sa l 03115 yasmeen arif

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Economic & Political Weekly EPW january 3, 2015 vol l no 1 53

The Audacity of Method

Yasmeen Arif

I thank the anonymous EPW reviewer for a sensitive and insightful reading. Thoughtful comments from Jaivir Singh, Deepak Mehta, Adil Hasan Khan and my Spring Cohort at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus, during 2014 have been invaluable in giving these imaginings some shape, however incomplete.

Yasmeen Arif ([email protected]) teaches Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.

The dominant theories, methods or epistemologies in

sociological or social anthropological work, or even in

the wider human sciences, seem inadequate. In

response to that challenge, and written from the “South”

with due recognition of the cognitive injustices of

knowledge production, this article proposes that

hemispheric or other binaries need to be laid to rest.

Instead, it attempts to see how encounters among a

diversity of locations, expressive lives and experiences

connect in messy, non-hierarchical, uncharted but

resonant and associative ways, such that they insist on

destabilising dominant concept or modes of

theorising. The article attempts a politics which liberates

straitjacketed epistemologies (like binaries) that stifle

attempts at knowing or in articulating knowledges.

Illustrations, broadly following a “politics of life”, are

discussed to propose an alternate, inclusive and

cognitively ethical mode of theorising.

We think too much in terms of history, whether personal or universal. Becoming belongs to geography, they are orientations, directions, entries and exits. There is a woman-becoming which is not the same as women, their past and their future, and it is essential that women en-ter this becoming to get out of their past and their future, their history. There is a revolutionary-becoming which is not the same as the future of the revolution, and which does not necessarily happen through the militants. — Deleuze 2007: 2

Epistemological desires, or in another way, ways of know-ing, have always recognised the inequitable privileges of power and place. Critique in knowledge production,

within and across disciplinary parameters, have addressed such concerns and this essay attempts another intervention, delivering a politics of epsitemology in methodological orien-tation. Marking the present as a location for this exercise, I suggest a proposal which privileges the “contemporary”. The contemporary, in a fairly common-sensical framing, identifi es a slice of current space and time textured as an interplanetary meshwork of incessant connections and fl ows – temporal and spatial, real and virtual, opaque and transparent; or, assem-bled in emergent socialities, ethics, experiences, cultures, economies that seem to dismantle hemispheric borders, fron-tiers or any other catalogues of location. First, the critique is about the mismatch of historically dominant, linear forms of theory and their discordance with such an environment – a mismatch usually associated with the persistent hegemonies of concept that legitimating centres of power endorse and reproduce.1 Second, the proposal involves the formulation of a method, which could provide for an epistemology that recognises the hegemonic inscriptions but refuses their terms of negotiation.

If decentred theorising is the need of the day, one recent in-stance is Jean and John Comaroffs’ (2011) Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa, which suggests a global coming-of-age in Africa, where the machina-tions of late-capitalism far outreach those developing in the North. It thus stands to their reason that we now need to look to Africa to understand what the future holds for the erstwhile Northern “leaders” of human civilisation (and the world), thereby enact a reversal of epistemology – thus “Theory from the South”. The text is characteristically nuanced and rich as is the debate that has followed.2

I point to the simplest discomfort evident in the title itself – the commitment towards radicalising theory, but within the containment of preordained geography.3 Is this not an articu-lation of theory that has endorsed the same hemispheric categories, the binary relationships that the production of

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january 3, 2015 vol l no 1 EPW Economic & Political Weekly54

knowledge has always known? Speaking for the South through the reiteration of the same classifi catory systems that decide the “enunciatory location” of theory or its alleged “reversal”, does not quite endorse any new reallocation of epistemo logical privilege.

In response, I work with the possibility of going against the grain of “theory from the South”4 and the task I set for myself is: if there is to be a potential for new epistemologies, what re-mappings of geography can indeed provide the blueprint for a historically alert and methodologically feasible innovation? The ideas sketched here follow that pursuit in two threads – the fi rst suggests a strategy suitable for an empirical environ-ment that destabilises hemispheric classifi cations (that have been and are part of academic imaginations), and instead senses a mobile, intermeshed planetary fi eld. The second thread identifi es how subject positions that appear in this plan-etary fi eld claim the potential of enunciatory privilege by mov-ing beyond the identity constraints that classifi catory systems in linear theory bestow.

In both, I draw from critiques in social anthropology, but the method I propose here cannot limit itself to the same disci-plinary parameters. The ambition is about understanding how critique can inform the making of a research object in the contemporary, recognise the inadequacy of theory and con-cept in that making and anchor that recognition in a politics of epistemology.

Explaining what theory is, is undoubtedly an onerous task. However, theorising as an active process, which has an effect on the inadequacy of concept, is what I bracket here.5 How can there be a possibility of accommodating those kinds of empiri-cal material that cannot be explained by the fi xities, the abso-lutes, the certainties of conceptual categories that dominate our theoretical horizon. It is not enough to evaluate whether any concept is valid or not in any context, but rather, to seek out what remains outside that conceptual ambit.

What needs to be done, thus, is to be methodologically crea-tive enough to harness the empirical material and translate them to conceptual innovations, or accretions. In brief, this project argues for an active theorising that emerges from an epistemological politics that moves away from origins and from oppositional thinking that has guided and crafted forms of knowing and validated inadequate concepts, simply by retaining the terms of those concepts.6 As I argue, conceptual innovation can appear when the terms of negotiation are set anew, and not when they are repeated without recognition of difference and singularity.

Liberating Straitjacket Identities

The fi rst theme is the harnessing of the empirical in the contemporary. Using an anthropological manoeuvre, but arguably, a staple in the processes of making knowledge, I reshape the idea of “encounters”. Anthropological encounters, in their classical mode, work through a set pattern of engraved pathways: North-South, South-South, East-West, global-local, centre-margin, hegemonic-subaltern, and so forth. Instead, these “encounters” can be radically reframed and energised as

“emergent encounters” (Arif 2006, 2012) in so much that they move forward with a conscious, anarchic methodological intention of fi nding connections amongst locations, peoples, experiences, ideas, articulations, expressions, representations, that defy engraved associations and classifi catory systems that the academy has mandated.

The proposition for emergent encounters thus formulates its basis as follows – an assemblage of encounters that is framed through an isomorphic cartography of dialogic spaces which play with the dynamic of “others”, now released from erst-while binaries and from insular heterogeneity. It is an imagi-nary routed through an intent that makes connections and analytical jumps between cultures, locations and places that changes the original encounter between the West and the rest, simultaneously dismantling the original self/other dynamic into an interface, collaboration, negotiation and interaction of different others. The assemblage that would allow access to both empirical and epistemological possibility lies in the interface of these differentiated cultures, knowledges, social formations and experiences with each other. What, then, emerges in this methodological intent is an interactive understanding of intercultural interfaces – in other words, between and amongst multiplicities that are not seen as isolated diverse wholes but rather as different analogous or resonant nodes.

The epistemological shift lies precisely in the routing thr-ough isomorphic encounters, which by contouring emergent objects of enquiry through resonant encounters do not simply map the path, for instance, from the local to the global (and vice versa), but in effect, show how such correspondences negotiate with each other in ways in which both the parti-cularities of the local and the universalisms of the global continu-ally change and reformulate themselves. This epistemolo gical reformulation crafted out of a remapping, becomes potent also because these isomorphic mappings have been enacted through a politically motivated cartography – one that makes a conscious acknowledgement of hegemonic patterns by delib-erately denying them in practice.

To pre-empt the argument that follows, in the pairings of North-South, East-West, global-local, centre-margin, hegem-onic-subaltern, the hyphen is substituted by an “and”,7 where the “and” moves beyond just pairings. The motivation is to see how encounters among a diversity of locations, expressive lives and experiences connect in messy, non-heirarchical, uncharted but, resonant and associative ways such that they insist on destabilising conceptual categories and normative understandings. This motivation harnesses the continual re-production, the birthing of new forms of empirical composi-tions, carefully underlining the couplings and connectivities that precede that birth. By locating an epistemology in the compositions and assemblages, I attempt a politics that liber-ates the straitjacket identities (like the binaries above) that sti-fl e our attempts at knowing or in articulating knowledges. The following illustrations from historiography show that such lat-eral connectivities are not limited to the contemporary – their potential has existed over time.

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Susan Buck-Morss (2009: x) suggests in her preface to Hegel, Haiti and Universal History that “Universal History refers more to method than to content”. At the core of this thesis is what Buck-Morss reads as a perplexing puzzle. At the time when Hegel writes a profound political philosophy that moves from the minute cycles of economic production to colonial economies and then to the crux of the “master-slave dialectic”, he fails to make any reference to the ongoing events at Haiti, even as they were unfolding when he wrote. This was a time, as Buck-Morss notes, when it would have been impossible for someone like Hegel who, over the cusp between the 17th and 18th centuries, was an avid reader of all periodicals and current publications, to have not been acutely aware of the well documented hap-penings in Haiti which later came to be called the fi rst success-ful slave revolution in human history.

As she writes (2009: 12-13).

Conceptually, the revolutionary struggle of slaves, who overthrow their own servitude and establish a constitutional state, provides the theoretical hinge that stakes Hegel’s analysis out of the limitlessly ex-panding colonial economy and onto the plane of world history which he defi nes as the realisation of freedom – a theoretical solution that was taking place in practice at Haiti at that very moment.…Ultimately, ‘Hegel and Haiti’ is about the connection, the ‘and’ that links these two historical phenomena in silence. What drove me and what and in fact angered me in the course of this research was an in-creasing awareness of the limits that scholarship places upon our im-agination, so that the phenomenon called Hegel and the phenomenon called Haiti, porously interconnected at the time of their origins (as newspapers and journals clearly document) had been severed by the history of their transmission. To evoke the specter of Eurocentrism at this point is easy, of course, but it begs the point of how Eurocentrism was itself constructed historically and what role Haiti might have played in that process.

This connective tissue between Haiti and the philosophical place of freedom as symbiotic can fi nd any function only if we could allow for them to be placed adjacently, in connection with or in communication as simultaneous facts of the time, and not as one of Haiti subsumed as part of European history. What Buck-Morss does with her claim is to liberate this bit of alleged local history and gives it its rightful place in the larger narrative of history for humanity – as an ethical, political, philosophical epistemological triumph. This act of giving Haiti its place is not to suggest a monopoly, an exclusive right of the Haitian episode over that moment – over emancipatory action or the consciousness of it – but rather to suggest that neither does Europe have that monopoly that she has long been given. The impossibility of according audacity of emancipatory con-sciousness among slaves, or they willy-nilly creating history rather than be part of it, was a notion embedded as a limit of imagination in the way Europe thought. The potential of this statement lies in that it emerges from an act of methodological imagination, an act of scholarly liberty which chooses to make connections between facts, ideas, realities which remain sepa-rated not in their own right, but simply because they have not been allowed to connect.

The kind of historiography that Sanjay Subrahmanyam attempts in his connected histories, suggests a similar episte-mological excavation of an archive. The archival conurbation

that he brings together is too vast to meaningfully summarise. However, working with his “expertise” on south Asia, Subrah-manyam seeks an opening out of overly classifi ed south Asian history by showing how myriad mutual infl uences, interfaces, interactions across the Mediterranean, Eurasia, Iberia and east Asia combine together to reconfi gure epochal attributions. He tells us (1997: 761-62)

Given the fragmentary nature of access to knowledge, each of us is more or less condemned in greater or lesser measure to Area-Studies. Let me end, therefore, with a plea once more, that we not only com-pare from within our boxes but spend some time and effort to tran-scend them, not by comparison alone but by seeking out at times frag-ile threads that connect the globe, even as the globe came to be de-fi ned as such. This is not to deny voice to those who were somehow ‘fi xed’ by physical, social and cultural co-ordinates, who inhabited ‘localities’ in the early modern period and nothing else, and whom we might seek out with our intrepid analytical machetes. But if we ever get to ‘them’ by means other than archaeology the chances are that it is because they are already plugged into some network, some process of circulation.

His work runs counter to accepted and replicated historio-graphical “categories”, but culls out interfaces that remain embedded in the archive but do not fi nd expression in writing. My emphasis on the contemporary is another form of the same intention, but steps away at a particular juncture.

The Project of Epistemological Rerouting

Buck-Morss or Subrahmanyam, as historiographers, compel a writing that draws from the past in order to script a narrative of interfaces and also to secure a future epistemological innovation. These writings, as it were, are retellings, albeit at a decibel level that will force another hearing of political philo sophy and universal history. My venture has the contem-porary as its temporal location. It enmeshes both pasts and futures. I do not ask for a rewriting of a narrative (which it may as well do), but rather suggest a porosity between contexts and positionings that hitherto remained unconnected in theoreti-cal or epistemological enterprise.

Consider a small motif and its reroutings in my own rese arch through which I can initiate an explanation of the project of epistemological rerouting. My work explores an articulation of life, as formulated in its reclaimings and reformulations, its assertions and disavowals in realms of mass damage. My assembly of encounters includes locations like Beirut, Delhi, Gujarat, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and New Orleans; or institutions and discourses of international law, justice mechanisms, humani-tarianisms, aid bureaucracies, religion, community and citizen-ship. One resonating theme that I have explored is the different infl ections of sovereignty in citizenship and community life.

An experience that emerges from these infl ections in the contexts that I have explored is that of self-killing or suicide. In the fi rst instance, a Sikh widow who, unable to cope with the killings of her sons and husband, commits suicide in the months after the Delhi 1984 Sikh carnage.8 A second instance that emerges in the wider terrain of political violence is that of the suicide bomber (in Sri Lanka or elsewhere). These self- killings refl ect of each other the entanglement of sovereignty,

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community life and citizen life. I read the fi rst self-killing as an exercise of complete sovereign freedom, an act of withdrawal from the imposed membership of a community of widows or from an identity of belonging, in order to fold back from the outside to complete subjective interiority. The suicide bombers, on the other hand, are embodiments of another claim to sovereign freedom, but this self-killing merges the body with the community in an act of belonging and solidarity.

If these acts were to be placed against an understanding of sovereign power that locates its source in the nation state – in the classical concept of sovereignty as the juridico-political or a politico-theological construct which places sovereign power of the state to command a claim on life above all others – any other claim to sovereignty stands in some relation of tension with the source. Suicide, in any of the above formulations, takes the shape of an illegality, a taking away of sovereign power over life, from state sovereignty.

However, if these empirical instances were to be laterally connected, without a necessary mediation of a source geneal-ogy that a dominant concept validates, what we can poten-tially propose is an expansion of the idea of sovereignty. By taking away sovereign power from its analytical hinge in a source, it is possible to understand its potential in its produc-tion of subject positions, or relational positions that re-/ produce sovereign power. Foucault (2003: 46) identifi es this when he says, “The manufacture of subjects rather than the genesis of the sovereign: that is our general theme”. Above all, sovereign power is emergent. It is emergent insomuch that newer and newer relations, through which subjects can be made subservient to power, are generated as much as subjects that claim that power for themselves are produced.

Such subjects, in my example, emerge in parallel circum-stances of self-killing. In that, both emerge as resonating motifs, but each with a singular and different articulation. However, their symbiotic reading exemplifi es, not just their re-petitive illegality in terms of state power, but rather that sover-eign power makes possible its manifestation in a realm of rela-tions that emerge between citizenship and community, as claims of belongingness within the social contract and outside. While, with Foucault, I do not suggest that the cutting off of the king’s head be taken literally; of course, accumulated, or centralised, power over life or death can be within a state apparatus. However, I would want to think about sovereignty as a concept that does not just respect a given genealogy and does not only draw from a theory of origins.

I would rather think of an analytical instinct which leads us towards fi nding and understanding those relations that can generate sovereign power. In understanding the idea of sover-eignty through relationships it will be possible to understand the subject positions that are being created by such relations of sovereign power. These relationalities, in turn, explain fecundity of the expanded concept of sovereignty, through its re-routed theorising; a rerouting that underplays the mediation of a singular hegemonic concept created through linear theorising of position and opposition, but underlines the potential in its theorising through lateral connectivity; recognising in

its path, the positionings, the singular experiences in the empirical, that make that theorising possible. Perhaps, in this specifi c methodological rerouting, a visibility is made possible of the resonant connections among sovereignty, statecraft, government, community and citizenship which suggests that the productive analytical intervention is not to critique and oppose and thereby make less valid these alleged hegemonic and often inadequate notions; but rather to make possible a wider, more inclusive and inherently different imagination and experience of these notions for the local context as well as the global concept.

Sovereignty, in conditions of violence, as in the above rendi-tion, is a small illustration of a possibility in lateral resonance – not all research endeavours need be located in such extreme conditions. Clearly, the potentiality of these sorts of connections and their effects on conceptual restructurings and normative changes are neither new nor unknown in pragmatic worlds. Various kinds of fl ows and interconnections in the realms of trade, commerce and fi nance, international public and private law, technology and human tissue transfers, migration and human resettlements, virtual spaces and others too vast to effectively summarise here, have all negotiated a relation between and among lateral locations which have resulted in innovative practices and also, in re-conceptualising norms.

Opening the Space for Theory

These exchanges do not necessarily work with ethical princi-ples that work towards equitable solutions – but that precisely is the reason why the routing of these norm changing practices need to be traced so that privilege and power is once again revealed. Yet, insofar that they change established understand-ing, they make a change in epistemological potential – eventu-ally, in the destabilisation of generalisations that make theo-rising possible. The emphasis thus is in recognising that these changes, negotiations, norm-transformations are themselves carriers of conceptual change and allotting them their rightful place in the narrative of knowledge production is the political act. Theorising, from this perspective, is not just about a politics of location, but rather about dismantling the rigidities of location that constrain social theory, especially when we rec-ognise the fact that lateral associations have remained opaque not because they do not exist, but because practices of scholar-ship deem them so.9

One kind of effort lies in understanding the present as a reassembled empirical environment through emergent en-counters as I have traced here. Announcing their reassembling may seem redundant, if I also say that they have always existed (as I have illustrated with small historiographic anecdotes), but it is important to note how their reassembling reveals what the constraints of scholarship have been. We rec-ognise them as unlikely connectivities (to reify, made unlikely by academic histories), compositions and resonant negotiations which, though anomalous as far as traditions of knowledge production and theorising go, nonetheless liberate us from the folly of tunnel vision, the kind in which Hegel and Haiti would remain as historical sequence where European or Hegelian

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“thought” would have preceded and guided Haitian action, but not as historical parallels where Haiti would have infl uenced Hegel. The method clearly is in not just making those connec-tions, but also acknowledging these as conscious innovations and fi nally, in judging them as epistemological moments.

The second necessary theme is the recognition of what enunciative positions appear in these “new” empirical assem-blies. The assembly as well as those that make the assembly – both together make possible an alternate epistemology. The next section turns to the Deleuzian oeuvre to help us fi nd those enunciatory possibilities.

From Logos to Theory

George Marcus writes in 2008, that there has “been no new ideas and none on the horizon” in anthropology since the “rup-turing critiques” of the 1980s and 1990s (2008: 2-3). He says (2008:3), “What’s left to do then, is to follow events, to engage ethnographically with history unfolding in the present, or to anticipate what is emerging”. In this long sigh after the tri-umphs of postcolonial, poststructural critique all that seems to remain in the professional corridors of the discipline is the rank and fi le of morally engaged, politically correct, well trained army of anthropologists who do not do much more than the “best, deepest journalists” (Marcus 2008:4), consci-entiously reporting from their deep embedding in multiple locations, positionings or refl exivities.

However, this lament can sound a little different if one were to hear it among some of the multiple, the peripheral or the marginal. In the peripheries, we seem to have claimed and achieved for ourselves a proper epistemology that is articu-lated through a recognition and expression of a coherent, identifi ed and located subjecthood – whether that be of the subaltern, the postcolonial, the indigenous and so forth. I, however acknowledge a gnawing realisation that we may be little else. Having been identifi ed as such, are we to be trapped in that identity straitjacket indefi nitely, which lets us speak in or speak on behalf of the voice that has been granted to us, however much we may have demanded and gained it? More worrisome is the situation where we contemplate whether that fi xedness is going to allow for the understanding of potentially other life experiences, selves, social associations or other forms of human existence that seep outside given structural categories. One wonders, if now the characters have been cast, are we to “lower the curtain” (as Marcus 2008, uses the phrase) on a play that has played to packed audiences, created publics of viewership and actors and has had its share of sequels and re-reruns? In this allocation of rightful visibility on a struc-tural map of knowledge producers, what future does this effect have on theorising or concepts?

If the challenge recognised and resolved in anthropology or beyond has been the observation and representation of multiple, alternate and heterogeneous positionalities and experiences through a resolute recognition of authenticity, then this achieved goal seems to provoke the danger of “structural” multiplicity. In this, identity authenticates repre-sentation and fi xed, immovable identity remains the goal of

history achieved, foremost, by claiming a subject position (through a dialectical logic) and freezing it for all future devel-opment of thought that is to be generated by that subject positioning. It is not as though this authenticity cannot be bor-rowed or emphatically represented by those who do not belong in that subject group – anyone should be able to speak for women or the dalit10 – but, in its entire claim to epistemologi-cal power, the churn of the motor of initiative is oppositional reaction. The question then is, can this momentum of opposi-tional reactive be the solution to the contest over epistemological privilege and theory making?

The common experiences of history have created the dialectical logic through which counter-positionings of gay and lesbian, women, varieties of coloured people, the subaltern, the postcolonial, the dalit are established. Their political place as affi nitive groups become possible, each of which (in all their authentic pluralities) claim, fi rst and foremost, subjecthoods with which and for which to rally against the oppressive regi-mes of knowledge that dominant patriarchies, whiteness, colo-nialisms, imperialisms, casteisms, nationalisms, healthisms and so forth, have produced. All aspects of living in this contempo-rary world become an outcome of experiencing it through these subjectivities – and it is this rational, objectifi ed position that we continually use as to how social life is to be explored.

Theory, then, is the spin-off from these logos. The challenge, however remains, whether these theoretical positionings have indeed exhausted our capacity for theorising as we face and recognise the persistent newness of the empirical. This is not to suggest, in the least, that these positionings have to be dismissed and their application to the social theory be disregarded. Rather, is there any way of reinvigorating their potential, where the renovation is not a solipsistic exer-cise of self-referentiality, of internal dialectics, but rather a development through external tangentialities that emerge from their enco unter with the shock of the transgressive exter-nal, the empirical?

I reckon that this challenge becomes important because, if it is not articulated as such, then historical progression in the development of epistemology in knowledge production will have a twofold outcome. First, we will remain content to triumph in our rational subjecthood – in effect, another kind of objectifi cation – that we have wrenched out of our prior ob-jectifi cation. This will be a triumph whose dark side can never quite be ignored. To invoke a statement that Frantz Fanon (2001: 187) makes about his experience in France, as a black man well trained in the French way, and yet...

I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from the outside. I am the slave, not of an idea (be it the tenacious negative stereotype) that oth-ers have of me, but of my appearing...I am fi xed.11

Second, and in relation to the above, is authentic subjec-tivity or fi xity of location the only access to epistemology – isn’t that kind of authenticity rapidly achieving levels of rationa-lised objectifi cation and epistemological predictability? When instances in the empirical tend to befuddle and frustrate, we keep them within control because of the surety and rationality of the knowing and knowable positionality that will explain it

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all. However, that control and surety seems to be an illusion as more and more lived experience seems to fall outside the gridlock of subject positionings and rational theory – even the most radical of historical movements have had to face up to the frustrations of inadequate concept. This is where I turn to Deleuze’s notion of becoming – briefl y prefaced and overly simplifi ed in this essay – to deliver the force of the method that I sketch here.

Non-Linear Emergent Encounters

Deleuze frequently implicates the bursts of newness that ap-pear from the wayward travelling of thought and things out-side those territorialities and channelling that rational history or genealogy of concepts have managed to recognise and clas-sify. His imagination is profoundly spatial insomuch that he seeks a subordination of linear, evolutionary temporality in the historical development of philosophy to a haphazard im-aginative of spatiality that literally re-territorialises the map-pings of concept creation. This privileging of expansive, virtual thought manoeuvres over evolutionary linearity and is linked to the rejection he espouses of “being” and suggests in its place, “becoming”, rather “revolutionary – becomings” as one of his motifs of liberation from the tunnel visions of historical progress in rational thought. “Becoming” opposed to the fi xity of “being” is conceived of and predicated on the rejection of the surety of the thinking cogito which is capable of mastering both understanding and knowledge by the very act of com-manding and exercising thought and concept as prior to the material, empirical world. “Becoming” rejects the fi xties of transcendental subject positions – the powerful sollipsisms and self-referentialities of rational, linear thinking that knows origins and ends, and also creates the world as it goes along with the sheer power of the concepts that it develops within itself and for itself.

His suggestion always is the breaking open of these fi xities by privileging of the empirical, the plural and the multiple as that which is pre-thought or pre-concept. His canvass is not the abstract above the material or of the transcendence over the “real”; but the immanence of the empirical. In brief then, the processes of thought, or of concept creation, lie in the delv-ing into the empirical, in which uncharted movement is the motor of creation that assembles a territory of connections that is mapped only as it is traced. Simply, it is the empirical reality out there that is the basis of creative thought and not the other way around. This is a tracing that cannot abide by the fi xity of preordained dialectics or the constancy of their interfacing subject positions qua-identities.

It is also not about an evolutionary progression from the past to the future through the present, but rather lateral, hori-zontal, vertical or any which way movements that create and yield encounters and ideas as they move, where the creation lies in the movement itself. The intention is towards creating bastard thought and concept through illegimate encounters – ones that refuse to follow a dialectics of movement that the normative union or opposition of binaries produces – men/women, man/animal, past/future, natural/artifi cial and in my

arguments here, north-south, east-west, metropole-margin, anthropologist-native, theory-practise. Concept creation, as Deleuze likes to call philosophy, is not about pre-structured operations of thought, but rather fl ights of imagination that take off from anywhere and at any point in the assemblage of geography and history, but not from origins towards futures.

The notion of emerging encounters that I have mentioned earlier bases itself on the inevitability of the Deleuzian empiri-cal plural, and indicates a line of fl ight that seeks to place this empirical plural in an assemblage that de-territorialises linear imagination, theoretical application and concept creation. In this sense, it does not suggest like Comaroff and Comaroff (2011), that events, facts and the “real” in the “South” (in their case, Africa) will now precede the “North” (or become the core to the northern periphery?), but rather that, no amount of hemispheric reversals will be adequate to the task. Nor is there any use in pulling out the foghorn again on who came fi rst in epistemological power and who will now precede, or, how much authenticity of position can be used against western imperial epistemologies.

The need of the moment seems to be to understand what and who connects to what else, in resonance of practice and concept, and to proceed to furthering this connection as a plu-rality that now propels towards a theorising from an epistemo-logical parity. This empirical plural, however, does not lose sight of the historical in so much that it purposefully summons the territorialisations of knowledges or subject positionings in order to de-territorialise them, to open them up for further po-tential. To put it bluntly, emergent encounters recognise the history of territorialised, oppositional thought (colonialism/postcolonialism, dalit/brahmin, blackness/whiteness, man/woman, for instance) through which the hegemonies of knowl-edge production, the powers of epistemology and the inade-quacies of theorising or conceptual constructs have been main-tained but, does not reify their linear progression.

Valentine Moulard-Leonard (2005) suggests Deleuze’s revolutionary-becoming in a context where the potential for other epistemologies and theorisations seems to have remai ned frustratingly impotent. Working on the historically momen-tous negritude consciousness and its apparent non-success in achieving a full libratory potential, she goes through the Kan-tian or Hegelian transformative momentum of negative dialec-tics, tracing the usual understanding of the development of subjective consciousness, in this case, black consciousness in the trail of thesis, antithesis and synthesis (the master-slave dialectic) through which the fi nal subjecthood of emancipa-tory consciousness could emerge in the black mind – one that could achieve the fi nal abstraction which could then assume the proportions of a fully formed universal concept relevant to freedom per se.

What is left behind in this formation of the universal is the difference in experience, the singularity of life and the irre-ducibility of the empirical. This then leads to a logical end, like the one in which Sartre calls for the negritude movement to be a potent moment (just a moment, it would seem) in the hurtling of history towards the amalgamation of oppressed

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subjectivities in the proletariat revolution. Based entirely on the humanist-existential fulcrum of lived experience, this is not an idea outside of the empirical, but it is one that distils lived experience into abstract abject subjects which can move the motor of history only through opposition. The frustration that the impotency of this abject consciousness leads to is the fi nal desire of Fanon’s violent revolution, when violence becomes the inevitable emancipatory mechanism.

Moulard-Leonard (2005: 233) thus states, “Such a concep-tion of history, I contend, precludes the creation of a genuinely new system, with new values, which would guarantee the im-possibility of any recuperation by the old hegemony”. The sim-ilarities for the arguments here are about, of course, the dis-comfort with historical progression through opposition and dialectic. In addition, appearing through Moulard-Leonard as well, is the incongruence of moving time and empirical emer-gences on one hand and the fi xity of ways of knowing through frozen positionings on the other.

Liberation through ‘Revolutionary-Becomings’

As I understand, empirical pluralism as it exists currently in the understanding of heterogeneity in anthropological para-meters is a form of structural multiplicity. As empiricism, it can be potent only when all that is plural and multiple is not frozen in its multiplicity and plurality – rather they are the “revolutionary-becomings” that constantly break open their identities. The imperative of asserting and fi xing subject posi-tions in the momentum of history is, to say the least, a logical temporal absurdity, where change itself is an understanding of time. In other words, we do not accept the liberation, for instance, of the postcolonial authenticities of subjecthood or the subaltern other from the colonial hegemonies as the only goal of history. Rather, we allow that liberation into a persist-ent becoming – so that a further will to knowing (not “know-ing” as automatic power) and doing continues. In another way, the subaltern learns to speak, not only in voicing self-articula-tion but more so, in active engagement that commands listen-ers who speak a similar language born of singular, ongoing experience and not of straitjacketed identity, conceptual or empirical. And this, I suggest, fi nds place in the realm of knowledge production as a politics of epistemology.

Thus, constituting the assemblage is as important as identi-fying the constituents of that assemblage. While the disman-tling of hegemonic structures requires “new” value systems – dismantling theorising privileges also requires recognising the “new” in existing subjects and allow for the emergence of new ones. As a methodologically rigorous endeavour that can sus-tain a valid claim to theorising, their articulation requires the energy of association through the kind of encounters and mappings that I have sketched.

J Biehl and P Locke (2010) illustrate this in their essay, “Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming” when they write about two separate fi eldwork terrains. In the case of the former, the life of Catarina, a Brazilian woman, apparently mentally unstable, abandoned by family and left to lead life in the insensi-tive contexts of social bewilderment and pharmaceutacalised

public mental health institutions and mechanisms. Biehl enters Catarina’s world through her self-kept dictionary, her conver-sations and her biography to decipher a lexicographical consciousness that traces a world of (non)sense, that, in effect carves out a space of another life, an altered life of desire and escape that fi nds no parallel in the concepts and constructs that theory would have provided to throw light on her “ethno graphy”. No ready notions of structural vio-lence, or biopower and governmentalities can quite depict that singularity of experience that, in effect charts out an “in between, plastic and ever-unfi nished nature of a life” (Biehl and Locke 2010: 318).

Locke’s work in Bosnia-Herzgovina, on the other hand, is an outside-the-edge rendering of lives lived in a city ravaged by war, economic and political chaos and not least of all, under the diagnostic radar of post-war international therapeutic gov-ernance which renders a society mentally unbalanced by post-traumatic stress disorder. As Locke listens carefully and obser-ves beyond looking, he fi nds what Biehl found with Catarina – the insuffi ciency of Foucauldian biopolitics, or psychiatric theory, or neo-Marxian renderings of structural violence in representing what collective life is in Sarajevo. Extracting a small part of their essay, but a signifi cant part of their intent, I understand Biehl and Locke (2010) looking explicitly for subject positionings that show a potential for becoming insomuch so that they “leak” out of their preordained positions in the gridlock of assigned subjectivity, whether collective or individual.

These are sustained lives, not “successful” lives; they are discontent but not resistant; they are abject but not without desire, damaged but not destroyed, labouring but not mindful of creating, unsound but perceptive, compromised but not unethical, knowing but not learned – yet it is a challenge to document them into the classifi cations that our conceptual toolkit equips us with. These are lives that cannot be defi ned only by biopower, by subjugation, by their cellular makeup, their ascriptive identities, their juridical position or by their physical, mental, cultural or customary attributes – they are not about their performances and representations alone.

These are lives lived in these categories, often all at once, in fl ux as well as stagnation, creating biographies that interact with any or all categories of institutions, customs and socialities to carve out ways of living that are closer to feasible life than to idealised life. In the incessant attempts to locate the grids of control and power, we forget that life is led continually, in spite of and in defi ance of these grids to manifest a liveability that, to say the least, demands attention.

Finding an explicit mode of approaching such untidy lives, complex contexts, unpredictable and untameable tendencies in the project of lived life through the Deleuzian inspiration of looking for life-becoming as life-potential, Biehl and Locke (2010) recommend the ascendance of desire over power (follo-wing Deleuze) in the lives and experiences they observe. They propose “microanalytical” ethnography to capture those moments of breakages and leakages in the ethnographic ter-rain that cannot be explained by received theory and assigned

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representations. Working with an implicit notion of “the mean-time” in lives and social worlds, Biehl and Locke (2010: 336) understand that this “runs counter to that of political and eco-nomic rationalities, to the reason of policy and governance, which makes people the objects of technical fi xes with specifi c, temporally limited stages of progress and evaluation”.

One point, apart from the sum and substance of a Deleuzian way, strikes a chord here. It is a feature that helps me anchor the notion of becoming to its place in a map of assembled encounters – Biehl and Locke’s separate contexts of fi eldwork fi nd place in the same essay, in the connective universe of life-becoming that binds them together in ways that conventional anthropology would not. There would be too many “non- comparable” variables between Catarina and Sarajevo, yet they stick together in the attempts towards theorising social life.

The notion of emergent, resonant or isomorphic encounters is one that leads to the search for a new empiricism, or allows the nuance, the vividness, the chaos and spectrum of life and experience to generate connections and trigger researcher’s instincts to step out of received categories of wisdom to gener-ate creative conceptual relations. This is a displacement from the set maps of historical encounters where the fi xity of identi-ties have been played out in pre-emptive scripts and roles; through locked positions in rational categories of spatial place-ments and historical junctures.

Towards a Conclusion

What I have proposed here is a methodological double strat-egy. First, trace a remapping that can initiate assemblages with epistemological potential. Second, shift and displace identity/subject positions from fi xities, so that the insulation of being moves into the potential of becoming – in other words, fi nd a

future for positions that we may yet not know. In this dual strategy a set of parallel notions are clear – that of histories and their re-crafting in genealogies.

If we are to understand history as the linear unfolding of events serialised in a particular way, with defi nite political stakes aimed at arriving at precluded solutions, genealogical interventions is a re-serialisation of that history. Following Deleuze (1983, 1995) and Foucault (1984), genealogy is a re-ordering that reveals political intentions, ordained origins and hallowed lines of descent. In seeking a method that could facilitate how a genealogy (of knowledge production practices) could be re-serialised, I have suggested here a remapping of epistemological positions – in assembled connections and in the constitutive positions that make that assembly. While that re-arrangement captures the form, the “shape” of the technique, the problem that has been re-recognised is the making of ade-quate concept through newer theorising. In a sense, this is the process of problematising the making of concept and in that process, suggest a modality of theorising through a metho-dological orientation.

In Deleuzian terms, this could be the return to the virtual, which in this interpretation, could be the eternally expanding, never fi xed horizon of concept creation and theorising. Ex-tracting out from the actualised moments of a methodology – the kind sketched here, it may yet be possible to reclaim a right to declare the dominant concept insuffi cient and inadeqaute and at the same time, seek a potential for further knowing. The incomplete attempts in this essay are thus the outline of a method which reproblematises how knowledge is produced and with that, actualises another arrangement of epistemo-logical potential. This is not proposed as a solution to a problem, but it is the recognition of a limitation, a constraint that the

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Notes

1 These powers are usually associated with metro-politan, western, northern, euro-american centres or any other label that would suit a paradigm of epistemological privilege. However, in my argu-ments, I suggest that the question is about enunciatory privilege, not all of which is in the alleged centres and often, marginal enunciations are much too centralised than is acknowledged.

2 A discussion on the Comaroffs’ text was hosted by the journal Cultural Anthropology during February 2012 and is available online at http://www.culanth.org/fi eldsights/268-theory-from -the-south, viewed during November 2012.

3 In the above debate, see, for instance, Arava-mudan (2012).

4 This is not quite the space for a detailed cri-tique of the ubiquitous label “the global south” which fi nds so much purchase in current dis-course – suffi ce to query here – can one meaningfully encompass the southern hemi-sphere or all that it represents under one label? That thought, in itself, is disquieting, not to mention the disquiet of labels like “Africa” or for that matter, “India”, from where I write.

5 I thank the reviewer here for his/her important reminder to clarify this relation. In his/her words, the question indeed is – “Does the rela-tion between theories and concepts constitute a unitary ground or is there more to the rela-tion between theories and concepts than a framing which would yield that the two, alth-ough internally connected, are yet separate (so that there could be multiple theories about a concept)?” Concepts could be thought of as congealed ideas that appear from within a lin-ear historicity of theorising, one that conceals its origins and yet, avails universal purchase. While “Western” theory is the usual focus, my reckoning is that validating inadequate con-cepts in our work is as much a participation in hegemony – the responsibility lies in that rec-ognition. My proposition, is indeed the destabi-lising of these concepts, through an active, critical epistemology that theorises, aiming to reveal and inscribe again, on that history – re-framing it as genealogy (certainly following Deleuze (1983) and Foucault (1984), and their debt to Neitzsche) and understand that process in our everyday practices in the academy. Eventually, the aspiration is to understand the necessity of routing theorising towards the un-making of inadequate concept.

6 Briefl y elucidating this in Deleuze (2007) read-ing of Neitzsche, “Critique is not a reaction or ressentiment, but the active expression of an active mode of existence”. In some tandem with this, critique that works with the terms of any concept, reacts, rather than acts. Both could be important in recasting epistemology, but the former has been the dominant mode.

7 This essay owes more to Deleuzian notions than I can directly refer to. His privileging of the “and” over arboreal thinking or over oppositional

sublations is perhaps the ground of what I suggest here. In anthropology, the “and’ is also found in E Viveiro de Castro (2003), “(anthropology) and (science)”, available at http://nansi.abaetenet.net/abaetextos/anthropology-and-science-e-vi-veiros-de-castro, viewed during June 2010).

8 See Veena Das (1990). 9 The “Area – Studies” emphasis in Northern

Universities, initiated in the 1960s, has its obvi-ous origins in a geopolitical manoeuvre that marked the recognition of newly-independent nations, and the need to classify and label the possibilities of knowledge that could be gener-ated out of those classifi cations. While the im-portance of understanding knowledge in con-text and culture of areas and regions, histori-cally or in contemporaneous modalities, can-not be undermined, it is still important to mark what those classifi cations will now hinder or have done so. The larger question, of course, is about the intellectual history of theorising, and in addition, I agree with the reviewer’s com-ment about the eventual reckoning with the “space” of theory per se, which goes beyond any locational politics. This essay is much too brief for that large a terrain, yet, I would urge that the arguments here be read as a small foray into a space of theorising that, indeed, appeals beyond locational politics.

10 Gopal Guru, writing from a dalit perspective, would claim that only experience could authenti-cate expression and knowledge. See Gopal Guru and Sunder Sarukkai (2012) and Sundar Sarukkai (2007). Guru’s insistence on lived ex-perience as the moral right to theorising is sig-nifi cant. While thoroughly important, the epis-temological claim to theorising through that experience runs the danger of insulated agency. While I can speak of the dalit, by being a dalit, I can be no other – my future is locked in that authenticity. In a sense, my claim to theory, to universality stalls my imagination of an eman-cipated, different future. Can I say, rather, that while subjugation and humiliation claims me with concepts that colonise my experience, I do not claim them? My experience can fi nd poten-tial, even freedom, perhaps in embracing capi-talistic enterprise – then, can my experience legitimate and embrace other concepts and other theorisations that do not just defi ne my subjugation but rather, for instance, can even re-conceptualise capitalism as emancipation, however transgressive that reconceptualisa-tion may be? In that, can my expe rience only mark my linear progress from dalit...to dalit again, or can I seek universal freedom with a becoming?

11 What limits or fi xities of identities do we place, say, on the enunciative potential of a transgen-dered, coloured migrant from east Asia to the United States?

References

Aravamudan, Srinivas (2012): “Surpassing the North: Can the Antipodean Avantgarde Trump

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force of contemporary empiricism (echoed in re-engraved his-toricities) demands.

Insofar that the remappings go against the lines of descent, fragment origins and make anxious the sureties of power and privilege that do not just author knowledge and monitor its reproduction, but also retain the right to overturn, critique and reverse, this movement against the grain is a transgression, an audacity. That, in effect, is this audacity of method, where theorising from reassembled empirical environments and transgressing scholarly positionings may yet achieve a new equation in the dynamics of knowledge production.

Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a simple appeal to lived experiences. On the contrary, it under-takes the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard. Empiricism is a mysticism and a mathematicism of concepts, but precisely one which treats the concept as the object of an encounter, as a here-and now, […] from which emerge inex-haustibly ever new, differently distributed “heres” and “nows” […] I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentred centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them (Deleuze 1995: xxi-xxii).

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