Subaltern, Postcolonial, and Postmodern Theory Thread

[Anonymous No.16254751]

Hey /lit/,

I'm not very well-acquainted with post-colonial theory, the subaltern school, or deconstructionism, so I'm gonna need some help understanding this passage. It's from the opening section of Partha Chatterjee's The Nation and Its Fragments.
1. He attacks the "subject-centered rationality characteristic of post-Enlightenment modernity" but does not define it. What does this phrase refer to? Who first pointed it out? In what text is this subject defined and criticized in the manner that Chatterjee describes?
2. Am I correct in interpreting the following sentence as a distorted description of the belief that the individual is not only capable of reason, but should use his capacity for reason to investigate the world around him, to sift fact from fiction, and to distinguish the merely subjective from the objective and empirically verifiable?
3. What does he mean by "the virtues of the fragmentary, the local, and the subjugated?"
4. What does he mean by "the will to power that lies at the very heart of modern rationality?"
5. What does he mean by "decenter its epistemological and moral subject?"
6. What does he mean when he speaks of "claiming agency on behalf of persons, groups or movements?"
7. Am I mistaken in thinking that the upshot of all this is to place limits on the claims that can be made by the individual intellect on the basis of rationality? If I have understood him correctly and if he is correct, then none of us have the "right" to criticize or even contest the claims of, for instance, the Naxalites, Dalits, Native Americans, African-Americans, and so on.
8. When he states that "by asserting an inseparable complicity between knowledge and power, this critique has been unable adequately to vindicate its own normative preferences," what does he mean? Does he mean that the claim that knowledge is inseparable from power can be and is turned against the academics who have produced this narrative, such that they are forced to admit that they are the holders of power and creators of hegemonic discourse in our society?

[Anonymous No.16254782]

Damn white people and their *shuffles deck, pulls card* rationality

[Anonymous No.16254798]

>>16254782
Thanks for the bump.

[Anonymous No.16254843]

>>16254751
Here's the quote in question in full:

"By now knowledgeable people all over the world have become familiar with the charges leveled against the subject-centered rationality characteristic of post-Enlightenment modernity. This subject-centered reason, we have now been told, claims for itself a singular universality by asserting its epistemic privilege over all other local, plural, and often incommensurable knowledges; it proclaims its own unity and homogeneity by declaring all other subjectivities as inadequate, fragmentary, and subordinate; it declares for the rational subject an epistemic as well as moral sovereignty that is meant to be self-determined, unconditioned, and self-transparent. Against this arrogant, intolerant, self-aggrandizing rational subject of modernity, critics in recent years have been trying to resurrect the virtues of the fragmentary, the local, and the subjugated in order to unmask the will to power that lies at the very heart of modern rationality and to decenter its epistemological and moral subject. In this effort at criticism, materials from colonial and postcolonial situations have figured quite prominently.
"However, a persistent difficulty has been that by asserting an inseparable complicity between knowledge and power, this critique has been unable adequately to vindicate its own normative preferences and thus to provide valid grounds for claiming agency on behalf of persons, groups, or movements. I do not propose to offer in this book a general solution to this problem. What I attempt instead is a series of interventions in different disciplinary fields, localized and bound by their own historically produced rules of formation, but thematically connected to one another by their convergence upon the one most untheorized concept of the modern world - the nation."

[Anonymous No.16254972]

bump

[Anonymous No.16254979]

>>16254751
>"subject-centered rationality characteristic of post-Enlightenment modernity"
doesn't exist

[Anonymous No.16255013]

>>16254979
it's pretty clearly referring to the liberal-capitalist subject, anon, or "bugman"

[Anonymous No.16255030]

>>16255013
that's not a "subject" though, it's more like a fragmented machine/machine-operator

[Anonymous No.16255648]

bump

[Anonymous No.16255955]

>>16254751
>What does this phrase refer to? Who first pointed it out? In what text is this subject defined and criticized in the manner that Chatterjee describes?
Kant in his 'What is Enlightenment' could give you classic description of this, but there are many sources. It's a mainstay of enlightenment liberal thought: the conception of human beings as free, autonomous, rational subjects who are in a progressive movement through history. (putting aside the plurality of conceptions that actually have existed in the enlightenment and since then). Foucault is one of those big names connected to later 20th century attacks on the liberal subject, but his inspiration you can find in Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Heidegger...

>Am I correct in interpreting the following sentence
Yes, it is about the 'rational subject of modernity' which supposedly would hold the highest form of being, of ways of knowing about the world, and claims this one position as _the_ way anyone else should adopt, denigrating other ways of knowing, other types of rationality. It is about a certain 'monism' which the post-structuralists are considered to have attacked especially, that's what all the fuss about margins against centre is about: from the margins you get to see most clearly what is the norm, in what a culture for example tries to exclude you get to see what its identity is. And it's also against 'monistic' (unitary) conceptions: unitary stories exclude others, and we want to give voice or visibility to those excluded others. By advocating for radical plurality you go against the One Truth (of History, of Reason, of the Nation, of Religion...) and the centre as the producer of legitimate meaning. The local and fragmented also stands against the (presumed) unitary stories of the whole, of the universal, of the world moving in a certain direction as dictated by Enlightenment conceptions of history.


>claiming agency on behalf of persons, groups or movements
The big aim of subaltern studies and related circles has been to 'recover' the agency of peoples (once) colonized by Europeans, especially non-elite actors (in the case of SS)

I would agree with 8 from this quote, on 7 I'm not sure if Chatterjee goes that far, but it certainly goes in that direction and has been taken to such paths by others.

[Anonymous No.16256041]

>>16255955
Thank you for your detailed response! I'm only just beginning my journey with theory, so this is all very new to me.
There is another thing that I don't understand. What is meant here by "agency?" I was once criticized for denying the "agency" of my subjects, even though from my perspective I was faithfully reproducing what they themselves had said. What does it mean to say that the "subaltern" has lost his agency, and what would it look like for them to recover it?

[Anonymous No.16256055]

>>16255955
Also, what would they posit in opposition to the free, autonomous rational subject of the Enlightenment? I am perfectly fine with attacks on the doctrine of historical progress, but I am not sure about the rational subject.

[Anonymous No.16256329]

>>16256055
Well, if you look at mainstream historical narratives of Euro colonized regions, the standard for a long time was (and popularly still is) to put white men in the centre doing all kinds of this, rescuing or redeeming the native, bringing civilization or even exploiting/murdering the natives. This goes from the discovery of the world, to the civilizing mission to today's development aid and humanitarianism. What subaltern studies, as one example, did in the 1980s was to look at colonial (and postcolonial) India and ask: what were the non-elite people doing? Were they just passive recipients of British civilization? Or did they have their own desires, thoughts, did they interpret the world in their own way and shape the colonial encounter themselves, determine the way colonialism happened? Instead of these nationalist stories about elites shaping postcolonial India, let's look at what non-elites have been doing. Recovering or reconstructing the agency of the subaltern or subjugated is about emphasizing that these peoples were crucial in determining how e.g. European colonialism played out, their own differences, their own force and power. They have their _own_ stories and histories, which don't put white men centre stage. The fragmented and local shows that colonial rule wasn't this all-determining power but had its weaknesses, its limits, its fractures. And subaltern agency shows itself most clearly when we examine that.

On the rational subject, there's a lot of alternatives, but you'll often find references to Nietzsche: his emphasis on the body versus consciousness, on the truths we hold which are actually 'lies', stories we told ourselves which we have forgotten that they aren't true. There's Freud's emphasis on the unconscious and drifts. If you look at desires, at affections, you attack this 'purity' of reason. See also Marx emphasis on alienation of the 'free' man in bourgeois society.
The attack on the rational subject is to say: hey, Kant and all the others, what you take as universal rationality, what you take as universally valid supreme conception of a human being, is actually a very particular conception tied to Enlightenment/modern Europe, it's not how peoples elsewhere in the world conceive of the world. What you say is 'pure reason', or freedom, is actually through and through marked, coloured by your particular white male European ideas in a bourgeois milieu, and when you pretend that it's a universal thing and denigrate other culture's their understanding you are being an imperialist, you're justifying colonizing other peoples because you say they don't attain to your particular idea of reason and autonomy, and therefore they're inferior. Like the vacuum domicilium argument: you guys live as hunter-gatherers, you don't have private property, you don't know how to properly cultivate your lands; well, we do, so it's our now.
(i'm trained as a historian so my answers have an emphasis on history)

[Anonymous No.16256434]

>>16256329
>(i'm trained as a historian so my answers have an emphasis on history)
Good to hear. I'm a history major who will soon be applying to grad schools. I'm currently reading this in an independent study with one of my advisors.
>The fragmented and local shows that colonial rule wasn't this all-determining power but had its weaknesses, its limits, its fractures. And subaltern agency shows itself most clearly when we examine that.
Okay, this sounds like a valuable contribution to historical inquiry. I don't disagree with anything up to this point.
>but you'll often find references to Nietzsche: his emphasis on the body versus consciousness, on the truths we hold which are actually 'lies', stories we told ourselves which we have forgotten that they aren't true. There's Freud's emphasis on the unconscious and drifts. If you look at desires, at affections, you attack this 'purity' of reason. See also Marx emphasis on alienation of the 'free' man in bourgeois society.
I'm not sure about this, though. I don't particularly like Nietzsche, and I don't see how it is possible to prove that someone is motivated by this or that desire when they make an argument. I do agree that there are many forms of speech, argument, and discourse that are intended to legitimize a political or other aim in terms that are acceptable to the broader context in which they operate, but I do not think that we can dismiss any form of argument or discourse solely on this basis.
>What you say is 'pure reason', or freedom, is actually through and through marked, coloured by your particular white male European ideas in a bourgeois milieu, and when you pretend that it's a universal thing and denigrate other culture's their understanding you are being an imperialist,
But is it not the case that every single other people on this planet conceives of their own beliefs as universal? Is it not the case that Confucians, for instance, regarded their conception of what we might now call civilization as a universal standard by which all peoples might be judged? Is it at all possible to believe in any one narrative from any one society without regarding that narrative as, or operating as if it were, universally true and correct?
>you're justifying colonizing other peoples because you say they don't attain to your particular idea of reason and autonomy, and therefore they're inferior. Like the vacuum domicilium argument: you guys live as hunter-gatherers, you don't have private property, you don't know how to properly cultivate your lands; well, we do, so it's our now.
Wait, I think we've missed a step. I don't see how belief in the rational subject necessarily entails making specious arguments in favor of imperialism. It is certainly true that these two beliefs coincided in a great many people, but isn't Enlightenment rationality itself one of the best tools we have against such arguments? And isn't the work of this school predicated on the ripened fruits of that rationality?

[Anonymous No.16256586]

>>16256329
Decolonization is actually a far right spenglerian notion, malcom x jose vasconcelos chandragath bose and sayyid qutb all cited that one book. Notice how these so called decolonialists are all advocates of the most decadent post christian western liberal ideas like queer feminism and whatnot a therapeutic consumer view of the self, lucy always yanking away the football of alterity before charlie brown gets a chance. Postcolonial discourses are a justification for managerial neoliberal globohomo a new breed of snivelling and self abasing colonial hypocritically

[Anonymous No.16256598]

>>16256586
I'm gonna need a more detailed explanation, man. You're making some pretty big claims here.

[Anonymous No.16256681]

>>16256598
Even postcolonial theory follows on the lines of earlier british practices of colonial governance. The periphereal elites who got a western education on the. First 6 decades of the 20th century got drunk on universalism and the idea of world revolution and you just cant have 10000 would be pol pots running around. Better to detract those libidinal energies away from maoism or even national developmentalist proyects and concentrate them in an oedipal relationship with the white man as incarnated in the mediatic managerial and educational structures of the imperial core. Also recent events have shown this paradoxical postmodern moralising attack on the rational subject can be an effective means of policing domestic discontents amidst collapsing empire and the transfer of colonial counterinsurgency tactics to the heartland.

[Anonymous No.16256740]

>>16256598
Going from bourgeoisie autonomy to therapeutic identity politics postcolonial subject of benevolent western institutions is an objective downgrade.

[Anonymous No.16256794]

>>16256681
>>16256740
I can't tell if what you're saying makes any sense. Can you point me to any sources where I can read more about this?

[Anonymous No.16256847]

>>16256794
Ironically Paul Gottfried. On multiculturalism and the politics of guilt towards a secular theocracy is more useful for anticolonial politics than anything the credentialist homoglobalist managerial apparatchiks come up with. Beside that everything is plain common sense and material analysis.

[Anonymous No.16256903]

>>16256434
>but I do not think that we can dismiss any form of argument or discourse solely on this basis.
I think it's more about showing how claims to truth are entwined with will to power. I'm not wholesale defending Nietzsche or Foucault or anyone, btw. Wrt desire, think of the typical binaries of sensuous/rational, cultural/natural etc. which have stereotypically been pasted on a West/the Rest, Europeans/Africans type of way. In a colonial context, you would see colonizers appeal to the rationality of their legal system against the superstitious beliefs of Africans to realize their colonial interests. Think also of the psychological characterizations of Africans, for example, lacking abstract reasoning capacities, stuck in irrational witchcraft beliefs, psychopathologizing political protest, or Freud's scheme in Totem and Taboo equating growth phases in European children to the mentality of savage peoples.

>But is it not the case that every single other people on this planet conceives of their own beliefs as universal?
I don't think some of these postcolonial theorists would deny that, the story these authors tell is that when Europeans colonized the world, they claimed to hold supremacy in their particular beliefs, and you then denigrate the legitimacy of other cultures and other peoples' beliefs and ways of governing, ways of production, relationship to nature etc. I would agree with you that many go too quickly from Descartes/Kant to imperialism/colonialism, and it is arguably more insightful to ask about the multiplicity and commonalities in and between cultures than to homogenize them.

>>16256586
>>16256740
>>16256847
I see what you're saying and I mainly agree. What's your alternative to the therapeutic ID pol? What are your thoughts on Spengler himself?

[Anonymous No.16256941]

>>16256794
The Apparatus of Capture chapter may be of use to you. A particular highlight is that the 'First World' or imperial center actually creates 'Third Worlds' or peripheries inside itself because of the flows from the periphery to the center. My own reading would be that there is indeed still an oedipdal relationship with the former colonial powers (or the United States) and their ability to drain unrest away from the peripheries quashes revolution abroad (people who want change leave the country) and at home (shattering of domestic class structures through managed flows of therapeutic idpol and multicultural fallout). D&G think we all need to become minority in an abstract sense to resist, but of course this is in 2020 exactly what capital wants, it wants sliced and diced demographic profiles it can manage with microtargeting, customer segmentation, and crab-bucketed progressive stacks.

[Anonymous No.16256978]

Some well informed posts in this thread. I think the key to understanding poco thought is Neitzche, he is used as a critique of Liberal thought but then becomes a spooky problematic fascist if you think about organising collective political action around a new postcolonial group. Most poco stuff is just new age liberalism as the new managerial elite asset strip their countries. He is used like Marx without the socially-grounded critique.
To understand most modern theory you need a superficial understanding of Marx, Neitzche and Freud.

[Anonymous No.16257015]

>>16256847
>>16256903
>>16256941
It would seem that theory is indeed powerful. I'll be reading some Gramsci and Derrida this semester in addition to this. What else would you guys recommend that I read?
>>16256903
>Wrt desire, think of the typical binaries of sensuous/rational, cultural/natural etc. which have stereotypically been pasted on a West/the Rest, Europeans/Africans type of way. In a colonial context, you would see colonizers appeal to the rationality of their legal system against the superstitious beliefs of Africans to realize their colonial interests. Think also of the psychological characterizations of Africans, for example, lacking abstract reasoning capacities, stuck in irrational witchcraft beliefs, psychopathologizing political protest, or Freud's scheme in Totem and Taboo equating growth phases in European children to the mentality of savage peoples.
This makes a lot more sense, but in a way it reminds me of negritude. Why not contest these claims instead of embracing and subverting them? They sound a lot like the claims made by partisans of the Enlightenment against pre-Enlightenment forms of rationality, particularly that exemplified by Aristotle and his Catholic successors. By that I mean that any rational system is based on a number of unprovable axiomatic statements. If you accept these statements, everything else flows naturally, and even rationally, from them.
>I don't think some of these postcolonial theorists would deny that, the story these authors tell is that when Europeans colonized the world, they claimed to hold supremacy in their particular beliefs, and you then denigrate the legitimacy of other cultures and other peoples' beliefs and ways of governing, ways of production, relationship to nature etc. I would agree with you that many go too quickly from Descartes/Kant to imperialism/colonialism, and it is arguably more insightful to ask about the multiplicity and commonalities in and between cultures than to homogenize them.
Good to hear. What field of history do you study? And are you a fellow American?

[Anonymous No.16257051]

>>16256903
Yeah, many of them form conclusions that are too large, in their attempts to negate or deconstruct Enlightenment thought, to the point their reasoning falls into its own trap of meta-narratives.

[Anonymous No.16257190]

>>16257051
Not to go too off topic but the postmodern method of denying all metanarratives while seething that capitalism is still happening always reminds me of Madhyamaka (Buddhism), though that has a soteriology, an actual line of flight out of denying all phenomena and mental constructions as inherently existing. The postcolonialist has a similar problem in trying to deconstruct the colonizer's imposed worldview because he still clings to his nationality or ethnicity as the grounds for resistance. Why shouldn't that also be deconstructed? Or why shouldn't capitalist domination as a metanarrative be deconstructed? These materialist philosophies cannot actually abolish all metanarratives because those material relations they rely on are never themselves deconstructed. They are assumed to be real while whatever superstructure or geopolitics or ideology above them is taken to be false. And if that is the case, what is to stop our liberated victims of capital, as nations, from not progressing into imperial centers of their own? Once they are able to plug themselves directly into the flows, rather than being downstream of hydraulic power as a client, they will fulfill the same destiny. Samsara.

[Anonymous No.16257321]

>>16257190
The aim is not to abolish metanarrative but to show the relation between the division of labour, power and meta narratives. Jameson explains this very clearly at the start of both Political Unconscious and Postmodernism.
The whole metanarrative thing is an undergraduate understanding of postmodern thinkers like Lyotard and their subsequent acceptance/critique in Marxist or Deleuzian thought.

[Anonymous No.16257330]

>>16257015
The morphology of Western faustian civilization culminates in godels incompleteness theorem, the turing machine, cybernetics, shannons mathematical theory of communication, modernization theory in the social sciences and and levi straussian structural anthropology. History will end with the sage who will write the book of absolute knowledge, but when the book is wriitten there will be no humans left to read it only animals of the species homo sapiens. We are all living amidst the fallout of a botched attempt to rebuild the tower of babel. High modernists are underrated vis a vis the postmodernists.

Levi Strauss presents race et histoire before julian huxleys unesco, structuralism as the basis for a new universalism beyond western culture, years later he deconstructs man into nakedness in a book patterned after wagners gotterdamerung. Julian Huxley wrote the preface to pere teilhard de chardins the phenomenon of man and coined the term transhumanism. Proyect cybersyn in chile emerges out of CEPAL and modernization theory cut short by the coup of september 11.

Most postcolonial theorists just moralise against a strawman of western reason. While making no attempts to understand it or profer a viable alternative. After all they are in the business of managing an empire in the terminal phases of its decline.

[Anonymous No.16257331]

Why do these nibbas reify everything though? Tendencies get turned into underlying principles of reality!

[Anonymous No.16257365]

>>16257330
You're sounding real esoteric here, man. But I think i see your point.

[Anonymous No.16257398]

>>16257321
Makes more sense from that perspective; can see the clear debt to semiotics. But the postmodernists have still dug themselves into a hole

[Anonymous No.16257443]

>>16257398
Yeah man precisely it says more about the popularity of semiotics than metanarrative. Bit like Lacan saying the subconscious is structured like a language: surely the opposite is true post war theorisation of thought is semiotic in nature. But, again, Lacan was no fool and was not literally suggesting the subconscious is so.

[Anonymous No.16257477]

>>16257321
Do you have a particular take on decolonial thought trending atm? From my position in Europe, I've grown a bit disappointed that alot of thought still presumes the colonizer/colonized, or white/racialized peoples scheme to think our world today. How are we supposed to reconfigure the coloniality of relations between Europe and Africa for example, if we aren't already from the start taking China into account? What does it mean to effect reparations or restitution of museum collections to African museums built or financed by East Asian capital? What is the significance of the African diaspora residing mainly in the West while nations on the continent are looking east to China for investments?

[Anonymous No.16257530]

>>16257443
Lacan finding new ways to rip people off. The OAS scheming to to assasinate general de gaulle like will e. Coyote going after the roadrunner. Everyone pretending to be maoists and then signing that paedo age of consent law petition. The youthful leaders of the 68 movement denounce marxism and become tv neocon jews. Foucault gets aids. Jean Marie le pen's wife appears in playboy in french maid outfit after the divorce. Houellebecq, dieudonne and the bogdanoff twins . french culture is just awfully silly i am having a hard time taking any of it seriously.

[Anonymous No.16257547]

>>16257365
>>16256794
He's saying that after the end of European Imperialism, there were a lot of small countries with resources to take and economies to exploit (wealth comes from taking part in a process, you cannot "steal" wealth). If these countries (say, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand) were allowed to develop their economies on their own, they'd end up forming sovereign countries.

But "decolonialism" isn't about that. The US (And the USSR) wanted to end European Imperialism so that THEY could be the sole imperial power. The US wanted (and got) the whole world as its colonial subjects. So instead, it props up this "Decolonization" idea which prevents 3rd World Shitholes from becoming Real Countries with actual sovereignty. These faulty ideas of Decolonization prevent them from stopping US Corporations from looting them of resources and siphoning off wealth (economic activity in, say, Nigeria, is not put to developing Nigeria, but is put to benefiting US Corporations).

[Anonymous No.16257552]

>>16257477
Another poster earlier on in the thread hit the nail on the head about postcolonial nations being either forced or willingly cucked by the global financial system and the managerial revolution.
People like Homi Bhaba or Edward Said for instance could have been a kind of revolutionary intelligentsia but instead got sucked into the American academy or spaces like London and became a kind of cosmopolitan force.
It is complicated - postcolonialism is really deradicalised socialism or radicalised liberalism. Think about how the Canadian legal system works and how their economy functions. Cosmopolitanism is a useful word here. Postcolonity is, in my opinion, a useful tool for establishing a nationalist middle class not combating capitalism.

[Anonymous No.16257569]

>>16257530
The pedo thing is more about the problem of theorising and legalising certain forms of sexuality tout court, not that younger people can or can't give consent at a certain age. Rather it should be on a case by case basis.

[Anonymous No.16257570]

>>16257015
>>16254751

I have never studied the subject, but I think some of the points brought up are interesting, even to an outsider. Why does it almost never feel this way when the subject is discussed in other places?

[Anonymous No.16257584]

>>16257570
Also, how does discourse in this thread compare to the discourse about the same topics in a university classroom?

[Anonymous No.16257630]

>>16257547
>>16257552
These make perfect sense to me. I can't tell you guys where I go to school, but I've met a ton of people from the Third World who fit precisely this description.
>>16257570
What do you mean by "other places?" It might be because people here feel free to make whatever radical - or reactionary, as the case may be - critiques without fear of repercussion. If I were to reenact my OP and the rest of this thread in a classroom, I would have to be very careful about who I mention and what I say. I am not white, so I can get away with a lot, but there is always a limit.
>>16257584
From what I can see, the people responding to this thread are either at the advanced graduate level or are working academics. I feel truly blessed to have been able to garner such responses.

[Anonymous No.16257679]

>>16257552
In practice it may have even functioned as a means for dismantling nationalist middle classes decoupling them from developmentalist coalitions and integrating them into the neoliberal sphere of progressive global citizenship. I believe the collapse of the bretton woods system was a key turning point. The 70s were a weird transitional decade in general, that culminated in the washington consensus and the rhetorical construction of a 'post industrial globalised high tech economy' which was by no means a foreseen conclusion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_International_Economic_Order

[Anonymous No.16257760]

>>16257630
>>16257630
They are the children of those who work for global corporations helping them despoil their country. Nationalism is a meme but it's not an excuse to let the IMF leave your fellow men in poverty.
I am a PhD student. Most undergraduates have a basic understanding of these issues that does not really show the limitations of Liberal thought - this is because these people are fodder for bourgeois institutions. If you get to masters level, you might understand more clearly about changing paradigms of thought across history and become more sceptical of capitalism and neoconservative global politics. By the time you are a PhD student you are wasting your time and will work in precarity for 5 years on shitty contracts when you could be on a grad scheme earning €60k.

Another tendancy of undergrads, as an early poster made a semi-meme reference to, is deference to technocratic thought. This means that, for instance, protests in the US need to be organised in a certain way, communicate their positions clearly, use legal institutions etc. This is clearly ridiculous as we all know what happens in law courts. This is a way of delegitimising whole swathes of society.
The whole postmodern neomarxism spook is a pretty solid way to delegitimise academia. Many, many academics are Marxist or anarchist leftists - they rigorously critique this Liberal postcolonial thought that the neoliberalised uni is churning out. It is pretty funny really.

[Anonymous No.16257787]

>>16257679
Yes this is a better answer than my earlier post, OP - it is a good way to break coalitions. I think the nationalist middle class identity is still fostered to a certain extent as a fascistic fallback in times of crisis.

[Anonymous No.16257825]

>>16257760
How can you develop the level of understanding which enables you to critique other? Is there a way or methodology for that?

[Anonymous No.16257851]

Most of these texts seem to be banking on you not knowing what the words mean and being suitably impressed thereby. But when you can read it as easily as Cipher reads the falling icons that make up the Matrix, it's all so tiresome.

[Anonymous No.16257870]

>>16257825
Read, read, read, read, read. Instead of watching random crap on YouTube, find a quality lecture series - like Rick Roderick. Once you have a basic understanding of key thinkers: congratulations, you are in the upper percentile already. Most people just do not read or take articles in the economist or something as the ceiling of what they engage with. Be curious and be honest with yourself - take advantage of books experts have written on other thinkers before piling into difficult texts.

[Anonymous No.16257871]

>>16257787
Hard also to fit into the postcolonial framework are the countries of the former eastern block. George soros scion of a prominent family of budapest esperantoists studies under karl popper at the london school of economics, derives central idea of reflexivity the subject can observe itself and change its behaviour accordingly. The economy itself is a reflexive creation of investor expectations. Soros founds the post keynesians, open university at budapest the first to offer programs in ecology media and gender studies in central europe. Orban Viktor uses soros as scapegoat in a right wing nationalism that is itself a reflexive bricollage of disparate historical elements.

[Anonymous No.16257874]

>>16257477
Postcolonialism paves the way for China's Belt and Road Initiative. In a brilliant rhetorical sweep, it is not imperialism because they are communist, and it is not colonialism because they are Asian. With every rail, cinderblock, and loan laid down, they are building something the British could have only dreamed of

[Anonymous No.16257900]

>>16257874
I'm LOLing at someone believing this. This is such a retarded and facile understanding of:
1) postcolonialism
2) how Chinese propaganda works
3) how countries view China (whether you choose to believe it or not, the leaders of the African states etc. are not retarded children)
4) the mechanisms of Chinese neocolonialism
You probably think your take was super epic but it exposed you for the retard that you are.

[Anonymous No.16257919]

>>16257552
Postcolonialism is the native middle men of colonial rule using marxism or liberalism to make themselves kings of the jungle. It is a negativity more than anything else; denial of Europe because the Nile is a river in Africa. We see a mirror image in wokeist capital, where a corporation becomes decolonized by having its managers be expressions of racial or gender diversity. No one will say the shares of these companies ought to be distributed, but titles are a plentiful and everyone loves having titles, from the lowliest ancient Egyptian overseer whipping his corvee work gangs to the auditors of a financial firm.

[Anonymous No.16257926]

>>16257870
How do you judge a bad work for the good work? Can I trust my intuition?

[Anonymous No.16257929]

>>16257760
>The whole postmodern neomarxism spook is a pretty solid way to delegitimise academia. Many, many academics are Marxist or anarchist leftists - they rigorously critique this Liberal postcolonial thought that the neoliberalised uni is churning out. It is pretty funny really.
So it's still a circlejerk?

[Anonymous No.16257930]

>>16257871
I am English but I lived in Budapest for many years, visiting many of the smaller cities and towns. I have much love for it in my heart. Many of my friends are either technocratic types or have strange neo fascist view points. Socialism is a dirty word but less and less than globalism. People have seen the false dawn of the European Union, as the bankers take over rather than the Mafia and party.
The strange clash between rural culture and urban accumulation is typical of the uneven development of neoliberalism, but of course this is very specific and very fascinating. There is a massive gap between the two that Catholicism used to fill. It is worth mentioning that most analyses of neoliberalism are not from the perspective of 2nd tier European countries. They are either Anglosphere, Germany or global south, seldom Greece, Portugal etc.
The work of Bela Tarr captures this I think.

[Anonymous No.16257931]

>>16257584
I graduated several years ago and recall sociology courses where people would ignore racial issues but still attack racism. For instance, the professor asked how we would describe him to a police officer if we were making a complaint and it took several tries before someone said he was white. But these are the same people who would burn Portland and say structural racism is the original sin of America.

[Anonymous No.16257938]

>>16257926
If you see that a work is cited on /lit/ often, it is probably bad. If you see that a work is never cited on /lit/, it is probably irrelevant. If you see that a work is cited on /lit/ occasionally, then it's probably worth reading.

Also Goodreads ratings are actually surprisingly accurate for academic-y books. The types of people who take the time to rate and review a book like, say, The General Theory by Keynes, are generally the type of people who know what the fuck they're talking about.

[Anonymous No.16257942]

>>16257900
Making loans and getting 99 year leases on the properties built when the debtor defaults is imperialism with extra steps.

[Anonymous No.16257946]

>>16257926
Debate and discussion with people who take your questions seriously - even if they disagree with you of course. Once you start with 1 good book, you will quickly find citstions to 20, 10 may be not particularly relevant but 2 or 3 will be fantastic. What are you looking to start with?

[Anonymous No.16257953]

>>16257874
Greater east asia co prosperity sphere, general haushofer on the supercontinental grossraum as the basic political unit under 20th century technological conditions, biopolitics and geopolitics, mackinders map of the world island with its eurasian core surrounded by the seas. anglo american empire is the empire of the seas, of financial demographic and information flows while china and russia aspire at least in rhetoric to be land empires and self sufficient civilizational states(still a long way off tho).

[Anonymous No.16257960]

>>16257942
The Chinese have much better terms that the IMF.

[Anonymous No.16257969]

>>16257942
Yeah, no-one is disputing that. It's neocolonialism 101. The hilarious part is that you think postcolonial thought somehow paved the way for that, as if China rolled in and said: "hey, we're not white and we're not capitalist, let us pillage you in the exact same way the Europeans pillaged you in the 60s and 70s and you can trust us because we're Asian which somehow makes us better by the metrics of a current of intellectual thought you don't give a shit about", and then the African countries all said fuck it and took them at their word like they were naive six-year-olds.

[Anonymous No.16257970]

>>16257953
It would be quite the irony for the American experiment to end as a Carthaginian foray into Chinese Rome

[Anonymous No.16257983]

>>16257969
Yeah exactly there are endless critiques of Chinese business practices, there's no big conspiracy. You could say that the lack of infrastructure is due to colonialism though.

[Anonymous No.16258007]

>>16257969
I have no doubt that the people running African countries are highly educated and cynical products of the same high powered university system that churns out everyone else's leaders. But given that the founding myth of every Africam nation involves overcoming colonialism, and that the Chinese consistently have painted themselves as 'non-aligned' extra-Western, extra-Soviet paternalists, that the timeless tributary flows to China still operate, it is very much the case that China's engagements in Africa and Eurasia make that very case of not being like the ghost people of the before times.

[Anonymous No.16258010]

>>16257938
>>16257946
What if I am coming from art background(mainly photography)?
This medium is totally dominated by liberals who rarely express their opinions or critique other work and when they critique it's full liberal narratives like male gaze, women objectification etc. I mean I haven't see any problem with this but photography is an aesthetic medium first but they view it mainly as theoretical tool for the contemporary issues and shit.

[Anonymous No.16258053]

>>16258010
Bro I am in film studies, you will find thinkers. Barthes for instance is still mega influential. Have you read WJT Mitchell what pictures want? This is a classic of the field - some of the stuff on 90s 00s network culture sounds a bit dated, but it is pretty great.
You will find it on b -oK.Org minus space

[Anonymous No.16258063]

>>16257630
By other places I meant anything from Twitter to college campus. I was a STEM student far from most political discussions happening in real life on campus. So, most of my experience was seeing social media posts and hearing conversation which happened to be around me. They were mostly of the form "X Bad, Y Bad, Z good". I guess you could question my expectations of a social media post/casual conversation.

My next question is about the disconnect between social media posts/the people posting them. To what degree are people posting oversimplifying their ideas/knowledge? Clearly there is and has to be simplification, since they want to present some idea concisely and get people to read them. But maybe the simplifications are not large, and the posts are actually a relatively fair representation of their ideas/knowledge. I am sure there is a good amount of very knowledgeable people, but I am curious about the general college student demographic.

Maybe the answer is obvious, but I don't think I can honestly gauge these things being an outsider.

I don't mean to derail a thread with questions about academia/students, but I am curious because the topics here are certainly commonplace in universities.

[Anonymous No.16258073]

>>16258063
Twitter is terrible unless it is bright people have a brisk back and forth. It is good for sharing articles, not having debates.

[Anonymous No.16258123]

>>16258073
>>16258073
Yes I agree with that. Let me try to clarify my question.

Twitter is immensely popular and it is used to share a lot of information. Many students read the threads there, and a good amount make posts there. To what degree do those posts represent the knowledge/ideas of the people involved in these things (such as activism on campuses)? For instance, maybe the makers of these infographics/Twitter threads/instagram posts are more like some of the people in this thread, and just not elaborating on the ideas on those platforms since they want to produce easy to consume material.

[Anonymous No.16258126]

>>16258063
Twitter is not the place for sophisticated intellectual discourse. If you see people posting genuinely stupid garbage on Twitter, they are probably not very knowledgeable or intelligent themselves. Twitter is for those who are fully plugged into contemporary political discourse and, if they are academics, are interested in projecting what little power they have over others. It's extremely toxic, and you should probably just stay away from it entirely.
Just remember that the most intelligent and productive people do not use Twitter. The most intelligent and productive people are probably hard at work in either the library or at home.

[Anonymous No.16258131]

>>16258123
Can you give us some examples?

[Anonymous No.16258240]

>>16258123
A lot of younger academics are embedded in social media, got to find mega mind authors and then follow them.

[Anonymous No.16258329]

>>16254751
I'm so glad I swerved away from this at uni.

[Anonymous No.16258686]

Any books on the relation between labour, power and metanarratives like >>16257321 for recent decades?

[Anonymous No.16258772]

>>16258686
Jasper Bernes' book is good - work of art in the age of deindustrialisation. Capitalist Realism is a bit of a meme but a good read.
Surveillance capitalism is a good book on big tech.

[Anonymous No.16258839]

>>16255955
Since Marx explicitly based his work on the "rational core" of panlogist Hegel, it seems dubious to refer to him as anything like an irrationalist, although he was something of a standpoint epistemologist, if you had the correct theory you were good. He saw European liberal capitalism as progressive and others as still backwards. He would probably have considered these guys to be reactionaries, "micronationalists", especially since homogenization of the proles seems to be a prerequisite for the global revolution.

Isn't the principle of general human emancipation quite universalist? I don't buy their radical particularism, or they wouldn't seek to deconstruct the West on the basis of a more universal justice.

[Anonymous No.16259050]

>>16255955
India is a massive very complex beast of its own. British colonialism overlaid this mostly rural world of castes and sects that didnt conceive of itself as a nation it was the western educated elites who came up with the national project. Gandhi was actually a feudal conservative his project can be contrasted with that of nehru the lse educated fabian modernizer and ambedkar author of indias republican constitution who advocated for the abolition of castes. All this goes through a game of broken telephone and is taken up by the west.

It seems as if when all grand narratives of class nation, revolution, etc. are spirited away not even a coherent movement for african americans or dalits or naxalites is sustainable, the subject is reduced to pure corporeality a corporeality which is always under assault, foucault favourably cites von mises and hayek and james c scott as masters of the art of not being governed, reaching a coincidence of the opposites in liberal feminists idolizing sex work as the epitome of bodily autonomy. leftist discourse shifted from classes and masses and alienated subjects to mere 'bodies'. Other cite of the coin is sociobiology the epsteins and pinkers, james d'amore fired from google for making the privatization of biopolitical sovereignty way too obvious.

https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no1/silencing-the-subaltern

A concerted attempt to deconstruct traditional conceptions of humanity using lsd multimedia and cybernetics.

https://auticulture.com/john-brockman-eminence-grise-for-a-globally-dominant-counterculture/

[Anonymous No.16259096]

>>16258839
>Since Marx explicitly based his work on the "rational core" of panlogist Hegel, it seems dubious to refer to him as anything like an irrationalist,
Agreed. Subaltern Studies was heavily inspired by Marx for example. And, maybe I'm cutting too many corners here, but I think a lot of these postcolonial authors still draw on some notion of emancipation and autonomy, maybe through Foucault, Deleuze or Marx etc., to Kant

>>16259050
you make good posts, I'll have to check those links out, not familiar with John Brockman

[Anonymous No.16259112]

>>16254782

I only hate two type of white people
1. Racist white people
2. White people that harbor jews

[Anonymous No.16259144]

western colonizers bad

non-modern colonizers good