The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World.
The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World.
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DOI：
10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300318
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发表时间：
2008-02
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
A. Robinson
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
A. Robinson
当代政治理论2008年7后殖民世界。本书的大部分内容包括一系列关于“政治社会”形成的讲座和相关文章，以及一些关于全球化、“反恐战争”和城市清洗的额外短文，使本书达到了目前的长度。这本书是必要的阅读，以了解如何排除，往往运作以外的非法，有时获得一个声音，在现代国家，虽然有一些问题，如何查特吉设想社会运动和国家之间的关系。书中提出的中心论点是查特吉所说的“政治社会”的存在。查特吉在现代国家的两种动力之间构建了一个二元结构：一方是理论、民族主义、无约束的序列、公民、同质的国家空间和公民社会;另一方是实践、治理、有约束的序列、人口、异质的社会空间和政治社会。借鉴本尼迪克特·安德森的理论，他区分了无约束序列（unbound serialities）和有约束序列（bound serialities），前者是在同质的空闲时间中运作的、具有民族认同感的想象共同体，后者是通过人口普查等数学手段和针对特定群体的治理策略构建的（第5页）。然而，他反对安德森，认为后者构成了现代社会的结构。“人们只能想象自己处于空的同质时间中;他们并不生活在其中。空的同质时间是资本的乌托邦时间。"自法国大革命以来，民族主义通过认同人民、民族和国家，成为国家权力合法化的核心（第27页）。但它是不可持续的，因为它需要某种人和社团--在社会中拥有适当的、法律的地位的公民（而不是臣民），以及作为这些公民的社团的公民社会（第33页）。在实践中，治理依赖于人口类别-承认诸如种族、宗教和种姓等变量，以及生活在合法边界之外或边界上的群体-以便指导社会福利和社会控制项目。因此，在实践领域，公民被“人口”所取代。即使在西方，带有监控网络、工具主义和不参与精神的政府心态也已经取代了公民身份，成为政治的核心。在后殖民世界中，它实际上先于民族国家（pp。34-35）。人民没有被排除在政治之外或国家的影响之外，但他们也没有被视为公民或民间社会的成员。相反，它们被视为应受控制或照顾的实体（第38页）。因此，大众的政治经验是一种作为被动的、支离破碎的政治而受制于政府的经验，而不是作为公民的经验。因此，像印度这样的政府试图建立他们所声称的基础，将人口转变为公民（第39页）。这个现代主义项目的一个问题是，存在着整个人口群体，他们的社会生活依赖于违法行为--擅自占地者、街头小贩、逃票者、获得免费水电的人--以及
Contemporary Political Theory 2008 7 postcolonial world. The majority of the book consists of a series of lectures and related pieces on the formation of ‘political society’, with a few additional short pieces on globalization, the ‘war on terror’and urban cleansing bringing the book to its current length. The book is necessary reading for understanding how the excluded, often operating outside illegality, sometimes obtain a voice in modern states, though there are some problems with how Chatterjee conceives the relationship between social movements and the state. The central thesis presented in the book is the existence of what Chatterjee terms ‘political society’. Chatterjee constructs a binary between two dynamics within the modern state—on one side, theory, nationalism, unbound serialities, citizens, a homogeneous national space, and civil society; on the other, practice, governmentality, bound serialities, populations, a hererogeneous social space, and political society. Drawing on Benedict Anderson, he differentiates unbound serialities—the open-ended imaginary communities of national identity, operating in homogeneous empty time—from bound serialities constructed through mathematical devices such as censuses and by strategies of governmentality targeting particular groups (p. 5). Against Anderson, however, he asserts that the latter form the texture of modern society.‘People can only imagine themselves in empty homogeneous time; they do not live in it. Empty homogeneous time is the utopian time of capital’(p. 6). Nationalism has become the central legitimation of state power since the French Revolution by identifying people, nation and state (p. 27). But it is unsustainable because it requires a certain kind of person and association—the citizen (rather than subject) who has a proper and legal place in society, and civil society as the association of such citizens (p. 33). In practice, governance rests on population categories—recognition of variables such as ethnicity, religion and caste, and of groups living outside or on the borders of legality—in order to direct projects of social welfare and social control. In the realm of practice, therefore, citizens are replaced with ‘populations’. Even in the west, governmentality, with its networks of surveillance and its ethos of instrumentalism and non-participation, has displaced citizenship at the heart of politics. In the postcolonial world, it actually preceded the nation-state (pp. 34–35). Populations are not excluded from politics or outside the state’s reach, but nor are they treated as citizens or as members of civil society. Rather, they are seen as entities to be controlled or looked after (p. 38). Hence, the popular experience of politics is an experience of being subject to governmentality as passive and fragmentary politics, not of being citizens. Governments such as India thus seek to construct the very basis they claim, to transform populations into citizens (p. 39). One problem for this modernist project is the existence of entire populationgroups whose social life depends on transgression of illegality—squatters, street traders, fare-dodgers, people who obtain free water and electricity—and