Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
as the ‘language turn’ in social thought worldwide, although it has simultaneously led to a welcome emphasis on the subjective. The idea of ‘political identities’ has been perhaps the dominant intellectual notion here. But discourses and identities are simply seen as effects of the structure of interests and power; for Foucault, they are themselves a ‘subjective structure’, so to speak, and they constitute the essence of the culture of modernity (2003a: 54). Studies of political identities have become overwhelmingly dominant within all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities today, in the Global South in general and in Africa in particular, so much so that they are consensual. Thinkers as disparate as Ali Mazrui, Mahmood Mamdani, Valentin Mudimbe, Kwame Appiah and Paul Zeleza (not to mention a myriad of feminist writers) have all, in their different ways, thought African society, state and politics in terms of identities: personal, social and political.21 One of the difficulties they have tried to confront has been termed the ‘essentialism’ of identities, which refers all thought to an unchanging kernel or essence of the identity in question and thereby evidently de-historicises and naturalises it. Attempts have been made to overcome this difficulty by reference to the relational side of identity – the idea that there is no ‘self’ without the ‘other’ – but unfortunately this does not overcome the problem, for relations presuppose the existence of differences and only stress their interconnections, even though these may be given a central effectivity.22 Neither does the notion of ‘hybridity’ or the recognition of a complex multiplicity of identities get us very far in thinking a politics of emancipation.23
Africans, of course, have been overwhelmingly analysed – by outsiders as well as by themselves – in terms of their social location in Africa and in terms of Africa’s continental place: in ‘human evolution’, in (colonial) history, in the world economy, in its collective culture and identity, and even in its ‘personality’ (inter alia, its ‘darkness’ or its ‘Blackness’).24 The core of the discourse of African identity has been the African as victim. For Mbembe, ‘modern African reflection on identity is essentially a matter of liturgical construction and incantation rather than criticism’ (2001: 2); such reflection, he adds, reduces an extraordinary history to three tragic acts: ‘slavery, colonization and apartheid’ (p. 3); in other words, Africans are thereby simply reduced to victims of history. The placing of subjectivity within location was, of course, an Enlightenment conception. For Hegel (1952: 196), for example, the supposed absence of history in Africa was to be accounted for by its geographical location.25 Today the study of identities and place has simply become pan-disciplinary in Africa. Displacement – the politics of excess beyond social location and identity – has rarely provided the theoretical foundation for a history of Africans, and yet it is surely displacement that is the truly universal phenomenon of politics and hence of history.26 The once common statement that it is people who make history has largely been forgotten; it is time to revive it and to insist that people can think beyond their social place. In this context, the consequences of recent events in North Africa and the Middle East for thinking emancipatory politics need to be urgently drawn.27
TRANSCENDING POLITICAL IDENTITIES AND IDENTITY POLITICS
The dominance after the 1980s of a concept of ‘civil society’ provided a boost to the sociology of social movements as well as to a Left critique of African state parties, as various dictatorships were replaced by parliamentary democracies, partly as a result of popular protests, partly as a result of external pressure from the neo-liberal consensus. Throughout the continent, but in post-apartheid South Africa in particular, there has been a dramatic increase in the study of so-called organisations of civil society.28 Yet what is important to note as regards politics is that social movements as well as NGOs are always organised interests. In other words, as they invariably represent interests of various sorts, their politics are overwhelmingly the politics of representation, with the result that their mere existence (however much they may ‘resist’, ‘protest’ or ‘critique’) provides us usually with little more than popular examples of state politics. This, of course, is precisely how the sociology of social movements analyses them, even in cases when movements may have been able to invent a politics of excess over their social location.29 Actually existing sociology has not been able to transcend the view of consciousness as representation. A universal politics of emancipation, on the other hand, is not given by the existence of social movements; if it is to exist, such a politics must step out from its limitations of interest, from its confines of place. Any organisation doing so ceases to be a social movement in the strict sense and transcends place while remaining localised. We can call this process a singular process, to distinguish it from the usual notion of the particular (Badiou, 2004). This collective subject now overtakes its location while its politics have the potential to become universal (to produce a ‘truth’, in Badiou’s terms); it thereby creates itself as a collective subject of politics.30 Such a process is referred to as subjectivation.
Another difficulty with identity studies has been precisely their inability to conceptualise politics beyond the particular, with the consequence that a universal politics of emancipation, which people are evidently clearly crying out for, remains untheorised. Identity politics, which vary from the totally reactionary (in the case of ethnic or xenophobic politics) to the state-focused liberalism of multiculturalism, workerism and currently hegemonic liberal feminisms, are incapable of providing a basis for the thinking of a politics beyond state democracy and hence beyond current configurations of neo-liberal capitalism. As a result, one is left with a theoretical vacuum which is desperately demanding to be filled. The question crudely put is: given the demise and evident irrelevance of past theoretical perspectives for thinking emancipation today, how is emancipation to be thought – assuming that it is indeed to be thought, something which is here taken for granted? The social sciences as currently constituted, given as they are to reducing consciousness to social location or place, are subjectively constrained by their current episteme – in Foucault’s sense of the term – and are thereforce unable to theorise a necessary notion of excess over interest, such as the idea of dignity.31
The fundamental problem of identity studies from the perspective of emancipation is that political identities are necessarily derived from social location; they ‘represent’ such social location or place in what is termed ‘the political’. As a result, identities can only reproduce such places subjectively along with their accompanying hierarchy, thereby leaving a universal notion of emancipation (equality, freedom, justice, dignity) unthought and indeed unthinkable outside market-capitalist and state-democratic norms. In contrast, any ‘politics of emancipation attempts to supersede (outrepasser) questions of identity’ (Badiou, 2010b: 37). Simultaneously, the absence of a thought of politics beyond identity, the inability to think a politics of excess, has also had other problematic effects. Central to these has been the inability to break free from state modes of thought, from ‘seeing like a state’, as James Scott (1998) puts it. It is important to understand that, irrespective of which (class or other) interests control it, regardless of the contradictions within it and independently of the form it may take (whether authoritarian, democratic, colonial or postcolonial), the state is and remains a set of institutions that create, manage and reproduce differences and hierarchies. It not only regulates the various interests founded on a social division of labour but also manages differences, so that any given situation is reproduced. The state can be little more than a machine for creating identities, as these are simply the subjective representations of interests.
State politics, then, concern the representation of interests (by parties, interest groups, social movements, NGOs, etc.) and the management of such interests, thus restricting them to controllable limits. State politics can therefore not be concerned with excess over identities, or change beyond what exists. For state politics, all historical change can only be thought of as natural and objective (as in the notions of ‘progress’, ‘development’, ‘modernisation’, etc.) and obviously as linear and teleological. For emancipatory politics, change from the current situation can only be primarily subjective, as it has to overcome place on the understanding that there is no end to history or, for that matter, to difference; hence, such a politics can only be ‘indifferent to difference’ or ‘disinterested interest’ (Badiou, 2001). In the absence of concepts to enable a thinking of politics on its own terms, we are invariably drawn