[Reader-list] Independent Fellowship 2007[First Posting]

Wed Mar 7 19:28:46 IST 2007

Beyond Private And Public : New Perspectives on  Personal  and Personalist Social Work
  ________________________

   ARNAB CHATTERJEE

  [ Doctoral Fellow at dept. of Philosophy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata and  on the visiting faculty of Ethics and Human Values at Bengal Institute of Technology, Kolkata.]

            Put in a sentence, my work deal with revising the notion  which makes us  see the personal as another synonym of the private. 
  But not simply a lexical reordering, the challenge and the interest of this project lies in realizing whether the category could be   historically recovered, theoretically 'proved', culturally debated and practically deployed. The horizon of such expectations, not to say more,  marks the site and starts the beginning. And as an apprentice-author dedicated to the discourse of social work, let me confess, I would like to situate this study well within the ill defined ( and academically underrated) contours of social work practice.
  But aims apart, in this introductory posting I shall briefly outline my project, delineate its major themes, locate landmarks and finally offer some examples to make the proposal go live.
              It should be common knowledge now that the key to understanding modernity is the public/private divide and a corresponding failure to find a way beyond the binary. To understand this somewhat sweeping statement we may recall an example: Marx. Curiously, Marx is a symptom of  both, he said for the first--"the state is founded upon the contradiction between public and private life. " and for the second : "if the modern State wished to end the impotence of its administration it would be obliged  to abolish the present conditions of private life. And if the State wished to abolish these conditions of private life it would have also to put an end to its own existence, for it exists only  in relation to them." Now, throwing in the fact that private property is just a singular and an isolated moment in the discourse of private life, Marx's agenda --I guess- looks readily defamiliarised here.  But while Marx had had an effective concern with smashing the liberal
 divide, there is a long list of  other thinkers who have grappled -- being imbibed with --"interpretive" interest--the problem of  finding a way beyond the binary.   While Hannah Arendt previously had rejected  intimacy   as a deep private ,  for Habermas it again reappeared  as a  beyond of private and public. To grasp the sign of our own times--and strongly-- let us reiterate ( without recommending)  how --recent researches-- while tracing "the ongoing struggle in  Locke, Shafetusbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Smith to find a framework to mediate between the public and private", advocate ( and we shall show --erroneously) the "secret" in Derrida ( and Levinas) to have been the tempting solution. Death ("language about death is nothing but the long history of a secret society, neither public nor private, semi -private, semi-public, on the border between the two; the postcard ( half-private half-public neither the one nor the other) and the telephone are Derridas three
 examples of the secret meant to solve the liberal dichotomy. All this is --how ever-- to make a single point--all thinkers who have been pivotal to have found ( western) modernity and also those who were prophets of colonial  modernities--could be seen to have been--not always in an informed manner though-- struggling to solve the public/private riddle with an answer of their own : this has been the story since 1767  and runs amok till  2007. The public/private riddle is the strongest unresolved puzzle in the history of ideas.

                          We are into deadly business therefore. 

  Deadly and this is more significant--that they always ran up to alternative versions or weak synonyms of either the private or the public. While I ( being a humble and lonely apprentice of a social worker) propose the personal as the beyond of the private and public, a  stream  of discourses could  be recalled which  had proposed, in their desperate will to move beyond this liberal paradigm, alternative versions of the private and the public where the personal appeared as another version of the private. A ready instance is the  slogan 'personal is political'  which has been deployed by the feminists as an invitation for all of us to take  oppressive private matters  for public-political redressal.  What was glossed over in this urgency is that the personal has been allowed to coincide with the private!  
           My work  argues the personal as a beyond of  private/public binary and  distinguishes it from the private vis-à-vis the public.  Private is opposed to the public and resists public scrutiny and publicity -the stuff by which the public is made. Personal -the way we dont know what a person is, what his/her  real/final intentions are or whether somebody is genuinely aggrieved or not -makes the personal- largely unpredictable and indeterminate in the final instance and not necessarily opposed to the public. Private/public being legal juridical categories have specific indicators. Personal relationships-like love or friendship for this reason  remain  outside legislation. No wonder that this personal has been suppressed and its autonomy sacrificed to benefit political rigour. I make a thorough  attempt at its recovery. But to be attentive to the reader's  interest and not only elicit promises to be pursued in subsequent SARAI postings, let me give one instance of
 this recovery which at the same time would illuminate that what we've been talking through: Marx. Now, notwithstanding the will to go beyond private/public divide, it may rightly be asked, could Marx be used to endorse the personal that I'm proposing? Yes! And  choosing only one instance -- love , we may document this flower unfolding in Marx.

                    "Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you         can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc... if you want to exercise influence over other people,   you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. ...If you love without evoking love in return that is, if your loving does not produce reciprocal love; if   through a living expression of yourself as a living person you do   not make yourself a beloved one then your love is impotent -- a misfortune."

  Isn't this the personal in Marx -- which --I'm sure --he would willingly exclude form the domain of private life   he wanted to abolish for history? I think the reader agrees. ( This part will form the substance of my next posting ).  
                          At this stage if anybody asks whether there are no precursors prefacing this study, s/he would be wrong. It is to the tradition of what goes by the name of personalism in phenomenology-- that my debt is the most; Max Scheler ( a dark disciple of Husserl and whom the latter distinctly disliked ) should be named as  an inspiring instance here. But while transcendental phenomenology teaches us the irreducibility of the person to acts or agency, it rarely engages with other discourses to see the consequences this view entails. The theological gloss often given to personalism derives, I guess,  from this not so  owned apathy. But the real precursors that the reader should reckon with  are Hiralal Haldar, J.E. Mactaggart and Hermann Lotze. I found Lotze's reference first  in Haldar's work and then in Mactaggart. I was confirmed in my belief by that brilliant sociologist Gilian Rosewho died of cancer recently.  When Rose--with a sad  irony-- wrote how
 Lotze is not read now but once was thought an equal to Kant and all sociological theories are basically neo-Kantian, I was sure-- I would be interested.  It was Lotze's and Hiralal Haldar's work --their dusty books ---when I started reading them put into me  a psycho-semiotic disorder I should say and everything instrumental to this work was put in place. Summing this up-- my observation for the reader could be : when you deal with 'forgotten' theorists, know you are touching a few forgotten theories too which had gone away with them and it is present with them only. And this reading operation makes it sure that the viewpoints weve missed, now find their ways through the trees.
   Consider this as forming the theoretical background of this study.

         Now it is one thing to historically recover and theoretically delineate a category, and quite another thing to thematize  and deploy it. Therefore in the third posting, having recuperated the personal as a suppressed narrative using historical and socio-theoretic tools, Ill interrupt it by thematizing the category ( though not limiting it) through  the cultural self understanding of particular communities and deploy it by using the registers of  personalist social work.  [Deriving its force from social and psychotherapeutic case work, personalist social work as a particular discourse of helping denied to be absorbed in either the public ( the governmental state and far from the now fashionable but brutally mistaken notions of welfare as hegemony or welfare as surveillance) or the private ( resistance to publicity)]. This  study will  limit itself to exploring how the personal negotiates with the questions of publicity/mediation in the context of colonial
 Calcuttas emerging civil society which was energized by  its claims to have generated  modernity --- a debate which continues even today. In other words, charting the personal as distinguished from the private and therefore not necessarily opposed to the public, contributes generically-and in this sense intrinsically  to the  debates located around the emergence or recession of the public domain in India. But  rarely this can be extricated from its urban moorings and the  problems of an emergent public mediation. And because this distinction is aided much by the cultural self understandings of particular communities ( in Bengali in the absence of separate words, byaktigoto  stands for both personal and private), the paper would therefore try to chart the elicitation of the personal and personalist social work in terms of Calcuttas 19th century urban history. 
  The examples of such a personal in this context may be seen in the instances of  numerous autobiographies written in the 19th century by educated, city based Bengali  housewives and whether these could be classified as private or personal memoirs  for public reading would be a matter of arguable contention incited by the findings of the paper. Kolkata based Neo-Hegelian philosophers like Brajen Seal had hinted at the impossibility of personal emotions; Hiralal Harldar declared that the personality is a colony. The range of this inventory and the topic of mediation could be demonstrated by the fact that even in the early 20th century we find Rajsekhar Basu-the satire scientist-- talking about  personal advertisements in the personal column ( byaktigoto bigyapon) appearing in public newspapers and giving the Calcutta public a  taste of scandalous novelty by disclosing private affairs ( "Ghochu! please come back, we'll get you married to your chosen girl."). Now, if
 these were some nominal examples of the personal, one origin of personalist social work may be seen in the competitive urge of the neo rich babus of Calcutta --who at the bathing ghats distributed huge alms to the poor and the kangalis ( vagrants and destitutes) in order to  add an edge to their persona by earning  a name as  daanvir ( a hero of charity). Prankrishna Duttas 19th century classic (and now an urban history primer)---Kolkatar Purabritta  documents the appearance of this new-custom with care. This  competition resulted in debates on disorganized charity and colonial laws were promulgated for feeding the right number of kangalis. In this context-I would like to engage more with   the activities of the Brahmos and other reformers in Calcutta-who while outwardly professing  the well wrought organized principles of civil society - namely objective, universal, intelligent helping, were oblivious to the fate that their attempts  had meekly surrendered  to
 the temptations of the  principle of personality. It is evident however--while failing the prospects of  colonial civil society, still-the way  they contributed to the development of the personalist genre of social service and the way they impacted upon both the  private and the public, should be  of unfailing and originary interest. [All the above will be episodically covered in serial postings.]
              But it may be hazarded and with justification that the interest must continue! Put more tersely, the question would be framed in these terms: the interpretive grid that I'm proposing --is it able to intervene in current debates of public/urban mediation ? In response to this provocative expectation let me catalogue that the study will ( apart from those theoretical and historical postings) accumulate texts that range from the Calcutta Neo-Hegelian Hiralal Haldars  debate with Mactaggart ( in the 1890s) on whether the absolute or a  school club has a personality (even if  the personality is a colony) to showing how the personal or personalist social work may  engender the first systematic critique of Partha Chatterjees  revisionist notion of new  Political Society [ in the wake of  welfare of the population) -- whose examples he has drawn from  contemporary Calcutta.

  __________________________
  The work which is very much a work in progress and forms the content of  an upcoming (planned)  monograph  is dedicated to my mother Dipali Chatterjee  who even months before her death  on October 30, 06 was scary about my tryst with Hegel, Lotze et.al and urging me to come to terms with acceptable academia in Kolkata - wished me to put to rest my habit of  'polemicising' which has earned me a team of fierce  'well wishers'. Her unforgettable concern will always remain higher than my unforgivable stubbornness. Higher all the more because she  would have been the happiest to know that my work has had such a large and informed audience now  at SARAI-CSDS. 
                              Wishing you all well and inviting your comments. All responses will be answered with care and scrutiny.

                                                              ___________________

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