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Bibliographic Data: Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. [2000]
Main Argument:
The entire constellation of concepts, cliches, habits of thought and ways of being in the world commonly collected under the rubric "(political) modernity" is not a universal set of concepts, but instead a set of concepts which have deep roots in Europe. Furthermore, these concepts have colonized and are indeed foundational myths for the entire structure of the social sciences and of universities globally, thus ceding the European intellectual tradition an unquestioned, if not unthought of, pride of place in any scholarly inquiry. Writing from within that tradition, it is not possible (or even wholly desirable) to transcend it (and the idea of doing so probably is a function of a false understanding of the nature of the dilemma)--but it is necessary to keep firmly in mind the fact that histories are always plural, that the universal can only be glimpsed in the particular, and that historical time is something that is imposed on events--by holding these contradictory theses in mind at the same time in cognitive resonance, we may be able to grope our way towards a post-Enlightenment, posthuman future, in which Enlightenment rationality is only one of many valid ways of being in the world.
Historiographical Engagement:
Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, John Locke, Herodotus, Aristotle, Michel Foucault--what we in undergrad were pleased to call "the Great Conversation." Also in the second half of the book in particular most of the major Indian and Bengali historical figures and thinkers of the past two hundred years, particularly Gandhi and Tagore. Covertly, Giorgio Ambagen's idea of "bare life" and the concept of biopolitics. Also, only semi-explicitly, with Søren Kirkegaard (who is still awesome).
( Provincializing Europe )
Critical assessment:
It's not every day that the back cover description of an academic press book completely misses the point, but the back cover says that the book "globalizes European thought," which misses the point--European thought is already (always) globalized, and what Chakrabarty is trying to do is both to problematize that in and of itself, to show that European universalist thought is itself a particular thing, and to carve a space in that supposedly universal discourse for the non-universal, non-total histories and ways of being in the world outside of Europe (and within it too, I'd bet) that treats them as valid and as vital.
Inasmuch as he simply points out something we all should already have known, it's a brilliant book, though I personally related more to the first half, which is all theory, than to the second half, which gets into the specific particulars of the translation of modernity in Bengal. At one point I asked in the margins, "whose Europe is this not?" as in, what conceptions of Europe does Chakrabarty disregard to make his points, but the question is fairly minor and seems like a form of "white people's pain," so let that be. My bigger critique is that (and I'm tempted to ascribe this to the fact that Chakrabarty is a man) despite his gestures towards feminist scholarship, he doesn't quite make enough of an attempt to fully incorporate it into his attempts to pry open spaces inside the concepts whose European origins he exposes. Let me say here that I am directly familiar with 90% of the "great thinkers" Chakrabarty quotes; until some time in college I considered the idea that humanism could be expanded to cover classically non-humanist subjects to be fairly unproblematic, and even claimed myself to be a humanist. I no longer think this is the case; Chakrabarty is unquestionably correct when he says that the universal idea of the abstract human embedded in European enlightenment thought has been deployed to marvelous effect in the cause of social justice, but I don't think he quite gets the fact that the abstract universal human simply can't be expanded to fit a lot of people whose ways of being in the world are antithetical to the Enlightenment project. The day when feminism truly triumphs is the day when we will have a new posthuman civilization, because the one we are living in now, for all the fact that we are unquestionably postmodern, is still one shaped and framed by modernity. (I have to say that I think postmodernity is a dead end--an interesting, fun dead end, but a dead end nonetheless, which is part of why I'm not terribly concerned about the conceptual difficulties involved in trying to write postmodern history, though I do think that the idea of postmodern history, and trying to write it, deserves further consideration and attempts at the same. Actually, it strikes me that Pandemonium and Parade is a least a half-hearted attempt at that; the way Foster specifically abnegates the question of belief in youkai strikes me as a Chakrabartian attempt to dislodge rationality from its pedestal, and allow for non-human agency in history without actually taking a stance on the existence of non-human agencies.)
As a side note, that the social sciences have not previously grappled seriously with the epistemological implications of quantum mechanics is frankly boggling.
Further reading:
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations; Herodotus, Histories (reread); John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (reread); Tessa Morris-Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought; Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
Meta notes:
If Chakrabarty writes under the signs of Marx and of Heidegger, then I should probably try to write under the sign of Chakrabarty. Also, reason isn't everything, but I already knew that.
Once again I find myself asking, Can we ever really know anything? and Why do we write/do history? Historical time makes for an excellent narrative framework, and I find myself wondering whether my insistence that the story of the human race isn't just One Damn Thing After Another is not in fact conditioned by my thinking of myself as living in historical time. But on the other hand, like all narrative tropes, historical time exerts a pressure on the contents of the narrative to proceed (note this figurative language) in a certain way, and we have to beware of that, and the fact that historicism implicitly valorizes the passage of time in and of itself in a deeply problematic way.
The other thing is Chakrabarty's almost passing comment on the fact that all other intellectual traditions outside of Europe (and Euro-America) are considered dead for the purposes of scholarship. This is absolutely essential to remember, and that there is no essential reason that this should be so--clearly efforts at correction in order. Chakrabarty also says it's simply not possible to walk out of the collusion between modernity, universities, and the state, but if it's not complexly possible to attempt to do so in some fashion, we should all just go home.
Main Argument:
The entire constellation of concepts, cliches, habits of thought and ways of being in the world commonly collected under the rubric "(political) modernity" is not a universal set of concepts, but instead a set of concepts which have deep roots in Europe. Furthermore, these concepts have colonized and are indeed foundational myths for the entire structure of the social sciences and of universities globally, thus ceding the European intellectual tradition an unquestioned, if not unthought of, pride of place in any scholarly inquiry. Writing from within that tradition, it is not possible (or even wholly desirable) to transcend it (and the idea of doing so probably is a function of a false understanding of the nature of the dilemma)--but it is necessary to keep firmly in mind the fact that histories are always plural, that the universal can only be glimpsed in the particular, and that historical time is something that is imposed on events--by holding these contradictory theses in mind at the same time in cognitive resonance, we may be able to grope our way towards a post-Enlightenment, posthuman future, in which Enlightenment rationality is only one of many valid ways of being in the world.
Historiographical Engagement:
Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, John Locke, Herodotus, Aristotle, Michel Foucault--what we in undergrad were pleased to call "the Great Conversation." Also in the second half of the book in particular most of the major Indian and Bengali historical figures and thinkers of the past two hundred years, particularly Gandhi and Tagore. Covertly, Giorgio Ambagen's idea of "bare life" and the concept of biopolitics. Also, only semi-explicitly, with Søren Kirkegaard (who is still awesome).
( Provincializing Europe )Critical assessment:
It's not every day that the back cover description of an academic press book completely misses the point, but the back cover says that the book "globalizes European thought," which misses the point--European thought is already (always) globalized, and what Chakrabarty is trying to do is both to problematize that in and of itself, to show that European universalist thought is itself a particular thing, and to carve a space in that supposedly universal discourse for the non-universal, non-total histories and ways of being in the world outside of Europe (and within it too, I'd bet) that treats them as valid and as vital.
Inasmuch as he simply points out something we all should already have known, it's a brilliant book, though I personally related more to the first half, which is all theory, than to the second half, which gets into the specific particulars of the translation of modernity in Bengal. At one point I asked in the margins, "whose Europe is this not?" as in, what conceptions of Europe does Chakrabarty disregard to make his points, but the question is fairly minor and seems like a form of "white people's pain," so let that be. My bigger critique is that (and I'm tempted to ascribe this to the fact that Chakrabarty is a man) despite his gestures towards feminist scholarship, he doesn't quite make enough of an attempt to fully incorporate it into his attempts to pry open spaces inside the concepts whose European origins he exposes. Let me say here that I am directly familiar with 90% of the "great thinkers" Chakrabarty quotes; until some time in college I considered the idea that humanism could be expanded to cover classically non-humanist subjects to be fairly unproblematic, and even claimed myself to be a humanist. I no longer think this is the case; Chakrabarty is unquestionably correct when he says that the universal idea of the abstract human embedded in European enlightenment thought has been deployed to marvelous effect in the cause of social justice, but I don't think he quite gets the fact that the abstract universal human simply can't be expanded to fit a lot of people whose ways of being in the world are antithetical to the Enlightenment project. The day when feminism truly triumphs is the day when we will have a new posthuman civilization, because the one we are living in now, for all the fact that we are unquestionably postmodern, is still one shaped and framed by modernity. (I have to say that I think postmodernity is a dead end--an interesting, fun dead end, but a dead end nonetheless, which is part of why I'm not terribly concerned about the conceptual difficulties involved in trying to write postmodern history, though I do think that the idea of postmodern history, and trying to write it, deserves further consideration and attempts at the same. Actually, it strikes me that Pandemonium and Parade is a least a half-hearted attempt at that; the way Foster specifically abnegates the question of belief in youkai strikes me as a Chakrabartian attempt to dislodge rationality from its pedestal, and allow for non-human agency in history without actually taking a stance on the existence of non-human agencies.)
As a side note, that the social sciences have not previously grappled seriously with the epistemological implications of quantum mechanics is frankly boggling.
Further reading:
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations; Herodotus, Histories (reread); John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (reread); Tessa Morris-Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought; Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
Meta notes:
If Chakrabarty writes under the signs of Marx and of Heidegger, then I should probably try to write under the sign of Chakrabarty. Also, reason isn't everything, but I already knew that.
Once again I find myself asking, Can we ever really know anything? and Why do we write/do history? Historical time makes for an excellent narrative framework, and I find myself wondering whether my insistence that the story of the human race isn't just One Damn Thing After Another is not in fact conditioned by my thinking of myself as living in historical time. But on the other hand, like all narrative tropes, historical time exerts a pressure on the contents of the narrative to proceed (note this figurative language) in a certain way, and we have to beware of that, and the fact that historicism implicitly valorizes the passage of time in and of itself in a deeply problematic way.
The other thing is Chakrabarty's almost passing comment on the fact that all other intellectual traditions outside of Europe (and Euro-America) are considered dead for the purposes of scholarship. This is absolutely essential to remember, and that there is no essential reason that this should be so--clearly efforts at correction in order. Chakrabarty also says it's simply not possible to walk out of the collusion between modernity, universities, and the state, but if it's not complexly possible to attempt to do so in some fashion, we should all just go home.
