construct and impose these big states? Certainly not at the level of the states or of their personnel. On this point, the experience of the great ancestors is definitive; their efforts at this level all failed. But more generally, that is the lesson of the whole twentieth century, which we can sum up in this somewhat crude way:  affairs of state are much too serious to be left in the care of states. [As we know, this was precisely the call issued by Mao Zedong to Chinese youth at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution: “get mixed up in affairs of the state”; which, again, is not so easy. (simple?)]

On this point, then, we can maintain that African consciousness is ahead of the game, in the sense in which “any conscientious African”, as Lenin would have said, knows that nothing is to be done at the level of the state, since at this level the only alternative is corruption or death.

The whole question is to follow through with the consequences of this knowledge.

A first consequence is certainly not to expect anything from any position within state or international institutions. But we must go further. An essential point in situating oneself completely outside the existing corrupt states is to succeed in keeping one’s distance from elections. Elections, as we know, are a means of division and of crushing. The purpose of elections is to involve people in the naming of a subordinate and servile state personnel; at “best,” they announce a period of corruption (for very little, often for a simple t-shirt), of sterile division—since there is nothing really at stake in them—and thus of the paralysis of the peoples. At worst, they open up periods of confrontation that are all the more atrocious for being pointless.

Elections have been a dreadfully pernicious way of attacking the supporters of independence. And experience has shown that it is not easy to escape them. The most striking example, with the most disastrous consequences, is undoubtedly that of the elections organised in 1956 by the French government in Cameroon. Previously, the UPC (the party of Nyobe Moumie), the only serious and truly established party, had been prohibited. It, therefore, could not run its own candidates. What was to be done under these conditions? Accepting these falsified elections and relying on moderate spokespeople (like Soppo Priso), who will immediately play their own game and unburden themselves of the commitments they have made? Or boycotting the elections? It is because it found itself squeezed in this double bind — either submission and the risk of accepting the formation of a phony government, or a boycott which would have meant entering into antagonism — that the UPC, in fact, lost the initiative and found itself committed in spite of itself to a rash and defensive war. Same thing in the Congo, same thing, more recently, with Aristide’s party in Haiti. We can truly say that once real independent forces are constituted, elections are deployed by imperialists as a massive weapon of destruction, allowing them to take back the initiative and to hasten the antagonism according to a time-scheme determined by them.

So then, let us propose to agree on a line that we will call that of indifference to elections. The word “indifference” is essential, and we will take our starting point in proposing the watchword indifference in two registers. First, indifference that does not preclude sympathy toward the process of identification; second, antipathy but above all indifference towards the electoral processes, indifference here being the important point to apply and to win. Let it be understood that we are neither concerned with nor interested in elections. What defines this line is, in fact, an immediate stake, which is to suggest that we not talk about — consequently that we not become divided over — names, but only about contents, proposals, watchwords.

We will claim that this is enough to begin. To begin what? Investigating, working among people, the people. Must we pick up the question of independence where it was left off?  Must our goal be the construction of big states? What do you think of these proposals?  Here objections, stories, examples, enumerations of obstacles — in this case, we propose the discussion on the watchword indifference in its two registers — are going to proliferate. Perhaps they can take written form, that of a tract, which would then be presented for discussion. A meeting could be called. At that point new watchwords will emerge — small ones, intermediate ones, objectives putting this work of unification into action; a small work, certainly, patient, tiny. The initial theses will become increasingly refined, reshaped, ramified, depending upon places, circumstances, the battles that need to be won. The work of ants, invisible, bringing neither rewards nor fame, the work of the “old mole”, except that here the image is less one of digging in order to undermine the edifice than to construct. But construct what? Nothing other than an independence, for we will maintain that independence, as we have seen, is not an affair of state, cannot be entrusted to states. For whom and where, then, if not to the people? What is independence if not a politicised people capable of imposing its decisions? This is why we can say that independence, as the UPC saw and practised it in Cameroon, even without grasping its ultimate political consequences — this is why we must pick up where it left off. Independence is nothing other than “the proceedings”, the process of independence (in Bassa language, Ngaa Kunde: “You will know who you are”).

Thus, as Mao Zedong used to say, to investigate a problem is to solve it. Politics consists of proposing theses and of putting them to work and into discussion, of addressing the problem to be solved. And of continuing. Of beginning, and of continuing. Of following through the process, of holding on to the thread.

Who will do it? Anyone and everyone, can do it. Those who decide to do it.

Certainly, those who have a little more time have a particular responsibility (how are you going to do anything, a comrade used to say, when in the Congo, for example, you have to devote all your time and energy to finding whatever you can to eat today?); particular responsibility falls to those who know how to read, and can read for others; who know how to write and thus how to take notes and write them up; who can travel, etc. In other words, the well-known question of the intellectuals.

We can no longer hope, as Amilcar Cabral used to say, the petit-bourgeoisie will commit suicide as a class in order to put itself in the service of its people and of the peoples. More than ever today, the petit-bourgeoisie, the literate class, constitutes the bulk of the corrupted, the servile personnel.

Responsibility falls to those who are “one and another”: to singular subjects.

When the “mass connection,” the idea of “going to the people”, becomes itself a mass phenomenon, it means that something is going to happen. This is the 19th century Russia or, in a smaller and closer version, the movement of going to work in the factories in France just before 1968. So it is also something that already participates in movement, carrying with it the energy and the ambiguity of what makes movement possible and  interrupts itself in the exhaustion of its contradiction. This was often a beginning without any follow-up, because the predominant fantasy was that of “going there, but nothing after”, because in the last analysis what was really involved was a narcissistic project, because the theme of connection is a theme of movement, at once strong and ambiguous: this is an absolutely necessary theme, a sine qua non for beginning, but it is not a sufficient theme for politics.

The political theme, the militant one, is to begin and to continue, and then it is equality as the experience of the process and of contents. To put it differently, what is available to us today is a method. This method is properly speaking the heritage of Maoism, whose content is in no way reducible to the idea of “mass labor” — that is the requirement and the beginning; it is a method for continuing, in other words for trying out, through the rigour of the investigation and the realisation of its consequences by means of new proposals, new watchwords, new theses, that we can continue. (go on?)

(This text presents itself as a proposal for beginning and for continuing.)

Cécile Winter is a French political activist working in the northern suburb of Paris. The author of various programmatic and interventionist tracts and brochures on workers’ politics, she was a member of the French Maoist group, UCFML (now extinct), and then went on to play a prominent part in L’Organisation Politique. As somebody who continues to be an engaged militant, Africa and its colonisation are some of Winter’s major concerns. A doctor by profession, she hopes to elucidate the notions of life, genericity, conscience and decision in the works of Joseph Conrad.

Pothik Ghosh

The question of politics as far as an artist or a litterateur is concerned is usually posed in terms of what position the artist or the litterateur in question strikes as an individual with regard to the political situation of his day. Those terms often also extend to what such an artist or writer says about politics in his works of art or literature. That is mostly how the question of an artist or a writer’s politics is approached and framed. We could call this the question of literature in politics or politics in literature – the problematic of art/literature about politics, or the problematic of political art. Now that, most certainly, is a valid approach in dealing with the question of art and politics, and their relationship. The attempt here, however, is to engage with the works of Bangladeshi writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias by way of another approach. One that has arguably come down to us from Marx — evident in his engagement with the literature of Classical Hellenic Antiquity – through, primarily, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht. (There have, of course, been others like Adorno and Ernst Bloch, and such Althusserians and post-Althusserians as Pierre Macherey and Jacques Ranciere respectively, not to forget Fredric Jameson, who have adopted one or another variant of this approach in their engagement with art and literature.) This approach seeks to deal with the question of art and politics in terms of what we ought to call ‘the politics of art’.

What does this approach entail? It seeks to deal with art and literature not principally in terms of what artistic or literary works have to say on or about politics, but what is the politics they pose by virtue of being the works of art or literature they are. More precisely, this approach attempts to grasp the politics posed by the aesthetics of the works in question. That is, it tries to grasp the politics of a work of art or literature by figuring out the organisation of space constitutive of that work. This approach attempts to unearth the politics of art in terms of how the question of relationality has been embodied by the text of a work of art or literature, and envisaged in its production. For, it is the logic of relationality that is constitutive of the organisation and structure of space thus giving that structure and organisation a specific character, whether in our so-called real, social life or the life of the world that is a novel, a story, a poem, a painting or a film. It is this character of the structure or organisation of space of a work of art that is its economy, while that which founds this character or economy and/or renders it manifest is its politics.

Politics of Literature And Elias’s Savage Mind

The two approaches of dealing with the question of art and politics delineated above are not mutually exclusive. They are interdependent. However, the stress here, in dealing with the question of politics with regard to Elias’s literature, will fall principally on the latter approach. That is not to say one intends to evade engaging with Elias’s works in terms of the former but one certainly wishes to understand how what Elias says about politics in and through his literary works derives from the politics his literature as such speaks. That is, how it is actually the politics of Elias’s literature which renders what that literature says on or about his contemporary political situation, and on politics in general, complete and effective. It might be a repetition to once again explain and explicate the terms of the approach and concept of politics of literature. But it might not be a bad idea to do so, perhaps at some length, before we begin engaging our determinate object – that is, the literary works of Elias. On that score, Ranciere (2011, pp.3-4) provides us with an apposite conceptual compass:

“The politics of literature is not the same thing as the politics of writers. It does not concern the personal engagements of writers in the social or political struggles of their times. Neither does it concern the way writers represent social structures, political movements or various identities in their books. The expression ‘politics of literature’ implies that literature does politics simply by being literature. It assumes that we don’t need to worry about whether writers should go in for politics or stick to the purity of their art instead, but that this very purity has something to do with politics. It assumes that there is an essential connection between politics as a specific forms of collective practice and literature as a well-defined practice of the art of writing.

“….Politics is the construction of a specific sphere of experience in which certain objects are posited as shared and certain subjects regarded as capable of designating these objects and of arguing about them. But such a construction is not a fixed given resting on an anthropological invariable. The given on which politics rests is always litigious. A celebrated Aristotelian formula declares that men are political beings because they have speech, which allows them to share the just and the unjust, whereas animals only have a voice that expresses pleasure or pain. But the whole issue lies in knowing who is qualified to judge what is deliberative speech and what is expression of displeasure. In a sense, all political activity is a conflict aimed at retracing the perceptible boundaries by means of which political capacity is demonstrated. Plato’s Republic shows at the outset that artisans don’t have the time to do anything other than their work: their occupation, their timetable and their capabilities that adapt them to it prohibit them from acceding to this supplement that political activity constitutes. Now, politics begins precisely when this impossibility is challenged, when those men and women who don’t have the time to do anything other than their work take the time they don’t have to prove that they are indeed speaking beings, participating in a shared world and not furious or suffering animals. This distribution and this redistribution of space and time, place and identity, speech and noise, the visible and the invisible, form what I call the distribution of the perceptible. Political activity reconfigures the distribution of the perceptible. It introduces new objects and subjects onto the common stage. It makes visible what was invisible, it makes audible as speaking beings those who were previously heard only as noisy animals.(1)

“The expression ‘politics of literature’ thereby implies that literature intervenes as literature in this carving up of space and time, the visible and the invisible, speech and noise. It intervenes in the relationship between practices and forms of visibility and modes of saying that carves up one or more common worlds.”

Now the question is: what is the politics of Elias’s literature? It is, we ought to contend, insurrectionary. And that is exactly what this essay intends to demonstrate. To be more accurate, it must be said the politics posed by Elias’s literary aesthetic is insurrectionary. In fact, one should further qualify one’s take on Elias by contending the politics that the aesthetic — or more precisely the aesthetic economy — of his literature renders evident is insurrectionary, as opposed to being merely insurgent.

Before we proceed any further we would do well to clarify what insurrectionary politics is and how exactly is it to be distinguished from what one has chosen to term insurgent politics. Insurrection is generalisation of the emergent logic of a localised moment of insurgency – which is doubtless its constitutive moment – through the overcoming of that localisation into multiple insurgent moments that erupt uninterruptedly and simultaneously.

But how does this politics of insurrection manifest itself in aesthetics, the aesthetics of literature to be precise? Elias’s literature – his two novels [Chilekotar Sepai (Soldier in the Attic) and Khowabnama (Dream Chronicle)] and over two dozen stories – is an apposite instantiation of the same. The organisation of the space of his literature – which is its aesthetic – is constitutive of what Levi-Strauss terms “the savage mind”. It is on account of such constitutivity that the politics of Elias’s literary aesthetic becomes insurrectionary. According to Levi-Strauss (1966, p.245), “The savage mind totalizes” and “it is in (the) intransigent refusal on the part of the savage mind to allow anything human (or even living) to remain alien to it, that the real principle of dialectical reason is to be found”.

The French anthropologist further clarifies the principle of dialectical reason – and thus the savage mind – when he takes issue with Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason to explain and explicate the relationship between analytical reason and dialectical reason. He writes (1966, p.246): “…the opposition between the two sorts of reason (analytical and dialectical) is relative, not absolute. It corresponds to a tension within human thought which may persist indefinitely de facto, but which has no basis de jure. In my view dialectical reason is always constitutive: it is the bridge, forever extended and improved, which analytical reason throws out over an abyss; it is unable to see the further shore but it knows that it is there, even should it be constantly receding. The term dialectical reason thus covers the perpetual efforts analytical reason must make to reform itself if it aspires to account for language, society, and thought; and the distinction between the two forms of reason in my view rests only on the temporary gap separating analytical reason from the understanding of life. Sartre calls analytical reason reason in repose; I call the same reason dialectical when it is roused to action, tensed by its efforts to transcend itself.”

After all, a new analytic of thinking emerges as the subjectivity of an object to critically overcome externalised determination, and the meaning imposed on it through representation by an already existing analytic subjectivity so that the object can free itself from the violence done to it by the latter analytic, which is nothing but the abstraction of its own prior subjectivity. This, in order to assert itself in its concreteness. That is, to affirm itself as its own subject: Badiou’s “subjective-materiality”.(2) (2009, p.-198)

As a result, the unconscious of the analytical mode of reason is to overcome all analytic abstractions, including itself. The savage mind is the generalisation or awakening of this unconscious of analytical reason with the latter self-reflexively grasping itself as the former.

Therefore, the savage mind is activation of dialectical reason, which is analytical reason constantly overcoming itself by grasping its own logic of emerging to actualise it. The logic of emerging of analytical reason is, it must be stated at the risk of some repetition, also its unconscious when it exists as itself, which is dialectical reason in “repose”. Clearly, the savage mind is constitutive of the process of the self being transfigured into its beyondness. Therefore, as the actuality of the principle of dialectical reason it is de-identitarianising and cannot, therefore, have its locus ontically fixed in a self. Levi-Strauss puts that across quite succinctly when he writes: “I do not regard dialectical reason as something other than analytical reason, upon which the absolute originality of a human order would be based, but as something additional in analytical reason: the necessary condition for it to venture to undertake the resolution of the human into the non-human.”

And insofar as the savage mind is constitutive of the critical overcoming of externalised determination and analytical abstraction, it posits a critique of duality and relationality on one hand and identity principle on the other. The savage mind can, therefore, also be envisaged in terms of affirmation of singularity and non-identity. It could be construed as a figure of the actuality or historicity of singularisation or counter-totalisation of infinitely different space-times. A historicity of singularity as it were.

It must, however, be stated here as an aside that one has absolutely no intention of upholding the methodological structuralism of Levi-Strauss’s anthropology. In horizontalising various historical phenomena into an ethnography of relativised laissez-faire in terms of the universality of the deep structure that, according to the French anthropologist, constitutes them, this structuralism shares a methodological affinity with a kind of ahistorical Kantianism. This problem, it must be stated here in passing, stems from the theoretical level of abstraction being collapsed on to the practical or existentially-lived level of determination. A move that conceptually renders the subjective operation of dialectical thinking directly correspondent to and fully commensurate with the dialectical constitutivity of the structure (structural dialectic) in its objectiveness.

What the argument here takes from Levi-Strauss is basically his conceptualisation of the “savage mind” as a mode of social being animated by, and constitutive of, the operation of dialectical thinking. That not only serves to explicate the singularising and insurrectionary politics of Elias’s literature, it also arguably enables one to find the resources, from within Levi-Strauss’ anthropological discourse itself, to critically break with the twin-crises of structuralism and relativism of his ethnological method and discourse. That becomes possible on account of this conceptualisation of the “savage mind” being premised on the explicit recognition of the dialectic between history and structure (or logic). One that, in Benjamin’s words, enables us to brush history (as in its historical analytic) against its own grain (the dialectical logic of its emerging).

This counter-totalising savage mind, which both singularises infinitely diverse spatio-temporalities and is thus simultaneously also their singularity, is rendered rather explicitly evident in a constellation of different space-times of resistance that Elias constructs in his Chilekotar Sepai (2000, pp.187-188). Those different spatio-temporalities come together in and as the unity of their moments of insurgent, and thus evental, emerging to palpably inhabit, in the eyes of protagonist Osman Gani, a protest march on the streets of Dhaka against Pakistani occupation of East Bengal:

“Yesterday Ayub Khan’s police killed a boy from the university, such a huge protest happens, Anwar can’t get to see any of it! …Osman’s heart skips a few beats: so many people here, are they all breathing, fish-rice-eating normal human beings like him? This human flood here, he finds the attire, demenaour of many of them unfamiliar? Who are they? Does it mean, people from eras long gone by have also joined the procession? Here see, smack in the middle of the procession are short dhoti-clad denizens of Dhaka from the time of Islam Khan’s reign! In fact, those who would, in an even earlier time, travel to Sonargaon and back in boats full of sacks of rice have come too. Inhabitants of Bangla Baajar and Tantibaajar (weavers’ market) have emerged from the frozen heart of the vanished canal to come here? Here are the turbaned soldiers, from the time of Ibrahim Khan’s reign, who were killed in a skirmish with Prince Khusro. Osman gets a start on seeing those who died of hunger in Shaiyasta Khan’s Dhaka of the time of eight-maunds of rice for a taka. They have had nothing to eat for 300 years, — their steps in harmony, they march ahead with their black hair fluttering in the breeze like a wave. People battered by the Mughals, people battered by the Mogs, people battered by the Company’s merchants — could this procession have been this big had everyone not turned up? The Maratha priest has emerged from the dry layers of bricks of the Racecourse Kali Temple to come down here swinging the falchion, Majnu Shah’s fakirs are here too, here go the Muslin weavers throwing and waving their thumb-torn fists in the air, their eternally black bare bodies roast in the sun. Today, the naked, starving, skeletal bodies of weavers who weave taka 4,000- worth jamdanis walk an erect walk. The imams, muezzins, musullis of Babubajar Mosque riddled with bullets by the British are marching ahead, instead of muttering verses from the Quran they roar today, ‘We shall not let it go in vain!’ Here come the soldiers of Lalbagh Fort, mangled by the beastly bites of insatiable desire of Nabab Abdul Gani, Ruplal, Mohinimohon, let loose by the red-faced sahibs. Sepoys of Merrut have torn away the nooses around their necks to come down from the palm trees of Victoria Park, sepoys of Bareilly, sepoys of Swandeep-Sirajganj-Goaland. No dear, even that doesn’t suffice. The mother-worshipping youths of Jugantar and Anushilan in their dhoti and vests are coming, in their midst the two murdered boys of Kaltabajaar can be separately identified. From below the Naarinda bridge comes Somen Chanda, the bloody wave of Dolai canal on his head. There, that is Barkat! His skull has been blown off. That, at first sight, frightens Osman a little but he quickly takes hold of himself. So many people! In the high tide of a new water Dhaka’s past and present are today overflowing and dissolving into one another, today its morning-afternoon-evening-night are forgotten and stand dissolved, today the city is without its east-west-north-south, all the signs that divide and distinguish the seventeenth-eighteenth-nineteenth-twentieth centuries stand erased. Today, the city of Dhaka is fully intent on occupying this limitless time and space. Osman’s heart trembles: how far will he be able to go with this massive deluge? How far? Like a quaking pitcher under the running tap at the mouth of Golok Pal Lane becomes still once it is full to the brim, our Osman Gani’s heart too has gradually become full and complete, by becoming one of the smallest molecules of this uninterrupted tidal surge he is experiencing a warmth in his heart. That is no mean recompense? With his heart full he throws his fist in the air and roars, ‘Will not let it go in vain.’” (My translation.)

Clearly, what the historical-sociological specifications or mediations of those struggles are – that is, their identities – do not seem to matter in this novelistic depiction. At any rate, it is a secondary concern. Instead, what the discourse of the novel seeks to bring to the fore is the universality that each of those struggles in their mediational specificity posit. Each of those struggles in the specificity of being ranged against their respectively particular historical domination posit the unconscious of overcoming the general condition of externalised determination, and thus duality and relationality. It is this singularising unconscious, which can also be called the unconscious of universal-singularity, that is actualised in this passage from Chilekotar Sepai through the construction of this constellation that is accorded the reality of an existentially-lived world or space-time. This constellation is, therefore, nothing but the world of the savage mind – the savage mind in its own space and time.

Insurrection as Popular Culture, or from the Subaltern to the Oppressed

This example – typical of Elias’s literary aesthetic of the savage mind, and thus its insurrectionary politics – is, among other things, the enactment of popular culture. The discourse constitutive of such an aesthetic enables us to discern in it a conception of culture that is the singularising and singular configuration of space-times. It affirms a politics of culture that can, following Raymond Williams, be termed “cultural materialism”. Following his literary aesthetic, we could say that Elias, not unlike Williams, envisages culture as the materiality of life, wherein this materiality of life is not the positivist abstraction of that empirically-lived life. Instead, real materiality of life, for militant-intellectuals like him and Williams, emerges only when the living of life is a mode of struggle and self-critique. This aesthetic seems to suggest that popular culture, as Elias would grasp it, is not the symbolicness or discursivity of forms of subaltern expression that identitarianises culture. Rather, it would, for him, be precisely the expression of an impulse – of course made possible as that expression through the mediation of forms and their historically and sociologically given discursive resources – that tends to overcome the identitarian logic and politics of culture. On the other hand, culture is an embodiment of identitarian logic and politics when it is grasped in terms of its formal stability and discursive abstraction. This latter sort of culture should – following the insurrectionary aesthetic vision embodied in and by the discourse of Elias’s novels and stories – be comprehended as nothing but culture as the logic of representation, identitarianisation and domination. This, for us, is, clearly, culture as a commodity and ideology, and thus culture as capital and the politics of capitalism.

In the Eliasian scheme, which can be discerned from the nature of the writer’s literary aesthetic, popular culture would be the flow and flux beyond the abstraction of forms — which are nevertheless its constitutive moments because they serve to determinately actualise the de-formalising or de-identitarianising flux. It would be the force of the flow that unravels its own formal fetishes, which are tendentially inevitable, to overcome the centripetalising regimentation that compels it to turn into culture as bourgeois domination, and thus also into an embodiment of its politics of hegemony (in a precise Gramscian sense). Thus popular culture would, for Elias, be the expression of the generalisation of the tendency of de-representation, de-identitarianisation and centrifugalisation. Insurrection is nothing but the generalised expression of such a tendency, which in and as that generalisation is the actuality or historicity of non-identity and singularity. Clearly, for Elias, culture is truly popular only when it seeks to instantiate the tendency of the minor.

In the novel Khowabnama, for instance, the actuality of the centrifugalising force in its singularity is broached through the opposition posed by the mediations of the paganised-heretical Islamic discursivities of wandering mendicant and minstrel Cherag Ali’s traditional canon of mythic stories and anonymous Delphic dream-reading riddles, songs, limericks and doggerels to the sociology and discursivities of the culture, with a relatively more orthodox Islamic religious dimension, of the dominant class of rich kulaks such as Sharafat Mandal. The historical sociology of this opposition, more precisely contradistinction, is envisaged in the novel to reveal the unconscious of the heretical cultural discursivity and its concomitant subaltern sociology. And that unconscious of the sociology and discursivity of the subaltern culture, by virtue of it being constituted thus in its bid to overcome the domination and externalised determination by the dominant culture, is to obtain to the condition of singularity. After all, the sociologically relational existence of those two discursivities of culture proves the discursivity and sociology of the subaltern culture has constituted itself as what it is – that is, in its difference from the discursivity and sociology of the dominant culture – to thwart being represented, determined and thus dominated by the latter. By that same token of its constitutive or emergent logic, therefore, it must also overcome itself as that culture of subalternised discursivity and sociology, which renders it an identity precisely and simultaneously in being the difference it is.

The novel in question reveals that unconscious, or incipience, of the heretical-subaltern sociology and discursivity of Cherag Ali’s culture by actualising it, precisely by having that culture-as-difference (or difference-as-identity) overcome and transfigure itself. The constitutivity of mystic-mendicant Cherag Ali’s culture, which is subtractive and singular, is shown in the novel to actualise itself through its unfolding by overcoming, and in the process transfiguring, the discursively specified discourse of Cherag Ali. Such overcoming and transfiguration sustains the actuality of the centrifugalising force in its singularity, which is popular culture, by preventing its hypostatisation into a sociology or artefact of so-called popular culture. And that happens through the reconstitution of the centrifugalising force, which was constitutive of Cherag Ali’s discourse in its moment of emerging, as and in the new songs of social criticism and revolutionary transformation composed and performed by his self-appointed disciple Keramat Ali in the high-noon of the Tebhaga movement. What is at stake here is clearly not the actuality of the two cultural or discursive forms. It is not about the difference registered by the latter form with regard to the former in mutating from it either. What is, instead, at stake, as far as the emphasis of the novel at this point is concerned, is the actuality of the mutation itself. In other words, what is being staked out here through the two discursive, cultural or sociological forms and their difference is the actuality of the simultaneity of difference and the deployment of that difference. The novel demands that we focus here not on the actuality of difference but on the actuality of deployment of difference that the emergence of difference registers.

The break constitutive of the transfiguration of the figure of Cherag Ali into that of Keramat Ali produces, to talk in an Althusserian language, two different forms of “historical individuality” (Balibar; 1999, p. 252). But these two historical individualities, or figures of discourse, are different not merely in terms of the two sociologically different ontic positions, and historical situations, they occupy. Nor, therefore, is the difference between the two limited to the different discursive appearances of their respective discourses: anonymous mythic doggerels on one hand, and avowedly self-composed songs of social transformation on the other. Rather, what sets the two individualities radically apart is the break between their respective modalities of discourse, which marks an epistemological rupture in the qualities of the orientation of their respective subject-positions. Something that makes them inhabitants of not only two different historical situations but two radically different historicities or epochs. It is precisely on account of this difference that the two figures faithfully bear out the Althusserian concept of “historical individuality”.

The novel in having Keramat Ali assert that he is a disciple of Fakir Cherag Ali, even while he explicitly abandons the discursive pattern of the latter’s discourse, makes him into an active subject of his own invention as the singular centrifugalising force by reconstituting it through and as the new discursivity of songs of social transformation. It reveals that Keramat Ali is aware he is reclaiming the singular centrifugalising force, constitutive of the subalternised sociology and discursivity of Cherag Ali’s discourse in its moment of emerging, in precisely abandoning the discursive tradition of that discourse. This, therefore, also implies that, unlike the sociological figure of Cherag Ali, the sociological figure of Keramat Ali is self-reflexive in his awareness of the unconscious of the discursively-specified discourse he produces. The way he has been envisaged in the novel implicitly indicates his awareness of the need to also overcome the discursivity and sociology of his own discourse – which he has produced in the process of overcoming the sociology and discursivity of Cherag Ali’s discourse – in order to maintain his fidelity to the reconstitution of the singularity of the centrifugalising force.

So, while the historicity and sociality constitutive of the sociological figure of Fakir Cherag Ali are respectively that of duality and identity, the historicity and sociality constitutive of the figure of Keramat Ali, which are also the historicity and sociality posited by the novel, go beyond the historical sociology of Keramat Ali to be the historicity and sociality of singularity and non-identity. The former is a figure of anti-capitalism that is constitutive of the epoch of capital. The latter, on the other hand, is a figure of the communist epoch. It must, however, be stated here that precisely because the historicity that Elias’s novel Khowabnama constitutes is singular, do we encounter Cherag Ali not only as the sociological self he is, but also as a figure beyond that sociologically specified, existential self of his. That figure is animated by the character of the spectre of Cherag Ali, who appears after the death/disappearance of his sociologically-specified existential self. This clearly instantiates the radicalisation of the empirically-lived, sociologised finitude of a character such as Cherag Ali by transfiguring his existentially-limited and sociologically-specified present into a perpetually open present by stretching that existentially-lived finitude in its very moment to that of infinite beyondness. The doubling, or tripling, of the figure of Cherag Ali – in and as the characters of existentially-lived Fakir, his spectre and his self-appointed disciple Keramat Ali – symptomatises his finitude in its inhumanly monstrous radicalisation. This savagely insurrectionary spatio-temporality is the novelistic space of Khowabnama, insofar as that novelistic space is constitutive of the inhumanity of such monstrous radicalisation of the existentially-limited human finitude.

The transcending of the self-other binary – by bringing the self and the other into a constellated synchrony of, what Badiou would term, “the singular-multiple” (2010, p.82) by abolishing the dualising relationality among them – is precisely what such doubling (or repetition or twinning) of character-figures accomplishes. Such constellated transcending of that binary is a recurrent motif in Elias’s literature. It is echoed, for instance, by most of his stories that are enactments of the singularising interplay of different, psychotically estranged alterities of otherwise consolidated selves. The devices and registers of subtraction,(3) which are so integral to Elias’s literary discourse, enable the enactment of such singularising interplay of alterities. They are dream [Laalmiya and Bullet in ‘Jaal Sopno, Sopner Jaal’(The Dream-web and Counterfeit Dreams’)]; violently idiosyncratic reverie [Osman in ‘Pratishodh’ (Revenge), Romij Ali in ‘Keetnashoker Kirti’ (The Pesticide Magic)]; eccentric recalcitrance [Mobarok Ali in ‘Apaghat’ (Mishap), psychotic break [Haddi Khijir and Osman Gani in Chilekotar Sepai, Abbas Pagla and Mili in ‘Miliir Haatey Stengun’ (Mili and Her Stengun), Nurul Huda in ‘Raincoat’]; intoxication [Samarjeet in ‘Khonwari’ (The Alcoholic Stupor)]; and schizophrenic meditation on self and history [Ronju in ‘Nirrudesh Jatra’ (The Unknown Journey)].

These examples – and especially Khowabnama – serve to demonstrate that in Elias’s creative prose the practice and discourse of the subalternised and marginal subject-positions are not championed as such in terms of their sociology and discursive abstractions. Rather, they are affirmed in terms of their singular/singularising logic of emerging. This is indicated and indexed by the discursivity and sociology characterising their subaltern/marginal culture in its difference from the identitarianised discursivity and sociology of the dominant culture. Such affirmation is, as the example from Khowabnama demonstrates, integral to the reclamation of the singularity by critically overcoming precisely the identified discursivity and sociology of subaltern culture. This, among other things, implies that for Elias subaltern cultures in the mere finitude of their difference do not denote popular culture. The former do not amount to the latter in its uninterrupted and infinite openness. Subaltern culture as difference instantiates, at best, the repetition of the succession of infinite finitudes, wherein finite freedom as withdrawal from the horizon of infinite totalisation is really no more than subjective illumination that only serves to accelerate, at the objective level, the reproduction of that identitarian horizon of infinite totalisation.

A subalternised culture is objectively coeval with popular culture only in its evental moment or moment of emergent constitutivity. And in that moment the culture in question is neither subaltern nor an identity but precisely the determinate instantiation of the nonidentitarian excess of their ontological structure. This nonidentitarian excess, needless to say, immobilises the metaphysical dynamic of that ontological structure, while simultaneously also interrupting the differentiating flight from it that only serves to return and reproduce that structure.

To grasp the sociologies and discursivities of the cultures of the subalterns and the marginals in such terms is to realise that justice can be done to the popular grain of those cultures only by critically overcoming them in their subalternised/marginalised existence. Grasping and actualising such internal critique posited by those subaltern/marginal cultures due to the fact of their differentiating and differential existence vis-à-vis the identity of dominant culture, is considered indispensable by Gramsci for an effective and meaningful project of Marxist sociology.

Through his criticism of Nikolai Bukharin’sTheory of Historical Materialism: A Manual of Marxist Sociology, which is shown to be lacking on that score, Gramsci (1996, pp.419-420) demonstrates why and how the sociological discursivities of subaltern cultures must be grasped in terms of their own singular constitutivity of emerging, and thus their own internal critique. This they themselves mediately posit as their own unconscious or negativity. He articulates his criticism of Bukharin thus:

“The first mistake of the Popular Manual is that it starts, at least implicitly, from the assumption that the elaboration of an original philosophy of the popular masses is to be opposed to the great systems of traditional philosophy and the religion of the leaders of the clergy – i.e. the conception of the world of the intellectuals and of high culture. In reality these systems are unknown to the multitude and have no direct influence on its way of thinking and acting. This does not mean of course that they are altogether without influence but it is influence of a different kind. These systems influence the popular masses as an external political force, an element of cohesive force exercised by the ruling classes and therefore an element of subordination to an external hegemony. This limits the original thought of the popular masses in a negative direction, without having the positive effect of a vital ferment of interior transformation of what the masses think in an embryonic and chaotic form about the world and life. The principal elements of common sense are provided by religion, and consequently the relationship between common sense and religion is much more intimate than that between common sense and the philosophical systems of intellectuals…. In common sense it is the “realistic”, materialistic elements which are predominant, the immediate product of crude sensation. This is by no means in contradiction with the religious element, far from it. But here these elements are “superstitious” and acritical….”

It, therefore, follows that the sociological specificity of subaltern culture establishes its own specific identity precisely in the moment it tends to differentiate itself from the sociology and discursivity of dominant culture in its identified and identitarianised specificity. The assertion of discursive specificity of a subaltern culture to differentiate itself with regard to the particular identity of a dominant culture is intrinsic to its attempt to obviate its representation and domination by the latter. However, the assertion of such differentiating identity presupposes the condition of duality – for, difference, in order to affirm itself, needs to assert and exist in its discursive particularity with regard to a specific identity from which such assertion is meant to affirmatively distinguish it. And this condition of duality and relationality is constitutive of competition, domination and representation. This condition is the condition of possibility of the mutually interdependent existence of domination and competition. Hence, a particular form of domination cannot be truly abolished without simultaneously abolishing competition and the condition of possibility of their mutually constitutive existence in general. It is precisely for this reason that a subaltern culture, even when it exists as such through the assertion of its difference vis-à-vis the identity of a dominant culture, continues to be dominated, marginalised, and even represented – in terms of the very discursivity it asserts to affirm its specified difference – by the dominant classes and their cultural systems. Clearly, the assertion of a subaltern culture as the index of affirmation of difference vis-à-vis a dominant culture spells the abolition of neither the latter as the specific identity it is nor the relationality of domination it co-founds.

In that context, the attempt by a subalternised people to rid themselves of their subordination by the dominant class through the assertion of their culture – that is, their specified way of life – reveals itself to be governed by the very condition of possibility of domination. For, the assertion of such difference with regard to identity, as we have seen, posits the structure of duality that is this condition of possibility of identitarianisation and domination. In such circumstances, this struggle of the subaltern and the marginalised against their subordination through the assertion of the differentiating specificities objectively amounts to no more than competition, which co-founds domination and is thus simultaneously co-constitutive of duality as their condition of possibility. That is exactly what Gramsci implies when he writes about “the popular masses” and their “original thought” being subordinated “to an external hegemony” of “the great systems of traditional philosophy and the religion of the leaders of the clergy”, even as such “conception of the world of the intellectuals and of high culture…are unknown to the multitude and have no direct influence on its way of thinking and acting”.

What this suggests is that the existence of a way of thinking and culture specific to the subalterns and the marginals (“original thought of the popular masses” in Gramsci’s words) in spite and because of its particular difference, which sets it apart from the specified identity of the thought of the dominant classes by differentiating it from the latter, is still determined or articulated by its structuring logic. Being subjected to such hegemony means that not only does the subordination of the differentiating specificity of subaltern culture by the culture that has identified and established itself as dominant not cease in spite of the affirmation of the former as difference, but also that this difference in being affirmed as such is rendered a subordinate cultural form or identity. The latter itself then turns into a dominant material force with regard to other strata that it simultaneously produces through its own internal differentiation. The production of such strata, through that process of internal differentiation of the ‘original’ subalternity, is coeval with the variation of the discursive resources constitutive of that culture-as-difference-turned-identity so that those strata come to acquire the discursive markers of their respective cultural specificities that also serve to designate their respective social status.

Gramsci (1996, p.420) lays this process bare in this note on Bukharin: “The principal elements of common sense are provided by religion, and consequently the relationship between common sense and religion is much more intimate than that between common sense and the philosophical systems of intellectuals. But even within religion some critical distinctions should be made. Every religion, even Catholicism…, is in reality a multiplicity of distinct and often contradictory religions: there is one Catholicism for the peasants, one for the petits-bourgeois and town workers, one for women, and one for the intellectuals which is itself variegated and disconnected.” Khowabnama further elucidates this process when it shows how Islam, which is the religious-cultural, and eventually also political, expression of the subordinate social status of rich kulaks such as Mandal and his Muslim Leaguer son Abdul Qader, vis-à-vis the upper-caste Hindu absentee landlords and their Congress backers, is itself internally differentiated into a paganised-heretical Islam of landless peasants, poor sharecroppers and fisherfolk. That is so because the relatively more orthodox Islam – which is doubtless a marker of both subordination of kulaks like Mandal by the upper-caste Hindu culture of the absentee landlords, and thus also the competitive struggle of the former against the latter – is, however, in relation to the social stratum of those believers of paganised-heretical Islam, a discursive cultural marker of the material force of domination that is constitutive of such differentiation of the Muslim identity in that part of East Bengal where the novel is set.

There should, however, be no doubt that the orthodox variant of a kulak’s Islam would instrumentalise the heretical Islam of the poor and the landless if the latter fail to grasp the self-critique unconsciously posited by the particularity of their religio-cultural differentiality. A self-critique whose actualisation would lead to that heretical religio-cultural difference overcoming both itself as the identity it becomes in asserting itself as that difference, and thus also the social differentiation and the politics of competition that are its conditions of possibility. It is through such overcoming of itself that a subalternity grasps and transforms itself into a figure of the oppressed as it occurs in Marx. This process of transformation of a subalternity into the Marxian figure of the oppressed, through the critical unraveling and supersession of itself as the identity it becomes in asserting its difference, entails that this identity self-transformatively grasp the domination it experiences in the particularity of its historical situation as the operation of political force as simultaneously both dominance and hegemony. Such an operation of political force tends to repress, distort and decimate singularity. This is the fact of oppression that subalternity conceals and which the figure of the oppressed, constitutive of self-realisation and transfiguration of such subalternity, brings to light.

As a consequence, it envisages its struggle against the historical particularity of the domination it experiences as the universal affirmation of singularity in the very finitude of that historically and sociologically particular domination. It is this that makes such struggle, at once, both world- and self-transforming. Thus the struggle of a dominated people who grasp themselves as the figure of the oppressed is a dialectically articulated struggle that is simultaneously directed both against their domination in its immediate historical particularity, and exploitation and duality, which comprise the mediated generalised condition of possibility of such domination. The figure of the oppressed in its self-realisation and concomitant struggle is, therefore, a figure of the critique of political economy in its actualisation. It is, by that same token, also the figure of revolutionary politics that Marx designates as “class-for-itself”.

But the problem is the bearers of particular and particularised subordinate cultural identities do not experience the specific relationships of domination, which results in them acquiring those identities, as part of a larger, totalising historical-social process. Marx (1986, p.817) says as much while criticising “vulgar economy” for affirming and “feel(ing) particularly at home in the estranged outward appearances of economic relations”. That, according to him, “does no more than interpret, systematise and defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations”. This impels him to conclude that “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided”.

Nevertheless, implicit in this otherwise sound formulation of Marx is the fact that the science of general and generalised essence of exploitation is the synthesis of the infinitely open totality of historical experiences of different dominations. In such circumstances, the oppressed in its self-realisation would be the embodied concentration of that science of generalised exploitation into the finiteness of a particular experience of domination. It would be the realisation of the general and generalised infinity of different historically specific experiences in the finitude of that experiential particularity. Clearly, through such self-realisation of the oppressed the Marxist science of revolution fulfils itself by being restored to and dissolved into experience. It is this restoration of science to experience, which accords to science the hallmark of Nietzschean gaiety, that the generality of science and the particularity of experience are short-circuited to be transfigured into the universal-singularity of praxis. Elias seeks to accomplish precisely that in his literature. The constitutive deployment of the affective registers and tropes of psychotic break as subtraction — either as characters or situations, or both – in almost all his novels and stories serve to manifest the critical science of generalised singularity in and as the affectivity of experience. We could call this literary discourse of Elias his gay science.

And the above example from Khowabnama, which reveals precisely that, is no exception to the gay scientificity of his discourse. It attempts to show how the Tebhaga movement, by virtue of being a movement of radical transformation of inegalitarian agrarian production relations, is enabling the margin of margins to grasp this differentially particularised identity of theirs in terms of the unconscious self-critique it posits. The actualisation of such self-critique begins to enable, as the novel demonstrates, the identity of the margin of margins (not in the Derridean deconstructive sense ascribed to it by Ajit Chaudhury but in a literal sense) to overcome and transfigure itself and, therefore, in the same movement also move towards abolishing the stratified and differentiated socio-economic order that is its condition of possibility. But the novel also shows how the retreat and eventual collapse of that movement — thanks to the withdrawal of its Communist leadership for the sake of Hindu-Muslim amity in undivided Bengal and the rest of India — leads to the instrumentalisation of the pagan-heretical Islamic cultural identity of the landless peasants by the relatively more orthodox Islamic identity of the kulaks such as Mandal and his son Qader in the service of the Muslim League demand for the partition of undivided Bengal. An indisputable example of hegemony-reinforcing competitive politics of a subordinate people – Islam being the identity of the common struggle of landless, middle and rich peasants — against the dominant absentee landlords, whose specifying cultural identity is by and large upper-caste Hindu.

Yet, the fact remains that it is precisely such competitive struggle of the subalternised people against the particular form of their subordination by the dominant classes that posits the unconscious will of such competition to overcome itself and its constitutive condition of possibility (duality). This unconscious is posited by virtue of its striving to stop being dominated, and thus represented and identified, in its immediate particularity. That is clearly symptomatised by its exertion to establish its own particular identity – in the process of differentiating itself from the dominant cultural, and thus political, identity as a move to beat the latter’s representative imposition – through the assertion of a specifying discursivity and sociology to affirm its difference. But as long as this unconscious is not grasped for what it is, and generalised – which would lead to the creation of a qualitatively new historical and social actuality; the insurrectionary historicity and sociality of the savage mind – the struggle of the subordinated against the dominant is doomed to remain a struggle against the particular kind of domination the former directly encounters and experiences. This would obviously amount to no more than the assertion of a specific cultural and political identity by the subordinated against the cultural and political identity of the dominant in the particularity of their historical and sociological situation. As a result, it would, precisely in being the struggle that it is against domination, cancel itself out by being the vehicle of the very hegemony of the logic of domination, and its identitarianising and dualising condition of possibility that it is implicitly directed against. It must be said here that this perpetuation of hegemony by the struggle of the subordinated masses against their domination is not on account of the fact that it wages such a struggle – which is clearly inescapable and necessary – but it is so because of how that struggle is waged in its limited particularity.

Gramsci indicates that when he says the “external hegemony” of “the great systems of traditional philosophy and the religion of the leaders of the clergy” to which “the original thought of the popular masses” are subject to “limit” that thought “in a negative direction, without having the positive effect of a vital ferment of interior transformation of what the masses think in an embryonic and chaotic form about the world and life”. Hence, the only way for the subordinated masses to rid their culture and its politics of the hegemony they are subjected to is through their reflexive grasping of the unconscious will of such culture to non-representation, non-identity and singularity. Something that subjection of such culture to hegemony prevents, leading it to simply assert itself as a ‘differential identity’ vis-à-vis the discursively-specified identity of the dominant without simultaneously critiquing its own assertion as that differentiating identity in order to actualise the essential grain – or unconscious — of such an assertion. It is this grasping of its unconscious will to singularity and non-identity by a discursive specificity of subaltern culture that Gramsci terms the “interior transformation of what the masses think in an embryonic and chaotic form about the world and life”.

Therefore, when the Italian militant and philosopher states that in “common sense it is the “realistic”, materialistic elements which are predominant, the immediate product of crude sensation”, he is effectively arguing that common sense is an analytic of thinking that emerges as the subjectivity of an object to critically overcome externalised determination, and the meaning imposed on it through representation, by an already existing analytic subjectivity. This subjective emerging occurs, as has been observed earlier, for the object to free itself from the violence of abstraction perpetrated on it by an already existing analytic, and assert itself in its concreteness. But precisely because it does not self-reflexively grasp this logic of its own emerging it ends up replacing one analytic abstraction, that of great systems of traditional philosophy and high culture, with another, that of common sense. And that is precisely why, according to him, the elements of common sense “are here ‘superstitious’ and acritical”.

While criticising Croce and Gentile’s understanding of common sense in this note on Bukharin, Gramsci (1996, pp.422-423) characterises the same as “…the naïve philosophy of the people, which revolts against any form of subjectivist idealism, or… (it is) good sense and a contemptuous attitude to the abstruseness, ingenuities and obscurity of certain forms of scientific and philosophical exposition”.

That, however, does not suffice for Gramsci. He knows that common sense – which is the cultural system of thought of the “popular” or subaltern, masses – fails to engage in its own critical overcoming. A self-critique posited as its unconscious, which can be discerned from the discursively indicated fact of it having been constituted in opposition and difference to the traditional philosophy of the leading classes. For him, common sense is the necessary but not sufficient condition of possibility for the emergence of popular culture. He clarifies that by claiming his “methodological” emphasis on “starting from a critique of common sense…(does) not mean that the critique of the systematic philosophies of the intellectuals is to be neglected”. He also adds, “Indeed, because by its very nature it tends towards being a mass philosophy, the philosophy of praxis can only be conceived in a polemical form and in the form of a perpetual struggle.” He then qualifies that by arguing that “none the less the starting point must always be that common sense which is the spontaneous philosophy of the multitude and which has to be made ideologically coherent”. Gramsci clearly demonstrates that something more than sheer common sense is needed for popular culture to be actualised in its full insurrectionary glory. It means that common sense, or whatever other identified and identitarianised forms and sociologies of culture of the subalternised masses there are, must simultaneously seek to critically overcome themselves even as they constitute themselves as those discursively-specified forms in their difference and/or opposition to the identities of cultures that are dominant in relation to them.

The Gramscian Moment in Elias and His Crude Thinking

A similar critical spirit and approach with regard to the sociologies and discursively-specified forms of cultures of the subordinated, the marginals and the subalterns is evident in Elias too. Like the Gramsci we have just encountered, Elias is also not at all concerned with such sociologies and discursivised cultural forms as such and in themselves. He, in striking contrast to many petty-bourgeois radical intellectuals and artists of his modern South Asian and Bengali milieu, is arguably not enamoured of such sociologies and forms of subaltern and marginal cultures. Hence, unlike them, he also does not believe in romanticising such sociologies and forms of marginal and subaltern cultures. He is, instead, interested in those sociologies and discursive forms, and is drawn to them, precisely because they – by virtue of being characteristic of particularisingly ‘differential identities’ of subaltern/marginal cultures vis-à-vis identified cultures of the elite and the dominant – posit their unconscious will to singularity and non-identity by tending to critically unravel, supersede and transfigure themselves as those cultural discursivities and sociologies of marginality and subalternity. Such an approach is not only rendered evident by his literary aesthetic – something that we have already seen through examples from his novels, especially Khowabnama – but is also evident in his theorisation of culture and its politics. In an essay, Elias (2000, pp.12-13) writes:

“The community of lower-class working masses has been the home of some of the recent Bangla novels. Some writings have even managed to effectively bring out their misery and deprivation. In poetry, exploitation of the lower classes has been dealt with, and resolutions to participate in the struggle for emancipating them from such exploitation have been declared. Such literary and artistic productions have conscientised many boys from lower-middle-class and middle-class families. They have shed middle-class beliefs and petty aspirations to walk the rough road of leftist politics. But in none of these literary and artistic productions is the culture of the lower classes brought to fruition. Then how can I, in these cases, accord anything more than the prestige of still photographs to the reflections of lower-class life found in them.” (My translation.)

This excerpt is representative of the deep aversion he nurses for the petty-bourgeois radical propensity to valorise sociologies and historical forms of subaltern and marginalised cultures as such. Sociologically and discursively specified forms of culture of the marginal and the subordinated are, for Elias, no more than hypostatised artefacts of popular culture. It is for this reason that he critically designates such cultural forms — which he finds manifest in the representation of the lives of subalternised people in much of contemporary Bangla art and literature — “still photographs of lower-class life”. According to him, such congealed and abstracted moments – still shots — of the life of the popular masses do not manifest and realise popular culture. What he implies here is that the existence of the artefacts of subaltern culture, which are nothing but abstracted and hypostatised moments of popular culture, symptomatises the failure of the singular constitutivity of those artefacts in their moments of emerging (which is thus also their singularising unconscious) to generalise and actualise itself by overcoming and unraveling precisely those artefacts.

The conception of popular culture posed by this Elias essay is one that moves uninterruptedly from localised insurgency to generalised insurrection in the process of preserving and actualising the singular constitutivity of the former in its evental moment of eruption by cancelling the abstracted fetish of the form into which such eruption from social mediation has lapsed precisely in being determinately actualised by it.

This, therefore, means that Elias has no intention of jettisoning those artefacts of discursively-specified practices and discourses of subalternity – which is cultural difference-as-identity. However, he does not consider them significant in themselves either. For him, their only significance is their potential capacity to accomplish precisely what those artefacts of subordinated culture have failed to do on account of their romanticised identitarianised existence. For Elias, the importance of those identitarianised artefacts of subaltern culture lies in the self-historicising and self-critical unconscious they posit by virtue of their specific historical situation and position, which is highlighted through their discursive specificities. And they become, as we have already seen through some examples, indispensable resources of Elias’s literary discourse precisely by actualising their self-historicising, self-critical potential or unconscious. It is on account of such radical functioning of those artefacts and discursive forms of subaltern culture in Elias’s literary discourse as its constituent elements that the discourse is an instantiation of the aesthetic of the savage mind and its politics of insurrection.

This self-historicising, self-critical radical functioning of discursivities and forms of subordinate cultures in Elias’s literary discourse as its indispensable constitutivity is nothing but the singularising mode of “crude thinking” at work. Brecht seeks to propound this mode of thinking — which he calls dialectical as opposed to the undialectical modalities of high philosophical thinking – by affirming such non-conceptual registers of commonsensical mass discourse as adages, proverbs, folklore, fairytales, rhymes and doggerels. He was once supposed to have famously remarked: “Nothing is more important than learning to think crudely. Crude thinking is the thinking of great men.” But what Brecht hails, when he affirms those non-conceptual, commonsensical discourses, is not those discourses in their immediate discursive appearances or identities, but the modality of thinking constitutive of those discourses that their discursive appearances render mediately accessible.

Such discourses emerge in and as the articulation of resistance of non-specialist thinking of the common masses against the abstruse modality of high-philosophical thinking, and its esoterically specialised and thus conceptually systematised discourse that tends to dominate, objectify, identify and identitarianise. The specifying discursive patterns of the former discourse, in indicating its difference with regard to the latter, reveal that. It follows, therefore, that the logical tendency of thinking constitutive of such commonsensical mass discourses in their emerging is de-identitarianising and de-representational. Hence, the modality of thinking constitutive of such common and mass discourses in their crude, non-systematic and non-systemic registers militates against the tendency of representation, discursive abstraction, identitarianisation and domination. To that extent, the mode of crude thinking is also the self-critique its constitutive common, non-systemic discourses posit as the unconscious of their own discursive abstractions. It is this that makes crude thinking — cognate with Levi-Strauss’s savage mind as analytical reason “tensed by its efforts to transcend itself”, or Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis as common sense in autocritique — a dialectical, singularising and singular modality of thought.

Elias, not unlike the crude-thinking Brecht, disdains the high-philosophical modality of thinking, constitutive of conceptually systematised registers of discourse, for its propensity to produce dead abstractions estranged from feelings, emotions and the affectivity of experience. He (2000, pp.14-15) writes:

“Man is not merely an ingredient of history. Or, man is not merely an equipment to establish some theory. The working people are makers of history. Their lives cannot be explained and understood in theory….” (My translation.)

And this disregard for high theory, especially the conceptually articulated theoriations of revolution and socialism, figure continually in his literary discourse. Such scorn for the mode of high philosophical thinking arises off and on in both his novels, especially Chilekotar Sepai, and many of his stories, as unsparing statements of ridicule directed at the register of high theory and culture and their mostly upper-middle-class and middle-class social location. Often, this ridiculing of high theory, especially its radical variant, is realised in his literary discourse through ironical descriptions of, or sarcastic comments on, the sociological detail of the lives of its upper-middle-class and middle-class purveyors. In Elias’s accurate estimation, that is a phenomenon symptomatic of the alienation of the culture and idea of radical politics from the experiential affectivity of the subalternised working people. The following excerpt from his (2000, pp.211-212) story ‘Utsob’ (‘Festivity’) makes for a telling example:

“When either Muntasir, or Ishtiaq, or Aaharaar come, conversations on socialism in soft dulcet tones ensue even as they play Kanika Bandyopadhyay’s LP. Again, amid all this what sweet pain of loneliness is suffered. And when that happens there is nothing to be done save listening to Duke Ellington for full two hours with the air-conditioner running while the ceiling fan is turned on at its fullest.

“And see here! In the dead of night eight-nine dogs are running around – from this end of the alley to that. Aren’t there dogs there? They are there too. There was one, a gentleman, at the wedding reception. What a solemn expression the gentleman had, what physique! With what majesty he stood there mildly wagging his tail. It seemed as if a gentlemanly landlord, just like in a Bangla film, is sitting on his balcony in a deck-chair rocking himself while enjoying the sunset. When you see such dogs a feeling of devotion is bound to be aroused in the soul.” (My translation.)

Such examples seem to suggest that Elias’s politics of discourse is anti-theory. And that he, like most other modern radical petty-bourgeois intellectuals and artists from South Asia, is in the business of degrading and rejecting theory to romanticise and sociologise the life of the common masses in the name of some authenticity of experince. Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. If we do a close reading of the essay, which has been cited here in bits and pieces, we will realise the folly of such an inference. The last cited passage itself, when read in its entirety, reveals that. Even as Elias argues that man is “not merely a useful ingredient for the establishment of a theory”, and “that the way of life of the working people cannot be explained with the aid of theory”, he also makes it a point to state that the meaningfulness of art is derived from it being the search for the deep truth of life amid the working people’s way of living and practice of culture. He (2000, p.15) goes on to add:

“Only through such a process of inquiry can the truth immanent in theory be revealed. Art and literature is not about proving things, in there inquiry and ideology move together, they are contiguous with one another, it does not do to show one by tearing it away from the other.” (My translation.)

This declarative statement by Elias implies that like a classical crude thinker, he is also equally negatively disposed to the practice of experiences estranging their registers of emotion and feeling from thinking thus becoming hypostatised and reified in their discursivities into discourses and practices – i.e. cultures – of common sense and massified belief.

It also indicates that Elias’s rejection of the modality of high philosophical thinking is certainly not meant to spell a romanticised celebration of discursive abstractions of discourses and practices of the so-called common people dwelling in their massified passivity as popular culture. He is, after all, as averse to theory alienating itself from the consciousness of felt living, as the practice of affectively-experienced living alienating itself from thought to be reduced to custom and belief. The following excerpt from the essay (2000, p.9) in question bears that out:

“…the cultural practice of the lower classes is not witnessing any development, after having reached a particular stage its evolution has virtually come to a halt…. Their practice of culture has, in trying to move from its current stage to a new level, been stumbling.” (My translation.)

What this reveals is that Elias does not consider sociologies and discursivities of the culture of marginals and the subordinated to be popular. For him they were popular culture in their respective moments of insurgent emerging and will once again be so when their insurgent constitutivity or tendency of their emerging is generalised and actualised into the insurrectionary historicity of singularity.

Therefore, his rejection of the culture of high philosophical thinking is meant to be an affirmation of, what can, following Benjamin (1998, pp.159-235), be called the allegorical principle of theory, and its politics. And it is this allegorical principle of theory that Elias enacts as the authorial subject of his literary discourse.

The Literature of Practical Consciousness and Its Allegories of Command

As a writer of creative prose, he faithfully adheres to this allegorical principle of theorising. That is evident in his desire — symptomatised by the operation of his literary discourse – to grasp theories and concepts in and as the affectivity of the respectively different experiences of living them in their formation and thus grasp the singularity in those affects and feelings of experiencing the formation of theoretical discourses in their emerging. This affective living of discourses in their formation is to experience, what Williams calls, their “practical consciousness” (2010, pp.130-131). Such consciousness, Williams (2010, p.131) writes, is “…what is actually being lived, and not only what it is thought is being lived”. What is, however, even more crucial for us is what the British literary thinker (2010, p.131) says by way of further elaboration of that concept: “Yet the actual alternative to the received and produced fixed forms is not silence: not the absence, the unconscious, which bourgeois culture has mythicized. It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange. Its relations with the already articulate and defined are then exceptionally complex.”

Clearly then, to experience that affect of living a discourse in and as the moment of its pre-discursive formation and emergence is not to contemplatively grasp it but to grasp the singularity of living it as it is being formed through the affective experience of such living. The singularity thus grasped is — by virtue of its modality of grasping through living the grasped – a command concept and not discursively encoded knowledge. We must call it so because it is a concept that commands us to recommence the practical living of singularity, and affectively experiencing it as such, by overcoming precisely that discourse, whose formation one lived and experienced affectively to cognitively grasp the command of singularity. It must be added here that this singularity, which is cognitively grasped by experiencing the affectivity of living discourses, ideas and practices in their emergent formation, is what Williams (2010, p.132) conceptualises as “structures of feeling”. He (2010, p.132) explains: “The term is difficult, but ‘feeling’ is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology’. It is not only that we must go beyond formally held and systematic beliefs, though of course we have always to include them. It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable (including historically variable), over a range from formal assent with private dissent to the more nuanced interaction between selected and interpreted beliefs and acted and justified experienced.” He (2010, p.132) then goes on to add, “We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as feeling and feeling as thought….”

It is, therefore, not surprising that dreaming is one of the principal registers of thinking and theorising history in Elias’s literary discourse. The experience of dreaming, as opposed to the knowledge of dream one acquires after waking up from dream, is one of the key devices of psychotic break constitutive of Elias’s literary discourse. His literary discourse represents the working of this allegorical principle of theorisation through the psychotic disposition of the characters and the organisation of the literary space such dispositions are constitutive of in his novels and stories. Thereby, the discourse itself also becomes a performative demonstration of the allegorical principle of thinking. In being what it represents within itself, Elias’s literature becomes an allegory itself.

In Elias’s literary discourse, dream, not unlike the other registers and devices of psychotic break, is not its discursivised form or identity. Rather, it is the experience of dreaming as subtraction from, or overcoming of, the determination by wakefulness. For, when one dreams one does not know one is dreaming but experiences the dreamworld as the only reality that follows no rule of human wakefulness and normalcy and is completely free of the governance by such rules. Dream gets made sense of and identified as dream only when one wakes up. The cognition of singularity — which this dream experience enables through the end of the affectivity of living it as reality in waking up from it into its identified knowledge – gets posed as a command for reclamation of singularity. It is a command that can be followed only through the generalisation of singularity beyond the existentially-limited discursivity or identity that mediated the pre-wakeful dream-experience into being. This would be the practice of being singular by becoming it and thus also concomitantly living the affective experience of such being and becoming.

Dream experience ends, as we have seen, in wakefulness to inhabit its horizon of duality or binary as a constitutively alienated and subordinated identity. Similarly, experiences of insurgent (or evental) experiences of popular culture end with the beginning of history, or more precisely the historical, to inhabit it as myths. The project articulated by Elias’s literary discourse is to transfigure wakefulness, sanity and history into the singularity posed in cognition by the dreaming-experience, the experience internal to what is identified and seen from its outside as madness, and the pre-mythic insurgent moment of formation of what will eventually become myth. Such experiences are singular because in subtracting from or overcoming the externalised determination of wakefulness, sanity and history, and in concomitantly being their own ground and meaning, they reject duality and relationality. By that same token, they also pose the critical overcoming of their own discursively-specified and/or sociologically-identified mediating forms. Such allegorised actuality of the experiences of dreaming, insanity and popular pre-mythic insurgency would, in being generalised, be constitutive of its own historicity, which is historicity of singularity. Revolution is nothing but this condition and situation of singularty as its own historicity.

Let us now return to Khowabnama as an example of how the device and affective register of dream enables the allegorical articulation of Elias’s literary discourse with regard to history. Let us, for instance, look at how he (1998, p.9) begins the novel:

“The place where Tamijer Baap (Tamij’s Father) had planted his feet a little and had been waving his coal-black hands to chase away the ashen-grey clouds by standing erect to look up as much as was possible by stretching the veins of his neck, that place must be carefully considered. Once upon a time when, forget Tamijer Baap, even his father had not yet been born, it would even be a long time before his grandfather Baaghaad Majhi came into the world, one is not even sure whether Baaghaad Majhi’s grandfather or the father of his grandfather had been born or not, and even if he were born he would be merely crawling around on the freshly-laid mud floor of the yet-to-be constructed house whose foundation had just been laid after clearing off the forest. On an evening of one of those days Munshi Barkatullah Shah, in order to be part of Majnu Shah’s entourage of innumerable fakirs headed for the Mahasthan Fort, was headed towards Korotowa when he was killed by a bullet from the gun of Taylor, the chief of the White soldiers, and fell from his horse. The hole the bullet had made in his neck did not ever close. Once he had died, he, with chains around his neck and with his ash-smeared body, climbed on to the top of the pankur tree on the northern head of the Katlahaar marsh, and sat there with a pair of iron tongs, which had a fish engraved on it, in his hands. Ever since, during the day, he is spread out all over the marsh as sunlight within the sunlight, and all through the night he rules the marsh from the top of that pankur tree. Only if a glimpse of his could be caught – that is the hope with which Tamijer Baap waves his hands to chase away the clouds in the sky.” (My translation.)

The ashen-grey clouds that Tamijer Baap tries to chase away are his historical present, which is the eve of the Tebhaga movement, within which lives its past – the defeated Fakir-Sanyasi rebellions of 18^th-19^th century among others, for instance. This past lives within his historical present as its constitutively subordinated and contradictory identity (or difference-as-identity). This is the past-as-defeat — experienced and lived as myths and beliefs by poor landless peasants and fisherfolk like Tamijer Baap, who are the bearers of this past in the dominant historical present as its difference. And precisely for that reason is this subalternised difference simultaneously also a subordinated identity. Tamijer Baap attempts to chase away those clouds of his historical present because that present obscures the experiencing of its past, when it was its own present, by dominating and identifying the past as past. By chasing away those clouds of his historical present he wants to experience that past when it was its own present. That is, before it became identified as past. He wants to experience and live the past before it became identified as such through its subjection by the historical present. This chasing away of the clouds by Tamijer Baap is, therefore, a gesture to be in an open present, which is a present that does not itself become or produce a past. Following Derrida (1994, pp.xix-xx) we would do well to term this present present without presence.(4)

And since his existential self inhabits the historical present, Taamijer Baap can access past-when-it-was-present through his dreaming self that in subtracting itself from the governance of wakefulness of the reality of the historical present becomes an allegorical figure of its own singularity and thus a command-giving concept to generalise that experience of living the singularity beyond the empirical threshold of that past as it exists in its identified form determined by the historical present in question.(5) What this simply means is that Tamijer Baap is an allegorical figure, whose existence functions as a command for reconstituting the evental experience of insurgency — as lived, for instance, during the Fakir-Sanyasi rebellion against the oppression of British colonialism — in and through the new historically mediating experience of oppressive agrarian production relations of 1940s Bengal. Not unlike Benjamin’s (2003, p.395) Robespierre, who cited Ancient Rome for French Revolution by blasting it out of the linearly hierarchised continuum of history to grasp it simultaneously in its own present and his, Tamijer Baap is envisaged as a similar figure who cites the 18^th-19^th century Fakir-Sanyasi rebellions against British colonial oppression for the Tebhaga movement in 1940s Bengal. As a matter of fact, he not only cites but is also simultaneously the citation of those rebellions for his own existentially-lived historical present to generalise the evental singularity of those rebellions in their moment of lived emerging. Here is an example (Elias; 1998, p.178) of how Tamijer Baap functions as an allegorical figure of singularity, and thus a command-giving concept for the generalisation of singularity by tearing the historical present asunder:

“Tamijer Baap is, however, completely quiet. He looks towards Cherag Ali with the same sleepy eyes, his eyes give Kulsum an eerie feeling, does this man sleep with his eyes open, is he seeing grandfather’s face in his sleep? But sleep gets the better of Kulsum’s fear and prevents it from congealing, is the man smearing Kulsum’s eyes with sleep from where he sits at the other end of the mat? When Cherag Ali starts singing, Kaalaam Majhi says, ‘Hey you, Tamijer Baap, why the hell are you drowsing? Go home’. Yet, the man continues to sit where he is. The way his still eyes are stuck on Cherag Kulsum feels as if that man is seeing her grandfather in a dream. What kind of a man is this man? Unmoved, he sits dreaming amid so many people? Or is it that Kulsum herself is dreaming? That may be so. Otherwise how come iron chains dangle from grandfather’s neck? He gave up wearing those iron chains quite a few years ago, at the behest of the new khadim at the dargahsharif (shrine of a Muslim mystic.) For that matter, how is there a black turban on his head? But if Kulsum is, indeed, dreaming how can she hear the shopkeeper say, ‘Hey Baikuntha, you are here listening to songs? Let Shaha come, he’ll give you a piece of his mind?’, loud and clear.” (My translation.)

This encounter between Kulsum and a psychotic Tamijer Baap is an instance of the past-ised subalternity of the historical present – or the past in its subalternised identity within the historical present – encountering itself as past without presence. That is, it is an encounter between past, as the subalternised identity of and within the historical present, with itself when it was its own present and thus an evental insurgency. This singularising encounter is staged in the novel to depict how that encounter is a command that tends to induce the historical present – as both a dominating identity and a dualising horizon with its metaphysics of presence – to become an open, and thus non-identitarian and singular, present. One that, therefore, will neither itself lapse into nor produce the identity of past. Such a simultaneity of encounter with, living of, command for and transfiguration into the singular time of open present is constitutive of Benjamin’s (2003, p.395) “now-time” of revolution in its allegoricality-becoming-actuality. There is no doubt that the insurrectionary, or revolutionary, actuality can only be allegorical. But precisely because allegory is a command-giving concept — which arises precisely due to and through the punctuation of the actual – for reconstituting or re-commencing the truncated actuality, it stands validated as such only when allegory is itself sought to be practically actualised by overcoming the historical-discursive confines that mediate its experiential cognition. Clearly, allegory and practical actuality of revolution are dialectically bound to each other, and one cannot be itself without the other.

Therefore, the “now-time” of revolution, seen from the vantage point of a historically identified present that is enclosed within the continuum of history, is a spectral temporality. Such a temporality is the space-time constitutive of how things are, for instance, in dream or when one is under the influence of hallucinogens. The dimensions of such a time are inhuman and monstrous. The spectral and ghost-figures that populate Elias’s literary discourse, together with the eerie world they compose, are meant precisely to represent such non-human dimensions of space-time in his literature. For, it is through such representation that the affectivity and experience of living such savage and monstrous dimensions of a space and time animated, as it were, by an insurrectionary mind, can be communicated to be induced.

Clearly, the allegorical mode of theorising is continuing the insurrectionary unfolding of life, when that has stalled at the level of practical living, in the register of discourse, and thereby be a lived command – a Dionysian didacticism of desire, so to speak – for the reconstitution and resumption of the insurrection in the empirical practicality of existential living. It would not be an exaggeration to say that such reclamation of the insurrection involves the radicalisation and transfiguration of that empiricality of historically determinate existential living. Elias wants art to perform that allegorical function with regard to stalled unfolding of insurrection. For him that is the only way art can become meaningful. He (2000, p.5) writes:

“Bengali culture and artistic practice today has been transformed into a monotonous and lifeless habit because of its alienation from the large majority of lower-class Bengalis….

“What is drummed about as Bengali culture, if that fails to take inspiration from the lives and livelihoods of the majority of the country’s people then it too is bound to become as outlandish and groundless as that which is called degenerate culture.” (My translation.)

Elias’s creative prose, in its fidelity to its constitutive allegorical modality of thinking and discoursing, performs precisely that gay-scientific function of Dionysian didacticism. What such kind of didacticism amounts to is best explicated by Adorno’s (1997, pp.321-322) reflections on Brecht when the philosopher, while critically engaging with the politico-aesthetic positions of the poet-dramatist, sees the role of the latter’s theory inside his creative works. Elias’ literary discourse, especially his two novels, end as open texts that give commands precisely through that fact of being open. And their command is to practically live the singularity those texts have grasped and posed in and through the discursive specifications of the determinate existential finitude of their represented world by going beyond it. That is, have the discursive world they represent – or textually constitute – brush against its own constitutive or formational singular grain.

In Khowabnama, for instance, the fabulistic-spectral figure of Tamij, which climbs into the moon with its bullet-riddled neck after the life of existentially-lived, sociologically-specified and historically-limited character of Tamij has been ended by the paramilitary shooters, is nothing but an allegory. It is, therefore, a figure whose existence is a command to reclaim it as the singular and singularising constitutivity of Tebhaga in its moment of eruption by continuing to live it beyond its discursively-specified historical and existential finitude by stretching that humanly, and thus historically, finite moment to its savage, inhuman, monstrous beyond.

NOTES

(1) Politics as an abstraction is against drawing up of boundaries of the perceptible, so it is singularity that in challenging certain historically-given boundaries of the perceptible, and posing other boundaries for that is how singularity can actualise itself through the mediation of the specificity of a historical situation, redraw boundaries of the perceptible and yield political situations. Thus the political is never singular, it is instead the historically specific situation that mediates the singularity of politics into actuality even while, in the same movement, limiting it.

(2) To read Levi-Strauss’s conception of the “savage mind”, as a principle of the interminable process of dialectical reason, through the prism of Badiou’s (2009, p.189) “a materialism centred upon a theory of the subject” would take that conception to its radical conclusion by setting it free from its original conceptual matrix of structuralism. Such a reading, arguably, renders the conception of the process of dialectical reason – which in Levi-Strauss is a linear, punctuated and bounded interminability – uninterrupted in its interminability, and thus non-linear and unbounded. The two citations below from Badiou (2009, p.186, p.189) indicate how inflecting Levi-Strauss’s “savage mind” with Badiou’s conception of “subjective materiality” would radicalise the former:

“Materialism stands in internal division to its targets. It is not inexact to see in it a pile of polemical scorn. Its internal makeup is never pacified. Materialism most often disgusts the subtle mind.

“The history of materialism finds the principle of its periodization in its adversary. Making a system out of nothing else than what it seeks to bring down and destroy, puffed up in latent fits of rage, this aim is barely philosophical. It gives colour, in often barbarous inflections, to the impatience of destruction….

“However, this time of offensive subjectivization produces no stability. We see this as early as in the French Revolution, when the anti-Christian excess of the provisory allies, the plebeians of the cities, is broken by Hebert’s execution on the guillotine, whereas the regeneration of spiritualism of the great idealist systems connotes the possibility of a universal concordat. Bourgeois secularism, established through the State, will sometimes be anticlerical, never materialist.”

“Neither God nor Man, in modern idealism, has the function of the organizer of being. The constituent function of language, which excentres every subject-effect, deactivates the materialist operator of the inversion—of the inversion in the sense in which Marx spoke of putting Hegel back on his feet.

“To claim, by a ‘materialist’ inversion, to go from the real to the subject means to fall short of modern dialectical criticism, which separates the two terms—subject and real—so that a third, the symbolic or discourse, comes in to operate as a nodal point without for this reason becoming a centre.

“Barred from the path of a simple inversion and summoned to hold onto the scission in which the subject of idealinguistery comes into being as an effect of the chain, we Marxists find ourselves on the dire road of a procedure of destruction-recomposition.

“To pierce through the adversary’s line of defence requires this heavy ramrod whose idolatrized head bears our subjective emblems.

“That a conceptual black sheep—a materialism centred upon a theory of the subject—is equally necessary for our most pressing political needs…no doubt proves something….”

(3) Subtraction is a concept of politics that comes from Badiou. It is not constitutive of a political move or struggle against power and domination in order to withdraw from or disengage with them. In that, Badiou’s concept of subtraction is quite unlike the conception of withdrawal in Martin Heidegger that is concomitant with his concept of “ontological difference” in particular, and difference-thinking in general. Rather, subtraction is constitutive of the political manoeuvre – or struggle – to break with the horizon constitutive of domination and competition and its dualised and dualising structure, in the process unraveling and destroying it. Subtraction is a conceptual figure of singularity that is the science of revolutionary politics or praxis as ontology.

(4) Derrida’s “Present without presence” is present that does not pose itself in a manner so as to have its existential affirmation as itself produce an identified past of itself. “Present without presence” is present that does not become past and thus has no past. It is not present as a historical identity, something which as that historical identity produces its constitutively contradictory identity of past (as the present that has become absent).

(5) The conception of allegory as command — which is premised here on the asymmetrical dialectic, and thus torsion, between the particularity of the sensuous and affective (“beauty”, “material”, “individual”) on one hand, and the generality of the cognitive (“divine”, “transcendental”, “moral”, “ethical) on the other – is derived from a reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Allegory and Trauerspiel’, the last chapter of his The Origin of German Tragic Drama. It is precisely this asymmetrical dialectic, and the concomitant torsion, that Benjamin reveals to be the defining characteristic of the Baroque allegory when he (2003, p.160) affirmatively explicates the Baroque allegorical principle through his criticism of the classicist, as also the romantic, “symbol” for effacing this dialectical asymmetry between those aspects in order to present them as an organic harmony: “The unity of the material and the transcendental object, which constitutes the paradox of the theological symbol, is distorted into a relationship between appearance and essence. The introduction of this distorted conception of the symbol into aesthetics was a romantic and destructive extravagance which preceded the desolation of modern art criticism. As a symbolic construct, the beautiful is supposed to merge with the divine in an unbroken whole. The idea of the unlimited immanence of the moral world in the world of beauty is derived from the theosophical aesthetics of the romantics. But the foundations of this idea were laid long before. In classicism the tendency to the apotheosis of existence in the individual who is perfect, in more than an ethical sense, is clear enough…. But once the ethical subject has become absorbed in the individual, then no rigorism – not even Kantian rigorism – can save it and preserve its masculine profile. Its heart is lost in the beautiful soul. And the radius of action – no, only the radius of the culture – of the thus perfected beautiful individual is what describes the circle of the ‘symbolic’. In contrast the baroque apotheosis is a dialectical one. It is accomplished in the movement between extremes.”

It must also be stated here as an aside that the principle of baroque allegory bears, in Benjamin’s affirmative exposition of it, a strong conceptual affinity with the conception of philosophy of history that comes from Marx. The latter (dialectical materialism) is, clearly, not an epistemology of history as a presence-at-hand or identitarian existence. Hence, it is also not a code of moral, or conventional, directive to live (or live in) that empirical history as such. Rather, it is a philosophy of the moment of formation or making of history that is logically prior to the moment of history as such. Clearly, the Marxian philosophy of history – or dialectical materialism – is a philosophy that seeks its own realisation in and as the practicality of politics precisely by abolishing itself as the discursivised concept it is. It is “philosophy” only when it is, to cite Badiou’s Althusserian maxim, “under the condition of politics”. Such a philosophy of (more accurately, for) the making of history is, to once again resort to Benjamin, the grain of history against which history must be brushed.

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedmann (Continuum, London, 1997)

Badiou, Alain, ‘The Indissoluble Salt of Truth’. In Theory of the Subject, tr. Bruno Bosteels (Continuum, London, 2009)

Badiou, Alain, ‘The Black Sheep of Materialism’. In Theory of the Subject, tr. Bruno Bosteels (Continuum, London, 2009)

Badiou, Alain, ‘One, Multiple, Multiplicities’. In Theoretical Writings, edited and translated by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (Continuum, London, 2010)

Balibar, Etienne, ‘The Elements of the Structure and their History’. In Reading Capital by Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, tr. Ben Brewster (Verso, London, 1999)

Benjamin, Walter, ‘Allegory and Trauerspiel’. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, tr. John Osborne (Verso, London, 1998)

Benjamin, Walter, ‘On the Concept of History’. In Selected Writings (Volume 4), tr. Edmund Jephcott and Others, eds. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2006)

Derrida, Jacques, Spectres of Marx, tr. Peggy Kamuf (Routledge, London, 1994)

Elias, Akhtaruzzaman, Chilekotar Sepai [Soldier in the Attic] (The University Press Limited, Dhaka, 2000)

Elias, Akhtaruzzaman, Khowabnama [Dream Chronicle] (Naya Udyog, Kolkata, 1998)

Elias, Akhtaruzzaman, Galpa Samagra [Collected Stories] (Naya Udyog, Kolkata, 2000)

Elias, Akhtaruzzaman, Sanskritir Bhanga Setu [The Broken Bridge of Culture: Essays on Literature, Society and Culture] (Naya Udyog, Kolkata, 2000)

Gramsci, Antonio, ‘Problems of Marxism’. In Selections from the Prison Notebooks edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1996)

Levi-Strauss, Claude, ‘History and Dialectic’. In The Savage Mind, (The University of Chicago Press, 1966)

Marx, Karl, ‘The Trinity Formula’. In Capital (Volume III), ed. Frederick Engels (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1986)

Ranciere, Jacques, ‘The Politics of Literature’. In The Politics of Literature, tr. Julie Rose (Polity, Cambridge, 2011)

Williams, Raymond, ‘Structures of Feeling’. In Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010)

 

 

In our October (2013) meeting at Sevagram, we sought to comprehend the lag between the evolving nature of capital-labour conflicts and the institutionalised political language that most of us spoke – how latter was becoming a hurdle not just in not allowing us to make any meaningful contribution in workers’ politics, but many times by forcing us to play unknowingly reactionary role by thwarting the full realisation of politico-organisational potential of workers’ spontaneity and self-activism. It was this task of understanding and overcoming the lag that led us to demand from ourselves for our January meeting an attempt to engage in “workers’ inquiry” (the concept that we discussed in October) and deconstruct our politico-organisational programmatic abstractions in terms of reflections upon our engagement in concrete processes of class conflicts in our areas of work.

There were presentations from Nagpur that dealt with the history of workers’ struggles under a competitive regime of multiple trade unionism in particular industries. They showed how, on the one hand, these trade unions complemented the managerial techniques to produce and reproduce divisions among workers. On the other hand, various segments of workers indulged in ‘opportunistic’ manoeuvrings of the agencies of these unions to confront capital. During the discussions it came out that in recent years more and more workers in these industries are employed through contractors and on casual basis, and are thus generally not part of any union. The comrades from Nagpur stressed on bad unionism that simply instrumentalised workers for political gains and pointed at the lack of political consciousness among workers as a reason for their instrumentalisation. They do not consider workers’ said “opportunism” as a possible self-activity under specific conditions of entrenched unionist competition. However, it was pointed out during the discussion that ‘self-activity’ and ‘self-organisation’ are not to be glorified, rather they must be taken as something that necessarily happen in conflictual relationships between labour and capital.

A report presented from Dhanbad dealt with changes in industrial relations in collieries – with more and more workers being employed through contractors. The problem of multiple unionism on the basis of political lines does nothing but divide the strength and class consciousness of workers – they give a ready mechanism for the management to divide and rule. But the experience of collieries demonstrates that many a times workers, through their own initiatives and spontaneous coordination, confront managements. These initiatives force unions to come together, especially not to allow the competitors to take advantage. It was pointed out during the discussions that the unionist competition complementing the managerial strategies tend to clog out spaces for workers self-initiatives. It takes the suddenness of spontaneity to flush out blockages to workers’ coordination.

There was a report on the activities of Revolutionary Bolshevik Circle (RBC) and Union Research Group (URG) in 1970s -1980s that also touched upon independent cooperative experiments like that of Kamani Tubes in Mumbai. A worker-activist, who worked in RBC and later on was very closely associated with URG, presented the report. While the RBC was an attempt to move beyond traditional mass bureaucratic political formation within the working class, the leadership soon realised the gap between its programme and workers themselves – a gap between what they were targeting and what workers were up to. In their efforts to transcend this ‘communication gap’, the circle effectively dissipated itself in eclectic concerns of social importance – thus, reducing the working class to the sociologies of stratification and to mere one of those concerns.

The URG was a product of this dissipation, but was a unique recognition of the complexity of industrial relations beyond just the street rhetoric and muscle flexing that traditional unionism entailed. It did some very interesting studies on hi-tech industries and sought to develop the self-capacity of workers in organising themselves beyond the pecuniary logic of traditional unionism. It sought to arm the workers’ leadership in a factory with its research so that they negotiate with capital as equals and with an advantage – a knowledge of the opponents’ possible moves – changes in technology and managerial strategies. However, as it came out during the discussions, in the process URG seemed to idealise employees’ unions against traditional unions where ‘outsiders’ held the leadership, and sanctified the institutions of collective bargaining. It was noted that the stress on employees unions went well with the upcoming multi-national industries at the time that were wary of India’s traditional ‘political’ trade unionism and its erratic nature, and preferred either no unions or unions which would have interest in companies’ growth.

A contingent of University Workers, which mostly consist of students and adhoc teachers from various universities in Delhi, discussed their project of bringing out a newspaper, The University Worker (the draft of its first issue was circulated at the meeting). They discussed the crisis of the traditional left student movement, which conceived universities and education as sites of privileges. The political tasks for this movement were envisaged in a dual manner. On the one hand, the ‘workplace’ struggle was reformist and limited to making education inclusive, so that the underprivileged could share the privileges. Inclusion here implied both – an accommodation of more and more students from the underprivileged communities and a change in the curriculum design that can build an environment to facilitate such accommodation. On the other, the ‘revolutionary’ task was to mobilise martyrs who could sacrifice some of their privileges or utilise them to support the masses struggling somewhere else. Students’ movements too reflected the programmatic divide between the economic and the political – instrumentalising the former to prioritise the latter. Left students’ organisations like other left mass organisations engaged in “economic” struggles to mobilise cadres for “political” struggles which were supposedly happening at different sites or planes. During the Naxalbari phase, when we find a heightening of the discourse of sacrifices among students, it was mainly a symptom of a tremendous existential crisis among them. They were unable and unwilling to face the truth of their proletarianisation, in the wake of a massive increase in educated unemployment in the 1960s-70s. The political was an escape from the economic.

However, what we see now is ever more realisation that education is another work-site – it is integral to the social factory. It too is driven by the same logic of capitalist productivity and work discipline that is imposed through hierarchies and relationships that constitute the university system. Further, the hierarchisation of disciplines, schools, colleges, universities etc reproduces the same segmentation that characterises the labour market and the division among workers. The recent course restructuring and conflicts over it, especially in Delhi University, remarkably reflect all these processes. This has really changed the level of discourse in university politics – students and their organisations talking about the segmented labour market that the university system perpetuates and about the workerisation of the student life, while teachers reflecting upon intensity, productivity and the devaluation of their work to the level of instructors’ – the fading of their autonomy. There is a tremendous increase in ‘flexible’ employment in education – ad hocs, guest lecturers etc., are generally taken up by research students and new graduates. All this has virtually made the old understanding of solidarity redundant and even reactionary – because it leads to escapism and refuses to think education as a site of open class struggle. What is required is an inquiry-based coordination of concrete questions, and struggles around them, among various segments of workers divided across work-sites, including the sphere of education.

It was this presentation of university and schooling as sites of class struggle that opened up debates regarding the conceptualisation of class as a process continually posed and composed against and through proletarianisation and conflicts over the mobilisation and subsumption of living labour.

We also discussed the politics of common man (aam aadmi) as a statist response to the legitimation crisis that the capitalist state has been facing – and how its prime motivation is to organise and coopt the “street rage”, which is an expression of socially widespread precarities that manifests the mass character of intensive proletarianisation happening today. We discussed how in the centre of the recent anti-corruption and anti-rape movements were the anxieties and precarities of various proletarianised segments. We also tried to understand in the present conjuncture the meaning of spectacular gestures in terms of which traditional radicalism judged its successes, when they necessarily tended to blunt the critical edge of the centrality of the working class in the name of overcoming economism and socialising the unrest.

Faridabad Majdoor Samachar (FMS) presented their note on electronics – how its introduction has made many conceptualisations and organisational forms irrelevant for the contemporary working-class movement. There is a general consensus among managements about loyalty and commitment that permanent workers display – this consensus never dies as it revives every time some or other incident of defiance involving temporary workers occurs. But the unpredictability to which the introduction of electronics has exposed companies and governments by decomposing and intensifying production, along with the services transformation does not leave any scope for them to settle with permanent workforce. An increase in the temporary workforce is not a mark of strength and success for these companies and governments, as generally presented by experts and labour activists, but rather it exposes their fragility. They are eventually exposed to more precarities – mercurial and indifferent youthful workforce, having worked in geographically and industrially diverse environments at the age of 20-25 years. They can buy their labour-power, but not loyalty and commitment. The new spirit of the labour movement is embodied by these workers. It came out during the discussion that institutionalised organisational forms and languages are unable to capture this spirit. They are not only incapable of organising these workers, they are even unable to recognise the simmering unrest until and unless some grave incident happens. Therefore, the unpredictable behaviour of these workers is not only a problem for the human resource managements of companies, but also for the big and small managers of the labour movement.

The discussion on the organisational question was informed by debates around these reportings. The two notes that were circulated prior to the discussion were read in the light of diverse experiences. The note from a Kolkata comrade was, in fact, a response to the invitation letter that was circulated before the October Sevagram meeting, in which he raised apprehensions on any attempt to write off the utility of trade unions and party-forms for the contemporary workers’ movement. Trade union continues to play a defensive role in class struggle, however its bureaucratisation and conservatism must be challenged from below. While history has seen various forms of workers’ organisations, “no form can either nullify or guarantee self-activities of the working class.” Further, one can definitely question the substitutionist tendency, but that should not become the ground to reject the role of theory, individual and party as a network of communists.

The second note written by a comrade from Nagpur was a response to the first note. It questioned the radical utility of preconceived organisational forms – trade unions and party – outside the labour and capital conflict. Trade unions because of their permanent legal nature have become institutions that cannot question capitalist legality – seeking to reproduce capital as social power, which is established through the wage system. They become complicit in this reproduction. Therefore, independent workers organisations are necessary. The role of communists is to aid workers in developing and sustaining the class capacity to self-emancipate themselves. But in order to undertake this role, they must be inseparable from the working class and fully grounded in class praxis.

During the course of discussion it was pointed out that it is not sufficient to present a critique of forms only in their own terms – forms are historically specific, contextual. Workers’ organisational forms relate to specific junctures and purpose in class struggle. The resilience of forms must motivate us to examine how the same forms might have changed their functionality and purpose in accordance to their appropriateness in the structure of new reality. In the case of TUs, their legalisation per se is not a problem – because it was also a demand of the movement to decriminalise them. Instead, the issue is whether they are capable of comprehending the exigencies of the political recomposition of today’s working class, whether they are capable of resisting or have become complicit in its normalisation as technical class composition – in the management of class conflicts.

It was generally accepted during the discussions that the radical character of class conflicts is already evident in the self-activities of workers in their daily encounter with capital and each other since here they confront the root of the capitalist system – the capitalist imposition of work. This recognition exposes the impotence and irrelevance of preconceived organisational forms and vanguardist manoeuvrings, except in dealing with the after-effects of immediate confrontations – the political displacement of class conflicts in representative articulation of demands, rights, claims etc that necessarily must present the effects in understandable (political) language.

To keep apace with the time, the need to meet every three months was reiterated and it was decided to have the next meeting in Delhi on April 19-20, 2014.