Simmel, Nietzsche, and Mediations of Value-Form:  Four Fragments on Cultures of Capital

G.S. Sahota

Aurora Workshop 2025:  Analytics of Value:  Form and Critique in Contemporary Theory

April 5^th, 2025

UC Santa Cruz

1.

“Value,” as a category within classical bourgeois economy, is thought to lie primarily within the sphere of the market.  The delimitation of value as the result of pressures of supply and demand itself dissembles the wider determinants of this phenomenon.  Far from being a category relevant only to the sphere of the market, value in Marx extends outward to the non-material zones of everyday life and pulls those into the machinations of commodity production, just as much as it radiates the instrumental-rational structure underlying the commodity-form into ever more ethereal realms, conditioning them to accord with the logics of accumulation.  The value-form is already at play before the worker even arrives at the workplace, or the commodity on the store shelf.  The temporal frame of capital penetrates beyond these domains.  The sociality of value as generally necessary labor-time makes it difficult to determine where the market dimension of value comes to its limit and where it is exceeded.   This ambiguity resulted in Critical Theory’s distillation of instrumental rationality, replotting what was an emanation of the workings of the capitalist marketplace into a separate phenomenon undergirding the tragic course of Western Civilization in Dialectic of Enlightenment.  The reasons for this move in Adorno and Horkheimer are complex and revolve around some deliberate attempts to obscure their theories’ connection with the critique of capital.  By placing it back into the more specifically historical context in which the capitalist mode of production is dominant, one can wrestle with the ways in which it conditions our everyday world without imagining it as an inexorable constant for all history.  It is not clear what will help put in check the colonization of our life-worlds by the force of the market today; in the recent past, the category of the aesthetic assumed the role of resistance, as when the work of art was thought with its sheer uniqueness and potential break with conventional forms to counter the Enlightenment norms of identity-thinking.  Utterly out of step with immediate utility, the work of art was thought to put to a halt the force of reification.  Now we are in less certain times regarding the cultural realm as a whole.

What happens once the realm of culture becomes indistinguishable from the logic of accumulation, when it is coterminous with capital?  It seems that a self-devouring process ensues.  Over the course of this process one loses any sense of a rational end, and reason itself erodes.  Postone was alert to this deformation of social logic.  “Production for the sake of production signifies that production is no longer a means to a substantive end but a means to an end that is itself a means, a moment in a never-ending chain of expansion.  Production in capitalism becomes a means to a means.”  The occlusion of the fact of an underlying irrationality that undergirds the system goes hand in hand with the understanding that no option is any better than any other.  Postone elaborates:  “the relativism that prevents one from judging on substantive grounds the merits of one goal of production relative to another stems from the fact that, in capital-determined society, all products embody the same underlying goal of production – value.”  The curious nature of a society that “cannot decide on value (or surplus value) as a goal, for this goal confronts them as an external necessity” even though it is nothing less than the product of this society’s own collective ideations and physical exertions is worthy of extended investigation.  Value-form is hard fiction:  iron-clad in its appearance, but underneath as malleable as mud.  Commodity-fetishism is at once illusion and utmost reality.  When the former is forgotten and the latter taken as nature, a seemingly inexorable process of social self-devouring unfolds and a state of entropy is unleashed.  “Pure market sovereignty,” as Hobsbawm noted in a central chapter of The Age of Extremes, is a danger even to itself, for “capitalism had succeeded because it was not just capitalist.”  Once all of those cultural inheritances that helped sustain it – Adam Smith’s customary “habits of labor” for instance – are undermined from within, the bottom falls out.  Once this occurs, we seem to be tending in the direction of an illiberalism that may no longer be able to sustain the structure of capital in any recognizable form.

3.

Simmel’s work on the philosophy of money, the city, and the attenuated geistiges Leben that go along with both bears some scrutiny for our times.  Though his commitment to categories of German idealism such as the absolute or the metaphysical may seem quaint to our blasé mindsets, there is no doubt that he understood the hardening of heart and mind that comes from the penetration of the money-form into all vestiges of urban life in his times.  As the site where face-to-face relations begin to vanish under the imperative of abstract exchange relations, the city becomes the zone of expressive impersonality.  Here “a relentless matter-of-factness, . . . rationally calculated economic egoism,” reigns.  The indifferent nature of value – stripped of all uniquely distinguishing qualities through the processes of exchange – breaks down any vestige of Gemeinschaft, leaving in its train the “blasé attitude” whose essence is “an indifference toward the distinctions between things.”  The elimination of the qualitative for the quantitative furnishes a gray horizon.  To the blasé person, things appear in “a homogeneous, flat and gray color with no one of them worthy of being preferred to another.”  How an oppositional poetics might take shape against these conditions is a matter worth considering on another occasion.  Yet, one need look no further than Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927) to note how the tracks are already laid in his aesthetic visions of the city that will lead him straight into the Third Reich and association with Leni Riefenstahl.  Left to its own proclivities, this classic film of Weimar cinema demonstrates how the aestheticization of the machine goes hand in hand with the de-individuation of the human.  Classes and hierarchies are naturalized, the human realm is mechanized.  Nature as a zone of spontaneity and potential resistance is eclipsed; even animals are ranked in ways that match the various strata of capitalist society, but without antagonism.  Simmel’s insights provoke some thinking about how one might challenge this ordering of the city according to the dictates of the value-form, how one might fashion a post-capitalist urbanism, a Paris Commune writ large for our moment.

4.

Nietzsche, the hard man of European philosophy who had rendered empathy verboten when it came to humans but not horses, would have no answers for the question of the monied city, or at least not intentionally.  Yet his desires for an Umwertung aller Werte – a transvaluation of all values – furnishes some insights that oddly coalesce with those of Marx from a diametrically opposed position.  These provocative insights on the question of equality and the value-form produce for us a political quandary that has never been fully resolved in Critical Theory.  Simply put, the question is:  what role does, or should, the notion of equality play in our politics?  It is clear that capital cut a contradictory course on this question.  The diffuse power of market exchange and a bourgeoning commercial public sphere made intelligible the claims of universal equality even while the core dynamism of the commodity-form structurally reproduced inequality.  That is to say, the locus of modern equality is not given in the species homo.  Rather it lies in the sociality underlying capitalist commodity-exchange, even though this very sociality is characterized by the ever-increasing material divide between capital and labor, enrichment and immiseration.  Marx himself was always skeptical about the notion of equality, seeing it as an ideological ploy within the liberal ordering of people and things.  This comes out most forcefully in The Critique of the Gotha Program where generalized equality is impugned.  And it is on this very point that Marx finds himself in accord with Nietzsche, the fiercest critic of equality if there ever was one.  Both are mistrustful of the liberal notion of equality, even if for differing reasons.  For Nietzsche, as Malcolm Bull has noted in Anti-Nietzsche, “social inequality is the source of our value concepts, and the necessary condition of value itself.”  Without quite realizing it, Nietzsche has discovered the key to the value-form in capital, against one side of which (exchange value) he rails, and in accordance with the other side of which (use value) he remains committed.  The question of liberal equality and a communism that shuns such a fiction is one that brings together Nietzsche and Marx in the most unusual of ways.  Like Aristotle perplexed by the nascent value-form in antiquity, it is perhaps not within the horizon of our historical experience to be able to answer for this.

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2025.

Dystopic Monochrome and the Colors of Political Possibility: Questioning the Phenomenology of Afro-Pessimism through Photography

G.S. Sahota

Abstract

This presentation, composed of five fragments focused on questions of race and photography, constellates an immanent critique of contemporary Afro-pessimism’s questionable ontologies premised on “identity-thinking” (Adorno). Afro-pessimism, wittingly or unwittingly, betrays the possibilities of social transformation arising from within, yet at odds with the racial identities mediated by American white racism. The presentation looks to key moments in African-American history and Afro-Asian musical connections to rescue critical alternatives to the conceits of Afro-Pessimism. By examining key moments revolving around the photographic medium in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and Frederick Douglass, the experiments with Indian sonic colors in the late compositions of John and Alice Coltrane, and the synesthetic visions of the photographer Khalik Allah, these fragments aim to dissolve the artificial contrasts of racist language and imagery into the hues of an absolute continuum symbolized by the rainbow (borrowing from Walter Benjamin’s early writings and small essay on photography). This absolute continuum admits of no sharp racial distinction. What these operations entail is a critique of the phenomenology of dystopian monochromes of racial rhetoric shared by both afro-pessimism and the white Alt-Right, a critique afforded by the immanent powers of the photographic medium. In capturing radical contingency and sheer individuality, the camera can summon the latent potency of natural processes to explode the quasi-natural codes of racial reification, especially their monochromatics, and in doing so, recapture the irreducible ideality of color beyond the visual, sonic, or any other medium.

Keywords:  race and photography; color and media (music and image); critique of afro-pessimism; dialectical criticism; Marxism

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2025.

Reframing the Question of Realism in Contemporary India

Varieties of Realism:  Hearing, Seeing, Connecting

Aurora Lecture Winter 2025 by Prof. Francesca Orsini, FBA

January 24^th, 2025

Discussant Comments

G.S. Sahota

The “varieties of realism” presented in this paper provoke the question as to whether there is an adequate diversity of theoretical takes on the question of realism writ so large.  The fact that Professor Orsini has developed the cultural logic and concept of realism from the rich terrain of a long century of experiments within the modern Hindi novel and short story means that we have an internally derived criterion for exploring the reach of these experiments and do not have to resort to models and standards of another distant cultural zone such as the modern West.  We can thus avoid imposing external criteria for assessing the validity of Hindi articulations of realism, even if, say, Victorian literatures played a role as catalysts for fashioning these experiments.  A whole variety of questions arise of their own accord in relation to Orsini’s exploration of the senses, forms, modalities, and affects that forge a realism that has purchase and even transformative effects on everyday experience and open horizons of futurity.  I take some of these on in the reflections that follow.

In retracing Meenaskshi Mukherjee’s seminal and still very relevant work on Realism and Reality:  The Novel and Society in India (1985), it is worth noting how a general historical movement is reflected in shifts of genre and expansion of secular horizons of possibility.  This is noticeable in the cultural evolution from the tale to the everyday.  That is, the tale, the fantastic scion of myth and legend and the traditional abode of the supernatural, gives way eventually to the everyday realm pregnant with new representational possibilities.  Whereas the tale was the effective negation of quotidian existence, too mundane to have any literary value, the new short story and novel resuscitated all that which was denied representation.  The turn to the everyday as a zone of experience integrated with history, with the here and now, necessitates in turn the dissolution of the traditional narrative conventions that prevented the grasp of the mundane in earlier times.  Mukherjee’s appendices illustrate the shift and its potential. Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa, for instance, writes in his preface to Zat-i Sharif (c. 1903):  “I aim simply at the faithful portrayal of actual happenings and am not concerned with recording the conclusions to be drawn from them . . .” (Mukherjee, 188, my italics)  This move marks a concerted departure from the fable with its “moral of the story” in the direction of the grey zone of ethical ambiguity and perhaps epistemic uncertainty, hallmarks of modern realism the world over.  We see as well, in Ruswa’s comments in Umrao Jan Ada (1899), an orientation toward the immediacy of the everyday world:  “We should not give ourselves unnecessary trouble by trying to base our novels upon the lives of persons about whom we cannot know anything in detail.  In our own circle of friends and relations there are bound to be many whose experiences are truly strange and fascinating.”  (Ibid.) The point here is clear:  the real may be stranger than fiction, have more dimensions than legend, and raise more quandaries than the moral tale could ever possibly afford.

Like Orsini today, Mukherjee in her time noted that the entire question of realism had political repercussions far and wide.  Realism produced new subjects in opposition to old ways.  In her chapter on “Women in a New Genre,” Mukherjee captures a fundamental antagonism unfolding in literature and society all at once:  “Creating real people in a recognizable historical setting – people who are not mere archetypes or representatives of a caste or a class or a social role (priest, landlord, mother-in-law, etc.) – necessitates an acceptance of subjective individualism and a specific awareness of history.  The latter had never been a component of traditional narrative in India, and the former was not easy in a tradition-bound society, even though writers themselves had begun to be restive.”  (69)  This signifies that realism in the Indian context – and surely elsewhere as well – was the medium for the assertion of social presences – such as the Dalits whose predicaments are illuminated in Orsini’s comments – whose recognition has been deferred for too long, or effectively denied.  The psychological reality of “the everyday violence of caste and neurosis of passing” (Orsini) that is internalized finds its outward expression in the mode of a claim to reality for such subjects.  The claim to reality in this instance results in the production of a pervasive affect, which Fredric Jameson in The Antinomies of Realism (2013) considers to be one of the major impulses underlying this mode (the other, following Lukács, being the drive to narrate).  The aesthetic force of the marginalized mode of existence attains an intensity that demands that others feel what she feels, not as an emotion already named, but as an affect that that hits reality like a hammer, giving it a more livable shape.  Orsini captures in a profound way this role of affect in her invocation of synesthesia.  Realism here is not about the transparency of the medium vis-à-vis reality, but rather its solidity as an expedient means for reconfiguring it.  Whatever can perform that task has some purchase on the real and thus a claim to realism. By working in tandem with different historical moments, this notion of realism as telos does not bear any necessarily consistent form, but rather, as Brecht ventured against Lukács, should remain protean.

I have several queries to put forth for our conversation.  For instance, with respect to the looming figure of Premchand and the role of his oeuvre in shaping an ongoing engagement with historical reality, should we not think about the imperatives of his moment – to produce a language that is consistent and cohesive with a range wide enough to encompass nationalist aspirations – and not judge him as producing artificially monoglossic works unwittingly?  Did his single-register way with language not produce the challenge for later writers like Krishna Sobti, who worked against it to produce a heteroglossia that captures the granular details and striated social distinctions of tone, accent, dialect, and language in a multilingual roz marra ki zindagi?  One generation may thus have produced the conditions of possibility for realism for the next.   And when we look at Premchand’s entire oeuvre and not merely one short story or novel, do we not see diglossia at play, given that he is a writer of both Hindi and Urdu?

But a more compelling question must be posed in closing.  This has to do with medium and realism.  We see that the slow proliferation of the varieties of realism means that the question regarding its ultimate shape and form has not come to an end in contemporary India, and tremendous social stakes are involved in its evolution (or devolution).  If Mukherjee saw in realism the struggle of new subjectivities in tension with the given realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we may ask what is at stake today?  Other media such as film with their capacities for representing the polyglot worlds of India may outstrip the potentiality of the written word.  Or perhaps I am being too rash in this assessment, for I recall M. Madhav Prasad doubting whether the typical Bollywood film today, bound by so many political constraints, can ever really depict reality in any recognizable way.  In that case, the short story and the novel may still have potentialities, such as those of heteroglossia, which are only now being tapped.

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2025.

Images of Ambivalence and the Photography of Unbelonging:  Sikh Spaces and Communities Contemporary California

Paper Proposal for the 9th Dr. Jasbir Singh Saini Endowed Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies Conference

Theme of Conference:  Precarious Futures: Sikhs and Sikhi(sm) in an Uncertain World

Conference Chair:  Professor Pashaura Singh, Distinguished Professor and Saini Chair

UC Riverside, Department of Religious Studies

May 9-10, 2025

Paper Title:  Images of Ambivalence and the Photography of Unbelonging:  Sikh Spaces and Communities Contemporary California

G.S. Sahota, Department of Literature and Aurora Chair, UC Santa Cruz

Abstract:

This presentation stems from my ongoing photography project on the gurdwaras – Sikh sacred spaces – of California as sites of vulnerability to racist violence as well as refuge from pervasive social insecurity.  Like the congregants they bring together, Sikh gurdwaras are often easily distinguishable and thus easy targets for xenophobic violence in the West, and yet they continue to be sacred spaces that offer succor and sustenance to their members, providing both tangible and intangible means for community healing, self-strengthening, and resilience.   By examining this contradiction, this project contributes to intersecting movements and activities against racist authoritarianism in contemporary American society, aiming to provide a distinct vision to help foster a pluralistic, cosmopolitan culture reflective of diasporic ways of relating to different national contexts simultaneously.  Working with Sikh faith leaders and community institutions, the project will ultimately result in an exhibition and accompanying text that will circulate across different communities and spaces in California, developing thereby a series of visual assets and a wider critical engagement with visuality from a minority perspective.

While images and experiences from this project will be shared, the presentation focuses on specific predicaments and dilemmas that the medium of photography conjures for minority communities, in particular.  For is it not the case that photography could further exacerbate the vulnerability of easily recognizable minority communities through broad exposure?  But would not excluding minority communities from the visual domain render them even more invisible as social actors and make their presence all the more one of unbelonging?  What are the photographic forms and visual languages that would help give expression to these predicaments?  And what kinds of curatorial practices could help a minority community fend off damaging stereotypes and secure more control of their self-presentation?  What kinds of archival practices and institutional frameworks help address these concerns?

Alongside engaging with such questions in the visual realm, this presentation will also reflect on theoretical work relating to immigrant, minority, and subaltern experience in the US context.  Working through Lisa Lowe’s now classic, yet still relevant Immigrant Acts (1996), this paper will lay out potential strategies for working against the limitations of nationhood and liberal containments of minority critique.  Instead, it will seek to lay out ways to establish norms of cosmopolitan and diasporic belonging beyond the nation-state.

Bio

GS Sahota (PhD, University of Chicago) is associate professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz with affiliations in History, History of Consciousness, and History of Art and Visual Culture.  He currently holds the Sarbjit S. Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies.  His publications include Late Colonial Sublime:  Neo-Epics and the End of Romanticism (Northwestern UP), which received the Mellon Foundation’s Modern Language Initiative First Book Prize in 2018, as well as articles in journals such as boundary 2, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and Sikh Formations, on whose editorial board he serves.  His writing spans the fields of world literature, South Asian studies, Critical Theory, historiography, and film and media studies.  As a multilingual scholar, he regularly translates from Hindi and Urdu, conducts research in Punjabi, German, French, and Spanish, and is currently learning Italian and Portuguese.  Sahota is now writing his second book on the question of identity through investigations into the history of Indo-German cultural exchange and its ramifications for transnational method.  As a youth he trained in documentary photography under the tutelage of the renowned Magnum photographer Matt Black while making a name for himself in the skateboarding subculture with the sale of his photographs.  He held his first photographic exhibit on the Punjabi diaspora while a graduate student at the University of Chicago with special funding from the Committee on Southern Asian Studies.

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2025.

Canadian South Asian Studies Association

Congress 2024, McGill University (Montréal, June 15-17, 2024)

Panel 3.1A – New Work in the Textual Studies of Punjab

Introduction

I am very happy to have this opportunity to comment on these papers and glad that Anne has brought me to yet another very exciting city and another new venue for deepening my engagement with South Asian studies.

Time is a bit short and I should zero in as much as possible into this wonderful set of papers that together very much live up to the title of the panel, in that they are all new, bringing to light phenomena that have rarely surfaced in scholarly publications, and also in that they bring to the fore key theoretical questions regarding textuality in Punjabi language and literature.

1. Jvala Singh, “All-Metal Text (Sarbloh Granth):A Sikh Retelling of a Jain Text?”

Jvala Singh’s paper on the mysterious and rather contested Sarbloh Granth brings out some key qualities of Sikh textuality that demand theoretical grappling on a par with its inner richness and complexity.

Textuality in this instance signifies a site for intervening in and contesting canons, as well as asserting new works as equally “granth”-like in status.  I was reminded of how other genres such as Janamsakhis work along similar lines, that is, as vehicles for establishing alternative social possibilities.  This is a feature of the Janamsakhi tradition worked out in Hardip Singh Syan’s Sikh Militancy in the Seventeenth Century where janamsakhis become textual arenas for enacting rival guru lineages.

Even at such a late stage of pre-colonial Sikh textuality (mid-eighteenth century), one finds an interplay with puranic and tantric sources of a bygone era along with tropes from Jain traditions, all of which suggests a centrifugal textual web that knows no bounds, and which can catch within its interwoven structure any number of phenomena flitting through.  These traditions are not thought obsolete in the period of gunpowder empires, as Marshall Hodgson would put it in his third volume of The Venture of Islam.  What we have in this form of textuality is a mélange of meanings moving in different directions, toward different temporalities, in a seemingly chaotic fashion.

Contradictions are bound to arise, and this means that for a figure like Tara Singh Narotam, the Nirmala scholar of the late nineteenth century, who views the Sarbloh Granth with a skeptical eye, questions of authenticity are inevitable.  What are the implicit criteria by which a text can be judged authentic or inauthentic?  Why does the imperative arise at different times to clean the canon?  And what does one do with the apocryphal elements of a work of such widely dispersed textual referentiality?

2. Fatima Afzal, “Propaganda Against Punjabi:Muslim Nationalism in the Punjabi-Urdu Debate of 1909”

Fatima’s paper also breaks new ground by having us grapple with the hegemony that led to the demotion of Punjabi in colonial Punjab itself in the era of separatist nationalisms (in the wake of the Swadeshi Movement).  The Punjabi-Urdu debate manifested normative understandings of language that would do tremendous damage to Punjabi to this very day.  The idea that a language has to be one and must correlate with a religious community meant that the regional cohesiveness provided by a common tongue could be rent asunder along communal lines.  Nationalism demands linguistic standardization, tightly managed communal boundaries, and populational conformism.  Urdu equals Muslim, and Punjabi seems by default to mark Sikhism, even though it is spoken by a widely variegated population of all religious stripes.  Nationalism, as Roberto Schwarz notes in a different context, operates by a logic of subtraction.

The textuality that emerges in this context is one in which language is the medium of elite class self-consciousnes and assertion against less well-off and influential populations and subjects.  This means that the narrative Fatima gives us is one of linguistic subalternization.  She displays an especially acute sensitivity to the process at hand, and I would only recommend developing more theoretically adequate models – perhaps from Gramsci, or Voloshinov/Bakhtin – for capturing the tragic dimensions of this process.  This is a domain that Subaltern Studies left for others to tend to, and that is perhaps for the best.

3. Anne Murphy, “A Magazine for Change:Pritlari and the Vision of a New India in Late Colonial India”

Anne’s paper introduces at long last a very popular publication and the figure that spoke through it to a wide-ranging Punjabi-speaking world of the mid-twentieth century.  Contemporary intellectual and literary history will benefit from Anne’s engagement, which is characteristically rich and nuanced.  The questions this work raises are manifold, but again bring up textuality in distinct ways.

What is the form of discourse that Pritlari enacts in the public sphere?  Why are there so many limitations with respect to a philosophical treatment of this subject rather than an occasional, peripatetic, open-ended and internally irresolved style of discourse?

What is the connection between this form – qauasi-open-ended – to the question of love, especially “radical love”?  And furthermore, what is the genealogy demanded of this notion of love, which seems more suited to the impersonal world of the public sphere rather than to face-to-face relations?

Is “radical love” absolute, unconditional love – that seems unlikely in the public context – and how does it reconcile itself with instrumentality as the soft charm offensive for forming civility in a deeply divided and inflammatory political context?  Is this love Platonic or profane, meaning ready to sully itself with worldly politics? And how does it not dissolve or become ineffectual in the sphere of friend-enemy relations that mark late colonial and post-Independence India?

Concluding Comments:  Barthes on Textuality

Time is nearly up, but for the moment I have remaining I would urge our field to continue to undo its own marginality and subalternity by engaging with theoretical works that might speak more to it than their own cultural spheres.  I have in mind, for instance, Roland Barthes’s “De l’oeuvre au texte” from 1971.  The irrepressible dynamics of a textuality that is plural, liminal, centrifugal, and in some sense uncontainable resemble more the world of Punjabi and its milieux than the staid canons and standardized forms of modern French.  We would benefit from extending Barthes insights from this subaltern world which has much to offer for extending the domain of contemporary critical theory.  Thank you.

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2024.

Marxist Literary Group Institute on Culture and Society, Montreal, 13^th of June 2024

Reading Group:  Is Anti-Imperialism Dialectical:  Reading Mao Reading Lenin Reading Hegel

G.S. Sahota (sahota@ucsc.edu)

This is my first time at the MLG and I cannot think of a better way to make my belated entry than to be alongside Chris and Colleen, whose work I much admire and friendship appreciate.  I joined the conversation a bit late regarding the question at hand – Is Anti-Imperialism Dialectical? – and the chosen readings of readings of readings of Hegel to address this question.  With respect to the guiding theme, one might respond in a number of ways.  To the extent that anything that exists is subject to its own internally generated contradictions, the answer would be:  “yes, what isn’t?”  But if what is meant is whether anti-imperialism is necessarily anti-capitalist – that is, able to martial the powers of a determinate negation of the existing capitalist order of things – it has long been the case that the answer would be an unequivocal “no.”  In many ways, as noted by figures as diverse as Roberto Schwarz and Aijaz Ahmad with reference to equally divergent histories, anti-imperialism may deflect from a critique of capitalism.  Indeed, anti-imperialism’s persuasive powers within strong nationalist formations may tend more in this direction than toward a grappling with the contradictions of capitalism itself.  This point itself lays bare anti-imperialism’s limitations, which is to say, the discrepancy between its program and its overarching aims.  It is thus dialectical in ways not really intended, that is, generative of contradictions that anti-imperialism cannot always recognize and contain within its own ordering of peoples, things, and spaces.

But with the little bit of time remaining, I would like to draw attention to an aspect of the readings that I believe deserve some scrutiny in a setting such as ours, namely, the notion of “logic” as opposed to “dialectic” in Lenin and, in some cases, Mao as well.  There seems to be a misprision of Hegel in this respect that is itself revelatory, also in ways not fully intended.  The employment of the term “logic” would presume a sense of surety regarding the historical process at hand, which apparently can be worked out in the manner of a syllogism, as if one historical stage leads necessarily to the next, as if when one arrives at full blown capitalism, it inevitably follows that socialism will be on the horizon.  This is an idea that has long been shed, of course, and not only by postmodernism but by many varieties of contemporary Marxism as well, following none other than the late Marx himself.  Neither Lenin nor Mao were philosophers in the technical sense, so these criticisms may seem off point entirely.  But nonetheless it is worth noting the discrepancy, if not real antagonism, between Hegel’s dialectic and traditional and neo-traditional logic.  The figure who drew out the differences most forcefully to my knowledge is Theodor W. Adorno in his Introduction to Dialectics (Einfuhrung in die Dialektik), based on a series of lectures he gave in 1958.

What may seem initially as a quasi-scholastic point may reveal itself to have far-reaching social and political consequences.  And this is where what I have to say might converge in some respects with Blunden’s thoughtful re-conscription of Hegel for contemporary social movements.  In contradistinction to Lenin and perhaps Mao as well in certain regards, logic as understood by Adorno, particularly deductive logic, has a peculiarly coercive dimension for which dialectic is the antidote.  This is a strong leitmotif that runs through most of the lectures in some form or another, but Adorno’s critique of logic comes out most explicitly in several of them (lectures 4, 7, 8, 15, and 20).  First is dialectic’s tension with respect to any ostensibly logically grounded world:  “The dialectic is a critique of the apparent logical character of the world, of its immediate identity with our conceptuality . . .”[1]  This is in contradistinction to Lenin’s understanding that Hegel is developing logic in keeping with traditional philosophy rather than against it.  Adorno is certainly out of step with Lenin when Lenin writes that Hegel “demonstrated that the logical forms and laws are not an empty shell, but a reflection of the objective world” or that the “laws of logic are the reflection of the objective in the subjective consciousness of man.”[2]  Furthermore, Adorno notes that unlike traditional deductive logic, dialectic does not proceed inexorably from an ever-stable absolutely first or single highest principle.  Rather, Adorno follows Hegel in recognizing that such principles reveal their limitations and falsity in being merely first.  In not repressing contradiction but rather embracing it as the “organon of truth” – the generative tool or instrument of truth in process – Hegel and Adorno see dialectic as operating differently.[3]  That is, as Adorno clarifies, “dialectic is the attempt to break out of the prison of logic, to break free of the compulsive character of logic.”[4]  Instead of abiding by an imperative of non-contradiction, dialectic obtains a distinct freedom toward the inherent qualities of its object and of experience, a freedom of being unperturbed by immanent contradictions of both.  Dialectic is never mere random thinking, flight of fancy, or negative freedom.  But by giving priority to contradiction, dialectic comes into tension with logic itself, whose ironclad aim is understood as the production of consisten non-contradiction.

What are the actual practical political stakes in this distinction between logic and dialectic?  This is a topic for collective deliberation – hence the appropriateness of this venue.  One can sense Mao’s own tensions with some of his basic principles of perception, cognition, and ratiocination when he speaks of “the active leap.”  This occurs in various ways, for instance:  “The active function of knowledge manifests itself not only in the active leap from perceptual to rational knowledge, but – and this is more important – it must manifest itself in the leap from rational knowledge to revolutionary practice.”[5]  In prying himself free from the grip of his own philosophical system, Mao here reveals himself to be more dialectical than logical, manifesting the tension more than avowing it.  At this point in his essay “On Practice,” Mao comes close to expressing what Adorno sees as a crucial feature of the dialectic:  “the continual interaction between an extremely theoretical thought and an orientation to praxis . . .  For dialectical thought does not just present us with an elaborated theoretical system from which practical ‘conclusions’ are produced only after the entire theory has been duly settled.   Rather, all levels of dialectical thought, we might say, effectively yield sparks which leap from the extreme pole of theoretical reflection to the extreme pole of practical intervention.”[6]  In being fluid, mobile, and able to face unexpected situations, dialectic sets one up to respond to and work with contingencies and the generally aleatory nature of historical reality at various scales.  Logic, on the other hand, does not work that way. Thank you.

[1] Theodor W. Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics (1958), ed. Christoph Zimmerman (Cambridge UK:  Polity, 2017). 73

[2] V.I. Lenin,”Abstract of Hegel’s Science of Logic” in Raya Dunayevskaya (ed.), Marxism and Freedom . . . from 1776 until Today (New York:  Bookman Associates, 1958) 340.

[3] Adorno Dialectics 67

[4] Adorno Dialectics 216

[5] Mao Tse-Tung, “On Practice” in his On Practice and Contradiction, ed. Slavoj Zizek (New York:  Verso, 2007) 61.

[6] Adorno Dialectics 35

All Rights Reserved by G.S. Sahota © 2024.

Amphibious Zones and Planetary Justice: 

Inter-Areal Studies as Dialectic of Land and Sea

G.S. Sahota, Associate Professor of Literature (UC Santa Cruz)

“Mediterranean Studies, Present & Future:  The ‘California School’ Twenty Years On”:  Round Table Statement

November 3-4, 2023

Statement/Essay

O Sicily, proud island, most beautiful in all the Oceans,

Like a beacon you stand on the ways of the water-desert.

Thus goes one translation of Muhammad Iqbal’s poem “Sicily,” originally published in 1905 and included in his first collection of Urdu verse Bang-e Dara (Call of the Bell, 1924).[1]  A more literal translation would read:  “You are the guide in the desert of these waters,” again mixing terrestrial and maritime imagery, with “guide” glossing rahnuma, or “one who shows the path (rah).”  What is curious about Iqbal’s nostalgic dirge is its unusual transpositions:  it brings two areal spheres, South Asia and Europe, into conversation on the Mediterranean; further, the poem brings the elements of water and earth together in mythical tension, marking thereby a possible horizon when they might harmonize of their own accord; and, in casting a net far into the medieval past to capture an image of a more just era – for Iqbal, an era characterized inevitably by Islamic hegemony – the poetic lament opens the question of planetary justice, a question which today cannot be conceived without wrestling with mythical elements all over again, mapping their spatial limits and asking what forms of justice might exist beyond them.  The amphibian zone of Mediterranean Studies may serve as the most propitious staging ground of this poem’s images, geographies, histories, and elements.  It is where they all coincide. It becomes thereby the mediating point between South Asian and European Studies (the spot where the two area studies fields meet and verge on their other).  Moreover, Mediterranean Studies offers an arena where mythical elements jostle with each other, producing tensions that demand a program of planetary justice that by its nature exceeds the terrestrial and the oceanic.  To engage with this set of problematics, I turn to the uncharted horizon of possibility indicated yet foreclosed by Carl Schmitt’s ambiguous, if not ambivalent, spatializations of the elements of earth and water in his two countervailing works Land and Sea (Land und Meer, 1942) and The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the “Jus Publicum Europaeum” (Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum, 1950).  Schmitt’s regress to earth as the basis of legitimacy in Nomos after his explorations of other possible paradigms in Land and Sea have been seen as “an attempt to reinforce terrestrial boundaries against the open sea.”[2]  That is, Nomos attempts to root Recht in the earthly element by force, foregoing options he was on the verge of articulating in Land and Sea.  The paradigm of planetary justice involves breaking from this reactionary backtracking to earthly quarters.  It entails instead a departure from the impasses of Schmitt’s spatial commitments in the direction of amphibian zones between disparate areal studies paradigms and within a distinct play of the elements.

Let us float away for the moment from Iqbal’s poem and his idealized image of Emirate Sicily and turn to the incongruities of the Nazi jurist’s major works on legitimate political spaces and their corresponding elements.  In Nomos, as mentioned, the notion of legitimacy is forged on soil against the threat of a countervailing paradigm of the sea.  It was this latter paradigm that Schmitt verged on articulating in Land and Sea while casting himself outward in exploration of the discontinuous spatial orders that emerge concomitantly with revolutionary historical shifts.  England embodied a tendency toward that revolutionary paradigm.  In breaking with the continent, England also broke out of terrestrial constraints and became fish-like.  Uprooted, deterritorialized, and adrift, England “thereby won not only sea battles and wars but also something wholly other and infinitely greater, namely, a revolution, and, indeed, a revolution of the greatest kind, a planetary spatial revolution.”[3]  This new “planetary feeling” for Schmitt decentered the metropolitan core of English civilization, for now its place could just as easily be anchored to Asian landmasses such as India, where a Queen Victoria could be crowned Queen Empress, and the Leviathan’s reins of power could be manned by a Jew such as Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.  Leaving aside the accuracy or credibility of Schmitt’s take on England’s maritime deterritorialization, what these developments signified for Schmitt was a total separation of land and sea that allowed the new imperial polity to mark a new totally undifferentiated space.  Indeed, “the earth was now seen only from the perspective of the sea; the island, however, changed from a broken-off piece of the continent into a part of the sea, into a ship, or, even more significantly, into a fish.”[4]  What Schmitt found so troubling was the amount of sway the new paradigm would have for “the great Leviathan has power even over the spirits and minds of humans.”[5]  This oceanic paradigm of liberal justice with its purported openness to racial and geographical difference threatened to unleash a great leveling force within a purely spatial world that threatened to undo the centrality of England’s insular origins.  Indeed, this space afforded no necessary hierarchization.  The sea itself was turned into mere unbounded space.  The whirl of these developments and Schmitt’s own exploratory mode in this work lure him into a possible alternative paradigm for thinking about legitimacy, justice, and right, one that would take the element of water and the zone of the sea as points of departure rather than that of earth and land.  Instead, Schmitt reverted back to customary turf and adopted a terrestrial point of view in Nomos.

This regression to an archaic spatial paradigm with its idealized elemental stability took hold in Schmitt’s work long after the territorial basis for sovereign power had begun to falter during World War I.  At that time other elements such as air were becoming fundamental.  Though fully cognizant of these destabilizing developments, Schmitt chose to reestablish territoriality as the root of law, order, and justice.  Against the grain of his own inklings he hoped that a new sustainable international order would emerge from a distribution of the globe among internally homogenous peoples tied to specific parcels of land.  In Nomos, the sea is rendered lawless – “Auf dem Meere gilt kein Gesetz.” – and other mythical elements receive little attention.[6]  What is most important for present purposes is the role the earth plays in Schmitt’s political mythology.  It behooves one to review this fairytale-like topology.  As the mother of the law, the earth offers up from her womb the notions of inner measure, firm lines, and solid ground that can support buildings and other edifices, all key for a notion of right (Recht).  Schmitt grounds these concepts in an autochthonous etymology, taking recourse as usual to an ancient Greece furnished more by fable than history.  For him, the Greek word nomos is the Ur-begriff or primal concept for all proper standards and rules.  It has as its fundamental basis an original appropriation of land that is found “at the beginning of the history of every settled people, every commonwealth, every empire.” [7]  Land appropriation for Schmitt constitutes the original spatial order, the source of all further concrete order and all further law.  It is the reproductive root in the normative order of history.  All further property relations – communal or individual, public or private property, and all forms of possession and use in society and in international law – are derived from this radical title.  All subsequent law and everything promulgated and enacted thereafter as decrees and commands are nourished, to use Heraclitus’ word, by this source.[8]  Taking recourse in his rhetoric to myth and pristine origins, Schmitt seems to have departed from reality altogether.  Far from furnishing the grounds for a stable international order, Nomos saps the intelligence of the imaginative resources needed to confront his own contemporary world.  With respect to our era, ravaged by climate change, Schmitt’s reactionary turn to the terrestrial would be droll if it did not align as it still does with authoritarian terra firma.

It is as if Schmitt had never known earthquakes, floods, or fires, as if the earth of his time knew only the serenity of milk and honey, [9] harboring no threat to human society whatsoever.  More could be said on another occasion regarding the immanent possibilities of the mythic element of air, but for now it may be useful to point out how the sea too may be resuscitated and refashioned for thinking about planetary justice.  For, obviously, the sea is crucial to Mediterranean Studies, indeed, to Mediterranean societies.  The sea may have fashioned somewhat implicitly a notion of justice distinct from that of land.  The iusticia marium – this imaginable justice of the seas – afforded respite from the arbitrary enclosures of landed power.  As counterpoint to earthly limits and social constraints, the sea offers a sense of unbounded generosity and possibility crucial to any functioning of the law, for meanness is anathema, even corrupting, to its spirit.  For the individual hounded by communal conformity, the sea is succor.  Though the sea bears occasional storminess and admits of no permanent lines on its surface, it also knows pacific qualities crucial for the stability of the law.  The predictability of the tides too renders the sea the requisite regularity necessary for legitimacy.  Some of these contrapuntal qualities of the sea may be detected in Sharon Kinoshita’s keen observations in her “Negotiating the Corrupting Sea:  Literature in and of the Medieval Mediterranean.”  “Though the sea is the site of danger,” she writes, “it is nevertheless regulated by certain predictability.”[10]  In the centuries-long circulating historical romance Callirhoe, the sea acts to drive pirates off course, or to send a favorable wind to the husband seeking madly for his abducted wife.  Whereas Schmitt reduces the sea to the law of the fish by associating it merely with piracy, this is but one side with respect to the wider maritime connectivity of the Mediterranean, where “merchants, who come to trade, are simply the alter egos of pirates, who come to raid.”[11]  Other tales such as Floire et Blancheflor attest to the confessional coexistence and even interdependence, crucial foundations for thinking of justice which have no presence in Schmitt’s Nomos.  Kinoshita notes that in such tales “Mediterranean actors cycle through different roles and identities,” giving rise to a pluralistic perspectivalism among their audience, an essential quality for justice within multicultural societies.

In closing, we sail once again to Iqbal’s “Sicily” with its strange juxtaposition of water and earth elements, its mixing of terrestrial and oceanic imagery, ancient ruin and futural urging.  His lament before the ruins of a more just world of the past may resonate beyond his limited religious outlook.  The mixing of elemental metaphors may signal for our era that such mythemes remain inevitable, giving form to socio-political orders as if from scratch.  Yet no one mythical element will suffice in the end for conceptualizing planetary justice.  Hence the emphasis on the amphibian zone in this essay, which allows for the dialectical play of the elements in generative ways.  This zone is capacious enough to overcome the terrestrial biases of area studies fields such as those put into dialogue in Iqbal’s poem.  The notion of the sea may water these deserts to allow an oasis or two to serve as fructifying antidotes for the wastelands of terrestrial bias.

[1] Mohammed Iqbal, “Sicily,” trans. Saadath Ali Kahn, Poetry, vol. 94, January 1959, 233-234.  A more reliable translation can be found in Mustansir Mir, Tulip in the Desert:  A Selection of the Poetry of Muhammad Iqbal (London:  Hurst and Company, 1990) 117-118

[2] Oliver Simons, “Carl Schmitt’s Spatial Rhetoric” in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt, eds. Meierhenrich, Jens and Oliver Simons (Oxford:  Oxford, 2016) 797.

[3] Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea:  A World-Historical Meditation, trans. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin (Candor, NY:  Telos, 2015) 47

[4] Ibid.  79

[5] Ibid.  76

[6] Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Berlin:  Duncker and Humblot, 1950) 15.

[7] Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G.L. Ulmen (New York:  Telos, 2003) 48

[8] Ibid.

[9] “And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey . . .”  The Bible:  Authorized King James Version (Oxford:  Oxford, 1997) Exodus 3:8.  It is ironic that despite his anti-Semitism, Schmitt takes recourse to Old Testament topology.

[10] Sharon Kinoshita, “Negotiating the Corrupting Sea:  Literature in and of the Medieval Mediterranean” in Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita, Can We Talk Mediterranean?  Conversations on an Emerging Field in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (London:  Palgrave, 2017) 39.

[11] Ibid.  41

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