Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Social Criticism through Internal and Intercultural Dialogues
Vikram Singh Sirola, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India
Social criticism, as a social activity, can be situated in a wider
inquiry into life. It involves both critique and construction. The
task of social criticism is one of interrogating and reinterpreting
the foundations of society. It involves questioning the
traditional perspectives, the entire social order with its major
assumptions and values. In pointing out the gap between
values and actual practices and in questioning established
orthodoxies it serves as a vehicle for social change and
cultural creativity. Social criticism in this way can be seen as
one of the most important by-products of a larger activity –
cultural creativity and affirmation. Culture contains a critical
possibility to question the foundations of society and its
structure of power. It contains within it a dimension of ideal
seeking in relation to self-realization, modes of
intersubjectivity, and the constitution of a good society.
The starting point would be an enquiry into the
foundations of our life which leads to an awareness about its
multidimensional origin – the socio-cultural and the individual.
To be precise, criticism begins with a description of the
dynamics of relation between the three domains of life –
individual, social, and cultural. Society consists of the dialectic
of value and power and social criticism is an inquiry into the
mode of this dialectic without presupposing that it is a process
of determination where power determines the terms of
discourse and holds the key to human emancipation (Beteille
1980). This explicates how social criticism is closely related to
self-criticism and cultural criticism.
The questions to be examined here, keeping the nature
of society in general and Indian cultural milieu in particular,
are: What is the primary objective of a social critic? How do
they go about doing it in a society like Indian? What approach
should a critic adapt to explain comprehensively the genesis,
process, and implications of diverse components of a society
and its culture? And finally, how does a critique establish his
distance from the people and institutions he criticizes so as to
give it a moral authenticity?
Since criticism requires critical distancing, it offers a
great challenge for any society to be critical of themselves. In
Walzer’s words, “the condition of collective life – immediacy,
closeness, emotional attachment, parochial vision – militates
against a critical self-understanding” (Walzer 1988: 31). Any
critic – an individual, a group of critics, or a movement – are
also, most of the time, members of the same community,
sharing the collective reflection upon the conditions of
collective life. Hence the significant question is who can be the
most appropriate critic and where do they stand to be social
critics? i.e., how much distance can be called critical distance?
The conventional view is for the social critics to stand
outside the common circumstances of collective life. They
have to radically detach themselves from their own society.
This detachment is twofold – emotional detachment from the
intimacy of the membership and intellectual detachment from
the parochial understandings of their own society. It is
believed this would make them dispassionate, open-minded
and objective. The critics are perceived here as an outsider, a
spectator, a total stranger. He/she applies objective and
universal principles only to point out the faults and
contradictions of the society concerned but does not take
responsibility for their critical positions.
322
On the contrary, there is an alternative approach to
social criticism. Here the critics are related to the society they
criticize both politically and morally. They are neither
intellectually nor emotionally detached. They seek the success
of a common enterprise. Social criticism for such people is an
internal argument. It becomes an ordinary activity – less
influenced by scientific knowledge than, as Walzer puts it, an
‘educated cousin of common complaint’. It does not depend
for its force or accuracy upon any sort of high theory. Walzer
emphasizes “It is opposition, far more than detachment that
determines the shape of social criticism. The critic takes sides
in actual or latent conflicts; he sets himself against the
prevailing political forces” (Walzer 1988: 48). This way, the
true social critic stands only a little to the side of his society.
Using this “connected” critic model, we can examine
the important challenges faced by the world in the form of
exclusionary practices such as racism and violence,
discrimination and oppression of tribal groupses, minorities –
communal or gender, etc. These again originate from the very
notion of culture and tradition. These challenges arise out of
the confronting cultural differences and the
incommensurability of different cultural identities. Here, I would
limit myself to the analysis of the problem of representation of
the most marginalized communities in India, the outcasts or
dalits. This issue is very often touched by deep-rooted
imbalances in social relationships. We need to examine these
representations in writings or in different forums for their
academic status and also for the impact they leave on the
actual social conditions and social reality within which they
exist. It can be viewed against the broader context of related
issues as changing facets of cultural and gender domination,
meaning of knowledge and authenticity, and significantly the
moral or ethical authority to define and represent the
marginalized.
As an illustration, I would elaborate on the problem of
representation of the anti-caste movement in India. We can
re-frame the problem by asking who would be the appropriate
critic and representative of caste issues in India. Most of the
time the discourse on caste remains academic and fails to
relate to the masses who have important and serious political
points to make. Generally, scholars who champion the issue
do not bother to relate with those who are sufferers. These
interventions remain constricted at the polemical level and
mostly fail to elevate our understanding through the expansion
of the debate socio-culturally. This is the outcome of exclusion
of the insiders, i.e., the ones into the local practices and
arrangements – in this case the dalits, from the intellectual
domain.
This issue can also be looked at by analysing how
justified is the representation of dalits by non-dalits? Any critic
of the situation of marginalized subject classes, or oppressed
minorities or outcasts, I believe, will be authentic only when
this individual is also a participant in the enterprise of the
concerned community or class and equally share their
concern about success of their common enterprise. So, in this
case, a transformative dalit movement is possible only when
the insiders acquire the leadership as critic and subsequently
as representative leading to emancipation of the community.
In this context, Professor Gopal Guru writes “In order to claim
a moral status to their representation claim, dalits have to
acquire the moral capacity to question themselves vis-à-vis
both their intellectual and political moves….they are supposed