modes of reading culture

7/30/2019 Modes of reading Culture

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Modes Of Reading Culture

End-Term Examination

Submitted by: Amrita Chatterjee

Roll No. : H-1238

Course instructor: Prof. Uma Bhrugubanda

Submitted on: 23.04.2013


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Section I

a) Reflect upon Jurgen Habermas description of public sphere and discuss how

Nancy Fraser, Talal Asad and Sudipta Kaviraj critique his theorization and present

alternative understandings of public sphere.

Answer:

The term public sphere in very simplistic and layman terms can be defined as a common

space (geographic or social) where individuals can come together to identify and discuss

problems of the society, thus paving the way for influencing political action regarding those

problems. Gerard Hauser defines it as a discursive space in which individuals and groups

congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and where possible, to reach a common

judgement. (Hauser, Gerard, Vernacular Dialogue and the Rhetoricality of Public

Opinion, page 86) Jurgen Habermas is the foremost theorist on the concept of public

sphere. Let us first look into what Habermas says about it.

Habermas conceptualises public sphere as a domain within social life which can be accessed

by all and where public opinion can be formed. Habermas opines that this concept is a fruit of

democracy. The interactions within this space are independent of class hierarchies and people

come together here out of their own will to participate in matters of general interest.

Organized political authority is formed by the public through elections and the public sphere

is the realm for influencing and criticizing this authority. The public sphere, according to

Habermas, is different from both market-economy and the state. So Habermas model helps

to remind us about the distinctness of state apparatus, market-economy and democratic

associations. These distinctions are indispensible to democratic theory.


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Habermas tries to situate the idea of public sphere historically and concludes that there was

no concept of separate private and public domains during the medieval time. This happened

due to the class hierarchies implicit in the feudal system. As Habermas points out, the

difference was that more power was divested at each level of this class pyramid with the

zenith of the structure holding all political authority. This resulted in the rules changed point

of view: they understood themselves to BE the state and not its representatives, thus their

power was not held in behalf of the people, but TO the people.

After the medieval age was long past, feudal authorities and church rule made way for

autonomous pubic power towards the end of the eighteenth century. Public figures became

rulers and vice-versa. The age of the bourgeoisie authority was slowly dawning and it was

accorded autonomy with respect to the government. The public sphere, as Habermas puts it,

was the ultimate result of these developments. According to him, the formation of the liberal

public sphere (people coming out of their private spaces to create the public and thus

mediate between the state and the bourgeoisie so as to control the government) was an

unparalleled incident in history. One huge factor that contributed to this was the rise of

literary journalism as a public institution. But this liberal public sphere was not well-suited

for the modern industrialized democratic state because the ideology associated with this

model evolved with time. Public sphere expanded its boundary for one thing and the public

structure also changed. The public and the private spheres overlapped, thus creating a new

feudal framework for the public sphere.

In todays world, the character of the public sphere has been morphed in a very different way.

As I have mentioned before, the public sphere was used in the past as a tool to critique and

influence political decisions. But now it itself is used for the benefit of certain interest groups.

The public is not constituted of individuals any more; it is made of organized communities


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who exert their influence on the debates held in the public sphere through systematic use of

institutional coercion.

In Nancy Frasers Rethinking the Public Sphere, we find a critique of Habermas

approach to and definition of the public sphere. Fraser argues that to theorize the limits of the

existing late capitalistic democracy, Habermas theory needs to undergo critical questioning

and reconstruction. That will also help to conceptualize new and alternative modes of

democracy which is urgently needed in todays world. Frasers problem with Habermas

starts when the latter does not conceptualize a new post-bourgeoisie model of the public

sphere. He also fails to adequately address some problematic structural assumptions

underlying the bourgeoisie model.

I have discussed before, Habermas account of the structural transformation of the public

sphere. Fraser offers an alternative account of this, based on some revisionist historiographic

developments. Revisionist scholars like Joan Landes, Mary Ryan and Geoff Eley have argued

that despite appearances of full accessibility, one of the foundations official public sphere

was built on is a principle of exclusions. Landes say that the main exclusion is done on the

basis of gender and masculinist gender constructs were integral to the formation of the

Republic public sphere (in post-revolution France). Eley takes this argument further by

including Germany and England with France and also saying that in addition to gender, class-

related exclusions also happened. Here, Fraser points out that Habermas idealization of the

liberal public sphere fails to account for this irony that a discourse of publicity touting

accessibility, rationality, and the suspension of status hierarchies is itself deployed as a

strategy of distinction. Fraser admirably points out that Habermas ended up idealizing the

liberal public sphere because he does not pay any attention to the non-liberal, non-

bourgeoisie public sphere that existed. Mary Ryan, the other revisionist scholar Fraser


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mentions, concludes that the public sphere rested on a class and gender-based notion of

publicity and the exclusion of women from it was an ideological stand.

So the exclusions and conflicts that appeared as accidental trappings from his (Habermas)

perspective, in the revisionists view become constitutive (of the public sphere). Thus the

public sphere as presented by Habermas rather acted as a vehicle for political domination

through the construction of consent. The revisionist deconstruction of public, according to

Fraser, problematizes the following four assumptions central to this bourgeoisie masculinist

concept of the public sphere:

1. Societal equality is not a necessary pre-requisite for existence of political democracy.

2. A single public sphere is better for democracy than multiple publics.

3. In the public sphere, deliberation about private issues and interests are undesirable as

opposed to discussion about common interests.

4. A functional and democratic public sphere requires a sharp distinction between civil

society and state.

Fraser suggests alternatives to all the four assumptions. In place of the first two points, she

insists on a nexus of multiple public spheres formed under subaltern counter-publics or

egalitarian conditions. In such a case, the public sphere becomes a structured setting of

deliberation among many publics. She argues that the concept of plural publics is also

suitable for a classless yet multi-cultural structure where discussion and deliberation across

cultures can happen. Talking about the third assumption, she says that the idea of common

interests in the name of public good actually renders voiceless the private concerns of

minorities like womens. This happens because the common is made up of the powerful

people in the society and the public is defined in such a way as to make interests of the


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minority (not necessarily numerical minority, but with respect to the dominant class in

economy and gender) excluded from the public and included in the private sphere. This

definition thus becomes oppressive. In the end, Fraser critiques the final assumption by

concluding that Habermas weakens the concept of the public sphere by positing it at a far too

great distance from the state and decision-making authorities, thus rendering it incapable of

influencing the decision-making process. In Frasers opinion, this weakness can be mended if

strong public systems replace the weak public sphere. For example, a parliamentary structure

or institutions managed by the public like self-governed jobs and residential communities

and other hybrid forms are stronger alternatives as they leave the decision-making to public

sphere discourses.

Thus Nancy Fraser successfully modifies Habermas theorization of the public sphere

according to the needs of democratic system in a late-capitalistic society. Now let us turn to

Talal Asad.

Talal Asad, in his insightful article on the Islamic-headscarf-ban affair in France, reflects on

the changing nature of public sphere. At the outset, he makes clear that public is defined as

opposed to private. The public sphere, much as Habermas said, is the intermediary space

between the state and the matters of daily life. He also agrees to Habermas point that the

concept of the public sphere was vital to the emergence of liberal democracy. His central

argument revolves around the fact that essential to that formation al so is the political

doctrine of secularism. He reflects on the possible meanings of the term secularism and

how it is defined in a liberal democratic public sphere and to what extent that definition is

followed and executed. Habermas has idealized the liberal mode of public sphere by positing

it as a perfectly accessible (by all) and rational domain and has said that it had utopian

potential which was not fulfilled. But Asads essay trumps these claims. Well discuss that in

the following pages.


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The separation between religion and politics, with politics getting assigned to the public

sphere while religion gets relegated to the private sphere, was a very important step. This step

was deemed necessary because of the concept that rational discourse can only take place (in

the public sphere) if that space is not dominated by religion. The public space was ideally

considered as a secular domain. Asad visualises the public sphere as a space where certain

groups of subjects of the state are made to be morally autonomous as long as they are socially

responsible.

In 2003, a controversy bubbled in France about whether Muslim women should be allowed to

wear headscarves to public schools. The opinions against letting this happen were fuelled by

the anxiety that the secular personality of the state of France was being distorted by the

display of the headscarf (which people took as a symbol of Islam) since a states personality

is expressed through particular signs, even those attached to the individuals it represented and

owed it allegiance to. A government commission of enquiry called the Stasi commission was

set up to investigate into this affair. They submitted a report that led to the ban of displaying

of conspicuous religious signs like crosses, kippas and headscarves in public schools.

At this point, Asad tries to trace the origin of the secular state. Towards the end of the

sixteenth century, the states of Western Christendom decided that the religion of the ruler

would be taken as the official religion of the subjects. This was introduced in an attempt to

solve religious warfare by the adoption of a political scheme. But this only gave the state

sovereign authority to decide upon the definition of religious tolerance and even who were

deserving of religious tolerance. Thus this agenda did not stop religious and political

persecution.

Asad thinks that the modern French state also abides by this law even though they claim to be

a secular government looking after a largely irreligious people. This leads the author to the


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question that what are signs of the presence of religion in a society. The Stasi commission

separated discrete religious signs from conspicuous religious signs and allowed public

display of the former while banning the latter. Now the Muslims who protested against the

ban argued that wearing the headscarf is a Muslim girls religious duty and if that right is

taken away from them, it is a case where the state takes away the rights of a particular section

of its subjects the right to practise their own religion. I think that this implies that the state is

interfering in private sphere because it is there that religion is supposed t o belong. Thus in

the cases where the public overlaps with the private (like the wearing of headscarf to public

schools which by French law are secular institutes), government takes over. So the relation

between politics and religion becomes asymmetrical as religion is not supposed to intervene

in politics as it is a private issue but politics can meddle with religious rights of people. Here

Nancy Frasers argument against Habermas (that the public spheres obsession with

common causes and the complete exclusion of private concerns ultimately negatively

affects the dominated minorities whose interests are relegated as private and thus are

neglected) becomes all the more relevant. To go back to the Stasi commission report, it saw

itself as presented with a difficult decision between two forms of individual liberty- that of

girls whose desire was to wear the headscarf ( a minority) and that of girls who would rather

not. The commission gave freedom of choice to the latter group on majoritarian grounds.

This violates two rights: 1. The rights of the minority. 2. The religious freedom of every

citizen which is their inalienable right, irrespective of what the majority prefers. Thus

although the report insists that political power and religious choices are mutually exclusive

seta, the relation between the two remains unequal, as pointed out before. Asad concludes

that this asymmetry is a measure of sovereign power.

Defenders of the ban argue that the French state is justifiably reluctant to acknowledge group

identity within a Republic. This happens because of Habermas assumption that the public


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sphere is a singular entity. Here Asad also brings in another argument that the French state

was never a society comprised of individual persons with collective rights; instead, French

citizens have enjoyed rights by virtue of their association with particular religious groups.

Asad then cites examples to prove this point, but we dont need to go into that now. Let us

leap over to the questions that Asad identifies as excluded from the formation of a secular

private sphere. He says that this (Habermas) concept of a secular private sphere fails when

confronted with subjects who inhabit several public spheres across national and cultural

boundaries (like the French Jews who relate to their Israeli counterparts and the French

Muslims who are said to sympathise with the Palestinians).

Asad contradicts Habermas concept of public sphere by concluding that the public sphere

in modern secular societies is more than a space of communication and debate and is

comprised of citizen subjects for whom it is not easy to achieve a divorce of politics from

religion. The author feels that is the reason liberal states impose disciplinary laws on their

peoples in the name of secularism.

Now it is time to take a look at Sudipta Kavirajs notion of the public sphere and see whether

it is compatible with Habermas concept.

Sudipta Kaviraj, in his brilliant article Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices

about Space in Kolkata, takes a refreshing look at the way public spaces are conceptualised

in the colonial city of Kolkata. Basically what comes out of his essay is that the way Western

societies look at public spaces and public sphere and the way Indians look at them are

completely different. So Habermas theories are not applicable to India.

Kaviraj starts with a simple anecdote about a photo published in a Calcutta newspaper which

shows a few people urinating in front of a sign prohibiting the act of urination in that place.

The author interprets this little act of disobedience as a deep-rooted thing and not merely an


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impulse. The economically, educationally and class-wise backward people rarely get any

chance to act against the middle class and these small acts of insubordination are a means to

increase their self-worth to themselves. The middle-class bourgeoisie idea of public space

and the lower class idea of it are also completely different and the idea that a city has to be

clean as opposed to villages is a very bourgeoisie idea inherited from the colonial masters.

The poor were alienated from such influences and they in fact got access to public places like

public parks pretty late in the day and that too mainly through the Partition and other

population influxes in Kolkata. Kaviraj argues that the poor got access to the public spaces by

erecting a boundary of filth around them, which the middle class cringed from.

Kaviraj suggests that the pre-colonial Indian concepts of inside/outside, apna/paraya,

ghare/baire (title of a Tagore novel) changed vastly when it encountered the West and the

mapping of the Western ideas brought about an amalgamation to which the enlightened

middle and upper classes were privy. The poor and the rigid, upper-caste conservative crowd

tried to stay well away from the colonial influence and in doing so, tightened the boundaries

of the private against the public which they interpreted as the polluted or corrupt outside.

The middle and upper class people, who were in contact with the British for serving them,

sort of modified and Anglicised the Indian notions of marriage to companionship. But even

their households were afraid of dealings with the outside, which sometimes coincided with

the public for them. The poor and the lower classes were basically connected to them by

serving them in various forms and capacities. They came in daily contact with each other but

the middle class public sphere was really inaccessible to these people in the way Habermas

visualises. They maintained a safe distance from each other and did not overshadow each

others social circles.

Thus it is not possible to apply Habermas theory to Bengal. Habermas says that the public

sphere is that which is external to the bourgeoisie family and conceptualises the public as a


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reciprocation of the private. Application of this thesis results in a negative paradox. The

Western sense of the public and the way it is intrinsically and contradictorily bound with

the bourgeoisie notion of the private, cannot be applied to the historical transformations (of

the public sphere) in Bengal.Habermas proposition or even Frasers revisionist model is

completely different to the way public sphere evolved in Bengal, as has been briefly

discussed in the previous paragraphs. For the poor and destitute people, public came to be

defined only as a negative of private, without any value of its own: a space from which they

cannot be evicted by somebodys property rights over them.

To quote Kaviraj, to the poor, the nation of which they were now an indispensible and

sovereign part was a more distant tenuous imagination. Since this imagination is primarily

created in schools through the relentless repetitiveness of the curricula forms of historical

memory, and the destitute are deprived of that essential constituent of citizenship, ... they do

not share the lower middle classes mode of living in history.

Thus Nancy Fraser, Talal Asad and Sudipta Kaviraj all contribute to critique Habermas

theorization of the public sphere and put forward alternative understandings of the notion.

b) Discuss the enlightenment idea of the self and the ways in which Freud, Lacan and

Foucault have fundamentally critiqued it. What different ways of thinking about

subjectivity do they offer?

Answer:


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Enlightenment ideas of the self:

The enlightenment period was an intellectual movement during the seventeenth and

eighteenth century which was a significant turning point in Western philosophy and thought.

This period stretched from the time of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to the French Revolution

of 1789. The philosophical ideas that emerged at this time can be said to be in reaction to the

previous strands of thought and also to condition of the contemporary world. It was at this

time that subjectivity emerged as a major concept and subject was considered to be a free,

rational and autonomous body. Enlightenment cannot be taken as a homogeneous or single

entity and there are contradictions within it. The most important theories regarding the self

that were put forward during this era belonged to the three lading thinkers of the time:

Descartes, Rousseau and Kant.

Descartes epistemology is in relation to the meaning of the self: the meaning of the word

I. His most famous statement remains Cogito ergo sum. It means I think therefore I

am. Descartes held that the self is the foundation of the world around us and it is this

self that creates our knowledge, experiences and feelings. His theory of selfhood is based

on the individuals conception and understanding of reality. The other thing that he stresses

on is the importance of conscious thought over any other impulse. (He wrote: I am a real

being and really exist; but what sort ofbeing? As I said, a conscious being.) Descartes also

emphasises that the self which is constructed by the use of ones rational faculties can be used

to order the world.

Jean-Jacques Rousseauwas a later-day Enlightenment thinker. His work is situated at the

intersection of the rationality that Enlightenment thinkers so emphasised on and the stress on

sensibilities and feelings which emerged out of Romanticism, the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth century movement. In his Confessions (1781), Rousseau writes extensively about


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himself, his personal experiences and thoughts. He says that he is different (in a good way or

bad) than all other individuals on this Earth. I feel that here he is not talking about only

himself. He is talking about how every person is different from every other. Thus each

persons experiences are worth noting down as it has ...no precedent, and which, once

complete, will have no imitator. This sufficiency of individualism is a key thought in

Rousseaus works, especially Confessions. Rousseau believes that a human child when born,

is in a state of perfection which is then distorted by their encounters with society and history.

Humans themselves are responsible for this deterioration. The goal of human life, therefore,

is to go back to that pure and hallowed individuality with which one was born because this is

the only way through which one can liberate the self from prejudice, error and suffering.

Thus we see that Rousseaus thought deviated from Descartes at a fundamental point: while

the former says that the I or self derives meaning because of the experiences of an

individual, the latter says that it is our conscious attempts to take meaning out of our

experiences that attaches meaning to the self.

Immanuel Kantwas a German philosopher who appeared on the scene at a still later date.

His Critique of Pure Reason written towards the end of the eighteenth century is a very

important work on Enlightenment. He also wrote a famous response to a magazine question,

titled Was ist Aufklrung? (What is Enlightenment?). In it he says that enlightenment is

mans liberation from his self-imposed immaturity. This immaturity, he says, lies in mans

lack-of-desire to use his own understanding without the tutelage of others. We know that our

world is formed by the perceptions that we make about our surroundings. We look at

something form our own representations of it. But Kant argues that before any of this

happens, there must be something that is present to do the viewing or the perceiving. This is

the self. Thus any dealing we might have with the world is channelled through this self.

When we are communicating these observations to ourselves or others, we say (or even if we


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dont, we mean it) I think... and thus I is present in all consciousnesses. This cannot

happen if the self is not self-conscious. Thus, according to Kant, if we are to make any sense

out of our dealings with our surroundings, we must be conscious of our own selves. This

must happen evenbefore we have a sense of our I as different from everybody elses. Thus

he differs from Rousseau. According to Kant, subjectivity can have content only through an

awareness of the world and this awareness, in turn, comes from an awareness of the self.

Thus Enlightenment made the individual an issue and it is this concept that the twentieth

century thinkers (like Freud, Lacan and Foucault) have tried to interrogate.

Freud, Lacan and Foucaults ideas of Subjectivity and how they differ from the

Enlightenment thinkers:

Nineteenth century fiction began to reject the Kantian idea of the human consciousness being

the definitive factor in an individuals relationship with the world. Writers ranging from R.L.

Stevenson (Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde) to Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) began to tell the

stories of horror when the rational mind could not control the irrational impulses of the

human mind and was eventually overpowered by the latter.

It was at this juncture of thought that Freudappeared in the scene. He did not reject all

aspects of Enlightenment thought but differed with it in so far as the essentialist ideas

presented by it. He did not agree with the Enlightenment idea of the centred, unified self.

Freud brought to the fore his theories of the unconscious. The unconscious mind comprises

our biologically-driven instincts like sex and aggression (eros and thanatos). It is buried under

our conscious mind and we are unaware of it because of its disturbing and irrational nature.

The only manifestation of this unconscious mind comes through the most trivial of our


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behaviours or gestures. It is beyond the control of our conscious mind. Thesubconscious is

the layer that resides between the conscious and the unconscious. We can be aware of it

easily. Freuds works explain how the topography of the subject is built. He says that the

subject is the result of an intersection of its set of dominant familial and social relations. Thus

he says that the subject is not autonomous or natural or innate. The other thing he says is

that the primary contributing elements to the production of subjectivity are the gender roles

the child sees around himself (not herself because Freud concentrates on masculinity and the

development of the male child. According to him, the female child also suffers from a variety

of the Oedipus complex: she notices hr lack of a penis and thinks that she is already castrated.

She tries to compensate for this through giving birth to a child. Freuds notoriety in the

postmodern world is largely due to these anti-feminist ideas about the female subjectivity.)

and their sexual identifications. This is famously known as the Oedipal model. Thus he

opposes the Enlightenment idea that a child is born into an unaffected and natural world

which he then perceives according to the rationalities of his conscious mind. Instead he

argues that the world into which the child is born is already structured and ordered according

to the dominant culture. Freud divides the self into three parts: id, ego and superego. Here id

is supposed to be entirely unconscious while the other two can have conscious, preconscious

and unconscious aspects. These differentiations lead to the rejection of the idea that the

subject is centrally controlled and defined by a single, fully self-aware, autonomous identity.

Freud, in essence, decentred the self by theorizing that it is fundamentally divided.

Now let us turn to Jacques Lacan(19011981), the French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

whose works can be considered as a bridge between Freudian and postmodern

psychoanalysis. He extended Freud's critique of the centred, single, and uninhibited

autonomous self or consciousness. Lacans most famous interpretation is that the

unconscious is structured like a language. He rejected the idea that language was the means


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of communication and instead said that it (language) is the very material of which

subjectivity is built. He himself tried to use language in a very self-conscious manner. He

reverses the assumption that language arises out of and for our purposes. Lacan argues that

language pre-dates our existence and it is us who must locate ourselves in the field of

language if we are to find a place for ourselves in the human world. Thus subjectivity has to

emerge in a world where language is a pre-existing structure or system (as opposed to the

unaffected and unencumbered world of the Enlightenment child). Lacan calls the stage of

development of subjectivity in a child, the mirror stage. This stage, occurring between six

to eighteen months of the childs age occurs when the child sees her/himself in the mirror

(could be an actual mirror or could be seeing another child). Before that it has no concept of

self as a separate entity. Everything that it touches- including itself- is sensed as a

continuum of a limitless being. There is nothing external to the body since there is no sense

of limit. This is the Freudian pre-Oedipal stage when there is no subjectivity. It is only after

or during the mirror stage that child identifies spatially and goes from having a fragmented

body-image to a form of its wholeness, its unity. Thus subjectivity is developed as the

wholeness of the self is negatively-defined as an anti-thesis to the concept of otherness or

external forms/beings/things. But this new understanding of the self has ironically come from

the outside through some external image. Thus the subject does not define itself but is

defined by some other. Lacan beautifully put it by saying that the subject is the discourse

of the other. According to Lacan, the subject only exists as a tension between the imaginary

and the symbolic. Thus subjectivity cannot be autonomous or spontaneous. Both Freud and

Lacan have reached this same conclusion. But they vary at one basic point: Freud says the

subject is determined by anatomy (Anatomy is Destiny), but in Lacanian thought this

gender inequity and power struggle take place in the premise of language rather than

anatomy. Lacan says that our fantasy about an autonomous and self-generating subject (the


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imaginary) acts as a shield from reality: a safe place which our deepest desire drives us to

reach, yet which will always remain elusive to us.

Michel F oucaultis the next thinker we must turn to. He is popularly regarded as an anti-

Enlightenment thinker, but I have some arguments against that. He was definitely an anti-

essentialist theorist. Foucault refused to accept the idea of anything natural or spontaneous:

something that is the essence of human nature beyond history, culture and tradition. His

pronounced that the subject is a construct. This is something that Lacan also said, as we have

seen. But Foucault deviates from Lacan by saying that subjectivity is a factor of the power

structure omnipresent in society, instead of being a factor of the gender and sexuality roles of

family relationships. Foucault differs from the psychoanalytic understanding of power in that

he dislikes the latters attempt to define the true nature of the subject completely and finally.

He thinks that this is a totalitarian approach which ultimately collaborates with power.

Foucault seeks to differ with the Enlightenment (Rousseaus) idea of self-sufficiency and a

true self that can be recovered if the inauthenticity of day-to-day social life is banished and

man lives through pure and correct language structure, social group or personal style.

Foucault writes the exact opposite of this idea: The individual is not to be conceived as a

sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power

comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes

individuals. Instead, he argues that power is the cause for which certain bodies, gestures,

desires, discourses are identified as individuals. It is through this constitution of individuals

that power expresses itself. The individual which power has constituted is at the same time

its vehicle. We can now see that Rousseau says that the unencumbered individual (which

produces itself) comes first and then power pollutes and corrupts it whereas Foucault

maintains that power comes first and power is the reason our individuality (the individual

body, gestures and language we use) is the way it is. Foucault accuses Rousseaus model of


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being responsible for the ability of power to conceal itself and thus work more effectively

than ever. Kant and Hegel maintained that attaining self-consciousness was the highest goal

and destiny of human existence. Foucault challenges this notion. He says that by turning on

himself to achieve self-consciousness and the unique truth of the self, man is basically falling

prey to the existing power structures which want him to be forever aware of its desires. This

is because the subject being a result of power cannot think freely. It is not his own desires and

truths and consciousness that he is seeking, but the power structures.

Foucault was heavily influenced by German philosopher Nietzsche and especially his theory

that the subject is formed through a cross between power and language. Foucault thinks that

modern society has its own power structures which are different from those of pre-modern

societies. Modern power structures are constructed through institutions of prisons, hospitals,

barracks, schools and factories rather than through royalty or aristocracy. These are built for

the better management of the public by the power. As a result, the individuals interior life is

no more his own, to be brought to public attention at his own discretion. It is permanently on

display for psychological or sociological analysis and the truths these analyses bring out

subjugate the individuals. For instance, irrespective of whether we commit a crime or not, we

are subordinates to the psychological and sociological theories about crime and the criminal.

The criminal is a subject of whose evidence we look for in ourselves.

Now to come back to what I mentioned in the first paragraph, Foucault did not completely

reject every aspect of Enlightenment thought. In his later life, he wrote an essay called What

is Enlightenment? (obviously drawing upon Kants famous article) In this piece, he proposes

that there is only one way the subject can deal with his situation in the modern world: this is

by becoming conscious of the self that power constructs for them. Only by becoming

conscious of this can the people aim to manufacture an alternative (albeit as a fancy) to the


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conventions modern life try to normalise. Foucaults idea of self-creation is that the subject

should produce itself endlessly as a reaction to is culture, tradition and history.

These are the ways in which Freud, Foucault and Lacan respond to and present alternative

ideas of the Enlightenment concepts of selfhood.

d) William Mazzarella engages with Walter Benjamins work to critique the

totalization narrative of commodification and to outline a different way of

understanding the phenomenon of advertising and globalization. Discuss.

Answer:

First let us look at Walter Benjamins The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction because this is the work that Mazzarella critiques in his Shoveling Smoke.

In this essay, Benjamin discusses a change in perceptions (in the modes of existence of

humans) and its influences on the advancing fields of photography and other visual media

that have happened in the twentieth century. Our point of view and outlook on the modes of

visual representations have changed entirely over time and its consequences remain to be

seen. One of the questions asked here is whether there can be a universal, totalized

perception.

Benjamin here tries to find out the effect that modernity has had on the work of art.

Technological modernity has brought about film and photography. Benjamin thinks that there

has been a loss of aura because works of art began to be reproduced mechanically. This

aura is defined by the author as the uniqueness of non-replicable piece of art. By this


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definition, a photograph cannot have the aura that a painting has because the painting is

authentic whereas a photograph is the visual replica of another image.

Benjamin then talks about the significance of this loss of aura. For him, this loss of the aura is

equivalent to the loss of a mark of singular authority. But what replaces this void left by the

aura that is no more? How do mechanical reproductions of the work of art manage to fill up

this nullity? The author suggests that a tension occurs because of this friction between the

new and old modes of creation.

With respect to mass consumption, this liberation achieved through the loss of authority is

not necessarily conditional. For instance, the cameraman interferes with the way the spectator

perceives an image. What the eyes of the camera or the point of view of the cameraman does,

can never be achieved by a painter through his painting. This is because the photographer

dictates where to look and what to look for. So it is totalitarian in this respect. It guides the

viewers to a specific side of a story while leaving other sides out. The aura as Benjamin puts

it, now has to move to mythological spaces which can only be recovered by a genius. The

original loses its mystic as anyone can buy a ticket to a gallery or a theatre. This makes way

for a different appreciation of art but also for new kinds of distraction, guided by the

cameraman for example. The aura ensured a distance between a particular work of art and

man. But in its absence, man consumes the object and vice-versa. This is the reason why

mass consumption prospers at the loss of aura. This loss also creates a space for politicizing

art, i.e. it gives us the scope to raise questions about the politics of the mechanical

reproduction of art and whether that is good or bad.

Benjamin suggests that the way people consider a screening and even the character of the

film have changed so drastically that the audience doesnt individually perceive the film.

Instead, the film perceives the individuals. The contradiction of the physical inertia of rest


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while watching the moving images inertia of motion, shifts the entire perspective of the

audience. Because of the reproducible nature of the film, the audiences subordination to it

increases. According to Benjamin, this is but a symbol of something horrible happening. The

concept of subjectivity also changes in the new technologically modern age and the author

looks into that matter as well. Benjamin wonders what happens to the aesthetics of art in the

absence of its aura.

In Shoveling Smoke, William Mazzarella looks to critique the teleological totalization

narrative that is a dominant discourse on photographically mediated modernities. This

work by Mazzarella constitutes an exciting examination of globalised consumerism within

the framework of the Bombay advertising industry. The author focuses on the negotiation

between the global and the local, mostly from the time of the Indian independence

movement. He also writes about the role played by consumerism and advertising in the

production of a local Indian identity. This work casts light on the intricate relationship

between culture and consumerism.

Mazzarellas explanation of the commodity image is partially written as a vociferous critique

against the totalization narrative which is equally present in marketing theory, Marxist, and

structuralist literature. This narrative considers the subsumption of concrete particulars to

abstract universals to be a pre-condition of both commodification and the mechanical

reproduction of images (commodity image or otherwise). As an alternative explanation,

Mazzarella instead emphasizes on their firm involvement with public culture and locates a

continuous oscillation between influence and emotion, or between desire to own the

commodity and the brand image enclosed within the aura of the image. Branding can be

said to be the annexe of corporate command over the potential of this aura and is thus

reminiscent of the old anthropological connotation of gift (keeping-while-giving) as


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companies and agencies try to increase the scope of consumerism while at the same time

fighting to preserve general ideological control.

Totalization narrative is a narrative which talks about a world where everything is included

within the umbrella of a single history without any exceptions or deviations. It is even

inclusive of all forms of otherness. Mazzarella engages with Benjamins workand critiques

such a totalizing narrative. He also responds to Benjamins work on photography and opines

that Benjamin comes closest to a dialectical reading of the photographic image in the sense

that Mazzarella suggests. Benjamin talks about the way in which certain images may, au

contraire our habitual hypotheses, serve very reactionary purposes through their concretion

and depending on the image and the way in which it is used. According to Benjamin the most

important part the aura plays is through the distance it maintains. This distance occurs due

to the mystification of the authentic image and the boundaries of exclusivity it constructs

around itself. Benjamin proposes that attributing aura to image-objects means projecting the

assumptions of social reciprocity onto the relationship between people and these image-

objects. (Social reciprocity model basically says that positive action by a person towards

another person reaps rewards in reciprocal positive action and vice-versa in case of negative

action.) To quote Benjamin, to perceive the aura of the object we look at means to invest it

with the ability to look at us in return. Thus according to Benjamin, aura both heightens

distance and produces conditions of social reciprocity and the advent of photography only

increases this contradiction. For Benjamin, photography acts as a de-auratizing agent that

begets closeness by abolishing distance. But ambivalently, he also implicates photographs in

the manufacture and preservation of the auratic distance. This dialectic makes it possible for

Benjamin to advance towards expressing his thoughts on photography in a Post-Marxist

historical materialism strain. The diminishing distance between people and art that


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photography brought about was coupled with the defamiliarization of the everyday world

of instrumental purpose and objective knowledge.

Mazzarella admits that the part of Benjamins argument that mostly inspires him is his

conclusion that the dialectic of aura holds true for all the domain of visual representation,

including advertising (commodity images). Advertising, according to Mazzarella depends on

an incessant movement between reactionary mythologies and daily-life possibilities. In

contradiction to the totalization narrative, these two opposite points are not one entity but

they remain entangled with each other in an unsteady and uncomfortable companionship.

This dialectic oscillation of shock and domestication is an essential feature of the

transmission of commodity-images.

Thus William Mazzarella engages with Walter Benjamin to critique the totalization narrative

and offers an alternative concept of the globalized advertising industry.

Section II

Indian Premier League: The Culture and Politics of Cricket in India

Introduction:

The most commonly understood concept about modern India is that it runs on the three C s:

Cricket, Cinema and Corruption. The inclusion of cricket in Indian pop culture is surprising

to say the least. The most recent and conclusive stamp of mass culture on cricket (if it needed

any further certification) is the annual cricket event that is being held in India since 2008: the

Indian Premier League (IPL). In this essay, first Ill briefly talk about the inclusion of cricket

in Indian popular culture and the wider social implications of cricket in India; then Ill refer


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to Adorno and Horkheimers essay on culture industry to critique the event of IPL; lastly,

Ill conclude with my opinion on the effect of IPL on Indian society and culture.

Inclusion and the Place of cricket in modern Indian popular culture:

The classical construct of cricket can be easily identified by some markers: the stiff upper

lip attitude, the placid and polite hand-clapping, the obedience and reverence accorded to the

high priest of the game in a long white coat and an abstruse set of laws nobody can follow.

These markers in fact signify prototypical Englishness and used to stand for the British

Empire and for abiding by the laws, even if one considered the law-makers to be dictatorial

or stupid. This construct is invalid now because cricket and its societies have undergone vast

changes. India is now acknowledged as the new home of cricket. Ashish Nandy famously

said that cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British. Instead of the

upper and upper middle class exclusivity of the game, it has now been completely absorbed

by all sections of the society (provided, of course, that everyone can afford the expensive

cricket kits; but even where they cannot, crude bats are hacked out of tree branches and stack

of bricks used as wickets with a tennis or even a table-tennis ball serving as the cricket

equivalent). Cricket has now lost its initial class implications and has become- at least on the

surface of it- accessible to all classes in spite of the obvious middle-class dominance.

If we want to look at the history of any sport, well find that there are two major approaches

to it:

1. To concentrate only on its practice, the background of its patron and players, theevolution of its associations and tournaments, and on how it pays or does not pay for

itself. (Guha, 1998)

2. To view sport as a rational idiom, a sphere of activity which expresses, inconcentrated form, the values, prejudices, divisions and unifying symbols of a


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society. (Guha, 1998) It also argues for situating sports in its wider societal context

and only then proceeding to analyse it.

In colonial India, when the sport was first played in India, it was initially confined only to the

British. Then it slowly spread through the Indian princes because it gave them social

hierarchical power as playing cricket was a sign of the elite and the ruling classes and also

because they could get closer to the British by participating in the sport. Under their

patronage, different religious groups (starting with the Parsees and spreading to the Hindus

and Muslims through political and royal indulgence) started playing the sport and in a process

of cultural osmosis, it went on being absorbed by the subsequent lower classes. Initially it

was imposed by the colonisers on the colonised as a measure of the masters imperial power.

The popularity of cricket went on increasing until when it became a mode of expression of

subaltern mobilisation and cultural pride. Slowly, subaltern groups grew into and excelled at

the sport and it eventually became a symbol of challenge as victorious colonial cricketers

could claim a share of the values that the British claimed were inculcated by cricket. Beating

the imperial ruler on the field therefore buttressed claims to equal worth off it. (Scalmer,

2007) Slowly cricket became a vehicle of articulating nationalism. Supporting the national

team has been historically seen as a unifying factor for a nation divided over individual and

group identities. For example, an Indian Muslim has to support the Indian national cricket

team over Pakistan as a proof of his loyalty and allegiance to the nation; otherwise (s)he will

be taken as an anti-nationalist.

Apart from the class-based osmosis of cricket, the caste-history is also very interesting. It

would suffice here to say that the lower castes acquired access to this game in India through a

long history of struggle covering the early twentieth century. The Bombay Quadrangular

Tournament played a big part in and played host to a lot of drama regarding these. Today, in

cricket as in all other spheres in India, class, caste and gender-based biases are predominant


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but it is undeniable the sport has come a long way with regard to these minority-based

exclusions.

Critique of the IPL, in Reference to Adorno andHorkheimers Public Culture:

The IPL has played a huge role in changing the currency of Indian domestic cricket and it has

also played a key part in changing the cultural politics of cricket (both playing and

viewership) in India. It is a copybook case of being a product of the culture industry. To start

with analysing it, let us look at what Adorno and Horkheimer say in their seminal essay The

Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.

They begin by challenging the sociological theory that loss of support of religion, dissolution

of pre-capitalism, and an increase in technology leading to social differentiation are the

reasons behind causing cultural chaos. They argue for the uniformity of culture. The system

of culture functions as a corporation of artists and politicians across every kind of

government in all countries. The cities are converging towards the city centres irrespective of

how poorly they are made in the rush. The metropolis and its structure ensure that the

individuals are completely dictated by and subject to capitalistic power. Housing structure in

a city is very close (not to mention multi-storied apartments) and this results in the loss of

individual culture, tradition and identity. The films which represent our culture are but

business enterprises behind pretence of art. The culture industry is defined as a way of

mass reproduction of goods to meet similar mass demands but the catch is that the standards

are fixed by manipulation and retroactive need instead ofthe consumers actual demands. It

also echoes Says law in economics which state that supply creates its own demand. Thus,

for every IPL, the number of matches goes on increasing even though public attention is

falling (slightly). The logic behind this is that if there is a match on in the television, people

will watch it. Adorno and Horkheimer also state that the people controlling the economy


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possess technological hegemony as well, thus there is no way one can avoid looking at an

IPL advertisement (print or electronic) if one is to participate in the public sphere. The use of

technology helps to create standardisation and mass production and it gradually turns the

consumer from an active participant to a passive, freedom-less subject. The culture industry

leaves the customer dispensable because one customer can be replaced by another (a

television viewership can be immediately replaced by another and a stadium seat for an IPL

match can be sold to another person instead of the one). Thus the audience is tricked into

thinking that they are an integral part of the whole procedure when they are not effective and

active members of the whole IPL culture. Even the cricketers who are at least thought to be

very active parts of the whole tournament are replaceable commodities. The auctioning

process of the cricketers show that nobody is indispensable and often false hype is created

around certain players, whose cricketing prowess can be called into question, so as to benefit

the people in power. In the culture industry, every free expression is taken as a protest against

the institution. The England Cricket Board (ECB) which has refused to let its contract-bound

players participate in the IPL if it clashes with their domestic or international schedule is

regularly denounced as elitist and backward. While these accusations might be correct, the

grounds for making them are not. The culture industry, as the authors put it, leaves no space

for imagination or even spontaneity. Automatic responses of the audience are stifled and

substituted by mechanical and mass-produced artificial emotions which are dictated

according to the terms of the people in power. Like in a tele-serial or movie where the

audiences are given cues to laugh or cry or feel angry or amused or romantic by the

background music, even in the IPL this is done through using the cheerleaders and the

announcers at the stadium. Modern culture is responsible for forming the economic area

where art is produced. The only method to break out of this factory line is to be a deviant


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from the norm so as to be noticed by the industry (and may be subsequently pulled back into

the system).

A very important point that Adorno and Horkheimer makes here is that the upper class

capitalists maintain their power and control by making the lower classes insist on the very

ideology which enslaves them. In case of the IPL, the lower class people are being made to

believe that the tournament is doing wonders to the economy of the country and is helping it

to earn a lot of revenues, thus ultimately helping their economy. It is also touted as a form of

distractive entertainment to make people forget the grinds of daily life and immerse

themselves into the glamorous world of the IPL. The more people get insights into the

glamour world, the more people want it because that is the way they satiate their own

voyeuristic nature and unfulfilled desires. But the promise of the culture industry is a

mirage created by people in positions of power. The industry only represses everything and

everybody into a systematic idolization of the whole. Even the people in power are walled

off inside their own systems. The process and industry of culture feeds on itself. The people

subjected to the dominion of the culture industry are made to think that they are free to think

and choose for themselves; but they dont realise that the choices are already made for them

because their limited options are the ones provided by this same industry.

Conclusion:

The IPL has brought about a significant change in that it has expanded cricket viewership

beyond the traditionally male-dominated structures. The blend of non-cricketing elements

with the cricketing ones in IPL has attracted new viewers. One reason why cricket was

considered as the game of the upper classes is the huge amount of time one game takes for

completion. The economically insecure could never have so much time for leisure. But the

short format of the IPL has leaped over this hurdle. But it would be very wrong to say that


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IPL is bridging socio-economic or gender-based gaps. In fact it is doing the exact opposite.

The IPL has contributed hugely to make cricket a less egalitarian space than even before. The

very urban, metropolitan, capitalistic, bourgeoisie, exclusive and yet mechanical nature of

this tournament is against everything signifying equality.

REFERENCES:

1. Cashman, Richard I. Patrons, Players, and the Crowd: the Phenomenon of IndianCricket.New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1979.

2. Guha, Ramachandra. "Cricket and Politics in Colonial India." Past & Present 1998.161 (1998):155-90.

3. Scalmer, Sean. "Cricket, Imperialism And Class Domination." Working USA 10.4 (2007).4. The Bombay Quadrangular: Cricket as a Political Forum, Muneeb Ansari. Retrieved from the

following link:

http://www.academia.edu/1519536/The_Bombay_Quadrangular_Cricket_as_a_Politic

al_Forum_in_India
http://www.academia.edu/1519536/The_Bombay_Quadrangular_Cricket_as_a_Political_Forum_in_Indiahttp://www.academia.edu/1519536/The_Bombay_Quadrangular_Cricket_as_a_Political_Forum_in_Indiahttp://www.academia.edu/1519536/The_Bombay_Quadrangular_Cricket_as_a_Political_Forum_in_Indiahttp://www.academia.edu/1519536/The_Bombay_Quadrangular_Cricket_as_a_Political_Forum_in_Indiahttp://www.academia.edu/1519536/The_Bombay_Quadrangular_Cricket_as_a_Political_Forum_in_India

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