SPECIAL ARTICLE

The Audacity of Method

Yasmeen Arif

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.

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 (arif.yasmeen@gmail.com) teaches Sociology at the Delhi
School of Economics, University of Delhi.
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

january 3, 2015

vol l no 1

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 enter 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

pistemological desires, or in another way, ways of knowing, 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 orientation. 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, identifies
a slice of current space and time textured as an interplanetary
meshwork of incessant connections and flows temporal and
spatial, real and virtual, opaque and transparent; or, assembled in emergent socialities, ethics, experiences, cultures,
economies that seem to dismantle hemispheric borders, frontiers 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 instance 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 machinations 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 articulation of theory that has endorsed the same hemispheric
categories, the binary relationships that the production of
53

SPECIAL ARTICLE

knowledge has always known? Speaking for the South

through the reiteration of the same classificatory systems that
decide the enunciatory location of theory or its alleged
reversal, does not quite endorse any new reallocation of
epistemological privilege.
In response, I work with the possibility of going against the
grain of theory from the South4 and the task I set for myself
is: if there is to be a potential for new epistemologies, what remappings 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 first suggests a strategy suitable for an empirical environment that destabilises hemispheric classifications (that have
been and are part of academic imaginations), and instead
senses a mobile, intermeshed planetary field. The second
thread identifies how subject positions that appear in this planetary field claim the potential of enunciatory privilege by moving beyond the identity constraints that classificatory 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 disciplinary 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 concept 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 empirical material that cannot be explained by the fixities, the absolutes, 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 creative 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 first 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
54

emergent encounters (Arif 2006, 2012) in so much that they

move forward with a conscious, anarchic methodological
intention of finding connections amongst locations, peoples,
experiences, ideas, articulations, expressions, representations,
that defy engraved associations and classificatory 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 erstwhile binaries and from insular heterogeneity. It is an imaginary 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 through 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 particularities of the local and the universalisms of the global continually change and reformulate themselves. This epistemological
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 deliberately denying them in practice.
To pre-empt the argument that follows, in the pairings of
North-South, East-West, global-local, centre-margin, hegemonic-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 reproduction, the birthing of new forms of empirical compositions, carefully underlining the couplings and connectivities
that precede that birth. By locating an epistemology in the
compositions and assemblages, I attempt a politics that liberates the straitjacket identities (like the binaries above) that stifle our attempts at knowing or in articulating knowledges. The
following illustrations from historiography show that such lateral connectivities are not limited to the contemporary their
potential has existed over time.
january 3, 2015

vol l no 1

EPW

Economic & Political Weekly

SPECIAL ARTICLE

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 happenings in Haiti which later came to be called the first successful 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 Hegels analysis out of the limitlessly expanding colonial economy and onto the plane of world history which
he defines 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 increasing awareness of the limits that scholarship places upon our imagination, 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 find 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 consciousness 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 separated 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 epistemological excavation of an archive. The archival conurbation
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

january 3, 2015

vol l no 1

that he brings together is too vast to meaningfully summarise.

However, working with his expertise on south Asia, Subrahmanyam seeks an opening out of overly classified south Asian
history by showing how myriad mutual influences, interfaces,
interactions across the Mediterranean, Eurasia, Iberia and east
Asia combine together to reconfigure 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 compare from within our boxes but spend some time and effort to transcend them, not by comparison alone but by seeking out at times fragile threads that connect the globe, even as the globe came to be defined as such. This is not to deny voice to those who were somehow
fixed 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 historiographical categories, but culls out interfaces that remain
embedded in the archive but do not find 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
philosophy and universal history. My venture has the contemporary 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 theoretical or epistemological enterprise.
Consider a small motif and its reroutings in my own research
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, humanitarianisms, aid bureaucracies, religion, community and citizenship. One resonating theme that I have explored is the different
inflections of sovereignty in citizenship and community life.
An experience that emerges from these inflections in the
contexts that I have explored is that of self-killing or suicide. In
the first 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 selfkillings reflect of each other the entanglement of sovereignty,
55

SPECIAL ARTICLE

community life and citizen life. I read the first 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 genealogy that a dominant concept validates, what we can potentially 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 production of subject positions, or relational positions that re-/
produce sovereign power. Foucault (2003: 46) identifies 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 circumstances of self-killing. In that, both emerge as resonating
motifs, but each with a singular and different articulation.
However, their symbiotic reading exemplifies, not just their repetitive illegality in terms of state power, but rather that sovereign power makes possible its manifestation in a realm of relations 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 kings 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 finding and understanding those relations that can
generate sovereign power. In understanding the idea of sovereignty 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
56

its path, the positionings, the singular experiences in the

empirical, that make that theorising possible. Perhaps, in this
specific 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 rendition, 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 flows and interconnections in the realms of
trade, commerce and finance, 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 principles 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 understanding, they make a change in epistemological potential eventually, in the destabilisation of generalisations that make theorising 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 recognise the fact that lateral associations have remained opaque
not because they do not exist, but because practices of scholarship deem them so.9
One kind of effort lies in understanding the present as a
reassembled empirical environment through emergent encounters 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 recognise 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
january 3, 2015

vol l no 1

EPW

Economic & Political Weekly

SPECIAL ARTICLE

thought would have preceded and guided Haitian action, but

not as historical parallels where Haiti would have influenced
Hegel. The method clearly is in not just making those connections, but also acknowledging these as conscious innovations
and finally, in judging them as epistemological moments.
The second necessary theme is the recognition of what
enunciative positions appear in these new empirical assemblies. 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 find 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 rupturing critiques of the 1980s and 1990s (2008: 2-3). He says
(2008:3), Whats 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 triumphs of postcolonial, poststructural critique all that seems to
remain in the professional corridors of the discipline is the
rank and file of morally engaged, politically correct, well
trained army of anthropologists who do not do much more
than the best, deepest journalists (Marcus 2008:4), conscientiously reporting from their deep embedding in multiple
locations, positionings or reflexivities.
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 articulated through a recognition and expression of a coherent,
identified 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 identified as such, are we to be trapped
in that identity straitjacket indefinitely, 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
fixedness 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 structural 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 representation and fixed, immovable identity remains the goal of
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

january 3, 2015

vol l no 1

history achieved, foremost, by claiming a subject position

(through a dialectical logic) and freezing it for all future development of thought that is to be generated by that subject
positioning. It is not as though this authenticity cannot be borrowed 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 epistemological power, the churn of the motor of initiative is oppositional
reaction. The question then is, can this momentum of oppositional 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 affinitive groups become possible, each of which (in all their
authentic pluralities) claim, first and foremost, subjecthoods
with which and for which to rally against the oppressive regimes of knowledge that dominant patriarchies, whiteness, colonialisms, imperialisms, casteisms, nationalisms, healthisms and
so forth, have produced. All aspects of living in this contemporary world become an outcome of experiencing it through
these subjectivities and it is this rational, objectified 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 exercise of self-referentiality, of internal dialectics, but rather a
development through external tangentialities that emerge
from their encounter with the shock of the transgressive external, 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 objectification that we have wrenched out of our prior objectification. 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 others have of me, but of my appearing...I am fi xed.11

Second, and in relation to the above, is authentic subjectivity or fixity of location the only access to epistemology isnt
that kind of authenticity rapidly achieving levels of rationalised objectification 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
57

SPECIAL ARTICLE

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
Deleuzes notion of becoming briefly prefaced and overly
simplified 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 appear from the wayward travelling of thought and things outside those territorialities and channelling that rational history
or genealogy of concepts have managed to recognise and classify. His imagination is profoundly spatial insomuch that he
seeks a subordination of linear, evolutionary temporality in
the historical development of philosophy to a haphazard imaginative of spatiality that literally re-territorialises the mappings 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 fixity
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 commanding and exercising thought and concept as prior to the
material, empirical world. Becoming rejects the fixties 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 fixities
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 delving 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 fixity 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, horizontal, 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/artificial and in my
58

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 flights 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 empirical plural, and indicates a line of flight 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 first 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 plurality that now propels towards a theorising from an epistemological 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 potential. 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 knowledge production, the powers of epistemology and the inadequacies of theorising or conceptual constructs have been maintained but, does not reify their linear progression.
Valentine Moulard-Leonard (2005) suggests Deleuzes
revolutionary-becoming in a context where the potential for
other epistemologies and theorisations seems to have remained
frustratingly impotent. Working on the historically momentous negritude consciousness and its apparent non-success in
achieving a full libratory potential, she goes through the Kantian or Hegelian transformative momentum of negative dialectics, 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 final subjecthood of emancipatory consciousness could emerge in the black mind one that
could achieve the final 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 irreducibility 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
january 3, 2015

vol l no 1

EPW

Economic & Political Weekly

SPECIAL ARTICLE

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
final desire of Fanons violent revolution, when violence
becomes the inevitable emancipatory mechanism.
Moulard-Leonard (2005: 233) thus states, Such a conception of history, I contend, precludes the creation of a genuinely
new system, with new values, which would guarantee the impossibility of any recuperation by the old hegemony. The similarities for the arguments here are about, of course, the discomfort with historical progression through opposition and
dialectic. In addition, appearing through Moulard-Leonard as
well, is the incongruence of moving time and empirical emergences on one hand and the fixity 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 parameters 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 fixing subject positions 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 persistent becoming so that a further will to knowing (not knowing as automatic power) and doing continues. In another way,
the subaltern learns to speak, not only in voicing self-articulation but more so, in active engagement that commands listeners who speak a similar language born of singular, ongoing
experience and not of straitjacketed identity, conceptual or
empirical. And this, I suggest, finds place in the realm of
knowledge production as a politics of epistemology.
Thus, constituting the assemblage is as important as identifying the constituents of that assemblage. While the dismantling 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 sustain 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 fieldwork 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 insensitive contexts of social bewilderment and pharmaceutacalised
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

january 3, 2015

vol l no 1

public mental health institutions and mechanisms. Biehl enters

Catarinas world through her self-kept dictionary, her conversations 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 finds no parallel in the concepts and
constructs that theory would have provided to throw light
on her ethnography. No ready notions of structural violence, or biopower and governmentalities can quite depict
that singularity of experience that, in effect charts out an
in between, plastic and ever-unfinished nature of a life
(Biehl and Locke 2010: 318).
Lockes 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 governance which renders a society mentally unbalanced by posttraumatic stress disorder. As Locke listens carefully and observes beyond looking, he finds what Biehl found with Catarina
the insufficiency 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 significant 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 classifications that our conceptual
toolkit equips us with. These are lives that cannot be defined
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
flux 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 defiance 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 (following Deleuze) in the lives and experiences they observe. They
propose microanalytical ethnography to capture those
moments of breakages and leakages in the ethnographic terrain that cannot be explained by received theory and assigned
59

SPECIAL ARTICLE

representations. Working with an implicit notion of the meantime in lives and social worlds, Biehl and Locke (2010: 336)
understand that this runs counter to that of political and economic rationalities, to the reason of policy and governance,
which makes people the objects of technical fixes with specific,
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 Lockes separate contexts of fieldwork
find place in the same essay, in the connective universe of lifebecoming that binds them together in ways that conventional
anthropology would not. There would be too many noncomparable 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 researchers
instincts to step out of received categories of wisdom to generate creative conceptual relations. This is a displacement from
the set maps of historical encounters where the fixity of identities have been played out in pre-emptive scripts and roles;
through locked positions in rational categories of spatial placements and historical junctures.
Towards a Conclusion

What I have proposed here is a methodological double strategy. First, trace a remapping that can initiate assemblages with
epistemological potential. Second, shift and displace identity/
subject positions from fixities, so that the insulation of being
moves into the potential of becoming in other words, find 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 definite 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 reordering 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 adequate 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 methodological orientation.
In Deleuzian terms, this could be the return to the virtual,
which in this interpretation, could be the eternally expanding,
never fixed horizon of concept creation and theorising. Extracting 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 insufficient 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 epistemological potential. This is not proposed as a solution to a problem,
but it is the recognition of a limitation, a constraint that the

REVIEW OF RURAL AFFAIRS

December 27, 2014
Food Subsidy: Concept, Rationale, Implementation Design and Policy Reforms

Bhupat M Desai, Errol Dsouza, N V Namboodiri

Economic Benefits of Futures: Do Speculators Play Spoilsport in Agricultural

Commodity Markets?

K G Sahadevan

Projected Effect of Droughts on Supply, Demand, and Prices of Crops in India

Praduman Kumar, P K Joshi,

Pramod Aggarwal

Groundwater Irrigation-Electricity-Crop Diversification Nexus in Punjab: Trends,

Turning Points, and Policy Initiatives

Anindita Sarkar, Arjit Das

Agricultural Productivity Growth: Is There Regional Convergence?

Balaji S J, Suresh Pal

For copies write to:

Circulation Manager,
Economic and Political Weekly,
320-321, A to Z Industrial Estate, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400 013.
email: circulation@epw.in
60

january 3, 2015

vol l no 1

EPW

Economic & Political Weekly

SPECIAL ARTICLE

force of contemporary empiricism (echoed in re-engraved historicities) 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.
Notes
1 These powers are usually associated with metropolitan, western, northern, euro-american centres
or any other label that would suit a paradigm of
epistemological privilege. However, in my arguments, 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/fieldsights/268-theory-from
-the-south, viewed during November 2012.
3 In the above debate, see, for instance, Aravamudan (2012).
4 This is not quite the space for a detailed critique of the ubiquitous label the global south
which finds so much purchase in current discourse suffice to query here can one
meaningfully encompass the southern hemisphere 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 relation between theories and concepts constitute
a unitary ground or is there more to the relation between theories and concepts than a
framing which would yield that the two, although 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 linear 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 concepts in our work is as much a participation in
hegemony the responsibility lies in that recognition. My proposition, is indeed the destabilising of these concepts, through an active,
critical epistemology that theorises, aiming to
reveal and inscribe again, on that history reframing 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 unmaking of inadequate concept.
6 Briefly elucidating this in Deleuze (2007) reading 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
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

january 3, 2015

8
9

10

11

Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a

simple appeal to lived experiences. On the contrary, it undertakes 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 inexhaustibly 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).

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-viveiros-de-castro, viewed during June 2010).
See Veena Das (1990).
The Area Studies emphasis in Northern
Universities, initiated in the 1960s, has its obvious 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 generated out of those classifications. While the importance of understanding knowledge in context and culture of areas and regions, historically or in contemporaneous modalities, cannot be undermined, it is still important to mark
what those classifications 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 reviewers comment 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.
Gopal Guru, writing from a dalit perspective,
would claim that only experience could authenticate expression and knowledge. See Gopal
Guru and Sunder Sarukkai (2012) and Sundar
Sarukkai (2007). Gurus insistence on lived experience as the moral right to theorising is significant. While thoroughly important, the epistemological 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 emancipated, 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 find potential, even freedom, perhaps in embracing capitalistic enterprise then, can my experience
legitimate and embrace other concepts and
other theorisations that do not just define my
subjugation but rather, for instance, can even
re-conceptualise capitalism as emancipation,
however transgressive that reconceptualisation may be? In that, can my experience only
mark my linear progress from dalit...to dalit
again, or can I seek universal freedom with
a becoming?
What limits or fixities of identities do we place,
say, on the enunciative potential of a transgendered, coloured migrant from east Asia to the
United States?

References
Aravamudan, Srinivas (2012): Surpassing the
North: Can the Antipodean Avantgarde Trump
vol l no 1

Postcolonial Belatedness?, Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology

Online, 25 February, http://www.culanth.org/
fieldsights/270-surpassing-the-north-can-theantipodean-avantgarde-trump-postcolonialbelatedness, viewed during June.
Arif, Yasmeen (2006): Anthropologies of Difference: The Making of New Encounters, Journal
of the World Anthropologies Network, 1: 41-57,
available at http://www.ram-wan.net/docu
ments/05_ e_Journal/journal-2/7.Arif.pdf
(2012): Emergent Encounters: Towards a Politics of Epistemology, Journal of the World
Anthropologies Network, 6: 23-42, available at
http://www.ram-wan.net/documents/05_e_
Journal/journal-6/2-arif.pdf
Biehl, Joo and Peter Locke (2010): Deleuze and
the Anthropology of Becoming, Current Anthropology, 50(3): 317-51.
Buck-Morss, Susan (2009): Hegel, Haiti and Universal
History (New York: Zone Books).
Comaroff, Jean and John L Comaroff (2011): Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is
Evolving toward Africa (Boulder: Paradigm
Publishers).
Das, Veena (1990): Our Work to Cry, Your Work to
Listen in Veena Das (ed.), Mirrors of Violence:
Communities, Riots, Survivors in South Asia
(Delhi: Oxford University Press), pp 345-98.
Deleuze, Gilles (1983): Nietzsche and Philosophy, Tr
by Janis Tomlinson (New York: Columbia
University Press).
(1995): Difference and Repetition, Tr by Paul
Patton (New York: Columbia University Press).
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (2007): Dialogues II,
Tr by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Viva-Continuum, South Asian edition).
Fanon, F (2001): The Lived Experience of
the Black in R Bernasconi (ed.), Race, Tr by
V Moulard (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers).
Guru, Gopal and Sunder Sarukkai (2012): The
Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience
and Theory (Delhi: Oxford University Press).
Foucault, Michel (1984): Neitzsche, Genealogy,
History in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault
Reader (New York: Pantheon Books).
(2003): Society Must Be Defended: Lectures
at the College de France, 1975-76 (New York:
Picador).
Marcus, George (2008): The End(s) of Ethnography: Social/Cultural Anthropologys Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition,
Cultural Anthropology, 23(1): 1-14.
Moulard-Leonard, Valentine (2005): Revolutionary Becomings: Negritudes Anti: Humanist
Humanism, Human Studies, 28(3): 231-49.
Sarukkai, Sunder (2007): Dalit Experience and
Theory, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 142 (40):
4043-48.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (1997): Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of
Early Modern Eurasia, Modern Asian Studies,
Vol 31 (3): 735-62.

61