On Law & Community

When the notion of community assumes as its predicate the notion of boundary, “the purity of the community” necessarily intervenes. “Boundary”, “demarcation”, “binary”, “Self & Other” – one can say these terms in rotation. In relation to such a notion of community, the language of law (i.e. legal lingo) becomes the language of exclusion, whose objective is the security of communal integrity, or purity. The practice of which is inherently problematic, as demonstrated by Stoler’s article. On the exclusion of the métis from legal categories in both French Indochina and the Netherlands Indies, Stoler reports that the refusal of the corresponding governments to grant citizenship or subject status to a métis “could not be made on the basis of race alone, because all métis shared some degree of European descent by definition” (520). For the language of law is, generally speaking, a language of denotation, rather than that of allusion; it is constructed for stating that one object is this and not that, and furthermore, that this is never, under any circumstances, that. An example of such legal logic is found on page 75 of Burmese Days, where a suspect is convicted of theft solely on the “evidence” of his scars: marks of past offence – ‘“He is an old offender. Therefore he stole the ring!”’ As demonstrated by this same episode, such logic, or system of rationalization, carries its own danger: the language of law risks division of its people to an idea of community, an ‘imagined community’, to use Benedict Anderson’s term; this episode can be thought of as functioning the role of one of the many moments of tensions, that prepares for what is to take place in the final scenes: Maxwell's murder, Ellis' heated and tragic encounter with the Burmese students, the mob at the clubhouse, to list but three. Perhaps Forster’s dictum – “only connect” – provides a way of thinking about community without lapsing into an idea of boundary that cannot rid itself of the rhetoric of exclusion. Perhaps it is not so much the idea of boundary that carries within itself the seeds of the dangers previously mentioned – the injustices and humiliations inflicted upon another human being on the grounds of racial divide, or “colonial difference” – but the seemingly ineluctable reliance on such an idea to establish the grounds for colonial governance: to rule a people, you create the people. One way to do this is to speak the language of law, the language of exclusion.