Flipping Faces – On Stoler

Raymond Williams in Keywords notes the ambiguity in current political argument between emphases
on a political system and on an economic system- If imperialism, as normally defined in early nineteenth
century England, is primarily a political system in which colonies are governed from an imperial centre,
for economic but also for other reasons held to be important, then the subsequent grant of
independence or self-government to these colonies can be described, as indeed it widely has been, as
‘the end of imperialism’. On the other hand, if imperialism is understood primarily as an economic
system of external investment and the penetration and control of markets and sources of raw materials,
political changes in the status of colonies or former colonies will not greatly affect description of the
continuing economic system as imperialist.

In Globalicities, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak circumvents the inherent semantic challenge of twentieth
century ‘post-colonial, post-national’ terminology and identifies in globalization efforts toward global
governance, inaugurating a world in a common culture fix with urbanism as its signature – a rupture
distinguished from world trade and world systems through the ascendancy of finance capital.

Perceptively recognizing the fluid hierarchies, class mobilizations and ideologies that this entailed Ann
Laura Stoler in her essay ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’ charts the litany of historical and
philanthropic vocabulary that is employed by the new imperialists, i.e. the United States, as she studies
the morphing dynamics of the imperial capitalist impulse.

Stoler‘s argues that ‘colonial studies have subscribed to a myopic view of empire that sidelines a wide
range of imperial forms as anomalous’. Compassionate imperialism and the distribution of pity and
political intervention it condoned, employed and lauded a rhetoric benefitting a politic endowed with
consensual rather than coercive qualities. Holding itself starkly against the contiguous continental
empires defined by outright coercion, conquest and exploitation, territorial distinction, and legalized
property confiscation, the ‘American Empire’ in comparison is ‘a better international arrangement than
all realistic alternatives’. Its ‘invisible’ qualities are the liberal impulses of ‘free markets, human rights
and democracy’ and the added burden of carrying out violent interventions acting on humanitarian
sympathies. Along with questioning the definitions of empire walks an awkward politics of comparisons
and consolations when conversely it should be an exploration of ‘what constitutes the current ecology of
belief, the sedimented histories through which these notions of empire circulate, and the weight and
currency that nourish these notions now.’

It is crucial to note that it is ‘notions’, ideas, and social imaginaries that colonial empires depend on. The
American insistence on enforcing a global order is backed by the ‘grace notes’ of human rights
buttressed by a dynamic synergy with metropolitan urbanism. The idea of a distant, distinct ‘other’, a
racial formation necessarily with inequalities of position, cognition and opportunity set the conditions
toward a marketable imperial narrative where uneven entitlements could be fostered.
Appeals to moral uplift, compassionate charity, appreciation of cultural diversity, and protection of
“brown women and children” against “brown men” were based on imperial systems of knowledge
production enabled by and enabling of coercive practices. These were woven into the very weft of empire
– how control over and seizure of markets, land and labor were justified, worked through, and worked
out.

An intrinsic corollary to such ideological foundations is that imperial formations have never been steady
states. In fact they are states of becoming rather than being, macropolities in constant formation. Spivak
in fact makes further observations that these very porous boundaries are what result in an inability to
perceive the invisible power lines that make and unmake the visible. As we see cities exploding their
spatial outlines and virtualizing into nexuses of telecommunications or indeed being halted from such
easy virtualization, the cartographic distinct spaces – city and country – transform radically into data in
structurally related ways. The imperial map of well defined nation states is aspirational as its ground
realities are dependent on dislocation of populations, polities and identity, the mobility of colonial
agents and the military and the redistribution of resources. This contingency on shifting categories is
founded on what Stoler calls States of Exception.

It is often assumed that agents of empire were intent only to clarify borders, establish ‘order’, and
reduce zones of ambiguity … [but] agents of imperial rule have invested in, exploited, and demonstrated
strong stakes in the proliferation of geopolitical ambiguities. Imperial formations required frequent
redrawing of the categories of subject and citizen; of who was outside and who within at any particular
time. Vague political status and territorial autonomy are fundamental to technologies of rule. Imperial
architectures are not wholly visible or wholly opaque. Oscillations between the visible, secreted and
opaque structures of sovereignty are common features and in this respect the U.S has long embraced
peculiar formulations of territoriality. Being an effective empire has long been contingent on partial
visibility – sustaining the ability to remain an unaccountable one.

By giving rise to new zones of exclusion and new social groups Stoler points out that the after effects of
the exception and migratory process has been a collapsing of the distance and difference that once
allowed sympathy. It would be helpful at this point, to take a step forward from failed imperialism to a
pact with empire and ask who the emergent here is. The narrative of class mobility inevitably crops up in
which, as capital clears its path, it must initiate an abstract social productivity that creates not only a
working class but also a middle class that gives the backbone to a new world. But the other side of the
development of capitalism has meant that this middle class, the agent of human rights all over the
world, is altogether distanced from the subaltern classes in “their own culture,” epistemically. Society is
subalternazed under the social-Darwinist assumption that to be fit—and thus to survive—is to have the
skills for capitalism.

The aftermath of 9/11 has seen historical anxieties of who is really us, who gets to be white, and who is
just passing reemerge. The other has entered the nation’s ranks and is culturally and linguistically
indistinguishable. Fear inducing narratives – an omnipresent, malicious, hidden force – are security
apparatuses designed to protect society against the dangers that are born in its own body. Inversely the
notion that ‘society must be defended’ condones the moral right to murder those ‘outside’ – this only a
heartbeat away from the panicked social vigilantism that compels social and racial profiling. In the
theory of ‘two nations’ that Stoler quotes, the very equations of empire seem inverted and polarized.

Raymond Williams noted that there has always been a political campaign to equate imperialism with
civilization and a civilizing mission and the ambiguities between its political economic and social
ramifications make its semantics argumentative. But like any word which refers to fundamental social
and political conflicts, its important historical and contemporary variations of meaning point to real
processes which have to be studied in their own terms.

Stoler seems to pick up on these real processes as she not just questions the dynamics of the new
empire vivified by America but also to ask who dictates what the choices should be and out of what
axiomatics?

Works Cited
On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty, Ann Laura Stoler; Public Culture 18:1© 2006 by Duke University
Press

Keywords -A vocabulary of culture and society, Raymond Williams; Oxford University Press, New York;
Copyright © Raymond Williams 1976, 1983

Globalicities-Terror and Its Consequences, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University