I have spent a full week focused on reading, and haven’t allowed any programming distract me. I try to divide my time between my Korean study, Japanese readings in history, and more theoretical stuff mostly written in English. In this last category I’m currently stumbling through Wittgenstein and Derrida and Partha Chaterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Chaterjee is an easy read (although to be fair, it would be difficult to imagine how one could make the first of these two books an “easy read”) and although I’m only through the introduction, I already find some of his observations sharp and relevant.
What prompted me to post today is confusion I feel at his attack, by now quite familiar to me in my reading, on what he consistently refers to as “liberal-rationalists”. While I have a similar reaction to many other things I read in the same vein, Chaterjee’s succinct summary of his version of the argument makes it easy to reproduce for comment.
I am gradually beginning to understand the range of criticisms of “analytical” or “modernist” or “liberal-rationalist” and have begun to sympathize with some of their moves and choice of targets. However, I am still very uncomfortable with approaches which seem to result in blatantly circular reasoning or, to put it another way, seem to launch an attack on reason itself, by means of reasonable arguments, only then to go on and continue to use familiar methods of the “rational” mode both to argue their own positive case, and to condemn their opponents within their own camp of critical thinkers.
I will get to some specific examples from Chaterjee’s introduction shortly. I will first say that I’m familiar, or at least becoming familiar, with some of the potentialy responses to this. That is, there are ways in which rationality, and particularly its propensity for universality, progressivism, and a “logic of the present” are critiqued, rationality delimited, and then revived in a new delimited state. Much of this hinges on key debates on the nature and limits of language (which justifies my digression in the world of Wittgenstein and Derrida). However, I don’t believe this process, even if it is possible, escapes some of the consequences of relativism. I believe that what results is a necessary split amongst those who endorse this form of critique: They may choose to believe that the consequences of relativism are indeed great and hold that there is a moderate “third way” which neither suffers the totalizing ills of modern “liberal-rationalist” thinking nor the “Nietzschean” extremes of the other side. Another option is to profess that there are no disturbing consequences of relativism, or that there is no way to avoid such consequences (so we might as well deal with them), or that the normative judgments implicit with the identification of such consequences is merely a reflection of traces of “liberal-rationalist” thinking.
For those who are confused, read on for a less abstract example of a point in which I feel this issue arises.
Chaterjee begins his introduction by recounting a number of popular accounts of the “problem of nationalism” focusing on John Plamenatz, Ernest Gellner, Elie Kedourie, and Anthony Smith. Rarely during this setup does Chaterjee speak “in his own voice” but paraphrases the theorists and notes those places where they clash. What they all have in common is their “liberal-rationalist” approach to the issue. Within this framework, even his example of the most critical (although from a conservative view) approach to nationalism, Kedourie, denies the non-European world an “autonomous discourse” of nationalist thought. For the others, nationalism may indeed be fully absorbed by non-European nations, but because of its derivative nature, and certain historical and cultural circumstances, it is prone to deviation from a classic model of nationalism which, at the very least, has some redeeming features. This deviation helps account for the more horrible manifestations of modern nationalism.
Chaterjee then suggests that, “it is not possible to pose this theoretical problem within the ambit of bourgeouis-rationalist thought, whether conservative or liberal. For to pose it is to place thought itself, including thought that is supposedly rational and scientific, within a discourse of power. It is to question the very universality, the ‘giveness’, the sovereignty of that thought, to go to its roots and thus radically to criticize it. It is to raise the possibility that it is not just military might or industrial strength, but thought itself, which can dominate and subjugate. It is to approach the field of discourse, historical, philosophical and scientific, as a battleground of political power.” (11)
This is a powerful and very concise description of Chaterjee’s problematic. It also mirrors a great deal of what has been written lately in a host of fields. There is also here an unmistakable taste of Gramsci, Foucault, and via both of these, Edward Said.
I can see where this is going, and his point is well taken. There is no denying the discourse of power he is referring to, nor the central importance of thought as a battleground of political power.
Where I falter is when this is used as a premise in an argument which proceeds by means of attacking the “sovereignty of thought” and “universality”. This argument then may or may not concede that amongst the ruins are multiple sovereigns, and without universality, a pure relativism. When thought itself, and consequently the means of argumentation itself, comes under attack, I’m really at a loss on where the theorists can “stop the train” and stake out a moderate position which allows for the possibility of communication and any form of normative critique.
I feel that Chaterjee is a scholar who wants to do so, or even if he doesn’t, finds himself inevitably employing a rhetorical strategy which at least assumes the possibility of a rational or moderate approach. For example, after making the above statement, Chaterjee goes on to discuss two alternative approaches in the field of anthropology, both of which “deny the usefulness of looking for rational explanations of behavior” and the possibility of identifying adequately “the social circumstances in which a community lives” (12) After this, he offers a short evaluative comment on these methods, the language of which is remarkably familiar to my eyes, “Many substantive problems have been raised about the validity and the usefulness of both [of these views]” (13) On the same page he refers to a “strong argument of relativism” which he will later critique.
I know that Chaterjee is going to sort out some of this later (by staking his own position in some fashion), but I raise this example because I’m at a loss to how questions of “validity” or “strong arguments” are dealt with. By what means are validity measured without all of the baggage of “rationality”? It forces me to ask an absolutely fundamental question that I am tackling with: Assuming this approach is the only way to address the limitations of current thinking, how are strong arguments to be distinguished from weak ones? Are they evaluated in some neo-pragramatist fashion (as Rorty might try), are they relativized to the level of culture, or delimited in some other fashion?
What of “usefulness”? Usefulness to what? A “liberal-rationalist” will say, “a usefulness towards finding the truth,” (or if a normative claim, a utilitarian might claim that it contributes to the most happiness or some-such) and will be scoffed at as being old-fashioned. But for a post-colonialist is usefulness merely measured by its efficacy in the battle against oppression? If so, is this position, an “anti-oppresion position”, merely one of an infinite range of possible and equally viable positions in the battleground of life?
What is usefulness for the anthropologists Chaterjee is describing assuming that their “functionalist” and “symbolist” (structuralist) methods are problematic. At least these two had explicit measures of utility (how much something contributes to the functioning or persistence of the social system, or how something fits into a symbolic pattern). What external measuring rod was he wielding? To be fair, this wasn’t going where he wanted, so he said he wasn’t going to address that issue.
Nonetheless, I am honestly confused. If I am seen as being silly for suggesting that this kind of talk (of “validity” and “strong arguments”) becomes problematic in the face of a critique of “liberal-rationalists” and that I’m missing the point, then I need to be shown that the true target, whose weaknesses I am now willing to admit, can fall without taking everything else with it.
I continue my reading, but I admit that I am very much plagued by the “specter of relativism”. I am looking for a theoretical approach which either banishes the phantom head-on even as it concedes the limitations of the traditional analytical approach, or allows me to coexist with it, albeit uneasily. I currently feel that failure can only result in full possession.