Mitchell - Everyday Metaphors of Power

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Everyday Metaphors of PowerAuthor(s): Timothy MitchellSource: Theory and Society, Vol. 19, No. 5 (Oct., 1990), pp. 545-577Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657563

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Everydaymetaphors of power

TIMOTHY MITCHELLDepartment of Politics, New YorkUniversity

Across the different disciplines of social science, studies of power andresistance continue to be dominated by a single, master metaphor: thedistinction between persuading and coercing. The metaphor seems asclear as the difference between mind and body, to which of course itcorresponds. Power may operate at the level of ideas, persuading themind of its legitimacy, or it may work as a material force directly co-ercing the body. Max Weber founded his sociology of domination onthis Cartesian and Kantian distinction, and the distinction colonizedother theoretical territory in which it had been originally placed inquestion, including that of Marx. The metaphor survives today even inthe growing number of works that realize its limitations and formallyrenounce it.' This essay offers a critique of the metaphor, as a mis-leadingly narrow approach to understanding modern methods of domi-nation; at the same time, by offering an alternative understanding ofthose methods, it reveals the metaphor to be their unexamined pro-duct.There are at least two reasons for the metaphor's persistence. Onestems from the fact that it is indissociable from our everyday concep-tion of the person. We tend to think of persons as unique self-constitut-ed consciousneses living inside physically manufactured bodies.2 Assomething self-formed, this consciousness is the site of an originalautonomy. The notion of an internal autonomy of consciousness de-fines the way we think of coercion. It obliges us to imagine the exerciseof power as an external process that can coerce the behavior of thebody without necessarily penetrating and controlling the mind. Powermust therefore be conceived as something two-fold, with both a physi-cal and a mental mode of operation. This way of thinking of power inrelation to the political subject applies not only to individuals but toany political agent, such as a group or class. Much of the recent theoret-Theoryand Society 19: 545-577, 1990.? 1990 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.


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546ical writing on resistance and power is intended to bring oppressed orneglected groups to our intellectual and political attention. It does soby revealing, beneath their appearance as anonymous masses, theirexistence as genuine political subjects.3This means they must be shownto be self-formed, internally autonomous actors resisting an externaldomination. The power to which they are subject, it follows, mustrecognize their status as subjects by having the same two-fold charac-ter.A second reason for the metaphor's persistence is that even those whohave tried to go beyond these humanist assumptions about the politicalsubject, often in the footsteps of Michel Foucault, and see theautonomous subject as itself the effect of distinctively modern forms ofpower, have failed to consider something further: these forms of powerhave also created a peculiar kind of world. Like the modern subject, theworld seems to be constituted as something divided from the beginninginto two neatly opposed realms, a material order on the one hand and aseparate sphere of meaning or culture on the other. No recent explora-tion of power and resistance, even among those that question ourassumptions about human subjectivity,has managed to break with thislarger dualism. Nowhere is the dualism that opposes meaning to mate-rial reality examined as the very effect of strategies of power, in a man-ner that would bring to light the limits and the complicity of thinking ofdomination in terms of an essential distinction between the materialand the ideological, between coercing and persuading.

The first of these two arguments, relating conceptions of power to con-ceptions of personhood, can be illustrated by some of the recent con-tributions to what has come to be called the moraleconomy view ofpower and popular resistance. The name is taken from the work of E. P.Thompson on the making of the English working class, both a passagein his well-known book4 and a subsequent article entitled The MoralEconomy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, whichtogether argue that apparently spasmodic acts of popular resistance toauthority in eighteenth-century England were often in fact deliberateresponses to the violation of a social consensus that required theauthorities to maintain an adequate distribution of food in times ofscarcity, a consensus Thompson calls the moral economy of thepoor. 5The argument was taken up and extended into a general theoryof popular revolt in James Scott's influential study of peasant rebellionsin colonial Southeast Asia, The Moral Economy of the Peasant.6 Theshared theme of these writings is that prior to the triumph of capitalism


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547common people shared an ethic based on reciprocal exchange of giftsand services and redistribution in times of need, rather than individualpursuit of self-interest, and that their consistent actions in defense ofthis ethic, although seemingly random and unspectacular, entitle themto be taken as historical agents. 7The more recent contributions to this approach are numerous anddiverse. They include for example, among anthropologists, JeanComaroff's Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance, a study of implicitforms of resistance to the South African state among the Tshidi people(where the distinction between physical power and mental resistance isindicated even in the book's title); among historians, the studies ofpopular resistance in colonial South Asia written by scholars associ-ated with the series Subaltern Studies, published in New Delhi; andamong political scientists, a second and well-received study of South-east Asia by James Scott, Weaponsof the Weak:EverydayForms of Pea-sant Resistance.8 Although these more recent studies have drawn onideas - including those of Gramsci, Foucault, and Bourdieu - thatundermine the moral economy view of power and resistance (andindeed while continuing to invoke Thompson's work, they now avoidhis famous phrase), they continue to subscribe to it. The reason is thatthey continue to examine forms of domination and resistance to bringto light subordinate groups that can be taken as historical agents.In the following pages I offer a critical reading of one of these recentstudies, Scott's Weaponsof the Weak.My purpose in focusing on thisbook is neither to provide simply a review essay nor to suggest that itrepresents a particularly egregious example of the problems I wish toraise. Rather, I have two related aims: first, to explore through a casestudy of Scott's book some fundamental weaknesses in the kind of dua-listic language with which contemporary social science conceives of thequestion of power and resistance, a language I relate critically to thework of Bourdieu, Gramsci, Clifford Geertz, and other theorists of cul-ture and ideology; second, to present an alternative approach to theunderstanding of domination, one that not only avoids the dualism ofcontemporary social scientific writing but, through an analysis of theprocess I call enframing, examines how domination works throughactually constructing a seemingly dualistic world. In a book entitledColonising Egypt (1988) I have developed many aspects of this argu-ment at greater length, using historical material from the Middle East. Ido not repeat that material here, but show instead how argumentsdeveloped from the colonial Middle East can be used to critique and


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548reinterpret the evidence gathered by Scott from a different period anddifferent part of the world. Moreover, by presenting this alternativetheory of domination through the critique of an influential recent work,the relationship can be brought to light between the dualism of contem-porary social analysis and the larger forms of dualism through whichdomination is constructed.My critique of Scott forms the first half of this article. The analysis firstdraws out a contradiction in Weaponsof the Weakbetween the argu-ment that the exercise of power requires, or at least used to require,what Scott calls a symbolic or ideological dimension and the argu-ment that ideological domination never actually dominates. It then exa-mines two ways in which the book overlooks this contradiction: byinvoking the unexpected figure of the rational peasant, and by relabel-ing several forms of domination as something else. These forms ofdomination, as a result, are excluded from the analysis of power andresistance. I argue that both the contradiction and the resulting exclu-sions are caused by the need to understand resistance in terms of theproblematic distinction between power as a material force and powerat the level of consciousness or culture. The second half of the articledraws on the critique of Scott to develop the two arguments introducedabove: that the problematic distinction between two dimensions ofpower is required in order to grant to neglected political groups the sta-tus of self-formed, autonomous actors; and that this distinction is espe-cially problematic because an alternative approach to the analysis ofdomination (which can be illustrated from Scott's account but is notoffered there) shows how its methods in fact create the apparently two-dimensional world that our everyday metaphors of power take forgranted.

The two orders of dominationWeaponsof the Weak s a study of power and resistance in a small rice-growing village in northern Malaysia, which the author names Seda-ka. The book's declared intention is to determine to what degree, andin what ways, peasants actually accept the social order propagated byelites. 9 In other words, it aims to discover whether power works bypersuading peasants' minds of its legitimacy or simply by coercing theiractions: it examines the extent to which elites are able to impose theirown image of a just social order, not simply on the behavior of non-eli-tes, but on their consciousness as well. '0 This distinction between


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549behavior and consciousness, body and mind, divides the two mainchapters on resistance (6 and 7) and runs throughout the book.On the basis of a careful and richly detailed account of the life ofSedaka, in particular the reactions of poorer families in the village toradical transformations during the 1970s (first by new irrigation sche-mes and seed varieties and subsequently by the introduction of combi-ne-harvesters and the elimination of opportunities for wage-labor), thebook's answer to the question is that elites may control the outwardbehavior of the poor, but not their minds. Behind the faCadeof sym-bolic and ritual compliance, we are shown innumerable acts of ideo-logical resistance. Although they do their best to drag their feet, pil-fer and deceive, the poor find that the realmof behavior is where theyare most constrained; it is atthe level of beliefs and interpretationsthat they are least trammeled. '2 From this evidence it is argued thatthe notion that domination operates at the level of ideology, in particu-lar Gramsci's explanation of power in terms of hegemony, s unhelp-ful and indeed likely to mislead us seriously in understanding classconflict in most situations. The concept of hegemony ignores the abili-ty of most subordinate classes ... on the basis of their daily materialexperience, to penetrate and demystify the prevailing ideology. 3This immediately raises a number of questions that need examining.What is meant, first of all, by a prevailingideology if there are doubtsabout its ability to prevail? If subaltern classes are not persuaded byhegemonic ideas, does power need to operate in this realm, and if so,why? In an earlier section entitled Material Base and NormativeSuperstructure, the book argues that, if it is to work at all, domi-nation requires a normative dimension.'4 Thus there is at least apotential contradiction between the claim that so-called hegemonicideologies are not hegemonic, in the sense that the poor see throughthem, and the argument that normative superstructures are essential tothe functioning of authority.What is their power and in what sense arethey essential?This part of Weaponsof the Weakechoes the arguments made earlier inThe Moral Economy of the Peasant, although with an important differ-ence. Scott's earlier book was very much a study of the normative con-text of peasant life, a context said to be shaped by the norm of reci-procity in the exchange of gifts and services and the consequent eliteobligation (that is, peasant right) to guarantee - or at least not infringeupon - the subsistence claims and arrangements of the peasantry.


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550When the peasant revolts it is because of a violation of his rights. Themoral dimension of peasant life, in other words, was presented not as aframework of ideological domination but as a mutually agreed systemof rights that establishes the peasant as a conscious historical agent.This emphasis on rights ... confers on him a history, a political cons-ciousness, and a perception of the moral structureof his society. 'Weaponsof the Weaklargely abandons this language of rights and re-places it with the more fruitful notion of euphemization, borrowedfrom the work of Pierre Bourdieu.'6 Bourdieu's analysis of patterns ofexchange and generosity among Kabyle peasants in Algeria argues notonly that such acts of redistribution are constitutive of political authori-ty in a pre-capitalist society (an argument previously made by peoplelike Karl Polanyi and Marshall Sahlins and always drawing, as JamesScott and E. P. Thompson draw, on the work of Malinowski);'7 hefurther argues that to create lasting effects of domination these exchan-ges must always disguise themselves as moral relations. Dominationcannot take place overtly. In order to be socially recognized, it mustget itself misrecognized. 'o achieve this misrecognition, strategies ofsocial and economic subordination need to be transformed by meansof gift exchanges, marriages, feast giving, and other practices into rela-tions of kinship, personal loyalty, piety, and generosity. Ina word, theymust be euphenmized. Weaponsof the Weakdemonstrates a similarprocess at work in the village of Sedaka, showing how the dependenceof the rich on the labor of the poor has traditionally required them tocultivate their loyalty with acts of generosity and the provision of sup-port in times of need. Where direct physical coercion is not possibleand where the pure indirect domination of the capitalist market is notyet sufficient, Scott concludes, powerful local families depend upon asocially recognized form of domination achieved by the processes ofeuphemization and not simply imposed by force. ) This, it wouldseem, is the normative dimension necessary to the functioning ofpolitical domination in the village. But how does this fit with the argu-ment that power is essentially coercive since most subordinate classesare in fact able topenetrate and demystify the prevailing ideology ?Bourdieu offers an approach to this sort of problem that Scott does notfollow. Instead of assuming an opposition between physical coercionand the voluntary acceptance of an ideology, he invents one of hiswonderfully hybrid concepts, symbolic violence. The term refers tothe contradictory or double reality of conduct that is intrinsicallyequivocal. It is intended to overcome the dualistic representation of


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551the relationship between practice and ideology by bringing to light theways in which, for a certain kind of society, sustained coercion canonly take place in the guise of a voluntary acceptance.2 Symbolicviolence, Bourdieu explains, is the gentle, invisible form of violence,which is never recognized as such, and is not so much undergone aschosen, the violence of credit, confidence, obligation, personal loyalty,hospitality, gifts, gratitude, piety. 2'He adds that itwould be a mistaketo see a contradiction in the fact that violence is here both more pres-ent and more hidden. Because the pre-capitalist economy cannot counton the implacable hidden violence of objective mechanisms, it resortssimultaneously to forms of domination which may strike the modernobserver as more brutal, more primitive, more barbarous, or at thesame time, as gentler, more humane, more respectful of persons 22Weaponsof the Weakhandles this seeming contradiction by saying sim-ply that although domination is not necessarily imposed by force, theweaker party must acquiesce ifonly publicly. 23 n other words it relieson the distinction between a public (and behavioral) acquiescence anda realm of private (and largely mental) autonomy. But if acquiescencein the dominant ideology is feigned ( the poor... hardly find it con-vincing, let alone hegemonic ), what makes this ideological dimensionsomething essential to the exercise of power? The answer seems to bethat it no longer is essential, it only used to be. The transition to morecapitalist forms of production has rendered ideological dominationeither ineffective or unnecessary. The book reports of the large farmersthat thebasis of their domination has been transformed. Their control,which was once embedded in the primary dependencies of productionrelations, is now based far more on law, property, coercion, marketforces, and political patronage, all of which are to be construed, pre-sumably, as non-ideological.24 Hence compared with their situation inthe past, the rich find themselves operating today in something of anideological vacuum. They have to argue continually against the his-torically given, negotiated moral context of village life. 25

This way out of the contradiction between the necessity for ideologyand its apparent ineffectiveness leaves two kinds of problem. First ofall, the implication remains that before the historicalwatershed of the1970s, the dominant ideology was accepted.26The book insists that inthe 1970s the village underwent perhaps the most far-reaching econo-mic and social changes in its history.27To use evidence gathered duringfieldwork undertaken at the end of such a decade to make an argument,not about the impact of this transformation but about the nature of


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552political domination in general, and to conclude on the basis of it thatmost subordinate classes are able to penetrate and demystify theprevailing ideology is far from convincing.Second, even the evidence from the late 1970s, as Scott explains,shows that an important shaping of village discourse is still at work.Despite the changes that have occurred, the vocabulary of capitalismremains unacceptable. Straightforward talk about property rights andprofit making has no moral standing in village life. On the one handthis places wealthy households at a symbolic disadvantage, withmaterial consequences', because it obliges them to choose betweentheir reputation in the village and the maximization of their profits.Weaponsof the Weakdemonstrates the important point that hegemonicideologies always offer significant claims to those they are directedagainst. The desire to be thought well of, or at least not despised, is amaterial force in the village made possible only by the symbolic mobili-zation of the poor around certain customary values, a mobilizationthat is strengthened, a footnote adds, by their subversive threats ofviolence and theft. 28On the other hand the large landowners havemuch more to gain from this joint mobilization around customaryvalues and the common avoidance of all talk of capitalism. Peasants, weare told, rarely discuss options that seem out of reach. The small-holders of Sedaka, for example, do not talk about land reform, eventhough they seem enthusiastic when the author raises the topic. Itwasnot a subject that ever arose spontaneously. Nor is it raised by either ofthe two major Malay political parties active in the countryside or bystate agricultural officials. Instead, the efforts of the poor are morerealistically focused on the possibility of securing a reasonably tenancywithin the existing system of landownership. 29 Despite the radicaltransformation of agricultural life, village politics continues to occuralmost entirely within the normative framework of the older agrariansystem.... There is virtually no radical questioning of property rightsor of the state and its local officials, whose policies are designed to fur-ther capitalist agriculture.Almost everything said by the poor fits easilywithin the professed values - within the hegemony - of local elites.Surely, then, there is clear evidence that political domination in Sedakastill works through the shaping of what can be thought and said, by thisdefining of what presents itself as reasonable and realistic and thismaintaining of an ethic of reciprocity and politeness. Even the oneattempt at organized resistance among the village poor, when thewomen delayed planting rice for landowners who had introduced com-


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553bine-harvesters the previous season, was conducted obliquely, with analmost embarrassed avoidance of direct confrontation, as demandedby the ethics of hierarchy and dissimulation within the village, and thechallenge quickly collapsed.31To confine political practice and debatewithin the deferential and dissimulating moral world of the villageappears even more limiting when one adds that the combine-harvestersthat now eat the work (and the wages) of the poor are owned bypowerful commercial syndicates in the towns, and that the scarce plotsof land that villagers rent are now mostly controlled by large ownersliving outside the village.32In addition, even landowners within the vil-lage are now supported by the coercive external forces of the state. Theelement of fear that results, especially a fear of the ever-present pos-sibility of arrest at the whim of Bashir, a powerful landowner in thevillage closely connected with the ruling party and its security ap-paratus, ispresent in the minds of many villagers.... It structures theirview of the options open to them. 33Weaponsof the Weak is aware of the importance of the ways in whichlocal views are structured by such hegemonic effects, and in fact theirdetailed description is part of the richness of the work. Rather like avillager in 'Sedaka, however, the book appears to move obliquely,adopting a series of strategies to avoid confronting these effects di-rectly.The strategies are of two sorts: to admit that these effects amountto what is often meant by hegemony but then sidestepping them byinsisting on a much narrower field of meaning for the term, at the sametime presenting us outside this narrowed field with the unexpectedfigure of the rational peasant; and to relabel and disguise hegemoniceffects under the heading of givens, or obstacles to resistance. Iillustrate each strategy, and then argue that what motivates these eva-sions is the need to sustain a distinction between the two orders ofdomination.

Evading hegemonyThe concept of hegemony is repeatedly defined so as to be too narrowto fit the evidence from Sedaka. First, it is confined to the sense ofdomination at the level of ideas, which is not the way Gramsci uses theterm. Hegemony, in Gramsci's writings, refers to non-violent forms ofcontrol exercised through the whole range of dominant cultural institu-tions and social practices, from schooling, museums, and political par-ties to religious practice, architectural forms, and the mass media.34In


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555ony is refuted by a final resort, more or less, to the figure of the ratio-nal peasant (indicating how much the moral economists share in com-mon, for reasons we will explore, with some of their supposed oppo-nents, such as Samuel Popkin).4 It hardly needs pointing out, however,that resignation to the fact of private landownership is only rationalfor a given community because of a certain configuration of historicaland political forces, and a certain assessment of those forces. Evenassuming that these villagers go through the strange process that capi-talist societies call rational decision-making, with its constructions ofalternative artificial futures, its reduction of life's complexities to aseries of isolated variables, and its ideology of the sovereign individual,the rational is never something calculated in a manner that is context-free.4' The calculation will always depend on estimations and supposi-tions that are the effect of a set of hegemonic relations.To employ the figure of the rational peasant, Weapons of the Weakisobliged not only to assume such a context-free rationality, but also toprovide some of these estimations. The argument that choosing pettyresistance rather than direct confrontation is the result of a rationaldecision depends not only on an evaluation of the situation in Sedakabut on a general historical estimate of where peasant interests lie. It isquite possible to disagree with Scott's estimates and reinterpret his evi-dence. Christine White, for example, points out that the tricks ofadding stones, straw, etc. to increase the weight of the landlord or thetax collector's share of the harvest can perhaps give peasants the illu-sion of having more power and manoeuverability than is actually thecase - that is, these ineffective but psychologically satisfying forms ofresistance could in fact contribute to false consciousness, blindingpeople to the painful reality of the extent of their powerlessness andexploitation. 42Weaponsof the Weak s able to disagree with such nega-tive assessments of petty resistance (although it concedes - again, onlyin a footnote - that to the extent that such resistance actually reinforcesthe larger system of subordination, the case for ideological hegemonyis strengthened )43 n part because it begins with the assertion that thealternative of large-scale revolt is a mixed blessing for the peasantry,given the fact that a successful revolution almostalways creates a morecoercive and hegemonic state apparatus, which is often able to battenitself on the rural population like no other before it. 44My point is notso much that many peasant households in places such as Algeria, Cuba,Egypt, and Nicaragua might disagree with this comparatively positiveassessment of the old social orders they helped overthrow, but thatassertions about what is practical and therefore rational in peasant


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556rebellion are always situated interpretations of historical and politicalexperience.45The book rejects the concept of hegemony, then, by arguing that theterm implies some consensual and internal acceptance of things,whereas the peasants of Sedaka - and perhaps subordinate groupseverywhere - exhibit only an external, rational decision to conformrather than rebel. The conformity of subordinate classes rests pri-marily on their knowledge that any other course is impractical, dange-rous, or both. 46Invoking this rational choice and the unproblematickind of knowledge on which it depends ascribes their failure to rebelnot to any hegemonic shaping of consciousness but to the direct reali-ties of coercive force. It is in the immediate interest of most poor villa-gers to uphold the official realities in nearly all power-laden contexts,the book concludes.47In other words, the narrowingof the definition ofhegemony combined with the device of the rational peasant transformthe rich details of hegemonic domination into evidence that the poor,although they may lose their outward physical freedom, retain an inter-nal mental autonomy.The second strategy by which Weaponsof the Weakdeals with the evi-dence of hegemony is by relabelling many of its effects. They are listedunder an intermediate category, neither coercion nor consciousness,with a heading such as givens or obstacles to resistance. These ex-plain the limited nature of peasant resistance without expressly analy-zing its limits as part of the play of power relations. The book describesat least five such majorgivens. The first is the isolating nature of thechanges that have taken place: on the one hand, they have consistedmostly of piecemeal shifts in agricultural practice, confronting thepoorer villagers only individually or in small groups; on the other, theyhave tended to remove the poor from the productive process ratherthan increase their exploitation, so that sites of potential conflict - oversuch things as rent payments or the distribution of the harvest - havebeen simply eliminated.48Second, there is the complexity of class con-flict in the village, with no simple distinction to be found between thelandless and the landowners. Both rich and poor may rent in plots ofland, small landowners (or their children) may work other plots aslaborers, and these laborers may find it economical at the same time torent combine-harvesters for their own plots. The absence of a decisivesingle cleavage along class lines militates against collective action. Theabsence is complicated by other divisions and alliances that cut acrossclass, such as relations of kinship, friendship, faction, patronage, and


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557ritual ties. Almost all of these, we are told, operate to the advantageof the richer farmers by creating a relationship of dependence thatrestrains the prudent poor man or woman from acting in class terms(and, one could add, in gender terms). All this is even more true oflinks beyond the village, where personal ties are formed by kinshiprather than by class.49The third obstacle to resistance is that the mostreadily available response to oppression and economic hardship is toleave the village and look for work elsewhere. A few find permanentjobs on rubber and oil palm plantations, in factories, on building sites,or as domestic servants; the majorityfind only temporary work as con-tract laborers and must leave their families behind in the village, de-prived of the household head and marginalized in village politics. Thefourth given is repression and the fear of repression. Attempts tosabotage the combine-harvesters and boycott those who used them, forexample, occurred in a climate of fear generated by local elites, by thepolice, by the 'Special-Branch' internal security forces, by a pattern ofpolitical arrests and intimidation. Fifth and finally, there is theday-to-day imperative of earning a living, the process of personal and house-hold survival that Marx calls the dull compulsion of economic re-lations. Although not ruling out petty resistance, this economic com-pulsion sets limits that only the foolhardy would transgress. 50Listed in this fashion as obstacles to resistance, these five sets of fac-tors are conceived as fixed limits rather than modes of domination.This corresponds, of course, to the peasants' own experience of them.Yet other factors experienced in this way, in particular the moral lan-guage of the village, are carefully analyzed as part of the mechanism ofpower. It would seem appropriate to do the same for these five factors.For example, when social cleavages between landowners and the land-less are bridged by ties of kinship, this is no coincidence. Kinship is notsomething given that happens to work as an obstacle to resistance,but another of those strategies of euphemization by means of whichrelations of dependence and exploitation disguise themselves, as theymust, in this case in the form of family ties. When the system of povertyinstalled in the village forces families to send the household head insearch of casual employment in the cities, this too is not somethinggiven but a mode of operation important to the success of large-scalecapitalist agriculture. When combine-harvesting eliminates the sites offace-to-face political struggle this is not simply an inevitable side-effectof mechanization but an answer to the urgent need for more efficientand cost-effective forms of exploitation in the rural areas of the ThirdWorld, an integral part of the combine's profitability. When the dull


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559potential) on the other in a system of domination.53 Consciousness,the mental realm, is placed in opposition to modes of domination thatare not purely physical, it turns out, but include the memory of pastrepression and an anticipation of potential repressions, both aspectsof consciousness. This is no accident of phrasing. Memory and antici-pation are not something ancillary to the working of so-called directrepression but part of its every operation. No matter how far one rea-ches back, away from memory or consciousness or culture in the direc-tion of a purely physical dimension of power, this physical realm willturn out to consist of an inseparable mixture of what we insist on think-ing of as the separable realms of behavior and consciousness.54

Meaning and reality?A close reading of Weaponsof the Weak has brought to light the limi-tations of founding the analysis of modes of domination on the distinc-tion between a realm of consciousness or culture and some purelymaterial or physical realm. But there is a larger argument to be devel-oped. On the one hand, I want to show that this problematic mental/physical dualism is the product of humanist assumptions about politi-cal agency, which in turn it seeks to reproduce. On the other hand, Iargue, the dualism and the accompanying humanism seem natural to usbecause they coincide with the apparently two-dimensional order ofthe world itself. It is through the creation of what appears to us as thelarger binary order of meaning versus reality that the effectiveness ofmodern forms of domination is to be understood.The more simple mind/body dualism of the behavioral approach tosocial analysis, which is still especially persistent in political scienceand therefore in accounts of power and resistance, has of course beencriticized over the last two decades or more, in particular by the inter-pretivist theories of social analysis put forward by scholars like CharlesTaylor and, most notably, Clifford Geertz.55 My own arguments canbest be introduced by showing how interpretivist approaches - and asimilar critique could be made of other kinds of critical theory, inclu-ding Marxist and post-Marxist writings56- ultimately fail to historicizeor even put in question the larger opposition between meaning and rea-lity that seems so obvious to the modern world.Interpretivist theories have argued against the view that sees culture orpolitical consciousness as a private, internal realm of meaning or belief,


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560opposed to a public world of observable behavior. Social interaction,Taylor and Geertz point out, is itself meaningful, for it depends uponthe continuous interpretation of what others' actions mean. These mea-nings are not something private, but publicly shared understandingsthat constitute, in Geertz's words, amultiplicity of complex conceptualstructures or public framesof meaning in terms of which particularactions are produced, perceived and interpreted. Culture, it follows,is ideational without existing in someone's head and unphysicalwithout being an occult entity. 57The common metaphor used toevoke the public and yet not-quite-physical nature of this realm ofmeaning is to liken it to a written text. The best way to outline a critiqueof this approach is to try and bring to light the problematic assumptionsabout meaning versus reality or structure versus practice embodied inthis simple metaphor of the text.58One way Geertz explains what it means to think of culture or socialmeaning as a text is by introducing, as a further metaphor, a special yet

nicely illustrative sample of culture - a Beethoven quartet. It is withthis further metaphor that we will have to begin. No onewould ... identify [the quartet] with its score, Geertz suggests,nor... with a particular performance of it or with some mysteriousentity transcending material existence. Rather, the quartet is a tem-porally developed tonal structure, a coherent sequence of modeledsound - in a word, music. 59Such an understanding of music, I wouldargue, is a peculiarly western one; and, unproblematic as the metaphormay seem to us, in the end commits us to believing in something mys-teriously transcendental.It can be shown, as I have argued at length elsewhere,61 that to conceiveof music - or texts, or cultural/ideological forms in general - as anabstract structure or model, endowed with a non-particular and un-physical being, existing somehow beyond any particular performanceof it, that is, beyond any particular practical or material occurrence, isultimately to take for granted a quite mysterious, elusive, and transcen-dental effect. Its elusiveness begins to become apparent when one cea-ses adding metaphor to metaphor and starts trying to pin down thenature of this unphysical entity. It turns out to be an effect createdonly out of particular performances, arrangements, and practices. Thedistinctive nature of the modern world-as-exhibition in which we liveis that more and more of social life has been so arranged that we mis-take these effects of certain coordinated practices for the existence of a


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561distinct metaphysical realm of structure or meaning that stands apartfrom what we call material reality.61In the relatively simple case of western classical music, for example,these would include a whole series of distinctive techniques - includingmethods of musical notion, the cult of the composer, the apparatus ofcriticism and musical scholarship, and the theatrics of performance -that cumulatively conjure up the unphysical effect of the musical work.By contrast, there are other musical traditions, those rooted in thecomplex arts of improvisation, whose methods do not create this effectof a composer and his work, or of the work as a text-like structurethat can be considered to have an existence or nature apart from therepeated and yet always differing performances. A similar argumentcan be made regarding written texts. I have described elsewhere a lite-rary tradition other than our own, that of the pre-colonial Arab world,which did not share our naive conception of the text as an unphysicalentity that somehow exists apart from the physical process of its oralor written repetition. In fact Arabic scholarship was preoccupied withthe arts of continuously recreating written works through repeatedrecitations and copyings. The text existed and survived only in itsalways differing performances.62My argument, then, is that the conception of a people's culture or polit-ical consciousness as a text employs a problematic and distinctivelymodern notion. However much the cultural text is said to find ar-ticulation in particularperformances, it is assumed to enjoy a sepa-rate nature as an unphysical structure or frame of meaning. The dis-tinction between particular practices and their structure or frame isproblematic not simply because it may not be shared by non-westerntraditions but because, as it is the purpose of this essay to argue, theapparent existence of such unphysical frameworks or structures is pre-cisely the effect introduced by modern mechanisms of power and it isthrough this elusive yet powerful effect that modern systems of domi-nation are maintained.There is a second, related problem with the dualist understanding ofmeaning or ideology illustrated by the metaphor of cultures as texts,which must be addressed before considering further the question offrameworks, namely the problem of agency. Just as the correspondingwestern conception of music ties the work to the authority of a com-poser with a proper name, whose intention supposedly governs all par-


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562ticular performances and yet survives apart from them, this view of cul-ture or ideology as a text-like entity existing apart from a material baseimplies a sovereign subject (individual or collective) whose intention isthe author of the cultural text. Our formulations of other people'ssymbol systems must be actor-oriented, Geertz writes. That is, theymust be castin terms of the construction we imagine [those people] toplace upon what they live through. 63This constructed text can then beconstrued as a story they tell themselves about themselves. 64Although the interpretive theory of culture rescues us from the closedbehavioralist world of private beliefs motivating public actions, itsnotions of text and authorship keep us in a world of subjects whoalways author their own collective narratives and whose cultural identi-ties are thus unique and self-produced. Built into the theory, therefore,is the latent notion of a subjectivity or selfhood that pre-exists and ismaintained against an objective, material world, and a correspondingconception of power as an objective force that must somehow penetra-te this non-material subjectivity.This conception could be illustrated from almost any recent account ofpower and resistance, whether the theoretical inspiration is behavioral-ist, interpretivist, Gramscian, or any other. O'Hanlon's sympathetic butcritical reading of the Subaltern Studies work on resistance to colonialrule in South Asia, for example, where the strongest theoretical influ-ence is that of Gramsci, shows how assumptions of this sort havetended to govern that research.65 Here I illustrate the problem by re-turning to Weaponsof the Weak,and exploring how political agency isconstructed in terms of the distinction between a power that operatesat the level of objective behavior and power in the realm of individualor collective consciousness.In the first place, this distinction is linked with a series of other opposi-tions: material versus ideological, actions versus words, observableversus hidden, coerced versus free, base versus superstructure, bodyversus spirit. Weaponsof the Weakand much of the other recent litera-ture on power and resistance construct their objects of study out ofthese parallel tropes, each of which is dependent on all the others.These correspond to a theory of domination that understands power assomething originally and essentially behavioral or material, whichseeks to extend itself and work more economically by producing effectsthat are cultural or ideological. This way of thinking about power cor-responds in turn to a certain conception of the human person. In fact it


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563is one demanded by the desire to make the discovery of a self-formedand autonomous personhood the end point of the analysis.The Moral Economy of the Peasant, James Scott's earlier study of pea-sant resistance, ends with a paragraph that expresses this desire, whichWeaponsof the Weak s to take up. Itis especially at the level of cultu-re, the earlier book concludes,

that a defeated or intimidated peasantry may nurture its stubborn moral dis-sent from an elite-created social order. This symbolic refuge is not simply asource of solace in a precarious life, not simply an escape. It represents analternative moral universe in embryo - a dissident subculture, an existen-tially true and just one, which helps unite its members as a human communi-ty and as a community of values. In this sense, it is as much a beginning as anend.66

Weaponsof the Weak s an attempt to discover and describe such a realplace, an embryonic moral universe, a beginning or point of origin, asite of originality, justice, and existential truth. The site is given thename Sedaka, a Malay word of Arabic origin whose usage suggestsgenerosity or social justice - but whose original meaning, it so happens,is to speak the truth.Having deliberately reduced, as we have seen, many of the more com-plex modalities of power to the status of givens or background, andshown how dominant groups control the villagers' visible, onstage be-havior (the theatrical metaphor erects an apparent artificiality essen-tial for creating a contrasting sense of something unproblematicallyauthentic), the book moves behind the scenes and records, back-stage where the mask can be lifted, a few lines of what it calls the fulltranscript of peasant discourse.67 The author does not claim access tothis unedited transcript of subordinate classes in its entirety. Headmits, for example, that the village poor told him almost nothingabout religion, even though it appears that the major form of under-ground political opposition among these Malaysian villagers takes theshape of shadowy Islamic organizations with many thousands ofmembers, two of which were banned during the first year of theauthor's stay in Sedaka.68(The implications of this silence are left unex-plored, as of the fact, mentioned in passing, that the author was livingin the house of by far the largest and richest landowner in the village, aposition that must surely have shaped his discussions with the poor, nomatter how much they took him into their confidence.)69 Nevertheless,


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564Scott clearly makes the claim that there is such a text, such an uneditedoriginal, such an inner site of authenticity and truth - that small socialsphere where the powerless may speak freely. 7'

Power-laden situations are nearly always inauthentic, the book ex-plains. What it hopes to reveal in this small social sphere is a placewhere the play of power does not penetrate, where discourse becomesauthentic. It seeks the voice of an author n the problematic, idealistsense discussed above, a collective self that is the author of its own cul-tural constructions and actions, constituting a beginning or point oforiginality that is embryonic, initially autonomous, and genuine. In thisway it hopes to uncover a site of existential truth. To reveal the natureof power, it is assumed, one must oppose to it a pre-existent self andtruth, to which relations of power are wholly external.To do justice tothe victims of inequality and domination in the modern world one mustprove, in E. P.Thompson's words, that they can be taken as historicalagents, and the means of establishing them as historical agents is todiscover their authenticity, their original autonomy.71The consequenceis an essentialized notion of the subaltern, of the subject in general andits self-created mentality, and a theory of power that accepts withoutquestion the dichotomy between the material and the ideological, apower that coerces and places limits on people's options, rather than apower that works, among other things, through creating truths and sub-jects and sites of apparent autonomy.Sedaka, one might say in summing up the argument so far, names a de-sire for the authentic, and it is this desire that subverts the logic ofworks like Weaponsof the Weak. It is this desire that disguises powerrelations as a list of givens, conjures up the figure of a rational peasantwho stands outside the field of hegemonic effects, and elides the impactof historical transformation by developing general theories of powerand resistance from evidence gathered at the end of the most pro-foundly dislocating decade in a people's history.

Unphysical frameworksI now want to turn to look at this historical transformation more close-ly, and to trace in it the appearance of those unphysicalframeworksfirst mentioned above in the discussion of Clifford Geertz. The appear-ance of such frameworks, I argue, is the elusive yet powerful effectthrough which modern systems of domination are maintained. This


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565argument was developed through a study of political and social trans-formation in colonial Egypt,72but I want to show here how the sameanalysis of modes of domination can be made through a reinterpreta-tion of the material Scott presents on Southeast Asia.Weaponsof the Weak offers a very rich account of how large landow-ners, with the intensification of large-scale capitalist agriculture inMalaysia,are becoming increasingly dependent on what we call the state,while their dependence on the labor and ideological acquiescence ofthe poorer villagers decreases. The state itself, Scott argues, has neverneeded the latter's ideological acquiescence, at least in the twentiethcentury; not because its power relies solely on physical or economiccoercion, but because the majority of villagers are irrelevant to itsappropriation of surplus rice, given that three-quarters of the region'smarketed paddy is produced by the richest eleven percent of its cultiva-tors. One can find several discrepancies in this line of argument. Theproduction figures, first of all, are from the late 1970s, after the intro-duction of new seed varieties and a second growing season had increa-sed yields of rice by more than fifty percent.73 State regulation,moreover, has for a long time played a role in agriculturallife, in parti-cular through fixing low prices for rice so as to facilitate feeding andpacifying the urban population - resulting in rural protests on morethan one occasion.74 Price controls affect not only the income the poorreceive for what little they sell, but the wages they get for planting andharvesting the rice of the richer farmers. State regulation has alsoplayed an active role in preventing villagers from switching to other,more profitable crops, and in enforcing the grossly unequal distributionof land, which ensures that the rich have surplus rice to market, leavingthe bulk of the rural population living below the poverty line. This un-equal distribution can itself be seen as a state-enforced appropriation.Indeed the book explains at the beginning that the state ... is now adirect participant ... in nearly all aspects of paddy growing. Most of thebuffers between the state and rice farmers have fallen away. 75So whydoes the book subsequently insist on minimizing the relation betweenthe state and the peasantry?It does so, I think, to make its central argument about the absence ofideological hegemony more plausible. Weapons of the Weakneeds toshow that an older authority negotiated within a shared moral world offace-to-face encounters has given way to a kind of power that is essen-tially impersonal, intractable, and remote - and thus in no particularneed of ideological support. Scott portrays the local experience of this


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566transformation in tremendous detail. I draw on these details to con-struct an alternative account of the new forms of power. Far from beingless ideological, I argue, they operate by inventing the apparent distinc-tion between material and ideological realms, in all its supposed sim-plicity, that every modern theorist of power takes for granted.The transformation in modes of power can be described, of course, ineconomic, social, and political terms. It occurs in each of these spheres.In every sphere, however, it involves what I have called elsewhere (bor-rowing a term from Martin Heidegger), the process of enframing. 76By enframing I mean a variety of modern practices that seem to resolvethe world's shifting complexity into two simple and distinct dimensions.Such practices - which I illustrate from the case of Sedaka - give rise tothe effect of a purely material world, opposed to and given order bywhat now appears as a free-standing, non-material realm of meaning.We name this realm culture or the symbolic, or the ideological, or insome contexts simply thestate )and believe it to exist, metaphysically,as something apart from what we call the physical world. The newmodalities of power work, at least in part, by means of this binaryeffect.I should stress that in describing this world as two-dimensional, I amnot invoking the unity of some antecedent life where, as Bourdieu says(following Weber), the world was not yet disenchanted ; where, asFoucault says, words were not yet detached from things; or where, asMarx says, the values of things were not yet detached from their uses.Rather, it is the invention of this two-dimensionality that makes it pos-sible to imagine such an antecedent unity, such enchantment, and suchattachment of meanings to their objects and of uses to things.A first way of describing the transformation is that villagers find them-selves subject to powers whose source seems increasingly removedfrom their own world. The terms of their agricultural life, Scott ex-plains, arenow decisively set by social forces that originate far outsidethe village sphere. Everything from the timing of water supply, andhence the schedule of transplanting and harvesting, to the cost of fer-tilizer and tractor services, the price of paddy, the cost of milling, theconditions of credit, and the cost of labor is so much an artifact of statepolicy and the larger economy that the sphere of local autonomy hasshrunk appreciably. 77The local powers of dominant village house-holds are not simply an autonomy being eliminated, however. They arepatterns of domination that, in typical fashion, are becoming the con-


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567duits of these larger forces. Power relations continue to acquire theirhold over peasants' lives as something local and immediate, at work informs of landowning and employment, the supply of seeds and irriga-tion water, or the demands of kinship and personal loyalty. The differ-ence is that the articulation of these local powers into larger networksnow creates the effect of power as a system of demand that exists assomething external to ordinary life.This articulation, moreover, takes several forms. The larger networksare not only those of the state, but also large-scale commercial syn-dicates and powerful landowning interests outside the village. Nor arethey encountered only in the form of persons or groups. The new com-bine-harvesters, for example, are experienced as mechanisms of exter-nal demand, which ignore the villagers' need for employment in thename of an external capitalist accounting and transfer the moneypreviously paid as wages within the villages to the commercial consor-tia from whom the machines are rented and the companies in Australiaand Japan who manufacture them.78In the second place, these new forces create an effect of fixity and per-manence. The earlier, less coordinated forms of domination seemedalways unstable. To maintain them required the innumerable techni-ques of euphemization, and the periodic acts of violence, by which rela-tions of subordination were continuously created and recreated. Thenew forms of domination, by contrast, appear fixed and enduring. Thenegotiated and flexible modes of authority have given way to patternsof power that seem to reproduce themselves. Weapons of the Weakoffers several illustrations of this.The book shows, for example, how a series of relationships that werethe subject of negotiation have become determined and nonnegotiable.Thus, the way land is rented has changed from a system of paddyrentto one of cash rent. Previously tenants paid the landowner his rent atthe end of the season, after the harvest, in a quantity of the harvestedpaddy (or its cash equivalent, according to its price that season). Nowmost rents are required in cash in advance. So the rent can no longer bebargained up or down on the threshing floor according to the numberof sacks of threshed paddy. The payment carries no reference to thosesacks - to the amount and value of what the land has produced.79Thesite where competing economic needs were established and negotiatedseason by season has been eliminated, replaced by a predeterminedand inflexible demand.


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568There are many similar transformations described. The price of paddyis set by predetermined external forces, meaning government policyand the international market, rather than by local or regional need. Thepatterns of transplanting and harvesting no longer vary with the mon-soon rains, as was mentioned, but are fixed according to an official irri-gation schedule. The government control of milling, marketing, and thedistribution of fertilizer and credit are further aspects of this pervasiveprogramming of rural life. The local offices of the Agricultural Devel-opment Authority have each spawned a Farmer'sAssociation, throughwhich the larger farmers acquire a disproportionate share of credit.Villagers are increasingly dependent on credit to purchase the largeamounts of fertilizer required for green-revolution agriculture.8 Con-trol of the land has become more rigid as the enormous profits of thegreen revolution and combine-harvesting cause ownership to be con-centrated among fewer families, leaving less available for rent or fordistributing as dowries to children. Marriage, as a result, has becomemore difficult.81The fixed, self-reproducing power is also evident in a far greater con-trol over dishonesty and delinquency, achieved with less surveillanceand supervision. Both cash rents and mechanical harvesting have con-tributed to this more efficient exercise of power. Under the old systemof paddyrents, Scott explains, the tenant could use a number of care-ful ploys to decrease the owner's share of the crop, from quietly harves-ting a little of the rice the night before the official harvest, to makingspurious claims of crop damage in order to bargain for a reduced rent,or deliberately leaving unreaped paddy on the stalk to be collectedlater when gleaning.82With rents for the land fixed and paid in advan-ce, the landowner places all the risks of cultivation upon the tenant,thus guaranteeing himself a larger profit at the same time as he freeshimself from the need to exercise any surveillance over the harvesting.Similarlywith the introduction of combine-harvesting, Scott points out,the machine relieves the farmer of the task of recruiting laborers andsupervising them in the field. It also enables him to harvest and storehis entire crop in a single day, thus removing the opportunity for thepoor to steal an occasional sack of the harvested paddy left overnight inthe fields.83All such transformations in the agriculturallife of the villa-ge make its system of exploitation more effective, more economical,more inflexible, and more permanent. Patterns of domination thatbefore had to be continuously established and re-established are nowbuilt into the functioning of economic and social practices.


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569Outside the sphere of agricultural production there have been similarincreases in the efficiency of surveillance and control. A generationago, Scott reports, when the region was more sparsely settled andincluded large areas of uncleared brush and forest, and its populationwas more mobile and less actively policed, there were many groupswho escaped the surveillance and control of the large landowners andthe authorities, including bandits and rustlers now remembered aspopular heroes. Since then, the government-organized spread of irriga-tion canals, agriculture, roads and police stations has eliminated theplaces of refuge and opened up the countryside to permanent super-vision. Today, says Scott, all the land around Sedaka is flat and culti-vated and the police ... are far more numerous, mobile, and wellarmed. 84So alongside the programming that tends to enfix rural life isa pervasive and everyday policing. The area does not suffer from themass arrests and government death squads common elsewhere inSoutheast Asia or in places such as Central America. Instead there isan Internal Security apparatus that prevents effective political organiz-ing, and an efficient system of everyday repression maintained by

diligent police work. '5The result is not a system of terror but rather acontinuous effect of fear and insecurity that guarantees a relatively effi-cient self-reproduction of authority.8

The frame of meaningThese various features of the new techniques I have described combineto produce the common effect of enframing. The new modes of power,by their permanence, their apparent origin outside local life, their in-tangibility,their impersonal nature, seem to take on an aspect of differ-ence, to stand outside actuality, outside events, outside time, outsidecommunity, outside personhood. Hence they appear, not as somethinggiven, as Scott would have it, but rather as something other, somethingnon-particular and unchanging - as a framework that enframes actualoccurrences. Although it is constituted, like the rest of the social world,out of particular practices, this framework appears as somehow non-particular and non-material, that is, as something ideal, and comes toseem as though it were its own, transcendental dimension of reality.Numerous examples can be found in Weapons of the Weak of thisnovel, metaphysical effect.Take, as the most straightforward illustration, the new system of rentsexplained just above. One way the villagers express the difference that


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570comes with pre-paid rents is in terms of the living and the dead. 87The old rents were carefully related to what was grown in the rentedfields, hence the name liverents. The new rents, fixed in advance, are

dead, no longer a part of what grows and fluctuates, but abstract,non-living, arbitrary.This disconnection makes the rent into a scalethat stands apart, an absolute measure against which the success or fai-lure of the harvest must now be measured. The measure is unaffectedby what it measures, like a container holding a certain contents. Rentnow appears to stand in relation to agriculturallife as this inert contain-er, this framework that is somehow of a different order from the sortsof practice it enframes. Of course the fixing and paying of rents aresocial practices like any other part of the life of the village. But the newprinciple that governs them creates the effect of a life no longer madeup of interrelated practices, but rather consisting of a framework andthe practices it enframes, as though these were two different orders ofexistence.As the economy of Sedaka is converted to the use of cash, there areseveral other ways in which money becomes an example of this kind ofintangible, inorganic measure of things. Scott explains that before theeconomic transformation the measurement of a family's resources wasimmediate and tangible. The wealth of a paddy-growing family couldin the past have been inferred from the amount of paddy stored in thegranary. The tangibility of resources made it relatively easy for thepoor to importune their richer neighbors for loans, for which the tradi-tional medium was, fittingly, paddy or polished rice (beras), the basicfood staple (not to mention the fact that by prying apart the boards ofa granary at night the poor could surreptitiously help themselves toadditional supplies). Now, however, thewidespread use of cash marksa shift to a village in which wealth is more easily hidden. The resourcesof the rich become transformed into something inaccessibly other,something inorganic and non-material, outside the realm of what canbe borrowed, begged, or otherwise appropriated. Indeed the poorappear to believe that the sale of paddy for cash is, in part, an attemptby the wealthy to avoid being importuned for loans. 88In such ways,the surplus from the fields is converted into what seems an abstraction,something that stands outside the play of personal relations and localdemand. Capital, which is no more than a practical set of relations,creates the impression of a world now absolutely divided, between arealm of the tangible and material and a realm of the abstract andenduring.


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571When one is told that for the peasants of Sedaka, the basic contoursof the country's capitalist economy have become for all practical pur-poses a given, this should not be read, I would argue, as implying simplyan extension or redefinition of the boundaries of the natural landscapeof the village - as the word given implies.89 Economic forces nowappear as contours in a literal sense, like abstract lines on a map.However much they may be taken for granted, the new economic prac-tices create an order that seems to stand apart from the natural land-scape, the way a map does, as a plan that gives the world a dimension oforder. Starting with strategies as everyday as the payment of rent inadvance or the selling of rice paddy for cash, the new social and politi-cal practices all contribute to creating the effects of enframing.These effects are not limited to the economic. The very process of cul-tivation, to repeat an example mentioned above, is now largelydeter-mined by the schedule of water release fixed in advance. 9?The con-trolling and distributing of irrigationwaters are practices like any otherpart of social life. But with their distance from local influence, theirregularity,and their repetitive uniformity, practices of this sort createonce again the effect of something that is not a part of social practice,something that seems to exist outside the practical world as a programgoverning particular practices. It is the effect, once again, of enframing.Government plans and official policies, all the self-reproducingmethods of controlling and policing described above, all the neweffects of fixity, legal regulation, and structure, create this effect of theprogram. The provision of what is labeled infrastructure, such asroads, electricity, piped water, clinics, schools, and mosques, a processthat has touched virtually every village in the country, is a furtheraspect of the pervasive process of enframing.91Working through the techniques of enframing, power will now appearas something essentially law-like. It will seem to be external to practice,as the fixed law that prescribes a code against which changing practicesare then measured. This transformation occurs, moreover, at preciselythe point when power in fact becomes most internal, most integral, andcontinuously at work within social and economic practices. So it is notsimply that, as Foucault says, power inserts itself and, arrangesthingsin such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the out-side, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is sosubtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasingits own points of contact. 92 It is that this occurs at precisely the samemoment when, and by precisely the same detailed methods as, power


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573to stand outside ordinary practice. They correspond to the methods ofenframing already described, all of which contribute to this impressionthat life's meanings constitute a program or text that exists apart fromthe practical world.The binary world constructed by the new forms of power includes aseries of novel practices that appear to create outside the world itself aseparate realm of intentions, ideology, or meaning. The effects of ex-ternality, fixity, and permanence achieved by the new modes of domi-nation coincide, therefore, with the more general effect of the existenceof meaning as a distinct order of being, opposed to what it will now bepossible to call mere reality,a merely material world.It can now be seen how the binary world of modern techniques oforder and domination, far from being brought to light by analyses likeWeaponsof the Weak,works itself into the very vocabulary with whichwe speak of power. Like most of the work of the moral economy sort,and indeed virtually all contemporary literature on power and resist-ance, Weaponsof the Weakapproaches the question of domination interms of an essential distinction between physical coercion and ideo-logical persuasion. The approach is inevitably blind to the possibility,argued in the preceding pages, that power now works through novelmethods of creating and recreating a world that seems reduced to thissimple, two-dimensional reality.It represents a way of writing in whichsuch two-dimensionality is merely reproduced.As I argued in the first half of this essay, the complexities of dominationnever quite fit the terms of the opposition between a physical andmental form of power. Many forms of exploitation and control cannotbe reduced to this binary form. The attempts to make them fit seem toarise from a desire to present certain political groups as self-formedpolitical subjects, meaning subjects who preserve against an essentiallyphysical coercion a space of mental autonomy. This binary and essen-tializing view of the political subject is what connects the weaknesses ofprevailing approaches toward the study of power to the alternativeunderstanding of domination advanced in the second half of this essay.This is because the opposition between a subject and an object-worldthat this view implies depends on taking for granted the fundamentaldistinction opposing an ideal realm of existence to a material realm.The latter corresponds to the broader distinction we take for grantedbetween the realm of meaning and the real world. Rather than beingfundamental to the nature of power, this larger opposition turns out to


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574be a metaphor that imitates, but fails to see, the very distinctionthrough which modern effects of domination are produced.AcknowledgmentsMany people read and commented on an earlier draft of this arti-cle. I am particularly grateful to Lila Abu-Lughod, Nathan Brown,Wendy Brown, and Bertell Ollman. I would also like to thank Jim Scottfor his willingness to discuss my criticisms of his work, and for thegraciousness with which he did so.

Notes1. For example, Jean Comaroffs study of power and resistance among the Tshidi ofsouthern Africa criticizes the acceptance of such stubborn dichotomies as thedistinction between the symbolic and the instrumental, but her critique is limitedto showing the interdependence between these two distinct orders of determina-tion rather than questioning the nature of the distinction. Jean Comaroff, Body of

Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 3-4, 262.2. The political invention of the modern notion of mind or consciousness, and its rela-tionship to modern theories of power as essentially coercive or repressive, are exa-mined in the work of Michel Foucault, especially Discipline and Punish: The Birthof the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977), and The History of Sexuality. Volume 1:An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978). I have explored this process in acolonial context, and contrasted it with pre-modern theories of personhood, inTimothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1988). On the contrast with classical understandings of body and soul, see alsoRichard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1979).3. See Rosalind O'Hanlon's critique of studies of resistance to colonial rule in SouthAsia, Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance inColonial South Asia, Modern Asian Studies 22/1 (1988), 189-224.4. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz,1963), 59-68.5. E. P. Thompson, The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the EighteenthCentury, Past and Present 50 (1971), 79.6. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence inSoutheast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).7. Thompson, Moral Economy of the English Crowd, 76.8. Ranajit Guha, editor, Subaltern Studies: Writingson South Asian History and Soci-ety (Delhi: Oxford University Press,1982-); James Scott, Weapons of the Weak.EverydayForms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).9. Scott, Weaponsof the Weak,41.10. Ibid., 38-9.


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11. Ibid., 304.12. Ibid., 322.13. Ibid., 317.14. Ibid., 307.15. Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant, 188-189.16. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1977).17. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957 119441;Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972).18. Bourdieu, Outline, 191.19. Scott, Weaponsof the Weak,307.

20. Bourdieu, Outline, 179.21. Ibid., 192.22. Ibid., 191.23. Scott, Weaponsof the Weak,307.24. Ibid., 310-312.25. Ibid., 184-185.26. Ibid., 147.27. Ibid., 139.28. Ibid., 234-235.29. Ibid., 325-326.30. Ibid., 336.31. Ibid., 250-251.32. See John R. Bowen, The War of the Words: Agrarian Change in Southeast Asia,Peasant Studies 14/1 (1986), 61.33. Scott, Weaponsof the Weak,274.34. See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State (London: Lawrence andWishart, 1980).35. Scott, Weaponsof the Weak,316.36. Ibid., 335.37. See Joseph Femia, Hegemony and Consciousness in the Thought of Antonio

Gramsci, Political Studies 23/1 (1975), 32-35.38. Scott, Weaponsof the Weak,326.39. Ibid., 49.40. Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society inVietnam(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).41. On the relations between artificial futures and capitalist agricultural practices, seePierre Bourdieu, The Disenchantment of the World, in Algeria 1960 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1979).42. Christine White, Everyday Resistance, Socialist Revolution and Rural Develop-ment: the Vietnamese Case, Journal of Peasant Studies 13/2 (1986), 56.

43. Scott, Weaponsof the Weak,287-288.44. Ibid., 29.45. For Malaysian peasants, this experience might include memories of strategicham-lets, free-fire zones, and other innovations developed by an occupying Britisharmy to suppress the long communist insurgency in post-war Malaya, innovationsthat were subsequently transferred by British military advisers to South Vietnam.Scott's assessment of Malaysians' propensity to rebel makes no mention of this his-torical experience.46. Scott, Weaponsof the Weak,320.


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57647. Ibid., 321.48. Ibid., 242-243.49. Ibid., 244-245.50. Ibid., 246-247, citing Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970),737.5 1. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202-203.52. Scott, Weaponsof the Weak,322.53. Ibid., 40.54. These ideas about violence are further developed in Timothy Mitchell, The Repre-sentation of Violence in Writings on Political Development: The Case of Nasserist

Egypt, in Farhad Kazemi and John Waterbury, editors, Peasant Politics andViolence in the Recent History of the Middle East (forthcoming).55. Charles Taylor, Interpretation and the Sciences of Man, The Review of Meta-physics 25/1 (1971), 3-51; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretationof Cultures: SelectedEssays (New York: Basic Books, 1973).56. For example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strate-gy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985) calls for a post-Marxist abandoning of the discursive/extra-discursive dichotomy and thethought/reality opposition (110). But like the work of Foucault on which they

draw, they fail to explain how and why the construction of what I have called theworld-as-exhibition has made these oppositions, despite their elusiveness, sopowerful and so seemingly obvious. See Timothy Mitchell, The World as Exhibi-tion, ComparativeStudies in Society and History 31 (1989), 217-236.57. Clifford Geertz, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, inThe Interpretationof Cultures:Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 7,10, 28.

58. Recent criticisms of Geertz's work fault it for failing adequately to distinguish thenatives' cultural text from the interpretive text of the anthropologist (a difficultyGeertz himself admitted from the beginning). They do not tend to question what ismeant by a text. See, for example, Vincent Crapanzano, Hermes Dilemma: TheMasking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description, in James Clifford andGeorge E. Marcus, editors, WritingCulture The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography(Berkeley: University of California, 1986) and Mark Schneider, Culture-as-Text inthe Work of Clifford Geertz, Theory and Society 16/6 (1987), 809-839.59. Geertz, ThickDescription, 11-12.60. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt.61. See Mitchell, The World as Exhibition.62. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 142-154.63. Geertz, Thick Description, 14-15.64. Clifford Geertz, Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, in The Interpreta-tion of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 448.65. Rosalind O'Hanlon, Recovering the Subject.66. Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant, 240.67. Scott, Weapons of the Weak,48, 287-288, 329.68. Ibid., 288n, 334-335.69. Ibid., 2.70. Ibid., 330.

71. Cf. O'Hanlon, Recovering the Subject.72. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt; see also Timothy Mitchell, The Effect of the State,


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577

paper presented at the SSRC workshop on State Creation and Transformation inthe Middle East, Istanbul, September 1989 (publication forthcoming).73. Scott, Weapons of the Weak,312-313.74. Ibid., 52, 56.75. Ibid., 56.76. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 44-48, 79, 92-94.77. Scott, Weaponsof the Weak,48.78. Ibid., 162.79. Ibid., 72-73, 151-153.80. Ibid., 82-84.81. Ibid., 237.82. Ibid., 152-153.83. Ibid., 156,269.84. Ibid., 266.85. Ibid., 274.86. Ibid., 277.87. Ibid., 104.88. Ibid., 142-143,268.89. Ibid., 48.90. Ibid., 56.91. Ibid., 54-55.92. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 206.93. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 149.

Mitchell - Everyday Metaphors of Power

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