Shasheej Hegde Modernity

Social Scientist
Review: Modernity's Edges: A Review Discussion

Author(s): Sasheej Hegde
Review by: Sasheej Hegde
Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 28, No. 9/10 (Sep. - Oct., 2000), pp. 33-86
Published by: Social Scientist
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3517976
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SASHEEJ HEGDE*
Modernity's Edges: A Review Discussion
The dialectical form of exposition is only correct when it knows its
limits.
- Marx
If a good demonstration means simply an argument which is effective,
where are we to stop?
- Robert Blanche
PROTOCOLS
The form, as indeed the formulation, of my topic may seem somewhat
strange.' To be sure, I am concerned to review a work, Javeed Alam's
inventive India: Living with Modernity (hereinafter Javeed; and the
work in question will be notated as ILM). But in addressing a work,
it would be worthwhile to look within (and ahead) and prognosticate
whatever lies there. One would like to create circumstances that would
not otherwise exist on their own. A 'division of labour' - howsoever
problematical, at first sight - seems to me critical. On the one hand,
we have the problem of making sense of a work, in the sense, say, of
delivering summations ('snapshots') of its thought and arguments;
on the other is the problem of defining its specificity, making present
a work - emphatically, what makes a work the work it is about.
However one wishes to interpret this division, in relation to the work
in question here, the principle remains the discontinuity of what is
being assembled in and by it. For why should we be describing the
work of ILM? Or, again: how is one to be defining this demand? And
how can we do so when what is to be described is not yet visible in
the work? This is precisely the problem that is to be examined.
The flurry of questions, nevertheless, is bound to put into the
background another common - need we say Marxist? - concern with
* Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad
Social Scientist, Vol. 29, Nos. 9 - 10, Sept.-Oct. 2000
34 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
the meaning of a work: the identity, that is, of a subject of a work.
This being so, I presume, it should be made clear at the very outset
that I have no intention of suspending this reference. What the Weimar
philosopher and critic, Walter Benjamin, has claimed translates into
an important scheme of possibility. According to him:
The immanent tendency of the work and, accordingly, the standard
for its immanent criticism is the reflection which has at its basis and is
imprinted in its form. Yet this is, in truth not so much a standard of
judgement as, first and foremost, the foundation of a completely
different kind of criticism which is not concerned with judging, and
whose center of gravity has not in the estimation of the single work
but in demonstrating its relation to all other works and, ultimately, to
the idea of art.2
This, with the relevant modifications - notice that Benjamin is
alluding to the space of art, and not, as with Javeed (as we shall see)
the space of politics - could well serve as a methodological
introduction to the schemes invented herein. Needless to say, I shall
be redeploying these near-formal protocols throughout this review
essay.
CIRCLES OF MEDIATION
There are, of course, ways of reading the form, as well as the
content, of theoretical debates and critical moves and countermoves.
In fact, for anyone interested in the procedures which the Marxist
critic Fredric Jameson has called cognitive mapping,3 Javeed's ILM
shows patterns of thought and argument directed not only at
substantive issues of politics, process and history, but, by way of a
self-positing of modernity, explaining how it could even be possible
to think coherently about some basic category and/or experience:
one does not need to extrapolate the metaphysical slogans of
modernity (the way that Marxists - and non-Marxists alike - continue
to do with Enlightenment relativities). It is the nature of this mapping
procedure that I believe is suggestive, and not for predictive purposes
either, or with a view toward identifying recurrent patterns. Rather,
Javeed sets us the example of a criticism of criticism, a theorization
about theory, which, while alive to the passionate contexts of
interventions in the present, also attempts a measure of their reactive
profiles. In particular, ILM discloses the fidelity with which so many
ideologically different positions offer precise symptoms of the absence
of that 'unembodied surplus' Javeed traces as modernity. I shall return
to this presently, but perhaps the most important reason for the
MODERNITY'S EDGES 35
attraction of the project is that it leads to a distinctive vision of political
criticism's demands. Foundationalism, of whatever kind, is untenable:
"It makes that which is emergent in history or encoded in culture an
immutable first principle"(ILM, 215). And yet, this rejection of
foundationalism does not imply that nothing can or need be grounded
or theoretically justified: "(t)he effort here will be to see if these (the
emergent in history or the encoded in culture) can be theoretically
grounded in the process of becoming"(ILM, 216). Javeed uses the
dialectical stance - "that which is immanent in history cannot be
foundational because it cannot be outside the process of unfolding or
becoming"(ibid.) - to generate, not just a distinctive method of
political criticism, but an account of the very subject matter of political
criticism itself.
ILM is not a very long book, but its architectonic seems pretty
fraught and categorical. It might be useful to distil its main elements
into a manageable set of propositions. I distinguish ten theses that
are at the core of Javeed's project, though they by no means exhaust
the details of what he has to say. I will formulate them in a way that
makes for ready intelligibility, while not always departing from the
letter of his writing.
(i) 'Modernity' is the primary moral predicate, not nationhood and/or
nationalism; nationhood is defined simply as a constituting positivity.
That there are streams of nationalism within this positivity - as also
the fact that the shape and process of national consolidation in the
colonized world entail occupying the same demarcated spaces as carved
out by colonialism - will mean that they are contextually determined,
not mandatory, although, of course, they can (and have been)
mandatory in determining a whole course of politics in twentieth
century India.
(ii) There is a central sense of modernity that derives from what is an
'unembodied surplus' in the philosophical thought of the moder. It needs
to be distinguished from the dominant form of modernity that became
historically embodied - 'entrenched modernity' - in conjunction largely
with capitalism. While the latter needs to be rejected - being of necessity
exclusionary and homogenizing - the possibility of separating necessary
from historical relations must entail that what became entrenched with
modernity is a matter of historical contingency and that there is no logical
relation between the exclusionary features of modernity and modernity
per se. Modernity is thus more than what is encapsulated in its entrenched
form. Central to this bifurcation is the belief, issuing off a putatively
Hegelian coordinate that there is no going back in history: indeed, that
modernity is not only desirable but also irreversible.
36 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
(iii) In this central sense, modernity is nothing more or less than its being
corrigible; and, given that corrigibility implies critique, self-correction and
extension, the historical tendency within modernity toward exclusionary
forms of reason can be transcended. Again: it is capitalism which
foregrounds and privileges a certain trajectory as the sole mode and
possibility of modernity, so that the history of the violence of modernity in
the discursive realm parallels the violence that capitalism denotes in the
domain of practice - a matter of "reciprocal causation or generative
conditioning"(ILM, 19). The question of whether there is a necessary
connection between capitalism and colonialism is a more intricate one -
indeed not only that, while everything in history points to the equation
between the two, "it can be shown apriori that capitalism as an ascendant
tendency in history is possible without colonialism"(ILM, 10); but also
that "the mode of the colonial constitution of the other is (-) detachable
from modernity even if it came in the baggage of colonialism to our
societies"(ILM, 11).
(iv) This is a contextualist account of modernity and nationhood/
nationalism, because an idea (or an ideal) will be compelling under
Javeed's approach, and will serve to justify a politics, if and only if one
could reasonably reject it as a foundational principle: if and only if it
is, in that sense, contingently irresistible. Modernity is now being
conditioned as much by its own consequences in the course of its
historical development. With the necessity historically entailed by
modernity having thus been rendered contingent, modernity is now
open to correction; much of it can be reassembled in new creative
ways "integrat(ing) and harmoni(zing) the best in different cultures
around the world"(ILM, 37). There is no going outside modernity to
live-in and rework modernity.
(v) There is no precise measure for deciding what a detailed modernist
alternative to entrenched modernity would be; the latter can only
emerge through the broadest possible struggles and contestations
(although, of course, what remained unexhausted by entrenched
modernity is a surplus that can be drawn upon). The experience of
modernity in the colonial context, nevertheless, has been a complex
phenomenon, involving the incorporation of new conceptual languages
and also their mediation with earlier and extant vocabularies. To this
extent, the translation of conceptual vocabularies under conditions of
modernity - as indeed the activation of resources latent to a culture
and its languages - are that much more intricate than those of capitalism
"where largely external reality is involved"(ILM, 59). In this
perspective, then, "transfers from the generalized culture of modernity
and their deployments in and encounters with the specificities of
particular non-modern situations are not in any simple sense an alien
intrusion or imposition"(ibid.).
(vi) Modernity is also about a sense of distinctiveness of one's self.
And, what is more, modernity's encounters with other cultures has
meant, among other things, a process of individuation of persons and
interests on a scale never attained before: "(t)he social being of
individuated persons is something that distances them from others -
the pre-existing communities frgm which such persons emerge - and
therefore also creates a sense of difference"(ILM, 55). Feeling oneself
to be different and also, to whatever minimal degree, distant gives rise
to a sense of private in the sense that "something of (or in) 'me' cannot
always be open to scrutiny and that the unsolicited social regulation of
my personal life is a kind of invasion"(ibid.). According to Javeed, "it
is here that the need for 'rights' begins to be felt by persons who hitherto
could live happily without them"(ibid.).
(vii) Individuation, understood in this way, explains why its remains
simply unconvincing to register the fact of modernity by merely
affirming the resilience of 'our' culture and their linguistic resources -
that indeed many concepts which originated in Western modernity are
not only a living need ("to capture and nurture new expectations,
aspirations and telos of life"[ILM, 59]) but can also become rooted in
different cultural situations. Controversies, therefore, about whether
certain terms currently in use in discourse have been illicitly borrowed
from the West are sterile.
(viii) This is the primary reason, so it is affirmed, why the contextualist
determination of modernity is persuasive. As Javeed puts it: "For a
society on the path to modernity, there is (-) a sense of unfamiliarity
and strangeness to the individual experience. How does this experience
become (socially) communicable? Can the earlier languages and their
conceptual reserves articulate this experience?"(ILM, 55).
(ix) A second reason that allegedly supports such contextualism,
however, is that the concepts mediating India's experience of modernity
- such as rights, secularism and the nation, with each disclosing or
answering to a specific need of the society - have never been put through
"the prism of a grounded critique so as to take care of the linguistic or
cultural specificities, regional peculiarities or historical memories"(ILM,
76); and, again, that the failure to do so has put enormous strain on
the Indian polity to cope with questions of national unity.
(x) But there is more to the morality and life within modernity, in
fairness to this approach, than avoiding the snares of entrenched
modernity. While the first requirement is to valorize, as a positive
democratic gain, the spaces available for popular activity of a totally
new kind in Indian society - the tracks chosen by Hindutva to rework
tradition notwithstanding - a second will be to live up to the demands
of certain values and principles, those that bear, in particular, on a
38 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
sense of self or individuation. Especially, with respect to the latter, a
proper recognition and consolidation of "the right to exit" is quite
central in accommodating the claims of the community and the rights
of the individual.
In what follows, I shall be engaging with each of these theses,
albeit neither schematically nor in a sequence, while going on to
modulate detailed and more specific changes of aspect. One need
assert here that this is more than simply a matter of describing the
circumstances surrounding ILM, their positive conjuncture, and
something like a concrete staging of what gets expressed in the
abstract. In thus opening up the borders that Javeed's narrative sets
and the possibilities it contains, any line of critique would have to
acknowledge the following.grounds of appraisal.
A ZONE OF ENGAGEMENT
Something more than a strict or traditional conception of
'historical materialism' are involved here. In fact, if I am allowed to
state somewhat summarily and rhetorically, when a Marxist scholar
undertakes to represent the ideological foundations of an entire process
of politics, as Javeed has done with his ILM, he is bound to meet
with opposition and criticism.
Some of the objections are going to be textual and personal, a
matter of points of emphasis and disputed readings. These are more
or less straightforward and call for particular resolution, but they do
not affect the method. I am not, in any case, ultra-sensitive to the
determinism for which Javeed's analysis, as an appraisal in the Marxist
mode, may be attacked. All the same, it might be important to clarify
what is meant by this term. In the tradition of Marxist orthodoxy,
determinism figures as a model of the primacy of the social relations
of production over the productive forces. In its own way, Javeed's
model of an India living with modernity (to abstract somewhat from
the work's title) substitutes for that determinism a dialectic of
modernity and its consequences. In asking under what historical
conditions modernity came into --and could become established in -
India, Javeed is not far removed from what seems to be Marx's central
thesis: that the relations of modernity are, among other things,
'contradictions of progress'.4 Now Javeed's explanatory model, as I
receive it, makes it possible to refract from this contradictory
circumstance and conceive, medially, as it were, the overall structure
of the field of politics implicating twentieth century India. From its
standpoint, the question of the courses open to and taken by modernity
in India - or, more precisely, the question of what differentiates the
trajectories of politics in India, and how that difference is transformed
with the history of modernity in India - becomes the decisive issue.
I shall come to complicate the axis of this construal presently, but
for the moment, more important are those objections that would
target the theory informing ILM - the theory, namely, that modernity
is, among its other marks, also about individuated persons. The
criticisms that could be leveled against this are two-fold, and they are
mutually contradictory. On the one hand, it could be affirmed that
the theory is unsatisfactory because it is not universal; and,
consequently, that even if it is correct it is not a sociological proposition
but a limited historical finding. Javeed does not claim, however, that
the ideology of individuation has a general theoretical application;
he maintains that individuation is a characteristic of modernity - if
this is a limited finding, the limits are those of an epoch, a process in
time. On the other hand, it can be objected that the ideology of
individuation can be found in non-modern situations - for example,
in the ideology of the renouncer in the classical Hindu context - and
that it rests on so simple a condition of humanity as to be traceable
anywhere.5 But Javeed's analysis makes it quite plain that what he is
concerned with is a modality that is intrinsic to a particular
configuration.6 Javeed nevertheless vacillates - alternating between
individuation as a statement of knowledge and individuation as a
symptom of practice --a vacillation traceable back to individuation
as at once a fundamentally Marxian and non-Marxian (read,
bourgeois) theme. That this vacillation can make for a complication
of the narrative of India's transition to modernity is only to be, but I
am anticipating.7 We shall re-turn.
More specifically, criticism could attempt to come to terms with
Javeed's model of scrutinizing concepts and engaging with conceptual
transfers: "(c)onceptual vocabularies, in whatever way they may have
originated, have a way of imposing themselves by virtue of their
communicability"(ILM, 58). Textual questions aside, a chief gravamen
would be that the opposed concepts are not clearly separated from
each other but share attributes and tasks to such an extent that the
complementarity asserted by Javeed is not to be found in the concepts
themselves. Javeed's own defense, offered already in the preface to
ILM, is that his examination of the philosophical presuppositions of
modernity prompted him "to look for alternative trajectories of
modernity perhaps available in the history of modern philosophy";
and that, "(h)aving found such a possibility in the idea of 'unembodied
40 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
surplus' in modern philosophy", he is led to ask: "Why did these
alternative trajectories remain only at the level of thought and were
never embodied in the history of our contemporary world"(ILM, vii-
viii). Clearly this defense, although evasive, is forceful. Any social
ideal, however explicitly subscribed to by those who intend it to direct
their lives, is liable to local adjustments, tendentious manipulations,
various contradictions, and some degree of confusion. So if it is
demonstrated that a concept and the process of its transfer, in
particular cases, is not fully carried into effect, this is not in itself a
decisive refutation of the proposed schema. For that matter, if it can
be shown that even ideally concepts do not exhibit a clear partitioning,
this too can be attributed to a normal erosion of categories; it does
not necessarily mean that the construct or its transfer is artificial or
mistaken.8
At first sight, therefore, the schema of ILM does seem susceptible
to a purely methodological resolution. If the partitioning of concepts
and vocabularies is called into question, in the respects so far adduced,
the outcome is likely to be determined by influences that are written
into the theory and criticism of ILM. But there is a further test of
Javeed's ideas that I should like to propose, namely, to resort to a
wider axis of discursive negotiation and/or comparison: the foundation
of a completely different kind of criticism which is not concerned
with judging, and whose center of gravity lies not in the estimation
of the single work but in demonstrating its relation to all other works
and, ultimately, to the idea of political criticism. I guess this test also
is likely to lead to the irresolution's that have been mentioned, but at
very least it offers a vantage point from which the issue may be seen
under a new aspect.
CHANGES OF ASPECT
There is no prior or absolute standards by which to determine
what shall serve as basic concepts for the analysis of modern India.
In fact, as Robert Blanche, the celebrated logician has held, even in a
stricter science "the point of taking certain propositions as basic or
primitive is simply that we cannot demonstrate everything".9 Yet in
the widening of the axis of negotiation we can demonstrate more
than has yet been done; and where demonstration cannot at present
be achieved, we can at least analyze concepts that are taken for basic
and thus better reveal their constitution and capabilities.10 I mention
this line of appraisal only to advert to various themes that run through
the treatment of the politics of twentieth century India. Two general
matters call for special stress here, and in context.
The first is the enigmatic operation of rendering problematic
India's transition to modernity, meaning by this the capacity to
discriminate in a process of change as many connotations and uses as
can be discovered or contrived. To be sure, there is no technique for
doing this, but it can be prepared for by the appreciation of suitably
striking modulations of context. The modulations themselves connect
up also with the second theme. This is that there are advantages of
understanding to be had by being ready to suspend, on occasion - if
not altogether contest - an exclusive reliance on the procedures of
universal (read, Eurocentric) history. The recent work of Partha
Chatterjee provides some ingenious illustrations of this approach. In
his the Annual SOAS South Asia Lecture, Chatterjee not only supplies
some acutely observed formulations about the colonial and
postcolonial history of India, but also tellingly brings out their peculiar
quality by resort to some striking conceptual innovations. At one
point he sums up the impact of a series of rather puzzling episodes by
maintaining: "(T)he discursive formation that emerged in India from
the late nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century could both
valorize British parliamentary institutions and criticize, even reject,
them, within the same discursive field".11 At another point he
prognosticates how it is that the stuff of democratic politics as it
takes place on the ground in India necessitates that we "think of a
field of practices mediating between state institutions and civil society"
- what he terms 'political society' - and that this ground often involves
"what appears to be a constantly shifting compromise between the
normative values of modernity and the moral assertion of popular
demands".12 In between Chatterjee explains how it is that within the
confines of a modernisation narrative (whether of a Weberian or a
Marxist kind), "the conceptual domains of state and society have
either had to be sharply distinguished, with the central state
institutions carrying the burden of an interventionist project of
modernising traditional social institutions and practices, or collapsed
entirely so that state practices become completely moulded by the
pulls and pressures of prevailing social institutions" - and that by
following these procedures of inquiry one cannot tackle the question
of "the sites, if any, of an interventionist project of changing society,
or indeed of the transformations that have been brought about by
the expansion of democracy itself".13
Admitted, it is the characteristic features of the events described
and the models framed that give these modulations their force; but
42 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
one can easily forget the details, or fail to appreciate them at their
proper value, as it is the work's 'system of reference' that conveys the
distinct quality of the experiences described or the concepts framed.
Although this level of comprehension is prepared for by a systematic
and cumulative negotiation of the space of discourse as recounted in
Chatterjee, the medium of its intelligibility is ultimately the work's
'system of reference', and in its own fashion; for, as Wittgenstein has
written, "(a)ll testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a
hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is
not more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our
arguments...(It is) the element in which the arguments have their
life".14 Let me venture a formulation in the context of ILM.
While not in the least depreciating the force and the uses of these
argumentative strategies, Javeed, it seems to me, is also trying to
exemplify other departures - certain alternative means by which to
thematize India's modernity (or transition into modernity). Like the
spontaneous process of a change of aspect modulated in and by
Wittgenstein's writings, the appositeness of a work's 'system of
reference' cannot be deliberately contrived, and neither can the
revelatory capacity of a term in the discourse be purposefully
contained.15 There is no strict method in these matters, of course, but
speaking from within the reference of ILM - and in the context of
Chatterjee per se - there is a certain diffidence in the former about
the latter, a diffidence that affects the discursive apparatus of ILM
rather as abstract works of art affect the capacities for sympathetic
participation. One reason - fairly obvious, I should think - that the
works' of Javeed and Chatterjee cannot converge while not exactly
diverging (or, for that matter, remaining parallel) is the specific load
being brought to bear on the "facts" of India's transition into
modernity. Where Chatterjee's investigations issue from a certain
framing of (in his words) a rule of colonial difference - the rule is as
much meant to operate as a critique of the persistence of an ideological
erasure in liberal historiography (by means of which the assumptions
of universal history work to displace the specificity of colonial power)
as to signify the violent intrusion of colonialism 16-Javeed is concerned
to inflect this rule further into a sort of double notation: modernity/
colonialism as being at once a distorting and creating situation
undergirding the nation space.
One has to be fairly secure in one's own nationalism to be able to
think through the dialectic of these formulations; and, in fact, Akeel
Bilgrami has been emphasizing as much in his various writings.17 One
could, I suppose, also seek to pursue their implications for the split
construction of the nation subject. Neither Chatterjee nor Javeed,
strictly, do so. Gyan Prakash has asked precisely this question in the
course of a comment off Chatterjee - "What are we to think of the
inner domain of the nation when its constitution was crossed by the
'outer', when the separation between the two had to be produced on
the site of their hybridisation?"18- but, as is evident, assembles it on
the problematic conceptual terrain of hybridisation. I cannot be
reviewing this positioning here, but, to be sure, the grids of class and
institution (as indeed the conditions of production of this
'hybridisation') evaporate in this condensation.19 Javeed's treatment
of nationalism (Part II of ILM, largely) is not altogether so carefully
worked out as to yield a real chronology, but if I understand him
correctly he seems to be asserting that elite constructions, far from
appearing stable and solid, were often uncertain and contradictory.
Javeed, it seems, is so much incited by the prevailing (academic?)
consensus on these questions that he is taken in by the possibility of
demonstrating that there are elements in the space of Indian
nationalism which need to be analytically contended with in order to
yield an alternative narrativisation of that history - one that could
ground a context-sensitive modernity. May one quote from Javeed:
In (the) appeal to nationalism or the national movement and its heritage
a few simple questions need to be raised: Are the values or themes
talked about by Hindutva spokespersons today totally unrelated to
the nationalist thought of any type? and to Indian nationalism in
particular? Conversely, is what the Left is holding on to the only tenable
position in relation to this nationalism? In the course of this analysis,
it is necessary to interrogate the presuppositions of and background to
these positions in order to bring out the contradictory content of
(Indian) nationalism (ILM, 85).
And he adds, in a footnote: "Most accounts of the rise of Indian
nationalism ...take their starting point in the 1880s but a new
importance has been attached to this period of late. Since the beginning
of the 'discourse analysis' of the nationalist thought there has been a
tendency to look at this period as a source to disbelieve the
'autobiography' that nationalism gives to itself" (ILM, 97, n.4). Or,
again, his remark issuing off the dialectic of the state and the nation
in India - "If, before Independence, the 'nation' was to give birth to
the State, after Independence, by a reversal of roles, the State was to
absorb the nation and become its sole spokesman" (ILM, 147) -
44 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
(O)ne has to concede the validity of Lenin's formulation that nothing
short of granting complete equality to all nationalities, big or small,
highly developed or still in the process of formulation, will overcome
conflicts between national groups. Anything remains less within the
logic of nationalism - a logic which cannot answer to the recurring
contestation of the various national claims. In determining their
historical legitimacy, it is not the level of their development as
nationalities which is crucial, but the growth of national awareness
and the nationalist stir among the people representing it, which has to
be the prime consideration (ILM, 160).20
To be sure, the idea of a system of reference for modernity (vide
the division, internal to Javeed's narrative of modernity, between
'entrenched modernity' and the idea of an 'unembodied surplus' in
modern philosophy) and the coherence that it gives to the experiences
internal to modernity need not necessarily turn on these
considerations; and, similarly, does not rest on those experiences being
informed by a singular ethos either. Alternatively, and as if by
extension, in an analysis pursuing the implications of India's modernity
- as Chatterjee's analysis is wont to pursue (recall his diatribe against
Eurocentric social philosophy and his postulation of the capital/
community opposition as the central "unsurpassed contradiction" of
Western social philosophy) - we can have a fair idea of what the
solutions might be;21 for these are implicit in the character of the data
that Chatterjee (among others) is analyzing, or they can be inferred
from the premises, or else by some other prior reduction in the range
of likely results one can work in the direction of a certain kind of
outcome. None of this can be looked for when the arguments
grounding ILM are at work: this is a condition of its potential and
part of its provocative power. There are bound to be problems here
as well, but again I am anticipating. Well, let me cite all over again
from Javeed, and this time from his review of Chatterjee's A Possible
India: Essays in Political Criticism.22 Recognizing the interesting twist
being given to the meaning of democracy when Chatterjee talks of it
not simply as government of the people but as "the politics of the
governed", Javeed notes that the emerging contours of politics in the
present has given "new rigour and strength to Indian democracy with
the vulnerable sections of society as the pillars of commitment to
liberal democracy". And yet, there is an "infirmity" in this battle for
bourgeois equality: "(e)ach community wants to preserve its own
internal relations and it is in this respect that communities also take
recourse to ritual and caste norms". Javeed is categorical that it is for
this reason that one must be wary of defending "difference"
unconditionally as Chatterjee does: "(I)n the name of recognizing
democracy, we cannot also allow indignities and atrocities to go on
being perpetrated because communities are so constituted or wait
indefinitely for an alternative to emerge from within themselves". In
particular, it is this recognition which underscores ILM's espousal of
"the right to exit".23 We will return to complicate these construals.
To these modes of discourse one should add what Sunil Khilnani
has been concerned to effect as "the idea of India". The affecting
depictions of his book The Idea of India24 are not entirely original,
issuing off the altogether familiar coordinate - how is it that a country
so diverse in its languages, religions and castes, and so deeply
traditional in its ways of life has survived into modernity? - but they
derive their impact from a largely visual prose style whose power to
move is both fairly predictable and can be explained. In four fertile
chapters, Khilnani is concerned to graft a story of the twists,
contradictions and themes that run through the politics of India -
"(i)n a fundamental sense, India does not merely 'have' politics but is
actually constituted by politics" - and constitute his tidings through
the question, "(w)hat is the history of India since 1947 the history
of?" 25 For Khilnani, "the processes of modernity within India have
unraveled, and it has not kept to the script"; while going on to draw
the rules for recognizing the "idea of India", even seeing in India's
present "a premonitory hint of the West's own political future". In
this case too, one can be prepared to recognize the modulations being
effected upon the space of discourse/experience, and even accord them
something of the importance that accrues to Khilnani's eponymous
"idea". But we cannot draw up precise rules for recognizing the "idea"
or even design it - as Khilnani is wont to do (recall, the figure and the
persona of Nehru looms large in The Idea of India), - and we cannot
apply it in analysis in the methodical way in which we resort to abstract
concepts.26 Do not get me wrong. While surely I am not pressing
against the acceptance of non-discursive modes of doing political
history (or political criticism), I am also suggesting that we should be
no less wary in our attitudes towards them as one should be in
employing the discursive frames as have been alluded thus far. Besides,
I think it is a singularly unfortunate turn of phrase that one should
deem, as Khilnani does, that "(l)ike the British empire it supplanted,
India's constitutional democracy was established in a fit of
absentmindedness".27 To give up an undue reliance on axiomatic
commitments and other false certainties in the practice of political
46 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
criticism entails, all the more pressingly, that we should explore every
conceivable means of discovering just what we can rely on.
The above considerations need not entail a new modality of
representation; they only complicate the relationship between a
received movement of discourse (the articulated structure of ILM)
and an executed movement of discourse (the wider space of discursive
negotiation that we have sought to record). Between the two, an
interval could be established, whether it divides up the received
movement infinitely or prolongs it in a plurality of possible reactions.
In what follows therefore, it will be a question of taking advantage
of this interval; or, strictly speaking, interpolating ourselves in the
enunciatory levels of ILM.
ENUNCIATION'S
In trying to account for the forms taken by the politics of twentieth
century India - not quite (or only) the transition into modernity - the
postulate of an India living with modernity can have a special efficacy.
I am not, of course, alluding to the different senses in which the
epithet 'living with' can be used. Granted the historical and analytical
importance of the epithet - and accordingly translatable as a postulate
- the next question is what can usefully be done to refine our grasp
or appreciation of the concepts that it underwrites. To this enunciatory
level, one should add the articulated structure of ILM, what I have
earlier announced as 'circles of mediation' (Sect.II). These depictions
are not strictly propositional, although I have so described them, and
derive their impact from a larger field of negotiation whose contours
I have tried to determine (while not wholly explaining) in Sects.III
and IV. The simply pragmatic consequences of the emplotment of
such contours would indeed be quite impressive in the task of
rendering certain classes of phenomena more readily intelligible. But
there remains to be undertaken the more radical task of discovering
on what grounds our explications are resting when resort to such
construals. They are not all self-evidently ultimate terms in the sense
that they are logically simple or that they are resistant, at least, to the
analysis of their own grounds, constitution or validity. These
enunciation's, and the justifications of their unqualified utility, are
just as much proper objects of political criticism as are the phenomena
which they order.
The conventional definition of modernity is to attribute to it
characteristics and properties derivable from the project of the
Enlightenment. Javeed has shown however that this definition is
unrealistic, and, what is more, that it is logically unviable. The division
at the heart of ILM - between an 'entrenched modernity' and of an
'untapped surplus' within modern philosophy - has the potential to
revise the analysis of modernity and of statements about the political
structuring of modernity. The process of the politics of the late
nineteenth and twentieth century India that also obtains at the core
of ILM reports the point that, by the singular convergence of ideas,
the various streams have been largely concerned to adduce the
lineaments of an entrenched modernity. Political criticism carried out
in the stock classificatory terms of entrenched modernity and of
foundationalism are subverted by the fact that they bear reference to
discrete classes of phenomena and not to processes of becoming.
Especially, Javeed is concerned to emphasize the point that "the
message to refract in society has to be deeply context-sensitive in
terms which are, in the first instance, capable of appealing to the
thought features of (a) people and secondly, of creating intellectual
resources in tune with the prevalent social practices"(ILM, 46). A
main conclusion of ILM is to ground these processes of becoming in
the notion of individuation. The axis of this enunciation calls for a
revision of the coordinates of political criticism, and of the procedures
by which the social forms and representations of a process of
modernity are grouped for study.
My own deployment of the modernity principle has been carried
out in a number of places, and indeed its applications in political
criticism as I (now) see it are unpredictable.28 The prospect I envisage
here nevertheless, in the context of ILM, may permit the determination
of some basic predicates in the study of India's modernity. Consider
the following from Javeed:
Within the specificities of societies like ours I want to look for that
process which can ground the notion of rights as I did with the notion
of the secular...That process ...is best captured in the notion of
individuation. The process of individuation, in the history of becoming,
in society, is the starting point of the many values and concepts which
inform our contemporary life. ..Community leaders and other notables
who wield power over the people cannot arrest the process of
individuation - a la Hegel, there is no going back in history - but they
do have a vested interest in controlling the consequences of this process.
.1 am not asking for a cognitive blindness to genealogy, but on the
contrary asking to work in spite of this genealogy. .Not treating
modernity as outside human material practices and cultures but as
bound by them, will help overcome the foundationalism of Western
48 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
theories of modernity and this simple fact will neutralize the 'violence'
supposedly inherent in modernity. ..What has been said of modernity
can also be said of many other things which emerged alongside it, such
as the notion of nation. The idea of nation suffered the same fate as
that of modernity of which it was a product. A monolithic,
homogenizing definition of nation took hold ..In the way, this notion
was refracted in Indian society, and the question of whether India could
ever be a nation in the way it crystallized in western Europe was never
asked (ILM, 216-224).29
The strong link between modernity and a context-bound engaged
contestation upon that very space is obvious here, but there is also an
implicit model in the structure of social development at work which
creates complications in Javeed's understanding of the 'modern' as a
domain of individuation. To bring this out, I could invoke the
distinction that Charles Taylor has made between 'cultural' and
'acultural' theories of modernity.30 Cultural theories account for the
transition to modernity in terms of the intrinsic appeal of the
normative content of a specific cultural form. Taylor himself, in the
opus Sources of the Self, adopts this kind of approach in his explication
of the modern identity as shaped by ideals of inwardness, freedom
and the affirmation of ordinary life. 'Acultural theories', on the other
hand, explain the transition in terms of the actualization of some
universal but dormant capacity for thought and action, or by way of
the performance of some social operation which is definable
independently of culture. In this model, all cultures could, under
suitable conditions, undergo the transition to modernity; any culture
could in principle serve as 'input' for the chosen 'culture-neutral'
explanatory procedure. Functionalism has been an influential theory
of the 'acultural' kind, but theories that construe the transition to
modernity as a rationalization process also tend to take this form.
It would not be inappropriate to suggest that Javeed's account,
although deriving from some prior (or implicit) 'acultural' theoretical
commitment, is also concerned to straddle the space of the 'cultural'.
In fact, this can be deduced from the passages cited above. The
resources of modernity are made up of self-reflexive concepts of
reason, mechanisms of bonding and patterns of individuation; all
societies, if they are to be living with modernity, must be successful
in reproducing these resources. In this sense, I believe Javeed is not
far from Habermas for whom the crux is the 'internal relation'
between modernity and rationality - modernity has a claim to
rationality in so far as it can "create its normativity out of itself".31
But where, for Habermas, the commitments of modernity translate
into a procedural mechanism for reproducing the resources of
modernity, Javeed is interested to map this terrain on to the contingent
substance of those resources themselves. Hence I think the emphasis
writ large over the enunciatory space of ILM, the idea, to use Javeed's
own terminology, that modernity pace individuation is "the moment
of multiple births"(ILM, 222), and the argument for "preferred futures
within context-bound, engaged modernities which are contested,
fought over and struggled for" (ILM, 223).32
The infirmity of the binary instituted by Taylor should now be
evident; it cannot stand - and, in fact, Taylor's own work complicates
the terrain.33 But what is perhaps more crucial is what this infirmity
can entail for the received ontology of theorizing about modernity.
Let me set up a passage into Ja-veed, through Hegel, and onto the
enunciatory space of ILM.
Javeed takes his lead from the putatively Hegelian coordinate
that there is no going back in history: indeed, that modernity is not
only irreversible but also desirable. As Terry Pinkard, Robert Pippin
and others have disclosed, off Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the
structure and intentions of that work as a whole are an attempt to
come to terms with the modern conception of autonomy, in the wake
of the social and political upheavals of the late eighteenth century,
and the critical revolution brought about in philosophy by Kant.34
Hegel is judged to have understood the significance of this conception
of autonomy for the modern world, both in its problematic and in its
positive aspects. It is, for him, the destiny of western thought to realize
that the fundamental nature of the human condition is to be free, and
while this brings with it all the dangers of disenchantment, it is none
the less the sign of the maturity and the great contribution of the
times that it can at last think in these terms, fully abandoning the
support of tradition, authority or the higher meaning of metaphysics
and religion. This, above all, is what Hegel meant when he famously
declared in the preface to the Phenomenology that "ours is a birth-
time and a period of transition to a new era".35 Now, clearly, this
position is historicist, being also self-reflexive, in the sense that once
a historicist position of the sort adopted by Hegel is taken, then no
argument can be given for it that is not itself historical. That is to say,
if it is claimed that the critical narrative of history - or, in the terms
of ILM, the critical narrative of modernity - alone provides the
justification for the principles we accept as authoritative, this position
itself can only be argued for by showing how the failure of all other
50 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
standpoints has led us there, through its own narrative. This (and I
shall limit myself to Javeed here, although this also holds the key to
Hegel) seems to lend ILM a curious structure: it attempts to give this
historicist position its own historicist vindication, less by offering a
reflexive self-criticism of all attempts to give authoritative principles
an immediate (or ahistorical) grounding than by providing a narrative
of the philosophical history of the modern.36
Nonetheless, for anyone seeking to come to terms with the
enunciatory space of ILM on its own, it can indeed be read as an
attempt to show that a historical narrative of India's transition to
modernity is imperative. Javeed himself is clearly sympathetic to this
project, but he does not go on to consider the wider problem that is
raised by this narrative: namely, whether the historical narrative that
Javeed is trying to ground offers us a view of processes of becoming
that is too idealized to be credible, so that when critique comes to
examine the historical genesis of its authoritative positioning, it seems
to be doing so from within a sheer contingency of shifting frameworks
(and/or an immanent logic of progressive changes) rather than a
dynamic of historical periodization - thereby undermining the very
source of those "preferred futures" sought for in modernity.37 Unless
this challenge is met, the suspicion will remain that while Javeed may
have sought to leave behind the excesses of a foundationalism in
coming to grips with modernity, he merely offers us the equally empty
consolation of a history that only tells a part of the story. But let us
get on.
Javeed may yet give a plausible account of the transition to
modernity, of how the rational core of intuitions and situations specific
to modernity can be clarified by way of a reconstruction of the
reciprocity conditions of individuation.38 But it is far from evident
how intuitions concerning the significance of individuation - indeed,
of the whole range of strongly valued characteristics not always (or
obviously) bound to the requirements of modernity - can be classified
in that manner. This point connects back to the problem we indicated
in the paragraph concluding Sect.III above, concerning Javeed's
theorization of individuation, the vacillation between individuation
as a statement of knowledge and individuation as a symptom of
practice.39 For Javeed faces the difficulty of explaining how
interpretations of modernity are capable of carrying conviction. Let
us assume that such interpretations help constitute notions of
individuation. Since Javeed conceives of "context-bound modernities",
and since he includes a concept of individuation in the normative
content of modernity, he must also accept that transitions within (and
between) modernities are subject to assessment. And yet, however, it
is hard to see how the source of such convictions can be reduced to
the presuppositions of individuation. That is to say, it is far from
clear how transitions within (and between) modernities can derive
their cognitive and/or political thrust from the idealizing
presuppositions of the mechanisms for reproducing the resources of
individuation. Javeed wants his thematisation to meet two seemingly
incompatible objectives (and perhaps, there lies the challenge of ILM).
On the one hand, his theory of modernity is designed to account for
the transition to modernity as a process, among other things, of
individuation. In order to do this, it must incorporate a differentiation
between a condition of modernity and the claims of modernity upon
that very space. On the other hand, his theory must also account for
how context-specific developments within the space of the modern
are thematisable. Both tasks require the mediation of distinctions.
The first Javeed attempts to fulfil by way of a distinction between
'entrenched modernity' and an 'unembodied surplus' within the
modern. He tries to achieve the second by resort to a politics of the
present, a politics essentially of secular contingency. I turn now to
the adequacy of these gestures at mediation; in between, however, I
shall allude to a Marxist space of problematisation.
OTHER DEPARTURES
"The most common descriptions of modern society", Niklas
Luhmann has observed, "repeatedly refer to an unusual measure of
contingency".40 This is as true of Anthony Giddens, whose work The
Consequences of Modernity4l sees the characteristic of modernity as
consisting in a "time-space distanciation", wherein (or whereby) the
reciprocal ties between time and space are decreasing and becoming
contingent (that is to say, they are based on agreements); or as
Zygmunt Bauman, who situates his study within the debate about
Enlightenment made famous by Adorno and Horkheimer's critique,
but, quite unlike the protagonists of the Frankfurt School, takes solace
less from the original project of modernity than from its postmodern
legacy.42 Furthermore, it is significant that the discourse on modernity
is most often conducted at the semantic level, where (to echo Luhmann
again) in attempts to characterize modernity "features are employed
that originate from the repertoire of societal self-descriptions".43 This
corresponds as much to Habermas' well-known essay 'Modernity:
An Incomplete Project', as to Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis: The
52 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
Hidden Agenda of Modernity, a work, incidentally, that Javeed recalls
as important to the trajectory of ILM. I shall engage with this
semantics presently; Luhmann himself is concerned to force home
the point that we remain without adequate structural descriptions of
the characteristics of modernity.44
One can easily see that the matrix of these ideas is ill suited to
pass judgement on specific modernities, or to describe modernity in a
way that is appropriate to its complexity. And yet, one cannot do
away with them as well. Indeed, the degree to which these procedures
are at odds with each other need not concern us here, and those who
affirm that they present requirements that are difficult to render
compatible will be forced either to think their way through a series
of more or less difficult choices or to find some strategy for evading
these choices. ILM, clearly, is adverting to the latter possibility,
although Taylor's way of viewing the matter seems equally impressive.
While accepting modernity as processes whose attributes might vary
in a bewildering fashion from one testimony to another, depending
partly on the area and the group concerned and partly on the
presumptions of the observer, Taylor partitions ideas about modernity
into cultural theories and their acultural counterparts. We have already
alluded to the terms of this contrast in the preceding section and
therefore will not delineate further. The reader may source the content
of these ideas therein; what seems marked out, nevertheless, is that
certain images and contours are particularly appropriate to each other,
but the attributes themselves are partially independent of either type
of demarcation.45 Taylor argues that this form of independent variation
has been a source of great confusion in attempts to explain modernity
- and not simply because, to echo Taylor, "an acultural theory tends
to make us both miss the original vision of the good implicit in Western
modernity and underestimate the nature of the transformation that
brought about this modernity"46 - and urges that theories should be
regarded as just one component, of no more defining importance
than images and contours, of the composite ideas which are the
modernities (mark the plural) in question today. An essential point in
his summation is the realization that the named modernities consist
of "creative adaptation" and that "(a) given society will, indeed must,
adopt the mode for which it has the cultural resources".47
To return, then, to Javeed, the narrative structure of ILM neatly
although not actively sidesteps these choices/results, and it does so
by straining to a remarkable extent on that unembodied surplus (as
separate from entrenched modernity) Javeed calls the space of the
modern. We have commented fairly extensively on aspects of this
partitioning in the foregoing sections; let us attempt a further
assessment. The semantics of the phrase disturbs the identity of
modernity by opening it to its (untapped) potential, but it does so by
transforming those possibilities into necessities, at once moral and
political. It seems imperative to take up the logic of this inversion,
Javeed himself being drawn to it as a marker of an urgency to be
recovered for political criticism today. Recall the work's title India:
Living with Modernity, the 'living with' translating into all that is
complete and to be completed about India's transition to modernity.
Recall also the point about corrigibility that Javeed locates at the
heart of modernity - the principle, really, that the greatest of conflicts
have been waged inside modernity itself. To be sure, there is nothing
new about the contradictory and self-canceling nature of the modern
adventure. In fact, the condition dovetails into the observation set
out at the start of this section, about the most common descriptions
of modern society repeatedly referring to an unusual measure of
contingency. Perhaps it is precisely in this loss of hubris, in the
prevalent messiness of the social world, in the new and unfamiliar
humbleness of expectations, that the hope for responsible action can
be rooted? But Javeed would have us look in another direction - the
need to re-forge contingency from blind fate into a consciously forged
destiny. Recognizing our historical contingency is an insufficient means
for creating a better society. Javeed's nuanced yet positive assessment
of modernity comes grafted onto the legacy that descends from Marx/
Hegel, and which continues to animate struggles in the present.
Doubtless, such political projects live with their own uncertainties
while holding out the hope that the future will not need to be quite so
ambivalent about what has been achieved.48
Essentially, what Javeed is doing is renouncing the terms of the
Weberian story whereby - controversies about when the West entered
the modern period notwithstanding (around 1500 for most historians,
in the seventeenth century for philosophers and historians of science,
sometime after 1850 for those who study literature or the visual arts)
- a narrative about 'disenchantment', rationalization and
secularization comes to dominate the talk about modernity's
distinctive features.49 The consequence of this narrative has been to
make the disparate descriptions of modernity reconcilable and the
individuation of modernities hard to discern. Paradoxically, this is
what Taylor is gesturing at by means of the contrast between cultural
and acultural theories of modernity; but, I suppose, the most awkward
54 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
question to be raised of this analysis is this: what are we to do with
this analysis? The historical choice of repeating the European
transition to modernity has been closed for ever, although the
perspective of "a divergence in convergence" - of a modernity which
even if not coming up with the identical institutions of western
modernity comes up with functionally equivalent ones50- configuring
parts of the analysis seems to retain a semblance of that very choice.
Perhaps it is important to hold on to the rudiments of that choice,
but mark the point. I am maintaining thus against the very grain of
Taylor's proposal that "(an) exclusive reliance on an acultural theory
unfits us for what is perhaps the most important task of social sciences
in our day: understanding the full gamut of alternative modernities
which are in the making in different parts of the world"."s The process
of this demonstration need not concern us here; and, to be sure, I am
not accusing Taylor of being blocked in an ethnocentric prison - such
a charge, incidentally, can be attributed to Partha Chatterjee). But
surely the insistence that the question "Can there be a plurality of
culturally different alternative modernities?" should be subject to the
normative conditions implored by that other question "Can we create
a normatively superior alternative modernity?" implies that nothing
is self-evident or could on some ground be taken for granted.s2
Rather than be trapped or be drawn into the vortex of such
construals, Javeed instead reanalyzes the coordinates of modernity
as various and alternating combinations of his division between
'entrenched modernity' and an 'unembodied surplus' within the
modern. The claims of/for modernity given on any occasion are the
outcome of opposed and irreconcilable dynamic tendencies, towards
consolidation and differentiation, which leads to variations in
conceptions of the modern - for more on this, address broadly the
dynamic of Javeed's chapter 'Modernity and Preferred Futures' (ILM,
27-53) - and the principle responsible (as I could state it) is that of an
analysis claiming for itself the characteristics of its object of study,
namely, modernity. An incidental lesson of this demonstration is that
the clarification achieved is not the result of a genealogical dodge
that happens to prove effective. The outcome is attained the other
way round, as it were, by virtue of an intrinsic separation between
the principle and the very constitution of the genealogy under
investigation. Thus to quote from Javeed all over again: "I am not
asking for a cognitive blindness to genealogy but on the contrary
asking to work in spite of this genealogy" (ILM, 222). To judge by
the variations in what the people themselves are reported to subscribe
to, it may even be that in this part of the world working in spite of
genealogy is actually a mode in which a people really think about the
transition to modernity.53
A QUESTION OF MARXISM
To write about modernity presents an irresistible temptation,
increased no doubt by the currency of that thing called
'postmodernity', which compels us to believe that modernity proper
can now be understood more thoroughly because it is a thing of the
past from which it is possible to take a certain distance. For Marxists,
often, the temptation hardly obtains - the frame of reference in relation
to which they could define themselves has invariably been capitalism
and not modernity - although that situation is now beginning to
change. It is very hard to give a critical justification for any clear
contrast between capitalism and modernity, although it has been
constantly resorted to in the historical study of cultural forms. I do
not doubt a causal connection between them, of course. But what
seems very much a question is whether this causal relation is effected
and mediated by what? Also: how is their necessity being framed - in
relation to what and in what terms? Summarily, inquiries into the
causality of capitalism and/or modernity take such forms as, say, "how
did capitalism secure itself and with what consequences?" or "what
makes modernity secure capitalism?" and, again, "what is it in
capitalism that gives rise to modernity?" - investigations structured,
clearly, by the expectation that some causal activity procured certain
effect by means of some kind of force or immanent logic. Not that
such questions are in principle unjustified or in practice useless; they
could correspond to the way things (have) come to be and thus elicit
something internal to a process of being (or becoming). But it is
frivolous to keep pressing the inquiry in such terms when the answers
do not. always justify them; and it leads only to confusion and
miscomprehension then to posit classes of phenomena which
correspond not to the answers received by to the questions put. The
philosophically-minded historian Hans Blumenberg has called
attention to the ease with which we confuse 'preconditions' (plainly,
the histories of what led up to something) and 'effects' (the aggregate
of the changes which that something causes or that unfold in respect
to it).54 Besides, ideas about 'necessary' and 'sufficient' conditions
too suffer from pitfalls. The contrast of methods, in this case, can
never be an absolute one, since in determining what conditions are
sufficient (for something else), one may still have to get involved in
56 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
determining.what is necessary for those very conditions. If I mention
this line of appraisal, I do so for reasons that hopefully will get clarified
in course; although, to be sure, I am not renouncing the idea of
causality in history, only venturing to develop patterns of historical
causality.55
That this method of explication is far from being a modern piece of
sophistry, or at least a fashionable inversion of postmodern ideas, can be
borne out by reference to an analysis that was published some years ago
within the pages of the leftist journal New Left Review. This is to be
found in Peter Osborne's reflections about what kind of concept
'modernity' is - issuing off Adorno's muse "(m)odernity is a qualitative,
not a chronological, category" and which also passes off as the title of
the essay we are considering here.56 The reflection is of special weight
because (unlike Javeed's prior suggestions about the 'postmodern')
Osborne's account is directed specifically toward confronting Marxism's
neglect of problems in the philosophy of history, as well as squaring up
to the thought that "modernities, in any substantive historical sense,
grow old" and that "(f)ully reflexive conceptions of postmodernity ...
take us back into the paradoxes and aporias of 'modernity' at a higher
conceptual level".7 I report it here with all the more assurance in that
Javeed does not seem to know of it when he wrote ILM and in the
greater expectation, therefore, that it may incline readers (Javeed included)
in favour of the issues at stake.
Osborne begins by framing the many different senses in which
the term 'modernity' can be (and has been) used - the ideas of
modernity as a category of historical periodization, a quality of social
experience, and an incomplete project - and the problematic
conclusions drawn by scholars, Marxists included, concerning the
nature and status of the concept itself. The problem arises from "the
absence in (most) accounts of an independent treatment of the logic
of 'modernity' as a category of historical periodisation ...no
consideration of the way in which the idea of modernity itself marks
a new mode of historical periodisation"(pp.67-68); indeed that
'Modernity' (-) plays a peculiar dual role as a category of historical
periodisation: it designates the contemporaneity of an epoch to the
time of its classification, but it registers this contemporaneity in terms
of a qualitatively new, self-transcending temporality, which has the
simultaneous effect of distancing the present from even that most recent
past with which it is thus identified. It is this paradoxical doubling or
inherently dialectical quality that makes 'modernity' both so irresistible
and so problematic a category (p.73).
This temporal structure, he maintains, has been an abundant
source of equivocation within analysis - between Marxists generally
- oscillating as they seem to be between "two quite different senses of
'modernity': (1) as a flawed and misleading category for the
identification and analysis of historical processes which are better
understood in quite other terms; and (2) as the legitimate designation
for a historical phenomenon, the theoretical comprehension but not
the identification of which is contested" (p.67). Adopting the first
sense, they offer a critique of the discourse of 'modernity'; and yet, as
Osborne discloses, their conclusion emphatically presumes the second
sense: "modernity is a historical reality, capable of 'prolongation',
'fulfillment' and 'abolition"'(ibid.). Osborne frames the 'connection'
thus - "(it) resides in the reflexivity of historical experience itself:
'modernity' has a reality as a form of cultural self-consciousness, a
lived experience of historical time, which cannot be denied, however
one-sided it might be as a category of historical understanding"(ibid.).
Mark the point - it is being suggested that there can be Marxist
accounts of 'modernity' which do not reduce it to a merely ideological
concept. In fact, it is some such presumptions of the latter sort that
makes Marxists uneasy with the category, so that even as modernity
is recognized as a historical given, it is 'given' only as an ideological
form, a mode of experience produced and reproduced by the rhythms
of the capitalist market. Osborne also calls attention to a tendency to
oppose modernity to modes of production - to offer in the place of
the former an alternative Marxist account of historical development,
based on a periodization of modes of production, the rise and decline
of classes and so on - but notes a problem about this opposition
however. As he pithily puts it, it is precisely the idea of a differential
temporality bound up with the concept of modes of production "which
is associated, classically, with the idea of modernity itself" (ibid.).
The problem is that most accounts remain within the tradition of
an unreflexive sociology of modernity wherein - to recall Osborne,
once again - "the attempt to establish what is new about 'modern'
societies fails to reflect upon the temporal coordinates and conceptual
implications of this form of investigation itself" (p.68); and that -
(t)he problem posed by an insufficiently differentiated concept of
modernization..cannot be reduced to a simple opposition of
'homogeneous' to 'differential' historical time. Rather, it concerns the
possibilities and pitfalls built into the dialectics of homogenization and
differentiation constitutive of the temporality of 'modernity', and the
way in which these are tied up, inextricably, with its spatial relations
58 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
(p.74).
I perceive a slippage here, in the very terms of'the opposition
between modernity and conjunctural analysis - that even as the
complex and differential temporality of the latter reproduces the idea
of modernity itself, conjunctural analysis remains an operation to be
negotiated in context, not forsaken for the philosophically modern.
Although remaining within the parameters of modernity's temporal
matrix - pp.73-74 of Osborne has the details - conjunctural analysis
may involve a decisive mutation of the field as well. One need add
here that Javeed's sociology of modernity is not quite reflexive in the
sense being inscribed; it nevertheless comes across as so, within the
framework of a conjunctural analysis of India's transition to
modernity.58
The idea that this matrix conveys is that of a 'transitive' expression,
a designation taken from the analytics of historical investigation and
corresponding to what Osborne has distinguished, with reference to
the concept of modernity itself, as "our primary secular category of
historical totalization"(p.84) - "a form of historical consciousness,
an abstract temporal structure which, in totalising history from the
standpoint of an ever-vanishing, ever-present present embraces a
conflicting plurality of projects, of possible futures, provided they
conform to its basic logical structure"(p.80), although, as is conceded,
which of these projects will turn out to have been truly modern, only
time will tell.59 What happens is that a radical idea passes, by distinct
spatializations, into other senses in which the term ('modern',
'modernity' or even 'the modern age', in this instance) is employed.
Some such spatializations are the result of semantic and temporal
associations - "the differential register of the new historical time
within different European languages is bound up with the different
forms and rates of economic and political development in European
nation-states (p.68, n.6) - but others have their origin "in the repressed
spatial premises of the concept of modernity" (pp.74-75, n.27) and
translates into the possibility that "the significance of modernity for
the non-West (will) never be grasped unless it is apprehended in the
non-West's (changing) spatial relationship to the West" (ibid.). The
prejudice, or principle, under attack here can be shown to be
problematic, however. For if, as Osborne discloses, "new
configurations of 'modernity' will be uncovered in non-'Western'
places" (ibid.), then the impulse to both construe and deny universal
history that undergirds what Osborne is generalizing about the space
of modernity would have to be compromised. It is significant perhaps
that in acceding to the political logic of the concept of modernity,
Osborne is invoking an investigation implicating Japan.60 The
recognition underscoring the latter - that there is no inherent reason
why the West/non-West opposition should determine the geographic
perspective of modernity except for the fact that it definitely serves
to establish the putative unity of the West - need not translate into
the point about new configurations of modernity being uncovered in
non-Western places [although the formulation "(m)odernity is a
Western idea. Whether it can any longer be thought of as an exclusively
Western concept ..however is doubtful"(p.68, n.6) might yield other
suggestions as well.61
Taken together, these comments - on the part of a Marxist - not
only make the point that there could be Marxist accounts of modernity
which operate at a different level of analysis from the concepts of
Marxist political economy, but they argue more fundamentally about
'modernity' as a primary secular category of historical totalisation.
Granted that the historical and analytical importance of the modernity
concept has (thus) been established, the next question is what can
usefully be done to refine our grasp or application of the concept.
This would necessitate a transfer of terms, even a shift of registers -
from an analysis of words or concepts to an evaluation of acts and
operations - in which case a 'contextual' reading has an obvious
claim to attention.62
MIRRORS OF THE PRESENT
Contextualism, on Javeed's standpoint, is less a heuristic device
for identifying the space of the modern, than a theory of the
normativity that modernity constitutes; it is, on this register and as
our engagements of the foregoing pages would have disclosed, a more
radical, more complete contextualism than any previous version of
India's transition to modernity. But what exactly does it mean to say
that a theory of modernity is constitutive in this sense and not just
heuristic? And again, what is one to make of a resort, in this context,
to a politics of the present, to a politics essentially of secular
contingency? Mark the phrase 'secular contingency'; it is a question,
above all, of the rightness and wrongs of India's present. Let me set
up a detour through some strands of ILM, before tracking back.63
Just as we argued, in the paragraph concluding section V, that
since Javeed conceives of "context-bound modernities", and since he
includes a concept of individuation in the normative content of
60 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
modernity, he must also accept that transitions within (and between)
modernities are subject to assessment, so Javeed's concern with ILM
is equally a concern with how context specific developments within
the space of India's modernity are thematizable. Among the
connotations of modernity, Javeed privileges the linkage with
corrigibility - understanding this in a manner enunciated in theses
(i), (ii) and (iii) above in our Sect.II - and argues that in the relevant
sense of the term modernity is corrigibility and corrigibility modernity:
"Within the inner logic of modernity the wait of corrigible is
crucial"(ILM, 11). This is what makes his account more than just a
heuristic device for identifying the space of the modern. The
commitment to having a constitutive theory of this kind comes out
clearly in his refusal to equate modernity with what is encapsulated
in its entrenched form. As we saw, he insists instead that whatever
became entrenched with modernity is historically contingent (indeed
that there is no logical relation between the exclusionary features of
modernity and modernity per se) and that modernity is now being
conditioned as much by its own consequences in the course of its
historical development. More frontally, it comes through in his
understanding that modernity as a process, among other things, of
individuation - the vacillations notwithstanding - and in his insistence
upon "the right to exit" (of a piece with his analysis of individuation)
as a way of balancing the rights of community with those of the
individual. The reason he takes this line is that, for Javeed, most
communities in India are "in their original moorings, continuous
communities; in the sense that they spontaneously renew themselves
to be what they have been"(ILM, 191) - quite unlike communities in
the West "which one could term 'self-created' in the sense ..that the
persons within these communities retain their autonomy ..(and) that
the community is open to critical evaluations both from the individuals
within and outside it"(ibid.). Consequently, therefore, whatever
pattern there may be in the way forms of conduct relate to community
values, they are to be derived from the fact that "(i)f a community's
right to a way of life cannot be questioned on democratic grounds,
then it can be done only on the basis that the community justify and
defend what it enforces on individuals as obligatory"(ILM, 207).
Grounding these claims are of course some context-specific
developments within the space of India's modernity. It may be
necessary to consider how these are being thematized. It was - and it
remains - a question of a struggle for a certain pluralism, not only in
the context of early nationalism (1880s and 1890s) and the ideologies
of nationhood inscribed therein, but also in the context of how the
nationality question has played itself out in India. Thus Javeed:
"Taking everything into consideration, we are still left with the
interpretative problem with which we started fixing some
responsibility on early nationalist thought for providing the
justificatory basis for the contemporary fusion of the communal and
the national or, in other words, the collapse of the national into the
communal and the manner in which it fills the public space"(ILM,
161).64 More specifically, he is trying to establish what is right (in
some independent sense of right) by looking at what is happening
within the space of tradition - "(t)hat (-) intellectual moves (within
the space of tradition) were provoked by challenges from outside the
domain of tradition"(ILM, 173), that since modernity in India came
as a package with colonialism "the dialogue took place, in many an
instance though not necessarily, caught between defeat, domination
and humiliation of being under foreign rule on the one hand, and on
the other ..the flattening of differences juristically and the consequent
sense of pain at being made to look inferior"(ILM, 172) - and that
the consequent interpretative stress and the narrowing of the space
within the tradition has had the result of "creat(ing) a neat distinction
between the 'modern' and the traditional or the 'secular' and
religious"(ibid.).65 The very linkage between community culture and
related traditions and politics, Javeed avers, must be approached in
terms of a particular paradox underwriting the 'public sphere' in
India - "the conditions which gave rise to the emergence of the public
sphere in India were, paradoxically, the ones which led later to its
contraction" (ILM, 206) - and, again, that "(t)he success of Hindutva
forces in silencing many other forms of politics has been achieved by
their ability to bypass and overrule the institutions of the State and
civil society" (ILM, 199).66
The bedrock, clearly, is secular contingency, and that is where, to
turn an essentially Wittgensteinian motif on its head, the rightness
and wrongs of India's present is being posited. Politically, at least, a
particular interest attaches to this thematization. On the one hand, it
is geared towards a distinct purpose and contributes to recovering an
urgency for Left theorizing and praxis in India today; but on the
other hand the results have to be qualified, and it has to be conceded
that the thematization does not possess the kind of certainty or
decidability that its notation appears to promise. Perhaps I can
elaborate; it may be necessary, after all, to bring the teleology
implicating ILM, as it turns into the meaning and significance of past
62 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
'acts' and present 'events' back to the conditions and circumstances
of its signifying.67
It is by no means clear that the battles about the nature and object
of India's modernity are not entirely pointless, but, as with every
question of modernity, in which a political charge is concealed - the
qualification, I reiterate, is important - it makes sense to add to the
question: to attempt understanding how the development of modernity
causes a flutter in the fabric of social relations and situations, and
also to look for the threats to modernity and the logic which provides
their rationale. For every question of India's modernity, therefore,
we need to supplement a more crucial and complex question, that of
the trajectory and sequence of its modernity. The issue must now
arise of how, or whether, independently perceived sequences (of
histories) might be related to each other; and whether, in order to
apprehend the particularity of a situation, it might be necessary to
institute certain distinctions and separations, as a guarantee of
specifically historical modes of argumentation. Javeed, to be sure, is
sensitive to these lines of work, frequently adducing to the recurrence
of forms of thought and practice, the poverty and peculiarities of
modes of historical explanation in the political thought of a period,
as well as being concerned, all through, to construct a framework in
which these complicities could become intelligible. And what has been
adduced as the bedrock of ILM, namely, secular contingency, need
not dissolve these thematic either.
But suppose we think more abstractly and along two poles of
development: one centering on object-level contentions about a
contextual (or context-bound) modernity, of the sort which ask about
the denotatum of an expression (say, of an India living with
modernity), whether the objects picked out by that expression are
necessarily so or not (what could translate into a fallibility thesis
about modernity generally, the claim really that modernity does not
necessarily have positive (or universal) value, and that therefore there
cannot be a context-free definition of modernity) and the second pole
focusing on the meta-level issue of whether the contents of context-
bound modernity can (or should) be explicated free of certain
normative criteria, and serving as the basis of the claim that any
object denoted by context-free concepts is itself not constituted by
any contingent quality (the neutrality thesis). A lot of space exists for
theoretical maneuver with respect to each of these poles - deflected
on to the terrain of the rightness and wrongs of a present - and strictly
speaking they are variations upon each other (although they cannot
be equated or lumped together in one compact claim).68 One may
nevertheless debate the quick conclusion from the neutrality thesis to
the fallibility thesis, just as the fallibility thesis is essentially querying
the imperatives governing the neutrality thesis. The former derivation
is quite clearly mistaken on the ground that something obtains as a
'factual object' does not mean that it is not valuable in the light of a
normative principle. Moreover, the precise logical relation between
both the poles has never been properly accounted for, and the common
practice of arguing contextually for a context-free stipulation of the
contents of modernity and then concluding that either object-level
contentions are sufficient or that meta-level descriptions are necessary
turns out to be philosophically problematic. Thinking about how the
neutrality thesis might bear on the truth (or falsity) of the fallibility
thesis, although it does not straightforwardly imply it, could still be
important. The neutrality thesis, in a manner of speaking, is nothing
but a suggestion for a criterion of adequacy that eliminates those
stipulations of modernity that would incorporate moral criteria and
thus have a direct impact on the fallibility thesis. A corollary question,
therefore, would be whether the neutrality thesis is an acceptable
restriction for an explication of the contents of modernity.
An analogous scheme, without of course implicating our terms
of appraisal, is put forward in Akeel Bilgrami. In a wide-ranging
discussion incorporating the conceptual frameworks of liberal political
theory, he suggests a distinction between a normatively ordered
position and a descriptively orchestrated one; and stresses, especially
in the context of the communitarian critique of liberalism, that a
descriptive acknowledgement of the fact "that many sections of a
given population may have fundamental communitarian
commitments" need not entail the normative stand that this is a "good
thing" - even that one could take into account the descriptive fact of
communities and communitarian commitments and adopt the
contrary normative stance of thinking community to be a crippling
curb on individual assertion and self-respect. The thought
underscoring this analysis is an interesting one: making a case against
classical liberalism (as represented by a tradition from Mill to Rawls)
that is "entirely independent of the truth of communitarianism".69 If
I am not quite convinced, this is for reasons that should find their
place in a monograph on method rather than in the present advertences
to the importance of descriptive/analytical commitments.70
I mention Bilgrami's interesting proposal, however, as an example
of one life of possible progress. If it is accepted that there could be
64 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
different accounts of modernity (even of context-bound modernities)
vide the two poles/theses alluded above, then a conceivable way of
conflating the various levels has an obvious claim to attention. The
difficulty --as indeed the challenge - created by Javeed's self-
interpretation of the space of right, displaced on to the terrain of
India's modernity, lies precisely here. It seems a fair inference that
what we have been adducing as the bedrock of ILM also translates
into the imperative that different regions of practical space reproduce
or satisfy certain demands of modernity (what I shall henceforth
condense as the axiomatic of secular-national contingency).
Conversely, it would be of similar importance if a further
concentration on this axiomatic were to discriminate a variety of
modes in which it might be employed. Doubtless this has already
been demonstrated in effect to be problematic vide the distinction,
posited by Bilgrami, between a normatively ordered position and a
descriptively orchestrated one. But it can be argued that the framework
of this construal cannot have the same purchase on political and
cultural phenomena/developments (as I hinted above and in n.70).
Besides, if it is accepted that the term national is ambiguous - it can
refer to a site, one not necessarily defined in terms of territory (though
boundaries are certainly important), and it can also refer to a basis
for a movement or claim to gain control of that site - and/or that
narration's which focus on the national as a site cannot have the
same order to determinacy as those which stress the national as the
basis for a movement, then it is very much a question whether a
discrimination of distinct modes of secular-national contingency is
usefully practicable in discussions about (India's) modernity.71
I think there may well be something to gain by drawing out the
implications of a thesis central to ILM: that 'modernity' is the primary
moral predicate, not nationhood and/or nationalism; nationhood is
defined simply as a constituting positivity. The periodisation, I guess,
is important - from 1880s and 1890s, the making of the nationalist
platform, specifically, to Independence and thereafter, the thereafter
translating into the communally charged politics of the 1980s and
1990s. As enunciated in thesis (i) of our Sect.II, that there are streams
of nationalism within this positivity will mean, for Javeed, that they
are contextually determined, not mandatory, although, of course, they
can (and have been) mandatory in determining a whole course of
politics in twentieth century India. It is in discussing the contradictory
content of Indian nationalism as laying the intellectual foundations
and the cultural contours of the subsequent politics that Javeed
observes - "(i)f, before Independence, the 'nation' was to give birth
to the State, after Independence, by a reversal of roles, the State was
to absorb the nation and become its sole spokesman"(ILM, 147). Of
this reconstitution he maintains, in an intriguing formulation, that
"nothing" short of granting complete equality to all nationalities,
big or small, highly developed or still in the process of formation,
will overcome conflicts between national groups. Anything less
remains within the logic of nationalism - a logic which cannot answer
to the recurring contestations of the various national claims"(ILM,
160).72 Note how this formulation rides over the ambiguity attaching
to the term national even as it unhesitatingly posits it; even more
specifically in the context of the point that "(i)n the post-colonial
situation in countries like India, the national question is no more
than the contestation of a variety of national claims internal to the
nation-state" (ibid.).73 The specific dilemma that this translates into
concerns the intertwining of modernity and nationalism and, although
ILM does not have an explicit theory about this intertwining, it turns
on the question of reworking modernity as a "living need". To insist
that modernity is constitutive of how we make sense of our world,
while at the same time lamenting the increasingly contradictory ways
that the lineaments of modernity have been refracted through society
- as Javeed is wont to do - may be a comprehensible stance, but it
can nevertheless be a fundamentally incoherent stipulation,
misunderstanding how exempla derive and maintain their force for a
culture as a whole.74 Everything, to be sure, is a matter of proportion
and degree; and I think Javeed does have a perspective to offer.
Precisely because nothing would be more futile than trying to legislate
still another set of imperatives to judge the legitimacy of how
modernity/the present is represented and invoked, it is all the more
important to consider each instance on its own terms. Perhaps the
paradigm which best encapsulates this central lesson of ILM is
individuation, the matrix and crucible of modernity's reconstitution.
It is worth spelling out the issues at stake in this constellation,
because so often writers (Javeed included) who theorize about
modernity/nationalism want to have it both ways - they insist, that
is, on drawing global conclusions from an experience whose specific
characteristics they also regard as singularly concrete. Consider, for
example, Benedict Anderson, a figure at the forefront of contemporary
theorizing about nationalism. Introducing a comprehensive and
definitive reader on the subject, he writes: "It (is) gradually becoming
clear that it (is) impossible to think about nationalism except
66 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
comparatively and globally: but it (is) also very difficult to feel it,
and act politically on it, in any but particular terms".7s At the same
time, from another angle, we are told that what makes nationalism
pivotal is that it is, at bottom, nothing more (or less) than a necessary
and thoroughly functional response to the 'Great Transformation'
from static agrarian society to the world of industry and mechanical
communication.76 But if nationalism is so all-encompassing because
it is modern, or, in a still darker formulation, because it exposes the
deep complicity between the same 'Enlightened' industrial modernity
(which in Gellner's view had created nationalism) and the fact of
imperialism and colonial domination,77 then its pertinence to past
'acts' and present 'events' is scarcely self-evident. If, on the other
hand, the point is that nationalism is modern "because it is a typically
modern way of responding to the threat represented by the advancing
wave of modernization",78 then there is nothing singularly concrete
about it; it could also be obtaining, on this register, in the heart of
Europe, in the course of the European transition to modernity.79 The
history of serious thinking about nationalism, its hiatuses and bursts
of energy (to adapt the terminology of Anderson) cannot be
distinctively revelatory about nationalism as such, and about
specifically post-Enlightenment European culture, without
unintentionally making that culture the privileged explanatory model
for the entire world. It is, I think, the injury to European self-esteem,
as much as to its destructive facets, that is being highlighted in abstruse
formulations like Chatterjee's - well, not quite Chatterjee, but surely
Dipesh Chakrabarty or even Balagangadhara80 - and it is a notably
European crisis of representation and understanding that nationalism
is so readily accorded its position at the heart of modernity's self-
interrogation.81 Nationalism may still be the only locus where
philosophical and sociological reflections in this part of the world -
as also the West, I guess - can proceed untroubled by globalizing
impulses, and if there is a kind of unconscious cultural imperialism
in the ways that nationalism is being used as a universal gauge for
representing the frontiers of humanity, this only demonstrates how
thoroughly the discourse about nationalism has been absorbed into
the traditional terminology and practices of the very systems whose
assumptions it supposedly discredited.82
At this point, the problems of methodological imprecision and
descriptive adequacy return. It may not quite be fair to spell out our
judgement as such, but the grammatical ambiguity of such
pronouncements as "India living with modernity" or that "there is
no going back in history" - even the formulation of individuation as
the matrix and crucible of modernity reconstitution - is unlikely to
be causal. Javeed employs these notions to suggest both coherence
and centrality, and indeed as we have laboured to suggest there obtain
levels of coherence and centrality. Yet, the criteria required to decide
what is dominant (and what is determinate) in a composite formation
are missing; so too, in fact, are criteria for defining the composition.83
One might formulate these difficulties in precise terms as follows; an
elaboration could wait another occasion. There is what can be called
the descriptive (over)determinacy problem: what we 'know' is
overdetermined conceptually by our capacity to describe it. So it is
not merely that description, as instrument of knowledge, is
contingently limited; it seems to overreach itself to the frontiers of
what can be known. Grafted on to the space of ILM, the problem
would go like this: Javeed thinks that there is something about India's
modernity which can and ought be known; and it turns out that his
description of it (the theory which makes his account of the transition
to modernity more than just a heuristic device for identifying the
space of the modern) in fact overdetermines what can and ought be
known about India's modernity. The other aspect of these difficulties
matches what we have just outlined. If overdetermination shows that
we conceptually construct (by 'description') the full extent of what
we 'know', then the other difficulties show us that attempts to cognize
over that full extent produce contradictions within our descriptive
apparatus. These are the paradoxes of scale, the most obvious problem
being self-inclusion. Does 'everything that is the case' include itself?
To put it ontologically: is our description of the world itself a part of
the world or not? And, if so, which world? This throws up difficulties
of philosophical interpretation. Removing the description entirely
from the world it describes is hardly an answer. The trouble is that
such an interpretation, even apart from the question of where it is
coming from, still seems to be subject to problematical restrictions.84
In sum, then, and in keeping with our strictures above (and in the
foregoing pages), the simple ascription of 'Reality' to 'world' fails to
apprehend the manner in which description and world interact as
part of the same process. To be sure, there are various ways in which
this can be represented; in which case, I think, we ought to be returning
to the pages of ILM, so as to recover something that is formalised
into our current system of descriptions about modernity, and about
India's modernity. A final; word, nevertheless.
68 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
CODA
All too often, disquisitions about change take the form of an
evasion of the changes. I am not saying that this has happened with
Javeed, but to insist - as I do - that change cannot be applied to any
referent does not mean that it cannot be used for an act of reference.
In this oscillation between a possible referent of change and the use
of changes in an act of reference, there lurks an ambiguity that has
been the cause of many debates on the ontology of reference.85 The
problem that arises immediately - in the contexts that we have been
setting out to elucidate - is whether a set of changes can be interpreted
and seen as consistent or inconsistent without bringing in something
external to change. It is the strength of Javeed's argument that he
bases it on a laboured conception of the materials available to the
internal interpretation. On the crudest understanding of that
interpretation - their difficulties and challenges notwithstanding - it
is an attempt above all to comprehend modernity through change;
and, accordingly, reverses the procedure of comprehending change
through modernity. The difference is difficult, but crucial; and
everytime I wondered how I would have reorganized ILM if I had to
write it, I would say to myself that Javeed's reversal would have to be
turned over. In fact, it would be interesting to begin by starting with
what happens when, subjected to the pressure of a dynamical object,
namely, change - the fact and the value of change - one decides to
consider it as (if you will) a terminus ad quo rather than as a terminus
ad quem. That is to say, an analysis devoted less to the end-point of a
process of change (terminus ad quem) than an analysis of the ways in
which changes are produced (terminus ad quo).
The decision to state the problem of change thus, in terms of its
being a terminus ad quo rather than as terminus ad quem, implicates,
I believe, Marx, and necessitates a longer historical dynamic than a
merely chronological or even discontinuous rendering of the periods
in question. This said, it is important not to fall, once again, into an
opposition of the type "primary process - secondary elaboration",
especially if this opposition were to be founded - as is the case with
Javeed (and many others, across an ideological spectrum) - on the
idea that the passage from the premodern (or even nonmodern) to
the modern corresponds to a disruption of levels in the modes of
differentiation. Here there seems to be real issue for historians and
sociologists, as indeed for Marxists. But again, because this initial
dichotomy (terminus ad quo/terminus ad quem) may seem reductive,
one has to go a step further: engage the contextual question of
particular modernities (in time, as in space). There is no avoiding
Javeed, I guess; there is no avoiding the questions that escape his
programming either.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. I am very grateful to Social Scientist for the opportunity of this review
discussion, but must apologize to Javeed, primarily, for the delay. The work
I have chosen to accord an extended and (perhaps) abstract treatment here is
a work with which I feel the strongest of affinities; and precisely because of
this - as its dialectical underside, as it were - I have tried to sharpen the poles
of its practice. I also owe my thanks to Seemanthini Niranjana for overseeing
the drafts. Walter Benjamin has written somewhere that citations from his
works were like highwaymen who suddenly descend on the reader to rob
him/her of their convictions. Benjamin meant this quite literally, I think,
while the citations anchoring my treatment, as indeed the treatment itself,
only attempt to embody this procedure. The line from Marx quoted at the
beginning of this review is from A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (its pagination eludes me for the moment); that of Robert Blanche
from the absorbing Axiomatics (Trans. G.B. Keene) London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1962, p.15.
2. Cited in Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience
(London: Routledge, 1998), p.46.
3. For a thoroughly rhetorical albeit catachretic summation, see Fredric Jameson,
'Cognitive Mapping' in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (ed.), Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1988)
pp.347-57.
4. The terminology 'contradictions of progress' is traceable back to Marx, and
especially to his (infamous?) notes on India. Strangely enough, Aijaz Ahmad
in orchestrating a defense of Marx does not allude to this line of appraisal.
See his 'Marx on India: A Clarification' in In Theory: Classes, Nations,
Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), pp.221-42. Ahmad, doubtless, is
concerned to interrogate certain procedures of cultural criticism that have
taken shape in the wake of Edward Said and the study of 'colonial discourse'
generally. I believe that some of the proposals anchoring ILM are in keeping
with the spirit of those notes (of course, substituting for some of Marx's
fanciful references on India the categories and concepts of historical
scholarship and political criticism). The Orientalism problematic, as I
understand it, has served to distract from questions of change and historical
periodization. And, what is more, in this case, the distraction is not merely a
question of theoretical ambiguity or error of judgement; it is an error in the
conception itself. The problem is not so with Javeed, or even Marx.
5. Difficulties notwithstanding, the most nuanced discussion of the ideology of
the renouncer is Louis Dumont. See his 'World Renunciation in Indian
Religions' in Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, Complete revised English
edition), pp.267-86. On the concept of epoch central to the temporal
consciousness of modernity, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the
Modern Age (Trans. R.N.Wallace) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983,
70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
pp.457-82. For Blumenberg, broadly, "the legitimacy of the modern age is
not the legitimation of its specific constituent elements under all possible
circumstances" (ibid., p.240), which leaves open the question of (I) just how
much is involved in the claim for legitimacy and (ii) how we can accept
something as a necessary component in our legitimation of modernity if we
do not know the full story of the motivation of the modern tradition. Mark
these two lines of contention: all claims for legitimation are as puzzling finally
as the claims about modernity. We shall be straddling these contours (and
much else) in the pages that follow.
6. Thus Javeed: "The process of individuation is also the moment of multiple
birth - of claims and experiences and expectations in life" ('Indispensability
of Secularism', Social Scientist, Vol.27 (7-8) 1998, p.4). Cf. also Chs. 3 and
9 of ILM passim and the paragraph concluding our Sect.V below. Readers
need note the specific ambiguity attaching to the notion of modality (or
mode). Conceived in the Kantian sense, it designates a form of the knowing
subject; but it may also be taken as a form in which something reacts to the
problematization of its problem. I will be returning to this ambiguity in due
course, and therefore reserve further comment.
7. I am for the moment deferring the question about the exact content or status
of Javeed's construal of individuation, although the latter constitutes a theme
that would attract the full sweep of the Marxist appraisal. For Marx, any
critique must concern conditions of possibility, yes; but 'conditions' translated
in the context of the social and material forms of life of the subject. The
question to be posed of any conception of knowledge, subject or experience
must concern the kind of society in which such a conception of knowledge/
subject/experience is plausible. Thus the conception that knowledge starts
with the passive reception of the data of the senses, and that the reception of
such data is by an individual or epistemologically self-sufficient subject, will
seem overwhelmingly plausible in a society in which, effectively, human beings
are functioning as atomic individuals. That is to say, in a society whose rules,
institutions and constitutive practices define persons as self-determined but
essentially interchangeable individuals, and in which, consequently, they have
lost sight of the ways in which the objects they have to deal with are shaped
by social labour.
To this characteristically epistemological ground of critique must be opposed
a sequence of specifically moral claims drawing on the authority of (we can
say) Kant, especially the latter's invention of his action-guiding principle of
morality. These two enterprises, morality and epistemology, are, to be sure,
held together by a pair of guiding questions. First, Kant's claim that we
ourselves legislate the moral law creates a new conception of autonomy.
How does this differ from earlier notion of self-governance, and how did the
very idea of morality as self-governance develop out of a Christian
understanding of morality as obedience to God? Second, Kant (like Marx
after him) is an egalitarian, in so far as he holds that everyone has the capacity
to will the moral law for themselves; but how did this picture of our capacities
overturn the conviction that there exist moral experts (human or divine)
whose advice or edicts most of us must follow? For a thorough, and distinctive,
treatment of these themes, see J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy:
A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1998). The challenge, of course, is to go beyond Kantian themes, but
without taking on board Hegel's way of thinking. Read on.
8. Note the considerations foregrounded herein; they will receive extended
treatment in the sections to follow. The issue concerns both a logical problem
- say, of an unauthorized slippage between two levels of discourse, the
prescriptive and the descriptive - and one of a straining within and against
'significant language' (to use a phrase from Wittgenstein) that any reflection
on concepts must accept. The issue needs to be taken seriously, if we are to
avoid dissolving the contingency that one is describing. Wittgenstein, of
course, was querying our capacity to rationally discourse about ethics: that
ethics is an attempt to say something that cannot be said, a running up against
the limits of language. See his 'A Lecture on Ethics', Philosophical Review,
Vol.74, 1965, pp.3-12. By way of an elaboration, Wittgenstein further
contrasted absolute with relative value, taking the latter to involve a
predetermined standard (as when we say that this is a good table, and mean
by 'good' that the table comes up to a certain standard of excellence for
tables). Thus such judgements, being relative to a predetermined standard,
are in Wittgenstein's view simply disguised statements of fact. As such they
do not express what he regards as absolute or ethical value (ibid., pp.5-6).
Rendered thus, I suppose, there can be a way of judging a concept - a condition
- without smoothing over what that concept/condition can entail, namely,
contingency. How does this operation obtain within the narrative spaces of
ILM? Our examination will hopefully yield an answer. Note, however, that
it is not going to be our contention that the universal horizon ought be
unthought or jettisoned. Indeed, the very critique of universals gains its force,
so to say, from a universal; for the universalism-particularism divide, in terms
of its competing imperatives, can also be an argument between different forms
of the universal perspective. Nor are we, for that matter, concerned to straddle
the space of a relativist construal. Indeed, the claim that certain kinds of
social conditions were necessary for certain kinds of conceptual/theoretical
development need not imply relativism. Specific social conditions were
certainly propitious for the development of, say, modern physical science,
but the content of that science does not depend for its validity on any kind of
social context. In short, questions of historical cause are not to be confused
with questions of logical ground or empirical soundness. There is of course
a complex web of methodological considerations involved here, impinging
on questions of discovery and justification as well as turning on a distinction
between what is constitutive to a theory/concept (or tradition) and what is
merely a modified part of it. Moreover, there is the whole problem of the
'should' - the straining within and against 'significant language'? - in a word,
the imperative and prescriptive dimension of (our) concepts, that must be
grasped (and which, I need mention, most arguments for or about contingency
smooth over). Javeed, in particular, might maintain that this is precisely the
motivation behind the contextualist allusions of his work; and yet there can
be difficulties, as we shall see. Well, it is not always easy to be a Marxist and
find one's feet within Marxism. I make another overture in the direction of
Wittgenstein in n.15 below.
9. Robert Blanche, Axiomatics, op. cit., pp.11-12.
10. It seems imperative to reiterate here that in a formalized subject which, for
instance, Blanche is recounting - namely, axiomatics - the concepts that are
taken for basic can properly be described as axioms. An axiom is not thought
72 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
to require demonstration; it is accepted without proof as the basis for the
logical deduction of other statements. The concepts that I shall implicate in
the sections that follow are not strictly axioms by this latter criterion, for
they are instruments of thought or predicates of possible judgements rather
than propositions. Besides, I am concerned to debate less words than acts
and operations, meaning by the latter not something strictly logical or mental.
The points underscoring n.7 and n.8 above are what I have in mind. Of
course, it is another matter than I am resorting to this relation almost as if it
had an axiomatic quality.
11. Partha Chatterjee, 'Modernity, Democracy and a Political Negotiation of
Death', South Asia Research, Vol.19 (2) 1999, p.106.
12. Ibid., pp.107-109.
13. Ibid., p.107.
14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Trans. D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe),
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969, #105. A preliminary, albeit narrowly oblique,
line of appraisal encountering the ground of Partha Chatterjee can be had in
my 'In the Tracks of Community and Identity: Deepening the Interrogations'
(forthcoming in a volume edited by Surinder Jodhka and published by Sage
India).
15. I have often pondered the use and the resources of the late Wittgenstein for
political theory. I am not as convinced about his procedures as I once was,
nevertheless. But do see James Tully, 'Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy:
Understanding Practices of Critical Reflection', Political Theory Vol.17 (2)
1989, pp.172-204.
16. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Ch.2 passim.
17. For the latest, see his review of Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India in Raritan,
Vol.18 (3) 1999, pp.135-47. As he observes therein: "I would distinguish ()
between on the one hand someone like Ashis Nandy, who despite some
strikingly original and interesting claims, is prone to a quite unrealistic and
uncritical yearning for an India uncontaminated by modern institutions, and
on the other someone like Partha Chatterjee, who over the years has written
most penetratingly of the long-standing class character of the national
movement and the Indian state. What makes Chatterjee nevertheless fall in
line with the antimodernists is that he often equates (or derives) this quite
correct understanding of the Indian state with a more generalized rejection
of Enlightenment conceptions of sovereignty and reason - an equation (or
derivation) that requires more steps of argument than he gives, or perhaps
can be given" (Bilgrami, ibid., p.146). I return to this axis of appraisal in
Sect.VIII.
18. See his review of Partha Chatterjee's edited book Texts of Power: Emerging
Disciplines in Colonial Bengal in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.56 (1) 1997,
pp.223-25. The lines quoted are on p.224.
19. For some passing comments see my essay cited in n.14 above. But of course
the final word on this constellation must remain with Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory,
op.cit.
20. These passages from Javeed have been cited at some length for reasons that
will be taken up later on. In his review of ILM, Achin Vanaik has been
concerned precisely to emphasize some of these lines of argument; especially,
Achin makes much of Javeed's maneuvers underscoring the complicities
between the religio-cultural and the modernist-secular currents of nationalist
thought in India. See his 'What Kind of Modernity?' Economic and Political
Weekly, Vol.34 (27) 1999, pp.1769-71. Mark also the lines that I have
italicized in the text. As already mentioned, I return to these questions in
Sect.VIII below.
21. I am alluding of course to Partha Chatterjee's paper 'A Response to Taylor's
Invocation of Civil Society' (Working Papers and Proceedings of the Center
for Psychosocial Studies, Chicago, No.39, 1990). Cf. also his The Nation
and its Fragments, op.cit. pp.228-39. It is significant that Chatterjee is
targeting Charles Taylor, a scholar at the foreground of understanding the
ethnocentricity that grips contemporary thought. The formulation 'entrenched
modernity' in Javeed, incidentally, is drawn from Taylor. The latter's
magisterial Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989) forces home the point,
among other things, that "(m)odernity is often read through its least
impressive, most trivializing offshoots" (ibid., p.511). Akeel Bilgrami's
observation, as recounted in n.17 above, is also pertinent in this context. An
effort to correct this assimilation perhaps underscores the turns that have
come to characterize Chatterjee's discourse. See especially his 'Talking about
our Modernity in Two Languages', Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences,
Vol.2, 1996, pp.153-69, as also the SOAS lecture cited earlier. His attempt
to characterize alternative modernities marks definitely an attempt to resist
the thrust of the antimodernist crusade. I engage with aspects of this terrain,
as also with Taylor, in Sect.VI below.
22. The review is in Biblio, March-April 1998, pp.15-16. The lines that I cite in
the rest of this paragraph are on p.16.
23. Cf. especially the chapter "Community Culture in Politics" of ILM (pp.191-
212). As Javeed asks therein, having noted the repressive features of
communities in India, "(t)he crucial question is, can the right to a way of life
be claimed on behalf of a community when the exercise of the same is denied
to the individual?" (ILM, 207). And, soon enough, acutely comments: "If a
community's right to a way of life cannot be questioned on democratic
grounds, then it can be done only on the basis that the community justify
and defend what it enforces on individuals as obligatory" (ibid.). Meanwhile,
of course, Javeed has observed that he remains unconvinced of Chatterjee's
argument that only reform through internal representative institutions is a
source of changes in the community and all else (including or especially the
site of the state) is coercive. The argument of Chatterjee is in his 'Secularism
and Toleration', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.29 (28) 1994, pp.1768-
77. For Javeed: "Pre-modern communities in India do not give individuals
the right to exit, which is crucial to the pressure for internal reforms felt
within communities and from outside their boundaries, including the State
and other communities whose practices may differ from their own" (ILM,
195-96). What perplexes me are these gestures, potentially, in a liberal
direction and in a seemingly radical (nationalist?) discourse. I hope to
complicate the axis of this construal someday; but address also the ground I
cover in Sect.VIII below.
24. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997.
25. Ibid., pp.9 and 1 respectively. The subsequent lines that I cite in the text are
on p.8.
74 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
26. Cf. Bilgrami apropos The Idea of India: "As one might expect, there is in all
this an old combination of sentimentality and intellectual passion, which
does not always make for clear thinking about Nehru and his 'Idea of India"'
(op.cit., p.138). Perhaps the procedures inscribing The Idea of India are the
problem: "Political history has been neglected - the doings of the state, of its
elites, and of the many significant individuals in India's twentieth century
history. Whatever political history has been written has remained imprisoned
by the imperial mode of administrative history or, in its post-1947 analogue,
diplomatic history, or it has been repetitious nationalist hagiography. The
attempt to see the larger picture through new eyes has rarely been risked"
(Khilnani, ibid., pp.2-3).
27. Sunil Khilnani, ibid., p.34.
28. As I discovered in the process of this review, a book - titled, yes, Modernity's
Edges: Essays Postcolonial and Modern - assembling together my various
papers on a body of convergent themes (and scholars) seems perfectly
plausible. I should have more to say when that work sees the light of day.
29. Note these passages constitute my rummaging through Part IV of ILM.
Chapter 3, 'Rendering Modernity Communicable' is crucial to the
architectonic of these passages.
30. The distinction is problematical, as we shall see, but I go along only to animate
another set of issues. The distinction can be had in Taylor, 'Inwardness and
the Culture of Modernity' in Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe
and Albrecht Wellmer (ed.), Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished
Project of Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp.88-110.
See, for an update, Taylor, 'Two Theories of Modernity', Public Culture,
Vol.11 (1) 1999, pp.153-74.
31. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures
(Trans. F Lawrence) Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, p.7. Chs.1 and 12 of
this work are also important. Cf. again Habermas, 'Modernity: An Incomplete
Project' in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture
(Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), pp.3-15.
32. Mark the plural modernities - we shall have to engage with this modality.
The plural, of course, crosscuts the singularity of any framework of
enunciation engaging (in this case) India's transition to modernity. I can only,
for the moment, beseech the reader's patience. As should be discernible, I
spurn the device of summarizing a discussion, opting rather to work with a
series of points and counterpoints.
33. William Rehg has written that "Taylor's analysis of the internal relation between
description and evaluation does not differ radically from (a discourse-ethical)
account of the internal link between moral norms and values" (Insight and
Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jurgen Habermas, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994, p.116). While this might seem an understating of the
difference between Habermas and Taylor, I cannot quite accept the division across
the space of their thought, that one (Habermas' account) corresponds to an
'acultural' theory and the other (Taylor's) to a 'cultural' account. I think the
binary is overstated, but see Sect.VI below. Cf. also Taylor on the logic and
ontology of 'strong evaluation' in Sources of the Self, op.cit., Chs.l-4 passim
and Habermas' essay 'Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional
State' in Amy Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of
Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp.107-48.
34. Cf. Terry Pinkard, Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Robert B. Pippin, Hegel's
Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-consciousness (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1989). An useful review discussion is Karl Ameriks, 'Recent
Work on Hegel: The Rehabilitation of an Epistemologist?', Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Vol.LII (1) 1992, pp.177-202.
35. My edition of the Phenomenology is the old Torchbook edition (1967),
mistranslated as The Phenomenology of Mind and introduced by the
prominent Marxist scholar George Lichtheim. Here the lines that I cite in the
text go as "it is not difficult to see that our epoch is a birth-time, and a
period of transition" (Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Trans. J.B. Baillie,
New York: Harper and Row, 1967, p.75). It is striking to see how much the
ambiance and mood of these thoughts find echo in Javeed. Note also how in
the context of these gestures the 'cultural-acultural' binary of Taylor's scheme
gets deflected on to the fraught surface of (a) historicism. It is not surprising
that Taylor himself has been a keen student of Hegel's thought - having
written extensively on the latter - although, in Taylor's view, Hegel seriously
misunderstood the dynamics of modern life. Hegel's importance for Taylor
is that the former posed what for the latter is the modern question - how to
unite radical autonomy with an expressive unity with nature. Mark, again,
how Javeed's poser that modernity, among other things, is also about
individuated persons deflects off this circumstance. For Taylor on Hegel, see
Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979),
which incidentally is an adaptation of a longer earlier work. As for Hegel's
historicism, Terry Pinkard, op.cit., has argued, off the Phenomenology, that
it is essentially a dialectical-historical narrative of how European thought
has reached this distinctively modern outlook, through the successive reflective
critique of all supposedly necessary and authoritative principles which have
been taken to provide an external grounding for our practices. For the
Phenomeniology, the grounding can only come from within our own historical
evolution and experiences, in which the authoritative principles of modern
science or political morality are shown to have evolved out of the rational
critique of their predecessors.
36. Cf. again the points propounded in our Sect.II above - and perhaps then this
curious structure would become discernible. There is a sense in which
'modernity' is not historicist, and I engage aspects of this terrain in Sect.VII.
Javeed obviously is not receptive to such nuances of thematization, although
it is a part of the refrain of ILM that we have to reach out for subtler accounts
of cultural borrowing and conceptual transfers. Nuance, it seems, has always
to be about objects, and need not absorb the subject constituting the object.
Marxists (and others) may do well to examine aspects of the first thesis of
Marx's 'Theses on Feuerbach'. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social
Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Trans. R. Nice) Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1984, pp.466-84.
37. It is striking that when Javeed is trying to recuperate the philosophical
discourse of modernity (Chs.1&2 are more or less emblematic) he does so
predominantly against the background of a putatively established
postmodernism. Alternatively, when he is engaging the space of a more
contextual determination - that is to say, when he enters more concretely
into the "experiential" world of India (Ch.3 as indeed Part II and III passim)
76 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
- it is an immanent logic of progressive changes underscoring India's transition
to modernity that takes over. But across this space too, a contingency of
shifting frameworks is asserted as having a story to tell about Indian
nationalism particularly (vide Javeed's diagnosis of the "religio-cultural" and
"modernist-secular" currents of nationalist thought in India); while also being
laced together by a narrative of India's present (the politics of Hindutva
primarily). The details can be had across Parts II and III of ILM. These
oscillations in the narrative space of ILM only underscore the point that I
make in the text. But do read on. I engage the ground of modernity/
postmodernity more fully in Sect.VII. Taylor has maintained - an observation
that we have already cited (n.21 above) - "(m)odernity is often read through
its least impressive, most trivializing offshoots". I suppose one could
supplement this further to say that postmodernity, as well, is often read
through its trivializing offshoots (which is not, of course, to dovetail the
postmodern terms of debate - as sometimes Javeed is prone to do - to Michel
Foucault). Clearly, my terms of reference is not the Anglo-American cultural
studies establishment take on postmodernism.
38. Cf. again Javeed: "What does the process of becoming an individuated person
involve? An individuated person demands dignity of person and equal concern
from others; he is a self-respecting person with an equal sense of self-worth.
Such concerns arise because individuation, at its minimum, creates a distance
between one's 'self' and one's community from where one emerges as an
individuated person, and therefore also a sense of difference from others. In
the process, one's mutual recognition of the distance and difference of others
grows, and along with that, the respect for what you yourself are. Feelings of
egalitarianism, a sense of freedom and many other such values begin to take
hold. This is what I meant... that individuation as a process in history is the
moment of multiple births" (ILM, 221-22).
39. Cf. again our n.7 above. Individuation: to think of it in psychological terms
would be absurd; it goes deeper than any personal predilection. If particular
depictions vacillate - this vacillation is invariably between individuation as a
statement of knowledge and individuation as a symptom of practice - it is
because such a dichotomy is inherent in the experience of individuation itself.
The problem, however, lies in the overall balance of the judgements and
verdicts that emerge from this experience.
40. Observations on Modernity (Trans. W. Whobrey) Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1998, p.44.
41. A more phenomenological approach to his subject matter can be had in
Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
42. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1991). In fact, for Bauman, postmodernity is modernity coming of age. Since
I tackle the question of postmodernity in my next section, I shall not clarify
further. The debate about Enlightenment made famous by Adorno and
Horkheimer's critique can be had in the latter's Dialectic of Enlightenment
(Trans. J. Cumming) London: Verso, 1986 (second edition). For another
recent history of modernity told in a thorough, grindingly systematic style,
see Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London:
Routledge, 1995). This work too represents modernity as an inherently and
irreparably contingent project, torn apart right through its core by
incompatible demands/promises and hopes of autonomy and order,
emancipation and normativity, freedom and discipline.
43. Luhmann, op.cit., p.2. The bibliographic details of the references that follow
in the text are Habermas, op.cit. and Toulmin (New York: Free Press, 1990).
44. As he puts it: "What is lacking is a theory adequate for such a state of affairs,
a semantics of the relationship between structure and semantics, a theory of
self-description of a society that reproduces itself via structure"(ibid., p.5).
According to Luhmann, sociology has played only "a small role in the
discussion of the criteria of modernity" (ibid., p.4), and consequently seeks
to formulate a set of considerations productive of this topic. It is also
significant that the observations articulated herein avoid the terms of the
Weberian story. I engage these grounds more fully in the paragraphs that
follow.
45. Cf. Taylor: "It should be evident that the dominant theories of modernity
over the last two centuries have been of the acultural sort. Many have
explained the development of modernity at least partly by our 'coming to
see' something like the range of supposed truths mentioned ...Curiously
enough, (negative theories of modernity, those that see it not as gain but as
loss or decline) too have been acultural in their own way" (op.cit., 1999,
p.155).
46. Ibid., p.168.
47. Ibid., p.164. I think this is an appropriate place from which to extend the
catalogue of allusions to the modernity idea, but shall refrain from doing so
here. Perhaps the following thought from Taylor may permit the determination
of basic predicates in the study of modernity today. As he observes in a
footnote: "One can envisage another kind of search for an alternative
modernity, one that would realize its normative promise more fully. This is
an important issue - indeed, one of the great issues - of our time. But the two
questions are distinct: Can we create a normatively superior alternative
modernity? Can there be a plurality of culturally different alternative
modernities?" (ibid., p.164, n.7). And adds: "the attempt to realize new
positive answers to the second question should be subject to the normative
conditions that the first raises. Not every mode of cultural distinctness is
thereby justified and good""(ibid., p.165). I engage with aspects of this
approach in a paper presently in progress, and tentatively titled 'Making
Sense of Modernity'. See also the discussion in the preceding section and in
context below, in the paragraph succeeding the next.
48. The ways in which notions of necessity reenter contingency, as indeed the
location of contingency in necessity, can be an exercise in itself. A key part of
Wittgensteinian exegesis, if not Wittgenstein's work, has consisted in this.
Note, nevertheless, what is happening within the context of these 'inversions'.
The limited question of what is meant when one speaks of contingency in
modern society is avoided. For a take on this, see Luhmann, op.cit., Ch.3. I
am just about beginning to intuit the problematic contours of this (kind of)
work. On the imperative of recognizing our historical contingency, see
generally, from across the spectrum, Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and
Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Agnes Heller
and Ferenc Feher, The Postmodern Political Condition (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988). Vivek Dhareshwar, ('Valorizing the Present:
Orientalism, Postcoloniality and the Human Sciences', Cultural Dynamics,
78 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
Vol.10 (2) 1998, pp.211-31) is another bewildering source, whose scholarship
seems to be translating into demands at once unrealistic and (what is more)
logically unnecessary.
49. To be sure, there are questions of periodization to be engaged with here; and
I am convinced that no Marxist can renounce this procedure. Broadly, this is
what could set apart a Marxist from a Weberian. Of course, the complicities
of a Marxist line of appraisal with that of a Weberian mode are there for one
to grasp and consider. Derek Sayer's Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus
on Marx and Weber (London: Routledge, 1991) is a useful discussion; but
nearer home, for a glimpse of an avowedly Marxist operation coming wrapped
in a Weberian mode of appraisal, see Achin Vanaik, Commurnalism Contested:
Religion, Modernity and Secularization (New Delhi: Vistaar, 1997), esp. Ch.3.
I mark out an alternative terrain in the section to follow.
50. Taylor, op.cit., 1999, pp.164-65.
51. Ibid., p.165.
52. Cf. n.21 above. The section in the text from which this note springs is also
important. For Chatterjee, of course, a critique of Europe's modernity remains
the most demanding intellectual task. I have advanced some arguments
concerning this axis in my paper alluded to in n.14 above.
53. Cf. also Partha Chatterjee, 'Talking about our Modernity in Two Languages',
op.cit., pp.153-69 passim. But the reader must be prepared for another
catalogue of allusions to follow, and this from a rather exciting source, namely,
Marxism.
54. fHans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World (Trans. R.M.
Wallace) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987, p.127. (Blumenberg, of course,
was alluding to the history of science.) I suspect that such a conflation
underwrites Javeed. Thus, adverting to an alternative trajectory in Western
thought which "helps us to overcome the dichotomous view of reality which
has so often been the basis of criticism of modernity by those influenced ..by
post-modern currents of thought", Javeed writes: "By paying closer attention
to the multiplicity within those thought processes which emerged with
modernity, two things seem immediately likely: first, an ability to see why a
certain conception of modernity, reflected in Enlightenment philosophy,
became interiorized within capitalism and how it became universalized as
the only form of modernity; and, secondly, a possibility can be discerned of
overcoming the dichotomies whose opposition seems to be the essence of
modernity .. There is no going back on history - so we should look for those
thresholds which provide for such an overcoming" (ILM, 32). Or again, the
contention that "(t)he initial relation between entrenched modernity as theory
or philosophy, and capitalism, was not one of identity but only one of
reciprocal causation or generative conditioning" (ILM, 19). Cf. also his
accompanying claim, anchoring in large measure ILM, that modernity is
now being conditioned as much by its own consequences in the course of its
historical development. But read on. The considerations foregrounded in
Sect.V - especially the last three paragraphs of that section - need to be
borne in mind. I engage the postmodern terrain herein below.
55. I take this to be the definitive marker of Marxism. Cf. also our point (in
Sect.III) about Marx's central thesis: that the relations of modernity are,
among other things, 'contradictions of progress'. The aporias of historical
materialism as a theory of politics - and not quite (or only) as a philosophy
of history - however need attending to. I engage with aspects of this ground
in the section to follow.
56. Peter Osborne, 'Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category',
New Left Review (No.192) 1992, pp.65-84. Adorno's muse is from his
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott)
London: Verso, 1978, p.218.
57. Osborne, ibid., p.77. All paginations in the text, henceforth in this section,
refer to Osborne. Not least of the problems, one need note, concerns the
character and status of the 'postmodern'. It is singularly unfortunate that
Javeed's philosophical recuperation of the theme of modernity should take
place against the backdrop of a putatively posited postmodernist attack. I
am not of course claiming a lack of literature that designates itself - or other
such literature - 'postmodern'. But, Javeed, in formulating against this
backdrop, is unable to do for postmodernism what he does with 'modernity':
make the idea the object of philosophical attention at the level at which it is
constituted. Javeed does not quite make the connection, but surely it is a
dialectical view of modernity that licenses his scepticism about
postmodernity's potential to transform itself from a market-driven diversity
into an emancipated solidarity. And., what is more, without an account of
the 'modern' as a philosophical term, such references in Javeed as "(w)ith a
post-modernist notion of self, there cannot be ..any possibility of a theory of
resistance"(ILM, 17) and/or that "the notion of resistance in Foucault remains
at the level of philosophical style or, at best, acting merely locally"(ILM, 42)
- even that "(h)istory has become open for us in a way that it was not for
those in Western Europe and later in North America" (ILM, 40) - are fated
to remain little more than mere assertions. As Luhmann states, "(t)he
proclamation of the 'postmodern' has at least one virtue. It has clarified that
contemporary society has lost faith in the correctness of its self-
description"(op.cit., p.ix) - but I would like to inflect the study more
philosophically in the direction of a concern about historical periodization,
the present as change, history as culture and so on. Surely there are problems
with Foucault - and Foucauldians - and not just from a Marxist standpoint.
And yet, the sheer tenacity of Foucault as a diagnostic discourse of 'the times'
cannot be lost track of. See Jurgen Habermas, 'Taking Aim at the Heart of
the Present' in David Couzens Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp.103-108; as also Michel Foucault, 'What is
Enlightenment?' in The Foucault Reader (ed. P. Rabinow) New York:
Pantheon Books, 1984, pp.32-50.
58. I shall be taking this thought on more frontally in the next section, and
therefore reserve comment. Osborne's point, concluding his discussion, that
"(b)orn like capitalism, out of colonialism and the world market, 'modernity'
as a structure of historical consciousness predates the development of
capitalism proper"(p.84) may yet meet with Javeed's approval. But ..xead
on. The notion of conjuncture may be sourced back to Althusser, especially
to Ch.4 of Reading Capital (Trans. B. Brewster) London: Verso, 1979,
although the inability of this Marxism to think historical change cannot be
sidelined. For the juxtaposition of modernity to modes of production, see
Perry Anderson 'Marshall Berman: Modernity and Revolution' in his A Zone
of Engagement (London: Verso, 1992), pp.25-55.
59. Cf. also Osborne about the role of so-called 'theories of modernity' (as distinct
80 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
from the more general theorization of 'modernity' that he sketches): "to
provide a content to fill the form of the modern; to give it something more
than an abstract temporal determinacy"(p.75). Marxist unease also springs
from the fact that the concept of modernity (in its logical form) admits no
internal principle of variation, a principle that could identify the historically
(as opposed to the chronologically) 'new'. It is a matter of contention whether
the concept of modernity requires such a principle, even as one admits that
this requirement is fulfilled by 'theories of modernity'. As Osborne mentions:
"It is at this point, historically, the geopolitical dimension of the concept
comes into its own, providing, via the discourses of colonialism, a series of
criteria of 'progress' derived, first, from the history of European nation-
states, and later, in modernization theory proper, from America" (ibid.). For
the analytics of historical investigation, see Arthur C. Danto, Analytical
Philosophy of History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1964). The
book has been reissued with some new essays as Narration and Knowledge
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
60. And this from a rather peculiar source, namely, Naoki Sakai, the problematic
contours of whose essay 'Modernity and its Critique: The Problem of
Universalism and Particularism' (The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol.87 (3)
1988, pp.475-504) eludes Osborne. Note my next point about the recognition
underscoring Sakai is from the prefatory remarks anchoring the investigation.
61. I take on these questions in the paper under preparation 'Making Sense of
Modernity', but the drift of my previous section need also be borne in mind.
One of the main contributions of the post(-)colonial critique, I must add, is
this spatialization of the modern. Stuart Hall's 'When was the "Post-
Colonial"? Thinking at the Limit' (in I. Chambers and L. Curti (ed.), The
Post-Colonial Question., London: Routledge, 1996, pp.242-60) is a smart
introduction. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,
1994) also effectively "displaces the 'story' of capitalist modernity from its
European centering to its dispersed global 'peripheries'; from peaceful
evolution to imposed violence" (Stuart Hall, ibid., p.250). The specific
problems that attach to this re-narrativisation need attending to - Aijaz
Ahmad, In Theory, op.cit., is only a part of the space of problematization.
62. As should be discernible, my gesture here is purely strategic - to cleave back
into Javeed's text. Of course, words and concepts are also acts and operations.
But they are not, to that effect, identical. It is not my implication, besides,
that Osborne's reflections are any less contextual; only they are contextual
in another, rival sort of way. I guess it is a problem of levels, but be prepared
for what follows: a contextual reading implicating a national frame.
63. I say detour, although it is not exactly a detour if one contemplates the
experiential context of Javeed's probing. Especially the contents he attributes
to the process and ideology of individuation - as indeed his gestures in the
direction of a "right to exit" as a means of accommodating the claims of
community with those of the individual, in the context of the assertions of
nationalism in and off the present - consolidate into the commitment to
have a constitutive theory not only of India's transition to modernity but
also of India's present. The register, all through, is both moral and political.
Recall our earlier allusion to an aspect of the semantics of ILM: as disturbing
the identity of modernity by opening up to its (untapped) potential, but
doing so by transforming those possibilities into necessities, at once moral
and political. Not least of the subjects implicating ILM is the fact of India's
transition to modernity - and the vicissitudes attendant upon that trajectory
- but also the familiar dialectic between the concept of a nation and the
concept of a religious community (the politics, that is, of Hindutva). The
question - our question? - of the rightness and wrongs of India's present
marks thus a course intermediate between the claims of politics and the
demands of morality. Hopefully, the reader will remain attentive, as ever, to
the process of my articulation. The protocols instituting our reading (Sect.I)
cannot be lost sight of either. The prefatory remarks anchoring Charles
Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1987) are also worth pondering.
64. Chs.4, 5 and 6 have the details, stringing together considerations on the
properly political significance of nationhood with the problem of specifying
that which belongs to the sphere of the national. Note how this sets aside
another (artificial) dilemma: it cannot be a question of positioning a collective
identity against individual identities. (As might be inferable, all identity is
individual, but there is no individual identity that is not historical.) The
question of how are individuals nationalized or socialized in the dominant
form of national belonging is hereby displaced. There obtain, nevertheless,
other peculiarities within Javeed's discourse.
65. Cf. also Sect.IV above, as indeed the paragraphs concluding Sect.V. For Javeed,
tradition in India "stands divided between its lived versions and its articulated
forms"(ILM, 170). Further it is maintained that this bifurcation "between
the public face of tradition, which fills the public sphere as politics or
intellectual debate, and its private face amongst the people in its varied
unreflective forms" has come about in the last hundred years or so (ibid.). In
a manner of speaking, ILM's object may be approached as facing the dilemma
which Joseph Levenson has described as that between 'value' and 'history';
what ought to be is not what is going to happen, but nevertheless it requires
to be affirmed. See the introduction to his Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and the Mind of
Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953). In these
circumstances, to affirm one's values is not an act of unreal abstraction, but
precisely a moral necessity. My attention to this matrix of ideas was drawn
by J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought
and the Atlantic Republicanl Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1975), p.243. The content of our n.74 below instances other complexities to
be considered.
66. The great theme of recent historical-sociological scholarship is the emergence
of the 'public sphere', and here discussion is focussed on whether it is a
specifically 'modern' phenomenon (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries)
connected with bourgeois forms of sociality or whether it is the result of a
development, the basis of which was laid down a long time before. Craig
Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1992) remains the most comprehensive discussion of the theme. For
an analysis engaging the Indian context, see C.A. Bayly, Empire and
Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India,
1780-1870 (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 1999, First South Asian edition),
pp.180-211. Needless to say, these questions are not at the forefront of ILM;
the imperatives of the present make it difficult for Javeed to inscribe this
focus. It is not a lack, nevertheless, as the ensuing discussion will reveal.
82 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
67. To be sure, ILM lacks a distinctive focus on the morals of modernity,
paralleling, say, Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1996) or even, for that matter, Charles Taylor,
Sources of the Self, op.cit.. The absence of this focus notwithstanding, one
may yet read into the circumstances of the work in order to extricate a theme
that will carry through the form of my exposition (while also adhering to
our rule of method, of looking within, and ahead, and prognosticating
whatever lies there). The Wittgensteinian motif alluded to in the text, in its
precise form, is this: "If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached
bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply
what I do"' (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Trans. G.E.M.
Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968, # 217).
68. It would be a methodological mistake to envisage these two claims as one.
The error can spring from a misunderstanding of the sense of 'necessity' that
is involved in the two poles/theses. I cannot take up the problem here, but
note the arguments that follow. Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral
Complexity, op.cit. is worth a look. Because of the loaded character of the
notions of fallibility and neutrality, the uncertain application of the terms
'fallible' and 'neutral' is always on the cards. It was only after I had crafted
these lines that I came across the following observation by Akeel Bilgrami:
"I do not actually think that there is a well-formed debate about the rights
and wrongs of modernity" ('Secular Liberalism and Moral Psychology of
Identity', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.32 (40) 1997, p.2539, n.13).
Well, delivering into this problem might lend some perspective to my proposals
here, which I admit are summarily postulated. I hope to gain a hold on these
categorizations soon. But my current state of indecision - perhaps also a loss
of words - need not undermine what I develop here in course. My points
here are valid independently of postulation of these theses (although the
theses themselves do bear on our question). I return to Bilgrami below.
69. Akeel Bilgrami, 'Secular Liberalism .., ibid., pp.2531-532.
70. I suspect also undue 'is-ought' transitions in the modalities of Bilgrami's
argument - ironically, the very point he seems to be making against
communitarians generally - being forged as they are in a specific historical
and political context of secularism and communalism in India. Needless to
say, Javeed's proposals skirt these questions, while inaugurating some further
normative paradoxes as well. It is less the paradoxes themselves that I am
concerned to straddle here than a series of calculated extrapolations from
the narrative contexts of ILM. Read on. Javeed's 'Indispensability of
Secularism' (Social Scientist, op.cit.) is neither convincing nor sufficient. We
may also do well to remind ourselves that "to know the occasion of an
intellectual happening is not to know everything about what it was that
happened" (J.G.A. Pocock, op.cit., p.57). I hope to engage with Bilgrami
more fully when his book Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity
(forthcoming from Harvard University Press) is out.
71. The terms of the ambiguity have been drawn from Bilgrami's review of The
Idea of India (Raritan, op.cit., p.135), but is being deployed to orchestrate
another sphere of discussion. For Bilgrami, it remains central to be able to
orchestrate a theoretical space sensitive to the limitations of liberalism and
at the same time "does not permit any scope for this sensitivity to degenerate
into a relativistic and anti-statist communitarianism" ('Secular Liberalism
. op.cit., p,2538). Besides, he seems correctly impatient with the question
invariably asked about India - how is it that a country so diverse in its
languages, religions and castes, and so deeply traditional in its mores, has
survived into modernity not merely intact, but with the thoroughly
nontraditional apparatus of formal democratic representation and statehood?
- seeing in it an invocation of the national in the second sense (the basis for
a movement). Cf. Bilgrami's review discussion in Raritan, op.cit., pp.135-
36.
72. I say intriguing because the formulation draws on the authority of Lenin.
The dream of transcending the problem of nationalism by formal recognition
of the terrains and cultures of its major nationalities while subordinating
them fully to a universal project was the basis of Bolshevism. Well, I think
Javeed has a lot to account for here, but read on. The passages that I have
just mentioned have already been cited in our Sect.V above; the gloss of
course was missing (or, rather, quite different).
73. Cf. also ILM (p.166, n.23): "After vigorous debates from 1942 to 1974, the
Left has put the debate on the 'national question' under an undeclared
moratorium ..It is high time that the issue is reopened in today's radically
changed circumstances". Also Javeed's point about "the main methodological
fallacy in most Marxist works on the national question" and "how the
problem was frozen to a sterile debate on 'definitions' as against the
importance of the national stir in identifying nations and nationalities as
was the case with Lenin" (ILM, 166, n.20). I think Javeed is trivializing the
Left position here; the moratorium such as there is can (or need) hardly be
reopened in today's charged times. Cf. also Regis Debray, 'Marxism and the
National Question', New Left Review, No.105, 1977 (although Debray's
point does not concern the structural attributes of nations or nationalities,
as opposed to classes, but rather the ideology behind peak levels of collective
agency). The contents of our n.64 above are also worth recalling.
74. For some impasses of the receptivity question, see Vivek Dhareshwar, op.cit.,
pp.224-25. The description under which Vivek pushes through his ideas is
however problematic. Cf. also n.8 above. There is of course a difference to
be drawn between the mere transmission of a tradition and the defensive
conceptualization of either tradition or transmission. The historian of
'political languages' J.G.A. Pocock has observed: "(W)hen an image of past
time as continuous and as bearing authority for the present is attacked, and
segments of the past are dismissed as possessing no value - this may happen
as a result of a classicizing attempt to locate all value in a particular period -
it may follow either that the repudiated period reasserts its claim to authority
over the present in consequence of some other relationship to it, or that it
becomes necessary to explain how, if the phenomena concerned were without
authority or value, they nevertheless existed and were causally linked with
both present and past" (The Machiavellialz Moment, op.cit., pp.54-55). And
adds: "In these circumstances some relativistic mode of explaining the past,
as having its own way of existing and its own values or other claims upon
our attention, may very well arise" (ibid. p.55). An extended theoretical
treatment of the question can be had in J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language
and Time: Essays in Political Thought and History (London: Methuen, 1972),
Ch.8.
75. See Benedict Anderson, 'Introduction' in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.) Mapping
84 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
the Nation (London: Verso, 1996), p.2. I am changing the tense in which
Anderson is delivering these remarks. The contemporaneity that attaches to
Anderson's introduction cannot be lost sight. For him, "this disjuncture (the
compulsion to think about nationalism comparatively and globally, but also,
being singularly concrete, in very particular terms) and the theoretical stumble
that it causes, helps to explain some of the history of serious thinking about
nationalism, its hiatuses and bursts of energy"(ibid.).
76. The inspiration here is clearly Ernest Gellner, especially his Nations and
Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). See Miroslav Hroch for a
rebuttal of the terms of this theory; Hroch's general theses and also Gellner's
critical response and defense of his own position can be had in Gopal
Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation, op.cit., pp.78-97 and 98-145
respectively.
77. I have in mind here Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial
World: A Derivative Discourse? (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), Ch.1.
Chatterjee attacks Gellner and others for sociologism and modularity. It is
perhaps significant that when the contours of this investigation are extended,
the target has shifted to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983);
Chatterjee's The Nation and its Fragments (op.cit.) begins with a critique of
Anderson, posing frontally the question 'Whose Imagined Community?'.
Indeed, here, as Anderson has noted, "elite nationalism in Asia and Africa
receives a somewhat warmer evaluation than in his previous writing"
('Introduction' in Gopal Balakrishnan, op.cit., p.11).
78. I am here alluding to Charles Taylor's appraisal of the intertwining of
modernity and nationalism in a volume devoted to examining every aspect
of Gellner's theory. The essay is titled 'Nationalism and Modernity' and
obtains in John A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and
the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
pp.191-218. The lines cited are on p.207. The formulation bears comparison
with Javeed, especially the latter's point that "intellectual moves (within the
space of tradition) were provoked by challenges from outside the domain of
tradition" (ILM, 173). See also n.65 above, and the lines in the text from
which that note springs. Taylor further notes: "Elites have always been able
to experience a dramatic loss of dignity in the face of conquering power. One
way of responding is to fight back or come to terms with the conquerors out
of the same traditional identity and sense of honour. Another is to force a
new categorical identity to be the bearer of the sought-for dignity. It is (a
sub-species of) this second reaction that we call nationalist; but it is essentially
modern" (ibid., p.207).
79. For this see generally Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood:
Ethnicity, Religion and Natiotalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997). It is significant that, for Hastings, "(t)he specific root of nationalism
does not lie in the circumstances of post-Enlightenment modernity. On the
contrary. It lies rather in the impact of the Bible, of vernacular literature, and
of the two combined in creating a politically stable ethnicity, effectively
'imagined' by its members across a unique mythology" (ibid., p.151). See
also Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), for an effort to reverse the order of
precedence and therefore of causality. Rather than define nationalism by its
modernity, Greenfeld sees modernity as defined by nationalism. This of course
tides over the point whether historically the emergence of nationalism predated
modernity. But cf. Balibar: "(T)he ever-recurring paradox of nationalism:
the regressive imagining of a nation-state where the individuals would by
their nature be 'at home', because they would be 'among their own' (their
own kind), and the rendering of that state uninhabitable; the endeavour to
produce a unified community in the face of 'external' enemies and the endless
rediscovery that the enemy is 'within', identifiable by signs which are merely
the phantasmatic elaboration of its divisions. Such a society is in a real sense
a politically alienated society. But are not all contemporary societies, to some
degree, grappling with their own political alienation?" ('Class Racism' in
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous
Identities, London: Verso, 1991, p.215). This paradox may be juxtaposed
against the point about an India living with modernity but remaining
ambivalent with respect to the problem of modernization. The axiomatic
frames in which thinkers have thought the question remain to be exhausted.
Cf. also n.81 below.
80. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who
Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?', Representations, Vol.37, 1992, pp.1-26; or, more
recently, his 'Radical Histories and the Question of Enlightenment
Rationalism: Some Recent Critiques of Subaltern Studies', Economic and
Political Weekly, Vol.30 (14) 1995, pp.751-59. Also: S.N. Balagangadhara,
'The Future of the Present: Thinking through Orientalism' Cultural Dynamics,
Vol.10 (2) 1998, pp.101-21.
81. For Partha Chatterjee, as for Javeed, a critical stance towards India's
modernity is also a critique of nationalism's contradictory contents. Strictly
speaking, however, the critique is not designed to unmask the inner falsehood
of the entire world of national representations and to trace back the contents
of modernity from their distorted form to what they really are (although the
elements of such an orchestration are there, in the pages of ILM). Javeed's
critical stance is rather a way of preserving and embedding all of modernity's
contents, through a critique of the form in which modernity manifests itself,
or the way in which it is represented. Obviously, this critique also runs over
into the content, and thus contains a certain repudiation of modernity's
contents as well. It is significant, perhaps, that the Gramscian construct of
'passive revolution' configuring Chatterjee (at least of Nationalist Thought
and the Colonial World, op.cit.) hardly finds echo in Javeed. The latter's
basic orientation is - remains - the restoration and reconstitution of
modernity.
82. Notwithstanding what Aijaz Ahmad has to say, one may yet have to return
to Fredric Jameson's prognosis of the 'national allegory' - in his 'Third World
Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism', Social Text Fall 1986,
pp.65-88 - but with the sensitivities that I have tried to posit. Ahmad's critical
rejoinder is, of course, contained in his In Theory, op.cit., pp.95-122. Cf.
also Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 'Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity
in South Asia, 1400-1750', Daedalus, Vol.127 (3) 1998, pp.75-104 passim
and the editorial observations of Bjorn Wittrock, 'Early Modernities: Varieties
and Transitions' in the same issue of Daedalus, pp.19-40.
83. Cf. all over again the contentions - convictions - anchoring the concluding
paragraph of Sect.V.
86 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
84. I have engaged with some aspects of these questions in my 'Pathways through
Method: An Essay in Review', Social Scientist, Vol22 (7-8) 1994, pp.83-
100. Methodological issues, I realize, often turn readers off, but there is no
avoiding the space of method for coming to a principled verdict about India's
modernity. I believe this gesture approximates to the spirit of Marx. While
his many theses are surely contestable, what cannot - and demands emulation
- is the body of work in which these theses are contained. Marxist historians
(if there are any left?) could do well to listen.
85. What follows is a somewhat free elaboration of an idea taken from Umberto
Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition (Trans. A.
McEwen) London: Secker and Warburg, 1999, Ch.1 passim.

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Social Scientist

Review: Modernity's Edges: A Review Discussion

Modernity's Edges: A Review Discussion

The dialectical form of exposition is only correct when it knows its

If a good demonstration means simply an argument which is effective,

where are we to stop?

The form, as indeed the formulation, of my topic may seem somewhat

strange.' To be sure, I am concerned to review a work, Javeed Alam's

inventive India: Living with Modernity (hereinafter Javeed; and the

work in question will be notated as ILM). But in addressing a work,

it would be worthwhile to look within (and ahead) and prognosticate

not otherwise exist on their own. A 'division of labour' - howsoever

problematical, at first sight - seems to me critical. On the one hand,

we have the problem of making sense of a work, in the sense, say, of

delivering summations ('snapshots') of its thought and arguments;

on the other is the problem of defining its specificity, making present

a work - emphatically, what makes a work the work it is about.

However one wishes to interpret this division, in relation to the work

in question here, the principle remains the discontinuity of what is

being assembled in and by it. For why should we be describing the

how can we do so when what is to be described is not yet visible in

the work? This is precisely the problem that is to be examined.

The flurry of questions, nevertheless, is bound to put into the

background another common - need we say Marxist? - concern with

* Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad

Social Scientist, Vol. 29, Nos. 9 - 10, Sept.-Oct. 2000

the meaning of a work: the identity, that is, of a subject of a work.

that I have no intention of suspending this reference. What the Weimar

philosopher and critic, Walter Benjamin, has claimed translates into

an important scheme of possibility. According to him:

The immanent tendency of the work and, accordingly, the standard

judgement as, first and foremost, the foundation of a completely

different kind of criticism which is not concerned with judging, and

but in demonstrating its relation to all other works and, ultimately, to

the idea of art.2

This, with the relevant modifications - notice that Benjamin is

the space of politics - could well serve as a methodological

introduction to the schemes invented herein. Needless to say, I shall

be redeploying these near-formal protocols throughout this review

There are, of course, ways of reading the form, as well as the

content, of theoretical debates and critical moves and countermoves.

In fact, for anyone interested in the procedures which the Marxist

critic Fredric Jameson has called cognitive mapping,3 Javeed's ILM

shows patterns of thought and argument directed not only at

substantive issues of politics, process and history, but, by way of a

self-positing of modernity, explaining how it could even be possible

to think coherently about some basic category and/or experience:

one does not need to extrapolate the metaphysical slogans of

modernity (the way that Marxists - and non-Marxists alike - continue

to do with Enlightenment relativities). It is the nature of this mapping

procedure that I believe is suggestive, and not for predictive purposes

either, or with a view toward identifying recurrent patterns. Rather,

Javeed sets us the example of a criticism of criticism, a theorization

about theory, which, while alive to the passionate contexts of

interventions in the present, also attempts a measure of their reactive

profiles. In particular, ILM discloses the fidelity with which so many

ideologically different positions offer precise symptoms of the absence

of that 'unembodied surplus' Javeed traces as modernity. I shall return

attraction of the project is that it leads to a distinctive vision of political

criticism's demands. Foundationalism, of whatever kind, is untenable:

"It makes that which is emergent in history or encoded in culture an

immutable first principle"(ILM, 215). And yet, this rejection of

foundationalism does not imply that nothing can or need be grounded

or theoretically justified: "(t)he effort here will be to see if these (the