Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- 9 Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions
- 10 Marxism and the politics of representation: The ‘agrarian question’ and the limits of political economy – class, nation and the party-state
- 11 Thinking beyond representation, acting beyond representation: Accounting for worker subjectivities in South Africa
- 12 Renaming the state in Africa today
- 13 Domains of state politics and systemic violence: The concept of ‘uncivil society’
- 14 The domain of civil society and its politics
- 15 The domain of traditional society and its politics
- 16 Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions
from Part 2 - Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- 9 Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions
- 10 Marxism and the politics of representation: The ‘agrarian question’ and the limits of political economy – class, nation and the party-state
- 11 Thinking beyond representation, acting beyond representation: Accounting for worker subjectivities in South Africa
- 12 Renaming the state in Africa today
- 13 Domains of state politics and systemic violence: The concept of ‘uncivil society’
- 14 The domain of civil society and its politics
- 15 The domain of traditional society and its politics
- 16 Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the dominant conceptions whether liberal or influenced by Marxism (marxisante) and also fascist, politics is in fact abolished. Neither the idea of class nor that of free opinion can deal with it. The complex of the state and the economy occupies the whole of the visible.
– Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique?, 1985 (my translation)Sociological demystification … produces this result: it recasts the arbitrary as necessity.
– Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 2004Any [emancipatory] politics is constructed by what it affirms and proposes and not by what it negates or rejects.
– Alain Badiou, ‘L'Impuissance contemporaine’, 2014 (my translation)THINKING BEYOND SOCIOLOGY: THE DIALECTIC OF POLITICS
For the discipline of sociology, it is the social that is said to determine consciousness or subjectivity. This is manifested in culture, which is determined both internally (socialisation) and externally (social constraints). In this manner both structure and agency determine consciousness (e.g. as indicated by types of social action in the work of Max Weber). There is no freedom to think outside the social except in utopias, which are precisely disconnected from social reality. The social is thereby naturalised. As a result there is no room for thinking emancipatory politics, as there is no room for excessive thought. This way of reasoning results directly from the conservative reaction to the Enlightenment, which insisted on the social (i.e. the centrality of difference and the ownership of property) as the foundation of life and human freedom (e.g. in the writings of Edmund Burke) as opposed to the idea of natural equality (in Locke and Rousseau), which was understood as only subsequently altered in the social. This conservative idea and its admixture with empiricism, the equally conservative nature of which I have already noted, provide the foundation of academic sociology, especially in the Anglophone world.
The insistence on the social itself as the core of life implies prioritising both representation over thought and social objectivism over political choice. To think the excess in emancipatory politics is to think beyond the social; it is to tear oneself away from the habitual in order to think universal humanity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Thinking Freedom in AfricaToward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, pp. 243 - 262Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016