Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State (Global Critical Caribbean Thought) - Softcover

Sanin-Restrepo, Ricardo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783487062 ISBN 13: 9781783487066

Verlag: Rli, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In order to achieve a true democracy, this book explores different political and philosophical traditions that do not necessarily seem to speak in unison, notwithstanding their common goal: to propose an alternative to hard-line neo-liberalism, Western hegemony and coloniality.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo is a member of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and a professor of legal and political theory at several institutions across Latin America, including Universidad Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM), Universidad Central de Quito, Universidad San Luis de Potosí (Mexico), PUC Rio de Janeiro, and Universidad Javeriana in Colombia, among others.

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Decolonizing Democracy

Power in a Solid State

By Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2016 Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-706-6

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii, 
1 Coloniality: Decrypting Power in a Solid State, 1, 
2 First Definition of Democracy: The Hidden People as the Dark Energy of Power, 19, 
3 Difference and Simulacra: The Poisoned Gift of Platonism, 47, 
4 The Plastic Soul of Democracy: Power Between Potentia, Potestas, and Actuality, 71, 
5 The Phantom Pain of Civilization: Against Negri's Understanding of Spinoza, 115, 
Bibliography, 209, 
Index, 215, 
About the Author, 241, 

CHAPTER 1

Coloniality

Decrypting Power in a Solid State

We can only name the world as it is, in all its complexities, pitfalls, and rich details, from coloniality. Nevertheless, and this is the major paradox, coloniality stands as the quintessential organization of power in modernity precisely because it is the prohibition imposed on the many to name the world. The said prohibition is mainly accomplished through the permanent qualification of conditions to access language. However, coloniality is not a fact added to the world, it is the fact of the world. There is no unilaterality, no juxtaposition of planes of the world that fold like symmetrical pieces into each other, or colours that blend in a canvas to create a new texture; it is not, as Hardt and Negri naively call it, an 'encounter'. Coloniality is the brutal understatement of power as domination.

We will prove, then, that power in coloniality depends on the neutralization or utter destruction of politics, the latter understood as the common of language of the being of difference. Nonetheless, the uniqueness of coloniality as power as domination is not only the stringent qualification it imposes on access to politics, for this would simply be to give a tautological definition of potestas. Potestas as such is the devious art of splitting power apart in order to fix it in a solid state from which it conquers the programming codes of language and then surveils all its points of access. Potestas is thus the capture of the power of language and the imposition of qualifications for its use. The element that above all defines potestas is the construction of schemes of unity and identity through the direct cancellation of any being that produces difference.

Nevertheless, our main target is not potestas per se but to clamp down the uniqueness of potestas in coloniality. Hence, we will discover that the uniqueness of coloniality is that in order for potestas to act expansively and frictionlessly it must simulate democracy and thus necessarily encrypt power. Simulation and encryption are the fundamental keys to the enigma of coloniality. Through them, coloniality not only arrogates for itself the transcendent locus of legality, but also bestows upon the world the dreadful fantasy that domination is the only possible measure of power. If encryption and simulacra are the fundamental nuclei of coloniality as domination, they are also our paths to break coloniality from the inside through democracy. Both terms will be deployed throughout the book in order to expound power as domination and open up the conditions for power as liberation. Nevertheless, a third term is necessary to bring out the most acute dimensions of the power in a solid state, a new category of politics that necessarily emerges from the fissures of coloniality as its crucial reversal: the hidden people. As we will discover, the negativity inscribed in the heart of coloniality brings to the consideration of power an uncanny novelty: the hidden people are the constitutive exclusion of coloniality and, at the same time, the fundament of its operability. As we will prove, the hidden people are the constitutive substance of politics; they are what define politics as the truth of the being of difference in permanent resistance that inhibits the law of identity and unity of coloniality to shutter upon itself. Through the unveiling of the hidden people we will discover that democracy is the only materiality of politics as well as its sole ontological truth.

Democracy, as the only materiality of politics, casts forth the most beautiful paradox of philosophy. Politics is the question of all questions, because it is the question of who can formulate questions. We only have access to the world when we have access to politics. It is impossible to give an answer to politics as long as the possibility of language remains encrypted and its place of enunciation tightly reserved for qualified subjects. Democracy is the only place for politics because it is the non-place where language does not mean anything yet and everything is yet to be decided. Only when every being who makes a difference can communicate her difference through language are we before politics. The ontological condition of politics is that there are absolutely no conditions or qualifications beyond difference to decide what politics means. What questions, then, are hidden when democracy is occluded through coloniality as the production of the hidden people?

COLONIALITY AND COLONIALISM

Coloniality is both the foundation and the pyramidal construction of modernity; modernity can only be understood as an expression of coloniality. The West, as the self-imagined axis of power, thinks itself on its own solitude, on its own epic quest to conquer the limits of nature and the human spirit. Its historical magnum opus is modernity. Nevertheless, modernity exudes a centripetal history that absorbs every molecule of what it considers foreign and flushes it back as culture, development, and civilization (meaning, in reality, war, domination, and the suppression of everything that would stand in its way). Not only capitalism but all elements of the package that go along with it — the law, the modern state, constitutional law, etc. — would hold no ground without the dyad of coloniality and modernity. The aforementioned are neither the inventions of a pure spirit in seclusion nor a production in the midst of a battle to conquer the good; rather, they are the structures that have made possible that queer and unbalanced unit of modernity/coloniality. All the institutions that come in the package of coloniality are the expressions of power in a solid state: they are, above all, institutions that mutate back and forth from liberation to domination. All of these products of modernity are thus not the products of a higher cultural praxis but a praxis that builds itself on the need for domination. It is not the gift of a demiurge but the choking point of difference. In short, they are a force-feeding (a gavage) of civilization, culture, and history. Modernity and all the light that it expels is but a poison injected into the stream of our fragile planet. It is the tropic where episteme, metaphysics, politics, and aesthetics come to a boiling point and galvanize in a portentous structure of domination that leaves no stone unturned and no corner unscathed by its might.

One of the backbone theses of this book is that coloniality is the hegemonic form of the organization of power in modernity which trickles down and overdetermines every form of politics, knowledge, epistemology, and being. Hence, any work attempting to create a politics of liberation that forsakes the central formational role of coloniality turns out to powerfully reinforce it. At the end of the day, we are left to tragically regard the sad spectacle of all the ingenuity of those works that, no matter how earnestly concerned with liberation, nonetheless carry coloniality on their obedient and docile backs. We then begin to develop a premise: It is not only full-size institutions like capitalism, international law, the nation state, citizenship, and constitutions that become unthinkable outside the symbiosis of modernity and colonialism; but the fundamental dimensions of ontology, ethics, politics, become unnamable outside of the symbiosis. In other words, doing constitutional or political theory outside this symbiosis is not only to perform theory in a vacuum of darkness, but also to reinforce the relations of coloniality. Forsaking the constitutive force of coloniality sends every project of liberation and transformation astray, not only eroding their own potential but turning them, functionally, into instruments of coloniality.

The dyad of modernity and coloniality has shaped the world in a bizarre dynamic of imposition, resistance, experimentation, transplant, and syncretism. This dynamic locates its protagonist in the euphoria of law, the fanaticism of science, the barbarism of development; it is to persist in a continuum of motion and rest, of acceleration and precipices, of fascination towards the body and its dismemberment. The greatest ploy of coloniality is its capacity to retrieve itself, to hide in plain sight while it reproduces itself exponentially. In coloniality, the problematic other — the black, the poor, the women — are put in the ghastly parenthesis of a state of exception, and are turned into the excrement of a 'universal history'.

Coloniality, as Nelson Maldonado-Torres explains, is different from colonialism:

Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes the latter an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and the production of knowledge well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breath [sic] coloniality all the time and every day. (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 243)

Coloniality does not simply denote a chronological succession, or the over-coming of colonialism, but something more encompassing and total (Dussel 1995). As claimed by Argentine semiotician Walter Mignolo (2001), conceptually, coloniality is the hidden face of modernity. The dyad of modernity and coloniality means that coloniality is constitutive of modernity, and therefore there is no modernity without coloniality. For example, the Americas were not incorporated into a pre-existing capitalist system; rather, capitalism simply would not have existed without the Americas (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2009). As Gabriel Méndez-Hincapíe has stated, the first global monetary system was not bred at the port of Antwerp or at the stock exchange in England but in the Spanish mines of Potosí in today's Bolivia. This strange but coordinated duality allows modernity to have two confluent faces. Inside the West, modernity spreads the biopolitical fantasy of evolution, what Boaventura de Santos Souza calls the logic of regulation/emancipation. Modernity hides under the guise of an arrow of history that demolishes superstition in the name of the light of reason while accomplishing freedom and prosperity for all through technologies of power and an emancipated will whose best representation today is the idea of the 'free' market. However, its necessary converse, in the colonial world, is extraction and racism, domination and exclusion (Santos 2010). The colonial subject becomes what must be civilized, the superstition that must be superseded in the name of the freedom of reason.

The colonial subject stands as the perverted and barbaric underside of the fantasy of reason. A hideous paradox is thus created in the bosom of coloniality. Modernity's dream of emancipation and reason can only be fully accomplished when it rests on a kind of internal destiny to convert the impious to reason and to civilize the barbarian. Nevertheless, the dream may only bare all the thickness of life under the condition that it never materializes. In other words, it functions as long as the subject of coloniality is never actually converted but kept in a sempiternal state of submission, as the utter negativity of reason and emancipation. Maybe the best image to describe this logic can be found in the new version of the film Mad Max. Max is captured and, when recognized as a universal blood donor, he is hung head down in the back of a truck as a blood bag for a decrepitating War Boy. The boy can go on and perpetuate carnage as long as he has an immobile living blood bag feeding him life. In the case of the emblem of the War Boy of coloniality, the fate of modern man is to liberate mankind, a destiny that can only be fulfilled when the world is liberated from archaism (through law, science, economy). Nevertheless, the completion of this logic of liberation is impossible, for if the aim is to free the blood bag that keeps him alive, with the fulfilment of this aim a catastrophic systemic failure would befall the liberator.

We are thus faced with a fact that is much more powerful than a mere coincidence of strategies of domination or a succession in some particular history. Following Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2001), we can only conceptualize the present world-system when we understand that coloniality is basically the very matrix of power. Coloniality is a matrix in the most rigorous sense; it is the hegemonic strata of meaning that overdetermines every other meaning. There is no pristine meaning of anything in modernity unless any meaning is contrasted first with the colonial matrix of power. As Maldonado-Torres explains, 'Modernity as a discourse and as a practice would not be possible without coloniality, and coloniality continues to be an inevitable outcome of modern discourses' (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 244).

Another fascinating fact about coloniality is that it is very hard to capture, to bring to its own terms; we cannot grasp it entirely at one given moment, for it always eludes us as it shapes every corner of our reality. Coloniality is so powerfully subtle that it would not even do to consider it as the screen through which we see reality, a kind of machine installed in the environment which distorts and translates a different reality; for coloniality is something more physical, organically creased to the body, closer to a membrane in the eye which sees reality, not 'instead of me' but 'as me'.

As Anibal Quijano (2001) explains, the West as the carrier of coloniality stands on two founding myths. The first is the idea that the history of human civilization is a linear and necessary trajectory that springs out of a fuzzy state of nature and culminates in Europe as its unique model, as the chosen place of fate. This model is then fraught with all the brutality of physical and symbolic violence over non-European worlds, which are therefore considered non-worlds, that is, the utter negation of the world. The second is that the differences between European and non-European are natural-racial and not the consequence of history and power.

When in Europe science awakens from religion, this will mean the imposition of an even harsher leash on the colonized world. As science is believed to be the product of an autonomous language that does not depend on hierarchies or opinions, on particular wills or hidden principles, but on a fully objective method, domination will be exercised under the pretence of absolute and universal truth. This is what Santiago Castro-Gómez dubs the constitution of a zero point of coloniality (Castro-Gómez 2005). Through science, domination will reach its climax as a pure 'idea Mathematica'.

When the absolute other is created through the coloniality of being and the coloniality of knowledge, what is extended as facticity is thus a negative fantasy: the fantasy of pureness in race, of straightness in reason, of wholeness of law. Coloniality holds itself as a dominant power through the need to create an absolute other that defines defectiveness, the one to be ordered and straightened. What is projected onto the model is nothing less than the fetishization (and, by perverse extension, facticity) of such a fantasy. And, as in Marx, the producer of the fantasy as a commodity must remain invisible, trapped in the sheaths of the fantasy. What is naturalized in this process of becoming facticity is the order of hierarchies, of masculine/feminine, white/ non-white, and proprietor/non-proprietor. Nevertheless, when this order of hierarchies is dissolved in the point of its creation, the dissolution reveals its nature as but a decision of exclusion, a decision harnessed in power. The primordial hunger of power in coloniality can thus be reduced to the need of constituting the other permanently through exclusion so that the fantasy/fetish may stand as the only possibility of truth. As Ramon Grosfoguel teaches us:

This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding the location of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial expansion and domination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior knowledge and, thus, of superior and inferior people around the world. We went from the sixteenth-century characterization of 'people without writing' to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century characterization of 'people without history', to the twentieth-century characterization of 'people without development' and more recently, to the early twenty-first-century of 'people without democracy'. (Grosfoguel, 2011)

Race becomes the abstract universal equivalent of right and might; it defines access to the world (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991). Facticity becomes the image that represents all images, a unifying mechanism that condenses and dilutes difference. Such a facticity is a construction whose origin, stages, and deployment in time can be traced and identified. The key point is to know that such a constitutive aperture is not the coy mistress that reflects a blast of illuminating forms of being, but a dark whirlpool intended to alienate them. What is fetishized through facticity is not only labour as actuality, but labour as being. As affirmed by Lewis Gordon (2005), the shift of political conflict into the severe codifications of the law creates vast populations that are in strict submission to the orders of the law. This is the world of coloniality, where conflict is shuttered in magical formulas defined by an elite, leaving the rest of the people in a syntactic form of existence dependent upon the protocols designed in the words of the law. The validity of this game of differences between inside and outside is protected by a theodicy (Gordon 2005) that proves the kindness of god (now displaced onto modern, supposedly secular institutions) despite the perversity of the world, where evil is external and foreign to god. Each and every modern rational mythology starts with this theodicean division: Nazism outside the liberal project, ethnic cleansing outside any Western construction of race, the slaughter of the indigenous as a simple sacrifice on the road to evolution and progress. It is precisely the belief in the completeness of the system that allows its members to deny the horrors that inhabit and are produced by that system (Gordon 2005).

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rli
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783487062
• ISBN 13: 9781783487066
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 250
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar