ANGELAKI

journa l of the the oretic al humani tie s v olum e 6 num ber 1 april 200 1

hat is it to produce a concept? Or more specifically in the context of the theme of this particular issue of Angelaki, what precisely is the nature of the theoretical or conceptual operation involved in producing the concept of a subalternity?1 Delineating the theoretical operation that generates this concept requires the producer of concepts to distinguish adequately between: (i) those concepts that constitute a theory of subalternity; (ii) those concepts that belong to a particular manifestation of the subaltern and that constitute that subalternitys expressivity, and which can become the objects described and analyzed by the aforementioned theory of subalternity; and (iii) the state or condition of subalternity as such, a condition that overdetermines the expressivities yielded by this state or condition.2 A theory of subalternity is thus the outcome of a productive process, no more or no less than the putative object of this process, the condition of being a subaltern. This theory, the theory of being a subaltern, is a practice, just as the condition of subalternity is a multilinear assemblage of practices structured by distributions of income, assets, power, and status. A theory, this theory, any theory, is in short a practice of concepts. What is a theory of subalternity? A theory of subalternity is not about subalternity per se, but about the concepts that are generated by subalternity and its denizens concepts that are in turn related in a variety of ways to other concepts associated with other assemblages of practices. Hence, the concepts generated by the condition of subalternity can, in the relevant context, be related by an appropriate theory to the concepts associated with the assemblage of practices named uneven development (as understood by Samir Amin and others), or peripheral Fordism (as characterized by Alain Lipietz and other members of the Ecole R gulation), and so forth. A theory of subalter-

kenneth surin THE SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL, SUBALTERNITY, AND BECOMING-OTHER

nity does not bear directly on subalternity or on the personage who is the subaltern, but rather on the concepts of this or that subalternity and its associated personages, and these concepts are just as actual and effective as (the condition of) subalternity itself.3 Subalternitys concepts are not given in the ensembles of practices that constitute it, and yet they are subalternitys concepts, not theories about subalternity.4 Every subalternity generates for itself its own thinkability (and concurrently its own unthinkability as the obverse of this very thinkability), and this even if the condition of subalternity is not taken to be such by those whose condition it is. Thus the peasant, the urban petty bourgeois, and the worker (Ranajit Guhas paradigmatic exemplification of subalternity) who perceive that they behave deferentially towards the rich landowner or factory owner contribute to that subalternitys thinkability,

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/01/010047-17 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/0969725012005676 5

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even if they are unable to acknowledge that this owing of deference is precisely what constitutes the kind of subordination that defines subalternity.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 be unable to perform the requisite operation of transcoding that renders this or that piece of deferential behavior (say) into a marker or symptom (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 order to be what it is, and that its concepts in ways that are inescapably selective, confining, and even arbitrary are the thematizations or representations 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 subalternity)? Subalternity, qua condition, is a prodigiously 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 to be 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, invariably 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, and even 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 into being 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 abolished, and new fields must be brought into being in order for these concepts to be rendered inapplicable or illegitimate. To see this, we have only to consider the ethnographic accounts of the practice of deference provided in such wellknown 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 apparatus that determines the timing, execution, and perception of the various acts and sequences of acts that constitute deference as is demonstrated 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 apparatus 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 possibility. 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 more plausibly to be viewed as an order of orders, that is, as an order that brings together and orchestrates 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 individuals willingness to submit and to defer (or at any rate, with the socially instituted expectation of 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 characterization. 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 fundamental 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 theorist is essentially in the former situation, while someone who self-involvingly employs an expressivity 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 of a 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 question, all the more so in that these expressivities happen to belong to a culture that is disaccommodated 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 insurmountable exteriority to the theory of (that) culture, and in so doing function from the beginning 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 subalternist theorists writing and describing, this is a condition that the theorist cannot write or institute, 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 description or writing). There are two possible responses to this unavoidable circumscription or deflation of the ambition of cultural description. One is to integrate into ones projects of cultural description this lack of commensurability between expressivity and description, to recognize that representation 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 very desire whose name is ethnography or cultural description. Why desire to name those who ostensibly have no desire to name themselves? Why continue to produce concepts motivated by this desire to name those who happen to live their lives outside the confining epistemic space 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 questions 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 position taken in this article that the subalternist theorist is enjoined to make a similar reflexive turn for herself. 10 The second possible response (to this seemingly 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 knowledge 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 connection 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 and signs, 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 established by an ensemble of sign-images constituting the new world of the city of Calcutta, by a similar ensemble constituting the old world of the small rural village 400 miles away, by the signimages 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 constitution 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 ensemble 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 previously inhabited.12 In this way, a whole range of multiply-linked sign-image assemblages underlies ones prehensions of the temporal and spatial relations embodied in the antecedents and proximities 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 transition from the one to the other, and so on and so forth are criss-crossed by yet other assemblages (each of course with an associated affective component) 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 subalternity and 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 possibility: 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 subalternist 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 theoretical 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 generated 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 intelligibility of the concept of the subaltern is a particular structure of exploitation: the theoretical operation 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 exploitation 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 accumulation is the primary engine driving this structure 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 rudiment is supplied by the axioms of capitalist expansion. The current phase of capitalist development (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 typically 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 production 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 capital logic regulated the dynamic of both these modes, and it did so basically by extirpating socalled precapitalist formations from each mode. Hence, from 1789 onwards, the modern liberal state and its bourgeois democratic appurtenances 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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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 earliest 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 modulation of Capital into the structures of transnational 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 securities and credit systems, the inauguration of a new semiotics of value, and so forth. In this new regime of accumulation, production, in the nineteenth-century sense of an activity that typically requires the factory to function as a disciplinary space of enclosure or concentration 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 something 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 reproduction 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 domain of productive social cooperation, and thus effectively 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 worldsystem is thus an immense machine, a machine that endlessly proliferates deconstitution after deconstitution, and, concomitantly, reconstitution 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 F lix 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 conditions 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-capitalist sectors or modes of production. A case in point here would be a country like Brazil, in which there is every conceivable kind of production, 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 precapitalist 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 in which 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 York and 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 question in regard to the issue of the mode of production, because it is now clearer than ever that there has 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 domination). 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 this desire, 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 domination, even before it becomes visible to us through its more overt manifestations (corporations 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 and distributes the kind of generative desire or phantasy 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 d class subjects are found in every segment of the capitalist system in its current shape and form, whether at the peripheries, semiperipheries, or centers of this system. The critical 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 subaltern? This question is central not simply because it was for Guha the decisive question posed for the historiography of colonial (and post-independent) 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 consciousness or situation as a d class 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 transgression and its expressivities, and also be persuaded that once we accept that transgressions expressivities are the determinative marker of subalternity, it will perhaps be clear: (i) that subalternity 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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lumpen proletariat, and so on), so that subalternity is exactly what the theorist cannot produce as an adequate practico-theoretical object; and (ii) that a rigorous rendering of the concept of subalternity in terms of the notion of transgression opens up certain possibilities that may otherwise be occluded, to wit, that the transgressor is someone 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 theoretical askesis germane to the notion of a subalternity 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 minoritarian historical and political subject (and, moreover, 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, somewhat paradoxically employs what is intrinsically a majoritarian discourse to bring this minoritarian 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 is where its at, baby). Movement or transformation 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 the slightest departure from a normative whiteness, say, already amounts to a crossing of the threshold 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 normativity 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 quintessential 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 universal in becoming-minor, and it is the more intense becoming-other of the one who is embarked on the movement towards that which is minoritarian. 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 transgression. The imperative that the speech of the subalternist theorist incorporate a theoretical askesis that is in line with the conception of a becomingminoritarian sketched out here requires the theorist 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 (theoretical) 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 the one 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 becomingminoritarian and its attendant becoming-other.25 It should be emphasized that this becomingminoritarian 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 disposition 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 solidarity 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-minoritarian is thus inherently transgressive. This transgressiveness 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 transgression 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 the limit or interdiction in another direction, a direction 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 associated with such majoritarian figures as the pharaoh, king, king of kings, various divinities, 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 voluntarily the most far removed, and this because life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty (The Accursed Share 19798; emphasis in original).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 exemplary and essentially utopian embodiment is for Bataille the person who, even fleetingly, has an object of desire that is not defined by the necessity conferred by suffering (The Accursed Share 199). This extension of the notion of the sovereign being to d class or minoritarian subjects is crucially important, if only for the following reason. Standard accounts conceive of the subaltern 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 essential 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 undertakes 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 selfconstituting subject-agent of liberal humanism

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(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 histories. In this way, the representative subaltern figures 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 counterpoint 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 the principle of utility), but is nonetheless still constrained by some manifestation or other of the principle of utility. The subaltern or d class subject has no real becoming-minoritarian in this particular historiographical scheme of things, and is not able to exercise a sovereignty not ultimately 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 impossible 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 and sovereignty (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 whatever 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 to encompass the d class 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 selfidentified subalternist theorists. Taussig and Balzer both provide narratives that, among other things, characterize shamanism and sorcery as practices grounding the lineaments of a counterhistory which places its subjects in a divergent universe in which the sufferings visited on subjugated 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 neocolonialism in its variant manifestations; and also because the shaman, in tendering this counterreality, draws his/her clients into the space of a healed reality which has as its raison d tre 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 d class and in however unpromising a situation, find ways to become sovereign beings, political and epistemic equivocalness notwithstanding. In such accounts, d class subjects have the possibility of speaking for so long as they can transgress against the given. Taussigs and Balzers ethnographies show with devastating clarity how persecution and its accompanying distress soon await those who reconcile themselves 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 transgress, there is hope for the hopeless. The space in which this sovereign hope, a becoming-minoritarian hope for the hopeless, is active is in part the space of what I am calling a paracoloniality. This is a realm in which the being-minoritarian of the d class subject is amplified into further and perhaps more intense becomings-minor, and the subject repositioned accordingly. Each becoming-minor is a becoming-other, so that the subject is a kind of fermentation, a crystallization of forces and passions, that can be moved on: (s)he can become indefinite, 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 X that is neither A nor B but which enables A to become B, then C (through a Y), and so forth. Each becoming therefore establishes the relativity and mobility of its counterparts. The subject, from this viewpoint, is an assemblage of multiplicities (Freud, for example, is all the objects father, mother, siblings, teachers, friends, wife, Jung, Adler, Ferenczi, and so on who populate the assemblage or consciousness whose title is Freud), a dynamic panorama of becoming (so Freud is all those variable 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-visualization, in which the subject is constituted as a semiotic ensemble, that register the impossibility of pronouncing emphatically the difference between white and non-white, Western and nonWestern, European and non-European, just as there can be other segments of this space in which 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 trajectory taken across these segments as one moves through ones various becomings-other. A particular 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 postcoloniality may be decomposed, even if only momentarily, through the amplification of the heterotopian 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 be unknown to the subject undergoing that becoming-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 d class 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 negated by 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-domination that is only the obverse of the mastery and ascendancy embodied in the figure of the colonial

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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 constellation 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 occupation, 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 principles 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 counterpoint 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 d class 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 emergence and development of Subaltern Studies, see Vinayak Chaturvedis Introduction to his collection Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (viixix). All the essays in Chaturvedis collection, many by the projects key and originating protagonists, 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 existing conceptuality can always be superseded by a newer one: no conceptuality expresses or determines 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 this concrescence), 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 assemblages can be organized, no expressivity (qua the name of the assemblage in question) can eliminate its competitor names and the assemblages designated 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 satisfactory 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 of subalternity are likely to include the notions (which may be inchoate or half-formed) of rank and entitlement, 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, urban petty 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 collective, 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 formations 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 ethnographic 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 there is 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 subalterns 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 subalternity 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 subalternist theorist (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 generalized skepticism regarding representational or symbolic systems per se, affects all theories of culture, 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 argument regarding sense (ii) of the incommensurability 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 integral to 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, structurally, 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 Not Studying 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 embodiment 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 understand subalternity as an abstraction used in order to identify the intractability that surfaces inside the dominant system it signifies that which the dominant discourse cannot appropriate completely, an otherness that resists containment (288; emphasis in original). The position developed in this paper builds on Prakashs counsel of a needed self-reflexivity in thinking of the inside of a dominant 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 anthropology, see James Clifford and George E. Marcuss Writing Culture. As a consequence of the selftargeted skepticism enjoined by the self-reflexive turn, it was no longer possible for the ethnographer 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 October 1932, quoted Clifford, The Predicament of Culture 230). Of course, this skepticism regarding representational 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 defining 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). Signs are 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 firstand 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 consciousness 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 theoretical account of the semiotic ensemble that is the subject 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 formations in which this agency and these practices are exercised; and a third will supply the particular context in which forces, structures, and formations are efficacious, and in which the political subjects practices are undertaken. Forces, structures, 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 political 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 condition that is subalternity. It should be noted that here I depart from the Subaltern Studies movements 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 Dipesh Chakrabarty (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).

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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 biopolitical production, see Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire. The following account of the relation between the current regime of capitalist accumulation 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 of power (Subaltern Studies 20). Guhas proposition 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 production, and certainly no comprehensively prevalent capitalist culture. 19 IBM currently operates in 164 countries. On this see <http://www.ibm.com/planetwide> (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 (Subaltern Studies). 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 this sense 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 whiteness is majoritarian even when surrounded by numerically overwhelming instantiations of nonwhiteness). 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 uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority. There is a universal 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 amplitude that constantly oversteps the representative threshold of the majoritarian standard, by excess or default. In erecting the figure of a 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-minoritarian 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 hrtique: 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). X is neither A nor B, but rather that which enables A and B to become that which they are in the process of becoming. This is the kind of movement 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 bourgeois 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 sympathetic 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 their project. 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 workworn 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 distinguish 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 escapees quest for liberty) (Kafka 59). 32 I refer here to the logic of hyperdifferentiation 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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