The Indian Condition from Centre Right India by Jaideep Prabhu: A version
of this post was published on Niti
Central on November 05, 2012.
It
is remarkable how entrenched statism – and to a slightly lesser extent,
socialism – are in the Indian psyche… Call it fate, or blame the vagaries of
history, but around the time of the Enlightenment and the subsequent
Industrious and Industrial revolutions, India underwent significant
de-industrialisation and was ultimately colonised… The cost of missing an
intellectual upheaval has been incalculable… There is no liberal tradition,
based on individualism and liberty, in India … The institutional breakdown
initiated by Indira Gandhi has taken a severe toll on the Indian political
landscape. So what is the solution? I do not have one.
Personally,
I am deeply suspicious of anonymity, but personal dislike is not
strong enough a reason to mandate disclosure. If dislikes were the yardstick,
I’d also do away with poverty, socialism, war, and bigots. Sadly, it is not so.
For all the “principled” opposition to anonymity, let it be noted – there is no
such principle.
If
the preference for an idea, the liking or disliking, strikes first, and the
reasoning that justifies it follows, then learning more about the ingredients
and mechanics of preference tells us about belief… This focus on the
preferential moment, our liking or disliking, our desires, is unusual. It runs
contrary to the main thrust of post-Enlightenment reason and science. But its
role in believing the ideas we adopt as our own is, I’m arguing, necessary. If
necessary we should know more about it.
I’m
working on a brief book on Levinas’s aesthetics that will also include some
examination of his contributions to speculative metaphysics, philosophical
ecology, race theory, and philosophy of art. The book will present what I’m
calling the “darker side” of Levinas and is aimed at readers who would like an
approach to Levinas that largely avoids redundant discussion of the face, the
Other, and all the usual catchphrases… He’s a rich and, I think, dark thinker
who deserves a more complex and diverse body of scholarship. At the end of the
day I just think that there’s a lot more that can be done with
him.
How
exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the
humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We
seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at
the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse,
we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can
afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at
expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other
academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an
accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt,
thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure,
than producing change in the world? …
Our
most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never
make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new
material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we
do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an
analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly
motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at
all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion
people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of
production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That
network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of
resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and
communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the
distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc.
What
are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you
navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of
infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have
you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually
bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and
acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring
the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of
avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization.
Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a
distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global
consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this
in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems
of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was
the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the
heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking
about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically.
Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and
the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can
tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm,
Laruelle.
A
centralized network is what we now critique as “transcendent”. It was
always a network, never a genuine transcendence (as in the case of Plato or
theism), and never fully successful. These networks were the medieval
“great chains of being”, the Oedipus, patriarchy, and more recently systems of
party politics or the Stalinist state-form. They were machines that
required all other nodes in an assemble to pass through one point:
God, the king, the father, the dictator, the president, or the party.
They were always a network. At the other end of the spectrum we see
anarchy or what communism should be. Communism and anarchy are
synonyms. Sadly neither has ever been realized except at small
scales. This is the dream of all genuine politics: a network without
hubs…
A
politics either aims to reinforce the power of a hub (reaction,
authoritarianism, traditionalism), to demolish or produce new hubs
(revolution), or to abolish hubs altogether in the name of forming a
distributed network (anarcho-communism). There’s really not much more to
be said.
A Tale of Two Scholarly Debates on Adam Smith from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy
- A Response to Claude Hillinger’s “Adam Smith’s Argument For the
Existence of An ‘Invisible hand’” Gavin Kennedy (Emeritus Professor, Edinburgh Business School, Edinburgh)
Smith’s
assertion was confined to a modest quantitative arithmetical change in “annual
revenue and employment”. It concludes with comments on Claude
Hillinger’s interesting, though ultimately flawed, version of Adam Smith’s
supposed argument for the existence of an “invisible hand”.
Last time I discussed the relationship between the
concepts of Ascent and of transcendence… A key feature of any kind
of transcendence, it seems to me, is dissatisfaction: something
appears wrong with that which one is trying to transcend. In Nussbaum’s
transcendence-by-descent, one is dissatisfied with one’s own weaknesses and
flaws. In an Ascent, one is in some sense dissatisfied with the whole world.
But what if one is dissatisfied with the whole world in a way that motivates
one not to step outside the world, but to changeit?
Such
a formulation immediately calls to mind Karl Marx, whose gravestone reads “The philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Such a view is at the heart of radicalism; it is directly opposed
to any form of literal
conservatism, where the point is to keep the world more or less as it is.
But Marx is hardly alone in holding such radicalism. Modernism itself
is radical: the celebration of the modern is a celebration of change, a break
with the past.
But
what I’ve repeatedly been noticing lately is the similarity between
a Marxian radicalism or modernism, on one hand, and Ascent traditions on the
other. Both aim for a transcendence of the world – because both hate the real world as it happens to be.
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