Luhmann's Version of Systems Theory Will Used to See How Narratives And

Postcolonial Literary System: Toward an Ethics of Post-subjectivity

Shital Kumar Dahal, M.A.

A dissertation

English

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Approved

Bruce Clarke Chairperson of the Committee

Jen Shelton

Yuan Shu

Fred Hartmeister Dean of Graduate School

August 2010

Texas Tech University, Shital Dahal, August 2010

Acknowledgments

My mere words of thanks would be inadequate to express my gratitude to the

dissertation committee. I enjoyed the unforgettable, once-in-a-life-time journey of reading volumes of literature, exploring several topics, finally pinning down on one, and that was just the beginning. The critical theory class I took with Dr. Bruce Clarke, which included Bruno Latour, must have been the beginning of all beginnings of the topic that I chose for this dissertation. Toward the end of my first attempt at the prospectus, when I

was still trying figure out how to bring together Derrida, Husserl, Buddhism, and Rig

Veda, I went to see Dr. Clarke at his home, and he introduced me to a series of

philosophically oriented works on paradox, which included Luhmann, Maturana, Varela,

Spencer-Brown and von-Foerster. A number of subsequent meetings with Dr. Clarke

convinced me to pursue systems theory, instead of just limiting to paradox. The

postcolonial component of this dissertation may be traced to the class I took with Jen

Shelton in my first year at Texas Tech, but it had to be reignited several times by Yuan

Shu’s vision. I have had a lot of fun working with these people.

Dr. Clarke’s theoretical scholarship, grand patience punctuated by a couple of occasions of impatience, generous ideas, and around-the-clock readiness to offer ideas in person and through email, were a tremendous help in completing this work. Dr. Clarke is

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not only a genius but also a great person and teacher to work with. Dr. Jen Shelton’s constructive, at times stern, criticisms undoubtedly helped me revise the draft several times and finally take the current shape. Dr. Yuan Shu’s broad theoretical knowledge eased the process of my bringing together postcolonialism and systems theory. His positive comments were much-needed encouragement, especially at those times when I was struggling with ideas. Thank you all three so much. I am grateful to Texas Tech

Graduate School for the Summer Dissertation/ Thesis Research Award 2009. The financial help certainly let me concentrate fully on completing the dissertation. Last but not least, I am equally indebted to University Writing Center’s Laura Brandenburg and

Kathleen Gillis, for their invaluable help in editing the final draft.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgement ii

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

1.1. Argument

1.2. Overview

Chapter 2: Systems Theory and Its Relevance 20

2.1. Why Systems Theory?

2.2. Boundary: The First Cut

2.3. Observation

2.4. Binary

Chapter 3: Description of Postcolonial Literary Subsystem 38

3.1. Emergence of Postcolonial Literary Subsystem

3.2. Interaction between Literary and Critical Works

3.3. Reproduction of Colonialism within Postcolony

3.4. Diaspora: Hybrid (Wandering Gypsy?)

Chapter 4: Resistance and Antagonism 84

4.1. Resistance as Realm of Conflict

4.2. Culture as Resistance and Memory

4.4. Limitation of Cultural Identity for Solidarity

4.5. Total Inclusion and Collective Movement iv

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Chapter 5: Toward an Ethics of Post-subjectivity 111

5.1. History of Subjectivity

5.2. Postcolonialism and Subjectivity

5.3. Reasons for Resisting Subjectivity

5.4. Post-subjectivity as Resistance Strategy

5.4.1. Colonial and Post-colonial Animal

5.4.2. Phantoms, Avatars, and Prosthesis

5.4.3. Technological Body

5.4.4. Toward the Future

Glossary 182

Works Cited 191

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Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Argument

Contemporary postcolonial studies as an academic discipline owes a great deal to the explosion of anthologies of critical works in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which had their precursors in Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Edward Said’s works, to name a few. Within postcolonial literary field, so far only historical accounts of the field have been attempted

(Robert Fraser, Deepika Bahri, Graham Huggan, to name a few). Historical accounts of the field have their own merits, but they are limited as they lack a robust theoretical account of the evolution of the field. By embarking on systems-theory concepts of communication and interaction, I have attempted to provide the missing account of the field, in which I have added the “how” of the history to the “what” of the history.

To account for the interaction between literary and critical works in the making of the postcolonial literary system, I could not find guidance in other theories but systems theory. There is simply no theoretical formulation of interaction in other theories. I chose Niklas Luhmann’s version of systems theory because it shows closeness with art, particularly literature. Moreover, on the one hand, Luhmann’s concept of system allows analyzing how postcolonial literary subsystem achieved its distinction within the literary system. On the other hand, it helps pave the 1

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way to expand the system’s horizon beyond humans so the subsystem can increase its ability to respond to other systems in the environment and, in turn, ensures its life and longevity. The subsystem achieves all this without jeopardizing its operational prerogative, while still allowing structural changes within the subsystem in its own terms.

This dissertation is the first attempt at viewing postcolonial literature as an autopoietic system in that it contributes to the ongoing discussion of what belongs to the system. My first intervention is primarily theoretical in that I borrow the concept of interaction and communication from Luhmann and argue that it is not geographical location, indigeneity, colonial history of a nation, its language, culture, or origin of a text (settler or non-settler colony, postcolony, metropolis, non-colony) that automatically qualifies to be a system element. I argue that the qualification is based on communicative potentiality of a text, creative or critical; therefore, it should be theorized accordingly. By “communicative potentiality,” I mean whether the text has engaged with postcolonial themes; whether it has attracted the attention of the system; whether the text in question has generated conditions of further communication. In the same manner, whether this dissertation belongs to the postcolonial literary subsystem depends not only on whether it has participated in the ongoing discussion of the relevant topics designated by the system but also on whether it will generate conditions of further communication, i.e. whether it will attract the attention of future postcolonial texts, either in the form of constructive intervention, problematization, reconfiguration, elaboration of postcolonial topics with new twist. To be part of the system, it must make a difference for future communicative events of postcolonial literary system.

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With systems theoretic lens, particularly interaction and communication, we are able to

avoid qualification of postcoloniality based on origin, on the one hand, and primacy of literary

texts over critical texts or the reverse, on the other. The significance of this displacement of

origin criterion, i.e. rendering geography non-criterion, is that the field (system) will expand

geographically, which may be roughly viewed as the system’s structural opening, and the field

will continue to consolidate its boundary based on communicative elements relevant to

postcolonial literary subsystem and will maintain its operational prerogative and autopoiesis

(guarding itself from incursion by other systems in the environment).

Usually in practice, there is a tendency within the postcolonial literary system to conflate colonizer with European colonizer, ignoring the fact of internal colonization as well as some powerful postcolonies’ reproduction of colonial behaviors toward their people and neighboring countries. As a consequence of the conflation, the problem of internal colonization, i.e. reproduction of colonialism at home, in post-independence nations has not been sufficiently addressed in postcolonial critical works. My argument is that these postcolonial nation-states inherited colonial institutions and operate in a similarly colonial mode against which they fought.

The relevance of systems theory with regard to the problem of internal colonialism is that it allows us to see how colonial systems of politics, economy, and education in particular created enough conditions of reproduction in former colonies before colonial powers left. These systems could not transition from stratification to functional differentiation, thus resulting in the continuation of a political super-system, which still controls all other systems in most postcolonies, if not all.

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Some prominent reflective works of the postcolonial field have offered solutions to the

question of subject and nation, particularly with the concepts of syncretism (hybridity) and

diaspora. I do not question the value of syncretism in the context of settler (post)colonies, but in

the non-settler post(colonies), especially with respect to subalterns, a wholesale embrace of

syncretism is problematic. However, cultural syncretism seems to underlie the assumption that

colonialism in all versions has ended, thus ending the need for oppositional politics for once and

all. The question regarding the binary code of colonizer/ colonized still remains unresolved, i.e.

if it has any efficacy in postcolonies. My intervention is that rather than nullifying the code for

all occasions, this binary code, which is not objective but strategical, can still play some useful

role in non-settler colonies for oppositional politics for they continue to face both external and

internal colonialism. However, the code should neither be hierarchized nor oriented toward

achieving purity or humanist subjectivity, in strict metaphysical sense. Regardless of the

semantic dispute surrounding the code, no system can process information, i.e. reduce

complexity, without a two-valued code.

For some strange reasons, the postcolonial literary field has been plagued by the question

of subjectivity, despite knowing the fact that even culturally hybrid, fragmented subjectivity has

been limited to humans, a few privileged in that. As a consequence, modern project of

purification (recall Latour), othering, and hierarchization has continued, and other actors like animals and machines, not just human subalterns, have been instrumentalized. My intervention in the postcolonial literary subsystem’s emphasis on metaphysics of subjectivity is that it is inextricably entangled with colonialism, and this entanglement has prevented the view of other

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others, i.e. absolute others. In order to open up to these extreme others, we have to step outside the tradition of humanism.

On the basis of a survey of the history of subjectivity, I claim that the postcolonial literary system should take a post-humanist turn and abandon the metaphysics of subjectivity so it can open up to other agencies like non-human animals, machines, etc. This last ethical move is proposed as a post-subjective stance of the postcolonial in that resistance takes the form of overcoming subjectivity and of recognizing hybridity so all actors, humans and non-humans, in the network are accounted for their roles. Here also, I had to supplement Luhmann’s systems theory with other posthumanist critical works, from Jacques Derrida through Bruno Latour. An application, as well as further elaboration, of the proposed theory is attempted using the three literary texts. Neither the effects of colonialism and neo-colonialism on non-humans independently nor interpenetrations between humans, animals, and machines have ever been addressed within the postcolonial literary subsystem. In this sense, this last chapter should be another contribution to the postcolonial literary field in that I have suggested that the discursive inclusion of animals and machines will increase the complexity of postcolonial literary system, and these new topics will renew the field’s relevance and life.

Let me break down and elaborate further those four major problems that this dissertation responds to. The first of the problems concerns with the confusion surrounding the field, between those pointing out risks of exclusions in the name of stability and coherence of the field and those pointing out the need “to proceed [ahead with the field] on the basis of all sorts of exclusions” (Williams and Chrisman x). In this context, some postcolonial theorists have argued

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that the field aspires to be another grand narrative, failing to account for differing histories,

geographies, cultural traditions, and inequity in power relations between the colonized and the

colonizing nations.1A few others, for instance Deepika Bahri, have argued against the disciplinarity of the field, pointing out “its attendant tyrannies” (Native Intelligence 44). This anomaly surrounding the field is the first problem that this dissertation addresses with the help of

Luhmann’s version of systems theoretic concepts such as boundary, system, observation, interaction, communication, etc.

The second problem that this dissertation tackles is the tendency that conflates colonizer with European colonizer while ignoring the fact of internal colonization as well as some powerful postcolonies’ reproduction of colonial behaviors toward their people and neighboring countries. The problem of internal colonization in the post-independence nations has not attracted sufficient attention, as the conflation of colonizer with Europe continues to hold sway under the nationalist paradigm. Within these post-independence nations, blaming the West for everything that goes wrong at home can satisfy nationalist interests and cover up their failures as well as provide them with an excuse to suppress ethnic, cultural, and regional interests of the minority groups. In the midst of all these self-interests and cover-ups, newly independent nation-states have failed to recognize the reproduction of colonialism at home. This dissertation has attempted to underscore the problem of internal colonialism with the hope that future critical works of the field will attend to it.

The third problem deals with the solutions that postcolonial reflective works have provided to the question of subject and nation, particularly with the concepts of syncretism

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(hybridity) and diaspora. I do not question the value of syncretism in the context of settler

(post)colonies, but in the non-settler post(colonies), especially with respect to subalterns, a wholesale embrace of syncretism is problematic. Maybe, as Harish Trivedi points out, cultural hybridity between the Orient and Occident is a privilege of the postcolonial elite (159-60).

Granted cultural syncretism has its own merit for continuing nuanced oppositional politics in settler post-colonies, and granted it does not assume colonialism in all versions has ended, the question that Benita Parry raises in as early as 1987 with regard to politics still remains unresolved:

What are the politics which dissolve the binary opposition colonized self/ colonized other, encoded in colonialist language as a dichotomy necessary to domination, but also differently inscribed in the discourse of liberation as a dialectic of conflict and a call to arms? (29)

The fourth and final problem revolves around the question of subjectivity, including culturally hybrid, fragmented subjectivity, which has been limited to a few privileged humans.

There is a problem with the argument that subjectivity has to be extended to the excluded humans. An extension of subjectivity has been often proposed as a solution to suppression and exploitation, where as it is the hindrance to the acknowledgment of other actors in the network.

The modern project of purification has not only excluded human others but also hierarchized the relationship among actors that include animals and machines, not just human subalterns.

As a response to these four problems, four major arguments are presented in this dissertation. First, systems theory will allow us to move from subject-center analysis to systems difference. With the concept of system-environment distinction, literary texts appear as more

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than mere rewritings of earlier texts, or as more than a closed system in which texts are reactions to predecessors, generating (or self-generating) variations on common themes, characters, and topoi. From a systems-theoretic point of view, I argue that the postcolonial literary subsystem has emerged from an interaction between postcolonial literary works, theoretical works, and other system-specific communicative events. As a sample of such interaction, I have chosen three literary works, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, and Kiran

Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, alongside Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Edward Said, Salman

Rushdie, Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, Chandra Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, and a few others’ critical works. Second, I argue that neo-colonialism is not limited to the Empire; practice of neo- colonialism, as an obvious legacy of colonialism, continues in the post-colonies internally, thus affirming the reproduction of colonialism. Third, resistance to colonialism in all its forms, including internal colonialism, must continue, embracing antagonistic democracy. Fourth, postcolonial literary subsystem should abandon its affiliation with subjectivity so that it can not only avoid risking inadvertent suppression and domination of the other but also respond to posthumanism and increase complexity for the future relevancy.

There is one sub-argument underlying these arguments, especially starting with chapter three: For its conservation of organization and adaptation, post-colonial literary subsystem must continually respond to the theme of resistance to “colonialism, colonialist ideologies, and their contemporary forms” (Tiffin vii). In other words, because the system’s differentiation is based on its loose coupling with the political system, the political has to be perpetually relevant for the subsystem’s autopoiesis.2 This claim already entails several assumptions, which require some

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unfolding. This claim is made in the backdrop of the version of hybridity and syncreticity that

risks verging on an uncritical acceptance of assimilation theory of the new Empire, often under

the argument that the Western globalization is locally appropriated and that consequently ensures

postcolonials’ share in the making of this phenomenon.3 What needs to be added to my claim is

that resistance does not have to be necessarily reduced to humanist, transcendental subjectivity.4

In systems theoretic formulation, subjectivity slides into the background of the society with a

reduced role. To signify this demotion, as it becomes merely the social system’s environment,

not regulator, I propose a theory of post-subjectivity. During its brief history, the post-colonial

literary subsystem has devised various strategies of resistance, and now, in the climactic age of

information and technology, it must take a post-humanist turn, if it has not already. One does not have to and should not go through the route of liberal humanist subjectivity, by and large a colonialist legacy, to pursue strategies of resistance and to claim agency. If we are ready to admit that the human species has always co-evolved with non-humans, animals and machines, after having failed to acknowledge the disproportionate distribution, and address their inter- relationship, one of the ways to keep the political ball, resistance, rolling, is to respond to the posthuman turn. This move will also help generate a conscience to help mitigate the aggression between humans, if it is only as a side effect. I conceive post-subjectivity primarily as recognition of consciousness among all life forms. The concept is further developed, rather particularized in a postcolonial context, as a resistance strategy, hoping to add new layers to the already hybrid and to increase complexity with new life-rhythm. I do not take posthuman to be linear evolution in that the human is shedding off the animal and culminating teleologically into

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the inevitable destiny of machine state. As the human is not after the animal, posthuman is not

after the human. As the concept has evolved and diverged, posthuman can no longer be reduced

to, to put in Clarke’s words, bodiless, “vitiated informatics” or to non-cognitive bodies (Clarke,

Posthuman 5). In my version, to be posthuman is to be discontinuously evolving by opening up

to non-human animals, machines, and other non-living beings, virtual or otherwise, sometimes

symmetrically and other times asymmetrically. More appropriately, I would like to envision the

posthuman to be indifferent to the notion of “best possible world” and Hegelian dialectical

synthesis, thus keeping the radical politics, antagonism, intact, not veering into Katherine Hayles’

transcendental union of “mindbody” or fighting over the supremacy of one over the other in the

name of embodiment or disembodiment.5

As colonialism has persisted in various guises, and as the new Empire views the

culturally dislocated actor as vulnerable prey, subjectivity (subject activity in its inward

movement or in Cartesian-Hegelian tradition), under global capitalism, I persistently argue in this dissertation, finds itself as an Enlightenment project renewed in neo-colonialism.6 In other words, the politics of subjectivity is an endless entanglement with liberal humanism, thus forever holding humans in the captivity of the Enlightenment’s wrong and false promise: Wrong because it presumes that the human, as an all-knowing, transcendental subject, has rightly taken over the ontotheological task of managing all systems of society and securing justice; false because its central task of securing humans’ liberty and freedom by reason alone is unachievable. Once again, following systems theory’s techno-politico ethos, I find the Enlightenment goal—nothing

at all may remain outside—to include all not just utopian but colonialist.

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By interpreting how the characters from Mukherjee’s, Lahiri’s, and Desai’s works adapt

to cultural dislocation without falling for Enlightenment humanism or its dictum of common,

universal/ European humanity, I have suggested that one of the ways postcolonials can get out of

the liberal pluralistic trap is by making a leap into posthumanist agency, i.e. a post-subjective,

transgressive agency.

It is relevant to mention at the outset some of the assumptions around which the main

argument is built. Society and its analysis cannot be reduced to human beings; therefore,

following Luhmann, a paradigmatic shift to communication is sought for an analysis of society.

From the systems theory perspective, exclusion and inclusion are taken “as a correlate of

functional differentiation” (Stäheli and Stichweh 3). Moreover, insistence on subjectivity has

always been at the cost of alterity, thus privileging subjectivity (Bohn and Hahn 9). Hybrid

identity will be read as a reentry of the distinction inclusion/exclusion within itself (Stäheli and

Stichweh 5). What this means is, in the functionally differentiated, modern society, individuals cannot be reduced to only one function or one social theme like race, gender, or class, to extract individuality. Systems theory recognizes the multi-location / dispersion of the individual in many functionally differentiated systems, thus re-writing the atomistic individual into dividuals, cuttable agency. Further, it holds that there cannot be a dialectic synthesis of the agency into any one individuality. Systems theory acknowledges agency without individuality in the classical sense; in other words, it argues that there are psychic systems without subjectivity, and humans

are one among many. The abandonment of subject does not mean abandonment of human beings;

it means as long as we keep the concept of subject, there is risk of retaining hierarchy and of

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referring to the subject as the overarching principle of all systems. Moreover, this dissertation in

its last chapter argues that the liberal subject should be contested on the ground that it not only

involves in suppression and domination of the other but also orients, in various guises, toward

maintaining the privilege of the bourgeoisie. However, what this means is humans are retained as

one type of actors among many; they are only environment to social systems; and they do not have direct causal influence on what is communicated. Actors, to put in Søren Brier’s words,

“can only be structurally coupled to [society]” (“Applying Luhmann” 39). This is where the culture, as a specific medium of meaning that connects psychic system and social system through structural coupling, will find its role (Laermans).

We may want to recognize some of the apparent difficulties system theory poses in its application. For one, it confines individuals in the interaction system and in the familial system.

At first glance, it might even look scandalous when system theory states psychic systems, individuals in old terminology, cannot communicate with and do not, therefore, belong to society.

On one occasion, Luhmann relinquishes the issue of inequality, saying “domination and exploitation” be best left for Marxism (Differentiation 234). Cary Wolfe expresses the same concern in his conclusion that Luhmann, among others, remain entangled into “a liberal humanist pluralism,” albeit of a different sort, which “pays little attention to how real inequality in the economic and social sphere complicates and compromises the pluralism they imagine generated by their constructivism in the sphere of theory” (Critical Environment 129). The point is, if we strictly follow Luhmann’s version of systems theory, we might not be able to sufficiently help address cultural particularizes. However, a recent development within systems

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theory, particularly the conference “Inclusion / Exclusion and Socio-Cultural Identities,” held at

University of Bielefeld, in 2001, has attempted to deal with the question of culture and identity.

More recently, in 2007, Dirk Baecker, Søren Brier, and a few other “Luhmannians,” conducted a

conference on “how to apply Luhmann’s work to various areas” (5), which included one paper

directly related to culture, Rudi Laermans’ “Theorizing Culture, or Reading Luhmann Against

Luhmann,” which attempts to fill the lack in systems theory, still insufficiently. Luhmann’s

systems theory refrains from prescribing solutions to social problems. For instance, he declares,

“From the perspective of systems theory, we ask not for a ‘solution,’ or even a ‘good ending’ to

conflict, but rather to what degree conflict can be conditioned” (Social Systems 393). However,

in his view, “A society must offer many as yet unused opportunities for conflict if it wants to

reproduce its immune system” (395). This position takes us close to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal

Mouffe’s antagonistic pluralism.7

The choice of these literary texts, besides the reasons given in the chapter 3.3 section,

“Diaspora,” comes from the fact that they embed significant parts of the colonial history in their

narratives: While Lahiri’s Namesake has West Bengal in its background and Desai’s Inheritance

of Loss is predominantly set in Kalimpong, a town in the same state, they evoke some rudimentary memories of the British establishment in India. Desai’s work also takes us to the other end of the colonial and postcolonial India, Gujarat. Part of Mukherjee’s Jasmine is set in

Punjab, a northern state in India. If West Bengal marks the beginning of the British establishment, Punjab is the state that experienced most adverse effect of the partition of the nation at the end of the colonial era.8 From a systems theory perspective, their significance lies in

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the way they allow the observation of postcolonial India’s reproduction of colonialism internally,

thus resulting in the ethnic and secessionist movements for liberation, both in Bengal and Punjab.

In short, they cover the two ends of the country during both colonial and postcolonial times.

Moreover, because these texts are not arguably as canonical as most would think, the

significance of the choice lies in the fact that postcolonial literary system historically has evolved,

if only in part, as a rebellion against the notion of cannon and is supposed to be oriented toward

questioning the notion of cannon.

1.2. Overview

Chapter two, “Systems Theory and Its Relevance,” begins by elucidating those concepts

of systems theory that pertain to postcolonial literary system and posthumanism, while other

concepts are explained in the course of literary analysis in the last three chapters. It follows up by

explaining the relevance of systems theory in general to validate the choice of the theory, as

opposed to others. The colonial political code of colonizer/colonized is examined and tested if it

has any more relevance. Especially in the case of internal colonialism, the code still seems to be

operative. Externally, though, especially in the case of diasporic communities, it may have lost

its efficacy. The explanation of systems-theory concepts is oriented toward preparing the groundwork for the observation of postcolonial literary system. Postcolonial literary field is analyzed for the first time as a subsystem of literary system, which is, in turn, a subsystem of the

system of art. The analysis is narrowed down to how the subsystem differentiates from the parent

system and achieves its autonomy.

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In chapter three, “Description of Postcolonial Literary Subsystem,” I argue, following

Luhmann’s version of systems theory, that narratives and critical narratives inform each other and interactively form the postcolonial literary subsystem. To narrow down to the textual level within the scope of this dissertation, I will observe how Fanon, Said, Rushdie, Bhabha, Spivak and a few others’ postcolonial theoretical discourses interact with three postcolonial writers’ works, viz. Mukherjee’s Jasmine, Lahiri’s Namesake, and Desai’s Inheritance of Loss. Their interactions, both agreements and disagreements, produce relevant communicative elements for the postcolonial literary subsystem. This subsystem closely resembles many of the procedural details of what involves in the functioning of a social system, including internal differentiations, operational closure with structural openness, autopoiesis, etc. Furthermore, I will argue that postcolonial critical narratives remain entangled with the colonial tradition. One of the underlying sub-arguments of the chapter three, and chapters following this, revolves around why resistance cannot be abandoned.

Chapter four, “Resistance and Antagonism,” further explains the link between resistance, rights, and system differentiation. Resistance in the realm of conflict utilizes the political code of friend/enemy (colonizer/colonized or ruler and ruled). Two inter-ethnic movements, Khalistan

(Punjab) and Gorkhaland (West Bengal) attest to the usage of dyadic political code. Culture is explained as memory and past achievement while arguing its limitation in political and social movements. This chapter ends with an endorsement of antagonistic democracy that ensures protests and opposition. In one sense, this chapter further tests the applicability of systems theory for postcolonial literary system and attempts to make the theory workable to address the issue of

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culture from within its operative mode. In light of systems theory, some of the central issues of postcolonialism will be complexified.

Chapter five, “Toward an Ethics of Post-Subjectivity,” charts the history of subjectivity from Descartes through Lacan and beyond. The argument that subjectivity should be overcome is premised on the assumption that postcolonial literary subsystem—to be understood here as both literature and theory related to the postcolonial nation states after the World War II, their people, culture, and history due to colonial past—has invested a large part of its creative and intellectual energy in identity politics with the hope of achieving the goals of liberal humanism: subjectivity, equality, justice, freedom, cultural differences, etc. Taking guidelines mostly from posthumanist theories like Luhmann’s version of systems theory, Bruno Latour’s constitution of objects, and

Derrida’s ethical philosophy of animals, this chapter seeks to broaden the concept of hybridity to non-humans while arguing that the postcolonial literary subsystem can and should dispense with humanist subjectivity. I claim that the posthumanist move will only strengthen the postcolonial literary subsystem, not weaken it. The dispensing has begun from within the field, in its questioning of the unitary subject, but the field will find more convincing reasons in this project for dislocating humanist subjectivity from its historically assigned privileged place in the metaphysical tradition. My effort in this project is to broaden the scope of postcolonialism by lending it a post-humanist dimension. After formulating a theory of post-subjectivity, the theory is applied to the three literary texts.

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Notes

1. For instance, Ann McClintock, in her often-anthologized essay, “The Angel of

Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-colonialism’,” cautions as early as in 1992 that “the singular

category ‘post-colonial’ may license too readily a panoptic tendency to view the globe within

generic abstractions voided of political nuance” (1187).

2. See Chapter 4.2 for detailed discussion on resistance.

3. In “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality,” Simon Gikandi writes: “Clearly, globalization appeals to advocates of hybridity as diverse as Homi Bhabha and Pieterse because it seems to harmonize the universal and particular…” (629).

4. In In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, Gayatri Spivak acknowledges that

“the subaltern’s view, will, presence, can be no more than a theoretical fiction…. It cannot be recovered” (204). The non-reducibility of both subaltern’s consciousness and resistance, or the latter to the former, is one of the effective ways to seek “the place of a difference rather than an identity” (204). And, in systems theory, we may conceive the difference as system difference,

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whose differentiation alone addresses the question of rights, rather than rights as universal anchorage of all other systems.

5. In “Flesh and Metal : Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments,”

Katherine Hayles seems to propose “enaction” as a seamless union of two independent types of systems: psychic system and organic system, erasing the operational prerogative of each. In How

We Became Posthuman, her “enaction sees the organism’s active [instructive] engagement with surroundings as more open-ended and transformative” (156). Hayles’ theory directly contests, albeit baselessly, systems theory’s concept of operational closure. Yet, subjectivity in some confusing form shows up as emergent in the concluding paragraph of “Conclusion” (291).

6. Since Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” we have by and large accepted that “individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects” (119).

From Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s “The Concept of Enlightenment,” we learn that enlightenment project, as one of its goals, was to exterminate “the incommensurable” and to bring humans to conformity because “[n]othing at all may remain outside”(12, 16). From Michel

Foucault’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” we gather that the autonomy of the subject lies in the use of universal reason to obey, and that is what is called the “humanity’s passage to its adult status” (“What Is Enlightenment” 38). The

“obligation prescribed to individuals” becomes “a political problem” (37). Subjectivity is a willfully accepted circumscribed position. Then, in her conversation with Jane Gallop, Gayatri

Spivak takes on the same issue. After summing up Kant’s essay in the following words, “Reason

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is one. Therefore, everyone has the same inalienable rights,” she argues reason is not one, and the “totally disenfranchised” do not have the same rights (Polemic: Critical or Uncritical 187).

Is this not seeking rights to be willfully circumscribed? I have elaborated further on this issue in chapter four.

7. Luhmann-Laclau engagement began when a couple of Luhmannians contributed to

Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart edited Laclau: A Reader, in which Laclau, in his reply to

Urs Stäheli’s systems approach to hegemony, sees coincidence between marked and unmarked and “space of representation and the unrepresented” (320).

8. As Richard Allen notes, the Battle of Plassey, which took place in West Bengal, “is the key event, not only because it enabled the British to establish themselves in India but because it established the model for takeover—a mixture of military conquest and insinuating themselves into the local Indian governments” (30).

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Chapter 2

Systems Theory and Its Relevance

“In fact, autopoietic and allopoietic descriptions of a system are complementary pairs, depending

on the observer’s needs”—Varela, Principles of Autonomy 16.

In this section, I will defend the choice of systems theory and elaborate on some of the

systems theory’s difficult concepts—such as what makes a system, particularly social systems;

how subsystems are formed; how each subsystem functions like a system by internal

differentiation with its own environment, etc. Since the question of binary has been confusing

between how systems theory employs it and how poststructuralism and other theories influenced by it conceptualize binary, I will attempt to clarify some of that, in defense of using the binary code in specific circumstances, especially within colonialism. Additionally, I will explain the political code of colonizer and its counter value colonized and the value of its reversal in oppositional politics of postcolonial literary subsystem. To put in postcolonial terminology, such reversal too could be viewed as using the master’s tool against the master in the contexts of internal colonialism. Maybe, in a certain sense, this move is similar to what Needham characterizes “as a strategy of re-play, in which what is appropriated is literally repeated and re- staged for critical scrutiny” (52).

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2.1. Why systems theory?

Two things come to my mind off the sleeve: Systems theory takes into account the observer, and it avoids representationalism. When systems theory presents the observer and the object of observation, both are accounted in co-intention.

With the concepts of functionally differentiated social systems, systems theory does away with hierarchy and super-structure. To elaborate, modern society cannot be organized around a particular system, for instance economic system in Marx or system of consciousness in Hegel and Heidegger. As society is differentiated into operationally exclusive functions systems, this society is without top or center; in other words, we live in a society with multiple centers. One system cannot take the charge to regulate other systems. This does not mean that there are no interconnections between systems; it only means that the relation between systems is based on loose coupling, not strict coupling. As a consequence, no one particular system is overburdened with determining individuality of individuals. Because the individual of the modern society (or postmodern) belongs to more than one system, she is included only partially to each. As the individual is only a part of reality and this part of reality cannot be conceived as underlying the whole of reality, Luhmann’s suggestion to “drop the term ‘subject’” is helpful in formulating a post-subjective stance (Essays 113). Luhmann replaces the concept of subjectivity with system of consciousness, which operates as “an individual system, using its own unity and its own conscious events to reproduce its own unity and its conscious events” (118).

With Luhmann’s systems theory, “we avoid a petitio principii,” which means we do not assume conclusion in the beginning. This move refrains from reducing society to “political or

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economic, ‘civil,’ or ‘capitalistic’ referents” (Essays 176-77).1 Moreover, society is no longer viewed as composed of human beings, i.e. society cannot be “formed on the model of a human being, that is, with a head at the top and so on” (Luhmann, Social Systems 213). In a certain sense, this is analogous with deconstructive position of passing “beyond man and humanism” and not dreaming of “full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin,” etc. (Derrida,

“Structure” 292). However, even if Luhmann’s version of systems theory declares that human being “is no longer the measure of society,” this does not mean the human being is done with

(Social Systems 213). It means reduction of human beings to “parts of the societal environment,” which makes them “more complex and less restricting than if they had to be interpreted as parts of society” because environment is more complex and less restricting than society (212).

One of many things that we can gain from a system-environment distinction is it takes into account the excluded. In other words, exclusions are no longer excluded as exclusions. They are constitutive of systems, even if only as their other side. Systems theory may appear to share the all-inclusive rhetoric of Enlightenment in that systems are open to everyone, but in fact systems can neither require nor guarantee everyone’s inclusion. A person, if she wants to be included, which is her decision, has to meet certain preconditions of the social system she intends to be part of. It is up to each system to determine whether the categories of gender, ethnicity, class, etc. can be a part of its recruiting criteria.2To elaborate, instead of appeasing specific interests or responding to other systems’ concerns, an autopoietic system primarily bases recruiting criteria on its own sustainability. If the system is not endangered by conceding to certain social categories, and if it helps in some fashion to just augment its image, even as a

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future investment, the system may be attracted to them. New social movements will have to continue working on attracting the attention of relevant systems.

2.2. Boundary: The First Cut

Before I explain the concept of boundary, it is pertinent to begin by defining what

Luhmann’s version of system is. Luhmann gets rid of the usual notion of system as control mechanism or a detectable pattern that connects. As Baecker aptly notes, in Luhmann, system is system deconstruction (“Why Systems” 63), which means system is neither whole of its parts nor, as in the modified version, greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, a part is more intelligent than the whole of which it is a part. The reason being, as Baecker explains, is that the “whole tries to absorb any environment and to insist on its own wholeness”; whereas a part takes “its own lack of knowledge into account” and supplements “the knowledge of others for one’s own non- knowledge” (62). Here, parts should be understood as functionally differentiated systems.

Autopoietic systems are not unified around one super-system and heading toward one direction.

Whenever systems theory speaks of unity, it speaks, to put in Baecker’s terms, “not the unity of a whole but the unity of systems that are ecologically linked with each other, lacking any

‘supersystem’ ensuring and organizing that ecology, let alone directing it teleologically to a better future” (64). A system is simply an observation of reproduction, and, as I will argue later, postcolonial literary subsystem cannot have come into existence without observing its own reproduction.

But before observation of reproduction, a system differentiates from its environment by making a first cut, thus setting up a boundary (about the postcolonial literary system’s first cut, I 23

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will go into detail in later sections). Here, it must be mentioned that only by keeping the boundary the system maintains its difference from environment. However, the boundary does not foreclose connection with the environment; it only means that once processes are allowed to cross the boundary, they enter into relations in consonant with the system (Luhmann, Social

Systems 17). The paradigmatic difference between system and environment does away with the traditional whole-parts difference, and, as a consequence, we are able to see the distribution of causality “over system and environment” (20).

In systems theory, the concept of boundary replaces the concept of structure. This concept recognizes that there is something beyond. As we noted above, drawing boundary is not disconnecting from the environment; rather, it is both “separating and connecting system and environment” (Luhmann, Social Systems 28). Luhmann clarifies the twin function of boundary by drawing a distinction between element and relation. The boundary between system and environment merely separates elements belonging to each, not their relations. The limitation of boundary is that it “separates events but lets causal effects pass through” (29). With this reformulation of boundary’s role, from Luhmann we have a theory of social system that is operationally closed but structurally open. Even if boundaries mediate a contact between system and environment, they “cannot convey to any system the full complexity of another” (29), let alone the entire complexity of its environment. Separation from an environment is necessary for every system, but it varies from one system to another “if the system must distinguish other systems (and their environments) within its own environment and adjust its boundaries to this

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distinction” (30). In the case of postcolonial literary system, as we will see later, the boundary is

set by its mode of operation, i.e. by regulating relations among what it employs as elements.

2.3. Observation

Everything in systems theory begins with observation. Observation means using a

distinction to indicate one side, leaving the other side unmarked. Observation without distinction

is not possible. The presupposition is that “distinction and indication form an invisible whole,

since only what can be distinguished can be indicated, and distinctions can be used only for the

purpose of indication (which includes the possibility that will lead us to second-order

observation: indicating the distinction itself with the help of another distinction)” (Luhmann,

Risk 223). The observation follows only one command in the first instance: “Draw a distinction”

(Spencer-Brown 3). Postcolonial literary system is no exception to this observational rule, irrespective of whether the command was followed at the dawn of Third World literature or

Commonwealth literature or when Salman Rushdie articulated the feeling shared by many others

in the early 1980s: “I had begun to find this strange term ‘Commonwealth literature,’ unhelpful

and even a little distasteful” (Imaginary Homelands 61). The distinction contains, in Dirk

Baecker’s words, “the motive, the content, the value, and the name of the distinction” (Problems

of Form 2). In a different context, Benedict Anderson articulates a similar notion of distinction:

“In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps

even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/ genuineness,

but by the style in which they are imagined” (Imagined Communities 6). Further, Ashcroft,

Griffiths, and Tiffin group post-colonial texts’ special character into four models: national/ 25

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regional with emphasis on distinctness of particular national or regional cultures; race-based with

emphasis on common issues like diaspora; comparative; and comprehensive comparative with

emphasis on hybridity and syncretism” (Empire Writes Back 16). Their argument is that these four models “operate as assumptions within critical practice” (16). The point I am trying to make is the observation cut the ground for the system. Or, in Baecker’s words, “A system is what we begin to observe when we try to observe how a reproduction is done…” (“Why Systems?” 11).

Spencer Brown puts it more precisely, “We see now that the first distinction, the mark, and the observer are not only interchangeable, but in the form, identical (Laws of Form 76). In other words, the system is the observer, not transcendental human consciousness.

It should not be difficult to notice how systems theoretic formulation of self-observation is post-Cartesian in that it does “not present a privileged access to knowledge” (Luhmann, Social

Systems 459). Luhmann elaborates different grounds of self-observation in the following words:

“[T]he ‘self’ of self-reference must treat itself as impossible of exchange. In self- observation, it must identify with what it observes. The Cartesian tradition emphasized the special advantages of this position, showing that the self occupies a privileged position, that it has a special access to itself, and that this results in epistemological advantages that are not accessible to anyone else. But the flip side is that in self-observation the self is condemned to exclusivity. Only it can observe itself. (459)

The formulation above also does away with representation and consensus.

Neither every difference makes a difference nor does every cut produce a system. If that were the case, Third World literature, World literature, Common Wealth literature, New

Literatures in English, or minority literature would have emerged as a self-sustaining field.3The

cut produces two asymmetrical sides, “which allows for connecting operations on one side but

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not on the other” (Luhmann, Art 42). Gauri Viswanathan makes a similar point, albeit in a different language: The field “has enabled the inclusion…But at the same time it has disabled…a serious study of the specific histories of these other societies” (“Pedagogical Alternatives” 55).

Not only exclusion, Viswanathan admits that “there is self-selection in what is taken up for discussion [inclusion]” (55). We will resume the discussion of first cut or postcolonial literary subsystem’s differentiation in the next chapter, but for now suffice it to say that the boundary formation of a system is not based on “space constraints,” as Williams and Chrisman surmise (x).

The instituting moment of that first cut, as Oliver Marchart puts it, is “the moment of the political” (72).

Luhmann modifies Talcott Parson’s version of system, by borrowing concepts from biology and cybernetics. In Parson’s definition, system “is the concept that refers both to a complex of interdependencies between parts, components, and processes that involve discernable regularities of relationship, and to a similar type of interdependency between such a complex and its surrounding environment” (177). In Luhmann’s redefinition, system differentiation replaces whole-parts difference: “System differentiation is nothing more than the repetition of system formation within systems” (Social Systems 18). Luhmann admittedly follows Varela’s suggestion:

“[W]hat is basically valid for the understanding of the autonomy of living systems…carries over to our nervous system and social autonomy” (Varela, Principles xvi). In Luhmann’s theory,

“[S]ystems are reductions of the complexity of the world…. [They] acquire an identity through their characteristic means of reducing complexity” (Differentiation 192). As for social systems in specific, they are formed, one again in Luhmann’s words, “whenever the actions of several

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persons [units] are meaningfully interrelated and are thus, in their very interconnectedness, marked off from an environment. As soon as any communication whatsoever takes place among individuals, social systems emerge” (70). That the term “persons” denotes not just humans but also actors takes us beyond the simplicity of humanism. We may also want to note the fact that

“each process of communication has a history distinguished by the fact that…only a few out of a wide array of possibilities are actualized” (70).

Systems cannot handle all possibilities offered by their environments. A system constitutes itself through a process of self-selection by reference to its difference from an environment. In the past, there have been two discreet ways of describing a system: One described the system to be “a whole more than its parts”; the other as a “logically consistent network of relations” (Luhmann, Differentiation 190). However, in Luhmann’s version, a system is dependant upon and in communication, however only by way of structural coupling, with its environment. In Brier’s words, “autopoietic operational closure creates a meaning world of its own that does not exclude outside influences, but selects them to have influence only according to the system’s own inner world of meaning and survival” (“How to Ground”). This is an important contribution to the re-conceptualization of system in that previously it was solipsistic. The solipsism charge, I think, has largely to do with systems theory’s allegiance to phenomenological tradition, which will be elaborated in chapter five. For now, it must be pointed out that systems theory goes beyond post/structuralist notion of a text as a closed system of linguistic signs.

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In the same context, let us recall that for Roland Barthes, a literary “text is a tissue of quotations from drawn from innumerable centers of culture” (146); or for Harold Bloom, “A poem is a response to a poem” (18). Luhmann’s version of systems theory has “a real reference to the world” (Social Systems 12). For instance, he sees literary system as a “combination of self- reference and hetero-reference” (Art 26). When systems theory describes postcolonial literature as a subsystem emerging from the self-drawn boundary and interrelationships between creative and critical works, it offers something new with the concept of environment, which is not the same as viewing texts as mere rewritings of earlier texts, or a closed system in which texts are reactions to predecessors, generating (or self-generating) variations on common themes, characters, and topoi. In the environment of postcolonial literary system, we have all other systems. The system must presuppose environment for its identity (“unity” would be more appropriate term) because identity is possible only by difference. The system is structurally open to the environment, which is to say that the system responds to the changes that occur in the environment. With its responses to the environment, the system increases its complexity, i.e. more possibilities for connection between system elements, and in a circular fashion, the system is able to increase its response to the environment. However, the system cannot process all of the environment’s complexity, and its handling of the information from the environment is in accordance with its autopoiesis, which it cannot overlook even for a moment.

The system’s operational procedure is guided by its own self-created laws, which no other system in the environment can dictate. In this sense, the system is operationally closed, and this closure is necessary for its functional differentiation from other systems that are in the

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environment and for its identity. The self-closure, however, through reentry, introduces the world

that the system just severed itself from, for its identity. After the system gathers a chain of events

and distinguishes itself, the system needs the distinction system/environment for the second time for self-referential observation, i.e. to observe the distinction within itself. So, first the system produces the system; second, it reintroduces the distinction for observation within the system.

In thinking this way, system theory avoids the transcendental position: It observes what it produces and remains operationally closed to the environment (here, the closure could also be understood as circular, though there could be structural drifts4). This formulation is consistent

with the idea that the system is structurally open to the environment but takes only what it can

find meaningful for the system. On the observation level, this environment of the system is part

of the copied distinction. In the case of the art system, for instance, all this could be said to be

happening while still remaining within the art system. Through further internal differentiation,

with the introduction of the world in its imaginary, so to speak, the system chooses its own

elements. To put it more properly, the system constitutes and is constituted by these elements

together with variation in modes of communication. Here, we can see two things happening: first,

self-closure opens to further differentiations, thus the emergence of genres; second, unity, i.e.

self-distinguishability from background and other units, and the domain in which it exists are

specified by the process of its distinction and determination. The condition(s) (for instance,

postcolonial) that specifies a unity determines its existence. Any change that occurs within the

structure of the unity is subordinated to its identity. The brief ontogeny of structural

transformation of postcolonial literary system is the history of the system’s identity through

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continuous self-observation in its self-drawn space. If only to help explain boundary, we may

recall a more familiar text of Derrida’s, who defines writing “within the historical closure,” i.e.

within the boundary of certain system (“Grammatology” 93).

Another idea that Luhmann puts forward is that society in its initial phase was

differentiated by segmentation. Here, inequality was merely an effect of environmental

conditions. But as society transitioned to stratified societies, inequality gained a systematic

function. Stratified societies are unequal due to differences of power and wealth; these societies

were hierarchical, and the whole was represented by a part: the top of the hierarchy, the highest

stratum. With the beginning of modern society in the 18th century, subsystems like the art system,

the system of economy, the political system, etc. underwent functional differentiation, which

means subsystems are assigned their separate functions. One subsystem cannot substitute another

system functionally: in this sense, subsystems are unequal. For instance, the political system

cannot function as an art system, or vice versa. However, everyone can freely join more than one

subsystem. For example, a politician can be an artist. She functions distinctly in these two

subsystems. In any condition, these two systems have their own operative modes of processing

information, as well as their own codes, laws, references, etc. Since they have their own modes

of operation, they are closed systems, though they react to or observe other function systems.

This reaction or response is in accordance with its own mode of operation (programs and codes).

One characteristic of functionally differentiated systems is that they are self-referential.

A system interrupts self-referentiality by internal differentiation, i.e. through system/environment

difference within a system. The system also interrupts self-referentiality by a selective process: It

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chooses its external-reference points that specify what it can react to and to what it should remain

indifferent in the environment. However, system and environment must remain distinct without

one flowing directly into another. One important point that applies to all systems is that they are

able to base the selection of its operations on the prospect of future states, either in the sense of

trying to achieve such states or trying to avoid them. It goes outside to recruit additional meaning,

necessary to fill in the self-referential space. In this sense, self-reference is also hetero-reference.

Luhmann clarifies some of the confusions surrounding systems theory in the following words: “Contrary to what is commonly thought of it, the focus of modern systems theory is not identity but difference, not control but autonomy, not static but stability, not planning but evolution” (Essays 187). Unlike other theories, it does not present a rosy picture or solutions to all problems. Luhmann’s theory does not offer a master solution to all problems and does not claim his is the only one. In fact, as he admits, his version is just one of the ways of reinstating the problems that modern society faces: “[T]here are no solutions for the most urgent problems, but only restatements without promising perspectives. Taking all this into account, success seems to be highly improbable. . . . It may remain unsuccessful, but I cannot find it ridiculous” (187).

Additionally, on the one hand, this disclaimer from Luhmann refrains from offering political solutions to all the challenges we face today; on the other, this indifference to “specific interests”

paves the way for system-specific observations. In other words, it cancels out the possibility of

resolving all differences and renders all observations incomplete with regard to the society as a

whole. As a consequence, as Rasch and Wolfe correctly note, the question of politics is reopened

in that it is consonant with Laclau and Mouffe’s “social antagonism” (Observing Complexity 21-

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22). The very description of modern society as a functionally differentiated society ordered on a

horizontal plane is also partial because with respect to postcolonial states, for instance, some

social systems exert more influence over others and prevent their autopoiesis. Granted that

functionally differentiated society does not promise the best possible world, it does mitigate

some of the flaws of the stratified society. More importantly, systems theory’s description of

modern society as a functionally differentiated society does allow for the political space of social

antagonism. At the same time, systems theory does not claim that functional differentiation of

society is the only way of ordering the society or the natural destiny of stratified society.

2.4. Binary

Binary may appear to be operative at two different levels in systems theory: One at the

system-environment level, and the other at the level of code. The first one is distinction necessary for system differentiation and indication, and the second one is necessary for the system to process information. As Luhmann points out, with regard to function systems, production and continual reproduction of the difference between system and environment is done typically “by means of a binary code which fixes a positive and a negative value whilst excluding any third possibility” (Reality 16).

To recall once again, Luhmann’s version of system, following Spencer-Brown’s calculus of form, begins by the construction of distinction. The distinction has two sides. Form is the unity of these two sides. The “space cloven by any distinction, together with the entire content,” is called “the form of the distinction” (Spencer-Brown 4). The two sides are neither opposed nor hierarchized. What has been excluded remains potential for the system to respond to at a later 33

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time. The two sides are complementary. Irrespective of which side one chooses to indicate,

which is indispensible for any observation, “the occasion for opposition arises not from the facts

but from the observation modes of the other side; it presupposes second order observation”

(Luhmann, Risk 220). This is tantamount to saying that the distinction is based not on facts but

on observation. One could say, in post-metaphysical terminology, the distinction is not essential

but strategic. In systems theory, this is called self-reflection of the system, or more accurately, the system observing itself as an observer. Or, to paraphrase Said loosely, anti-imperial struggles are universalized, and the divide between the West and non-West is dramatized (Culture and

Imperialism 199). The dramatization corresponds to second order observation here.

At the level of code, the binary colonizer-colonized was used by colonial systems of economy, education, law, etc. The same code has been redeployed by postcolonial literary subsystem for the conveyance of oppositional politics. We may provisionally accept that in settler postcolonies (and, to a certain extent, urban areas of non-settler colonies), syncretic approach to subversion can be more effective than direct, confrontational approach, which enjoyed its success in most of the independence movements against colonizing powers. However, both approaches recognize the political dimension of postcolonial literary subsystem. Ashcroft,

Griffiths, and Tiffin, in their concluding paragraph of Empire Writes Back, assert that

“subversive maneuvers” “are the characteristic features of the post-colonial text” (196). Even “a radical dismantling” of European, colonial code has to assume “European hegemonic systems

[system in conventional sense]” as the other (195). While advocating for hybridity, Ashcroft and

his co-authors concur that hybridity occurs in peripheral subversion of European hegemonic

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models. I agree with them that it is impossible “to return to or to rediscover an absolute pre- colonial cultural purity, nor is it possible to create national or regional formations entirely independent of their implication in the European colonial enterprise” (195-96). However, recovery of some of the pre-colonial practices, for instance vegetarianism, by appropriation is desirable in postcolonies. In any case, to retain the political, postcolonial literary subsystem has to identify provisionally the enemy. In other words, it must presuppose the other side so it can launch its protest and attempt to subvert. However, resistance or protest in itself is not solution.

At this point, particularly with reference to rural areas of non-settler postcolonies and existing colonies, I think postcolonial literary subsystem not only finds it logically compulsive but also politically strategical to keep the binary code of colonizer/ colonized in practice, despite

“the discipline [in theory] argues vehemently against it” (Bahri, Between the Lines 139). In fact,

Luhmann suggests apprehending “the function systems of modern society as binary coded systems” (Risk 220). However, issues can age and lose their vitality in organizing movements. In such cases, resistance has to seek new topics. Although postcolonialism’s deflation of essentialism may address some of the problems of resistance movements, any hasty decision to render the colonizer/ colonized universally null underlies the assumption that the era of colonialism is over and that it does not exist in any form; and by extension, it assumes a radical, historical break between postcoloniality and coloniality, which only a transcendental position can presume. As a far reaching consequence, the theme of resistance or opposition becomes meaningless in the absence of this division. The irresolvable division is in resonance, as we will see later, with antagonistic democracy.

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For now, it must be mentioned that the binary code is intensified at the time of protest movements, both political and social. The binary code—for instance, colonizer/ colonized

(variously enemy/ friend or outside/ inside)—as Luhmann cautions, “should not be confused with the difference of system and environment. And the internal boundary of the code, which divides the negative from the positive value, should not be confused with the external boundary, which differentiates the system from its environment” (Reality of Mass Media 16-17). As the code is not objective and final, syncretic de-essentialization of the code can be taken as the limitation of the code in that it is less effective in settler postcolonies. Moreover, it seems that the syncretism of settler postcolonies has found it strategically more effective to invisibilize the code of colonizer/ colonized while keeping subversion by way of engagement with the center; yet, syncretism maintains European hegemonic models as the other for subversion. Therefore, we could say that syncretism also follows the binary code and designates the system’s operations, thus maintaining the distinction between system and environment. Alternatively, if syncretism were to be introduced as the third value, its appearance would be possible only, to put in

Luhmann’s phrase, “on the level of programming,” i.e. with the “differentiation of coding and programming,” “but only to co-steer the allocation of the code-values on which it primarily depends” (Ecological 41). In short, syncretism, too, maintains its difference from what it is opposed to, though this difference does not mean indifference to what it sets up for subversion.

Suffice it to say that syncretism is not blurring boundary or including the third value in coding, which is simply impossible.

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Notes

1. As far as I can remember, the term “petitio principii” refers to Nietzsche’s critique of

Kantian idealism in his Beyond Good and Evil.

2. In “Fatal Attraction? Popular Modes of Inclusion in the Economic Systems,” Urs

Stäheli draws similarity between systems theory’s universalism with “inclusionary rhetoric of the

Enlightenment” (113). I disagree with this.

3. For the evolution of the postcolonial field, see Graham Huggan’s concluding essay

“Thinking at the Margins: Postcolonial Studies at the Millennium,” pp. 228-243, in The

Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. I have summarized and commented on this essay in the next chapter.

4. Maturana and Varela explain structural drift in the following words: “[E]very ontogeny as an individual history of structural change is a structural drift that occurs with conservation of organization and adaptation” (Tree of Knowledge 102-03).

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Chapter 3

Description of Postcolonial Literary Subsystem

This section, while charting the evolution of postcolonial literary subsystem,

provides a theoretical basis behind the formation of the subsystem, particularly its

differentiation. Communication interactions between postcolonial literary and critical

works could be attributed to the evolution of the subsystem in that they set up its

boundary and recruit its elements from its environment and process their relations as per

the operative prerogative of the subsystem. The subsystem has evolved into an

autopoietic system by using its communicative elements recursively.

3.1. Emergence of Postcolonial Literary Subsystem

Although it is a common practice among postcolonial theorists to investigate on

“how post-colonial writing interacts with the social and material practices of colonialism”

and “the way in which it interacts with, and dismantles, some of the assumptions of

European theory” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 12, 13), few have reflected on the

interactions between literary works and critical works, let alone viewing the emergent

field as a literary subsystem. There is obviously a lack of accountability of the system’s

self-reflectivity, even though it has been an ongoing process within the field: more specifically, lack in the systems theoretic sense of not being able to account for the system’s self-observation and how critical and literary works’ interactions play vital a role in the formation of the system. To put it in strict system theoretic terminology, 38

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reflection is “a case in which system reference and self-reference coincide” (Luhmann,

Social Systems 455).

In a sense, self-reflection is an awareness of this coincidence. Some postcolonial

theorists take theory to be external, a tool to be applied to decode and explain literary

texts. Others, like Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, believe, for instance, that indigenous

theories that fall under the banner of post-colonial theory emerged “in reaction to” “the

philosophical traditions of the European world and the systems of representation”

(Empire Writes Back 11, 12). Still others, like Robert Young, would raise a different

question: “To what extent is ‘colonial discourse’ itself a legitimate general category?”

(“Colonialism and Desiring Machine” 78). Like many others, Young delimits the

postcolonial theory to a mere political stance against the theory of the West

(Postcolonialism 57-69). To add one more to this list, Spivak, though in a different

context, dismisses Foucault and Deleuze’s declaration: “[A]ction of theory and action of

practice […] relate to each other as relays and form networks” (qtd. in Spivak, Critique of

Postcolonial Reason 256, 264). This makes a full circle, going back to what Ashcroft and

his co-authors insinuate above about the interaction between “post-colonial writing” and

“material conditions of colonialism,” which is, in Spivak’s sense, theory and practice.

Ranajit Guha and members of the Subaltern Studies group venture into retrieving the

historiography of the subaltern, especially their undocumented sacrifice in the struggle

for the independence of India.

In spirit, the anti-Orientalist historiography is similar to Young’s position.

However, the claimed retrieval, having unmediated access to the world out there,

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uncannily re-enthrones the transcendence of consciousness. Phenomenologically and

from systems theory perspective, with which this project aligns, this move is untenable.

Even Spivak, who contributed to Selected Subaltern Studies, opines that the retrieval is

not that of a “sovereign and determining subject” but of the “subaltern subject effect”

(12-13). This random list, though a very brief one, suggests that something very

significant is overlooked or at best mentioned only in passing. What is obviously missing

is not only observation but also observation of observation and self-observation, thus resulting in hasty conclusion, despite in theory all “acknowledge that no speech, no

‘natural language’ (an unwitting oxymoron), not even a ‘language’ of gesture, can signify, indicate, or express without the mediation of a pre-existing code” (Spivak, In Other

Worlds 213). Elleke Boehmer’s tangential remark is probably the closest, albeit lacking in investigation, to what I am attempting here: [P]ostcolonial criticism […] champions in particular those aspects of the postcolonial narrative that illustrate and adumbrate the theory” (237). Thus, it is this lack of attention to self-observation of the system that this section attempts to fill in, but to venture in this direction, one has to think of the postcolonial literary phenomenon in terms of systems theory.

There are obvious reasons to view postcolonial literary phenomenon as a subsystem, primarily for the system’s autonomy. This will allow us direct our attention more to system autonomy than to an individual’s autonomy. Also, it is to remind ourselves that a system achieves its autonomy through evolutionary process. Although it is not within the scope of this dissertation to document each event that historically contributed to the evolution of the system, an attempt is made here to direct attention to

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some of the well-known events that played a significant role, but emphasis is laid on how

they played part than what they merely did: This shift in emphasis could be termed post- ontological.

Long before the emergence of the field, literary works were in existence, if we consider travelogues and letters, dealing with colonial conditions. In prose fiction, however, Rudyard Kipling could be considered as the first among the canonized to introduce and place the empire front and center, beginning with his first collection of short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills (1886-1888). Kipling’s first story in this

collection, “Lispeth,” is about what goes on between a seemingly benevolent Englishman

and an Indian “Hill-girl,” who finds him injured on a road, brings him home, and nurses

him until his health is restored, which spans over fortnight. The woman, Lispeth,

instantly falls in love and declares him to be her future husband. She is dismissed as

“savage by birth” (Kipling 35). However, not to break her heart, the Englishman tells her

a lie that he will come back to marry her. Later, the Chaplain’s wife reveals the truth that

the Englishman is never coming back, and the lie was to keep Lispeth quiet. For three

months, she makes “daily pilgrimage to the Narkanda Ridge,” where she saw the

Englishman the last time (36). Heart-broken at this news, Lispeth, a native who has been

converted into a Christian and has been living as a “half servant, half companion” with

the Chaplain and his wife since she was an infant, threatens to go back to her people: “I

am going back to my own people. You have killed Lispeth. There is only left old Jadéh’s

daughter—the daughter of a pahari and servant of Tarka Devi. You are all liars. You

English” (37). Eventually, she takes “to her own unclean people savagely, as if to make

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up the arrears of life she had stepped out of; and in no time she married a wood-cutter

after the manner of paharis [hilly, native people], and her beauty faded soon” (37).

Kipling’s message is when a native like Lispeth is with the Chapel and follows the imperial prescription of life, she is civilized and beautiful. Moreover, he seems to suggest, native Indians, no matter how long they are taught, fail to stay loyal to the

Empire’s program: “There are no law whereby you account for the vagaries of the heathen” (37). In a post-colonial reading, though, we highlight the false promise, betrayal, and failure of the British Empire. Kipling’s collection is an eclectic, but each story unmistakably idealizes the British Empire and demonizes the native of the colony.

Nevertheless, Kipling is rightly credited for introducing the British Empire into English literature.

Only under certain conditions, “autopoietic subsystems close themselves off and, by differentiating operational modes of their own, become capable of treating environmental perturbations as chance events that stimulate the variation and selection of system-internal structures” (Luhmann, Art 215). And there are “evolutionary mechanisms whose separation facilitates this process” (215). A number of questions may pertinently

be raised here: Is the post-colonial literary subsystem partially differentiated or fully? Has

it been able to demarcate a realm or domain that exclusively pertains to it? Is this a semi,

auto, or heteronomous subsystem? My claim is that postcolonial literary subsystem has

been able to distinguish itself as autonomous, though it did go through an evolutionary

process. Keeping within the scope of this dissertation, I will limit the question to the

approximate time when self-observation began in the postcolonial literary field. Self-

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observation and self-description are system requirements for reproduction: “A system

that can reproduce itself must be able to observe and describe itself” (Luhmann, Social

Systems 457). The relationship between system and observation could be best described

in Baecker’s words: “A system is what we begin to observe when we try to observe how

a reproduction is done that has nothing but the uncertainty of the next event and the

instability of each current event to build upon” (“Why Systems?” 68).1 I would add, in

the case of postcolonial literary system, that self-observation has contributed to system differentiation and to intensification of its boundary.

I am seeking to highlight the role that self-observation, evident both in postcolonial literary and critical works, has played and continues to play in the evolutionary stages of, to put in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s words, “the project of asserting difference from the imperial center” (Empire Writes Back 5). Helen Tiffin and a host of others credit Said’s Orientalism for the decisive moment that opened the viability of the field. However, she also notes, “Two years before the publication of Said’s

Orientalism in 1978,” Robert T. Robertson had presented an argument that enough symptoms were coagulating together to constitute an independent field, with the name

Commonwealth Literary Studies. Robert Young attributes the great Havana

Tricontinental of 1966, which produced the earliest journal Tricontinental, for marking the founding moment of postcolonial theory (Postcolonialism 5); Graham Huggan, who

quotes Anna Rutherford, and many others note the significance of the Leeds Conference

of 1964 (233). The proceedings of conference “were to constitute” Commonwealth

Literature’s “founding volume—John Press’ Commonwealth Literature,” published in

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1965, which was actually preceded by Press-edited Teaching of English Literature

Overseas, published in 1963, and Alan McLeod’s Commonwealth Pen, published two years earlier (Huggan 230). Among the initiating observational moves were the

establishment of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies in

1964 and creation of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature in 1965. Kunapipi, a

journal exclusively devoted to theory and criticism of commonwealth literatures, was first

published in 1979, whose subsequent publication is credited in “establishing the shift to

the term postcolonial literatures” (“Commonwealth Literature”). There are other events

during this initial period leading to Rushdie’s objection in 1983, “Commonwealth

Literature Does Not Exist,” in Imaginary Homelands, which Graham Huggan has

chronicled (230-31). I take these events to be initial instances of self-observation as well

as of observation of observation. With these self-referential instances, postcolonial

literary system indicates itself and differentiates from its environment. Within itself, it

creates differences so that it can react to differences in the environment, leading to the

creation of information for the system (Luhmann, Social Systems 444). What this means

is postcolonial literary system, too, like any other autopoietic system, creates everything

it needs to use as elements and re-uses recursively those same elements that the system

has already constituted, and, in turn, the system is constituted by the elements.

The question with regard to how the postcolonial literary system was able to

differentiate itself from other literatures is the first one to be addressed here. Ashcroft and

his co-authors designate postcolonial literature as any literature coming out of the

formerly colonized countries: “So the literatures of African countries, Australia,

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Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan,

Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka are post-colonial literatures”

(Empire Writes Back 2). My contention is that the field cannot be observed as being distinguished on the basis of one of the following categories exclusively: nation, race, gender, history, and even power, among the most well known. I do not think we can say,

“All literatures originating from countries with colonial past, e.g. Vietnam, India, Algeria,

Fiji, Indonesia, French Guiana, etc., are postcolonial,” unless they deal with the effects of colonialism, implicitly or explicitly. In his recommendation for reading Albert Memmi’s

Colonizer and the Colonized back in 1965, Jean-Paul Sartre describes the limitation of geographical location from which one can express solidarity as “criminal line of reasoning” of colonialism: “The newspapers there tell us that the colonizer alone is qualified to speak of the colony. The rest of us, who live in the mother country, do not have his experience, so we are to view the burning land of Africa through his eyes, which will just show us the smoke” (xxi).

A few have used the category of power to disqualify literatures originating from the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, for the postcolonial literary system, but would not, then, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa’s recent entrance into the G-20 have to follow the same standard? The membership criterion for the G-20 is based on the country’s ability to contribute to the management and stabilization of the international financial system and capital markets. Its website states that the membership is based on “systemic significance for the international financial system” (“G-20: FAQ

5”). As a part of the international financial regulatory forum, are these former colonies

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not also part of globalization, thus neo-colonialism? In view of these questions, the power criterion for disqualification is not compatible with the system. In this context, I find

Peter Hallward’s questioning of geo-political location relevant to the system, particularly when, in his Absolutely Postcolonial, he reads an American author like Charles Johnson in postcolonial terms under the title “Charles Johnson and the Transcendence of Place.”

In a broader sense, geographical locations, gender, ethnicity, and styles may enhance the system when they are already dealing with issues related to post/colonialism, but they are not necessarily system constitutive elements, in and of themselves, though they possess potentialities. They do not make the first cut or its trace, do not cause internal differentiations, and do not respond to relevant perturbations in its environment. The moment of the first cut (traditionally, the origin) of postcolonial literary system is not only hard to trace but also less relevant in the present discussion.

However, there are factors that contributed to the system differentiation. Robert

Fraser chronicles six stages in the emergence of postcolonial prose narrative, which have

“involved marked shifts of emphasis, even twists of contradiction” (8): pre-colonial narratives that recount inheritance from a time earlier than colonial occupation; narratives written under colonial subjugation, more or less in complicity with it; narratives of resistance, characteristic of “the immediate pre-independence period”; nation-building narratives; prevalent in the “immediate post-independence period”; narratives of internal dissent, capturing the “mood of disillusionment” after the short-lived euphoria of independence; and transcultural narratives, in which diasporic experience of dislocation and displacement, together with the inheritance of loss, is highlighted (8-9). Fraser’s is

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only a half story in that he leaves aside critical works and their interaction with narrative prose.

On the other hand, Deepika Bahri’s account of the history of the field is too broad in that she credits several subsystems that preceded and were already existent in the environment of the postcolonial literary system: “Most accounts of the rise of the field fail to acknowledge that in the Anglo American context, the development and consolidation of the programs such as African American, Asian American, and feminist studies provide the crucial background for Said’s text [Orientalism] as the official beginning” (Native Intelligence 38). Had these subsystems not been accepted in the academy, and had not poststructuralism and postmodernism been popular, in Bahri’s opinion, postcolonial literary subsystem would not have existed. To be fair to Bahri’s historical account of the inception of the field, she does mention several events that played significant role in shaping and consolidating the field. Her list includes narrative and critical works of the 1960s such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Fanon’s

Black Skin, White Masks; commonwealth literatures; Said’s Orientalism, Ashcroft and his co-authors’ Empire Writes Back, and Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman edited

Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory, etc., among the prominent works of the

1970s and 1980s; and the “production and availability of texts in English by postcolonial authors and the actual presence of ‘postcolonials’ in the West” with their abilities “to teach and discuss those texts” (47). Bahri, nonetheless, contests the disciplinization of the field because it excluded other postcolonial works, for instance, North American and

Latin American, “based on practical considerations” (43), while recognizing the

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inevitability of normalization, solidification, and disciplinization of the field. Yet, most of

Bahri’s Native Intelligence attempts to include as many excluded as allowed in the 290-

page space of the book.

The next subsection looks at how critical discourses and literary texts interact and

how their interactions, both agreements and disagreements, form a subsystem of

postcolonial literature.

3.2. Interaction between Literary and Critical Works

None of the critical works in the postcolonial literary system has seriously

considered the significance of interaction between literary and critical works and more

significantly, the production of communicative events in the formation of the subsystem.

For instance, Fraser’s six stages of prose narrative and Bahri’s all-inclusive approach do not reflect on interaction. In Bahri’s account, the postcolonial literary subsystem free- floats and freely picks information from the environment.

On the basis of the way the field is evolving, I will suggest that this subsystem is autopoietic. For convenience, I have chosen some of the well-known critics of the field:

To name a few, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak.

Among the literary works, I have strategically chosen three Indian Diasporic writers writing from the United States, viz. Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, Jhumpa Lahiri’s

Namesake, and Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss. As an autopoietic system, postcolonial literature is a self-observing system. Also, in the evolutionary fashion, the interaction suggests a departure from Franz Fanon’s nationalist, liberationalist approach. I find

systems-theoretic assumption similar to what Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin suggest,

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“Critical texts as well as creative texts are products of postcolonial hybridity” (Empire

Writes Back 180). The notion of “hybridity” in the present context may best be

understood as the hybridity of actual and possible, in the Husserlian sense. But following

systems theory, I take part-whole relationship to be circular, which will be discussed later.

The interaction between the elements of postcolonial critical discourse and the element of

literary works plays a crucial role in the self-observation of the postcolonial literary

subsystem. Let us also remind ourselves that these elements are not a priori existents.

They are effects of the system and are mutually constituted. They constitute the system,

and, in turn, are constituted by the system, thus avoiding the trap of both linear causality

and transcendentalism. It is through self-observation that a system gives continuity to its

life and continues to reproduce its elements, i.e. individual art works and critical

discourses. Interactions between these elements are through communication, and

communication only generates further conditions of communication if it is to continue

further.

As a cautionary note, it should be mentioned that interaction and postcolonial literary subsystem are two distinct systems: system of interaction and societal system.

These two systems do not have the system-environment relationship. Luhmann explains interaction in the following words: “Interactions are episodes of societal process. They are possible only on the basis of the certainty that societal communication has been going on before the episode begins… Thus, interaction brings about society by being relieved of the pressure of the society” (Social Systems 406-407). Most importantly, this difference between two systems allows the societal system to achieve its complexity and

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interaction to acquire its “qualified improbability” (407). As interaction systems are

psychic systems, they are not communicative systems. However, what results out of

interactions could become a topic for social communications, i.e. one or more of

communicative subsystems may observe the topic as relevant for further communications

(King and Thornhill 17).

In the case of the postcolonial literary system, each work, literary or critical, has

thus far created a condition for further communication. By creating this condition for

future communication, literary and critical works only assert that they belong to the

system and maintain the system identity. This has so far been an ongoing process. If we

recall, the loose definition of system fits here perfectly that it is not a concrete structure

or entity that is pre-given and closed off from environment but a process of interactions

that give rise to new properties while still conserving organization and adaptation needed

for its continuity. Besides, most of the reflective task, or self-observation, of the system is carried out by postcolonial critical works (theories), providing stability to the system.

Theoretical works, self-reflection, may happen outside literary works, but they are not exclusive to critical works. Literary works are replete with theoretical interjections.

Actually, both critical and literary works are found to be in communication, simultaneously referring to past communications and creating further conditions of communication, thus satisfying one of the significant system requirements. In other words, communication “must be able to identify something as repeatable” (Luhmann,

Social Systems 28). Although literary and critical works are self-descriptions crafted at different levels of complexity, these descriptions are shared and re-used by both,

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indicating one side of the system. Both communicate within the postcolonial literary

system about the system. Employing Luhmann’s language, one can say that postcolonial

literary system, as a self-referential system, describes itself and insert the description into

itself (Essays 184-86); and this insertion can be noticed when we observe the interaction

between literary and critical works. Additionally, I find that postcolonial theories, as tools

of self-observation, are not developed exclusively by critical works. Most significantly,

there is self-referential autonomy of the system at the functional level, and the interaction

between literary and critical works attest to this fact. This interaction may well be

described as self-referential communication.

For a sampling of such interaction, we may place Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa

Lahiri, and Kiran Desai’s literary works alongside Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Paul

Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, Chandra Mohanty, and Gayatri Spivak’s critical works; from their interaction, we will get a sense that they are in a dialog with each other as if conversing

in a roundtable conference, one responding to the other and generating conditions of

further communication. Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989) and Mohanty’s “Under Western

Eyes” (1988), published within a year of each other, react similarly to the stereotyping of

the Third World woman’s sexuality. From another angle, as a response in advance to

Mohanty, Mukherjee, in her creation of mobile and highly adaptive Jasmine, departs

from creating another victimized immigrant after Dimple in Wife. After five years from

the publication of Jasmine, Arjun Appadurai, in his “Disjuncture and Difference” (1994),

seems to be responding to Mukherjee’s description of Hasnapur at the advent of

globalization, particularly how globalized products are indigenized and, at the same time,

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how globalization creates fantasies among inhabitants of the world across. Jasmine from

Mukherjee’s work, Ashoke from Lahiri’s work, and Biju from Desai’s leave India due to the effect of these fantasies about the global Empire.

Similarly, Bhabha’s “The Other Question” (third chapter of Location of Culture)

and Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” interact with Said’s Orientalism. Right at the

outset of introduction to Orientalism, Said observes a constant interchange between

academic and imaginative forms of Orientalism, and from this interchange has evolved

“Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over

the Orient” (3). Said employs Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse to designate the

West’s systematic method of producing the Orient. In this discursive formation, Said

continues, the Orient was presented as incapable of voice and action so the West would

gain “in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate

and even underground self” (3). Mohanty reworks Said’s ideas and applies them to a

certain brand of western feminism to suggest that it “discursively colonize[s] the material

and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world, thereby producing/

representing a composite, singular ‘third-world woman’” (66). This “arbitrarily

constructed” image, Mohanty adds in the same passage, “carries with it the authorizing

signature of western humanist discourse.” Further, western eyes are Orientalist in their

discursive homogenization of the Third World Woman as, for instance, sexually deprived,

helpless, and exploited. Mohanty correctly notes, “Universal images of ‘the third-world

woman’. . . are predicated on . . . assumptions about western women as secular, liberated

and having control over their own lives” (84).

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“As a system of thought about the Orient,” Orientalism rendered the Orient into a

static, ahistorical entity, a constant that will remain the same for varying reasons in

different epochs (Said, Orientalism 96). This is one of the places where Bhabha

contributes to the dialog by providing a theory of ambivalence for the constant’s

persistence in different times. I think Bhabha must be reading closely Said’s example of

Flaubert’s Oriental discourse about one Oriental woman, Kuchuk Hanem. In Said’s

reading, Flaubert is ambivalent toward Hanem, feeling simultaneously nauseated and

enchanted about her. Bhabha points out that the power and effectiveness of colonial

discourse precisely lies in its ambivalence and contradiction, not in fixed stereotypical

representation of the Orient: The Orient “is at once an object of desire and derision”

(Location of Culture 96). A little later, Bhabha, recalling Fanon’s Black Skins, White

Masks, adds: “The black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants (the bearer of food); he is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; he is mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most worldly

and accomplished liar, and manipulator of social forces” (118).

Mohanty, on the other hand, credits Bhabha for her analysis of colonial discourse

of certain western feminism, but, I think, she must have gained some insight from Said’s

dismantling of Flaubert’s description of the Oriental woman. For Flaubert, as Said notes,

Hanem was “no more than a [sex?] machine” and indistinguishable gibberish

(Orientalism 187). As Said summarizes in the introduction, for Orientalists like Flaubert, the Oriental woman “never spoke for herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her” (6). It is obvious that Mohanty

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resorts to Said’s discourse analysis except that she replaces Flaubert (western white male)

with discursively colonizing feminists: Western feminism, under the guise of offering

help, had “to construct ‘third-world women’ as homogeneous ‘powerless’ group often

located as implicit victims of particular cultural and socio-economic systems” (“Under

Western Eyes” 68). Said, Bhabha, and Mohanty make a similar case that the goal of colonial discourse is to devalue people of the Orient as handicapped, backward, degenerate, etc., so the West can justify its hegemony. However, all three allude to the fact that Orientalism is not exclusive to the West and its people.

Similarly, creative works lend credence to the themes of the critical works and solidify the system references. For instance, in Inheritance of Loss (2006), Desai’s

Oxford-educated judge comes back with Orientalist eyes to look down upon all ethnic values and treats his wife as an insane person because she refuses to learn English and its ways. He goes to the point of physically assaulting her and forcing her to commit suicide.

In this work, the judge’s cook also develops Orientalist eyes to discriminate Nepalese

Indians from the judge’s dog, Mutt, who is ironically the only remnant of colonial time for the judge.

Nimi, the judge’s wife in Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, who dies anonymously,

reminds the reader of Spivak’s Bhubaneswari Bhaduri from A Critique of Postcolonial

Reason. This time Spivak reads Bhaduri’s suicide as a “rewriting of the social text of

sati-suicide” (307). It is with reference to Bhaduri’s intervention that Spivak retracts the

remark that the subaltern cannot speak. Stories of widows and suicide under the colonial and postcolonial conditions often appear in different configurations in both literary and

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critical works. Jasmine, her mother-in-law, her friend Vimla, in Mukherjee’s Jasmine, evoke widowhood and suicide. Similarly, even if the topic of suicide does not enter

Lahiri’s Namesake, Ashima becomes widow at the end and would not enter a second marriage for the rest of her life.

The ending of Desai’s work replays Bhabha’s “DissemiNation” (1990), the eighth chapter of Location of Culture. Gyan’s reluctance to join GNLF, which is launching an insurgency for an independent nation, is an awareness that the new nation, like postcolonial India, would not be representative of all cultural differences in equity between

Sikkimese, Bhutanese, Lepchas, and Tibetans, the four minority groups in the midst of

Nepalese majority, who are also minority as far as the state power goes.

Obviously, there are other instances where other postcolonial works are referred to, at times critically, as a kind of systemic self-reflection. For instance, in Desai’s

Inheritance Loss, Lola and her sister, Noni, converse lightheartedly but meaningfully about V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River: Noni admires Naipaul’s work as “one of the best books,” but the other considers him strange, “I think he’s strange. Stuck in the past. . . . He has not progressed. Colonial neurosis, he’s never freed himself from it. Quite a different thing now. In fact, chicken tikka masala [an Indian dish] has replaced fish and chips as the number one take-out dinner in Britain. It was just reported in the Indian

Express” (52). Lola’s imputation against Naipaul could be heard from other postcolonial critics as well, if not in the same brusque language. In another instance from the same work, the narrator notes, “Noni had picked a sad account of police brutality during the

Naxalite movement by Mahashveta Devi, translated by Spivak who, she had recently read

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with interest in the Indian Express, was made cutting edge by a sari and combat boots

wardrobe” (239). Spivak translated two anthologies of Devi’s stories, Breast Stories

(1997) and Imaginary Maps (1995), but the time Noni borrows the anonymous book from

the library is 1988. However, “Draupadi,” one of Devi’s stories, was translated by and

published in Spivak’s In Other World a year earlier in 1987. “Draupadi” has its setting in

West Bengal and its action takes place toward the end of Naxalite movement.

Undoubtedly, this story provides instances of police brutality: “In 1971, in the famous

Operation Bakuli, when three villages were cordoned off and machine gunned . . .” (187);

after the arrest and severe gang-rape by the police personnel, Draupadi, the revolutionary

protagonist, slowly regains consciousness and feels “[s]omething sticky under her ass and

waist. Her own blood. Only the gag has been removed. Incredible thirst. In case she says

‘water’ she catches her lower lip in her teeth. She senses that her vagina is bleeding. How

many came to make her?” (195).

What else could be observed besides the generation of conditions of

communication is that the literary and critical works, which are system internal elements,

improve upon each other and determine the course of further reproductions. In each

repetition with a difference in self-observation, they self-describe with the production of

semantic artifacts, “to which further communication can refer and with which system’s

unity is indicated” (Luhmann, Social Systems 456). Or, to put another way, these literary

and critical works reinforce the system’s boundary by selecting reference points in the

environment, what to include and what to exclude.

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3.3. Reproduction of Colonialism within Postcolony

After the colonial regimes left their colonies, it was expected that colonialism ended operating there, but that has never been the case. Colonialism has persisted in at least two broad forms, viz. neocolonialism and internal colonialism, in addition to the older form’s existence in a number of states, from Puerto Rico through Tibet, Western

Sahara, Tokelau, and French Guiana, covering all the continents. One may conveniently say, like the judge’s old-time friend from Inheritance of Loss opines, “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter too much [that the colonial power left]—now they can just do their dirty work from far away” (226). Expressions like this would remain Orientalist if one were to close eyes to the internal colonialism. When colonial regimes like Britain, France, Spain, and others left their colonies, they left a self-generating mechanism that has continued to plague these former colonies, and this time around colonialism has been directed toward their own ethnic and other minorities, whether in the name of consolidating state power, building an assimilative national culture, or modernizing the nation. There has been scant theoretical work to analyze this reproduction of colonialism. Though only peripherally relevant for the present context, when one comes across the term “reproduction,” she may readily be reminded of the opening section of Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State

Apparatuses,” in which he reflects on the “reproduction of the conditions of production”:

[T]he reproduction of labor power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class “in words.” (89)

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Althusser may have theorized reproduction with respect to “social formation” and

“relations of production” (86); however, if we give his reflection a systems theoretic twist

and apply it to the context of persistence of colonialism after 1940s, we could say that colonialism—initially an economic system before becoming a political super-system in most non-settler colonies, e.g. India under Britain—had produced enough conditions of

reproduction to ensure its continuity. To elaborate, more than the former native

employees of the colonial regime like the judge and his friend from Inheritance of Loss

or Ashoke from Namesake or the Masterji from Jasmine, the institutional framework that

former colonies have inherited could be attributed for the conditions of reproduction. In

the former colonies, the political super-system, a colonial legacy, has so far prevented the stratified systems from transitioning into differentiated systems, thus an endless continuation of exploitation and repression of certain communities. Now, in the post- independence phase, it is no more than concealment of the new state’s own repressive strategy and wrongdoings against its own subaltern people when it resorts to the conflation of colonizer with Europe.

The contestation of the conflation of colonizer with Europe seems to have been noticed first in literary works. In “Situating Colonial and Postcolonial Studies,” Ania

Loomba cites Mahasweta Devi’s “Shishu” as an early example of the postcolony’s reproduction of colonialist mode of behaviors. The story “describes how tribal peoples have been literally and figuratively crippled in post-independence India” (Moomba 1105).

She concludes, “‘Colonialism’ is not just something that happens from outside a country

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or a people, not just something that operates with the collusion of forces inside, but a

version of it can be duplicated from within” (1106).

As a prelude to this chapter and to attest Loomba’s assertion, let us go over Devi’s

story, “Shishu.” In this story, the character of block development officer (BDO) unhesitatingly describes tribal people of Kuva, a remote town somewhere in West Bengal, as “barbarians” and questions their intelligence as a response to why they are singing

(Devi 237). Silencing of the tribal people’s complaints and their uprising is done through the state military intervention. For generations, the Agarias, the tribal people of Kuva, have always been working with iron, but the postcolonial state forces them to switch their occupation to agriculture (note that this area is scorched and rocky; it cannot be plowed).

The tribe retaliates when the state blasts the iron hill with dynamite. In turn, the state

prosecutes the tribe by burning down the village: “[T]he police set the fire to Kuva,

sowed the earth with salt so that nothing would grow there, and left. The other Agaria

villages suffered too. Punitive taxes . . . ruthless oppression . . . terrible prosecution”

(240). Christian missionaries find these tribal peoples easy prey in the name of saving

them. A few of the Agarias escape to the nearby forests when Kuva is burnt down,

hoping to preserve their way of living. Mr. Singh, another well-meaning government

officer, serves the tribal people but serves only those who subordinate themselves to the

state, unaware of the existence of those who escaped before his arrival. Those who live in

the woods are reduced to diminutive sizes and appear as children from distance due to

lack of food and proper care. Mr. Singh’s normalcy in health and size, in contrast to these

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diminutive humans, is the irony of the post-independent India, analogous to the colonial

ruling.

Similarly, in her reading of Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha,” Spivak

notes internal colonization: In postcolonial India, state functionaries employ the “alibis of

Development to exploit the tribals and destroy their lifesystem” (Critique 143). The action of the story coincides with the fortieth anniversary of India’s independence. The celebration elsewhere is contrasted with the life and struggle of tribal people in Pirtha, a remote place in central India. Words such as “exploitation” and “deprivation” are inadequate to describe the condition of the tribe, and ironically these words and their synonyms do not exist in some tribal languages of the region. In this so-called lack of modern knowledge and consciousness of the tribe, humanist and anthropocentric hegemonies find an opportunity to codify the tribal situation and claim their supremacy.

As the story seems to warn, and the reality of indigenous people in India and other postcolonies corroborates, tribal ways of living are at the verge of meeting the fate of pterodactyl, a species of distant past, and unfortunately all this is happening in the decolonized nation-state of India. These tribal people’s intimacy with the land and forest has to do with their communal livelihood and co-existence with nature. Shankar, an aboriginal subaltern, laments at what has happened to their ways of life, “Once there was forest, hill, river, and us. We had villages, homes, land, ourselves . . . . Oh, we climb hills and build homes, the road comes chasing us. The forest disappears; they make the four corners unclean” (119-20). The new nation-state may have built “roads, houses, schools,

[and] hospitals” in some tribal areas, at the cost of displacing the tribe and ruining its

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ways of living, but the development was not meant for them. Shankar adds, “We wanted none of this, and anyway they did not do it for us” (120). In short, development programs of the new nation have further disenfranchised the tribal people, thus reproducing colonial practices internally.

Like the non-Aryan aboriginal people of Pirtha, the Róng tribe (or “Lepcha” in mainstream language) is non-Aryan and non-Tibetan, supposedly the earliest inhabitant of Darjeeling district, which is the primary setting of Desai’s Inheritance of Loss. A brief summary of the history of the Róng tribe and Darjeeling is relevant here before analyzing the on-going internal colonialism within the state of India. First, Tibetans invaded the

Róng’s homeland in the fourteenth century, and “Tibetan migrants, the Bhotias, settled in the kingdom between fourteenth and sixteenth centuries” (Minahan 1728). Before

Tibetan colonization and consequent proselytizing of the Róng into Buddhism, the tribe believed in Shamanism and worshipped “spirits of the mountains, rivers, and forests” (A.

White 8, 16). From arbitrating the 1817 treaty between Sikkim and Nepal, the East India

Company was able to procure a tract of land from Sikkim; then, it went on to acquire

Darjeeling as a gift at a time when the Róng refugees began returning home. However, the gift was due to the fact that the Company assisted the Sikkim Government to succeed in forcing the refugees to retreat to Nepal. These Róng people had fled under the tyranny of the contemporary Sikkimese monarchy, which had been of Tibetan origin since its establishment (O’Malley 19-22). The 1861 treaty did not only see the British “possession of the district” of Darjeeling but also reduced the sovereign nation of Sikkim into a protectorate status (A. White 17). Ever since the British importation of Nepalese

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indentured laborers in mass to Sikkim and Darjeeling to work in tea plantations in mid- nineteenth century, the Róng tribe has been minority in the region. These Róng people in

Darjeeling have been dwindling fast and scattering elsewhere; as a tribe, it is at the verge of extinction. Their language, literature, beliefs, cultural practices, and long-acquired knowledge of medicine and nature are being archived in the museum and academies of the West, particularly the Netherlands.

Desai’s work sparingly refers to the Róng people, eight times in total,2 as Lepcha, which initially meant “dumb people” in Nepali. In one instance, an anonymous, helpless

Róng was brutally beaten by the police, to the point that “his ribs broke” and eyes

“extinguished” (248, 249). The police needed a scapegoat for the stolen gun from the judge’s house, and they found the Róng. In fact, “the police were just practicing their torture techniques, getting ready for what was coming [for suppressing the Gorkha movement]” (249). When the same man’s wife and father appear at the judge’s door, looking for compensation for the damage, they are identified as “Lepchas”: “We are not even Nepalis, we are Lepchas. . . . He was innocent and the police have blinded him”

(288). “The woman looked raped and beaten already [possibly by the police]” (289). As the woman and her father-in-law were herded out of the gate, “they squatted down on their haunches and didn’t move, just stared motionless, as if drained of hope and initiative”

(290). This incident shed lights on the horror these remaining tribal people have to encounter on a routine basis in the postcolony. No wonder one of the characters in

Inheritance of Loss is quick to point out that “they [Róng people] are disappearing. In

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fact, they have the first right to this land and nobody is even mentioning them” (144).

Perhaps this could be the reason no Róng character is named in the novel.

Moreover, Desai’s work evades the issue of India’s illegal annexation of Sikkim

in 1975. Only in 1990, India “acknowledged the illegality of the annexation and issued an

official apology but refused” to heed to the demand of Sikkim’s status as a sovereign

nation (Minahan 1731). Another piece of evidence for India’s colonialism is the Treaty of

1949 that it signed with Bhutan, particularly Articles III and VI that allowed India to control Bhutan’s foreign relations and partially defense until 2007 (Bhutan). India’s frequent political and military interventions in other neighboring countries are well- known, suggesting India’s colonial behavior in the region. The modern India has not stopped reproducing its internal colonies in its treatment of minorities and ethnic groups, nor has it ceased extending the reproduction externally to those neighboring countries that are economically struggling and are not in a position to defend themselves.

In addition to interactions between its elements, re-entry of the subsystem’s form into its form seems to be operational in the postcolonial literary subsystem. What the latter part means is similar to Von Foerster’s non-trivial machines (Understanding 311-

13). And the metaphor of non-trivial machine suggests that the system uses its own output as input. The system’s interactions are communicational interactions. Each communicational event “identifies itself by referring to past communications and by opening a limited space for further communications” (Luhmann, “Globalization” 6). This occurrence is evident in the interaction, however limited, among Desai’s Inheritance of

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Loss, Devi’s “Pterodactyl” and “Shishu,” and those postcolonial, critical works that deal

with tribal issues.

In the context of global economic system, neocolonialism is a subsystem, which

creates, or rather reuses, the old tool of colonialism, a difference between colonizer- colonized or center-margin. In the further differentiation, there is a reentry of colonizer- colonized within the colonized. Therefore, the colonizer-colonized relations have been reduplicated from colony/metropolitan in the postcolony, i.e. operation of internal oppression within the postcolony continues in the old, colonial manner. Self-observation of the postcolonial literary subsystem has not failed to notice this phenomenon:

“Colonialism always operated internally as well as externally, and the stratification of societies still continues” (Robert Young, Postcolonialism 9). Not only the discourse of postcolonialism but also the so-called decolonized nation replicates the colonizer- colonized distinction while successful old colonizers and emerging new empires have been constantly refashioning their strategies of domination and legitimizing them so that

they will not be immediately opposed with any effectiveness. For instance, outsourcing

and child-labor exploitation pass without much opposition in economically struggling

postcolonial countries. In this sense, colonialism seems to have produced enough

conditions for its reproduction. The ethnic tension of the late 1980s in Darjeeling,

India— against the background of which most of the actions of Desai’s Inheritance of

Loss takes place—could be taken as an example internal colonialism, which supports my

argument of reproduction of colonialism in the postcolony.

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Desai’s novel begins with a scene in which Gorkha National Liberation Front

(GNLF) rebels break into the Judge’s house, who is now retired and living in Cho Oyu, a

house built by a Scotsman, symbolizing colonial left-over, in Kalimpong. One of the rebels remarks, “House needs a lot of repairs” (8), obviously implying a second meaning with reference to the modern state of India. To recall, in the mid-eighties the Gorkhaland movement was at its peak, which had started as a resistance to anti-immigration campaigns launched in other neighboring states like Meghalaya and Assam, which seemed to be silently approved by the Indian federal government as its inaction implied.

The prevailing political situation among the Indian Nepalese is summed in the following speech by an anonymous rebel leader in the novel:

In 1947, brothers and sisters, the British left granting India her freedom, granting the Muslims Pakistan, granting special provisions for the scheduled castes and tribes, leaving everything taken care of, brothers and sisters— Except us. EXCEPT US. The Nepalis of India. At that time , in April of 1947, the Communist Party of India demanded a Gorkhastan, but the request was ignored. . . . We are laborers on the tea plantations, coolies dragging heavy loads, soldiers. . . . We are kept at the level of servants. We fought on behalf of the British for two hundred years. We fought in World War One. We went to East Africa, to Egypt, to the Persian Gulf. We were moved from here to there as it suited them. We fought in World War Two. In Europe, Syria, Persia, Malaya, and Burma. . . . We are still fighting for them. When the regiments were divided at independence, some to go to England, some to stay, those of us who remained here fought in the same way for India. We are soldiers, loyal, brave. . . . But we are Gorkhas. We are soldiers. . . . Are we given respect? (Desai 174-75)

This long passage summarizes a part of the history of Nepalis living in the Kalimpong-

Darjeeling area in the state of West Bengal in India. A series of secessionist movements flared in India in the aftermath of the nation’s independence, and they have shown no sign of abating. Similarly, in Mukherjee’s Jasmine, we get a glimpse of Sikhs’

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independence movement, known as Khalistan movement, in the 1980s. Coincidentally, both Sikhs and Gorkhas were considered as the most loyal to the British Raj, especially during the 1857 Mutiny and thereafter, but they were also among the most neglected and disappointed when the country was divided into two halves along the religious line.

British Raj created the category of the Martial Race to enforce further the racial divide and placed Sikhs and Gorkhas at the top of the hierarchy, but ironically they were at the bottom of the social strata as only the illiterate and poorest from within these two ethnic groups would take jobs in the military and be foolishly loyal to sacrifice their lives for a colonial regime. This racially essentialist category did not terminate with the departure of the British Raj. It has continued in other versions; for instance, the Gorkhas are nationally stereotyped as “Bahadur,” literally brave, but its connotation extends to loyal doorman as if it were their destiny to be as such, already fixed by the British Raj (I have a personal experience of being called “Bahadur” while waiting at a friend’s gate).

Finally, the protest movements in Jasmine and Inheritance of Loss have not attracted adequate attention from critics. These protest movements could be viewed from twin perspectives: They attempt to renew the same spirit of independence that freed India from the British Raj; and they face internal colonial forces of the newly decolonized nation state. In the excerpt below, Gyan draws a parallel between Gorkha Movement and

India’s Independence Movement and wishes that the nation had the same hunger for a region’s liberation:

Gyan remembered the stirring stories of when citizens had risen up in their millions and demanded that the British leave. There was the nobility of it, the daring of it, the glorious fire of it—“India for Indians. No taxation without representation. No help for the wars. Not a man, not a rupee. 66

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British Raj Murdabad! [Down with the British Rule].” If a nation had such a climax in its history, its heart, would it not hunger for it again?” (Desai 174).

Bose, Jemu’s friend since his English days, sums up the postcolonial situation:

“Well, I suppose it does not matter too much—now they can just do their dirty work from far away…” (226). The British Orientalist left in 1947, but they had produced enough surrogates to continue their legacies, mainly through institutional framework: education, law, culture, religion, language, health, etc. Two of the prominent surrogates through a number of overlapping, partially differentiated systems are the Judge and his granddaughter, Sai, in Inheritance of Loss. Masterji in Jasmine and Ashoke and his fellow traveler, Ghosh, in Namesake are others.

At one point, speaking of the Indian diaspora living in the United States, Desai’s narrator transposes Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, with some addition: “What was

India to these people? How many lived in the fake versions of their countries, in fake versions of other people’s countries? Did their lives feel as unreal to them as his [Biju’s] own did to him?” (293). Let us compare this excerpt with one from Rushdie’s:

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or immigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being muted into pillars of salt. But if we look back, we must also do so in the knowledge—which gives rise to profound certainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.” (10)

This idea of an imaginary homeland is not exclusive to diasporas living in different countries but also extends to migrants within the same state. For instance, Lola, a minor character from Inheritance of Loss, who is a migrant in Darjeeling from Calcutta, 67

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ruminates over the concept of nation: “What was the country but the idea of it? She

thought of India as a concept, a hope, or a desire” (259). As, by rule, communication uses

its output as output recursively, postcolonial literary subsystem uses its past achievement

for autopoiesis, but the past is presented in the present for the future, i.e. for furthering

communication. Appadurai’s remark in “Disjuncture” perfectly interconnects Rushdie

and Luhmann: “The past is now not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory”

(30). He is right: The past, “another country,” is an “idea of imagined community” (31),

and the community in this instance is the postcolonial literary subsystem itself.

3.4. Diaspora: Hybrid (Wandering Gypsy?)

By largely focusing on diaspora, which has become postcolonial literary

subsystem’s element, this sub-section illustrates the thematic connection between the

literary texts, with respect to the subsystem’s evolution by way of internal interactions,

structural coupling, and responses to its environment. Despite the fact the term “diaspora”

has generated a lot of differing views within the discourse of postcolonial literary

subsystem, it cannot be denied that the term has gained constitutive status, at least for

now. In postcolonial literary works in general, not just the three novels that I have chosen

for the current research, despite diasporic characters’ differing backgrounds at home and

experiences abroad, they are not only described as responding similarly to varying

circumstances but also the responses they receive in the new Empire are described similarly. It appears that these descriptions also have become elements for the subsystem, though their relations remain indeterminate in the sense that some of them are actualized, while others remain potential.

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While elaborating on the circumstances through which native subalterns in the postcolony become diasporas, I will argue that in the reproduction of these similar descriptions, the postcolonial literary subsystem is solidifying its differentiation and autonomy. I take these similarities to be the postcolonial literary subsystem’s internal interactions. From another angle, they stress the system boundary and its closure with regard to how it processes information; but when we see the postcolonial literary system’s response to feminism, in its observation of double colonization, this is an instance of the system’s structural openness to its environment through coupling. (The topic of diaspora, in addition to native subalterns, is continued in the next two chapters).

Contrary to Gilroy’s contention, the category of diaspora is no longer limited to

“forced dispersal and reluctant scattering” (318). Etymologically, the term diaspora suggests dispersion, dissemination, and scattering of seeds; and in the current usage, it denotes dislocation from native homelands through “the movements of migration, immigration, or exile” (Braziel and Mannur 1). Let us note that it does not necessarily mean “flight following the threat of violence” (Gilroy 318). If that were the case, barely

Jasmine from Mukherjee’s Jasmine would fit into this category. Ashcroft and his co- authors expand the term’s usage beyond the people of colonies and post-colonies:

“Colonialism itself was a radically diasporic movement, involving the temporary or permanent settlement of millions of Europeans over the entire world (“Diasporas”).

Contestation over the term’s usage aside, stories of dispersion, dislocation, survival, and so forth, narrated in two distinct styles, literary and critical, are significant constituents of the postcolonial literary subsystem, if not the only one. In his distinction between

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postcolonialism and anti-colonialism, Robert Young goes so far as to claim that

“postcolonialism has become associated with diaspora, transnational migration, and internationalism” (Postcolonialism 2). Postcolonialism may not be limited to diaspora, but it cannot be denied that postcolonialism bears significant relationship with it. And for this reason, the three literary and most of the critical texts chosen for the systems analysis come from the diaspora, and the Indian diaspora in particular because India “received the greatest economic, cultural and historical attention from the British” empire during the peak of its colonial project (Young, “Colonialism and the Desiring Machine” 79) and also because major thinkers of the field have engaged with post/colonial India to a considerable extent.

Moreover, diasporic agents are in a spontaneous position to elude Orientalist representation precisely because they are too heterogeneous to be organized into a single group, thus lacking collective consciousness. In this sense, they are not very far from what we ordinarily identify as the subaltern. Particularly in a post-independent, neo- colonial condition, they may be called new subalterns, but at the same time they, largely due to their differing backgrounds in their homeland and experiences in the new Empire, complicate both the homogenized notion of diaspora and subaltern. I agree with Gilroy that the term must retain its plural status, diasporas (330), because the life experience before and after the dislocation in each case is different; yet, those responses that diasporic characters receive from the Empire and their interpretations bear astonishing similarities. From systems theory perspective, those stock descriptions of diasporic characters’ suffering could be viewed as stabilized meanings that make culture.

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Additionally, one could say that those descriptions are system specific references because

every communication refers to the system.

First, let us analyze the circumstances under which each of the characters

becomes diasporic. Jasmine “was born eighteen years after the Partition Riots”

(Mukherjee 44), but she inherits the story of family dislocation from her mother, herself a

victim of the riot. When the country was partitioned into India and Pakistan, the family

was uprooted from Lahore, Pakistan, “to a village of fluky mud huts [in India]” (41). In

Lahore, her parents had owned farmlands and shops, and they lived honorably “in a big

stucco house with porticoes and gardens” (41). Her mother could never forget how

“Muslims sacked” their house: “Neighbors’ servants tugged off earrings and bangles,

defiled grottoes, sabered my grandfather’s horse” (41). Jasmine has never been to Lahore,

but “the loss survives in the instant replay of family story: forever Lahore smokes,

forever my parents flee” (41). With the dislocation, Jasmine’s family did not only

become poor but also had to start from scratch on several fronts, abandoning the Punjabi

dialect and culture of the old place. As a way to connect to the old place and compensate

the loss, her father “would tune in to the Pakistani radio broadcast, and listen for their

Punjabi-language shows” (42). Jasmine inherits the memory of what her father and

mother had to go through and how they managed to survive.

The survival story as memory, therefore culture, comes handy when Jasmine is

dislocated, albeit under different circumstances from Hasnapur to Florida. When her

innocent husband becomes a victim of inter-ethnic violence, launched by the Sikh nationalists against Hindus, she has reasons to fear that she will meet the same fate: “The

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bomb was meant for me, prostitute, whore” (93). And with “illegal documents” (98), she escapes to Florida, with a mission “to create new life” (97). Jasmine’s first impediment to

the mission of creating a new life is Half-Face, a man in the business of transporting undocumented workers. With a prayer to her sandalwood Ganpati, the elephant-headed god, for strength and with an evocation of Kali for annihilating the evil figure of Half-

Face, Jasmine reroutes her mission of burning the husband’s suit in Florida to

reincarnating herself into an untiring fighter. In brief, in her redefinition of the mission,

she adds the Hindu mythology of reincarnation to the survival story of her parents.

The Empire, old and new, disregards the circumstances under which a person is

dislocated and is turned into a diaspora: It treats all the same way, especially racially and

culturally, as something undesirable and unwelcome. The postcolonial literary subsystem picks on the theme of stereotyping and racism, suggesting desirability of anonymity at

times. Why else would Frantz Fanon say, “I strive for anonymity, for invisibility”? (Black

Skin, White Mask 96). This pronouncement comes after his wanting “to be a man among men” and after feeling “betrayed” (92, 95). The case is analogous and reminiscent of

Desai’s Inheritance of Loss: Biju’s “tiny brief ‘Hello’ came out wrong; too softly so that they did not hear” (108). Jemu also finds himself in a similar situation that he feels

“agonized over even a ‘How-do-you-do-lovely-day’” and he cannot greet back for the same fear of getting it wrong (46). During his early days in pursuit of law degree at

Cambridge, Jemu withdraws “into a solitude” that reduces him into a shadow (44). His mind begins “to wrap” to the point that he becomes a stranger to himself (45). He is forced to feel “his own skin odd-colored, his own accent peculiar,” and gradually he loses

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a sense of himself, barely feeling human at the end (45). At the beginning, when Jemu has to look for an apartment in Cambridge, twenty-two landlords refuse to lease him one, on the racist ground, before a lady finally does, for fear that no other lodger may come looking for it due to its unfavorable location (44). Racist slurs like the following are uttered to his face: “Phew, he stinks of curry” (45). As the judge has to bear with racist remarks routinely in the street and other public places, he mostly confines himself in the apartment, except those times he has to go to school and grocery shopping, seeking invisibility. After almost a generation in the new Empire, Biju also similarly “smells” to the owner of the Pinocchio’s Italian Restaurant (54). To aggravate the insult, the owner bought Biju “soap and toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo . . . most important of all, deodorant.” However, it must be acknowledged in passing that this reduction to racism faces complication when we see Biju “heckled” and “harassed” by some Punjabi taxi drivers in the streets of New York (55), or slave-driven for “seventeen-hour donkey days” by the Indian owner of the Gandhi Café (163).

In Namesake, Lahiri recounts a similar experience like that of Biju’s. Ashima makes a habitual error when her Bengali grammar slips into her English, and she confuses between “finger” and “fingers.” “But in Bengali, a finger can also mean fingers, a toe toes” (7). “This error pains her almost as much as her last contraction.” The fear of committing errors does not end here, and memory only aggravates the pain. In one of her first trips out of her apartment, Ashima “remembers selecting the smallest and cheapest style, saying ‘I would like to buy this one, please’ as she placed the item in the counter, her heart pounding for fear that she would not be understood” (160, emphasis added). At

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another instance, which happens to be a routine encounter, when the Ganguli family

visits a store, the cashier directs his question to the America-born child than to his parents.

“For by now he [the son] is aware, in stores, of cashiers smirking at his parents’ accents, and of salesmen who prefer to direct their conversation to Gogol, as though his parents were either incompetent or deaf” (67-8).

At another occasion, right after graduating from high school, Gogol finds himself in an awkward position at a party when he has to introduce himself to Kim: “But he doesn’t want to tell Kim his name. He doesn’t want to endure her reaction, to watch her…eyes grow wide. He wishes there were another name he could use, just this once, to get him through the evening” (Lahiri 95). In one extreme case, the Gangulis’ mailbox becomes the object of racist atrocity. “One morning, the day after Halloween, Gogol discovers, on his way to the bus stop, that it [GANGULI] has been shortened to GANG, with the word GREEN scrawled in pencil following it” (67). Obviously, the incident is painful to the America-born Gogol: “His ears burn at the sight, and he runs back into the house, sickened, certain of the insult his father will feel” (67). Gogol interprets the racist vandalism directed at his parents’ difference, particularly accent. His father suppresses his agony and dismisses Gogol’s concern, “It’s only boys having fun” (68). Apparently,

Ashoke seems to have gone through many of these racist encounters and seems to have immunized himself from being affected any more.

In each case, these characters wish they were anonymous and invisible so that they will not have to endure the pain of being different. Saeed, a minor character in

Inheritance of Loss, sarcastically sums up the colored immigrant’s situation in the

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following words: “Thank God, to them we all of us look the same!” (88). Each time the

same pain is re-described with difference in degrees in varying circumstances. Even the

one who believes she is seamlessly assimilated is not guaranteed of a waiver. Jasmine in

Mukherjee’s work has to hear similar but more subtle jab about her body: “You have nice

hips…Wide. Nature meant you to carry babies” (Mukherjee 34). Wylie and Taylor,

supposedly benevolent ones, are familiar with the “[a]ncient American custom, dark-

skinned mammies” and caution Jasmine not to “be flattered by it” (169). Wylie senses the

pain in the assumption, of which Jasmine “never heard” before: “You are probably tired

of Americans assuming that if you are from India or China or the Caribbean you must be

good with children” (168). Moreover, at another occasion, when Jasmine and Bud go out

to have a drink at a bar in Dalton, she is not spared from a racist slur. “A big dusty, blond

man” at the bar is not happy about her presence: “Whoa! I don’t know nothing about

horsepower, I know whorepower when I see it” (201).

Like the judge’s reverence to Queen Victoria and her people grew gradually while

attending a missionary-run school in India a generation ago, Biju also finds that he has

“possessed an awe of white people” and hatred for black people in America (Desai 86), despite being excluded from the promised fruits of European modernity. No matter how fast he pedals to deliver foods to Freddy’s Wok’s customers or how many hours he works at the Gandhi Café (58, 162), “the mainstream” is far off (108), as if the script of the previous generation had still to be followed and as if immigration were supposed to be only one-way from the metropolis to the colony. On this occasion, I am reminded of J. R.

Seeley’s Expansion of England, in which he urged, at the height of British colonialism,

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that the civilizing and educating race immigrate to the colonies at a faster pace (245-52).

Obviously, he did not mean the other way around.

At a philosophical level, let us recall that Husserl restricted these wanderers

(diasporas) from his conception of European spirit (subjectivity), i.e. they were to be

excluded for the protection of European spirit, and the reason he gave was: “[W]hen we

are thrown into an alien social sphere, that of the Negroes in Congo, Chinese peasants,

etc. [all non-Europeans], we discover that their truths, the facts for them are fixed,

generally verifiable, are by no means the same as ours [Europeans’]” (Crisis of European

Sciences 139). This description of non-Europeans coincidentally parallels with Lacan’s distinction of animal code from human language in that the former’s is “the fixed correlation of its signs to the reality that they signify” (Écrits 84).3 And in

Phenomenology and Crisis, the term “Europeans,” for Husserl, includes “the English

dominions, the United States, etc., but not, however, the Eskimos or Indians of the

country fairs, or the Gypsies who are wandering about Europe” (155). On the other hand,

Luhmann’s society includes those wandering “Gypsies.”

For an example of the postcolonial literary subsystem’s response to its

environment, we may discuss here the concept of double colonization. First, this concept

is a latecomer in the postcolonial literary system. The postcolonial literary system has responded to the gender issue in both colonial and postcolonial conditions. What happens to native women of the colonies and post-colonies happens at the first order observation.

Their response, if it does not take risks into account, remains at the first order. When the postcolonial systems responds to gender issue, following feminism or otherwise, it, to put

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in Luhmann’s language, “operates at the level of second-order observation,” but only if the system’s description and explanation are for the purposes of preparation for action, first-order observation will be reactivated. Since the primary purpose of literary system is not oriented toward political action, such description of female’s double colonization does not necessarily activate the first order, except indirectly. If Desai’s Inheritance of

Loss dramatizes the character of Nimi as a victim of double colonization in a colonial condition, Lahiri’s Namesake presents Ashima as a soft version of double colonization in a postcolonial condition; and Mukherjee’s Jasmine recounts the same, if only peripherally, in a compact way.

To begin with Jasmine, in Hasnapur, India, “dowryless wives, rebellious wives, barren wives” (Mukherjee 41), suffer indiscriminately, and one of the sufferers happens to be Jasmine’s friend, Vimla. When Vimla’s husband was twenty-one, he “died of typhoid, and at twenty-two she doused herself with kerosene and flung herself on a stove”

(15). Unfortunately, in that town, “Vimla’s is not a sad story” (15), as daughters are considered “curses” to be gotten rid of (39). When Jasmine was seven years old, the astrologer foretold her fate of “widowhood and exile” (3). She becomes widow before she turns seventeen years old and, with that, she has to live the rest of her life in exile, as if fulfilling the prophesy. Her journey to the United States underlies the same mission of

Sati, at least that is how she interprets. Her rape by the Half-Face could be safely attributed to both her illegal status and gender. Undocumented and excluded in the new

Empire, Jasmine—during her five-month stay at the Vadheras’ in New York—is not safe outdoors; and indoors, “behind ghetto walls,” the Vadheras, an Indian family, have

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“artificially maintained Indianness” (145)—“silence, order, [and] authority” (151).

Whether as “Duff’s day mummy and Taylor and Wylie’s au pair in Manhattan” or carrying Bud’s child in Baden, Iowa (127), Jasmine cannot overcome her subordinate status, wanting one day to be in Mother Ripplemeyer and Lillian Gordon’s position, not at the receiving end (224).

Another mild version of double neo-colonization is portrayed through the character of Ashima in Namesake. British Raj left in 1947, but the institutions it built were left behind, and Ashima, in the early 1960s, was one of the first batches of college students after the British departure. “English had been her subject. In Calcutta, before she was married, she was working toward a college degree. She used to tutor neighborhood children in their homes. . . helping them memorize Tennyson and Wordsworth, to pronounce words like sign and cough, to understand. . . Shakespearean tragedy” (Lahiri

7). Yet, in Ashoke’s first visit to Ashima as a potential bride, her mother highlights

Ashima’s skills, as if she were destined to be confined in domesticity, “She is fond of cooking, and she can knit extremely well. Within a week she finished this cardigan I am wearing.” Strangely, Ashima is “amused by her mother’s salesmanship.” Before entering the living room where her mother and Ashoke are conversing, Ashima notices a pair of shoes on the floor outside the door where visitors customarily leave them. She takes the imperial “initials U.S.A.” on Ashoke’s shoes for wonder: “[U]nable to resist a sudden and overwhelming urge, [she] stepped into the shoes at her feet” (8). Like Ashima, Ashoke, too, is a product of the British education system. “As a teenager he had gone through all of Dickens. He read newer authors as well, Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, all

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purchased from his favorite tall on College Street with pujo [ritual gift] money” (12). It

was Ghosh, a visitor from England, who sowed the seed of diaspora in Ashoke’s mind.

“Ghosh spoke reverently of England” (15). Initially, Ashoke resisted the temptation, but

Ghosh was quick to offer help if Ashoke decided to travel abroad, “If you ever change

your mind and need contacts, let me know” (16). Soon, the books that he had read began

reminding “him only of his confinement,” and he started thinking of leaving his home

country (20). Similar stories of the influence of British education system in the post- independence India could be detected in the characters of Jemu and Jasmine in Desai’s

Inheritance of Loss and Mukherjee’s Jasmine, respectively. Their departure from home country, temporary or otherwise, has been partly credited to the education system that

India inherited from the British Raj.

The surname “Ganguli” that Ashima takes after the husband “is a legacy of the

British, an anglicized way of pronouncing his [Ashoke’s] real surname, Gangopadhyay”

(Lahiri 67). After marriage, she spends two-third of her life cooking, “hoping to please” her husband (10). She quickly learns how “her husband likes his food,” but there is no reciprocity from him, as if it were her destiny to serve the man to eternity.

At the time of their first-born child, the Gangulis face a difficult situation as the new Empire’s health system cannot wait a little longer for the name to be arrived from the grandmother in Calcutta. “In India parents take their time. It wasn’t unusual for years to pass before the right name, the best possible name, to be determined. Ashima and

Ashoke can both cite examples of cousins who were not officially named until they were registered, at six or seven, in school” (25). The Gangulis are forced to come up with an

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official name quickly or else the hospital would not release the new-born baby. As all the

suggestions are off the table for various culturally conflicting reasons, the Gangulis have

no choice but accept the hospital official’s last one: “Then what about naming him after

another person? Someone you greatly admire?” (28).

Ashoke decides to relate one cultural incident of naming with an accident of his

own life, the train-wreck that he survived due to the book he held in his hand, The Short

Stories of Nikolai Gogol. The name Gogol is supposed to be the baby’s pet name, “the name by which one is called, by friends, family, and other intimates, at home and in other private, unguarded moments” (16). In Bengali tradition, next task for the parents is to determine the child’s “good name, a bhalonam, for identification in the outside world”

(16). The school system simply does not have the provision for accommodating the

Bengali tradition of two names, so the school principle, in her ignorance, practically

denies Gogol the “good name,” Nikhil. “At the end of the first day he [Gogol] is sent

home with a letter to his parents from Mrs. Lapidus [the school principle], folded and

stapled to a string around his neck, explaining that due to their son’s preference he will be

known as Gogol at school” (60), not Nikhil as the parents wanted in accordance with the

tradition. The far reaching consequence of this cultural trampling is that Ashima, until

late in her life, is emotionally disconnected and distant from her child. After twenty-eight

years in the United States, Ashima finally takes her “first job in America,” at a public

library, where she makes her “first American friends” in her life (162). It takes her forty- eight years to break the confines of domesticity, after wrapping up child-bearing, rearing, and husband-pleasing tasks. Yet, when her husband dies of a heart attack in Cleveland

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(169), she still refuses to utter the patriarch’s name out of reverence and maintains

unflinching faith in his intention: “Now I know why he went to Cleveland. He was

teaching me how to live alone” (183).

It was not just the dowryless wives who became doubly victims, in the collusion between the practices of patriarchy and colonialism, the rich suffered the same fate, as can be seen in Nimi’s case in Inheritance of Loss (100-01). Nimi’s “dowry included cash, gold, emerald from Venezuela, rubies from Burma, uncut kundun diamonds, a watch on a watch chain, lengths of woolen cloth for her new husband to make into new suits in which to travel to England. . . and a ticket. . . from Bombay to Liverpool” (Desai 100). In the manner Jyoti was renamed into Jasmine by her husband, Nimi’s “name was changed into the one chosen by Jemubhai’s family, and in a few hours, Bela became Nimi Patel” at the age of fourteen (100-01). With the renaming comes the power to possess the renamed. Nimi is reduced to an absence, however “a disruptive presence” (189). When his powder-puff container accidentally breaks, Jemu rapes his wife in outrage:

“Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment, he clamped down on her, tussled her to the floor. . . he stuffed his way ungracefully into her” (186). Jemu “repeated the gutter act again and again,” for all the simple reasons that she resists learning English and following modern ways.

On one occasion, Nimi unknowingly happens to join the independence movement against the British Raj (333). For a faithful colonial subject like Jemu, Nimi’s act crosses all imaginable lines. Nimi’s inadvertent participation not only offends Jemu’s colonial sensibility but also jeopardizes his image, if not quite his promotion yet. The district

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commissioner warns Jemu, “I trust that no member of your family will do anything to

compromise your career again. I am warning you, Patel, as a friend” (333). Hurt by

Jemu’s verbal abuse, finally Nimi speaks back, “You are the one who is stupid” (335).

Jemu punishes Nimi with extreme violent measure, knocking her down “with his fists,” and when his fists are tired, he starts kicking her: “He even limped a bit, his leg hurting from kicking her” (335). Nimi’s bruises last for weeks. Jemu imagines “himself killing her” (335). He forces her to commit suicide, by sending her back to Gujarat, her home town. British colonial brutality outside is matched by the patriarchal brutality inside, and

Nimi is the sad story of double victimization.

It should be evident from the discussion above that the reproduction of colonialism has been continued in a two-fold way in the postcolony: internal colonialism and double colonization, both of which could be attributed to the society still based on stratification, a colonial legacy. The solution to these social ills cannot be found by assigning one system the absolute responsibility, be it the system of politics or economy or some other. However, we should opt for a society that at least guarantees resistance and social antagonism so that attention of the respective system can be sufficiently drawn to these problems (more to follow on this topic in the next chapter).

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Notes

1. Here one can see why Baecker describes system as system deconstruction:

“System theory in line with Luhmann’s intellectual spirit may well be read as an attempt to do away with any usual notion of system, the theory in a way being the deconstruction of its central term” (“Why System?” 61). This compares well with Derrida’s description of différance as having neither existence nor essence: “différance is not, does not exist, and is not any sort of being-present (on)” (Speech and Phenomenon 134).

2. Those eight references are in the following pages of Desai’s Inheritance of Loss:

92, 103, 144, 211, 218, 288, 307, and 345. We may add one more indirect reference,

248-49, which does not identify the homeless Róng until later.

3. Derrida first picked this passage in Animal. See pp. 122-23 for his discussion.

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Chapter 4

Resistance and Antagonism

Colonial societies as well as newly decolonized societies remain stratified, not

completely functionally differentiated. As Sartre notes in the preface to Fanon’s

Wretched Earth, colonialism “endeavored by every means to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonized societies” (10). In a stratified society, the higher status

groups rarely communicate about the lower strata: In other words, low-lying environment

is ignored. The structure of this society remains hierarchical, with unequal distribution of

wealth and chances, “unequal distribution of communication chances,” thus resulting into

unequal subsystems (Luhmann, Differentiation 234). The unstated goal of a functionally

differentiated society is to increase complexity, i.e. increase communicational

opportunities.

It cannot be denied that the categories of class, gender, race, ethnicity, etc. exist in

various discourses, including postcolonial, but their values are limited to perception in

interaction system. They cannot be taken as unifying and organizing principles of modern

society. They simply do not make a difference in a functionally differentiated society. In

the sense of effecting difference, they are not legitimate, and, as Luhmann suggests, the

characterization of modern society as functionally differentiated could be used “as a kind

of trivialization of interest conflicts” (Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity 200). In brief,

functional systems cannot use these distinctions, residue of premodern society, as

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legitimate distinctions. Apparently for a different purpose, a delegitimization of (or, ambivalence toward) race, gender, ethnicity, and indigeneity is in the process within the recent postcolonial critical works. Yet, these are the categories liberal humanism has advocated for providing universal justice based on consensus. However, any attempt to universalize liberal humanism perpetuates neo-colonialism. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal

Mouffe’s “antagonistic democracy”—not Habermasian consensus type but the one based on pluralistic hegemonies—is one of the ways to resist the new Empire and its global hegemony.

To translate it into systems theory register, antagonism must grow as openly and strongly as possible so that all sub-systems of society differentiate and acquire autonomy, and if they interact, which they do, they will do so as each other’s environments without dictating their systemic autonomies. Therefore, we read functional differentiation as redistribution of hegemonies, by way of splitting the top and center. In “Competing

Figures of Limit,” Stäheli cautions against taking antagonism as something ontologically given and asks us to read it as “the effect of particular observation” (235). This means that antagonism must be conceived as an effect, emerging out of interacting elements and systems, which is highly contingent and shifting. Though in a different context, Bhabha cautions us against oppositional politics if it involves homogenization: “It is only by understanding the ambivalence and the antagonism of the desire of the Other that we can avoid the increasingly facile adoption of the notion of a homogenized Other, for a celebratory, oppositional politics of the margins or minorities” (Location of Culture 75).

Keeping Stäheli and Bhabha’s cautionary remarks in mind, this section ends with an

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endorsement of antagonistic democracy, with some qualification, after testing the theory’s efficacy against Desai’s Inheritance of Loss.

As I noted earlier, Rasch and Wolfe have drawn a parallel between antagonistic democracy and functional differentiation (“Introduction” 21-22). In my view, functional differentiation helps pave, to put in Mouffe’s phrase, “the dimension of conflict and antagonism within the political” so that the work of extending “the democratic revolution to an increasing number of social relations [in Luhmann’s term, social systems]” can begin (152-53). My explanation of the code in the opening alludes to Ernesto Laclau and

Chantal Mouffe’s concept of antagonistic democracy, for a healthy resistance to hegemony, be it internal or external. I agree with Laclau and Mouffe that “there cannot be a radical politics without the definition of an adversary (Hegemony xvii). In other words, it is not advisable to abandon antagonism for a radical resistance to colonialism in all its forms, including internal colonialism. The concept of antagonism supplements what systems theory apparently lacks. However, at a closer look, besides his theorization of two-valued code, Luhmann seems to be expressing a similar view with regard to oppositional politics when he theorizes the form of protest movements in general: “[T]he form of protest remains a form that presupposes the other side that is to react to the protest” (Luhmann, Risk 126). A society structured on functional differentiation and binary coding, Luhmann adds, “generates protest-prone situations en masse and initiates a selection procedure to choose one of the alternatives for system building in the sense of social movements” (139).

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Perhaps, the concept of antagonism may be translated into systems theory as

antagonism between social systems in post-independence nations where social systems are not fully functionally differentiated, i.e. they are constantly invaded by political super-system. But again, there is no privileged point of rupture into the on-going practice

of colonialism, and social struggles cannot be totalized into one struggle. For this reason,

postcolonials must continue their struggles from respective areas of interests, unlike what

Spivak suggested by joining “the globe-girdling Social Movements in the South through the entry point of their own countries of origin” (Critique of Postcolonial Reason 402.).

Inequalities and differences cannot be reduced to the category of class. Laclau and

Mouffe question the class-essentialist logic of Marxism. The implication is such that society cannot be totalized under the rubric of economy. This position is on par with systems theoretic stance on systems differentiation and operational closure.

4.1. Resistance as Realm of Conflict

To recall the explanation of my thesis in my introduction, postcolonial literary system cannot abandon the topic of resistance. The term “resistance” may appear to imply the supremacy of the political, and the system’s ontology may still appear to be dependent on it, but systems theory, as it describes the modern society to be functionally differentiated, departs from this notion of one system’s controlling authority over all other systems. Edward Said, speaking of resistance and totalizing tendency of various systems, expresses the same concern, though differently, “All of these systems that confirm themselves over and over again so that every shred of evidence becomes an instance of the system as a whole—these systems are really the enemies” (Power, Politics,

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and Culture 65). In other words, he is cautioning against one system’s tendency to encroach upon and subsume all other systems. To avoid the pitfall of a grand narrative, the term “resistance” is used here merely to mean “a realm of conflict,” as William Rasch recommends in his reading of Chantal Mouffe’s “return of the political” (“Locating the

Political” 152). My claim should not be misunderstood as resistance or the political being the sole determinant of the postcolonial literary subsystem; rather, resistance has to be observed as one constituted in the system’s projected environment, i.e. political subsystem, with which it has loose structural coupling.

At the outset, we may have to interpret “resistance” as a system meaning first and then as semantic, because it is recursive, of new social movements. How does the system translate or respond to the “resistance” component of the political system, which is in the environment of the postcolonial literary system? After considering this question, we will be in a position to discuss resistance with reference to all three texts, i.e. resistance to hegemony, possibly resistance as cultural resistance plus sectarianism (with reference to

Khalsa Lions and GNLF). The context in which the issue of resistance is evoked here is that there has been an ongoing debate within the postcolonial theory whether to deploy resistance from within or outside for it to be politically relevant, and whether those who are expressing solidarity should be prescribing the route or whether it is a prescription for themselves, considering their unique situation in the academia of the metropolis or postcolony. For them the passage to inside is no longer a concern: They are already inside, and their advocacy for solidarity with resistance from inside is valid for them. For others like an illegal taxi driver, Saeed, or Biju in Inheritance of Loss, the question remains still

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puzzling, “[H]ow to move into the mainstream?” (Desai 109). At some level, their hurdles are more difficult than a physically and mentally incapacitated person’s, as Saeed recounts, “Even a disabled or mentally retarded green card holder would be fine—” (109).

Once inside, one is more likely to follow the operational parameters of the inside. If that were not the case, Said would not refuse many offers from “Third World groups and states” and would not be citing Régis Debray’s co-optation: “What you say about constituency and the place of the intellectual seems to me significant when thinking about people like Régis Debray, who began getting deeply involved in political struggles and now is an advisor to Mitterrand” (Power 55; emphasis in original).

In the context of British India, there were many like Debray, for instance Gopal

Krishna Gokhale, because of whom, as his critics believe, the independence movement was pushed back by over a decade. The debate—which started with Gokhale and the so- called moderates on one side and Gandhi, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and the nationalist on the other at the end of twentieth century, the former standing for self-government within the

Empire and the latter for self-government without the Empire—seems to have continued to the present in a subtle and uncanny disguise, however in a markedly different context.

Uncannily, the rhetoric of negotiation with the center seems to be in an alignment with the rhetoric of self-government within the Empire, in this particular case. A similar form of co-optation could be dictated in the case of the GNLF leader of the 1980s, Subash

Ghising, whose fellow revolutionary leader of the Kalimpong wing, Pradhan, appears briefly in Desai’s Inheritance of Loss in a dark-comedic manner. Pradhan, obviously not historically accurate, insults the character of Lola when she goes to him, seeking justice

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for her property encroachment by the GNLF’s cadres: “I am the raja [king] of Kalimpong.

A raja must have many queens. . . . dear aunty, would you like to be the fifth [queen]?”

(268). Historically speaking, Pradhan, too, co-opted when the GNLF signed a peace treaty with the government; and, as soon as he was included, he abandoned the cause of the movement of attaining autonomy for the region.

To resume the discussion of resistance from outside versus inside, there is irresolution, perhaps because it has not been reflected upon sufficiently within the postcolonial literary system before rejecting one mode in favor of the other. However, as

Helen Tiffin points out, “by the late 1980s,” resistance from outside has been generally dismissed, by attaching a binarist paradigm on it, “in favor of the exploration of hybridity, creolization, complicity, syncretism, and liminality” (“Plato’s Cave” 162). If I were to stick to a postcolonial lexicon, both would be equally relevant from their respective spaces and times, which further requires defining what we call outside. The issue of outside is more complicated when viewed from the systems theory because it is hard to designate a space completely lying outside of the society. As an effort to calibrate postcolonial theory’s stance with system theory’s, we may say that the dismissal that

Tiffin mentioned above does not resolve the dispute but only reproduces outside-inside in

the inside. Is not the dismissal of the outside also the dismissal of the other, as in the-

subaltern-cannot-speak?

Within postcolonial field, the outside- inside binary is invoked at two levels: one

has to do with who is authentic to speak; and the other where the resistance could be

launched from.1 In Luhmann’s version of systems theory, inside-outside binary is

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handled through two related ways. First, there is simply no outside of the society. In other

words, outside is the logical necessity, not just a factual occurrence, of inside. The

outside is copied within inside through reentry after the original distinction between

inside and outside is made. In each case, the outside is remainder after the selection, i.e.

after distinguishing the inside. Secondly, the binary, without hierarchy and without

obliteration, is extended to inclusion-exclusion and must remain relevant. On the basis of

Luhmann’s articulation on the outside, we may say that there is no possibility of resistance from outside of society, to overthrow its order. A revolution cannot wish away all challenges of society and include all unconditionally (as we have seen the promises and fates of communist states). However, a non-society can, however, remind the limit of the society.

Before employing the above-mentioned surgical approach of systems theory as a new contribution, I will present a literary analysis of these three texts. All the three literary texts’ conflicts underlie a form of resistance to the Empire, but they employ different tactical approaches, which may help clarify outside-inside resistance.

Desai’s Inheritance of Loss chronicles fragments of colonial India in a series of flashbacks, but the conflict between two forces is less focused on British versus Indians than between Anglicized and non-Anglicized Indians, even though one of the flashbacks takes us to a scene where the division stands out grossly along racial line. It is 1939 when the future judge, Jemubhai Patel, is about to leave for Cambridge, and his family has hired a two-men military band for a nice farewell at the train station in Piphit, a town in

Gujrat, India: “They had stood on the platform between benches labeled ‘Indians Only’

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and ‘Europeans Only,’ dressed in stained coats with dull metallic ricrac unraveling about the sleeves and collars” (41). Apparently, the Patel family and those who accompanied them are indifferent to the signs of racial segregation, as opposition and conflict would jeopardize the entry to the “Land of Hope and Glory” (43). Jemu’s search for a room to rent takes him to twenty doors, and the last one also does not want him either, but she lets him as she would not find another tenant due to the iniquitous location. People on the bus normally do not sit next to him and complain about his odor (45). As we noted earlier, what happens to Jemu, the judge, in Cambridge in the early 1940s, happens to Biju, the only son of the judge’s cook, in New York in the 1980s. First the restaurant owner and wife insult Biju, complaining about his smell, and then as they notice he does not have anything “in common with them, like religion and skin color,” they fire him (54). The difference between the Judge and Biju is that the former is concerned about being accused of smelling, but the latter quits the place. Biju’s stay in America exemplifies reversal of American dream into American nightmare. Can one afford to oppose and, at the same time, keep his occupation and pursuit?

After the Jemu’s return to India, the real conflict wages between him and his wife, with her emphatic “no.” The wife’s opposition is analogous to India’s fight for independence in that both are against oppression and exploitation. The nation succeeds to force the British Raj leave, but suppresses the GNLF’s fight for the region’s autonomy.

Most critics of Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine have pointed out that the protagonist’s life journey is about seamless assimilation and that the authoress endorses assimilation politics of the new Empire, as if the excluded could be painlessly included.

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For Leslie Bow, Mukherjee’s works are “pro-assimilation politics” (61), a call for obliterating the cultural heritage for the mere sake of assimilation, thus succumbing to the discourse of the “First World” politics. Others like Debjani Banerjee, Inderpal Grewal, and Sushma Tandon, who echo along the same line, feel vindicated by some of

Mukherjee’s interviews. Fred Pfeil accuses Mukherjee of co-optation and complicity with

the Empire in her portrayal of Jasmine as a mobile and adventurous character. Each

complains that resistance to the Empire has been abandoned in Jasmine, perhaps because

of their preference for the resistance from outside. Moreover, what aggravates their

dismay is Mukherjee does not use an overtly confrontational approach and presents the

character of Jasmine as a calculative fighter rather than a traditionally submissive quitter

or an all-out revolutionary. However, there are a few critics like Phillipa Kafka who see

differently like I do: It is through the ambivalence, i.e. only partially and transiently

belonging to one or more systems, that Jasmine questions the legitimacy of the new

Empire. Jasmine’s life and the world that she lives in elucidate the limit not just of

neocolonialism and modernity but also of functional differentiation that modernity, too,

needs its other, be it by way of self-generation or otherwise (if one were to pursue a

different conceptual path).2

Jasmine’s journey is from one favela, so to speak, of small town to another favela

of big city: Hasnapur, a town in Punjab, India to Miami and other cities in the United

States. In these favelas, whether they are located in industrialized nations or elsewhere,

“if one takes a closer look, one does not find anything that could be exploited or

suppressed. One finds existences reduced to the bodily in their self-perception and other-

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perception, attempting to get to the next day” (Luhmann, “Beyond Barbarism” 269).

Jasmine’s description of her birth may not be from a value-free stance, but it surely complicates both descriptions—life reduced to bodily existence and exploitation— descriptions made from stratification and functional differentiation, respectively: “In a makeshift birthing hut in Hasnapur, Jullandhar District, Punjab, India, I was born the year harvest was so good that even my father, the reluctant tiller of thirty acres, had grain to hoard for drought” (Mukherjee 39). The makeshift birthing hut may appear to be anomaly to modernity, but the good harvest, which, in this case, is contingent upon factors other than the father’s hard work, is endowed with a second meaning, which one may call culture, “If I had been a boy, my birth in a bountiful year would have marked me as lucky, a child with a special destiny to fulfill” (39). But in that place and at that time, i.e. in the postcolonial India of 1965, “[D]aughters were curses” (39); “All over our district, bad luck dogged dowryless wives, rebellious wives, barren wives. They fell into wells, they got run over by trains, they burned to death heating milk on kerosene stoves” (41). That

Jasmine’s family was uprooted from Lahore, a town in present-day Pakistan, and flung

“to a village of flaky mud huts” was not cultural, but a consequence of the partition of the country (41).

Let us compare this event with the one when she faces Half-Face, a rapist, as soon as she arrives in Florida: “He pulled me off the floor and dropped me on the bed” (113).

Then, the Half-Face tells her to “lie back and enjoy it,” while Jasmine is helplessly crying in protest, “Please don’t do anything to me” (115). After this traumatic ordeal, as she has nowhere to go, she walks miles randomly in one direction, without water and food, until

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“she could go no farther” (128). She feels as though she “never left India”; she “had travelled the world without ever leaving the familiar crops of India” (128). The second person, without her initiation, who happens to speak to her, welcomes her to America:

“No work! This Kanjobal crew. Vamoose! Fuck off! Get lost!” (129). Jasmine’s primary concern is organic survival, not subjecthood or consciousness, i.e. not with social system or psychic system but organic system.

Jasmine’s temporary careers determine her partial inclusion, thus allowing her to construct an illusion of acceptance and unity of consciousness, i.e. a positive pretension of being the same all along.

Then, Jasmine’s sojourn at an Indian family’s apartment in New York further underscores the favelas of the new Empire and the myth of all inclusion, which is further elaborated in the next sub-section. This myth continues after her arrival in Baden, Iowa.

But this is still a description from a certain vantage point, i.e. from the observing system, postcolonial literary sub-system in this case: That the “environment has no self- reflection or capacity to act,” thus requiring external attribution, is a system strategy, as we know this does not mean that the (observing) system can tame the environment

(Luhmann, Social Systems 17). It depends on how we see:“If we see stratification, we will tend to see… injustice, exploitation and suppression; and we may wish to find corrective devices… .” ; but if “we see functional differentiation, our description will point to the autonomy of the function systems…Then, we will see a society without top and without center; a society that evolves but cannot control itself. And then, the calamity is no longer exploitation and suppression but neglect” (Luhmann, “Globalization” 8).

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This is the way it is “at the margins of function systems” (Luhmann, “Beyond Barbarism”

270).

One relevant question that must be raised here is whether the favelas is just at

margins of functional systems or whether it is at the margin of societal system, which “is

the encompassing social system that includes all communications” but “excludes external

communication” (Luhmann, Essays 176). I think the margin of societal system can be

best understood with reference to Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of antagonism as “the

‘experience’ of the limit of the social” (125). In strict terms, as they explain,

“antagonisms are not internal but external to society; or rather, they constitute the limits of society, the latter’s impossibility of fully constituting itself” (125). In Laclau and

Mouffe’s formulation, antagonism is not contradiction, as in Marxism, or real opposition as in “a collision between two stones” (123). If Luhmann sees the limit of society as

neglect, Laclau and Mouffe see it “as an experience of failure” (126). The way I see, the failure of the post-independence India that Jemu, Biju, Gyan, the cook, and subalterns in the tribal as well as semi-urban areas of Darjeeling and elsewhere experience shows the limit of society. As failures of the times past still continue to haunt, we may recall the events that lead to Gogol’s namelessness in Lahiri’s Namesake. And in Mukherjee’s work, Jasmine succinctly describes how the memory of loss is replayed, some of which she did not even experience, “I’ve never been to Lahore, but the loss survives in the instant replay of family story” (41), and the ghost of the astrologer, who forecast her fate when she was seven, still “floats cross-legged above [her] kitchen stove” when she readies to undertake another journey at the end of the novel (240). Desai’s Inheritance of

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Loss resumes the narrative of legacy of loss, which its title sums up nicely, but goes back

in time in more detail to chart the uneven path of loss, in which resistances abound at

each crossroad, from the hospital bed through Gogol’s school and the deaths of relatives.

4.3. Culture as Resistance and Memory

For a diaspora, since culture is more particular and specific and continues to be

handier than other categories like indigeneity and nationality, we will first discuss in this

section how culture bears relation with memory and mobilizes its resources as means for

both resistance and survival. Edward Said, in his 2003 interview, provides an

interconnection among culture, memory, and resistance within the postcolonial field: “In

the case of political identity that’s being threatened, culture is a way of fighting against

extinction and obliteration. Culture is a form of memory against effacement” (Culture

and Resistance 159). If Said were speaking in systems theory language, he would be

suggesting both social system and psychic system use and reuse memories to process new

information and to effect action. This recursive function of memory may easily be

connected to communication, if we recall, once again, Heinz von Foerster’s formulation

that communication is recursion (Understanding 308). On more than one occasion,

Luhmann also has articulated the notion of culture in terms of memory.3

In Jasmine, the protagonist has no other option but to resort to the myth of Sati

(spelled sometimes as Suttee) for survival. She takes on the image of Kali, to defy the

literal fate of Sati as well as to destroy the Half-Face of America. She came to America

with one mission: “To lay out the suit, to fill it with twigs and papers. To light it, then to

lie upon it in the white cotton sari I had brought from home” (Mukherjee 118). Half-Face

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rapes her, and, with that, her mission changes from lying on the pseudo funeral pyre into slicing her own tongue so that she will have a bleeding tongue, similar to the avenging goddess Kali’s, to punish the evil: “I wanted that moment when he saw above me as he had last seen me, naked, but now with my mouth open, pouring blood, my red tongue out.

I wanted him to open his mouth and start to reach, I…” (118). More on this will follow in chapter five.

In Rudi Laermans’ compilation of Luhmann’s scattered references to culture, the term’s definition pivots around condensation, “specific articulation of the overall medium of meaning,” observational difference (second order observation), etc. (70-71). Society is rived with fundamental antagonisms, which, in accordance with the exchange principle, get covered up by identitarian thought. Identity buries society’s antagonisms (and systems’ functional differentiation). Identitarianism is assimilation par excellence, i.e. its dictate is such that one cannot be everywhere at home; one cannot be half and half. Or, in the words of Jasmine’s, in Mukherjee’s work, “Even memories are sign of disloyalty”

(231). Similarly, in the case of Lahiri’s female protagonist, she cannot always live a demarcated life of Bengali culture. She cannot keep all its rituals in a location that is indifferent to their meanings. She gradually gives them up one by one, and finally, “True to the meaning of her name, she [Ashima] will be without borders [dividing alterity and identity?], without home of her own, a resident everywhere and nowhere” (276).

In the case of legal identity, the new Empire simplifies and homogenizes, for instance, the naming system, and, as a consequence, Gogol’s parents are left with no option but to “do away with the pet name altogether, as many of their Bengali friends

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have already done. For their daughter, good name and pet name are one and the same:

Sonali, meaning ‘she who is golden’” (Lahiri 62). As time passes, in the imperial design, a certain way of life is rendered meaningless and forgotten. In Inheritance of Loss,

Jemu’s name is Anglicized (colonized?) into James (Desai 44), and the cook’s into

Thomas, whose real name is Panna Lal, but hardly mentioned by either of those (71). In this connection, Lavina Shankar notes a relevant point, “Servants, slaves, and the colonized subjects have always been nameless, faceless groups, not individualized by proper names” (51). In the case of Mukherjee’s protagonist, it is different. Jasmine changes her names to suit her roles in each new situation, more as a way of overcoming her struggles.

4.4. Limitation of Cultural Identity for Solidarity

As the question of cultural identity pertains to political solidarity, we should start from where this question arises, rather what leads to the search for cultural identity, and proceed to discuss its (limited) relevance. While conceiving world society as an autopoietic whole of regional societies, Luhmann acknowledges regional differences, but he cautions that those regional particularities cannot serve as world society’s references as those particularities are not “independent variables” (“Globalization” 7). For instance, we cannot say Sikhs and Gorkhas engage in internal wars because they are Sikhs and

Gorkhas. However, evidently the two movements, Sikhs’ for sovereign state, Khalistan, and Gorkhas’ for Gorkhaland, are organized by invoking the rhetoric of cultural identity, ethnic and regional, respectively. The Khalistan movement is in the background of

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Jasmine, and the Gorkhaland is in the background of Inheritance of Loss, reflecting the neglect of the post-independent, modern state of India. Historically speaking, the former, after some twenty years, was violently squelched by the state military in the early 1990s.

The latter flares up every now and then since the peace-treaty with the state in the late

1980s did not achieve a creation of separate state except partial regional autonomy.

In Luhmann’s view, a study of regional differences should aim at investigating

“how and why this society [world society] tends to maintain or even increase regional inequalities” (“Globalization” 7). Following Luhmann, we may have to determine whether the imposition of nation-state is a misfit for these previous colonies, or, whether the inequality is the general condition of global neglect that “stimulates the search for personal and social, ethnic or religious identities” (7). It seems to me that both may be at work in cases like Khalistan and Gorkhaland, but when it comes to the absolute other, cultural identity is less significant because those in favelas and slums, those masses of starving people, are primarily concerned with survival.

The primary concern with survival is depicted in Jasmine, through the character of Du. Before arriving to the Ripplemeyer family, Du’s life in the refugee camp was all about survival. His sister would fetch “live crabs and worms for him to eat whenever she could sneak a visit from her own camp” (Mukherjee 18). He had to eat “filth in order to stay alive” (214). His struggles are indescribable. We can only unjustly itemize them, as

Jasmine does: “[H]e has lived through five or six languages, five or six countries, two or three centuries of history; [he] has seen his country, city, and family butchered, bargained with pirates. . . he has survived every degradation known to this century” (214).

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Jasmine’s life, the time between her husband’s genocide and Iowa, which lasts about five

years, is also filled with similar survival crises, though not as extreme as Du’s.

As we noted earlier, Jasmine was forced to escape Hasnapur under the Sikh

Nationalist threat. Not long after seeing her husband bombed in the ethnic violence and

die in her arms, Jasmine becomes a victim of brutal rape at the hand of a Floridian, on her

first day in the United States, and in an attempt to prevent repeat-rape, she murders the

Half-Face. Following this incident, she finds herself penniless, homeless, and aimless. To recount Jasmine’s ordeals once more, without food and water for two days, she keeps walking on some “dirt trail about three miles east of Fowlers Key, Florida” until she becomes too feeble and nearly passes out: “ ‘Water,’ I tried to say. ‘Pump.’ Blood still drained from my mouth” (Mukherjee 129). Her dejected state fails to gain pity from those passing by; instead, they bully her. When Lillian Gordon, a charitable woman, stumbles upon her, she does not have good news to deliver to her, “Lord. Well, there’s nothing we can do here, is there? And I suppose those chappies from the INS would leap at the sight of you in those sandals” (130). In Gordon’s view, Jasmine is lucky that “India had once been a British colony” (132). Jasmine spends five-month at the Vadheras’ in Queens,

New York, strictly following the Punjabi ritual of widowhood, which requires her to do everything in modesty. Without legal documents, she lives every day under the fear of being caught and deported by the INS: “I was a prisoner doing unreal time. Without a green card, even a forged one. . . I didn’t feel safe going outdoors” (148-49). At the

Hayes’, as Jasmine begins her first job as nanny to turn her life around. One Sunday she

suddenly sees Sukhwinder, the man who killed her husband, selling hot dogs not far from

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their apartment, and she has to leave New York, for the same reason she did Hasnapur, this time for a small town in Iowa to start life out of scratch one more time. Later, as Du is recruited through legal documentation, he is ingested into various social systems, including education and health. His eventual inclusion, through adaptation, may be described as partial, inclusive exclusion.

In Inheritance of Loss, the place Gyan lives resembles the “favelas of South

American cities” that Luhmann found “beyond description” (“Beyond Barbarism” 269).

The zone of exclusion where Gyan lives, which is a two-hour walk from the outskirt of

Kalimpong, is described as the following: “[H]uts perched along eyebrow-width ledges in the thick bamboo. Tin roofs promised tetanus; outhouses gestured into the ether so that droppings would fall into the valley. . . . in these homes it was cramped and wet, the smoke thick enough to choke you, the inhabitants eating meagerly. . . reality skidding into nightmares. . . ” (Desai 279-80). In the midst of these huts, Gyan’s house looks “a small, slime-slicked cube” (279). Life here is barely “holding on desperately,”

“something truly dismal,” modernity “in its meanest form” (280). Jasmine’s Hasnapur home and the neighborhood Ashoke’s family lives in Calcutta similarly resemble the favelas; many of whose denizens live outside almost all systems.

However, zones of exclusion are not only in South America, Africa, and Asia; they are also in Europe and the United States. As an illegal immigrant, Biju’s life in the favelas of New York is marked similarly with deprivation from most, if not all, social systems, largely due to exclusion from the legal system. At the beginning, when he arrives in New York, Biju lives in “the basement of a building at the bottom of Harlem,”

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run by an “invisible management company” and rented out exclusively to illegal

immigrants (Desai 57-58). Biju’s father sent him to America because he believed, “In

that country, there is enough food for everybody” (93). After a couple of years, once Biju

starts working at Gandhi Café, an Indian restaurant, he is offered housing in the kitchen

full of rats who would chew “Biju’s hair at night” (163). For Biju, it is always about

getting through the day; he does not have the luxury of the axiom another-day-another- dollar (166). One day, while working at the restaurant, Biju skids “on some rotten spinach in Harish-Harry’s kitchen,” hurting his knee badly (205). Getting medical help is out of the question. Unable to bear the physical pain, he dares open his mouth, “Without us living like pigs, what business would you have? This is how you make money, paying us nothing because you know we can’t do anything, making us work day and night because we are illegal” (206). The response he gets from the Indian owner is “[y]ou can help cutting vegetables while laying down and if you are not better, go home. Doctors are

very cheap and good in India” (207). At about this time, Biju feels, “[I]f he continued his

life in New York, he might never see his pitaji [father] again,” a usual occurrence in the

life of an illegal immigrant (255). Undoubtedly, Biju and many other minorities’ struggling lives in the United States fit Jameson’s description of the “internal Third

World” (49).

Any interpretation of their illegal status as resistance to the State is mere observation from outside because, as we noted above, Biju and his friend, Saeed, are concerned with survival, not resistance. One brief scene from Inheritance of Loss illustrates this, “The more he told them about his family in Zanzibar, his faked-up papers,

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of how he had one passport for Saeed Saeed and one for Zulfikar—the happier they

got. . . . Any subversion to the U.S. government—they [left-leaning Vermont hippies, whose daughter Saeed just married] would be happy to help” (Desai 134-35). For Saeed and Biju, it has all been about survival, avoidance of deportation, and movement (job- hopping). In Saeed’s case, survival is also about suffering sexual harassment with no option for resistance: “My boss, I swear he keep[s] grabbing my ass” (133). Upon his return from America, Biju is strip-robbed and left “with far less than he’d ever had,” except “an old throbbing of the knee that he had hurt slipping on Harish-Harry’s floor”

(Desai 349, 350). These stories of exclusions reveal the limit of modernity, the limit or the blind spot of functionally differentiated systems of the modern state, which it must address. Slavoj Žižek’s remark on exclusion resonates with Luhmann’s, especially with regard to liberal humanist universal rights, “exclusions are constitutive of the ‘neutral’ universality of human rights” (“Class Struggle” 101).

With the affluent variant of diaspora, since Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, it is safe to posit that cultural identity is “imaginary reunification” with one’s past (Hall,

“Cultural” 235). This reinforces the current rhetoric of cultural hybridity. To this affluent group belong Ashoke and Ashima from Namesake and Jemu and Sai from Inheritance of

Loss, though with varying consequences due to different historical and geographical contexts. However, their limitation is to the cultural hybridity, which can be still seen as applicable to subversion of the hegemonic, national culture, either of the new Empire or postcolonial states; yet, it is not adequate to launch, if I may, urban, guerilla-like subversion in other spheres of society as hegemony is too diverse and located everywhere.

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One of the reasons I have proposed post-subjectivity in chapter five is for looking beyond the constraint of cultural hybridity and for embracing hybridity of humans and non- humans.

4.5. Total Inclusion and Collective Movement

Although, as we noted above, culture can remain as a form of resistance in certain

situations, the relevance of humanist subjectivity has to be contested. I do not intend to

suggest any venue of resistance should be abandoned as long as it remains effective for

the system’s life, but subjectivity—including non-essential, pluralistic, and

fragmentary—seems to be losing its leverage in producing any change in the status quo

of power equation, besides its incompatibility with the postmodern modes of thought. To clarify, I do not see how the topic of subjectivity can rally the subaltern into a community that leads into a collective social or political movement. In other words, a protest movement has never been and can never be organized around the topic of subjectivity, especially for postcolonial Diasporas. Spivak’s claim regarding academic intervention and assistance to the disenfranchised woman cannot be as direct unless we imagine social systems to be still stratificatory and hierarchized in the metropolis and unless we see no hope for postcolonies’ transition to functional differentiation of social systems: “For her

[the disenfranchised woman of the diaspora] the struggle is for access to the subjectship of the civil society of her new state… . And the interventionist academic can assist them in this possibility…” (Critique 401-402).

Before I return to systems theoretic stance on the issue of intervention, let me briefly digress to Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, in which she recommends providing

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assistance to the disadvantaged on the condition that they will not need any more help

after a certain point. Unfortunately, she cautions, help has been so far mobilized to create

more opportunities for help, increase help-dependency, an endless cycle of help, and

subjugation under the pretext of help: “The cycle that chokes off desperately investment,

instill a culture of dependency. . . . The cycle that, in fact, perpetuates underdevelopment,

and guarantees economic failure in the poorest aid-dependent countries” (Moyo 49). The

consequence of aid-dependency is that outsiders continue to preserve the authority of

writing the destiny of underprivileged nations and their peoples (66). Moyo does not call

for an end to help abruptly but gradually. Her field-research “envisages a gradual (but

uncompromising) reduction in systematic aid” over a reasonable time and reach a level to

completely end the cycle of aid (76). My extrapolation from Moyo’s research is that help,

whether it is coming from a person, INGO, trust, or charity, should be directed toward

ending the tradition of aid-dependency. To revert to Spivak’s claim, it calls for the

education system’s intervention into the legal system. Maybe, the assistance should be

understood in terms of solidarity from one system to another, but such solidarity has

limitation. In Luhmann’s functionally differentiated systems, “It [help or expression of

solidarity from one system] cannot determine, but it can irritate other systems

occasionally” (Observations 62). In other words, one system’s solidarity can attract other

systems’ (in this case political and legal) attention to the neglect or to the “exploitation and suppression” (Luhmann, “Globalization” 8).

Yet, Spivak knows that the right to subjecthood does not guarantee subjectivity, if we are to understand simplistically by this term, as she implies, the right to voice and the

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right to be heard. No system can accommodate the right to be heard for all. One always

has to work her way through in a social system and produce relevant actions to attract the

notice of the system’s communication. The illegal immigrant’s stories that I analyzed

above have shown that a diasporic subaltern is on her own, concerned primarily with

getting through the day. Yet, Spivak asks the disenfranchised to “think of themselves

collectively” and “join the globe-girdling Social movements in the South through the

entry point of their countries of origin” (Critique 402). This is a plea for total inclusion, not quite dissimilar to Enlightenment promise; whereas the two political movements,

Khalistan in Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Gorkhaland in Desai’s Inheritance Loss, for territorial sovereignty leave us wondering whether such promise could always be fulfilled.

A few in the forefront of the movements benefitted immediately while demands were compromised in the process of the negotiation with the State. This historical occurrence is highlighted in Desai’s work; and historically, many sub-national movements in India

(and elsewhere) are still facing failures due to co-optation, or inclusion of a few.

First, as there is no master narrative, there is no master prescription with regard to how to deal with the situations that postcolonial diasporic persons encounter. At least since Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition, we have been disenchanted with grand narrative of emancipation: “[W]e can resort neither to the dialectic of Spirit nor even to the emancipation of humanity as a validation of postmodern scientific discourse” (60). Both their histories and the vicissitudes of their migrancy are too heterogeneous for the master prescription to be effective. Secondly, due to their heterogeneous backgrounds, I see them more as the new subaltern, in the sense that they cannot be collectivized; therefore,

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it is impractical to ask them to join a social movement for full inclusion. Postcolonial

diasporas like the characters in Mukherjee, Lahiri, and Desai’s works exemplify that each

is on his or her own. The energy spent on subjectivity seems to me more of the

postcolonial’s intellectual exercise from the metropolis than anything else. Even as a

strategy, we cannot ignore the fact that subjectivity risks the ends-justifying-means route.

In a sense, my proposal of post-subjectivity, elaborated in the next chapter, could be seen as a reinvigoration and reconfiguration of resistance, but it has its limitation: It cannot function as a topic for a social movement as it is less likely, to put in Luhmann’s words, to “give promise of organizational strength” and less likely to “evolve into a system (even a temporary one),” at least not in the near future (Risk 138, 139). Then, with respect to dispersed diaspora, the new subaltern, in the new Empire, where does its worth lie? Both the old and new subaltern, by definition, are the group of people that cannot be grouped in the old globe-girdling social movements. They simply lack collective consciousness, thus requiring a different strategy for survival and resistance, an alliance with all actors of the network they find themselves in. This alliance frees diasporas from the constriction of essences of ethnicity, race, language, geography, and the like and opens possibilities of joining issue-based, interests-based movements that can be effective.

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Notes

1. Within the postcolonial theory, the debate about outside-inside began as early as when Albert Memmi was writing The Colonizer and the Colonized, evidenced by

Sartre’s introduction to this work: “The newspapers there tell us that the colonizer alone is qualified to speak of the colony” (xxi), and its reversal later that those with native background assumed the exclusive right to speak of the (post-) colony. Memmi, an Arab

Jew, complicated the matter because he could neither be categorized as colonized nor a colonizer. The same thing could be said about Fanon and many others. Benita Parry renewed the debate, charging Spivak, Young, and others as inauthentic. In Parry’s case, she differentiates inside-outside second time in the inside.

2. See William Rasch’s “The Limit of Modernity: Luhmann and Lyotard on

Exclusion,” particularly pp. 210-212.

3. Prior to Luhmann, Talcott Parsons, though, took culture to be one of the four action subsystems: organism, social system, cultural system, and personality. Culture, in

Parson’s view, is “structured in terms of patternings of meaning… [T]he prototypical cultural systems are those of beliefs and ideas. The possibilities of their preservation over time, and of their diffusion from one personality and/or social system into another, are perhaps the most important hallmark of the independent structure of cultural systems”

(Social Systems and Evolution of Action Theory 178). Later, he adds that whatever a system, psychic or social, takes from its environment is “mediated through the cultural

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system” (181). This is a position culturalists and postcolonial theorists seem to be content with. Although Luhmann keeps the symbolic dimension of culture, he strips it from system status because obviously culture in modern society is not functionally differentiated.

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Chapter 5

Toward an Ethics of Post-subjectivity

I love the fact human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive…, and some of which…doing…no harm. —Donna Haraway, When Species Meet 3-4.

Neither the effects of colonialism and neo-colonialism on non-humans independently nor interpenetrations between humans, animals, and machines have ever been addressed within the postcolonial literary subsystem. Although Fanon noted as early as 1951 that the colonial promise to raise the native “to the supreme rank of man” was premised on the colonial reduction of the native to “animal-machine man” (Black Skin

194), the note somehow failed to attract the subsystem’s attention, i.e. it did not become communication for the subsystem because the underlying exclusion of the absolute Other has been in its blind spot.1 The system has not acknowledged the Other of the postcolonial human other. This blind spot is humanist. To put in differently, postcolonial literary subsystem’s preoccupation with subjectivity, a colonial specter, has been blocking the view to this exclusion; or maybe the paradox of the subsystem, at the elemental level, is that natives too could only become humans by excluding the Other others, non-human Others. The postcolonial literary theory cannot justify the exclusion of animals and non-living beings such as machines while, at the same time, pleading for the inclusion of all human others. One first move to unfold this paradox could be to pursue

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radical interrogation of subjectivity.2 With the proposition of post-subjectivity, I hope to

open an ethical debate to include the absolute Other while interrogating the relevance of subjectivity for the postcolonial. The discursive inclusion of animals and machines will increase the complexity of postcolonial literary system.

, Ashis Nandy, and

Spivak shows that subjectivity has been a postcolonial literary system’s preoccupation, whether in the form of affirmation, appropriation, or partial negation. Yet, another survey shows that this preoccupation owes a great deal to the metaphysical tradition of Western philosophy, which overlaps with the Enlightenment vision of human being as free, rational, and sovereign subject. These surveys suggest that both metaphysical and

Enlightenment visions of human assisted various colonial projects theoretically in the past, and those visions have persisted in neo-colonialism in the present. Although metaphysics of subjectivity may appear to have been questioned since the mid-nineteenth century—in historical materialist (Marx), psychoanalytical (Freud and Lacan), post- ontological (Heidegger), discursive (Foucault), and ideological (Althusser) accounts—it has only been rehabilitated in each case, though in a much truncated form. Postcolonial literary system’s response to metaphysics of subjectivity has been limited to these accounts, with minor appropriation.

The discussion in the first couple of sub-sections pivots around subjectivity at three different levels: Historical-philosophical, postcolonial, and literary. Before I propose a theory of post-subjectivity as a strategy for resistance and demonstrate its application, I will outline some of the prominent reasons to abandon, i.e. overcome,

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subjectivity, both idealist and empiricist-materialist versions, as I find them

counterproductive to the postcolonial topic of resistance. One of the main reasons is that

the history of subjectivity, since Descartes, and the history of colonialism since

seventeenth century do not only reflect each other but also tentatively collude with each

other.3 As a resistant strategy, post-subjectivity, in an oversimplified sense, extends the concept of hybridity beyond cultural hybridity to hybridity of human, animal, and machine. With the extension, I hope that postcolonials, not just humans, will be retooled with a new strategy of resistance as they find themselves among the “collective,” in

Latour’s sense. Aphoristically, the greater hybridity, not the greater good, is right. The burden is how to prevent hybridity from falling into homogeneity and from obstructing political movements as well as how to imagine heterogeneous hybridity (contradiction vis-à-vis hybridity). In a certain sense, we may have to formulate a way of bringing together hybridity and systems differentiation, and this hopefully can happen if we translate hybridity as the system’s ability to respond to environment and increase its complexity.

5.1. History of Subjectivity

In the course of interrogating subjectivity, its history in summary is attempted

here. One of the conclusions drawn is that subjectivity underlies a geopolitical and racial

dimension, and thus remains the subjectivity of the West. Undoubtedly, the concept of

subjectivity remains problematic as it has been configured and reconfigured variously

throughout its history. In ancient time, subjectivity was theocentric, i.e. exclusive to gods.

God alone was individual, an indelible, immutable, and uncuttable mark. When early

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Greek thinkers, Democritus among the forerunners, took up the question of subjectivity,

they came up with an atomistic (a-tomos, meaning not cuttable) theory of reality, which

included everything. In their view, “everything was composed of unchanging, indivisible

atoms” (Peter Pesic 16). They proposed “void” so that atoms would have motion. The

atom-void couple would later be reconfigured as being and not-being (or nothingness). If

we combine what Parmenides and Protagoras formulated on this issue, it appears that the

whole Western metaphysics has been stuck, more or less, with the same anthropocentric

notion of subjectivity that “man [anthrōpos] is the measure of all things” and that

“Thinking and Being are one and the same ” (Parmenides 25).4

Later, within the same metaphysical tradition, the atom-void couple has been theorized as Same and Other. In the meantime, atomism traverses through many incarnations. Metaphysical tradition defines subjectivity without taking history into account, thus leaving it unquestionable and granting it transcendental status. In the Age of Reason and Emancipation, subjectivity moved from theocentrism to anthropocentrism, where it has found permanent abode. And since subjectivity is a Western formulation, designed for the emancipation of a select group of humans in a specific geographic region, one may suspect that it underlies an ethnocentrism, too. More devastating is the fact that, as stated in Wolfe’s summary of Derrida’s “Eating Well,” “the humanist concept of subjectivity is inseparable from the discourse and institution of speciesism, which relied upon the tacit acceptance . . . that the full transcendence of the ‘human’ requires the sacrifice of the ‘animal’ and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible a symbolic

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economy,” which sacrifices not just other non-human animals but also other human animals, by making the latter resemble the former (“Old Orders”).5

To begin with the pivotal figure of theory of subjectivity, René Descartes

establishes the certitude of “I,” the immaterial substance (thinking thing) from which all

other truths could be deduced (Meditations on the First Philosophy). With Descartes,

ontotheology fully turns into onto-anthropology, thus the split between subject and object,

programmatically endowing the former with the privilege to master the latter and replace

the God.6 For this subjectivity to emerge, in Descartes’ philosophy, it must separate from

body, animal, madness, and their variants, thus the source of construction of the Other in

later Cartesians. This thinking thing is without parts, unlike the body (Kim Atkins 8). In

retrospect, it was not a simple mind-body dualism but a harbinger of Self-Other and

identity-difference dualism in the Western metaphysics. It is more than a matter of

coincidence that Thiong’o finds colonial alienation analogous with “separating mind

from body” (28), or, by extension, separation of humans and non-humans. In Heidegger’s

reading, it was with Descartes that human being became subject (Question Concerning

Technology 127-54), in both the political and metaphysical senses. It was intended to be

man’s liberation from the “bonds of the Middle Ages” (127), and with the liberation, he

would become the master of his destiny (political) as well as the master of the universe,

capable of objectifying what apparently lacked thinking, thus securing the role of

representative of the representing (metaphysical). Although it may appear only with Jean-

Jacques Rousseau that subjectivity became disengagement from the world, subjectivity

has always been that way, even with Hegel and those inspired by him. If I may add

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hastily, it should not be difficult to detect what role such thinking played later in

colonialism and, in particular, its legitimization of civilizing mission, especially in light

of John Locke, David Hume, and Kant’s ethnocentrism, which I have touched on below.

To proceed chronologically, for Locke, “[P]ersonal identity consists” “in the

identity of consciousness”: “That with which the consciousness of the present thinking

thing can join itself, makes the same person, and is one self with it, and with nothing else;

and so attributes to itself and owns all the actions of that thing as its own” (459). In other

words, Locke’s ideas concerning identity does not differ significantly from Descartes’:

Person “is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider

itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” (448). Furthermore,

in Locke, we see the overlap of metaphysics and law: “In this personal identity is founded

all the right and justice of reward and punishment” (459). At the same time, Locke’s tie

with colonialism is unmistakable. As Edward Andrew notes, Locke “profited from

slavery, justified slavery in his writings, codified it in the constitutions he wrote for

American colonies, advocated colonial conquest, and denied the right to rebel against the

colonial power” (qtd. in D. Hall 33-4).

The idea of identity as self-sameness is given continuity in Hume, despite his challenge to Cartesian constancy of metaphysical self. Although Hume recognizes human self as “a bundle or collection of different perceptions . . . in a perpetual flux and movement” (“Of Personal Identity” 252), he claims that mind has an innate principle of uniting differing perceptions, and the union is taken to be personal identity. Hume’s personal identity is “a smooth and uninterrupted progress of thought along a train of

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connected ideas,” or semblance of succession amidst all variations, produced by

imagination (260). However, in the last instance, one would have to suspect that

consciousness or ability to combine diverse perceptions, for Hume, apparently belonged

to white men alone, “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of

men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There

was never a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual

eminent either in action or speculation” (“National Characters” 213). And in European

colonies, he states, none of the colonized had “any symptoms of ingenuity” (213).

In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, pure categories, including substance, acquire

meanings through “I,” and transcendental ego is placed outside of play as a priori for all

determinations: “Consciousness is, indeed, that which alone makes all representations to

be thoughts, and in it, therefore, as the transcendental subject, all our perceptions to be

found” (334). That there is this “possibility of a continuing consciousness in an abiding

subject” is “sufficient for personality” (343). In “On Cognitive Faculty,” subjectivity

resumes the Cartesian anthropocentrism:

The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person—i.e. through rank and dignity an entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes. (15)

In “The Difference between the Races,” the champion of Enlightenment humanism is a curious case in that he, in agreement with Hume, decrees all non-Europeans and non-

Euro-Americans are “savages” without virtues and taste: “All these savages have little

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injury, which is at once noble and beautiful, is completely unknown as a virtue among savages” (638). The savage is without the courage to use his reason. He cannot respond to the call, “Dare to know,” like the animal.7

In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, consciousness is essentialized as both production and negation of the Other. In the famous dialectic of Master and Slave, subjectivity exists only by holding the Other in subjection, and in this subjection, “the lord achieves his recognition” (68). Although Hegel grants consciousness to the Other, for him the consciousness of the Other is a dependent consciousness, “whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another” (115). The conflict between the lord and bondsman dissolves in mutual recognition and affirmation, without violence (synthesis).

The victor cannot terminate the life of the vanquished as the former requires constant recognition of his self-consciousness from the latter. The Other surrenders and is granted a life of servitude, but he is just there to be defeated again and again, thus giving constant recognition to the Master. It is not difficult to detect some calculation in Hegel’s optimism about the Other, the servile consciousness without self-reflection, which he describes simply as a necessary stage in the process of “rediscovery of himself by himself”

(119). The negative being will inevitably and eventually achieve independent consciousness through two formative stages of absolute “fear and service,” and more significantly, he adds, “[T]he bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work [servitude] wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own”

(119).8 If we take this bondsman as every human being, then it becomes a parable of the metaphysics of subjectivity, in which self-distancing (alienated existence) is the

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distancing from oneself as nature (self-splitting). The distancing, in turn, allows

objectification and, in the process, procures self-consciousness and returns to unity. If

there is any difference between Hegel and Descartes, it is mostly in methodology. The

end goal remains the same, despite Hegel’s detour, a sort of process from consciousness

to self-consciousness, higher unity through sublation. To put in a political context, as the

internal corresponds to the external, the human being has to go through one extra step,

the phase of struggle, before he achieves his freedom and becomes the subject and, with

that, right to objectify and master the universe.

When it comes to specificity, like his predecessors, Hegel maintains his

Orientalism. This last scenario, in which Hegel imagines bondman’s emancipation

through alienation, is not less “fantastic” than the one he essentializes about the Orient,

especially Indians, in Philosophy of History (141). In India, we are told, such possibility

is not in the immediate horizon. In Hegel’s view, the transfer of subjectivity from gods to

humans, theocentrism to anthropocentrism (man in the image of God), cannot happen in

India because Hindu gods are not afforded subjectivity, to begin with (141). In India, the

“primary aspect of subjectivity,” the antithesis between Nature and Spirit, “is wanting”

(159-60). Hegel correctly notes, “[Hindu] religion is the manifestation of Diversity [in

‘Avatars’]” (156). He attributes Hindus’ lack of self-consciousness to their belief in

Avatars because their failure in the unity of thought inevitably occurs due to their inability to terminate Avatars, failure to terminate them by way of submission to rational abstraction. In its idolization of Avatars, “India sustains manifold relations to the History of the World” and to Nature (141); therefore, in Hegel’s view, Indians lack the Unity of

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Spirit. Moreover, in his view, Indians do not have History (self-reflection) to distinguish themselves from objects, thus lack in the ability to objectify, as they tend to degrade

Spirit (subjectivity) “to the multiformity of sensuous objects” (162). Another element

Hegel finds lacking in Indian spiritual system is representational.9 With reference to India,

Hegel claims, “Annihilation [of Self]—the abandonment of all reason, morality, and

subjectivity—”is reduction to body (167). I wonder if Hegel saw this annihilation as the

annihilation of his Dialectics. In a strange way, this annihilation is a return to Cartesian

subjectivity, where Parmenides and Protagoras meet. Like Hume and Kant, Hegel

declares that the natural fate of Asia, as it is bereft of thought, is fated to be “conquered

and subjugated” to Europeans (Philosophy of History 115). Later, when Hegel says,

“Man is in very nature destined to be free” (417), he cannot be self-contradicting as he

clearly means only European men have the destiny of freedom. With the evocation of

“destiny,” the dialectic process disappears. If I may sum up, subjectivity lies in

objectification, rationalization, and ultimately unification of contradictions, thus ending

Dialectics with a resolution.10 On the basis of Hegel’s Philosophy of History, one could

say metaphysical subject and citizen subject overlap.

All in all, subjectivity has evolved at the cost, or rather subjugation, of life, body,

animal, and machine.11As we shall see below, this pattern continues all the way to

Heidegger and beyond.

Marx anticipated such potential disruption in Hegel’s formulation of the self-

created contradiction within the subject, but this, as I noted above, dissolves in resolution.

Hegel’s retaining contradiction is a recent appropriation, thanks to Marx’s recognition of

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“double error in Hegel” and his interpretation of Hegelian subject as a process (Economic

147-53). However, dissolution of contradiction may be detected in Marx’s submission of estranged consciousness to class consciousness and the latter’s eventual return to real self-consciousness. Put simply, Hegel’s alienated bondsman becomes the estranged proletariat in Marx, but that is not all. It appears that Marx only elaborates—admittedly, he faithfully “abstract[s] from Hegel’s abstraction” (157)—on Hegel’s conception of the genesis of subjectivity. For instance, in Economic, it is hard to tell whether the following remark is his or Hegel’s: “This relation [of the worker to the product of labor] is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature, as an alien world antagonistically opposed to him” (75). It is no secret that Hegel and Marx

“modeled their concepts of reason (in the former) and the emancipation of labor (in the latter) on the self-conscious Subject” (Heartfield 75). Marx’s proletariat, like Hegel’s bondsman, would return to self-consciousness after a necessary sojourn in the class consciousness and a few intermediate phases, but this time not through abstract negation of negation, like in Ludwig Feuerbach’s assessment of Hegel. In a certain sense, Marx reverses several of Cartesian assumptions with regard to human consciousness, especially when he posits history (of class struggles) before self-consciousness.

To repeat, Marx’s human turns to society first, only to return later to self- consciousness at the end, but he rewrites a few stages within the stage of estrangement, which is itself a phase of self-consciousness: Worker’s alienation from the product of his labor, submission to class consciousness, overthrow of bourgeois hegemony (capitalism), dictatorship of proletariat, socialist humanism, etc. Just like every existential analytic

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ends up with the notion of essence, Marx’s appropriation of Hegel is no exception.

Hegel’s “outstanding” achievement for Marx is that Hegel “conceives the self-genesis of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation” (Economic 149). Regardless of the (abstraction) process, it is transcendence and Absolute Knowledge, at the end. He ends the so-called “Critique of Hegelian Dialectic” without a word of critique on the “essential” defect of the

“externality of nature”; in fact, sadly, he accepts the Hegelian premise that nature’s being is defective because “its being is something other than itself” (167).

With notions like “pseudo-essence” (Economic 159), Marx may appear to have broken with, in Louise Althusser’s words, “every theory that based history and politics on an essence of man” (“Marxism and Humanism” 227), but he, with Friedrich Engels, failed to part with anthropology even in German Ideology, though his historical materialism is an effort to distance from idealism: The first act of human beings is not thought (note direct refutation of Cartesians), but they naturally “begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization” (37). Later, Marx and Engels add, “[T]he animal does not ‘relate’ to anything, it does not ‘relate’ itself at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all” (49-50).

These views are consistent with Marx’s earlier position. For instance, he distinguishes man’s “conscious life-activity” “from animal life-activity” (Economic 76). Every time one makes a case that consciousness is exclusive to human beings, we have to suspect

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whether he practically means that it belongs to certain group of human beings, whether

consciousness is re-packaged in such concepts as universal liberty, equality, right to

happiness, or similar gimmicks.

In the same context, following the same Hegelian schema, the post-1844 Marx unscrupulously declared the following:

Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton. England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia. Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Moguls, who had successively overrun India, soon became Hindooized, the barbarian conquerors being, by an eternal law of history, conquered themselves by the superior civilization of their subjects. (“Future Results”).

Concerning British presence in India, Marx not only saw the necessary destruction of but

also, in his own words, the beginning of regeneration in India. In this passage and the

passage below from “The British Rule in India,” Marx is doing more than approving

British colonialism in India and elsewhere and more than crediting the British Empire for bringing about revolution in Asia, though he criticized “the manner” in which colonialism was carried out:12

They [Indians] restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. . . . We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindustan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste 123

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and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

A combination of these two passages will result in an overlapping of Hegelian metaphysics of subjectivity and political economy. Marx approved of the British colonial presence and India’s destruction as a historical phase of estrangement necessary for regeneration, i.e. sublation of dialectics, or arrival at the national self-consciousness.

Marx’s approval of British colonialism is based on the Hegelian premise that India lacked history, i.e. lack of self-reflectivity, lack of ability to draw distinction between subject and object, both inside and between inside and outside. Moreover, what Marx saw was the lack of industrial workers in India. He saw India would never produce an industrial working class without the British colonial intervention. This vision is on par with the

Communist Manifesto of 1848 that only the working class produced by modern industry is the revolutionary class; “the lower-middle class, the small manufacturer, the shop keeper, the artisan, [and] the peasant” are not revolutionary (Economic 220), and, let me add, India only had these disparate classes, being therefore devoid of class consciousness necessary to launch revolution. Like Hegel, Marx too found that it was necessary for

India to terminate its Avatars, cows and monkeys, and begin the process of history, underneath which lay the Western subjectivity. Ironically, barely three years later, the

1857 Sepoy Mutiny, or popularly known as India’s First War of Independence, is often credited to Hindu sensibility to one of those Avatars, cow.13

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5.2. Postcolonialism and Subjectivity

Before analyzing Jemu’s character from Inheritance of Loss as an example of

Cartesian-Hegelian subjectivity, which is equally colonial, it would be pertinent to ponder over postcolonial theory’s erroneous fascination with subjectivity. Based on the survey, however limited, of a history of theories of subjectivity, I argue that there is a serious problem with postcolonialism’s turn to subjectivity, under whatever pretexts. One of the reasons the postcolonial theory often presents is that colonialism denied subjectivity to the colonized Other. The other concomitant reason is that colonialism obliterated the subjectivity of the colonized. For the postcolonial theory, reclaiming subjectivity or achieving subjectivity, depending on the perspective, appears to be the same Hegelian-Marxist historical phase. Fanon raises both of these questions, denial and obliteration, in his works. One could translate the obliteration as colonialism’s inscription of its ideologies on the tabula rasa of the colonized. Bhabha notes Fanon’s performance

“of the desire of the colonized to identify with the humanistic, enlightenment ideal of

Man: ‘all I wanted was to be a man among other men…’ ” (Location of Culture 340;

Black Skin 92).

In 1986, some thirty years after the publication of Fanon’s Black Skin

Thiong’o, in his call for decolonizing the mind, firmly puts back subjectivity at the center, at around the time when the postcolonial subsystem was in its nascent reflective mood:

“Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest… But its most important area of conquest was the mental universe of the colonized…how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world”

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(Decolonising the Mind 16). Writing at around the same time as Thiong’o, Ashis Nandy,

one of the leading voices of Subaltern Studies, proposes “that colonialism is first of all a matter of consciousness and needs to be defined in the minds of men”; and he goes on to attribute this idea to Fanon, as he was among the first “to point out the psychological dominance of the European middle class in the colonies” (qtd. in Young, Postcolonialism

340). Therefore, Nandy argues that liberation must be sought by decolonizing minds.

Said, in his criticism, laments that only “anonymous collectivity mattered” to

Marx (Orientalism 155). In a 2001 interview, he univocally expresses his belief in

“individual consciousness”: “This is the root of all human work. Human understanding cannot take place on the collective scale…” (Culture and Resistance 98). About two years later, he slides into the same schema of theocentrism-to-anthropocentrism:

“Language is the central cultural expression of the Arabs. It is very closely tied to —in fact, is—the language of God. . . . It descended directly from God” (164). The poet, he adds, tries to find a “voice for herself and himself within this tradition” (164).

Toward the end of Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak, as an “indigenous postcolonial elite turned diasporic” (343), finds the “basis of a decolonization of the mind” in the cultivation of a contradiction and aporia, but, she points out, the same is not true for a disenfranchised diasporic woman, who still has to transplant into the new state (399):

“For her [disenfranchised woman] the struggle is for access to the subjectship of the civil society of her new state: basic civil rights” (401). In these remarks, Spivak limits the occupation of decolonization of minds to postcolonial, elite diasporas, and she may be right that the inward movement is a leisurely concern of the bourgeoisie.

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Decolonization assumes colonization of minds has already occurred, which means, in Thiong’o words, annihilation of “a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves” (3). The projected goal of the colonization of mind is to make the native overvalue and want everything the West represents and doubt, despise, and discard everything the Orient stands for. In the context of India, the infamous 1835

Minute on Education by Thomas B. Macaulay, a member of the British-Indian law commission, is often cited as the manifesto of civilizing mission: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons, Indians in color and blood, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (qtd. in Spivak, Critique 369). The mission was overtly directed to native elites, but the desired effect was to make the rest of the population want to imitate the cultural clones. Colonialism of all varieties—from indirect rule through direct rule—did employ civilizing/ humanizing strategy, for which productions of

Orientalists as well as Westernized natives were carried out.

Now to see if the colonization of mind is addressed in the selected literary texts, let me quote a passage from Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, where Jemubhai’s condition during his initial days (1939) in Cambridge is described:

Thus Jemubhai’s mind had begun to wrap; he grew stranger to himself than he was to those around him, found his own skin odd-colored, his own accent peculiar. He forgot how to laugh, could barely manage to lift his lips in a smile, and if he ever did, he held his hand over his mouth, because he couldn’t bear anyone to see his gums, his teeth. . . . To the end of his life, he would never be seen without socks and shoes and would prefer shadow to light, faded days to sunny, for he was suspicious that sunlight might reveal him, in his hideousness, all too clearly. (45) 127

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In Fanon’s theory, this would be an ideal instance of colonization of mind. Obviously,

Jemu’s alienation is not an isolated case, and his case may not appear to be exclusive to a

colonial or postcolonial diaspora at first glance. One may even argue that had he come

from a location other than a colony, he would most probably have been treated the same

way and that he is more a victim of racism and xenophobia prevalent in the metropolis,

obviously cultivated by colonialism. Those Britons who treat Jemu as an inferior, sub-

human may not be necessarily the agents of colonialism, not in a direct, overt sense. As

the process began in the colony, I think we need to look at how this colonization of mind

was initiated in the first place.

In 1919, Jemu was born into “a family of the peasant cast…at the outskirt of

Piphit,” a small town in Gujrat, then under the British rule (Desai 64). As a pseudo- employee of the British legal system, Jemu’s father ran a “business [of] procuring false

witnesses to appear in court” (64). He might not have accepted the 1835 Minute on

Education, but he knew, by educating his son, he would accumulate more wealth and live

a better life one day. He enrolled his son into Cotton Bishop School, a British missionary

establishment. To accomplish this mission, his wife would pour cold water on the

sleeping, “invisible self” of their son, and awaken “his brains” (65-66), as if following

Kant’s Enlightenment creed. “From their creaky Patel lineage appeared an intelligence that seemed modern in its alacrity” (66). Under the symbolic presence of Queen Victoria, whose portrait hung in the “entrance to the school building,” Jemu’s “respect for her and

English grew” (66). Jemu’s parents would marvel at his mind, how it would work “like an unsnagging machine through a maze of calculations” (66). 128

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When Jemu graduated from high school, the principle, Mr. McCooe, suggested to his father that “his son take the local pleader’s examination that would enable him to find employment in the courts of subordinate magistrates” (Desai 66). (Let us note in passing that the Raj limited the elite native work in the area of law). The father dreamed his son

“could be the judge himself” (67). This dream started taking shape as Jemu received scholarship at Bishop’s College, another missionary establishment, not far from home.

By the time he reached twenty years old, in 1939, Oxford English Dictionary became his new Veda. As a consequence, he accepted his inferiority: At the time he was leaving for

England, he “stood [indifferently] on the platform between the benches labeled ‘Indians

Only’ and ‘Europeans Only’ (41). He did not perceive racism underneath the discrimination based on nationality. The desire to be human, which is unequivocally to be

English-like, was ideologically inscribed in his mind through the Empire-controlled education system. Toward the end of his stay in Cambridge, Jemu “felt barely human at all” (46).

During his days in Cambridge, Jemu became, as Fanon would say, “an image in the third person,” the burden of “bodily curse” (Black Skin 90-91). Jemu’s mind is similarly described in Inheritance of Loss: “He had learned to take refuge in the third person and to keep everyone at bay, to keep even himself away from himself like the

Queen” (122). Let us recall that the goal of the civilizing mission was to produce a select group of Westernized natives so they would do all the colonial dirty works, including infecting cultural “hideousness” in fellow natives. This is exactly what Jemu, as a part of the colonial “system of justice,” does against his fellow natives upon his return to India:

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“The man with the white curly wig and a dark face covered in powder, bringing down his

hammer, always against the native, in a world that was still colonial” (Lahiri 224).

From systems-theoretic perspective, on the one hand, Jemu’s cloning is an

instance of the political system’s encroaching upon the system of education, a usual

occurrence in a stratified society. On the other hand, Jemu’s description of the experience

of hideousness and his participation in infecting the native with cultural inferiority could

be described as, in systems theory, acting upon a colonially stabilized meaning. In an

individual event, consciousness and communication elide, but since Jemu’s description,

to put in Luhmann’s words, “transcends the closure of consciousness” (Social Systems

99), it is a communicative event for the postcolonial literary system. The description’s

transcendence could be noticed from Memmi and Fanon through the character of Biju in

Inheritance of Loss, as they all describe and re-describe the colonial experience in similar terms, with varying degrees of differences, when they are in similar situations. For this reason, we cannot assign the psychic system “ontological priority over the social”

(Luhmann, Social Systems 98), but, again, meaning is not merely generalization or

actualization. Meaning “must also organize self-reference,” which means it must preserve

what has not been actualized for “re-availability” (93). More significantly, in Luhmann’s

words, “Only by including all contradictions can the world of meaning attain the

character of self-referential closure” (95). If this were not the case, other postcolonial

characters—especially Sai, Jasmine, and Ashima—would not be describing the same

experience in contradistinction to Jemu’s hideousness. Viewing this way prevents

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meaning from surrendering to subjectivity, or in Luhmann’s words, takes us “outside the domain of modern subject-metaphysics” (101).

To recapitulate, my argument is that the movement toward subjectivity is at the root of the colonization of mind. One has to wonder if this is the same submission— allowing the colonization of mind to occur in the first place—to the Hegelian schema of alienation as a necessary phase of emancipation. The preventive measure that we should take is to not fall for this schema and avoid the detour or, most preferably, take a different route.

This may sound implausible, but I contend, following systems theory as well as cultural theory, that colonization of mind as such does not happen, either by force or persuasion if we are to understand by this term an absolute control of the colonial or neo- colonial regime over the native, as far as the desired effect is concerned. Such notion of absolute control would lead us to conclude that the civilizing mission of colonialism completed successfully, but, as a matter of fact, that is not the case. Having never arrived at the other side of his alienation, Jemu lives the rest of his life in the agony of contradictions. His estrangement with himself and the world never finds a way out of it precisely because he, as a native informant of elite variant, faithfully follows the colonial program of subjectivity. In other words, colonialism continues to have its sway over him because he believes in humanism that the ten percent human within him could one day become hundred percent (recall the epigram of this chapter) and because he is bent on purifying his consciousness of the animal and on subsuming the world outside, which is evident in his treatment of the native, his wife Nimi, and the cook. It is by participating in

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the colonial program of stratificatory exclusion that Jemu asserts his becoming a human

and British subject. As Jemu is led to despise Indians and envy English (Desai 131), he becomes British human only to Indians, i.e. he’d be included in the ranks of humans only by excluding natives. With the departure of the British Raj in 1947, he becomes just another “estranged Indian living in India” (230).

Let us take another example of force and persuasion from Inheritance of Loss: In

the mid 1970s, during Sai’s four years at St. Augustine’s Convent, a missionary school,

she chronicles some of the ways she was corporally punished for minor offenses like not

doing homework. The list includes the following:

a. standing in the rubbish bin with dunce cap on b. getting heatstroke in the sun while on one leg and with hands up in the air c. announcing your sins at the morning assembly d. getting paddled red black blue and turmeric. (Desai 33)

The goal of the civilizing mission, pushed through corporal discipline and teaching, may have been to inculcate purity: “[C]ake was better than laddoos, fork spoon knife better than hands, sipping the blood of Christ and consuming a wafer of his body was more civilized than garlanding a phallic symbol with marigolds. English was better than Hindi”

(33). But everything Sai was taught in those four years has “fallen between the contradictions” (33), and she becomes “a reflection of all the contradictions around her”

(287).

Neo-colonization of the mind, in post-independent nation states or in the Empire, is an instance where a person willingly partakes in the initiation ritual and, in Jasmine’s words, “Once we start letting go—let go just one thing, like not wearing our normal

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clothes, or a turban or not wearing a tika on the forehead—the rest goes on its own down

a sinkhole” (Mukherjee 29). She adds, “When he first arrived, Du kept a small shrine in

his room, with pictures, a candle, and some dried fragrances. I don’t know when he gave

it up” (29). Moreover, when his history teacher tries a little Vietnamese, Du finds it

humiliating. It is more like interpellation, and the so-called colonized mind becomes a self-appointed ambassador of those ideas and behaviors deemed fit by the Empire.

Jasmine never seeks, never arrives, and seems untroubled by the imperial requirement of stable subjectivity. Ashima is content with the life of half-and-half. They are one-person guerillas, fighting for survival. Jemu’s looking down upon the native, including his wife and Gyan, Biju’s refusal to abandon Hindu traditions in the midst of struggles for life, Ashima’s choice of dividing her time between America and India,

Gogol’s name change and reversal, Jasmine’s shuttling between identities (Mukherjee 77,

185, 231), and Gyan’s participation in the independent movement are instances of submissions and resistances in various degrees.

The project of decolonization of the mind, if one were to be conceived, cannot begin with imitating Europe and its subjectivity. Fanon was right when he said, “[W]e must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate

Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe” (Wretched of the Earth 252). The textual analysis presented above show that this “something different” cannot be sought in the metaphysics of subjectivity or in liberal humanist subject. Decolonization of mind must be about overcoming subjectivity precisely because

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it is humanist and the insistence on liberal humanist subject is counterproductive for the

postcolonial literary system.

5.3. Reasons for Resisting Subjectivity

Perhaps, disruption or displacement of the subject may have been at work since the inception, but there has not been enough work done to liquidate this concept, and this dissertation is not going to achieve it, except gathering some reasons to resist the temptation to keep the concept, as it pertains to postcolonials.

The return of the suppressed—variously interpreted as the unconscious or the remainder after idealization of an object—is already touched on in Marx, paving the way for Nietzsche and Freud.

And in Nietzsche, the organism possesses a propensity to subordinate destructive urges to the dominant, creative one. However, Nietzsche deems weakness, at least in one stance, the urge toward unity (Will to Power 346), on the grounds that it blocks

heterogeneity. In any case, it is with him the questioning of Cartesian programmatic of

subject takes a fierce course, followed by Freud and others. Subject for Nietzsche is no

longer a sovereign, rational, thinking thing. It is constituted by an unconscious impulse

called Will to overcome the all-too-human. Perhaps, he is first to flatly reject the

transcendental subject, “There exists neither ‘spirit,’ nor reason, nor thinking, nor

consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use” (266). This

summary rejection is a rejection of being as such, and, with this, Nietzsche moves from

the constancy of being to becoming, and determines being-in-becoming (or overcoming

of being) as will to power. After a couple of aphorisms, he adds, “The ‘subject’ is not

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something given; it is something added and invented and projected behind what there

is.—Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is

invention, hypothesis” (267). Even if Nietzsche sees the subject as projection, he posits

that the self emerges as a living unity of impulses from the entirety of the organism (267-

72), thus prefiguring the poststructural shift to body. From Nietzsche, believers in

subjectivity may conclude that it resides in the very being of will to power, i.e. in the

ability to reevaluate values and overcome the given. His Overman may appear to pivot

around humanism, and his theory of will to power, in Heidegger’s assessment, may not

be an exception to that (154-55), but those are, again, metaphysical interpretations. What should have been instructive is this visionary remark from Nietzsche: “In the long run, it is not a question of man at all: he is to be overcome” (358). Overcoming of man (or will to self-overcoming), instead of self-preservation in self-consciousness, should have been interpreted as reaching out to the Other. On the last page of Black Skin, Fanon makes an apparently similar appeal, “Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, and discover each other” (206), but unfortunately his “other” is limited to raising “the animal- machine man to the supreme rank of man” (194, emphasis added). We have much to say on animal-machine a little later, but for now let us proceed to Freud via Lacan, while mentioning in passing what Nietzsche’s animals have to say: “Behold, we know what you

[Zarathustra] teach: that all things recur eternally, and we ourselves too; and that we have already existed an eternal number of times, and all things with us” (Thus Spoke 220).

A combination of Nietzsche’s organic impulses and eternal return resulting in

Freudian desire is more than coincidence, but the eternal return could also be extended to

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the resurrection of the Other,14 which was successfully sublated in Descartes and Hegel.

Moreover, eternal return is the return of the suppressed (the unconscious) in Freud and

Lacan. Despite this apparent intervention in Cartesian-Hegelian subjectivity, as Lacan notes, “Freud’s method is Cartesian—in the sense that he sets out from the basis of subject of certainty” (Four Fundamental 35). There are, according to Lacan, “two approaches of Descartes and Freud [that] come together, converge” (35). We know that precisely where Descartes doubts, he is certain that he doubts, and it is in this certainty “I think” and “I am” elide. Lacan explains the similarity: “Freud, when he doubts—for they are his dreams, and it is he who, at the outset, doubts—is assured that a thought is there, which is unconscious, which means that it reveals itself as absent” (36).

Lacan admits his “adhesion to Hegelian dialectic” except the fact that there is “no mediation” and no “vision of successive syntheses” between the subject and the Other

(Four Fundamental 221). Thus, what we have in Freud and Lacan is an impure, incomplete subject, a subject that emerges “at the level of meaning only from its aphanisis in the Other locus, which is that of the unconscious.” Haunted and fractured by the Other, i.e. by the reappearance of the repressed, the subject is left with no choice but conceive of itself from something other than itself. For Freud, as Lacan illustrates, the subject’s desire to conceive unity, i.e. “the being conscious of self” (self-consciousness),

“subject fulfilled in his destiny to himself” (Écrits 296), results in alienation from himself.

Here, Lacan differentiates Freudian subject from Hegelian subject: As “desire becomes bound up with the desire of the Other,” the subject is faced with the desire to know the

Other (301).

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With Freud, Lacan, and Heidegger, the subject merely becomes a subject of

becoming, decentered, fractured, indeterminate, contaminated, split subject. This post-

modern, split subject is theorized, narrativized, dramatized in various literary subsystems,

including postcolonial, with the hope of achieving emancipation in the split subject, i.e.

in opposition to the unified subject. After all, the split subject is still a subject, even if

only by half, or in Hall’s words, part continuity and part rupture (“Cultural” 237). From

another angle, subject has been stripped of everything it formerly consisted of; yet, we

are keeping the concept and its rudimentary function of creating an illusion of unity out

of imaginary homelands (One must wonder if this is mere nostalgia of the lost unity that

was never there in the first place except in conceptuality or an inadvertent effort to

reinforce the legitimacy of the legal subject, which requires such unity for persecution).

Decentering of the subject has been variously narrativized in the three works: As shuttling between identities (Jasmine in Jasmine); as cultural hybridity (Ashoke, Ashima and Gogol in Namesake); and as contradiction (Sai in Inheritance of Loss). These narratives seem to parallel with the history of subjectivity. To begin, Jasmine, in the immediate aftermath of her encounter with the Half Face, sees herself as “walking death.

Death incarnate” (Mukherjee 119). But the feeling of death is a cause enough to construct a new life that is open to possibilities, not out of scraps but out of this experience of encounter with death.

Similarly, in Namesake, Ashoke’s mother forecast “[t]hat he would be reading a book the moment he died” (Lahiri 13), and it turns out later that he was “clutching a single page of ‘The Overcoat,’ crumpled tightly in his fist” when he was near death (18).

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This near death foreshadows Ashoke’s third rebirth in America: “He was born twice in

India, and then a third time, in America. Three lives by thirty” (21). It is this death experience that sets his journey to the West: “It had started with his father’s [Ashoke’s] train wreck, paralyzing him at first, later inspiring him to move as far as possible, to make a new life on the other side of the world” (286-87). The same could be said about

Sai, Jemu, Gyan, and Biju in Inheritance of Loss. Similarly, the questioning of subjectivity within postcolonial literary system could be detected in the characters of

Jasmine and Du in Mukherjee’s work, who celebrate schizoid, to put in Peter Dews’s words, “fragmentation of experience and loss of identity” “as a liberation from the self forged by the Oedipus complex” (49), a humanist cobweb, as if they were characters of

Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Ashima and Gogol in Namesake are no exception to that. These characters in so many ways resemble Fanon. In “Interrogating Identity,”

Homi Bhabha reads Fanon’s situation “in the divided world of French Algeria” as something restless and ambivalent that cannot be conceptualized: “[T]his end of the ‘idea’ of the individual […] produces a restless urgency in Fanon’s search for a conceptual form appropriate to the social antagonism of the colonial relation” (Location of Culture 58).15

In a sense, these postcolonial narratives of the death of the subject may simply be marking the history of subjectivity itself, the decentering as a phase; or, they could be ruminating over the implantation of the colonial desire of subjectivity and fatal consequences ensuing from it. Maybe, it is about time we see the posthumanist message in those narratives: Human beings have never been subject and never will be, colonial or

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postcolonial, in the colony or metropolis, at least not humanist-colonialist subject in its calculated project.

As Derrida notes, the decentering of the subject has continued but liquidation has not actually happened yet, not even with Heidegger and Levinas (“Eating Well” 113), not even with Lacan, as we noted above.16 With Freud, Lacan, Foucault, and Althusser,

the decentering of the subject took full course, but as Derrida argues, abandonment of the

metaphysics of subjectivity never actually happened in them except appropriation, thus

continuation of subjectivity under various guises (97).

With the post-humanist turn in the theoretical enterprise, one would

automatically hope that the liberal subject would not resurface, but that does not seem to

be the case despite the good intention. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine

Hayles contests liberal humanist subject, which she summarizes as “a coherent, rational

self, the right of that self to autonomy and freedom, and a sense of agency linked with a

belief in enlightened self-interest” (85-86). For Hayles, posthuman subjectivity is

successor to liberal humanist subjectivity (How We 6). Despite her appeal to avoid

“grafting of the posthuman onto a liberal view of the self” (286-87), Hayles, as Clarke correctly critiques, could not abstain from “an investment in the modern humanist, discursive-dialectical subject” (Posthuman 5), because she thinks that “serious consideration needs to be given to how certain characteristics associated with the liberal subject, especially agency and choice, can be articulated within a posthumanist context”

(How We 5). Moreover, her premise to reappropriate the posthuman is framed on the outdated first-order cybernetic transhumanism, the erasure of embodiment in particular,

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and this framing somehow reactivates the same distinction that it purports to contest, the

“distinction between matter and information, substance and form” (Clarke, Posthuman 5).

Despite all these, my conception of post-subjectivity shares, to a certain extent, with

Hayles’ posthuman ethos (however, I add non-living to the list) that we should craft posthuman in a manner “that will be conducive to the long-range survival of humans and of other life-forms, biological and artificial, with whom we share the planet and ourselves”

(How We 291); yet, opposing human embodiment and its evolutionary history to information and intelligent machines cannot be the right direction for such a craft. Most problematic part of her work lies in the fact that animals are absent from her conception of embodiment, as if embodiment were exclusive to the human. The posthuman ethos of her last chapter starkly contradicts with the end of the preceding chapter: In this, “when the human meets the posthuman,” Hayles’ concern is human beings’ survival alone and

“meaning for ourselves and our children” (282). I do not see how Hayles’ putting back the flesh, the human body in particular, into play is compatible with the view that “we share the planet” with non-humans, though it may contribute to the notion that cognition is not exclusive to human consciousness but, again, we get the impression that it may just be limited to “disparate parts” of the human body (3).

As long as we are concerned with subject, as Derrida would say, it is the subject of the essence, a priori and seat of the transcendental logos, thus the end of play and differences.

Derrida’s Of Spirit visits Heidegger’s deconstruction of ontology in Time and

Being and tests if he was able to achieve the goal of freeing the human of subjectivity, but

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Derrida’s findings suggest that the humanist project of othering animal and machine

continues in Heidegger. In Derrida’s reading, Time and Being employs subtle detours to

pronounce that the animal, the inanimate, and the machine all must be vanquished in the

service of Cartesian-Hegelian subjectivity (47-57). Derrida arrives at the conclusion that as long as we insist on subjectivity, the project of negativizing the Other continues, or else Heidegger’s “Rectorship Address” would not regress to the “metaphysics of subjectivity,” “to racism, to totalitarianism, to Nazism, to fascism, etc.,” all “in the name of spirit, and even of the freedom of (the) spirit,” i.e. subjectivity of Europe (40). Seeing where the subjectivity leads to, Derrida concludes in “Eating Well,” “I don’t see the necessity of keeping the word ‘subject’ at any price” (99). Judith Butler’s Gender

Trouble follows Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, to pronounce almost the same (4-9, 106,

170, and 172).

Luhmann finds “no need for a concept of the subject,” except for playing the game of negating it endlessly (Social Systems 28). In systems theory, if anything, a person’s consciousness is reduced to the status of environment for the social system, not prime mover or creator of society (179). Therefore, as we have seen in the last sections, subjectivity has always been calculation, legal, political, ethical, and metaphysical, but never alterity’s calculation or incalculable calculation. Subjectivity never confronted the incalculable; therefore, it avoided responsibility. The Other never had and never will have its share in the constitution of the subject, its theoretical conceptualization or praxis. It is not just philosophers, be they technophiles, animal rights groups, and postmodernists, who question the relevance of humanist subjectivity; an ordinary encounter with the

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Other, if one is moderately concerned about ethics and responsibility, should suffice her to doubt about the intrepidity of humanist subject. Luce Irigaray recounts one such ordinary encounter that allowed her to reflect on human vulnerability and helplessness:

“How can we talk about them? How can we talk to them? These familiars of our existence inhabit another world, a world that I do not know…unless I project my human imaginary onto them” (195). The animal figure is relevant, considering how the colonized were regarded as animals in the heyday of colonialism and how this imagery has been reconfigured in various guises in the postcolonial world. Sartre in his “Introduction” to

Memmi’s Colonizer and Colonized, writes, “How can an elite of usurpers, aware of their mediocrity, establish their privileges? By one means only: debasing the colonized to exalt themselves, denying the title of humanity to the natives, and defining them as simply absences of qualities—animals, not humans” (xxvi, emphasis added). Treatment of certain demography of human beings as animals involves double crime, twin debasement of fellow creatures, debasement of both fellow human animals and non-human animals.

From systems theory perspective, the mind as a psychic system is operationally insulated from external dictation; it takes from its environment what it finds relevant. In

Luhmann’s words, “No system can completely determine the system/environment relations of another system, except by destroying them” (Social Systems 18). In the same context, Maturana and Varela posit, “In the interactions between the living being within this structural congruence, the perturbations of the environment do not determine what happens to the living being; rather, it is the structure of living being that determines what change occurs in it” (Tree of Knowledge 95-6). To put this in the context of the Western

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colonization of the Oriental mind, the interaction is not instructive, as the West does not determine what its effects are going to be. If only as a way of explaining, we may recall

Hall’s negotiable and oppositional decoding, “Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements”; “[In oppositional decoding]

He/she detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within the same alternative framework of reference. . . . Here the ‘politics of signification’—the struggle in discourse—is joined” (“Encoding/decoding” 11-16).

Furthermore, John Fiske’s concept of excorporation may clarify how the subordinate mind is not at the dominant ideology’s total control:

Excorporation is the process by which the subordinate make their own culture out of resources and commodities provided by the dominant system, and this is central to popular culture, for in an industrial society the only resources from which the subordinate can make their own cultures are those provided by the system that subordinates them. (14-15)

Is not subjectivity reducing alterity to identity, ironing out differences, resolving contradictions, seeking a ground to submit them to the Absolute (Reason), and, thus, an all-out war against the Other? This is where subjectivity and identity are assumed to be synonymous. One will be granted subjectivity under the condition that s/he is identical with the Master’s program, i.e. humanist ideals. Sartre, in his Preface to Fanon’s

Wretched of the Earth, notes this compulsion: “Crammed with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure to its inhabitants. With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism” (21). The Other will always have to be waiting to arrive later. And, then, there has to be perpetual reproduction of the Other for the relevance of the Same.

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Ironically, this perpetuation of the Other has been at the core of the Emancipation project

of liberal humanism.

With systems theory, the question is no longer whether one starts with unity of subject or arrives later at the unity of subject. Manifold of reality, multiple subjectivities, fractured reality, decentered subjects are “product of cognition, resulting from certain types of distinctions, which, as distinctions, are instruments of cognition” (Luhmann,

Theories 144). In Luhmann, unity is conceived as operational unity of a system, operational closure of the system (145). This is Luhmann’s direct refutation of Cartesian-

Hegelian dialectic (Theories 150-51; 169-83). Cognition is not exclusive to humans. As

“a recursive processing of symbols,” cognition is found in intelligent machines, cells,

brains, psychic systems, and social systems (Luhmann, Theories 170). With this shift,

“traditional attribution of cognition to ‘man’ has been done away with” (147). In systems

theory, the human being is de-hierarchized: “He is no longer the measure of society”

(Luhmann, Social Systems 213). To repeat, he is reduced to the environment of society.

As a part of the environment, psychic systems are relevant for the formation of social

systems. Let us recall once again, “Observation takes place when living systems (cells,

immune systems, brain, etc.) discriminate and react to their own distinction” (Luhmann,

Theories 147).

5.4. Post-subjectivity as Resistance Strategy

History, ontogeny, of postcolonial literary systems reveals that it has punctuated several of its previously articulated assumptions about race, nation, culture, authenticity, ethnicity, indigeneity, globalization, hybridity, identity, etc. One of the issues that

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postcolonial theory continues to grapple with is cultural identity, which has remained

confined within the discourse of humanist metaphysics of subjectivity, primarily because the discourse begins with the concept of the Other, thus already assuming the civilizing

mission. The same could be said about other discourses that start out with self/other

distinction or with the noble aim of all-inclusion (Rasch, “Human Rights as Geopolitics”).

To acquire humanist subjectivity is to acquire transcendental subject position, to continue

the program of controlling and dominating the other, whether in the form of one’s own

body or nature. Humanist subjectivity has always oriented toward mastering nonhumans,

i.e. animals (other species), machines, artifacts, nature and technology, thus reproducing

the hierarchical relationship of master-slave and/or civilized-savage in the network of other social actors.

As I have argued in the preceding sections, subjectivity is liberal humanist telos.

Even if one were to view colonization as a process of objectification, i.e. denial of subjectivity or refusal to acknowledge the value of a subject’s activity, one of the ways to resist colonial logic is to undervalue the denial, i.e. make it ineffective, by questioning its relevance and political efficacy, or, in all modesty, by pointing out its limitation.

Moreover, the category of subject, particularly revisionary approaches to it, holds little help in furthering political possibilities. In Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and

Pluralism, Michaels argues that post-identity theory of the last decade could not, contrary to its claim, disentangle itself from essentialism. Post-identity theory, even in its formulation of performative, fragmentary, hybrid, discursive, etc., has ended up in each occasion with the question of “who,” i.e. an assumption of an entity prior to performance.

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Michaels’ argument obviously has some historical lacunae related to the theoretical development on this issue, but that Derrida’s question about the question—“What differs?

Who Differs? What is difference” (Speech and Phenomena 145)—is picked up in his

“Eating Well” makes one seriously think about the question of subject as it seems to pose a threat to the very notion of difference.17 In Shape of Signifier, Michaels argues that politics of subjectivity is an end to communication, i.e. end to politics, because it does not address social inequality and disparity of various forms. Besides, since it is logically impossible to conceive of subject “containing itself and everything else,” we “should drop the term subject” and replace it with psychic system or individual or actor

(Luhmann, Essays 113-14).

Post-subjectivity is, in nutshell, the questioning of humanist subjectivity, a counter-hegemonic strategy to dissuade postcolonials from the allurement of identitarianism, a colonial residue. It assumes the culmination of humanist subjectivity in colonialism and continuation in neo-colonialism. In an effort to further the ongoing transformation of postcolonial theory, post-subjectivity may be viewed as a constructionist deconstruction of subject/object distinction into the system/environment dyed. Human as unity of all autopoietic systems is untenable. Since neo-colonialism has persisted in the project of liberal humanism, one of the counter-strategies is to conceptualize the postcolonial as already being posthuman, hybrid without borders, in her questioning of legitimacy of humanism and denuding its false promises. In this borderless hybridity, we are going beyond the cultural hybridity that has remained content with

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interstices of human cultures.18Now, machines and non-human animals are as hybrids as

human animals.

All in all, post-subjective stance combines Latour’s constitution of objects with

Luhmann’s systems theory in that it achieves equilibrium by downgrading humans, i.e. disrupting their deistic flight, and by upgrading non-humans. It discards the modern project of purification, i.e. the absolute separation between humans and non-humans, and recognizes the legitimacy of their hybrid proliferations, which is possible, in the first place, due to the functional differentiation of society. As Luhmann says somewhere, complexity reduced is complexity increased. The post-subjective stance is awareness of hybridity punctuated by structural couplings and interpenetration.

Within the postcolonial literary sub-system, post-subjectivity, first of all, cannot be conceived by limiting the postcolonial to humans, which means that we have to see the distribution of cognition beyond human consciousness. To put in Andy Clark and David

Chalmers’ curt language, “Cognitive processes ain’t (all) in the head!” (“Extended

Mind”). Distribution of cognition, however, does not mean dissolution of the distinction between psychic systems and organic systems. The distribution of cognition opens the possibility of recognizing social actors beyond humans, as well as a possibility for accounting the interpenetration between organisms and technological artifacts, between humans and non-humans, and between “many other little things” that “are associated with one another” (Latour, “When Things Strike” 113). Moreover, post-subjective stance is not limited to cognition; it also distributes life to all entities that it interacts with. This

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agency of post-subjectivity enters the social network as a new actor, which means, in

Mieke Bal’s words, “a dog, a machine, could act as an actor” (114).

In the remainder of the chapter, I will make a suggestion that the postcolonial literary system can find reasons to respond to some of the posthumanist moves without sacrificing its operational autonomy, or its constitution, maintaining the political and resistance. As the postcolonial literary system reflects further on how it has been tackling with the topic of humanist subjectivity, hopefully it will find that there are other actors in the social assemblage, and that they are our equals. An accounting of the interpenetration between human, animals, and machines will provide the postcolonial literary system a renewed life. More specifically, one such post-subjective move takes note of the colonial effect on the relationship between humans, animals, and machines as well as on the postcolonial human-animals’ response to the absolute other. Post-subjectivity is further elaborated through application in the three postcolonial literary texts, which are not homogenous in their response to the animal and machine or the interpenetration between humans and non-humans. The aim of post-subjective stance within the postcolonial literary system is to increase system complexity, i.e. increase connectibility, by opening its door to previously excluded non-humans while maintaining its autopoiesis.

5.4.1. Colonial and Post-colonial Animal

This section, as an application of the post-subjective theory, presents an analysis, accounting for the animal in the selected three works. Needless to say that to be postcolonial post-subjective agent is to begin such accounting. Desai’s Inheritance of

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Loss is in many ways haphazard in its response to the question of the animal, sometimes nearly empathetic, other times reckless; while Mukherjee’s Jasmine mentions animals marginally; and Lahiri’s Namesake stays largely silent on animal, i.e. licensing a silent consumption. Nonetheless, the effect of colonial and neo-colonial humanism on animal as such and on metaphoric animal cannot go unnoticed.

At the outset, let us recall Hegel’s critique of India on the question of animal,

which he admittedly based on “English reports”:

Characteristic of the Hindoo’s humanity is the fact that he kills no brute animals, founds and supports rich hospitals for brutes, especially for old cows and monkeys—but that through the whole land, no single institution can be found for human beings who are diseased or infirm from age. The Hindoos will not tread upon ants, but they are perfectly indifferent when poor wanderers pine away with hungers. (History 158)

My guess is Hegel must be referring to whatever remained of the Indian state that was

once vegetarian under the Maurya Dynasty. In the third century, as recorded in the rock

edicts of the Mauryn king Ashoka’s, India adopted policies that included nonviolence and

“compassion for all living beings,” plants and animals (David Loy 31-32). The edicts

reveal that Ashoka built hospitals for animals and plants. In the subsequent empires,

particularly Mogul in the fifteenth century, Buddhist approach to state administration was

gradually abandoned, culminating in the British Raj. Non-violence towards and care for the absolute other was ridiculed, as Hegel’s recitation of the English reports shows.

To begin with the silence on animal in Namesake, the Ganguli children, under the new Empire’s economic and health systems, consume more meat products than they ever would under any other while their parents relish on their old habit of fish-eating.

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The last part of Jemu’s narrative comes close to Derrida’s posthumanist dictum,

“the animal that therefore I am [or, follow after],”19 a recognition of the failure of liberal

humanist subjectivity, a goal set out for the colonized by colonialism and reset by neo-

colonialism. Negativization of animal does not secure Jemu a humanist subjectivity.

Jemu has been cloned into a colonial human to negativize the absolute alterity, which he

has been led to synonymize with everything that stood for Indian, including Nimi, his

wife, during the colonial time. It is against this colonial-humanist animal that the Empire

promised him subjectivity. Jemu spends more than half of his life relentlessly pursuing

the imperially assigned goal of becoming a human. In “The Post-colonial Project,”

Griffiths sums up Said’s argument in Orientalism: “[C]olonialism created non-mutual

and hierarchical relations in which the colonizer was always and inescapably the Self to the marginalized Other of the Colonized. By ‘knowing’ the Other the colonizer asserted his right to determine what the other could be or should be” (165). Jemu, in his

desensitization of his body and punishing its external references, religiously follows the

colonizer’s roadmap for his human subjectivity, without realizing that he is merely

serving the economic and political interests of the colonizer. The novel relates the events

in the contemporary historical context that persuaded (or, one could argue, coerced) Jemu

to doubt and abandon his “Indianness” and follow the English as the beacon of humanity.

Under the colonial dictate, Nimi’s inarticulateness and Gyan’s repetition of the same

“purr” without deft at prosthetics (forks and spoons) appear to the judge as the animal

other, which he has been trying to suppress within himself but has not been able to

confront it. To Jemu, Gyan and Nimi do not have face, in Levinas’ sense. Yet, Jemu fails

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to acquire the colonially prescribed goal of humanistic subject position. He laments his loss: “He wanted neither to pretend he had been the Englishman’s friend (all those pathetic Indians who glorified a friendship that was later proclaimed by the other [white] party to be nonexistent!), nor did he wish to allow himself to be dragged through the dirt”

(227-28). He fails even to acknowledge for a long time that Nimi has ever been a human while she was alive. At the time she died, Jemu chooses “to believe it was an accident”

(338). The colonial-humanist animal does not, to put in Derrida’s words, “know how to

‘let be,’” does not live like “human” and does not die like “human” (Animal 159), so

Nimi is deprived of her human death. Only when Jemu loses Mutt, he opens to the animal beyond pet-keeping, opens to the one within himself and to the other outside. This opening leads him to take responsibility for Nimi’s suicide.

It takes Jemu about forty years to wonder “if he had killed his wife for the sake of false ideals” (Desai 338). It takes him the same length of time to realize, when Mutt disappears, the colonial version of “[h]uman life was stinking, corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone any harm” (320). His growing reliance on his dog, Mutt, even in its absence, sends a message that could be best put in Haraway’s variation of Latour’s language, “[W]e have never been human and so are not caught in that cyclopean trap of mind and matter, action and passion, actor and instrument…we are bodies in braided, ontic, and antic relating”

(When Species Meet 165).

After the suicidal death of his wife and Mutt’s murder, Jemu’s subjection to the Other is not sufficient to wholly free him of Cartesian tradition and colonial

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subjectivity. He returns to the same judge on opportune time, punishing the poor cook in a similar manner that he beat Nimi: “The judge was beating down with all the force of his sagging, puckering flesh, flecks of saliva flying from his slack muscled mouth, and his chin wobbled uncomfortably. Yet that arm, from which the flesh hung already dead, came down, bringing the slipper upon the cook’s head” (Desai 353). How would Jemu resist or subvert colonialism without renouncing subjectivity, without renouncing his self, without taming his will to dominate and control the other? Following Derrida, one could say subversion of colonialism would require abandonment of subjectivity (Animal 117-8).

Jemu’s failure, late awakening, and reversion could be an event that the postcolonial literary subsystem may find meaningful and may feel the urge (“irritation”) to respond to it.

5.4.2. Phantoms, Avatars, and Prosthesis

Before we venture on the concept of extended mind(s) without grounding, it is pertinent to revisit the theory embodied mind. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Varela,

Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch define embodiment as an axis of knowledge, cognition, and experience. Embodiment, in their words, “encompasses both the body as a lived, experiential structure and the body as the context or milieu of cognitive mechanism”

(Embodied Mind xv-xvi). On the one hand, the theory of embodiment purports to reverse disembodiment, and, on the other, it posits the mind as an emergent phenomenon, as in emerging out of lived experience. In the emergence, one can notice the existential movement from embodiment to disembodiment, as if the subject levitates from the matter.

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I do not think we need to pit silicon-based lives against carbon-based lives, to account for

culturally lived experiences: memories, phantoms, avatars, etc. Nor do we need to reduce

one type of chemical to disembodiment and lift the other to embodiment, creating a

hierarchy.20 When the emergence approach takes an ethical view as carried out by Varela

and his co-authors, the solution to scarcity of goods and competition in the capitalist

economy that they provide is disengagement, i.e. mindlessness (246-53).

Even if this solution may not have a pragmatic, wide-scale appeal, it should not

be summarily dismissed as it questions ego-centered habits and calls for a compassionate

action on behalf of the unfortunate: “[W]hen groundlessness is embraced and followed

through to its conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness

that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion” (Embodied Mind 253).

Varela et al. add, “The realization of groundlessness as non-egocentric responsiveness,

however, requires that we acknowledge the other with whom we dependently cooriginate”

(254). But what Varela and his co-authors miss is groundlessness, abandonment of

subject-centric activities, at a global scale requires that the political be left intact, without

weakening it, because unconditional compassion is an endless process that can be

achieved, if ever, in gradation, and not everyone, even with the required commitment, can

subscribe to it in every situation. Although political antagonism seems to disappear in their formulation, one of the diasporic characters from Jasmine finds meaning in

compassion, which she interprets as “care-giver’s life” (Mukherjee 240), but she, too, cannot sustain it when confronted by the Half-Face. This confrontation leads Jasmine to invoke conditionality of compassion, and with that, the activation of the political. From

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the time Jasmine was married to Prakash through being Duff’s nanny and Bud’s lover,

she follows a care-giver’s life, but this care, like Varela and his co-authors’, does not extend to animals, not in practice.

Jasmine does not want to perish like “the soft waterlogged carcass of a small dog” that she stumbled onto in a river when she was seven, but she would lead a campaign against another dog while proclaiming to devote her life to caring for human animals, but why would not she be able to extend the same (or different) care to non-human animals?

Jasmine’s first encounter with a dog occurs when she is in Hasnapur, India. For Jasmine, the rabid dog, who is in need of immediate care, is something to be dispensed with. The town has a medical facility but is reserved for humans alone. Jasmine “hated all dogs” and this particular one more because it “terrified naked women crab-crawl” (Mukherjee

56). Proud in her act, she celebrates the gang-killing of the helpless, non-human animal with her friends: “The women helped me up. One of them poked the wounded animal with a twig. It lay on its back, its legs pumping outward like a turtle’s. My staff was still stuck deep into the snout, its bloody tip poking through an eye socket. Blood plumed its raw sides. . . . The women dragged the body to the nullah [drain] and let it float away”

(57). She shows no sign of guilt whatsoever in the act and in its aftermath. We may contrast this gruesome incident with Jasmine’s abandonment of her “plans for revenge” against Sukhi, the man who murdered her husband (203). Her neutralization of harm against the human animal is in sharp contrast against non-human animals. The grim face of modernity is that violence against animals in the name of disease control is not only sanctioned but also funded by humanist institutions like the United Nations, and Jasmine

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acts in this instance as a self-appointed U. N. volunteer, saving human lives at the expense of other lives. In this instance, one may be reminded of Levinas’ response to non-human animal face, “I don’t know if snake has a face”; and he adds, “In the dog, what we like is his child-like character” (“Paradox” 172). The question here is not about which animal but rather human friendship; for that matter, human ethics is associated with the category of civilizable animals, and this takes us directly into the heart of the colonial civilizing mission of the native and its promise of including those natives who would behave in the manner of a colonizer. And the human-first schema of Levinas’—

“The human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal”—is analogous with the colonial legacy of colonizer-first (172).

Jasmine’s second encounter takes place when she visits Kate in search of a job in

Manhattan: “A giant, hideous version of a gecko lay snorting and hissing and tongue- flipping on my lap. The boys in my village used to climb into the corners of our rooms, catch the house lizards, then hang them by the neck from branches of the lichee trees.

We’d watch them twitch and turn until the crows discovered them” (Mukherjee 163). Her justification of describing the gecko and lizards in this manner comes from modern humanity’s growing fear of the non-human, to which Hasnapur owes its fear of the reptile in general, but Jasmine, in the following remark, generalizes it to be universal within

India, rendering nonexistent the prevalent practices of karunā, care for all life forms, within Indian Jainism, Vaishnavism, and Buddhism: “The relationship of an Indian, any

Indian, to a reptile, any reptile, is that of a fisherman and fish” (163). Moreover, even if we leave aside her intolerance of a different face, Jasmine can see the iguana’s captivity

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only with relation to her own human condition: “I looked into his [marine iguana’s]

beady little eyes, his ugly wattled face. Sam, I thought, we are both a long way from

home, aren’t we? What’ll we do? Look after little girls? There is no going back, is there?”

(163-64).

Jasmine’s third encounter happens at the hog-farm that Darrel owns. Darrel, a

farmer and neighbor of the Ripplemeyers’, keeps a hundred and fifty hogs and plans to

double the number in near future (Mukherjee 23, 233). This is a scene that occurs toward

the end of the novel when one day Jasmine and Bud hear a “high-pitched whine” from

Darrel’s farm, and they rush to the place (Mukherjee 233). Once they are on the scene,

Jasmine reveals her thoughts, “Unfed hogs are like unfed babies. They set up the most

pathetic wheezing and whining. Animal abuse of any kind is the one thing a farmer’s

reputation just doesn’t survive” (234). Jasmine limits the animal abuse to lack of feeding.

She cannot see abuse in Darrel’s practice of breeding and raising livestock on an

industrial scale. One has to pause and wonder why her compassion recoils, in practice,

from extending to all living and non-living beings. Then, beyond the elementary level, there is a problem with the extension itself: Granted compassion is extended to the absolute other, but the problem is we are merely imposing human ethics upon it. We also have a humanist risk of Kantian type in the extension logic, which argues that “kindness bestowed on animals helps us cultivate and strengthen our good will, thus making us more likely to do our duty to each other” (Atterton 272). The thoughts that Jasmine expresses at Darrel’s farm come close to Levinas’ in that both do not want animals to suffer “needlessly” (“The Face” 89). The operative word here is “needlessly,” which

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licenses suffering of the Other as long as it is needed for the human, from animal husbandry through mass slaughter. At the end we come to know that the “good life, worthy life” that Jasmine wants to live is far from an ethical life (240). A good life does not translate into elimination of suffering,21 when it comes to the absolute other. Varela and his co-authors’ compassion, similarly, cannot see abuse in “invasive and brutal animal research on monkeys” and kittens (Wolfe, Critical 82.3). In all the three encounters with non-human animals, Jasmine takes on a negative avatar body that operates in a neo-colonial, humanist paradigm, which is in stark contrast with the moment when she was one with wildflowers, quails, squirrels, trees, etc. To put in Ann

Weinston’s words, “the zone of relationality” or connectibility with the non-human animal collapses in the humanist paradigm (40-41).

To move from humanist ethics of compassion to memories as extended mind (or body) without ground, we have to observe how the protagonist of Mukherjee’s Jasmine derives her strength from various Punjabi folklores, mythic characters of Hinduism, and cultural memories. Jasmine keeps a “sandalwood Ganpati,” “a god with an elephant trunk to uproot” anything in her way (102). When she arrives in the United States, it is not just the technology that she encounters; she sees the world crammed into one miniscule place:

“The first thing I saw were the two cones of nuclear plant . . . against the pale unscratched blue of the sky. I waded through Eden’s waste: plastic bottles, floating oranges, sodden boxes, white and green plastic sacks tied shut but picked up by birds and pulled apart by crabs” (107). In the supposedly free world, she has to wade through the

“waste” of non-humans, against which lie the new Empire’s nuclear plants and, further

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down, aliens in hiding.22 She has “faced death twice before,” and she will not allow it

sneak up on her prematurely soon (116). To prevent second rape in succession, she goes

to the bathroom under the pretext of fetching water. The Kingland’s knife that she has

been carrying in her pocket finds suddenly a new life, as “the murkiness of mirror and a

sudden sense of mission” converts the practical meaning of Sati from self-immolation into self-preservation through participation (117). Her original mission for coming to

America is in perfect compliance with the prevailing practice of Sati: “To lay out the

[husband’s] suit, to fill it with twigs and papers. To light it, then to lie upon it in the white cotton sari I had brought from home” (118). With the sandalwood Ganpati, Kingland’s knife, and the bathroom mirror as co-actors, initiation ritual is ready for Jasmine to take

Kali as her new avatar, instead of Sati. Passing into an avatar of Kali, with her tongue sliced, blood dripping mouth open, she is assigned with a new mission of terminating the

Half-Face by stabbing him in his throat. Let us recall that interpenetration between human beings and social systems “implies that the social meaning of an action is judged primarily by whether it corresponds to the norm or not” (Luhmann, Social Systems 230).

In this interpenetration, Jasmine deviates from cultural practice of Sati of the Hindu religious system. Sati is not grounded in consciousness or experience, i.e. its origin lies elsewhere in mythological archives. Jasmine’s deployment, when faced with a repeat- rape, activates the often forgotten meaning of Sati. “Jyoti [Jasmine] was now a sati- goddess: she had burned herself in a trash-can-funeral pyre behind a boarded-up motel in

Florida” (176). The sati-goddess she evokes here is literally “Death incarnate” because

Kali in Sanskrit means goddess of Death (119). Moreover, the sati-goddess has many

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incarnations, among which Kali is just one.23 This may evoke the “Cyborg imagery” that

Haraway suggests, but the sati-goddess is certainly in the “spiral dance” without having to choose a Cyborg over a goddess (“Cyborg Manifesto” 181).

In another instance, Jasmine, at the age of seven, is chucked “hard on the forehead” by an astrologer, resulting in “a star-shaped wound” into her head (Mukherjee 3). She sees the scar on her forehead as her third eye: “In the stories that our mother recited, the holiest sages developed an extra eye right in the middle of their foreheads. Through that eye they peered out into invisible worlds. ‘Now I’m a sage’” (5). Following the scar incident, the seven-year-old girl decides to swim in a river nearby and stumbles upon a

“waterlogged carcass of a small dog. The body was rotten, the eyes had been eaten” (5).

As soon as she touched the carcass, “the body broke in two, as though the water had been its glue. A stench leaked out of the broken body, and both pieces quickly sank” (5). The memory of that stench lives on, and for seventeen years, she has been reminded that she does not want to deteriorate and perish like the carcass. The star on her “forehead throbs: pain and hope, hope and pain” (225). She may not have to know what she wants to become, but, “caught between the promise of America and old-world dutifulness,” she finds “a caregiver’s life” worthy to live (240); but it has to be adventurous, a tug of opposing forces, Shiva the destroyer and Shakti the preserver. From the time Jasmine was married to Prakash through being Duff’s nanny, Bud’s lover, and Du’s pseudo-mother, she follows a care-giver’s life, while, on the way, mastering her “demons” and preparing to “re-position the stars” (223, 240).

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The figure of phantom is used in many senses in Jasmine, of which two hold

particular significance in the present discussion. While still a child, Jasmine believes

“she-ghosts” are guarding her from fate, which basically means she is one with the nature:

“I smelled the sweetness of flowers. Quails hopped, hiding and seeking me in the long

grass. Squirrels as tiny as mice swished over my arms, dropping nuts. The trees were

stooped and gnarled, as though the ghosts of old women had taken root. I always felt the

she-ghosts were guarding me” (Mukherjee 4). In general, she takes some ghosts in a

positive sense, as in the case of changing identities for survival: “In the white lamplight,

ghosts float around me. Jane, Jasmine, Jyoti” (21). Born as Jyoti, she becomes Jasmine to

Prakash, Jane to Bud, Jase to Taylor, and Kali for Half-Face. Shuttling between human

avatars, she feels “the tug of opposing forces” as those roles return as memories. Guided

by these positive ghosts, she takes on a wanderer’s adventurous life.

Some other ghosts neutrally give her company. In one of the nights during her

stay in Florida after being rescued by Lillian, Jasmine, in loneliness, watches “ghosts flit

across the ceiling, wrap themselves in curtains, creak from room to room” (171). Some

other ghosts like Sukhi who murdered her husband are negative. Due to her illegal status,

she cannot confront the negative ghost in person, but she circumvents it by anonymously

writing to INS about his illegal presence in New York. Most likely, Jasmine only

experiences the traumatic effect of her husband’s death, and Sukhi, a person in turban, a

Sikh in New York, could be a figment of her imagination. Nonetheless, the effect of absent presence is such that she loses her consciousness instantly when she sights his ghostly presence, which eventually leads her to leave New York for Iowa. In Baden,

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Jasmine connects with Du through the positive phantom figure. As she is lying awake one night, “Du joins the ghosts of men. He is a phantom lover, he watches me; perhaps he has been watching every night, in his secret, inventive ways (30). As opposed to negative ghosts, Jasmine connects with other humans through positive ghosts. In system theoretic terms, for Jasmine, ghosts become the meaning as medium to interconnect with other psychic systems.

Of all the phantoms, the phantom of astrologer tags along with Jasmine throughout her life. She constantly defies its verdict that she would live in “widowhood and exile” (Mukherjee 3). Even at the end, we hear her challenging the “astrologer who floats cross-legged above [her] kitchen stove”: “Watch me re-position the stars” (240).

She realizes life is beyond having “a husband and place to call home” (224). She has already buried the present self, which she built over three years in Iowa, and is ready to start anew in California, “I realize I have already stopped thinking of myself as Jane”

(240).

In Namesake, in Gogol’s case, it is the name that becomes the extension of the body. His name starts gaining a life of its own, beyond his control: “At times, an entity shapeless and weightless [as his pet name] manages nevertheless to distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt he has been forced permanently to wear”

(Lahiri 76). He “hate[s] the name Gogol” (102). In an effort to get over the distress, he pursues legal course to change it into Nikhil. With the change comes the “responsibility to notify Motor Vehicles, banks, schools,” etc. (102). But “there is a snag: everyone he knows in the world still calls him Gogol” (103). The new name does not resolve the

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problem; instead, he feels “he is not related to them [his parents]” anymore (106). His parents still call him Gogol on most occasions, but they call him Nikhil when his friends are around. For Gogol, “Living with a pet name and a good name in a place where such distinctions do not exit—surely that was emblematic of all confusions” (118). Helplessly,

Gogol vigorously pursues the path of cultural distancing: He avoids everything Indian, including America-born Indians (119).

The physical distress Gogol has been suffering does not go away until his father eventually tells him, when he is twenty-plus years old, the story behind the name—“the story behind the train he’d ridden twenty-eight years ago, in October 1961, on his

[Ashoke’s] way to visit his grandfather in Jamshedpur. He tells him about the night that had nearly taken his life, and the book that had saved him, and about the year afterward, when he’d been unable to move” (Lahiri 123). Until this point, Gogol has been interrupting this story from being fully told whenever his father attempted to begin. Due to the accidental death of a passenger on the train that Gogol was on while travelling home for Thanksgiving, he is ready to listen to the full story, “his eyes fixed on his father’s profile” (123). Gogol not only finds out why he was named Gogol, but also several layers of meanings embedded in the story—the second life the physical book, The

Stories of Nikolai Gogol, gave his father, translation of that second life in Gogol’s name, and his father’s limp. Gogol finally figures out how his father’s defect is associated with him: “That’s why you have that limp, isn’t it?” (123). In an uncanny sort of way, the physical distress Gogol has been undergoing because of the pet name coincidentally finds a link to his father’s limping leg; and, with the link comes a resolution: “And suddenly

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the sound of his pet name, uttered by his father as he has been accustomed to hearing it all his life, means something completely new, bound up with a catastrophe he has unwittingly embodied for years” (124).

However, the connection with his father and Bengali culture does not materialize fully until the father passes away. It is through the “mourner’s diet,” which forgoes “meat and fish,” that Gogol is able to create a bridge to the phantom figure of his father (Lahiri

180-81). Now, whenever he boards a train, “he thinks, always, of that other train he has never seen, the one that had nearly killed his father. Of the disaster that has given him his name” (185). His memory takes him to a time when he was little kid and the family had visited Cape Cod: “He remembers his father’s footprints in the sand; because of his limp, the right toe of his shoe was always turned outward, the left straight ahead” (186).

Leaving Ashima behind, the father and son had gone to the end of the breakwater but had left the camera behind. Back then the father had wanted the son to remember the day:

“Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go” (187). Besides these memories, which Gogol had suppressed for over twenty years until his father passed away, he has only The Stories of

Nikolai Gogol to connect with his father. His father had given him this short story anthology as a birthday gift in 1982, when he was fourteen years old, but he had shoved it into his locker for some time and then later packed it with others in a box. After eighteen years, in 2000, when he is thirty-two, he stumbles upon this book, which radiates as the new actor of the individuated assemblage. It is only by dis-individuation of these two actors that they achieve intimacy, which is analogous with what results from Luhmann’s

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interhuman interpenetration but can be better described with Latour’s notion of quasi-

objects as both, their past and present, become meaningful and relevant to each other at

the point of connection. Similarly, quasi-objects like Judge’s hammer and powder puff, and a few other things in Inheritance of Loss function as extended bodies (or minds).

As we proceed from Ashoke’s limp in Namesake to Bud’s phantom limb in

Jasmine, we will notice something continues to appear in absence, with equal life sensitivity. Since the day Bud was shot “in the cauda equina [lower end of the spinal cord]” (Mukherjee 199), he has to rely on a wheelchair for movement. Jasmine plays a sub-prosthetic role. She has to assist Bud in many ways and share in his difficulties the best she can: “Gallon jugs of white vinegar for his soaks, tubes of antibiotics for decubitus ulcers, support hose and diuretics for ‘dependent’ edemas. The keening language, so precise yet so suggestive; blood tests for ‘occult’ presences. Even the bacteria, when they settle in his ulcers, become ‘indolent’” (226-27). Yet, she does not and cannot know “the pain he suffers” (37) because it is his private pain, though she can communicate about it when he is not around: “I think he must be crying in his hotel room.

Crying comes over him suddenly these days. They call it post-traumatic syndrome” (158).

As Jasmine has to work with the wheelchair and the man in the wheelchair every day, the metaphorical prosthesis in the character of Jasmine accompanies the material prosthesis of Bud’s wheelchair, creating a post-subjective, in Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase,

“machinic assemblage” (92). The memories of Bud’s able-body acts in the past pain

Jasmine, in a sub-phantom sort of way. According to Bud’s therapist, “amputees sometimes scream from the terrible pain in their absent limbs. It’s called phantom pain.

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Bud will suffer from muscle memory; the loss of function, the memory of muscles that

have died” (Mukherjee 227).

As a way of explaining, it may be relevant to resort to some of the conclusions

that V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, two neuroscientists, drew from real-life cases, which included their own patients. They point out causes behind the experience of phantom-limb are not that patients want their amputated body parts back or feel that “the missing limb is still there” (23). As they note, there are even people “born with phantom limbs” (40). These two neuroscientists agree with Bud’s doctor, “[S]ome patients say that the pain they felt in their limbs immediately prior to amputation persists as a kind of pain memory” (51). Most relevant of all their conclusions is, “Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience” (58). The relevance lies in the fact that Bud and Jasmine, in different degrees, extend their body- images to the wheelchair so much so that it shapes their bodily functions. The wheelchair too has to grow its prosthetic impulse with the human actors around. To put in Marquard

Smith and Joanne Morra’s terminology, they co-evolve, producing a post-subjective network of humans and non-humans; with Luhmann, one could say technologized organism is analogous with socialized persons. As Ramachandran and Blakeslee conclude, our body image is a “transitory internal construct that can be profoundly modified with just a few simple tricks” (Phantoms 62). Jasmine contends that her body image is “merely the shell, soon to be discarded so she can “be reborn” again (121). On the day Jasmine is leaving Bud and Iowa for California, “Bud’s face, gray, ghostly, bodyless, floats in narrowing circles around” her (Mukherjee 239). Even if Bud’s anguish

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does not stop her from leaving him, the sub-phantom limb is likely to stay with her for some time.

I end this subsection with a cautionary note that there is a risk involved in viewing prosthetic bodies as extended body or, for that matter, extended mind. Or, we should keep the extension without ground, i.e. without body and mind. In any case, I think we should see each system on its own, organic systems, technological systems, and psychic systems, each retaining its operational prerogative and structural openness to the other, as they interact only through structural coupling.

5.4.3. Technological Body

This is another variant of posthumanism suggesting a network of human actors and technological actors. Du in Mukherjee’s Jasmine explicitly exhibits he is the technology’s new baby, a prototype of post-subjective agency in the making. If Nietzsche

Overman in Zarathustra is trans-human, this would be only adding more power to the human, thus anthropocentric, in which case my argument departs from Nietzsche’s. Du engages with technological artifacts and presents himself as one actor in the socio- technological network, where artifacts are equivalently participants, thus forming a quasi- subject-quasi-object agency (Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory will be introduced here in conjunction with systems theory). This relationship will be analyzed from two approaches: Actant network theory (ANT) and systems theory.

Du Thien, a Vietnamese refugee, is adopted when he is fourteen by the

Ripplemeyers, a family in Baden, Iowa. Like Jasmine, he comes from a post-colonial

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country. Under the dominant culture of the new Empire, he too is led to abandon his cultural practices, “When he first arrived, Du kept a small shrine in his room, with pictures, a candle, and some dried fragrances….he gave it up” (Mukherjee 29). Du does not lament what he had to give up; instead, he befriends technology. In other words, he chooses technology as his environment. Du’s has been fascinated by technology since he

“watched television in his home in Saigon” (18). While still in Vietnam, Du’s first question to Bud is not about humans and their ideals, but rather: “You have television?

You get?” (18).

Du is a “real yogi,” a psychic system that comes to life with its operational boundary from social, organic, and neurophysiological systems. His only medium is his consciousness, which includes those thoughts and feelings that he can lend significance and meaning to. It is through his yogic media of consciousness that he performs his self- referring operations and relates to the environment, i.e. technology, a social system in itself. So the relation between the psychic system and social system is very much like the relationship between system and environment.

After the Ripplemeyers buy him a computer, Du takes a flight into the world of

“circuitry, in crossbreeding appliance, in hoarding and restoring” (Mukherjee 224), and he sets a goal to “design computer Scrabble, like computer Chess” (225). Gunther

Teubner’s example of chess may help to elucidate Du’s sociality with machines, social both in the sense of “tying together heterogeneous bundles, of translating some type entities into another” (Latour, “When Things Strike Back” 113), and of a system

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consisting entirely of communications. The constitutive rules of chess may appear to be

the game's defining feature. However, in Teubner’s words,

Social autopoiesis explains chess as a ‘living’ social system based on a dynamic chain of events. From this system, a new autonomous unit of communication—the move— emerges, which is recursively linked to other moves. The move is the emergent element of the chess game, with the rules only a secondary phenomenon. The dynamics of chess are concerned with the emergence of something new that is not contained already in the lower strata, using Maturana's language of autopoietic emergence. Chess is an example of the way a very artificial type of communication specializes itself and begins to operate recursively on different types of its own kind, thereby beginning the development of a chain of distinctions that propels itself into the future. The dynamic game consists of recursively linked moves in a web of expectations, moves and rules.

Du individuates as a hybrid, yet an autopoietic, psychic system similarly, by following moves with possibilities that technological artifacts allow him. He lives his life in Baden surrounded by technological intermediaries. He spends most of his time

“reshuffling circuits, combining new functions” (Mukherjee 159), and he “transforms

crude appliances that he touches” (154). Jasmine is constantly in awe, watching him rig

her “alarm clock to the coffee in the kitchen…[transforming] remote-control garage-door openers into door openers for a chair-bound man [his adopted father]” (155). He has improvised a drawer with a lock mechanism “out of tossed-out farm equipment” (29). In summary, Du converts linear, “boring function” of simple machines into complex, multifunctional ones: He animates them and, I turn, is animated in the act of the conversion. In the exchange between Du and quasi-objects, they both achieve multi- functionality: “Du’s genius is for scavenging, adaptation, appropriate technology” (155).

The relationship between human and technology is not an actor-instrument relationship.

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Du does not call it actor-instrument engineering, “It’s not engineering. It’s recombinant

electronics. I have altered the gene pool of the American appliance…I didn’t have to

learn it, it’s what I do” (156). What Du does is the empirical world, the reality out there.

The questions to be addressed are how this world is phenomenalized, brought into

consciousness, and how it is articulated.

Du has to go through a series of operations to emerge as a psychic system before

making an observation about the world that he is in; yet, “[t]he condition of possibility

for observation is not a subject (let alone subject endowed with reason)” (Luhmann, Art

57). To simplify, first Du has to become first-order observer before he becomes second- order: Time allows him to do so. As a first-order observer, he indicates “something in opposition to everything that is not indicated” on a horizontal plane (Art 61). At this order of observation, he does not and cannot thematize the distinction between distinction and indication. His “gaze remains fixed on the object. The observer and his observing activity remain unobserved” (Art 61). The thematization comes from a second-order observation, be it Jasmine, Bud, or Du’s at another instance. Being two distinct systems,

“Consciousness cannot communicate; communication cannot perceive” (Luhmann, Art

47): The world cannot see; mind cannot communicate. In other words, psychic and social systems maintain their operative closure. Structural coupling between psychic system and social system can happen through art, culture, or memory. Now these two systems can participate in what they formerly lacked, not directly but through mediation/translation

(starting again with distinction, indication, reentry, and so on).

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In response to Jasmine, who says, “I’ve also killed a man,” Du’s pronouncement is reflective of his life, “I know. So have I. More than one” (Mukherjee 157). This articulation figuratively suggests that he has transformed his agency by bidding farewell to many humans within him. Machines are Du’s entrance into life, but not just instruments. His ontologization of machines frees him from several neo-colonial constraints of humanism. In Don Ihde’s words, “In so far as I use or employ a technology,

I am used by and employed by that technology as well…We are bodies in technologies”

(qtd. in Haraway When Species Meet 249). Du “is a hybrid, like the fantasy appliances he wants to build” (Mukherjee 222), and his hybridity is obviously not limited to cultural hybridity, which, though, has produced his “hyphenated” accent. Jasmine, his adopted mother, finds Du’s “wirings and circuits” “close to Vijh & Vijh” (223), but she knows they are apart. Vijh & Vijh, an electronic workshop, was a future project that Jasmine and

Prakash, her murdered husband, had planned to co-own one day, when he would graduate from Florida International School of Technology. During her days with Prakash, she learned how to mingle her bodily technology with electronic artifacts, how to reconcile the unduly separated techne and poiesis and see life in the connection, i.e. in the circularity of interpenetration and communication. At the beginning, her husband would give her “a pair of pliers and [would guide] them through a maze of tiny lines and wires”

(89). Later, he would bring home “ruined toasters, alarm clocks, calculators, electric fans,” and Jasmine would “probe and heal” them (89). From this mutual healing is born desire.

To put it differently, we may say by rephrasing Derrida’s words in “Typewriter Ribbon,”

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this machine-like event is about retaining both event and machine, without subordinating or reducing one to another (74).

However, Jasmine does not have access to Du’s mind, which she admits, “I don’t know what he thinks” (Mukherjee 18). How could she, since they are two monadic psychic systems? As autopoietic psychic systems, each is environment for the other, prevented from having direct access; however, each can talk about the other within his or her system. We do not know and will never know whether Du identifies himself as a technological artifact. If he does, it only means that this is a semantic reaction to the facts of complexity of society. However, if one or more of society’s subsystem finds such reaction communicatively meaningful, then it becomes part of society. Du belongs simultaneously to different social systems: familial, biological, interactive, and social subsystems like education, economy, politics, etc. John K. Hoppe characterizes Du as a technological hybrid. Du’s individuality rests on his psychic system’s ability to maintain operational autonomy, to reproduce elements autopoietically, which other systems in the environment may find meaningful, like Jasmine did above, despite acknowledging impenetrability of the other.

And it is in Du’s narrative that the strongest links between human and non-human is articulated. Beyond Latour’s Actant-Network Theory, it is relevant to note that postcolonials are politically strengthened if they embrace the interface between human, animal, and technology as prosthesis, i.e. “the joining of materials, naturalizations, excorporations, and semiotic transfer” (Sobchack 19).24

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5.4.4. Toward the Future

Absolute subalterns, subalterns, and semi-subaltern diasporic agents, as among the most dispersed and mobile, are the ones who have to constantly shift and make new alliances in the network. In their flights and movements, many have disappeared anonymously. Should not other subalterns—besides human animals, non-human animals, and machines—be as well accounted in the history of dispersion, flight, and extinction that colonialism and neo-colonialism have something to do with, for instance vegetal lives and geological lives? As an example, what still needs to be addressed is the effect of tea plantation on the flora and fauna as well as the ecology of places like Kalimpong, which was once a territory of Bhutan. Desai’s Scottish built Cho Oyu is set in Kalimpong, where the judge has retired and his granddaughter joins him later in this dilapidated house.

This is the same town once sparsely inhabited by a dozen of Róng families before the

British takeover in 1864. In Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, there are scant references to the mountain Kanchenjunga, rivers, bridges, zoos, and planters’ “blood-sports and brutality”

(222). We get a glimpse of colonial importation of indentured laborers from Nepal to

Kalimpong when Gyan’s ancestral history is narrated, which briefly touches on the beginning of tea plantation: “In the 1800s, his ancestors had left their village in Nepal and arrived in Darjeeling, lured by promises of work on a tea plantation” (158). Later, there is reflection back on a colonial time, which light-heartedly mentions the killings of fish and animals, but does not cover vegetal life and life of the land: “Fishing expeditions in the

Teesta had brought back, just forty years ago, a hundred pounds of mahaseer. Twain had shot thirteen tigers on the road between Calcutta and Darjeeling” (222-23). There is not a

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word on ecosystem in any of the three novels, but we know that colonial agro-economic

and industrial systems, e.g. plantations, did have adverse impact on ecosystems of the

colonies, by deforestation, pollution, mining, etc. We may never know to what extent

colonial society aggravated the ecosystem of colonies, or the neo-colonial impact on

post-colonies’ environment, but we must start communicating about those ecological dangers so that, at least, there will be acknowledgment that they exist.

There have been some historical works regarding colonialism and environment,

though they have not gained much attention. Richard Grove is possibly the first to

document early history of environmentalism by linking it to colonial context. He gives

credit to the indigenous system of knowledge for the colonial, environmental science. As

he notes, recommendations to conserve nature were formulated during the colonial period

in the eighteenth century but were either ignored or used as a ploy because the colonial

agenda was to control the native and maximize profit by plundering the nature. And

whenever they were implemented, “forest conservation and associated forced

resettlement methods were frequently the cause of a fierce oppression of indigenous

peoples and became a highly convenient form of social control” (12). To further explicate,

even though colonial environmentalists warned that “the whole earth might be threatened

by deforestation, famine, extinction, and climate change,” the colonial states did not stop

from destroying the nature (15).

The second important anthology is William Adams and Martin Mulligan edited

Decolonizing Nature. In their introductory essay, they note the British Empire

“transformed nature, creating new landscapes, new ecologies and new relations between

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humans and non-human nature” (1). Because conservation ideas have been around since

19th century, some of the questions that this collection engages with are whether colonial

ideas about nature has persisted and what kinds of strategies are needed to address the

environmental problem in postcolonial world. In general, this anthology calls for an

ethical engagement between humans and nature in postcolonies. Val Plumwood’s essay

from the same collection sees colonial dimension in both anthropocentrism and

Eurocentrism in that former rationalizes its colonization of non-human nature in the same manner the latter does natives, for their lack of rationality. His call for recognition of nature’s agency is worthy to note. Despite these historical-theoretical works, they have not been brought into communication with postcolonial literary works.

Postcolonial literary system can increase its complexity further by responding to these topics of ecosystem. With relation to ecology, Luhmann says, “Contemporary society feels itself affected in many different ways by the changes that it has produced in its own environment” (Ecological 1). He acknowledges that the society may not have cognitive means to assess all changes in its environment, but only by communication, the society could be exposed to ecological dangers. Even an updated version of, to use

Luhmann’s term, “semantics of the sacred” and “ritualization” of the earth would not be a bad start, especially in the case of natives, to communicate about environmental dangers

(33).

Post-subjective theory remains incomplete in this dissertation. In order to avoid the risk of being just another displacement, the postcolonial in the network of all actors will have to account for all exclusions, not just the zoo-technological, in a way that

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avoids amalgamation of heterogeneity and that addresses the colonial and neo-colonial effects on all actors and their agential inputs in the network, while recognizing differences in hybridity. Postcolonial lives of plants and earth will be a bigger, worthy project for another occasion.

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Notes

1. J. M. Coetzee is an exception to this, whose Disgrace, a prose fiction, is the

first, as far as I know, to launch a postcolonial scene and the question of animal. The

protagonist volunteers to euthanize dogs in a local animal shelter, but after some time,

one day he is baffled by the effect of his work. Coetzee follows this work with The Lives

of Animals, a nonfiction, in which he says, “[W]e can discuss and debate what kind of

souls animals have, whether they reason or on the contrary act on biological automatons,

whether they have rights in respect of us, whether we merely have duties in respect of

them” (22).

2. It would be relevant to recall Derrida’s hypothesis concerning the concept of

subject and exclusion of animals: [W]ithin the history of rights or law and the concept of

the legal subject. . . within the history of the concept of the subject,” there is certain

“denial of all rights to the animal” (Animal 88).

3. However, as a caution, question concerning rights of minorities in the spheres of legal and political systems have been left out in my discussion, even though those rights, as they entail humanist biases, are questionable. These rights are system specific, and one right does not guarantee the other. For instance, suffrage does not automatically lead to economic independence, though the reverse may not be true. I intend to avoid the confusion between subjectivity and civil rights as subjectivity has primarily to do with the Western philosophical concept of self as the ground for understanding the world as

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well as the consequence of such conceptualization in other areas such as legal and political.

4. This is one of Heidegger’s conclusions in Nietzsche, Vols. 3 and 4: “If we recall here that in Greek philosophy before Plato another thinker, namely Protagoras, was teaching that man was the measure of all things, it appears as if all metaphysics,—not just modern metaphysics—is in fact built on the standard-giving role of man within beings as a whole” (86). I added Parmenides because Descartes seems to have combined

Protagoras and Parmenides’ ideas in his infamous “cogito, ergo sum.”

5. Here “sacrifice” means “need, desire, authorization, the justification of putting to death, putting to death as denegation of murder” (Derrida, “Eating Well” 115). Derrida

“link[s] this denegation to the violent institution of the ‘who’ as subject,” i.e. the institution of subjectivity.

6. For this interpretation, I owe to Francisco Varela, Evan Thomson, and Eleanor

Rosch’s “The Cartesian Anxiety,” pp. 140-43, in The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. They note that “prior to Descartes, the term ‘idea’ was used only for the contents of the mind of the God; Descartes was one of the first to take this term and apply to the workings of the human mind” (141).

7. “Sapere aude! Dare to know!” declares Kant, as the Enlightenment creed

(“Answer” 58). On Kant’s position on animal, see Derrida’s Animal (92-105).

8. Later, Karl Marx, in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, works the master- slave dialectic into a theory of class consciousness, particularly in “Manifesto of the

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Communist Party.” Additionally, one could also see Hegelian influence on Freud’s

unconscious as repression in The Interpretation of Dreams, or the play between id, ego,

super ego in The Ego and the Id.

9. One cannot go without being reminded of Heidegger’s critique of

representationalism and anthropomorphism in his “The Age of the World Picture,” The

Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays.

10. For this formulation, I acknowledge Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, in

which he intimates that identity is the annihilation of dialectics (contradictions/diversity)

and states that Hegel “does not put his trust in dialectics” (337).

11. This is the gist of Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. See 5.3

and 5.4 below.

12. Both Said, in Orientalism (153-6), and Young, in White Mythologies (1-5),

cite and discuss these passages, but not by tracing Cartesian-Hegelian tradition.

13. In 1857, East India Company introduced a new rifle to Indian soldiers. To load the new rifle, the soldiers had to bite off the cartridge paper, greased with cow and hog fat, at one end before ramming down the barrel. Cow is the most sacred animal to

Hindus, and they perceived greased cartridge as an unbearable incursion into their belief, a British scheme to proselytize them into Christians. This incident was the culmination of their resentment against the East India Company. It rallied Hindu soldiers into a mass rebellion all over India and broke the trust between Indians and Britons, never to be the same again. See George Bruce Malleson’s Indian Mutiny of 1857 (18-35).

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14. In Écrits, Lacan notes that the history of unconscious goes back to St. Thomas

Aquinas (297), though its technical significance developed with Freud. Also, the history

of eternal recurrence can be traced as far back as to Empedocles, who introduced the

Buddhist wheel of life to the West; and via Leibniz, Kierkegaard reintroduces in

Repetition; Lacan mentions Empedocles and Kierkegaard in his discussion of eternal return of the unconscious desire (Écrits 167).

15. For further explanation, see Bhabha’s Location of Culture, pp. 66-7.

16. It looks like Derrida’s use of the term “liquidation” is a playful reference to the concluding chapter of Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, whereas Lacan

contrasts “liquidation of transference” (that unconscious cannot be liquidated) with

liquidation of the analyst’s subjectivity (“that the subject who is supposed to know ought

to be supposed to have been vaporized”) (267). My reference to Foucault in the next

sentence is to his Order of Things. Take for instance his conclusion, “It is no longer

possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance” (342); or,

his rhetorical question, “Ought we not rather give up thinking of man, or to be more strict,

to think of this disappearance of man . . . ?” (386).

17. Some dismiss Derrida as an apolitical and ahistorical deconstructionist, but

within postcolonial theory, his ideas are politically relevant. Robert Young ends his

Postcolonialism with the chapter, “Subjectivity and History: Derrida in Algeria,” in

which he underscores Derrida’s experience under French colonialism and in the Algerian

War of Independence and frames his texts in the postcolonial context.

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18. In “Culture’s In-Between,” Bhabha explains that the concept of hybridity is

“to describe the construction of cultural authority within conditions of political

antagonism or inequity. Strategies of hybridization reveal an estranging movement in the

‘authoritative,’ even authoritarian inscription of cultural sign” (58). In this explanation,

we see the limitation of cultural hybridity.

19. In Animal, Derrida tracks the history of philosophy, “from Aristotle to

Heidegger, from Descartes to Kant, Levinas and Lacan” (27), that has taken the position

of master-y to refuse the animal whatever is presumed to be proper to the human and created the pseudo-concept of “the animal,” as if all animals were the same, and endowed it with everything negative (135). This is in tune with what Latour describes as the massive purification project of modernity.

20. N. Katherine Hayles takes this path in “Narratives of Artificial life,” How We

Became Posthuman, especially pages 235-46.

21. See Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, particularly chapter 9, note 2: “It adds to clarity in the field of ethics if we formulate our demands negatively, i.e. if we demand the elimination of suffering rather than promotion of happiness (285).

22. One cannot go without being reminded of Derrida’s chronicle of ten plagues that are “tearing apart so-called democratic Europe and the world today” (80), among which are featured exclusions, exploitations, deportation of exiles by national fortification, and nuclear threat (“Wears and Tears” 80-83).

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23. Sati was Shiva’s wife, but she self-destructs, due to humiliation by her father, to reincarnate into many avatars, each with a specific assignment to involve in the world, some of which are creative and others destructive. For further reading, see “The

Mythology of Sati” in David Kinsley’s Hindu Goddesses.

24. Vivian Sobchack’s essay voluntarily takes a humanist turn as he reverses

Steven Kurzman’s objection to “prosthesis as technology” into something to stand on,

thus the title of the essay, “A Leg to Stand On.” If we choose to go in that direction, we

may theoretically satisfy the humanist nostalgia of subjective stability and grounding.

However, as opposed to a material grounding, I do not see this is desirable any more.

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Glossary1

Group A

Autopoiesis: The term comes from biology. Initially, it served as a descriptor for auto- reproductive processes in living organisms. An autopoietic system does not have inputs or outputs. It can undergo any kind of changes without losing its identity. All changes in an autopoietic system are subordinated to the maintenance of the system. Although all changes are internally determined, for an observer, its ontogeny partly reflects its history of interactions with an independent environment. An autopoietic system can be perturbed by changes in its environment. The system makes internal changes as a response to its environment’s changes, thus enhancing its complexity. In this sense, an autopoietic system is structurally open, but, since its handling of internal relations between its units and responses to the environment’s perturbations are limited to the system’s identity, it is operationally closed from the environment. If a system opens itself operationally to the environment, which means if it allows other systems to determine its life, then it could be said that it is no longer an autopoietic system, i.e. its life and identity are open to the control from outside. Whether postcolonial literary system is autopoietic is tested in this dissertation. Notice how the meaning of autopoiesis changes “when it is transferred from organic social systems: here it secures not the continuity of life but the connective capacity of actions” (Luhmann, Social Systems 372). I have generally assumed autopoietic systems whenever I have used the term “system,” unless stated otherwise.

Blind spot: The observer (of whatever order) cannot know what s/he has excluded. S/he can see only one side of the distinction. Seeing the exclusion will prevent observation. The important point is, “[O]bservation cannot see itself” (Luhmann, Risk 15). One sees precisely because s/he cannot see the very act and place of seeing. See “paradox.”

Boundary: A system uses a boundary to regulate a difference from its environment, but it does not mark a break in connection. Luhmann explains boundary in the following words, “The concept of boundaries means, however, that processes which cross boundaries (e.g., the exchange of energy or information) have different conditions for their continuance (e.g., different conditions of utilization or of consensus)) after they cross the boundaries” (Social Systems 17).

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Closure or operational closure: In Principles of Biological Autonomy, Varela’s thesis is, “Every autonomous system is organizationally closed” (58). Behavior of a closed system is such that all environmental perturbations and changes are subordinated to the maintenance of the system’s identity. “[A]ll apparent informational exchanges with its environment will be, and can only be, treated as perturbations within the processes that define its closure, and thus no ‘instructions’ or ‘programming’ can possibly exist” (59). In the case of an organizationally open system, however, environment plays an instructive role, thus making the system allopoietic or heteronomic. In Embodied Mind, Varela and his co-authors discuss the implication of the thesis of operational closure contributing to the end of representationalism: “A system that has operational closure is one in which the results of its processes are those processes themselves…The key point is that such systems do not operate by representation. Instead of representing an independent world, they enact a world as a domain of distinctions that is inseparable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system” (139-40). Later, Luhmann contributes to the closed system by introducing the term “structural opening” to social systems, making them simultaneously open and closed (see “structural coupling below). To understand “closure” through an analogy with différance, see Derrida’s Speech and Phenomenon, where he describes “différance as the strategic note or connection—relatively or provisionally privileged—which indicates the closure of presence…a closure that is effected in the functioning of traces” (131).

Code: Every function system uses a specific code, which is dual-valued, for communication. Binary codes steer system-specific communication by creating difference. A system requires a code to conceal tautologies and paradoxes as well as to maintain its autonomy. Codes have universalizing claims and exclude a third value. Their validity remains within the system that uses them. They help systems reduce complexity by sorting out everything into two opposite values. Their efficiency lies in their abstractness. If coding closes the system, programming opens it. In any case, the code is not established before the system formation (Luhmann, Ecological 36-43).

Communication: It is not mere seizure of information and uttering it out (through sounds words, or gestures) or release from a sender to a receiver. Communication takes place when three distinct selections of information, utterance, and mis/understanding emerge into a unit for the purpose of further communication. It terminates when no such possibility occurs. In this definition, human beings as psychic systems cannot communicate, though they can imagine they are doing so. If communication continues, it sure can look captivating to human beings. Communication plays a major role in the autopoiesis of a system by reducing complexity and opening connectibility within a system, though systems and their respective environments are not in communication (Luhmann, Theories 170-82).

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Contingency: Something could have been otherwise.

Culture: Culture may be understood in terms of a system’s memory. It is the system’s past that it uses in the present and furthers communication for the future. In another sense, culture is over-determined meaning. The “stock exchange, where the options on unfolding the paradox are traded, is called culture” (Luhmann, “Paradox of Form” 23).

Environment: Everything that is outside the boundary of a system is environment. A system designates its own environment. In the environment, there are other relevant systems. Environment is significant not “only for ‘preserving the system, for supplying energy and [potential] information” to the system but also for the system’s identity “because identity is possible only by difference”; therefore, environment is a “presupposition for the system’s identity” (Luhmann, Social Systems 177). The distinction system/environment is observational, not ontological: “It does not cut all of reality into two parts: here system, there environment. . . . It is correlative to the operation of observation, which introduces this distinction (as well as others) into reality” (178).

Element: Rather than referring to some constants, the term refers to “units constructed (distinguished) by an observing system” (Luhmann, Art 103). System-elements are neither self-sufficient nor determinate. They constitute a system and are constituted by it. If we are to speak of elements in a system’s environment, they must be spoken with relation to structural couplings. Different systems may use some of the same elements, but they are processed differently within the respective systems. In any case, elements are not visible until observed by system- specific distinctions. Elements are reciprocal with relations: “Just as there are no systems without environments…, there are no elements without relational connections or relations without elements” (Luhmann, Social Systems 20).

First Order Observation: It is the making of initial distinction (see “form” below). On this level of observation, the difference “between distinction and indication is not thematized. The gaze remains fixed on the object. The observer and his observing activity remain unobserved” (Luhmann, Art 61). For the first-order observer, the observed world seems to be the only truth. By contrast second-order observer (see below) “notices the improbability,” in the sense that s/he notices there are more than one possibility (62). In a simpler language, first order would be observing an object, and second order would be observing the observer that observed the object.

Form: It is a two-sided entity, marked and unmarked. Any cognitive or communication act must begin by indicating one side as its area of interest, concern, or relevance. This indication brings forth another side, non-indication. A cognitive or communicative act copies the initial form on the marked side of the distinction.

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Further distinctions follow in the same manner. The drawer can see only one side. An observer can observe only if both sides are distinguishable.

Functional differentiation: It is a self-description of modern society, in which social systems are functionally differentiated without a center or top, with, however, the awareness that this society could have been (or could still be) otherwise.

Individual: Individuals do not refer to humans alone. Humans are only one kind of individual.

Information: Traditionally, information is representation, i.e. “a correspondence between symbolic units in one structure and symbolic units in another structure” (Varela, Principles xiv), but this definition is not used here. With respect to a system, something counts as an informational unit as long as it helps maintain the system’s identity. As it is relative to the system maintenance, its environment cannot be viewed as containing information or noninformation. The term “information” also appears with relation to the constitution of communication, which is composed of utterance, information, and mis/understanding.

Interaction: In general, interaction suggests an exchange between people. A system of interaction constitutes people. Exchanges between people do not make a society. However, if a social system finds people’s exchanges meaningful, they become its topic of communication. In postcolonial literary subsystem, interactions within literary works and between literary and critical works take place at the elemental level.

Interpenetration: In a sense, this concept replaces, rather abandons, the concept of intersubjectivity. Interpenetration is “an intersystem relation between systems that are environments for each other” (Luhmann, Social Systems 213). When two systems interpenetrate, they reciprocally introduce their complexity to each other but can only partially translate that complexity into their own systems.

Observation: It means handling distinctions. It is “merely the management of a distinction—for example, that between system and environment” (Luhmann, Social Systems 178).

Paradox: This is not logical contradiction. Paradox “is a form that contains itself without reference to an external standpoint from which the paradox could be observed. The paradox is hence both beginning and end at once” (Luhmann “Paradox of Form” 18). Paradox “is always presupposed…as the blind spot that makes distinction, and thus observation, possible in the first place” (Luhmann, Art 32). Paradox is the condition upon which system distinction between system and environment is based. System differentiates from an environment that is not part of itself. The external environment is the system’s internal construct. “By treating 185

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itself as if it existed in an objectively verifiable world, the system has no awareness of the paradox of its own existence, and is able to operate as if its communications were justified and legitimized by universal notions of what is true, legal, morally right, scientific and so on” (King and Thornhill 20). Systems cannot see this paradox, thus remain in the blind spot.

Reflexivity: An autopoietic system is capable of self-observation: it reflects upon itself to compensate.

Representation: It is not a correspondence but a consistency with its own ongoing maintenance of identity.

Second Order Observation: It is an act of observing an observer, be that psychic system’s or social system’s operations of observation. The observed system is taken as an observer system. “It only observes how others observe” (Luhmann, Art 62). As an example, literary system, or postcolonial literary subsystem, is an outcome of second-order observation. “The second-order observer encounters the distinction between distinction and indication (61). However, even this observer cannot observe his observing and himself as observer. The same could be said about other higher degree (third-, fourth-order, etc.) observers. This means that “second- and third-order observations explicate the world’s unobservability as an unmarked space carried along in all observations” (61). The observer may or may not be the same. We use this term when a system observes another system. The observing system discovers that the observed system’s environment is not constituted by boundaries, but by constraints. In a sense, the second-order observer “is a first- order observer as well, for he must distinguish and designate the observer he intends to observer” (Luhmann “The Paradox of Form” 20). Second-order observation can unfold the paradox but falls into another.

Self-observation: It can happen only after a system describes itself after drawing boundary from its environment. In self-observation, system-environment distinction is re-introduced within the system. Autopoiesis can occur with the help of the re-entry of distinction. Self-observation guarantees the reproduction of elements (Luhmann, Social Systems 37).

Semantics: If the supply of themes “is reserved specifically for the purposes of communication,” it is called semantics (Luhmann, Social Systems 163).

Society: Instead of peoples, it consists of everything that is recognized as a communication by one or more of its subsystems. It is constituted of all communicative systems.

Structure: It is a network of operations (Luhmann, Art 214).

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Structural Coupling: Luhmann uses this concept to explain how two or more systems may co-evolve around particular issues or ideas. One does not dictate or instruct the other but includes only in its environment and responds to the other’s outputs in its own operational terms on a continuous basis.

System: It is a chain of events related to each other, or of operations. There are two broad categories of systems: autopoietic and allopoietic. I have presented postcolonial literary subsystem as autopoietic in that it uses its output as input. It is worth mentioning that postcolonial societies have remained stratified in that functional systems in these societies are not fully differentiated, meaning some are autopoietic and others are prevented from becoming autonomous.

Systems Differentiation: Viewed from the discipline of humanities and liberal sciences, the moral message of system theory is that functionally differentiated systems work better for the overall societal system. Political system, system of economy, art system, system of law, etc. are all social systems. Modern society is characterized by functionally differentiated systems, but this society has not achieved the stated goal fully. The postcolonial societies are in the early modern phase in the sense of functional differentiation. The social systems of these societies have not become autonomous and autopoietic.

Unity: Unity is distinguishability from a background, and hence from other units. With reference to “unity of the system and that of its elements,” unity is the “unity of all self-reference and other-reference, thus is constituted paradoxically” (Luhmann, Social Systems 363).

Glossary B

Antagonism: It primarily points out the limit of a given social order, its flaws, etc. Antagonism is the other of the totality assumed by a hegemonic force. “In a situation of antagonism, differential political positions can only relate to others by, in an equivalential way, referring to something which they are not. But this ‘something’ is not tertium quid. It cannot be integrated into the internal chain of differences without affecting the latter’s status. Rather, it must be understood as something ‘radically’ different, incommensurable, threatening, and exclusionary, in so far as it negates the positive identity of the internal differences (by turning them into their opposite: equivalence). Under this aspect one can define antagonism—equivalence established by negation—as that which denies differentiality as such. The ‘radical,’ hence, indicates exactly this negatory dimension of antagonism with respect to field of differences in the plural” (Marchart “Politics and Ontological Difference” 59).

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Colony: A territory or a country under the administrative control of another country. Among the main types, colonies could be categorized into settler colony (e.g. Australia, Canada), partial colony (e.g. South Africa, Zimbabwe), and non-settler colony (e.g. India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Jamaica). Until the publication of Empire Writes Back, literatures from settler colonies were not included in the postcolonial literary subsystem (Tiffin, “Plato’s Cave” 162). Yet, there is a tendency to not take seriously those literatures coming out of power centers like Unites States and Canada despite their histories of struggles with the metropolitan states like Britain and France.

Colonial: In a loose sense, pertaining to a colony; also, characteristic of upholding the values and power of the Empire. In certain strict sense, “the European temporarily resident in the new society, generally contemptuous of the life and customs observed, who remains tied to and is somehow identified with an administrative appointment abroad” (New 105).

Colonist: It is a European person “who settles in the ‘new’ land, and who participates in the reshaping of its social mores” (New 105).

Colonialist: I use this term to designate a person or policy that has colonizing agendas, regardless of whether the person resides temporarily or permanently in the colony or participates in such activities from the metropolis.

Equivalence: In the context of colonialism (e.g. India under British Raj or Algeria under French empire), domination is variously enacted every day through a wide array of contents (language, manner, food, etc.). “Since each of these contents is equivalent to the others in terms of their common differentiation from the colonized people, it loses its condition of differential moment” (Laclau and Mouffe 127). Initially parasitic, equivalences, as they acquire second meaning, could be subversive of the dominant power. In systems theory interpretation, one cannot include the other as it is but by re-entry, and this always creates a condition of instability. (See “Antagonism” above.)

Hegemony: For Gramsci, to whom the term is often credited, hegemony, the dominant power position, is achieved through vanquishing enemy and winning over the consent of willing subalterns. It involves the crushing of all antagonistic forces. As a relation between social forces, hegemony occurs when “a particular force assumes the representation of a totality that is radically incommensurable with it” (Laclau and Mouffe x-xiii). Metropolis: It is “the imperial nation-state as such, ‘metropolitan’ then applying to its internal national realities and daily life (which are of course not exclusively urban, although organized around some central urban ‘metropolis’ in the narrower sense)” (Jameson “Modernism and Imperialism” 65).

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Subaltern: In general, subordinate. Gramsci used the term subaltern to describe “non- hegemonic groups or classes” (Prison Notebooks xiv). In a more strict sense, subaltern is someone who lacks class consciousness and, therefore, finds himself/herself in a weak situation for political action. For Spivak, to be subaltern is “to be removed from all lines of social mobility” and “to be without identity” (“Scattered Speculations” 475, 476).

Social: Two definitions, one following the systems theory and the other Laclau’s post- Marxism: The former views it as a moment of interconnection between unities. The latter looks at it as a discursive space.

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Notes

1. This is not a conventional glossary but an attempt to clarify some of the systems theory terms that I thought could be confusing for the readers not familiar with them. Some of terms are clarified only with reference to this dissertation and may not carry relevance outside. Among other glossaries on systems theory, see Maturana and

Varela’s “Glossary” in Autopoiesis, Luhmann’s in Ecological Communication, and Hans-

Georg Moeller’s in Luhmann Explained. For convenience, the glossary is divided into two parts, one pertaining to systems theory, and the other to postcolonialism and antagonistic democracy.

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