Paper short abstract:

Using the case of the Maoist Movement in India, this paper explores how the dialectics between epistemological and ontological uncertainty and certainty, may be central to the making of a revolutionary.

Paper long abstract:

In the early phases of the spread of an armed revolutionary movement, the dialectics between epistemological and ontological uncertainty and certainty, may be central to the making of a revolutionary. These dialectics are not just the result of an ontological uncertainty of ideological commitment to the movement, but are crucially also about the search for epistemological clarity in social relations imagined to be less opaque and hence more trustworthy. Doubt, an uncertainty about what one knows about one's social relationships is characteristic of the epistemic murk that accompanies the breakdown of the normative order in the revolutionary situation. In this context, revolutionary terror arises from the creation of epistemic clarity—the possibility that on the other side norms and relationships will be more certain. This is a certainty that is carved out of uncertainty and ambivalence, a certainty that denies or projects away uncertainty. Its weapon is paranoia, an ability to make enemies where there would be doubt, betrayal where there would be benefit of the doubt. The potential revolutionary is therefore not only unsure about his/her ideological commitments, but moreover, a crucial component of their predicament might be an uncertainty about the social relations in which they find themselves and the hope that revolutionary engagement might come with more guarantees. Ethnographic insight from the spread of the Maoist movement in India is hence used to show how becoming a revolutionary is also about being in search of certainty.