Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Defending Losers

This is an old interview of Amit Chaudhuri but I found this bit interesting and worth highlighting:

Q: Do you think Indian writing has also suffered as a result of the country's modernizing and globalizing zeal?

A: For me the position of the outsider is of great importance to the health of any society. For any cultural practice, whether it's academic or literary, the position of the outsider, the misfit, the daydreamer and even of failure are very important categories in the creation of a truly energetic and self-critical social and intellectual space. They are important components because of the latent critique of power that they have in constituting our imaginative life.

My anxiety is that in the last 20 years India, typically for a globalizing country, hasn't theorized a position for the outsider or for the misfit or for failure. Its rhetoric is concerned with success in various ways. So Indian writing in English or any other phenomenon is always spoken in terms of success and if it is not successful, it becomes invisible.

Right now we do not have a space for the irresponsible misfit, which means we do not have a space which is at an angle to power. Even those who speak against power are in some ways in powerful positions of their own. In India, everybody is some way in some kind of nexus of power. We need to regain that space for the irresponsible.

8 comments:

wildflower seed said...

Nice. But dont you think that in societies which have had this space, today we are witnessing a blurring of the line? Outsiders becoming insiders, and so on.

Alok said...

yes absolutely. That's how liberal capitalist society works. Even modes of lives which were deemed rebellious and non-conformist in previous generations are standardised, commodified and in the process accommodated into mainstream. You can see it in all the "hipsters" hanging around college campuses and other such hideouts.

Sometimes I think the only way left if you want to refuse being part of mainstream is to choose complete isolation, live like a hermit, a life of vanaprastha.

wildflower seed said...

Well, its not always a bad thing. I think that in the measure that outsiders are becoming insiders, society also faces an integrative challenge, and this may produce pathologies but it also holds out the promise of real evolution. I find it difficult to believe that this is not already happening. I would place this kind of dynamic in a broader context. Think of the second law of thermodynamics which says that time's arrow is unfailingly certain. Physical processes always go from more ordered to less ordered. The universe is winding down, the clock is running out. But in the biosphere, time's arrow is pointed exactly in the opposite direction. Evolution is irreversibly headed in the direction of more differentiation/integration, more complexity, and more organization. From less ordered to more ordered. From amoebas to apes, but never backward. So how does one reconcile these opposing arrows? Is there a possibility that one will dominate the other? I dont know the answers, but all I am saying is that this tension is always there, and at the same time that there is reason to despair, there is also reason to hope.

wildflower seed said...

Alok, have you read anything by Jurgen Habermas? Your previous post made me wonder....

Alok said...

yes I agree, there is definitely that trend in society where oppositional and disorderly elements are assimilated - that is in fact the whole dynamic of change.

But if you see the culture as it is right now, there is hardly any space for genuine and meaningful non-conformist living. No matter what you do, there is always this feeling that you are living your life based on some pre-set rule, in short a life that is not yours. And as a result it feels like a static society, which is paradoxical because on surface so much is changing.

Sometime back on the blog we were discussing popular culture in the 60s in the context of the Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. That culture feels authentic even now because it was made by people who were living on the margins, and as a result they were truly "being" what they really were. In our time we get Britney Spears. I think this is the logic of capitalism - the way everything is progressively commodified. (All that is solid melts into air etc).

wildflower seed said...

Yes, "mainstream" culture is surely on its own trip. But there is a new tribalism emerging, a new global consciousness emerging, I think. You dont have to travel far to see evidence of this. The Internet provides ample proof.

I think the idea of "mainstream" is itself under challenge.

You could say I am incurable optimist, but I would say I've paid my price to get there. :)

Alok said...

No I haven't read anything by habermas. I have read some elementary essays about frankfurt school philosophers and sociologists which make reference to all this but haven't been able to understand much. I think Max Weber was the guy who first wrote about rationalisation of society and instrumental rationality...

wildflower seed said...

Wonderful that you mentioned the '60s. The '60s did not die out, thankfully. Today something like Burning Man is mainstream. Who would have thunk?

I think something of that order of magnitude is fast approaching again. And this time, I dont think it can be marginalized as readily.