1) what does speaking of the processes of publicity in terms of a counter public hide and reveal? what of gramsci’s subalterns: what does that hide or reveal? which provides a better vocabulary and what does that vocabulary help us understand? aren’t we still speaking of older forms (or, marginalized forms) of association and their relationship to newer forms of associations? need we more words?
1) a. fraser’s vocabulary focusses on group identity though it gets caught up in the spatializing aspects of the public sphere theory. the best she has to offer on the questions of justice is some mixture of socialism and deconstruction. it’s not a complete idea and lacks many definitions. might we be better of focussing on the modes of publicity? here one can utilize her argument to show how modes are constitutive of the politics of language/identity and economic access.
2) rise of a form of legitimacy and its processes is what we are speaking of. how do the turns taken by dewey and de certeau help to resolve the problems that typify group identity and its relationship to the State? why do i intuitively prefer them over most others?
2) a. with dewey its clear taht he helps to declutter the conversation on the topic and i agree with most of what he says and could attempt to exaplin it. with de certeau, the best i have to say is that he brings our attention make to dspositions, habits, dailyness and does so from a rhetorical standpoint.
3) i haven’t read habermas in a while so he is missing here along with mr. weber. does anyone else matter to me in this conversation?
Filed under: Dewey, Fraser, Legitimacy, Modalities, Publicity, de Certeau | Leave a Comment
Nancy Fraser’s imagination…
…likes to read things and isolate ideas from them, impress an idealized version of those ideas in her minds in antithetical categories and, then, argue against them. I wonder what consequences that has for the social theory she builds. It’s just not very nuanced. Also, she thinks in pairs like most sociologists.
Filed under: Nancy Fraser, Social Theorists' Imagination | Leave a Comment
recognition redistribution
i am reading fraser again to incorporate parts of her argument in the first chapter on the relationship between class and other forms of identity in building a social movement. thus far, i have these issues with her argument:
1a. its not clear what she understands by class. is it a particular social category which got sedemented with the advent and crystallization of capitalism that was identified in social theory after marx? or, does class obscure other socio-poltical relations some of which spill into identity politics? are we speaking of old wines in new bottles? that is, in speaking of class and its relationship to other markers and forms of social organization, what is getting lost? habermas’s structural transformation is still a better book in this regard.
1b. she does say that she is creating a heuristic distinction between class and identity politics, one that doesn’t exist between “cultural and political economy” (p. 12) in the real world, at the outset in order to understand the problem of justice in our present time. i am not sure that she will be able to do this because her so called analytic categories are ill defined and founded.
2. she only understands class and its constructions in a particular context, that is, the west. not her fault/problem, i understand, even though she seems to be making a general case. but in india, what does speaking of class entail?
Filed under: Class, Indian Left, Indian historiography, Labor, Sacred/Secular, Unit 1, What is the political? | Leave a Comment
democratic centralism
What does democratic centralism mean to the CPI(M)?
Filed under: Leninist | Leave a Comment
Incommensurability
Perhaps the problem that I am facing towards the middle, and leading up to the end, of the dissertation in trying to connect two ideas might be a problem of incommensurability. The idea of democratic centralism as a way of organizing is integral to the project because the SMO (social movement organization) I am working with has clearly adopted the Leninst style of organizing from the Communist Party to which it is affiliated. However, de Certeau’s ideas aren’t integral to this case. They sort of help me think through how SMOs work much better than “democratic centralism” does. But that isn’t this project and hence must be left for exploration in a different paper/ project.
Hence, disentangling is good. With me a part of the problem of writing clearly requires disentangling my messy brain. Yowzers! For this project, it’s going to be let’s think through this movement between ideology and structure (that is, organizing) using the case and the vocabulary of democratic centralism and what it stands to mean in this context. Period.
But…
I also end up wondering how do anthropologists do this movement(!)/dance between different frames/vocabularies of thinking in their writing? What am I missing? Both de Certeau’s framework and the language of democratic centralism give us a way of thinking about the relationship between ideology and structure (i. e., organizing). Some answers could be: (1) They are thinking at two different times about this relationship (2) They are addressing two different concerns about the movement- one seems to be focused more on the vanguard and its ideology, the other on “masses,” for lack of a better term, and their insertions into the ideology. But they both of them seem to help me understand and describe the SMO I am engaging with, which is why I can’t give either one up.
Well, I guess I’ll just go back to writing and hope for things to work themselves out. Because the most annoying thing would be to say that these two ideas come from two sociologically different paradigms and leave it at that. Shouldn’t be able to, using my case, do something about that exact incommensurability, whatever it entails! Why else did I sweat it out in the fucking field?! What’s the point of collecting any evidence/experience/data?
Filed under: Work, Writing | 2 Comments
Wilting down
After, months of writing, not writing, redrafting, brooding here’s what I have to say:
Chapter 1: Tackles Nancy Fraser’s argument about the relationship between recognition and redistribution with examples from the Indian social movement organization I am studying. It shows the difficulty of building a working class women’s movement in the face of religious, caste, and ethnic diversity of India.
Chapter 2: Takes on arguments about the relationship of class to gender by providing an overview of the tumultuous relationship between class and gender and other markers of identity through four phases of the Indian women’s movement. It’s the history of movement chapter which ends up arguing that class needs to be recognized as one of master narratuves of the Indian women’s movements. Scholars of the movemnet often recognize religion as one the master narratives but sideline class.
Chapter 3: Takes on Leninst notions of linking ideology to structure in the building of a movement. The organization I am studying borrowed this from the CPI(M) whose “women wing” it is. This chapter is on the structuring of a social movement organization and ends up showing the problems that exist in applying the idea of “democracy in discussion, unity in action” to real politics in this organization.
Chapter 4, 5, 6: Continues this link developed on Chapter 3 between ideology and structure to talk of it in three ways: Time, Space, and Body (TSB). In each of these chapters the movement between rhetorical notions of Time, Space, Body to their habitual, physical notions is mapped to show how a MOVEMENT works.. This is done through examples which almost end up providing a strengths and weaknesses type illustration of building a unified working class women’s movement in the face of India’s identity politics.
Chapter 7: I iz brain dead. Some things I could say: (1) TSB framework of modalities is better for understadning social movements because it helps to link the discursive to the structural, makes connections between the micro and macro processes (Michel de Certeau’s argument) (2) I could also say that in india’s case we see how the struggle for women’s identity needs to be tied to notions of women’s work (class politics) rather than to the politics community, state or nation (Nussbaum, Rajeshwari SundarRajan’s argument). (3) I DON’T KNOW HOW TO FUSE THESE TWO IDEAS. WHY?
Filed under: Class, Gender, Indian Left, Keywords, Last Chapter, Leninist, Modalities, Outline, Preface, Unit 1, Unit 3 | Leave a Comment
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Thank you for visiting. I am busy updating other aspects of my life. Will return shortly. Please visit again.
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Intimate journals
“Revolution confirms Superstition, by offering sacrifice.”
XXXII, My heart laid bare
“In order that the law of Progress could exist each man would have to be willing to enforce it; for it is only when every individual has made up his mind to move forward that humanity will be in a state of progress. This hypothesis may serve to show two contradictory ideas–free-will and destiny–are identical. Not only will there be identity between free-will and destiny in Progress, but this identity has always existed. This identity is history–the history of nations and individuals.”
CVII, My heart laid bare
Filed under: Baudelaire, Destiny or fate, Free will, Inertia, Revolution, history | Leave a Comment
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18th Burmaire-I
p. 15
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
p. 15-16
In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.
p. 16
…the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society….But unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and battles of peoples to bring it into being.
p. 18
The social revolution of the nineteeth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only form the future.
The February Revolution was a surprise attack, a taking of old society unawares, and the people proclaimed this unexpected stroke as a deed of world importance, ushering in a new epoch….Instead of society having conquered a new content for itself, it seems that the state only returned to its oldest form, to the shamelessly simple domination of the sabre and the cowl.
p. 19
Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy in the everyday spirit; but they are short-lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate th results of its storm-and-stress period. One the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and non form the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created whihc makes all turnign back impossible, and the themselves cry out:
His Rhodus, hic salta!
Here is the rose, here dance!
p. 20
[comparing the Democrats to the Chiliasts]…fancied the enemy overcome when he was only conjured away in imagination, and it lost all understanding of the present in passive glorifcation of the future that was in store for it and of the deeds it had in petto but which it merely did not want to carry out as yet.
p. 24-25
[on the defeat on the June insurgents] It had proved that in countries with an old civilization, with a deployed formation of classes, with modern conditions of production and with an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved by the work of centuries, the republic signifies in general only the political form if revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life, as, for example, in the United States of North America, where, though classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange their elements in constant flux, where the modern means of production instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, rather compensate for the relative deficiency of head and hands, and where, finally, the feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world its own, has left neither time nor opportunity for abolishing the old spirit world.
___________
Notes:
Filed under: Destiny or fate, Free will, Imagination, Marx, Revolution, history | Leave a Comment
Tags: 18th Burmaire
AIDWA In News
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- HAPPY BIRTHDAY AUNG SAN SUU KYI! - HardNews Magazine
