Julian Go's subaltern standpoint

In a chapter titled 'the subaltern standpoint' in his book 'Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory' Julian Go writes- 

“[I]f postcolonial thought is to lay claim to political and ethical import,” avers Leela Gandhi,

it must actually go to a postcolonial country and engage in politics or in moral entrepreneurism. Shitting out boring books in a College Campus in Europe or America doesn't change anything. True, there can be exceptions. Edward Said was quite an effective spokesperson for the PLO at one time. But that was because Yasser Arafat was an important figure back then.  

“it must use the analytic advantage of historical hindsight scrupulously to disclose the failure of imperial binarism.”

Imperialism meant ruling over distant colonies. That ended when most colonies could no longer 'pay for themselves' nor rely on the Imperial country providing protection. There were some exceptions. Martinique chose to remain with France. The Falklands still need the British Navy. 

Gandhi here announces a central task for postcolonial theory: to overcome what Said called the “law of division” or, in Gandhi’s terms, “imperial binarism,” by reconstructing the past through reconnecting relations.

In other words, telling stupid lies. But such lies didn't help Leela's ancestor- the Mahacrackpot.  

As a humanistic project, Said’s contrapuntal modality means to realize this urgent task.

One might say he was pushing back against a well-entrenched Israel lobby. Anti-Semitism we will always have with us. It helped that Said was a Protestant and had been to the right schools and Colleges.  

As a social scientific project, postcolonial relationalism is a promising aperture. We have pursued this in the previous chapter.

Go had written ' This is a relationalism that attends to the mutual constitution of the powerful and powerless,

There is no such 'mutual constitution'. Either a country has a big navy and army with which to occupy colonies or it does not. 

 the metropole and colony, the core and the postcolony, the Global North and Global South.

People like Nehru had tried to organize the 'Global South' so as to gain countervailing power. But, 'Panchsheel' & the Bandung Conference failed. In 1962, Nkrumah wrote to the British PM demanding that Britain stop helping India. In 1965, Sukarno sided with Pakistan against India. Later, the 'Brandt commission' and other such initiatives failed miserably. 

 It is relationalism taken to the geopolitical scene, scaled upward and outward to critically apprehend imperial interactions and their enduring legacies that have been for too long covered up by extant social science.

It was stupid shit. The powerless can't help each other or themselves. 

We have seen that relationalism embeds within social theory a postcolonial approach for overcoming not only analytic bifurcation, but also, relatedly, Orientalism, the occlusion of empire and of colonized agency.

Japan, Korea and China were all 'oriental' and had Confucian ideas in common. This did not prevent Japan trying to conquer both. The big problem with such 'relationism' was that they tended to work in favor of one country which sought to dominate others similar to itself. Consider 'Pan-Arabism'. It was a miserable failure.  

Yet, these are not the only obstacles that we must overcome in order to craft social theories and sociologies sensitive to the postcolonial challenge.

i.e. telling stupid lies about how all us darkies should unite against Whitey. The problem is that it is other darkies who keep trying to steal all our cool shiny stuff.  

There is another. We have named it metrocentrism. Metrocentrism, recall, is the generalized analytic practice of Eurocentric universalism. It is the practice of false universalism: taking a specific parochial or particular experience and assuming it is universal.

It may be misapplied but it can be very useful. Lawyers and Judges in India or Kenya might take note of judgments made in other English speaking jurisdictions. So may legislators. Economists and Statisticians, too, may use techniques developed elsewhere.  

Postcolonial theorists problematized this false universalism on several fronts, from the universalism of European humanism to that of Marxism.

But they wrote like shit. Nobody could understand what they were getting at.  

The question thus remains. How can this limitation be transcended in social science?

Easily enough if you are smart and have a good enough 'Structural Causal Model' to work with. What matters is whether what you are doing is useful. Thus, suppose the government of your country is auctioning 5G spectrum. You look around and see how other countries have done it. Which approach made the most money? There is a mathematical 'auction theory' which enables you to make good enough predictions. 

Relationalism is not necessarily the panacea. The very theoretical opposition between relationalism and substantialism has an arguably provincial genealogy that is confined to European Enlightenment thought.

No. Both are mathematical au fond. Because of complexity, concurrency, and computability problems, the substantive approach may be off the table. The best you can do is seek to promote a better correlated equilibria based on better public signals.  

And, for all their relational insights, Bourdieu’s field theory and Latour’s actor-network theory can be said to be provincial theories, rooted in the particular context of Anglo-European theorizing and concerns.

Nonsense! Both can be applied well enough in India or South Africa.  

Universalizing such theories helps transcend the imperial episteme’s law of division, but does it not also reproduce the imperial episteme’s metrocentrism at the same time?

Not if you live in India or South Africa and simply use a particular vocabulary or methodology which has been implemented elsewhere. Why reinvent the wheel?  

If we want a postcolonial social theory

We don't. It is useless.  

that goes beyond metrocentrism, we may have to look elsewhere. This chapter ponders the possibilities, and ultimately suggests that, for overcoming metrocentrism, we might fare well to look at what can be termed “the subaltern standpoint.”

Fine. Go to a poor country and make Youtube videos of poor people explaining what problems they face and how their lives could be made better and more productive.  

FROM METROCENTRISM TO THE STANDPOINT Let us first return to metrocentrism. As seen in Chapter Two, metrocentrism was a characteristic of early social theory and social science more generally, and it remains pervasive and palpable today. Wallerstein (1998) suggests that metrocentrism is one of the dominant modalities of Eurocentric social science, though he calls it “universalism”: the view that “scientific truths that are valid across all time and space.”

This is certainly true in the natural sciences. However, a false theory- e.g. that History is about class struggle rather than class cooperation- will be shit no matter where it is applied. 

According to Wallerstein, “European social science,” exhibits “universalism in asserting that whatever happened in Europe in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries is applicable everywhere” (Wallerstein 1997: 93).

But the Germans were Listian and kept banging on about 'sonderweg'- or 'special path'. But lots of countries said they would develop according to their own native genius thus avoiding the problems fo Capitalism or Socialism or whatever.  

No doubt, from modernization theory to Durkheim’s theory of anomie, from Marx’s theory of class conflict to Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power—these theories are rooted in the specific experience of Anglo-European metropoles.

They were stupid lies. It isn't really true that Society secretly wants to watch you poop and will punish you if you rebel against Capitalism by eating your own shit.  

Metrocentrism arises as these theories are unproblematically applied everywhere around the world: a world that now figures, by this false universalism, as a blank slate onto which we project our Eurocentric concepts.

Americo-centric maybe. Europe is washed up. The plain fact is that commercial enterprises around the world begin to resemble each other as scientific management techniques are introduced. Politics and Jurisprudence too converge to what is most effective. However, if in a particular country- e.g. China- the ruling Party waded through an ocean of blood to secure absolute power, it is unlikely they will permanently surrender such power- unless the leader, like Gorbachev, is as stupid as shit.  

Remember, too, the assumption that underpins metrocentrism: that the particular experiences of Anglo-European metropoles are not particular, and, therefore, that social theories based upon those experiences are universal.

Some are, some aren't. Stock Exchanges may work in pretty much the same way around the world but there may be historical institutions- e.g. the Monarchy or the Established Church- which are ideographic, not nomothetic.  

Metrocentrism denies the situatedness of knowledge.

It may usefully deny that 'situatedness' matters greatly in economic processes. A foreign company may grow rapidly in a particular country. However, it is unlikely that a foreign politician will be able to win elections in a country of which he has little knowledge.  

Universalizing the particular while denying the particularity of that which is universalized, it attempts to pull the god trick. It refuses to recognize that the supposed view from nowhere is always–already from somewhere.

But if all experts, no matter where they are from, come to the same conclusion then it is a 'view from nowhere in particular'.  

As Harding (1992: 312) notes, this especially pernicious assumption guides Anglo-European science in its entirety.

But such science has been very successful. Voodoo, on the other hand, isn't successful.  

By this assumption, only metropolitans have scientific knowledge.

No. Only those trained in science who are actually doing science have such knowledge. I may live in London but I lack scientific knowledge. There are guys living in remote jungles in India who have plenty of scientific knowledge- which is why they are doing research in out of the way places.  

“Western science, which is simply ‘science’ for Eurocentrists, is conceptualized as fundamentally pure ideas, not as the culturally determinate institutions and practices that historians, sociologists and anthropologists report” (Harding 1992: 312).

Also Western Mummies and Daddies are conceptualized as pure Mummies or Daddies. Kids don't say 'I like kissing my Western Mummy'. They just say 'I like kissing Mumsy. She is the bestest Mumsy in the whole world'. This shows that Western kids are very evil and metrocentric and thus should be forced to learn 'the subaltern standpoint' in Grad Skool.  

We know that this assumption of an omnipotent knower, the Cartesian subject who is fully rational and objective, independent of social determination, is itself historically and geopolitically rooted in the emergence and rise of the Dutch empire and the early stages of Europe’s global reign (Dussel 2008).

No we don't. The fact is Descartes arrives at the same type of Occassionalism as Ghazali or the Gita. One might say that something like 'analytic geometry' was available to both and this explains the commonality. 

Writing from the “decoloniality of knowledge” school in philosophy, Grosfoguel (2012: 89)

who is White and has a Dick. This means he is very evil.  

aptly summarizes what this means: We see here the beginning of the ego-politics of knowledge

only because you have a dick. Cut the thing off immediately! Then you won't be seeing any fucking 'ego-politics'. You will be weeping and weeping.  

which is nothing less than a secularization of the Christian cosmology of the theo-politics of knowledge.

Christian cosmology does not feature analytic geometry.  

In the ego-politics of knowledge, the subject of enunciation is erased, hidden, camouflaged….

No. Descartes signed his name to his book. He had no objection to becoming famous.  

The latter is a point of view that hides itself as a point of view,

Descartes often used to disguise himself as a potted plant.  

or, put differently, the point of view that assumes having no point of view.

The dude said 'I think therefore I am'. He didn't say 'I am the cosmos and often take the form of a potted plant.'  

We are dealing, then, with a philosophy in which the epistemic subject has no sexuality, gender, ethnicity, race, class, spirituality, language, or epistemic location within power relations, and a subject that produces truth from an interior monologue with himself without relation to anyone outside him.

But he still has a dick. He just wasn't tugging at it incessantly or, if he was, he kept that under his hat.  

Metrocentrism is thus a particularly troubling barrier to postcolonial social theory,

More particularly if, like Julian Go, you live in Chicago- which is a big metropolis.  

because its associated positivist assumption of full knowledge and objectivity coming from a disembodied knower is seemingly intrinsic to social scientific thought.

There is no such assumption. The ugly duckling theorem suggests there will always be some bias.  

Keim (2008: 562) argues that “general sociological theory, by definition, encompasses in the scope of its statements any society, North or South, and claims to be valid for all of them equally” (emphasis added).

This may be but everybody thinks Sociology is a shit subject.  

It thus seems impossible to overcome one (metrocentrism) without casting out the other (social theory). The very idea of “social theory” carries metrocentric assumptions that hide the situatedness of knowledge.

The 'social theory' of a bunch of savages living in a remote jungle would not be very interesting.  

The original meaning of theory goes back to the Greek noun theōria and verb theōrein, which suggest detachment and vision: a “visually determined contemplation of the world from afar.”

As opposed to chopping off your dick and gouging out your eyes with it.  

The possibility of social theory itself, therefore, depends upon a “scopic regime of ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’” (Jay 1996: 169; Abend 2008: 180).

But that 'possibility' turned out to be a waste of time.  

Is metrocentrism alleviated, circumvented, or transcended by relational social theory?

No. Only stupid people go in for it. Still, the metropolis in which such people teach shows little interest in their babbling.  

It is true that rewriting our accounts of modernity to show how imperialism and colonialism constituted modernity or disclosing the complex connectedness of North and South can help unseat if not upend traditional Eurocentric sociological theories and overcome sociology’s analytic bifurcations.

But it would still be a shit subject which only cretins go in for.  

... Would not a postcolonial relationalism that uncritically universalizes these theories and applies them to the entire globe run the risk of reinforcing and perpetuating metrocentrism rather than transcending it?

But how else can it get paid? If you say 'I don't know shit about shit- indeed, nobody can know shit about shit'- then nobody will hire you to teach. 

All of this brings us back to front: a postcolonial social science is impossible.

No. It is possible because shitting is easy.  

If we can overcome imperial binarism,

which disappeared long ago 

we cannot also overcome metrocentrism, which is etched into the very fabric of social science.

by chopping off our dicks and gouging out our eyes.  

The most we can do is follow Chakrabarty’s suggestion of provincializing that which is presumably universal:

Charkrabarty resigned from his well paid job in Amrika so as to return to Calcutta and starve to death. 

hence, write deconstructive histories, not postcolonial social theories.

Both are nonsense. The former is about saying 'the author does not exist because he is the mise en abyme of chopping off his own dick' while the latter is about saying 'Whitey be debil'.   

The present chapter resists this conclusion. It argues that the transcendence of metrocentrism lies not in overturning social science but drawing upon a post-positivist strand already immanent to it: standpoint theory.

The problem is that the standpoint of a Professor of useless shite is a shitty standpoint.  

More precisely, this chapter articulates together standpoint theory with another emerging body of work in social science that is sometimes called “indigenous sociology” (also known as “Southern Theory”) .

Which is better done on an American campus.  

The latter has emerged in the wake of the postcolonial onslaught, and seeks to overcome Eurocentrism in sociology by excavating native voices from the Global South.

Easily done by actually going there and talking to natives.  

Along the Southern barricades, critical theorists have trumpeted this sort of sociology. It can be seen as a parallel project with postcolonial theory, but it has maneuvered on different terrain than second-wave postcolonial theory in the humanities. My argument is that this Southern Theory/indigenous sociology movement

championed by a White lady who teaches in Australia. She mentions Veena Das who did teach in Delhi but who subsequently was able to emigrate to America.  

holds promise for meeting the postcolonial challenge, but that its promises can best be realized if it is mobilized with and articulated as a form of standpoint theory.

The relevant standpoint being that of a Professor of useless shit. Still, there was a time when people like Veena Das or Gayatri Spivak or Dipshit Chuckrafuckoff were useful because they appeared Lefty but were actually no such thing. If they were able to emigrate to greener pastures, well and good.  

 Go quotes Said & Dipshit at the beginning of this chapter-

Without significant exception the universalizing discourses of modern Europe and the United States assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-European world.

This wasn't the case. Europeans went to foreign countries and learned their languages from natives. They translated the classic works in those languages into their own tongues. Explorers used native guides. Plenty of talking occurred. Speaking generally, the 'emic' native's opinions were deferred to though at a certain point- e.g. with Sanskrit in Germany- European scholars went their own way because 'critical mass' had been achieved.  

There is incorporation; there is inclusion, there is direct rule, there is coercion.

Said's Egypt had a 'veiled protectorate' for about forty years. His Palestine was a British mandate for about thirty years. Plenty of dialogue occurred between 'natives' and the Imperial power.  

But there is only infrequently an acknowledgement that the colonized people should be heard from, their ideas known. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 

No. There was always an acknowledgment that the smarter or more influential natives be heard from and coopted as far as possible. Said studied Literature. He didn't know shit about History or Politics or Economics.  

For generations now, philosophers and thinkers who shape the nature of social science have produced theories that embrace the entirety of humanity.

Not in Europe where a clear distinction was made between 'Christendom' and the howling heathens found on other continents. Marx, it must be said, was influenced by the Chartist leader, Ernest Jones, who had been brought up in Germany. This led to his coming to think of his theory as having universal application. 

As we will know, these statements have been produced in relative, and sometimes absolute, ignorance of the majority of humankind—that is, those living in non-Western cultures. […]

Not in the London of Jones and Marx. If you wanted to know about India or Africa, you could find an Indian or an African in your neighborhood who could explain things to you.  

The everyday paradox of third-world social science is that we find these theories, in spite of their ignorance of ‘us’, eminently useful in understanding our societies?

Because, au fond, everything is about economics which features objective functions which can be maximized or minimized.  

What allowed the modern European sages to develop such clairvoyance with regard to societies of which they were empirically ignorant?

Mathematical economics and Statistics.  

Why cannot we, once again, return the gaze? Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 

Mahalanobis was Bengali, just like Dipshit. He set up the Indian Statistical Institute- the only 'third world' institution which was directly copied by a Western University. Plenty of smart Bengalis have 'returned the gaze' of the West- to the West's great profit. 

Julian Go's fundamental mistake is to think that 'Postcolonial thought is the intellectual equivalent of the anticolonial movements of the twentieth century that birthed it.

This isn't the case. Postcolonial thought was and is the thought of the people who took over the administration of the countries which ceased to be colonies. It has nothing to do with an academic availability cascade some Professors of useless shite used to gain intellectual affirmative action and thus a nice sinecure on a Western campus. 

 Hence the question: How might social theory survive the invasion?

Social theory turned to shit a long time ago. It became adversely selective of cretins who need to be able to gas on about how they are survivors of horrendous epistemic self-abuse and thus should be granted tenure by way of reparation.