Inside the Romanticist Episteme

Author(s): Thomas Blom Hansen

Source: Social Scientist , Jan. - Mar., 1996, Vol. 24, No. 1/3 (Jan. - Mar., 1996), pp. 59-79
Published by: Social Scientist

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THOMAS BLOM HANSEN*

Inside the Romanticist Episteme

The post-structuralist turn has subverted both theoretical languages

and the production of objects of knowledge within the social sciences.
This has led to an important and valuable re-cognition of the always-
already historical situatedness of both the observing gaze and of the
constructed character of objects and categories. This has, however,
often incurred a certain cost: the eloquence of post-structuralist critiques
of teleology, universalism and essentialist reasoning have often been
obtained by simplifying a 'theoretical Other' into caricatures written
in capital letters : Reason, Enlightenment, Modernity, the West, etc.
The eagerly projected ambience of a radical rupture with the past that
pervades this wave has thus been obtained by partially obscuring the
philosophical antecedents and 'conceptual grammar' upon which a
major part of the unquestionable post-structuralist insights are built. To
put it polemically, post-structuralist practice in e.g., anthropology,
development studies and sociology often bears the marks of ideological
intervention: construction of an Other, reduction of complexity,
dissimulation of historical plurality, flawed reflexivity vis-a-vis its
own origins, etc.
Foucault remains for many a good reason the paramount figure on the
post-structuralist firmament. Foucault's project was always polemic.
He never aimed at a full account of western intellectual history, but
ventured to subvert the dominant epistemology and recuperate the
suppressed margins of history. He wanted to historicise History, to
dissolve an ordered meta-history into the myriad of smaller, unruly
histories of dissent and heterogeneity which constituted the
boundaries of bourgeois societies and the objects of their normalising
strategies. Out of this venture grew an implicit equation of
Enlightenment rationality with modernity as such which rendered an
image of modernity as a relatively coherent project: an emerging and
irresistible will to order, an emerging episteme bent on explanation
and taxonomisation, and a drive to discipline bodies and social agency

*International Development Studies, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark.

Social Scientist, Vol. 24, Nos. 1-3, January-March 1996

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60 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

through scientific discourses and state institutio

last phase of this life Foucault turned towards an e
of the 'ethos of Enlightenment' which he saw a
'critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practic
that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried o
ourselves as free beings'. To Foucault, this practi
of a critical philosophical life entailed 'faith in
well as faith in the possibility of creating ourse
beings.1 Thus paying homage to the possibility of
critiques of a post-Kantian variety while also inv
belief in autonomy as an ideal, Foucault prudently
location within the edifice of modernity as a ph
that enables both critiques and improvements-
specific.
In spite of these qualifications from the late Foucault, the tendency
towards construction of modernity as a somewhat caricatured
theoretical Other has become something of a trademark among many
subsequent users of Foucault's theoretical language. This can be
observed e.g., in the frequent combination of the otherwise disparate,
though not unrelated, theoretical languages of hermeneutics, positing a
historicist time space bound character of categories and intellectual
horizons, and post-structuralism positing a 'higher order', often quasi-
transcendental, reasoning on language, power and subjectivity. This
combination is often held together only by an ostensibly common
denominator, namely the critique of 'modernity-as-universalist
reason'.

The argument I wish to make here is that critiques of 'moderity-as-

universalist reason' inadvertently tend to move upon an already
densely structured field of historical discourses and philosophical
traditions, notably romanticist philosophies of language and culture,
which opposed and in many ways constructed the notion of 'modernity-
as-universalist reason' already from the latter half of the eighteenth
century. One may argue that if western intellectual history is marked
by an emergent episteme bent on universalist reason, the same history
is also marked, and enriched, by the existence of another, though
weaker, romanticist episteme. This latter episteme posits knowledge
and meaning as being culturally differentiated, as always mediated by
a specific language, as always situated in unique historical settings. It
presupposes a fundamental culturalist ontology, positing human beings
and human subjectivity as, first and foremost, being produced within
discrete and distinct cultural horizons of meaning. The romanticist
episteme marks in a certain way the final breakthrough of modernity
as a cultural system as it for the fist time posits originality and notions
of autonomy and self grounding of human beings, cultures and social
forms as marks of the highest cultural and political value. If
modernity as a cultural system of secularised thought fundamentally is

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 INSIDE THE ROMANTICIST EPISTEME 61

characterised by its anthropocentrism and celebration of a b

the past, the romanticist celebration of human will, auto
emerging human spirit, the mystique of the artistic self-cr
individual genius etc., marks the consummation of that cult
The romanticist celebrations of the self grounded and i
expression of human creativity have in innumerable gui
constant critical companion of positivist, materialist, tele
other universalist schemes.2 Hence, I venture that curr
always-already are posited upon the tension between
epistemes, or, rather, mutually reproducing discursive f
recurrent intermixtures and re-differentiations remain a crucial
intellectual deep structure of modern western thought.

THE CONCEPTUAL GRAMMAR OF ROMANTICISM

In his admirable work The Legitimacy of the Modern Age

Blumenberg proposes to see the ostensible continuities in intel
history across otherwise radical ruptures in the socio-historical f
as the effect of the inheritance of problematics already structure
intellectual labour of an earlier age. Every epoch in vents a s
dominant discourses and intellectual problematics which, Blum
argues, do not simply evaporate as the socio-historical world c
They remain in intellectual history as traces, as problema
intellectual positions-maybe left vacant as older beliefs or ide
loose validity-but still present as 'a mortgage of prescribed qu
that cannot simply be set aside or left unoccupied . . . The modem
readiness to accept as its own obligation to pay off goes a lon
towards explaining its intellectual history'.3 Blumenberg term
movement towards answering the questions posited by a pre
generation or age as 'reoccupations' of the vacant positions in
intellectual landscape. Although Blumenberg's main concern
explain more precisely how modern ideological discourses brea
from and yet are deeply structured by Christian eschatology
cosmology, I believe the logic he outlines between 'position
incessant 'reoccupations' also can be applied to the intellec
trajectory of modern philosophy and epistemology in the
sciences.

Modernity was a never coherent project, and Enlightenment

rationalism was neither unified nor uncontested. Modernity, which is
the name we ex post give to the effects of contingent historical
combinations of disjunctive economic, social and cultural processes in
Europe from the seventeenth century onwards, was almost from the
outset marked by a split intellectual horizon. Rationalist classicism
and romantic historicism emerged as competing epistemological fields,
partially overlapping, feeding upon each other, while simultaneously
hardening each others stances. The field of oppositions developing

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62 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

between the rationalist, universalist Enlighten

determined to explain the world (Erklaren), and
romanticist episteme looking for deeper meani
configurations while striving to understand the w
became the fertile field upon which most substantial
the social sciences have been premised. This does n
same essential epistemological differences have been r
and again in identical forms or essences, forming t
and closed traditions, and that intellectual history
through the grand 6wings of the pendulum of knowl
between these traditions. On the contrary, the bo
these two epistemes have always been fuzzy an
practice. What has been reproduced again and again in
the last couple of centuries is an intellectual structure
difference between mutually conditioned epist
stressing either the historical and contextual, or i
patterns and universal logics. However, this recur
opposition and difference has bestowed a certain mea
within each of the emerging competing episteme
possible a certain transference of conceptual gramma
to the next. To speak with Blumenberg, earlier roman
capitalism, technology and universalist reason, for in
certain problematics, as sets of positions that
occupation at a later stage, in new epochs. Alvin Go
how major contributions to the social sciences from M
draw on both sides of this split philosophical her
argues that romanticism constitutes a constant sourc
the pressure for objectivation and systematisation of
launched by the dominant rationalist episteme al
separation of the subject and the object. Romantici
argues, both emancipatory, non-conformist and in
one must add, its inherent essentialism also cont
through later political mediations lend themselves
xenophobic nationalism, racism and totalitarian thoug
The Romantics lived in a twilight world of transit
unsatisfactory present and an unworkable past
world in which the conventional social maps
effectiveness, but in which acceptable new ones h
formulated, it was to the individual self as the maker of
meanings that they turned rather than to the traditional rules.
Living in a world where received cultural categories and
conventional social identities no longer made social reality
meaningful, they came to see social reality as possessed of
intrinsic vagueness ... they saw objects blending into one another
rather than as well demarcated boundaries. (Romanticism's)

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 INSIDE THE ROMANTICIST EPISTEME 63

basic problematic revolves on the relationship between a kn

'Subject' and a known 'Object', and it regarded this
distinction as false consciousness of the Subject, since the
rather than being that which was not the Subject, was
unconsciously created by it.5

Romantic poetry was fascinated by twilight, boundary d

mystery (Schwarmerei), the grotesque, the sublime, the i
looking and unique individual experience; Idealist philosop
trying to 're-enchant' the human world by insisting on the cent
agency (e.g. Fichte's and Schopenhauer's emphasis on 'Will
face of the collapse of a divine authority), of the centrality of
search for individual and cultural originality6, of imagina
spirit (geist) in the self-grounded creation and reception of
world; and the inheritors of Herder's theory of natural langua
organic culture strove to install language, culture and history
categories in the study of human societies, notably in the
German tradition of Kulturwissenschafft. Needless to
contemporary prominence of ethnography, history and anthro
in their subject and main intellectual debts always heavily inde
the romanticist notions of cultural autonomy and self-grou
testifies to their historical success.
Romanticism philosophy had profound effects in the field of
epistemology and methodology. The romanticist philosopher and
linguist Schleiermacher founded modem hermeneutics as he reworked
the notion of the uniqueness and individuality of inner spiritual
experiences (Innerlichkeit) he had inherited from Protestant theology.
Along with the development of hermeneutics in the nineteenth and
twentieth century7 evolved a still more systematic methodology: the
importance of first hand understanding, of letting oneself be immersed
in mysterious, popular and exotic, of deep and differentiated meanings,
of psychological factors in reception of discourses, etc. The entire
inventory of present-day fashionable methodological tool kits-the
case study, context, unstructured interviews, qualitative method,
discourse analysis-thus all have important, though far from
exclusive, roots in the romanticist episteme. At the same time, the
rigour and systematic fashion in which they often are applied pay
obvious homages to more objectivist and rationalist epistemes.
Another example is the question of language. While the linguistic
turn in philosophy often is ascribed to not least Wittgenstein's
powerful interventions, the fact remains that already Herder and
later Schlegel developed a philosophy of the link between language,
culture and social being which Charles Taylor aptly has characterised
as 'expressivism' and Louis Dumont has called 'individualist holism'.8
The romanticist theories of language were framed as critiques of
objectivist and empiricist epistemologies in the Cartesian mould

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64 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

which in a sense separated the observer from the gaz

the transparency of objects in so far as they le
observation, thus rendering language as an ostens
vehicle of representation. The objective world, the
argued by contrast, only existed as a social fact throu
by human beings in spirit and language. Languag
represent the world, they expressed the world. Th
argued that any linguistically mediated action, m
phenomenon could be properly understood only if
expression of the ctiltural and social totality at a giv
argued that the structures of meaning endowing
determinate meaning was to be found in langu
determines what can be thought, and in which style
Hence, language endows humans with consciousness, a
multiple languages, there exist multiple culturally
of consciousness, that is multiple culturally specific e
Also, here the romanticist discomfort with mimesis
cultural elements was central. There were, argued
two types of languages and cultures, the dynamic and
: the dynamic languages were the original and
(Sanskrit, German, Celtic) and possessed qua th
supreme capacities for cultural creativity; while
languages born out of cultural mixtures (Latin langua
were 'dead' and mechanical.11 The deep interconne
romanticism and cultural nationalism were, and remains,
unmistakable.
The contemporary axiom of the discursive construction of the social
world gaining a foothold in the social sciences after the 'linguistic turn'
in philosophy, and the primacy of epistemology in determining
ontological presuppositions that Gaston Bachelard's historical
epistemology12 imprinted on a generation of French intellectuals from
Althusser to Foucault, are, in other words, not altogether new.
Contemporary post structuralism and historicism is among many other
things premised upon the conceptual grammar inherited from
nineteenth century romanticism, but has advanced in several ways,
abandoning essentialist notions of 'Man', of 'spirit' and of historical
teleology. What we see today is not a restaging of the classical 'grand
divide' but a restaging of a structure of opposition and difference
between the often overlapping discursive fields and epistemes
emerging from the late eighteenth century onwards.

THE RETURN OF ROMANTICIST PROBLEMATICS?

Where does this 'deconstruction of deconstruction' and 'historicisation

of historicism' lead? First and foremost towards a sharpened
awareness of the intellectuat corollaries and historical predicament

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 INSIDE THE ROMANTICIST EPISTEME 65

of any epistemological and methodological choice. Intelle

takes place on a historically structured terrain in which
critiques and attempts to create new ground always are prem
discursive terrain of 'positions' not of one's own choice. To
Blumenberg, while breaking with the past one may ver
maybe unconsciously, perform the task of re-occupy
positions.
Post-structuralism tends, in other words, to be structured in some of
its themes and polemic positionings by earlier romanticist critiques of
'modernity-as-universalist reason', the theoretical Other created by
the German idealists. This is even clearer in the case of contemporary
hermeneutics, not least as it is practised in anthropology and
development studies, where the themes of eroding authenticity of
communities, the originality and self-groundedness of cultures, of
'deep' meanings, and of the unbridgeable gulf of understanding between
the observer and the observed, often invokes and reactivates the entire
conceptual grammar and epistemological inventory of romanticism.
I will in the following try to show the predicament and compulsions
of the pre-structured intellectual field of opposition to Enlightenment
rationalism, and the contradictions and ambiguities which political
problematics of identity, cultural meanings and emancipation can
engender when employing the historically loaded and structured
conceptual grammars of currently progressive theoretical languages in
a given field of study, in casu post-colonial studies of South Asia.

DIFFERENCE AS AUTHENTICITY

The notion of authenticity seems to prevail in the current deba

recuperation of popular cultural identities from the comb
hegemony of colonial history and institutionalised nationa
historiography in South Asia. In much of the fertile and innov
literature coming out of e.g., the Subaltern Studies attempts to cr
historiography 'from below', these localised and marginal iden
are defined as dispersed, fragmented and popular. Yet, they ar
mostly by implication, claimed to be somewhat more authentic
the identities constructed by official nationalism or Orien
knowledge, exactly because they are indigenous and popular and
belonging to a sphere less penetrated and organised by coloni
western discourse. The posited authenticity of such
marginal/suppressed identities as a 'radical difference', as an
epistemological device producing an original history, and as an
ontological position, revealing a radically different type of reality
subverting the dominant images of the West with modernity and
Enlightenment: as the western Other articulated through the colonial
and postcolonial state is alien, non-authentic and outside, the inside,
that is the popular and subordinated, becomes, by implication, both

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66 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

authentic and original. What moreover is at stake

operation is the delicate 'extraction' of the popular
bears the marks of the true people, from within the
i.e. the mass of subordinated and the silent. The criterion for this
extraction becomes in the Subaltern Studies precisely articulation
resistance, defiance or negativity vis-a-vis the colonial state. O
when the people articulate negativity vis-a-vis the powers that
does it become truly popular.
This discursive operation is particularly evident in Parth
Chatterjee's recent work on the construction of the Indian nation wh
posits a fundamental antagonism between, on the one hand,
colonial and postcolonial discourses and, on the other hand, subal
consciousness and communities.
The notion of community and Gemeinschafft has historically been
reproduced over and over again in widely different political and social
environments, as a constant romanticist critique and companion to the
dominant belief in the superiority of reason.13 This persistent notion of
community as the basis for social action and a model for larger
solidarities presupposes that communities are spontaneous,
preconscious entities persisting through emotional ties. This sense of
community donates, true to its romanticist genealogy, a mode of social
organisation and interaction which is 'deeper', self grounded and more
authentic than the elective association of individuals depicted by the
liberal-individualist paradigm. The authenticity derives from the
emotional investment, the almost pre-linguistic affinities, the
unspoken, in brief, from the effects of human love that communitarians
see as antinomical to Gesellschafft and the project of control and
discipline of the modern state.
Partha Chatterjee, developing this view from Gramsci and Ranajit
Guha's interpretation of peasant insurgency in India, traces in Hegel a
'suppressed narrative of community, flowing through the substratum of
liberal capitalist society, which those who celebrate the absolute and
natural sovereignty of the individual will refuse to recognise'.14
Liberal individualism, the argument goes, seeks to conceal the
fundamentally social and socialised nature of human life, and seeks to
discipline the basic impulse of love and affection among human beings
which continues to unfold to this day against the grain of that other
narrative of bourgeois individualism'.15 The constant articulation of
community amounts in this reading to a 'return of the suppressed'
Gemeinschafft; as a persistent human urge to form communities, which
in effect emerges as a constant immanent critique of modernity and
capitalism. Community is here the 'radical outside'-a human element
that defies and limits hegemonisation. Historically, the colonial
world constituted this 'outside' vis-a-vis the West. In the postcolonial
states, it is argued, the persistence of community and more or less
spontaneous protests and defiances emanating from subaltern

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 INSIDE THE ROMANTICIST EPISTEME 67

consciousness constitutes a major problem in the implement

developmental schemes, disciplinary institutions and the gri
nation-state designed to erase and subsume smaller communitie
corporate, unified nation.16 However, the notion of community
immanent critique of modernity has been impoverished by its
Europe where older communities effectively have been demolis
capitalism and modernity, argues Chatterjee. Only when t
complexity and stubborn resistance of community-forms in
explored will we (re)discover the subversive power of commu
in the universe of social sciences:

If the day comes when the vast storehouse of Indian social

history will become comprehensible to the scientific
consciousness, we will have achieved along the way a
fundamental restructuring of the edifice of European social
philosophy as it exists today.17
This is a tall claim which somewhat conveniently 'flattens' European
history to utilitarian/rational Enlightenment, conceals the genealogy
of the communitarian discourse in western romanticism and populism,
and instead renders the heroic task of subverting the foundations of
western social science to those researching the suppressed popular
dimensions of Indian social history, as for example the Subaltern
Studies. This claim must be understood against the backdrop of the
overall project of the subaltern studies group that in crucial ways
informs Chatterjee's work. Ranajit Guha, the nestor of the subaltern
perspective, has in various works explored the modalities of
community and peasant insurgency in colonial India and the structure of
colonial domination.18 Guha's thesis is that colonialism was
'domination without hegemony': colonial rule revealed the limits an
double standards of western universalism and colonialism and the post
colonial state has never fully hegemonised indigenous popular
perceptions and communities. Colonialism was always dominant bu
never hegemonic. The historiography of colonial India must, therefore
be re-shaped towards an 'autonomous historiography ... (depicting
the originality of Indian culture of the colonial era and why it def
understanding either as a replication of liberal bourgeois culture o
nineteenth century Britain or as the mere survival of an antecedent pr
capitalist culture'.19
Guha's and Chatterjee's invocation of the 'popular' and communities
is thus directed against both the dominant nationalist historiograph
of India, and against the colonial depictions of the British Raj savin
India from her own anarchic implosion, re-integrating her into world
history. This endeavour has produced a range of very interesting
detailed studies of hitherto unknown historical material, and has
excavated a long history of peasant disobedience, protest and loca
conflict far beyond the knowledge and horizon of the urban, nationalist

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68 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

middle class. Yet I believe, this programme of

indigenous social science tends to overestimate the coh
universalism and to conceal its own indebtedness to a romanticist
communitarian discourse born in the West. It is my contention, tha
happens as the subalternist positions seek to construct a credible cl
of a persistent 'popular' authenticity which is constitutively differ
i.e. negating colonialism and 'western categories'. Hence the nee
reduce historical complexity and produce images of a simplif
rational West, an external colonial power seen as a 'pure' intru
conceptually extricated from the local institutional complexitie
complicities of actual colonial governmentality, and a constitu
opposition between foreign bureaucracy and capital bent on 'univer
reason', versus indigenous, self-grounded authentic communities.
Marx argued within a Hegelian figure of the synthetic Aufhebun
essences to self-consciousness, that classes existing an sich only
acquire self-consciousness regarding their true being-as-classes fur
through negation and conflict. An identical 'expressivist' Heg
figure is employed in the subalternist view regarding the moveme
peasant consciousness in periods of insurgency of pure negativity t
notion of community, the principle which, according to Chatte
'gives to all these specific aspects their fundamental constitut
character as the purposive acts of a collective consciousness'.20
consciousness of community arising out of insurgency, Guha
Chatterjee maintain, is merely the expression of an immanent esse
the derivation of social identities from the community, that i
constitutive primacy of community as it is lived through the struct
subordination, division of labour, endogamy, maintenance of c
boundaries. Hence,'peasant consciousness has its 'own paradigm
form' which is no less than 'the other of bourgeois consciousn
which, however, cannot be concretely identified in the melang
everyday interactions. The consciousness of the immanent and emer
'peasant community' lies in the 'cultural apparatus-languages in
broadest sense' which enable this consciousness both 'to understand
act' etc.21 Peasant consciousness is in this rendition a truly Heg
essence moving through history, manifesting itself at various p
and being a constant negation of bourgeois free wills, rationalit
social structures of domination. This communitarian consciousness
resides in the never fully colonised minds of the peasants. But it on
manifests itself as truly 'popular'-as communities-in moments
negativity, defiance and insurgency. Chatterjee even identifies in th
rapidly fluctuating votes at elections in postcolonial India
contemporary manifestation of this subaltern, peasant conscious
Somewhat unsurprisingly, Chatterjee suggests that this 'commun
spirit' sets India apart from other societies and render stand
methods of political analysis as important here. Only those

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 INSIDE THE ROMANTICIST EPISTEME 69

possession of the magical key to peasant consciousness may, it

get access to the social world of India.22
It may, however, be helpful to see this subalternist approac
part of the ongoing contested production of the Indian peop
nationalist imagination evolved in late nineteenth century Ind
production of the people became a paramount concern. The invers
colonial and Orientalist depictions of India as a melange of cu
communities became crucial in the dominant nationalist productio
representation of the 'Indian people' in corporate community t
The Indian people thus came to know itself, and be known am
educated strata, through a dual discourse and a dual structur
representation : on the one hand as caste-communities, rel
communities, villages, linguistic groups, etc., represented th
associations, religious reform societies, educational institution
patron-client structures, and, on the other hand, as a larger ab
entity 'the Indian people' opposed to the British Raj, represent
the political parties, first and foremost Indian National Congress.
In India as elsewhere, communities came to know themselves in a
modern sense as communitiesfur sich only as the democratic revolution
in a vernacularised version laid bare domination as illegitimate, and
as the discourse of cultural nationalism constructed objectified notions
of 'our culture', the 'people', 'our history' 'our religion'. This enabled
Indians to know and construct themselves as discrete, essential, but also
abstract and supra local communities of Hindus, Muslims, castes,
language groups, etc. The communitarian discourse and the production
of communities are .in India, as old as colonial objectivation of
communities, and the inversion of this colonial discourse on
communities in cultural nationalism, is thus inseparable from the
historical production and nationalisation of 'the people'. Seen in its
polemical and political context, the subalternist communitarianism
seems at least partially to fit into Bourdieu's depiction of populism as
a compensatory strategy on part of dominated sectors in an intellectual
field, in casu conflicting forces of global intellectual politics. To those
invoking the people, their invocations are 'inseparable from the desire
for their own ennoblement'.23 The subaltern variety of
communitarianism and many other related theoretical objects
emanating in these years from the postcolonial world are also
inseparable from the continuation of an older cultural nationalist
agenda of producing a real people-an authentic people-nation-and
inseparable from the quest for a gehuine recognition of this nation from
its significant others.

HYBRIDITY AND AUTHENTICITY

In a paper on the construction of Punjabi identity, Arvind-pal S

has recently argued in Derrida'ean mould that pre-colonial Punjab,

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70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

to its turbulent history of successive invasions and se

area marked by an extraordinary multiplicity of cult
codes-mostly oral-engaged in a multilayered and f
meanings.24 With colonialism came the western rat
which a priori posited religion and scripturally aut
as the central categories around which this sea of diff
ordered. Through an army of indigenous western edu
and 'mimick-men', this 'panoptic vision' becam
naturalised in Punjabi society, creating by the end
century three distinct and competing public sphe
around a religion (Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism) ea
language (Hindi, Urdu and Gurumukhi), thus thoroughly
communalising Punjab. In other words, the advent of the rationalist
episteme privileging script, God and a Holy Book, simplified and
reified cultural communities and 'naturalised' and rationalised
cultural differences into larger antagonistic entities. This intel
and cultural mimicry, Singh argues, has to this day involved a
wholesale adoption of the essentialism and objectivation inherent in
'western metaphysics', bent on the desire to be recognised 'as almost
equal', yet inevitably subjected to meconnaisance by the
imperial/western Other:
For each of them (postcolonial notions and diaspora communities,
TBH), the post-colonial desire, as the desire for an identity, is
articulated through a particular languages that can do no other
than both mimic and misrecognise, and thus be seen as a shadow
of the imperial tongue.25

This ongoing mimicry-'authenticated by academia and mass

produced by media networks'-has rendered religious identity widely
accepted as the primary cultural marker, and organiser, of difference
in postcolonial societies. Thus, contemporary cultural struggles over the
meaning and significance of religion in postcolonial societies-
especially in South Asia-is fought in the idioms, categories and
historical narratives inherited from the West. Singh argues that the
official ideology of secularism in for example. India is nothing but an
articulation of western hegemony:

... it is itself a culture in its own right-one that is also based on

essentialist metaphysical principles such as Man, Human culture,
Universality, and ultimately, therefore, the culture of capitalist
techno economics.26

Singh argues that all this boils down to one thing: the problem of
translation understood as the process of cultural encounter inevitably
rendering disparities between e.g. the traditional languages of Indian
religions (in so far they have not been hijacked by the 'mimick-men')
and western rationalist discourses.

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 INSIDE THE ROMANTICIST EPISTEME 71

The main problem, Singh argues in an unmistakable rom

vein, lies in the alienness of the language employed to d
tradition, religion and contemporary conflicts: not only is it pr
discussed in academic English (an alien and thus distorting la
according to Singh), but also in the conceptual language of 'w
metaphysics' whose categories of purity, boundaries an
definitions are bound to distort the essentially, hybridised cultu
South Asia. The problem is fundamentally Singh argues with
that the very character of 'Western discourse'-it objectifyin
language' is so dominant that even subjects in the periphery
other option but to understand themselves through the structu
this language, and the descriptions offered by this meta-languag
on the Jew/Greek/European culture in which cultural difference
periphery always will appear as 'more of the same'-the per
Other.

The double bind for the Third World writet is that he can write,
but what he writes is always through translation of his culture
into European. He writes his identity in the hope of retaining
purity and originality .... By the very process of cultural
translation, the radical alterity of the other is homogenised,
made palatable, digestible. It is no different from the process of
colonisation.27

Singh's paper ends with a very elegant section on cultural hybridity

and hybrid politics in which he, clearly speaking from the Punjabi
diaspora community in Britain, argues-again wholly consistent with
Derrida-that cultural differences are alterable, always in a state of
flux ad never closed systems of signification kept together by
privileged markers such as religion or nationality. The whole problem
therefore boils down to invent a conceptual language which permits
hybridity-and not just the identity allowed by modernist,
multiculturalist or traditionalist discourses bent on fixing differences in
stable patterns-thus permitting translation without conceptual
violence.
The most interesting thing about Singh's paper is the technique of its
arguments: while the paper at one level basically draws on Derrida's
insights regarding the essentialist, reductionist and a-historical onto-
theological deep structures in modern western thought, and on
Derrida's early insights into the displacement of meaning inherent in
the process of writing, it also corntinuously engages in exactly these
conceptual activities in order to present the case of Punjabi and post-
colonial identities. In Singh's usage, the West remains an ahistorical,
and entirely metaphysical construct. He is essentialising the entire
western history to structures inherent in western languages and
metaphysics, while claiming an authentic Punjabi hybridity, an
original hybridity beneath layers of 'mimicry'.

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72 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

To speak with Blumenberg, while denouncing t

postcolonial regimes as incarnations of an essentia
inadvertently comes to re-occupy the position
'authenticity'. He remains trapped in the writing
he criticises: while trying to argue a case for hy
'civilised' translation, he is himself translating Der
must admit) to a Punjabi context, thus in a strict sen
both himself and his language. Singh thus posits
romanticist problematic denouncing mimesis and c
which leads him straight into a celebration of a somewhat
paradoxical 'original hybridity'.

THE PERIPHERY STRIKES BACK: POSTCOLONIALS AGAINST UNIVERSALISM.

Similar paradoxes are at work in certain versions of the notion

postcoloniality, a term which has gained much currency especially
western academic debate in recent years. The term postcoloniality
today widely used in a variety of ways in literary studies, feminism
cultural studies and a range of other fields. The term today cove
anything from literary genres, or critical 'points of view', to m
spatio-temporal locations. I wish here only to take issue with the mo
overarching ideological connotations of the term which have be
inscribed in it, when deployed to displace the idea of a unified Th
World as a geographical and/or cultural periphery. Postcoloniality
this more ideological sense refers to an analysis of the current globa
structures of knowledge and culture as marked by the assertion of t
periphery as a subversive and productive site whose peripheral an
'incommensurable' voices and articulations undermine the erstwhile
firm foundations of western epistemology-even in the heartlands o
the West-through representations of heterogeneity, marginality,
race, gender, etc. In the words of one of the leading proponents of the
notion of postcoloniality in this very broad sense, Gyan Prakash

. . . (nowadays) the third world, far from being confined to its

assigned space, has penetrated the inner sanctum of the first
world in the process of being 'third worlded'-arousing, inciting,
and affiliating with the subordinated others in the first world. It
has reached across boundaries and barriers to connect with the
minority voices in the first world: socialists, radicals, feminists
minorities, etc.28

While it certainly is true that migration and globalisation ha

brought large numbers of erstwhile citizens in non-western states to
cities and labour markets in Europe and North America, the
arousing' and 'affiliating' with the 'subordinated others in the fi
world' seems primarily to have been of a rather hostile, even xenofo
nature. However, what Prakash refers to is of course not actual polit

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 INSIDE THE ROMANTICIST EPISTEME 73

at the street or neighbourhood level, but the intellectual p

difference and the unquestionable energies and creativities com
of postcolonial fiction, cultural studies and feminist scholar
question is, therefore, if at all, can one extrapolate from in
mobilisation to identification of any global political project
name? Or are we merely experiencing a rebirth of the good old
Worldism dressed up as hybridity in the rather wester
universalist idiom of post structuralism? I have, for on
difficulties in identifying any actual political project of t
arising-except at the campuses of western universities. One
question the real intellectual advance of this particular
intellectual construction of postcoloniality, being made in the
historicisation, which in Prakash's article ultimately ends
highly generalising and sweeping statement about the sta
global intellectual-political struggle as structured along clea
lines: the stubborn, Cartesian modernising elites of the West v
emancipatory rainbow coalition of hybridised Third Worl
along with all kinds of metropolitan minorities. It seems clear
validity of this type of conceptualisation of postcoloniality as
cultural state in the making presupposes and depends vita
certain essentialisation of the West. It also presupposes a con
of the romanticist pre-structuring of its critique of the
modernity-as-universalist reason. Not only does this notion
simplification, it also seems to generalise the discourse of d
intellectuals into a projection of a common hybridised future o
of a coalition of peoples in the postcolonial world. If nothing e
universalist pretension of Prakash's argument certainly m
against the quest for difference upon which it claims to be bu
maybe worth recalling Foucault's warning that
the claim to escape from the systems of contemporary reali
to produce the overall programs of another society, of
way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the wo
led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions.29

In what comes close to a collective ad hominem argumen

Dirkin has suggested that the group of diasporic inte
promoting post-coloniality cares little about the people of thei
countries, still predominantly bogged down in what to the pos
intellectual may seem naive imaginations of a bright mod
mimicking future for themselves in their respective states
the promotion of industrialisation, education, secularism an
classical Cartesian-modern values this necessarily entails, ac
to a postcolonial line of thinking. According to Dirkin, the
postcoloniality denotes nothing but the exhilaration on the
handful of South Asian intellectuals, of their new-found p
respectability in the heart of western academia--US Iv

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74 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

universities-extrapolating their own experience

rest of the world.30 Though Dirkin's analysis may
base from where the notion of post-coloniality has
unclear why this group has been so successful in se
intellectual agendas. I suggest that the appea
energetic claims that post-coloniality is a new eme
state must be seen as one of several ambiguous mom
global intellectual politics of recognition: the colon
world has for a century been the metaphorical
party, standing outside the important antagonisms
powers, lately between communism and western dem
war, where the Soviet Union played the part o
West. The Other is feared, but also recognised a
while the stranger is either neglected or brutal
Zygmunt Baumann has taught us.31 Now, in the po
the concept of post-coloniality seeks in part to fill
of the Other and to install the post-colonial world
the West. But this is obviously not the full stor
post-coloniality in this ideological and philosoph
at the same time, with reference to the (foundational?) colonial
experience, the fundamental difference between the West and the rest.
Hence, they insist on postcolonial subjects as constituted a priori as
'incommensurable others' beyond the reach of western universalised
categories. This entails an attempt to develop the position of this
incommensurable 'stranger' into a subversive but also constructive
epistemic position.32 Even this latter more radical position seems,
however, to amount to a politics of recognition in that it both
paradoxically confirms the globalised hegemony, and presupposes the
produced universality, of categories, problematics and modes of
thought originating in the West.33 These remain crucial and
instrumental to the entire project of construction of the
'incommensurable other'-both as an epistemic project and as a project
of constructing sovereign non-western modernities.

THE INAUTHENTICITY OF MODERNITY

The discourses of community, hybridity and post-colonialism may

according to the logic I have outlined here, be seen as moments in
process of deterritorialisation of generically western concept
theories-in casu romanticism and later post-structuralism-and
repatriation and effective vernacularisation in new contexts. They
also be seen as examples of how ostensible new discourses, new wa
positing a problematic, inadvertently are caught-though
necessarily irredeemably trapped-in the conceptual grammar
hegemonic and universalised intellectual tradition. Critiques of
intellectual hegemony of generically western categories seem

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 INSIDE THE ROMANTICIST EPISTEME 75

caught in the categories of the romanticist episteme beca

essentialisation of 'modernity-as-universal-reason'.34 It s
long post-colonial critique posits the 'West' as somewha
historically undifferentiated and 'Modernity' as a sim
essentialised other, it becomes, inevitably, posited within a
problematic of self-grounding and recuperation of authenticity which
the romanticist episteme already defined.
Certain forms of post-colonial critique adopts from post-
structuralism the notion of hybridity, but claims hybridity to be an
essential feature of post-colonial subjects. This amounts, to my mind, to
a misreading of the post-structuralist critique of modernity, a
misreading which paradoxically installs hybridity as an essence. In
my understanding, post structuralism posits hybridisation, difference
and indeterminacy as intrinsic to the modern worlds; as a part of what
modernity always both created and fought-but never recognised in its
dominant self-descriptions. As David Kolb notes in the end of his study
of Hegel and Heidegger, modernity was never as coherent or radically
self-grounded as both its spokesmen (such as Hegel) and its critics (such
as Heidegger) claimed. Critiques of modernity do not have to be, and
probably cannot be, posited outside modernity, argues Kolb: 'If our
multiple inhabitations of modernity (TBH) are themselves internally
multiple and tense, then there is room for freedom and creativity
without the need to always be out and ahead'.35
Our predicament is to recognise that 'we', despite discrete localised
differentiality within an uneven global structure, all are forced to come
to know ourselves, and explore our limits and autonomy-as Foucault
would have it-within certain modern intellectual deep structures.
This means that claims of authenticity on the part of the periphery-
or anywhere else-may stand forth, at least partially, as internal
moments in the romanticist episteme, and as inescapable effects
of simplistic critiques of 'modernity-as-universalist-reason'.
Inauthenticity, displacement and non-identity with oneself are
fundamental and universal conditions of global modernity, or rather
the multiple modernities proliferating on the globe. No one can escape
this condition that everybody-post-colonials as well as
'metropolitans'-have to live with. To reduce modernity to a
'provincial' western condition, and to 'ethinicise' modernity into only a
peculiar outgrowth of Greek-Roman-Christian culture, such as both
progressive post-colonials and western conservative advocates for
rather different reasons, seem to conceal this problem instead of facing
it. This does not mean that modernity should not or cannot be criticised,
but that this, in th_ spirit of the late Foucault, should take place as
critiques of modern practices and of the varied and historically
specific institutions of modernity. We should avoid the totalising,
moralistic and therefore ultimately detached and paternalistic modes
of critique of epistemic or ideological systems in their entirety.36 Such

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76 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

totalising and simplified critiques of 'modernity-

reason' inadvertently end up recycling older problema
the romanticist episteme.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. M. Foucault, 'What Is Enlightenment', in P. Rabinow, (ed.): The Fouc

Reader, New York, penguin. In this remarkable text Foucault discuss
classical intervention in Berlinische Monatschrifft in 1784 concernin
question: Was ist Aufklarung?. Kant's answer was that Enlightenment
break with past 'immaturity' and a move towards human maturity in so f
entailed a new attitude to knowledge and critique, namely that men n
the courage and audacity to know their own condition for themselves. Fou
endorses this philosophical ethos which he sees as a 'permanent critique
historical era' (p. 42). As an interesting antidote to the rhetoric of r
attacks on 'Western modernity' that proliferate among many a Foucauldia
labour of critique means to Foucault a pragmatic-practical attitude to
change:' .. . this work must (. . .) put itself to the test of reality (and) mu
away from all projects that claim to be global and radical (. . .) I prefe
partial transformations ... to the programs for a new man...' (pp. 46-47)
2. The continuity between e.g. Foucault and earlier critiques of Enlightenm
both obvious and explicit qua Foucault's indebtedness to Nietzsche,
indebtedness to the romanticist philosopher Schopenhauer's concept of Wi
driving force in human history is well-known. Nietzsche was also influen
the broader fascination in nineteenth century Germany of the heroic ori
and vitality (Urkraft) of the pre-Christian pagan Germanic culture
dissolution at the hands of the institutionalised churches Nietzshe bemoaned.
Peter Murphy has recently noted that the construction of 'radical otherness' is
the main contribution of romanticism to modem culture: 'The age of modernity
has been, in equal parts, fearful of the other, because the other always
represents another kind of law, heteronomy; and desirous of being radically
other, because that is testament to one's autonomy'-Peter Murphy; 'Romantic
Modernism and the Greek Polis', Thesis Eleven, no. 34. Boston, MIT, 1993, p. 42.
Romanticism's quest for origins and roots was posited as a critique of the
preceding classicist and baroque epoch of mimesis, searching for similarities,
order and taxonomies. While the eighteenth century was marked by a
fascination of the mimetic and eclectic roman culture, the nineteenth century
romanticism, by contrast, celebrated the Greek culture as auctobonous, self-born,
and self-grounded (Ibid., pp. 43-45). It is noteworthy that Foucault in the second
volume of the History of Sexuality explores sexual habits and personal ethics in
ancient Greece, and here unequivocally celebrates the self-groundedness and
autonomy of the Greek polis, as opposed to the obedient conformism and mimetic
practice of modern disciplined individuals-Michel Foucault, The Use of
Pleasure, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986, pp. 26-91.
3. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age Cambridge, Mass., MIT
Press, 1983, p. 65.
4. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, London, Hutchinson, 1960 traces the genesis of
cultural nationalism in German romanticism. The same genealogy is described in
great detail by Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism A Study of its Origins and
Background, Macmillan, New York, 1994, and more recently by Liah Greenfeld,
Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Harvard University Press, Boton, 1992.
5. Alvin Gouldner, For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today, Alien
Lane, London, 1973 p. 328.

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 INSIDE THE ROMANTICIST EPISTEME 77

6. As Charles Taylor has recently argued, the philosophical articulatin

notion of authenticity came from Herder's reformulation of Rousseau'
the innate capacity of individuals for making their own moral judgemen
idea of the uniqueness and inner original essence of individuals and cu
'Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, which is so
only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining m
am realising a potentiality that is properly my own. This is the back
understanding to the modern ideal of authenticity (. . .) Herder appli
conception of originality not only to the individual person among other
but also to the culture-bearing people among other peoples. Just like ind
a Volk should be true to itself, that is, its own culture. Germans should no
be derivative and (inevitably) second-rate Frenchmen ( . .) Slavic peop
to find their own path. And European colonialism ought to be rolled back
the people we now call the Third World their chance to be them
unimpeded. We can recognise here the seminal ideal of modem nationa
both benign and malign forms-Charles Taylor, 'The Politics Recogn
Gondberg (ed.), Multiculturalism. A Critical Reader, Blackwell, Oxfo
Cambridge, 1294, pp. 75-106, p. 78. Taylor has developed the idea that t
for authenticity is intrinsic to modern thought, modern knowledge and
identities in a series of lectures, published as The Ethics of Authen
Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard Univ. Press. (especially pp. 1-55).
7. See e.f. Hendrik Birus (ed.) Hermeneutische Positionen: Schleiermacher,
Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Gottingen, Vanneback & Ruprecht, 1982.
8. Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975 pp. 11-12
and Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism, Chicago University Press, 1983, pp.
116-18. See also J.G. Herder Uber der Ursprung der Sprachen, Freies Geist Leben,
Berlin, 1965, And J.G. Herder: Zur Philosophie der Geschiichte. Eine Auswahl,
(Fragmenten and Notitzen 1764-1803), Afbau-Verlag, Berlin, 1952.
9. German Romanticism grew out of the philosophical currents and debates in the
Sturm und Drang period in late eighteenth century Germany where es'ecially
Herder, and later his student Fichte, towered as important figures While
Herder remained within a discourse of organicism and cultural determiru;m, the
notion of will and human creativity in moulding the human spirit plays a key
role in Fichte's idealism. To Fichte, the central notion was that moulding the
human mind and will could wrestle the human spirit out of its mute historical
contingency and create a sublime 'synthetic spirit'. (J.G. Fichte, Addresses to the
German Nation, Open Court Publications, Chicago, 1922.) This figure received
its most universal and sophisticated formulation in Hegel's notion of negativity
and Aufhebung.
10. Some of the best discussions of Herder's work in English can be found in Isiaah
Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas, London, 1976 and
in Reinhold Ergang, Herder and German Nationalism, Columbia University
Press, New York, 1931. See also F.M. Barnard (ed.), J.G. Herder on Social and
Political Culture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969.
11. Friedrich Schlegel (1966): Studien zur Geschichte und Politik, (eingl. und hrgs.
von Ernest behler), Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, (Vol. 7), 1966.
12. See specially Gaston Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique, (Paris, Presses
Universitaire de France, 1934) translated to English by Arthur Goldhammer,
The New Scientific Spirit Boston, Beacon Press, Berlin, 1984.
13. communitarianism has, like romanticism generally, always been somewhat
undecidable in relation to the Left-Right dichotomy, though in Europe
predominantly articulated by conservatives and right-wing populists as
Gemeinschafft in conjunction with cultural nationalism, celebration of nature,
historical authenticity, family, cultural values, etc.-always in opposition to
'immoral' liberalism, or the radical modernism and constructionism articulated

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78 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

by the Left. There was always on the Left a celebration o

solidarity-community among workers, labourers and the wret
seen as emerging out of a common subordination and nak
deprivation and liberation from older ties, and not out of an o
Gemeinschafft. Nevertheless the multiple celebrations of t
people' on the Left testifies to that the rationalism-roman
transcends any Left-Right dichotomy. This distribution of stan
the co-articulation of the natural, authentic with the vital
Fascism. In the last few decades the reversal of poles is qui
defends community, culture, history and the popular, w
conservative stance today predominantly is marked by free
and the rationalist universalism which the old left used to
Dahl has recently shown that a new intellectual convervatism and
postmodernism and post-structuralism especially in Germany and France tend to
converge around celebrations of concepts like 'the political' created by Carl
Schmitt and elements of the Lebensphilosophie, but also in the community-
debate in journals like Telos. Goran Dahl, 'Vil 'Den Anden Gud' tabe igen?
(Danish), in Kritik, no. 1, 1995 (Copenhagen).
14. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, Princeton University Press,
New Jersey, 1993, p. 231.
15. Ibid., p. 232.
16. Ibid., pp. 234-239.
17. Ibid., p. 169.
18. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India,
Oxford University Press, Delhi and Oxford, 1983 and Ranajit Guha, 'Dominance
Without Hegemony and its Historiographies' in Subaltern Studies IV, Delhi,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989.
19. Guha, 1989, Ibid., p. 308.
20. Chatterjee, 1993, Ibid., p. 163.
21. Ibid., 164.
22. 'The Indian history of peasant struggle is a history that will educate those of u
who claim to be their educators. Indeed, an Indian history of peasant struggle is
a fundamental part of the real history of our people, the task is for the Indian
historian to perceive in this a consciousness of his or her own self. Ibid., p. 172.
23. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990, p. 151.
24. Arvind-pal Singh, 'Interrogating Identity: Cultural Translation, Writing an
Subaltern Politics', (paper presented at the 13th European conference on South
Asian Studies, University of Toulouse, August 30th-Sept. 3rd, 1993).
25. Ibid., p. 16.
26. Ibid., p. 19.
27. Ibid., p. 25.
28. Gyan Prakash, 'Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World:
Perspectives from Indian Historiography', Comparative Studies in Society and
History, New York, no. 32, April 1990, p. 403.
29. M. Foucault (1984), op. cit., p. 46.
30. Arif Dirkin, 'The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Globa
Capitalism', Critical Inquiry, Chicago, Vol. 20, Winter, 1994, pp. 328-56.
31. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991
pp. 53-75.
32. To my mind, Vivek Dhareshwar's recent essays 'Our Time: History, Sovereignty
and Politics', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 30, No. 6, February 11, 1995,
pp. 317-24. and 'Postcolonial in the Postmodern', in Economic and Political
Weekly, Vol. 30, No. 30, July 29. 1995, PE 104112, on postcolonial sovereignty and
modernity mark some of the more ambitious and theoretically interesting
attempts in this direction. The idea of the 'incommensurable other' as an

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 INSIDE THE ROMANTICIST EPISTEME 79

epistemic project emerged in discussions with V. Dhareshwar, P

Cahtterjee, Susie Tharu and many others in the course of seminar on 'Cu
Modernity'. I had the privilege to participate in Mysore a 18-23rd No
1995.
33. It is interesting to note the virtual competition in current debates
which of the major Asian cultures really constitutes the other of the W
writings of Said on Orientalism and the general 'post-orientalist'
historical productions of knowledge and subjects rather than conte
institutional dynamics in non-western societies, seems to make its int
strategy almost self-propelling. The problem in the notion of non
incommensurability as an epistemic project is that it ends up in
comparative civilisational-religious history, where the West is (ess
Christian, and the East a in paradoxical neo-Orientalist move be
essentially Hindu, Buddhist, etc. Not only is this sort of compa
civilisational history traversed by essentialist concepts and anteceden
the German Kulturwissenschafft, it also acquires certain affinities w
narrative of civilisational contest and clash forecasted by Samual Hunt
34. I believe that Roy Boyne has a point when he suggests that deconstru
post-structuralism as a theoretical project has reached its limits and e
a philosophical line of inquiry, though it far from has exhausted its
within the human and social sciences. Many areas still await the whir
deconstruction. Boyne argues, that the strength of deconstruction l
critique of power and taxonomisation, whereas it is vulnerable in its cel
of difference. Boyne quotes Derrida's unequivocal critique of apart
defence of equality as a supreme value in Jacques Derrida, the laws re
Nelson Mandela, in Admiration' in Jacques Derrida and Mustapha T
For Nelson Mandela, Seaver, New York, 1987 and Foucault's 'Kantian t
towards personal autonomy and ethics in his late works, as proof
recognition by both Foucault and Derrida of the inevitability of
foundations in notions of individual sovereignty, equality or other of
universalist and foundational values they both have criticised so sever
Boyne, Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason, Unwin Hyman, L
1990, pp. 157-60.
35. David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity: Heidegger and After
University Press, Chicago, 1986, p. 259.
36. I am here indebted to Manas Ray's thoughtful and inspiring call for re
critiques that explore historically specific and complex instituti
structures of governmentality, to replace the totalising perspective
critique cast in the deconstructionist mould. Manas Ray: 'Ethics and Gov
Setting Limits to Critique', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XXVII,
1996, pp. 2119-24.

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