"Futures Past? David Scott's Black Jacobins and the Dead End of Cultural Politics" (2008)

Postcolonialism across the Disciplines

Series Editors Graham Huggan, University ofLeeds

Andrew Thompson, University of Leeds

Postcolonialism across the Disciplines showcases alternative directions for postcolonial studies. It is in part an attempt to counteract the dominance in colonial and postcolonial studies of one particular discipline - English literary/ cultural studies - and to make the case for a combination of disciplinary knowledges as the basis for contemporary postcolonial critique. Edited by leading scholars, the series aims to be a seminal contribution to the field, spanning the traditional range of disciplines represented in postcolonial studies but also those less acknowledged. It will also embrace new critical paradigms and examine the relationship between the transnational/cultural, the global and the postcolonial.

Friends and Enemies

The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature

Chris Bongie

Liverpool University Press

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PART Ill

Exiles on Main Stream: Browsing the Franco-Caribbean Canon

Convergence and divergence of the thinker and the huckster. Inside every philosopher is a nouveau philosophe whom he can neither completely disavow nor unreservedly embrace. This swaggering, dishevelled mischief-maker, a human barometer, ever ready to sign on to the latest happening, slniling into the camera with a petition in hand. is both the philosopher's true likeness and his simpering caricature. If he opens wide his door in welcome, he abandons thought. If he slams the door shut. he soon takes on a musty smell, his career fizzles out. There is only one solution to the dilemma: leave the door ajar, play cat-and-mouse. The most gripping thing about it is that no one can predict who is who. An intellectual: two beasts in one body, and it is never clear which one will ensnare the other.

Regis Debray (1980, 292)

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INCURSION Ill

Futures Past? David Scott's Black jacobins and the Dead End of Cultural Politics

My discussion ofWalcott's The Haitian Trilogy provided a close reading of the text as well as a critique of its ideological assumptions, .showing how its argument with, and effacement of, the .scribal figure ofVastey paves the way for the invention of the 'great writer' and his careerist assumption of cultural authority. What I strategically refrained from doing in the previous chapter was to broach some glaringly obvious questions raised by the Nobel laureate's repackaging of three old plays in a glossy, and by no means inexpensive, paperback edition. Why did he do it? Even more pertinently, what made it possible for him to do it? If the briefForeword to the trilogy is as unforthcoming on this point as on all others, that is because the posing of such questions elicits a decidedly uncomfortable response: namely, that the increasing marketability of postcolonial literature and especially of its 'celebrity authors' may well be what provided the most salient rationale for the production of this 'new' text, both from the point of view of its author and his publishers. The Haitian Trilogy differs from the plays it contains only by virtue of its packaging; the pronounced lack of any supple- t mentary attempt on Walcott's part at fathoming (and throwing into question) · the ideological assumptions that originally led to the creation of these plays exacerbates one's sense of the text's market-generated identity, its inseparability from the 'commodifying processes through which [postcolonialism'sj ... literary products are disseminated and consumed' (Huggan, 2001, 18). Vital as the task might be, chronicling the intimate relation of these com modifying processes to the very existence of The Haitian Trilogy, and to that of the 'legendary artist' who signed off on it, is not one with which the text- and authorcentred approach of (postcolonial) literary criticism has much concerned itself. It is, rather, the practitioners of cultural studies who have, over the past half century, drawn. our attention to the urgency of positioning authors and their texts within the 'circuit of culture' through which they are materially produced, distributed, consumed, and regulated.

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Exiles on Main Stream

As I argued in the Introduction, the cultural-studies approach - at least inasmuch as it entails a desacralization of'charismatic' authors and their textual productions - is not one that has been readily embraced within the field of postcolonial studies as a whole, and most especially in its literary subfield, where the belief in the 'great writer' continues to prevail, 'permitting consecrated artists to constitute certain products, by the miracle of their signature (or brand name), as sacred objects' (Bourdieu, 1996, 230), and ruling out any serious consideration of the fraught relations between the penseur and the vendeur that are highlighted in the passage from Debray's Le scribe which serves as epigraph to this final part of Friends and Enemies.1 What I will be doing here is to interrogate this belief (one that has been, if anything, even more central to francophone than to postcolonial studies) through an examination of the recent work of two of the most prominent figures in the canon of Franco-Caribbean literature, Maryse Conde and Edouard Glissant, paying specific attention to the ways in which their work partakes, or declines to partake, in what I have dubbed the 'postcolonial middlebrow'. Adopting a cultural-studies approach to the fields of postcolonial and francophone studies in general, and to the work of Conde and Glissant in particular, is a necessary component of this interrogation, but I should emphasize from the outset that my goal here is most certainly not to provide a detailed materialist analysis of the production and reception of their work. While the following two chapters do stress the desirability of future researchers spending time in French publishing houses (inquiring into marketing strategies, ferreting out sales statistics, etc.), or setting up reading groups in a variety of locations to verify in a sociologically exact manner the differing modes of reception to which the work of these celebrity authors lends itself, I am not, ultimately, concerned with 'doing' cultural studies in a place where it has seldom been done, but with reflecting on how such an approach affects our understanding of the existing fields of postcolonial and francophone studies and the nascent field that would join them together. Once the commodified nature of the literary object has been brought to the fore and become an inescapable feature of our interpretive framework, what place, if any, can or should there be in francophone postcolonial studies for the memory ofliterature and the 'great writers' who are said to have created it?

The Haitian Trilogy's relation to the postcolonial marketplace thus provides one conceptual bridge from the previous chapter to the cultural-studies-oriented chapters in this part of Friends and Enemies. The present Incursion will create another such bridge, only our point of departure here will be an issue that was explicitly dealt with in the chapter on Walcott: namely, (the aftermath of) tragedy. Tragedy is the formal ground on which the first play, Henri Christophe, self-consciously established itself, and we sa«! how important the scapegoating process, an integral component of the tragic genre, was to the young Walcott's enterprise. In The Haitian Earth, tragedy and its mechanisms are still present, but in an extremely attenuated, ghostly sort of way- barely visible on the edges of a script that, while lacking the carnivalesque exuberance of Drums and Colours, nonetheless offers enough quasi-populist song and dance to make us forget its

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tragic double, the early play with which the trilogy, and Walcott's career, begins. This never final passage from tragedy to what comes after it is what will be examined here in a reading of two key works by the anthropologist David Scott, founder of the Caribbeanistjoumal Small Axe and one of the region's most vital critical voices at present. The two works in question - a seminal article entitled 'Fanonian Futures?', included in his Refashioning Futures (1999), and his book Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004)- enact more or less the reverse of the trilogy's intellectual trajectory, with the book adopting a tragic sensibility that his earlier article, an exemplary work of cultural studies, seemed confidently to circumvent. It is the tragic failure of cultural studies (or, more specifically, of the politics it supposedly entails) to which Scott's trajectory bears witness - a failure that haunts every attempt (such as my own, in the following chapters) to position cultural studies as an academic discipline with the future on its side.

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In Conscripts of Modernity, a book-length reading ofC. L. R.james's groundbreaking account of the Haitian Revolution, The Black jacobins, David Scott repeatedly stresses that we have for many years now, although without adequately registering this fact, reached the end of the line when it comes to the possibility of telling anti-colonial stories in a plausible manner. His central thesis is that by the early 1960s James had become presciently aware of this impossibility, and that he inscribed such an awareness in his second edition of The Blackjacobins. The first edition, published in 1938, had been drenched in the assumptions of what Scott calls 'anticolonial Romance'; it was 'a modernist allegory of anticolonial revolution written in the mode of a historical Romance' (2004, 59). By contrast, the many additions and revisions that James made for the second edition, which came out twenty-five years later in 1963, testify to another, post-modernist mode of seeing the Haitian Revolution in particular, and anti-colonial revolution in general, wherein it is recognized that the old stories cannot 'give point to the project of social and political change' (57). The 1963 text, while perforce retaining much of its original, 'romantic' point of view, is supplemented by a 'tragic' sensibility that is, Scott argues, far better suited to the task facing ~s here and now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century - that task being to confront a world in which the pre-conditions for the realization of 'anticolonial Romance' have disappeared, if indeed they ever really existed in the first place.

By 1963, James had become all too aware of the 'enfeebled and exhausted' nature of the struggle for national sovereignty. Even at the very height of the decolonization era, only a few years after the Cuban Revolution,james's eyes had been opened to 'the virtual closure of the nationalist Bandung project that grew out of the anticolonial revolution' (30).2 This 'virtual deadend' (57) in which James situates himself and his readers in 1963 became visible to him not simply through a new sensitivity to the limitations of specific anti-colonial projects but, more broadly, through a dawning awareness of the illusory nature of the belief that generates these and all such modernist projects: that is, the belief that we are

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'self-making creatures' (184) who can treat the modernity out of which a global colonialism emerges as nothing more than 'a largely passive or negative environment merely waiting to be surmounted or mastered or translated or displaced by preconstituted subjects' (114). James had come to see that, far from being an old script awaiting the writing of a definitive post-script, colonial modernity and its 'enlightenment' continues to limit our choices and our actions, making of us its conscripts, ineluctably conditioned by the very world that we believe, or believed, ourselves capable of mastering and making anew (19).

Scott argues that it is precisely such an awareness of our ineluctable conditioning that has been missing from postcolonial theory, notwithstanding the fact that it has, from its beginnings in the late 1970s, taken pains to distance itself from the blunt imperatives of the anti-colonial movements that preceded it. Postcolonial theory has 'continued to assume an anticolonial picture of the problem of colonialism' (6), even if so many of its practitioners have made a career of taking anti-colonialism to task for its manifest failures, both practical and conceptual. Its proponents have not registered the fact that the 'cognitivepolitical problem-space we inhabit' has altered, and they have thus continued asking the same old modernist questions as did their predecessors - questions that inevitably produce the same sort of liberationist. answers as were offered in the past. Postcolonial theory has continued to construct 'an image of colonialism that demands from us an attitude of anticolonial longing, a longing for anticolonial revolution' (7); it has continued to sanction the belief that we are self-making subjects who are in a position to realize this longing, as long as we provide different responses than did our predecessors to the pressing question of how to master the 'totalizing structure of brutality, violence, objectification, racism, and exclusion that the anticolonial revolution was supposed to overcome' (6).

Postcolonial theory, in short, is still grappling with the same old questions, rather than coming to grips with the need to ask new ones that do not depend upon 'exposing the negative structure of colonialism's power and with demonstrating the colonized's agency in resisting or overcoming these conditions' (6). Thus (although this is a point Scott makes only by implication) the last several decades have seen the proliferation of what we might call 'surrogate' modes of anti-colonial thinking,3 which recuperate 'anticolonial Romance' in a minor key: mimicry, migrancy, nomadism, hybridity, interculturalism, counter-hegemonicity, and so on. These 'signature postcolonial concepts' (Hallward, 2001, xi) have, in tum, provoked any number of angry replies from those we might call the recidivists (oft-cited critics such as Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, Benita Parry, Epifanio San Juan Jr), who urge us to go beyond postcolonial theory by going back to its anti-colonial origins, retrieving the basic ~umptions and practices ofliberation narratives that have, at least within the academy, been increasingly · marginalized by the more complicated stories told by the surrogates. This by now all-too-familiar quarrel between the surrogates and the recidivists is fated to last until all eternity, Scott would argue, until the two parties take cognizance ofJames's tragic insight, disseminated in the 1963 edition of The Blackjacobins,

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that we are the (un)willing conscripts of modernity rather than its potentially sovereign opponents (or, for that matter, exponents).

The modal shift from 'anticolonial Romanticism', 'confident in its striving and satisfied in its own sufficiency' (220), to a tragic sensibility involves, first and foremost, telling ourselves different stories, in the present, about the past and the future. That anti-colonial stories have 'typically been emplotted' in the narrative form of Romance means that they have relied upon a certain beginning and a certain ending - indeed, they have relied upon the very idea of beginnings and endings in order to tell a tale about the vindication of the past and the redemption of the present through their future overcoming. Tragedy, by contrast, opens up a vision of these liberated horizons as 'futures past', 'a horizon of possible futures that are not, any longer, ours to imagine, let alone seek after and inhabit' (29); it 'has a more respectful attitude to the contingencies of the past in the present, to the uncanny ways in which its remains come back to usurp our hopes and subvert our ambitions' (220). In 'the congealing context of our postcolonial time' (29}, tragedy affords us an appropriate vision of a world lacking in direction, haunted by memories that will not go away, by futures that cannot be mapped:

For tragedy, history is not leading us anywhere in particular. And if the past is a wound, it is one that may not heal; it cannot be evaded or cleanly overcome. It doesn't go away by an act of heroic agency. Nor is there a rational calculus that will guarantee the navigation of the contingencies that inevitably appear in the tragic hero's path. (166)

Those who embrace this perspective, situating themselves 'within the conflicted space of this insurmountable conundrum' (220), will have 'more patience for paradox and more openness to chance' than either our anti-colonial forebears or the theorists (be they surrogates or recidivists) who have come calling in their wake, belatedly and covertly sticking to the same old 'discursive strategy in which political change is thought in terms of a vindicationist narrative of liberation or a concept of revolution' (65).

For those who have a quarrel to pick with such narratives and such concepts, ( the 1963 James's (i.e., the 2004 Scott's) vision of an open, direction-less future certainly offers a more hopeful take on tragedy than one finds in Walcott's equally 'prescient' work from this period, with its sceptical insistence on the closed circle of History, doomed to repeat itself endlessly - before, during, and after colonialism - until such a time as we choose, on an individual basis, to make of ourselves New World Adams ... a drippingly 'romantic' scenario if ever there were one.4 Scott's advocacy of a 'tragic sensibility' will be attractive to anyone who is suspicious of teleological meta-narratives and sovereign agents, and yet who is unwilling to abandon (either in postmodern resignation or Adamic euphoria) the political stakes associated with those 'enfeebled and exhausted' postulates. We find a version of the same argument, for instance, in Paul Gilroy's recent work, where he invokes (as part of that cautiously humanist turn discussed in Incursion I) the virtues of a 'hopeful despair', which would be

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reflective of the 'planetary consciousness of the tragedy, fragility, and brevity of indivisible human existence that is all the more valuable as a result of its openness to the damage done by racisms' (2005, 75). The echo is, of course, a merely partial one, as the distance between Scott's 'openness to chance' and Gilroy's 'openness to the damage done by racisms' testifies: the latter, in its far greater specificity, still appeals to the 'authorizing apparatus' of the very thing, 'race', that it is purporting to go beyond (as Scott himself has intimated in a critique of Gilroy's work; see 1999, 118-22). Nevertheless, the arguments of Scott and Gilroy share a general willingness to engage with, rather than merely condemn, the limited and limiting viewpoint of colonial enlightenment (and the common humanity it presupposes).

The openness to chance and contingency called for by Scott also quite obviously overlaps with a great deal of Derridean-inflected postcolonial criticism, which is (un)grounded in 'apostrophic' invocations of 'the chance of the future as chance itself' (Derrida, 1997, 50), in 'incubational' appeals to 'the vision of the Unbuilt' (Bhabha, 2003, 34), in 'figural' summonings of'the unimaginable future "to come"' (Spivak, 2003a, 32). That there are no index entries for any of these thinkers in Conscripts of Modernity is but the most obvious sign that Scott's argument has not yet engaged with this overlap and its ramifications. Be that as it may, a 'problem' that Scott's tragically open vision of the future shares with those of Bhabha, Spivak, & Co. is that their appeals to the future -rigorously stripped, as their anti-teleological outlook demands, of any positive content - have a tendency to come across as purely rhetorical gestures. Within Scott's tragic framework, alternatives to the 'futures past' of anti-colonialism can only be posed in the vaguest of terms: he repeatedly asserts that we must 'reimagin[e] other futures for us to long for, for us to anticipate' (45), that we must 'open up new ways of thinking about possible futures' (SO), but he goes no further. These hortatory appeals to alternative futures proliferate in Scott's book; they are the necessary- if necessarily empty- coda to his argument, which is primarily intent on registering (without lamenting) the inadequacy of any and all old stories that have been told about the past and future, while reminding us that whatever new story (and thus choice) we now make will be 'partly constituted by th[e] modern world and, therefore, a choice partly constructed through its conceptual and ideological apparatuses' (115). The 'poignant beauty of our humanity', as tragedy displays it, resides in our inability to tell our own story, our inability to make our own choices and thereby avert the contingency (and the modernity) to which we are now, and will for the foreseeable future be, subject. Tragedy shows us the double bind we are in: faced with no future that can possibly be chosen or built, and yet nonetheless obliged to 'choose between impossible options' (185). ,)IA

Now, the main argumentative burden of this Incursion is not to address · logical flaws in Scott's book but, rather, to demonstrate its genealogical relation to the far less dour and (as far as the future goes) decidedly less empty argument put forward in his earlier article, 'Fanonian Futures?' Confronting that earlier, cultural-studies approach with the tragic vision adopted in Conscripts of

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Modernity will serve to put some flesh on the bones of Peter Hallward's stark, but vital, claim that 'the idea of a "cultural politics" is a disastrous confusion of spheres'; it will illuminate Hailward's insistence that 'progressive political practice' requires 'a sharp conceptual break between culture and politics', between th~ r_ealm of_ di~erences and the 'domain of strictly in-different principles: pnnoples of Justice and equality, principles that apply to all relations without discrimination' (2001 , xix). Elaborating on that claim will, in turn, serve as a cautionary reminder of the ljmits of the cultural-studies-type analysis that I provide in the ltist two chapters of this book, where I examine Maryse Condes fraught relation to the 'postcolonial middlebrow' (Chapter 6) and Edouard Glissant's increasingly hyperbolic insistence on the supposed virtues of detaching cultural practice from any and all political agendas (Chapter 7). In order to get to my main point, however, it will be useful first to identify and discuss several significant problems with Scott's argument in Conscripts - the first of which has to do with some of the specifics of his account (of james's account) of the Haitian Revolution, and the second with his and james's mutual recourse to 'the classic myth of the tragic hero of enlightenment' (171) in their portrayals of Toussaint Louverture.

The first problem, which may already have been evident to the reader from my discussion of Scott's appeals to alternative futures, has to do with the repeated slippage in his book between a hopeful invocation of 'possible futures' and a tragic insistence on 'impossible options'; in turn, his portrayal of these 'impossible options' is itself logically inconsistent, leading to evident difficulties in his account of the double bind in which we and/or the tragic protagonist, Toussaint Louverture, are said to be situated. Throughout the book, Scott argues that both the solutions arrived at and the questions posed by 'anticolonial Romance' are now quite beside the point; we need to ask different questions, which call for other solutions, and wiU thus, he assures his reader, open up new ways of thinking about possible futures. These encouraging, if empty-seeming, appeals to the realm of possibility obviously retain a certain 'romantic' hope for the future, at least once we have acknowledged that the future envisioned by 'anticolonial Romance' and other such narratives of sovereignty is impossible. f This 'romantic' take on tragedy, however, is simply window-dressing for Scott's more interesting, and conflicted, emphasis on impossible options.

At times Scott's account of these options is what we might call an open one. which affirms merely that, in one way or another, all options are 'impossible' and hence our every approach to the future will be haunted by this tragic fact; in this scenario, there.can be no 'possible futures', only impossible ones from which to choose, according to one's own necessarily contingent and faulty beliefs. This open version of impossibility is, however, doubled by a far more restricted one, which affirms in a quasi-deterministic manner that, when confronted with a choice between incommensurable values, we are locked into making one particular choice rather than another, equally flawed one. That James (in 1963) tends to portray Toussaint's choices in this restricted manner is what Scott plausibly argues; however, Scott himself often adopts this very same position, at

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times confusingly merging his own account of Toussaint with James's, while at other times establishing some distance between himself and James by shifting back to the first, more open vision of the 'impossible options' between which Toussaint and his contemporaries were forced to choose.

A specific example here will help flesh out this problematic dimension of Scott's argument. At one point in his analysis of the seven paragraphs that James added in 1963 to the opening of chapter 13, "'The War oflndependence", the last, longest, and most dramatic chapter of the book' (132), Scott glosses James's account of the 'tragic alternatives with which [Toussaint] was faced' and his assertion that Toussaint's tragic flaw was 'not a moral weakness ... [but] a specific error, a total miscalculation of the constituent events' (151-52). Scott notes that 'it is important to grasp that these miscalculations were not mere arbitrary lapses of judgment, a momentary negligence in an otherwise clear and efficient mind' (155). Rather, Scott asserts,

Toussaint's error, as James says ... , 'sprang from the very qualities that made him who he was'. He could not have chosen otherwise; there was no otherwise on the basis of which he could have exercised choice-and as James goes on to say, tellingly, there would have been no otherwise for us (his readers) to choose either. We - colonial and postcolonial moderns ourselves and constituted (or conscripted) in precisely the same predicament - could not have chosen better, more successfully, in Toussaint's place. (155)

Exemplifying Scott's often ventriloquial relation to James, this passage provides a glaring instance of the logical slippage to which I just drew attention. Quite simply, to say that Toussaint could not have chosen otherwise is not the same as saying he could not have chosen better. The former claim depends upon the restricted view of Toussaint's 'impossible options', in which decisions seem written in stone for him; the latter on a more open view, in which he might well have found himself faced with a variety of equally unviable alternatives. It would have been far more consistent, though decidedly less grand, simply to say that Toussaint could not have chosen rightly; that there was no good alternative (of the sort posited by 'anticolonial Romance') on the basis of which he could have exercised choice, rather than to imply, for instance, that some of Toussaint's most obviously questionable choices - such as his fatal admiration for Napoleon - were somehow an ineluctable result of his conscripted relation fo 'colonial enlightenment' and the 'insurmountable conundrum' within which it situates its subjects. Scott does not, to be sure, consistently maintain this restricted view of Toussaint's options; at many points in the book, he adopts the more open view, as when he critiques 'the arrogant simplicity ofToussaint's sophisticated and cosmopolitan world of value' and laments his 'inability (orllftther, unwillingness) to admit the virtue of other values' (206). The parenthetical insertion of 'unwillingness' in the place of 'inability' could not be more telling of the inconsistency of Scott's argument- an inconsistency which does not simply affect his representation of Haitian history but, more importantly for our purposes, his representation of those whom (as in the above-cited passage) Toussaint is said

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to be the mirror of, 'we' colonial and postcolonial moderns who 'share the same predicament'.

The second significant problem with Scott's argument that needs to be addressed here involves precisely his shifting representation of who 'we' are, and exactly what 'world of value' we inhabit. At times, Scott's 'we' is quite simply 'humanity', in all its 'poignant beauty', or more particularly, a 'colonial and postcolonial modern' subset of that humanity; at others, however, it points toward a far more specific identity, which derives from Scott's allegorical identification of Toussaint as, first and foremost, a figure for the intellectual. At various points in Conscripts of Modernity, Scott asserts that James re-imagined Toussaint not only, in the manner of George Lamming, as a revolutionary Caliban 'but as a modernist intellectual, suffering, like Hamlet, the modern fracturing of thought and action' (16). This is, certainly, a plausible assertion when it comes to James's representation of Toussaint; however, Scott often appears to be not only describing this representation but buying into it. This allegorical reading has the effect of conflating Toussaint's (the intellectual's) tragic dilemmas with those ofal/ 'colonial and postcolonial moderns', and perhaps even humanity at large, as one sees in the following passage:

There is no overcoming this ambiguous inheritance of enlightenment. There is only the everlasting negotiation with it. For us, no less than for Toussaint, it is a permanent part of what it means to be a conscript of modernity. This is our tragedy as much as it was Toussaint's. (175)

If the story of 'anticolonial Romance' required a 'revolutionary Caliban', it is obvious why Scott's argument should shift attention away from Lamming's earlier insisence on Toussaint's Calibanesque identity, but why does the figure of the modernist intellectual provide such a compelling allegorical point of reference for Scott in his representation of Oames's) Toussaint, and thence of 'us'? Why should he adopt the restricted view that Toussaint's (the intellectual's) tragedy 'remains the fundamental story of our time' (175), when it is obvious that such an assertion marginalizes and excludes a whole range of other identities and other worlds of value that could nonetheless, in a more open view of( our tragic circumstances, still be understood as related, and responding, to the' same 'impossible options' with which Toussaint was faced?

In his 1960 Pleasures of Exile, which itselffeatures a groundbreaking discussion ofJames's 1938 history of the Haitian Revolution, George Lamming revealingly closed his account of an article James had recently published in The Nation (the media outlet for Eric Williams's People's National Movement in Trinidad) with the assertion that 'we will not raise the question ofjames's relation to a colonial bureaucracy; for the author of Black jacobins is too great a man to be dragged into such marginal disputes' (1992, 47; also qtd. in Scott, 2004, 225-26). Four decades later, in an interview with Scott, Lamming would make a version of the same point when he identified James as 'the supreme example ofan intellectual, a man whose life is the life of the mind, whose oxygen was ideas' (Scott, 2002, 165). This emphasis oflamming's onjames's status as an intellectual helps give

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us a sense of what is at stake in Scott's intermittent identification of Toussaint with the modernist intellectual, and why his tragic awareness, and the values attached to it, are so important to Scott. Here at the core of Scott's argument, I would argue, we find a lingering, 'romantic' attachment to the idea of the 'great man' (analogous, in some respects, to that preference ofSpivak's for the 'singular and unverifiable text' we examined in the Introduction [12-13]). In making this identification between Toussaint's tragic vision and that of the modernist intellectual, and in then associating this vision with all 'colonial and postcolonial moderns', what Scott does is effectively erase from consideration a range of other, perhaps equally flawed, responses to 'the tragedy of colonial enlightenment' - be it those ofless Hamletian leaders, such as Dessalines (as we will see in a moment), or of the 'colonial bureaucrats' whose very existence is inseparable from 'marginal disputes', scribes like Vastey, whose intellectual work cannot be disentangled from his partisan values or the institutional framework within and by means of which he publicized them. The modernist intellectual becomes, like Walcott's 'legendary artist', in all senses of the phrase, a pure figure - one who exists at a sanctifying distance from, notably, the sullied world of the politician and the publicist, and yet who re(as)sembles them at their best.

Nowhere is the problematic nature of Scott's identification of the 'intellectual' Toussaint with 'us' more apparent than in his gloss on james's comparison of Toussaint and Dessalines: the former, we are told, is 'a modern intellectual who lives the tangled relation between thought and action - and with it the conflict of moral options and the negotiation of contingencies - in a way that Dessalines cannot' (171 ). Two very different readings of this claim are possible. lfwe hold strictly to the terms of Scott's argument about the modernity ofToussaint's tragic dilemma, then we might well conclude that Dessalines cannot live this 'tangled relation' in the same way because he is still in important respects a pre-modem subject, a primitive soul (and this, of course, is precisely how Walcott portrays his foul-mouthed, sex-and-power-hungry emperor in The Haitian Earth). Less dramatically (but more damagingly for his argument about 'our' identification with Toussaint), Scott might simply be saying that Dessalines responds differently than does Toussaint to the modernity of which they were both equally conscripts; one can, after all, surely admit that 'modern power' has shaped 'the conditions of possible action, more specifically, shaped the cognitive and institutional conditions in which the New World slave acted' (106), without turning all such conscripts of modernity into cookie-cutter tragic versions of themselves (and all of'us' into doubles ofToussaint qua modernist intellectual). The example of Dessalines shows all too clearly that 'the tangled relation between thought and action' in colonial Saint-Domingue and post-independence Haiti could be lived otherwise, if not better, than Toussaint lived it. Indeed, the reaftragedy of Haiti in the years following its momentous victory against France in 1803 would be that two very different, if both tragically inadequate, responses to 'the conflict of moral options and the negotiation of contingencies' took on institutional form in the regimes of Christophe and Petion, resulting in a perpetual state of civil war - one that was already anticipated by the vicious struggles in

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1799-1800 between Toussaint and Rigaud, a topic about which neither James nor Scott has very much to say, doubtless because while it is easy to oppose thought (Toussaint) to action (Dessalines), it is altogether more difficult to understand the internecine quarrels of two 'intellectuals' such as Toussaint and Rigaud without reducing them to the status of mere partisans. There is, in other words, a tacit elitism to Scott's, no less than to james's, representation of Toussaint, and to his identification of (his) Toussaint with 'us'.

To be sure, Scott does at points draw attention to the limits of his argument, as on those rare occasions when he distances himself from Toussaint's troubled and tragic cosmopolitanism (distinguishing, for instance, between the black Jacobin's inability and his unwillingness to engage in certain actions that others, such as Dessalines, might well have undertaken). If Scott nonetheless insists upon that one representation of Toussaint and of 'us', it is surely because the primary goal of his book is neither to produce an objectively unassailable history of the Haitian Revolution nor to offer a fully compelling anthropological portrait of all those who were, and who continue to be, conscripted by a modernity that cannot - as 'anticolonial Romance' would have it - simply be overcome. Rather, what he wishes to do is put forward an ethical argument, based on a selfconsciously allegorical reading of past events, about how we ought to act in the present and for the future. Toussaint's (supposed) responsiveness to 'the conflict of moral options and the negotiation of contingencies' provides Scott with a model for engaging with the postcolonial present, one that is (he believes) not only superior to the tired old vindicationist/redemptionist model sanctioned by 'anticolonial Romance' but superior to whatever other engagements might be envisioned in the less 'restrictive' perspectives on tragedy and its 'impossible options' that I alluded to above. It is not Toussaint's actual responses that are of vital interest to us now, for Scott, but his exemplary responsiveness to the contingency of his situation; not his actions, but his model awareness of the impossibility of those actions 'within the conflicted space of [an] insurmountable conundrum'. Like (his) Toussaint, Scott insists, we all need patiently to attend to paradox, to learn how to inhabit what looks like a 'virtual deadend' in the chance that it might appear otherwise to us in a possible future. This is { indeed the sort of 'impossible option' best entertained by those who go under the name of'intellectuals'!

As Scott himself tacitly admits in the final pages of his book, however, not only can we not all be intellectuals, we cannot be intellectuals all of the time. The intellectual's virtue is, for Scott, his paradoxical awareness of the impossibility of action, but Toussaint was, in the final analysis, no intellectual. Notwithstanding the fact that he 'had precious little space within which to act', act he did, and Scott's final paragraphs, closely following James on this point, make it very clear that, in the end, he acted wrongly. Rather than pursue what Scott calls 'freedom', Toussaint-as-leader made the same choice as Robespierre and Lenin would: he 'felt obliged to forego the principles of public freedom, public happiness, and public spirit', and 'opted to secure the economic (necessity) over the risk of the political (freedom)' (220). Notwithstanding the impossibility of choice in a world

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of contingency and incommensurable values, choices - Scott suggests at the very end of his book - are not only possible, but they matter. Toussaint settled for mere liberation when he might have chosen.freedom, Scott laments, and this 'surrendering of freedom to necessity, of the political to the social', ensured that 'the end of white domination and the tyranny of plantation slavery' would not lead to the 'fashioning of a free black republic, the creation of a public and constitutional arena in which the newly emancipated black could appear and have her voice heard'. Toussaint and his tragic downfall thus offer the 'sobering lesson ... that nothing guarantees freedom but the political commitment to its founding - and even this, James is likely to have added, is often not enough' (220).

This last sentence, in its ambiguous relationship to 'political commitment', is absolutely crucial in understanding the impasse that Scott's book both identifies and skirts around: without political commitment, no freedom, only liberation -and that is not, at least for Scott, good enough. Politics, the right politics, thus emerges here at the end as a necessary, though 'often not' sufficient, supplement to ethics. And yet it is precisely such political commitment that Scott's ethical insistence on the need for a tragic sensibility, which dominates the book from beginning to end, can neither guarantee nor even sustain, because from the perspective of tragedy that he has been championing one sees all too well that there are no grounds for any such commitment. Whatever future might come of a commitment to liberation, a commitment to the 'risk of the political' (or the 'risk of a cause', as Debray would have said), will be groundless - as groundless, one might add, as ... that deprecated future envisioned by the enfeebled and exhausted narrative of 'anticolonial Romance', which, if it can never again be treated as a good alternative to our neo-colonial predicament, may at the very least remain among the better ones.

In the preceding discussion of Conscripts of Modernity, 1 have identified a number of problem areas in Scott's account of james's Black jacobins: the conflict between a restricted and an open view of tragedy; his reliance on the idea of the 'modernist intellectual' as privileged respondent to the tragic world; and the aporetic relation between tragic ethics and liberationist politics with which he leaves his reader at the end. If 1 have lingered over these problems, it is by no means in order to criticize Scott for his inability to resolve them. Rather, 1 have provided this detailed account to demonstrate, and argue for the significance of, the stark contrast between Scott's position in Conscripts and the one adopted in an earlier essay like 'Fanonian Futures?', where he put forward a far from tragic and markedly anti-elitist cultural-studies-type argument, affirming in no uncertain terms that, at least for some people, ther~re possible options to choose from in the present, which can productively divert us away from the dead end of anti-colonial politics if only they are given the chance to flourish.

Both the 1999 essay and the 2004 book take as their starting point the idea that 'anticolonial Romance' no longer offers a viable model for understanding

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our postcolonial circumstances. However, in the earlier essay, far from sounding a tragic note, Scott positively revels in the possibility, at least in certain cultural or subcultural contexts, of yoking- in a relation of'strategic supplementation' (1999, 219) - a vibrant Foucauldian ethics to an exhausted Fanonian politics. This union of Foucault and Fanon, Scott claims, will be able 'to keep alive a productive. tension between (simplifying somewhat here) a demand for the closure of politics and a demand for the deferral that makes space for a genealogical ethics' (195). The essay, though, spectacularly fails to deliver on this promise and, .despite its author's stated intentions, in fact reveals the tragic incommensurability of these two demands (one that will be explicitly acknowledged in the final pages of Conscripts of Modernity). As we will see, Scott's belief in 'Fanonian Futures?' that he can deliver on such a promise is possible only because he keeps culture apart from politics, making of culture the site of an alternative (to) politics. The tragic perspective of the 2004 book will be an open admission of the inadequacy of the 'cultural-politics' that made possible his earlier optimism; it is an admission, one of crucial significance to the entire field of cultural studies, that the very idea of such a 'politics' involves a 'disastrous confusion of spheres', to recall Peter Hallward's blunt assertion.

In 'Fanonian Futures?', Scott sketches out, in a portrait of Frantz Fanon and his well-worn narrative ofliberation, the critique of'anticolonial Romance' that he would expand upon in Conscripts. Scott's basic argument, that 'we no longer look into the same future that Fanon did almost three and a half decades ago' (1999, 199), should be familiar by now. He insists upon 'the exhaustion, if not the failure, of a certain vision of our postcolonial futures' (191); he stresses the need for our awakening from the 'dream' of 'anti-imperialist sovereignty' (223), arguing that a 'Fanonian politics of national liberation is only intelligible when the currency ofnation-state sovereignty has value as an unattained aspiration that counts . in global politics', and that because 'the currency value of that national sovereignty has vastly declined', such a politics has now become unintelligible (204). For all these reasons, we must articulate 'a Fanonian politics of postcolonial futures' within a new horizon, recognizing that, given the very different 'conditions of possibility' that obtain today, the Martiniquan's narrative f of liberation should no longer 'hegemonize the field of the political'. If we do not engage in such a re-articulation and try to imagine 'a postcolonial politics after Bandung', Scott warns, it is the Third World itself that may well disappear from (postcolonial theory's) view, given that ours is a time when 'metropolitan diasporas have implicitly or explicitly come to be constructed as the privileged site of the colonial condition and the postcolonial problem', and that the Third World as a result 'is being forgotten' (197).

The portrait sketched here ofFanon is, of course, sorely inadequate; if anyone felt the tragic failure of the project of national liberation, then it was surely the author of The Wretched of the Earth, more so perhaps even than James, whose own views from, as it were, 'almost three and a half decades ago' are adjudged in Conscripts to be so very pertinent to 'our postcolonial present'. However, for the purposes of my argument, the vital point to register is simply that in the

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1999 essay, rather than rejecting outright this exhausted politics (as in the 2004 book), Scott speaks merely of the need to 'supplement' it, specifically with a healthy dose of Foucault's 'politics as ethics' (which, as we will see, turns out to be no politics at atn.

In order to make this supplemental move, Scott finds it necessary to place a stress on 'social division' that is virtually absent from Conscripts. He has recourse to Raymond Williams's idea of 'structures of feeling' as his point of departure for an analysis of the postcolonial state in his native Jamaica, and distinguishes starkly between two such structures, the 'nationalist-modem' and the 'popular modem'. The former 'was, in many ways, the Jamaican version of the Bandung project'. A middle-class project, devoted to 'the cultivation of an enlightened, humanist, and morally and socially reforming modernity', it sought 'to integrate progressively the social and cultural formations that composed the plurality of Jamaica around a single conception of the national good and a single portrait of the national citizen-subject' (190-91 ). Over the course of Scott's essay, the 'nationalist-modem' will come to function as a metonym for both middleclass values and a nation-centred (and hence Fanonian) vision of the political. In typical cultural-studies fashion, this hegemonic culture and its exhausted project of 'anti-imperialist sovereignty' is counterpoised to the 'popular' (or the 'popular-modem'), which constitutes a source of anxiety for 'the nationalistmodem middle class' but a source of hope for the cultural theorist. Exemplified in Jamaica by dancehall, 'simultaneously a social site and an ensemble of cultural practices that circulate around music and dance' (191), the popular becomes the place where a productive reading of Fa non with Foucault can happen, where the 'closure of politics' can be thought alongside its deferral.

At least so Scott claims. What becomes evident as the essay progresses, however, is that Scott cannot articulate these two positions in one and the same conceptual space; Fanon and Foucault remain, Scott's rhetorical protestations

:i notwithstanding, in a state of non-negotiable opposition that ends up mirroring the 'social division' that exists between the 'nationalist' and 'popular' modem. There is, ultimately, no place for Fanon in his argument. In Scott's hopeful analysis of the 'popular-modem', Fan on and the closure of the political - with its i[levitable exclusions and its troubling affinities to the 'nationalist-modern' - simply disappears from view as anything other than an object of critique, supplanted rather than supplemented by a decisively euphoric emphasis on culture, and specifically popular culture, as the privileged site worked upon in the present and for the future by subaltern people who are not, as in past generations, hostile to and alienated from 'the project of the middle-class nationalistmodem' but now quite simply indifferent to that project and its collapse (194), situated at a (in some ways, purifying) remove from it.

The particular case-study Scott examines as an instance of the 'popularmodem' and the promise it holds for a thinking of 'postcolonial futures' is that of the ruud bwai, 'at once a figure of intense fascination and mortal dread, of urban folk-heroization and draconian police operations' (209). Scott is not interested in reading this figure as hero or villain but, rather, in arguing for the

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importance of a certain type of cultural work on the subaltern body that he dubs 'ruud bwai self-fashioning'. We must not dismiss or condemn the ruud bwai as has been done by so many in Jamaica who do not share the 'popular-mod~rn· structure of feeling. Nor, however, should we romanticize this figure - as some did in the 1960s and 1970s, interpreting the ruud bwai as a force of resistance 'recoupable for a Fanonian narrative of revolutionary-liberatiorust overcoming (from alienation to realization, from lumpen to militant)'; 'the new political ideological problem-space', Scott warns, 'does not enable that progressivist narrative a positive purchase' (211 ). Rather than impose those demonizing or romanticizing narratives on the ruud bwai, we are urged to interpret this figure's self-fashioning 'as an instance of what Foucault, in his later work, would call "an ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom"' (213), 'an exercise of self upon self by which one tries to work out, to transform one's self and to attain a certain mode of being' (214). The ruud bwai's body work, his cultivation of 'a certain gait, a certain bearing, a certain poise', and so on, demands to be read as

a distinctive mode of popular self-fashioning whose transgressive difference is constituted precisely at the point where the postcolonfal state seeks to inaugurate and sustain itself as an assimilating/containing middle-class unity, and whose discordant practice of freedom consists in working/unworking/ reworking the limit of that seeming singularit;y and in the mocking refusal of its consensus. (219)

As this passage demonstrates, 'taking the popular seriously' and embracing an 'important subaltern cultural-politics' allows Scott to shift rhetorical gears, producing a bubbly prose full of energetic adjectives like 'distinctive', 'transgressive', 'discordant', 'mocking'. Instead of having to talk about 'exhaustion' and 'deadends', he can here retrieve a language of vigorous oppositionality (as in his discussion ofBob Marley's 'oppositional claims' and 'his ruud bwai refusal' [216]). The 'ascetic' practice of ruud bwai se!Uashioning is, Scott insists, only apparently self-indulgent; in fact, it 'constitures a site of internal danger to the norms of bourgeois-liberal civility' (214) . The danger this 'cultural-politics' (215) poses is indissociable from the hopeful example it offers those who question f these norms: recognizing and cultivating this and other such practices will allow ' us to envision 'politicalJsociety inJamaica not as a domain centered on the state and the competition for its offices, but as a field of interdependent pluralities governed simultaneously by a desire for settled identities and by an unsettling genealogical ethic of pluralization' (217). 5

Foucault's unsettling insistence on pluralization is what attracts Scott to him: it allows for the questioning of the settled identities demanded by a 'politics of Fanonian revolution', no less than by that of the 'liberal state'. Scott is careful to insist that Foucault was not, per se, against conventional ideas of political liberation (such as Fanon's), but simply that he was sceptical as to whether the political processes leading to the overthrow of a colonial regime 'are adequate to the task of constructing the ethical practices of freedom throuah which the

. Q

postcolonial community is to be fashioned' (206). For Foucault, Scott explains,

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the inadequacy of these processes lies in the limits they impose, since the 'affirmative consensus' (the 'totalization') upon which politics depends necessarily involves the 'constitution of a boundary'. As Foucault well knows, 'every political order produces an exclusion' (207). Foucault's concern, then, is to question those limits, to put these exclusions into question: 'to pose, as he says, a certain number of questions to politics - genealogical questions, in effect, about the edges that such a totalization excludes, the otherness it produces, and the difference it seeks to obliterate as the condition of its identity' (207). It is not just within the field of cultural studies as practised in today's academy that such a concern with 'edges' must sound not only inviting but commonsensical. Who could dispute the relevance of these admirable questions (especially when they are accompanied by Arnoldian jibes against the philistine 'brown' middle classes in Jamaica and their self-seeking competition for state office)? What is there to say against the virtues of 'an ethos of agonistic respect for pluralizations of subaltern difference' (224)? Who would deny the need for multiplying 'the relational identities that can be enacted or practiced, the subjectivities that can appear as constituent members of a pluralizable, public political sphere' (218)? Scott's Foucauldian, but also Glissantian (see Chapter 7), emphasis on 'relational identities' and a plurality of interdependent subjectivities seems an altogether appropriate supplement to an exhausted Fanonianism (or even a bourgeois liberalism) in need of revitalization.

It is, however, one thing 'to lodge a dissonant reminder to ourselves that any such decision as the Fanonian politics demands produces an exclusion' (219), and quite another, as I suggested in Chapter 1, to avoid the violent production of otherness in the active pursuit of social justice. The Foucauldian agenda Scott embraces in his 1999 essay, inasmuch as it calls for implementation, cannot escape the exclusions that come with any and all forms of political engagement, as we can see, for instance, in the glaring irony that results from his contrast between Fanon's 'demand for an immediate resolution of the normative question of a new form of political community' with Foucault's 'demand for an indefinite deferral of any such resolution in order to gain space - to buy time - for the work of ethicality' (200). Who, one cannot help asking, is going to make possible this gaining of space and buying of time? Who is going to make, much less be in a position to consider making, the choice to defer indefinitely the sorts of choices that constitute politics, Fanonian or otherwise? Presuming one actually has the power to legislate such a choice, how is it going to affect all those who find it an irresponsible or dangerous choice? What other forms of identity are excluded by the 'relational identities' in the name of which this choice is to be made? How are these exclusions any different from those that characterized the 'political' in the bad old sense of the word? These are the sorts of questions, regarding choice, power, and implementation, upon which any such 'vision of an ethical-political field of pluraJizations of identity\difference' (220) must founder.

Scott does, one should point out, gesture in the direction of these questions when he notes, very much in passing, that this pluralized field will be 'agonistic'

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rather than simply harmonious (220). This sort of appeal to 'an ethos of agonistic respect' is a favourite refrain of those who champion 'deep pluralism', and who insist that it 'periodically must be defended militantly', at those times when 'the-limit point is reached' and 'pluralism itself is threatened by powerful unitarian forces that demand the end of pluralism in the name of defeating "relativism'', "nihilism'', or "rootlessness"' (Connolly, 2005, 123, 65, 67). Such appeals, however, do not resolve the problem so much as deepen it, as one can gauge from Slavoj Zizek's critique of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's post-Marxist adherence to a 'pluralistic order' that would preserve agonism and yet, happily, do away with real antagonism (see Zifok, 2004, 88-102). Laclau/ Mouffe's pluralistic world of 'antagonism subordinated to differences', Zizek rightly points out, is one in which there can be no good answers to the fundamental question of how one evaluates and chooses between different political options (what, for instance, are the decisive criteria that make 'radical democracy' the politics of choice for these pluralizing post-Marxists?). Such decisive answers are ruled out of the non-adversarial world of differences described by the likes of William Connolly or Laclau/Mouffe, and it is this exclusion (ironically enough, the exclusion of exclusions) that forms the blind spot of any and all arguments for pluralism as a politics.

Now, Laclau/Mouffe's theory of democratic hegemony at the very least acknowledges the necessity of the political, while trying to downplay the exclusionary violence through which its distinctions between friends and enemies are made - the imperative task for these post-Marxist thinkers being to 'envisage forms of construction of we/they compatible with a pluralistic order' (Mouffe, 2005, 115). By contrast, notwithstanding Scott's occasional references to the 'agonistic' nature of the pluralized 'ethical-political field' that he conceives of as an alternative to the 'nationalist-modern vision of the postcolonial state', in the 1999 essay he is able to hold forth the possibility of deferring the necessity of the political precisely through the conceptual legerdemain that allows him to speak of such a field as the 'ethical-political' in the first place. He can paper over the blind spot of pluralism by resorting time and again to variations of this hybrid term, the 'ethical-political', which seemingly dissolves the obvious differ-1 ences between an ethical attitude (that privileges inclusion) and political action' (that requires exclusion). Throughout this article, Scott presents his reader with a variety of phrases, based on Foucault's own discussion of 'politics as ethics' (qtd. 207), that mediate between the openness of ethics and the closure of politics: not only 'politics-as-ethics' (208), 'the project of politics/ethics' (219), and so on, but also, and crucially for our argument here, 'cultural-politics', as when he claims (giving a specific content to the 'ethical practices of freedom' that he envisions.flourishing in the future) that ruud bwai self-fashioning exemplifies a 'subaltern cultural-politics' that can lead to 'a fundamental reimagining of political subjectivity and of the modalities of political community' (215). In the 1999 essay, the ethical and the (subaltern) cultural perform exactly the same hybridizing work, adding on to the political ('politics/ethics', 'cultural-politics') and thereby apparently redeeming it from itself (from, that is, the exclusionary

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assumptions that are as basic to middle-class liberalism as they are to Fanonian anti-colonialism). As should be abundantly clear from my discussion in the previous paragraphs, though, the work such hybridizing phrases perform is purely rhetorical, drawing attention away from the incommensurability of the two things ostensibly being joined together by the hyphen or the slash. While the ethical project of helping 'illuminate the Otherness at the heart of order, the difference that identity invariably denies' (219), can undoubtedly serve as a useful reminder of the injustices sanctioned by all political orders, conservative or revolutionary, this project cannot be translated into progressive political action without falling back into the very thing it warns us against: that is the double bind glossed over in Scott's repeated invocations of such seductive phrases as 'cultural-politics' or 'politics/ethics'.

Jn the final analysis, Scott's essay offers us no politics at all, despite its promise of somehow welding Fanon to Foucault. It is the Foucauldian supplement that takes centre-stage here, with Fanon (and the closure of ~e political) getting shunted to and even beyond the margins. My larger argument in this Incursion is that such a marginalization of the political is precisely what characterizes the ostensibly progressive fields of cultural and postcolonial studies, which assume that culture (and the differences upon which it is founded) somehow directly translates into politics (and the in-difference, as Hallward would say, without which it is nonsensical to contemplate the idea of equality and justice for a/Q.

In Conscripts of Modernity, Scott openly comes to grips with this problem. Indeed, in the Preface to the book, Refashioning Futures, in which 'Fanonian Futures?' was included, he had already gone some way toward identifying this problem. In that Preface, Scott identifies postcolonial criticism as an exemplary form of'cultural criticism', and points out that, as such, it

operated through a certain suspension or deferral of the question of the political, a deferral of the question of the renewal of a theory of politics. Or, rather, postcoloniality operated by implicitly occupying the horizon of nationalist politics already defined by the anticolonial project. It is, in a sense, precisely this deferral of the question of the political that made possible a sustained interrogation of the internal structures of the cultural reason of colonialist knowledges. (14)

Postcolonial criticism, in other words, offered a useful epistemological, and thence ethical, purchase on the post/colonial condition; what it failed to do; by not 'giv[ingj up th[el story of radicalism and conservatism and find(ing! another whose vocabulary distributes its distinctions differently across the field of the political' (19), was to grapple head-on with 'the question of the political'. 'Fanonian Futures?' purports to do just that, and yet, as we have seen. it ends up providing but one more version of the same old ethos of suspension and deferral it sought to transcend; the 'question of the political' is finessed , through 'radical' evocations of 'cultural-politics', and what we are left with is nothing more (or less) than 'sustained interrogations' of the very thing that was supposedly to have been renewed.

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When he comes to write Conscripts of Modernity, Scott has become aware of the extent to which he flagrantly failed, in an essay like 'Fanonian Futures?', to put an end to the suspension and deferral that he had, in the Preface to Refashioning Futures, identified with postcolonial (and more broadly, cultural) criticism. This claim is not mere speculation on my part. At the end of an interview with Stuart Hall that was conducted shortly after the publication of Conscripts, Scott himself notes that Foucault is a 'less pervasive' influence in Conscripts than in Refashioning Futures; he openly admits that 'ethicality alone won't produce politics' and therefore 'Foucault has to be supplemented' (see Hall, 2005). For those who might have placed some hope in his advocacy of a Foucauldian 'cultural-politics' in an essay like 'Fanonian Futures?', this is a troubling admission, but it certainly addresses (and confirms the relevance of) the argument I have made in this Incursion. Foucault is, to be sure, by no means absent from Conscripts: the author of 'What Is Enlightenment?' remains the book's guiding ethical light, providing insight into how 'to cultivate an ethos more open to our ambiguous and paradoxical (and at any rate permanent) relation to the Enlightenment' (180). But, in contrast to the earlier essay, no easy translation from an open ethics to the closure of politics is envisioned in this book; Toussaint becomes the ethical figure par excellence, the modernist intellectual supremely aware of the contingent nature of the choices with which he is faced, and yet this awareness will prove of no help to him in the necessary act of making political choices. No amount of ethical self-fashioning can help Toussaint when faced with impossible options - options that entail the necessity of pausing, as it were, from pausing, despite one's awareness of the ethical untenability of any such deferment of deferral.

Scott's focus in Conscripts thus remains on the ethical moment, but as he now represents this moment it is tragically detached from any and all cultural practices and political decisions. It is precisely this gap between the ethical and the political, and the irrelevance of the cultural - be it popular or otherwise -when it comes to bridging this gap, that Scott inscribes in the final pages of Conscripts, where Toussaint, facing up to an 'insurmountable conundrum', is held forth as the very model of what 'we' should be, and yet is also said to havt made the wrong choice, the choice of liberation over freedom. (This choice, of course, can only be identified as 'wrong' from a certain political perspective, one that Scott does not openly articulate in Conscripts; such an authoritative perspective on Toussaint's choices would be one that feels, impossibly, entitled to stand its ground, something the advocates of pluralism have an understandable difficulty doing, as Zifok points out in his commentary on Ladau/Mouffe's theory of hegemony, which 'is ultimately a "reflexive" theory, not a theory of political action but a theory of why every action is haunted by an inner impossibility, and ultimately has to fail' (2004, 96).6)

As I have suggested, the tragic dilemma that Scott leaves us with in Conscripts, as opposed to his earlier article, might well be seen as a variation on the deconstructionist insight that (to quote Spivak's gloss of Derrida's Politics of Friendship) 'political decisionism must negotiate with the undecidable' (2003a, 30). It is

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certainly not my purpose here to foreclose upon the possibilities that such negotiations may open up, at least for those willing to take the chance that the aporetic relation between ethics and politics, between the undecidable and the decided, is not simply a proven dead end - as one might assume, say, from Terry Eagleton's dismissive account of a Derridean ethics 'bathed in an aura of religiosity' (2004, 154) - but, rather, a still (un)viable point of entry to a more just future that is, perhaps and always, 'to come'. That we might look forward to a departure from the same old exclusionary constructions of the political is the (empty) horizon toward which any deconstructionist cannot help looking, and I am enough of one myself not to forego the ready pleasures of appealing to the undecidable that hauntingly anticipates and awaits our every political decision.

In drawing this Incursion to a close, though, I would, rather than look forward to a deconstructed future, like to tum back to the anti-colonial (Fanonian, tricontinentalist, etc.) past that Scott is urging us to think ourselves after. And as part of this backward turn, I need to indulge, ever so briefly, in a retrospective glance at my own earlier books. lfl have lingered so long over Scott's work here, it is not merely because the shift from 'Fanonian Futures?' to Conscripts of Modernity so vividly draws attention to the dead end of 'cultural-politics', thereby providing a nicely cautionary preface to my own efforts in the following two chapters to bring a cultural-studies-type perspective to bear on the canon of Franco-Caribbean literature. It is also because the tragic emphasis of Conscripts takes me back to my own insistence, in past books, on the paradoxical value of 'ideas without a future': the exhausted project of exoticism, which cannot help coming after what it must come before (Exotic Memories); the insular affirmations of jdentity that continue to haunt us in an ever more creolized world (Islands

~ \

and Exiles). Scott's account of'the deadend of the hopes that defined the futures of the anticolonial and (early) postcolonial projects' (209) is very familiar territory for someone who two decades ago embraced 'the tragedy of exoticism' in Joseph Conrad's novels, and who, charting the collapse of Pier Paolo Pasolini's tiersmondiste faith (the exoticizing double of Fanon's 'anticolonial Romance'), once suggested that 'it is perhaps time to settle for a "tragic beauty", to live with the impossibility of our desire for an end to modernity' (Bongie, 1991, 216). Even the cadences of Scott's 'horizon of futures that are not, any longer, ours to imagine, let alone seek after and inhabit' (2004, 29) brought back to me memories of 'an unviable path leading back, once again, to a world that is no longer ours - and that is ours to remember' (Bongie 1991, 143). In short, I feel a great affinity for the tragic sensibility Scott advocates in Conscripts, and it is this intimate sense of connection that has been the primary spur to my engagement with his work.

However, the evident contrast between those two· lost worlds that are 'no longer ours' should point toward a significant difference in our approaches to tragedy, one that is worth mentioning here, in closing, because it allows me to address one last major conceptual problem with Scott's book. In my own work, I have always insisted on the uses that can be made of a past that

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is no longer imaginable as present - that is no more (or less) than a memory, a phantasm that is 'ours ·to remember' in a world from which it has been once and for all excluded as a real possibility. I have insisted on the potential benefits of returning to the old, exhausted stories, in a 'commemorative inventio' (1991, 185) of what can no longer, if it ever could, be taken for real, and I have gone so far as to suggest that such commemorative gestures, which 'fight for the conservation of what no longer exists, of what is now irrevocably absent and yet absolutely necessary', might well be the cornerstone of a 'politics of absence' (f991, 227-28). That my championing of a 'politics of absence' involves some version of that conflation of the ethical and the political at work in· Scott's 'Fanonian Futures?' is all too likely.7 What is more to the point, however, is that Scott, notwithstanding his frequent comments regarding how the remains of the colonial past haunt the postcolonial present, fails even to raise the possibility- a rather obvious one, it strikes me - ofreading the revised version of The Blackjacobins as a commemorative gesture, a memorial that weakly (re)inscribes a political project whose effective purchase on reality has for its author become entirely questionable.

Leaving aside the curious fact that Scott says nothing about the development of James's thinking after the tragic insights of 1963 (did he remain true to this vision for the next twenty-five years of his life? can one speak of a posttragic James, and if so, how did he give expression to tragedy's aftermath?), the most obvious problem with Scott's account of the second, revised edition of The Black jacobins is that he quite simply fails to theorize its existence as a hybrid text. This failure stems, I would argue, from his insistence on there being a clear progression from one historical 'problem-space', and an 'ensemble' of questions and answers appropriate to that space, to another, in which those old questions and answers have lost their cogency. Insisting on this 'temporal dimension' of the 'problem-space' (4), arguing that 'different historical conjunctures' constitute 'different conceptual-ideological problem-spaces' (7), is at once critical common sense (for it is indeed beyond dispute that 'problems are not timeless' [4] and that the 'strategic value' of responding to them, or not, will hence shift over time) and yet far too programmatic in its emphasis on the r sharpness of these differences. This emphasis - an echo, one suspects, of the early Foucault's desire to make sense of history through an appeal to epistemic shifts, a de.sire that does to time what exoticism does to space, putting radical alterity in the place of overlapping, time-lagged relationality (see Bongie, 2005) - produc.es a reading of the revised Black jacobins in which the two modes of emplotment, romantic (1938) and tragic (1963), are simply at odds with one another, with the latter being the sole interpretive framework appropriate for those who find themselves 'star[ing] into the bleak face of the various deadended modernities constructed by the postcolonial state' (115). In making this argument, Scott retains a certain allegiance to the 'progressivist narrative' of 'overcoming' against which he is ostensibly arguing in Conscriptsi it is no small irony, in a book that stresses the untimeliness of any and all ~uch narratives, that 'romance' so readily gives way to 'tragedy' in his formulation of what is the most

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appropriate approach to our present circumstances. For Scott, the postcolonial critic comes, once and for all, after Bandung, and is thus called upon to occupy new conceptual territory, to explore an entirely different problem-space from her anti-colonial predecessors. j

By contrast, the memorial lesson I would be inclined to glean from a hybrid text such as the revised edition of The Blackjacobins is that while we are doubt: less called upon to position ourselves differently in relation to the revolutionary story it tells, this 'enfeebled and exhausted' narrative may well retain a certain melancholic value for us today- even if the price one pays for refusing simply to jettison the 'passionate certainties' that once made such an impossible story possible is to allow oneself to (continue to) be infected by, as $(Cott puts it, 'the nostalgia and clinging resentment that attaches to the fading narrative of anticol_onial Romance' (2004, 207). james's 1963 text in no way escapes this nostalgia and this resentment; it may, however, be precisely the vexed confrontation with these unappealing qualities, rather than their mere surpassing, that gives his fading narrative, if not new life, then an after-life that can haunt and provoke those who - mistakenly, no doubt- still aspire to build the twin towers of natioa·al sovereignty and inter-national democracy in a world from which they are so tragically absent. James's 1963 revision of The Blackjacobins demands to be read as a double text, one that leads not Uust) forward to the 'congealing context of our postcolonial time' but back to the past, and the memory of a place - be it called Haiti or Bandung - where the future made sense. To seek after this place is the perhaps not entirely tragic challenge, the productively melancholic venture, with whkh Jame.s's hybrid text confronts us, reviving doubtful memories of a future in which the tired old anti-colonial project of social justice will have remained as imperative to those of.us for wbom it is now strangely unintelligible as it once was for those who first made it seem so memorably possible.

Notes

'Unite et lutte du penseur et du vendeur. Tout philosophe porte en lui un "nouveau philosophe", qu'il ne peut ni repudier ni accueillir tout a fait. Ce lutin piaffant, ebouriffe, barometrique, toujours pret a placer son nom au_ bas de la derniere nouvelle, souriant a la camera sa petition en main, c'est a la 'fois son reflet et sa grimace. Qu'il ouvre grand sa demeure, le philosophe renonce a la pensee. Qu'il lui claque la porte au nez, ii sentira le renferme et finira fruit sec. Une seule issue: l'entrebailler, histoire de jouer au chat et a la souris. Le piquant de la fable, c'est que nul ne peut predire qui est qui. Un intellectuel: deux animaux en un, on ne sait jamais lequel attrapera l'autre.'

_2 Fqr a pe.rtinenr reading of James's trajectory between 1938. and 1963, see Timothy Brennan's account of 'the post-1950 "cultural James'" ( 1997, 208-58).

3 I am alluding here, very loosely, to Joseph Roach's account of surrogation as a process of ongoing response in a communiry to 'actual or perceived vacancies oCOJr[ingJ in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric. Into the cavities created

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Futures Past?

by loss through death or other forms of departure ... survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates' (1996, 2).

4 For strong criticisms of Walcott along these lines, see the chapter devoted to bim in Ian Strachan's Paradise and Planmtion, where he argues that 'Walcott's model of liberation is far too individualist in nature and evades ·socioeconomic and political realities' (2002, ·209), and notes that 'his propensity for envisioning escapist, spiritual l.iberations is ... linked to his tendency toward afTecting an apolitical stance, and to his abhorrence. of violence' (216).

5 We find an ostensibly similar argument on behalf of Foucautdian ethics in George Yudke's Expediency of Culture, where he promotes the virtues of'a reflexive practice of self-management vis-a-vis models (or what Bakhtin called "voices" and "perspectives") imposed by a given society or cultural formation' (2003, 38-39). However, Yuaice proves far less euphoric than Scott because rather than adopt the inside' outside model that tacitly generates the latter's account, with its opposition between a policed popular culture and those who police it, Yudice's emphasis - an incipiently tragic one- is on a single 'rulture of expediency' that occupies the entire 'force field' of national life, 'absorb(ingj and cancel[lingj out hitherto prevailing distinctions among high culture, anthropological, and mass culture definitions' (4). If Scott's 1999 article to some extent demonstrates the tendency of 'rultural studies scholars' to conceive of 'cultural agency ... as if a particular individual or group expression or identity in itself leads to change' (Yudice, 2003, 3), his 2004 book by contrast abounds with statements that echo Yudice's bluntly tragic assertion that 'there is no outside ofinstitutionality' (317; e.g., 'there is no overcoming th[ el ambiguous inheritance of enlightenment' [Scott, 2004, 175]).

6 The 'reflexive' nature of Ladau/Mouffe's pluralism, Zizek contends, means that they are.in no position to give decisive answers to 'elementary questions· such as 'What, in concrete terms, would [al new leftist vision be, with regard to its content ... Where is a better leftist global solution to our present predicament to be found?' (2004, 97). As we have seen, when it comes to the question of content, Scott's Conscripts is equally at a loss to make concrete suggestions about the 'possible futures' that might flourish were we to abandon 'ariticolonial Romance'.

7 What more, in other words, is there to a 'politics of absence' than the vaguely Foucauldian act of self-fashioning - and the (in)decisively Derridean future it anticipates - that I applauded in the following sentence: 'The work of these fin de siecle thinkers [Conrad, D'Annunzioj confronts us with a supremely ethical decision: to occupy the scene of decadence rather than attempting to overcome it; to abandon f all hope for a radical cure to a malaise that has taken on global proportions; and to (re)create strategies for livingwith(in) this unending decline' (1991, 186)?

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"Futures Past? David Scott's Black Jacobins and the Dead End of Cultural Politics" (2008)

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Transcript of "Futures Past? David Scott's Black Jacobins and the Dead End of Cultural Politics" (2008)