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Let Us Talk About Your Book:
Arvind Pal Singh - "Religion & The Specter of The West"
Part VI

Q & A with Author by SIKHCHIC.COM

Continued from last week …



PART VI

Q   Your argument seems to go much further than simply presenting an objective analysis. Doesn’t your analysis include the subjective aspect of Sikh lived existence? In fact doesn’t it make that lived experience central?

A   Yes, you’re right. The book goes much further than simply presenting objective historico-phenomenological analyses of the modern reconstruction of Sikh tradition.

What complicates this scenario quite severely (and what scholars either forget or repress) is that this scenario of power relations didn’t just happen in a historical moment. Rather, it continues to be repeated in the way that Sikhs today continue to retrieve the narrative of ‘reform’ within the parameters of the modern social imaginary.

For many people ‘reform’ simply equates with the retrieval of a purely ‘religious’ identity, without realizing that this equation between ‘reform’ and ‘religion’ is actually a translation of sorts. But it’s a translation in which the negative work of the dialectic remains invisible.

And its invisible because it is internalized into the psyche. This is why the subjective aspect of the book, which I tackle through the question of repetition, and the attempts to re-enact repetition otherwise than the politics of religion-making (or identity politics), is so central to the book and why a purely objective, historical framing cannot properly articulate the problem or the desire to rethink it.

Q   What, then, is it about the project of ‘reform’ that links the colonial, neo-colonial and postcolonial domains, and thus holds together the various parts of the book?

A   The simple answer to this is the movement of the dialectic. Indeed, the question of reform is inseparable from the work of the dialectic.

The reformist project as such manifests in the desire of Sikh and other elites (Hindu, Muslim, etc) to improve, that is, to elevate themselves above their present condition which, from the outset, was assumed to be a condition of lack.

The native elites were perceived by the colonizer -- and through mutual interaction began to perceive themselves -- as lacking proper religion, language, civilization.

They believed they had lost it and therefore needed to retrieve it from some original source. In other words, the generative force of the ontology that shapes the agency of the colonized is motivated by loss or lack. Its cause is a negativity that stems from a problematic notion of difference -- one where the colonizer’s own identity as European-Christian is assumed as the basis for defining difference.

The native elites’ notion of identity (and therefore difference) results from a comparative relation to the colonial (specifically the West/East binary). Although the colonized may desire to overcome this, the association with the colonizer results in a representation of difference in essentially negative terms, as lack or opposition, and by a desire to negate this difference through the movement towards a unified presence that is granted recognition by the colonizer.

Hence the agency of the native elites (e.g., the Singh Sabha), based on dialectical movement, continues to be shaped by an imperial or possessive inclination of self to other. Shaped by a form of difference grounded in causal negativity, the reform movements were driven by a politics of negation (I am Sikh because I am not so and so …, etc) which consistently positioned bearers of difference (Sikh, Hindu, Muslim) as active agents of change, but simultaneously as bearers of the problematic negativity that desire seeks to eliminate or transform.

Now, when the responsibility for transformative action (reforming agency) rests with the negating class (Sikhs/Hindu reformists, etc), the active critical potential and accountability of the dominant class is elided, with the result that the apathy of the privileged (British/European) is excused. There is therefore little or no motivation for the colonizing class to engage in any postcolonial transformation “when this is not presented as a common task responsibly shared by all within the postcolony”.

Related to the ontological negativity of the dialectical process is another process that informs the dominant Western view of progressive history-making and is in turn absorbed by the reformist scholars in their various constructions of national histories. When history itself is understood to be driven by the causal negativity of difference and desire, each conceptualized in relation to the transcendent ideal of mutual recognition, the process remains tied to a form of agency grounded in an imperial disposition.

This in turn generates social forms (Singh Sabha, Arya Samaj, etc) that reproduce relations of power structured by the impulse of self-mastery and self-possession, and by relations of desire aimed at appropriating the lacking object (the Tat Khalsa, the Arya, etc). Any break with this neo-colonial sociability requires us to introduce a genuine historical (and therefore dialectical) discontinuity rather than continue with the progressive process of continuous reconciliation (Singh Sabha history, theology, etc. as reconciled with the master narratives and codes of imperial discourse).

Only such a discontinuity can inaugurate new kinds of difference and a qualitative change in the kind of sociability that is practiced.

The organizing structure of my book therefore reflects my desire to bring into view the operations of the dialectic not only in past historical moments (imperialism, reform movements etc) but also right here, right now in the very institutions and practices that comprise the symbolic order of our late modern
social imaginary.

My broad argument is that the structure of the dialectic frames not only the colonial and neo-colonial but also the post-colonial / post-modern. As I see it there is a continuity between the colonial and the post-colonial/post-modern, despite the latter’s loud claim of having broken with the past.

The continuity consists in the perpetuation of the religion-secular binary and the perpetuation of an opposition between:

(i) contemporary secularism which defines the nature of the public sphere in terms of belief in ontological fullness derived from Christian-European metaphysics or Christianity as the standard Religion, and

(ii) the construction of religions saddled with a lack that is reincarnated in the postmodern, postcolonial era through the interlinked apparatus of state, media and academia.

To bring this continuity into sharper focus was the purpose of the first part of the book.

It was designed to show that the dominant symbolic order of the colonial period is not qualitatively different from the dominant symbolic order that is operative today - what Charles Taylor calls the modern social imaginary.

Only its form has changed.

Non-Western discourses are still faced with the burden of translating into a dominant Western conceptuality. And from this bind stem the basic problems that the book tries to address.

Q   So if the dialectic introduces negativity into cultural projects, how can it be stopped? How does one go about breaking the cycles of repetition driven by the causal negativity of the dialectic? How to effect an alternative kinds of repetition, one that does not reproduce the vicious cycles of identity politics?

A   My solution to the problem of the dialectic’s causal ontological negativity and the process of repetition and history that it drives was to turn, not to Western theoretical sources (which I have explored mainly for the purpose of diagnosing the problem), but to the writings of Guru Nanak.

Of course, the Singh Sabha scholars of the colonial period also based their exegetical reformulations on the teachings of the Sikh Gurus. But as I have argued at length in the book, their interpretations were caught within a field of translation governed by Western metaphysics – specifically, a comparative conceptual framework which was central to the colonial symbolic order.

Once they began to enunciate within this framework, and therefore by the rules of the dominant symbolic order, they could not avoid reproducing the dialectic.

And this is best illustrated in their collective conceptualizations of the figure One or Oneness, which acquired ontological lack in the very moment that these were produced philosophically, theologically and politically in relation to the comparative frame of world religions.

For reformist elites in the late nineteenth century, this perceived lack in the Sikh Gurus’ conception of Oneness then became the force that drove their desire to prove the existence of God in order to establish a conception of the One that had ontological fullness.

By contrast, Guru Nanak’s experience of Oneness, which he translates into language through the enigmatic phrase “Ik Oankar“, articulates a positive conceptualization of causal difference and creative desire that “offers an alternative view of ontological process as actualization (sargun) driven by an immanent virtual positivity (nirgun)”.

This ontology helps to actualize a theory and practice of complex relational embodiment enabling multifaceted, heterogeneous and affective forms of subjectivity. By drawing on this alternative ontology it is possible to theorize postcolonial agency and transformative action through a non-dialectical method, that is to say, one that does not accrue lack from the outset. Guru Nanak’s ontology of virtual creativity (nirgun = hidden / non-present = reality here and now) can only make sense as a materially engaged employed in the here and now of this world. In doing so his ontology inverts the Real / Virtual binary upon which depends modernity’s central claim, by allowing what is virtual (hidden / immanent) to be seen as Real in the actual.


To Be Continued Next Week …

February 24, 2014

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