4 Proposed Sociological Theory of Malawi
4.2 The Epistemic Foundations of the Theory
4.2.1 Episteme 1: Conformity as Disguised Rebellion
This is the first basic episteme. Conformity to the State, as the historical evidence shows in the first section, cannot be taken to represent the end of political ambitions to seize and control the State. This is because even as late as 1993-94 (thirty years after independence), the voting patterns in Malawi went along ethnic and regional lines. Therefore, the daily activities people were involved in during the dictatorship which resembled social tranquillity and stability are accounted for in terms of a gross scale of suspicion in which the only way mistrust could be managed was if a dispelling message was sent to the other members of that society. Such a message could not be arbitrarily generated and portrayed again because of the regional and ethnic suspicions that prevailed. Therefore, it could only be received and transmitted from the
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very same centre of power to which everyone aspired to have control over. That centre of power was the State.155
By banding around this message, and performing for others, people where then able to manage suspicion by making certain that they were not being misunderstood for being politically ambitious by the politically ambitious others of that same society. It is in this manner that ethnically and regionally disintegrated people helped sustain a State establishment that they themselves would have rather seen collapse. To this effect, conformity and even general sociability in the Malawian context cannot be seen as a uniformity of ideals amongst those who seem to adhere to it. Conformity can equally be seen as the mask disguising a rebellious demeanour – or in other words the political activity of wanting to seem apolitical.
4.2.2 Episteme 2: Social Life as Performance
In a connected fashion, if conformity can be seen as disguising political ambitions, then it follows that the disguise is directed at a potential interpreter or spectator who has the capacity to read the message carried by that disguise. As such, the disguise therefore must have a vocabulary that is shared by the spectating others, further implying that the wearer of the disguise is equally capable of reading the other disguises worn by the spectating others. This is because people perform to meet expectations. It is precisely this grand collaboration of competent yet unaffiliated masqueradors that leads to the conclusion that social life in Malawi is about portraits which saturate the social landscape and veil the unknown motivations behind them. With this conceptualization, we automatically begin to see the demarcations as well which divide between the realm of social things called social ontologies and the psychological space of the individual which we have grossly seen as the origins of motivation whatever those motivations might be.
The question “what is the motivation that inspires the wearing of such disguises?” can be rephrased in a different form without losing its essence or spirit. That form can be, “what are the costs to be incurred if someone was not to wear those disguises?” The discussions conducted particularly in the History and Sociability section suggest that there is a tension in which people seek to remain legitimate or acceptable actors within a social setting albeit with its limitations while those same people nurse internal ambitions to realize goals or outcomes whose realizations are restricted by that same commitment to remain legitimate and acceptable. The
155 The details for this argument have already been presented the subsection From Nyasaland to Contemporary Malawi under the broader heading History and Sociability.
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negotiation between these opposing conditions requires therefore a mechanism that enables the actors to appropriate upon themselves the things of society that enable them to navigate towards those outcomes. This process of appropriation is what translates into a performance – which in a rudimentary definition can be seen as presentation of arguments that appeal to social expectations in order to appease other spectators into allowing the performer to realize a certain goal. Therefore, action intended to effect the wanted or contested social ontological thus dresses in a performance in a simultaneous projection of meanings to spectators and an effective action towards the wanted or contested thing.
4.2.3 Episteme 3: The Sociability Imperative
The sociability imperative which is a term coined to capture this mutual tension in which action must be robbed in performances which potentially make that action more elaborate and less effective draws logically from the second episteme. As Coleman (1994) argues, human beings or people have no reason to act appropriately in a social context except for wanting to remain acceptable members of that social system. Indeed the term Social Context implies that basic idea because the sociality of a context is preciously the mutuality of perception and participation in a collectively indulged order. Performance is therefore the endeavour to remain integral to the social context by way of truncating the motivations behind an individual’s numerous activities into a code that makes them appropriate to that order.
Importantly, this is preciously where the dynamisms and structuralism of the social setting can be conceptualized. Within the Sociability Imperative there is the aforementioned tension of transgression within conformity, or conformity to achieve transgression. This tension can also be seen as an institutive element of social life in which structure – that tendency for society to maintain a status quo – is enforced by social actors in their performances that make those social actors recognizable and to seem normal. The dynamism – an innate tendency for change – is present through the availability of the transgressing ambition which seems to always ever so slightly bend the rules of the social in view of the outcomes it wishes to achieve. This is way, in order to better illustrate this, the study delved into a discussion about consciousness as a way to clearly render this tension. There, it was suggested that consciousness as Schutz (1967) and Husserl (1901, 1965) argued is in essence intentional because consciousness can only be about being conscious of something. But thinking – the civilizing or sociability enabling mechanism of consciousness’ intentionality – is what accounts for performance. In which case, consciousness is to action what thinking is to performance.
111 4.2.4 Episteme 4: History as Intersubjectivity
The next question therefore has to do with the substance of performance. From where does the substance that makes up a performance come from? Here, the arguments presented under History and Sociability about the role of history in the process of acting in the “now” are illustrative. While there is indeed the possibility of making claims based on anticipated events that are yet to come, history from which the identity, traditions and cultures of a given people are forged presents an inherently overpowering capacity to institute what is right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate within a social setting. This is because, as illustrated previously in the argument about social contexts, sociability or the competence of participating in a shared order seems to always be acquired upon familiarity and recognizability. The order is precisely that to the extent that it is both familiar and recognizable. By extension, a normal situation becomes abnormal once its events seize to follow their expected sequence stored in the memory of the collective, and as such, people typically act or perform in a manner that is – as this dissertation puts it in another place – persons consistent. That is, a manner that is in harmony with the general course of history – that is, the social context or the order.
In this manner, history is seen as the instituting power or force behind legitimate social activity.
And by extension, since history in this fashion undergirds the security of the collective in terms of appropriateness and inappropriateness, then history is equally the basis upon which intersubjectivity is built. This is because an individual is collectively recognizable on the basis of their historically expected activities, just as the collective is recognizable to the individual as fellow adherents of those same activities. It is therefore in everyone’s interest to portray that they are in sync with the historical stoke of their social setting not only in order to be recognizable and acceptable, but also in order for them to see what others see and to be a member of that collective public eye. Through history, people do not only acquire the capabilities to perform before others but also the right to call others to conformity.
If it is accepted that history carries out this function within the Malawian setting, then it must also be accepted that Malawian intersubjectivity is largely rooted in Malawi’s history. As such, through that history, Malawians more or less see the same things; comprehend more or less the same implications pertaining to those things; and by extension know the performances they ought to generate when acting within the context of those things. To put it simply, history is the basis of their intersubjectivity.156
156 See the section History, Sociability and Intersubjectivity for a more in-depth presentation of this argument.
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4.2.5 Episteme 5: The Inclination towards Standards
In the preceding epistemic foundations, two general features can be seen. Firstly, there is the dynamism caused by the need to transgress whose effect seems to be pulling the society into discord. And then there is the structuralism caused by the concurrent commitments to adhere and conform through the wearing of masks or performances whose effect counters the disorganizing impulses of the dynamism. This study proposes that the force of the dynamism is usually less than the force of the structuralism as long as the entire societal project remains viable over time (see Horkheimer, 1973 summarized in footnote 158). And this is for the following two reasons;
Firstly, there is a great desire to hold others to conformity because, as already shown, straight-jacketed others are more predictable in terms of the kinds of actions they are likely to roll out as performances upon the social context. Their predictability reduces the fluidity or uncertainty of the social terrain thereby allowing the individuals – in this instance seen as centres around which social life occurs – unload their own performances upon the social context with certain outcomes in mind.157 But these centres are numerous, and so the grand scale effect of these calling-others-to-conformity impulses are that they further impose the structural stasis which everyone seems motivated to overcome from their individual perspectives.
Secondly, the putting on of the disguises, masks or performances, as shown in the previous episteme of History as Intersubjectivity, emphasize the shared and collectively known history itself. The consequence of which is a self-imposed limiting of the intention to transgress which occurs right at the point at which performances are staged and portrayed for others. The force of the dynamism is therefore in this sense overpowered by the individual himself or herself when they civilize their ahistorical appetites into a socially acceptable code. In this regard, the dynamism element of society is thus overwhelmingly an opportunistic process, nested within the gradual distorting processes of transgression which reproduce disfigured, defaced and structurally- compatible novel elements of the broader structural dictum of social things.
Therefore, the Malawi social setting seems inclined to maintain contextualizing standards that enable the individual sources of activities to be regulated by the overarching banners of appropriateness and inappropriateness. These standards, rooted in history and as such the
157 We have argued that this was the basis for the self-perpetuating dictatorship, and also the reason for the rise of judicial power in Malawi following democratization when the legislative and executive arms of state became increasingly fluid due to their inability to limit the excessive encroachments of politicians.
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constitutive parts of intersubjectivity, generate the social context and by extension guide the sociability imperative that occurs upon that context.158