A Postcolonial Aesthesis

I refer to “Decolonial Aesthesis: From Singapore, To Cambridge, To Duke University” by Walter D. Mignolo and Michelle K., dated June 27, 2013, and since then having had quite the readership. 

OFTENTIMES it seems rather difficult to securely affix contemporary discourse or thoughts of postcolonialism against a modern, prevailing and realistic manner without the inevitable perceived loss of some tact, more so due to its highly subjective nature. Talking about ethnicity and racial background must not be, under any circumstances, incorrectly misconstrued for blatant racism (It is not), but rather a necessary access to engaging conversation on broader and far more universal struggles between Self and Other – a tributary, of sorts. Similarly, equally trying is to discuss postcolonialism within its expected and considerably restrictive linguistic boundaries, as it is many a times incorrectly assumed to be: “post-colonialism” – a temporal circumstance or set of conditions upon which the chronological, systemic and ordered collapse of empire is couched. Assuming which, rapid decolonization subsequent to the Second World War would have already significantly reduced colonial establishments, and therefore by extension, the immediate and instantaneous response is a diminishing spirit of colonialism, not coloniality. With the physical and worldly manifestations of Colony almost entirely disassociated from a position of social dominance as well, why then the need for decolonial aesthetics? It is no more susceptible than the undesirable alternative of “claiming equality”: assertions that attempt to equivocate cultures and traditions of the Occident and Orient. It is not a concerted outcry that exposes “its injustices and contradictions, or simple disobedience towards the rules of art and polite society” – it is an insinuative concession that coloniality exists and in a continued position of global domination.

AND still the greatest perpetuation of coloniality is a postcolonial aesthesis: language.

The colonial consciousness is a complex system of collective values and beliefs that govern the relationship between “master” and “subject”, which possesses an insatiable desire for perpetuation. It is fearful of and persistently forced to resist the unceasing possibility of being relegated into isolation. At heart, the spontaneous and self-preserving response of coloniality is transcendental to the passing of time, and more importantly, transcendental to material developments. And incidentally, the most pervasive and significant demonstration of the colonial system is language as well as the ostensibly irrational and fastidious value we ascribe to language, which eventually become normalized as being justly commensurate:

“You never learn Latin, but you learn to fake it well enough to give the prayer before the Fellows in the dining hall. It’s an honor, you’re told.” (Decolonial Aesthesis: From Singapore, To Cambridge, To Duke University)

TO question the spirit of coloniality necessitates first an understanding of language – not literature – as an inextricable and influential component that is largely fundamental to the basis of history. Arguably, almost the entire historical methodology of documentation is contingent upon the solvency of language as an effective communicative medium in speech and thought. Only then are we able to accurately convey the stories of history. But the vast subjectivity of perceiving and operating in different languages confines histories to its inherent and very precise ideological parameters. Consequently, history is at best merely an indicative process of the creation of meaningful narratives from a seemingly meaningless series of past events, since we attribute, in a very arbitrary manner, semantic value to specific morphemes. Over time, this linguistic pliancy of conversation thus allows society to place a constructed premium of cultural and social desirability on particular languages as opposed to others.

ABOVE all, most striking is the meta-connotative implications of entire systems of language themselves – that the instantaneous response of the average individual to, say, Greek and Latin texts is surprisingly dense with the baggage of coloniality: graceful, intellectual, scholarly in nature, and supported by the struts of ancient knowledge. Or the “plebeian” gift of English: refined, elegant, stately and noble. It is the distinctive sense of an alluring prominence grounded in historical European ascendancy, but anchored firmly to the both needs and desires of current times. That the common tongues of the Occident far dominate the lingua franca of societies, pervading to near saturation even in the geographical Orient, and against the diversity of alternative languages present. The most visceral and resonant reflections of colonial perennialism is neither architecture nor education nor political institutions, but the language of Empire. It is a frequently unrecognized edification of coloniality, one that immortalizes the colonial spirit in the regularities of social interactions and totemic records of history.

TRULY, “coloniality is far from over: it is all over”, even as we speak – especially when we speak.

Sources

Mignolo, W., & Michelle, K. (2013, June 27). Decolonial aesthesis: From singapore, to cambridge, to duke university. Retrieved from http://waltermignolo.com/decolonial-aesthesis-from-singapore-to-cambridge-to-duke-university/

– Of noteworthy things (particularly significant to local readers) – a friend, on “brothers”: “Why ‘adelphos’, not ‘abang’?”

Mr. and Mrs. Marx: Feminism, Structural Imposition, and Ads

IMAGINE this: A truck barrels down the highway at high speed, narrowly avoiding several other vehicles. Oddly enough – beyond perhaps, well, irresponsible commuter’s behavior and risky driving – of far greater concern, however, is the sarcophagus of a strikingly bright-colored corporate livery which adorns the transport. It’s an image that individuals unacquainted to (for lack of better expression) liberal frameworks of perceiving society are likely to miss – more so in as conservative a community as this.

The advertisement features something most of us would unquestioningly consider ubiquitous: a middle-aged woman, blonde, operating a cooking pan purportedly of the latest technological advances: non-stick, minimal grease residue, easy-cleaning – really just the usual value-adds corporations love publicising.

And that’s what makes it all the more of a tremendous issue. The instantaneous average human response is a self-completing image that cements unknowns and knowledge gaps, independent of whether any relevant information is present or not, of the persona featured in the product pitch. Sure, here’s what we see: an ordinary person working a kitchen object, presumably preparing a meal. But what do we actually mean? The translation of this simple idea by our subconscious faculties is certainly more complex (and absurd?): female, house-wife, mother, good chef, obedient, family, caring to the kids, female. We’re probably quite familiar to these thoughts, and, to a large degree, the comparative end is similarly insidious – where the mass media portrays masculinity as a trope: an essentialist template of physical prowess, decisiveness bordering on blind obstinacy and infinite passion.

THOUGH, logically-speaking, this makes no sense at all. The basic rational and cognitive function of human minds grounds itself in making meaning from practical observations and trends. It is alarming, therefore, that the connotative capacity of this advertisement alone – no much different from any other of its kind – is sufficiently great to trigger the various aforementioned gender associations. This phenomenon is further compounded by its ubiquity. That parallel occurrences have became just so commonplace is already worrying to begin with, yet more so that people are reaching a stage of desensitisation to such prevalent perpetuations of gender stereotypes. The inclination now is not to challenge the impositions of social institutions, but normalise these artifices as the universal constant to disturbing consistency, upon which the greatest of premiums crown.

Marxism and feminism find convergence on the same common contention of human agency: do individual choices exist, and if so, how autonomous can they possibly be?

In The Critique of the Political Economy, German philosopher Karl Marx (1859)  posits the following:

…The mode of production of material life conditions the general processes of social, political… It is not the consciousness of man that create their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness… (The Critique of the Political Economy, p. i-iii)

Here, the construction of identity – and therefore, by extension, our decisions – arguably predicates an uncontrollable “superstructure” of economic organization: the manner and metric by which material goods and services are distributed in society. Undoubtedly, any immediate connection between a Marxist outlook of the economy and feminism is likely tenuous and obscure. This is where I try my best to explain.

MY argument is that in the post-modern, laissez-faire free market, consumerism contributes significantly to entrenching the male-female gender binary. It does not carry the burden of having to be critical to neither Marxist thought, nor capitalism. The hypothesis begins from the (hopefully reasonable) assumption that advertisements, being the most direct and widely applied marketing tool of enterprises, strive to increase demand of a particular product. And in order to do so, advertisements compete to either build commonalities and shared interests with a target audience (say, having a line of perfume scents branded as ideal for the corporate environment), or creating generic themes which resonant strongly within the majority aggregate of consumers. It is hence unsettling that, in this process of commercial outreach, the line of best fit tends to be the line of segregation as well.

This is because advertisements, in attempting to pander to populist social conventions, lean towards portraying goods as complementary to specific genders, and unfortunately to the extent whereby femininity (or masculinity, for that matter) becomes defined by the very products it supports, and society willingly endorses such practices. Paradoxically and disturbingly, females do too, albeit, in most circumstances, not of their own consent. Why?

To answer this question prompts an understanding of “ideology” as a concept that is central to Marxist literary criticism. Louis Althusser (1970) describes ideology as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” which shields authenticity behind a veneer of what is “socially-acceptable” or “correct”. In its original inception, ideology purposed to frame capitalism as an hidden evil – the silent enemy, and justify some communist epiphany of sorts. Placed against a modern context, however, it normalizes gender roles as what is supposedly a natural state of social tension between the sexes. Historical influences of ultra-conservative systems of patriarchy (which could be as subtle as male-only hunting parties, and more recently and perhaps controversially, the authority and power structures within a family unit) feeding into this existing narrative only clouds it with even more additional biases against women. This means that even female communities face overwhelming difficulties in escaping this system of belief, by sheer virtue of the fact that it has become the dominant social order.

CONSUMERISM in a capitalist economy places immense importance on the ability of a commercial venture to mass market goods and services in pursuit of economic success. At its genesis advertisements bring some congruency to product and gender. In this early stage, the two elements (recall: think a frying pan and a female user) complement each other to present a cohesive and cogent impression that potential buyers feel comfortable viewing and processing, but ultimately remain distinct – the emphasis continues to remain on the product. That’s no longer the case, because consumerism and marketing have reached a threshold whereby gender is almost entirely assimilated into the product; that the artificial edifice of what it means to be “female” is constructed by commercial expedition. As such, female identity has been built and objectified (or, in the preferred terminology of Marx, “reified”) by the associations of branding a product to correspond to social conventions.

THEN, what is the message being proliferated? In Food and Love, writer Katherine Parkin (2006) highlights an advertising culture which embraces a feminine ideology of “sustained involvement in housework”, “marriage, motherhood”, and “deference to male desires”. The incessant perpetuation of such gender stereotypes through advertisements and mass marketing establishes an equilibrium of power that is quite ironically imbalanced against females. Them being placed on the back foot results not in structural discrimination, but a delicate and stealthy infiltration of how we perceive the social environment surrounding ourselves – definitely in some contributing manner producing the glass ceiling in workplace situations, or influencing as foundational and cardinal aspects as behavioral tendencies. The function of ideology explicated in Marxist theory preserves this equilibrium, and any resistance is labeled disruptive and rebellious to what is self-righteously “normal”.

Sources

Althusser, L. (1970). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. France: Retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm

Marx, K. (1859). A contribution to the critique of political economy. (p. i-ii). Moscow: Progress Publishers. Retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

Parkin, K. (2006). Food is love. (p. 66, 129, 139). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Retrieved from http://books.google.com.sg/books?hl=en&lr=&id=0IodJ2vuQjYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=advertisements and gender roles&ots=ce90U_xRyX&sig=nX3ymNPRF8csM7DPGfGCB8su02o

A Defense of Political Literature

LITERATURE exists as a highly dynamic element: subversive and insurrectionary, yet at times equally obedient and conformist to social conventions. French critic Jacques Ranciere (2006) describes the great extent to which literature is intimately attached to politics as comparable to a strongly resilient relationship where “literature does politics by simply being literature,” (Politics of Literature, p. 3-4). We can hardly deny the presence of fundamental political element core to works of literature – whether we choose to acknowledge its capacity is really another matter altogether.

Perhaps an intuitive beginning would be to establish some key definitions as a basis for discussion: that this specific concept of “politics” in question exists beyond artificial constructions of society which readers generally associate to characters of “government” and “public sector”: bureaucracy, systems, rulership and the like. Rather, it considers the intricate connections of power and authority between various social groups and attitudes. An area of concern, thus, is the predicament of what we refer to as “minority” – not necessarily a purely numerical minority, but in general collectives that suffer from misrepresentation (or none at all) and have little to no political influences as opposed to the “majority”. This is exceedingly different from the principles of liberal humanism, which concern attempts to elicit literary value grounded in objectivity and an isolationist position detached from all worldly influences. For instance, New Critics W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley (1954) highlight that the essence of literature exists in a sovereign sphere of language, independent of exoteric pressures:

…[The text] is not the critic’s own and not the author’s… it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle. (The Intentional Fallacy, p. 3-6)

In all interests of a publication whose subject-matter is indeed political literature, we reject this.

THERE are several foundational assumptions to be made. Here, the first axiomatic premise is therefore that literary value is largely grounded in the political significance it encapsulates. This is an understanding that literature and politics cannot be perceived as an exclusive, separable duality – it is mutually complementary, and this is the lens we ought to apply – well, at least insofar as we talk about political literature.

Admittedly, given the prevalence and widespread application of liberal humanist approaches to literature, particularly in modern systems of education, the utterly foreign notion of evaluating literary expression by a political metric is very understandably alien to us. Yet, there are significantly viable reasons for such a position. Let’s start from the basic premise that literature in general fulfills a rather functional purpose of conveying the complex nuances of the human condition: as a unique manifestation of behavior, thought, emotion, our interactions with self and other. In fact, this characterization of literature and its utility as an exhibition of sociological tendencies and feelings (which, a liberal humanist would assert, are universal properties of humanity and transcendental to practical implications) is one we’ve been exposed to somewhat frequently, especially when put in comparison to my current attempts to steer literature towards some form of heterotelic, political conclusion.

The construction of our human identity and associations in society, however, is to a considerably large extent defined by the very society and social circumstances in which this process of meaning-making occurs within, since the facilitative institutions and structures that serve to assist in that precise development inevitably nudge us towards certain inclinations as well (For example, schools and teaching, media, the legislative and judicial framework – and so on; all of which shape our existence and beliefs). Therefore, any attempt to discuss literature and literary importance in can effectively be an extrapolation to a very political angle

Secondly, if literature determines what is natural, and politics are primarily interactions within a network of power, then logically the powerful dictate the narrative of society through control of literary expression, because they maintain a monopoly of coercive power over the mechanisms of state, including the authority to censorship and other such regulatory measures. These are in essence political instruments whose jurisdiction extends far beyond the boundaries of literature, and in order to judge the value of something literary, it is equally, if not more, critical and practical to consider their resultant political products as well. Similarly, feminist critic Dale Splender (1981) views the prominence of patriarchy as a direct consequence of literature:

…The monopoly over language is one of the means by which males have ensured their own primacy, and consequently have ensured the invisibility or ‘other’ nature of females… For females, the only semantic space in English is negative. (Man Made Language, p. 12, p. 161)

UNSURPRISINGLY, a lot, if not all, of the aforementioned are extremely debatable, but necessary nonetheless to inaugurate some launchpad of sorts for further propositions.

Sources

Ranciere, J. (2006). Politics of literature. (pp. 3-4). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Splender, D. (1981). Man made language. (p. 12, 161). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited. Retrieved from http://books.google.com.sg/books/about/Man_made_language.html?id=4Vc9AAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y

Wimsatt, W. K., & Beardsley, M. C. (1954). The intentional fallacy. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Retrieved from http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/seminar/Fallacy.htm