Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

234 Okwui Enwezor
ethical-juridical territory of power relations, namely, between the recognition
of the given fact of natural rights and that right regulated and legitimized
by the law: here the individual is “subjectiWed in a power relationship.” 24
The idea of the sovereign subject as it concerns Africa is important
if we are to rethink questions of authenticity in cultural practice. I want
to do so by turning to the position of the artist as producer in a time of
crisis, 25 the crisis of the postcolonial state. 26 There is also the crisis of development
discourse that has been the bedrock of the democratization and liberalization
of the postcolonial state and economies since the 1960s. Here it
is important to note that the postcolonial state has been exacerbated in the
last two decades by the brutal macroeconomic Structural Adjustment Program
(SAP) policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund
(IMF) during the 1980s and 1990s. Though there are disputes among experts
about the actual causes of the kind of congenital underdevelopment we see
today in Africa, it is generally agreed that SAP deepened the crisis and weakened
the capacity of the state to manage and respond effectively to its
effects. SAP put into place the inability of a host of African subjects to
properly conceptualize and formulate their own futures, that is, to speak as
true social subjects. All through Africa, institutions and citizens are vulnerable
to the rapacious calumny of the industrial forces of economic and political
rationalization. Rather than reform as was promised, the shock of the
experiment at liberalization produced stagnation, structural atrophy, collapsed
economies, deep poverty, failed institutions, and loss of state autonomy
from donor institutions and markets. Liberal reform of the economy (devaluation
of currencies, the imposition of austerity measures, privatization of
state assets) set in motion a deepening crisis and further underdevelopment
and dependency. Only recently have liberal economists, the World Bank,
and IMF begun to acknowledge the failure of these economic shock therapies.
27 As a test case the neoliberal ideology of free market capitalism not
only failed in Africa, it also produced a wave of disenchantment, instability,
and erosion of social networks.
If as Foucault claims “the theory of sovereignty assumes from the
outset the existence of a multiplicity of powers . . . [imagined as] capacities,
possibilities, potentials,” 28 the grim assessment of the postcolonial state and
the postcolonial subject within the developmental discourse of neoliberal
market ideology introduces a series of antinomies. But here we need a critique
of crisis as always the logical outcome of the neocolonial transformation
of the modern African state. Indeed, crisis not only situates the subject,
it mortiWes the subject. The chief and primary effect of this is traumatic.
This trauma compels a complete rethinking, if not necessarily the overhaul,
of the forms, strategies, and techniques of everyday existence as well as the