Theatre, Number, Event: A Second Appraisal

Prathama Banerjee

[ HUG reproduces a second appraisal and an early critique of Soumyabrata Choudhury's newly published book Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth, IIAS, Delhi, 2013. The writer was a panelist in the recently organised session at C.S.D.S. , New Delhi on the occasion of the release of the book.  This is the concluding essay in this series.]

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Soumya is a very old friend from my university days, and it is a special feeling to be discussing his book.  In that it is indeed a discussion rather than a comprehensive review of the book, and I do not even claim to do justice to the book’s ambitious narrative and unusual analytic frame.  Soumya is an extraordinary mind.  He is a philosopher, a literature student, a performer, a director of plays, a teacher and now I see also a historian.  The book, therefore, like he himself, is a challenge for any friend and comrade, who like me shares his passion for politics and philosophy, but thinks very differently, perhaps even incommensurably.  What I shall say by way of discussing the book is then a kind of response to this intimate challenge that Soumya poses before me.

First, let me present briefly how I read Soumya’s book.  The book is about sovereignty – sovereignty as simultaneously political sovereignty and sovereignty of thought, sovereignty as that of philosophy on the one hand and on the other, of the king/Christ/state and eventually of that impossible, uncountable entity, namely the people.  Soumya works through a series of historical moments, though not chronologically (something to which we shall come back later) – 5^th century BC Greece with its theatre and its civic assemblies of gods, citizens, faceless slaves and women, 12^th century Europe with its notion of Christian theological kingship, 8^th-9^th century Byzantium with its controversy regarding the question of the icon and the idol and the worship and circulation of the same, 18^th century France with its revolution, terror and increasingly medicalised madness, and finally the contemporary with its war on terror and its democratic revolutions.  Soumya’s project is to tease out histories of the constitution of sovereign power in this long story of Europe (and he shall argue the world).

Soumya implies that the history of sovereignty is produced at two levels – one, as the story of the sovereign as a figure and two, as the question of the ground, the basis, the founding principles of sovereignty. The figures of sovereignty as they appear in history, and yet fail to acquire full presence and stability (which is what the whole story is about), are the Greek gods with their strategic intelligence and liturgical role, the consecrated Christian king backed by the notion of eucharist transformation that transubstantiates the inscrutable idea of divinity into flesh, and the post-revolutionary republican people, counted as a disassembled numerical order of populations and while being mobilized as the One, the singular Nation.  The ground of sovereignty on its part appears in two senses.  One as jurisdiction – of law, administration and taxation – that appear through history as fisc and empire and patrie, in different ways assigning a territoriality, a world-extension to sovereignty itself.  The ground also appears as the ground of thinking the power of the universal, which in the history of Europe appear as philosophy and theology and in modern times, mathematics.  Through what Soumya calls a  ‘commensuration’ of the figure and the ground, the book goes on to show that the ground of thought is also the ground of sovereignty, the ground which underpins the exercise of both power and truth.

Soumya’s story is full of fascinating moments – as when he demonstrates that the imperative of governmentality is as old as and indeed part of the imperative of sovereignty; or when he lays out the long history of tithes and taxes in Europe as a dialectic between the debt to and debt of the sovereign; or when he excavates an older history of the economy as a domain of regulation mapped by the circulation of Christian icons, making the economy into God’s worldly plan for the salvation of mankind.  We do not have time here to dwell on these details, though each of these by itself can be major point of discussion.  I shall only mention here that in Soumya’s imagination, all these discrete moments make up what he calls an ‘inconsistent’ history of sovereign power, i.e. a history without unity or necessity.  This means, in my understanding, that no straight-forward chronological or successional history is possible for sovereignty, precisely because the career of sovereignty is also repeatedly a history of its siege, its failure, its dysfunctionality – the manifestation of the groundlessness, the voiding of sovereignty, despite its cunning, its ruses and indeed its claim to truths.  In that sense, despite its historicity, sovereignty, at different times must be set up anew, following its own failure.  The place of the French Revolution in the book is precisely to show up such a moment of the failure of sovereign power and of the difficult search for a new ground and a new figure of sovereignty, namely the people.  As Soumya shows through his reading of Michelet’s history of the French revolution, it is not as if forms of sovereignty, power and truth make successive paradigm shifts in a long history of political society, but that everything must be recommenced, the present reinvented every time, by rewriting once again its past and its future, following upon the defaulting of an earlier form of sovereign presence.

Soumya’s account of the career of sovereignty is persuasive in its own terms, but in my eyes, the account comes up against a critical unresolved question – namely, the question of the relationship between history and philosophy.  Soumya imagines this relationship as a kind mismatch – sometimes there is the glimpse of geological metaphors, a faultine, an abyss – between the metaphysics of truth and the structure of possible actualisations of power, between the philosophical mandate and the historical logic. It is this perpetually restless, quaking faultine between history as actualization and philosophy as the axiomatic instance, as he aptly calls it, which causes what he calls torsion, a violent twisting, of thought – a torsion through which thought moves as it were.   In my reading, however, this formulation retains the place of history and the place of philosophy somewhat undisturbed, even though teetering on both sides of the abyss – while I would have thought that it were precisely those places, those habitations of history and philosophy that would come under question in his account.  My feeling is that this is because Soumya does not face squarely the different ways in which modern western philosophy has harnessed history to itself – or the ways in which history and philosophy have sought to take each other’s place through time.  Of course, in modern times and with Hegel, history itself – world history to be precise – was transfigured into a philosophy of global sovereignty.

But even if we consider the Hegelian moment passé, there is another way in which philosophy continues to harness history to itself even today.  In the western tradition, philosophy operates as always already history of philosophy, through which not only is an exclusive philosophical canon set up, but more importantly a strange contemporaneity is set up amongst philosophers of diverse times and contexts, from Plato to Marx, from antiquity to today, such that thought appears to undo its own historicity and assume an infinite, universal and eternal form, becoming in a way thought unto itself.  In other words, in this tradition philosophy becomes its own history in such as way as to pitch itself beyond the ephemeral and the contingent – that being the truth-procedure of western philosophy itself.  And even when a contemporary philosopher such as Alain Badiou – who seems to hugely influence Soumya – grants autonomy to history, he does so in the name of the Event with capital E – making true history incumbent upon emblematic dates, exceptional events and proper names.  But this precisely is the imagination of history against which subalterns have had to struggle incessantly, in the name of long durations as well as contingencies, of the everyday and the quotidian, of the anonymous and the defeated.

All this is not to argue against Soumya’s effort at bringing philosophy and history together within the same frame.  On the contrary, that is exactly the importance of the book. This is only to say that one cannot any longer presume to be innocent about the close complicity, and not just the antagonism, between history of a kind and philosophy of a kind.  Indeed, one cannot be innocent about history itself, and I do sense such an innocence in Soumya.  One cannot presume, in obedience to Badiou, that the event with capital E will show itself inexorably and obviously and force new thought, new truths, and new subject-bodies who appear purely in fidelity to the event.   Instead, it is in the very process of historicisation, in the assigning of a new past and a new future to it, that an event becomes an Event.  In other words, it is precisely through new periodisations that politics moves – as our experience with the regime of the modern tells us at our own peril. I think it is critical the way Soumya makes the choice and arranges the sequence of his historical instances – whether Greece or Byzantium or France, whether classical, medieval or modern.  But he hesitates to make the political stakes in his choice explicit.  I also think that he is too quick in the way that he extrapolates a global paradigm of sovereignty from these very particular and local European instances.  I am not quite certain that this seamless passage into the global is not the residual conceit of philosophy itself – even if this philosophy is humbled before the contingency of the event.

But Soumya does make a critical move away from the Badiou-kind of history-philosophy problematic – not only because he seeks to theorise sovereignty (taking Foucault on board, Foucault whom Badiou does not consider a philosopher) rather than truth or being or subjectivity, but also because he inflects his story of philosophy and history by a third entity – namely, theatre.  He does not use quite use theatre in the way that Badiou or Ranciere or Virno does – by raising questions of spectatorship, passivity, agency, publicity, community so on i.e. by making the question of theatre isomorphic with the question of politics itself.  Soumya invokes theatre from perspective of theatre itself, but he also does not reduce it to a generalized notion of performance which leads to trite observations such as politics is performative and so on.  Soumya counterpoises theatre with philosophy, and I shall add also history.  This is because theatre dislodges both the philosopher’s truth and the historian’s real.  As Soumya says, theatre puts forth the mask, the actor’s mask, which is in a disjunctive relationship with any natural, ontological or legal position.  Theatre also displaces the map of subjects and objects by distributing figures on the stage merely though a logic of positions rather than through epistemologics.  In that sense, Soumya reconfigures the history-philosophy binary into the evocative triad of history-philosophy-theatre.  But once again, Soumya does much less with theatre than he promises, tantalizingly, in the beginning of the book.  At the very end of the book, however, he quotes a long passage from Antonin Artaud, where he says (and I quote from the quote) “Once the plague is established in the city, normal order collapses. …At this point, theatre establishes itself.  Theatre that is to say the momentary pointlesslessness which drives people to useless acts without immediate profit or point.”  This Soumya proposes is a moment of exception to both the law and the liturgy of sovereignty – leading to a kind of activation beyond the limits of civic and cultural participation.   I really wish that Soumya would write more on this other notion of action and subjectivity that theatre helps us imagine.

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Prathama  Banerjee  is Fellow, C.S.D.S., New Delhi.  She is the author of the book Politics of Time: Primitives and History-Writing in a Colonial Society, published in 2006.

Theatre, Number, Event : An Appraisal

Saitya Brata Das

 

[The writer was one of the discussants in a recently organized session at C.S.D.S. , New Delhi, on the occasion of the release of Soumyabrata Choudhury’s book—Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth. Here is the text that the writer has shared with HUG]

I feel honoured to be here today on this occasion of the book launch of Soumyabrata Choudhury’s much awaited book Theatre, Number, Event: Three Essays on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth. The book is much awaited, especially for his privileged friends like me, friends who know that Soumyabrata has been working on a book for a long time. Some of us , and I am one among this “ us” , are fortunate enough to have had glimpses into the book in the process of its gestation and unfolding, a process from which certain “violence” is inseparable albeit a creative violence it is. Such violence seems to be inseparable from a book like this, given the formidable ambition and accomplishment of it, as we will be able to see now properly in the light of its publication. Such violence is audible in the very language of the work that does not welcome us immediately and the reader has to think a lot to decide whether she should pick up the book to read at all, not out of disrespect but precisely out of a profound respect, respect that we know to be a certain experience of distance or withdrawal. Such an “unattractive” or rather “attractive” quality of the book can be disadvantage only if the book does not have such formidable ambition and is thus impatient in soliciting the reader’s immediate attention and instant gratification. Sometimes such “indigestibility” or “unattractive” character proves to be good for the health of a work, especially if it merits serious attention from the reader who wants to read in a responsible manner.

Given the formidable character of the book that takes the reader into a labyrinth that seems to have a secret password connecting so many paths and counter paths, lanes and by-lanes and thereby weaving an intricate network of concepts, spaces, and times, it is impossible for me to talk about the book in a comprehensible manner. Moreover, one should leave the reader to the risk of the book, the kind of risk, or “wager”- a word that Soumyabrata is in love with – wager that book itself assumes. I should therefore let each reader to judge her/himself whether such a risk that the book undertakes is at all worth taking and whether the researcher has succeeded or failed in his attempt. I will just speak, within some minutes of clock-time, of one of the problems that book raises in a manner of a glimpse or in the blink of an eye. Obviously, it is going to be insufficient and even, perhaps, unworthy of me since I do different things, and raise some different problems in my works. So I will take up one problem, the problem with which the books begins, the problem that I am somehow more interested and little-bit more connected, which is: the problem or rather the scandal of “sovereignty” and the question of the political-theology.

The question that Soumyabrata appears to me to have raised is not so much to ask: ‘what is sovereignty or even, who is the “sovereign” so as to arrive at the “axiomatic” understanding of sovereignty or at the concept of the “political” as such.In fact, a good deal of the book is devoted to the even more preliminary discussion of the “axiomatic”, bringing out carefully the precarious or fragility that adheres in the “axiomatic” as such, the poros or the aporetic that ties and unties its claims to the status of the “immemorial”. The book rather raises the following uneasy question: ‘why is it that, and in what manner is it at all that the concepts/figures/modes of sovereignty assume the status of the “axiomatic” in such a way from which a certain claim of the “immemorial” is inseparable?’ Now this assumption of sovereignty and this intrigue of relation between sovereignty, axiomatic and immemorial itself, while being structural, is also historically variable, not just in a quantitative manner but in a manner of qualitative discontinuities. Thus from the liturgical foundation of sovereignty to the later Christus-Fiscus parallelism that justifies sovereignty, there is a discontinuity, in fact a violence that Soumyabrata delineates carefully with the help of Ernst Kantorowicz in a manner that will surely evoke much admiration for the reader. To answer the question he asks, Soumyabrata traces out a history or perhaps better, a genealogy of apparatuses of inter-linking practices and discourses alike by means of three interlinking fictions of concepts – “theatre”, “number”, “event” – to reveal the thread that tie and untie the “axiomatic” to the “sovereignty” and “sovereignty” in turn to the “immemorial”. It appears here as if the porosity or fragility of the one immediately brings porosity to the others: the porosity and aporetic binding or unbinding of the axiomatic claims of sovereignty to the immemorial.

Soumyabrata conceives that it is the philosophical task par excellence, the task of this strange discourse called “philosophy” – here I don’t go too far with what he understands by “philosophy” – to envisage, or better welcome the “new immemorials” that are eventive, aleatory and ever new contingent eruption that breaks into the historical continuum of the world. Here and this now of this “breaking into” is the place of the “new”, a space without a pre-given parameter of measurement and a time without pre-given measure of numbers. Such a possibility of thinking, for Soumyabrata, is given by a strange mathematics, now released from a dominant version of the “mathematizable” in the sense of the countable mathematics of number, a “contingent” or “situational” mathematics if at all one can use these words, mathematics that is not alien to “the logic of multiplicity” that constitutes and potentially deconstitutes each situation, each topos, each denomination, making hegemony of each and any nominative denomination broken. What, then, Soumyabrata seems to me to be concerned with are bruises, wounds or injuries that affect any claim of the worldly powers to sovereignty. If you read the text attentively in its performative gesture – and we all know that Soumyabrata is a great performer, a great actor – without hurrying to catch up with the core content or doctrine abstracted from the verbal character of the book, then you see these terms abound – especially the words like “wound” and “torsion”, beautiful words they are, but also violent. For Soumyabrata, each axiomatic claim of the sovereign to the immemorial is wounded and is potentially broken, and by a strange logic, is marked by a paradox, by paradoxes, because these immemorials are never true immemorials. Therefore this discourse called “philosophy” needs to be infinitely restituted in the name of the “new immemorials” wherein immemorial has nothing much to do with something that has passed by beyond memory, but an immemorial , or rather immemorials to come which will never be part of any speculative memory and will therefore never be appropriable to sovereignty.

This is his hope, and it is this hope and this promise that gives the energy and dynamis to Soumyabrata’s thought. In so far as such hope is unconditional, it can never be demonstrated or even validated by measures or numbers of what already exist as countable; they can thus only be “fictions”, not “fictions” opposed to “truth” but “fictions” that do not need to oppose to “truth” at all, but rather welcome it, immemorial and infinite truth. Where, in what discourse, in what trembling language, in what tonality and gestures, in what rhythms and caesuras that such “fictions” may break into and be seized if not in “philosophy” itself, this abyssal and dizzying landscape wherein fabulization of the world may be taking place even though it is the very discourse that wants us to be disenchanted with the mythic foundation of the world?

Here comes the strangest paradox among all the paradoxes: philosophy alone is the discourse that, precisely by absolving from the immediate stakes of the world in a immediate manner of urgency – and therefore for philosophy alone such a task of the immemorial can at all be a task, a unique and so absolutely singular task – such a discourse alone in a profound manner exposes us to the absolutely contingent, so irreducibly aleatory and such precarious moments of life as they appear to us without any pre-given measurement of numbers and without the calculability of the “count as one”. This is the problem of mortality. Soumyabrata never has raised this question in this manner, but he is so attentive to this strange paradox that ties and unties all sovereignty in advance. The sovereign must transcend any given situation that immediately exists as a generalizable order of law; as if the “halo of perpetuity”, the term that he borrows from Ernst Kantorowicz, has never ceased to determine sovereignty as such, even if such a doctrine is historically applicable only to a specific formulation of sovereignty. But at the same time, mortality haunts each figure, each contour, each icon, each idol of sovereignty, bruising each figure with the wound of mortality. If so, the immemorial task of philosophy to welcome the “new immemorials” can only be bruised, wounded, and therefore a mortal immemorial, the immemorial that is haunted by the sting of mortality, with the possible death of the world. How to think this connection between mortality and the immemorial in such a way that each and every hegemony founded upon the sovereignty of principle – principle beyond all principles – is destituted, in so far as the question of sovereignty is essentially the question of principle, of thetic and thus is of the nominative?

I will conclude my talk by taking you from Soumyabrata’s book to another work. In the posthumously published magnum opus, Broken Hegemonies – a book that Soumyabrata has not referred in his work – Reiner Schürmann calls us to be attentive to the connection between thetic, denomination, nominative and nomos , a connection that establishes the an-Archic arché of sovereignty , constituting thereby each linguistic regimes of hegemony. But mortality haunts each of such instituting and founding acts of natality, as if like an undertow, destituting each hegemony in turn and thereby rendering each situation, each historical condition tragic. Such a tragic is for Schürmann the true philosophical task of thinking that welcomes what he calls ‘singularization to come’.

Perhaps the time has come to ponder anew over the tragic condition of our existence, one that is historical, in such a manner that we never cease welcoming such singularity to come , a never ceased destitution of all institution in the name of such a ‘to come’. I congratulate my lovely brother and my dear friend – and I must now speak in this personal manner – for giving us such a work that will inspire to think such difficult questions once again. Thank you.
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Saitya Brata Das is Assistant Professor, Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, JNU, New Delhi.

 

 

 

Bhaduriji

 

Phanishwar Nath Renu on Satinath Bhaduri

[HUG translates part of Phanishwar Nath Renu’s reminiscences on Satinath Bhaduri and his times. The original piece appears in Satinath Shawrone (Reminiscing Satinath), edited by Subal Gangopadhaya & compiled by Madhumay Pal in 1972. The work was re-published by Prakash Bhavan in January 2013.]

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Bhaduriji…!

We used to call him Bhaduriji. I mean, we, the boys from Zila Purnea. Not Bhaduri-moshai, or Satuda, nor Comrade Satinath or Bhaduribhai. Simply Bhaduriji. He used to love Purnea more than India. So the context of my knowing him will remain Purnea. My father was a mid-level kisaan in a village nearby, and often he used to get engaged in various land related court cases. So, I used to know the names of all the big and minor wakils of that area—right from the ones seen in the sub-divisional court to those practicing in the zila kachehri. That is how I came to know about the Chhotababu of the Bhaduri household. One day baba took me to his chamber and I was immediately admonished for not touching his feet. It is at that moment that I spotted that all encompassing, winsome smile on Chhotababu’s face: “Good that you have not touched my feet or else I would have ended up cross-examining your baba about this sudden urge to train you in the right etiquettes,” he said.

On the way back baba started telling me about him: “What a man! No pride of learning whatsoever. Does not utter a word more than what is required. The senior wakils at the bar-library would vouch by his legal digests and commentaries. And handwriting? Likhnewale ki ungliya chum lu! And we all knew that Chhotababu was the tennis champion of the Station-Club. And indeed I saw him playing one day—no fanfare, no karamati—Chhotababu returning each serve with effortless ease. And no reaction betrayed on his face, whether he won or lost a point. Such was his focus and nonchalance.

When I was at Biratnagar (Nepal), studying at Krishna Prasad Koirala’s ashram of a school Adarsh Vidyalaya, I received  a letter from Baba: Chhotababu had left wakalati and had joined the Congress, the letter said. He does not stay in his bungalow anymore but lives in an ashram at Tikapatti, a fringe locality. And has started walking barefooted I was stunned for a few hours and began constructing in my mind a certain tapestry: a lonesome itinerant figure with his trademark smile, charkha-jhola-kambal slung on his side, walking down the village path. Unperturbed by fashion and commotion.

Within:

By then I had joined the Student Federation. It was in 1942 that I met Bhaduriji for the second time. This time: at Bhagalpur Central Jail. I could see his smiling visage from a distance among the other time-servers in the Segregation Ward. He had also recognized me instantly: “You, here? Shabbash!” And then without giving me any time, this man of few words, started a rare unwinding. He turned to the assembled political prisoners: “This boy made a fool of the daroga of Farebgunj, do you all know? The daroga and some constables and chowkidars encircled their house, intending to trace the volumes on hanging and sacrifice that appeared in Chand and Hindpanch magazines respectively. They had a search warrant too. And young Renu got hold of a red khaddar gunny-bag and put up this little act as if he was taking off to school. Of course those books were in that bag. The daroga, truth be told, actually did express some suspicion but was fooled by his seemingly innocuous reply.” I became red with embarrassment—that was such an insignificant incident. What a thing to tell in front of such big political leaders! But that little incident broke the ice and instantly made my relationship easy with many prisoners thereafter.

Of course Bhaduriji was one of the star football players in jail and I always witnessed his steely nonchalance on and off the field. One day, after a volleyball match, he quietly asked me: “Don’t you know how to handle the volleyball?  Badminton? Tennis—anything? Why, will your name be stricken off from the Student Federation rosters if you indulge in games and sports?”  I was embarrassed. Actually, he was right. Student leaders would not look too kindly on young boys who would take interest in sports. That was not the ‘political field.’

There were five communal messes in our ward during that period. But Bhaduriji was swapaki—used to cook his own food. There was this man Anath-babu, who ran the mess where I was enrolled. But he used to always admonish me for my tea-drinking sprees.  I believe he had this secret mission of reforming me of this habit. So, he would take half a cup of milk, begin pouring a pale red tea ‘liquor’ over the milk and start his daily rant.  Every single day. Twice. All that I recall of it was tannic acid and tannin and the distortions and contortions of his facial muscles even as he tried to impress upon me my stupidity. One day I had had enough, rushed to Bhaduriji and asked whether he would allow me to have my tea with him. At this, he enquired what was wrong with the mess. I replied pat that Anath-babu and his gang would not allow me my daily dose of tannic acid.  He started chortling. The more I tried to explain that I actually meant ‘flavor,’ the more he would laugh his heart out. “No, no, you are correct,” he said, “But do you know the amount of tannin that a pot of tea contributes gets far outstripped by a tiny piece of betel-nut?” And he stopped himself right there.

Soon, I noticed that those who would lecture us on the side effects of guzzling tea would be the ones who consumed the maximum quantity of betel-nuts. Bhaduriji was trying to show the inconsistency of the health-wallahs—the gap between precept and practice. His tremendous and silent humanism would thus shine forth. Unexpectedly, minimally. That day he had narrated to me stories of some of the most famous tea-drinkers in history and how many cups they would gulp down every day. I still remember Gladstone was one of them. At another time, one of my ‘well-wishers’ complained to Bhaduriji that I had again gotten into the habit of smoking. His reply was typical: “Did Renu ever quit smoking? I always get the faint smell of Abdullah Cigarettes around here. May be he will be dismissed from his party if he quits smoking. How can you engage in red-hot political bahas without a fag?” It is only later, when I was alone with him, that he lightly suggested to me that the ‘sundries allowance’ that we used to get could also be utilized for officially acquiring cheap and proscribed Russian books and not just for buying Abdullah Cigarettes.

Life in jail is a curious leveler.  You begin to detect the masks among different individuals. Our reverence for many big leaders got a severe jolt within the boundaries of the jail. We were witness to astonishing kinds of deviousness in everyday matters.  Circumstances forced us to become iconoclasts—divesting our consciousness of uncritical hero-worship. In such moments of confusion, it was Bhaduriji who would give us clarity and succor through his tireless, unadorned way of living. I recall that we used to get note-books and pencils in jail and many prisoners started writing. Birendranarayan from Bhagalpur would write plays and inspired other prisoners to act out his scripts. Ranen-babu wrote a short treatise in Hindi: Samajvaad ki Moti Baatein. Our Gandhian Rambahadur-babu composed a complicated chart on austere food habits and titled it Gandhivaadi-Aahar. One day Bhaduriji asked the Jail Superintendent to transfer him to the isolated T-Cells. The Superintendent was very surprised at this strange request. Why would one, on his own accord, wish to live in an isolated cell? What kind of prisoner was this? But some of us decided to join him in those cells soon. It is then that I realized why he was so interested in the T-Cell. It was possibly the best place to read and write, away from the din that marked our diurnal life in prison.  One day I chanced upon his ‘manuscript’—a diary of sorts—and could not stop until I finished the whole thing.  I quickly realized the tremendous literary and social power of this work.  He would underplay it, of course. Divert all discussion to other subjects. But what tremendous grace and fortuitousness: I was the first reader of Jagori!  A curious side-effect followed too: since my reading of the manuscript, I would often see someone in jail and think in my mind: “Babaji, your sketch has been etched right to the last detail in Jagori.” And chuckle.

I had never discussed his manuscript with Bhaduriji, save once, when I blurted out: “Bilu too, could not stand blood,” referring to one of the key figures in his novel through whom a section of that astonishing stream of consciousness meandered. He was silent and I did not press further.  But I could gather that he knew what I meant. Actually, a few days ago, while slicing some bread, he had accidentally cut his finger. The moment he saw the blood oozing, Bhaduriji fell senseless. As he gained consciousness and encountered our puzzled, worried looks, he routinely brushed it off: “Ah, you all carry on with you work. It is nothing. I just can’t stand blood.”

In one of the kavi-sammelans in jail I had decided to recite a rather longish poem of mine. Written in free verse. The poem tried to dramatize what might have gone through Gandhiji’s head  just after Kasturba’s death. I was young and it was a precocious bit of writing. At one point I wrote how Gandhiji was thinking about his first kiss with Kasturba and about such intimate moments spent with her. I was possibly thinking about the most human thing to do after the death of one’s beloved. But it stirred a hornet’s nest. The elderly gandhivaadis called the very thought obscene.  I had to sit down; my recitation unfinished. Saddened, I came back to my cell.  Bhaduriji walked in: “I heard the recitation session was very good today. Now, where is your poem?” When he saw the length and the freedom that I took with the metrical structure, he smiled in exasperation. Then, after giving me a hearing, remarked: “So, what did they say? Gandhiji had never kissed Kasturba?” And continued, “You know what? In the free verse mode there may not be any tuk (rhyme) but never ever forgo taal(rhythm). Those two nurtured taal in their relationship, which the world will little appreciate if it continues to vacantly moralize. And yes, why don’t you try writing stories? You do have a fine sense of the situation and the spread.”

Bhaduriji would maintain a small book rack in his cell which housed sundry novels. But also some English writings of M.N. Roy. Those who were in jail with Bhaduriji during the satyagrahi days in Hazaribag used to tell us that deep down Bhaduriji was a Roy-ist—asl mein woh Roy-ist hain, was the inference. This was a way to suggest that he had dubious loyalties, since during the Great War the Radical Humanists supported the Brits. And this running down the ‘other’ has been a standard, time tested way to prove by implication, how authentically radical one’s own position is, isn’t it? So, when I noticed those books on his rack, I asked him impulsively: “So, you still continue to be a Roy-ist, it seems?” “Of course I am,” he replied, “Have you had the chance to read any of M.N. Roy’s works? Do you comprehend, I mean feel, the dialectical process that you all are taught or is it mostly rote learning as Badrilal seems to practice every morning here? Have you read some of Plato’s dialogues? Or Indian philosophy? Not Upanishad. But say thinking about Nyaya and analytical philosophy—not in a faux comparative framework, which is a lazy endeavor, but in order to truly relate to what you and I have been doing?” That day I realized that he was no ist, save Purnia-ist. This incident reminded me of the lore of how a so-called French scholar had once an audience with Bhaduriji and was trying to give him some high-falutin lecture on French literature. After a while, Bhaduriji sought his permission, got a primer on French language from his home library and smilingly requested him to meet him again once he was done reading it (Those of you who have read Shotti Bhraman Kahini and his essay Madhusudan o La Fontaine will know how deep and subtle his knowledge of the French  language and literature was, though otherwise Bhaduriji was a man firmly grounded in the blood and grime of Purnia). Gentle as he was, Bhaduriji would give no indulgence to inanity and glibness. That is possibly one reason why he could not remain in the arena of public politics.

I remember another incident quite vividly. The jail administration had warned us that we could not celebrate January 26 in any form or manner. A day before, a thorough ‘search’ of our cells took place and sundry national flags, boxes of color, red ink, green and red papers—were all confiscated. The plan was to lock us up on January 26, with a threat that in case we indulge in nara-baazi and so on within our cells, there would be a lathi-charge. The gandhivaadis were against any form of programmatic politics. They argued: since we are locked up, we are now helpless. So, being closeted within the four walls of our cells was a form of protest in itself. The administration was naturally happy with this division of opinion. Anyway, we planned to stick to our program, queued up and started the proceedings with a few choicest slogans. Then we started singing bandemataram. The officer among the warders outside gave a shrill order—we could hear him loud and clear. Hearing the order, the gandhivaadis spread their blankets and began spinning charkhas. Presently, we heard the sound of the warders’ quick-march, approaching and approaching ever closer. At that moment Bhaduriji left his writing desk, came up and took his position right in the front row. He was already hit during the satyagraha days at the Purnia Zila Jail. A black mark on his neck bore the sign of that hit. Standing behind him and watching him sing bandemataram, I was wondering whether the lathi would again fall next to that very spot that day.

After:

After our release from prison, one day I went to meet Bhaduriji. As I approached the Bhattabazar junction, I spied CID inspector ‘muchhedaar Shukla,’ taking a close look at Bhaduriji’s place. The dreaded Azad Dasta was still quite active in Purnia and it is through them that we came to know about some recent killings of the CID wallahs or about some fresh encounters with the police. But why Bhaduriji—he was a pure ahimsak?  And then I recalled that indeed he was one ahimsak who was marked X in jail. The charge against the gandhivaadi Y detainee was “that he was trying to overthrow the government.” And against the left-winger: “that he was trying to overthrow the government by means of terror and violence.” So, I gathered that the X mark was haunting him even outside of the jail. When I reached his place I appreciated the context better. Kuldeep Jha, the secretary of Azad Dasta, had come to meet Bhaduriji the night before and could not take off. He was sleeping peacefully, under mosquito net and all, in one of the basement rooms. When I informed Bhaduriji about the khufia activity, he did not seem to be very bothered.

The Congress was still an illegal association. District level Congress workers would meet periodically to discuss issues related to the Kasturba Memorial Fund. The first of these meetings took place at Bhaduriji’s place. I was present. At that meeting a few Congress workers suggested the publication of a parcha (handbill) to expose, and caution the people about,  the Jan Dasta methods of looting and extortion. Bhaduriji had found this proposal ridiculous and opposed it by making the point that even if it were to be true, this kind of a handbill would  merely help the police. The ones proposing the publication actually nurse a  hidden agenda, to be in the district administration’s nek-nazar. Those who proposed the handbill did not expect such a sharp intervention at all. I laughed my heart out. A few months later there was government decree to all kisaans and shop-owners to contribute money to the National War Fund. This was forcible extortion by the government. People started selling off land and cattle, jewelry and utensils in order to get hold of the amount fixed by the officials by the appointed date. The whole district was suffering, seething silently. The Congressi-babus had just come out of jail and so did not want to expose themselves immediately to this freshly brewing issue. At that point one day, in many leading newspapers, a long letter got published—a letter full of teeming satire, on the pure extortionist techniques that the government had adopted. The District Magistrate was livid and fuming  and immediately sent off a Show Cause Notice to Bhaduriji. We had a merry laugh and argued about its Hindi equivalent: kaaran bataao or dikhaao wajah—what could be more appropriate? But as Bhaduriji began to think of a suitable reply, the DM sent him a letter of apology. We came to know that the Judicial Secretary from Patna had sent a strong memo to the DM, asking him to rescind the charge against Bhaduriji. Thereafter this War Fund tamasha also stopped.

Meanwhile Jagori saw the light of the day—finally, after a few rejections! Some wonderful reviews followed. Awards too. But Bhaduriji was by then an itinerant journeyman. He had quit the Congress in 1947. He had briefly joined our party—C.S.P., but also quit it pretty soon since he realized that not unlike the Congress party—some Zamindar scions actually ran the party. He had no business in raj-kaaj (governance of the new nation) as he used to say. At that point I had also quit the party.  I recall a funny incident of that period. We were all travelling from village to village working for the Party and decided to stay over in a village close to River Parman on a particular night. The comrade who was from that part of the district promised us fish for dinner. So, as we approached the river-ghaat and as the comrade began calling out the names of the local fishermen, to our utter surprise we sighted the fishermen running helter-skelter. The comrade raised his voice further.  More running ensued. Bhaduriji got it. He started cackling: “Arre, first get rid of the red socialist headgear of yours. The poor men are sanguine that we are the police.”

“You have seen enough Renu. Start chronicling. Via the inner you. The words and feelings that are hidden within you. Unbind them. Let the world know and feel with you,” he told me one day.  I had by then published about a dozen short stories in the magazine Vishwamitra, published from Calcutta. But could not muster the courage to write a novel. Maila Anchal was published in 1954. The day I got hold of my writer’s copy, I ran down the streets, straight to him.  I knew he was so happy and proud for me. Meanwhile, a few local Hindi writers spread the canard that my book was a copy of Bhaduriji’s Dhorai Charit Manas. Om Prakash, the proprietor of Rajkamal Prakashan wrote a letter to Bhaduriji and enquired about the matter. Bhaduriji’s reply was characteristic: “I am sure you have a couple of Hindi writers who are also adept in Bangla. Please ask them to read both the works. Renu has seen life in his own terms; he has evolved by developing his own resources and philosophy.” And told me: “Now you are an ‘all-Hindi figure’; these things are a natural corollary. The more well known you will become, the more you will witness the stingy-ness of soul. Don’t let that deter you. You have seen far sterner stuff. The world awaits you—sundry naysayers hardly matter. Just keep on writing.” For the muharat of Teesri Kasam, both Basu Bhattacharya and Basu Chatterjee came down to Purnia and they wanted Bhaduriji to hold the clap-stick. I was horrified, knowing his doubts about certain Hindi films. But he acquiesced, quite willingly, in fact.

It is impossible to write about our association and the days we lived in one short piece. I have barely narrated some disjointed incidents. Bhaduriji was such an accessible man. One who never ever gave priority to disinterested intellect, though he was the foremost writer-activist-intellectual of our time.  It would be apposite to end this tribute with a couple of lines from his Shotti Bhraman Kahini: “To be ordinary is the real blossoming, the fulfillment of human identity. Extra-ordinariness is a long-nosed caricature of that self. When our sensual soul is no more, we call it thoughtful mind. The limbs of the dead frog dazzle everyone in the frothy brightness.”

 

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The Political Economy of Reading

William St Clair

Last year, some of us were privileged to hear the first John Coffin Memorial Lecture given by Robert Darnton entitled ‘The Devil in the Holy Water.’ In that talk, by offering a  close textual and historical study of just one pamphlet, Darnton showed how much could  be learned about Paris day by day when the French Revolution was actually occurring. In terms of ‘the history of the book’, that talk was at the micro end of the spectrum. This year I propose to move to the other extreme, the macro, looking at books and reading as a whole and over a long time span.

I begin by suggesting some of the big questions that ‘the history of the book’ shouldaddress. What were the conditions within which books came into existence in the form thatthey did, and not in others? How were those books that did come into existence produced, sold, distributed, and read, in what numbers, by which constituencies of readers, and over which time scales? – again asking why these events happened in the ways they did and not in others? And what were the consequences of the reading of the texts that were inscribed in, and that were carried by, the books? What were the effects on the minds of their readers, and on the mentalities of the wider society within which the reading took place. By mentalities, a word adopted from the French, I mean the beliefs, feelings, values, and dispositions to act in certain ways that are prevalent in a society at a particular historical and cultural conjuncture, including not only states of mind that are explicitly acknowledged but others that are unarticulated or regarded as fixed or natural. And although I say ‘books’ for convenience, I include journals, newspapers, and other media.

These questions are, of course, not new. However, although there has always been much interest in what certain texts mean, how they came to be written, and in the lives of their authors, less attention has been paid to the processes by which the texts reached the hands, and therefore potentially the minds, of different constituencies of readers. I draw many of my findings from the print era in the English-speaking world, roughly the four hundred years from 1500 to 1900, a long sweep of history with many changes.

But, in one respect, that era forms a unity. For, during that time, paper imprinted with words or pictures was the  only medium by which complex texts, and therefore complex ideas, could be carried in  quantity across time and place. I choose 1900, incidentally, not as the end of the print era,  but as a way of conventionally marking the moment when, with the arrival of radio and film, printed paper lost its uniqueness. During those four centuries, almost everyone whose opinions on the matter are recorded believed that the reading of books affected the minds of readers, the mentalities of the people, and the fate of the nation. Whether engaged in politics, education, religion, literature, scholarship, science, propaganda, advertising, or censorship, many of the leading men and women of the past tried to use print to spread their ideas and to advance their aims. This was particularly true during the period from the 1790s to the 1830s, that I have studied in detail, an extraordinary rich and innovative time as contemporaries knew. But, we should ask, were they right to regard books and reading as having power over minds? How can we investigate the validity of the assumption? Literary and intellectual history, two of the disciplines that have traditionally attempted to retrieve historic mentalities, have mainly been written in accordance with what I call the ’parade of authors’ convention.

The writings of the past are presented as a march-past of great names described from a commentator’s box set high above the column. In literature, we see Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth. In philosophy Hume is followed by Adam Smith, Rousseau, or whichever names the writer wishes to include. According to the parade convention, those texts of an age which have later been judged to be the best, or the most innovative, in a wide sense, are believed to catch the essence, or some of the essence, of the historical situation from which they emanated. It is a convention centred on newly written works that, for the most part, denies an active role to readers. Another convention that has come in more recently, I call the ‘parliament of texts’. This presents the writings of a particular historical period as debating and negotiating with one another in a kind of open parliament with all the members participating and listening. Thus, when news of the French Revolution reached this country, there was an outpouring of books and pamphlets that discussed the implications, and took the debate from questions of immediate policy to philosophical issues about the nature of human society, the role of the state, the justifications for political, social, and gender hierarchies, and much else.

Under both of these conventions, the historian chooses the texts that march in the parade or sit in the parliament. Both approaches can be linked with critical and hermeneutic analyses of the texts which are not time specific, seeking to understand their rhetorical stance and ideological assumptions, and employing, for example, theories of myth to explain the enduring appeal of certain types of narrative. Some scholars attempt to test the truth of what the texts assert, although, sadly, that is out of fashion. And the texts can be situated in specific contexts. However, as ways of understanding how mentalities may have been historically formed by the historic reading of books, neither approach seems to me to be complete or satisfactory. For one thing, any study of the consequences of the reading of the past ought to consider the books that were actually read, not some modern selection. Nor, in describing the reading of a particular period of the past, can it be enough to draw solely on the texts written during that period, specially significant though these may have been. Much of the reading that took place in the past in the English-speaking world, probably most, was of texts written or compiled long ago and far away.

In both parade and parliament conventions, newly written printed texts succeed their predecessors, engage with them, and in some cases defeat or supersede them, and it can be convincingly shown that this happened in certain cases. As far as readers were concerned, however, chronological linearity was not the norm. No historical reader, whatever his or her socio-economic or educational status, read texts in the order in which they were first published. In nineteenth century Britain, for example, many readers read the texts of the Enlightenment only after they had been subjected to an intensive school education in the texts of the Counter-Enlightenment, and many others, including many women, read the Counter-Enlightenment without having read the Enlightenment at all. In the debates on the implications of the French Revolution, Paine’s Rights of Man was quickly suppressed, and only a few of the other pamphlets were produced in cumulative print runs of more than 500 or 750 copies. But, for Burke’s Reflexions on the French Revolution, there are records of over twenty thousand copies being produced and circulated in the early 1790s alone.

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Pamphlets were of course often read by more than one reader and circulated through book clubs, and information and ideas can travel by word of mouth. But, of the many men and women who tried to understand the implications of the French Revolution by reading the printed discussions, most must have come to their conclusions on the basis of Burke alone. When we read a book or essay called, say, ‘The Age of Wordsworth’, should we not be concerned that, in his lifetime, most of Wordsworth’s books were produced in editions of  about 500 to 1,000 copies of which many were remaindered or wasted several years after publication?

Could that amount of reading have shaped the minds of ten to fifteen million people? Especially when Wordsworth was, on the whole, reinforcing ideas that were mainstream in the culture of his day? How do we deal with the fact that over two million copies of Scott’s verse and prose romances had been sold in Britain alone by the middle of the nineteenth century, maybe a million more than all other authors put together? And Scott was regarded by the best critics as the equal of Homer, a great teacher and model, not a  predecessor of Jeffrey Archer or airport pulp fiction?

Furthermore, readers have never been the inert recipients of meanings carried by texts. They had freedom, within their circumstances, to choose which texts to read and which passages to give most attention to, to skip, to argue, to resist, and to read against the grain. As far as children were concerned, if my experience of real children is any guide, their responses were even less constrained. Exclusively text-based approaches, which are caught in a closed circle, cannot ever, without information from outside the texts, take us to impacts and consequences.So what should we do? Part of the answer is to conceive of a past culture not as a parade or as a parliament but as a dynamic system with many interacting agents, into which the writing, publication, and subsequent reading of a text were interventions that had consequences. Since, according to this approach, the engagement between competing texts occurred mainly in the minds of readers, we must expect the trajectories of development to be different from those of the first writings, or of the first printings, of texts. Which takes me to the ‘political economy of reading.’

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If that phrase has an eighteenth century ring about it, that is part of my point. The classical political economists of the Enlightenment investigated the observable consequences of different types of governing arrangements on commodities, trade, prices, employment, incomes, and the physical well-being of people. They believed that, by understanding  economic systems, they could improve the political management of such systems to bring about improvements in the lives of participants, and for the most part they were successful and the subjects they founded have become well-established disciplines with many achievements. I want to carry that tradition forward into cultural systems, tracing the effects of the governing structures on texts, books, access, readerships, and consequential mentalities. If I had been living in the eighteenth century, I would have called my book, ‘An Inquiry into the Political Economy of Knowledge.’

How can we set about developing such a political economy of reading? I begin with the economic aspect of political economy. The ‘history of the book’ is, among much else, the history of an industry, and there is nothing inappropriate about adopting the conceptual tools that are successfully employed in understanding the behaviour of industries with similar characteristics. There are, for example, parallels with pharmaceuticals and information technology, in which intellectual property is central. And we have a body of well-established, empirically-tested, theory about the consequences of different types of economic and business structures. Table 1 is a simple diagram that illustrates the observed economic behaviour of a publisher of a newly written text in the romantic period. On the vertical column we chart price, on the horizontal, quantity. Within constraints not shown here, the publisher chose where to position his intended book on the demand curve, either selling a small number at a high price or a larger number at a lower price. A publisher who  holds the exclusive right to copy and sell a particular text, that is the copyright-holder, will maximise his financial returns if he moves down the demand curve in a series of discrete tranches over time. That is the classic behaviour of a monopolist.

One reason why I have shown an ideal demand curve is that, in its shape, it neatly matches the actual books of the romantic period. I take two of the most praised and most demanded literary works of the time. Scott’s Lady of the Lake, moving down the demand curve from quarto, to octavo, and then to duodecimo, and then stopping. And Byron’s Don Juan, on which, for reasons I need not go into here, intellectual property rights turned out not to be enforceable.Don Juan was tranched down far further—indeed to the lowest point on the curve obtainable with the technology of the day, tiny books, crammed pages, tiny print, scarcely readable with the naked eye.

I have the actual numbers for the three main variables, price, quantity, and time. For The  Lady of the Lake, the prices are, in shillings, 42, 12, 9, a drastic reduction, and the sales rose from about one thousand to tens of thousands. It took fifteen years to move from the large expensive quarto to the smaller less expensive duodecimo. In the case of Don Juan, the price fell from 57 to 5 shillings, less than a tenth of the initial price. Sales rose from a few to several hundred thousand. And that move down the demand curve took place in less than two years from the time Don Juan was first published as a completed work. The Lady of the Lake did eventually follow Don Juan down the demand curve but not until the 1840s when the copyright expired, prices fell, and access widened even more dramatically. We can relate the book prices to the incomes of different constituencies of potential buyers and readers. The quarto volumes, for example, would have cost about a third of the weekly income of a gentleman, say a retired senior captain of Nelson’s Royal Navy whose income was about 100 shillings a week. The tiny editions of Don Juan by contrast became affordable by clerks, artisans, and others hitherto excluded from modern reading. During the romantic period, incidentally, there were no free public schooling or free public libraries, no railways or rapid communication between people. My simple demand curve, therefore brings out the relationships between the governing regime of intellectual property, price, access, and the timing of access, in all its starkness.

For most of the print era in England, the Lady of the Lake pattern was the norm, although of course not all texts conform so neatly, and only a small number were ever reprinted at all. Until 1774 English publishers practised perpetual intellectual property and stayed high on the curve. Indeed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they crept higher up, selling smaller numbers at higher prices, and abandoning the lower tranches. And when perpetual monopoly was ended by the courts after a long period in which the statute law was ignored by the industry, and the lower tranches were opened up, we see that prices tumbled, production soared, and access widened. In the case of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a best seller from the moment it was published in 1719, the archives show that, within about five years, it sold more copies than in the seventy years since it first appeared. With Shakespeare, within twenty five years of 1774, more copies were sold than in the one hundred and fifty years since the first collected edition of 1623. And, if you are thinking that the fall in price was due to mechanisation of book manufacturing, as is often asserted, thatwas not the case. The books that poured from the English presses in rising numbers at falling prices after 1774 were manufactured by traditional hand-craft methods largely unchanged since Gutenberg.

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On the lower part of my demand curve diagram, I have mentioned anthologies, abridgements, and adaptations. They are part of the means by which ideas were, and are, diffused, in economic terms ‘trickle down’. They enabled longer texts to be made available to wider readerships, including young people, to the-less-well educated, and to the economically disadvantaged. They help to bind a society together, uniting the reading experiences of one generation with that of others, introducing children to texts which they may later read in more sophisticated versions, and maintaining a shared memory across time, place, and social situation. One pattern that I noticed in my scrutiny of the archival record is that, quite suddenly, in about 1600, the English book industry stopped producing texts of this kind that drew on copyrighted material. There were, for example, no abridgements of the eighteenth century novels, of Adam Smith, of Gibbon, of the English translations of Homer or Virgil, long works that cry out for abridgement. The judicial decision of 1774 not only enabled innumerable complete texts to be read by millions who had previously been excluded but resulted in a flood of anthologies, abridgements, and adaptations that drew on the same body of older texts and carried the ideas to even larger constituencies including children.

The patterns relating to abridgements, anthologies, and adaptations, Alps on the landscape of book history, were not brought to light either by traditional descriptive bibliography or by narrative history. But, as with tranching down, once noticed, the explanation jumps from the page. The business purpose was to prevent the high price market in the complete texts from being undermined. Since the clampdown was notretroactive, the older texts, that is those for which an intellectual property ownership claimhad been made before 1600, continued to be reprinted. This resulted in the build up of vested commercial interests in prolonging the existence of the older texts that had been first printed before the clampdown.

A political economy approach helps to explain why after  1774 the reading nation grew rapidly until near universality was reached by the end of the  nineteenth. It explains why Shakespeare disappeared from popular reading, from 1594 to  1808, and why a body of texts of mediaeval romance that had been continuously favoured  for many centuries should suddenly lose all appeal around 1800.

The time lags in access that resulted from these governing economic structures and business practices were not trivial. For example, in the romantic period, a large constituency of middle class readers were caught in the print of texts produced in an England of two or more generations before, texts that became more out of line with their real life experience every passing year. The poor were caught in texts first printed several hundred years earlier, English language bibles, almanacs, chapbook abridgements of mediaeval and Renaissance romance such as Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, and the Seven Champions of Christendom. Those at the top of the demand curve could of course buy the less expensive books and many did. Samuel Pepys and James Boswell, for example, loved the old abridged chapbooks and made collections. But those at the lower tranches could not regularly buy access to the books in which more modern texts were inscribed.

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Although I have given literary examples, the same broad patterns are discernible across the whole range of printed texts, science, medicine, philosophy, history, and so on. Those at the top had modern knowledge, those at the bottom had superseded knowledge, those at the top had clinical medicine, others had folklore and unwanted children. Those at the top had science, the rest had astrology. And the effects on minds were cumulative, affecting the horizons of expectations of succeeding generations.

What this simple diagram shows is a reading nation in which different layers of readers interacted with texts of differing degrees  of modernity and obsolescence within their economic circumstances and cultural horizons.  Some may query my use of the word ‘obsolescence’ in this context. I do not wish to imply that the longer the time that has passed since a text was first produced or made available in print, the less truthful, valuable, or useful it must necessarily be. By the same argument, ‘long-lived’ texts do not become admirable just because they were first produced long ago. Readers have often been able to draw contemporary, maybe even universal, meanings from texts that are not contemporary, sometimes from unpromising material, and there are innumerable examples of men, women, and young people successfully surmounting the obstacles to access to knowledge and education brought about by high prices. But, for an understanding of the political economy of reading, we should beware of putting too much weight on anecdotal evidence whose representative quality is uncertain. George Craik’s The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: illustrated by anecdotes was a Victorian favourite, but occasional exceptions, reassuring though they may be in some ways, also confirm that the norm was the norm.

What determined the shape of the demand curve? Many factors we can think of —literacy, incomes, horizons, censorship, appeal to readers, none of which are static, and all of which have to be investigated and factored in. The curve for books as a whole, for example, looks very steep in the century before the romantic period, in the sense that the number of additional copies which were sold if the price was reduced was modest. By 1900, as a result of a virtuous circle of cheaper books leading to more reading, it had become much flatter as more and more men, women, and children joined the reading nation.

I mention one other factor, the effects of the changing technology. To my initial surprise, I found that the figures for edition sizes, that is print runs per edition, for British books in the early nineteenth century were not all that different from those found in the previous centuries of the print era, when the population, the economy, and the market for books were only a fraction of what they had become. The normal range, from about 500 to 3,000 copies per edition, with a few outliers on either side, is similar in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy for which there are sixteenth century figures. It seems to be constant across Europe and North America. Only in the mid nineteenth century, with the introduction of printing by stereotype plates do we see much of a change and some print runs become longer. Why, we should ask, did the coming of print in fifteenth century Europe result in more texts? Surely the political and ecclesiastical leaders of the time, who claimed a monopoly of truth, should have preferred more copies of the existing body of texts? There is a simple economic explanation relating to the marginal costs of producing extra copies. With moveable type, after about 3,000 copies, the producer of a book maximises his returns relative to his costs and risks by putting the type back in the case, and starting again with a new edition if demand exceeds 3,000.

The political economy point is this. In the past, the differing technological and  economic limitations on manufacturing of copies of texts changed the balance of  production, and therefore of reading, between old and new texts. Some technologies  encouraged the production of more copies of the existing body of texts. Moveable type  encouraged the production of more newly composed texts.

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I turn now to the last link in the chain of the analysis. When we have retrieved historic reading patterns, can we perceive an overlap with subsequent historic mentalities? Can we confirm that the universal assumption that reading had consequences for mentalities was valid? Obviously there is more scope for judgement and interpretation in answering this question than in the others noted so far, some of which are largely factual. And, in order to avoid circularity, we need to use manifestations of mentalities that are external to the texts. For myself, having done the political economy work in considerable detail for a particular historical period, I do discern a recognisable correspondence between historic reading patterns and consequent mentalities. The correlation is far from exact, but over the whole print era, the links, both general and particular, between texts, books, reading, and wider consequences appear to be secure. For example the persistence of rural religious pre-Enlightenment constructions of essential Englishness into the industrialised urban world, the emergence of a distinctively working class sceptical urban reformist culture, and the persistence in belief in astrology and other ancient supernaturals despite the efforts of church and state — in all these cases, the overlap is with books and readers not with authors and texts. We also have the astonishingly neat overlap between the immersion of the English-speaking reading nation for over a century in the neo-chivalric romances of Walter Scott, the values of Victorian Britain, and the states of mind that we detect in the American Civil War and the First World War, connexions that had been remarked upon by Mark Twain, Paul Fussell, and others.

If I am right, and it is accepted that reading has been shown to have historically shaped mentalities, then the implications are immense. For, having disconnected outcomes from traditional text- and author-centred approaches, we have connected them to other ways of understanding complexity. One striking conclusion is the extent to which simple, well understood, and empirically well-tested economic models, such as price and quantity,  monopoly and competition, have been able to account for the behaviour of the printed book  industry, and therefore also the patterns of readerly access, during all the centuries when  print was the paramount medium. The study has shown that the tendency of monopolistic  industries to pay most attention to the topmost tranches of the market, to move slowly  down the demand curve, to ration supply to the market in order to protect the market value  of their properties, to neglect large constituencies of the market altogether or to supply them  with obsolete and often shoddy goods, can be observed in the monopolies and cartels  operated by the printed book industry through the institutions of private intellectual. Basic economic theory can, therefore, help to explain how the reading nation came to be divided into overlapping layers of readers, differentiated not only by income, by socio-economic class, and by educational attainment, but by the degree of obsolescence of the  print to which each layer had access. To have linked mentalities to historical reading is, therefore, to have linked them to the economics of the production and marketing of texts in the age of print.

I now turn to the politically-decided component of the political economy of reading.  I offer worked examples of the effects of different types of governing regime ranging from private monopoly ownership of all texts in perpetuity, as in England until 1774, total absence of intellectual property as in eighteenth century Ireland, and various forms of mixed, protectionist, and offshore regimes. Again you may wish to dispute my data or my inferences from them, although nobody has yet done so –nor indeed do I know of any alternative data having been collected. What I emphasise is that, in every one of these regimes, we can trace the effects of the politically-decided regime on the behaviour of the book industry, the shape of the demand curve, and trace the consequences for prices, access, timing of access, horizons, and readerships, and therefore on the constituting of knowledge among different constituencies.

In general, it emerges that the development of virtually all aspects of texts, books, and reading, including the English-language Bible and Shakespeare, have been influenced by the three main governing structures of the print era, private intellectual property in the hands of the text-copying industry, cartelisation within the industry, and a close alliance between the state and the industry in which the industry delivers textual policing and self-censorship in exchange for economic privileges. It emerges too that the governing structures of private intellectual property enforced and guaranteed by the state, which, in England, were first put in place in the early sixteenth century and, although constantly undermined by manuscript, pirate, and offshore publication, had a large measure of success in achieving their aims. If the findings of my inquiry are confirmed, then it follows that these governing structures helped to determine society itself, affecting every stage of cultural formation from textual production, through the choice, production, and distribution of print, to readerly access, readerly horizons, choice of reading, reception, and consequent mentalities. And these conclusions and findings about the consequences of different types of regime hold true irrespective of the actual texts that are being turned into books, throughout the print era. We have here, I suggest, the framework within which the role of particular texts can be traced. We have useable models for the political economy of reading.

The fierce debates about intellectual property that occur today are mainly conducted not in terms of political economy but in absolutist language that ignores consequences. One is the language of property and of theft. Bill Gates, the President of Microsoft, recently described those who challenged the politically-decided regime within which the firm makes its monopoly profits as ‘communists’. The absolutist language obscures the main point. For intellectual property is essentially different from real property, One is physical and visible. The other is immaterial and invisible. The custom and practice of real property have existed throughout recorded human history, in essentials unchanged at any rate in the Western tradition. Intellectual property is a European invention of the fifteenth century which has subsequently been subject to many changes in law and in practice. With a piece of real property, say a house, the owner can make drastic alterations and the result will still be recognisably the same house. But the owner of a house cannot make a second house by making an abridgement of the first house. If the house is divided among a number of people, each can only enjoy a share, and the more the property is divided the smaller the share that each one gets. With intellectual property, on the other hand, division need not lead to any diminution of utility. My experience of reading Shakespeare is not diminished if you read Shakespeare.

In addition to ‘property’, the present arguments about intellectual property are permeated with another absolutist language, the author as unique ‘creator’, who has the right to own and defend his creation. But we know historically that even the most creative writers, such as Shakespeare, did not start with nothing, but adapted what already existed. No one, whether author or intellectual property owner can reasonably claim that any substantial text has been compiled solely from privately owned materials. By its use of language, which is essentially social, by its appeal to memory and readerly notions of genre, and by its repetition of recognised old as well as new sentiments, all texts inescapably draw on knowledge which they share with their readers. Indeed, without the shared public element, texts would have had little or no appeal to readers. The intellectual property in every newly printed text is, in effect, the asserting of a private ownership claim over part of a language and intellectual domain which has previously been both open to the public and free. However, in the English book industry by the seventeenth century, the whole discourse of property as it applied to real property, including the penalties for stealing it, damaging it, and trespassing on it, the political rights and privileges attached to the possession of it, and the legal protections against confiscation, was being applied to this recently invented form of private wealth.

Today the texts over which a private property right is being asserted, and payment demanded for its use, are becoming ever shorter and the degree of creativity required is minimal. When Warner Brothers learned that Groucho Marx was making a parody of their film Casablanca, their lawyers sent him a stern warning. Groucho replied that the Marx Brothers existed long before the Warner Brothers and he claimed rights over Brothers.Today he might not have been able to laugh his way out. Just a few months ago Lady Thatcher made a successful claim against the BBC for breaching what she said were her property rights in a phrase of her creation used in her memoirs ‘Treachery with a smile, this. Emily Dickinson firmly believed that we cannot fully comprehend life unless we also understand death.’ In making this banal remark, I have committed an offence. For I have not acknowledged that this thought was allegedly created by Wendy Martin in 1988 in an article in The Columbia History of American Literature. This example comes not from some extremist booksellers’ trade association but from the professional guidance to academic researchers published by the Modern Language Association of America. The MLA notes that ‘a starving person who steals a loaf of bread can be rehabilitated . . . but sadly, almost always, the course of a professional writer’s career is permanently affected by a single act of plagiarism.’ So, before the police arrive, can I confess that I have made use of ideas ‘created’ in 2003 in the Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.

I wonder what the political economists and jurists of the Enlightenment would have made of this? If spoken language is the main faculty which holds human beings together in society, they asked, why should written words be private property? Following their lead, we can describe private intellectual property for what it is, a state-guaranteed monopoly right to copy and to sell a text, a restrictive business practice which, if it is to be permitted, has to be justified by the public policy benefits that it may bring to the society that grants the privilege. And that argument about benefits can only be conducted rationally if it is informed by a developing understanding of the likely consequences of different regimes, for readers as well as authors, in other words by a political economy. Such a discussion should, of course, consider the incentives that some types of regime may provide to useful innovation as was agreed in the eighteenth century. But, to avoid abuse, whenever there is monopoly, there should also be regulation.

8

So, returning to the ‘history of the book’, what is needed if we are to develop a political economy of reading? For a start, if we want to do political economy, we have to have economic information. It would be a fairly simple task, with modern technology with many hands contributing, world wide, to place alongside the plentiful information we already have about texts, such scattered information as survives about production, prices, access, and readerships, over time. From such information we will perceive patterns and develop provisional explanatory models. Emerging results can be challenged and either replicated or amended. Emerging results in one reading nation may be transferable, with adaptations, to the experience of others. Such a project would fit well with the other projects at present underway, such as putting texts on line or the collecting examples of recorded historic reading. Having information of this kind would enable us to built a fuller and more theoretical understanding of texts, books, reading, and consequences. And, since such information is unlikely to be found for periods after 1900 when there are just too many  media and too many transactions, we should improve our understanding not just of ‘then history of the book’ but of cultural production and consumption of all kinds into our own time.

One last point. Contrary to what Wordsworth believed and wrote about in The Excursion, his mind was not formed by experiencing Nature direct in the mountains of the Lake District. He was participating in a tradition that went back many centuries. Nor was the mind of Byron’s Bonnivard chainless and free in the dungeon of Chillon, although his heroic story may have provided encouragement to innumerable readers and listeners. The more complex aspects of our minds — I leave aside the lessons we learn from putting our hand in boiling water — may be, to a larger extent than we understand or care to acknowledge, temporary outcomes of the consumption of the texts to which we and our predecessors have been exposed, texts produced by political and economic processes involving property, and therefore power. If we wish to improve our understanding of why, as societies, we have come to think the way we do, and to give ourselves, if we choose, a greater degree of freedom, we need a political economy of reading.

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William St Clair is a founding member of Open Book Publishers, based in Cambridge (UK), and an active supporter of the Open Access movement. This lecture was delivered at the School of Advanced Study, University of London (where he is a Senior Research Fellow) as The John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book 2005.

Why Stephen Greenblatt is Wrong — and Why It Matters

Jim Hinch

One year ago this month, Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt stepped to the podium at the Cipriani Club in New York City to accept the National Book Award for nonfiction. Greenblatt won for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, a 356-page study of the transformative cultural power wielded by an ancient Latin poem called De Rerum Natura by a first-century BC Epicurean philosopher named Titus Lucretius Caro. Holding back tears, Greenblatt thanked, among other people, his publishers at W.W. Norton for committing to “the insane idea that they could sell a book about the discovery of an ancient poem by a Renaissance humanist to more than a handful of people.” In fact, by the time Greenblatt addressed the Cipriani Club’s gold-domed ballroom, The Swerve already had spent more than a month on the New York Times bestseller list, just as had Greenblatt’s previous book, Will in the World, a Shakespeare biography that came close to winning its own National Book Award (it was a finalist). Five months later, The Swerve won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. The book remains a strong seller on Amazon.

Clearly, The Swerve spoke to far more than a handful of people. But as American book lovers gear up for another awards season — the National Book Award this month, followed by the PEN/Faulkner Award in March, then the Pulitzers in April — the acclaim showered on Greenblatt’s book about the discovery of an ancient poem raises profound questions about just what these awards really mean. Simply put, The Swerve did not deserve the awards it received because it is filled with factual inaccuracies and founded upon a view of history not shared by serious scholars of the periods Greenblatt studies. That such a book could win two of America’s highest literary honors suggests something doesn’t work in the awards system itself.

The Swerve, in fact, is two books, one deserving of an award, the other not. The first book is an engaging literary detective story about an intrepid Florentine bibliophile named Poggio Braccionlini, who, in 1417, stumbled upon a 500-year-old copy of De Rerum Natura in a German monastery and set the poem free from centuries of neglect to work its intellectual magic on the world. This Swerve, brimming with vivid evocations of Renaissance papal court machinations and a fascinating exploration of Lucretius’s influence on luminaries ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci, to Galileo, to Thomas Jefferson, is wonderful.

The second Swerve is an anti-religious polemic. According to this book, the lucky fate of De Rerum Natura is a proxy for the much more consequential story of how modern western secular culture liberated itself from the deadening hand of centuries of medieval religious dogmatism. “Many of [De Rerum Natura’s] core arguments are among the foundations on which modern life has been constructed,” Greenblatt writes in The Swerve. “Almost every one of the work’s key principles was an abomination to right-thinking Christian orthodoxy.” In other words, The World Became Modern when it learned to stop believing in God and start believing in itself. Here’s how Greenblatt describes the epic transformation Lucretius helped bring about:

Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. […] The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without fearing that one is infringing on God’s jealously guarded secrets; to question authorities and challenge received doctrines; to legitimate the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; to imagine that there are other worlds beside the one that we inhabit; to entertain the thought that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe; to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling the death of the soul. In short, it became possible — never easy, but possible — in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.

Lucretius’s role in this cultural revolution was to inject, with a flavoring of poetic wonder, the idea that God and religious faith not only are unnecessary for personal fulfillment but in fact are incompatible with human happiness and the pursuit of truth. Among the influential themes Greenblatt finds in De Rerum Natura: there is no God, no gods, no creator of the universe; all religions are invariably cruel; the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain; the chief enemy of pleasure is not pain but delusion.

Prior to the revival of such insights, according to The Swerve, western Europe endured a long, suffocating era dominated by an obscurantist, pleasure-hating religious ideology. Greenblatt’s characterization of the Middle Ages, scattered throughout The Swerve, is summed up in an article he wrote for The New Yorker shortly before the book was published. The article synthesizes various passages from The Swerve:

It is possible for a whole culture to turn away from reading and writing. As the Roman Empire crumbled and Christianity became ascendant, as cities decayed, trade declined, and an anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the ancient system of education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work, scribes were no longer given manuscripts to copy. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books. Lucretius’s poem, so incompatible with any cult of the gods, was attacked, ridiculed, burned, or ignored, and, like Lucretius himself, eventually forgotten.

The idea of pleasure and beauty that the work advanced was forgotten with it. Theology provided an explanation for the chaos of the Dark Ages: human beings were by nature corrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve, they richly deserved every miserable catastrophe that befell them. God cared about human beings, just as a father cared about his wayward children, and the sign of that care was anger. It was only through pain and punishment that a small number could find the narrow gate to salvation. A hatred of pleasure-seeking, a vision of God’s providential rage, and an obsession with the afterlife: these were death knells of everything Lucretius represented.

This is a powerful vision of the world entering a prolonged period of cultural darkness. If it were true, then Greenblatt’s second Swerve, the anti-religious polemic, also would deserve every award and plaudit it won. However, Greenblatt’s vision is not true, not even remotely. As even a general reader can gather from a text as basic as Cambridge University historian George Holmes’ Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe(published in 1988 and still available on Amazon): “Western civilization was created in medieval Europe. The forms of thought and action which we take for granted in modern Europe and America, which we have exported to other substantial portions of the globe, and from which indeed we cannot escape, were implanted in the mentalities of our ancestors in the struggles of the medieval centuries.” Greenblatt’s caricatured Middle Ages might have passed muster with Enlightenment-era historians. Present-day scholarship, especially the findings of archeologists and specialists in church and social history, tells a vastly more complicated, interesting and indeterminate story.

I’m at a loss to explain how two distinguished prize juries managed to overlook the fact that The Swerve’s animating thesis is at best “questionable,” and at worst “unwarranted,” as Renaissance historian John Monfasani put it this summer in the online journalReviews in History. Still, to make clear the extent of The Swerve’s errors, I’ll go through Greenblatt’s portrait of the Middle Ages point by point. First, it may be true that “it is possible for a whole culture to turn away from reading and writing.” But that didn’t happen in medieval Europe. Indeed the Middle Ages are considered Europe’s most bookish era, a time when books — Christian, Greek and Roman alike — were accorded near totemic authority. Medieval readers and writers (not just clergy — lay culture was widely influenced by texts and documents, especially following the 10th century) were apt to believe anything they read in an old book just because it was old and from a book. This was especially true if the book happened to be by a writer like Lucretius, a classical author whose words therefore automatically carried the imprimatur of truth.

There are declines in written evidence during the centuries immediately following the wane of Rome but that’s not because medieval people suddenly became illiterate or bullied by Church culture police. Rather, during those centuries Europe was a primary destination for waves of migration from the interior of Asia and regions east of the Baltic Sea. Most of these migratory peoples preserved their cultural memories orally and so they did not pay attention to books while plundering medieval monasteries, where most libraries were located. Nevertheless it did not take long for these peoples to assimilate to written culture. Anglo-Saxon England, colonized from the sixth century primarily by waves of illiterate Germanic tribes was within decades considered Europe’s finest center of book production, home to such gorgeous volumes as the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Along these lines it is simply untrue to assert that classical culture was ever lost, ignored or suppressed during the Middle Ages. As Garry Wills noted last month in The New York Review of Books (reviewing the latest publication by Augustine biographer Peter Brown): it is a “discredited […] myth […] that the Roman Empire (but only in the West) ‘fell’ overnight when barbarians invaded and brought it down. The light of classical times blinked out and we stumbled straightway into the Dark Ages.” Writers throughout the medieval period read, copied and were profoundly influenced by texts such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The earliest manuscript of the Metamorphoses dates from the ninth century, as do the two earliest copies of De Rerum Natura. In fact, as Cambridge classicist Michael Reeve pointed out five years ago in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, scholars have long detected “Lucretian influence in north-Italian writers of the ninth to eleventh century, in the Paduan pre-humanists about 1300, in Dante, and in Petrarch and Bocaccio.” Greenblatt cites the Cambridge Companion numerous times in his endnotes. Did he read it?

Greek learning was similarly influential during the Middle Ages. Greek texts, brought by Muslim and Jewish scholars who had rediscovered thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle in libraries in Mesopotamia, began filtering into Europe almost immediately following eighth-century Muslim conquests in Spain and Asia Minor. By the 12th century, Aristotle was widely known to European scholars, and major theologians such as Thomas Aquinas spent the 13th century attempting to form a grand synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought. Chaucer, at the end of his poem Troilus and Criseyde, written in the late 1300s, sends his poem off to seek its fortune at the feet of “Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan and Statius.” Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a weird and wonderful poem written probably by a late-14th-century clergyman for the entertainment of a rural gentry household in the northwest of England, begins with an account of the fall of Troy.

Equally untrue is Greenblatt’s claim that medieval culture was characterized by “a hatred of pleasure-seeking, a vision of God’s providential rage and an obsession with the afterlife.” I know Greenblatt has read Chaucer. He’s quoted from him in numerous books. Has he forgotten the ribald pleasure-seeking in The Canterbury Tales? What about the 13th-century French courtly love epic The Romance of the Rose? The twelfth-century Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes? I find no rage in Dante’s complex vision of human morality and providential grace in the Divine Comedy. Nor do I detect an ounce of asceticism in the ravishing unicorn tapestries in the Cloisters Museum in New York. Or in the rose window in Chartres. Or in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. Or in the gracious courts of the Alhambra.

Similarly, it is a gross distortion to describe medieval people as “an anxious populace” scanning “the horizon for barbarian armies.” By “barbarian” Greenblatt presumably means the Goths, Vikings and other non-western-European peoples who migrated out of Asia and the Baltic regions beginning in the first century. Scholars of Late Antiquity know that this process of migration was primarily characterized by gradual colonization and assimilation, not decisive battles fought by bloodthirsty hordes. (The battles get more prominent mention in written sources but archeology tells a different story.) One of those hordes, otherwise known as the Normans (or “North-Men”), migrated from Scandinavia first to northern France, then to England, and finally to Sicily, where beginning in the 11th century they founded a kingdom that went on to become one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan centers. Medieval Sicily was a thriving melting pot of Muslims, Jews and Christians. Along with Spain, Constantinople and the cities of northern Italy, it formed one of the main conduits to medieval Europe for the riches of Islamic civilization, riches that include many of the scientific and cultural advancements Greenblatt erroneously traces to early modern Europe. Perhaps Greenblatt could have written about this Sicilian Swerve. But then of course he’d have had to open up his account of the Middle Ages to a far more complex story of multiple swerves, connections and continuities. He’d have had to find a new name for his book. He’d have had to write a different book altogether. 

The Swerve, however, is what we got. And nothing in its depiction of the Middle Ages is as tellingly wrong as its bizarre excursus into the practice of medieval monastic self-flagellation. About a third of the way through The Swerve Greenblatt suddenly begins quoting various passages, mostly from medieval saint’s lives (notoriously unreliable as historical evidence), that describe the kind of self-scourging familiar to viewers of medieval film noir — Hollywood blockbusters such as “The Name of the Rose” or “The Da Vinci Code.” These lurid accounts culminate in the claim that “a vast body of evidence confirms that such theaters of pain […] were widespread in the Middle Ages.” A check of the endnotes shows that Greenblatt cites no such “vast body of evidence” and of course he doesn’t. There is no evidence because self-flagellation was not widespread in the Middle Ages. Not in homes, not in churches, not even in monasteries. In fact medieval monasteries were among the least religious and most worldly institutions of their time. Like modern research universities, medieval monasteries were wealthy centers of learning and power whose leaders rotated into and out of careers in secular government. Waves of monastic reform efforts testify to a perennial complaint in the Middle Ages that religious authorities, far from enforcing an ascetic, pleasure-hating discipline, in fact were too luxurious, too cozy with the rich, too willing to dispense with their religious vows.

I mention the self-flagellants because — in a touch worthy of Greenblatt himself — this particular tic in The Swerve turns out to be key to unlocking both the book’s underlying worldview and the reason that worldview won such praise. Here is Greenblatt on the whippers:

The ordinary self-protective, pleasure-seeking impulses of the lay public could not hold out against the passionate convictions and overwhelming prestige of their spiritual leaders. Beliefs and practices that had been the preserve of religious specialists, men and women set apart from the vulgar, everyday imperatives of the “world,” found their way into the mainstream, where they thrived in societies of flagellants and periodic bursts of mass hysteria. What was once in effect a radical counterculture insisted with remarkable success that it represented the core values of all believing Christians.

Greenblatt, as I mentioned, does not cite any primary sources attesting to widespread medieval self-flagellation, so I don’t know where he got this idea. What I’m more interested in is the notion that such asceticism represented “the core values of all believing Christians” in the Middle Ages. In fact no serious scholar would claim to know what “the core values of all believing Christians” were, in the Middle Ages or in any other period, because historical sources never yield enough unambiguous information to make such overstated claims. And yet it is here, where his evidence is weakest, that Greenblatt lays most stress in his argument. And of course he does, because The Swerve is a story about transformation and triumph. And without a caricatured Middle Ages of self-hating religious dogmatists Greenblatt has no clean-cut transformation and no clean-cut triumph. The complex truth about medieval Europe, indeed about all historical periods — that pleasure and pain, love and hate, faith and doubt, curiosity and stupidity, superstition and rationality, existed everywhere and at all times in complex and varying measure — is not so easily packaged as a narrative and so is less likely to top bestseller lists. But that doesn’t absolve Greenblatt of responsibility for getting his facts right. Unless, of course, that wasn’t his goal.

It wasn’t. If Greenblatt remained one of the “tenured radicals” he once was accused of being (by no less a scold than George Will), The Swerve might have told readers that notions such as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are little better than shorthand for arbitrarily bracketed periods of time in which certain changes in the pattern of human life are interpreted as significant and others are not. It might have enumerated the costs of so-called modernity, and the continuities from the past that sustain it, alongside the justifiably celebrated developments. It might have noted that many of the supposed religious values scorned by Lucretius — faith, self-sacrifice, an identity shaped not by individual desire but by family and community — remain widespread in western and non-western cultures and are in no way inimical to human freedom and progress. A truly radical book might have left readers feeling more challenged by the past, less quick to pass judgment and more able to find value in ways of life alien to their own.

Instead, The Swerve’s primary achievement is to flatter like-minded readers with a tall tale of enlightened modern values triumphing over a benighted pre-modern past. It’s no accident, I think, that The Swerve’s imagined Middle Ages bears a strong resemblance to America’s present era of superstitious know-nothing-ism. Or that Lucretius’s secular, principled-pleasure-minded values bear an equally strong resemblance to the values of Greenblatt’s cultural peers — including, presumably, the jurors who awarded him two national literary prizes. The Swerve presents itself as a work of literary history. But really it is a salvo in the culture wars; an effort to lend an aura of historical inevitability to the idea that religious faith has no place in a modern democratic society.

Writing shortly after The Swerve was published, The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda panned Greenblatt’s book as a shallow, derivative “non-fiction potboiler.” Dirda wrote that he couldn’t put his finger on why exactly The Swerve “rubbed me wrong.” I can think of a reason. Unlike other non-fiction potboilers, The Swerve claimed for itself, and received, huge moral and cultural authority it simply didn’t earn. Armed with that authority, the book went on to fool unsuspecting readers (like a reviewer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, who called The Swerve “a chapter in how we became what we are”) into believing that Lucretius, who wrote of placidly watching others suffer secure in the knowledge that all phenomena in the universe are merely a wondrous rearrangement of atoms, somehow symbolizes all that is bright and new in the origin of modern life. (This latter point is developed at length in Morgan Meis’s review of The Swerve in the journal n+1.) Greenblatt obviously admires Lucretius. And, as he wrote in a brief rebuttal to John Monfasani in Reviews in History, “I am of the devil’s party that believes that something significant happened in the Renaissance.” That’s marvelous. But it doesn’t give Greenblatt the right to make stuff up. I would like to think that when America’s literary lions gather to award their best and brightest they are looking for robust factual engagement with the messy complexities of human life, not just intellectual self-congratulation. The honors heaped on The Swerve make me wonder.

I once had a teacher at Berkeley named Robert Brentano, a historian of medieval Europe whose mind crackled with all the restlessness and complexity The Swerve lacks. In an afterword to his most famous book, Two Churches, a study of English and Italian churchmen in the 13th century, Brentano wrote of his desire to dispense with narrative in history altogether. The best historical writing, he wrote, can present “a series of images and ideas whole, clear, bright, and let the transition occur, as it should, without the dullness of written words. Without words, transition becomes beautiful. If I ever have enough nerve, I shall write history completely without transition.”

This awards season I’m rooting for ideas whole, clear and bright. Writing with the nerve to say what’s true. History without transition.

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(Jim Hinch wrote this piece for Los Angeles Review of Books on December 1, 2012).

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The Foreboding of Autumn: Aamir Bashir’s Harud

Akhil Katyal

Director: Aamir Bashir
Cast: Reza Naji, Shanawaz Bhat, Shamim Basharat, Salma Ashai

If you work with silence as your frame, every sound gets registered. If you work with scarcity as your chosen form, every little detail is capable of a denotative surplus. Aamir Bashir takes this formal technique and builds from it his film Harud that matches, shot by shot, the gravitas of its subject, carefully ‘seeking dignity,’ as he puts it, ‘in a violent place’.

Harud is set in Srinagar. It is about a Kashmiri Muslim family coming to terms with the disappearance of their son Tauqir. The film takes place in that breach which refuses to close when someone in the family is enforcedly disappeared by a power that is almost beyond redressal. In each shot, Tauqir’s younger brother Rafiq and his parents Fatima and Yusuf are seen attempting to adequately mourn a loss that they do not know the final shape of, that they necessarily cannot know the final shape of. When someone dies, you mourn their death. The certainty of their going away is the vehicle of the mourning. When someone disappears, even that certainty is withheld from you. You live a kind of daily life in which no hope remains uncontaminated with despair, where the object of your loss is both perpetually retrievable and permanently lost at the same time. In such an anchorless world, we see Rafiq and his family trying to find directions, but as if with a compass that is missing the lodestone.

When he was asked to give a brief synopsis of the film to an interviewer in 2010, the year this film released, Bashir summarized thatHarud, or Autumn, ‘is about decay, it’s about psychological decay, and you see this…through the family, primarily through the protagonist…Rafiq’. The film could not have released in any other year. 2010 was its necessary place in time. It was in the summer of that year when this decay, so acutely shared among so many in the valley, transformed and erupted from the hands of thousands of Kashmiri boys on the streets of Srinagar, most as young as Rafiq, who picked up stones and hurled them at police and paramilitary forces on whose shoulders the Indian occupation in Kashmir rests. The film begins with this real time footage of stone-throwing. These young men on the streets provide the film its epigraph.

2010 was also when the actual story of the disappearance of the Nadihal men – a story more terrible because it mirrored many more like it – had broken out. A Special Police Officer had offered army jobs to three young men in the Nadihal village. Mohammad, 19, an apple farmer, Riyaz, 20, a herder and Shahzad, 27, a laborer were given a paltry sum of money and were taken to a remote army camp in Machil where nine soldiers shot them down. This was done to claim the reward money that the Indian state offers for the killing of ‘militants’. In the script that the army wrote for its press release shortly after the massacre, this herder, laborer and apple farmer were found in the possession of three AK-47s, one Pakistani pistol, ammunition, cigarettes, chocolates, dates, two water bottles, a Kenwood radio and 1,000 Pakistani rupees. In the last quarter of a century in Kashmir, if a young man goes missing, you shudder to imagine the possible consequences he or his body has met, what official script he or it has been instrumentalized towards. The endless speculation makes you fall apart, the cost of conflict comes home with every living second without him who has vanished.

This is why Harud patiently bears out its each second. The film makes of allocating screen time to objects, scenes and characters an art, marking affiliation with how time looks like when in grief. The camera focuses long on the face, particularly the scorching eyes of Rafiq, played by Shanawaz Bhat. It rests gently and with an always uneasy calm on landscapes. It saddles together the unmatched beauty of the valley with its fragility, with the constant fear that attends the streets of downtown Srinagar and their inhabitants. This constancy of fear hangs like a fog which obscures the legendary beauty of the valley. In fact, the film, as Bashir claims, is about the exact opposite of beauty, it is ‘about decay’, that particular passage of time when beauty disappears slowly. Autumn for Bashir is both a season and a metaphor for this decay that takes its toll almost silently. No matter how beautiful that time of the year is, ‘in Kashmir,’ Bashir says, autumn ‘is also a precursor to dark winters’, one has to prepare for them, one has to be ready to cope with them. In one of the recurring sequences of the film wherein the camera follows Rafiq closely as he vends newspapers at dawn in Srinagar, he cycles past a shop of wrist-watches that has not yet opened. ‘Timex,’ the shop front reads, ‘Life is Ticking.’ Bashir keeps his screen time patiently ticking, every moment pregnant with apprehension, till it explodes in the last shot.

But the opposite of fear also stalks the valley, that is, the real antonym of fear, not tranquility, but courage. In 1991, Parveena Ahangar’s son, like Tauqir, had also disappeared. He was at his uncle’s home where he had been studying when he was picked up by the Indian security forces during a search and cordon exercise and was taken away in a van. Javaid Ahangar was nineteen then and Parveena never heard of him again. Through these years the grief has remained as raw as the day she lost him. She went from every police station she could find, every interrogation centre, hospital and camp looking for him. During these searches, she met those who were her exact mirror images, scores of parents and relatives of men and boys who had been enforcedly disappeared in Kashmir. She invited them to make this search for their loved ones a collective one and in 1994 the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) was formed. Soon, those who joined APDP found that disappearances were not the crimes of a few aberrant officers of the police or the army, but that they were systemic and were implicit in the way an occupation structures itself on the land it arrogates. Families after families filed habeas corpus, literally ‘produce the bodies’, writs in the Srinagar high court most to no avail. In Harud Tauqir’s mother Fatima goes regularly for the sit-ins and protests of the APDP holding a portrait of her son. She is accompanied by many like her who have faced the sorrow of outliving their own children, each holding on to the portraits. Rafiq accompanies her.

If time begins to loom large when someone goes missing, that which is the visual becomes more defined. It becomes subject to an alertness that is pervasive and almost instinctive in the way that people see things around them in Kashmir. In fact, an alertness to all that is visible is the strategy of the DOP of the film, Shanker Raman, who is also one of the writers of its screenplay. A kind of alertness that people always have in zones of conflict, where every surface is capable of shock, where what you will see next cannot be predicted. As Raman shoots the calm surfaces of the valley, as he distills them into mind-bogglingly beautiful frames, the story he tells, keeps scratching these surfaces, his plot keeps exploring the crises into which these scenes plunge very often. In fact, the central conceit of Harud is also something which rests on the visual, on how we look, and how we strive to capture that which we look at – the camera. As a tangible object, it dominates screen time. As a plot device, it marks a watershed moment in the trajectory of Rafiq’s character. As a tool, it is how he engages with the world decaying around him.

Rafiq is part of an entire generation in Kashmir that has picked up the camera (or the microphone, or the pen). It is a generation of young film-makers, photographers, journalists, rappers and writers that have started telling the stories of Kashmir in the 90s, the decade they gave their childhood to. These stories and images were previously untold and unseen; they do not match the versions that circulate in Delhi’s big press circles or its parliament. These young men and women, based both in Kashmir and outside, have taken it upon themselves to distribute in any which way – whether leaking, publishing, uploading or shouting out – the stories of Kashmir’s autumn, that is, the stories of disappearances, of unidentified mass graves, of illegal encounters and of police violence on protests in the streets of Srinagar and in the snowed hinterlands of their valley. They give utterance to the word, one which remains graffitied on the walls of Srinagar (Rafiq cycles past it), azadi, and explore all that it could mean.

The camera that Rafiq stumbles upon in Harud was his brother Tauqir’s who had been a tourist photographer before he disappeared. In the two years after 2010, much noise has been made about the return of the tourists to the valley and their presence has been taken to mean that peace has come to roost here and that Kashmir has finally agreed to sign, no questions asked, on the covenant of perpetual belonging with India. Rafiq’s generation has made it amply clear that this calm is enforced and superficial, that this surface if stretched will not hold. It has not been easy for them to do this. The State government has attempted to censor online communication, has cracked down on facebook and twitter and has tarnished wikileaks, the nationalist media has ignored searing content that merits to be breaking news, dissenting individuals have been disallowed entry into J&K and several of the young, of the really young, have been put in jails on unfound charges. When Rafiq picks up the camera, he picks up that which photojournalists on the streets of Kashmir have been beaten up for picking, for stealing an image that does not fit into the narrative of peace that is being sold en masse to the rest of the world.

The tourist can never see what the Kashmiri sees. The tourists’ gaze is circular, he looks at that which others exactly like him also look at, so he only sees Dal Lake or its shikaras, in soft light and sanitized proportions, and he goes back to the hotel room at night. Above all, he leaves soon, and even when he comes to Srinagar, he comes mainly in spring or summer, not in winter or harud. Rafiq and his generation’s penetrating gaze cuts through the circularity of this gaze of the tourist. It does not look at the same places in Kashmir and when it does it does not look in the same, hurried way. They persevere with what they look at. They persist without hurry letting the places yield all their significances. When Rafiq photographs Dal Lake, as he does in an extended and central sequence in the film, he photographs a shikara with the paramilitary jawans sitting in it, each of their postures alert, each of their guns ready, and Dal’s silver waters extend for miles behind them. When you choose stillness as your frame, as Bashir and his protagonist do, you notice all the incongruities, that constant admixture of beauty and fear that becomes inevitable if you live in Kashmir. The images that Tauqir clicked – of Indian tourists in Kashmiri costumes – shied away from this admixture in selecting only the beautiful because the tourist desired only the beautiful. When asked why he chose a muted background score for his film, Aamir Bashir reasoned that he was ‘very conscious of the fact that’ he does not ‘hear any music in Kashmir [he meant Kashmir does not lend itself to an undemanding sort of music] because it is not that kind of a place anymore, in my eyes,’ he said, ‘it is not pretty anymore, there is so much mistrust in the air, it is such a dark place’. Does the tourist ever see the dark place in the place that he sees?

Other than the stone-throwers of 2010, one other man gives Harud its epigraph. The last couplet of the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali’s Tonight is the first thing we see – ‘And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee – / God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.’ Earlier this year, when I met a close friend of Shahid’s in Srinagar, he spoke of everything about Shahid and Kashmir other than how the police and army squashed the militancy through the 90s and later, this he could not speak about, how the police and army did this was the point at which words left him, he said, I will begin to cry if I speak of it now, not here, we were sitting in a public café off M.A. Road, and he left those stories at that, at that brink of speaking. These are stories beyond all accounting which are now coming so searingly into light. These are stories that defy reason and the basic measures of compassion that we expect even from the worst, let alone the one’s (allegedly) own government. These are stories like that of enforced disappearances. Like how so many of the 2010 children went – even official records say that more than a hundred perished that year – of them, there were the stone throwers who met bullets as a reply for their stones, but of them were also the boys playing carom, boys returning from their tuitions, boys looking at the protests from a distance. When you reside in Kashmir, you do not have to do a lot to be in the line of a bullet. Sometimes, you have to do nothing at all. Harud takes off from here and tells us that, going like this, a harsher winter awaits us in Kashmir.

——————–

Akhil Katyal is a Delhi based writer and academic. He blogs at akhilkatyalpoetry.blogspot.com.

Laziness & Work: An Interview with Pierre Saint-Amand

Sina Najafi and Pierre Saint-Amand Jean-Siméon Chardin, Auguste-Gabriel Godefroy Watching a Top Spin, 1738. The roots of our contemporary obsession with work and productivity are usually traced to the eighteenth century, when the new social and philosophical project of the Enlightenment, founded on rationality, dovetailed with the emergence of a capitalist economic system based on maximizing efficiency and productivity. This is the century in which the secular gospel of work in its modern form was written. In its most radical articulation, this gospel proposes that freedom and work are in fact equivalent. In his book, Paresse des Lumiéres (Editions du Seuil, 2008; The Pursuit of Laziness: Idle Philosophy and the Enlightenment), Pierre Saint-Amand, professor in the departments of French studies and comparative literature at Brown University, looks to the eighteenth century paradoxically not for a critique of laziness but instead for a counter-tradition that champions it. In figures as diverse as Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Siméon Chardin, and Pierre Marivaux, he finds the beginnings of a refusal to participate in a social project governed by the work ethic and of a skepticism toward the notion that productivity and industry should be our ultimate goals. Sina Najafi spoke with Saint-Amand by phone. Why did you choose the eighteenth century as the focus of a book on laziness?The discourse against laziness really starts in a coherent way in the eighteenth century, as we reach the cusp of industrial capitalism, and as the discourses on labor and economy emerge in their rationality. That is when we see the previously marginal discourse on laziness becoming more and more pointed. In many of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, one finds an equivalence between work and life itself. In Discourse on the Political Economy, for example, Rousseau acknowledges the inevitability of work; when he considers the responsibilities of the State and the well-being of its citizens, he argues that it’s imperative that work always be necessary and never useless. Voltaire champions the spirit of industry that pervades his century when he writes, “To work is to live.” And in his famous essay What Is Enlightenment?, Kant defines the project of the Enlightenment as having “the courage to use your own reason.” For him, laziness is associated with cowardice, which is the condition for remaining in what he calls a state of “tutelage.” For Kant, laziness is the primary obstacle to an autonomous life. I was interested, however, in examining a counter-discourse that valorizes laziness. This counter-discourse rejects functionality, resists the ideology of utility, and affirms forms of marginality that radically unsettle the Enlightenment project. What is especially interesting is that some of the same figures in my book who promote laziness are also the ones writing apologies for work and labor. Diderot would be one example, as would Rousseau, who begins to associate laziness with freedom in his later work, especially Reveries of the Solitary Walker. This is also the case with the painter Chardin. Many of his canvases celebrate domestic activity, but then you have the other paintings where work is suspended, and the subjects are distracted—they indulge in relaxation and even indolence. That’s basically the contradiction, the moment of dialectic, that I wanted to explore in the book. But I wanted to leave aside the question of aristocratic idleness, which is of course a given in the eighteenth century. I wanted to confront instead the particular area where laziness and idleness become figures of resistance within bourgeois economy. Is the aristocracy exempted from critiques of laziness?Not exactly. In religious treatises and in a lot of satire, you do see aristocrats being portrayed as lazy, as unproductive. And, of course, during the French Revolution the aristocrat will become the iconic figure of laziness. In 1789, for example, Emmanuel Sieyès formulated, in his influential What Is the Third Estate?, the revolutionary ideas of the nation, which he saw as bound by a common obligation to work. And aristocrats became “strangers” to this common project because they did not produce anything. But the aristocracy is not really affected by the context of the rising bourgeois economy and its values, which is what I’m concerned with. After all, the aristocracy is a class that is exempted from all forms of work. Leisure is an inherent privilege. Are people like Diderot in fact reading the emerging bourgeois theories of economics and labor?We have traces of these theories in the work of someone like Diderot, of the way the discourse of liberal economy is infiltrating the discourse of the philosopher and the encyclopedist. The historian Annie Jacob has written on the alignment between the physiocrats, who were the early economists of the eighteenth century, and the encyclopedists like Diderot. We even find in Diderot allusions to Benjamin Franklin’s writings on economy—the proto-Weberian apology for work. Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack was translated very early on into French as La Science du Bonhomme Richard. When in Rameau’s Nephew —Diderot’s imaginary dialogue between a philosopher and an idler—he portrays the nephew as a parasite, as someone who lives on the margins of the market economy, he knows exactly what he’s doing. But there is a contradiction in Diderot’s work. He certainly belongs to the category of philosophers who promote labor, who want to valorize work. But in Rameau’s Nephew, Diderot creates this unique character who is a hero of non-production—a bohemian musician who does not produce anything that lasts. Diderot shows his admiration for the genius of an artist of unfinished works, for an idler who resists economic finality and is consumed by the present, who refuses employment and subjugation. And it’s interesting that Rameau’s Nephew was written while Diderot was involved in the great busy work of his life, the Encyclopedia, for which he wrote around five thousand entries. There are also entries in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia that deal with laziness.There are several of them, and they establish a hierarchy; I focus on three. The articles were written by the Chevalier de Jaucourt, who contributed many entries to the encyclopedia. At the lowest level, there is fainéantise, literally “doing nothing,” which is described as the most physical negation of activity, a perverted escape from the obligation to work, a fault that reaches the soul. Then there is, at a more positive level, paresse, simply described as “lack of action.” And then oisiveté, “idleness,”which has more noble connotations. Is Jaucourt drawing on an already accepted ranking of types of laziness? Or is he in fact inventing this hierarchy himself?One can see in Jaucourt’s definitions that he speaks very much like the economists who are writing at the time, for example Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. Jaucourt is repeating distinctions that physiocrats like Turgot are making between various forms of economic unproductivity. It was interesting to see that Jaucourt lionizes Hercules and his labors. I assume some of the anti-laziness discourse followed an existing Christian tradition that defined sloth as a sin. But to what extent was Classical literature mobilized?Yes, it was interesting to see how Hercules becomes this mythological hero of work. He appears not just in Jaucourt but also, for example, in the seventeenth-century treatise Traité de la paresse (Treatise on Laziness) by Antoine de Courtin. The treatise, which continued to be influential in the eighteenth century, drew on the Christian tradition, and considered laziness essentially as what derails a virtuous, useful life. In one nice phrase, Courtin describes laziness “as a bed for the devil to lie in.” And Courtin proposed Hercules as the hero par excellence of action, as the paragon of virtue. Hercules is not only present in philosophical works, though; as Lynn Hunt shows in her work on the French Revolution, Hercules is also referenced in the French Revolution, which establishes an entire discourse valorizing work. And, of course, we find Hercules later in some fascist discourses. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Indolence (The Lazy Italian Girl), 1756–1757. One of the figures in your book is the playwright and novelist Pierre de Marivaux. He is perhaps the most important French playwright of the eighteenth century and was also quite prolific. It is surprising to see him as one of the people you turn to in your book for evidence of a counter-Enlightenment position that advocates laziness. Can you talk about this? Despite Marivaux’s rich output, laziness is a persistent preoccupation of his in certain autobiographical fragments and in a number of his other writings. I focus on Marivaux’s output as a young man. In 1721, he launches Le Spectateur français, a French version of The Spectator, the periodical started by Addison and Steele in England in the first decade of the century. Le Spectateur was similarly part of a modern aesthetic project that represented an ideological break with the anciens, namely the attempt to put the present into prose. Marivaux becomes a painter of modern life, of “the world as it is.” He anticipates Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent,” and he wants to avoid any authorial gravity, any thinking that involves work. Instead, Marivaux’s “Spectator” becomes the scribe of circumstance, and holds himself in readiness for events as they transpire. Marivaux insists that openness to the incidental means the total absence of work. At one point, he says, “An author is a man who, in his leisure moments, is overtaken by a vague desire to think about one or several subjects; and one might call this ‘reflecting upon nothing.’” The Spectator abandons himself to the “randomness of things.” What fascinated me about Marivaux is that he is one of those authors who portrays lazy subjects who are in fact very active at the same time. It’s this contradiction that makes them interesting—this productive un-production. The Spectator is busy, and he’s busy not being busy. His non-production comes from observing the form of an urban life that produces moments of pure circumstantiality, moments of complete inconsequence. For example, the Spectator at one point described a moment when the wind catches the powder in the hair of a bunch of elegant men. It’s these moments of volatility, pure moments of ephemerality, that Le Spectateur captures. Are these experiences non-productive in that they don’t build on each other and offer a larger perspective?The urban experience gives us these moments of pure futility, where the significance of events is consumed in pure epiphany. So there is nothing to build on! The observations are empty. The minute they happen, they are inconsequential. And there’s no judgment. Pure perception is the goal. In your book, you discuss how the labor that goes into the Spectator’s busy laziness must remain invisible in order for the project to maintain itself. How does that work?It appears like trickery, in a way. Because it doesn’t aspire to be aristocratic; it’s simply a perverse play on not giving in to the ideology of work and capital. You see this in Chardin as well. The critics of Chardin wanted him to find more noble topics for his work, which was simply genre painting and not more elevated history painting. Of course, a lot of the subjects in his paintings are also distracted or lazy. Chardin’s critics accused him of not showing his labor: they accused him of laziness, complaining that they never saw him paint! It’s true that Chardin was a slow painter, and in the eighteenth-century ideology of work, there’s a need not just to be productive but also to show labor. The realization of labor does not only come about in its products, but also in its representation. The question of representation of labor brings up Rousseau. Can you talk about the various positions that Rousseau stakes out on laziness, political life, and the public representation of work?Rousseau is complicated. There are a lot of shifts in his work and I didn’t want to efface them. On the contrary, I wanted to play with them and see what was going on in Rousseau’s edifice. Because, indeed, even very early on in his political writings, in the Discourses, for example, you find an apology for work. He sees work as being contiguous with citizenship, and in the famous Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater, he defines work as constitutive of the polis. Yet we see that at the end of his life he elaborates a different subjectivity, this time founded on laziness, idleness, and solitude. Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy, Rousseau Meditating in the Park at La Rochecardon near Lyon in 1770, 1770 (detail). The work that Marivaux refuses is a particular type of intellectual work. But Rousseau is talking about manual labor. Does he make distinctions between different kinds of work? He does. And it’s interesting to see that when he himself withdraws from work, his criticism of work is specifically of large-scale manufacturing, which he sees as politically alienating. The work that he celebrates instead is mostly artisanal: work that can be done in solitude, doesn’t involve a major production, and doesn’t extend to a consumerist society. They are, in the end, for him, non-work. He himself hand-copied sheets of music for money. And, perhaps surprisingly, he thinks of his own work as artisanal because it satisfies all those conditions. How does his position vis-à-vis work evolve?In his earlier anthropological writings, there is a moment where from his description of the different states of society—agricultural, pastoral, and the more superior cultivated state of society—you see that he finds the pastoral state the most perfect. And artisanal work is in some sense a manual version of pastoral work, because in the pastoral age, you also have isolated individuals who are obviously not involved in a consumerist goal. But when Rousseau considers work in the social state, he then refuses laziness. He views it as going against the collective will, as a negative. Laziness appears only to be acceptable in the state of nature; elsewhere it is a perversion. In his last book, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau is very interested in the relationship between doing nothing, for which he uses the Italian phrase far niente, and working.Reveries represents the moment when Rousseau finally abandons all apology for work. The text re-creates the conditions for idleness: isolation of the individual, the forced distancing of the collective, an artificial state of nature. One form of “work” that we do find in Reveries is botanizing. This is the sort of peculiar form of work that Rousseau will celebrate. You’re basically working with and in nature, contemplating creation, and collecting. It is the closest to the pastoral age. Botanizing in Rousseau, as he explains it in Reveries, never becomes a scientific, methodical enterprise. Rousseau basically collects plants simply for memorizing. Although Linneaus is a model who is invoked, in fact the Linnean approach is completely deconstructed in Reveries. Ultimately, Rousseau’s project is not even about naming plants. It’s about capturing the souvenir of a moment of enchantment. Walking involves the same; it is governed by the same economy of ephemerality and bliss. Does Reveries explicitly discuss the effect of laziness on the self?Yes, and it is at its purest in the chapters dedicated to the fifth walk and the eighth walk. There, Rousseau develops in full the subject of “worklessness,” where he finds full autonomy in doing nothing, where you have the individual who finds freedom in the act of doing nothing. In doing nothing, the self is completely “aerated.” There is an airing-out, an expulsion of external forces. It’s a little complex; you have a turning inward, yet you are also outside in nature. Is far niente not possible in your own house? For example, if you just stayed in bed?No, he specifically finds these epiphanies outdoors in a sort of harmonizing with nature. And he specifically critiques the cabinet of the philosopher, the philosopher’s study. He says, “My cabinet is outdoors.” What is left of the self after you “aerate” it, after all of the external ideologies and forces that have shaped your subjectivity have been expelled? Even if doing nothing were able to accomplish this, what would be left of the subject called Rousseau? And a second question: in this moment, even if it were possible, what is left for him to think, or see, or do, or indeed write?What is left is pure existence, pure affect. That is what, in fact, he seeks in Reveries—this peculiar moment of pure affectivity. When Rousseau is back at his desk, does the task of writing this pure affectivity pose a dilemma for him? Is writing the experience of a fully evacuated self an issue?Yes, it is an issue. That’s what you find in Reveries—he says that the writing traces this ephemerality, this drive toward affectivity. That’s whyReveries is written in the form of a diary. It’s a poignant irony that Rousseau’s death is inscribed in the work’s unfinished state. As he seeks repose, as he searches for this sovereign moment of worklessness, it is ironic that he encounters the most poignant form of repose—death itself. The shortest reverie is the last one. The book is unfinished; he died before completing it. ———————————————- Pierre Saint-Amand is professor in the departments of French studies and comparative literature at Brown University. He is the author of several books, including The Libertine’s Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel (Brown University Press, 1994) and The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, and the Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet, a non-profit organization. This interview first appeared in an issue that dealt with Sloth, Cabinet magazine, Spring 2008.

© 2008 Cabinet Magazine

A Song Sung True

Gopal Gandhi

 

Her name responds with images. Of her. O.P. Sharma has a lovely photograph of her. A ‘late’ Kamaladevi, picture-daters would say. She is seated at a table, her hands stretched across it. The round face is lined with scars of battle. The salt march of 1930, for instance. A thousand footsteps on the sand are etched on that face. And a smile washes over them, like the waves at Dandi might do. As you look at the picture more closely, you see a chin of extraordinary determination and eyes of a rare penetration.

But it is the hands that grip you. Strong-veined and profusely, almost ostentatiously, bangled. Who says courage and beauty do not go together, she seems to ask. They cannot but. I am proud to be a woman and I celebrate the beauty of womanhood, the whole frame can be heard saying. Let no one, absolutely no one, take beauty to suggest weakness, no fear! And to proclaim womankind’s strength, I will assert its feminity, not ape men. My working, writing, creating hands will proclaim them.

Then there is the black and white footage of her fanning a pot of boiling saltwater. The quirk of 8 mm speed-filming gives her hands, bangled again, an extra verve. With each vapour goes a wisp of imperial hubris. Each sedimented salt-crystal makes swaraj tactile. Kamaladevi is in that frame the satyagrahi incarnate. But she is not to be typecast! Not in that scene, not anywhere else.

In Mangalore, where she was born on 3 April 1903, father, mother, elder sister and Kamaladevi comprised a rather small family, for those days. It was there, in the verdant garden home of her Saraswat parents – Ananthiah Dhareshwar and Girijabai – that Kamaladevi first saw, touched and began to move the multi-coloured beads on the abacus of her sensibility. Her memoirs (Inner Recesses Outer Spaces, Navrang, 1986) tell us that the twinkling of the mrigasirsha star which heralds rain, the onset of showers in the month ofsravana and the worship of the tulasi plant became a continuum for her, signalling the reassurance, if any was needed in that fecund part of our western ghats, of the creative principle of life. Kamaladevi’s narration of her childhood is no idle amble down a memory footlane. I had not heard it explained anywhere until I read her autobiography that mrigasirsha is so named because the rains it heralds are such as make the mriga (deer) bend its sirsha (head) down under the torrent.

For Ananthiah, a district collector, nationalist politics was taboo. But even in her teens, Kamaladevi made her own decisions. Nobody was to give her taboos. In this, she was clearly influenced by her mother, ‘a feminist with a very strong consciousness about women’s rights.’ In 1910, when Kamala was seven, Ananthiah died, leaving no will. Her step-brother claimed the entire estate and offered a subsistence allowance to Girijabai. This the self-respecting widow declined to accept and decided to support her daughters by herself.

For those times, this was no ordinary resolve. It steeled the young girl in adversity and resoluteness. But certain customs Girijabai could not resist. By the custom of the times, Kamala was given in marriage while in her early teens – and not surprisingly, was widowed not long thereafter. What could that ‘status’ have meant to a child? In a less enlightened home, it could have meant an irreversible eclipse. But Girijabai’s home was different. Kamaladevi studied, passed her Senior Cambridge and was encouraged to pursue her interests which were clearly taking her towards the arts and theatre. She moved to the intellectual and capital of the South – Madras.

Around that time her path met that of Harindranath Chattopadhyay. A musical genius, the young Bengali had poetic and histrionic talents that could only have been matched by those of his sister, the Bulbul-e-Hind, Sarojini Naidu. Kamaladevi and Harindranath found they had shared interests and decided to marry, affronting the orthodox not just because this was, in her case, a remarriage but by its cross-regional nature. Spurred by a joint vision, this did not deflect them. ‘When poet-musician Harindranath and I teamed up it was for a sharing of dreams and ambitions to devote ourselves to create a new theatre in India,’ she writes in her memoirs.

But the real theatre of the times was not under arclights or on stage. It was being played out under the sharp daylight of non-cooperation. Kamaladevi was but sixteen when she happened to be in Bombay and attended a mammoth meeting addressed by Mahatma Gandhi. Chowpatty was ‘a sea of heads,’ she recalls, and being there she felt the power of the Mahatma’s appeal. She was enlisted into politics that day, I should imagine.

What drew Kamaladevi into that vortex was more than the self-evident political compulsion of the cause. It was the strange mix that Gandhi was offering of political regeneration and constructive renewal. Kamaladevi and Harindranath met the Mahatma and Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan. ‘Tagore felt that personality can be built up through music,’ she records. Whereas Gandhi said it was ‘to be built up through craft – the use of hands.’ Harindranath, restless by temperament and peripatetic by choice, wanted to go to England and savour its world of letters and theatre. Kamaladevi joined him there and enrolled in Bedford College, London, to read sociology and economics.

But after a brief spell there she returned home. Not because she would not have made a success of an academic course in London but because her mind was in India. She enrolled in 1924 for volunteer work – no simple badge-pinning work, let us remember, but everything that needs to be done at a mammoth gathering – at the Belgaum Congress. The session was a historic one, presided over by Gandhi himself. The Mahatma had been a volunteer in earlier Congresses himself, when still relatively unknown. Nothing was too menial or too ‘high’ for a volunteer. Kamaladevi’s presence did not go unnoticed. How could a Sakuntala have gone unnoticed! And especially when her Dushyanta, Harindranath, was as prone to short-term memory loss as the hero of Kalidasa’s epic. A drama troupe started by the two had been most successful, with ‘Abu Hasan’, the play Harindranath wrote when he was eighteen, showing to packed halls in Bombay. Another, ‘Discovery of India’ showing the progress of Indian civilization from 5000 B.C. to contemporary times had also captured popular imagination. Their son Ram had a role in that production. So here was a stage heroine boarding the nationalist train.

Within two years Kamaladevi was in the thick of mainstream politics. In 1926, elections had been called to the Madras Provincial Legislature and just on the eve of polling it was announced that women too could contest. Margaret Cousins, educationist wife of the Irish poet and playwright James Cousins, prevailed upon Kamaladevi to do so. She decided to file her nomination as an Independent, as Congress had already closed its lists. With no time available, and no resources of any kind, her debut was foredoomed. And fail it did but with the astonishingly small margin of 51 votes! Her ‘defeat’ was in fact a victory and was hailed as such. She had made a point – that in the man’s world of elections a woman could take men on as their equal.

The Congress invited Kamaladevi to become a member of the party the very next year and organise a volunteer corps in Madras, which she did with the kind of ‘to-the-manor-born’ ease she was to become celebrated for in public life. In 1927-28, Kamaladevi was elected to the All India Congress Committee, the citadel of political participation. But the citadel was not so pleasing! Not to her, anyway. She found the status of women needed to be safeguarded even there, in the very core of the freedom movement.

As batches of volunteers began to be identified for the salt satyagraha in 1930, she learnt that women were to be excluded from the enacting of that historical moment. Never awed, she went to the Mahatma. ‘The significance of a non-violent struggle,’ she put in, ‘is that the weakest can take an equal part with the strongest and share in the triumph.’ The point was conceded. Kamaladevi was one of the first to break the salt law. ‘Even as I lit my little fire to boil the salt water, I saw thousands of fires aflame dancing in the wind. The copper pans sizzled in laughter while their bosoms traced the white grains of salt and the heat lapped up the last drop of water.’

I do not think Sarojini Naidu could have improved upon her sister-in-law’s description. ‘Hail Deliverer!’ are the words which the Nightingale of India had uttered, as the Mahatma bent to pick up his fistful of salt at Dandi. Kamaladevi was at that time making a double point. The salt law needed to be broken and it needed to be broken by the sons and daughters of India, together.

Even as Gandhi was arrested, so was Kamaladevi along with hosts of others, the magistrate saying she had been responsible for more people breaking the law than anybody else! She was incarcerated at Yeravada, Poona, in the first of her many jailings which were to extend to a period of five years during different periods of the struggle. Five years are, today, thought of exclusively in terms of Lok Sabha terms and governorships. She clocked a different kind of quiennale.

In the 1932 Civil Disobedience movement, she shone as a star. By now Harindranath and Kamaladevi were pulling in different directions. He was a musical bee, humming his winged way in a garden of many flowers. She was the sole lotus in the garden pond – sublime when she was closed for him, sensational when not, as in the plays they did together. But the lotus’ decision to bloom or remain inaccessible was the lotus’s. The bee had no part in it. They parted. He, to explore other harbours and manorial hothouses. She, to remain firmly rooted in her deepening concerns. Harindranath performed and performed brilliantly. Kamaladevi just was.

There was something naturally anti-pomp in Kamaladevi. Anti-pelf and shall I say, anti-chandeliers. Her charisma glowed from a simple oil-wick in an earthen lamp. And strangely the wick remained sootfree. Naturally, she was drawn to the socialist ideal, going counter to ‘insider’ sentiment in the Congress. Becoming a founder-member of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, she was elected President of the CSP at its Meerut session in 1936. Elections took place in 1937 to the provincial legislatures and Congress won 8 out of 11 provinces, notably in Madras where Kamaladevi had done so much work in. Rajaji was to be premier of Madras. Many illustrious Congressmen were for the first time inducted into office.

I have recently come across a fascinating letter written on 5 April 1937 from the Mahatma to Jawaharlal Nehru, then President of the Congress, on the subject of women in the higher reaches of the Congress of the times. I excerpt it:

‘…Kamaladevi was travelling with us from Wardha to Madras. She was coming from Delhi. She came to my compartment twice and had long chats. At last she wanted to know why Sarojini Devi was excluded (from the Congress Working Committee), why Rukmini Lakshmipati was being kept away by Rajaji (from the Madras Ministry), why Anasuyabai was excluded, and so on. I then told her of my part in her exclusion, and told her almost all that I could remember of the note I wrote for you on that silent Monday. Of course I told her I had no hand in Sarojini’s exclusion at first or inclusion after. I told her also that Rajaji so far as I knew, had nothing to do with L’s exclusion. I thought you should know this.’

Now that was Kamaladevi at her typically determined and assertive best. Nobody was allowed to ignore womankind. Not when womankind was not ignoring the struggle. And if that meant boarding the Mahatma’s compartment between Wardha and Madras, and obtaining from him a point by point clarification, which then had to be shared with the Congress President, so be it. World War II broke out two years later and Kamaladevi addressed the Mahatma another letter, which must rank among the most important in India’s political discourse on the war. Quoting it in extenso, Gandhi wrote an article on her intervention in the Harijan of 9 October 1939. One part of that letter of Kamaladevi’s is memorable. ‘…if England and France have the right to rule over large tracts and big nations, then Germany and Italy have an equal right. There is as little moral justification in the former countries crying halt to Hitler as there is in his what he calls his rightful claims.

‘That there is a third view the world hardly seems to think, for it rarely hears it. And it is so essential that it should find expression: the voice of the people who are mere pawns in the game. Neither Danzig nor the Polish corridor are the issue. The issue is the principle on which the whole of this present Western civilization is based; the right of the strong to rule and exploit the weak.’ Kamaladevi was telling Gandhi, not very gently, that in his opposition to the Hitlerian aggression, he and the Congress were letting Britain get away too easily.

Gandhi commented in his article: ‘I agree with Kamaladevi’s analysis of the motives of the parties to the war. Both are fighting for their existence and for the furtherance of their policies. There is, however, this great difference between the two: however incomplete or equivocal the declaration of the Allies are, the world has interpreted them to mean that they are fighting for saving democracy. Herr Hitler is fighting for the extension of the German boundaries, although he was told that he should allow his claims to be submitted to an impartial tribunal for examination. He contemptuously rejected the way of peace or persuasion and chose that of the sword. Hence my sympathy for the cause of the Allies.’

In 1941 she toured the USA, making a deep impression on the Roosevelts and numerous others by her candid countering of British propaganda against the Indian national movement. She also visited China and Japan, and while in Japan roundly criticised the Japanese aggression on China.

Sanctimoniousness was something she had no time for. Words devoid of sincerity were verbiage, action which was not genuine hypocrisy. So if the Congress could not contain her, nor could the mantra of socialism. It had to prove itself in the actuality of daily life. Having been in the forefront of the Quit India movement in 1942, she became a member of the Congress Working Committee in 1946. Anyone would have expected her to gravitate from there to the Constituent Assembly. Kamaladevi declined. She had not taken to politics as a vocation! She was to turn down other offers. Saying ‘no’ came almost as an aesthetic exercise to her. She had said that most effectively to an aesthete of aesthetes after all – Harindranath himself.

Kamaladevi’s signature, incidentally, became a wonder to behold. Few signatures have its elegance. Though separated from Harindranath she had retained his surname. But the ‘C’ in capitals and the following ‘h’ in her signature intersect, making a cross, a crossing-out. I find that flourish of her carefully-held pen deeply symbolic. She did nothing without thought. A ministership of state, came her way very early on after independence. ‘If Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, very rightly, should be of cabinet rank, should I…?’ Only this time, she did not seek to interrupt the prime minister’s train journeys. The modes of leaders’ travel had also changed! Kamaraj, then chief minister of Madras, wanted her to be governor of his state and sounded Nehru. ‘Ask her,’ the PM told the CM, ‘If you can persuade her, what can be better!’ Nehru knew, Kamaraj understood, that Kamaladevi’s ambitions were not for office.

After 1947, Kamaladevi turned her attention increasingly to crafts, to the use of hands, the natural passion which had been whetted in her by Gandhi and by a valued friend, G. Venkatachalam. Setting up the Central Cottage Industries Emporium and heading the All India Handicrafts Board for a number of years, Kamaladevi became a synonym for crafts. But not for the acquiring and flaunting of objects made by hand. That she left to the ‘cultivated’ classes of Delhi.

She meant by crafts the makers of those objects, their needs and the nurturing of their genius. For her, handcrafted objects were not an elite interest, though that too she did not exclude as a natural aspect. For her crafts meant a continuum between the maker and the user of those objects, not unlike that between mrigasirsha, sravana and tulasi.

Kamaladevi came to know innumerable craftspersons intimately. And she discovered talent among city-breds in the matter of crafts-promotion. L.C. Jain, whose acquaintance she had made earlier in the matter of refugee rehabilitation, brought his formidable talents of marketing and distribution to her cause. Craftspersons thanked her for her assistance, of course. But more, they thanked her for her understanding. The World Crafts Council sought her out. And she travelled the world, meeting artists – her natural constituency – and writers, thinkers.

Kamaladevi probably had more friends in the outside world among its true ‘greats’ than anyone not in high office in India. The Roosevelts, De Valera, Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek and his wife, Chou-en-Lai, Oppenheimer – all came to know and respect her personally. Kamaladevi told me once of how an All Important Person had looked right through her at the CIE in New Delhi, only to be told within days by a visiting prime minister that she wanted ‘to see Kamaladevi more than anyone else in Delhi’ – and then being invited by the same Mightiness to a meal in honour of the visitor and being hugged ostentatiously!

She visited Sri Lanka, as Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, when I was working there, in 1978. Her visit was regarded in that country as that of an Indian stateswoman. She was better known there than many then or later in high office in India. She had first visited the island in 1931 with the Nehrus – Jawaharlal, Kamala and young Indira. Apocrypha grow like mildew around the famous. I was told by Minnette De Silva that the Kandy of 1931 was agog with rumours of Kamala Nehru strongly disapproving of her husband’s taking the other ‘lotus’ a-rowing in Kandy lake! And Kamaladevi was also remembered in Sri Lanka for her later visit in the early 1940s to help the Lanka Sama Samaj Party ‘build up’.

In her 1978 visit, she did not stop with visiting the high and positioned. Her hosts, High Commissioner Thomas Abraham and Meera Abraham had drawn up a fine itinerary for her. But she found time to include in it visits to the homes and huts of little-known mat-weavers, potters, painters and writers travelling in a bumpy jeep I was able to offer her. ‘Do you know if Manjusri is still alive?’ she asked me. I had not even heard of Manjusri at that time. Enquiries were made and the great artist of Sri Lanka’s temple paintings and decorations was traced and brought, in an ecstasy of joy, to meet Kamaladevi. Years later, when I was back in Sri Lanka, Manjusri’s son, now an acknowledged artist himself, remembered that meeting of his late father and Kamaladevi. And Chitrasena, the Lankan dancer recalled her as ‘the greatest Indian name after Gandhi and Nehru.’

All this is not to say that Kamaladevi was a beloved goddess always and everywhere. She was not. There were many who found her hard, difficult, impossible to persuade or correct when she was in error. In the iciness of her relations with the remarkable Aruna Asaf Ali, the ‘fault’ was not that of the heroine of 1942 alone, surely. And in the later lack of warm understanding between the creative and much misunderstood Pupul Jayakar too, Kamaladevi’s reserve amounting to coolness certainly played a part. Especially when it came to judging people, she was human enough to make mistakes, serious ones, of assessment. She could be taken for a ride. And many tried to do just that.

As the years advanced, and Delhi’s long shadows of indifference crept over her evenings at India International Centre, she became easy prey to the passer-by’s idle curiosity and even naughtiness. She could be made to play favourites – easy and disastrous in the world of the performing arts over which she reigned as Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi. Never dizzied by applause or dismayed by its absence, she was nonetheless susceptible to the insidious effects of Delhi-bile. She saw through games soon enough. But only after they had caused her distress and her causes, harm.

Kamaladevi was human enough to be greatly pleased when she was asked if she would accept the Padma Vibhushan. ‘I am getting it for my contribution to Letters!’ she said with barely concealed joy. Some years later when the President of the day most appropriately conferred the Bharat Ratna to Aruna Asaf Ali, Kamaladevi was not alive. If she had been, the Gods of Equity would have been displeased. It would have been like conferring that highest award to Latabai Mangeshkar before Subbulakshmi.

Kamaladevi had said no to office and power, but not to public life. Her interest in causes such as those of the tribal communities of India, of refugees and of children, was great. But great as it was, her interest in these had to be subordinated to her care for individuals. When towards the end of her days she came across the case of two boys, one of who happened to be a Hindu and the other a Sikh who were picking berries somewhere near the Punjab border between India and Pakistan and strayed absently into the ‘wrong’ side of the border and were locked up, she took up the matter with President Zia ul Haq. Her letter worked and within a few days the boys were back home. But not before they came to her personally to say thanks. Everyone else had just seen the reports in the papers and turned the page, perhaps with a tch, tch.

I remember about the same time seeing Kamaladevi in tears. ‘This girl,’ she said, ‘Anshu Saxena, has had acid thrown on her face and on her torso by a bunch of hoodlums in Meerut.’ I did not know quite how to respond. ‘You cannot imagine what that can mean to a girl.’ And then tears were replaced with rage and resolve. ‘Those men have to be given the hardest punishment there is for such an offence. But more than that I want to raise enough money to see that the girl gets the best reconstructive surgery there is. Will you help me, Gopal?’ Many people helped, not because they would have ‘even otherwise’ but because after she had spoken to them they saw the ‘case’ as a human being’s traumatic experience. Among them was the then President of India, R. Venkataraman who wrote out a handsome cheque and sent it to her with the spontaneous seriousness of something due from a diligent Roman to Caesar. Truth is a big word. So misused. And made so common. But if there is one word I would associate with Kamaladevi, it is that word.

Decades earlier, Kamaladevi’s mother had told her about truth: ‘Taste the tiny drop of its essence and you will continue to linger on it…’ Kamaladevi did that. She lingered on what seemed to her to be true and just. Its tiny drops, one by one. Be it Sarojini’s exclusion, the ordeal of two berry-pickers, Anshu Saxena’s torment. Or the dry and howling cataract of our neglect – India’s and particularly male India’s neglect – of those who ought not to be counted as ‘weak’ but are. To all these she extended her hand – the use of her hand – as Gandhi had told her. A strong-veined and bangled hand which seemed to say ‘you know, these bangles… they have been made by a remarkable couple I know in the deep of Madhya Pradesh…’

In Kamaladevi’s equation with Gandhi there was space for candour, with Nehru for firmness, with Jayaprakash for compassionate understanding. Her nationalism had room for a global outreach, her socialism for individual expression. Her work for women came from within. It came from her as the sravana breaks over Mangalore, spontaneously and torrentially. It is my conviction that had she lived some more years Kamaladevi would have organised a nationwide movement in support of women’s issues and become something of a national lodestar once again, even as Jayaprakash Narayan did in the late ’70s. And perhaps with the same disillusionment?

____________

Gopal Gandhi was the governor of West Bengal serving from 2004 through 2009. This essay was first published in Seminar 540.

 

Spinoza, Bayle, Socinians

 

 

Russ Leo

 

(Review of Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750.  Oxford University Press, 2002.  832 pp.  ISBN 978-0199254569.  Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752.  Oxford University Press, 2006.  983 pp.  ISBN 978-0199279227)

 

In her study $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (2007), A. Kiarina Kordela reads Jonathan Israel alongside Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt as proponents of “Neo-Spinozism” in contemporary philosophy and political theory.  While offering scant praise for this “Neo Spinozist” camp Kordela recognizes Israel’s intervention  beyond the field of intellectual history. Of Israel in particular she writes, “To praise Spinoza as the most philosophical force of secular modernity on the ground of arguments such as [in  Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (2001)] only makes one wonder whether it would have been better to have left him in quasi-anonymity.”

In other words, she recognizes the importance of  Radical Enlightenment  (and subsequently  Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy,  Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (2006)), the extent to which both works argue for a certain modernity as well as a revised history of modernity. Kordela’s treatment of Israel exemplifies the degree to which the concept “Radical Enlightenment” currently enjoys cross-disciplinary vogue.  It provides a useful point of entry into Israel’s attempt to retrace the Enlightenment, an attempt that is as much a critique of reigning forms and fantasies of modernity as it is an historical corrective.  For Israel, Benedictus de Spinoza is the intellectual progenitor of “the only kind of philosophy which could (and can) coherently integrate and hold together such a far-reaching value condominium in the social, moral, and political spheres, as well as in ‘philosophy’” (EC 867).

 

It is Spinoza and Spinozism which promotes the adoption of secular reason and government,  universal toleration and shared equity among all men, personal liberty, freedom of expression, and democratic republicanism.  Israel’s vision of modernity, grounded in his reconfigured Enlightenment history, is a polemical statement buttressed by an historical archive – one which critics and philosophers across disciplines, including Kordela, seem interested in recruiting or dispelling. Given the scope of his archive as well as his argument, the appeal of Radical Enlightenment is perhaps unsurprising.  In both  Radical Enlightenment  and its companion text Enlightenment Contested Israel challenges existing approaches to  and histories of the Enlightenment based on his identification of a single, coherent and continuous “radical” stream of thought.

 

This radicalism emanates from Spinoza and his Dutch circle during the mid-seventeenth century. Israel  takes issue with national histories of the Enlightenment and claims to multiple Enlightenments as well as with unsophisticated and insular histories glorifying  later eighteenth-century French and/or English innovations.  In their stead he introduces a single history of Enlightenment marked by three competing trends or forces – those of Radical Enlightenment, Moderate Enlightenment, and Anti Enlightenment, all of which are set to work as early as 1650.  Radical Enlightenment ideas cut across national, regional and confessional lines as their Spinozism takes shape (much earlier than has been accorded by historians of the Enlightenment) throughout Europe as the most thorough, systematic, and rigorous critique of the “shared core of faith, tradition, and authority” of the Middle Ages and Early Modernity (until around 1650)  (RE 3).

 

Illustrating Moderate and Anti-Enlightenment trends, Israel identifies numerous reactionary movements working to stop the torrent of Spinozistic claims and illegal texts.  These reactionary movements understand Spinozist claims as anarchic and atheistic innovations that quickly breach the limit of what is necessary to maintain order and morality in a civil (and religious) society.  Israel’s is a history where radical philosophers stand at odds not only with absolutism, tyranny, superstition, and intolerance but with an emergent Moderate Enlightenment as well.  Here we encounter an apologetic and ultimately conservative philosophical cohort working to reconcile philosophy and reason with faith, including such hallowed figures as Rene Descartes,  Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire. For Catholics, Protestants, monarchs, limited-republicans, humanists, scholastic philosophers, and philosophers of the Moderate Enlightenment alike it is the spread of Spinozism that marks the greatest threat to a well-ordered, pious, and increasingly-rational European world.

Israel’s determination of Spinoza and Spinozism first takes shape in  Radical Enlightenment. Indeed, detailed investigations of related figures and controversies surround the exegesis of Spinoza’s  oeuvre, particularly the 1670 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the posthumously-published 1677  Ethics, and the 1660-1 Korte Verhandeling.   Israel’s reading of the Korte Verhandeling in particular supports his crucial claim that Spinoza’s system was essentially determined by 1660 which, in turn, buttresses the underlying claim for Spinoza’s primacy.  He introduces such key philosophers as Franciscus Van  den Enden, Johan de la Court, Peter Cornelius Plockhoy, Johannes and Adriaen Koerbagh, and Lodewijk Meyer, as well as debates and events concerning early modern science, political theory, and the (unsuccessful) efforts on behalf of Anti- and Moderate Enlightenment forces alike to curb the publication  and distribution of radical texts and ideas.  Israel’s treatment of Johannes Bredenburg and the so-called “Bredenburg Debates,” of Balthasar Bekker, Bernard  Le Bovier de Fontanelle, and the heated disputations over superstition, oracles, and the existence of the devil reveal the degree to which Spinozism and the very name “Spinoza” became watchwords for disruptive or impious challenges to  existing beliefs and institutions. This is even the case in controversies where the so-called “Spinozists” act in the name of religion and deny the influence of such a notorious atheist and innovator.  This is perhaps nowhere as evident as in the case of Pierre Bayle, a figure who in his conflicting allegiances to the Reformed Church, to Catholicism, and to Spinozism throughout his life comes to exemplify the complex protean tenor of Radical Enlightenment  debate and exegesis.

Despite his avowed hatred for Spinoza and his declared piety, Bayle’s careful (and lengthy) treatment of Spinozism across his works led contemporary and future readers to suspect the motivation of his philosophical and theological projects. Controversial issues such as tolerance and the stated virtue of atheists led Bayle’s readers to Spinoza in spite of (or, as Israel suggests, in accord with) his declared intentions.

 

Much of the work of Radical Enlightenment – indeed, what makes it an invaluable intervention in the history of Enlightenment thought as well as in the history of religion – lies in Israel’s attention to lesser-known figures and, ultimately, to the lesser-known Dutch context of early modernity.  This is not to accuse Israel of merely producing a rival national history to counter existing English or French varieties; on the contrary, the Netherlands of Radical Enlightenment takes shape as a porous polity populated by a number of political  and religious refugees and communities in exile.  Publishing in the Netherlands retains an international character and the range of figures that spent significant time in the region, including Locke and John Toland, is striking.  Nevertheless, it is attention to the Dutch context that enables Israel’s most scouring critique of existing histories of Enlightenment (namely those of Peter Gay and Margaret C. Jacob), where the celebrated innovations of Locke, Newton, and Voltaire are rendered conservative in comparison to their lesser-known contemporaries, the victims of national histories.

 

Enlightenment Contested  extends the earlier argument to account for the emergence of France as a crucial theater in the contest between rival versions of Enlightenment.  Here he locates the work of such figures as Bayle, Voltaire,Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesqiueu, and Denis Diderot in relation to Spinoza and Spinozism and in opposition to trans-national Jesuitical, Jansenist, and Reformed movements working to limit (albeit in opposition to one another as well) Radical Enlightenment.  The narrative is not one of philosophy versus religion, however; neither is it an easy contest between political forms, between oppressive despotic regimes and their republican discontents.  Enlightenment Contested advances a more intricate competition over ideas (as in the preceding volume), identifying divergent philosophies and theologies according to the tripartite scheme: Radical, Moderate, or Anti-Enlightenment.  While much of the work retraces the spread of Spinozism beginning with Bayle, Israel eschews another investigation of Spinoza’s Spinozism and that of his immediate circle.

He proceeds, rather, through a series of controversies and topics; Israel’s treatments of Socinianism (a key theological movement which  Radical Enlightenment  referenced without explanation), tolerance, deism and physicotheology, Hobbesian thought and forms of republicanism, monarchy and representation, humanism, and the new discipline of the History of Philosophy all foreground rival versions of Enlightenment.  Particularly salient is his exploration of various approaches to Islam, Confucianism and Chinese political formations, race, gender, sexuality, and debate over what is now known as evolution.

 

Here Israel continues to extend his thesis beyond Europe, offering key, albeit brief, Enlightenment scenes from Russia and China as well as the New World, where Jonathan Edwards comes to stand in as a sort of representative Moderate or Anti-Enlightenment colonial informant.  His exemplary attention to Germany and the Baltic region works to expose additional contexts for the transmission of radical ideas and their subsequent effects in various political and religious landscapes, giving the reader a more capacious understanding of the scope of Enlightenment.  In order to make a case for the spread of radical ideas, particularly Spinozism, Israel attends not only to  philosophical ideas but explicitly to the materials and emergent institutions of Radical Enlightenment across both volumes, investigating censorship laws  and the contents of “universal” libraries as well as the strategic publication of illegal books and the circulation of clandestine philosophical manuscripts.  This is one of the stronger points in Israel’s narrative, lending credence to an otherwise unfamiliar and estranging notion of Enlightenment and historical philosophy as well as to many heretofore-unknown clandestine documents.

 

But while Israel is clearly capable of tracing the  spread of ideas among philosophical circles and within certain religious institutions and organs of state, neither  Radical Enlightenment  nor  Enlightenment Contested  seem able to make a case for the dissemination of Spinozistic ideas among the general European population.  His thesis is particularly difficult to accept outside of literate aristocratic circles and specialized reading groups.  Israel traces the ubiquity of the name “Spinoza” as well as the often-derogatory use of the term “Spinozism” (or some variation) to refer to any number of radical philosophical claims yet this does little more than establish familiarity with the name alone.  The thesis wants evidence of the supposedly wide spread of Spinozistic ideas themselves.  A brief tour through mid-seventeenth-century heresiographies (particularly in English, during the turbulent 1640s and 1650s) might have shed new light on the circulation of Spinozism as a term without content, or at least without the radical content Israel is looking for.  Heresiographies are notorious for misrepresenting ideas for popular audiences and comparative work might distinguish Israel’s claims for a more substantial dissemination based on the recognition of “Spinozism” from more dubious terms.  While the histories of radical materials are often compelling one is nevertheless left with the feeling that some aspect of this very material history has been omitted, that the print histories Israel offers are somewhat incomplete: what audiences did such texts expect? How were the texts read? Who was able to obtain radical texts, besides philosophes?  Did they circulate with similar philosophical materials or with clandestine or illicit books of a more general sort?  My reservation is that when “Spinozism” is understood as a general period term for atheism, for secularism, for reason and Enlightenment, it might also come to stand for a type of literature common to a more general trade in pornography and satire, recalling a more familiar terminology proper to libertinism.  Whether or not this is the case is unclear in Israel’s work.

 

In support of his basic argument – that Enlightenment is transnational and continuous, marked by varying degrees of acceptance but ultimately stemming from an initial systematic critique in Spinozism – Israel often writes defensively.  In some of the most unfortunate moments across the two books we encounter Israel championing his own methods and determinations of liberation against parodic summations of his intellectual opponents’ arguments – those of social historians, “postmodernist and postcolonialist philosophers,” and critics of Enlightenment projects (notably, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre). Despite the reaction to his work across disciplines, such moments lead one to wonder which debates Israel imagines his work intervening in.  In short, Israel’s most polemical moments, which often act as bookends for his more substantial investigations, stand conspicuously against his treatment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materials.

 

This is particularly evident in Israel’s determination of secularism, a term which he locates at the center of radical thought and which becomes  the measure against which philosophers are classified as “Radical” or “Moderate.”  Israel is correct in identifying numerous critical approaches to religion (and to Christianity in particular), especially in the aftermath of the Reformation and its attendant violent conflicts, just as he is correct  in locating in Spinozism a particularly thorough and systematic statement against a particular sort of religion.  But in what ways is Spinoza’s philosophy “secular”?  This is a question that Israel answers too quickly, eschewing the investigations of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish influences that have figured prominently in competing studies of Spinozism.  This is not to chastise Israel (or his Spinoza) for their trenchant critiques of religion nor is it an attempt to apologize for religion in any general sense.  What Israel misses is the extent to which various religious movements or interventions make possible the very “secular” achievements in thought he seems to champion.  Israel’s thesis – that the true Enlightenment began with Spinoza and with Spinozism, the only strains of thought which truly deserve to be called “Radical” – carries with it a  dismissive determination of secularism.

 

Not every critique of religion is necessarily secular, even when the critique is as systematic as Spinoza’s ontology.  Secularism is an argument or set of practices working toward a particular vision of modernity.  It is not merely the opposite of religion nor is it necessarily a form of atheism.  Numerous interventions across a number of fields teach us otherwise, from the work  of Hans Blumenberg, Michael J. Buckley, and Marcel Gauchet to that of John Milbank, William E. Connolly, Charles Taylor and Talal Asad (and this is, of course, only scratching the surface).

 

But in Israel’s work secularism is taken for granted and conflated with Spinoza’s project and with his apparent atheism.  In this way Israel seems  not to contend with certain important trends in Spinoza scholarship either, ignoring the possibility of Spinozism as an alternative to confessional forms of  religion and to secularism, as a philosophical movement that offers something  else entirely.  I refer to the work of Antonio Negri and Yirmiyahu Yovel in particular, both of whom make compelling cases for a certain continuity between  religious or mystical languages and concepts and Spinoza’s own innovative philosophy.

 

Moreover, Spinoza’s supposedly secular and atheistic philosophical monism is further conflated with a kind of universalism, a claim that enables Israel to locate in Spinozism the only conceivable way to posit the inherent equality of all men.  Despite his early attention to Spinoza’s ontology in Radical Enlightenment, by the end of  Enlightenment Contested  Spinoza’s complicated and intricate ontological intervention (particularly in his Ethics) risks devolving into a blanket universalism which Israel is able to locate across a wide spectrum of writers.  Israel’s picture, in turn, becomes more a clash of universalisms – religion versus secularism – rather than a more nuanced vision of the many conflicting approaches to secularism and to religious life.

 

Israel’s determination of secularism is more than a theoretical problem.  It is reflected in his treatment of historical resources.  This is evident in his treatment of Socinianism across  Radical Enlightenment  and  Enlightenment Contested, an important heretical movement impacting sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European confessions in its threatening approaches  to Scripture and reason. While Israel is correct in affirming the importance of Socinianism he is markedly incorrect in his summary of Socinian beliefs and practices; what he understands as “a denial of Christology” and “a thoroughgoing scepticism about miracles” is in fact a more subtle understanding of doctrine emphasizing adiaphora and anti-Trinitarian thought (EC 123).  He concedes Radical  Enlightenment status to Socinianism (despite disputations between Socinian  Frans Kuyper and Bredenburg, with the former championing Moderate Enlightenment principles against quasi-Spinozism (RE 347-358)) on the grounds that it comes close to a supposedly-Spinozan “freedom of thought and a comprehensive toleration” (EC 123) rather than its (more accurate) alternative comportment to orthodoxy and belief itself.  Ultimately Socinianism is only important or radical based on its apparent similarity to Spinozism, a similarity that we are told is merely tactical on Spinoza’s part.

 

But while Socinianism is misunderstood it is Israel’s treatment of English Revolution philosophers, theologians, and social theorists that is most puzzling. Figures as diverse as Gerard Winstanley, John Milton, Roger Williams, John Lilburne, Anna Trapnel, Edward Sexby, and Abiezer Coppe, Lucy Hutchinson, translator of Lucretius, or Margaret Cavendish are elided based on Israel’s deployment of secularism which in turn shapes his understanding of radicalism.  This is particularly  frustrating given his disproportionate attention across the two books to  the bourgeois sources and contexts of continental radicalism; given the opportunity to read the English vein of radicalism with or against continental trends, Israel discounts such sources based on their religious character and what he reads as their relative simplicity.

In his own words, “the pantheism of a Winstanley had a theological, strongly poetic, even magical quality, and altogether lacked the pretensions to philosophical rigour characteristic of Spinoza, the Dutch Spinozists, and the British Deists of the Early Enlightenment” (RE 601).  Thus we are left with an English scene characterized by Thomas Hobbes and Oliver Cromwell, neither of which Spinoza liked, based on limited secular criteria.

 

Israel’s treatment of English Revolution texts – and, subsequently, scholarship of mid-century radical writing in English – points to  his dismissal of Dutch capitalism in its capacity to shape the Enlightenment and to the economic situation informing Spinoza’s philosophical project. His Spinoza and Spinozism work to enable a personal liberty as well as a notion of individualism itself that is not necessarily apparent in other historical versions of Spinozism or of modernity itself.  The degree to which this determination of Spinozism – and, indeed, radicalism – is in fact shaped by commitments to political and economic forms of liberalism departs from other recent Spinozisms (in particular, Negri’s).

Both Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested will undoubtedly remain standard references for future histories of Enlightenment as well as of Spinozism, Cartesianism, and a host of other philosophical figures and movements, and for good reason.  It is an erudite and convincing project insofar as Israel presents Enlightenment as an inclusive pan-European trade in competing claims and methods, supported by detailed investigations of its materials and institutions.  Nevertheless, Israel’s secular vision of Enlightenment carries with it a number of risks. Despite the thrilling recuperations of various figures and texts; despite his romance with Spinozism which reveals other histories of the Enlightenment and their champions as reactionary and subordinate; even despite the ambition and scope of such a project and the invigorating energy it brings to scholarly debate, Israel’s treatment of secular modernity leads to a  series of challenges in understanding the stakes of Spinozism as well as of religious dissent, even within orthodox traditions.  It leads one to wonder what the term “radical” is capable of doing in recasting the history of modernity under secularism, and certainly to question what form of emancipatory modernity Israel presents.  Even in praise of the book I offer, after Spinoza, a word: caute.

 

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Russ Leo is Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. He will join the Faculty in the English Department at Princeton University in Fall 2012. This review article was first published as “Caute: Jonathan Israel’s Secular Modernity,” in Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 9. no. 2 (Summer 2008): 76-83.

 

 

Pancho Adrienzén, Late 1970s & Peruvian Films

NOTE ON PERU IN THE 1970s

In October 1968, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry was ousted in a military coup and succeeded by General Juan Velasco Alvarado. Velasco’s government was one of contradictions. It combined nationalizations; recognition of Cuba; agrarian, educational, and labor reform; Third Worldist rhetoric and behavior; repression of the working class; and imposition of an enormous foreign debt which led the country into a severe recession. The left was split by these contradictions, with the Peruvian Communist Party and other elements supporting the regime while others vehemently opposed it. In August 1975, General Francisco Morales Bermúdez replaced Velasco and led the country rightward. By 1977 the country had entered a depression and was subjected to “stabilization” measures by the International Monetary Fund: devaluation of the sol, a high rate of inflation, and harsh restriction of wage increases. The period was marked by growing labor militancy, including general strikes in 1978 and 1979; by the election of a constitutional assembly in 1978; and finally by new elections in 1980, with Belaúnde returning to power. The left parties united temporarily, but tragically and irresponsibly they split just before the elections, and so fared very poorly.

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JUMP CUT: Describe the formation of your group.

Pancho Adrienzén: We came together to project films. In 1970 repression in the universities was very severe. The only way for students to organize politically was through clubs where they could link cultural and political work: film clubs, theater clubs, song clubs, and so on. Through the film clubs we could help students grow in their political consciousness by showing Cuban, Chinese, and Soviet films. But we always intended that our work reach beyond the university. From the beginning we showed films three or four times a week in unions and barriadas (poor communities circling Lima). We never exhibited films just for the love of films but clearly understood the political usefulness of such work.

Our film exhibition project originally started out from a mass-based, neighborhood, organizing project in a barriada. Showing films let us get people together and carry out activities that would keep people thinking of themselves as active social agents. The project let us, as a group, work collectively. The films chosen served to highlight various social problems, show other countries’ realities, and demonstrate — in a small but very important way — that there is another kind of cinema. People also have to learn to look at commercial film with other eyes.

What was the political stance of your group?

Our vision of the world was Marxist, but we had members from different political groups. We never privileged any international line or position. We were in reality a broad political front. For all of us the fundamental factor was that the epoch of President Velasco was a reformist epoch: there would be no basic structural changes. Our effort was to help citizens of the barriadas and workers to organize independently and not succumb to the reformist propaganda of the government. It was this effort that united us and motivated us to work, and it is an effort we have been carrying out for almost ten years now. We want to use film as a weapon, as a way to forge independent, popular organizing and peoples coming to consciousness. Two films which we have distributed a lot come closest to our way of thinking: Eisenstein’s OCTOBER and a Cuban film by Manuel-Octavio Gomez about the literacy campaign, HISTORIA DE UNA BATALLA. The work in the university above all helped us to form a core group of politically committed, technically competent people.

Have you changed your strategies over the years?

Yes. In the beginning it was rather dispersed work, based on individual initiative and good will. After a while we became more organized, forming a group which took on responsibilities that obligated each of us to commit ourselves to the plan of work. We had weekly meetings where we discussed the political side of what had gone on, evaluated our activities, and planned new projects. Sometimes we even met two or three times a week — almost continuously. Many of us also became interested in aspects of production, in taking photographs and trying some filming.

There was another development. At first a union would invite us to show a film for its anniversary or because it needed to raise funds or for some other reason. But we soon became dissatisfied with this process. We would show a film, a lot of people would come, there would be a political discussion about film, then people would go home. There was no follow through. And the unions did not get a lot of support because the whole thing was very sporadic and did not lead to any constant progression in the political consciousness of the working class. So we decided that every time a union invited us, we would commit them to a cycle of four or six films, shown in the same location and with a certain political rationale. For example, we could project a series on countries that had suffered repression, or countries that had struggled for liberation: Vietnam, China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. We also learned from this experience to apply the same policy in the barriadas.

We learned at the same time to hold preliminary discussions with union and community leaders, so that they would understand the importance of each film. Thus, they were the ones who always presented the films and led the discussions. This is how we collaborated in the organizing of unions. From 1970 to 1973-1974, a great number of unions were formed in Peru, class-conscious unions. With these film projections we assisted in organizing those unions.

Did you work with any particular political organization?

We have worked with all the political organizations on the left: organizations opposed to right parties such as APRA and Acción Popular or SINAMOS (Sistema Nacional de Apoyo á la Movilización Social — the government’s branch intended to organize peasant collectives and other local units). And we have refused to work in places where left organizations were in conflict. We were once asked to show a film in a place where two groups were contending for control in very competitive, partisan terms, with a political line very distanced from popular reality and not thinking of what was best for the people at all. So, we did not go. Our purpose is to support the development of leftist organizations in sectors where there is class-consciousness of a struggle against the organizations of the right and of the government.

Were there differences in your work in the unions and in the barriadas?

Yes, we showed different kinds of films and varied the manner of presentation. A very political, very revolutionary film, like Eisenstein’s OCTOBER, had impressive success in the unions. I recall that during times of conflict, of miners’ strikes, people responded to OCTOBER as if it showed them the road. Such showings really made a great impression on me. They were euphoric. People would come out like … Well, if a soldier or a police car had passed by just then, they could have burned it! But films like OCTOBER, which implied a certain political development in the viewer, would not produce the same effect in barriadas or peasant communities. So for them we turned to films with mainly social content, like Buñuel’s LOS OLVIDADOS. We would take films borrowed from embassies, the French or Czech embassy, for example. Or Cuban films, like Tomás Gutierrez Alea’s THE TWELVE CHAIRS, not political, but rich in social content. We used Chaplin often. His films permit a lot of social commentary and attract a large crowd. We’d begin with such films in a series and end with others that elicited — a more strictly political discussion.

Describe if you can a discussion resulting from one of these showings. How would people discuss a Chaplin film?

We’d often begin with comparisons. Compare, for example, the Chaplin film with contemporary feature films or television soap operas. Different kinds of plots favor different kinds of characterizations. In many of his films Charlie Chaplin plays a vagabond, a poor person, or someone dominated by others — but his films also have a message of hopefulness. We want people to be able to criticize mainstream cinema so as to create a public for alternative, political cinema.

Sometimes we work through churches, who have the projection apparatus and the locations, and who let organized groups, clubs, and associations run the meetings.

Does the church support the left?

Institutionally, not so much, but pastors feel they have to. The state clearly acts in a hostile way towards ordinary people, and the pastor either has to be on the side of the state or on the side of the people. Sometimes we block off a street to show a film, sometimes we put up a screen after mass and the people stay after church. The churches have also been very advanced in preparing filmstrips with cassette tapes and so have exhibition facilities for those.

What kinds of repression have you faced and how have you dealt with it?

Well, we advertise these as cultural events, run by a local organization. Right-wing parties and many religious groups have cultural events in the barriadas, too. By working with established political groups, we have had minimal public visibility, both personally and organizationally. This gave us a lot of security, and gave our equipment and films protection too. And if we would go into an area like the sierra, where there was a miner’s strike, and therefore severe police repression — including the thorough searching of cars between cities or on the one road leading into town — we would travel separately from the films and projector. But while we were going to exhibit films to fishermen in the big national fishing industry strike, the police confiscated one of our three projectors and before returning it, took off an arm, which we have never been able to replace. For that reason, we will never travel with a projector again, only with films. And for other reasons, too, we have decided to center our activities in Lima and not disperse ourselves. For a while I was projecting films almost every day, often in two different places each Saturday and Sunday. It caught up with me, and we can’t let activism damage us like that.

Really our film showings have always been political, not aesthetic, events. We show films to bring out issues, to increase leftist understanding, for example, of workers in the middle of a unionizing drive. Our film showings give support to the leftists working within the union. The film and the discussion after it increase rank and file consciousness about left politics or a left political analysis. This is one of the reasons why we always have a preview screening and a mini-discussion beforehand with the group’s leaders and then have that group present the film to its own people — a double process of cinematic and political education.

Our main political goal is to increase political awareness and class-consciousness among ordinary people. It is only education and pressure from the base that will force unity on the left and keep the left parties from just fighting among themselves. When there was a Constitutional Assembly, the over thirty left parties that have sprung up since the Velasco era did not consult with their popular base on proposals for the Constitution, not even with the base of their own party. The left parties were heavily criticized by the masses for that, and many of them seem to be responding more to the people’s demands.

One of our members belonged to a left party. But when he went around projecting films to every workers’ organization and left-organized community project in Lima, he saw the limits of his own group. Economic changes in Peru have been so drastic, and left parties have been so backward in keeping up with these changes, that just opening your eyes and talking constantly to people is an important step. It lets you get information and see what the situation is. This is why our group has always basically been a communications group.

In the barriadas, how many would come for the projections and how many would remain for the discussions?

We average 150 to 200 persons, because in the barriada people love film, and because the films we show are very cheap, five to ten cents. Sometimes we don’t charge. When we do charge, it’s just enough to pay for our taxi or for someone to carry the projector, and to have a little fund to buy a new bulb for the projector and so on. We get some support from friends to repair the films and help with costs. This does not help us get ahead with our own film work, but our purpose is to take the films to people at an affordable rate.

About half the crowd will stay on for the discussion. Usually a very small percentage of the people speak. You find the same fear as in the university cinema clubs, the fear of not being a cinema specialist and therefore not knowing enough to contribute. Where there is broad political development in a zone, then there is greater participation, because people see the connection of the film to their collective work.

Sometimes, people don’t meet our expectations in reacting to a film. We showed LUCIA (Humberto Solás, Cuba 1968) quite a bit in 1972 and 1973. We expected people to like the third episode best, but they liked the second, because there was more action. Regrettably, many of them would praise the husband for dominating his wife in the third episode. With MANUELA (Solás, 1966) they would be enamored of the action and romance and little more.

In the unions, it was different. Participation was much greater, because the workers have political preoccupations and well-formed opinions. And they would focus on class struggle itself, the nature of armed struggle, say, in LUCIA and MANUELA. Projecting films at their political meetings usually results in their taking up distinct positions in the discussion afterward. Their debate is much richer.

THE POLITICS OF FILMMAKING IN PERU

You told us earlier that in 1975 there was a conjunction of very favorable factors for the film movement in Peru. Could you tell us about that period?

Yes, I’ll need to give you a little background first on the Film Law and censorship. Peruvian cinema as it is now began with the Film Law in the early months of 1973. We had film before that, but no support for it. You could not produce shorts, because there was no place they could be exhibited. The new law stimulated the production of a great quantity of shorts [by means of a tax rebate — trans. note]. But there is a problem. Look at the films from the first year after the law. They are of three types. There are auteur films, like those of Robles Godoy, and films to make money, including industrial films. Then there’s EL CARGADOR/ THE PORTER, about a foot-carrier of heavy loads in the Andes. This documentary study by Lucho Figueroa is a film with a certain social interest, showing Peruvian reality. The vast majority of the shorts then and since have been of the second type.

The problem for filmmakers like Figueroa was and is censorship. Censorship occurs in two stages in Peru. First the films are qualified for adults or minors. The films then go to the Commission for Promotion of Film (COPROCI) to receive authorization to exhibit, another form of censorship. If a film passes the first censorship, but is denied authorization for theater exhibition, it can still be shown in film clubs, unions, and schools. Nora de Izcue’s RUNAN CAYCU, for instance, a film about peasant struggles leading up to The Agrarian Reform Law of 1969, did not pass the first stage and so cannot be shown publicly under any circumstances. Ñawi (Eye) Cinematic Production’s EL FOTÓGRAFO DEL PARQUE/ PARK PHOTOGRAPHER is a documentary film on the itinerant salespeople, the food sellers, beggars, and so on, who make up the reality of University Park in Lima. It was passed at the first stage but not at the second (until two years later).

So producers become frightened. They don’t want to invest in films with social themes. In spite of this, some filmmakers still insisted on making films about social problems, but they were censored or denied the right to exhibit. Examples are Izcue’s RUNAN CAYCU; Fico Garcia’s HUANDO, a film about a strike by workers at the Hacienda “Huando”; and TIERRA SIN PATRONES/ LAND WITHOUT LANDLORDS, a film documenting peasant struggles up to the Agrarian Reform Law of 1969. Other censored works include the group Liberación sin Rodeos’ (Liberation without Detours’) UNA PELICULA SOBRE JAVIER HERAUD / A FILM ABOUT JAVIER HERAUD, on the Peruvian poet-guerrilla killed in 1963); and NIÑOS CUSCO/ CHILDREN OF CUSCO, a film about Andean peasant children.

This situation, which began in 1973, had certain consequences in the ideological and political terrain. Film people began to organize to protest against the outrages of the state, against the censors, and against COPROCI. The workers organized to combat the film companies; in 1974 they formed the Union of Film Industry Workers (SITEIC). At the same time, the workers in distribution and exhibition formed the Federation of Film Workers (FETCINE). Simultaneously came the famous transference of the newspapers from private and wealthy owners to the government, in July of 1974. Those of us who wrote for the film magazines Hablemos de cine and Cinematógrafo went to work as critics for the newspapers. We had access to a medium that before had been closed. This access, together with the organization of the film workers and their conflict with the government and the industry, permitted us to open a wide debate about Peruvian cinema. This debate lasted throughout 1975 and into the early months of 1976. Its fundamental issue was how to give political content to Peruvian film.

What kind of problems did people in production have?

A fundamental problem was that their films were not approved by COPROCI. They could not make the films they wanted to. Then there were labor problems for those working for companies: low salaries, sporadic and infrequent working hours, no right to work, no life security, and so on. People working in distribution and exhibition are still very exploited. They do not have stable work, and the government refuses to recognize their union.

The various production workers, the critics, and the actors’ union reached the point of uniting in a Front for the Defense of the National Cinema. This Front entered into a lengthy discussion over how to take up the struggle for a national cinema, a cine popular, a cinema which expressed the interests of the majority. This discussion had a basic political and ideological purpose, the defense of freedom of expression.

It sounds good, but we in the Front had problems and committed serious errors. For instance, there was infighting between groups of different tendencies in the Front, and we failed to arrive at a correct political direction. We identified two fundamental enemies: North American business with its control of the film market; and the state, which being capitalistic and bourgeois defends its interests through a castrating censorship which cuts off all initiative and development.

If we understand correctly, this is part of a general national situation. The state subsidizes multinational companies and makes it very difficult for native industry to develop on its own. It’s a situation which creates unemployment and underemployment at many levels.

Yes, it is the same. Our problem was that we had identified the enemies to strike, but we had no consensus on whom to strike first. A related problem was that we did not agree on our orientation. The film critics thought we needed to develop an ideology for the movement before further developing its politicization, although that should be happening simultaneously as well. Others believed the opposite, and for them it was most important to attack North American imperialism directly through the multinational companies. In addition, the movement did not actually advance much beyond pure initial emotion, an emotion without perspective, on the struggle.

But there was a strike at this time, wasn’t there?

Yes, we carried out various actions. The FETCINE people had strikes, which received a decent amount of support. Juan Bullita and I published two sections in our Sunday page in the Correo. One contained authentic Marxist film criticism plus commentary and news. In the other we addressed problems in the cinema movement. We published the communications of the unions and federations. We reported their struggles with the censors. This we did from July of 1974 until November or December of 1975. There were also projections of films, discussions of a political and ideological type, and marches and demonstrations by film people.

And production?

No. We lacked production for various reasons. First, film people’s political and ideological development was very weak, and continues to be very weak. Second, in the vacuum of opportunity for our development, we had few technical groups capable of producing political films. Those who intended to make political film lacked resources and equipment. Third, the left faced a series of discrepancies. The Revolutionary Vanguard and the Revolutionary Communist Party, for example, did not agree at all. Red Fatherland could not agree with the Revolutionary Left Movement. As a result of this very marked sectarianism, the few people in film who wished to make political film found little consistent support. It was difficult to form crews. There were some experiences in super-8, but very limited work at the bases, for one or another union. SITEIC turned out one number of a newsreel, but that was all.

There were a few films. Nora de Izcue made RUNAN CAYCU (in 1973, but the battle over whether it should be exhibited lasted into 1974-1975). Liberación sin Rodeos made a film on Javier Heraud, the guerrilla poet, an honest but sentimental film without a real leftist point of view. The group Liberación sin Rodeos tried to make other films, including an interesting project on black slaves in Peru in the nineteenth century, but did not finish them. Then there was Bruma Films, a group of Chileans and Peruvians who came from Chile after the coup in 1973. They had a good amount of political maturity and clarity. They made a rather important film, TEATRO EN LA CALLE/ STREET THEATER in 1974 about the street theater actor Jorge Acuña in Lima, and a film called VIA PÚBLICA, about the itinerant salespeople of Lima. They also made two other shorts, EN CADENAS/ MY CHAINS about a barriada, and NECESITA MUCHACHA/ MAID NEEDED about domestic employees.

So there wasn’t much political production. And this limited our discussion. It was also limited by the fact that we were mainly fighting for democratic conditions within the system’s structure of production, and we were not planning alternate cinema at the system’s margins.

Why this last limitation?

The main reason was the filmmakers’ ideological weakness. The majority of FETCINE who wanted to make films did not want to make a political commitment. So they might think of films that were slightly radical, but within the system. In short, they were not militants.

So what happened to the movement of 1974-1975?

Because of the debate over whom to strike first, because of the uncertainty whether to start with the ideological or political, and because of the lack of accord between various sectors, including the industry and critics, the government was able to carry out a very effective maneuver in 1975. It created a commission to compose a new general law for the film industry, for production, distribution, exhibition, cinema clubs, everything to do with film. It sent out a call to distributors, producers, workers, actors, and critics to help plan the law. It tricked us: the endeavor immobilized us. All of our forces were channeled into this new law. We met every afternoon four or five times a week for six months, piled up papers full of projects, and all for a law that never saw the light of day, that the government never intended to enact.

At the same time, the union entered into a political struggle against the company owners at a time when the union’s forces were insufficient. It went on strike and its members were fired. It also fought legally, with a grievance to the Ministry of Labor, and it lost there too. The government first recognized the union, then decided not to recognize it. Part of the problem was that the union lacked clear political and ideological preparation. There was too much infighting, and it is said that Revolutionary Vanguard used the union for its own political ends. The result was that the union entered a period of political crisis and dissolved.

The critics also had contradictions that we still haven’t resolved. These contradictions made it difficult for us to deal with the increasingly tougher newspaper censorship, in 1976, under the more rightist government of General Morales. All of this added up, and the film movement failed. Most filmmakers now do not want anything to do with the word union, because of the failure of this movement.

But for a year now there has been an Association of Filmmakers. We realize that it also was organized by the government, by COPROCI.

Yes, another trick, partly intended to be divisive. The original union included film workers of all kinds, including independent workers, who work part time or work by contract for small companies. Most of the workers in the industry are independent workers. But there are also those called the filmmakers: the qualified technicians, the directors, the liberties. It was well planned, very well organized, and our proposals carried the day. We also got an agreement among the participants that the government had to respond in sixty days to our accords. This was all producers, in other words the petite bourgeoisie, well paid and considered above the workers. Government functionaries utilized this division, wooing the better-paid group with promises of greater production liberties and better exhibition possibilities.

This brings us to July 1977, when COPROCI organized a seminar of filmmakers, not workers, to evaluate Peruvian Cinema and to present a series of proposals for new laws to the government. Somewhat wiser this time, a group of left filmmakers, and critics used the seminar for our own purposes. We prepared our own proposals. For example, in the area of censorship, we proposed that films from all countries be allowed to enter Peru, that COPROCI not be a censorship body composed of technicians and functionaries of the state, that it not have representatives from the armed forces, that it have representatives from among the critics and film people. The entire series of proposals had to do with democratic very fine. But in fact the government complied with none of our proposals. The only one they complied with, aside from a minor concession, was creation of the Association of Filmmakers.

And what kind of body is the Association? Do you belong?

No, I do not belong. It exists under the government. The people who did form it have hopes that it will help build the Peruvian film industry. For them, that means collaborating with COPROCI and avoiding political and ideological discussion. They think that if they develop the industry, then they will be able to make more progressive films.

I believe this is the government’s game to demobilize film people, stifle their politicization, and stop them from even beginning to make films with progressive content. Films now are technically very professional, yet they  have no analysis of reality, representation of contradictions. Most of our filmmakers are turning their backs on their country. The Association perspective is mistaken. It means no ample debate over the possibilities and realities of Peruvian cinema. For two years now — since the seminar — no one has wanted to discuss anything about Peruvian cinema. If the Association’s notions prevail, they will always think political cinema lies somewhere in the future. Yet political knowledge can only come through struggle.

In making films that reach the theaters for two, three, four years, when the time comes to make political films about Peruvian reality, they will not know how to do it.

Right! Last year, 1978, was a year never seen before in the history of Peru, rich in popular struggles: the strike by SUTEP (the national teachers’ union), strikes by the miners, national campaigns for the Constitutional Assembly, the land seizures. And the filmmakers were not present. A few of us were there, but we lack the experience of those who have worked more consistently in film, and we do not have their economic resources.

A POLITICAL FILM-MAKING PROJECT

What can you tell us about the film your friends are working on now?

It records the struggles of a barriada here in Lima, its effort to gain political recognition and to prevent SINAMOS from interfering in its affairs. The barriada was formed in 1974, and at the end of 1977 the residents undertook a redistribution of the zone. Let me explain. When land is first invaded on the outskirts of a city, everyone grabs their own piece of land. Afterwards, when everything is more or less organized, then the space becomes redistributed and shared according to the necessities of each person. This took place in 1977 independently of the government, through the people’s good will. A friend who works and lives in that barriada contacted a friend of mine, and he went out to film the redistribution, because the people wanted a record of how it was actually done. So, without any greater perspective, he shot a little over a half hour, on how they organized the houses, how they live, and a few other things like a small police tank arriving to obstruct their work, some marches in the zone. But he had no precise idea of what to do with the material. He financed this half-hour with the aid of friends who gave him some outdated film still in good condition. And he had, as is always the case, the backing of friends, film technicians who could give him access to labs and equipment, and so on. After the filming, a German group that had come to Peru contributed some money, so my friend and his collaborators were able to make a positive answer print.

The next step was to show their material to the people of the barriada. They wanted the residents’ opinions, wanted to know from them what to do with the material. They cut out the bad shots, put a certain order to it, and made a more or less parallel sound track on cassette tape. They projected it twice, first for the community leaders, about fifty people, and then for the entire community. Technically, the material is not very good; they did not have light meters, used hand-held camera, and so on. But this was not important to the audience. The film made a strong impression on them, not only because of their excitement at seeing themselves on film, but also because they saw a segment of their struggle. With high participation and after considerable discussion, they asked from the filmmakers a history of that barriada from start to present.

So they went forward, interviewing different sectors of the population on how they organized to take the land. There is one twelve-minute interview with a family who were involved in a confrontation with the police. My friend also filmed more material on living conditions in the zone, more interviews on present conditions and problems.

Significantly, in this struggle, the entire population participated and it was a big battle — with people wounded, kidnapped, and killed.

What do they show of the struggle? How will they show it?

They were able to get photographs of a moment of the struggle, of one very important struggle in particular, where during a strike three people, including two children, were killed in a confrontation with the navy.

How are they going to render the struggle politically?

Politically, there are a number of factors. First, they make it clear in the film that this barriada is typical; they show that the same conditions exist elsewhere in Peru. Second, they examine a particular popular movement, which is exemplary and inspiring. Third, they consider it important that the people who carried out the struggle have seen the film and contributed to its form and content. Fourth, they show the state’s economic and political interest in having people continue to live under these conditions and in insuring that barriadas do not organize independently from the state, from SINAMOS. This is one of the few peasant-migration barriadas which won its battle against SINAMOS, which got construction money on its own terms. And, fifth, in opposition to the state, they show the break from SINAMOS; they show the importance of the barriada’s being organized independently and acting together to choose its own destiny. This is more or less the film’s central idea.

What stage is the film at now?

They have about two hundred feet more to film, some details, another interview or so, and then the editing. They have sufficient financing now to finish the film in the next half year. They are experiencing a little difficulty in the barriada itself. As a result of the killings, the people have withdrawn a little, and it has a new directorship. But they do not expect this to hinder them much. In addition to the remaining filming, they feel they need to undertake some self-criticism, both to improve their editing of this film and for the sake of future projects.

What do you anticipate will come out in the self-criticism?

For one thing, although two of them worked on the project with the support of many others, they failed to put together a film crew which worked consistently on this film and would be ready to make more films in the future. Also, they meant to have a more collective process in making the film, but isolated themselves from people at the base. They did consult with the residents about the general direction of the film, but did not work closely with them; the filmmakers did not share the film and therefore the people did not participate fully enough. The fault lies partly in failure to consolidate a crew, partly in economic problems. My friend, for one, could not afford to work on the film all the time that was necessary. Being aware of this error, they will now consult with the people before beginning to edit, so the people can make suggestions for improvement.

They face a third and related error. As a small group of filmmakers, they failed to carry on political work in the barriada. They came and went; they discussed the film in a limited sense, but were not a permanent presence in the zone. If the filmmakers had at least been sharing the film more, if the people had participated in its elaboration, then the people would have been developing politically.

This last reminds us of the criticism that progressives in the sierra make of anthropologists. The anthropologists come to observe and write about the peasants, even with sympathy and good intentions, but come and then go. They give nothing, and they do not participate in an effort to develop political consciousness, both their own and that of the peasants. In the worst of cases it is exploitative. In the best, as with your friend’s work, people genuinely intend political engagement. The product of your friend’s presence clearly will aid this and other communities.

Yes, one of the most important things to come out of that work will be the lessons that they can share with other filmmakers.

Aside from your work in video, what other projects do you have?

We are planning small studio workshops for the production of slides. In our film projection work, we have recognized a great limitation. The foreign films we show often reflect realities very different from ours and thus unimportant to us, although a few, like Sanjinés’ BLOOD OF THE CONDOR, almost exactly parallel Peruvian life. So we are trying to organize these studios with other filmmakers and technicians and with groups in the barriadas. Once the studios exist, social and political organizations will be able to take photographs of their own reality and then project those slides for discussions and debates. The project is economically feasible and can lead to greater popular enthusiasm and participation.

I don’t know if you understand what kinds of economic limits we work under. I told you our exhibition group has three projectors, one broken by the police. Of those, I got one by trading a horse for it! Another someone “liberated” for us. The other was also a present, but it had only a motor and no lens, nor bulb. We had to rebuild it completely.

We have had to establish a network of technical and industrial assistance, such as finding ways to do lab work very cheaply. One of our members is very good at electronics and can build a slide projector which can run off batteries. All he needs is the lens to start with. We do slide shows with black and white, 35m positive slides. When we and other militant Latin American filmmakers go to a film festival such as those in Cuba, we are not looking for worldwide distribution. We just need enough sales to recuperate our costs and to go on. The Peruvian government strongly censors all militant film. And it is not interested in protecting and encouraging filmmaking in general, much less distributing 16mm films.

Do you and your collaborators plan to help the people of the unions, barriadas, and peasant communities use photographic equipment to make their own videotapes, or super-8 films? We realize this is difficult, given the costs and lack of resources here, but as you know, it has been done elsewhere.

Look, for the moment, for personal reasons, I can’t plan much of that. I have to finish my video projects first of all. I’m paid for much of my video wok. That and the writing and photographing for magazines keep me going. But, yes, we are thinking of involving workers in making videotapes, in planning and scripting and the whole process. This is a concrete project, but separate from my present work in video. In film the fundamental thing is to push the ideas of Cinematógrafo, to get a debate going in the film movement.

Let me say just a few words about the group who published Cinematógrafo.

We meant to make films, films arising out of political and ideological discussions about film and about Peruvian reality. But we could not make them, mainly because of economic conditions. Out of a group of about fifteen people, five of us participated the most in discussions and reached a certain level of unity. We five put out the magazine and began to play a very active role in the film movement of 1974-1976, which we discussed earlier. The central preoccupation of Cinematógrafo is the problem of what a national cinema is. In Number 4, we intend to have a long theoretical article on this problem, resulting from an internal editorial seminar which went on for six or eight intensive meetings and which we taped. We discussed national cinema from political, cultural, economic, social, and cinematic points of view. Since 1975 there has been no insistent debate and no public discussion on national, political cinema, and this is very damaging. We wish to pick up the impulse of 1975, to stimulate a great debate and promote a new cinematic movement in this country.

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Pancho Adrienzén is a Peruvian free-lance photographer and film critic for the prominent leftist weekly Marka, and co-editor of the film magazine,Cinematógrafo. The first short film that established him as a powerful creative artist was Correo Central, (Central Station). It is a film about the importance of correspondence as a form of communication, in which a hidden camera observes tourists, peasants, students and others in the post office. Letters by Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, and Simon Bolivar are part of the commentary. His other path breaking film is Daniel Carrion, about a Peruvian doctor who discovered the inoculation for smallpox.

The interview here is a composite of two meetings, carried out on two occasions in 1979 — in May by Buzz Alexander and in December by Chuck Kleinhans and Julia Lesage of Jump Cut (no. 28, April 1983). Buzz transcribed, translated, and edited this combined interview, in consultation with Chuck and Julia. Buzz transcribed, translated, and edited this combined interview, in consultation with Chuck and Julia.