What postcolonial studies teach us can be summarized as follows: technical, evaluative, objective, ahistorical knowledge is based on a priori assumptions that have political positions, functions, and effects. Truth, in any discipline, is not discovered; it is constructed . Behind the "discovered" truths, presented as neutral facts, there is always a relationship of social power.
Each of us looks at the world from a perspective that, willingly or unwillingly, is biased. In this sense, we produce the social world; we produce it through a shared definition of meanings , and, simultaneously, our subjectivity is produced through it. There is no opposition between the individual and society; through relationships and social interactions, we are continually in a process of subjectivization, of constructing the self . Any difference or identity is never something immutable, something that essentially belongs to the thing or the subjects; we are always the ones who mark a difference or delineate an identity. This is not a voluntary act, it is the order of discourse in which we find ourselves inserted, through which we perceive some differences rather than others, some similarities rather than others; we open and close points of enunciation and visibility.
Understanding this means freeing ourselves from all those metaphysical truths that seek to impose their partial truths as total truths with "epistemic violence" and " symbolic violence ." The works of Edward Said, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Abdelmalek Sayad, Sandro Mezzadra, and others share precisely this goal of exposing the partiality and subjugating functions of those forms of knowledge that present themselves to the world as impartial and objective.
In the production laboratory
From this premise, we can take a second step and observe what happens in what Marx called the " laboratory of production ." This is a highly effective field of investigation for analyzing the material conditions that lead to the production of power relations, regimes of truth, and hierarchies of knowledge. These productions, being embedded within the cognitive functions and capacities of subjects—that is, in their ways of thinking and acting—take on a role as central as (if not more so than) the production of goods. The opposition between man and machine in cognitive capitalism is replaced by the incorporation of the machine by man: the worker does not produce by entering into a relationship with an external machine (think of the figure of the classic worker in the Taylorist factory), but through tools that belong to his own subjectivity, such as knowledge. The control of socially recognized truths becomes even more crucial than in the past. Consequently, it is easy to understand how and why the mechanisms of control have changed significantly over the last few years. The exclusionary differentiation of subjectivities across geopolitical, cultural, social, religious borders, and so on, which postcolonial studies refer to with the concept of intersectionality, has discriminatory effects based on class, race, and gender, and produces social hierarchies that make some subjects more vulnerable than others.
Intersectionality
Proceeding schematically, with respect to differences in gender, class and race, we can show the main devices that, by tracing and intersecting boundaries, make these mechanisms possible.
1. gender-family ; gender differences have been constructed through a boundary between production (work), historically the domain of "men," and reproduction (care and management of household chores), historically the domain of "women" and considered " non-work ." This has led to the denial of women's fundamental role in determining the very possibility of producing according to the capitalist mode; in fact, it is evident that without reproduction there could be no production, and that very often it is not possible to draw a clear line between the two phases. The patriarchal family is the main device for rendering citizens' private lives apolitical; or, to put it bluntly, the place where the social production of value is not recognized, and therefore, paid for.
2. Race-national border ; in this case the relationship appears very clear: the border has the function of creating an artificial boundary useful for demarcating an inside and an outside, so as to turn migrants , when they cross the line, into a blackmailed workforce from which to obtain more flexible working conditions than would be possible without the border and in conditions of less social subordination.
3. Class-private property ; private property is a useful boundary for extracting value from social cooperation and natural resources. This boundary, with regard to intangible goods—that is, goods that by their nature are neither exhaustible nor subject to deterioration (think, for example, of knowledge)—serves to produce scarcity, thus creating individuals willing to exchange their time for a wage that does not correspond to actual production.
Thus, the conditions of market existence, far from being something that humans produce naturally, must be continually reproduced artificially through social institutions such as the patriarchal family, national borders, and private property; institutions which, as postcolonial studies have highlighted, are an expression of the perennial intersection of violence and historically determined power relations.
Antonio Di Stasio
