Post-modernism Today

A Brief Introduction

Siraj

Radical Publications
Kolkata

First Edition : January 2003

Foreword

Post-modernism or post-structuralism, a powerful wave of anti-rational, anti-commonsensical,

anti-Renaissance, anti-Marxist thoughts stormed into the academic, intellectual and political circles
at the end of the last century. Emanating from Europe, it burgeoned into a devastating trend
challenging the concept of truth, any scope of emancipation of mankind from the existing order and
also the struggles of the dominated and the exploited towards a new order of things. The birth and
growth of such benumbing thoughts worshipping passivity or at best small-scale protests coincided
with the decay in the socialist states, frustration of the new generation, the retreat of the radical
Left, and the theoretical puzzlement induced by brands of accommodative Marxism. The world
capitalist system despite waves of crisis could menacingly appear internationally with the mantra
of globalization. This objective situation also helped do the spadework for the rise of the new breed
of intellectuals who preferred intellectual exercise in pessimism or exclusively narrow-based
thinking like identity, politics, etc. instead of the consideration of a bouncing back with a global
perspective for dislodging the international chains of the capitalist system. Such politics of this new
trend against radical politics and philosophy obviously provides some soothing balm to the war-
weary imperialists. Marxism is resurging on the international arena, protests roaring in the heart of
the imperialist states and the discontent of various sections brewing for an explosion. This small
book is an endeavour to critically show the irrational and harmful philosophy and politics of post-
modernism/post-structuralism. This critique is also an espousal of the cause of the dominated and
the exploited fighting for a new order.

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Post-modernism/post-structuralism in its insistence on difference and the fragmented nature of
reality and knowledge shows intense insensitivity to history. Structures and causes are dismissed
by overstress on fragments and contingencies. Such romantic idealist trend bids adieu to
Enlightenment concepts of progress or making history. The bankruptcy of the petty-bourgeois
philosophers is eminently evident when they reject any programme to cope with the system of
capitalism. In the name of ‘difference’ they concentrate on varied particular identities like race,
gender, ethnicity, various particular and separate oppressions but reject the scope and possibility
of collective action based on common social identity like class and common interests.

Post-modernism/post-structuralism philosophers and writers are deliberately complicated in their

approach, self-consciously difficult in style and refuse to follow any clarity in presentation of their
views. Burdened with numerous jargons, their writings prove to be inaccessible to general readers.

The most influential post-modernist Foucault, an avowed disciple of Nietzche, was concerned with
power and knowledge. He saw knowledge-generation-power constituting people as subjects, and
then governing these subjects with knowledge. Power and power in every aspect of life is what he
sawn negating its class content; and, in his view, people have no escape route from the multiple
sources of power. He also dismisses the view of overhauling the system of domination.

The entire body of post-modernism/post-structuralism literature is anti-rational, openly anti-

emancipatory and chooses to raise so many questions without presenting any rational and radical
programme. Such trends can at best befog the thinking process by its strange and bizarre logic of
confusion. It spreads a linguistic net to destroy the basis of all rational understanding and all
experiences attained over centuries by mankind, and arrogantly declares that we and our thoughts
are the creations of language. This idealism is a dangerous trend requiring critical study and a
powerful attack at its roots.

The emergence of the post-modern/post-structural trend is, in one sense, a rebuff against the
prevalent western thought of imparting centrality to the subject by the post-Cartesian philosophy
culminating in instrumental rationality, systematically reducing the world to the raw material of
subjective needs. It was also a critique of Husserlian phenomenology and the Satrean effort at
marrying Marxism and phenomenology. Structuralism, emanating from Saussure’s structural
linguistics, conceiving language as a structure of differences, accorded at best a secondary position
to the subject in the production of meaning. Derrida drew on Saussure’s theory of language,
particularly the conceptions of language as a system of differences involving an anti-realist theory
of meaning. Saussure emphasized more on the distinction between the signifier (word) and the
signified (concept) than on the distinction between the word and the object. This also involved the
primacy of signifiers over signifieds so that meaning became a matter of interrelations of words.
Derrida and other post-structuralists straightened this theory by denying any systemacity to
language. Derrida found the inherent contradictions in the Saussurian language theory, which
contains, in his words, ‘the metaphysics of presence’ according direct reality to the subject. Derrida
pointed that the endless play of signifiers in Saussure’s theory of language must involve postulating
a ‘transcendental signified’, which is somehow accepted as prevailing in consciousness without any
mediation of language. This raises the question about the language itself. Such consciousness,
accepted as given, reduces the role of signification to merely a convenient aid to memory or
economy of thought. Even Derrida found in this Saussurian view the proposition of impurity in
significations as befogging our vision. What is to be noted here is the vulnerable points or weakness
in Saussure’s concept of the linguistic structure conceding words in relation to other words to give
meaning, not by primarily referring to objects. And it was Derrida who, in an atmosphere of
dismissal of the notion of Husserl’s acting subject, went too far in quest of a ground of

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transcendental consciousness. Now the subject is subordinated to an endless play of difference
moving beyond history. Derrida starts his journey with the avowed claim to escape from the
metaphysics of the presence taking recourse to ‘difference’. It is a play of words involving both the
disruption of presence as well as substitution of the presence through deferment towards an
endless game where one never reaches the unknowable point. The practice of deconstruction,
contesting the metaphysics of presence on its own terrain, in reality finds no escape route.

This takes us towards the Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself. It should be stated here that if
Derridean textualism does not deny the existence of extra-discursive objects, it does deny our
ability to know it. Derrida’s endless play of signifiers provides us with the intimation of difference,
though no more than that, because of the necessarily metaphysical nature of language, writes Alex
Callinicos. The Kantian unknowable thing-it-itself comes back to the scene through Derridean
‘deconstruction’. Marxism is a scientific theory that gasps the laws of the development of society
and bases itself on practice for making history. Post-modernist/post-structuralists thoughts stand
against this, and any rational thinking. They created fleeting ripples in an atmosphere of temporary
retreat of radical Marxism. They got extra fodder due to the setback in communism in Russia and
China, resulting in a growth of revisionism. Revisionism, seen (posing) as Marxism, is a
vulgarisation of the original, depriving it of its scientific essence, and making it, therefore,
unattractive to those who desire change. Quite naturally postmodernism appeared relatively more
attractive to the intellectual. But, waves of powerful enriched Marxism and revolutionary practice
are now coming back like a whirlwind that will provide befitting answers to petty-bourgeois
idealist thoughts of the post-modernist/post-structuralist thinkers.

Ours is a preliminary small effort with no claim to successfully grappling with the whole range of
Post-modernist/post-structuralist thinking. And this note is basically meant for the activist and
people aspiring a radical change in the existing order. We promise to make a deeper study of the
post-modernist view on literature, physics etc., and also go into greater depth on its impact on the
protest movement in India. We will update this note with such critical studies. We have tried our
best to offer a lucid presentation of complex things, yet we admit to our weakness in doing so.
Friendly criticism is invited from our readers.

Siraj

Note: The word ‘Logocentrism’ is used by the Post-modernist/post-structuralists to denote any

universalizing concept like truth, progress beautiful, etc.

Contents

1. Introduction : 1

2. What Post-modernists/Post-structuralists claim : 6

3. Structuralism: 12

4. Post-modernism/Post-structuralism: A Total Rejection of Post-Renaissance Development :16

5. Critique of Post-modernism/Post-structuralism:32

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6. Linguistic idealism of Post-structuralism/Post-modernism : 42

7. Critique of The Dangerous Ideas of "Death of History And Ideology" :56

8. Cultural Studies The Tunnel View :60

9. On Power :64

10. Totality : 66

11. Difference :70

12. Anti-revolutionary Discourse Theory:74

13. Critique of Colonial Discourse Analysis:77

14. Against Unilinear View:83

15. Cause and Effect and Idealist Critique of Post-modernists/Post-structuralists: 85

16. Post-Modern Negative Impact On The Study Of Science:89

17. Post-modernism/Post-Structuralism, A New Fad :97

18. Post-modernism: A Romantic Petty-Bourgeois Exercise Dumping Rationality and Practice: 104

19. Conclusion : 123

Select References :127

Introduction
Marxism had to wade through the maze of multifarious socio-political and philosophical obstacles
in the last century, particularly after the World War II. Many of such theoretical obfuscation was
directly sponsored and nurtured by American multimillionaires. What is ironic is that most of such
theories, which raised some short-lived ripples in western universities, soon gathered dust for no
takers. The two decades after the World War II were dominated by Talcott Parson’s grand synthesis
of Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, Marshall and subsequently Freud. Parson, in collaboration with some
other people, developed the theory of structural functionalism to celebrate the virtues of American
Society and fight communism. The U.S. Government and academic institutions glorified the anti-
Marxist ‘Behavioural Approach’ as an enemy of empiricism and a historical approach, preferring to
study the "behavioural world". This "Behavioural Approach" was openly sponsored by various
foundations funded by Carnegie, Rockfeller and the Ford foundations. It was followed by "Post-
Behaviouralism". The System Theory, studying the so-called open and closed systems, focused on
the stability, instability, equilibrium and break-down of a system. This so-called system theory led
to structural-functional and input-output analyses. All the efforts were concerned with the
individual or with action in small face-to-face groups, less on institutions. Lipset, in 1981, endorsed
the development of an apolitical Marxism. Ralf Dahrendorf, basically a follower of Weber, who is
projected in the West as a sociologist of the social conflict tradition, declared in 1959 "The

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equalization of status resulting from social development of the past century has contributed greatly to
changing the issues and diminishing the intensity of class conflict."[Ralf Dahrendorf, "Class and Class
Conflict in Industrial Society", Standford University Press, 1959, pp. 22-23]

But it was only a short-lived phenomenon. The crisis of capitalism, the rising movements of the
people and particularly the liberation war in Vietnam in the 1960s and the fast half of 1970s,
together with the great Cultural Revolution in China, shattered the foundation of such bourgeois
idealist theories. Theories of consensus, equilibrium and celebration of capitalism against Marxism
proved to be futile theorisation in cosy academies. Devastating criticism was mounted even in the
West and such theoreticians shrank in the face of never ending struggles and the growing crisis of
capitalism.

Following World War II, there arose in the United States a host of crude anti-socialist and anti-
democratic theories like the Elite Theory, Group Theory, Power Theory, etc. Without any
conceptual basis, the Elite Theory preached the idea that in every society a selected few have the
right to rule. The Elite Theory reminds us of German Sociologist Pareto’s notion of the circulation of
the elites. The Elite Theory emerged as a vociferous critique of socialism and democracy. The Group
Theory added that, the elite need consist of social groups engaged in perpetual struggle for power
and domination over each other. This theory ultimately and logically leads to a particular concept of
the social system and of political behaviour. It echoes behaviouralism to explain how society
maintains equilibrium through a mechanism of "balance of the group pressures". What lies behind
those two anti-socialist, anti-democratic theories is the notion of POWER as the primary urge. In a
similar fashion the Power Theory, having its mooring in the anti-humanist, anti-socialist concept of
Nietzche, Treitscke, etc. advocated that politics is the study of who got what amount of power, when
and how. All those theories preached that an urge for power and power relations are fundamentals
in the study of politics. As the post-modernist Foucault found power and power everywhere, those
above theories also preached crudely a form of power-based determinism.

In sociology, against the grand macro level tradition there emerged the micro-level interactionist
theories. Charles Horton Cooley of the American tradition of social psychology attempted to show
in 1902 that social interaction takes place only within each individual’s mind as he or she imagines
other people’s attitudes and possible responses. To him the fact is that language is always a kind of
imaginary conversation. In his words " The immediate social reality is the personal ideas ……..
society, then, in its immediate aspect, is a relation among personal ideas………….. Society exists in
my mind as the contact and reciprocal influence of certain ideas….." embodied in language.[Randall
Collins(ed), Four Sociological Traditions, Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 1994, pp. 285-
286] Thus Cooley concluded in an idealist fashion "Social person is primarily a fact in the
mind."[Ibid p.288] This micro-interactionist tradition was taken further by George Herbert Mead
and his disciples like Herbert Blumer founding the theory of symbolic interactionism. Mead
anticipated the present day vocabulary of post-modernists/ post-structuralists when he declared
that the self is not one’s physical body, but a complicated set of attitudes derived from both inside
and outside. So, what Mead presented was a fluid state of self without any consistent and solid
foundation: We are multiple selves as we have multiple social relationships, and on these we build
yet another degree of multiplicity through reflexive relationships among our own selves.[Ibid.
p.294] Apparently speaking, this multiplicity of selves is not at variance with reality. But what this
view leads to, is an over-emphatic edge to utter flexibility of the human mind, with no steady
cohesive role for any consistent activity as a conscious worker or a revolutionary dedicated to fight
to the finish the hurdles in society.

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Existentialism emerged as an irrationlistic trend in philosophy particularly in the post-World War II
Germany and then in France and other countries. Its origin lies in Husserl’s phenomenology and
mystico-religious teachings of Kierkegard. It is an irrational reaction to Enlightenment and German
classical philosophy declaring that the essential defect of rational thought lies in that it proceeds
from the principle of anti-thesis of the subject and object, i.e. it divided the world into the objective
and the subjective. Existentialism preached, a sort of irrational reality. For existentialism the true
means of knowledge lies in the penetration of the world of "existence" through existential intuition.
Freedom lies in the individual’s choice among many possibilities, and thus choice is divorced from
circumstances and objective necessities; making, thereby, freedom an individual’s ethical question,
resulting extreme individualism.

The Frankfurt School, which emerged in the 1920s in Germany, has its genesis in anti-Bolshevik
radicalism and a revised form of Marxism. It shrinks from treating society as an "object" to be
examined, an object with its own "laws of motion". Instead the theoreticians of this school generally
insist on resorting to "subjectivity" of human endeavours, the capacity of people to shape their own
destiny, and potential for rational and collective regulation of society – although the most
pessimistic would argue that capitalism has penetrated the human psyche so deeply as to erode
even the potential for an emancipated society.[Michael Buraway and Theda Skocpol, Marxist
Inquiries, Studies of labour, Class and States, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London,
American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 88, Supplement 1982, p. 56] The Frankfurt School rejects the
role of the proletariat in history and that of progress as shown by Hegel. However, the Frankfurt
theoreticians are reluctant to abandon their roots in Enlightenment — the view of history as one
all-embracing process in which a historical subject attains its essence. Inspite of a general faith in
the Dialectics of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno did not want to focus the contradiction
between productive forces and production relations nor even the conflict between the proletariat
and bourgeois. They rather resorted to some elements of post-modernism by declaring that the
Enlightenment had changed into Positivism, to serve capital, to become totalitarianism and to
culminate in Fascism.[Paul Connerton(ed), Critical Sociology, Penguin Books, 1976, New York, p.
27]

Now, the attack against Marxism has come in the name of Post-modernism. According to Victor
E.Taylor post-modernism is a term used to describe a wide spectrum of aesthetic, cultural,
historical, literary and philosophical endeavours. In a philosophical context it claims dissociation
with logo-centrism and dismantling of universal human reason, that is characteristic of modern
philosophy.[Victor E.Taylor, General Commentary, In Victor E.Taylor and Charles E.Winquist(eds),
Martin Jay,"Post-Modernism…..", Volume I, Routledge, London and New York, 1998, pp. xii-xiii]

There are basically two kinds of post-modernism/ post-structuralism. The first, in the words of
Richard Rorty is ‘textualism’, which is actually an heir to German classical idealism. Whereas the
nineteenth century idealism, Rory adds, wanted to substitute one sort of science (philosophy) for
another (natural science) as the centre for culture, textualism wants to place literature at the
centre, and to treat both science and philosophy as, at best, literary genres. The chief proponents of
textualism are Jacques Derrida and his North American followers, particularly the late Paul de Man,
notorious after the posthumous unearthing of his earlier pro-Nazi writings. The second form of
post-modernism/post-structuralism was pioneered by Michel Foucault through his master
category of ‘power-knowledge’. While the former type almost exclusively concentrated on language
as premise, Foucault, in his theory of power, moved towards the tentacles of power-everywhere
and emphasised the power of knowledge. In both kinds of presentation two words denoting
concepts come up frequently: Discourse and narrative. In the words of one front-ranking pioneer of
this trend, Leotard, the language for discussion of science or philosophy is ‘discourse’, while the

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language used for mythical writings, etc. is ‘narrative’. However, he also added that discourse too is
basically narrative; meta-narrative or grand-narrative. In any case, all the variants of post-
modernism/post-structuralism owe their fatherhood to Nietzche. Derrida has acknowledged the
influence of Nietzche in various texts; Faucault even called himself "simply a Nietzchean" before his
death.
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What Post-modernists/Post-structuralists claim

This new fashionable trend challenges the Enlightenment’s belief in the existence of underlying
essences and unified entities. With this distancing from the Enlightenment it focused on the local
and the particular. They argue that there is no such thing as intrinsic nature, an objective reality or
an accurate representation of the world as it is in itself. Just as there are no universal laws of history
operating independently of particular agents, similarly, there is no truth out there, existing
independently of the human mind, waiting to be ‘discovered.’ [R.Rorty, The Contingency of
Language, London Review of Books, April 17, 1986] All claims about the nature of the world are
embodied in language and mediated through our theoretical paradigm. Hence, we never know the
world in itself; what we see and know is the world as it appears to us through the lens of our
paradigm. Thus our descriptions of the world are human constructs, devised, used and judged by
their capacity to perform certain tasks. This idealist view thus rejects the objective basis of
knowledge, the empiricist conception of science and the Enlightenment’s quest for philosophic or
scientific certitude. The materialist view that some truth can be discovered by scientific observation
and philosophic reason is rejected by this new petty bourgeois philosophy. The advocates of post-
structuralism/post-modernism in their criticism argue that such ideas stemmed from the
fundamental belief that there are non-linguistic things called ‘meanings’ and ‘essence’ and the task
of language is to express these meanings and represent their essences. Most of all, post-
modernists/post-structrualists reject this conception of language itself. What is devastating is their
argument that we must drop the idea that language is a system of representation.

Such assertion led the post-structuralists/post-modernists to draw several conclusions like: (1) all
languages are human constructs and it is never appropriate to speak of a language as being an
adequate or inadequate representation of the world or self. (2) The choice between one language
game and another can neither be explained in rational terms nor grounded in "algorithmic
certainty."[E.Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time, Verso, London, 1990, pp. 188-
90] (3) Truth is a property of linguistic entities and it does not refer to an accurate representation
or a mirror image of the world (4) There are no absolute referents in the form of ‘intrinsic nature’
or ‘pure essence’; meaning is therefore an object of self-creation: it is to be made, not discovered.
[R.Rorty, The Contingency of Language, Ibid] (5) For Derrida, the signifier is characterized by a
‘surplus’, i.e. it supplements the thing itself. Since the sign or signifier does not actually represent
the signified, it cannot be reduced to a single identifiable object or meaning. All we can say about
the sign, as a text, is that it resonates with several meanings. Its meaning is not exhausted by the
author’s intentions or the particularity of the historical context.[J.Derrida, Of Grammatology,
Maryland, Baltimore, 1976, pp. 317-18] Thus it is said that the reader/analyst has to approach the
text with an essential awareness of the ‘arbitrariness’ of the sign and the indeterminacy of meaning.
Such a view implies that the search for a unified meaning within a text must be given up. Instead
the focus should be on the inconsistencies and the contradictions of meaning within a text. Thus the
Derridian deconstruction asks the reader not to go in for one meaning but to question, reverse the

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existing "oppositions or hierarchies". In the words of Derrida, a reading of absences and the
insertion of new meanings are the twin strategies and they are employed not for "tracking down" or
"discovering" truth. It is instead the fields of "free play …. a field of infinite substitutions in the
closure of a finite ensemble." [Derrida, Of Grammatology, Ibid, p.51] Thus it boils down to a field of
infinite substitution of words or in other words the acceptance of otherness – a residual content
against the supposed conceptual closure "imposed by the metaphysics of presence". (6) The post-
modern/post-structural theorists reveal, at the epistemological plane, through their limitless
celebration of difference and otherness, the actual impossibility of reading and knowledge. They
express doubts about the human ability to shape the present and the future, conceding the
powerlessness, disintegration and contingency as human predicaments. (7) With the absence of
philosophical justifications, solidarity among members cannot be assumed. Since there are bound
to be differences among members of a society on any issue, only "civil association" allowing for
differences, can be imagined.[R.Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Basil Blackwell, Oxford,
1980, p.318] On other occasions they justify the struggles of women, gays, environmentalists, etc. in
the context of Euro centric logos of Enlightenment rationality, these theorists celebrate the ethnic
and the oriental. For them Ethnos becomes an authentic and primary category in social analysis and
an expression of their pluralistic stance. Such preference for the ethnic and the cultural is
manifested in the writings of this trend.

Post-modernism is the outcome or result of the ideological and objective crises in the period when
the prospect of revolution receded to the background and the militant working class movement in
Europe was largely assimilated by the states. The Soviet and Chinese degeneration had a great
enervating influence on the general mass. At this juncture emerged the discourse of post-
modernism, the momentarism of pluralism — at once a radical departure from the past, with
concepts, minus a foundation in history, philosophy and all disciplines. It was the robust opposition
to the enlightenment ideas, reason, cause and effect, and so on.

In the crisis of the western world, Post-modernism is not a mere negative response, it is also a sort
of distorted protest. It reflects the cynicism and frustration of the 1970s and 1980s and so it is
easily accepted in the west. In Derrida’s thought, ‘power’ tends to be corrupt. He says that ‘power’
tries to unify everything by force and thus rejects differences. So reject power. The basic fact is, they
say, that the tortured remains tortured because the entire system invariably generates the tortured.
Whatever political system it may be, the final result is absence of freedom and presence of
frustration. Such views gained further credibility due to the rise of bureaucratic revisionist regimes
in Russia, East Europe and then China, after capitalist restoration. These views are easily accepted
in the western world mired in chronic crisis. For freedom Derrida gave the call for Deconstruction.

Secondly Post-modernism raises questions of Reason, which, it thinks, gave birth to the present
science, democracy and the notion of progress as well as imperialism and neo-colonialism. Foucault
showed that the present form of power and knowledge have created a new form of hegemony.

To summarise the views of Post-modernists in the words of a key post-modernist that wants to
blend post-modernism with Marxism, Fredric Jameson, we find the following: First, post-modernity
is a depthless, superficial world; it is a world of simulation (for example, a jungle cruise at
Disneyland rather than the real thing). Second, it is a world that is lacking in affection and emotion.
Third, there is a loss of a sense of one’s place in history; it is hard to distinguish past, present, and
future. Fourth, it is now the world of the explosive, expanding, productive technologies of
modernity (as television).[Fredric Jameson, Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, Durham, Duke University Press, 1991] In the words of Rosenau, the post-modern mode
of thought is largely characteristics of the modern way of thinking, in terms of its method of

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opposition. Instead of grand narratives, it prefers more limited explanations or no explanations at
all. It also rejects the boundaries between various disciplines. Post-modernists are more often
startle the readers, than engage in careful, reasoned academic discourse. And most important is
that, instead of looking for the core of society (like rationality, or capitalist exploitation), post-
modernism is more inclined to focus on more of the peripheral aspects of society.[Pauline Marie
Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, inroads, and intrusions, Princeton
University Press, 1992]

Romanticism in the 19th century also came out against rationalism of the Enlightenment. It saw the
motive force of cognition, the experience of the contradiction between the finite and the infinite, the
aspiration for the infinite, the frustration born out of the unattained ability of the infinite, an
ironical attitude towards oneself and one’s creation. Romanticists idealised the feudal Catholic past;
some of them even turned to Catholicism and became ideologists of the Restoration. Their criticism
of capitalism was one-sided, looking at only the dark side of it and preaching for the medieval past.
However, a section of them, despite utopian conclusion at the end, made a critique of capitalism and
the feudal past in Europe.

Not only romanticism, some other schools of thought like Historicism, Hermeneutics, Critical
Theory and post-empiricist theories of science criticised modernism. However,
post-modernists/post-structuralists stand on a different plane from them, on some vital questions.
Some German Historians and philosophers attributed to the Enlightenment reason for the problems
in industrial societies. Herder and some other historians questioned the Enlightenment’s reading of
history, dismissing all previous ways of life. However, neither historicism nor romanticism
questioned the existence of the universal. They did not abandon the search for an objective truth
though they questioned the view of a single reality and truth. In certain respects they anticipated
the current idealist trend: they considered social reality to be a human construct, its distinctive
cultural voice or historical spirit could be recovered. In one sense, the search historical spirit could
be recovered. In one sense the search for the objective truth was not totally abandoned.
Hermeneutic philosophy gave up the notion of an essential and universal truth, and argued for
different types of rationality stressing on history. Empiricist philosophies of science had also some
proximity with the current idealist trend like the view that there is no way in which we can know
the world in itself. All knowledge, even that of the natural sciences, is mediated through conceptual
schemes and subject of interpretation by the members of the scientific community. [N.R.Hansen,
‘Observation as Theory Laden’ In S.Brown, J.Fauvel and G.C.Spivak, The John Hopkins University
Press, Macmillan, London 1981]

The post-modernist/post-structuralists dismiss the hermeneutic faith in the recovery of a single,

historically and culturally specific meaning with the twin ideas of indeterminacy of meaning and
absence of closure. They also reject the views of those critics of Enlightenment/Reason, by
challenging the very quest for foundations and essences, overemphasizing the absolute contingency
of the self, language and community. Simultaneously, any reading should try to focus on the
ambiguity and incoherence present in the text, expecting the reader to loosen the text by allowing
other meanings to seep into the text.

Post-modernism derives many of its basic elements from structuralism and post-structuralism, the
latter being its main building blocks. Many of the post-modernist thinkers lived in both the trends.
For an understanding of this prominent trend this discussion at first touches upon structuralism to
move on to post-structuralism with its additional features exhibited in post-modernism. In many
cases post-modernism and post-structuralism appear to be similar in approach. Before going into a
critical study of this trend it is made expressly clear that this is neither a comprehensive study by

9
trained philosophers or linguists nor an exercise in futile weaving of arguments detached from the
practice of demolishing the bases of capitalism, imperialism as well as feudalism; the former ones
breeding distorted reason and perverted man-nature relationship, the latter tenaciously trying, in
countries like India, to move backward to the world of unreason and superstition.

Structuralism

Structuralism is a method of enquiry, which takes as its object of investigation a system, ie. the
reciprocal relation among a set of facts, rather than particular facts considered in isolation. It
considers totality, self-regulation and transformation. The structuralists, in general, are concerned
to know the human world, to uncover it through detailed observational analysis and to map it out
under extended explicatory grids. However, it should be added here that their position is still
mainly like that of the traditional position of objectivity and their aim is to explore the traditional
scientific goal of seeking truth. To put the concept of structuralism in a lucid way one example may
be cited: There are variations in accent and presentation of Hindi, Bengali or such other languages
spoken over a vast area. Structuralists will stress to find the elements common in variations of a
language forming a general structure of Bengali or Hindi or so on. Going against empiricism and
positivism, structuralism wants to hold the focus on relations between the units or elements
invisible to human observation. Basically started as structural linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure
(and also by Emaile Durkheim, in sociological analysis) structuralism has been used by Levi Strauss
in anthropology, Rolland Barthes in the field of semiotics, some eminent critics in the fields of art
and literature, and even by persons claiming Marxist persuasion like Louis Althusser. When
structural analysis is applied to the study of literature, the structure of a poem or a story or a novel,
the relations of various elements in the structure become the question of the study. It is not the
concern of the structuralist to study the normative or value-based aspect in the structure. The
understanding of the deterministic structure-based fixed-meaning is the subject of enquiry.
Althusser rejected the humanist and Hegelian themes in Marxism, paying little or no attention to
historical changes. Some people claiming themselves Marxists went to an extreme point of
structuralism by concluding that "There is no real objective ‘history’; the notion that there is a real
history is the product of empiricism."[Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of
Production, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and Boston, 1975, p.3117] Althusser brought in the
concept of theoretical practice and insisted that reality is irreducibly complex and manifold, subject
to multiple causation. He coined the word over-determination for such multiple causative factors.
The causality is also structural. The Althusserian system, with all its apparent emphasis on
materialist science, downplays the role of human beings as authors of historical development
reducing them to the status of supports or effects of structures and relations of the social formation.
It shows its idealism by cloistering knowledge within a wholly circular, self-validating conceptual
realism, detached from direct access to what is given as reality. The web of over-determination
ultimately leads to a labyrinthine lane in the realm of praxis.

Structuralism was also a reaction especially against existentialism of Jean-Paul Satre. In his early
work Satre focused on the individual, particularly individual freedom, adhering to the view that
what people do is determined by them and not by social laws or larger social structures. However
in his later life Satre came closer to Marxian theory with his stress on "free individual" "situated in a
massive and oppressive social structure which limits and alienates his activities."[Ian Craib,
Essentialism and Sociology: A study of Jean-Paul Satre, Cambridge University Press, 1976, p.9]

10
Saussure, the father of structural linguistics, (1857-1913) stood against positive physical facts as
actual evidence, and argued that physical facts are not sufficient to account for language as
language, the language of social groups, as signifying and bearing information. Ferdinand de
Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics and ultimately structuralism in various fields,
differentiated between langue and parole, the former being the formal, grammatical system of
language whose relationships of phonic elements are determined, he believed, by determinate laws.
Parole is actual speech. Langue can be viewed as a system of signs — a structure — and the
meaning of each sign is produced by the relationship among signs within the system. What was
important in Saussure’s view was a system of signs, a structure, and the meaning of each sign is
produced by the relationship among signs within the system. Here comes the importance of
relations of difference, including binary oppositions, as the meaning of the word ‘dark’ comes not
from some intrinsic properties of the world, but from the word’s binary opposition to the word
‘light’. When this view is applied to the social world, the meanings, the mind, and ultimately the
social world itself are shaped by the structure of language. Thus, structural linguistics does not
focus on the existential world of people shaping their surroundings; instead all aspects of the social
world are shaped by the structure of language. The Sassurian notion of sign systems were further
taken to the field of semiotic, encompassing not only language but also other sign and symbol
systems like body language, literary texts and all sorts of communication. It is evident that Saussure
who became the inspirational source for post-modernism did not reject the societal aspect and
stressed that the role of the signifier as word is to impart meaning to the signified, a thing or living
being, etc. In the structuralist linguistic system the relation between the signifier and the signified,
expressed by language, is not historical but depends on every moment of utterance. Saussure
referred to the concept of dichotomy in understanding a single colour. To understand black the
contrasting colour of yellow, to understand dog the difference is made with some other animals.
Thus the words should be placed considering the differences of the signifieds maintaining
proximity. Similarly, there is the dichotomous inter-relationship between colour and sound, colour
and sound with form, and so on. Such a network of relations, Saussure thought, makes a structure.
And to comprehend any structure such binarity is considered. He asserted, "in the linguistic system
there are only differences". With all this Saussurean concepts of structure, structuralism was born.

In the Durkhemian line, with the advent of Levi Strauss in the 1960s, the analogy between the unity
of society and the unity of the thinking of an individual mind is superseded. The members of a tribe
are considered to be bonded together by a perpetual weave and shuttle of back-and-forth
transactions. In Levi Struass the unity is no longer linked to centralization. He views kinship
exchange as a system of communication and dismisses the biological unit in favour of a larger
exchange unit. Thus in the view of Strauss, marriage binds together not just a man and a woman,
but a man who gives a woman and another man who receives her. Here too culture predominates
over nature. The same structuralist view is found in the writings of Louis Dumont who, in his huge
work on the Indian caste system, promises to bring forth the ultimate economic basis, but shuns it
altogether in favour of the predominating role of Brahminical ideology as a central core of this evil
system. This cultural aspect over economics was stretched out further in the post-modernist frame.

Roman Jacobson (born in 1896 and died in 1982), the one time leader of Russian formalism, made a
fusion of formalism and structuralism. Formalism pronounced relative detachment from theory
emphasizing "scientificity of literature". Formalists stated that "there is a difference between theory
and conviction" and "the vitality of science is not measured by its establishing truths but by its
overcoming errors". They also simultaneously stress that new forms build up new contents. So
formalism in reality is a form-based scheme. There was criticism that formalists were heading
towards fixing various contents in various forms, virtually rejecting the literary content. This form-
based literature gave birth to a formalistic mechanical method. Jan Mukarovsky kept his faith in

11
formalism up to 1930 and then discovered its limitation. He accepted structural analysis without
the rejection of history. Mukarovsky distanced himself from other structuralists emphasizing social
consciousness. Roman Jacobson who introduced the word structuralism in the field of linguistics
way back in 1929 declared, "I do not believe in things, I believe only in their relationships".
Jacobson, who is often referred to by post-modernists, however, believed that the development of
language is teleological because it follows its rules. He, in his later life, criticised Sassurian concepts
of langue/parole or synchrony/diachrony and emphasized the semiotic character of language and
its relation with various semiotic fields. But he stuck to the ultimate structural relation between the
signifier and the signified. But post-structuralists went beyond all this by simply removing this
deterministic relation altogether.

"The problem of structural linguistics is," in the words of Richard Hartland, "that, once they have
started explaining language hermetically, they find no reason to stop. There is no clearly visible
limit where their kind of explanation cuts off. So an original methodological decision to exclude the
outside world... gradually turns into a general philosophical principle of unlimited scope."[Richard
Hartland;Superstructuralism, p.91]

The same criticism is also applicable in case of post-structuralism/post-modernism as we progress

forward.

000

Post-modernism/Post-structuralism: A Total Rejection of Post-

Renaissance Development

Oswald Spengler, in his book written during the World War I, The Decline of the West declared the
end of western civilization with its dominant values. Four decades later, C. Wright Mills, in his book
The Sociological Imagination, pronounced the end of the modern age with a virtual collapse of
liberalism and socialism. Post-modernists in the current decades do share many of the pessimistic
formulations of those writers and others, who, in the world of capitalist onslaughts, imperialist
wars and temporary defeats of socialism, present a non-emancipatory dismal picture of the world.
Post-structuralists or post-modernists move to the extreme, like the structuralists who believed
that the signifier points to one or two signifieds, or in other words, the language of literature
proceeds in some deterministic way. There was some scope left for reaching out to truth or fact, i.e.
moving towards a centre. Post-structuralists or post-modernists opposed these structuralists’
supposed binding the signifier and the signified in a structure. Saussure found the meaning through
differences between one signifier from another signifier; as a ‘cow’ is a ‘cow’ because it is not a
‘horse’ or a ‘dog’ or a ‘tiger’, etc. If such differentiation between the signifier and the signified, the
post structuralists argued, is stretched further and further the Saussurean concept of fixed
relationship in a structure begins to fall down. Post-strucralists or post-modernists want to
unremittingly carry on such negation of the use of certain signifier for some signified in an endless
way. Not only that, they think that the moment when a sentence is formed, in a certain unconscious
manner, we feel the absence of words which has been abandoned by the used signifier. This way
they moved further on to a road absolutely non-deterministic. In this scheme the signifier cannot
provide any determinancy to the signified, making the relation between the signifier and the
signified extremely uncertain. Thus comes a total rejection of the fact that the signifier truly reflects
the signified. This uncertainty of language forecloses, through the view of post-structuralists, the
possibility of unfolding oneself to another since "I am also built by language". On the basis of this

12
sense of uncertainty between the signifier and the signified Derrida built up his post-modernist
theory of deconstruction. It is, however, necessary to keep it in mind that both structuralists and
post-structuralists or post-modernists base themselves on a common platform by inverting the
general base-superstructure model and reducing base to a secondary or extremely negligible
position. Here knowledge is language-based and human beings too are built by language. What
post-modernism brings to the fore may be summed up as a focus on language, culture and
‘discourse’ (on the grounds that language is all we can know about the world and we have no access
to any other reality), to the exclusion of: "economistic" concerns and supposed pre-occupations
with political economy as Marxism preaches; a rejection of "totalizing" knowledge and of
"universalistic" values like western conceptions of "rationality"; the general ideal of equality, both
liberal and socialist, and the emancipatory theory of Marxism. They emphasize "difference", on
varied particular identities such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, on various particular and
separate oppressions and struggles; an insistence on the fluid and fragmented nature of the human
self (the "decentered subject"), which make our identities so variable, uncertain, and fragile that it
is hard to see how we can develop the kind of consciousness that might form basis of solidarity and
collective action based on a common social "identity" like class, a common experience and common
interests. They reject a unilinear development theory, and, in this respect, criticise Marxism. They
celebrate the marginal and repudiate grand narratives such as Marxist theory of history, western
ideas of progress, etc. They reject the Marxist emphasis on the role of mode of production as a
historical determinant, the material or economic determinants. And while rejecting such objective
factors, post-modernists announce "discursive construction" i.e. language-based construction of
reality. Simultaneously post-modernists reject any kind of causal analysis terming it "essentialism".

There are a number of post-modernist views. Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Leotard, and such post-
structuralists, laid their basis by placing the signifier before the signified. In the words of Derrida
"the meaning of meaning is infinite implication, the indefinite referent of signifier to signified ..........
It always signifies and differs." This signification resists any implied structural hindrance and
opposition. Derrida calls it dissemination. Such explanation is evident in Lyotard’s theory of
intensities, in the concept of power in Foucault, and Baudlliard’s notion of Synergy. On this basis
attack was launched against the foundations of knowledge in philosophy. Nietzche, Wittgenstein,
Heidegger, et al, are the pioneers of this thought. It was Nietzche’s view that there is nothing like
truth, cause and effect, values, etc. Lyotard shows that in the post-modern situation there is nothing
like grand narrative and modernism has lost all hope of existence. Foucault declared the death of
man. As a whole, the entire Enlightenment of the Renaissance period came under attack. The very
notion of wholesomeness is rejected. Post-modernism is actually an outcome of a crisis situation in
the USA and Europe and at the same time a sort of romantic effort at coming out of this situation at
the theoretical plane.

There are many shades of opinion in post-modernism. In the words of Barman Marx was the first
modernist. To be modernist in this sense is to create an atmosphere where it provides "adventure,
power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world, and at the same time, that threatens
to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are." But when it is stated by
Anderson that "the vocation of the socialist revolution in that sense would be neither to prolong nor
to fulfill modernity, but to abolish it" — we have just the reverse thinking on the role of socialist
revolution vis a vis modernism. Another writer John Robert in his book Post-modernism And Art
(1990) wrote that "That is why Post-modernism, as a proliferation of a critical legacy of modernism
across subject positions, ideological fronts and expressive resources, is an attempt to keep faiths
not only with Marx’s materialist view of art, but with his historical method."

13
Ihab Hassan thinks "the Post-modernist era is marked by a radical decomposition of all the central
principles of literature, the falling into deep questionability of critical ideal about authorship,
audience, the process of reading and criticism itself."

Philosophically speaking Post-modernism raised some critical points, aswe shall now recount: Till
today, conventional philosophy started from some fundamental concepts or foundational
conceptual scheme as constant, true and an inevitable basis. Post-modernism states that those
fundamental concepts are closed concepts, in ideology or theory. To come out of them needs
deconstruction. They think that there is no concept as self-sufficient and everlasting. Such concepts
emerged in some context and so with the contextual changes those ideas also undergo changes.
They are not infinite. Post-modernists/ Post-structuralists think that in universities philosophy
should not be taught as a separate discipline; philosophy can at least, subsist as a part of other
disciplines. It decries the role of philosophy as the highest judgment-making discipline. For this
reason philosophical judgment is called a meta-discourse. The main theme of philosophy is
epistemology. They think that philosophers base themselves on axiomatic categories. Descarte
taught that if we remain alert and follow correct methods then we can acquire correct knowledge
without any skepticism. Such knowledge is based on reason so it is incontrovertible. Here the Post-
modernists take objection. As they rigidly conceive of the relativity of knowledge they don’t accept
any fundamental knowledge. They are skeptical of all foundational theories and facts and try to
deconstruct them. They argue that philosophers have refuted various types of fundamental
concepts: Kant attacked Descartes, Bogenstien rejected many concepts of Frege. In the view of the
deconstructionists all such arguments are the bickerings, internal to the discipline of the
philosophers. Their criticisms were never to come out of the reason-based system. However, the
deconstructionists cannot altogether reject philosophy. Descartes in his book ‘Discourse on Method’
changed the pattern of thinking by shifting the primary concern of philosophy i.e. metaphysics, to
reason-based non-skeptical knowledge. What we learn as non-skeptical, is truth. He thought the
human mind can be made refined through Reason, to learn the reality. God has made it possible to
acquire this knowledge, as He is kind. And as God is not a deceiver, he has created the world
knowable, not mysterious with intrinsic vagueness. The point is that we learn through experience,
but Descartes opined such knowledge is not reliable. What he stressed is reason-based knowledge
to unearth the apparent mystery. Through Descartes epistemology thus took center stage.

After 100 years, while accepting epistemology, Kant brought forth the role of human beings from a
relatively secondary to principal role. He thought without the active contribution of man no
knowledge is possible. Like Descartes’ knowerman he does not merely unfold truth, nor is he the
passive receiver, Kant showed that man can make the world acceptable to Reason. Man’s Reason-
based knowledge may produce a distorted notion, but he is helpless, he explains the world as he
can. The real world is never possible to know, and we can never know it. We learn the world basing
ourselves on some categories, which are of course not pure imagination. He thought that we learn
through the application of some categories and by way of application of sensory organs we explain
space and time through the help of intuition. And what we do not learn through experience, they
are concepts without experience. As human beings are thinking animals they possess certain ideas
akin to Aristotelean logic which also has two axes; either false or true. Kant said "we need
categories to make the experience of an object thinkable". Kant accepted relations between
categories to state it in a categorical framework. And those categories, he thought, are found
without experience and they are universal and indispensable. Thus categories are true in all
respects while experiences may not be.

Post-modernists complain that modern philosophers thought that for everything there must be a
cause and effect to get a reason-based conclusion. They critically state that for removing all

14
skepticism, ultimately one goes to mysticism or metaphysics or reason without experience. Post-
modernists challenge this ultimate validity of any theory.

Modern capitalism is based on individualistic and egoistic thought. Hobbes (in the 16th-17th
centuries), in his social contract theory on the emergence of the state, opined that when man lived
in a state of nature it was a state of war of all against all. Thus he justified the emergence of the
state, to be free from chaos. This view later became a strong element in modern political theory.
Descartes, in the same period, as the father of modern philosophy, was a rationalist and his aim was
to base his philosophy on scientifically established truths. His philosophical belief was of
organically interconnected branches of one science. In his view there can be only one kind of
scientific knowledge and one science. He also had a mechanical view like, that animals can be
considered as machines.

Post-modernism identified modernity in the Enlightenment that opened up a new era in Europe
unfolding the process of modernisation. The new thinkers, like Locke, Kant and others started with
the basic notion that man is a rational being. The philosophers of the Enlightenment held that any
knowledge has to meet the standards of rationality and so rational thinking became the yardstick of
measuring truth. Like in philosophy, many thinkers of the Enlightenment believed that politics
should also be subjected to rational scrutiny and political institutions are required to follow a
rational path. This Enlightenment also drew a dividing line between the sphere of religion and
other political and intellectual spheres.

The principal critique of post-modernism is directed against the Enlightenment reason as the core
of modernism. Kant and other thinkers stressed that reason must be the guidelines for all action
and explanations. Kant thought that theoretical and practical reasons are two sides of the same
coin. And that this theoretical reason provides a systematic understanding of our experience and
the world. Through practical reason, in the Kantian view, a rational agent moves towards a goal
voluntarily adopting means he believes to be right and then follows certain general principles to
evaluate the end.

Behind all the above process, Post-modernists stress, it is implied that man is a rational animal; free
and altruistic and cultivating reason as a regulative principle of all actions. The process is thus
characterised by some emphasis on precision, enquiry, critical attitude, empirical data-collection,
pursuit of a rigorous methodology, etc., in order to attain some certainty. In an extreme form, this
knowledge makes the above agent a self-sufficient individualist who wants to dominate over nature
through the attainment of scientific knowledge. Post-modernists make a persistent criticism of the
modern ways of life, its reason and epistemology, anthro-pocentrism, historicism, cultural
homogenisation, state-centric politics, emphasis on productivity through rampant technological
growth and emancipatory notions. Post-modernists claim that the universal or global truth
emerging from the Enlightenment reason is false. Their critique is based on the thought that as
there are different forms of rationality and heterogenous traditions of reason, there cannot be only
one form of rationality; the rationality of the Enlightenment cannot and should not be given any
privilege. Foucault, the principal critique of modernism, stated that power and claim to universal
truth turned out to be repressive towards all other forms of reason. Such truth, he added,
marginalised them as "unreason" or "irrationality". Kant was criticised for his theorisation of
reason based on Aristotelian logic and his metaphysics.

Discourse, is a term basically associated with Foucault. It is used to designate established ways of
thinking together with the power-structure that supports them as the discourse of science, the
discourse of patriarchy etc. The existence of "discursive practices" within a society allows for

15
certain subject positions to be taken up, as a person at once belongs to a class, gender, race or such
other identities. Modes of discourses are established and modified over time, and ideas of class,
gender, race, individuality, etc. are determined by them. In this sense a discourse depends on
shared assumptions, so that a culture’s ideology is inscribed in its discursive practices. Contrary to
the Marxist method of the dialectical way of analysing the mode of production and relation of
production as fundamental to study a society, discourses are related to power relations, and the
basic consideration is that social meaning often arises at the point of conflict between different
discourse. Thus, concepts of gender result from the struggle between the legitimised discourse of
patriarchy and the marginalised discourse of feminism. Similarly colonial discourse refers to the
group of texts, both literary and non-literary, which were, produced by the British writers in the
British colonial period.

Epistomologically, Post-modernists stress plural, fragmentary and heterogenous realities. They

reject the possibility of arriving at any objective account of reality. Lacan wrote about the
"incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier". They reject the border of knowledge
considering it as a human construct. In biology there is living and non-living, plant and animal
kingdoms; in science there is the border between physics and chemistry and as they are human
constructs they can be challenged. Derrida believes in a system of floating signifiers, with no
determinable relation to any extra-linguistic referents at all. This signifier receives all pre-
ponderence over the signified. Post-modernists reject the concept of truth, causality and even
questions the status of science itself. For Foucault, knowledge is only fragmentary and there is no
continuity in history. So, for him truth is merely a truth within a discourse. Post-modernists think
that the human subject is devoid of any unified consciousness but is structured by language. They
make a bitter criticism of the modernist view of keeping man at centre-stage. They reject this
philosophical concept as "anthropocentrism". In Foucault’s view human sciences have reduced man
to a subject of study and also a subject of the state. The object behind it is to subject human beings
to a set of laws to define their entities, e.g. economic, rationality, laws of speech, social behaviour
and even biological functioning. Thus the "real selves" are which conform to the set of laws of the
state. Foucault considered it that such a man as a universal category is the creation of the
Enlightenment reason. So he predicted the death of Man. He thought that there cannot be a constant
"condition" and "nature". They are quite strong in their criticism of the modernist view of
domination over nature. They think that the anthropometrical view goads man to comprehend the
laws of nature with the aim of subjugating her for his desires and aspirations. They stress an
organic bond between man and nature.

Kant, Hegel, Marx and others strongly believed in the progressive development of history. Post-
modernist/Post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida, Foucault and others reject such a view. They do
not believe in historical progress. They do not consider that modern society is better than past
societies. Foucault strongly criticised Marxism for its faith in historical development. For the post-
modernists, history is discontinuous, without any goal, directionless and the narrative of human
agency from the past to the present is an illusion.

Post-modernists stoutly oppose cultural homogenisation, which projects a universal culture. This
process of homogenisation, when carried on written boundaries of nation-states, marginalises and
subjugates culture of various groups and communities. They lay great stress on the question of
power. Modern state power suppresses and appropriates the identities, aspirations of various
communities and groups. However, post-modernism, unlike Marxism, does not hold the main focus
on state power. For Foucault there is no central power; power is everywhere and it is not a thing
that can be acquired, and its relations are immanent in all kinds of relations, economic, political, etc.

16
It is now necessary to refer to some of the salient contentions of Foucault in regard to the concept
of power as presented in "Two Lectures" in his book Power/Knowledge in 1976.

"The general Marxist conception of power is an economic functionality of power. Here ‘power’ is
conceived primarily in terms of the role it plays in the maintenance simultaneously of the relations
of production and of a class domination ........."

"Power is primarily the maintenance and reproduction of economic relations, but it is above all a
relation of force ...... Power is essentially that which represses. Power represses nature, the
instincts, a class of individuals .... So should not the analysis of power be first and formost analysis
of the mechanism of repression?"

"......... Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only
functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in any body’s hands, never
appropriated as a commodity or a piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-
like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the
position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power ...."

Foucault starts from some written or artificial or such language-based presentation of some facts to
the statement. The statement is about some object that in turn makes one scientific subject and that
also in its turn gets separated to another scientific subject. A number of such presentations make
one discourse. For each of the discourses has its centre point based on the ideology current in the
market.

In the meaning of words a perceptible difference is obvious between the modern and the post-
modern. Every work, in the post-modern/ post-structural view, symbolises many different
meanings. Such multi-linear meanings were suppressed towards a single meaning during the
modern age — through the force of power. With the single meaning man, society and also human
life have been given shape. Thus words have assumed the symbol of a power equation. Post-
modernism/Post-structuralists believe that in traditional society power was decentralised,
marginal, dispersed. In the new arrangements power emerged from all sides. No interim or
intermediary step remained in existence. For wielding power there emerged a stock of experts, who
are to remain in feed-back responsibility at the top, in order to appraise the necessities for making
humans in conformity with requirements.

Post-modernism rejects the unilinear approach and strongly prefers pluralism or a many-sided
point of view.

Foucault in his book Power/Knowledge said "The history which bears and determines us has the
form of a war rather than that of a language, relations of power, not relations of meaning. History
has no meaning, though this is not to say that it is .......... incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible
and should be susceptible to analysis down to the smallest detail - but this is in accordance with the
intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics."[1980:114]

Thus the end part of the above furnishes it that the continuous struggle, tactics and strategies make
us aware of our history. He thought civil society and political society were tied together through the
form of power. Power cannot be removed from our life, as if it were passing through our vein.
Foucault said "power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from
everywhere." [1984:93] So, in Indian society the marginalised position of the subaltern is proof
positive. In other words in civil society itself power is dispersed in multifarious forms.

17
Foucault said "We should admit that power produces knowledge ...... That power and knowledge
directly imply one another, that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a
field of knowledge"[1977:27]

Foucault added "Truth is not outside power or lacking in power .......... Each society has its regime of
truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is the types of discourse, which it accepts and makes
function as true". [1980:131]

Derrida’s version of "deconstructionism" argues that all of existence is a text. In "reading" (i.e.,
trying to understand) any text — whether a book, nature or society, or ourselves — we rewrite it.
All reading is "writing", a constant, endless process inherent to the living, that cannot be carried out
consciously, at least not with the autonomous self-consciousness prior modernity had posited.
Hence we can no more determine an author’s intent than could the original author. There is no
experience per se that is shared by all human beings; everything is a surface that constantly
reconstitutes itself. Absence dominates all presence, and we are left to pursue the "traces" of an
absent itself. What is concealed, for example, on the "margin" or in the spaces between the lines
becomes as important as what is present in the words of a text. Hence we try to avoid
"logocentrism". Since all reading is writing, a flux of alternative explanations is inevitable. An
urbane openness to diverse interpretations, which actually reduce to a cacophony of voices, is
required; whenever anything in reality begins to ossify, the deconstructionist moves in to play the
role of solvent.[Gregory Bruce Smith, Nietzche, Heidegger and The Transition to Post-modernity,
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1996, p. 9]

Such a Post-modernist/Post-structuralist view focuses on the extent to which reality, including our
own being, is constituted by our very acts of trying to use, describe, and understand what it is. Post
structuralism is built on the notion that reality both human and non-human is fundamentally
malleable. We cannot, however, do our constituting of reality consciously or rationally. That would
require a stable, unchanging actor facing a structurally stable world, and we are not beings with a
simple, pre-given structure or nature. Hence the modern desire to consciously or rationally
reconstitute the world is seen as a chimera. Any closure is simultaneously rejected.

In Post-modernism respect is shown to the tradition, a major part of it being a sort of blind worship
of native tradition. This view on tradition considers the concept of time and space is a question of a
complex notion. Indian astronomer Aryabhatta predicted that time is measurable. Later we find in
Copernicus the concept of zero hour or the point of a beginning. Later it was developed by others.
Minkovaski’s measurable time brought the concept of a four-dimensional world-view. With the
notion of length, breadth and width was added the concept of time. As the fourth dimension is
measurable, the world no longer remained outside the pale of measurement. Modernism, the Post-
modernist/post-structuralists’ claim, after World War I, found its reason in the progress of thought
in respect of time and space. It wrongly made use of measurable and divisible dimension of time to
make the concept of limited space. When time and space became ‘limited’, the world was placed in
some measurable points. Thus came the notion of Omega point or the point of destruction while the
point of beginning was conceived as alfa point. This concept also connected those two points in a
straight line. With the concept of those two points came the idea of naming, and thus time and space
was divided into pre-modern and modern. Post-modernism asserts that modernism provided the
tag "modern" or pre-modern to certain points in the above straight line. The Post-modernist says
that the bourgeoisie has taken the notion of ‘limited’ utilising the time-space theory. Post-
modernism argues that when modernists speak of modernising tradition, it tries to discover good
or bad elements in the tradition. While the Post-modernist think that they should accept tradition

18
considering the ‘unlimited’, uninterrupted notion of ‘time and space’. It says that reconstruction of
tradition or its replication, etc. is not its concern; it is the concern of the modernists. Minkovsky
himself stated "space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and
only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality. Only a world in itself will
subsist". (H. Minkovaski, Space and Time).

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the intellectual brain behind various trends like Satrean
existentialism, linguistics, the ‘structuralist’ and ‘hermeneutic’ schools of textual interpretation,
postulated the primacy of language : "Language is the house of being. Man dwells in this house.
Those who think and those who create poetry are the custodians of the dwelling".[Quoted in George
Steiner, Heidegger, Fontana press, London, 1992, p.127]

We have seen that Saussure gave the privileged position to "Langue" over "Parole". The concept of
"Langue" leads to the concept of "differentiation". When language as signifying, depends on the
selection of one linguistic item as against other possible items, language as signifying does not
depend upon the particular positive properties of what is uttered and what is not uttered as we
generally understand, because in Saussure’s way of thinking has nothing to do with images or
mirrorings or mental "things" of any kind. Such a notion is completely different from the general
view of language accepting words as closely related to concrete things. Thus, in the sphere of
‘Langue’, the dualism between objective things and subjective ideas fall apart. Such a metaphysical
concept is further taken to its extreme point in the theorists of post-structuralism/post-modernism
by snapping the link with the societal aspect of language as contained in Saussure.

Rolland Barthes, who had passed through both structuralist and post-structuralist phases,
emphasized "mythologies" behind the ordinary everyday things of the objective world even when
they are simply perceived without concepts or verbalization. Barthes declared that when we eat a
piece of steak, what we enjoy is not just that material steak itself, but also the idea of steak. A
particular piece of steak carries the interpreted cultural glamour of all steak-hood even before it
comes into contact with the taste-buds. Thus a word uttered standing for a general meaning by way
of rising to a level-breaking resemblance to the referring or naming or asserting functions.

Post-structuralist/post-modernist current of language theory reaches its height through Jacques

Derrida’s writings with a priority of the sign over objective things and the subjective mind, by
making the sign "material" in an unusual way, thereby finally discarded all notions of the objective.
Derrida is more concerned with writing. For him writing is language in the most self-sufficient way,
it exists not insubstantially in the mind nor briefly and transparently in sound-waves of the air, but
solidly and enduringly in marks upon a page. Derrida justifies writing over voice by turning the
commonsense way of looking at the world upside down. He stresses that writing is the fundamental
condition which language has always aspired. For the post-modernist/post-structuralists
constitutes the human world and the human world constitutes the whole world. Derrida expands
Saussurean linguistics by emphasizing writing rather than Langue, and by doing this he displaces
objective things and subjective ideas with their binary relation. With all this Derrida brings to the
centre-stage writing. In effect, he brings a kind of apparent "thingish-ness" into the inside world. It
is the Derridean way of "materialising" subjectivity with the help of the Freudian concept of sub-
consciousness. Derrida argues that the unconscious mind underlies the conscious mind in the form
of writing on the matter of the brain, breeding all speech. The trace in the brain, in the Freudian
sense appears as a sign, as writing as a sign. While in Freud there was a relation, however
mechanical, between perception and memory in a metaphysical way, in Derrida the trace turns into
a sign, of course leaving out all notion of mind or soul. "Writing supplements perception before
perception even appears to itself" [V. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, Routledge & Kegan

19
Paul, 1978, p. 224] Thus Derrida goes to the extreme point of accepting life and consciousness in a
dreamy state. He interprets Freud stating that "speech... figures in dreams much as captions do in
comic strips." [ibid p. 218] Thus the signifier that are fundamental in Derrida’s general theory of
language, are not to be considered as things which first exist in their own right and then point out
to some other things. It is the signifiers signify before they are themselves. We are formed by
language and signifier in this Derridean model, and losing all objectivity assumes all centrality.

The Derridean theory of deconstruction is concerned with what is going on in a text — not by
seeking out its meaning, or its component parts, or its systematic implications — but rather by
marking off its relations with other texts, its contexts, its sub-texts. It means that deconstruction
accounts for how a text’s explicit formulation undermines its implicit or non-implicit aspects. It
claims to bring out what the text excludes by showing what it includes. In the first part of
Dissemination Derrida offers a deconstructive reading of Plato concentrating on the word
Pharmakon used by Plato. He shows how the word does service for Plato while it reveals a complex
network of signigications associated with Plato’s text. The varied significations of the word
Pharmakon have metaphysical oppositions and hierarchical valuation. The Greek word Pharmakon
has multiple and contradictory meanings like a drug, a healing remedy or medicine, an enchanted
potion or philter, a charm or spell, a poison, a dye or paint. Derrida insists that even when Plato
contextualises this word with a certain meaning, the multivalence or the word remaining in effect in
the Greek text.

While the western tradition of philosophy points to the binary opposition of the logic for the term
like that a remedy being the opposite of a poison, Derridean deconstruction attempts at subverting
this dialectical logic. He states that traditional commentator subjects the value of his/her writing to
the authentic meaning of the text that is being commented on. Derridean language works on
differentiation but it is a differentiation with a difference or to state precisely with a "difference", a
word coined by him. It is in one sense that the differer indicates distinction, inequality, etc. or the
other. It expresses "differing". The meaning of poison does not exist merely by its difference from
the meaning of remedy, but also for the deferring of the meaning "remedy". The meaning that is
differed is put off for the present and in time, that differs will have to flow over it. Derrida displaces
the assumption of authoral privilege. Dissemination deconstructs the difference between the inside
and the outside and seeks to move both interior and exterior. Thus it claims to shake up an endless
contradiction. Derrida studies the Platonic text moving at a point where the text is open to a
moment of alertly and from which, Derrida claims, divergent paths through the texts can be
pursued. In the Derridean deconstructive exercise, this movement is which cannot be experienced if
one thinks that the structure of a text is emanating from a fixed centre or origin. Here every origin
is always already displaced in the activity of writing, as writing poses signs as substitutes for the
intrinsically absent and non-locatable origin — an origin that is always other and different, an
origin that is perpetually deferred by writing. Thus we find two fundamental notions of Derrida as
well as post-modernism/ Post-structuralism. The absence of center or origin in a discourse and the
concept of Derridean "deferance" which are fundamentals to post-modernism were revealed in the
Derridean scheme of language. The Derridean approach to reading a text grows out of the thinking
that aligns itself in various ways with the work of Nietzche, Freud, Sussure, Levians, Heidegger,
rejecting the centre in the claimed "post-metaphysical epoch".

Jacques Lacan (1901-81), the controversial figure in French psychoanalysis, interpreted Freud in
the light of the new structuralist theories of linguistics and focussed on the human subject as
defined by linguistic and social pressures. Lacan speaks of the ‘law of the signifier’ in which "the
signifier comes and in its turn exerts upon the desiring subject. Subjects, the theorists and their

20
fellow human beings are quite bound by it". [Malcolm Bowie, Lacan, Fontana Modern Masters,
Fontana Press, 1991, p.79]
The primacy of language working as a sovereign in the human world is the fundamental pillar of
post-modernism/ Post-structuralism. Post-modernism gives priority to culture over nature.
Influenced by this trend, a new crop of literature has come up in the name of ‘cultural studies’
obviously distancing itself from earlier studies on culture. Such cultural studies emphasize that
differences are always decisive while similarities are the result only of coincidence. It is the idea,
which posits differences, not only as real and important, but fundamental, permanent, and stable,
that is to say trans-historical. Like structuralism, post-structuralism or post-modernism "cultural
studies" claimed in the 1980 the position of radical alternative to positivisim. Samuel Huntington in
his much-hyped book The Clash Of Civilization and The Remaking Of World Order in the last decade
of the last century elevated the role of culture to an imaginary plane, obviously reductionist in
nature. He claimed that with the end of Cold-War, after the exit of the Soviet Union, world politics
has now turned into a clash of various cultures leaving aside the role of class conflict and other
conflicts emanating from economic causes. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was also now justified as a
clash of civilizations.

With the so many ‘post’ theories, Post-Colonial thought or theory emerged as an offshoot of post-
modernism/post-structuralism. Edward Said, the founder of this thought, through his much-
publicised book Orientalism, published in 1978, appeared as a professedly Foucaultian critique of
the West. Said, in the Derridean line, argued that Europe establishes its own Identity by establishing
the Difference of the Orient. He went to the extreme by bracketing Asschylus, Victor Hugo, Dante
and also Marx in the formation of Orientalism. [ibid p.3] For him Orientalism is "a Western style for
dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." Said’s Orientalist Discourse,
stressing the primacy of representation, has given birth to Colonial Discourse Analysis. Orientalism
is also a discourse. In such discourse-theory also, it is not economic exploitation, but language that
is important: language doing the speaking through humans.

000

Critique of Post-modernism/Post-structuralism

What is called a modern society is the new society that emerged from the womb of feudalism. The
disintegration of feudalism was made possible by the rise in trade and commerce on a massive scale
with the emergence of the merchant bourgeois class. The Italian Renaissance, to be sure, marked
the beginning of the modern age. The Renaissance heralded a new age with its emphasis on
rationalism, this — worldliness, scientific attitude and secularism. It opened up the new spirit of
discovery and scientific and technological inventions. Against feudal tyranny, a sort of humanistic
spirit also made its presence felt in that new age. Keplar, Galileo and then Newton laid the basis of
modern science. The Renaissance also brought to the fore the concept of sovereign political entity
or the nation state. Modern capitalism emerged with the disintegration of the feudal system. The
advance in science, technology, communication system, rational thinking, etc. paved the way for the
advance of the capitalist system.

Modernisation and its essential features are:-

* Industrialisation

* Unbanisation with new mode of production

21
* Increasing world population

* Growth of working class

* New type of economic relations

* Architecture, engineering

* Modern science with electricity, steam engine, power loom, machine, electronics, international
network of communication, massive inventions in the medical field

* Press and possibility of putting into print ideas and opinions.

* A new relation of production

* Modernity assumes that local ties and parochial perspectives should give way to cosmopolitan
attitudes and universal commitments; that the truths of utility, calculation, and science take
precedence over those of the sacred, emotion, the non-rational; associations in which people live
and work should be based on choice not on birth; people should not submit to fatalism;
accountability of the rulers and participation of people in the control and removal of tyrannical
rule, etc.

* A distinct rise in the attitude towards this-worldliness and a division between this-worldliness
and other worldliness.

Modernism was a cultural outlook, a mood and movement. It held dominance for over a century.
And this modernism also, for a long time, put under pressure bourgeois social organisation. Irving
found in modernism a rebellions attitude against traditional forms. Modernism provided meanings:
i) it tried to remove distance, the distance may be mental, social and aesthetic with its stress on the
present and experimentation. ii) Subjectively it brought humanism and unhindered creativity as
found in the 19th century. It attacked religious beliefs in the auspicious, supernaturalism and faith
in heaven and hell. It also brought motion and speed through revolutionization of the productive
forces. The middle age was controlled by mystery and death. The rise of Reason opened up the path
towards immense possibilities in human beings. Self-consciousness became the matter of intense
deliberation. The very important contribution of modernism, coming through Reformation and the
Renaissance, was that even knowing the inevitability of death, man disobeyed it by going into
conscious creative activities. Thus it overcame the limits or boundaries breaking with tradition.

Heidegger and Nietzsche, the fathers of the Post-modernist/post-structuralists believed that the
world is full of disorder and that the world has not any aim and objective. The
Post-modernist/post-structuralists worship the prophets of doom. They reject any discipline in
society.

In the whole of the middle ages the debate was between Reason and non-Reason. This Reason
became the enemy of the post-modernist. Modernism stressed on the present, not the past. In fact
modernism came as an alternative to religion with a degree of humanism. Modernism wanted to
establish life aesthetically what Post-modernist/post-structuralists oppose. The latter stress the
instinctive elements, what modernism criticised.

22
The positive and negative aspects of modernization in the post-Enlightenment period are to be
judged in respect of fulfillment of the basic needs of the common people — economic, political,
cultural, medical etc. It is necessary to take into account the questions of economic inequality,
employment opportunities, colonial or neo-colonial exploitation, maintenance of balance with
nature and so on. The massive development in the production of food and tools, the unbelievable
development in technology and science, the great break-throughs in the medical field, the
extraordinary widening of the horizon of knowledge in innumerable spheres, the changes in the
traditional societies marked by the predominance of astricriptive, particularistic and diffused
patterns, by limited, special and occupational mobility, and reduced faith in ghosts, spirits and
quackery and so on are the fruits of the post Enlightenment Age. Modernization had been identified
by one writer (who, however, now preaches a dangerous view) as a revolutionary process; its
technological and cultural consequences are as significant as those of the Neolithic Revolution
which turned food gathering and hunting nomads into settled agriculturists.[Samuel P. Huntington,
"The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics", Comparative Politics, Vol.3,
April, 1971, pp.283-322]

When post-modernist/post-structuralists launch crusades against the whole process of post-feudal

developments and benefits, it is better to visualise societies sans all those changes beneficial to
mankind. No post-modernist/post-structuralistss could presumably weave out their theories in the
then state of affairs. They want the world to really hark back to the morass of a superstitions
backward state without the aforesaid benefits of science and technology.

This, however, does not imply that capitalism and still later the gigantic imperialist power springing
from capitalism in the most-modern societies are benedictions for the world people and nature. The
large body of Marxist literature is the embodiment of a rational, scientific dissection of the capitalist
system as well as a farsighted programme of a socialist society free from the ills of capitalism.
Marxism is not merely a theory but also a guide to action. Marxists do admit that the very
technology that has produced more and more deadly armaments has also produced a more and
more wasteful civilisation in the very centres of the West. The imperialist system’s increasing
inequality and exploitation and wars are also the results of this capitalist system. There is also a
theory in support of modernization which declares the high-sounding lofty view that when
differences between national societies are narrowed off it will lead to "a point at which the various
societies are so homogenized as to be able capable of forming a world state."[Cyril E. Black (ed.),
Comparative Modernization: A Reader, New York, Free Press, 1976, p.174] This homogenisation
view practically mediated by force to erase pluralities, nationalities, cultures, etc. is befittingly
challenged by nationally, cultural and other just movements. Marxists support such just movements
and even preach the right to self-determination of nationalities from a state under dominant
nationalities. It was Lenin who allowed Finland to get separated after the October Revolution and
the Soviet Constitution enshrined a clause for the intending nationalities to secede. Post-
modernist/post-structuralists thinkers quite justifiably raised their voice in their writings against
the homogenisation process, but no known Post-modernist/post-structuralists theoretician are
found to pluck enough courage to come to the streets in order to oppose repression on
nationalities, ethnic groups, etc. fighting for their rights.

It is true that the roots of opposition between modernity and tradition go back to at least as far back
as the period of the Enlightenment. It is also true that some protagonists of modernism posed it as
diametrically opposite to tradition in all respects. A proper dialectical approach rests on rejecting
the feudal and even pre-feudal obnoxious elements in order to usher in a society free from all the
evils of the past. This does not mean rejecting or brushing aside all the elements of the past. We
have to carry forward the precious experiences and contributions of our ancestors embodied in

23
culture, in thoughts, in the vast field of indigenous medicines and so on. In Marx’s writings, in Mao’s
experience in China, etc. references are galore to prove that the best elements of the past, conducive
to human progress, were not only appreciated but also were made the best use of in the interest of
mankind.

Some American sociologists posit Marx against tradition.[Lloyd I. Rudolph, Susame Hoeber
Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition, Political Development in India, Orient Longman, p. 3] In an
oft-quoted passage in the Grundrisse (Introduction) Marx observed that Greek art, although it is
bound up with specific forms of social development, it nevertheless remains for us, in certain
respect, "a norm and an unattainable ideal" and exercises an "eternal charm". Marxists value and
project the egalitarian nature of the early societies, which extends to relations between the sexes:
both women’s productive role and their personal autonomy. There might have been some mistaken
understanding even among some Marxists regarding traditional culture and practices but a
familiarly with the wealth of Marx’s or Mao’s writings will dispel such confusion.

The eternal respect for tradition among the post-modernist against science and reason actually
leads to a romantic love even for the ossified and stagnating social formations and their elements.
In the name of tradition then we have to leave untouched the repellant culturo-anthropological
factors dividing the exploited people at the bottom of Indian society, we have to abandon our fight
against the practice of untouchability, we have to withdraw our concerted battle against primordial
loyalties, against sacrifices of human beings and animals to win favours of gods and goddesses, we
have to allow the people at a very low technological level to die at the hands of Gunins, Ojhas,
sorcerers, exorcists, etc. for even simple diseases without making them conscious to undergo
treatments provided by modern medical science, and so on and so forth. The Post-modernists will
shout out aloud that any intervention to that end by us will amount to imposing ‘our’ power-based
science on those people. The question can be shot as to what measures our Post-modernist/post-
structuralists actually follow in their real-life situation. Do they abhor modern treatments or the
affordable technological and scientific facilities while preaching tender love for the tradition?
Obviously not.

Marxism is never a closed system. Even Derrida had commented that "....... Marxism presents itself,
has presented itself from the beginning with Marx, as an open theory which was continually to
transform itself and not become fixed in dogma, in stereotypes ..........."[Quoted from an interview
with Derrida in Literary Review, No.14 (April/May 1980 in Dr. Pradip Basu, "Post-modernism — an
Enemy of Marxism?" In Cultural Theory and Cinema, An Introductory Reader, A Journal of Cine
Society, Mosabani, Vol. 16, 1999, p.43] Marxism is a historical product. It has its internal strength to
cope with the emerging problems and it is also enriched by the developments in science, technology
and the experiences of the people’s struggle for socialism and its progress in an adverse situation.
The debate with post-modernist/post-structuralists thinkers will undoubtedly enrich the cutting
edge of Marxism. It is clear that Marxism will enrich itself through a critical study of those trends.

In Post-modernism any attempt to know the world as a whole, being open to rational
comprehension, let alone the will to change it, has to be dismissed as a contemptible attempt to
construct ‘grand narratives’ and ‘totalizing’ knowledge. In the discourse analysis only power is
universal and immutable, reducing resistance only to the local level. Actually a typical American
kind of pluralism is propagated. In the Foucaultian propositions for whatever claims to facts are
nothing but truth-effect produced by a ruse of discourse. Secondly that, whatever attempts are
made to resist Power, is already constituted as Power. Then there really is nothing for theory to do
except to wander aimlessly through the effects – counting them, consuming them, producing them

24
— and in the process submitting to the continuous whisperings of Discourse, both as Origin and
Fate.

The Derridean kind of Post-Modernism moves to the direction of a "self-reflexive celebration" (one
is free to choose any and all subject positions – beyond all structures and all systems), Edward
Said’s notion of Orientalism with the Foucaultian concept of history, having no subjects or collective
projects in any case, and the political implications of Foucault’s philosophical position and narrative
structure tend not only to reinforce the impossibility of stable belonging and subject position but
also to bestow upon the world a never-ending cages for the Discourses of power, and all this leads
human beings to nowhere without any scope of emancipation. The Discourses of power present
history without systemic, origin, human subjects or collective sites. However, it is a history of all-
encompassing Power, which is wielded by none and cannot be resisted because there remains
nothing outside the fabrications of Power. History in this sense is not open to change, only to
narrativization having occasional micro-level and individual scope of resistance.

Marxism also rejects the notion of ‘limited’ or what the conservative theoretician in the Post-
modernist/post-structuralists trends declared as "The End of History" with the downfall of the
Soviet Union and capitalist restoration in China. But Marxism can never subscribe to such Post-
modernist notion of blind worship of tradition and the ludicrous rejection of any measurable
progress in social, economic, scientific and other fields in course of a long historical process. There
may, however, be some points of agreement with some Post-modernist thinkers in respect of
marginalisation of some people or arbitrary use of the tag of backwardness on some deprived
people by the power controlling the state. Yet Marxism rejects any such view which pretends to be
oblivious of or which tries to skip the question of progress or regress in terms of meeting the basic
needs of human beings, knowledge and possession of superior or inferior technology, knowledge of
the laws of nature, cultural elements, man-nature relationship, human relationship, level of
consciousness of the people in regard to nature, socio-economic problems, etc. etc. However, all the
variegated aspects might not be focused in all cases or in all contexts. Secondly, certain features like
imperialist exploitation or extreme consumerism or the like may crucially overshadow many of the
positive elements referred, but this does not require to jettison the whole idea of advancement
history has recorded since time immemorial. The concept of time and space as presented by Post-
modernism contains the unconcealed idea of no progress in historical time in respect of
developments in the fields of economy, cultural refinements, medicine, physics, etc.

Marx in his early essay "On The Jewish Question" wrote that men have freed themselves from the
incubus of religion by relegating it to the personal sphere, cut off from the public hurly burly of
competition. In such separation he saw an index of the alienation of man from man, making it
impossible for the individual to be a full human being. Still, it was a necessary step forward, and the
Reformation which inaugurated it was a revolutionary advance (Introduction, Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right’).

The fundamental laws of dialectical materialism are: (1) the law of the transformation of quantity
into quality, according to which gradual quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes. (2) the
law of the unity of opposites, which holds that the unity of concrete reality is a unity of opposites or
contradictions; (3) the law of the negation of the negation, which claims that in the clash of
opposites one opposite negates another and is in its turn negated by a higher level of historical
development that preserves something of both negated terms (thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis).

It is true that dialectical materialism has been sometimes wrongly placed in terms of historical
materialism as something like economism. The economic determinist view asserts that, as the

25
material base of society, only the economy, and even perhaps only its ‘most material’ aspect,
productive technology, has real causal efficacy, the political and theoretical superstructure being
epiphenomenal., Engels, Lenin and Mao strongly contested such view.

If dialectical progress is negated, only the prophets of doom or anarchy, with no prospect for
progress, would result in an absurd world with nothing to measure for studying human history,
past or present. The role of common sense, the reasoning power of judgment and any study or
praxis should be given a go-by.

Marxists would not generally reject Foucault’s thesis that all knowledge is produced within certain
structures of power. But they must raise the fundamental question as to whose power and how to
change the existing structures of power. Marxists will identify capital, and capitalist relations and
their overall structure remaining as the fundamental locus of power in a capitalist state. Secondly,
those who are economically and politically dominant will, as a rule, control the structures
producing and disseminating knowledge. Against this view Foucault will argue that Power is
everywhere, in every social relation, but dispersed, diffused, impersonal, multiple, wielded by no
one, with no identifiable origin or defined purpose. He made it categorical that the history of Power
cannot be narrated from the twin sites of political economy and the state. Thus, it is implied that
resistance to Power can also not be organised as some project to change the nature of the state or
politico-economic system. Foucault also opined that since Power is everywhere there is really no
place where resistance can be distinguished from Power itself, what is resistance is in reality
another kind of Power.

Foucault had written his highly thought-provoking books like The Order of Things: An Archeology
of the Human Sciences (1966), The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), The Birth of Clinic: An
Archeology of Medical Perception (1963); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (1975) and the
incomplete six-volumes of History of Sexuality (1976). His main preoccupation was with
epistemology and history of modern sciences concentrating on the central point that all systems of
thought stand in relation to Power.

Marxists do admit that modern economic thought arises along with the capitalist production, or
modern political thought springs from the time of emergence of the bourgeois state. However, to
Foucault there are no particular boundaries between ideology and science, or between true and
false knowledge. His main concern is that the relationship between those truth claims of human
sciences and the structures of power legitimising them. The question remains whether one can
draw a distinction between the claim to truth and the claim to power in every case. Most important
is that Foucault denied any objectivity of knowledge that was not an effect of power.

Foucault formulated his arguments along two axes: the epistemological claims and discursive
formation of the various sciences, and a historical account of particular discourses as specific
Power/knowledge complexes. His main concern was to discover the real properties of what he
called the Western episteme, the basic system of all European knowledge as they have been
constituted since the Age of Reason from the period of Descartes and others, and were then
stabilized in the Modern Age when various human sciences came into being. This period has been
identified between 1790-1950.

Foucault did not find any system in the historical process. There is no meaning, moving stream, no
gradual step-by-step or dialectical process of progress. In Foucault’s opinion what is found is one
type of disjoined, fragmented thoughts emerging at the end of one type of civilization. Such
thoughts have been called by Foucault part-knowledge or ‘episteme’. At one stage in the course of

26
time old epistemes yield place to the new epistemes. A Discourse is thus an epistemic construction.
And Foucault speaks of full-fledged discourse emerging only after the 16th century because what he
called ‘discourse’ presumes, as coextensive corollary, a rationalism of the post-medieval kind,
alongside the increasing elaborations of modern state forms, modern institutional grids, objectified
economic productions and modern forms of rationalized planning.

In his detailed studies of particular ‘discourses’ like health and medicine, incarceration,
punishment, social reforms, etc., Foucault sought to establish a certain binding link between
knowledge and Power, humanism and terror, reform and domination, throughout the history of
Modernity, Reason playing the role of perfecting all forms of domination. Secondly, Foucault was
categorical that there was no one source of power like the state or political economy but discrete
practices of power through regulation of sex, imprisonment, sending to lunatic asylums, etc., which
could only be studied only in their respective autonomous spaces; there was no History as a Pursuit
of Liberty, but only histories of Power, productivity and subjugation. So there cannot be any just
struggle for freedom since that is also going to help emerge another Power of subjugation. Foucault
also sought to establish that the real problem was not the exploitation of labour but what he called
technologies of the body: the religion, moral, judicial, medical, sexual, penal and more or less violent
means of inculcating in the human body what was supposedly ‘normal’. The very puzzling question
that Foucault laid stress on was that power was dispersed in innumerable discourses and practices
but there was no person, no institution or network of institutions and interests to whom the
exercise of power is traceable; no point of origin where, the wielding of power starts from; no point
of pressure at which resistance could be organized; each discourse of power produced its own
points of tension and conflict, and resistance could only be multiple, local and transitory. With the
omnipresent ghost of power, or in other words, the presentation of an all-pervading power from
which man can not wriggle out and perpetually fail to identify the sources or remain blind-folded to
the monstrous modern state and main exploiting classes. An oppressed and exploited person, in
Foucaultian scheme, is only left with small-scale, local and temporary resistance. This is the
dangerous proposition for the exploited and repressed people of the world.

000

Linguistic idealism of Post-structuralism/Post-modernism

Post-modernism rejects structures, causes and truth in favour of fragments, contingencies and
uncertainty. The all-pervading system i.e. capitalist system is no concern of it, it rejects the study of
the systemic unity of capitalism and laws of motion. It is notable that post-modernists attract our
attention to consumerism, problems of individual existence, deforestation, the subtle sources of
extant power, etc. but one misses the study of the crisis of capitalism and its vulnerable areas to
overhaul this system. Its focus on language, culture and discourse blunt the spirit of grappling with
the objective world. The basis of post-modernist theories is "discourse" which brings to the fore
language which is all we can know about the world and so we have access to no other reality. This
idealism has turned language into an all-pervasive force both—sovereign and dominant, virtually
diminishing human agency. Everything is discourse you see and discourse is everything. Such
linguistic theories, as we have referred to before, unequivocally announce that we are linguistic
creatures, the world in which we act is a world we come to know and describe through readymade
language.

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Such "discourse" or "text", the jargon may vary, with the basic message remaining the same,
defines, limits and conditions what we know, do or imagine in this world. It should however be
admitted that Saussure was the founder of a theoretical, methodological concept which stood
against the methodology of linguistics called comparative philology during the heyday of British
imperialism and the rise and consolidation of the German nation and German bourgeoisie, who
wanted to be a partner or sharer of the spoils of imperialism. He was strongly against racialism.
This helped in the fight against racism and fascism. However, the post-modernists/post-
structuralists make a cunning use of Saussure to dish out a theory serving the present system of
exploitation. Their fatherhood goes actually to the idealist Plato, though they ascribe their real
fatherhood to Saussure.

What started out as interpretative methods borrowed from Saussurean linguistics and
hermenutics, in course of time, through a Derridean play of words, post-modernism/post-
structuralism reached its height of idealism by making a drastic departure from the objective basis
of language. When political struggle is reduced to abstraction by some post-modernists basing
themselves on language and language-games, there is no way out to identify the system against
which people must have to struggle. Structural linguistics as stated above absolutely concentrated
on studying the relations of elements in a given structure, not the content or the normative aspects.
Saussure’s stress that "in the linguistic system there are only differences" provided the theoretical
premise of the later-day post-modernists/post-structuralists. In the same way, despite some
differences with Saussure, Roman Jacobson’s assertion that "I do not believe in things, I believe only
in their relationship"reminds Saussurean concept. But while they still retained the structural
relation between the signifier and the signified, post-modernists/post-structuralists reached the
new horizon of idealism by snapping this relation altogether.

One writer, favouring Derridean radicalization of a discourse concluded : "This radicalization

involves the recognition that being post-metaphysical or writing after Platonism is already caught
up in relationship between the inside and the outside, the within and the beyond, etc., relationship
that, if taken for granted, only affirms the metaphysical bonds that one is attempting to
overcome ..." [Walter Brogan, Plato’s Pharmakon : Between Two Repetitions, in Hugh J. Silverman,
Derrida And Deconstruction, Routledge, New York and London, 1989, p.12] One of the chief
philosophers of this new idealism, Derrida actually produced so-called radicalism being indifferent
to actual social practice against the system of exploitation and oppression. He could easily declare
that he "would hesitate to use such terms as "liberation"[Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction ad the
Other in Dialogue with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester :
Manchester University Press, 1984), p.121, Quoted in David Mcnally, Language, History, and Class
Struggle, Monthly Review, July-August, 1995, p.14]

This idealism preaches that with our imprisonment within language, the maximum possibility
through the theory of ‘Deconstruction’ is a mere play of words. However, it is hopeless to liberate
ourselves from immutable structures of exploitation and oppression, supposed to be fundamentally
rooted in language, not in the inequitable social system. What Deconstruction can at best do is to
mollify our spirit of studying the root cause of exploitation for an overhauling of the system into
feeble attempts at a very low-intensity verbal duel with the supposed decentered power at a certain
academic level. This so-called radicalism is virtually a call for abdication of political responsibility
when capitalism and imperialism threateningly show off their fangs all over the world.

The play of words and also suppression of some words assuming universal forms in
Deconstruction, is an open-ended process towards uncertainty with no center or foundation. The
idealism is tangibly present in Derrida’s play of words, deferring one (of the many) for the other.

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Differance is not God or negative theology, claims Derrida, yet in the first flush of Derrida’s more
famous account of differance in a well-known text he clearly states that differance is not an entity
and that it makes no appearance and has no truth, observes John D. Caputo. It sounds a lot like the
hidden God. Sometimes differance is actually that ultimate unknowable, the unknowing of which
constitutes the most learned wisdom. Derrida clearly states that when the thought of differance
(Being) "goes beyond ontic determinations it is not a negative theology, or even a negative
ontology" [Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1978, p.146 quoted in John D. Caputo, Mysticism and Transgression: Derrida And
Meister Eckhart in Huge J. Silverman (ed) Derrida And London, 1989, p.27.]. Thus
difference/differance does not confirm a hidden God (deferring himself behind the chain of
signifiers) but neither does it deny God. Derrida himself admitted that "ontological anticipation,
transcendence towards Being, permits, then, an understanding is but the ether in which dissonance
can resonate. This transcendence inhabits and founds language."[Jacques Derrida, Writing and
Difference, ibid p.146] John D. Caputo elucidated the above saying that the role of
difference/difference is to establish the conditions within which discourse functions. It founds (and
unfounds, undermines) languages, vocabularies, showing how they are both possible and
impossible without a closure. So difference/ differance establishes the possibility (and
impossibility) of a language, which addresses God.[John D. Caputo, ibid, p. 28] This idealist,
ultimately God-oriented, boundless, uncertain philosophy of language, which is also supposed to be
determing human existence, cannot get us anywhere. The play of words turns out to be a
worshipper of God-centered, though the language claims to be without any centre of its own. It is
obviously an anti-historical, anti-evolutionary, anti-materialist concept of language. Marx conceived
of the infinite mind as an illusory projection of finite beings and nature as transcendentally real.
Marx replaced the Hegelian immanent spiritual teleology of infinite mind by a methodological
commitment to the empirically-controlled investigation of the causal relations within and between
historically emerging, developing humanity and irreducibly real, but modified nature. Marxism
rejects the logical mysticism born out of conjuring tricks of words as dished out by Derrida.

The ‘discourse’ theory, based on language as the over-arching sovereign, conceding only to
discursive knowledge is openly anti-rational and anti-objectivity. Despite variations among the
post-structuralist/post-modernist thinkers all have a common foundation: they challenge
objectivity and truth. They are quite disastrously anti-scientific. While many structuralists
ultimately remained more or less with objective things or subjective ideas, the
post-structuralists/post-modernists proceed towards the extreme point considering that we cannot
live as human beings below the level of language categories and social meanings because it is
language categories and social meanings that make us human in the first place. Thus there remains
no deeper subjective reality behind the ordinary socially created intelligibility of our world. This
way the objective world is turned upside down conceding the language categories and social
meanings as ultimate reality. Language in this view, precedes the objective things and subjective
ideas. This line of argument gives a privileged position to Culture over Nature, and priority of the
Sign over Ideas. This concept of idealism leads to further extremes. Language attains abstract self-
sufficient status without the objectivity of things or the subjective mind perennially interacting with
the objective world.

Reification (i.e. the act or the result of transforming human properties, relations and actions into
properties, relations and actions of man-produced things which have become independent of man
and govern his life) transforms human beings into thing-like beings, which do not behave in a
human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. Marx discarded such reification in Capital.
[Capital III, ch. 48] Marx exposed crude materialism and "this reification of things and the
reification of the relations of production". With such a so-called post-structuralist/post-modernist

29
view of language we can no longer speak of mere false ‘reification’, instead we see ideas taking on a
‘thing-ish’ objectivity. In reality what suffer from such idealist extreme view are the concept of
Truth and Falsity. With the departure of objective things and subjective ideas there cannot be any
fundamental role for the truth as a correspondence between the domain of objective things and the
subjective idea. In such a foundationless scheme, when language categories and social meanings are
accorded the status of "objective" idea in the post-structuralist/post-modernist way, truth or
seeking the truth becomes the inevitable victim.

Such discursive theories turn language not only into an independent domain, but also into an all-
pervading force, reducing human agency to a non-entity and making human beings merely
linguistic creatures. i.e. robots with articulation.

Such theories using various jargons like "discourse" or "text" are also applied to the political realm
as well by some post-structuralists/post-modernists. And here we face a dangerous pessimism or at
best an accommodative feeble resistance at local levels. Oppression or exploitation is supposed to
be rooted ultimately in the way in which we are defined linguistically, the way in which we are
positioned by words in relation to other words. For this reason, this idealism in the garb of
radicalism wants us to live within the prison-world of language. In the face of real-life exploitation
and oppression, it offers the rhetorical gestures or the play of words. Derrida hesitates with such
terms as "Liberation" in the name of "deconstruction" and ultimately turns it into an intellectual
jugglery of words and a sort of self-satisfying narcissistic exercise. Foucault is deliberately silent on
imperialism and can only think of low-level, local resistance. Sloterdijk provided the quintessential
post-modernist view of resistance for our times. Borrowing from Nietzche’s Diogenes Sloterdijk
highlights the ‘sensual embodiment’ of protest flouting standards of citizenship, urinating and
masturbating in the marketplace as paradigmatic acts. [It should be remembered that Sloterdijk is a
prominent devotee of Rajneesh who founded the Rajneesh Ashram. Sloterdijk’s view presented in
Manas Roy, Marxism : The Dilemma of Critique, Economic and Political Weekly, June 12, 1993,
p.1253]

Thus such new idealism in the present age of globalisation and threateningly increasing power of
imperialism and states represent an obstacle to revolutionary struggles on all fronts as: it negates a
scientific understasnding towards the development of the social system (with it’s a historical
approach); diffuses focus on the chief perpetrators nof exploitation and oppression (by seeing
domination everywhere, delinked from the system); and by spreading pessimism in any alternative
system, with the understanding that all power corrupts. Instead of plugging the loopholes in the
theoretical domain and practice, such linguistic idealism leads us to torpidity and pessimism.

Spinoza (1632-77), the Dutch materialist philosopher rejected dualism of Descarte preaching that
only nature existed, being the cause of itself and needing nothing else for its being. For Spinoza,
man is a creature in whom the mode of extension, the body, is coupled with the mode of thought,
the soul. Engels appreciated his materialism which freed material consciousness, thought and
language from idealism. He did not accept Cartesian division of bodiless consciousness and
thoughtless body connected by God in the pineal gland [Cartesianism (the Latin transcription of
Descartes’ name) identified matter with extension or space. He contended that a soulless and
lifeless bodily mechanism combined in man with a volitional and rational soul. Thus he believed in
the existence of both consciousness and reality as mutually exclusive with reality reflected in
consciousness.]

Idealists broadly preached that abstract thought was already in existence which later entered
human brains, thus emerged language. Spinoza rejected such a view like "I think, i.e. my body

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thinks". This materialist view was a rebuttal of idealist concept. In the Indian philosophy, the Yoga
system of Patanjali, pratibha is synonymous with Prajna, the supreme faculty of omniscience.
According to the philosophy of grammar built upon the basis of Patanjali Mahabhasya by
Bhartihari, Pratibha is intimately bound up with the origin of knowledge and of the objective world.
It is the foundational thesis of the Sabdika that the source of all phenomena is Eternal Verbum,
called Sabda Brahma or Para Vak. We may assume that the Sabdika Godhead in this idealist view
has two-fold aspects as Transcendent beyond Time (in which it is above all predictions in thought
and language and as Immanent in Time — in which it is the subject, as well as predicate, of all
judgements). Now it is assumed that knowledge as a mode [a mode which excludes Eternal Jnana or
Brahman],, which is no other word than from verbal associations, evidently for the reason that it
originates from Sabda. Hence an object (arth) which is knowable (Jneya) is also nameable and
cognisable and the relation between the name and the nameable, as between knowledge and
knowable, is an eternal relation, which the Supreme Being simply manifests in the beginning of
each aeon. The manifestation of this relation is co-eval with the origin of the objective world.
Naming and thinking being are virtually identical process. This manifestation of the Universal is the
same as the revelation of the Veda, which is nothing but the body of eternal names and thought in
eternal relation to the Universals. The Veda is thus synonymous with Pratibha, the self-revealation
of the Supreme Thought.[Gopinath Kaviraj, Aspects of Indian Thought, the University of Burdwan,
1984, p.12-15] The supreme transcendent Sabda is as it were the dark background of all
manifestations and forms, the Absolute of the Indian grammarians. Thought is same as the object,
while the former is an internal and the latter is only an external aspect of one and the same Reality.
This way we find that for idealist Bhartihari this original consciousness remains in the form of
words, ie. the world of consciousness = language = God = Brahma. With such views it is no wonder
that post-modernists flock to Hindu mythology, as insects to a light.

The Bible states: "In the beginning was the word" [John 11]. So also was announced in the Vedic
scriptures "God is word". This idealist view propagated that logic or any thought is nothing but the
thought in language. Plato, Descartes, et al also considered that the reflection of thought is language.
Hegel went back to Spinoza and found it that human thought cannot be solely expressed as
perceptible form through language. Working man works as a conscious man. Language is only a
part of his whole consciousness, Hegel added. However, for Hegel, thought is produced independent
of human beings, thought is a sort of subjective mental activity.

In the words of Lenin, "Essentially, Hegel is completely right as opposed to Kant. Thought
proceeding from the concrete to the abstract — provided it is Correct (and Kant, like all
philosophers, speaks of correct thought) — does not get away from the truth but comes closer to it.
The abstraction of matter, of a value, etc., in short all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd)
abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely. From living perception to abstract
thought, and from this to practice — such is the dialectical path of objective reality. Kant disparages
knowledge in order to make way for faith : Hegel exalts knowledge, asserting that knowledge is
knowledge of God. The materialist exalts the knowledge of matter, of nature, consigning God, and
the philosophical rabble that defends God, to the rubbish heap". [Lenin, Philosophical Notebook,
vol. 38, p.171 in Lenin on Language, Raduga Publication, Moscow,1983, p.35-36].

Marx and Engels were not so much concerned with developing a theory of language. Yet their
occasional dealing with the question of language leaves for us a materialist conception of language.
Marx’s observations relevant to linguistics and linguistic philosophy concern the problem of the
essence or nature of language. In German ideology we find the thesis of the unity of material-social
activity and language. For him communication is not just one of the functions of language. On the
contrary, language presupposes, both logically and factually, the continuous interaction among the

31
people. Criticising the idealist view of language Marx and Engels clearly observed, "Language is the
immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence,
so they were bound to make language into an independent realm." [Marx and Engels, The German
Ideology, quoted in David Mcnally, Language, History and Class Struggle, Monthly Review, July-
August, 1995, p.13]. What the post-structuralists/post-modernists have unequivocally accepted is
the independent existence of language turning human beings into its creatures. What comes out as
the centrality of the Marxian view on language is its essentially social aspect, not just contingen or
secondary. As consciousness is a social product, so also language is also a social product.
Materialism rejects the view of idealists who detach consciousness, thought, ideas, etc. from labour,
social production, in other words, practical human activities. Language is thus the form of
specifically human consciousness and the consciousness of social beings. Marx wrote in his
"Feurbach, Opposition of Materialistic and Idealistic Outlook" that "... Language is as old as
consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that
reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language like consciousness, only arises from
the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men."[Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I,
Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973, p.32] This is what Marx, the materialist, understood as
language. The overall explanatory logic of Marxism revolved around the basic question of positing
theories and concepts within practice in order to advance it. Thus it considers the
interconnectedness within wholes and differs from those views, which emphasize the relativity of
reference to language. The idealist view which moves the other way with language is inevitably
trapped within language. It is where the post-structuralists/post-modernists want us to lead,
rejecting the rational object-subject relationship ultimately to become worshippers of signs-words,
and symbols.

Marxists consider the sign-system of any physical nature serving the communicative functions in
the process of human activity. Obviously it plays an important role in the formation of human
consciousness. Human consciousness cannot exist outside of language which is socially
conditioned. It is a means of accumulating knowledge and passing it down from generation to
generation. Knowledge, both perceptual and conceptual, or in other words for the abstract thought
language is essential. Language is essential for concretising. Yet it will be wrong to consider
language and thought identical. Once a language arises in a society, it develops its own laws, which
are different from thought. It is true that the words can, dog, leaf, etc. possess no qualities as such of
the animals or things in them but they are socially accepted words and human beings can easily
differentiate the words meant for specific living or non-living things. The language signs maintain
some inner ‘structure’ or structures but not detached from the objective world. What post-
structuralists/post-modernists are engaged in is the abandonment of a subject, be it philosophy or
society or the other as a discipline by giving precedence to language structure over it. Thus signified
is reduced to an insignificant existence with the dominant and sovereign role of the signifiers,
Derridean deconstruction theory in some cases invites curiosity and even unearths the deferred
meanings of some words but it cannot get us further to deconstruct the oppressive social system.
Actually he wants to say that the language of the ruling class is undecipherable by the common
masses and it has to be deconstructed by a small-range deconstruction process abstracted from the
real political and other straggles. When Marx asserted that "Ideas do not exist separately from
language" [Grundrisse, p.163] it must not be deemed that they are identical and that linguistic
structure determines the thought process. It is stated that the ideas of the ruling class in every
epoch become the ruling ideas. From this Bakhtin under the pseudonym Volosinov found it that
"the sign becomes an arena of the class struggle."[V. N. Volosinov "Marxism and the philosophy of
Language", New York and London : Seminar Press, 1973, p.23]

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Rolland Barthes declares that when we eat a piece of steak we also eat the ideas of the steak. Such
view can be stretched to an absurd level. To elucidate this absurdity an instance may be cited. In
1999 the daily Asian Age published a photo of a Hongkong hotel with four persons sitting around a
dining table on which plates were properly placed before each "eater". There was a menu but no
actual food as such. The waitress only served them "food" for mental eating as per order. This may
be said a post-structuralist/post-modernists eating. This language-based absurd thought is far
removed from what Marx considered language as the immediate actuality of thought. The mental
eating or the Barthe’s eating of an idea of a steak can be explained through the Soviet natural
scientist Pavlov’s reflex theory. Pavlov said that man is not only capable of forming temporary
connections on the basis of sense stimulation but also can react on speech, which had become a sign
automatically standing for sense stimulations and sense objects. Pavlov called this system of
conditional reflex to language as "second signal system", [I.P. Pavlov, "Conditional Reflex and
Psychiatry", International Publishers, New York, 1941, p.93, cited in Amal Dutta, Social Psychology
And Revolutionary Practice, K.P.Bagchi & Co., Calcutta, 1985, pp. 6-7]. Despite elements of emphatic
naturalism and weakness of early scientific investigation, in Pavlov’s view there also remains some
link with the social aspect in forming the meaningful sign system. However, an over-structuring of
this reflex signal in all thought process will only lead to the absurd concept of Barthes or of mental
eating, privileging the signifier over the signified for all occasions.

The post-structuralists/post-modernists, semiotcians in particular, refer to the all-pervading sign-

field in the capitalist world. But their apparent condemnation becomes groundless, the more power
they attribute to signs and words, the more they lose power to position themselves against the
capitalist, consumerist society. They do not have any programme to invoke the struggling spirit
from within the society. They go beyond the logic of the structuralists and make post-
structuralist/post-modernist positions increasingly more absurd post-structuralist/Post-modernist
than ever, to a height far removed from the objective reality. A make-believe world crashes in the
course of time and no amount of lying can suppress the true conditions of the world and the
universe. It is to befog reality and confuse the intellectuals and large number of people to remain
passive against oppression. It becomes more signish that the sign itself, allowing sign to work
cutting off the link between the signifier and the signified in a sort reckless fashion towards a sort
of idealism radical in word, conservative in reality. It becomes an anarchic play of words or signs
subverting socially controlled meaning. Sign is posed as if something material, the only reality and
thus they discard all notion of social reality. The wretched of the earth are invoked by post-
structuralists/post-modernists to rest satisfied with mentally consuming words for food, not the
actual food. And the oppressed and the exploited have to deconstruct the world of signs, the system
breeding inequality, oppression and exploitation. The deceptive notion can best be summed up in
the words of Lacan: "It is the world of words that create the world of things..." [Quoted in Malcom
Bowie, Lacan, Fontana Modern Masters, Fontana Press, 1991, p. 95]

It must be remembered, as Bakhtin finds that all signs — from word to traffic signals are related to
the material world and they are social in nature. and for this social aspect, speech is the lifeblood of
a language functioning through communication. This social interaction cannot be simply discursive
or emotive. Speech is not a realm with an independent existence. It is only one aspect of a
multifaceted network of social relations. In a class society signs are also involved in the prevalent
relations and for this relations of hierarchy exert in a considerable way on the language and speech.
as a consequence the realm of speech with the existence of hierarchy and domination there also
remains a steady stream of resistance. The accent of words by hierarchically placed people
naturally reflect the class aspects. Thus sign becomes an arena of class struggle and an arena of
violent reactions as well. Andre Bettile in his study of a Tanjore Village [Andre Betille, Caste, Class
and Power, Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village, University of California Press,

33
Berkley, Los Angeles, London, 1971, p. 53] found it that in the Tanjore district Sanskrit has been a
major influence on the bramhins. Here bramhins and non-bramhins represent two different
cultures, reflecting the class divisions between them. As the study shows this is reflected in both
their speech and language.

In a study of dalit dialect of the Tamils the remarkable differences were like the following:

"Caste status appears to be the dominant social variable correlated with linguistic variation ... The
dialect differences appear to be used as expressions of social identity. That is why we find in
Tamilnadu, Bramhin dialect which is distinguished from Harjan Dialect."[G.Srinivasa Varma and N.
Ramaswamy, Harijan dialect of Tamil,Annamalai University, 1976,Intruduction p.iv.] Similarly Jhon
Gumprez found in his study of village Khalalpur in Saharanpur in UP the distinct speech pattern of
the Chamars from that of the upper caste [Jhon J.Gumprez,...p.32]. So a Rajput with high socio-
economic status warns a caste brother that he is speaking like a Chamar; [ibid p.37] Some writers
have also found supposedly mystic powers in a language like Sanskrit which actually helps in
Brahminisation. Surnames were used as status symbol in the middle ages by the aristocracy [Max K.
Adler, Naming and Addressing,... pp.107-108]. In Italy restrictions were imposed under Fascist rule
on Christian names for Germans and Italians considering that those were against national
sentiments. [ibid. p.122]. Judico Greek-names were also banished under Fascism. Social
stratification pervades in a language, particularly in greeting, apology, expression of wishes, etc.
[ibid p.173]. The above makes it abundantly clear how sign becomes the arena of struggle against
domination and exploitation.

If there is domination there is also resistance. Post-modernists like Foucault also noted that
language is a terrain of power. But the emptiness of his view is revealed when relations of power
are reduced to discursive or linguistic relations. This power has no identifiable source in society
and as power is constituted by language and we are supposed to be in the prison-house of language,
then there is ultimately no actual possibility of resisting that all-encompassing power. The Foucault
scheme also dismisses the basis of real resistance. Making a distinction between words and speech,
Bakhtin asserted that speech does contain both meanings and themes. The latter involves accents
and emphasis that the speakers of various social groups try to give to words for the necessary
transmission of experiences and expressions in different contexts. The way of speech varies from
one context to the other. And here remains both the possibilities of domination and resistance in a
relatively unequal speech pattern with distinct genres spoken by the dominant and the dominated
classes. The dominated use their own accents, norms, etc. while resisting the oppressors. There is
no master discourse which permeates all contexts although those who exercise power may try to
impose a single discourse upon their subordinates. For Bakhtin (Voloshinov) signs are multi-
accentual, and the ruling classes also continuously try to reject this multi-accentuality of signs
imposing a single world view through discourse. They make it appear like a supraclass, attribute an
eternal character to the ideological sign. Counter discourses of the exploited arise as a form of
resistance and they emanate from their experiences in the productive activities, relations of
productions and inter-actions among themselves.

The Italian Marxist, Gramsci, found that the supremacy of a social group or class manifests itself in
two different ways: domination or coercion, and intellectual and moral leadership. This latter type
constitutes hegemony. Social control takes two basic forms: besides influencing behaviour and
choice externally through rewards and punishment, control is made internally "by moulding
convictions into a replica of prevailing norms. "Such internal control is based on hegemony," which
refers to an order in which a common social moral language is spoken, in which one concept of
reality is dominant, in forming with its spirit all modes of thought and behaviour". Gramsci opined

34
that this hegemony is also obtained by eliciting "consent" [Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political
Thought, Oxford University Press, 1981, p.24.] Gramsci, however, never accepted such hegemony as
total as there always exist ideas and attitudes that are "counter-hegemonic" against dominant
values and ideas. For him a member of the producing class "has two theoretical consciousness (or
one contradictory consciousness): one that is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him
with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially
explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbs." [Antonio Gramsci,
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, New York, 1971, p.333]. This
enables us to grasp the revolutionary politics in terms of the contradictions pervading the
experience, activity, and language of the oppressed. Gramsci’s view simply helps us understand
Voloshinov’s (Bakhtin’s) conception of speech genres in the domain of practical politics of
resistance: The exploited using the dominant speech genres and more egaliterian genres in a
different relationship to their equals as using a counter-discourse against the dominant discourse.
However, Bakhtin’s (Voloshinov) multi-accentual sign does not connote infinitely multipliable
meanings as some writers try to indicate. Bakhtin (Voloshinov) did not go to the abstract post-
structuralist/post-modernist way of detaching language and speech from the complex relations
men enter into for the production and reproduction of the conditions of life. As language is social
and related to the objective world, productive activity in particular, the counter-discourses cannot
transcend the reality. And here lies the difference between post-structuralist/post-modernist
uncertain, infinitely open-ended idealist views with the objective Marxian concept of multiple
discourses as oppositional to the discourse of the ruling class. Similarly when a Dalit in India reacts
to the upper caste oppressors’ domination in his/her dialect, hated by the oppressors, this opens an
arena of struggle. The struggle for the right to speak one’s own language against a dominant
language of a dominating group also is a front of just struggle. These are the real-life questions and
we Marxists treat the question of language facing them, materialistically.

Critique of The Dangerous Ideas of "Death of History And Ideology"

In Marx’s words "Ideas, when they take possession of the masses become a material force." The
Italian Marxist thinker Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks contributed to Marxist theory by avoiding
the orthodox Marxism reducing social consciousness for the most part to a mere reflex of economic
condition. Gramsci brought in the concept of hegemony, a system of alliances, which the working
class must create to overthrow the bourgeois state and to serve as the social basis of the workers’
state. Gramsci argued that in the modern condition a class maintains its dominance not simply
through a special organisation of force but because it is able to exert a moral and intellectual
leadership and make compromises (within certain limits) with a variety of allies who are unified in
a social block of forces which Gramsci calls the historical bloc. This bloc represents a basis of
consent for a certain social order, in which the hegemony of a dominant class is created and
recreated in a web of institutions, social relations, and ideas. This fabric of hegemony is woven by
the intellectuals of society, Thus for the revolutionary party with the task of achieving a socialist
state the counter working class hegemony must be developed. [Antonio Gramsci, Selection from the
Prison Notebooks, Quinting Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, International Publishers, New York,
1971] This is from a great Marxist thinker and a very useful idea to comprehend the mechanism of
a modern state and the role of ideology. Lenin emphasized the coercive and the real nature of a
modern state behind the screen of bourgeois democracy while rebuffing the revisionists,
worshippers of the bourgeois state. Mao further enriched the reservoir of Marxism by profusely

35
shedding light on the role of ideology, particularly with his gigantic experiment in the Cultural
Revolution of China.

It is true Marx and Engels at one time overstressed the economic side and Engels even self-critically
stated that "We had to emphasise the main principle vis-a-vis our adversaries, who denied it and
we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other factors
involved in the interaction..." [ F. Engels, Letter to Joseph Block, September 21-22, 1890] In the
same letter Engels conceded "the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and
reproduction of real life". However, the force of Marxism lies in the fact that there are numerous
passages in the writings of Marx against economic reductionism. It is the complexity of the
relationship between the conditions of social production and the world of ideas and culture, which
remains the domain opened up for investigation by historical materialism, cannot be studied by the
simplistic formula of economic reductionism. When Maurice Dobb, the writer in his studies in the
development of capitalism shows that the English Industrial Revolution was possible for the
inventions and favourable economic circumstances, he shows the immense power of science, skill
and revolutionary spirit in the emerging circumstances. Marx, Engels, Mao and other great Marxists
laid so much stress on the role of class struggle. Marxism contains in it the twin-role of voluntary
efforts of the masses and their advanced detachment along with the objective socio-economic
condition. The stress on class consciousness and class struggle as an ideological weapon emanates
from the Marxist concept of the role of working class ideology. It is to be emphasized that Marx
himself had rejected ‘contemplative materialism’, a materialism which neglected the central
importance of human subjectivity. Marx asserted the multiplicity of causes in capital : "An economic
base which in its principal characteristics is the same [may manifest] infinite variations and
gradations, owing to the effect of innumerable external circumstances, climatic and geographical
influences, historical influences from the outside, etc." [Capital III, ch.47, sec. 2, quoted in Tom
Bottomore (ed), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Blackwell Reference, Oxford, 1983, under
‘Determinism’.] Some people and CPI(M)-like parties naively propagating the inevitability of
socialism without plunging into the sea of class struggle for the destruction of the existing order are
actually the worshippers of fatalism. Historical materialism also rejects "the general path of
development prescribed by fate to all nations". [Marx, Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow,
1975, p.293] And here comes the role of a Communist Party armed with the revolutionary ideology
guiding the masses through the proper path predicated upon the specificities of the country and
also the international context.

When the neo-liberal bourgeois theorists declare war on ideology. the target is basically Marxism.
Daniel Bell in 1970 in a paper entitled Post Industrial Society: Technocracy and Politics stated that
de-ideologisation is the essential condition of ‘post-industrial society’. The American economist,
J.K.Galbraith considered the dominant role of the state in the post-industrial society both internally
and externally by capturing overseas market as "a new era of capitalism in the post-industrial
society" was accepted in uncanny readiness by the protagonists rejecting the differences between a
capitalist and a socialist state. They claimed the irrelevance of Marxism-Leninism in the "post-
industrial age". There is a strange similarity between the theorists of "post-industrial society" and
the "post-modernist age". While theorists of "End of ideology" in the "post-industrial" society
downplayed the capitalist system as such along with the role of ideology, the post-modernists do
not consider totality of the material world with no reality of truth. Truth is always discursive or
present in the realm of logic. Hence it is extremely relative. As in this view everything is relative and
split, there cannot be the consideration of a social system. There is no capitalist or its substitute
socialist system. In the post-modern view there is no class or class interest but only different
identities. Post-modernism rejects revolutionary ideology and its basis like the theorists of ‘End-of-
ideology’. Freidrick Jameson declared in his book Post-modernism and the Cultural Logic, of Late

36
Capital clearly in 1991, that post-modernism has turned out to be a "continuation and fulfilment of
the old fifties’ ‘end of ideology’ episode." In the same line the reactionary Rightists’ ambition to
fashion a new grand narrative is Fukuyama’s book The End of History and The Last Man (paid for
by the Olin Foundation). Fukuyama, the former State Department official under US president Bush,
and a Rand Corporation functionary, preached that the victory of western liberation with the
downfall of the Soviet Union registered the final stage of history. Huntington, the head of national
security under the US president Jimmy Carter, in his notoriously anti-left book in 1996, The Clash of
Civilization and the Remaking of the world Order echoed Fukuyama commenting that with the
absence of the Soviet Union there is no "threat to the Free-World" (p.34-35) The de-ideologisation
concept of those Rightists with the projection of an anti-Marxist world order coincides with the
pessimistic, anti-Marxist furore of the post-modernist rejecting the possibility of any grand battle to
topple the existin

Cultural Studies The Tunnel View

Like the post-colonial theories, cultural studies emphasizing culture or cultural differences as
fundamental, permanent and stable emerged in the end of the last century. The earlier British New
Left in the 1950s and 1960s led by Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams contributed to the field
of culture linking working class culture to domination and liberation rejecting the dogmatic
reductionist view prevalent among some Marxists. Diametrically opposite to the optimistic,
basically pro-poor orientation of the above, the recent Cultural Studies having genetic links with
post-modernism that cropped up expressing itself as radical, but in reality when it toed post-
modernism/post-structuralism, the result was depoliticisation. In the words of Probert W.
McChesney, "The professionalization of Cultural Studies implicitly encourages depoliticization,
which makes it far easier to get funding. for those who abhor radical politics or believe that radical
politics must be secondary to institutional success, this depoliticization is a welcome turn of events,
a sign of the field’s maturity..." [Robert W. McChesney, Is there Any Hope for Cultural Studies,
Monthly Review, March 1996.] The very foundation that culture or difference among people based
on culture as something permanent has its root in the orthodox religious and community ideologies
of the past. Post-modernism identified the enemy in the Enlightenment reasons crudely regarding
the threatened Enlightenment values themselves as the problem, the fountainhead of all
oppression. What the Enlightenment consciousness did positively do to a great extent was
separating the domain of politics from the domain of religion. The rich contributions in various
fields of knowledge in the recent centuries had to stridently battle with the prejudiced and
dogmatic view of cultural immutability. Like everything cultures are also changing but the recent
theories of cultural specificity consider that differences between cultures are always decisive while
similarities are only coincidence.

Edward Said’s, "Orientalism" is located in the cultural studies emphasizing European humanism’s
complicity in the history of European colonialism. Such Foucaultian notions can be faulted on the
basic question: this narrative of convergence between colonial knowledge and colonial Powers
simply can not be assembled within Cultural Studies itself, because histories of economic
exploitation political repression, military conquest, and ruthless colonial policies can not be simply
assembled within such limited studies. It is true that colonial, European humanism, had a capitalist
rationality and colonial culture had a role in the colonisation of the East. Yet it is sweeping and one-
sided to lump them in the Cultural Studies itself as fundamentals of colonialism. The theoreticians
of Cultural Studies virtually relegated to the backburner the role of political oppression, economic

37
exploitation, military conquest, etc. With this almost exclusive target at the western ‘Metropolitan
Culture’ Edward Said reached such a dangerous position.

"Resistance to imperialism does not, of course, only involve armed force or band of guerrillas. It is
mainly with nationalism and with an aroused sense of aggrieved religious, cultural, or existential
identity" [Edward Said, Orientalism, ibid, p.27-28 (emphasis ours)]

Thus resistance is not mainly the armed struggle along with such various levels of movements of
the masses, of course inclusive of the struggles against colonial, feudal or reactionary bourgeois
culture, but mainly the struggle against the alien culture. Such a view in practice begets a crop of
arm-chair critics who can never dare to cut offf the foundations of the colonial or the capitalist
system. Of course, in spite of his ideological problems, unlike many of the others, Said was a staunsh
protagonist of the Arab/Palestine cause against Israeli Zionism.

Samuel Huntington, the head of national security under the U.S. president Jimmy Carter declared in
The Clash of Civilizations and The Remaking of The World Order, that cultural differences are
fundamental because they involve domains defining "relations between human beings and God,
Nature, Power", is at one and the same time to reduce cultures to religions, and to regard that each
and every culture emanates fixed specific concepts. Samir Amin has raised a very relevant question.
To quote Amin, "...which ‘cultures’ are we talking about? Those defined by religious space, by
language, by ‘nations’, by homogeneous economic region, or by political system? Huntington has
apparently chosen ‘religion’ as the basis for his ‘seven groups’, which he defines as Occidental
(Catholic and Protestant), Muslim, Confucian (although Confucianism is not a religion !), Japanese
(Shintoist or Confucian?), Hindu, Buddhist, and Orthodox Christian ..." [Samir Amin, Imperialism
and Culturalism Complement Each Other, Monthly Review, June 1996, p.5]. Such a view must be
pleasing the religious fanatics who preach Hindutva or Islamic or Christian orthodoxy. This is also a
very important question of methodology and orientation of a social scientist revolutionary.
Huntington imaginatively and with definite purpose predicted that after the fall of the Soviet Union
"... the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political or economic. In the
new world the most pervasive, important and dangerous conflicts will not be between social
classes, rich and poor or other economically defined group". [Samuel Huntington, The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, ibid. p.28]. Such mapping of history or painting
the course of unfolding history informed by a purposely ‘grand narrative’, is an incitation to
religious clashes. This does not mean we do not support struggle of religious minorities against
discrimination or such struggles against religious domination. Such a USA-endorsed view rejects or
banishes the emancipatory politics against the capitalist system and considers capitalism as
universal and permanent. The BJP, the main Fascist political force in India must draw inspiration
from Edward Said’s formulation on mainly national or cultural resistance or Huntington’s
prediction on basically the rise of religion-based civilization. Hitler denounced the class politics of
the Communists in Germany and instead raised successfully the ghastly anti-human battle-cry of
German nationalism based on anti-Jew, anti-class so-called Aryan culture of the past.

The communal Hindutva ideologues in India carry on an insidious propaganda that the Hindus are
turning into minorities in their own land of so-called Hindu cultural heritage. The RSS supremo M.S,
Golwalkar publicly acknowledged his debt to Savarkar. He adopted Savarkar’s theory of "cultural
nationalism". And what is this? It is embodied in the BJP’s manifestos of 1996 and 1998 and
expectedly fits perfectly with the orientation of post-modernist Cultural Studies. It reads: "Our
nationalist vision is not merely bound up by the geographical or political identity of media, but
defined by an ancient cultural heritage. From this belief flows our faith in cultural nationalism,

38
which is the core of Hindutva." [Quoted by A.G. Noorani, Anti consensus, Pro-hate, Hindustan Times,
21 January 2003].

It should not, however, be misconstrued that Marxists altogether junk nationalism and the role of
cultural identity. In various struggles cultures of the people have played an important role in
rousing a spirit of oneness and a sense of identity against colonialism or the oppressive order. In
various local level peasant resistances like the Wahabi movement, Moplah revolts, etc. religion of
the oppressed peasants helped in the solidarity of the oppressed peasants. However, this appeal of
a particular religion, as Islam in case of the Moplahs, had a limiting role in spreading the flame of
revolt among the Hindu oppressed peasants living in the adjoining areas. The nationalist
revolutionaries taking oath in the name of Hindu god or goddess during the armed struggle against
the British alienated the Muslims. Instances abound. Marxists judge or support a movement in
consideration of genuine anti-imperialist, anti-exploitative nature but may not subscribe to all the
elements associated with the politics of such a movement. What Post-modernists provoke, preach,
concentrate on and support is the view that religion or community-based identities are stable and a
substitute for class identity and solidarity of the masses. Caste, community, religious and such
bonds are inherently too narrow, weak-visioned and one-sided to ultimately face the global attack
of imperialism and reactionary classes at home.

On Power

Discourse theorists, basing themselves on the approach of Michel Foucault, discover power as
universal and immutable, reducing resistance only to the local level. They consider knowledge, even
of Power, is always partial. Affilations can only be shifting and multiple, to speak of a stable subject
positions is to chase the chimera of the ‘myth of origins’. Thus history without systemic origins,
human subjects or collective sites is nothing but a history of all-encompassing power. And this
power is wielded by none and so cannot be resisted because there is nothing outside the fabrication
of power. Therefore resistance can only be provisional, personal, local, micro level. Foucault and his
followers have put forward explanations of the workings of power almost totally within the domain
of the subjective. Such theorists see power as negotiated between individuals and leave them at the
mercy of ‘power’ and in this way, our attention is taken away from any possibility of collective
political resistance. Those theorists brush aside the question of class and refuse to give weight to or
evaluate different elements of Power. For the discourse theorists Power is diffuse and is nowhere,
rejecting any formulation of specific strategies and tactics for change. Marxism discards such
subjective theory and considers that power is centered in the external material world, rather than
simply in people’s head. So, the complete elimination of its internalized form will be impossible
until power inequalities within society are first removed.

Foucault began his theoretical journey foregrounding the infinitude of micro-powers and how they
are "invested, re-aligned and integrated" into a globalizing strategy of the state. He then shifted
after some years to the privileged role of the state as the point of strategic codification of the
multitude of power relations and the apparatus in which ‘social hegemony’ is formulated.
Regarding their respective dilemmas, Foucault by his emphasis on ‘social surplus’ and dispersion of
micro powers remaining intact virtually fails to produce any consistent interpretation of structural
domination. Some critics find that such dilemmas ultimately led Foucault to sharply turn to
personal ethics at the end of his life. Then emancipation is presented as a process of self-formation
of the subject [Michel Foucault, The Final Foucault, James Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds),

39
Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1988]. This shift in attention to the self-formation is dismissed by
Marxists as pure and simple idealism. Marxism also teaches us about the ideological power and the
way of overcoming the oppressive ideological power in the process of social transformation.
Marxism does not deny multiple elements of powers but holds the central focus on the ownership
of means of production as the main source of power. Simultaneously it considers that the power of
ownership goes far beyond mere economic control. The discourse theory not only befogs the
questions of state and the ownership of means of production, it casts a black pall of power scenario
making any real resistance impossible.

000

Totality
Post-structuralists/post-modernists think that grand theories, by virtue of the consideration of
totality as a unified, transparent entity, ignore a basic problem: totality represents no more or less
than a slippery zone that constantly undermines itself by sheer surplus of meaning, surplus of
elements, relations and practices. Against the notion of totality Foucault attempts at highlighting
the "contingencies that make us what we are" or attempts at investigating the continuous, diffuse,
local ‘capillary character of disciplinary technologies’. Derrida rejects totality because in the
discourse or language there is no center and it is the field of infinite substitutions exhausting
totalization. With this rejection of totality post-structuralists/post-modernists insist on "difference"
and the fragmented nature of reality and human knowledge. Thus there is no structured process,
not even in the capitalist system with its systematic unity and laws of motion. There is no truth, any
notion of "making history" but only anarchic, disconnected and inexplicable differences. The post-
structuralist/post-modernist view on totality basically stands on two notions: (i) fragments and
impossibility of reaching at truth (ii) discourse. And those two are intricately related to each other.
It is the world of words that create the world of things, said Lacan. And from this comes the idealist
concept that language is doing the speaking through human beings. As language is supposed to be
without any center with infinite substitutions, contingencies rejecting the concept of the whole
become the destructive course of this new brand of idealism. Foucault charged that Marx played the
very negative role against the efforts at decenterings "by the historical analysis of the relations of
production, economic determinations, and the class struggle — it gave place, towards the end of the
nineteenth century, to the search for a total history, in which all the differences of a society might
be reduced to a single form, to the organisation of a world-view, to the establishment of a system of
values, to a coherent type of civilization ..." [Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, New
York, 1972, p.11-12].

It is half-truth and anti-history. Marx was not a crude idealist to conceive of erasing all conceivable
differences in any future classless society, not did he make any search for a "total history".
Dialectics teaches us about multiplicity of contradictions as well as the principal and main
contradictions. Marx avidly studied the historical process and discovered those contradictions, the
resolutions of which through the intervention of subjective forces would wheel history forward to a
social system. But Marxian dialectics never says the end of history in such a new society, nor does it
deny the non-existence of all the earlier contradictions or emergence of newer ones. Secondly, Marx
never claimed to embark on a project of total history of capitalism. For the theorists of fragments
against totality without any concern for social progress through revolutionary struggle, there is no
need for a comprehensive view with definite focus on the important contradictions and classes in
the capitalist system. None can deny the importance of many different types of histories, local
histories, histories of religions, medicines, art, literature and so on and so forth. Among so many

40
histories Marxism is basically concerned with the socio-economic dynamics of a society and its
movement at a certain stage towards the dissolution of the old order for a new socialist and then
communist society. Therefore historical materialism basically studies the main centers to be
dislodged or replaced, the main contradictions of a country in a given stage and the classes in the
society.

As for people like Foucault, Derrida and the band of post-structuralists/Post-modernists there is no
such project of changing the system of capitalism itself, there is no need for developing a total view
of the state of things. Those idealist theoreticians are however, consistent in such rejection of
totality with the associative notion of casting aside the very prospect of reaching the truth. As truth
is a taboo and it eludes them how can they accept totality? [Elsewhere this question of reaching the
truth has been discussed.] However, it is absolutely wrong that Marxism rejects or discourages
other histories of various fields of knowledge or histories of localities, regions, etc.

It is necessary to make a little elaboration of the Marxian concept of totality. For a Marxist
methodologist what the investigator knows is founded upon his contact with the external world
through his senses, the material basis. Hegelian dialectic enables the study of the ‘organic wholes’
and of the inter-structural relations that those wholes involve. Some people mistakenly construe a
single whole. The dialectic makes it possible to study society — such as capitalist one — as a
differentiated whole or totality of each structure (i.e. inclusive of component parts). Marx had taken
Hegelian dialectics as a tool of analysis in the study of the whole and the inter-structural relations
that this whole involves in a historical process. Marx found that the relations are internal to some
whole or totality of which they consist in reciprocal interdependence. Thus facts are logically
interdependent. In this way Marx concluded that each of them is only a one-sided view of the
totality or whole. It is to be kept in mind that Marx’s notion of totality is different from Husserlian
phenomenology using the notion of "totality". Marx’s dialectical method demystified such
phenomenology by concentrating on the living historical relation linked with the real and by giving
the notion of whole or totality, meaning in the concrete reality of an honest investigation. But the
real moment, detached from the whole, with Husserl and particularly with his followers, becomes
idealism and speculation. And here comes the question of practice. ‘Totality’ is not an abstract
category. It is moving with life throughout and with the life of what thought perceives — but it is
not thought. Beyond the phenomenology which, above all, conceives of totality as a structure, Marx
conceives totality as a source. In Capital, Marx begins with an analysis of the commodity, both
because it is the basic expression of the relations between men in the capitalist socio-economic
formation, and because, historically, the commodity mode of production preceded the capitalist
economy itself and constituted the point of departure. In short, the characteristic of the dialectical
method of Marx is to refrain from separating the study of structures from the study of the internal
dynamics of these structures, of these organic totalities, and the contradictions, which act as their
motive force.

It is not new to reject totality or taking into consideration fragments, even during the age of the rise
of empiricism through John Locke, George Berkely and David Hume. Treating facts in isolation was
common and the search for intervening links, i.e. the necessary links that connect facts to their
essence (i.e. the totality or whole) was abandoned. In this way individual aspects held sway over
the methodology of totality: the parts were prevented from finding their definition within the
whole, and instead the whole was discarded as unscientific or else it degenerated into the mere
‘idea’ or ‘sum’ of the parts. Marx’s concept of society is a complex whole or totality encompassing
both structure and super-structure. His methodology involves two movements; the first consists of
a movement from the empirical to the abstraction involving isolation of the components of the facts
under study. It is not that components shall not come under focus but they have to be studied not as

41
mere fragments but as components of the whole, in certain relationship in a process. The second
movement is the transition from this first phase of abstraction to the of the concentration of many
determinants, hence unity of the diverse. [Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Vantage Books, New York, 1973,
p.101]

The obstinate dismissal of the question of whole in favour of fragments and contingencies and the
entire concept standing on the discourse theory cannot explain social reality, nor can it think about
revolutionary change in a society. As a natural corollary of such petit bourgeois views we are
invoked to deny history for the supposed absence of any systems, no scope of general opposition to
the existing order, no scope of getting at the roots of the many powers oppressing us and that there
is no possibility of emancipation.

000

Difference
Post-modernists/post-structuralists insist on "difference" and the fragmented nature of reality and
human knowledge. Instead of accepting the structural process accessible to human knowledge, they
hold the focus on differences. They emphasize "difference", on varied particular identities such as
gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, on various particular and separate oppressions and struggles, on
the fluid fragmented human self (the ‘decentered subject’), making our identities extremely
variable, uncertain and fragile.

The guru of post-modernists / post-structuralists, Nietzche said that man becomes human by being
the other of the non-human, he being the other of slave, etc. He argued and what his disciples echo
that future humanity would have to be determined by accepting a variety of differentiated roles.
[Friedriche Nietzche, The Gay Science, Vantage Books, 1966, p.38] He further said that man would
have to act "as if" he were determined by instinct, without delving into the self in search of rules for
action. (ibid. pp.279-300, 302-303). To him difference had to appear natural or all action would be
ironic, detached and uncommitted. He went to the extreme by declaring that out of homogeneity,
difference would be re-created, first through the difference of state and the resultant differentiation
of consciousness. From this flowed his strong repugnance to socialist equality or even any sort of
distribution of good for the greatest number in the bourgeois Benthamian sense. He preached that
the root cause of decay "was brought to a peak by Jesus : with him every man was of equal worth,
and had equal rights; out of his doctrine came democracy, utilitarianism, socialism, progress now
defined in terms of these plebeian philosophies, in terms of decadence and descending life. [Will
Durant, The Story of Philosophy, 1933, p.420] Post-modernist/post-structuralists worship Nietzche
who preached eugenic breading, birth of the superman, eulogised the well-bred splendid stock of
the ruling class in Germany, France, England, Italy, Russia, etc. He detested feminism, democracy,
equality between man and woman. He thought that that splendid stock of ruling class was
corrupted, first by Catholic praise for feminist virtues secondly by the puritan and plebian ideals or
Reformation and thirdly by insufficient emphasis on ‘difference’ [ibid. p.429] Nietzche’s over-
emphasis on ‘difference’ naturally led him to such a reactionary height. He became the father figure
in Nazi Germany, which drew inspiration from his racialism and the notion of predatory modern
hegemony of Will. Heidegger joined Nietzche in founding the philosophy of "difference" that has
gained so much currency among the post-modernists. But for Heidegger, "difference" is never
primarily a human contrivance, even though it changes. It must be, however, recalled, that his own
thought was the carrying forward of Nietzche’s view. And he became directly associated with
German Fascism.

42
One of the central issues of post-modernism is related to the problem of Nature overlapping with
the question of "difference". Some post-modernists/post-structuralists think that they should
transcend the anti-nature animus of modernity — not by Willing the natural as a myth, as with
Nietzche, any more, than by affirming that no part of difference is a social construct — but by
legitimising self-presenting difference, respecting it and the interactions that flow from it. Post-
modernists/post-structuralists in their bid to follow the Nietzchean tradition prescribe that
difference is preferable to identity, otherness to sameness and thus dismiss inadvertently that all
universalism is oppressive. As a corrolary of this extreme view they dream of a human world free
from all law and constraints, floating ambiguously from one "subject’s position" to another. Thus
they posit human subjects as merely the effect of cultural forces, privileging culture over nature.
They reject the notion of whole and without any programme to tackle the system of exploitation
and oppression they describe the relations of production — if they are compelled to call them as
such — as mere fragmented, diffused or disorganised ones. And along with the strong view on
language, or discourse constructing ‘the real’, the notion of ‘difference’ is given all importance. Post-
modernists/post-structuralists state that all difference is relational, based on the play of unstable
surfaces, where, with Derrida for example, the surfaces are seen as signs that point to no ultimate
signified or source. It is a thoroughly theoretical imposition upon the phenomena. These post-
modernists/post-structuralists have written ‘natural’ difference out of existence "only to extol
difference as a free-floating, ever-changing, contingent surface". This deification of surface is
perfectly Nietzcheanism. It refuses to accept physis as self-presenting and not based on our
projections. It must be admitted that physis presents itself in a variety of ways and there is very
little primary Nature left to us to which we can return. In the common sense terms, Nature and
habit always melt away making attempts to completely differentiate the parts of the whole difficult
and so focussing the two separately opens a path to absurdity. Both unity and diversity should be
counted in a dialectical way against such Nietzcheain tradition.

It is true modernism of the West preached history as only universally valid and universal. Such
unilinear notion rejected localised and other histories outside the universal as outmoded. It is an
element of exclusivism of modernity which can be justly criticised. Marxism admits difference
obviously not in the post-modernist way which abandons the concept of whole, truth, emancipation
and so on. Marx’s understanding of the movement of history was not based on a simple belief in
progress. Much of Marx’s intellectual energy was devoted to a monumental critique of
Enlightenment thought related to capitalism’s exploitative nature and its inherent contradictions.
At the same time he projected the alternative to the path of capitalism.

In the name of ‘difference’, Foucault’s view on cultures and traditions remaining outside the
universalist norms of concrete progrmmme of action quite naturally leads to worshipping pre-
modern elements and depoliticised passivity. And this settles for a different mode of domination,
locally different understandings steeped in cultural practices in the societies: what is ironic that the
violence in those societies, each being different from the other, however, does not get minimised by
their multiplicity. But to worship the ‘difference’ as being intrinsic to societies is to legitimise and
provide feudal moral licence accepting all the horror-inspiring practices in such colonial or semi-
feudal societies of the East. This is the danger of irrationally worshipping orthodox practices in the
name of legitimising "difference". Lyotard is in agreement with Foucault in rejecting Marxism and
Reason as meta-narratives in support of ‘little narratives’ of ethnic, minorities, local communities
and traditional beliefs. He posits ‘culture and ‘customary knowledge’ against the rational and the
scientific. Culture of a people is supposed to be ‘constituted’ as a ‘difference’. The ‘difference’ is
clearly a primordial difference. In addition, such culture is knowable to the insiders, not to the
outsiders, the ‘foreigners’. Such extreme rightist views on the ‘difference’ between insiders and

43
outsiders is an extremely welcome concept to the BJP and its sister organisations, the RSS and the
VHP in India. Such organisations too highlight such ‘difference’ posing that material minded Europe
can never reflect that so-called spiritual culture of India. Ethnic cleansing, exclusionary concepts are
rooted in such ‘difference’. Ideologues of Post-modernism/post-structuralism fulminate against all
rationality, science and the rebel spirit grown out of the Renaissance presumably to force us into
the pre-modern world. But it is curious that they themselves are much too dependent on the
luxuries of the West or the East aided by modern-facilities and state-of-the-art gadgets. Marxism
condemns such uncritical worship of the past as conservation and hypocrisy while favouring
critical assimilation of the best of the past and the present.

The communal Hindutva ideologues in India carry on an insidious propaganda that Hindus are
turning into minority. The RSS supremo M.S. Golwalkar’s teachings were to see the "difference"
with the Muslims and so if not physically, paralyse them economically and ostracise them socially.
Such dangerous obsession with the notion of this "difference" and emphasizing it like something
unchangeable and stable have always been menacing to all progressive people. Hitler’s
philosophical guru Nietzche advocated eugenics and Hitler’s eugenic sterilization victims included a
part from tens of thousands of Jews, the Communists, gypsies, the mentally challenged, etc. Mrs.
Indira Gandhi during the dark days of Emergency period in 1975-77 in the name of family planning
through vasectomy killed 1,774 men primarily poor, overwhelmingly from the scheduled castes
and minorities.[Hindustan Times, Dec 19, 2002]

What is ridiculous and illogical is that post-modernists/post structuralists are given to stretching
things to an extreme point trampling upon commonsense and reality. Marxists allow space for
‘difference’ positing it in proper perspective as they focus on identity. And all depends on the
bedrock of the crucial question of people’s interests and social progress. The post-modernist
protagonists of ‘difference’ absolutise it and thus abandon the very scope and concept of united
struggles or cementing the unity of the wretched of the earth.

000

Anti-revolutionary Discourse Theory

What unifies all trends of Post-Modernism is that there can be no grand narrative about matter, life
and society. They think that the Discourse that tries to bind everything under a single head is faulty
Discourse. There is no master discourse in the World. If someone refers to Hegelian dialectics or
Marxism as a grand discourse Post-Modernists will reject it outright. For argument’s sake, if there
are separate discourses concerning feudalism, capitalism, etc. it is simply foolish to have a
generalised discourse like historical materialism.

Post-Modernists think that in a society there exist multiple separate discourses of religion, caste,
gender, family, etc. And in every discourse there will remain a hegemonistic part along with
possibilities of generating one or more discourses. Through the deconstruction of hegemonistic
discourse such counter discourses emerge. As for example in India the Dalits build up counter
discourse against domination of the priviledged. So also in the gender discourse men constitute the
dominating discourse. In both cases the counter discourse of the Dalits or Women deconstructs the
dominating discourse making room for democratic space of the Dalits or Women.

44
The relevant question comes up immediately as to the possibility of interrelation of unity or
alliance of all the dominated parts of various discourses. At this Post-Modernists smell the tendency
towards forming a meta-narrative. Thus while the discourse of men is deconstructed by discourse
of women, even if the discourse of men is the discourse of working men it is also dominating. Post-
Modernists here adduce the argument that if efforts are made to unify on the basis of labour,
feminism, etc. they will invariably turn into a sort of servility to the discourse of men.

The ideology of this Discourse accepts certain preconditions. Firstly, truth has no existence
independent of Discourse. What dominating Discourse will pronounce as the truth that is truth. In
the works of Post-Modernists truth is text-based. In the 19th century such view was condemned as
idealism by the materialist thinkers. Secondly, the multiple types of discourses as pointed to by the
Post-Modernists do not have any inter-relationship. They do so because they simply reject the
rational efforts of the European Enlightenment period to establish cause-effect relationship in the
material or animal world. Post-modernists don’t bother as to why there exist gender, caste or such
divisions in a society and why there is class division and such relevant questions. Their queries are
confined to the genealogy of a particular Discourse. Whether inter-relationships can be found
among the discourses or whether some discourse can be accorded the status of a fundamental or an
unimportant one is not the concern of the post-modernists. In their consideration the efforts at
finding out such inter-relationships will impose determinism and essentialism. Actually, they
announce, nothing can be determined by something else. They reject that the discourse of economy
ultimately determines the discourse of politics. They do not consider it essential that the discourse
of class will have any determining role in the law-making of a state. Instead of considering inter-
relationship between the discourses, the Post-modernists think it wise to address a Discourse
which assumes some importance at a given moment. It is actually a policy meant for contingent
demand. This does not mean the fading away of other discourses. They lose their importance for a
temporary period.

However, it will be mistaken to think that like the Marxists Post-Modernists also differentiate
between primary and secondary importance of discourses. For the Post-Modernists society itself is
the arena of war for multiple constructions and deconstructions. In this war he who constructs a
Discourse deconstructs it in another discourse. This refers to the multiple identities of the persons
concerned. In this sense on one occasion the same category of people is both target of attack and
targeting some aim.

Thus there is an unremitting war of all against all with no question of discrimination between
important and unimportant aspects. It is downright anarchism. Actually the politics of Post-
Modernism is the politics of subversion. In a given period against a dominating Discourse there
emerges a counter discourse through the deconstruction of the former. However, the
deconstruction of the dominant discourse by the dominated does not end repression or domination
by a certain Discourse. Post-Modernists generally agree that whatever discourse comes up
displacing another discourse the erstwhile dominated now starts wielding power over others. So
there is unending process of domination through power politics with no hope of emancipation. The
space of democracy formed by the struggle of the counter discourse against a dominating discourse
shall ultimately lead back to square one. So the discourse analysis passes into an anarchic state with
the total neglect by Post-Modernists to build up a concrete programme against such bleak prospect
of humanity. Marxists also admit aspects of multiple identities but lay stress on essential aspects for
the destruction of main sources of exploitation and domination taking into consideration inter-
relations of various contradiction. Despite immense success in the Russian or Chinese Revolution
there remained numerous loopholes as regards resolution of certain other contradiction in a

45
proper way. But this does not teach us to reject the rich experiences of the socialist revolution and
to go about courting anarchism.

While preaching discourses in a society based on power, Post-Modernists conveniently avoid

delving deeper into the facts that difference does not invariably mean bossing or domination and
that a society can move forward having many differences, some are open to change with
fundamental changes in a society. This however, does not preclude the conscious efforts on the part
of revolutionaries from the beginning to address various types of domination and exploitation
while spearheading the attack against the principal forms of exploitation and domination. This was
one of the crucial theoretical mistakes of the C.P.I. and C.P.I.(M) leadership to shelve struggles
against caste system and such other questions with the fond hope that a socialist society shall
automatically erase them from the Indian society. Such a fatalistic approach based on Discourse is
clearly anti-Marxist, and hence harmful to the revolutionary struggle. It only poses a question
whose post-modernist solution is embedded in anarchy, passivity and also running away from the
actual struggle against any type of domination.

000

Critique of Colonial Discourse Analysis

Post-colonial thought initiated by Edward Said is the last refuge of the post-modernist/post-
structuralist trend fathered by Darrida, Foucault, etc. In Orientalism Said reduces the narrative of
the convergence between colonial knowledge and colonial powers under ‘Orientalist Discourse’
virtually banishing economic exploitation and political coercion. It is true that Edward Said brought
to the center-stage the question of cultural imperialism but the discursive theory takes us to
subjective idealism. Even going beyond the age of modernism he discovered the whole literary
tradition from Aschylus to Edward Lane as European literature’s complicity in inferiorization of the
‘Orient’. In the post-modernist frame he identified Enlightenment as a unified master sign of both
orientalism and colonialism. This exaggerated and fabricated narrative, based on Discourse theory
of Foucault leads to a sort of nationalism which encourages unequivocal worship of national
tradition without any discrimination between colonialists and anti-colonialists in Europe and the
reactions of various strata towards colonialism from diverse planes. When Said remarks that
orientalism delivered the orient to colonialism it appears that colonialism starts as a product of
orientalism itself — a project which Said traces from Aschylus to inferiorize the orient preceding
actual colonization. Thus imperialist ideology is nothing but some sort of writing. Aizaz Ahmad
shows that using Derridean idea of Identity and Difference, Said reaches a strange position. Said
wants to show that the West has needed to constitute the orient as its other in order to constitute
itself and its own subject position. Ahmad observes "... This idea of constituting Identity through
Difference points, again not to the realm of political economy — not to those other social
materialistics of a non-discursive kind — wherein colonialization may be seen as a process of
capitalist accumulation, but to a necessity which arises within discourse and always been there at
the origin of discourse, so that not only is the modern orientalist presumably already there in Dante
and Euripides but modern imperialism itself appears to be an effect that arises, if not naturally,
from the necessary practices of discourse."[Aizaz Ahmad, Theory Classes Nations Literatures,
Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1994, p. 182]

In his height of absurdity Foucault located Marx firmly within the boundaries what he called
’western episteme’ considering that Marxian thought is framed entirely by the discourse of political

46
economy falling within that episteme. Similarly Said discovered Marx in the oriental discourse. It is
downright non-sense and cannot be established even by any conceivable way that Marx was an
Orientalist and justified colonisation by European imperialist powers. Marx not only disdainfully
remarked against "Lousy orientalist", the whole body of Marx’s writings is directed against capital
and colonisers’ loot and destruction of the East. It is true that in his early journalistic writing — and
Said has solely depended on it harping on a comment — Marx observed that the laying of railways
and other measures brought about a churning in the otherwise backward stagnant society of
orthodoxy. Marx’s "favourable" opinion flashed and ended there. And with the unfolding days Marx
brilliantly and cogently portrayed with glaring facts the horrible scenario under the wheels of the
imperialist juggernaunt throughout the East.

The so-called Colonialist Discourse is basically weak and partial to the point of ignoring the highly
important constituents of colonialism, its economic exploitation and massive politico-
administrative set-up.

When Foucault’s followers stick to so-called "colonial Discourse Analysis" it is made clear that we
are constituted by colonialism, the only Discourse that really matters is the Discourse of the
colonialist. Such people reject all the existing methods in history writing, going far beyond the
empirical historian’s usual interrogation of and scepticism about the available evidence and the
accepted mode of interpretation: and they enter the Niezchean world of question not merely
positivist construction but the very facility of facts. Nietzche firmly announced "…. truths are
illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are."[Quoted in Edward Said’s Orientation,
p.203] The Nietzeean fulmination against the image of language as the enemy of experience and
that representation through language is always — already a misrepresentation — only lead one to
the rejection of truthful human communication. Hence, in this sense any truthful statement in
history writing is always prejudiced by the very nature of the language itself. It is true that words
do not necessarily perfectly represent something. There is no leafiness in the word ‘leaf but it is
human experience and socially accepted word of representation of the leaf. The Nietzschean
rejection of this very image of the enemy of experience and such assertion that representation is
always — already a misrepresentation reject forthwith the possibility of human communication. In
relation to the knowledge of history, then this consideration of such image of human
communication as a ruse of illusory subjectivity precludes the possibility of reconstruction of
history through writing using a language. Such anarchic views leads nowhere and our Post-
modernists are also at a loss during making a statement with the help of the socially accepted
language itself.

Post-structuralists/Post-Modernists are now vocal protagonists of the colonial discourse. It refers

to the group of texts, both literary and non-literary, which were produced by the British writers
during the British colonial period. The Subaltern Studies in India now refers to discursive regimes
of power to co-opt Indian social classes and thus shift the blame for the Subalterns’ failure in India
on to the British, the ultimate authors of the discourse of colonial power. Thus the powerful
domains of imperialist discourse were posed as all-powerful in respect of the vanquished
subalterns in India. And soon the original marginalised Subalterns lost priority in such studies in
order to study the discourses of the elite. The Subaltern Studies Collective’s shift from Marx to
Foucault led it to all-pervasive colonial discourse’ making colonialism ultimately the sole actor in
Indian history. Hence the supposedly long slumbering India also was awakened by the fruits of
civilization from the west with colonialism remoulding or assigning meanings to indigenous
structures like caste, gender or class and cutting up Indian society into mutually opposed blocks of
religion, tribe or caste. Thus Foucaultian or Post-Modernist influence ultimately turns Subaltern

47
Studies into a study of the elite with the acceptance of the coloniser British as the principal actors
on their own right.

With Foucault’s denunciation of the Western episteme or Derrida’s denunciations of the

transhistorical Logos nothing remains outside the epistemic Power, logocentric thought, no classes,
no gender, not even history, no site of overall resistance, no prospect of human emancipation. With
the oriental discourse communalism can now be considered alone as a result of Orientalism and
colonial construction; caste itself can be portrayed as a fabrication primarily of the Population
Surveys and Census Reports, and so on.

Even Edward Said, the Foucault follower had this to say later: "Foucault’s eagerness not to fall into
Marxist economism causes him to obliterate the role of classes, the role of economics, the role of
insurgency and rebellion in the societies he discusses………." [Edward Said, World, the Text and the
Critic, pp. 244-6 Quoted in Aizaz Ahmad, in Theory, Classes … ibid, p.199]

The post-colonial theory bases itself on the post-modernist frame, which cries hoarse that no "final
vocabulary" can be shown to be rationally superior. Richard Rorty in this fashion expresses himself
as sentimentally patriot about the USA, willing to grant that it could slide into Fascism at any time,
but he is proud of its past and guardedly hopeful about the future.[Richard Rorty, Contingency,
Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989] Homi Bhaba, the post-colonial
theorist, makes it clear in his book The Location of Culture the additional aspect in this approach:
"Driven by the subaltern history of the margins of modernity — rather than by the failures of
logocentrism - I have tried, ..... to revise the known, to rename the post-modern from the position of
the post colonial."[Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London 1994, p. 175] In fact the
language metaphor "to provide a social imagery that is based on the articulation of history and
culture" stands as fundamental of post-modernists and is faithfully pursued by such post-
colonialists. Such fundamental comes to the fore as their master concept, of ambivalence
characteristic of Lacanian theorizing - the ambivalence constituting the colonial discourse. Homi
Bhaba echoes the post-modernist view: "colonial discourse is an apparatus of power, turns on the
recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences." [ibid, p.70] It appears that in
such studies the intrinsic heterogenity of discourses is a consequence of "the structure of symbolic
representation." Cultural differences between the coloniser and the colonized turns out to be
Derridean difference, the endless process of displacement from one signifier to another, in which a
transcendental signified that would stop this flight of meaning is at once constantly posited and
indiefinitely deferred. Homi Bhaba disclosed the fact quite bluntly that "if the interest of post -
modernism is limited to a celebration of the fragmentation of the ‘grand narrative’ of post-
enlightenment rationalism then for all its intellectual excitement it remains a profoundly parochial
enterprise". [ibid p.4]. And in reality Bhaba remains within the four walls of post-modernism.
Ranajit Guha, the Guru of Subaltern Studies group in his well-known book Elementary Aspects of
Peasant Insurgency brought to the centre stage the role of rumour, symbols, territoriality, etc in
graphic details obviously at the cost of the fundamentals of colonial exploitation that lay behind the
resistances and. revolts. Homi Bhaba seizes on Guha’s discussion of rumour helping precipitate the
revolts. For Bhaba, "the indeterminate circulation of meaning as rumour or conspiracy, with a
pervasive, psychic effects of panic, constitutes the inter-subjective realm of revolt and
resistance."[Homi Bhana, Ibid, p. 200] Thus we are taken to the absurd height by drawing on Guha’s
illustration of the role of rumour or of sending ‘chapati’ from one village to the other. as a symbolic
signal for the circulation of ‘insurgency’. Bhaba writes "....the reinscription of a traditional system of
organisation through the disturbance, or interruption of the circulation of the cultural codes ...bears
a marked similarity to the conjunctural history of the Mutiny."[Homi Bhaba, ibid. p. 202] Thus the
great earth-shaking rebellion of 1857 against British imperialism is conceptualized primarily in

48
terms of an "interruption" of the signifying chain. If revolts are explained fundamentally in terms of
developing "familiar symbol" as chapati into an "unfamiliar social significance as sign" through a
transformation of the temporality of its presentation, this history or making history is reduced to an
exercise merely in such transformation. Marxism obviously rejects such superficial academic
approach hesitant to go at the roots. The early claim of subaltern studies to situate writing within
the collective reflection of the Indian left in order to highlight the achievements and limitations of
great anti-imperialist struggles of the subaltern masses is itself a history now.

Gayatri Chakraborty Spivack, the subaltern theorist and translator of Derrida’s book Of
Gramatology explains in 1988 that "their work presupposes that the entire socials, at least in so far
as it is the object of their study, is what Nietzche would call a fortgesetzte zeichenkette — a
‘continuous sign-chain’. The possibility of action lies in its dynamics of the disruption of the object,
the breaking and relinking of the chain. The line of argument does not set consciousness over
against the socius, but see it as itself constituted us and on a semiotic chain."[Gayatri Chakraborty
Spivac in Guha and Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies, Oxford University Press, New York,
1988, p.5] The same refrain of culture or nature or language constituting us, what Spivak found in
the perspective of Subaltern Studies, Bhaba echoes it when he discovers the Great Revolt of 1857 is
the "disruption of the" "semiotic chain", a chain that binds not only human consciousness but also
the social in its entirety. What is dangerous is the central concept that rebellion is the disruption of
signifying chain. Thus Bhaba’s post-colonial theory is an idealist reduction of the social to the
semiotic and a tunnel-view of politics. It is in order to state what Edward Said had to self-critically
comment later virtually rejecting the opposition to totality. He asserted that "if subaltern is
constituted to be only a separatist enterprise much as early feminine writing was based on the
notion that women had a voice or room of their own, entirely separate from the masculine domain
—then it must run the risk of just being a mirror opposite [of] the writing whose tyranny it
disputes. It is also likely to be as exclusivist, as limited, provincial and discriminatory in its
suppression and repression as the master discourses of colonialism and elitism. In fact, as Guha
[Ranajit Guha] shows, the subaltern alternative is an integrative, for all gaps, the lapses and
ignorance of which it is so conscious. Its claim that by being subalternist it can see the whole
experience of India resistance to colonialism more fairly than the partial histories provided by a
handful of dominant native leaders or colonial historians..."[Edward Said, Foreword, in Guha and
Spivask (eds)., Selected Subaltern Studies, ibid p. viii] It is self-explanatory that Said now rejects the
attempt to base the critical theory on a binary opposition between dominant and subaltern groups;
at the same time he seems to be in favour of a totalizing perspective for comprehending the nature
and means of turning upside down the relations of oppression. What glaringly comes to the fore is
that the so-called post-colonial thought born out of and nurtured by post-modernist philosophical
foundation based on Nietzche’s metaphysics of power is a pure and simple attempt at
depoliticization of theory as appears in Foucault’s last writings of an "aesthetics of existence"
implying that political action be redirected away from any intervention in the public sphere
towards restyling of the self. It is a thought, which destroys the attempts at resistance, not to speak
of emancipation. Foucault, the mentor of post-modernist/post-colonial theorists like Edward Said
was later criticised by none but Said himself.

000

Against Unilinear View

Marxism does not endorse a unilinear process of social development. A sound familiarity with the
works of originator of Marxism — obviously not partial familiarity with two or three sentences

49
taken out of their vast works - will enlighten the reader how Marx substantiated, revised and even
abandoned some of his observations made in early life with the increasing accumulation of newer
facts in the course of his long life. It is also true that the unilinear model for all societies i.e.
Primitive Society, Slavery, Feudalism, and Capitalism, gained currency in the international Marxist
circle during the 30s and 40s of the last century. And as Marxists are not fundamentalists they
debated this model with the appearance of Marx’s Grundrisse and his notes on India, Algeria, Sri
Lanka, etc written in his last life. Marx wrote his two famous papers, ‘The British Rule in India’ and
"The Future Results of the British Rule in India" in 1853 based on British parliamentary papers,
Francois Bernier’s memoris of his travels and ex-colonial officers’ reports on the India socio-
economic system. The concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production formulated in the preface to ‘A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ was the result of his early studies. That Marx did
not have in his mind a unilinear or Western model for countries like India is crystal clear from his
formulation of the Asiatic Mode. The Asiatic Mode was marked by self-sufficient village
communities, the absence or near-absence of commodity production, repressive ‘oriental despotic’
state, absence of private property in land, etc. However, it was Marx who did not cling to old ideas
unflinchingly with the unearthing of newer facts, with the re-opening of debate on pre-colonial
Indian society during the praparetion of the second and the last volume of Capital. Between 1879
and 1880 Marx wrote Notes on Kovalevsky and scruputously detailed Notes on Indian History. In
1881 when he replied to the letter of Vera I. Zasulich, he compiled his notes on J.B. Phear’s and
Henry S Maine’s books on India. In the later years we can identify a clear change in the way Marx
perceived Indian society. Yet Marx, as some Marxist scholars go on record, never, even in his later
years, recognised the West European type of feudalism in India.[Osamu Kondo, Feudal Social
Formation in Indian History in the Making of History (eds) K.N. Panikkar, Terence J Byres, Utse
Patnaik, Tulika, New Delhi, 2001, pp. 57-58; Diptendra Banerjee (ed), Marxian Theory and the Third
World, Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. New Delhi, 1985; Daniel Thorner, ‘Feudalism in India’, the
shaping of Modern India, Allied Publishers, New Delhi, 1980, p. 288] It must be kept in mind that
Baden-Powell’s more reliable studies on Indian land system and society, the land system of British
India, Indian Village Community saw the light of the day after Marx’s death.

If Marx accepted one thing common to all societies it was the labour process. Marx said that for all
societies there is "the labour process independently of any specific social formation" and it is "the
everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore ... common to all forms
of society in which human beings live". [Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, Harmond Worth, 1976 p. 283, 290.
Quoted in Terrell Carver, Marx and Non-European Development, in Diptendra Banerjee (ed)
Marxian Theory and The Third World, Sage Publication Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi, 1985, p. 45]

Marxists like Lenin, Mao, et. al. rebuffed the unilinear model to make revolution in their respective
countries. If unilinear trend prescribing a single-way of progress in history, downplaying the
specificites of the societies concerned, made its presence in the international Marxist movement on
certain occasions, it did not surely emerge from liberation pessimism of the post-modernists
bitterly rejecting any model of revolution for destroying the existing system of human bondage. ‘Let
hundred flowers blossom’ was the clarion call of Mao after the revolution and it had its results too.
We admit that a wrong trend supposing to cast all into a single mould ignoring differences or
mechanically applying a fixed belief has had its negative impact on the Marxist movement. In the
future socialist society the question of people’s democracy in various specific features and
contradictions must be accorded paramount importance drawing lessons from the failures of the
earlier socialist systems.

000

50
Post-modernists/Post-structuralists
Post-modernism rejects categories like cause and effect. Marxism believes that cause always
precedes effect, but succession in time is not the adequate sign of cause. For example, day follows
night, but night is not the cause of day. Here comes the question of rotation of the earth. No
phenomenon exists or can exist without cause, for everything has its cause. Causality is inherent in
reality and is discovered by man in the process of cognition and practical activity.

When Post-modernists reject cause and effect they in fact reject all scientific experiences so far.
This leads to one sort of nihilism, which does not seek any reason or cause behind any result. They
think that no cause can be studied perfectly. Such a view leads us to nowhere before any incoming
problems. We need to be left with only results, with all uncertainty and we should never try to
recreate anything knowing the inherent laws. This is Post-modernism.

Post-modernism rejects categories like cause and effect but Marxists believe that the categories of
Marxist dialectics are a result, generalisation of the centuries-old experience of people, of their
labour and knowledge. In course of his practical activity man, coming in contact with, and cognizing
objects and phenomena of the world, has singled out their essential, general features and fixed the
results in categories, concepts. Lenin wrote "Instinctive man, the savage, does not distinguish
himself from nature. Conscious man does distinguish: categories are stages of distinguishing, i.e., of
cognizing the world."[Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.38, p.93]

Categories like cause and effect are stepping stones of knowledge to help people to find their way in
the intricate web of phenomena in nature and society, to reveal the interconnection and
interdependence of things, the definite order and the law-governed character of their development
and to choose the right course of practical activity.

Marxism rejects idealism which denies the objective character of categories. Kant thought that
before man begins to know the world his consciousness contains categories of causality, necessity,
chance, etc. With the help of which he allegedly introduces order into the chaotic world of natural
phenomena. Marxism refutes such a view and posits categories in the realm of objective reality.
Secondly, categories are interconnected, changeable and mobile, being reflection of the material
world, the universal connections and interactions of its objects and phenomena. The connection of
categories is so close that under certain conditions they can turn one into the another. Thus cause
becomes effect and vice versa, necessity becomes chance and so on.

Post-modernism/Post-structuralism rejects three pillars of Marxism, its epistemology, social

totality and class. It rejects causality involving the elements of cause and effect. It states that ‘cause
producing effects’ — this sequential and logical order is the fundamental principle of the
essentialist concept of causality. By essentialism it is meant, they argue, the hierarchical
oppositions between reality and appearance, between essence and accident, between economic and
non-economic, between inside and outside and so on. The post-modern/post-structuralist trend
rejects prioritising one against the other considering such act as essentialist. Thus, it rejects
causality behind effects or for that matter the Hegelian thesis — antithesis — synthesis triad.
Derrida argues that elements in a structure having hierarchised i.e. some having more importance
than the other is, what he calls, logocentrism. Derrida thus attacks such logo centrism targeting: (1)
the prior or originary element — that which causes — is autonomous. (2) An element is determined
by the other elements (3) the factor, like the forces of production, that is considered to be the most
important factor. Post-modernists/post-structuralists reject any foundational concept, originary

51
base, the causation of one elements having privileged position over the causation of other elements,
etc. They smell essentialism, ‘logo centrism’, reductionism, etc. in cause-effect, in the stress on
principal contradiction, principal aspects of a contradiction and on all such Marxist fundamentals.

Cause and effect have a dialectical relation in which one influences the other. The superstructure
(effect) comprising political, moral, religious, cultural aspects are generally the products of the
mode of production (cause) continuously exerting impact on the cause. Cause and effect can also
mutually change their positions. The cause in one context can become effect in some other context.
Effect also can turn into cause. From the Marxist point of totality, it is found that every cause can be
an effect and every effect can be a cause. Marxism also holds the view on the presence of internal
cause, basic causes and principal cause. There is difference between the complete cause and the
specific cause. The former is the sum total of all the circumstances, the presence of which
necessarily gives rise to the effect. The specific cause is the sum total of circumstances, the presence
of which (with the presence of many other circumstances already present in the given situation
even before the conditions for the action of the cause) leads to the appearance of the effect. The
establishment of a complete cause is possible in comparatively simple cases and generally scientific
investigation proceeds towards the comprehension of the specific causes of the phenomenon.

Post-modernists reject the question of cause causing effect. They often refer to their guru Nietzche
who in his The Will to Power gives the example of pin and pain. I feel pain. Immediately, I look for a
cause, i.e. the pin. Thus pin is the cause, pain is effect. Nietzche changes the order. He says that my
experience of pain causes me to look for the cause (pin), thus causes the production cause. Pain
becomes the cause while pin the effect of the cause. This way Nietzche wants to prove that the
cause becomes the effect, while effect the cause. With this example, Nietzche and his followers claim
to have destroyed the cause-effect sequence and also the position of origin. This is metaphysics,
simple and pure, an obstinate effort to dismiss the cause-effect sequence. Instead of pin if we take a
mosquito bite/snake-bite and the resultant painful suffering/death, our post-modernist idealist
doctor with his Nietzchean view will pinpoint the latter as the cause of the former and burst into
frenzied glee for the supposed, dismissal of the point of origin. Such absurd idealist view will in turn
exonerate imperialists, capitalists, etc. as cause for plunders and exploitation. In the name of logo
centrism or essentialism such idealist thinkers reject giving privileged status to certain
factors/elements and thus dismiss the Marxian dialectical view that the causative factors, like the
forces of production and relations of production, generally play a more important role than other
elements in the socio-economic process. They are stubborn in their allowing equal status to all
elements with the rejection of the cause-effect sequence. This is also Derridean deconstruction, the
deconstruction of dependency, origin and foundation. Against such an absurd view of befogging the
socio-economic process, Marxism holds that there are both internal and external contradictions
with the internal generally remaining as basic. Nevertheless, at times external contradiction plays a
decisive role. It is not the role of the social scientist to leave the stage imparting equal importance
to all the factors in a given moment; rather it is his duty to study the contradictions in order to
grasp the principal, main and less important contradictions at a given moment. In the name of
reversal cause-effect sequence, giving equal status to all the factors and dismissing the originary
point, post-modernists/post-structuralists actually want us to keep our eyes closed to the principal
imperialist powers, the basic classes of revolution, the principal contradiction in a country in a
given period, etc. Such views can raise a furore over a tea cup in a coffee house or academic
institution, but becomes dangerous opium in the real life struggle of the masses.

000

52
Post-Modern Negative Impact On The Study Of Science
Post-modernism has left its extremely narrow, irrational, parochial impact on the question of
studying modern science. The scientific tradition of thinking about the coinciding of reality and
truth is challenged. The set of doctrines often referred to as ‘social construction of science’ or
‘sociology of scientific knowledge’ claims that like any other way of knowing, scientific methods are
wholly relative to a theoretical framework and a world-view: we know what we ourselves construct
and there can be no justification that our constructs can progressively come to map the world as it
really is. Thus truth is a matter of how we "garland consensus with authority."[David Bloor,
"Knowledge and Social Imagery", Chicago, p.42 Quoted in Meera Nanda, ‘Restoring the Real :
Rethinking Social Constructivist Theories of Science, In Socialist Register, 1997, K.P.Bagchi & Co.,
Calcutta, 1997, p. 302] By this, facts once seen as due to the world’s own determination are instead
seen as projections upon a much thinner world by the cultural practices of communities of
inquirers. This way culture and power get a privileged position over each and every scientific
enquiry. Meera Nanda has summed up such views from writings of various authors, which can be
paraphrased as (1) What makes a belief true is not in correspondence with an element of reality,
but its adoption and authentication by the relevant community of enquirers. (2) Science is socially
located praxis that creates the reality it describes; it is not at all a detached description of a pre-
existing reality external to its own practice. Thus science does not just describe or unravel ‘facts’,
but actually constructs them through the active, culturally and socially situated choices scientists
make in the laboratory. (3) Such theories admit of no analytical distinctions between knowledge
and society, the cognitive dimension and the socio-cultural dimension: people’s knowledge of the
world and their organisation of life in the world constitute each other, the two are ‘co-produced’.
With such views theorists "tend to deny any meaningful distinction between what is inside and
outside of science and between things natural and social."[Meera Nanda, Ibid p. 303] Many post-
modernists/ post-colonial critics of modern science consider that the challenge to the traditional
order being armed with "Western Science" is an act of conspiracy against the local tradition. They
consider such rational, scientific minded people as "internal colonizers" bringing the diverse local
narratives under the sway of a Eurocentric meta-narrative. Foucault, Rorty, et al guide them to
reject such efforts. This approach is basically premised on the post-modernist concept of discursive
knowledge, power and inaccessibility of reality. The concentrated expression of this Post-modern
view has been projected by Alan Sokal, a theoretical physicist at New York University, who strung
together the statements of post-modern theorists like Derrida, Lacan, Leotard et al to declare how
Post-modern social theory has shown that, the reality physicists study is a social and linguistic
construct.[Meera Nanda, Ibid. Foot note, p.346]

Under the post-modernist influence this extreme view in the name of "social construction of
science" or "sociology of scientific knowledge" denies that scientific facts have any necessary
relation to casual processes and theoretical entities, which they claim to describe. This new breed
of theorists regards science as mere construction but not a discovery of reality. Thus our knowledge
is said to be our own construction and so fails to present the reality itself. Post-modernism/Post-
Structuralism dismisses truth and sermonises that truth is nothing but our acceptance of it with
authority.

It goes without saying that science has been often misused and scientists have shown biases and
material interests to impose the existing social order upon the order of nature. This is some
scientists’ bid for naturalization of an unequal order. Recent history testifies to the abominable fact
how the majority of U.S. physicists were pressed into service for the gargantuan programme of Star
Wars in the 1980s. It is a fact that in the name of research and development millions of dollars have

53
been spent in the USA alone and huge amount of it has gone towards building up sophisticated
lethal weapons. Also in the field of medical sciences, notwithstanding its big advances, it has been
vulgarised and debased due to the maniacal drive for profits, creating an atmosphere amongst the
post-modernists to negate allopathy totally — taking the idealisation of herbal treatment to
extreme levels. It was in Mao’s China where aq more rational approach was adopted of combining
the two — i.e. using the best in allopathy, together with maximum efforts to advance indigenous
remedies.

So, the question comes up whether we can dismiss or impute an absolutely negative role to science
and that scientists always and on all occasions working at the diktat of the powers that be. When
Bernal writes that under colonial rule Indian scientists must "be subjected to the patronizing and
insulting habits of the English to their subject races" [J.D.Bernal, The Social Function of Science,
Routlegdge, London, 1939, p.208] should we not invariably consider the scientific space created
outside and against the hassles and impediments under the imperialist system had a different role.
It was definitely difficult but was presumably natural to develop dialectical opposition to colonial
science.

India has a long tradition in medical science. Ancient tribes invented the primary method of
alleviation of various maladies obviously through exclusive experiment towards a scientific way of
treatment. The archaeology of medicines that we inherit from the past does not necessarily justify
the Foucaultian concept of power always at work towards scientific researches whatever may be
their level. Traditional medicines, written and unwritten, have a very long history. The use of neem,
turmeric and numerous things as medicines has a very very long history in India, originating at a
time even remotely can be conceivable as evolved in the arenas of powers. What is very much
known that practising medical men or researchers on human body were looked down upon by the
Brahministic big and small rulers in India. The great pioneer in the medical science in Europe,
Hypocrat had to practise steathily lest he should pollute others and draw the ire of the controllers
of society. The examples are cited in order to refute the claim of Post-Modernism/ Post-
Structuralism that science is always a tool in the hands of the powers that be.

Under the British colonial system there always remained a dilemma, western science was
introduced without any distinct science policy along with structural limitations for research and
development. The British Govt. sponsored science for the very reason of its existence; geography,
geology, botany, zoology, archaeology, medicine and even astronomy were introduced primarily on
the grounds of political and commercial gains.[R.K.Kochhar, Science as a Tool in British India, EPW,
August, 1993] To combat the shameless apathy of the imperialist rulers towards scientific
education, Indian scientists’ inventions in various fields was a certain amount of defiance. But in
general what was transplanted in Indian society as science was not for the indigenous social needs
but for imperialism itself. Yet one can not dismiss J.C.Bose’s contributions in the field of science and
its popularization against enforced difficulties under the colonial regime. Against colonial science
there emerged a counter trend. One historian recorded the role of a pioneer of technology in 19th
century Bengal, Sitanath Ghosh for his invention of the cotton spindle of a new type, an air-pump, a
power loom, a weaving machine, a wheat pounding mill, a mechanical plough, etc. Those inventions,
however, were not produced on a commercial scale.[Chittabrata Palit, "Sitanath Ghosh the
Forgotten Pioneer of Technology in Bengal", In Science, Technology, Medicine And Environment In
India, (eds) Chittabrata Palit, Amit Bhattacharya, Bibhasa, Calcutta, 1988 pp. 89-98]

While denouncing positivism Bernal attempted to present a social responsibility to the scientists.
He was also hopeful that an appreciation of historical relation of science and society by the
scientists would make it possible for them to counter the efforts of those who misuse science.

54
Natural philosophy fragmented into separate domains of enquiry like natural and human science
only in the 17th century. And only at this crucial period science assumed an independent status.
With the emergence of capitalist society, the increasing connection between science and the
production process and research through funding science, a tendency becomes clear: science is
used for profits and fabrication. And designing tools of Drawin, Newton, Faraday, et al, were driven
by the internal momentum of science getting inspired from within the tradition of science itself. It is
scientists’ motivation to fathom how nature works and how to do things more and more easily. And
the long technical tradition is nurtured by the scientific tradition. But we cannot but admit that the
most flourishing period of science coexists with flourishing economic activities and technical
advance.

Marxism strongly refutes the sweeping conclusion of this idealist doctrine that there is always a
merging and mutual constitution of the social order and the order of knowledge. If it is accepted
that the content of natural sciences is not merely conditioned but constituted by the culturally
endorsed social practices, the entire scientific knowledge turns into a matter of prevailing and ever
changing conventions. Then there remains no necessary relation with the natural order, nor the
critical relation with the social order. When this extremely idealist doctrine dishes out the view that
reality is nothing but a constructed image, we are then left with no way out of this created image to
verify our findings and beliefs in relation to the objective reality. Also if it is taken for granted that
all rational views and practices work within the four walls of the power nexus and inevitable biases
then we are reduced to mere programmed robots which always fail to do creative work or get at the
objective reality.

It is a fact that sometimes what is passed for truth is created by the powers that be with definite
interests, but these Foucault followers go to extremes by declaring that truth is always and on all
occasions is the creation of power. They reject the possibility of forming knowledge transcending
the barriers imposed by culture, local contexts and power. Such orthodox doctrines in the Post-
modernist heritage, would then dismiss the possibility of People’s Science movements being carried
on by various organisations in India and other countries making the people aware of irrational
ideas and practices rooted in societies and the possibility of overhauling the system of exploitation
being armed with the findings of science. It must be kept in mind that people, freed of superstitions
and abominable practices, and the organisations working at the grass roots with rational, scientific
consciousness are the actual force to expose the anti-social scientists power-broker nexus against
human civilization itself.

Simultaneously it is absolutely wrong to reject forever and for all times scientific findings that have
any inherent scope and possibility of universal application. If the USA and some other powers
showing off their infinite arrogance and possessiveness to declare ban on the acquisition of atomic
knowledge developed by physicists in other countries is blown-up to equate with all instances of
scientific findings, then we have to reject every invention of science as anti-people. History,
however, testifies to the universality of scientific findings in numberless instances. Those
hypocritical critics of science try to project themselves as truly opposed to western imperialism by
equating the whole of modern science coming from Europe as a sign of western imperialistic
domination. This sermonisation is also a narrow, reductionist notion conveniently evading to
discriminate between the elements of domination and the contributions of science to people’s life.
They also reject the possibility of "Trans cultural appropriation of the methods, theories and world
view of modern science" Scientific knowledge proceeds through continuous self-correction in the
light of fresh findings from the natural order. But those so-called pundits hold that the evidence
from nature can never be free from contextual values and the scientists’ cultural moorings. The

55
ever-changing scientific theories and rival theories in similar contextual and cultural situations
substantially belie such fixed and extremely irrational ideas. We do not dismiss the fact that cultural
meanings and social power play an important role even in the field of science. But we reject such
views that scientific rationality is solely or ultimately decided by them and that all the reality we
can ever really reach is the reality that is internal to our system of representation in the Post-
modernist/post-structuralist sense. Thus in that sense such representations are merely our
constituted reality and moving towards truth is an illusory venture. In the same fashion things
remaining outside our representation are things-in-themselves as Kantian agnosticism explained.
Marxism is not positivism but considers truth as relative. This extremely narrow view under Post-
modernist influence rejects the boundary line between science and superstition and thoroughly
dismisses any possibility of truth outside the power structure. This dangerous trend reaches its
nadir through the relativistic logic of post-modernism in the writing of physicist Alan Sokal. He
writes:

"It has become increasingly apparent that physical "reality", no less than social "reality" is at
bottom a social and linguistic construct, that scientific "knowledge", far from being objective,
reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it,
that truth claims of science are inherently theory laden, and the discourse of the scientific
community."[Alan Sokal’s writing In A Callari and D.Ruccoio, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover
and London, 1961, Quoted in Meera Nanda, ‘Restoring the Real : Rethinking Social Constructivist
Theories of Science, In Socialist Register, 1997 ibid] It is one type of agnosticism separating
substance from appearance. It limits science, rejects logical thought, and distracts attention from
cognition of the objective laws of nature and society. The best refutation of such superficial view is
practice and material production. Kant differentiated between real ground and logical grounds. In
his early works he restricted formal deductive methods of thinking in favour of experience.
Ultimately Kant was led to agnosticism stating that the nature of things as they exist of themselves
in principle is accessible to human knowledge. To him true theoretical knowledge is possible only
in mathematics and natural science. And it is determined by the fact that in man’s mind there are
apriori forms of sensuous contemplation of reason and there is a connection between sensuous
contemplation and the concept of reason. In Kant’s view sensation stems from the action of an
unknowable " thing-in-itself" on the sense organs as ordered by means of a priori forms of
sensibility (space and time) and reason (categories of unity, plurality, causality, possibility,
necessity and other). He also believed that striving for absolute knowledge is rooted in reason.
Man’s reason thus seeks to solve the problem. He accepted God as necessary postulate of faith, on
which the moral order of the world rests. Marx and Engel’s exposed the idealist contradictoriness in
Kant and in his philosophy of thingishness and idealist view on reason. Hegel believed that reason
does not go beyond static definiteness, abstract identity, abstract universality fixed opposites
separated from one another (essence and appearance, necessity and chance, life and death, etc.)

Discursive or simple reason-based thought is not enough, it is merely the necessary step which
allows one to rise higher, towards the intelligible forms of cognition. The dialectical negative-
intelligible aspect of thought resolves the problem of one-sided and limited definitions of reason.
Cognition is a dialectical process having different stages of development. It starts from "living
perception" bringing human beings to external qualities of objects. The data of "living perception",
experience are processed and generalised by their higher cognitive ability, abstract-logical thought
which forms concepts. The logical activity of thought is affected in various forms: induction and
deduction, analysis and synthesis, construction of hypothesis and theories. Yet this creates only
subjective ideas, yet to become the objective truth. Truth is arrived at by a process by removing
error, and limited by the given stage of development in technological level, potentialities of
production and such other factors. Here lies the strength of Marxism and baselessness of the Post-

56
modernist attack against all rationality, not to speak of absence of verifiable principle of practice in
the dictionary of that idealist trend.

Popper placed his non-relativist view on the progress in science by referring its movement closer
and closer to truth through successive falsification. T.S.Kuhn criticised it by positing both
continuities and discontinuities in the evolutionary process of science with the absorption of earlier
ideas and newer findings.[T.S.Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago
Press, 1970] Many later writers like Richard Boyd, Philip Kitcher, etc. while admitting the role of
contextuality of knowledge attempted to show that this problem can be overcome to a great degree.
[Richard Boyd, ‘Constructivism, Realism and Philosophical Method’, In John Earman(ed), Inference,
Explanation and Other Philosophical Frustrations: Essays in the Philosophy of Science, Berkley,
1992, Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science Without Legend, Objectivity Without
Illusions, Oxford University Press, 1993]

To end this part, it is necessary to fight tooth and nail the gigantic state apparatus exploiting and
utilising science against humanity. Simultaneously we must expose and lay bare the haughty fad of
the pretentious Post-modernists/Post-structuralists to dismiss science per se as internal to our
system of representation, discursive and always remaining within the bounds of power and culture.
What is needed is to put science in use for the people’s needs.

000

Post-modernism/Post-Structuralism, A New Fad

Anthony Giddens uses terms like "radical", "high", or "late" modernity to describe modernity in
order to indicate that the present modernity is continuous with the early stage.[Antony Giddens,
Modernity and Self Identity: Self and society in the Late Modern Age, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, California, 1991] Jurgen Habermas sees modernity as an "unfinished project", conceding
the continuation of the modern world. [Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity:
Twelve Lectures. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1987] By now "the new fad (Post-modernism) disappeared
into the whirl of cultural fashion."[Douglas Kellner, Introduction, In Douglas Kellner(ed), Post-
modernism, Jameson, Critique, Washington, D.C., pp. 1-2] Kellener also states that it is the hottest
game in town. Smart has differentiated among extreme post-modernism represented by Jean
Baudrillard and Arthur Kroker; the post-modernist position taken by Fredric Jamson, Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe having some sort of inclination to Marxism consider Post-modernism as
growing out of and continuous with modernism, and finally the position as adopted by Smart
himself views Post-modernism not as a separte epoch but continually pointing out the limitations of
modernism. [Barry Smart, Post-modernity, Routledge, London, 1993]

Derrida opposed structuralism and reduced language to "writing". While in his theory of
deconstruction there remained a focus on language, writing was not supposed to be a structure. In
Derrida’s hands the stability and order of the language system turns into disorderly and unstable.
Secondly, the underlying laws of language as was found by Saussure were gone in Derrida’s
technique. Derrida’s objective is to strongly oppose logocentrism (the search for a universal system
of thought expressing truth, beautiful, etc.). Derrida believes that logocentrism, since Plato, has
caused closure, repression which needs to be deconstructed by freeing writing from things that
enslave it. Derrida brings in the notion of the traditional theological stage present for centuries
governed by authors and directors. However, the alternative stage in the Derridean scheme, with

57
‘free’ actors or writers with no role of ‘dictators’ appears to be a vague and anarchic. Here also
comes the post structuralist/ Post-modernist argument of ‘decentering’ allowing actors a sort of
freedom of play, open ended position. Actually speaking, in the words of George Ritzer, "Having
debunked authority, in the end Derrida leaves us without an answer; in fact, there is no single
answer…"[George Ritzer, Sociological Theory, The Mc Graw Hill Companies, INC, Singapore, 1996,
p.598.]

In his effort at attacking the ‘metaphysics of presence’ Derrida takes recourse to what Martin Jay
calls ‘carnivalesque play of language’. "This play of Deconstruction constitutive of signification
necessarily involves both the disruption of presence, which is always part of a chain of substitution
which transcend it, and the reference to presence, but a presence which can never fully be achieved
but is constantly deferred. Difference is thus ‘the obliterated origin of absence and presence’.
Difference can only be conceptualized by means of a language which necessarily, by virtue of the
nature of difference, itself, involves the metaphysics of presence: since it is ontologically prior to
both presence and absence, is therefore unknowable. From this contradictions springs the practice
of deconstruction which involves contesting the metaphysics of presence on its own terrain – a
terrain from which there is (in) any case no escape…" [Alex Callinicos, Against Post-modernism, A
Marxist Critique, Polity Press, Cambridge, U.K., 1996, p.75] This is a critique from a Marxist and it
strikes at the very root of the Deconstruction theory. Actually speaking Derrida’s focus on
differentiation implies either nostalgia for a lost unity or conversely a utopian hope for a future one.
This utopian hope induces him groping for a "pure" word, the original word, from which
supposedly emanated all the words. It sounds like the word or original word in Hindu mythology
‘Om’ — word as pure as God. Such flight to the so-called first principle is nothing but a romantic
nostalgic exercise. It is what some critics found a search for "transcendental consciousness". Many
writers have found in Derrida’s argument strong affinity with the German idealist tradition. It
appears that with post-modernists/post-structuralists the Derridian concept of difference is found
more attractive than differentiation. With the abandonment of any hope for a new totalization in
the dialectical sense, they fall for such an untotalized network with the Derridian supplementary
differences positing as the superior alternative to the Marxist notion of totality. But while doing so
ultimately, they deny the subject and furnish a counter holistic concept. We learn from Alex
Callinicos the critique of Derrida by Dews who argue that Derrida offers us ‘a philosophy of
difference as the absolute’ — an absolute which like Schelling’s is unknowable by the procedures
characteristic of modern scientific rationality.’ Callinicos adds that the idealist Schelling believed
that the absolute could be grasped intuitively; Derrida, by contrast, relies on the endless play of
signifiers to provide us with an intimation of difference, though no more than that, because of the
necessarily metaphysical nature of language. [Alex Callinicos, Ibid, p.76]

Under the extreme form of Post-modernism, Baudrillard criticised Marx for being infected by the
"virus of bourgeois thought". He announced the alternative of "symbolic exchange" against the
Marxian analysis of capitalism. Baudrillard was critical of the working class and appears to accept
the role of the new left, of hippies, etc. For him modern society was no longer dominated by
production, but rather by the "media, cybernetic models and steering systems, computers,
information processing, entertainment and knowledge industries and so forth". From all such
features, Baurillard found a veritable explosion of signs with the objective shifting from exploitation
and profit to domination by the signs and the systems that produce them. Such post-modernist
theoreticians preached that with the new epoch taking centre stage, the masses become
increasingly passive, instead of increasingly rebellious as the Marxists believe. This Baurillard, after
his visit to the USA, came to the conclusion that there is no revolutionary hope, nor is there the
possibility of reforming society.[Jean Baudrilland, America, Verso, London, 1989]

58
Foucault received an assignment to cover the Islamic Revolution in Iran from which power was
captured by the forces of Khomeini. Foucault thoroughly endorsed this Iranian Islamism for its
being completely different from the "Western episteme". Foucault supported it as because in Iran
the so-called Islamic Revolution was free from the modern elements like "class struggle or of social
confrontations" or "the presence of a vanguard, class, party, or political ideology" [Lawrence D.
Kritzman (ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture — Interviews and Other Writings
1977-1984, Routledge, London, 1988 pp. 212-13] Foucault’s extreme bitterness against
Enlightenment Reason leads him to court obscurantism of Iranian Islamic leaders. He posits the
Iranian case against Reason in the following way.

"They don’t have the same regime of truth as ours, which , it has to be said, is very special, even it
has become almost universal..... The Arabs of Maghreb have another, and in Iran it is largely
modelled on a religion that has an exotic form and an esoteric content .......So not only is saying one
thing that means another not a condemnable ambiguity, it is on the contrary, a necessary and highly
prized additional level of meaning. It is often the case that people say something that, at the factual
level, isn’t true, but refers to another, deeper meaning, which cannot be assimilated, in terms of
precision and observation."[Ibid p.223]

While class, party, social confrontation, etc. are rejected as outcomes of Western Reason, Foucault
glorifies not only Iranian religion but also the curious notion of Truth there. Thus Foucault obscures
all the glaring line between truth and hideous falsehood. Armed with such a view, the Foucaultian
scheme can not offer any justifiable or consistent explanation for imperialism or any genuine
struggle to come out of the feudal socio-economic and cultural systems. The general Post-modern
view as expressed by Foucault to posit non-western un-reason against all Western Reason. This
way of glorifying all religious rituals and practices as embodiment of tradition is to push the world
back into the morass of orthodox tradition. Foucault’s avoidance of presenting a narrative of
colonialism, imperialism, political economy of capitalism actually blunts the cutting edge of his
otherwise brilliant exposition of the birth of psychiatry or power based knowledge. It should not be
forgotten that Foucault visualised a massive project for ‘The Modern Age’ and the ‘Western
episteme’. Foucault launched his crusade against liberation or to refer to the power, the immense
power of modern imperialism in this period. Such silence is deafening.

Leotard defined the modern in the following words:

"I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a meta-
discourse........ Making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectic of spirit, the
hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of
wealth ..... This is the Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a
good ethico-political end — universal peace." [Jean-Francois Leotard, The Post-modern Condition
— A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, Introduction]

Thus the Post-modern condition what Leotard considered as modern is just an altogether rejection
of what he considered as "modern". It is a rejection of Hegel and his view on "the dialectics of
spirit", Kant’s view on the emancipation of the rational or working subject and Marxism for its
dialectical-materialist position rejecting all unreason and the irrationalities of the capitalist market.
Leotard like all Post-modernists do not like to speak of ‘humanity’ or ‘mankind’ which is supposed
to be a part of Enlightenment universalism leading towards a totalising meta-narrative. When the
notion of globalization, global economy, etc. takes the centre stage with the third world countries
increasingly falling under the deadly impact of globalization, one wonders how could the post-
modernists work out a theory to face those problems.

59
Leotard and other Post-modernists not only stand against the metanarrative of reason and
emancipation, they posit "little narratives" of ethnic minorities, local communities, traditional
beliefs, etc. against the former. Leotard’s dangerously sectarian and orthodox approach to culture is
found in the following sentences quoted by Aijaz Ahmad.

"The consensus that permits such knowledge to be circumscribed and makes it possible to
distinguish one who knows from one who doesn’t (the foreigner, the child) is what constitutes the
culture of a people.

..............Anthropological studies and literature that take rapidly developing societies as their object
can attest to the survival of this type of knowledge within them, at least in some of their sectors.
The very idea of development presupposes a horizon of non-development where, it is assumed, the
various areas of competence remained enveloped in the unity of tradition and are not differentiated
according to a separate qualifications subject to specific innovations, debates and inquiries ...... It is
even compatible with the (apparently contrary) premise of the superiority of customary knowledge
over the contemporary dispersion of competence."[Jean-Francois Leotard, The Post-modern
Condition .... Ibid.p-19]

Post-modernism, while rejecting rationality, often tends to find in the pre-modern condition the
sufficient answer to the solutions for the problems of modernity. Leotard’s approach to the
understanding of ‘culture’ is fraught with the dangerously orthodox proposition distinguishing
‘foreigners’ and ‘natives’. In cultural anthropology such a proposition was smuggled in the 1960s
with the emphasis that ‘outsiders’ can not faithfully study a traditional society. In European
philosophy also such conception of culture as a form of intuitive knowledge available to the insider
dates back to at least Fichte and Herder.. It was very common with German Romanticism and
European racism. When human potential ‘to act as rational and moral agents’ is denounced by the
post-modernists, it is natural for them to worship traditional illusory and overtly barbaric
practices. In India during the hey-day of religious nationalism under the British Raj, orthodox
Hindus were the dogmatic protagonists for the preservation of Indian tradition rooted in grotesque
practices. The RSS activists must draw inspiration from Leotard’s propositions by rejecting non-
Hindus any potential and scope to study Hindu practices to which they are the supposed foreigners.
Leotard’s definition of culture as primordial belonging and intuitive knowledge actually leads him
to draw the unscientific and irrational contrast between development with the modern elements
emanated from Enlightenment and non-development based on ‘the superiority of customary
knowledge’. The positing of clear binary opposition between development and tradition virtually
fits well with American modernization theories.

Hindu revivalists bear a romantic longing for the spirit of the past as a dominant principle against
"individualistic, critical, rationalistic and materialistic trends of modern Western civilization. Hindu
revivalism believes in a traditional, organic and associative outlook." [V.P. Varma, Modern Indian
Political Thought, Agra, 1980, pp372-373] Like all the Hindu revivalists, the founders of the
Bharatiya Jana Sangh which is now the BJP, announced the superiority of Hindu culture and was
deeply convinced of the moral and rational efficacy of its values [ibid p.396]

Habermas found neo-conservatism in Post-modernism. Actually speaking Habermas liked the early
modernism of the Enlightenment period. On the other hand Leotard wanted to remove all
enlightenment based modernism. Habermas opposed Post-modernism for its total condemnation of
Reason and Enlightenment. He found that in the late 60s the youth were increasingly being

60
overwhelmed by unreason, anarchism and frustration. He thought the crisis lay in the present
economic system itself.

Post-structuralists, however, apparently differed themselves with modernism by emphasizing ‘text’,

not history or society. Derrida, Barthes et al believed that there is nothing without language. Such
faith in language is in actual sense a sort of revolving within modernism. The language and
discourse are closely related in the view of the post structuralists.

It should be emphatically stated that both modernism and post-modernism are related to European
or American society. Our country like most of the 3rd world countries has not yet witnessed
‘modernism’ in the western sense. A backward economic structure, steeped in tradition or religion,
like ours has yet to get "modernised". So the debate is irrelevant in the mostly pre-modern system
and structure in countries of the 3rd world.

If all categories are rejected, if certain things like measurement through the conceptual tools like
theoretical mathematics are condemned, it will ultimately take us nowhere, in a chaotic condition.
Foucault in his Post-modernist writings rejected all sorts of power. Post-modernists also advocate
total rejection of certain tools essential to find certain results like cause and effect and thus force us
to go in for total chaos. Post-modernists/Post-structuralists do not provide any solution, only raise
questions and ultimately end up in absurdities. It takes us to a world without basis, without the
need for change of the present system and in the end rejects common sense and the prospect of
progress to a new society. They reject the power of a writer or the metaphysical basis of language
but unwillingly or consciously develop power of their own to convince, behind a veil of neutrality
and ultimately enter the cage of an anti-realist philosophy of language. Most important of all that
the big guns of Post-modernism and their trusted disciples keep themselves out of the pale of
simple protest like against the US aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere. It is worth
mentioning that academicians and intellectuals of the 20th century, both liberal unorthodox and
Marxist in inclinations, made their voice heard around the world on questions of war, imperialist
aggression, fascism, etc. In contrast the Post-modernist/ Post-structuralists leaders’ voice is hardly
heard when imperialism is unleashing its unbridled offensive against the people and even against
some states asserting their rights of sovereignty.

000

Post-modernism: A Romantic Petty-Bourgeois Exercise Dumping

Rationality and Practice
Foucault presents us certain powerful arguments.

In Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish Foucault furnishes us with fascinating
examples that we are living in a disciplinary society. School, college, hospital, army, prison, factories
are all modelled on disciplinary society. Man is in chains. And the basis of this chained condition is
"power-knowledge". He believed that "Power-knowledge springs from a political awareness of
small things for the control and use of men for the purpose of administration" That is, the discourse
of power-knowledge dominates over man. As a corollary of this argument Foucault believed that
even in the change of any established power the domination can not be eliminated. He believed that
any system is an embodiment of domination. He reasoned; "I think another system is to extend our
participation in a system." He accepted that against repression there will be resistance and it will be
local, sporadic but that much. Foucault also went to the extent of declaring that "Power is never

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manifested globally but always at local points, as micro power". He came in support of protest
movements inside jails. With this notion of disciplinary society Foucault analysed the French
Revolution. He accepted that Enlightenment brought some measure of freedom but also burdened
man with chains of domination. Through this Revolution peasants were made citizens from serfs
and for this they had to pay a heavy price.

About Marxism he said "At the deepest level of western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real
discontinuity ........ Marxism had no intention of disturbing and above all, no power to modify even,
one jot, since it rested entirely upon it."[Foucault The Order of Things, pp. 260-262] Against the
Marxian view of unity, totality and universalism Foucault in his book Archaeology of Knowledge
(Introduction) emphasized fragments, discontinuity and rupture. He himself stated that he is far
away from Marxism and closer to Niestzsche. Echoing Foucault, Leotard has written "Let us wage
war on totality.....Let us activate difference".

First, the concept of power can be analysed from two aspects. It is a fact that knowledge also gives
birth to power. Examples are galore to justify it. If it is considered from the other way round one
may conceive of a situation minus knowledge. Does it augur well for humankind? Is not knowledge
essential? Besides that, when Foucault is vocal with his knowledge-based concept, does it not exert
power on the listeners or readers?

Secondly, Foucault’s view on all the systems producing power is not to bring about any
fundamental change. Structural functionalists and system analysts in the 1960s made it a point to
drive this idea home that all systems are basically for the same function of delivering goods with
requisite measures of system maintenance. David Easton in his system theory clearly stressed this
point reducing practically all the differences between a capitalist or socialist system to nothingness.
If one is to accept Foucault’s view then one cannot see the difference between a feudal or fascist
capitalist system and a socialist system. As a corollary to Foucault’s view one cannot expect any or
try for any better system without the ruthless exploitation of the feudal lords or capitalists.
Foucault and such post-modernists saw the socialist degeneration in the USSR and elsewhere. But
while totally rejecting such new advanced systems they have not provided any remedy. In fact
many of the Post-modernists like Leotard preferred the capitalist order. If post-modernists/ Post-
structuralists are to be accepted then one is to reject the inherent and basic differences between a
slave system and the feudal system, and between the capitalist system and the socialist system.

Jurgeon Habermas was the first theoretician who showed the relationship between Post-
modernism and neo-conservation and in his Adorno award speech criticised both of them.
Habermas was in favour of modernism of the period of Enlightenment; on the contrary Leotard was
against enlightenment-based modernism. Habermas identified post-modernism as "Post-modern
conservation" and then attacked it. He called Foucault and Derrida ‘Young conservative’. Habermas
looked with terror at the situation when the young generation was overwhelmed by unreason,
anarchism and frustration. He also called post-modernism anti-modernism.

Marx and Engel’s did not uncritically accept the Enlightenment. It should be remembered that
despite great positive aspects of the Enlightenment, at the base of it lay the idealistic assumption
that consciousness plays the decisive role in the development of society. It did not impart stress on
the decisive role of the economic conditions of development and the objective laws of society. It
addressed all classes of society especially those in power, preparing the advent of the capitalist
system.

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What George Lukacs called "Romantic anti-capitalism" has now come up in the garb of post-
modernism/post-structuralism in the challenge against entire Enlightenment. But what transpires
as the main difficulties common to all the philosophers of this trend (Deleuze, Derrida, Foucant, et
al) is their dangerous denial of any objectivity to discourse, their inability to base their resistance to
power which they claim to articulate, their rejection of any coherence and also actual initiative to be
assigned to the human subject. It is notable that on many an occasion those philosophers of the new
trend are using tools of modernism while rejecting it. In his critique of the Enlightenment and the
rising capitalist system Marx of course examined bourgeois society, not as the actualization of
reason, but as the latest version of the exploitation and imperialist expansion, distinguished chiefly
by its technological dynamism and nurturing of the proletariat – the class capable of abolishing the
exploitative society. While Marx and Engel’s, working in the second half of the 19th century, used
scientific reason against the bourgeoisie to decode the law of motion of capitalism in order to
destroy it, Nietzche, the philosopher father of Fascism and also present-day post-modernism/post-
structuralism, a contemporary of those enemies of capitalism, preached the will to power as
intrinsic to life itself and rejected non-exploitative society. This new idealism bears two prominent
qualities, viz. puzzling and confusing the readers and lulling them in the deep tunnel with no escape
route. This trend poses to be doing battles against holism, logocentric tradition, Enlightenment
reason and univocality but what finally emerges, to follow Habermas, "is that it merely inverts
consciousness – philosophy by denying the subject, and thus ironically, is as holistic as the
logocentric traditions it opposes….."[Quoted in Martin Jay, Habermas and Post-modernism In Victor
E. Taylor and Charles E.Winquist, … ….., Volume II, Routledge, London and New Yourk, 1998, pp.
241-242] This new trend is actually conservative with radical pronouncements. It can be equated
with some striking features of the advanced capitalist societies which are both libertarian and
authoritarian, hedonistic and repressive, multiple and monolithic. "The logic of the market place is
one of pleasure and plurality, of the ephemeral and discontinuous of some great decentred network
of desire of which individuals seem the mere fleeting effects…. The political ambivalences of post-
modernism match this contradiction exactly … a lot of post modernism is politically oppositional
but economically complicit…." [Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Post modernism, Blackwell
Publishiers, UK 1997, p.132]

Post-modernists/Post-structuralists declare war on Enlightenment and Reason as they built up the

base of modernism, which later showed signs of degeneration. The question is how can one reject
post-feudal developments? Instead of rejecting all the development in the fields of technology,
science and such other fields a judicious, sober and rational view could have helped make a proper
review of the developments related to the benefits of man and society and to decide on how to put a
stop to the potentials of danger and degeneration. Take for example, the question of deforestation.
Necessary deforestation in pockets could be balanced with systematic afforestation programmes in
a planned economy (as was done in the communes in Mao’s China) — but it is the capitalist’s greed
for profits that ravages the ecology. Some post-modernists are vocal supporters of environmental
preservation. It is a right stand against reckless destruction of nature. Modernism overlooked
environment, its flora and fauna. Man-nature relation was trampled by aggressive modernism
based on capitalism.

It should be kept in mind words, like grassroots, grass level, etc. were given priority by Mao. Post-
modernists with their overwhelming priority on fragments, opposition to the concept of whole, etc.
pose their views as a paradigmatic shift. Way back it was Marx who declared in 1844 "The
universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature
as his inorganic body, (1) as a means of life and (2) as a matter, the object and the tool of his
activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say, nature in so far as it is not human body. Man
lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is

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not to die. To say that man’s physical and metal life is linked to nature simply means that nature is
linked to itself, for man is a part of nature."[Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, In
Marx, Early Writing, Vintage, New York, 1974, p.328] Thus Marx, in his much discussed question of
alienation, brought forth the problem of estrangement of humanity from its own labouring activity
along with from its active role in transforming nature, making man’s estrangement from his own
body from his spiritual, human essence. It is also an estrangement of man from himself and nature.

It is in order to state that Post-modernist are not the pioneers in raising the question of ecological
consciousness. Marx was not basically an environmentalist. Whenever he invoked Prometheus he
did it mainly to project him as a symbol of revolution not as a symbol of technology. He was not a
crude worshipper of ‘Prometheanism’ or in other words a worshipper of the machine. Against
mechanistic domination Marx did not share the views of the Romantics. He favoured rational
development of science and technology for the all-round development of human creative potentials
for the achievement of a realm of freedom maintaining ties with nature. It was Marx who could
anticipate the destructive effects of machinery and large-scale industry. In his own words,

"All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of
robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is progress
towards ruining the long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large
scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more
rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques
and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining
the original source of all wealth – the soil and the worker."[Marx, Capital, Vol. I. pp. 637-38, quoted
in John Bellamy Foster, Marx And The Environment, Monthly Review, July-August 1995, p. 109]

Marx’s materialism is obviously not the ‘Baconian’ domination of nature and economic
development. It contained the assertion of ecological values, the assertion for balance man-nature
relations. It is opposed to a spiritualistic, vitalistic view of the natural world tending to be the
worshipper of nature. Marx’s approach to environment was not spiritualistic naturalism or natural
theology. Some Marxists also became staunch protagonists of unbridled development of productive
forces without taking into account its fall-out on the man-nature relationship and the negative and
destructive potentials associated with the monstrous growth of technology and science and also
certain ideological and cultural decay. Mao opposed the theory of productive forces emphasizing
politics in command in the context of his fight against the capitalist roaders. In India too the CPI and
the CPI(M) on different occasions voiced in favour of pure industrialisation citing the examples of
the first world countries. It is in order to state that among the poets of the Romantic Age in England
Wordsworth and some others gave a call to go back to Nature against the rapid progress of
industrialisation. This love of Nature was also the result of bitter feelings emanating from the all-
out attack against the feudal order during the French Revolution. The poetic fancy can permit a
flight to the bosom of Nature disregarding down-to-earth reality but the irresistible power of the
Industrial Revolution proceeded as a natural development opening up a new age tearing apart the
past socio-economic relations. Some post-modernists echo the romanticists but one should take
into account the present stage of industrialisation with potentials of devastation. The motive for
super-profit, destruction of nature and production of lethal weapons etc. have been closely
associated with the present moribund capitalist system and the extent to which those dangerous
features have reached any conscious Marxist or even a democrat must think twice before extending
support to any industrialisation or scientific experiments. We differ with post-modernists like
Norman O Brown who announced in the late 60s: "Release all the chains of desire, instinct,
discipline and the limits of all restraint. Be naked, strip yourself and go back to the habits of savage
humans."[Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, London:

64
Sphere Books 1970] Daniel Bell called this attitude of Norman O. Brown "the Post-modern mood",
Brown is also against Reason and he believed that all knowledge is acquired through our sensory
organs.

Even Freud, the leading figure of Psychology and a non-Marxist, studied instinct and placed his
theory of the subconscious at a plane between the conscious and the unconscious. Freud in his
unearthing of the subconscious, mainly tried to develop a bridge between art and neurosis, a sort of
compromise between instinct and reality. In his discourse on civilization and its insatiety, Freud
clearly stated that man always swings between the demand of instinct and the restriction of society.
With the progress of civilization individuality becomes reduced, and that civilization puts man on
certain fetters. Then Freud found some compatibility between the development of civilization and
progress based on libido. He believed that at a certain stage a baby gets detached from the mother,
which is necessary for the well being of the baby. In Freud’s opinion the real problem did not lie in
the imposition of restrictions on inspirations. Not only that he had also to ultimately state critically
that his psychoanalysis has confused many people. He was poignant to add that psychoanalysis was
not any advocacy of unbridled instincts, rather its aim was to sound a warning to mend the
deviations of the people in their lives.

The post-modernist mentors like Brown are for lifting all instinctive desires. While Freud,
commonly known as the father of psychoanalysis emphasizing instinctive factors, was for a
restriction, the post-modernists prefer destruction of all restrictions on sex or instinctive acts.

Marx described his position in a unity of naturalism and humanism. Naturalism is that man is a part
of nature, not created by some transcendental spiritual agency. But humanism is the view related to
the fact that by a creative way of acting, in other words praxis, man both changes nature and
creates himself. He assertively stated that "If one wants to judge all human acts, movements,
relations, etc. in accordance with the principle of utility one must first deal with human nature in
general and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch." [Capital, Vol.1 ch.22]
Marx gave new life to Aristotle’s distinction between actuality and potentiality. And what is more is
that Marx specified the conditions under which human potentiality is crippled and wasted: the
division of labour, private property, capital, state oppression and false ideological consciousness.
Their abolition, what Freud never conceived of, is a necessary condition of universal emancipation.

The post-modern Brown was attracted to Russeau’s famous saying: man was born free and
everywhere he is now in chains. With this Brown found that Freud is the measuring stick of our
unsacred madness and Nietzsche is the symbol of sacred madness and mad truth. Whereas Marx
worked on a broader plane, Post-modernists like Brown instead of visualising a new order based on
equality and higher order of culture advocated anarchy and slavery to instinctive needs. Erich
Fromm in his book The crisis of Psycho analysis, Essays on Freud, Marx and Social Psychology had
this to say: ".......... Marx’s petit-bourgeois interpreters interpreted his theory as an economistic
psychology. In reality, historical materialism is far from being a psychological theory; its
psychological presupposition are few and may be briefly listed: men make their own history; needs
motivate men’s actions and feelings (hunger and love); these needs increase in the course of
historical development, thereby spurring increased economic activity, .......... Marx and Engels
certainly stressed that the drive towards self-preservation took priority over all other needs, but
they did not go into details about the quality of various drives and needs. However, they never
maintained that the ‘acquisitive drive, the passion for acquisition as an aim in itself, was the only or
essential need. To proclaim it a universal human drive would be naively to absolutise a psychic trait
that has taken on uncommon force in capitalist society." [pp.167-168] In the same way if instinctive

65
drive is given precedence over all economic and cultural activities of the people, as some post-
modernists preach, man is posited as a slave to instincts!

To come once again to Foucault’s view on power, the world has come across two powerful trends
like anarchism and syndicalism in the past. Those Post-modernists reject the principle of political
authority as well. Anarchism also rejected it and imagined a society without authority. It’s central
negative thrust is directed against the core elements that make up the modern state, particularly its
coercive machinery. The positive thrust of anarchism is directed towards the vindication of ‘natural
society’, i.e. a self-regulated society of individuals and freely-formed groups. Marx and Engels saw it
as a petty bourgeois phenomenon. The attack was not against the actual state but an abstract state
that nowhere exists. Moreover anarchism denied what was essential in the struggle for the
emancipation of the working class: political action by an independent working-class party leading
to conquest, not the immediate destruction of political power. For Engels "abolition of the state
makes sense only as the necessary result of the abolition of classes, with whose disappearance the
need for organised power of one class for the purpose of holding down the other class will
automatically disappear."[Marx, Engels, Lenin, Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndication, Progress
Publication, Moscow, 1972, p. 27]

What Foucault meant by all-pervading power is an indisputable fact. But the abstract theory voicing
against power is in reality a sort of valued criticism of powers without furnishing any remedial
measures. Marxism rightly differentiates between the central and all-powerful power of the state
and other centres of power. If Foucault’s view that whoever occupies the state must wield power, is
accepted to the letter then no effort should be made to destroy the existing power of the exploiting
classes occupying the state. This virtually leaves the exploiting classes to retain the principal power
centre. However, we, the Marxists have to find ways and means to check the communist party-led
state turning into a bureaucratic power-wielding centre. On this score we still have to do a lot on
the ideological and political front, particularly in post-revolutionary societies. Besides that, the
peripheral multi-faceted sources of power should also be taken into account. But what Foucault
presented as all-pervading power without any proper theorisation on tackling them is in reality the
presentation of a fearsome picture of a monster with countless tentacles keeping uninterrupted
surveillance on all of us who are reduced to helplessness in perpetuity. Foucault, however, was in
favour of small-scale protests but those are not supposed to culminate into a revolutionary struggle
under a disciplined and well-ordered party.

To come to refute the view of Foucault on discontinuity, rupture, fragment in the historical process,
Marxian dialectic examines the world in constant movement, change and development. The study of
the general picture of the world’s development is an important task of materialist dialectics. This
movement proceeds not along a closed circuit, but along a spiral, each spire being deeper, richer
and more diverse than the preceding one. Foucault did not find continuity but only ruptures and
discontinuity. What Marxists stress is that the material world is not only a developing, but also a
connected integral whole. All its objects and phenomena develop not in themselves, not in isolation,
but in inseparable connection or unity with other objects, etc. are some of the important examples
of this inter-connection and unity with nature. In history, the general trend in the world is to move
from a primitive socio-economic system and relations to machine-based higher stage of economic
and social system. There may be short-lived ruptures in this process. Marx cited the example of the
attacks of barbarian tribes to overrun the Roman Empire bringing about a sort of break in the then
advanced socio-economic structure (Grundrisse). Marxian dialectics also stresses the spiral in
process of history, obviously not a pure straight line. In Foucault ruptures or discontinuity gets
precedence over the general historical trend of progress. In practice such theory is dangerous, since
it reduces the historical process to only uncertain discontinuity. History, like so many things, is then

66
like accidental events with no progress and the makers of history, in this Post-modern view, must
not have to work out any programme, must not have to have any theory and goal. Thus we are led
to a world full of uncertainty, with no future of an advanced civilization. When such a theory is
blended with the notion of never-possible-change in the power structure spread from top to bottom
we are thrust into a world of frustration and futility. Foucault thus ends his ostensible tirade
against the systemic power and oppression by projecting a state of permanent human bondage.

It is an irony of history that while the anarchists like Bakunin, Cropotkin et al advocated some
adventurous actions against the oppressive regimes, our present day post-modernists/post-
structuralists in general are too timid for any effective action against US imperialism and its
international role of exploitation and barbarous attacks on all opponents of its interests.

As to the Post-modernist concepts of the infinite (unlimited), totality, truth, etc. a few words may be
added here. Marxism considers that the direct perception of things is the initial phase towards
knowledge. Lenin defined sensation as a subjective image of the objective world. Idealist agnostics
claim that the world consists of certain combinations of sensations of the subject, that there are as
many worlds as there are people. This is false. In reality our sense organs do not deceive us. In
Mao’s view sensory or perceptual knowledge takes a dialectical leap in the brains to reach the level
of conceptual knowledge. Logical cognition or the conceptual knowledge is a higher state of
knowledge resulting from generalised activities of man’s reason, the painstaking process of a vast
mass of data furnished by sensory knowledge. Concepts also reflect the changing world, the
constantly developing practice, and hence they themselves must be flexible and mobile. Other
forms of thought-judgement and conclusions are formed on the basis of concepts. It is in order to
mention it that while the supporters of empiricism underestimate the role of abstract thought or
knowledge, accepting only sense-impressions, the supporters of rationalism do not believe in the
sense-organs and consider reason or abstract thought the sole source of true knowledge. Marxism
places three interconnected basis of knowledge — sensory, human practice in constituting social
life and concept.

Dialectical materialism understands truth as that knowledge of an object, which correctly reflects
that object, i.e., corresponds to it. With this dialectical materialism solves another important
problem of knowledge, i.e. how man cognizes objective truth - at once completely, unconditionally,
absolutely or only approximately, relatively. Absolute truth is objective truth in its entirety, an
absolutely exact reflection of reality. In principle Marxism holds that nothing is unknowable but
simultaneously it accepts it that there are limitations to the cognitive abilities of man’s reason. His
knowledge is limited by the corresponding historical conditions, the level of development of
production, science and experimental techniques. In this sense his knowledge is limited. Relative
truth is the incomplete correspondence of knowledge to reality. And thus it is closer to the
cognition of absolute truth, to knowing its new elements, links and sides. Relative truth is, in a
sense, containing grains of absolute truth. Man’s knowledge is relative and also absolute; relative
because it is not exhaustive and can be endlessly developed and deepened, revealing new sides of
reality; absolute, because it contains elements of eternal, absolutely exact knowledge. In addition to
it Marxism holds that truth is always concrete, not abstract. Even for one and the same process
truth cannot be eternal or fixed once and for all. This process itself develops, the conditions in
which it takes place change and naturally the truth reflecting it also undergoes change. What is true
in a certain condition may be untrue in a changed condition.

Thus Marxism is just the reverse of the view of Nictschez and other post-modern theoreticians who
reject objective truth or any hope of progress. Human civilization itself negates such desperately
pessimist views while conceding the fact of temporary retardation, retreat, crisis and all the

67
stumbling blocks in history. Marxists reject the absolutising notion of the post-modernists/post-
structuralists that truth is constituted by language or that truth is always formed by power.

Related to the question of knowledge the Marxian concept of totality stands radically against the
post-modernist view of fragments as enunciated by Foucault. Marxism stressed dynamic totality. It
is the concrete unity of interacting contradictions. The systemic relativity of all totality both
upwards and downwards, i.e. all totality is made up of totalities subordinated to it and vice versa
Secondly, all totality is changing in the concrete historical period. Marx took the concept of totality
as a dialectical method from Hegel. In Lenin’s words "The totality of all sides of the phenomenon, of
reality and their (reciprocal) relations - that is what truth is composed ........"[Lenin, Conspectus of
Hegel’s science of logic, progress Publishers, 1961, p.196] Thus social totality in Marxist theory is a
structured and historically determined complex. It exists in and through those manifold
meditations and transitions through which its specific parts of complexes — i.e., the partial
totalities — are linked to each other in a dynamic world. The fragmented approach of the Post-
modernists cannot provide us with concrete knowledge. It cannot give a many-sided view of totality
basing on categories and practice. Such rejection of totality by post-modernists/post-structuralists
with total negation of theory and the concept of truth can only furnish a partial view. Jean Paul
Sartre criticised the concept of totality as something problematic. However his concern was
"totalisation" not ‘totality’ as such. Sartre found totalisation, i.e. a multiplicity which totalizes itself
to totalise the practical field from a certain perspective, and its common action, through each
organic praxis, is revealed to every common individual as a developing objectification.[Sartre,
Critique of Dialectical Reason, London, New Left, p.492.1960] In such a view the whole, as a
developing totalisation, exists in everyone in the form of a unity of the "interiorised multiplicity and
nowhere else".

Richard Hartland in his book Superstructuralism marks a distinction between structuralism and
superstructuralism (in other words post-structuralist, post-modernism). Hartland states that the
former in general, is concerned to know the (human) world - to uncover it through detailed
observational analysis and to map it out under extended explicatory grids. "Their stance is still the
traditional scientific stance of objectivity, their goal the traditional scientific goal of Truth."[Richard
Hartland, Superstructuralism, Methuen, London, 1987 p.2] About the later i.e. Superstructuralism
Hardand writes that "...... These groups are fractious in the extreme, and make the most of their
differences. Nonetheless, they do share a characteristic new philosophical position — and this
characteristic new philosophical position is not only incompatible with the concept of structure but
also quite radically anti-scientific. In effect, the Post-Structuralists bend the philosophical
implications of the Superstructuralists way of thinking about superstructures back round against
the traditional stance of Objectivity and the traditional goal of truth. And, with the destruction of
objectivity and Truth, scientific knowledge becomes less valuable than literary and political activity;
and detailed observational analysis and extended explicatory grids are discarded in favour of
instaneous lighting-flashes of paradoxical illumination." [Ibid.p.3]

Let us consider the critique of Marxism by the front ranking post-modernist Baudrillard. As for
natural labour power, he considers work no more important than non-functional play and ritual in
the primitive conditions. He contradicted Marx’s view on alienation. In Marxian sense it is an action
through which (or a state in which) a person, a group, an institution, or a society becomes (or
remains) alien (1) to the results or products of its own activity (and to the activity itself), and/or (2)
to the nature in which it lives, and/or (3) to other human beings, and — in addition and through
any or all of (1) to (3) — also (4) to itself (to its own historically created human possibilities).
Boudlliard thinks that a man is alienated when he starts to see himself in terms of labour-power in
the first place. He criticises Marx for placing the needs against the interest of capital, as being under

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the spell of the capitalist consumption ethic. So Boudlliard does not consider the Marxian view as a
radical one. Secondly, he contradicted Marx’s concept on use-value and exchange-value. Marx’s
view was that exchange-value ought to correspond with use-value. Boudlliard stated that exchange-
value is autonomous. In the Marxist conception, the apparent fairness and balance in exchange
relations between man and man no longer corresponds to a real fairness and balance on the level of
use-value; the system of equivalences on the level of exchange value merely obscures and excuses
the real exploitation of one class by another. But Marx still thinks that exchange-value ought to
correspond to use-value, rejecting the autonomy of exchange value. Baudlliard not only accepts
autonomy of exchange-value, what he objects is exchange value per se exchange value as it operates
in the capitalist economics, exchange value as a system of equivalences. With this view Boudlliard
moves further and poses things in his post-structuralist way. He sees the capitalist tyranny as not
mere accumulation of material benefits by one class at the expense of another, he posits the tyranny
at the proper functioning of social exchange. And then referring everything to natural needs,
natural labour-power and natural use-value Baudlliard thinks, the tyranny manages to make itself
seem natural. He thus inverts the notion that exchange-value, obscures and excuses a real
exploitation on the level of use-value, and claims that, on the contrary, use-value serves as "a
referential rationale (raison) a concept, an alibi" for a real tyranny on the level of exchange-value. In
a post-modernists/post-structuralists fashion Baudlliard virtually obscures the basis of capitalist
exploitation at the socio-economic level based on ownership of means of production conditioning
the extraction of labour power of the class forced to sell labour power. Instead of this relationship,
Baudlliard places the whole mechanism of exploitation, which, he asserts, is to be found in "a new
revolution that has occurred in the capitalist world ........." And this is the measuring, coding,
regulating system, which applies to every aspect of human exchange-relation. The whole
operationalization of all exchanges lies under the law of the code. Thus he wants to have us believe
that what Marx never contemplated and Marxists fail to comprehend is that the present day
capitalist exploitation is to be found not in basically and fundamentally the production relation but
in "a structure of control and of power much more stable and more totalitarian than that of
exploitation". He assertively states that we are now faced with "the symbolic destruction of all
social relations not so much by the ownership of the means of production but by the control of the
code" [V. Jean Baudlliard, The Mirror of Production, St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975, p.122.]

Thus, like other Post-modernists Baudlliard, basing himself on semiotics, finds alternative to the
present capitalist system not in some pre-signifying "nature" but in a further intensification of
signifying itself. In Hartland’s explanation if we can no longer simply recover a state of social flow
and giving as in symbolic exchange of the tribes, then we must take the deliberately perverse route
of intensifying our present day of anti-social inertia and passive receptivity. And since consumerism
is the very essence of our anti-social inertia and passive receptivity, we must become more purely
consumers than before. For Boudlliard "the masses", as created by modern mass-society, are truly
like a physical dead weight, absorbing everything and responding to nothing. By taking the signs,
bombarded by mass-media, literally, as nothing more than signs, "the masses", according to
Baudillard, are driving the regime of "the sign" towards its own logical self-destruction.

Thus the role of ‘masses’ is entirely negative. "Unlike Marxist proletariat, Baulliard’s masses carry
no seed from which a more positive state of society might spring, after the self-destruction of our
present state ........" observes Richard Hartland.

For some structuralists to post-structuralists/post-modernists the real problem is that a most all-
pervading role of ideology, sign and such super structural elements which they give are given a
permanently privileged position over the socio-economic base of a society. Althuser, the
structuralist Marxist, also echoed that in the present stage of capitalism it is bourgeois ideological

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influence which is making overt repression unnecessary as was seen during Marx’s time with the
obvious presence of a repressive apparatus of the police, army, prisons, courts, etc.[Louis Althuser,
Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1971, pp 180-181]

Foucault over stresses the less visible network of coercion and instead of the legal instruments he
basically points to the all-pervading power without specific centre(s). Boudlliard too takes us to the
immense power of signs. In all such instances while the function of multifaceted aspects of signs
controlling and benumbing and also mesmerising the common people are poignantly unfolded, the
fundamental question of all direct exploitation, oppression and control through the economic basis
remaining as the principal source along with all the visible apparatus of repression and control is
theoretically pushed to the level of unimportance or virtually of least importance. There is no
programme for the post-modernists/post-structuralists to do battle against the base for an
alternative system, nor do they stand as the real enemy of modern capitalism. With the flashes of
puzzling arguments lacking in the spirit of a rebel in a real life situation Post-modernism/post-
structuralism will remain in history as half-hearted protesters with profound intellect sans the
cutting teeth. They concentrate on cutting off the branches of a tree, and it is undoubtedly
necessary, but the root is left unattacked.

In his whole thesis on power, Foucault sees state repression but never tries to single it out as the
principal target. Rather he is projecting a vast net-work like a will-o-wisp, which wields power but
it is never possible to hit it or we can never be free from it. In this intellectual exercise while subtle
sources of power, particularly of the present capitalist system, is perfectly presented, Foucault
fights shy of the fundamental generators of power or power centres like the state.

However, one does not disagree when Foucault attacks the view that power exclusively springs
from economic factors. The vitally important questions like gender, race, caste, etc. require to be
studied considering other non-economic factors as well. It is a fact that some Marxists in India and
other countries had and still have a perpetual penchant for reducing all those problems to solely
economic problems. It is vulgar Marxism. The power of Marxism lies in the fact that it contains a
corrective mechanism to check wrong tendencies. It might be in order to once again refer to Engel’s
letter to C. Schmidst on 27 October 1980 combating a reductionist interpretation of the base-
superstucture image by emphasising the ‘ultimate supremacy’ of, or ‘determination in the last
instance’ by the economy which ‘nevertheless operates within the terms laid down by the particular
sphere itself’. He thus moves away from the idea of a causality whereby one level, the economy, is
supposed to be the cause and the other levels, the superstructure its effects. Thus the ultimate
determining factor does not exclude determination by the superstructures, which, as secondary
causes, can produce effects and ‘react’ upon the base.

This has been stated above to make it clear that Marxism does not exclude the important role of the
factors other than economic in certain circumstances and conditions. And here it should be added
that neither Foucault nor Derrida could totally reject Marxism. Foucault had this to comment in an
interview entitled ‘Prison Talk’: "It is impossible at the present time to write history without using a
whole range of concepts directly or indirectly linked to Marx’s thought and situating oneself within
a horizon of thought which has been defined and described by Marx. One might even wonder what
differences there could ultimately be between being a historian and being a Marxist."

Even while rejecting certain fundamentals Derrida assertively stated in his book Specters of Marx
that "........ Now, if there is a spirit of Marxism which I will never be ready to renounce, it is not only
the critical idea or the questing stance (a consistent deconstruction must insist on them even as it
also learns that this is not the last or first world). It is even more a certain emancipatory and

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messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate from any
dogmatics and even from any metaphysico-religious determination, from any messianism. Now,
this gesture of fidelity to a certain spirit of Marxism is a responsibility, once again, would here be
that of an heir. Whether they wish it or know it or not, all men and women, all over the earth, are
today to a certain extent heirs of Marx and Marxism..............". [Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx,
Routledge, New York and London, 1994]

Thus said two stalwarts of post-modernists/post-structuralists with all the reservations on certain
fundamental questions of Marxism. However, Marxism does not require accolades from
intellectuals indulging in some sort of benumbing exercise, which cannot augur well for the people
mired in poverty and exploitation or the people facing imperialist onslaughts.

Then what is the programme of post-modernists? Foucault in his general outline of the
"methodological course" to study power had made it clear that "we must escape from the limited
field of juridical sovereignty and state institutions, and instead base our analysis of power on the
study of the technique and tactics of domination." And again that "It’s not a matter of emancipating
truth from every system of power (which would be chimera, for truth is already power) but of
detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within
which it operates at the present time."[Power/Knowledge, ibid p.133]

Foucault’s programme is limited to only partial or local resistance to power. His evasive attitude
towards the vast power of the modern state reduces his scheme to some form of liberatarianism
without the cutting edge of the revolutionary spirit with a clear aim and objective.

Coming once again to the philosophical question of reason and knowledge, it is necessary to assert
that Marxism is a superior philosophical system and it critically drew heavily on the rational
outlook of the Enlightenment period. Post-modernism attacks at the root of science and reason.
They altogether reject the Kantian concept of reason and knowledge. For Marx, Engels and Lenin,
Kant’s theory of knowledge was defective on three courts. First, it was held to be ahistorical in its
account of the apriori contribution made by the mind in the constitution of knowledge. Secondly,
whereas Kantianism locates the a priori conditions of objective knowledge in faculties of the mind,
Marxism characteristically locates them in indispensable human social practices, which have bodily
and mental aspects. Finally, Engels and Lenin argued that the boundary between the world of
knowable ‘phenomena’ and the unknowable ‘things-in "themselves" was not, as Kantianism
required, fixed and absolute but historically positive. The potential knowability of the world,
independent of and prior to the human subject, was seen as essential to the materialist world-view
of Marxism. Derridean Deconstruction moves towards endless substitution of presence but
presence can never be reached. His difference ultimately involves the metaphysics of presence.
Thus Derrida sets difference in the place unknowable. A return to Kantian "things-in-themselves"!

When post-modern/post-structural concepts are employed in affirmative action or norms they

yield an attitude of skepticism and nihilism within which every kind of coherent and meaningful
enquiry becomes suspect. While reading a text, post-modernism/post-structuralism first postulates
ambiguity, incoherence and not-determination as the attributes of texts, and then actively pursues
the ideal of ambiguity, in coherence and analysis. Such fondness for a play of words leads to a sort
of jugglery through the "denial of the metaphysics of presence and foundationalism of every kind."
With their dismissal of totality they celebrate difference and heterogeneity. Though the Foucaultian
concept of the inseparabletic between power and knowledge or Derridean ultimately difference is
no less a concept of totality. They also reject progress and emancipation in history. The
fragmentation of the social world is, within this perspective, compounded by the

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post-modern/post-structural denial of coherence in life and social structure precluding the
possibility of offering explanations. With their notion of ‘dislocations’ structural regularities and
identities are issues that remain unexamined. Similarly, the narrative of dislocations remains an
enigma. They even rule out the possibility of explanations, however incomplete, partial or limited
they might be. With their rejection of cause and effect they exclude any predictability in any field.
While the critics of historical determinism accepted at least the possibility of post-hoc explanations.
As for example, we can retrospectively explain why a bullet launched at a particular point landed
where it did. This means we can explain the trajectory by methodologically (and temporarily)
closing off what in reality is an "open" system, undetermined and subject to the play of multiples
variables. Post-modernists contradict both pre and post-hoc explanations, in the existence of a
coherent structure and the supposed attempt by the analyst "to introduce closure". Some critiques
find gross weakness in over-emphasising open-endedness in their writings. It is argued that human
intentions may not always be realized and other individuals may read the situation differently: but
individual actions can be conceived and executed only by giving a determinate meaning to a
situation. The critiques justifiably argue that a certain degree of closure is integral to our being and
social life; it is neither a myth nor a limiting aspiration. The notion of multivocity or multiple voices
has two correlatives: difference and non-determination. What is actually found is that many post-
modernists/post-structuralists translate non-determination to suggest the incoherent and
ambiguous nature of the text. In their view social structure like history or life are unstable,
incoherent and ambiguous. Such nihilist conception of the text fragment the actual social world and
reduce it to a myth. Epistemologically speaking, the destructive denial of univocity at any moment
including the claim that the words or utterances can have a univocal meaning in a giving context
opens the floodgates of relativism. This in reality even abandons partial explanation of social
phenomena. If such view is accepted, pessimism will rule supreme. No social revolutionary, no
scientist, no revolutionary party, no theory and no practice can take off since at the very beginning
the supposed notion of incoherence and faulty basis shall doom the whole endeavour.

000

Conclusion
When post-modernists question the very possibility of knowledge or knowing the truth it rather
sounds like unknowable "things-in-themselves", an agnostic world-view. It is relevant here to quote
a brilliant passage from Lenin on the theory of knowledge. It runs thus: "First, if we are to have a
true knowledge of an object we must look at and examine all its facets, its connections and
‘mediacies’. That is something we cannot ever hope to achieve completely, but the rule of
comprehensiveness is a safeguard against mistakes and rigidity. Secondly, dialectical logic requires
that an object should be taken in development, in change, in ‘self-movement’ ......Thirdly, a full
‘definition’ of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of truth
and a practical indication of its connection with human wants. Fourthly, dialectical logic holds that
‘truth is always concrete, never abstract’". [V.I. Lenin, "Once Again on the Trade Unions, the Current
Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin", Collected Works, Vol.32, 1979, p.94, Quoted in
Alexandra Getmanova, Logic, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1989, p.348] The above is self-
explanatory and stands on the opposite pole of the post-modernist/post-structuralist position on
acquiring knowledge and attainment of truth.

However, this does not mean the Foucaultian reference to the subtle net-work of power should not
guide us to conduct research and take lessons from our reality. On some aspects the post-modernist
critique of the varied ills encountered as a result of capitalism could widen our horizon of

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knowledge. But what basically makes us stand apart from such approach is its war against reason
and science along with the conservative aspects devoid of any programme for the destruction of the
capitalist system itself. Simultaneously we have to upgrade our theoretical framework to cope with
the monstrous mechanism of present capitalism. Marx wrote Capital to destroy capitalism. In the
hovering atmosphere of pessimism generated by the degeneration in the erstwhile Soviet Union
and Mao’s China it is incumbent on the Marxists to rise to the occasion in order to develop socialist
thought to a higher stage only by rectifying the past mistakes. And here lies the necessity of
constant dialogue with certain post-modernist view-points and other critical theories in all fields of
knowledge in order to enrich our knowledge and judgement, and to establish the invincibility of
Marxism in a world of chaos.

So, to sum up:

Post-modernism is a trend of thought opposed to modernism (i.e. ideas emanating in the post-
feudal era) and is therefore not only opposed to Marxism, but the entire leaps in thinking and
values that came with the birth of capitalism — i.e. the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Reason and
even science.

Post-modernism, though it can trace its roots to over a century back, in its present garb, it draws
extensively from the philosophies of Nietzche, the philosophical farther-figure of Hitler’s fascism.

Post-modernism got a major boost due to the intellectual vacuum resulting from the temporary set-
back to communism, resulting from the reversals in the Soviet Union and China, and a retreat of the
national liberation movements that witnessed an upsurge in the 1960s and the 1970s. In the
resulting atmosphere of pessimism, post-modernism found thousands of takers even from the
ranks of the Marxists, demoralised by the setbacks.

There is no doubt that the post-modernists address the ills of society thrown up by the
capitalist/imperialist system, whether in the field of science, medicine, architecture,
bureaucratisation and power polity, oppression and discrimination, etc etc., but their opposition
does not come with any solutions. Though the Chinese experience, particularly that of the Cultural
Revolution, did give many answers to these questions, it was short-lived and the reversal there,
soon after, reduced the impact of that experience.

Post-modernism has, in fact, flourished in this period of ‘globalisation’. The set-backs in the above-
said movements facilitated, in a big way, the offensive, on a world-scale, of imperialist capital, which
has come to be called ‘globalisation’. And with ‘globalisation’ and the retreat of the State from all
welfare measures, together with the vacuum created by the retreat of communism, the imperialists
pushed and funded lakhs of NGOs throughout the world, and particularly in the backward
countries, where levels of poverty became even more extreme. What existed earlier in pockets was
now made an overwhelming phenomenon. And today, it is these NGOs that are one of the major
vehicles of post-modernist ideas and views.

In India too, post-modernism has proliferated among a section of dissident intellectuals,

disillusioned ‘Marxists’ and more particularly amongst the thousands and thousands of NGOs.
Though the bulk of them may not subscribe to post-modernist philosophy openly (and may not
even know its contents), they generally reflect that type of thinking. This is manifested in a mode of
thinking that has a common thread, and, as such, ends in being anti-people. One strong factor in
their approach is their attitude to power. First, as they have the approach that all power is bad they
oppose any change in the existing order, on the grounds that the new power will be as bad. This, de

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facto, amounts to support to the present capitalist/imperialist system. Also, on the same grounds
they are averse to organisation and organised dissent as that too will result in alternative power
centres; so continuous ‘discourse’, like at the WSF, is more their focus rather than coming to
conclusions and evolving organised plans of action. Generally, all these NGOs also take a negative
attitude towards revolutionary organisations, and when they do associate they have the approach
to subvert them — philosophically all these are linked to their approach to power. Second, their
primary focus is at a micro level, they have no macro focus, also a part of the post-modernist
approach. Third, their anti-modernist, anti-reason approach makes them turn back to tradition and
the glorification of backward feudal thinking — this can result in them even becoming apologists of
reactionary views like Hindutva. Fourthly, their emphasis on compartmentalised ethnicity and
opposition to class unity results in them promoting exclusiveness of the dalit, women, tribal, etc.
questions, resulting in the fragmentation of the unity of all the oppressed. Such then is the negative
role that post-modernism is playing at the ground level within the Indian scenario.

The Post-modernist critique of the ills of this system has its basis in the horrendous impact of the
present crisis ridden system that is, affecting every sphere of human activity. The acute
impoverisation of the masses; the intense alienation faced by the people; the degrading status of the
more marginalized sections; the vulgarisation of the utilisation of science, as seen in the medical,
armament and other spheres; the rapacious destruction of the environment; the blatant mafia-style
operations of the power brokers and big business; and the fascist terror and imperialist wars — all
have resulted in a groundswell of opposition to this system. But, some ideological basis is necessary
to anchor such sentiments. With the weakening of the communist movement, post-modernism has
sought to fill the vacuum, and was used primarily as a weapon against Marxism. What is required is
a re-assertion of science, reason and a creative application of Marxism to the ill of this system.

This can only be achieved by making Marxism a living social science to be creatively used as an
ideological tool with which to understand present phenomena, and devise a way out of the morass.
To do so, one has to rescue Marxism from the grip of the revisionists, dogmatists, empiricists and all
those who vulgarise its scientific, class and revolutionary essence. Only then will Marxism be able to
effectively counter post-modernism and illumine a path for the suffering masses to a new bright
future.

000

Select References

1. Gregory Bruce Smith, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the transition to Post-modernity, the University
of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.

2. Erich Fromm, the Crisis of Psycho analysis, Essays on Freud, Marx and Social Psychology, Penguin
Books, England, 1970.

3. V. Afanasyev, Marxist Philosophy, A Popular Outline, Foreign Language Publishing House,

Moscow, 1970.

4. Lloyd I. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition, Political Development in
India, Orient Longman, 1987.

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5. Aijaz Ahmad, Post-modernism in History, In K.N. Panikkar, Terence J Byres, Utsa Patnaik (ed) The
Making of History, Essays presented to Irfan Habib, Tulika, New Delhi, 2001.

6. Jean - Francosis Lyotard, The Post-modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University of

Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984.

7. Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus, University of Wisconsin Press, Masidon, 1982.

8. E.A. Kaplan (ed), Post-modernism and its Discontents, London, Verso, 1988.

9. S. Lash, Sociology of Post-modernism, Routledge, London, 1990.

10. Jurgen Habermas, Towards a Rational Society, Bacon Press, Boston, 1970.

11. Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, Bacon Press, Boston, 1975.

12. Fredric Jameson, Post-modernism or the cultural logic of late Capitalism, Duke University Press,
Durham,1991

13. Marx Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History, Polity, Cambridge, 1985.

14. Terry Eagleton, Marxism, Structuralism and Post-structuralism, Against the Grain,

15. Erich Fromm, the Crisis of Psychoanalysis, Penguin Books, 1970.

16. G. Mahajan, Explanation and Understanding in the Human Sciences, Oxford University Press,
Delhi, 1992.

17. Karl Popper, Open Society and Its enemies, Vol.I, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1966

18. J.F.Lyotard, The Post-modern Condition: A Report on knowledge, Manchester University Press,
Minneapolis, 1988.

19. Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and modern social theory, an analysis of the writings of Marx
Durkheim and Max Weber, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992

20. George Ritzer, Sociological Theory, The Mc Graw Hill Companies, INC, Singapore, 1996

21. Alex Callinicos, Against Post modernism, A Marxist Critique, Polity Press, Cambridge, U.K., 1996

22. Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture - Interviews and
Other Writings 1977-1984, Routledge, London, 1988

23. Several writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao.

24. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Vintage,
New York, 1965.

25. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage, New York, 1979

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26. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978.

27. John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology, Materialism and Nature, Cornerstone Publications,
Kharagpur, India, 2001.

Select Journals

1. Monthly Review

2. Economic and Political Weekly

3. Seminar

4. Various monthly/quarterly in different languages.

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