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(print) ISSN 1476-7430 (online) ISSN 1572-5138
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POSTCOLONIALISM AND MODERNITY
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A Critical Realist Critique
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BY
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NISSIM MANNA MANNATHU THUKKAREN KKAREN1
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Dalhousie University
[email protected]
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engagement with Abstract . This paper focuses on postcolonial theory’s engagement modernity. It argues that that postcolonialism’s problematisation of modernity modernity is significant and has to be contended with seriously. In seeking to question the predatory universalism universalism of western modernity, modernity, postcolonial theory aspire aspiress to open open up paths for different modernities that have the promise of emancipation and liberation for all cultures and societies. But the crux of this paper is that this promise is hardly fulfilled. Using critical realism, it interrogates postcolonialism’s understanding of modernity. It demonstrates that, with regard regard to various aspects such as the material dimension, structural conditions, binaries and dualisms, relativism, fallibilism, temporality and structure/agency, postcolonialism’s formulations formulations are incomplete and inadequate. Ultimately, Ultimately, from from a critical realist perspective, the non-fulfilment of postcolonialism’s initial promise has serious serious consequences for the subjects of the ‘Third World’ that the theory claims to represent.
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ch’i,, constellational unity, Key words words:: anthropism, anthropocosmism, ch’i dualism, duality, ground-state, identity, identity-in-difference, non-duality, theosis
No single concept, in the last las t three decades or so, has been dissected as much as 2
modernity. The ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ that tha t is so much m uch in in vogue has put
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Department of International Development Studies, Studies, Dalhousie University, University, 6299 South South Street, Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 4H6. Nissim Mannathukkaren’s research interests include the Communist movement in India, development and democracy, modernity, the politics of popular culture, and Marxist and postcolonial theories. He is the author of The Rupture Ruptur e with Memory: Memory: Derrida Derrida and the Specters that Haunt Marxism (2006) and has published articles in the Economic the Economic and Poli Politi tical cal Weekly, Weekly, The International Journal of the History of Sport , Sport , Third World Quarterly , and South Asian History and Culture . 2 Lyotard 1984, xxiv.
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a question mark on anything that is associated with modernity. As Friedrich Nietzsche’s Nietzsche’s disciples set about dismantling the Enlightenment Enlightenment project project in the the We West, st, the the 3 subject of the ‘Third World’ is caught in a bind: just as she arrives on the threshold of modernity, she is asked to forget its promise of progress and salvation as a chimera. If, in the originary conception, Enlightenment and modernity meant the inauguration inaugurati on of the rule of reason reas on and liberation from the tyranny t yranny of the irratio irr ational nal and the unreasonable, now it is posited that ‘modernity’s incoherences – its places of unreason – are not cases of mere dysfunction which might readily be solved by a 4 better management management of technical technical progress progress and economic economic growth’. What does it mean to be modern in a Third World or postcolonial postcolonial society? Does modernity in in such societies always have to be a ‘known history, somethi ng which has history , something already happened elsewhere, elsewhere, and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or 5
otherwise, with a local content’? Or do these societies always have to inhabit what 6 Homi Bhabha calls the ‘liminal space’ – a state of in-betweenness, in-betweennes s, condemned to ‘a 7 permanent transition, transition, an endless endless pause’. What is it in their modernities that makes 8 their present a site from which they must escape? Are these societies characterised by ‘social ‘social blanks’ – the lack of of institutional institutional capabilities capabilities required required for for modern megasocieties, arising from the dissonance between western institutions that have been imposed on them and their own ‘family, caste, village, pilgrimage centre, little 9 kingdom, and so forth’? If we do not agree with these formulations formulations we could take comfort in the ‘fact’ that we are all inescapably modern now: ‘most societies today 10 possess the means for for the local local production of modernity’. This has led to a veering away from canonical forms of European modernity and the positing of alternative or 11 plural modernities. modernities. In this paper I focus on postcolonial theory and its understanding and critique of modernity. There have been well-known well -known criticisms criti cisms of postcolonial postcolonia l theory theory with with regard regard to its confusions about the temporal or geographical limits of postcolonialism and, from a Marxist perspective, the class location of postcolonial thinkers and the 12 material conditions conditions of the emergence of postcolonialism. postcolonialism. Arif Dirlik, for example,
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The terminology ‘Third World’, needless needless to say, has has become obsolete since its pejorative pejorative connotations were exposed. But here I continue to u se it following Dirlik 1997, who argues for the unexhausted radical potential of the connotation. 4 Chesneaux 1992, 140. 5 Meaghan Morris quoted quoted in Chakrabarty Chakrabarty 1997, 283, original emphasis. 6 Bhabha 1994. 7 T. N. Madan quoted in Deshpande 1999, 3. 8 Chatterjee 1997, 1–20. 9 Saberwal 1986, 2. 10 Appadurai and Breckenbridge 1995, 19. 11 See Gaonkar 2001. 12 Dirlik 1997; 1997; Ahmad 1995; O’Hanlon and Washbrook 1992.
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in an influential critique, has argued that postcolonial theory’s emergence is itself linked to the latest phase of capitalism – the emergence of Third World capitalism, 13 and the arrival of Third World intellectuals in First World academe. While these criticisms are valid, I veer way from these to focus on an interrogation of the postcolonial problematisation of modernity, for Marxist critiques have also had a tendency to dismiss postcolonial theory. Dirlik argues that ‘rather than a description of anything, [it] is a discourse that seeks to constitute the world in the sel f-image of 14 intellectuals who view themselves as postcolonial intellectuals’. For Dirlik postcolonialism’s key arguments do not represent any ‘earth shattering conceptual innovations’ for they are a rephrasing of older concerns. Similarly, Aijaz Ahmad has 15 argued that ‘postcoloniality is … like most things, a matter of class’. Postcolonial theory raises very important questions about modernity and these cannot be dismissed as easily as these quotes suggest. There has been a tendency in theoretical frameworks like that of Marxism not to enter into a dialogue with 16 postcolonialism. This, in my view, is unproductive, for it does not allow us to expand our existing frameworks of understanding and explanation. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge the ways in which postcolonialism is able to bridge the gaps in Marxism, especially errors spawned by a hubristic modernism or the 17
‘technological Prometheanism’ of the later Marx. This tendency, unfortunately, has been the dominant feature of many Marxist theories and communist movements inspired by them. Postcolonialism’s important contribution in extending the postmodern and poststructuralist critique to the empirical contexts of colonised Third World societies (something that was outside the ambit of the latter) has to be recognised. In particular, its theorisations of subalternity, Eurocentrism and 18
nationalism are vital to overcoming many of the premises of modernism. Nevertheless, I argue that despite these important questions raised by postcolonial theory, the answers provided have been very unsatisfactory. From a critical realist perspective, they provide an inadequate and incomplete understanding of modernity and its formulations are ultimately unhelpful and, in some cases, dangerous for the subjects that the theory claims to represent. The fundamental problems stem from the inadequacies of the philosophical paradigm that it employs, which is basically interpretivist. There is a persistent refusal to acknowledge ‘that there is a world 19 existing independently of our knowledge of it’. In showing these limitations, I
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Dirlik 1997, 53. Dirlik 1997, 62–3. 15 Ahmad 1995, 1–20
. 16 Bartolovich 2002, 1. This applies to engagement with postmodernism/postructuralism as well; see Mannathukkaren 2006. 17 Bhaskar 1989, 126. 18 Bartolovich 2002, 11. 19 Sayer 2000, 1. 14
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proceed here as immanent critique in critical realism would do ‘by identifying theory–practice inconsistencies, contradictions and anomalies … and remedying the constitutive absences or incompleteness that give rise to them, thereby effecting a 20 move to a fuller, richer conceptual totality’. Ontologically and epistemologically, postcolonialism’s formulations are incomplete. As I elaborate below, these are reflected in its understanding of modernity. After outlining and establishing some of
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The Critique of Modernity
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In this paper I only look at postcolonial authors from India who have been a ssociated with the Subaltern Studies project. The project has contributed to some of the major themes of postcolonial theory, and scholars associated with it are some of the
the key arguments of postcolonialism, I undertake a critique of its understanding of modernity in relation to various aspects such as capitalism, the place of the peasant, Eurocentrism and the relationship to the past. In each of these areas I demonstrate its inadequacies with regard to some key themes such as the material dimension, structural conditions, binaries and dualisms, relativism, fallibilism, temporality and structure/agency. At least in some of these a return to a Marxist problematic is vital and unavoidable, for its critical realist tools make it possible to overcome postcolonial theory’s deficiencies. There is a close link between Marxism and critical realism. Roy Bhaskar argues that socialist emancipation will not be possible without critical realism. Many of the key themes of critical realism are already present in Ma rx, even 21 if they are not explicitly articulated. This does not mean that Marxism and critical 22
realism can be conflated or that critical realism naturally leads to Marxism. Critical realism provides a platform for taking on board the critiques of positivist fallacies raised by postcolonial theory without abandoning the Marxist concerns with objectivity, truth and emancipation. The Marxism that is reconstructed in this fashion 23 is a non-reductionist one. It is imperative that the heterogeneity of the Marxist 24 tradition is reinstated. The error that postcolonial theory commits is in reducing 25
Marxism to Eurocentrism, thus ignoring the various counter-hegemonic struggles in the Third World that have appropriated Marxism to their cause in an engaging way, demonstrating its universalist implications.
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Hartwig 2007a, 99. Bhaskar 1989, 192, 134. Hartwig 2007a, 100–1; Sayer 2000, 8; Bhaskar and Collier 1998, 392. For a critique of Marxist reductionism, see Sayer 1998, 121. Benton 1998, 297; Mannathukkaren 2006. Bartolovich 2002, 10.
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important voices of postcolonialism. If the Subaltern Studies project began in India towards the late seventies by a group of historians who were disillusioned with existing trends of Indian historiography, which in their view had been completely 27 dominated by elitism, thus ignoring the subaltern, it broadened its horizon from the study of the subaltern to an understanding of the ‘postcolonial condition’ and a criticism of modernity in the Third World. Subaltern Studies, in the beginning, especially, drew inspiration from Antonio Gramsci, who had grappled with the question of subaltern identity through a Marxist framework. But from the beginning it was clear that the project of reclaiming the subaltern voice could not proceed on the basis of a mere inversion within modernist discourse. Dipesh Chakrabarty, prominent postcolonial thinker, argues that subaltern historiography differs from Gramscianinspired social history ‘from below’ in three important respects: it ‘necessarily entailed a relative separation of the history of power from an y universalist histories of capital, critique of the nation form, and an interrogation of the relation between 28 power and knowledge’. And this critique of modernity and the Enlightenment was visible as early as in the first volume of Subaltern Studies, where a distinction was being drawn between two spheres of politics: first, traditional peasant-communal politics based on community; and second, modern organised politics defined by the 29
‘centrality of the individual’ and ‘sectional interests’. As we will see, postcolonial theory is built on such binaries, e.g. modernity/tradition. One of the fundamental problematics of postcolonialism, following Subaltern Studies, has been to question the stagist (allegedly Eurocentric) notion of history in which agrarian societies have no option but to transform themselves into industrial societies to achieve progress and democracy. In this view, some the main culprits of linearity are Marxists who see peasant consciousness (which is mainly governed by religion) as an aberration in modernity. Postcolonialism argues, instead, that peasant consciousness is both radical and political and is perfectly capable of adapting to 30 conditions of modernity. The essence of Subaltern Studies could be described as ‘a democratic project meant to produce a genealogy of the peasant as citizen in contemporary political modernity’. The main way in which political modernity in postcolonial societies diverges from that of the West was that in the former it was not ‘founded on the assumed death of the peasant’. Moreover, the western notion of the political as a ‘story of human sovereignty in a disenchanted world’ does not appl y to non-western
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Even though the focus is on India, these authors have generalised its experience to stand for the entire postcolonial condition – something that has drawn justifiable criticisms. 27 Guha 1982, 1–3. 28 Chakrabarty 2002, 8. 29 Chatterjee 1982, 37. 30 Chakrabarty 2002, 9, 11.
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contexts where a strict separation between politics and religion is not sustainable. The endeavour to read postcolonial modernity on its own terms would mean the critique of the tendency in existing historiographies to describe it using negative prefixes borrowed from ‘European metahistories’: ‘not bourgeois, not capitalist, not 32 liberal , and so on’. According to postcolonial theory, colonised societies’ history has always been read in terms of a ‘lack’ or ‘absence’, from the perspective of (western) modernity. Instead, they want to recover the deep ambivalences that mark their modernity in which anti-historical and anti-modern tendencies meld seamlessly with modern 33 institutions and even projects like nationalism. The implication is that postcolonial modernity fundamentally differs from western modernity. Partha Chatterjee, another key postcolonial thinker, argues in a similar vein when he speaks about ‘our
modernity’. The distinguishing feature of the modernity of the colonised is the persistence of a certain scepticism about modernity’s values and consequences even in its acceptance, which according to Chatterjee stems from the intertwining of modernity with colonialism. As a result, while modernity in the West has been characterised by a conception of the ‘present as the site of one’s escape from the past, for us it is precisely the present from which we feel we must escape’. The complicity of ‘modern knowledges with modern regimes of power’ has condemned the colonised to be perpetual consumers of a universal modernity. This subjecthood has resulted in the colonised’s urge to produce their own modernities. Chatterjee detects the adaptation of modernity not only in the ‘supposedly cultural domains of religion, literature or the arts. The attempt to find a different modernity has been carried out 34 even in the presumably universal field of science.’ Postcolonial theory’s critique of a universal modernity has important implications for the theory and practice of Third World politics. The crucial argument that it makes is the ‘external’ and ‘alien’ character of modernity because of the introduction of new ideas such as liberal rights, individual subject, the state as an impersonal entity, etc., by European colonial powers. This externality was compounded by the fact that the anti-colonial national movement led by the elitist middle class, rather than explore structural possibilities of their own societies, followed European models 35 and ideals. Chatterjee argued in a similar vein when he posited that nationalism, even when it opposed colonialism, shared its thematic of reason, progress and modernity, accepted its Orientalist conception of India, and thus was a derivative
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Chakrabarty 2002, 19. Chakrabarty 2002, xxii, original emphasis. Chakrabarty 1997, 284. Chatterjee 1997, 19, 13–14, 18. Kaviraj 1991, 78–9, 84.
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discourse. Even in the postcolonial period, despite the fact that bourgeois rights have been adopted by the constitution, they cannot claim to unify society because of 37 ‘their externality to the immanent forms of social consciousness’. As far as the material domain is concerned, postcolonialism argues that the global history of capital does not reproduce the same history of power everywhere: ‘In the calculus of modernity, power is not a dependent variable and capital an independent one.’ Chakrabarty accepts that Marxism is relevant but inadequate to theorise power, especially in colonial societies. The fundamental characteristic of power in postcolonial societies is the direct domination and subordination of the subaltern by 38 the elite, a political domination rather than an economic one. Postcolonialists want to question the ‘foundational’ status attributed by Marxists to capitalism in understanding the colonisation of societies and also their tendency to read ‘particularistic’ histories of ‘region, culture, race, nation’ from the ‘universalistic’ language of capitalism (or class) only. Instead, they assert ‘difference as the condition of history’s possibility … and that the histories of the metropolitan proletariat and the 39 colonized are discrepant, even if both are exploited by capitalism’. Even colonialism survived only on the condition that the colonising bourgeoisie failed in its universalising mission. Colonial capitalism definitely impacted society but could not incorporate ‘vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people’. It was capitalism, but in leading subalternist Ranajit Guha’s famous words, it was 40 dominance without hegemony. Increasingly, ‘differences’ became the main motif of postcolonial theory. The divisions on the basis of religion, caste and language that mark the working-class movement make Chakrabarty argue that the singular failure of Marxists has been the 41
lack of ‘an anthropological and theoretical understanding of culture(s)’ that stems from their ‘disenchanted’ and ‘hyper-rationalist’ view of the world, which shows 42 ‘antipathy to anything that smacks of the “religious” ’. Obviously, with the emphasis on differences, totalising claims of other hegemonic discourses such as nationalism were also questioned. The focus began to shift to the ‘fragments’ that resist such 43 totalities. There is no denying the fact that postcolonial theory has exposed many of the linear, evolutionist and progressivist notions of the theoretical paradigms mainly influenced by modernism. Postcolonial theory is definitely justified in criticising the
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Chatterjee 1986. Quoted in Bannerji 2000, 909. Chakrabarty 2002, 13. Prakash 1992, 184. Chakrabarty 2002, 13. Chakrabarty 1988, 29. Chakrabarty 1995, 752. See, for example, Chatterjee 1993; Pandey 1997.
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dominant theories of modernity, which Charles Taylor has described as a-cultural, for believing in the linear transition of all societies to a single end-point, a modernity that 44 is immune to the immense cultural markers of difference that exist am ong them. The older modernisation theories and political development approaches were characterised strongly by the tradition–modernity dichotomy. Even theories like dependency, which opposed modernisation from a Third World perspective, were
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Whither the Material?
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One of the most important flaws of postcolonial theory’s understanding of modernity
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ultimately operating ‘within the same discursive space of development’, and thus were unable to overcome their ethnocentrism. Postcolonial theory offers an important corrective to the widespread tendency among such accounts of non-western societies to treat them as mirror images (in the making) of western societies; hence the appellations such as ‘developing,’ ‘modernising,’ etc. that have been used to describe them. But, as we will see, postcolonialism succumbs to the many errors that it points out in other theories.
is its lack of attention to its material basis. This stems from its interpretivist refusal to acknowledge the ‘the presence of a non-discursive, material dimension to social life’ 46 and that ‘meanings are related to material circumstances’. Postcolonialism does a poor job of theorising about the ‘irreducible material dimension’ of human social 47 life. Social structures are definitely reliant on the agent’s consciousness; at the same time they cannot be reduced to it. Even when they are concept-dependent, that is not 48
the only aspect, for the material dimension is as important. Postcolonial theory does not move to a ‘non-idealist critique of ideas’ by acknowledging ‘the possibility of 49 non-ideational causality’. The later linguistic and cultural turn in Subaltern Studies led to seeing social reality in terms of ideational aspects. This was a justifiable move when positivist and materialist frameworks were dominant. But problems arise when a complex reality is reduced to merely one aspect of it, the level of ideas and discourse. Postcolonialists might concur with Arturo Escobar that the criticism of discourse and culture is a ‘naïve defence of the real’ for it does not see disc ourse as 50 material. The whole debate is not whether discourse is material with real effects (which it is) but whether postcolonial theory has reduced reality to discourse alone.
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Taylor 2001, 179, 192. Arturo Escobar quoted in Crush 1995, 20. Sayer 2000, 17–18. Hartwig 2007b, 231. Bhaskar 1989, 4; Sayer 1998, 122. Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 158. Escobar 2006, 449.
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Moreover, frameworks that focus on discourses tend to conflate discourses with 51 effects and practices, as if the intended ideas are completely translated into practice. I argue that, even with regard to the discursive level, it does only a partial job of excavating various discourses and the contradictions in them. As in poststructuralism, 52 texts gain primacy over institutions. Questions of objectivity, validity and 53 materiality are ignored for the focus on representation and meaning. Of course, concepts like ‘the material’ cannot be understood in a reductionist fashion, and phenomena such as economic exploitation are not experienced in an unmediated 54 fashion. They still need the medium of language. Nevertheless, it is here that critical realism with its conception of a stratified reality, i.e. ‘the existence of multiple levels 55 and modes of engagement between knower and known’, is able to provide a more nuanced understanding of reality. This is missing in postcolonial theory. While differences are emphasised, it is not analysed as to how these differences are created 56 and promoted in the real world. The structural conditions in which these social processes take place are glossed over. The classic critique that is raised by critical realism about non-realist or inadequately realist frameworks applies here: while these may acknowledge the reality of events they do not admit any structures lying beneath 57 them which cause these events. Despite the condemnation of the practice of reading colonised societies through ‘European-derived social sciences and political philosophies’, the debt of postcolonial theory to Michel Foucault is obvious and is not unacknowledged. Following Foucault, the history of modernity cannot be understood through capital alone, but through the emergence of a new disciplinary regime that occasioned and accompanied capitalism. In new institutions like workhouses the instilling of ‘ethical consciousness of labour’ was more fundamental than their economic role and testifies to ‘the bourgeoisie’s great dream and great preoccupation of the Classical age: the 58 laws of the state and the heart are at last identical’. This denial of a central role to capitalism in the constitution of modernity is problematic from the point of view of
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Sayer 2000, 45. Dews 1987, 35. For an empirical critique of postcolonial theory’s textualism, see Mannathukkaren 2007. 53 Dirlik 1997, 5, 20, 79. 54 Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 60. 55 Norris 2007, 335. 56 Bahl 2000, 99. 57 Collier 1994, 7; Bhaskar 1989, 3. 58 Foucault 1973, 68. For Foucault, the ‘supervision of, and intervention in, the social domain by agencies of welfare and control is a more fundamental characteristic of modern societies than an economy released from directly political relations of domination’. This follows Max Weber, for whom ‘the social forms engendered by purposive or instru mental rationality, with their indifference to personal ti es, and their crushing of idiosyncrasy and spontaneity … repr esent a profounder threat to human freedom than the class oppression specific to capitalist society’ (Dews 1987, 147, 151). 52
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the marginalised and the subalterns whose voice the theory is trying to reclaim. 59 Despite the few gestures towards understanding capitalism, they do not attain any significance. The denial of causal effectivity (prompted by the interpretivist belief in the 60 efficacy of meanings alone and not causal explanation ) to questions of political economy by postcolonial theory is also a major drawback in analysing the present conjuncture of late capitalism. Modernity is mainly seen as a cultural phenomenon, not as ‘capitalist modernity’. Like postdevelopmentalist arguments that speak of the 61 ‘strawman of capitalocentrism’, postcolonial theory sees capitalism as ‘nothing more than a potentially disposable fiction … which can be “refused”’ in favour of 62 ‘marginal histories, of multiple and heterogeneous identities’. With the transition from formal to real subsumption by capital in almost all societies, and the resultant predatory globalisation (combined, it is extremely important to note, with precapitalist forms of exploitation and oppression), it is imperative that the gargantuan global scale of capitalism is understood. But postcolonial modernities with their emphasis on articulating ‘difference’ are not able to provide this and, as a result, are unable to talk about exploitation of labour as a common reality under different ‘cultural capitalisms’ (which is all the more pronounced in those societies 63
marked by ‘traditional’ forms of consciousness as outlined by postcolonial theory). The critical realist emphasis on using scientific tools to understand the causes of 64 exploitation and enabling the oppressed to change those conditions is alien to it. The postcolonial position on capitalism is vague and ambivalent; if it has posited capitalism as unimportant, it also sees the ‘homogenization of the contemporary 65 world by capitalism’. But it does not prescribe any programme to counter this phenomenon. Postcolonial theory is correct in questioning the discourse of capitalocentrism that has consecrated capitalism as the holy grail of modern social formation: capitalism is not a monolithic entity but is constantly interrupted by other logics that run counter to 66 its logic of accumulation. The universal triumph of capital is not inevitable and
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Among the postcolonialists, Dipesh Chakrabarty is the only theorist who has sought to rethink many of the postcolonial positions in light of Marxist criticisms (see Chakrabarty 1985; 1993). He accepts that ‘Marx’s critique of capital and commodity will be indispensable for any critical understanding … a critique of modernity in In dia [cannot] ignore the history of comm odification in that society’ (Chakrabarty 1993, 1094). 60 Hartwig 2007b, 230. 61 See Escobar 2001. 62 O’Hanlon and Washbrook 1992, 147. 63 The extreme levels of repression and exploitation of labour during the growth of the ‘miracle economies’ of South East Asia is an example. 64 Hartwig 2007a, 97. 65 Prakash 1990, 398. 66 For an empirical substantiation, see Gidwani 2008.
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there is definitely an ‘outside’ of capitalism that can be one of the main sources of 67 imagining alternatives to capitalism. At the same time, there is also a need to understand its real effects which are causing the commodification of human beings and nature to an extent that is unprecedented, and this it does not attempt. Crucially, postcolonial theory fails to explain developments such as the remarkable and emphatic consensus from the 1980s on the adoption of neoliberalism in political 68
economy by diverse nations ranging from the First World to the Third World. As Harvey points out, ‘transformations of this depth and scope do not occur by 69 accident’. It also fails to elucidate how ‘Oriental’ societies such as China and India immersed in millennia of non-accumulationist traditions and governed in recent history by communist and socialist ideas have, in a matter of two to three decades, spectacularly became the drivers of the global market economy. This is obviously a material transformation but also involves changes in the discursive level. But what is important from my perspective is that to understand modernity in the Third World, the crucial question that has to be asked is how the market logic is becoming all pervasive despite the existence of other discourses, and very often in conjunction with them. Here it is imperative that (non-reductionist) Marxist tools be employed to understand this material conjuncture while simultaneously making sense of its cultural/ideational aspects. The postcolonial project of ‘peasant as citizen in contemporary political modernity’ remarkably does not involve the material transformation of the peasant. Material questions such as the structural position of the peasant in either feudalism or capitalism are not addressed, as broad categories like the subaltern and elite are used. The theoretical focus on differences has not translated into practice and is thus unable to understand the complex reality marked by class, religion, gender and other divisions. The notion of class is alien and was brought in only by the coloniser. Class itself is understood in a non-economic way, as a part of power relations, thus 70 obfuscating processes of surplus expropriation. The peasant is supposedly able to relate to modernity but curiously remains constrained by the moral economy of feudalism and a ‘peasant-communal’ ideology that is pitted against modern organised politics. There is no understanding of the implications of the breadth and scope of the different kinds of peasant struggles in the twentieth century that went beyond Scottian ‘everyday forms of peasant resistance’ and the various ways that they have related to organised politics. Ironically, the most successful peasant struggles have been those that have combined spontaneity with organisation and transcended various
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See Nigam 2007. For a brilliant summation of these processes, see Harvey 2005. Harvey 2005, 1. Mannathukkaren 2010b, forthcoming.
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internal divisions. It is no one’s case that there is a linear transition to secular identities like class from pre-existing ones like religion and caste as in modernist narratives. And we can accept that religious consciousness is a big part of the peasant world. But postcolonial theory does not move to explaining how this consciousness has also been transcended or conjoined with other ideas in thousands of struggles all over the world. In reducing the peasant struggles for recognition as well as redistribution to merely cultural struggles for meanings, its emancipatory project of bestowing citizenship on peasants is rendered ineffective. The problems in postcolonial theory arise from its unwillingness to move beyond interpretivism to understand the various kinds of false beliefs that can inhabit peasant (and other kinds of) consciousness. It privileges lay narratives as truth without seeking to criticise them. In interpretivism, people’s own understanding of their actions ‘exhaust or constitute the social’. So there is no scope for critique. This ‘ignores unintended consequences, tacit knowledge and the uncons cious, as well as that conceptualisations may be inadequate and/or distort what is going on, or that aspects of social reality may not have been conceptualised at all’. This therefore 72 73 ‘tends to an interpretative fundamentalism’. There is no concept of ideology in it. On the other hand, Bhaskar argues that ‘the hermeneutic mediation of meanings (or fusion of horizons)’ is not sufficient; it ‘must be complemented by [a] consideration of the question posed by semiotics as to how such meanings (horizons, etc.) are 74 produced’. Explanatory critique here plays an important role in human 75 emancipation by unveiling the false beliefs that aid in human oppression. Thus there is a need to marry understanding with explanation and the material with the discursive to better understand capitalism and the place of the peasant, and this is missing in postcolonial theory.
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The Strawman of Eurocentrism
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If the recouping of subaltern voices was the main agenda of the Subaltern Studies project in the beginning, it soon began to lay the foundation for an essentially cultural critique of western Enlightenment and Eurocentrism, putting in place the building blocks of postcolonialism. Hence the task of ‘provincialising Europe’ – a process of documenting how Enlightenment’s reason ‘which was not always self-evident to everyone, has been made to look “obvious” far beyond the ground where it
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For details, see Mannathukkaren 2010b, forthcoming. Hartwig 2007b, 232. Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 21. Bhaskar 1998, 232. Bhaskar and Collier 1998, 389.
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originated’ and uncovering the externality of modernity. There is nothing to quarrel with in an endeavour to decolonise and de-Orientalise postcolonial consciousness. But the fundamental question that is not being asked here is whether postcolonial societies can attain emancipation and liberation just by eliminating European influence in all spheres. The cultural/material split and the resultant attention to Eurocentrism without capitalism fails to explain the particular power of European 77
colonialism and its distinguishing feature from other colonialisms in history. This leads to the rupture of the moral dimension of the critique of colonialism ‘from its mooring in radical, often rich, structural critique of capitalism and 78 imperialism/colonialism’. Europe or the West becomes a fetish with ‘no credible 79 referent’. Even though Subaltern Studies arose as a counter to elitist colonial, nationalist and Marxist historiographies, because of its later obsession with Eurocentrism it eventually became an indigenist discourse uncritically upholding tradition, religion, community, etc., ignoring in the process questions like that of internal hierarchies and 80
oppression. The series of dichotomies that characterise its enterprise – cultural/material, tradition/modernity, coloniser/colonised, West/East and so on – hardly enable it to answer them. Ironically, it can be seen as a replication of the binaries that characterise many modernist projects. Thus, as Bhaskar argues, productivist socialism drew a sharp dichotomy between nature and society (which licensed unlimited expropriation of nature). This is reflected in other false binaries such as physical/mental, natural/spiritual, individualism/collectivism and 81 science/morality. Postcolonial theory mimics these, differing only in privileging a different half of the binary. The pitfall of such a binarising strategy lies in not seeing 82
the different aspects of the binary in ‘continuous dynamic causal interaction’. This is where the project’s political programme has serious negative consequences for the oppressed multitude of the Third World. Postcolonial theory’s Third World seems to resemble the one that scholar Geeta Kapur characterised as excelling ‘in revenge histories about otherness but lack[ing] the initiative on historical reflexivity for 83 envisaging a future’. If in the beginning subalternists critiqued the complicity of the nationalist elite in
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Chakrabarty 1997, 287. Dirlik 1997, 68; Mannathukkaren 2009, 481. 78 D’Souza 2007, 70. 79 Lazarus 2002, 44. 80 Mannathukkaren 2009, 481. 81 Bhaskar 1989, 1, 6–7. Hermeneutics is also characterised by dualisms like the ones between history and theory and the universal and the particular. And when they are bri dged they result in the ‘identity of social being and thought’ (Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 20, 57). 82 Bhaskar 1989, 6. 83 Kapur 1998, 202. 77
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silencing the voice of the subaltern and its ‘ failure to speak for the nation’ and also saw nationalism in the political domain as deeply complicit in the project of 84 modernity and its forms of disciplinary power, later they partially redeemed the 85 nationalist elite. The turn to Mahatma Gandhi despite the earlier trenchant critique 86 of him as affirming ‘the status quo and against any radical change’ is an example of this. Now Gandhi’s ‘anti-modernist, anti-individualist’ rhetoric of ‘love, kinship, austerity, sacrifice’ becomes the symbol of the struggle for the sovereignty of the 87 inner spiritual domain of the nation. A re-reading of Gandhi is extremely relevant in the present conjuncture when western modernity is facing a severe moral and material crisis. Some of Gandhi’s views on modernity, which were considered 88 archaic at the time, have acquired a particular meaning and salience now. But the problem with postcolonial theory is that it has selectively appropriated Gandhi’s antimodernist writings while ignoring the immense contribution that Gandhi has made to developing a democratic public sphere and the critique that he launched against a n 89 unreconstructed traditional order. Even pre-political resistance to colonialism is redeemed as nationalism: nationalism in the material domain is still imitative of western models, but in the cultural and spiritual domain it is now seen as launching the most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a ‘modern’ national culture that is nevertheless not Western. If the nation is an imagined community, then this is where it is brought into being. In this true and essential domain, the nation is already sovereign, even when the state is in the hands of the 90 colonial power.
The culturalist assumption is seen here in the positing of the cultural domain as a ‘true and essential domain’. The internal hierarchies and contestations within this domain are papered over. Moreover, the artificial and false separation between the material and cultural domains prevents an analysis of how the constraints imposed by 91
the former shape the imagination possible in the latter. Such a lacuna is carried over to the postcolonial present in which the valid concern with decolonisation of consciousness is severed from an analysis of the material prerequisites for the same. The limitations of the interpretivist approach are again clearly visible.
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Chatterjee 1986, original emphasis. Bannerji 2001<2000?>; Mannathukkaren 2007, 1203. Pandey 1982, 187. Chatterjee 1993, 220–39; Mannathukkaren 2007, 1204. See Nigam 2009. Gupta 2009. Chatterjee 1993, 6. Mannathukkaren 2007, 1203.
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Flight to the Past I argue that this obsession with Eurocentrism and colonialism leads to temporal problems as in non-engagement with the present, despite providing a critique of 92 modernisation theories. Without an understanding of the present, ‘the attempt to 93 provincialise Europe may, paradoxically, simply trap us in that province’. If there are indications of recognising the ambivalent nature of the modernities of the nonWest – ‘one cannot be for or against modernity; one can only devise strategies for 94 coping with it’ – these are overshadowed by a resolution that rejects modernity. The attempt to reclaim subjecthood by charting ‘our’ own modernities regresses into judgemental relativism. This leads to the elision of the present and a constant harking back to the past, the ‘pre-modern’. This way of looking at modernity reinforces the modernisation paradigm. For in both the ‘in-betweenness’ is not overcome: in the first, the past becomes the ideal, and in the second, the future. Some postcolonial writers have recognised that there is no going back to pre-modern political languages 95 to solve modern-day problems. But this is occluded by the strong tendency to see the past as the ideal. Chatterjee’s definition of non-western modernity and the present as a ‘site from which we feel we must escape’ is a strong indicator of this: ‘At the opposite end from “these days” marked by incompleteness and lack of fulfilment, we construct a picture of “those days” when there was beauty, prosperity and a healthy 96 sociability, and which was above all, our own creation.’ Chatterjee attributes this disenchantment to a failed project of cultural modernisation undertaken by the elite. The failure arises from the latter’s desire to replicate in its own society the forms as well as the substance of Western modernity. It was a desire for a new ethical life in society, one that is in conformity with the virtues of the enlightenment and of bourgeois freedom and whose known cultural 97 forms are those of secularized Western Christianity.
The disenchantment is attributed to ignorance of traditional social practices and the imposition of western modernity. Despite its recognition that this may lead to 98 ‘dehistoricising and essentialising “tradition” ’, Chatterjee’s position slips into the tradition/modernity dichotomy. The interpretivist approach adopted by postcolonial theory has, of course, the merit of understanding the worldviews of subjects and the meanings that they
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Mannathukkaren 2009, 481. Dhareshwar 1995, 322; Mannathukkaren 2007, 1218. Chatterjee 1997, 20. Kaviraj 1991, 96. Chatterjee 1997, 20. Chatterjee 1997, 13. Chatterjee 1997, 11.
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construct. Interpretative understanding is an ‘indispensable part of everyday practice’ and the hermeneutic tradition is vital in making sense of the meaning-laden human social reality. This reality is a ‘pre-interpreted reality, a reality already brought under 99 concepts by social actors’. Interpretivism is therefore correct in asserting the necessity of different kind of method from the natural sciences to understand human reality. But this does not mean that any interpretation is possible in a given situation – it is limited by the practical context in which communication and action take place. So the position that there cannot be a differentiation between good and bad 100 interpretations is problematic. The problem with such relativism is that, while correctly recognising that all knowledge is culturally and historically bound, it goes to the extent of denying therefore that arbitrating between different knowledge claims 101 is possible. To the extent that interpretivism seeks to provide depth to the meanings that govern reality, it is complementary to critical realism. Even poststructuralist deconstruction can be ‘useful in opening up the uncertainties of meaning and exposing how power relations within discourse privilege certain terms while excluding others’. Thus it is complementary to critical realism’s emancipatory 102 project. At the same time critical realism goes further than poststructuralism to argue for a ‘richer conception of ontology’ entrained by Bhaskar’s critique of 103
ontological monovalence (denial of the reality of absence). According to Bhaskar, ontological monovalence erases the ‘contingency of existential questions and … 104 despatialize[s] and detemporalize[s] (accounts of) being’. I also argue that postcolonial theory has been inadequately interpretivist. It succumbs to the tendency, often seen in interpretivist frameworks, of imposing the 105 researcher’s categories on subjects. It does not unpack the caste and class coding of the desire to escape the present. Once we do that, it can be seen that generalisation of this desire as a characteristic of ‘our modernity’ cannot be sustained across social categories. The relation to the past is governed by one’s social location. As in Chatterjee’s account based on the elite, the past is one of beauty and prosperity: the villages ‘teemed with healthy, happy and robust people, who spent their days mainly 106 in sports’; for those who live under slavery, however, the story is completely different:
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Bhaskar 1998, 21. Sayer 2000, 46. 101 Potter 2007, 274. 102 Joseph 2007, 441. 103 Joseph 2007, 441. 104 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 7. 105 Sayer 2000, 46. 106 Motilal Ghosh (founder of Amrit Bazar Patrika, famous nationalist daily in Bengal) describing the 1850s, quoted in Chatterjee 1997, 6. 100
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The entire history has become an affair which makes us angry and rebell ious. It has all got to be changed. We only have the minimum. Our health is not improving. We 107 have no education or art of our own, no culture, no work, no money, nothing.
Unlike the accounts of the landed classes and other elites who have lost much of their power under modernity, there is no romanticisation and idealisation of the past here. Instead, the account of it is animated by the desire for freedom, for equality of all, and for liberation from oppression, servitude and basic wants. It demonstrates clearly 108 the aspiration to create a society in which ‘needs are not frustrated’ and ‘unwanted and unnecessary’ constraints, especially those that perpetrate oppression and exploitation, are removed. The idea of freedom is not only negative but also includes rights and ‘needs and possibilities, such as possibilities for self-realization and self109
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development’. What Bhaskar calls the ‘dialectic of desire to freedom’ is precisely what receives insufficient attention in postcolonial theory because of its reliance on elite and dominant accounts (ironically for a framework that has the subaltern as its central focus). This dialectic takes its departure from the consideration that ‘human beings, by and large, want to be free, under some (sets of) description(s)’. If the subaltern desire and aspirations for freedom have remained largely unfulfilled, it is not merely because the postcolonial elites tried to bring their societies into ‘conformity with the virtues of the enlightenment ’, as argued by postcolonialists. Such a position ignores the efficacy of pre-modern history in shaping the present, especially the role of economic and cultural capital acquired over centuries of hegemony of the upper castes and the dominant classes. It avoids a critical examination of ‘tradition’ and the role of the feudal propertied classes in the 112 hollowing out of democracy in postcolonial societies; and it misses the ironic ways in which the modernity/tradition divide is bridged, as in the powerful monopoly of elites built by what is called a ‘syncratic alliance’: ‘a concord uniting traditional 113 agrarian interests, too strong to be destroyed, with a modernizing industrial elite’. In postcolonial theory there is a detachment of the theoretical critique from any kind of conception of a political praxis. Here, once again, the operation of a binarising strategy is visible. Even a vague idea of the institutions that are going to be put in place in the de-colonised and post-Eurocentric societies is missing. This is because the project of the Third World writing its own history is ultimately shackled
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A labourer from an untouchable caste in India quoted in den Uyl 1995, 32. Benton and Craib 2001, 139. Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 261–2. Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 260. Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 269, original emphasis. Mannathukkaren 2010b, forthcoming. Haynes 1997, 172.
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by the incoherent conception of structure and agency and inadequate understanding of the present and the past: ‘The bitter truth about our present is our subjection, our inability to be subjects in our own right. And yet, it is because we want to be modern 114 that our desire to be independent and creative is transposed on to our past.’ Postcolonial theory oscillates between voluntarism and determinism, but ultimately all agency is directed towards recreating an unattainable past, ignoring the structural constraints of the present. As noted before, one of the ironies of fram eworks like that of hermeneutics and interpretivism is that they mimic and reproduce many features of 115 positivism because of the hegemony of positivism. Their fear of positivism has led them to the other extreme of a complete voluntarism that ‘is nothing but the simple 116 inverse of positivism’s blanket determinism’. Critical realism endeavours to avoid 117 the errors of both voluntarism and reification. There is no sense of the dual character of society and human praxis in postcolonial theory: society is not created by us but it ‘is both the ever-present condition (material cause) and the continually reproduced outcome of agency. And praxis is both work, that is conscious production, and (normally unconscious) reproduction of the conditions of production, 118
that is society’. What is notable in this account is that, unlike dualist understandings, social structures are seen as ‘both conditions and outcomes of human agency’ and ‘people as both products of and conditions of possibility of social 119 structures’. At the same time the society and people have their distinct nature. Postcolonialism only indulges in empty critique of the present-day institutions like the state because of its deep fear of the modern impersonal Leviathan, and seeks to recover the ‘fragmentary and [the] episodic’ that ‘cannot dream of the whole called 120 the state’. While it is definitely important to think of new forms of political sociability that go beyond the state in order to creatively envisage the future, postcolonial theory consistently refuses to articulate the exact nature of the fragmentary or how it can engage with/overcome the structure called the modern state. Postcolonialist adoption of the notion of governmentality to argue for the blindness of the modern liberal state to communitarian identities and its inherent 121 coerciveness leads to a position that fails to understand the multifarious effects
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Chatterjee 1997, 20. Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 19. 116 Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 20. 117 Bhaskar 1989, 4. 118 Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 213. 119 Benton and Craib 2001, 132; Sayer 2000, 18. Bhaskar distinguishes between (1) duality, a combination of existentially interdependent yet irreducibly distinct correlatives, as in agency and structure; and (2) dualism, which is characterised by dichotomy or split. 120 Chakrabarty 1995, 757. 121 Chatterjee 1994. Chatterjee argues that western notions of secularism are inapplicable to a multi-religious society like that of India. 115
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produced by the state, including struggles for popular sovereignty. But it does pose some valid questions, such as the efficacy of concepts like civil society (which were primarily developed in western societies), with their focus on individual rights, for understanding the vastly different conditions of the Third World. Thus it correctly calls for the development of new theoretical vocabularies that take into account 122 innovative strategies developed by communities in political praxis and struggles.
21
For a Different Understanding of Modernity
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The biggest failure of postcolonial theory is the lack of an explanation for the attraction of modernity for the masses and its appropriation and acceptance of many languages of western modernity, again showing the inadequate application of 125 126 interpretivism. After all, it is through the very institutions of ‘alien provenance ’ that the masses are announcing their presence in the democracies of the Third 127 World. It is ironical that postcolonial theory has termed the Enlightenment
Nevertheless, this promise is not fulfilled. Various dichotomies such as 123 modernity/democracy, political society/civil society, East/West are again invoked. This misses the ‘continuous dynamic causal interaction’ between the different halves of the binary and the ways in which they are bridged. Ultimately, postcolonialism fails in the task of proposing alternative institutions to those of modernity. The political future that is envisaged is paralysed by an overdependence on the past and an unwillingness to engage with the present. Again, Dipesh Chakrabarty is the only postcolonial theorist to grapple with this problem. He asks: ‘Can we … build democratic, communitarian institutions on the basis of the non-individualistic, but hierarchical and illiberal, precapitalist bonds that have survived and sometimes resisted – or even flourished under – the onslaught of 124 capital?’ But the posing of the problem and its recognition of ambivalence and contradictions has not been matched by the answers that have one-sidedly rejected modernity.
‘European’ when, as Andrew Collier points out, the struggles to defend it ha ve been
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Chatterjee 1998b, 60; Chatterjee 1998a, 281–2. Chatterjee 1998a, 280; 1998b, 65; 1993, 236–7; 2004, 41. For a detailed empirical substantiation of the inadequacies of these dichotomies, see Mannathukkaren 2010a. 124 Chakrabarty 1989, xiv. 125 Even when postcolonial theory acknowledges that ‘the ideologies of modernization and instrumental science are so deeply sedimented in the national body politic that they neither manifest themselves nor function exclusively as forms of imperial power’, it attributes them merely to their ‘authorization and deployment by the nation state’ (Gyan Prakash quoted in Dirlik 1997, 60). 126 Kaviraj 2002, 28. 127 See Alam 1999; Baiocchi 2005. 123
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as much a feature of non-western societies and when serious threats to its values have 128 arisen from within Europe. In cases like India where democracy is still largely of a formal kind, the increasing assertion of the disadvantaged classes and groups is nevertheless an irrevocable reality. Without denying the uniqueness and specificity of modernity, the attraction to forms of substantive equality can be considered a 129 universal spanning across cultures and different historical periods. Dialectic or ‘the pulse of freedom’ is ‘an inner urge that flows universally from the logic of elemental absence (lack, need, want or desire)’ especially in conditions when power relations are dominant, and the ‘logic of dialectical universalizability’ is such that human 130 beings will eventually accept the concept of ‘freedom for all’. The binary categories of modernity/tradition, and the privileging of one over the other, fail to understand the dialectical relationship between the two, the new and the received. The range of misconceptions that have arisen in the context of the modernity debate are a result, as Jayant Lele points out, of treating ‘modernity as a unique product of 131 the West’, which is very true of postcolonial theory. This formulation leads to the fallacious assumption that tradition is unchanging, while change is brought about only by (western) modernity through European colonialism. This misses the 132 strengthening of many existing pre-colonial traditional elements by colonialism. But, more importantly, it ignores the considerable empirical evidence that exists about the ‘ambiguous early modernity’ of South Asian and other societies prior to 133 European colonialism or the polyvalent nature of the emergence of modernity. Postcolonial theory does not allow us to understand the emergence of ‘universal values of freedom, equality and rationality’ or the intimations of political theory, individuality or the public sphere before the western Enlightenment and in non134
western contexts. Of course, this does not mean that there are no differences between modernity and tradition – if such a clear distinction can be made at all. But the focus only on the dichotomy and rupture between the two misses the important 135 continuities between them. There is evidence for the criticality of many features of pre-modern social systems in the creation of modern societies. Giovanni Arrighi asserts that ‘capitalism [is] an interstitial formation of both premodern and modern
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Collier 2003, 53. As Barrington Moore notes: ‘Movements to do away with the priest, to attain direct access to the deity and the source of magic, have simmered u nderground in both [pre-modern] Europe and Asia for long periods, to burst forth from time to time in heretical an d rebellious movements’ (1967, 456). 130 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 277, 269. 131 Lele 2000, 48–50. 132 Pieterse and Parekh, 1995, 2. 133 Subhramanyam 1998. 134 Lele 1981, 6; Subhramanyam 1998, 93; Mannathukkaren 2009, 480. 135 A serious lacuna in postcolonial theory is a simplistic understanding of precolonial history. 129
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times’. The universalisable content of modernity thus has to be recognised. Here Jürgen Habermas’s notions of the immanent rationality of linguistic inter-subjectivity and 137 reason as inherently communicative offer some resources to understand the universal underpinnings of human societies if they are to be read with a Marxist focus 138 on the ‘paradigm of production’. The values of an alternative society should be 139
immanent in current practices, otherwise they would be utopian. At the same time there are some equally serious problems in locating ethics on linguistic foundation as 140 there are in separating it from any concrete history. Habermas is also limited by a 141 Eurocentric focus. True enlightenment and emancipation can only be a result of a dialogic process, especially if a repeat of the horrors of a monologic western universalism is to be avoided. Here the language of ‘perspicuous contrast’ is helpful in engaging in such a dialogue. This language is one in which ‘we could formulate both their way and ours as alternative possibilities in relation to human constants at 142 work in both’. Critical realism’s belief in fallibilism would go well with such a perspective that is aware of the need to overcome modernism’s arrogance. It is willing to recognise the knowledge-producing capacity of non-scientific practices and also everyday activities of lay people. More importantly, it ‘recognises the omnipresent potential of human error’ and that truth can be thought of ‘not in terms 143 of absolutes but rather in terms of “true and truer”’. Thomas McCarthy argues that ‘we have things to learn from traditional cultures as well as they from us, not only what we have forgotten and repressed, but something 144 about how we might put our fragmented world back together again’. Postcolonial theory is not interested in such an enterprise to revitalise the modern and the present 145
by creative engagement of the past and tradition. Postcolonial theory, as we saw above in a reductionist reading of Gandhi, misses out on articulating the universal implications of Gandhi’s thought that would constitute a critique of western modernity but at the same time extend some of its core ideas. Here Bhaskar’s dialectical project of ‘philosophical recapitulation of the past’ in relation to the
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Arrighi 2002, 42 . Rasmussen 1990, 28. 138 For a critique of Habermas’s abandonment o f the ‘paradigm of production’ for the ‘paradigm of communication’, see Heller 1982, 34–5. 139 Bhaskar 1989, 113. 140 Bhaskar 1989, 114. 141 Lele 2001<2000?>; McCarthy 1983. 142 Taylor 1985, 125. 143 Potter 2007, 273. 144 McCarthy 1983, 78. 145 For such a perspective, see Mannathukkaren 2006. 137
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traditions of both the East and the West is vital. Postcolonial theory’s aim to write ‘post-foundational’ histories, against 147 foundational ones, based on identities such as ‘individual, class or structure’ transmutes into a denial of any kind of universal foundations, including ‘contingent 148 foundations’ or ‘limiting notions’ of birth, death and sexual relations and ethics 149 deriving from that conceded even by radical interpretivists such as Peter Winch. As Habermas had warned prior to the advent of postcolonial theory, ‘if we remain faithful to the Aristotelian view that moral reasoning is bounded by the law of the city, and [if we] remain linked to a lived-in ethos, we must be prepared to dispense with the emancipatory potential of moral universalism and abandon the chance for 150 penetrating moral criticism of exploitative and repressive social structures’. Postcolonial theory, in any case, reduces universalism to the Enlightenment. This 151
ignores that universalism had existed before modernity. The postcolonial focus on differences overshadows concerns of unequal access to power and material resources: ‘having an egalitarian society and political democracy may be laudable thoughts in themselves but these thoughts are not as important or as sensitive to the philosophical 152 questions of differences’. So the democratic project of peasant as citizen is contradictorily undercut by a focus on differences that does not accept any universals. The problem is that postmodern thought wrongly equates universalism with uniformity. It does not realise that for the genuine promotion of diversity of cultures and communication among them, an understanding based on universalism is 153 required. Contra postcolonialism, western modernity itself was shaped in a dialectical relationship with non-western societies, and all societies now are participants (with varying strength and agency, of course) in modernity, in its critique and institutionalisation. The essentialist and monolithic view of western modernity propounded by postcolonial theory ignores its internal differentiation and the different strands within it. If this one-sided interpretation of modernity is to be avoided, then it is necessary to recover understanding of its dialectical nature. The systematic reduction of the critical potential of modernity to instrumental rationality and the complete separation of facts from values and the descent of the promise of Enlightenment into the Weberian ‘iron cage’ and the Foucauldian ‘carceral society’ need not be seen as the inevitable outcome of the crowning of reason. As Anthony
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Daly 2000, 13. Prakash 1990, 397. This is Judith Butler’s phrase (Seidman 1994, 12). Winch 1970, 107. Quoted in Rasmussen 1990, 70. Collier 2003, 50. Dipesh Chakrabarty quoted in Bahl 2000, 112. Collier 2003, 53–4.
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Giddens argues, modernity must be understood in ‘four dialectically related frameworks of experience: displacement and re-embedding, intimacy and 154 impersonality, expertise and re-appropriation, privatism and engagement’. The possibility of recovering a more humanist spiritual enlightenment ‘than the mechanistic, sceptical and vulgarly relativist bourgeois Anglo-French 155 enlightenment’ should be a part of any emancipatory project.
7
Conclusion
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Postmodern-inspired streams of thought like postcolonialism need to be engaged with rather than hastily dismissed. The substantial contribution of postcolonial theory is the problematising of modernity, especially in the Third World. This task is an absolute imperative in the present when the particular modernity that has become entrenched is facing a severe material and moral crisis. Here, recognising the ambivalences and contradictions of Third World modernities is important, and the postcolonial focus on recovering cultural differences erased by European universalism is laudable. Any solution to the crises of the present will have to recover the critical elements in the submerged and discarded traditions. The violence committed on these by the dominant monochromatic and a-cultural modernity has to be recognised. But as we have seen, the questions posed to problematise modernity have been nullified by the answers that are provided. Proposals that draw the contours of the pathways out of the present morass have not kept step with the outlining of the problem. The content of ‘our modernity’ is thus hardly specified. There is negative definition of the postcolonial present as being determined by a colonial past. It characterises the present as ‘a site of escape’ and much of the Third 156 World as mired in ‘postcolonial misery’. By blaming all the ills of postcolonial societies on the foreign colonial oppressor, postcolonialism ignores the oppression perpetrated by internal hierarchies that have a pre-colonial origin and are often justified in the religious consciousness that it valorises. It hardly helps in the praxis of liberation of those who are subject to such oppression. Thus theory here crucially fails to penetrate the superficial appearances of reality and excavate truths that lie behind them. The relativist conclusions of the postcolonial project result in a failure to acknowledge that all modernities might have some common features. There is also no conception in postcolonialism of the myriad wa ys in which cultural traditions of the Third World societies have interacted with western modernity to create a third layer, a synthesis ‘for which an analogue can be found neither in western modernity
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Giddens 1990, 139–40. Daly 2000, 12. Chatterjee 1993, 11.
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or in indigenous tradition’. The project of restoring agency to postcolonial societies and constructing a modernity that is not a western replica is ultimately hobbled by a lack of attention to/understanding of the material domain, especially challenges such as the threat of rapidly universalising market system. The ultimate equation of modernity with the West, the stand against universal ethics, the occlusion of material aspects in favour of cultural ones lead to the reinstatement of the tradition/modernity, individual/community and other binaries that postcolonialism started out criticising, thus failing to fulfil the promise that it once carried. On a number of criteria, a critical realist paradigm is able to provide a more nuanced and complex understanding of modernity than postcolonialism’s interpretivism. This does not mean that this critique is a refurbished version of modernism. As noted above, it is fully in agreement with many postcolonial criticisms such as the pathologies of modernity manifested in features like instrumental rationality. But unlike postcolonialism it does not reject modernity but articulates the need for a dialogic modernity. The significance of critical realism is that it is able to avoid the extremes of modernism and postmodernism. It seeks to reject modernist arrogance of positivist frameworks that deny ‘openness, contingency and contextually variable character of social change’. At the same time, it also rejects 158
postmodern-inspired frameworks that question the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Even as it avoids such simplifications, it also seeks to extend the emancipatory 159 themes of both modern and postmodern ethics, demonstrating the real possibility of a new eudaimonian enlightenment of free flourishing on a global scale that transcends modernity/postmodernity. The task of explanatory critique is not to be value neutral but to move towards an emancipatory axiology. Thus in critical realism 160
there is no separation between fact and value or theory and practice. It is able to provide a basis for unifying some of the central concerns of both postcolonialism and modernist frameworks like that of Marxism while transcending them in a richer differentiated totality.
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