[Reader-list] Beyond Private And Public - Posting by Arnab Chatterjee

[ARNAB CHATTERJEE]

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.

BEYOND PRIVATE AND PUBLIC: PERSPECTIVES ON PERSONAL AND PERSONALIST  
SOCIAL WORK

By ARNAB CHATTERJEE
[Doctoral Fellow at dep’t. 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 deals 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 an "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  
so-- 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) as 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 Derrida’s three examples of the secret meant to  
dissolve 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  social  
work theory) 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 don’t 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 if there are no precursors prefacing  
this study, s/he would be right in doing so . 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 Rose—who 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 we’ve  
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,  
I’ll 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 Calcutta’s 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 Calcutta’s  
19th century urban history.

To illustrate, 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, “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 Dutta’s 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 Haldar’s  
debate with Mactaggart (in the 1890’s) 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 Chatterjee’s   
revisionist notion of new  Political Society [in the wake of   
‘welfare’ of the population) -- whose examples he has drawn from   
contemporary Calcutta.
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