(to produce a ‘truth’, in Badiou’s terms); it thereby creates itself as a collective subject of politics.30 Such a process is referred to as subjectivation.
Another difficulty with identity studies has been precisely their inability to conceptualise politics beyond the particular, with the consequence that a universal politics of emancipation, which people are evidently clearly crying out for, remains untheorised. Identity politics, which vary from the totally reactionary (in the case of ethnic or xenophobic politics) to the state-focused liberalism of multiculturalism, workerism and currently hegemonic liberal feminisms, are incapable of providing a basis for the thinking of a politics beyond state democracy and hence beyond current configurations of neo-liberal capitalism. As a result, one is left with a theoretical vacuum which is desperately demanding to be filled. The question crudely put is: given the demise and evident irrelevance of past theoretical perspectives for thinking emancipation today, how is emancipation to be thought – assuming that it is indeed to be thought, something which is here taken for granted? The social sciences as currently constituted, given as they are to reducing consciousness to social location or place, are subjectively constrained by their current episteme – in Foucault’s sense of the term – and are thereforce unable to theorise a necessary notion of excess over interest, such as the idea of dignity.31
The fundamental problem of identity studies from the perspective of emancipation is that political identities are necessarily derived from social location; they ‘represent’ such social location or place in what is termed ‘the political’. As a result, identities can only reproduce such places subjectively along with their accompanying hierarchy, thereby leaving a universal notion of emancipation (equality, freedom, justice, dignity) unthought and indeed unthinkable outside market-capitalist and state-democratic norms. In contrast, any ‘politics of emancipation attempts to supersede (outrepasser) questions of identity’ (Badiou, 2010b: 37). Simultaneously, the absence of a thought of politics beyond identity, the inability to think a politics of excess, has also had other problematic effects. Central to these has been the inability to break free from state modes of thought, from ‘seeing like a state’, as James Scott (1998) puts it. It is important to understand that, irrespective of which (class or other) interests control it, regardless of the contradictions within it and independently of the form it may take (whether authoritarian, democratic, colonial or postcolonial), the state is and remains a set of institutions that create, manage and reproduce differences and hierarchies. It not only regulates the various interests founded on a social division of labour but also manages differences, so that any given situation is reproduced. The state can be little more than a machine for creating identities, as these are simply the subjective representations of interests.
State politics, then, concern the representation of interests (by parties, interest groups, social movements, NGOs, etc.) and the management of such interests, thus restricting them to controllable limits. State politics can therefore not be concerned with excess over identities, or change beyond what exists. For state politics, all historical change can only be thought of as natural and objective (as in the notions of ‘progress’, ‘development’, ‘modernisation’, etc.) and obviously as linear and teleological. For emancipatory politics, change from the current situation can only be primarily subjective, as it has to overcome place on the understanding that there is no end to history or, for that matter, to difference; hence, such a politics can only be ‘indifferent to difference’ or ‘disinterested interest’ (Badiou, 2001). In the absence of concepts to enable a thinking of politics on its own terms, we are invariably drawn into the politics of the state and the tyranny of the objective, so that political choices become impossible, given that politics becomes guided, if not determined, by the objective course of history.
What this argument also implies is that there can be no subject of history (the proletariat, the nation, the multitudes, etc.). There is, of course, a subject of politics which for writers like Rancière and Badiou is always collective, but this subject results from a process of conscious political self-creation or affirmation – a process of subjectivation. Therefore, there can be no way of filling a spontaneous immanent Hegelian process of ‘in itself–for itself’ with other newly invented subjects of history, along the lines of the ‘multitudes’ proposed by Hardt and Negri (2001, 2004), for example. In fact, such an immanent transfiguration denies the necessity of thinking a political process whereby people can think for themselves and collectively constitute themselves as a political subject; invariably this comes down to thinking politics in terms of representation by parties or movements and to asserting that real change is impossible, for people cannot think independently of representation. Unlike the concept of ‘the people’, which is a purely political concept, the idea of the multitudes for Rancière (2015: 92) ‘emphasizes that politics is not a separate sphere of existence but instead that which expresses the multiple as the Law of being’. Politics in this understanding simply expresses or represents the social.
Another important consequence of the argument above is that we can no longer think politics as existing exclusively within a clearly demarcated domain, that of ‘the political’, i.e. that of the state and its appendages. The political or the civic or the ‘house of power’ – to use Max Weber’s suggestive phrase (1970b: 194) – is, of course, said to be the domain within which conflicts of interest are deployed, represented and managed. Politics cannot be thought of as concerning power, for to do so is to restrict them to the state. Even more interesting perhaps for the arguments that follow is that the discourses and practices which are to be labelled ‘political’ cannot be so labelled simply because they deal explicitly with identifiable objects of state politics (states, nations, trade unions, movements, citizens, NGOs, etc.). There are two points of note here. The first is that a clearly demarcated domain of the political cannot always be assumed to exist, as in the obvious case of ‘traditional society’ in Africa; the second is that the various idioms and discourses deployed by people in affirming their politics, in presenting themselves on the ‘stage of history’, are not always evidently ‘political’, in the sense that they may invoke ‘traditional’, ‘religious’ or other linguistic tropes, which do not count as ‘politics’ for the liberal (or Marxist) episteme. In other words, the idea of the political, emanating as it does from liberal roots, has a clear neo-colonial content to it. Moreover, of course, the form of the state today in Africa, as elsewhere, is one in which the liberal distinction between the public and the private has not been apparent for some time now. The national or public interest today has largely disappeared, smothered by the (over)weight of the private (Neocosmos, 2011b).
The overwhelming consequence of the current phase of neo-colonialism – known as globalisation – in the sphere of politics has been the fetishisation of democracy, understood in its hegemonic liberal Western state form. Yet recent popular upsurges in North Africa have shown that the popular demand for democratisation cannot simply be equated with Westernisation. In post-apartheid South Africa the democratic fetish is so overwhelming today that it has become extremely difficult to question the equation of such state democracy with freedom itself. Yet one courageous popular organisation in particular – Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack-dwellers’ movement based in Durban – has done so in practice, taking a principled stand (at least between 2005 and 2014) not to participate in elections and not to celebrate a non-existing freedom for the poor. In fact, in this country it has been popular organisations and intellectuals emanating from grassroots struggles, not the university variety, who have been at the forefront of the questioning of democracy; academics have so far been overwhelmingly mesmerised by the trappings of state ideology.
It is indeed quite demoralising to see the extent to which intellectuals today are simply cut off from those sites in which ordinary people – particularly those living in informal shack settlements, the most ‘lumpen’ according to Mbembe (2010b) – are themselves attempting to find solutions because, after all, they are the first to suffer the consequences of the crises that intellectuals analyse from their positions of relative comfort. The work of the people of Abahlali baseMjondolo, for example, who are intellectuals in their own right, has gone in some ways much further in assessing the crisis of the African continent than that of many professional academics.32 What seems to underlie the thinking
