It is nearly an axiom of contemporary thought that we live in a shrinking world, in a world of unprecedented transnational exchanges, the global movement of peoples, flows of goods and ideas, and so on. The world has never seemed smaller, some commentators argue, and clichés about the present situation abound, among them the idea that the world is a ‘global village’; others, in a variation of this argument, speak of a world that is increasingly ‘flat’. Global village sounds trendy, chic, even sexy and, in some vague way, ethically responsible. It gives rise to the satisfying idea, which however demands no action on our part, that our humanity links us all. We may be all connected, in much the bland way envisioned in cell phone ads; at the other end, if one is to take a highly optimistic view of the matter, perhaps the idea of ‘global village’ may be said to have been anticipated in John Donne’s famous observation, ‘No man is an island’.
There are obvious rejoinders, of varying complexity, to the notion that our world has shrunk and that information travels at immense speeds not even remotely imaginable a mere few decades ago. Visa and passport regimes have been considered tightened, borders have never seemed so hostile and insurmountable, and walls – in Palestine, between India and Bangladesh, along the US border with Mexico, and many others — have come up where they never existed before. The increasing turn towards biometric measurements and national identity cards points to the fact that surveillance regimes have the world over become normalized. One wall, in Berlin, came down, but many more have come up in its place. There are, of course, many walls besides those built with brick and mortar, or with electric wiring calculated to leave dead or shock into submission those daring to transgress the law of borders. It is not even necessary to enter into discussions about whether the Euro will survive over the next decade or two; of more interest is the question whether the EU is at all the harbinger of a freer and more ecumenical world as it is sometimes made out to be. Free trade agreements offer relatively unhindered movement of goods, but no nation-state will even remotely contemplate the free mobility of outsiders across its borders. Those living in the Global South can barely indulge in the idea of wanderlust. (On a recent visit to Germany, the Schengen visa issued to me, a citizen of India with permanent residency in the United States, holding professorships at leading universities in India and the US, specified the exact dates during which I was permitted to be present in the land of former Nazis: 21 to 25 November 2010. Just how easy is it for those without invitations, immediate family members in the country of destination, professional positions, or reasonably lucrative businesses to travel to the Schengen zone or North America?) Leaving aside, however, for the present such obvious criticisms of the regnant ideas of the day about our so-called ‘global village’, what would a more trenchant critique look like?
There is much talk of ‘knowledge cities’ and ‘knowledge societies’, and no one doubts that the sum total of our ‘knowledge’ of the natural and social world is much greater than it has ever been before. But everything hinges on what we mean by knowledge, and what relation knowledge has to awareness, wisdom, perspicaciousness, and insight; moreover, any pride we may feel in our capacity for knowledge is at once moderated when we begin to ask, whose knowledge, to what end, and for whom? Even as our knowledge of the world has perhaps grown, the means by which we oppress and remain oppressed have grown dramatically. Oppressive class relations, the military-industrial complex, feudal norms that stipulate the place of overlords and servants, the brutal exercise of sheer military force: all these have persisted through the advent of modernity. Nevertheless, there is little if any awareness of the fact that oppression is increasingly exercised through what might be described as the imperialism of categories established by modern knowledge systems. What are the categories of knowledge bequeathed to us by the social sciences through which we are induced to comprehend the world around us, and how have these categories become nearly impermeable to critique?
One of my earliest books, Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2002; enlarged Indian ed., Sage, 2005), is largely orchestrated around the idea that, if knowledge helps to liberate us, it also enables a more thoroughgoing and rigorous oppression than anything else that we have so far witnessed. Even concentration camp inmates understood that it was possible to be broken in the body but not in the mind. From there we move to the more complex idea that the interpretive categories through which we understand the world have shrunk rather than grown, even as disciplines have developed and multiplied and the entire knowledge industry has grown by gargantuan proportions. The social scientist may object that certain categories are dropped as they are found to be inadequate, false, misleading, or unproductive, but in truth the social scientist establishes an imperialism of categories. If the idea of the nation-state holds us in captivity, as is obvious to those who have thought about the fact that the nation-state appears to be the only form in which corporate political community is now conceptualized, why should we expect that the categories with which economists and social scientists work, such as ‘development’ and ‘growth’, or ‘poverty’ and ‘scarcity’, to be any less compromised? The Palestinians and Kurds may simply want ‘freedom’, but why does freedom necessarily have to take the form of a nation-state? [See Thesis Three, next, for a greater elaboration of this point.]
How did a category such as ‘literacy’, if I may take another example, become so normalized as to become sacrosanct? The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, usefully, that though the word ‘literate’ was first used in the English language around 1432, the word ‘literacy’ only entered the language in 1883. [See the essay on literacy by Barry Sanders in Ashis Nandy & Vinay Lal, eds., The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century (Viking Penguin 2005).] There have always been literates and illiterates, but ‘literacy’ as an evaluative scale, used to judge one nation-state in relation to others, only came into use in the age of eugenics. To reiterate: even though military domination, class relations, and other familiar structures of hierarchy may not have diminished, increasingly oppression will be exercised through the imperialism of categories established by modern knowledge systems. The corollary is that our conceptual categories have, contrary to received opinion, shrunk dramatically. The implications of this are all the more frightening to contemplate when we consider that the Global South cannot even remotely claim intellectual autonomy since the practice of the social sciences is borrowed lock, stock and barrel from the West.
See also previous and subsequent posts in this series:
Thesis Four – Nonviolence: A Gaping Hole in Postcolonial Thought
Thesis Three: Postcolonialism’s critique of the nation-state remains inadequate
Thesis One: Postcolonialism never mounted an effective critique of history
The Politics of Culture and Knowledge after Postcolonialism: Nine Theses (and a Prologue)
[...] Thesis Two: Postcolonialism has had nothing to say about the imperialism of categories [...]
[...] Thesis Two: Postcolonialism has had nothing to say about the imperialism of categories [...]
I want to make two points in response:
First, I am not entirely sure that the categories are as hegemonic as the essay seems to suggest. The universities of the global south might be borrowing their science entirely from West Europe and North America, but universities in the global South don’t command the same kind of authority in the South as they do in the North. For instance, what M N Srinivas, or Andre Beteille might argue or believe remains confined to a very very small section of India or South Asia. I guess one of the most powerful institutions in the business of vending the categories of modern western knowledge are schools through the education board approved textbooks, but again their reach and their capacity to foist an imperial system seems limited to me. Isn’t it far more likely that these categories are largely being domesticated, i.e., translated out of shape by a large number of people? The ‘vikas’ that Himanshu Kumar and Bela Bhatia, and even the Maoists seem to talk about is not the development of the World Bank at all. Lastly, if indeed people are translating categories out of shape, then can we really call the categories imperial?
Second: There are many non-Western categories alive and kicking in India (and in the South) and performing their own oppressions. I do agree with you that post colonial theory by and large is uncritical about the categories it trades in, but it also often can be too uncritical about ‘indigenous’ categories. For instance, post colonial theory fiendishly delights in finding ethnocentricism in Euro-American texts, but rarely is the same criticism leveled against the texts of ‘indigenous knowledge’. If Americans can be faulted for the belief in their own pre-eminence, why not the Dongria Konds, who incidentally also seem to harbor notions of pre-eminence, per some anthropological texts? Does post colonial theory exonerate indigenous texts because these texts have already been viciously ridiculed by colonial scholars and therefore some respite is in order? Or because indigenous peoples were not launching missiles on most of the world? I’m genuinely curious.
Very interesting post and a thought provoking comment by Aniket.
For the West Imperialism is seen as a development from synoecism, in India the Presidency Towns worked in the opposite way for most Indians- as a dioecism, a fractured social existence, an internal exile from an increasingly irreal ‘native place’.
To say the ‘Imperialism of categories’ is already political, to have subscribed to a pre-fabricated Weltanshaaung- unless one has a narrative of a development, or deviation, from a ‘synoecism’ of categories’. But, this is something the West does very thoroughly- if speciously- by pretending that all genealogies go back to Periclean Athens and Tacitus’s Rome.
I don’t know that Post Colonialism as a project, was doomed from the start. What if it had thrown up someone with a little intelligence? I am aware that the Academy is very scrupulous in taking precautions against this sort of thing- but was there really no institutional gate-keeper who couldn’t have been bribed or black-mailed to let an intelligent little person into this particular play-pen?