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INTERIOR FRONTIERS
 Praise for Interior Frontiers

“What do we need in a moment of catastrophe: environmental, sanitary, cultural,

democratic, pedagogic? Not pain relievers, but rage. But not only rage, also infinite
subtlety and sensitivity. But not only sensitivity, also erudition, memory, inflexible
conceptual rigor. All this, and more, we find in Stoler’s collection of essays, which
weaves together the sinews, elusive inequalities, and creative refusals of imperial
democracy. I call this a book of necessity.”
—Étienne Balibar, author of Violence and Civility

“At a time when questions of social, racial, and economic justice are as desperately urgent
as they are contested, Ann Stoler’s Interior Frontiers brilliantly points out the importance
of the cultural, affective, and aesthetic undercurrents that both advance and limit the
unfinished process of decolonization that has stretched from the last century into this
one. Stoler’s essays chip away at what she and Étienne Balibar term “internal frontiers,”
the less visible divisions within, as opposed to on the peripheries of, political and social
entities. In her readings of Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction,
Stoler insightfully demonstrates how elisions of race and colonialism in the critiques by
European writers on the Left are symptoms of hidden hierarchies. Crafting the idea of
“colonial aphasia,” Stoler unveils how apparently innocuous but sometimes even prized
acts create shadow indices of worth with material political ramifications. In a time where
the evidently unjust—even the obviously violent—is whitewashed into acceptability,
Stoler shines a necessary spotlight on the softer, blurrier, and perhaps even more perni-
cious forms of erasure that undergird the divisions that govern our lives and values today.
Interior Frontiers is a veritable tour de force.”
—Bernard E. Harcourt, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of
Law and Professor of Political Science, Columbia Law School

“Interior Frontiers sheds brilliant light on the subtleties of social line-drawing. With
these essays, Ann Stoler (re)establishes herself as the foremost theorist of affect. From
the snobberies of the dinner table to the under-interrogated “instincts” rationalizing
global carcerality, she dissects the complex, ineffable sensibilities and “gut” intu-
itions that inform hierarchies of taste, place, vulgarity, disgust, fear, temporal order,
revenge, social death, and physical vulnerability. Greatly expanding the insights of
Bourdieu’s magnum opus, Distinction, Stoler presents an important fracturing of the
binarism upon which so many political exclusions, colonial practices, and racialized
regimes depend. This collection looks at examples ranging from zoning laws to state-
lessness to the revulsions of touching “alien” skin, and deploys them to question the
shape-shifting nature of such invented division. Most importantly, Stoler asks what
is fluidly emergent in the resonant depictions of “the frontier” itself—what moti-
vates the regard that moves from “neither here nor there” and proceeds to a sense of
bounded existence runneled by Janus-faced mechanisms of simultaneous certitude
and ambiguity. In examining those quietly mobilizing edges, Stoler delivers a searing
indictment of our greatest contemporary paradox, the democratization of human
inequality.”
—Patricia J. Williams, University Distinguished
Professor of Law and Humanities, Northeastern University
 ✦
interior frontiers
essays on the entrails of inequality

a nn laura stoler

1
1
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Heretical thinking is a constituent power born in the act of non-​
acquiescence, born in the estrangement from what we once imag-
ined we were able to know, born in the leaching of confidence in the
categories we call upon and the concepts of which we have lost the
capacity to even ask after the scenes of their making.
 Table of Contents

Without Whom ix
Unquiet in the Polis xiii

PART I: ON THE METRICS OF WORTH

1 Interior Frontiers 3
2 Weaponizing the Senses 35
3 (Dis)taste of Race 67
4 How Not to Know 108

PART II: OF DISSENSUS IN THE MAKING

5 Poetic Rage: Anti-colonial Avant-​Gardes 141

6 Archiving Praxis: For Palestinians
and Beyond 199
v i i i |   Table of C ontents

PART III: SHATTERZONES OF IMPERIAL

DEMOCRACY

7 “All Things being Equal”: Mobile Extractions

in a Carceral World 237
8 Colonial Diffractions in (Il)liberal Times 272

Bibliography 301
Index 339
 Without Whom

Without whom. . . writing these essays would have been a much

harder and more lonely task. Instead, writing them has provided
rare occasion to have dearest friends and new ones as interlocu-
tors to think with me about what so matters. Writing what matters
congeals political dissent and concept work, animates discomfort,
compels a welding of content and form. Not least their support
curbed fears, induced a more precise word, with tender if tough
critique. They course through this work as inspirations.
I should perhaps start with one I’ve never met and who has
never read my work. Not surprisingly, Foucault seeps in the folds
of my thinking, his queries have compelled my own.
My debt to Etienne Balibar (who I refer to as EB through-
out these essays) is at once personal, politically pressing, at times
inscribed in bold font, sometimes subjacent but just as strong.
I could say his support over decades as that of cherished men-
tor if I didn’t already know that he would reject that assignment,
in favor of that of a cherished friend. His breath-​taking philo-
sophical labor stops me short in work that has never veered from
a concerted task: creating, at times reviving, a political vocabu-
lary that assails, without cynicism, how deeply power is wielded
x |    W I T H O U T W HOM

in the violences of inequality. Still he tenaciously refuses that it

cannot change, that it needs to remain as it is today. I owe to EB,
the book’s very title, Interior Frontiers, sometimes stretching the
concept across other scales and terrains with his encouragement
to venture further than where I thought to go.
***
Paul Rabinow has been a collaborator in absentia, a friendship
perhaps nurtured by distance, by our stubborn dispositions that
somehow didn’t get in the way. Concept-​work was a passion we
shared. Both of us were taken by the concept and substance of
“fieldwork in philosophy,” both imagining its potential to trans-
form the nature of social inquiry. He is present here, though he
never saw these essays. Our styles of writing differed. Politics and
poesis matter to me. Paul not so much. When asked, he said he
saw them getting in the way. Still his style of thought seizes me.
He is a much-​missed interlocutor and friend.
***
An unexpected “without whom” emerged in my feverish effort to
identify an anti-​colonial avant-​garde, and its distinctive expres-
sions of “poetic rage.” I sought out Henk Meier’s help, a long lost
friend and colleague with an uncanny capacity to convey the
nuances and power of Indonesia literature. I sought out his help
in working on that literature in a conversation that somehow we
had never had before.
***
Nancy Lutkehaus, Victoria Ebin, Jay Bernstein, Seloua Luste
Boulbina, Jean and John Comaroff, Bernard Harcourt, Nancy
Hunt, Neni Panourgia, Richard Rechtman, Kate and Ed West,
Pat Williams, are those long cherished confidants whose sharp
insights remain always nested in a trust that could make me
retreat from a too strident claim to embrace one more pointed
and often more bold. Nancy Hunt patiently worked with me to
 W IT HOU T W HOM |   x i

pursue the spare, to remove the excess, and to delete, making way
for less cluttered passage.
***
Many others also have guided me with care: Fady Asleh, Ariella
Azoulay, Omar Berrada, Leonoor Broeder, Val Daniel, Beshara
Doumani, Eric Fassin, Rema Hammami, Charles McDonald,
Mohamed Amer Meziane, Gwenn Miller, Adi Ophir, Sherene
Seikaly, Saphe Shamoun, Dominque Rousset, (Karib) Fathun
Satrio. I thank Keith Foulcher for offering a counterpoint to
what I see as a recalcitrant unnamed anticolonial Indonesian
avant-​garde literature. Erin Simmons editing skills carried me
through the scorch of summer with attentiveness to every line
of the manuscript, from punctuation to question marks next to
awkward turns of phrase. She crafted the index as I imagined it
should be: a conceptual map and key, guiding readers within and
between essays.
***
And then, of course Bruno and Tessa (who did the cover photo)
holding me tight through Covid. I’m not supposed to say they are
guardian angels of sorts, but they are. They grace me both with
gentle reminders that the political practice when I was their age
configures differently today. Their generosity in the face of the
time and attention I poach from them is precious—​for work they
know sustains me in dark corners of the everyday. Larry’s pres-
ence is on every page: drafts read and reread, muddle cut, portals
pried from a throw away phrase.
***
“Without whom” is my gratitude to them all.
 Unquiet in the Polis

It takes strength “to be able to live and to forget the extent

to which to live and to be unjust is one and the same thing.”1

COLONIALISMS STAMP THEMSELVES INTO BODIES, into

minds, in the creases of skin, in the pores of flesh. As Simone
Weil and Frantz Fanon have insisted, those who imagine having
escaped that inscription fool themselves.2 This is especially true of
the well-​meaning, good-​hearted among “us” who never wanted
“them” to be colonized, but profited and continue to profit,
nonetheless. As beneficiaries, subsidizing extractions—​hailed as
development—​is the stock and trade of the well-​meaning, a set of
practices renewed at every turn. Philanthropy and humanitarian-
ism are the goods parlayed in the process of feeling good about
feeling bad while the well-​intentioned, in their silence, endorse
camps of containment, forests destroyed for mega-​plantations,
gated corporate-​funded compounds, and ever more lethal tactics
to render “sensitive quarters” more secure and well-​heeled ones
more safe.

1. Frederick Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History,” in Untimely

Meditations, trans. R. J. Holliingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 76.
2. Simone Weil, Contre le colonialisme (Paris: Payot & Rivage, 2018), 33–​35, from
“Les membres palpitants de la patrie,” Vigilance 63, no. 10 (1938).

​ ​
x i v |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

Imperial formations are racial emporia, stacked with com-

modities and currencies of inequality—​infrastructures that are
unevenly distributed, resources that are generously allotted to
some, meted out meagerly, if at all, to others. Imperial designs
are drawn with measures of cultural capital that are both white
defined and white infested—​ assuring blocked and privileged
access. Those psychically and physically damaged by (what I refer
to in these essays as) “imperial democracies” occasionally have
their privations verbally acknowledged, but still left materially
unaddressed. Those others, not counting among the counted, are
subject to forms of duress that go unregistered or strategically lit
upon then (willfully) ignored.
This extended early-​twenty-​first century conjuncture ampli-
fies, as it refigures, implacable features of imperial democracies
and their quasi-​democratic struggles. On the one hand is a pro-
tracted moment of enflamed and threatened ultra conservative
activisms; on the other hand is a fierce rejection both of racialized
practices and those “colonial-​like” inequities, recursively struc-
tured, recasting ones that have come before.
Baldly skewed and public attention-​getting contests over the
language and landscapes of pedagogy, politics, labor, and aesthet-
ics rage. Sometimes the substance of the battle is on unrecogniz-
able terrain to all interlocutors; sometimes the battle is explicitly
over the same time and place. Those bent on prohibiting and deny-
ing the teaching of colonial histories of dispossession, massacre,
and violence versus those asserting the palpable, urgent need for
more specific and pointed such histories may be voicing mutually
unintelligible claims. Or they may be positioned in hand-​to-​hand
combat, in practiced pursuit over museum curation, disposses-
sion of land, restitution payments; in short, over every object and
inch of contemporary and historical terrain.
It is hard not to be struck by the disparate renderings of what
democracies are built upon and what they do and need to do now.
Even an agreed upon vocabulary calls up different phenomena
and distinct understandings of the political stakes and underly-
ing principles on which the social sphere of the polity is founded
 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x v

and expected to thrive. Affective allegiances too are distinctly ori-

ented to the public expression of fear, shame, indignance, humili-
ation, anger—​a ll emotives distributed differently, less often with
resignation than rage.

I M PE R I A L DE M O C R AC I E S O N
THE LINE

We’ve got on slippery ground where there is no friction and so in a

certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also just because of that,
we are unable to walk. We want to walk; so, we need friction. Back
to the round ground.3

British imperialism, built on the tenets of nineteenth-​century lib-

eralism rather than in contradiction to it, prepares us in many
ways for what has followed: the terms of how liberal democracies
are understood to protect its communities or sever them, each
with distinctively different rights.4 Even those who are critical of

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe

(New York: Macmillan, 1968), 46.
4. See Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study of Nineteenth-​Century British
Social Thought (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999) that was to become and still
is required reading in any course on empire. I was on the board of Politics and Society
in 1989 when Mehta’s manuscript “Liberal Politics of Exclusion” (Politics and Society
18, no. 4 (1990): 427–​54) arrived. Totally taken with his bold and pointed analysis,
even as a fledgling, I took it on as my first manuscript to edit. That sense of won-
der led to profiling its framing as the first chapter in the volume Frederick Cooper
and I edited, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Culture in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), 59–​86. Mehta’s appreciation of the interior
frontiers and cultural competencies “molded” by liberalism (what I would later call
the requisite “education of desire” of imperial governance) was already set out with
respect to Locke in Anxiety of Freedom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992),
where he wrote: “Locke is [was] concerned not merely with settling the boundaries
between individuals . . . but also . . . with settling the internal boundaries of individu-
als (emphasis added),” a century before the German philosopher Johan Fichte used
the term, “internal frontier” as described in my opening essay included here. Mehta,
Anxieties, 3.
x v i |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

what democracy offers don’t agree on the “democratization of vio-

lence” that underwrites it. John Keane, political theorist of democ-
racy (and who has written for decades about eastern Europe and
“the power of the powerless”) questions whether violence is really
at the heart of democracy, arguing that the “democratization of
war” makes acts of violence “publicly accountable.”5
Achille Mbembe, to the contrary, would hold that democ-
racy, in its very making, nurtures violence and a “democra-
tization of fear” in which “necropolitics” is not only a tool of
democracy but its core (and a protracted death sentence for
so many who have imagined salvation in its promises). This
“society of enmity,” about which Mbembe has long written,
nourishes the explicit delineations of difference and the (sub)
metrics of inequality.6 There is virtually no democracy separate
from the colonial condition and the displacements it inflicts.
The dark spaces of democracy are not only penal colonies and
prisons, strategically located for surveillance, isolation, and
extraction. Extractions of land, labor, and produce shape gov-
erning policies, practices, and violences in the interior border-
lands, and supposedly exterior territories of democratic racial
states.7
“Imperial democracy” can be celebrated or derided but rarely
is it understood to mean the same one thing.8 Some treat it as the

5. See John Keane, “Does Democracy Have a Violent Heart,” in War, Democracy
and Culture in Classical Athens, ed. David Pritchard, 378–​ 408 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010); Vaclav Havel and John Keane, The Power of
the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe (Armonk: M.E.
Sharpe, 1985), and a rich Wikipedia entry on his work on human rights at John Keane
(political theorist), Wikipedia, accessed June 13, 2021, https://​en.wikipe​d ia.org/​w iki/​
John​_​Kea​ne_​​(pol​itic​a l_​t​heor​ist).
6. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003);
Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Politiques de l’inimitié (Paris:
La Découverte, 2016).
7. See Part III, “Shatterzones.”
8. See David Slater, “Exporting Imperial Democracy: Critical Reflections on the
US Case,” Human Geography 2, no. 3 (2009): 1–​13. I hadn’t known that Arundhati
 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x v i i

joining of two opposed projects: one interior to the polity and its
citizens; the other directed at the conquest and coercive manage-
ment of subject peoples and sites of extraction, as if the imperial
spaces were outside the nation’s proper bounds. But this is not
what most fundamentally characterizes imperial democracies,
nor what they do on the ground.
It should not be necessary to repeat (but I would hold that it
still is): The common image of a dichotomy between inside and
outside, with respect to those infrastructures in democratic lib-
eral policies that distribute rights and resources, dissembles, and
misconstrues. It is not that access and resources are meted out
sparingly in the imperial domain, “outside” national borders, but
allotted with equity for those who are properly within. “Interior
frontiers” do not refer to inside and outside the nation. Rather they
mark distinctions among the good citizen, the sub-​citizen, and the
non-​citizen, those with a place vs. those who are superfluous and
have no place, citizen vs. subject, refugee, migrant.
Interior frontiers are at once fierce and fragile sites of struggle
between differentiated populations, spaces, and persons—​divi-
sions that can be silently and violently enforced. Distinctions are
drawn along multiple axes. The boldest are between those relegated
to deprivations vs. those who feed off scarcities—​of health, hous-
ing, education, and wealth. Interior frontiers can mark “osmotic
borders” or a “no man’s land” of “fragile limits” as André Green

Roy used the term “imperial democracy” nearly twenty years ago in a hugely popular
broadcast at Alternative Radio on May 13, 2003, on America’s purported “moral right
to rule.” Originally at https://​w ww.alter​nati​vera​d io/​org/​spea ​ker/​a rundh​ati-​roy [no
longer available], there is now a DVD recording of the two lectures entitled “Imperial
Democracy” followed by a discussion with Howard Zinn. For a much earlier and
alternative use of the term to describe a U.S. in which its “greatness was thrust upon
it” and on President McKinley, “reluctant” to annex and colonize the Philippines
or intervene in Cuba at the turn of the twentieth century, especially see Ernest R.
May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (New York:
Harcourt and Brace, 1961).
x v i i i |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

writes, among persons or within persons themselves.9 But Green’s

most striking observation, which Balibar placed as the subtitle to
his 1993 text “What is a frontier?” reads: “One can be a citizen or
stateless, but it is difficult to imagine that one is a frontier.”10
Some would argue that today’s template for imperial democ-
racies is that of ancient Athens where Sophocles was lauded for
crushing a rebellion on the island of Samos. Although there was no
mass enslavement or massacre, as the renowned British classicist
Mary Beard contends, subservience, dependence, and debt were
the Samosians’ lot.11 The semiotic politics that lauds both Athens’
imperial conquest and its commitment to internal democracy is
a rhetorical ruse. Its resilient appeal clearly speaks to a confirm-
ing and comforting political imaginary for the demos today. The
mythohistory is of imperial ventures as oceanicly distant, “out-
side,” with respect to the democratic venture: democracy as the
pre-​eminent space of equalitarian justice, a firmly possessed place
and foundational principle within the “nation’s” fortified bounds.
But this characterization misses a critical point in this ever-​
ambiguous play and politics of comparison. Only a small fraction
of those within Athens had voice or rights. The interior fron-
tiers were sharply drawn with slaves, women, and immigrants
excluded from the polis. In the early-​twentieth century U.S., the
“Ugly Laws” targeted removal from public space of those who were
poor, beggars, lame, disabled, Black, or petty “criminals,” those

9. André Green, “The Borderline Concept,” in On Private Madness (Abingdon:

Taylor and Francis, 2018), 63 [originally published in French in l986]. In the earliest
of Balibar’s essays on “Interior Frontiers” Green is quoted in several places (refer-
enced in the eponymous first essay of this volume), but in subsequent texts of the
same essay, reproduced in French and English, reference to Green in the text and
notes, and the quote above are absent.
10. See Green, “The Borderline Concept,” 63.
11. Mary Beard, “Democracy according to the Greeks,” October 14, 2010, in New
Statesman Podcast, produced by The New Statesman, podcast, MP3 Audio, https://​
www.newst​ates​man.com/​ideas/​2010/​10/​athen​ian-​democr​acy-​ath​ens. Beard called
Athens’ imperial democracy something akin to “an exclusive gentleman’s club.”
 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x i x

not altogether different from immigrants, underemployed, home-

less, and superfluous persons cast out of the polis today.12 Those
not protected by the normative requirements of the community’s
protocols are reminded in every movement and everyday practice
that they are outside both “invisible borders” and requisite com-
petencies, deserving of full membership.13

BE T W E E N T H E BL ATA N T A N D
IMPERCEPTIBL E

Still, imperial democracy is not a world of clarities, not

Manichean as some political positions might claim. How those
who move across the edges of these divisions and distinctions,
and how those distinctions are finely calibrated and discerned,
open to core concerns of the essays that follow. Roland Barthes
made a germane case in his exceptional thinking on semiot-
ics where a specific issue guided his methodological work. As
Evelyne Grossman parses it: his approach seeks to enlarge our
“fields of perception and sensations . . . to touch from a distance,
to augment the threshold of sensibility (emphasis added).”14
This piercing analytic and methodological insight is joined by
another—​a kin to how Raymond Williams described a “struc-
ture of feeling” only a few years earlier; as that which is “at the
very edge of semantic availability.”15 Both point to a critical

12. Susan Schweik’s powerful account of the career of what was to be called the
“Ugly Laws” is discussed in various subsequent essays here. See The Ugly Laws:
Disability in Public (New York: New York University, 2009).
13. Étienne Balibar, “Fichte and the Internal Border,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas:
Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson
(London: Routledge, 1994), 83.
14. Evelyne Grossman, Eloge de l’Hypersensible (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit,
2012), 119.
15. Raymond Williams, “Structures of feeling,” in Marxism and Literature
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 134.
x x |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

space of politicality, where and when the emergent and potential

political, can thrive.
Barthes posed his problematic in a semiotic lesson on how
to read: “to render sensible to an imperceptibility that does not
know how to know what it discerns.”16 Here, he stretches between
what is linguistically unavailable and the “imperceptible” as that
which one does not yet know how to know. It’s a politically vital
distinction addressed not only to what one cannot yet say, but to
a “rendering” of the “sensible,” as a practice attentive to sensory
epistemics, a way of knowing that so textures the lived experience
of disparate lives.
Williams rather looks to the “affective elements” that articu-
late the personal and the social as a politically emergent space.17
Barthes opens to politicality in the “minutely detailed.”18 For those
for whom reading is a political practice and literature a foun-
dational site, the political seems to emerge on his every page.19
Barthes offers the possibility of speaking to what constitutes the
political with each point of pressure put on the imperceptible and
how we might learn to see. Nuance replaces the rigid binarisms
he rejects. In his accounting, emphasis is less on not yet having
an adequate language to say something than on the dilemma of
not even knowing “how to know what one discerns.”20 Hans-​Jorg

16. Quoted in Grossman, Eloge, 119.

17. Williams, Marxism, 132.
18. Roland Barthes, “Utopia,” in The “Scandal of Marxism”: and Other Writings on
Politics, Essays and Interviews, Vol 2 (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2015), 106–​107; and see
Sam Maculiffe, “The Imagination of Detail: Barthes and Politics of Utopia” (paper,
London Conference in Critical Thought, London South Bank University, London,
UK, June 2017).
19. In a critically negative and snippety review of Barthes’ Mythologies in The
New Yorker, he is described as “an unrelenting opponent of French imperialism”
whose “strongest essay in the book is ‘African Grammar’,” missing from the l972
edition of Mythologies and reinserted in the 2012 edition. Richard Brody, “The Uses
of ‘Mythologies’,” The New Yorker, April 19, 2012, https://​w ww.new ​york​ers/​com/​cult​
ure/​rich​a rd-​brody/​t he-​uses-​of-​myth​olog​ies.
20. Barthes, in Grossman, Eloge, 119.
 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x x i

Rheinberger reposes that caveat again: “One must know the

method of knowing in order to grasp the object to be known.”21 It’s
a methodological guidepost not to be missed. Others have said it,
but Rheinberger reduces the noise, conveying it in a sentence.22
The succinct formulation stops one short, capturing why the how
matters. Racial formations are steeped precisely in an assumed
way of knowing expressed in loquacious and carefully muted
registers. The relationship between what one knows and how one
imagines to know informs each of these essays to follow.
Gaston Bachelard somewhat differently grounds the how of
knowing in an “epistemology of detail” that he once described as
the aspirational crux of his work.23 That torque on the detail has
guided my archival practice for years. The anxiety of not knowing
how one should know was both a leitmotif of the nineteenth-​cen-
tury Dutch colonial archives and in turn of my anxious move-
ments following the archives’ own. Evidential truths derived from
rumor, visual proof, hearsay, emotives, and the written word,
each called upon as “fact” (or disparaged as unreliable) depending
on who conveyed them, where and when. These “hierarchies of

21. Hans-​Jörg Rheinberger, An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth-​Century

Histories of Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 31.
22. This principle and imperative defined my reading of colonial archives as I
sought what those governing thought they knew and how they thought they knew.
Along the Archival Grain came out the year before Rheinberger’s, An Epistemology
of the Concrete where the citation is located, but his earlier Toward a History of
Epistemic Things (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)was already shaping my
archival trajectory.
23. Gaston Bachelard, “une philosophie du détail épistémologique” in La philoso-
phie du non (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1940), 14. I render the phrase as
an “epistemology of the detail,” but it might better be rendered as a “philosophy of
epistemological detail.” In either case, both forms address what we imagine to know
and how we imagine to know it. In my own thinking on race and empire, I have taken
it as an insight of conceptual methodology, “crucial to understanding how, where,
on whom, and with what intensity imperial relations impose and thrive” in Carole
McGranahan and John Collier eds., Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2018), 480.
x x i i |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

credibility” were protean as contexts, urgencies, and imaginaries

of subtle recalcitrance to subversion changed.24
Epistemological hesitance has served me as a political diag-
nostic. It can mark where and when problems of interpretation
arise, where doubt confronts emphatic claims. Such issues are
alerts to where interior frontiers emerge and reposition, how sen-
timents distribute social distinctions, how taste marks denigra-
tion, and how the forgotten and forgettable withhold social worth.
In Part I, attentiveness to the “how” of knowing is key to idioms,
comportments and sensory regimes of racialized attributions and
the (sub)metrics of inequality.
Explicit and subjacent spaces of entitlement and deprecation
make up racialized systems of credence. Those participating in
these practices (that impinge on social ecologies) may barely know
the discernments in which they invest. Anxiety and ambigu-
ity aside, persons and peoples are still easily dismissed as if with
unwavering clarity, the criteria imagined to be so self-​evident, as
if without intended political effects. This unflexing confidence,
providing a willingness and an impulse to subscribe, circulate
through these essays to locate different sites of application. The
formulation speaks to an effort to make visible the conceptual and
material practices that concerted disregard (and what the atten-
tiveness that goes with it) entails. When disregard is sanctioned
with certitude and by common sense, implausibilities about rac-
isms’ reason may be hardly questioned at all.
Reason can be turned from itself. Disregard depends on
bodily and psycho-​social requirements that are not always the
same: sometimes disregard is a concerted effort, conscious but
unacknowledged, or “innocently” processed as “inadvertently
passing over,” or in repulsion, looking away. For adverbs can point
to ethical compromise, wavering intent, couched animus. Adverbs
do lots of work: they can provide an excuse for one’s qualified
commitment to particular acts: those “unwittingly” carried out,

24. See Ann Laura Stoler, “Hierarchies of Credibility,” in Along the Archival Grain:
Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009), 181–​236.
 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x x i i i

practices “hardly” visible, a declaration of innocence in “I ‘simply’

didn’t know” alter the claims for an act, how it is judged, and the
limits of accountability.25 It was the philosopher and linguist John
Austin in a “A Plea for Excuses,” (his 1955 essay often taken as the
manifesto of ordinary language linguistics) who reminded us to
seize on, and not ignore protective adverbs that qualify claims.26
This volume’s final essay “Colonial Diffractions in (Il)liberal
Times” turns less to the moral authority that disregard confers than
to the conditions that recast liberalism’s fundamental inequities as
primarily colonial coordinates. If excuses are an “admirable” sub-
ject for exploring the range of withdrawals from ethical responsi-
bility, as Austin held, imperial democracy might serve as one of its
exemplary sites. “Colonial aphasia” as I have long suggested is an
ultimate excuse, one that removes the need for excuses, with a lapse
of knowing as a powerful occlusion, one almost shorn of account-
ability.27 “Decolonizing” becomes almost a conciliatory gesture,
turning the inequities of imperial democracy away from the liberal
demos as if those inequalities might better be accounted for in the
exterior sites rather than in the movement between these spaces and
in the managed mobilities on which imperial democracies thrive.

A SET OF ÉTU DE S

In the spirit of Barthes’ sensory alertness, I think of the essays that

follow more as a set of études than chapters, not as cases strung out
to resolve into convergent points.28 Each is part of studied concen-
trations on a domain in which interior frontiers are assiduously

25. See the final chapter of Stoler, Archival Grain, 237–​79, “Imperial Dispositions
of Disregard.”
26. John L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses: The Presidential Address,” Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society 57 (l956–​1957): 1–​30.
27. Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia: Disabled History and Race in France,” in
Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016),
68–​121.
28. The turn to études is not a linguist conceit but a call to the double meaning of
études as essays that do work as well as studies that research.
x x i v |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

and surreptitiously assembled—​and defiantly dismantled (the lat-

ter is a focal point of both studies in Part II on Dissensus in the
Making). I ask how these distinctions, denigrations, and dissen-
sions are reworked and recharged. I think of an étude as used in
apprenticeship and musical pedagogy, exercises intended to instill
skilled patience, not always achieved. It is not a set of abstract
skills. If anything, it is (and I am) tediously focused. An étude
offers the occasion for practicing a technique, relinquishing any
claim to mastery. I use it here to suggest a set of tentative takes
on inequities written into seemingly benign designations packed
with judgments of worth.
Enumerated chapters suggest a succession, a cumulative
making, a narrative with crescendo and denouement. Anticipated
resolution and forecasting conclusions afford good introduc-
tions, offering readers a path to make sense of a book’s direction.
These studies work in a somewhat different way. Interior frontiers
offers neither a narrative nor seeks one. Rather, it pulls on a thick
thread that courses differently through each essay. Each, of var-
ied lengths, tracks how the distinctions of superiority and sub-
ordination, high and low, command and subjugation are forged
in imagined measures and metrics of worth. In the essays that
follow, I refrain from referring to them as études, with a sense that
some readers might see it as mannered. Still, the term sticks with
me to stress a poetics of politics, an undercurrent of what follows.
Conceding to some convention, I rather refer to these conjoined
thoughts as “essays/​essais” throughout the volume.

ON (SU B)M E T R IC S

The term “(sub)metrics” appears throughout these essays. I take

it as a term that demands attention to what is actually mea-
sured, what is imagined to be measured, what is an imaginary
measure, and what succumbs to the exactions of numbers (as in
the obscene, meticulous documents of torture regimes from the
 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x x v

fifteen-​century Inquisition to twentieth-​century Pol Pot massacres

in Cambodia).29 The sites of differentiation I explore are located in
a more ambiguous space: some (hardly) acknowledged, (partially)
subjacent, and (largely) evasive of measurement though they are
“measured” all the time –​not unlike Austin’s attentiveness to the
quiet power of adverbs to limit an ethical claim.)
Judgments of worth are made across the often obscure affec-
tive landscapes in which sentiments are joined in different com-
posites that distribute worth. The “sub” here underscores what
exceeds, evades, or is fundamentally outside measurement. But
measures are still there, imagined to be there, denigrating, dan-
gerous, and in their certitudes, blinding and defended in violence.
Attention to what I call the (sub)metrics of inequality does not
abide by a fixed frame in the essays that follow. Sometimes there
is an almost hidden measure, often that which is imagined to be a
“measure” is neither a quality nor feature of thing or person that
can be measured at all.
Measures and “metrics” in these essays appear as palimpsest,
subscript, and imaginary; calculations, despite incalculabilities,
repeatedly take hold in gray zones where differences that count
and those that don’t are punctuated, erased, and assessed. These
are not always measures primarily riveted on distinctions of worth
and exclusions of access. They may operate in dimmer light, in
lower register, in modulated speech acts, in practicing tentative
distinctions that make a case.
Lower, quiet registers can hold silent or nuanced verbal court.
Such is the case with the searing anecdote of Aimé Césaire about
his first day in a white lycée in Port-​au-​Prince when he was a young
boy (which opens Part II, “Poetic Rage”). A schoolboy, the son of a

29. On the state’s meticulous record-​keeping around torture, see Irene Silverblatt,
Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004); Michelle Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence,
Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2014).
x x v i |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

beké (as elite whites were called in colonial Martinique) dismissed

him as nothing but a Black, having no place in the school and
no worth. The assault was not shouted across the courtyard as a
racial slur. It was spoken in the modulated voice that elite white
boys in the colonies (and elsewhere) were groomed to practice as
“second nature.” Sufficiently soft-​spoken, their teacher could pre-
tend not to notice or hear. Thus Part I, “The Metrics of Worth,”
argues for an implicit metrics of difference and a recurrent epis-
temic dilemma that cannot quite capture what people imagine
they know and how they know it.
The early-​nineteenth century term, “interior frontier,” which
Étienne Balibar forged into a political concept some thirty years
ago, has become an unexpected conceptual hinge for my thinking
about racial formations across colonies and Europe’s “raceless,”
racialized urban strongholds. It’s a concept with political weight,
cutting across affects and bodies, along soft and hard borders
of community, and through the fault lines of polity. It comple-
ments biopolitics, with more specific emphasis on the frictions
of fraught divides. As a political concept it demands a reckoning
of unstable scales of demand and duress. Interior frontiers rest
in no one place. They occupy person and polity, body, and body
politic. They mark the interior workings and psychic spaces of
bodies where there is permeability, seepage, opened pores, skin
tightened against contagion. These metaphors and means of tox-
icities absorbed, cracked fissures, and unhealed closures define
the changing contours of interior frontiers in their making.
The first essay, “Interior Frontiers” makes a move in that
direction, reflecting on the paradoxical, quixotic quality of the
concept in the practices it calls forth. On the one hand, to seal
affiliations among “a people,” and between person and polity,
and ostensibly, as Johan Fichte put it in 1808, to bolster “moral
armament” or possibly the opposite—​tear at the inner seams of
civic life, turn persons against one another. It may do what the
singular French expression “moi peau” invites to thought about
the skin as an “envelope:” a sensorial limit, site of excitation, a
 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x x v i i

“protection against aggression,” a “defense against effraction” and

a sieve to the self. I think of it less as a metaphor of a “me,” or ego
(as “moi” is usually translated), but of the skin’s capacity to acti-
vate the abrasions that mold one into a political subject refusing
to be demeaned, a racialized. But that white skin, so easily con-
taminated and equipped with imagined protective features does
more: it protects white time and space from lesser, or not quite
human-​k inds.30
“Weaponizing the Senses” (essay two) concentrates on dis-
tributions of sentiments, a subject that has directed much of my
work on the toxicities of racecraft for some time. Here sentiments
are broached as relational measures of value that may be articu-
lated in speech, or mutely performed. Treated as judgments in the
making, they may confirm what one already imagines to know,
or they may provide the occasion to form a new assessment.
Whether the sentiment is “remorse” or “longing,” or “disdain,”
these are never freestanding internal states but elements of social
dispositions, responses to relations, and contested arrangements.
As importantly, they index inequalities, active in producing dis-
positions and conditions needed for inequities to flourish.
In moving among sentiments, sensibilities, and the senses, I
look to how they politically matter, and what is entailed in mak-
ing such a claim. These affective spaces provide the kinetic and
arrested emotives that shape the tones in which subordinations are
played out. Sensory intrusions and insights turn on smell, sound,
touch, revulsion, and unwanted proximities. “(Dis)Taste of Race”
(essay three) could be considered a centerpiece to the volume. It
is exemplary of conversions from common noun to political con-
cept I have in mind. It is where the sinews of discrimination take

30. The term “moi-​peau” is used by Didier Anzieu. It is usually considered a psy-
chic device constitutive of a “me” (it is mentioned in Green’s text, not Balibar’s).
Didier Anzieu, Le Moi-​Peau (Paris: Editions Dunod, l985). Also see Charles Mill’s
powerful rendering of “white time” and its construction of stolen time in a white
chronotopic world of ideal theory. “White Time: The Chronic Injustice of Ideal
Theory.” Du Bois Review 11,1 (2014, 27-​42).
x x v i i i |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

a rarely considered and strikingly powerful form. Like “gut feel-

ings” and “intuition,” “taste” (good and bad taste, or the “taste-
less”) can operate undetected, below the radar of identified and
indicted hate speech and enmity, classified as racial crimes. Yet it
is precisely these seemingly innocuous, even cherished, conceptu-
ally laden acts—​to compare, to intuit, to forget—​that are girded
by, as they furnish—​fierce senses of belonging and demarcations
in our fractious racialized world. I treat them here as sites of
potential danger, readily recast as cure rather than poison, car-
ing rather than corrosion, enabling rather than destructive, inclu-
sionary rather than the very bedrock on which exclusions rest.
They do something more. They address a multisensory over-
load that yields more than Pierre Bourdieu sought to address in
Distinction, while taking more seriously the underside of aesthetic
eminence that was neither Kant’s subject nor concern. Here, the
convention that sets taste and distaste—​gôut and dégôut—​as sub-
jects of different fields and methods of inquiry is not cast aside.
Instead, the two are treated as mutually enabling, dependent and
joined. In rebinding their common making, viral, visceral dis-
tinctions condone the making of social kinds and truth-​claims
as judgments.
Kant’s Third Critique of Judgment is the founding text for the
philosophical study of aesthetics; Bourdieu’s study is poised as
its “transgressive” counterpoint, an assault on elite aesthetics. If
Bourdieu were with us today, we might ask about his seamless
move between a critique of Kant’s blindness and a pointed attack
on French elite values. His acute sense of distinction draws on
commodity consumption to demonstrate difference and confirm
status. Still, Bourdieu and Kant could be seen as sharing some
common ground. If, for Kant, disgust has no place, for Bourdieu,
centuries later, the dégôut that underwrites gôut is left in the shad-
ows. Dégout is there in Bourdieu’s formulation of taste but absent
from the extensive surveys his team carried out or the commen-
tary on them. As importantly, distaste and disgust are hardly
accorded an analytic or political space.
 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x x i x

Attending to the muted and glaring, and even low-​key forms

of exclusion exposes a sense that the psychic life of power is doing
important and contradictory work. The material longings and
distribution of resources offer a window on to disparate micro-​
ecologies in which so many live. That thought informs my dis-
cussion of Albert Camus’ The Stranger in the essay “How Not to
Know.” Others have read the novel as retreating from and effac-
ing the colonial situation in Algiers. But through another lens,
one might consider the racial subtext (unremarked and treated
as given by Camus), as the template for a broader racial imprint.
As a racial common sense, endorsing an achieved racially cali-
brated lifestyle, this scene Camus offers is one that never forgets
who is an impoverished indigène, who is a poor white, striving to
be properly modern.
Racism in France is ever present in the minor details of ges-
ture and speech, policing what it means to be “really” French.31
If geared in a particular direction (toward Roma, Algerians,
Islam in general), French racism engages familiar conventions
as in the United States. Some might argue that in l960s France
it was a non-​subject, one submerged, absent, erased, but this is a
hard case to make with respect to the infrastructures and archi-
tectures throughout France: bidonvilles (ghettoized tenements),
public school manuals with French colonial ventures applauded

31. And its ever presence, despite denials, has been there for a long time. Among
others, see Michel Wieviorka, La France Raciste (Paris: Seuil, 1992); Herrick Chapman
and Laura Fader, eds., Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Politics of
Difference (New York: Bergahn, 2004); Didier Fassin and Eric Fassin, eds., De la ques-
tion sociale à la question raciale (Paris: La Découverte, 2006); Cette France-​la, volume
2 (Paris: La Découverte, 2008–​2009); Carole Reynaud Paligot, La Republique raciale:
Paradigme racial et ideologie républicaine (l860–​1930) (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 2006); Miriam Ticktin, Casualities of Care: Immigration and the Politics
of Humanitarianism in France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Marc
Bernardot, Captures (Bellecombe-​ en-​Bauges: Editions du Croquant, 2012); Eric
Fassin, Démocratie précaire (Paris: La Découverte, 2012); Mayanthi L. Fernando, The
Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2014).
x x x |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

or erased, “overseas” (d’outre mer) policies, torture tactics during

the Algerian war.
Racism was never peripheral. A racialized vocabulary defined
the internal borders of French society, and as Aimé Césaire put
it, an undeclared “racial war.”32 Bourgeois elitism and bourgeois
arrogance have produced less aggressive ire—​more willingly if
begrudgingly recognized. In Bourdieu’s exacting study of the
details that command class and racial valuations, the clarity of dif-
ference might have been as much in the untranslatable etiquettes
that dictate how and when to do what, as it was for Bourdieu in
the life of things.

SCENES OF DISSENSUS IN
THE MAKING

One of the most striking responses to imperial and colonial impo-

sitions derives from a poetics of dissent that is creative, crush-
ing, energizing, and exceeding what is deemed “relevant.” The
two essays in Part II address a dissensual politics seventy decades
apart, in some cases even more. There is no claim that they are the
same. Both moments are marked by a creative energy not focused
on colonial atrocities. More emphasis is on creating and finding a
new space of aesthetic response, alliances that make that possible,
and an explicitly dissensual poetics.
Philosophy has often been accorded (and claimed) the trib-
ute of working toward “wisdom as practice.”33 I’m not sure about
ceding that honor to philosophy. The anti-​colonial forms of prac-
tice discussed here might be candidates for such acclaim. Likely

32. Aimé Césaire, Non a l’humiliation (Paris: Actes Sud, 2014), 11.
33. Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of philosophy: Wisdom as Practice (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012); Pierre Hardot, Philosophy As A Way of Life
(London: Blackwell, 1995).
 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x x x i

they wouldn’t have assigned it themselves. “Poetic Rage: On the

Anti-​colonial Avant-​garde” (essay five) looks to that flourishing
of artistic production and a form of life spirited by anti-​colo-
nialism throughout the world from the 1920s in some places,
through to the 1950s and 1960s in others. That flourishing sug-
gests more than a reassessment of the locus of avant-​garde prac-
tice. Although Europe and Paris clearly figured in the circuits
of political recalcitrance and artistic production, the multiple
centers of gravity for locating that work demands an adjusted
optic and frame.
From Cuba, Morocco, Lebanon, Mexico, Egypt, and across
the Antilles were courageous persons engaging creative thought
and practice, whose signature one could argue was more
organically political than some of the traditionally labelled
avant-​garde with which they have been linked. They often were
forefront precisely because of the colonial constraints they
sought to escape and were forced to reckon with. Europe was
not their originary site or source of their visions of the future.
Rather, Europe was a rich site of meeting and collaboration, a
way station, a stop along the way. They seem to have been con-
stantly on the move, creating new socialites and alliances. Such
a perspective changes the points of articulation and orienta-
tion, changes what can be seen, and obliges us to rethink which
tracks are critical to follow.
Essay six, on what has been happening in Palestinian collec-
tive work or among individual artists/​activists/​academics, builds
on an earlier attentiveness to archives and the limited access of
Palestinians to Israeli ones. Research devoted to when, where,
and how Palestinian documents were seized and stolen is produc-
ing an intensely political project. Another set of ventures shifts
the focus yet again, addressing the practice of archiving itself
as a political and creative project. Here I look at a sliver of that
practice, small scale and personal, and that on the troubled scale
of one of the most important new museums in the Arab world,
Ramallah’s “independent” Palestine Museum.
x x x i i |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

T H E L OW E R R E C E S S E S

These essays open to calibrations and metrics of inequality that

move between the nuanced and blunt, the subtle and bold, the
diffuse and concentrated, the boisterous and silent. Features of
these often opaque measures, are sometimes elusive in words.
Sometimes they are hard to see and label. As with most power-
ful idioms—​conceptually they bear the “polyvalent mobility” that
can work both to secure relations of power and undermine them.34
For as many as have hailed a postracial society and asserted a
resolutely postcolonial one, dissension also comes from other
directions: from the far right, on one hand, and from those for
whom enduring colonial conditions wreak destruction in the pro-
tracted past and overlapping present. There is really no “our” in
these political scenarios. For as many condemning a contempo-
rary racial history, are others who deny racial logic and the racial
imaginaries stamped into national priorities and the contorted
contours of interior maps.
These essays are about the conditions of imperial democracy—​
both the marked and unmarked racial inequalities folded inside
seemingly innocuous distinctions that make up their conceptual
grammars. Taste, remorse, and forgetting emerge as evaluative
spaces that elicit veridictions about the differences between social
kinds and their supposedly definitive and defining qualities. The
temporal zones stretch across what might be considered past and
present, refusing the clarity of those designations. Instead, they
hover between what is not over but rendered forgettable—​what is
disregarded as irrelevant for the future and only a vestige, barely
present. Sometimes these temporal and political claims are fought
as wars of position that shift and sharpen the terms and practices

34. On “polyvalent mobility” see Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of
Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1995), 89.
 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x x x i i i

of dissent. Sometimes the deep inequities of imperial democracies

are treated as if in need of a dedicated colonial lexicon.
Bringing “imperial democracy” into focus undermines the
conceptual and political artifice of interior and exterior, ren-
dered as fixed and distinct rather than a strategic, conjured fic-
tion. Imperial democracy makes sense of multinational resource
extractions with consequences for the future. These wars on the
disenfranchised follow the logics of illiberalism, emerging as
a global phenomenon across the EU, the United States, Turkey,
Israel, Hong Kong, Brazil, the Philippines, and India, to name just
some of the most currently repressive.
COVID-​19 and Black Lives Matter have riveted global urgen-
cies over the year and a half (from early 2020 to summer 2021)
during which these essays were written or revised. In that time,
political cleavages have forged new and hardened censorships,
in radically oppositional directions. Far right-​wing parties, from
France’s Rassemblement National, Denmark’s People’s Party, the
Alliance for Brazil, the Netherlands’ two radical right-​wing popu-
list parties, and the U.S.’s white supremacist contingency are only
the most obvious signs of how deep commitment is to racially
infested and discriminatory politics.
Once claiming the extreme right mantle, the French FN and
then RN led an advocacy of policing the poor, “foreigners,” the
underemployed, and the allegedly recalcitrant. But the extreme
right was never alone in advocating for these demands. Social
maps realign as a more extensive population assert that being
truly European or American is their historical, sacrosanct right,
their coveted possession. Those claims open to others; entitlement
to put up “no trespassing signs” to exclude those who do not (and
can never) comply with often opaque, proprietary requirements.
Colonial conditions (as if set outside imperial democracy) have
been repositioned as descriptive of a planetary phenomenon; not
just the dark underside of the global economy but the equivalent
of a predatory cyclops propagating death inducing conditions and
captivities on an ever-​broader scale.
x x x i v |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

A S H AT T E R Z ON E OF
I N E Q UA L I T I E S

Shatterzone, an eighteenth-​century geological term, refers to an

area of fissured boulders severed through with cracks, crushed
stone under such weight and pressure they split from compression
at their seams. Sometimes the fissures look haphazard; unevenly
layered sediments—​a cascade of folded rock. But shatterzones
are made up of more than heaves of displaced rock and scattered
stones.
Something extraordinary and precious appears in the crev-
ices of the fissures, in the space of the cuts, in the fault lines of
a racism that too often goes unnamed: what forms is a network
of veins that are often filled with rich mineral deposits. It is an
image that seems resonant in thinking both about what makes up
Europe and North America, how to reconceive who has made up
its “outside” in Palestine, Indonesia, and the Caribbean. Contrary
aesthetic frames and political energies make up its veins.
Shatterzone as metaphor and model has a history of its own,
most commonly used among political analysts and in international
relations to refer to sites of constant ethnic conflict, “fracturing” in
the Balkans, “splintering” in the Sudan, fractious hostilities in the
Middle East, and borderland rebellions in Russia.35 Shatterzones
as in the “borderlands of Europe,” can fulfill an Orientalist fan-
tasy as conflict zones of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Europe

35. Michael J. Totten, “Shatter Zones,” Australia/​Israel & Jewish Affairs Council
Review, July 31, 2015, https://​a ijac.org.au/​austra​lia-​isr​ael-​rev​iew/​shat​ter-​zones/​;
also see Grace Lugo, “Shatter-​belt Countries: They Affect the Rest of the World,
Too,” StoryMaps, February 2, 2020, https://​storym​aps.arc​g is.com/​stor​ies/​8cf21​92b8​
7cd4​ad78​7086​c304​67e7​d48; Omar Bartov and Edward Weitz, eds., Shatterzones of
Empire: Co-​existence and Violence in Eastern European’s Borderlands (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2013). An exception is James C. Scott’s use of the term in
The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), where it
defines “places of resistance,” (p.22) rather than marking zones of dense and persis-
tent inequalities as I use it here.
 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x x x v

is always positioned outside its circumference. As political meta-

phor, shatterzones are on the borderlands of civility where eth-
nic ferocities reach a pitch and degree of “random” killings—​not
in “the West.” The press revels in those distinctions, a clash of
civilizations that asserts, as Samuel Huntington did twenty years
ago, that there really is only one civilization in the clash. In the
Orientalist model, the rich mineral veins go unremarked.
Here I think of Euro-​ American imperial democracies as
shatterzones of compressed inequalities, racial cleavages, and
geopolities of distributed impoverishment, damage, and neglect,
of exorbitant privilege and wealth. The figures are rampant and
repeated: refugees, Roma, undocumented workers, and migrants
described invariably with the same worn intimation of being a
“problem”—lacking the agency to “rise above” crime, violence,
and their consequences—​on which the U.S. and Europe depend.
Both diagnostics and design are needed to confront the dis-
positifs of empire’s continual remaking. Required are sharpened
tools with which to challenge and garner conceptual and politi-
cal traction to do something different, and better. Europe and the
United States (and Israel should be included) are shatterzones of
inequalities, studded with rich deposits of those who refuse to be
governed in this way, here and now.
Critics of racialized Europe refer to a newly fractured social
fabric (think the “outrage” in Germany over a swastika scrawled
across a church). I would argue that it has been fractured in its
very making; exclusions, dispossession, and racial infrastructures
have defined the underside of European modernity all along.36
My compass here is not pointed to the “hot spots” on the global
international relations map. Nor is it pointed to the “turbulence”
with which the Middle East is so inherently endowed. Rather it

36. Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, &
the Philosophy of Liberation (London: Humanities Press, 1998)is focused on the once
current concept and material conditions of underdevelopment and colonialism, and
less on the racial coordinates of those projects.
x x x v i |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

is directed at the distress caused by displacing Europe’s founda-

tional imperial history and the people on whom the privileges of
Euro-​American prosperity have relied, i.e., those who have been
drawn on, recruited, expelled, recruited again, set aside, aban-
doned, reduced to second class citizenship or shorn of residence
and citizenship and thrown outside the carefully guarded interior
parameters of what Edward Said called the “imaginative geogra-
phy” of Europe, and its distorted map.
The first essay in “Shatterzones of Imperial Democracy”
(Part III), entitled “All Things Being Equal: Mobile Extractions in
a Carceral World” calls on the common phrase to consider that
things are never equal; that it is the assured inequality of things
on which racecraft is based. In the case of imperial democracy,
“all things being equal” (premised on the imperative that things
should never be and never are) is a principle and substance of their
radically racist histories, insupportable without those inequali-
ties, vital to its organic growth. No institution of imperial democ-
racy is more glaringly racially skewed and exploitative than the
incarceration industry. Although today’s abolitionist anti-​incar-
ceration movement has now spread to mainstream politics, race
still defines a system designed to entrap, to bring into captivity a
class of persons for whom the end of slavery was not guaranteed
by the thirteenth amendment but ensured by it. This is a shatter-
zone of the United States.

ON S T R AT E G IC I R R E V E R E N C E

Imperial democracy is predatory on holding fast to certain institu-

tionalized practices: on producing internal enemies, democratiz-
ing fear, limiting social goods, and skewing their distribution, and
broadly investing in insecurity.37 As Fanon held, we are all implicated

37. Mbembe, Politques; Stoler, “Reason aside,” in Duress, 205–​236.

 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x x x v i i

and affected by its making. But the “we” as Foucault insisted, cannot
come before the problematic is posed and the question asked.38 Some
“we”—​yet to be determined—​needs to identify the new and renewed
practices, disciplines, and institutions on which imperial democracy
thrives. Imperial democracy impales the present, shot through with
a longevity of inequalities that can neither be absolved in a genera-
tion nor in a calculable set of years. Foucault’s warning implies some-
thing else: that some constitutive “we” must redefine what constitutes
a recalcitrant politics—​polyphonous and irreverent.
The project is vexed from the start, conceptually, practically,
and in just about every way. Hierarchies of relevance, and the
uneven valuation of what counts as knowledge, the conversion of
veridiction into opinion, as Hannah Arendt warned, is the modus
operandi of politics.39 If life is always already potentially political,
as Carl Schmitt claimed, and the political is always tethered to
what constitutes a life and who has a right to one, then the visceral
nodes of affect, taste, boundaries of the self, and the major nodes
of incarceration and dispossession are implicated in setting out
which borders are porous and resilient, which are not. For they
delineate in an oblique register how one sees and forges oneself as
a political subject and social being.40
Reconfiguring archiving projects has the possibility of dis-
torting its principles of production, rejecting its logic, and redraw-
ing the map. Again, my compass points elsewhere: to a politics
of comparison that refuses some of the incommensurabilities on
which the U.S. as an exception is based. The inner “borderlands”
of race produced in Europe are not carved out by red lining but

38. Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” in The Essential

Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–​1984, eds. Paul
Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: The New Press, 2003), 114.
39. Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” originally in The New Yorker, February
25, 1967.
40. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political [1932] (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1996).
x x x v i i i |   U N Q U I E T I N TH E POLIS

the geopolitics of HLM’s (habitation à loyer modéré, low-​income

housing) in cities and on their urban peripheries, as in France,
are used in principle, if not in their specific practices, with similar
effects.
In 2017, I went to the Quai Branly Museum to see its new
exhibition, “The Color Line: African-​ American Artists and
Segregation.” I had an introduction in hand to meet its producer
and curator, Daniel Soutif, who graciously shared his thoughts
and time. I should have been prepared for what was sayable and
unsaid. Instead of using the occasion to challenge the myth of a
raceless France, there was no reference, neither an artistic, eth-
nographic reference, nor curatorial gesture to race in Republican
France nor to the aptness of a comparison.41 Soutif held that com-
parison with France would have been inappropriate where “real
racism” was absent.
Many in France agree. Others hold that the erasure of the
damages inflicted by French imperial pursuits and colonial his-
tory represent a refusal that extends to children, and subjects
intentionally not taught the subject in public schools.42 Still, rather
than dwell on the catastrophic and most obvious denials, here
I stick closer to the underside of damaging gestures, disdaining
habits, and affronts that prepare the ground for and accompany

41. The Musée de l’homme set up in l937 was the Anthropology Museum of Paris,
whose holdings were transferred to the Musée de Quai Branly in 2012. Many who
have worked on colonialisms and museum curation rightly imagined that the Quai
Branly would articulate a radically different history of its collections than its ear-
lier incarnation obscuring France’s colonial history. Surprise, fury, and disappoint-
ment at the curation with lionization of French activities in Africa and description
of objects and artifacts not as stolen but “given” to soldiers was not expected. See
Sally Price, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2010)for an excellent account of the transfer to the Musée
de Quai Branly.
42. For a brief recapping of the storm around colonial history at a local and
national level see Itay Lotem, “A Decade After the Riots, France has Rewritten its
Colonial History,” The Conversation, January 25, 2016, https://​t hec​onve​rsat​ion.com/​
a-​dec​ade-​a fter-​t he-​riots-​f ra​nce-​has-​rewrit​ten-​its-​colon​ial-​hist​ory-​50499.
 U NQU I ET I N T H E POLIS |   x x x i x

disaster, sometimes before these conditions are given a name.43

Overt and subjacent distinctions cling to the lower recesses of
daily lives: where one walks by day, avoids by night; how one
walks, at ease or at a clip; jobs impossible to get, buildings where
one is asked to show an identity card, treatment in hospitals and
government offices; waiting hours for a visa, then told the office is
now closed; waiting for a restaurant table until none are left. The
list is a fraction of the everyday.
These essays are efforts to take direct and oblique paths to the
“rough ground” of imperial democracies. Certitudes are fragile.
There is no smooth passage. My response is to the dissensions of
these times. Nietzsche’s warning can’t be repeated too often. Here
it serves as prelude to what follows: the strength it takes “to be
able to live and to forget the extent to which to live and to be unjust
is one and the same thing.” It is both in the subjacent and frontal
affronts of violating, subordinating practices—​their verbal, ges-
tural, and torqued expression—​in which those damages thrive
and where these essays uneasily rest.
***

43. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories

of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York:
Norton, 2019).
 PART I
✦

ON THE METRICS OF WORTH

 1
✦
Interior Frontiers

INTERIOR FRONTIER IS A CONCEPT that has accompanied me

for more than thirty years as I’ve been following the fault lines that
racial states produce and the distinctions on which they depend.
Étienne Balibar [EB] introduced me to his 1990 essay of that title
when it was published just as my work was turning to the racial
distinctions that colonialisms install.1 On leave in Paris in l987,
I attended his small seminar on nationalisms and racisms while
steeped in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s collection of pamphlets,
manuals, and newsprint on the French colonies, on the proper phys-
ical and psychological hygiene for those European whites prepar-
ing to leave for French Indochina and French West Africa, and for
those already there. There were piles of thin, barely opened house-
hold manuals devoted to guarding one’s white health in the colonial
tropics; still not what I was after, those official, unofficial, miscel-
laneous documents that were “lost” among other concerns: about
inappropriate intimate relations, about those who fell outside the
neat racial categories imposed (or chose to stay precariously and
sometimes insistently outside them). That year, I had just made my

1. I refer in this essay to Étienne Balibar as EB rather than “Balibar” finding it awk-
ward, as I long have, to refer to a close colleague/​f riend by a last name. EB’s first use of
the term “interior frontier” appears in Étienne Balibar, “Fichte et la frontière intéri-
eure: A propos des Discours à la nation allemande,” Cahiers de Fontenay 58/​59 (June
1990), reprinted in his La crainte des masses: Politique et philosophie avant et après
Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1997), 131–​156. For the English translation, see Étienne Balibar,
“Fichte and the Internal Border: On Addresses to the German Nation,” in Masses,
Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James
Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 61–​84.

​ ​
4 |   O N T H E M E T R I C S O F WO R T H

way to the French colonial archives near Aix. Racial imaginaries in

imperial pursuit occupied page after page sometimes in sotto voce,
sometimes with a fervent bold, white supremacy making up colo-
nial common sense.
I don’t remember EB using the term in that 1987 seminar but
when he sent his 1990 essay on “la frontière intérieure,” there was
already an uncanny affinity in the turn his own work was taking and
my own.. Neither Fichte in 1808 nor EB’s rethinking of the term in
1990 were concerned with colonialisms. Still, the term and EB’s treat-
ment of it captured the ambivalent and ambiguous work that bound-
aries, enclosures, frontiers do when they occupy internal/​interior
spaces of polity and person, porously encased. “Invisible bonds” was
a key term in Fichte’s formulation for national regeneration—​also
recurrently present in the French and Dutch colonial archives when
the subject turned to “national belonging” and race. The invocation
of “invisible bonds” and who could not share in them marked a core
dispositif of colonialism’s racial infrastructures and imagination.
I first drew on the concept in 1990 then again in Comparative
Studies in Society and History in “Sexual Affronts and Racial
Frontiers” (1992) where it framed my thinking about métissage.2 By
the time Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (2002) appeared,
the concept showed up in three chapters. When the Political
Concepts collaborative decided in November 2016 to devote our
next annual conference and volume to EB’s work, it was “interior
frontiers” I turned to again. This time to follow the work it did in
his writing, dovetailing with, and sometimes diverging from, my
own. The revised version here opens this volume to underscore
this unfinished work and to continue my pursuit of what it offers.

2. That first presentation was a raw version, in honor of Eric Wolf at an American
Anthropology Association meeting, elaborated in Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts
and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusions in
Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 3 (1992):
514–​551, later revised in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Prâna cannot work alone without the help of âkâsa. All that we know
is that motion or vibration and every movement that we see is a
modification of this prâna, and everything that we know in the form of
matter, either as form or as resistance, is a modification of this
âkâsa. This prâna cannot exist alone, or act without a medium, but in
every state of it, whether as pure prâna, or when it changes into
other forces of nature, say gravitation or centrifugal attraction, it can
never be separate from âkâsa. You have never seen force without
matter or matter without force; what we call force and matter being
simply the gross manifestations of these same things, which, when
superfine, we call prâna and âkâsa. Prâna you can call in English the
life, or vital energy, but you must not restrict it to the life of man, nor
should you identify it with the spirit, Âtman. Creation is without
beginning and without end; it cannot have either, it is an eternal on-
going.
The next question that comes is rather a fine one. Some European
philosophers have asserted that this world exists because “I” exist,
and if “I” do not exist, the world will not exist. Sometimes it is
expressed in this way; they say, if all the people in the world were to
die, and there were no more human beings, and no animals with
powers of perception and intelligence, all manifestations would
disappear. It seems paradoxical, but gradually we shall see clearly
that this can be proved. But these European philosophers do not
know the psychology of it, although they know the principle; modern
philosophy has got only a glimpse of it.
First we will take another proposition of these old psychologists
which is rather startling, that the grossest elements are the bhutas,
but that all gross things are the results of fine ones. Everything that
is gross is composed of a combination of minute things, so the
bhutas must be composed of certain fine particles, called in Sanskrit
the tanmâtras. I smell a flower; to smell that, something must come
in contact with my nose; the flower is there and I do not see it move
towards me; but without something coming in contact with my nose I
cannot smell the flower. That which comes from the flower and into
contact with my nose are the tanmâtras, fine molecules of that
flower, so fine that no diminution can be perceived in the flower. So
with heat, light, sight, and everything. These tanmâtras can again be
subdivided into atoms. Different philosophers have different theories,
and we know these are only theories, so we leave them out of
discussion. Sufficient for us that everything gross is composed of
things that are very, very minute. We first get the gross elements,
which we feel externally, and composing them are the fine elements,
which our organs touch, which come in contact with the nerves of the
nose, eyes and ears. That ethereal wave which touches my eyes, I
cannot see, yet I know it must come in contact with my optic nerve
before I can see the light. So with hearing, we can never see the
particles that come in contact with our ears, but we know that they
must be there. What is the cause of these tanmâtras? A very
startling and curious answer is given by our psychologists,—self-
consciousness. That is the cause of these fine materials, and the
cause of the organs. What are these organs? Here is first the eye,
but the eye does not see. If the eyes did see, when a man is dead,
and his eyes are still perfect, they would still be able to see. There is
some change somewhere; something has gone out of the man, and
that something, which really sees, of which the eye is the instrument,
is called the organ. So this nose is an instrument, and there is an
organ corresponding to it. Modern physiology can tell you what that
is, a nerve centre in the brain. The eyes, ears, etc., are simply the
external instruments. It may be said that the organs, Indriyas, as
they are called in Sanskrit, are the real seats of perception.
What is the use of having one organ for the nose, and one for the
eyes, and so on? Why will not one serve the purpose? To make it
clear to you,—I am talking, and you are listening, and you do not see
what is going on around you because the mind has attached itself to
the organ of hearing, and has detached itself from the sight organ. If
there were only one organ the mind would hear and see at the same
time, it would see and hear and smell at the same time, and it would
be impossible for it not to do all three at the same time. Therefore it
is necessary that there should be separate organs for all these
centres. This has been borne out by modern physiology. It is
certainly possible for us to see and hear at the same time, but that is
because the mind attaches itself partially to both centres, which are
the organs. What are the instruments? We see that these are really
made of the gross materials. Here they are,—eyes, nose, and ears,
etc. What are the organs? They are also made of materials, because
they are centres. Just as this body is composed of gross material for
transforming prâna into different gross forces, so these finer organs
behind, are composed of the fine elements, for the manufacture of
prâna into the finer forces of perception and all kindred things. All
these organs or indriyas combined, plus the internal instrument or
antahkarana, are called the finer body of man,—the linga (or
sûkshma) sarira.
It has a real form, because everything material must have a form.
Behind the indriyas is what is called the manas, the chitta in vritti,
what might be called the vibratory state of the mind, the unsettled
state. If you throw a stone into a calm lake, first there will be
vibration, and then resistance. For a moment the water will vibrate
and then it will react on the stone. So, when any impression comes
on the chitta, or “mind stuff,” it vibrates a little. This state of the mind
is called the manas. Then comes the reaction, the will. There is
another thing behind this will which accompanies all the acts of the
mind, which is called egoism, the ahamkâra, the self-consciousness,
which says “I am,” and behind that is what is called Buddhi, the
intellect, the highest form of nature’s existence. Behind the intellect
is the true Self of man, the Purusha, the pure, the perfect, who is
alone the seer, and for whom is all this change. The Purusha is
looking on at all these changes; he himself is never impure; but by
implication, what the Vedantists call adhyâsam, by reflection, he
appears to be impure. It is like a red flower held before a piece of
crystal; the crystal will look red; or a blue flower and the crystal will
look blue; and yet the crystal itself is colorless. We will take for
granted that there are many selves; each self is pure and perfect, but
it is all these various divisions of gross matter and fine matter that
are imposing on the self, and making it variously colored. Why is
nature doing all this? Nature is undergoing all these changes for the
improvement of the soul; all this creation is for the benefit of the soul,
so that it may be free. This immense book which we call the universe
is stretched before man so that he may read, and come out, as an
omniscient and omnipotent being. I must here tell you that some of
our best psychologists do not believe in a personal God in the sense
in which you believe in Him. The real father of our psychologists,
Kapila, denies the existence of God as a Creator. His idea is that a
personal God is quite unnecessary; Nature itself is sufficient to work
out all that is good. What is called the “Design” theory he repudiated,
and said a more childish theory was never advanced. But he admits
a peculiar kind of God; he says we are all struggling to get free, and
when man becomes free he can, as it were, melt away into Nature
for the time being, only to come out at the beginning of the next cycle
and be its ruler; come out an omniscient and omnipotent being. In
that sense he can be called God; you and I and the humblest beings
will be gods in different cycles. Kapila says such a God will be
temporal, but an eternal God, eternally omnipotent and eternally
ruler of the universe, cannot be. If there were such a God, there
would be this difficulty: he must either be bound or free. A God who
is perfectly free would not create; there would be no necessity. If he
were bound, he would not create because he could not, he would be
weak himself. So, in either case, there cannot be an omnipotent or
omniscient eternal ruler. So wherever the word God is mentioned in
our Scriptures, Kapila says it means those perfected souls who have
become free. The Sânkhya system does not believe in the unity of all
souls. Vedânta believes that all individual souls are united in one
cosmic Being called Brahman, but Kapila, the founder of the
Sânkhya, was dualistic. His analysis of the universe so far as it goes
is really marvellous. He was the father of Hindu evolutionists, and all
the later philosophical systems are simply outcomes of his thought.
According to this system all souls will regain their freedom and their
natural rights, which are omnipotence and omniscience. Here the
question may be asked, whence is this bondage of the souls? The
Sânkhya says it is without beginning, but if it be without beginning it
must also be without end, and we shall never be free. Kapila
explains that this “without beginning” means not in a constant line.
Nature is without beginning and without end, but not in the same
sense as is the soul, because Nature has no individuality, just as a
river flowing by us is every moment getting a fresh body of water,
and the sum total of all these bodies of water is the river, so the river
is not a constant quantity. Similarly everything in Nature is constantly
changing, but the soul never changes. Therefore as Nature is always
changing, it is possible for the soul to come out of its bondage. One
theory of the Sânkhya is peculiar to this psychology. The whole of
the universe is built upon the same plan as one single man, or one
little being; so, just as I have a mind, there is also a cosmic mind.
When this macrocosm evolves there must be first intelligence, then
egoism, then the tanmâtras and the organs, and then the gross
elements. The whole universe according to Kapila is one body, all
that we see are the grosser bodies, and behind these are the finer
bodies, and behind them, a universal egoism, and behind that a
universal Intelligence, but all this is in Nature, all this is manifestation
of Nature, not outside of Nature. Each one of us is a part of that
cosmic consciousness. There is a sum-total of intelligence out of
which we draw what we require, so there is a sum-total of mental
force in the universe out of which we are drawing eternally, but the
seed for the body must come from the parents. The theory includes
heredity and reincarnation too. The material is given to the soul out
of which to manufacture a body, but that material is given by
hereditary transmission from the parents.
We come now to that proposition that in this process there is an
involution and an evolution. All is evolved out of that indiscreet
Nature; and then is involved again and becomes Avyaktam. It is
impossible, according to the Sânkhyas, for any material thing to
exist, which has not as its material some portion of consciousness.
Consciousness is the material out of which all manifestation is made.
The elucidation of this comes in our next lecture, but I will show how
it can be proved. I do not know this table as it is, but it makes an
impression; it comes to the eyes, then to the indriyas, and then to the
mind; the mind then reacts, and that reaction is what I call the table.
It is just the same as throwing a stone into a lake; the lake throws a
wave against the stone; this wave is what we know. The waves
coming out are all we know. In the same way the fashion of this wall
is in my mind; what is external nobody knows; when I want to know
it, it has to become that material which I furnish; I, with my own mind,
have furnished the material for my eyes, and the something which is
outside is only the occasion, the suggestion, and upon that
suggestion I project my mind, and it takes the form of what I see.
The question is, how do we all see the same things? Because we all
have a part of this cosmic mind. Those who have mind will see the
thing, and those who have not will not see it. This goes to show that
since this universe has existed there has never been a want of mind,
of that one cosmic mind. Every human being, every animal, is also
furnished out of that cosmic mind, because it is always present and
furnishing material for their formation.
 II
PRAKRITI AND PURUSHA
We will take up the categories we have been discussing and come to
the particulars. If we remember we started with Prakriti, or Nature.
This Nature is called by the Sânkhya philosophers indiscrete or
inseparate, which is defined as perfect balance of the materials in it;
and it naturally follows that in perfect balance there cannot be any
motion. All that we see, feel, and hear is simply a compound of
motion and matter. In the primal state, before this manifestation,
where there was no motion, perfect balance, this Prakriti was
indestructible, because decomposition comes only with limitation.
Again, according to the Sânkhya, atoms are not the primal state.
This universe does not come out of atoms, they may be the
secondary, or tertiary state. The original matter may compound into
atoms, which in turn compound into greater and greater things, and
as far as modern investigations go, they rather point towards that.
For instance, in the modern theory of ether, if you say ether is also
atomic, that will not solve the proposition at all. To make it clearer,
say that air is composed of atoms, and we know that ether is
everywhere, interpenetrating, omnipresent, and these atoms are
floating, as it were, in ether. If ether again be composed of atoms,
there will still be some space between two atoms of ether. What fills
up that? And again there will be another space between the atoms of
that which fills up this space. If you propose that there is another
ether still finer you must still have something to fill that space, and so
it will be regressus in infinitum, what the Sânkhya philosophers call
anavasthâ,—never reaching a final conclusion. So the atomic theory
cannot be final. According to the Sânkhyas this Nature is
omnipresent, one omnipresent mass of Nature in which are the
causes of everything that exists. What is meant by cause? Cause is
the more subtle state of the manifested state, the unmanifested state
of that which becomes manifested. What do you mean by
destruction? It is reverting to the cause,—the materials out of which
a body is composed go back into their original state. Beyond this
idea of destruction, any idea such as annihilation, is on the face of it
absurd. According to modern physical sciences, it can be
demonstrated that all destruction means that which Kapila called
ages ago “reverting to the causal state.” Going back to the finer form
is all that is meant by destruction. You know how it can be
demonstrated in a laboratory that matter is indestructible. Those of
you who have studied chemistry will know that if you burn a candle
and put a caustic pencil inside a glass tube beneath the candle,
when the candle has burned away, if you take the caustic pencil out
of the tube and weigh it, you will find that the pencil will weigh exactly
its previous weight, plus the weight of the candle,—the candle
became finer and finer, and went on to the caustic. So that in this
present stage of our knowledge, if any man claims that anything
becomes annihilated, he is only making himself absurd. It is only
uneducated people who would advance such a proposition, and it is
curious that modern knowledge coincides with what those old
philosophers taught. The ancients proceeded in their inquiry by
taking up mind as the basis; they analyzed the mental part of this
universe and came to certain conclusions, while modern science is
analyzing the physical part, and it also comes to the same
conclusions. Both analyses must lead to the same truth.
You must remember that the first manifestation of this Prakriti in the
cosmos is what the Sânkhyas called Mahat. We may call it universal
intelligence, the great principle; that is the literal meaning. The first
manifestation of Prakriti is this intelligence; I would not translate it by
self-consciousness, because that would be wrong. Consciousness is
only a part of this intelligence, which is universal. It covers all the
grounds of consciousness, sub-consciousness and super-
consciousness. In Nature, for instance, certain changes are going on
before your eyes which you see and understand, but there are other
changes so much finer that no human perception can catch them.
They are from the same cause, the same Mahat is making these
changes. There are other changes, beyond the reach of our mind or
reasoning, all this series of changes is in this Mahat. You will
understand it better when I come to the individual. Out of this Mahat
comes the universal egoism, and these are both material. There is
no difference between matter and mind save in degree. It is the
same substance in finer or grosser form; one changes into the other,
and this will exactly coincide with the modern physiological research,
and it will save you from a great deal of fighting and struggling to
believe that you have a mind separate from the brain, and all such
impossible things. This substance called Mahat changes into the
material egoism, the fine state of matter, and that egoism changes
into two varieties. In one variety it changes into the organs. Organs
are of two kinds—organs of sensation and organs of reaction. They
are not the eyes or nose, but something finer, what you call brain
centres, and nerve centres. This egoism becomes changed, and out
of this material are manufactured these centres and these nerves.
Out of the same substance, the egoism, is manufactured a yet finer
form, the tanmâtras, fine particles of matter, those for instance which
strike your nose and cause you to smell. You cannot perceive these
fine particles, you can only know that they are there. These
tanmâtras are manufactured out of that egoism, and out of these
tanmâtras, or subtle matter, is manufactured the gross matter, air,
water, earth, and all the things that we see and feel. I want to
impress this on your mind. It is very hard to grasp it, because, in
Western countries, the ideas are so queer about mind and matter. It
is hard to take these impressions out of our brains. I myself had a
tremendous difficulty, being educated in Western philosophy in my
childhood. These are all cosmic things. Think of this universal
extension of matter, unbroken, one substance, undifferentiated,
which is the first state of everything, and which begins to change just
as milk becomes curd, and it is changed into another substance
called Mahat, which in one state manifests as intelligence and in
another state as egoism. It is the same substance, and it changes
into the grosser matter called egoism; thus is the whole universe
itself built, as it were, layer after layer; first undifferentiated Nature
(Avyaktam), and that changes into universal intelligence (Mahat),
and that again is changed into universal egoism (Ahamkâra), and
that changes into universal sensible matter. That matter changes into
universal sense-organs, again changes into universal fine particles,
and these in turn combine and become this gross universe. This is
the cosmic plan, according to the Sânkhyas, and what is in the
cosmos or macrocosm, must be in the individual or microcosm.
Take an individual man. He has first a part of undifferentiated nature
in him, and that material nature in him becomes changed into mahat,
a small particle of the universal intelligence, and that small particle of
the universal intelligence in him becomes changed into egoism—a
particle of the universal egoism. This egoism in turn becomes
changed into the sense-organs, and out of these sense-organs come
the tanmâtras, and out of them he combines and manufactures his
world, as a body. I want this to be clear, because it is the first
stepping stone to Vedânta, and it is absolutely necessary for you to
know, because this is the philosophy of the whole world. There is no
philosophy in the world that is not indebted to Kapila, the founder of
this Sânkhya system. Pythagoras came to India and studied his
philosophy and carried some of these ideas to the Greeks. Later it
formed the Alexandrian school, and still later formed the basis of
Gnostic philosophy. It became divided into two parts; one went to
Europe and Alexandria, and the other remained in India, and
became the basis of all Hindu philosophy, for out of it the system of
Vyâsa was developed. This was the first rational system that the
world saw, this system of Kapila. Every metaphysician in the world
must pay homage to him. I want to impress on your mind that as the
great father of philosophy, we are bound to listen to him, and respect
what he said. This wonderful man, most ancient of philosophers, is
mentioned even in the Vedas. How wonderful his perceptions were!
If there is any proof required of the power of the Yogis to perceive
things beyond the range of the ordinary senses, such men are the
proofs. How could they perceive them? They had no microscopes, or
telescopes. How fine their perception was, how perfect their analysis
and how wonderful!
To revert again to the microcosm, man. As we have seen, he is built
on exactly the same plan. First the nature is “indiscrete” or perfectly
balanced, then it becomes disturbed, and action sets in and the first
change produced by that action is what is called mahat,—
intelligence. Now you see this intelligence in man is just a particle of
the cosmic intelligence,—the Mahat. Out of it comes self-
consciousness, and from this the sensory and the motor nerves, and
the finer particles out of which the gross body is manufactured. I will
here remark that there is one difference between Schopenhauer and
Vedânta. Schopenhauer says the desire, or will, is the cause of
everything. It is the will to exist that makes us manifest, but the
Advaitists deny this. They say it is the intelligence. There cannot be
a single particle of will which is not a reaction. So many things are
beyond will. It is only a manufactured something out of the ego, and
the ego is a product of something still higher, the intelligence, and
that is a modification of “indiscrete” Nature, or Prakriti.
It is very important to understand this mahat in man,—the
intelligence. This intelligence itself is modified into what we call
egoism, and this intelligence is the cause of all these motions in the
body. This covers all the grounds of sub-consciousness,
consciousness and super-consciousness. What are these three
states? The sub-conscious state we find in animals, what we call
instinct. This is nearly infallible, but very limited. Instinct almost never
fails. An animal instinctively knows a poisonous herb from an edible
one, but its instinct is limited to one or two things; it works like a
machine. Then comes the higher state of knowledge, which is
fallible, makes mistakes often, but has a larger scope, although it is
slow, and this you call reason. It is much larger than instinct, but
there are more dangers of mistake in reasoning than in instinct.
There is a still higher state of the mind, the super-conscious, which
belongs only to the Yogis, men who have cultivated it. This is as
infallible as instinct, and still more unlimited than reason. It is the
highest state. We must remember that in man this mahat is the real
cause of all that is here, that which is manifesting itself in various
ways, covers the whole ground of sub-conscious, conscious and
super-conscious states, the three states in which knowledge exists.
So in the Cosmos, this universal Intelligence, Mahat, exists as
instinct, as reason, and as super-reason.
Now comes a delicate question, which is always being asked. If a
perfect God created the universe, why is there imperfection in it?
What we call the universe is what we see, and that is only this little
plane of consciousness or reason, and beyond that we do not see at
all. Now the very question is an impossible one. If I take up only a bit
out of a mass and look at it, it seems to be imperfect. Naturally. The
universe seems imperfect because we make it so. How? What is
reason? What is knowledge? Knowledge is finding associations. You
go into the street and see a man, and know it is a man. You have
seen many men, and each one has made an impression on your
mind, and when you now see this man, you calmly refer to your store
of impressions, see many pictures of men there, and you put this
new one with the rest, pigeon-hole it and are satisfied. When a new
impression comes and it has associations in your mind, you are
satisfied, and this state of association is called knowledge.
Knowledge is, therefore, pigeon-holing one experience with the
already existing fund of experience, and this is one of the great
proofs that you cannot have any knowledge until you have already a
fund in existence. If you are without experience, or if, as some
European philosophers think, the mind is a tabula rasa, it cannot get
any knowledge, because the very fact of knowledge is the
recognition of the new by comparison with already existing
impressions. There must be a store ready to which to refer a new
impression. Suppose a child is born into this world without such a
fund, it would be impossible for him to get any knowledge. Therefore
the child must have been in a state in which he had a fund, and so
knowledge is eternally going on. Show me any way of getting out of
this. It is mathematical experience. This is very much like the
Spencerian and other philosophies. They have seen so far that there
cannot be any knowledge without a fund of past knowledge. They
have drawn out the idea that the child is born with knowledge. They
say that the cause has entered the effect. It comes in a subtle form
in order to be developed. These philosophers say that these
impressions with which the child comes, are not from the child’s own
past, but were in his forefathers’; that it is hereditary transmission.
Very soon they are going to find this theory untenable, and some of
them are now giving hard blows to these ideas of heredity. Heredity
is very good, but incomplete. It only explains the physical side. How
do you explain the influence of environment? Many causes produce
one effect. Environment is one of the modifying causes. On the other
hand we in turn make our own environment, because as our past
was, so we find our present. In other words, we are what we are
here and now, because of what we have been in the past.
You understand what is meant by knowledge. Knowledge is pigeon-
holing a new impression with old impressions—recognizing a new
impression. What is meant by recognition? Finding its association
with the similar impressions that we already have. Nothing further is
meant by knowledge. If that be the case, it must be that we have to
see the whole series of similars. Is it not? Suppose you take a
pebble; to find the association, you have to see the whole series of
pebbles similar to it. But with the universe we cannot do that,
because in our reasoning we can only go after one perception of our
universe, and neither see on this side nor on that side, and we
cannot refer it to its association. Therefore the universe seems
unintelligible, because knowledge and reason are always finding
associations. This bit of the universe cut off by our consciousness is
a startling new thing, and we have not been able to find its
associations. Therefore we are struggling with it, and thinking it is so
horrible, so wicked, and bad;—sometimes we think it is good, but
generally we think it is imperfect. The universe will be known only
when we find the associations. We shall recognize them when we go
beyond the universe and consciousness, and then the universe will
stand explained. Until we do that all our fruitless striving will never
explain the universe, because knowledge is the finding of similars,
and this conscious plane gives us only a partial view. So with our
idea of the universal Mahat, or what in our ordinary everyday
language we call God. All that we have of God is only one
perception, just as of the universe we see only one portion, and all
the rest is cut off and covered by our human limitation. “I, the
Universal, so great am I that even this universe is a part of me.” That
is why we see God as imperfect, and we can never understand Him,
because it is impossible. The only way to understand is to go beyond
reason, beyond consciousness. “When thou goest beyond the heard
and hearing, the thought and thinking, then alone wilt thou come to
truth.” (Bhagavad Gita II. 52.) “Go thou beyond the Scriptures,
because they teach only up to Nature, up to the three qualities.”
(Gita II. 45.) When we go beyond them we find the harmony, not
before.
So far it is clear that this macrocosm and microcosm are built on
exactly the same plan, and in this microcosm we know only one very
small part. We know neither the sub-conscious, nor the super-
conscious. We know only the conscious. If a man says “I am a
sinner,” he is foolish, because he does not know himself. He is the
most ignorant of men about himself; one part only he knows,
because the fact of knowledge covers only one part of the “mind-
ground” he is in. So with this universe; it is possible to know only one
part through reasoning, but Nature comprises the whole of it, the
sub-conscious, the conscious and the super-conscious, the
individual mahat and the universal Mahat with all their subsequent
modifications, and these lie beyond reason.
What makes nature change? We see that Up to this point everything,
all Prakriti, is jadâ (insentient). It is working under law; it is all
compound and insentient. Mind, intelligence, and will, all are
insentient. But they are all reflecting the sentiency, the Chit
(Intelligence) of some Being who is beyond all this, and whom the
Sânkhya philosophers call Purusha. This Purusha is the unwitting
cause of all these changes in Nature—in the universe. That is to say,
this Purusha, taking Him in the universal sense, is the God of the
universe. It is claimed that the will of the Lord created the universe.
This is very good as a common daily expression, but that is all. How
could it be will? Will is the third or fourth manifestation in Nature.
Many things exist before it, and what created them? Will is a
compound, and everything that is a compound is a production out of
Nature. Will itself cannot create Nature. It is not a simple. So to say
that the will of the Lord created the universe is illogical. Our will only
covers a little portion of self-consciousness, and moves our brain,
they say. If it did you could stop the action of the brain, but you
cannot. It is not the will. Who moves the heart? It is not the will,
because if it were you could stop it or not at your will. It is neither will
that is working your body, nor that is working the universe. But it is
something of which will itself is one of the manifestations. This body
is being moved by the power of which will is only a manifestation in
one part. So in the universe there is will, but that is only one part of
the universe. The whole of the universe is not guided by will, that is
why we do not find the explanation in will. Suppose I take it for
granted that the will is moving the body, and then I begin to fret and
fume. It is my fault, because I had no right to take it for granted that it
was will. In the same way, if I take the universe and think it is will that
moves it and then find things that do not coincide, it is my fault. This
Purusha is not will, neither can it be intelligence, because
intelligence itself is a compound. There cannot be any intelligence
without some sort of matter. In man, this matter takes the form which
we call brain. Wherever there is intelligence there must be matter in
some form or other. But that intelligence itself is a compound. What
then is this Purusha? It is neither intelligence nor buddhi (will), but
yet it is the cause of both these; it is His presence that sets them all
vibrating and combining. Purusha may be likened to some of these
substances which by their mere presence promote chemical
reaction, as in the case of cyanide of potassium which is added
when gold is being smelted. The cyanide of potassium remains
separate and unaffected, but its presence is absolutely necessary to
the success of the process. So with the Purusha. It does not mix with
Nature: it is not Intelligence, or Mahat, or any one of these, but the
Self, the Pure, the Perfect. “I am the Witness, and through My
witnessing, Nature is producing all that is sentient and all that is
insentient.” (Gita IX. 10.)
What is this sentiency in Nature? The basis of sentiency is in the
Purusha, is the nature of the Purusha. It is that which cannot be
spoken, but which is the material of all that we call knowledge. This
Purusha is not consciousness, because consciousness is a
compound, but whatever is light and goodness in this consciousness
belongs to It. Sentiency is in the Purusha, but the Purusha is not
intelligent, not knowing, it is knowledge itself. The Chit in the
Purusha, plus Prakriti, is what is known to us as intelligence and
consciousness. Whatever is pleasure and happiness and light in the
universe belongs to the Purusha, but it is a compound because it is
that Purusha plus Nature. “Wherever there is any happiness,
wherever there is any bliss, there is one spark of that immortality,
which is Purusha.” This Purusha is the great attraction of the
universe, untouched by, and unconnected with the universe, yet it
attracts the whole universe. You see a man going after gold,
because therein is a spark of the Purusha, even though he knows it
not. When a man desires children, or a woman a husband, what is
the attracting power? That spark of Purusha behind the child or wife,
behind everything. It is there, only overlaid with matter. Nothing else
can attract. “In this world of insentiency that Purusha alone is
sentient.” This is the Purusha of the Sânkhyas. As such it
necessarily follows that this Purusha must be omnipresent. That
which is not omnipresent must be limited. All limitations are caused;
that which is caused must have beginning and end. If the Purusha is
limited it will die, will not be final, will not be free, but will have been
caused. Therefore if not limited, it is omnipresent. According to
Kapila there are many Purushas, not one. An infinite number of
them, you are one, I am one, each is one; an infinite number of
circles, each one infinite, running through this universe. The Purusha
is neither born nor dies. It is neither mind nor matter, and the reflex
from it is all that we know. We are sure if it be omnipresent it knows
neither death nor birth. Nature is casting her shadow upon it, the
shadow of birth and death, but it is by its own nature eternal. So far
we have found the theory of Kapila wonderful.
Next we will have to take up the proofs against it. So far the analysis
is perfect, the psychology cannot be controverted. There is no
objection to it. We will ask of Kapila the question: Who created
Nature? and his answer will be that Nature (Prakriti) is uncreate. He
also says that the Purusha is omnipresent and that of these
Purushas there is an infinite number. We shall have to controvert this
last proposition, and find a better solution, and by so doing we shall
come to the ground taken by Vedânta. Our first doubt will be how
there can be these two infinites. Then our argument will be that it is
not a perfect generalization, and that therefore we have not found a
perfect solution. And then we shall see how the Vedantists find their
way out of all these difficulties and reach a perfect solution. Yet all
the glory really belongs to Kapila. It is very easy to give a finish to a
building that is nearly complete.
 III
SÂNKHYA AND ADVAITA
I will give you first a resumé of the Sânkhya philosophy, through
which we have been going, because in this lecture we want to find
where its defects are, and where Vedânta comes in as
supplementary to these defects. You must remember that according
to the Sânkhya philosophy, Nature is causing all these
manifestations which we call thought and intellect, reason, love,
hatred, touch, taste; that everything is from Nature. This Nature
consists of three sorts of elements, one called Sattva, another Rajas,
and the third Tamas. These are not qualities, but the materials out of
which the whole universe is being evolved, and at the beginning of a
cycle they remain in equilibrium. When creation comes this
equilibrium is disturbed and these elements begin to combine and
recombine, and manifest as the universe. The first manifestation of
this is what the Sânkhya calls the Mahat (universal Intelligence), and
out of that comes consciousness. And out of consciousness is
evolved Manas (universal Mind). Out of this consciousness are also
evolved the organs of the senses, and the tanmâtras,—sound
particles, touch particles, taste particles, and so forth. All fine
particles are evolved from this consciousness, and out of these fine
particles come the gross particles which we call matter. After the
tanmâtras (those particles which cannot be seen, or measured)
come the gross particles which we can feel and sense. The chitta
(“mind-stuff”) in its three-fold functions of intellect, consciousness
and mind, is working and manufacturing the forces called prânas.
These prânas have nothing to do with breath, you must at once get
rid of that idea. Breath is one effect of the Prâna (universal Energy).
By these prânas are meant the nervous forces that are governing
and moving the whole body, which are manifesting themselves as
thought, and as the various functions of the body. The foremost and
the most obvious manifestation of these prânas is the breathing
motion. If it were caused by air, a dead man would breathe. The
prâna acts upon the air, and not air upon it. These prânas are the
vital forces which manipulate the whole body, and they in turn are
manipulated by the mind and the indriyas (the two kinds of organs).
So far so good. The psychology is very clear and most precise, and
just think of the age of it, the oldest rational thought in the world!
Wherever there is any philosophy or rational thought, it owes
something to Kapila. Wherever there is any attempt at psychology, or
philosophy, there is some indebtedness to the great father of this
thought, to this man Kapila.
So far we see that this psychology is wonderful, but we shall have to
differ with it on some points, as we go on. We find that the principal
idea on which Kapila works is evolution. He makes one thing evolve
out of another, because his very definition of causation is “the effect
is the cause reproduced in another form,” and because the whole
universe, so far as we see it, is progressive and evolving. This whole
universe must have evolved out of some material, out of Prakriti or
Nature. Therefore this Nature cannot be essentially different from its
cause, only when it takes form it becomes limited. The material itself
is without form. But according to Kapila, from undifferentiated nature
down to the last stage of differentiation, none of these is the same as
Purusha, the “Enjoyer,” or “Enlightener.” Just as a lump of clay, so is
a mass of mind, or the whole universe. By itself it has no light, but
we find reason and intelligence in it, therefore there must be some
Existence behind it, behind the whole of Nature, whose light is
percolating through it and appearing as Mahat and consciousness
and all these various things, and this Existence is what Kapila calls
the Purusha, the Âtman or Self of the Vedantist. According to Kapila,
the Purusha is a simple factor, not a compound. It is immaterial, the
only one that is immaterial, whereas all the various manifestations
are material. The Purusha alone knows. Suppose I see a
blackboard, first the external instruments will bring that sensation to
the organ (to the indriya according to Kapila), from the organ it will
go to the mind and make an impression; the mind will cover it up with
another factor,—consciousness, and will present it to the buddhi
(intelligence), but buddhi cannot act; it is the Purusha behind that
acts. These are all its servants, bringing the sensation to It, and It
gives the orders, and the buddhi reacts. The Purusha is the Enjoyer,
the Perceiver, the real One, the King on his throne, the Self of man,
and It is immaterial. Because It is immaterial, it necessarily follows
that It must be infinite, It cannot have any limitation whatever. So
each one of these purushas is omnipresent, each is all-pervading,
but can act only through fine and gross manifestations of matter. The
mind, the self-consciousness, the organs and the vital forces
compose what is called the fine body, or what in Christian philosophy
is called the “spiritual body” of man. It is this body that comes to
reward or punishment, that goes to the different heavens; that
incarnates and reincarnates; because we see from the very
beginning that the going and coming of the soul (Purusha) is
impossible. Motion means going and coming, and that which goes
from one place to another cannot be omnipresent. It is this linga-
sarira (subtle body) which comes and goes. Thus far we see from
Kapila’s psychology that the soul is infinite, and that the soul is the
only principle that is not an evolution of Nature. It is the only one that
is outside of Nature, but It has apparently got bound by Nature. This
Nature is around the Purusha and It has identified Itself with Nature.
It thinks “I am the linga-sarira,” It thinks “I am the gross matter, the
gross body,” and as such is enjoying pleasure and pain; but these do
not really belong to the soul, they belong to this linga-sarira, and to
the gross body. When certain nerves are hurt we feel pain. We
recognize that immediately. If the nerves in our fingers were dead we
could cut the fingers and not feel it. So pleasure and pain belong to
the nerve-centres. Suppose my organ of sight is destroyed, I do not
feel pleasure or pain from color, although my eyes are there. So it is
obvious that pleasure and pain do not belong to the soul. They
belong to the mind and the body.
The soul has neither pleasure nor pain; it is the Witness of
everything, the eternal Witness of things that are going on, but it
takes no fruits from any work. “As the sun is the cause of sight in
every eye, yet is not itself affected by the defects in any eye; as a
piece of crystal appears red when red flowers are placed before it,
so this Purusha appears to be affected by pleasure or pain from the
reflection cast upon It by Nature, but it remains ever unchanged.”
The nearest way to describe Its state is that it is meditation. This
meditative state is that in which you approach nearest to the
Purusha. Thus we see why the meditative state is always called the
highest state by the Yogi, neither a passive nor an active state, but
the meditative state. This is the Sânkhya philosophy.
Next, the Sânkhyas say that this manifestation of Nature is for the
soul, all the combinations are for something outside of Nature. So
these combinations which we call Nature, these constant changes
are going on for the enjoyment of the soul, for its liberation, that it
may gain all this experience from the lowest to the highest, and
when it has gained it, the soul finds that it never was in Nature. It
was entirely separate, and it finds that it is indestructible, that it
neither goes nor comes, that going to heaven and being born again
were in Nature and not in the soul. So the soul becomes free. All of
Nature is working for the enjoyment and experience of the soul. It is
getting this experience in order to reach the goal, and that goal is
freedom. These souls are many, according to the Sânkhya
philosophy. There is an infinite number of souls. And the other
conclusion is that there is no God, as the Creator of the universe.
Nature herself is sufficient to produce all these forms. God is not
necessary, say the Sânkhyas.
Now we shall have to contest these three positions of the Sânkhyas.
First that intelligence or anything of that sort does not belong to the
soul, but that it belongs entirely to Nature; the soul being simply
qualitiless, colorless. The second point is that there is no God, but
Vedânta will show that without a God there cannot be any
explanation whatever. Thirdly, we shall have to contend that there
cannot be many souls, that there cannot be an infinite number, that
there is only One Soul in the universe, and that One is appearing as
many.
We will take the first proposition, that intelligence and reason belong
entirely to Nature, and not to the soul. The Vedânta says that the
soul is in its essence Existence-Knowledge-Bliss; but we agree with
the Sânkhyas that all that they call intelligence is a compound. For
instance, let us look at our perceptions. We remember that the chitta
(or the “mind-stuff”) is what is combining all these things, and upon