Mbembe’s provocative essay brings together a set of primarily French theoretical perspectives on power and spectacle to think through the analyt- ics of what he calls “the postcolony” through the example of Cameroon.1 Already the controversies are legible: can Foucault and Bakhtin be used to describe the postcolonial situation, given that they theorize from within the colonial discourse of France and represent what some might see as a further expression of colonial hegemony? To use such theory to describe postcolo- niality may well constitute a recolonization of the postcolony, and ought this to be the direction for social and political theory? Is there a “postcolony” that can be described in its abstract singularity? Is this an untenable abstrac- tion imposed upon a set of diverse, if overlapping, cultural and historical sites of postcoloniality which, taken in their geopolitical specificity, resist the kind of theoretical generalization thlat Mbembe supplies? And if Cameroon and Togo become the “exannples” of a “postcolony” de- scribed/produced through the works of Foucault and Bakhtin, does that not represent a colonizing subordination of the example to the type at the level of theory, an epistemological ruse of power, that ought to come into ques- tion?

“The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony,” Public Culture 4/2 (Spring 1992): 1-30. My thanks to Wendy Brown and Gail Hershatter for reading Mbembe’s article with me and for their instructive comments.

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Now it may appear that I raise these questions in order to pursue the an- swers to them, but I want merely to ask after the presuppositions that condi- tion them as questions at all. What impresses me in Mbembe’s essay is his willingness to retheorize both resistance and opposition through considering the ways in which power compels its subjects ritualistically to perform, within and through the mundane practices of civil society, a ratification of its own spectacular excess. Mbembe considers not only the way in which power lays claim to its subjects through coercion and violence, but how that “coercive” power compels its subjects to rearticulate that power, to confer grandeur on that power, and to do this through a convivial participation in (simulation of‘) that power. This is not an effort to locate a site of resistance outside power; moreover, the power that is delineated is itself already multi- ply situated, diversified from the start, so that even the cornmandement is not a stable notion of sovereignty; on the contrary, this is a commandement that governs to the extent that it is perpetually and extravagantly ratified, and whose extravagance and theatricality is central to its operation.

Mbembe describes how this very process of ratification becomes itself the site for the subtle de-authorization of state power that takes place through its authorizing rituals, how the vulgarity of the production is ex- posed, how the language of the ritual is altered through intonation and se- mantic shifts. And this kind of deauthorizing subversion which takes place in and through the exercise of ratification re-authorizes that power at the same time that it exposes its vulnerability, “kidnapping” or “recapturing” some of the power it is supposed to confer on the cornmandement. Later he will argue that “confrontation occurs,” not so much in the Bakhtinian notion of parody, but in the improvisation that is produced in response to the commandement’s imperative to simulate, a response which takes that law seriously even as it exploits its own power of ratification to ridicule the law. In other words, this is simulation that both ridicules and reinstates that commanding power, and which participates in power through its rituals of ratification; this is not a parody which dethrones or displaces the law that it simulates. In Mbembe’s words, here “signs are recaptured and reshaped . . . in the refabulization of power” (1 1).

I would suggest that this kind of recapture of power, this subversion in and through ratification, might be read as part of Mbembe’s own textual strategies in the “citing” of the French theorists, in the reworking and rearticulation of their theoretical apparatus. Could the following description

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of the postcolonial subject provided by Mbembe also describe his own theo- retical enterprise:

faced with this plurality of legitimizing rubrics, institutional forms, rules, are- nas, and principles of combination, the postcolonial “subject” mobilizes not just a single “identity,” but several fluid identities which, by their very nature, must be constantly “revised” in order to achieve maximum instrumentality and efficacy as and when required (5).

Perhaps “the postcolony” is itself precisely such an extravagant and im- possible sign, one which, by virtue of its impossible unity, cannot describe the “examples” by which its power is nevertheless illustrated. And though Mbembe works Bakhtin and Foucault, “ratifying” their cultural hegemony, he also works between them, destabilizing the ultimate authority of both.

That said, I would like to consider what limits the kinds of descriptions that Mbembe offers, and because I do not write from knowledge of the African contexts of which he writes, I will consider alternate readings of the commandement which his descriptions imply, but which he himself does not pursue.

Mbembe qualifies his description of the cornmandement and the ways in which it compels ratification with the following observation: the postcolo- nial subject is “made visible” when (a) daily rituals ratify the commande- men? as a fetish and (b) the subject is produced as homo Zudens. Implicit here is the capacity of the subject, through reworking the simulative strategy that the state incites and compels, to, as Mbembe puts it, “travesty the metaphor meant to glorify state power” (7). The symbolic means by which this travesty operates center, he claims, on the disfiguration and defilement of the commanding body as it is theatricalized and fetishized through public ritual. Although Mbembe considers the meaning of the fetish as that which “aspires to sacralization” (15) and autonomy, he appears to prefer the meaning given the term by Baudrillard (a practice of simulation that exposes magical thinking) over Freud (a penis-substitute in the face of maternal cas- tration).2 A consideration of the latter might link the lure of the fetish to the body in its alternating defilement and idealization through castration and thus raise the question of specifically gendered meanings. This seems cru- cial given that it is the theatricalization of the masculinist body through

See Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1991).

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which the state is ritualistically ratified, and that the rituals of ratification and ritual may also be markedly masculinist?

With or without Freud, however, we can ask whether the fetishization of orifices and genital organs can be understood apart from their relation to gender; indeed, can the very meaning of defilement be dissociated from feminization? The Congolese example that Mbembe cites from Sony Labou Tansi figures the monarch as unable to respond with appropriate virility to the “strong, delivering thick thighs” and “essential and bewitching ass” of girls. Mbembe reads this as a mocking of the autocrat’s “natural member,” what he will later call “anxious virility,” but in this description there is, of course, a double-figuration, one of the monarch, and another of women, synecdochically collapsed into thighs and ass, demanding and ready, and yet also devious and compelling, “bewitching.” But perhaps most signifi- cant is the use of “essential” here, for why is it that this ass would be essen- tial, for whom, for what purpose?

Mbembe restricts his analysis to what appears to him to be most salient about the description: the commandement’s own taste for lecherous living and its focus on the (gender-neutral) body. In particular, Mbembe first claims, it is “the mouth, the penis, and the belly” (9) which become the signs or metaphors through which state power is travestied, but then he generalizes that it is “the body that eats and drinks,” defecates and farts; in this final set of concerns, then, we are asked to dwell on a body part which is not named as salient, but on pages 10 and 11 circumscribed as essential, namely, the anus. How are we to link the “essential” anus of the women above to the fetishization of the ruler’s anus?

Mbembe follows Bakhtin in reading bodily parts and functions apart from the gender and sexual taboos that are invested in them;4 further, this putatively gender-neutral body appears to be a common preoccupation of

Freud argues that the fetish is Rot only a penis-substitute, but a substitute for the phallus that the mother is imagined to have prior to the ‘discovery’ of her castration (Standard Edition 21: 203). Baudrillard credits the practice of fetishization with the capac- ity to expose magical thinking.

One might read Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1986) and Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1966) to consider how public discourses on bodily contours, what is imbibed, and what excreted, are ways of negotiating social taboos on what qualifies as “dirt,” (i.e., as outside the social), and how the production of the outside of the body sus- tains cultural norms regarding appropriate sexual exchanges.

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“power,” where “power” is defined as postcolonial to the extent that it is not specifically African:

defecation, copulation, pomp and sumptuousr~ess are all classical ingredients in the production of power, and.. .there is nothing specifically African about it (1 1).

Here bodily functions are not only relieved of their gendered meanings, but their racialized ones as well. Mbembe not only wants to claim a specificity for “the postcolony” which is distinguished from the specificities of cultural and political geography and history, but he will then seek recourse to those very specificities to illustrate the autonomy of the “postcolony” in its organi- zational structure. He separates the analytics of power, the workings of the postcolonial simulacrum from historical and cultural analysis, and yet he can only demonstrate or prove his case by revealing the dependency of the con- cept of “the postcolony” on the specificities from which it differentiates it- self. Here “Cameroon” will be the examplle, as, he claims, Togo once was. What makes these sites “exemplary,” and what keeps the “postcolony” dis- tinct from these African sites of its exemplification? Further, does the radical separation of “the postcolony” from the “African” de-racialize the postcolo- nial so that there is no way to trace the raci;alization of the body that the state both symbolizes and compels?

Oddly, perhaps, this point and the one about gender and sexuality can be made through a reconsideration of the centrality of the symbolization of the orifice in state theatrics. Following the remark cited above, Mbembe maintains: “the obsession with orifices ha:; to be seen as due to the fact that in the postcolony the comrnandernent is constantly engaged in projecting an image both of itself and of the world . . . the cornmandement itself aspires to be a cosmogony” (12). The effort of the cornmandement to install itself as cosmogony requires hiding its own contingency; the vulgar references to orifices, then, are meant not only to expose the vulgarity (over and against the grandeur) of the cornmandement itself, but to desacralize the body of the ruler as fetish, i.e. significantly to reduce iits size. And yet here I would sug- gest that the figurative collapse of the ruler to his anus may also be a way of underscoring his own penetrability, a way of admitting the culturally marked “feminine” into the self-sufficient masculine ideal; the cornrnande- ment seeks to produce itself not only as a cosmogony, but as a kind of phallic puissance which only penetrates, and is itself never penetrated. Its capacity for penetration is thus mocked, as in the parody of the Congolese

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ruler who cannot measure up to his own expectations. In the following fig- ure that Mbembe cites from Sony Labou Tansi, but does not read, the in- dustrialized phallus (the phallus as figure and instrument for an industrial- ized state) requires women to be the repository of its waste: to command is to pass one’s time “pissing grease and rust into the backsides of young girls” (13-14). Here a certain industrial waste is figured as the ejaculatory product, whereby the phallus is figured as an industrial machine, and the “young girls” the cesspool.

Here the anus as receptacle is situated in and as the feminine, and yet we might read this as an effort to preempt or refute the synecdochical collapse of the ruler to his own anus which occurred when the commanding power of the commandement is brought to a vulgar simulation by his subjects. Is, then, the anus to be taken as a sign of feminization? And is this feminization of the anus mirrored and reversed in the vulgar simulation by those subjects who would reduce the ruler to his anus and the “sodomitic gesture’’ (lo)? The cornmandement requires the externalization of the anus as the feminine, a tenuous projection which is thus worked for its tenuousness by those who call into question the ruler’s power through figuring him as the anus itself. What the ruler and the subjects have in common, then, is the requirement to feminize the anus in order both to re-erect and to question the commande- ment as self-sufficient phallus. Here it is not any mode of self-sufficiency or grandeur that is at stake, and not any cosmogony, but one which is thor- oughly masculinist in its construction, and which requires the production of women either as waste or as lamenting spectator (26) in order to be main- tained. No accident, then, that the improvised exposure of that commande- ment will force the defilement of the law through its feminization, and the law will re-erect its own force through the defiling figuration of the femi- nine.

And yet the way in which the cornmandement is articulated through these gender dynamics calls to be read as a profoundly racialized discourse. For if colonization requires the sexualization of race (Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy), and the production of the African body as excessive sex- uality, then what is to exempt “the postcolony” from either of these consti- tutive dynamics? What qualifies as a “postcolonial subject”? Are strategies of ratification gender-specific? But, further, what kinds of gender and racial meanings compose the commandement itself, the ruling apparatus and its self-aggrandizing rituals? Which body is ratified, and with what racial for- mation as its constitutive history?

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We are asked by Mbembe to consider how it is that postcolonial subjects are compelled to simulate the dictates of the commandement, but we do not learn how the vocabulary of the commandement’s self-production and self- aggrandizement itself replays, recaptures, reinscribes the simulations of racialized sexuality commanded by colonial impositions of power. For, counter to its own cosmogonic claims, what the commandement will figure as power will not originate with itself; indeed, to credit the commandement with that power of originating its own meanings is, according to Mbembe’s own account, to lend the commandement the kind of authorizing power that it seeks to exact from its subjects. But what would it mean to understand the commandement itself as a simulation of a set of signs, symbols, narratives, with &verse and complex and complicitous origins, and that the originating power of the cornmandement, its cosmological effect as the origin of all things, can only be secured to the extent that its own origins are obscured? And to the extent that its own origins are themselves derived from the im- positions of colonial power, in particulaa, the French production of the African, the commandement will thereby conceal its derivative status as well. For the cornmandement is not only produced by the subjects who rat- ify its power, but also by a history embedded in traditions of racism, colo- nialism, and both colonial and non-colonial forms of misogyny. It is per- haps this genealogy which remains foreclosed from investigation when we take the commandement at its word and believe in its originating power, its cosmogonic function.

It may be that the state as fetish, derived from the Latinfacera, is always a fake, a substitute, and that it will be in the logic of the fetish, when it poses as an origin, to undermine its own originating claims. It was, I think, the psychoanalyst Maud Mannoni who claimed that the structure of fetishism was to claim, “I know, but still ,, . .”: I know all the reasons not to desire what I desire, but I desire it nonetheless, or I know that what I desire is repellent, but I desire it nonetheless. And further, that it is precisely be- cause it is unreasonable and repellent to desire what I desire that I desire it. It is perhaps the contradictory status of this desire that motivates what Mbembe has brilliantly outlined as the ritualized fabulation and ratification of the state in the postcolony. But if the vulgarizing of the law does not displace it, but happens in the course of its re-fetishization and re-enhance- ment (“I know, but still ...”), it may be that we might displace the fetish through some more thorough exposure of its genealogy. To ask from what complex site of cultural and historical origins did this “originating power”

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derive its source of power might supplement this impressive study of indis- cipline with a Foucaultian turn to a genealogy of the postcolonial.

Judith Butler is Professor of Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. Her re- cent publications include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and she has co-edited, with Joan Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992).