A Critique of Judgment and Towards Jaina Theory of Literary studies

Transformation is a way of life according to Landmark Education and I am learning a thing (learning being one of my strong suits) or two everyday. Discussing the problems of relationships with my friends, I discovered how being judgmental is a negative way of being which drains us of vitality and openness. Most of us believe that we are open-minded, but if we just became aware of the things that we consider ` good', `right', `wrong' or `bad', we discover that we are constantly judging people, situations, things and of course ourselves. At the same time, almost all of us allow other people's judgment to affect us and influence our way of thinking and being. I believe if we avoid looking at the world in terms of ` good-bad', `right-wrong', `proper-improper', our world view would become very broad.

I was wondering about the conversations I heard during the Forum regarding, ` Must, Is, because' and ` Always Already Listening' and I felt I did not quite get them. But I feel today that they about ways of thinking and being which restrict our openness and put constraints on the other possibilities of being and living. Saying that X is like this or Y must ... or thinking in terms of `because' are all based on the perception of present which is based on our past. LM perceives the present from the point of view of the future which is not merely a projection from our past that is our fantasies, anxieties, fears and wish fulfillments etc. Transformation, in LM philosophy is different from change. Change is modification or alteration of what already exists, transformation is invention of a state of being which is not a modification of what already exists.

LM educational philosophy is based on the idea of `transformative education’ instead of informative education and it achieves its aims by focusing on our areas of being, living, and thinking which we did not know that we did not know, as against most of the education system which focuses on what we know we don’t know -we know we cant speak Chinese or how to hack into the Pentagon website. An instance of transformative education unit is the idea that most of us are judgmental thinking in terms of `right-wrong’ etc without acknowledging or knowing that we are judgmental.

With these things at the back of my mind, I was browsing through Crossword bookstore looking for good books on Jainism. Jainism is an incredibly powerful religion and like all great religions, it is based on atheism. Its central value is `aviolence’ (often translated as non-violence) which has to be conceived very broadly. This central value is based on its metaphysics of ` anekantavaada’ or pluralistic view of reality (that is `realities’). The Jaina logic, probably one of the greatest logical systems of the world, is based on seven step syllogism or the Sapta Bhangi Nyaya. This logical system like the notion of `a-violence’ is based on non-absolutist metaphysical outlook of the religion.   The summary of this seven fold logic is first found in the writings of a Jaina monk Bhadrabahu (c. 4^th century B.C,) and goes something like this:

"The syadvada is set forth as follows: (1) May be, it is; (2) may be, it is not; (3) may be, it is and it is not; (4) may be, it is indescribable; (5) may be, it is and yet is indescribable; (6) may be, it is not and it is also indescribable; (7) may be, it is and it is not and it is also indescribable."

A-violence is possible if your outlook becomes a non-absolutist and being judgmental implies that my view is truth and is unquestionable one, because I am Right and you are Wrong.  In a way, our judgmental view is the source of violence in the world and it limits our world view in a violent way.

Sometime back, I was almost fanatic and dogmatic upholder of the ` evaluative’ mode of criticism and felt that non-evaluative or non-judgmental study of literature as promoted by outstanding critics like Northrop Frye has resulted in certain `anomie’ of values in literary studies department. The judgmental way of reading or being is actually a very limited and violent way of reading. I wonder how a-violent or non-judgmental mode of reading is possible. It is possible by admitting multiple points of views of readers and the characters and the author in the process of reading, in fact, by admitting that all the voices that speak in the text, including the voice of reader, is not  speaking `the Truth’, but ` a truth’ which is a limited one.  Reader response theories admit multiple points of views of readers by asserting that the readers produce their meaning, but there is need for this ethical awareness that even a particular meaning generated by the reader is not the `right one’, but one right reading among the many ones. The potential of this ethical outlook can be radical and can actually go against educational and pedagogical models of literary studies which actually are violent in the fact that they want readers to produce a `particular kind of reading’ in order to get grades. The Syadvaad can be a base of newer ethics of reading and `criticism’. Am I proposing a Jaina theory of literary studies? Probably I am, or probably I am not….Probably it will lead us beyond the conversations marked by ` Must, Is, Because’ and ` Right/Wrong, ` Good/Bad’, ` Correct/Incorrect’ which delimit our views and open up a possibility of radically open mode of literary studies….

One Man's Relativism : Relativism and the Aesthetic Criterion

Relativism, after all, is also an `-ism', a theory which claims to be universal. The logical contradiction lies in the statements such as these. When I say, `Everything is relative', I have uttered an absolute statement. I have problem with the absolutism in the argument that `the good and the bad are relative things'. Conclusion: Everyone is working with some absolutism and some criteria. Whether one is aware of it or not or whether one is honest enough to acknowledge it or not is a different issue.

My criterion is this: poetry with cliché, obvious turns of phrase, and usual content is an ordinary one. This I take as a working definition of interesting poetry.

The question would be `what is cliché or obviousness' when it comes to poetry? Well the answer would be largely empirical based on reading of a range of texts. If the phrases, images, rhetorical figures and ideas which recur in quantitatively large number of texts are found in a poem you are reading, the poem becomes an ordinary work. Bad poetry refuses to reinvent the language and move beyond its limits.

I am not sure if I agree with the idea that a good critical analysis would not change my view of the poem under consideration. A good critical analysis can do amazing things, and Oscar Wilde was unfailingly correct when he considered criticism as a form of art. I had never thought of Freud as a creative writer until, I read Harold Bloom's essay ` Freud: A Shakespearean Reading' in the Western Canon.( notice it is not Shakespeare a Freudian reading').People who dislike criticism are people who dislike art because good criticism is also an art: art of discovering, inventing, uncovering and moving beyond the obvious and the habitual modes of reading. In India probably due to the influence of medieval Bhakti movement, there is a tendency to consider criticism as an unnecessary evil. This is largely due to anti-intellectualism among Indian middle class. If anti-intellectualism comes, can fascism and totalitarianism be far behind?

Richard Rorty on Literary Studies Today

• "I think that the English departments have made it possible to have a career teaching English without caring much about literature or knowing much about literature but just producing rather trite, formulaic, politicized readings of this or that text. This makes it an easy target. There's a kind of formulaic leftist rhetoric that's been developed in the wake of Foucault, which permits you to exercise a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion on anything from the phonebook to Proust. It's sort of an obviously easy way to write books, articles, and it produces work of very low intellectual quality. And so, this makes this kind of thing an easy target from the outside.", Rorty, interview in The Dualist, 2, 1995, pp. 56-7

Thanks Prof Rorty for saying this.

Politics of Theory and Theory of Politics

The distinguished Professor of English from the US Prof Radhakrishanan delivered a stimulating lecture on the status of Theory in present times yesterday in our dept.The Professor said that theory is not really `about' anything and it is precisely a critique of `being about something' that is about representation in all senses of the word representation and that it can give its own `jouissance'.

I raised my usual doubts about theory becoming a canonical genre today. I said that it has become more of a self-indulgent academic language-game in these days, and it has become a cliche and jargon. The respectable Professor talked about women in America mourning for her son and women in Iraq mourning for their son too. He suggested that theory can be empowering for them as it can enable them to ask why they had lost their dear ones. In my usual irritatingly skeptical way I asked whether you need Foucault or Derrida to enable Iraqi and American women to ask why they lost their children. Theory, it seems to me, which began by questioning the premises of the traditional ways of thinking about culture, society and history has become canonical and `established' in its own right. I feel the need to reinvent theory as a language and a language game itself today. That does not mean that we should behave as if there was no theory and try to go back to the `age of innocence' which was never innocent once again.

There was a discussion on Ranajit Guha's recent book on World History at its limit or something like that. I again raised my doubts about elitism of the subaltern historiography itself and complained that subaltern studies were being done in the very language which oppresses and excludes the subalterns. I also said that the Subaltern Wallahs who shouted against the tradition historiography being elitist themselves as as elitists. So whats the point about raising ruckus over elitism in historiography? I compared the situation with Derrida's critique of Foucault's history of madness where Derrida points out that Foucault is using the very language which has `othered' and repressed madness for centuries and whether it was possible to write `history of madness' in the same language.

I also asked why Foucault's notion of power as something which demands resistance and opposition to assert and affirm itself was not being dealt with in all the discussions of resistance and opposition and dissidence. I feel that the people who who were celebrating theory today were selective in what is meant by theory due to their own political compulsions in the context of contemporary Gujarat. Not that is is incorrect but I don't feel thats being very honest.

Foucault's model of power sees power being immanent and pervasive rather than being limited to state apparatus ( favorite whipping boy for the Marxists) and functioning in `bottom-up' rather than `top down' way in society. If power is so ubiquitous than the concept of power looses its effectiveness as a critical notion, I said, because once you `everything is political' than what's the whole point of saying this is political and that is political?

My friend Deeptha said that the idea of `political' has a very significant critical function in our times when universalistic discourses were rampant. The political, she said, can expose the historicity of things . I pointed out that the very notion of the political as it reaches us itself comes through certain universalist ( Western)discourses and what we are doing is we are choosing a particular universalism over another. Besides the historicity of theory itself needs to be taken into account.

I recalled Derrida's words in the over anthologized essay `Structure,Sign and Play' where he says that we cannot utter a single destructive proposition without slipping into the same language and idiom that one seeks to destroy. The status and situation of critique itself becomes a problematic that needs to be addressed. Being critical of the non-critical as well as being critical of the critical is the need of the hour I feel today.

Though one cannot avoid taking political positions, there is need to be critical of our political positions as well. I would go along with Foucault who talks of ` issue based politics' and `micro-politics' rather than subscribing to some grand narratives like Marxists or Hindutva or Secularism or Capitalism or whatever.

Some friends were very disturbed by the discussions and pointed out that in the present times ( that is in the times of rampant religious fanaticism)in which we were so embedded,questions such as mine can have a very different slant to it and the traditionalists and Hindutvawallahs would be happy at the idea of critiquing the critical spirit itself. I would like to reassure my friends that I don't have very pleasant things to say about Hindutva either. I feel that it is Brahmanism at its worse and wont succeed fooling all the people all the time.