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.
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