The topic for this conference is given as New Theories and Reflections in Indian Literatures and Cultures. In considering this, at the outset it is important to acknowledge the marginalized position of the Humanities in our times. And when I mention “our times” it is a variable window of time I am referring to, something that can go back to European Enlightenment of the 17th c. or fast forward to the 21st c era of the Anthropocene and rise of orthodox patriarchal nation-states. To varying degrees throughout this “long duration” the humanities have been reduced, from a luxury for speculation and consumption by elite classes to social irrelevance. This has been inversely proportional to the image of the human as homo faber, technological man, defined by its increasing mastery over the earth based on the power of reason to come to total knowledge (the project of science) and use this knowledge for total power (the project of technology) over the world. Natural History museums and anthropological textbooks often illustrate this image in the form of a sequence of humanoids rising from fours in increasing sophistication to upright homo sapiens with a tool in his hands. This universalized image of the human, assumed by our age, is a historical artifact inaugurating what we call modernity, our times. With it comes a number of assumptions endemic to our time:
- Man is differentiated from the animal by his posture and the size of his brain.
- This brain gives man the faculty with which God made the universe, i.e. reason, a sign that man is made in the image of God and endowed with the power to know the mind of God through science.
- The posture releases man to distance himself from the earth so as to observe, know and control it.
- The earth has been given to man to master, exploit and enjoy through technology.
- Normative man is gendered male and as per the origin of this image of the human, European/Western. It is also the elite, the one that possesses the benefits and results of reason to the full.
- The possession and enjoyment of the world implies the separation of rational and tool-bearing Western male individual as subject and world as his object.
- World here is a gradation from subject to object, self to other, from “me” to those considered “mine” (forming a “we”) on to those considered “not-me” or “mine,” in other words “the other,” fair game for exploitation or “wasting,” that is destroying or discarding as irretrievable entropic waste.
- In social normative terms, the subject or privileged “first person” “I” in the linguistic construct is the Western male with its others (objects) in various degrees of distance as women, children, “uneducated” or “underprivileged” humans, non-Western humans and non-humans, whether living or non-living.
- The social ontology that this image normalizes is the ontology of ownership grammatized and legalized by the social contract of property values, what is mine and what is the others,’ an ontology further socially inflected by the socially privileged I (the white elite or power-holding male) and its shadow-selves and others.
- This image of the human and its social ontology forms the engine of a world-making that has universalized itself as “our time” through a series of movements, perhaps the most important of which are the age of colonization (16th-mid 20th c.), followed by the age of world nationalism.
- The graded hierarchies, privileges, subjections, margins and outsides of this social ontology are maintained through the currency of capital, both in its classical economic sense and its wider cultural sense (as per Pierre Bourdieu or the subaltern theorists).
- The consequences of this ontology, characterizing modernity, have included anthropocentrism, individualism, objectification, urbanization, privileging of reason, privileging of techno-capitalism, ownership, hierarchism, national and social identity formation, competition, I/us/them othering, legally founded social contracts.
The arts and humanities that belong to this ontology are characterized by its properties, objectivity, naturalism, the activity, subjectivity and emotions of class and property distinction, the internal conventions or technology of signs pertaining to its habitus, the theater of the colonization of the lifeworld. In its extension across the world through colonization, a new underclass, the colonized, was added to its hierarchies, with its own distinctions, carried over from its histories but modified in contact with a new order. At the same time. Colonizer-colonized contact yielded a clash of social ontologies, leading to a cultural politics of hybridity, a seeking for self-identity through revivals, self-transformation through reform and independence through nationalism. Cultural nationalism of the colonized thus contained an element of critique and zones of untranslatability that complicated the world expansion of modernity. We will have occasion to consider some relevant manifestations of this critique.
Critique of the accelerating march of industrialism leading to urban concentration and forms of life, brining a rupture to the agrarian way of life, combined with the injustices of social hierarchies and domesticated status of the creative artist, to bring about a countercultural revolution during the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The enhanced exposure to colonized cultures also played its part in this revisionary outlook. The category of the aesthetic normalized by the social ontology of modernity and maintained by the tastes and patronage of the rich was challenged in the name of subjectivism. The choice of conventional content and the dividing line between classical or “high” and popular or “low” art forms were discarded in favor of depth of individual expression and experience. The absence of standard conventions led to a plethora of new principles justified through movements and manifestos, jostling with each other or following one another in quick succession. Impressionism, post-Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism are only a few of the major movements from the 1870s-1930s in the visual arts, just as Symbolism, Imagism, stream of consciousness and Surrealism emerged in the literary field. In poetry, rhyme was discarded and rhythm was subordinated to diction. The rational cogito, which is the assumed subject of modern human identity and linguistic address, was no longer the norm of literary speech. Most importantly, creative expression became socially critical and political. The injustices of modernity, social and psychological became an important aspect of the revised scope of creative expression, including a recognition of the marginalized role of the creative artist. Given its challenge to the social, psychological, cultural and stylistic/linguistic norms of modernity, this movement marks a break with mainstream society and was treated at first with incomprehension and hostility. The British novelist and scientist C. P. Snow wrote an influential essay in 1959 titled The Two Cultures, referring to the wide gulf between the sciences and arts in modernity and calling for an education which included both these activities. However, Snow’s essay fails to take into account the social inequity between these “two cultures” and the critical rupture represented by the arts in 20th c. modernity.
This revised scope of the arts in the first half of the 20th c. has been called modernism. By the 1930s, modernism became an international phenomenon, with cultural variants and experiments in different regions. In Bengal, 20th c. modernism began to make its mark from the 1930s with authors like Buddhadeb Bose and Jibanananda Das and magazines like Kallol. Modernism is thus a cultural critique of modernity and an experimental field of alternative becoming. Beginning on the impoverished and bohemian margins of modernity by mid-century an institutional infrastructure made up by journalism, criticism, award ceremonies, collection and academic education had established itself around modernism, which seemed to give it the social respectability which people like Snow had sought, but which also served to co-opt and domesticate the movement. However, the revolutionary counterculture was not extinguished and the post-World War 2 period saw a new phase of modernity in all respects. The aftermath of the war largely saw an end to colonization and the global age of nationalism. The world became divided into nation-states that were politically free but at the cost of being infected by the virus of modern ontology, universalized through the image of the human maintained by the knowledge academy and put to the service of the world market. Equally it was the age of multinational corporations and the start of the accelerated phase of technological governmentality and capitalism that has today become a technological ontology. At the same time, as in a materialization of its inverse, the 60s were an intense phase of countercultural activity throughout most of the world, social, cultural, psychological and ideological. Subjectively, this era introduced psychedelic and communitarian experimentation through the hippie movement in the West, while in the rest of the world it spawned important grass-roots movements aspiring ideologically towards a leveling of social hierarchies and universalization of human opportunity. The globalization of the world market and the conditions of work led to a fragmentation and dispersion of cultures, with forces working towards an erasure of cultural histories and diasporic formations or an assimilation of existing cultures into the world market. The drive for universalization of modernity’s ontology encountered varying degrees of cultural resistance leading to zones of incompatibility, untranslatability and hostility that resulted in an impedance to the smooth movement of modernity, a phase that has been called postmodernity. As with modernism, the subjective and cultural inverse of this has been called postmodernism. It is marked by transcultural hermeneutics and subjective multiplicity. The human subject is not only decentered from the cogito but becomes nomadic and plural, giving way to a jumbled ecology of temporalities, cultural memes and personalities. This is a prelude to self-pluralization and internalization of the other, a condition of hybrid becoming in the interior of experience.
Postmodernity and postmodernism lead us to our “own time” in the narrow sense of the 21st c. As a phase of modernity it has been called a number of things, of which I will highlight one, the Anthropocene. This term means that the human footprint has occupied the planet, turning the geological era into the cultural era of the modern human. It is when everything on earth has been turned to human property and capitalized. This capitalization is mediated by ubiquitous technology that has made the map conterminous with the territory. It seems to be the fulfillment of the telos of modernity, the acquisition of tptal knowledge using science turned to total power using technology. This has brought a kind of technological divinity to the human, an omnipresence using geo-positional satellite imaging that allows us to contact any point on earth at any time; an omniscience, using distributed databases that give us access to all the information available historically to man at the press of a button; and an omnipotence using networked wireless technology to effect action at a distance of any power, including the obliteration of all life, at the press of a button. But this seeming technological apotheosis runs parallel to its dystopian opposite – modernity’s colonization of the geosphere and biosphere has disrupted ecosystems and climatic conditions resulting in a revolt of the earth increasing in severity and heading towards unlivable conditions; modernity’s exile of religion and subordination of cultural difference has resulted in the strident “rise of the rest” through entrenched orthodoxies and unstable political conditions across the world, threatening to escalate towards nuclear disaster. Just as modernism and postmodernism arose as the subjective inverse of modernity and postmodernity, this apocalyptic phase of modernity has birthed its own subjective inverse in posthumanism. Posthumanism puts its finger on the ontological roots of modernity – its definition of the human as founded in the othering and hierarchizing capacity of the reason and the categories this produces. As discussed at the start of this article, modernity privileges Western rational heterosexual man as the normative human subject of its humanism and builds its categories of subjection and exile based on this definition. Further it exercises these categories in its world-making enterprise through technology. The non-normative human, feminine or homosexual or trans-gendered or the non-Western human are subordinated subjects to this norm, while the non-human, animal, plant, earth or the invisible presences of the spiritual world or technology itself are considered non-subjects, i.e. objects of its use, incapable of subjectivity. Posthumanism refuses this definition, holding instead that the human is co-constituted by all its others. With postmodernism it holds that human identity is not unitary and located in the rational cogito but plural, nomadic and known only in a process of becoming. Moreover it holds that not only the objective but the subjective boundaries between what we think of as the human individual and its others are porous, relational and hybrid. The human can become animal, become other-human or become cosmos or form hybrid subjects with any or all of these. This challenges the Kantian notion that the individual is epistemologically isolated by keeping the possibilities of subjectivity embedded, embodied and experimental. As Gilles Deleuze, one of the inspiring thinkers of posthumanism is wont to say adapting Spinoza, “One does not know of what a body is capable.”
Posthumanism opens the possibility of a wholesale revision of the ontological foundations of modernity, not a competitive world of isolated humans forming compromised and policed social contracts and hierarchic systems of identity and opposition but a relational world of affective plural subjectivity operating from experiences of co-individuation. Such a vision tends politically towards a subjective realization of political anarchism, where the social body does not depend on government from above and outside but tries to discover it collectively through co-individuation. The creative arts related to posthumanism are the posthumanities, which further this vision of blurred and hybrid subjectivities through fictioning. In concluding this talk, I would like to consider the practical implications of this in terms of human-animal relations.
Treated under humanism as distinctly non-human, the human-animal relation has nevertheless always been complicated through an attribution of values. It is easy to see how the first step towards dehumanizing someone is to designate them as animals. An individual becomes dispensable at that point since our identification with them ceases and they entire into a zone void of value, the zone of necropolitics. The marginalized categories and discards of humanism share such necropolitical categoric space with animals. At the same time, depending on the culture, humans have historically projected various human qualities onto animals, abstracting them and making them ciphers of the human imagination. The French anthropologist Jacques Cauvin has written about the revolution of symbols that characterizes major shifts in human culture. For example, the transition from hunters and food gatherers to agrarian settlers leading to a ceramic and bronze age, represented a distancing from the forest, designated as wild as against the inner social space, designated civilized. This transition coded itself culturally through rituals of designation, particularly using animal classes that became part of this transition, such as the bovines. The cow was often granted a positive value in this transition while the bull was an ambiguous transitional figure, that needed to be tamed and dominated to replace it by the human as the master of the cow. Rituals of bull or buffalo fights or bull leaping belong to this revolution of symbols. As with many other locations, we find this in the Indus Valley; humans developed biopower to enter into contests of strength with buffalos, killing them and assimilating their power through wearing their horns. We are presently close to the annual spectacle of the Durga Puja in Kolkata but how often do we stop to think of the further displacement of the negative value of the buffalo onto the demon Mahishasura? It may be thought of as a continuation or carry-over of the revolution of symbols during our transition to an agrarian age.
Projecting human values onto animals as part of our domesticated interior space continues in early animal fables, such as the Aesop’s fables or the Panchatantra in India. Such texts, along with mythical ones, prepare a cultural imaginary with attitudes about animals which “de-animalize” them, if we are to see them in posthumanist terms. As against modernity, which structures a space for the human which keeps the animal strictly out of bounds or under control, in the postmodern polis of India, animals have a more porous co-existence with the human, but largely under conditions of mythical projection. Monkeys are seen as the messengers of Hanuman and cows walk the streets freely and fearlessly as a figure of the Vedic mother goddess. At the same time, these animals are not related to in their own right as lifeforms, nor, except in rare cases, is there any attempt at human-animal communication based on such relation.
It is not that mythical or human-animal transferences are fictionally illegitimate from a posthumanist point of view, but rather that deep relationality with the animal world begins with an attempt to intuit the specific lifeworlds of animals. In this sense fictioning in the posthumanities can be thought of as an exercise in the cross-species hermeneutics of translation. Through intimate relationship with the lifeworld of the “other,” one translates the affects that one intuits, which form a continuity with human affects. Some examples of animal-human hermeneutic analogies from modernist literature can be considered. One may think, for example, of Baudelaire’s famous poem on the Albatross, where the metaphoric analogy of the poet with the bird, soaring majestically and in graceful freedom in the sky but awkward and unskilled on earth is conveyed through a sense of the bird’s lived embodied affects as related to by the poet. Similarly, in thinking about modern Bengali literature, one may consider Abanindranath Tagore’s Budo Angla. Many of Abanindranath’s paintings and writings feature animals which often stand in for the colonized subject and/or the subaltern. In an inversion of the dehumanizing of the human when construed as an animal, Abanindranath views the animal as a deep subaltern, of which one can ask the poignant question of Gayatri Spivak, can the subaltern speak? Of course, the subaltern speaks but in relation with the cultural other, its speech becomes transformed. What Abanindranath explores here are the fictive boundaries of translation through deep listening and observation. The birds in his story follow observed migratory paths and behaviors, close attention to which yields a translated language of immanence which is an epistemological lesson in relationality for the child human protagonist of the story and corresponding reader.
Such cross-species hermeneutics of fictioning is an important direction in the posthumanities. A closer example to our times (in the narrower sense) may be seen in Amitava Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide in the myriad human and non-human lifeworlds the author sets in the co-existence of the Sundarbans. This is particularly articulated through the environmental studies of the Indian-born American cetologist, Piya in the novel. A methodical approach to such fictioning, that has increasingly gained ground, is taken from the biosemiotics work of biologist Jakob von Uexkull. Uexkull has been extended in phenomenological considerations by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze. His method is to make a careful relational study of the sensors and effectors of the other to intuit the experiences of its lifeworld (umwelt) as carriers of significance to its inner world (innenwelt) of affects such as sensations, fears, enjoyments and creativity, turned towards meaning-making. In his work, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, Uexkull invites us to go beyond anthropological thinking so that we can observe those “unfamiliar worlds; worlds strange to us but known to other creatures, manifold and varied as the animals themselves. [. . .] To do so, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. [. . .] A new world comes into being [;] [. . .] the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us.”