From Hegemony to Governmentality

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International Critical Thought

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From Hegemony to Governmentality Pranab Kanti Basu To cite this article: Pranab Kanti Basu (2016): From Hegemony to Governmentality, International Critical Thought, DOI: 10.1080/21598282.2016.1172323 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2016.1172323

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Date: 27 April 2016, At: 09:23

INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2016.1172323

From Hegemony to Governmentality Pranab Kanti Basu

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Department of Economics and Politics, Visva-Bharati, West Bengal, India ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

Postcolonial studies in India have a rich tradition. Since the late 1980s, many theoretical innovations have been deployed in these analyses. The objective of this article is to uncover some of the limitations of the theoretical fields deployed to analyse postcolonial societies within the discourse of postcolonialism in India. I will narrate the transition from the discursive field constituted by hegemony and its related concepts to the field constituted by a version of governmentality and critique these deployments. This critique, like all critiques, is based on a particular query. I am primarily interested in the question: how far does this deployment allow or shut out the subversive potential of actors within the postcolonial structure?

Postcolonialism; hegemony; governmentality; Gramsci; Lacan

1. Introduction Some of the postcolonial studies of the Indian socio-economic formation since the 1980s have deployed the Gramscian formulation of hegemony, modifying it innovatively. Since the turn of the century, there has been a shift to Foucault’s problematic of governmentality. My central proposition is that these problematics lack the potential to accommodate subversion or counter-hegemony. I will narrate the evolution of the literature based on these founding concepts and then try to establish the reasons for this fundamental lack in the discourse.

2. Conceptualising postcolonialism through hegemony: Gramsci reconstructed 2.1. Simple hegemony and complex hegemony In their initial formulations, Sanyal (1988) and Chatterjee (1988, 1993) used a neo-Gramscian conceptual field and mode of argument for analysing the postcolonial political economy of India. In the traditional Marxist narrative, when an older or less progressive social order is transformed into a more progressive social order through a revolutionary change, the new ruling class establishes its hegemony over the cultural-symbolic space of the social totality. The ruled think within the symbolic space structured so as to project the particular order of the existing ruler as the universal order. The worker in the capitalist factory recognises/identifies him or herself on the basis of the quality of CONTACT Pranab Kanti Basu

[email protected]

© 2016 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

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(bourgeois) dignity enjoyed, the value of private property owned, the wages earned, etc., which all make sense within the discursive space constituted by the nodal signifier “commodity-capital.” The ruled are civilised into obedient subjects of the capitalist order. The rule of capital gains temporary legitimacy. This is what has been termed as hegemony by Gramsci. The postcolonial analyses which I am examining refer to this as simple hegemony (Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti 2000), to distinguish it from the phenomenon of complex hegemony, a term that I will elaborate presently. Gramsci’s departure is invoked at this juncture. Gramsci argued that under certain historical circumstances the rulers may not be able to establish such culture control. The bourgeoisie, for example, may have to compromise with working classes’ (community) demand for social security, public health services, etc., which go against the grain of the individualistic culture of the bourgeoisie. The welfare state was born from this compromise. Gramsci calls the process of compromise “passive revolution.” Sanyal and Chatterjee constructed their theory of postcolonialism on the idea of the passive revolution. Chatterjee (1993) elaborated in some detail the structure of the postindependence Indian state and society. In the initial post-independence period, the capitalist class was very weak and so lacked the capacity to control the state apparatus on its own. Coupled with this, bourgeois individualism did not structure the cultural-symbolic space of the people. Within the parameters defined by the independent democratic state apparatus, the government could not support a policy of primitive accumulation of the same intensity as had been undertaken by the now developed capitalist nations in the initial phase of capitalist development in their countries. Capitalists compromised with the landlords and could not establish sole control over the state. Apart from this, the character of the independence movement also forced the state to compromise on economic policies. In their struggle to establish democracy in the West, the potential “citizens” had demanded freedom from feudal bondage and equality (which was initially interpreted in various ways, but quickly fixed to mean bourgeoisie equality). The masses that joined the independence movement in India, on the other hand, expected the independent state to ensure a minimum standard of living because the nationalist critique of colonial rule had centred on the economic distress rooted in the drain of wealth by the British imperialists; as a result, they demanded some kind of an independent welfare state. The post-independence government could not politically afford to ignore this demand. The demand for a welfare state had also gained momentum at a certain historical juncture in the West. But by that time the process of primitive accumulation had mostly been accomplished, at least with respect to land. The peasants had been dislodged and transformed either into industrial workers or into the reserve army of unemployed. But primitive accumulation had not been accomplished in India at independence. This was a task that the state had to take up given its faith in capital-centric development. The ruthless displacement involved in the construction of Durgapur Steel Plant, Bhakra Dam, Damodar Valley Corporation project, and others bear witnesses to the effort of the state for primitive accumulation. This facet of state policy is underplayed to the vanishing point by the proponents of “complex hegemony.” At the same time, given a democratic setup, the state could not quite ignore the expectation of economic betterment that the masses nurtured. Thus, the state born out of “passive revolution” in India assumed the character of a “surrogate universal”—incompletely representing all classes, posing as an autonomous super functionary. To avoid a possible misconception, it needs to be

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pointed out that it is in the character of “hegemony” or pervasive cultural domination, of whatever sort, that the ruling class/bloc is veiled by the state. In that sense, the state is always perceived as a super functionary—not a player but a referee, an arbitrator—a universal that lays down the rules of the game. And because the rules are inviolate both for the ruler and the ruled, the ruler is hidden. In the case of simple hegemony, the cultural-symbolic space in which the citizens think and live and the codes of the state are symbiotically constituted in the course of their becoming (the state and citizens). The state is the singular —the appearance of the essence, which is the pervasive hence essential, universal equality of the cultural-symbolic space. It just codifies the essence, necessarily partially, always supplementing its codes (say the acts and rules of the state). Put a bit differently, the force (not coercion) of the state is not sought. The state is perceived as natural. In the case of complex hegemony, however, the force of the state is sought by a mass of players belonging to the margin, the informal sector—call it what you will—to right the perceived systemic wrongs against them. The independent state is perceived as an expression of justice. It is therefore contingent, like justice, not natural as in the case of simple hegemony. This renders the idea of complex hegemony vexed. Hegemony refers to a situation of ideological domination. In the case of complex hegemony, however, there appears to be no pervasive universal cultural-symbolic domination. Those inhabiting the centre and those inhabiting the margin have different ways of thinking, different imaginaries and symbolic spaces—different essences. It is in the clash of values that justice evolves. Because it is not perceived to be natural, just policies are forced by the state. (The concept of synthetic hegemony, which I will presently elaborate, reconstitutes the pervasiveness of a dominant culture on the plane of discourse and therefore naturalises the state in the dual society.) Sanyal intervened at this theoretical moment. Chatterjee had posited that the bourgeoisie had been forced to compromise on various issues because it was politically weak. Sanyal argued that it was not their weakness but the direction of economic development in postindependence India that had forced the bourgeoisie into such compromise. It was impossible for capital to expand its geographical reach and accommodate the entire able-bodied population, which would be dislodged from their rural moorings or from their petty productive employment by primitive accumulation. The non-capitalist and informal capitalist production and trading sector provided the rejects of the capitalist sector with some sort of employment. In his initial proposal (Sanyal 1988), the economic reasons for the stable coexistence of the capitalist and non-capital are unclear. But the process of expansion of the domain of capital may reach a saturation point long before total destruction of pre-capital is achieved and as a result, the capital/pre-capital dualism may turn out to be a permanent, rather than a temporary, phenomenon. (Sanyal 1988, 28)

Thus pre-capital is not a receding residual. The dual economy becomes stable and new roles are determined for the state. On the one hand, it is concerned with expanding markets so that the expansion of capital is not impeded and with aiding the process of primitive accumulation through displacement of huge, mainly tribal population (a fact that is largely ignored in this narrative). On the other hand, it accepts moral responsibility for welfare measures intended for those who are disempowered by capitalist growth. The new development economics of Amartya Sen and others of this genre established the theoretical basis of such economic policy. Traditional bourgeoisie development theories

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preached that the benefits of capitalist growth would ultimately trickle down to all citizens. The new stream recognises some are perpetually excluded from the benefits and so indicators like the spread of education, public health services, etc., are weighted together with per capita income to give a “true picture” of development. The ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie assumes a modified form, which has been named “complex hegemony” by Sanyal, following Chatterjee. There is a break in the dialectical march of the Marxian stages of history. This is, therefore, characterised as blocked dialectic. This does not constitute a new theoretical space, just as Gramsci’s passive revolution does not challenge the orthodox Marxian stages of history that is based on Hegel’s triadic logic. However prolonged may the stage of blocked dialectic be, it is just a step in the dialectical transition from feudalism to capitalism. According to Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti (2000), Gramsci simply added a time dimension or chronological sequence to the logical denouement of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. He could, therefore, interrupt temporally the logical course of history through which capitalism annihilates pre-capital. In the postcolonial states, at a certain stage in time, instead of annihilating pre-capital, capital compromises with it. The result of this compromise is a state that has a mixed character: constituted by elements of pre-capital and capital. This surrogate synthesis presents itself in popular perception as transcendence of pre-capital. This does not alter the logical course of history in any way. Drawing on the examples cited by Chatterjee and Sanyal, one may say that though the capitalist class reaches an understanding with other classes in order to maintain its grip on power, its aims and objectives do not change. They may temporarily desist from adopting certain policies, but when the situation warrants they will aggressively pursue the same objectives. The aggrandising role of capital with the adoption of the “New Economic Policy” in India, since the mid-1980s, is an example of opportune renewal of aggression. The policy initiatives of the National Democratic Alliance government in the current phase are, perhaps, more aggressive manifestations of the same. It should be pointed out that Sanyal (1988) was not entirely happy with the Gramscian framework, which he deployed nonetheless. I have indicated that Gramsci and the neoGramscians, like Chatterjee and Sanyal, advance no theoretical reason for the (Marxian) dialectical journey of history terminating at the stage of blocked dialectic. In fact, Gramsci calls this an exceptional case. Sanyal thought that the Gramscian framework needs modification for two reasons. First, calling Western capitalism “classical” while dubbing the other forms as “exceptional” reduced the significance of the latter in the temporal scale. Sanyal has, time and again, referred to the blocked dialectic, but he also perceived that within this theoretic, transition to the classical or pure form of capitalism was inevitable. Secondly, in all the “exceptional cases” that Gramsci discussed, the ruler and the ruled think within the same symbolic-cultural space. In India, or more generally in all the postcolonies, the two inhabit different symbolic-cultural spaces.

2.2. Synthetic hegemony I will take off from the second source of Sanyal’s discomfort with the Gramscian framework to introduce Chaudhury and his co-authors—Das and Chakrabarti.1 Chaudhury 1

This insertion does not follow the chronology of the literature. Chaudhury’s proposition had preceded much of the “complex hegemony” literature.

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(1988) alone and subsequently with his co-authors (Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti 2000) proposed a discursive space where hegemony could be situated if the hegemon and the hegemonised belonged to different cultures. They called this space “synthetic space” and this type of hegemony “synthetic hegemony.” Chaudhury criticises the essentialism embedded in the field of complex hegemony. Here capital and pre-capital have their own essences, independent of each other and enter into compromises, alliances, etc., giving and taking from their original positions. But from a postmodern perspective, such origin is untenable. The two segments of our socio-economic structure overdetermine and constitute each other. They do not have separate, essential meanings. But introduction of the field of overdetermination alone is insufficient to analyse the problem at hand. As Chaudhury and his co-authors point out, this is the limitation of postmodernism: it cannot accommodate hierarchy. Capital/pre-capital, modernity/tradition, fast growing islands of progress/vast stagnant hinterland—each of the terms of these couples constitute the other term through their difference. But they are on the same level. Modernity has an embedded notion of hierarchy: the more rational is more universal and is situated on a higher plain. Capital, for example, is more rational than pre-capital and, therefore, has greater universality (reflected in its non-discriminatory rights). It is, therefore, higher or more progressive than pre-capital. In contrast, postmodernity denies all hierarchy. Difference alone, is constitutive. This, as Chaudhury correctly points out, bars certain necessary concepts like hegemony, subordination, imperialism, from the discursive space. He therefore proposes overdetermination with hierarchy, which Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti (2000) name mimicry of overdetermination. Using this discursive field they define three hierarchically arranged discursive spaces: the centre, the margin and the margin of margin. As difference is fundamentally a linguistic category, they build their new category using the Lacanian linguistic figures of metaphor and metonym. I will elaborate it through an application, as a theoretical explication will take us too far afield. I am using an example elaborated in detail by Basu (2008). The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA)—Save Narmada Movement—was organised to block the proposed construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam project on the Narmada River in the late 1980s. The mainly forest resource dependent tribes (adivasis—original inhabitants) who inhabited the proposed catchment area of the dam organised to prevent loss of their livelihood and culture. Their slogan was koi nehi hatega, bandh nehi banega (no one will leave, the dam will not be constructed). A number of agitators, including the leader of NBA, Medha Patekar, threatened to court jal samadhi (burial by water) at the Sulpaneswari Temple, which was to be submerged in the dam. But they broke their resolve. Sulpaneswari Devi—the ruling deity of the temple—drowned. No one courted jal samadhi. The adivasis were displaced in larger numbers as the height of the dam increased. The demand of the agitators changed to compensation and alternative housing. The initial resolve of the adivasis was not to enter into any dialogue or negotiation with the modern world that threatened to drown their lives, livelihood and culture, which were essentially different from that of the modern world. There was no communication between the two. They inhabited what Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti (2000) call the margin of margin. Immediately after the announcement of the project, no ground existed for dialogue or cultural exchange between the centre (including the planners of the dam) and the adivasis in the margin of margin. There could only be violence. Movement-violence-

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displacement created the ground for cultural exchange, for understanding each other in difference. That is the ground for overdetermination, but not just overdetermination or difference as the process of constitution—difference with hierarchy. The adivasis entered the field of cultural exchange with the centre as subordinates of modernity, i.e., into the margin of modernity. The promoters of the dam had argued through some fictive capitalisation of costs and benefits that the latter outweighed the former. To the adivasis inhabiting the margin of margin, this calculation was meaningless. No market value could be attached to their loss of way of life. The centre used violence to bring them into the symbolic-cultural field of modernity where everything, including death, has a market value. From their new situation at the margin, they saw themselves as the reduced other of the modern centre—the “refugees of development.” They now understood the value of market calculations, that they were subjugated to the markets; all they could demand was “compensation.” They had lost the freedom to say that what they had lost was incommensurable as their way of life had not been purchased in the market. From their position at the margin of margin, market valuation of their environment and culture was meaningless. So they opposed valuation by the “experts.” From their new position at the margin, they evaluated the cost of their displacement. On the basis of this, they proposed a compensation to which they were “entitled.” They now submitted to the symbolic space of commodity-capital.

3. Governmentality: the new discourse of postcolonialism Roughly from the beginning of the new century (Sanyal 2001), Chatterjee and Sanyal changed their discursive field completely. From hegemony or complex hegemony as the nodal concept of their discursive space, they have shifted to governmentality as the nodal concept. Sanyal had previously argued, The process of expansion of the domain of capital may reach a saturation point long before total destruction of pre-capital is achieved and as a result, the capital/pre-capital dualism may turn out to be a permanent, rather than a temporary, phenomenon. (Sanyal 1988, 28)

In 2001, he shifted his position and argued that capitalist development is a process that gives birth to pre-capital in its wake. Sanyal is clearly distinguishing between capital and capitalism. In the postcolonies, capitalism or capitalist development gives birth to both capital and pre-capital or, perhaps, non-capital. This calls for some elaboration. Orthodox Marxism says that the elementary aspects of capitalism are brought together through the process of primitive accumulation. During this historical phase, a class of people lose ownership of the means of production. This is concentrated in the hands of an entrepreneurial class that seeks to make profit from their productive use. This class initiates capitalist production in factories where the dispossessed find employment. Harvey (2003) argues that this process is not just prior to but is also simultaneous with capitalist development. That is why Harvey calls this process “accumulation by dispossession” rather than “primitive accumulation.” Sanyal agrees with this position but urges that there is a significant difference in the process of such accumulation in the present era with the process that preceded capitalist development in the West. In the earlier phase, those who were dispossessed of the means of livelihood in the villages migrated to the cities

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and were employed in the factories built by those who had been enriched by the same process. Those displaced today are not employed in the expanding capitalist sector. Compared to the earlier phase, production is much more capital intensive or automated. Hence less labour is necessary for production. Besides, the displaced, like the adivasis who once inhabited what is now the Sardar Sarovar, lack the basic technical knowledge that would make them employable in this age of computer aided technology. This “surplus population” inhabits a shadowy world on the fringes of the political-symbolic rule and order of commodity-capital. They live in large and small slums, frequently illegal squatter colonies. We employ them for household services against a pittance (far below the legal minimum wages); some work on daily or job basis as plumbers, masons, carpenters, and plain odd-job-men; they hawk cheap wares from door to door or on the pavements of urban settlements. According to Sanyal, they are not just service providers and petty traders but they also engage in production, but (and this is the specific nature of this production) they do not accumulate to expand. In official jargon they are employed in the informal sector. Sanyal clubs their economic activities into what he calls the “need economy.” This contrasts with the “accumulation economy” owned by capital. The enterprises in the need economy do not expand through accumulation. Rather, because of the ease of entry into this economy, the expanding surplus population migrates to the metropolitan centres and enters the need economy setting up new enterprises (Sanyal 2007). The expansion of the accumulation economy is entwined with the proliferation of the need economy. In this sense, Sanyal argues that the process of expansion of capitalism gives birth to pre-capital. Chatterjee (2011), while accepting Sanyal’s discursive dichotomisation, opts for a new term—non-corporate capital—to emphasise his understanding that “peasant production” as well as “informal units in manufacturing, trade and services . . . deeply embedded within market structures, investments and returns are conditioned by forces from the operations of capital” (Chatterjee 2011, 222). Simultaneously, with the introduction of the dichotomy—accumulation economy/corporate capital, on the one hand, and need economy/non-corporate capital, on the other—Sanyal and Chatterjee move from the scheme of complex hegemony to the scheme of governmentality. Sanyal advances some reasons for shifting ground from complex hegemony to governmentality: We have to abandon the Hegelian framework and see postcolonial capitalism as necessarily a complex of capital and a noncapitalist need economy. This at the same time extricates the story of postcolonial capital entirely from the historical materialist paradigm and the Hegelian idea of supersession that informs it. For if capital necessarily exists as a complex of capital and a noncapitalist outside, then the historical materialist trajectory of stages in which capital supersedes precapitalist modes becomes totally irrelevant, ruling out full fledged transformation even as a possibility. And this marks our departure from the Gramscian narrative of passive revolution that presents the postcolonial scenario as a case of blocked transition while full transition remains the reference point in relation to which the postcolonial case is seen as a deviant one. (Sanyal 2007, 63) This, for sure, is a theoretical task. It calls for a characterization of capitalist development that theoretically rules out the possibility of capital superseding pre-capital. And this is what marks my point of departure from the neo-Gramscian literature. In what follows I shall conceptualize capitalist development as a process that in its own course produces pre-capital. While on the one hand, the process of primitive accumulation, I will argue, leads to the destruction of the

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pre-capitalist sectors, on the other hand, it simultaneously produces a space that necessitates the recreation of those sectors. (Sanyal 2007, 39; italics original)

In some ways this space is similar to the space of the household that is necessary to capital but is a space of non-capital.

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[But] unlike the household, it has no role to play in the creation of the economic conditions of capital’s expanded reproduction. The relationship here is not one of extraction/appropriation; rather it is one defined in terms of exclusion and rejection; in other words, in terms of refusal on the part of capital to engage in an extractive/appropriative relationship. But like the household, this space of the excluded challenges capital’s political and cultural/ideological universality, unsettling the state of its being. (Sanyal 2007, 63–64; italics original)

Immediately after this, to strengthen what Sanyal feels is the difference between household labour, which is necessary to capitalist accumulation, and the “need economy” of the postcolony, which is redundant to capitalist accumulation, Sanyal cites the example of employment in Nike, Indonesia, as reported by McCloskey (quoted in Sanyal 2007, 63). The long queues outside the factory gates indicate that this “surplus population” wishes to be exploited, despite condemnation of the inhuman conditions prevailing within the factory by critics. This example actually shows up the error in calling this segment immaterial to capitalist accumulation. It is this surplus population that allows “super exploitation.” Consider this report, for example: Knight, CEO and Chairman, Nike, said in an address to shareholders in 1998, “Our studies show that using the same production techniques, the average cost at retail for a pair of Nike shoes if we did that [produced them in USA] would go up $100 . . . to $170 or $175.” 2 The 1997 “China Report” on Nike found that Nike uses child labour, forces overtime without overtime rates, penal wage deductions and also extorts illegal deposits. I will come back to the significance of this super exploitation later. For the time being, let me go along with the Chatterjee-Sanyal formulation. The need economy/non-corporate capital is not economically necessary to capital. But, . . . for its political and ideological conditions of existence, capital is no longer self-referential, and the outside has to be addressed in politico-ideological terms. In other words, capital’s political and ideological conditions of existence require that the expropriated producers inhabiting the outside be reunited with means of labor so that they can engage in economic activities outside the domain of capital. What follows is a process whereby the means of labor are made to flow from the domain of capital to its outside where producers are reunited with the means of production to engage in noncapitalist production. More specifically, a part of the surplus produced in the capitalist sector is not transformed into new capital but transferred to the surplus population to constitute the conditions of existence of noncapitalist production. While primitive accumulation seeks to transform the means of labor into capital and subsume them within the domain of capitalist relations, this process of transfer is a reverse flow that extricates them from the grasp of capital and reunites them with labor. I characterize this decapitalization of means of labor as a reversal of primitive accumulation. The result is a need-based economy in which the dispossessed are rehabilitated in noncapitalist production activities; and the rehabilitation, I further argue, is made possible by interventions brought about by the discourse of development. (Sanyal 2007, 59; italics original) . . . Why must capital’s existence be legitimized in the first place? What if the dispossessed are allowed to perish? . . . The discourses of democracy and human rights have emerged and consolidated themselves to form an inescapable and integral part of the political and social order. 2

See http://www.stanford.edu/class/e297c/trade_environment/wheeling/hnike.html.

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As relatively autonomous discourses, they have constituted an environment within which capital has to reproduce itself. A crucial condition of that reproduction is that the victims of primitive accumulation be addressed in terms of what Michel Foucault has called “governmentality”—interventions on the part of the developmental state (and non-state organizations) to promote the well-being of the population—and what I identify as a reversal of primitive accumulation refers to this realm of welfarist governmentality: the creation of the need-economy is an imperative of governance. (Sanyal 2007, 60)

Chatterjee echoes Sanyal:

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Therefore, without a specific government policy of resettlement, peasants losing their land face the possibility of the complete loss of the means of their livelihood. Under the globally prevailing normative ideas, this is considered unacceptable . . . government agencies have to find the resources to, as it were, reverse the consequences of primitive accumulation by providing alternative means of livelihood to those who have lost them. (Chatterjee 2011, 213–14)

According to Chatterjee, the compulsions for the autonomy and apparent class balancing acts of the postcolonial state in India changed from (complex) hegemony to governmentality in the course of the 1990s. Sanyal goes on to argue that the motor of postcoloniality is “discourse.” This is a clear break from the field of genealogy within which Foucault discusses the idea of governmentality and absolves Sanyal of the need to account for the “real processes” at work: But what makes this process of rehabilitation possible? Who institutes the need economy? How are its conditions of existence created and reproduced? What are the agencies that converge to ensure the conditions for its reproduction? I see the process of recreation and renewal of need economy as being rooted in a global discourse on development and the agencies produced by that discourse. (Sanyal 2007, 64)

As we have mentioned earlier, Chatterjee and Sanyal complement each other. In fact, they almost dovetail in the governmentality phase. While Sanyal elaborates the economic character of the need economy and the nature of the economic policies that reverse the effects of primitive accumulation, Chatterjee fleshes out the mechanics of the political forces that compel such reversal. To this end, Chatterjee introduces another couple: civil society/political society. “Civil society is where corporate capital is hegemonic, whereas political society is the space of management of non-corporate capital” (Chatterjee 2011; emphasis added). As I understand it, this nomenclature—political society—indicates that this “society” is organised so as to be able to negotiate politically with the legal organs of the state for special treatment, in order to obtain a subsistence living. The result of such negotiation is that the state gives certain privileges to the population segments that inhabit political society. Some of these may be legal, like differentially low rates of interest charged, less stringent collateral requirements for economic units operating in the need economy and the reservation of certain productive sectors for artisan producers. Special privileges are granted to subcategories within this political society like the scheduled castes and tribes. The state also devises targeted relief programmes like The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.3 The segmentation and codification of subcategories in the political society for the purpose of gathering 3

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005) is an Act of Parliament for enhancing the livelihood security of rural households by guaranteeing 100 days of work (paid by the government) in a financial year for a household whose adult members offer to do manual labour. This work is mainly for rural infrastructure building.

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information for formulation and monitoring of targeted programmes also impact the consciousness of the “surplus population” inhabiting political society. The effects of primitive accumulation are also partially reversed through extra-legal instruments. The government allows street vendors to encroach public space; it tolerates illegal squatter colonies; environmental laws are not enforced on production units in urban slums, etc.

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4. Critique of hegemony and governmentality: absence of space of counter-hegemony This completes my narrative of the evolution of postcolonial political economy leading up to Chatterjee’s Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (Chatterjee 2011). My critical position, which I proposed at the outset, is that this literature lacks a subversive or counter-hegemonic position. In fact, it shuts out the space in which such positions can be located. The refusal to take into account the presence of plural discursive formations marks both the problematic of hegemony and its derivatives, as well as the problematic of governmentality in the context of postcolonial India. And this is the essential cause of their inability to theorise subversive possibilities. 4.1. Critique of hegemony Simple hegemony is a tight discursive structure with no embedded aleatory mechanism. The counter-hegemonic project has to be imported from outside. The repository of “scientific knowledge” of the true destiny of society is the party. This is the classical conception of revolutionary mobilisation to which Chaudhury (1995) overtly subscribes. Complex hegemony is, however, a transitional and hence unstable structure that admits the possibility of change. But because of the under-theorised status of the problematic, the nature of state power remains unspecified. Chatterjee (1993) suggests that the subject who controls the state, compromises and obtains consent is the capitalist class. However, in his debate with Chaudhury (1988), it appears that he too does not subscribe to the position that the subjectivity of the capitalist class is essential and pre-given. Rather, it is constituted together with pre-capital in the process of complex hegemony. This makes the problematic of complex hegemony similar to that of synthetic hegemony. Synthetic hegemony is a well structured discursive concept. The culture and consciousness of the subordinate is permeated by the symbols flowing from the cultural space of the ruler and reduced to passivity. “More correctly, hegemonic power is a condensation of the persuasive power and the displaced (synthetic) collaborative principles. The subaltern can now read the language of persuasion—by means of its own modified language, that is, of collaborative principles” (Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti 2000, 87; italics original). The forest dweller had the choice of not collaborating, of refusing to have truck with the dam builders, of courting jal samadhi. But they chose to live. This was the collaborative principle. If the dispossessed choose to live, they choose to collaborate with the hegemon, and they need entitlement to the means of living. This is the displaced collaborative principle. The hegemon persuades the margin that this modern world, to which they perforce have to migrate, is good. But the displaced do not understand the paeans in praise of capitalism. This has to be condensed with the collaborative principle of demand for entitlement to means of living to yield the principle of compensation. As far as this narrative

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goes, the margin is entirely integrated as a moment4 of synthetic hegemony. There is no discursive space for any identity apart from this. Chaudhury (1988) and later Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti’s (2000) acerbic critique of Chatterjee is pegged on the disavowal of all forms of essentialism in the synthetic space. Hence there is no discursive possibility of subversion from an elementary position. The elementary position simply does not exist in this discourse as it is an essentialist idea. The margin and the centre can only constitute each other through their difference, albeit with hierarchy. The margin of margin has an elementary or essential position but strictly outside the discursive space of synthetic hegemony. It may choose not to collaborate. But that implies they choose jal samadhi, i.e., not to live. Perhaps, it is significant that there is much talk of suicide in the margin of margin. Though, professedly, Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of hegemony is a point of departure of Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti (2000) that culminates in synthetic hegemony, their trajectory takes a truncated Lacanian route. There were possibilities within the Lacanian discourse also, but they are missed. The refugees of development who transit from the margin of margin may retain memories, albeit displaced. There would then be a tension between the discourse of synthetic hegemony and their discourse. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) differentiate between the field of discourse and the discursive space. The former contains the elements, the moments (of hegemony) as well as hegemony. The discursive space, on the other hand, is constituted by the moments and hegemony, only. Laclau and Mouffe do not elaborate hegemony in terms of discourse, but as an ontological process within the field of discourse so that a space for the “real” (what they call element) and the symbolic representation (moment in their terminology) can exist together. And thus the possibility of plurality of subjectivity and so of subversion is retained. “In any case, if articulation is a practice, and not the name of a given relational complex, it must imply some form of separate presence of the elements which that practice articulates or recomposes” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 93). Further on, they argue “if contingency and articulation are possible, this is because no discursive formation is a sutured totality and the transformation of the elements into moments is never complete” (107). The relation between Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti’s (2000) reading of Lacan and Laclau and Mouffe needs elaboration. The real is used in a Lacanian sense to denote what exists out there but is not symbolised and hence not part of our conceptual world. It always remains “the unspeakable remainder.” As different from the “real” there are the “imaginary” and the “symbolic” spaces in Lacanian analysis. These three spaces or force fields constitute the thought space. In a very gross and indicative sense, the imaginary is the register of images, the components of which have not been analytically separated by filtration through the sieve of culturally sanctioned symbols. The symbolic is the register upon which we base all our communication. This register is culturally constituted and is part of the ideological apparatus that forms our subjectivities and so establishes the ruling culture’s hegemony over us through the exclusion of certain crucial or “nodal” signifiers that are necessary for constituting a counter-hegemonic position. In our familiar world, through our uncritical gaze, our subjectivity is constituted by the hegemonic symbolic. It is pedagogically useful, sometimes, to think of these three fields as spatially segregated. But this robs the dynamic potential of this psychoanalytic discourse. Laclau and Mouffe’s “elements” would be coterminous with the constituents of the “real”; 4

Used in the sense of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) quoted later.

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“moments” with the culturally filtered “symbols” that constitute the field of the “symbolic”; “hegemony” as the process of mutation of elements into moments through exclusion/inclusion of foundational signifiers that impart meaning. In difference with the topographical presentation of Lacan, there is another representation that treats the real, the imaginary and the symbolic as force fields that are continuously in friction, making the space of representation or of the operation of hegemony itself contingent hence, contestable. Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis seems parallel to this latter reading of Lacan. Hence there is the possibility of action and reaction between the elements and moments allowing for contestation of hegemony itself. Thus Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemony is an activity, while Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti’s (2000) hegemony is a structural “necessity,” a discursive inevitability. Overdetermination always admits the coexistence, without coherence of the “elements” and “moments,” thus paving the way for the discursive situation of subversion. Within the structuralist discourse (through the topographical reading) to which Lacan is reduced, without reference to the real—through the concept of “mimicry of overdetermination”—there is no field for subversion. What the reductionism of Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti (2000) does is to ignore the state of flux brought about by the continuous play of the force fields of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic that characterises the Lacanian discursive. Synthetic hegemony is a static field of power play. Perhaps, this needs qualification. The margin of margin is outside the symbolic order of synthetic hegemony. In that sense, they are beyond discursivity. But they cannot be subversive. They may refuse to abide by the order of synthetic hegemony into which they are violently precipitated; they may refuse to live, that is. Perhaps, they may be termed the foreclosed in a Lacanian sense.

4.2. Critique of governmentality Chatterjee states clearly that his focus is not counter-hegemony or subversion in any form. I do not deny the transformative role that critical events often played in history. But those are precisely the heroic events that have drawn attention of historians and political analysts. In looking at political society as a condition of un-heroic everyday politics, I am trying to find that which is new in the quotidian. (Chatterjee 2011, 149)

The lineage of this focus can be traced to his earlier involvement with “subaltern history” writing, as he admits. This could be a valid position but for the fact that the discursive space that Sanyal and Chatterjee propose forecloses or represses all such heroic or subversive politics. Also, the possibility that “everyday politics” itself can be subversive is foreclosed by this deployment. This simultaneously shuts out the question of the nature of state power. To put it another way, the state is projected as an autonomous entity whose only concern is with affecting compromises that maintain stability of the order. But without an entry point to a discourse on the purpose of this order, the end of this law and this order appears to be law and order, validating the neoliberal defence of bourgeois right, freedom and order as eternal and hence its glorification of the present as the end of history. The deployment of governmentality shuts out the space of subversion (and, as corollary, the objective and basis of state power) in various ways: First, through the erasure of constitution of subjectivities, the space of potential friction between the

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therapeutic strategies of governmentality and the elementary aspects of consciousness of the governed are wiped out. Second, the discourse of governmentality ignores a lot of the economic specificity of neoliberalism and so wipes clean the very “everyday” violence that restructures the workforce and attendant resistance by the working people. Third, by discursively delinking primitive accumulation and governmentality, it distances the violence of state power and therefore bars the discursive space for situating the reaction of the governed to state violence. Let us take up these issues one by one. 4.2.1. Truncated space of subjectivity Plural subjectivities, indeed the formation of subjectivities are given short shrift in the particular interpretation of governmentality that informs the works of both Sanyal and Chatterjee. Sanyal and Chatterjee neglect the constitution of subjectivity and treat the desires and objectives of the population segments as essentially given. Governmentality is then merely a problem of framing policies so as to gain consent of the governed. Through analysis of the process of constitution of subjectivities of the dominated in the period of neoliberalism, it is possible to dig out the simultaneous production of aberrant or subversive subjectivities that may be mobilised for counter-hegemonic or counter-to-hegemonic practices. Indeed the absence of discussion of the formation of subjectivities is closely linked to another big gap in this problematic: how is the subject of state policy to be theorised. In the absence of such theorisation, there is an empirical conflation of the problematic of complex hegemony, which Sanyal and Chatterjee previously deployed, and their version of governmentality. In practice, government in both schemes works autonomously to affect compromises to obtain support. This is evident in Chatterjee’s formulation: In every region of India, there exist marginal groups of people who are unable to gain access to the mechanisms of political society . . . Political society and electoral democracy have not given these groups the means to make effective claims on governmentality. In this sense, these marginalised groups represent an outside beyond the boundaries of political society. (Chatterjee 2011, 231–32)

What Chatterjee says is that there are various population segments outside those who have internalised the rule of modernity (and thus belong to civil society). Some among these— specifically those who are able to mobilise to “make effective claims on governmentality”— constitute political society. The rest are excluded entirely from the discursive universe. Thus, the ability to make effective claims on government marks the constituents of political society. The obverse of this is that governmentality consists of the accommodation of such claims to gain the support of such mobilisations. Those who cannot mobilise to this end are the excluded of civil and political society. One of the ways in which the problematic of postcoloniality can accommodate subversion, counter-hegemony, etc., is through the tension in the process of constitution of the subjects of governance. This field is absent in Sanyal and Chatterjee’s version of governmentality. There has to be discursive space for those excluded from the field of governmentality (i.e., those who belong neither to civil society nor to political society). This will accommodate the tension I have just referred to. There is flux between this field and the field of political society that is fecund for subversion. The memories of the excluded space that the members of political society bear also have subversive potential. It may be argued against the proposition of neglect of subjectivity formation that Chatterjee and Sanyal do talk of the segmentation of the population for the purpose of

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formulating and monitoring targeted welfare programmes that are an important component of the governmental policy to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation. They also do mention how this influences the designs of the inhabitants of need economy or political society. But this is a very marginal constitutivity. Political society has already and always an essential purpose: extraction of doles from the government. This also specifies the very limited nature of its autonomy. Its essence has been marked out in the nomenclature used to denote its constituents. They are “surplus population” and they inhabit a “need economy.” So there is nothing to be taken from them. The nature of the economic flows can only be unidirectional—dole flowing from the state to the need economy. The “subjects” of political society/need economy are fully constituted before the process of governmentality is initiated. They mobilise for favours, for special treatment. That is their essence. Chatterjee’s conception of oppositional politics supports my contention that the subjectivity formation that he discusses is indeed a marginal issue. His conception of oppositional politics is based on Laclau’s idea of populism (Laclau 2005). Chatterjee explains how populism is not the ground of oppositional politics alone but can be an instrument of governmentality. He mentions two ways in which governmentality deploys populism. A government can divide a population into such categories as will break up populist equivalences; it could also attempt to unite the citizens into a popular front pitted against a putative enemy—generally a foreign nation—and thus form a chain of equivalences that includes government itself. The general form of oppositional mobilisation is defined in contradiction with this form of governmental deployment of populism and is based on categories emanating from that deployment. “The common form of oppositional politics is the assertion of ethnic identities based on governmental classification frequently dating back to colonial times” (Chatterjee 2011, 147). What is the objective of achieving consent through governmentality—the process of bestowing favours? The basis of governmentality is consent, which is also its end. The question of who wields power, indeed of power itself, is elided. This is then another and more subtle defence of neoliberalism. 4.2.2. Failure to conceptualise neoliberalism This leads seamlessly to the second problem with the formulation of governmentality: it ignores the economic specificity of neoliberalism. The characterisation of the multitude outside the “formal” employment sector as “surplus population” is complicit with the erasure of the phenomenon of super exploitation of the working people in the “multitude” through putting out of parts of production processes that had once belonged to the formal sector. Observe, for example, the unfettered extension of work hours, casualisation of work, total disregard for labour laws in burgeoning employment centres like Gurgaon. Outsourcing, based on IT, also changes the rhythm of work as call centres have to provide service during the daytime of the service buyer, not that of the provider.5 This entails also governmental strategies for reconstituting the mass of working population (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2013). I have already touched upon this issue in the context of the Nike factory. There is a vast body of empirical work on informalisation of the working class. This super exploitation has been characterised as rent extraction by an 5

For details consult various issues of Gurgaon Workers News, http://gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com.

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extension of the Marxist scheme of production and extraction of surplus value (Basu 2008). The purpose of exclusion of labour services from the purview of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was probably to keep a vast pool of cheap labour in segmented markets, which is used by global capital for super exploitation through Business Process Outsourcing (Basu 2008). Once we take into account the flows from the “need economy” to the “accumulation economy,” we will be able to explore the full potential and limitations of the governmentality schema. The inhabitants of the “need economy” are not just “surplus population.” A large chunk of economic agents populating the need economy do produce surplus, but do not accumulate as it is siphoned off in various ways by the “accumulation economy”— through outsourcing, through payment of lower wages and salaries to the employees in the organised sector whose income is supplemented by the surplus produced by the fringe dwellers who provide various household and semi-skilled technical services. The government is not an autonomous body that simply plays a balancing act to maintain stability of the system. With respect to the so-called need economy or the unorganised sector, the process of governmentality is not restricted to “soften[ing] the blows dealt by primitive accumulation” (Chatterjee 2011, 214). Governmentality, as Foucault (1978) hypothesised, is actively concerned with restructuring of identities. As Chakrabarti and Dhar (2013) suggest, the state is an active agent in “informalisation” of urban production and the attendant restructuring of the direct producers or the working segment of the urban population. This process that works through the redrawing of labour and trade union laws and regulations breaks up “class” identity. The new identities have not only political implications but also affect economic flows. This results in super exploitation and extraction of surplus from the informal sector in the form of rent. Chatterjee and Sanyal ignore this (neoliberal) economic aspect of the constitution of subjectivity. Once we site this active neoliberal state we can come back to the question of state power that I had raised. It is only through the process of reconstitution of identities that the problematic of governmentality can mutate to locate the “character” (class or otherwise) of the state or the political-economic interests that control state policy. Indeed, the nature of state power cannot be conceptualised purely within the problematic of governmentality. In fact, this is not a concern of governmentality. But, as I have discussed, without analysis of motives, governmentality becomes a circular defence of neoliberalism. Without introducing another discursive formation, another point of view, you cannot denote the subjectivities that are transformed through the practice of governmentality. You just indicate them through the naming: “surplus population,” “need economy,” “governed,” “political society,” etc. To create a discursive space for foregrounding the frictions that may have counter-hegemonic or counter-to-hegemonic potential as well as to imagine the character of state power, it is necessary to imagine a prior identity of the working people that is reworked in the course of (neoliberal) governmentality. The working class, for example, that has a prior identity, elaborated within the Marxian discursive formation, has to be fragmented and forced into a new world where the state no longer takes any responsibility for determining how far the laws of the market are allowed to eat into the life-time of the labourer, or for ensuring that disciplinary measures adopted in factories do not violate the principles of human dignity that were established with the rise of liberalism itself. The significance of such restructuring is to convert workers into semi-slaves.

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An unsullied problematic of governmentality cannot assign any identity to the elements as Laclau and Mouffe call them, because each subjectivity is doomed to be a moment of the discourse of governmentality from the very moment of its cognition.6 In Laclau and Mouffe’s own formulation, as I have elaborated, the elements and the moments exist and conflict to create both a field of discourse and discourse. Laclau and Mouffe do not elaborate hegemony in terms of discursivity so that a space for the “real” (or element) and its representation in the symbolic space (moment) can exist together. And thus the possibility of plurality of subjectivity and so of subversion is retained. I have modified their fields to fit the postmodern idea that no position, not even the elementary aspects are visible as such. So what we need is a plurality of discursive spaces to theoretically accommodate the elements and the moments. So in place of “discourse” and “field of discourse,” we have a plurality of discursive spaces, accommodating the possibility of thinking subversion.

4.2.3. Primitive accumulation There is antagonism between primitive accumulation and governmentality which the discourse of governmentality evades through covert evocation of time axis. Primitive accumulation comes first and then governmentality comes to accommodate the refugees of primitive accumulation. Let us recall Sanyal on primitive accumulation and governmentality: A crucial condition of that reproduction is that the victims of primitive accumulation be addressed in terms of what Michel Foucault has called “governmentality”—interventions on the part of the developmental state (and non-state organizations) to promote the wellbeing of the population—and what I identify as a reversal of primitive accumulation refers to this realm of welfarist governmentality: the creation of the need-economy is an imperative of governance. (Sanyal 2007, 60)

Clearly there is sequencing. The problem of surreptitious sequencing of primitive accumulation and governmentality is closely linked to the absence of formation of subjectivities within the discourse of governmentality. The absence of analysis of the formation of subjectivities, in a sense, is the outcome of seeing postcoloniality through the prism of governmentality. Governmentality is bereft of any subject based power (capitalist class power, imperialism, or whatever). The only notion of power that it accommodates is a disembodied power shaped by civil society. “Disembodied,” because it is embodied in all. I say this because this must be a power that is totally internalised by the objects of power. At the same time, power totally internalises all “subjects.” There is no outside of governmentality. Thus the relation of the proposed outside, or the outside that is seen without any theoretical site, with the inside must be redundancy. It is just a political trauma that must be administered political therapy and civilised into the discursive space of governmentality. Let me examine this location without a theoretical site. There is actually a sequence of problematics or discursive spaces that Sanyal and Chatterjee adopt in their narrative that is symptomatic of a sequence in real time, which is a basic premise of their narrative, but one that is suppressed. There is, first, the subterranean discursive space constituted by power, 6

I am using the terms in the sense in which Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 93) used them.

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supersession, etc., which the surface narrative condemns as Hegelian-Marxist. It is here that the outside is constituted by the power of capital that dispossesses a mass of people. At the second stage, we come to the surface where we see the Foucaultian light of governmentality. The unruly inhabitants of the nether world are civilised by the Christian therapy of governmentality. There is pastoral peace. There is a logical problem for Sanyal’s conceptualisation. Unlike Chatterjee, as I have mentioned, Sanyal argues that the same economic process that causes capitalist development also causes the expansion of both capital and non-capital. The crucial link is primitive accumulation. Chatterjee takes their simultaneous existence for granted and goes on to argue that the two are linked through governmentality. Primitive accumulation that is necessarily aided by government is the violent aspect of economic governance. Governmentality, in contrast, is the discursive space where governance with and for consent can be elaborated. If the primitive accumulation and “reversal of the effects of primitive accumulation” run concurrently, then proposing governmentality, alone, as the discursive space proper to the analysis of government policy in the era of neoliberalism is, to put it mildly, baffling. The before-after scheme then appears to be a ruse that suppresses the violence of neoliberalism: Special Economic Zones, infrastructure (particularly highway) expansion, informalisation, growing urbanisation, changes in agricultural techniques and crop patterns, increasing risks of agricultural production with growing exposure to world markets, together with the persistence of older causes for displacement, like construction of major infrastructural projects, and industrialisation, make the age of neoliberalism an age of large-scale displacement of populations from livelihood and frequently from habitat. Violence meets resistance, while persuasion may elicit collaboration. Suppression of primitive accumulation amounts to the suppression of a major structural cause of current governmental practices. To repeat: it is not just that this literature is firmly focused on the mundane forms of people’s reaction to governmental practices, but that it also suppresses the potential sources of heroic resistance and contemplation of alternatives to neoliberal development.

5. Conclusion I have tried to argue that the problematic of hegemony, in its various shades, and that of governmentality have circumvented the question of subversion or counter-hegemony not because the focus was different but because the structure of discourse anchored to these master signifiers is incapable of accommodating or negotiating with a region beyond the ordered totality based on these foundational signifiers. In the postcolonial discourse based on hegemony, what is accommodated as the subordinate position (or marginal position) is constituted through difference from and hierarchically below the position of the hegemon. The specific deployment of psycho-symbolic terms and arguments emphasises the discursive process of constitution of the marginal positions symbiotically with the position of the hegemon within the postcolonial discourse based on hegemony. The symbolic is a closed structured space that brooks no disorder. In the postcolonial discourse based on governmentality, the subordinate position is predetermined as one seeking to negotiate with the government to obtain differential favours.

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This very conception of the subordinate position rules out memories of the loss and so of aspirations beyond the practice of governmentality, as well as the multitude that cannot negotiate with the state for favours. Whether this was a worthwhile schema in the particular context in which governmentality was formulated is not my concern here. What I have argued is that this is definitely insufficient in a context where state power violently dispossesses, restructures life time/labour time of the work force, etc. “Governmentality” may be fruitfully applied to elaborate certain facets of government policy like targeted welfare programmes, but it definitely cannot be used to understand continuing state violence as a permanent feature of neoliberal policy.

Disclosure statement

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor Pranab Kanti Basu has taught at Asutosh College, Kolkata, India. He is currently Professor at the Department of Economics and Politics, Visva-Bharati, India. His latest book includes Globalisation: An Anti-text (Aakar Books, 2008). His recent publication includes “World of the Third” (Economic & Political Weekly, August 1, 2015). “‘Inclusive Growth’—A Lacanian Reading” is scheduled for publication in Rethinking Marxism 28 (2) in 2016. His areas of interest include Marxism, community, and critical thought. He teaches International Economics and Marxian Political Economy.

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