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The watershed of Modernity: translation and the epistemological revolution

Rada IVEKOVI

[Cacute]

Taylor and Francis

ABSTRACT

From Modernity on, there has been continuity for the ‘West’ and interruption for non-European cultures, histories and languages, for which indeed there is supposed to be only discontinu-ity with their own antiquity. Their own past counts as ‘premodern’ or ‘traditional’, and thus asbelated compared with universalised Modernity. This is so because Modernity itself is normative, andit is normative because it was universalised. The norm of Modernity and the dignity of the modern‘political’ has been spread through western idioms: through the western normativity of the political,such concepts as democracy, revolution, state, republic and the like will have their patterns in‘Europe’ and in the ‘West’, while all other political concepts and terms, when contributed to a worlddictionary of political terms, will denote merely exceptions. Modernity has been one of the great splitsor disjunctions that froze some norms in history, making them become patterns: from that time on,western modernity (first western, then ‘western’ and finally ‘universal’…) has constructed anunbroken genealogical origin for its own concepts and episteme as ‘universal’, and has proposed/imposed them to the planet. The patterns of selection, exception and exclusion of Modernity, whichposit the subject as an ‘autonomous’ figure mirrored and complementary of (state) sovereignty –while referring it to the hegemonically dominant model – have not altogether disappeared today. Theyare merging and mutating into, and coextensive with, configurations of multiple power vectorswithin non-transparent networks of blurred and crossed hierarchies with novel, and maybe morevolatile, forms of production, of integration and of institution, where again, although in a completelynew way, collective action, the sharing and federation of knowledge transcend individual subjectivitywhile reaching out to both old and new forms of association.

K

EYWORDS

: Indian philosophy, episteme, epistemology, methodology, translation, subjectivation, normativity of concepts, the political, language, modernity

The origin of this research project in translation

As a young scholar in philosophy bothIndian and Western, i

1

began my career asthe student of a great teacher, my master

[Ccaron]

edomil Velja

[ccaron]

i

[cacute]

, alias Bhikkhu Ñ

[amacr ]

naj

[imacr

]

vako,

2

who was engaged in the bestcomparative philosophy of his and my time.A lot of my work was therefore, and still is(or is now again), concerned with method-ological issues, dealing with epistemologicalquestions of cross reading and reciprocity

between ‘alien’ and historically unconnected(or not all that well connected) philosophies.In the meantime, subsequent criticalcurrents in philosophy, anthropology andpostcolonial studies, the event of decoloni-sation and later that of the end of the ColdWar, as well as, in theory, the questioning ofthe subject position, had made me interro-gate and critique the very foundation ofcomparative philosophy itself

3

and thetheories taught by my teachers. But somelessons in

defusing

and deconstructing philo-sophical arrogance could be learned from

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the well-intentioned, although theoreticallyweak comparative philosophy too. Compar-ative philosophy, which would later proveto be a problematic idea, was however animportant first step of western philosophiestrying to give dignity and an equal treat-ment – from a methodologically unequalfooting – to extra-European philosophies.The debate would start around the conceptof philosophy and whether it was applicableor not to Indian thought – or whether it wasapplicable outside the scope of its genealogi-cal environment. Today, i return to some ofthese methodological questions within achanged context and for novel reasonsraised by the contemporary world and in thepresence of new claims for political subjecti-vation, unheard of at the time when i was astudent. A new need for political andcultural translation has arisen, having inview an incoming epistemological revolu-tion. These questions have to do with thepolitics of philosophy. When i studied‘Indian’ philosophy and tried to figure outits one-sided reception or outright rejectionin the ‘West’, nobody had ever heard ofpolitical subjects, whether individual orgroup, such as women,

dalits

(‘untouch-ables’ in India), or migrants and refugees, asin today’s transcontinental and transbordermass migrations. I am aware and wary ofthe problematic issue of essentialised ‘iden-tity’ possibly raised here, and have beenvery clear about this. At that time, in the1960s, it didn’t appear yet as a question ofidentity, which was itself not yet hailed onthe agenda to rights, autonomy or liberty.‘Identities’ as a claim for recognition are nota feature of traditional Modernity, but of themore recent demarcation of Globalisationarticulated from the symbolic year 1989, andthe end of the Cold War, on. When i was astudent in the former Yugoslavia, and thusin a peripheral European country that iden-tified itself with the Third World rather thanwith the Eastern Bloc (with which it hadparted ways after the Second World War),Marcuse had just passed by, elated by all thepossible and available upcoming politicalsubjects and issues of his time – feminists,Cuba, China etc. With ‘humanist’ Marxism

(Marxism, as well as socialism, ‘with ahuman face’), at that time we still hung on toclass, an ill-defined category that didn’tmisfit any other categories but had the meritof hitting the issues of social justice andequality; all this – as the decolonisations ofthe 1960s were just underway – was, for thatvery reason, difficult to envision.

My renewed interest for epistemologicalissues, as well as the need to re-interrogatesubsequent theories, therefore has multiplegenealogies itself (of which i have mentionedonly some, and the oldest ones),

4

and callsfor ‘translation’ as a method on the way to along-term epistemological revolution. Thatrevolution has been engaged through a self-critical approach in ‘western’ thought ingeneral, triggered by historical events, andespecially with the help of knowledgeturned ‘upside-down’ as it were – flowingfrom the global South to the global North.Such knowledge is not yet formalised orinstitutionalised, it is been transmitted inter-mittently and erratically as yet, although, aswith any other knowledge, it can lead toideologised discourses and normativeconcepts: there is no certain protectionagainst this. Since it is a form of power,knowledge tends to freeze into normativeexpressions. This is what i propose to studyin the present context, but with this onereminder: the normativity of ideas andknowledge, being a looming dangerconnected to political conditions of which noidiom, no freedom ideal, is safe forever; weneed to scrutinise the tendency to normativ-ity (which, by the way, has some good sidesto it too) in each time and at every turn.

The epistemological revolution

A new methodology is needed; it may becalled the translational approach, in view ofa much needed epistemological reform orrevolution. The ‘borders’ that now need tobe translated or crossed appear against abackdrop of

partage

(see below for defini-tion) of reason as borders of the mind. Theydo not exactly reproduce territorial borders,but they may be their projection and arestrongly related to them. The border’s

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ambiguous nature is particularly apparentwhen viewed from the perspective of borderdwellers and border crossers, migrants,transdisciplinarity, as well as from theperspective of those areas of the worldwhere whole regions, indeed countries,have become borders of sorts (Pakistan,Middle East or Western Asia etc).

5

There is and must be an epistemologicalrevolution under way. It is necessary inorder to liberate and reset knowledge fluxesin all directions, and especially South-South,South-North, East-West (missing links sofar), as well as in order to move towardsmore cognitive justice. Cognitive justice is apart of social and political justice. In thegenealogy of concepts – even when suchconcepts are converging, being diverse andcontext dependent – wide gaps of misunder-standing are found in political and theoreti-cal language between ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’.Brett Neilson’s insisting on ‘“multiple linesof descent” for concepts’ may help us here.

6

This revolution is taking place in the contextof a general crisis of cognitive apparatusesand of their social and political contextsworldwide, and has been since the turningpoint of 1989. At the practical level, it meansmoving towards multilingualism and morepolitical translation. We must thereforewatch the politics of translation.

The late capitalism of the present era hasno problems in absorbing and merging allsorts of different thinking traditions, withouta coherent hierarchical

7

context; some sort of‘new age’ mix is at work in philosophy too,where values, kitsch or humour are difficultto locate or translate because they are socontext dependent. The cognitive post-indus-trial capitalism we inhabit continues apace,restructured from within, regardless ofwhether there are subjectivation theories –favoured by the ‘West’ but reputed to be non-existent in ancient Asian schools – at hand ornot. One of the signs of this new era is thereversal of the fluxes of knowledge that havenow visibly started flowing, notwithstandingthe uncertainty of values, South-North, East-West, South-South. We need to be epistemo-logically prepared for this event. We have toadapt our language and thinking categories,

study the contexts within the difficulty ofcontexts merging and being drawn one intothe other. We need to study the contexts, butthe difficulty is that we ourselves exist withinthese contexts, and that these contexts (’East’,‘West’ etc) keep merging, and are absorbedinto each other; they are drawn into oneanother as globalization progresses. It is notmerely a matter of ‘learning’ foreignlanguages. It is a matter of operating multipleentry points into systems in order to be ableto converse and translate from one epistemeto another, in a postcolonial and post-ColdWar situation and under conditions of utterinequality of languages (i don’t necessarily oralways qualify this inequality as injustice, butthat is another matter).

8

I call such work

trans-lation

. I insist on the normativity – more oftenthan not a national normativity – of anyscholarly idiom, political language, andframe of mind. The intellectual, political orscholarly contexts are not neutral. The polit-ical dimension is especially normative andhistorically ‘West’ centred. We need to dealwith the context, deconstruct it, take it intoaccount in order to understand a ‘foreignculture’ that seems inscrutable.

At the point when the capitalism of ourtimes is being reshuffled so as to accommo-date all kinds of diverse and contradictorygenealogies of thought, however, the politicalsubject, as much as scorn for it and for politics,both seem to result in unequal, subordinate,differential, latitudinal, or ‘missing’ forms ofcitizenship all over the planet. The tool oftranslation will be of use here again.

The

partage de la raison

(division/shar-ing of reason) is a mechanism by whichreasoning keeps flowing in an endlessprocess over time, transcending the individ-ual on whom it depends, as well as genera-tions. Reason is a regulating and normativemechanism, guiding our thinking, institu-tions, laws, culture,

sensorium

. It producesborders in the mind, but also allows these tobe crossed. It is easily associated withpower. At every turn, at every notion withinthis dynamic, concepts tend to congeal in abifurcation of normative and relationalopposites, at successive ‘levels’, as binaries,as dichotomies. Such points are situations

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where translation is absent, constitutingconditions for the construction of ‘identi-ties’, making violence – which is an eternalpossibility but not a necessity – more likely.Most concepts refer to a binary, which is asimplifying mechanism of the mind thathelps us organise the ‘hard disk’ in our headand that really denotes a relation. It is thebinary, and not the concept singled out of it,that should be considered as a whole (thus,violence and non-violence come together, aswell as big and small etc). In addition, manyconcepts bear the ambivalence within them-selves, whereby they can mean two oppositethings, as in the French word

partage

. Wecould also say that in such cases the namecovers two opposite concepts. It does notmean that the things and complexityreferred to by the naming inherent to theconcepts can ‘really’ be reduced to thedichotomy in material and practical life, butthey are so in our imagination, conceptualapparatus and language. The concepts andthe binaries belong to our minds, not to thereferents. The misuse of the binaries occurswhen they (or the notions singled out) areused in a normative way. The binaries,which belong to reason(ing), are easily asso-ciated with power. Reasoning is a form ofpower after all, and dichotomies are itsfigures and instruments. The ambivalence ofmany concepts makes you unwittinglyaccept one of the possible meanings insteadof all, depending on the political agenda ofthe person or of the ideological contextsuggesting (imposing) it to you.

Modernity has been a great split ordisjunction (although there are many suchbifurcations) which froze some norms inhistory, making them become patterns: fromthat time on, western modernity (first west-ern, then ‘western’ and finally ‘universal’…)has constructed an unbroken genealogicalorigin for its own concepts and episteme as‘universal’ and has proposed/imposedthem on the planet. That genealogy is basedon etymologies in European languagesimagined – and constructed – as foundingand universal. The universalisation may beusurpation, but it is a self-fulfilling proph-ecy and it is efficient. From Modernity on,

there has been continuity for the ‘West’ andinterruption for non-European cultures,histories and languages, for which indeedthere is supposed to be only discontinuitywith their own antiquity. Their own pastcounts as ‘premodern’ or ‘traditional’, andthus as belated compared with universa-lised Modernity. This is so because Moder-nity itself is normative, and it is so because itwas universalised. The norm of Modernityand the dignity of the modern ‘political’has been spread through western idioms:through the western normativity of thepolitical, such concepts as democracy, revo-lution, state, republic and the like will havetheir patterns in ‘Europe’ and in the ‘West’,while all other political concepts and terms,when contributed to a world dictionary ofpolitical terms, will denote merely excep-tions:

panchayat, gachacha, harmony, gherao,caste, uhuru, min-jian

and others

…

This isone of the reasons why i avoid indulging intheories of exception and exceptionality.

Translating borders and dealing with the dividing lines in reason

There is a correspondence between borderson the land and borders in the mind. In thispaper, we probe into the principle andmanner of their production in all areas, as acommonality, and especially into borderswithin the mind.

9

The inconsistent, unsta-ble, unreliable and changing character ofborders, as institutions, translates theirpolitical status, quite beyond politicalborders themselves. The political, indeed,has tension and virtual conflict (virtual, notnecessarily real) as its characteristic. Bordersare

partage

to start with: certainly thisFrench term means both dividing and unit-ing. Such translation evolves within thecontext of

partage

of reason

10

which isanother way to state the political; the

partage

is itself not a result of globalisation but is,more generally, an existential condition ofshared life as well as a characteristic of thefunctioning of reason, thought and mind.I use the French word

partage

to refer to thedichotomy or rather to the

in-com-possible

aspect, because it has two opposite but

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complementary – you could say ‘in-com-possible’ – meanings. As the Buddhistmadhyamaka philosopher N

[amacr ]

g

[amacr ]

rjunaalready knew, concepts come to us in pairsof opposite notions, such as male/female,black/white, within/without, up/down etc(two being the simplest and really reducedform of plurality). The dichotomy tends topresent itself as fixed, hiding not only allplurality and diversity, but also the dynam-ics and movement (including reciprocitybetween the two terms) in that to which theconcept refers. The symmetry of the binaryis itself an illusory effect and instrumental,since it usually dissimulates a hierarchy, aninequality and a discrepancy. Namingthrough fixating concepts, and bringing to aclose the contents of the latter, depoliticisesthe referent in our mind. Dichotomies arenormative, and so usually are definitions.This creates ‘identities’, essentialises themand makes you believe that there is such athing as, for example, ‘East’ and ‘West’, twoopposed entities, outside the constructs ofour minds. But these concepts do not have a‘natural’ referent, and owe their linguisticexistence merely to the fact of constituting arelation. Such a process produces a borderin the mind, the borders between ‘East’ and‘West’, which is really nowhere, because itis everywhere. Every point of the ‘East’ hasits ‘West’. For N

[amacr ]

g

[amacr ]

rjuna therefore, thedichotomy is dismissed (N

[amacr ]

g

[amacr ]

rjuna 1988).In that manner, we can construct borders astwo contrasting or complementary, yetseparate, spaces divided by an imaginaryline; and we have indeed historically doneso. Dichotomies are instrumental to lines ofpower and to historical movements ofdomination of various types (colonialism isonly one of them). But dyads are ever insuf-ficient to express the complexity of theworld. There is always a ‘rest’ not taken intoaccount by hegemony or by a normativepower-configuration. This is exactly why ithas to be normative, after all. Proceeding inthis way has historically been developed inEurope’s colonial expansion, has been main-tained as a form of ‘othering’ and of‘bordering’ (‘border production’) allthrough orientalism and is still largely part

of postcolonial cultural and political mores.It is part of other social and political hierar-chies and policing methods too. It is mucheasier to think with stable forms, welldefined identities and fixed lines – whichmeans that borders are an essential support,as much as a limit, in thinking. The newlooks of the globalised planet are now oblig-ing us to accept thinking with and fromunstable forms and to reckon with uncer-tainty. It is indeed much less comfortable.Political and cultural translation contributesto softening inner and outer borders, bothwith regard to states, as well as with regardto the social fabric and thought within,across and beyond it. But it can also contrib-ute, through more or less relative softening,new institutionalisations. The historic formsof firmly defined borders are national states.They are not disappearing, although theyare being transformed and many of theirfunctions, as well as those of borders, arechanged. Sovereignty has been challenged,and with it the subject as well as some otherconcepts.

As many authors have pointed out,positing an exception also means choosing aviewpoint. To have exceptions, you needborders and vice versa. They work in thecontext of sovereignty. In dominant cogni-tive practices, we have usually consideredthe other and the other’s ways to be anexception. The norm is naturally associatedwith the subject position, and, when possi-ble, with dominance. From the other’sperspective, however, it is ‘we’ who mayturn out to be the exception. Aihwa Ong hasshown this with regard to the ‘western’model of welfare state in capitalism: seenfrom Greater China and Asia in general, itcould be said that the way capitalism devel-oped in Europe was rather an exceptionthan the rule for the planet (Ong 1999). Butthis is not the way it has been taught indominant history. Generally, a whole line in‘western’ thinking has theorised the ‘catas-trophism of exceptionality’ (Agamben[2005] derived this concept from CarlSchmitt to build his own approach tobiopolitics after Foucault). The ‘problematic-ity’ of the exceptionalist theories becomes

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especially visible as the deterministic idea oforiented progressive historicity undergoescritique. The Marxian concept of the ‘Asianway of production’, an exception if Europeis seen as the rule, has been sufficientlyexposed to criticism. The assemblage ofrule-and-exception works only in a settingof

partage de la raison

(or of borders withinthe mind). An exception is a relationalnotion. So are the concepts of inclusion andexclusion, which work in tandem. Thepicture becomes somewhat more accurate,but also more complex, if we recognise that,in most cases of social and political exclu-sion, we actually have situations of subordi-nate inclusion; or, as Sandro Mezzadra andBrett Neilson have it, of differential inclu-sion (Neilson and Mezzadra 2010):

11

theapparent symmetry is then rightly replacedby a multifarious hierarchy.

The normativity of concepts prevents seeing other horizons

The tendency to a normativity of concepts isnot characteristic of any culture or languagein particular, but is of political contexts andframes of mind. It is highly dependent onhistoric conditions, times and forms of insti-tuted, and sometimes constituting, power. Itis also linked to forms of what ‘Continental’philosophy calls ‘subjectivity’.

When speaking of democracy, theframework that is self-understood is capital-ism (Vanaik 2009). The notion of ‘democracy’has a certain etymological continuity from animagined Greek antiquity. But in Asia, otherideals with other etymologies and genealo-gies, other historic depths, other imaginedconfigurations with concepts such as‘harmony’ of (hu)man and the world, ‘grossnational happiness’, as well as the idea ofprimacy of pedagogy, of the sage’s example,ideas of disengagement of the will topower and of the dispossession of the selfhave been in circulation. Translation not onlybetween languages but between epistemo-logical contexts is required here. We need toperform an epochal epistemological switch.

There has been a sequence of historicturning points in world history. While

that of Modernity is still to a great extent aparadigm, the French Revolution came toenforce it, the Cold War froze it and, in ourtimes, its end opened the way to today’ssituation of differential inclusions and ‘flexi-ble citizenships’ (Ong 1999). The concept ‘

of(the) political

’ is particularly prominent fromthe French Revolution onwards. It is lessshining in the Anglo-Saxon world, but eventhere it is used to rein in any tendency toautonomy with emerging subjects. Moder-nity introduced, and the French Revolutionspread, the ideal of equality. The politicalcoincides with the public in the Modern, butquite universal, cleavage between publicand private. This cleavage has been thebasis of industrial capitalism that has led theWest to its climax. It is constructed aroundaccess to property. The concept of

the politi-cal

is one of those double-edged normativeconcepts. As an instrument of judgement,the political becomes normative. Its linkwith the subject’s positioning is transparent.

Let us address the issue of normativitythrough the question of caste in India. Casteis usually opposed to democracy and under-stood as a social feature essentially differentfrom any social phenomena in the ‘West’,which is thought as ‘normal’. Caste is anormative concept of western sociology forIndia, which doesn’t exclude its beingnormative in Indian society too, along differ-ent lines (which i am not addressing here).The fact of the foreign origin of the conceptand of its normativity (many if not all socio-logical concepts tend after all to be norma-tive; this is why we constantly need newones) has not prevented caste, a vague andpolysemic notion, from being adopted bysuccessive rules and eventually by Indiansociology. The western Latin genealogy ofthe term ‘caste’ impedes a political andsocial imagination that would include theIndian social experience (

varna

,

jati

etc).There are several wrong premises, one beingthat a ‘normal’ society has no castes, whichare an additional feature that can beremoved from the social fabric to make it‘normal’ again. Next, far from the fact beingspecific to India, the idea of democracy andrelative actual democracy have always and

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everywhere coexisted with social inequalityand injustice. They are unthinkable withoutexclusions and borders. Democracy is acontradiction in itself because of its flawedorigin, since it is impossible without anexception and thus without an exclusion,besides amounting to merely projects or aprescriptive idea, and no palpable reality.The ‘strangeness’ of ‘Indian’ society washistorically constructed for and by the Westtogether with contempt for it. With referenceto France and the French suburbia, RobertCastel has shown how the (ethnic, racial,religious or other) instrumentalisation ofalterity becomes itself a factor of exclusion(or of subordination) within society, in spiteof the abstract republican (in the Frenchsense) principles that proclaim the equalityof all. Although there is a choice with regardto concrete situations in principle, a societywith empty and abstract declarations aboutequality coexists with the discriminationand inequality it fosters and condemns at thesame time (Castel 2007). This is meant aboutthe West. The same applies to India with thecaste system. Because of historic clichés, it isdifficult for Europeans to understand how acountry like India, reputed for its ‘castesystem’, might be the vibrant democracy itreally is. This is so because these conceptsare normative. Denying the aura of politicsor democracy to others implies not takinginto account the gradual aspect of democ-racy. Democracy becomes a directiveconcept when proposed to other continents,all the way down to the military enforce-ment of democracy characteristic of the endof the 20th/beginning of the 21st centuries.‘Caste’ is one of those stereotypes of thewestern mind that resist translation intopolitical terms, or that are incomprehensibleaway from an imagined cultural cliché. Inaddition to that, ‘Indian’ philosophy has notbeen read in the West as political. At best, ithas been understood as religion or asaesthetics, so explanations could not beensought in it, or would have been misunder-stood because they were received in anotherdiscourse regime (Lyotard 1983).

The normativity of concepts comesfrom deeply rooted cultural contexts, origin

and even ‘national’ or nationalised territoryin spite of their possible striving for univer-sality. Most concepts are able to travel, andnormative concepts do so too. The anatomyof knowledge actually delineates previousand un-acknowledged choices.

In this context, we might note thatjustice itself is not always perceived orexpressed in political terms as classicallyunderstood in the ‘West’. Indian society forexample has also always known the preoc-cupation for well-being quite beyond (orindependently from) principles of equalitybecause of the individual strife for liberation– individual though in a way past both theindividual and the social spheres (Dumont1967; Kakar 1978). The concepts of

nirv

[amacr ]

na

or

mok

[scaron]

a

, individual liberation, fit in here. Butthe recognition of a political dimension isnot readily conceded, on the part of Europe(all too easily identified with the ‘West’ inthis), to others and to distant ‘non-western’continents, even as it is increasingly evidentthat the intimately political dimension ofinner freedom is one of the missing links of‘western’ emancipatory patterns.

The turning point of 1989

Until 1989 and while state sovereignty wasstill holding harder than it is now withinglobalisation, national borders were thoughtto be natural markers of the geographicallydefined limits. The year 1989 is really thesymbol of a new great epochal divide. Thehistoric (Westphalian) sovereignty of moststates has obviously weakened, althoughneither sovereignty nor the national statehave disappeared altogether or will do soany time soon. Borders are reshuffled,recomposed, reassembled and reorganisedat all levels (Sassen 2006b, 2008). They multi-ply and spread from territorial to otherdimensions. They translate politics intoconcrete relations. The globalised capitalacting through complex social and culturalfluxes, as well as through networks – andsome of these are the same as the networkswe are entangled in as private persons, asthe two cannot be separated – creates asemblance of a unified ‘contemporaneified’

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time. Or rather, it enhances a homogenisedtime out of diverse, relative and concreteparticular times: that levelling of the historicdimension builds ‘identities’ and ‘cultures’as definitive and prematurely closed collec-tive narratives. The rich diversity of complexsocieties is evened out, ‘ironed’ into the flatsurface, whereby borders are introduceddeep into the social canvas (‘us’ and ‘them’),made analogous to time exclusions : ‘moder-nity’ versus ‘tradition’ etc. Borders thenappear also in time: the supposed backward-ness of such and such a place or community.The homogeneous time of capital fragments,at the other end of the global spectrum, soci-eties, narratives and epochs, through fixingidentities with the help of a general depoliti-cisation and commoditisation. The latter isobtained by collapsing time upside down inthe general political discourse at the handsof states, of trans-statal actors, of networks,of social and human sciences, of journalists.Time is disturbed so that cause and effectare inverted, and categories (‘identities’,communities in the narrow sense) areexplained by (supposedly immemorial)conflicts as if they had not been created bythe same conflicts. But in its turn then, suchanticipation of identities through their nomi-nation downloads them into material exist-ence. Time borders are operating especiallyin such examples as colonial history or thehistory of women and also, as shown byAihwa Ong, Sandro Mezzadra and BrettNeilson and others, through processes suchas ‘benching’ – when skilled migrant work-ers are made to wait in different kinds oflimbo situations, or are put to some workwhere they are overqualified for a certainperiod of time, waiting for the right opportu-nity, benching with lower jobs waiting forhigher ones; benching in Singapore hopingto go to the USA etc. As feminists have beenthe first to theorise regarding women, subor-dinate inclusions are part of the game andthe rule. They may also be ethnicised inthe process when required. Ethnicisationnamely then appears to be the manner ofinclusion into the market for migrant work-ers (Asia), but also for indigenous popula-tions as they claim access to the Nation,

especially in Latin America

12

where, asconcerns women, a previous inclusion (i.e. asubordination) into the ethnic group isusually required. Ethnicisation is then thecondition of insertion of women into thepolitical society (Ivekovi

[cacute]

2003a, 2005a; Bian-chini

et al

. 2007[2005]), in Latin America andprobably elsewhere too. The new form ofcapitalism supports and is also sustained byall other kinds of divisions – racial, caste,gender, class, labour, ecological interests etc.These different hierarchies also sustain eachother (Ivekovi

[cacute]

2003b).

Why the concept of subject is important

‘Subjectivation’ is important for under-standing our topic and purpose because thesubject and its autonomy are the landmarksof historic Modernity, and because thesubject is the bearer and the transmitter ofnorms whose characteristics may ‘stick’ tothe latter in giving a general pattern. But it isalso important because not all philosophieshave developed a concept of the subject ortheories on the subject.

It may be useful to compare some ‘west-ern’ subjectivation theories with some‘Asian’ ancient ‘non subjectivation’ theories,those of demobilising the ego. The hypothe-sis is that they may not be as incompatible aswe might have thought and as has beentaught in the (western) history of philosophy.

Since at least the 1960s, philosophersand social scientists in the ‘West’ (and thus,set in a ‘universalised’ international publicspace) have identified and confided in evernew political subjects and agencies. Thatperiod was followed by one, embodied byreadings of Foucault, of disavowal of thesubject in ‘western’ thought. As from theturning point of 1989 – the end of the ColdWar and the opening of the neoliberal era oflate capitalism – some of these subjects havebeen constructed as ‘identities’, with some-what ethnicised dimensions. At the sametime, ‘western’ metaphysics of the subject,which is a strong line in ‘western’ philoso-phies, has indulged even more than beforein individualism, as the era of social utopiaand common projects had come to a close

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(as well as the ideologies carrying them).Collective and individual projects and typesof subjectivation had become increasinglyopposed in the ‘West’. The subject, whetherindividual or collective, is based on posses-sion, appropriation, self-foundation andpower. The Sanskrit term

svayambh

[umacr ]

(self-born) shows however, among others, that,of course, ‘Indian’ philosophies too have thenotion and have the option, in spite of‘Indian’ schools of thought deliberatelyavoiding developing a full-fledged subjecttheory, whereas it is usually considered inthe ‘West’ that ‘Indian’ philosophies lack theconcept of the subject, and that this is aserious deficiency.

There have existed, all along, ancientphilosophies that have not indulged inmetaphysics of the subject and that havedeliberately avoided building subjectivationtheories. While such no-subject theorieshave been latent and an alternative in the‘western’ history of ideas, they have beenprevalent in the great ‘Asian’ philosophicalschools, and possibly elsewhere too. Whilenot nurturing the ego, an ‘identity’ or thesubject, they had other recipes for happi-ness: avoiding self-foundation, eludingsubjectivation and in any case escapingsubject theories at a meta level, decentringoneself, dispossessing or dissolving of theself, tranquillity and detachment. Theycannot be said to have fared worse than theself-founding zeal known in Europe and theWest. Contrary to the latter, they have notmuch opposed individual and collectiveconstructions. They have accepted thehuman existential paradox of being bothfinite and infinite, both historic and tran-scendent, including the paradox of achiev-ing detachment and inner freedom,meaning the disbanding of the self –through individual will. Generally, theyhave not proscribed contradictions, as ifaware of the fact that these are ultimatelyimpossible to undo.

Early and long-standing Modernity wascharacterised, especially in the ‘West’, bythe prominence of the subject as a politicalconcept. Although Modernity is still there inmany ways and will be there as a major and

lasting turn in history, some aspects of ourtime have again, and not for the first time,relativised the subject together with theconcept of sovereignty. Subjectivationtheories or not, cognitive post-industrialcapitalism continues on regardless, butrestructured from within, tolerating allthese contradictory theories, or toleratingbetter their apparent contradictions.

At all times, subjects – not only privateand individual subjects but also groups,sometimes entire ‘cultures’, ‘Weltanscha-uungen’, ‘lifestyles’ – have been constructed,not only through positive and triumphantaction, but also – and maybe particularly –through loss, defeat, retrieval, passivity,disgrace, renouncement, through givingup power or rejecting it, through disgustbut also enchantment or disenchantment,through otherworldliness, through being‘not there’, ‘not that’ (

neti – neti

),

13

‘not mine’,through the rejection of possession andsovereignty. Only partly does this dividebelong to colonial history, but this is a matterthat cannot be addressed in this paper.

It may be useful to test comparisonsbetween desubjectivation, subjection andsubjectivation theories against the overrid-ing universalising attempts of introducingand spreading political concepts such as‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ etc, especiallyafter the end of the Cold War (1989), whichrepresents a major turning point. The prob-lematic universality of such forcefullyuniversalised concepts results sometimes inidealising other notions from other cultures:but this is no remedy, if we remember thatall conceptual apparatuses have the capac-ity and even the tendency of being norma-tive, together with the languages they areembedded in. We need to be wary here ofthe dangers of essentialising such conceptsas ‘Asian values’ and the like, and ofsupporting various nationalisms (Sakai2001),

14

and that of course is not whati propose to do. I am interested in the tenu-ous line between the two – faring a conceptas long as it is helpful, and avoiding it, orovertaking it, when it becomes normativeand supportive of dominant or hegemonicsubject positions. This can never be done

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once and for all, and will be a perpetualepistemological project.

Subjects are constructed and decon-structed within changing and instablecontexts, through the formation, displace-ment or destruction of borders, through lossand failure, and not only through positiveoccurrences of ‘subjectivation’. One of thereasons why thinking when structured andexpressed in words tends to become norma-tive is to allow us a common ground, acontext, a minimum ‘translatabilty’ withoutwhich we would be unable to understandeach other even within one single language.Such stabilisation of frameworks createscontexts that can be transmitted as packagesof knowledge where we know at least tosome extent what we are talking about. Assoon as we move out of a known context, weactually are not sure what to understandand don’t know what we are talking about.But luckily, contexts change sufficientlyslowly so as to allow understanding, butchange nevertheless, and allow for newunderstanding, new experiences and newknowledge. Today, the new world context issuch that subjectivity is directly involved incapital through the body hosting it; it is assuch that it fashions biopolitics. Politicalsubjectivation and its ‘reverse’ projects ofdispossession of the self, of deconstructingthe ego, as they are found in certain ancient‘Asian’ philosophies, used traditionally tobe pitted against each other in the ‘West’through the efforts of the latter in depoliti-cising any extra-occidental subjectivation.Nowadays, through the absorption within ageneral ‘context’ of different thinkingpatterns, we face more uncertainties and arecompelled to think, judge and decide moreand more without axioms or guidelines,which is much more difficult. As our auton-omy in this is greater, it is also weaker, andnew forms of collective thinking, associat-ing, networking and instituting make theirway since the individual can’t do much byherself.

The split produced at Modernity cannotbe undone. It has historically become partof everyone’s condition in different ways.But new readings of the past and new

connections to the others can help us build anew approach to a common and commonlyproduced future.

Subjectivation and non-subjectivation

According to ‘Indian’ ‘traditional’ stereo-types, non-subjectivation is seen as a solu-tion to modern stress, while duality anddifferentiation are the result of

avidy

[amacr ]

, igno-rance. Such dispossession of one’s self isculturally valued, posited and cultivatedincluding outside the master-to-student or

guru-

[sacute]

i

[scaron]

ya

relation. This refusal of the affir-mation of the self has a long and interest-ing history quite beyond the a-historicityallotted to it. It certainly accentuates muchless the binaries, but it nevertheless doesnot prevent domination, and should there-fore not be idealised. A further paradoxconsists of the simple fact that renouncingthe self – as used in some Asian philoso-phies of life – requires a minimum of indi-vidual, subjective will, and thus theassertion of the self, which is an intimatelypolitical act. It is as if subtracting oneselffrom the tyranny of the social order couldonly be achieved by a sidestep without thesystem; as if through resorting to trickery,by exiting the playground. And if thisseems possible, it is because one believesoneself to be able to avoid the division ofreason (which is owed to the fact that weoriginate and that we think starting fromthe gender difference [Héritier 1996])

15

inby-passing language. There is with theTaoists a ‘supreme void’ before any divi-sion, named

Qi

, which is the receptacle ofboth

yin

and

yang

within an undifferenti-ated, though doubly constituted, unity(doubly constituted: full/empty; move-ment/rest; feminine/masculine) (Cheng1997): a fundamental unity that prevailsover the scissions. It is true that both inChinese as well as in Indian antiquity (seeN

[amacr ]

g

[amacr ]

rjuna 1988) dichotomies are seen assymmetrical and equal because it is theeasiest way to conceive of the

two

as induc-ing harmony. This is comparable to thesituation in ‘western’ thought where thepretended symmetry of the binaries of

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thinking plays the historicising game ofthe dominant hegemony and where, by auniversalising manoeuvring, the pretendedsymmetry impedes seeing the inequalityinflicted on the particular element (and thegoal of such impediment is not to allow theparticular to speak). Not only such schoolsas Taoism, Buddhism, but also the oldIndian philosophical school of

S

[amacr ]

mkhya

recognise some ‘primary’ level or instanceas the origin or context of undivided reason(it often has a feminine and materialisticcharacter moreover): that ‘primary’ space isa universe not-yet-split, resembling

Qi

; itcould be said universal and neutral regard-ing the differences (particulars) it hosts.

What may appear to be a psychologicaltrait is also a social mould, a ‘principle ofelegance’ and an elitist ideal in some Asiansocieties beyond Islam, where it is incul-cated through early education that the egoshould not be made prominent and allconflict is being avoided in anticipationthrough the retreat of the self from the‘buffer zone’ with others (Frank 1986: 5).

Japanese and some other Asian culturesseem to have developed such buffers offormal behaviour rules against social pres-sure and violence. But what makes no doubtin such cases is the violence itself. Violenceis not discussed when the buffer is resortedto. It is taken for granted, and techniques aredeveloped only for avoiding it

ex post

, whileknowing that there is no zero degree ofviolence. The antiquity of such methodscannot always protect against the violenceof modernity. When the ‘shells’ or subse-quent ‘peels’ of the self end up showing thatthey are its only reality and when they areworn out, it is the heart of the identity itself,the ‘i’, which is irreparably struck. Its nullityis then made obvious (Murakami 2005). By awelcome detour, and in order to illustratethe ancient Indian concept of

ko

[sacute]

a

envelop-ing the innermost ‘subjectivity’ like peelencompassing an onion, let us cite Deleuzeand Guattari (who, however, are not talkingabout the Indian concept of

ko

[sacute]

a

). The quoteexplains how subtraction operates, andpoints at the impermanence at the core ofcontinuity. It means that no identity may be

self-founded – or that self-foundation is ausurpation of power. The ‘centre will nothold’ or it is void:

This is as much as to say that the fascic-ular system does not really break withdualism, with the complementaritybetween a subject and an object, a natu-ral reality and a spiritual reality: unity isconsistently thwarted and obstructed inthe object, while a new type of unitytriumphs in the subject. The world haslost its pivot; the subject can no longereven dichotomise, but accedes to ahigher unity, of ambivalence or overde-termination, in an always supplemen-tary dimension to that of its object. … Notypographical, lexical, or even syntacti-cal cleverness is enough to make itheard. The multiple

must be made

, not byalways adding a higher dimension, butrather in the simplest of ways, by dint ofsobriety, with the number of dimensionsone already has available – always n-1(the only way the one belongs to themultiple: always subtracted). Subtractthe unique from the multiplicity to beconstituted; write at n-1 dimensions.(Deleuze and Guattari 1987[1980]: 6;emphasis in original)

The possible advantage of philosophiesproposing the ideal of dispossession of theself is, in principle, the conceptual decon-struction of the conjunction of notions ego-power-violence in hegemony. They mainlydo it through their therapeutic practices(

yoga

). But none of them can dispense itselfof the necessity of translation, whichtraverses and outgrows geographic deter-minisms of philosophies. Such philosophiesof dispossessing the self would be tradition-ally considered

un

political ‘in the West’, butthis is because of a normative understand-ing of the political. The unpolitical or thedepoliticised can, however, be translatedinto the political, at least to some extent.

Political subjectivation (the ‘western’pattern for both reform and revolutionaryaction, and for political action in any case)and the project of dispossession, demobili-sation of self (or of non-subjectivation) as itcomes in some Asian philosophies, havetraditionally been pitted against each other

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in the ‘West’, in the latter’s endeavour todepoliticise all extra-western agency orsubjectivity. But the two may not be alterna-tives to each other and indeed may some-times come together in the same individualsand in some cultural-political configura-tions. The pattern of demobilising the self isnot at all at the antipodes of revolutionaryaction in the way of ‘negative freedom’(Berlin 2002), which may or may not be onlyone part of it.

16

Citizenship, subjectivation and culture

Generally materialised in displacement, inmigrations without guarantee of arrival, thevital necessity of thinking translates notonly an economic need or that of escapingconflicts and wars (where, by the way, itbecomes increasingly difficult to distin-guish, as requested by the Geneva Conven-tion of 1948, between economic and politicalrefugees), but it translates first of all anacute need of citizenship, yet a citizenshipunderstood in a new way. That shape,hoped for by the migrant, immigrant andrefugee populations calls for a reformedconcept of citizen – with all its cultural andsocial components, quite beyond the politi-cal or the merely juridical and administra-tive. It need not at all include the wish totake up the citizenship, and even less thenationality, of the country of immigration.In many cases, any country but the one oforigin may do, but it is administratively andculturally liberal countries that are soughtout for practical reasons. The concept of citi-zenship enlarged by culture, however,should not distract us from noting more andmore restrictive forms of citizenship madepassive in many ways that we see emerging(Sassen 2001, 2006a, 2006b; Ong 1999). Miss-ing citizens

17

belong to the latter category.They also belong to the unnumbered (butcountable) category of drowned in the seasand oceans of hope, the

refoulés

from theborders of Australia, Europe, Yemen orelsewhere.

Yet most Asian cultures have cherishedhistorically, among other ideals, an individ-ual quest for happiness, inner freedom, and

tranquillity, regardless of, or across, variedpolitical contexts, and independently fromthe question of equality (Mil

[ccaron]

inski 2006). Oneline of thought in ‘western’ thinking hasmeant that individual happiness, indeed,freedom, can be acquired through collectivehappiness and through some degree of socialengineering. Thanks to Foucault, we realisethat the ‘West’ too had produced its alterna-tive therapeutic philosophies (Foucault2005). On the other hand, elitist Asian philos-ophies have often believed that no amount ofsocial reforms or revolutions will be able tosupply individual happiness and freedom –often, but not always, and not all Asianphilosophies of course.

In spite of claims, an effective synthesisbetween individual liberty and collectivewell-being is far from being achieved inEurope or the ‘West’, while its realisationtakes other routes in China and in India.What seems to be a turning-point for post-industrial Western societies (reverting toindividualistic values) is not so or not so inthe same way for India or for a larger part ofthe world. Turning to individualistic values,although of another kind, has alwaysexisted there. Individualistic values in Asia,including elitist ones such as inner freedom(

mok[scaron] a, nirv[amacr ] na, ekat[amacr ] ), have not beenconstrued as opposed to collective values.

On the other hand, Aihwa Ong sees inAsian spaces and regions of Asian immigra-tion ‘neoliberalism as exception articu-late[ing] a constellation of mutuallyconstitutive relationships that are not reduc-ible to one or the other’ revealing ‘novelinterrelationships through which problemsare resolved’ (Ong 2006: 9). We would benefitfrom including the concept of inner freedomwithin the concept of freedom tout court. Allthis only adds to the reasons why the tradi-tional concept of economy may be insuffi-cient to designate today’s capitalism, whichmutates also through culture, utilising it at itsvery heart. Obviously, political economychanges too. It has to take into account exter-nalities of work, labour outside workingtime, knowledge, private networks as well asthe living force, the bodies, which includesprocesses of subjectivation in migration

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etc. Capitalism is today a bioproduction.Accumulation in cognitive capitalism func-tions (also) through the accumulation ofknowledge, of immaterial investments, ofinvention and creativity, of immaterial input.Asia more than any other continent today isan example of all this.

Some societies are now retrospectivelyconstituted into limited ‘communities’ withspecific borderlines by groups according totheir (imaginary or real) origin and thusaccording to a ‘settlers’ pattern even wherethere has been no colonisation. Suchopposed groups tend to become immunisedagainst the other. Nationalistic conflicts,disguised as ‘cultural’, are still operatingand instrumentalised politically, and areoften triggered or produced by the neweconomic trends. The cultural translation ofcitizenship, although useful, however, is notclear of some threat of essentialisation, andmay be only at the very beginning of itsredefinition under conditions of globalisa-tion in Asia. As any other concept, culturetoo is traversed by the partage of reason andcan be misused.18 Increasingly, however, acleavage is building between big cosmopoli-tan cities with a mixed population, andmore or less rural regions often speakingone language, within the world-system.This is especially the case in Asia. Theorigins of new conflicts are complex, anddifferent articulations of territory, of author-ity and of claims of rights intersect in them,often through ‘denationalizing’ ‘culturaliz-ing’ processes and institutions in order to‘renationalize’ them in new ways (Sassen2006b). Megalopolises are now probablybecoming the rule. Small towns or villages,sometimes regions and countries, that haveremained monolithically mono-linguisticand untouched by the hybridity of sharingmay well increasingly be the exception (andhave been the rule in Asia). Asia has lessand less of such spaces circumscribed bynarrow borders.

When the state abdicates its traditionalpolitical and social function through theloss of the primacy of the sovereignty para-digm (though it may remain strong in otherareas), the recourse to imagined culture,

community, nation may become all thestronger, while new agents, NGOs, transna-tional agencies, economic forces acquirenew momentum. Today, adding to these,world-scale migrations are greatly disturb-ing both the mono-cultural (national) aswell as the multi-cultural patterns. They arethe social and political movements weyet need to be able to decipher as such(Mezzadra 2007[2001]).19 Asia has more ofthose than any other continent, and theytake place within the inter-Asian space.They disrupt the monolingual situation.Multiculturalism fails in many ways today,and shows its limits, as it presupposescompact and separate cultures cohabitating.What we see developing in the big cosmo-politan cities appropriated by migrantsbeyond multiculturalism, immigrates and apartly existing shared transnational publicspace is: shared cultures that traverse andcontaminate each other. As for multicultur-alism, it has been the instrument of states,for building different degrees of ‘apartheid’,inner and outer borders, or religious groupsand for fragmenting social forces. In bigfuturistic cities such as Dubai or Shanghai(quite differently), which are a separatephenomenon, the patterns of multicultural-ism with exclusion and of hybridisationcoexist, intermingle, but do not fail toconstruct new hierarchies.

Since culture is now not seen any more asexternal to citizenship and other forms of thepolitical, we might want to ask where, froma cultural perspective, borders lie. We alreadyknow they do not reproduce territorialborders. That there is no democracy withoutborders means for us that translation isimpossible, necessary and unavoidable. Inother words, it is always imperfect. This iswhy a mistrust or caution towards identifica-tion is useful, resulting in a voluntary, strate-gic ambiguity and possibly some (but not toomuch) historic relativisation. In this sense,borders are the lines of temporary coagula-tion of applied power, without being powerdirectly: they are derived, and so are ‘identi-ties’. The political – along with inequality,borders and conflict – is ontological in thissense, as Chantal Mouffe (2005) has it. It

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‘precedes’ society. But the excess, on top of theaporia, above the division of the borders andthe absolute translation, as that which cannotbe represented – is where subjectivations aremade or miscarried, and where changeappears: through, across, in spite of identities.

The role of language

The agent(s) of change are not always identi-fiable, especially not in real time. Some recog-nisable political subjects and agenciesoperate within a ‘cultural’ agenda as politi-cal, and others that are yet difficult to identifyfor their novelty or because of their lack of alabel or of a common denominator, withinglobalisation. The latter have a lot to do withdisplaced and migrant populations, guest-workers, studying in centres of knowledgeindustries, industrial parks, cognitive-capitalism and counter-globalisation move-ments (Boutang 2006; Ong 2006; Rossiter2006; Neilson 2004). International norms,state obligations, commitments to the UN, toregional cooperation, to integrative units, toproclaimed political ideals or prevailingvalues translate and trickle down into thenational and further into the social in manycomplex ways. Translating policies (Lendvaiand Stubbs n.d., 2007), translating systems,movements, institutions, and borders is ofthe utmost importance here. There is aconstant to and fro across the borders, fromthe national to the transnational (and viceversa). In this, language plays a role. Theconcept of the mother tongue, often associ-ated with the national culture and sustainedby the state can be – and is – in many waysrepressive. There is a difference betweenglobal, local, colonial, regional languagesand levels of communication (Ivekovi[cacute]

2007b, 2007c). The global language, Englishas it is used, for example, serves (very differ-ently) different purposes in Sweden, France,China or India. In Sweden, it is the languageof international communication and it isspoken by all, though not used amongSwedes themselves. The mother tongueSwedish is therefore the intimate and modestpersonal language protected from foreigners,but never claimed on the international level,

and hardly associated with national pride.English is not felt as a challenge, but is ownedas a common human good. In France, on thecontrary, the high value of the Frenchlanguage linked to national pride reducesEnglish to a challenge and provocation to beresisted, including by the generationsof 1968. For India, on the other hand,English is the familiar international languagecombined with a local language (it is both),abstractly neutral among Indian languages,but not neutral regarding class: it is accessibleto people who have a fair secondary andhigher education. For the Chinese, whileMandarin has increasingly been globalisedand homogenising, English is the difficultbut indispensable foreign language able tobring prosperity within the globalised world.In none of these examples, except in thephobia-driven imagination of a certainFrench national-cultural configuration, isEnglish to replace any of the functions ofother local languages. It merely has theadvantage of bringing other interlocutorsinto the picture. There are other globallanguages growing from local languages(Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, etc). We may be‘lost in translation’,20 but we are even morelost without translation.21 Languages natu-rally host each other (Heller-Roazen 2005),and we learn one through another. It is theassumption of this paper that institutions(such as borders, or other), social practices,generations, and politics, are translated, andthat they can be so in more or less felicitous,more or less thorough ways. Translatingguarantees a certain social and political fluid-ity and flexibility, while the lack of translat-ing willingness usually signifies somereserve of possible violence. But the transla-tional feature of fluidity, its mobility, its tran-sitional character, does not in itself guaranteeequality, democracy or the absence ofviolence. Borders in translation are thetemporary fixing of changing circum-stances.22 But more than anything else nowa-days, borders seem to materialise around‘identities’. These appear ‘within’ when thereis no more ‘without’ (Hardt and Negri 2001).Or, identities translate the without into thewithin, in globalised times. According to

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Roberto Malighetti, identities appear like araw material reshaped through social rela-tionships, which maintains out of sight theforms of domination (Malighetti 2007). Iden-tity building takes the place of politics andproduces borders. Not only is a general dese-manticisation part of the new internationalpolitical situation and governing technolo-gies with generalised terror, unheard ofeconomic and social brutality, world-widemigrations and a network of complex assem-blages at the level of the state(s) as well as atinfra- and supra- levels, but a loss of meaningis also at its core and its source too (Ivekovi[cacute]

2007d, 2007e).Whole new transnational educational

industries, disconnected from ‘nationaleducation’, sometimes from state andnational languages, and from single states,have come into being. They do not repro-duce national elites any more, or not exclu-sively; they produce transnational ones. Youcan study medicine in Budapest in Hungar-ian, German or English under competitivecircumstances for an international career,you can be a foreign student with a veryattractive grant for high-tech studies or afamous foreign academic at the world globaluniversity in Singapore with so many privi-leges, or you can prepare a top international(as well as local) profession in a centre ofexcellence at a leading Malaysian or Indianuniversity. You can be one of the world’sbest mathematicians hired from abroad togive a one month course to the best Chinesepostgraduates at Tianjin, preparing them forthe upcoming local maths internationalconference in which they will take part. Oryou can be a Croatian expatriate faculty inHong Kong, stranded there after thedismantlement of Yugoslavia. On the otherhand, other niche temporalities and alterna-tive sub-citizenships will be created for themigrant workers or women – underpaidand no-rights no-benefit workers in thosesame places. The future labour force is inthis way (re)produced starting from thebasic invention force or knowledge force,which are also new categories that have tobe introduced right at the heart of our oldcategories (an updating of Marx’s concept of

abstract labour). Contemporary capitalismendeavours to capture new forms of collec-tive intelligence (beyond Gramsci’s collec-tive or organic intellectual, referring mainlyto the party [Gramsci 1991, 1996, 2007]).

Translation: a new political economy

A new political economy is needed, beyondmere divisions of labour and beyond prop-erty status, as it was conceived at the time ofindustrial capitalism. It needs to capturedivisions in the mind as well, but more thananything else, it needs to capture the coop-eration of minds in networks. Capital(ism)uses the networks and brain cooperation ofits workers, i.e. intellectual cooperation byenhancing sharing and interaction. It is soft/hard, it is material/immaterial. New formsof institutions are in the making (Rossiter2006). Cooperation is a basic form here, andit involves culture, organising, institutingtoo. It involves patterns and paradigms andit is not all material, though it is material asbrains and physical bodies of the workers.But it goes beyond the classical division oflabour into complex networks spread inspace, time, and migration over borders anddimensions (‘endimions’ – Rushdie 1975).‘Between hierarchy and the market, thenetwork appears as the cognitive form ofdivision of labour’, says Yann MoulierBoutang (2006: 95). It is not merely that apiece of knowledge is a good, a merchan-dise; it is the way knowledge and informa-tion are intertwined, organised, the waythey are transmitted. Classical politicaleconomy did not deal with this, and itneglects the borders in time, including care(which allows it not to take into accountexternalities: colonialism is a typical case).In ‘care’ we not have only classically thework of women, we also have huge aspectsof migration changing the face of capitalism:care work is done in the mirates by overqual-ified Indians or Pakistanis (thus benchingfor better jobs), in Italy by Ukrainian womentoday but by Philippino families untilrecently and Eritrean house help womenearlier; likewise elsewhere in the West. Thisliberates other workers for other types of

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work at other times, often women again asin the Philippines or Malaysia, but notexclusively. Chinese au pair girls or teachersdo care work in US families who anticipatethe future through bringing up their chil-dren in Chinese.

The patterns of selection, exception andexclusion of Modernity, which posit thesubject as an ‘autonomous’ figure specularand complementary of (state) sovereigntywhile referring it to the hegemonically domi-nant model have not altogether disappearedtoday. They are merging and mutating into,and coextensive with, configurations ofmultiple power vectors within non-transpar-ent networks of blurred and crossed hierar-chies with novel and maybe more volatileforms of production, of integration and ofinstitution, where again, although in acompletely new way, collective action, thesharing and federation of knowledge tran-scend individual subjectivity while reachingout to both old and new forms of association.

Acknowledgement

The present article draws, besides my otherwork, on papers given at two conferences:‘Translating borders’, at the Social ScienceResearch Council’s Inter-Asian ConnectionsConference, Dubai, 2008 (workshop: ‘BorderProblems: Theory, Culture, and PoliticalEconomy’, wonderfully organised by DavidLudden, Julie Mostov and Dina Siddiqi),and ‘Subjectivation, translation and thebifurcation of Modernity’, given at the Inter-national Conference at the National ChiaoTung University, Hsin Chu, Taiwan, on‘Biopolitics, Ethics, and Subjectivation:Questions on Modernity’, June 24–28, 2009. Ithank the organisers of both conferences forgiving me the opportunity to present mywork and, as for the second one, i thank inparticular Joyce C.H. Liu, Yuan-Horng Chuand Kuan-Hsing Chen for a long term faith-ful collaboration.

Notes

1. I have been trying to call myself ‘i’ and not ‘I’ fortwo basic reasons: one is that the capital letter of

putting oneself above the ‘you’ or ‘they’ looks soexaggerated and self-centered and in keepingwith an assertive subject. The other is the lessonlearnt and the fact that i have an intellectual debtto Asian philosophies which avoid any empha-sis on the ‘I’, the subject, or the prevalence ofoneself over others. In some languages it is evenrude to over-use the first person singular of thepersonal pronoun.

2. [Ccaron] edomil Velja[ccaron] i[cacute] , alias Bhikkhu Ñânajîvako(1915–1997), was a philosopher at university inthe former Yugoslavia before he retired to SriLanka as a Buddhist monk. He is the author or anumber of important studies on Asian philoso-phies, mainly Indian, and on comparativephilosophy, which he took for granted. We alsoco-authored one book. Most of his work waspublished in Serbo-Croatian, some of it inEnglish, and some in German.

3. See Bhikkhu Ñânajîvako (1970, 1983) and[Ccaron] edomil Velja[ccaron] i[cacute] (1958, 1978, 1982), as well asother books by the same author, Bhikkhu Ñâna-jîvako being Velja[ccaron] i[cacute] ’s Buddhist monk’s pseud-onym. An incomplete but fairly abundantbibliography in different languages can befound on: http://www.yu-budizam.com/texts/veljacic/bibliografija.html.

4. I have been driven to and by translationthrough the fact that i worked on ‘Indian’philosophy, but also content-wise, by Buddhiststudies and Buddhist linguistic scepticism. Thecircumstances of life made it so that i havealways had to mediate between severallanguages and cultures as scholar, teacher andeditor in the former Yugoslavia and in France,that i was also thematically interested inlanguage and translation theories, and over thepast almost two decades, that i have been onthe editorial board of Transeuropéennes(www.transeuropeennes.org), a multilanguagejournal of critical thought.

5. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have beencalling the ‘method itself a border’, which hasthe advantage of underscoring the uncertaintyof any positive knowledge; it also has the advan-tage of stressing the impermanence, the indeci-sive and provisional character of the parallelsequences of contents/objects of knowledge onthe one hand, and of the knowing or learningprocess itself. It is also critical and deconstruc-tive of ‘method’ as such, which may in itself bewelcome. But borders do not seem a method tome, though i can see how they can influence one.When saying that borders are a method, weprobably mean that they are a metaphor. Weneed a ‘method’, indeed, showing that bordersoperate also in our minds, not only in the thingsout there our thoughts refer to. This is precisely

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the reason why Mezzadra and Neilson want touse the same term for both (Neilson and Mezza-dra n.d.). We really need a philosophy of theborders that explains how they operate startingfrom reason and the mechanisms of thinking.This philosophy is that of the partage of reason(Ivekovi[cacute] 2007a).

6. In Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra’s paper‘Borderscapes of differential inclusion’ (2010) aswell as in his accompanying mail to me on May9, 2009 on differential inclusion and their paper.

7. A ‘hierarchy’ is coherent within its own scaledlogic. By calling a hierarchy ‘coherent’, i am notexpressing a judgement of value, at least not atthis point: i am describing.

8. Some inequalities (but not all) end up as historicinjustices – we can help compensate for these tosome extent.

9. At the time of writing this piece, i was not awareof the many coincidences between my work andthat of Kuan-Hsing Chen, whom i read onlylater.

10. Partage de la raison: i have developed this notionin much of my published and still unpublishedwork over the past years in several languages,although mainly in French (Ivekovi[cacute] 2005b,2006, 2007a).

11. The authors rightly insist on the multiple geneal-ogies of the concept, which is in any case one ofthe fundamentals in feminist theories. AihwaOng too, on the other hand, through her obser-vation of ‘flexible citizenships’, deals with it(Ong 1999).

12. See Bartolomé Clavero (2005), and other writingby this author. Also see R. Samaddar (2005); andsee the whole issue of the journal Diogène dedi-cated to ‘Conflicts and constitutions’.

13. Neti – neti, ‘not that – not that’, Sanskrit, is a wellknown saying appearing in several of the classicalUpanishads to disclaim any possible particularidentification to the self, atman, as well as tosuggest on the side and as a corollary, the absenceof any substance, or importance, to the ego.

14. See Sakai’s work in general, as well as Sakai andJon Solomon (2006, 2007), and Solomon (2007).

15. For Héritier, there is no doubt about this.16. The insistence on reducing politics to ethics

which takes place in a lot of English languagephilosophy, the switching from a vocabulary ofstate sovereignty to that of governmentality andbiopolitics, all serve the purpose of depoliticis-ing the other and are unable to account for thepolitical, i.e. for the partage de la raison. Whenthe language of sovereignty is replaced by thatof governmentality, the two are usuallyconstructed into a sequence and the two para-digms are generally made incompatible, whichthey are not. The two coexist even today, and the

two patterns traverse each other, in the sameway Modernity and Post-Modernity and globali-sation do.

17. My concept (R.I.) appearing in my French writ-ing (citoyens manquants) (Ivekovi[cacute] forthcoming)and constructed in analogy to the Indian socio-logical concept of missing women (Sen 1990).When you name a category, you make it visible.Missing citizens (missing to Europe in particu-lar, besides missing to themselves) are all thosemigrants and refugees who lost their lives intrying to reach Europe. You could also count asmissing citizens in a larger sense all those who,although present on a territory, are eitherdeprived of their rights or do not exercise themfor different reasons.

18. Dongchao Min shows good Chinese languageexamples of such utilisation of concepts in herpaper ‘Translation as Crossing Borders. A CaseStudy of the Translations of the Word “Feminism”into Chinese by the CSWS’ (Min 2007).

19. See also Mezzadra’s other writings.20. The movie by Sophia Coppola.21. Professor Dongchao Min at the University of

Shanghai, said this at a conference in Paris in2007; see her paper ‘Translation as CrossingBorders. A Case Study of the Translations of theWord “Feminism” into Chinese by the CSWS’(Min 2007).

22. See papers by Jon Solomon (2007) and by SandroMezzadra (2007).

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Author’s biography

Rada Ivekovi[cacute] is a philosophy professor at theUniversity of St. Etienne, and Programme Direc-tor at the Collège international de philosophie,Paris, France; she is a member of the scholars’network TERRA: http://www.reseau-terra.eu/article783.html.

Contact address: 10 rue Alexandre Dumas, 75011-Paris, France.

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