Breaking with the Enlightenment: The Twilight of History and the Rediscovery of Utopia

198 Pages·1997·21.952 MB·English

by  Rajani K. Kanth

First published in 1997 by
Humanities Press International, Inc.
165 First Avenue, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey 07716
© 1997 by Rajani Kannepalli Kanth
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rajani Kannepalli Kanth.
Breaking with the Enlightenment : the twilight of history and the
rediscovery of utopia / Rajani Kannepalli Kanth.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-391-04012-X (cloth: alk. paper).-ISBN 0-391-04031-6
(paper: alk. paper)
1. Utopias. 2. Dialectical materialism. 3. Eurocentrism.
I. Title.
HX806.R36 1997
321'.07-dc20 96--30252
CIP
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without written permission.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to the women of this world, who have sustained and
succored the civilities of social life for aeons; it is their millenium-they,
who must emancipate humanity from its self-imposed cruelties.
More personally, I salute the extraordinary women I know (or have known)
best: Kesavan Kesari, Antara, Indrina, Malini, Anjana, and Cory. This world
were safe, were it to rest solely in their gentle hands!

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments Xl
Preface: The Epoch of Uncertainty Xlll
1 The Ancien Regime: The Roots of
Modernism 1
2 The Emergent Imperium: of Conflicting
Corporatisms 16
3 A Critique of Political Economy:
On Elisions in Materialism 57
4 Capitalism and Socialism: The Twin Faces
of Janus 82
5 Against Eurocentrism: Breaking with the
Enlightenment 94
6 Alternative Visions: Toward Conviviality 116
7 The Reveille of Emancipation: Toward Volition 129
Postscript 161
Bibliography 163
Index 169
IX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The twentieth century marks the grand culmination, and lofty ascendancy,
of the high modernist impulse set in motion by the remarkable forces, both
material and metaphysical, unleashed by the European Enlightenment of the
eighteenth century. Pockets of resistance aside, the Great Crusade has, appa
rently, been won-or so the storytellers would have us believe; at any rate,
a certain kind of history has been made by some, inevitably, at the expense, of
various others. This book provides a searing account of the myth and reality
of modernism, and its victorious planetary agenda, incorporated in the so
called New World Order-but counterposed vividly against the emergent,
and largely unsuspected, challenges to this new epoch-in effect since the
collapse of the USSR, though in the making for decades prior to that signal
event. The triumphalist revival, resurgence, and re-establishment of the capi
talist mode of production, after surviving the many challenging uncertain
ties of the century, including socialism, the depression, and fascism, is of
course, part and parcel of contemporary folklore. What it calls for, on the
'Left,' though-a fact not always fully appreciated-is a fundamental re
examination of its alternate, but related, visions of liberation, particularly its
inescapable heritage of Eurocentrism, which continues to define human/social
behavior in linear, reductionist, monist, materialist, and universalist abstractions,
not far apart from the canonical prejudices of traditional economics. This
text offers a critique of the ideologies, and the metaphysical underpinnings,
of both capitalism and socialism-the psyche of modernism generally-aside
from pointing to a vitally organic, historically revealed, and radically con
trasting, docket of values to both of these Eurocentered visions of society.
As such, this work runs on a dual track, first arguing with traditional
categories, and then subjecting these categories to a scathing critique. To
facilitate ease of reading, the two tracks have, for the most part, been sepa
rated and placed in different chapters (although some reference to the cri
tique to come is available throughout the text). The critique of Eurocentrism
offered here has been the result of many influences, perhaps the most im
portant of which has been the discovery of the potency of culture-as a
survival kit-while living as a disenfranchised third world subject-citizen,
albeit in an entirely voluntary exile, of the appropriately deculturalized
hegemonic leader of the first world.
Xl
Xll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Other than the pedagogy implicit in this ontological condition, teaching
revelatory courses in race, culture, and gender studies, and supervising eman
cipatory dissertations of some powerfully committed graduate students in
this area, has provided the necessary goad, stimulus, and imperative, to my
own continuing education. Friends, family, and comrades (distinctions that,
happily, fade with time), at another remove, have also helped to keep the
intellectual and moral fires burning at times when the deep freeze of fell
circumstances seemed all but impossible to foil. While a full listing of such
fellow travelers is out of the question, I must name a few (in no particular
order), comprising both intimates and distal compeers, who either marched
alongside, or provided necessary philosophical nourishment quite unknow
ingly, one time or another, in this long and arduous trek: Roy Bhaskar,
Noam Chomsky, Roger Owen, Robert Heilbroner, Bill Brugger, Paul Sweezy,
Paul Feyerabend, Sai Baba, Harry Magdoff, Paul Auerbach, Mark Blaug,
Boudhayan Chattopadhyaya, Peter Bell, Tony Brewer, Wolfram Elsner, Ali
Shamsavari, Sudipta Kaviraj, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, Vandana
Shiva, Chandra Mohanty, Warren Samuels, Barbara Thayer, Janeen Costa,
Kamal Chenoy, Shaun Lovejoy, David Gordon, Paul Hanson, Tim Wonderly,
Janaka Bmanwila, and Janet Darley.
Thanks are also due to an anonymous reviewer, courtesy of Humanities
Press, whose gracious criticism helped to redirect my own attention toward
strengthening the basic theses being advocated here to the relative neglect
of a host of quite secondary, and ancillary, arguments that otherwise might
have obstructed them; indeed, an entire new chapter was later added on, in
direct consequence of his/her suggestions. I need also express gratitude to
several editors of Humanities Press who patiently sustained my excesses of
form and style.
Finally, I must note that this work is not intended as yet another offer of
abstractions in an already over-theorized world, but as a manual for engage
ments (moral, spiritual, political, etc.-but in the lower case), pointing the
way to struggle as an inescapable condition, and emancipation as an una
voidable goal, of a human society; unavoidable, because the passion for
freedom (from arbitrary, and unfamiliar, restraint) is arguably the only uni
versal impulse shared by humankind across time and space. It is, by far, the
only episteme that does not, and cannot, change; it is what still stands be
tween us and a complete capitulation to the dictates of modernism. As such,
the most predictable thing about the New World Order (to come) is that it
will be, inevitably, the product of our own sustained determinations (or lack
of them) to fashion an easeful, more sensual world.
PREFACE: THE EpOCH
OF UNCERTAINTY
We are, in the current period, in a state that physicists might call a singu
larity, where conventional wisdom (whether expressed in the form of 'laws,'
or 'models,' or not) breaks down. The collapse of the Soviet Union, though
eagerly sought by both the Right and many variants in the Left, came as a
complete and total surprise to all of the pundits of determinism (doing more
damage, actually, to vulgar Marxists among that roster). Neither capitalist
cold war political propaganda, nor socialist rhetoric, anticipated either the
collapse, or-more to the point-the astonishingly effete manner in which it
was actually accomplished. That a complex social system, embodying an
elaborate power structure, could self-destruct, more or less peaceably, stood
all varieties of political science, bourgeois and putatively Marxist, on their
head-suggesting, simply, that social science even today is more preten
tious than it is prescient in matters involving an understanding of the dy
namics of power and social change. At any rate, after generations of tug
and tussle, drama and debacle, the twentieth century has provided the mod
ernist ambition, that began its sweep of the world about the time of the
European Enlightenment, with a near-total victory over an apparently pros
trate world.
In mainstream physics, singularities tend to be abhorred because of the
sway of the rabid anthropocentrism (the so-called 'anthropic' principle) that
refuses to accept any phenomena as beyond the pale of human understand
ing, as though the universe were created explicitly for human comprehen
sion (arguably axiomatic in most of Judeo-Christian discourse). A similar
orientation subsists in the social sciences (social science abhorring a vacuum
even more than nature) in both the rationalist and materialist streams, deriv
ing from the European capitalist Enlightenment dating from the eighteenth
century. In this context, suffice it to say that social science remains, today,
more of a self-glorifying datum, to be critically examined, than a reliable
instrument to decipher the nature of reality. The fatal flaw here is the ma
terialist reductionism, inescapable attribute of the modernist temper, com
mon to bourgeois theory and vulgar Marxism alike-a reductionism that
derives human conduct from material motives, as a sort of a radical a priori,
XllI
XIV PREFACE
instead of viewing it only as a hypothesis to be tested against actual, con
crete experience. In this sense, the obliteration of state socialism has at least
provided the shock waves necessary to re-evaluate, also, socialist agendas
and Marxian theory, presenting therefore a unique opportunity to explore
what is to be undone in these areas.
At any rate, it is quite imperative now, at this juncture of both exploded
and exulting visions, to critically re-examine the received views of the two
dominant European models of society, that have almost completely mono
polized the critical idealism of several generations (in both the European
and non-European world), as though the future of humanity was completely
rendered permanently hostage to either capitalism, or its dual, socialism.
Stated simply, human history has always been an almost unfathomably rich
treasure trove of societal modes, and the customary liberal-radical penchant
of digging no further, nor deeper, than the European sixteenth or seven
teenth century for institutional innovations, betrays only a stunning want of
intellectual responsibility, to say nothing of imagination.
Today, given the fairly deep and widespread disenchantment with social
ism, all paths seem, inevitably, to lead to the inviting abyss of high capital
ism. As such, it is one of the tasks of this book to break the near-fatal,
hegemonic spell of late European ideology, and its demotic idolatry-to point,
instead, to the pleiad of pristine, lush, and opulent, founts of the human
genius, in the sphere of societal relations, that have almost been completely
overlooked (for being overrun) by this form of monist thinking, that has
trapped humankind as the benighted victims either of an omnipotent market
(read capitalism) or an omnipotent state (read all forms of 'actually exist
ing' socialism). Stated simply, the ideological conceit that leaves us with
only this hopelessly sophistical 'choice' between Tweedledum and Tweedledee
is, as Marx might have put it, a sheer libel upon the human race. As such,
consigning the last three hundred years of 'modernist' European ideologies
to the rubbish heap of history may be but the necessary first step in the
rediscovery of utopia.
However, to suspend the sway of received 'reason,' to break out of the
trance of everyday life, to snap out of what Gaston Bachelard called the
near-sublime state of soporific 'reverie,' that blindly legitimizes the status
quo, requires a form of emancipatory shock therapy that necessarily is apart
from the work of ordinary persuasion that we employ, to deservedly dull
effect, in the stolid routines of 'normal' science. Accordingly, a work of
this nature has some (but obviously) self-conscious defects that the sophis
ticated reader is expected to take in her stride. Perhaps less obviously, the
greatest of its defects are likely to be the ones of heroic aggregation; which
a fact we don't always appreciate-is, of course, simply another term for
theory. Indeed, this matter is important enough to deserve some overstate-
Preface xv
ment. The urge to totalize is understandable, and heroic aggregation is quite
class neutral in its incidence, shared by capitalist and socialist theorist alike.
However, without the ever present reminder that, in crucial regards, the whole
is not just more than the parts, but is also less, the enterprise is likely to go
awry. Theory misses detail ab initio; worse, theory usually appropriates macro
phenomena, and is less sensitive, if not altogether blind, to micro phenom
ena; and finally, theory can be, and is, refuted by unfolding realities. All
these considerations impose a deservedly heavy weight of modesty upon the
theorist, and upon theory.
As such, the spirit in which these reflections are offered is one that Marx,
in his better moods, would have appreciated (it was, by his own confession
to his daughter, his favorite motto--though subsequent Marxists would seem
to have completely forgotten it): De Omnibus Dubitandum. It is also impor
tant to note that I claim no apodictic certainty, drawn from either science or
theology, for my theses; conceived in the fervid vortex of feeling, and reared
in the silent cloister of observation and reflection, they are offered in the
spirit only of free, passionate, and moral Argument with which people of
sincerity and learning (similarly motivated) can disagree quite legitimately
without bloodletting, in the full realization that in a human society, it is not
so much reason that struggles against unreason, nor truth against error, but
rather that it is values that clash with values and interests with interests. It
is indeed high time that independent, unattached scholarship (of the, now
near-vanished, kind that marked the Enlightenment before the corporate or
ganization of the production and dissemination of knowledge) shed the con
stricting crutches of corporatist paradigms, tied to the newest fashion of
academic respectability, to perform the simple, but signal, intellectual serv
ice required of a scholar-of thinking for oneself.
The moral failure of socialism, adventitiously, predated its material col
lapse (some such fate, I will argue, lies also in store for capitalism); as
such, this book also represents a long drawn struggle to emancipate the idea
of emancipation from the old-style emancipators. It is possibly no accident
that this work, conceptually, originated in New York, while being completed
in Utah; the opportunity to review both ends of the (unpromising) scale of
capitalist evolution must have had something to do with the project (paral
leling my own personal displacement from the third world to the first, in
another evolutionary leap-backwards). I believe we are poised, on the eve
of the twenty-first century, on the brink of a resumption of an old parity
between east and west, rudely sundered by the sudden, meteoric blaze of
European capital that, much like Hamlet's uncle, envenomed the non-Euro
pean world as it lay, peacefully, in deep slumber. Today, the Asian giants
are fitfully awake with the possibility of a polycentric world, though regret
tably united presently only in sharing a common philosophy of greed, once