DISCUSSION

The Call of Difference: Agency, Subalternity and Beyond

Sasheej Hegde

A response to Gyanendra Pandeys Politics of Difference: Reections on Dalit and African American Struggles (8 May 2010).

yanendra Pandeys recent contribution Politics of Difference: Reections on Dalit and African American Struggles (EPW, 8 May 2010, pp 62-69) examining the dynamics of difference under conditions of subalternity, provides an absorbing interpretation of forms of socio-political activity that are internally complex while simultaneously determined by the modern structure of oppositional movements. In many respects, it is an attempt to deal with the problem that has long vexed historians and sociologists who want to acknowledge the ways that subalternity constitutes a distinct condition affecting most societies and states and their cultural spheres of articulation and becoming. His subject is that classic problem, one of description and analysis what constitutes the integrity of movements and struggles whose ways of being can often appear culturally essentialist, even when they are demonstrably engaged in articulating an alternative politics of becoming? In accepting the question that feminist and other oppositional movements have raised in our time namely (as Pandey puts it) of how modern societies and states can take account of, and live with, difference (p 62) and successfully demonstrating the ways that this is rhetorically represented in African American and dalit struggles, he has, to my mind, made a strong case as much for the notion of subalternity as he has for its articulation with difference. I found the discussion both fascinating and frustrating, and my comment will reect this. Hopefully, there are lessons to be learnt even from such a contradictory state of reception as much by sociopolitical activists as by those who study these struggles.

The Constitution of Difference

Sasheej Hegde (sasheej@gmail.com) teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad.

The simultaneous constitution and interruption of the discourses of subalternity

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and difference is an intriguing conceptual and historical question; and it is as part of an investigation of this question that Pandey foregrounds the signicance of the Dalit struggle in India and the African American and womens struggles in the US. Doubtless, for him, the matter of how particular subaltern communities and identities come into being, and what kinds of culture they invoke, is a question for historical investigation (p 67), but points out that across these diverse and distinct terrains of struggle (t)he political foundation of [a] making of community, and common consciousness, is unmistakable (p 68). Pandey invokes several thinkers and activists B R Ambedkar and W E B Du Bois, Bell Hooks and Audre Lorde, Urmila Pawar and Baby Kamble including recent writers like Doris Summer and Gayatri Spivak on this subject, noting with approval the view that there is an aspect of the articulation of difference that goes beyond cultural essentialism into a history and politics of a becoming and of political/cultural communities yet to be (p 68). As he narrates, the politics of difference, as locatable in many aspects of dalit and African American self-assertion, is never the difference of pure culture (somehow already constituted), but rather a culture that ows from political difference and an alternative political perspective (ibid). Yet, it can be claimed that there is no intrinsic virtue in formulating thus unless of course the allusion is simply that there are more elements that combine in the articulation of subalternity with difference. The tension identied in Pandeys paper is between difference as somehow already constituted and as a history and politics of a becoming. The argument, it would seem, generally proceeds with these entities opposed, and the insistence on the cultural autonomy claimed by subalternised, oppositional groups can come across as articially historicist, invoking a preposterous and implausible account of agency as atemporal members of other worlds. Such rebuttals may be missing the point however.1 It is true that the metaphors of difference of an already existing community coming to consciousness of itself and of historical conditions
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and political practice producing new senses of community and of difference (p 69) continually invite an ontological interpretation that ts their historicist heritage; but Pandey repeatedly (as his larger corpus of work also amply testies) distances himself from such interpretations. Arguably, he is discussing two standpoints on difference, and not two worlds of difference. Certainly, to push the point even further, although the subject matter of Pandeys argument (namely, the politics of difference) is essentialist, the standpoint of the argument is not (or need not). Mark my point yet: although Pandey nearly always uses the terms political/ cultural differences as the objects of a politics of difference, there is no denying that he invites misunderstanding by using an oppositional metaphor of difference as somehow already constituted and as a history and politics of a becoming. If that reading is rmly set aside, then we discover that the controversial and exciting claims about agency in the cultural autonomy claimed by subalternised, oppositional groups are not claims that subaltern subjects can be shown to be atemporal choosers or members of other worlds. Of course, if the concern of a politics of difference is only with ways in which agents conceive themselves, then it cannot (given its own misgivings about self and other knowledge) ground a theory of agency. All it can produce (it may be said) is the anthropological claim that human beings in fact see themselves under ineliminable yet distinct sets of descriptions, but this sociological fact would not tell us why we should take dualities in human agency and selfconsciousness seriously. In what follows, I take up some dualities in human agency and self-consciousness as it bears on subalternised, oppositional movements in an effort to note further challenges for description and analysis.

Agency, Experience and Dislocation

In many respects, the discussion of the relationship between pronouncements of subalternity and difference, as they obtain in movements apparently based on these conditions, builds a picture of dislocation from the organised frameworks of
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representation an effect, as Pandey briey posits, of the altered terms of argument underlying the political exertions of the subaltern. According to him, where the state and the dominant classes foregrounded differences of gender, caste, race, sexuality and so on as a way of organising and naturalising subalternity and legitimating and reinforcing existing relations of power, what the disadvantaged and the marginalised have done in response is to deploy the very category of difference to demand a re/arrangement, if not an overturning, of the prevailing structures of power (p 63). Indeed, for Pandey, this dislocation and altered structure of representation, while refusing to accept any simple dichotomy between claims to equality and claims to difference equality as itself requiring the recognition and inclusion of differences has entailed a fundamental critique of the ways in which the idea of difference is deployed, and of the operations of categorical difference (ibid). The point is signicant, but does not quite go far enough (all the more, since Pandey is predisposed to take into account the inner logic of subalternised difference). The agency what is termed the resistance/refusal in the dalit, Black and womens movement has to be established in the cultural logic that produced it, since there is in the inner logic of the articulation an inexorable reproduction of a reality of dislocation.2 I think this axis of exploration is important if we have to be further distancing ourselves from an ontological interpretation of difference, while at the same time giving form one open to description and recognition to difference. The institution of this axis may seem contradictory and/or controversial, not simply because subalternised, oppositional movements have often been characterised by bursts of rapid development and selfcritical shifts of position but, more importantly, because in opting for a systematic approach to these movements/issues (as I am imploring) the focus ought to be as much on what they are saying as on what the texts produced within, attempt to do (as also, I think, Pandey is only too aware). Indeed, on a rather more expansive conception of the stirring words of Baby
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Kamble on the dalit struggle as cited by Pandey: The struggle yielded us three jewels humanity, education and the religion of the Buddha. The ame of Bhim started burning in our hearts. We began to walk and talk. We became conscious that we are human beings (pp 68-69) subalternised argument is not powerless in the face of excess; rather, it is concerned to effect the affects of a relapsed public in an effort to work on, to transform, their common condition. That the subalternised, oppositional articulation takes this to be a plausible task explains much of its use of a range of styles of reasoning and stylistic devices. These considerations do not undermine my point; on the contrary, it may be reasonably retorted that we require a systematic reconstruction of subalternised difference in order to know why it is concerned with the affects of its subjects, why it feels compelled to mobilise diverse stylistic resources. All the same, they do establish a testing ground for Pandeys interpretation, namely, that it must be able to explain the philosophical reasons for the claim to difference, as indeed for the resistance/refusal in the dalit, Black and womens movement. The clear and present benet of Pandeys strategy is that it allows us to appreciate an overall orientation in subalternised, oppositional movements and, to the extent that Pandeys arguments are compelling, it provides an architectonic structure within which to situate subalternised subjects specic philosophical innovations and arguments. The imperative, of course, is to think this out further than, say, Pandey or even subalternised subjects are wont to do. The question at stake here is nicely illustrated by a call to experience made in the context of the dalit claim to intellectuality and difference alternating as it does between experience as a philosophical problem and as a physical/physiological condition.3 The indecision (or ambivalence, if you will) underwriting the claim, has to do with the fact that, in exposing the physical/physiological roots of (dalit) experience, reection would also, ipso facto, expose the limits of its own power to overcome it (for philosophical argument is powerless in the face of physical/physiological turmoil or excess). It

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must be admitted, however, that it is not clear that the subalternised subject would accept this postulation. Be that as it may, we need a more compelling account of what the dalit (or subalternised subjects, generally) takes to be the character of experience and its sources, and to articulate the basis on which this re-evaluation is to be proposed and the form it takes. I venture some further thoughts here, but given the space constraint I shall have to be very brief. In unravelling experience as the key to the dalit claim to intellectuality and difference, it may be useful to distinguish two versions of experience one, the experience of disorientation (which, to formulate very quickly and sharply, denotes the view that our highest values have no objective standing) and, two, the experience of despair (which, even as it posits that the value of our highest values depends on their being realisable, also admits that they cannot be realised). It is not entirely clear what the fundamental focus of the project of recuperating experience as the key is. For instance, if the claim is that the experience of despair is the fundamental focus of the dalit project, it might be interesting be see whether the claim is on the basis of the argument that the experience of disorientation, in undermining value in general, cannot ground an evaluative rejection of arrangements of power (whereas the experience of despair has the right shape to ground such an evaluative rejection).4 Alternatively, is it that what is shared by both these forms of experience is the basic claim that there is no goal in the realisation of which our existence nds meaning, where a goal can perform this work only if it has value and is realisable (experience as disorientation denies the former and as despair denies the latter). Getting a measure of the semantic of radicalisation in the call to experience made in the context of the dalit claim to intellectuality and difference is always both a power and an enigma. In the nal analysis, then, the undecided and ambivalent character of the claim to experience made in the context of the dalit claim to intellectuality and difference as, indeed, the politics of difference spoken about and energetically theorised

by Pandey combines a sociological incertitude and a philosophical perplexity. My comment has tried to unravel some aspects of the philosophical perplexity; it would be stimulating to command the sociological incertitude as well. Hopefully, there will be other occasions.
Notes
1 The juxtaposing of these struggles is fascinating sociologically (although I am not too sure the analysis is doing full justice to the cross-continental comparisons they signify). All the same, the claims, howsoever signicant, can seem most puzzling. In making use of a distinction between culture as somehow already constituted and culture as a history and politics of a becoming, Pandey may be said to avail himself of a transcendental vantage point which he otherwise repudiates. But note the argument that follows in the text. In a signicant critique of the 1980s anthropologists and radical historians romance with agency as the recognition of the full humanity of their subjects, Talal Assad (1993: 16) has argued that agent and subject (where the former is the principle of effectivity and the latter of consciousness) do not belong to the same theoretical universe and should not, therefore, be coupled. Assad argued against the view that human beings were in principle the authors of their own history on the ground that that agency was a property of structured relationships of power, not of subjects. I am afraid I cannot explore this line of analysis here, although it is only too apparent that my thoughts in what follows y against the grain of the formulation. I have often puzzled over why and how experience has come to constitute an important category within, in the Indian context, dalit intellectuality, and my reections herein have some bearing on the problem. I am afraid the discussion on this question I have in mind the debate between Gopal Guru (2002 and 2009), Sundar Sarukkai (2007 and 2009), Natrajan (2009) and others hardly even skirts this ground. Gopal Guru has always been

keen that I intervene in the debate, and my truncated observations here and in the text could also be viewed in this light. I am of course setting aside the contentious issue of my labelling of the two versions of experience as disorientation and despair; as also the idea whether these two forms of experience are not better construed as distinct, but related, expressions of a more basic notion of experience, namely, self-reection and moral ontology. But clearly the articulatory space of dalit emancipation and the interpretive space of its analysts/interlocutors has been polyvalent, and my formulation is a perfectly defensible position from within. More importantly, it brings into focus distinctions that are articulated and clearly present but which have been widely overlooked. Given the remarkable power and appeal of the paradigm of dalit emancipation in India today, a study of the subject as a cultural phenomenon in its own right is clearly in order, and historical semantic analysis is a way of proceeding. A preliminary reading along this axis has been explored in Hegde (2010). Another ground of suggestions is in Rao (2009).

References
Assad, Talal (1993): Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press). Guru, Gopal (2002): How Egalitarian Are the Social Sciences in India?, EPW, 14 December, pp 5003-09. (2009): Archaeology of Untouchability, EPW, 12 September, pp 49-56. Hegde, Sasheej (2010): Truth, Experience and Desubjectivation: Juxtaposing Foucault and Ambedkar (unpublished paper presented at Centre for Political Studies, JNU, March). Natrajan, Balmurli (2009): Place and Pathology in Caste, EPW, 19 December, pp 79-82. Rao, Anupama (2009): The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Los Angeles: University of California Press). Sarukkai, Sundar (2007): Dalit Experience and Theory, EPW, 6 October, pp 4043-48. (2009): Phenomenology of Untouchability, EPW, 12 September, pp 39-48.

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