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the sovereign individual
even if they are unable to acknowledge that this
owing of deference is precisely what constitutes
the kind of subordination that defines subalter-
nity.5 Hence it is this subalterns concepts that
constitute the thinkability of the condition in
which (s)he is inserted, even though (s)he may beunable to perform the requisite operation of
transcoding that renders this or that piece of
deferential behavior (say) into a marker or symp-
tom (in something like the Lacanian sense) of
subalternity.
Another way of making this point would be to
say that a particular subaltern condition, like
each and every cultural condition, has to secrete
its multitudinous expressivities precisely in orderto be what it is, and that its concepts in ways
that are inescapably selective, confining, and
even arbitrary are the thematizations or repre-
sentations of these expressivities. Or, more
briefly, that the concepts of a particular subaltern
condition are its expressivities limned in the form
of that subalternitys thinkability.
Theories of subalternity, by contrast, are the
outcome of a theoretical operation whose object
is the natures, functions, and so forth, of these
expressivities. Theories of subalternity operate
on a particular subalternitys thinkability, and
involve a kind of transcoding. It is possible to ask
the question What is subalternity? but there is
another kind of question, involving quite another
kind of theoretical operation, that can be asked
as well, in this case: What is (a) theory (of subal-
ternity)? Subalternity, qua condition, is a prodi-
giously varied and complex practice of signs and
images with an accompanying orchestration of
affectivity, whose theory scholars like Spivak and
Dipesh Chakrabarty must produce, but produce
precisely as conceptual practice (in this case a
practice that generates, in a metalanguage,
concepts that reflect upon the concepts and
expressivities of subalterns, expressivities which
therefore constitute what is in effect a basal or
first-order language that comes subsequently tobe transcoded). No theoretical intervention, no
matter how refined or thoroughgoing it may be,
can on its own constitute the concepts of (this or
that) subalternity: the concepts of the subaltern
are expressed in advance and independently of
the theoretical practice of the individual, invari-
ably an academic, who reflects on the situation of
the subaltern. Theorists, qua theorists, can only
create or traffic in theories of subalternity (or
culture or collective fantasy or whatever).
The concepts that theorists produce can be
operative in more than one field of thought, andeven in a single field it is always possible for a
concept to fulfil more than one function. Each
domain of thought is defined by its own internal
variables, variables that have a complex relation
to their external counterparts (such as historical
epochs, political and social conditions and
processes, and even the brute physical character
of things).6 It is an implication of this account of
conceptual practice that a concept comes intobeing or ceases to be operative only when there
is a change of function and/or field. Functions for
concepts must be created or invalidated for the
concepts in question to be generated or abol-
ished, and new fields must be brought into being
in order for these concepts to be rendered inap-
plicable or illegitimate. To see this, we have only
to consider the ethnographic accounts of the
practice of deference provided in such well-
known works as Pierre Bourdieus Outline of a
Theory of Practice or James C. Scotts Weapons
of the Weak.
It is clear from Bourdieus and Scotts
accounts that the various culturally sanctioned
forms of deference are structured by an appara-
tus that determines the timing, execution, and
perception of the various acts and sequences of
acts that constitute deference as is demon-
strated by the person who bows too low and in so
doing ironizes and thereby ruins what seems like
a deferential greeting, or by the low-status cousin
who replies a little too slowly to the chief
landowners invitation to a wedding feast and
who thereby insults him, and so forth. This appa-
ratus demarcates the deferential from the merely
ostensibly deferential, and in this way brings into
being whole ranges of actions with this or that
mode of deference as their condition of possibil-ity. The apparatus does this by providing rules
that specify the appropriate operating conditions
for the various enactments of deference, and
these conditions, as Bourdieu and Scott point
out, are always political. (One recalls
Bourdieus lapidary formulation, The conces-
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sions of politeness always contain political
concessions (95; emphasis in original).)
At a more general level, the concepts that are
expressive of subalternity likewise follow rules
that constrain their appearance and perpetuation.
It may be, however, that subalternity is moreplausibly to be viewed as an order of orders, that
is, as an order that brings together and orches-
trates the rules for an amalgam or network of
practices practices having to do in more or less
complex ways with economic, social and cultural
deprivation, political subordination, as well as
with the various dispositions betokening the indi-
viduals willingness to submit and to defer (or at
any rate, with the socially instituted expectationof submissiveness and deference, an expectation
that can of course be resisted or deflected in
many subtle and not so subtle ways) with each
component or tier of this network having its own
rules.7
The task of identifying and elucidating the
rules that establish this or that subalternity (qua
intricate mesh of practices) is fraught with the
pitfalls that typically attend ethnographic charac-
terization.8 These pitfalls, now fairly well known
thanks to the efforts of cultural anthropologists
identified with the so-called reflexive turn in
their subject, hinge on the principle that a funda-
mental difference exists between a situation in
which one is presented with a description of a
particular cultural phenomenon (in our case the
practices typically associated with the condition
of being a subaltern) and a situation in which one
is confronted in a directly self-involving way with
that cultural phenomenon. The subalternist theo-
rist is essentially in the former situation, while
someone who self-involvingly employs an expres-
sivity betokening the condition of subalternity is
in the latter position. Thus, the theorist of the
subaltern brings with her implicitly the historical
and intellectual experience that makes her the
thinker she is, but that experience may not
belong to the place or culture she is studying.Her ideas, and the ways of living to which they
apply, may mean that she is not at all like the
persons who belong to the (subaltern) culture she
is endeavoring to describe. It may also mean,
conversely, that the members of the (subaltern)
culture may not be in a position to recognize the
theorists (putatively non-subaltern) thoughts
as being germane to their condition or connected
with it in a way that is interesting or salient or
whatever. There are inherent limits and obstacles
to any attempt to visit as a theorist all the reaches
of a particular historical phase, or even those ofa particular culture, subaltern or otherwise. The
subalternist theorist, like any theorist of culture,
can never therefore be absolutely certain of the
precise reach of her theories and concepts, nor
can she be sure that these theories and concepts
have any kind of adequate approximation to the
expressivities of the subaltern culture in ques-
tion, all the more so in that these expressivities
happen to belong to a culture that is disaccom-modated or misrepresented in very decisive ways
by its non-subaltern counterparts (and in that the
theorist of the subaltern is invariably someone
who is not in the position of being a subaltern).
A cultures expressivities stand as an insur-
mountable exteriority to the theory of (that)
culture, and in so doing function from the begin-
ning as irremovable etiolations of the ambition of
cultural description and this even when the
describer of the subaltern culture happens to be
in profound sympathy or solidarity with the
denizens of that marginalized culture.9 Another
way of making this point would be to say that,
while the subalterns expressivities or speech
become the condition of possibility of the subal-
ternist theorists writing and describing, this is a
condition that the theorist cannot write or insti-
tute, and this because expressivities are perforce
irreducible to description (even though they can
be transcoded into description, theory in this
instance being expressivity rendered into descrip-
tion or writing).
There are two possible responses to this
unavoidable circumscription or deflation of the
ambition of cultural description. One is to inte-
grate into ones projects of cultural description
this lack of commensurability between expressiv-
ity and description, to recognize that representa-tion or naming (the sine qua non of any project
of cultural description) is inherently problematic,
self-vitiating even, and that the ethnographer had
better face up to this, and turn the ethnographic
undertaking into an operation which, in the spirit
of a certain theoretical asceticism, interrogates
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the sovereign individual
the very desire whose name is ethnography or
cultural description. Why desire to name those
who ostensibly have no desire to name them-
selves? Why continue to produce concepts moti-
vated by this desire to name those who happen to
live their lives outside the confining epistemicspace that is home to the operation of naming,
and especially when the context of this operation
is one in which description can never hope to
catch up with expressivity? Posing these ques-
tions in ways that amount to a deflation of high
ethnographic ambition is of course one of the
defining features of the so-called reflexive turn
in cultural anthropology that manifested itself in
the 1980s, and it is an implication of the positiontaken in this article that the subalternist theorist
is enjoined to make a similar reflexive turn for
herself.10
The second possible response (to this seem-
ingly inescapable restriction or deflation of the
aspiration of cultural description) is associated
with the one just canvassed, and it requires the
subalternist theorist to find ways of relating to
the exteriority constituted by the expressivities of
the subaltern that, more or less self-consciously,
do not involve the creation of systems of knowl-
edge that replicate the asymmetries of power that
define the relation between the subalterns
culture and the invariably non-subaltern culture
of the subalternist theorist, but that instead
regard the unbridgeable gap between expressivity
and description as a problem posed essentially
for the internal constitution of subalternist
theory. That is to say, the inevitable outstripping
of (subalternist) description by (subaltern)
expressivity strikes at the heart of the enterprise
of description, and it should therefore ensue in a
displacement of the theorist rather than simply a
displacement of the subaltern object of study. A
rigorous theoretical askesis (self-disciplining) is
therefore the only adequate way of responding to
this problem. I shall return to the question of this
theoretical askesis shortly, above all in connec-tion with the primary external variables of the
field in which the concept of a subalternity is to
be produced.
Before I discuss some of the primary external
variables of the field in which the concept of a
subalternity is generated, something needs to be
said about the mechanisms that underlie the
constitution of the lived world that is the context
from which the perceptions, desires, thoughts,
and actions of social subjects are orchestrated.
The daily round of life for the social subject is
complexly mediated by ensembles of images andsigns, signs being images of images, and images
in turn being orchestrations of temporal and
spatial relations.11 Thus, the lived world of, say,
the Bengali peasant who migrates from Calcuttas
rural hinterland to Calcutta itself to work as a
cargo loader in the port of Calcutta will be estab-
lished by an ensemble of sign-images constituting
the new world of the city of Calcutta, by a simi-
lar ensemble constituting the old world of thesmall rural village 400 miles away, by the sign-
images prevalent in the new world that is
Calcutta that designate the small village that used
to be home for the migrant peasant (This is
how the typical inhabitant of Calcutta thinks of
the place I came from), and by the sign-images
designating Calcutta that prevailed in the old
world of the small village (This is how the
people of my village typically view Calcutta),
and all this because the semiotic registers of the
movements between different lived worlds have
themselves to be incorporated into the constitu-
tion of the worlds in question. The peasants
conceptual rendition of the village-world left
behind is now inflected by the peasants insertion
into the new semiotic ensemble that is Calcutta,
just as the semiotic ensemble that is Calcutta is
always itself constituted by the semiotic ensem-
ble that is the peasants previous lived world, the
small village 400 miles away. The small village is
always prehended in terms of the big city and
vice versa, and the world I have left behind is
prehended in terms of the world I have moved
into, just as the world I have moved into is always
prehended (if not entirely, then certainly
partially) in terms of the world or worlds I previ-
ously inhabited.12 In this way, a whole range of
multiply-linked sign-image assemblages underliesones prehensions of the temporal and spatial
relations embodied in the antecedents and prox-
imities that enable a world (that peasants world,
but still a public world) to be constituted out of
the flux that is composed of these antecedents
and proximities.13
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These semiotic assemblages designating
Calcutta, the rural village the peasant has
migrated from, the ensemble regulating the tran-
sition from the one to the other, and so on and
so forth are criss-crossed by yet other assem-
blages (each of course with an associated affectivecomponent) that designate such formations as
family, job, education (if any), circle of friends
and associates, gender, caste and class position,
and so forth. The notion of (a) subalternity,
therefore, is an abstraction denoting a particular
kind of relationship between these assemblages
subalternity is inevitably mischaracterized when
it is viewed as an object or discursive entity that
is directly denoted by the concept subalternityand its cognates. For, as has just been indicated,
the object itself is already an abstraction from
this nexus of assemblages and from the unstable
linkages between them. The expressivities of the
subaltern have the subalterns insertion into this
matrix of assemblages as their condition of possi-
bility: not to be embedded in them is perforce to
be something other than a subaltern.14 (The
crucial question here is whether or not the subal-
ternist theorist is necessarily constituted in such
a way that, while she may be able to reflect on
the subalterns expressivities and thereby
produce the concept of the subaltern as a theo-
retical object, the constitution of the subalternist
theorist unavoidably detaches the lived world of
this theorist from the nexus of assemblages that
bring about the existence of the subaltern.)
The primary external variables of the field in
which the concept of a subalternity is to be gener-
ated today will be identified through an account
of the conditions of possibility for the emergence
of the semiotic assemblages that create the
personage of the subaltern and the expressivities
that define this personage. It would take an
extended and complex narrative to enumerate the
full range of these external variables, and the
following account is unavoidably schematic.
The basis for the applicability and intelligibil-ity of the concept of the subaltern is a particular
structure of exploitation: the theoretical opera-
tion involved in the production of the concept of
subalternity has as an axiom that the subaltern is
such precisely because they happen to be
exploited in some way, and because they are
subjected to the particularity of interests in ways
that reflect fundamental asymmetries of power
whose effect is to consign the subaltern to the
margins of society.15 This structure of exploita-
tion possesses two primary axes, namely, the
mode of domination and the mode of production;the struggles of the subaltern take place along
both these axes.16 Struggles over the mode of
domination are primarily struggles for greater
social visibility and for more effective social
agency; struggles over the mode of production
have the reallocation of value as their primary
(though not necessarily exclusive) focus.
In todays world, and as has been the case
since the emergence of the modern world-system,the capitalist paradigm of production and accu-
mulation is the primary engine driving this struc-
ture of exploitation. Though not all forms or
manifestations of subalternity have as their direct
cause the workings of the capitalist system, the
logic of the overall structure which organizes the
particularity of interests is a logic whose rudi-
ment is supplied by the axioms of capitalist
expansion. The current phase of capitalist devel-
opment (called real subsumption by Antonio
Negri, or the epoch of the society of control by
Deleuze) is also the period in which biopolitics
is the name of the mode in which power is typi-
cally constituted, and any attempt to produce the
concept of subalternity calls for an analysis of
both the mode of power or domination and the
mode of production typically associated with this
phase.17
In this new phase of capitalist development,
the mode of domination and the mode of produc-
tion have entered into a qualitatively different
kind of relationship. In previous capitalist
dispensations, as Marx himself pointed out, it was
necessary for the mode of domination and the
mode of production to reinforce each other
directly, so that a single, all-encompassing capi-
tal logic regulated the dynamic of both these
modes, and it did so basically by extirpating so-called precapitalist formations from each
mode. Hence, from 1789 onwards, the modern
liberal state and its bourgeois democratic appur-
tenances were the typical form in which the mode
of domination was constituted (in the industrial
countries of the West, at any rate), and in this
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the sovereign individual
way it was possible for the prevailing mode of
domination to be aligned in a relationship of
structural affinity with the accumulation strategy
governing the mode of production (i.e., the earli-
est forms of monopoly capitalism in the first
stage, and FordismKeynesianism in the second).Today, however, capitalism is becoming more
abstract, more algorithmic, because this is the
only way that it can ensure that it mediates every
and any kind of production even that of a
precapitalist variety and places them at the
disposal of accumulation. The transition to this
phase is marked in a number of registers: the
creation of an international division of labor, the
rise of an international debt economy, the modu-lation of Capital into the structures of transna-
tional corporations, the introduction of flexible
manufacturing systems and labor processes, the
growth of decentralized and informal economies,
the exponential growth (especially in the
economies of the semiperipheral and peripheral
nations) of standardized markets and patterns of
consumption, the development of complex secu-
rities and credit systems, the inauguration of a
new semiotics of value, and so forth.
In this new regime of accumulation, produc-
tion, in the nineteenth-century sense of an activ-
ity that typically requires the factory to function
as a disciplinary space of enclosure or concen-
tration owned and regimented by the capitalist, is
effectively (though not entirely) relegated to the
peripheral and semiperipheral nations. What
takes place in the capitalist centers today is some-
thing quite different, a kind of production that is
akin to a production of production, a higher
order or metaproduction associated with markets
that deal not so much in goods or merchandise as
in stocks and services and in the technological
instruments for the telematic orchestration of
images and spectacles. The domain in which
these orchestrations take place is that of culture,
and it is culture that allows the logic of Capital
to become planetary and diffused.The current phase of capitalist expansion, with
its progressively more extensive systems of
metaproduction, has created a social order in
which all the conditions of production and repro-
duction have been directly absorbed by Capital
by abolishing the boundary between society and
capital, Capital has itself become social in nature.
In order to enable further the extraction of new
forms of surplus value, new forms it has to invent
as a way of dealing with the crisis of the current
paradigm of accumulation, Capital has to extend
its logic of command to cover the entire domainof productive social cooperation, and thus effec-
tively envelop the whole of society. Only in this
way can Capital insert itself into the flows of
social power, the power it needs to be precisely
what it is Capital. Capitalist command is now
universal and diffused, and Capital in this world-
system is thus an immense machine, a machine
that endlessly proliferates deconstitution after
deconstitution, and, concomitantly, reconstitu-tion after reconstitution. One day I am a peasant
laborer in rural Bengal, another day I am a cargo
loader in Calcutta, another day I am
The transnational algorithm that is Capital is
able to ensure the isomorphy (a term I have
taken from Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari) of
very diverse formations. Isomorphy is not to be
confused with homogeneity because, unlike the
latter, it is compatible with the prevalence of a
real diversity of formations. As a kind of grid
or diagram whose logic is to secure the condi-
tions of its own reproduction, Capital is situated
at the crossing-point of all sorts of formations
(commercial or economic, religious, artistic, and
so on), and it therefore has the complementary
capacity to integrate and recompose non-capital-
ist sectors or modes of production. A case in
point here would be a country like Brazil, in
which there is every conceivable kind of produc-
tion, from the tribal production of Amazonian
Indians to computer technology as advanced as
anything to be found in North America or
Western Europe. It would seem that every and
any kind of production even that of a precapi-
talist variety can be mediated in countries like
Brazil, and placed at the disposal of Capital.18
In such an isomorphic world, literally everything
can yield surplus value for capital. In a milieu inwhich Capital has become ubiquitous, productive
labor (as always the sine qua non of Capital)
is also positioned within every component of
society. But then, equally, the whole of society
has to be organized so that Capital is able to
continue to reproduce itself. The outcome of this
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twofold development is that the absolute spatial
division between exploiters and exploited posited
by a more conventional Marxism has effectively
been eliminated the exploiters are everywhere,
as too are the exploited. The sweatshop exists in
Mexico and Macau, and it also exists in New Yorkand Los Angeles, just as it is a latter-day business
imperative that IBM has a head office not only in
New York and London but also in Jamaica
(where IBM has had an office since 1950) and
Malaysia (where it has had an office since
1961).19
This state of affairs poses an important ques-
tion in regard to the issue of the mode of produc-
tion, because it is now clearer than ever that therehas to be a prior organization of social power
before production can even begin to take place.
In its metaproductive mode, Capital has
bypassed a phase in which it needed only to
concentrate exploitative power at this or that
specific point of production. In order to be what
they are today, the modes of production depend
crucially on an enabling matrix of antecedent
processes that organize power and desire so that
production can become possible. Another way of
saying this would be to view the modes of
production as the outcome of expressions of
desire, as the outcomes or derivations of this
ceaselessly generative desire (or phantasy) which
is produced in the mode of domination (and
which therefore allows domination to take place
in ways that do not necessarily look like domina-
tion).
What enables each mode of production to be
constituted is a specific aggregation of desires,
forces, and powers brought about in the mode of
domination: it is this antecedent assemblage,
lodged in the mode of domination, that is the
enabling condition for the reproduction of the
mode of production. A requisite organization of
productive desire or phantasy has always
preceded capitalist accumulation; today,
however, the very existence and nature of thisdesire, the process of its composition into an
economy, has to be permeated by Capital itself.
The upshot is that nowadays Capital has started
to do much of its work, in the mode of domina-
tion, even before it becomes visible to us
through its more overt manifestations (corpora-
tions such as IBM and Siemens, stock exchanges,
investment banks, entrepreneurs, shopping
malls, and so on).
If Capital is an axiomatic that transcodes or
rearticulates a particular space of accumulation,
culture is the site where Capital organizes anddistributes the kind of generative desire or phan-
tasy that enables production and accumulation to
take place. Capital has to saturate the spaces in
which culture is organized and produced. And
here the transnationalization of the capitalist
axiomatic has as its necessary complement the
transnationalization of the processes involved in
the organization of generative desire (the locus of
which is culture).Not everyone is a subaltern, obviously, but,
just as obviously, subalternity is everywhere,
since dclass subjects are found in every
segment of the capitalist system in its current
shape and form, whether at the peripheries, semi-
peripheries, or centers of this system. The criti-
cal question for those reflecting on the question
of the proper or plausible form of a theory of the
subaltern has to be the one that exercised Ranajit
Guha in his pivotal Elementary Aspects of
Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, namely,
what significance does this theory place on the
insurgent or transgressive activity of the subal-
tern? This question is central not simply because
it was for Guha the decisive question posed for
the historiography of colonial (and post-indepen-
dent) India, but also because it is precisely the
contours and outcomes of this transgressive
activity that define the subaltern (rather than
simply the matter of the subalterns conscious-
ness or situation as a dclass individual).20
Anyone convinced by Guha on this point would
place the weight of significance in formulating a
theory of the subaltern on the thematics of trans-
gression and its expressivities, and also be
persuaded that once we accept that transgres-
sions expressivities are the determinative marker
of subalternity, it will perhaps be clear: (i) thatsubalternity is best parsed as an abstraction
(the term is Gyan Prakashs) that registers a surd
or voiceless element, an internal theoretical
fissure, confounding the theoretical ambitions of
the subalternist theorist (in this sense, it has
nothing really to do with real life peasants, the
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the sovereign individual
lumpen proletariat, and so on), so that subalter-
nity is exactly what the theorist cannot produce
as an adequate practico-theoretical object; and (ii)
that a rigorous rendering of the concept of subal-
ternity in terms of the notion of transgression
opens up certain possibilities that may otherwisebe occluded, to wit, that the transgressor is some-
one necessarily positioned in an economy of
desire not totally constrained by a capitalist
axiomatics, and, furthermore, that the space of
this non-capitalist economy of desire is that of a
paracoloniality possessing traits that are
markedly different from those of its counterpart
formation, postcoloniality.21
I have already suggested that espousing a theo-retical askesis germane to the notion of a subal-
ternity is an undertaking that best takes the form
of a deconstitution of the speech (a majoritarian
speech) of the subalternist theorist. Here one
adverts to the paradox that lies at the heart of
subalternist theory: namely, that the object of
this theory is to all intents and purposes a minori-
tarian historical and political subject (and, more-
over, a subject often deemed by proponents of
the majoritarian discourse to be outside the
domains of rationality and the reach of history,
as Gyan Prakash and others have pointed out),
while the creator of this theory, the subalternist
theorist, invariably an academic ensconced in a
European or North American institution, some-
what paradoxically employs what is intrinsically a
majoritarian discourse to bring this minoritar-
ian figure to speech.22 This seeming paradox
owes its existence to the fact that the occupant of
a majoritarian position is never capable of
advance or becoming inasmuch as (s)he is
already, analytically, the norm or standard of
what is preeminent, excellent, desirable,
absolute, and so on.23 Since the normatively
majoritarian subject is already where he should
be, he can only occupy the position, always
pregiven, of the constant and of the mean (the
cool majoritarian is always able to say: this iswhere its at, baby). Movement or transforma-
tion can therefore only come from those who are
not in the situation of being majoritarian; and the
majoritarian subject can be transformed only by
withdrawing from that which is majoritarian, just
as minoritarian consciousness is transformed only
by exceeding, and exceeding again and again, the
standard where the minoritarian happens to be
lodged. And since the minoritarian standpoint
embodies all that differs from this majoritarian
subjectivity, the latter consciousness being one
that necessarily dispels difference (as when theslightest departure from a normative whiteness,
say, already amounts to a crossing of the thresh-
old into a problematic non-whiteness), the most
radical becoming-minor is always directed
towards difference and the different. In the face
of the static implacability that inherently defines
the normativity of the majoritarian subject, the
proponent of difference becomes different
precisely by striving to keep this pregiven norma-tivity at bay. The minoritarian can never differ
enough from the normativity of the norm, even
if (s)he happens already to be launched on a
trajectory of becoming-minoritarian: hence, for
instance, there can be no conceptual limit to the
becoming non-white of someone deviating from
the normativity of an unbending and quintessen-
tial whiteness. Transformation or movement for
the minoritarian consciousness therefore takes
the form of an indispensable intensification of
difference, and one becomes truly gay, for
instance, only by making greater and greater
distantiations from the majoritarian normativity
that resides in being straight. There is a univer-
sal in becoming-minor, and it is the more intense
becoming-other of the one who is embarked on
the movement towards that which is minoritar-
ian. All minoritarian subjects are embarked on a
trajectory of becoming-other simply by virtue of
their being minoritarian.24
I invoke Deleuze and Guattaris suggestive
account of becoming-minoritarian for two
reasons: (i) it provides us with a way of fleshing
out the theoretical askesis that the subalternist
theorist must take on; and (ii) it points to a
conception of the transformation of social and
historical subjects that links this work or project
of transformation to the category of transgres-sion.
The imperative that the speech of the subal-
ternist theorist incorporate a theoretical askesis
that is in line with the conception of a becoming-
minoritarian sketched out here requires the theo-
rist to find a line leading away from his/her
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theory that can initiate a becoming-minor for
himself/herself and his/her characteristic (theo-
retical) speech. In so doing, the theorist moves
away from the speech of language A to language
B, and in the process finds a language X that
gives him/her a line to the becoming-other of theone designated subaltern; mutatis mutandis,
the theorist finds, through immersion in
language X and through the complementary
engagement with the becoming-other of the
subaltern, his/her own unanticipated becoming-
minoritarian and its attendant becoming-other.25
It should be emphasized that this becoming-
minoritarian of the theorist does not serve as an
exemplification of the injunction Theorist!Always show solidarity with the oppressed!
which is often taken to express the basic disposi-
tion of someone writing in a politically engaged
manner. A becoming-minoritarian of the kind
envisaged here may in fact show that, in some
circumstances, the very possibility of such a soli-
darity is preempted until the theorist is able to
become something other than a theorist, and the
oppressed victim something other than a victim.
Becoming-minoritarian consequently involves
the simultaneous breaching and closing of limits
that have been instituted by the majoritarian
rulers of society. The propensity to excess or to
dereliction that constitutes becoming-minoritar-
ian is thus inherently transgressive. This trans-
gressiveness is not, however, necessarily to be
taken in the sense of a war against majoritarian
limits, but is rather the creation of something
else, the space of a transvaluation in which these
limits become something they could not have
been, had the transgression not taken place. This
characterization of the transgressive act brings to
mind Georges Batailles discussion of transgres-
sion in his Lerotisme, which begins with the
formula: The transgression does not deny the
taboo but transcends it and completes it
(Eroticism 63).26 According to this logic of the
transgressive act, the transgression impels thelimit or interdiction in another direction, a direc-
tion that culminates (in principle) in something
that resists the possibility of being expressed in
the form of an interdiction, something that, on
the contrary, decodifies the interdiction and in so
doing evades the majoritarian apparatuses that
subtend the upholding of all such interdictions.
Related to this conception of transgression are
the notions of the sovereign individual and the
sovereign operation developed by Bataille in
La Part Maudite (The Accursed Share), and it is
to these that I now turn.Demarcating his notion of sovereignty from
the one more obviously and traditionally associ-
ated with such majoritarian figures as the
pharaoh, king, king of kings, various divini-
ties, as well as the priests who served and
incarnated them, Bataille adumbrates an
apparently lost sovereignty to which the beggar
can sometimes be as close as the great nobleman,
and from which, as a rule, the bourgeois is volun-tarily the most far removed, and this because
life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty
(The Accursed Share 19798; emphasis in origi-
nal).27 The sovereign individual is thus someone
whose subjectivity is not finally constrained by
capitalist relations of production, with their
apotheosizing of the principle of utility; its exem-
plary and essentially utopian embodiment is for
Bataille the person who, even fleetingly, has an
object of desire that is not defined by the neces-
sity conferred by suffering (The Accursed Share
199). This extension of the notion of the sover-
eign being to dclass or minoritarian subjects is
crucially important, if only for the following
reason. Standard accounts conceive of the subal-
tern as someone engaged in forms of palpable
insurgency or quiet resistance that escapes the
purview not only of state formations, but also of
the more official forms of opposition to the state
(elite-dominated nationalism or neo-nationalism
in colonial and independent India, for instance),
as well as the academically legitimated histories
of these opposition movements. Subalternist
theory traffics in such notions, seemingly essen-
tial to it, as the people, the masses, and so
forth, and it derives much of its theoretical
energy from an identification with the figures
designated via recourse to such abstract notions,whose hitherto effaced histories it then under-
takes to recover.28 The outcome, and here I agree
with Rosalind OHanlon, is that subalternist
theory effectively gives us a new if cleaned-up,
pristine, version of the classic unitary self-
constituting subject-agent of liberal humanism
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the sovereign individual
(80), since the requirement that the subaltern be
understood as an effective historical agent
involves positing this agent as a parallel and
equally assertive counterpart-subject to the
agents and agencies posited in the official histo-
ries. In this way, the representative subalternfigures invoked by subalternist theory come to be
understood as owners and makers of their
pasts, and so forth, and therefore constitute a
rival or shadow being-majoritarian that is a coun-
terpoint to the states and the social elites own
official versions of being-majoritarian. The
upshot is that the subaltern is someone who
escapes the full reach of the states exercise of
sovereignty (i.e., its authoritative rendition of theprinciple of utility), but is nonetheless still
constrained by some manifestation or other of
the principle of utility. The subaltern or dclass
subject has no real becoming-minoritarian in this
particular historiographical scheme of things, and
is not able to exercise a sovereignty not ulti-
mately predicated on the principle of utility.
By contrast, a sovereignty compatible with a
becoming-minoritarian (Bataillean sovereignty,
we could call it) will involve the dissolution of
majoritarian limits in ways that could not have
been anticipated from any of the epistemically
available standpoints in that particular society.
Hence, a state of affairs hitherto thought impos-
sible or unreasonable can now manifest itself to
that societys subject-citizens, even though this
manifestation of the new does retain certain
qualities of the mysterium even as it is revealed.
This state of affairs becomes an instance of what
Bataille calls the sovereign exigency, that is,
the impossible coming true, in the reign of the
moment (The Accursed Share 211; emphasis in
original) in the course of which the rule of
exchange-value and the commodity-form are
breached. It should be acknowledged that
Bataille takes this exigency to indicate not a
reality that is realized, but rather an unending
dialectic between the principle of utility andsovereignty (the telos of which is the negation of
utilitys conditions). For Bataille it is the case
that:
[w]e cannot reduce ourselves to utility and
neither can we negate our conditions. That is
why we find the human quality not in some
definite state but in the necessarily undecided
battle of the one who refuses the given what-
ever this may be, provided it is the given. (The
Accursed Share 348; emphasis in original)29
The expansion, along the lines specified by
Bataille, of the notion of sovereign being toencompass the dclass or subaltern individual is
perhaps more apparent in the works of such
cultural anthropologists as Michael Taussig
(Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man)
and Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (The Tenacity
of Ethnicity) than it is in the writings of self-
identified subalternist theorists. Taussig and
Balzer both provide narratives that, among other
things, characterize shamanism and sorcery aspractices grounding the lineaments of a counter-
history which places its subjects in a divergent
universe in which the sufferings visited on subju-
gated peoples by the colonial and neo-colonial
dispensations are conclusively abolished. The
complementary universe opened up by these
shamanistic practices is therefore utopian, and
this in at least two senses. It is utopian in that the
dispossessed Putumayo people of Southwestern
Colombia (Taussig) and the Khanty people of
Northwestern Siberia (Balzer) come to encounter
alternative realities in which they are liberated,
even if only for a short while, from the rule of
necessity (Batailles given?) imposed by neo-
colonialism in its variant manifestations; and also
because the shaman, in tendering this counter-
reality, draws his/her clients into the space of a
healed reality which has as its raison dtre the
abolishment of the affliction and pain caused by
the ruinous prevailing order (i.e., that given).
The shaman and his dispossessed clients, no
matter how dclass and in however unpromising
a situation, find ways to become sovereign
beings, political and epistemic equivocalness
notwithstanding.
In such accounts, dclass subjects have the
possibility of speaking for so long as they can
transgress against the given. Taussigs andBalzers ethnographies show with devastating
clarity how persecution and its accompanying
distress soon await those who reconcile them-
selves to the given. Yet the same ethnographies
also show how refusing to accommodate oneself
to the given may likewise betoken death and
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misery. Tragedy always lurks for the subaltern,
or so it would seem. But these ethnographies
demonstrate that, as long as it is possible to trans-
gress, there is hope for the hopeless.
The space in which this sovereign hope, a
becoming-minoritarian hope for the hopeless, isactive is in part the space of what I am calling a
paracoloniality. This is a realm in which the
being-minoritarian of the dclass subject is
amplified into further and perhaps more intense
becomings-minor, and the subject repositioned
accordingly. Each becoming-minor is a becom-
ing-other, so that the subject is a kind of fermen-
tation, a crystallization of forces and passions,
that can be moved on: (s)he can become indefi-nite, then definite, then indefinite again; (s)he
can become other other other
other. Each becoming permeates and
displaces adjacent becomings, as the movement
from becoming A to becoming B is always
through an Xthat is neither A nor B but which
enables A to become B, then C (through a Y),
and so forth. Each becoming therefore estab-
lishes the relativity and mobility of its counter-
parts. The subject, from this viewpoint, is an
assemblage of multiplicities (Freud, for example,
is all the objects father, mother, siblings, teach-
ers, friends, wife, Jung, Adler, Ferenczi, and so
on who populate the assemblage or conscious-
ness whose title is Freud), a dynamic
panorama of becoming (so Freud is all those vari-
able relations of becoming that obtain between
him and all those he approaches), and a
condensation of forces (so Freud is a matrix of
forces that are transmitted to him and those
forces that he transmits).30 There can be
segments of this space of enunciation-visualiza-
tion, in which the subject is constituted as a semi-
otic ensemble, that register the impossibility of
pronouncing emphatically the difference between
white and non-white, Western and non-
Western, European and non-European, just
as there can be other segments of this space inwhich such differences can be palpably felt and
stated. Neither kind of segment is able to abolish
the possibility of the other, and what is crucial
for the constitution of the subject is the trajec-
tory taken across these segments as one moves
through ones various becomings-other. A partic-
ular and specific trajectory, but not another,
may establish a heterotopian segment of
this space in which other segments bearing the
names coloniality, Empire, and even post-
coloniality may be decomposed, even if only
momentarily, through the amplification of theheterotopian segment. A heterotopian segment
functions as the unthought of the segments
that bear the names coloniality, Empire,
postcoloniality, and so forth, since the very
conditions of possibility of the heterotopian
segment necessitate a preemption of the semiotic
assemblage that is coloniality, Empire, or
postcoloniality. Each becoming-other expresses
one or more possible worlds that may beunknown to the subject undergoing that becom-
ing-other. These are not worlds that the subject
in question has necessarily to see or know, for
they could be possible worlds in which the
subject comes to be seen or known, in which one
is rendered visible or knowable to oneself, even
if only transiently. One may have to see others,
the inhabitants of this possible world, looking at
oneself before one can come to see oneself.
In taking this itinerary through the segment of
the discursive space that is paracoloniality, a
space that can exist in the midst of Empire, the
subject traverses possible worlds in which her
consciousness is reconstituted in ways that
decompose the realities of Empire. As a result
of this reconstitution, the subject discovers that
she, and the worlds into which she is drawn, are
only the concretions of a specific desire. The
upshot is that the subject and these worlds can be
dismantled by other, alternative, configurations
of desire, in a dismantling that does not involve
an act of negation on the part of the subject and
the inhabitants of these paracolonial worlds. In
taking the lines of flight constitutive of these
worlds, the dclass subject finds a liberty that is
not defined in relation to a master, a master
who, in the manner prescribed in Hegels
masterslave dialectic, would have to be negatedby the slave before the latter can become
free.31 In the realm of this paracoloniality,
liberty is attainable in principle without recourse
to the strategies of a mastery, of a counter-domi-
nation that is only the obverse of the mastery and
ascendancy embodied in the figure of the colonial
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the sovereign individual
master. In these admittedly rare realms (I am
thinking here specifically of the worlds of
shamanistic practice as described by Taussig,
Balzer, and others), the actualities of mastery and
domination are comprehensively dissolved. For
imperial dispensations are situated in a constella-tion of myriad possible worlds, each of which
affects the others. These are worlds that in the
texts of Taussig and Balzer are expressed by
sorcerers, individuals of different races and
nationalities, persons of mixed ethnicity, subtly
arcane rituals, the sharing of food, a stereoscope
of landscapes, the brutalities of colonial occupa-
tion, an immense proliferation of states of
consciousness, and so forth.In these multiply-constellated worlds, subjects
do not necessarily have their identifications and
affects structured on the basis of a differentiation
from an other who would be, according to the
logic of the dialectic, necessarily a second. In
such worlds, there are others, certainly, but
these constitute thirds, fourths, fifths,
sixths, and so on, each of whom is related to
its counterparts in ways that do not conform to a
dialectical logic. In paracoloniality we find prin-
ciples of differentiation that spawn identifications
according to several, if not many, logics, logics
which in some cases may be non-commensurable,
and hence not in any kind of direct or discernible
opposition to each other.32
It is important, in conclusion, that we should
not inflate the claims made on behalf of the
concept of this paracoloniality that is a counter-
point to the coloniality and postcoloniality of
the subalternist theorist. Suffice to say that
paracoloniality exists in the midst of coloniality
and postcoloniality, and more often than not
is overwhelmed by them. Heterotopian spaces
can be beset by a tragic fragility. But where
they exist, they make it possible for their
denizens, however dclass they may be, to
live the lives of sovereign beings freed from
the constraint of exchange relations.The expressivities of these
sovereign beings provide what
is perhaps the decisive impetus
for an internal delimitation of
the descriptive ambitions of the
subalternist theorist.
notes
1 There are several or indeed many subalternities.
The locus classicus of the concept is of course the
Subaltern Studies project based in the area of
South Asian history, with a particular initial
emphasis on the history of British rule in India,though later works associated with the notion of
a subaltern studies have extended themselves
geopolitically beyond the domain of India and
intellectually beyond the field of historiography.
For a brief but excellent conspectus of the emer-
gence and development of Subaltern Studies, see
Vinayak Chaturvedis Introduction to his collec-
tionMapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial
(viixix). All the essays in Chaturvedis collection,
many by the projects key and originating protago-nists, reflect the different and varied phases of its
development and extension.
The account of conceptual practice given below
was developed in my On Producing the Concept
of a Global Culture, from which several
sentences have been taken. This account is greatly
indebted to Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris
What is Philosophy?
2 It is an implication of (iii) that a currently exist-
ing conceptuality can always be superseded by a
newer one: no conceptuality expresses or deter-
mines the condition or situation that it brings to
expression in a way that is completely exhaustive.
An expressivity works by naming things, yet the
thing named is never the thing itself, but is rather
the affects associated with the thing in question.
Spinoza was the thinker who first perceived this,
and Gilles Deleuze is to be credited with the
systematization of this insight. The thing is a
concrescence of its affects (it is the event of thisconcrescence), and the affects in question vary
with the interactions that have that thing as their
point of focus. Hence, say, the horse that races is
a very different thing (especially for its jockey
and horse-racing fans) from the horse that draws
a plow (especially for the peasant farmer using the
horse for this purpose). On this, see Deleuze and
Claire Parnet, Dialogues 60. The thing being an
assemblage of affects, and there being in principle
a huge variability in the way in which these assem-blages can be organized, no expressivity (qua the
name of the assemblage in question) can eliminate
its competitor names and the assemblages desig-
nated by them.
3 This is another way of indicating that hardly
deniable effectivity of thought with which the
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idealist philosophical traditions have always been
impressed, but which materialist traditions have
usually found awkward or insusceptible of satisfac-
tory description and analysis, or else reducible in
general to something more constitutive and
emphatic, namely, matter.
4 Thus the formulations of a Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak or Ranajit Guha constitute a theory
about subalternity, while the concepts ofsubal-
ternity are likely to include the notions (which may
be inchoate or half-formed) of rank and entitle-
ment, property division, and so forth, actually
operative in the thought and practice of the
Bengali peasant (say) of a particular historical
period.
5 For Guhas triptych (worker, peasant, urbanpetty bourgeois) see his opening article in
Subaltern Studies (Vol. 1). The fifth volume of
Subaltern Studies adds women to this grouping, and
another member of the Subaltern Studies collec-
tive, David Hardiman, has written three articles on
tribal groups in Gujerat. Interestingly, the dalits
(or untouchables) have never been designated
as subalterns by the collective (see Talwalker
17ff.).
6 It is possible to view this complexity in ways akin
to Althussers notion of an overdetermined
relation between formations, and between forma-
tions and the points from which subject-positions
are constituted.
7 On the contestation of symbols of authority as a
feature of peasant rebellions in India, see Guha,
Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, especially
the first two chapters.
8 It is an open question whether or not there has
to be an irreducible ethnographic component to
any attempt to study the subaltern. I am inclined
to think that there has to be some kind of ethno-
graphic dimension to such an attempt, and this
because the very identification of the practices of
the subaltern requires a kind of transcoding of the
expressivities of the subaltern into the theoretical
idioms of the individual seeking to formulate a
theory of the subaltern/subalternity. Even if thereis no such recourse to ethnography, there has to
be some way that enables the theorist of the
subaltern or of subalternity to reflect upon these
expressivities in all their context-bound specificity.
The subalternist theorist has willy-nilly to
construct the text of her inquiry, and so she has to
try and grasp the functions and intent of the subal-
terns Sprache before these expressivities can be
transcoded into theoretical discourse. Certain
forms of historical inquiry can do this job just as
well as an ethnography, so there is no suggestion
here that the study of the subaltern or of subal-
ternity is the prerogative of the ethnographer and
no one else.
9 The position outlined here is an amalgam of two
claims which have to be separated analytically: (i) a
principio, the expressivities of a culture always
outstrip the cultural aspirations of description; and
(ii) given the fact that a subaltern culture invariably
occupies a position of subordination in relation to
its dominant counterparts, the expressivities of a
subaltern culture have a systemic propensity to
elude the conceptual reach of the subalternisttheorist (in this case someone typically belonging
to a dominant culture). Almost all versions of
subalternist theory dealing with the asymmetries
that exist between subaltern and dominant
cultures tend to characterize these asymmetries in
terms of (ii). In the meantime, the intractability
represented by (i) remains unaddressed. This
intractability, which is the outcome of a general-
ized skepticism regarding representational or
symbolic systems per se, affects all theories ofculture, and ought therefore to be addressed by
the subalternist theorist.
My formulations here are indebted to some
more general theses adumbrated by Bernard
Williams (The End of Explanation?). My argu-
ment regarding sense (ii) of the incommensurabil-
ity between expressivity and description is in line
with sentiments expressed by Daniel Mato (Not
Studying the Subaltern). Mato finds problematic
the notion of studying the other that is integralto many versions of subaltern studies, since this
way of producing information about the subaltern
invariably overlooks the privileged situation of the
one able to generate knowledge that, struc-
turally, is withheld from those who happen to be
the powerless and specularized objects of this kind
of study. Matos is clearly a version of subalternist
theory in sense (ii) above.
10 This is also the position taken by Mato in NotStudying the Subaltern and by Gyan Prakash in
The Impossibility of Subaltern History. Prakash
claims that many forms of subalternist theory are
undermined by a paradox: the subaltern is typically
placed outside prevalent systems of rationality but
is still deemed to be knowable as the embodi-
ment of irrationality, and superstition, and so
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on in terms of just these forms of rationality. As
a way of avoiding this paradox, Prakash proposes
a kind of theoretical askesis in which we under-
stand subalternity as an abstraction used in order
to identify the intractability that surfaces inside the
dominant system it signifies that which the domi-
nant discourse cannot appropriate completely, an
otherness that resists containment (288; empha-
sis in original). The position developed in this
paper builds on Prakashs counsel of a needed
self-reflexivity in thinking of the inside of a domi-
nant system. Another version of this paradox
afflicting subalternist theory is to be found in
Dipesh Chakrabartys Postcoloniality and the
Artifice of History.
For the self-reflexive turn in cultural anthropol-
ogy, see James Clifford and George E. MarcussWriting Culture. As a consequence of the self-
targeted skepticism enjoined by the self-reflexive
turn, it was no longer possible for the ethnogra-
pher to say with a straight face what Margaret
Mead said when she was completing her study of
the people later to be named the Mountain
Arapesh: We are just completing the culture of a
mountain group here in the lower Torres Chelles.
They have no name and we havent decided what
to call them yet (Mead, letter of 21 October1932, quoted Clifford, The Predicament of Culture
230). Of course, this skepticism regarding repre-
sentational systems or symbolic orders based on
the positing of a pure and intact speaking I, an I
(the ethnographer in this case) blessed with the
capacity to name and designate from a position
seemingly outside of discourse itself, was a defin-
ing feature of the work of Barthes, Kristeva, Lacan,
and others in the 1960s and 1970s.
11 This understanding of the image and sign is
derived from Gilles Deleuze. According to
Deleuze, [t]he image itself is the system of the
relationship between its elements, that is, a set of
relationships of time from which the variable
present only flows. What is specific to the
image is to make perceptible, to make visible,
relationships of time which cannot be seen in the
represented object and do not allow themselves
to be reduced to the present (Cinema 2 xii). Signsare second-order images that render these
temporal relations visible in the first-order
images that embody them (the first-order
images being constituted intrinsically by the
modalities of movement and time), through the
intervention of a third-order image-sign that
functions as the interpretant between the first-
and second-order images (30). In other words, a
sign functions as a packet of knowledge and affect
regarding its object, but this knowledge and affect
is released only through the intervention of the
sign-image that is the interpretant, the latter
increasing and adding news packets of knowledge
and affect to the first-order image-sign. Images and
signs are plastic, changeable assemblages.
12 I take the concept of prehension from
Whitehead who, in Process and Reality, uses it to
denote the registering of sense by the conscious-
ness in a way that does not involve the operation
of the cogito.
13 Using a theoretical apparatus borrowed from
Deleuzes Logique du sens, I give a more theoreti-
cal account of the semiotic ensemble that is thesubject below.
14 The signs that compose an assemblage can be
assigned to at least three levels or components of
the assemblage. One set of signs will relate to the
political subjects agency and practices; another
will designate the forces, structures, and forma-
tions in which this agency and these practices are
exercised; and a third will supply the particular
context in which forces, structures, and forma-tions are efficacious, and in which the political
subjects practices are undertaken. Forces, struc-
tures, and formations (on the one hand) and
agency and practices (on the other), along with the
context in which both are manifested, together
constitute an amalgam that is the social and politi-
cal process in which social agents are inserted.
Social agents always stabilize this process and
reduce its complexity as a condition of their being
able to act.15 The presence of this structure of exploitation
is a necessary, but not in itself sufficient, condition
for the emergence and perpetuation of the condi-
tion that is subalternity. It should be noted that
here I depart from the Subaltern Studies move-
ments stress on the need to keep the history
of power separate from a universalist history
of Capital (as provided by most Marxist or
Marxisant narratives of Capital). For this feature of
the Subaltern Studies project, see DipeshChakrabarty (Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial
Historiography 15).
16 On the need to analyze capitalist formations
in terms of both the mode of domination and
the mode of production, see Samir Amin
(Maldevelopment 2).
the sovereign individual
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17 On real subsumption, see Negri, The Politics
of Subversion (17790). On the society of
control, see Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on
Control Societies. On biopolitics and biopolit-
ical production, see Negri and Michael Hardt,
Empire. The following account of the relation
between the current regime of capitalist accumu-
lation and the conditions in which subalternity is
generated is taken from my own On Producing
the Concept of a Global Culture.
18 I owe the example of Brazil to Antonio Negri
(Interview with Alice Jardine and Brian Massumi
83). According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranajit
Guha is to be credited with the realization that
the global history of capitalism does not have to
reproduce everywhere the same history ofpower (Subaltern Studies 20). Guhas proposi-
tion is strongly confirmed by an analysis of the
current disposition of capitalism, where the global
history of capitalism does not even ensue in a
single and homogeneous mode of production, but
rather has the form of a concatenation of several
differing modes of production. As a result, there is
no rigid hierarchy among the modes of produc-
tion, and certainly no comprehensively prevalent
capitalist culture.
19 IBM currently operates in 164 countries.
On this see
(accessed on 12 Dec. 2000).
20 Chakrabarty makes this point well on Guhas
behalf (Subaltern Studies).
21 Chakrabarty has made explicit this perceived
convergence between Subaltern Studies and
recent work in postcolonial theory (SubalternStudies).
22 This is of course the problematics that is the
subject of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks important
Can the Subaltern Speak?
23 Here I am deeply indebted to the account of
becoming minoritarian in Deleuze and Guattari
(A Thousand Plateaus 29193; see also 106). It
should be stressed that being majoritarian in thissense has nothing necessarily to do with quantities
or numerical proportions: in relation to the
analytically or normatively majoritarian, even large
numbers can be minoritarian (as when white-
ness is majoritarian even when surrounded by
numerically overwhelming instantiations of non-
whiteness).
24 Deleuze and Guattari put this well:
Minorities are objectively definable states,
states of language, ethnicity, or sex with their
own ghetto territorializations, but they must
also be thought of as seeds, crystals of
becoming whose value is to trigger uncon-trollable movements and deterritorializations
of the mean or majority. There is a univer-
sal figure of minoritarian consciousness as the
becoming of everybody, and that becoming is
creation. One does not attain it by acquiring
the majority. The figure to which we are
referring is continuous variation, as an ampli-
tude that constantly oversteps the represen-
tative threshold of the majoritarian standard,
by excess or default. In erecting the figure ofa universal minoritarian consciousness, one
addresses powers (puissances) of becoming
that belong to a different realm from that of
Power (Pouvoir) and Domination. Continuous
variation constitutes the becoming-minori-
tarian of everybody, as opposed to the
becoming-majoritarian Fact of Nobody.
Becoming-minoritarian as the universal figure
of consciousness is called autonomy. (A
Thousand Plateaus 106)
25 I am referring here to Deleuze and Guattaris
invocation of Pasolinis work Lexprience hr-
tique: That is why Pasolini demonstrated that the
essential thing is to be found in neither language
A, nor in language B, but in language X, which is
none other than language A in the actual process
of becoming language B (A Thousand Plateaus 106).
Xis neitherA nor B, but rather that which enables
A and B to become that which they are in theprocess of becoming. This is the kind of move-
ment captured by Michel Leiris in an exemplary
moment of theoretical askesis, when he said at
the end of the 193032 French DakarDjibouti
expedition that Id rather be possessed than
study possessed people, have carnal knowledge
of a zarine rather than scientifically know all
about her (quoted in Clifford, The Predicament of
Culture 169; French original in LAfrique fantme
324).
26 For Bataille, the socius is constituted by a
double alogic that includes both the interdiction
and the accompanying transgressive act. The
taboo and its violation are alogically consistent or
compatible, and are required to complete each
other.
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27 Bataille goes on to say: Sometimes the bour-
geois has resources at his disposal that would
allow him to enjoy the world in a sovereign
manner, but then it is in his nature to enjoy them
in a furtive manner, to which he strives to give the
appearance of servile utility (198). Several
sentences in the ensuing paragraphs are taken
from my own The Sovereign Individual.
28 In the words of Rosalind OHanlon, a sympa-
thetic critic of the Subaltern Studies movement:
It is this central ground, the masses and the
recovery of their own specific and distinctive
histories, with all of the legitimating power
implied in such a concern, which the Subaltern
contributors claim as the hallmark of theirproject. Their task, and that of all historians
who write in the same idiom, thus becomes
one of filling up: of making absences into
presences, of peopling a vacant space with
figures dissimilar in their humble and work-
worn appearance, no doubt, but bearing in
these very signs of their origin the marks of a
past and a presence which is their own. (79)
29 Batailles repudiation of the principle of utility
demands a corresponding disavowal of exchange
value and the commodity form (the impossibility
of this companion disavowal would mean that the
principle of utility is positively irremovable and
that sovereignty is not attainable). Bataille does of
course reject the principle of utility, and while his
position is strictly utopian, it is nonetheless
profoundly political, since for him the exercise of
sovereignty clearly lies not in the eradication of
the given, but in the struggle against it.
30 Here I use a number of concepts derived from
Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens 292372.
31 Here I follow Deleuze and Guattari, who distin-
guish between flight or escape (which does
not require an act of negation on the part of the
escapee) and freedom (which requires precisely
such a negation, but which in the process imposes
an unequivocal, and thus delimiting horizon that
of a relation to the master on the escapeesquest for liberty) (Kafka 59).
32 I refer here to the logic of hyperdifferentia-
tion identified by Brian Massumi as something
quite different from the dialectic (A Users Guide to
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, especially 91 and
17778n73).
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Kenneth Surin
Program in Literature
Box 90670
Duke University
Durham
NC 27708-90670
USA
E-mail: [email protected]