Aamir Mufti has written a slim and eminently forgettable book called 'Forget English!' which has caused Homo Baba to peremptorily ejaculate- 'Aamir Mufti brilliantly elaborates Edward Said’s critical itinerary to confront the contrapuntal and contradictory nature of neo-liberal capitalism while questioning the disciplinary claims of world literature. Forget English! is a bracing riposte to the frothy fellowship of cultural globalistas who believe that ‘the earth is flat’ and take the ubiquitous access to Starbucks as a sign of global prosperity and well-being. I warmly recommend Forget English! for its critical insight and its political commitment.”
The rise of China has shifted the economic center of gravity of the globe. It has also made nonsense of the notion that 'neo-liberal capitalism' actually exists.It is now obvious that there are only more or less powerful nation states which ruthlessly promote their own economic interests while maintaining some pretence that their Corporations are actually perfectly free of State control.
English however has not declined in importance- even if, in deference to French sensibilities, some call it 'Globish'. On the other hand, Literary theory- of the sort Baba and Mufti get paid to bleat about- is as dead as whatever circular firing squad of a political program these guys pretend to advance.
Mufti, being a Muslim and therefore likely to just have stepped out of the Arabian Nights, begins his book by conjuring up a flying carpet upon which you will journey today to a far country where you will be forced to converse with its most famous writer.
No doubt, this sort of thing happens to Mufti and Baba all the time. However, it not a routine occurrence for most people. We don't want to travel to far countries- they tend to be shit-holes- and we don't want to meet writers there. A beach and a bacardi would suit us better.
Why don't we want to meet writers? They are ugly and stupid and, if 'politically engaged', tell stupid lies. By contrast, at the beach, some callipygous Kardashian lookalike may permit us to take a selfie with her which, after a bit of Photoshopping, we can post up on our Instagram feed.
Still, I suppose, someone or other has to meet writers 'of renown' from time to time or else they might turn feral and bite their own heads off. This being the case, the world will always need Babas & Muftis.
Mufti is speaking of a global publishing industry well supplied with translators and literary magazines and foolish University Departments housing people like himself. This is indeed a relatively modern development. But it peaked in the Sixties and is now greatly in decline because only stupid people read books and the internet offers us something better.
Still, while the going was good, a person like Frances Pritchett could very profitably converse with a writer like Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and thus gain an Archimedian point from which to change Western reception of Urdu poetry. Precisely because Pritchett is a good egg, she has made her work available for free on the web with the result however that we'd no longer want to meet either Pritchett or Faruqi. The internet allows us to quickly identify their blind-spots- which for people of their generation has to do with Islamic theology. But Urdu shorn of Islam is a baroque type of hysteria. A simple Google search easily corrects their bias and disintermediates contemporary men of letters from our reception of Literary traditions.
It is curious that Mufti should be so wrong about India. He must know that a hundred years ago, an European or American visitor to India would have been able to converse quite productively with a Tagore, Iqbal or Bharati. Tagore was translated to mass acclaim in Europe and China and Latin America. Iqbal was more erudite and could discuss Bergson and Bedil and Leibniz and Ghazzali and so forth. Bharati might have bored his interlocutor with Shelley but then he was an Iyer and- as I have repeatedly proved on this blog- Iyers are as stupid as shit and deserve to be given OBC status with retro-fucking-respect.
What about two hundred years ago? We know that European sojourners conversed with Indian men of letters with great profit to themselves. Raja Ram Mohan Roy provided much needed ammunition to Unitarian theologians. Many British officials, and some scholarly travelers, gained a European reputation purely on the basis of such conversations and assistance.
Learning the elements of a Classical language of a particular Culture was, in general, sufficient for them to gain a permanent place in the annals of scholarship. However, diminishing returns rapidly set in. Their successors would need much greater talent and application to make any sort of impression. Still, a good Sanskrit scholar who interviewed Hindu Acharyas in 1919 would have left a useful chronicle for scholarly purposes. That is no longer the case. All you'd get is something Pico-fucking-Iyer level vacuous and self regarding.
Mufti, bizarrely, doesn't understand that European 'griffins'- i.e. newcomers to India with some indoctrination in Oriental languages at Haileybury or Hanover- had no difficulty administering Districts, let alone conversing with 'notable writers' of whom their Munshis or Pundits would have informed them. Even an indifferent 'Dubash' or dragoman assisting a traveler, east of Venice, would permit highly profitable interchange.
Still the fact is, some languages were more useful than others. Farsi would have sufficed to speak to almost any notable writer from Istanbul to Calcutta. Arabic would have opened up yet richer treasures. Sanskrit turned out to be extraordinarily valuable to those who mastered it. It revolutionized European philology in the same manner that it had impacted on Chinese literary culture more than a thousand years previously.
Similarly, people from China or India or Africa who learned European languages and traveled to Europe or America did profit by their intercourse with literary savants to be found there. Ram Mohan Roy's meeting with Bentham and Mill is a case in point.
In comparative terms, little profit can be gleaned by meeting a foreign writer today which is why there is little eagerness to do so. Either, like Borges, the guy will simply perform his party piece or you'd be exposed to narcissistic whinging of a sick making sort. Two centuries ago things were quite different. There were increasing returns to intercourse. Even a hundred years ago, profitable exchange was possible for people of talent.
Mufti's mistake is perhaps one natural to a Pakistani. He may believe that the Hindus and Sikhs who used to live in his country were completely insulated from Muslim culture which was itself more a matter of habit and custom than anything amenable to rational analysis. Thus, a Western visitor would have been confronted with something too heteroclite to construe. However, the truth is, Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims in eighteenth century Sindh or Punjab did participate in a common culture which, however, was hierarchical because only a few 'Amils' could access the Classical models of vernacular compositions. In India we speak of these as 'ritigranth'- rule following- literature. They were already taxonomised by the local cognoscenti and one's 'Munshi' or 'Pundit' could soon enable you to productively engage with them. No doubt, there may have been an initial impression of polyglot cacophony for the European traveler entering Muslim or Hindu realms. But one could easily find a dragoman or dubash and everything would become legible quickly enough.
European visitors who studied the Classical language could within a few months converse very profitably with writers of note across a wide geographical canvass precisely because they were all steeped in common, more or less ancient, literary and poetic forms with rigorous rules of composition and a rich hermeneutic tradition.
Consider the poetry European visitors found in Indian cities like Lahore or Lucknow or regions like Rajasthan . They soon saw a parallelism with what obtained in their native place. They understood that just as an Newdigate prize winner might write a dialect poem or a Border ballad in between composing Greek anacreontics or Latin epigrams, so too might an Indian poet write in Persian, Punjabi, Bhojpuri or Urdu while, in the case of a scion of a scholarly family, also turning out turgid lucubrations in Sanskrit or Arabic.
What Mufti fails to grasp is that so long as some coalition of members of the cognoscenti- preferably including the Prince himself- is conversant with all these forms then there could be an 'overlapping consensus' affirming that they represented common aesthetic objects. This was what in fact obtained in India. But it also obtained in Europe of the period. The Laird might know a little Latin and his Rector a little Greek but both could judge the merit of the local Rabbie Burns as well as form an informed opinion of more learned compositions in the Edinburgh Review. But then, some of those compositions may have been written by the sons of crofters who had grasped such slender threads of opportunity as fell within their ken and had risen by their own indomitable spirit or genius.
Mufti takes a different view. In common with other Ivy League sub-continental academics in shite subjects, he believes his ancestors to have been little better than beasts till the Brits very kindly raised them up to the status of infantile or mentally retarded subjects.
This is why his book is crap. Human beings were human even before there was any Imperialism or Neo-liberalism. Literary compositions in any language- more particularly one 'opaque' to the Prince- were of interest precisely because Literature possesses utility and novel forms of Literature permit a lifting of what hermeneutics merges as its horizons. No doubt, if the Prince were preoccupied with battles or the bottle, the impetus for cultural intercourse may have been lacking. However, in India, the brilliant court of Akbar had set the opposite example. A Prince could burnish his reputation and gain 'soft power' by encouraging cultural interchange. Warren Hastings did not depart from this precedent. He sought to reinforce it and Europe was greatly impressed by the results. Since Hanover was in personal union with Britain at that time, the industrious German pedant fastened upon Sanskrit and Persian and Arabic in return for a modest financial reward and helped reshape European philology while adding fuel to the Romantic movement.
It is not a coincidence that where prosperity increased on the basis of rational Economic policy, the arts also thrived. But there is no arrow of causation here. No sinister Marxian force was at work. It is simply the case that 'positional' services- e.g. those provided by a richer and more varied Literature- have high Income elasticity. Where there is secular stagnation, Literature stagnates. The opposite happens where there is economic growth. However, it should be remembered, Literature has to compete with other types of Instructional Entertainment. Supply side changes in the market for substitutes severely impact Literature. It declined as TV burgeoned not because people read fewer books but because talented people could make more money writing for TV. Now, thanks to the smartphone and broadband, only a fool would bother to read a recently published book. It is bound to be shite. Crowd sourced information, in line with the Condorcet Jury theorem, is more reliable and more affecting. It better fulfills the ethical and aesthetic goals of Literature.
Mufti may not be, like Spivak, a self-styled 'Europeanist', but he is my age and from a similar background, thus must have spent more time reading in adolescence than watching TV. I'd imagine Helen Waddell's 'Wandering Scholars' was as much a favorite of his as it was of mine. In any case, he took courses in Anthropology at the LSE when I was there- so he can't be wholly ignorant of the relationship between oral and written literary traditions. True, he may have been influenced by Said's silly- but well written- essay on the Chanson Roland, but he is after all a cultured Pakistani who can see with his own eyes that scription does not fasten vampire fashion upon oral culture so as to 'transfer surpluses' or any such foolishness. The fact is traditional rhapsodists- like the various Qawwali groups- make far more money from their art than people like Mufti.
The guy isn't a deracinated snob, yet- probably because teaching a worthless subject at Ivy League causes Brown people to despise themselves so deeply as to impute sub-humanity to their own venerable ancestors- he forgets that literature in Europe was composed by a wide class of people- some of an ecclesiastic, others of a goliard stripe. Since Europeans understood this about their own culture, they were not baffled at all at finding the same thing elsewhere. No doubt there were pedants and prudes who did express bafflement but then their profession was stupidity.
Mufti presents one side of the picture- an initial impression of complexity and confusion- but does not tell the other side of the story- viz. that there existed a cognoscenti who valued this diversity of aesthetic expression as having univalent foundations and thus, upon which they could turn a positional good, or 'soft power' type, profit.
Mufti is an academic. But his branch of academia is now considered wholly worthless. Nobody cares what 'gravitational pull' it experiences. Money matters- which is why we care about Financial Markets. His University Department does not matter at all. Why? It is incapable of writing in an interesting and legible manner about any literature whatsoever. For a while, it can hide its stupidity under a pretense of cosmopolitan erudition or pedagogic empire building. But then a lot of us losers are doing exactly the same thing. When my on and off g.f reproves me for not having lost any weight, I say that I've just started the Patagonian cleanse which, perversely, first increases water retention. It turns out she has just returned from Patagonia and knows that the Patagonian cleanse is based on consuming large quantities of penguin poo. I then say- 'obviously I mean the Welsh Patagonian cleanse which is manufactured in Cardiff using the same genetically modified protein chains as would also provide a concrete model of the Mochizuki proof of the abc conjecture. The thing is highly experimental and hush hush. Don't even try to Google it. ' Since the g.f works for a V.C outfit, she pretends to believe me. That's how things are now. We are all cosmopolitan only in our frauds and deceptions. Mufti, who believes there is a Great Depression, mentions Marx and Engels and Auerbach and Said so as to shore up his claim to 'critical intelligence'. Why? Because these names are wholly alien to his Religion and his Culture- whatever that might be. This is the 'gravitational pull' of cosmopolitan fraud which allows us to forget, if only for a moment, that it is only English we speak and if we can't do so sensibly- thus benefiting English speakers- then we inherit oblivion much in advance of Language's Lethe limit.
No comments:
Post a Comment