Two things that happened in the last week prompted this post.
One, a link to a blog that defiantly raises an "angry" fist to the issues of the world from the all too sure perspective of literature and theory. Second, a seminar where a highly intelligent presentation collapsed into theoretical noise.
I remember my teacher at College, the nutty and cranky Dr Roy, sagely telling us what Adorno said to his students during a confrontation- theory is praxis. That was on one of those Royesque hot Delhi afternoon tutorial sessions spent in his dusty office up on the roof of St. Stephens. I still remember that moment. The creaky fan swirled hot air and dispersed Dr Roy's words into fragments of charged particles that settled around my soul, and opened up and justified to me, my world.
I loved, still love, the abstract words, weighed down by intended and interpreted meaning, that colonize the pages of texts tagged philosophy and theory. I dismissed my love for the more simple and direct. Charles Dickens, Lev Tolstoy, Steinbeck. But what nagged me, surrounded as I was, with friends who would sit on candle light vigils, participate in marches, take trips to riot ridden Ahmedabad, raise their voices for the cause of those displaced by the Narmada project, my boredom and disinterest in participating in a social cause. I felt guilty, terribly useless as a thinking individual, but I found the 'committed to a cause' bandwagon slightly neurotic with the penchant for speaking in the same and old language of 'activism'.
Theory is praxis. It delighted me, it gave me conviction; it set my sense of wrong to right. I eased into myself. It was okay. I could read, think, write and yet feel I am somehow contributing. The blog I stumbled upon recently would have warmed the cockles of my heart some years ago. It is full of subjectivities and issues of identities and representations and ideologies. The humanities departments in India, particularly the English Departments, constantly stumble into the fallacy of applying theory. They take historical, theoretical, philosophical responses to political , economic and social upheavals, and despite their own cautionary warning against universalization, promptly turn their meanings into categories, analysis into fixed concepts and critical language into jargon.
They reproduce without basis the historical consciousness of another age and era without scrutinizing the complexity and new realities of the present. Look at the way, for instance, Said's analysis of the Orientalist discourse is irresponsibly reproduced, cited, 'applied' to whatever might seem like a relationship of domination and colonization. Derrida is not understood, yet his trace, erasure and differance ceaselessly multiply across dissertations in India. Marx is sightlessly grasped and quoted to establish a reputation of sorts. It is 'fashionable' to use theory. The danger is when it is used as fixed unchanging thought.
In the pages and conversations of a persuasive old man, I found truth. Some years ago, I would have called truth debatable. Now I know that I can simply and confidently say truth according to me. It does not deny anyone else's version. It identifies my authorship.
What did I find? I found that if I do not give my reader, my listener, the key to enter my world, if they cannot comprehend or fail to identify with what I am saying, theory can not ever be praxis. It is not for your audience to step up. It is up to you to step down. When I stepped down, I realized I had to unlearn everything I thought I had learnt. When I stepped down, my learning was of no use. But I have started re-learning the alphabet.
It is true that theoretical concepts are haphazardly and uncritically applied to disparate situations often in the field of academic research but the motive matters here, madam. while dilettantism and pseudo-intellectualism might prompt certain people to brandish concepts like post-structuralism or marxism or feminism as talismans, as incantations the use of which will enable perceptive analysis of any and every phenomenon they have been applied to, there are others too who do so to learn in the process themselves and also to test the efficacy of a powerful theory of an era in a different epoch.
ReplyDeletebut why do you feel you need to step down? it is the reader's responsibility to endeavour to step up since she wants to engage with certain ideas that have no scope for simple expostulation and expand her horizon in the process!
Of course. All learning begins in imitation and perhaps ends in it too. And the relationship between writing and thought is already fraught with so many issues. You are right. Unfortunately, I am right too.
ReplyDeleteI feel I need to step down because when I think I know, my writing alienates the reader who does not know.I am then only chattering like other academic monkeys, telling tales told by idiots, all sound and fury, signifying nothing!My learner-reader too chatters in response, learning to reproduce the sound of what she hears without any access to the core thought that produced it.
When I step down, I step down not for my reader but for myself. It is so easy to be complex and complicated. It is the hardest thing in the world to be simple.
Well, of course. It is as hard to be simple as easy it is to be simplistic and the latter always reduces potency of arguments. if we have ideas that is best expressed through fury of a little understood polymaths, then let us retain the right to be abstruse. can anyone dream that the Ulysses would have been more powerful had it been simpler?
ReplyDeletebesides, one most fascinating peculiarities of humanities is in its attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct, it has to test the limits of conventional thoughts, language usage and institutions, it comes across as complex and confusing. but you know that far better than i do-you who is the winsome votary of 'theory is maxim' principle.
ha ha. But I do think Ulysses would have been as powerful if told simply! I think I enjoyed Dubliners or Portrait of a Young Man much more than Ulysses!
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