Sent: Saturday, November 14, 2009 10:22:25 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: Fwd: Colonial state's claim to be a civilising force : REPLY

A lot of percpetive things have been said in this discussion, but some
contributors seem to think that colonial regimes were interested in
modernizing the areas they ruled. There were some modernizers in the
colonial regimes, but at best, most administrators thought that they
would "civilize" Africans, and even that was limited and seen as a long
term operation. Colonial authority was very weak, dependent on African
intermediaries. Some of the clerks were modernizer, but administrators
and chiefs were often threatened by modernization, something best
depicted in the fiction of Joyce Cary and the autobiographical writings
of Amadou Hampate Ba.

Martin Klein

Thomas Lappas wrote:
> ----
> Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:48:52 -0500
> From: "Brett O'Bannon" <bobannon@depauw.edu>
>
> ------------------
>
> Ibra certainly sparked an interesting discussion with his usual spot on
> observation. He sees the colonial state as consubstantially one with
> violence. I understand Ibra to have used intentionally the Christian
> theological term consubstantiation, Luther's notion that Christ's body
> and blood are inseparably one with the bread and wine shared at mass.
> Given the announcement's reference to the (Christian) civilizing
> mission, exploration of a consubstantial relationship seems perfectly in
> order.
>
> I'm reminded of how Iris Marion-Young (que la terre...) employed Hanna
> Arendt's distinction between power and violence (in Chatterjee and
> Scheid (eds.) Ethics and Foreign Intervention, Cambridge Press, 2003).
> Arendt notes that political theorists erroneously assume they have
> "theorized violence when they discuss political power," when in fact
> the former can only destroy the latter. Recalling Arendt's view that
> violence is almost always instrumentally employed in a calculated way as
> a means to an end, it is rarely wanton. Fremigacci seems to agree: "La
> violence n'a donc pas découlé de l'arbitraire du pouvoir comme on le
> croit, mais de la loi.," I think Abou is correct that Fremigacci is in
> agreement with Ibra. It would be interesting to see what the lecture
> does, but I assume the Hegelian perspective on law as the "pure
> expression de la volonté de l'Etat" is actually problematized. The
> abstract suggests a view that the colonial state may have been
> articulated in the same early social theoretical terms that were applied
> to the emergent state form in Europe. But this was despite the fact that
> none of the conditions to which Comte, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim or Weber
> were witness, and to which they ascribed a causal relationship to the
> rise of the early modern state, were present. There was no organic
> relationship between the colonial state and indigenous society. The
> former was not a functional response to the latter's growing division of
> labor (though Boone's work demonstrates how metropolitan divisions of
> labor impacted the form of the colonial state), etc.
>
> Fremigacci's reference to totalitarianism is certainly consistent with
> an Arendtian framework for an analysis of the colonial state. Lacking
> any organic relationship between state and society, the former had no
> power (a legitimate basis for exercising force - and states indeed have
> all manner of reasons for legitimately using force - en"forcing"
> environmental regulations, maintaining sufficient domestic order to
> allow citizens to realize their potential, etc.). Having no power - no
> ability to facilitate people "jointly [constituting] their manner of
> living together" (Young 254) -- it had to rely on sheer violence.
>
> I would argue that today's state crisis in Africa is well understood as
> a problem of the lack of power, therefore the abundance of violence. As
> Crawford Young notes, the state has an assiduous capacity to recreate
> itself over time. Bula Matari may not be what it once was, bit its
> inherent flaw persists: no power, just violence. And not even a monopoly
> on that.
>
> Brett O'Bannon
> DePauw University
>
>
>
> Brett R. O'Bannon
> Associate Professor
> Department of Political Science
> DePauw University
> tel.: 765.658.4157
> fax: 765.658.4799
>

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