© Mukesh Williams 2010
Foucault understands Kantian enlightenment as blackmail. For Kant enlightenment is an “exit” and a “way out.” It is a “difference” that the present introduces with respect to the past. Therefore Kant’s Enlightenment is located “at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history.”
DISCURSIVE SYSTEMS
Foucault believes that certain discursive systems—the ways in which objects, concepts, and enumerative modalities are organized—generate specific strategies that are finally embodied in themes and theories. He talks about a diffraction in discourse when two incompatible objects or concepts emerge under similar conditions and occupy the same discursive space (either/or). However, the conditions that become a part of the discourse exist outside the discourse as a kind of discursive constellation. Discourses are also shaped by authority which decides who can say and who can spend. The field of authority is in turn governed to some extent by the field of desire—fantasy, forbidden and satisfaction.
KANT’S PERMANENT CRITIQUE OF HISTORY
Kant introduced a new kind of philosophical inquiry in western thought that reflects upon man’s relationship to the present, his historical mode of being and his individual self as an autonomous subject. Kant according to Foucault introduced a permanent critique of our history and changed the philosophical environment we inherit. According to Foucault we should not get trapped in either accepting or denying the project of Enlightenment. Instead we should see it as an ongoing critique of our historical practices.
ENLIGHTENMENT AND HUMANISM
Foucault points out that we should differentiate between the concept of Enlightenment and humanism. The notion of humanism comes from religions, science and politics. The concept of humanism enters religion and ideology—whether it is Christian humanism or Nazi humanism—and creates a conception of man. Enlightenment forces us to reinvent ourselves, while humanism gives us an unexamined conception of man. Enlightenment does not seek “formal structures with universal values” but investigates into the nature of events—as to how we think and what we do with our thinking. It functions as archeology, design and method not as metaphysics or moral action which is the domain of humanism.
Foucault argues that there is no “complete or definitive knowledge” of our historical limitations. However in spite of knowing this we still wish to go beyond it. And this is seen as a contradiction in Foucault’s epistemology and thought. Foucault wants us to believe that though we do not have a definitive knowledge of our historical condition we always want to begin anew. We always wish to critique the present.
HABERMAS AND TAYLOR
Foucault has been criticized by Jurgen Habermas for his lack of normative standards in his philosophical inquiry. How can we have a permanent critique of power without an analysis of truth inquires Habermas. Charles Taylor talks about rescuing freedom and truth from a discourse of discursive practices and power. The claims to power, Taylor argues, belongs to a linguistic field from which categories of truth and freedom cannot be excluded. How can we understand Foucault if he does not deal with our liberation from dominating forms of power? If we talk of illusion, mask or disguise that control us, then we should also talk about a standard of truth that can be used in unmasking them. A Foucauldian irony which does not take sides is not enough to resolve our dilemma. There should be one standard to critique the present otherwise it becomes a totalitizing exercise of philosophy. If there is no single standard we would lack a position from which to judge. A panoptical gaze is not enough.
STYLE OF DISRUPTION
The argument against the objections to Foucault is that such criticism forces him into a binary opposition. Foucault himself considers these objections a kind of Enlightenment blackmail. He interrogates the multiple uses of language by interrupting the epistemological, normative and rhetorical narrative through different claims on the subject. He asks questions to show how social practices shape us, bind us and limit our understanding of self, truth and rationality. His style of disruption follows earlier iconoclastic philosophers such as Socrates and Nietzsche. He is not anti-self. We can see in his writings that on the one hand he ridicules and dismisses the self that has come about as a result of power-knowledge regime, but on the other hand allows the self to establish a relationship with itself in an act of reconstitution. There are some pro-Foucauldian scholars who see Foucault’s language and lack of a single standard as exciting us into action rather than limiting us into inaction.
MODERNITY
We can understand Foucault better if we see his understanding of modernity as an attitude, an ethos—“a mode of relating to contemporary reality.” Modern man therefore constantly tires to “invent himself” and produce himself; he does not possess an essence. So producing and inventing ourselves is what ethics means.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
Geertz and Foucault: Culture and Symbolic Anthropology
Mukesh Williams
The interrogation of alien cultures from the standpoint of the west was further aided by the rise of symbolic anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. Symbolic anthropology significantly influenced cultural poetics which later came to be known as new historicism. American anthropologist and liberal humanist Clifford Geertz simultaneously confronted the data collecting approach in social sciences and the universalizing discourses of Marxism. He explained culture as symbolic "patterns of meaning" that men and women employ to communicate and develop "attitudes toward life." His ethnographic model employed "thick description" to explain social expressions of an alien culture that were somewhat confusing and enigmatical to the Western mind.
In the opening essay, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture," Geertz remarks, "Analysis is sorting out the structures of signification--what Ryle called established codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it makes the enterprise sound too much like that of the cipher clerk when it is much more like that of the literary critic--and determining their social ground and import"(p. 9). This statement had a great impact upon the method and procedures of both anthropologists and literary critics in the middle of 1970s (Geertz, 1973 9).
Geertz in After the Fact elaborates upon the post-positivist critique of empirical realism, which questioned the traditional theories of truth and knowledge and introduced an indefinite "quest" after the fact in anthropology (Geertz, 1996 168). In the beginning symbolic anthropology was "suspected as European, literary, or worse, philosophical." And to quite an extent these suspicions were well founded. In an attempt to restructure anthropology and formulate graduate programs in it, anthropologists overhauled curricula driven beyond the boundaries of their discipline into an area of new intellectual practices arising out of a combination of "the linguistic, the interpretative, the social constructionist, the new historicist, the rhetorical, or the semiotic"(Geertz 1996 114).
Now the ethnographer's task was not only to re-conceptualize his discipline but to adapt the new methodologies to his discipline. In Available Light, Geertz explores issues in political philosophy, religion and psychology through a postmodernist and multi-cultural perspective. Here he brings to the surface the symbolic significance of the concepts of nation, country, identity or self and how their unstable meanings change through time and place. But he makes an interesting remark in the beginning of the book, which would gladden the hearts of literary critics. Geertz wrote,
A lot of people don't quite know where they are going, I suppose; but I don't even know, for certain, where I have been. But all right already. I've tried virtually every other literary genre at one time or another. I might as well try Bildungsroman (Geertz, 2000 3).
Geertz's light-hearted statement of becoming a novelist and writing a bildungsroman has far-reaching implication both for anthropology and literature. A bildungsroman narrates the story of the psychological development and moral education of its protagonist, and now anthropology is called upon to do the same. The thin margin that once separated the imaginative text of a writer and the scientific text of an anthropologist has almost disappeared by now.
The interpretative and exhaustive method of anthropology was quickly appropriated by cultural historians, and subsequently by literary critics, more as a narrating practice than as a cultural theory. Literary critics particularly employed the interpretative narrative technique of this ethnographic model to understand literary culture and the literary ethos. Interestingly Geertz's interpretative ethnography was criticized within the field of anthropology by fellow anthropologists as reducing economic and material conflicts in society to impressionistic understanding of local cultures. His use of thick description failed to relate "cultural texts" to a larger tradition of literary, economic and social change.
The Geertzian method of finding indigenous cultural significance to the exclusion of social laws has drawn criticism from critics such as Roger Keesing, Dominick La Capra, Vincent Pecora and Aletta Biersack (Pecora, 1989 243-276). These critics point out that culture can be both mazes of "mystification" or streets of signification. It all depends on who constructs cultural meaning and interprets culture; and what are his ulterior motives.
Naturally new historicist practices have also come under attack. Hayden White in Tropics of Discourse sees literary conventions and linguistic constraints impacting on the writing of history (White, 1978; 1987). The historical discourse now becomes a narrative prose discourse that represents past structures as models in order to explain their meaning. In Metahistory, White sees the historian functioning as a chronicler of events that happened in the past and constructing a story from it (White, 1973). The controversy about the new methodology continues. The linguistic turn towards culture in history, sociology and anthropology has been dealt with exhaustively in Beyond the Cultural Turn which analyses different aspects of the narrative mode and offers a postmodernist critique of knowledge seeing the body and self as important sites intersecting culture and society (Bonnell and Hunt, 1999). Walter Cohen sees the new historicist reliance on "arbitrary connectedness" between different aspects of social reality as a significant lack of an "organizing principle" (Cohen, 1987 34).
The interrogation of alien cultures from the standpoint of the west was further aided by the rise of symbolic anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. Symbolic anthropology significantly influenced cultural poetics which later came to be known as new historicism. American anthropologist and liberal humanist Clifford Geertz simultaneously confronted the data collecting approach in social sciences and the universalizing discourses of Marxism. He explained culture as symbolic "patterns of meaning" that men and women employ to communicate and develop "attitudes toward life." His ethnographic model employed "thick description" to explain social expressions of an alien culture that were somewhat confusing and enigmatical to the Western mind.
In the opening essay, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture," Geertz remarks, "Analysis is sorting out the structures of signification--what Ryle called established codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it makes the enterprise sound too much like that of the cipher clerk when it is much more like that of the literary critic--and determining their social ground and import"(p. 9). This statement had a great impact upon the method and procedures of both anthropologists and literary critics in the middle of 1970s (Geertz, 1973 9).
Geertz in After the Fact elaborates upon the post-positivist critique of empirical realism, which questioned the traditional theories of truth and knowledge and introduced an indefinite "quest" after the fact in anthropology (Geertz, 1996 168). In the beginning symbolic anthropology was "suspected as European, literary, or worse, philosophical." And to quite an extent these suspicions were well founded. In an attempt to restructure anthropology and formulate graduate programs in it, anthropologists overhauled curricula driven beyond the boundaries of their discipline into an area of new intellectual practices arising out of a combination of "the linguistic, the interpretative, the social constructionist, the new historicist, the rhetorical, or the semiotic"(Geertz 1996 114).
Now the ethnographer's task was not only to re-conceptualize his discipline but to adapt the new methodologies to his discipline. In Available Light, Geertz explores issues in political philosophy, religion and psychology through a postmodernist and multi-cultural perspective. Here he brings to the surface the symbolic significance of the concepts of nation, country, identity or self and how their unstable meanings change through time and place. But he makes an interesting remark in the beginning of the book, which would gladden the hearts of literary critics. Geertz wrote,
A lot of people don't quite know where they are going, I suppose; but I don't even know, for certain, where I have been. But all right already. I've tried virtually every other literary genre at one time or another. I might as well try Bildungsroman (Geertz, 2000 3).
Geertz's light-hearted statement of becoming a novelist and writing a bildungsroman has far-reaching implication both for anthropology and literature. A bildungsroman narrates the story of the psychological development and moral education of its protagonist, and now anthropology is called upon to do the same. The thin margin that once separated the imaginative text of a writer and the scientific text of an anthropologist has almost disappeared by now.
The interpretative and exhaustive method of anthropology was quickly appropriated by cultural historians, and subsequently by literary critics, more as a narrating practice than as a cultural theory. Literary critics particularly employed the interpretative narrative technique of this ethnographic model to understand literary culture and the literary ethos. Interestingly Geertz's interpretative ethnography was criticized within the field of anthropology by fellow anthropologists as reducing economic and material conflicts in society to impressionistic understanding of local cultures. His use of thick description failed to relate "cultural texts" to a larger tradition of literary, economic and social change.
The Geertzian method of finding indigenous cultural significance to the exclusion of social laws has drawn criticism from critics such as Roger Keesing, Dominick La Capra, Vincent Pecora and Aletta Biersack (Pecora, 1989 243-276). These critics point out that culture can be both mazes of "mystification" or streets of signification. It all depends on who constructs cultural meaning and interprets culture; and what are his ulterior motives.
Naturally new historicist practices have also come under attack. Hayden White in Tropics of Discourse sees literary conventions and linguistic constraints impacting on the writing of history (White, 1978; 1987). The historical discourse now becomes a narrative prose discourse that represents past structures as models in order to explain their meaning. In Metahistory, White sees the historian functioning as a chronicler of events that happened in the past and constructing a story from it (White, 1973). The controversy about the new methodology continues. The linguistic turn towards culture in history, sociology and anthropology has been dealt with exhaustively in Beyond the Cultural Turn which analyses different aspects of the narrative mode and offers a postmodernist critique of knowledge seeing the body and self as important sites intersecting culture and society (Bonnell and Hunt, 1999). Walter Cohen sees the new historicist reliance on "arbitrary connectedness" between different aspects of social reality as a significant lack of an "organizing principle" (Cohen, 1987 34).
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Postmodern Philosophy: On Bernstein's The New Constellation
A Brief Note
Mukesh Williams June 2010
In short, one might say that once 'we' fully experience the rupture that has occurred with the 'postmodern' moment, once 'we' grasp the full force and sting of the critiques of humanism that trace their lineage to Nietzsche, then even the 'non-foundational pragmatic humanism' which I had been developing must be discarded--thrown into the abyss of failed metaphysical and philosophical projects. Needless to say I do not accept this judgment nor am I impressed by what has now become a cliché among many ‘post-modern’ writers, i. e., that humanism is passé, to be dismissed by laughter. But I do recognize that these critiques and deconstructions call for a strong response.
--Richard Bernstein, The New Constellation , 1992
In the book New Constellation Richard Bernstein examines the ethical and political dimensions of the modern-postmodern debate. Bernstein argues that the debate must be understood more as a protean “pervasive” mood created by thinkers like Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Rorty and MacIntyre than an intellectual revolt. However he admits that these ideas have had a profound impact on the culture of thinking in our times. Their contributions have created a distinctive constellation of ideas in the realm of politics and ethics and renewed the old Socratic inquiry ‘How should I live?’ The image of the constellation holds the book together after the emergence of the postmodern stimmung or mood. In Hegelian terms post-modern philosophy keeps the ‘other’ as other, since the postmodern negation of reason does not help it to provide a unified whole. Bernstein questions the post-ness of post in the word postmodern and suggests a more pluralist world of ideas that could involve some kind of integration with other philosophical notions that came earlier. The highly illuminating sections in the book deal with Heidegger’s concept of technology and his unwillingness to disown a contentious Nazi past and Rorty’s liberalist utopia and anti-foundationalist ideas. It is possible to understand through this book some of the forces that shaped the Anglo-American and Continental traditions in our times.
Mukesh Williams June 2010
In short, one might say that once 'we' fully experience the rupture that has occurred with the 'postmodern' moment, once 'we' grasp the full force and sting of the critiques of humanism that trace their lineage to Nietzsche, then even the 'non-foundational pragmatic humanism' which I had been developing must be discarded--thrown into the abyss of failed metaphysical and philosophical projects. Needless to say I do not accept this judgment nor am I impressed by what has now become a cliché among many ‘post-modern’ writers, i. e., that humanism is passé, to be dismissed by laughter. But I do recognize that these critiques and deconstructions call for a strong response.
--Richard Bernstein, The New Constellation , 1992
In the book New Constellation Richard Bernstein examines the ethical and political dimensions of the modern-postmodern debate. Bernstein argues that the debate must be understood more as a protean “pervasive” mood created by thinkers like Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Rorty and MacIntyre than an intellectual revolt. However he admits that these ideas have had a profound impact on the culture of thinking in our times. Their contributions have created a distinctive constellation of ideas in the realm of politics and ethics and renewed the old Socratic inquiry ‘How should I live?’ The image of the constellation holds the book together after the emergence of the postmodern stimmung or mood. In Hegelian terms post-modern philosophy keeps the ‘other’ as other, since the postmodern negation of reason does not help it to provide a unified whole. Bernstein questions the post-ness of post in the word postmodern and suggests a more pluralist world of ideas that could involve some kind of integration with other philosophical notions that came earlier. The highly illuminating sections in the book deal with Heidegger’s concept of technology and his unwillingness to disown a contentious Nazi past and Rorty’s liberalist utopia and anti-foundationalist ideas. It is possible to understand through this book some of the forces that shaped the Anglo-American and Continental traditions in our times.
The Nakasendo Way
Mukesh Williams June 2010
No one inhabits these ancient highways
Except wildlife, words and emotions,
But the curve of the road, the wooden houses,
The stone steps, the steep climb,
And the unreachable horizon
Are still covered with heavy snow,
Pug-marked by raccoon dogs hunts,
Collaged with clog footprints
And terraced by winter blizzard.
Words can still recreate the history of
Matrimonial alliances, political intrigues
And economic transactions,
Emotions can still trace the travel of
Princess Kazunomiya from Kyoto to Edo
On the Hime no Kaido to marry a shogun
Leaving sentiment and family behind
Like a hungry animal, lost traveler or a storm,
To strengthen an empire, forfeit the self.
No one inhabits these ancient highways
Except wildlife, words and emotions,
But the curve of the road, the wooden houses,
The stone steps, the steep climb,
And the unreachable horizon
Are still covered with heavy snow,
Pug-marked by raccoon dogs hunts,
Collaged with clog footprints
And terraced by winter blizzard.
Words can still recreate the history of
Matrimonial alliances, political intrigues
And economic transactions,
Emotions can still trace the travel of
Princess Kazunomiya from Kyoto to Edo
On the Hime no Kaido to marry a shogun
Leaving sentiment and family behind
Like a hungry animal, lost traveler or a storm,
To strengthen an empire, forfeit the self.
Leslie Fiedler
(1917-2003)
There was something of
An attacking lion in him
He would take issues
To their precarious conclusions,
Till they were tamed or devoured.
When he closed his eyes
His memory circled
Like an eagle in the clouds
Wrenching details from a vast repertoire
To support his argument.
Sentences flowed from his mouth
Just as they did from his pen
But he was a stickler for details,
He just had to revise everything
No less than seven to eight times.
A hard man to work with
But if you were patient,
Willing to learn and
Did not give up half-way,
He could teach you things
That perhaps no man could.
His pugnacity and prowess
Was stranger than fiction
He was always making bold plans
To cross the border, close the gap,
Scrupulously surveying the terra incognita
Like a lion, eagle or a mahatma.
April 2006, Tokyo
There was something of
An attacking lion in him
He would take issues
To their precarious conclusions,
Till they were tamed or devoured.
When he closed his eyes
His memory circled
Like an eagle in the clouds
Wrenching details from a vast repertoire
To support his argument.
Sentences flowed from his mouth
Just as they did from his pen
But he was a stickler for details,
He just had to revise everything
No less than seven to eight times.
A hard man to work with
But if you were patient,
Willing to learn and
Did not give up half-way,
He could teach you things
That perhaps no man could.
His pugnacity and prowess
Was stranger than fiction
He was always making bold plans
To cross the border, close the gap,
Scrupulously surveying the terra incognita
Like a lion, eagle or a mahatma.
April 2006, Tokyo
Geertz's Symbolic Anthropology and Foucault's Epistemic History
Symboloic Cultural Systems and Foucault's Epistemic History
© June 2010 Mukesh Williams
The anti-historicist idea of dealing with "a shared code" in medical and theatrical practices takes its cue from Geertz's notion of collective and symbolic cultural system and Foucault's epistemic rather than causal construction of history. In an essay "Return to History" published in Aesthetics, Method and Methodology, Foucault rejects historical causality in order to seek discontinuity and to find the emergence and center of an event. He concludes:
Structuralism, by defining transformations, and history, by describing types of events and different types of duration [duree], make possible both the appearance of discontinuities in history and the appearance of regular, coherent transformations. Structuralism and contemporary history are theoretical instruments by means of which one can--contrary to the old idea of continuity--really grasp both the discontinuity of events and the transformation of societies (Foucault, 1998 431).
In effect, Foucault argues that both the structuralist and historicist methodologies help us to understand the discontinuities of events and the change in societies.
The new historicist cultural model, however, seems to function within a closed ideological framework, quite similar to the framework built on formalist assumptions. If culture is a symbolically shared system then it is ideologically closed too. And if tropes are more important than causes, the critic analyzing the text in an intercultural framework becomes limited by the very nature of his singular perspective. Also cultural processes have an uncanny mind of their own, and are invariably incompatible with ideological conflict and change.
The ideological assumptions of new historicism and the models they used to analyze cultural processes limited the scope and nature of their analysis. Their study of European Renaissance drew upon the twin problems of ideology and resistance to ideology within a culture, which was later reframed in the binary terms of "containment" and "subversion." This was a procedure easy to apply but gave limited results as it was not sophisticated enough to encompass the subtle dynamics and change in cultural processes. But after nearly two decades these terms are seen as vestiges of a Cold War ideology somewhat incongruous to the globalizing processes of the post-Cold War era. And within Anglo-American criticism there seems to be a new shift in position, just as there is one in the ideological and psychological construction of the West after September 11, 2001 suicide attacks on American cities.
© June 2010 Mukesh Williams
The anti-historicist idea of dealing with "a shared code" in medical and theatrical practices takes its cue from Geertz's notion of collective and symbolic cultural system and Foucault's epistemic rather than causal construction of history. In an essay "Return to History" published in Aesthetics, Method and Methodology, Foucault rejects historical causality in order to seek discontinuity and to find the emergence and center of an event. He concludes:
Structuralism, by defining transformations, and history, by describing types of events and different types of duration [duree], make possible both the appearance of discontinuities in history and the appearance of regular, coherent transformations. Structuralism and contemporary history are theoretical instruments by means of which one can--contrary to the old idea of continuity--really grasp both the discontinuity of events and the transformation of societies (Foucault, 1998 431).
In effect, Foucault argues that both the structuralist and historicist methodologies help us to understand the discontinuities of events and the change in societies.
The new historicist cultural model, however, seems to function within a closed ideological framework, quite similar to the framework built on formalist assumptions. If culture is a symbolically shared system then it is ideologically closed too. And if tropes are more important than causes, the critic analyzing the text in an intercultural framework becomes limited by the very nature of his singular perspective. Also cultural processes have an uncanny mind of their own, and are invariably incompatible with ideological conflict and change.
The ideological assumptions of new historicism and the models they used to analyze cultural processes limited the scope and nature of their analysis. Their study of European Renaissance drew upon the twin problems of ideology and resistance to ideology within a culture, which was later reframed in the binary terms of "containment" and "subversion." This was a procedure easy to apply but gave limited results as it was not sophisticated enough to encompass the subtle dynamics and change in cultural processes. But after nearly two decades these terms are seen as vestiges of a Cold War ideology somewhat incongruous to the globalizing processes of the post-Cold War era. And within Anglo-American criticism there seems to be a new shift in position, just as there is one in the ideological and psychological construction of the West after September 11, 2001 suicide attacks on American cities.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Background
© June 2010 Mukesh Williams
1. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 1820 and the story takes place in a rural valley filled by a strange unearthly quiet. This place is near Tarry Town in the Catskill Mountains, of New York State. The short story is based on a German story but set in America. It reveals the conflict between different opposing themes—conflict between reason and superstition, city and country values, brain and physical strength, greed and love. It is also a story of greed and romance, of two young men wanting to marry the rich and beautiful village girl Katrina Van Tassel. The city man Ichabod Crane gets attracted to Katrina’s wealth and property but is chased away by Brom Bones who doubles up as the headless horseman. The story is full of humor and vivid description, the hallmark of Washington Irving’s story telling technique.
2. After four decades when the stories of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle were published in the Sketch Book, the readers in the United States and England loved both. Together the two stories laid the foundation of the growth of serious and literary narrative in American literature. In 1864 The Sleepy Hollow was published as an illustrated book and since then there have been many editions of the tale. Though Irving is largely forgotten today but his characters such as Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman have become a part of the American folklore and literary imagination.
Summary
3. The story is told in the first person by a man in a tavern called DK or Diedrich Knickerbocker, the fictional author of Irving’s earlier book. Before Washington Irving begins his story he wants to establish its authenticity by placing it amongst actual papers left by a man who is dead now. Placing a fantastic tale within the framework of day-to-day history makes the tale both dark and real.
The narrator places the story in a strange and comfortable Dutch village—“one of the quietest places in the whole world”—in a “remote” period of American history. It is not just a remote village but a magical village under the spell of a witch—“under the sway of some witching power that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in continual reverie.” The spookiness of the place has directly entered the American tradition of terror and incorporated in the Halloween.
4. The story is part of the papers left by the deceased Knickerbocker and begins with an idyllic poem where dreams float on a summer sky. The actual story begins by describing a market town called Tarry Town and its dreaming rural community. The pace is called Tarry Town as husbands here like to while away their time in taverns on market days. This town is protected from the natural elements by a cove. Not far from this cove is the Sleepy Hollow dozing peacefully by the Hudson River, untouched by time and modernization. The narrator finds the sleepy village so quiet on Sunday that when his hunting gun goes accidently off he feels irritated.
Ichabod Crane
5. Ichabod Crane comes from Connecticut to live in this enchanted village and work as a schoolteacher and singing instructor. His family name Crane suits him quite well as he is tall and lanky. He is also sharp-featured and wears clothes which are rather small for him. His ears are too big for his face. Though Crane is a strict teacher and liked well by his students and their parents he has no real friends in the community.
6. We must remember that in those days teachers were expected to hit their students when they misbehaved or made mistakes. Crane believed in the maxim “spare the rod and spoil the child.” But he did not physically punish weak students. Outside the premises of the school he was kind to his students and friendly with the old ones. He usually helped the younger students reach home safely and in the process he would often get a good dinner or meet their pretty sisters. He was more willing to “play” with the girls than with the boys. But this also shows his kind nature.
7. Though he was arrogant and pompous he treated his students fairly. He believes in the idea espoused by the Dutch school of Van Eyck that education must be imparted in strict and normative manner. He still kept his distance with his students, believing in the idea that there must be a civilized distance between the philosopher and the student. He did light chores for families and told entertaining stories and gossip to rural housewives. In return he got some food to eat and a place to stay. The simple village folks admired his intelligence and his erudition as he had “read several books.”
8. He wants to marry Katrina Van Tassel not because he loves her but because his father is wealthy. Ichabod also likes the food that is served at the Tassels. Katrina on the contrary prefers Brom Bones. Disappointed by her refusal Ichabod let’s his imagination run wild into the rural wilderness.
9. To add to his intense imagination is his interest in witches and witchcraft. His favorite book is Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft and no tale was “too gross or monstrous” to swallow. He was gullible by character and temperament.
Katrina Van Tassel
10. She is beautiful but coquettish. She knows her father is wealthy farmer and she is proud of it. She loves music and becomes a student of Ichabod. She plays with Ichabod but loves her roughneck suitor Brom Bones. She prefers physical strength and honesty to mental weakness and cunning. As she dances with Ichabod, Bones broods darkly in a corner. When the conversation turns to legends, Bones boasts of chasing the Headless Horseman a few nights but the specter always vanished in ball of fire when they approached the church bridge.
11. When Ichabod leaves the party with his nag Gunpowder he is chased by the headless horseman or Bones in disguise. As Ichabod races past the church bridge the specter throws his head at Ichabod. The schoolteacher is hit on the head and knocked off his horse. The next morning Gunpowder returns without his master. No one can find Ichabod but when they reach the bridge they discover Ichabod’s hat and a shattered pumpkin. Immediately thereafter, Bones and Katrina get married. When they talk of Ichabod, Bones gives a knowing laugh. Seemingly Ichabod destroyed himself because of his gullible character.
Romantic Fiction
12. The story possesses strong elements of romantic fiction. The love angle, two suitors, the presence of ghosts and supernatural events are the very essence of romantic stories. In the early nineteenth century many individualistic themes in America and Europe dealt with nature and death. There was a belief that emotions were more powerful than logic and dreams had greater significance than logical thinking. The Romantics as they were called also has a strong love for the supernatural.
13. The story of Sleepy Hollow has all these elements. It is not only set in rural and beautiful surroundings but is also quite romantic. The place is quiet and bucolic. You can hear the murmur of a brook, the whistle of a quail and the tapping of a woodpecker. The ghost story of the headless horseman is part of the ghost legends and typical of English Romanticism.
14. Irving was a romantic writer and was deeply influenced by the struggle between enlightenment values and puritan rules. He used nature and gothic imagery to impart a comfortable sense of the beautiful. But below this quiet the headless horseman gallops every night. The conflict between emotion and reason is highlighted by the fact that a very rational schoolteacher also comes to believe in ghost stories. By doing this Irving gives credence to the idea that such events cannot be completely understood by scientific and logical reasoning. Without wanting to he emphasizes the importance of emotion over reason.
City and Country life
15. The conflict between city and country is one of the great themes of American literature and folklore. In literature there are two sets of themes that are played out. The first scenario: The city is seen as civilized, rich and safe and country as ugly, dirty and dangerous. The second scenario: the city is dirty, swindling and dangerous while the country is simple and beautiful. Irving utilizes this city-country divide quite effectively in Sleepy Hollow.
16. During the early days of American colonization, the Dutch from the Netherlands settled in New York. In 1609 an English gentleman Hendrick Hudson who worked for the Dutch East India Company sailed from New York City to Albany along the Tappan Zee which we now call the Hudson River. The Dutch always laid claim to New York because of Hudson’s explorations under the Dutch East India Company. However NYC came under British control and subsequently under American domination and the Dutch lost their claims.
17. Irving wishes us to believe that the Sleepy Hollow is more in the domain of a legend than a myth. A legend is a narrative or tradition handed down from the past. It is distinguished from a myth by possessing more historical facts and less supernatural elements. Americans wish us to believe that Sleepy Hollow is a legend and not a myth.
Legends and Myths
18. The community of Sleepy Hollow abounds in legends handed down from the past. There is one legend of a German doctor bewitching the residents of the rural community. There is another one of an old Indian chief who cast a tranquil spell on the area. And there is the legend of the Hessian trooper who was decapitated during the Revolutionary War. He is occasionally seen riding at breakneck speed at night on his black horse searching for his head. Irving places his ordinary story of love and greed in such extraordinary surrounding creating horror and mystery in its telling.
Halloween in Sleepy Hollow
19. People today love to hold parties in the yard of the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow Country. After nearly 186 years of the writing of the spooky story, modern day fright seeks go to Tarrytown to catch a glimpse of the supernatural prowls. Between October 27th and 29th the Philipsburg Manor is lit by candle lanterns and bonfires to create a congenial atmosphere where ghouls, witches and apparitions can move freely. Even the pumpkin carvings and Headless horseman encounters are recreated for the fright seekers. In the beginning the area of Sleepy Hollow was an agricultural district but gradually it character changed and it became a manufacturing center producing steam-powered automobiles, shoes and batteries. Its proximity to Manhattan attracted the attention of American millionaires like Anson Phelps, Ambrose Kingsland and John D. Rockefeller who built grand mansions which are open to public viewing.
© June 2010 Mukesh Williams
1. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 1820 and the story takes place in a rural valley filled by a strange unearthly quiet. This place is near Tarry Town in the Catskill Mountains, of New York State. The short story is based on a German story but set in America. It reveals the conflict between different opposing themes—conflict between reason and superstition, city and country values, brain and physical strength, greed and love. It is also a story of greed and romance, of two young men wanting to marry the rich and beautiful village girl Katrina Van Tassel. The city man Ichabod Crane gets attracted to Katrina’s wealth and property but is chased away by Brom Bones who doubles up as the headless horseman. The story is full of humor and vivid description, the hallmark of Washington Irving’s story telling technique.
2. After four decades when the stories of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle were published in the Sketch Book, the readers in the United States and England loved both. Together the two stories laid the foundation of the growth of serious and literary narrative in American literature. In 1864 The Sleepy Hollow was published as an illustrated book and since then there have been many editions of the tale. Though Irving is largely forgotten today but his characters such as Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman have become a part of the American folklore and literary imagination.
Summary
3. The story is told in the first person by a man in a tavern called DK or Diedrich Knickerbocker, the fictional author of Irving’s earlier book. Before Washington Irving begins his story he wants to establish its authenticity by placing it amongst actual papers left by a man who is dead now. Placing a fantastic tale within the framework of day-to-day history makes the tale both dark and real.
The narrator places the story in a strange and comfortable Dutch village—“one of the quietest places in the whole world”—in a “remote” period of American history. It is not just a remote village but a magical village under the spell of a witch—“under the sway of some witching power that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in continual reverie.” The spookiness of the place has directly entered the American tradition of terror and incorporated in the Halloween.
4. The story is part of the papers left by the deceased Knickerbocker and begins with an idyllic poem where dreams float on a summer sky. The actual story begins by describing a market town called Tarry Town and its dreaming rural community. The pace is called Tarry Town as husbands here like to while away their time in taverns on market days. This town is protected from the natural elements by a cove. Not far from this cove is the Sleepy Hollow dozing peacefully by the Hudson River, untouched by time and modernization. The narrator finds the sleepy village so quiet on Sunday that when his hunting gun goes accidently off he feels irritated.
Ichabod Crane
5. Ichabod Crane comes from Connecticut to live in this enchanted village and work as a schoolteacher and singing instructor. His family name Crane suits him quite well as he is tall and lanky. He is also sharp-featured and wears clothes which are rather small for him. His ears are too big for his face. Though Crane is a strict teacher and liked well by his students and their parents he has no real friends in the community.
6. We must remember that in those days teachers were expected to hit their students when they misbehaved or made mistakes. Crane believed in the maxim “spare the rod and spoil the child.” But he did not physically punish weak students. Outside the premises of the school he was kind to his students and friendly with the old ones. He usually helped the younger students reach home safely and in the process he would often get a good dinner or meet their pretty sisters. He was more willing to “play” with the girls than with the boys. But this also shows his kind nature.
7. Though he was arrogant and pompous he treated his students fairly. He believes in the idea espoused by the Dutch school of Van Eyck that education must be imparted in strict and normative manner. He still kept his distance with his students, believing in the idea that there must be a civilized distance between the philosopher and the student. He did light chores for families and told entertaining stories and gossip to rural housewives. In return he got some food to eat and a place to stay. The simple village folks admired his intelligence and his erudition as he had “read several books.”
8. He wants to marry Katrina Van Tassel not because he loves her but because his father is wealthy. Ichabod also likes the food that is served at the Tassels. Katrina on the contrary prefers Brom Bones. Disappointed by her refusal Ichabod let’s his imagination run wild into the rural wilderness.
9. To add to his intense imagination is his interest in witches and witchcraft. His favorite book is Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft and no tale was “too gross or monstrous” to swallow. He was gullible by character and temperament.
Katrina Van Tassel
10. She is beautiful but coquettish. She knows her father is wealthy farmer and she is proud of it. She loves music and becomes a student of Ichabod. She plays with Ichabod but loves her roughneck suitor Brom Bones. She prefers physical strength and honesty to mental weakness and cunning. As she dances with Ichabod, Bones broods darkly in a corner. When the conversation turns to legends, Bones boasts of chasing the Headless Horseman a few nights but the specter always vanished in ball of fire when they approached the church bridge.
11. When Ichabod leaves the party with his nag Gunpowder he is chased by the headless horseman or Bones in disguise. As Ichabod races past the church bridge the specter throws his head at Ichabod. The schoolteacher is hit on the head and knocked off his horse. The next morning Gunpowder returns without his master. No one can find Ichabod but when they reach the bridge they discover Ichabod’s hat and a shattered pumpkin. Immediately thereafter, Bones and Katrina get married. When they talk of Ichabod, Bones gives a knowing laugh. Seemingly Ichabod destroyed himself because of his gullible character.
Romantic Fiction
12. The story possesses strong elements of romantic fiction. The love angle, two suitors, the presence of ghosts and supernatural events are the very essence of romantic stories. In the early nineteenth century many individualistic themes in America and Europe dealt with nature and death. There was a belief that emotions were more powerful than logic and dreams had greater significance than logical thinking. The Romantics as they were called also has a strong love for the supernatural.
13. The story of Sleepy Hollow has all these elements. It is not only set in rural and beautiful surroundings but is also quite romantic. The place is quiet and bucolic. You can hear the murmur of a brook, the whistle of a quail and the tapping of a woodpecker. The ghost story of the headless horseman is part of the ghost legends and typical of English Romanticism.
14. Irving was a romantic writer and was deeply influenced by the struggle between enlightenment values and puritan rules. He used nature and gothic imagery to impart a comfortable sense of the beautiful. But below this quiet the headless horseman gallops every night. The conflict between emotion and reason is highlighted by the fact that a very rational schoolteacher also comes to believe in ghost stories. By doing this Irving gives credence to the idea that such events cannot be completely understood by scientific and logical reasoning. Without wanting to he emphasizes the importance of emotion over reason.
City and Country life
15. The conflict between city and country is one of the great themes of American literature and folklore. In literature there are two sets of themes that are played out. The first scenario: The city is seen as civilized, rich and safe and country as ugly, dirty and dangerous. The second scenario: the city is dirty, swindling and dangerous while the country is simple and beautiful. Irving utilizes this city-country divide quite effectively in Sleepy Hollow.
16. During the early days of American colonization, the Dutch from the Netherlands settled in New York. In 1609 an English gentleman Hendrick Hudson who worked for the Dutch East India Company sailed from New York City to Albany along the Tappan Zee which we now call the Hudson River. The Dutch always laid claim to New York because of Hudson’s explorations under the Dutch East India Company. However NYC came under British control and subsequently under American domination and the Dutch lost their claims.
17. Irving wishes us to believe that the Sleepy Hollow is more in the domain of a legend than a myth. A legend is a narrative or tradition handed down from the past. It is distinguished from a myth by possessing more historical facts and less supernatural elements. Americans wish us to believe that Sleepy Hollow is a legend and not a myth.
Legends and Myths
18. The community of Sleepy Hollow abounds in legends handed down from the past. There is one legend of a German doctor bewitching the residents of the rural community. There is another one of an old Indian chief who cast a tranquil spell on the area. And there is the legend of the Hessian trooper who was decapitated during the Revolutionary War. He is occasionally seen riding at breakneck speed at night on his black horse searching for his head. Irving places his ordinary story of love and greed in such extraordinary surrounding creating horror and mystery in its telling.
Halloween in Sleepy Hollow
19. People today love to hold parties in the yard of the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow Country. After nearly 186 years of the writing of the spooky story, modern day fright seeks go to Tarrytown to catch a glimpse of the supernatural prowls. Between October 27th and 29th the Philipsburg Manor is lit by candle lanterns and bonfires to create a congenial atmosphere where ghouls, witches and apparitions can move freely. Even the pumpkin carvings and Headless horseman encounters are recreated for the fright seekers. In the beginning the area of Sleepy Hollow was an agricultural district but gradually it character changed and it became a manufacturing center producing steam-powered automobiles, shoes and batteries. Its proximity to Manhattan attracted the attention of American millionaires like Anson Phelps, Ambrose Kingsland and John D. Rockefeller who built grand mansions which are open to public viewing.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Tsuru in the Japanese Tradition
The Japanese Crane
© June 2010 Mukesh Williams
There is a saying in Japan that the tsuru (crane) lives for one thousand years while the kame (tortoise) for ten thousand. Both symbolize longevity and endurance. The crane is a strong and elegant bird which also represents honor and loyalty in Japan. It travels far and wide looking for food. It is believed that if someone folds one thousand cranes he can fulfill any wish.
The red-crowned Japanese crane is a migratory bird and is also called the Manchurian crane. It has a total population of 2700 in the world. In Japan where most cranes live, their population went down in the nineteenth century. In 1920 their number was recorded as 20. In Japan new protection measures including artificial breeding in winter has once more increased the population of cranes to 1200. The cranes feed on deep water marshes and often wander into dikes and agricultural fields foraging for food.
In Japanese tradition cranes are believed to bring prolonged existence and good fortune. They are therefore usually associated with weddings, family crests, tea ceremonies and traditional dresses. It is quite common to find cranes woven or crafted on kimonos, obis, temple wood carvings, chinaware, teapots, cups, stone and calendars. One of the Second World War Japanese victims Sadako Sasaki popularized the idea of folding one thousand cranes to fulfill a wish.
There is a legend in Japan of a crane wife symbolizing gratitude and skilled perfection. Once a young man freed a captive crane and in return she turned into a beautiful woman to marry him. Her only wish was that he would not look into her room at night what she was doing. Every night she would weave beautiful kimonos that everyone wanted. One day her husband out of curiosity peeped into the room and discovered she was a crane and was using her feathers to weave those beautiful kimonos. The story has different versions and one of the most popular ones is that of Osamu, the poor sailor and Yukiko the crane wife. Osamu takes care of a wounded crane that returns to him as Yukiko and weaves a magic sail that helps the couple to become rich temporarily. But one day he peeps into her work and she flies away.
© June 2010 Mukesh Williams
There is a saying in Japan that the tsuru (crane) lives for one thousand years while the kame (tortoise) for ten thousand. Both symbolize longevity and endurance. The crane is a strong and elegant bird which also represents honor and loyalty in Japan. It travels far and wide looking for food. It is believed that if someone folds one thousand cranes he can fulfill any wish.
The red-crowned Japanese crane is a migratory bird and is also called the Manchurian crane. It has a total population of 2700 in the world. In Japan where most cranes live, their population went down in the nineteenth century. In 1920 their number was recorded as 20. In Japan new protection measures including artificial breeding in winter has once more increased the population of cranes to 1200. The cranes feed on deep water marshes and often wander into dikes and agricultural fields foraging for food.
In Japanese tradition cranes are believed to bring prolonged existence and good fortune. They are therefore usually associated with weddings, family crests, tea ceremonies and traditional dresses. It is quite common to find cranes woven or crafted on kimonos, obis, temple wood carvings, chinaware, teapots, cups, stone and calendars. One of the Second World War Japanese victims Sadako Sasaki popularized the idea of folding one thousand cranes to fulfill a wish.
There is a legend in Japan of a crane wife symbolizing gratitude and skilled perfection. Once a young man freed a captive crane and in return she turned into a beautiful woman to marry him. Her only wish was that he would not look into her room at night what she was doing. Every night she would weave beautiful kimonos that everyone wanted. One day her husband out of curiosity peeped into the room and discovered she was a crane and was using her feathers to weave those beautiful kimonos. The story has different versions and one of the most popular ones is that of Osamu, the poor sailor and Yukiko the crane wife. Osamu takes care of a wounded crane that returns to him as Yukiko and weaves a magic sail that helps the couple to become rich temporarily. But one day he peeps into her work and she flies away.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
DISCOURSE ABOUT FOOD, MIDDLEMEN AND METAPHORS
FOUCAULT ON GREEK, CHRISTIAN, POSTMODERN CONCEPTIONS OF FOOD
© June 2010 Mukesh Williams
In Use of Pleasure Foucault explores the overarching discourse on food, the body and pleasures as a function of subjectivity and argues that the Greeks were quite preoccupied with the process of eating and yet their ethics emphasized the mastery of the self over appetites, pleasures and passions. The ethical substance in the Greek episteme was aphrodisia or the “acts, gestures, and contacts that produce a certain form of pleasure.” Aphrodisia were forms of pleasure associated with eating, drinking and sex. Though they are natural they need to be moderated. However early Christianity began to see a dichotomy between the carnal and the spiritual. It started to deny the natural appetites. Most of the modern scientific discourse about food and health was created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries out of the Christian religious and philosophical preoccupation with gluttony, indulgence and excess. This food and health discourse entered the social organization of home, school and hospital emphasizing nutrition as moral in nature. Children are often told to eat healthy food and avoid junk food and chocolates. Obesity is therefore occasionally referred to as moral laxity or degradation.
MIDDLEMEN
We should do away with middlemen that may enter between philosophers and their readers. Middlemen often adulterate food and convert accident into cuisine.
NIETZSCHE ON WORDS AND ORIGINAL ENTITIES
Nietzsche argues that though we use words to describe “original entities” and celebrate metaphors in poetry and rhetoric there is no clear one-to-one correspondence between metaphors and things. He writes,
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, 1873).
© June 2010 Mukesh Williams
In Use of Pleasure Foucault explores the overarching discourse on food, the body and pleasures as a function of subjectivity and argues that the Greeks were quite preoccupied with the process of eating and yet their ethics emphasized the mastery of the self over appetites, pleasures and passions. The ethical substance in the Greek episteme was aphrodisia or the “acts, gestures, and contacts that produce a certain form of pleasure.” Aphrodisia were forms of pleasure associated with eating, drinking and sex. Though they are natural they need to be moderated. However early Christianity began to see a dichotomy between the carnal and the spiritual. It started to deny the natural appetites. Most of the modern scientific discourse about food and health was created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries out of the Christian religious and philosophical preoccupation with gluttony, indulgence and excess. This food and health discourse entered the social organization of home, school and hospital emphasizing nutrition as moral in nature. Children are often told to eat healthy food and avoid junk food and chocolates. Obesity is therefore occasionally referred to as moral laxity or degradation.
MIDDLEMEN
We should do away with middlemen that may enter between philosophers and their readers. Middlemen often adulterate food and convert accident into cuisine.
NIETZSCHE ON WORDS AND ORIGINAL ENTITIES
Nietzsche argues that though we use words to describe “original entities” and celebrate metaphors in poetry and rhetoric there is no clear one-to-one correspondence between metaphors and things. He writes,
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, 1873).
Monday, June 14, 2010
Master Discourse
The Power of Master Discourse
Four Statements of Michel Foucault
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions."
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play)."
© 2010 Mukesh Williams
From time immemorial human beings have been fond of telling stories to each other. They have imagined their fears, anxieties, dreams, and have expressed them through words into a composite whole. From childhood to old age we are influenced by stories. We reject some stories as untrue and we accept some stories as true. There are, however, stories we accept tacitly without even analyzing such as “everyone must work hard” or “we are always progressing towards a better future.” Michael Foucault was the first thinker to unravel the power of such stories and their impact on our lives. He called these stories narratives and divided them into master narrative, minor narrative and counter narratives.
MASTER NARRATIVES
Master narratives are most powerful. They are the controlling discourses of modern societies, discourses such as self, ego, gender, class, race and nation. Though they are mostly imagined and constructed through language and signs they in due course acquire a social sanction and legality hard to refute or deny. They provide enormous benefits to the individual when they are followed and punishment when infringed.
Master narratives tell us that we are separate individuals and that our interests are often in opposition to others. The games we play when young teach us to win and take all. We are told not to help others in a competition as it breaks the rule. Winning in life matters and this is further reinforced by T.V. programs where winners are celebrated. We love competition. Our perceptions and language does not connect us with nature and with others but instead separates us from them. We do feel that love gives us happiness.
DERRIDA AND THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
Derrida tells us about the power of language. Language reinforces the separate self. It represents everything including ourselves as objects. Language uses signs and signs define objects against each other. White is understood against black. Our first personal narratives define boundaries through personal pronouns such as I, me and mine. These pronouns are different from you and yours.
Culture and society curtail our construction of an autonomous, free self. Though we use out skills, accomplishments, possessions and appearance to create ourselves in opposition to others, it leaves us dissatisfied as we feel we can do better or worse others can do better than us. Master narratives do not clearly define a referent to us which is in the final analysis no other than ourselves. On the one hand we are separate from others and on the other we are intrinsically connected to others. We depend on others for warmth, sustenance and support. Our DNA is connected to others. Our cells do not compete but cooperate.
THE DISCOURSE OF INDIVIDUALITY
Individuality is of recent origin. Before the eighteenth century, pre-modern Europe did not see individuality in a positive light. The medieval world saw a preordained hierarchy of kings, feudal lords and church functionaries running the world. This divine worldview was rigidly enforced and you did what your status allowed you to do. Your position in society was predetermined. If anything individual identity worked against you. The eighteenth century writers brought in reason and tried to decenter the master narrative of European aristocracy. The age of democracy developed the concept of the self and gave right to everyone to acquire power. Individualism became more powerful and began to involve creativity, autonomy and a unique personality. But events in Europe such as the Holocaust and existentialism revealed that we cannot escape our moral responsibility and freedom of choice. Even in mature democracies we find that our liberty and freedom are curtailed. Money and politics undermine democracy.
We believe that our understanding of a separate self is associated with notions of freedom and happiness. The notion of individuality though linked to free society and democracy has been forged in the fire of bloody revolutions which in turn has been influenced by counterrevolutions. Though we feel we are free individuals but we fail to create the world we envision. We also believe that competition is healthy. Freud legitimized the idea of the ego and our selfish motives. We feel that everyone must serve us and our needs. When we are infants we just live to satisfy our needs, functioning within an id. Gradually we develop a superego which stands for society. If we can successfully negotiate between id, ego and superego we can lead a healthy life; we can self-evaluate ourselves and self-improve ourselves regularly. The Freudian narrative continues to explain our separate selves as given and legitimate.
Foucault shows us that the ego narrative creates a psychological discourse that both limits and manipulates our freedom. Advertising, marketing and business strategies use methods to create desires and then force us to fulfill them. We think that we are free agents making informed choices. When we imagine ourselves as egos we see everything as an accessory to be used and do not find happiness in connecting with nature or others. Though we do not like to be called egoistic or selfish but in truth we are. As long as we believe that our self is separate from others we cannot but be self-centered.
The master narrative of the ego which is just an imagined idea sees others as objects either helping us in our goals or hindering us. We try to control others, denying them identity or personhood. We understand ego narratives to encompass group identity such as social cliques, tribes and nations and then construct our own sense of superiority and other’s inferiority. At the center of these identities are mental constructions comprising of words. We can create a world, which conforms better to our goals and aspirations.
GENDER ROLES
Gender is the fundamental expression of the ego narrative. Though gender undoubtedly has biological base it is predominantly cultural in nature. Gender generates different responses in people and a lot of it is inherited through language and socialization. We treat boys and girls differently. We hold boys facing outward and girls facing towards us, telling them how they should play their roles in society. Boys will find a place for themselves in the outer world, girls in the inner world. Blue blankets are for boys, pink for girls. Guns and tools are for boys; pretend jewelry and dolls for girls. The feminist movement beginning in the 1950s with Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique defined new gender roles for women. The slogan personal is political took women out into the market place and led them to self-actualize themselves. The Feminist movement of the 1970s tried to show that gender roles were more cultural than biological in nature. Women now acquired the foresight to become lawyers, scientists and teachers.
Obviously males and females are different but culture defines their roles more sharply. Most cultures spend more time in gender socialization. The master narrative tells us that males are expected to dominate women. Boys are therefore allowed to be aggressive, they are persuaded not to cry or be sissy. Women need love and companionship. The problem is that men too need the same. Western literature is filled with the heroic figure of the solitary male hero who seeks to conquer the world alone. We are told that only men face the problem of bonding with other males. Women by nature find it easier to bond with others.
The female narrative grows upon the notion that the feminine ideal embraces the male ego and, therefore, is the very opposite. Hiding below the feminine pursuit of beauty, pleasure and love for baubles is the feminine ideal of service, cooperation and communication. Early in life girls are taught to be cute, speak cheerfully and act caring. The stories told to girls and the games they are expected to play deal with romance and motherly love. They play with dolls to learn the art of mothering and later in life read romantic stories to find a prince charming. From their seniors, such as mother, sisters and friends, they learn to be seductive and by the time they are ready to marry they have become adept in playing psychological, domestic and sexual roles.
We often do not recognize that sexual morality and reproductive function embrace a created language of gender. There is no hierarchy in morality or biology. Male and female both work together to give birth to a child and there is no hierarchy in reproduction. The narrative of dominance does not help us to understand the intimate and the erotic in human relationships. The ego prevents us to participate freely in the emotions of ecstasy, wonder and beauty.
The female narrative also includes a separation of self and belief in order to win in society. Though women do not usually resort to violence they compete quite aggressively to become desirable as a woman or a mother. They also look for success by wearing alluring clothes and wanting an expensive house. They also compete with men in workplace and can ‘play the game’ of currying favor with their boss with equal finesse.
The Victorian model of morality and sexual ethics had once placed strict social control on the behavior of men and women. Promiscuity in men and coquetry in women were reproached. Though sexual behavior per se was freed from social control in the twentieth century we still feel sexual repression. Our heterosexual bias still plays a big role in determining our sexual preferences. We still have not been able to accept same sex love or other sexual relationships which we consider ‘abnormalities.’
SOCIAL CLASS
Social class constitutes another category of the master narrative. It believes in the survival of the fittest in society and has given greater preference to self-interest than to altruism. Biology however teaches us that cooperation amongst proteins is the key to the survival of living organisms. Our knowledge and belief teach us that we should take as much from nature as we can. The belief that our lives are separate from our surroundings allows us to take everything. Altruism is seen as a foolish thing. Only recently we have come to realize that nature is hitting back at us through global warming and climate change.
The ego narrative also creates an economic system based on the primacy of money and directed by self-achievement. The word economics comes fro the Greek word ekos and nomos which mean the rules of the house. House rules determine our economic relations and are therefore created by us. If we change our house rules (for example in communism) but do not change our master narrative of the ego we will not go far. Communism preaches that individuals can create their own rules through violent revolutions but since the ego narrative remains in communism, it provides a new hierarchy of corruption and economic inequality. However that does not mean that the home rule of capitalism or free enterprise is any better either.
Money decides who lives and who dies, who eats and who goes hungry, who gets education, health care and employment and who remains illiterate, sick and unemployed. Money also decides who can travel and enjoy life and who cannot. The narrative creates a moral climate that allows us to enjoy life without bothering about the poor and down trodden. The free market economy reminds us that by nature we are lazy. So greed is wonderful. The force that helps us over come our laziness is fear. Middle class fear the loss of their livelihood if they do not work hard while the upper class their position. The ego pushes us to get more in order to succeed, but still we need admiration and esteem. We acquire goods to satisfy our desire and get the admiration of others.
We rarely find democratic functioning of institutions. Instead we see people using social position and family connections to succeed. The ego narrative works against all principles of enlightenment. It works for personal gain against the common good. In terms of global relations ego gets translated into economic egoism of developed versus developing nations. Multinational organization use poor countries as a source of cheap labor and refuse bin for toxic wastes.
RACE
The master narrative of race gets linked to the ego narrative and tends to exploit others more savagely. Slavery had a great effect on the narrative of race. Africans and Europeans had a history of slavery in their own geographical regions for a long time. The development of maritime trade made possible the growth of inter-regional and intercontinental slavery. Once trading in black slaves began an attempt to justify such trade through scientific racism, eugenics or anthropology also began.
We do not just psychologically imagined Freudian egos but also biological agents looking for emotional comfort and a sense of community. Our post-Enlightenment culture reminds us through the constitutions that we are all equal—“we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Though on a fundamental level we believe that everyone is equal and that birthright does not count, we still see a different truth in the functioning of governments and social systems.
CONCLUSION
Through master narratives, especially through religious discourses and linguistic paradigms we perceive the world as a place, a terra firma, and the cosmos as the result of some first cause. We call it power, God or force. To be engaged with a subject whose subjectivity is greater than ours leads us into a reference area outside time, space, reason and human understanding. By the late seventeenth century a reaction set in against the kind of religious model. A new secular model used scientific evidence and logic to explain a new cosmology that conformed to human inquiry and laws. In Argument of the Second Epistle Alexander Pope asserted, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/The proper study of Mankind is Man.” Now the world of nature was seen as a big machine. Therefore a theory could be developed which could predict and control everything that happened in the future.
The secular model builds a moral world based on Emmanuel Kant’s notion of categorical imperative which posits a universal standard for individual behavior. Though this ethical principle keeps egoism in check by condemning corruption and deceit, it nonetheless perpetuates inequalities by allowing free competition and the victor take all syndrome. Scientific discourses teach us that nature does not function with a mind and we have no responsibility for the various problems of the world. Everything follows a certain law and we are not free to make a moral choice. Obviously all this is changing now. Both the Nobel Prize Committee and the Australian electorate are choosing people who highlight our responsibility for protecting nature. But these two paradigms are more intertwined than separate. There are post modern secularists who believe in the existence of radical evil and pre-modern religionists accepting democracy and human rights. National discourses also prevent us from seeing our larger identity as members of the planet earth.
The ego is more imagined than real. It is more cultural than biological. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre our ego depends on our consciousness and not the other way round. Both Foucault and Derrida unraveled the mysteries of the master narratives and decentered them for us. If we can change our notion of the ego and pick up other non-ego narratives can have more freedom and be happier.
Representing India: Literature, Politics and Identities
Four Statements of Michel Foucault
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions."
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play)."
© 2010 Mukesh Williams
From time immemorial human beings have been fond of telling stories to each other. They have imagined their fears, anxieties, dreams, and have expressed them through words into a composite whole. From childhood to old age we are influenced by stories. We reject some stories as untrue and we accept some stories as true. There are, however, stories we accept tacitly without even analyzing such as “everyone must work hard” or “we are always progressing towards a better future.” Michael Foucault was the first thinker to unravel the power of such stories and their impact on our lives. He called these stories narratives and divided them into master narrative, minor narrative and counter narratives.
MASTER NARRATIVES
Master narratives are most powerful. They are the controlling discourses of modern societies, discourses such as self, ego, gender, class, race and nation. Though they are mostly imagined and constructed through language and signs they in due course acquire a social sanction and legality hard to refute or deny. They provide enormous benefits to the individual when they are followed and punishment when infringed.
Master narratives tell us that we are separate individuals and that our interests are often in opposition to others. The games we play when young teach us to win and take all. We are told not to help others in a competition as it breaks the rule. Winning in life matters and this is further reinforced by T.V. programs where winners are celebrated. We love competition. Our perceptions and language does not connect us with nature and with others but instead separates us from them. We do feel that love gives us happiness.
DERRIDA AND THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
Derrida tells us about the power of language. Language reinforces the separate self. It represents everything including ourselves as objects. Language uses signs and signs define objects against each other. White is understood against black. Our first personal narratives define boundaries through personal pronouns such as I, me and mine. These pronouns are different from you and yours.
Culture and society curtail our construction of an autonomous, free self. Though we use out skills, accomplishments, possessions and appearance to create ourselves in opposition to others, it leaves us dissatisfied as we feel we can do better or worse others can do better than us. Master narratives do not clearly define a referent to us which is in the final analysis no other than ourselves. On the one hand we are separate from others and on the other we are intrinsically connected to others. We depend on others for warmth, sustenance and support. Our DNA is connected to others. Our cells do not compete but cooperate.
THE DISCOURSE OF INDIVIDUALITY
Individuality is of recent origin. Before the eighteenth century, pre-modern Europe did not see individuality in a positive light. The medieval world saw a preordained hierarchy of kings, feudal lords and church functionaries running the world. This divine worldview was rigidly enforced and you did what your status allowed you to do. Your position in society was predetermined. If anything individual identity worked against you. The eighteenth century writers brought in reason and tried to decenter the master narrative of European aristocracy. The age of democracy developed the concept of the self and gave right to everyone to acquire power. Individualism became more powerful and began to involve creativity, autonomy and a unique personality. But events in Europe such as the Holocaust and existentialism revealed that we cannot escape our moral responsibility and freedom of choice. Even in mature democracies we find that our liberty and freedom are curtailed. Money and politics undermine democracy.
We believe that our understanding of a separate self is associated with notions of freedom and happiness. The notion of individuality though linked to free society and democracy has been forged in the fire of bloody revolutions which in turn has been influenced by counterrevolutions. Though we feel we are free individuals but we fail to create the world we envision. We also believe that competition is healthy. Freud legitimized the idea of the ego and our selfish motives. We feel that everyone must serve us and our needs. When we are infants we just live to satisfy our needs, functioning within an id. Gradually we develop a superego which stands for society. If we can successfully negotiate between id, ego and superego we can lead a healthy life; we can self-evaluate ourselves and self-improve ourselves regularly. The Freudian narrative continues to explain our separate selves as given and legitimate.
Foucault shows us that the ego narrative creates a psychological discourse that both limits and manipulates our freedom. Advertising, marketing and business strategies use methods to create desires and then force us to fulfill them. We think that we are free agents making informed choices. When we imagine ourselves as egos we see everything as an accessory to be used and do not find happiness in connecting with nature or others. Though we do not like to be called egoistic or selfish but in truth we are. As long as we believe that our self is separate from others we cannot but be self-centered.
The master narrative of the ego which is just an imagined idea sees others as objects either helping us in our goals or hindering us. We try to control others, denying them identity or personhood. We understand ego narratives to encompass group identity such as social cliques, tribes and nations and then construct our own sense of superiority and other’s inferiority. At the center of these identities are mental constructions comprising of words. We can create a world, which conforms better to our goals and aspirations.
GENDER ROLES
Gender is the fundamental expression of the ego narrative. Though gender undoubtedly has biological base it is predominantly cultural in nature. Gender generates different responses in people and a lot of it is inherited through language and socialization. We treat boys and girls differently. We hold boys facing outward and girls facing towards us, telling them how they should play their roles in society. Boys will find a place for themselves in the outer world, girls in the inner world. Blue blankets are for boys, pink for girls. Guns and tools are for boys; pretend jewelry and dolls for girls. The feminist movement beginning in the 1950s with Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique defined new gender roles for women. The slogan personal is political took women out into the market place and led them to self-actualize themselves. The Feminist movement of the 1970s tried to show that gender roles were more cultural than biological in nature. Women now acquired the foresight to become lawyers, scientists and teachers.
Obviously males and females are different but culture defines their roles more sharply. Most cultures spend more time in gender socialization. The master narrative tells us that males are expected to dominate women. Boys are therefore allowed to be aggressive, they are persuaded not to cry or be sissy. Women need love and companionship. The problem is that men too need the same. Western literature is filled with the heroic figure of the solitary male hero who seeks to conquer the world alone. We are told that only men face the problem of bonding with other males. Women by nature find it easier to bond with others.
The female narrative grows upon the notion that the feminine ideal embraces the male ego and, therefore, is the very opposite. Hiding below the feminine pursuit of beauty, pleasure and love for baubles is the feminine ideal of service, cooperation and communication. Early in life girls are taught to be cute, speak cheerfully and act caring. The stories told to girls and the games they are expected to play deal with romance and motherly love. They play with dolls to learn the art of mothering and later in life read romantic stories to find a prince charming. From their seniors, such as mother, sisters and friends, they learn to be seductive and by the time they are ready to marry they have become adept in playing psychological, domestic and sexual roles.
We often do not recognize that sexual morality and reproductive function embrace a created language of gender. There is no hierarchy in morality or biology. Male and female both work together to give birth to a child and there is no hierarchy in reproduction. The narrative of dominance does not help us to understand the intimate and the erotic in human relationships. The ego prevents us to participate freely in the emotions of ecstasy, wonder and beauty.
The female narrative also includes a separation of self and belief in order to win in society. Though women do not usually resort to violence they compete quite aggressively to become desirable as a woman or a mother. They also look for success by wearing alluring clothes and wanting an expensive house. They also compete with men in workplace and can ‘play the game’ of currying favor with their boss with equal finesse.
The Victorian model of morality and sexual ethics had once placed strict social control on the behavior of men and women. Promiscuity in men and coquetry in women were reproached. Though sexual behavior per se was freed from social control in the twentieth century we still feel sexual repression. Our heterosexual bias still plays a big role in determining our sexual preferences. We still have not been able to accept same sex love or other sexual relationships which we consider ‘abnormalities.’
SOCIAL CLASS
Social class constitutes another category of the master narrative. It believes in the survival of the fittest in society and has given greater preference to self-interest than to altruism. Biology however teaches us that cooperation amongst proteins is the key to the survival of living organisms. Our knowledge and belief teach us that we should take as much from nature as we can. The belief that our lives are separate from our surroundings allows us to take everything. Altruism is seen as a foolish thing. Only recently we have come to realize that nature is hitting back at us through global warming and climate change.
The ego narrative also creates an economic system based on the primacy of money and directed by self-achievement. The word economics comes fro the Greek word ekos and nomos which mean the rules of the house. House rules determine our economic relations and are therefore created by us. If we change our house rules (for example in communism) but do not change our master narrative of the ego we will not go far. Communism preaches that individuals can create their own rules through violent revolutions but since the ego narrative remains in communism, it provides a new hierarchy of corruption and economic inequality. However that does not mean that the home rule of capitalism or free enterprise is any better either.
Money decides who lives and who dies, who eats and who goes hungry, who gets education, health care and employment and who remains illiterate, sick and unemployed. Money also decides who can travel and enjoy life and who cannot. The narrative creates a moral climate that allows us to enjoy life without bothering about the poor and down trodden. The free market economy reminds us that by nature we are lazy. So greed is wonderful. The force that helps us over come our laziness is fear. Middle class fear the loss of their livelihood if they do not work hard while the upper class their position. The ego pushes us to get more in order to succeed, but still we need admiration and esteem. We acquire goods to satisfy our desire and get the admiration of others.
We rarely find democratic functioning of institutions. Instead we see people using social position and family connections to succeed. The ego narrative works against all principles of enlightenment. It works for personal gain against the common good. In terms of global relations ego gets translated into economic egoism of developed versus developing nations. Multinational organization use poor countries as a source of cheap labor and refuse bin for toxic wastes.
RACE
The master narrative of race gets linked to the ego narrative and tends to exploit others more savagely. Slavery had a great effect on the narrative of race. Africans and Europeans had a history of slavery in their own geographical regions for a long time. The development of maritime trade made possible the growth of inter-regional and intercontinental slavery. Once trading in black slaves began an attempt to justify such trade through scientific racism, eugenics or anthropology also began.
We do not just psychologically imagined Freudian egos but also biological agents looking for emotional comfort and a sense of community. Our post-Enlightenment culture reminds us through the constitutions that we are all equal—“we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Though on a fundamental level we believe that everyone is equal and that birthright does not count, we still see a different truth in the functioning of governments and social systems.
CONCLUSION
Through master narratives, especially through religious discourses and linguistic paradigms we perceive the world as a place, a terra firma, and the cosmos as the result of some first cause. We call it power, God or force. To be engaged with a subject whose subjectivity is greater than ours leads us into a reference area outside time, space, reason and human understanding. By the late seventeenth century a reaction set in against the kind of religious model. A new secular model used scientific evidence and logic to explain a new cosmology that conformed to human inquiry and laws. In Argument of the Second Epistle Alexander Pope asserted, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/The proper study of Mankind is Man.” Now the world of nature was seen as a big machine. Therefore a theory could be developed which could predict and control everything that happened in the future.
The secular model builds a moral world based on Emmanuel Kant’s notion of categorical imperative which posits a universal standard for individual behavior. Though this ethical principle keeps egoism in check by condemning corruption and deceit, it nonetheless perpetuates inequalities by allowing free competition and the victor take all syndrome. Scientific discourses teach us that nature does not function with a mind and we have no responsibility for the various problems of the world. Everything follows a certain law and we are not free to make a moral choice. Obviously all this is changing now. Both the Nobel Prize Committee and the Australian electorate are choosing people who highlight our responsibility for protecting nature. But these two paradigms are more intertwined than separate. There are post modern secularists who believe in the existence of radical evil and pre-modern religionists accepting democracy and human rights. National discourses also prevent us from seeing our larger identity as members of the planet earth.
The ego is more imagined than real. It is more cultural than biological. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre our ego depends on our consciousness and not the other way round. Both Foucault and Derrida unraveled the mysteries of the master narratives and decentered them for us. If we can change our notion of the ego and pick up other non-ego narratives can have more freedom and be happier.
Representing India: Literature, Politics and Identities
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Utilitarianism and Utilitarian Education
© 2010 Mukesh Williams
Utilitarianism is a philosophy based on a minimalist view of human beings that explains human nature in terms of economic relations alone. It believes that the moral significance of an action is judged by its utility to people. Though it has many contradictions it was responsible, in some measure, for reforms in administration, sanitation and education. Utilitarianism promoted a theory of laissez faire and came to represent a streamlined civil service and centralized administration. G. D. Klingopulos highlights the contradiction in utilitarian thought by saying that though “in some matters, such as the agitation for cheap bread, the utilitarians were friends of the working man, in others, such as the regulation of conditions in factories, they were his enemies” (Klingopulos, 1970 30-31).
BENTHAM AND ADAM SMITH
It was difficult to reconcile the Bentham’s idea of general happiness, based on enlightened political and legal principles, and Adam Smith’s self-harmonizing economic principle of laissez-faire (minimum intervention from the law). Dickens seemed to be both a victim and a chronicler of a contradictory response to utilitarianism in Hard Times. This contradiction is evident both in his treatment of education and trade unionism.
Dickens’ polemical response to industrial growth, utilitarianism, capitalism, education, economic self-interest and trade unionism is also reflected in the novel through his representation of Coketown, Gradgrind, Bounderby, Mr. M’Choakumchild, Harthouse and Slackbridge.
COKETOWN
The redbrick Coketown is presented in the novel as soot-coated, black and savage. Its daily life is repetitive, monotonous and grinding (HT, p. 22). Both its streets and inhabitants have lost their uniqueness,
It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next (HT, p. 22).
The repeated use of the word “same” and the phrase “like one another” reveals both the tedium of Coketown and the drudgery of its inhabitants. In a prophetic vision at the end of the novel the author tells us that five years later Bounderby would die of a fit on these very streets (HT, pp. 217-8).
Everything in Coketown is “severely workful” and the idea of sameness extends to the eighteen churches of different “religious persuasions,” the jail, infirmary, town hall, school and cemetery. Its blasting furnaces become hot as hell and gas from them fills the air asphyxiating the people. In Dickens’ own words,
The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily. Stokers emerged from low underground doorways into factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals. The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoom: and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled languidly in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels (HT, pp. 85-6).
Dickens brings out the unreality of Coketown and its ominous power. It stands at the edge of doom stifling the lives of its inhabitants. Yes it’s the unreality of the town that stands out as if it seems that Dickens did not understand Coketown as well as London. The sense of intimacy, the closeness, the insider’s perspective is missing. The serialization technique and polemical confusion further limits his vision. However, in spite of the unreality of vision Coketown is definitely an ideal setting for the manifestation of a utilitarian philosophy.
SCOTTISH EDUCATION AND M’CHOAKUMCHILD
Dickens campaigned for structuring education and wished to do away with unqualified teachers in schools. He strongly felt the need to provide training to teachers. He introduced Mr. M’Choakumchild, fresh from a training college, accompanied by his wife, about to deliver his first classroom lecture. The satire, both in the choice of the name and presentation of character, seems inescapable. M’Choakumchild is after all a representative of a new school ideology. His Scottish-sounding name obviously refers to the import of trained Scottish teachers in English schools. Obviously M’Choakumchild possesses too much useless knowledge in his own conceited way. He bores and confuses his simple-minded but ignorant students. Dickens writes:
He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmology, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, M’Choakumchild (HT, p. 12).
M’Choakumchild’s “ten chilled fingers,” and his “stony way” point to the fact that though he may be extremely knowledgeable he has lost the ability to enjoy or make his innocent wards enjoy life. His hard facts stifle the imaginative “fancy” that is “lurking within” each child. Dickens concludes his sketch of M’Choakumchild by saying that, “If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!”
Through M’Choakumchild, Dickens expressed some of the popular criticism against training schools of the time. Dickens wanted training schools to instruct teachers in teaching methodology and help them to develop the intellect of children, not just impart some erudite scholarship. Educators felt that Dickens’ account of M’Choakumchild and the object lesson at Gradgrind School were only partially correct. Scuh presentation could be just Dickens’ own middle class emotional reaction to an educational system that he disliked. Monroe Engel believed that Dickens was not attacking but dissociating himself “fully and publicly from the Benthamites” (Engel, 1959 160-62).
THE ILL EFFECTS OF UTILIARIANISM
Chapter two of the novel is entitled “Murdering the Innocent” framed within one of the three sections of the book “Sowing.” The other two sections, “Reaping” and “Garnering” also come from an agricultural vocabulary—a vocabulary that describes, and sets in contrast, the mechanical world of Coketown. Klingopulos believes that the school setting and the title of the chapter help Dickens to “go beyond matters of economic theory to strike at those psychological and educational ideas, which formed the ‘philosophical’ part of utilitarianism” (Klingopulos, 1970 34). Gradgrind’s boast that he can easily reduce “any parcel of human nature” into “a case of simple arithmetic” underscores his cold intellectuality. Gradgrind’s over-confidence exemplifies the misguided belief of utilitarianism in the efficacy of their educational content and method at the primary level. Gradgrind is absolutely certain as to what the children require and the way it ought to be given to them. The vocabulary of Hard Times is loaded with this sentiment—children are passive “little vessels’ or “little pitchers” to pour utilitarian “facts” into. His approach stands in stark contrast to the understanding gained by the senses, based on feeling and mutual respect for others. The episode where Gradgrind asks Sissy to define a horse and Bitzer’s successful definition of it is an example of the twin approaches to life.
Benthamite utilitarianism argued for “the greatest good for the greatest number of people” but failed to realize it. Though few succeeded most people continued to live in grinding poverty. Dickens felt that there was more to life than just economic success. It was not just to brand the discontented and disenchanted as dregs of society and send them to prison. Bentham believed in moral principles and disciplinary institutions for the betterment of society. He campaigned for the building of Panopticon prison which allowed an observer to observe the prisoners without being noticed. Through this design Bentham wanted to bring about social and legal reform based on the concept of invisible omniscience. Foucault saw the Panopticon as a reflection of nineteenth century rule-based institutions to police the individual. The terrible discourse of state control does not result in human progress or happiness.
Works Cited
KLINGOPULOS, G. D. “Notes on the Victorian Scene,” in Boris Ford ed., The Pelican Guide to English Literature Volume 6. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970.
ENGEL, MONROE. Charles Dickens, Hard Times. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.
Utilitarianism is a philosophy based on a minimalist view of human beings that explains human nature in terms of economic relations alone. It believes that the moral significance of an action is judged by its utility to people. Though it has many contradictions it was responsible, in some measure, for reforms in administration, sanitation and education. Utilitarianism promoted a theory of laissez faire and came to represent a streamlined civil service and centralized administration. G. D. Klingopulos highlights the contradiction in utilitarian thought by saying that though “in some matters, such as the agitation for cheap bread, the utilitarians were friends of the working man, in others, such as the regulation of conditions in factories, they were his enemies” (Klingopulos, 1970 30-31).
BENTHAM AND ADAM SMITH
It was difficult to reconcile the Bentham’s idea of general happiness, based on enlightened political and legal principles, and Adam Smith’s self-harmonizing economic principle of laissez-faire (minimum intervention from the law). Dickens seemed to be both a victim and a chronicler of a contradictory response to utilitarianism in Hard Times. This contradiction is evident both in his treatment of education and trade unionism.
Dickens’ polemical response to industrial growth, utilitarianism, capitalism, education, economic self-interest and trade unionism is also reflected in the novel through his representation of Coketown, Gradgrind, Bounderby, Mr. M’Choakumchild, Harthouse and Slackbridge.
COKETOWN
The redbrick Coketown is presented in the novel as soot-coated, black and savage. Its daily life is repetitive, monotonous and grinding (HT, p. 22). Both its streets and inhabitants have lost their uniqueness,
It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next (HT, p. 22).
The repeated use of the word “same” and the phrase “like one another” reveals both the tedium of Coketown and the drudgery of its inhabitants. In a prophetic vision at the end of the novel the author tells us that five years later Bounderby would die of a fit on these very streets (HT, pp. 217-8).
Everything in Coketown is “severely workful” and the idea of sameness extends to the eighteen churches of different “religious persuasions,” the jail, infirmary, town hall, school and cemetery. Its blasting furnaces become hot as hell and gas from them fills the air asphyxiating the people. In Dickens’ own words,
The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily. Stokers emerged from low underground doorways into factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals. The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoom: and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled languidly in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels (HT, pp. 85-6).
Dickens brings out the unreality of Coketown and its ominous power. It stands at the edge of doom stifling the lives of its inhabitants. Yes it’s the unreality of the town that stands out as if it seems that Dickens did not understand Coketown as well as London. The sense of intimacy, the closeness, the insider’s perspective is missing. The serialization technique and polemical confusion further limits his vision. However, in spite of the unreality of vision Coketown is definitely an ideal setting for the manifestation of a utilitarian philosophy.
SCOTTISH EDUCATION AND M’CHOAKUMCHILD
Dickens campaigned for structuring education and wished to do away with unqualified teachers in schools. He strongly felt the need to provide training to teachers. He introduced Mr. M’Choakumchild, fresh from a training college, accompanied by his wife, about to deliver his first classroom lecture. The satire, both in the choice of the name and presentation of character, seems inescapable. M’Choakumchild is after all a representative of a new school ideology. His Scottish-sounding name obviously refers to the import of trained Scottish teachers in English schools. Obviously M’Choakumchild possesses too much useless knowledge in his own conceited way. He bores and confuses his simple-minded but ignorant students. Dickens writes:
He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmology, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, M’Choakumchild (HT, p. 12).
M’Choakumchild’s “ten chilled fingers,” and his “stony way” point to the fact that though he may be extremely knowledgeable he has lost the ability to enjoy or make his innocent wards enjoy life. His hard facts stifle the imaginative “fancy” that is “lurking within” each child. Dickens concludes his sketch of M’Choakumchild by saying that, “If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!”
Through M’Choakumchild, Dickens expressed some of the popular criticism against training schools of the time. Dickens wanted training schools to instruct teachers in teaching methodology and help them to develop the intellect of children, not just impart some erudite scholarship. Educators felt that Dickens’ account of M’Choakumchild and the object lesson at Gradgrind School were only partially correct. Scuh presentation could be just Dickens’ own middle class emotional reaction to an educational system that he disliked. Monroe Engel believed that Dickens was not attacking but dissociating himself “fully and publicly from the Benthamites” (Engel, 1959 160-62).
THE ILL EFFECTS OF UTILIARIANISM
Chapter two of the novel is entitled “Murdering the Innocent” framed within one of the three sections of the book “Sowing.” The other two sections, “Reaping” and “Garnering” also come from an agricultural vocabulary—a vocabulary that describes, and sets in contrast, the mechanical world of Coketown. Klingopulos believes that the school setting and the title of the chapter help Dickens to “go beyond matters of economic theory to strike at those psychological and educational ideas, which formed the ‘philosophical’ part of utilitarianism” (Klingopulos, 1970 34). Gradgrind’s boast that he can easily reduce “any parcel of human nature” into “a case of simple arithmetic” underscores his cold intellectuality. Gradgrind’s over-confidence exemplifies the misguided belief of utilitarianism in the efficacy of their educational content and method at the primary level. Gradgrind is absolutely certain as to what the children require and the way it ought to be given to them. The vocabulary of Hard Times is loaded with this sentiment—children are passive “little vessels’ or “little pitchers” to pour utilitarian “facts” into. His approach stands in stark contrast to the understanding gained by the senses, based on feeling and mutual respect for others. The episode where Gradgrind asks Sissy to define a horse and Bitzer’s successful definition of it is an example of the twin approaches to life.
Benthamite utilitarianism argued for “the greatest good for the greatest number of people” but failed to realize it. Though few succeeded most people continued to live in grinding poverty. Dickens felt that there was more to life than just economic success. It was not just to brand the discontented and disenchanted as dregs of society and send them to prison. Bentham believed in moral principles and disciplinary institutions for the betterment of society. He campaigned for the building of Panopticon prison which allowed an observer to observe the prisoners without being noticed. Through this design Bentham wanted to bring about social and legal reform based on the concept of invisible omniscience. Foucault saw the Panopticon as a reflection of nineteenth century rule-based institutions to police the individual. The terrible discourse of state control does not result in human progress or happiness.
Works Cited
KLINGOPULOS, G. D. “Notes on the Victorian Scene,” in Boris Ford ed., The Pelican Guide to English Literature Volume 6. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970.
ENGEL, MONROE. Charles Dickens, Hard Times. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Identity Claims and the Media
© Mukesh Williams
We all make identity claims for one reason or the other. Usually our identity claims reflect our concerns, anxieties and desires. Usually our identity claims are harnessed in our self-interest or the interest of our community, tribe or nation. A selfless identity claim is a misnomer. Though nations may be imagined, they nevertheless provide an opportunity for people to make specific identity claims (Anderson, 1991; Hall, 1997). When we have a soccer match between two countries and the captain of the winning team drapes his country’s flag around him he is making an identity claim that spectators can relate to and identify with.
IDENTITY AND ADVERTISING
Advertising also lays claim to our identity. Successful modern advertisements force us to place ourselves in the situation occupied by one of the characters and identify ourselves with what they say or do. Image advertising also works in similar fashion. Media photographs work for us if they excite our emotions of pity, anger, joy or resentment. We then indentify ourselves with them and claim them as they claim us. For example a bird covered in oil sludge, a child crying from hunger, soldiers killed in war, a volcanic eruption and so on. The picture implicates us, forces us to produce meaning in the act of looking. As we enter this fantasy world again and again we become a part of that world.
COLLECTIVE IDENTITY
People come together into a group and imagine an identity. We have many identities—such as racial, local, city, gender, national and religious—and we use different aspects of these collective identities to our advantage. Identity is therefore neither single nor fixed but constantly reconstituted and in a state of eternal flux. We give meaning to things through the use of language. At the same time we are reconstituted by those collective identities we use to define or redefine ourselves. The reconstitution and redefinition of our identities have been further accelerated by digital and mobile technologies.
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WORLD
There are different strategies to understand the way we signify, the way we represent and the way we create meaning. It is possible to divide theories of representations into three broad categories: reflective, intentional and constructionist. The first implies that meaning is inherent in objects, persons, ideas or events and language merely acts as a mirror to reflect such meaning. The Greek notion of mimesis grew out of this conception of the world where painting and drawing mirrored the real world of nature. The reflective theory of representation is therefore often termed as mimetic theory. Obviously visual arts do attempt to represent the shape and texture of objects, but they also represent objects as two-dimensional signs. Literary theory is full of it. The second theory argues that the observer, speaker or author gives meaning to the world through the use of language. Meaning therefore depends on intention. But language is a social discourse organized along shared codes and conventions and must follow a well-formulated pattern in order to be intelligible. The third premise moves away from the first two approaches and argues that meaning does not lie in objects but we create meaning using signs, signifiers, concepts and strategies. We are constructionists in our representation of the world. The material world exists per se but meaning is created through the discourse of language and linguistic practices (Hall 1997, 24-25).
MODERNITY, POST-MODERNITY AND IDENTITY
Both modernity and post-modernity have deeply affected our sense of identity—the way we constitute it and the way we are affected by it. Modernity brought in a new urban revolution in our inner psychological space and outer physical space. Both our ways of thinking and the city spaces we live in changed radically from the earlier medieval times. In the post-modern era, though the urban landscape is still present, it is the mass media that defines our sense of individuality and cultural identity. Some of the ill effects of modernity felt in urban architecture, knowledge areas and psychological spaces are reduced in post-modern world. The oppressive effects of modern city spaces and rules of behavior are somewhat lessened in postmodern city spaces where the individual becomes once more important. The process of globalization as a function of late modernity has further accelerated an economic process that connects with mass migration and reassertion of pan identities on new levels. The “cultural resonance” of postmodernism as a “structure of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams phrase, distracts us from its impact upon economic organizations, marketing and advertising (Jameson, 2001 xiv).
IDENTITY CRISIS
The notion of identity crisis is a post-structuralist idea that began to dominate the sub-discipline of structuralism from the 1960s. With the breakdown of the old world order old collective identities lost their validity. Micro level identity politics connected to lobby groups, localism and even nationalism began to dominate the identity project. The individual in the postmodern world was more fragmented than alienated (Jameson, 2001). Alienation assumed a unitary core self but the postmodern self is seen as unstable and multiple. Therefore the concept of alienation within identity is replaced by anxiety. The Internet further destabilized identity by creating a “culture of simulations” by substituting reality with virtual communities (Turkle, 1997).
The 1960s was a momentous decade. Lacan began to attack the concept of the embedded self and posited the notion of a de-centered self. The dominant theory thesis and hegemonic ideas connected with it began to give way to micro politics. By 1970s it became rather difficult to say, both on the individual and group level, “Who am I? or Who are we?” As we go into the 1980s again new groups get formed such as Yuppies and DINKS. Identity is no longer what we have learned or experience but something to be consumed and used. The consumer culture acquired greater intensity during this decade. Today it is difficult to assert an ‘authentic identity’ as postmodernism undercuts modern history, psychology and philosophy.
Works Cited
ANDERSON, BENIDICT. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991.
APPADURAI, ARJUN. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
HALL, STUART. “The Work of Representation,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Stuart Hall ed. London: Sage, 1997.
JAMESON, FREDRIC. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
TURKLE, SHERRY. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
We all make identity claims for one reason or the other. Usually our identity claims reflect our concerns, anxieties and desires. Usually our identity claims are harnessed in our self-interest or the interest of our community, tribe or nation. A selfless identity claim is a misnomer. Though nations may be imagined, they nevertheless provide an opportunity for people to make specific identity claims (Anderson, 1991; Hall, 1997). When we have a soccer match between two countries and the captain of the winning team drapes his country’s flag around him he is making an identity claim that spectators can relate to and identify with.
IDENTITY AND ADVERTISING
Advertising also lays claim to our identity. Successful modern advertisements force us to place ourselves in the situation occupied by one of the characters and identify ourselves with what they say or do. Image advertising also works in similar fashion. Media photographs work for us if they excite our emotions of pity, anger, joy or resentment. We then indentify ourselves with them and claim them as they claim us. For example a bird covered in oil sludge, a child crying from hunger, soldiers killed in war, a volcanic eruption and so on. The picture implicates us, forces us to produce meaning in the act of looking. As we enter this fantasy world again and again we become a part of that world.
COLLECTIVE IDENTITY
People come together into a group and imagine an identity. We have many identities—such as racial, local, city, gender, national and religious—and we use different aspects of these collective identities to our advantage. Identity is therefore neither single nor fixed but constantly reconstituted and in a state of eternal flux. We give meaning to things through the use of language. At the same time we are reconstituted by those collective identities we use to define or redefine ourselves. The reconstitution and redefinition of our identities have been further accelerated by digital and mobile technologies.
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WORLD
There are different strategies to understand the way we signify, the way we represent and the way we create meaning. It is possible to divide theories of representations into three broad categories: reflective, intentional and constructionist. The first implies that meaning is inherent in objects, persons, ideas or events and language merely acts as a mirror to reflect such meaning. The Greek notion of mimesis grew out of this conception of the world where painting and drawing mirrored the real world of nature. The reflective theory of representation is therefore often termed as mimetic theory. Obviously visual arts do attempt to represent the shape and texture of objects, but they also represent objects as two-dimensional signs. Literary theory is full of it. The second theory argues that the observer, speaker or author gives meaning to the world through the use of language. Meaning therefore depends on intention. But language is a social discourse organized along shared codes and conventions and must follow a well-formulated pattern in order to be intelligible. The third premise moves away from the first two approaches and argues that meaning does not lie in objects but we create meaning using signs, signifiers, concepts and strategies. We are constructionists in our representation of the world. The material world exists per se but meaning is created through the discourse of language and linguistic practices (Hall 1997, 24-25).
MODERNITY, POST-MODERNITY AND IDENTITY
Both modernity and post-modernity have deeply affected our sense of identity—the way we constitute it and the way we are affected by it. Modernity brought in a new urban revolution in our inner psychological space and outer physical space. Both our ways of thinking and the city spaces we live in changed radically from the earlier medieval times. In the post-modern era, though the urban landscape is still present, it is the mass media that defines our sense of individuality and cultural identity. Some of the ill effects of modernity felt in urban architecture, knowledge areas and psychological spaces are reduced in post-modern world. The oppressive effects of modern city spaces and rules of behavior are somewhat lessened in postmodern city spaces where the individual becomes once more important. The process of globalization as a function of late modernity has further accelerated an economic process that connects with mass migration and reassertion of pan identities on new levels. The “cultural resonance” of postmodernism as a “structure of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams phrase, distracts us from its impact upon economic organizations, marketing and advertising (Jameson, 2001 xiv).
IDENTITY CRISIS
The notion of identity crisis is a post-structuralist idea that began to dominate the sub-discipline of structuralism from the 1960s. With the breakdown of the old world order old collective identities lost their validity. Micro level identity politics connected to lobby groups, localism and even nationalism began to dominate the identity project. The individual in the postmodern world was more fragmented than alienated (Jameson, 2001). Alienation assumed a unitary core self but the postmodern self is seen as unstable and multiple. Therefore the concept of alienation within identity is replaced by anxiety. The Internet further destabilized identity by creating a “culture of simulations” by substituting reality with virtual communities (Turkle, 1997).
The 1960s was a momentous decade. Lacan began to attack the concept of the embedded self and posited the notion of a de-centered self. The dominant theory thesis and hegemonic ideas connected with it began to give way to micro politics. By 1970s it became rather difficult to say, both on the individual and group level, “Who am I? or Who are we?” As we go into the 1980s again new groups get formed such as Yuppies and DINKS. Identity is no longer what we have learned or experience but something to be consumed and used. The consumer culture acquired greater intensity during this decade. Today it is difficult to assert an ‘authentic identity’ as postmodernism undercuts modern history, psychology and philosophy.
Works Cited
ANDERSON, BENIDICT. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991.
APPADURAI, ARJUN. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
HALL, STUART. “The Work of Representation,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Stuart Hall ed. London: Sage, 1997.
JAMESON, FREDRIC. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
TURKLE, SHERRY. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Academic Writing: Writing Scientific Lab Reports
Writing accurately and scientifically helps us to share our hypothesis and conclusions with the rest of the world and contribute towards the advancement of documented and written forms of knowledge. Scientific lab reports add to the cumulative knowledge of man. They help us to verify our conclusions, concepts, procedures and practices. They become the focal point for our research paper writings, conference presentations and submissions to scientific journals.
Scientific Reports: All scientific reports employ the scientific method based on two kinds of logic—inductive logic (particular to general) and deductive logic (general to particular). We use inductive logic to develop a hypothesis and then employ deductive reasoning to verify the hypothesis. At times our hypothesis does not stand the test of our deductive reasoning and we have to abandon it. Then we think of a new hypothesis for renewed testing.
Scientific Practice: Over the centuries scientific practice has developed its own unique procedures and exactitude. Invariably lab reports are organized around seven sub-themes namely: title, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion, conclusion and literature cited.
1. Title: A title should be succinct and provide all the factual details of the lab experiment. It should be between five to ten words and use keywords to catch the attention of the reader.
2. Abstract: An abstract is usually a short, single paragraph which summarizes the research experiment without providing too many details. However an abstract presents the major findings and the procedure followed.
3. Introduction: While writing a scientific introduction you should clearly state your objective. An objective involves what you have set out to prove. Then you must explain the context, why this work is singular and important. At last you should state the lab you are working for, name of your supervisor and significant dates including the start of the project and its completion.
4. Materials and Methods: Materials and methods fall in the category of instruments, methodology and procedures. In this sub-heading you must explain the materials connected with your research experiment, instruments and procedures. This section should also show the way of tabulating or calculating the results. Sometimes the materials used can be separated from the methods.
5. Results and Discussion: This is the most important section of the lab report as it provides the results of the scientific experiment based on calculations, tables and graphs. The data should not be left unexplained. A clear discussion of every graph and table must be provided and how a particular conclusion follows from it.
6. Conclusion: The conclusion summarizes the test results and procedures. It explains how, what was stated in the objective, has been realized. The conclusion also states what new knowledge has been acquired through the scientific experiment and how it advances the scientific field under investigation.
7. Literature Cited: This section lists all the scholarly books and research articles actually consulted and differs from a general bibliography where lots of information is provided. Remember that most scientific journals have their own specifications for citations but citations must be alphabetically arranged.
Language: The language used in writing a lab report must be precise, objective and verb-loaded. Writers are often advised to use the passive voice (the verb to be+ the past participle of the verb) while elaborating upon methods and procedures.
New technologies: Researchers now take recourse to new technologies and computer programs such as GNU Octave, Mathcad, Maple, Atlas/ti, Jasymca A MATLAB or Baudline to organize their research data.
Scientific Reports: All scientific reports employ the scientific method based on two kinds of logic—inductive logic (particular to general) and deductive logic (general to particular). We use inductive logic to develop a hypothesis and then employ deductive reasoning to verify the hypothesis. At times our hypothesis does not stand the test of our deductive reasoning and we have to abandon it. Then we think of a new hypothesis for renewed testing.
Scientific Practice: Over the centuries scientific practice has developed its own unique procedures and exactitude. Invariably lab reports are organized around seven sub-themes namely: title, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion, conclusion and literature cited.
1. Title: A title should be succinct and provide all the factual details of the lab experiment. It should be between five to ten words and use keywords to catch the attention of the reader.
2. Abstract: An abstract is usually a short, single paragraph which summarizes the research experiment without providing too many details. However an abstract presents the major findings and the procedure followed.
3. Introduction: While writing a scientific introduction you should clearly state your objective. An objective involves what you have set out to prove. Then you must explain the context, why this work is singular and important. At last you should state the lab you are working for, name of your supervisor and significant dates including the start of the project and its completion.
4. Materials and Methods: Materials and methods fall in the category of instruments, methodology and procedures. In this sub-heading you must explain the materials connected with your research experiment, instruments and procedures. This section should also show the way of tabulating or calculating the results. Sometimes the materials used can be separated from the methods.
5. Results and Discussion: This is the most important section of the lab report as it provides the results of the scientific experiment based on calculations, tables and graphs. The data should not be left unexplained. A clear discussion of every graph and table must be provided and how a particular conclusion follows from it.
6. Conclusion: The conclusion summarizes the test results and procedures. It explains how, what was stated in the objective, has been realized. The conclusion also states what new knowledge has been acquired through the scientific experiment and how it advances the scientific field under investigation.
7. Literature Cited: This section lists all the scholarly books and research articles actually consulted and differs from a general bibliography where lots of information is provided. Remember that most scientific journals have their own specifications for citations but citations must be alphabetically arranged.
Language: The language used in writing a lab report must be precise, objective and verb-loaded. Writers are often advised to use the passive voice (the verb to be+ the past participle of the verb) while elaborating upon methods and procedures.
New technologies: Researchers now take recourse to new technologies and computer programs such as GNU Octave, Mathcad, Maple, Atlas/ti, Jasymca A MATLAB or Baudline to organize their research data.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Charles Dickens Hard Times
© Mukesh Williams 2010
TURNING MEN INTO MACHINES
There is no domestic sweetness in the novel, no lover for Sissy, no wedding bells. Louise escapes her foolish husband Bounderby only by becoming a widow. Though she dreams about future happiness we know it is just wishful thinking. The novel is a dark novel made darker by the bleak landscape of Coketown. Even the familiar landscape of London is missing. Hard Times is a harsh indictment of the relentless industrialization of the nineteenth century made in the name of progress that was making men into machines. In the name of economic growth people were becoming greedier and heartless. Their misguided sense of social welfare and profit was destroying the healthy and natural tenor of English social life. Hard Times is a novel of social transition when values and social life were in ferment.
INDUSTRIALIZATION
Industrialization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century introduced machine-based production of textiles, iron manufacture and the use of refined coal. Canals, railways, steam power and water wheels greatly expanded trade and profit. Industrialization helped Britain resolve its problem of feeding the population and generating sufficient energy for the nation. As Eric Hobsbawm pointed out industrialization was not just a function of western capitalism but also of British control of world trade through naval supremacy and a concerted foreign policy to make profit overseas. However, the keen desire to realize economic and social progress through industrialization forced people to lose their natural rhythms and become a victim of mechanical rhythms. Trying to become a part of industrial progress most people lost their emotions, humanity and imagination. Both Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby are products of the industrial ethos. Gradgrind tries to bring up his children and pupils through the study of hard facts, while his friend Bounderby exploits the factory workers for his own profit. Both, the children and factory ‘Hands’ of Coketown, lead a life of drudgery.
RATIONALISM AND SELF-INTEREST
Gradgrind further degrades the life of Coketown by his misdirected rationalism and self-interest. He believes that strict rules must govern school and society and compassion and imagination must be rooted out. But in this atmosphere life becomes hard to live. Though he wants his children to be happy and economically well off he fails in his attempt. Lousia gets into an unhappy marriage and ends up loving someone else. She makes her father realize that his method of child rearing was unnatural; it made her unable to integrate herself in society. Tom becomes wayward and gives in to drinking and gambling. He is contemptuously referred to as a whelp and brings discredit to the Gradgrind family. Bounderby lives a life of boastful deceit and is presented as an insincere and ridiculous man—am inflated balloon and an immense soap bubble. Here is a moral fable with Bounderby as an example of a dramatic monster. Dickens does not allow his characters to succeed just to underscore the detrimental effects of utilitarianism and rationalism. He exposes the morally corrupt characters like Bounderby but praises upright people like Stephen Blackpool and kind-hearted Sissy Jupe.
BENTHAMITE UTILITARIANISM
Benthamite utilitarianism argued for “the greatest good for the greatest number of people” but failed to realize it. Though few succeeded most people continued to live in grinding poverty. Dickens felt that there was more to life than just economic success. It was not just to brand the discontented and disenchanted as dregs of society and send them to prison. Bentham believed in moral principles and disciplinary institutions for the betterment of society. He campaigned for the building of Panopticon prison which allowed an observer to observe the prisoners without being noticed. Through this design Bentham wanted to bring about social and legal reform based on the concept of invisible omniscience. Foucault saw the Panopticon as a reflection of nineteenth century rule-based institutions to police the individual. The terrible discourse of state control does not result in human progress or happiness.
FACT VERSUS FANCY
An excessive reliance on facts leads to a disjointed view of the world. Though facts are important they are also a matter of perspective and interpretation. Dickens provides examples to prove his point. Bounderby saw the factory Hands as lazy and too demanding while the factory workers saw themselves as industrious and exploited. Dickens believed that opposing interpretation of facts cannot be synthesized as they are just different perspectives. He went further to explain that “facts” can also be seen as individual “taste.” Therefore fiction had its place even in a mechanized and matter-of –fact society. Even Gradgrind admits that though Sissy has not learnt much about utilitarian facts, she has become “an affectionate, earnest, good young woman” (p. 91). Dickens presents to us a new society guided by a new principle of life guided by mathematical and scientific methodologies. This worldview rooted out everything else—the circus, the imagination, idleness and Sissy Jupe.
THE FEMININE PRINCIPLE
The Victorian society gave great importance to the feminine principle which was seen as kind-hearted, morally untainted and psychologically receptive. It was believed that women by and large were able to resist the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization more than men. In the novel Rachael’s gentleness and fortitude gives strength to Stephen. His monotonous factory life is lighted up by her presence. She is therefore called a guiding angel. Sissy brings love and kindness into Gradgrind’s family restoring those human qualities in Louisa which had been lost by her father’s misguided training.
NATURAL RHYTHMS VERSUS CLOCK TIME
It is possible to see the rhythms of the seasons placed against the calibration of time measured by mechanical clocks. Both Gradgrind and denizens of Coketown measure time through the “deadly statistical clock.” Dickens suggests that time in the industrial city is both mechanical and monotonous—“Time went on in Coketown like its own machinery” (p. 90). In Coketown both machinery and its movement marks its own time. Dickens however divided the novel along agricultural rhythms governed by the changing seasons—the three books of Hard Times are called “Sowing,” “Reaping” and “Garnering—referring to the process of planting and harvesting and laboring. The “varying seasons” bring their rhythms. Even the “wilderness of smoke and brick” in Coketown cannot prevent the change of seasons. Seasons come naturally breaking the monotony of life in Coketown. Even Gradgrind feels that Sissy carries a primordial rhythm of life that she has inherited from her forefathers. Even if she has not learnt all the utilitarian facts she has grown into “an affectionate, earnest, good young woman” (p. 91).
SMOULDERING SERPENTS
The smoke above Coketown hangs as poisonous serpents blinding Bounderby and people like him to their own moral and social responsibility to society. Instead of recognizing his greed, Bounderby sees the smoke serpents as indications that the factory is manufacturing goods for profit. Dickens uses the smoke to show the inability of Bounderby to recognize his inhumanity and the grinding poverty of the factory workers. In a biblical sense smoldering serpents could be seen as something sinister and evil that industrial progress had brought about.
INDUSTRIAL UNREST
Though the novel has an industrial agitator in Slackbridge who exhorts people to rise against the oppressors, there are no industrial strikes or labor unrest. The novel does not present any confrontationist politics between labor union and the management. The action is never intense but only critical and evaluative. We only see the factories floating like “fairy palaces” pushing their steam engine pistons “monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.” This melancholy madness is more important as sentiment and emotion than the actual presentation of common industrial issues such as poor working conditions, unemployment and child labor. Blackpool though he is represented as an honest workman is not “particularly intelligent” and dislikes all shades of opinions.
TURNING MEN INTO MACHINES
There is no domestic sweetness in the novel, no lover for Sissy, no wedding bells. Louise escapes her foolish husband Bounderby only by becoming a widow. Though she dreams about future happiness we know it is just wishful thinking. The novel is a dark novel made darker by the bleak landscape of Coketown. Even the familiar landscape of London is missing. Hard Times is a harsh indictment of the relentless industrialization of the nineteenth century made in the name of progress that was making men into machines. In the name of economic growth people were becoming greedier and heartless. Their misguided sense of social welfare and profit was destroying the healthy and natural tenor of English social life. Hard Times is a novel of social transition when values and social life were in ferment.
INDUSTRIALIZATION
Industrialization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century introduced machine-based production of textiles, iron manufacture and the use of refined coal. Canals, railways, steam power and water wheels greatly expanded trade and profit. Industrialization helped Britain resolve its problem of feeding the population and generating sufficient energy for the nation. As Eric Hobsbawm pointed out industrialization was not just a function of western capitalism but also of British control of world trade through naval supremacy and a concerted foreign policy to make profit overseas. However, the keen desire to realize economic and social progress through industrialization forced people to lose their natural rhythms and become a victim of mechanical rhythms. Trying to become a part of industrial progress most people lost their emotions, humanity and imagination. Both Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby are products of the industrial ethos. Gradgrind tries to bring up his children and pupils through the study of hard facts, while his friend Bounderby exploits the factory workers for his own profit. Both, the children and factory ‘Hands’ of Coketown, lead a life of drudgery.
RATIONALISM AND SELF-INTEREST
Gradgrind further degrades the life of Coketown by his misdirected rationalism and self-interest. He believes that strict rules must govern school and society and compassion and imagination must be rooted out. But in this atmosphere life becomes hard to live. Though he wants his children to be happy and economically well off he fails in his attempt. Lousia gets into an unhappy marriage and ends up loving someone else. She makes her father realize that his method of child rearing was unnatural; it made her unable to integrate herself in society. Tom becomes wayward and gives in to drinking and gambling. He is contemptuously referred to as a whelp and brings discredit to the Gradgrind family. Bounderby lives a life of boastful deceit and is presented as an insincere and ridiculous man—am inflated balloon and an immense soap bubble. Here is a moral fable with Bounderby as an example of a dramatic monster. Dickens does not allow his characters to succeed just to underscore the detrimental effects of utilitarianism and rationalism. He exposes the morally corrupt characters like Bounderby but praises upright people like Stephen Blackpool and kind-hearted Sissy Jupe.
BENTHAMITE UTILITARIANISM
Benthamite utilitarianism argued for “the greatest good for the greatest number of people” but failed to realize it. Though few succeeded most people continued to live in grinding poverty. Dickens felt that there was more to life than just economic success. It was not just to brand the discontented and disenchanted as dregs of society and send them to prison. Bentham believed in moral principles and disciplinary institutions for the betterment of society. He campaigned for the building of Panopticon prison which allowed an observer to observe the prisoners without being noticed. Through this design Bentham wanted to bring about social and legal reform based on the concept of invisible omniscience. Foucault saw the Panopticon as a reflection of nineteenth century rule-based institutions to police the individual. The terrible discourse of state control does not result in human progress or happiness.
FACT VERSUS FANCY
An excessive reliance on facts leads to a disjointed view of the world. Though facts are important they are also a matter of perspective and interpretation. Dickens provides examples to prove his point. Bounderby saw the factory Hands as lazy and too demanding while the factory workers saw themselves as industrious and exploited. Dickens believed that opposing interpretation of facts cannot be synthesized as they are just different perspectives. He went further to explain that “facts” can also be seen as individual “taste.” Therefore fiction had its place even in a mechanized and matter-of –fact society. Even Gradgrind admits that though Sissy has not learnt much about utilitarian facts, she has become “an affectionate, earnest, good young woman” (p. 91). Dickens presents to us a new society guided by a new principle of life guided by mathematical and scientific methodologies. This worldview rooted out everything else—the circus, the imagination, idleness and Sissy Jupe.
THE FEMININE PRINCIPLE
The Victorian society gave great importance to the feminine principle which was seen as kind-hearted, morally untainted and psychologically receptive. It was believed that women by and large were able to resist the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization more than men. In the novel Rachael’s gentleness and fortitude gives strength to Stephen. His monotonous factory life is lighted up by her presence. She is therefore called a guiding angel. Sissy brings love and kindness into Gradgrind’s family restoring those human qualities in Louisa which had been lost by her father’s misguided training.
NATURAL RHYTHMS VERSUS CLOCK TIME
It is possible to see the rhythms of the seasons placed against the calibration of time measured by mechanical clocks. Both Gradgrind and denizens of Coketown measure time through the “deadly statistical clock.” Dickens suggests that time in the industrial city is both mechanical and monotonous—“Time went on in Coketown like its own machinery” (p. 90). In Coketown both machinery and its movement marks its own time. Dickens however divided the novel along agricultural rhythms governed by the changing seasons—the three books of Hard Times are called “Sowing,” “Reaping” and “Garnering—referring to the process of planting and harvesting and laboring. The “varying seasons” bring their rhythms. Even the “wilderness of smoke and brick” in Coketown cannot prevent the change of seasons. Seasons come naturally breaking the monotony of life in Coketown. Even Gradgrind feels that Sissy carries a primordial rhythm of life that she has inherited from her forefathers. Even if she has not learnt all the utilitarian facts she has grown into “an affectionate, earnest, good young woman” (p. 91).
SMOULDERING SERPENTS
The smoke above Coketown hangs as poisonous serpents blinding Bounderby and people like him to their own moral and social responsibility to society. Instead of recognizing his greed, Bounderby sees the smoke serpents as indications that the factory is manufacturing goods for profit. Dickens uses the smoke to show the inability of Bounderby to recognize his inhumanity and the grinding poverty of the factory workers. In a biblical sense smoldering serpents could be seen as something sinister and evil that industrial progress had brought about.
INDUSTRIAL UNREST
Though the novel has an industrial agitator in Slackbridge who exhorts people to rise against the oppressors, there are no industrial strikes or labor unrest. The novel does not present any confrontationist politics between labor union and the management. The action is never intense but only critical and evaluative. We only see the factories floating like “fairy palaces” pushing their steam engine pistons “monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.” This melancholy madness is more important as sentiment and emotion than the actual presentation of common industrial issues such as poor working conditions, unemployment and child labor. Blackpool though he is represented as an honest workman is not “particularly intelligent” and dislikes all shades of opinions.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Discussion of Foucault’s Archaeology Chapter 5
Notes on Foucault’s Archaeology
Here are some of the points of Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (1972), Chapter 5, that we discussed at the last meeting of the Philosophy Society:
1. Prejudices are latent in conceptualization, classification, schemata and succession. There is always a selection that takes place in using these intellectual paradigms which is more emotional than logical.
2. The field of memory is highly selective as statements are forgotten both intentionally and/or unintentionally. There is no continuity in things; it is always created and imagined whatever be the theme or discipline.
3. What we remember is what we want to remember. Things that we are not concerned with do not possess continuity. This is so because we are not aware of them.
4. Procedure is a function of prioritizing or privileging what we want. A holistic scheme is just a notion, a figment of the imagination.
5. The transcription method is discursive in nature and therefore only approximates itself to perception, measurement and description. The latter processes are not exact. Discussion which invariably employs these skills is therefore artificial.
6. Rules operate within a discourse both anonymously and relentlessly. We must use these rules if we follow or enter a discourse. A discourse functions within a set of frames, practices and rules. However these rules are not universally valid but typical to a particular time and discourse.
7. Rules in the formation of objects or concepts are not located in an ideal or empirical “progress of ideas.” They are neither things nor words. Also they cannot be related to the knowing subject or to the psychological individual.
© Mukesh Williams May 2010
Here are some of the points of Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (1972), Chapter 5, that we discussed at the last meeting of the Philosophy Society:
1. Prejudices are latent in conceptualization, classification, schemata and succession. There is always a selection that takes place in using these intellectual paradigms which is more emotional than logical.
2. The field of memory is highly selective as statements are forgotten both intentionally and/or unintentionally. There is no continuity in things; it is always created and imagined whatever be the theme or discipline.
3. What we remember is what we want to remember. Things that we are not concerned with do not possess continuity. This is so because we are not aware of them.
4. Procedure is a function of prioritizing or privileging what we want. A holistic scheme is just a notion, a figment of the imagination.
5. The transcription method is discursive in nature and therefore only approximates itself to perception, measurement and description. The latter processes are not exact. Discussion which invariably employs these skills is therefore artificial.
6. Rules operate within a discourse both anonymously and relentlessly. We must use these rules if we follow or enter a discourse. A discourse functions within a set of frames, practices and rules. However these rules are not universally valid but typical to a particular time and discourse.
7. Rules in the formation of objects or concepts are not located in an ideal or empirical “progress of ideas.” They are neither things nor words. Also they cannot be related to the knowing subject or to the psychological individual.
© Mukesh Williams May 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Class Notes on Charles Dickens' Hard Times
Dickens’ Hard Times
© Mukesh Williams 2010
SERIOUSNESS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Though Dickens was a great entertainer he was not included in F R Leavis’s The Great Tradition of the English novel as he lacked seriousness something that Henry James and Joseph Conrad possessed. However Leavis felt that Hard Times has complete seriousness that could excite the adult mind. Leavis praised the novel’s tight story, clear symbolism, moral values, sharp dialogue, natural style and convincing denouement. Hard Times was seen as a great moral fable that captured the writer’s moral vision.
LIFE OF FACTS
“I want facts sir! What I want is facts, sir!” the teacher’s voice booms in chapter one. It is a classroom scene where only the voice of the teacher echoes. The one word that comes out of the lesson is ‘facts’ and next ‘reason.’ The voice of the teacher is imperial and authoritative. Dickens is ironic here. He presents the school as a model school in which Bitzer is the best student defining a horse clinically and dispassionately. There is no heart or creativity in education, just dry scientific facts.
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Dickens was born in 1812 and was a product of the Industrial Revolution, a revolution that saw the rise of factories in England between 1770 and 1840. Dickens was rather poor, had no proper education and worked in a blacking factory. All this made him unhappy. He worked hard to educate himself and write novels to make a decent living. Dickens, like Gradgrind, had no time for idle fancy.
COKETOWN
The people of Coketown have no life at all, as people of Great Expectations do. We feel that characters in Hard Times have no energy at all. Dickens knew London better than Coketown but he could still bring out the listlessness of the townsfolk in Coketown. Dickens shows the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization in urban Victorian society but does not show details of the environment. English factories were destroying the bucolic landscape and the economic power that was arising from them was changing the social order making some wealthy while leaving others rather poor. The soot-coated, black and savage Coketown gives the feeling of repetitiveness, monotony and drudgery. Both its streets and inhabitants have lost their uniqueness and they look alike. The repeated use of the word “same” and the phrase “like one another” reveals both the monotony of Coketown and the drudgery of its inhabitants. Everything in the redbrick Coketown is “severely workful” and the idea of sameness extends to the eighteen churches of different “religious persuasions,” the jail, infirmary, town hall, school and cemetery. The blasting furnaces of Coketown make it hot as hell; the gas-filled air makes people feel asphyxiated.
SOCIAL CRITICISM
Social criticism saw the novel as a novel of “passionate revolt” where there were no villains or heroes, but only oppressors and victims. And the culprit, if there was one, was industry. Socialists saw the machine as a symbol of oppression when controlled by money-making capitalists. Dickens has lost his good humor. His tone becomes quite serious. Cecilia Jupe and Louisa are serious and suffering characters. Though humble and natural, Sissy is predictably bookish. Louisa is tragic.
THEMATIC BALANCE IN THE NOVEL
The novel ends in a thematic balance. The novel begins with the childhood of the mind and ends with the childhood of the body. Dickens begins the story with reason and hard facts and ends it with fancy and imagination. He believes that both machine and social graces should make life beautiful and worth living. The loss of balance in society was undoubtedly lamentable.
VICTORIAN UTILITARIANISM
Dickens brings out the negative effects of Victorian Utilitarianism are seen in the characters of Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby. The practical utilitarianism of Gradgrind and the egotism of Bounderby destroy the creative spirit and fellow feeling. Utilitarianism was a philosophy based on a minimalist view of man that understood human nature in terms of economic relations alone. Though riddled with self-contradictions it was responsible in some measure for reforms in administration, sanitation and education. Utilitarianism, though inspired by the theory of laissez faire came to represent a streamlined civil service and centralized governance. It was difficult to reconcile the Benthamite idea of general happiness of a political and legal kind with Adam Smith’s self-harmonizing economic principle of laissez-faire (minimum intervention from the law). Dickens seemed to be both a victim and chronicler of such a contradictory response to utilitarianism in Hard Times, both in his treatment of the theme of education and trade unionism.
RESTRUCTURING EDUCATION
Dickens wanted to restructure education and do away with unqualified teachers in schools. He strongly felt the need to provide training to teachers. As such, he introduced Mr. M’Choakumchild, fresh from a training college, accompanied by his wife, about to deliver his first classroom lecture. Though the satire, both in the choice of the name and presentation of character, seems inescapable, M’Choakumchild is after all a representative of a new school ideology. His Scottish-sounding name obviously refers to the importation of trained Scottish teachers in English schools. Obviously M’Choakumchild knows too much in a somewhat conceited way. He bores and confuses his simple-minded but ignorant students. Through M’Choakumchild, Dickens expressed some of the popular criticism against training schools of the time. Dickens wanted training schools to instruct teachers in teaching methodology and develop their intellect, not just impart some erudite scholarship.
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PARENTS
Hard Times develops the conventional theme of nineteenth century fiction that it was the responsibility of parents to get their sons into a financially rewarding profession and their daughters into a financially secure marriage. Till they got comfortably married, education for women was seen as developing skills to protect themselves against the greedy instincts of men. Gradgrind is no different from a typical Victorian father who has the welfare of his daughter at heart. Though it hurts Dickens’ sensibility, just as it does ours, Gradgrind finds no trouble with the idea of marriage as a financial transaction. He understands that her middle-class daughter needs money to set up an establishment. It is, therefore, commonsense to look for a man of means like Bounderby.
MARRIAGE AND POWER RELATIONS
Tom Gradgrind, more than his father, sees Louisa’s marriage to Bounderby as strengthening of “power relationships” between the two families apart from providing a good financial deal to his sister. Tom employs a mercenary approach. He views matrimonial alliance as economic advantage or exploitation. And he is not wrong in doing so.
POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM
Edward W. Said in his book Culture and Imperialism argues that the English novel in the nineteenth century continues the narrative of a stable British empire and its imperial policy. The novelist, insofar as he believes in the general idea of free trade, sees outlying colonies available for convenient use in developing themes of “immigration, fortune, or exile.” It is only later that the Empire becomes the main subject in writers such as Kipling, Haggard, Doyle and Conrad. Fictional discourse about the Empire is also accompanied by discourses in ethnography, administration, economics and historiography. Furthermore, belief in liberal individualism and free trade were hard to reconcile with the maintenance of a vast colonial empire overseas. In Hard Times Dickens is alive to the debate of unionism, utilitarian education and worker’s predicament. Apparently the novel reveals the inherent tensions, ideological conflict and the muddled intellectual position of the author.
DECONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM
The conflict between facts and imagination is also played out along ideological lines. The opposing values of utilitarianism in schools and traditional humanism of the circus are played between utilitarians and emotivists. Gradgrind employs metaphorical language to control others. He believes in equivalencies while the circus folks see language as dialogue to empower others. A tension exists between metaphorical language of domination and broken language of dialogue.
NEW HISTORICISM
New Historicists, such as Catherine Gallagher, situate the text in the English industrial society and analyze Dickens’ attempt to suggest social cohesion through an intricate process of linking cooperative family life to competitive public life. Dickens attacks the unhealthy link between money and morality. And yet his novels reveal the unwillingness of the family to participate in larger social issues of the day. Dickens’ withdrawal into middle-class family values of self-discipline, responsibility, domesticity, self-sacrifice and dedication seemed at times to work against the idea of individual freedom. Critics have pointed out this lapse in Dickens’ writing, and, more seriously, have condemned him for his lack of enthusiasm at resolving his own ambiguous position vis-Ã -vis these issues.
FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM
The single hard fact about Hard Times is that it is a male-dominated and patriarchal novel. Obviously, this gives rise to the issue of gender and opens up related issues of,
A. the way Victorian society was constituted,
B. the way people saw themselves and constructed the other, and
C. the way sexual politics controlled women in private and public life.
Dickens explores feminine discourses such as female affection and sympathy much to the chagrin of his male-dominated critics such as George Henry Lewes (George Eliot’s companion). Dickens reveals a linguistic structure that attempts to control literature and more especially the entry of women in public life. Dickens also challenges the power structure of male-dominated Victorian society by presenting the world through female terms and conditions. Though speaking as a male and from the outside, Dickens speaks against the controllers of power thereby enhancing his position as a novelist. Feminist literary criticism, originating in the 1960’s out of the feminist movement demanding equal rights for woman, had gained strength and popularity in subsequent decades. It presupposed that, by and large, most cultures tend to be patriarchal if not outright misogynist. Feminist critics commonly agreed that concepts of gender tend to determine aspects of masculinity and femininity in any given culture. Therefore, unlike human sex, which is anatomical or biological, concept of gender has a social construction. They tended to agree with Simone de Beauvoir that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
© Mukesh Williams 2010
SERIOUSNESS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Though Dickens was a great entertainer he was not included in F R Leavis’s The Great Tradition of the English novel as he lacked seriousness something that Henry James and Joseph Conrad possessed. However Leavis felt that Hard Times has complete seriousness that could excite the adult mind. Leavis praised the novel’s tight story, clear symbolism, moral values, sharp dialogue, natural style and convincing denouement. Hard Times was seen as a great moral fable that captured the writer’s moral vision.
LIFE OF FACTS
“I want facts sir! What I want is facts, sir!” the teacher’s voice booms in chapter one. It is a classroom scene where only the voice of the teacher echoes. The one word that comes out of the lesson is ‘facts’ and next ‘reason.’ The voice of the teacher is imperial and authoritative. Dickens is ironic here. He presents the school as a model school in which Bitzer is the best student defining a horse clinically and dispassionately. There is no heart or creativity in education, just dry scientific facts.
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Dickens was born in 1812 and was a product of the Industrial Revolution, a revolution that saw the rise of factories in England between 1770 and 1840. Dickens was rather poor, had no proper education and worked in a blacking factory. All this made him unhappy. He worked hard to educate himself and write novels to make a decent living. Dickens, like Gradgrind, had no time for idle fancy.
COKETOWN
The people of Coketown have no life at all, as people of Great Expectations do. We feel that characters in Hard Times have no energy at all. Dickens knew London better than Coketown but he could still bring out the listlessness of the townsfolk in Coketown. Dickens shows the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization in urban Victorian society but does not show details of the environment. English factories were destroying the bucolic landscape and the economic power that was arising from them was changing the social order making some wealthy while leaving others rather poor. The soot-coated, black and savage Coketown gives the feeling of repetitiveness, monotony and drudgery. Both its streets and inhabitants have lost their uniqueness and they look alike. The repeated use of the word “same” and the phrase “like one another” reveals both the monotony of Coketown and the drudgery of its inhabitants. Everything in the redbrick Coketown is “severely workful” and the idea of sameness extends to the eighteen churches of different “religious persuasions,” the jail, infirmary, town hall, school and cemetery. The blasting furnaces of Coketown make it hot as hell; the gas-filled air makes people feel asphyxiated.
SOCIAL CRITICISM
Social criticism saw the novel as a novel of “passionate revolt” where there were no villains or heroes, but only oppressors and victims. And the culprit, if there was one, was industry. Socialists saw the machine as a symbol of oppression when controlled by money-making capitalists. Dickens has lost his good humor. His tone becomes quite serious. Cecilia Jupe and Louisa are serious and suffering characters. Though humble and natural, Sissy is predictably bookish. Louisa is tragic.
THEMATIC BALANCE IN THE NOVEL
The novel ends in a thematic balance. The novel begins with the childhood of the mind and ends with the childhood of the body. Dickens begins the story with reason and hard facts and ends it with fancy and imagination. He believes that both machine and social graces should make life beautiful and worth living. The loss of balance in society was undoubtedly lamentable.
VICTORIAN UTILITARIANISM
Dickens brings out the negative effects of Victorian Utilitarianism are seen in the characters of Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby. The practical utilitarianism of Gradgrind and the egotism of Bounderby destroy the creative spirit and fellow feeling. Utilitarianism was a philosophy based on a minimalist view of man that understood human nature in terms of economic relations alone. Though riddled with self-contradictions it was responsible in some measure for reforms in administration, sanitation and education. Utilitarianism, though inspired by the theory of laissez faire came to represent a streamlined civil service and centralized governance. It was difficult to reconcile the Benthamite idea of general happiness of a political and legal kind with Adam Smith’s self-harmonizing economic principle of laissez-faire (minimum intervention from the law). Dickens seemed to be both a victim and chronicler of such a contradictory response to utilitarianism in Hard Times, both in his treatment of the theme of education and trade unionism.
RESTRUCTURING EDUCATION
Dickens wanted to restructure education and do away with unqualified teachers in schools. He strongly felt the need to provide training to teachers. As such, he introduced Mr. M’Choakumchild, fresh from a training college, accompanied by his wife, about to deliver his first classroom lecture. Though the satire, both in the choice of the name and presentation of character, seems inescapable, M’Choakumchild is after all a representative of a new school ideology. His Scottish-sounding name obviously refers to the importation of trained Scottish teachers in English schools. Obviously M’Choakumchild knows too much in a somewhat conceited way. He bores and confuses his simple-minded but ignorant students. Through M’Choakumchild, Dickens expressed some of the popular criticism against training schools of the time. Dickens wanted training schools to instruct teachers in teaching methodology and develop their intellect, not just impart some erudite scholarship.
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PARENTS
Hard Times develops the conventional theme of nineteenth century fiction that it was the responsibility of parents to get their sons into a financially rewarding profession and their daughters into a financially secure marriage. Till they got comfortably married, education for women was seen as developing skills to protect themselves against the greedy instincts of men. Gradgrind is no different from a typical Victorian father who has the welfare of his daughter at heart. Though it hurts Dickens’ sensibility, just as it does ours, Gradgrind finds no trouble with the idea of marriage as a financial transaction. He understands that her middle-class daughter needs money to set up an establishment. It is, therefore, commonsense to look for a man of means like Bounderby.
MARRIAGE AND POWER RELATIONS
Tom Gradgrind, more than his father, sees Louisa’s marriage to Bounderby as strengthening of “power relationships” between the two families apart from providing a good financial deal to his sister. Tom employs a mercenary approach. He views matrimonial alliance as economic advantage or exploitation. And he is not wrong in doing so.
POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM
Edward W. Said in his book Culture and Imperialism argues that the English novel in the nineteenth century continues the narrative of a stable British empire and its imperial policy. The novelist, insofar as he believes in the general idea of free trade, sees outlying colonies available for convenient use in developing themes of “immigration, fortune, or exile.” It is only later that the Empire becomes the main subject in writers such as Kipling, Haggard, Doyle and Conrad. Fictional discourse about the Empire is also accompanied by discourses in ethnography, administration, economics and historiography. Furthermore, belief in liberal individualism and free trade were hard to reconcile with the maintenance of a vast colonial empire overseas. In Hard Times Dickens is alive to the debate of unionism, utilitarian education and worker’s predicament. Apparently the novel reveals the inherent tensions, ideological conflict and the muddled intellectual position of the author.
DECONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM
The conflict between facts and imagination is also played out along ideological lines. The opposing values of utilitarianism in schools and traditional humanism of the circus are played between utilitarians and emotivists. Gradgrind employs metaphorical language to control others. He believes in equivalencies while the circus folks see language as dialogue to empower others. A tension exists between metaphorical language of domination and broken language of dialogue.
NEW HISTORICISM
New Historicists, such as Catherine Gallagher, situate the text in the English industrial society and analyze Dickens’ attempt to suggest social cohesion through an intricate process of linking cooperative family life to competitive public life. Dickens attacks the unhealthy link between money and morality. And yet his novels reveal the unwillingness of the family to participate in larger social issues of the day. Dickens’ withdrawal into middle-class family values of self-discipline, responsibility, domesticity, self-sacrifice and dedication seemed at times to work against the idea of individual freedom. Critics have pointed out this lapse in Dickens’ writing, and, more seriously, have condemned him for his lack of enthusiasm at resolving his own ambiguous position vis-Ã -vis these issues.
FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM
The single hard fact about Hard Times is that it is a male-dominated and patriarchal novel. Obviously, this gives rise to the issue of gender and opens up related issues of,
A. the way Victorian society was constituted,
B. the way people saw themselves and constructed the other, and
C. the way sexual politics controlled women in private and public life.
Dickens explores feminine discourses such as female affection and sympathy much to the chagrin of his male-dominated critics such as George Henry Lewes (George Eliot’s companion). Dickens reveals a linguistic structure that attempts to control literature and more especially the entry of women in public life. Dickens also challenges the power structure of male-dominated Victorian society by presenting the world through female terms and conditions. Though speaking as a male and from the outside, Dickens speaks against the controllers of power thereby enhancing his position as a novelist. Feminist literary criticism, originating in the 1960’s out of the feminist movement demanding equal rights for woman, had gained strength and popularity in subsequent decades. It presupposed that, by and large, most cultures tend to be patriarchal if not outright misogynist. Feminist critics commonly agreed that concepts of gender tend to determine aspects of masculinity and femininity in any given culture. Therefore, unlike human sex, which is anatomical or biological, concept of gender has a social construction. They tended to agree with Simone de Beauvoir that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
Foucault’s Terminologies
© Mukesh Williams 2010
Michel Foucault rejects the vast unities imagined by historians in historical periods and instead suggests “rupture” and “discontinuity.” He uses the notion of discontinuity as both the “instrument” and “object” of research. He objects to the themes of “cultural totalities” and “search for origins.” Instead he develops his own theory and procedure to explain the paradox of discontinuity.
1. Archaeology
Foucault identifies various discourses as they emerge in society and get transformed in the process of their implementation. Archeology is a unique method of investigating their emergence and transformation. Foucault does not unravel the hidden meaning of discourses or the deep structure of their rational content. He is not interested to access the larger impact of discourses on the collective unconscious or group psychology. Unlike Derrida he does not wish to investigate the traces or outside implications of discourses. Foucault uses this archaeological method to study the positive aspects of existence. He believes that the method of archeological investigation creates the requisite detachment necessary for a historian to evaluate and clearly explain an archive. The method of archeology involves the distance a historian must maintain while chronicling events. Therefore history can be defined as a system of difference. Archaeology describes the verifiable and positive aspects of a discourse, as if was describing an artifact or a monument.
2. Archive
An archive is understood to be a set of available texts in a given historical period. Foucault analyzes the conditions which give rise to an archive, the relations and institutions that allow statements in texts to become archived. An archive is neither a collection of artifacts nor a set of statements. It is a series of relationships—“the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.”
3. Oeuvre
Foucault interrogates the concept of oeuvres, commonly understood as a set of texts approved by an author in his lifetime. However there are various texts, manuscripts, oral recordings and materials of an author collected posthumously. The author takes various positions from which he makes statements. These positions are independent from the author’s approved position. Therefore the notion of the oeuvre is not a pure category of totalities but a fragmentariness of an author’s works ranging from thoughts, experience, and imagination to unconscious and historical determinants that influence him. An oeuvre is also the secret origin, something that cannot be “quite grasped.” Any person can write from any of the positions not approved by the author and the author himself can express his thoughts from multiple positions. An author’s book contract details and scribbling on a paper napkin do not occupy the same status as an approved manuscript of a book. Foucault therefore destabilizes the conventional meaning of an oeuvre.
Michel Foucault rejects the vast unities imagined by historians in historical periods and instead suggests “rupture” and “discontinuity.” He uses the notion of discontinuity as both the “instrument” and “object” of research. He objects to the themes of “cultural totalities” and “search for origins.” Instead he develops his own theory and procedure to explain the paradox of discontinuity.
1. Archaeology
Foucault identifies various discourses as they emerge in society and get transformed in the process of their implementation. Archeology is a unique method of investigating their emergence and transformation. Foucault does not unravel the hidden meaning of discourses or the deep structure of their rational content. He is not interested to access the larger impact of discourses on the collective unconscious or group psychology. Unlike Derrida he does not wish to investigate the traces or outside implications of discourses. Foucault uses this archaeological method to study the positive aspects of existence. He believes that the method of archeological investigation creates the requisite detachment necessary for a historian to evaluate and clearly explain an archive. The method of archeology involves the distance a historian must maintain while chronicling events. Therefore history can be defined as a system of difference. Archaeology describes the verifiable and positive aspects of a discourse, as if was describing an artifact or a monument.
2. Archive
An archive is understood to be a set of available texts in a given historical period. Foucault analyzes the conditions which give rise to an archive, the relations and institutions that allow statements in texts to become archived. An archive is neither a collection of artifacts nor a set of statements. It is a series of relationships—“the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.”
3. Oeuvre
Foucault interrogates the concept of oeuvres, commonly understood as a set of texts approved by an author in his lifetime. However there are various texts, manuscripts, oral recordings and materials of an author collected posthumously. The author takes various positions from which he makes statements. These positions are independent from the author’s approved position. Therefore the notion of the oeuvre is not a pure category of totalities but a fragmentariness of an author’s works ranging from thoughts, experience, and imagination to unconscious and historical determinants that influence him. An oeuvre is also the secret origin, something that cannot be “quite grasped.” Any person can write from any of the positions not approved by the author and the author himself can express his thoughts from multiple positions. An author’s book contract details and scribbling on a paper napkin do not occupy the same status as an approved manuscript of a book. Foucault therefore destabilizes the conventional meaning of an oeuvre.
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