Michel Foucault - The Order of Things - Part 1

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault.

Original Title: Les Mots et les choses [words and things]. Published in French in 1966, and in English in 1970.

I feel a little stuck trying to summarize this book. On the one hand, there is a vast amount of very specific information about some very important things. On the other hand, one could basically sum up his point in a couple of sentences, do a few of those clapping/sliding of hands together things they do in the movies when there is something dramatically dusty that needed finishing being finished, and be done with it. While typing up my notes from the book I had the same feeling I’d had while reading it, that I could have just read the second half and through it understood the whole first without having had to suffer through reading the blasted thing. I was also reminded of the fact that Foucault is freakishly brilliant, a fantastic writer, uses more semicolons than anyone else in history, and can be a total bore when he’s not being thrilling. As you’ll see in my notes on Heterologies, l’autre Michel de le examination de Theory & Method, Monsieur de Certeau, totally agrees. Anyway, Foucault wrote a big ol’ book about how everything in the world changed and that book did a pretty goddamn good job of changing everything about how people talk about the world.

So, I’m going to try to do a combo chapter-by-chapter kind of a thing as well as a sort of a bullet-pointed highlights reel/ talking points list. Hope that works.

Main Keywords/ Themes:

Order:

“at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront once another, and also that which has no existence except in the gird created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression (Foucault, xx).

Archaeology:

The archaeological level of investigation is the level of thinking in a project which is concerned with what made something possible (Foucault, 31).

Resemblance:

Resemblance is the way in which, as mentioned previously, “the space where one speaks” and “the space where one looks… fold one over the other as though they were equivalents (Foucault, 9-10).”

Episteme:

“In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice (Foucault, 168).

Secondary Keywords/ Themes:

General Grammar/ Philology

Natural History/ Biology

Wealth/ Political Economy

Preface:

Order exists in every culture and is,

at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront once another, and also that which has no existence except in the gird created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression (Foucault, xx).

In other words, order, is the relationship between things and what they are called that is so deeply imbedded it gets taken as natural, something within to be brought out, rather than that which is decided or imposed. Foucault continues by explaining that,

The fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices – establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home (Foucault, xx).

These are ordering codes. While, “at the other extremity of thought, there are the scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general, what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this particular order has been established and not some other (Foucault, xx).” Or, what he calls, reflections upon order itself. So, Order is both the code that governs who we interact with the world and the ways we devise of thinking about those codes.

Foucault says that his intent in The Order of Things (from here-on-out, OT) is try to analyze the “pure experience of order and of its modes of being” that occurs between ordering codes and reflections on order itself which he says exists in all cultures. His purpose is to show how this experience has developed since the sixteenth-century. As he lays out in the preface, he is, then, particularly focused on “language as it has been spoken, natural creatures as they have been perceived and grouped together, and exchanges as they have been practiced” in other words, “in what way, then, our culture has made manifest the existence of order, and how, to the modalities of that order, the exchanges owed their laws, the living being their constants, the words their sequence and their representative value” and the ways in which these “modalities of order have been recognized, posited, linked with space and time, in order to create the positive basis of knowledge as we find it employed in grammar and philology, in natural history and biology [and] in the study of wealth and political economy (Foucault, xxi).” These, what we would now call “disciplines,” grammar, philology, natural history, biology, wealth, and political economy, are where Foucault focuses his inquiry.

As he says in his preface, this is project does not belong to any history of ideas or science, it is rather,

An inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards (Foucault, xxii).

The conditions that make knowledge possible, and how those conditions, and thus knowledge, change. That is, as ever, what is of interest to Foucault in this book. His methodology once again being archaeological (more on this to come shortly), he seeks to investigate the threshold between Classical knowledge (knowledge prior to the sixteenth century) and that served to “separate us from Classical though and constitute our modernity (Foucault, xxiv).” On this constitutive threshold, as he calls it, first appears “the strange figure of knowledge called man and revealed a space proper to the human sciences.”[1]

Okay, so, I could stop here and you’d already know why people think this book is important. Obviously, it matters how and why Foucault took on this project. He’s not really getting at something terribly different than he does in his histories of institutionalized power like mental hospitals (Madness and Civilization, 1961 and Birth of the Clinic, 1963), or prison (Discipline and Punish, 1975), or sexuality (History of Sexuality, parts 1-3, 1976 -1984) but the project’s comprehensive combination of detail and expansiveness does set it apart and you can see why it set his career off to run the way that it did. The archaeological method he uses is then articulated fully in the next book he publishes after OT, appropriately titled, The Archeology of Knowledge, released in France in 1969. So, it is worth taking a minute now to make sure it’s clear what Foucault means by “archaeological” in this book.

The archaeological level of investigation is the level of thinking in a project which is concerned with what made something possible (Foucault, 31). Archaeology “can give an account of the existence” in terms of “conditions and a prioris established in time,” it can be used to write “a history of knowledge… on the basis of what was contemporaneous with it” but “not in terms of reciprocal influence (Foucault, 208).” In other words, archeology is a way of studying what happened at a time to make something possible, not a way of saying why or how that thing came to be or how it might have come to influence other things. Or, in still other word, archaeology “must examine each event in terms of its own evident arrangement (Foucault, 218).” The emphasis here ought to be on the idea that the arrangements (conditions) around (of) an event that can be considered archaeologically are only those that are evident, as in discernibly present at the time of the event.

Part 1

Chapter 1: Las Meninas

The first chapter is about a painting by Diego Velázquez from 1656 called “Las Meninas” or “The Maids of Honour” (incidentally, housed in the same Museo del Prado in Madrid as Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” with which de Certeau’s Mystic Fable was so interested – who wants to go on a field trip with me?). I won’t say much about the chapter, other than that it is Foucault’s way in to talking about the relationship between things and what they are called, and the model on which this relationship operated in Classical knowledge, resemblance. You see both what interests him about the painting and what his agenda is in using it in this passage:

And the proper name, in this particular context, is merely an artifice: it gives us a finger to point with, in other words, to pass surreptitiously form the space where one speaks to the space where on looks; in other words, to fold one over the other as though they were equivalents. But if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided, so as to stay as close as possible to both, then one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task. It is perhaps through the medium of this grey, anonymous language, always over-meticulous and repetitive because too broad, that the painting may, little by little, release its illuminations (Foucault, 9-10).

It is clear here, that for Foucault, at stake in this investigation of how words used to be matched to things, and how that relationship changed, is a declared interest in opening up space where the relationship could shift once more.

Chapter 2: The Prose of the World

This is where we start to get into what Foucault means by resemblance and what its significance is in Classical knowledge. Resemblance is the way in which, as mentioned previously, “the space where one speaks” and “the space where one looks… fold one over the other as though they were equivalents (Foucault, 9-10).” Here, he elaborates, “The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the starts, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man (Foucault, 17),” he goes on to state what is already becoming clear, that “The main point is man: he stands in proportion to the heavens, just as he does to animals and plants, and as he does also to the earth, to metals, to stalactites or storms (Foucault, 22).” This was the kind of resemblance, man finding in the world a reflection of his needs thus served, that “up to the end of the sixteenth century… played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them (Foucault, 22).”

Since the world of resemblances can “can only be a world of signs (Foucault, 26)” one must be sure to understand what signs are and how they are read in this Classical mode. In its raw, historical sixteenth-century being, language is not an arbitrary system; it has been set down in the world and forms a part of it (Foucault, 35).” At that time, “things themselves were seen to “hide and manifest their own enigma like language” and words were seen to “offer themselves to men as things to be deciphered.” Foucault describes this relationship in more theoretical language in the following way:

Let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to make the signs speak and to discover their meaning, hermeneutics; let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to distinguish the location of the signs, to define what constitutes them as signs, and to know how and by what laws they are linked, semiology: the sixteenth century superimposed hermeneutics and semiology in the form of similitude. To search for a meaning is to bring to light a resemblance. To search for the law governing signs is to discover the things that are alike. The grammar of beings is an exegesis of these things. And what the language they speak has to tell us is quite simply what the syntax is that binds them together. The nature of things, their coexistence, the way in which they are linked together and communicate is nothing other than their resemblance (Foucault, 29).

Or, in other, more approachable language, one could understand it this way, as when he writes of the world as it was understood in the sixteenth century,

…it was all legenda –things to be read. But the reason for this was not that they preferred the authority of men to the precision of an unprejudiced eye, but that nature, in itself, is an unbroken tissue of words and signs, of accounts and characters, of discourse and forms (Foucault, 39-40).

Nature itself was thought of differently, as something to be read, that could be read. Foucault then argues that,

from the seventeenth century, one began to ask how a sign could be linked to what it signified. A question to which the classical period was to reply by the analysis of representation; and to which modern thought was to reply by the analysis of meaning and signification. But given the fact itself, language was never to be anything more than a particular case of representation (for the Classics) or of signification (for us). The profound kinship of language with the world was thus dissolved (Foucault, 43).

Okay, so that’s resemblance. Remember this later when we get to the 17^th century and how it all comes undid.

Chapter 3: Representing

The first part of this chapter is about how Don Quixote is the

first modern work of literature because in it we see the cruel reason of identities and differences make endless sport of signs and similitudes; because in it language breaks off its old kinship with things and enters into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear, in its separated state, only as literature; because it marks the point where resemblance enters an age which is, from the point of view of resemblance, one of madness and imagination. Once similitude and signs are sundered from each other, two experiences can be established and two characters appear face to face (Foucault, 49).

This part is a lot of fun, but I think much more relevant to our present purposes, is the following bit of the chapter’s second part, called “Order,” which so far as I’m concerned, basically spells out the main questions guiding the book:

Generally speaking, what does it mean, no longer being able to think a certain thought? or to introduce a new thought.

Discontinuity – the fact that within the space of a few years a culture sometimes ceases to think as it had been thinking up till then and beings to think other things in a new way – probably begins with an erosion from outside, form that space which is, for thought, on the other side, but in which it has never ceased to think from the very beginning. Ultimately, the problem that presents itself is that of the relations between thought and culture; how is it that thought has a place in the space of the world, that it has its origin there, and that it never ceases, in this place or that, to being anew? Foucault, 50

The place of thought in culture, how it gets there, what form it takes, and how and why its forms and positions changes when they do. That’s really what Foucault is after. He lays these questions before the reader just as he begins to talk about the first major shift in Western thought that is of concern here, the one from resemblance to representation which happens through processes of comparison.

Because comparison becomes the way by which people relate things to things, and words to words, and words about things to other words about things,

the activity of the mind… will no longer consist in drawing things together, in setting out on a quest for everything that might reveal some sort of kinship, attraction or secretly shared nature within them [resemblance], but, on the contrary, in discriminating, that is, in establishing their identities, then the inevitability of the connections with all the successive degrees of series (Foucault, 55).

Of this difference in thought (“the activity of the mind”), Foucault says,

All this was of the greatest consequence to Western thought. resemblance, which had for long been the fundamental category of knowledge – both the form and the content of what we know – became dissociated in an analysis based on terms of identity and difference; moreover, whether indirectly by the intermediary or measurement, or directly and, as it were, on the same footing, comparison became a function of order; and, lastly, comparison ceased to fulfill the function of revealing how the world is ordered, since it was now accomplished according to the order laid down by thought, progressing naturally from the simple to the complex. As a result, the entire episteme of Western culture found its fundamental arrangements modified (Foucault, 54).

In an epistemic system of representation, “to know is to discriminate, history and science will become separated from one another (Foucault, 55).” In other words, “the written word ceases to be included among the signs and forms of truth… it is the task of words to translate that truth if they can; but they no longer have the right to be considered a mark of it. Language has withdrawn from the midst of beings themselves and has entered a period of transparency and neutrality (Foucault, 56).” Or, in still more clear words, “It is no longer the task of knowledge to dig out the ancient Word from the unknown places where it may be hidden; its job now is to fabricate a language, and to fabricate it well – so that, as an instrument of analysis and combination, it will really be the language of calculation (Foucault, 62-63).”

Here, Foucault turns to imagination, an says that, “without imagination, there would be no resemblance between things. The double requisite is patent. There must be, in the things represented, the insistent murmur of resemblance; there must be, in the representation, the perpetual possibility of imaginative recall (Foucault, 69).”

The point here has been to draw a picture of the two ends of the spectrum of how people thought about the world in the sixteenth century. At one of the spectrum is resemblance, I which “simple natures” (based in resemblance) are ordered according to mathesis, and at the other end is the taxonomic ordering of “complex natures” (based in representation) (Foucault, 72). “Thus, at the two extremities of the Classical episteme, we have a mathesis as the science of calculable order and a genesis as the analysis of the constitution of orders on the basis of empirical series (Foucault, 73).” Furthermore, “it is patent that these three notions – mathesis, taxinomia, genesis – designate not so much separate domains as a solid grid of kinships that defines the general configuration of knowledge in the Classical age (Foucault, 74).”

Chapter 4: Speaking

Chapter four picks up where three left off, but clearer:

From an extreme point of view, one might say that language in the Classical era does not exist. But that it functions: its whole existence is located in its representative role, is limited precisely to that role and finally exhausts it. Language has no other locus, no other value, than in representation; in the hollow it has been able to form. …

Henceforth, the primary Text is effaced, and with it, the entire, inexhaustible foundation of the words whose mute being was inscribed in things; all that remains is representation, unfolding in the verbal signs that manifest it, and hence becoming discourse (Foucault, 79).

Importantly, here Foucault also clarifies why language, of all sign systems, is of such primary importance:

What distinguishes language from all other signs and enables it to play a decisive role in representation is, therefore, not so much that it is individual or collective, natural or arbitrary, but that it analyses representation according to a necessarily successive order; the sounds, in fact, can be articulated only one by one; language cannot represent thought, instantly, in its totality; it is bound to arrange it, part by part, in a linear order (Foucault, 82).

Language orders by way of general grammar, which you may remember, was one of the main modalities of knowledge listed in the preface. According to Foucault, “General grammar is the study of verbal order in its relation to the simultaneity that it is its task to represent. Its proper object is therefore neither thought nor any individual language, but discourse, understood as a sequence of verbal signs (Foucault, 83).”

This chapter’s overall intention was, “to determine in what conditions language could become the object of a period’s knowledge, and between what limits this epistemological domain developed. Not to calculate the common denominator of men’s opinions, but to define what made it possible for opinions about language – whatever the opinions may have been – to exist at all (Foucault, 119).” Again, the conditions that made possible this thinking. Thus, Foucault concludes that,

If language exists, it is because below the level of identities and differences there is the foundation provided by continuities, resemblances, repetitions, and natural criss-crossings. Resemblance, excluded from knowledge since the early seventeenth century, still constitutes the outer edge of language: the ring surrounding the domain of that which can be analysed, reduced to order, and known. Discourse dissipates the murmur, but without it, it could not speak (Foucault, 120).

In other words, Classical knowledge was thought in different ways, but it was fully rooted in the order of resemblances.

Chapter 5: Classifying

This chapter gives us one of the other really big points of the book which is that,

Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history. Foucault, 127-28

Natural History, another of the modalities listed at the beginning, “is nothing more than the nomination of the visible (Foucault, 132)” which “finds its locus in the gap that is now opened up between things and words (Foucault, 130).” History had to become Natural (Foucault, 128) and thus, “What came surreptitiously into being between the age of the theatre and that of the catalogue was not the desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse. A new way of making history (Foucault, 131).” More specifically, classification, which Foucault says is the “constituent problem of natural history… took up its position historically, and in a necessary fashion, between a theory of the mark and a theory of the organism (Foucault, 145).

According to Foucault, natural history produces a “discourse of nature” which is not “ a question of a more general rationality imposing identical forms upon grammatical thinking and upon taxinomia. Rather, it concerns a fundamental arrangement of knowledge, which orders the knowledge of beings so as to make it possible to represent them in a system of name (Foucault, 157).” He explains that,

Things and words are very strictly interwoven: nature is posited only through the grid of denominations, and – though without such names it would remain mute and invisible – it glimmers far off beyond them, continuously present on the far side of this grid, which nevertheless presents it to our knowledge and renders it visible only when wholly spanned by language (Foucault, 160).

Thus, he concludes importantly, that,

We must therefore not connect natural history, as it was manifested during the Classical period, with a philosophy of life, albeit an obscure and still faltering one. In reality, it is interwoven with a theory of words. Natural history is situated both before and after language; it decomposes the language of everyday life, but in order to recompose it and discover what has made it possible through the blind resemblances of imagination; it criticizes language, but in order to reveal its foundation. If natural history reworks language and attempts to perfect it, this is because it also delves down into the origin of language. Foucault, 161

Okay, so, you see how he’s building this whole “relationship between mots and choses, yes? Good, okay, onward! Chapter 6 is going to tell us about the last Classical term in those pairs of modalities (grammar/ philology, natural history/ biology, wealth/ political economy) and then we’ll get on to the second part of the book which deals with how we get to those second terms in the pairings.

Chapter 6: Exchanging

Chapter six is about the Classical concept of wealth, which, like general grammar and natural history, is thought in resemblance and representation. Or, in Foucault’s words,

Whatever its economic determinations and consequences, mercantilism, when questioned at the level of the episteme, appears as the slow, long effort to bring reflection upon prices and money into alignment with the analysis of representations. It was responsible for the emergence of a domain of ‘wealth’ connected to that which, at about the same time, was opened up to natural history, and likewise to that which unfolded before general grammar (Foucault, 180).

Here the mode of representational resemblance is that of exchange, “In other words, in order that one thing can represent another in an exchange, they must both exist as bearers of value; and yet value exists only within the representation (actual or possible), that is, within the exchange or the exchangeability (Foucault, 190).”

We start to see how all of this connects when Foucault explains that,

With language, the system of signs is passively accepted in its imperfection, and only an art can rectify it: the theory of language is immediately prescriptive. Natural history establishes itself a system of signs for denoting beings, and that is why it is a theory. Wealth is a system of signs that are created, multiplied, and modified by men; the theory of wealth is linked throughout to politics (Foucault, 205).

Thus,

Philology, biology, and political economy were established, not in the places formerly occupied by general grammar, natural history and the analysis of wealth, but in an area where those forms of knowledge did not exist, in the space they left blank, in the deep gaps that separated their broad theoretical segments and that were filled with the murmur of the ontological continuum. The object of knowledge in the nineteenth century is formed in the very place where the Classical plenitude of being has fallen silent. Foucault, 207

And, “Structuralism is not a new method; it is the awakened and troubled consciousness of modern thought” which was produced by “the essential problem of Classical thought” which,

lay in the relation between name and order: how to discover a nomenclature that would be a taxonomy, or again, how to establish a system of signs that would be transparent to the continuity of being. What modern though is to throw fundamentally into question is the relation of meaning with the form of truth and the form of being: in the firmament of our reflection there reigns a discourse – a perhaps inaccessible discourse – which would at the same time be an ontology and a semantics.

Thus, Foucault concludes the first part of the book by bringing everything together in the following explanation:

The whole Classical system of order, the whole of that great taxinomia that makes it possible to know things by means of the system of their identities, is unfolded within the space that is opened up inside representation when representation represents itself, that area where being and the Same reside. Language is simply the representation of words; nature is simply the representation of beings; need is simply the representation of needs. The end of Classical though – and of the episteme that made general grammar, natural history, and the science of wealth possible – will coincide with the decline of representation, or rather with the emancipation of language, of the living being, and of need, with regard to representation. Foucault, 209

From here, we go back to literature. First Borges (did I mention that, that it all starts with Borges? Probably not. You just assume that, right? Important theory book, the first pages must be about Borges. Okay, good), then Cervantes, now the Marquis de Sade. Are things getting hotter in here, or is it just the Enlightenment finally arriving half way through the book? Right, sorry, anyway, “Sade’s characters correspond to him at the other end of the Classical age, at the moment of its decline. It is no longer the ironic triumph of representation over resemblance; it is the obscure and repeated violence of desire beating at the limits of representation (Foucault, 210). Hawt.

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[1] Gil Anidjar has done some thinking recently on “the strange figure of knowledge called man” that appears in OT, if not also, as it does according to Foucault, in the sixteenth century. Anidjar’s most recent (Summer 2011) Critical Inquiry piece is a good place to look if you want to know what he thinks of this idea, and of the book in general. If by some chance that is a perspective that interests you, the article, called The Meaning of Life, can be found here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660988.

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society

Introduction

In the nineteenth century, a number of words in English acquired new meanings. These are:

• Industry – Prior to the Industrial Revolution, this meant a human attribute, “skill, perseverance, diligence.” Afterward, it became a collective word for our manufacturing and producing institutions, and their general activities. Adam Smith is one of the first writers to use this word to mean a thing in itself, an institution, rather than an attribute. Industrial, industrialism, and Industrial Revolution follow suit.
• Democracy – Prior to the French and American Revolutions, democracy was a bad word: mob- rule, agitation, Jacobinism.
• Class – Meant a division or group in schools or colleges from 1772; changed to mean element of social structure: lower class, working class, class-prejudice, class war all follow in the course of the nineteenth century.
• Art – Like industry, it formerly meant a human skill, but then came to mean a particular group of skills: creative or imaginative “arts.” The artist became a special type of person.
• Culture – Used to mean a process of human training—a culture of something. Then it came to mean a thing in itself, in four ways
  • A general state or habit of the mind, closely related to the idea of human perfection
  • The general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole
  • The general body of the arts
  • (Late nineteenth century) A whole way of life: material, intellectual, and spiritual

Thesis: The development of the word culture is a record of a number of important reactions to great historical changes in social, economic, and political life; it can be seen as a map by which to explore the changes themselves. That development merges two responses: first, the recognition of the practical separation of certain intellectual and moral activities from the driven impetus of a new kind of society; second, the emphasis of these activities, as a court of human appeal, to be set over the processes of practical social judgment, and yet offer itself as a mitigating and rallying response. Culture was not just a response to new methods of production, but was also concerned with new kinds of personal and social relationship: as a recognition of practical separation and as an emphasis of alternatives. Culture comes to mean a whole way of life, not only as a scale of integrity, but as a mode of interpreting all our common experience, and, in this new interpretation, changing it.

Part I—A Nineteenth-Century Tradition

Chapter 1: Contrasts—Edmund Burke and William Cobbett

The mood of England in the Industrial Revolution was one of contrasts. Burke, the “first modern Conservative,” and Cobbett, the “first tribune of the industrial proletariat,” are contrasted here. Their differences notwithstanding, they criticized the new England from the standpoint of the old, and initiated traditions of criticism of the new democracy and the new industrialism which remain.

Burke is the great recommender of prudence as the primary virtue of civil government. For him, politics was a business of practical expediency, not theoretical ideas. His opposition to the new agitations for democracy is based on its potential slippage into tyranny—the guarantee of the proper humanity of man is the historical community. Thus the whole progress of man is dependent not only on the abstract historical community, but on the nature of the particular community into which he is born. Burke established the idea of the State as the necessary agent of human perfection, and in terms of this the idea the aggressive individualism of the nineteenth century was bound to be condemned. He also established the idea of the “organic society,” where the emphasis is on the interrelation and continuity of human activities, rather than on separation into spheres of interest, each governed by its own laws—an ironic recommendation, as this “organic society” was being broken up before his own eyes by new economic forces.

Cobbett wrote in the manner of a popular journalist, criticizing the new industrial system as oppressive and inaugurating rampant inequality. He saw the consequences of the emerging class-structure of the new society in class-conflict, and approved the course of the rising labor movement. Yet he participated in the idealization of the medieval (viz. communal vs. individualist) that many conservative writers did, his standard being “the England into which I was born.” Thus Burke and Cobbett, though antagonistic thinkers, shared a tradition of criticism, albeit compounded of very different and even directly contradictory elements. The continuing attack on the driving philosophy of the new industrialism made even stranger affiliations: Marx, for example, wrote against capitalism in the manner of Burke and Cobbett. So too the connections between Robert Southey and Robert Owen, one a Tory reformer and the other a utopian socialist, who both asserted: a) that the change in the conditions of production effects an essential change in the human producers, and b) that the Industrial Revolution was such a major change, and produced what was virtually a new kind of human being.

Chapter 2: The Romantic Artist

Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and other poets of the early nineteenth century, saw their conclusions about personal feeling as conclusions about society, and observations of natural beauty as carrying a necessary moral reference to the whole and unified life of man. The stereotyped opposition between the poet and sociologist is on the whole a late development, though doubtless a product of the Romantic movement. For these artists, however, poetry and political commentary were inseparable. At this time of political, social, and economic change, there was also radical change in the concept of art, the artist, and their place in society. There are five main points:

• A major change was taking place in the relationship between a writer and his readers.
  • Rise of a middle-class reading public turned systems of patronage into commercial publishing. This at once removed the writer from the stricture of patronal caprice, and threw him into the literary marketplace.
• A different habitual attitude toward the “public” was establishing itself.
  • One of the primary sources for the idea of “culture”: Wordsworth's insistence on the “embodied spirit of a People,” the true standard of excellence, as something superior to the usual run of the market.
• The production of art was coming to be regarded as one of a number of specialized kinds of production, subject to much the same conditions as general production.
  • This followed from the institution of commercial publishing. A critique of mechanical artistic production closely mirrored that of industrial production, and the abstraction of Culture, together with Art, became a standard against which authenticity was to be measured.
• A theory of the “superior reality” of art, as the seat of imaginative truth, was receiving increased emphasis.
• The idea of the independent creative writer, the autonomous genius, was becoming a kind of rule.

Artists began to view themselves as bearers of the creative imagination. This was another of the principal sources for the idea of Culture. In the work of artists was a practicable mode of access to that ideal of human perfection which was to be the center of defense against the disintegrating tendencies of the age. Emphasis on creative imagination was also an alternative construction of human motive and energy to the assumptions of the prevailing political economy. Under pressure, Art became a symbolic abstraction for a whole range of human experience, a creative sensibility, an exalted special temperament, in contrast to merely “skill” or “practice.”

Chapter 3—Mill on Bentham and Coleridge

Mill's attempt to absorb and unify the truths of both the utilitarian and the idealist positions is a prologue to the subsequent history of English thinking about society and culture. Mill tempered Bentham's utilitarian philosophy, which organized and regulated merely the business parts of social arrangements, with Coleridge's emphasis on the spiritual interests and welfare of society. What he latched onto in Coleridge was a “philosophy of human culture,” which saw, “in the character of the national education existing in any political society, at once the principal cause of its permanence as a society, and the chief source of its progressiveness.” The emphasis on Culture was Mill's way of enlarging the Utilitarian tradition. The social idea of Culture, now introduced into English thinking, expressed value in terms independent of “civilization,” and of the progress of society. The standard of perfection, of “the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity” (Coleridge, Constitution of Church and State), was now available not merely to influence society, but to judge it. Mill's later work is dominated by two factors: his extension of the methods and claims of Utilitarian reform to the interests of the rising working class, and his effort to reconcile democratic control with individual liberty. He thought that culture—as impressed upon him by Coleridge—was adequately provided for, in terms of a social institution, by the extending system of national education. His can be called a “humanized Utilitarianism.”

Chapter 4—Thomas Carlyle

The idea of culture as a whole way of life receives a new emphasis in Carlyle. It is the ground of his attack on Industrialism: that a society is comprised of much more than economic relationships. Here the idea of culture as a body of arts and learning and as a body of values superior to the ordinary progress of society meet. Carlyle furthered the conception of a “spiritual aristocracy,” a highly cultivated and responsible minority, concerned to define and emphasize the highest values at which society must aim. However, the then-existing organization of society offered no actual basis for the maintenance of such a class: Culture came to be defined as a separate entity and a critical idea.

[There is a lot at the beginning of this chapter about Carlyle's critiques of the “mechanical age,” but the paragraph summary above is from the part of the chapter most relevant to the thesis. I am also omitting Chapter 5, a series of book reviews of “Industrial Novels” (eg. Hard Times), which provide “some of the most vivid descriptions of life in an unsettled industrial society.” It isn't difficult to see where this is going: a common criticism of industrialism, but in which sympathy for suffering under oppressive working conditions is transformed not into action, but into withdrawal. It is the person, not the People, against the system.]

Chapter 6—Matthew Arnold

The chapter starts with J.H. Newman, but his ideal is the same as that of Coleridge: the work of perfection (“the harmonious development of qualities, etc. etc.) was emphasized in opposition to the Utilitarian tendency to conceive of education as the training of men to carry out particular tasks in a particular kind of civilization. Arnold wrote an important work called Culture and Anarchy. He defined culture as “the study of perfection,” which “leads us...to conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society.” Arnold draws heavily on Coleridge, Burke, Newman, and Carlyle. But he was most influential in putting his revaluation of society into practice; as an inspector of schools, and independently, his effort to establish a system of general and humane education was intense and sustained. His emphasis on State power, however, lends itself to a kind of authoritarianism: the confusion between the ideal State which is the agent of perfection, and the actual State which embodies particular powers and interests, becomes dangerous and disabling. Moreover, there is a further danger in Arnold's version of Culture becoming a kind of fetish: perfection is a becoming and culture is a process, but part of the effect of Arnold's argument is to create around them the suggestion that they are absolutes. The problem is in many ways due to the difference between him and his influences: Burke drew on an existing society; Coleridge drew from the values known from the older society; Newman believed in a divine order; Arnold, however, defined culture as a process but could not find the material for that process in the society of his day. Hence the process became an abstraction, one without an absolute ground.

Chapter 7—Art and Society

An essential hypothesis in the development of the idea of culture is that the art of a period is closely and necessarily related to the generally prevalent “way of life,” and further that, in consequence, aesthetic, moral, and social judgments are closely interrelated. In nineteenth century England, the important names are Pugin, Ruskin, and Morris. Pugin arrived from criticizing change of architecture (away from the Gothic) to criticizing a civilization. Ruskin's social criticisms arose from his thinking about the purpose of art: in his criticisms of art, his standard was always “Typical Beauty,” the absolute evidence of “the universal grand design”; in his social criticism, his concern was with “the felicitous fulfillment of function in living things,” and with the conditions of “the joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man.” He found the special qualities of the artist generally lacking in nineteenth century society, prevented from emergence by a mechanical habit of apprehension. Not only is a national art thus impossible, the whole society is therefore bad. His thinking is best understood in the context of a transition between thinking about art and thinking about society, which in turn is marked by changes in the meanings of culture. But his attempts at reform were unhelpful and dull; the significance of Morris is that he sought to attach the general values of this tradition of thinking to the growing force of the organized working class. For him, art was a particular quality of labor, delight in which work had been destroyed by the machine-system of production. The arts defined a quality of living which it was the whole purpose of political change—specifically, socialist change—to make possible.

[I have omitted Part II, “Interregnum,” because it is a series of short snippets of relatively uninfluential writers. Williams himself introduces the section with the following caveat: “[W]e shall not find in them...anything very new: a working-out, rather, of unfinished lines; a tentative redirection.”]

Part III—Twentieth Century Opinions

Chapter 1—D.H. Lawrence

The points Lawrence took from the nineteenth-century tradition can be summarized as follows:

• The general condemnation of industrialism as an attitude of mind.
• Human purpose is seen as debased to sheer mechanical materialism.
• The condition of the mechanical, disintegrated mind is what has led to the ugliness of an industrial society.
• Industrialism is the forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition.

According to Lawrence, all our effort must tend toward preserving spontaneous life-activity, against the rigidities of category and abstraction of which the industrial system is so powerful an abstraction. This is the weakness of social movements: the life-activity forced into fixed ideals. Lawrence's attitude to equality removes from the idea the element of mechanical abstraction, and emphasizes relationship, the acceptance of “present otherness.” He has been vulgarized into a romantic rebel, and although there is plenty in his work to support this, he was fundamentally an exile who wanted to commit himself, but rejected the terms of commitment. For Williams, this is the tragedy: the working-class boy who did not live to come home.

[I have omitted Chapter 2, “R.H. Tawney.” Who in the world is R.H. Tawney?]

Chapter 3—T.S. Eliot

In The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot claims that industrialism, when it is unregulated, tends to create not a society but a mob; he is afraid that thus the religious-social complex on which a Christian organization of society is based would be undermined. His essential conservatism is even more evident in Notes towards the Definition of Culture; its importance is twofold: its adoption of the meaning of “culture” as a “whole way of life,” and its effort to distinguish between “elite” and “class.” Williams' final critique serves as a good summary: Eliot's theoretical persistence in the view of culture as a whole way of life seems only to be matched by his refusal to observe its practical implications. It is clear that in the new conservatism (much inferior to that of Coleridge and Burke), a genuine theoretical objection to the principle and the effects of an individualist society is combined, and has to be combined, with adherence to the principles of an economic system which is based precisely on this “atomist,” individualist view. The “free economy” which is the central tenet of contemporary conservatism [Ed. We would call it “classical,” as this was written in the 1950s], not only contradicts the social principles which Eliot advances, but also is the only available method of ordering society to the maintenance of those interests and institutions on which Eliot believes his values to depend. Against the actual and powerful program for the maintenance of social classes, and against the industrial capitalism which maintains the human divisions which endorses, the occasional observation of the immorality of usury and exploitation seems feeble—it could be afforded if culture were only a specialized product, but if culture is a “whole way of life,” then the system must be judged as a whole.

[If anyone knows who I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis are, then enjoy reading Chapter 4, “Two Literary Critics.” If not, then meditate on the pseudo-Latin epigram studere, studere: post mortem, quid valere?]

Chapter 5—Marxism and Culture

A Marxist theory of culture will recognize diversity and complexity, will take account of continuity within change, will allow for chance and certain limited autonomies, but, with these reservations, will take the facts of the economic structure and the consequent social relations as the guiding string on which a culture is woven, and by following which a culture is to be understood. Much of the “Marxist” writing in English of the '30s was basically the old Romantic protest that there was no place in contemporary society for the artist and the intellectual; a tradition proceeding from the Romantics through Arnold and Morris was supplemented by certain phrases from Marx, while continuing to operate in the old terms. This is understandable insofar as Marx's dismissal of culture (viz. “[men's] existence determines their consciousness”) was shocking to thinkers and artists who considered themselves pioneers of humanity; it had to be shown that Marxists gave high value to culture. Moreover, not only was past and present culture to be interpreted in Marxist terms, future culture had to be predicted. However, Williams repudiates the kind of Marxist literary criticism where literature is defined solely in terms of its political affiliations. Literature is obviously a social activity, and value does seem to lie in the writer's access to certain kinds of energy that can be discussed in directly literary terms, but which have a more-than-literary origin, and lie in the whole complex of a writer's relations with reality. It is the identification of this energy with participation in a particular kind of social or political activity which is not proven.

The question relating to Marxist impact on our thinking about culture: is the economic element in fact determining? Williams says it is unanswerable. Even if the economic element is determining, it determines a whole way of life, and it is to this, rather than to the economic system, that literature has to be related. The interpretive method which is governed by the arbitrary correlation of the economic situation and the subject of study leads very quickly to abstraction and unreality, and the overriding of practical concrete judgments by generalizations. To describe English life, thought, and imagination over the last three hundred years simply as “bourgeois” is to surrender reality to a formula. If you get into the habit of thinking that a bourgeois society produces a bourgeois culture, then you are likely to think that socialist society produces socialist culture; most of this speculation has been nothing but Utopian, and untrustworthy. From their emphasis on the interdependence of all elements of social reality, and from their analytic emphasis on movement and change, Marxists should logically use “culture” in the sense of a whole way of life, a general social process.

[Chapter 6 on George Orwell is a moving tribute but analytically poor. I will forge on ahead to the conclusion.]

Conclusion

The idea of culture is a general reaction to a general and major change in the conditions of our common life. Its basic element is its effort at total qualitative assessment. The new conditions, however, were neither uniform nor static. Hence though the idea of culture describes a common inquiry, the conclusions, as well as the starting points, have been diverse. Thus what it indicates is a process, not a conclusion. The various arguments do not point to any inevitable action or affiliation; it is up to us to decide which to take up.

It is worth drawing a distinction between “bourgeois culture”—the basic individualist idea and the institutions, manners, and habits of thought that proceed from it—and “working-class culture”—the basic collective idea, and the institutions, manners, and habits of thought and intention that proceed from it. The basic distinction is not language, or dress, or leisure, but between alternative ideas of the nature of social relationship. The culture that the working-class has produced, and which should be recognized as a remarkable creative achievement, is the collective democratic institution.

In its definition of common interest as true self-interest, in its finding of individual verification primarily in the community, the idea of solidarity is potentially the real basis of a society. To rid oneself of the illusion of the objective existence of the “masses,” and to move towards a more actual and more active conception of human beings and relationships, is in fact to realize a new freedom. The idea of a common culture brings together, in a particular form of social relationship, at once the idea of natural growth and that of its tending. The former is a type of romantic individualism, the latter a type of authoritarian training. Yet each marks a necessary emphasis. Any culture, in its whole process, is a selection, a tending. The distinction of a common culture is that the selection is freely and commonly made and remade. The tending is a common process, based on common decisions, which comprehends the actual variations of life and growth. The natural growth and the tending are parts of a mutual process, guaranteed by the fundamental principle of the equality of being.

Gyan Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India

Preface(s)

Let's start with the familiar critique of this book: communalism is ultimately attributable to colonial discourse, the phantom product of Western colonial power-knowledge and its classificatory strategies. First of all, Pandey makes it clear that anti-colonial secular nationalists were at the forefront of negotiating the category of communalism, by stereotyping this discrete, substantive political tendency as the conceptual other of nationalism. Moreover, he emphasizes that communalism as a colonial mode of knowledge only means that it was the product of a particular interpretation of history in which perennial religious battles were constantly re-enacted between already always-constituted and sharply differentiated communities of Hindus and Muslims. The point is that communalism should not be studied in isolation from other political trends of the colonial and postcolonial period. What this book investigates is “the meanings that different participants in the sectarian politics of the period—local Hindus and Muslims, nationalist spokesmen, colonial officials—attached to these politics.” Pandey's concern is not only with social, economic, and political “facts,” but with how historians, administrators, politicans, and “the people about whom we know least of all” have isolated “facts” and served them up as “history” (xvii). The discourse of communalism—the concept, the vocabulary—is as much a part of its politics as any notion of real, lived experience.

Chapter One—Introduction

Histories written over the last century have been national histories, and this is no different for modern India. Communalism became a stand-in, beginning in conservative colonialist writing, for a subcontinental version of nationalism—same-same, but different. By contrast, for Indian nationalists, communalism was important because it was not nationalism—it was, in fact, together with colonialism, nationalism's chief adversary. Both of these formulations rest on the ahistorical notion of the “nation” as a pure, fixed entity. In historical writings on South Asia, colonialist as well as nationalist, the concept of communalism and that of nationalism emerge as predetermined—Indian history being a deviation from the European model—instead of as the outcome of historical processes. Since communalism appeared in that particular political discourse of colonial India as “the central problem to be overcome in the development of a self-governing, national, and democratic polity in India,” the study of communalism is part of “a larger exercise aimed at understanding the construction of Indian society and politics in recent times” (5). This book analyzes a construction of knowledge about Indian society—the construction of a sociology and a history that can be summarized as “communalism.” It explores the history of the “problem” of communalism by examining the discourse that gave it meaning; in other words, what do we accomplish when applying the term “communalism” to the history of Hindu-Muslim (or Hindu-Sikh, etc.) relations in colonial North India?

Communalism is a form of colonialist knowledge. In academic usage, the term is applied to “organized political movements based on the proclaimed interests of a religious community, usually in response to...another religious community” (6). Yet the term is never applied in this sense to feudal Europe or other pre-capitalist societies, nor in reference to Protestant-Catholic conflict in Northern Ireland. It is reserved for “the analysis of social and political conflict in the 'backward' parts of the colonial and post-colonial world, and then read back by some analysts as a quality that must have existed in these societies long before the colonial intervention” (7). Communalism captured for the colonialists what they had conceptualized as a basic feature of Indian society—its religious bigotry and fundamentally irrational character—which denies history, consciousness, and agency to colonized peoples (10). In the colonialist view, communalism was age-old, essential to and more or less universal among Indians, except among the enlightened/liberal/Western-educated. In the nationalist view, however, communalism was a problem with relatively recent origins, the outcome of economic and political inequality and conflict, and the handiwork of self-interested elite groups (11). But although these conceptions differ on the face of it, both the racist-essentialist and the liberal-rationalist view of Indian politics accept the givenness of communalism—a tangible phenomenon whose causes can be identified and which must be overcome for progress to be possible (12-13).

The false totalities of ready-made religious communities have largely been undermined by recent historians—liberal-nationalist, Marxist, even neo-colonialist—who have pointed out the immense differences in language, occupation, economic interest, and religious practice among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, etc. of different regions, castes, and classes (13). However, some old views still remain current, such as the “continuity” argument, put forward by Christopher Bayly and others, which suggests that much that happened in colonial India—in this particular case, communal conflict—had its beginnings in the centuries before the arrival of the British, and that colonial intervention did not mark the drastic rupture which it has generally been assigned (15). This argument overlooks the radically altered nature of the state under colonialism—more modern, powerful, centralized, and interventionist than any prior “state” in the subcontinent. Another old view which persists is the search for “causes” and “rationality,” which reduces sectarian movements and conflict to economistic explanations. All this does is replace the Orientalist-essentalist view of Eastern irrationality with the false universal of bourgeois rationality. In sum, we must question the givenness of communalism by underscoring its historical character. As Benedict Anderson has shown, all communities are imagined, made; categories of thought, too, are “made” in this sense (22).

Chapter Two—The Colonial Construction of the Indian Past

Colonialist writers more or less established the pattern of the Indian past as we know it today. Sectarian strife was an important motif in that pattern. The reading of Indian history which represented religious conflict as a distinctive feature of Indian society was distinguished in three ways: a) its periodization in terms of the European experience (ancient/medieval/modern); b) its use of communal (religious) categories to differentiate those periods of history (viz. Hindu classical age/Muslim dark age/British renaissance); and c) the emptying out of all history from the political experience of the people and the identification of religion as the moving force of Indian politics (23-4). This chapter asks how reports of sectarian strife were received by contemporary and subsequent observers, what meanings were derived from them, and what place they were assigned in different representations of the changing colonial world—in other words, how colonialist observers (gazetteers, administrators) “read” the history of Hindu-Muslim strife in coming to terms with Indian society (26). Exemplary are the evolving historical perceptions of the 1809 Hindu-Muslim riots in Banaras, and how a particular experience of religious antagonism comes to apply to the country as a whole (28). Not only are there discrepancies between the earliest and most “authoritative” accounts of the 1809 riots, but the “bare facts” of the situation were constructed out of the prejudices, biases, and “common sense” of the writers (32). Some of these differences across the colonial accounts are as follows:

• The figures of 28 people killed and 70 wounded get inflated to “several hundred” killed in the District Gazetteer of 1907 and the Government Memorandum of 1928.
• The site of the initial outbreak shifts from the Lat Bhairava temple a mile outside the city to the Vishwanath temple at the city's center.
• The cause of the conflict is displaced from the desecration of the Lat Bhairava idol, to the “frenzy” excited by Muharram lamentations, to a clash between Holi and Muharram processions, to “friction” over the mosque built by Aurangzeb (17^th C.) at the current site of the Vishwanath temple.

The reconstruction of the Banaras riots in colonialist discourse, in its successive recensions spread out over approxmiately a hundred years, assumes over time the importance of a master narrative, a model for all descriptions and evaluations of communal riots in official prose (32). The colonial exercise of giving a cause and a name (fanaticism, irrationality) to the violence of 1809 not only emptied it of any other significance (or context, or history), but it established the fundamental antagonism between “Hindus” and “Muslims” (39). Colonial writings on Banaras in the early nineteenth century have certain recurring features: the emphasis on ethnic and doctrinal signs for the identification of rival crowds; the construction of a diachrony into which these events fitted; the description of violence as a means of describing native character (39-40). In this kind of history, “violence” always belonged to a pre-colonial tradition: the imposition of British rule, the displacement of an earlier balance of power, had nothing to do with it. The tradition of strife becomes the justification for colonial rule—by the late nineteenth century, it is no longer English military or scientific or commercial prowess but the hopeless divisions and primitive passions of the “natives” that legitimizes British power (45).

One striking component of these colonial writings, and another legacy of nationalist historiography, is the reduction of Indian history to the history of the state. The new, colonial state stood out in contrast to the pre-political, proto-historic character of local society. In the case of Banaras, James Mill wrote that the maintenance of peace and order in that cirty was “for some time” a “troublesome” and “imperfectly” accomplished task. But the “unrelaxing firmness” of British rule, a “better knowledge of the British character” and the “improving intelligence” of the Indians “lightened the labour” (i.e. the divinely ordained British task of bringing law and order) so that ten years after 1809, Banaras was “regulated with as much facility as any other city in the territories of the Company” (cf. Mill, History of British India, Vol. VII, pp. 338-9). In other words, the pre-history of Banaras, as that of all India before the coming of British power, is chaos, and, within ten years, history supervenes, order is established (46). These writings efface the violence of the colonial state, promoting a picture of a wise and neutral power, ruling by the sheer force of moral authority (49).

Finally, the colonial narrative on communal strife—the “communal riot narrative”—throughout the nineteenth century and beyond followed a particular model, unfettered by time or space. It proceeded by identifying the “first” major riot (usually the first recorded after the establishment of British rule), and then tracing a straight line through to the “last,” which naturally changes with the date of the writing (62-3). In this model, any riot can stand in for another, and all that can be usefully compared is the magnitude of violence—thus a description of the “first” outbreak indicates the character of all subsequent strife, such that Mubarakpur in 1813 = Shahabad in 1917 = Bombay in 1893 (63). The phrases that make for the history of these places in the nineteenth century are “fanatical and clannish” entities, “disorderly sections of the population,” communities “prone to dacoity and rioting,” “fires of religious animosity,” and “indiscriminate affrays” (64). This is of course not a history, but an ideological equation of rioting, bigotry, and criminality with an inferior people and a people without history—a “native” violence is distinguished here from the unacknowledged but “legitimate” violence of the colonial state (64). The violence of the native has specifically Oriental characteristics; it is helpless, irrational, and related to the age-old flames of sectarian strife. This is what constitutes the Indian past (65).

Chapter Three—The Bigoted Julaha

[See in this connection Chapter 3 in Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, “Translating Life-Worlds,” pp. 78-80. Chakrabarty questions Pandey's universalization of the figure of the weaver between Marx, E.P. Thompson, and the julahas of colonial U.P. In particular, he is concerned with the imposition of the secular time of history on the singular time of gods and spirits—that the particular life-worlds of the julahas, in which work and worship (i.e. labor and the spirits) are not dissociated from one another, cannot be subsumed to the “History 1” of the globalizing urges of capital.]

Colonial historiography of the past was accompanied by a colonial sociology of the present. The central organizing principle of Indian society in the colonial records shifted over the course of the nineteenth century from the “village community” to “caste.” This was concomitant with a shift in the colonial concern with revenue to the concern for law and order. With “castes,” colonial sociology sought to map the qualities of the subject population that were most germane to the business of administration—“not only a group's productive capacity, its traditional occupation, its (established or reputed) efficiency, laziness, etc. but also its criminality, military prowess, truthfulness, litigious tendencies, rebelliousness, and so on” (68). This chapter discusses one caste-stereotype, that of the “bigoted Julaha” (weaver) and its importance in the explanation of sectarian strife in northern India. The larger question is that “the relationship in colonialist discourse between 'sociology' and 'history'--'caste' and the politicized 'religious community', or, in other words, 'caste' and 'communalism'” (69).

Muslim weavers' involvement in Hindu-Muslim conflict is unsurprising, since they constituted the largest segment of the Muslim minority in the U.P. region, and they were concentrated in towns where the possibilities of violent conflict were greater (70). Moreover, the weaving communities of the north Indian hinterland were subjected to many new economic hardships—the decline of handicrafts, the deprivation of educational opportunity, urban migration—with the onset of colonialism and the market economy (72-8). It is a small step from weaver/moneylender to Muslim/Hindu conflict, but the reality is a little more complex. First of all, religion should not be taken as a surrogate for something else, but neither is it all-encompassing and unchanging; in nineteenth century northern India, the presence of a new colonial regime (of knowledge-power) was very consequential in determining the character of public religion and religious issues—in particular, the regime's drive to catalogue, to reify, and to record “established” customs and practices that had always contained a great deal of fluidity. The institution of “caste,” even more than “religion,” represents an outstanding example. New caste movements and status claims in the nineteenth century were not only negotiated within, but largely accentuated by the hierarchical classificatory efforts of the colonial Census (82-3).

The centrality of the loom in the Julaha community united work and worship to such an extent that economic struggle was closely entwined (pun intended) with religious sentiments. As part of the Julahas' fight to preserve and improve their economic and social status, prominent groups of weavers guarded against innovations that would reduce the importance of their religious festivals and places of worship. On account of these diverse, at times desperate struggles by weavers in many different places, the community acquired the reputation of being “uncompromising, easily aroused, violent Muslims: a community of 'fanatical', 'clannish' and 'bigoted' Julahas.” This stereotype effectively erased the different self-images and historical circumstances of different groups of Muslim weavers in northern India (102). Moreover, this image of Julaha bigotry was drawn up in colonialist writings on the basis of only the Gazetteers of four U.P. districts—Banaras, Ghazipur, Ballia, and Azamgarh—where “the existence of many old centres [sic] of cloth production, the numerical strength of the weavers in these 'urban' localities, the self-image and pride of the weavers, combined with the economic, social, and political disloation of the colonial period and the renewed struggles for power and prestige that came along with this, brought the Julahas out in numerous acts of resistance and repeated outbreaks of fighting over the prized symbols of Hinduism and Islam” (104-5).

The point here is that the myth distorts reality by taking history out of it. As Barthes writes, “Myth is depoliticized speech....It deprives the object of which it speaks of all History. In it history evaporates...all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful [or ugly] object without wondering where it came from. Or even better: it can only come from eternity” (Barthes, Mythologies, pp. 143, 151). In colonial sociology, “caste” is not just an organizing principle of Indian society; it becomes the site of particular instincts, tendencies, and urges. It is through this quality of having innate, unchanging properties that caste feeds into communalism, which has more to do with a kind of culture—“of unreasonableness, narrowness, dogmatism and violence, all arising at bottom out of an irrational, primitive religiosity. For the colonialist...if caste was the defining unit of Indian society, communalism was its defining culture” (108).

--I have omitted Chapter 4 in this summary, since it deals with a particular local history which is does not contribute significantly to the overall thesis. Here are two paragraphs, however, from Chapter 5 which are important to the argument that belonging to a “Hindu” and “Muslim” community did not always mean responding to “Hindu” and “Muslim” interest: many other factors, caste in particular, had far more weight in terms of local community solidarity--

“All this is not to suggest that 'Hindu' and 'Muslim' interests or the notion of a 'Hindu (or Muslim) community' had no meaning for the vast majority of local castes, in the Bhojpuri region or elsewhere....But the relevant point, perhaps, is that apperception at the local level during the early nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, was very much in terms of jati and biradari, caste and kinship, that the strength of local caste and community organization mattered (in that decisions were most often taken and/or channelled [sic] through them), and that the feeling of belonging to a wider 'Hindu' or 'Muslim' community did not mean—in spite of all that colonialist historiography and sociology had to say on the subject—that 'Hindus' and 'Muslims' responded automatically and in unvarying ways to every appeal for action on behalf of 'Hindu' or 'Muslim' interests.

The point possibly applies with greater force to the Hindu community than to the 'Muslim', because, unlike the latter, the 'Hindu community' was far from being small, concentrated in particular localities, or bound by anything in the way of a 'revealed' book or a 'united' church. The all-India 'Hindu community' (and, to a large extent, the all-India 'Muslim community' too) was a colonial creation for, as I have argued, the social and economic changes brought by colonialism, Indian efforts to defend the indigenous religions and culture against western missionary attacks, the 'unifying' drive of the colonial state—which was marked at the level of administrative structure and attempted political control...tended to promote the idea of an all-India 'Hindu community' and an all-India 'Muslim community' which were supposedly ranged against one another for much of the time. In spite of a widely felt sense of 'Hinduness' and 'Muslimsness', I would suggest that until the nineteenth century at any rate, people always had to work through caste, sect and so on to arrive at the unities implied in the conception of the 'Hindu community' and the 'Muslim community'.” (198-9)

Chapter Six—'Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan'

By the early years of the twentieth century, the sense of religious community was far more widespread than ever before. Reform movements, religious debates, administrative demands, census operations, and representative politics pushed elite groups among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs to: a) appropriate marginal groups (“untouchable” = “Hindu”); b) purify their domains (“Muslim” ≠ “Hindu”); and c) establish their separate identities (eg. the Singh Sabha's famous proclamation Ham Hindu Nahin, “We are not Hindus”). Along with the mobilization of Hindu and Muslim communities went the attempt to build “nationalist” feeling that transcended these boundaries and narrow interests (204-5).The ambiguity in Indian nationalism—that is, the contradiction between a “modernist” idiom of secular cosmopolitanism and the “dharmic” idiom of precolonial tradition—has been viewed by some as a tactical necessity and by others as a constitutive split (208). Pandey suggests that there is a third idiom: on the one hand, nationalism must speak in the language of rationality, the equality of all individuals; on the other hand, it needs the language of historical necessity, of ancient status and attributes, which is part of the discourse of community (209). The question is: how was the imagined political community of the future (à la Anderson) being constructed by Indian nationalists at different times? The answer is: prior to the 1920s and 1930s, the nation of Indians was visualized as a composite body, a collection of communities, each with its own history and culture and contribution to a common nationality. After this, India came to be seen much more as a collection of individuals, of Indian “citizens.” The concept of communalism, according to Pandey, was articulated in the context of this shift (210). This chapter peruses the writings of Hindu and Muslim nationalist writers—Bhartendu Harishcandra, R.C. Dutt, Syed Ahmed Khan—to discern a particular vision of nationhood. The evidence from the turn of the century points, on the one hand, to a political vision of emerging or potential unity based on the common interests of all Indians. On the other hand, it indicates the existence of a vision of society as already formed into discrete communities, each with its own priorities and interests and each with the right to determine its own future (231).

Chapter Seven—Nationalism Versus Communalism

This chapter represents the second part of the argument made above: that sometime around the 1920s, communitarian mobilization as had been articulated previously came to be regarded by more and more nationalist observers as a distorting tendency. “Hindu” and “Muslim” politics became divisive, primitive, and the product of a colonial policy of Divide and Rule. This was the birthplace of the nationalist version of the concept of “communalism.” Indeed, Indian nationalism itself, as standing above (or outside) the different religious communities, and taking as its constitutive unit the individual citizen untainted by the “primordial” pulls of caste and religious community, was conceptualized only on opposition to this notion of communalism. The point is that communalism and nationalism as we know them today arose together; they were part of the same discourse (235-6).

The binary opposition between nationalism and communalism entailed a careful re-examination and presentation of the Indian past. This reconstructed history emphasized not only the tolerance and synthesizing capacities that had gone into the making of Indian civilization, it would also show the commitment of all India's prior inhabitants to the soil, to the State, and to the nation—in other words, the priority of a “secular national loyalty” over any loyalty to religion, caste, or race. Nationalists now claimed, in opposition to colonialist assertions about the impossibility of uniting Indians, the fundamental, essential unity of India, based on its geographical boundaries, economic self-sufficiency, and the interdependence of its various parts (247). “In the nationalist discourse of the twentieth century, then, the unity of India appeared as a demonstrable but at the same time a metaphysical truth. 'India' became the nation personified” (249). This oversimplification of history is common to all nationalisms, but what was missing in the Indian case was the sense of the common people (instead of the great rulers of India—Muslims, Rajputs, Buddhists) as historical agents, of the peoples and classes of the subcontinent struggling to realize their many versions of truth, honour [sic] and the just life. “There was no room here for an accommodation of local loyalties, for continued attachment to religion, or even appreciation of the vigorous struggles that had been waged against these; nor much allowance for the class-divided and regionally diverse perceptions of the 'imagined community' (Anderson again), out of the struggle for which Indian nationalism and the Indian national movement arose” (253). By denying the subjecthood of the Indian people, nationalist historiography shared with colonialism a kind of statist perspective: for the colonialists, “the state alone...could establish order out of chaos, reduce the religious and other passions of Indians to 'civilized' proportions, and carry India into 'modernity.' So, too, in the nationalist account, the Indian state had performed the role of maintaining Indian unity in the past and would do so in the future” (253).

The nationalist redefinition of politics in the 1930s and 1940s excluded problems like communalism from the realm of the political. They attempted to subjugate the “social”—the religious and other pre-existing communities—to the “political” world—the mass of people mobilized into a new national community. However, they could not accomplish this subjugation, because they could never quite decide whether communalism was a social or a political problem. And even as the new religion of secular nationalism was being articulated, there were many vacillations and compromises made to accommodate Hindu and Muslim communal interests. [For an example of how the ostensibly secular Congress Party wilfully protected and empowered Hindu partisan ideologues after independence, in many ways setting the stage for present-day resurgence of the politics of religious extremism, see a recent article by Manu Bhagavan, “The Hindutva Underground: Hindu Nationalism and the Indian National Congress in Late Colonial and Early Postcolonial India,” The Economic and Political Weekly (Special Article, 13 Sept. 2008): 39-48]. The nation was, and continues to be, the outcome of many different visions—including the rights of the individual, of the poorest and longest oppressed—and the struggles between them. It is between these different conceptions of nationhood that the struggle must still be waged (261).

Afterword (2005)

[I quote from the last two pages of the afterword, because they are fabulous]

“In the plural societies of large parts of Asia and Africa, where neither absolutist nor conquest state had emerged in the early modern period to homogenize religious traditions and cultural practices, the politics of communalism—or what has been called communalism—arose in the colonial period to become a major factor in political debates. Such a politics was often seen, justifiably, as disruptive of emerging struggles of nationhood and independence, especially since there was always a danger that communalist campaigns would sprout separate national movements of their own. But movements of this kind were also a part of emerging political contests in these complex, multi-layered, plural societies—one element in the negotiation of political futures, the outcome of which was hardly predictable in advance.

The increasingly centralized nationalist states that have arisen all over the world since then have altered the political equation almost beyond recognition. The statist chauvinisms that have often followed the establishment of these nation-states have refused to enter into any dialogue with the kinds of sectional, sectarian, or cultural movements that were once labelled [sic] 'communalist.' In addition, the 'collapse of socialism', as it is called, the emergence of a unipolar world, and the onset of aggressive globalization, has eroded the grounds of contestatory democracy even further.

[…]

[F]or all the talk of a globalized and 'smaller' world, our planet as perhaps a more contradictory and fragmented place than it was a hundred or even fifty years ago. There are many more sovereign nation-states...the vast majority of people are recognized as citizens of one state or another (even if there is, once more, a growing number of refugees and migrants without any surety of this); and there is increased talk, in many countries, of multiculturalism, of the contributions of privileged migrants and diasporic communities, as well as of the fundamental rights of all men and women in all parts of the globe. It is in the rhetoric of sovereignty and human rights, in the disorder of our political world, and in the messiness of our search for new intellectual/political ends, that we will still find grounds for struggle.” (281-2)