Nikita Dhawan affirmatively sabotaging German affirmative action

Portugal and Spain- two smallish countries on the Atlantic coast- established huge overseas Empires in the Sixteenth Century. How did they do so? Nikita Dhawan, a Professor in Germany, tells us that

postcolonial theorists emphasize the profound interconnection between Europe’s imperial ventures and the Enlightenment veneration of reason, science, and progress that made possible the very thinking of the world as a unified whole. 

This is rather strange. Neither Portugal nor Spain showed any symptom of 'Enlightenment' till their Empires had decayed and greatly diminished. These guys were busy stoking up the fires of the auto da fe and hunting for victims for the Inquisition rather than 'venerating reason, science and progress' at the height of their Imperial success. Portugal retained a large, albeit economically moribund, colonial Empire longer than even Britain or France. That was why it remained backward, even relative to Spain, into the Sixties and Seventies. Jean Paul Satre, taking a vacation from war ravaged Paris, was astonished at the poverty of the Portuguese people who had escaped both Wars but, nevertheless, stagnated. 

Nikita tells us that, according to po-co theorists, it was impossible for the Portuguese or the Spanish to conceive of the world as a unified whole even though they had circumnavigated the globe by 1522- because that event took place at least a hundred years before any scholar has dated the beginning of the Enlightenment.

Germany, though divided and slow to recover from the Wars of Religion, certainly did have an Enlightenment and a Scientific Revolution- at least on the campuses of its many Universities. So did Switzerland. The latter had no 'Imperial ventures' while the former did because it was a rising naval power and foolishly believed that colonies would help pay for shiny new battleships which would throw shade on those of the Kaiser's cousin- the British King Emperor.

Here is the clue for why the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution had no connection whatsoever- except in terms of their impact on naval power- with Colonial ventures. Portugal and Spain and later on, Holland and Britain and France, all had experienced Atlantic fishermen who could turn into sailors and soldiers able to take control of overseas territories from which valuable commodities could be extracted. However, more than experience of crossing dangerous oceans was required for Naval supremacy. Science could make a decisive contribution. Similarly, religious tolerance and economic freedoms lowered the cost and increased the profitability of colonial ventures. That is why, England prevailed over Portugal and France in India. The former's religious zealotry had provoked the wrath of the natives who soon cut it down to size. Even France made similar mistakes- though less programmatically. Ananda Ranga Pillai tells the story of a French Governor who orders the destruction of both the Temple and the Mosque to please his religious wife or mistress. The Muslims stand firm- so the Governor backs down. The Hindu priests of the Temple are unpopular with their clients and so they simply slink away. The Temple is destroyed. But this puts up the backs of the Hindus- who were the majority in South India. They gravitate to the British who were prepared to restrain or deport their own missionaries if they upset the locals.

The Brits also prevailed over the Dutch because, according to British accounts, the Dutch were drunken slobs who spent their time raping their native maidservants. Their wives, on the other hand, were kept busy whipping those same raped women. Still, the Dutch did manage to hang on to some valuable possessions which they managed to turn a profit on.

Nikita tells us that po-co theorists hold ridiculous views because 'Inspired by the Frankfurt School and the poststructuralist critique of the Enlightenment.' In other words, po-co theorists are stupid and ignorant people who, unfortunately, stumbled on some worthless drivel which sought to explain why the right sort of Revolution hadn't happened yet. But, the answer to that question was not far to seek. The Bolshevik revolution was a disaster for all Russians including most 'Old Bolsheviks'. Ordinary people showed perfect rationality by voting against, if necessary with their feet, that type of blood boltered shambles. What cognitive dissonance of their own caused po-co theorists to attach themselves to this particular academic availability cascade? One answer is that there was already a nativist 'Gharbzadegi' (Westoxification') type indigenous availability cascade based on Heidegger and other such crackpots. Post-structuralism- though enthusiastically embracing the Iranian revolution in the person of Foucault- was slightly less uncouth. Also, it qualified one for a Professorship in some academic backwater like Innsbruck or Idaho.

Nikita, who teaches at the former, probably speaks in propria persona when she goes on to say-

These “world-knowing” and “world-creating”strategies were at the heart of European colonialism. Imperialist ideologies were successful in translating their provincial understanding of knowledge,norms, values, and ideals into explanatory paradigms with universalist purchase. The universalizing project of Enlightenment imposed a uniform standard of instrumental reason, privileging European conceptions of knowledge and institutions.

Nikita is saying that European colonialism had univocal strategies of an epistemic type. Yet we know that Spain and Portugal had very different epistemic systems from those of Holland or Britain. France has always had a type of thinking wholly alien and generally uncongenial to empirical England. We think philosophy is a joke subject. The French make it a compulsory at High School.

'World knowing' and 'World creating' are meaningless terms in English. No body knows the World. It is too big. God may have created it. We certainly haven't.  Weltwissen und Weltschaffen might mean something to Germans- but then we think of them as a fundamentally stupid, pedantic, people who easily confuse themselves with long words and end up invading Poland and then, quite gratuitously, declaring war on America, after which they end up getting raped and slaughtered and losing a lot of territory.

Spivak's 'worlding' is based on a grotesque parody of Heidegger's essay on 'the origin of the work of art'.
George R.R Martin is an artist who has 'world knowing' and 'world creating' with reference to a particular world- the one depicted in 'Game of Thrones'. But he hasn't actually colonised that world or tamed any dragons. Spivak argues otherwise. She thinks a Britisher taking a walk in India in the early nineteenth century is actually inventing the natives and the strange trees and birds and animals that he sees. It is all becoming Imperial intellectual property. What's worse is it is all done in secret. Them redcoats come and occupy our country and extract huge profits from our starving peasantry but still they are not content! Secretly, they have invented us and our country! Macaulay doesn't say this in plain words. But in the India Office archives there's some document which shows this is what happened! Perfidious fucking Albion!

Why does Nikita think Europe had a 'uniform standard of instrumental reason' at some time in the past? It doesn't have such a standard now- which is why Merkel can't speak for May or Orban or even Macron- and it certainly didn't have such a standard in its past. No European country- colonial or otherwise- has ever privileged 'European conceptions of knowledge and institutions'. There was once a 'Concert of Europe'. It didn't stop the French getting rid of the Bourbons or Belgium gaining independence or anything else associated with 'Enlightenment' or 'Illuminati'.

Countries privilege their own institutions and standards of instrumental reason- unless the latter
militates for a pooling of sovereignty but even then that pooling could be reversed if 'instrumental reason' calls for it.

The Enlightenment reform of legal, administrative, and economic policy in the colonies, instead of ushering in freedom and equality opened a new chapter of the history of domination.

This is sheer nonsense. There was no 'Enlightenment reform' in French Algeria or British India or Dutch Indonesia or Portuguese Africa. There were pragmatic concessions and, in the case of territories held under a League or UN mandate, some cosmetic window-dressing- nothing more. No colonial power pretended that subject people were 'free and equal'. If they had done so, their own citizens would have rebelled because it was their taxes and conscript sons who kept the Imperial show on the road. In return, they got the psychic satisfaction of being the 'master race'- even if miserably poor in their slums or shanty towns.

It introduced practices of subjectification, surveillance, regulation, and discipline.

Where? Such practices already existed and were taken over or extended by colonial powers. Nothing was introduced save where a large enough colonial population existed. The French indigenat system might, at first blush, look like a counter example. But, on closer scrutiny, the whole thing turns out to be bureaucratic window-dressing. It corresponded to nothing real on the ground. That is why France kept getting hammered every time it went to war with Germany. On paper it had this huge coloured population as conscriptable (though less cowardly) as its own sons. But that paper was worthy only of wiping the Nazi conqueror's bum.

By contrast, the Kremlin did introduce highly effective practices of subjectification, surveillance, regulation and genocide to its client regimes. But so did the C.I.A. The Kremlin might invite a leader to Moscow and quietly strangle him. The Americans would pay off a general to slaughter their client along with his family- unless some member of it happened to be a Cardinal- for similarly silly reasons. What does this prove? Only that, as Obama said, super-powers have a foreign policy which consists of 'doing stupid shit'. It's a sort of Zahavi handicap they are foredoomed to.

Attempts at enlightened and humanitarian reforms regularly resulted in the increased control over the individuals in whose name these reforms were carried out.

Sheer nonsense! There were no 'enlightened and humanitarian reforms'- as opposed to capitulations to Evangelical or other Religious or Ideological pressure groups- but these were of a cosmetic nature.

Controlling people costs money. Controlled people have a lower marginal product and thus, if the population increases, control decreases or imposes a burden on the metropolitan population. The thing is incentive incompatible.

As argued by David Scott (1999: 35), colonialism produced not just extractive effects on colonized bodies, but also governing effects on colonial conduct.

Scott is a silly man who writes nonsense about the Carribean- a topos very different from that of  African or South Asian Imperialism.
 'Extractive effects on colonized bodies' is gibberish. It is not really the case that the imperialists got up in the middle of the night and extracted the oil our of coloured people's hair, or wax from their ears. 'Governing effects on colonial conduct' is equally meaningless. Extraction and Governing are the same wherever they occur. Only magic, or some supernatural process, could make them different in different climes or having regard to different complexions.

Although the focus has primarily been on time, it is important to bear in mind that the Enlightenment association with and embeddedness in the geographical region “Europe” is a decisive aspect of its self-consciousness.

WTF?! Has this lady never heard of America? The geographical region 'Europe' meant nothing to the young Republic. England did- as an object of hate. Santayana's young Puritan is taught to transfer his fork to his right hand after cutting up his meat because do otherwise is 'English' and effete and thus wholly un-American.

From this perceived “center”, the Enlightenment thinkers began to theorize the“peripheral” parts of the world, comparing their own societies and cultureswith the rest of the world. Colonialism was the “age of discovery”, when the Europeans claimed to have “found” new worlds by bravely encountering“cannibals” and “savages” (Hulme 1990: 20). Not being great travelers did not deter the Enlightenment thinkers from theorizing and judging other societies. Although few of them had direct experience of the colonies, several worked closely with private and state bodies that were responsible for formulating the colonial policies of European powers. Relying on travel literature, ethnographic sources, and literary accounts they assessed and judged the moral, political, social, and economic practices,institutions, and traditions in America as well as Asia and Africa. At the heart of the Enlightenment idea of history was the notion of “progress” of mankind from “savagery” to “civilization”, based on a complex developmental model with Europe on top of the “civilizational pyramid”. For instance, in his re-flections in
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes draws on events in the Americas to substantiate his claim that the state of nature is savagery (Hobbes2003: 103). In his view, the “savages” hold a mirror up to the “reality” of human nature; they show the frightening image of a society bereft of those attributes which make it civilized (Hulme 1990: 24). Hobbes proposes that the state of nature is a state of war, thereby legitimizing the eventual ac-ceptance of an ultimate earthly authority, namely Leviathan, who will guarantee peace and order. The implied relationship between Europe and America becomes apparent in this metaphorical map of the world where the former symbolizes civilization and the latter savagery (Hulme 1990: 25). The language of development and the metaphor of maturation deem the natives inferior to European standards. Or, in John Locke’s famous words: “in the be-ginning all the world was America”

So, it turns out the lady has heard of America. What she does not say is that the natives of North America did indeed prove inferior to the English- at least in their resistance to certain old world diseases.

Dr. Johnson described the Scottish highlanders as savages- so what? The truth is them guys wot live in the Council block around the corner are cannibals. Don't trespass on their turf or they will eat you. The same goes for White's club. I was invited there by an Old Etonian aristocrat but one look at his filed teeth (English aristocrats, in a state of nature, have tusks) assured me that his invitation was by way of providing his fellow toffs with a bit of 'Indian takeaway'. I'm not falling for that again. I once accepted an invitation to dine with an Old Harrovian and, though a vegetarian Punjabi, he literally chewed my ear off with piteous whining against the gorgeous, pouting, Chidu who was our Finance Minister at the time. Well when I say 'literally' I mean 'literally' like in American usage- and, in fairness to him, I should mention the fellow had been to Wharton.

Marx said America was more advanced than Europe. Indeed, the whole world is becoming America. Why? It is because Americans were and are Americo-centric not Eurocentric. John Adams did spend a little time in a German grammar school but soon dropped out realising the Teutonic race to be one of industrious donkeys. Ultimately, he decided the proper education for one of his class should be technocratic. More importantly, American Universities developed wholly indigenous courses and methods of study though, like Hollywood, they used their financial muscle to cherry pick impecunious European talent. However, this did not mean that- as Gorshenkov forlornly hoped- young Americans turned into proper Europeans but rather that Europe Disneyfied itself and surrendered to Coca-Cola and the Big Mac.

Nikita may think 'Enlightenment thinkers' are important. Some American pedagogues might pretend the same thing in their classrooms or tenure-tropic, apple polishing, publications. But Americans know silly Europeans don't and didn't matter. What mattered was Franklin discovering electricity and Washington smoking a reefer through wooden teeth.

Nikita's knowledge of history is worse than even that of my imagined American Everyman.

She thinks authority was not something the law concerned itself with. If you beat your pageboy to death the law would do nothing so long as there was some discourse that was the epistemological corollary of your brutality. Such a discourse would proceed by showing that your pageboy was your inferior in brawn- which is why you were able to beat him to death- and also your inferior in wealth and social status- which is why he was working for you.

If Nikita is correct, then it must always have been the case that European discourse was founded on the 'might is right' principle. Clearly if you know you have more might than the other guy, you can do what you like to him because you have 'constituted him as an object of European knowledge'.


You don't believe Nikita could have such a foolish belief? See for yourself-

Colonial discourse was the epistemological corollary to colonial violence:It authorized Europeans to construct and contain the non-European world and its people by defining and representing them as racially and culturally inferior. By constituting them as objects of European knowledge, the colonial subject’s perspectives were disqualified and devalued. The universalist agenda of colonial discourse laid the foundations for the ideological justification of colonialism as a civilizing mission. Its Eurocentric, totalizing teleology stripped non-European peoples of agency and historicity, while the focus on reason silenced other perspectives disqualifying them as “irrational” and“unscientific”.

Is Nikita doing a spot of Spivakian 'affirmative sabotage' here? She is a Professor in a German University. Clearly, some Germans think brown people can be 'rational' or even 'scientific' which is why they hire them. Nikita feels she has to sabotage the very affirmative action machinery which grants her the status of a rational and scientific human being. She does this by saying

1) that colonial discourse had a universalist agenda- i.e., as in Chesterton's paranoid fantasies- its aim was to use coloured troops from the Colonies to enslave metropolitan citizens and force them to give up alcohol or anything else the elite disapproved of.
The truth is there was a small amount of discourse devoted to colonial matters. In France, it was fucked in the head because almost all French discourse has always been fucked in the head. In England, however, a lot of it was alethic, pragmatic but scarcely univocal. One guy says 'the people of x are stupid' and another guy promptly replies with a paper showing those same people are geniuses and probably the original Aryans or Atlanteans or whatever. The only thing English colonial discourse was univocal about was that contiguous territories populated by almost identical people must nevertheless be administered differently for wholly contingent and hysteresis related reasons.
Crap colonial discourse may have had a universalist agenda- but it was so obviously crap that it had zero abiding influence.

2) Colonialism was based on profitability. It never had any 'ideological justification'. It did have a strategic justification based on Mahan type Naval doctrine. 'Civilising mission' was funny for a while- but Kipling killed it off by linking it to his Gospel of Work. 'Ornamentalism' replaced 'Orientalism'. What was important was that appearances be kept up at the lowest possible cost. Saki describes an Edwardian Imperialist thus- ' he had quieted a province, kept open a trade route, enforced the tradition of respect which is worth the ransom of many kings in out-of-the-way regions, and done the whole business on rather less expenditure than would be requisite for organising a charity in the home country.' In other words, this magnificently moustachioed pro-consul was playing the same game of bluff as the Vicar's wife who hands round a plate of caviar sandwiches with such elan that those below the salt- who somehow end up with potted meat- nevertheless vicariously enjoy the display of an imaginary opulence. Anyway, it's all in a good cause. The Jewish Banker has been comforted with caviare and such champagne as his own vineyards produce and thus, in that spirit of Christian charity which is the monopoly of his race, signs a munificent cheque which will keep the Church heated through winter with something left over for the Organ fund and the Boy Scout's tent.

3) Communism and now Eco-Feminist gobshittery has a totalizing teleology. The former also had very good systems of surveillance and torture- or biopolitics as Foucault would have it. The latter is yet to develop any such thing- which is why we dismiss it as gobshittery. ISIS type sociopathy, at one time, seemed to be shaping up but it collapsed because of fracking. Economics, it seems, is all that matters. That, at any rate, was the scientific- as opposed to psychotic- part of Marx.

Let us now bid farewell to Nikita Dhawan. I presume she is Punjabi. Surely she doesn't need to try so hard to affirmatively sabotage the egalitarian machinery of her Academic paymasters? Why not simply dance the bhangra while saying 'India pherry hot'? After all, it worked for Ranajit Guha- and he is isn't even Punjabi.


Anyway, what really gets my goat is that Ireland- the original homeland of us Iyers till we were ejected by the leprechauns- is now ruled by some fucking Marathi- like Rajnikanth who is now running for the top job in Tamil Nadu. When will this Maratha aggression end? How long must we remain subject to their Imperialism?