Dear All
I am turning to the list for a clarification of the concept of
'governmentality', as employed by the substaltern studies theorist Gyan
Prakash, in his book 'Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern
India, (Princeton, 1999) 1255-126. I am reproducing a page from my essay for
your comments and feedback.
best,
Nadeem Omar
Lahore, Pakistan.
------------------------------------------
Gyan Prakash a critical voice in the Subaltern school of historiography[1]
while enriching the perspective of the governmentality through his studies
of colonial modernity in India, attempts to relocates the 'Euro-centric view
' of Foucault[2] by trying to establish the 'Governmentality in British
India' as 'radically discontinuous with the Western norm'. 'Colonial
governmentality', he argues, 'could not be the tropicalization of its
Western form, but rather was its fundamental dislocation'.
Colonial governmentality was obliged to develop in violation of the liberal
conception that the government was part of a complex domain of dense,
opaque, and autonomous interests that it only harmonized and secured with
law and liberty. It had to function also as an aspect of coercion, that is,
instituting the sovereignty of alien rulers[3].
For Prakash, it is the lack of political legitimacy and cultural alienation
of British rule, which determines the peculiarity of colonial
governmentality and explains its violence. However, violation of
metropolitan liberal norms is constructed to be 'a productive breach, not a
restrictive liability; it instituted a generative dislocation, not a
paralyzing limitation'.
Produced at the point of such estrangement of Western rule in despotism,
British India was marked by the absence of the elegant
sovereignty-discipline government triangle that Foucault identifies in
Europe. Fundamentally irreconcilable with the development of civil society,
the colonial state was structurally denied the opportunity to mobilize the
capillary form of power.[4]
Prakash reads colonial rule in the theoretical context of an old model of
sovereign power, which, according to Foucault, was liquidated by the
government as a new model of power in eighteenth century Europe. The
rationality of new forms of power operates not through a claim to the will
of sovereign's juridical writ, enforced through coercion, but a form of
political rationality which 'works not in spite of but through the
construction of the space of the free social exchange and through the
construction of a subjectivity normatively experienced as the source of free
will and rational autonomous agency'[5]. What is left out of Prakash's
analysis of the colonial governmentality is power 'understood not as the
antitheses of freedom and reason (in which freedom emerges as the product of
progressive realization of power), but power as the general name of the
relation in which differential effects of one action upon another are
produced'. [6]
His rich sociological and historical account of the colonial career of
European modernity and civil society as a breach of liberal ideas of
freedom, and reason to borrow from Scott, 'reads like familiar improving
story of modernization', which while homogenizing colonial forms of
rationalities to a single rule of difference fails to understand the
distinctive forms of modern power as it emerged in Europe and came to be
deployed in the disciplinarisation of the colonial state in the nineteenth
century.[7]
With the emergence of the discourse on population, the rationality of the
colonial state was coded in a similar rhetoric of liberal reforms all across
the British Empire like in India, Egypt, or Ireland or even Africa. However,
the deployment of the discourse on population for various modes of
domination from direct to indirect form of rule spells out the conditions
for the formation historically specific forms of colonial governmentality
rather than articulating principles and rules of differences along a
singular logic of displacement of liberal principles. In the governmentality
of colonial state in India, the emergence of discursive formation of
population as an autonomous category, which is independent of the
territorial domination that provides a framework through which the
relationship between 'men and other kinds of things' can be established
objectively and independently of the will of the alien sovereign. It is the
'welfare' of different kinds of population, identified through census and
surveys expressed through pastoral concerns for improved 'habits of mind',
physical and social environment, economic conditions that become the sole
reasons of the state and defined the distinctively modern character of
statecraft of a 'paternal' government in the late nineteenth century Punjab.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
[1] Subaltern School of historiography has been initiated by a group of
Indian historians in the XX 'whose primary concern has been to give voice to
the unvoiced, to high light 'subaltern' resistance and illustrate the extent
to which subordinate people retain control over their own destiny and
subtly-and sometimes more directly- modify the designs of their rulers' John
M Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, (Mancehster, 1995),
p 11. For a representative collection of the school, see Ranajit Guha and
Gayatri Chakravorty (eds) Selected Subaltern Studies, (Oxford: 1988). For a
critical comment on the Subaltern Studies see Rosalind O' Hanlon and David
Washbrook, 'After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the
Third World' in Comparative Studies of Society and History, Vol 34, 1992.
Also see Florencia Mallon, 'The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies:
Perspectives from Latin American History' in American Historical Review,
December,1994.
[2] Foucault has been 'widely criticized for alleged Eurocentrism' and his
'scrupulous silence' on colonialism, and post colonialism especially when he
is seen contemporary to the 'context of the Paris of Sarte, Fanon and
Althusser, the traumatic defeat of the French at Dien Phu in 1954, the
Algerian War of Independence, the national liberation movement of the 1950s
and 1960s, to say nothing of his own trips to Brazil'. See, Robert Young,
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2001) p. 397. Also see
Megan Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African illness
(Cambridge, 1991) for the difficulties of applying Foucault to the colonial
context.
[3] Gyan Prakash, op.cit., pp. 125-126.
[4] Ibid. p.126.
[5] David Scott, op.cit., 'It is this idea of a form of power, not merely
traversing the domain of the social, but constructing the normative (i.e.
enabling/constraining) regularities that positively constitute civil
society, that Michel Foucault tries to conceptualize in his work on
"governmentality".' Pp 201.
[6] David Scott, op.cit., p.201.
[7] For a critique of Prakash's position and generally of Subaltern Studies
Project see Rosalind Hanlon and David Washbrook, 'After Orientalism:
Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World', in Comparative Studies
in Society and History (Vol. x, No.34) (April, 1992).
I am turning to the list for a clarification of the concept of
'governmentality', as employed by the substaltern studies theorist Gyan
Prakash, in his book 'Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern
India, (Princeton, 1999) 1255-126. I am reproducing a page from my essay for
your comments and feedback.
best,
Nadeem Omar
Lahore, Pakistan.
------------------------------------------
Gyan Prakash a critical voice in the Subaltern school of historiography[1]
while enriching the perspective of the governmentality through his studies
of colonial modernity in India, attempts to relocates the 'Euro-centric view
' of Foucault[2] by trying to establish the 'Governmentality in British
India' as 'radically discontinuous with the Western norm'. 'Colonial
governmentality', he argues, 'could not be the tropicalization of its
Western form, but rather was its fundamental dislocation'.
Colonial governmentality was obliged to develop in violation of the liberal
conception that the government was part of a complex domain of dense,
opaque, and autonomous interests that it only harmonized and secured with
law and liberty. It had to function also as an aspect of coercion, that is,
instituting the sovereignty of alien rulers[3].
For Prakash, it is the lack of political legitimacy and cultural alienation
of British rule, which determines the peculiarity of colonial
governmentality and explains its violence. However, violation of
metropolitan liberal norms is constructed to be 'a productive breach, not a
restrictive liability; it instituted a generative dislocation, not a
paralyzing limitation'.
Produced at the point of such estrangement of Western rule in despotism,
British India was marked by the absence of the elegant
sovereignty-discipline government triangle that Foucault identifies in
Europe. Fundamentally irreconcilable with the development of civil society,
the colonial state was structurally denied the opportunity to mobilize the
capillary form of power.[4]
Prakash reads colonial rule in the theoretical context of an old model of
sovereign power, which, according to Foucault, was liquidated by the
government as a new model of power in eighteenth century Europe. The
rationality of new forms of power operates not through a claim to the will
of sovereign's juridical writ, enforced through coercion, but a form of
political rationality which 'works not in spite of but through the
construction of the space of the free social exchange and through the
construction of a subjectivity normatively experienced as the source of free
will and rational autonomous agency'[5]. What is left out of Prakash's
analysis of the colonial governmentality is power 'understood not as the
antitheses of freedom and reason (in which freedom emerges as the product of
progressive realization of power), but power as the general name of the
relation in which differential effects of one action upon another are
produced'. [6]
His rich sociological and historical account of the colonial career of
European modernity and civil society as a breach of liberal ideas of
freedom, and reason to borrow from Scott, 'reads like familiar improving
story of modernization', which while homogenizing colonial forms of
rationalities to a single rule of difference fails to understand the
distinctive forms of modern power as it emerged in Europe and came to be
deployed in the disciplinarisation of the colonial state in the nineteenth
century.[7]
With the emergence of the discourse on population, the rationality of the
colonial state was coded in a similar rhetoric of liberal reforms all across
the British Empire like in India, Egypt, or Ireland or even Africa. However,
the deployment of the discourse on population for various modes of
domination from direct to indirect form of rule spells out the conditions
for the formation historically specific forms of colonial governmentality
rather than articulating principles and rules of differences along a
singular logic of displacement of liberal principles. In the governmentality
of colonial state in India, the emergence of discursive formation of
population as an autonomous category, which is independent of the
territorial domination that provides a framework through which the
relationship between 'men and other kinds of things' can be established
objectively and independently of the will of the alien sovereign. It is the
'welfare' of different kinds of population, identified through census and
surveys expressed through pastoral concerns for improved 'habits of mind',
physical and social environment, economic conditions that become the sole
reasons of the state and defined the distinctively modern character of
statecraft of a 'paternal' government in the late nineteenth century Punjab.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
[1] Subaltern School of historiography has been initiated by a group of
Indian historians in the XX 'whose primary concern has been to give voice to
the unvoiced, to high light 'subaltern' resistance and illustrate the extent
to which subordinate people retain control over their own destiny and
subtly-and sometimes more directly- modify the designs of their rulers' John
M Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, (Mancehster, 1995),
p 11. For a representative collection of the school, see Ranajit Guha and
Gayatri Chakravorty (eds) Selected Subaltern Studies, (Oxford: 1988). For a
critical comment on the Subaltern Studies see Rosalind O' Hanlon and David
Washbrook, 'After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the
Third World' in Comparative Studies of Society and History, Vol 34, 1992.
Also see Florencia Mallon, 'The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies:
Perspectives from Latin American History' in American Historical Review,
December,1994.
[2] Foucault has been 'widely criticized for alleged Eurocentrism' and his
'scrupulous silence' on colonialism, and post colonialism especially when he
is seen contemporary to the 'context of the Paris of Sarte, Fanon and
Althusser, the traumatic defeat of the French at Dien Phu in 1954, the
Algerian War of Independence, the national liberation movement of the 1950s
and 1960s, to say nothing of his own trips to Brazil'. See, Robert Young,
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2001) p. 397. Also see
Megan Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African illness
(Cambridge, 1991) for the difficulties of applying Foucault to the colonial
context.
[3] Gyan Prakash, op.cit., pp. 125-126.
[4] Ibid. p.126.
[5] David Scott, op.cit., 'It is this idea of a form of power, not merely
traversing the domain of the social, but constructing the normative (i.e.
enabling/constraining) regularities that positively constitute civil
society, that Michel Foucault tries to conceptualize in his work on
"governmentality".' Pp 201.
[6] David Scott, op.cit., p.201.
[7] For a critique of Prakash's position and generally of Subaltern Studies
Project see Rosalind Hanlon and David Washbrook, 'After Orientalism:
Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World', in Comparative Studies
in Society and History (Vol. x, No.34) (April, 1992).