Critical Studies
in Politics
Towards interdisciplinarity
in the study of politics
The proposed workshop comes out of our experience of teaching,
studying and doing/guiding research in the discipline called
Political Science in India. We are a group of scholars from
different parts of the country and most of us are involved
in teaching political science - in Imphal, Hyderabad, Chandigarh
and Delhi.
Our experience of teaching, doing research
and guiding it, relates both to the ways in which we ‘do’
and teach theory, as well as the ways in which we do empirical
and theoretical research. A hiatus divides the discipline
along the theory/empirical question. This divide, and the
very rigid ways in which ‘what is theory?’ is
defined, seems to stand in the way of our discipline grappling
with the fascinating richness of politics in contemporary
India. Many of us who have been engaged in doing and guiding
research increasingly feel that much of the difficulty in
enhancing our capacities of understanding political practice,
has to do with the fact of our fairly limited disciplinary
paraphernalia.
There are two main points that are important
in this respect:
(1) We seriously think that we now need more
and more interdisciplinary approaches for studying the richness
of political practices in the contemporary. In order to do
this, political science requires a much more productive engagement
with other disciplinary energies and research being undertaken
in other fields.
(2) The theory/ empirics divide needs to
be thought afresh. Our “theory” must engage with
and emerge from the specifics of actual political practices
and our “empirical” research be framed in theory.
Currently, these two aspects tend to be treated as rigid sub-disciplines,
with theory as textual exegesis and “Indian politics”
as a series of empirical studies of laws, political parties
and so on. In the former there is rarely a whiff of actual
politics, and the latter rarely examines the conceptual field
on which it stands
At one level, there is the common-sense understanding
within our discipline that ‘political practice’
is ‘non-theoretical’, completely bereft of any
discursive-theoretical content. However, all ‘political
practice’, we believe, is always constituted by some
form of reflection and thought – theoretical or non-theoretical
– and as we realize painfully today, at least one part
of theorization must be about making sense of ‘practice’
through an understanding of the subject’s own world
and her categories of thought. We feel that intellection itself
must be seen as a specific kind of political practice that
is in turn situated within the larger universe of social and
political practices which it influences in very significant
ways. Irrespective of whether it is contemporary studies or
whether we are looking at more historical issues of the nineteenth
or eighteenth centuries, for example, we need to pay very
careful attention to the practices and social imaginaries
of the social agents in question.
These raise issues, for example, of memory
and memorialization as evidenced in say Mayawati’s erection
of monuments that mark public space in specific ways as Dalit.
While we may have legitimate normative critiques (misuse of
state funds, felling of trees), we as a discipline need to
come to terms with the ways in which the symbolic marking
of space is as important as marking time (through production
of counter-histories) in the fashioning of political identities.
Addressing these issues demands that political science enter
into a dialogue with history; with recent developments in
critical geography (on issues of space); with architecture
(on space and architectural forms); with anthropological studies
and philosophical reflections (on memory and memorialization);
with cultural studies (on practices of cultural resistance,
semiotics); with philosophy (on questions of subjectivity
and fashioning of the self) and so on.
Even when we are dealing with the relatively
standard concepts and concerns of our discipline, for instance,
‘state’, ‘democracy’ or ‘development’,
our investigations and theorizations need to open out to the
ways in which newer intellectual and conceptual histories
may reveal different trajectories and ways of conceptualizing
these categories. Some recent work for instance, shows that
in the Indian tradition, the conceptualization of political
power was significantly different – never enjoying the
‘sovereign’ position in society. Sovereignty,
in this view, always belonged to a higher Order or Law –
Dharma. We are now also increasingly becoming aware
of the fact that in ancient Buddhist social organization (and
presumably, pre-Buddhist ones as well), some form of an elective
principle was in operation. Can we then think of a different
history of democracy, as well – one that goes beyond
the Greek polis? It goes without saying, that an
exercise of this type would have to draw from with religious
studies, Indian philosophy and even Indology.
The Themes: State/Governmentality,
Capital and Subjectivity
Entering into this terrain, as many of the
scholars in the proposed workshop show, demands our engagement
with a range of other questions that centre on the question
of different histories and practices of the state and issues
of cultural politics and subject formation, of economies and
their cultural-political constitution, contexts and ways of
knowledge production and so on. Similarly, there are issues
of reconstituting ‘tradition’ to make it speak
to the challenges of modern political life which articulations
of notions of ‘the active life’ or the attempts
to re-read the Gita in India’s early encounter
with colonial modernity acquire a very significant place.
Some of the scholars in the workshop will be dealing explicitly
with these questions of intellectual history that are simultaneously,
questions of and for political thought.
Historians in India and some political and
social theorists have already begun taking these questions
seriously but unfortunately, the discipline of political science
has remained relatively immune to these currents.
We wish to emphasize in this workshop that
it has become necessary for us to recognize that the task
of doing theory is for us also inescapably ‘empirical’
and historical. We wish to underline that we need to work
through different kinds of “archives” in order
to be able theorize our contemporary adequately.
“Empirical” research also needs
to be recast. Critical Studies in Politics must therefore
try to make methodological departures. We have felt that it
has become virtually impossible to understand politics today,
especially but not only, in India, by simply relying on the
standard questions of ‘formal’ politics. It seems
to us to seriously impoverish our understanding of politics
if we confine our gaze to the more evident and recognizable
forms of political behaviour – for instance, voting
in elections or providing governance etc. The exclusive focus
of ‘political science’ on processes, institutions,
norms (constitutionalism, rule of law etc) places certain
kinds of demands that move our gaze away from the bewildering
array of practices that we must recognize as “political”
but which remain outside the gaze of our discipline.
In terms of the thematics that the different
papers will cover, three broad and related rubrics seem to
have emerged:
(1) State/governmentality
(2) Capital/ economy/ development
(3) Formations of subjectivity.
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