Continued from Parts 1 and 2
This is exactly why history as critical practice is so crucial. Without a relationship to the past (historicity) we assume things like culture are natural, immutable. Something which is the product of history is naturalized as the eternal human condition and then used to justify oppressive practices, as if it is in the nature of people of colour, women, and non-Western peoples to be dominated. Marx brought this to our attention when he unmasked bourgeois man masquerading as universal man. Historicity, then, is a means of recognizing alterity. As Spivak points out, history involves the "transgression of the logical by the historical-geographical." It introduces the problem of difference into the philosophical master narrative, requiring us to be sceptical of claims to timeless truths. This opens up the possibility of changing our present and imagining a very different future. Likewise, Nietzsche's critical history means the prospect of putting a knife to the roots of an injustice, "a privilege, a caste, a dynasty." Ironically critical history lets us be in the present by loosening the hold of the past, "to shatter and dissolve something to enable [us] to live."
The difficulty is how to act without the script, without slotting our story into its place in the grand master narrative. This is more important than ever in our supposed postcolonial world. Despite decolonization and liberation struggles, the hierarchies between the West and the rest of the world are perpetuated; indeed the disparities grow wider. HIV/AIDS, conflicts and intractable poverty prompt some to say the postcolonial project has failed. Trying to follow the blueprint the West has laid out does not seem to be an option, but neither does looking backwards. Time moves forwards so there is no choice about whether or not to progress, but maybe progress must not be unilinear. Maybe, as Nandy suggests, there are alternative universalities. If the universals of the West had to so distort the difference they encountered in order to include it, are they really universal? Instead of othering difference in order to force it to fit into the universals, can we modify the universals to truly accommodate difference? In other words, can we change the script?
According to Spivak's reading, Marx was already dealing with these concerns in his critique of the intending subject. Even the capitalist, in whom we usually see dominance, power and agency, is just an instrument of capital: "capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will." If both those who dominate and those who are dominated are but playing a part, following a script, where is there any room for responsibility, agency, change? Capital may be the historical agent in Marx's historicism, but it is not alive. Indeed any script is dead without actors to breathe life into the part. It cannot function without people, humans to play the part: "the human is the living element that can be instrumental in animating (or operating) inscriptions." A script is not entirely deterministic. If there is no escape from the script, can we perform it creatively?
In some ways, this is what people are doing all the time in their everydayness, when they, "collectively attempt to make their own history as they act (in the most robust sense of agency) a part they have not chosen, in a script that has as its task to keep them silent and invisible." (Yup, her again) Chakrabarty shows us that despite how hard the British worked to enumerate and measure fixed, impermeable and discrete communities, Indians still inhabit fuzzy communities: "In their everyday lives, in negotiating the spheres of friendship and kinship, say, Indians, like human beings everywhere, are comfortable with the indeterminacies of ethnic identities." This is part of what he means by the term History 2. There are ways of being in the world that cannot be explained by even the most rigorous history of capital. All the everyday practices that cannot be captured by scripts and identities are not necessarily subject to temporizing. Because it is outside its logic, History 2 is not the Other of capital. History 2 is its limits, disrupting its totalizing force. While historicism tries to "subjugate or destroy the multiple possibilities that belong to History 2," it cannot complete the "subordination of History 2s to the logical of capital."
In a sense History 2 is simply an attempt to name the radical alterity of the past. The past is often treated as the other of the present, as if it can be captured, but in truth it escapes our grasp. The infinite fullness and diversity of the vanishing present cannot be held onto, preserved, as the antiquarian would desire. It slips through our fingers. We can never capture the past in its rich livingness; we cannot make it present. Neither can we cram it into a single master narrative, to possess its essence or meaning. Its teeming complexity will overflow even the grandest monumental account.
We can never know everything that happened in the past – Nietzsche's superhistorical perspective notwithstanding – but neither can we be outside of history. Though the past has passed, its traces remain in the present. If I have a broken leg, it is because last week's event – say, falling out of a tree – is in some way present today. There is no standpoint outside of history, outside of human experience. As temporal beings, we are imperfect, finite, embedded in a particular history and culture. This contingency of our existence, rather than discouraging, is actually cause for hope. If contingent, it can be created otherwise. We can destabilize history's all-knowing narratives of power by starting with the limits. This opens new vistas. An imaginative source for re-presentation, history can be transformative. This is history in service of life.
BTW, I put the points I consider most important in bold - is it helpful or distracting?
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Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Friday, August 1, 2008
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Why Critical History in a Postcolonial World? Part 2
Continued from Part 1...
In order to effect comparisons and determine positions in a hierarchy, differences must be made commensurate, usually by the application of a universal category. If by definition universal (Encarta: "applicable to all situations or purposes") means there is nothing outside the universal, how do universals deal with difference? Partha Chatterjee shows that under colonialism claims of both universality and difference had a tendency to slip into a development narrative, as we saw in Hegel, which was a way of temporizing and therefore assimilating cultural and historical difference. Difference thus produced deferral, based on an expectation of education, improvement and progress. Through this not-yet, primitive India could be brought into the grand master narrative, though not equally with Europe. What Chatterjee calls the "Rule of Colonial Difference" meant a deferral of identity or sameness, possibly an eternal deferral: if Europe is still progressing and India is behind, can it ever catch up?
This is the situation inherited by nationalist movements. Fanon explains that colonialism, "not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future," also "distorts, disfigures, and destroys" the past of the colonized societies. To fortify and legitimize collective identity in the present, nationalism must rehabilitate the past. Fanon sees this as a response to colonialism's totalizing discourse. In the nationalist psyche, to recreate a pure and uncolonized past is to find and recover the national culture. But for Fanon the attempt to recover the glory of a past civilization is doomed. It makes culture, which should be in constant motion and full of vitality, into an artefact, preserved like a museum piece, dead. This kind of nativist history is, in Nietzsche's words, not serving life. It resembles antiquarian history, which "merely understands how to preserve life, not how to generate it." Mummified, decaying, this is the past sucking the vigour from the present. We can see exactly this tension in Nehru. Although he wants to rejuvenate the universals he finds in India's past (to make that past live), he is also searching for mythological origins of the nation's essence.
This search for origins and essential identities often has the purpose of buttressing boundaries, demarcating identities, making precise the inside and outside of "authentic" culture. Tradition is one familiar means for this, and its invention and preservation seem to have been a feature of nearly all decolonization struggles. This reproduction of the (imagined) past often involves enforcing custom and tradition, sometimes in a repressive manner: "the fact that something has become old now gives rise to the demand that it must be immortal." (Nietzsche) Obsession with tradition is yet another form of fetishism of the past, privileging it over the present. In opposition to the domination of the West, difference is privileged. In the name of emancipation, this nativist history reverses the binary, valorizing the past and rejecting the modern. Different problematic same thematic, it remains within the colonial logic, since it presupposes that the colonized are living in the past, while Europe is modern and more advanced on the unilinear historicist scale.
This is the general problem for Others trying to reconstitute their selves as subjects, because, as Fanon says, sealed in Otherness the only way to have a subject position is to accept being the voice of the Other, to fetishize themselves, reproducing the racialized logic of same and other. It also explains the performance of nativism by native intellectuals and elites who feel they must "go native" to "get away from the white culture." As if the only way to participate in politics and society is to take on these identities. However, identity politics is simply another form of mimesis: first determine the Indian way of doing things, and then follow that script. It is puppetry, following the black man script because that appears to be the only way to enact a subject position. But whiteness has constructed blackness, so this is playing someone else's part without authenticity or real agency; taking on the voice of the Other is about sheer instrumentality.
What is tricky, as Chakrabarty reminds us, is to take on a subject position of difference that does not repeat the racialized self-other logic. Fanon recognizes how difficult this is, and says it indeed produces a sort of melancholy because for this there's no script. We want a living culture, a community with national consciousness, but what the hegemonic order means by "culture" is a given political identity. If culture is that which cannot be captured, the living vanishing present, what Balibar calls everyday practices of meaning, "culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin."
Part 3
In order to effect comparisons and determine positions in a hierarchy, differences must be made commensurate, usually by the application of a universal category. If by definition universal (Encarta: "applicable to all situations or purposes") means there is nothing outside the universal, how do universals deal with difference? Partha Chatterjee shows that under colonialism claims of both universality and difference had a tendency to slip into a development narrative, as we saw in Hegel, which was a way of temporizing and therefore assimilating cultural and historical difference. Difference thus produced deferral, based on an expectation of education, improvement and progress. Through this not-yet, primitive India could be brought into the grand master narrative, though not equally with Europe. What Chatterjee calls the "Rule of Colonial Difference" meant a deferral of identity or sameness, possibly an eternal deferral: if Europe is still progressing and India is behind, can it ever catch up?
This is the situation inherited by nationalist movements. Fanon explains that colonialism, "not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future," also "distorts, disfigures, and destroys" the past of the colonized societies. To fortify and legitimize collective identity in the present, nationalism must rehabilitate the past. Fanon sees this as a response to colonialism's totalizing discourse. In the nationalist psyche, to recreate a pure and uncolonized past is to find and recover the national culture. But for Fanon the attempt to recover the glory of a past civilization is doomed. It makes culture, which should be in constant motion and full of vitality, into an artefact, preserved like a museum piece, dead. This kind of nativist history is, in Nietzsche's words, not serving life. It resembles antiquarian history, which "merely understands how to preserve life, not how to generate it." Mummified, decaying, this is the past sucking the vigour from the present. We can see exactly this tension in Nehru. Although he wants to rejuvenate the universals he finds in India's past (to make that past live), he is also searching for mythological origins of the nation's essence.
This search for origins and essential identities often has the purpose of buttressing boundaries, demarcating identities, making precise the inside and outside of "authentic" culture. Tradition is one familiar means for this, and its invention and preservation seem to have been a feature of nearly all decolonization struggles. This reproduction of the (imagined) past often involves enforcing custom and tradition, sometimes in a repressive manner: "the fact that something has become old now gives rise to the demand that it must be immortal." (Nietzsche) Obsession with tradition is yet another form of fetishism of the past, privileging it over the present. In opposition to the domination of the West, difference is privileged. In the name of emancipation, this nativist history reverses the binary, valorizing the past and rejecting the modern. Different problematic same thematic, it remains within the colonial logic, since it presupposes that the colonized are living in the past, while Europe is modern and more advanced on the unilinear historicist scale.
This is the general problem for Others trying to reconstitute their selves as subjects, because, as Fanon says, sealed in Otherness the only way to have a subject position is to accept being the voice of the Other, to fetishize themselves, reproducing the racialized logic of same and other. It also explains the performance of nativism by native intellectuals and elites who feel they must "go native" to "get away from the white culture." As if the only way to participate in politics and society is to take on these identities. However, identity politics is simply another form of mimesis: first determine the Indian way of doing things, and then follow that script. It is puppetry, following the black man script because that appears to be the only way to enact a subject position. But whiteness has constructed blackness, so this is playing someone else's part without authenticity or real agency; taking on the voice of the Other is about sheer instrumentality.
What is tricky, as Chakrabarty reminds us, is to take on a subject position of difference that does not repeat the racialized self-other logic. Fanon recognizes how difficult this is, and says it indeed produces a sort of melancholy because for this there's no script. We want a living culture, a community with national consciousness, but what the hegemonic order means by "culture" is a given political identity. If culture is that which cannot be captured, the living vanishing present, what Balibar calls everyday practices of meaning, "culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin."
Part 3
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Why Critical History in a Postcolonial World? Part 1
This is a follow-up to yesterday's post.
Let nothing be called natural
In an age of bloody confusion,
Ordered disorder, planned caprice,
And dehumanized humanity, lest all things
Be held unalterable!
Bertolt Brecht
The past has passed, meaning it is no more. By definition not present, it no longer exists. So why bother attending to it? Whether we attend to it or not, we cannot escape the past, since it produced our present – what exists is inherited from whatever came before. Perhaps we could just forget the past and be as happy as Nietzsche's cows. With no memory, they would be forgiven for taking themselves to be the general case. They might assume the whole world is an eternal pasture, and that a herd is the only natural way of being. But this is exactly the concern. Without attention to historicity we run the risk of naturalizing a particular kind of subject, society, culture, economic system, or set of power relations, universalizing the particular, making natural a product of history. Not only does this reduce anything (or anyone) different into an Other, an aberration, it leaves little room for change. The colonial order, racial hierarchies, gender inequality all appear natural and timeless.
A diachronic perspective, by contrast, can show us that things have not always been the way they are now, and therefore immunize us from assuming things will be thus forever. How we tell our past-narrative, our history, impacts how we imagine ourselves, our present, and our future. This is precisely the reason postcolonial thinkers have concerned themselves with the past. Of course, as Nietzsche points out, not just any attention to the past will do – history should serve life. Whatever falls outside of the grand universal narrative of historicism, akin to monumental history, is produced as an Other. Nativist history, a response to this othering, makes a fetish of the past (as does antiquarian history), but is unable to break free of the othering discourse. In contrast critical history and attention to historicity are concerned with the present and have the potential to go beyond the othering discourse.
The grand sweep of colonial history could be seen as an attempt to deal with difference met in the colonial encounter. In order to persevere, historicism had to find a way of fitting very different societies into its universal temporal narrative. Often seen as unhistorical, in stasis, outside of time, these colonized societies were only wrenched back into the stream of time by colonial rule. Although back in the narrative, they were then behind, backward. The colonies were seen as Europe's own past, like Europe but at the same time not like Europe. Historicism is then about both sameness and difference. It brings difference into sameness by temporizing. Nietzsche could have been writing about this when he wrote of monumental history: "how much that is different must be overlooked, how ruthlessly must the individuality of the past be forced into a general form …" Monumental history is inspirational. It advises us that greatness is once more possible if we imitate past greatness. Monumental history thus produces a script, forcing out all specificity. It is nothing but lifeless mimesis, producing "nothing but timidly disguised universal men."
Hegel exemplifies historicism. His juggernaut of a master narrative simply rolled right over alternative histories. He could subjugate them, bringing them all into the grand narrative, because of the totalizing progress of spirit (geist) through the ages. To be all-encompassing his system had to find ways to make these varied narratives commensurate, which is why the India we meet in Hegel's narrative is so distorted. Hegel's question of how to deal with discrepancy – India – was solved by the explanation that ancient India was once great but got stuck in stasis, while Europe kept on progressing. For Hegel, self-consciousness is produced dialectically through experience of the other: "those peoples therefore are alone capable of History... who have arrived at that period of development... at which individuals comprehend their own existence as independent, i.e. possess self-consciousness." But the Indians, steeped in spirituality, did not exercise their reason to separate Man from Nature and God. Without differentiating themselves from the universal, the dialectic could not function. The irrationality and lack of individuation of Indians ("In India we have only a division in masses..." explains Hegel) thus retarded the development of reason. And because reason, or Spirit, is the great mover of history, without it the Indians could have no history or progress. They were doomed to be stuck in the past – at least until Europe's convenient intervention; it was "the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjected to Europeans." In Hegel, India is othered, then the other is conquered by the same. As Chakrabarty explains this is a united world with an internally articulated hierarchy – the world is both one and unequal.
Part 2 here
In an age of bloody confusion,
Ordered disorder, planned caprice,
And dehumanized humanity, lest all things
Be held unalterable!
Bertolt Brecht
The past has passed, meaning it is no more. By definition not present, it no longer exists. So why bother attending to it? Whether we attend to it or not, we cannot escape the past, since it produced our present – what exists is inherited from whatever came before. Perhaps we could just forget the past and be as happy as Nietzsche's cows. With no memory, they would be forgiven for taking themselves to be the general case. They might assume the whole world is an eternal pasture, and that a herd is the only natural way of being. But this is exactly the concern. Without attention to historicity we run the risk of naturalizing a particular kind of subject, society, culture, economic system, or set of power relations, universalizing the particular, making natural a product of history. Not only does this reduce anything (or anyone) different into an Other, an aberration, it leaves little room for change. The colonial order, racial hierarchies, gender inequality all appear natural and timeless.
A diachronic perspective, by contrast, can show us that things have not always been the way they are now, and therefore immunize us from assuming things will be thus forever. How we tell our past-narrative, our history, impacts how we imagine ourselves, our present, and our future. This is precisely the reason postcolonial thinkers have concerned themselves with the past. Of course, as Nietzsche points out, not just any attention to the past will do – history should serve life. Whatever falls outside of the grand universal narrative of historicism, akin to monumental history, is produced as an Other. Nativist history, a response to this othering, makes a fetish of the past (as does antiquarian history), but is unable to break free of the othering discourse. In contrast critical history and attention to historicity are concerned with the present and have the potential to go beyond the othering discourse.
The grand sweep of colonial history could be seen as an attempt to deal with difference met in the colonial encounter. In order to persevere, historicism had to find a way of fitting very different societies into its universal temporal narrative. Often seen as unhistorical, in stasis, outside of time, these colonized societies were only wrenched back into the stream of time by colonial rule. Although back in the narrative, they were then behind, backward. The colonies were seen as Europe's own past, like Europe but at the same time not like Europe. Historicism is then about both sameness and difference. It brings difference into sameness by temporizing. Nietzsche could have been writing about this when he wrote of monumental history: "how much that is different must be overlooked, how ruthlessly must the individuality of the past be forced into a general form …" Monumental history is inspirational. It advises us that greatness is once more possible if we imitate past greatness. Monumental history thus produces a script, forcing out all specificity. It is nothing but lifeless mimesis, producing "nothing but timidly disguised universal men."
Hegel exemplifies historicism. His juggernaut of a master narrative simply rolled right over alternative histories. He could subjugate them, bringing them all into the grand narrative, because of the totalizing progress of spirit (geist) through the ages. To be all-encompassing his system had to find ways to make these varied narratives commensurate, which is why the India we meet in Hegel's narrative is so distorted. Hegel's question of how to deal with discrepancy – India – was solved by the explanation that ancient India was once great but got stuck in stasis, while Europe kept on progressing. For Hegel, self-consciousness is produced dialectically through experience of the other: "those peoples therefore are alone capable of History... who have arrived at that period of development... at which individuals comprehend their own existence as independent, i.e. possess self-consciousness." But the Indians, steeped in spirituality, did not exercise their reason to separate Man from Nature and God. Without differentiating themselves from the universal, the dialectic could not function. The irrationality and lack of individuation of Indians ("In India we have only a division in masses..." explains Hegel) thus retarded the development of reason. And because reason, or Spirit, is the great mover of history, without it the Indians could have no history or progress. They were doomed to be stuck in the past – at least until Europe's convenient intervention; it was "the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjected to Europeans." In Hegel, India is othered, then the other is conquered by the same. As Chakrabarty explains this is a united world with an internally articulated hierarchy – the world is both one and unequal.
Part 2 here
Monday, April 30, 2007
On Truth and Illusions
Truths are illusions which we have
forgotten are illusions.
From The Nietzsche Family Circus via More Notes From Underground
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Have a Burning Question?
Get it answered at AskPhilosophers.org.
Is medical care or education a basic human right? If so, why?
Is global capitalism workable?
...is it fair to judge and punish [people born into poverty] in the same way as more privileged people who might do the same things?
More Philosophy & Reflection
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
Spinoza - Reason in an Age of Religious Intolerance
Philosophers do have some very relevant things to say. For example, a very easy and interesting read perfect for the layperson, is Making Sense: Philosophy Behind the Headlines by Julian Baggini. He dissects a handful of contemporary issues such as abortion, euthanasia, cults vs religion, and even the Clinton Lewinsky affair (public vs. private sphere).
Found here
I wish we'd see a lot more reason and a lot less extremism and intolerance. Want to listen to an interesting program about religion? Is Religion Dangerous?
More Philosophy & Reflection, Religion
Spinoza's reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him was to try to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happened to have been born. Self-aggrandizement can be the invisible scaffolding of religion, politics or ideology.
Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving false entailments that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more cosmically important than we truly are, that we have had bestowed upon us — whether Jew or Christian or Muslim — a privileged position in the narrative of the world's unfolding.Spinoza's system is a long deductive argument for a conclusion as radical in our day as it was in his, namely that to the extent that we are rational, we each partake in exactly the same identity.
Spinoza's faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state, is neither a rational nor an ethical option.
Found here
I wish we'd see a lot more reason and a lot less extremism and intolerance. Want to listen to an interesting program about religion? Is Religion Dangerous?
More Philosophy & Reflection, Religion
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