Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
show that people speak for themselves – contrary to much social science, which sees itself as speaking for people who do not speak for themselves:
The normal is when people remain in their place and when it all continues as before. Nevertheless, everything of note in the history of humanity functions according to the principle that something happens, that people begin to speak ... If we are speaking of the ‘workers’ voice’, we speak from the perspective of people who speak. That seems to be a truism. Yet it is contrary to a certain scientific method which requires that when we speak of the voice of the people, we are speaking of those who do not speak ... the point essentially is to speak for those who do not speak. This is as much a strategy of top politicians as it is of historians or sociologists, to say that the voice which counts is the voice of those who do not speak (Rancière, 2012: 194, my translation).
IN CONCLUSION
In sum, ‘politics is thought’, ‘thought is real’ and ‘people think’ are the three fundamental axioms of this book. Today, in the 21st century, it is apparent that emancipatory politics are not necessarily constituted around class, although they invariably are constituted around the politically ‘in-existent’, in Badiou’s sense of the term (Badiou, 2011c).39 The social categories of the people, the poor, the youth (and, during certain periods, women), have equally provided the basis for the thought of emancipation; yet, however excessive that thought of politics may have been at times, in most instances emancipation has been thought in terms of access in one form or another to the state, a fact which has had the effect of reversing emancipatory gains. The reduction of emancipatory political subjectivity to class (and indeed to any other social location or identity) is today redundant because the thought of politics as expressive of social location is the foundation of state politics: it is the state which thinks location, hierarchy, interests and identities, as it must ensure their reproduction. For emancipation to be adequately thought, social reductionism must be replaced with an understanding of the politically subjective which, while in some way marked by the objectively social, recognises its excessive – and hence its irreducible – character. It is not just a matter of critiquing neo-liberalism, socialism or nationalism as such. Rather, an alternative vision of freedom must also be affirmed, and it is the old notions of emancipation and freedom that need to be critiqued. In order to do this we need new categories and concepts to propose as part of a new vision of freedom. It follows that without opening up political subjectivities – including those of freedom – to rigorous study, making them visible, recognising their existence as worthy of analysis, we will be stuck within the past ways of thinking freedom (liberalism, Marxism, nationalism), which could not move beyond state thinking.
The way forward intellectually must be to think emancipatory politics, to think subjectivities as such, not simply as expressive of the social, which amounts to state thinking, but by detaching them from their current anchor in identity politics in general and from (social) psychology or morality in particular. This is a complex enterprise, but part of it must consist in a rethinking of history beyond historicism and of politics beyond the state; not as determined ‘in the last instance’ by the social (economy, state, nation, etc.), a conception which is always founded on material interests, but to refashion Althusser’s insight that history has no subject. In this manner politics can also become thinkable outside the party form, for the party represented the subject of history in radical thought, being said to represent the working class, the masses, the people or the nation in the political sphere. Subjects – which, according to Badiou (2009a), are always collective subjects in politics – can therefore be rigorously understood as produced and not as given; they can in fact be conceived as produced through a politics, as the products of subjectivities (through a process of ‘subjectivation’) and not the other way round, thus avoiding a collapse into idealism.
As Lazarus (1996: 67ff) insists, the foundation statement for the thinking of politics today must be ‘people think’. The foundational axiom of the thought of emancipatory politics must be that people are capable of thinking a different ‘possible’ – in other words, ‘what could be’ – in the present: ‘to say “people think” is to say that they are capable, under a name, of prescribing a possible which is irreducible to the repetition or continuation of what exists’ and thus to become component parts of a collective political subject (Badiou, 1998a: 32). They are, in other words, capable of reason, of thinking beyond their social location and conditions, of thinking an excess beyond the simply given extant of the social division of labour and its corresponding social identities. Politics as thought in practice – emancipatory politics – must thus exist in excess of social relations and of social identities; otherwise, any change from the existing matrix of social relations and power cannot possibly be the object of thought, and people are not considered to be beings who reason; it cannot therefore be understood as a ‘reflection’ or ‘representation’ of existing socio-economic groupings and their hierarchies. Without this ‘excessive’ character, politics is simply conflated with ‘the political’, with party, the state and political community. This has been the core problem of previous attempts to understand emancipation in Africa and national emancipatory politics in particular. At the same time, it must be noted that excess is always excess over something, namely the extant, with the result that there is always a relationship between the thought of what is and the thought of what could be. The ‘excessive’ and the ‘expressive’ are always related in some dialectical way in political subjectivity, and it is the dialectical relation between the two which provides the thread of this book. Badiou (2016) puts it as follows: ‘you can indeed exceed the world but you can only do so from within. The procedures you invent must necessarily borrow from surrounding conceptions willingly or not.’40 Finally, it should also be stressed that the idea of ‘excess’ must not be understood in any simple ‘additive’ sense, for it may overturn the thought of the extant completely, or ‘puncture a hole in it’; yet such a politics of separation is sufficiently linked to the extant, to identities, interests and the state, for it ultimately to be, arguably, the most appropriate term available. Therefore, the objective and the subjective must not be thought of as related exclusively in an expressive manner, with the latter at most reacting back onto the former. They may be so related ‘normally’ or ‘habitually’, within what Badiou (1988) refers to as ‘the state of the situation’ and within society itself, although even in this case the expressive may take the form of specific idioms and discourses themselves not immediately reducible to social place, as we shall see in later chapters. But an emancipatory subjectivity can only find its roots within a relation of excess, wherein the expression of the objective is transcended or ‘punctured’ in many different ways, depending on circumstances. The excessive–expressive dialectic is thus what structures the thought of emancipation.
This book is concerned with opening up and discussing this excessive subjectivity – this thought in the strict sense, for expressive subjectivity is not thought, but mere expression of interest – justifying its existence, outlining some of the categories necessary for it to begin to be apprehended in thought, and identifying the way it is still marked by and linked to expression and representation. The book’s concern is to ‘bring politics back in’ – to paraphrase a hackneyed slogan – in view of the fact that politics understood as consciousness, ideologies, choices – in other words, as subjectivities – has been systematically evacuated from thought in the social or human sciences, primarily and fundamentally because of the equation of politics with the state along with the ‘epistemic reason’ governing these forms of knowledge acquisition. As a result, to paraphrase Spivak’s (1988) famous point, ‘the subaltern cannot be heard’ from within the parameters of this scientistic epistemic discourse. This is not because of any conscious distortion, but because of the ways in which a social or human science thinks subjectivity: exclusively as a ‘reflection’ or ‘representation’ of the social and, more precisely, of the entities of the social division of labour and hierarchy. As we shall see, such thinking amounts to a statist mode of thought, for it is the state which is concerned to manage and regulate such divisions, differences and identities; this mode of thought simply concerns how society is and cannot possibly think how it could be. It cannot think an alternative prescriptively, but only the extant descriptively or analytically and the tendencies derived from them. It therefore cannot think a possible future in the present, because it cannot think a universal Idea of freedom and equality