Mbembe Provisional notes on the Post Colony

His ppurpose is to analyze bureocratic banality ofpower in the postcolony, meaning not just bureocratic formalities or arbitrary rules nor the habit of daily forms of power. Rather he is interested in those elements of the obsene and the grotesque that, what Bakhtin locates in the field of the popular and as a mean of critique to power. He points that these elements are part of any regime of domination, to the way they operate and are deconstructed.
The post colony is chaotically pluralistic, but has some internal coherence related to the violence implicated in the colonial experience: it is a particular way of creating simulacra. In this the grotesque is not just a mirror reflection of power, is also a style of political improvisation, an excess, a multiplication transformation and circulation of identities. But even more the postcolony is made of a series of corporate institutions and political machineries which together constitute a particular regime of violence, that produces subjectification as a dramatical effect. He is interested in two diemnsions of this: 1) How, in creating the central code of society, state power governs the various logics that underlie all other meanings. 2) How in its attempts to institutionalize this meanings as real the state creates a common sense and attempts to integrate it into the consciousness of the period. Thus the state legitimates itslef in the form of a fetish. He thus proposes to invert Bakhtin claim of the obsene as a popular way of resisting from dominant culture. Rather he proposes that grotesque is: used as a means of creating time and location, through specific material means, and operates creating a spectacular performative display of manificence for its subjects.
Post colonial power is then an "illicit cohabitation" in which "commandmentn and subjects share the same living space" what has generated a "mutual zombification" (rather than an energic domination/resistance) in which each robbed the other vitality and has left both impotent."(4) He proposes to focus on "the logic of the conviviality, on the dynamics of domesticity thta inscribe the dominant and the dominated with te same episteme". The postcolony does not have a one public space but several entangled ones, each with a particular logic. The postcolonial subject is visible as he navigates these spaces and is able to mange several identities (what he calls "homo ludens"), but also when he is subjected in the daily rituals of reatification of comandment's power. The emphasis on the fluids, genitals, eschatological of the commandment's body "contribute integrally to the making of political culture of te postcolony", to joke on the commandment's body generates a participation in the system of signs, ritual displays, and makes it possible to "follow the trail of violence", by "taking the official world seriously" (7), it also breaks the boundaries between the boy of the despot and the that of its subjects. The conflict is then not inverting the systems of meanings but unifying the chaotically pluralistic systems into a single one.
But also because of this plurality and constant change the commandment needs to constantly project its image (of himself and the world) into its subbjects to even start habits of obedience, it needs to tire out the bodies of the subordinated to ensure docility rather than productivity. There is not opposition between official and popular culture but a lot of commonality which generates the need of foficial grand displays of prestige to signal sovereignty and to "ensure the maxim docility" (one of the central pillars of a phallocentric system is the subordination of women to the princple of male pleasure). It is not very clear were conflict or tension emerges, not of course between two entities but what is the site to evade power. He states for example people's "laughter kidnaps power and force it to examine its own vulgarity" (8), so instead of Bakhtin inversion there is forced appropriation to undermine magnificence. But laughter is not resistance, in its desire for majesty the popular borrow the power's repertoire, while the official world mimics the popular vulgarity. What is particular about post colonial violence is the way even there is this shared identity with the dictator there is also violent mobilization against the regime. This violence takes the language of the dictator and re-mythologize the conceptual universe, disempowering both.
If the ruled fail to put together an identity to adul the dictator, the dictator sees this as blasphemy, as the creation of other mindscape. It is also understood as a "theophagy" a cannibal like praxis in which the body of the god is devoured by its worshippers. This practice is only a continuity with colonial power, the violence over the body to subject it rather than make it produce. Theopagy is then a continuity of colonial economy of death, death as a display of power and as a site of spectacular enjoyment, a line in which obscenity has to be understood too. So he proposes to see how exactly the economy of pleasure is made into a site of death, how access to pleasure is part of the economy of power. If food and sexual pleasure are a value creating power, then famine and death are the counterpart of the disposed. The mouth, the belie, and the sexualized parts of the body function as sites of power in this regime.
Power shaped in conviviality and coersive power should not be dismissed however as part of this other dynamic. The colonial subject thus engages in barroque and ambiguous practices that mimics and eats power while internalizing dominant epistemology. This disempowering is what defines colonial situation.
I think Membe brings to attention a multiplicity of interesting points, however I can't follow him in his emphasis in power as mostly a system of meaning that is effective as long as is internalized. I find his notion of power as created in cohabitation more interesting, and interesting as something created in the repeated practice. Also the economy of pleasure and death are suggestive, again i would focus it more as a series of actions that regulation of practice and not so much as the mantainance of a regime of spectacular and visual adulation to incorporate a system of meaning. The question on difference and otherness remains unanswered, how dispossesion is related with subjection as one different for m the dictator (he mentions women as other that are totally available to his pleasure but no more than that).