In the postcolony, Mbembe writes, the ‘commandement’ (the term he uses to refer to an authoritarian mode of power) institutionalises itself, and achieves legitimation and hegemony by inventing signs officially invested with a surplus of meanings that are not negotiable, and that one is officially forbidden to depart from or challenge (Mbembe, 2001: 103):
To ensure that no such challenge takes place the champions of state power invent entire constellations of ideas; they adopt a distinct set of cultural repertoires and powerfully evocative concepts; but they also resort, if necessary, to the systematic application of pain (p. 103).
Turning Bakhtin on his head, Mbembe finds two of these ideas in that of the ‘grotesque’ and the ‘obscene’. No longer strategies of ordinary people to parody officials, they become the characteristics of occasions that ‘state power organizes for dramatizing its own magnificence’ (p. 103). The state is necessarily extravagant, needing to ‘furnish proof of its prestige and glory by a sumptuous (yet burdensome) presentation of its symbols of status, displaying the heights of luxury in dress and lifestyle, turning acts of generosity into grand theatre’ (p. 109). Yet the ‘ordinary people’ do not resist these grotesque spectacles. Rather, ‘the popular world borrows the ideological repertoire of officialdom, along with its idioms and forms; conversely, the official world mimics popular vulgarity, inserting it at the core of the procedures by which it takes on grandeur’ (p. 110). This leads Mbembe to his conclusion:
It is unnecessary, then, to insist … on oppositions or, as does conventional analysis, on the purported logic of resistance, disengagement, or disjunction. Instead, the emphasis should be on the logic of ‘conviviality’, on the dynamics of domesticity and familiarity, inscribing the dominant and the dominated within the same episteme (p. 110; emphasis added).
Has Mbembe not slipped into a type of theoretical formalism, positing a society that is hermetically closed in on itself? There is no (radical) outside (to borrow a term from Ernesto Laclau), no possibility of resistance that can break the terms of post-colonial power. Dominant and dominated merely mimic each other, producing what Mbembe calls a mutual ‘zombification’ that robs each of their vitality and leaves them both impotent (p. 104).2 Is this not another way of saying that the post-colonial subject’s imagination has indeed been colonised?
What Chatterjee finds in post-colonial nationalism is precisely a ‘difference’ with the colonial discourse: ‘The most powerful as well as creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa’, he writes, ‘are posited not on an identity but rather on a difference with the “modular” forms of the national society propagated by the modern West’ (Chatterjee, 1993: 5; original emphasis). ‘By my reading,’ he continues,
anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with Imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains – the material and the spiritual. … [N]ationalism declares the domain of the spiritual its sovereign territory and refuses to allow the colonial power to intervene in that domain (p. 6).
Hence, if Western nationalism is a state project, anti-colonial nationalism is a cultural one. It seeks to ‘fashion a “modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western’ (p. 6).
One wonders, however, if Chatterjee has not moved too quickly. We get a sense of this from his style of writing. In the passage referred to above, he invokes a ‘we’ (post-colonial subjects) and a ‘them’ (the West): ‘History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, [are] the only true subjects of history’ (Chatterjee, 1993: 5; emphasis added). The argument of this book is that the proper domain of nationalism is in the emergence of this ‘we’. The individual that refers to himself or herself in the name of a people – this nation – is already a national subject, whether this naming takes place in the field of art, culture, theatre or political battle. What has to be explained, in other words, is the emergence of such a collective pronoun in the first place.
The problem with Anderson’s account is not that he locates the origins of the nationalist imagination in Europe – the fact that something originates somewhere tells us virtually nothing about how it is appropriated, developed, elaborated and transformed. The trouble is that his account of nationalism is not political enough: he does not sufficiently explore its origins in the democratic imagination of the eighteenth century. Let us dwell for a moment on his argument.
Political communities, Anderson suggests, are to be distinguished ‘by the style in which they are imagined’ (Anderson, 1991: 6). In contrast to dynastic and religious communities that conceived their unities, not in terms of causality or dependence, but, rather, of prefiguring and fulfilment – what Walter Benjamin described as ‘messianic’ time – the nation was imagined in homogenous time. The conditions of the nation idea, Anderson tells us, were prepared when certain cultural conceptions lost their axiomatic grip. ‘The first of these was the idea that a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth’ (Hebrew or Latin, for example) (p. 36). The second was
the belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centers – monarchs who were persons apart from other human beings and who ruled by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation. Human loyalties were necessarily hierarchical and centripetal because the rule, like the sacred script, was a node of access to being and inherent in it (p. 36).
The third was a ‘conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical’ (p. 36).
How do these cultural axioms combine to give the form of religious and dynastic communities? On their own terms, Anderson explains, religious communities have no history other than the schema of God: their events, trials and happenings are merely moments of some otherworldly logic. The time of society is the time of God, since the social totality, being merely an epiphenomenon of the divine will, develops according to His plan. The rise and fall of civilisations, the elliptical circuit of the moon, the setting of the sun, war, poverty, peace and abundance all happen according to some great design. Hence the radical distance between these communities and modern ones: the meaning of things was given uniquely by their place in the scheme of God, revealed through certain privileged texts or miracles. The limits of the community are fixed by divine, symbolic referents that are either announced or revealed. Hence the empirical boundaries of the Christian, Islamic and Buddhist communities, for example, were given by the limits of their sacred languages (Latin, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese) – which were solely capable of expressing divine intentions – so that literate priesthoods were the privileged savants of Godly purpose.
Dynastic communities, on the other hand, Anderson continues, produced and reproduced their unities through marriage and intermarriage – the community, given corporality in the body of the sovereign (as the site of God on earth), expanded or contracted according to his/her marital liaisons. Hence the form of dynastic and religious communities: they encompassed diverse linguistic and cultural groups, and they were not territorially fixed. The community did not receive its coherence or its consistency from the subjects that belonged to it, but merely from the monarchical figure that embodied it. Therefore, its reproduction coincided exactly with his/her fortune: expanding or contracting through war (displacement of or by another monarch) or through marriage (the joining of communities).
What replaced this mode of apprehension, we are told, was an ‘idea’ of homogenous time. Anderson approaches a description of this idea through the example of the modern novel. Characters that never meet and whose existence is unknown to each other are nonetheless connected in the story through a double movement: (1) they are ‘embedded’ in particular ‘societies’ (Hardyesque landscapes of the mind such as Wessex, Lübeck, Los Angeles); and (2) they are ‘embedded’ in the reader’s mind, so that despite their simultaneous and parallel actions, they nonetheless constitute a community of characters in the