12-10-2004, 01:18 AM
x-posting link and relevant portion ..
Academic Researchers Versus Hindu Civilisation
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The intellectual entrepreneur</b>
The growing numbers in contemporary society engaged in intellectual endeavour and the resulting institutionalisation of their work underlines the role of the modern intellectual entrepreneur. This class of entrepreneurs operates in an intellectual marketplace that ultimately serves the needs of the prevailing order, i.e. groups and/or powerful societies and states. They are profoundly dependent for material rewards and status on established institutions. Such entrepreneurs display a superficial restlessness and rootlessness that may suggest cosmopolitan allegiances, but they are in fact firmly anchored to the prevailing structures of political, economic and social power. That has of course always been true to some degree in all societies. The hallmark of such a social class is necessarily opportunism and the few 'virtuous' dissidents that undoubtedly exist among them have a circumscribed impact. One should not therefore be unduly awe-struck by the views and postures adopted by this intellectual social class or impute excessively durable significance to its cogitation.
In this context, the production of intellectual output is much like any other modern economic activity. The isolated lone entrepreneur engaged in a small-scale cottage industry, operating at some remove from formal institutions and somewhat alienated from the prevailing order, owing to intermittent direct interaction with society, is now exceptional. The comprehensive institutionalisation of paid intellectual labour and the system of regulation, vetting by the peer review system of journal editorial boards and the editors of major publishing houses (and increasingly television) have seen off and/or constrained the upstart autodidact. These channels are the unavoidable conduits through which 'quality control' is exercised (as the famous intellectual Theodor W. Adorno himself discovered).
The scale of the complicity of intellectual entrepreneurs in the sordid purposes of the State is a little hard to believe because intellectual life is wrongly associated with probity and openness. There is also a tendency to accept the conventional account of past events offered in standard textbooks and journals. The best test for evaluating the extent of deception and lies is to judge the veracity of accounts about contemporary issues, since one is more likely to be aware of the truth. Such an exercise makes clear that dishonesty is the name of the game and the scale of the lies, by acts of commission and omission, are simply huge. How many people, for example, realise that the British and French governments were assiduous supporters of the Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia while it was engaged in genocide? Such historical facts simply disappear from view because intellectual entrepreneurs comply with the injunctions of State policy.
The specific forces that govern the individual intellectual entrepreneur's output of analyses and ideas are a combination of the subjective (i.e. personal) and the dominant objective forces in society, beyond his control. The subjective motive is a curious amalgam of socialisation, transparently evident in the conformist similarities of common genres, and shared ideas, underpinned by an inter-subjective 'language'. But any subjective freedom that apparently exists is embedded within the imperatives of the political power and purposes of society. The subjectivity of the intellectual entrepreneur is subordinated and unceremoniously impaled on the logic of society's power political structures, by the mundane imperatives of access to funding and rules for achieving status. It scripts creativity and imposes conformity. Such subjective and objective stimuli also create strong competitive pressures to succeed that intensify conformist behaviour.
Private, sentimental attachments have but a precarious place in such endeavours. It often entails the sacrifice of family life and friendships, which highlight some advantages for the unencumbered single entrepreneur, with a tenuous stake in the future. He may therefore turn out to be the most reliable archetype for achieving institutional political objectives. As a result, such intellectual endeavours exhibit, in sublimated form, the profile of successful criminality: keen awareness of and responsiveness to external stimuli and the capacity for instrumental ruthlessness because the type of work involved nurtures foresight and manipulative skills.
This is the key to understanding the relationship between the individual intellectual entrepreneur and their object of investigation. Any display of sentimental attachment to the object of enquiry is highly conditional, though some mutability in loyalties presumably exists, qualified by the imperatives of political necessity that cannot be disregarded by the entrepreneur. The study of language, literature and the humanities enjoys a measure of immunity from explicit political sanction that subjects like international relations and anthropology are unable to escape. The origin of international relations as a subject was functional to great power politics after WWII and anthropology began as a colonial and imperial venture to investigate and thereby control subject peoples.
<b>India as an object of entrepreneurial enquiry</b>
It may be innocently imagined that an intellectual entrepreneur engaged in sustained study of a particular society or country must have empathy for it. On the contrary, such enquiry can take the shape of reconnoitring an enemy and indeed compound the distaste for the culture in question, which I imagine is the case with a majority of Western scholars of India. Critiques of the foundational ideas of a society and culture indicate, ipso facto, distaste for it. A society will always be vulnerable to the scurrilous deconstruction of its primordial beliefs because they are historical in character. Arbitrary first principles, usually mythical, are the basis for all human existence. Thus, pitiless scrutiny, without respect or empathy, of the deeply held sacred beliefs of others, which defines their very humanity, is a sure sign of utter disregard.
'Scorched earth' techniques of 'academic' investigation are typified by the disgraceful and (as it also happens) dubious scholarly methods employed by an American academic, who engaged in gross abuse of the Indian saint Ramakrishna. This arrogance originates in the mindset of a slave-owning culture, which devoted its ingenuity to digging holes in the ground to bury an unborn child in her pregnant black mother's swelling stomach, before whipping her bare buttocks. Some morally bankrupt Hindu psychoanalyst (the closest modern social science gets to witchcraft) supported this author deviously, though without the courage to do so explicitly. He took out political insurance for himself by confessing that he had portrayed a fictional character inspired by Ramakrishna sympathetically, in a novel. Such scholarly discourse is equivalent to stripping someone's mother naked in public because it merely violates the taboo of shame and causes no actual bodily injury. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Academic Researchers Versus Hindu Civilisation
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The intellectual entrepreneur</b>
The growing numbers in contemporary society engaged in intellectual endeavour and the resulting institutionalisation of their work underlines the role of the modern intellectual entrepreneur. This class of entrepreneurs operates in an intellectual marketplace that ultimately serves the needs of the prevailing order, i.e. groups and/or powerful societies and states. They are profoundly dependent for material rewards and status on established institutions. Such entrepreneurs display a superficial restlessness and rootlessness that may suggest cosmopolitan allegiances, but they are in fact firmly anchored to the prevailing structures of political, economic and social power. That has of course always been true to some degree in all societies. The hallmark of such a social class is necessarily opportunism and the few 'virtuous' dissidents that undoubtedly exist among them have a circumscribed impact. One should not therefore be unduly awe-struck by the views and postures adopted by this intellectual social class or impute excessively durable significance to its cogitation.
In this context, the production of intellectual output is much like any other modern economic activity. The isolated lone entrepreneur engaged in a small-scale cottage industry, operating at some remove from formal institutions and somewhat alienated from the prevailing order, owing to intermittent direct interaction with society, is now exceptional. The comprehensive institutionalisation of paid intellectual labour and the system of regulation, vetting by the peer review system of journal editorial boards and the editors of major publishing houses (and increasingly television) have seen off and/or constrained the upstart autodidact. These channels are the unavoidable conduits through which 'quality control' is exercised (as the famous intellectual Theodor W. Adorno himself discovered).
The scale of the complicity of intellectual entrepreneurs in the sordid purposes of the State is a little hard to believe because intellectual life is wrongly associated with probity and openness. There is also a tendency to accept the conventional account of past events offered in standard textbooks and journals. The best test for evaluating the extent of deception and lies is to judge the veracity of accounts about contemporary issues, since one is more likely to be aware of the truth. Such an exercise makes clear that dishonesty is the name of the game and the scale of the lies, by acts of commission and omission, are simply huge. How many people, for example, realise that the British and French governments were assiduous supporters of the Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia while it was engaged in genocide? Such historical facts simply disappear from view because intellectual entrepreneurs comply with the injunctions of State policy.
The specific forces that govern the individual intellectual entrepreneur's output of analyses and ideas are a combination of the subjective (i.e. personal) and the dominant objective forces in society, beyond his control. The subjective motive is a curious amalgam of socialisation, transparently evident in the conformist similarities of common genres, and shared ideas, underpinned by an inter-subjective 'language'. But any subjective freedom that apparently exists is embedded within the imperatives of the political power and purposes of society. The subjectivity of the intellectual entrepreneur is subordinated and unceremoniously impaled on the logic of society's power political structures, by the mundane imperatives of access to funding and rules for achieving status. It scripts creativity and imposes conformity. Such subjective and objective stimuli also create strong competitive pressures to succeed that intensify conformist behaviour.
Private, sentimental attachments have but a precarious place in such endeavours. It often entails the sacrifice of family life and friendships, which highlight some advantages for the unencumbered single entrepreneur, with a tenuous stake in the future. He may therefore turn out to be the most reliable archetype for achieving institutional political objectives. As a result, such intellectual endeavours exhibit, in sublimated form, the profile of successful criminality: keen awareness of and responsiveness to external stimuli and the capacity for instrumental ruthlessness because the type of work involved nurtures foresight and manipulative skills.
This is the key to understanding the relationship between the individual intellectual entrepreneur and their object of investigation. Any display of sentimental attachment to the object of enquiry is highly conditional, though some mutability in loyalties presumably exists, qualified by the imperatives of political necessity that cannot be disregarded by the entrepreneur. The study of language, literature and the humanities enjoys a measure of immunity from explicit political sanction that subjects like international relations and anthropology are unable to escape. The origin of international relations as a subject was functional to great power politics after WWII and anthropology began as a colonial and imperial venture to investigate and thereby control subject peoples.
<b>India as an object of entrepreneurial enquiry</b>
It may be innocently imagined that an intellectual entrepreneur engaged in sustained study of a particular society or country must have empathy for it. On the contrary, such enquiry can take the shape of reconnoitring an enemy and indeed compound the distaste for the culture in question, which I imagine is the case with a majority of Western scholars of India. Critiques of the foundational ideas of a society and culture indicate, ipso facto, distaste for it. A society will always be vulnerable to the scurrilous deconstruction of its primordial beliefs because they are historical in character. Arbitrary first principles, usually mythical, are the basis for all human existence. Thus, pitiless scrutiny, without respect or empathy, of the deeply held sacred beliefs of others, which defines their very humanity, is a sure sign of utter disregard.
'Scorched earth' techniques of 'academic' investigation are typified by the disgraceful and (as it also happens) dubious scholarly methods employed by an American academic, who engaged in gross abuse of the Indian saint Ramakrishna. This arrogance originates in the mindset of a slave-owning culture, which devoted its ingenuity to digging holes in the ground to bury an unborn child in her pregnant black mother's swelling stomach, before whipping her bare buttocks. Some morally bankrupt Hindu psychoanalyst (the closest modern social science gets to witchcraft) supported this author deviously, though without the courage to do so explicitly. He took out political insurance for himself by confessing that he had portrayed a fictional character inspired by Ramakrishna sympathetically, in a novel. Such scholarly discourse is equivalent to stripping someone's mother naked in public because it merely violates the taboo of shame and causes no actual bodily injury. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->