In this entry, I want to think about some conceptual relationships and effects. The concepts I want to work with are modernity, decolonization, and constitutions. On the one hand, there seems to be a clear relationship between constitutions and decolonization, namely, that as decolonization happens, emerging states draft constitutions as a part of the process of inter-state recognition and legitimation.[i] Furthermore, this process would, according to many accounts, be situated in a context of modernity, or at least one of modernization.
Fair enough. But what if our conceptual tools are less straightforward than this narrative suggests? And what if the effects and consequences of political, economic, social and legal actions taken according to the straightforward interpretation are more fraught, more significant than is perhaps realized? Does this give us a justification for digging a little deeper beneath our surface apprehensions, for rethinking meanings and practices?
Let’s start with modernity. What does this term mean? In the first place, it is an abstraction, which captures a sense of time, space, and culture history. But whose? And under what conditions? Modernity for a long time has had as its inclusive core “Europe,” or “the West,” and cosmopolitan-ness. These are themselves troubling abstractions, but more importantly, they are political (and polemical) arguments with wide scope, the content of which has shaped consciousness and material practices in importantly determinate ways. Race, rationality, progress… these are crucial syncretic elements of modernity, but only particular facets of them are constitutive of modernity.
Which brings us to another of our concepts: constitution, and its conjugates. In the short narrative above, a constitution is a thing, a textual document that emerges from socio-political process (such as a convention, a revolution, or the work of a committee) and establishes the basic structures and processes of government, gestures to the limits of government through the inclusion of protected rights, and creates, in some sense (a sense that is variegated) a charter for a state and, in many cases, a nation. Both the thing and the process, are important in this variety of the telling, marking at once the coming into being of a state and its guide for action.
But what if “constitution” imbricates more than just the state as historical being and agent? This is, in part, one dimension of the notion of “constitutional orders” that we seek to explore on this blog. What if, in other words, “constituting” also captures subjects, and articulations (or, perhaps better, co-articulations) of subject-state relations? Further, what if constituting also carries the implication of implanting qualitative values? Not merely notions of liberty, fairness, justice, but more quotidian, mundane, and less visible values, like propriety, essence, sameness, or the ideal. Constituting, in this sense, leads us to consider symbolic economies: circumstances, processes, conditions in which exchange, substitution, commensurability, and representation become our guides for analysis and thought.
This move, from constitution as a modern thing that creates and charters states (and nations) to constitution as a convergent process of social and symbolic formation that accepts and includes certain forms of being and modes of thinking and rejects or excludes other forms and modes, hits its stride in decolonization as, on the one hand, geopolitical reality, and on the other, precursor to the intellectual shifts represented by, for example, postmodernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and critical race, feminist, and subaltern approaches. The move takes us into the realm of reconsidering the relations of modernity, constitution, and decolonization, away from a linear and progressivist approach to history, becoming (of states and nations), and legitimacy, toward a concern for the production of difference and the role of differentiation (at multiple scales), the intensity and direction of social action, complex temporalities and contingent dynamics, and the philosophical issues of knowledge and being and the nature of social worlds: who is included, who isn’t, and what criteria are used to make determinations.
The binary of material : symbolic should not be understood as in opposition but as conjugated and reciprocal essences. Decolonization, too, should be understood in these mutual, constitutive terms. It does not mark a temporal process of before (colonized) and after (decolonized); or an ideological project of enlightenment in which the premodern (colonized) is supplanted by the modern or modernizing (decolonized); or a modern political project in which territories/nations move in geopolitical terms from a status of excluded (colonized) to included (decolonized/state). Rather, it marks one aspect of a process that is bound up with modernity, not as its other, but as its self, co-constitutive, and necessarily interpellating subjects in the larger, macroscalar processes of history, politics, sociality, markets. These processes are not simply the determining forces that create the subject or determine personality or constrain action, but are social fields, networks of relations through which ideas, resources, values, currencies, commodities, counterpoints, and alternatives are shared, exchanged, given new local valences, and subsequently participating in the formative processes of material and symbolic economies that underlie modernities, constitutionalisms, and decolonizations.
-asc..
[i] This is a general heuristic statement, and the reader should bear in mind that constitutions are also created in colonized spaces, and that the “direction” of constitutionalization is not a simple center to periphery movement.