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Clues from 18th Brumaire:

The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking all separate local, territorial, urban, and provincial powers in order to create the civil unity of the nation, was bound to develop what the monarchy had begun, centralization, but at the same time the limits, the attributes, and the agents of the governmental power. Napoleon completed this state machinery. The Legitimate Monarchy and the July Monarchy added nothing to it but a greater division of labor, increasing at the same rate as the division of labor inside the bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and therefore new material for the state administration. Every common interest was immediately severed from the society, countered by a higher, general interest, snatched from the activities of society’s members themselves and made an object of government activity – from a bridge, a schoolhouse, and the communal property of a village community, to the railroads, the national wealth, and the national University of France. Finally the parliamentary republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen the means and the centralization of governmental power with repressive measures. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it. [sic] The parties, which alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state structure as the chief spoils of the victor.

….

But let us not misunderstand. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his modern Cevennes [A peasant uprising in the Cevennes mountains in 1702-1705] but his modern Vendée.^[119] [A peasant-backed uprising against the French Revolution in the French province of Vendée, in 1793]

….

It is clear: All “idée napoléonienne” are ideas of the undeveloped small holding in the freshness of its youth; they are a contradiction to the outlived holdings. They are only the hallucinations of its death struggle, words transformed into phrases, spirits transformed into ghosts. But the parody of imperialism was necessary to free the mass of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure form the opposition between state power and society. With the progressive deterioration of small-holding property, the state structure erected upon it collapses. The centralization of the state that modern society requires arises only on the ruins of the military-bureaucratic government machinery which was forged in opposition to feudalism.

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XXXXX is forming coalitions by bringing women from diverse backgrounds together. It is altering structures of feeling. It is creating another molecularity through the organization in the sense of D&G’s line of flight/notion of molecular.  What is that line of flight? It is that which allows them to critique Hindu and Muslim religion and their implications for women and representations of women as chaste wives daughters etc.  However, the line of flight, which is molecular, also becomes molar.  How? It does not critique religion outrightly. Why? Because direct critique of religion would alienate women, would become equivalent to pandering to one religious constituency or another for electoral gain. Divergent opinions over Uniform Civil Code for Indian women in XXXXXX (a few Muslim women in this org. want to do away with Muslim personal laws but the org. doesn’t think it’s wise to speak of a Uniform Civil Code at this moment in time. The org. wants to focus on reforming Hindu and Muslim personal laws instead).

From “Micropolitics and segmentarity”

page 215: “Four errors concerning this molecular and supple segmentarity are to be avoided. The first is axiological and consists in believing that little suppleness is enough to make things”better.” But microfascisms are what fascism so dangerous, and fine segmentations are as harmful as the most rigid segments. The second is psychological, as if the molecular were in the realm of the imagination and applied only to the individual and the interindividual. But there is just as much social-Real on one line as on the other. Third, the two forms are not simply distinguished by size, as a small form and a large form; although it is true that the molecular works in detail and operates in small groups, this does not mean that it is any less coextensive with the entire social field than molar organization. Finally, the qualitative difference between the two lines does not preclude their boosting or cutting into each other; there is always a proportional relation between the two, directly or inversely proportional.”

page 216: “It is as if a line of flight, perhaps only a tiny trickle to begin with, leaked between the segments, escaping their centralization, eluding their totalization. The profound movements stirring in society present themselves int his fashion, even if they are necessarily “represented” as a confrontation between molar segments. It is wrongly said (in Marxism in particular) that a society is defined by its contradictions. That is true only on the larger scale of things. From the viewpoint of micropolitics, a society is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular. There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed to a “change in values,” the youth, women, the mad, etc.”

I found out through an email sent by the Contentious Politics folks at Columbia:

“Dear friends,  It is with utmost feelings of great loss to inform you that Chuck has passed this morning. We are still awaiting official announcements from his family and the Columbia community. However, I wanted to let you know that some of Chuck’s students and friends will be holding a small candlelit vigil tonight to remember Chuck and everything wonderful that was him.”

so, i’ve been reading walter pater.  and i realized (and i kind of remember this vaguely form my education in eng. lit too) that the medieval ages were perhaps pretty solipsistic too.  one could find petrarch something similar to prufrock. but the renaissance as pater seems to be making the case is tried to get rd of the distinction between art and life like in shakespeeare’s winter’s tale when perdita comes to life scene.

now that is some ammunition for the solipsism argument. the point it think i am trying to make is that this distinction of heightened self consciousness which modernity has claimed as its own is perhaps like the turning of the wheel: pater: “To regard all things and principles of things as in constant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought” (The Renaissance, p. 194). another fun quote that i don’t know what to do with yet is: “What we have to do is forever curiously teasing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in the facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own.” (The Renaissance, p. 197)

“Just such a strange flower was the mythology of the Italian Renaissance, which grew up from the mixture of two traditions,  two sentiments, the sacred and the profane” (The Renaissance, pages 38, 39).

i was thinking that for each of the concepts i am going after:

1) the problem of the political imaginary (intersubjectivity, solipsism, false consciousness)

2) rhetoric as modalities (not spatial spheres or just speech)

i could visit this idea in 3/4 important thinkers on this topic and distill what they have to say and show the growth/changes in that idea and the implications that arise because of the differing conceptualizations

now i should stick with modernity. so let’s see the important ideas are coming from 2 traditions: european and american

european

hegel marx nietzsche d&g weber habermas

american

mills dewey

indian

hahaha

Corbett & Eberly: topoi & enthymeme

Do Indians reason enthymematically?

I) FREEDOM MOVEMENT

1) a. Example from Gandhi:Exploitation through the cotton economy or salt tax are the problems

All those who are self sufficient can’t be exploited
You are self sufficient (by spinning your own cotton, burning/not consuming foreign goods, producing your own salt)
You can’t be exploited

In these examples of resistance, the minor premise is performed not stated!?

1) b. Gandhi on Non-violence

All oppression is based on recognition of oppression
If you don’t recognize oppression
You won’t be oppressed

Is that even correct? Or, did I construct that wrong? (If it is correct then again the minor premise is performed.)

2) a. Tagore

3) a. Bose

5) a. Tilak/Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay
4) a. Jinnah

II BHAKTI POETS

1) a. Kabir

2) a. Mira

3) a. Tulsidas

4) a. Sufi Poets (+ Bulleh Shah etc.)

(ASIDE) IT WOULD BE INTERESTING TO DO A COMPARISON OF TULSI, VALMIKI, AND KAMBAN RAMAYANA FOR THIS. THREE VERSIONS OF THE SAME STORY WRITTEN IN THREE DIFFERENT PERIODS.

I like to read variously. By this I mean that if I am studying one thing, whatever that maybe (organizing in modernity for my dissertation), then I read something completely at variance with this. Thus, Walter Pater on The Renaissance. Also, I’ve liked reading about the Renaissance since my undergraduate years. I hadn’t read Pater for a while so today when I found him in the collectibles section of a Half Price near my house I knew I had to read him immediately. (I have a theory about books finding us at the right time.)

In an essay on Pico della Mirandola, another author I haven’t read in a decade (the circle is perhaps coming to a close! Unless ’tis a gyre, grin), Pater writes (can’t find date on Modern Library edition, p. 24-25):

“No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. To reconcile forms of sentiment which at first sight seem incompatible, to adjust the various products of the human mind to each other in one many-sided type of intellectual culture, to give humanity, for heart and imagination to feed upon, as much as it could possibly receive, belonged to the generous instincts of that age. An earlier and simpler generation had seen in the gods of Greece so many malignant spirits, the defeated but still living centers [US spelling] of the religion of darkness, struggling, not always in vain, against the kingdom of light. Little by little, as the natural charm of pagan story reasserted itself over minds emerging out of barbarism, the religious significance which had once belonged to it was lost sight of, and it came to be regarded as the subject of a purely artistic or poetical treatment. But it was inevitable that from time to time minds should arise, deeply enough impressed by its beauty and power to ask themselves whether the religion of Greece was indeed a rival of the religion of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated themselves, and men’s allegiance was divided. And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to do as a religious object. The restored Greek literature had made it familiar, at least in Plato, with a style of expression concerning the earlier gods, which had about it much of the warmth and unction of a Christian hymn. It was too familiar with such language to regard mythology as a mere story; and it was too serious to play with a religion.”

[The Bhakti poetry of Kabir, Mira, and Sufis, Bulleh Shah, etc. did much the same. Gandhi too but as much as these folks.] Anyway, so what happened to this syncretic culture? What did the Enlightenment do? Is that the question one needs to revisit to understand the scope of a different political imaginary?

“The problem is, rather, that we do not have any analytic categories in our aggressively secular academic discourse that do justice to the real, everyday, and multiple connections that we have to what we, in becoming modern, have come to see as nonrational. Tradition/modernity, rational/nonrational, intellect/emotion-these untenable and problematic binaries have haunted our self-representations in social science language since the nineteenth century.” (Chakrabarty, Habitations, 2002, p. 26)

“What else is this but an unreflexive (re)statement of the struggle of the Enlightenment with superstition? ” (Ibid)

My point here on Indian Romanticism in Habitations, Chapter 2 (see post Critique of Subaltern): Two figures Gandhi and Tagore. Gandhi used religion in his politics much like the Hindutva brigade does but the kind of religion he used was that of the Bhakti poets, a syncretic one of Kabir, Meera, etc. Tagore on the other hand wasn’t nationalist when it was necessary. He has been called a visionary poet for that reason. So, two extreme examples. What to make of that? Also, why define Gandhi as romantic? Perhaps there is an Indian label for him. But then Dipesh would always find that label Hindu as anyone else. He calls Aurobindo and Sarat Chandra’s imagination as lacking in space for the Muslim other. So, what do we do then fall back on the political imagination produced by Enlightenment. This is where Indian subcontinent was when the British came rife with infighting and segregated. The debate in early Indian history was would Indians have united on their own into some form, whatever that may have been, or did the colonial empire pave the way for it. So for me the questions of religion and secular is a question of building a coalition? By which I mean how does one create a pluralistic state? So, we are back to Plato, right? And then, what is so fucking subaltern about this question of pluralism? What is our real quarrel with liberal humanism? Because even the so called West has taken up cudgels against Enlightement without being subaltern or postcolonial. What’s the REAL issue here, dear subalterns?