2004b Chaudhuri 2004b

Amit Chaudhuri In the Waiting-Room of History a review of Dipesh Chakrabarty Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, London Review of Books 24 June 2004, p. 3

     ". . .

     ". . . Walter Benjamin thought photographs changed our perception of human movement . . . 

     "Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious; just as we discover the instinctual subconscious through psychoanalysis." 

     ". . . Benjamin goes on to say in a late essay Theses on the Philosophy of History, "The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time."

     ". . . he [suggested] an alternative version of modernity and space in his description of the flâneur, the Parisian arcades and 19th-century street life . . . The flâneur, indeed, retards and parodies the idea of progress. But [the flâneur] did not prevail. Taylor, who popularised the watchword "Down with dawdling!", carried the day. The flâneur views history subversively; he-and it is usually he-deliberately relocates its meanings, its hierarchies. As far back as 1929, Benjamin had explained why the flâneur had to be situated in Paris:

     ""The flâneur is the creation of Paris. The wonder is that it was not Rome. But perhaps in Rome even dreaming is forced to move along streets that are too well-paved. and isn't the city too full of temples, enclosed squares and national shrines to be able to enter undivided into the dreams of the passer-by, along with every shop sign, every flight of steps and every gateway? The great reminiscences, the historical frissons-these are all so much junk to the flâneur, who is happy to leave them to the tourist. And he would be happy to trade all his knowledge of artist quarters, birthplaces and princely palaces for the scent of a single weathered threshold or the touch of a single tile-that which any old dog carries away."

     ". . . Benjamin doesn't romanticise the primitive . . . instead, he comes up with a particularly modern form of aleatoriness and decay in the 'weathered threshold' of a Parisian street.

     "Of course, the flâneur was not to be found in Paris alone. There was much wayward loitering in at least two colonial cities, Dublin and Calcutta . . . Calcutta would have probably been difficult for Benjamin to imagine. Benjamin's figure for the flâneur was Baudelaire, and for Baudelaire-and, by extension, for the flâneur-the East was, as it was for Henri Rousseau, part dreamscape, part botanical garden, part menagerie, part paradise. Could the flâneur exist in that dreamscape? Dipesh Chakrabarty, the author of Provincialising Europe, [writes] an elegy for, and a subtle critique of, his own intellectual formation and inheritance as a Bengali. The kind of Bengali who was synonymous with modernity and who believed that modernity might be a universal condition-irrespective of whether you're English, Indian, Arab or African-has now passed into extinction. Chakrabarty's book is in part a discreet inquiry into why that potent Bengali dream didn't quite work-why 'modernity' remains so resolutely European.

     ". . .

     ". . . Europe is at once a means of intellectual dominance, an obfuscatory trope and a constituent of self-knowledge, in different ways for different people and histories.

     "Said's great study [Orientalism] takes its cue from the many-sided and endlessly absorbing Foucault, in its inexhaustible conviction and its curiosity about how a body of knowledge . . . can involve the exercise of power. [This approach seems somewhat used up. Chakrabarty seems post-structuralist and Derridean, and it rehearses a key moment in Derrida: the idea that it is necessary to dismantle or take on the language of Western metaphysics . . . but there is no alternative language available with which to dismantle it-so that the language must be turned on itself.

     ". . .

     ". . . 'Historicism-and even the modern, European idea of history-one might say, came to non-European peoples in the 19th c. as somebody's way of saying 'not yet' to somebody else' . . .  John Stuart Mill . . . proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against giviing Indian or Africans self-rule since they were not yet civilized enough to rule themselves . . . thus consigning [them] and other rude nations to the waiting room of history."

     ". . . Gandhi . . .when asked what he thought of Western Civilization thought it would be a good idea . . . Tharoor writes, "India is not an underdeveloped country. It is a highly developed country in an advanced state of decay". . .

     ". . .

     [The literature of colonialism, J.S. Mill, Naipaul, Conrad, Forster is about 'waiting,' 'not now,' 'not yet,' 'an echo,' 'not real.']

     ". . .

     ". . . The translator and scholar William Jones called Kalidasa, the greatest Indian poet and dramatist of antiquity, the "Shakespeare of the East." To do this, Jones had to reverse history -Kalidasa preceded Shakespeare by more than a thousand years. Jones is not so much making a useful (a supremely approbatory) comparison as telling us inadvertently that it's impossible to escape 'homogeneous, empty time:' that as far as Kalidasa is concerned Shakespeare has already happened . . .

     "The 'first in English, then elsewhere' paradigm . . . made the processs of modernisation seem . . . like mimicry. "We pretend to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World," Naipaul [writes] . . . the exuberantly impenetrable Homi Bhabha in Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse . . . tries to rescue the idea of mimicry to make it subversive: mimicry undermines the colonisers' gaze by presenting him with a distorted reflection . . .

     ". . . to provincialise Europe is not to vanquish or conquer it . . . but a means of locating and subjecting to interrogation some of the fundamental notions by which we define ourselves.

     ". . . [the narrator of The Mimic Men] . . . writing something like his memoirs, is . . . haunted, even entrapped by the language called 'Europe.' It's not a life story he wishes to compose. My first instinct was towards the writing of history . . . I have read that it was a saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city . . . Even memory, the site of renewal for the Romantics and Modernists, is deceptive . . . memory is 'discursively constituted,' and has its own truth . . .

     ". . .

     ". . . in the chapter Adda: A History of Sociality . . . (pronounced 'uddah') is translated as "a place for careless talk for boon companions" or "the chats of intimate friends."

     ""By many standards of judgment in modernity, adda is a flawed social practice: it is predominately male in its modern form in public life; it is oblivious of the materiality of labour in capitalism; and midde-class addas are usually forgetful of the working classes. Some Bengalis even see it as as practice that promotes sheer laziness . . .""

     ". . . Both adda and flânerie are activities whose worth is ambivalent in a capitalist society: they rupture the 'march of progress.' Flânerie is 'dawdling', and adda a waste of time . . . Neither flânerie nor adda is a purely physical or mental activity; both are reconfigurings of urban space. The flâneur . . . walked about the Parisian arcades of the 19th c.  . . . as if they were extensions of his living room: he blurred the line dividing inside from outside . . . adda took place in drawing rooms, in such a way as to disrupt domesticity and turn the interior into a sort of public space; or on the rawak or porches of houses in cramped lanes . . .

     "Benjamin's relationship to the flâneur and his subterranean affirmation of daydreaming in his meditations on flânerie lend his work an odd poignancy and ambivalence; given that Benjamin was a Marxist, the flâneur could never be wholly legitimate either outside or inside his work . . . Chakrabarty's concerns . . . modernity, adda, and the shadow of Benjamin's flâneur . . . occupy a similarly ambivalent position in relationship to his provenance . . . It is the ambiguity of Chakrabarty's own position as both a critic and archivist of modernity that give his study its poetic undertow and its intelligent irresponsibility."

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 Kelyn Roberts 2017