Chakrabarty, Dipesh - Provincializing Europe

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. “Postcoloniality and the artifice of History” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The purpose of this chapter is to problematize the celebration of the subaltern studies as a “Indian” re appropriation of their capacity to represent their own history. “Insofar as the academic discourse of history –that is history, as a discourse produced at the institutional site of university - is concerned, “Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories” (27). All this other histories remain as variations of a master narrative of European history, a history made universal. Any subject position articulated as part of an “Indian” remains as subaltern. There is an asymmetric politics of ignorance, while European historian can ignore the “non western” works, it is impossible for subaltern intellectuals to reciprocate this gesture. The second symptom of subalternity is that even though the western theories presented as universal are shaped in ignorance to “the rest of the world” (only Europe is theoretically knowable, the other histories are “cases”), these theories are useful for third world intellectuals. By using these theories, the other histories become subject of a methodological and epistemological historicism: presented as previous stages in time and in conceptualization (ie the notion of pre-capitalist). The histories of third world become histories of a transition, of states of incompleteness, of a development towards a modern capitalist nation-state. The Subaltern Studies manifest itself claims to study the historic failure of a complete decolonization “ the failure of the nation to come to its own” “an inadequacy of the bourgeoisie and the working class”. The British rule shaped the desire to be a subject among the elite that would lead the nationalist movement, for them to be a modern individual meant to become European. In contrast the peasant and the working had to be modernized, characterized as ignorant, parochial, communal, imbued in false consciousness. He proposes to reread the narratives of transition in reverse and find “plenitude” where there is “lack”. The Indian individual is shaped mimicking the European “legal fiction of citizenship” (35) but the private self (as a deferred public self) still remains to be shaped–the autobiographic genre are never about an “interiority”. This “other constructions of self and community while documentable, will never enjoy the privilege of providing a metanarratives or teleologies of our histories.” (37) The attempt to use this other narratives to make a history based on the Indian difference turn to mythology of the peasant and the workers, but these narratives are ahistorical. History is thus “the site where the struggle goes on to appropriate on behalf of the modern (my hyperreal Europe), these other collocations of memory.” (37) If this histories are subordinated to a linear history towards citizenship, nation-state, and human emancipation in the terms of Enlightenment, and reaffirming European Enlightment project as the most desirable political community (and only project possible). But in many cases the collective mobilization towards nationalism was based on ahistorical structures of the kin and community (a community that was both ahistorical and particularly indina, but also the base for a political institutional community). This is a kind of double bind in which the Indian subject articulates itself: the “Indian people” subject of the modernization is also its object, the subject is the already modern elite and the object is the yet-to-be modernized peasant. This subject only existst as part of the metanarratives called Europe, that invents itself in this process: both in the coloniality and in the post coloniality. In this process the only possibility of self representation left is the mimicry (Bhabha) of a modern European subjectivity. The “Indian” subject, as anhistorical antimodern, subject cannot speak as “theory”, “this subject can only be spoken for and spoken of b transition narrative, which will always ultimately privilege the modern.”
Rather than making an “other” history he proposes to make a different alliance with the centre of modernity, and go against universalization. He proposes to provincialize Europe a way of exposing heterogeneity, contradictory, plural struggles and the forms of coercion in both sides. He proposes to show the process by which European reason was made as a valid knowledge outside Europe, a process not conceded to other “reasons” [nieztchean logic]. The acquisition of the term modern has o be considered as part of the colonial project, also it is something third world nationalism have contributed to shape. E proposes to unravel all the violence both foundational and quotidian that are the base to the modern state, a violence directly linked to forms of idealism. This project contrasts with a cultural relativism or to a rejection of modernity. This project cannot be realized within university, it is thus a project of impossibility, within larger “politics of despair”. It is a history that has to push to the limit of undoing itself by recognizing the impossibility of translation “so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous. (…) To provincialize Europe is to see the modern as inevitably contested… to write over privileged narratives other narratives of human connections.” (46)

briones 2007 parte 2

Por algun motivo me fue imposible ser sintetica con este texto y el de grossberg, un poco por la densidad, por estudiarlo mas de cerca, y otro poco por que estan trayendo todas las lineas de la lista que estoy cerrando a una discusion que me ayuda a aclarar. Me quedo sin duda con un nivel amplio de discusion como este, quizas algoq ue no me cierre tanto es montar un andamiaje, que si bien flexible y que es mas que nada para pensar, en intuitivamente atravesaria mas. Me quedo pensando en las cosas que lei que critican a los estudios culturales, algunas sin ser tan elaboradas, otras que en la critica caen a un nivel muy subjetivista si bien dicen no hacerlo, y fianlmente otras que en el proyecto de crear conceptos como herramientas para pensar flujos, y contenidos y formas en devenir, no me dan muchas pistas metodologicas para pensar como poner esas herramientas a trabajar. el desafio seria entonces seguir a briones / grossberg en las dimensiones que abren, ver cuales me faltan, y pensar formas de ponerlos a dialogar para no usarlos como andamio. eso creo.



3. It is in this context of the discussion that Social Sciences incorporate the concept of performance. She presents Butler as bridging the gap Foucault leaves open between conscious everyday practice over the self and the psychoanalytic unconscious. She does this by getting away from narratives that propose to generate knowledge about the self, as these narratives veil the underlying dichotomy of self/other, and focus on the practices of signification. This position open the possibility of showing how for instance theories of a fragmented subject, reproduce the forms of oppression is trying to get away from. Butler thus gets away from any proposition implying identities precede practice, and proposes that it is in the act that the subject is constituted. In other words, the practices constitute the phenomena they seem to be expressing. This is different to existentialism that recognizes a pre discursive subject and of acts. Contrarily Butler’s subject and act are mutually and variably constituted each time. In this way she distances form Althusser’s foundational acts, in signifying chains to propose that each time is a re-foundation, and that the norms define intelligibility, this rules have substancialyzing effects and thus deflect themselves. It is only in the necessary repetition that any subversion is possible, in the sliding of meaning, accentuations and tone while repeating. This displacement is less the effect of strategic movements than of the multiple lines that transverse any disposition, (the superpositions are themselves what make any disposition unstable). But it is the emphasis in the performance as only practice, as a general “doing” that conducts to a “cliché performativity”. One problem is to equate performance with act, and with this the concepts looses the specificity of the emphasis in form and in the staging itself, it also looses the sense of Austin performative verbs, those that “do” instead of naming. If any action is preformative, we cannot see the non discursive dispotifs that also inscribe the rules. She then summarizes the implications of thinking identities following Hall and Grossberg, to set the base for a critique to notions of flexible identities. She criticizes the association between flexibility of identities as a form of articulation based on future rather than past, as future is not necessary more flexible. Mostly flexibility is problematic as it is not a quality equally distributed, to have more possibilities of movement and choice is something restricted to small sector of the world. There is a tension then between sedimentation and invention. Invention has the limit of : 1) the incapacity to transform or revert some processes (ie colonization), thus identities may be contesting power but also spaces of consent and frustration; 2) there are norms of what it is and is not debatable about the past , identities are exposed to “strategic forms of authentication”, that shapes the terms of articulation and the effectivity for gaining recognition; 3) the way of representing subaltern memories always implies the incorporation of dominant perspectives and logics. Tradition is then a complex result of practices of signification and simbolization in which continuity and change are ideas used to get recognized as a “contemporaneous different”.
4. Her final questions are what is the relation between subjectivation and subjectivity, and what mediates between subjectivation and identification. For this she takes the notion of fold of Deleuze in Grossberg, the interiority is only the exterior folded towards an “inside” that is only a second moment that creates a epistemological dimension not an ontological genesis. In sum there is no essential or pre given interiority. If this is combined with he notion of machineries what it is folded is the experience available as a result of the operating machineries, what is folded are the “mandates advice, techniques, norms to be human, the means through which self is constituted in different practices and relations” (Grossberg 2003 in Briones 70-71). She claims then that if the subjection operates through the inscription of the dispositif, subjectivity is linked to the fact that some parts of the fold are unstable part to be linked through a biography. Identification is a process in which some aspects of the fold are visualized as biography and the way these aspects are selected to make sense of the particular subject position. Subjectivity is thus the way this positions are inhabited and then made visible as social identities.
In this context performativity is the capacity of people to stabilize or generate lines of flight form social identities as they embody them. Agency is limited by structured mobilities that define possibilities of movement, access and empowerment. This limits to performativity, are the limits to constructivism as a theoretical approach. In other words, are the tension between the triple movement of the constitution of the subject, representation and act of theorization and the real, between capacities of agency and the performative realization of the real.
She points to the fact that most studies of identity come into being in a context of a politization of identities, in this she criticizes that this studies are implacable evaluators of the limitations defined in regards to desirable notions of subversion. In this she considers that the real would be a better starting point than the otherness that operates as “an excess, as a constitutive exteriority”.
What are then the effects of a cliché constructivism or performativity? The author warns against the tendency to analyze the processe of identification with the narrative force of theories we are using. Constructivism generally fails when it tries to generalize characteristics, rather than understanding conditions and machineries and its effects. It fails when it confuses contingency whit fluidity, necessary non correspondence as a critic to necessary correspondence, hybridity as emergent aspect of social interaction with hybrid identities. Hybrid identities confuses the multiple subject positions with the (necessary) fragmentation of identities, and because it postpones the discussion of why some subjectivations define hierarchies in the different folds, while other show more messy surfaces. Other problem is to read strategic essentialisms, in what we could understand as essentialist installations, to recognize a more dynamic political field rather than a strategies that swallows the subject (almost like Vonnegut’s epigraph of “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be”). Talking about installations let us understand the contrastive presentations of identities (with hard divisions between an us and other) as a non necessary discursive turn rather than as epistemological distinctions. To study identities as an us/them division veils the possibilities of understading different levels and the perforations that are more a regularity resulting form different articulations and the heterogeneity of any collective containing multiple subject positions. The theoretical emphasis in contrastivity then tends to find “problems” of identities something that is more a limitation of the theories, is more our limitations as users of those theories. Many analysis claim that indigenous identity politics of identity are dangerous as they close possible articulations with other groups, when it would be a better question to think which are the conditions and contexts making identities to emerge in those terms. Ultimately this theories frame the claims and are able to put into question the bases for the political claims.

O si Lefebvre reloaded

La estrategia fue no abrir el libro de nuevo para no ser deborada, pero algo asi paso leyendo las hojas de notas. al menos sirve para darse cuenta que Lefebvre es mucho mas refinado que los usos que le di hasta ahora. La anotation fue inundada luego por parte de las notas.

Lefebvre, H. 1991 [1974] The Production of Space. Trans by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell: London.
1. Lefebvre considers that place is social: each social formation (each society and mode of production in his terms) produces space in a particular way in which contradictory relations and social hierarchies unfold; but is also produced: not only as a result-means of economic production, but in the generation of social relations, which means to consider their relevance in the reproduction of social relations (form biological reproduction, workforce reproduction and reproduction of social relations of production which include the visible and invisible representations). He is against economicistic explanations of space which regard space as an object, and thus generates a space fetishism, by erasing social relations (see p88-93).
Lefebvre incorporates the propositions of phenomenological perspective (he is in dialogue with Bachelard, Heidegger who consider are only focusing in two dimensions of space: abstract conceptions and the lived representational): “Being has a history and a history is nothing but the history of being” (p121), thus he also takes historical dimensions and the social contradictions into the understanding of any place production.
He regards space as a concrete abstaction (p 100 –for space time p 118). His analysis of the production of an abstract space as a necessary condition for capitalism and the violence that this process demands, echoes in the historical incorporation of the Chaco to the Argentinean state.

2. Hence, Lefebvre proposes a three-dimensional process in the production of places: 1) conceived: the planning of places from positions of power, 2) lived: the representations of places by its users that may challenge those ideological dimensions, and 3) perceived: the practices over places that effectively produce and reproduce them, following both the lines set by power positions and alternative constructions. (p 33-38)

3. After this definition he dedicates the rest of the book to define the transition form absolute space (form middle ages to absolutists state especially ch. 4 p 229-262) to the production of the abstract space of capitalism (p 262- . Space as a product and a means of capitalist (national and bourgeoise) domination embodies its contradictions which prefigure the possibility of a new space. He has a chapter analyzing the contradictions of abstract space (p 352-) “Contradiction of space make contradictions of social relations operative” (365). He states that difference arrises in the peripheries: which contradicts the universality of the abstract space. (373) If labour is abstracted space of capitalism need is abstract too, spatial practices are related to production and reproduction, knowledge crates an homogeneous space measurable (ie. geometry which he criticizes form the beginning of the book), and the lived space is limited to work, and the visual.

Abstract space is based on the city predominance over the country, in architecture is marked by the division inside/outside, the façade and the perspective. Abstract space is not just an empty or natural or homogeneous, it is also complex and obscure: creates differential hierarchically structured spaces; it is obscure, send aspects of the social to the obscene by negating them (for obscene p 99). In sum he defines it as predominantly visual (p282), geometric and phallic (p285). For the first there is a need of making transparent spaces for control, the space of capitalism as one in which “there is nothing to hide”, for the second the making of an isomorphic space the space for the commodity and the commodification of space, and the phallic as its masculinist preponderance, and ojectual absolut verticality of buildings (ie see 40, 166). He exemplifies the fracture of space with the female body as without organs (Lacan) (p 355).
State. Capitalism is the result of the expansion of the space of accumulation and the rise of forces of production, but is the link violence and the economic which gives place to the constitution of the State. The establishment of the state as an abstraction veils the class struggle, by establishing an ideology of sovereignty. It is state what produces territory as a result of its dominion of space (279-280) “Every space s born of violence… state power endures only by virtue of violence directed toward space” (280). Violence directed over nature and population, creates unity, creates the rationality of accumulation, bureaucracy an reassured by monopoly of force by arm. Space is fragmented, hierachized, submitted to sovereign power of state.

4. His analysis includes a long reflection on how the soviet revolution’s project failed as a result (he argues) of the failure of inaugurating a new spatiality, in this he shares the ideas of situationists in the need of motorizing revolution form the everyday life, but rather than arguing for the way this would be done through artistic movements (Lefebvre will say “ representations of the relations of production which subsume power relations, these two occur in space: space contains tehm in the form of buildings, movements and works of art” p 33), he sees the importance of liberating space. Space can be appropriated for new uses, new practices (p 165). It is for this that his book is ultimately a political project of a differential space which need the establishment of new knowledge, new relations, possibility of difference.

5. Lefbvre’s unending book can be re-read in search of different topics (ie. knowledge, language, visuality, ), one of the tangential topics I’ve been interested in is his understanding of body-space. For Lefebvre, the body is the agent of the social production of space, and then it is part of each dimension through its productive energy. The body is separated from objects and the world, language is put as a mediation in te production of a knowledge which is “over” the world. But also body’s sexual drive is repressed, it is thus a castrated body. (p 40) To reestablish practice and sensorial qualities of the body is also a way of producing a new type of knowledge by decentering (esto resuena a Nietzsche, creo). A new type of knowledge should overcome dichotomies. In this way competence and performance within spaces are embodied activities and a way of knowledge, bodies are the motor of practice and what enables perception. Therefore the lived body is the base of experience. An experience shaped by power relations but also that can be contested from the body. The body has the potential of inaugurating a new type of space. This brings to another contradiction: the abstraction of space from social relations can only be achieved through violence that is reproduced by dominant knowledge of the space . Again it is through the body that this contradiction can be recognized and then overcome. Synthesizing his conception of the body as a potential for political transformation he states that: “The restoration of the body means the restoration of the sensory-sensual, of speech, of the voice, of the smell, of hearing. In short the non-visual. And of the sexual…” (363) “The social space contains potentialities (of work and re-appropriation) (…) that correspond to demands of a body “transported” outside itself in space, a body which by putting up resistance inaugurates a project of a different space.” (349).


6. Space and Language (131-166): space has meaning and may imply a message, but space is cannot be understood as language, rather discourse is in – about – of space. He critiques Jackobson, Barthes, Pierce, Nietzsche.
“No space ever vanishes utterly living no trace” (p 164). Every new addition reinterprets the past.” (P 164) But also “ Nothing disappears completely, however, nor can what subsist be defined solely in terms of traces memories o relics.” (229)

Varios contradictions:
Quanity vs Quality
Exchange valu vs use vale
Violence vs knowledge
Savoir vs connnaissance
Domination vs appropiation
Repetition vs differece

“A space in which each individual and or collective subject would become aquainted with use and enjoyment is at present only at infancy” (p 381) Cantrak power can be challenged by local powers in which the machine of the state is replaced by machines managed form below. This questo of counter space overwhelms the division between reform and revolution
“The enigma of the body is its tendency to produce difference unconsciously” (395)

The end of my notes just say What is the subject? A momentary centre. The object? Likewise. The body? A focusing, active and productive energy.