Clarifications about agency , resistance, power in Foucault - found this useful

http://danbutin.org/Dan%20Butin%20-%20Foucault.pdf

Satish's Deshpande's article on Caste and Castelessness

Please follow the link to read the article. The timing of the article is so perfect in my opinion, taking into consideration the discussions we had both in the class and outside it.

http://www.epw.in/perspectives/caste-and-castelessness.html

Performing caste/class: an autobiograhical note

For somebody who was not exposed to any literature on middle classes before, the readings prescribed for this class were a revelation in many senses. While going through the readings, especially Lietchy’s formulation of middle class as a ‘suitably modern’ group constantly engaged in the process of ‘becoming’ a class in a performative space reminded me of the experience that I underwent looking for a house in a decent locality close to NIAS. I wish to be autobiographical this time sharing my own experience of ‘class’ in a middle class neighbourhood in Bangalore. I also want to draw your attention to how ‘class’ in India is unavoidably filtered through the lenses of caste and religion, and how a class experience cannot be spoken of without qualifying it by caste. This seems to be very evident to me the way our neighbourhoods are segregated (who will get to live where?) even in a metropolitan city like Bangalore.

When I went looking for houses within 2kms radius of NIAS, my aim was to find a middle class locality, a decent residential area away from the common din (maybe you can read it as lower class din). If I deconstruct what I had in mind (when I went on telling people I needed a middle class locality) in the light of the readings for discussion today, I could locate myself in a middle class position (desiring a healthy distance from the lower classes and their noise which I thought Mathikere was so full of) and also get a sense of how my own class position was evaluated (by the people who rented their place to me) when I finalised a house in ITI Layout.

My survey of the neighbourhood of ITI layout, going around asking for houses (many people do not entertain brokers), gave me a sense of the kind of neighbourhood the very first day. A few inquiries and stops told me they preferred Brahmins (the very first question most people asked me was about my caste and my eating habits and then the size of my family). There were many who said that they won’t rent the place to anyone other than Brahmins. I was let in many places to see the house but they had other tests to confirm if I was really a Brahmin (maybe my looks were not that assuring of my Brahmin self) by asking me about my subcaste and gotra. I found a lot of these questions irritating but I had no option to answer them. When they learned I was going to live alone, they wanted to make sure that I believe in and act according to certain middle class morals and values. Some owners said they don’t want to rent the place to a single women because they don’t want to take the ‘risk’ (by that maybe they meant a woman living alone without parents or husband is not to be trusted). That’s when I realized maybe I will not be able get a place on my own because most of them evaluated me as not belonging to ‘Brahmin middle class’ category inspite of my telling them so. I liked the locality very much and wasn’t ready to go seek houses elsewhere. There was a gap between what they meant by ‘Brahmin middle class’ and what I was conveying through my very appearance- ‘Brahmin middle class’. The two did not match. That was when I realized the burden of ‘caste/class expectations’ and how I didn’t completely fulfil them. I wasn’t ‘suitably’ middle class Brahmin girl of 25 years age (in saying that I will be living alone, I somehow did not fit neatly into their image of a middle class Brahmin girl).

To cut the long story short, I made my father negotiate the deal for me because I couldn’t take all the enquiries after sometime. After my parents intervened, the owner was willing to rent the place to me on condition that I don’t bring boys and use the place for any other purpose than residence. My father was made to vouch for my middle class Brahminness. My parents visit me often to just give the sense that I am not some totally unmonitored young woman living in a city all by myself. In my everyday interactions with the people around me, I often get questions like when I’m going to marry (the fact that I speak Kannada makes them ask these questions easily). My parents are also asked the same question sometimes when they visit me. Whenever I bring people to home I get a sense that my neighbours are watching me (till date I’ve not taken any of my male friends home). My neighbours take great pride in how the locality has remained a Brahmin locality since its beginning and how anybody who has come to occupy one of the houses in the neighbourhood has made it big in life but has still remained true to the middle class roots. I’m also expected to be the same. I’m surrounded by all Brahmins who make sure that the next one who comes to occupy the place will  also be a ‘Brahmin’ who doesn’t unsettle their ways of life and beliefs. Outside the walls of my house I have to play or perform to conform to their Brahmin middle class mores, if I want to deviate, I can do it only at the risk of leaving the place.  

I think in some sense the readings for this class came as a welcome relief, since it seemed to provide some answers and directions to many of us who are struggling with the notion of 'class' in our own work. Particularly, the Leichty article and the one on 'Global Middle classes' seemed to provide a lot of clues on how to approach my own field with its different 'class' groups, but ones that I cannot articulate in terms of traditional categories of the bourgeoisie and proletariat or haves and have nots.

'Class' as 'practice, production and performance' as Leitchy says it seems much more real to apply to my own work. Because to come to think of it, in terms of the life skills project, its not the distinction that the groups I work seem to be making in terms of the material differences, but very immaterial ones like ways of being, life style, consumption and so on. And this is what categorises the fluidity about the middle class I guess, because with the coming in of whole new sets of service industry jobs or 'affective labour' as the Heiman, Leichty and Freeman point out, there seems to be new modes of mobility available (in terms of material wealth) but as Bourdieu would say, what is lacking is the 'disctinction' that comes from knowledge of certain forms of cultural production. If I were to apply it to my field, this is perhaps just what makes me feel like there is a difference between the 'management' and the 'facilitators' - even though the facilitators with new jobs equal to the status of a teacher in a school they perhaps earn as much; but then they don't seem to resemble the very middle class (upper caste?) teachers of even the charitable trust school who display their caste / class status in insisting in talking with me in English, or through the avenues they have chosen for their son's education or even the typical forms of jewellery they wear to display. In fact this difference is perhaps more clearly evident in their orientation towards the children - while the teachers view them as troublesome and ill-mannered, the facilitators view them as their own, to be given the 'skills' that will help them transcend their 'social class' and thereby perhaps economic class as well.

Class as production is also very useful to me in resolving the differences in middle classness that  see on the field. Like Heiman, Leichty and Freeman point out there are 'middle classes' and the plurality is shaped as an interaction between agents and structures - in response to the state, ideologies and material practices of capitalism, forms of consumerism, etc. So I now understand that while I (and I suspect in popular imagination when we talk of the middle class) we most often refer to the 'new middle class' but its perhaps equally important to trace out how the anxieties of creating distinction for themselves also plays out with the traditional middle class.

But some questions I have in relation to all this: how or when can you 'categorise' (functionally) a group as belonging to a particular class? For example, if we understand class as production or performance, would a life skills training which teaches working class children middle class ways to be and behave allow one to move up the social ladder? Or do we view it generationally as we do in education, wherein even if a person to move up to the level of a PhD, he'd still be a first-generation learner if his parents were not educated?

Second, as Wright seems to suggest, conflict and exploitation as central to class is inevitable since classes by nature have different stakes; yet, as Breen suggests of Weber's theory, in practice are classes positioned in conflict against each other since similar goals of mobility, status, aspirations characterize many classes? The Marxian / neo-Marxian response to this is of course that this is the working of capitalist ideology, but for example in a communist society, would aspiration for distinction and status be absent? 

Technological change and Bourdieu's theory

Following our discussion last class on Bourdieu’s practice theory and how it cannot sufficiently explain social change and transformation, I wish to take forward that discussion to today’s class and ask questions which are inspired by my area of interest - media and communication. Reading Calhoun’s article on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field pushes us to think about how far can we push Bourdieu’s ideas if we are dealing with complex self regulating societies? (As Calhoun argues, Bourdieu’s theory works fine if we are dealing with a simple society like a Kabyle one, but what happens when we are looking at more complex societies. Bourdieu’s concept of capital, Calhoun mentions, envisions capital without capitalism)

The one question that constantly bothered me while reading Calhoun and Hoy: how can technological innovations be accommodated within the concepts of habitus and field? Innovations, especially, scientific and technological innovations, in the first place, cannot be exhausted by explaining them as unintentional structured social actions being structured by a certain habitus that informs scientists engaging in a scientific activity (Bourdieu in his “Homo Academicus” [I’ve not read the work but I’ve read what others say it contains] tries to place the academicians in their particular habitus and looks at them as the products of that habitus; and how their questions however radical they might have been, but they are informed by a certain habitus that predisposes the academicians to ask certain questions by mapping the possibilities within the field). Let me transpose this idea to technological innovations and see how the concepts of Habitus and Field work or do not work there.

Once some technology is innovated and that technology gets diffused among people resulting in a change in the social setup, how can we explain this change within the ambit of Bourdieu’s theory of practice? [To make this point clear, let me take examples of technological revolutions. Print revolution, it is argued, solidified national feelings and facilitated the integration of society into nations. We are for a while now witnessing digital revolution. Internet, it is known, had its beginnings in the US Defence. It was definitely not invented to pave the way for outsourcing business operations. The possibilities that internet offered triggered changes elsewhere. Digital piracy threatens big capitalist publishing empires]. At the risk of sounding a technological determinist, I want to consider how we can accommodate Bourdieu’s concept to explain technologically induced changes that transform society. If change for Bourdieu was not radically different from the habitus and field that the actors were anchored in; and it is only a rupture (but rupture with a history) within the system that tries to destabilize the system; and change is just a realization of the possibilities that can be thought of within a particular field and habitus whose primary aims are to reproduce themselves and conserve through misrecognition; and change is something that is secondary depending on the realization or recognition of dominance within a field; or change is something that is the result of the external contact with an altogether different habitus and fields, how can we look at technologically induced changes which are not the result of any of these processes? Is Calhoun right in pointing out that Bourdieu’s theory is too general to account for these complex changes? Or should we try and see technology as a possibility that was already dormant in a particular habitus and field waiting to come out and destabilize the system? If yes, how do we do that? If we do that, will it not mean that the kind of change I’m talking about, and the technology instrumental in bringing it about always had a history, and that the innovation of any technology is not a break but a continuation? Who steers technology? Agents? Structure? What happens when its effects are felt in the field/s which the innovators did not contemplate to transform to begin with?

While I found Bourdieu's theory addressing very subtle and even psychological aspects of the social world, I still thought there was a privileging of structure ["In reality, the dispositions durably inculcated by the possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and necessities, opportunities and prohibitions inscribed in the objective conditions (which science apprehends through statistical regularities such as the probabilities objectively attached to a group or class) generate dispositions objectively compatible with these conditions and in a sense pre-adapted to their demands. The most improbable practices are therefore excluded, as unthinkable, by a kind of immediate submission to order that inclines agents to make a virtue of necessity, that is, to refuse what is anyway denied and to will the inevitable" (p.54)] though I can see how he tries to break away from a strict structuralist approach of the Levi-Straussian kind; [LiPuma I think on the other hand is critiquing him for the reverse? - "The theoretical outcome is such a strong claim for the indivisibility of knowledge and human interest, stronger even than that articulated by Habermas (1973), that it leads to a positional epistemology. What we can know of ourselves or our society depends entirely on our "orbit" within a field of forces." (p.23)]

But my main question / concern is whether Bourdieu's theory does not remove/reduce action from being  intentionally / consciously political  by explaining action as a result of the interactions between a habitus and field which limit the range of possibilities, and by arguing that one is not often aware of the game he is born into? ["The habitus - embodied history, internalised as second nature and so forgotten as history - is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present." (p. 56) - this sounds like a justification of present action to be reproducing the past and therefore maintaining the hierarchy / domination] LiPuma also states that the notion of the ‘habitus' enables Bourdieu to analyze the behavior of agents as objectively coordinated and regular without being the product of rules, on the one hand, or conscious rationality (conscious rationality to me being the operative term that makes me wonder if he deliberately wants to view practice as not intentionally political?) And this to me would be the break from Foucault  - whereas there is a strong idea of embodiment in his argument by which bodies occupy certain social positions because of differential distribution of embodied capital, embodied knowledge, embodied beliefs etc, I think Foucault's argument is about how knowledge or other forms of 'capital' are used to shape bodies in a deliberate manner.

One could I guess argue that his idea of reflexivity is trying to do just that - that is make actors conscious of their social positions - but that doesn't seem to address my concern; which is that while I can become conscious of my act, I need not be guilty of it if its something that is embodied in me because of my habitus which I cant escape (even if there are other choices that i could have made within my habitus) - so for example one does not typically hold people accountable when they raise their arm as a reflex (defensive) action, and even if they were to be conscious of it, they could still justifiably raise their hand the next time around since it is a bodily mechanism of defense. 

Some queries

I understood Bourdieu’s project as the one that primarily sets to reconcile the antinomies of subjectivist/phenomenological and objectivist/structuralist thinking to produce a synthetic understanding of social phenomena gaining from the best of both streams of thought. But more important than this, Bourdieu’s project is one that problematizes and questions the knowing subject, who in the process of knowing, objectifies the object s/he studies but does not question or objectify the relationship between himself and the object s/he studies. In what he calls as a ‘reflexive turn’ which doesn’t overturn the possibilities of doing research within a particular discipline like the poststructuralist thought did, but makes significant contribution to the corpus of sociological knowledge by inviting us to investigate more carefully ourselves as knowing subjects emerging from a particular set of social conditions which make the process of objectification of the object possible in the first place, Bourdieu is redirecting the gaze upon the knowing subject. I understood it as:

Knowing  subject àdirects his gaze upon àobject (what existed before Bourdieu)

Knowing Subject is objectified ßà object (After Bourdieu)

I want us to think about how is this different from Foucault’s question “what do disciplines?” in his “Order of Things” and “Archaeology of Knowledge”? Isn’t he also occupied with somewhat a similar question? Is the difference between Bourdieu and Foucault is one where Foucault doesn’t engage with individual/collective practices within a particular field, but enquires the function of a particular branch of knowledge collectively created at a particular time in history? What is the difference in their questions? Is Foucault dealing with the question of ‘emergence’ and ‘what an emergence does’ and Bourdieu trying to understand the social conditions and the agents behind it?  After reading the essay (that Maithreyi posted a few days ago) which discusses Bourdieu and Foucault, and tells us that Bourdieu, in many ways, was not comfortable with philosophical appropriation of social problem (that requires empirical work) without learning the trade of doing empirical research, I wanted to know more about the difference between both of their works. For me question is, hasn’t Foucault also answered in a way the question of knowing subject in trying to tell us the disciplines had their history and emerged at particular points in time to serve specific functions. What is the difference in Bourdieu’s reflexive turn?

The chapter “Belief and the Body” where Bourdieu shows us how bodies incorporate the structures doesn’t seem to me very different from what Foucault discusses in his “Discipline and Punish” especially the chapter on docile bodies. Again I want to know if you people find any difference between the two in the way they explore the corporeality of structures (in Foucault’s case it’s power)?

Another most important question, Bourdieu studies ‘rituals’ that don’t have sense/meaning outside their very observance. How can we connect his object of study i.e., rituals to what he has arrived at a kind of reconciliation within social theory of what was considered irreconcialable? How has his object of study helped him achieve this? This question flows from our previous discussion on Foucault’s object of study ‘ideas’ and his project of telling us their histories. 

Montag on Spivack

Have been trying to figure why I have this discomfort with Spivack. Found thus essay, and though I definitely didnt think of it in terms of how Montag does by critiquing Spivack for placing a transcendental question that cannot be answered, I think like I was trying to put it class, my discomfort is with the claim to be 'speaking on behalf of' rather than 'speaking of' as I think Foucault does.  And I  think the reason that I was trying to give for this has been articulated in a much better fashion by Montag below:
"For if we accept Derrida's arguments against the speaking subject as ideal origin of speech, present to its utterances as a guarantee of their truth and authenticity, that is, that speech is always already a kind of writing, material and irreducible, we are left only with the fact that there is no pure, original working class or subaltern (or ruling class), possessing a consciousness expressed in its speech or for that matter its acts. There is speech and writing (although these are only modalities of action which are in no way privileged) always and everywhere. It is precisely in and through the struggles that traverse these fields of practice that collectivities are constituted. The question of whether or not the subaltern, or to use the Leninist term, the masses can speak cannot be posed transcendentally but only conjuncturally by the disposition of opposing forces that characterizes a given historical moment."
Full essay below.

Can the Subaltern Speak
and Other Transcendental Questions*

Warren Montag

     1. Althusser insisted throughout his work that a philosophy must be judged by the effects that it produces, all the effects, whether internal or external to whatever disciplinary boundaries might be thought to impose their jurisdiction on it. For Althusser history no more forgives the "misunderstood" or "misinterpreted" philosopher than it does the defeated revolutionary. From a materialist standpoint there is no more a "court of final appeal," as Machiavelli put it, in philosophy than in politics. To grant philosophy a material, practical existence in this way is to admit that "misinterpretations" are not subjective errors (whether malicious or benign) in the minds of one's readers but are rather the objective effects of one's own work, not of course of the intentions behind it but in its real existence and in its unforeseeable encounters with other works, and other forces. It hardly needs to be said that few philosophers have openly endorsed such a position, just as few philosophers have ever written books with the phrase "self-criticism in the title. And more disturbing than the narcissistic injury that results from the recognition that one is not entirely master of one's words and arguments, no matter how painstakingly constructed, is the idea that truth is not enough, that false and harmful ideas are held in place by relations of force that can be changed only by opposing force. In other words, Plato was right to see philosophy as the site of a war that can have no end insofar as one must constantly confront the unforeseeable consequences of one's own work.

     2. Not that Gayatri Spivak needs to be told any of this. Her essay "can the Subaltern Speak?" (which exists in several forms--I'll be examining the longest version, which appears in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture) displays a dazzling array of tactical devices designed to ward off or pre-emptively neutralize the attacks of critics. We might say of Spivak what Althusser said of Lacan--that the legendary difficulty of the essay is less a consequence of the profundity of its subject matter than its tactical objectives: "to forestall the blows of critics . . . to feign a response to them before they are delivered" and, above all, to resort to philosophies apparently foreign to the endeavor "as so many intimidating witnesses thrown in the faces of the audience to retain the respect." To acknowledge this does not automatically imply a criticism of Spivak (which is precisely why I cited the case of Lacan the importance of whose work for me at least is unquestionable): after all, tactics are dictated by the features of the concrete situation.

     3. Of course, the difficulty of the essay cannot be reduced to a matter of tactics alone. Its difficulty is also a consequence of the fact that Spivak carries on several struggles simultaneously. the first, and perhaps the most important, is her intervention in the debates surrounding the field of Subaltern Studies as it existed in India in the early eighties, particularly as represented by the work of Ranajit Guha. As a critical supporter of Subaltern Studies as a project, Spivak seeks to point out a discrepancy between its research and the way its practitioners theorized that research. In particular, she objects to the notion that Subaltern studies seeks to allow the previously ignored voice of the subaltern finally to be heard and that its objective can be to "establish true knowledge of the subaltern and its consciousness." The notion that the subaltern is a kind of collective individual, conscious of itself, an author, an actor, in short, the classical subject, allowed the movement to differentiate between the subaltern and the representation of the subaltern by imperialism, and thus to call attention to the blank spaces imperialist discourse. The subaltern studies movement did so, however, only by suppressing the heterogeneity and non-contemporaneity of the subaltern itself, that is, by assigning it an essence and therefore falling into a metaphysical abyss from which Spivak seeks to rescue it.

     4. And according to Spivak they found themselves in some very distinguished company in that Abyss. The other major objective of the essay is to intervene in a quarrel not so much between Foucault and Derrida (who did engage in a philosophical debate which Spivak curiously neglects to mention) as between their champions, acknowledged and unacknowledged, in the U.S. A third figure, Deleuze, also comes to play a part, if a minor one, in this scene as Foucault's accomplice. In particular, she seeks to lay to rest the "received idea" that "Foucault deals with real history, real politics and real social problems; Derrida is inaccessible, esoteric and textualistic." She will show, in contrast, that "Derrida is less dangerous" than Foucault, who not only privileges "the 'concrete' subject of oppression" but even more dangerously conceals the privilege he thus grants himself by "masquerading as the absent non-represented who lets the oppressed speak for themselves." While this may seem a surprising charge to lay at the feet of Foucault, who, after all, asked the famous question, "What is an Author?" and in doing so had a few things to say about Derrida that Spivak might profitably have consulted, she invokes "the labor of the negative" to sustain her accusation. Foucault's critique of the subject is itself a ruse of subjectivity. The ruse is so clever that its work cannot be glimpsed in any of Foucault's major texts where it labors to dissemble the negation of the subject that it will finally itself negate. Accordingly, Spivak must turn to what she calls "the unguarded practice of conversation," i.e., an interview to discover Foucault's thought. Of course, one might be tempted to argue that it is not only possible but inevitable that Foucault would contradict himself not only in interviews but in his most important works, unless that is, we assign to Foucault the position of Absolute subject, whose writing, despite the appearance of contradiction , possesses total coherence and homogeneity. Spivak, however, suggests that what Foucault utters in apparently "unguarded" moments can only reveal a truth kept carefully hidden under a veil of appearance; such a procedure of reading resolves the apparent contradiction to restore Foucault's work to the bad totality that it has always been.

     5. What Foucault and Deleuze, First World intellectuals, share with the subaltern studies group is the notion no less dangerous for being naive that "the oppressed . . . can speak and know their conditions." And thus to the general plague of essentialism which in truly internationalist fashion circulates freely between the First and Third Worlds, Spivak proposes the antidote of a single question: can the subaltern speak? It is a testimony to the power of Spivak's essay that this question has come to dominate an entire theoretical field to such an extent that the vast majority of responses have consisted of answers to, rather than examinations of, her question. It is as if there exists a simple dilemma before us: either we argue that the subaltern can indeed speak, in which case according to one's perspective we have either brought agency back in or, in contrast, lapsed into essentialism; or we argue with Spivak that the subaltern cannot speak, which means for some that we have silenced the oppressed, which for others we have refused the myth of the originary subject. Few have ventured to question the question itself, to ask how such a question functions and what are its practical effects.

     6. A recent exception has focused on the putative subject or non-subject of speech: the subaltern. Chakrabarti and Chaudhury have criticized Spivak's use of the term as suppressing class antagonisms, not simply essentialistic or reductive ways of understanding these antagonisms, but class contradictions per se. In fact, if we examine the essay closely we can go even further to say that Spivak has elevated the contradiction between the First World and Third World as opposing blocs to a position of strategic and political dominance, as if the working classes in the West (and it appears that only the West has working classes--from the essay one would think that India was a primarily peasant society rather than one of the largest manufacturing economies in the world) is structurally allied more closely to its own bourgeoisie than to those forces traditionally regarded as its allies in the nations outside of Europe, North American and Japan: workers, rural laborers, landless peasants, etc. Thus, the idea of international alliances between the working classes East and West is for Spivak only a relic of so-called orthodox Marxism, it is even more menacingly a component of the strategy to maintain the domination of First World over Third World by subordinating the interests of the subaltern to those of their privileged counterparts. It is worth remarking that this is hardly a new position: on the contrary, it has a long history in the socialist and communist movements. Lenin flirted with it in his attempts to explain the capitulation of European social democracy in the First World War, Stalin embraced it and its very language derives from the period of the Sino-Soviet split and the consolidation of Maoism as an international current. Accordingly, those who hold this position might want to draw their own balance sheet of its real political effects.

     7. My objective, however, is to question the question itself, "Can the Subaltern Speak," which even if we replace the subaltern with another noun of our choice (the working class[es], the people, the oppressed, etc.) rests on an obvious paradox. Of course the subaltern speak and write; the archives of the world are filled not only with the political tracts of their parties and organizations, but there are literary texts, newspapers, films, recordings, leaflets, songs, even the very chants that accompany spontaneous and organized protests all over the world. To all appearances, there is speaking and writing always and everywhere and even more where there is resistance to exploitation and oppression. But here we must be very careful; Spivak does not ask whether the subaltern does speak but whether it is possible for them to speak. Her question is a question of possibility which as such functions as a transcendental question, akin to Kant's famous question: what can I know? That is, what we take to be the subaltern speaking may in fact be determined to be only the appearance of their speaking, if our theory deems it impossible for them to speak. Such transcendental questions thus necessarily produce a distinction between appearance and reality: if what is, is impossible then it must be declared no longer to be what is and a second real reality substituted for it.

     8. Even more curious than this transcendental turn itself is the argumentation Spivak musters to support her declaration, against all appearances, that the subaltern cannot speak. And she has called forth some very intimidating witnesses on her behalf, the primary one, of course, being Derrida. Who better than the translator of Of Grammatology to remind us of the relevance of Derrida's critique of Western logocentrism and phonocentrism to political life and to show the utter folly, if not the disingenuousness, of Foucault's call to publish the writings of prisoners as an integral part of the movement against the prisons, or the attempt to set up and archive for the workers' voices as part of the project of proletarian self-emancipation (a project which Spivak has already criticized in categorical terms)? It appears, however, that no one has thought to ask whether Derrida's argument's (especially in Grammatology, the work in which such questions are most extensively examined, lead to such conclusions). Is there anything in Derrida's critique of logocentrism that would allow us to say the subaltern cannot speak but must be spoken for, that is, represented both discursively and politically by those who can speak, those who are real subjects of speech? In fact, it would appear that Derrida's argument leads in precisely the opposite direction. For if we accept Derrida's arguments against the speaking subject as ideal origin of speech, present to its utterances as a guarantee of their truth and authenticity, that is, that speech is always already a kind of writing, material and irreducible, we are left only with the fact that there is no pure, original working class or subaltern (or ruling class), possessing a consciousness expressed in its speech or for that matter its acts. There is speech and writing (although these are only modalities of action which are in no way privileged) always and everywhere. It is precisely in and through the struggles that traverse these fields of practice that collectivities are constituted. The question of whether or not the subaltern, or to use the Leninist term, the masses can speak cannot be posed transcendentally but only conjuncturally by the disposition of opposing forces that characterizes a given historical moment.

     9. To recognize this is to recognize that Spivak has carried out a double displacement: not only has she replaced the question of whether the subaltern does speak at a given moment with the question of whether it is possible for them to speak at all, she has even more importantly substituted speech for action, as if, again, there exist opposing worlds of language (in which we are trapped) and being (which remains inaccessible to us). Had she not carried out this substitution, her essay would have been far less effective; for the subaltern or the masses never cease to resist and rebel even as they are constituted by these actions as the masses. Here we must draw a line of demarcation: on the one side, the transcendental questions that declare what exists impossible so as to declare necessary and inevitable the representation of the masses by others; on the other a materialism that recognizes the irreducibility of what exists, including the voices and actions of the masses as they wage their struggles for self-emancipation with or without intellectuals of the Third and First World at their side.

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Editor's Note

*This essay was originally presented at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, December, 1997, in Toronto, Canada.

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Contents copyright © 1998 by Warren Montag.

Format copyright © 1998 by Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087, Volume 1, Number 2, Spring 1998.

Interesting Read! "Bourdieu, Critic of Foucault"

Bourdieu, Critic of Foucault The Case of Empirical Social Science against Double-Game-Philosophy

These paragraphs helped me great deal to understand Bhabha and Spivak and what their deconstruction does to the postcolonial theory

For Bhabha the ‘emblem of the English book’ is one of the most important of the ‘signs taken for wonders’ by which the coloniser controls the imagination and the aspirations of the colonised, because the book assumes a greater authority than the experience of the colonised peoples themselves. But, as Bhabha argues, such authority simultaneously renders the colonial presence ambivalent, since it only comes about by displacing those images of identity already held by the colonised society[M1] . The colonial space is therefore an agonistic space. Despite the ‘imitation’ and ‘mimicry’ with which colonised peoples cope with the imperial presence, the relationship becomes one of constant, if implicit, contestation and opposition. Indeed, such mimicry becomes the very site of that conflict, a ‘transparency’, as Bhabha puts it, which is dependent for its fixity on the underlying negative of imperial presence which it seems to duplicate. For Bhabha ‘mimicry’ does not mean that opposition is rejected, but rather that it is seen to encompass more than overt opposition. Opposition is not simply reduced to intention, but is implicit in the very production of dominance whose intervention as a ‘dislocatory presence’ paradoxically confirms the very thing it displaces. The resulting hybrid modalities also challenge the assumption of the ‘pure’ and the ‘authentic’, concepts upon which the resistance to imperialism often stands. Indeed hybridity, rather than indicating corruption or decline, may, as Bhabha argues, be the most common and effective form of subversive opposition since it displays the ‘necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination’.

Spivak’s and Bhabha’s analyses are important and very influential warnings of the complexities of the task faced by post-colonial theory. But they have also invited responses which see them and their approach as too deeply implicated in European intellectual traditions, which older, more radical exponents of post-colonial theory, such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, had sought to dismantle and set aside. The debate is a struggle between those who want to align themselves with the subaltern and those who insist that this attempt becomes at best only a refined version of the very discourse it seeks to displace. All are agreed, in some sense, that the main problem is how to effect agency[M2]  for the post-colonial subject. But the contentious issue of how this is to be attained remains unresolved.

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 [M1]Can we understand this as the colonized reading/understanding of the colonizer’s texts and meaning? The colonized mimic the West. But the very act of mimicry dislocates and subverts the meanings intended by the colonizer’s discourse. The notions of civilization, liberty and human freedom are taken from the colonizer’s discourse but deployed in the nationalist struggle to fight Western imperialism.

 [M2]Or is the question: is there an agency independent of the colonizer’s discourse for the colonized to exercise it to a different end?

Found this paragraph in the intro extremely interesting. And my response and questions this time are in the form of footnotes to this paragraph

"Gayatri Spivak questions whether or not the possibility exists for any recovery of a subaltern voice that is not a kind of essentialist fiction. Although she expresses considerable sympathy for the project undertaken in contemporary historiography to give a voice to ‘the subaltern’ who had been written out of the record by conventional historical accounts, Spivak raises grave doubts about its theoretical legitimacy. She is sympathetic but critical in her response here to Ranajit Guha’s subaltern studies project which seeks to obtain what Said termed the ‘permission to speak’ by going behind the terms of reference of ‘élite’ history to include the perspective of those who are never taken into account (the subaltern social groups). Recognising and applauding the project’s endorsement of the heterogeneity of the colonial subject, and giving a qualified approval to the politics of the effort to speak a ‘politics of the people’, Spivak is nevertheless concerned to articulate what she sees as the difficulties and contradictions involved in constructing a ‘speaking position’ for the subaltern. Wanting to acknowledge the continuity and vigour of pre-colonial social practice, its ability to modify and to ‘survive’ colonial incursions and definitional strategies and exclusions, she insists that the poststructuralist mode of the project only disguises what she sees as an underlying persistent essentialism[M1] [M2] . For her, one cannot construct a category of the ‘subaltern’ that has an effective ‘voice’ clearly and unproblematically audible above the persistent and multiple echoes of its inevitable heterogeneity. Her conclusion is that for ‘the true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference[M3] , there is no subaltern subject that can ‘know and speak itself[M4] . Thus the intellectual must avoid reconstructing the subaltern as merely another unproblematic field of knowing, so confining its effect to the very form of representation (‘text for knowledge’) the project sought to evade and lay bare. The conclusion is expressed, perhaps unfortunately, in a rather negative way: ‘Subaltern historiography must confront the impossibility of such gestures’. Spivak’s negative, as José Rabasa has pointed out, does not ‘necessarily exclude such instances of colonized subjects defracting power as those Homi Bhabha has isolated in the case of India’." (from the introduction of "The Postcolonial Studies Reader")

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 [M1]Does this mean any engagement with 'what it was like before colonialism' or 'an attempt in the present to build our knowledge structures' cannot escape the essentialist streak while theorising? Fanon alludes to this when he says he doesn't want to legitimize past in the struggle/combat for independence against the colonialist forces. The questions that follow this line of thinking will be - Can past be revived in its pristine form after colonialist encounter? What happens to language that we speak? Will there be a language left unmixed with colonizer's language and its array of significance such that we can rebuild and reconstruct 'our' culture from that? To illustrate this let me take an example:

“India” as a category and a “nation”, many scholars have argued, was not available before colonialist encounter. It is only after the colonial experience we can have a nation and give that nation a name - India. But this category is unscrupulously used both in colonialist and non colonialist discourses.

The history that precedes the construction of the category of India becomes Indian history.

Indian history is not written showing us how specific events in time led to the emergence of India as a category and a nation but it is written tracing its history backwards where India has remained a singular entity from the Vedic civilization to the colonial invasion. The writing itself is such that there is something “essential”  in the categorical construct i.e. India which has flown like one river. We can recall here Foucault and his way of doing history. India can then be seen as an emergence at one particular point in time in history rather than a cumulative entity which has flown from Vedic civilizations.

This kind of essentialism which Spivak speaks has not completely gone from our discourses. We still speak of Indian Sciences and Indian knowledge as if there was something called India in Vedic times and the period that follows it along a continuum till the colonial encounter. 

 [M2]Also after colonial encounter it’s difficult to distill from what we are today - what is Eastern and what is Western/colonialist. Because colonial experience renders us incapable of recognizing what language meant before without conflating the meanings with colonizer’s language. Colonial encounter erases the colonized past and the colonized has to recognize her past from within the colonial experience she has had. Colonizer’s language does that to the colonized.

 [M3]I cannot know myself if I don’t encounter the other. Is this not in some way true of the West also?  Because after Saussure, one can’t help but say all identity lies in the difference.

 [M4] Is the question here: how can you distinguish a voice that is lost in the heterogeneity of voices? How can I discover this is my voice and my speech when I cannot know how my voice itself has so many others in it? When Dipesh Chakrabarty speaks of the project in History to provincialize Europe and bring in heterogeneity into history, my rather naive question is 'isn't doing 'History' itself a European idea? what can be done instead of history? ' 'Itihasa'? so as not to universalize a European paradigm? Haven't we equated 'Itihasa' with history  to the extent that we don't know whether there was any other way of doing Itihasa? Haven't we lost in the act of translation (which is itself a product of colonial encounter), the ability to retain the significance of signs in the colonized culture?  

Manuel Delanda explaining Deleuze

This video series helped me a great deal to understand Deleuze. Follow the link if you are interested too
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKIsA8yhP58

POSTSCRIPT ON SOCIETIES OF CONTROL: Keywords

Deleuze develops the Foucaultian thought on history of societies and how they are governed from societies of sovereignty to disciplinary societies (Foucault's terms) to societies of control (Deleuze's term).

Keywords:

Computer as the new machine or apparatus – similar to Networks of automatons in Rhizomes

Training which never ends

The spirit of corporation

Obsolete disciplinary mechanisms

On Rhizomes

[NOTE: the content within parentheses, small font are my comments and doubts]

Book has only itself; it is neither a signifier nor a signified. We will not look for anything to understand in it

Book exists only through the outside and on the outside

Literature is an assemblage

All we talk about are multiplicities

The Tree is already the image of world

Principle of Unity

            From Dichotomous root and tap root

                                    to        

Supplementary dimension of folding

Radicle chaosmos rather than root cosmos

Rats are rhizomes; burrows are too!

(Chomskian linguistic practice of parsing a sentence into noun phrase and verb phrase and the standard practice of deriving words from roots.)

Principle of Connection and Heterogeneity

            Any point of rhizome must be connected to any other and must be

            A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connection between semiotic chanins, organizations of    circumstances relative to arts, sciences and social struggles

There is no language in itself; nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patios, slangs and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Language is .... an essentially heterogeneous entity. There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity... A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence

            (Further critique of linguistics and its assumptions as a discipline)

Principle of Multiplicity

            Ceases to have any relation to the One as

·         Subject or object

·         Natural or spiritual reality

·         Image or world

There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object or to divide in the subject

A multiplicity is neither subject not object, only determinations, magnitudes and dimensions that cannot increase in number without multiplicity changing in nature

Assemblage – an increase in dimensions

(Who controls puppets? Should we stop at the artists or extend to his nerve fibres? Will that not be an increase in dimension?)

There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a Structure, Tree or Root. There are only lines

(Structures – societies, civilizations, system;

Tree or Root – evolutionary schemas, linguistic derivations

Root – origins and beginnings, tendency to start everything at the beginning)

(Is this a comment on the human understanding of the world? A comment  on the human knowledge and its history?)

Concepts are lines

All multiplicities are flat, n Dimensional, Asubjective and Asignifying

It is an asignifying rupture  

(Knowledge trying to explain everything about anything and saying ‘this is all it is about it’. Knowledge seems to offer full explanations leaving little for doubt. It’s too confident)

Segmentarity

Aparallel evolution

RHIZOME IS ANTI GENEALOGY

Principle of Cartography and Decalcomania

            A rhizome is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis and deep structure

“TRACING” – the tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree

A rhizome is a map and not a tracing

Rhizome has multiple entry ways. A map has multiple entry ways as opposed to the tracing which always comes back to the same point. The map has to do with performance whereas tracing always involves alleged competence

SCHIZOANALYSIS – rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to it – divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural, hereditary and syntagmatic

SUBJECTIFICATION OF AFFECTS

There exist tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome. The coordinates are determined not by theoretical analyses implying universals but by a pragmatics composing multiplicities or aggregates of intensities. A new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch

We are tired of trees. We should stop believing in tree, roots and radicles. They have made us suffer too much. All of the arborescent culture is founded on them, from Biology to Linguistics to Psychoanalysis

Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter

Grass / couch grass

Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centres of significance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories... such systems pre-exist the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place (significance and subjectification)

To CENTERED  SYSTEMS authors propose a contrast of ACENTERED SYSTEMS/FINITE NETWORKS OF AUTOMATA in which communication runs from any neighbour to the any other, the stems and channels do not pre-exist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment – such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency

DON’T REDUCE BUT PRODUCE

            The tree has dominated all Western reality and thought

            WEED leads the most satisfactory life of all

            Don’t go for the root, follow the canal

There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations, it is neo capitalism by nature. It invents its eastern face and western face, and reshapes them both...

KNOTS OF ARBORESCENCE IN RHIZOMES AND RHIZOMATIC OFFSHOOTS IN ROOTS

ROOT TREE – CANAL RHIZOME are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendental model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel

AN ANEXACTITUDE

            In the middle/ between things/ interbeing

            TREE – verb- ‘to be’

            RHIZOME – conjunction – ‘and, and, and...’

            Establish a logic of the ‘AND’

A Background to Deleuze

From the Stanford Encyclopedia

What I want to learn from today’s discussion on Foucault's ideas

Foucault’s approach is broadly classified under the tag ‘New Historicism’. What is ‘new’ about the history that he does? He showed us how ideas like madness and sexuality which were taken to have no history at all (transcendental and metaphysical concepts so central to explain the ‘origin’ in historical interpretations) had a history and emerged at particular point in time in the history of Western civilization. Foucault seems to make a distinction between archaeology and genealogy as methods/approaches to history. What is exactly this distinction? In his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History”, he charts out the details of a genealogical approach to history (he sometimes terms it as “Effective History”) against traditional approach to history. In his another essay “What is Enlightenment?” he says that his work is mainly “genealogical in design and archaeological in its method”. I want to know what is this difference that Foucault is pointing at? I feel that this difference is very central to the understanding of ‘what is it that Foucault did as a historian?’ Or to rephrase it, how did Foucault do what he did which resulted in shaking the traditional way of doing history? 

Link to Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control

http://www.n5m.org/n5m2/media/texts/deleuze.htm

The constitution of society

Paul Kockelman

Link to Ivan Karp's Review of Giddens

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/644591.pdf

Some questions before today's class

1.     I understand from Giddens that Weber in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” reverses the causality and attribute the development of capitalism not to the rationalization of economic life but to the irrational religious ethic. While reading Marx in the last class we discussed how religion serves as an instrument for the ruling classes to promote their ideology (or how bourgeoisie use religion to serve their capitalist greed). But Weber seems to argue that there was something in the religion/belief, in the first place, to make capitalism as we know today possible in the Western Europe. Weber establishes and fixes the causality in the religion/belief and not in the rationalist action of the bourgeoisie who attempt to maximise profit by exploiting what is at their hands. We also had discussed in the last class that Weber as a scholar did not interact with Marx or his works. But what is intriguing is that Weber seems to be critiquing the materialistic interpretation of history, particularly, of capitalism. For both Marx and Weber, the object of the study is capitalism. My question is ‘was Weber interacting with or responding to Marx? Or is it that the materialistic philosophy had gained currency and become popular by the time Weber wrote his book? If that is the case, he could not help but respond and formulate his questions in dialogue with materialistic philosophy.

2.      Giddens also informs us that Weber was trained in economic, legal and historical thought. Given his training, what he couldn’t do was ‘generalize’ because History as a knowledge domain is always preoccupied with the ‘particular’. When Weber thinks of ‘Interpretative Sociology’ to offer general explanations of social actions and develops the concept of ‘ideal type’ as a methodological tool, is he in some way thinking of an epistemological gap that History cannot fill and thus the need for Sociology to do this?

3.      Is Weber assuming that a researcher studying a social action will at all times be able to construct a perfectly rational ideal type to offer a subjective interpretation and causal explanation of a social action? In other words, will a researcher be in full knowledge of all possibilities that an abstracted ideal type can exhaust, such that s/he will be able to understand a real social action juxtaposing it with the ‘constructed ideal type’? When does one build these ideal types? Prior to empirical investigation or after it? What difference does this (construction of ideal types prior to or after fieldwork) make to the research? 

Weber - Economy and Society

Economy and Society: An outline of Interpretive Sociology

Weber - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of capitalism

Link to Volume 5 Collected Works

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volume05/index.htm 

Tentative Reading List

SEMINAR IN SOCIAL THEORY

NIAS, 2^nd term 2012-13

Carol Upadhya

Timings:  Wednesdays, 11.30 - 1.30

Name of instructor:  Prof Carol Upadhya

Credits:  3

Description:

The course is a reading seminar for committed students who want to work through some specific readings in social theory for their PhD projects. The broad themes that will be covered are:

1) Problem of structure and agency; practice theory

2) Subjectivity, self, power

3) Class analysis

Tentative topics and readings:

1.  Classical theory - Marx - historical materialism, value, commodity, exploitation, class

 relations                                                                                                        Jan 16                                                                                     

Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Society Theory (Cambridge UP, 1971), pp 1-64

Marx, from Collected Works (www.marxists.org):

     Theses on Feuerbach (Vol 5, pp 6-8)

     The German Ideology (Vol 5, pp 27-37; 59-62)

     Marx, Capital, Vol. 1:  Prefaces to 1^st and 2^nd editions; Sections 1-3, Commodity, Use-

Value, Exchange-Value; Section 4, Fetishism of Commodities; Chap 7, Labour Process and Surplus Value; Chap 10, Sections 1-2, Working Day; Chap 26, The Secret of Primitive Accumulation.

     Marx, Capital, Vol. 3. Chapter 52, Classes

2.  Classical theory - Weber - theory of social action; class and status; domination,

            authority                                                                                                        Jan 23                                                

Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Society Theory (Cambridge UP, 1971),

        pp 119-184, 224-242.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Routledge 1992[1930]), Chaps 1-3, 5.

Weber, Economy and Society; An Outline of Interpretive Sociology:  Chap 1 (Social action),

pp 3-28; Chap 3 (Domination and legitimacy), pp 212-222; Chap 4 (Status groups and classes), pp 302-307; Chap 9 (Class, status, party), pp 926-940; Chap 10 (Economic domination), pp 941-955.

Susan J. Hekman, Weber’s ideal type: a contemporary reassessment, Polity Vol. 16, No. 1: 119-137, 1983

3.  Habermas – theory of communicative action                                                  Jan 30

Jurgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action:  Vol I: Translator’s Introduction, pp v-xlii; Chap 3, Social action, purposive activity, and communication; Vol II, Chap 5, part 1, pp 1-42; Chap 6, System and lifeworld, pp 113-197.

4.  Giddens – structuration theory; modernity and self                                       Feb 20

Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Polity, 1984), Introduction and Chaps 1, 4, 6.

Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity; Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford UP), Introduction, Chaps 1 & 3

5.  Bourdieu - practice theory                                                                                 March 13

Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford University Press, 1990), pp 1-141.

Moishe Postone, Edward LiPuma, and Craig Calhoun, Introduction: Bourdieu and social theory. In Calhoun et al (eds), Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp 1-13.

Craig Calhoun, Habitus, field, and capital: the question of historical specificity. In Calhoun et al (eds), Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp 61-88.

6.  Structure and agency – recent interventions                                                   March 20                   

Sherry B Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), Introduction, Chaps 2, 5, 6.

Paul Kockelman, Agency: the relation between meaning, power, and knowledge. Current Anthropology 48(3): 375-401, 2007.

Ivan Karp, Agency and social theory: A review of Anthony Giddens. American Ethnologist 13(1):131-137, 1986.

Edward LiPuma, Culture and the concept of culture in a theory of practice. In Calhoun et al (eds), Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp 14-34.

Brenda Farnell, Getting out of the habitus: an alternative model of dynamically embodied social action. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 6(1): 397-418, 2000.

7.  Actor-network theory -  Latour                                                                           March 28

Bruno Latour,. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. --

Latour, Bruno. 1998. On actor-network theory: a few clarifications.

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8.  Class analysis – Bourdieu and beyond                                                             April 3

Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power. Transl. G Raymond, M. Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), Introduction and Chapters 1, 7, 11.

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) pp ---.

Pierre Bourdieu, The forms of capital, in J.G. Richardson (ed), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp 241-58.

Edward LiPuma and Sarah Keene Meltzoff, Toward a theory of culture and class: an Iberian example. American Ethnologist 16(2): 313-34, 1989.

9.  Class analysis – neo-Weberian, neo-Marxian approaches; class

outside the West                                                                                           April 10

Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), pp --.

Mark Liechty, Suitably Modern; Making New Middle Class Culture in a New Consumer Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), Chaps 1&3.

Mazzarella, William. 2005. Middle class. In R. Dwyer (ed), South Asia Keywords.

            http://www.soas.ac.uk/csasfiles/keywords/Mazzarella-middleclass.pdf.

Rachel Heiman, Carla Freeman, Mark Liechty (eds), The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing Through Ethnography (School for Advanced Research Press, 2012), Introduction.

10.  The Foucaultian turn – power and subjectivity                                              April 17

Michel Foucault, The subject and power, Technologies of the self, Preface to The History of Sexuality, Vol II;  [additional readings TBA]

[Critical readings TBA – from Dreyfus and Rabinow, et al]

11.  Deleuze??                                                                                                                        April 24