Benjamin. The Flaneur

Benjamin. The Flaneur.
The task Benjamin wants to undertake is to develop a certain “physiology” of urban life where the “street becomes a dwelling for the flaneur” (37). Walter Benjamin takes the notion of the urban observer (“who goes bothanizing on the asphalt” [36]) both as an analytical tool and as a modern lifestyle. From his historical materialism, Benjamin portrays the flaneur as a result of modern/urban life and the capitalist and colonial development. The Arcades Project comes from Benjamin's analytical and philosophical obsession with the arcades, which he found were key to understand the social changes occurred in the 19th century. Benjamin is also aware of the predominance of the seeing over the rest of the senses, this ocular scopic order, the flaneur with a male gaze and modern mobility (where "respectable women" were dominated by male and recluded to the opposite: immobility; and the only mobile women were the prostitutes also very central to late 19-early 20 century masculinity/modernity).

Benjamin quotes Simmel who says, “Interpersonal relationships in the big cities are distinguished by a marked preponderance of the activity of the eye over the activity of the ear. The main reason for this is the public means of transportation. Before the development of the buses, railroads, and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another” (38). This unpleasant situation is what became central to the modern life, the importance of seeing (and, of course, of being seen). And also the intoxication of commodities. But the movement of modernity is prefigured by technology or by desire and trascending? There is a big difference between the flaneur and the pedestrian in that the flaneur does not have any propose in his strolling, he is looking at the commodities and his own strolling becomes a commodity.

Simmel. The Stranger.

Simmel. The Stranger.
The stranger is the one that unify the wanderer in movement and escaping any possible fixation. To be a stranger is a specific form of interaction that implies remoteness and closeness, indifference and involvment. When considering mobility in relation to trading the position of the stranger becomes relevant. Because the primary producer tries to sell within his short circle and is attached to his land, the stranger intervenes in the sphere of trade as an outside force who cannot be “owner of soil”. She is a stranger in the eyes of the other. Usual restrictions to intermediary trade and finances give the stranger her feature of mobility. Although she is outside the social rules that condition local social relations (does not have ties of kinship, locality, occupation) she gradually knows every individual of the specific place. The objective situation of the stranger (always in-between near and close) makes she freer practically and theoretically. The stranger is close to us (common features: national, occupational, social, human) and is also far to us (we are connected but we are part of greater group). There is also strangeness when possibilities (for instance the love between a couple) become real, when this realization brings the awareness that this relationship has no inner and exclusive necessity. Strangers are near and far at the same time and at different levels. And in spite all they are an organic part of the group, but a “special proportion and reciprocal tension produce the particular, formal relation to the ‘stranger’” (3).

Chakravarty (2000). Provincializing Europe. Ch7.

Chakravarty (2000). Provincializing Europe. Ch7.
Chakravarty focuses in this chapter in a very rich and complex term in the Bengali society, Adda, something that can be translated as “chat of intimate friends”. For Ch. it is more the story of desire for –or against- the Adda in the process of modernization in Bengal. It is associated with maleness, public life, and middle-class, but yet it is also a central part of Bengali’s identity that now is disappearing. But Adda was seen by the elites as a lazy activity. But Adda’s places were also connected with spaces for the production of modern Bengali reading public. (It seems there is certain similarity with Habermas’ ideas of the coffee-houses deliberations in the Enlightenment effervescence with one difference: here is not only reason what counts, for many authors of that time and even now Addas was considered a more democratic reunion of equals –different from the Majtish- with strong sentiments of friendship and intimacy.) This grouping of mainly middle-class male was in the 20th century a center of a literary, artistic and then political sociability that was held in the rooftops and parks of Calcutta. For Chakravarty there is a tension between the Addas and the modern civil society in the Addas one could say the mean of having an intimate chat with friends was an end in itself, “the pure art of conversation” (205), whereas in the modern civil society time and space are rationalized in the search for certain goals. There are still many debates in the relation between Addas and modernity and capitalism: discipline vs. laziness, women’s confinement in domestic sphere vs participation in public sphere, separation of male and female spaces vs. shared public life for both, leisure classes vs. working classes, an openness to the world vs. responsibilities of domestic life, etc (284). Another central tension is this idea of modernity that is dissociated with a linear temporality of progress, here the conversation and the sense of grouping is first and the outcome is not important.

Chakravarty. Habitations of Modernity. Intro and Chapter 2

If modernity is a concept we must find some people or practices or concepts that are nonmodern. For 19th and early 20th century western philosophers and intellectuals there was a distinction between those modern and premodern. For Chakravarty “Western powers in their imperial mode was modernity as coeval with the idea of progress” and many “nationalists saw in it the promise of development” (xix). But can the description of something or some group as pre or non-modern be anything but the gesture of the powerful? How can we define those people (peasants and subaltern classes) who are contemporaries but at the same time challenging our “modern” separation between secular and sacred, feudal and capitalist, nonrational and rational? Some write about alternative or plural modernities, other about modernity at large. Modernity has lost its value but it is still necessary when dealing with issues of democracy and development, although we must exercise a spirit of vigilance with it. We are all traversed by the world capitalism but the pathologies of modernity itself should be considered in places such as India where issues of colonization and postcolonization produce a particular form of modernity. Chakravarty makes the distinction between modernity, democracy and civil life, India has become a greater democracy but not necessary liberal or nonviolent. Here the problem is how to characterize Indian modernity, many authors tried to call it using negative definitions borrowing European notions (not bourgeois, not capitalist, not liberal, or incomplete modernity, or incomplete bourgeois modernity), but for Chakravarty the most successful attempt to identify a positive way of describing the situation was Guja’s “dominance without [bourgeois] hegemony” although the without also suggested negative function. But the problem is that societies are different and sometimes it is hard to translate concepts or historical process from one to another, “Our use of negative labels may be read as an index of the problems of translation that we, academic intellectuals, encounter in describing Indian social acts through the filter of European-derived social sciences and political philosophies” (xxiii). For Ckakravarty write about modernity self-reflexively is not to equate being human with being political but the self-reflexivity about "the political" and the "modern" is itself something political. More over, (modern) notions of the political are secular but in the case of India for many groups political action implied a mix with religion. For the left there is no possibility to mix them because Indian secularism has to cultivate a rational outlook. But Indian historians (marxist, left-liberal) “have never been able to develop any framework capable of comprehending the phenomenon” (22) [the relation between politics and religion in India]. Religion can barely mean (for the historian such as Sarkar) a mean for a political end, but he cannot see that sometimes becomes and end en in itself. This is because Sarkar sees history as a continuous struggle between forces of reason and humanism and forces of emotion and faith. “The self-image of modern Indian secular scholarship, particularly the strands that flowed into Marxist social history writing, not only partakes of the social sciences’ view of the world as ‘disenchanted’, but even displays antipathy to anything that smacks of religious” (25). The problem for Ch. is that the (post)colonial hyper-rationalism lacks a language and “analytical categories to do justice to the real, everyday, and multiple connections that we have to what we, in becoming modern, have come to see as nonrational” (26). If religion and politics are irrevocable separated and opposed, then, modernity in India, according to secular historians, has seemed to be incomplete. But no one considered the possibility that India has its own modernity, and not a bad version of something that was an unmixed good, but the blame was in the colonialism, “colonialism stopped us from being fully modern” (28). But even the categories such as religion were/are not the same in Europe or India and so other categories used to understand Indian’s modernity. For Ch. the translations and the categories used are hybrid, impure and incomplete. And this process of colonization/modernization was at times violent and at times through persuasion, two forms of violence, one that institutionalizes and founds law and one that maintains law. But which is the relation of the intellectuals with those two kinds of violence. “If it is true that Enlightenment rationalism requires as its vehicle the modern state and its accompanying institutions-the instruments of governmentalitym in Foucault’s terms-and if this entails a certain kind of colonizing violence anyway, then one cannot uncritically welcome this violence and at the same time maintain a critique of European imperialism in India except on some kind of essentialistic and indigenist ground” (32). But the work is not to reject ideas of democracy, development or justice, the “task is to think of forms and philosophies of history that will contribute to struggles that aim to make the very process of achieving these outcomes as democratic as possible” (33) and we “write, ultimately, as part of a collective effort to help teach the oppressed of today how to be the democratic subject of tomorrow” (33) in a dialogue non-teleological recognizing that the history of subaltern social groups are fragmented and episodic. Fragmentary in a sense of fragments that challenge, not only the idea of wholeness, but the very idea of the fragment itself: “here, we conceptualize the fragmentary and the episodic as those which do not, and cannot, dream the whole called the state and must, therefore, be suggestive of knowledge forms that are not tied to the will that produces the sate” (35). “The subaltern is the ideal figure of the person who survives actively, even joyously, on the assumption that the statist instruments of domination will always belong to somebody else and never aspires to them” (36). “To critique post-Enlightenment rationalism, or even modernity, is not to fall into some kind of irrationalism” (37).

Benjamin. Theses on the Philosophy of History.

We have a certain relation to our image of happiness that is tied with the image of redemption. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. Only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past, and its past become citable in all its moments. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another” (256), so a historical materialist has to dissociates himself from it as far as possible, he regards his task as to brush history against the grain. The “state of emergency” we live is not the exception but the rule. Angel of history (Klee painting) says “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed”. Politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, and the negation of exploitation of labor and nature avoid the issue that oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. “This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren” (260). Progress was considered as progress of mankind itself, infinite perfectibility of mankind, irresistible and automatic through a progression through a homogenous, empty time. But history is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. Present is the “time of the now”, always open to Messianic time of redemption in the revolutionary chance in the struggle for the oppressed past. The present is change and the time in which the historian write history. Calendar as monuments of historical consciousness. Wreckage of modernity.

Foucault: What is Enlightenment?

Instead of looking at the present as a world era in which one belongs, or an event whose signs are perceived, or the beginning of an achievement, Kant sees the present as an “exit” or “way out”. He wants to understand the present as a difference. Enlightenment is the pass from maturity from immaturity, a pass that change the pre-existing relation associating will, authority and reason. And a man/woman has to free him/herself, Kant shows the obligation to know : “dare to know,” “have the courage, the audacity, to know”. Enlightenment is both a collective process and a personal act, men are elements and actors of a single process. Enlightenment is both a spiritual and institutional, ethical and political process through reason for reasoning’s sake. Reason must free in its public use and must be submissive in its private use (which is the opposite of the usual call of freedom of conscience). Reason must be subjected to particular ends in view. There is enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another. The public and free use of autonomous reason will be the best guarantee of obedience, on condition, however, that the political principle that must be obeyed itself be in conformity with universal reason. The self-reflection of Kant on his own work in this little article, is for Foucault a point of departure, the attitude of modernity. For Foucault modernity is an attitude rather than an epoch or a precise historical moment, it’s a way of thinking and feeling and a way of acting and behaving (tensions between the attitudes of modernity vs attitudes of “countermodernity”). For Boudalaire modernity is “heroize” the present and he says “we are each of us celebrating some funeral”. Modernity is not only a certain attitude/relationship with the present but also a relation with oneself, a production of himself. It is a simultaneous problematization of man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject. A permanent critique of ourselves but not confuse humanism vs Enlightenment and not fall in the “blackmail of Enlightenment” of being against or for Enlightenment (beyond outside-inside alternative): criticism consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits. A genealogical/archeological inquiry of historical events, of particular areas, partial transformations and practical attitudes are perhaps more clear to analyze. Growth of capabilities and growth of autonomy/freedom are not separated from the intensification of power (state) relations (knowledge, power and ethics).

Kant: What is Enlightenment?

Kant, “Was ist Aufklarung,” in Foucault, The Politics of Truth

Enlightenment is self-enlightenment through reason and rational thinking. “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage” and “Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another” (2007: 29) There is not need to think if other think or work for me, they would “guard” me, the problem is that one has to live out of any tutelage…But tutelage has become “almost his nature” for people who are not “accustomed to that kind of free motion”. If “freedom” comes, then enlightenment would come, but the point is a true reform in ways of thinking, especially the public use of one’s reason as a scholar instead of the private use of it. There is a relation between the scholar and his/her public in which he/she has an unlimited freedom to use his/her reason to speak in his/her own person.