[Reader-list] The Politics of Contemporanising: some notes

[Jeebesh]

dear all, recently i heard Prathama, a fellow in CSDS give this talk  
in a workshop on "Rising Powers". Thought that this list will benefit  
from it. warmly jeebesh

The Politics of Contemporanising: some notes

Prathama Banerjee

  In this presentation, I try to set up the contemporary – as idea,  
subjectivity, time – against the modern.

I do so because modernity – with its discourses of progress,  
modernization, development and transition – has historically  
established non-contemporaneity as the mode of being of peoples.  As  
different peoples were discursively and materially constituted as  
different moments of the same historical time – some primitive, some  
backward, some modern – life-in-common became unimaginable, except via  
re-presentation, literally, of the non-present.  In other words, by  
feigning that different entities cannot meet each other in a critical,  
indeed explosive, encounter of difference – because they do not appear  
in the same instance in time – modernity sought to insert  
representation as the necessary mediating moment between different  
peoples, societies, world views.  This has led, we know, to an  
unprecedented dominance, in modern times, of representation in the  
domains of both politics and knowledge.  In other words, historically,  
modernity can be seen as seeking to tame the recalcitrance of the  
contemporary under the regime of time as succession and politics as  
representation.  For that reason, mobilizing the contemporary can work  
as a political act of disruption of the modern.

  I say disrupting the modern, because, by its very linguistic  
constitution and temporal intent, modernity seeks to perpetuate itself  
ad infinitum.  It makes out as if everything that is and everything  
that is to come (including utopian futures) is always already modern.   
Formally, the modern appears to be just another historical period,  
analogous to the ancient or the medieval.  And yet, in our historical  
imagination, there is a before but no after modernity.  We have  
imagined the end of capitalism, the end of history, the end of the  
subject, indeed the end of the world in nuclear holocaust and  
environmental cataclysm.  But the modern has remained constant, as the  
sign under which time and human history unfold.  Perhaps, this is why  
the non-modern has been derivatively named postmodern, in an ironic  
analytical symmetry to pasts and presents being rendered, across the  
non-West, as premodern.  In face of this unrelenting modern, then,  
there might be a point in arguing that the contemporary throws up  
elements and moments which are indifferent to and irrespective of the  
story of modernity.  While the modern is very much part of the  
genealogy of our present, the contemporary is by no means another  
empirical instant in the mutating career of the modern – however  
uncertain, decentred, provincialised, hybridized, differed and so on,  
we may take modernity to be.  The contemporary may be another, not- 
quite-modern time.   Perhaps if we can force the contemporary out of  
the premodern, modern, postmodern transitional narrative, we may  
notice that the contemporary falls at an angle to the modern.

  One way of mobilizing the contemporary may simply be to admit that  
the modern has been, even in recent times, only one amongst many  
possible ways of being contemporary.  This was the way of valourizing  
the present by setting up a favourable contrast with the past, and  
more importantly, by refiguring the present as the necessary and  
logical future of the past. This present was then made (a) self- 
identical by exporting differences to the past and/or the periphery  
and (b) eternal by making all times to come appear always already  
modern.  Contrast this mode of setting up the present to other  
possible modes.  Santals, a tribal people in Bengal and Bihar, argued  
in the latter half of the 19th century that familiar causalities no  
longer worked in their present, because this present no longer seemed  
have a simple relation of succession to their past. The modern, they  
said, was then nothing other than utter contingency and must be  
engaged as such.  The point I am trying to make is that if the modern  
is seen as only one, particular, historical way of grasping the  
contemporary, it becomes possible for us to imagine other ways  
contemporanising too, which are not necessarily exhausted by  
modernities and their afterlives.

  Now, the modern and the contemporary belong to the same field of  
intelligibility, they are neighbouring times, at least apparently.   
This to my mind is important.  Because this enables us to rethink the  
modern without necessarily setting up a relationship of negation with  
it, in the way of other temporal categories like the primordial, the  
archaic, the traditional, the pastoral and so on.  For relationships  
of negation, while sometimes enabling anti-modern ideologising such as  
in the south Asian Gandhian or the German romantic moment, fail to  
effect a division within the modern and end up as the ‘external’  
ground for modernity itself.  Thus, it is not accidental that  
categories of temporal otherness such as the primordial and the  
classical have founded modern Western metaphysics, just as the  
category of tradition and/or culture have grounded modern social  
sciences and their imagination of transition towards a potentially  
global, even though heterogeneous, modernity.  The contemporary, on  
the other hand, does not necessarily bolster the idea of modernity,  
because it is not quite oppositional to it in a dichotomous sense.  It  
is in a way aside of it. The modern and the contemporary can be made  
to compete to claim the present, as it were.

  What it means to mobilize the contemporary is however not obvious in  
any manner.  This much seems clear to me though that we should guard  
against seeing the contemporary as an ‘objective’ condition out there  
– a new real to be grasped through new knowledges and reformed  
institutions.  I say this for two reasons.  One, casting the  
contemporary as chronologically our recent-most condition is to fall  
into the transition narrative once again, and thus remain within the  
conceptual ambit of modernity.  And two, it is also to disregard the  
fact that the contemporary, because of its excessive proximity and  
lack of form, does not present itself as an ‘object’ of study in any  
self-evident way.  The contemporary is not accomplished, in the way of  
facticity, and does not lend itself to either realism or empiricism or  
even ethnographic description in familiar ways.

  To me, then, mobilizing the contemporary would mean  
contemporanising, not a description or explanation of contemporary  
times but an active intellectual-political exercise that seeks to  
reconfigure and recompose the world, often against the grain of  
histories, genealogies and narratives of succession and inheritance.   
In other words, contemporanising is an act that seeks to set up  
unlikely relationships, alignments and exchanges across what  
conventionally appear as parallel histories, distant lands, mismatched  
times and mutually untranslatable languages.   Such contemporanising  
is not easy, and not only because our existing knowledge-forms and  
disciplinary training militate against it.  It is not easy also  
because we could easily slip into the colonial-modern framework of  
‘comparativism’ that once mapped the world in terms of a temporal  
hierarchy and a spatial enclosure of nations, civilizations and  
cultures, a comparativism that produced what we today know as the  
geopolitical map of the world.  We should therefore be wary before we  
take nations – India, China, south Africa and so on – as our units of  
analysis.  We should perhaps seek out, as part of our act of  
contemporanising, possible conduits and passages that bring us  
together spatially – not just those pathways that seem to exist out  
there as ‘real’, such as the ones charted by mobile capital, labour,  
faiths and identities, but also those novel ones which can lead to  
unprecedented spatial proximities and assemblies, however ephemeral or  
virtual, cutting across the erstwhile three worlds and across the  
current academic separation of  postcolonial and postsocialist studies.

  Contemporanising is not easy also because we could just as easily  
slip into the capitalist mode of instituting an apparent temporal  
simultaneity across the globe, through designs of perfect equivalence  
and universal exchange across life-worlds, rendered for that purpose  
into ‘cultures’ and ‘brands’. In face of this dream of capitalist  
globalization, then, we need to recover, as part of the act of  
contemporanising, imaginations of temporal heterogeneity, which goes  
beyond merely stating that in real life, people live in multiple  
times.  One possible move in the direction of conceptualizing temporal  
heterogeneity could be to disentangle the distinct histories that  
appear to come together to constitute the modern – such as the history  
of democracy, the history of capital, the history of public sphere,  
the history of the self,  and so on.  Hitherto we have worked with the  
presumption that these different histories necessarily articulate  
without surplus under the name of the modern.   And yet we are not  
entirely clear about the nature of these articulations. We almost  
always work by using epochal signifiers such as modernity, capitalism  
and democracy interchangeably or at most through hyphenated concepts  
such as capitalist modernity, colonial modernity, capitalist democracy  
and so on.  This, however, is not for lack of theoretical rigour  
amongst us.  In fact, this is in the nature of how modernity itself  
operates, in the nature of the modernity-effect as it were.

  Modernity, after all, is a unique name, in that it function  
simultaneously as one and many, proper and common – now a set of ideas  
(reason, enlightenment, progress), now a set of norms (equality,  
liberty, secularity), now an orientation of the self (secular,  
rational, individual, modernist, schizophrenic), now institutions and  
technologies (public sphere, governmentality, democracy), now capital,  
now an epoch (with a beginning but no end), and now an empty place- 
holder (filled with content by various peoples in various times and  
places).  In other words, the modern works precisely by subsuming all  
histories and all subjectivities of the present under its sign.  So  
whether we write the story of capital or of democracy or of the public  
sphere or of faith or of the self, they all seem to flow into the  
singular and capacious story of the modern.  This is the self- 
perpetuating technique of the modern as idea and as performance.   If,  
however, we imagine all these histories – of the state, of the demos,  
of self, of capital, of gods, of work, of the modern itself – to be  
distinct or sometimes even contrary histories which nevertheless can  
and do interesect,  it becomes possible for us to disarticulate the  
present, open it up to recomposition.

  The other possible move towards recovering temporal heterogeneity is  
to actively reconvene the past – not through the language of  
inheritance but through the admission of the impossibility of  
inheritance.  In the colony, as we know, the modern appeared as a time  
which did not and could not succeed the past, i.e. as an external even  
though inescapable contingency.  In face of such a disruption of the  
past-present relationship,  colonial-modern acts of engaging pasts and  
traditions came to be pitched as acts of culture rather than acts of  
intellection, quite unlike the way in which, for instance, modern  
European philosophers habitually engage their own antiquity  
contemporaneously.  For culture is precisely that which is meant to  
persist irrespective of the contingencies of time and vagrancies of  
consciousness, both being the predicament of the colonial and the  
postcolonial subject.  To my mind, then, acts of contemporanising  
would involve breaking out of the framework of culture and re- 
establishing connections with past traditions, where indeed no  
connections exist, through intellectual and political maneouvres.   
Such acts of temporal recompositions would be utterly distinct from  
and irrespective of what we know as genealogies of the present,  
because the presumption here is that in the postcolony, the modern can  
claim no obvious relationship to the non-modern in the mode of  
genealogy and succession.  Contemporanising would then mean the owning  
up of temporal heterogeneities, and a laborious and fragile suturing  
of fissured times.

  Finally, a few words in conclusion.  When we set up a transnational  
and interdisciplinary event such as this, we could see ourselves as  
seeking to contemporanise – rather than merely compare or connect or  
converse.   By emphasizing the active voice, as I have tried to do  
throughout, I wanted to flag the artificial and artistic nature of the  
enterprise.  I wanted to say that there is nothing natural or obvious  
in a south-south alignment – for colonial modernity has turned us into  
incommensurable cultures and mismatched times, forced to talk through  
the translating and regulatory mechanisms of universal language and  
global currency.  These mechanisms are best exemplified by the working  
of terms such as culture and nation on the one hand, and economy and  
democracy on the other.  Terms such as culture and nation ascribe a  
universal form to the singular while terms such as economy and  
democracy render it abstract and ideal.  Non-contemporaries are then  
set to talk under the global, sense-making regimes of culture,  
economy, nation, democracy.  Such has been the ruse of modernity and  
its rhetoric.  If we seek to contemporanise, both intellectually and  
politically, instead of seeking merely to globalise, we need to  
disrupt the apparently easy availability and seamless usage of terms  
such as culture, nation and economy.