a continuation of non/articulated discussions

this post was brewing in my mind, in context of recent discussions i had wid ths frnd, a document written by her that i commented upon a month back, an old letter (dated 21st march 06) and post in her blog... it was aided by the fact that i was ill for last 3 days and it was raining all the time, and i cudnt go out, and i am very disturbed by the things happening in jnu and abt lotsa other things...

i shall try to make it short and simple, as much as the content allows... lemme quote from tht old letter - coming out of tiss she reflected back upon the time spent in presidency college, calcutta:

In these two years the understanding that maybe Presidency college canteen conversations on Foucault and Russian revolution was lots of dreams and sensationalization; all of this ideology still holds me back but at the same time you also come to realize the academic and theoretical approach would not help the community based organizations who have evolved from the ‘93 Bombay riots and have struggled to ensure that communal harmony is the premise of development, their conditions are-one day of work missed to make a visit to the BMC(Bombay Municipal Corporation) means one day’s wage and therefore one meal less. I have learnt it is our faith and belief in what we do that makes it worth struggles of this kind and more.

well the key sentence to me is "the academic and theoretical approach would not help the community based organizations who have evolved from the ‘93 Bombay riots and have struggled to ensure that communal harmony is the premise of development"... i, as u might know, would rather argue that the theoretical approach definitely has lots to contribute to any grass-root movement... i am not so sure what she means by academic approach, if 'academic' is understood as institutionalised produced-in-university knowledge, well clearly i dont believe it to hav any primacy in knowledge hierarchy... but 'theoretical knowledge' thats something else... the rest of this post deals wid what to me is the most important aspect of theoretical exercises in context of political praxis (is there any other kind? well, a development professional just might say yes lol lol lol)...

by theoretical exercises i refer to various usages of largely post-structuralist theories... the reasons being - (i) coz that is what i practice when i do so ;) (ii) such theories are also dealt wid by most thinking precidencians (as apparent from her mention of 'foucault') (iii) they are usually cited as the most esoteric brand of all wretched theories, as a love toy for 'happy narrators of tragedy' sitting in ivory-towers/coffee-houses... among various terms/jargons to be found in post-structuralist theory literature, the two that i consider to be the cornerstones are 'deconstruction' and 'genealogy'... to explain in my naive/vague words, the former is the analysis of hierarchies (among binaries) till the moment of its crumbling or deconstruction; and the latter is the study of how that (crumble-prone) hierarchical order came into being in the first place, and what things made it appear invinsible? a note should be added, genealogy as a method does not attempt to find the 'origin' of hierarchical and/or hierarchising order, but rather the environment, the constellation of events, interaction of orders and meer accidents that led to their formation...

now what does this blah blah blah has to offer to one caught up in praxis? well it allow one to be self-reflexive in a very systematic manner... it allows one to be cautious and critical about the hierarchies in one's mind (and presumptions) that necessarily underpins any form of praxis... i should not claim that being cautious implies negation of all presumptions and un-deconstructed hierarchy of believes regarding what-constitute-'good'-praxis... in fact all praxis must necessarily be based on some presumptions and priority/hierarchy of issues/interests... this theory allows one to be aware of such ideological choices... the very fact that our perceptions and experiences are socially contsructed, it is natural that our praxis shall be informed by immediate experiences/perceptions which cannot be claimed universal/absolute in any sense... deconstruction and genealogy allows one to be aware of one's theoretical limitation and hence the limitation of the praxis... to be aware of one's experiences, perceptions, desires, fantacies, frustrations, oedipal-what-nots etc that lead one to believe in the specific form praxis... being aware also does not help at times... but at least one stay aware... in this post in my frnd's blog she expresses her wish to be a 'nobody'... as i understand this 'nobody' of her reflects a desire to have a self that is pure, absolute, defined-entirely-by-itself-only-
and-not-in-relation-to-'other'-orders-or-entities(say hinduism)... the nobody is 'no'body because it houses within itself all that is required to define it, and thus doesnt require to be a 'some'body to an 'other'body for its identity... this desire for absolute presence is, however, not one to be fulfiled... the impossibility of being a nobody makes it even more important to understand what constitutes one's own body... and deconstruction n genealogy are what allows one to do that...

self-reflexivity, however, requires one to be both the analysing subject and the analysed subject - an act that irreconcilably fragments the self... coming in terms wid the fragmented self aint an easy thing... some findings turn up to be particularly disturbing... anyway, tis easier to use those tools on texts other than one's self... for example the earlier sentence - "the academic and theoretical approach would not help the community based organizations who have evolved from the ‘93 Bombay riots and have struggled to ensure that communal harmony is the premise of development, their conditions are-one day of work missed to make a visit to the BMC(Bombay Municipal Corporation) means one day’s wage and therefore one meal less." tis apparent that a particular theoretical approach, the entire category of which has been written off, actually underlined the functioning of the community based organizations concerned - that a community based approach struggling for 'communal harmony' will be appropriate praxis for the situation concerned... this clearly is a theoretical position informed by individual/collective expreiences... an example closer to my heart is the mode of protest carried out by students in jnu during recent movement asking for provision of stipulated minimum wage and working conditions to workers in jnu... the movement was based on the understanding that the labourer 'individual' has the 'right' to be provided with minimum stipulated wage and working conditions... irrespective of who the employer is - a public enterprise or a contractor working under one... a very different take could be that the very arrangement of 'contracting out job' is practiced to put the unorganised labour as a sub/class in a weaker bargaining position... suddenly the aim of the praxis (movement) turns from one attemting to claim what is 'rightfully' there, to struggling to attain a better bargaining position... let us not evaluate the differences in the praxis as emerging from underlying theoretical differences but simply recongnise that there emerges some differences, which might play a big/small role in the actual effectivity of the movement...