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the sovereign individual

even if they are unable to acknowledge that this

owing of deference is precisely what constitutes

the kind of subordination that defines subalter-

nity.5 Hence it is this subalterns concepts that

constitute the thinkability of the condition in

which (s)he is inserted, even though (s)he may beunable to perform the requisite operation of

transcoding that renders this or that piece of

deferential behavior (say) into a marker or symp-

tom (in something like the Lacanian sense) of

subalternity.

Another way of making this point would be to

say that a particular subaltern condition, like

each and every cultural condition, has to secrete

its multitudinous expressivities precisely in orderto be what it is, and that its concepts in ways

that are inescapably selective, confining, and

even arbitrary are the thematizations or repre-

sentations of these expressivities. Or, more

briefly, that the concepts of a particular subaltern

condition are its expressivities limned in the form

of that subalternitys thinkability.

Theories of subalternity, by contrast, are the

outcome of a theoretical operation whose object

is the natures, functions, and so forth, of these

expressivities. Theories of subalternity operate

on a particular subalternitys thinkability, and

involve a kind of transcoding. It is possible to ask

the question What is subalternity? but there is

another kind of question, involving quite another

kind of theoretical operation, that can be asked

as well, in this case: What is (a) theory (of subal-

ternity)? Subalternity, qua condition, is a prodi-

giously varied and complex practice of signs and

images with an accompanying orchestration of

affectivity, whose theory scholars like Spivak and

Dipesh Chakrabarty must produce, but produce

precisely as conceptual practice (in this case a

practice that generates, in a metalanguage,

concepts that reflect upon the concepts and

expressivities of subalterns, expressivities which

therefore constitute what is in effect a basal or

first-order language that comes subsequently tobe transcoded). No theoretical intervention, no

matter how refined or thoroughgoing it may be,

can on its own constitute the concepts of (this or

that) subalternity: the concepts of the subaltern

are expressed in advance and independently of

the theoretical practice of the individual, invari-

ably an academic, who reflects on the situation of

the subaltern. Theorists, qua theorists, can only

create or traffic in theories of subalternity (or

culture or collective fantasy or whatever).

The concepts that theorists produce can be

operative in more than one field of thought, andeven in a single field it is always possible for a

concept to fulfil more than one function. Each

domain of thought is defined by its own internal

variables, variables that have a complex relation

to their external counterparts (such as historical

epochs, political and social conditions and

processes, and even the brute physical character

of things).6 It is an implication of this account of

conceptual practice that a concept comes intobeing or ceases to be operative only when there

is a change of function and/or field. Functions for

concepts must be created or invalidated for the

concepts in question to be generated or abol-

ished, and new fields must be brought into being

in order for these concepts to be rendered inap-

plicable or illegitimate. To see this, we have only

to consider the ethnographic accounts of the

practice of deference provided in such well-

known works as Pierre Bourdieus Outline of a

Theory of Practice or James C. Scotts Weapons

of the Weak.

It is clear from Bourdieus and Scotts

accounts that the various culturally sanctioned

forms of deference are structured by an appara-

tus that determines the timing, execution, and

perception of the various acts and sequences of

acts that constitute deference as is demon-

strated by the person who bows too low and in so

doing ironizes and thereby ruins what seems like

a deferential greeting, or by the low-status cousin

who replies a little too slowly to the chief

landowners invitation to a wedding feast and

who thereby insults him, and so forth. This appa-

ratus demarcates the deferential from the merely

ostensibly deferential, and in this way brings into

being whole ranges of actions with this or that

mode of deference as their condition of possibil-ity. The apparatus does this by providing rules

that specify the appropriate operating conditions

for the various enactments of deference, and

these conditions, as Bourdieu and Scott point

out, are always political. (One recalls

Bourdieus lapidary formulation, The conces-

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sions of politeness always contain political

concessions (95; emphasis in original).)

At a more general level, the concepts that are

expressive of subalternity likewise follow rules

that constrain their appearance and perpetuation.

It may be, however, that subalternity is moreplausibly to be viewed as an order of orders, that

is, as an order that brings together and orches-

trates the rules for an amalgam or network of

practices practices having to do in more or less

complex ways with economic, social and cultural

deprivation, political subordination, as well as

with the various dispositions betokening the indi-

viduals willingness to submit and to defer (or at

any rate, with the socially instituted expectationof submissiveness and deference, an expectation

that can of course be resisted or deflected in

many subtle and not so subtle ways) with each

component or tier of this network having its own

rules.7

The task of identifying and elucidating the

rules that establish this or that subalternity (qua

intricate mesh of practices) is fraught with the

pitfalls that typically attend ethnographic charac-

terization.8 These pitfalls, now fairly well known

thanks to the efforts of cultural anthropologists

identified with the so-called reflexive turn in

their subject, hinge on the principle that a funda-

mental difference exists between a situation in

which one is presented with a description of a

particular cultural phenomenon (in our case the

practices typically associated with the condition

of being a subaltern) and a situation in which one

is confronted in a directly self-involving way with

that cultural phenomenon. The subalternist theo-

rist is essentially in the former situation, while

someone who self-involvingly employs an expres-

sivity betokening the condition of subalternity is

in the latter position. Thus, the theorist of the

subaltern brings with her implicitly the historical

and intellectual experience that makes her the

thinker she is, but that experience may not

belong to the place or culture she is studying.Her ideas, and the ways of living to which they

apply, may mean that she is not at all like the

persons who belong to the (subaltern) culture she

is endeavoring to describe. It may also mean,

conversely, that the members of the (subaltern)

culture may not be in a position to recognize the

theorists (putatively non-subaltern) thoughts

as being germane to their condition or connected

with it in a way that is interesting or salient or

whatever. There are inherent limits and obstacles

to any attempt to visit as a theorist all the reaches

of a particular historical phase, or even those ofa particular culture, subaltern or otherwise. The

subalternist theorist, like any theorist of culture,

can never therefore be absolutely certain of the

precise reach of her theories and concepts, nor

can she be sure that these theories and concepts

have any kind of adequate approximation to the

expressivities of the subaltern culture in ques-

tion, all the more so in that these expressivities

happen to belong to a culture that is disaccom-modated or misrepresented in very decisive ways

by its non-subaltern counterparts (and in that the

theorist of the subaltern is invariably someone

who is not in the position of being a subaltern).

A cultures expressivities stand as an insur-

mountable exteriority to the theory of (that)

culture, and in so doing function from the begin-

ning as irremovable etiolations of the ambition of

cultural description and this even when the

describer of the subaltern culture happens to be

in profound sympathy or solidarity with the

denizens of that marginalized culture.9 Another

way of making this point would be to say that,

while the subalterns expressivities or speech

become the condition of possibility of the subal-

ternist theorists writing and describing, this is a

condition that the theorist cannot write or insti-

tute, and this because expressivities are perforce

irreducible to description (even though they can

be transcoded into description, theory in this

instance being expressivity rendered into descrip-

tion or writing).

There are two possible responses to this

unavoidable circumscription or deflation of the

ambition of cultural description. One is to inte-

grate into ones projects of cultural description

this lack of commensurability between expressiv-

ity and description, to recognize that representa-tion or naming (the sine qua non of any project

of cultural description) is inherently problematic,

self-vitiating even, and that the ethnographer had

better face up to this, and turn the ethnographic

undertaking into an operation which, in the spirit

of a certain theoretical asceticism, interrogates

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the very desire whose name is ethnography or

cultural description. Why desire to name those

who ostensibly have no desire to name them-

selves? Why continue to produce concepts moti-

vated by this desire to name those who happen to

live their lives outside the confining epistemicspace that is home to the operation of naming,

and especially when the context of this operation

is one in which description can never hope to

catch up with expressivity? Posing these ques-

tions in ways that amount to a deflation of high

ethnographic ambition is of course one of the

defining features of the so-called reflexive turn

in cultural anthropology that manifested itself in

the 1980s, and it is an implication of the positiontaken in this article that the subalternist theorist

is enjoined to make a similar reflexive turn for

herself.10

The second possible response (to this seem-

ingly inescapable restriction or deflation of the

aspiration of cultural description) is associated

with the one just canvassed, and it requires the

subalternist theorist to find ways of relating to

the exteriority constituted by the expressivities of

the subaltern that, more or less self-consciously,

do not involve the creation of systems of knowl-

edge that replicate the asymmetries of power that

define the relation between the subalterns

culture and the invariably non-subaltern culture

of the subalternist theorist, but that instead

regard the unbridgeable gap between expressivity

and description as a problem posed essentially

for the internal constitution of subalternist

theory. That is to say, the inevitable outstripping

of (subalternist) description by (subaltern)

expressivity strikes at the heart of the enterprise

of description, and it should therefore ensue in a

displacement of the theorist rather than simply a

displacement of the subaltern object of study. A

rigorous theoretical askesis (self-disciplining) is

therefore the only adequate way of responding to

this problem. I shall return to the question of this

theoretical askesis shortly, above all in connec-tion with the primary external variables of the

field in which the concept of a subalternity is to

be produced.

Before I discuss some of the primary external

variables of the field in which the concept of a

subalternity is generated, something needs to be

said about the mechanisms that underlie the

constitution of the lived world that is the context

from which the perceptions, desires, thoughts,

and actions of social subjects are orchestrated.

The daily round of life for the social subject is

complexly mediated by ensembles of images andsigns, signs being images of images, and images

in turn being orchestrations of temporal and

spatial relations.11 Thus, the lived world of, say,

the Bengali peasant who migrates from Calcuttas

rural hinterland to Calcutta itself to work as a

cargo loader in the port of Calcutta will be estab-

lished by an ensemble of sign-images constituting

the new world of the city of Calcutta, by a simi-

lar ensemble constituting the old world of thesmall rural village 400 miles away, by the sign-

images prevalent in the new world that is

Calcutta that designate the small village that used

to be home for the migrant peasant (This is

how the typical inhabitant of Calcutta thinks of

the place I came from), and by the sign-images

designating Calcutta that prevailed in the old

world of the small village (This is how the

people of my village typically view Calcutta),

and all this because the semiotic registers of the

movements between different lived worlds have

themselves to be incorporated into the constitu-

tion of the worlds in question. The peasants

conceptual rendition of the village-world left

behind is now inflected by the peasants insertion

into the new semiotic ensemble that is Calcutta,

just as the semiotic ensemble that is Calcutta is

always itself constituted by the semiotic ensem-

ble that is the peasants previous lived world, the

small village 400 miles away. The small village is

always prehended in terms of the big city and

vice versa, and the world I have left behind is

prehended in terms of the world I have moved

into, just as the world I have moved into is always

prehended (if not entirely, then certainly

partially) in terms of the world or worlds I previ-

ously inhabited.12 In this way, a whole range of

multiply-linked sign-image assemblages underliesones prehensions of the temporal and spatial

relations embodied in the antecedents and prox-

imities that enable a world (that peasants world,

but still a public world) to be constituted out of

the flux that is composed of these antecedents

and proximities.13

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These semiotic assemblages designating

Calcutta, the rural village the peasant has

migrated from, the ensemble regulating the tran-

sition from the one to the other, and so on and

so forth are criss-crossed by yet other assem-

blages (each of course with an associated affectivecomponent) that designate such formations as

family, job, education (if any), circle of friends

and associates, gender, caste and class position,

and so forth. The notion of (a) subalternity,

therefore, is an abstraction denoting a particular

kind of relationship between these assemblages

subalternity is inevitably mischaracterized when

it is viewed as an object or discursive entity that

is directly denoted by the concept subalternityand its cognates. For, as has just been indicated,

the object itself is already an abstraction from

this nexus of assemblages and from the unstable

linkages between them. The expressivities of the

subaltern have the subalterns insertion into this

matrix of assemblages as their condition of possi-

bility: not to be embedded in them is perforce to

be something other than a subaltern.14 (The

crucial question here is whether or not the subal-

ternist theorist is necessarily constituted in such

a way that, while she may be able to reflect on

the subalterns expressivities and thereby

produce the concept of the subaltern as a theo-

retical object, the constitution of the subalternist

theorist unavoidably detaches the lived world of

this theorist from the nexus of assemblages that

bring about the existence of the subaltern.)

The primary external variables of the field in

which the concept of a subalternity is to be gener-

ated today will be identified through an account

of the conditions of possibility for the emergence

of the semiotic assemblages that create the

personage of the subaltern and the expressivities

that define this personage. It would take an

extended and complex narrative to enumerate the

full range of these external variables, and the

following account is unavoidably schematic.

The basis for the applicability and intelligibil-ity of the concept of the subaltern is a particular

structure of exploitation: the theoretical opera-

tion involved in the production of the concept of

subalternity has as an axiom that the subaltern is

such precisely because they happen to be

exploited in some way, and because they are

subjected to the particularity of interests in ways

that reflect fundamental asymmetries of power

whose effect is to consign the subaltern to the

margins of society.15 This structure of exploita-

tion possesses two primary axes, namely, the

mode of domination and the mode of production;the struggles of the subaltern take place along

both these axes.16 Struggles over the mode of

domination are primarily struggles for greater

social visibility and for more effective social

agency; struggles over the mode of production

have the reallocation of value as their primary

(though not necessarily exclusive) focus.

In todays world, and as has been the case

since the emergence of the modern world-system,the capitalist paradigm of production and accu-

mulation is the primary engine driving this struc-

ture of exploitation. Though not all forms or

manifestations of subalternity have as their direct

cause the workings of the capitalist system, the

logic of the overall structure which organizes the

particularity of interests is a logic whose rudi-

ment is supplied by the axioms of capitalist

expansion. The current phase of capitalist devel-

opment (called real subsumption by Antonio

Negri, or the epoch of the society of control by

Deleuze) is also the period in which biopolitics

is the name of the mode in which power is typi-

cally constituted, and any attempt to produce the

concept of subalternity calls for an analysis of

both the mode of power or domination and the

mode of production typically associated with this

phase.17

In this new phase of capitalist development,

the mode of domination and the mode of produc-

tion have entered into a qualitatively different

kind of relationship. In previous capitalist

dispensations, as Marx himself pointed out, it was

necessary for the mode of domination and the

mode of production to reinforce each other

directly, so that a single, all-encompassing capi-

tal logic regulated the dynamic of both these

modes, and it did so basically by extirpating so-called precapitalist formations from each

mode. Hence, from 1789 onwards, the modern

liberal state and its bourgeois democratic appur-

tenances were the typical form in which the mode

of domination was constituted (in the industrial

countries of the West, at any rate), and in this

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way it was possible for the prevailing mode of

domination to be aligned in a relationship of

structural affinity with the accumulation strategy

governing the mode of production (i.e., the earli-

est forms of monopoly capitalism in the first

stage, and FordismKeynesianism in the second).Today, however, capitalism is becoming more

abstract, more algorithmic, because this is the

only way that it can ensure that it mediates every

and any kind of production even that of a

precapitalist variety and places them at the

disposal of accumulation. The transition to this

phase is marked in a number of registers: the

creation of an international division of labor, the

rise of an international debt economy, the modu-lation of Capital into the structures of transna-

tional corporations, the introduction of flexible

manufacturing systems and labor processes, the

growth of decentralized and informal economies,

the exponential growth (especially in the

economies of the semiperipheral and peripheral

nations) of standardized markets and patterns of

consumption, the development of complex secu-

rities and credit systems, the inauguration of a

new semiotics of value, and so forth.

In this new regime of accumulation, produc-

tion, in the nineteenth-century sense of an activ-

ity that typically requires the factory to function

as a disciplinary space of enclosure or concen-

tration owned and regimented by the capitalist, is

effectively (though not entirely) relegated to the

peripheral and semiperipheral nations. What

takes place in the capitalist centers today is some-

thing quite different, a kind of production that is

akin to a production of production, a higher

order or metaproduction associated with markets

that deal not so much in goods or merchandise as

in stocks and services and in the technological

instruments for the telematic orchestration of

images and spectacles. The domain in which

these orchestrations take place is that of culture,

and it is culture that allows the logic of Capital

to become planetary and diffused.The current phase of capitalist expansion, with

its progressively more extensive systems of

metaproduction, has created a social order in

which all the conditions of production and repro-

duction have been directly absorbed by Capital

by abolishing the boundary between society and

capital, Capital has itself become social in nature.

In order to enable further the extraction of new

forms of surplus value, new forms it has to invent

as a way of dealing with the crisis of the current

paradigm of accumulation, Capital has to extend

its logic of command to cover the entire domainof productive social cooperation, and thus effec-

tively envelop the whole of society. Only in this

way can Capital insert itself into the flows of

social power, the power it needs to be precisely

what it is Capital. Capitalist command is now

universal and diffused, and Capital in this world-

system is thus an immense machine, a machine

that endlessly proliferates deconstitution after

deconstitution, and, concomitantly, reconstitu-tion after reconstitution. One day I am a peasant

laborer in rural Bengal, another day I am a cargo

loader in Calcutta, another day I am

The transnational algorithm that is Capital is

able to ensure the isomorphy (a term I have

taken from Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari) of

very diverse formations. Isomorphy is not to be

confused with homogeneity because, unlike the

latter, it is compatible with the prevalence of a

real diversity of formations. As a kind of grid

or diagram whose logic is to secure the condi-

tions of its own reproduction, Capital is situated

at the crossing-point of all sorts of formations

(commercial or economic, religious, artistic, and

so on), and it therefore has the complementary

capacity to integrate and recompose non-capital-

ist sectors or modes of production. A case in

point here would be a country like Brazil, in

which there is every conceivable kind of produc-

tion, from the tribal production of Amazonian

Indians to computer technology as advanced as

anything to be found in North America or

Western Europe. It would seem that every and

any kind of production even that of a precapi-

talist variety can be mediated in countries like

Brazil, and placed at the disposal of Capital.18

In such an isomorphic world, literally everything

can yield surplus value for capital. In a milieu inwhich Capital has become ubiquitous, productive

labor (as always the sine qua non of Capital)

is also positioned within every component of

society. But then, equally, the whole of society

has to be organized so that Capital is able to

continue to reproduce itself. The outcome of this

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twofold development is that the absolute spatial

division between exploiters and exploited posited

by a more conventional Marxism has effectively

been eliminated the exploiters are everywhere,

as too are the exploited. The sweatshop exists in

Mexico and Macau, and it also exists in New Yorkand Los Angeles, just as it is a latter-day business

imperative that IBM has a head office not only in

New York and London but also in Jamaica

(where IBM has had an office since 1950) and

Malaysia (where it has had an office since

1961).19

This state of affairs poses an important ques-

tion in regard to the issue of the mode of produc-

tion, because it is now clearer than ever that therehas to be a prior organization of social power

before production can even begin to take place.

In its metaproductive mode, Capital has

bypassed a phase in which it needed only to

concentrate exploitative power at this or that

specific point of production. In order to be what

they are today, the modes of production depend

crucially on an enabling matrix of antecedent

processes that organize power and desire so that

production can become possible. Another way of

saying this would be to view the modes of

production as the outcome of expressions of

desire, as the outcomes or derivations of this

ceaselessly generative desire (or phantasy) which

is produced in the mode of domination (and

which therefore allows domination to take place

in ways that do not necessarily look like domina-

tion).

What enables each mode of production to be

constituted is a specific aggregation of desires,

forces, and powers brought about in the mode of

domination: it is this antecedent assemblage,

lodged in the mode of domination, that is the

enabling condition for the reproduction of the

mode of production. A requisite organization of

productive desire or phantasy has always

preceded capitalist accumulation; today,

however, the very existence and nature of thisdesire, the process of its composition into an

economy, has to be permeated by Capital itself.

The upshot is that nowadays Capital has started

to do much of its work, in the mode of domina-

tion, even before it becomes visible to us

through its more overt manifestations (corpora-

tions such as IBM and Siemens, stock exchanges,

investment banks, entrepreneurs, shopping

malls, and so on).

If Capital is an axiomatic that transcodes or

rearticulates a particular space of accumulation,

culture is the site where Capital organizes anddistributes the kind of generative desire or phan-

tasy that enables production and accumulation to

take place. Capital has to saturate the spaces in

which culture is organized and produced. And

here the transnationalization of the capitalist

axiomatic has as its necessary complement the

transnationalization of the processes involved in

the organization of generative desire (the locus of

which is culture).Not everyone is a subaltern, obviously, but,

just as obviously, subalternity is everywhere,

since dclass subjects are found in every

segment of the capitalist system in its current

shape and form, whether at the peripheries, semi-

peripheries, or centers of this system. The criti-

cal question for those reflecting on the question

of the proper or plausible form of a theory of the

subaltern has to be the one that exercised Ranajit

Guha in his pivotal Elementary Aspects of

Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, namely,

what significance does this theory place on the

insurgent or transgressive activity of the subal-

tern? This question is central not simply because

it was for Guha the decisive question posed for

the historiography of colonial (and post-indepen-

dent) India, but also because it is precisely the

contours and outcomes of this transgressive

activity that define the subaltern (rather than

simply the matter of the subalterns conscious-

ness or situation as a dclass individual).20

Anyone convinced by Guha on this point would

place the weight of significance in formulating a

theory of the subaltern on the thematics of trans-

gression and its expressivities, and also be

persuaded that once we accept that transgres-

sions expressivities are the determinative marker

of subalternity, it will perhaps be clear: (i) thatsubalternity is best parsed as an abstraction

(the term is Gyan Prakashs) that registers a surd

or voiceless element, an internal theoretical

fissure, confounding the theoretical ambitions of

the subalternist theorist (in this sense, it has

nothing really to do with real life peasants, the

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lumpen proletariat, and so on), so that subalter-

nity is exactly what the theorist cannot produce

as an adequate practico-theoretical object; and (ii)

that a rigorous rendering of the concept of subal-

ternity in terms of the notion of transgression

opens up certain possibilities that may otherwisebe occluded, to wit, that the transgressor is some-

one necessarily positioned in an economy of

desire not totally constrained by a capitalist

axiomatics, and, furthermore, that the space of

this non-capitalist economy of desire is that of a

paracoloniality possessing traits that are

markedly different from those of its counterpart

formation, postcoloniality.21

I have already suggested that espousing a theo-retical askesis germane to the notion of a subal-

ternity is an undertaking that best takes the form

of a deconstitution of the speech (a majoritarian

speech) of the subalternist theorist. Here one

adverts to the paradox that lies at the heart of

subalternist theory: namely, that the object of

this theory is to all intents and purposes a minori-

tarian historical and political subject (and, more-

over, a subject often deemed by proponents of

the majoritarian discourse to be outside the

domains of rationality and the reach of history,

as Gyan Prakash and others have pointed out),

while the creator of this theory, the subalternist

theorist, invariably an academic ensconced in a

European or North American institution, some-

what paradoxically employs what is intrinsically a

majoritarian discourse to bring this minoritar-

ian figure to speech.22 This seeming paradox

owes its existence to the fact that the occupant of

a majoritarian position is never capable of

advance or becoming inasmuch as (s)he is

already, analytically, the norm or standard of

what is preeminent, excellent, desirable,

absolute, and so on.23 Since the normatively

majoritarian subject is already where he should

be, he can only occupy the position, always

pregiven, of the constant and of the mean (the

cool majoritarian is always able to say: this iswhere its at, baby). Movement or transforma-

tion can therefore only come from those who are

not in the situation of being majoritarian; and the

majoritarian subject can be transformed only by

withdrawing from that which is majoritarian, just

as minoritarian consciousness is transformed only

by exceeding, and exceeding again and again, the

standard where the minoritarian happens to be

lodged. And since the minoritarian standpoint

embodies all that differs from this majoritarian

subjectivity, the latter consciousness being one

that necessarily dispels difference (as when theslightest departure from a normative whiteness,

say, already amounts to a crossing of the thresh-

old into a problematic non-whiteness), the most

radical becoming-minor is always directed

towards difference and the different. In the face

of the static implacability that inherently defines

the normativity of the majoritarian subject, the

proponent of difference becomes different

precisely by striving to keep this pregiven norma-tivity at bay. The minoritarian can never differ

enough from the normativity of the norm, even

if (s)he happens already to be launched on a

trajectory of becoming-minoritarian: hence, for

instance, there can be no conceptual limit to the

becoming non-white of someone deviating from

the normativity of an unbending and quintessen-

tial whiteness. Transformation or movement for

the minoritarian consciousness therefore takes

the form of an indispensable intensification of

difference, and one becomes truly gay, for

instance, only by making greater and greater

distantiations from the majoritarian normativity

that resides in being straight. There is a univer-

sal in becoming-minor, and it is the more intense

becoming-other of the one who is embarked on

the movement towards that which is minoritar-

ian. All minoritarian subjects are embarked on a

trajectory of becoming-other simply by virtue of

their being minoritarian.24

I invoke Deleuze and Guattaris suggestive

account of becoming-minoritarian for two

reasons: (i) it provides us with a way of fleshing

out the theoretical askesis that the subalternist

theorist must take on; and (ii) it points to a

conception of the transformation of social and

historical subjects that links this work or project

of transformation to the category of transgres-sion.

The imperative that the speech of the subal-

ternist theorist incorporate a theoretical askesis

that is in line with the conception of a becoming-

minoritarian sketched out here requires the theo-

rist to find a line leading away from his/her

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theory that can initiate a becoming-minor for

himself/herself and his/her characteristic (theo-

retical) speech. In so doing, the theorist moves

away from the speech of language A to language

B, and in the process finds a language X that

gives him/her a line to the becoming-other of theone designated subaltern; mutatis mutandis,

the theorist finds, through immersion in

language X and through the complementary

engagement with the becoming-other of the

subaltern, his/her own unanticipated becoming-

minoritarian and its attendant becoming-other.25

It should be emphasized that this becoming-

minoritarian of the theorist does not serve as an

exemplification of the injunction Theorist!Always show solidarity with the oppressed!

which is often taken to express the basic disposi-

tion of someone writing in a politically engaged

manner. A becoming-minoritarian of the kind

envisaged here may in fact show that, in some

circumstances, the very possibility of such a soli-

darity is preempted until the theorist is able to

become something other than a theorist, and the

oppressed victim something other than a victim.

Becoming-minoritarian consequently involves

the simultaneous breaching and closing of limits

that have been instituted by the majoritarian

rulers of society. The propensity to excess or to

dereliction that constitutes becoming-minoritar-

ian is thus inherently transgressive. This trans-

gressiveness is not, however, necessarily to be

taken in the sense of a war against majoritarian

limits, but is rather the creation of something

else, the space of a transvaluation in which these

limits become something they could not have

been, had the transgression not taken place. This

characterization of the transgressive act brings to

mind Georges Batailles discussion of transgres-

sion in his Lerotisme, which begins with the

formula: The transgression does not deny the

taboo but transcends it and completes it

(Eroticism 63).26 According to this logic of the

transgressive act, the transgression impels thelimit or interdiction in another direction, a direc-

tion that culminates (in principle) in something

that resists the possibility of being expressed in

the form of an interdiction, something that, on

the contrary, decodifies the interdiction and in so

doing evades the majoritarian apparatuses that

subtend the upholding of all such interdictions.

Related to this conception of transgression are

the notions of the sovereign individual and the

sovereign operation developed by Bataille in

La Part Maudite (The Accursed Share), and it is

to these that I now turn.Demarcating his notion of sovereignty from

the one more obviously and traditionally associ-

ated with such majoritarian figures as the

pharaoh, king, king of kings, various divini-

ties, as well as the priests who served and

incarnated them, Bataille adumbrates an

apparently lost sovereignty to which the beggar

can sometimes be as close as the great nobleman,

and from which, as a rule, the bourgeois is volun-tarily the most far removed, and this because

life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty

(The Accursed Share 19798; emphasis in origi-

nal).27 The sovereign individual is thus someone

whose subjectivity is not finally constrained by

capitalist relations of production, with their

apotheosizing of the principle of utility; its exem-

plary and essentially utopian embodiment is for

Bataille the person who, even fleetingly, has an

object of desire that is not defined by the neces-

sity conferred by suffering (The Accursed Share

199). This extension of the notion of the sover-

eign being to dclass or minoritarian subjects is

crucially important, if only for the following

reason. Standard accounts conceive of the subal-

tern as someone engaged in forms of palpable

insurgency or quiet resistance that escapes the

purview not only of state formations, but also of

the more official forms of opposition to the state

(elite-dominated nationalism or neo-nationalism

in colonial and independent India, for instance),

as well as the academically legitimated histories

of these opposition movements. Subalternist

theory traffics in such notions, seemingly essen-

tial to it, as the people, the masses, and so

forth, and it derives much of its theoretical

energy from an identification with the figures

designated via recourse to such abstract notions,whose hitherto effaced histories it then under-

takes to recover.28 The outcome, and here I agree

with Rosalind OHanlon, is that subalternist

theory effectively gives us a new if cleaned-up,

pristine, version of the classic unitary self-

constituting subject-agent of liberal humanism

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(80), since the requirement that the subaltern be

understood as an effective historical agent

involves positing this agent as a parallel and

equally assertive counterpart-subject to the

agents and agencies posited in the official histo-

ries. In this way, the representative subalternfigures invoked by subalternist theory come to be

understood as owners and makers of their

pasts, and so forth, and therefore constitute a

rival or shadow being-majoritarian that is a coun-

terpoint to the states and the social elites own

official versions of being-majoritarian. The

upshot is that the subaltern is someone who

escapes the full reach of the states exercise of

sovereignty (i.e., its authoritative rendition of theprinciple of utility), but is nonetheless still

constrained by some manifestation or other of

the principle of utility. The subaltern or dclass

subject has no real becoming-minoritarian in this

particular historiographical scheme of things, and

is not able to exercise a sovereignty not ulti-

mately predicated on the principle of utility.

By contrast, a sovereignty compatible with a

becoming-minoritarian (Bataillean sovereignty,

we could call it) will involve the dissolution of

majoritarian limits in ways that could not have

been anticipated from any of the epistemically

available standpoints in that particular society.

Hence, a state of affairs hitherto thought impos-

sible or unreasonable can now manifest itself to

that societys subject-citizens, even though this

manifestation of the new does retain certain

qualities of the mysterium even as it is revealed.

This state of affairs becomes an instance of what

Bataille calls the sovereign exigency, that is,

the impossible coming true, in the reign of the

moment (The Accursed Share 211; emphasis in

original) in the course of which the rule of

exchange-value and the commodity-form are

breached. It should be acknowledged that

Bataille takes this exigency to indicate not a

reality that is realized, but rather an unending

dialectic between the principle of utility andsovereignty (the telos of which is the negation of

utilitys conditions). For Bataille it is the case

that:

[w]e cannot reduce ourselves to utility and

neither can we negate our conditions. That is

why we find the human quality not in some

definite state but in the necessarily undecided

battle of the one who refuses the given what-

ever this may be, provided it is the given. (The

Accursed Share 348; emphasis in original)29

The expansion, along the lines specified by

Bataille, of the notion of sovereign being toencompass the dclass or subaltern individual is

perhaps more apparent in the works of such

cultural anthropologists as Michael Taussig

(Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man)

and Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (The Tenacity

of Ethnicity) than it is in the writings of self-

identified subalternist theorists. Taussig and

Balzer both provide narratives that, among other

things, characterize shamanism and sorcery aspractices grounding the lineaments of a counter-

history which places its subjects in a divergent

universe in which the sufferings visited on subju-

gated peoples by the colonial and neo-colonial

dispensations are conclusively abolished. The

complementary universe opened up by these

shamanistic practices is therefore utopian, and

this in at least two senses. It is utopian in that the

dispossessed Putumayo people of Southwestern

Colombia (Taussig) and the Khanty people of

Northwestern Siberia (Balzer) come to encounter

alternative realities in which they are liberated,

even if only for a short while, from the rule of

necessity (Batailles given?) imposed by neo-

colonialism in its variant manifestations; and also

because the shaman, in tendering this counter-

reality, draws his/her clients into the space of a

healed reality which has as its raison dtre the

abolishment of the affliction and pain caused by

the ruinous prevailing order (i.e., that given).

The shaman and his dispossessed clients, no

matter how dclass and in however unpromising

a situation, find ways to become sovereign

beings, political and epistemic equivocalness

notwithstanding.

In such accounts, dclass subjects have the

possibility of speaking for so long as they can

transgress against the given. Taussigs andBalzers ethnographies show with devastating

clarity how persecution and its accompanying

distress soon await those who reconcile them-

selves to the given. Yet the same ethnographies

also show how refusing to accommodate oneself

to the given may likewise betoken death and

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misery. Tragedy always lurks for the subaltern,

or so it would seem. But these ethnographies

demonstrate that, as long as it is possible to trans-

gress, there is hope for the hopeless.

The space in which this sovereign hope, a

becoming-minoritarian hope for the hopeless, isactive is in part the space of what I am calling a

paracoloniality. This is a realm in which the

being-minoritarian of the dclass subject is

amplified into further and perhaps more intense

becomings-minor, and the subject repositioned

accordingly. Each becoming-minor is a becom-

ing-other, so that the subject is a kind of fermen-

tation, a crystallization of forces and passions,

that can be moved on: (s)he can become indefi-nite, then definite, then indefinite again; (s)he

can become other other other

other. Each becoming permeates and

displaces adjacent becomings, as the movement

from becoming A to becoming B is always

through an Xthat is neither A nor B but which

enables A to become B, then C (through a Y),

and so forth. Each becoming therefore estab-

lishes the relativity and mobility of its counter-

parts. The subject, from this viewpoint, is an

assemblage of multiplicities (Freud, for example,

is all the objects father, mother, siblings, teach-

ers, friends, wife, Jung, Adler, Ferenczi, and so

on who populate the assemblage or conscious-

ness whose title is Freud), a dynamic

panorama of becoming (so Freud is all those vari-

able relations of becoming that obtain between

him and all those he approaches), and a

condensation of forces (so Freud is a matrix of

forces that are transmitted to him and those

forces that he transmits).30 There can be

segments of this space of enunciation-visualiza-

tion, in which the subject is constituted as a semi-

otic ensemble, that register the impossibility of

pronouncing emphatically the difference between

white and non-white, Western and non-

Western, European and non-European, just

as there can be other segments of this space inwhich such differences can be palpably felt and

stated. Neither kind of segment is able to abolish

the possibility of the other, and what is crucial

for the constitution of the subject is the trajec-

tory taken across these segments as one moves

through ones various becomings-other. A partic-

ular and specific trajectory, but not another,

may establish a heterotopian segment of

this space in which other segments bearing the

names coloniality, Empire, and even post-

coloniality may be decomposed, even if only

momentarily, through the amplification of theheterotopian segment. A heterotopian segment

functions as the unthought of the segments

that bear the names coloniality, Empire,

postcoloniality, and so forth, since the very

conditions of possibility of the heterotopian

segment necessitate a preemption of the semiotic

assemblage that is coloniality, Empire, or

postcoloniality. Each becoming-other expresses

one or more possible worlds that may beunknown to the subject undergoing that becom-

ing-other. These are not worlds that the subject

in question has necessarily to see or know, for

they could be possible worlds in which the

subject comes to be seen or known, in which one

is rendered visible or knowable to oneself, even

if only transiently. One may have to see others,

the inhabitants of this possible world, looking at

oneself before one can come to see oneself.

In taking this itinerary through the segment of

the discursive space that is paracoloniality, a

space that can exist in the midst of Empire, the

subject traverses possible worlds in which her

consciousness is reconstituted in ways that

decompose the realities of Empire. As a result

of this reconstitution, the subject discovers that

she, and the worlds into which she is drawn, are

only the concretions of a specific desire. The

upshot is that the subject and these worlds can be

dismantled by other, alternative, configurations

of desire, in a dismantling that does not involve

an act of negation on the part of the subject and

the inhabitants of these paracolonial worlds. In

taking the lines of flight constitutive of these

worlds, the dclass subject finds a liberty that is

not defined in relation to a master, a master

who, in the manner prescribed in Hegels

masterslave dialectic, would have to be negatedby the slave before the latter can become

free.31 In the realm of this paracoloniality,

liberty is attainable in principle without recourse

to the strategies of a mastery, of a counter-domi-

nation that is only the obverse of the mastery and

ascendancy embodied in the figure of the colonial

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master. In these admittedly rare realms (I am

thinking here specifically of the worlds of

shamanistic practice as described by Taussig,

Balzer, and others), the actualities of mastery and

domination are comprehensively dissolved. For

imperial dispensations are situated in a constella-tion of myriad possible worlds, each of which

affects the others. These are worlds that in the

texts of Taussig and Balzer are expressed by

sorcerers, individuals of different races and

nationalities, persons of mixed ethnicity, subtly

arcane rituals, the sharing of food, a stereoscope

of landscapes, the brutalities of colonial occupa-

tion, an immense proliferation of states of

consciousness, and so forth.In these multiply-constellated worlds, subjects

do not necessarily have their identifications and

affects structured on the basis of a differentiation

from an other who would be, according to the

logic of the dialectic, necessarily a second. In

such worlds, there are others, certainly, but

these constitute thirds, fourths, fifths,

sixths, and so on, each of whom is related to

its counterparts in ways that do not conform to a

dialectical logic. In paracoloniality we find prin-

ciples of differentiation that spawn identifications

according to several, if not many, logics, logics

which in some cases may be non-commensurable,

and hence not in any kind of direct or discernible

opposition to each other.32

It is important, in conclusion, that we should

not inflate the claims made on behalf of the

concept of this paracoloniality that is a counter-

point to the coloniality and postcoloniality of

the subalternist theorist. Suffice to say that

paracoloniality exists in the midst of coloniality

and postcoloniality, and more often than not

is overwhelmed by them. Heterotopian spaces

can be beset by a tragic fragility. But where

they exist, they make it possible for their

denizens, however dclass they may be, to

live the lives of sovereign beings freed from

the constraint of exchange relations.The expressivities of these

sovereign beings provide what

is perhaps the decisive impetus

for an internal delimitation of

the descriptive ambitions of the

subalternist theorist.

notes

1 There are several or indeed many subalternities.

The locus classicus of the concept is of course the

Subaltern Studies project based in the area of

South Asian history, with a particular initial

emphasis on the history of British rule in India,though later works associated with the notion of

a subaltern studies have extended themselves

geopolitically beyond the domain of India and

intellectually beyond the field of historiography.

For a brief but excellent conspectus of the emer-

gence and development of Subaltern Studies, see

Vinayak Chaturvedis Introduction to his collec-

tionMapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial

(viixix). All the essays in Chaturvedis collection,

many by the projects key and originating protago-nists, reflect the different and varied phases of its

development and extension.

The account of conceptual practice given below

was developed in my On Producing the Concept

of a Global Culture, from which several

sentences have been taken. This account is greatly

indebted to Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris

What is Philosophy?

2 It is an implication of (iii) that a currently exist-

ing conceptuality can always be superseded by a

newer one: no conceptuality expresses or deter-

mines the condition or situation that it brings to

expression in a way that is completely exhaustive.

An expressivity works by naming things, yet the

thing named is never the thing itself, but is rather

the affects associated with the thing in question.

Spinoza was the thinker who first perceived this,

and Gilles Deleuze is to be credited with the

systematization of this insight. The thing is a

concrescence of its affects (it is the event of thisconcrescence), and the affects in question vary

with the interactions that have that thing as their

point of focus. Hence, say, the horse that races is

a very different thing (especially for its jockey

and horse-racing fans) from the horse that draws

a plow (especially for the peasant farmer using the

horse for this purpose). On this, see Deleuze and

Claire Parnet, Dialogues 60. The thing being an

assemblage of affects, and there being in principle

a huge variability in the way in which these assem-blages can be organized, no expressivity (qua the

name of the assemblage in question) can eliminate

its competitor names and the assemblages desig-

nated by them.

3 This is another way of indicating that hardly

deniable effectivity of thought with which the

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idealist philosophical traditions have always been

impressed, but which materialist traditions have

usually found awkward or insusceptible of satisfac-

tory description and analysis, or else reducible in

general to something more constitutive and

emphatic, namely, matter.

4 Thus the formulations of a Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak or Ranajit Guha constitute a theory

about subalternity, while the concepts ofsubal-

ternity are likely to include the notions (which may

be inchoate or half-formed) of rank and entitle-

ment, property division, and so forth, actually

operative in the thought and practice of the

Bengali peasant (say) of a particular historical

period.

5 For Guhas triptych (worker, peasant, urbanpetty bourgeois) see his opening article in

Subaltern Studies (Vol. 1). The fifth volume of

Subaltern Studies adds women to this grouping, and

another member of the Subaltern Studies collec-

tive, David Hardiman, has written three articles on

tribal groups in Gujerat. Interestingly, the dalits

(or untouchables) have never been designated

as subalterns by the collective (see Talwalker

17ff.).

6 It is possible to view this complexity in ways akin

to Althussers notion of an overdetermined

relation between formations, and between forma-

tions and the points from which subject-positions

are constituted.

7 On the contestation of symbols of authority as a

feature of peasant rebellions in India, see Guha,

Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, especially

the first two chapters.

8 It is an open question whether or not there has

to be an irreducible ethnographic component to

any attempt to study the subaltern. I am inclined

to think that there has to be some kind of ethno-

graphic dimension to such an attempt, and this

because the very identification of the practices of

the subaltern requires a kind of transcoding of the

expressivities of the subaltern into the theoretical

idioms of the individual seeking to formulate a

theory of the subaltern/subalternity. Even if thereis no such recourse to ethnography, there has to

be some way that enables the theorist of the

subaltern or of subalternity to reflect upon these

expressivities in all their context-bound specificity.

The subalternist theorist has willy-nilly to

construct the text of her inquiry, and so she has to

try and grasp the functions and intent of the subal-

terns Sprache before these expressivities can be

transcoded into theoretical discourse. Certain

forms of historical inquiry can do this job just as

well as an ethnography, so there is no suggestion

here that the study of the subaltern or of subal-

ternity is the prerogative of the ethnographer and

no one else.

9 The position outlined here is an amalgam of two

claims which have to be separated analytically: (i) a

principio, the expressivities of a culture always

outstrip the cultural aspirations of description; and

(ii) given the fact that a subaltern culture invariably

occupies a position of subordination in relation to

its dominant counterparts, the expressivities of a

subaltern culture have a systemic propensity to

elude the conceptual reach of the subalternisttheorist (in this case someone typically belonging

to a dominant culture). Almost all versions of

subalternist theory dealing with the asymmetries

that exist between subaltern and dominant

cultures tend to characterize these asymmetries in

terms of (ii). In the meantime, the intractability

represented by (i) remains unaddressed. This

intractability, which is the outcome of a general-

ized skepticism regarding representational or

symbolic systems per se, affects all theories ofculture, and ought therefore to be addressed by

the subalternist theorist.

My formulations here are indebted to some

more general theses adumbrated by Bernard

Williams (The End of Explanation?). My argu-

ment regarding sense (ii) of the incommensurabil-

ity between expressivity and description is in line

with sentiments expressed by Daniel Mato (Not

Studying the Subaltern). Mato finds problematic

the notion of studying the other that is integralto many versions of subaltern studies, since this

way of producing information about the subaltern

invariably overlooks the privileged situation of the

one able to generate knowledge that, struc-

turally, is withheld from those who happen to be

the powerless and specularized objects of this kind

of study. Matos is clearly a version of subalternist

theory in sense (ii) above.

10 This is also the position taken by Mato in NotStudying the Subaltern and by Gyan Prakash in

The Impossibility of Subaltern History. Prakash

claims that many forms of subalternist theory are

undermined by a paradox: the subaltern is typically

placed outside prevalent systems of rationality but

is still deemed to be knowable as the embodi-

ment of irrationality, and superstition, and so

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on in terms of just these forms of rationality. As

a way of avoiding this paradox, Prakash proposes

a kind of theoretical askesis in which we under-

stand subalternity as an abstraction used in order

to identify the intractability that surfaces inside the

dominant system it signifies that which the domi-

nant discourse cannot appropriate completely, an

otherness that resists containment (288; empha-

sis in original). The position developed in this

paper builds on Prakashs counsel of a needed

self-reflexivity in thinking of the inside of a domi-

nant system. Another version of this paradox

afflicting subalternist theory is to be found in

Dipesh Chakrabartys Postcoloniality and the

Artifice of History.

For the self-reflexive turn in cultural anthropol-

ogy, see James Clifford and George E. MarcussWriting Culture. As a consequence of the self-

targeted skepticism enjoined by the self-reflexive

turn, it was no longer possible for the ethnogra-

pher to say with a straight face what Margaret

Mead said when she was completing her study of

the people later to be named the Mountain

Arapesh: We are just completing the culture of a

mountain group here in the lower Torres Chelles.

They have no name and we havent decided what

to call them yet (Mead, letter of 21 October1932, quoted Clifford, The Predicament of Culture

230). Of course, this skepticism regarding repre-

sentational systems or symbolic orders based on

the positing of a pure and intact speaking I, an I

(the ethnographer in this case) blessed with the

capacity to name and designate from a position

seemingly outside of discourse itself, was a defin-

ing feature of the work of Barthes, Kristeva, Lacan,

and others in the 1960s and 1970s.

11 This understanding of the image and sign is

derived from Gilles Deleuze. According to

Deleuze, [t]he image itself is the system of the

relationship between its elements, that is, a set of

relationships of time from which the variable

present only flows. What is specific to the

image is to make perceptible, to make visible,

relationships of time which cannot be seen in the

represented object and do not allow themselves

to be reduced to the present (Cinema 2 xii). Signsare second-order images that render these

temporal relations visible in the first-order

images that embody them (the first-order

images being constituted intrinsically by the

modalities of movement and time), through the

intervention of a third-order image-sign that

functions as the interpretant between the first-

and second-order images (30). In other words, a

sign functions as a packet of knowledge and affect

regarding its object, but this knowledge and affect

is released only through the intervention of the

sign-image that is the interpretant, the latter

increasing and adding news packets of knowledge

and affect to the first-order image-sign. Images and

signs are plastic, changeable assemblages.

12 I take the concept of prehension from

Whitehead who, in Process and Reality, uses it to

denote the registering of sense by the conscious-

ness in a way that does not involve the operation

of the cogito.

13 Using a theoretical apparatus borrowed from

Deleuzes Logique du sens, I give a more theoreti-

cal account of the semiotic ensemble that is thesubject below.

14 The signs that compose an assemblage can be

assigned to at least three levels or components of

the assemblage. One set of signs will relate to the

political subjects agency and practices; another

will designate the forces, structures, and forma-

tions in which this agency and these practices are

exercised; and a third will supply the particular

context in which forces, structures, and forma-tions are efficacious, and in which the political

subjects practices are undertaken. Forces, struc-

tures, and formations (on the one hand) and

agency and practices (on the other), along with the

context in which both are manifested, together

constitute an amalgam that is the social and politi-

cal process in which social agents are inserted.

Social agents always stabilize this process and

reduce its complexity as a condition of their being

able to act.15 The presence of this structure of exploitation

is a necessary, but not in itself sufficient, condition

for the emergence and perpetuation of the condi-

tion that is subalternity. It should be noted that

here I depart from the Subaltern Studies move-

ments stress on the need to keep the history

of power separate from a universalist history

of Capital (as provided by most Marxist or

Marxisant narratives of Capital). For this feature of

the Subaltern Studies project, see DipeshChakrabarty (Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial

Historiography 15).

16 On the need to analyze capitalist formations

in terms of both the mode of domination and

the mode of production, see Samir Amin

(Maldevelopment 2).


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17 On real subsumption, see Negri, The Politics

of Subversion (17790). On the society of

control, see Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on

Control Societies. On biopolitics and biopolit-

ical production, see Negri and Michael Hardt,

Empire. The following account of the relation

between the current regime of capitalist accumu-

lation and the conditions in which subalternity is

generated is taken from my own On Producing

the Concept of a Global Culture.

18 I owe the example of Brazil to Antonio Negri

(Interview with Alice Jardine and Brian Massumi

83). According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranajit

Guha is to be credited with the realization that

the global history of capitalism does not have to

reproduce everywhere the same history ofpower (Subaltern Studies 20). Guhas proposi-

tion is strongly confirmed by an analysis of the

current disposition of capitalism, where the global

history of capitalism does not even ensue in a

single and homogeneous mode of production, but

rather has the form of a concatenation of several

differing modes of production. As a result, there is

no rigid hierarchy among the modes of produc-

tion, and certainly no comprehensively prevalent

capitalist culture.

19 IBM currently operates in 164 countries.

On this see

(accessed on 12 Dec. 2000).

20 Chakrabarty makes this point well on Guhas

behalf (Subaltern Studies).

21 Chakrabarty has made explicit this perceived

convergence between Subaltern Studies and

recent work in postcolonial theory (SubalternStudies).

22 This is of course the problematics that is the

subject of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks important

Can the Subaltern Speak?

23 Here I am deeply indebted to the account of

becoming minoritarian in Deleuze and Guattari

(A Thousand Plateaus 29193; see also 106). It

should be stressed that being majoritarian in thissense has nothing necessarily to do with quantities

or numerical proportions: in relation to the

analytically or normatively majoritarian, even large

numbers can be minoritarian (as when white-

ness is majoritarian even when surrounded by

numerically overwhelming instantiations of non-

whiteness).

24 Deleuze and Guattari put this well:

Minorities are objectively definable states,

states of language, ethnicity, or sex with their

own ghetto territorializations, but they must

also be thought of as seeds, crystals of

becoming whose value is to trigger uncon-trollable movements and deterritorializations

of the mean or majority. There is a univer-

sal figure of minoritarian consciousness as the

becoming of everybody, and that becoming is

creation. One does not attain it by acquiring

the majority. The figure to which we are

referring is continuous variation, as an ampli-

tude that constantly oversteps the represen-

tative threshold of the majoritarian standard,

by excess or default. In erecting the figure ofa universal minoritarian consciousness, one

addresses powers (puissances) of becoming

that belong to a different realm from that of

Power (Pouvoir) and Domination. Continuous

variation constitutes the becoming-minori-

tarian of everybody, as opposed to the

becoming-majoritarian Fact of Nobody.

Becoming-minoritarian as the universal figure

of consciousness is called autonomy. (A

Thousand Plateaus 106)

25 I am referring here to Deleuze and Guattaris

invocation of Pasolinis work Lexprience hr-

tique: That is why Pasolini demonstrated that the

essential thing is to be found in neither language

A, nor in language B, but in language X, which is

none other than language A in the actual process

of becoming language B (A Thousand Plateaus 106).

Xis neitherA nor B, but rather that which enables

A and B to become that which they are in theprocess of becoming. This is the kind of move-

ment captured by Michel Leiris in an exemplary

moment of theoretical askesis, when he said at

the end of the 193032 French DakarDjibouti

expedition that Id rather be possessed than

study possessed people, have carnal knowledge

of a zarine rather than scientifically know all

about her (quoted in Clifford, The Predicament of

Culture 169; French original in LAfrique fantme

324).

26 For Bataille, the socius is constituted by a

double alogic that includes both the interdiction

and the accompanying transgressive act. The

taboo and its violation are alogically consistent or

compatible, and are required to complete each

other.

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16/17

27 Bataille goes on to say: Sometimes the bour-

geois has resources at his disposal that would

allow him to enjoy the world in a sovereign

manner, but then it is in his nature to enjoy them

in a furtive manner, to which he strives to give the

appearance of servile utility (198). Several

sentences in the ensuing paragraphs are taken

from my own The Sovereign Individual.

28 In the words of Rosalind OHanlon, a sympa-

thetic critic of the Subaltern Studies movement:

It is this central ground, the masses and the

recovery of their own specific and distinctive

histories, with all of the legitimating power

implied in such a concern, which the Subaltern

contributors claim as the hallmark of theirproject. Their task, and that of all historians

who write in the same idiom, thus becomes

one of filling up: of making absences into

presences, of peopling a vacant space with

figures dissimilar in their humble and work-

worn appearance, no doubt, but bearing in

these very signs of their origin the marks of a

past and a presence which is their own. (79)

29 Batailles repudiation of the principle of utility

demands a corresponding disavowal of exchange

value and the commodity form (the impossibility

of this companion disavowal would mean that the

principle of utility is positively irremovable and

that sovereignty is not attainable). Bataille does of

course reject the principle of utility, and while his

position is strictly utopian, it is nonetheless

profoundly political, since for him the exercise of

sovereignty clearly lies not in the eradication of

the given, but in the struggle against it.

30 Here I use a number of concepts derived from

Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens 292372.

31 Here I follow Deleuze and Guattari, who distin-

guish between flight or escape (which does

not require an act of negation on the part of the

escapee) and freedom (which requires precisely

such a negation, but which in the process imposes

an unequivocal, and thus delimiting horizon that

of a relation to the master on the escapeesquest for liberty) (Kafka 59).

32 I refer here to the logic of hyperdifferentia-

tion identified by Brian Massumi as something

quite different from the dialectic (A Users Guide to

Capitalism and Schizophrenia, especially 91 and

17778n73).

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Kenneth Surin

Program in Literature

Box 90670

Duke University

Durham

NC 27708-90670

USA

E-mail: [email protected]

surin, subalternity

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