Cosmopolitanism North and South: silencing the subaltern

In 1997, Martha Nussbaum argued for the necessity of ‘cultivating our humanity’ in an ‘inescapably’ international world, involving an acknowledgement of the ‘responsibilities’ we had to our ‘fellow citizens who live at a distance or who look different from ourselves’, and an understanding of the ways ‘in which common needs and aims are differently realized in different circumstances’.Footnote ⁵ Today, global developments such as the challenge posed to the world by the expected impact of climate change, or the effect of the global financial crisis on the world's economic system, seem to make this cosmopolitan call for the recognition of the global community's shared needs and interests more pressing than ever.

While the cosmopolitan project relies on the ‘normative idea of an extended global consciousness’, postcolonial theorists are keen to stress its complicity with global structures of domination.Footnote ⁶ They point out that a strong emphasis on humanity's ‘common needs and aims’ often fails to pay sufficient attention to the historical violence and patronisation that characterised the relationship between the Western ‘Self’ and its cultural ‘Other’ in the past, and continues to impact on it today. For example, Gayatri C. Spivak argues that the aim to ‘help the world’ by allocating universal rights and justice semantically replaces the burden of the white man with the burden of the fittest; leading to a kind of social Darwinism according to which the ‘weaker’ are unable to help or govern themselves. The historical reasons that have led to the distance between those who allocate rights, and those who are assumed to be victims of injustice and recipients of rights, are thereby masked.Footnote ⁷

However, shared human needs and interests are also emphasised among ‘Southern’ intellectuals and activists.Footnote ⁸ Following these voices, the process of globalisation has led to a weakening of people's power to make decisions about their own lives, and to an empowerment of multinational corporations that is orchestrated by global elites, which are mainly found in international organisations and Western states. This exploitation of ‘the people’ in the South is linked to the domination of ‘the people’ in the North, leading to calls for global solidarity and unified action.Footnote ⁹

In this article, I will focus on the some of the voices coming out of India. Following Stig T. Madsen, Indian activists' adversity to multinational corporations and international organisations is based in rural India's traditional hostility towards urban India, and the large-scale institutions the latter represents.Footnote ¹⁰ While in the past, these institutions were mainly national, what are perceived as forces of globalisation have led many Indian intellectuals to ‘redeem their own state’ while swinging round to attack international institutions and multinational corporations instead.Footnote ¹¹ This turn towards the state is based on what Manu Goswami calls ‘methodological nationalism’, which means that the spatial frame of the nation-state is taken for granted rather than perceived as being continuously (re)produced in relation to global processes and regimes.Footnote ¹² One example for this might be the different interpretations of the alarming number of farmers' suicides in the late 1990s. While the Indian government attributed the suicides to the failure of the monsoon, bad debts, poor management, and alcoholism, well-known Indian intellectual Vandana Shiva and activists of the Karnataka State Farmers' Organisation (KRRS) primarily blamed what Shiva calls the ‘unholy trinity’ of World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF).Footnote ¹³ Following this line of argument, these organisations' policies steered poor countries' farmers into monocropping, forcing them to take loans to survive global price fluctuations.Footnote ¹⁴ Shiva initially links liberation from this oppression to India freeing itself from colonisation. Referring to the suicides, Shiva opposes Monsanto's ‘seeds of suicide’, which for her represent the ‘second cotton colonisation’, to the liberating organic ‘seeds of prosperity’.Footnote ¹⁵ She also points out that the campaign ‘Monsanto Quit India’ was deliberately named in remembrance of Ghandi calling for ‘Britain Quit India’.Footnote ¹⁶

The rejection of global rule often goes hand in hand with the vision of the ‘Village Republic’ that originates in Ghandian philosophy. It advocates the establishment of a governance structure that is based on decentralisation, participation, autonomy, and direct democracy, with an economic system that is characterised by sustainable small-scale agriculture, resulting in a life in harmony with nature.Footnote ¹⁷ This celebration of local, self-determined ways of life, embedded in indigenous culture and tradition, cannot only be found in India. The Final Declaration of the Social Movement Assembly in Dakar/Senegal 2011 does not only declare its fight against multinational corporations, whose ‘extractionist practices endanger life and nature … taking away people's right to food and destroying biodiversity’. It also demands the ‘implementation of policies to protect local production, to give dignity to agricultural work and to protect the ancestral values of life’. ‘Sustainable peasant agriculture’ is regarded as ‘true solution to the food and climate crises.’ Like Shiva and the KRRS, the Social Movement Assembly denounces genetic engineering in agriculture as a strategy to increase corporate profit that neglects the destructive effect the technology has on natural life and biodiversity.Footnote ¹⁸

Sharply distinguishing between harmonious ‘ancestral’ ways of life and the hierarchical and hegemonic features of MNCs is closely related to the modernity/subalternity binary constituted in first-generation subaltern studies.Footnote ¹⁹ According to Subir Sinha, such a reading overlooks processes of mutual constitution and interrelation, both historically and contemporarily. He points, for example, at the commonalities between Ghandi's conceptualisation of self-sufficient rural communities and colonial community development programmes: both equally ‘deferred agency of the poor … and erected a hierarchy of other agents to act in their interests’, resulting in a programme made ‘for but not from “the masses”’.Footnote ²⁰ Moreover, Sinha also stresses that the successful development of the postcolonial Indian state was tightly bound to overcoming poverty via the establishment of self-sufficient rural communities.Footnote ²¹

Sinha's research is part of a wider school of contemporary subaltern studies that seeks to dismantle the simplified and essentialised distinction between ‘subaltern’ and ‘colonial’ based on detailed historical and ethnographic studies of particular ‘regional’ locations.Footnote ²² Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, scholars such as Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson argue that

Consequently, there is no colonial ‘watershed’ where ‘fully formed European structures and ideas … violently disrupt colonized natural and social ecologies’, with ‘the colonizers, the market, and the state’ as the ‘agents of ecological degradation’, and ‘indigenous peoples, the more neolithic the better as “nature's natural conservators”’.Footnote ²⁴ Directing this critique to the work of Shiva, Ilan Kapoor accuses her of crudely depicting Indian women as ‘naturally’ close to nature due to what she calls nature's ‘feminine principle’. In her work, Shiva celebrates Chipko, a forestry movement in the North Indian Himalayas, as an ecological and feminist alternative to the dominant Western model, without acknowledging its patriarchal dimensions and the tension between its different factions.Footnote ²⁵ Following Kapoor, Shiva's radical anti-development stance results in a ‘blanket endorsement of social movements as political alternatives’ and in an equation of ‘local’ with ‘necessarily benign’.Footnote ²⁶ Kapoor concludes that Shiva's attempt to produce an ‘authentic’ and ‘heroic’ cultural Other is just ‘another form of silencing the subaltern’.Footnote ²⁷

Beyond silencing and oppression? The case of India and Bt cotton

How the subaltern is silenced and spoken for is also a matter of concern for Ronald J. Herring. Like Sinha, he is keen to point out that what is perceived as coming from ‘the masses’ is in fact often done or spoken for them. In line with the criticism referred to in the previous section, Herring maintains that speaking for the poor results in an elimination of their agency, and he argues that the opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that features strongly among what he calls India's urban elite and intelligentsia is an apt example.

According to Herring, Shiva's and other Indian intellectuals' strong anti-GM sentiment shows a ‘deep urban cultural bias’ that constructs farmers as ‘hapless victims’ who are manipulated by ‘epistemic brokers’.Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, Shiva depicts the farmer as Monsanto's puppet, ‘exploited’ and ‘coerced’ into using the company's GM Bt cotton seeds.Footnote ²⁹ ‘Pushed’ into ‘despair’ and debt, he/she sees no other escape but suicide, which Shiva consequently labels as ‘homicide’ or ‘genocide’ committed by the multinational corporation.Footnote ³⁰ Following Herring, what Shiva and her fellow activists fail to acknowledge is the farmers' agency expressed in the rapid adoption of Bt cotton after its official commercial release in 2002: more than 8 million hectares were planted with Bt cotton in 2009, compared to 50,000 hectares in 2002.Footnote ³¹ Moreover, instead of being exploited by Monsanto, Herring points out that farmers tricked the company by planting illegal variants of Bt cotton hybrids before their official commercial release, particularly in the Indian state of Gujarat, without any regard for the country's biosafety regulation to which Monsanto had to adhere.Footnote ³² As a consequence, Indian fields had become ‘an unregulated, open-air laboratory for genetic engineering’, which made the BBC describe Gujarat as the ‘wild west of India with its own set of rules and its own set of values’. In the market town of Mansa, for example, one could now acquire ‘pirate seeds’, in addition to the already existing ‘pirate tapes’ and ‘pirate designer clothes’. These seeds were gained by cross-fertilising Bt cotton, originating from Monsanto's field trials, with local cotton varieties to suit the local climate and soil, which is something that farmers have done ‘for centuries’ with different seed variants. The illegal seeds were primarily sold by the small Indian company Navbharat Seeds Limited, whose CEO DB Desai was subsequently called the ‘Robin Hood of GM’Footnote ³³ – a name that implicitly links the ‘theft’ of Monsanto's seeds to the political aim of helping the poor by unauthorised redistribution. Indeed, JV Sha, who worked as an advisor for the company, pointed out that the farmers who bought and further crossbred the seeds did so ‘because they cannot afford the high prices of Monsanto's Bt seeds’.Footnote ³⁴ In defence of his action, DB Desai declared that the company did not use the modified gene on purpose, but picked it up by accident due to cross-pollination.Footnote ³⁵

For Herring, the eager acceptance of Bt cotton by ordinary farmers contradicts the claims being made in their names by GM-opponents; in other words (using Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal's terminology), their doing is at odds with prevalent Indian anti-GM narratives.Footnote ³⁶ However, considering his claim that ‘metropolitan elites’ cannot speak for the farmer, and that ‘authentic critique must come “from below”’,Footnote ³⁷ it comes as a surprise that Herring (who is Chair at Cornell University) does not seem to include himself into the ‘metropolitan elite’ engaged in ‘epistemic brokerage’. Throughout his work on Bt cotton and India, he points at the ‘proven’ safety and benefits of GMOs, dismissing any critique, even if it comes from scientists themselves, as ‘unscientific’ and political, which puts him in the position of the advocate of truth and objective knowledge.Footnote ³⁸ Moreover, implicitly working within a rational-actor-framework, he depicts Indian farmers as being driven only by interests, arguing that Bt cotton and its illegal variants were so successful because farmers have ‘strong interests in technologies to control insect pests, avoid pesticide indebtedness, and increase harvestable yields’.Footnote ³⁹ Consequently, instead of finally speaking for him-/herself, the farmer is once again spoken for by someone else – someone who understands and advocates these ‘objective’ interests.Footnote ⁴⁰ Following Herring's approach, if the farmer does not recognise the benefits he/she is gaining from using GMOs, he/she is manipulated by the anti-GM ‘epistemic brokers’ to be found in urban intelligentsia. On the one hand, Herring criticises the geographical and social distance between these epistemic brokers (located in the West and in urban India) and the rural Indian community. On the other hand, however, he bemoans the lack of distance between small grassroot anti-GM NGOs and Indian farms, which leads the latter to listen to the former instead of up-to-date ‘truthful’ (mainly Western!) science.Footnote ⁴¹ Herring is keen to unravel the social, cultural, and geographical hierarchies that are disguised in the cosmopolitan concern about GMOs, but argues at the same time that – in contrast to other grievances, for example human rights – the matter of GM is too complex and too difficult to understand for the local grassroot activists, making it apparently necessary for the ‘white man’ (scientist) to once again speak out for the ‘brown’. As Spivak points out in her famous essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, arguments such as those forwarded by Herring still do not sufficiently recognise the problem of representation that lies at the heart of speaking with/about/for the subaltern.

The problem of representation and subjectivity

At a first glance, analysing and critiquing the different ways of how the subaltern is silenced seems to be in line with Foucault and Deleuze's dismissal of the category of representation, and their consequential focus on action, that is manifested in their conversation ‘Intellectuals and Power’. According to Deleuze, for himself as well as for Foucault, the ‘theorising intellectual’ is ‘no longer a subject, a representing or representative consciousness’, but a ‘relay’ for those ‘who act and struggle’ for themselves. Focusing on Foucault's statement that speaking for others is an act of ‘indignity’, Deleuze stresses that the end of representation leaves ‘theoretical action and practical action’ as the only remaining task. Foucault adds that the student revolts in France in May 1968 have proven that ‘the masses’ no longer need the intellectual in order to become knowledgeable: ‘they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than [the intellectual] and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves’. Consequently, the theorist's task is no longer ‘to illuminate from a safe distance those who struggle’, but to fight him-/herself against the ‘forms of power’ that mould him/her into an object and instrument of knowledge, truth, consciousness, and discourse.Footnote ⁴²

However, in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Spivak maintains that Deleuze and Foucault show a limited understanding of representation that does not distinguish between its political expression, and ‘speaking about’ or ‘re-presenting’ in the sense of portraying.Footnote ⁴³ Moreover, Spivak argues that when talking about ‘a Maoist’, ‘the worker’, or even ‘the masses’, the two theorists universalise the ones who struggle as ‘monolithic and anonymous subjects-in-revolution’ – in contrast to various intellectuals Deleuze and Foucault refer to in their conversation, whom they differentiate by individual name.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to Spivak, this unravels ‘the banality of leftist intellectuals’, who in one and the same move represent the subaltern and themselves as ‘transparent’. Deleuze and Foucault's claim that theory is action, which puts them side-by-side with the oppressed, disguises the intellectual's hegemonic role that not only forms the subject he/she portrays, but also shapes (re-presents) the voice this subject is able (or not able) to rise.Footnote ⁴⁵ Ritu Birla brings this concern to the point:

Instead of explicitly and critically elaborating on their own historical and political involvement in the regimes of domination we are confronted with today, Foucault and Deleuze disguise their own subjectivity as intellectuals and authors of their texts to talk about Power and Desire instead.

To my mind, the problem of representation in the way presented by Spivak more than two decades ago continues to haunt subaltern studies. To be sure, Sinha, Sivaramakrishnan and others make as much room as possible for the ‘strategists’ of ‘lived experience’, in whom they are interested in, by looking for them in unexpected localities and by advancing an understanding of reality as being multiple, nonlinear, and incoherent.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, I maintain that their focus on detailed empirical analysis and ethnographic richness equally lacks both an explicit engagement with their own involvement as (political) subjects and an elaboration of the political stakes and implications of their analysis. In other words: the more an analysis is focused on empirical grounding, the more it is inclined to lean towards what Spivak calls ‘re-presenting’ in the sense of portraying, no matter how hard it attempts to avoid it.

Ranabbir Samaddar's work on material politics and political subjectivity, equally but in a different way indebted to Foucault's thought and work, seems to be more aware of this problem, seeking to develop an explicitly political understanding of empirical analysis. He advances an understanding of subjectivity in active, political terms by tying it to the element of opposition and ‘taking sides’. Accordingly, the political subject is not an essential given arrived at via contemplating the self, but is constituted in contestation: a ‘collective political actor posed against governmental rules for stabilising order’.Footnote ⁴⁸ For Samaddar, this understanding is inextricably related to the particular experience of colonial and postcolonial politics insofar that ‘ruthless colonial rule moved the colonised societies to a resistance culture where the normal question to be asked would be: Who are you to rule?’Footnote ⁴⁹ Samaddar maintains that consequently, politics should be studied as material forms, such as ‘the physical nature of rule’, the ‘material of organs of governing’, the ‘violent genesis of laws’, and the ‘contentions through which all politics proceed’.Footnote ⁵⁰ For him, this focus on materiality is intertwined with an ongoing criticality in the sense of problematisation.Footnote ⁵¹

However, Samaddar's understanding of politics is fairly traditional insofar that he links political subjectivity to opposition and intention, suggesting that the political subject ‘has set the [political] agenda’ even if it does not always succeed, and that it ‘is not the slave of a politics guided by others’ but instead ‘authors politics’.Footnote ⁵² This poses difficulties for the case I am interested in, because the ‘doing’ of the farmers in the Bt cotton controversy lacks the element of (intentional) opposition to governmental and corporate rule. Instead, politics as defined by Samaddar is to be found once again on the side of those who actively oppose GMOs and speak for and about the farmer as an object of economic exploitation; bringing us back to the problem of representation.

It is at this point that I would like to (re)introduce the work of Gilles Deleuze, particularly regarding his conceptualisation of life. I argue that his conversation with Foucault drawn upon by Spivak in her critique – disguises crucial differences in the two scholars' approaches. Although both pursue the same philosophical aim, which is to disrupt the status quo that is regarded as normal, and to indicate the unlimited number of ways to live that come into sight once we have realised normality's contingency, they do so along divergent paths. In contrast to Foucault, who abandons ontology, because he perceives it as leading to conformity and the affirmation of normalised identities, Deleuze regards ontology as a ‘way of addressing the difference that lies beneath the identities we experience’.Footnote ⁵³ However, instead of discovering ‘truthful’ ontology, Deleuze engages in the project of creating ontology to enable thought that goes beyond the distinction of subject and object, of ‘self’ and ‘other’, and, crucially, beyond opposition and intention.

According to Carsten Strathausen, Deleuze's dismissal of representation necessarily leads to a lack of epistemology, which means that Deleuze ‘literally names or transforms things into existence’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Indeed, for Deleuze, concepts are ‘things’ themselves, ‘but things in their free and wild state’; objects that do not represent, but encounter.Footnote ⁵⁵ The price that Deleuze pays for this move is the impossibility of the kind of reflection that Spivak demands, which indeed harbours the danger of ‘invest[ing] in the “reality” of the experience of the oppressed’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This problem comes to the fore particularly when Deleuze's historical narratives are read as an empirical instead of a creative account. To put it crudely: while Sivaramakrishnan and others draw on ‘stories’ to discuss ‘lived experience’, Deleuze makes them up. And while for Samaddar, the materiality of politics is distinct from its philosophy, for Deleuze thought and materiality cannot be distinguished. Despite the ongoing validity of Spivak's critique, I would maintain with Paul Patton that Deleuze's focus on ontological creation has the potential to ‘controvert a deep stratum of the European social imaginary’,Footnote ⁵⁷ creating politics and political contestation in thought, or better as ‘Thought’: an ontology of (political) resistance in itself.

To achieve his aim, Deleuze discards the concept of history and embraces geography: what counts is neither the future nor the past, but what Claire Parnet calls ‘present-becoming’. In this state, what matters is neither beginnings nor ends, but the ‘middle’, such as grass which grows from the middle, instead of trees which have tops and roots.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, in his book What Is Philosophy?, written with Félix Guattari, Deleuze also maintains that ‘present-becoming’ is ‘born in History’ and always ‘falls back into it’, even if it is ‘not of it’. This, according to my reading, is why Deleuze (and Guattari) employ history (which gives their work the appearance of being empirical): History grasps the event's ‘effectuation in state of affairs or lived experience’, even though ‘the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self-positing as concept, escapes History’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Becoming is based in an experimentation that needs history in order to become determinate and conditioned, but it is not historical in its nature – instead, it is philosophical, and resistance is crucially dependent on it.Footnote ⁶⁰

The emphasis on becoming goes hand in hand with questioning the notion of the subject. In Dialogues, Deleuze and Parnet argue that becoming knows no subjects, but only ‘dynamic individuations’, constituting ‘collective assemblages’: ‘Nothing becomes subjective but hecceities take shape according to the compositions of non-subjective powers and effects.’Footnote ⁶¹ In one of his last essays, Deleuze calls this the becoming of ‘A LIFE’.Footnote ⁶² It can be contrasted to what John Locke called ‘the self’, which is associated with the features of consciousness, memory, and personal identity. Following John Rajchman, the logic of ‘a life’ is a different one: individuation is impersonal, while ‘the self’ unfolds as ‘personal individualization’.Footnote ⁶³ ‘A life’ is located on what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘Plane of Immanence’ (PoI) in A Thousand Plateaus.

This ‘image of thought’Footnote ⁶⁴ makes us reject the very attempt of defining and dissecting the power constellations we feel confronted with for the sake of locating, if not constituting, the (speaking, resisting) subject. It suggests that instead we should look for ‘collective assemblages’ in which ‘unformed elements’ that are ‘only definable by movements and rests, speeds and slownesses … and by affects and intensities’ are related.Footnote ⁶⁵ Jane Bennett takes up this notion in order to relocate agency, which becomes ‘a property less of individual entities than of [material] assemblages of humans and nonhumans’. For example, instead of herself as the agent of her writing, she talks about the ‘current alliance Jane-keyboard-birdsong (from the yard outside)’.Footnote ⁶⁶ While for Sivaramakrishnan, a ‘dialectical relationship’ exists between ‘patterns of human engagement with non-human environments and patterns of change in those environments as they influence social-political outcomes of human endeavour’, with both being mutually constituted,Footnote ⁶⁷ the notion of the assemblage challenges the distinction between ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ at a more fundamental level.

An assemblage to focus on for the case in question might be the seed-farmer-soil one, although it has to be recognised that there are limits to the way this assemblage can be perceived and phrased. The very act of speaking of ‘seeds’, ‘farmers’ and ‘soil’ suggests that these are different formed elements, and that the boundaries of the assemblage are clearly defined, while Deleuze is keen to point out that assemblage elements are unformed. However, the linguistic barriers we face in making sense of assemblages can be led back to the relation of History and Becoming referred to before: Deleuze and Guattari stress that the PoI is complemented with the ‘Plane of Transcendence’ (PoT) on which immanent non-spatial and -temporal multiplicities are continuously stratified and ‘actualised’ (in other words, historicised) into, among other strata, subjects, and ‘strategists’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Nevertheless, the strata always entail lines of flight on which immanent life constantly escapes, and this is what I want to focus in this contribution.

Unleashing nomadic life: Monsanto's war machine and the failure of the State

In the twelfth and thirteenth chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari engage with questions about global power constellations that Indian intellectuals and activists are also concerned about: What is the role of the state in today's world? How is it related to the multinational corporation? And do the relations between these formations leave any space for the envisioning of alternative ways of life? Responding to these questions, however, Deleuze and Guattari come to different, maybe even counter-intuitive conclusions, which impacts on the case I am interested in.