in sites, but is simultaneously irreducible to a social referent. Unfortunately, Guha, Chakrabarty and Subaltern Studies as a whole, because their analyses are firmly situated within the discipline of history, have been unable to move to an irreducible analysis of the purely subjective. This is quite clear from their view of politics as socially located exclusively within two domains, that of the elite and that of the subaltern.
More recently, Chatterjee (2004, 2011) has pursued this argument by noting that two domains of politics exist in contemporary India (and, by extension, in other countries of the Global South) in which the relation of people to the state differs. One, which he refers to as ‘civil society’, is ultimately determined by a relation between people and state founded on ‘sovereignty’; the other is determined by relations between state and people founded on ‘governmentality’, in Foucault’s sense of state classification for welfare and security, which he saw as ‘a particular mentality, a particular manner of governing that is actualized in habits, perceptions and subjectivity’, i.e. as a particular mode of rule as well as a way of being in society (Read, 2009: 34; Foucault, 2000: 201–22). This domain Chatterjee terms ‘political society’. In each domain, he maintains, politics differs: in the former, it is founded on rights, citizenship and administrative technical procedures; in the latter, it is popular and informal and its ‘claims are irreducibly political’ (2004).10 While he rightly recognises that politics does not only exist within the narrow confines of the state but can exist in various realms which themselves originate from the colonial encounter, it is a structural determination, namely that between people and the state established by different modes of state rule, that Chatterjee takes to be the ultimate condition of political subjectivity and that is said to account for the difference between these forms of politics. It is different modes of state rule that determine not only different connections to power but also different subjectivities so that politics are reduced to (social) agency. Popular subjectivities are given no independent effectivity; they possess little choice in effecting these connections themselves and in exceeding the social. We are thus back to considering people simply as bearers of their objective location. A proliferation of state modes of rule, therefore, does not resolve the problem posed by the social determination of subjectivity.11 Politics does not have to be located within a state domain of ‘the political’ for it to be so qualified. This failure is one that leaves no room for a subjective politics beyond the social determinations of the state. Subaltern Studies ultimately misses out on understanding (emancipatory) politics, for it is caught in, and unable to extricate itself from, a statist view of what politics in fact is.
Nevertheless, Subaltern Studies is able to illustrate that there is a seemingly unavoidable limit to historical knowledge established by what Lalu (2009) calls ‘disciplinary reason’. History, as presently constituted, is indeed a state discipline by simple virtue of the fact, as Lazarus (1996) shows, that through a concept of time it objectifies the subjective, thus leaving no room for an understanding of subjective affirmations internally. ‘It is always in the interests of the powerful that history is mistaken for politics, that is that the objective is taken for the subjective’ (Badiou, 1982: 44, translation modified). The current misrecognition by the most progressive Third World historians of the nature of politics is only marginally distinct from the manner in which colonialism saw the actions of the subaltern rebel, as Guha himself makes clear. Indeed, the disciplines of the human sciences as a whole do not currently recognise politics other than as ‘the political’, and control scientifically the thinking of political subjectivity by psychologising it in a similar fashion to the (‘anthropologising’) practice of colonial discourse, for they combine a knowledge system with power, governed by what Foucault called an episteme. Lalu concludes that ‘we might see subaltern studies as a limited field of critique that is aimed at forging the beginnings of a postcolonial episteme’ (2009: 255). This may be a valid way of proceeding; however, the forging of such an episteme, I maintain, would require an analysis in terms of historical sequences, which may indeed be quite discontinuous, as Foucault (1968) himself pointed out long ago, thus indicating a way around the problematic concept of continuous historical time. Indeed, Foucault notes that it is precisely ‘the episteme [which] is the “apparatus” (dispositif) which makes possible the separation not of the true from the false, but of what may or may not be characterised as scientific’ (Foucault, 1980: 197). To this Spivak (1988: 298) adds that it distinguishes ‘the superstitious (ritual, etc.) from the scientific’. It is this episteme that I have referred to as ‘scientism’. On the other hand, a postcolonial episteme as proposed by Lalu would have to begin from an understanding of politics as purely subjective and hence sequential in order to fully discard the scientism and historicism inherent in holding to a correspondence between the subjective and the objective.
CONCLUSION
Where, then, does this discussion leave the subjectivity of the Mau Mau rebel in Kenya in the early 1950s? For a start, we do not have to abandon the rational or embrace a distant anthropologising of difference to make sense of this. Lonsdale is caught in the trap of the liberal historian sympathetic to the oppressed, but ultimately unable to break from the scientifically neo-colonial because of an implicit superiority, which can only locate African rebels’ consciousness within a ‘tribal’ context of ‘moral ethnicity’. That the term ‘ethnicity’ is given positive attributes while ‘tribe’ is given negative ones does not overcome the neo-colonial perspective. Such is the idealisation of ethnic life that it not only irons out power contradictions within Kikuyu society, but also fails to allow for the subaltern to speak in his or her own names and categories about what he or she thought and practised in the rebellion. Lonsdale shows very well how Kikuyu ‘moral economy’ or ‘moral ethnicity’ was founded on an understanding of the individual as a ‘subject’. Political agency was seen as central to adulthood in particular; Lonsdale may refer to it as ‘virtue’, but its essence can be read as fundamentally political, not moral.
In other words, in the context of colonial domination and land appropriation, Mau Mau activists could only realise subjecthood and adulthood – their collective and individual being – through fighting the British for the return of their land. But given his liberal proclivities, Lonsdale feels obliged to link this to an idealisation of ethnic culture, something that it is not at all clear the participants themselves were doing. Indeed, it is not clear why Mau Mau political subjectivity could not simply be read as concerning the assertion of human dignity, the simple attainment of their humanity, as Fanon had stated; the kinds of idioms used should not affect recognition of this. We are provided by Lonsdale not so much with a view of what the collective consciousness of militants looked like, but rather with the anthropological context of a very complex subjective system from which we are supposed to deduce a subjectivity that combined the notion of the human as ‘subject’, spirituality, political affirmation and economic demand for land. What is said to hold all this together is ‘ethnicity’, a quite unhelpful notion in this case, as such a ‘holding together’ had to be achieved in actual practice, through collective struggle under conditions of crisis – as Fanon showed in the context of the nation – thus clearly redefining the ‘ethnic’ in the process. Of course, the human individual as ‘subject’ (and thereby culture and being) had to be (re-)created by Mau Mau; it had not been given by colonialism. What had been given in fact were evidently servitude, passivity, victimhood and the attempted destruction of the ‘human subject’. In re-creating their subjecthood, there is evidence that the Mau Mau may have exceeded their ethnic place within the confines of a colonially constructed ‘traditional society’. According to Furedi (1989: 18), the movement ‘put into question the existing socio-economic structures of society’.12 Evidently, Furedi comes to this conclusion from concentrating on the lower-class nature of the guerrillas. Yet we do not have to understand this subjectivity in such a socially reductionist manner; it is perfectly possible to understand Mau Mau’s social ‘radicalism’ as a subjective excess over ethnic consciousness during a limited sequence. The problem of wishing to stress the ethnic, national or class attributes of Mau Mau simply results from the insistence of analysts on noting exclusively the expressive character of their political subjectivities, to the detriment of popular reason.
At the same time, the colonial obscure subject would
