BA EST 431 Literary Theory End Sem Model Question Paper

END SEMESTER EXAMINATION MARCH: 2011

IV SEMESTER

Programme: BA (PSEng, JPE, CEP) Max Marks: 100

Course: Literary Theory Duration: 3 Hrs

Code: EST 431

Answer Any Five of the Following. (5x20=100)

Note:

i. The questions are designed to bring out your positions viz-a-viz the theories you have studied. Please ensure that while clarifying your positions you locate them within or around the theories you have studied. A personal take or a personal narrative not located within the theories you have studied may not be treated as an answer.

1. Would Eagleton’s position that literature is an ideological apparatus, be acceptable to you? Give theoretically sound agruments for you position.

2. Between Plato and Aristotle, whose position is more acceptable to you? Explain with reasons.

3. How does Saussure’s conception of language complicate the idea of language you have inherited. Explain.

4. What structuralist notions of language and ‘reality’ does Derrida complicate? How does he do that? Elucidate.

5. What are the differing ideas of the subject  do Freud and Lacan inaugurate? Explain.

6. Discuss the possibilities and limitations of poststructuralist feminist thought for you as a student of English studies, and Psychology, who mostly lives and studies on parental support and has a different social history that determines your present subjecthood than that of Europe and North America.

7. How does Judith Butler problematise ‘gender and sexuality as categories of essence’? In doing so what new insights does she give into Freud’s thought? Explain.

8. How does Foucault show the relationship between discourse and power/knowledge? Does Foucault affect the way you looked at the social? Elucidate.

9. If we accept Said’s arguments on Orientalism, what political agenda does it set for you as a young undergraduate at the beginning of the twenty first century? Explain with reasons.

10. On what grounds would you argue that the condition you exist is postmodern. Delineate your argument using ideas of different postmodern thinkers you have studied.

BA EST 431 Literary Theory Material for End-Sem Exam

Making this post on the request of Fatema of II PSEng who made that request on behalf of her friends.

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0. Model Question Paper 

1. For Material upto Psychoanalysis please click here. 

2. Psychoanalysis by Yolmo Urgen of II yr PSEng

3. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses- Louis Althusser  by Nidhi V Krishna of II MA English 

4. Feminist Theory Jyotsna Subramaniam of II yr PSEng

5. Race and Postcolonialism  by Simran Purokayastha, 2nd PSEng

6. Study questions prepared by II year PSEng students

7. Study questions II year CEP students.

All the best. Do well. 

Race and Postcolonialism

Notes by Simran Purokayastha, 2nd PSEng.

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Mary Klages begins by laying out the basic premises of the study of ‘Race and Postcolonialism’, in an essay of the same name, by highlighting that ‘the field we call ‘English’ was originally defined based on the equation between nationality and language: an ‘English’ department studies works of literature written in the English language by people whose cultural history could be traced directly back to England… The field of postcolonial theory examines the effect that colonialism has had on the development of literature and literary studies within the context of the history and politics of regions under the influence but outside the geographical boundaries of, England and Britain.’

‘Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: ‘In reality, who am I?’’ Frantz Fanon

Postcolonialism claims the right of all people on this earth to the same material and cultural well-being. The reality, though, is that the world today is a world of inequality, and much of the difference falls across the broad division between people of the west and those of the non-west. Edward Said in fact argues that the West (or Occident) produced the non-white, non-Western cultures and people as inferior through a variety of discourses which stated the terms of their existence as inferior. This division between the west and the ‘other’ was fairly concretized by the 19^th century with the expansion of European and European- derived powers to include about nine-tenths of the entire land surface of the globe under its rule. Postcolonial discourses begin to arise in the 1960s as thinkers from the former colonies began to create their own forms of knowledge, to counter the discourses of colonialism: these postcolonial discourses articulated the experience of the colonized, rather than the colonizer, giving what’s called the ‘subaltern’ a voice.

The history of colonialism is intricately connected with the economics of capitalism. Apart from the necessary monetary transactions that characterize such a relation, the West exported its own ‘legal, religious, educational, military, political, and aesthetic ideologies along with its economic regime’ (i.e. Marx’s ‘superstructure’, and Althusser’s ‘ISA’). So, Western cultural standards were upheld and all other notions of culture were denounced as inferior and subordinated to Western standards. ‘English’ departments were initially designed to perpetrate this very thought (of Western cultural standards beings masters in every respect) and were employed

(i) to establish the hegemony of British culture worldwide, and

(ii) Act as a regulatory mechanism to teach and enforce the ‘correct’ form of English as a language.

Colonial and imperial rule was legitimized by anthropological theories which increasingly portrayed the peoples of the colonized world as inferior and requiring the paternal rule of the west for their own best interests (‘development’). The basis of such anthropological theories was the concept of race. The west- non-west relation was therefore thought of in terms of whites versus the non-white races. White culture was regarded (and remains) the true embodiment of ‘civilization’.

Race and postcolonial theorists are interested in studying ‘how distinctions based on race are made, circulated, and enforced.’ Mary Klages then goes on to explain how, because physiological facts (such as hair color, eye color and skin color) become signifiers connected to specific ideological signifieds, the concept of ‘race’ is actually a signifying system. She defines ‘racism’ therefore, as ‘the connections of physical signifiers to ideological signifieds in this system (of ‘race’)’. By extension, ‘race’ as a genetic or biological construct, does not exist. Rather, it is a signifying system wherein physical signifiers become connected to cultural conceptions (and misconceptions) that the physical signifiers are assumed to be pointing towards. These connections are, of course, arbitrary. But theorist then continue to question how these arbitrary connections ‘get made, enforced, expanded, reproduced, and/or modified’. The answer most often lies in Foucault’s idea of discourse, says Mary Klages. Writings about race from various academic disciplines (think anthropology, sociology, psychology, biology, literary studies…) connect physical signifiers with a particular trait, behaviour or disposition (‘certain kind of eye shape with a certain kind of intelligence, or a hair texture with a social behaviour’). And thus, ‘racial traits’ are created, elaborated and perpetuated. ‘And when we have made those associations, we then view those signs of race as ‘real’, as ‘true’, as ‘factual’’.

‘What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus that ‘true’ knowledge is fundamentally non-political (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not ‘true’ knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced. No one is helped in understanding this today when the adjective ‘political’ is used as a label to discredit any work for daring to violate the protocol of pretended suprapolitical objectivity.’ Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978)

Mary Klages then focuses on Edward Said and his iconic ‘Orientalism’ where he posits that a ‘discourse works to create ‘knowledge’ about a supposed ‘racial’ group’. He uses the example of anthropology and shows how it was a discipline used to create ‘knowledge’ from the perspective of the dominant culture, about the subaltern. He highlights that this knowledge wielded great power and aided the creation and growth of social attitudes, ideologies and practices that defined and delimited the group or culture in question.

‘Said uses the word ‘orientalism’ to refer to the set of discursive practices, the forms of power/knowledge, that Western Anglo-European cultures used to produce (and hence control) a region of the globe known as ‘the Orient’.

It is evident that ‘Orientalism’ depends upon the binary opposition ‘occident/orient’ (west/east). What is interesting to note, however, is that the ‘orient’ is whatever is east of the Anglo-European perspective’. This becomes clearer when one sees that England is the place where time and space begin (Greenwich, England’s GMT (0:00) is what the rest of the world measure time in relation to. Similarly, 0º longitude that runs just east of London is the ‘starting point’ of global navigation.).

Even cultural knowledge about, and representations of, ‘the Orient (al)’ constructed by the West make it a place of ‘otherness’.

Consider the following:

West/East

Modern/Traditional

Familiar/Exotic

Note that the Orient is everything that the Occident does not want to be. Simply, the West’s construction of the Orient is a projection of all that the West considers negative or has to keep repressed. By placing all forms of ‘otherness’ on the Orient, on the right side of the binary opposition, the Occident can construct itself as all positive.

‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much, What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea- something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice too…’

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)

The history of imperialism is the history of discourses about colonized places in various forms (official government reports, personal travel narratives, imaginative fiction…) and even this creation of discourse about a colonized culture, unmistakably, works also to silence that colonized culture, which cannot ‘talk back’, or write about itself. Any attempt to do so is considered illegitimate, non-knowledge, nonsense.

Postcolonial theory is concerned with what happens when the formerly colonized culture actually begins to produce knowledge by and of itself, insisting upon making itself heard. In such a situation, thinking about it via deconstruction, the binary oppositions ingrained in the culture’s psyche begin to fall apart, resulting in newer and hopefully more accurate ‘knowledge’ (conceptions).

In connection with this deconstruction of binary oppositions, Klages discusses the works and theories of three thinkers: Henry Louis Gates Jr., Homi Bhabha and Gloria Anzaldua.

HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr. AND ‘THE SIGNIFYING MONKEY’

• Connection between postcolonial theories and contemporary African-American theories
• His article- ‘The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Money’

Familiar to literary theorist’s post-Saussure, ‘signifying’ is typically used in the context of ‘signification’. In African-American cultural usage, the same term takes on a different meaning; that of what Gates calls ‘the dozens’, calling out, rapping and testifying. He insists that this ‘signifyin’’ is not just how African-Americans talk as a natural consequence of little/improper education or because they don’t know the ‘correct’ (where ‘proper’ would be that which is ‘hegemonic dominant cultural’, or ‘white’) forms of speech; rather, the activity of signifyin’ comes from an African and African-American tradition, just as classical rhetoric comes from the tradition of Greek and Latin modes of speech. He traces the roots of black signifying to African mythology and specifically to the archetype of the ‘Signifying Monkey’.

‘Signifying’ therefore, is ‘a form of verbal play, centering primarily on the insult, whereby people can demonstrate a mastery of improvisational rhyme and rhythm; the demonstration of such verbal mastery is a mechanism for empowerment within communities where other forms of power- political, economic- are unavailable.’

This practice is linked to the mythological figure of the Signifying Monkey, who is able to trick the more powerful animals in the jungle through his verbal skills. The link between the two is on at least two levels:

(i) the figure, and the practice, come directly from African cultural mythology, and

(ii) the figure of the Monkey in particular, plays on the racist construction of Africans as apes, and therefore less human than whites. The Signifying Monkey thus takes a figure from the white racist idea of blackness and refigures it and signifies on it so as to represent ‘a person with verbal power and the ability to stir up conflict between those who have more social power than he does’, a far cry from the construct of the ‘inferior monkey’.

Gates also looks at the Signifying Monkey as a subject position within language, at the fringes of ‘correct’ i.e. hegemonic, dominant cultural forms of speech. In this position, the Monkey is able to use words with greater flexibility and signify and shift meanings (fluidity), as compared to the speaker closer to the center of language. ‘Gates celebrates the subversive power of fluid language to disrupt existing hierarchies which create binary relations of domination and subordination’.

HOMI BHABHA AND ‘THE LOCATION OF CULTURE’

‘What does need to be questioned, however, is the mode of representation of otherness.’

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994)

• Ethnicity

• Ethnic cleansing

• The race-ethnicity-nationality connection

• Identity (examination: humanist model and poststructuralist perspective)

• ‘Overdetermined’ and multiply constructed

  subjecthood

• Capitalism as ‘connective narrative’

Primary focus: ‘Hybridity’ and ‘Imagined Communities’

People determined by/part of more than two ideologies or those who are not part of any discourse are said to occupy a ‘hybrid’ position, in Homi Bhabha’s words. Such hybridity is inherently deconstructive, as it breaks down any possibility of a stable binary opposition. Klages says ‘any place where you can cross categories, inhabit two subject positions at once, or find the space between defined subject positions, is a place of hybridity’. Examples include refugees, transsexuals, women etc…

Bhabha then moves on to argue that the idea of a homogeneous, stable concept of belonging to a nation becomes prone to profound redefinition once we recognize the idea of hybridity. He says we belong to ‘imagined communities’ that shape our identity and that we claim as our own. Nationality is an example of one. Hybridity challenges the idea of a unified ‘imagined community’ by bringing up the idea that one might belong to many communities or cultures at once.

Bhabha is interested in forces and identities that destabilize the idea of a homogeneous ‘imagined community’ and argues that the concept of ‘nation’ is built upon the exclusion (or even extermination) of those who are described as not belonging to the nation. He concentrates on refugees as an example. ‘The performance of identity as iteration, a re-creation of the self in the world of travel, the resettlement of the borderline community of migration, is where Bhabha locates the project for those not included in unified definitions of ‘nationhood’’, says Klages. One important place where this happens, according to Bhabha, is in literature. Literature has, for long, been solely associated with nationality but, times have changed and literature needs to give voice to the transnational, the hybrid, the postcolonial and the refugee experience. This, he says, will, in fact act as a transformation tool that will change how we think about literature itself.

GLORIA ANZALDUA AND ‘LA FRONTERA’

Homi Bhabha’s idea of the ‘hybrid’ finds a parallel in Gloria Anzaldua’s concept of ‘the border’. The border is both the space between cultures, classes, races, ideologies- the slash- and the place where they meld and mix (both sides of the slash and on neither side of it).

Anzaldua, in her essay, focuses on naming ‘the multiplicity of identity formations she inhabits simultaneously and contradictorily’. Her views concur with that of (post)structuralists who maintain that language speaks us. She asserts that ‘ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity- I am my language’. But those who occupy ‘the border’, she says, are ‘deslanguadas’ (without language)- ‘a linguistic nightmare, those who speak an orphan tongue and therefore culturally crucified’.

It is important to note that while Bhabha fights for the necessary presence of hybridity in literature, Anzaldua asks in what language such texts can or should be written, especially when one’s language is illegitimate or otherwise unacceptable.

Anzaldua’s own essay, in English and Spanish, embodies her answer to this problem. Anzaldua sees her linguistic mixture as a mode of empowerment, rejecting both sides of a choice structured as a binary opposition. Here again, one sees the fluidity of such a de-centered subject position. She claims this fluidity as a form of power: ‘Maimed, mad and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures’ magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for his/her inborn extraordinary gift’.

References and Recommended Reading:

· Pinto, Anil. Race and Postcolonialism. Christ University. Mar. 2011. Lecture

· Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism A Very Short Introduction. Rev. ed. 2007. India: OUP, 2003. (Available in the Christ University library, MA Philosophy section)

· Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Ed. 2001. India: Penguin Books, 1978. (Also available in the Christ University library)

· Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. 1994. Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1902. (Also available in the Christ University library)

· http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/themes/themes.html

· http://www.semioticon.com/virtuals/postcol.htm

• http://davidharvey.org/

2CEP- What Is Literature? by Terry Eagleton

WHAT IS LITERATURE

-Terry Eagleton

ABBREVIATIONS USED: lit= literature, lang= language

ABOUT TERRY EAGLETON:

- Still alive, from UK, Teaches at Cambridge, currently working on theology, comes from Marxist tradition.

-Raymond Williams influenced Eagleton. Williams is a key figure in culture studies. Eagleton differed from Williams, a general pattern in academic relations.

WHAT IS LITERATURE- General ideas

- Kant organized academics into disciplines

- Only 18th century Romantics, began trying to define lit.

- ‘Theory’ cannot have a single exception, because method means that all research should arrive at the same conclusion. Science does this best

- In Social Sciences, answers and conclusions are unimportant. The method or arriving at the conclusion is important, ie: how and why. ie: argumentation > conclusion

-Humanist vs Post Humanist

Post Humanists emphasize the varied ‘Positions of Author and Recipient’, and interactions of Speaker and Listener, Identity and Subject Position, Individual and Subject.

-Texts undergo cycles of relevancy

E.g.: Feminists loved, then hated, and are now re visiting Marx and his theory of labour. Environmentalists are referring to Marx’s idea on resources.

Broad topics argued by Eagleton, to define literature:

a-Imaginative writing?

b-Fact or fiction?

(His first 2 ideas, were Common Sense explanations of Literature. Common Sense is a literary concept from Plato till 1967, until Derrida broke it.)

c-Literature vs. Literature

d-Formalism (“organized violence committed on ordinary language”) (associated to Linguistics, Structuralism, Saussure). Formalism employed ‘scientific spirit (Pg 2)’: they relied on method and tried to be Objective. (Science can be falsified- Karl Popper) --Emphasis of Form/ Structure over Content -Importance of Devices

(Eagleton isn’t saying that the Formalists didn’t believe content was important. He says that Formalists believed that content isn’t the business of critics, but devices are)

e- Paradox: This estrangement from ordinary language (that the Formalists spoke of) brings us into a fuller possession of experience!

f- Norms?: Formalists identified lit. as a deviation from the norm (ordinary lang.). But what is the norm then?  Ordinary lang. itself differs across time and place. Slang doesn’t fit into this idea of the Formalists either.

g- Shift and Change: of time, place and context. (“context tells you it is literary but not the language”)

h- Making strange/ Matter of contrast (Pg 6)

i- Formalists think all lit = poetry, and thus prose is judged by the same scale as poetry.

j- “lit. may be at least as much a question of what people do to writing as of what writing does to them.” .

k- “lit is a non pragmatic discourse with no immediate practical purpose, but referring to a general state of affairs” . But what about Orwell’s essays studied as literature? (Pg 7-8)

l- Points j. and k. imply that lit is not Objective, but is up to how a person decides to read a text and not the nature of what is written (see also Point g.). There is no essence of lit (pg 8 & 9).

m- “Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them” (pg 8-9).

NOTE- I have made no lecture notes for pages 10, 11, 12, 13

n- Ideology: there is no randomness (Pg 14) (In India, when we began to include texts by Indian authors in Lit sylabbus, we included Ananthamurthy, RK Laxman. They all happen to be upper class, Hindu, males while most students of Lit were women. Power is maintained and exercised.)

o- Lit is constituted of value judgments. There can be no absolute definition of it, and only definitions that are “according to xyz” (Pg 15)

NOTE/ DISCLAIMER- My notes are by no means comprehensive of Eagleton’s original text. I have only included the information given by Mr Pinto during his lectures and some broad arguements covered in the essay. And out of my lecture notes, only that which is (seemingly?) relevant has been put up here. You still have to break your own head over the essay:).

II Year BA EST 431 Literary Theory Material

1. a. On What is Literature - Terry Eagleton. Notes by Satya, III Yr JPEng
    b. On What is Literature - Terry Eagleton. Notes by Noopur Raval, JNU
    c. On What is Literature - Terry Eagleton. Notes by Anoo, II Yr CEP
2. On Plato by Simran Purokayastha, II Yr PSEng 
3. a. On Thinkers from Aristotle till Mathew Arnold by Jyotsna S., II Yr PSEng
    b. On Thinkers from Aristotle till Mathew Arnold by Marisha Vashi, III Yr PSEng
4. Structuralism
5. On Saussure by Satya, III Yr JPEng
6. a. On Psychoanalytic Approach by Marisha Vashi, III Yr PSEng
    b. On 'Creative Writers and Day Dreaming' by Marisha Vashi, III Yr PSEng
7. Some more links to material from an earlier post

(Dear friends, if these notes are in any way helpful to you, please make it a point to thank in person your friends who have written these notes. Just as they give their time and energy to someone unknown to make their life a little more comfortable, you too find ways of doing it, in your own ways, to the unknowns. AP)

All the best

Lecture on Levi-Strauss Analysis of Oedipus Rex to II Yr JPEng- Clarification

I had mentioned in my lecture about Yayathi-Puru achetype. I had also mentioned mentioned about a play by Girish Karnad on the same story. Karnad has not translated it to English. However, there is a small write up on the story in Wiki. Click here for it.

Following are some of the previous post on Structuralist Approach of Levi-Strauss on Oedipus Rex.
1. Anil's ppt presentation on Levi-Strauss' Structuralist Analysis of Oedipus Rex
2. Notes by  Ashif who was 2009 Student of III PSEng
3. Anil's PPT points of the presentation on Levi-Strauss' Structuralist Analysis of Oedipus Rex
4. Classnotes of Sumana Sri from II CEP

Subjectivity - Notes of Anup Dhar's Lecture

Following is are the lecture-notes prepared by Nikita Naresh of II Yr JPEg based on Anup Dhar's interactive lecture on Subjectivity delivered on 8 January 2011 between 2 and 6 pm at Christ University. The lecture was organised by Padmakumar to orient the students and the faculty to forthcoming conference on Subjectivity in the University.

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The session began with questions from the audience about the nature of subjectivity and various other concepts related to it. The most prominent ones were:

What is subjectivity?

What is inter-subjectivity?

What is agency and does the subject have it?

What is the self/identity/individual/body (as opposed to the subject)?

What is structure?

Who is a subject?

Is there a free subject?

What role does experience or personal narratives play in subjectivity?

Is subjectivity ideal-dependent?

Subjectivity in law

Can a judge be neutral? Can we legally take into account the subjectivity of the perpetrator? What is objective evidence?

In the case of rape, the law requires evidence of forced penetration and also resistance from the ‘victim’. But traces of penetration are virtually impossible to find, and the examination involved to find it could be regarded the second rape of the woman. There could also easily be situations where under duress she could not resist the attack. In such cases then, the court turns to the subjective narrations of the woman and her personal experience of the rape. A true ‘narrative’ is one which goes against all odds, one that comes with a strong emotional attachment. This narrative is understood by the judge by virtue of his comprehension of the language, or the ability to hear. Subjective narrations can only be known through inter-subjectivity.

If the woman was experienced in sex, or was a sex worker, what differentiates this experience from any other? If we combine this situation with an inability to resist the advances of the perpetrator and there is no evidence of penetration, then according to objective law, there was no rape.

But the subject (the woman) knows that she has in fact been raped. How does she know this? How does she distinguish her experiences and provide her narrative? She must have had some prior knowledge of sexual violence. How does she identify herself with the role of victim?

Another case of rape was mentioned where the woman claimed that she did not resist the attack because the very act of been stripped of her clothes was indignity enough. She claimed that she knew that she had been raped even before there was penetration, there was no need for her to resist after this initial ‘rape’ had already been committed? Her experience then is different from that of other women, by cracking the basic ‘ideal’ of rape which is penetration. But if her experience of being stripped is in fact the same as that of a woman being penetrated forcefully, then should that qualify as rape? Her consciousness of sexual violence comes before that of the court (which ruled against her). Her agency ended when she was stripped and her free-subject essentially died at the point when she was subjected to rape.

Understanding this from an I/me/mine position of this woman,

I was raped.

My me was raped.

My mine was not in my genitals but in my clothes.

The mix of subjective and objective in law is a difficult one. Neutrality of a court is impossible, because there is no way of eliminating the subjectivity of the judge. Law itself is framed on the pervading morals of society. The court can only ever pretend to be objective, but cannot at any point provide a judgement which is not influenced by subjectivity. On the other hand the subjectivity of the defendant and prosecutor are never taken into consideration. The subjectively created constitution is upheld objectively regardless of the specific experience or narrative of the subjects involved.

Subjectivity and the body

In the case of a dead person, whom does the body belong to? The body exists without the subject, or without an ‘I’. We all have two bodies-the live body with the I and the dead body without it.

Our many subject positions all share one anatomical body of which we are not consciously aware of. We cannot feel our internal organs, the firing of neurons, the chemical reactions taking place within us. Only if there is injury or or a malfunctioning of the organ, can we sense its presence-through the subjective experience of pain. The depths of our anatomical body is known to us through pain, while the surface is known through pleasure.

The anatomical body is universal to all people (with a structuralist understanding), the lived body however is subjective to each of us. They do not arise on their own, but only through their relationship with others and the sensorial world. These relationships determine our own life-worlds, our choices and individual ‘destinies’.

The woman mentioned earlier faced an indignity at the surface of her body itself, before it reached the depths. At the moment she felt she was raped, it was her subjective body that had been attacked, not her anatomical one, which is why the court could not recognize it for rape.

At this point, the mind-body relationship was brought up as an erroneous western idea. One cannot exist without the other. When we discuss subjectivity, we are discussing both the mind and the body. There is no/can’t be any distinction between the two, because at any point there are several bodies which could be referred to. The mind is in a way transcendental over each of these bodies, brought together by human anatomy. There is a mental pole and a bodily pole which coexist in the lived body in a sort of continuum. A dead brain means a dead body.

In the case of phantom limbs (a sensation experienced by someone who has had a limb amputated that the limb is still there), the subjective body experiences and is conscious of the missing limb, even though the anatomical body or the objective body is not. The limb then is on the cusp of real-unreal.

In an ideal-driven world and a structural world, subjectivity will cause disruptions. Knowledge systems are wary of subjectivity because it contests their basic principles. But if we give free reign to it, there would be a proliferation of subjectivities which would not be compatible with each other and a functioning world would not be possible.

The thermometer (Subjectivity of beliefs)

If A claims to have a fever and B wants to verify this, then how would s/he do so?

Through her senses of touch, vision (of symptoms), hearing (A’s narration), by use of a thermometer and relating these findings to her own experience of fever.

After this analysis, if B agrees that A has a fever, there is a common inter-subjective result. If B comes to the conclusion that A does not actually have a fever then how do we reach a consensus?

The thermometer provides an objective measure of temperature, but at what temperature one is said to have a fever is again a subjective decision. These are the objective standards that we have today. before thermometers however, people measured fevers in different ways, the standards used change over time (as the notion of rape changes over time) which is why subjective understandings across cultures are so different.

There are only two possibilities in the earlier scenario. A either has a fever or doesn’t. In a Newtonian world, there are always only two options. The world is divided into binaries and the subject must choose between them. Good and bad, right and wrong etc. are conundrums, which cannot likely be solved because Dharma is uncanny.

The story of Mahabharata is essentially about the violation of Draupadi. But we often forget Duryodhana’s earlier humiliation, when Draupadi laughed at him. His order to strip her in the court was intended to humiliate her in return. In Ramayana, Ravan kidnaps Sita but treats her unlike any other woman in his life, with kindness and respect with the hope that she would eventually fall in love with him and would then turn down Ram’s hand in the same way that Ram turned down Soorpanika. An eye for an eye seems fair, in the sort of the objective world that we have created today, but right and wrong in these stories is difficult to clearly pin down. To understand subjectivity or the conundrums of right and wrong, we need to abandon Newton’s world and go inwards or antharmukhi according to Hindu philosophy.

It is difficult to deliberate over objective universals, especially when we acknowledge subjectivity. Universals of the thermometer kind may not always suffice. Then what do we do?

After reading A’s temperature, the mark on the thermometer will remain for millions of years, unchanged until an external subject shakes it back to normal. The thermometer requires human agency to revert back. The reading is created from A, but exists thereafter without any need of the world.

Coming back to A and B, the dialogue between them takes place in 3 stages:

I A has fever and a thermometer measure her temperature

II B says that A doesn’t have fever

III A says that she does in fact have fever, it’s her experience of fever.

The first stage is that of a third person and therefore objective. The second stage is one of inter-subjectivity with a need for a hyphen between the two. The third is one of intra-subjectivity and one of loneliness. This point, of acknowledging your own experience is the point of creation. It is the primal loneliness of god, which is present in all of us. This loneliness exists despite the fact that at any given time a subject is both speaker and listener within his/her own mind, because language functions in such a way that speaker and listener are always coexistent. The subject then is never ‘alone’ but lonely.

Newton and Identities

Western cultures were impoverished cultures because they were incapable of abstract thought, especially in numbers. The idea of 10, with a zero after one to depict a higher number required an immense amount of abstract thought and inter-subjectivity to symbolically represent 10 in this way.

Newton began as a lover of alchemy and with a secret affair with a great alchemist at the time. He stifled these passions with the aim of getting into the Royal Society and since then could only think straight and mechanistic, ignoring the subjective, as opposed to Einstein’s bent space and relativity.

Newton’s world is a billiards table, with a hard, even surface, solid balls and definite pockets. Einstein messed up this table by imagining the table made of a rubber sheet, that would bend under the weight of the balls and rock them of its own accord. Heisenberg messed this up even further by imagining each ball to be as small as an electron, so small that any attempt to look at it, would shift its position.

Today quantum theory still does not know if electrons exist, because it is impossible to see them. They believe that they exist because the physics involved suggests that there is a particle of negative charge present in the orbits around the nucleus of an atom. The structure of logic in a newtonian world is + and -, binary opposites.

“It is a numerical world of 9 and 10, but our subjective mind can create a platform 9 3/4 between them.”

The electron in quantum physics lies somewhere between this 9 and 10.

The Jains in contrast believed in a 7-fold world of logic (positively negative, really unreal, cause as well as effect etc.) It went between the binaries and beyond them. This is where subjectivity lies.

The subjective world is an intimate world. A pen is bent in water. This information may not be true, but it is still relevant. Lifting it out of water is like lifting it out of context/history/society. It is a phenomenal experience.

Who am I?

Answering this question requires self-reflection/ knowledge. In Hinduism to answer this question would again call upon antharmukhi.

Kunti was giving Karna an identity by telling him that he was a Pandava. But he could not just pick himself out of his ‘water’ and join a new context. His life and struggles had brought him to Duryodhana and he chose to fight alongside him even though it meant death. it is based on what you see inwards that tells you how to live your life. Karna chose death.

There is always an other or mirror upon which you ‘bounce off’ your reflections. Arjun had Krishna through the pages of the Bhagavad Gita. This is subjectivity, a dialogue. A dialogue cannot have morals or Newtonian logic. Definite identity frames cannot cater to the real identity. This universal world cannot be enough as it tries to label and categorize us. It attempts an objectivity which is not compatible with our multiple subjective bodies.

Reference:

Dhar, Anup. 'Subjectivity'. Bangalore: Christ University. 8 Jan. 2011. Lecture.