The Second Discovery of America

 

Eduardo Galeano

For Pedro Arsipe, homeland meant nothing. It was the place where he was born, which meant nothing to him because he had no choice in the matter, and that was where he broke his back working as a peon for a man who was the same as any boss in any country. But when Uruguay won the 1924 Olympic title in France, Arispe was one of the winning players. While he watched the flag in sun with the sun and four pale blue stripes rising slowly up the pole of honor, at the center of all the flags and higher than any other, Arispe felt his heart burst.

Four years later Uruguay won the Olympic final in Holland. And a prominent Uruguayan, Atilio Narancio, who in ’24 had mortgaged his house to pay for players’ passage, commented: “We are no longer just a tiny spot on the map of the world.”

The sky-blue shirt was proof of the existence of the nation: Uruguay was not a mistake. Soccer pulled this tiny country out of the shadows of universal anonymity.

The authors of these miracles of ’24 and ’28 were workers and wanderers who got nothing from soccer but the pleasure of playing. Pedro Arispe was a meat-packer. Jose Nasazzi cut marble. “Perucho” Petrone worked for a grocer. Pedro Cea sold ice. Jose Leandro Andrade was a carnival musician and bootblack. They were all twenty years old, more or less, though in pictures they look like senor citizens. They cured their wounds with salt water, vinegar plasters and a few glasses of wine.

In 1924 they arrived in Europe in third class steerage and then travelled on borrowed money in second class carriages, sleeping on wooden benches and playing game after game in exchange for room and board. Before the Paris Olympics, they played nine games in Spain and won all of them.

It was the first time that a Latin American team had played in Europe. The first match was against Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs sent spies to the practice session. The Uruguayans caught on and practiced by kicking the ground and sending the ball up into the clouds, tripping at every step and crashing into each other. The spies reported: “It makes you feel sorry, these poor boys came from so far away…”

Barely two thousand fans watched the game. The Uruguayan flag was flown upside down, the sun on its head, and instead of the national anthem they played a Brazilian march. That afternoon, Uruguay defeated Yugoslavia 7-0.

And then something like the second discovery of America occurred. Game after game, the crowd jostled to see those men, slippery like squirrels, who played chess with a ball. The English squad had perfected the long pass and the high ball, but these disinherited children from far-off America didn’t walk in their fathers’ footsteps. They chose to invent a game of close passes directly to the foot, with lightning changes in rhythm and high-speed dribbling. Henri de Montherlant, an aristocratic writer, published his enthusiasm: “A revelation! Here we have real soccer. Compared with this, what we knew before, what we played, was no more than a school-boy’s hobby.”

Uruguay’s success at the ’24 and ’28 Olympics, and at the 1930 and 1950 World Cups, owed a large debt to the government’s policy of building sports fields around the country to promote physical education. Now all that remains of state’s social calling, and of soccer, is nostalgia. Several players, like the very subtle Enzo Francescoli, have managed to inherit and renovate the old arts, but in general Uruguayan soccer is far cry from what it used to be. Ever fewer children play it and ever fewer men play it gracefully. Nevertheless, there is no Uruguayan who does not consider himself a Ph.D. in tactics and strategy and a scholar of its history. Uruguayans’ passion for soccer comes from those days long ago, and its deep roots are still visible. Every time the national team plays, no matter against whom, the country holds its breath. Politicians, singers and street vendors shut their mouths, lovers suspend their caresses, and flies stop flying.

Eduardo Galeano is a journalist and writer from Montevideo. This is a section from his book Soccer in Sun and Shadow.

 

Some Notes toward Queering the Humanities in the University

Brinda Bose

Has the increasing visibility of the movement against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (that criminalises homosexual behaviour) in recent years brought any significant change to gendered spaces in Indian universities? Is ‘gender’ as an established theoretical tool for reading the humanities – and literature in particular – being ‘queered’ in the classroom and outside it on campuses now? Gender studies have been traditionally seen as analogous to women’s studies, read through feminist tracts and critiques that identified women’s positions as marginalized and disempowered, and women’s politics as collusive or resistant. Queer studies has given this somewhat-tired paradigm a new lease of life in the classroom, perhaps its own shot-in-the-arm coming from fresh turns in contemporary sexuality politics in the country. We now seem to be witnessing a parallel movement in university spaces like corridors, plazas and gardens in which the politics of reading literary texts through radical queer frameworks, for example, is being extended to assertions of non-normative sexual choices and a spreading support for queerness – and queer thinking – on campuses. This is not to say that homophobia, and a conservative heteronormativity – in response to texts as well as lifestyles – is not still visible and disruptive, but is it possible to mark, analyze and interrogate an identifiable turn towards queering the gendered space in/through the humanities in the Indian university?

A few weeks ago, a young woman came up to me on the metro, checked that I was who she thought I was, and identified herself as an MPhil student of sociology for whom ‘Phobic Erotic was a Bible’ when she first began to do research on lesbian lives, and that she now could ‘not wait for the Gender Conference to begin’ (referring to the recently-concluded conference on gender, sexualities and multiple modernities that we organised at Delhi University).  So what, I wondered as I stepped off the train, has been happening in the Humanities and Social Science disciplines on university campuses since I put together The Phobic and the Erotic in 2007, an anthology of writings by feminist and queer activists and scholars? The intention of the anthology was to take stock of both activism and academics around sexualities in contemporary India, and to identify ways in which feminist and queer intellectual interventions had both interrogated and extended those politics and the thinking around it. Contributors to the volume included some of the foremost feminist and queer activists and thinkers in the field, and what emerged from the volume – and the subsequent reception to it – was the sense that while it was indeed time to critique both the activist and intellectual movements and analyze their limitations, the core necessity for feminist theorizing was far from dead. While feminisms have been challenged and transformed, and ‘woman’ as a category entirely destabilized and continually reconstituted, feminist theory as a tool of critical inquiry has remained essential to intellectual interrogations of how we materially inhabit multiple spaces. Queer interventions in feminist thinking had then given it new directions by fruitfully complicating the scenario and throwing up new and old spanners in the works.

I currently teach an MA course in Literature and Gender, and last semester offered an MPhil course on Sexualities and Visual Cultures in Contemporary India. The MPhil is a more advanced discussion class in which students are aware of originary debates in the field and can push the arguments in certain directions through the texts they consider and the critical readings they access. It has been the MA class which has been far more revelatory in a sense: the students are intellectually and otherwise younger and fresh from undergraduate degrees in which feminist criticism seems to start always by looking at how a woman has little or no ‘agency’ in her social structure and is dependent on, and oppressed by, a male figure. While this is not an entirely useless entry point into reading gender in the classroom, it has its obvious limitations. Starting at the undergraduate level, we try to complicate this scenario and offer ways of approaching texts that look at how men and women are gendered, constructed and performed, and how their desires, frustrations and negotiations of categories of male/female are fluid and overlapping. Students travel the range of heteronormative/homosocial/homoerotic/homosexual desire, and are able to make distinctions between different registers of desiring – not merely in terms of sexual difference, but in the ways which point toward collapsing binaries of difference into other more complex patterns of gendered and sexual interactions.

What I wanted to think about, then, is whether the climate-change that has been brought about by political, cultural and social developments in India since the movement around Section 377 intensified and captured the public imagination, has made possible a completely different set of negotiations and discussions both in and outside the classroom. For the first time in almost a decade and a half that I have spent at Delhi University – first in an undergraduate college and now at the postgraduate department – it seems to me that the intellectual is slowly also approaching and approximating the personal and the political, and this is not merely to do with whether one is gay and can ‘come out’ now, though that is a vital question too.

 What I am trying to work out is whether a connection can be made between developments in the immediate world around us as they impact on us – and on our students in particular – and emergent trends one can see on the university campus over the past few years. There are a couple of instances I would like to point to as markers of a changing campus in contexts of gender, though this is not at all to say that any of the problems of sexual harassment, crassness and insensitivity, rights violations and stereotyping have been resolved. In fact, with a campus increasingly open to new ideas and expressions, new problems – both of radical posturing and those coming out of a conservative backlash – have also begun to emerge, and need to be acknowledged and addressed.

 A couple of months ago, a male student of my MA course came to see me hesitantly, saying he had a personal problem that was linked to questions that we had been discussing in class over Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and wondering whether we could also share a space outside the classroom that took up related ‘real life’ issues. He was gay and closeted, but life had become intolerable for him ever since he had revealed his orientation to his male roommate, who was, presumably, straight. Without probing at all beyond what he felt he wanted to tell me, I gathered that this student had begun to ‘like’ his roommate (who, it seemed to me, was not entirely against indulging in some sexual experimentation until he had found a girlfriend who was incensed at whatever mischief she sensed in these uncertain equations). Much bitterness and heartbreak had followed. My student was terrified and confused at the same time; closeted, he feared that his erstwhile roommate who had now moved out would create trouble for him by spreading stories, but also perhaps about whether this ‘not coming out’ showed him up as cowardly and uncommitted toward a movement that was his lifeline. Another gay student, in the meantime, had begun to wear his sexuality on his sleeve (and on his Facebook statuses) and was enthused about all of us attending the Delhi Pride together as a university contingent carrying placards. Between these two students falls the shadow of queer activism and awareness on campus, of course, but what is interesting is that these are no longer just personal stories of angst and bravado.

Students have now begun to organise around their gender politics, and to look for strength in the support they might find from friends and faculty. Queer Campus India is a network which proclaims that they will address ‘sexuality… from scratch’, aiming ‘to be an Indian queer youth/students’ collective – a space to share your experiences, deal with coming out and find your own circle of queer friends’. There is a potential problem here too, as I see it, with its very specific and definite focus on coming out and identifying as queer by hanging out with members of the community – if ‘queer’ is defined narrowly as those who practise and acknowledge a homosexual lifestyle choice. What some of us on our very diverse campus are trying to do, through linking discussions in the classrooms with lives (secret and outed) outside of that more formal space, is to queer thinking, and to diversify the idea of sexual orientation to build a sexual politics that is interrogative, subversive, multiple, various.

What does Queer Campus India and its activities have to do with the Humanities classroom in particular? When gay and lesbian students come to campus after a relatively sheltered and closeted (if frustratingly constrained) existence at home through the growing-up school years, they are at once overwhelmed by the freedom campus life brings them as well as assailed by a whole new set of doubts and anxieties which are to do with their newly-forming/transforming identities as adults and their new and budding relationships and friendships. Life in hostel rooms, in cafes and canteens, on the metro and the roads, is far bigger and more real than the life contained within their textbooks. At those moments, however, when classroom discussions speak to their lives outside of it, and when their personal and political confusions are one with their intellectual engagements, those are potentially transformative moments, and moments that we can wrench into making a difference. That is the hope I still hold out, even as I recognise how difficult everyday negotiations of sexualities are for each of us in different ways.

We had an unprecedented turnout of students at our conference on gender, sexualities and multiple modernities at Delhi University last week, right through the three days, right through till 6 and 7 pm when we ended each day. This month, the St Stephen’s College Literary Society is organising their annual festival with ‘the Body’ as its theme; students of the university’s Political Science department are trying to put together a day of films and discussions around queer issues. There is a new Facebook group called Quest-Prayatna which has been trying to link campuses around the country on queer debates and posts. In fact, Facebook has sprung some spectacular campaigns for feminist and queer rights, including the Pink Chaddi and the protest against the sacking – and subsequent suicide – of Professor Siras by Aligarh Muslim University when it was discovered that he was gay.

The debates are alive and kicking up dust on campus, and there appears to be a tentative, provisional dialogue erupting, finally, between the classroom and the plazas and streets on which rainbow banners are held aloft once a year on Gay Pride Day. There is an awareness that feminism is vitally linked to queer debates, and it is often the point at which the isolation of the gay/lesbian is breached in the classroom and outside. There is also a gleam of awareness that one must begin to think queer, whether one is queer or not – where queer translates into an inclusive space in which all cohabit, in empathy as much as in combat. Surely something must come of this traffic?

Brinda Bose is Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi.

Re-reading Marquez’s Memoir

Manash Bhattacharjee

Many writers and critics have complained about the term “magic realism” used to describe much of Latin American writing by the world publishing market. It was the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier who put a more apt phrase for the kind of Latin American fiction that was forcibly translated as magic realist. He called such works of fiction: marvelous real (“lo real marvilloso”).

Europe is infamous for creating binaries after the Enlightenment experience wherein “magical” was opposed to “real” the way “irrational” was opposed to “reason”. So “magic realism” served as an oxymoronic fusion where the two binaries were retained to serve the double tension between the West’s own self-conscious distinction: between a magic deemed to be medieval and realism deemed to be modern within its own history, as well as between “other” cultures which are supposedly still in the grips of “magic” but – and it’s impossible not to be polemical here – in contact with the modern European form of fiction, also attains the claims of realism. In contrast, the term “marvelous real” simply conjures up an image of a fictional world where the word “marvelous” does not suggest something other than the real, but holds the marvelous as an attribute of the ordinary aspects of real life itself. Carpentier distinguished his idea of “lo real marvilloso” by contrasting it with the most vibrant literary movement in Europe during his time, surrealism: “In the first place, the sensation of the marvelous presupposes a faith.  Those who do not believe in saints cannot be cured by the miracles of saints… Thus the idea of the marvelous invoked in the context of disbelief – which is what the surrealists did for so many years – was never anything but a literary trick”.

Surrealism was a violent escape from the traps of Christian values and bourgeois life. It was a fusion of Marx and Rimbaud: a radical aesthetics aiming to liberate society by re-inventing love. In their search for a new future, the surrealists aimed to destroy conventional notions of both (Christian) morality and (bourgeois) reality by embracing the psychic/irrational depths of language. It led them to search and recover the resonances of pre-moral/primordial/pagan origins. Some of the primordial/pagan influences were however marketed into the imagination through a colonial route from non-European cultures.

The surrealist movement can also be read as an attempt to counter the various factors which produced in modern Europe what Weber called “disenchantment”, in the wake of capitalism and the Protestant ethic. Against this rationalization of life and faith, the surrealists introduced an aesthetic of re-enchantment. But, as Carpentier right pointed out, instead of welcoming faith, the surrealists took a critical look at faith, influenced by secular/Marxist traditions. Figures like Salvador Dali were however more ideologically ambiguous than leftist surrealists.

Carpentier’s criticism however, taking the example of Dali’s paintings, is that surrealism’s attempt was “the fabrication of the marvellous”. It is a criticism regarding the codification and manufacturing by Dali and other surrealists of a marvellous reality which wasn’t palpable in modern Europe as opposed to the raw translation by Latin Americans like Marquez of the marvellous which was tangibly experienced in their culture. Though this view holds water, it is important to qualify this crucial distinction. In the case of Latin American fiction, the marvellous was pretty much an easily obtainable material, from which a mise-en-scène could then be created. In surrealism, one could detect the structural influence of the Freudian revolution, with imageries of dream-states and the techniques of deciphering and interpreting them having a huge impact not only on Dali’s paintings, but also on Andre Breton’s concept of “automatic writing”. Carpentier argued how in Latin America, “the marvellous was around every corner”, whereas in Paris “one had to milk reality with great effort in order to extract the marvellous”. Carpentier seems to separate (artistic) labour and magic. He didn’t suspect the possibility that only labour can offer the radical means left in a culture besieged by the power discourses of religious beliefs and bourgeois rationality, to extract, however painfully, remnants of the lost and the buried forces (imageries) of culture. The surrealist enterprise of labour however suffers from a sociologically, if not existentially, alienated productivity.

This alienation can be grasped if one bears in mind that while the post-colonial Latin Americans kept alive their ties with the popular, the surrealists experimented within the artificial confines of an elite environment. The difference also lies in the condition (or situation) which the surrealists faced, where the exceptional had to be produced against the everyday. The surrealists, being revolutionary atheists fighting Christian dogmas, also found it difficult to say what Gabriel Garcia Marquez, despite being a communist, could suggest from a popular register of culture: “If you don’t believe in god, at least be superstitious”. This difference endorses Carpentier’s attempt to see the Latin American literary-scape vis-à-vis Europe through a prism of radical otherness and elsewhere-ness.

Latin American fiction, like any genuine fiction from the non-West, holds up a different version and vision of the world and of life. Even though the modern form of the novel began in Europe, with Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Milan Kundera’s assertion of the novel being “Europe’s creation” is merely an assertion about the creation of a form which has been re-created differently elsewhere. Writers from other cultures, faced with a Europeanizing modernity forced through their colonial histories, have tried to fuse the novel form with its older forms of story telling. The imaginations of fiction in such countries were, in a way, a paradoxical experience of appropriation and resistance. The fact that Marquez could achieve this specific task of fusing the Western form of the novel with his Columbian roots of storytelling is just a case in point. But writers from different cultures have not been necessarily busy in mimicking Europe. They also parodied their own world. As much as Europe was part of their colonized history, in effect, sometimes Europe itself got parodied. Marquez was of course busy in something different altogether: he invented a country (and a culture) through narratives in which both – that particular country and the rest of the world – could together come to read the unique story of its existence.

In the background of this contrast, let us look at Marquez’s memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, as an interesting text which blurs the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, thus moving into the space of marvellous reality through the narrative that affects all literature: the of memory. We will study the memoir and its structuring of memory vis-à-vis texts and forms from Europe which emerged around the same period.

Alastair Reid (in The New York Review of Books, 15/1/2004) gets the point as he calls the memoir, “an exercise in remembering, but without the tensions and contrivances of the novel”. Marquez does not however forget the techniques of story telling as he writes his memoir. The dramatic aspects of fiction is very well infused in the right places to prevent the narrative from appearing like an endless, routine seam of time and events following on each other’s trail. We shall consider a few of them. For now, let us turn to Marquez’s epigraph where he axiomatically draws the correspondence between the structure of life with the structure of memory: “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it”.

Perry Anderson (in The Nation, 26/1/2004) views it as “an invitation to selective recall, with all the facilities of a convenient amnesia”. He finds it legitimate to “ask how far memories correspond to facts”. The claim Marquez is making about life should unerringly be linked to the aspiration of writing a memoir.  The narrative of one’s life written through a process of remembering across lived time doesn’t need to corroborate mere facts through an objective digging into the past, as memory is vastly imbued with subjective ghosts where the person paints his life over the canvas of lost time, with every event being illumed by how one has been affected then and now rather than by projecting any truth-version. It’s true that Marquez seems to have kept quiet on many incidents and people. This does not necessarily warrant a judgment over selectivity. Even the act of remembering makes choices over which sleeping dogs to be left lying and which specters to bring up. In such a situation, recalling of the past is unavoidably selective but never on self-conscious grounds, and one can call the amnesia “convenient” only out of one’s own objective prejudices. We anyway don’t choose our own amnesia – amnesia, so to say, chooses us.

The act of remembering is never an act of recalling the truth about one’s life but rather a glimpse into the very real fiction of life. The essential difference between literature and philosophy arises from this distinction. For philosophy, “truth” is always the pivotal concept behind the search for meanings ranging from the idea of the state, to the idea of being, to life itself. This attitude turns a narrative moral, and hence justificatory in character, from the point of view of a truth-claim or a claim veering around (or against) truth.

The English proverb tells us that truth is stranger than fiction. What is revealing here is how the word truth is deployed in a way as to depend on the aura of strangeness when compared with and against fiction. The terms can be reversed and said that in literature, truth itself acquires a strange place, dipped in the schisms between words and reality. Literature, in this sense, aims for a more subjective story of human life where the question of truth is exposed to a game.

Marquez’s memoir is the triumph of narrative innovation where the story of his life borders on the fictional, even as it obliquely illuminates the novels he’s written. It reads like a story about his stories, about how he collected his materials from the characters he knew and weaved them into tales. His memoir is a tale that travels through the sideways of his fiction. The structure of Marquez’s memoir is episodic rather than linear. It inevitability is caused by how memory itself structures time. This shilly-shally between past and present life, provoked by memory, marks the flow of narrative-time.

In Living to Tell, Marquez has shown that a storyteller’s attitude and a memoir’s raison d’ etre can make an imaginative pact. A memoir, unlike an autobiography, is a story of encounters without reflective motifs. The encounters are part of pure story, narrated without any philosophical consequence for the writer. Autobiographies are anchored in the self’s predilections. With structural innovation and dramatic techniques, Marquez has managed to radically move the genre of the memoir towards fiction. The memoir gives Marquez ample space to experiment this alliance of genres as he’s clearly not interested in philosophical problems but in telling a story.

The autobiography is traced back to Augustine’s Confessions. Commentators see it as a narrative form where the immanent temporal form of the autobiography is displaced by the ideal and static scheme of allegory. But it is agreed that even when the autobiography took its modern, secularized form, the idea of the “self” always seemed to draw out, under autonomous garbs, certain religious and normative ideas, thus never really abandoning the allegorical influence. The confessional scheme was Christian not only for Augustine but also, years later, for Rousseau. The main concern here is how the autobiography was always an anxious enterprise to describe a journey of the self to be recovered, examined, vindicated, defended or simply guided in time through certain idealized visions. In autobiographies, the drawing of a relationship with one’s self is the central anxiety, ambition and trope.

But a memoir has a different task to deliver. It is about the story, which the self undergoes with others. What the writer pursues in the memoir is not the evolution of the self but the evolution of a life of stories, a story of lives. Marquez’s memoir is further, a tribute to all his loved ones, the way he had once, more playfully commented in his interview with Plinio Apulevo Mendoza, on One Hundred Years of Solitude being “a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends”. Marquez’s sensibility re-claims that no genuine literary work can take place outside its immediate human sphere; with any pretensions to universality.

European memoirs/autobiographies however couldn’t get away from the Kantian influence. In Sartre’s Words, where he reminiscences his childhood and adolescence, the writing is both lyrical and philosophical. Though sometimes descriptions of people and events do take on a purely literary flavour, the stirrings of a philosophical detachment from the world are writ large in the progress of Sartre’s life. Even as Sartre does offer memorable pictures of the world he was born in (primarily his mother and his grand parents), the “I” of the narrative gains a philosophical stronghold. There is a visible crack in Words, between Sartre’s verbal flourish in describing things, people and his relationship with them, and a Protestant-like analysis of self-growth where he confronts religion, his family, his class and the social morality surrounding him. He sounds having saved himself against his angst by climbing the ladder of reason. He mixes literary aphorisms (“I was born from writing; before that, there was only a reflection in a mirror”) with philosophical insinuations (“The conscious mind can only act later as critic, selector, discarder”). The Kantian anxiety is obvious.

For Marquez, the beginning of memory is however not adulterated by any sense of real, historical alienation. For many European writers, the 20^th century came to be the age of exiles. For writers who fled their home country, memory became the cause of anguish. Vladimir Nabokov in his memoir Speak, Memory, draws the most celebrated literary trysts between memory and language. But in contrast to Marquez’s memoir, where the recovery of the past becomes the marvelously real journey for the self, Nabokov’s is a piece de resistance about the displaced and dusty-eyed relationship between the self and its severed past. The exiled literature of Europe sought its self to be recovered, while other worlds like Marquez’s Columbia, threw up stories of a culture to be re-covered. Nabokov, who was forced to flee Russia with his family when he was eighteen, brings in the quiet lyricism of loss to his prose of remembering, while Marquez is content to conjure up the excessive craze-language of his culture. An alienated life turns Nabokov back to the burnt up pebble-shores of his self. For Marquez, the self is merged with inventive abandon into the mythopoetical fold of his cultural life. Nabokov has to force his memory to “speak” with a haunted nostalgia, while memory puts Marquez on a flight-vision of language. Nabokov seizes his clarity in Speak, Memory with this admission: “The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have missed for worlds”. This kick however slows Nabokov down, as his mind tries to pick up the scents and voices of lost things. It adds a pensive poise to his narrative. Nabokov remembers from afar whereas Marquez discovers within range – lost landscapes of a bygone life. Yet, the subjective worlds of writers can sometimes speak in the same tongue. Like this evocation of temporality that Nabokov brings in Speak, Memory could well have been Marquez’s own: “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip”.

We shall now look at three moments in the memoir to highlight three important registers of Marquez’s life. In the beginning of the memoir, Marquez mentions how his mother comes looking for him, despite the knowledge that he is drinking with his writer friends. Before he could react upon seeing her, she said: “I am your mother”.

The dramatic resonance of this statement, deployed by Marquez to arouse our attention, is a unique style of transporting the ordinary to the level of the exemplary. The mother’s declaration is authoritative as much as vulnerable. Marquez reminisces immediately about how many pregnancies she had gone through and yet how she managed to look beautiful at her age. It is a registering of pain, dignity and beauty all at once. Just as her statement evokes a bond which is at once bio-logical and socio-logical. In his registering of the mother, Marquez doesn’t forget the woman.

Marquez also speaks in this memoir about his friends and how they differed in their political positions. One was an “orthodox liberal”, another “a reluctant freethinker”, yet another “an arbitrary anarchist”. Marquez himself was seen as “an unbelieving Communist and potential suicide”. Marquez sums up the basis of their affinity: “I believe without any doubt at all that our greatest good fortune was that even in the most extreme difficulties we might lose our patience but never our sense of humor”. It is impossible not to relate to the wisdom behind that experience. Humour does not resolve differences but often helps to dissolve them. It reduces the seriousness of the world into a playground of insignificance – through it we bear the world, register our complaints and mend the strains of solidarity.

Reviewers of this book have taken notice of the incident where Marquez unselfconsciously wrote how he wanted to finish lunch in the midst of blood-splattering eruptions in Bogotá, following the murder of the popular leader Gaitan.  Even when his brother urged him to join a student’s protest against the murder, Marquez decidedly wished to flee. I would like to defend this quail-ish attitude in the writer against his critics.

Marquez said he stopped learning since the age of eight, after he left his grandmother’s house. The intimacy with maids and other women in the house convinced Marquez that women “are the ones who maintain the whole world” while men “throw it into disarray with our historic brutality”. Influenced by a matriarchal culture, Marquez has a unique eye for the masculine aspects of politics. From this decisive angle, he traverses through the frontiers of politics with watchdog alertness but with an equal irony. As he said in his interview with Mendoza: “I see myself as having been forced by circumstances into political activity”. His attitude to politics always retained this ambivalence of engagement and distance. He holds an inimical position that resists an ideological/moral typology, where taking part in a violent political event is held as a political form of duty for a writer. This relationship with politics is also born from and is a consequence of a writer’s unavoidable sense of solitude. Solitude is also the harbour of memory, and of all writing. 

Manash Bhattacharjee is  a poet and a political theorist. This piece was first published in – Biblio, July-August, 2010 – issue.

The Rienzi Effect

 

Hans Rudolf Vaget

Joachim Köhler, in his Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker, goes so far as to suggest that the German dictator was “merely” the executioner of Wagner’s ideas. Köhler argues that Hitler’s entire political program was essentially an attempt to turn the mythologically coded world of Wagnerian opera into a social and political reality. “The achievement of the Wagnerian world of the ‘work of art of the future’.” In everything he did, Hitler acted as the “agent” of the Bayreuth Circle, accomplishing the task originally set by that great prophet of the Third Reich and of the Holocaust: Richard Wagner.

Recently, Frederic Spotts, the author of a fine history of the Bayreuth Festival, took up the whole vexed matter and re-examined Hitler’s multifarious meddling with the arts – primarily architecture and music. In a thought-provoking and useful new study, boldly entitled Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Spotts laudably ignores those endless speculations about psychic and sexual abnormalities – the most eagerly pursued red herrings in Hitler studies – and proposes instead that the Führer’s social, racial, and geopolitical agenda was ancillary and subordinate to the realization of what was fundamentally an aesthetic project, namely, to create “the greatest culture state since ancient times, or perhaps of all time.”

What was the role of aesthetic experience in general and of Wagnerian opera in particular in the identity formation of Adolf Hitler? For the conscientious historian, however, the task is not to construct “Wagner’s Hitler”, despite that clever titular reversal, but rather to reconstruct Hitler’s Wagner. This is a far more difficult matter.

Some of the difficulties were duly noted by Joachim Fest in his 1973 biography. Striking as the affinities between Hitler and Wagner may at first sight appear – the outsider’s resentment against the bourgeoisie; the bohemian affect of an artistic existence; the basically non-political relationship to the world; the uncertainty about their ancestry; the morbid hatred of Jews – none can be simply attributed to the so-called influence of a widely idolized cultural figure. Much of what we find in young Hitler represents a constellation of phenomena perfectly typical of the era in which he grew up. The most characteristic elements of his Weltanschauung – nationalism, Darwinism, anti-Semitism – were in the air in Vienna at the time, which he could not help but breathe. Still, in Fest’s view, the Meister emerges both as the young man’s ideological mentor and as Hitler’s great exemplar.

Fest’s own assessment of the matter, though, is not free from contradiction. On the one hand he argues correctly that no direct succession from Wagner to Hitler can be established; on the other, he identifies Wagner as the Führer’s decisive teacher. He disputes the claim that Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism can and must be traced back to Wagner: the Führer’s racial anti-Semitism was uncompromising, he argues, whereas Wagner’s hostility towards Jews was selective and inconsistent.

Saul Friedländer, who noted (at the Schloss Elmau Symposium of 1999 on Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich) that Hitler, in all his speechmaking, never once invoked Wagner’s well-known hostility towards das Judentum. Why not? He could easily have argued that if the great Richard Wagner called for the elimination of Jews from German culture, then how could our current anti-Jewish laws and policies be wrong? We are simply carrying out what Wagner intended. But Hitler never said anything of the sort. Friedländer offers two explanations.

First, perhaps Hitler considered Wagner’s position insufficiently radical since both Das Judentum in der Musik and Parsifal leave open the possibility that Jews can find redemption by shedding their Jewish identity, as Ludwig Börne had done, and as the figure of Kundry implies. Second, perhaps the Führer’s very adulation of Wagner simply “did not allow for any disclaimers or any ambiguity”, so as not to call into question the lofty standing of Richard Wagner as one of the patron saints of the Third Reich. Third, if we may add a reason of our own, perhaps Hitler was astute enough to realize that mining Wagner for proto-Nazi ideas, and exploiting Wagner for crude propaganda, might have diminished his standing as the supreme example of the creator of an art that was thoroughly German, heroic, sublime, and highly auratic. A non political cult could be more effective than any propagandist exploitation.

This, then, throws into relief the crucial methodological problem and underlines the need for a new way of looking at the entire Hitler-Wagner complex. The crux of the matter, it seems to me, lies in the fixation of historians on the notion of influence. We can no longer use this term as trustingly as Viereck, Fest, Köhler, and a host of others have done. In reception theory, “influence” has given way to notions of reception and appropriation, denoting a more complex and indirect mode of intellectual transfer, and shifting attention from the source to the recipient. Thus, what may look to the untrained eye like a direct line from Wagner to Hitler could in fact be an optical illusion – the result of multiple refractions. For what we call influence accrues from an entire constellation of factors involving language, media, cultural practices of remembering, and the various ways in which these factors interact within a sharply defined historical space. As in all cases of intellectual precursorship, the basic tenet of reception theory fully applies to the case of Hitler and Wagner: a tradition does not perpetuate itself; rather, it is appropriated and adapted to the needs of the recipient and, in the process, bent and deformed.

As with “influence”, then, the very notion of mentor seems incongruous with Hitler’s study habits, which were those of an autodidact and dilettante. Furthermore, from what we know about young Hitler, the experience of Lohengrin and of Rienzi preceded his reading of Wagner’s prose tracts. And that adolescent aesthetic experience – more irrational and thus more idiosyncratically formative than the traditional master-disciple relationship – was by no means solitary or unique: Hitler shared it with great numbers of his contemporaries.

Wagner’s “grand tragic opera”, Rienzi, an early work that never became part of the Bayreuth canon, offers the most promising starting point for accessing the peculiar nature of Hitler’s Wagnerianism. As we know from the memoir of August Kubizek, a budding musician and Hitler’s boyhood friend, the two youths attended a performance at the Linz Landestheater early in 1905, when Hitler was fifteen, that appears to have had the impact of an epiphany. “In that hour”, he is reported to have said later on several occasions, “it all began.” But what, precisely, began in that hour?

His enthusiasm for Wagner? This is improbable, since he had earlier seen Lohengrin, at age thirteen. No, what more likely began was the elaboration of a particular fantasy triggered by Wagner’s opera – the fantasy of becoming the leader of the Germans and of restoring Germany’s greatness, just as Rienzi, the last tribune in medieval Rome, had attempted to do for Rome. As we shall see, Rienzi set one of the fundamental patterns of Hitler’s life. The significance of this youthful experience, then, can hardly be exaggerated. It shows, to begin with, that to young Hitler, as for untold numbers of Germans (and not only Germans), Wagner was primarily a great purveyer of overwhelming emotions, and only secondarily a purveyer of political ideas. Hitler’s youthful experience is furthermore crucial as much for the psychological pattern it reveals as for its content.

 Indications are that we no longer cringe when Hitler and art are discussed together in a serious fashion. This is terribly important. Much is to be gained from looking at young Hitler through the lense of a typology of the artist, for strictly speaking, as Otto Werckmeister has argued in “Hitler the Artist” (Critical Inquiry, Winter 1997), he was “a professional artist”, though clearly one “at the lowest level of the artistic proletariat”.

Once we look closely at the peculiar complexion of Hitler’s shaky status as an artist, a psychologically portentous aspect of the structure of his personality begins to come into focus. We see that two very dissimilar artistic sensibilities co-existed. In painting and architecture, his artistic impulse had but a modest potency. In music, on the other hand, he appears to have possessed an unlimited capacity for emotional transport, albeit of a purely receptive nature, as evidenced by his youthful Rienzi experience. Hitler may thus be regarded as a fairly typical dilettante in the sense that this term had acquired at the turn of the century, denoting as it did, one who led an inauthentic life based, in the last analysis, on imitation. Dilettantes populate the work of Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, of Heinrich and Thomas Mann.

In Hitler, the interaction of those two different artistic dispositions – one excessive, the other deficient – was controlled by no intellectual discipline. This appears to have led to a blockage and, eventually, a re-routing of his artistic ambitions to the field of politics, where he then was able to indulge his architectural fantasies on a much grander scale. As a budding painter, he was unable to imagine himself rising to the lofty level to which, the example of Wagner in mind, he secretly aspired. In music, however, where he had no practical skills, he seems to have had unlimited powers of emotional involvement which he would have had to invest in something altogether different – by becoming a populist leader like Rienzi. Such a realization seems to have dawned on him in 1919, when he discovered his talent as a political orator.

By reinventing himself as a politician in the image of Wagner’s operatic hero, Hitler the thwarted artist followed to perfection the typical psychological pattern of the dilettante – a stock figure of German literature since Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Indeed, it was Goethe who provided the classic definition of the dilettante as a would-be artist who “attempts to produce effects with the effects that affected him.” This was precisely Hitler’s case. Having failed as an artist, Hitler hitched his fate to a cultural icon whose national standing and international renown were beyond question. He began to practice a demonstratively non-political cult of Wagner, referring to the composer in public as the greatest genius that Germany had yet produced. This proved to be highly effective in the political arena: perceived as a devoted admirer of Wagner, Hitler was able to win respectability and cultural legitimacy and, eventually, to create a charismatic aura of genius for himself.

 In all of this, a key role must be attributed to the metapolitical notion of Erbe. It represents a privileged, even auratic form of reception in which the inheritor masks its basic character of appropriation by pretending merely to heed a call from the past. The importance of the notion of cultural inheritance to our understanding of the Hitler-Wagner nexus becomes immediately clear as we cast a brief comparative glance at the case of Anton Bruckner, who in June 1937, in a pompous induction ceremony at Walhalla, was inducted in the German Hall of Fame. The case of Bruckner, unlike Wagner, is one of wilful appropriation in the narrowest sense of the word.

Wagner had thematized again and again, from Rienzi to Parsifal, the idea of Erbe, even of Welterbe – world dominion. German Wagnerians thus grew up with the expectation that the Master’s heritage would one day be claimed. After Wagner’s death, the Bayreuth Circle, especially Houston Stewart Chamberlain, proceeded to radicalize the notion of a Wagnerian heritage by linking it to the hegemonic ambitions of Wilhelminian Germany. And throughout that post-Wagnerian era, a diffuse but vaguely appealing expectation was kept alive that one day a Parsifal-like savior would appear when Germany needed it most. Thus, when Hitler claimed that he was now wielding the sword that had been forged by Wagner and Chamberlain (as he did in his 5 May 1924 letter to Siegfried Wagner), he was in effect claiming to be Wagner’s political heir. The reference to Nothung, the magic sword handed down from Wotan to Siegmund and on to Siegfried, resonated not only for Hitler but also for his followers with powerful mythological and cultural overtones that lent him the aura of a potential savior in the manner of a Lohengrin, a Siegfried, or a Parsifal and, with that, the glamorous semblance of historical legitimacy.

Perhaps the most potent side-effect of Hitler’s cult of Wagner was something altogether different – the setting in motion of a messianic anticipation of the coming of a savior. The link to Wagner needed no explanation since the creator of Die Meistersinger, through the figure of Hans Sachs, had portrayed himself as a new John the Baptist – as someone who was merely preparing the way for the One who would not only sing, ‘Wach auf’, but who would truly awaken all Germany.

 Ian Kershaw, in his monumental biography of Hitler, has identified the widespread efforts to “work towards the Führer” – “dem Führer entgegenarbeiten” – as the key to understand precisely “how the Third Reich operated”. Hitler’s highly personalized charismatic rule “invited radical initiatives from below” and offered them backing as long as they stayed in line with his Weltanschauung.In other words, his followers were encouraged to tap into their own emotional reserves, their Wagnerian dreams, to help Hitler become the heroic leader and saviour that he wanted to be.

Against this background, then, we can now gauge more realistically the extent to which Wagnerian opera contributed to the identity formation of Hitler and his rise to power. I shall attempt, in this concluding section, to shed some additional light on this nexus by briefly assessing Hitler’s response to the three Wagnerian works that meant the most to him: Rienzi, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. I hope to show that the psychological as well as the political significance of the Hitlerian cult of Wagner derived primarily not from Hitler’s engagement with these works but from that engagement’s interaction with other forces within the cultural space in which he chose to operate.

At crucial stages in his apprenticeship – in Karl Luegers Vienna and in the post-war Germany of l9l8/l9 – Hitler seems to have read history through the looking glass provided by Wagner’s Rienzi. It was evidently this opera that enabled him to see in Karl Lueger, as he wrote in Mein Kampf, the prototype of the modern popular tribune, “den gewaltigsten deutschen Bürgermeister aller Zeiten”. Historical reality seemed to validate Wagner’s vision of the charismatic Volkstribun and convince him of its viability as a political ideal. There are intriguing indications that, as he took his first steps in the political arena of post-war Munich, Hitler looked to Rienzi for guidance, as though this opera were his metapolitical compass. As Brigitte Hamann tells us in Hitlers Wien, he had observed that at the meetings of the Pan-German groups the overture to Rienzi was played. He adopted this custom for his political rallies in Munich and made it a ritual element of the massive Party rallies in the Third Reich. That piece – both military and solemn in character – served as a kind of signature tune of the Hitler movement and of the political liturgy celebrated annually at Nuremberg. So attached was Hitler to this music that, as Albert Speer reports in his reminiscences, he refused to replace it with any of the laudable pieces composed for the occasion by eager Nazi musicians.

In a particularly revealing conversation of 1930 (reported by Otto Wagner in Heny A. Turner’s Hitler Memoirs of a Confidant), Hitler pointed out that he had learned an important lesson from Rienzi. Wagner’s hero fails, he observed, because he has no political party behind him and because he neglects to destroy his enemies. And indeed, from the outset of his career we see Hitler determined not to repeat the “mistakes” of his operatic model For his fiftieth birthday, Hitler requested and received, among other Wagnerian treasures, the autograph manuscript of Rienzi. What may at first strike the observer as a whim was surely motivated by his emotional bond to this particular work. Far from being capricious, his request breathes the air of inevitability. Eerily, having refused several urgent entreaties to allow the precious documents to be taken out of Berlin to a safe place, he apparently took all his Wagner autographs with him to the Führerbunker, the final stop of his catastrophe bound life, where all further traces of them vanish. Even his pathetic end in the Bunker is reminiscent of Rienzi’s demise in the burning ruins of the Roman Capitol.

But the most striking similarity is that between Rienzi’s turn against Rome and Hitler’s turn against Germany. The end in sight, Hitler, in his Political Testament, cold-bloodedly dismissed his own people as the loser in a historic struggle, undeserving of the greatness he had intended for it. Given all the echoes of Rienzi in Hitler’s career, it was almost inevitable that his end would point back to the concluding lines from Wagner’s tragic grand opera: “The last Roman curses you. / Cursed be this city! / Decay and wither, Rome! / That is the will of your degenerate people.”

The political repercussions of the historical Cola di Rienzi upon the 19th and 20th centuries are today often overlooked. It seems indicative of the intellectual milieu that sparked Wagner’s interest in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi. The Last of the Tribunes (1835), the book from which he culled his libretto, that approximately at the same time the twenty year old Friedrich Engels drafted a play on the same subject, also based on Bulwer-Lytton and intended as libretto for an opera. Not only Hitler but also Benito Mussolini chose Rienzi as a model. This is presumably the reason why in some early analyses of National Socialism, such as Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), Cola di Rienzi, rather than Cesar, is identified as the true historical prototype of modern fascism.

It is not difficult to see why Die Meistersinger also occupied a special place in Hitler’s mind. The community Wagner imagined and glorified in that opera comes close to the völkisch ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft, as opposed to a modern society. The corporate principles on which Wagner’s Nuremberg functions, the emphasis on community with its concomitant rejection of universalist values, clearly appealed to Hitler. Nor is it too obvious to mention that Wagner’s Volksgemeinschaft is led by a charismatic artist who enjoys the affection of the people. Unlike Parsifal, with its two momentous scenes of disarming and its message of compassion, Die Meistersinger contained nothing that could be perceived as undermining the war effort, which is probably the reason that this opera was played during the so-called “Kriegsfestspiele” of 1943 and 1944 almost to the bitter end.

The “Day of Potsdam” culminated, in a specially arranged, festive performance of Die Meistersinger in the Prussian State Opera. Wagner was to provide the capstone to this most successful propaganda effort of the new regime. At that performance on 21 March 1933, the people of Nuremberg were instructed, during the “Wach auf” chorus, to turn to Hitler’s box, thereby transferring their homage from Hans Sachs to Adolf Hitler. Perhaps no other moment better encapsulates the political uses of Wagner in the Third Reich than this unashamedly operatic gesture. The identification with Prussian tradition in Potsdam during the day and with Wagner at the opera at night achieved for the new regime an incalculable strengthening of its claims to historical and cultural legitimacy. It almost goes without saying that at the Bayreuth Festival that year, this theme was repeated in full orchestration and in deafening fortissimo: “As we listened to the conclusion of Die Meistersinger today”, wrote Hans Alfred Grunsky, “it seems to us as though we were hearing in our in- Parsifal provides the most illuminating example of the way in which the Wagner cult catapulted Hitler into the role of designated saviour of Germany. After Hitler’s first visit to Wahnfried, 30 September l923, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Winifred Wagner provided open letters which the aspiring politician gratefully used for his own purposes. It was the first time that Hitler received an enthusiastic endorsement from a widely respected cultural institution in Germany. Of particular interest are Chamberlain’s letters of 7 October l923 and of l January l924. Ailing and suffering since l9l4, he casts himself in the role of Amfortas who now feels comforted and relieved knowing that the new Parsifal has appeared on the scene: “Germany in the hour of her greatest need gave birth to a person such as Hitler.” Like Wagner’s Parsifal, Hitler is called upon to perform a “Heiltat”, but this time for Germany as a whole. His mission is to rid Germany of the lethal influence of Judaism – the “todbringendem Einfluß des Judentums auf das Leben des deutschen Volkes”. Chamberlain pointed out to the faithful that no one in Germany had the courage and the determination to carry out that necessary task – no one, that is, except Hitler.

Whereupon he virtually anoints the new Parsifal. In fact, Chamberlain gave Hitler a double role, that of Parsifal, the healer, and that of Siegfried, the liberating hero. When Hitler famously wrote that the spiritual sword with which he was fighting was forged in Bayreuth, he was actually taking a cue from Chamberlain. Apparently, Hitler had no difficulty imagining himself both as Parsifal and as Siegfried and encouraged his followers to see him in those mythical roles.

Those familiar with the Wagnerian code understood the implications of Hitler’s endorsement by Wahnfried. Hitler did not need to give explanations, nor did the public need them. From that moment on, Hitler could be certain that he was the bearer of a mission and that he could present himself as the political heir to Wagner. No transgression or misappropriation was required here. The role of the guardian of the Wagnerian legacy and of the future savior of Germany, as defined by Chamberlain, was offered to him, the devout, ostensibly non-political admirer of the Meister, on a silver platter.

Hans Rudolf Vaget, Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

A Moment of Revelation

 Prasanta Chakravarty

(A Report on ‘The Everyday Life of a Discipline’- a colloquium on contemporary English Studies that took place on February 4, 2011, at the Department of English, University of Delhi)

Unlike the social sciences, humanities in India at least, have been less systematic and meticulous about introspection. This is slightly odd owing to the fact that the onslaughts on humanitities, from both outside and from within its own quarters, have been quite relentless and ballistic of late. Besides, it is a good idea to take stock of things from time to time as disciplines morph and change gear. So, when I was asked to be part of a group of practitioners of humanities who were at the forefront of the last bit of stock-taking that took place during the late nineteen-eighties, I was curious to know how they see their own transition at this point of time and also get a sense about their assessment of English studies now, apart from my own contribution to the current debates. 

Alok Rai, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and Gauri Viswanathan are literary critics and scholars who in their own ways, along with many other fellow scholars, actually helped make a strong case for various changes in the way disciplines and departments of literature function. Chief among them were vital questions on the politics of canon-formation, the role of language in literature, issues of vernacular articulations and translation, forms of colonialism—including homebred ones, identifying markers of gender and identity politics and so on. In 2011, many of these issues are quite relevant and yet doing literature today also means dealing with fresh challenges and innovations.

For one, we now inhabit a much more fractured global world with more surreptitious forms of literary activities and attacks on it. The deeply invested local author is as much rooted in his own milieu as in other networks that mediate continuously with his own output and imagination. A dynamic scholarly document no longer resemble a linear narrative. There is a challenging task to identify and tackle this whole new field called digital humanities where literature intersects with documentation, visual media and other interactive literary production. There are issues of power equations involved with such innovations and yet these areas and paratactic associations could be explored effectively and critically.

There is now a tremendous investment in areas like textual and print studies, new aesthetic formalisms, detecting renewed ideals of empire formation in texts, studying subjective spaces (from diaries to autobiographies to blogs), invoking sacred spaces or looking for legal implications in literature and reconfiguring the political in literary utterances—say, looking closely at the way political poetry (a genre often not recognized adequately by postcolonial criticism) has been able to galvanize people in Middle East or parts of South America, of late. These concerns are not necessarily new to literary studies, but the times demand a fresh historicization from the practitioners.

So, it was interesting when Alok Rai started the proceedings with a mea culpa: that he feels like Hardy’s Jude—a hapless prisoner, in this case, implicated in the trajectory of literary criticism the way it has played out. What combination of sweetness and light led him to think that the outside is free and vigorous and the academe is not so—he asked himself. Even as he acknowledged the valuable works of the literary critics (on forgotten scandals and caste autobiographies) in the past three decades or so in cahoots with, what he marked as the cruising gangs of philosophers and social scientists, he came down heavily on the fake benignity (ah! English is so oppressed by Shelley) of such high moral endeavours. To study literature has become surrogating on a certain idea of reality, to gain a purchase on how one can affect the proceedings around oneself, even if that is through exploring tributaries of power or micro-studies of texts and textualities. Scholarship has become a matter of conviction rather than appreciation: ethically bankrupt, overtly politicized and thoroughly without joy. The world itself has become a text and the idea of representation is eroded. No appreciation for the subtleties of speech or rhetoric there. This Rai feels to be a kind of textual-political imperialism.

The price to pay then is a gradual erosion of appreciating a certain cognitive purchase that the ‘word’ provides. This expanding world of textual imperialism on the word, that forces us to forget the joys of discovering the turn of the phrase or the craft of lucid composition, is now being gutted down by the grim managerial class. The accounting protocols of footloose capitalism, which is not even deliberately cruel, is completely oblivious to the loss of this shared world. He invoked the multifarious life-world of Milan Kundera and John Keats’ idea of negative capability—the ability to dwell in uncertainties, mysteries and half-knowledge that literature provides us—in order to appreciate the role of literature in a world away from the capitalists and their vulgar opponents. 

Rai is essentially asking for two things: by means of getting back into the specificity of the word, he seeks to reconnect literature with a communitas of connoisseurs. There is a certain repossessing of an enshrined certainty of the experiential or the aesthetic in this act. But since he is at the same time arguing against the righteous certainty of literary activism, he also celebrates the complexity of the life-world that revels in its uncertainty of the fantasy, away from verisimilitude or truth hunting. There is a lament for the world that we have lost and a clarion call to restore a certain complexity within that very world, by capturing the nuances of literary hermeneutics. Rai’s project is philological, a historicization of the text after theory!

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan does not see humanities to be in a mode of crisis at this point. The crisis she finds in rather two concomitant developments: in the ideas that claim a of clash of civilizations even in the literary world and a rampant provincialism in literary-critical activities on the other hand. As an antidote to both—she offers a particular kind of secular-multicultural critique—one that will be sensitive to different cultures and values. She is aware that such renewed attempts to translate cultures and ‘collect’ literary data (say, a fresh lease of life that Arabic is having after 9/11, which is likely to increase manifold after developments in Tunisia and Egypt) has an underside—anthropological tools to be used as soft targets and future propaganda.

Nevertheless, Sunder Rajan bestows a certain salvational role to literature. Literature, as it were, is a secular correlative to religion. One must look for a space of literature and literary pursuits outside of the university precincts in order to reclaim its position. This is also important since, Sunder Rajan announced—much of the oppositional impulses of the left or feminism is now spent, thanks to changes in geopolitical arrangements. As a good example of a contemporary contrarian she referred to Simon During and his book Exit Capitalism: Culture, Theory and Post-Secular Modernity—and During’s ideas of using imagination as a bulwark to the forces of crass capitalism. Literature is a stabilizing force, rather than disruptive and utopian in such an imagination. In fact, Sunder Rajan was quite upfront about literature’s elite and selective preoccupations and affirmed the new spirit to conserve these preoccupations, which, she felt, store the most social power against democratic state capitalism.

If we look carefully at Simon During’s book or his recent utterances (in the SSRC blog—The Immanent Frame), we would notice that During, not unlike Sunder Rajan, feels that literature allows us a dizzying moment in which the frontiers between the real and imaginary, the ordinary and the exceptional, are broken in a way that cannot be accommodated by a non-secular lexicon. It’s not sublime, or an epiphany, or a visitation of grace that literature provides. But it carries its own ecstatic and unworldly charge. Literature is a world unto itself, observant but detached—a classic liberal humanist position to take. Sunder Rajan is once again moving towards an affirmation of the autonomy of the written word, but unlike Rai, is calling for a return to comparative philology in new forms—say, via world literature or global studies.

Gauri Viswanathan was not very enamoured by the idea of the salvific and individual national literatures. She kept on arguing for de-nationalizing literature in a different fashion. As a classic example of such a mode of writing, she cited the South African scholar Isabel Hofmeyr’s book The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 2003.

What happens to a literary artefact as it is translated into different languages, contexts, and societies? How is it changed by the intellectual environments it encounters? What does the transnational circulation mean for its reception back home? Hofmeyr follows John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as it circulates through multiple contexts–and into some 200 languages–focusing on Africa, where 80 of the translations occurred. In the process, the book crucially accounts for how The Pilgrim’s Progress travelled abroad with the Protestant mission movement, was adapted and reworked by the societies into which it travelled, and, finally, how its circulation throughout the empire affected Bunyan’s standing back in England. It weaves together British, African, and Caribbean history with literary and translation studies and debates over African Christianity and mission.

Here we have another example of “world literature” which denies nationhood but gives critical importance over translation, both linguistic and cultural. Viswanathan has a particular transcendental idea of freeing literary studies from the moorings of the nation state (and not filling with a literary content as Rai and Sunder Rajan would have it) and yet refilling it with a notion of portability and travel. But in this notion of portability and circulation, there is not much space for the local, which she too felt was another name for the narrowly provincial. There is also little critical questioning of the notion of the transnational. The work of art or literature is a matter of multiple productions and circulation, rather than any unified hermeneutic entity, as Viswanthan would have it.

What strikes me is the particular halo that literature is being given here with very little investment in the everyday. The lived and material moorings of the text, the writer, the receptor and the critic are gone and gone. What we have instead, are some worrying inferences: that blueprints of refusing capitalism are to be salvaged by reclaiming an ethical community or a hermeneutic practice that will at best be moments of deferral or ways of stonewalling the onslaught, and at worst, a pacifism of the shady grove of the word that would cocoon itself off completely from the attacks on literature per se and in the process, provide a field day to the marauding band of libertarians and their sell-out cronies.

The idea of multiculturalism, imagined in terms of a secular-philological enterprise, is another idea of literature that not only keeps itself secure from the blood and grime of literary transactions but the very cultural specificity and close-reading that it champions, becomes anthropological rather than getting grounded in the literary cultures of a place or movement or specific confrontations. It is no wonder that the names of Amitav Ghosh or Orhan Pamuk comes up as frequent examples in this kind of an old-school comparative philological enterprise. Once you begin by being suspicious of the vernacular for being provincial (which well could be at times), you have finite and cautious possibities, some of which we notice here. You also begin to undermine alternative networks and genres of literary pursuits.

The idea of circulation of texts, on the other hand, though a promising one, can hardly stand on its own as a form of critical scholarship. Portability itself is no justification for literature: the reading of the text against its grain is a vital aspect of literary scholarship, not merely noting the various movements across time and space. And then the issues of production and labour are vital in critiquing ideas of consumptive and circulating texts. The whole idea is to note and overturn the transnational conformities and banal consumerism that we see in airport lounges and literary festivals—so that one can carefully distinguish such half-hearted median fad from both the classical and the popular.

This is by no means a representative group of scholars who are thinking about humanities at this moment, but it is still instructive to watch out the way they are think and direct, because their pronouncements matter. What newness do such speculations bring in their wake? What fresh questions can we ask in the classroom and how do we innovate while sketching research methodologies? Most importantly: what are we asking the fresh minds to ponder on, even as they wish to critically delve into the stories and poems that are part of their very existence?

Prasanta Chakravarty is Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi.

Collective Pride

 

Arindam Chakrabarti

 

One good thing about collective pride seems to be that it has a tendency to curb or neutralize individual pride. One often takes pride in one’s family or school by stating how unexceptional or routine one’s own performance or achievement is compared to others of the same family or school. Similarly, the glory of greater collections tends to render the excellence of smaller groups less and less worthy of exhibition. But does that mean that collective pride is any more excusable or less offensive than individual pride?

 

Hume makes a stray remark that “Vanity is rather to be esteem’d as a social passion, and a bond of union among men.” Nationalism, patriotism, political party pride are such cohesive forces which do promote integrity and protect social groups from aggression or absorption by stronger groups. But they also encourage large-scale combativeness, cultural insularity and communal hatred. Schopenhauer decries “national pride” as “cheap” precisely because it levels out individual excellences and provides a generic refuge to those who lack self confidence and individual merit.

 

While the commendable forms of collective pride are patriotism, commitment to one’s club or community, rootedness in one’s culture, the contemptible forms are too well known: Racism, Jingoism, cultural chauvinism, the religious myths of the chosen people are easily recognizable as obnoxious. But the more paternalistic forms of cultural pride which come in the form of not wishing to judge alien or primitive societies by one’s own exacting standards, or the readiness to explain away and put up with atrocities too easily as due to “different value systems” are harder to recognize. Modern societies tend to practice some sort of collective self-mortification by being cynical about the domestic and over reverent about the foreign. But we must be as suspicious of excessive group humility as we have to be cautious against individual obverse vanity.

 

Sometimes, of course, the very content of collective pride precludes competitiveness or intolerance. If a certain cultural or religious group feels proud that they are the only people who have the catholicity to honor the value of all other cultures or the truth in all other creeds such a pride kept within limits should be less harmful and more ennobling than others. In so far as collective pride too is, after all, felt by individuals, it is based on more or less close relation with the self of the proud person. It can be, in that sense, always reduced to individual pride. An American’s pride “that we Americans are the most prosperous nation in the world” can be reduced to the pride that she herself belongs to the American nation which etc. But in this individualized form national or cultural prides are easily seen to be un-universalizable especially in international or trans-cultural contexts where such prides can be pointfully shown off.

 

Unlike individual pride which can be well deserved in certain cases, especially when the proud-making excellence is hard earned, collective pride is very often undeserved. So is collective shame. The individuals who feel these emotions hardly have any choice or responsibility in bringing about the noble or lowly thing which makes them proud or ashamed. The illiterate Bengali feels proud of Tagore’s poetry, the conscientious American feels ashamed of Vietnam. One feels the irrationality of such emotions but cannot therefore help feeling them. Even unavoidable individual prides are often based on truthful recognition of quite unchosen features like noticeable good looks, or congenital talents. What we shall be examining, however, is whether such pride becomes any more commendable when it is more widely shared. Let us put collective pride in the explicit “we” form to the test of universalizability. Suppose I am proud that we Indians have the greatest music of the world. On the crudest level I cannot at the same time will that the English, the American, the African or the Japanese should be proud that they also have the greatest music, because if they have to be proud that they all have the best music then they will have to have the best music in which case ours no longer will remain the best or even one of the few best musical traditions. It will not do to try to save the universalization by introducing the dodge that I have no objection to their believing that they do have the best musical tradition. For, as I have argued above, for me to wish that the Germans be proud that they produced the greatest music is for me to wish that it be true that they did, otherwise all I am ready to universalize is false collective pride.

 

As in the case of true or well-deserved individual pride, the truer a cultural group’s claim to excellence (in a particular respect) the less sincerely can the pride be willed to be universalized. To come up with considerations like “So what, if the Americans do not have so great a musical tradition of their own, they have science and technology” makes the national pride all the more offensive instead of toning it down. The less shallow way out is to relativize excellence to standards internal to a nation, culture or group. Thus, while I can be proud that we Indians have the greatest music by Indian standards, I can allow that every other nation be proud that they have the greatest music by their standards. This sort of “ours is the best for us” move lies at the back of most moral recommendations of moderate collective pride. While we give up the claim that there are absolute transcultural universal standards of judging the worth of cultures themselves, within a culture we can retain objectivity of norms for evaluating individual accomplishments. If every culture (that is, these sets of norms which are immanently objective) is to be judged only by its own standards, each of them will come out as excellent and unique and a non-jealous collective pride will be trivially universalizable. But this will not be an other-directed pride in our sense. In so far as the other groups in comparison to which a member of the collection will feel proud about a certain communal feature will not abide by the same standard of evaluation, Hume’s fourth or last constraint will not be fulfilled.

 

Also such uncompetitive pride will not come with expectation of recognition of exceptional merit from members of other groups. It will be as universalizable as simple love of family or devotion to one’s own culture which does not await any comparative estimate. The price we pay to make such collective pride morally permissible is this drastic mitigation of our claim of exceptional excellence. Alternatively, one can insist upon a universal moral standard and a transcultural scale for rating civilizations themselves. Cultural pride will then be meaningful and nontrivial. But then and to that extent it would be equally unfair and self-exempting. I don’t see how such cultural pride can be universalized, given the logic of pride-ascribing sentences that we have decided upon. We might not help having such prides. But we better not be proud of them.

 

Before I conclude, I must return to the widespread notion of species pride. About non-humans even if they do have social structure, as indeed some of them seem to have, we can either take the position that they are incapable of having self-consciously assessed cultural, moral, aesthetic qualities or achievements. Alternatively, we can hold on the evidence of the collective building skills of some ants and fidelity, etc., of dogs that they too can have shared features of varying excellence and can be proud or ashamed of those. If we hold the former view, then, our pride as human beings makes no sense because we do not have out-groups to compare our excellences with or expect recognition of superiority from. If we hold the latter view then our pride as humans remains ungeneralizable because we cannot will that all non-humans be as proud as us. So species pride is either senseless or immoral.

 

Arindam Chakrabarti is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii, where he directs the Center for South Asian Studies.

A Letter from Badal Sircar

To:  Richard Schechner

November 23, 1981

Dear Richard,

You wanted me to write for the “Intercultural Performance” issue of The Drama Review. You wanted me to write about my experience with my theatre group Satabdi; about the difficulties I had and the successes I have had; about my state of mind, my experiences as a playwright and a director.

What can I write? I am no writer of essays. I am a theatre man. I wrote some plays because I am a man of the theatre, not because I am a writer. I have to write in English, but English is not my language. My experiences with Satabdi, in theatre, in the cultural jungle of Calcutta, my city; my experiences with other people, with society, with life itself in all its absurdity, sordidness and beauty-all these are no better than a chaotic mass of confusion, and a long history of trying to find a meaningful course, a rational path, through this chaotic agglomeration. I am looking back to locate and understand the path already traversed; I am looking ahead to project it to the future so that the next few steps can be taken.

So where do I begin? At the beginning? At where I am now? At somewhere in the mid-course? Better somewhere in the mid-course; then I shall not have to bother about chronology, continuity, or coherence.

Calcutta. The city I was born in and raised in. An artificial city created in the colonial interests of a foreign nation. A monster city that grew by sucking the blood of a vast rural hinterland which perhaps is the true India. A city of alien culture based on English education, repressing, distorting, buying, promoting for sale the real culture of the country. A city I hate intensely. A city I love intensely.

Calcutta, July 6, 1979. An old building in the congested College Square area occupied by the Theosophical Society of India for more than ninety years. The lecture hall on the second story, 58 feet long and 24 feet wide, with its old dusty cupboards full of books on Theosophy and faded oil paintings of potentates of Theosophy—given to Satabdi on hire every Friday after much persuasion. First performance of Basi Khabar. Culmination of a year-long process. The first experience of Satabdi of creating a play collectively.

Year-long-but what is a year? None of the Satabdi members are paid anything. They work in banks, schools, offices, factories; they assemble in evenings exhausted by loveless work and sardine-packed public transport; they have to disperse early for long journeys, many by scandalously irregulars suburban trains. On Sundays we can work for five hours, provided we are not invited to perform somewhere-a village, a “bustee” (slum), a suburban town, a college lawn, an office canteen. Shows on Friday evenings; Thursday evenings spent on the rehearsal of the play to be performed the next day. How much time can we get for working on a new project? Eight hours in a week is an optimistic average. Still, a year means that we all grow with the play for one full year, and the play gets into our bloodstream.

One year back. July, 1978. First performance of Gondi—an adaptation I made of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. We felt good. We enjoyed preparing it—only fifteen performers taking care of forty roles; hut, stream, door, trees, bridge made of human bodies. We all felt that the play is Indian and contemporary and can be understood equally by the educated of the city and the illiterate of the village, and our later experience proved this belief to be correct.

It was the third year of our regular weekly performances at the Theosophical Society hall. Before that we have had two years of such weekly shows in another room (1972-1974), and a spell of nearly two years of only open air shows. Performances in public parks were stopped by the police during the “Emergency”(1975) and our search for an indoor space ultimately brought us to this hall in early 1976. Admission was free; a donation of one Rupee (eleven cents, a cup of coffee in a shabby cafe costs more in Calcutta) was expected and was willingly paid by most, but that was not the condition for entrance. Leaflets containing the program for the next five or six Fridays were distributed to the spectators, otherwise we depended entirely on word-of-mouth publicity. (I am using the past tense because we now perform in another hall-the system has remained the same.) The relation between acting and sitting areas varied according to the demand of the play. For Gondi we could provide about 125 seats, all seats were booked much in advance, and we felt good. That was the beginning of the year-long process of creating Basi Khabar.

After Gondi we had no play at hand. We were having workshops, relating sometimes to the cruel absurdities we live in. Enormous wealth and immeasurable poverty. A devastating flood ruining hundreds of thousands in the villages and a huge crowd of fans gathering to see the film stars raising donations in Calcutta for flood-relief. Construction of the underground railway in Calcutta and 90 percent of the underground water remaining untapped, rendering most of the arable land mono-crop. Satellites in space and 70 percent of the population under the poverty line. Democracy and police brutality The stupidity of man, the cruelty of man, the achievements of man, the callousness of man-not just in this country, but in the whole world.

But what about the courage of man? Somebody asked. What about Spartacus, on whose struggles we made a play in 1972? What about all those who dream of and die for the emergence of a new and better society? We decided that we would try to make a play collectively on these issues built around the theme of a revolt. Revolt—the ultimate burst of collective courage. We chose the Santhal revolt of 1855-56 that shook the British imperial hold on Eastern India for nine long months. The aboriginals. Always subjected to the worst kind of exploitation and injustice. Pushed beyond limits, they have often burst out in spontaneous revolts. But the accounts of such revolts do not find any place in the history textbooks. We had to depend on the work of some rare researchers and some obscure accounts.

The Santhal tribe is one of the oldest and largest communities of India, settled in the Bihar-Bengal border. I shall not try to describe here the inhuman extortion, oppression, and torture they were subjected to by the British colonists and their Indian stooges usurers, traders, native princes and landlords( the “maharajah” so lovably portrayed in Air India advertisements). One can imagine all that when one finds that fifty thousand hungry, half-naked Santhals took up their primitive arms-spear, axe, bow and arrow were killed, not counting the women, children and old folks in the villages razed to the ground after nine months of heroic struggle.

In the process of workshops, research and discussions, several decisions emerged. We decided not to make just a theatrical presentation of the Santhal revolt. Through our research we became more and more confirmed in the belief we already had-that conditions have not changed fundamentally even today. To us the subject was contemporary. We collected material from newspapers, magazines, survey reports-accounts of poverty, exploitation, injustice and atrocities perpetrated against the poorer communities and the repressive measures taken against those who protested or wanted to bring about a change. These accounts were juxtaposed against the accounts of the conditions that pushed the Santhals to revolt. We also decided that we would not make a play with characters and dialogue, for that would be false, unconvincing and inadequate.

We decided to show it from the point of view of a contemporary young man just like any of us. The man is born, is educated, is constantly bombarded by lots of information from text books, newspapers, radio, literature-false, half-true, irrelevant-and sometimes he comes across a report of mass killing or gang rape in an aboriginal village by paid hoodlums of the local (high caste) landlord. Or maybe a survey report giving figures and facts regarding “bonded labor”—a man or his whole family becoming virtual slaves for indebtedness (100 to 500 percent compound interest-fabricated figures to boot-to cheat the ignorant debtor) for making him forget all that, thereby allowing him to concentrate on his career, his personal life, his family affairs? Or will he change a little, will he make a decision, make a choice, however minor, to do something about it?

All that happened to us, is happening to us. Each of us was that young man, trying our best to deny the existence of the “killed man” in our midst, and yet not wholly succeeding. The “killed man” in our play wandered silently from time to time amongst the chorus of performers, sometimes breaking through, holding his bandaged right palm in front of the eyes of a performer to make him read something about the Santhals of the last century, another time using his left palm for something happening today. That was Basi Khabar (stale news)—a theatre created by the whole group in pain and love. It is not a theatre one can perform by “enacting.” It can only be performed by “state of being.” The performer acts out his own feelings, his own concerns and questions and contradictions and guilt. Through the play, our protagonist changed a little, we changed a little, and we hoped that our spectators, some of them, would change a little. The sum total of all these little, almost imperceptible changes, all these little positive choices we take, can one day bring about the change we are all waiting for.

Yes, our theatre has become a theatre of change. A long voyage- Spartacus, Michhil, Bhoma, Bhanga Manush, many other plays. We came out of the proscenium stage in 1972, five years after the inception of Satabdi, twenty years after the beginning of my involvement in theatre. The immediate reason was that of communication-we wanted to break down the barriers and come closer to the spectators, to take full advantage of direct communication that theatre as a live-show offers. We wanted to share with our audience the experience of joint human action. But in taking that course we also found our theatre outside the clutches of money. We could establish a free theatre, performing in public parks, slums, factories, villages, wherever the people are, depending on voluntary donations from the people for the little expenses we needed. We stopped using sets, spotlights, costly costumes, make-up-not as a matter of principle, but because we realized that they are not essentials, even if sometimes necessary. We concentrated on the essentials-the human body and the human mind. Our theatre became a flexible, portable and inexpensive-almost free-theatre.

The indigenous folk theatre of India, strong, live, immensely loved by the working people of the country, propagates themes that are at best irrelevant to the life of the toiling masses, and at worst back-dated and downright reactionary. The proscenium theatre that the city-bred intelligencia imported from the West constitutes the second theatre of our country, as it runs parallel to the folk theatre-the first theatre-practically without meeting. This theatre can be and has been used by a section of educated and socially conscious people for propagating socially relevant subjects and progressive values, but it gets money-bound and city-bound, more and more so as costs go on rising, unable to reach the real people. Historically there appears to be a need for a third theatre in our country-a flexible, portable, free theatre as a theatre of change, and that is what we are trying to build. This theatre is not an experimentation in form; we have no concern for taking theatre as an such exploration new forms often emerge.

Obviously, such a theatre takes the character of a movement, and cannot be taken as a profession. Those interested only in theatre cannot do this kind of theatre, nor can those depending on theatre to make a living. Only those who feel the urge to change, and want to use theatre to contribute to the forces of change, can be in this theatre. There are not many who come, and those who come can devote only their leisure hours. Our work therefore is frustratingly slow, but there is no other way. The only way is to have many such groups to join the movement at different places. This is beginning to happen, not so much in Calcutta proper, but in suburbs and provincial towns. Formation of new groups, change in old groups, establishment of free open air theatre spaces, organization of free open air drama festivals in different areas-all this is happening not only in this State, but in other parts of India as well, sometimes independently, sometimes as a follow-up of workshops I (and now others too) conduct from time to time at different places. Two joint productions have already been mounted successfully-three or four groups have joined together to prepare a play requiring a relatively large cast, though young, though still young, is steadily growing.

The ultimate answer however is not for a city group to prepare plays for and about the working people. The working people-the factory workers, the peasants, the landless laborers—will have to make and perform their own plays. We have deprived them not only of food, clothing, shelter, and education, but also of self-confidence. Here we can also help by demystification, by assuring them that theatre is not the monopoly of the educated. One of my greatest experiences of self-fulfilment occurred when a group of illiterate and semi-literate peasants and landless agricultural workers of a remote village

Bordering the jungles of Sundarbans (south of Bengal) began making and performing plays about their own life and problems, following Satabdi performances in that village and the workshops I did with them. I have recently experienced promising results in workshops with landless laborers in a Gujarat village in western India.

This process, of course, can become widespread only when the socio-economic movement for the emancipation of the working class has also spread widely. When that happens, the third theatre (in the context I have used) will no longer have a separate function, but will merge with a transformed first theatre. Richard, this is all I can write now. It is inadequate, incomplete, and confused, and may communicate very little to the Western reader who knows so little of the real India. You have seen a lot-in city and in village, you have known our group in action, you will probably understand what I am trying to say. So this is a letter to you.

Love,

Badal

Badal Sircar is a dramatist and theatre-director. He is the founder-director of the Theatre Group, Satabdi.

Source: The Drama Review: Vol. 26, No. 2, Intercultural Performance (Summer, 1982).

 

Three Tim Poems

Akhil Katyal

Tim calls from Brighton

Tim calls from Brighton, panting,
I ask him what’s wrong with you,
he says he wants a bit of friendly
advice but mainly needs my cue
for ranting, I plop myself on the
bed and give him the ‘Go ahead.’
‘If only,’ he says, ‘I could forget
him, all will be fine,’ he’s lonely,
my instinct says, but I listen to
his words an’ keep a tab on mine,
but soon, Tim, without a sense
of proportion, as is usual with him,
lets his grumbling decline from
the high themes of love and loss,
to how his day had been, what he’d
read and what he’d seen, how he
goes to the gym, to gather moss,
for the hot guys, but still, hates
to get on the treadmill. We yack
about his daily itinerary, bitch
about the world, and wax literary,
‘Love, you know Tim, is a bit like
your treadmill, where else would we
sweat so much, with heart-rate
gaining, think about time elapsed
and the time remaining, and run
like that (we don’t want to be parted)
only to end at the point we started.’

Returning from the Piccadilly Cinema

Tim thought it slightly odd
that, after a movie, he would
think so much of him. To
overreact to a film might
seem a little sad to you,
and so it did to Tim, but
movies, they do that to you.
Walking back, he thought of
those days with him, ‘what’s
the point,’ he asked, ‘of looking
into the past, it only tells you
how long misunderstandings last,’
yet this twenty-five year old
kept on chewing the plot in his
head, the guy in the film, he
remembered, said ‘I love you
still, there is no point lying,
in the end we’re all dead, or
dying,’ on his way back, Tim
did not think of anything as
far as tha’, but wished he
knew, tonight, if not how to
set right what now was riven,
at least to know how much he
had to forgive and be forgiven.

(Thanks to Vikram Seth)

Tim’s day out in Falmouth (Cornwall)

As the sleeper moves more south, more west
of London, some place names come weird, the
rest you just cannot say (what we don’t know
(Cornish) we let it lay), it halts at Taunton an’ Truro,
an’ Looe an’ Learkside, an’ when you pass all these,
you reach Gyllyngvase, if you please. Tim had to give
a lecture; that done, earlier in the day, he goes out
into the evenin’ sun, obeying what his supe’ had to say,
‘Cornwall? perfect, don’t forget, once you teach, go hit
the beach, they don’t come more blue.’ That was true
enough (Tim saw some surfers too) but he’d always
been skeptic of small towns, never could stray from
the centre of things, for him, it was always either
London or New York, cities which call a sfork a sfork,
where you shout (you want to) when you talk, look out
(you have to) when you walk, not these one High Street
towns, damn, ‘what to make of Falmouth,’ Tim frowns,
‘these small Cornwall seaside downs,’ so much so that
he feels a bit dismayed, when the owner of the guest
house where he stayed, says ‘Back from the beach?
So you goin’ to hit the town?’ ‘What town,’ Tim almost
said, then felt silly, might as well, ‘can’t just sit here,
shaking me willy.’ He went out, and in about half an
hour, he was glad he was there, the street was full
of the seaside air, not many people but under these
lights, this night felt different from all other nights.
He walked into a pub where 3 men sat, ‘let’s try,’ he
thought, ‘some sort of sea port chat,’ he was afraid,
though, that it would not click, all sea-talk he knew
was in Moby Dick, but Tim, you see, flirts a lot when
he’s on a trip (he trips a lot, that’s another thing, when
he flirts), but three pints down, he forgets the fear and
turns a little loud when speaking to one third of the crowd,
‘What’s your name,’ he asks the red shirt, ‘Chris,’ ‘new
around here?’ and then that is that and this is this,
they talk till they are well past the intro, and are now
poking fun (at each other, when did he do this last in
London?) they ask the full names of the other. ‘Chris,
Chris Weizenbaum’, Tim laughs and says ‘what’s sort of
name’s Chris, for a proper Jew boy like this’ ‘Why, what’s
wrong, did you expect Jacob or Moses?’ ‘No no, that’s too
much, but at least a Leo,’ Tim went on, when he thinks Jew,
he thinks talent, he thinks of Jerry Seinfeld or Woody Allen,’
and slightly tipsy, Tim imagines them passing their
baton on to Chris, and all of Manhattan (Jew paradise)
is suddenly this, and this, here, the Falmouth night
wears on, the nip in the air enters the door, the
barman here, seems to be done, ‘we’ll close now,
sons, it’s already one,’ (urgh, small towns!) they walk
out, more like, they flow, in a bit, Tim gets to know
that Chris is Irish, he laughs, ‘Are you thinking what
I am thinking? Gay and Jew, and Irish too, think of
all the cards that you can play.’ ‘Well it would seem,’
Chris says winking, ‘all three have come to use today.’

(Thanks to Howard Jacobson)

Akhil Katyal is a Delhi writer currently based in London. He blogs at akhilkatyalpoetry.blogspot.com.

Reconstructing Historical Materialism II

Jairus Banaji

[ This is the second and concluding part of the essay. It was presented at the 6th Annual Historical Materialism Conference in London, 2009]

 

3. The indeterminacy of ‘free labour’ and the return to materialist categories

The last issue I‘d like to raise is the incoherence of the notion of free labour. Much is made of free labour in run-of-the-mill discussions of historical materialism, as if the whole edifice of Marxist theory would collapse without the crucial cornerstones of free/unfree labour, economic/extra-economic coercion, and so on. These dichotomies are rooted in the voluntarist models of contract that sprang from the pervasive individualism of the nineteenth century and barely survived the searing assaults of American legal realism. (61) If Marxists continue to repeat them, one imagines that is because they derive comfort from the illusion that free labour is essential to capitalism. But the dichotomy between free and unfree labour is either a tautology (under most legal systems there are individuals who are either free or unfree) or a remarkably naïve reposing of faith in freedom of contract which is assumed to be a reality when it is in fact a transparent fiction, even more of one today than it was in the nineteenth century, as every good lawyer knows.(62) Marx called it an ‘embellishment’ on the sale and purchase of labour-power. (63) Contracts between employers and workers were simply a ‘legal fiction.’ (64) More often than not, free labour for Marx only meant labour dispossessed of the means of production. More illuminating than the contrast between free and unfree labour and its obvious potential for mystification would be a history of wage-labour itself, the ‘differences of form’ that Marx would doubtless have developed in his ‘special study of wage-labour’, (65) but reconstructed historically, with a wealth of material that scarcely existed for him.

Both the extent of wage-labour before capitalism and the brutality with which wage-labourers were treated under capitalism (and still are in most parts of the world) have been massively underestimated by Marxists. These are both issues that only historians can sort out properly but they will obviously have a major bearing on the future shape of historical materialism. As Karen Orren writes, “the institution of wage labor long preceded the emergence of capitalism in the seventeenth century.’ (66)Both the dispossession of labour and large-scale migrancy have been more common throughout history than the standard model of historical materialism suggests. Dispossessed farmers who worked as casual labourers or tenant-farmers on great estates in China from the late seventh century on, (67) ‘runaway households’ as the early T‘ang sources refer to such impoverished peasants; (68) the seasonal labourers who migrated from Umbria to the Sabine country to handle the harvests there; (69) the substantial volume of hired labour used in public works at Rome; (70) or the extensive use of wage-labour on English estates of the thirteenth century (71) are random examples drawn from the history of China and Europe. What was distinctive about agrarian, mining and industrial capital was not the existence of wage-labour markets but their forcible creation — laws for the ‘enforcement of industry,’ (72) the control of unregulated squatting on private land, (73) the kind of mechanisms discussed by Arrighi in his classic paper ‘Labour supplies in historical perspective’; and so on. That the Roman agricultural writer Varro recommended the use of wage-labourers for hazardous jobs (74) suggests that the capital invested in slaves was seen as fixed capital and vulnerable to loss (devaluation).

 It was Roman civil law that evolved the first clear model of the buying and selling of labour-power, doubtless because the use of hired labour was so widespread. Indeed, Roman labour markets were incomparably less regulated than the labour markets of colonialism with their widespread regulation by master and servant regimes. For example, there were half a million contract workers in the tea gardens of Assam by the early twentieth century, yet flogging of men and women was common in every garden, either for non-completion of work or for disobedience and desertion,’ (75) The forced recruitment of wage-labour that characterized pre-industrial forms of capitalism shaded off into the repeated use of force against wage-labourers, even in England in the nineteenth century when legal coercion was widely used against craft workers and the English working-class was, in a technical sense at least, still ‘unfree’ when Marx wrote Capital. (76) Indeed, it may well be that the overdetermination of ‘purely’ economic coercion by legal compulsion is a peculiarity of modern wage-labour markets, if we date the emergence of these to the Statute of Labourers in the fourteenth century.

To return to Laclau with this background behind us, the centrality of free labour to capitalism was the crux of his critique of Frank. Laclau‘s implicit reasoning was as follows: capitalism is characterized by free labour, free labour by the use of purely economic coercion. ‘Extra-economic’ coercion defines non-capitalist relations of exploitation, and these in turn constitute pre-capitalist modes of production. If the expansion of world capitalism consolidated pre-capitalist modes of production, then that is because it was bound up with the widespread use of non-capitalist relations of exploitation in the countrysides of Latin America and other parts of the Third World. The coherence of this picture is still seductive some forty years down the line, which is why Laclau continues to be cited.

But taken individually, almost every link in the chain of reasoning is false. The contrast between servile relations of production in the periphery and free labour in Europe is consistently overstated. Dispossession was no less characteristic of the colonies then it was of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was sufficiently widespread in New Spain in 1633 for the abolition of compulsory labour to have no serious effect on the supply of farm workers to private estates. (77) In South Africa, “the struggle to dispossess blacks on alienated land and subjugate them in the interests of capital accumulation proper” lasted throughout the nineteenth century. In the sheep-farming districts of the Cape interior, “Khoi labour was thoroughly proletarianised, even if subject to non-economic coercion.” (78) Second, free labour in the classic nineteenth-century sense that Marx understood it was certainly not free of penal coercion or most other forms of extra-economic compulsion. (79)

In England,  “employers commonly used criminal sanctions to hold skilled workers to long contracts.” (80) Most peones who worked on Mexican estates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not serfs but wage-labourers bound by debt. (81) They lacked any means of subsistence of their own and worked full time for the estates. Thus the distinction between free and unfree labour collapses in a grey area which is much better sorted out in terms of a notion of how wage-labour markets are structured and how they work, especially in agriculture, than through the distorting lens of ideological categories that have nothing to do with historical materialism. Finally, there is no logical inference from non-capitalist relations of exploitation to non-capitalist relations of production. Slave labour can feed into the expansion of individual capitals. Forced labour under fascism sustained large sectors of German industry, e.g., in Volkswagen plants the foreigner contingent was as high as 45% by 1942, and, as Ulrich Herbert says, “Virtually all large enterprises demonstrated their strong interest in foreign skilled workers,” i.e. forced labour. (82)

The more general point here is that modes of production cannot be inferred from the relations of exploitation that are typical of them. Their laws of motion suggest a more complex level of determination than any simple characterization in terms of slavery, serfdom, and so on. The corollary of this is that the analysis of exploitation also implicates a much richer, denser level of abstraction than simple taxonomies based on historically generic categories conceived in their abstract purity. The reason why Marxist historians have paid so little attention to this level of analysis, the deployment of labour, is that they have rarely moved beyond the general categories of labour to a grasp of the actual organization and control of labour-processes in history. Histories of capitalism in agriculture are a partial exception to this (Frank Snowden‘s work on Italy, William Beinart, Helen Bradford and Tim Keegan on South Africa, William Dusinberre on the slave-based capitalism of the Carolina ‘rice kingdom,’ (83) Mertens on the Mexican estates) but in general the ‘special study of wage-labour’ that Marx had planned remains a huge lacuna in Marxist theory. Much of his study would clearly have been about ‘distinctions of form,’ For example, when Tim Keegan refers to “white farmers’ preference for a tenant labour force rather than a proletarian one,” the contrast here is not between wage-labourers and other forms of labour but a ‘form determination’ within wage-labour, a contrast between labour-tenants and ‘pure’ wage-labourers, paid in cash, that Keegan describes as a ‘proletarian work force,’ (84)

Again, the sharecroppers (haris) employed by large landlords in Sind were on one description “more like labourers than tenants,”‘ “They were hired by the season and did not necessarily work for the same zamindar in consecutive seasons.” They were a “floating population drifting from zamindar to zamindar,” (85) The ‘form’ of sharecropping doesn‘t settle the issue of the nature of exploitation, only a concrete grasp of the actual relations concealed within it can do that. Such examples could be multiplied — the Instleute on nineteenth-century Prussian estates, paid largely in kind, including small allotments of land; (86) shepherds on the livestock haciendas of the Peruvian altiplano, whose remuneration was even more complex; (87) the peculiar methods of payment used to attract the thousands of casual labourers that descended on the reclaimed areas of Emilia, the bulk of them women88 (the nucleus of Giuseppe Massarenti‘s ‘proletarian republic’ at Molinella — from the 1890s to 1920 — and the seminal base of the Italian Socialist Party); etc. In the section on ground rent proposed for Volume 3, Marx, Engels noted, was planning to deal with the “diversity of forms of exploitation” of the Russian agricultural labour-force but “was never able to carry out this plan.” (89) There is clearly a major ‘scientific research programme’ here that Marxists have barely begun to address, but when they do, with the same sense for method that distinguished Marx himself, we shall finally have a more complex model of the integration of world economy than the schematic and formalist constructions on offer today.

 61 Dalton, ‘An Essay in the Deconstruction of Contract Doctrine,’ Yale Law Journal, 94 (1985).

62 Atiyah, An Introduction to the Law of Contract, p. 17.

63 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 682.

64 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 719.

65 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 683.

66 Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States, p. 10.

67 Twitchett, Financial Administration, p. 12ff., 16ff.

68 Pulleyblank, The Background of the Rebellion of An Lu-shan, p. 27.

69 de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, p. 187.

70 Brunt, ‘Free Labour and Public Works at Rome,’ JRS 1980; DeLaine, The Baths of Caracalla: A Study in the Design, Construction, and Economics of Large-Scale Building Projects in Imperial Rome.

71 Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, p. 263.

72 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 785, citing Tuckett.

73 Chanock, ‘South Africa, 1841–1924: Race, Contract, and Coercion,’ in Hay and Craven, Masters, Servants (n. 79), p. 343.

74 Varro, RR, 1.xvii.3.

75 Behal and Mohapatra, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations, 1840–1908,’ J. of Peasant Studies, 19 (1992) p. 157.

76 Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century.

77 Zavala, New Viewpoints on the Spanish Colonization of America, p. 98.

78 Keegan, ‘The Origins of Agrarian Capitalism in South Africa: A Reply,’ J. of Southern African Studies, 15 (1989) pp. 677, 673–4.

79 See Hay and Craven, ‘Introduction,’ in Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, p. 29.

80 Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor, p. 59.

81 Borah, Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real, p. 177: ‘recruitment of wage labor bound by debt.’ This view goes back, of course, to Silvio Zavala.

82 Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich, pp. 248 (Volkswagen), 208 (all large enterprises).

83 Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps.

84 Keegan, Rural Transformations in Industrializing South Africa: The Southern Highveld to 1914, pp. 124, 122.

85 Cheesman, Landlord Power and Rural Indebtedness in Colonial Sind, 1865–1901, pp. 60, 77.

86 Schissler, Preussische Agrargesellschaft im Wandel, p. 176ff.

87 Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, p. 295ff., access to pastures for own livestock a key element of wages. Marx was quite clear that “whether the captalist pays the worker in money or in means of subsistence does not affect (the definition of variable capital). It affects only the mode of existence of the value advanced by him.”‘. “The creation of 12

surplus-value, hence the capitalization of the sum of value advanced, arises neither from the money form nor from the natural form of wages…It arises from the exchange of value for value-creating power,”Marx, Capital, vol. 2, pp. 297–8.

88 Medici and Orlando, Agricoltura e disoccupazione. I braccianti nella bassa padana, p. 165ff., on compartecipazione.

89 Engels, ‘Preface’ in Marx, Capital, vol. 3, pp.96–7.

Jairus Banaji  is the author of Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation  (Historical Materialism Book Series 25) (Brill, 2010).

Reconstructing Historical Materialism

 Jairus Banaji

 [This is Part I of a two part essay that HUG is publishing. The paper was presented at the 6th Annual Historical Materialism Conference in London, 2009]

What I‘d like to do in this paper is raise the general issue of how we can develop historical materialism in more powerful ways than Marxists have tried to do since the sixties. The general issue is addressed by raising three specific questions. First, how should Marxists periodize capitalism? Second, is there a consistent materialist characterization of  ‘Asiatic’ regimes, since Marx‘s Asiatic mode of production clearly doesn‘t work as one? And third, why have Marxists had so little to say about the deployment of labour? By deployment of labour I mean not the general ways of controlling and exploiting labour that Marx himself would repeatedly refer to in categories such as  ‘slavery’,  ‘serfdom’ and so on, but the organization and control of the labour-process in concrete settings , as in Carlo Poni‘s fine monograph on the struggle between landowners and sharecroppers over methods of ploughing that increased the intensity of labour (1) or Hans-Günther Mertens‘ discussion of the organization of Mexican estates. (2)

1. Commercial capitalism, slaveholder capitalism: the problem of configurations

Let me start with the issue of slavery because that will lead into the wider issue of the periodization of capitalism. In the Grundrisse Marx states, “The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour.’ (3) This has always struck me as one of the most intriguing passages in all of Marx‘s writings. The Southern slaveholders are called capitalists but their form of capitalism is anomalous, because capitalism for Marx presupposes free labour (or at least wage-labour) and the Southern plantations are clearly not based on that. On the other hand, the plantations clearly are capitalist enterprises (in Marx‘s eyes) or the problem of characterizing them wouldn‘t exist. A passage in Theories of Surplus-Value is more explicit in exposing the roots of the tension evident here. Here Marx writes, “In the second types of colonies — plantations — where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the slavery of (blacks) precludes free wage-labour, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce has not arisen out of slavery but is grafted on to it‘. (4) Here he actually states that a capitalist mode of production exists in the colonial plantations despite the existence of slave labour. It is clear that the two determinations that summed up the nature of capitalist production for Marx (the production of capital or the drive to accumulate, on the one hand, the domination and use of wage-labour on the other) were in conflict here, and that Marx seemed to think that in one sense at least, that of characterizing the nature of these enterprises, the former mattered more.

By the 1860s this was certainly his position, because in Volume 2 he describes the money capital invested in the purchase of (slave) labour-power as ‘fixed capital’, (5) and in Volume 3 he states bluntly, “Where the capitalist conception prevails, as on the American plantations…’. (6) I‘d like to suggest that the real reason why Marx had to acknowledge the capitalist nature of the plantations was the impact of the colonial trades on the equalization of the general rate of profit, in particular their role in  ‘raising the general level of profit’. (7)”As far as capital invested in the colonies, etc. is concerned…the reason why this can yield higher rates of profit is that the profit rate is generally higher there on account of the lower degree of development, and so too is the exploitation of labour, through the use of slaves and coolies, etc. Now there is no reason why the higher rates of profit that capital invested in certain branches yields in this way, and brings home to its country of origin, should not enter into the equalization of the general rate of profit and hence raise this in due proportion, unless monopolies stand in the way.’ (8) Again, “the average rate of profit depends on the level of exploitation of labour as a whole by capital as a whole”. (9) ‘Labour as a whole’, including, then, slave labour or any other form of labour whose exploitation generated capital. It was Marx‘s recognition of the contribution of the colonial trades to the general rate of profit that tilted his conception decisively in favour of seeing the Atlantic slave economy essentially as capitalist.

But if that is so, the implications of this view for historical materialism have scarcely been discussed. On the contrary, most Marxists have played it safe and forestalled such a discussion by endorsing an orthodoxy that has little to do with Marx himself. For example, in his debate with Frank, Laclau took the stand that “in the plantations of the West Indies, the economy was based on a mode of production constituted by slave labour’, (10) characterizing the use of slave labour as a ‘mode of production’ when Marx himself had stated explicitly that a capitalist mode of production ‘exists’ in the slave plantations. That was in 1971. By 1997 when Blackburn published The Making of New World Slavery, the same orthodoxy persisted but now in a much less confident form. “The American slave planter of the seventeenth century and after was not a capitalist — in the strict sense of the term, the species was only just coming into existence — but neither was he as far removed from capitalism as the feudal lord or the Ancient slaveowner.’ (11) Or again,  “the undoubted fact that neither the feudal estates of Eastern Europe nor the slave plantations of the Americas can properly be regarded as capitalist enterprises should not lead us, as it has led some writers, to regard them as equivalently distant from the capitalist mode of production.” (12) The hesitation expressed in these passages stemmed presumably from Blackburn‘s deeper historical understanding of the Caribbean plantations. They were  “run according to business principles which were very advanced for the epoch”; “The construction of slave plantations did indeed require large fixed investments”; “The performance of the early eighteenth-century sugar plantation embodied technical improvements in nearly every aspect of cultivation and processing”; and finally, “the high capital value of a Caribbean slave plantation put pressure on the planter to maximize output from a given crew”. (13) All of which was a considerable advance over Laclau‘s blunt assertion of a ‘mode of production constituted by slave labour.’

By contrast, the historiography of the Old South moved in the 1990s to an aggressive assertion of what James Oakes would call the ‘capitalist nature of the slave system’ there. (14) Genovese, Oakes argued,  “misses the powerful force of capitalism within the slave system. Marx captured the essence of the problem when he wrote of capitalism as having been ‘grafted’ on to slavery in the Old South.” (15) A whole strand of American historiography had seen Southern slavery as a capitalist structure. Lewis Gray, for example, had described the plantation as a “capitalistic type of agricultural organization in which a considerable number of unfree laborers were employed under unified direction and control”. (16) That was in the early 1930s. “Was not the plantation owner just another capitalist?”, Barrington Moore had asked in the sixties. (17) When Fogel and Engerman demonstrated the profitability of slavery in the 1970s, it was no longer possible to see the South as an economic backwater. (18) In retrospect, Genovese was fighting a rearguard action and Oakes had seen why. “Implicitly equating capitalism with free labor, Genovese argues that slavery was a pre-capitalist form of social organization…”.(19) The upshot of the Southern debate is not, of course, that the peculiarities of the South should be disregarded but that Southern paternalism was not “intrinsically antagonistic to capitalist enterprise”, not “necessarily a barrier to profit maximization”. (20) In other words, historical materialism has to be able to accommodate distinct configurations of capitalism and not look at the history of capitalism by simply reiterating the abstract unity of capital  “in contrast to the multiplicity of its external forms”. This method of forced abstraction will only contribute to stagnation and leave the best historical work to historians less encumbered by false notions of orthodoxy.

If it was capitalism that generated modern slavery, then we need to ask both what kind of capitalism and what that means for the history of capitalism more generally. Marx himself drew a sharp distinction between manufacture and large-scale industry and worked with a periodization of capitalism that contrasted the ‘period’ of manufacture with that of large-scale industry. Both were forms of the ‘modern mode of production’  but manufacture was its first ‘period’, (21) which Marx saw as firmly established by the sixteenth century, when, as he says, “the modern history of capital starts to unfold”. (22) It was the creation of the world market that formed the great watershed of the sixteenth century. Manufacture “springs up where mass quantities are produced for export, for the external market — i.e. on the basis of large-scale overland and maritime commerce, in its emporiums like the Italian cities, Constantinople, in the Flemish, Dutch cities, a few Spanish ones, such as Barcelona etc.”. (23) In Volume 1 Marx was willing to concede that “we come across the first sporadic traces of capitalist production as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries in certain towns of the Mediterranean”, (24) and in the Grundrisse these early centuries, labelled the ‘Mercantile system’, are called an ‘epoch’. (25) The variegated backgrounds and origins of this first epoch of capitalism would culminate eventually in the dominance of Dutch capitalism in the seventeenth century. (26) The global history of capitalism between the later Middle Ages and the seventeenth century was of course one of the emergence and brute consolidation of the ‘colonial system’, and it was Holland that “first brought the colonial system to its full development”. (27) A large part of Dutch capital was tied up in the Atlantic sugar industry. (28) Indeed, sugar was “more heavily capitalized than any other plantation industry of that day…the industrial capital of the plantation …was probably not much less than half its total capital”.(29) Now, for Marx the striking feature of the colonial system was the fact that under it commercial capital ceased to be a mere mediation between extremes and dominated production directly.(30) It was the fusion of merchant capital and production that formed the true hallmark of commercial capitalism, and if the slave plantations were exemplars of this form of capitalism, ‘an aspect of early modern capitalist enterprise’, as one historian has described them recently, (31) so of course were the many forms of the putting-out system and the domination exercised by merchants over direct producers (weavers and other artisans) in a whole range of industries in Europe itself. (32) Marx saw this type of capitalism transforming artisans into ‘mere wage-labourers’ (33) and a likely starting-point for the evolution of ‘manufacture proper’. (34)

The theoretical point here is that it is just not tenable to hold fast to the distinction between circulation and production, or between ‘capital’ and ‘capitalism’ (Laclau), when we drop the level of abstraction and depict the concrete movement of capital as this appears in history. The task facing materialist historiography is not the endless repetition of formulas valid at certain levels of abstraction but writing histories of early capitalism that can generate more sophisticated models of the world economy than any currently on offer. Laclau‘s response to Frank that the expansion of capitalism consolidated pre-capitalist modes of production suffers from its radical incoherence. The colonial system was a legacy of commercial capitalism and the forms of exploitation used within it were not independent modes of production in any strict historical sense but forms of productive organization and control of labour peculiar to specific configurations of capital. The hybrid culture of Southern capitalism (35) could easily count as an example of this sort of purely historical configuration, but the historiography of the medieval and early modern worlds is sufficiently rich and detailed for Marxists to be able to map more of them.

2. ‘Asiatic’ regimes, or the class relations of tributary production

Turning to Asiatic regimes, Anderson‘s understanding of Russian Absolutism can serve as the counterpart to Blackburn‘s anomalous characterization of Atlantic slavery. Anderson reads Russian absolutism on a European model, describing the boyars as a feudal aristocracy,(36) referring to the “impulse within the aristocracy towards a military monarchy”, (37) as if Russian absolutism was the creation of a coherent aristocracy (!), and even arguing that “undiluted feudal principles were to govern the construction of the State machine”. (38) None of this comes remotely close to grasping the peculiarities of Russia‘s historical development or displaying any sense of why Trotsky for example characterized Tsarism as a ‘bureaucratic autocracy’ (39) or ‘bureaucratic absolutism’ (40) and insisted on the ‘special features’ that set Russia apart from western Europe. (41) The issue is crucial, because once we have demolished the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, which is easy to do (and which Anderson himself does effectively), we are left with whole continents of history — Byzantine, early Islamic, Russian, Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese, etc. — that clamour for a Marxist characterization lest they sink torpidly into the ‘absolving ocean’ of feudalism. (42) What Slavatinsky called the “fundamental difference which separates our ―service nobility‖ from the feudal landowning aristocracy of Western Europe” (43) marked off a distinct configuration of class relationships, a ‘totality’ of production relations, (44) quite different from feudalism. The dispossession of the old boyar aristocracy that culminated in the sixteenth century under Ivan the Terrible and its forcible integration into an expanded service class would mean that by the late sixteenth century “private property of the means of production became virtually extinct”. (45) “It was the combination of absolute political power with nearly complete control of the country’s productive resources that made the Muscovite monarchy so formidable an institution”. (46)

On the wider canvas that stretches back to the autocracies of the Byzantine and early Islamic worlds, it is the feudal mode of production that appears exceptional. The more widespread pattern was state economy and the regimes based on it, where class relations were configured around the legal fiction of the sovereign as the ‘real’ owner of all the land and the ruler either had no feudal elements to contend with (Muslim Spain) (47) or ruthlessly subordinated such elements on the model of Ivan‘s subversion of the aristocracy. If, with John Haldon, we call these regimes the tributary mode of production, (48) then Muslim societies lay at one extreme of a spectrum of class relationships defined in their case by the absence of an aristocracy in any conventional sense. The ‘Islamic social formation’ (to use M. Acién‘s expression) emerged through conquest and, as Coulson noted, the conquered territories were retained in the “public ownership of the Muslim community”. (49) Marx even believed that it was the Muslims who “first established the principle of ―no property in land‖ throughout the whole of Asia”.(50) Be that as it may, the key institution was the iqta or what the Russian liberal historian Paul Miliukov called the “eastern system of military holdings” which was eventually borrowed by the Muscovite princes in their creation of the pomest’ye in the fifteenth century.(51) With taxation as the general form of ground-rent, the assignment of villages to members of the military élite (amirs, pomeshchiki, etc.) was essentially an assignment of revenue, so that the class relations of tributary production were defined by an inherent instability of property rights. At the other extreme from this tightly centralized model lie India and China but exemplifying a less autocratic pattern in opposite ways. If Tsarism encapsulated the integration of the aristocratic and the service element into a unified Court nobility, Trotsky‘s ‘noble bureaucracy’, (52) but one totally subservient to the ruler [they numbered c.3000 in 1552], (53) then India under the Mughals, coeval with the paroxysm of Absolutism in sixteenth-century Russia, illustrates the falling apart of those elements, a model that juxtaposes a service élite with powerful regional aristocracies that were only loosely integrated into the administration (54) and heavily armed to boot. (55) This was certainly the most conflicted form of the tributary mode, one where Imperial cohesion was irreparably vulnerable to refractory aristocracies. (56) Despite their own internal divisions and amorphousness, the zamindars were an entrenched source of subversion, a perfect counterpoint to the disciplined nobility (mansabdars) that Akbar had created as the backbone of his imperial State. Finally, China saw new landed élites emerge from the ranks of higher officialdom, once the territorial aristocracies of the North had finally disintegrated and a more powerful bureaucratic regime emerged in the great transition from T‘ang to Sung (tenth century). The ‘widespread illegal acquisition of landed properties’ (57) was nothing new in China, and the Sung developments can be seen either as collusion between the bureaucracy and the landed élite or a pattern where powerful landed interests could dominate the government because they were leading members of the official class.(58)

This is hardly the place to rehearse the details of these separate forms of evolution. The key point here is that these variant class patterns describe the different ways in which the tributary mode was configured historically. This matches the point made earlier that the history of the capitalist mode of production is itself best reconstructed as a movement of distinct historical configurations of capitalism, each absorbing the previous one (Marx refers to industrial capital first having to ‘destroy’ commercial capital as an independent form). (59) More importantly, there was sufficient historical connectivity between the different forms and exemplars of the tributary mode for us to call ‘Asiatic production’ (60) an epoch that ran concurrently with feudalism in the West and outlasted it by several centuries till its own eventual dissolution under the unremitting pressure of world capitalism, starting with zamindar rebellions and outright seizure of territory in India, large-scale foreign borrowings by the Ottomans, and so on. But while they lasted, the ‘Asiatic’ or tributary regimes had considerably more vitality than Marx ever attributed to the Asiatic mode.

  1 Poni, Gli aratri e l’economia agraria nel Bolognese dal XVII al XIX secolo.

2 Mertens, Wirtschaftliche und soziale Strukturen zentralmexicanischer Weizenhaciendas aus dem Tal von Atlixco (1890–1912).

3 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 513.

4 Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, 2, p. 302–3.

5 Marx, Capital, vol. 2, p. 554: “In the slave system, the money capital laid out on the purchase of labour-power plays the role of fixed capital in the money form…”.

6 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 940.

7 Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, 2, p. 436.

8 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 345.

9 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 299.

10 Laclau, ‘Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America’, NLR 1/67 (1971), p. 30.

11 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, p. 376.

12 Blackburn, Making, p. 374.

13 Blackburn, Making, pp. 379, 336, 343, 339.

14 Oakes, The Ruling Race, p. xi.

15 Oakes, Slavery and Freedom, p. 55; the reference is Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 345.

16 Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol. 1, p. 302.

17 Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 121.

18 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross (1974).

19 Oakes, The Ruling Race, p. xiii.

20 Smith, Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South, p. 24; Smith is a good introduction to these debates.

21 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 450: “And yet the modern mode of production in its first period, that of manufacture, developed only where the conditions for it had been created in the Middle Ages”.

22 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 247: “World trade and the world market date from the sixteenth century, and from then on the modern history of capital starts to unfold”.

23 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 510–11.

24 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 875–6.

25 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 327.

26 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 916, stating, “Holland was the model capitalist nation of the seventeenth century”.

27 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 918.

28 Mauro, Le Portugal et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (1570–1670), p. 231.

29 Pares, Merchants and Planters, p. 24.

30 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, pp. 446–7.

31 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, p. 403.

32 E.g., Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, 3, pp. 468–70.

33 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, pp. 452–3.

34 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 510.

35 Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860, pp. 6–7.

36 Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 336.

37 Anderson, Lineages, p. 201.

38 Anderson, Lineages, p. 218. The subtext is clearly serfdom, but Anderson shows no awareness of Khlebnikov‘s crucial point that the Muscovite serf was more like a “state worker through the intermediacy of the landlord” than a serf in the strictly European sense, cf. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime , p.105.

39 Trotsky, 1905, p. 8.

40 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 1, p. 25.

41 Trotsky, 1905, p. 3: “the Russian revolution bore a character wholly peculiar to itself, a character which was the outcome of the special features of our entire social and historical development”; written in 1907.

42 Anderson, Lineages, p. 402.

43 Cited Madariaga, ‘The Russian Nobility in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, p. 223.

44 Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital: “The relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society…Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois society are such totalities of production relations”.

45 Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, pp. 93–4.

46 Pipes, Russia, p. 94.

47 Guichard, Les musulmans de Valence et la Reconquête, xie-xiiie siècles, 2 vols.

48 Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Production.

49 Acién Almansa, Entre el Feudalismo y el Islam; Coulson, History of Islamic Law, p. 23.

50 Marx to Engels, 14/6/1853, in Avineri, Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, p. 457.

51 Miliukov, Russia and its Crisis, pp. 114–21.

52 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 1, p. 26.

53 Pavlov, ‘Les réformes du milieu du XVIe siècle et l‘évolution structurelle de la noblesse russe’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 46 (2005) p. 96.

54 The duality is best described in John F. Richards‘ classic monograph, Mughal Administration in Golconda (1975).

55 Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy; Richards, ‘Warriors and the State in Early Modern India’, JESHO 47 (2004), pp. 390ff., reviewing Kolff.

56 Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India.

57 Twitchett, Financial Administration under the T’ang Dynasty, p. 10.

58 Ch‘ao-ting Chi, Key Economic Areas in Chinese History, pp. 135–9. 11

59 Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, 3, p. 468.

60 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 452.

Jairus Banaji  is the author of Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation  (Historical Materialism Book Series 25) (Brill, 2010).