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Developmental Zones and Commoning: A Study of Spatial Stratification

  •  •  •  •  •  •  • mathew kuriakose• roll no. 114088004• annual progress seminar- 1•  • supervisor• Professor D Parthasarathy•  •  • Indian Institute of Technology Bombay• Department of Humanities and Social Sciences• August 2012

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Rajan, a victim of enforced disappearance during Indira’s Emergency

“I still have no answer to the question of whether or not I feel vengeance. But I leave a question to the world: why are you making my innocent child stand in the rain even after his death?” (Prof. T. V. Eachara Varier, from Memories of a Father)

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Why Social Theory?

• Unearthing old, haunted, unanswered questions

• Pausing these simple questions in a scathing, disturbing and acerbic manner

• Seeking answers with more rigour, intensity and, above all, clarity

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Research Questions

• Do transformations in development geographies bring in significant changes in social relations of dominance and inequality which would reflect upon politics in general and governance in particular?

• Are ecological changes and changes in political and social subjectivities mutually enforcing?

• How does the emergence of new social and political subjectivities mutate governance, citizenship and sovereignty?

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Research Objectives

• To explore the consolidation of state, in the form of

superimposition of bourgeois forms of property and social

relations, through the creation of developmental zones as New

Spatialities of Exception (NSEs).

• To study the production, distribution and destruction of various

types of commons in a developmental zone.

• To identify emerging forms of social and political subjectivities in

the context of changing forms of property and social relations

linked to commons and the corresponding changes in

governance, citizenship and sovereignty.

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Theoretical Framework

• primitive accumulation as a mode of colonialisation/internal colonisation

• Development through Primitive Accumulation (DPA)

• spatial stratification through DPA

• developmental geography and ecological geography

• creative destruction of commons

• Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)

• Distributive State Apparatus (DSA)

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Methodological Notes

• “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows

to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about

my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet

by any.” Mohandas K Gandhi

• Eurocentricism as the authentic core of the Western way of thinking

• Can we de-Occidentalise Western theory?

• ‘Brown Master’s Burden’- native elites’ role in ‘civilising the savages’

• Can the Orient have its own orientalism?

• “the recognition of constraint [dukkha] as an attribute of Being itself frees epistemology and sociology to pursue human well being without being limited by antithetical binaries” (Radha D’Souza 2010: 21).

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On Ethnography• Alfred W. Crosby suggests that “[a]sk simple questions,

because the answers to complicated questions probably will be too complicated to test and, even worse, too fascinating to give up” (1995: 6).

• ‘contradictory logics and incommensurable discourses (which are) intermingled with one another’ (Akhil Gupta, 2000: 3).

• “How does one conceptualize impure, hybrid, incommensurable modes of thinking and being without filtering them of their messiness?” (ibid) (Emphasis added).

• a macrological framework, not metanarratives?

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Zoning and the Emergence of New Spatialities of Exception

• Internal territorial conquests

• Technologies of Zoning

-space imagineering

-theming the nation and territorial exceptioning

• Primitive Accumulation, New Spatialities of Exception and Subsumption of Territories

-divorce between producers and their means of production

-marriage between capital and nature

• The Territorial Logic of Capitalist Rule

- capitalist territorial network

- trickling down capitalist rule

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The Right to the City or the Socialisation of Commons?

• “sociologists of citizenship” as “thimble-rigging tyrants” (Badiou, 2012: 1).

• “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land”. (An African saying famously quoted by Bishop Desmond Tutu).

• now we have the Rights and they have the land• the Problem of ‘Rights’ in the Right to the City• How can we articulate claims to space in a context

specific/sensitive manner?• Is the rights discourse the only paradigm to articulate our

claims to space? • Is city the only space worth claiming for and does it involve

any special privileges?

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• “'imagine that a man slaps a woman in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. At the same time another man slaps a woman in a popular neighbourhood in Khartoum [Sudan], and yet a third does the same in a classroom at the Sorbonne in Paris. All three women protest: the woman in Paris that her rights have been violated, the woman in Khartoum that her dignity has been violated, and the woman in KwaZulu-Natal that custom has been violated. Every victim protests. But the language of protest is different in each case” (Mahmood Mamdani, 2000: 1).

• -“power claims to uphold rights in Paris, dignity in Khartoum and custom in KwaZulu-Natal” (ibid)

• Dadabhai Naoroji- British in India to behave in the British way• Gandhi employs a legal resistance approach that upholds the law by

both submission (by accepting the legitimacy of law) and disruption (by civil disobedience aims at legal reforms, not necessarily the abolition of colonial law itself)

• Bhagat Singh- through outright rejection and fight unto death (asks the British to send him to firing squads as he considers himself as a soldier of Indian nation that is in war with the British empire).

• urban bias of the right to the city approach

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Spatiality of Resource Shifts 

Intraurban resource shiftsSlum eviction, the case of mill lands in 

mumbai

Rural  to Rural&

 Urban to Urban Resource Shifts 

Interurban resource shiftsThe shift of capital from old Culcutta to New Delhi.  investment diversion

Intrarural resource shiftsLand transfers, irrigation,  diversion of government 

funds,  private moneylending, transfer of usage rights in commons

Interrural resource shifts

government funds and services, public 

infrastructure, irrigation

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Rural                  UrbanResource Shifts 

Urban to Rural(metropolitan capital, industrial 

products,technology, trends, lifestyles, fashion, waste)

Rural to Urban(provincial capital, water, minerals,  raw materials, electricity, labour, agricultural 

products, migrants)

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• community as commons• socialising commons• “Picture a pasture open to all” (Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy

of the Commons”). Joke of last century, Mr. Hardin. No pasture is open to all. You wouldn’t know, there exists customary laws and practices in the governance of commons, at least in our part of the world.

• the colonial notion of terra nullius. Our lands as empty lands which awaits your arrival and discovery

• dukkha (the awareness of restraints) in the governance of commons

“O’ Little one, light is dukkha Darkness is what comforts!

Akkitham Achuthan Namboothiri (translated myself)

Yes, darkness=non-awareness of restrains is what comforts. But light comes from dukkha= the awareness of restraints

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Proposed Work

• How developmental geography changes the ecogeography in the context of selected case studies

• Understanding “the ecological component of imperialism” (Crosby, 1995:7)

• Exploring semiurban semirural spaces• Delineating positive commons and

negative commons