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Culture
in Working Class History: A Discussion
*Dipesh
Chakrabarty
(*Dipesh
Chakrabarty is Professor at the University of Chicago.
This is an edited transcript of a lecture delivered by the
author and the discussion that followed at V.V. Giri
National Labour Institute on 25, November 1998.)
Given
the reactions to my book criticising me for culturalism,
let me preface my talk with something that I have often
thought about, namely, the role of the academic in
thinking about things that matter to people, in ways one
does not always address from the position of an academic.
One might address it from other positions. A few years
ago, I was on a small panel in Calcutta talking about the
intellectuals' role in discussing communalism in the
context of the BJP and fundamentalism and phenomena of
that order, and what struck me as I was speaking to that
audience there in thinking about the role of the
intellectual, was that there are basically two kinds of
expositions that academics do. I said that there is one
part of a social academic which, I think, is citizenly,
where the academic can actually participate in newspaper
discussions, participate in panels that involve people who
are not necessarily academics. I argued that, to me, the
role of academic, on such occasions, is to make things
that look apparently complex simple. In other words, the
effort then is to make things part of the discussion of
public life. I also said that what 1 often also find
myself doing as an academic and this is when I think
academics are talking to other academics, is to make
things that apparently look simple as complex and
complicated as possible for themselves.
The
reason why I say this is because I now have lived in
western countries for a long time and taught there,
particularly in America, where academics only speak to
academics and unless they are policy people, hardly ever
speak to those who deal with real life issues. Academic
speech gets more and more esoteric and gets caught up in
its own world, but at the same time one enjoys it. One
enjoys being part of a community that speaks in an
esoteric language. It has had one kind of effect on me, as
somebody from this country. Recently the New York Times
carried some reports on arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh,
(which also affects Calcutta, where my parents live) and
also on smugglers and extortion in Bombay and a Bengali
friend who teaches at Seattle e-mailed me with all this,
and I said to her, because I live in this country I have
bought a ticket out of that situation, though my parents
and the people I love are there. But buying a ticket does
not mean that your anguish or your sense of despair in
reading those reports goes away. What you lose the right
to, the moral right to, is to wave it in public as a flag
and cash your despair politically or in any other way. So
there is a kind of privatisation of grief, of despair, of
sadness at the state of our country. What happens is that
the part of the conversation in which academics are
talking to people who are non-academics, where complex
things are simplified, atrophies and the challenge that
one is left with, in speaking to other academics, is how
to convert the things that newspapers report into a
language that newspapers cannot understand. The reason why
I am saying this is that I am now caught in that
situation. In my talk I will try to break out of it. But I
am also aware that I will not be able to completely break
out of it. So my apologies if the language remains still
too academic.
With
that let me get back to this question of culture. The
reason why I thought about culture was because when I
wrote my working class book, which has a lot to say about
culture, one of the criticisms that was made, and I think
it is a correct criticism, was that I almost isolate
culture too much as a thing in itself, that I write as
though there could be something isolateable in human life
called culture. I think some of the criticism is
justified. In a sense, one might say that when I wrote the
book I was reading old anthropology, rather new
anthropology, because one of the things that has happened
in the social sciences, (and disciplines are, you know,
taking their turns in experiencing it, at least in the
part of the world where I live,) is that every discipline
is picking up its central founding concept and saying
there is something wrong with it. The latest I discovered,
taking to economist friends, is that the Chicago my
economics department is trying to do away with the idea of
the market and grappling with the possibility of thinking
economics without thinking the market. Anthropologists, as
you all know, for ten or fifteen years have gone through
the gesture of saying the culture concept is not a
concept. The culture concept began with German romanticism
in the late 18th century, out of which eventually a
subject called anthropology emerged with culture as its
founding concept. Hence anthropologists study culture and
now we have James Clifford and other people saying the
more we try to make culture a rigorous concept the more
the concept breaks down. (Historians are still to
undertake this exercise. Some historians do it but they
are always marginal in history departments.)
One
is left with a situation, though, in speaking to
anthropologists, where you cannot do without the word
culture. So the way in which one uses the word culture is
a loose, practical one, knowing that the word is no longer
theoretically as efficient as it was once supposed to be.
So, in thinking about what culture is in the context of
labour history or in writing a history of working class or
labour or labouring, I then have to begin from the
proposition that one can only use the word culture loosely
and if I use the word culture loosely and still want to
retain it as a useful word then what is the sense in which
the word can still be useful. In thinking about it, and in
thinking through own experience of trying to write history
of labour, it seemed to me that the sense in which the
word is still useful is the same as the sense in which all
history is cross-cultural. In other words all history is
written across a barrier of difference. Whether we say it
or not, the subject who writes history and the object of
the history are seldom the same, even when it is
autobiographical, for in autobiography one has to
objectify oneself and think of oneself as though one was a
different person from one's own self. So, if the
proposition is right that all history is cross-cultural,
then the sense in which one can retain the concept of the
culture is to say that culture refers to the fact that in
writing history one interprets. There is no 'natural
history' lying out there. If one interprets, then the
question of where culture comes into writing working class
history must be a question of the hermeneutics of
historical understanding. In other words, history writing
itself is a matter of interpreting some evidence across
certain differences. That is where culture comes in. So,
let me say that my first proposition then would be that
the question of culture remains in that which is
interpretive in writing labour history.
I
personally wanted to write labour history because in my
undergraduate years in Presidency College, Calcutta I
became a failed Maoist. Going through that conversion into
Marxism, Maoism had already left me with the idea that the
working class was a very important fact of society and a
very important social agent in society. I remember the day
Barun De gave me E.P. Thompson's book The Making of the.
English Working Class and said, 'we have nothing like
this, try and do this. I had not done history before. I
had no sense of what it meant and I thought I would write
a history of the workers I saw around myself. My problem
from the very beginning was a problem of interpretation.
My father used to manage a small engineering factory in
Calcutta and I grew up with these workers some times
coming to our place. They used to produce machine tools
and hand pumps and electrical pumps and things like that.
I then began to realise that, like anybody else grow, I
have always grown up around working class people. There
were domestic servants. There was a sweeper coming every
morning. I was, as a child, always in a relationship to
these people which, in my head, I would now call a
relationship of proximity, but not intimacy. I knew them
proximally. I knew them on an every day basis, but I never
knew them intimately. All these things used to come back
to me when thinking about how to write working class
history.
My
earliest experiences of being around the body of a working
class man was with all these men who would come to our
place and they would sit me on their lap. I remember, when
T grew up, there was one old industrial worker who used to
come home who had lost his thumb. As a middle class boy I
had never seen around me, amongst my relatives, people who
had lost a part of their bodies because of the work they
did. His way of entertaining me was to offer me the stub
of the thumb. And I used to pick it up and be mesmerised
by it. I still remember the fascination with which I would
look at this man's thumb. It was only later on, when I
read English working class histories, that I realised that
actually losing limbs was quite a common working class
experience in the history of industrialisation in most
parts of the world. Like every other middle class, family
we had domestic servants. We had this man who lived with
us for a long time, called Manglu. He was from Chapra in
Bihar. We also had a dog. In my parents' eyes, the dog was
part of a bourgeois middle class household, a child
growing up with a dog. The dog could be easily inserted
into Keith Thomas' book on the history of RSPCA or CSPCA
in Calcutta. But the dog had a very special relationship
with Manglu. Manglu used to put khaini below his lips and
he used to call out to the dog. The dog was called Rocky,
but Manglu used to call him Mr. Giant. I never asked
Manglu why he used to call him Mr. Giant. But he used to
have a separate sense of fun with the dog. I had this
story in my head, which I made up. I used to think, maybe,
at some point a circus had come into the town when Manglu
was a young man, growing up in Chapra. And, maybe, there
was a slapstick clown, or two of them, one of whom called
the other Mr. Giant, because what Manglu would often
perform with the dog was almost a circus acrobatic.
I
was aware, in growing up around Manglu, that the dog's
relationship with Manglu, in a middle class household, was
a very particular relationship. It was a particular
relationship in which Manglu could express his bodily
affect and affection in a way in which he could not
express it with respect to anybody else in the household.
Growing up in that middle class environment, one grew up
with the experience of being proximate to that
relationship but not intimate with it. As a child I never
thought of asking Manglu, 'why do you call Rocky Mr.
Giant?' He had a particular way of saying it which used to
give me fun. While he entertained me in doing, he was also
expressing and enjoying his own relationship with the dog.
There were other domestics like that. There were things
that I used to be struck by, when I was working on my
working class book. Out in Calcutta on the streets in the
middle of the summer heat, or going to a jute mill slum, I
would see all of these people pulling carts and things,
with things on them. Sometimes, I talked to these working
class people, when 1 went to the slums. They were very
poor and because I went in with a notebook they
immediately assumed that there was some way of getting
money or some benefit through my presence. So, first of
all, they would bring out their children, many of whom had
teeth and gum problems, and other diseases, and talk about
their problems. For me the most difficult thing was to
look at them and think, I have no idea about what it feels
like to live in that body. My response, I am talking
personally and not generalising, to the slightest hint of
a pain is to rush to a doctor if not to a painkiller. I
used to look at them and think, I have no sense of what it
means to live in that everyday embodied experience of
being a human being. From those things I knew
instinctively that, personally, I could not write a
history in which I did not at all address the problem of
writing that history. In other words, I knew who I was and
where I came from. That relationship of proximity but the
lack of intimacy, which I had to the working class people,
was critical for me to think about in writing a history of
these people. So half of my book is about navel gazing. It
is about trying to think 'what is the problem of writing
about these people whom I know proximally but not
intimately.
The
reason why I am not generalising is because I think it is
a very particular position that I am talking about. There
were other middle class people who were brave enough to
reach out more than I did. E. P. Thompson's own history
conies from a particular kind of involvement in labour
movement, as a teacher, teaching in working class schools.
For all sorts of reasons I did not have those sorts of
involvements. The general point I am making is that it
seems to be that, if my first proposition that every
history is cross cultural, that writing histories
invariably involve the gesture of interpreting, which is
something we academics call the politics of
interpretation, holds, then some degree of
self-reflexivity is absolutely critical in the writing of
any history. This is particularly so in the writing of
history when the person who writes history is not from the
social group whose history is being written. It is in that
sense that I wanted to raise the question of culture. I
want to make two other points and then we can open it up
for discussion.
The
second question I think about, and I do not touch on it in
the book, though I have thought about in thinking about
workers, is something to which I will not give a name. I
will come to it through description. One of the problems
in my book that bothered me was a certain way of thinking
about working class situations or Indian situations
generally. There is a prevalent way of thinking, where
things you do not like as an academic or as a liberal
person- things you see as undemocratic and hierarchical,
are thought of as remnants of an older society. It is
assumed that the more modern we become or the more
capitalist we become these things will go away. So,
generally, in academic jargon, I have called it so, others
also call it so, we think of it as a transition narrative
which entails going from a pre-capitalist condition to a
capitalist condition, or, if you want to speak American
sociology, from status to contract. Let me talk about that
a little bit. In reading Bina Aggarwal's prize-winning
book A Field of One's Own, I was strongly struck by a
thought. One of its fundamental propositions, and I think
it is a correct proposition, is that the reality of most
social organisations, including that of the family, is
about inequality and the oppressions and the exploitations
that might flow from these inequalities. Therefore, to
give people the wherewithal and the resources with which
they might fightback it is necessary to give them actual
rights in properties and things that actually give them
the strength to fightback. I do not disagree with that.
But when I read that book, the thought that struck me was
that in modem societies there are institutions in which
the language through which one wants to live in many
situations is precisely the language of those rights and
property and contract and all of those things. For
instance, if my dean in my university told me tomorrow, 'Dipesh
your work at the university of Chicago must be infused
with your love of the institution', completely
legitimately 1 will say to him we have a contract, 1 have
a wage contract, I live by it, you are an employer, I am
an employee and that is what I am. In other words I am
saying, a university or a public institution or a factory
may well be an institution in which we want to live
through the language of what we now would call the really
real.
If
Bina's proposition, which I agree with, is saying, even in
the family the language might be one of affect, and love
and loyalty etc. but the reality of it is power and
inequality. Therefore, one needs to be given the rights,
which will at least help restore some balance. I do not
disagree with the proposition. All I am saying, though, in
thinking about it, is that, it seems to me, that there are
certain institutions where, one could say in an abstract
way, one actually wants to live life through that language
of contract, of rights, of equality and all those things.
In thinking through Bina's work, I could not imagine a
family which would want to live through the language of
the really real. To go back to academic speech, it seemed
to me that there are certain institutions in models of
capitalism where the human beings live as though they were
abstracted human beings. I am talking about a model, I am
not talking about reality. There are certain institutions
in which one could legitimately say that the language of
legitimacy, the language through which I want to live in
this institution is the language of rights, of property,
of contract and all of those things. In tact, this does
not happen in a pure way anywhere.
When
I was doing my research for the working class book I was,
in fact, quite aware, as many of you must be, that trade
unions were often deliberately trying to inculcate that
language in the workers. The trade union leaflets and
flyers always had a pedagogical aspect to them. They were
also trying to tell the workers to think that they were
not just this caste or that human being or so and so's
father, that they were actually workers, that they were
part of an employer-employee relationship.
The
interesting thing is that if you think of somebody doing
it within families, and some people do it, (discussions of
children's rights or discussions of women's rights) it is
much more contestatory. It is so much more contestatory
that the attempt to do this for families would be
critiqued by somebody, who is otherwise quite a modern
progressive, like Habermas. If you wanted to think of
family life being lived through the language of rights,
through the language of equality and contract, someone
like Habermas would say this is instrumental rationality
invading the life world. The interesting thing is, how do
we think about the problem of how, in actually existing
institutions outside of the family, like the factory or
the university, where the language of employment, the
language of contract, which is the language of
abstraction, has more legitimacy than in the family, we
think about the circumstances in which other languages
erupt alongside this language, where the language of
friendship, the language of family, the language of affect
also the comes in. What I was fighting against, at least
in my own head, in the writing of the working class book
or thinking through this problem, was the way of thinking
whereby we say that if the other languages, of affect, of
emotions, of non-contractual relationships, erupt in a
place of work, then that is a sign of a continuing
'feudal' or pre-capitalist aspect of our society. The
moment we think like that we are thinking in terms of what
I call the transition narrative and the problem with the
transition narrative is that there is no guarantee that
the transition is going to actually happen ever. My
proposition then is that models of capitalism, and I could
defend it through my reading of Marx, sanction
relationships in which we live as abstracted human beings.
Actually existing institutions do not conform to the
model.
There
is a whole literature in anthropology, particularly of
work and organisation, in which this is seen as a lack on
the part of people. 1 think one interesting challenge of
labour history is not simply to change the bias, but
actually to ask, empirically what is the situation in
which the abstract language of being a bearer of rights
helps the working class or working people, and then to
ask, what are the situations in which the other languages,
which are not the languages that abstract labour from the
concrete integuments in which it is placed, are useful. If
that question is not clear enough, in this formulation,
let me go on to my third section which may help clarify
the question. The section is about the phenomenology of
labour. It does seem to me that when we use the expression
labour history we assume that we know what we mean by
labour, the act of labouring. I came to history late. I
came to history in my post-graduate years. I graduated in
physics and then I did an MBA from IIM. So, I could not
help noticing the linguistic changes that I had to make
and the changes in my languor practices. Later on, in
1990, I went to Berkeley to teach for a year. Last year I
met one of my students and he reminded me that I had told
him this particular story that I am going to tell you now.
When I first came into history one of the words that I
realised that historians used very differently to the way
that I was used to it was the word therefore. In high
school geometry therefore means there are no two ways
about it. Therefore means it is therefore and you do not
argue with it. In history therefore meant it looks
plausible, it looks likely. Similarly another word that,
in doing labour history, struck me as a very interesting
word in the social sciences is the word work. In writing
the history of labour you always know that the word work
is a highly disputed and contested word. You cannot define
it. In high school physics we always knew that work was
expenditure of energy and by that definition nobody was
lazy. Human beings would not survive if they did not work.
At every moment you are working, you are spending energy
to survive.
The
moment you come into labour history you know that the
whole question of discipline, motivation, the whole theme
of laziness that has been with us ever since capitalism
began is of great significance. You cannot write the
history of capitalism anywhere in the world without
writing a history of the concept of laziness because there
has always been somebody or other who has been dubbed
lazy. My experience of this recently was when I was
invited to speak at a conference on post-colonial
geography last June in Southampton. The university sent a
vehicle to pick me up from Heathrow and the driver was
Welsh and he was telling me how he was bringing up his
children, giving them the best of both the English and the
Welsh. I said to him 'what is good about being Welsh?' and
he said 'we work a lot harder'. That the English were
lazy. Anywhere you go the theme of laziness remains as the
other of work. In HM, in our graduate curriculum there was
a subject called motivation and Nitis Dey was one of the
people who taught us the subject. I was always fascinated
by it because if you look at business school literature
there have been so many experiments to find out what makes
people work, what makes people love their work. You will
realise that actually there is no answer to it because it
is not an answerable question. You find some answers in
particular contexts.
The
reason why I mention it as a labour historian, as someone
who wants to think about work is that one should not jump
into doing labour history, it seems to me, assuming that
one already knows what it means to labour, what it means
to work. In other words, working, human activity, is
highly embedded in all kinds of other human activities.
One of the most fascinating things of Indian labour
history, I have discussed this in an article published
last year, is how one absorbs into this simple sounding
word work all different kinds of human understandings of
what it means to be active. For me, one of the most
fascinating things in reading histories of working as I
read it, even with the South Asia material is this: on the
one hand there are all kinds of books called histories of
work and we assume that we know what working means, on the
other there is material of a different order. Cyan
Pandeys's essay on weaving in UP has this entire
discussion of how in the Muslim jhulahas practice of
weaving in the 20th century the whole question of the
Quran and Islamic understanding of divinity figures in the
very activity of weaving itself. In other words weaving
for them is not a secular activity of working. Gyan
Prakash's book on bonded labour and agricultural activity
in Gaya in Bihar includes a story about bhoots and spirits
and ghosts of the maliks of those lands so that again the
whole question of simply cultivating the land is not a
secular activity of just cultivating the land. Richard
Baton's description from 18th century literature from
Hyderabad, of women grinding wheat in the chakki where
they sing a song and with every turn of the chakki they do
the zikr, they say the name of Allah in particular ways so
that it is an activity that by its own grammar is invoking
other kinds of presences.
In
converting all of these different kinds of activities,
embedded in specific histories, in specific ways of being
human, a conversion we have to do as we have modern
societies and as we involve ourselves in the calculations
of modem societies, into the secular word work or labour,
involves us in a process of translation. Every process of
translation leaves a remainder of the untranslated. Going
back to my academic obsessions, I am always fascinated by
the question of what is the remainder and how to make
labour history sensitive to this question of that aspect
of the meaning of activity which remains untranslated or
untranslatable with respect to the English word labour or
work must be a very important part of our labour history.
I am making a more general appeal than just its
application to labour history. Most books on Indian
history are written in English. The problem of translation
is embodied in most books in an unselfconscious way in
that part of the book, which we call glossary. Every book
on Indian history has a section at the end of the book
called glossary. The assumption of a glossary is that it
should be such that one does not have to interrupt one's
pleasure of reading every time one encounters an Indian
word by turning to the glossary. So the glossary is the
least read, most hastily assembled part of a book and is
often assembled actually from documents produced by the
colonial officials. The translations are rough and ready,
not simply in the sense of being just approximate but
rough and ready in the sense that they were meant to suit
the rough and ready methods of rule that the colonialists
had.
One
of the most interesting experiences for me was reading,
Douglas Haynes' a book on public life in Surat and what
happens in that book is symptomatic of what happens in our
scholarship. Every time the word association comes up,
every time the English word public comes up in that book
you get long footnotes about the history of the word
public. Every time the word mahajan comes up, like majur
mahajan in that Gujarati use of it, he just writes,
roughly translated as association, but also writes that
the word has been in use for seven hundred years. If you
look at the footnotes you see that European scholarship
has produced its own translation of their own words, so
that one knows that the word public always has not had the
same meaning, or that the word association has gone
through several mutations. But in our histories we are not
equally aware. We know that the word has been in
existence. We know as historians that the word must have
gone through changes but somehow we do not track those
changes because of all kinds of reasons that you will know
about. We instead accept a principle which in practice
which we have already called rough translation so that you
use an Indian word and then you say 'roughly translated
as'.
The
entire development of so called area studies in which, let
us say, history falls, has been on that assumption. It
seems to me that if we write histories on this principle
of rough translation then we will not be sensitive to
precisely those aspects of our practices which come to us,
whether we want it or not, as the problem of the remainder
of translation- translation at different levels,
translation into the language of English, but translation
also into the social science language that we use. I am
not saying that it should not be translated. We have to
translate it. We have to think of ourselves through Marx,
Weber, Durkheim, George Simmels, through all the European
thought categories that we have got. But at the same time
it seems to me that one should not take European words for
granted. One should know that these words are constantly
translating our lives and like all translations leave us
with the problem of the remainder to think about and see
how to think about it.
The
reason why I think this as being connected to the
phenomenology of labour is that it brings me back to image
that I was trying to share with you. It has become a
general figure in my head because I see in Calcutta all
the time whenever I go. It is the image of the tar on the
Calcutta road melting in summer and some poor man from
Bihar dragging a cart, wearing chappals made of cycle tyre
that are getting stuck in the tar that is melting and me
looking at him and knowing that I do not inhabit that
body, I have never inhabited that body, I will never
inhabit that body, and I simply do not know what the
phenomenology of that activity. This also connects up with
my question of the unavoidability of the politics of
interpretation and self-reflexivity. But at the same time
the question of phenomenology is to then say that one has
to look at labour not as labour but as a series of
activities embedded in particular histories, in particular
practices of embodiment. To my mind it is only when we
begin to do these things that Indian labour history will
break out of the enduring hold, partly productive and
partly unproductive, of European sociological thought on
our thinking.
Madhavan
Palat:
You
have presented three problems to the labour historian and
I suspect these are not problems that are addressed either
only to the labour historians or to those who had the
experience of studying working class history. I detect in
it very general reality match his or her mind. And we have
been engaged in that problems of the historian and the
philosopher in every aspect. One of the questions that we
have to discuss is, in which way is this problem specific
to labour history itself, because I can see for example
the subject of work meaning many things as it is embedded
in all social life. The general problem is that it is not
necessarily only about workers that you encounter that
problem. If you ask a soldier what is soldiering and if
you seek to write the history of the army I think the
effort of comprehending that and writing it would be, I
presume, as great as that of writing labour history.
Presumably that applies to anything and that is what you
opened with. So what is specifically the problem with
respect to working class history as distinct from being a
problem of the historian itself? That is exactly the point
with which you opened the subject. Within that you made a
transition from that general problem to the problem of
translation, which, of course, is very specific, in our
case, to the study of Indian colonial history and the way
it is now written here. Shifts between languages will be
always experienced. But as a cultural experience, even
within the same language that very translation problem
does occur and once again we face the same problem. But
most generally, I think you raised your largest question,
the second one, on the language of abstraction and the
language of affect, how they meet and how they match and
how they are respectively useful in their various
endeavours. Of course, this is the largest undertaking
since the 18th century, when the conscious subject set out
to make endeavour and one of those innumerable activities
was that of the trade unionist trying to bring
consciousness to the working class, where he has conceived
a full project in abstraction and is seeking to bring it
to reality. But it is not only the trade unionist, we are
all doing it all the time. When we construct this
institution we have an abstraction in mind. The most
obvious is what the architect does. The jurist does it
with our constitution and we are trying to build India
according to the constitution that we have created in one
famous year or two and a half famous years and so on. We
are doing it all the time. When you go back to that
question, is it questioning that whole enterprise or are
you pointing out that this remains a perpetual problem,
which of course we do, or in the post-modernist world are
we saying that that as a whole thing is a waste of time or
we are perpetually engaged in the tension and we might as
well recognise it and sometimes give up the ghost as they
say? These are I think the general problems that I felt I
encountered.
Dipesh
Chakrabarty:
The
reason why I think of this abstraction, and other ways of
being human in the workplace, is partly because I have
been recently reading Marx on this question and one of my
discoveries for myself in reading Marx again was that on
the one hand Marx keeps arguing that the worker is an
abstract figure. In volume person or a Russian or an
Indian. This is what capitalism is. he employs a
rhetorical device at one point where he says 'what would
the worker, if his category worker could speak what would
this category say to the employer?' And the category says
to the employer, look you might be a good man, there might
even be a heart throbbing in you breast, you might even be
the odour of sanctity and a member of RSPCA, it has got
nothing to do with your relationship to me. When you and I
are here then its you as an abstract capitalist and me as
an abstract person not as so and so's son, not so and so's
wife etc that we meet. So on the one hand he is saying the
worker is an abstract category and therefore this is part
of the history of capitalism, when this abstraction is
realised. I am saying, Madhavan, that the abstraction is
inescapable in many moments and therefore I was not, and
you were not suggesting that I was, but just to clarify,
faulting the trade unionists or the communists for doing
it. In other words, capitalism involves certain practices
of abstraction in which we ourselves participate in
abstracting. But the interesting thing for me in reading
Marx was then to discover, in volume 3 of Theories of
Surplus Value, him talking about two kinds of histories
associated with capital. One, he says, capital itself
posits a certain kind of history, which is the universal
history of capital. He would argue, in my reading, that
the abstraction belongs to what capital universally does.
It does not matter whether before you became a worker you
were a tribal.
It
is about abstracting and it is done by factory discipline,
it is done by law, it is done by knowledge systems. I
agree entirely. But then Marx says capital also has
another kind of history. Capital encounters other kinds of
its past as antecedents to itself. It tries to subjugate
these histories. It tries to dominate them. But these are
histories that do not belong to its life process. In other
words, there are histories that belong to capital's life
process. These are histories of abstraction. These are the
practices of abstraction one participates in. He is also
saying that there are histories that do not belong to
capital's life process. Capital tries to dominate it but
they do not belong to capital. In other words he is
leaving room, within his own understanding of capital, for
practices that are not logically capitalist to be in
proximity with capital. He is not talking about human
consciousness. In fact two of his examples of such frisson
in the intimate bonding of capital, and it is quite
startling, are money and commodity. He says money and
commodity always involve practices that do not belong to
capital's life process. In other words, what I am saying
is that the opportunity of producing non-capitalist
activity is part of capitalism. Or, sometimes I say, that
it is within capital that there can be difference in the
sense that if you slash within with an in then you can say
that difference in capital could also be difference with
capital. To put it more simply, the logic of capital
dictates that the labourer should have holidays to
recuperate his labour powers. The logic of capital does
not say that the holiday should be called Christmas. That
involves other kinds of struggles with capital. If I am in
a country where the holiday is called Christmas and I am a
Muslim I might have to fight to call it Bakr-id. And
capital leaves that freedom. And that is the freedom that
I was trying to point to in saying that the question of
affect, the question of non-abstraction is not simply a
question of a residue of another history, or the workers
not understanding that they should look on themselves as
workers. The question of non-abstraction is precisely the
question of what I call history two. In other words, it is
a question of other historical possibilities existing
within the institutions which are based on the assumption
of abstraction.
Nivedita
Menon:
I
do hot have a problem with your argument the way in which
you posed it right now, which is that there are languages
and histories which exceed and precede capitalism. But I
am actually more troubled by the way in which you posed
your second point where it seemed to me that you were
defending the family as an institution of affect and love.
Let me stop here and ask you to explain and then I might
have other questions. Dipesh Chakrabarty: What I was
saying was that the thought I had on reading Bina's book
was not a thought of disagreement with what she was
saying. The thought was more to do with an empirical
question, which is to investigate what are the situations
in which we want to live through the language of contract
and rights, which I associate with abstraction, and what
are the situations in which one may not want to live
through that language. To me it seemed, in thinking about
it, that it was very hard to imagine being in a family
situation where the contractual mode of thinking could be
the only language in which I would want to express myself
in relationship to another human being. What I was saying
was that there are institutions which are founded on the
principle of abstraction and there are institutions which
are not founded on the principles of abstraction, even
though an abstracting analysis may have things to tell us
about those institutions. Nivedita Menon: What I think I
would like you to consider is, yes there are relationships
in our lives which we would not wish to live through the
language of contract. But the family is not offered to us
as an institution in which one can deny or reject that
language. The family, as we all know, is based upon huge
structures of law, state, etc. which define every single
possible relationship within that institution. So what I
am urging you to consider is that when you present that
family as an institution in which we might reject or not
reject this language, is that the family does not exist as
that space. The language of the family is already
constituted by what forms of relationships are permissible
and not permissible and so on and even the preexisting
languages within the family, for example songs of bidai
are shot through with a sense of incredible resentment,
injustice and so on and so forth. It seems to me that in
order to reject and in order to critique the language of
contract and instrumental reason you do not have to fall
back on certain notions which are not even possible to
justify within their own terms. Dipesh Chakrabarty: When I
read that page in Marx, what I was very struck by was his
explicit recognition that the factory is a site which is
based on realisation of abstractions. In other words, the
factory is a site in which relationships are based on the
principle of abstraction and in which it is possible for a
human being to act as though they were abstracted
characters. So in Marx's discussion on abstract labour he
says that abstract labour has a phantom-like objectivity.
So he is saying that the whole question of capitalist
production is a performance of abstraction. I was simply
trying to find a site in which the performance of
abstraction would possibly come across more resistance. I
do not deny any of the historical statements that you are
making about the family. But I am saying that in a family
politics, the politics of affect, just as when Marx' s
worker category says to the capitalist 'I do not care if
you love me because what you feel is no part of our
relationship' Marx is actually suggesting that you can
actually conduct that relationship in that language, the
family is structure as a site where to conduct
relationships, even the ideal desire to conduct
relationships all the time in that language would come up
against resistance. Because what I was saying is that the
family as I think of it is not an institution that
deliberately constructed itself on the principle of
abstraction, whereas the factory from the beginning, Marx
will say, including the planning of a factory is. Remember
the Kabyle household in Bourdieu's Logic of Practice. In a
family, the question of habitus is extremely important and
one recognises that the house he is looking at simply
grew, whereas the factory starts with a plan. The factory
from the beginning is an abstracted space whereas the
house that Bourdieu is talking about grows without a plan.
To say this is not to deny the question of justice and
inequality. All I was saying, following the logic of Marx,
was that capitalism is marked by the construction of the
institutions of public life which are explicitly premised
on the principle of abstraction and which privilege that.
So I was trying to construct an alternative space in my
head to highlight, by contrast, the privileging of the
principle of abstraction. Prabhu Mohapatra: This is about
an old problem, the problem that you set out in your book,
a problem that has been with us for a while, that is, the
problem of transition. But sometimes when you expound the
problem one is not sure whether you have not, yourself,
fallen into the same category. This is so even in your
presentation and this I think comes from the sense in
which you continuously reproduce the division between the
world of abstraction and, say, the world of affect.
Instead of transcending them, they are simply reproduced.
For instance, this simple problem: we can begin from your
citation of Marx. The factory is not actually a site of
abstraction. For instance, where the category worker meets
the category employer is in the market place and the next
paragraph is about what happens when they enter the
factory when the real factory owner brings his hide for
hiding and the worker is meek after the bluster of
equality in the market-place. The irony which Marx infused
into the sense of abstraction of the market-place
contrasted to the real domination in the factory is
central to Marx's critique, and according to some his most
important discovery. Connecting the so-called private
world of the factory, and here the relationship between
the factory and the family can come in, the factory and
the work place are conceived of in liberal theory as a
world of private relationships. The public relationship,
where abstractions meet each other is in the market place.
Marx's most important discovery, according to some, was to
connect the private world with the public. In fact, his
critique starts from the real domination that takes place
in the private world of factory work place which he uses
as a critique of the abstraction. Within vol 1 itself,
when he discusses the wage form, he has already connected
the critique of the private work place to the public space
of abstraction. The second problematic also relates to the
question of transition. Are we to assume that the world of
contract, the world of abstraction, is to be posited in
absolute contrast to the world of affect and the world of
embodied feelings? Or are we to assume that these worlds
which are not capitalist did not have their own forms of
abstraction. Would you not accept that abstraction is a
real human process not just a process of modern human
society? The world of zikr is a form of abstraction. From
Weber we know that world religions are a major form in
which abstract thought is encountered. In Weber's history
of the emergence of world religions, the emergence of
abstract thought is what is indicated. Abstraction occurs
in the pre-capitalist world, in admittedly different
forms. Changing the terms, the world of work, of contract
is not without affect. Contract is suffused with affect.
As you have shown, historically the two categories are not
mutually exclusive. In your book, you seemed to see affect
as outside the capitalist relationship, whereas what we
learnt from your book was that this was the specific form
in which the capitalist relationship was employed. One is
left with the question that while you have problematised
the transition, do you not reproduce the terms of the
transition again? Can we get out of this problem by the
means of translation? Is translation a device that allows
us to escape the bind of transition? Viewing the manner in
which you used 'remaindering', I am not entirely convinced
that we can use translation and the way in which you see
'remainders' as a method which can solve the problem of
getting out of this continuous problematic set out by
abstraction, a problem of transition itself. Suvritta
Khatri: I thought that you were trying to juxtapose two
things. Something which is a pure activity, a labouring
work, a historian's work, it could be anything which
involves culture. At one level, you were trying to show
how culture permeates and infuses all activity, at another
level, you also separate them. I wonder why we cannot view
pure labouring activity as influencing culture. In other
words, what you are trying to argue is that all histories
will essentially be histories of location, of experience.
Experience of work would also be experience of actively
making one's own culture. To illustrate from my own
research experience, I take the example of a gurukul, or a
residential school, where students stay for about sixteen
years. The school intends to shape students away from
these so-called relationships of family affect, etc.
Yashpal, a close associate of Bhagat Singh, was a student
of such a school. He later tried to disown those years
that he was at the school. But his writing also shows how
those years affected him. He wrote about two things in his
memoirs. When at school, he dreamed often. Dreams are part
of an intensely private life. He had always been told that
ghosts were dark-skinned and scary, but the figure that
appeared in his dreams was that of a fair-skinned tilak
dhari acharya. On the one hand, he was scared of the ghost
(bhoot) that constantly appeared in his dreams, on the
other hand he was worried about the fact that the ghost
did not correspond with the figure of bhoots that was
always painted for him. Later, while active in the
national movement with Bhagat Singh, distant in time from
the gurukkul days, Yashpal recalled his days in the
gurukkul, which seemed to affect his mind again in a
curious way. The dreams started coming back to him. The
change was that the ghost was a white man. Location and
experience can permeate one's culture. You shape your
culture and make it in a different way. So I am not
entirely persuaded about how the separation of pure
activity from the cultural can be effected. Neeladri
Bhattacharya: I will restrict myself to the theme that is
being discussed. You have critiqued the old theories of
transition from the pre-capitalist to the capitalist, from
the pre-modern to the modem, and the simple linear theory
of the old decaying and the new emerging. Opposed to this,
you are suggesting that even in the realm of the modem,
where the language of contract exists, a level exists
where other languages are also important. From my
impression, you are looking at culture and language as two
discrete domains. One the language of affect, or the
pre-modern or the precapitalist, and the language of
modernity, of rights, or the language of contracts, as the
case may be. There could be a third way of looking at it,
one where they are not seen as discrete, or as existing at
two levels, isolated, mutually-exclusive, but deploy a
concept of culture where the two are seen as dialogic,
mutually-articulating, informing, interacting with each
other, which provides the dynamism of transition. I see a
static notion of culture in your book, whereas the concept
of contract and of affect can be seen to inform each
other. The task for the historian is to critique a history
which sees the two as mutually exclusive and to provide an
alternative which sees each as being shot, or run through
by the other. The key categories would not be transition
in the old sense but dialogue, appropriation, conflict and
transformation.
Radhika
Singha:
Following
from what Prabhu and Neeladri said what I first thought
was that perhaps we can also get over the transition
problem by talking about the different kinds of grammars
that capitalism itself has introduced. If you move from
the period of high liberalism into periods of crisis then
alongside contract you also have notions of public
welfare, which can actually fuse very well with all kinds
of feudal hierarchical notions. I am thinking for instance
not only of post-depression America but alsoof Nazism and
concepts of organicity which separate rights from the
notion of contract and associating them with more
corporatist ideologies. Secondly, following from Nivedita,
I think what many of us would be disturbed about is this
opposition between the factory and the family, because as
we know the very process of defining the family as domain
dominated by affect is conditioned by the shift from the
family as a unit of production to the factory form and we
know how affect versus rights particularly operates along
the rights of gender. For instance, scholars have shown
how property conflict between brothers and rights over
property are very clearly and sharply articulated but when
it comes to the sisters rights then the realm of affect is
supposed to operate to the exclusion of rights. This has
been shown in the instance of the jat household by Prem
Chaudhary. I think here we have to see the lines between
abstraction and affect as historically constructed. In
addition it might be useful to separate rights from
contract and see how different grammars are introduced in
different phases of capitalism.
Dipesh
Chakrabarty:
In
my forthcoming book I deal with some of these questions.
Without making this discussion into a discussion on Marx,
the distinguishing feature of Marx's analysis of the
factory or a capitalist site is that he thinks that these
are institutions, the very building of which, in concepts,
not in actuality, employ abstraction as a totalising
principle, which is not to say that the mediaeval did not
include abstraction. To call someone a jagirdar is an
abstraction. The point is that Marx thinks there are
institutions now being built, which conceptually, not in
their everyday operation, employ the principle of
abstraction as a totalising principle. A very good
discussion of this is to be found in Lefebvre's convoluted
book, The Production of Space, where he makes distinction
between representational space and the place of
representation. To put it in one sentence, the distinction
I am trying to make is that the factory is the site in
Marx's discussion which as a site thinks of itself in that
abstract way as being structured by the principle of
abstraction. So the principle of abstraction is something
that is totalising. I am using the word totalising in the
tradition in which it has been used, in a certain
philosophical tradition in Europe, say Martin Jay's book
Marxism and Totality. Whereas the family as a site, and I
am not denying any of the problems that you mentioned,
does not erupt like the factory does in Marx's discussion,
as site that has premised itself conceptually on the
employment of abstraction as a totalising devise, which is
not to say that abstraction does not happen in the family.
Marx's critique of capital arises out of his acceptance of
this premise, the way Marx eventually creates the category
living labour. I have a chapter on this in my book called
'The two histories of capital' which elaborates what I
have just tried to summarise. Marx would also say that in
everyday reality both these histories, which I call
history one and history two, one is the abstract universal
history and the other history, all of these things mesh
together. The historian in Marx would not deny what the
historians in all of you recognise, but Marx's
philosophical critique can arise only because he knows
that this is a site which is a part of modem capitalism
which uses abstraction as a totalising principle. In other
words, as a principle by which one can sum it up. And that
is the point that I am making. I am not denying
description. In Marx there remains the tendency, and I
think it is Marx's problem, to then think of the abstract
and the non-abstract as a problem of transition. In the
whole discussion of capital's being and becoming in volume
1, but mainly in the Grundrisse, Marx thinks that when
capital comes into its own is a point, it might be a
Utopian point, when human beings totally live out this
abstraction. But at the same time Marx would say in
history this never happens, because the limits of capital
are constantly transcended as they are constantly posed.
All I was taking out of Marx is a lesson that what marks
these places is that conceptually they use abstraction as
a totalising devise and therefore there are many moments
in the histories of these institutions when I want to
become the abstract. The pedagogical part of the trade
union documents that I did not write about, but I think
about, which were telling the workers, think of yourselves
as a worker so that you could go to the employer and say
this is the bonus I deserve. And that I is not my
empirical I, the bonus I deserve I deserve as a worker.
Now as a historian I am saying, if one leaves Marx's
company, or the company of many modernisation theorists
gives up assumption of the realisability of the
abstraction in totality, then it is within the logic of
capitalism. There are historical events that belong to the
logic of capital and there are historical events that do
not belong to the logic of capital. There is a passage I
discuss which I will quickly tell you about, and you can
look it up. There is a very interesting footnote in the
Grundrisse where Marx discusses the distinction between
labour of making a piano and the labour of playing. He
says that for his critique of capital the labour of
manufacturing a piano is very important, but the labour of
playing it is as irrelevant as a madman's delusion,
because his entire critique is based on this acceptance of
the cardinal principle of abstraction, which produces
value, which produces surplus value. All I am saying is
that one has to bring back into our understanding of
capitalism the importance of what Marx calls use value.
Marx mentions use value but does not think about it. He
says there is a thing called use value but he elaborates
on exchange value because exchange value is critical to
his thought. Use value, the playing of the piano are all
questions of how one belongs in this earth, the Heidigger
expression, which I am very fond of, 'how one makes a
world out of this earth'. I was trying to make the point,
and I will go back to Suvritta's question with this, that
being active belongs in principle, and I am abstracting, I
am not taking about actual history, to two horizons. One
is the horizon of capital. Being active has to do with
adding to your GNP, improving standard of living, these
are all legitimate concerns. But being active also belong
to the politics of belonging. How do I remain a Bengali,
how do I have a holiday that recognises my being here in
this particular way? And I say that struggle is ongoing.
It is not determined by capital. The logic of capital does
not completely determine the struggles that go on in the
work place, which are also to do with the logic of
belonging, that I am here as this person, at this moment
in this history now. And in that sense the logic of
capital does not homogenise. In some ways Marx does not
help us to think much about that. Marx helps us to think
about the universal history of capital. To go back to your
question, Suvrita, I was not saying that there is
something called culture. In fact my book says it at
points and 1 think I was wrong. I was saying that what
remains in this conversation, what is inescapable, it
seems to me, in writing history, is the question of
interpreting something that is not completely accessible
to me. So, particularly when you write working class
history and if the class locations are different, culture
can only be used as a loose word and in the sense that all
history writing is cross-cultural and writing the history
of classes which have become working classes is even more
cross-cultural because people who write that history do
not belong to the world of that labour. In other words I
do not share the phenomenology. I share the phenomenology
of writing texts. To give just what I mean by it, Ranajit
Guha told me that he had problems working with the
computer and I asked him why ? He said, when he was a
child in east Bengal, he had to use a sharpened reed and
ink made with powder. I was used to all that. The computer
stops me from doing all that. It has changed my
phenomenology. So, he has produced other sorts of rituals.
That is a phenomenology of work that I can relate to
because in my childhood that mode of writing was still
around and I have read descriptions of it. But on the
other hand, when a working class person is working on a
machine and loses his thumb, he is part of a phenomenology
of activity that I have not shared and therefore I am
interpreting it and therefore it becomes a cross-cultural
activity.
Rana
Behal:
I
will not go into the other problematic of the abstraction.
That has already been discussed. You began with the
observations you made at the time you began writing
working class history. These were part of your
reflections, which made you believe that there is a
problem of writing cross-cultural writing of history.
Suppose someone has gone through the process of being a
labourer at some point and then becoming an academic
later. I can claim personally some bit of that. Not
totally. How is the problem posed then, if I have to
accept your proposition. You cited certain instances, of a
cart puller in the melting tar. Probably the picture very
beautifully brought up by a middle class professional film
maker, say in Do Bhiga Zameen may indicate that he has
been able to visualise and reflect it as effectively as
somebody who is actually going through the pain. So this
is one problem that I am posing to your formulation. The
other is that 1 have gone through the process of being
educated and yet simultaneously occupying another terrain
of activity. There can be two possibilities then. When I
got back to writing a history of some other labour I can
easily look upon that and from personal experience
romanticise because I know it pays. On the other hand I
have gone through a process of intense physical labour
which I do not wish to again go through because it can be
a horrifying. I know romanticising it can be saleable but
personally I also know that it is not very romantic. So
when you talked about failed Maoism I understood what you
meant because I had a lot of Maoist friends when I went
through college and I believed that they were doing good
work but I could not understand their involvements. But if
you are suggesting that the pain of labour cannot be
understood without experiencing the phenomenology of work
and hence the writing of working class history encounters
an insuperable barrier that in itself remains a problem.
Is it because you yourself went through the transformation
from one kind of experience to another so widely at
variance that today you are magnifying the problem? For
instance, today I am sitting here and I do not see it in
such magnified form though I am in a similar kind of
situation. So there is this problem that your argument
seems to me to pose.
Dipesh
Chakrabarty:
There
are two things to say. At one level I was not generalising.
One reason why I chose to speak autobiographically was to
say that there is a lingering trace of my autobiography in
way I wrote Rethinking Working Class History. I was not
claiming that it has to be everybody's autobiography. Not
just you. In labour history one reads someone like Michael
Burroway. Michael Burroway, in order to write labour
history joined factories as worker and actually tried to
enter that world. These are two different positions. Your
position is closer to Michael Burroway's than mine. I was
saying that some reflexivity, some indication of that
position will be there in what we write. In reading it,
one needs to read these accounts with that sensitivity.
And one needs to allow for a plurality of positions from
which to write. So I am not saying that one must go
through my history, nor are you saying that one must go
through your history to write working class history. But,
on the other hand, the difference between our histories
must create a difference in the histories we write. At a
more general level, I was not making the simple
proposition that if you go there and be that then you will
be that, because we all know that autobiography does not
make oneself transparent. The description of the person
that you are most close to does not automatically help you
solve all the problems of representation. That is why
dwelt on the question of hermeneutics. That was my
shorthand way of saying that one has to look at the
question of representation in representing the working
class. Because it goes back to the question of
representation one uses translation as a metaphor. In
raising these questions, that there is no working class,
labour or anything that can be there in a presence that is
completely unmediated by problems of representation, it
does not mean that you and I face exactly the same
problems because we still come from slightly different
histories. For me labour history becomes rich when it
actually reflects these little differences when they are
visible in the writing of it. Labour history becomes
formulaic precisely when the difference between your
position and mine is erased by a formula that takes hold
of the narrative. So at one level I acknowledge the
difference. At another level even my acknowledgement of
the difference does not completely solve the problem of
representation. And there again the move between print
media and film media would be different.
Susan
Vishwanathan:
I
feel that some of us are probably tone deaf to what you
are saying, primarily because we left the whole problem of
stereotypes and oppositions so far behind, and, as Suvrita
pointed out, have been working on the realm of interiority
or experience for several years. So, in some senses, this
very neat grid of what happens civilisationally or in
terms of time spans really seems completely unacceptable.
So I think a lot of the critiques have really come from a
methodological position which I think most us are working
with. I feel that this whole question of stereotyping in
terms of abstraction, or in terms of experience are
methodological problems in terms of even oppositional
thinking that most of us in Delhi have not been engaging
in for a long time. So we are a little surprised that you
have gone back into this nostalgic space of
self-reflexivity and the methodological exercises by which
a certain kind of interpretation, hermeneutic or
otherwise, takes place. So I think that all the questions
have in some senses reflected that surprise. So I just
reiterate it in terms of the fact that when one looks at
even the writings of someone like Simone Weil 1 think that
at some level the opposition between the whole question of
manual labour and mental labour has been broken down as
early as the 1930s. And that is the fundamental space
where most us would, I think, like to pitch in. I am sure
that the recording of socialist histories, for instance,
has been carried on in most parts of the world. The kind
of dichotomy that is made by which you first experience
something and then you write a particular kind of history
and if you have not experienced something you can not
write about it.
Dipesh
Chakrabarty:
I
will come to the oppositions. First of all let me say that
while you were surprised by my return to these problems,
being theoretically behind Delhi does not surprise me. But
I still find Marx's critique of capital very useful. At
the same time I have problems with it. What I do
personally is to read Marx through Heidegger and read
Heidegger through Marx. So I was not talking about
stereotypes when I was talking about abstractions. I hope
when my book comes out you have a chance to look at it.
Maybe you will see what I am doing. But I was not talking
about stereotypes. The question of autobiography is very
interesting. As Derrida argues in his book on
autobiography, the history of one's life is always
present. Whether one presents it as thought autobiography
or whether one presents it as an abstract thought is a
question of how one presents it. So, someone like Derrida
would say Hegel is the kind of writer in whom
autobiography is not directly present. But he would pick
Kierkegaard as another kind of writer who actually speaks
through autobiography. I do not think I was recommending
that everybody should do it. In fact there is not much
autobiography in my Rethinking Working Class History if I
may say so. I was simply making the autobiographical
elements visible in order to make a point about the
position from which one interprets. I was not saying that
one must go and breastbeat and produce this autobiography.
Usually autobiographies are boring. Nor was I talking
about a stereotype of a worker. I do not think I was
addressing the problem of the stereotype. If you were
making a point there it was lost on me. In any case about
oppositions and so on, I must say this, and say this
partly in response to Neeladri, maybe because I came to
social science very late, and I came having done some
Boolean algebra and binary numbers and binary logic, I
never quite imbibed a fear of binaries. Binaries to me are
a tool of thinking which are quite useful. Binaries can
give rise to other kinds of structures which are not
binaries in themselves. I also do not see how any
analytical move can avoid binaries. I think binaries are
what you start with and then you can mix and blend them.
Marx himself produces these binaries in order to think
through something. Melting binaries down is another level
of that Hegel also recommends when he talks about moving
from understanding to the level of reason. He always says
thought initially begins by understanding. Understanding
is about separating things out. When thought moves to the
level of reason, thought actually blends them together. In
some ways one does not have to produce the binary between
binaries and non-binaries. They can be part of the same
process of analysis.
Aditya
Nigam:
I
was just thinking about this question of transition and I
was wondering whether you always need to see transition in
terms of a move in time from point A to point B, where B
is in some way predetermined. So a process of an
open-ended transition would need to be considered in terms
of theoretically thinking out the problem that you
mentioned in terms of looking at residues of an earlier
period. The other thing in connection with this problem of
transition is, for instance, the moment of globalisation,
which has acquired a dynamic and a logic of its own so
that, without suggesting immanence or telos, it is still
possible to talk of a giveness of this phenomenon whose
effects cannot be entirely avoided. If we look at
transition in that sense maybe the question of residues
would have to be addressed as a confluence, or as Neeladri
put it, as a dialogue or as a negotiation.
Dipesh
Chakmbarty:
I
think these are very important questions. One quick
response is that the trope of talking about transition is
the way in which we make sense of what is happening and it
is not avoidable. It is hard to make sense giving up all
notions of transitions. What I have tried to think about
in recent times is how to think about the transitions and
the past in a non-totalising way. Let us say, I use the
category capitalism. But how do I use the category
capitalism in a non-totalising way. How do I see any
historical present as a ' non-totalisable event' or a
'constantly fragmentary event'. In using the word
fragmentary I am not echoing Partha Chatterjee or Cyan
Pandey though I go along with what they say. Constantly
fragmentary is a translation which you will find in
division two of Being and Time of Heidegger. He was deeply
concerned with the question of how to think of a
historical present in a non-totalising way. I am not
against deployment of notions of transition. But I am
thinking about how to make such narratives non-totalising.
One of the interesting things that has come to us from
working in Subaltern Studies is that the whole question of
modernity in our kind of country, where the peasant
actually becomes a citizen, and where the peasant becomes
full-bodied participant in political life, which precisely
makes for a modernity in which the language of transition,
survival, remnant make less and: less sense. And my
submission would be, fundamentally you experience a kind
of modernity which stretches the meaning of the word
political far beyond the territory that European political
thought assigned to it. European theorists can think of
transitions through remnants, survivals and evolutionary
metaphors or even the Marxist idea of uneven development
because fundamentally the use capital or modernity as a
totalising device. Even when E. P. Thompson and others
talk about the peasant they know that the peasant is under
world historical notice of extinction. The nature of our
modernity is very interestingly different and the
predicament is that we have to think it through European
thought and European thought fall short of what is
happening. That is where I locate the dilemma.
Navin
Chandra:
A
lot of questions have been asked and my basic problem is
that abstraction is being used very loosely. In reality
there are two types of abstraction, mental abstraction,
which can be called logical abstraction, which has been
used here but conflated with what Marx would call real
abstraction which the market process does deal with. The
whole of Marx's way of looking at evolving reality of
capital is the dialectic of the concrete and abstract.
Confusion can arise when the abstract becomes a
descriptive term and the abstract is sought to be imposed
on the concrete reality. It is the dialectic between the
abstract and the concrete that makes the reality evolve.
And I do not think that when we talk of transition we are
denying the reality of change because then there is no
history. The historian's business in my non-historian
viewpoint should be to describe or interpret historical
facts and look at how the dialectic of the abstract and
the concrete is evolving. And here one needs to remember
the famous statement by Goethe 'Theory is grey my friend,
Green is the tree of life' and that is what I mean by the
dialectic of the abstract and the concrete.
Dipesh
Chakrabarty:
I
hear your statement as a statement coming from somebody
who has thought long and hard about these questions, and I
respect that and I hear it as somebody else who has also
thought long and hard about these questions. Obviously we
think differently and I do not think we are going to
resolve our differences now. I accept that in this world
there is another Marxist who thinks differently to the way
I do.
C.S.K.
Singh:
My
question is in the nature of clarification. Is the economy
finally culture-driven or is culture economy-driven? Would
you describe yourself as a culture-isolationist? How and
why does the transition from an affect-dominated feudalism
to an abstraction-driven capitalist mode of production
take place?
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