What in the hell …

Some notes on some books, two of which have been recalled by some accursed other library user before I’ve read much of them. Curse you, other library user!

Notes on Chakrabarty

More notes on Provincializing Europe

“There are various ways of thinking about the fact that global capitalism exhibits some common characteristics, even though every instance of capitalist development has a unique history. One can, for one, see these differences as invariably overcome by capital in the long run. The thesis of uneven development, on the other hand, sees these differences as negotiated and contained - though not always overcome - within the structure of capital. And third, one can visualize capital itself as producing and proliferating differences. Historicism is present in all of these modes of thought. They all share a tendency to think of capital in the image of a unity that arises in one part of the world at a particular period and then develops globally over historical time, encountering and negotiating historical differences in the process. Over even when “capital” is ascribed a “global,” as distinct from European, beginning, it is still seen in terms of the Hegelian idea of a totalizing unity - howsoever internally differentiated - that undergoes a process of development in historical time.” (47.)

Chakrabarty discusses Marx and Aristotle (51), noting that Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, money is a convention that equalizes that which is different and unequal. Chakrabarty reads Marx, however, as believing there is a real equality, found in the category of abstract labor, which allows equalization to occur. (52.) Now, of course things must be equalizable to be equalized, but equalization or differentiation (and the mode of either) is always a decision, not a given. My marxological hunch is that Marx doesn’t hold to this equality so much as critique it as a category of bourgeois thought. That’s not all the important. What is important is recognizing the count-by- or count-as-one that occurs, wherein a unity, a unit (of measure) is opted for out of and over-and-against a multiple.

Chakrabarty opts for viewing labor power as multiple in his applications of his category “History 2″ to labor power. Labor power, or rather, its bearer, “embodies other kinds of pasts” than only those functional to value production. “These pasts (…) may be under the institutional domination of the logic of capital and exist in proximate relation to it, but they also do not belong to the “life process” of capital. they enable the human bearer of labor power to enact other ways of being in the world - other than, that is, being the bearer of labor power. We cannot ever hope to write a complete or full accounts of these pasts.” (66.) These other pasts are multiple, in a sense infinite, and thus not a unity except as the result of a count by one.

There is a sort of count by one operating at the level of temporal categories - Benjamin’s empty homogenous time is precisely time counted as one - connected with a certain type of history telling, “a natural, homogeneous, secular, calendrical time without which the story of human evolution/civilization - a single human history, that is - cannot be told. In other words, the code of the secular calendar has this claim built into it: that independent of culture or consciousness, people exist in historical time.” (74.)

(Chakrabarty connects this to traits “inherent in language,” [83] a move which flies in the face of his own critical remarks on the idea of “the human mind” [75] - the singular definite article preceding the phrase is what Chakrabarty dislikes. Chakrabarty here effects a totalization of language. Language is as much multiple as anything else is.)

Chakrabarty discusses Hobsbawm, quoting him saying “the procedures of the law court, which insist on the supremacy of evidence as much as historical researchers, and often in much the same manner, demonstrate that the difference between historical fact and falsehood is not ideological… When an innocent person is tried for murder, and wishes to prove his or [her] innocence, what is required is the techniques not of the ‘postmodern’ theorist, but of the old-fashioned historian.” (Quoted on 107. Chakrabarty doesn’t comment on Hobsbawm’s implication that courtroom truth standards and methods are free of ideology.) Chakrabarty writes, “This is why Hobsbawm would argue that minority histories must also conform to the protocols of “good history,” for history speaks to forms of representative democracy and social justice that liberalism or Marxism - in their significantly different ways - have already made familiar.” (107.)

He continues, “But minority histories can do more than that. The task of producing “minority” histories has, under the pressure precisely of a deepening demand for democracy, become a double task. I may put it thus: “good” minority history is about expanding the scope of social justice and representative democracy, but talk about the “limits of history,” on the other hand, is about struggling, or even groping, for nonstatist forms of democracy that we cannot yet either understand or envisage completely. This is so because in the mode of being attentive to the “minority” of subaltern pasts, we stay with heterogeneities without seeking to reduce them to any overarching principle that speaks for an already given whole.” (107.)

By “subaltern pasts” Chakrabarty means “pasts that cannot ever enter academic history as belonging to the historian’s own position.” (105.) These “are marginalized not because of any conscious intentions but because they represent moments or points at which the archive that the historian mines develops a degree of intractability with respect to the aims of professional history. In other words, these are pasts that resist historicization, just as there may be moments in ethnographic research that resist the doing of ethnography. Subaltern pasts, in [this] sense of the term, do not belong exclusively to socially subordinate or subaltern groups, nor to minority identities alone.” (101. Chakrabarty references an essay by Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” that sounds quite worth reading.) The basic question here is that of the world view of the historian and of the subjects the historian writes about. The claim seems to be that certain subjects’ first person perspective cannot but be subordinated by academic history.

One way of posing what Chakrabarty is interested in is as an encounter between the historian and other subjects: “humans from any other period and region - are always in some sense our contemporaries.” This is “the condition under which we can even begin to treat them as intelligible to us. Thus the writing of history must implicitly assume a plurality of times existing together, a disjuncture of the present with itself. Making visible this disjuncture is what subaltern pasts allow us to do.” (109.)

I like this formulation, but there are two risks here. On the one hand, there is a risk of positing one present - that of the historian - as properly present and others as the disjunctive presents. This is only a stone’s throw from positing them as throwbacks, archaisms, the past existing in the properly present. This is not Chakrabarty’s intent, but the way in which Chakrabarty’s account is different from this could stand to be spelled out more clearly. There is no hegemonic present, or rather, any hegemonic present is politically hegemonic such that it is not properly present while others are disjunctive. The difficulty here is familiar philosophically, that of recognizing one’s location and maintaining it with full commitment yet without positing it as having any particular recommendability for those in other locations. This is sometimes difficult, but it can be done.

On the other hand, there is a second risk, that of positing a single unified present or a substance which makes the relation posited by the historian present. This is analogous to the problem in Marx(ism) as to why heterogeneous labors and qualities and quantities can be at the same time homogeneous (enough to be exhangeable). On my view, the move to investigate the “why” here is a mistake. Given that the actual equalization of labors and object does occur, it must be possible to equalize them (since actuality is a subset of possibility and actuality is always possible), but this possibility isn’t very interesting and does little work. (Althusser on causality and aleatory materialism would be a worthwhile comparison here.) That is, Chakrabarty risks implying there is an actual present where in different presents and pasts interact, and that this present is ontologically primary. This may well be an assumption required for the writing of history and so is to be retained insofar as one is writing history, but that is no argument for taking it as anything more than a regulative idea of that particular practice. (Badiou remarks somewhere something to the effect that being is neither one nor multiple - either is the result of a decision. The same can be said here, the historian must decide there is such a present, but that does not recommend such a decision in other practices than those of the historian qua historian.)

Chakrabarty does not hold that the practices of reasoning frequently deployed by the historian are elitist. Rather, “[r]eason becomes elitist whenever we allow unreason and superstition to stand in for backwardness, that is to say, when reason collides with the logic of historicist thought. For then we see our “superstitious” contemporaries as examples of an “earlier type,” as human embodiments of the principle of anachronism.” (238.) For Chakrabarty, this move objectifies. [By the by, the non-anachronistic nature of working class discourse is one of the key axioms - and the goal to be demonstrated - by Sewell’s book.] The human anachronism can be important, but they are not the same kind of subject as the historian. They are the eyewitness (recalling Hobsbawm’s court analogy, quoted above) to an occurrence, but this means the historian is in a position of superiority, that of processing, judging, and providing or enforcing the parameters for the production of the eyewitness’s testimony. Chakrabarty sees a similar operation in ethnography, and believes that both ethnography and history can only objectify, and in so doing deny “the lived relations the observing subject already has with that which he or she identifies as belonging to a historical or ethnographic time and space separate from the ones he or she occupies as a the analyst.” (239.)

The “capacity to construct a single historical context for everything is the enabling condition for modern historical consciousness, the capacity to see the past as gone and reified into an object of investigation. It is this ability to see the past as genuinely dead, as separate from the time of the observer, that has given rise to the utopian and hermeneutic (but nevertheless ethical) struggles of the modern historical imagination - to try to get inside the skin of the past, to try to see it “as it really was,” to try and reenact it in the historian’s mind, and so on. I do no mean to devalue this struggle or the intense craftsmanship to which it gave rise. But it is also true (…) that the modern sense of “anachronism” stops us from confronting the problem of the temporal heterogeneity of the “now” in thinking about history. We need to consider why we find anachronism productive.” (243.)

Chakrabarty contrasts historicism, “the idea that to get a grip on things we need to know their histories, the process of development they have undergone in order to become what the are,” the idea “that once one knows the causal structures that operate in history, one may also gain a certain mastery of them,” with what he calls decisionism, “a disposition that allows the critic to talk about the future and the past as though both were concrete, value-laden choices or decisions to be made with regard to both.” In the latter, “[t]here is no talk of historical laws,” rather, “[t]he critic is guided by his or her values to choose the most desirable, sane, and wise future for humanity, and looks to the past as a warehouse of resources on which to draw as needed.” Decisionism “allows one to entertain a variety of attitudes toward the past - from respect to disgust - and yet not be bound by it (….) It thus represents a freedom from history as well as a freedom to respect the aspects of “tradition” considered useful to building the desired future.” (247.)

He quotes Ashis Nandy, saying that the decisionist constructions of the past “are primarily responsible to the present and to the future; they are meant neither for the archivist nor for the archaeologist.” ( Quoted on 247.)

For Chakrabarty, decisionism and historicism can be used compatibly, and even when in conflict the two share “the modernist dream of the “true present” that always looks to, and is in turn determined by, the blueprint for a desirable future.” (248.) Both thus retain a view of anachronism. (Chakrabarty’s argument is unclear as to why decisionism must retain anachronism.)

“To critique historicism in all its varieties is to unlearn to think of history as a developmental process in which that which is possible becomes actual by tending to a future that is singular. Or, to put it differently, it is to learn to think the present - the “now” that we inhabit as we speak - as irreducibly not-one. To take that step is to rethink the problem of historical time and to review the relationship between the possible and the actual.” (248.) Thinking the not-yet as unrealized actuality remains within the field of historicism, as does the future that will be (must be).

**

Notes on “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India”

This is Ranajit Guha’s short prefatory essay to the first volume of the Subaltern Studies collections. The project takes as its point of departure the attack on what it calls elitism, which is essentially the view that agency and/or importance lies up above, in national or international elites. (Structures could be a type of elite-which-is-not-one as well, having the same function of displacing agency.) The essential flaw of elitism is to fail “to acknowlege, far less interpret, the contribution made by the people on their own, that is, independently of the elite to the making and development” of what occurs. For Guha the focus is on Indian nationalism and India. Bracketing for now questions of nationalism and the people, this is a worthwhile sentiment. The “inadequacy of elitist historiography follows directly from the narrow and partial view of politics to which it is committed by virtue of its class outlook.” (3.) “What clearly is left out of [elitist] un-historical historiography is the politics of the people (…) an autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter.” (4.)

This autonomy was (is) an autonomous power, but it is not absolutely distinct from the elites, rather the two strata influenced each other and made use of each other, a “braiding together of the two strands of elite and subaltern politics” which brought about “explosive situations indicating that the masses mobilized by the elite to fight for their own objectives managed to break away from their control and put the characteristic imprint of popular politics on campaigns initiated by the upper classes.” (6.) Thompson’s descriptions of English working class radicalism and rebellion causing the ruling classes to re-organize themselves provides another version of this (one compatible with Tronti’s view of the centrality of the working class as productive agent of social organization), and Sewell’s remarks on working class and artisan radicalism in the French Revolution is another instructive point to compare.

*

Notes on Partha Chatterjee’s introduction to History And The Present

British social history a la Thompson contrasted with the Annales School in that the latter “claimed to have developed properly scientific and non-ideological methods for studying the histories of societies,” (1-2), a claim which the Brits disputed.

History that insists it is not producing ideology ends up producing ideology as its own presupposition. “Once the simple pretense of Rankean historiography - writing history exactly as it happened - was destroyed, there was no hiding the fact that history too had to have its presuppositions. These consisted of orientations, axioms, articles of faith - in short, ideology - held a priori, before the actual scientific operations could begin.” (9.)

“The question now is not “whether ideology,” but rather (…) whether implicitly as presuppositions or explicitly as the product. It is a curious fact that in many European languages - and through translation in most of the rest of the world - history refers both to what the historian writes, namely the historical works that are the products of the historian’s labour, as well as what he or she writes about, namely the past reality that is the object of his or her study. In order for history to be written, there must be a line separating the past as a reality that is no longer present (and therefore as something that can only be represented) from the ways of writing about the past which are part of the historian’s present. But if the ways of writing are inextricably entangled in the ideologies of the historian’s present, is not the historian, by ‘doing’ history, also participating in ‘making’ it?” (12.)

*

EH Carr, _What is History?_

R.G. Collingwood, _The Idea of History_

Mannheim, _Ideology and Utopia_

Charlers R. Bambach, _ Heidegger, Dilthey and the Crisis of Historicism_

De Certeua, _The Writing of History_

Barthes, “The Discourse of History”

Hayden White, _Metahistory_ and _Tropics of Discourse_

Reinhart Koselleck, _Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time_

Pierre Nora, _Realms of Memory_

See Wilhelm Von Humboldt, “On the Task of the Historian”