15 JuneAuritro Majumder Few comments/notes on your article -
1. Your use of Dron-Eklabya metaphor for the translative process I thought was very well-conceptualized. Bishon bhabalo/bhabachhe byaparta, I think this is an important contribution similar to your concept of the Babar-Jajati complex. Especially with regards to the general problematic of 'postcoloniality', speaking/writing back to the metropole, as well as the antagonistic relation of the Indian nation-state with its margins in particular.
2. Your use of Derrida's 'genealogical fantasy' critique is well taken, but has to be followed up, in my opinion, by a distinction which Derrida does not make - the class-historical position of particular constructions. Nahole shei standard poststruralist critique of grand-narratives ei ferot jaoa hoy, without attention to the historic specificity and potential functions of each and every so called fantasy.
3. The above leads directly to the appropriative TENDENCY of global capital you speak about, in the translation process and/or knowledge creation. Reading it as dialectically driven, such processes seem to me to form a part of the UNITY of the accumulative process at a given (world-historical) moment. I would not,thereforefore, subscribe to the view that such an extraction of surplus (knowledge) would continue unilinearly (you do not explicitly state if this is your conclusion) but would in fact give rise to its own tendencies of contradiction/transformation, which is borne out by a consideration of history of the past 200 years, I think.
Reminded of a passage from Engels on this redistributive (non-exploitative) form of social surplus in 'socialist society' http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_08_05.htm
the quote is - "There has also been a discussion in the Volks-Tribune about the distribution of products in future society, whether this will take place according to the amount of work done or otherwise. The question has been approached very "materialistically" in opposition to certain idealistic phraseology about justice. But strangely enough it has not struck anyone that, after all, the method of distribution essentially depends on how much there is to distribute, and that this must surely change with the progress of production and social organization, so that the method of distribution may also change. But everyone who took part in the discussion, "socialist society" appeared not as something undergoing continuous change and progress but as a stable affair fixed once for all, which must, therefore, have a method of distribution fixed once for all. All one can reasonably do, however, is 1) to try and discover the method of distribution to be used at the beginning, and 2) to try and find the general tendency of the further development. But about this I do not find a single word in the whole debate."
Do correct me wherever I am wrong. - Auritro Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1890 www.marxists.org Marx-Engels Correspondence
15 JuneAuritro Majumder
ReplyDeleteFew comments/notes on your article -
1. Your use of Dron-Eklabya metaphor for the translative process I thought was very well-conceptualized. Bishon bhabalo/bhabachhe byaparta, I think this is an important contribution similar to your concept of the Babar-Jajati complex. Especially with regards to the general problematic of 'postcoloniality', speaking/writing back to the metropole, as well as the antagonistic relation of the Indian nation-state with its margins in particular.
2. Your use of Derrida's 'genealogical fantasy' critique is well taken, but has to be followed up, in my opinion, by a distinction which Derrida does not make - the class-historical position of particular constructions. Nahole shei standard poststruralist critique of grand-narratives ei ferot jaoa hoy, without attention to the historic specificity and potential functions of each and every so called fantasy.
3. The above leads directly to the appropriative TENDENCY of global capital you speak about, in the translation process and/or knowledge creation. Reading it as dialectically driven, such processes seem to me to form a part of the UNITY of the accumulative process at a given (world-historical) moment. I would not,thereforefore, subscribe to the view that such an extraction of surplus (knowledge) would continue unilinearly (you do not explicitly state if this is your conclusion) but would in fact give rise to its own tendencies of contradiction/transformation, which is borne out by a consideration of history of the past 200 years, I think.
Reminded of a passage from Engels on this redistributive (non-exploitative) form of social surplus in 'socialist society'
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_08_05.htm
the quote is -
"There has also been a discussion in the Volks-Tribune about the distribution of products in future society, whether this will take place according to the amount of work done or otherwise. The question has been approached very "materialistically" in opposition to certain idealistic phraseology about justice. But strangely enough it has not struck anyone that, after all, the method of distribution essentially depends on how much there is to distribute, and that this must surely change with the progress of production and social organization, so that the method of distribution may also change. But everyone who took part in the discussion, "socialist society" appeared not as something undergoing continuous change and progress but as a stable affair fixed once for all, which must, therefore, have a method of distribution fixed once for all. All one can reasonably do, however, is 1) to try and discover the method of distribution to be used at the beginning, and 2) to try and find the general tendency of the further development. But about this I do not find a single word in the whole debate."
Do correct me wherever I am wrong.
- Auritro
Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1890
www.marxists.org
Marx-Engels Correspondence