Category Archives: conservatism
A Rant against the Pursuit of Private and Privative Perfections
Cain Pinto
The number of self-help books being churned out by presses both small and big is skyrocketing. Some[1] have speculated—reasonably enough—this can be seen as a manifestation of popular [res]sentiment coming to grips with socio-economic and geo-political realities that make it difficult to nurture, and preserve a coherent self-concept[2]. The surge in the genre’s prolixity and chutzpah can seem impressive if one doesn’t know that several of the glossiest Bestsellers are often books that experts have on their “Not Recommended” lists[3]. The wicked spawn of self-improvement books that adorn our bookstores and discount retail chain stores is as much a haphazard monument to our restless ambitions as it is a symptom of our merely nominal existence. If we were having the best sex of our lives we would perhaps have no need for How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale (2012) by Neil Strauss [and Jenna Jameson][4], and the legion[5] that is other[6] such titles.
On the one hand we have a fixation with the idea of youthful longevity through lifestyle change[7] and the over-eager technological utopianism[8] offered us make us giddy, and on the other hand we face the imminent danger of ecological catastrophe, an earth too fragile to bear our continued exploitations of its resources. Indeed, as Philip Auerswald puts it “As the fact of global climate change alone indicates, Malthusian spectres of demographic doom are regrettably still very much with us”[9]. It is not that we do not wish to change the world but that the world changes without our help; slowly ever more globalised market mechanisms leave more and more of us behind on sinking ships earmarked[10] for the unemployed[11], the unemployable[12], and the underemployed[13]. Without the slightest irony, thrown between pleasure and near certain extinction we are obsessed with lists like Five self-help books that want to change [y]our life[14]. This is no exaggeration…one could be more observant, more pessimistic…
The urban chic set[15] that keeps abreast with the latest fashionable causes to vent its self-projections and insular anxieties[16] seems to be staking a rather hazy claim to civic consciousness in India. A jejunating gerontocrat with an Oedipal grouse against corrupt politicos, and who wants to discipline drunkards by the lynch ‘em dry method, here gains prominence and lingers like a tepid stench long after his garrulity is spent achieving sweet fuck-all—with relative ease in our media saturated epoch. Adding vacuity and[17] loquacious[18] [19]fanaticism[20] to the masses’ burgeoning[21] discontent[22] are tabloids, blogs and television chatterati screaming shrilly their manifestos geared at [in]voluntary political quietism. When one’s attention is driven to his own pecuniary lack he is quickly driven to chagrin about black-money he hasn’t any means to extradite from subterranean governmental hands. This personal-frustration-driven politics is dangerous inasmuch as personal agendas are apt to end in rash manipulative gestures of political will. In a diverse country like India individualism would be the straw that broke the bullock’s back.
That the desire to improve one’s lot to the point where spending several hours a day on a treadmill is not only acceptable but profoundly desirable bespeaks a very peculiar attitude towards life, and what might be wrested from it. For one, it is a morbid obsession with a self-image, it is also a vain commitment to a self isolated from any substantiality beyond its commitment to its own image, reflected through a prism of phantasms and Aunt Dianaesque discourses. From the hives of our identitarian commitments we all clamour for audience and control, [we the Liberals/ Conservatives/ Nationalists!] , and in our unwieldy synchrony with the zeitgeist of these communities, we are stabbed cold by the rabid devotions of our mobs. The idea of improving the self sounds deceptively salutary, even ethical these days; no, but can’t we see this slick, new self contrasted prejudicially against gits who weren’t addressed by our self-style-guides’ target demographic cohort?
Opportunism, hedonism, and activism seamlessly blend into the mediated space of national and international discourses among informed consumers; there is conversation, but there is also lies, chaos and oligopolies of branded guff. Each nation becomes an individualist cohort driven towards an ever-becoming-Galt, striking the globally ghettoised masses—figuratively—unionised in their dire straits as plunderers.
The more we try to reclaim individuality the more we find ourselves fractured between odds and ends of the selves we had long taken for granted, shorn for convenience, or from shame. NRIs settled in cosy Silicon Valley apartments send their patriotism packed avowals in jingoistic emails tweeting their approval of desi tyrants; personal activisms quickly precipitate national travesties. Influence also enslaves us; as we wait on the beck and call of the new fad we might as well read about how we can outsmart that thickly accented son of the soil @ the call center job, with grooming tips and One-Month-Guarantee Speak English classes.
Originally posted Here : < https://sites.google.com/site/scene46/home/self-help-is-the-worst-help >.
Bibliography
Auerswald, Philip. (2012). The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Economy. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
Fresco, Jacques & Meadows, Roxanne. (2008). The Best That Money Can’t Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty and War. Québec, Canada: Osmora Publishing.
Kennedy, Dan, S. (2008). No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent: No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners Guide to Getting Really Rich. USA: Entrepreneur Press
Lomborg, Bjørn. (2001). The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. New York, USA: Cambridge University Press.
McGee, Micki. (2005). Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
Norcross, John, C.; Campbell, Linda, F.; Grohol, John, M.; Santrock, John, W.; Selagea, Florin; Sommer, Robert. Eds. (2012). Self-Help That Works: Resources to Improve Emotional Health and Strengthen Relationships. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
Notes
[1] See McGee, Micki. (2005). Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life. New York, USA: OxfordUniversity Press.
[2]. Roderick, Rick. Self-Under Siege: Heidegger and the Rejection of Humanism. USA: The Teaching Company. Available from < http://youtu.be/sDqDJJcJAOg >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[3] See Norcross, John, C.; Campbell, Linda, F.; Grohol, John, M.; Santrock, John, W.; Selagea, Florin; Sommer, Robert. (2012). Self-Help That Works: Resources to Improve Emotional Health and Strengthen Relationships. New York, USA: OxfordUniversity Press.
[4] See < http://goo.gl/cAlZc >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[5] See < http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Love-Health-Self-Guide/dp/1591200261 >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[6] See < http://www.flipkart.com/sex-your-questions-answered-01/p/itmdyuzr88ayheya >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[7] See Kennedy, Dan, S. (2008). No B.S. Marketing To the Affluent: No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners Guide to Getting Really Rich. USA: Entrepreneur Press. p. 23.
[8] See Fresco, Jacques & Meadows, Roxanne. (2008). The Best That Money Can’t Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty and War. Québec, Canada: Osmora Publishing.
[9] Auerswald, Philip. (2012). The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Economy. New York, USA: OxfordUniversity Press. p. 36.
[10] See < http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-03-05/ahmedabad/37469380_1_unemployed-youth-unemployment-figures-claims >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[11] See < http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/11/23/young-jobless-and-indian/ >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[12] See < http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_india-has-the-most-unemployable-population-report_1587604 >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[13] See < http://www.tradingeconomics.com/india/unemployment-rate >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[14] See < http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jan/07/five-self-help-books-change-life >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[15] “Armed with diplomas and aspirations for upward mobility, a rapidly expanding consumer class is said to be driving political activism and, thanks to its media savviness, forcing the government to listen”. Fontanella-Khan, Amana. 24, January 2013. “India’s Next Revolution”. The New York Times. Accessed 22, March 2013. Available from < http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/opinion/indias-next-revolution.html?_r=0 >.
[16] “…[t]hey often pay hired help just Rs 4,000-5’000 per month, and complain if servants demand more. Middle class folk don’t want to calculate the per capita daily spending of their servant’s family. They resent servants constantly wanting more pay, even if this falls short of the very level they find outrageous when specified by the Planning Commission. This double standard is not restricted to paying servants. When middle class folk go to Dilli Haat to buy a sari, they will beat down the weavers to the lowest price possible. If told that the weaver earns only Rs 4,000 per month, will they change their attitude or agree that they have helped keep the weaver poor? No chance”. Aiyar, Swaminathan, A. “Middle class hypocrisy on the poverty line”. The Times of India. 02 October 2011. Accessed 22, March 2013. Available from < http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes .com/Swaminomics/entry/middle-class-hypocrisy-on-the-poverty-line >.
[17] See < http://www.annahazare.org/ >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[18] See < http://www.ndtv.com/photos/news/top-20-surfer-comments-supporting-anna-hazare-10166 >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[19] See < http://www.indiatvnews.com/politics/national/anna-hazare-too-demands-death-penalty-for-rapists-7398.html >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[20] See < http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-11-22/india/30428675_1_anna-hazare-ralegan-siddhi-alcoholics >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[21] See < http://www.sacw.net/article2452.html >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
[22] See < http://lokpaldissent.wordpress.com/tag/anna-hazare/ >. Accessed 22, March 2013.
Why Hegel is not Freud is not Lacan Pt. 2.
Cain Pinto
II. iii
Negativity in Psycho-analysis
What is a person according to psycho-analytic theory? The answer, unfortunately, cannot be a neutral one. Just as any technical field of human knowledge requires technical definitions of its objects, tools and techniques psycho-analysis too proceeds through a stage of definitions. But, there is one marked difference in psycho-analytic theory: psycho-analysis is both a tool and a technique, and its object is to achieve or restore an individual’s capacity for affirming life as it really is.
What is life, really? Psycho-analysis cannot answer definitively—and does not purport to—for a variety of reasons. The idea that reality can be apprehended all at once, as naturally given to sense certainty, is anathema to psycho-analysis; yet, psycho-analytic realism is also innately conservative: it describes reality as the situations of life the way they are grasped by the common man, the reasonableness of everyday life and its institutions[1]. This description of life, as that which is not fantasy, depends on a majoritarian index of the reasonable, the normal, the typical and the permissible. Freud allied his conservatism with a hope in the definitive progress of empiricism: the god Logos, he called his brand of reality.
It must be admitted that this description of reality is rather enigmatic; it offers no more clarification than does a myth for its queerness; the reality psycho-analysis appeals to is so wide as to preclude any positive description. To describe a real person from this view of reality would be to approximate a discourse proper to poetry, fiction or prophecy, not science, not philosophy. Accordingly, as a corrective to this tendency towards fantastic descriptions, psycho-analysis begins with scepticism as its first axiom or, as Freud pithily aphorised: “Where the id was the ego shall be”[2]. All reality is a fabrication of instinct, but some ego-cathexes or fabricated realities are more tenable, scientific, and truer than other speculative truths.
The naturalism of Freudianism is eliminative. It describes reality after it has been shorn of delusion, intentional content and affective influence. Then, the vagueness of a consensual definition of reality as seen by society is overcome by psycho-analysis if only by a negative definition of reality committed to scientific verification. What is not scientifically demonstrable is suspect as fantasy, illusion, and pathology. Now, psycho-analysis can define a person: a person is a collection of symptoms that interact with the scientifically verifiable world. Accordingly, a religious person despite his education, occupational status, social capability and intelligence is neurotic because he is religious; a scientist is paranoid-obsessive if his overarching concern is to create a theory-of-everything because he presumes beforehand that such a theory is possible. Rather than be threatened with its rather tenuous descriptive power over a field of normative reality, psycho-analysis reduces the scope of positive description of reality to the range of demonstrable facts. This is both its epistemological merit and limitation.
Psycho-analysis is capable of calling the bluff on unfounded beliefs but cannot posit a positive description of reality. Each successive revision in scientific progress becomes one more ego-cathexis that approximates a total field of what can be called real legitimately. From this perspective psycho-analysis is an archaeology of the existing range of reality. It can explain how some symptoms are oriented towards the past and some symptoms are not compatible with the present situation and thus are gravitated towards a psychical crisis, or real life tragedy. The descriptions of psycho-analysis are essentially negative.
Then, how does psycho-analysis handle the idea of negativity qua negativity?
II. iv
To conceive of the negative, in view of psycho-analysis, we must return to the idea of the negative in dialectics vis-à-vis psycho-analysis. Dialectics simply begins with the naïve sense certainty of reason that becomes capable of propositions by latching onto binaries of identity and difference, conformity and contradiction; then, by eliminating the non-contiguous or incompatible elements between these objects of consciousness; and, finally, by affirming the sum of what has been negatively described[3]. Thus, the three stages of the Hegelian dialectic are uncanny analogues of the Freudian topographic triad of unconscious, preconscious and conscious. But the nature of this analogy is not determined in a compossible way. This is because psycho-analysis must question the very first instance of sense certainty with which the dialectic takes the liberty to begin a phenomenological account[4].
In the primary state of sense certainty we are in the domain of preconscious thought, by performing a reduction on sensory data by empirical verification we come to appreciate the gap between our expectations and reality. But, for psycho-analysis this movement has begun too prematurely; sense certainty is always suspect because we find it as a given. This is what Freud drives home using the idea of primary repression[5]. The given sense certainty and our attitude towards it is not indicative of its veridical quality, after all satisfaction with what is perceived as reality is actually only a compromise-formation between the id, the superego and reality[6]. But the suspicion of the psycho-analyst is also suspect for the same reason: it conforms to a knowledge it cannot have by definition. We must recall that there is no escape from the circular grip of Freud’s formulation: where the id was the ego shall be. Thus, we are led to reassess the claim of psycho-analysis against philosophy in light of its own inability to posit a positive description of what is reality without question begging.
If reality is a peculiar cathexis of the libido and the only way to be sure is to verify one’s beliefs scientifically it follows that there is no explicit teleological view in psycho-analysis. It can look behind and not forward because consciousness is redefined along the contours of empirical knowledge. Yet, because psycho-analysis must insist on looking behind it implicitly assumes that there is a reality which tends to escape consciousness; it believes this axiomatically, without empirical evidence. Thus, we have a paradox: the cogito which psycho-analysis calls into question is also constitutive of the psycho-analytical perspective[7]; it cannot question its posited rationality-beyond-fantasy. Because psycho-analysis functions on the basis of suspicion it must believe in its a priori access to an inchoate gestalt of the whole truth.
The negativity of dialectical philosophy works by eliminating the contradictory contents of cognition and thereby effects a newer, more complete, synthesis. This movement of knowledge is akin to the development of science: hypotheses work as sense certainties extended into the realm of what is considered to be possible, or probable by the scientific community; then, conflicting evidence is understood to re-define the earlier assumptions; and, finally, new knowledge emerges as a new perspective on an earlier problem within the scientific community. This understanding of negativity cannot be taken as identical to the one espoused by psycho-analysis. For psycho-analysis the movement of scientific knowledge into the future by way of hypothesis is still a neurotic approximation of consciousness to an imagined reality, or ego-cathexis. Accordingly, the negative moment which separates facts from hypotheses in scientific practice become positive moments of ego-cathexis to the psycho-analytic theorist. Rather than look at the predictive value of hypotheses in the present moment the analyst must rely on his a priori suspicion to measure present hypotheses within older contexts of knowledge, and find them lacking in integrity until proven otherwise in the future. But this is absurd, for didn’t Freud profess the process of scientific illumination [Logos] to be the object of mature desire?
It is helpful, now, to remind ourselves of the peculiar nature of the Freudian reality principle. It is not just the influx and interpretation of stimuli available to consciousness, rather it is “…the truth of a personal history in a concrete situation” in relation to its fantastical elements[8]. In this sense, it is not really the objective externality as it seems to the subject which is put to test against the id, the superego and the reality principle but it is the adaptation of the constitutive fantasy in accordance with the subject’s lived history[9]. What this means is that we cannot look at the contingent developments of knowledge from a perspective that doesn’t take earlier historical developments in the state of this knowledge into account. Reality becomes, psycho-analytically speaking, the sum total of past facts of experience and the radical gap between what is now known, and what one subsequently hopes to do with this knowledge.
Reality is no less than a feedback-loop propelled by instincts and examined in hindsight, continually changing itself by self-reference and self-positing. Accordingly, what is conventionally thought of as the negative in the phenomenological perspective is no longer self-identical as the negative in the psycho-analytic scheme. Since the analytical gaze of the psycho-analytic session is situated in the present but derives its impetus and coherence from raking up the analysand’s past, the dialectical view of negativity is recast as a positive determination when seen from the analyst’s perspective. Therefore, the psycho-analytic notion of negativity involves a redefining of the present symptom, or facts of observation, into a meaningfully cohesive unity with the symptomatic past of the analysand. Simply speaking, the negative in psycho-analysis consists of positive descriptions of the present moment as they relate to the intentions of the subject in light of his previous adaptations to reality; the traumatic remainder between past experience and present action is psycho-analytic negativity. Rather than the speculative moment’s projective impetus which is available to the idea of the negative in phenomenology, in psycho-analysis the idea of the negative is determined in the subject’s relation to the aleatory contingency of his previous actions which have conditioned the present horizons of his reality.
To be continued.
Read the previous section here: http://skepoet.Wordpress.com/2013/03/01/psychoanalysis-psycho-dialectics-or-psycho-synthesis-or-why-hegel-is-not-freud-is-not-lacan/
Bibliography
Akhtar, Salman. (2009). Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. London, UK: Karnac Books.
Beiser, Frederick, C. Ed. (1993). The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. Trans. Ihde, Done. (2004). The Conflict of Interpretations. London, UK: Continuum.
Ricoeur, Paul. Trans. Savage, Denis. (2008). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Delhi, India; Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Ltd.
Notes
[1] “…[R]eality is first of all the opposite of fantasy—it is facts, such as the normal man sees them; it is the opposite of dreams, of hallucination”. Freud’s crypto-philosophy offers to call reality a god; the god Logos. This move is nothing but Freud inserting “…a bit of irony…in an ad hominem argument”. Available from <http://skepoet.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/psychoanalysis-psycho-dialectics-or-psycho-synthesis-or-why-hegel-is-not-freud-is-not-lacan/>.
[2] See < http://skepoet.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/psychoanalysis-psycho-dialectics-or-psycho-synthesis-or-why-hegel-is-not-freud-is-not-lacan/>.
[3] Beiser, Frederick, C. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
[4] “Phenomenology begins by with an epochȇ of objects given to consciousness as sense certainty, in the first stage of the dialectic. Psychoanalysis begins by putting this givenness of consciousness and its objects and the epochȇ of the conscious thinker into doubt. “…[T]he true situation of consciousness is discovered” to be the motivating principle Eros and its instincts which clamour for satisfaction through feelings and intuitions in the analytical movement of Psychoanalysis. But, the synthetic movement of the dialectic takes the absence of visibly motivating instincts in feeling and intuition to be a proof for reason’s right to “…self-determination”. The suspicion of psychoanalysis and phenomenology is directed towards entirely different aspects of conscious thought”. Available from < http://skepoet. WordPress.com/2013/03/01/psychoanalysis-psycho-dialectics-or-psycho-synthesis-or-why-hegel-is-not-freud-is-not-lacan/>.
[5] Ricoeur, Paul. Trans. Savage, Denis. (2008). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Delhi, India; Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Ltd.
[6] Akhtar, Salman. (2009). Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. London, UK: Karnac Books. p. 52.
[7] Ricoeur, Paul. Trans. Ihde, Done. (2004). The Conflict of Interpretations. London, UK: Continuum.
[8] Ibid. p. 184.
[9] Ibid.
Psychoanalysis and Environmentalism, Part II
Cain Pinto
The Fruit of the Earth: Of Personal and Impersonal Ecological Conservationism as Forms of an Instinct
“Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom? Then when I die she will not take me into her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men! But how dare I cut off my mother’s hair?”
Chief of the Native American Wanapum Tribe, 19th Century (Sheldrake, R. 2007)
The adornment of nature with the lived experiences of man used as nominal and formal characteristics for its agentic description, or personification, is not peculiar to animists or primitivisms. Even the mechanist[1], the positivist[2] and the determinist[3] invoke figures of metaphor, metonymy and personification in the elaboration of their theories and findings. Bachelard’s pronouncement on metaphor as “…an invisible grain of hashish…”[4], though itself a metaphor, allows us equally well for its obliquity in relation with diurnal experience to enter the realm of oneiric, and then even sublime, imagination. The passage from the oneiric to the sublime, however, is one fraught with a perilous scope for [mis]translation of affects from the impersonal domain of unconscious object-libido cathexis [as in hallucinatory fantasy] to the possibility of sublimation by a conscious decision to take charge of the duty of “…being-for-the-outside”[5], and vice versa. The formation of images, both oneiric and sublime, is ultimately linguistic; in this capacity these images are representations of instincts in two important senses: the suerpegotic ordering of cultural meanings that prefigure images by the impersonal process of the emergence of languages in society and the egotic coming to grips, or being-for-the-outside, of colloquial and idiomatic language use and various coexisting individual styles of expression. By using the terms personal and impersonal we are still referring to the collective level where the various ecological conversation discourses operate: the use of impersonal, personal and suprapersonal, here, is the organisation of levels of ecological conservationist discourse as they correspond with the Freudian topography of id, ego and superego[6].
The push and pull between the personal and the impersonal is thus only the conflict of instinctual representatives, or ideas, defined by their fidelity to a suprapersonal, or theoretical and formal domain of discourse which makes ecological conservation a field of human knowledge and practice. Between the potentially oneiric or hallucinatory personal unconscious and its sublime realisation on one hand and the potentially hallucinatory cultural unconscious and its capacity for sublimation on the other there is a charged space of interaction: the transference of the analytic session can be invoked here by treating the interactions between personal and impersonal narratives of ecological activism that become coherent as artefacts of instincts in an archive of suprapersonal psychisms—geared towards a human desire that becomes more and more concrete through a dialectical movement between personal ecological activism and impersonal ecological activism.
The polarity between biocentric and anthropocentric ecology[7] perfectly represents the impersonal being-for-the-outside of the psychism of ecological conservationism as such. This opposition is not simply one between irrevocably disjointed worldviews, rather it represents the gap between a superegotic demand for complete biocentricity, where man is made a limb on the body of the earth with no special privilege of place as in Deep Ecology, on the underlying occult anthropocentricism of all ecological conservation projects as such. Here, the seeming opposition between two ecological conservationist ideologies functionally comes to embody an oneiric imago of the conservationist psychism as such reaching outwards to the possibility of sublimation through its antecedent stages of identification with the Earth and idealisation of the Earth, through an arduous and partial process of reality-testing; from the traumatic situation of having to live through an industrialised and consumerist ego-consciousness, the psychism of conservationism arises to defend Mother Earth from phallic spoilage by contemplating a voluntary castration, a formal, or superegotic, limitation on the instinct of the suprapersonal signifier of ecological conservation, and from this a part of the activist shrinks back—no one likes being curtailed, unless by a ruse of desire turned inwards like in hallucination the curtailment itself becomes a possession of the object in the ego.
Now, the warring between Deep Ecologists and Bright Green Environmentalists, for instance, is not a fundamental mismatch between ideas that share a common goal, they are the adaptations of discourse to the upheavals imposed upon it by science, world affairs and individually conflicting ideologies, or representatives of instinct, that are influencing the manifest discourse of an instinctual drive towards ecological conservatism. Thus each position contains a baseline reactionary element: the biocentric position entails a capitulation to the status of humanity without a right to thrive on Earth, it is a surrender to the very idea which inspires the need to conserve ecological integrity, namely the risk that human and animal exploitation will irremediably tarnish it; the anthropocentric position claiming to conserve Earth for man’s benefit, though more apparently realistic, is still an adaptation of the superegotic biocentric absolutism which issues the first formalised statement of intent, or instinct to preserve ecological integrity […for gods’ sake!, even].
To Be Continued…
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. Trans. Jolas, Maria. The Poetics of Space. New York, USA: Orion Press, 1964.
Chew, Matthew, K. & Laubichler, Manfred, D. 2003. “Perceptions of Science: Natural Enemies–Metaphor or Misconception?”. Science: Essays on Science and Society. 4 July 2003: Vol. 301 no. 5629 pp. 52-53. DOI: 10.1126/science.1085274. Web. <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/301/5629/52.full>.
Nordgren, Anders. Responsible Genetics: The Moral Responsibility of Geneticists for the Consequences of Genetic Research. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001.
Ricoeur, Paul. Trans. Savage, Denis. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, 2008.
Scholarly Editions. Issues in Mechanical Engineering: 2011 Edition. Atlanta, Georgia: Scholarly Editions, 2012.
Sheldrake, Rupert. The Greening of Science and God: The Rebirth of Nature. Cochin, India: Editions India, 2007.
[1] The use of operational metaphors during the process of designing new technology has a tangible effect on the possible outcomes of mechanical engineering projects. The case of the move from Pocket PC OS to PDAs was facilitated and given it unique trajectory by the use of organising metaphors that allowed the creation of a truly compelling interface for the device (Scholarly Editions, 2012).
[2] “Evolutionary biologists customarily employ the metaphor “survival of the fittest,” which has a precise meaning in the context of mathematical population genetics, as a shorthand expression when describing evolutionary processes. Yet, outside of the shared interpretative context of evolutionary biology, the same metaphor has been employed to argue that evolutionary theory is fundamentally flawed. Natural Selection, the argument goes, leads to a survival of the fittest. The fittest are those that survive. Ergo, natural selection describes the survival of the survivors. Thus one of the core concepts of evolutionary theory is a tautology. While it is easy to see how such an argument represents a deliberate misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, it also alerts us to some problems inherent to the use of metaphors in science. Metaphors introduce a fundamental trade off between the generation of novel insights in science and the possibility of dangerous or even deadly misappropriation. The extension of genetics to eugenics owed much of its popularity in the United States and in Germany to its use of culturally resonant metaphors. Labeling people as a burden, a cancerous disease, or a foreign body (Fremdkörper) conveyed the “threat” to society in terms that people could relate to in their respective historical and cultural settings (5–8). Given this power of metaphorical language, it is understandable why several scientists have been concerned with the prevalence of metaphors in certain disciplines (9)” (Chew, Matthew, K. & Laubichler, Manfred, D. 2003).
[3] The surety with which genetic determinism has been championed as a breakthrough has aroused concern in the scientific and academic community about the potential social fatalism that might emerge in defence of entrenched positions of power and exploitation in society. The idea that genetic determinism necessitates that some people are better than others in a determined way can have unsavoury social consequences (Nordgren, A. 2001).
[4] Bachelard, Gaston (1964). p. 219
[5] Ricoeur, Paul. (2008) “Book II. Analytic. Ch. 2. From the Oneiric to the Sublime: The Clinical Approaches to Interpretation”. p. 180- 86.
[6] The id, ego and superego cannot be conceived of as entities or locations in themselves; they are the movement of instinctual desires and their representations in ideas that come to take on the characteristics of the id, the ego and the superego. The possible outcomes of instincts namely sublimation, identification and idealisation as modifications of desire in relation to ideas of reality and their opposites regression, introjection and illusion in relation to a rejection of reality by the instincts are only labels that become coherent when the conflict between the instincts and reality reconfigure the position of the analysand in the products of his free associations. Id is the constant motivator of instincts, the superego is a facilitator of the id and the ego is that which is driven by the instincts to test reality or abjure it. All readings of a particular psychism function inside this energetics and topography in reference to pleasure, unpleasure and reality. See, Ricoeur, Paul (2008) p. 217- 29.
[7] The biocentrist ecologists oppose the bland and impotent anthropocentrism of deep ecologists to be a ruse of man’s narcissism; the biocentrists believe this narcissism is what has put man in the danger of becoming an ecocide in the first place (Sheldrake, R. 2007).
Paul Ricoeur’s Case for Hermeneutics Against Symbolic Logic
Reproduced from a Print Copy, and Posted by Cain Pinto
Paul Ricoeur
*This excerpt is taken in entirety from Paul Ricoeur’s magisterial Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970).
…what advantages can the hermeneutician adduce when faced with formal logic? To the artificiality of logical symbols, which can be written and read but not spoken he will oppose an essentially oral symbolism, in each instance received and accepted as a heritage. The man who speaks in symbols is first of all a narrator; he transmits an abundance of meaning over which he has little command. This abundance, this density of manifold meaning, is what gives him food for thought and solicits his understanding; interpretation consists less is suppressing ambiguity than in understanding it and explicating its richness. It may also be said that logical symbolism is empty, whereas symbolism in hermeneutics is full; it renders manifest the double meaning of worldly or psychical reality…[S]ymbols are bound: the sensible sign is bound by the symbolic meaning that dwells in it and gives it transparency and lightness; the symbolic meaning is in turn bound to its sensible vehicle, which gives it weight and opacity. One might add that this is also the way symbols bind us, viz. by giving thought a content, a flesh, a density.
These distinctions and oppositions are not false; they are merely unfounded. A confrontation which restricts itself to the symbolic texture of symbols and does not face up to the question of their foundation in reflection will soon prove embarrassing to the advocate of hermeneutics. For the artificiality and emptiness of logical symbolism are simply the counterpart and condition of the true aim of this logic, viz. to guarantee the nonambiguity of arguments; what the hermeneutician calls double meaning is, in logical terms, ambiguity, i.e. equivocity of words and amphiboly of statements. A peaceful juxtaposition of hermeneutics and symbolic logic is therefore impossible; symbolic logic quickly makes any lazy compromise untenable. Its very “intolerance” forces hermeneutics to radically justify its own language.
We must therefore understand this intolerance in order to arrive a contrario at the foundation of hermeneutics.If the rigour of symbolic logic seems more exclusive than that of traditional formal logic, the reason is that symbolic logic is not a simple prolongation of the earlier logic. It does not represent a higher degree of formalization; it proceeds from a global decision concerning ordinary language, the amphibolous character of its construction, the confusion inherent in metaphor and idiomatic expressions, the emotional resonance of highly descriptive language. Symbolic logic despairs of natural language precisely at the point where hermeneutics believes in its implicit “wisdom”.
This struggle begins with the exclusion from the properly cognitive sphere of all language that does not give factual information. The rest of discourse is classified under the heading of emotive and horatory functions of language; that which does not give factual information expresses emotions, feelings or attitudes, or urges others to behave in some particular way.
Reduced thus to the informative function, language still has to be divested of the equivocity of words and the amphiboly of grammatical constructions; verbal ambiguity must be unmasked so as to eliminate it from arguments and to employ coherently the same words in the same sense within the same argument. The function of definitions that succeed in doing this are scientific ones. These are not content with pointing out the meaning of words already have in usage, independently of their definition; instead they very strictly characterise an object in light of a scientific theory (for example, the definition of force as the product of mass and acceleration in the context of Newtonian theory).
But symbolic logic goes further. For it, the price of univocity is the creation of a symbolism with no ties to natural to language. This notion of a symbol excludes the other notion of symbol. The recourse to a completely artificial symbolism introduces in a logic a difference not only of degree but also of nature; the symbols of the logician intervene precisely at the point where arguments of classical logic, formulated in ordinary language, run into an invincible and, in a way, residual ambiguity. Thus the logical disjunction sign ∨ eliminates the ambiguity of words that express disjunction in ordinary language (Eng., or; Ger., oder; Fr., ou); ∨ expresses only the particular meaning common to the inclusive disjunction (the sense of the Latin vel) according to which at least one is false; ∨ resolves the ambiguity by formulating the inclusive disjunction as the part common to the two modes of disjunction. Likewise the symbol ⊃ resolves the ambiguity inherent in the notion of implication (which may denote formal implication, either logical, definitional, or causal); the symbol ⊃ formulates the common partial meaning, namely, that any hypothetical statement with a true antecedent and a false consequent must be false; the symbol is thus an abbreviation of a longer symbolism which expresses the negation of the conjunction of the truth value of the antecedent and the falsity of the consequent: ∼ (p. ∼ q).
Thus the artificial language of logical symbolism enables one to determine the validity of arguments in all cases where a residual ambiguity can be ascribed to the structure of ordinary language. The precise point where symbolic logic cuts across and contests hermeneutics, therefore, is this: verbal equivocity and syntactical amphiboly—in short, the ambiguity of ordinary language—can be overcome only at the level of a language whose symbols have a meaning completely determined by the truth table whose construction they allow. Thus the sense of the symbol ∨ is completely determined by its truth function, inasmuch as it serves to safeguard the validity of the disjunctive syllogism; likewise the sense of the symbol ⊃ completely exhausts its meaning in the construction of the truth table of the hypothetical syllogism. These constructions guarantee that the symbols are completely unambiguous, while the nonambiguity of the symbols assures the universal validity of arguments.
As long as the logic of multiple meaning is not guaranteed in this reflective function, it necessarily falls under the blows of formal and symbolic logic. In the eyes of the logician, hermeneutics will always be suspected of fostering a culpable complacency toward equivocal meanings, of surreptitiously giving an informative function to expressions that have merely an emotive or horatory function. Hermeneutics thus falls under the fallacies of relevance which a sound logic denounces.
The only thing that can come to the aid of equivocal expressions and truly ground a logic of double meaning is the problematic of reflection. The only thing that can justify equivocal expressions is their a priori role in the movement of self-appropriation by self which constitutes reflective activity. This a priori function pertains not to a formal but to a transcendental logic, if by transcendental logic is meant the establishing of the conditions of possibility of a domain of objectivity in general. The task of such a logic is to extricate by a regressive method the notions presupposed in the constitution of a type of experience and a corresponding type of reality. Transcendental logic is not exhausted in the Kantian a priori. The connection we have established between reflection upon the I think, I am qua act, and the signs scattered in the various cultures of that act of existing, opens up a new field of experience, objectivity, and reality. This is the field to which the logic of double meaning pertains—a logic we have qualified above as complex but not arbitrary, and rigorous in its articulations. The principle of limitation to the demands of symbolic logic lies in the structure of reflection itself. If there is no such thing as the transcendental, there is no reply to the intolerance of symbolic logic; but if the transcendental is an authentic dimension of discourse, then new force is found in the reasons that can be opposed to the requirement of logicism that all discourse be measured by its treatise of arguments. These reasons, which seemed to us to be left hanging in the air for want of a foundation, are as follows:
- The requirement of univocity holds only for discourse that presents itself as argument: but reflection does not argue, it draws no conclusion, it neither deduces or induces; it states the conditions of possibility whereby empirical consciousness can be made equal to thetic consciousness. Hence, “equivocal” applies only to those expressions that ought to be univocal in the course of a single “argument” but are not; in the reflective use of multiple-meaning symbols there is no fallacy of ambiguity: to reflect upon these symbols and to interpret them is one and the same act.
- The understanding developed by reflection upon symbols is not a weak substitute for definition, for reflection is not a type of thinking that defines and thinks according to “classes.” This brings us back to the Aristotelian problem of the “many meanings of being.” Aristotle was the first to see clearly that philosophical discourse is not subject to the logical alternative of univocal-equivocal, for being is not a “genus”
; and yet, being is said; but it “is said in many ways”.- Let us go back to the very first alternative considered above: a statement that does not give factual information, we said, expresses only the emotions or attitudes of a subject. Reflection, however, falls outside this alternative; that which makes possible the appropriation of the I think, I am is neither the empirical statement not the emotive statement, but something other than either of these.
This case for interpretation rests entirely on the reflective function of interpretative thought. If the double movement of symbols towards reflection and of reflection towards symbols is valid, interpretative thought is well grounded. Hence it may be said, at least, negatively, that such thought is not measured by a logic of arguments; the validity of philosophical statements cannot be arbitrated by a theory of language conceived as syntax; the semantics of philosophy is not swallowed up by a symbolic logic.
These propositions concerning philosophic discourse do not enable us, however, to say positively what a philosophical statement is; such an affirmation could be fully justified only by its actually being said. At least we can affirm that the indirect, symbolic language of reflection can be valid, not because it is equivocal, but in spite of its being equivocal”.
Bibliography
Paul Ricoeur. Trans. Denis Savage. “Book I. Problematic: Reflection and Equivocal Language”. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, 1970. P. 47- 54
In Defence of Ashis Nandy
Cain Pinto
Ashis Nandy’s controversial point that the lower castes are the most corrupt is controversial only insofar as its context is elided, evaded or ignored with an agenda.
The blending of ideal totalities of thought and deed in the brutal melting pot of our diverse, often divisive, Indian people has been long drawn on as a resilient, and, indeed now, a robustly commonplace philosopheme by her commentarial, emblem bearing khidmatgars. In fact, long before freeing herself from the yolk of Colonial subjugation, popular Indian sentiment, and its ascendant political jingo of saffron stained Nationalism, had developed in her people an avidity for this syncretic unitarianism of thought— as much in symbolism and rhetoric as could fail to translate into practice, even. Our politics have been a testament to this tradition of abrasion and richness in turn. We continue to be a nation of many chugged along an inertial, expedient, One: Bharatavarsha. Srinivasa Ramanujan’s mathematical prowess, for instance, Nandy argues not surprisingly, was rooted as much in the tradition of Western natural philosophy as it was in an indigenous, para-European [pathological/ anal-regressive?[1]] culture imbued with the constellating torque of theotechny, astrology and the honing of technics pertaining to extrasensory perception[2]. The dizzying plasticity and substantive force of medieval Indian logical traditions stands testimony to the heteronymous and collative business of our modern discursive practices; where else may one find admixed sublime notions of valour to be obtained in logomachy attended simultaneously by a strong distaste for epistemological consistency? In the surviving clamour of ricocheting, and ever-revivifying-reifying, Indian traditions of logic mired in ancient, plural originations of course [!] The Nyāya-Śhāstra[3] school, for instance, finds place for categories of logical disputation such as intentional quibbling [chala], wrangling for victory at the cost of Truth [jalpa], ad hoc attacks on debaters [vitanda] and outré forms of the analogue like the varnya-sama— balancing two questionable axioms such that a conclusion may nevertheless obtain. An example of varnya-sama:
Sound is non-eternal,
Because it is a product,
Like a pot.
The leisurely and anodyne practices of intellectual jousting cultivated with great fervour in ancient India, through centuries, have all but petered out in deference to the narrow proprietary template of the mediatised sensationalisation of our information age. No more do the media have the time or inclination to tackle any discursion a tad removed from punctual dotage to the average, illiterate demagogue’s fiery sound bite. The gap toothed maw of local traditions of reason, once sharpened by the insatiable Indian appetite for knowledge pursued hotly by competing clans, is now emptied out for fear that it might puncture the official bag of wind beloved to some partisan electorate; gerrymandering of course defies catagories of traditional, and reasonable, logic and is its own totem and taboo. Ashis Nandy’s strident rhetoric, begging to differ with the contours of our mediatised information society, demands a more thoroughgoing involvement with contextual nuances. His own indubitable record as a champion for the emancipation of lower classes and castes in India by exposing the complicity of apparently rivalrous political combatants vying for their vote, through –sociological and psychological analyses, rankles with the po-faced, straight laced expediencies preferred by the heirs of a sterile Nehruvian secularity[4]. The aforementioned sterility of this secularity, perfectly emblematised by the rivalry between the Congress as self-appointed benefactors of minorities and the BJP as heroic brigands out to restore the lost glory of Hindutva, is best understood through Nandy’s critique of their mutual need for and benefit from the perpetuation of manageable instances of communal violence[5]— is not the very idea of the political the idea of an ineradicable enmity that justifies the Law and its punitive sovereignty and excess, the idea of a [6]polémios or hostis that a government alone can resist?
Now, the defence of minorities is no simple matter of taking sides in a political establishment that functions in line with ancient wasms, myths and cultural pasts which have seeped into the very [un]conscious ego structures of its principal actors. There are several polarities occulted between seemingly binary embattlements. The Hindu upper castes feel entitled to their privileges by descent while the lower classes, Dalits included, are grudgingly ceded to by way of reservations in government employment and education sectors, but the consequences of this allegedly salubrious interaction between puritanical and postlapsarian Hindu ideology on one hand and the reality of legally empowered lower castes on the other are mixed at best. While the idea behind reservations for lower castes in governance, education and employment was to secure their representation, equal status and reintegration into a chronically hierarchically stratified Indian society it has led to the development of sub-classes among the lower castes[7] and the perpetuation of bad faith among Hindu hegemons who see affirmative intervention on behalf of minority communities as de facto anti-Hindu. The irony is incontestable: the Hindu Nationalist political outfits uphold Hindutva ideology as an ego ideal that will not only restore a mythical, imaginal glory and pre-eminence to Hindu cultural values but also emancipate the oppressed classes in a soteriological telos; of course, both assertions are problematic given Indian history is replete with records of violence meted on cultures by colonising, invading others[8]: Hinduism of the historically accurate variety is by its form hierarchical and exclusive, shaped as it was by invaders and repeated subjugation to cultural others, but the symbolic efficiency of its rhetoric gaining gravity from sheer persistence continues to be exploited by RSS and BJP ideologues[9]. The use of linguistic, cultural, religious and mythical differences between communities continues to be dominant in the will to power; dividing electorates by caste lines[10] makes political sense if power is its sole motive. Is it surprising that governments have endorsed particular versions of history to be taught in schools and universities, at variance not only with established or inadequate, unequivocal, facts but also with each other? Ashis Nandy thinks the use of controversial historical revisions in officially endorsed versions for pedagogical use to be a tactical instrument of power: it establishes means for legitimating and enforcing negative social attitudes towards persistently marginalised minority communities, and lower castes[11].
The problem runs deeper still: emancipatory provisions like reservations to ensure the gradual improvement of the economic and social standing of the lower classes, e.g. Dalits, Other Backward Communities, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes etc., have led to pockets of prosperity while leaving the rest of their communities marginalised[12]. And, if this was not problematic enough, the newly enfranchised and prosperous beneficiaries of reservation and other alleviating government interventions among the lower castes, also, have historically tended to re-christen and acculturate themselves as Hindus proper; adapting Hindu religious practices and beliefs once their economic marginalisation was redressed, and dissociating from their erstwhile class peers from their original communities— adding a twist to the casteist logic by identification with their upper caste oppressors, in a process sociologists have called sanskritisation[13]. To state controversially a very necessary observation: the symptomal tendency of the condemnation Ashis Nandy’s ironic, innocuous and constitutionally privileged speech act has garnered from the lower castes belies another occasion of identifying with the aggressor: in calling out Nandy’s provocative defence of their cause, offended lower caste representatives have allied themselves with their higher caste oppressors who would like to get rid of Nandy’s scathing exposé of their cultural chauvinism. In this way they can continue to subjugate lower castes in a system that appears legitimate, in an almost fatalistic pre-ordination as Kancha Ilaiah[14] would point out. In light of these endemic and long abandoned fault lines the fashionable brouhaha about sensitivity towards the historically oppressed classes, political correctness and the rule of communal vote banks take on a life that is parasitic upon the body politic of a deferred, and truly representational, democracy. In its place we have a semiosis with sound and fury betraying an unresolved psychic deadlock at the heart of our divided lower classes and their unified oppressors. When Nandy said, at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2013, —during the talk entitled “Republic of Ideas” which the present author was fortunate enough to attended with his wife, —that the Dalits, O.B.Cs, S.Cs and S.Ts are the most corrupt class of governmental officials he was formulating the dominant psychological and adversarial consciousness of upper class elites that informs the formal and institutional communalism of Indian governmentality. The persistent outrage against reservations in premier colleges for students from marginalised Dalit, O.B.Cs, S.Cs and S.Ts communities, who have been put to disadvantage by dominant higher castes for several centuries of India’s history as a Republic based on the principle of equality accountable to constitutionally privileged Law, bears witness to what the privileged classes and castes think of the lower castes and the oppressed: precious little. Nandy has shown both the oppressive Hindutva hegemons like the Sangh Parivar; RSS; VHP; the BJP and their symbolic adversary the Congress, with its Nehruvian secularity, mirrored obliquely in several identitarian political parties, are only concerned with a will to power, and their predilection for a status quo that legitimates their own political sovereignty[15].
The modifying apogee of Nandy’s ironic formulation— which most media failed to convey along with their ad hoc sensational and irresponsible reportage of [mis]quotation, repeated ad nauseum in loops— was to come later in an elaborately qualified agreement with his interlocutor Tarun Tejpal, founder of Tehelka; where he said, he saw corruption among lower classes as having an ameliorating effect; he thought it was an opportune symptom that belied lower caste consciousness having reached a stage where they were better equipped to redress their systemic suppression by the armatures of our ingrained casteist governmentality. His underlying thesis being: what the upper classes had done with impunity has now become available, in however insular and specific instances of corruption among lower caste governmental and bureaucratic actors, as a counterstrategy against a traditionally upper caste governmental culture. Behind his deadpan pronouncement that corrupt lower caste governmental agents restored his hope in the possibilities of a robust Indian Republic and a democracy to come was a well worn career of forty years spent theorising and empowering the subaltern, the oppressed and the peripheral selfhood of Colonial and Post-Colonial subjects. But this defence which may have taken many an odd hour everyday for years on end to formulate, as discourse, as clarion call and vitanda cannot be conveyed without Nandy’s seemingly egregious irony. Without irony there could be no ironing out of differences irreducible to a few seconds of vocalised order words, no longer coherent in a social space alienated from its communal meaning and being. There is, of course, no time for such nitpicking and responsibility towards the veridical in the Indian republic of mediatised democracy. Sound arguments are loudly, quickly and efficiently supplanted by sound bites that turn around the very purpose of dissensus and defence. I stand behind Nandy, not to be contrarian, offensive, insensitive or casteist but because I believe he said what he did in good faith and as an ally of the oppressed, with the weight of traditions of logic, reason and rhetoric that go back and forth from Pre-Vedic to post-modern India, behind and before him as a warrior-theoretician of the Indian subaltern.
Bibliography
Derrida, Jacques. Trans. Collins, George. “On Absolute Hostility: The Cause of Philosophy and the Spectre of the Political”. The Politics of Friendship. UK: London, Verso, 2005.
Gottlob, Michael. History and Politics in Post-Colonial India. India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Kakar, Sudhir. Indian Identity. India, New Delhi: Penguin India Ltd. 2004.
Ilaiah, Kancha. Post-Hindu India: A Discourse on Dalit-Bahujan, Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Knowledge. India, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009
Michael, S., M. Ed. Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values, Second Edition. India, New Delhi: Sage Publications. 2007.
Nandy, Ashis. Return From Exile: Alternative Sciences; The Illegitimacy of Nationalism; The Savage Freud. India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Nandy, Ashis. Exiled at Home: At the Edge of Psychology; The Intimate Enemy; Creating a Nation. India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Sarangi, Asha. Themes in Indian Politics: Language and Politics in India. India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Vidyabhusana, Satis, Chandra. A History of Indian Logic: Ancient, Medieval and Modern Schools. India, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited. 2006.
[1] Ashis Nandy in his essay “The Savage Freud” discusses the prevalent attitudes of European intellectuals about Indian cultural mores and ways of thinking and being as, psychoanalytically, anal-regressive.
[2] See Nandy, Ashis. Return From Exile: Alternative Sciences; The Illegitimacy of Nationalism; The Savage Freud. “Alternative Sciences: The Other Science of Srinivasa Ramanujan”. India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. P. 120.
[3] See Vidyabhusana, Satis, Chandra. “Contents of the Nyāya-Śhāstra. 32. The Categories: Their Definition”. A History of Indian Logic: Ancient, Medieval and Modern Schools. India, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited. 2006. § II. P. 55- 69.
[4] Krishna, Sankaran. “Death of Irony in the Age of Media”. The Hindu: Editorial. P. 10. Thursday, January 31, 2013.
[5] See Nandy, Ashis; Trivedi, Shikha; Mayaram, Shail; Yagnik, Achyut. “Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the Fear of the Self”. Exiled at Home: At the Edge of Psychology; The Intimate Enemy; Creating a Nation. India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. P. 1- 207.
[6] The idea of public law demands that there be a transgressor of public law, necessarily and chronically: the public enemy is a structural necessity as the basis for a judicature that can punish and discipline. For an enlightening discussion on this theme see Derrida, Jacques. Trans. Collins, George. “On Absolute Hostility: The Cause of Philosophy and the Spectre of the Political”. The Politics of Friendship. UK: London, Verso, 2005. §5. P. 112- 137.
[7] Jogdand, P., G. Ed. Michael, S., M. “Reservation Policy and the Empowerment of Dalits”. Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values, Second Edition. India, New Delhi: Sage Publications. 2007. P. 315- 335.
[8] See Kakar, Sudhir. Indian Identity. India, New Delhi: Penguin India Ltd. 2004. Also, Ilaiah, Kancha. Post-Hindu India: A Discourse on Dalit-Bahujan, Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Knowledge. India, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009.
[9] See Gottlob, Michael. “Scientific and Political Claims in the Rewriting of Indian History”. History and Politics in Post-Colonial India. India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012. P. 1- 80.
[10] See Sarangi, Asha. Themes in Indian Politics: Language and Politics in India. India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.
[11] ibid. Gottlob, Michael. P. 23
[12] Ibid. Ed. Michael, S., M. (2005)
[13] See Ilaiah, Kancha. “Symptoms of Civil War and End of Hinduism”. Post-Hindu India: A Discourse on Dalit-Bahujan, Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Knowledge. India, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009. P.232- 266.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid. Nandi, Ashis et al. 2005. P. 1- 207
What is Patriotism?
On what it takes to be a Soldier
Cain Pinto
Like all young nations, at some point in their historical emergence, India realised the instrumentality of military as the armature of governance while breaking free from the mother country. Before independence, however, joining the army was a sure way to alleviate social and economic backwardness. This also allowed an escape from the hegemony of caste and indigenous systemic equality to the otherwise dispossessed: among the lower classes consciousness arose that serving the government which professed egalitarianism was better than suffering under the wasms of a hereditary master class. The so called “untouchable” community of Mahars who were martial men under Shivaji, for instance, found meaningful political presence accorded them by joining the British-Indian Army: Dr. B. R. Ambedkar too was brought up in an army cantonment (Roy, K., 2006, p. 165).
The advent of the nineteenth century, however, brought about changes in recruitment policies and the Mahars were excluded from recruitment opportunities in the British-Indian Army; to this, the natural reaction of the community was one of perceived insult and removal from British governmental patronage (ibid. 165). The community, suddenly disenfranchised by government policy, sought to negotiate a reconsideration of their people as fit for the army- in the deeply ingrained caste system which characterised colonial India the British Indian Army offered a singular opportunity to acquire both social and economic emancipation for the oppressed classes. This is the historical juncture where joining the army first proved itself the social ladder which the Indian theopolitics of caste had engendered and perpetuated for centuries. In an unequal society surrender to warfare is the only possibility of peace.
“In the first decades after Independence,” a retired officer told The Hindu, “enlisted men came from backgrounds which led them to unquestioningly accept feudal attitudes and values. The officers were also products of the same feudal landscape. It doesn’t exist anymore — but the institutions remain.” (Swami, P., 2012). Stephen Cohen elaborates, contrarily, that caste and region continue to be the major determinants of hiring in the Indian Army, also the lower rung soldiers who are the largest part of the army are hired from villages which possess this martial tradition of deference. “[they are] inculcated with traditional notions of obedience, but he remains tied to the village authority structure; [their] behaviour in the army reflects upon their village, and caste elders ensure that any runaway is returned to the army for discipline” (2004, p. 21). Indeed today, the world over, it is the poor and the occupationally curtailed[i] who form the biggest demographic for recruitment into military forces[ii] (Anderson, M., L. & Taylor, H., F. 2007, p. 529).
Thus, it is clear, that there is an obvious perceived benefit, i.e. the alleviation of poverty, relief from social prejudices and a shot at experiencing power which moves large numbers of people from the poorer and oppressed sections of society to serve their country. The will to serve thus making itself manifest in sections of the population socially and economically waylaid if not for the military is a prime component of existential patriotism. In exchange of their mortal selves, without much recourse to success in a relatively less dangerous but painful and subjugated life of normal society, these men and women choose to buy a chance at power: herein, consists ur-patriotism. The material logic of muscular ascent is undeniable when one considers the genesis of these real patriots, indeed, it possess the brute force of a malformed pundigrion.
Why would disenfranchised people choose to join a fight for a prodigal idea, an idea which doesn’t liberate them from the necessity for its defence, even shielding its abstract hieroglyphs with their flesh? Simple necessity compels them. But what about the higher castes, more prestigious ethnicities and economically well established who join the army? Are they given to risk their life and limb, secure as they are with their fingers in a bowl of rarefied butter and a platter of cashews- as a Hindi proverb goes-, for the love of a piece of land joined only by the slenderest thread of rhetoric? The lust for power and impunity drives them to patriotism[iii]. The passion for an idea, which makes it ideal, must not expose the core nihility of the tasks which it consists in, as this would prove the idea a mere set of orders and obedient actions carried out: if patriotic soldiers knew that their patriotism consisted in serving the roughshod diktats of their superiors they would desist from endangering their lives for its phantasmal appellation and glory (Belkin, A. 2012, p. 67). This transaction of patriotic acts of self-endangerment must be carried out symbolically, if it is to function. The boots and berets serve a psychical need for ceremony, the parades a need for ritual adoration for their brave surrender to the behemoth of governance. Warrior masculinity is a performance (ibid. p. 67); this is precisely why any pointing out of this performance as artifice rouse such genital anger in warriors and their defenders: for these charades of honour to continue their vassalage at the feet of bureaucracy it is necessary that they play their part as Real Men with complete self assurance that they are the chosen ones. Is it not obvious in the ad copy of the Indian Army’s recruitment program: Be an Army Man. Be a Real Man.
The brisance of missiles, the phallicism immanent to projectile weaponry and the roughshod passion of patriots-of-the-bicep is not too oblique an analogy to the pathic avidity of a rapist in action, who given over to a passionate consummation of his ‘territory’ violates all that prohibits his satiation- even the very grounds of his desire- just to stake his passionate claim, to legitimise it in fulfilment. Celebrating soldiers is to celebrate the dire situation where the happenstance muscular egoism of nations becomes a grand procession of national spirit, pulverising all that is best in us and at hand and setting it aside to ride the arseholes of projected enemies, rivals to some insane national glory-hole, rivalling our claim to that sovereignty which is but an idea realised by luckless chance and nuclear warheads. Doing honour to soldiers is a foil that allows some men to sacrifice other men to an idea which is no one’s in particular; the defence of an idea by loss of life is not the defence of an idea, Brecht once rightly said, it is merely the loss of life.
References
Anderson, M., L. & Taylor, H., F. (2007). Sociology with Infotrac: Understanding a Diverse
Society: Fourth Edition. Belmont, CA: Thompson Learning Inc.
Belkin, A. (2012). Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American
Empire. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Cohen, S. (2004). India: Emerging Power. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution.
Roy, K. Ed. (2006).War and Society in Colonial India: Oxford in India Readings, Themes in
Indian History. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.
Swami, P. “Ladakh troop revolt underlines Army class tensions”. The Hindu. Updated
on May 12, 2012. Accessed on January 1, 2012. <http://www. thehindu.com/news/national/article3412907.ece >Web.
Remembering Adorno: The Recursive Telos of Critical Conscience
By
Cain Pinto
Yesterday was Adorno’s birthday [peace be upon him!]. And, while it remains enduringly fashionable among left-wing types to dismiss Adorno, and no less The Frankfurt School, in a single remonstrating gesture, it also remains a verifiable fact that few bother to engage him from beyond the miasma of elitism, essentialism and arrogance which our spectacular age has mounted on his diagnoses of culture. The general response to his work bespeaks a fear of raising the patina of intellectualism over praxis, of alienating popular culture, of subverting reasoned criticism to shirk the unconscionable biddings of political immediatisms where art has lost its frame of coherence and has become yet another product for popular consumption- a respite with sound and fury but no signification- yet such was never Adorno’s own project.
Among his copious folios of work there is one particular stream in which his thought permeated the very heart of the matter, and though he may have fallen off his hobby horse now and then into the pits of assumption and error, his reconnoitering remains exemplary in its scope, perspicacity and endurance. His critique of the nexus between artistic expression and the cultural trends that it capitulates to is damning and remains all too painfully pertinent; when we admit to ourselves and others that music means no more than entertainment, which may be as it may, do we really escape the indictment of abandoning the task of our own escape from the strictures of oppressive culture? It is highly suspect. Among the basic axioms of his procedure, Adorno gave special place to the unique recursive structure of thought applied to thought, one expects no less from a dialectician: he posited that a deep dissatisfaction with one’s culture presumed an immersion worth the name into its substance. Only those who partake of its products, paradoxically, are allowed the luxury to see in it the detritus of their conscience, the dregs of their resistance waylaid by the trite melodies of popular dance music and as they are struck petrific by the entrancing thaumaturgy of film. Today, were he around, he would most probably be goaded into citing himself- Simon Critchley calls self-citation an act of narcissism, but I digress- and pronounce upon us our dishonest evasion of our predicament. It is not that merely our desires are stifled by the culture that enables us our habituated libertinage but even their symptoms are effaced by the apparatus of “…a lavish display of light air and hygiene…[produced] by the gleaming transparency of rationalised big business…” (Adorno 2005, p. 58).
Our complicity with contemporaneous conditions makes us culpable for its failings, for the slippages of desire and damage incurred by acceding to the despots’ machinery of causeless effects. If indeed art were produced in vacua there would be no need for its justification but only since we are swarmed by it in a reciprocal configuration of desire versus desire we owe more than wrung hands to its integral form. It behooves us to draw strength from this involvement “…to dismiss it” in so far as it fails to arouse our sympathetic epiphany, our rising beyond the material conditions of the commoditised world to reclaim the tenacity of despoiled, alienated and thereby mystified desire. “What is true of the instinctual life is no less true of the intellectual: the painter or composer forbidding himself as trite this or that combination of colours or chords, the writer wincing at banal or pedantic verbal configurations, reacts so violently because layers of himself are drawn to them. Repudiation of the present cultural morass presupposes sufficient involvement in it to feel it itching in one’s finger-tips…” (Adorno 2005, § 8. p. 29).
The import of his critical project would not have us wash our hands off art’s lifeblood at the scarce font of immediatisms accommodating the brutality of indifferent social systems. The mystical and poetical flourishes most contemporary artists employ to exonerate themselves from the duty of explaining their motivation only serves as a foil for the abject regression of the artistic self, which has miscarried all artistic intent before it can strive to redeem itself by its own toil. The artistic subject removed from ipseity at home in his milieu, thrown into the being of the market system which homogenises all in the currency of its one-all, has become a blight to the possibility of a conscience that has power to elevate art above human conditions and, so in due inversion, the possibility of also man’s elevation above the artefacts of [a]historical conditioning. “… [Herein] lies music’s [indeed, all arts’?] theological aspect. What music [art] says is a proposition at once distinct and concealed. Its idea is the form (Gestalt) of the name of God. It is demythologised prayer, freed from the magic of making anything happen, the human attempt, futile, as always, to name the name itself, not to communicate meanings” (Adorno 2002, p. 114).
The logic of the day, which makes so much of its clarity, has naively adopted this perverted notion of everyday speech. Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case. Rigorous formulation demands unequivocal comprehension, conceptual effort, to which people are deliberately disencouraged, and imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions, and thus an isolation that they violently resist (Adorno § 64, p. 101).
So, briefly, why read Adorno today? Because, it is imperative to act against the reactionaries, though they be ourselves. If we say too much has happened that has incontestably altered the course of art and its equation with consumption, thought and its relation to things are we not merely begging more reasons for surrendering to the beast that is already astride us? Read Adorno because, precisely because, he angers you with his obstinacy, his clinging to a hopeful differentiation from the abject form of alterity imposed upon popular consciousness. To fight the abstractions which generalise the self, artistic and otherwise, Adorno’s critical apparatus remains a worthy weapon, -though it sometimes is a knife all blade- what hurt is spared the self which cannot define art but can seek out a hadron’s theotechny? Wherein rests the aura of artistic inspiration; wherein the magic of its immaculate conception; wherein the titanic moment of its articulation and production through the very engines from which we derive our existence, let us inquire therein of the precise psychical automatisms that move us thusly to procure for its occult, atemporal archaeology the produce of our bodily culture, our arts. If our art is all sensuousness and corporeality what then is the mystery of its immaculate inspiration, how can we rest assured in the rejection of all inquiry and criticism of its material epigenesis? To do so is dishonesty shown home, in ourselves, in a world where selcouth artistic essences threaten the very existence of the thing itself; the world where art is two birds in a bush and we are left with age-old platitudes in our hand, kneeling before the disembodied flash which animates it with a cataclysm. In the end, to mystify the moment of our deepest impulses with the rhetoric of romance or respectable forgetfulness is to disavow the pompous claim history lays upon our culture: justify yourself despite your existence. Why must rational consciousness coil itself like an illusion, effacing its discernable origins, if it comes ascendant on Dickinson’s nimble winged hope? The emancipatory potential of art lies in the understanding of its brutal prehistory and natal experience, which must be unearthed and come to terms with on its own terms; thought, in order to be made intelligible and not mystical or sophistically narcissistic, must break free its jaw from its own tail. Adorno invites us, despite the neutralising haze of our critical conscience that settles itself on his work, to recreate the topology of desire and study the imbrications and scarifications lathed upon it as so many warts only so we may excise them now, though it is too late. For, we are moving in the circle of unreason so long as we attribute to some divine preordainment the subordination of art to both commerce and magic, the repression of self to the bad infinity of the body which speculates about the end of history. The end of history situates itself in our aeon, and we must resist becoming anachronisms in this inauthentic becoming. Else, why art at all?
Works Cited
Theodor Adorno. Trans. Gillespie, S. Ed. Leppert, R. “Music, Language and Composition (1956)”. Essays on Music: Theodore W. Adorno. USA: University of California, 2002. Print.
Theodor Adorno. Trans. Jephcott, E., F., N. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. UK: Verso, 2005. Print.
Indian Aesthetics part II: Emic Philosophical Discursions
Cain Pinto
Indian Naturalism: An Emic View
The naturalistic bent of contemporary Indian thought is a product of the materialistic philosophy of Lokāyatas or Carvākas from the Nāstika School, and, it is also, as is claimed by the movement, in contiguity with the ethos of European Enlightenment (Quack, J., 2011, p. 9). The Lokāyata is described, traditionally, with its origins being in heretical opposition to Vedic thought, as a technique of critique which did not propose a negation as logical refutation; its modus operandi, being the generation of inevitable absurdities [nigraha-sthāna] in an “…argument by adopting false and puzzling analogies [jāti]…”, is vitandā which can be translated into an oxymoronic appellation, in its substantive form, as illogical logic (Dasgupta, S., 2007, p.512).
There is here an ambivalence lieu of the oppositional tendency of the epistemic systems between the Hindus and the Buddhists as it can aid a more holistic comprehension of the metaphysical chasm between the two religions, as for the latter there is no distinction between tricky argumentation and correct argumentation. Although Buddhists do not accept distinction between modes of argumentation the do distinguish between arguments that provoke virtue and those that abet vice, yet what is illogical logic for rationalistic Hindus [upholders of Lokāyata, in terms of soteriological historiography] may be called logical in the Buddhist view (Ibid 2007). May one not say, then in the heretical and solemn timbre of the Lokāyata, an argument is an argument is an argument?
“All is impure; all is not impure; the crow is white, the crane is black; and for this reason or for that” says the Lokāyata, or the book of unbelievers (Ibid 2007, p. 515).
The popularity of this vein of sophistry was associated in public consciousness with science, and there was an entire discipline which concerned itself with the study of this modality of argumentation (Ibid 2007). This, contrarianism at the heart of Hindu hermeneutics, is sometimes taken as reason to propose that the truth of idealist Hindu philosophy can be attained sola scriptura (Ibid 2007) — by definition, cutting off the role of the hermeneutic subject, or interpreting authority as extraneous and even a priori nihilistic. The distinction “…between the natural and the supernatural…”, says Quack (2011), “is…extremely complex and treacherous” (p. 10); contemporary Hinduism would, however, by and large, treat of the naturalistic materialist position as atheism (Ibid 2011). This blanket term of atheist would also be used to describe rationalists who try to broach the question by adopting a syncretic view, inclusive of humanism, scepticism, ethical attitudes (Ibid 2011).
This blog-post is a continuation of an ongoing series on Indian Aesthetics…
Bibliography
Dasgupta, Surendranath (2007) A History of Indian Philosophy: Volume III. India: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Quack, Johannes (2011) Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism and Criticism of Religion in India: Organized Rationalism and Criticism of Religion in India. USA: Oxford University Press.
A Review of Bānabhatta’s, [circa 606–647 AD], “Kadambari”
By
Cain Pinto
Arguably the first novel ever, Bānabhatta’s Kadambari is a rollicking ride in a rickety machine of transcendence. The plot so convoluted is yet humane and filled with the awe, empathy and openness of attitude that is lost on our contemporary society: Bānabhatta’s critique of individualism is more than mythologically bolstered legalism; it is coloured in the soil of its culture and yet seeks expression, authenticity, in those breaches where tradition and reason collide in individual experience.
The lexis and idiom is circumlocutory, exotic and immediate to the point of seeming to want in variety; one must however bear in mind the peculiar geography implicated in this work and its evolved, involuted, characters and their loves and strifes in a uniquely lived cosmology. The possible encumbrance of ubiquitous hyperbole, the sheer profusion of alaktha, lotus stalks and parijata petals, rut fluid dripping from scent elephants and the floral fugleman, Manmatha’s- an Indian Cupid’s- carnal elicitations in the graduated litanies of metaphor and stretched similes are all to be savoured as served if one must arrive at the strange experience laid out for perusal, demanding a suspension of disbelief.
The book may seem, to some, a lure in its promise of strange, alienating, pleasures and a trap in its effusiveness and wild itinerary to others: the force of gods and goddesses, imps and monarchs who only long for the ascetic life populate its teeming landscape. Our unreliable narrator, Vaishampayana- who is, in fact, Pundarika- cursed again by his erstwhile, petulant suitor, is no less steadying in his relating of the tale. This relating being a game of leading to us on to another narrator, and who does likewise to another, so on till the resolution of the plot where all lovers unite against hitherto improbable seeming odds. A rare and osmotic book, dense with ingenuity, liberality and an innate capacity for finding enchantment in the most traumatic and profound of human experience and also the most tender; love and separation from the beloved that one can never anticipate until begged the occasion are laid bare in their ancient sangfroid, tainted by the alaktha of Bharatavarsha’s vision and cultural identity
My Rating: ****
My Copy: http://www.flipkart.com/kadambari0143064665/p/itmczyrpbnrsrfac?pid=9780143064664
Work Cited
Bāṇabhaṭṭa. Trans. Rajappa, Padmini. (2010). Kadambari. India: Penguin Books.
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