Normativization
Perhaps the hardest problem we encounter in the comparative task of reconceptualizing the domain of the human sciences is theorizing normativity. It stands to reason why that is so: the moral domain is unintelligible to Indians. Even today the questions that moral philosophy struggles with does not make intuitive sense to us. The paradox at the heart of morality – one can only be immoral if one is already moral – is driven by the dynamic of secularization. In some way analogous to the Christological dilemma – Christianity must lose its properties to make its truth acceptable to all, but more it loses its properties , less Christian it becomes – the paradox of morality seeks to absorb other domains within itself. The moral person enacts in the secular realm the endless process of conversio that the priest undergoes in the monastery. Morality is the secularization of the monasticization process, but without the benefit of the theological resources which rendered the monasticization process meaningful to the priest. If Protestantism abolishes priesthood by making everyone a priest (as Marx expresses it), the modern citizen is the secular priest, giving norms to himself. As Christianity begins to be ascendant, the pagan world of Greece and Rome become subjected to the dynamic of secularization. It is my argument that this process of secularization takes the form of normativizing all domains that it encounters. Indeed, at the limit, all human action is subject to moralization. These domains, their problematizations and actions, begin to be broken down, rebundled or transformed in a peculiar way with the emergence and spread of Christianity. Normativization begins to supplant problematization. What does normativization involve? What happens when experience is brought under a norm? In his The Uses of Pleasure, which should be considered the first significant work on the norming of experience, Foucault begins by noting that “sexuality” – the term or its equivalent, the thing and the discourse – did not exist in pre-Christian Europe (or in non-European cultures).[19] Foucault then proceeds to show how “sexuality” is what emerges when diverse and distinct domains of practice and reflection about them – dietetics (diet and regimen), economy (the household and the relationship between husband and wife) erotics (reflections on the relationship with boys) and finally wisdom in relation to erotic love – when these areas or domains are clubbed together or unified by norming or moralizing them. The transformation – as much historical as it is discursive – results in the ontologically peculiar entity called “sexuality.” This thing does not exist in India or China; it however seems to exist for the West. They “experience” it, talk about it incessantly; its scope is ever expanding, though in a repetitious, monotonous way. It is the introduction of (a distinctive notion of) truth and norm by Christianity in the pagan milieu that drives this historical and cultural transformation that is still incomplete.
In the last decade of his life, Foucault’s research focussed on highlighting the radical difference between Christianity and the Hellenic-Romanic thought. Truth, of course, is at the heart of what he uncovers. With Christianity there emerges a conception of truth totally at odds with the conception that had organized the “care of the self” culture.[20] If self-knowledge in the latter was access to a reality that was not the object of knowing, in Christianity, knowing (connaissance) is entirely and exclusively intellectual or theoretical. The examination of conscience, for example, is a knowing of the kind that Christianity brings into being, as is the endless decipherment of the self as an object, a domain. When Christianity begins to attack domains like economics and erotics that were integrated into the conditions of spirituality as part of the access to truth, those domains get opened up for knowing through the rational reflection of theology. A peculiar combination of rationality and morality begin looking for “truths” in these domains, truths that allegedly provide the subject with the knowledge about how he ought to act or what he ought to avoid. This combination of rationality and morality is what I would like to term “normativization,” the unique contribution of Christianity.[21] If problematization was the route that the many spiritual movements used to seek access to truth, Christianity fashions normativization as the route for the salvation of souls.[22] The extraordinarily detailed genealogical picture of the ancient world that Foucault draws is meant to highlight the later emergence of domains such as sexuality, economy and politics that are ontologically peculiar in that they distort experience by insulating it from reflection.
I can now complete the argument: under colonialism, the secularization process sought to transform the domains it encountered in India. The practitional matrices (whose idealized structure I have sought to delineate) was experienced normatively as the caste-system. Once the matrix idea is in place, it is possible to argue how “the caste-system” is the product of a frame that comes with colonialism. To say this is to say that the entities in that frame are not amenable to theorization – we know as much or as little about the caste-system as we did in let’s say the 18th century. The more interesting question is why that frame brings up entities that are of this nature, that is, they are incapable of being understood or theorized. Because they are incapable of being understood, their deployment effectively stifles any creative responsiveness the practical form of life needs to nourish itself.
Conclusion
Let me state as emphatically as I can what I have argued for and what I have not, so there is no confusion: I am not offering another Foucauldian view of the caste-system; I am arguing that like “sexuality,” “the caste-system” is a product of the normativization process which is specific to the West.[23] Does it exist in some sense of exist? I have suggested that it existed for the West, as an entity in their experiential world. This argument opens up a deeper inquiry about the relationship between experience and normativity. I have often in the past referred to such entities as ontologically peculiar. However, given the framework outlined here, that inquiry into the relationship between normativity and experience will have to be an adhyatmic one. I am aware that the argument I have developed and the methodology I have implicitly employed will have left many conceptual and empirical questions unanswered. The hope is that those questions can eventually be answered if the argumentative strategy has enabled me to formulate the domain problems any research project that seeks to reconceptualise Indian traditions has to confront. To what extent the domains we take for granted in our thinking perpetuate the discourse of normativity? How does the latter persist long after colonialism? Does our persistence with the use of domain talk (inherited from the existing human sciences, legal and political discourse) in some way perpetuates normativity? Or is it the case that the learning attitude that underlies practical mode of knowledge have something to do with this persistence? In the absence of the cultural conditions that drives normativization, how do discursive structures of norms reproduce themselves in India (if indeed they do)? Furthermore, if normativity actively repulses or occludes experience, it would be reasonable to assume that a culture nourished on experiential knowledge would find ways of resisting it. Would it be possible to formulate a hypothesis regarding the forms that such a resistance would take?
Finally, if spirituality is knowledge – what I have been calling experiential knowledge – then the issue cannot be only one of resistance to normativity and preservation of practitional matrices. Are there new ways of inter-articulating cultural knowledge and sociality? I have been using the term cultural learning – Tagore’s assimilation of truth and Gandhi’s Swaraj are examples – whenever I have spoken of spiritual or experiential knowledge. The reason for that should have been obvious. That learning is intrinsically linked to happiness; however, the conditions of spirituality and access to truth have no one path. There are innumerable ways and heuristics to discover or invent to seek access to truth which brings about transformation in the subject, brings about happiness. Consequently, the sociality articulated by that cultural learning too tends to be richly layered and pluralized. When, therefore, the religious-secular world of colonialism/capitalism has begun to strip sociality of all cultural learning, the urgent question for both practical-spiritual knowledge and intellectual knowledge is: how can we articulate new cultural learnings that find expression in the articulation of sociality itself? Will the learning attitude be able to radically reconceive politics as the creation of sites of ethical learning?
Vivek Dhareshwar is Scholar-in-Residence at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Bangalore. He is at present working on the idea of ethical action in Indian thought and on the link between normativity and experience.
Notes
[1] Although I will touch on all the pairs, my focus will be on the last. Among contemporary thinkers, it is Ashis Nandy who first forced us to think about tradition and the past – a) and b) above – in a radically novel way. See his “An Anti-Secularist Manifesto.” Seminar, 314 (1985), 14-24; “History’s Forgotten Doubles”. History and Theory, 34:2 (1995), 44-66. The puzzle is why Nandy has not brought to bear the same radically revisionary perspective on the last two pairs too. It is a puzzle because, as I hope to show, making the choice in one case–say tradition over religion–will lead us to the choices presented in the other cases too.
For the contrast between tradition and religion; and the contrast between the past and history, I am indebted to S. N. Balagangadhara’s, “How to Speak for the Indian Traditions: An Agenda for the Future.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 73:4 (2005), 987-1013; “What do Indians Need, A History or the Past? A Challenge or two to Indian historians.” Maulana Azad Lecture 2014. (http://ichr.ac.in/seminars_lecturers.html. Accessed on June 6, 2015). More generally, I have drawn both from his unpublished writings on normativity and from the many stimulating conversations over the years on the need for reconceptualizing the human sciences. I doubt though that my formulation of the issues, my approach and what I have made of his insights would be congenial to him.
[2] The phrase is from Joseph Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald, Creating a Learning Society. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). The sense of learning implied in that work is rather different from what is sought to be articulated here. Stiglitz is concerned about how economic policy should be designed to preserve economic skills – use of complex financial instruments for example – that have tendency to migrate with capital flight. Although his undefined notion of learning economy/society is proposed as an alternative to the neo-classical approach, he seems unable or unwilling to explore a notion of learning society outside of the economic conception of productivity. As my discussion of Gandhi’s objection to the separation of ethics and economics will make clear, a genuinely learning society is one which brings to bear ethical learning on what we think of as economic or political activity.
[3] As we shall see, both Gandhi and Tagore insist on seeking explanations of the Indian predicament, its indistinction, its having disintegrated into facts, from within the actional frame, so that the very activity goes toward making the frame distinct, even as the explanation offered illuminates what has rendered India indistinct and helps in seeking ways to strengthen the dharmic activity. The actional frame is what Tagore calls the rhythm of dharmic activity that helps “assimilate truth.”
[4] I have developed the concept of sites of learning to explain both Gandhi’s response to colonialism and his understanding of ethical action in my ”Politics, Experience, and Cognitive Enslavement: Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj,” in Democratic Culture: Historical and Philosophical essays, edited by Akeel Bilgrami (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011).
[5] There is nothing mysterious in this: think of “cover drive” or “square-cut” which cannot be understood except by having some understanding of the practitional matrix, namely cricket, within which that concept/action has sense. Bernard Williams once contrasted thin concept such as “right” with thick concepts that are action-guiding and world-guided. His claim was that under the sway of morality, thick concepts are disappearing. See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), ch. 8.
The action-theoretic concepts of the practitional world fit the bill better because they are truly action-guiding and world-guided. For a discussion of the practitional matrix in a comparative perspective, see my “Critique, Genealogy and Ethical Action.” Marx, Gandhi and Modernity: Essays Presented to Javeed Alam, edited by Akeel Bilgrami (New Delhi: Tulika, 2014).
[7] Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ed. The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore: 1915-1941 (New Delhi: NBT, 1997).
[8] Although I present here textual reference for my interpretation of Tagore’s arguments, my interpretation of Gandhi draws largely on my ”Politics, Experience, and Cognitive Enslavement: Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj.”
[9] Mohandas. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj. Edited by Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
[10] I have discussed the need for postulating these two frames in ”Framing the Predicament of Indian Thought: Gandhi, the Gita, and Ethical Action,” Asian Philosophy, 22:3 (2012), 257-274. It is significant that something like that idea is implicit in both Gandhi and Tagore, and that, furthermore, the explication of that idea helps in reframing the debate between them, thereby making that debate directly relevant to our own contemporary effort to overcome the framing effects of colonialism. For a discussion of how the two frames idea may be of relevance to a comparative cultural understanding, see my “Critique, Genealogy and Ethical Action.”.
[11] Rabindranath Tagore, “Talks in China,” in The English writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Vol. 5 (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers) 2007, 722-24.
[12] There is a question here for Tagore and Gandhi too. When they talk disapprovingly of some Western idea being “mechanical,” do they have in mind something like what I am saying here about the quasi-cognitive-evaluative frame? It seems perhaps that they do mean some force that turns ideas into manipulable entities. Thus their problem with nationalism, class, the state etc. (which has a component of ideology or discursivity of some kind). They have no view which they counter-pose to nationalism; their objection would indeed be that there could be “views” of this kind (ideologies). It is instructive in this regard to compare Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj with Tagore’s “Our Swadeshi Samaj,” in The Sky of Indian History: Themes and Thought of Rabindranath Tagore, edited by S. Jeyseela Stephen (New Delhi: UBSPD, 2010).
[13] Bhattacharya, ed, The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore: 1915-1941, 73.
[14] Rabindranath Tagore, “Creative Unity,” in The English writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Vol. 5 (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers), 2007, 642.
[15] Without a language or reflective dimension, but still a force as a disposition – we have here the phenomena of contemporary politics and business! Even resistance to that is without a language, as we witnessed in the anti-corruption movement of Anna Hazare.
[16] Similarly, when we say a certain raga can only be sung at a particular time of day, there is no science, either meteorology or physics of sound or psychology, that is the basis for that practice.
When reading or watching Oedipus Rex, do we think that Greeks were unscientific or superstitious when the Thebans complain about the plague that has come about because of some polluting act and ask the king to punish what has gone unpunished? It may well be that Tagore’s own work too sits in two frames: his philosophical reflection and songs in the actional frame, aiding its revitalization, and his novels which uneasily and ambivalently sit in the quasi-cognitive-evaluative frame. There is perhaps one more issue between these two great minds that remains unexplored, namely whether it is ever right to form ones politics or thought as though one is in or confronting an emergency. In his uncompromising response to Tagore’s criticism of the cult of the charkha, Gandhi says that India is like a house on fire. To save this house of dharma, he seems to say everyone must abandon whatever he/she is pursuing, the poet his poetry, the lawyer his law-books, the doctor his scalpel. Tagore perhaps objects to this state of emergency thesis. His thought seems to be that we contribute best by persevering with our craft, practice or profession. Even if it were a situation of emergency, wouldn’t the house of dharma need people who have experience in transmitting certain ways of going about the world which is what is under threat? I am indebted to Narahari Rao for pressing this question.
[17] Imagine a singer who engages with the world through sound losing his/her conceptual capacities. Not only is he/she not able to sing—engage the world—she cannot even respond to sound anymore or do so only intermittently. The practitional matrix that made possible that conceptual response simply withers, as there is no creative engagement anymore. The singer no longer has the conceptual ability to enter that matrix. Suppose we now extend this example to the world of Carnatic or Hindustani classical music—the singers and the involved (that is, educated) followers suffer a conceptual loss over a period of time: the singers or listeners are barely able to engage with the complex practitional matrices that house the conceptual capacities, without which there are no innovations, no new action. Suppose we now imagine the larger practical domain of which the musical world is a subset (but also a microcosm) undergoing a conceptual loss. The example of musical world is important for two very different reasons: one, music illustrates very well the fact that the conceptual capacity involved is not propositional. Two, it is indeed remarkable that in the real world in which the conceptual loss has happened, the musical world–whether that of Carnatic or Hindustani—has survived as a genuine practical field with vigorous innovations and creative explorations. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is the only field in which we have witnessed genuine excellence in a sustained way for over a century now, precisely the period of parasitism in other fields. Well, that’s where we are; the example will, I hope, bring to mind the enormous complexity of the practical form of life, the senses in which its conceptual capacities organized the very diverse learning and responsiveness that an experiential conception of truth demands.
[18] As Amartya Sen asks in his essay on Tagore in Amartya Sen, “Tagore and His India” in The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity , New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2005, 101. Sen’s anodyne portrait of Tagore as a defender of ‘reason” and (of all things) anticipator of Hilary Putnam’s “internal” realism, makes him into an 19th century English liberal consequentialist with some mildly eccentric (hence embarrassing) view about religion. Sen wilfully ignores the Tagore of philosophical essays such as “Our Swadeshi Samaj, “ “the Centre of Indian Culture,” “Personality,” “the Fourfold Way of India,” “Creative Unity,” or any number of letters and lectures where he explicitly develops what I have been calling an experiential conception of truth, which has no echo in western philosophy . See the volumes 4-6 of The English writings of Rabindranath Tagore, (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2007. The core of that conception makes clear how Tagore regards reason: “For the reality of the world belongs to the personality of man and not to reasoning, which, useful and great though it be, is not the man himself. ” Tagore, “Personality,” in The English writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Vol. 4 (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2007), 368.
What’s depressing about Sen’s essay is its dogged attempt to find Tagore “reasonable” from a Western lens, filtering out, in the process, Tagore’s attempt to think with Indian concepts. Ironically, the only place where Tagore insistently speaks about reason is in his critique of charkha, which has generated for us the puzzle of why Tagore is occupying the frame—the quasi-cognitive-evaluative frame — which finds incomprehensible the actional frame that he (Tagore) himself is trying to revitalize. That Sen is firmly anchored in the same frame but without even suspecting the existence of another frame speaks to the predicament of Indian thought; illustrating no doubt the indistinctness that Tagore had spoken about.
[19] Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1985). However, it should be noted that Foucault himself seems to be at best only obliquely aware of normativity as a cultural phenomenon that is specific to the West. See note 21 below.
[20] For a discussion of the significance of the “care of self” culture, see Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
[21] The most difficult problem here is the relationship between truth and norm. Can that be investigated philosophically? It is clear that part of the reason for Foucault’s rejection of philosophy in favour of genealogy has to be that the philosophical route to that question will lead back to theology. Instead, he thought he could show the how the ethical reflections of Greek and Roman schools and their exploration of the condition of spirituality as access to truth had nothing in common with the universally binding property of Christian morality (or its secularized versions) or with the Christian concept of Truth. Whereas the secularized version of Christian morality is relatively easy to track (think of Nietzsche’s work), the secularized version of truth has posed a far more difficult challenge. Although Foucault did not always formulate his earlier inquiry as tracking secularization, it was evident when, for example, he discussed the vertical or in-depth Christianization (as distinct from its horizontal spread through proselytisation) or welfare state as pastoral form of power; however, once he began his inquiry that produced the volumes on the history of sexuality, it was clear that he was indeed explicitly investigating the relationship between truth and norm as what structures the secularization process. Perhaps the only place where Foucault does explicitly use the term secularization to designate the phenomenon of governmentalization is in his lecture “What is Critique” in The Politics of Truth. trans. L. Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007) 44. For further discussion of this notion of secularization, see my “Marx, Foucault and the Secularization of Western Culture.” Rethinking Marxism 28/3-4 (Forthcoming: September 2016).
[23] It has often been suggested to me by readers who refuse to follow the methodological steps required to understand the argument about normativity that the term “caste-system” is the problem, whereas “caste” is transparent, on the obvious understanding that it translates “jaati.” Although this is not the place for a detailed elaboration, I want to suggest that it is “jaati” tha has been made to translate “caste,” which cannot be understood outside of the normed entity “the caste-system.” There can be no theory of normed entities. Foucault does not, unlike Freud or Lacan, offer a theory of “sexuality.”
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