Beyond Free and Equal: Subalternity and the Limits of Liberal-Democracy
Jakeet Singh
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Political Science University of Toronto
2012
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Abstract
This project seeks to critically examine the hegemony and imperialism of liberal-democratic modernity, and the possibilities for forms of politics that are rooted in subaltern difference. I argue that one of the great challenges in resisting the hegemony of liberal-democracy is that it offers a broad family of both conservative and progressive/critical languages that can be adopted and used by elite and subordinate groups alike. The availability of critical or dissenting languages that are internal to liberal-democracy often entices subordinate groups to make use of them, but this only furthers the subalternization of other distinct normative or practical traditions. I aim to articulate an alternative form of politics that remains rooted in subaltern difference, and is not simply based on an internal or immanent critique of liberal-democracy. This is a type of ethico-politics that seeks to actualize subaltern goods and traditions in its very practice or way of life, and to build its forms of resistance and transformation upon this practice. This dissertation (a) explores some of the key features of this kind of subaltern ethico-politics; (b) examines the ways in which contemporary modes of postcolonial and political thought, especially those with critical or emancipatory intent, often serve to contain and/or efface this form of subaltern praxis; and (c) addresses some of the broader questions and challenges this praxis poses for resistance to imperialism and coalition-building among diverse social movements today.
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Excerpts from:
Chapter 1: The Imperial Frontiers of Liberal-Democracy: Subalternity, Social Movements, and the Ethico-Political
1.1 Introduction
1.6 An Alternative Trajectory for Postcolonial Politics
1.7 Chapter Outlines
Chapter 5: Agency beyond Autonomy: Social Movements, Deep Diversity, and the Relationship between Ethics and Politics
5.1 Introduction
5.6 Conclusion
Chapter 6: Conclusion: Sikhi as Ethico-Political Practice
In full:
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/65490/1/Singh_Jakeet_201211_PhD_thesis.pdf
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Chapter 1
The Imperial Frontiers of Liberal-Democracy: Subalternity, Social Movements, and the Ethico-Political
1.1 Introduction
...liberal democracy is not the enemy to be destroyed. If we take ‘liberty and equality for all’ as the ‘ethico-political’ principles of liberal democracy...it is clear that the problem with our societies is not their proclaimed ideals but the fact that those ideals are not put into practice.
So the task for the left is not to reject them, with the argument that they are a sham, a cover for capitalist domination, but to fight for their effective implementation.
-- Chantal Mouffe (2005:32)
Liberal-democracy functions today as both an imperial and an emancipatory script. While the theory and practice of liberal-democracy historically arose with, was disseminated globally by, and provided crucial justifications for modern imperialisms, it has also provided the basis for many forms of critique of and resistance to imperialism. Indeed liberal-democratic languages have generated moral, humanitarian, economic, cultural, and political arguments on both sides of imperialism (Young 2001). This continues in the present, in a global order constituted by a more informal, US-led imperial system in which both its forms of governmental power, as well as the most recognizable forms of resistance to it, operate primarily through the languages of liberal-democracy (Kiely 2010; Ayers 2009; Vázquez-2 Arroyo 2008; Brown 2006; Amin 2004; Rose 1999; Dean 1999; Hindess 2004, 2001; Helliwell & Hindess 2002; Scott 1999; Venn 2006). It is this dual functionality of liberal-democratic norms, values, and institutions today that gives it its hegemonic character; liberal-democracy is hegemonic, in other words, precisely because it often sets the terms fought over and mobilized by both elite and subordinate groups within the hegemonic relation.To confront the hegemonic structure by denouncing the gap or contradiction between its official values and its actual practice — with greater or lesser success — is the most effective way of enforcing its universality.
-- Etienne Balibar (1995: 62)
But liberal-democracy does not itself set the parameters for all possible forms of critique, resistance, and politics in response to its progressive march. Rather, critique and resistance to liberal-democratization have always also arisen from within the various ethical-political traditions that liberal-democratization has sought to subalternize, in ways that neither simply subversively mimic or re-deploy liberal-democratic languages against themselves, nor primarily seek to gain control of liberal-democratic institutions. These forms of politics cannot be understood, then, as based on internal or immanent critiques of liberal-democracy, nor as performative contradictions. This dissertation seeks to bring to light this broad and amorphous category of subaltern politics (or at least one particular form of it), to argue that it has been largely ignored or misunderstood by prominent strands of political theory, and to show how it stretches the limits of many forms of political thought and practice.
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1.2 Liberal-Democracy
1.3 Hegemony and Subalternity
1.4 Postcolonialism and the Challenge of Politics
1.5 Political Theory and the Postcolonial Challenge
1.5.1 Postcolonial Liberalism?
1.5.2 Postcolonial Development?
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1.6 An Alternative Trajectory for Postcolonial Politics
To this point, I have traced how strands of both postcolonial and political theory that take up questions about the politics of imperialized groups have contained these politics within a subinternal mode. Significant strands of postcolonial theory have focussed on the subversion of imperial discourse, or the incorporation of subalterns into conceptions of modernity, while work within political theory has contended that postcolonial or anti-imperial politics must/should remain within the basic parameters of modernization, development, and liberal-democracy. But is it true, as McCarthy argues, that a more itively-oriented, (re)constructive postcolonial politics will necessarily fall back upon modernization and development thinking? Is it the case, as Ivison suggests, that the fulfillment of liberal-democracy remains at the heart of the postcolonial project? Is the only form of agency or politics available to imperial subjects to conduct an immanent critique of modernity, development, the Enlightenment, and/or liberal-democracy? My aim in this final section is to suggest that certain, more politically-engaged, strands of postcolonial thought are charting another possible path, one that does not remain confined to subinternal resistance. Building upon the political trajectory being developed by Arturo Escobar and the modernity/coloniality research program, among others, I trace a postcolonial politics that privileges (1) subaltern difference, (2) social movements, and (3) a mode of political action that I call the ‘ethico-political’.
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1.6.1 Privileging the subaltern
1.6.2 Privileging social movements
1.6.3 Privileging the ‘ethico-political’
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1.7 Chapter Outlines
The remaining chapters of this dissertation explore in greater detail the key features of the kind of subaltern ethico-politics described above; the ways in which contemporary modes of political thought serve to contain and/or efface this form of praxis; and some of the broader questions and challenges it poses for resistance to imperialism and coalition-building among diverse social movements today. In the following two chapters, I focus on two of the dominant approaches within political theory for understanding and taking up a politics of religious and cultural difference. In both cases, my aim is to show how these approaches are premised upon the subinternization of cultural and religious difference, and serve to foreclose the possibility of a subaltern ethico-politics. The first of these dominant approaches, which attempts to take up the challenge of religious and cultural difference by re-shaping the norms of public reason, is the focus of Chapter 2. Here I engage with the recent ‘postsecular’ turn in the thought of Jürgen Habermas, which explicitly aims to take seriously the enduring presence of religion in public life, and to move beyond older theories of modernization and secularization which assumed either the complete privatization of religion or the eventual demise and disappearance of religious ways of life altogether. In response to these discredited theories, Habermas proposes a new relationship between religious citizens, secular citizens, and the state that is largely based on a form of public reason that is more responsive and inclusive of religious contributions. Starting from within the terms of Habermas’s theory of postsecularism, I attempt to work my way out, revealing how religious difference is subordinated to the imperatives of legitimation and modernization in this framework, in ways that both position religious difference as a threat to be contained and re-structured, and obscure the forms of power and violence implicated in these liberal-democratic imperatives. I conclude this chapter by arguing that a more genuinely postsecular approach to public reason would have to be more critical, comparative, and ethical than Habermas’s approach in order to take seriously both religious difference and contemporary forms of liberal-democratic power.
Chapter 3 engages with the other dominant theoretical approach to cultural and religious difference, which is a cultural rights-based approach that seeks to accommodate cultural difference through institutionalized forms of recognition and self-determination. This chapter aims to expose the conceptual, normative, and practical limits of this dominant approach to (multi)cultural politics, which I call the top-down approach, by contrasting it with an alternative, bottom-up approach to the politics of recognition and self-determination. My account of the latter continues to fill out the picture of a subaltern ethico-politics begun here, and draws heavily upon the work of Gandhi to do so. By directly juxtaposing these dominant and subordinate approaches to cultural politics, I aim to highlight both the constraining and subinternizing effects of the dominant approach, and the possibilities of a significantly re-oriented and expanded field of cultural politics.
Chapter 4 picks up on a discussion begun in Chapter 3 on the work of Michel Foucault, and his central role in the bottom-up tradition. While Foucault’s work has been pivotal in influencing and shaping the theoretical apparatus used by approaches from below, especially in postcolonial thought, many of these latter thinkers have not directly engaged with the normative commitments that Foucault affirmed in his later work, and the implications of these for postcolonialism’s own commitments. Indeed, in his later work, Foucault affirms a number of commitments, including a commitment to an autonomous subject, that converge with liberal-democratic forms of thought, either because they already occupied a place within the latter tradition, or because they have since been incorporated into that tradition. This convergence, I suggest, poses a yet unresolved tension within those strands of postcolonial thought that are committed to the affirmation of forms of subaltern difference, often over and against the hegemony of liberal-democratic forms of thought. This tension is especially acute with respect to the question of whether postcolonialism’s own turn to ethics is or ought to be premised on the kind of ethics of autonomy emphasized by Foucault.
Chapter 5 reveals how the tension over an ethics of autonomy described in Chapter 4 plays out in the context of the deep diversity of social movements contesting forms of globalization and imperialism today. Here I analyze several theoretical approaches that attempt to conceptualize, frame and orient this deep diversity of struggles using different understandings of the relationship between ethics and politics. Nancy Fraser’s approach, rooted in a neo-Kantian Critical Theory tradition, argues that social movements must converge on a politics that transcends their deep ethical diversity. Chantal Mouffe and Richard Day, on the other hand, rooted in a radical democratic and post-anarchist tradition respectively, argue for the inseparability of ethics and politics—that all forms of politics are intertwined with a form of ethics, and are therefore properly understood as ethico-political—and the corresponding irreducibility of ethico-political difference. Nonetheless, I suggest that an ethico-political meta-norm of autonomy remains operative in the work of both authors, mainly because each conceptualizes difference through the lens of an oppression/autonomy binary. In the end, I turn to Saba Mahmood’s work on Islamic women’s piety movements to illustrate the kinds of challenges that subaltern, ethico-political social movements might pose to the limits of both dominant and subintern forms of ‘progressive’ politics.
Finally, I conclude the dissertation by utilizing the framework developed in the preceding chapters to reflect on two distinctive forms of politics rooted in my own Sikh community and tradition. The first is a modern, subintern politics that largely abstracts away from the content of Sikhi in the course of struggling for inclusion or accommodation into liberal-democratic norms and institutions. The second is a subaltern ethico-politics that struggles to live a Sikh way of life in the face of the broad array of assimilative forces of modernity. I argue that the latter is emerging in the cracks and interstices of the modern project, indeed transgressing the boundaries which that project seeks to impose. In doing so, it points beyond itself, toward the possibility and actuality of diverse modes of praxis, grounded in subaltern traditions, that only taken together in their irreducible diversity can begin to constitute a post-imperial pluriverse.
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Chapter 2: Pluralism beyond Postsecularism: Imperialism, Liberal-Democracy and
the Politics of Religious/Secular Diversity
2.1 Introduction
2.2 The Postsecular Turn
2.3 Two Limits on Postsecular Pluralism
2.3.1 Legitimating the Liberal-Democratic State
2.3.2 Imperial Modernization
2.4 Beyond Habermasian Postsecularism: Public Reason in an Imperial Context
2.5 Conclusion
Chapter 3: Recognition and Self-Determination: Approaches from Above and Below
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Two Understandings of Recognition
3.3 Two Understandings of Freedom & Power
3.4 Two Understandings of Cultural Claims & Cultural Diversity
3.5 Two Understandings of Self-Determination
3.6 Conclusion
Chapter 4: Foucault, Freedom and the Ethics of Autonomy
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Foucault’s Three Freedoms
4.2.1 The First Freedom
4.2.2 The Second Freedom
4.2.3 The Third Freedom
4.3 Foucault and the Politics of Autonomy
4.4 Foucault and Liberal-Democracy
4.5 Beyond Liberal-Democracy and the Autonomous Subject
4.6 Conclusion
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Chapter 5
Agency beyond Autonomy: Social Movements, Deep Diversity, and the Relationship between Ethics and Politics
5.1 Introduction
Contemporary reflection about global social movements from below must contend with the incredible diversity of these movements. Sites like the World Social Forum and the Occupy protests (as well as the myriad links made between the latter and the Arab Spring uprisings) make readily visible the myriad forms of difference across which many groups are attempting to build cooperation and solidarity. Increasing recognition of this deep diversity is apparent in the widespread shift from the term ‘the anti-globalization movement’ to ‘the movement of movements’, and from the slogan ‘another world is possible’ to ‘other worlds are possible and actual’. This shift in emphasis toward greater diversity appears in many ways to be a response to contemporary sites like the WSF in which the modern, secular left comes into contact with religious, indigenous, feminist, ecological, queer, dalit and many other subaltern peoples and groups (Sen et al. 2004; Santos 2005b, 2006, Conway 2012).The resistance to modern oppression has to involve, in our part of the world, some resistance to modernity and to important aspects of modern theories of oppression.
--Ashis Nandy (1987: 117)
While the dizzying character of this diversity is often acknowledged—“chaotic, dispersive, unknowable” (Mertes 2004: 237)—attempts to think through it in a sustained way have tended to focus on differences of organizational forms, structural targets, and tactics/strategy. For example, there has been a great deal of discussion about the appropriate processes, procedures and organization of these activist spaces with respect to this diversity—about ‘open space’ in the WSF, and about ‘consensus decision-making’ in the Occupy movements. Other discussions have centred around the tensions between groups that are centralized and structured hierarchically, and those that are decentralized and organized horizontally, as well as tensions between groups that are oriented toward institutional reform, and those oriented toward anti-systemic, revolutionary change. Still other conversations have focussed on how to conceptualize the common structural target of these movements—globalization? neoliberalism? empire?—and on the appropriate tactics with which, and scale(s) on which, to confront this target. Finally, a good deal of attention has been paid to the diverse and intersecting structures of oppression that operate among diverse groups, and to the question of how to confront and resist all of these structures simultaneously.
Relative to these issues of organizational-structural-tactical diversity, however, little direct attention has been paid to the issues raised by the deep ethical or normative diversity of these movements, and especially the challenges it poses for coalition- and solidarity-building. Of course, many of the former issues are closely related to questions of ethical diversity; nonetheless, it has been rare for substantive ethical differences (e.g. those between indigenous and modern ways of life) to be confronted in any concrete and sustained way. Indeed often when questions of ethical diversity arise, the response does not involve a concrete engagement with substantive differences but rather a (re)affirmation of a commitment to autonomy. For example, one of the most common ways of describing the benefits to diversity of the ‘horizontalist’ procedural and organizational innovations of the WSF and Occupy protests is to say that they allow for greater autonomy of participating individuals and groups. Similarly, one of the most common responses to the various structures of oppression that affect diverse groups has been to affirm a common commitment to ‘anti-oppression’ or to the minimization of oppression and domination, which itself is often internally related to a commitment to autonomy (as we saw to be the case with Foucault in the last chapter). The encounter with deep diversity within the global justice movements, then, has in many ways served to re-inscribe the classic, modern meta-norm of autonomy (however ascribed with a subintern meaning) as a kind of higher-order good that is to orient and coordinate the praxis of deeply diverse social movements.
Indeed because of the hegemony of modern, top-down ways of thinking about diversity that seek to transcend diversity rather than engage with it, the appeal to meta-norms of freedom, equality and autonomy continues to be quite common within both activist circles and academic theories that regard themselves as aligned with bottom-up social movements and as taking seriously their vast diversity. In this chapter I will engage with several prominent theoretical approaches to the politics of diversity among social movements. Interestingly, while each of these approaches is rooted in a different critical tradition, they each explicitly reflect on diversity through an examination of the relationship between ethics and politics, and therefore focus on the specific question of ethical diversity. Through a detailed exposition and comparison of each approach, I will argue that these theories form a kind of trajectory or learning curve with respect to the depth and complexity of diversity (especially normative diversity) that they take seriously.
First I will examine Nancy Fraser’s neo-Kantian approach, which draws a strict separation between ethics and politics, and suggests that diverse movements ought to build cooperation around a politics that remains impartial to ethical commitments. I will argue that Fraser’s approach limits diversity by (a) asserting a universal liberal-democratic principle that ostensibly transcends all cultural complexity and difference; (b) employing a meta-narrative of modernization that does much of the work to limit the scope of diversity that Fraser takes seriously; and (c) restricting what counts as ‘political’ to those claims or demands that can be placed on, and enforced by, dominant institutions.
Second, I will then turn to the post-Marxist, radical democracy tradition of Chantal Mouffe. Through an examination of both her sole-authored writings and her earlier work with Ernesto Laclau, I will argue that this approach takes the complexity of diversity more seriously than the neo-Kantian approach because it begins with the premise that no form of morality can transcend all ethical diversity, and that the field of the political is marked by undecidability and irreducible pluralism. Despite this starting point, however, this approach proceeds to argue for a contingent but nonetheless hegemonic liberal-democratic project that is both ethical and political and provides a ‘contaminated’ form of universality through which to articulate diverse movements into a chain of equivalence. The liberal-democratic limits of diversity in this approach, then, turn out to be quite similar to the neo-Kantian approach, but are simply construed as ethico-political decisions, not moral requirements. Furthermore, like the neo-Kantian approach, Mouffe deploys a modernization story that does a great deal of work in limiting the range of diversity that Mouffe has to take seriously.
Third, I will examine the work of Richard Day, who is writing in an anarchist/post-anarchist tradition. Day’s approach shares with Mouffe’s the notion that ethical difference cannot be bracketed out of politics by recourse to a deontological morality, but unlike the latter he is highly attentive to forms of ethico-politics that fall outside of hegemonic projects, especially that of liberal-democracy. Furthermore, Day is very critical of imperial meta-narratives that circumscribe diversity within the limits of modernity. I will argue, however, that because Day’s approach takes up diversity within an oppression/autonomy problematic, it ends up affirming a meta-norm of autonomy which is to reconcile and coordinate the actions of deeply diverse movements.
Lastly, I will attempt to bring into conversation with these three ‘progressive’, secular-humanist traditions the work of anthropologist Saba Mahmood. Mahmood’s work aims to show how an Islamic women’s piety movement in Egypt challenges the limits of ‘progressive’, liberal-democratic understandings of politics by illustrating that ethical movements can exercise tremendous agency and commitment to radical social change without necessarily being oriented toward the end of autonomy or liberation from oppression. I will use Mahmood’s work to argue that a post-imperial approach to diversity must learn to see the deep diversity of ethico-political movements that lie beyond the oppression/autonomy problematic. This, I suggest, will help us take another step in understanding and furthering the possibilities for coalition- and solidarity-building within the global networks of social movements from below.
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5.2 Nancy Fraser and the Critical Theory Tradition
5.3 Chantal Mouffe and the Radical Democracy Tradition
5.4 Richard Day and the Post-Anarchist Tradition
5.5 Saba Mahmood and the Politics of Piety
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5.6 Conclusion
One might object to my inclusion of Mahmood’s case study into the learning curve I have laid out here. After all, there is no indication from Mahmood’s account that the piety movement she studies is trying to build political ties with other movements, and certainly not with the network of anti-globalization, global justice, anti-neoliberal, leftist, or otherwise ‘progressive’ movements from below which have been the focus of this chapter. Surely, it may be argued, this network of movements has some kind of oppositional or emancipatory commitments in common which the piety movement does not share, and which therefore makes the latter’s inclusion here inappropriate or out of place. Indeed, as we have seen, Mahmood herself is hesitant to attribute to this movement any kind of grand, oppositional political motive that might bring it into conversation or coalition with other movements.
Nonetheless, one of Mahmood’s main points is to show how the piety movement challenges the limits of ‘progressive’ political languages, frameworks, judgements and sensibilities. And this is precisely why I find it important to bring this work into conversation with the three other critical ‘progressive’ traditions I examined. Global networks of social movements today bring any number of diverse struggles and movements into contact, and potentially into relationship, with any number of others. Furthermore, cooperation among these movements can be produced by any number of negative or positive, oppositional or affirmative, convergences. Resistance to imperialism, which has been my focus in this dissertation, provides only one such nodal point among many others. As such, no, there is no single set of commitments that unites a global network of movements, especially at its edges (Conway 2012); rather, the network hangs together through a dense and complex web of diverse, criss-crossing, and intersecting interests and commitments; of cooperation and competition, convergences and divergences, affinities and aversions, friends and enemies. For those who are serious, then, about creating ‘one world with many worlds in it’ (to use the popular Zapatista slogan) — and not just as a future goal, but as something to actualize and bring into being in the present — one of the crucial tasks is to think through the challenges of deep diversity, and more specifically of deep ethical difference — including the kinds of differences between secular-humanist forms of progressive politics, and an Islamic women’s piety movement.
One of the key challenges in this regard, to which I have tried to draw attention in this
chapter, is the challenge of moving beyond top-down approaches to difference which attempt to deal with ‘difference’ in the singular — that is, in the abstract — through an appeal to a meta-norm that simultaneously transcends, reconciles, and yet enables concrete differences. I have argued that all three of the critical progressive traditions I surveyed rely, albeit in somewhat different ways and different senses, on the modern meta-norm of autonomy in this way, treating it as a higher-order norm that allows them to abstract away from concrete ethical differences, rather than as a central ethical commitment of a modern, secular-humanist way of life. As such, these traditions can each be thought of as subintern traditions to modernity — that is, they are subordinate (critical) traditions, but are nonetheless internal to modernity because they share its central form of problematization: the struggle over the autonomy of individuals and peoples.
The encounter with deep ethical difference, however, cannot simply occur within modernity in a way that allows moderns to remain safely entrenched in their already-accepted ethico-political tradition. Indeed, the pretension to be able to do so is itself an expression of the hegemonic power of modernity. And this is one of the central dangers here: that modern, especially liberal-democratic, forms of power will be reinscribed and reproduced within the network(s) of social movements attempting to realize a new world with room for many worlds in it. Taking the imperial power of liberal-democracy seriously means that many of us have to come to terms with the fact that our languages of the good and of emancipation are themselves implicated and complicit in pervasive forms of global power, injustice, oppression, assimilation, and destruction. And if this new world is built using only these modern languages and normativities, a number of modernity’s dividing and assimilative relations will surely be reproduced. As such, in this chapter I have attempted to trace a number of steps to help move beyond this family of political languages.
A first step in the learning curve I have sketched out here is to provincialize liberal-democratic norms that were regarded as universal and transcendental, and instead to regard these as particular ethico-political commitments. A second step is to recognize ethico-political movements that are not oriented toward, and therefore not constrained by, modern political institutions. A third step is to move beyond the idea that differences need to
be hegemonized by a common political project, even if it is by a (now-provincialized) liberal-democratic project. A fourth step is to no longer rely upon a meta-narrative of modernization to limit the forms of difference that need to be taken seriously in the first place. A fifth step is to begin to take seriously the many movements that are neither oriented toward autonomy nor against oppression, but toward any number of goods or visions, and to pay attention to the infinitely diverse ways in which various movements assert forms of sameness and/or difference in relation to one another.
To recognize and affirm this complex web of deep ethico-political diversity is not to say that all differences are incommensurable, or that common goals and cooperation are not possible. Rather, it is to say that all convergences that make up this web will be provisional, situated, and shifting, and cannot be posited in advance from within one language, framework, ideology, or way of life. These convergences must be earned and built from the ground up, from within concrete relationships of trust, humility, care, and cooperation across difference, and within dialogues that are critical, comparative, and ethical in their forms of reasoning. From the perspective of the participants involved, what is enacted here is not a form of “groundless solidarity” (Day 2005) or a “solidarity without bounds” (Kurasawa 2004), as some have suggested. Rather, these practices and relationships of solidarity remain firmly grounded and rooted within the dense field of ethical commitments and differences, not in abstraction from it.
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Chapter 6
Conclusion: Sikhi as Ethico-Political Practice
This dissertation has been an attempt to think through the hegemony and imperialism of liberal-democratic modernity, and the possibilities for forms of politics rooted in subaltern(ized) difference. One of the great challenges involved in resisting this form of hegemony is that liberal-democracy itself offers a broad family of evaluative languages that includes not only dominant languages that function to conserve and protect existing power relations, but also a wide range of robust and well-developed critical languages of resistance that can be used to challenge and subvert existing power relations. While the latter do provide the means of internal critique, these critical (or subinternal) languages share with the dominant languages a basic form of life rooted in the structures, social formations, and self-understandings of modernity. As such, the struggle between the dominant and critical languages of modernity does little to address the relation of this form of life to other forms of life, and in particular to the processes of subalternization of all non-modern ways of life and forms of normativity. Indeed the adoption and reliance on subinternal languages of resistance by subordinate groups helps to propagate and strengthen the hegemony of liberal-democracy, and the corresponding subalternization of alternative normative traditions and ways of life.Truth is high, but higher still is truthful living.
--Guru Nanak
These processes of subalternization of alternative normative traditions are further complicated by the fact that liberal-democracy’s critical languages are built upon the image of an autonomous subject whose freedom and equality ostensibly allows pluralism and difference to flourish. As such, these languages carry a promise of emancipation and of the protection of difference—indeed, of providing the very preconditions for difference. These promises serve to channel alternative normative traditions into this modern, liberal-democratic form of life itself—to take up and utilize liberal-democracy’s critical resources as its own, and as a means to its own ‘interests’. The interaction of alternative normative traditions with liberal-democratic languages therefore causes an internal bifurcation with which most alternative normative traditions are grappling today: the divide between a modern, liberal-democratic form of the tradition and other forms of the tradition that are not epistemically adjusted to the priority of the modern, liberal-democratic form of life. In other words, this is a divide between those forms of a tradition that are now subinternal to liberal- democracy, and those that remain subaltern. The resulting split between ‘good Muslim’ and ‘bad Muslim’ articulated by Mahmood Mamdani is a phenomenon that arises not only within the Muslim community, then, but within practically any alternative normative tradition today (although not equally so) that comes into contact with the discourse of liberal-democracy. As Esteva and Prakash argue, paraphrasing Yvonne Dion-Buffalo and John Mohawk, subintern/subaltern peoples today have three choices: “become good subjects, accepting the premises of the modern West without much question; become bad subjects, always revolting against the parameters of the colonizing world; or become non-subjects, acting and thinking in ways far removed from those of the modern West” (1998: 45, original italics).
Indeed, my own motivation for analyzing this process of subinternization/subalternization arises from a concern over the sheer weight and vast assimilative power that liberal-democracy exerts over the ‘other’ normative tradition in my own life: the tradition of Sikhi. It is therefore appropriate, I hope, for me to conclude this project with a reflection on how the above bifurcation is playing out within the Sikh community today, especially in the Western diaspora. This is a community that has in recent years been labelled both a model minority and a terrorist threat; has experienced racism and racial profiling, exclusion, and state-sanctioned violence and persecution, while at the same time achieving high levels of public integration; and has been grappling simultaneously with struggles against assimilation, struggles for inclusion, and movements for internal reform and transformation. In response to these various pressures and struggles, a wide range of political forms have been generated within the community, but here I want to focus on what I see as two broad families of what we might call ‘Sikh politics’.
The first, which is the most prevalent, is a modern, liberal-democratic form of Sikh politics that is centrally concerned with the struggle for forms of multicultural accommodation/inclusion of Sikhs and Sikh practices within a broadly liberal-democratic public sphere, as well as for forms of Sikh nationhood/political sovereignty. This modernist form of Sikh politics tends to abstract away from the specific or particular content of Sikhi, instead utilizing dominant liberal-democratic tropes of rights, representation, recognition, popular sovereignty, and the oppression/autonomy binary to fight for inclusion into the modern state and supra-state institutions and orders. Central examples of this family of political struggles include the fight for the right to wear the kirpan in public schools and other public institutions, to be able to wear the dastaar (turban) and to keep kesh (uncut hair) in the U.S. military and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and to have Sikh representation in political institutions, as well as for an independent Sikh state. The second form of Sikh politics, by contrast, is an ethico-political form that approaches Sikhi as a normative tradition to be actualized in the lives and practices of Sikhs. Far from abstracting away from the positive content of Sikhi, this latter form of politics does not use modern liberal-democratic languages as an instrument or means to achieve Sikh ends or to protect Sikh difference; rather, it closes the gap between means and ends by starting on the ground of micro-scale practices of Sikhi rather than on macro-scale institutions (but does not end with the former), and shifts the focus from the formalistic modern question of how Sikhs can achieve full, free and equal personhood, citizenship and/or nation-statehood, to the question of what it means to be/become a Sikh and to live a Sikh way of life. Within this latter form of politics, ‘modernity’ is hardly taken for granted, but actually tends to be regarded as an assimilative force that often distorts and/or contains the meaning and practice of Sikhi.
To be sure, these two forms of politics are often not regarded as standing in tension with each other. Modern rights to freedom of religion, for example, are not usually seen as an intrusion by modernity upon Sikhi in the same straightforward way as are modern social pressures to cut one’s hair. Nonetheless, I want to suggest that there are increasing tensions between these two forms of politics within the Sikh community, as dissonances between Sikhi and modernity, Sikhi and liberal-democracy, are increasingly recognized, and as the constraints imposed by modern liberal-secular rule and culture upon Sikhi are increasingly identified and challenged. One very interesting example of such a tension between these two forms of Sikh politics arose in the recent debates over the campaign for inclusion of Sikhs into the U.S. Military. While several critical commentators suggested that, rather than fight for inclusion into any and all institutions of this kind, Sikhs ought to consider whether the institutions into which we seek inclusion are themselves congruent with the teachings of Sikhi, a number of others who were spearheading, participating in, and supporting the inclusion campaign argued that, regardless of our interpretations of Sikhi, those Sikhs who want to join the military should have the right to do so.
Of course, there is a very specific reason why the modern liberal-democratic form of Sikh politics abstracts away from the actual content of Sikhi. Indeed, part of the very point of the modern, secular, liberal-democratic project is to provide a moral and political order in which liberalism serves as a higher order set of values and norms—a set of meta-norms—that ostensibly provide the preconditions and necessary protections for the exercise of diverse ways of life, while at the same time requiring that these diverse ways of life, including perhaps especially religious ways of life, be epistemically adjusted so that their first-order beliefs, practices and norms internally conform to the second-order values, practices and norms of secular liberal-democracy. This applies equally to the more traditional liberalism of someone like John Stuart Mill, for whom the process of epistemic adjustment occurs through social reform in civilized societies and through colonial tutelage and despotism in ‘backward’ societies, as to the more contemporary, ‘post-secular’ liberalism of Jürgen Habermas, for whom religious citizens must undergo a series of ‘learning processes,’ ‘reconstructions,’ or ‘epistemic adjustments’ that allow them to ‘modernize’ and to reconcile their religious ways of life with the primacy and authority of modern, secular science and liberal-secular constitutionalism and individualism. Politics, in this tradition, is largely construed as withdrawing from first-order considerations, leaving these instead to a private sphere of individual choice, and establishing a public sphere based only upon the second-order norms and procedures that are required for social cohesion, political legitimacy, and peaceful co-existence in an otherwise diverse society. Indeed, then, the shoehorning of Sikhi that occurs within liberal-democratic Sikh politics, as well as its abstraction away from much of the distinctive content of Sikhi, is quite intentional, for this is regarded as a central condition of the social compact that ostensibly enables diverse citizens and groups to both live together peacefully, and be able to choose for themselves the way of life that best suits them.
The problem, however, with this tradition in general and therefore with the dominance of the liberal-democratic form of Sikh politics in particular is that it is precisely in the course of all of this ‘learning’, ‘reconstruction’, and ‘adjustment’ that the distinctiveness of diverse normative traditions is often lost, and that these traditions can and often do become radically disconnected from the everyday lives of their adherents. Rather ironically, the words of that great liberal imperialist himself, John Stuart Mill, are helpful in understanding this point. In the context of drawing a contrast between ‘dead dogma’ and ‘living belief’ in his treatise On Liberty, Mill argues that most Christians hold the doctrines of Christianity as a dead dogma, that is, in a way that is radically disconnected from the actual regulation of their conduct. He writes:
The argument I am making here bears some resemblance to Mill’s, in that I am suggesting that many forms of politics often engaged in by Sikhs in their ‘every-day judgments and practices’, and commonly understood as ‘Sikh politics’, have much more to do with the demands and interests of what Mill calls ‘worldly life’—but what I will call the structures of modern, capitalist, liberal-secular life and its forms of governmentality—than with Sikhi itself, and in fact serve to contain any radical potential of Sikhi. In the process of fighting to be integrated and included into, and therefore largely accepting the terms and constraints imposed by, modernity and its dominant ethico-political framework, forms of rule, and way of life—that is, in the process of subinternization—Sikhi can become a ‘dead dogma’, rather than a ‘living belief’. Sikhi is hollowed out, individualized and privatized such that its distinctive ontology and normative framework are either gutted or confined so effectively to a private realm that it is both disconnected from most aspects of Sikhs’ everyday lives and practices—especially in the ‘economic’ and ‘political’ spheres—and also rendered incapable of presenting any real critical challenge to those practices. Political integration can, in this way, serve to further cultural assimilation. This is precisely the phenomenon described by Esteva and Prakash in the following passage:...it is scarcely too much to say that not one Christian in a thousand guides or tests his individual conduct by reference to [the laws of the New Testament]. The standard to which he does refer it, is the custom of his nation, his class, or his religious profession. He has thus, on the one hand, a collection of ethical maxims, which he believes to have been vouchsafed to him by infallible wisdom as rules for his government; and on the other a set of every-day judgments and practices, which go a certain length with some of those maxims, not so great a length with others, stand in direct opposition to some, and are, on the whole, a compromise between the Christian creed and the interests and suggestions of worldly life. To the first of these standards he gives his homage; to the other his real allegiance.
But as Wendy Brown, using Foucault, reminds us, the power of modern liberal-democracy exceeds the power of the state alone. Modern governmental power goes well beyond the state; indeed, the state is itself to some degree governmentalized, or subjected to forms of governmentality which permeate the whole realm of the social (2006: 78-83).[The modern state] attempts to assure absolute fidelity of the citizens-subjects whose social and political relationships cease to have their own center, to subordinate themselves to public or private capital of the centralist state, founded on the individualization of the possessive, envious and covetous individual, the Homo oeconomicus, created in the West. The state attempts to homogenize all natural communities in its territory; to impose upon them the same way of thinking and behaving, the same habits, to establish what is called el imperio de la ley (“the Empire of the Law”). (1998: 132, original italics)[/size]
This, then, is the great assimilative power of modern secular liberal-democracy: that while liberal-secular values, practices and norms are promoted and accepted as simply second-order norms—a set of enabling, capacitating, empowering meta-norms that do not rival or threaten first-order identities and beliefs, but, on the contrary, provide the necessary preconditions and protections for the exercise of those identities and beliefs—they nonetheless come to serve as the primary norms that orient and structure our basic, everyday form of life. As non-modern ways of life come to be adjusted to, dependent upon, and in fact built around, liberal-democratic norms, institutions, and forms of sociality, as well as capitalist economies—often through the very process of subalterns fighting for forms of freedom and equality within liberal-democratic modernity—alternative normative traditions are privatized, displaced, restructured, and marginalized. To use Mill’s phrasing again, those religious ‘maxims’ that ‘stand in direct opposition’ to the demands of worldly life, or those that do not ‘go a certain length’ with adherents’ everyday judgments and practices, are largely discarded, and in the process, any alternative contenders for their allegiance (and the forms of radical difference contained therein) are neutralized with respect to any real ability to regulate their conduct. This is the phenomenon described by Talal Asad (1996), when he says that “insofar as certain modern forms of religiosity have been identified with sets of abstracted belief-statements which have barely anything to do with people’s actual lives, you get the curious phenomenon of Christians, non-Christians, and atheists allegedly believing in or rejecting religion, but living the same kind of life.” The irony here, of course, is that this containment of alternative normative traditions which often causes them to become ‘dead dogma’ is part of the very point of the modern, secular, liberal-democratic project that John Stuart Mill himself and others were so instrumental in justifying and disseminating globally.
Of course none of this is to say that liberal-democratic forms of Sikh politics involve only a one-way process of assimilation of Sikhi into an overarching liberal-secular structure, or that Sikhs cannot and do not practice liberal-democracy differently than others. The specificities of Sikhi can and do play a modulating role in how Sikhs practice and inhabit liberal-democratic norms and forms of subjectivity, and Sikhs have played a very important role in modifying and expanding liberal-democratic norms in ways that may not have happened otherwise. Indeed, to take only one commonplace example, the fight to wear the kirpan in public schools and institutions has provoked a great deal of thought and reworking of the liberal tradition in directions that may not have otherwise happened, as evidenced by, if nothing else, the fact that the ‘Sikh kirpan’ case study plays a central role in the literature and jurisprudence on liberal multiculturalism and debates over religious freedom. Modifications of liberal-democratic norms are certainly possible, but my basic claim is that these interventions largely remain as modifications within, rather than transformations of, the general terrain of modern liberal-secular forms of rule. What is modified, amended, and/or expanded here are the central categories, values, and practices of liberal-secular rule, which are not displaced according the distinct logic(s) and categories of Sikhi, but rather maintain their privilege and place as the central structural and organizational categories.
This is precisely where the importance of the second, subaltern form of Sikh politics becomes clear, as it provides a crucial form of resistance to the assimilative power of liberal-democracy and its processes of subinternization. This form of ethico-political practice, or what I have otherwise been calling a form of ‘actualism’, is itself not new, of course—attempts to actualize or to live up to the normative tradition of Sikhi are as old as the tradition itself. Nonetheless, the specifically political aspect of this practice has largely been concealed, obscured, or contained by modern frameworks that have construed Sikhi as a ‘religion’, and therefore as something separate from ‘politics’. Indeed the very shift away from the English term ‘Sikhism’ and toward the Punjabi term ‘Sikhi’ is meant to reflect a rejection of the constraints imposed by colonial vocabulary and Western regimes of knowledge that constructed ‘Sikhism’ as a set of relatively abstract metaphysical doctrines, belief-statements or truth-claims, and to instead recover a sense of ‘Sikhi’ as an embodied, practical tradition. In doing so, Sikhi no longer remains simply a religion in the modern sense, but becomes a non-compartmentalized way of life, a practical tradition that can orient conduct across a variety of social spheres, rather than being contained within a single sphere.
Sikhi is returned in this process to its roots as a radical social movement, as a kind of transformative praxis that operates according to an autonomous logic that need not be subordinated to the ‘higher-order’ practical rationality of hegemonic institutions, and whose politics is not primarily based on making demands of, or gaining power within, these institutions, but on actualizing a different way of life here and now through practices that prefigure or enact an alternative set of social values and practical relations. Sikhi as an ethico-political practice therefore re-unites Sikhi’s commitment to both miri and piri, to both transformative social organization and communal life as well as to individual detachment from both ego/self and material life. This re-thinking and re-grounding of the thought and practice of Sikhi beyond the constraints of the theory and practice of liberal-democratic modernity is today occurring not only in the academic realm of Sikh Studies (Mandair 2009), [37] but also within emerging social movements like the Sikh Activist Network in the greater Toronto area.
The key challenge for Sikhi as an ethico-political practice, then, involves the attempt by Sikhs to extend the teachings and practices of Sikhi throughout all the spheres of their lives, or, perhaps more accurately, without regard for the differentiation of social spheres that is so central to theories of modernity and modernization. This involves developing new habits of applying the categories and normativities of Sikhi both in relations among Sikhs and in relations with non-Sikhs, to realms both within and beyond the Sikh community for which this previously may have seemed unnecessary or inappropriate. It will involve asking what Sikhi has to say (or how it can be used as a resource to think) about economic and political relations, about relations of power and oppression, about the environment, about pluralism and the diversity of normative traditions, about gender relations, and about the central goods that should guide our spiritual and material lives and our forms of critique of the same. In short: are there modern problems for which Sikhi can provide solutions? Answering this question will also involve exploring and experimenting with how to actualize or practice Sikhi here and now.
To be clear, Sikhi as an ethico-political practice is not a hegemonic or assimilative project. This is not an attempt to gain modern political power in order to legislate or enforce universal Sikh norms over Sikhs and non-Sikhs using the coercive power of the state. Sikhi, after all, is not a juridical or legislative tradition; it emphasizes truthful living over doctrines of truth, virtuous practice over universal moral and religious law. Furthermore, Sikhi is not an evangelical tradition that seeks to convert or assimilate others, but neither is it a relativistic tradition. It is neither a universalistic, nor a particularistic, tradition, but something closer to what I have called a common tradition. A central tenet of Sikhi is that there are many paths to spiritual enlightenment, so there is no impulse to proselytize or engage in missionary work; rather, a Sikh simply challenges others, through words and through her own example, to live up to the best in their own traditions. Sikhi is a deeply pluralistic tradition, committed to the flourishing of deeply different ways of life, but its pluralism is not rooted in a modern notion of autonomy.
Furthermore, Sikhi as an ethico-political practice certainly takes seriously unjust power relations and forms of oppression within to the Sikh community; indeed one of its primary tasks is surely to confront and transform these relations. However, this approach regards Sikhi as providing its own resources for internal critique and internal consistency. There is no such thing as a formal or abstract critique of power that can be used to analyze Sikh social relations and institutions; most that claim to offer such a critique are based in a naturalized secular-humanist ontology and conception of the subject, one that is backed up by the coercive power of liberal-democratic institutions. Any critique of power is based in an affirmation of a distinct form of subjectivity and set of normative goods, and as such, Sikhi can itself provide an internal (albeit essentially contested) standard for a critique of power relations. One rather simple place to begin to think about a Sikh critique of power, then, could be with Sikhi’s distinct ethical system, comprised of five vices or ‘thieves’ (lust, anger, greed, attachment, and ego/pride), and five virtues (truth, contentment, compassion, humility, and love).
However, in thinking of Sikhi as a practical and normative tradition that has the ability to guide a holistic way of life, this tradition should not be thought of in a narrow sense, with regard only to its central ‘doctrines’, ‘values’, or ‘beliefs’; rather, it should take into account the full breadth and depth of this diverse and contested tradition, including both its symbolic and material content, and how all aspects of this tradition can serve as sources for anchoring and/or orienting the ethico-political practices of Sikhi. As such, practices of Sikhi can be those that draw upon any number of aspects of this broad and (critically) holistic tradition, including its language(s), history, scriptures, exemplary figures, normative values and frameworks, historical and contemporary customs and practices, popular narratives and meanings, social and religious institutions, and so on. Ethico-political practices of Sikhi could involve abstaining from forms of consumerism and consumption as a way of detaching from maya; developing alternative dispute resolution mechanisms and other parallel institutions within the Sikh community oriented toward Sikh goods and values; struggling to establish non-hierarchical and egalitarian workplaces as an expression of nimrata (humility) and a rejection of lobh (greed) and ahankar (ego/pride); establishing forms of communal and cooperative living, such as those encouraged and practiced by Guru Nanak; attempting to extend and apply the ethos and discipline involved in keeping the five kakkars to other aspects of one’s life in an effort to live up to the ideal of the saint soldier; developing a form of Sikh feminism that is not grounded in modernity’s autonomous subject, but in a distinctly Sikh subject; or re-imagining and re-institutionalizing langar (free, communal kitchen and meals) beyond the confines of the gurdwara. By expanding Sikhi’s ability to guide our conduct in every aspect of our lives, we engage in practices that not only project from subaltern difference, but also begin to actualize a post-imperial, post-modern, post-liberal, post-capitalist, post-secular way of life.
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References:
37. For the beginnings of a very interesting dialogue between Sikh Studies and Indigenous Studies, see Johnson 2011
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Bibliography:
Johnson, Greg. 2011. “Religion and the Specter of the West.” Interventions 13(1): 146-49.
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