Archive Page 2
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
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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:
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Tags: 18th Burmaire
Long last!
I just found this and I am thrilled:
http://www.communicationhistory.org/index.html
Finally, folks who study the history of the idea of communication. Yay (Standing on my head)! This ICA interest group has been around since 2007. I discovered it today. So this is going to be my second favorite communication group along with this one:
http://www.ashr.org/
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More on agenda
Heading 3: Labor, work, women
Purpose: lay out issues of labor and work and how they relate to question of women’s enlightenment/gaining of consciousness/awareness; to show how AIDWA understands citizenship or the process of becoming a citizen as inextricably tied to being a worker, AIDWA is an example of this process of citizenship building (with it’s own problems of course but its problems demonstrate the problems of living out this idea) [Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan writes about this in The scandal of the state and I think Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach has this at its core (or maybe not)]
Too much going on in the brain. Need to think this through. Here is a bad outline:
1. Rural working women’s concerns
Access to land
Govt. subsidies
Migration of men and Feminization of poverty
2. Urban working women’s concern
In households and whose work goes unrecognized
Unorganized women workers-domestic help, prostitutes, etc
3. Impact of a liberalized economy of women
In terms of rising prices & Food insecurity & PDS
No jobs ahead
Migration of men and Feminization of poverty
Gender budgeting
4. Technology and labor
5. Depoliticization of labor
Self help groups
Microcredits
Filed under: Class, Labor, Unit 3, Work | Leave a Comment
Agenda
So, I did manage to orient myself to diss writing yesterday after 2 big bottles of Perrier, numerous cups of tea at 2 coffee shops, terribly loud live music, and a trip to Whole Foods. I cleaned up notes and data on the first data chapter on gender and class tentatively titled, Interrelatedness of class and gender: The AIDWA Story. I like clever titles without hyphens and till I can come up with one this will have to do. Today I will take (grin) what is known as a data dump in the introductory section of this chapter.
To tame my over zealous, over complicated brain I have decided to tell this story in three parts. And no matter what my brain tells me to do I am NOT GOING to change this scheme. Yes, I will overlook many details that are of paramount importance but I will put them as notes next to the writing dump and see what I can do about them when I sit down to edit.
That said, here it is:
Heading 1: Story of the birth of AIDWA
Although the members of AIDWA belong to all classes of India, the story of AIDWA is predominantly the story of working class women of India. A commonality of experience unities these women with those who share in their world view and are willing to stand by their side. Thus, the story of AIDWA can only be told in terms of the efforts that the women of this organization have made to systematically and consistently link patriarchy with the politics of class and economic inequality.
Subsections under this are [the place from where this story will be reconstructed is in brackets]:
1. Gandhi and Freedom Mvt. [Radha Kumar's The history of doing, Interview with Laxshmi Sehgal]
The women’s movement in India in its earliest stages was closely aligned with the Freedom movement. Gandhi is widely cited in histories of the Indian women’s movement as the person brought women into the Indian public sphere in large numbers. The All India Women’s Conference (AIWC), one of the oldest women’s organizations in India, was born from such an impetus.
2. Addressing rural women’s concerns
However, after Independence, and mainly during the 1970’s, those who organized women in the rural areas as well as the urban working class centers of India realized that the concerns of these women were unique to their class. In a nutshell, this realization was the driving force behind the constitution of AIDWA in 1981.
(1) Among such women was Lakshmi Sehgal. Lakshmi Sehgal was born in an affluent Tamil family. Her father was a lawyer and her mother was an activist/member of the AIWC. She realized that the Communist party gave her a way to organize working class women in Kanpur. [Interview with Laxshmi Sehgal and her autobiography]
(2) Telangana and Tibhaga struggles for land [Radha Kumar's book and AIDWA documents on these]
(3) Inability to organize and address women’s concerns within the working women’s committee in the Trade unions [Interviews with Ranjana, Brinda, and..]
3. The Beijing conference [Radha Kumar's book, Interview with Indu]
4. Present State of Women’s Mvt. in India [Nandita Gandhi & Nandita Shah's The issues at stake, Amrita Basu's Two faces of protest, Interview with Indu, Indu and Palriwala's article on this in Nehru Memorial Library's Archives-find ref]]
As of now the women’s mvt. in India has women’s group which politicize and which depoliticize the women’s issues (or, it comprises of politically affiliated groups, autonomous groups, NGOs)
Heading 2: AIDWA’s philosophy or A Marxist understanding of women’s oppression (Keep it short please and don’t read anything new)
This section will be AIDWA’s understanding of women’s mvt. [Jim Aune's article on Lenin and women, Kanak Muherjee's, EMS's article on women and Marx, Interview with Laxshmi Sehgal]
Heading 3: Labor, work, women
Next Post
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Long last
Today I have begun working on my dissertation after a long time. This post will hold me accountable. Since the last post I have realized the following about my dissertation:
1. That modalities is a key concept in this project. Many people have struggled with it. The two organizational folks that immediately come to mind are Anthony Giddens and James Taylor. I am clearly obsessed with the idea. I am sold into de Certeau’s understanding of practices and want to write about modalities using that framework.
2. I don’t care about theory building even though I love doing exactly that in my head. I’d rather do thick description and be good at it.
With that, here I go to patiently lay out the story.
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As states of mind (intent of the speaker)
Page 99:
“The modalities of pedestrian enunciation which plane representation on a map brings out could be analyzed. They include the kinds of relationship this enunciation entertains with particular paths (or “statements”) b according them a truth value (“alethic” modalities of the necessary, the impossible, the possible, or the contingent). an epistemological value (“epistemic” modalities of the certain, the excluded, the possible, or the questionable), or finally ethical or legal value (“deontic” modalities of the obligatory, the forbidden, the permitted, or the optional).”
In this idea one sees how de Certeau in tracing out his theory of practices borrows first from Aristotelian notions of rhetoric and then here from…?
The first move enables him to forge a link between the space and memory to speak of the spatializing of memory. The second move allows him to…?
Space becomes phatic topoi…
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Zizek on Writing
I saw a film on Zizek last week and it provided an interesting tip for writing. In this film Zizek states that he finds it impossible to sit down and write so this is how he writes: he puts down out all his ideas on a particular topic/subject in complete sentences till he is convinced that he’s basically said everything that he needed to and then all that’s left for him to do is to end it. So he writes a conclusion. Zizek argues that by writing in this manner he takes writing out of the equation.
I’ve tried writing this way instead of making tedious outlines, which I am prone to doing, and I think it’s working for me. It’s working to help me write about my fieldwork. It may not work when I write more theoretical stuff.
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I have become very social again after years of hibernating during graduate school and whenever I become social in America this is something that strikes me about the way in which friendships operate between Americas and Indians. I think that this difference has something to do with how politics gets shaped and defined in the two democracies (since the press seems to be rife with comparisons between the world’s largest and oldest democracies I thought I’d add my two cents of junk to the pile).
Let me begin by clarifying that what I am about to state is something that has been corroborated by many other Indians who have lived outside India. So here it is: While it is possible for Indian friends to stop by at their Indian friends’ homes without prior notice or on a short notice somehow I rarely see that happening between American friends. In other words, Indian friends frequently invade their friends’ lives (which, I understand, isn’t such a good thing when it comes to earning a living in a workaholic culture such as America or even in the quickly liberalizing Indian economy).
The women’s organization that I hung out with for my fieldwork has basically grown by developing large webs of friendships between women from diverse classes, castes, and religions. Hence, I find this comparison between friendships amongst Indians and Americans pertinent to an understanding of politics in the two countries. I don’t think the women from this organization would have been able to do as much if this option of invading and being invaded by your friends wasn’t present in India. I am sure partly the activists of the women’s organizations in India do it as an obligation but I’ve also known that to be true for the general fabric of life in India.
So, is this comparison on friendship amongst Indians and Americans valid at all? Or has this Indian generalized way too much? Hello? Anybody?
Filed under: Life, What is the political? | Leave a Comment
