1
Freedom, Possibility and Ontology – Rethinking the problem
of ‘competitive ascent’ in the Caribbean
Abstract
Under contemporary pressures of globalization CARICOM seems threatened by
increasing global and regional insecurity, vulnerability and marginalization as they are
seemingly once again carried across another middle passage rite in the turbulent waves of
a neo-liberal globalization. How can the region find safe passage in this contemporary
cross roads marking yet another chapter in their struggle for ‘survival and beyond’? What
are the imperatives for successfully navigating globalization, or negotiating, a space –if
there is little to none- in order to cross-over? Do contemporary analysis and policies for
regional development provide an improved or even relevant basis for small and
vulnerable states to achieve competitiveness? What exactly are the preconditions for
CARICOM’s success? In this paper I explore these questions and point towards elements
of an answer, which prioritizes analyses about ontology, through a critical engagement of
some of the existing approaches to these issues.
In particular, I argue that the current perspectives for competitiveness are either still
rooted on positivistic modernization theories of development as the sine qua non for
sustaining competitive performance in small states and/or they continue to bypass
systematic analysis, and related empirical examination, of the first order political and
social ontological conditions (inclusive of social structural, institutional and social
capital states) for strategic transformation or regional competitive ascent. That is, there is
a failure to substantively explore the complex ontological structuring of power or the
“state of the ‘State’” in Creole Caribbean societies’ and correspondingly a failure to
provide analyses (local and comparative) capable of helping one to elicit a better grasp of
the complex forces shaping/challenging the ‘state of’ dynamically and complexly
constituted but still plantation embedded ‘states’ and ‘creole societies’. Yet, without this
research and analysis on the ‘ontology of creole power’ there is little to act as a basis for
cogently articulating on the region’s States’ transformational or emancipatory
‘necessities’ and the possibilities to sustain local or regional success.
In either case, the theoretical, methodological and empirical limits of existing analysis on
the possibilities and processes for development in the region perpetuate an insidious bias
against endogenous social transformation, by continuing to ignore the lessons from the
enduring Bestian observations on the complexity of Caribbean ontology- emergent from
unique yet systemic ‘global and local’, structural and institutional’ ‘plantation and post
colonial’ ‘processes and forces’- and his related critiques of Caribbean’s epistemology.
Moreover, by continuing to fail to integrate critical observations on the nuanced character
and strengths (or weaknesses) of Caribbean creolity - culture, society, polity, economyinto ‘adjustment’ and ‘adaptation’ paradigms and strategies for ‘ascent’, these current
approaches and paradigms for ‘competitive success’ threaten to leave the rich depth of
the Caribbean’s’ potentials and values in a state of endogenous peripherilization, despite
the recurrent rhetorical praise for the creative spirit and ethic of the peoples’ of the
region.
2
2004 Annual Conference of the
International Association for Critical
Realism (IACR): University of
Cambrige - Girton College
15th – 19th , August 2004.
Workshop and Conference Theme:
Theorising Ontology
Freedom, Possibility and Ontology –
Rethinking the problem of ‘competitive
ascent’ in the Caribbean
Dr. Patricia Northover
University of the West Indies- Mona
Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies
Kingston Jamaica
Email- patricia.northover@uwimona.edu.jm
2004© Not to be quoted without author’s permission.
3
Freedom, Possibility and Ontology – Rethinking the problem
of ‘competitive ascent’ in the Caribbean
Introduction:
Under contemporary pressures of globalization the Caribbean Community (CARICOM)1
seems threatened by increasing global and regional insecurity, vulnerability and
marginalization as they are seemingly once again carried across another middle passage
rite in the turbulent waves of a neo-liberal globalization. How can the region find safe
passage in this contemporary cross roads marking yet another chapter in their struggle for
‘survival and beyond’? What are the imperatives for successfully navigating
globalization, or negotiating, a space –if there is little to none- in order to cross-over? Do
contemporary analysis and policies for regional development provide an improved or
even relevant basis for small and vulnerable states to achieve competitiveness? What
exactly are the preconditions for CARICOM’s success? In this paper I explore these
questions and point towards elements of an answer, which prioritizes analyses about
ontology, through a critical engagement of some of the existing approaches to these
issues.
In particular, I argue that the current perspectives for competitiveness are either
still rooted on positivistic modernization theories of development as the sine qua non for
sustaining competitive performance in small states and/or
they continue to bypass
systematic analysis, and related empirical examination, of the first order political and
social ontological
1
conditions (inclusive of social structural, institutional and social
The CARICOM member states are Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Dominica, St. Lucia,
St.Vincent, Grenada, Bahamas, Haiti, Guyana, St. Kitts/Nevis, Antigua, Suriname, Belize. It represents 14
million people and has an aggregate GDP of approximately US $ 21 billion (1998).
4
capital states) for strategic transformation or regional competitive ascent. That is, there is
a failure to substantively explore the complex ontological structuring of power or the
“state of the ‘state’” in creole Caribbean societies’ and correspondingly a failure to
provide analyses (local and comparative) capable of helping one to elicit a better grasp of
the complex forces shaping/challenging the ‘state of’ dynamically and complexly
constituted but still plantation embedded ‘states’ and ‘creole societies’2. Yet, without this
research and analysis on the ‘ontology and dynamics of creole power’ there is little to
act as a basis for cogently articulating on the region’s states’ transformational or
‘emancipatory necessities’ and the possibilities to sustain local or regional success.
Section 1: Conditions of possibility for ‘achieving ascent’ in the Caribbean?
The countries of CARICOM have experienced complex and diversified social histories
which have been shaped by divergent geographies and geopolitics. These histories and
geographies have led to variegated processes of socio-economic change, reflected in the
patterns of economic structure and performance, with some states regarded as “out
performing” others, but all today remain, by and large, vulnerable small states, see
We wish to adopt the concept of ‘creole’ to bring attention to the dynamic ambiguity and dialectic
embedded in ‘species being’ in the Caribbean world. Thus, as Stewart (1999) notes, ‘creole’ has a double
meaning as it has been used to refer to both a racialised objectification process and to the emergent
‘syncretic’ creative outcomes from processes of social relationships of persons in the world, see Charles
Stewart, 1999, “ Syncretism and its synonyms: reflections on cultural mixture,” in Diacritics, 29:3, 40-62.
We thus use the term here to flag that given these contradictions and ambiguities of “creole being in the
Caribbean”, there is a ongoing dialectic- a discursive process that is driven by human subjects seeking to
investigate the truth of opinions about their being in the world, or to engage in an enquiry, whether
verbalized or not, into their metaphysical contradictions and possible solution strategies. Such a process
may be construed as a process of “dialectical creolization” which is manifested in the states of evolving
consciousness and cultures engendered by the subjects who are constrained/enabled by their complexly
structured being in the world. Moreover this dialectical process is only possible because, the human exists
or is imagined as a ‘species being’ . Here we draw on Marx (1844) in his Economic and Political
Manuscripts where he commented that “ man is a species being, not only because he practically and
theoretically makes the species- both his own and those of other things—his object, but also—and this is
simply another way of saying the same thing—because he looks upon himself as the present , living
species, because he looks upon himself as a universal and therefore free being.”
2
5
Appendix Table 1.3 Furthermore, all face increasing insecurity at the national, regional
and global level given the complex socio-economic, environmental and political effects
of globalization processes,4 deepening vulnerability as small or small island developing
states 5 and threatened marginalization in the competitive circuits of global capital.6
The Caribbean Regional Negotiation Machinery (CRNM) sets itself the complex
task of seeking to manage ‘reciprocity’ in the ‘cross currents of globalization and
regionalization’, in order to facilitate ‘strategic global repositioning’ for the competitive
viability of its members7.
The Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), the
other partner in navigating and negotiating space, is required to execute strategic
economic ‘repositioning’ to enable the exploitation of the ‘spaces of possibility’ being
politically negotiated to facilitate the pursuit of competitiveness. But what are the
regional and/or national socio-political constraints and conditions of possibility for
‘achieving ascent in the next century’?
Roughly, two broad types of argument on the ‘conditions of possibility’ or
‘necessary social and institutional forms and processes’ for ‘achieving ascent’, can be
detected in the Caribbean development literature. They are either:
3
For an overview of the economic performance trends of the CARICOM Caribbean countries under
globalization , see ECLAC (2002) Globalization and Development, Chapter 11.
4
See Ivelaw Griffiths( 1997) Drugs and Security in the Caribbean: Sovereignty Under Siege (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press; Ivelaw Griffiths (ed.) (2004) Caribbean Security in the Age of
Terror: Challenge and Change. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers.
5
See Jose Ocampo (2002) “Small economies in the face of globalization.”
http://www.revistainterforum.com/english/articles/052702arteco_en.html ;
UWICED (2001) “Vulnerability and Small Island states” in Development Policy Journal, Vol 1,
www.undp.org/wssd/docs/BDP_Policy_Journal_Vol_1.pdf; and R. Ramsaran ed.(2002), Caribbean
Survival and the Global challenge, Kingston: Ian Randle Press.
6
See ECLAC, Foreign Investment in Latin America and the Caribbean. 2003 Report
http://www.eclac.cl/
7
Richard Bernal , (2003), ‘The Caribbean’s future is not what it was” in Social and Economic Studies,
Vol. 52, Bo. 1, March, pp. 185-217.
6
(A) Prescriptive arguments for national and/or ‘Supra-national’ ‘State autonomy’, the
latter premised on political union within the CSME, as necessary institutional forms, for
enabling ascent as ‘modernized capitalism’; or
(B) Pragmatic arguments seeking out more intrinsic or organic and actually embedded
institutional ‘design and development’ solutions, for enabling cooperative beneficial
actions within broad cultural systems, and hence ascent as ‘participatory Caribbean
Creole development’.
The first perspective expresses a vision of
an essentially top-down national
and/or regional ‘Developmental State’, (albeit somehow ‘embedded’), that is strategically
engaged in the political engineering of the conditions for modern economic change, viz
modern industrialization, whether manufacturing or agricultural ( or both) based, (see
Marshall 1998; Karagiannis 2002; Karagiannis and Alleyne 2003). This approach
basically relies on a form of aprioristic reasoning that offers to deductively generalize
possibilities given premises of
institutional
development ‘laws’ that have been
abstracted as the conditions for success . In this case, we have that the implied ‘law’ that
–strong states with (somehow) embedded autonomy, (somehow) effect the right mixture
of repression and incentives, and thereby produce the trajectory of ‘ascent’.
The second perspective points to a need to cultivate processes engendering
potent perspectives on Caribbean ‘identity’, regional ideology, cultural forms and
distinctive political, socio-economic and moral institutions, anchored in broad and narrow
social capitals, that will sustain local endogenous transformation processes, (see Boxill
1997; Nettleford, 1997, 2003; Hall, 2001; Thomas 2001, 2003). This in turn is expected
to continuously spill over into the building of a Caribbean creole regional ideology and
7
regional development process. The tendency in this approach is thus to try to focus on
social, socio-economic and cultural conditions and the related empowerment issues
required for achieving ascent in the form of an embedded, or creole Caribbean, equitable
and competitive development. The second perspective supports a more a posteriori
approach and thus tends to call attention to the issues of particular social and/or cultural
histories, shaping distinctive paths to national and regional development. But what is the
relationship between, the society, economy and the State, that is implied in this
envisioning of ‘creatively ‘achieving ascent’ under contemporary globalization? If a
recognition within the pragmatic approach, is that a fundamental condition for the
viability of the Caribbean State in a global capitalist system, is its subversion of the
paradox of modernization through its own paradox of creative engagement, then, the
practical political questions to be addressed for this approach are these: Can such
desirable outcomes be achieved without a State acting, strategically, and not merely
functionally, to enhance domestic capabilities’, through specific political processes? And,
what is the nature of the concrete political processes or dynamics shaping this unfolding
potential for the emergence of an emancipatory creole social power?
Silence on these questions would support a tendency to a functionalist political
agnosticism on the strategic role of the State, which we argue would hinder the
subversive and transformational interests of the specific social powers of groups which
have been at the root of the subversions of the paradox of modernization via their
creativities. The imperative here in order to support the theme of social or cultural
empowerment in the pragmatic approach is thus to pursue an investigation of the nature
of the ongoing political processes shaping the ‘State of the State” and hence the potentials
8
and probabilities for emergent Caribbean Creole social powers and state capabilities.
Developing a specific understanding of creole political processes would lead us to
analytically and empirically probe State, society, economy relationships in order to better
understand the basis for a transformational relationship to be forged between the State
and society in the making of history.8 This would help one to determine the possibilities
for a strategizing State acting to linking and building ‘social capital’ for Caribbean creole
and regional development9.
Thomas (1972, 1984a, 1984b, 1988), provides a Marxian, Institutional Political
economy, variation on the pragmatic arguments for ‘ascent’. Thomas introduces explicit
analysis on the form of the political processes and the imperatives for their strategic
direction given the examination of the socio-economic history of plantation systems.
However, he derives prescriptions for social transformation on an aprioristic class reading
of the State’s political strategies for creole development or ‘social capital’ linking,
building and restricting strategies. Later, Thomas (2001, 2003) shifts track in his
approach for a suitable political economy , in an attempt to “ elaborate on the meaning
and content of political democracy, the state… as well as state-civil society relations [in
order to allow for] … relaxing the [earlier] assumptions in regard to political and social
8
This view above is analytically linked with discussions that focus on the relationship between social
capital, civil society and the state, stimulated by Robert Putman’s (1992), Making Democracy Work: Civic
Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, however this idea can be pursed in many
methodologically dissimilar ways which can make all the difference to the depth of the analysis.
9
The social capital literature is blooming, with various treatments of this concept, see Baron et al (2000),
Social capital: Critical perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press and for a discussion of the role of
social capital in the relationship between the state and society , see Peter Evans, (1996), “Government
Action, Social Capital and development: Reviewing the Evidence on Synergy”, World Development,
Vol.24, No. 6, pp. 1119-1132.
9
conditions”10. In so doing Thomas is led to call for “ the needs of the household …[ to be
translated] into a priority claim of household rights on the economic production and
growth of the region,11” which takes him to “ the creation of framework within which to
locate social policy as development”12. In this framework, “the overall objective of
social policy is described as: the creation of more secure and functional social relations (
or as it is also termed social capital); these relations (social capital) would enlarge the
capability of the population, both men and women ( and in particular the poor and
vulnerable groups), in meeting their own needs and interests through effective
participation in the activities of the four central institutions of society: state, market,
community and household.”13 These developments in Thomas’ ideas are certainly to be
welcomed, however the issues of the nature of the relationship between “Power and its
subjects” have been recessed into the background, in preference to a more technical
approach to the process of history making in the region. However to progress beyond
identifying the need for “effective participation”, we suggest that what is inescapable is a
return to analytical and empirical research on the ‘ontology and dynamics of creole
power’ in the Caribbean, in the absence of which one is left with too little to either
strategically identify or impact upon the region’s states’ transformational or emancipatory
‘necessities’ and its possibilities to sustain local or regional success.
Now, while issues of ‘power’ seem more fore grounded in the first perspective
given the ostensive linking state and society in attempting to grasp the basis for
Clive Thomas (2001) “On reconstructing a political economy of the Caribbean” , in B. Meeks and F.
Lindahl, (eds) New Caribbean Thought : A Reader, Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago:
University of the West Indies Press, p.507 [my inserts]
11
Ibid, p515
12
Clive Thomas, (2003), “Designing and Implementing Development Policy” in K. Hall and D. Benn (eds),
Governance in an age of Globalization: Caribbean perspectives, Kingston: Ian Randle press, p.133.
13
ibid, p 135-6.
10
10
transformational processes, it relies on an, ultimately deterministic and ‘aprioristic’
reasoning reflecting an inadequate attention to the nature of the ( socio-cultural and
political) creolization’ processes entailed by them. Processes germane to
past
institutional development possibilities are accordingly either assumed not to causally
matter much for extrapolating this institutional policy formula for success, and the
relevant mix of repression and freedom associated with embedded autonomy, is
apparently to be determined through class categories, or is left as an unexamined sociopolitical process, that may somehow produce the right outcomes. More generally, despite
the fact that modern capitalist states are undoubtedly ‘doubly embedded’ in global and
local social structural processes, this approach’s analysis of the requirements for states
seeking viability of general capitalist structural reproduction within the circuits of global
competitive capital, glosses over the ways in which generic real interests acting on the
state are translated into particular real interests, whose form of political expression is
constantly being negotiated with local social groups given that its pursued interests must
command/attract a level of legitimacy and public trust, see Migdal (2001).
Yet these constraints on the ways that state’s concretely work out particular
interests, or specific forms of embedded autonomy, as shaped by particular creole
processes at the local level, in turn act to shape the ‘state of the state’, social capabilities
and consequently the technological dynamism in the society. The outcomes of these
political processes furthermore cannot be read deterministically. Overall, the presence of
a tendency to aprioristic reasoning leads to several weakness in this approach as a guide
to development policy: First, insufficient depth of empirical analysis, as seen for example
in the absence of a study of the processes and forms of Caribbean creole empowerments
11
and ‘governmentalities’, means that there is little to substantiate and guide the ‘how’ of
politically acting
for the claimed transformational ‘necessities’ to sustain local or
regional success. Second, it reinforces weak historical and political positions, which
support a tendency to be silent on political economy tendencies emergent from
industrialization patterns in small states that pursue scale and capital intensive models of
modernization and industrial development, as for example manifested in industrial
organization structure, concentration and endogenous capability development14. Third,
there is a tendency to gloss over contextual, organizational and geographical constraints
that mediate the specific types of industrial development strategies that may be
sustainably pursued15. Fourth, there is a tendency to oscillate between deterministic
pessimism on the weakness of existing states and an unjustifiable optimism that such
weak states can execute the ‘developmental state’ project prescribed, given the penchant
for ‘aprioristic’ reasoning again reflecting an inadequate attention to the nature of
processes of social development. Finally, it encourages
ignoring
the
different
developmental trajectories and the nuanced strategic ‘social or cultural policy’
implications arising from substantive social history differences that shape the concrete
dynamics in the political processes of ‘working out’ the ‘embedding’ of the state.
On the whole then, both perspectives are insufficient for formulating an approach
to regional ascent because of inadequate methodological bases for the analysis of
processes of social development, which in turn engenders, a failure to sufficiently
As exemplified in the case of Singapore as critically commented on by Daniel Lian (2000) “Singapore
Inc.- New economy patron or old economy saint?” www.singapore-window.org/sw00/000605ms.htm
15
See, for example, Martin Bell and Keith Pavitt (1993) “Technological Accumulation and Industrial
Growth: Contrasts between Developed and Developing countries”, Industrial and Corporate Change, Vol.
2, No 2, pp157-210; and Winston Griffiths (1987) “Can CARICOM Countries replicate the Singapore
experience” The Journal of Development Studies, Vol 24, No 1, pp 60-82.
14
12
concretely examine and analyze the institutional and socio- political ‘how possible’
process and agency conditions for producing and shaping the probabilities for ascent. To
address these limitations, we argue that only a thorough escape from, or absence of, the
overarching and complex paradigm of modernization in ‘development discourses’, plus
the presence of more adequate analytical and philosophical frameworks will enable a
better or fuller understanding of the relationship between “power and its subjects” which
we contend is a prerequisite for a better grasp of historical processes and possibilities. In
this regard, we further argue that contestations over ‘rural space/place and identity’
provide a pivotal lens into these processes of formation and (contingent) transformation
of
the relationship between ‘power and its subjects’ given the centrality of ‘rural
othering’ under modernization. As such, we put forward that both processes of, and
contestations over, ‘rural othering’ will sharply impact on the experiences of, and
tendencies in, the politics of identity in post-colonial state systems, which consequently
impact on the state of the ‘State system in society’ and on the experiences of ‘crises’
facing the Caribbean people in the world.
We illustrate the latter point by highlighting how struggles negotiating political
identity, - the legitimacy of certain states of ‘subject-other’ identities or social and
cultural orders defining ‘sacred beings in the world’-, are implicated in rural development
policy and experiences, and we further emphasize how the recent impasse at the WTOCancun ministerial, and its set of constraints are particularly important to the future of
the post-colonial ‘State systems in social life worlds’ and to the unfolding future of
modernity/post-modernity .
13
We try to overcome the aforementioned analytical deficiencies by suggesting a
model for grasping the ontology and dynamics of powers in our modern societies. This
model helps to bring into relief the role that constructions of ‘rurality’ play in shaping
the future of modern state systems, modernity and the possibilities of different and more
empowering human experiences under contemporary globalization. In the next section,
we develop our arguments for our model by moving through a brief critical review of
recent discussions examining the nature of the relationship between the state, society and
history.
Section 2: ‘Imagining State systems’: Critical reflections and New Directions
Recent approaches seeking to understand the processes and politics of development and
change, reflect divergent views on the State’s significance to history making and have
varied conceptualizations of its mode of articulation with society. The strengths and
limits of these efforts however seem correlated with the extent to which they have
effectively redressed the weaknesses in the perspectives on the State that have been
developed out of the modernization paradigm. One approach in particular that represents
an effort to pull together the most important contributions on thinking about the state –
society relationship is Migdal’s (2001) “State in Society” approach16. We believe our
approach represents and advance on this and also escapes the modernization paradigm.
We begin the discussion with a brief look at the dominant paradigm’s treatment of the
issue of the state-society-history relationship drawing on the discussion in Migdal (2001)
and then introduce our model of the relation between “ Power and its Subjects” via a
critical examination of the limits still present in Migdal’s ‘State in Society’ model.
16
Joel Migdal (2001), State in Society: Studying how States and Societies Transform and Constitute one
another, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
14
In Migdal’s (2001) discussion of the dominant modernization perspective
informing the study of development and change, he notes that the accomplishment of
modernization has been constantly associated with the presence of a Modern Nation State
(MNS), which may function as either effect or cause in this process. In the first case, if a
retrospective view is taken of the modernization process, which is interpreted as a
movement from traditional to modern social systems, then the MNS emerges as an
effect, a resultant flowing from the linear trajectory of increasing specialization or
societal differentiation. That is, this differentiation process is held to lead to the growth of
increasingly specialized authority, culminating in centralized authority which is in the
form of the MNS. This resultant State formation is interpreted as a bureaucratic
organization that functions to guarantee the reproduction of the social equilibrium. In this
story then there is no role for the State in the process itself, that is, the State is not an
‘actor’ in this story but a spectator that comes in at the end of a finished process. In this
story, there is also no theory of the relationship between these two states, namely the
initial condition of traditional society and the equilibrium condition of modern society, at
best, one has “ a hazy image of interlocking authoritative institutions in the modern
sector”17 that somehow facilitated the building and binding of the modern social whole.
Thus, in this story, the ontology and dynamics of power within processes have been
neatly bracketed in favor of a sanitized discussion of the emergence of modern change.
This silence on political processes18 was dramatically lifted in the late 1960’s
when the State gets its first stage call as an actor, capable of leading a process of
17
Ibid, p. 199.
Indeed, as Migdal (2001) emphasizes, in early structural functionalist and evolutionist theories of modern
change discourse of something called a State had not yet emerged, rather notions of the political system
prevailed.
18
15
modernization.19 This was made possible through the rise of US foreign policy and
through the ‘development theory’ discourses which are concerned to move backward
societies or economies forward to their modern destiny.20 In introducing the State as
actor, these modernization orientated development discourses tended to rely on the
Weberian tradition of defining the State as a bureaucratic organization with a monopoly
over legitimate violence, and with a modus operandi of bureaucratized scientific
rationality. The effect of this characterization is to contain and concentrate power within
the institutionalized bounds of the MNS and thus restrict an analysis of power to this
organization’s ontology and its managerial dynamics for executing power. With the
ontology and dynamics of power neatly packed into the MNS, the State is then
represented as the locus of authority and power in the modern society and world. The
MNS is constructed as the center for the acting of the modern subject, the author of
modern change.
Unsurprisingly then, given this scripted entrance onto the modern world stage, the
MNS, quickly assumes, at least on stage, its authorship over the process of modern
history making, submerging all history into The History of The acting subject, The critical
prime mover in society and mover of society, which for its part is now to be ‘represented’,
acted upon, and trans-formed by the holder of Modern Subject- Sovereignty, the MNS.
It should be noted here that the State had really been making its way on the stage from the early 60’s as
Parsons, a lead thinker in this school of thought had by the early 60’s changed his mind on the role of the
state in the modernization story according it a major role in his theoretical framework, see Bertrand Badie
and Arthur Goldhammer (1983), The Sociology of the State, Chicago and London: Chicago University
Press, chapter 2.
19
20
See Gilbert Rist, (1997), The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith. London
and New York : Zed Books, and Colin Leys, (1996), The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, Nairobi:
EAEP, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press and Oxford: James Curry.
16
With the emergence of this new overarching historical subject, whose capabilities are
problematized by Huntington (1968)21 and reified in Skocpol (1985)22, other ontologies
of power and their dynamics and hence their relationship with the States and its attributed
powers, are again bracketed, and this particular version of a truncated analysis of power
comes to dominate the discussions23. However, as
Scott (1998)24 has argued, this
“imagining of the state” has prompted numerous historical interventions into social life
which have produced perverse divergence effects rather than the expected convergence to
the ‘good life’ identified with Western modernity. In abstracting power in this way, and
in this ‘imagining’ of the State, the way was thus prepared for both the crafting of sterile
dichotomies along old analytical axis of centre- periphery and subjects- objects, and the
engendering of critical dissent, in theory and practice.
In particular in abstracting power in this way, first by pursuing a reductive
compression of power into an institutional or organizational phenomena and second by
creating a discourse around a singular transcendental meaningful subject, [bracketing the
social bodies that animate this state formation], the effect is to freeze analysis into causal
dichotomies. Accordingly, both analysis and history, are deductively read from a thing’s
position in the dichotomous causal relation. For example, from the equation
core=subject=State and periphery=other/object=society we engender the State/society
21
Samuel Huntington, ( 1968) Political Order in Changing societies, New haven CT: Yale University
Press.
22
Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds), (1985), Bringing the State back in,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23
This approach to the state-society seems paralleled in the top-down approaches to Caribbean ascent
discussed in section 1. However, following Huntington existing state capabilities are problematized hence
the question shifts to the conditions argued to be necessary for Strong states, in which autonomy is one of
the elements. This problem focus has supported a tendency to discuss the problem of the state-society
relationship in terms of the need to push through the relative autonomy or enlightened hegemony by some
elite group identified as responsible for social change.
24
James Scott (1998) “Seeing like a State: How certain schemes to improve the Human Condition have
failed.” New haven and London: Yale University Press
17
dichotomy and the image of verticality which is interpreted as the State being ‘outside’
and ‘above’ society. 25 This equation seems to have driven the so called ‘State-centric’
realist approaches, exemplified in Skocpol et al (1985), but this work of course follows
Hegel’s and Weber’s leads in imagining power.
Criticisms of the above have focalized around this analytical dichotomy with its
implied separations between the state, society and culture, and its gifting of the State with
autonomous history making powers, in virtue of its claimed ‘autonomy’. Against these
dichotomies a set of counter-arguments, with ‘revolutionary potential’ against these
‘imagined powers’ encoded in the MNS, are dialectically called out. Thus, for example,
one has Geertz’s inversion of the dependent relations in the basic equations above and
so we are provided with the perspective of ‘Power serving Pomp’ 26; or more radically,
one has the collapse of the State into Civil society through an emphasis on the historical
evolution of rules;27 or the ordering powers ascribed to the State become ‘State effects’,
an appearance or spontaneous illusion, produced because of the pervasive extension of
Focauldian disciplinary technologies or governmentalities of which the State is but a
part, rather than apart, standing above like some reified structure;
28
or the ordering
powers of the State become complicated by powerful societies which produce weak
states;29 or by class struggle in wars of position to establish hegemony30.
This concept of ‘verticality” was adopted in James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, “Spatializing States:
Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality,” American Ethnologist, 29, 4, (November 2002), p
982.
26
Geertz….
27
Denis, Navari
28
Timothy Mitchell (1991), The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist approaches and their critics’, American
Political Science Review, (85:1) pp 77-96.
29
Migdal
30
Gramsci
25
18
Migdal’s objective in his 2001 text is to critically weave these critiques against
the image of verticality into his ‘State in Society’ approach in order to argue that the
practices and experiences of the State- as organizations with certain powers and
capabilities, whether ‘weak’ or ‘strong’- are embedded and meaningfully constituted in
society/groups/civil society, and are negotiated through culture/representations. Through
this critical synthesis, Migdal attempts to break new ground or to critically develop on the
analytics of the ontology and dynamics of power in society..
However, as the State is pulled back into society/culture , and as we therefore
prioritize the dynamic and mutually constitutive relations by which states and societies
are held to transform and constitute one another, certain ontological questions need to be
asked. First, when states are pulled back in and their powers embedded in society/culture
what exactly are we to make of the nature of the articulation in the relation between
‘power’- qua social power, and the ‘subjects’- qua the governed, the self ? 31For example,
is that complex relation of power above to be understood as wholly contained in the
political relationships between state-qua institution and society-qua social groups. In brief
we need to understand more clearly, what is being related to what and in what way?
Second, what is being mutually constituted and transformed given this ‘state in society’
approach? In brief, how Migdal deals with these ontological issues is shaped by his new
definition of the State that aims at a departure from his earlier Weberian treatment in
31
Foucault (1982) introduces several important distinctions in the use of the concepts power and subject. In
speaking to power, he states that “ the power that we are analyzing… brings in to play relations between
individuals ( or between groups), moreover, “the exercise of power is not simply a relationship between
partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others.” Pp 217, 219 And in
speaking to the concept of subject, he states, there are “ two meanings of the word subject: subject to
someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self knowledge.”
P 212Foucault in Dreyfus and Rabinow. We wish to adhere to these Foucouldian distinctions in raising our
set of questions regarding Migdal’s model.
19
Strong Societies and Weak States, however we argue that the new perspective is limited
by its continuity with traditional analytical frameworks. 32
Now, in the updated Migdal we are presented with a two part definition of the
state, as follows: “The state is a field of power marked by the use and threat of violence
and shaped by (1) the image of a coherent controlling organization in a territory, which
is a representation of the people bounded by that territory, and (2) the actual practices of
its multiple parts.”
33
Thus, as he emphasizes “actual states are shaped by two elements,
image and practices.”34 Drawing special inspiration from Shils, Bourdieu and Foucault,
Migdal uses this definition to stress the paradox of States-being-in the-world, and thus
to convey that States seem to be both symbolically overarching powerful agents in the
world (vertically) imposing its will to power and projecting its ideas of representations
into the world, and pragmatically fragmented powers, whose wills are bent, broken,
navigated, ignored by the competing wills and interests of the many in the fields of
society.
Given this interaction between the image and practices of the State, the
processes in which, and by which, the MNS seeks to represent, extend its rules, laws or
penetrative bureaucratic social control are complex, contestability, difficult and open
ended. These conditions form the basis for states and societies mutually constituting and
transforming one another, with the action taking place daily around the struggles over
the rules and ideas that are involved in the multiple ( as against singularly directed)
practices of governmentality in the social world.
The above approach of stressing paradox, the ambiguity of State-being-hard-inprojection and soft-in-the- world, has wide appeal in the contemporary literature on the
32
Migdal 1988, definition
Migdal 2001, pp 15-16.
34
Ibid, p.16
33
20
state, which as Hansen and Stepputat (2001) argue, is now more concerned to “explore
the local and historically embedded ideas of normality, order, intelligible authority and
other languages of stateness.”35 Accordingly, as Ferguson and Gupta (2002) comment, “
states are not simply functional bureaucratic apparatuses, but powerful sites of symbolic
and cultural production that are themselves always culturally represented and understood
in particular ways. It is here that it becomes possible to speak of states, and not only
…nations as “imagined’- that is, as constructed entities that are conceptualized and made
socially effective through particular imaginative and symbolic devices that require
study.”36 And indeed they do require study, but what sorts of questions should we be
asking in this more culturally and conflict sensitive investigation of the State in
society/culture?
We submit that much of what is going on in these contemporary
discussions may still be reflecting a prioritization of the way in which the problem of
order has been previously framed and solved in the study and practice of domination and
change in society. And this we argue has led to blurred and truncated analyses of power
as well as paradoxical images of power in the state in society relationship.
These problems of inherited frames are inherent in Migdal (2001) and so we will
now offer to identify how Migdal’s critical synthesis fails to be critical enough and is
limited in its new directions for analysis. We do not suppose that Migdal alone suffers
from these limits as the literature on the State continues to reflect reactive treatments of
the problem of power in society, leading to an embrace of limiting and polarizing
treatments of the political in society, with social political power- still being treated as
either ultimately focalized in centralizing institutions or extensively diffused across
35
Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Post
Colonial State. Durham and London : Duke University Press, p.9
36
Ferguson and Gupta (2002), ‘Spatializing States’ , p. 981
21
society. Indeed, the latter perspective tends to the view that power is so diffused in
society that the ontological and analytical relevance of the state to stories of power is
practically or straightforwardly denied. Addressing these limits, presupposes paying
closer attention to the ontology of power, its dynamics and the nature of the relationship
that is taking place between power and the subjects, and this we propose requires getting
outside of the
Hobbesian, Weberian and
Durkheimian effects in constructing the
“problem of order” as well as, rethinking the “Foucault effect” in imagining State
Systems in social life worlds.
Towards “imagining” ‘state systems in social life worlds’:
The problems of inherited frames in Migdal’s (2001) interesting and challenging ‘state in
society’ approach emerge in his tendency to focus the analysis of domination and change
from the perspective of the state, and its pre-occupation with securing order. As Migdal
states, “ the challenge for political leaders has been how to remain apart from societythe state as the ultimate authority- while somehow still benefiting from people’s
“collective self-consciousness”, their sense of belonging to something bigger than
themselves of which they are an integral part.”37 Thus, we note Migdal’s preferences to
appeal to Shil’s notion of the “image” of the State as a powerful normative social centre,
imagined to produce the social whole, and thus
can broker the peace between its
individual elements in the world. This is done by appealing, as well as acting, to
culturally produce the ‘pack’ instinct which reflects the primitive animalistic desire for
ontological security to be achieved through selective force. For social systems, that
special selecting social field of force, is the State- the Law- in partnership with Society-
37
See Migdal 2001, p 257.
22
the system-, which jointly produce or try to engender the “collective consciousness’
supporting individual ‘identification’ with the social whole38.
What is being set up here then is a framing of the problem in terms of the
Hobbesian problem of order, [itself premised on a Cartesian dualism of Subject being
standing independently of relation s with Object being /the natural and social world],
which premises a ontological atomistic human being in extrinsic relations with others,
thus inter-actional conflict and uncertainty lies at the heart of the problem of social order.
With this frame, the relations between power and the subject are fundamentally
contingent and external, a relation of force and domination. Logically, one can imagine
power expressed as fixed or stable in the world, if human nature can be ‘socialized’.
From free spinning atoms on their own axis, we thus shift to models of human being in
the world that are socially determined, i.e., agents are held to internalize society, its
norms, its rules, but such processes of socialization are backed up with the use of threat
and violence- the State. Given the above aprioristic readings of ‘human being in the
world’, a tradition is established for oscillating these two models of order,- the under
socialized man ( rational economic man or Homo Economicus) and the over-socialized
man ( the rule following, Homo sociologicus)- but the problem conceptualization remains
the same, that deviation or conflict are to be addressed by finding a superstructural
adhesive, e.g. culture as superglue, and thus legitimacy of order problems are addressed
through rituals for producing this glue.
Migdal offers to complicate this perspective by adding a story of differential
power and conflict, which allows him to add more interesting dynamics about how states
fail or are saddled with a paradox. This research project however does not fundamentally
38
See Migdal, 2001, p13, , p16, pp 255-256.
23
enable us to deepen the level of thinking about how the conditions shaping these ‘order
games’ are being themselves produced. The ontology and dynamics of power is once
again bracketed to the study of the “ dynamic institutional arrangements”, i.e. State- as
MNS – but which are now seen as a “ an organization divided and limited in the sorts of
obedience it can demand.”39 Ultimately then, Migdal’s study is characterized by the
tendency to define the problem of order, not only in organizational terms as guided by the
MNS construct, but primarily in terms of the problem of adhesiveness and the lack of
adhesiveness given the residual nature of the MNS and its pragmatic competition with
other social models or modes of governmentality . At the end, in response to our
ontological question of what is being related to what and in what way in Migdal’s model,
and what is being mutually constituted and transformed we essentially have the answer
that the analysis of the relationship between power and its subjects should be viewed in
terms of the cultural evolution of efficient rules for ‘good governance’ which is more a
concern with the quality of the relationship between an organization and its clients.
Making the break
To go beyond this level of analysis it is necessary to break with the framework for
discussing order and shaping discourse on the state, and power in society. To do this
three ontological departures will be made based on alternative analysis of ‘human subject
being’ in the world, which paves the way for establishing a different view of the
ontological structure of ‘social being in the world’, and from there a conceptualization of
‘social power in social life worlds’ and ‘State systems in social life worlds’, which is the
model that we wish to set out in contrast to the approaches briefly analyzed above.
39
See Migdal, 2001, pp.263-4
24
We wish to begin our discussion by arguing that instead of asking the question,
guiding the existing approaches to the study of power and change in society, “how is
order possible?”, which implicates an oscillation between rationalistic and functionalistic
accounts of social order and impoverishes our understanding of dynamics, we should
instead begin by asking how is disorder achieved? This feeds in to the related problem,
how does that experience of disorder shape the dynamics of process?
This problem re-focusing requires empirical support by examining the nature of
human being’s social life in the world. Tim Ingold provides a very detailed examination
of this very issue in his text, Evolution and Social Life, (1986). In that text, he argues for
a model of the human being as “ a conscious subject, whose life is a trajectory as
entwined with those of others around him as the lives of the latter are with his” and
“whose conscious life… is a movement that adopts culture as its vehicle”. 40 Social life
thus “exists in the intertwining”, indeed he argues that it is the “process by which we
constitute one another as persons”, and a social relation is produced in the “movement”
of this process of social life.41 Drawing on Mauss’s analysis of the exchange of gifts, he
goes on to argue that the production of the social relationship is achieved through the
mutual giving of one selves, thus creating an inter-subjective bond between persons and
a mutual subjectivity production. Given the above, social order reflects processes of
person to person interpenetrative and constitutive dependence, and the experience of
social order is constituted in and emergent from these social relationships that reflect “
the temporal unfolding of consciousness through the instrumentality of cultural forms,”
40
41
Tim Ingold (1986) Evolution and Social Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University press, p.222, p293
ibid, p222
25
as well as our interpenetrating lives and the co-producing of our selves in social life42. As
Archer (1995) succinctly states, ‘social identity is an emergent from personal identity.”43
From this perspective of human being in the world the problem facing persons in
the mutual constitution of their social lives and selves is not, how to glue together
separated beings, but rather how to transform the inescapable internal relations of ‘ being
together’ and ‘becoming together’, at both the personal and social levels, in a way that
seems to offer the enhancement of personal being in the world. Since this subjectivity is
formed through the inter-subjective experiences of social life, the search for a better
expression of person being is simultaneously a self interested and altruistic choice for the
sustaining of
social life. Taking this human subjectivity and its internally related
constitution of person being, as the vital agents in history, the question thus becomes,
how do these agents produce the changes of their social worlds?
In this regard, we wish to turn to Archer’s (1985), Realist Social theory, where
she has argued, drawing on the philosophical orientation of critical realism, that in order
to address this question of articulation between the person and their worlds in
engendering process, and to avoid collapsing into models of individualism or holism for
explaining social process, then one needs to operate with a
complex ontological
stratification of the world. Now, while one may still wish to engage Archer on her
substantive arguments about the theories of the world and the nodes and modes of
articulation taking place between, persons, agents, collectivities and structurally emergent
properties that she has developed, her contributions are critical for thinking through the
relations between power and the subject. In particular, Archer’s social models, along with
42
Ingold, p 293
Margaret Archer (1995), Realist Social Theory: A Morphogentic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, p.284.
43
26
Ingold’s arguments on social life, allow us to begin to pose vital questions as to the how
of the constitution of the relationship between our vital agents, human subjects, and the
complex world that they personally, relationally and collectively co-produce, drawing on
structural resources, or as constrained by structural constraints in structurally emergent
powers (SEP) 44.
Thus far, by beginning with Ingold’s ‘constitutive’ model of social life, and
personal identity, we are led to support a view of the ontological stratification of human
beings in an ontologically stratified world. That is, the human being is (at leas) a double
emergent person, which is to say that our person being is ontologically dependent on our
relations with nature and with social conditions that pre-date person being in the world,
but this person being is irreducible to neither45. There is thus an ontological articulation
between social being in place/space, via the positions that we encounter in life, and the
person being/human body in place/space, as mediated by the conscious subject46. The
possibility for disorder now emerges given this inter-generational time dated co-evolution
of our complex social life in the world. That is, this disorder emerges if and in so far as
the structural emergent socio-cultural conditions shaping social being and action
negatively shape/constrain the subject’s experiences of inter-subjectivity and their
interactive exploration of themselves in the mutual shaping processes of social life
production.
Archer defines SEP’s as being “ irreducible to people and relatively enduring … and are specifically
defined as those internal and necessary relationships which entail material resources, whether physical or
human, and which generate causal powers proper to the relation itself .” p177
45
One could also argue, in line with Archer (1995), that this person being is a triple emergent, if one
locates the creative properties of person being as emergent from some non-natural, non-social creative
source.
46
Of course, this social process itself is a co-emergent from human being’s evolution of practical and
discursive consciousness in the world, see Ingold (1985)
44
27
In the next section we will be discussing one such process of disordering that
emerged with modernity, but in general paradigmatic examples of such processes of
‘disordering’ social life are to be found in processes of ‘objectification’ or ‘othering’
such as those associated with
Foucault’s disciplinary technologies which permeate
racialized colonial encounters or which are deployed in the ‘subjectification’ processes
forming the social positions of female or male identity in some space/place. These
processes of ‘objectification’ are articulated with a person’ sense or consciousness of
themselves in the world and may produce experiences of disorder that impact on person
being in different ways. If there is an experiences of disorder this implies the
engendering of a disturbance in relations of reciprocity sustaining social relationships,
that is, a disturbance in the process of inter-subjective bonding between persons in their
mutual subjectivity production. This disorder or disturbance will then form the basis for
person’s intersubjective and ontological insecurity in social relationships, and lay the
basis for the presence of fundamental uncertainty and conflict in negotiating interests and
managing uncertainty in social life. Finally, this disorder or disturbance, given its impact
on person being via social being, will also form the basis for the subject driven social
processes of the politics of identity in the world.
Given the above ontological framework, if one returns to Foucault (1983) and
examines his analysis of power there we can see that Foucault’s treatment of power is
consistent with a treatment of power as a SEP47 that acts as a condition for the actions of
the subject, which Foucault also treats as a person, that is “someone … tied to his own
47
That is, as a structural power exercised through social being and acting with a certain intensity in a
certain direction in constraining or enabling the action/experiences of the subject in their social
relationships.
28
identity by a conscience or self”48 . In particular, Foucault in speaking to power, states
that “the power that we are analyzing… brings in to play relations between individuals
(or between groups), moreover, “the exercise of power is not simply a relationship
between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify
others.”49 Now, by making a creative analogical extension drawing on the Durkheim’s
Elementary Forms of Religion, ( EFOR), we argue that one may express this emergent
social power as forming a State System: a representational system for the collective
expression of positional political identities or cosmologies of social being in the world
that turn on an sacred and profane identity relations.50 51
In expressing the State system as a Representational system52, we carry the
religion analogy further to argue that just like in the EFOR, our state system engenders
processes for incorporating the body politic via disciplinary, ritual, pedagogical and
embodiment technologies, which find their apex in the totem-government.. Moreover, as
Marx argued, with the emergence of modernity, this representational system is developed
around a certain abstraction that focalized class power in the idea of the ‘political state’
which was in turn responsible for the cultural production of the materialization of ‘civil
48
Foucault in Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983), pp 212
ibid, pp 217, 219
50
Durkheim in his introduction to his text, described Religion as “ … something eminently social.
Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities: the rites are a
manner of acting which takes rise in the midst of the assembled groups and which are destined to
maintiaqn, or recreate certain mental states in these groups.” Quoted In Kenneth Thompson, (1982/1990)
Key Sociologists: Emile Durkheim, London :Routledge. It should be noted here that given our conception
of social life as guided by Ingold, an appeal to Durkheim’s insights in no way implies treating human as
mere actors on the social stage driven by the social script.
51
It should be noted that our analogical borrowing from Durkheim to convey our concept of State systems
is not meant to convey any deterministic effects, given our model of human and social ontology, but it
serves to underline the importance of Representations as being central to politics.
52
This emphasis on representations as clearly central to politics is well appreciated in the literature, as
seen in Migdal (2001) and Appardurai (1996), our innovation is really to make this link back into a reconceptualization of the structuring of politics or social power in modernity.
49
29
society’53. In this analysis of the relation between P/power and its S/subjects within
modernity54, Marx, was indeed predicting Foucault’s later analysis of the demonic
coupling of the “city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game”.
We wish to further suggest that such a concept of a State system is implicit in
Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’. Foucault uses this concept to depict the form of
modern social Power as reflecting “in reality … a triangle [of] , sovereignty-disciplinegovernment, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism
the apparatuses of security.”55 This ‘governmentality’ moreover, acts as an irreducible
social power shaping the social life worlds of persons, thus as he states “governmentality,
…is at once internal and external to the state.”56 We believe that in this discussion and in
the light of his earlier discussions on Power and the Subject, Foucault was thus seeking
to illuminate modern governmentality as the concrete expression of
modern social
power, and in so doing enable a shifting of the analysis of power from the institutionalorganizational level to the structural57.
This allows us to interpret and respond differently to Foucault’s suggestion that
“maybe after all the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized
abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than we think. Maybe what is really
important for our modernity- that is, for our present - is not so much the étatisation of
53
See Derek Sayer (1991), Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursion on Marx and Weber, London:
Routledg, chapter 2.
54
We use capitalized P to refer to social power and common p to refer to the state-institution or
government, and Capitalized S to refer to the sacred political identities and common s to refer to the
population of individuals as subject-citizens.
55
Foucault (1991), Governmentality, p.102
56
Ibid, p 103.
57
In this regard, Richard Marsden analysis of the State presents an interpretation of Foucault’s writings as
making precisely this point in relation to the character of the rise of modernity, in particular, Marsden
offers to show how Marx’s focus on the political relation between the ‘idealism of the state’ and the’
materialism of civil society’ are sides of ‘ Foucault’s disciplinary practices’ , see Marsden (1992) “The
State: A Comment on Abrams, Denis and Sayer”, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp358377
30
society, as the ‘govermentalization’ of the state.”58 In particular, instead of reading
Foucault as suggesting that the significance or relevance of the state is passé given that it
is really not a ‘source of power’, we wish to suggest, an alternative reading of Foucault.
In this case one that interprets him as saying that while the modern state has indeed
emerged as part of modern governmentality and will be being reconfigured by
contemporary processes extending the “tactics of governmentality”, the fact of the
“governmentalization of the state” means that the importance of the state as an
embodiment site of symbolic power increases ( especially as the Weberian MNS –qua
functional institutional bureaucracy becomes dismantled in deconstruction) rather than
decreases in modernity. This is consistent with Foucault’s other analytical insights that
the “modern state” is interpenetrated by both P/power and its S/subjects as it seeks to
combine those two games- “the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game”- in
strategically sustaining itself in modernity59. This ensures that, after all, the imagined
modern states still remain as “ powerful sites of symbolic and cultural production that are
themselves always culturally represented and understood in particular ways”.60
In virtue of experiencing social power within-as representative and Governor of
“biopolitics”61 in the city-citizen game- and without – as Representor and Agent of
modern social power in the shepherd-flock game- the modern state thus retains a strategic
Foucault (1991), ‘Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p.103
59
Foucault (1978) quoted in Mitchell Dean, 2001 “Demonic societies: Liberalism, Biopolitics and
Sovereignty” in Hansen and Stepputat (eds. (2001), p 41.
60
Ferguson and Gupta, 2002, p. 981
61
Mitchell Dean (2001) argues for an interpretation of Foucault’s comment on the demonic coupling of
these two games as the attempt to combine “sovereignty and biopolitics”, p 45 where “biopolitics refersto
the relationship between the government and the population, (p47), see Mitchell Dean, op cit. We wish to
suggest that the games also imply that the state is seeking to serve, so to speak, two masters, one the
citizen-subject-population and the second The Subject-Power- SEP, The Sacred being identified in the
modern cosmology of social life.
58
31
role in the mediation and transformation of the nature of the relationship between these
two games. This implies that the modern state acts as a mediator of the transformation of
social Power which is being dynamically elaborated through the state system and
contested by the ‘flock’. That is, state practices of governmentality in imposing
constraints on the form of subjectivity experienced in social relationships by all in the
society including those within the institution of the modern state, will induce processes of
contestation and negotiation (Foucauldian counter-conducts)62 that will unsettle modes of
governmentality and in turn shape the nature of the state system, its institutional
embodiments and its S/subjects. In other words, the experience of the state in terms of
“its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality”
63
will
set in train changes in states of consciousness, or states of subject experiences which will
disturb the nature of the “governmentalization of the state”
as social power is
reconfigured in the very processes of its power embodying tendencies and practice.64
Thus, only by keeping an analysis that addresses all the ontological layers of the state
system will one be able to identify the set of political conditions important to subject
strategies in strategically guiding the transformation of conditions needed for deepening
the experiences of subject’s freedom/empowerment. We suggest that the following model
below of “ State systems in social life worlds” provides us with such a framework for the
analysis of the relationship between power and its subjects, See Diagram 1.
Finally, to reinforce the value of our model in sustaining a shift in thinking about
power and the subjects, we want to use our model to elaborate on the morphogenetics of
Colin Gordon (1991), “Governmental rationality :An Introduction,” in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P.
Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality” Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983, p. 5
63
Foucault, 1991, p. 103
64
ibid, p.103
62
32
power65 by introducing the concepts of vertical demands and horizontal necessities
which together combine to constitute and produce the politics of the cross. Thus, from
our model we have that the vertical demands on person being in the world are produced
through State system’s cultures of power (COP) which are Representations of social
Power for the expression of social reality66. As recognized in the analysis of modernity
by both Marx and Weber, these cultures of power are emergent social powers attached to
specific life worlds
67
Historically, vertical demands have emerged around complex
constructions of identity, expressed as difference relations, which have created certain
priviledged/sacred political identities and certain subordinated/profane identities, and in
so doing constitute and express a particular cosmology of ‘social being’ in the world. 68
While these vertical demands reinstate the verticality effect of Power being above
and yet apart of the body politic, they seek concrete realization in social relationships and
thus the horizontal processes of othering/disordering. But since social relationships
reflects a
“process by which we constitute one another as persons”
then vertical
demands will stimulate the ‘horizontal necessity’ of a “struggle for meaning,”; a
We follow Archer (1985: 5) here in adopting the term ‘morphogenetics’ to allude to two points in
change processes. First that social power has no preset- form or inherent natural state of equilibrium – the
morpho element of the term, and also that changes are like a morphing, a transformation of one image into
another. Second that social power takes its shape from and is formed by, agents qua persons, and thus
originate from their activities, relationships and all the intended and unintended consequences flowing from
those- this is the second part of the term the genetics. The whole term together implies a focus on the
processes of change and transformation of social power, state systems, in social life worlds, societies.
66
This emphasis on Durkheim elementary form of religion, Quote, but wish to eschew any notion of such
SEP, effectively elementary State systems having any deterministic effects, given our model of human and
social ontology, the importance of Representations clearly central to politics, as appreciated by Migdal, and
presents a leitmotif for Appardurai, project to shift to diasporic politics Modernity at large 1996.
67
See Derek Sayer (1991), Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursion on Marx and Weber, London:
Routledge
68
Corrigan and Sayer (1985) discussion of the rise of the English state helps to exemplify these complex
socio-cultural processes shaping and driving state formation. For them, state formation is part of a process
of cultural revolution ordering society to support the emergent modern capitalist system, underlining the
fact that the modern state is produced out of the contingent and dialectical evolution of specific cultures of
power and the emergence of modern governmentality.
65
33
“cultural politics” 69 70. Such a “cultural politics” from the intersecting vertical demands
and horizontal necessities, producing the cross, is thus generated in the routine
productions of
social life. These cultural politics, which are based on states of
experienced disorder, may also be characterized as ‘sound clashes’71 produced along the
axes of differences in meaning, beliefs and knowledge. Such differences emerge as part
and parcel of the subject’s unfolding consciousness of themselves in the social
relationships of social life and express their own cultures of power. As COP’s collide in
social relationships, literally reflecting the conjuncture of the upward reach of “the
othered” and the downward stretch of the “centered Subjects”, and as S/subjects face off
with each other on the ground of their social life worlds, social Power may be morphed in
the ensuing strategic wrestling match for the making of history. 72
These struggles for meaning are ultimately then the basis for the morphing of
Power in the world and literally encompasses everyone who in their own experiences of
the processes of being the ‘outed’ subjects, must in their inter-subjective and mutually
penetrative social life encounters with Power as governmentality, strategize to achieve
their own understanding of their subject powers in the world which as we have said are
instrumented and expressed in their own cultures of power. Thus, the shaping of social
powers in the world will be fielded on the literal ground of
persons’ social life
We were inspired to use this phrase by Paulin J. Hountondji’s 2002 text, The Struggle for Meaning:
Reflections on philosophy, Culture and democracy in Africa, Ohio University Center for International
Studies.
70
We adopt the definition of cultural politics put forward for Alvarez et al, (1998) as follows: “ … cultural
politics as the process enacted when sets of social actors shaped by, and embodying, different cultural
meanings and practices come into conflict with each other” in Alvarez et al (1998) ‘Cultures of Politics and
Politics of Cultures’, p.7
71
Our concept of sound clashes was inspired from attendance at a Conference put on the Center for
Caribbean Thought in Jamaica, June 2004 in honor Stuart Hall. There a presenter, Julian Henriques,
engaged in a stimulating discussion of “ Sound, Image and the ‘Science’ of the Dancehall Sound system
session”, which provoked our imagination of the dynamics of cultural politics.
72
See in this regard, Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent (1994) Everyday Forms of State Formation:
revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico. Durham and London: Duke University press.
69
34
production of place making and space making. These experiences may be eventually
come to be expressed in the culturally politics of local and global socio-cultural social
movements given shared experiences of being in the world, and may eventually act to
redefine modern State systems , their politics, institutions, governmentalities and cultural
powers within modernity73.
Section 3: Processes and Strategies of “rural othering” within Modernity:
Impact and Challenges to Caribbean state systems
As we have argued in the previous section, the open ended dynamics of processes of
history making are driven by the morphing, or morphogenetics, of social political power
embedded in ‘State systems in social life worlds’, which in turn takes place through the
cultural politics of, so to speak, the ‘cross’. That is, through the interpenetration of
vertical demands -expressed in complexly constituted cultures of power (COPs)
privileging and protecting certain political identities or ‘sacred beings in the world’ - with
horizontal dialectical necessities – expressed in the ‘sound clash’ of cultural struggles for
meaning articulated around the politics of identity.
From this perspective, we wish to emphasize that the emergence of ‘capitalisms’
out of ‘fuedalisms’ given the latter’s rootedness in land embedded relations between
‘power and its subjects’, meant that the ascension of the former - a contingent social
political power- would be marked by an architectural constraint channeling/expressing
the reconfiguration/reconstitution of land and social labour processes around new
73
In this regard, see S.Pile and M Keith (1997) Geographies of Resistance; Appaduri, A (1996)
Modernity at Large : Cultural Dimensions of Globalizations; Alvarez, et at (1998) Cultures of Politics and
the Politics of Cultures, Harvey ( 1993), From Space to place and back again: Reflection on the condition
of postmodernity, in Putman et al, Mapping the Future: Local culture global change.
35
relations of political identity.74 . Thus, in light of these transformational processes, the
imagining of ‘modernity’ and ‘modern power’ was achieved largely through a politics of
identity difference with ‘feudal’ social political power.
Accordingly, the cultural struggles over meaning emergent out of the ‘modern’
vertical demands for archetyping ‘modern social life’ would have been orientated around
what we wish to describe as a “process of rural othering”. This is a phenomenon that has
been recognized from an early stage, and thus an evolving consciousness of it is threaded
through the many critical and analytical reflections on the unfolding of the capitalist
process. Thus from Marx’s polemics in the Communist Manifesto (1848), which presents
a picture of the inexorable logic and dominance of capitalist society in which, “ the
bourgeosie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns,” and creates “ a world after
its own image”; to Kautsky’s critical reflections in 1899 on the “Agrarian Question”,
which focused on the issues of the nature of the transformations taking place in the social
relations of production with the industrialization of agrarian societies75; to Karl Polanyi’s,
1957 critique of the “Great Transformation”, which examines the transition process in
terms of the rise of the ‘market society’ and its limit points in its tendencies to the
commodification of land and labour, which would invoke ‘double movements’ and
reactive forms of govermentalities;
and more recently, we observe that Polanyi’s
concerns find contemporary resonance in the anxieties expressed in U. Beck’s thesis of
74
Such transformations will of course be part and parcel of the complex cultural and dialectical coevolution of ‘modern govermentalities’ and ‘modern states’-qua institutions, see Corrigan and Sayer
(1985).
75
The Agrarian Question has acted as a central concern in examining the dynamics of capitalist society,
and has been taken up in different ways by contemporary analysts in seminal contributions like D.
Goodman and M. Watts (eds.) (1997), ‘Globalizing Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring’,
London and New York: Routledge; and P. McMichael (ed.) (1995) ‘Food and Agrarian Orders in the
World Economy’, Connecticut, London: Praegar.
36
the “Risk society”, which points to the breaching of the limits from the extension of
‘market society’ given the ‘ageing of industrial modernity’ where “ the social political,
ecological and individual risks created by the momentum of innovation increasingly
elude the control and protective institutions of industrial society”76 .
These aforementioned discourses underline the fact that the ascension of modern
state systems has led to processes of ‘rural othering’, to be elaborated below, forming and
being
read
as
a
central
symbolic
motif
for
politically
fixing/reifying
or
resisting/unsettling the sacred identity categories, or relations, that are invested in
‘capital’ as a modern social power. This remains the case, as we will show, even as these
modern social identity relations orientating capitalism are being transformed from the
dynamic effects of its complexly articulated socio-cultural exercises of social power.
Thus, we argue that the visible expression of the ‘legitimate power and authority’
of the modern state system, has been symbolically located not just in the institution of the
‘modern nation-state’, but also, and of equal or perhaps greater importance, in the
subordinate identities produced in a politics of ‘rural othering’ expressed in “ creating the
countryside,”77 or in imagining ‘rural spaces’ and thereby culturally producing certain
kinds of relations and relationships between land and labour or land and society which
in turn engender distinctive forms of political ecology associated with the cultural
extension of modern political identities or sacred/profane internally and dialectically
related “ social being in the world”.
U. Beck, (1996), “Risk Society and the Provident State” in S. Lash, B. Szerszynski and B. Wynne (eds.)
1996, “ Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology”, London, Thousand Oaks , New
Delhi : Sage Publications, p.27.
77
We take this apt phrase from the 1996 text, “ Creating the Countryside: The Politics of Rural and
Environmental Discourse, edited by E Melanie Dupois and Peter Vandergeest, Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
76
37
However, how this vertically driven and thus ideologically informed politics of
identity which ‘directs’78 modern state systems as it ‘seeks’ to spatialize or globalize its
modern social powers through concrete embodiments of governmentality will manifest,
will be contingently and contextually dependent on the mediating effects of geography,
geopolitics and social history that are present. These conditions define the nature of the
points of articulation between power- ‘seeking’ encompassing space- and specific
geographies of social life worlds/ concrete place. In this process therefore, one can
anticipate spatial variations of ‘rural othering’ which reflect a certain fragmentation of
power as ‘it’ spatializes through modern state systems and hence one can also predict a
rich multiplicity of creative transformations of social powers emergent in engagements
with this dominant architectural socio-cultural constraint of processes of ‘rural othering’.
In this regard, one may further anticipate that those sites that have the lowest level
or most compromised state of mediating conditions will more closely conform to the
vertical demands from rural othering, that seek the archetyping of social life worlds,
though never exactly as designed given the horizontal necessities of cultural struggle.
Moreover, an unintended effect of this relative vulnerability, given the deeply felt effects
of vertical constraints is the dialectical production of a paralleling depth of cultural
politics which, as Foucault would emphasize, may express in relation to power, complex
The presence of the social power abstracted in the ‘cultures of power’, fixing political identity,
generates certain directional tendencies even as these are contested and unsettled by the specific processes
of space and place making. Such ‘direction’ is thus not a clear directive but rather a tendency acting with a
certain force in a particular direction, and therefore reflects a ‘law of tendency’- the exercise of a certain
causal power-, which arguably is equivalent to Foucault’s notion of Power as a “way of acting upon an
acting subject or subjects”, or his interpretation of power relations, as “ intentional and non-subjective”,
see Foucault (1983:220) in H Dreyfuss and Rabinow, (1983) , ‘Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics’, 2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. This notion of tendency is distinguished
in critical realist discussions from ‘tendency laws’, which refer to constant conjunction of events, or
regularity laws, and thus presupposes closed determinate systems , See Lawson (1998 ) Tendencies, in J.
Davis, W. Hands, and U Mäki (eds.), The Edward Elgar Companion to Economic methodology.
Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
78
38
strategies of resistance, complicity, ambivalence and escape, ever mobile with the
shifting flows of social being and consciousness in the world which are being generated
by the historical dynamics of the cultural politics of the ‘cross’.
Exploring the complex patterns of rural othering:
We now wish to spell out more precisely the nature of this process of rural othering,
analytically and historically according to four phases of rural othering, which we identify
as (i) emergent-modern (ii) colonial-modern (iii) post- colonial-modern and (iv) post
colonial-neo-modern. We begin our discussion of rural othering in the context of the
emergent-modern, which provides in a sense the archetyping telos and hence power
relation template on which new patterns of rural othering evolve and through which
‘othered’ subjects must seek transformational deconstructions79, strategic appropriations
and remaking subversions for the expression of new subjectivities and identities in their
struggle for meaning within these othering processes.
Emergent-modern rural othering:
The process of rural othering within the emergent-modern, is produced first of all through
the development of an abstraction that constructs the land as an inert naturalized space.
This is achieved over a period of time by stripping away the symbolic powers associated
with the land given the presence of certain social relations of production or social life
worlds and associated governmentalities. This stripping of the land is in turn politically
achieved when the existing social powers governing the land are alienated from the land
The sense of the term deconstruction is not mean in a literal sense of ‘destruction’, but rather in the
Derridian philosophical sense, which rejects ‘objectivism’ and thus puts forward the claim that in any ‘text’
written or not, or in any presentation of ‘knowledge’ or systems of symbolic representation, there does
not exist any ‘unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another’. This open up the political
space for playing with represented meaning for one’s own strategic orientations. ( derrida website)
79
39
and power becomes morphed into modern social power, symbolized by ‘capital’. At the
end of this historical process of re-imaging power, land becomes a non-social, abstract
natural thing, a pure endowment from nature or an atomistic factor of production. In
modern rational discourses, led by the development of positivist ‘economic theory’, the
productivity of the land is furthermore, reduced to inherited physical states, exogenous
natural forces, which determines the natural yield. Given the existence of private property
rights, that yield or return may be extracted as a ‘quasi rent’ from a fixed factor of
production, but such returns will be subject to naturally determined laws of ‘diminishing
returns’, unless the a-social productive factor of capital is additively added.
The violence of the Enclosure movements represents the visible apex of this
process of rural othering and marks the ascending social power and modern state system
with its evolving governmentalities. This is the case because with this movement
community rights, associated with feudal social powers, are transformed into private
property rights system. With land naturalized and then commodified, that is, made
alienable on the basis of the exchange of property rights, the basis was laid for the
development of the next architectural element of emergent rural othering, which was the
attempted ‘agriculturalizing’ of rural space. That is the remaking of the land’s productive
and symbolic powers in terms of its capabilities to speedily supply, in response to
external demands, agricultural commodities or food commodities, given the introduction
of emergent-modern social powers, that is, the laws of capitalist production – namely, the
mass production of commodities by means of commodities.
This archetyping construction of rural space, allows for the ‘creation’ of the
countryside as the site for ‘agricultural sector’ activities. However, this ‘agricultural
40
sector’, while now reflecting the re-socialization of the land given its modern absorption
of capital relations, holds a casted status within emergent modernity, in virtue of its
connection to the land- the former site of feudal power. That is, it is given a subordinated
fixed role to play in the reproduction of capitalist society. In particular, it becomes the
strategic servant of the core capitalist- symbolically situated in the city- the urban space
which culturally represents the space of political security and freedom for the new social
forms of power and the associated life worlds. In other words, in the ideal type political
value chain, capital that is land independent (i.e. non-agricultural) and operates as a free
standing, self-creating, unbounded transcendental social power, is at the top of the
sovereign status hierarchy.
Notwithstanding the above emergent casting of rural space, the dynamic forces of
capitalist development within the agriculturalized rural spaces will, along with the
globalizing effects of a spatializing state systems, result in shifting constructions and
politics of rural othering and re-imagining the country side, given changes in the states
of social life worlds induced by these dynamics.80 For example, the impact of a
globalizing rural othering process produced the unintended consequence of reverse
migration of non-white peoples from ex-plantation colonies, which ‘despoiled’ the city,
and which then became associated with racial degeneration and danger or evil, this
engendered the rehabilitation of rural spaces along racialized lines, as the rural spaces in
80
To be sure, the literature on rural othering and contestations is abundant and examines many dimensions
in these experiences of ‘othering’. Some of this literature draws attention to the impact of new groups into
the countryside and the surfacing tensions that are generated in re-defining rurality oppositionally. While
other analyses have examined how particular representations of the countryside are exclusionary and rely
on dualistic categories of thought, such as rural/urban, productive/marginal and nature/society, in effecting
a culturally shaped political economy over the countryside with significant real effects, see for example, P.
Cloke and J.Little (eds.) (1997) “Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness marginalization and
Rurality”, London: Routledge and E. DuPuis and P. Vandergeest (eds.) 1996, “ Creating the countryside:
The Politics of Rural and Environmental Discourse”.
41
these countries that witnessed the first form of rural othering, were now constructed as
‘white spaces’ in which to breed healthy and moral race peoples, support the ‘family
farm’ lifestyles, or more radically provide a new site for non-agricultural rural
industrialization (counter- urbanization), all of which supports a radical cultural reinvention of the social purposes of the land or rural space. 81 In a sense then, these trends
portend the end of a certain kind of ‘rural othering’, at least its naturalizing dimensions,
within its mother site, as the land is being culturally transformed into the social
embodiment
for sacred political identity. This process however, as the essays in
Contesting the Countryside indicate, is still enmeshed in continuing struggles for
meaning within the ‘core’ countries, as some identities are read out, such as rural poverty
and social diversity, as other are read into the countryside.
In particular, Raul Cloke and Jo Little editors of the text Contested Countryside
Cultures make the compelling argument that “rurality is subject to forms of internal
colonisation in that the discursive formation of the rural rests on a complex hegemony of
dominance and acceptance which both materially and culturally constitutes an acceptance
and belonging for some and a marginalisation and exclusion for others.”82 Let us now
turn to examining the patterns of rural othering that have been associated with the
colonial and post-colonial experiences.
The Colonial Modern elaboration of rural othering:
This experience begins with the extension of emergent modern rural othering, in the
form of the ‘agriculturizing’ of rural space accordingly it presupposes the construction of
encountered lands as natural and commodifiable things. However, as the vertical
81
82
Agymen and Spooner Paul Cloke and Jo Little Contested Countryside Cultures
Paul Cloke and Jo Little (1997), Contested Countryside Cultures, p. 7
42
demands of the notions of sacred being in the world embedded in the emergent COP’s ,
are carried into the colonial experience of space and place making, it adds complexity to
the process of rural othering, and introduces a racialized and imperialistic discourse for
othering encountered countries/geographies. Hence the colonially encountered place
based historical subjects of specific state systems, become re-politicised and are endowed
with new identities that reflect a status of the ‘profane’, ‘non-sacred and impure things’,
uncivilized animalized brutes, mere objects of production, whose existing state systems
albeit are strategically engaged with whether for complex contingent mutual interest or as
a prelude to the most violent conquest83.
Colonial construction of rural othering thus superimposes a ‘non-white’ space
upon colonially othered and agriculturalised spaces. This form of rural othering we
contend, led to what we refer to as Limbo governmentalities, which we argue provided
the transformed modern template for emerging governmentality and state systems in the
colonies soon to become post-colonies. Limbo govermentalities are processes of
governmentality that are challenged to creatively make space ( express self originating
power) despite the sharp space restraining constraints on identity introduced from the
complex interpenetrating layers of rural othering. However, given these sharp constraints
the tendency is also for a limbo governmentality to narrowly interpret strategies for
empowerment in terms of the exploitation of ‘naturalized’ resources versus the
encouragement of domestic social capabilities, or to restrict political agency to the
‘liberated’ modern spaces in capitalist development constructions. In general, limbo-ing
was pursued by all agents in the colonized spaces through the concrete exercises of
See Sylvia Winter, (2003), ‘Unsettling the coloniality if Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the
Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentaion- An argument,’ The New Centennial Review, 3.3, pp. 257-337.
83
43
counter conduct in response to the exercises of governmentality, and which reflected
processes of deconstruction, appropriation and remaking or reshaping of identities, for
the expression of power, subjectivity.
Thus, the process of seeking to extend modern social power through spatializing
state systems which fix the identity of modern power, led to the constructions of
colonial states which were ‘identified’ by processes of spatializing rural othering, and
which in turn dialectically provoked negotiations of place making by colonial agents of
sacred being, viz, governors, colonial administrators, assemblies and planters. These
negotiations with power were principally geared towards mobility in the political value
chain as established in emergent modernity. Indeed, while exercising social political
power and representing the Modern state system’s ‘will to power’, as Crawford Young
(1994) emphasizes colonial states were never full-fledged modern nation states, as they
lacked sovereignty, autonomy and were not embedded in society, moreover they
remained appendages to powerful European military and administrative complexes. Thus,
as Young insightfully argues, “ the emergence of the colonial polity as a distinctive
species of the state genus occurs as a process paralleling the development of the modern
state.”84 This LIMBO status was however contested by the heirs of sacred power, as the
frequent conflicts between the colonial administrators, assemblies and planters, attested
to, and was also contested by the heirs of ‘non-sacred’, ‘subordinated subject’ and
‘invisible” othered beings, viz. the slaves, women, non Christians, indentured labourers,
non-propertied whites, etc. Moreover, these negotiated freedoms were again complexly
mediated by conditions of geography, geo-politics and social history, as seen in the
84
Crawford Young (1994). The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven: Yale
University Press, p.44.
44
comparative differences in the experiences of the form of colonial governmentality
among countries in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean 85.
Post –colonial, modern rural othering:
The soup thickens as now we enter into the phase of modernization paradigms insertion
into the process of rural othering. Here, we begin again with an abstraction that
constructs, the postcolonial society as ‘backward’ and lacking ‘modernity’. Accordingly,
the constructions of rural space that have driven the colonial agenda, become re-imagined
in the knowledge-power complex of ‘development theory’ and its dualistic analytical and
ontological categories of modern -traditional, center- periphery, urban –rural, which
create tidy and neat spaces of separated and non-interpenetrative realities. Remarkably,
given the weight of colonial history, this process of rural othering seeks to begin afresh,
unthinking the past with new ahistorical identities of being in the world.
As the well rehearsed story of modernization goes, post-colonial spaces are
traditional spaces, its inhabitants lacking the substance of creative social power, and
needing to be freed from their primitive stage of development. In light of this
interpretation of the postcolonial condition, post colonial peoples are duly once again
othered and become legitimate objects to be acted upon in order to bring them into
modernity. This double invention of history, first with colonial othering and now with
modernizations mandates, means that post-colonial spaces become alienated from of their
own social history, adapted cultures of power and governmentality emergent from prior
processes of rural othering, and are given transfixed and reconstructed identities, to
85
See Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2001), States of Imagination: Ethnographic explorations of the
Postcolonial State. Durnham and London: Duke University Press.
45
allow for a linear narrative of the ascent of the complex modern through objective
processes and deterministic laws of societal differentiation.
The introduction of a new species of rural othering in this pot of cultural
politicking, is achieved through the assignment of primitive agricultural identities to the
traditional, whether this construct is applied to the whole country or to a section of the
society as in Lewis’s dualistic model of economic growth with unlimited supplies of
labour. Given this assignment, peasants or unproductive labour attached to the land
emerge and again the historical task of modern social power, is to extend its modern
social relations unto the land, stripping the land of any previous social cultures of power.
In Lewisian terms, labour need to be extracted from the surplus labour sector, and then
via a leading process of industrializing society, ‘agriculturalize’ the traditional sector,
which would again be subordinate to the needs of urban development86. The radical twist
in this recipe of rural othering, lay in the strenuous efforts to stimulate urban space and
place making within the post colony.
Thus, rural othering was seized upon my modernizing national elites who took
charge of the state-qua institutions apparatus, and thus inherited the templates of and
strategic orientations of Limbo governmentalities, who saw in modernization paradigms
the political opportunity for producing their own, indigenous social life world rooted,
modern space/place making of empowered subjectivities. Modernization’s systems of
rural othering thus provided a rare moment for re-orientating history making away from
the emcompassing primacy of rural agriculturalizing, and investing local agents with
Arthur Lewis (1954). ‘Economic Development with Unlimited supplies of labour,’ Manchester School,
May 1954 and January 1958
86
46
uncommon powers. Thus, in keeping with Bates (1981, 1989)87 rational institutional
analysis of agrarian development in Africa, though subjecting his arguments
to
methodological and analytical modification, we can hypothesize that given the
architectural constraints of rural othering in shaping cultures of power, modern states-qua
institutions, modern governmentalities and modern state systems, limbo experienced
actors will seek to negotiate for spaces of power given the constraints of rules and
identities that they have been constructed with, given previous and ongoing experiences
of rural othering.
Accordingly, as has been noted by scholars development was not simply the
rationalization of the economy in the Caribbean and Africa and other third world places
but was pivotally tied to the project of nation-building, “founded (as it was) on the
primacy of politics and popular mobilization.”88 Thus, emphatic calls were made to
remake the nation according to postcolonial virtues. In Trinidad and Tobago the new
postcolonial citizen had to be instructed in the correct diction and posture to adopt for the
singing of the national anthem.89 Development thus construed within the project of
nationalism and independence concerned ‘catching up with the West’ or at the very least
it was seen as a way to facilitate progress relying on indigeneous understandings of
community. Development then was for the developing world, the critical package to the
87
Robert Bates (1981) Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political basis of Agricultural Policies
(Berkley: University of California Press), and Robert Bates, (1989) Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The
Political economy of African Development in Kenya, New York : Cambridge University Press.
88
Mamadou Diof, “Senegalese Development from Mass Mobilization to Technocratic Elitism (trans. Molly
Roth and Frederick Cooper in F. Cooper and Randall Packard eds. International Development and the
Social Science. Berkeley: University of California, 1997: 291-319.
89
Internationally renowned Trinidad painter, Christopher Cozier depicts this nationalist project poignantly
in several prints. For more on Caribbean nationalism see also, M.A. Crichlow, “Development,
Nationalism and the Re-definition of States and Creole Citizens” mss. See also, Paul Tyambe Zeleza,
“Imagining and Inventing the Postcolonial State in Africa,” Contours: A Journal of the African Diaspora
1, 1, (Spring 2003): 101-123.
47
realization of their dreams of becoming sovereign, free and responsible modern citizens
in the world.
This strategy suffers from sharp limitations however as the new non-sacred’
political identities are further marginalized from a greater inclusion in cultures of power.
This ineluctably produces the dialectical response of limbo counter-conducts to secure
new experiences of subjectivity by playing/deconstructing, appropriating and as far as
possible reshaping, the new modern nation states’ – and its centered actors- projects of
‘development’ executed through that special species of post colonial governmentality.
The strategies of modern nation making have thus symbolically proceeded through
strategies of rural othering reconfigurations in predictable response to the predictable
‘development failures’, manifested in the worsening conditions of social life, especially
among the rural poor, and in the deepening conflicts and cleavages within these limboing nation states.
Nevertheless, the unintended effect of these glocal and international projects for
reconfiguring rural space and implementing a new politics of rural othering is often the
production of quite significant new cultural powers are formed through the cultural
politics of limbo-ing agents and limbo governmentalities, indicating that the rural
othering politics of ‘development projects’ is a force of creative destruction. However,
this force has come with a very high price of uncompensated destruction, as amply
attested to in the literature on ‘social development’ and agrarian change 90. That is, this
complex process of rural othering has served to deepen the experiences of exclusion, as
evident in the states of rural poverty malaise, with its gendered layers of subordination
See in this regard, IFAD’s 2001 Rural Poverty Report, the World Bank’s 2001 Report on Attacking
Poverty and the World Bank’s 2004 strategy paper for social development in LAC.
90
48
and insecure being91, rural migration and marginalized urban identities. These ‘othering’
processes have also thus served to excite the growth of informal sector life as people seek
escape from ambivalent governmentalities and their regulatory projects or law enforcing
goals. However, such informal sector growth92
has generally been achieved at the
significant cost of increased risk taking and increased vulnerabilities, insecurities and
burdens93. Moreover, such escape seems continually reflected back into novel
perpetuations of limbo governmentalities and practices, with all their unstable tendencies,
thus producing a complex mosaic of history breaking and reinforcing. These observations
provide a good point of entry into our discussion of the contemporary phase of rural
othering, which seemingly sustains the pattern of a historical process apparently moving
in a dialectic of recursive loops.
Post -colonial neo modern rural othering and the future of modernity
After more than two decades of debt regimes and the onset of the neoliberalism
agenda, post-colonial processes of rural othering are now expressed within a different
‘neo-modern’ optic. Whereas under modernization, othering was culturally brokered by
the development state and proceeded from an ‘étatist positivism’ to use Zeleza’s
construct, under neo-modernization it is ‘market positivism’ that now leads to restructure
See, for example, Joan Collins (1995) ‘ Gender and Cheap labor in Agriculture’ in P. McMichael (1995)
ed, Food and Agrarian Orders and Laura Raynolds (1997) Restructuring National Agriculture, Agro-food
trade, and Agrarian livelihoods in the Caribbean, in Goodman and Watts (1997)
92
For a discussion of the process of informalization, see Faruk Tabak and Michaeline Crichlow (eds.)
(2000), Informalization: Process and Structure, Baltimore and London :John Hopkins University Press
93
Consider for example the lives trapped in foreign jails because of their enterprises into the drug trade. In
particular, one may note that for Jamaican women the drug trade has left them paying a heavy price as it
has been reported that roughly half of the foreign nationals in the prison system of England and Wales are
Jamaican drug mules, see The Guardian, October 2, 2003. One also has to note the hordes of illegal labour
subsidizing the cities of the world, as discussed by Saskia Sassen (1998) Globalization and its discontents:
Essays on the new mobility of people and money. New York: New York Press.
91
49
and reconfigure states and their rural economies and people.94
This neoliberal
globalization project has thus engendered a less active role for the nation-state, shifting
its focus from implementing nationalist projects of rural othering to now acting as a
facilator of trans-nationalist rural othering projects. These measures have depreciated
states’ roles in development, not least in agriculture, putting an end to subsidies (except
for those cleverly hidden or forgotten, as in Brazil and Australia or politically shielded as
in the case of Europe and the US), and have thus intensified the focus on deepening the
‘market society’ (commodified production systems) in the hope of achieving agricultural
competitiveness and sustained growth.95
Within this post-colonial, neo-liberal, post-modern age patterns of rural othering
have of course undergone their own transnational transformations. These new dynamics
of agricultural restructuring have been well surveyed and examined in Goodman and
Watts (1997). In their introduction, Goodman and Watts, highlight several important
features of this process. Of course, a key dimension identified in this deepening complex
of rural othering is the global reconfiguration/restructuring of the industrial organization
of national agricultural production systems. These supply changes are in turn being fed
by the changing demands from consumer politics, the oligolistic retail industry (the
transnational supermarkets) and oligoplistic food manufacturers ( the transnational agroindustrialists). And these reconstitutions of demands within the global food market are
taking place because food and its products are being subjected to a process of differential
reconstruction, which has emphasized factors such as (i) ‘value adding’ thereby
distinguishing between the new high value foods (HVF’s) such as fruit and vegetables,
94
Zeleza borrowed the term from Kwaku Kosang. See Paul Tiyambe Zeleza (2003):
Philip McMichael and David Myhre “Global Regulation vs the Nation-State: Agro-Food Systems, and the
New Politics of Capital” Capital and Class 43 (1991): 83-105; Arturo Escobar,
95
50
poultry, diary, products and shell fish, versus the old or classical export commodities (eg.
coffee, bananas, sugar ,cocoa, tea, cotton); (ii) quality standards; (iii) sanitary and
phytosanitary standards; (iv) environmental and labour standards, as well as (v)ethical
standards. These new ‘cultural politics’ being played out through ‘food’, have produced
new configurations of subordinated identities and marginalization and have engendered
new forms of cultural struggles for the expression of new subjectivities. Thus, for
example we see the emergence in Mexico of the Zapatistas and in Brazil, the radical
Landless Worker’s Movement, or on the more conservative scale we have the new farmer
movements which have as their focus prices not land and the new sorts of regulations and
standards stemming from the new politics around the reconstruction of ‘food’ and its
products..
These struggles are thus oriented around new politics of identity, as stimulated by
changing processes of rural othering, and are engendering new forms of networking and
new forms of contestation of not just ‘civil society’, but also, and more importantly, the
forms of expression of modern social power at the global and local levels, and hence the
nature of the state systems within modernity96. It is important to recognize here that as
Escobar (2001) states, “the local and global are scales, processes, or even levels of
96
Sonia Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino and Arturo Escobar make a similar kind of point in their introduction to
“Cultures of Power, Politics of Cultures” , when they stress the profound reconstructive political powers
of cultural struggles as expressed in social movements. This, they argue, is achieved through the
enactment of a ‘cultural politics’ which shapes the field of the political, by remaking the parameters of
democracy, by re-representing what is meant by political, by ‘trans/forming’ and stimulating the
‘trans/formation’ of public-politics, and by the deconstructing and reconfiguring of ‘state in society’
relationships, which produces new forms of embodiments of power within state institutions, see S.
Alvarez. E. Dagnino and A. Escobar (1998), eds. Cultures of Power, Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning
Latin American Social Movements” West View Press. This view above is analytically linked with
discussions that focus on the relationship between social capital, civil society and the state, stimulated by
Robert Putman’s (1992), “Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy”, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, however there are many methodologically dissimilarities which can make all
the difference to the depth of the analysis.
51
analysis, but certainly not places or location.”97 . These cultural politics stimulated in
rural othering processes are thus impacting on both these levels of modern social power,
as the globalized and now trans-nationalized forms of modern social power that are
being spatialized, through global-modern state systems’ space making tendencies, are
also being localized through its articulation with local place making strategies. These
complex articulations shape the nature of the glocal98 modern state systems, glocal
modern social power, and glocal-modern-nation states with their practices of limbo
governmentalities within rural othering, which in turn feeds into the morphing of global
modern social power.
Now, as we hypothesized earlier those states with limited mediating conditions of
geography, geopolitics and social history, can be expected to experience the most
disturbing troubling effects from processes of rural othering. The regions of Africa, Latin
America and the Caribbean that were most deeply implicated in the Atlantic trade routes
fall in this category. South Asia also falls here given the role of their own social
histories in reinforcing the effects of the subordinating demands of rural othering, and
finally, the Eastern and Central European countries have recently joined the group of the
vulnerable with the collapse of the ‘iron curtain’, central planning and state socialism99.
In contrast with these experiences of deep othering, we have those regions and
Arturo Escobar (2001), “Culture sits in places: Reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of
localization” Political Geography, 20, p 152.
98
In light of the discussions presented in Escobar (2001), we wish to adopt the term ‘glocal’ here to
suggest the nature of the ontological morphogentic processes that are shaping the unfolding of modern
social power and state systems within modernity. The term has thus been adopted to reflect our own
concern to focus on the symbolic and ontological articulation between the scales of the global and the
local, and to emphasize that the articulation of politics involves simultaneously practices of global-space
and local-place making. Our use of the term, we believe, is sympathetic to Dirlik’s ideas on the term’s
analytical and communicative value, which as Escobar summarizes, facilitates ‘moving towards giving
equal attention to the localization of the global and globalization of the local’ ibid. p 156.
99
See IFAD’s 2002 strategy paper for rural poverty reduction in Central and Eastern Europe and the
Newly Independent States, http://www.ifad.org/operations/regional/2002/cen/cen.htm.
97
52
countries where geography, geopolitics and social history have helped to deflect or
substantially negate the vertical demands from spatializing rural othering processes. In
this group of course, the giant China and the strategically placed East Asian group with
their deep social histories, stand out. Within the triangular trade space, Botswana, USA,
Argentina, Costa Rica and Chile stand out as notable exceptions to the marginalizations
encountered elsewhere in the pattern of rural othering.. These are not just lucky states,
they reflect the confluence of a specific kind of emergent-modern social power that
culturally privileged ‘whiteness’ or ‘European-ness’, combined with the favorable factors
of geography, which facilitated ‘white’ settlement strategies, and social histories which
saw the encountered ‘others’ in these geographies being nearly cleanly erased or pushed
back into marginalized non-white spaces or reserves. These countries were thus able to
modify the effects of rural othering along lines that supported the more equal distribution
of social capabilities, through a commitment to more equitable land ownership.100 This
provided the basis for a more equitable pattern of capitalist development to emerge,
which has tended to give way to agro-industrial concentration within the Americas. This
tendency, so far, has been resisted in China and East Asia, leading them to be at the
vanguard of defining an ‘alternative modernity’101 and threatening a displacement of the
cultural dominance of emergent global capitalism.
100
These effects of social history and geography have been recently discovered by positivist economists
and are now leading the discussions on development, see K. Sokoloff and S. Engerman (2000), History
Lessons: Institutions, Factor endowments and Paths of development in the New World. Journal of
Economic Perspectives, (13:3) pp217-232, D. Acemoglu, S. Johnson and J. Robinson (2001), The
Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation. The American Economic
Review, (91:5) pp. 1369-1401; J. Isham, M. Woolcock, L. Pritchett, and G. Busby, (2002) The Varieties of
rentier experience: How natural resources endowments affect the political economy of economic growth,
www.worldbank.org/wbi/B-SPAN/docs/renteir.pdf
101
See Lui Kang, (2001) Is there an alternative to (Capitalist) Globalization? The Debate about Modernity
in China, in The Cultures of Globalization, eds F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi, Duke University Press.
53
Given these tendencies in shaping the morphing of social political power, the
CARICOM group, which falls within the set of countries with limited mediating
conditions of geography, geopolitics and social history, are challenged to strategize a path
for greater empowerment that can unsettle the disturbing effects of path dependency. The
most significant of these negative effects are to be seen in the growing challenges of
conflict, debt, poverty, unemployment, migration, sizable informal economies, but very
importantly also in the architecturally constrained forms of creole governmentalitylimbo governmentalities- that have emerged from processes of rural othering.
Accordingly, as the pace of competitive globalization intensifies, these countries are
currently faced with critical limit points and rising costs or sharp diminishing returns
from their current tactics of governmentality which have only allowed for incremental
adjustments in the region’s position within modern economic and political value chains.
Thus, despite the creativity of complicity, as reflected in complex processes of
resistance and accommodation, displayed by Limbo governmentalities that are
constrained by globalizing modern State systems; and despite the depth of cultural
innovation required for sustaining the subject’s personal being in the world, as reflected
in their achievements of empowerment through their own cultures of power called out in
the cultural politics of the cross, and enacted in the context of processes of othering
(which emcompasses the citizen-State strategical games being played by limbo-ing
governments and their limbo-ing target populations), their contemporary strategic
situation within modernity suggests that these vital agents of history may have arrived at
a significant historical conjuncture, a cross-road. However, I believe that the cultural
politics that could be pursued now could yield an emancipatory break in history but this
54
is contingent on events challenging the evolving consciousness and cultural politics in
the region as a glocal space, and contingent on strategies that could be pursued to deepen
the region’s critical discourses that could create a wider and sharper critical sensitivity to,
and discussion of, the possibilities for new trajectories that could be set in train given a
critical deconstruction and re-reading of modern state’s Powers vertical demands as
expressed in a specific coupling of the city- citizen game and the shepherd-flock game.
In this regard we wish to speculate on a potential future scenario for unfolding
modernity in which the region could play a significant role depending on the extent to
which they have successfully de-constructed and reinterpreted these two games and play
them for local empowerment and transformational competitive advantage. The scenario
is
the upcoming negotiations on a framework agreement on the Agreement on
Agriculture (AoA) and the conjecture is that given, as we have argued, the central role of
the symbolic powers of rural othering and the nation state in visibly signally the legimate
authority and power of emergent modern social power, and on the basis of the tendencies
shaping the morphing of social political power, then we believe that those countries
facing the deepest and the shallowest impacts from the process of rural othering will, if
formal negotiations go ahead, present the most powerful potential challenges to the
current hegemony of a certain reading of modern social power in modernity.
We put forward this conjecture given that these two groups, have a certain level
of cultural charismatic and political capacity that could be mobilized to privilege the
principle of ‘empowerment’ over the ‘the market society’ principle. This contest of
principles may be expressed in the language of the arguments animating the debates over
the future of the agriculture, where the first principle coincides with the political
55
emphasis on ‘development’ or escaping and combating poverty, while the second
principle coincides with the political emphasis on ‘trade liberalization deepening’, or the
opening and extension of markets.
The political interest in empowerment is shaped by the presence or absence of
effects from rural othering, which was based on the subordination of the land to the
extension of the market society. In China and East Asia this extension and subordination
to the market society was sharply limited, and these countries were able to internally link
the security of their social powers with the embedding of social life worlds into the land.
This created the conditions for growth with equity and the generally high level of social
development and hence of social and technological capabilities. The symbolic power of
the land was therefore not stripped and located exclusively, so to speak ‘in capital’, in
spite of their socio-cultural deviation these countries were able to build the state of their
capitalist capabilities and reinforce their state capabilities, indicating that modern social
power was not necessarily to be built on a comprehensive identity difference with feudal
social power, and thus did not necessarily implicate that capital, or modern social power
should remain in an extrinsic relationship with the land.
These countries thus present an alternative form of modernity, based on their
alternative non-naturalized constructions of power relations with the land. Moreover,
given that the reconstructions of the countryside, involved in neo-conservative place
making within Europe, portend the end of a certain kind of ‘rural othering’, at least its
naturalizing dimensions, and signal that the land is being culturally transformed into the
social embodiment for sacred political identity, this open up a greater political space for
the vulnerable group to creatively exploit these trends and engage in their own re-
56
constructing of the countryside and innovative and empowering place making drawing on
the wealth of socio-cultural powers that have been attached to social life worlds in rural
spaces in these countries102. This would imply that greater efforts be exercised to link
these indigenous powers within the formal state-institutions which could be achieved if
‘rural policies’ more explicitly privileged the indigenous knowledge and social powers of
its most creative negotiators with modern social power.103
In the case of those most deeply affected by rural othering, the logic of the
identity difference relation of capital with feudal social power was pursued most
vigorously, and has the most disturbing consequences. The instinct for this group is thus
somehow to shield themselves from a deepening effect of the extension of the market
society. However, this group will manifest ambivalence in pursuing a commitment to
empowerment given the depth of penetration experienced and the lure of potential market
access. This creates a tendency for empowerment to still be read by this group as obliging
more of the same ‘development’ constructions. Nonetheless, this group possesses like
the first, both the cultural charisma and political capacity to take a bold strategy forward
on empowerment. Their cultural charismatic capacity lies in their capacity to mobilize
public sentiment by saturating public attention with the contrastive visible effects of the
102
As Doreen Massey (1994) reminds us, there is no need to be essentialist in conceptualizing the nature of
place making, which as she argues is “about constructing a sense of a locality’s place in the world, (its
identity) which has the courage to admit that it is open… this does not mean a de- prioritizing of, or lack of
recognition and appreciation of , specificity and uniqueness. If anything, it is to allow us to take uniqueness
on board more fully, not to see it as flattened…” “ Double Articulation: A place in the world”, in by
Angelika Bammer, (ed.) (1994), “Cultural Identities in Question” , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.,
p.117.
103
See in this regard Andrew C. Okolie “Development Hegemony and the Development Crisis in Africa:
The Importance of Indigenous Knowledges and Practices in the Making of Food Policy,” Journal of
African American History, 88, 4 (Fall 2003): 429-448, 435.
57
‘market society’, which can call lead to the mobilization of opinions calling into question
the legitimacy of this model of social power.
This is already taking place with the public endorsement of the agenda of rural
and social development by institutions such as the World Bank, the visibility of cultural
struggles such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, the visibility of the WTO Banana case and the
impact on the decision on the Windward island banana producers, and the agitation of
African states around the issues of unfair trade in Agriculture and their public visibility as
a region in severe crises.
The political capacity of these two groups are differentially located. For the China
bloc, effective social powers lies in past successes, the growing pace of consumption
demands and of course China’s sheer size. This group is thus able to generate credible
threats in any negotiating exercise and they stand as the make of break group in Global
trade negotiations. This capacity has already been expressed in the emergence of the G20
group, which includes China and several Asian NICS, during the WTO Cancun
negotiations, this group’s power may also be reinforced by the existence of the G10
group which includes Mauritius, Japan and South Korea104. For the Africa bloc, their
political capacities lie in the implied and real threats of explosive violent crises if these
states of vulnerability are not effectively addressed.
Whether the Africa Bloc, which has coalesced in the G 90 group, will be able to
use their capacities to preserve a principle of empowerment is undecidable, especially
given the nature of their state systems and state- institutions, but the conjunctural
strategic moment exists nonetheless for a new path to be forged by these two groups to
104
For a recent update on these group based politics in the agricultural negotiations in the WTO, see
ICTSD (2004), “Agricultural Negotiations at the WTO: ‘Framework Phase’ Update report, accessed July,
2004, http://www.agtradepolicy.org/output/resource/agriculturenegotiations11.pdf
58
extract a framework agreement on Agriculture that builds on an empowering reciprocity
that would support the expression of ‘national sovereignty’105 and that would also create
a different set of historical possibilities for the dialectical unfolding of modernity.
Given this possibility, we believe that the region’s states’ are faced with the challenge to
unthink and rethink the rationality of their forms of governmentality and in so doing act
to promote a different sort of cultural politics, in light of the emancipatory ‘necessities’
that flow from the processes of rural othering, that could facilitate transformational
change and help realize local or regional success.
As things are now however the strategies undertaken by the vulnerable group
reflect the strategy of Limbo governmentalities as the group seeks to gravitate between
committing to a deepening of rural othering through a enshrinement of the mantra of
competitiveness, where a country is either “ world class or no class”106, and seeking to
deflect its effects through various regional initiatives, such as the New African Initiative,
( NAI) , the New Economic Partnership for African Development ( NEPAD), in Africa or
the “Alliance for Sustainable Development of Agriculture and the Rural Mileiu” in the
Caribbean. Thus the marginalized seek to continue their limbo in ambivalent hope.
105
This concept is here interpreted as the right to protect indigenous knowledge and cultural powers
located in life worlds within specific culturally politicized geographies and to support the conditions
enabling the production of one’s own security and expression of power, and thus to express a certain
construction of one’s political identity. A focalizing of ‘national sovereignty’ here, is not meant to ignore
the fact nation- state sovereignty has been eroded given global transnationlization processes, however,
these changes do not mean that land based and hence citizen based national sovereignty is under threat,
indeed we concur with the thesis put forward by Thomas Ilgen, in his introduction to “ Reconfigured
Sovereignty: Multilayared Governance in a Global age”, that “the global enhances the sovereignty of the
local”, thus “ while the boundaries between national and regional or local sovereignty have been in flux,….
more often than not, this movement has been toward greater sovereignty for the subnational of governance.
The global age is pushing in the direction of a multilayered structure of governance from the international
to the local and toward an accompanying diffusion of sovereignty.” “ Reconfigured Sovereignty:
Multilayared Governance in a Global age”, ed by Thomas Ilgen (2003), Aldershot: Ashgate, p 3.
59
Conclusion:
In the absence of adequate analysis of the ontology and dynamics of power in the
Caribbean, the existing analysis on the possibilities and processes for development in the
region perpetuate an insidious bias against endogenous social transformation. In so doing
they continue to ignore the lessons from the enduring Bestian observations on the
complexity of Caribbean ontology- emergent from unique yet systemic ‘global and
local’, structural and institutional’ ‘plantation and post colonial’ ‘processes and forces’and his related critiques of Caribbean’s epistemology. Moreover, by continuing to fail to
integrate critical observations on the nuanced character and strengths (or weaknesses) of
Caribbean creolity - culture, society, polity, economy- into ‘adjustment’ and ‘adaptation’
paradigms and strategies for ‘ascent’, these current approaches and paradigms for
‘competitive success’ threaten to leave the rich depth of the Caribbean’s’ potentials and
values in a state of endogenous peripherilization, despite the recurrent rhetorical praise
for the creative spirit and ethic of the peoples’ of the region. Moreover as the Caribbean
struggles with neoliberalization which has generated a set of conflicts that throw into
relief the issues of sovereignty and autonomy, we have sought to go beyond the
customary discussion of whether states- qua institutions are being weakened or not to
focus rather on the reconfiguration of states systems in societies drawing on our model of
the relationship between “Power and its Subjects”.
Our discussion we believe can in this post colonial neo-modern era of WTO
engagements and trans-nationalizing forces, help to direct the forging of new strategies
that are needed by States –qua institutions in order to legitimize their claims to authority
60
and rule. But it is not states-qua institutions that drive the making of history, but rather
the complex processes relating P/power to the S/subjects, hence, states and citizens in the
world must enter into different kinds of relationships with each other as they both seek to
reposition themselves within the global economy and reassert themselves glocally.
Conjunctural and structural dynamics in the global processes of space and place making
require however different strategies and processes of negotiation from within and outside
states. These negotiations will thus entail complex elaborations of power “within the
social networks at the local scale and between the local and non-local (or global)
scales.”107 Critically, these negotiations may result in an unsettling of the processes of
rural othering, however this potential will be dependent on the ongoing cultural struggles
associated with morphing modern social powers and state systems and thus also reflective
of the real wrestlings taking place among the contesting modern state systems in social
life worlds in defense of the sovereignty of the imagination.
Brian Page “Restructuring Pork Production, Remaking Rural Iowa,” in David Goodman and Michael J.
Watts Globalizing Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring. New York: Routledge, 1997 : 133157, 145.
107
61
Appendix
State systems in social life worlds
Diagram 1
CULTURES
OF POWER:
P/S
V
D
SUBJECT
STATE
H
N
CULTURES
OF POWER
p/s
OTHER
62
TABLE 1: Vulnerability of Caribbean States and Per Capita GDP
Low
capita109
income
Low
vulnerability108
per Guatemala
Medium per Venezuela
capita income Colombia
Medium vulnerability
High vulnerability Total
Honduras
Haiti110
Nicaragua
Cuba (estimated)
Costa Rica
Panama
Jamaica
Dominican Republic
El Salvador
Guyana
6
St. Kitts & Nevis
St. Lucia
St. Vincent &
Grenadines
14
Grenada
Dominica
Belize
Suriname
Bahamas
5
High
per Mexico
Barbados
Antigua & Barbuda
capita income
Trinidad & Tobago
TOTAL
4
11
10
25
Source: Association of Caribbean States- Small Economies of the Greater Caribbean,
July 2001, p.45, http://www.acs-aec.org/small_econ_eng.htm
108
High, medium and low vulnerability are as estimated by the Commonwealth Vulnerability Index scores.
High per capita income is >US$5,000
Medium per capita income is US$2,000-5000
Low per capita income is <US$2,000
110
Haiti is the only LDC amongst all the ACS countries.
109