Critical Introduction to Sociology

Y2 SEMESTER 3

part one

FREEDOM & FAITH IN WHAT?

DISAPPEARANCES

“when we say heaven ... or the div e as what heaven, we are talk g about someth g that would be nowhere, no place, and at the same t e, as a result, everywhere. Someth g, assum g we can say ”someth g,” or “someone,” who would be nowhere and everywhere.”

“When we use the name god ... we are do g someth g rather unique”. It a “proper name and yet not a proper name”. It names “the possibility that there ex ts for us collectively, as well as for each of us s gularly and dividually, a relationsh with th nowhere and everywhere.”

It names the fact that “I am not l ited to all those relations I have with all the th gs of the world ... someth g that makes me be, that makes us be as humans open up to someth g more than be g the world [as it ], more than be g able to take th gs up, man ulate them, eat them, get around the world, send ace probes to Mars, look at galaxies through telescopes, and so on.”

What happens when “man th kable outside any relationsh to the div e?”

Someth g so much bigger than my dividual ex tence, my mortal identitysometh g mense, nite. And th conviction unique to human be g. Th thought: “What does it mean to be ... as much a human be g as possible?”

Is it to be ju a b ody among bodies, a vict among other vict s, all cry g out for their own rights di erent languages? Or it to be able to th k? Together wIth others their absolute uniqueness who are mak g a s cere e ort to th k too?

Can man treat man as “a m d? As a glorious th g made of ardu ?”

By the 19th c. god d appear g from the heavens of Europe. Sociology beg n g.

Jean-Luc Nancy

Rohit Vemula

When god d appears, does the human be g d appear?

GOD/SOCIETY heaven? heavens

“We refer to the “markets,” just as in the Bible the word Elo-him, a masculine plural noun in Hebrew, meaning the gods, is used to speak of the one God: “In the beginning, God [Elohim] created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).” (Dupuy)

Human Action vs. Social Structure

Emile Durkheim (social facts)

Is there a que ion of obligation or only desire?

- vs. Herbert Spencer (utilitarian) - “Survival of the fittest” as an answer to relentless Change. Hypothesised organic movement towards confederations of integrated heterogeneities (primitive to military to industrial to ”negative regulative industrial”). However this thesis celebrated “greed [as] the great agent in the elevation of the human race … and in the evolution of the universe”. (Pierce) It provided no counter-force to the prevailing individualism, breakdown of traditional authority, loosening of social bonds and moral coldness (anomie).

Max Weber (existential orient.)

- Sociology’s theoretical precursor Louis de Bonald wrote “‘Nature creates society, men rule the government. Since Nature is essentially perfect, it creates, or intends to create, a perfect society; since he is essentially depraved, man plays havoc with administration or tends constantly to botch it” (Natural Laws)

- Father of Sociology “Comte conceived of human deeds as links in the ‘great chain of being’ ... Only some human actions can indeed attach themselves to this chain ...” (Only a superior intelligence can grasp ’social nature’)

- To Durkheim society imposes moral constraints on human action, ie, “The individual submits to society and this submission is the condition of his liberation….”

- Society is the good incarnate, and its social ideals form a psychic reality of soft coercion, a ‘conscience collective’ :“between God and society lies the choice”.

- “Durkheim called the scholars of the social to ‘bow before facts’. These facts, in Durkheim’s vocabulary, are moral commands, constitutive of the ‘collective consciousness’ of ‘the group’.”

NATURE HISTORY

We have to under and the h torical transition to a new set of “natural laws of trade”! (Marx)

Liberty as the Seduction of Continuous Credit

The Industrial Revolution began with a radical transformation in the “mode of economic behaviour”. Till then profits were still made by buying cheap and selling at a higher price between geographies.

- Set up in 1694 to finance the Republic’s increasingly frequent wars against France , the Bank of England gave the State loans from its private sector depositor’s gold and silver. In return for these loans, the depositors were issued various government-backed paper assets. By the 1720’s this collaboration proved enormously successful. On the rising strength of its deposits the Bank began issuing its own “paper money unbacked by real goods or services”. Bills of exchange and promissory notes became everyday business currency. By the 1750’s small entrepreneurial banks in the provinces were issuing their own notes to keep up with the appetite for credit. (Deane) By the 1890s on “average at least 50 per cent of actual capital paid up” consisted of loans. (Morris)

A major cr ruck th sy em that was fa overextend g itself 1797, and the government acted to secure the nation’s gold reserves so that Brita ’s war e orts aga Napoleon’s France would not su er: An o cial decree forbade the Bank from mak g payments gold and silver

- British cotton capitalists who risked borrowing to mechanize work, ie, install power looms were able to expand profits at an unprecedented rate from the 1820’s. Their furious activity stimulated “ancillary industries in merchanting, bleaching, dyeing” etc. Soon, capitalists - ie, those who had the right contacts and could take risks with credit - could challenge the political influence of landed/inherited wealth. Suddenly, economic mobility into elite circles was more widely accessible than ever before.

- This happened across the Atlantic as well. Initially North American middle-men sourced cotton from the wealthy landed planters of the South, and sent it to the booming cotton mills of Lancashire. Taking advantage of disruptions in trade across the Atlantic caused by the wars of the French Revolution and 1812, the Northerners created small local manufacturing centers. By the 1860s the Southerners wanted to form a separate Nation State and set their own prices freely with Europe. This led to the American Civil War, during which the Northerners took huge credit risks to increase local manufacturing 12x between 1860 and 1900. (Robinson) *

– Paradoxical e ect: Bank of England credit notes took the place of ‘real money’, l ited only by how fa they could be pr ted.

INDUSTRIAL EXISTENCE

Producing the Wealth of Nations

- Mass manufacture endlessly churned out needles, ribbons, yarn, envelopes, steel pens, personal watches and all manner of specialized everyday consumables at affordable prices.

- With the availability of cheap jam, working-class women “no longer spent their few spare hours before bed making soups for the next day's lunch”.

- Grand exhibitions and trade fairs beckoned the middle-classes to come taste the success and future of 'Western Civilization' in an afternoon.At Prince Albert's prefabricated Crystal Palace (“a technological world wonder” of 1851), they sipped ginger beer and marvelled at the thousands of fantastic new industrial innovations gathered from around the globe. In “the great hall of machines [at] Napoleon III's Universal Exposition” a few years later, they were dazzled by a techno-utopian promise of the future “tower[ing] over them”

The century of the Indu rial Revolution was also a century of capital’s booms and bu s - the rhythms unpredictable, the returns evitable. With every fresh cr (1797, 1814-16, 1825,1839, 1847, ’57 and ’66) the workers were le without daily bread, even as the “classical econom ts from Smith to Mill regarded bus ess depressions and booms” unworthy of economic analys . (Deane)

- The basis of the new wealth was in fact a large pool of workers dependent on the daily sale of their labour power for survival. The competition at this level was stiff. With increasing mechanization and the division of labour into a series of unskilled tasks, the demand for skilled labour kept falling. Workers had to take up on themselves the costs of staying strong and dexterous while packed into tenement housing.

- By the 1830's British parliament declared working-class pauperism a natural problem, “a law of nature” which could be overcome only by a good education in the capitalist ethic.

Brit h ve ors were eculat g on South American m g projects, ve g trade that never touched Brit h shores. Railway shares and du rial ocks became middle class concerns. Individual ve ments grew tightly tertw ed with government war expenditure and balance of trade.

CAPITALIST SPIRIT

The Problematic Birth of Liberal (normative) ethics

Max

Weber

- What was new in the ‘spirit of capitalism’? Luther had rebelled against the Catholic Church’s sale of forgiveness in 1517 in Germany. Inspired Calvin in France and others. Protestant reform begins in England (1534) when the Catholics refuse King Henry a divorce. Puritans break away from Queen Elizabeth’s CoE by early 1600s and move to Netherlands. When they failed to prosper there, few of them migrate to America by 1620 in search of ”successful and efficient professional activity, occupation, and work.” They bore with them an ‘ascetic ideal’/passion for a ‘calling’ of a community without access to God in Heaven: “our whole life (everything we do or think, in private or in public) constitutes a sign or an expression of the Other scene” of Godly Truth, “of being chosen or not” ... Luxury was considered evil and so being chosen meant using accumulated wealth only to grow wealthier.

Adam Smith lectured the 1760s that the ma er-slave relationsh was a necessary part of the “dome ic relations” of political economy. Later through ‘Wealth of Nations’ (1776) th logic “became part of the canon of Enlightenment political economy.” In fact, “the theoretical mach ery of utilitarian m and po -Ricardian political economy” depended on th hypothes – that the colonies were part of the Engl h ma er's economic household.

- Weber essentially contended “that the darker world did not have the culture of frugality and thus willed itself into poverty”. They had to learn the Protestant Ethic.

J.S. Mill

God has set the world on a Prede ed course societies of heritance - acqu

- in his classic liberal essays , “On Liberty” and “On Representative Government,” Mill argued against giving Indians or Africans self-rule because they were not yet civilized enough to rule themselves. He “ converted history itself into a ... waiting room.”

- “In his mind, Britain and its colonies … formed part of a single analytical field” – a closed-system of mutual benefit. He had in fact authored “the leading economics textbook” of the age, during his time as a colonial administrator for the British East India Company.

LIBERAL IDEOLOGY

The Problematic Birth of Liberal Ethics II

John

Locke

- England: Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in England, the landed aristocracy acquired rights to takeover (“enclose”) lands deemed “unproductive”. Intellectuals like John Locke hobnobbed with them in scientific institutions (such as the Royal Society) to debate how the takeover of common property (or enclosure) was for 'the greater common good'. Poor farmers and foragers were pushed off land, and their dispossession made way for aristocratic “country houses, parks, and landscape gardens”

“t labour deed that puts the di erence of value on everyth g ”... Us g crude ‘calculations’ he declared that the un proved common lands roamed and put to various seasonal uses by American Indians were not worth “1/1000 of the Engl h acre”.

- America: “By the seventeenth century the word 'improver' was firmly fixed ... to refer to someone who rendered land productive and profitable” ... “In the beginning all was America”, wrote John Locke (“the father of liberalism”) However the Settlers found “America as fully settled as it well could be by Hunters”. When the American tribes refused to be dispossessed and put to work as labourers on their own ancestral land, their resistance was met with violence. The American middle and lower classes living in the new settlements – saw this elimination of the natives as a natural part of the destiny of improvement.

Karl Marx

- “It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined [simply] by the quantity of labour expended to produce it [as Ricardo claimed], it would be the more valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would need more time to complete the article”/improvement!

Objectively, the work g class could not a ord laz ess: potential employers judged their labour-power as if it were a commodity.

* Key Reference: Ellen Meiksins Wood. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View.

The ethic of ‘ provement’.

John Locke

ALIENATION

“The sum total of these relations of production con itutes the economic ructure of society, the real foundation, on which r es a legal and political super ructure and to which corre ond de nite forms of social consciousness.”

“The whole development of the human race needed order to humanize the senses and to educate them so that they become human senses.”

“The point is to change” the world

Karl Marx

- Marx’s contemporaries expected atheism would liberate man. Marx was more nuanced: Yes, “ Man makes religion , religion does not make man ... But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man –state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world , because they are an inverted world Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people [must be] the demand for their real happiness.”

- The inverted world is a set of objective conditions that separate me from the conditions of meaningful agency. I am at once alienated from:

a. The product of my labour (what I want to buy vs what I earn selling my labour-power never match)

b. The activity of my labour (I am constantly overworked, desperately seeking time for passive consumption)

c. ‘Species Being’ (from my humanity because of hierarchization in production-consumption, and from “hierarchies that normally organize sensory experience, such as ... between intelligence, which determines, and the hands, which obey”)

d. Social bonds (from my capacity for sincere fraternal association beyond “enlightened ‘self-interest’”)

The verted world a world of alienation: “... a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, like the sorcerer who no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by h ells.

“The rational action commences when the rules are ‘already there’; it does not account for the orig s of rules, expla why rules rema rong, or why they take on the shape they possess. ”(Bauman)

LOVE

The “relationsh between “base” and “super ructure” has been mechanically m under ood ... Marx’s concept of h tory as a whole was based on the conviction that there ex ts an objective development conta g with it the formation of a subjective factor ... Intellectual production does not follow material production but occures s ultaneously .... the ideas of the rulers are the dom ant ideas, but not the only ones, of the epoch”

Homo Faber (Creative Labour of Self-Creation)

Karl Marx

- ‘marriage in its present form [is] “a form of exclusive private property”’ What does it say about “human nature” that “the other person ... has become one of his [material] needs”? It is as if human nature stands outside of man as a part of silent, immovable Nature. “It follows from the character of this relationship how far man has become ... a species-being , a human being.”

- “Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours ... when it is ... utilized in some way.”

Alain Badiou

Love is reducible neither to the enjoyment of sex alone, nor to a fusion of two into One in the form of coupledom/marriage (neither (a) fondness that shrinks from misunderstandings, nor (b) negotiated endurance that leaves one of the two feeling forever subordinated, nor (c) as a pragmatic arms-length contract).

* Key Reference: Alain Badiou. In Praise of Love.

- Love “is an existential project: to construct a world from a decentred point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity ... Selfishness, not any rival, is love’s enemy. One could say: my love’s main enemy, the one I must defeat, is not the other, it is myself, the “myself” that prefers identity to difference, that prefers to impose its world against the world re-constructed through the filter of difference ... we can also say that love is communist in that sense, if one accepts, as I do, that the real subject of a love is the becoming of the [Two scene] and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts. Yet another possible definition of love: minimal communism!”

What is communism?

“Commun m the ... dynamic pr c le of the mediate future ... not itself the goal of human development”

COMMUNISM - SET OF PRINCIPLES

“Capitalism is Part of Neolithic Culture”

What is the communist idea?

hierarchy (re onsibility)

ecial ation (e ciency) authority (command)

professionalization (expert e-merit) procedures (cont uity)

rationalization

The “distinction between principles and rules ... is real and important. Rules are practical; they are habitual ways of doing things according to prescription. But principles are intellectual; they are useful methods of judging things. Rules seek to tell an agent just what course of action to pursue ... A principle, such as that of justice, supplies a main head by reference to which he is to consider the bearings of his desires and purposes, it guides him in his thinking by suggesting to him the important consideration which he should bear in mind. (Ambedkar 1936)

- “It is worth remembering that the doctrine, practice and thought of capitalism, in its current form, is liberalism. Today we are so keen to ... believe that what is called 'neoliberalism' is different from the out-and-out liberalism of the nineteenth century. But its doctrines, its proposals, its ways of doing things, its enemies, etc., in no way differ from those of the liberal doctrine formulated and deployed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” (Badiou 2018, Greece and the Reinvention of Politics )

- “the established order has thus far always been inegalitarian, and that that’s what’s called the Neolithic Age. We don’t know much about what came before it. There were little groups of hunters. But the so-called “Neolithic Revolution,” for the first time, formed societies based on inequality ... In all societies, for the past four thousand years, a ruling group, ruling unequally, on the basis on how much private property it owned, ran society, protected itself with a proper state apparatus, competed with other groups of the same type, and so on. We’re still completely stuck in this situation.” (Badiou 2019, In Praise of Politics )

NEOLITHIC SOCIAL WORLDS

Modes of Intercourse of societies based on equality

- Every Social Formation has all of them, but they are mixed in different ways

- There is a dominant mode/logic for each existing world (eg. c-b-a )

- Modes describe social logics of both families & nations, small prod. units & corporations

b c d

DOMINANT MODE

BASIC FORM

LOGIC

MODERN FORM

PARADOX

Mini World

a -c -b

- Federation of Tribes

- Reciprocity (Gift)

Nation

Sacrifice (only reciprocity)

Empire b -a -c

- City-states

- Plunder-Redistribution

State Sovereignty (only redistribution)

routinization of charisma

LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY (WEBER)

Hitler (charismatic)

Queen Elizabeth (traditional)

World Economy

c -b -a

- Capitalist-centers

- Commodity Exchange

Capital Unemployment (only commodity-exchange)

Droupadi Murmu (rational-legal)

routinization of charisma

Ideal- maitri + free assoc.

Fidel Castro (charismatic)

- Not the violence of something from outside, but system immanent violence, “violence of consensus”: Depression, ADHD, Burnout.

- “The capitalist system is switching from allo-exploitation to auto-exploitation in order to accelerate.” (aatmanirbharta)

- With a growth-mindset, the drive is towards unlimited self-productivity

- Every entrepreneur is an ”auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise”. You Should is replaced by You Can: “Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation.”

- Look at books for entrepreneurs: Creative Confidence, The Squiggly Career. On the other hand, “depression is creative fatigue and exhausted ability ...” We have to be able to be “flexible, able to assume any form, play any role, or perform any function” We are running a rat-race against ourselves. Your resume will never feel good enough .

- Growth, self re-invention and expansion of pleasure “presumes an array of products tied to identity ”. Constant comparison leaves us anxious that we are just ordinary. No wonder we need courses in ‘empathy’today’s “hyperactive ego” needs to be taught how to give sincere attention to someone else.

- We switch hectically between overwork and distraction. We are bombarded by “an excess of stimuli, information, and impulses. It radically changes the structure and economy of attention.” Multitasking requires Hyperattention - a survival trait of wild animals - and leads to “ hyperpassivity ; now one obeys every impulse or stimulus [to consume] without resistance.” (Han 2010)

Normality vs. Humanity

- “[We] now live in bipolar times” ... Diagnoses have shot up in the 2000s. “Global diagnoses are up 4000%”

Diagnoses of Bipolar II, III, IV, V, VI are being mobilized to prescribe drugs for a wider spectrum of mood-swings.

- “The confidence, euphoria, and energy that characterize the early stages of mania seem to fit very well with the stimulus to achievement, [and] productivity ... required by today’s companies” and the resulting mood-swings.

- “[M]ania is like a rocket that roars into space, splendid, unstoppable ... The usual barriers that prevent a person from taking risks disappear.” Just as suddenly, “other people can become too present ... Manic euphoria takes on a tinge of anguish. Small obstacles are amplified, triggering rages and violent outbursts. Paranoid ideas increase.”Psychiatric intervention today aims at the right cocktail of drugs and therapy to stabilize one emotionally between the 2 poles.

When the migrant crisis unfolded after the announcement of the nationwide lockdown, the privileged ‘grades’ sincerely attempted to communicate(?) on social media their sudden surge of fellow feeling and sympathy for the migrants. However their attempt collapsed into obscenity — recall #MeTooMigrant . Exactly when people are “most vulnerable and the most threatened, they must be thought of along the most universal amplitude. This is the amplitude of what Marx once called “generic humanity” ... For instance, recently Uber corporation ... offered to ferry doctors in its taxis.” Could it open it’s taxis to “to all the people stranded on the open highways under the summer sun to make it possible for them to travel not only safely but in leisure”? (Soumyabrata Choudhury 2020)

- Amidst our “continually multiplying contacts and fleeting relationships”, what can found communities not based on kinship, self-interest, consumption? (Han 2010)

part two

EQUALITY & REASON ON WHAT BASIS?

APPEARANCES

1690 John Locke's ‘Essay Concern g Human Under and g’ uential across Europe. “By nam g sensory experience as the only genu e source of knowledge, sensation m engendered a su icious attitude toward ab ract theory, which operated at a remove from mediate physical sensation.”

Another Beg n g.

The Enlightenment: What does it mean to be ‘scienti c’?

Descartes (1641): I can doubt everyth g that I th k (even my mo basic beliefs about a th g I am look g at). I can doubt everyth g, except that I am th k g. That where we beg .

Th uence has become a common-sense nearly 60 years later when Diderot says that "bl d people [th k] like mathematicians and mathematicians like bl d people both were unusually pervious to sensory experience, therefore lack g sensibility." Sensibility operates subtly between science and art. When not work g on h encyclopedia he reads a new type of novel - books where noth g was expla ed s ply and purposefully, and no topic was appropriate. For eg, he calls ‘Tr tram Shandy’ the “madde , the w e , the gaye of all books.”

By the early 1800s there a "poetic revolution" Europe. Writers like Flaubert and Balzac break with the old literary reg e (with "high genres, devoted to the itation of noble actions and characters and low genres devoted to common people and base subject matters"). Vico (who wrote ‘New Science’) derides the old ways as "the language of childhood". In the new real t writ g the moral a of the characters no longer clear, whereas all sense pressions, all prosaic activities are cluded, like an encyclopedia lay g bare "the character of a t e or a society". They expla everyday "realities as phantasmagorias bear g witness to the hidden truth of a society". Th k d of attention to th gs "that seems obvious at r glance but actually prove[] to be a fabric of hieroglyphs and a puzzle of theological quibbles" becomes the bas of "sociological terpretation”. Which lits to two - (1) University Sociology (à la Locke): Durkhe 's re ection on 'social facts' and (2) Metasociology (à la Descartes): Marx's analys of commodities: "A commodity appears, at r sight, a very trivial th g, and easily under ood."

Jessica Riskin

Jacques Ranciere

H

“What a nation? It a body of associates liv g under a common law, represented by the same leg lature, etc” ... Today when for the r t e

tory, the People are set to become ' akeholders' the sovereign authority of the State, there are “three que ions that we have to ask of ourselves:

1. What the People? – Everyth g.

2. What, until now, has it been the ex t g political order? – Noth g.

3. What does it want to be? – Someth g.”

Equality as the Promise of a New Common

In 1789, The French Revolution affirmed that there was a generic humanity to everyone who was present in the nation, no matter how different. Traditional-authority in the old regime (ancien regime) was vested in the Priestly Estate (religious-social power) and the Nobles (political-religious power). These were institutions of hereditary inequality. The challenge to the principle of inequality was articulated in a popular pamphlet ‘What is the Third Estate‘ (or ‘People’) written and circulated by Abbé Sieyès (a clergyman!). 'The People' demanded representatives free of “superstitious respect” for these traditionally privileged orders, and with an equal voice, to sit beside the existing decision-makers in the Estates General.

The Revolution became not ju an objective age of change, but it also became a subjective force of change; it became a subjective prescr tion of change: “I am French, but I am go g to go somewhere else and ght for the sake of these values which are for everyone”. It creates an awareness of h tory itself be g a common pr c le [where change for all happens]

The Revolution in France opened access to the highest offices in the State to anyone who could prove their ability. Seizing upon this historic opportunity, the son of a minor nobleman from Corsica rose rapidly through the Army's ranks to become a military commander. By 1799, Napoléon Bonaparte embarked on a series of military campaigns in violation of the peace that had reigned on the continent since the Treaty of Westphalia. In every territory they annexed, they abolished the old aristocratic codes and set up liberalised puppet States. Napoléonic France was linking the territories of Western Europe into a federal imperium capable of countering the global power of British Capital. And at the same time transmitting the modern institutional values of the Revolution (homogeneity, transparency, legibility). In reaction there arose “German and even Italian unification. And the various European imperialisms that subsequently emerged ultimately gave birth to nationstates around the globe.” * Key References:

Soumyabrata Choudhury

"

EQUALITY

We have to “become equal to the task of th k g equality as equals.”

Aishwary Kumar

subjectification does not create subjects ex- nihilo; it creates them by transforming identities defined in the natural order of the allocation of functions and places into instances of experience of a dispute ... Any subjectification is a disidentification , removal from the naturalness of a place ... "Speaking out" is not awareness and expression of a self asserting what belongs to it. It is the occupation of space in which” the voice challenges the mythology of the community. The modern political subject is a literary one. Literary speech = my novel/story vs. Mythology.

What is (modern) Politics?

Bole resolution passed in Bombay Legislative Council in 1923: “We resent the segregation policy of the South African Colonies and therefore we must set our house in order ... The Council recommends that the Untouchable classes be allowed to use all public water sources” Mahad was one of the municipalities that adopted the progressive resolution but many were unhappy. A conference of Untouchable castes was held in March 1927. They decided to march towards Chavadar tank and drink its water. A rumour was spread that the Untouchables were defiling the nearby temple. The caste Hindus rioted and sorely injured many conference attendees. Messages were sent to upper castes in neighbouring villages to thrash Mahars as they returned to their villages.

“This point may be illustrated by a historic episode, a speech scene that is one of the first political occurrences of the modern proletarian subject. It concerns an exemplary dialogue occasioned by the trial of the revolutionary Auguste Blanqui in 1832. Asked by the magistrate to give his profession, Blanqui simply replies: "proletarian:' The magistrate immediately objects to this response: "That is not a profession;' thereby setting himself up for copping the accused's immediate response: "It is the profession of thirty million Frenchmen who live off their labor and who are deprived of political rights'. For Blanqui, profession is a “profession of faith, a declaration of membership of a collective” on the side of political equality. (* Read pages 3-6, Badiou’s What is Politics ) This is 10 years before the Communist Manifesto!

* Key References:

A 2 nd conference was held on On 25 December 1927 where the Manusmriti was burnt - the book of repressive customary law. Ambedkar’s speech: “It is not that you and I will become immortal by drinking the water of this tank ... We go there to establish that we are also human beings like others ... this conference has been called to make a beginning towards establishing equality.” * Read pages 209-210, Ambedkar’s Speech Revolution and Counterrevolution. In France, when Napoleon was defeated by the British (1814-15), there was a Restoration: Louis

XVIII and Charles X, brothers of the executed King Louis XVI returned to restore the institutions, of the Ancien Régime. By 1830 Charles dissolved the National Guard & Parliament. In response - July Revolution. By 1851 Napoleon’s nephew had taken over on the side of restoration. 1871 - Paris Commune.

Social cu omnurtured with families by elders’ reverence of sacred law - teaches that socially ferior( ed) others are likely to reveal their “true nature” violent outbur s.

SUBJECTIVATION

- Aristotle (Politics Book I, Greece ) For the real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, the just and the unjust etc. It is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household and a state .” (4th c. BC)

◦ Where do we draw the line of justice (Evil/injustice as something new sensed in experience & shared as analysed fact)? Where do we draw the line Man/Animal? (Greek basis: Citizens vs. Slaves.)

- Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, England ) What about the greater common good of the utilitarians? In the Hobbesian (late 17th c.) liberal political philosophy, “the state of nature” involves “a war of all against all” from which the man capable of ‘improvement’ would rescue Natives - unruly children defending their 'naturally' chaotic, unproductive wastefulness - or educate the lazy poor. This is justice, ie, the advantage/ self-interest of the superior man; this ‘natural law’ that wealth = dominance.

◦ Ambedkar’s/Ranciere’s question to this is: what do we/they really have in common? Why do you get to decide that they are on the side of Nature and you are on the side of the household of Civilization? (Colonial/Liberal basis: Trustees vs. trainees.)

‘What happened??’

“ What is Enlightenment? ” (Kant, 1784) “First of all, the Enlightenment is a historic period which invents its own name: the Enlightenment calls itself Enlightenment ... it defines itself as a privileged moment in history, as a way out of immaturity into adulthood ... as a coming of age - an adulthood which implies the use of reason without an outside authority to rely on .” (Dolar) Kant in this and later texts brings out the difficulties involved in choice of ethical attitude.

After the enlightenment, the rational individual is divided : Reason seems powerless

Public (Democratic zones)

Task: Question/don’t believe

The Law of universality that I impose 'from within' destroys my illusion of pure freedom (the freedom to have more)

Freedom to reason according to ‘Liberte, egalite, fraternite’ itself is ultimately based on a traumatic self-control of my own freedom (self-reasoned duty)

They have to decide: Is democracy the r k of con ict or adm tration of consensus?

Private (Contractual zones)

Task: Obedience to power

The Rational-Legal system reveals itself to my principled reason to be founded on nothing but power

The external Law makes me obey for example the market, but there is nothing ethical here. I have to impose my own internal moral Law that constitutes me as a modern subject

Is politics a game of power, or about the public appearance of ju ice as an open que ion to everybody?

faithful ectatorial d cursive

bears the new thought as a truth

nothing new, a stage of ‘univ. progress’

it is a unique cultural achievement

obscure what has happened is unnecessary

CIVILIZATION

As a movement from Philosophy to Physics, Ethics, Mathematics, Metaphysics (causes)

History (Europeanist)

- 6 c. BCE: Ionian Thinkers (Western Turkey) - preSocratics - Athens

Theodicy (Euro-centric)

- For the professors of Europe, “real” civilization and modern intellectual potential originated in white Greek culture and followed a racial destiny.

- ie, No Civilization - Ancient Greece (6-4 c. BCE) - Dark AgesRenaissance (15

c.) - Reformation - Enlightenment

The first course in Sociology: Course of Positive Philosophy (1830, August Comte - ‘Father of Sociology’ ) : Sociology is the complex science of particulars that comes after all the others; and as the final science (starting from mathematics), it must assume the task of coordinating the development of the whole of positive knowledge . Coined the name ‘Sociology’.

- How to stop/minimise the effects of the Revolution? ( Plan for the Scientific Work Necessary to Reorganize Society, 1824) ‘How does one reorganize human life, irrespectively of God and king’?

(1848) How to infuse a rational scientific spirit into politics

( Positive Polity ) Can we have a technocratic society run by sociologists (who will combine observation with imagination to learn from history and predict possible futures)?

Devised Law of 3 Stages States of knowledge:

◦ (1) Theological state - supernatural agents

◦ (2) Metaphysical state - abstract essences

◦ (3) Positive state - causes laws based on empirical observation, trust in no absolutes

◦ Ionia inherited Technology (market, coins, alphabet), religion, thought from Egypt, Mesopotamia (Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey, Syria), Near East (see Isonomia (Karatani))

◦ Plato wrote that the Egyptians were mentors of the Greeks (Nubia - Southern Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan etc). Greeks worked as mercenaries for Pharaohs (see Black Marxism (Robinson) )

- 6 c. BCE: Buddha (India), Laozi (China)

◦ Buddhism = Enlightenment (principle of maitri / fraternity ). For details on Indian society at that time see The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism (Chakravarti)

◦ Laozi - dao the infinite is in this world ... “world’s first banknotes ... made of leather ... Around 800 AD, paper money started being used ...500 years until the system was abandoned because of inflation. The temptation to print more money was too great.” (see Who Cooked ... (Marcal) )

- 4 c. BCE: Alexandria (Egypt) - Persia

◦ Neoplatonism, medical research (for more on this period see History of Islamic Philosophy (Fakhry) )

- 7 c. BCE: Damascus (Syria)

◦ Neoplatonic - Islamic philosophy, medicine, science

- 10 - 12 c.: Ibn Sina (Persia), Ibn Rushd (Spain)

- 14 - 19 c.: Balkans to Bengal complex (for more on this period, see What is Islam (Ahmad)

Europe as an archive of Universal ideas be g te ed ‘as if for the r t e’; as if they are for everybody

inheritance

No more universal social ideas. Only scienti c technique of measurement and adm tration of consensus

SOCIAL FORGETTING

- She travelled in America wrote a travelogue, and developed “ How to Observe Morals and Manners (l838b)” the first practical guide to sociological observation and research before Durkheim, Weber, Marx .

◦ In America she used these methods to compare the moral principles American’s professed (democratic) vs. the social reality of how they lived. She found a wide gap - kept alive through a social “pressure towards conformity”.

◦ She published ~60 years before Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method (1895). In the 20th century both men & women scholars have been on both sides: remembering & forgetting.

◦ Sociologically studied “social class, forms of religion, types of suicide, national character, domestic relations and the status of women, delinquency and criminology” (Durkheim’s social facts )

- “Through self-study she rigorously augmented her early exposure to subjects routinely taught only to males. University study was barred to women, but Martineau maintained a regimen of intense, self directed investigation throughout her life. ”

- “She successfully supported herself as an author in various forms ... In the Illustrations of Political Economy she used fiction to explicate the principles of the new science of” liberal economics.

- Translated Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive and popularised it in the United States.

Was a champion of equality for all women : “She campaigned against victimisation of widows. She went on to organise a successful barbers’ strike against the prevailing practice of shaving of widows’ heads.

She advocated and encouraged widow remarriage. Adopted the son of a brahmin widow” and faced social ire

“She canvassed against infanticide of ‘illegitimate’ children. She opened a home to rehabilitate such children. Her own home became a sanctuary for deserted women and orphaned children.”

- She gave speeches transmitting the thought of equality and was one of the first Indian women to “publish two collections of her own important speeches”

- Promoted emancipatory women‘s education. ““Learn English to annihilate caste” was a common refrain in some of her poems.” Why?

- Christian converts and missionaries were the first trained women teachers in India. Contemporary to them were Savitribai and Fatima Sheikh who set up multiple schools.

- Led the Satyashodhak Samaj after Phule’s death.

- Together with Phule developed the Sarvajanik Satya Dharma (the Religion of Universal Truth) which had no priests, encouraged individual thought and was for everybody who was willing to change

(1) Braj Ranjan Mani & Pamela Sardar (ed.). A Forgotten Liberator.

(2) Michael Hill. Harriet Martineau (1802-1876).

Harriet Martineau

- Felt that sociological understanding could reform selfish individualism of capitalism because social studies were inherently moral in character. We must have faith in society.

- Division of labour in pre-modern societies was strongly constrained. There was a mechanical repetitious quality to ritual practices generating a mechanical solidarity . Law worked through physical retribution to keep boundaries drawn (repressive law) .

- DoL in modern societies is dynamic. Fellow feeling here has to develop as organic solidarity , ie, in a dynamic environment without any basis in kinship. Legal sanctions here reform wrongdoers into good community-members (restitutive law) .

Suicide: A Study in Sociology , 1897 was a pioneering analysis, matching suicide statistics to logic of social (im)balance:

- Egoistic Suicide - depressed from lack of community

x Altruistic Suicide - death as obligation to a community

- Anomic Suicide - everything staked on desire

x Fatalistic Suicide - future is blocked to all desires

Elderly Japanese

Hindu wives

Indian Farmers

Institutional Murder

- While the Protestant ethic set-up capitalist habits, capitalist modernity with its drive to ‘rationalization’ (calculation and standardization) ‘disenchants’ all our interactions and institutions, leaving us approaching an ‘ iron cage ’ of ‘bureaucratic rationality’.

- Through large scale statistical studies we can find solutions to the social problems of the age and solve them with economics. America was the model society.

- We must not neglect increase of domination through ‘social closure’, trying to stabilize rewards within groups of ‘insiders’ (men, white workers, upper-castes) - which is not direct economic exploitation.

“In general, we understand by ‘power’ the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the same action.”

Karl Marx (Conflict

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Max Weber

Emile Durkheim

The Communist Manifesto

Weber, Economy & Society

Theory)

“All of us know where to nd society ... [It ] there wherever more than one human be g to be found.”

IRRATIONALITY OF RATIONALITY

1. In 1991, agriculture was deprioritized “for lending at low cost interest rates from the banking system” was given up. Denied access to both cheap credit and fertilizers, small and marginal Indian farmers found their out-of-pocket costs rising sharply (Rajalakshmi 2004)

2. The 2nd blow to the farmers came with India signing on to the GATT (later WTO) in 1994 - food security was declared to be a “non-trade concern”. India was obliged to export certain volumes of food/yr, regardless of domestic food security concerns. (In 2002-03 “the worst drought year for two decades”, India exported a record-breaking 1 million tonnes/mo of food-grains for European cattle & Japanese pigs: “The dream of the Indian farmer is to be a European cow!” (Farmer, Vidarbha) (Patnaik 2014)

3. The 3rd blow came in 1996. Between 1991-96, lakhs of small Indian farmers switched from cultivating food-crops to export-crops like cotton and coffee, taking on debt on market predictions. “But ...world prices started crashing from the end of 1996 onwards and by 2001 it was practically at half the level it was in 1995.” (Rajalakshmi 2004)

4. The 4th decisive blow to India's poorest followed close behind in 1997-98, when the government gave in to international “pressure to “target” the food subsidy”. From that year on it was decided to divide the population into APL vs. BPL, and only those families falling 'Below the Poverty Line' would have access to cheap food.

- By 2005, Utsa Patnaik calculated (using the NSS data from 1999-2000) that rural head-count poverty in India stood at 74.5% whereas, “the official Planning Commission figure ... [was] only 27.4 percent! ... about 350 million persons” had been denied their right to access subsidized food. (Patnaik 2014)

- Over 200, 000 farmer suicides were registered btw 2000 and 2010. By 2016 this number crossed 350,000. (Krishnan 2016)

‘The Invisible Handjob’ (Zupancic)

India’s journey to be declared an “emerging” market begins with signing on for an IMF structural adjustment loan in 1991. FDI flows increased more than 6 fold over the first three years. Within a few weeks of taking the loan the government opened up new areas (like power generation) to foreign investor participation. Soon MTv, BBC and CNN entered middle-class homes, and a few million youth began practising their “global English accents” dreaming of BPO & IT jobs. By 1993, the financial industry was partially opened up. Telecommunications and mining followed in ’94—the same year India signed on to the GATT. The country was declared “emerging”, the following year. (UNCTAD)

The ‘Policy Roadmaps’ prepared by the top global management consultants - McKinsey etc - report steadily falling poverty rates, steadily growing GDP. Between ’91 and ’95, the GDP growth rate went up and up and up (from 1% to 7.5%). (World Bank) And poverty dropped (from 33.2% in ’93-’94, to 25.7% in ’04-’05 (All-India Poverty – Patnaik 2008)). Even while the GDP suffered significant dips and spikes for the rest of the decade, poverty was reported as steadily dropping and official exuberance focuses on the Indian IT boom. By 2000, “the Indian IT Industry [is] a ten billion dollar sector.” (Kapur 2002)

As of 2007, India's miracle-sector provided direct employment to only 1.6 million workers, along with “3 million jobs in various support services”, employing only 0.4% of the population. (Sanyal 2015)

In 2009, the entire Indian National Sample Survey was scrapped, and re-conducted, when the Chairman of the Planning Commission (Montek Singh, ex-IMF, McKinsey Advisor) felt the results showed “too much poverty”. In 2015, the BJP led government overhauled the Planning Commission and renamed it: the National Institution for Transforming India. They also shut down the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau.

“Irrationality [of rationality] means that rational sy ems are unreasonable sy ems.”

George Ritzer

SOCIOLOGY II

“Is there a notion of society operative that capable of encompass g all ex t g human be gs?”

- Established and lived in Hull house, a ‘settlement house’ in the middle of a poor immigrant working-class neighbourhood. Though ‘settlement house’ conventionally indicated charity, she had a different philosophy: “not ... a sense of duty of the ... ‘haves’ to the ‘have nots,’” (Trustee mentality) but rather a space that took up the feminist challenge of ‘how to give voice to multiple positions without falling back on hierarchies.’

- Hull house hosted lectures by philosophers (John Dewey, Herbert Mead), college extension courses, English language courses, and social clubs for anyone. It affirmed that anyone could attend, learn and speak as an equal.

- Some of the brightest feminist minds lived here for years. Every encounter was also a chance to allow others to change oneself.

- Conceptualised ‘sympathetic knowledge’ : knowing others better to reinforce our common connection.

- Wrote philosophical reflections on juvenile delinquents, garbage collection, immigrant folk stories, and prostitution through conversations with people. Her sociological writing on domestic help 'A Belated Industry' (1896) conceptualised why they were powerless labourers since as isolated individuals, they were treated as servants to a household blocking the ability to organize.

- Conceptualised ‘lateral progress’ - social progress not as the work of great intellectuals or entrepreneurs, but as the work of those who have the courage to change with others, like Abraham Lincoln.

Alone

- Was hired to study the black populations in the Philadelphia ghettoes. The university expected he would quantify how the “atmosphere of dirt, drunkenness, poverty and crime” of the ghettoes “were features of the black populations”.

- He presented a meta-theoretical reflection on Sociology itself to the American Association of Social & Political Science (’Study of the Negro Problem’, 1898) (Should we begin our sociological studies assuming the blacks are a problem, when black Americans were “forced to take extraordinary measures to live ordinary lives”?)

- Gathering positive knowledge is not enough. What about the "sacred" history of my own society that colours the data? Rewrote history of America as a segregated social totality.

‘Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880’ . (1935) “Lincoln learned”. Although he was part of the liberal culture which consumed Minstrel shows (travelling plays mocking 'colored' peoples) and respected “capital invested in slaves”, Lincoln was moved by how black workers fought, bravely, efficiently and with honour for his side in the CIvil War. Against all his advisors he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, fought for a Constitutional Amendment for equal rights, and posted troops in the conservative Southern States to defend blacks’ fresh constitutional rights. He was assassinated.

WEB DuBois

Jane Addams

Y.S.

Without Sympathetic Knowledge we live Protected Ignorance setup by “societal practices and their govern g ideas.”

STRUCTURE OF (NON)SOCIETY

B.R. Ambedkar

- Analysed the mechanism, genesis and development of ‘Castes in India’ (1916). Sociologist Gabriel Tarde hypothesized that the fundamental psychological forces operating in society are ‘imitation’ and ‘innovation’.

In India Ambedkar adds the force of castes is both psychological and mechanical Even for those who don’t psychologically imitate, they find themselves claustrophobically “closed in” to a caste. He also added a 3rd term ‘excommunication’ to bring out the peculiar mechanism of castes. (Excommunication “ is essentially an exclusion from what, modern terminology would call, “free speech” (Choudhury 2018)).

- “Unity of culture” is not enough to make a society however. In ‘Annihilation of Caste’ (1936) he theorized that “Men do not become a society by living in physical proximity ... [and acquiring] similarity in habits and customs, beliefs and thoughts ... the only way by which men can come to possess things in common with one another is by being in communication with one another. This is merely another way of saying that Society continues to exist by communication indeed in communication.”

So there are, then, many of what is called samaj . (Jaaware 2019. Read p.49)

Deleuze, Gilles. How Do we Recognize Structuralism?

Caste cannot be understood like race. In America racial segregation created separate cultures and endogamy did not form castes out of the races. Division of labour is not the caste system’s essence, as DoL is present without castes in other societies. Its uniqueness lies in that blocs of the population were artificially chopped off and circumscribed in circles “outside which people should not contract marriages.” Caste is about control of who women marry.

“Every ructure psychosomatic ... Every ructure an fra ructure ,,, a virtuality of co-ex tence” which “nonsense ... produces sense ... produces it by circulat g the ructure” Social ructure not architectural or biological. It like a lliv g grammar.

In this segmented social structure there is no common humanity. Only “a graded system of sovereignties ... which are jealous of their status.” All hearts are codified against innovation or “conceptual interruption that, in a sense, disturbs given philosophies of history.”

One cannot change hearts without a change of structure. This requires conversion to a new principle.

1. Non-Violent direct action is perceived as violence by those who identify with ‘the naturalness of’ their place in the structure.

2. They see in the direct action only a willingness to break laws. But “How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust?”

3. If one waits for the right time, one will be stuck in the waiting room that is their history

Letter from Birmingham Jail

Martin Luther King Jr.

SOCIOLOGY ON THE WAY TO SOCIETY

- Sociology asks what are the ‘aspects’ of society? (from Latin aspectus (“look, sight; appearance”))

- Thinkers of equality (Addams, DuBois, Ambedkar etc.) say: “It would be the gravest error to assume that there is something, one thing, that we could call “society” ... What can be found is sociability. It is (has to be) invented .” (Jaaware 2019)

- Sociability “is about how we conduct ourselves in relation to persons unknown”

- “It is not as if each husband and wife living separately are a family by themselves. Often enough, brothers, sisters and other relations come together under the patriarch’s or his wife’s umbrella, so to say, and settle family issues ... travel to meet each other.”

(Jaaware 2019)

“In segmented sociabilities we obtain a relation of nonrelation: We can trade, exchange, have sex with, “the lower,” and yet not relate to them in any manner”

(Jaaware 2019)

We need concepts to make sense between

+ “what happens” (facts)

+ “what I live through” ( ories)

+ what you live through ( ories)

“Because the sexualization of female identity has not been accompanied by a genuine redistribution of social and economic power and because it has in a way reinforced men’s sexual power over women, it makes traditional patriarchy attractive ... Freedom has both made more widespread and more legitimate experiences of uncertainty, devaluation, and worthlessness .” (2019)

Homo Sentimalis ((ir)Rational Construction of the Emotional Self)

‘right’ conduct of desire

psycholog ts therap ts self-help irituality tradition

Sexual situations “are nonrelationships because at least one of the two sides either lacks an emotional goal or refuses to imagine the future, or both.” (2019))

Durkheim’s 1897 notion of anomie relied a great deal on the example of a new social type of 19th c. France - the single man. “Anomic desire is ... restless, hyper-active, in perpetual quest of something ...” This type had appeared as a warning in literature much earlier - Gustave Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’ (1856). Remade as ‘Maya Memsaab’ (1993) in 20th c. India - something in Emma/Maya’s condition was relatable to Indian audiences now.

Eva Illouz

- Looking for a life-partner: Matching with your ideal ‘emotional’ partner is a way of “ engineer[ing] sociability through emotional compatibility”.

◦ You construct your ideal self textually and visually in your profile.

◦ Through a questionnaire your qualitative “difference [with a stranger] is precisely expressed as magnitude” the likelihood of “a neutral ground”.

◦ Is a high chance of compatibility really a high chance of love? Is making your own profile really the opposite of arranged marriage? What is ‘compatibility’? (2007)

- What do I want? Something casual, to feel desired: Unloving “is about the unmaking of social bonds ... at least one of the two sides either lacks an emotional goal or refuses to imagine the future, or both.” In unloving “choice is exercised both positively (wanting, desiring something), and negatively ( defining oneself by the repeated avoidance or rejection of relationships , being too confused or ambivalent to desire, wanting to accumulate so many experiences that choice loses its emotional and cognitive relevance, leaving and undoing relationships serially as a way to assert the self and its autonomy).” (2019)

Badiou: “In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that ... [Love] takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can ... construct a world from a decentred point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity.” It is not a “pure” experience that confirms my identity and desirability.

* Key Reference: (1) Alain Badiou. In Praise of Love. (2) Eva Illouz. The End of Love . (3) Jacques Ranciere . Why Emma Bovary Had to be Killed

Nainika Seth. Online matrimonial sites and the transformation of arranged marriage in India. ‘

Y2 SEMESTER 3: SOCIOLOGY I

I am indebted to

B.R. Ambedkar

Alain Badiou

Zygmunt Bauman

Soumyabrata Choudhury

Prabuddha Collective

Ernst Fischer

Lewis Gordon

Byung-Chul Han

Eva Illouz

Aniket Jaaware

Martin Luther King-Jr.

‘I th k that we mu manage to th k what has happened. Let’s set out from a pr c le: noth g that anyone does un telligible. To say ‘I don’t under and’, ‘I’ll never under and’, ‘I can’t under and’, always a defeat.

We can’t leave anyth g the reg ter of the unth kable.’ (Badiou)

shiraziq@gmail.com

Aishwary Kumar

Karl Marx

Utsa Patnaik

Jacques Ranciere

Ellen Meiksins Wood

Alenka Zupancic

APPENDIX:LIST OF ARTWORKS

In the order I have placed them:

Part One

- Angelus Novus (Paul Klee, 1920)

- Ptolemaic Cosmology (Oliver Lodge, 1893)

- Illustration of the transept of the Crystal Palace (Sir Joseph Paxton, 1851)

- Increase the Productivity of Labour (Yuri Pimenov, 1927)

- Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms 1521 (Unknown)

- Flammarion Engraving (Unknown, 1800s)

- Screenshot from Spencer (Pablo Larrain, 2021)

- Illustration from God of Money (Maguma, 2016)

- Protect Me From What I Want (Jenny Holzer, 1987)

Part Two

- Photograph of Diderot’s Encyclopédie (Unknown)