an international
and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 3, November 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
Destinies of the
Critical
“[I]t is now the difference…on the one hand,
between philosophy and the human and social sciences, and …on the other,
between philosophy and the sciences of life and technosciences”[1]
Whether chronological or conceptual,
contestatory or complicitous, the discourses of the “post” have now gained a
place in the academy. From being
marginal and “illegitimate” at one point, they (have) move(d) through the
passage of ascendancy and banality. The
discourses of the “post” have recast disciplinary/institutional production of
knowledge. But even as these discourses
were making their way, a sort of planetary reorganization of forces and flows
was under way – a reorganization that eventually began to undermine
systematically the institutional sustenance of certain discourses of the post
and put to crisis the very disciplinary constellations of the “social” and
“human”. This new conjuncture has
emerged through the interrelated spectacle of the rise of technosciences and
the release of capital flows.
This paper is
a reflection on two specific moments of the “post”: (i) the “post”-war period
and the expedient intellectual discourse – area studies (and its attendant
disciplines in the social sciences)– that became ascendant then; and (ii) the
so called “post-liberal” and “post-historic” period of today (with the rise of
technosciences) and the necessity of developing a critical humanities
literacy. These reflections are offered
here from the techno-savvy, and rapidly (bio)informatizing Indian context.
MANAGEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE
Area studies is the expedient discourse
of a postwar geopolitical conjuncture.
Area studies is inseparable from the ascendancy of the
Area studies demonstrates the West’s relation to and
regulation of the non-West. This theme
(of the relation between the West and non-West) is of profound ethical and
political (and pedagogical) significance; this theme is of crucial relevance to
thinking in general. Although,
area studies is an integral part of all the major American universities, this
theme never gets addressed as central to institutional and discursive
formations in general. Thus American
Studies (a postwar phenomenon) symptomatically excludes area studies on its
agenda. American studies remains a
national-domestic intellectual and institutional enterprise. Area studies is relegated to the status of a regional
concern.
To be sure, area studies always insisted on disciplinary
affiliations and perspectives. From
Richard Lambert to Wendy Doniger, area specialists evinced methodological
priorities. In fact, area studies
proclaimed nothing less than a new way of organizing knowledge – a sort of
epistemological adventure. The adventure
involved a committed application and presumed extension of received paradigms
of social sciences. The area knowledges,
thus, are the consequence of extensive covering of the “field” by these
paradigms.
Curiously, in his recent plea to reconfigure area
studies, Arjun Appadurai narrativizes the post-war emergence of area studies in
terms of an aesthetic – a sort of “social imagination”: “it is important to recall that one variety
of the imagination as a force of social life – the academic imagination – is
part of a wider geography of knowledge created in the dialogue between social
sciences and area studies.”[2] What kind of
“dialogue” did area studies bargain with social sciences? Did these two academic fields really have a
dialogic status? Wasn’t area studies
largely receiving and extending/expanding the non-rigorous social science
paradigm? And what was the relation
between the “academic imagination” and the “powerful interests” of the post-war
US? Appadurai covers over these questions
in aestheticizing area studies. What
Appadurai completely avoids discussing is the actual architecture of this
expedient cold-war discourse - its
gigantic institutional formations and formulations, and its material
creations. In this recuperative assessment
of the field, area discourses are creations of an “academic imagination”[3]. The area – some region or theme of the non-West –
is declared to be a great laboratory to test the Western social science
models. The detractors of these models
confirmed them by erecting “regional” models of the grand paradigms (McKim
Marriott is an eloquent example here).
The area expertise was more extensional and applicational with regard to
the forms and substances of the European-Western human and social
sciences. The specialist inquiry never
engaged the presuppositions of these very frames of knowledge production on the
one hand, and the relation between such knowledge and its parergonal bounds –
or what remains on the borders of the frames, on the other. In a way the area knowledges assumed the
transparency of the object (area theme) and foreclosed the problem of
representation.
A discussion of area studies can no longer be
isolated (as if a problem of “periphery”, “south”, “new society”) from
inquiries into the governing assumptions and practices of the humanities and
social sciences (as if the “center”, “north”, European-West) in general. Thus
one can argue that area studies and analysis of disciplinarity offer an
ill-conceived resolution of the relation between the specificity of the
idiomatic and the possibility of its translation. In area studies (and disciplinary inquiries
as well), the emphasis has either been on the specific or the idiomatic and
thus denies its translatability.
Consequently, nostalgic or celebratory response toward the area object
persists; a preservationist and museumizing approach prevails with regard to
the object. Ethne oriented relativism
emerges here as the best practice (From Marriott’s Indian culturalism to
These relativizing and generalizing tendencies,
however, are exposed to deeply ironic consequences. While the former in its insistence on the
specific denies its translatability, this is done, even as the idiomatic (say,
a song-text in Tamil) is eloquently represented in the English language of
American area studies. If one sees
translation as a movement across acknowledged borders, the irony can be noted
here (among others, Margaret Travick’s work can be cited here). Whereas the “generalizing” impulse, in its
aggressive recommendation of a unilinear path to the planet can hardly be said
to respond to the specific. In other
words, in its arrogant dragging of events and entities, signatures and
artifacts from their contexts into a supposedly universal normative line
violates the idiomatic. It commits a
translational violence without attending to the idiomatic (starting with the
Center for International Studies at MIT, international studies programs in
general are “agents” of such translation).
These ironies betray the work (not only) of the area specialists.
Another deeply rooted and seldom-examined limit of
area studies is also the inherited legacy of the human/social sciences: And it is
the predominantly verbal-textual mode of its discourse. Area knowledges – like their parental
disciplinary frames are conceived and disseminated in print medium and printed
material. As in the mainstream human
sciences, there is no inquiry into the mode and medium of organization of
knowledge in area studies. In the epoch
of decolonization, as in the earlier colonial period, print technology and
print medium were indispensable in the creation and circulation of knowledge.
FACING FUTURES
Now with the global capital flows and the networked
world of planetary communications (in principle), a new geopolitical
conjuncture has emerged. This has made
area studies as a paradigm of organizing knowledge and demonstrating the West’s
relation to the non-West not just untenable, but irrelevant. For, in the new conjuncture, the class-mobile
citizen of decolonized (“post”-colonial) world (a world deeply marked by
postwar institutional domination by the US), as the “agent of change” not only
contributes to the capital flows but also plays a key role in the formation and
organization of “knowledge” itself. In
the new conjuncture, the very notion of knowledge and the nature of paradigm
have changed significantly. We are
caught in the networks of what is called “information paradigm” and we are
compelled to contribute to the creation of “knowledge society”. Neither area studies nor their guarding
disciplinary frames have adequately prepared the critical intellectual to face
this new paradigm. The very notions of critique
and criticality need rethinking in the new conjuncture. It is not so much the right doctrine that is
required today. Critical thinking must,
while strategically attending to the specific and idiomatic with care, must
reflect on a planetary scale. For this
we need to cultivate some kind of planetary critical literacy.
What follows is a sketch of the new conjuncture and
the tasks to be taken up at individual, institutional and collaborative
levels. The ensuing reflection is a
response from the specific (but mutating) context of Indian society today.
THINKING TOGETHER
Today thinking and action will have to be conceived
in planetary terms, on a planetary scale, for a planetary living. Today the challenge of responsibility must be
articulated only in the face of a planetary calling. For the intimations of the past and the
forebodings of the future are inescapably planetary.
Yet the planet is no simple and homogeneous unitary
whole. Its diversity is
inexhaustible. The strength and limits
of planetary thinking are contingent upon this heterogeneity. The diversity, as in the multiplicity of
languages, gives idiomatic specificity to a particular thought. But the apparent diversity, the division and
difference of languages, disguises or blinds us to the regulating frames of the
seemingly divergent. The diversity might
blind us to the “grammar” of the divergent.
If the planetary thinking and action must emerge, and it is most needed
today, it must engage precisely with this double bind of thinking: the
equivocating relation between the singular and shared, the unique and the
universal.
The prevailing explanatory models of thought, ways of
understanding what we do, how we live, who we are, and what we think – have
emerged from a faith and investment in the categorical seperability of the
equivocating forces of the singular and the general. Most systems of thinking today, many
educational and research paradigms today, are germinated and nurtured in the
categorically divided and maintained poles of culture-specific
(particularistic) and culture-transcendent (universalistic) framework. Appropriate epistemological models –
archaeological or eschatological or inductive or deductive – have generated
inexhaustible mines of positive knowledges.
These knowledges have a hold on the planet’s thought and life today.
The consequences of the framework of thinking
outlined above, at least from the 18th century, have been deeply
ambivalent. On the one hand, this
thought has unleashed violence in disturbing and reorganizing prevalent
structures on a global level. Yet, on
the other, the encroaching violence was turned into an enabling force across
the globe. It is precisely from the aftermath
of this “enabling violence” that the planetary thinking and action must be
conceived.
BLOCKS OF REASON
But before rushing headlong into designing a
blueprint for a global thought and action, it is necessary to examine
rigorously the way the received, “enabling-violent” continues to function and
regulate thought today. The double-deal
of the European-western ana-lytic
thought will be obvious as one recognises that when this thought refers to
“itself” it takes the path of the cohesive, origin-seeking, foundational
inquiry with assured identity and lineage.
Whereas when it represents what is outside its fold, it takes recourse
to the divisive track of
fragmentation, and particularism, devoid of commonality – lacking the identity
of a common name. Thus in the story of
European modernity the eloquence of the ana-lytic
double-deal systematically relegates the non-European to the fragmented,
context-bound, uncohering, crowds[5]. Since
philosophy – that sovereign story of origins and ends – can be European only,
the non-European, by definition, remains empirical, lacking in
universality. The latter are thus
forever, objects of anthropological, ethnological “wealth”. As a result, any body of
“reflection”/”activity” whether concerning the place of woman, the notion of
debt, the idea of inheritance, the “concept” of “science” or that of the legal
from the non-European provenance will only have a regional historical and
culturalist status. They are, in other
words, unlike European categories, untranslatable.
Against such enframing of non-European idioms of
reflection, hasty assertions of native identity will only ironically reinforce
European-western analytic framework. If
a planetary thinking must emerge, it must be wary of these traps and
temptations. What are, then, the chances
of such thinking today?
Contemporary developments
in divergent fields – such as genetic engineering, neurosciences, natural
languages, Artificial Intelligence, robotics, image technologies, philosophy
and literary studies – (“Descriptively it is an era of man-made
brain-power industries.” Lester Thurow) point
towards two differing paths. Both these
paths are in a way concerned with destiny or destinations of thinking and
life. One path seeks to invest in or
determine a specific destination or end to these developments. The other defers or suspends ends
interminably: the ends of thought or activity are interminable. The first path claims the “positive” sciences
and knowledges as its progeny. The
principle of reason or more precisely the principle of calculative reason is
the destiny-determining basis of these proliferating positive knowledges.[6]
Increasingly the planetary thinking is
being forced to reckon itself in accordance with this principle. The ontology of the human is defined as
calculable rationality. The “book of life”
has 3 billion “letters” proclaimed a genome researcher the other day. This genetic archaeological research claims
to have deciphered the codes, the calculative rules, “the reading frames”,
which regulate the combination of the “alphabet” of life and create the
“language” of life. If the codes of life
can be deciphered, why can’t we unravel the rules of our so-called natural
languages – asks another scientist. This
is the very old dream of a quest for common language, the desire to master the
“common code” – the code conceived in terms of a principle of calculable
reason. Today this dream seems to find
its culmination in the informational and communicational technologies. Calculative rationality is the essence of
miniaturization (of processors, architecture, time-space and data crunching)
that these technologies accomplish. The
supreme and unparalleled manifestation of this calculative rationality remains
the Internet .
The new technologies redefine the notion of knowledge
as information and convert all existing “forms” of knowledge or knowing into a
common universal language that a machine can decipher and manipulate. (“Knowledge is the new basis for wealth. This
has never before been true.” Lester Thurow) The
logical terminal of this movement appears to be to make systems, which can
manipulate and calculate rationality on their own.
As asserted earlier this principle of reason – with
its long history has manifested in many forms, regulated all systems of
thinking – in short, canonized a heritage (of European provenance). No science whether natural or biological,
human or social has escaped the injunctions of this principle and its
heritage. This heritage has not just
elaborated a “positive” thought but determined the very essence of the human as
calculative. Today, more than ever, we
see the blatant manifestation of this essence in all forms of human
endeavour. Every form of molecularized,
particularized, research (say that of PCR or of molecular medicine) inside and
(more and more) outside the university is reckoned in terms of the calculated
returns it ought to bring (the drugs/pharmaceutical conglomerate is worth over
$380 billion).
As pointed out earlier, the new technologies are
immensely capable converting all kinds of (exteriorized) thought forms of any
epoch or eon into a “common” language of numbers – called information. And information is the quintessential
commodity for calculated returns today (global info business is estimated in
trillions of dollars).
If calculative rationality dominates the research
agenda, its another avatar controls the globe through the financial sector
today[7]. Struggling
under these new global compulsions and conditionalities – every sector in the
world (health, agriculture, economic, educational and family) is violently
being reorganized. The vulgar figure for
the forces driven by the principle of reason today is the “market”.[8] Planetary thinking cannot escape these forces. To echo a contemporary philosopher: there is
nothing outside this text of planetary forces.
PIETIES OF THOUGHT
It must be asserted
once again that these global forces, driven by the principle of reason, are no
simple univocal or monolithic agents of destruction. They appear to gain their ground and spread
across entirely due to their “persuasive” visibility. In fact, their permeation is deeply measured
by thorough calculations and through inducement of desire. (“Capitalism’s bad
genes cannot be separated from its good genes since both flow from the fact
that capitalism taps into the greed that seems to be built into human beings.
The desire to have “more,” however much one already has, is the human desire
that makes capitalism work” Lester Thurow)
In this specific conjuncture of ours at the beginning
of the millennium, what is to be done?
How to conceive of a thinking and action that is not reducible to the
manifestation of the principle of reason outlined above? How to rethink the concept of science when
what goes on in the name of science is little more than corporate governed
commodified information? (What kind of “science” is being developed by say
Celera Genomics or Monsanto or Syngenta?[9]) How does one
articulate the notion of justice when
renaming the usage of an element or thing, with disregard to its prevalent uses
or manifestations, has the law on its
side? What are the ways in which reason
– or rendering of reason - can be distinguished from its totalizing calculative
path? Is it possible to rethink the
human beyond the enframing of the ana-lytic
discussed earlier? Precisely, rethink it
on the threshold where the “organic” is permeated by the cybernetic (from the
Greek kybernetes – the system that
steers) or the prosthetic? How to
rethink the technological beyond its instrumental ends? Above all, how should one live when life as a
computational code disregards all forms of living and experience? (“The world
has been reduced to two kinds of software objects – data structures and
algorithms”).
Today, paradoxically, when the calculative
rationality is encroaching upon every sphere, it seems possible to unravel its
spread and interrogate its multiple avatars.
Such questioning is emerging at least from two heterogeneous directions
today. Paradoxically, one such force is
emerging from within the heritage of the ana-lytic
– from the experience of the principle of reason. This has taken the form of a fundamental
questioning of all the received categories, concepts and paradigms of
thinking. Importantly this questioning
has practiced the strategy of using the resources of the very heritage it sets
out to unravel. This critical path thus
implies and invests in the possibility of reconstellating the resources of the
heritage[10]. It thus
denies the conflation of the heritage with the calculative rationality that
arrogates to itself the agentive role for the heritage. In a way, it tracks and underlines the
principle of difference supplementing (and thus distancing from) the forms of
the principle of reason.[11] This critical
movement has had profound impact on thinking and institutions of diverse kinds
in the last two decades.
If one force has taken the critical path of internal
unraveling of the heritage another force has emerged (however discontinuously)
from outside, in the tracks of this heritage.
This force today can be designated in the form of diverse social
movements emerging from the non-European world.[12] These
movements, precisely in their non-totalised forms, are posing the most
fundamental questions that we have indicated above: How to live today? What are the ends of the science of
progress? Who are the beneficiaries of
calculative rationality?[13] How does one
articulate the experience of relations among the diverse life forms (the
so-called animal/human/plant) and the non-life forms? How does one negotiate
the equivocal difference and distance between the so-called life and
non-life? Significantly the force of
this questioning does not take the form of the most privileged avatars of the
analytic tradition – those of the philosophical or scientific. The a-theoretical form of these articulations
can be found in song and gesture, performance and poem of the diverse new
social movements that are encircling the globe today. These movements are primarily concerned with
the uses of available resources for unprecedented purposes.[14]
Although these twin forces are emerging from two
different directions, curiously there is something common to these: Their
concern for the singularity of idioms.
The critical path that interrogates the heritage persistently insists on
the recognition of the idiomatic – the unique status of an articulation. Yet, alert to the perilous possibility of
this attention to the singular sliding into the lytic or lytological ethno-relativism,
this critical force insists on the necessity and the inescapability of
translation. Nothing can arrest the
movement of the singular beyond its alleged provenance. “This [desire for]”
wrote Derrida in a related context, “justice…alone allows, the hope…of a
unversalizable culture of singularities, a culture in which the abstract
possibility of the impossible translation could nevertheless be announced.”[15] Nothing less
than the survival of the singular is dependent on its transference or
translation. The step of translating the
singular, the unavoidable call of response must be taken up as a movement. This critical path choreographs the movement
of such steps.
Whereas the articulations of most of the social
movements are inseparable from the distinctive idioms and rhythms in which they
emerge. The widely spread and deeply
tangled immemorial roots that sustain these idioms and rhythms have gained
accents in women’s voices and maternal tongues.
Today, they sing the question songs and carry the elemental inquiries. Their origins, like the origins of the maternal,
are intractable, and their destinies or destinations, like that of maternity,
indeterminable. The singularity of these
accents is outside the heritage of the analytic framework we are soliciting
here. “I don’t write songs”, says
Gaddar. “When I think about something, I
go on to weave. You should write in your
words, about yourself, for your emancipation.
Do not wait to someone. Write
in the language that you know.”[16] Therefore no
linguistic science can measure the accents and steps of these figures.
CONFLICTS OF THE FACULTIES
If a planetary thinking and action must emerge, then
it is imperative to attend to these distinct interrogations. It is imperative to take steps and mix voices
in these directions. In the Indian
context today there is no single institution that, in its present form, makes
these moves possible simultaneously.
This is essentially due to their acquiescence to the mandate of the
principle of reason. The research
institutions – whether in the field of the natural, biological or the social,
human sciences – have nurtured only paradigm replicating research, and thus
foreclosed interrogations at the level of paradigmatic assumptions that
regulate inquiries. Pedagogical models –
especially in the sciences, but not just there – have been deeply formalistic
(or formulaic), determining the protocols of inquiry within the internally
defined and guarded boundaries of molecularized disciplinary divisions.
In the process these practices generate armies of
experts who would protect the borders of a science from contamination. They would foreclose systematically any kind
of “anomaly” (in Kuhn’s sense) from emerging in the practice of science. Consequently, basic inquiries concerning the
assumptions about science, the protocols of its justification are hardly
addressed. One crucial testimony to this
is the fact that most pedagogies of science have no place for history and
theory of science (or any discipline for that matter) on their agenda.
Another symptomatic instance of paradigm-replicating
teaching in the sciences is the drive to impart the subject in the
vernaculars. This activity of “translating” the sciences into the
vernacular remains the most ill-thought and dogmatic venture of the
educationists in the country. This is
for two reasons: the idea of translation that governs this venture is a
simplistic one. It understands
translation to be carrying the content from one pole to the other (from source
to target). In this conception, language
(of either pole) remains an instrument, a negligible carrier for transmitting
something that could otherwise exist independently. Secondly, this conception spurs the
fabrication of a wholly synthetic language from the archaic (or unexplored)
Sanskrit base. Even the “target”
language remains a mere carrier. Neither
the language affects thought nor thought leaves its mark on language in this
beehive of translation. This pedagogy
cannot encourage reflections on science from the specificity of its
receptions. Further, in the absence of
historical and theoretical inquiries into science, it is impossible to expect
this pedagogy and research to attend to the specific, idiomatic conceptions of
science prevalent in the heterogeneous languages outside the European-western
language of science and philosophy.
No wonder, the institution of science today is
quickly submitting itself to the new paradigm of corporate-driven science. Kant, the German philosopher-architect of the
modern university, would have dubbed all the claims of today’s corporate sciences
as “illegitimate”. For, these claims are
no longer judged by the rigorous inquiry of the philosophical faculty (not to
be confused with the departments of philosophy).[17] And Kant
insisted that the university autonomy depend on the independent judgement of
the philosophical faculty – independence, precisely from the state power. When the remote controlled global financial
flows have usurped the state powers, the state could only impose the
conditionalities advanced by the calculative global powers on the university
thinking. How can scientific inquiry
maintain its autonomy in the present conjuncture? On the contrary, the science and technology
establishment remains the celebrated avant-garde of the global-financial
state-regulated mandate today.
Kant would certainly have judged contemporary
encroachments illegitimate; Humboldt, who followed Kant’s architecture to found
the modern
Whether Kant’s judgement is appropriate for today’s
situation or not, what he identified as the “conflict of the faculties” is
surely raging in the university and the society on a planetary scale. Hence the need for a planetary thinking and
action on the most sedimented categories of thought and action today. This thinking will have to emerge from a
fundamental and rigorous inquiry into the received categories, codes and
institutionalized thought-frames.
The critical interrogation of the received codes and
frames could proceed on two lines: (I) Inquiry from within the accepted
protocols of a code or discipline; and (ii) “setting to work” these codes and
concepts beyond their customary tracks.[18] Here the
enormous amount of work already available in the specific – demarcated
disciplinary domains and its advances must be rigorously analysed to unravel
the presuppositions and the destinations that regulate this work.
Further, the possibility and necessity of translating
the codes beyond their formalised frames and territories must be explored. This will indicate the limits of a code’s
(discipline's) assertions of its universality.
This latter activity can be called setting to work of the system – in
that it invites an inquiry into a system within and outside of its assumed
(assured) protocols. Here one must
recognise the necessity of a negotiating encounter between highly guarded,
rigidified, formalised systems on the one hand and practices and conceptions
that are not easy to measure with the established protocols of the systematic
and the formal on the other. Medicinal
and agricultural systems today require/make possible such encounters. But such
an encounter is possible only when there is an attempt to attend to the
singularity of the idiom, only when the ear learns to have patience for the
accents and rhythms of the singular voices.
Otherwise, the encounter will be as futile as the
European exposure to the multiplicity of languages in the 18th
century: all the newly “discovered” languages (Egyptian and Chinese) were
judged by European conceptions of (alphabetic) language. The encounter will be a failure if one looks
for correspondences, approximations and confirmations to what is already
codified and systematized (an easy security against anxieties). This kind of inquiry requires enormous amount
of patience and labour – but above all the ability to actively forget or
suspend the regulations of the codified.[19]
CONTEXTS OF
THE LOCAL
Today[20] the fields of science and technology are forcefully tethered
to the ends of business and economy; they spectacularly extend the culture of
calculated returns. Undoubtedly new
energies and new talented human resources will burst forth and these will be
harnessed as techno capital of the country.
“Knowledge means business,”[21] declared a group of Vice-chancellors at a conference
in
(i)
Given the deeply
iniquitous social order that has historically developed, what will be the fate
of those, in this new techno-economic order, who have been deprived access to
the resources of human capability enhancement?
(ii)
Given the
returns-based ethos of technocapitalism – where is the guarantee that the new
forces of capital (science and technology) would not reduce all those who have
been kept away from resources of mobility to just a treasure trove of
exploitable natural resources?
(Already, after the recent proclamations about the
Human Genome sequencing, Indian scientists have eloquently declared what a rich
human genome diversity
Given the orientation of the sciences and the new
technologies today, it is difficult to imagine how investments in science and
technology[24] alone would tackle the issues of magnitude indicated
above, as is the case with current developments in Indian scenario. For these issues cannot be addressed only by
means of technological solutions (increased bandwidth in
There are no simple technical solutions to the
problems indicated above. Whereas
scientists, engineers and technologists are wont to reduce every issue to
technical problems (problems to be dealt in isolation from the myriad other
related matters).[26] They require longer historical understanding of
human organization as series of efforts to comprehend and struggle to
communicate what it is to live in the complexity of inscrutable elemental
forces.[27] Our deplorable science education in schools and
colleges has no place for longer, historical and a more comprehensive of the
field (science and technics) as a human activity.
CRITICAL LITERACY
In the new conjuncture formed by the global flows and
Information technologies, education is indeed the issue of great
magnitude. Now the most challenging task
is what kind of education should one design?
How does one impart it? Who are our audience? What is our content? How do we address our contexts? Should expediency alone be the determining
factor? These are not mere desperate
questions. These are questions
concerning our common future.
In the Indian context and more particularly in the
apparent situation of the precarious future of the disadvantaged sections of
our society, what is of prime importance and urgently needed is a critical
literacy programme. Keeping in view all
the spectacular advances in diverse fields (neurosciences, genomics,
biotechnology and the humanities), this programme can identify three core themes
for the critical literacy. These are:
(i) Languages, (ii) Technics, and (iii) the Body. Let me elaborate.
Language (extended to include verbal and non-verbal)
is the most primordial communicational system that forms our expressions and
articulates our experiences. It is
indispensable to any conception of the social or cultural. Despite the hierarchies and gradations
imposed in studying language (“standard”, “non-standard”, “primitive”,
“cultural” etc.,) language lends itself to undermining such dogmatic
conceptions. Given that social stratification
draws on and reinforces linguistic stratification, a critical understanding and
sharing of language is essential for any education.
In developing a suitable curriculum for such an
understanding of language, the programme would emphasize a non-linear or
non-sequential communicational mode. In
other words, the programme would draw from a range of communication systems
such as gestural, oral, scribal/print, audio-visual and digital
(non-sequentially), and develop a participatory response to these systems.
In conceiving a curriculum for an alternative
literacy (alternative to the fearfully overburdening scholastic curriculum of
today’s schools) another crucial theme that needs attention is “technics”. This theme concerns basically the way we do
things. If the earlier theme of language
domain broadly involves the work of the face (speech), the theme of technics
underlines the work of limbs. The use of
hands and legs in making things is made central to the designing of
curriculum. Here, once again, the domain
of technics ranges across the complex manifestations of physical work
(artisanal tacit knowledges) to the prosthetic work of cyber limbs in virtual
worlds. Technics, in this conception,
implies bringing forth something (unavailable) from the resources available and
at large.
The dazzling array of communications in language and
the spectacular accomplishments of technics are unthinkable without the
body. In fact these are in a way
inscriptions and manifestations of the body.
Conversely the body itself embodies inscriptions of a very intricate
kind – and these inscriptions are the traces of a very long historical past on
the one hand and intimations of an interminable movement, on the other. Conceptions of the body for curricular
purposes could gather inscriptions from the inexhaustible range of the
Zinjanthropic symbolic representations of the body (in mythograms) to gender
and species based differentiations, from the received organic and inorganic
lineages to the genetic lineaments across the zoological and biological
phenomena and extend even to the elemental chemical forces that make and unmake
the bodies of our known and unknown (“the heavenly” or “celestial” bodies)
galaxies beyond our planet.
GATHERING SOURCES
Keeping in view of the developments and ramifications
of the educational models of the colonial and decolonization periods, the three
themes, language, technics and the body, are offered here as central to the
critical literacy sketched earlier.
Unlike the classical pedagogical models, the critical literacy project
is deeply sensitive to the contexts of its formulation and function. Consequently the curricular material for the
three domains will have to emerge from specific contexts. For example, curricular or learning resources
must be drawn from the diverse linguistic and cultural heritages on the one
hand and the natural/biological/technological phenomena on the other. These resources can be gathered together by
only those who are in intimate relation with them. Hence the imperative of context or locally
based curricular material. However the
project would be alert enough to reduce any constricting relativisms and it
would persistently explore the possibilities of transmitting or translating the
context specific material (cultural, natural biological and technical).
The focus on the three themes and the concentration
of context specific curricular/learning resources is essentially aimed at
releasing or making visible the long inherited (but seldom circulated beyond a
restricted context) experience and unarticulated but real and pertinent
understanding of the available resources of specific ecobiomes, gendered
bodies, inherited technics and differentiated languages. Further, it can be noticed that these
resources would provide not just curricular/learning material for the
disadvantaged, but open up fundamental research possibilities of the most
radical kind.
Needless to say that there is an imperative need for
such a research into our inherited resources.
The deep heterogeneity of Indian cultural fabric in languages,
narrative, visual and performing traditions would provide challenging material
and modes for thought and action. It
must be said that after the early British and European explorations and
sketching the cultural (and other resources) map of Indian living traditions, a
comparable work of quality critically examining that earlier sketch is yet to
be undertaken.
The critical literacy project outlined earlier gives a
central place to the new technologies in its agenda. Based on these new technologies the critical
literacy project would develop sharable knowledge systems from our inherited
resources.
The university must be made to play a crucial role in
bringing forth and realizing of the critical literacy programme indicated
above. Here the universities, especially
with rural, provincial bases, must be encouraged to participate and explore
further the possibilities of such alliance.
More concretely the universities, with their research and training
agenda can initiate what can be called a “virtual adoption” of specific
villages. The idea of a virtual
adoption, in avoiding the “top-down” approach of solving problems according to
what is thought from above, aims at building capabilities through shared work,
through inculcation of confidence and encouraging responsible choice. In all this, the three core issues of
literacy suggested above would be explored as thoroughly as today’s most
advanced regions of research would allow.
Since this critical literacy project aims at developing a cultural
practice of responsible sharing – it would deeply involve the participants
(university academics and researchers) in learning from below, learning through
exploration with the communities.
As the urban based universities and research
institutions individually may not have the required competencies nor the vision
of the proposed curriculum/literacy, alliances and affiliations among the
region-specific institutions be undertaken (within the urban institutions, from
primary to tertiary and research level, the curricular and research agendas are
in need of a fundamental change. This
change can be initiated keeping the three figures of language, technics and
body in mind). Since this critical
literacy project runs on the principle of vigorous interanimation between the
largely marginalized rural and adivasi communities on the one hand and the
privileged and insular urban institutions on the other, the aim of the project
of developing responsibility- based sharing must also govern other extensions
of the project.[28]
All the enterprise-based initiatives that wish to
reap the benefits of the collective work outlined above must be made to abide
by the principle/ethic of responsible sharing. For one’s own existence must be
seen as the effect of giving and receiving of the other and not
the monument of some unaging essential core.[29] (Here the
practical issues like the use of databases, IPRs, returns to the participants
etc can be worked out from specific concrete situations. If, for example, the nomadic [“dalit”]
Dakkali Katalu’s herbs have a potential for arthritis, the possible future uses
of his “received knowledge” must assure real and sustainable returns not just
to Katalu alone but to the destitute Dakkali community in its entirety.)
Clearly, given the vibrancy with which these 21st
century technologies and the governance models are developing, leveraging these
sectors is indispensable. Yet what is at
stake here indeed is precisely the lever or what the Greeks called the mochlos
– how we lever the use of these technologies and their presumed
teleologies. Here we must initiate and
practice a radical departure from a conception of the self based on personal
interest or domestic benefit toward the other earlier suggested conception as
responsibility-based sharing.
The major human gain accomplished through the
exponential growth in communications technologies must be sustained through a
collective planetary involvement and this cannot be reduced to some top-down
versions of administration and specialist economics or engineers.
The networked society conceived as the force emerging
from the interanimation of our rural and urban (and by extension metropolitan and
planetary) regions would surely release new energies and unprecedented
opportunities. Such energies and
opportunities would be unleashed globally as well. The consequences of these developments would
remain definitely equivocal. They would
certainly propel our societies into post-human, engineered virtual worlds,
animated by virtual lives. The futures
of the “human” are precariously exposed to these difficult-to-control
breakthroughs. While enforseeing
such futures, our immediate challenge is to develop capabilities to recognize
and respond to such new situations. All
alliances must recognize this fundamental responsibility. “What we call society,” wrote Raymond
Williams meditating precisely on communication technologies of an earlier
period[30], “is not only a network of political and economic
arrangements, but also a process of learning and communication. Communication begins in the struggle to learn
and to describe”.
In conceiving alliances the spirit of the figure
“network” must be borne in mind. The
network can strangulate all those caught in it.
But its strength can enhance when it is recognized as the intricate
structure of enormous complexity – a structure impossible without the
participation and confluence of divergent energies and communities/communications. The network is the supreme figure for
collective capabilities.
Therefore in weaving this network of knowledge
society, the question of responsibility must extend from our context-based
nodes to our larger planetary abode of alliances. Where the ethical political core of these
commitments lies is a matter for negotiation, through the existence of
“collaborative alliance”, then its commensurate efforts to achieve this must
make the agenda a collective effort and collective responsibility from the
context-specific communities to the planetary human (even posthuman)
collectives.
FORCING THOUGHT
A planetary thinking is inconceivable without a
collective and collaborative exploration.
This thinking together has to draw on international resources. Such an alliance committed to
internationalist scholarship is indispensable for a transnational critical
literacy.
A planetary thinking certainly demands persistent
engagement on a planetary basis – to keep open the inquiry interminably. The new geopolitical conjuncture formed by
the capital flows and informational paradigm can be unraveled only through such
“collective alliance” of planetary resources beyond the existing “posts” of our
world.
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, November 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes