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The Aura of Authenticity

Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determi- Aamir R. Mufti
nation to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces
the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: “In reality,
who am I?”
—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Whenever I read or hear the words colonial India, it hurts me. It hurts like an
injury that has healed and yet has retained somehow a trace of the original
pain linked to many different things—memories, values, sentiments.
—Ranajit Guha, “A Conquest Foretold”

Colonialism is a form of human suffering, one of the historically determi-

nate forms of suffering specific to the modern age. Frantz Fanon is one of
the best-known cartographers of this experience of suffering and has left
us a vocabulary, as much a revised psychoanalysis as it is a “stretched”
Marxism, for tracing out its contours in the culture and politics of the
colonial world.1 In a remarkable recent essay on the phenomenology of
colonial conquest, Ranajit Guha has reopened this question for the post-
colonial moment, exploring its links to the narrative traditions in which
the ascendancy of Europe and its encounters with non-European cultures
and peoples continue to be told and retold.2 Guha produces a gestalt shift
in our understanding of anticolonial nationalism by pointing out that its
principal affect is a desire to tell and retell this same painful story, though
from the perspective not of the colonizers’ victory as such, but rather of
the defeat and subjugation of the colonized. I shall take Guha’s reopening
as my own point of entry into the question of colonial dislocation and suf-
fering and will attempt briefly to indicate some of the directions a renewed
discussion of it might take. I am concerned in particular with the themat-
ics of authenticity and recovery of self as they have appeared repeatedly, at
many times and in many places, in the midst of the struggles that we
speak of collectively as decolonization. My concern here is to identify a
pervasive language and mood in the contemporary critical scene that is
concerned with the inauthenticity of postcolonial culture, community, and
politics, and in which authenticity comes to attach itself to the concepts of
certain cultural practices as a kind of aura, as the practices themselves
come to be seen as resources for the overcoming of the forms of alienation

Social Text 64, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press.
5. Mufti 8/9/00 12:51 PM Page 88

that are the result, and the subjective dimension, of the colonial encounter.
Thus singled out as the site for resistance to what comes to be viewed as
an imperialist and increasingly universal liberalism, these practices collec-
tively come to acquire the auratic name of religion. It is religion—as belief,
ritual, institution, worldview, or identity—that becomes the unsubsumable
Other to the dominant culture of the modern West, the authentic embod-
iment of difference that the great equalizing engine of modern culture
would annihilate, and the means of restoring to itself the shattered totality
of life in modernity.
It is my intention here to begin to produce a critique of the particular
modes of the critique of colonialism that share such a move, which I refer
to collectively as auratic criticism. I shall explore two such contexts from
recent decades—the first being a series of critical interventions in Anglo-
phone “postcolonial” debates since the mid-1980s and the other the curi-
ous trajectory of jadidiyat—usually translated as “modernism”—in Urdu
literary criticism since the 1960s. My goal in bringing together these two
contexts and the distinct critical voices within them, widely separated by
locale, language, and historical moment, is precisely to suggest an affinity,
not quite the connectedness of historical precedence and causality, but the
inhabiting of a common problematic, produced under the pressures of the
desire described with utter clarity by Ngugi wa Thiong’o as “decolonizing
the mind.”3 In sum, I wish to explore the contours of authenticity not as it
has come to be formulated in the philosophical history of the modern
West, but from the other side of the colonial divide, with that divide itself
becoming a dimension of the problem of authenticity. Modes of transition
to modern forms of culture that have been mediated through the experi-
ence of colonial subjugation share the inability to produce narratives of
cultural continuity that can absorb the dislocations of modernity. In such
contexts, the question of tradition takes a distinct form, with the past
appearing not exactly to be dead and buried, even if present in ghostly
form, but murdered and still remaining, as Gayatri Spivak has suggested,
inappropriately and insufficiently mourned. Tradition is, in the first
instance, the realm in which a cultural object has restored to it its aura, but
here it is also that which has become alien and distant, a marginal and
threatened fragment of life, but a fragment out of whose lineaments one
might attempt to recall what was once all of life. To this demand for the
rootedness of culture, we may counterpose, following Edward Said, the
ethical imperatives of “secular” consciousness, a melancholy insistence
that this-worldly experience is fragmented and incomplete. The posture of
such criticism is thus that of minority, the mode of social locatedness that
allows a perception of the uprooting inherent in any project for the root-
ing of culture and memory. Thus secular criticism affiliates its practices

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with minority cultural practices and positions, as a sign of its irreducible It is itself a critical
concern with “the distribution of power and powerlessness” in society.4 In
the following pages, I shall attempt first to outline the workings of authen- task of some
ticity in a number of critical works and then to suggest the means to a
reframing of the question of this—let us call it postcolonial—alienation, a urgency that we
reframing that allows for the question of critique to be reopened at pre-
begin to
cisely the point where it is about to be closed off by the workings of the
aura of authenticity.
distinguish the
The title of this essay points in the first instance to Adorno’s critique
of what he called the jargon of authenticity in pre- and postwar German commitment to
culture. For Adorno, as Asha Varadharajan has noted, the critique of iden-
tity thinking is animated by the recognition “that authenticity is bought at critique that
the price of the decimation of others.”5 But my title also invokes Ben-
jamin’s artwork essay and its characterization of modernity as the emer- requires a
gence of nonauratic forms of culture and memory. For Benjamin as well,
the exploration of authenticity and aura is animated by a concern with the scrupulous
rise of fascism, which Benjamin describes as the constellation that
responds to the decline of aura by an aestheticization of politics.6 Fascism elaboration of the
mobilizes the masses, but not in order to give them their fundamental
homelessness of
right—the transformation of social relations. It offers them instead
“expression.”7 In thus situating fascism within capitalist modernity, Ben- modern
jamin brings together, on the one hand, the history of class relations and,
on the other, the history of the artwork and the loss of aura. Or, rather, it experience from
is in the mutual interactions of these two histories that he sees the emer-
gence of capitalist modernity and of fascism as a political pathology spe- the impulse to
cific to it. For Benjamin, the only possible outcome of the aestheticization
of politics, of mass mobilization without justice, is “war,” or what Adorno resolve the crises
referred to as the self-destruction of society.8 It is thus the impulse of
authenticity toward the extermination of difference, on the one hand, and of modern culture
social self-destructiveness, on the other, that I am concerned with here, an
through a gesture
impulse as fully dependent on the evolution of liberal state and society in
the postcolonial context as it has been shown to be in the metropolitan
of recuperation of
one. In other words, what I shall explore are the contours of self-destruc-
tiveness in a postcolonial context and the inflections that critical narratives a lost world.
of its emergence in Europe must undergo in being transported to this
non-European setting.
We may begin this discussion of auratic criticism with Ashis Nandy’s
Intimate Enemy (1983). This is not an arbitrary choice, for Nandy’s book
may justifiably be considered a pioneering one for the kind of criticism I
am considering here. Nandy’s basic procedure, in this work as in others, is
to identify, in the myriad scenes of social and cultural life, traces of a
“nonmodern” and Indian consciousness, one that has remained, as he

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puts it, “untamed by British rule in India.” Very often, he speaks of this
consciousness simply as “Hinduism” and means by the latter the pecu-
liarly Indian way of coping with suffering, the “cunning” response of a
civilization to the “long-term suffering” of domination. It is in and by
means of this consciousness that India has resisted the West, which Nandy
speaks of as a “psychological category” and as one that is now essentially
“everywhere.” Nandy is careful here to clarify that he means by “Hin-
duism” not Hindu nationalism, that is, not an identity defined as against
the other inhabitants of this place called India, but rather that “unselfcon-
scious Hinduism, by which most Indians, Hindus as well as non-Hindus,
live.”9 Hinduism, in other words, is simply the culture of the people of
India. It can be held to be synonymous with this culture so long as we
conceive of it in terms of lived experience, as “religion as faith,” rather
than as a systematically formulated “ideology.”10 One of the motivations
of this distinction between religion as faith and as ideology is of course to
make it possible to produce a concept of religious belief and practice that
is not contaminated by what in modern South Asian history has come to
be called communalism—that is, the identification of one religious com-
munity in terms of its inherent conflict with another. Nandy’s hope here is
to rescue religious belief from the suspicion under which it had been
placed by official secularism since the rise of Jawaharlal Nehru to promi-
nence in the nationalist movement in the 1920s despite the prestige of
Mahatma Gandhi’s ostentatiously public religiosity within it during this
same period.11 And in fact Nandy turns repeatedly to the figure of Gandhi
as the most visible embodiment of this Hinduism-as-Indianness, conceiv-
ing of him as “the representative of traditional India” and pointing to his
unassailable “authenticity as an Indian.”12
We need not belabor here the point that to read Gandhi and his cul-
tural politics in this manner as the simple antagonist of the official secu-
larism of the postcolonial Indian state is to miss the central, dynamic ten-
sion—let us call it the intellectual and practical tension between Gandhi
and Nehru—that dominated the history of Indian nationalism at least
since the 1920s. More crucial is the fact that Nandy implicitly claims a
position outside the Hindu-Muslim conflict for an argument—“Hin-
duness equals Indianness”—that has historically been a position internal
to this conflict. The ascription of an auratic quality to “Indian” religiosity
leads inexorably here to a conceptual inability to recognize the contested
nature of this nationalization of religiosity, not simply of religion as “ide-
ology” but also as “faith” or “belief.”13 Although Nandy derives some of
his conceptual language from Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the
instrumentalization of reason in capitalist modernity, it would be a grave
misconception to collapse the two. It is itself a critical task of some

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urgency that we begin to distinguish the commitment to critique that

requires a scrupulous elaboration of the homelessness of modern experi-
ence from the impulse to resolve the crises of modern culture through a
gesture of recuperation of a lost world. The (dialectical) perception that
enlightenment reverts to myth must not be confused with the critique of
reason that takes the form of a gesture of disavowal—“reason” and its
canons as “justifications of [here, colonial] domination.”14 If anything,
Nandy is closer to the hermeneutical tradition, in its rejection of the
Enlightenment model of critique in favor of a conception of reading as
internal to the horizon of a “traditionally” constituted community of
interpretation.
We find a very different kind of formulation of this set of questions in
Talal Asad’s monumental contribution to the comparative sociology of
religion, in particular Genealogies of Religion (1993). One of Asad’s central
projects has been to uncover the manner in which religion has come to be
conceived of as a distinct, and marginal, realm of social and cultural life in
modernity. He is concerned with the way in which varieties of liberalism
today construe religious belief, and in particular publicly expressed reli-
gious belief, as the great Other of liberal tolerance, as a threat to liberal
state and civil society—a dynamic made palpably visible for Asad in
Britain during the crisis around the publication of Salman Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses and the panic caused by the campaign against it by sections
of Britain’s Muslim immigrant population. But in the end, Asad reads the
liberal claim concerning the alterity of religion on its own terms, rather
than against the grain, and therefore does not perceive the reliance of lib-
eralism on the categories of religious experience, of the always incomplete
universalism of liberal secularism itself.15 Asad is a critic not only of the
secularization thesis, in its descriptive as well as normative modes, that has
underwritten the narratives of Western modernity, but also of those critics
of this thesis who counter it with evidence of the “deprivatization” of
religion in contemporary life.16 For Asad, such critics too often reproduce
the assumptions of liberalism and distinguish between good and bad
forms of religiosity, the former presumably compatible with modernity
because they accept the norms of the liberal, “rational-critical” public
sphere. Asad counters Habermas with Foucault, as it were, arguing that
the liberal public sphere is “a space necessarily (not just contingently)
articulated by power” (“RNS,” 180), so that the exclusion of certain
forms of religiosity—such as, presumably, politicized Islam in Britain—is
inherent to it. Hence, the charge that Islamist movements are antidemoc-
ratic can only be for Asad an instance of the Western-liberal characteriza-
tion of Islamism, and perhaps of things “Islamic” in general, as antimod-
ern. That one might be a critic simultaneously of such Western-liberal

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If Nandy’s effort notions as the rational public sphere and the counteruniversals of
Islamism is not entertained in his work.
for the recovery The overall thrust and tenor of Asad’s work is of course quite differ-
ent from, and even opposed to, some of the qualities I am ascribing to
of an authentic “auratic” criticism. One of the more interesting concepts in some of his
writings is that of “the West” itself as a now universal “project” that pro-
Indian self leads
duces the same “stories” everywhere, such as narratives of progress and
development. If for Nandy “the West” is a particular psychology, for
him to forget the
Asad its dominance lies in the convincing nature of its stories. One of the
contested and central operative concepts in Asad’s analysis is narrative, and he con-
ceives of “the West” itself as a now universal “project” that produces the
conflicted history same “stories” everywhere.17 If for Nandy “the West” is a particular psy-
chology, for Asad it is a set of plots and narratives, and its dominance lies
of Indianness, in the convincing nature of these stories. The function of genealogy in this
context—genealogy as an ally and prerequisite of critique, derived here
Askari’s search for from Foucault’s influential reading of Nietzsche—seems thus to be to
uncover and expose the dynamics of this storytelling through which the
the “tradition” of West is produced as a universal project at numerous political and cultural
sites around the world. But when it comes to an examination of the claim
Urdu requires a
of Islamists themselves to be above politics and simply in continuity with
forgetting of the religious “tradition,” we get no demystification of this particular story and
are left with the following affirmation: “to themselves they are simply
Indianness of proper Muslims” (“RNS,” 190). The diversity of social and cultural life
in the Muslim world is thus subsumed under an invoked singular tradi-
Urdu itself. tion—“Islam”—and the fact that Islamism, its claim to be the incarnation
of “traditional” Islam notwithstanding, is merely one position, or rather a
loosely connected set of contested positions, within postcolonial society is
erased by the auratic weight of a return to tradition. So long as it is con-
cerned with the categories of secularist—or, in Asad’s terms, Western and
liberal—thought, the method of the critic, who is here implicitly con-
ceived of as located in the metropolis, is genealogical, but when it comes
to the forms of life he takes as his object, he offers no objection to the
claim that these are appropriately constituted by “tradition.” In other
words, when it comes to an examination of the place of religious belief,
practice, and identity in contemporary postcolonial society, the critical
energies of genealogy are dissipated; instead, we get an assertion of the
transparency of a continuous tradition, subject to interpretation and dis-
putation, certainly, but no less coherent and continuous for that com-
plexity. The hermeneutics of suspicion are abandoned for the hermeneu-
tics of reclamation. In this articulation of genealogy and tradition, those
“rival versions of moral inquiry,” the classic anthropological stance of
subject toward object of knowledge, which above all Asad’s own earlier

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work has helped us to perceive, is brought up to date for the era of the-
ory.18
If such are the contours of authenticity in the increasingly globalized
contemporary critical scene, we may turn now to an earlier moment and
another locale in the history of decolonization. As I have already noted, I
have in mind the school of Urdu criticism initially known as jadidiyat, and
in particular the work of Muhammad Hasan Askari, its leading light and
founder. A magisterial intellect, a polyglot and polymath of staggering
erudition, Askari began writing criticism in the 1940s as an enthusiastic
interpreter for the Urdu literary world of European modernism, of the
entire series of formal developments from Baudelaire and the impression-
ists to Joyce, Eliot, and Lawrence. In a series of essays written during the
late 1940s and 1950s, Askari explored the relationship of Urdu writing to
the literature of the modern West and argued that the former could no
longer find its way except insofar as it came to terms with the latter. Thus
in an essay on modernism titled “The Last Stage of Western Literature,”
he argues that

while living in this world, we cannot produce an Eastern literature of the tra-
ditional sort. Such a literature can only be produced in a society that has its
foundation in a metaphysical tradition. For this reason it has become
inescapable for our writers to accept Western influences. But we must be
alert to which influences we accept and to their significance. My own opin-
ion is this: that until the writers of the East absorb within themselves the lit-
erary process that began with Flaubert and Baudelaire, as well as Joyce,
Pound, and Lawrence, they will not be able to produce a meaningful litera-
ture.19

A great deal of Askari’s work of this period is an attempt to explore what

this absorption would mean. The cultural fissure represented by British
ascendancy in South Asia—usually located in Urdu literary culture in the
Great Rebellion of 1857—and by the introduction and dominance of
“modern” or “English” education, is for Askari at this point an irre-
versible one. In Urdu literary culture in the last century and a half, 1857
has been the object of repeated and obsessive attention, with the rebellion
and its aftermath coming to mark the moment of catastrophe, and this
obsessive reopening of the question of rupture has itself become the con-
dition of possibility of creativity for successive literary generations. In
Askari’s work, and in that of his leading disciple, Saleem Ahmed, it marks
the moment at which the social order that was the world of classical Urdu
literature is destroyed and human experience becomes a fragmented and
alienated one. The horizon of Urdu writing in the twentieth century is
provided by this fragmentation, and the task of the writer is to produce an

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adequate response to it. The literature of a period, movement, or school,

or the oeuvre of an individual author, may thus be evaluated in terms of
the kind of response it embodies and the latter’s social, cultural, and psy-
chological implications.
In the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Askari’s positions underwent a
series of subtle shifts whose cumulative effect is dramatic. In a series of
long essays, he began to rethink the meaning of “tradition” (rivayat),
arguing that it could not be reduced to convention, habit, or “culture.”
Traditional ways of living are now viewed as fundamentally different from
the modern West and to be in essence the same everywhere. Thus at one
point he speaks of the essential unity of all “Eastern civilizations,” which
resides in their adherence to the principle that Islam has called wahdat-ul-
wujud (the oneness of being, immanence) and that Hinduism has elabo-
rated as the unitarian philosophy of advaita (nonduality, monism) (M,
584–85). Even Europe before the Renaissance is absorbed in this notion
of “tradition,” and Askari is able to make the following far-reaching claim:
“The basic tradition is everywhere the same; the difference is one of out-
ward appearance only” (M, 639). But by the end of his life, his work was
focused on the reconstruction of the tradition of Urdu literature—which
he deemed “Islamic”—a hermeneutic effort across the break represented
by British ascendancy in north India. And in his last work, Jadidiyat, pub-
lished posthumously in 1979, Askari turned, in a new shift of emphasis, to
an enumeration of the “errors” and misconceptions of “the West” con-
cerning Islam and religion in general, errors that had been disseminated
through “English education” among Muslims themselves (M,
1171–1268). The very word that had designated the kind of critical prac-
tice he inaugurated was now held up as the sign of the destructiveness of
the culture of the modern West toward the cultures of “the East” generally
and Islam in particular. But I do not think it would be very fruitful to
think of these transformations as steps in the development—or, depending
on the point of view, degeneration—of an individual career and critical
project. I suggest instead that they are the results or outputs of a common
underlying problematic and that certainly Askari himself would not have
seen his later views as an abandonment of his earlier ones. For in Askari’s
reading, modernism is the appropriate aesthetic response to inappropriate
existence in modernity. What modernism makes available is a kaleido-
scopic perception of the fragmentedness of modern subjective experi-
ence, of modernity as a fallen condition. This perception allows the critic
to begin the work of recovery—the recovery of tradition and of self
through tradition. While the effort to recall and reproduce an auratic con-
sciousness of the (precolonial) past and to reanimate it in the present
must be alert to the plurality of the present, to the continued survival of

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“our” tradition, it can only begin by fully inhabiting and working through
this (colonized) condition. Furthermore, the interpretation of tradition
belongs to its traditional upholders, the ‘ulama, but since the latter are pre-
vented by their education from an understanding of “Europe” as it has
arisen even in our midst, and are therefore unable to comprehend fully
our present, it is the role of the critic to function as mediator, to interpret
their exegeses to the larger national public sphere, on the one hand, and,
on the other, to enable the ‘ulama to comprehend better the culture of the
modern West in order to refute more effectively their Westernized and
rationalist critics. Askari’s larger project, therefore, is nothing less than a
transformation of the modern public sphere into the domain of traditional
disputation, but we must not confuse this project with those of what has
come to be called Islamic fundamentalism, as his less careful critics are
wont to do: for the shattered totality his work struggles to reconstruct is
not shari’a or Islamic law per se, but the Sufi worldview (tasawwuf) of the
medieval Indo-Persian world as interpreted in the work of such twentieth-
century exegetes as Ashraf Ali Thanvi—a far cry from, for instance, the
hyperrationalist techno-Islamism of an increasingly global sort that makes
headlines from time to time in such places as suburban New Jersey and
downtown Manhattan.
It is in the explication of the first-person plural, which stands at the
center of his project, that Askari’s elaborate hermeneutic effort encounters
its limit and makes visible its own reliance on the structures of modern
state and society. For the attempt to contain the premodern past of Urdu
in a coherent and self-contained structure of meaning—“tradition”—inex-
orably replicates the conflation of language, literature, and religious “com-
munity” that is an ongoing process in the development precisely of the
modern nation-state formation in colonial and postcolonial South Asia.
Thus the subject of Urdu writing is for Askari “Muslim,” in a strong
sense that he spent the better part of his intellectual life in elaborating.
And the search for the traditional font of Urdu writing leads him inex-
orably and exclusively to such Arabic and Farsi sources as Ibn al-Arabi,
Rumi, and Hafiz. The fundamental homelessness of modern Urdu litera-
ture, its minoritization implicit in the nationalization of Indian culture
and society, which is the context proper to this effort at resettling and
recovery, is thus erased from literary historical memory. So while Askari’s
project is far more nuanced and ambitious than anything Nandy has pro-
duced, it manages to arrive at the same cul-de-sac as the latter, although
from, as it were, the opposite direction: if Nandy’s effort for the recovery
of an authentic Indian self leads him to forget the contested and con-
flicted history of Indianness, Askari’s search for the “tradition” of Urdu
requires a forgetting of the Indianness of Urdu itself. And it certainly

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seems possible that Asad’s equation of Islamism with reassertion of tradi-

tion, if made the basis of an analysis of Pakistani culture, would require us
to view the latter as simply another “Muslim” national formation and to
forget the Indian and hence minoritarian context of the development of
Muslim identity in South Asia. The auratic attempt to resolve the crisis of
postcolonial culture can thus be taken in either “Hindu” or “Muslim”
directions. But at no point can either of these versions of Indian reality
open themselves to the other. In such a context, the central question,
about how these “traditions” are located within the national-cultural space
we call India, cannot even be formulated.
My critique of auratic criticism is not animated by a desire to defuse
the crisis of authenticity. It does not attempt to settle, once and for all, this
question, which under no circumstances do I take to be a spurious or illu-
sory one. The enormity of what has been ruined is not in doubt, and evi-
dence of the destruction is everywhere to be seen. I am concerned instead
with the possibilities of living with this crisis and coming to understand
the social and ethical stakes in that struggle to live. For criticism of the
auratic variety, the wound can be healed by the resurrection of religious
subjectivity. In this move, not only the cultural practices subsumed under
the rubric of religion, but the critical practice itself, come to acquire the
aura of authenticity. The equation of the modern with the Western, and of
the nonmodern with (contemporary) religiosity, seeks to settle the ques-
tion once and for all in favor of the rejection of everything marked as
modern (and Western) and the recuperation and strengthening of surviv-
ing, “lived” traditions, wherever they are to be found. This tendency to
look for an Archimedean point outside modernity—as embodied, for
instance, in Nandy’s interpretation of Gandhi or Askari’s attempted recu-
peration of medieval tasawwuf—this failure to recognize that there is now
no recourse to an outside, leads to an implicit, albeit unwitting, affirma-
tion of some of the most violently exclusionary political contexts in con-
temporary society. Thus the victims of Islamist politics—women, orga-
nized labor, non-Muslim minorities, artists, and intellectuals—do not find
room in Asad’s text, and Askari’s straining toward the tradition of “Islam”
produces a literary history not out of tune with the cultural self-mystifica-
tions of the Pakistani state.
Over half a century after the first speculations about the universal
emancipatory potential inherent in the struggles against colonial subjec-
tion, it is clear today that political decolonization in itself is no guarantee
of survival for a deauraticized conception of social and political relations.
The intensification of an uneven capitalist integration in the postcolonial
era has everywhere been managed by the introduction of aesthetics into
politics.20 In the countries of South Asia, for instance, the aestheticization

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of the century-and-a-half-old politics of identity, in which nothing less

than the meaning of Indianness has been at stake, is now at a stage where
we can say that society is in a position to experience the possibility of its
own destruction with “aesthetic pleasure,” as Benjamin had noted of fas-
cism’s production of war as spectacle.21 This aesthetic consumption of its
own destruction is no longer limited to the fringes of society but increas-
ingly available to it at all levels and embodied in the very logic of raison
d’état. The speeding up of local integration into the post-Fordist global
economy and the continued destruction of older forms of life have pro-
duced the objective conditions for a renewal and updating of the demand
for self-determination and justice. The mainstreaming of religious funda-
mentalism represents a managing of this demand by means of the aes-
theticization of political claims and public memory. Auratic criticism
wishes to affiliate itself with the objective demand, and not with its manip-
ulation, but blunts the edge of its critique by succumbing to the aura of
authenticity. It is part of the bad faith of such criticism that while affiliat-
ing itself with the demand for self-determination, it forgets the majoritar-
ian context for the invocation of tradition, one of the cultural dimensions
of the distribution of “power and powerlessness” in (postcolonial) society.
For a critique of the sort I am attempting to elaborate here, it is not
sufficient to make the historicist argument that all traditions are invented.
What is called for is an immanent critique of the aura of authenticity
itself, a critique that seeks to displace the terms, such as tradition, in which
the problematic of authenticity is produced. In beginning to outline such
a critique, I shall turn here to a seemingly unlikely text, aphorism No. 32
of Adorno’s Minima Moralia, which carries the famously provocative title,
“Savages Are Not More Noble.”22 In the pious populism that is increas-
ingly our common sense in the humanities, the title and text of the apho-
rism can be easily misread and dismissed as signs of the elitist Adorno, of
a mandarinism unable to see history as anything but the history of Euro-
pean man. It would be an incorrect, because partial and incomplete, read-
ing, for these Eurocentric emphases must be read within Adorno’s larger
concern here with a critique of historical agency as it has traditionally
been conceived of in Western Marxism. No. 32 is part of a set of apho-
risms that chart a twin process: on the one hand, the decline of bourgeois
liberal culture and society into administration, but also, on the other, the
containment of genuinely emancipatory politics in the cult of the com-
missar. Thus in No. 30, progress and barbarism, as these terms apply to
contemporary mass culture, are shown to be in a dialectical relation (MM,
50). Progress in the productive means available to society, while real in
itself, is no guarantee of social and cultural progress as such, which now
requires a critical relationship to the language and the paraphernalia of

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progress. And in No. 31, Adorno marks the decline of solidarity, which
had been the intersubjective dimension of progressive politics, into the
ruthlessness and “cold shoulder” of “the organization men” (MM, 52).
Solidarity has turned into the “confidence that the Party has a thousand
eyes” (MM, 51), and the psychic energies of individuals are now wasted
in surviving the capriciousness of the bosses, rather than in testing the
weaknesses of the class enemy. It is this twin process—the descent of lib-
eralism into administered mass society, and the adoption by organized
political opposition of the psychology of totalitarianism—that opens up
for Adorno the question of a newcomer on the world-historical stage con-
structed by “the conflicts of industrial society”: the non-Western, the
underdeveloped, the primitive, the native.
The dominant and characteristic posture of the aphorism is a studied
avoidance of and caution against political sentimentality. Adorno antici-
pates, in a remarkably prescient manner, the rise of the postwar figure of
the anticolonial insurgent and warns against its romanticization within an
ultimately unaltered and Eurocentric history of the realization of Man. A
classic, even canonical, formulation of this romance is to be found in
Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth, where, in stark contrast with
Fanon’s own studied hesitation in the face of precisely such a move, Sartre
situates the native as the agent of a more comprehensive and universal
humanism than that which had so far been achieved, in a world divided
between “men” and “natives,” between colonizer and colonized. Sartre
describes his own text as an attempt to take the argument further, beyond
the point where “Fanon stops,” and in the process he reinscribes the
native as more European than the European (at present). In Sartre’s text,
anticolonial insurgency cancels out a humanism tainted by colonial
racism, a contradictory mode of “laying claim to and denying the human
condition at the same time.” By inflicting violence on the settler, by mur-
dering him, the native becomes “a different man; of higher quality.” The
conclusion of this process is the final disappearance of racism, a “full-
grown” humanity, and hence the “end of the dialectic.”23
Adorno, like Fanon, resists this resolution. For Fanon, the mere sub-
stitution of Third World for Europe, of native for European, is a ruse of the
colonial status quo itself: “If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe,
and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our coun-
tries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most
gifted among us.”24 Adorno opens up an even more complex and para-
doxical constellation: “There is some reason to fear that the involvement
of non-Western peoples in the conflicts of industrial society, long overdue
in itself, will be less to the benefit of the liberated peoples than to that of
rationally improved production and communications, and a modestly

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raised standard of living” (MM, 53). This remarkable passage, each of

whose phrases opens up a prospect onto the problematic of decolonization
and modernity, will recall for readers Adorno’s better-known critique of
jazz.25 In both cases, the emphasis is not on the thing itself—jazz or decol-
onization—but on the ability of an increasingly integrated world to admin-
ister it. Faced with the prospect of “the involvement of non-Western peo-
ples in the conflicts of industrial society,” Adorno opens up the question:
involvement on what basis, on what terms, and in the interest of whom?
Unlike Sartre, for whom the native simply takes us to a higher, more
complete humanism, Adorno’s skepticism leads us to ask the question of
the fate of humanism itself: how will “the non-Western peoples” narrate
their humanity out of their struggle against colonialism? His answer to
these questions is of course a cautionary one. It calls, above all, for pes-
simism, for the recognition that the system can absorb and work over that
which is outside it. Effective critique of capitalist modernity therefore can-
not take the form of a gesture merely of self-distancing and disavowal: “It
presupposes experience, a historical memory, a fastidious intellect and
above all an ample measure of satiety” (MM, 52). As is well known, the
social equivalent of this critical posture for Adorno is the experience of
exile, the indeterminate, threatened, and threatening location at the cusp
of outside and inside. The fact that Adorno could not anticipate the “sati-
ety” (and therefore “experience”) of the colonized with European culture,
that he could not recognize the emergence of an antagonistic and exilic
“historical memory” not reducible to that of the principled European critic
of Europe, marks the limit of his own comprehension of the dialectic of
enlightenment in a decolonizing world. But his skepticism is also salutary,
a refusal to speak in the name of the colonized, a refusal to append their
struggles to a narrative of the self-realization of a Eurocentered humanity.
Auratic criticism may speak in the name of the people and their tena-
cious life-worlds (Nandy), the “tradition” of mystical writing (Askari), or
the legalistic disputation of politicized Islam (Asad). What centers such
criticism is its hostility to exile, which, paradoxically, is its own context
and condition of possibility. It contains a desire for a settling of things—of
peoples, traditions, identities. In the midst of the conflicts of modern cul-
ture, it wishes to resurrect a cohesive universe of meaning. But this ges-
ture is necessarily an incomplete one, as the critical practice itself remains
outside the cultural practices, either popular or elite, in whose name and
interest it wishes to speak. In failing to take scrupulous account of its
own reliance on the institutions of criticism, auratic criticism reveals its
bad faith not merely toward criticism but also toward that which it wishes
to recuperate: the traditional world. Adorno’s aphorism, while directed in
the first instance at the Western romanticization of decolonization, cuts

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through the aura of authenticity as well. For all his skepticism about what
decolonization will mean, there is for him no alternative to it. It is already
“long overdue,” marked by a lag that has distorted the modern West itself
and its trajectories. But Adorno is agnostic about the form that the par-
ticipation of the non-West in the conflicts of modernity will take and what
it will mean for the project of modernity as a whole. The resistance to
colonialism is for Adorno a conflict within modernity, but not in the sense
of Sartre’s formulation in the preface.
To the gesture in criticism that would pretend to reanimate an auratic
recollection of the past, one may counterpose what I would call vernacular
modernities.26 When a writer like Salman Rushdie, who is now almost
iconically identified with the thematics of postcolonial secularism, is
engaged in either avowal or disavowal, it is not often understood, least of
all by Rushdie himself, that a number of these secularist formulations are
not unique to the postcolonial migrant context. Despite huge differences
of impulse and emphasis from the latter, one may point in the Indian and
Urdu context, for instance, to numerous precedents: to the unapologetic
urbanism of the fiction of Saadat Hasan Manto, to Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s
immersion in, and secularization of, the language of Sufism in classical
Urdu lyric, to Abulkalam Azad’s Islamic polemic against the cultural
claims of Muslim separatism, embodying a religious but nonauratic view
of the political present, to cite only a few.27 Each of these writers takes up
the question of relationship to the past in a manner consistent with his
material: modern narrative and epic ambition, modern lyric poetry and its
recollection of the polyvalences of love in tasawwuf, and the uses of cul-
tural memory for the staking of political claims, respectively. But each is
alert to the ethical consequences of this reopening of the question of the
past and views social space as inherently secular, to be shared with others,
and always in excess of narrative claims about the past. It is with such ver-
nacular projects for modern selfhood and collective life that criticism must
affiliate itself in its struggle to point toward and achieve authentic forms of
culture and memory.
I have argued elsewhere that the critique of colonial culture implies a
double, two-sided movement.28 If, on the one hand, it is meant to inter-
rupt the manner in which something called the West narrates itself and its
Others, it is also a warning against the possibility that Orientalist descrip-
tions take hold within the very societies that they take as their objects.
Auratic criticism involves a forgetting of this second dimension of anti-
colonial critical practice, a forgetting symptomatic of its own, stated and
unstated, affiliations in the struggles and conflicts that populate postcolo-
nial space. The task of criticism with respect to the struggles for authen-
tic forms of selfhood in the postcolonial world is not to authenticate the

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violent attempts to restore aura to culture that these struggles often pro-
duce. It is rather to make visible the workings of this aura and the social
costs of these attempts at its restoration. The task of criticism, in other
words, is critique, which Foucault defined, in a remarkable lecture given in
the last years of his life, as “the art of not being governed, or the art of not
being governed like that and at this price.”29 It must, therefore, take a
recalcitrant stance with respect to what Foucault would call the arts of
governance, which include today the myriad forms of the identification of
selves as insiders and outsiders, nationals and aliens. Authentic commu-
nities of interpretation that correspond to this desire called critique can
only be produced out of the dialectic of location and displacement, of fil-
iation and affiliation, of belonging and exile, rather than out of the gesture
that presents the problem of criticism in terms of belonging to some
shared, autonomous, and inherited life-world, in terms of the reanimation
of “tradition.”

Notes

A shorter version of this essay was first presented as a paper at the annual con-
vention of the Modern Languages Association (MLA) held in San Francisco,
December 1998. I am grateful to the other participants in the MLA panel,
Rajeswari Sundar Rajan, Bruce Robbins, and Edward Said, for their encourage-
ment and helpful suggestions. My thanks also to Kamran Asdar Ali, Ann Pelle-
grini, and Janet Jakobson for their reading of an earlier draft, and to Charles
Hirschkind for his valuable critique.
1. Fanon’s most extended discussion of psychoanalysis in the colonial con-
text is of course to be found in Black Skins, White Masks (New York: Grove,
1967); but see also “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” in The Wretched of the
Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1979), 249–310. For the
comment on Marxism, see The Wretched of the Earth, 40.
2. See Ranajit Guha, “A Conquest Foretold,” Social Text, no. 54 (spring
1998): 85–100.
3. See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in
African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 1997).
4. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 332. This
phrase is taken from the 1994 afterword to the book. I have made this argument
at length through a reading of Said’s work in Aamir R. Mufti, “Auerbach in
Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Cul-
ture,” Critical Inquiry 25 (fall 1998): 95–125.
5. Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spi-
vak (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xxi.
6. On this aspect of Benjamin’s argument in the artwork essay, see the essay
by Russell A. Berman, “The Aestheticization of Politics: Walter Benjamin on
Fascism and the Avant-Garde,” Stanford Italian Review 8 (1990): 35–52, to
which I am indebted here.

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7. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn

(New York: Schocken, 1969), 241.
8. Ibid., 241. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B.
Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1987), 203.
9. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colo-
nialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 100–101, 44, xi, 104.
10. Ashis Nandy, “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious
Tolerance,” in Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots, and Survivors in South
Asia, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 70.
11. On this genealogy of the category of religious “communalism” in India,
see the seminal work by Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in
Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
12. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 48, 57.
13. On the nationalization of religious belief and practice in colonial India,
see the recent study by Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
14. Nandy, “The Politics of Secularism,” 90.
15. Liberal secularism’s reliance on the signs of religious conviction and reli-
gious difference is the subject of Aamir R. Mufti, “Secularism and Minority:
Elements of a Critique,” Social Text, no. 45 (winter 1995): 75–96; and Mufti,
“Auerbach in Istanbul.”
16. Talal Asad, “Religion, Nation-State, Secularism,” in Nation and Reli-
gion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehman
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 179. Hereafter cited in the
text as “RNS.”
I am grateful to Charles Hirschkind for pointing me to this important essay.
Asad is thinking here in particular of José Casanova, Public Religions in the Mod-
ern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
17. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in
Islam and Christianity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993),
12.
18. See Alisdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Ency-
clopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990). Asad’s mile-
stone contribution to the critique of colonial anthropology is in such works as
Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad (London: Ithaca, 1973);
and Talal Asad, “Afterword: From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the
Anthropology of Western Hegemony,” in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Con-
textualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, ed. George Stocking (Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 314–24.
19. Muhammad Hasan Askari, Majmu‘a (Lahore, Pakistan: Sang-e Meel,
1994), 580–81; emphasis added. Hereafter cited in the text as M.
20. On fascism and the management of social crisis, see Susan Buck-Morss,
“Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,”
October 62 (fall 1992), 4; and Benjamin, Illuminations, 242.
21. Benjamin, Illuminations, 242.
22. “Die Wilden sind nicht bessere Menschen.” See Theodor W. Adorno,
Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Berlin: Suhrkamp Ver-
lag, 1951), 84. I shall be referring here to the text of Theodor W. Adorno, Min-
ima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London:

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Verso, 1978), 52–53. Hereafter cited in the text as MM.

23. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon,
trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1979), 7, 24, 21, 24, 27, 31.
24. Ibid., 31.
25. See, for instance, Theodor W. Adorno, “Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” in
Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 119–32.
26. The term vernacular modernities, as I use it here, owes much of its
impulse and substance to the deployment of the term vernacular in Homi K.
Bhabha, “Editor’s Introduction: Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotia-
tions,” Critical Inquiry 23 (spring 1997): 431–59.
27. These writers are discussed at length in Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment
in the Colony: The Jewish Question and Dilemmas in Postcolonial Culture (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
28. See Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul”; and also Said, Orientalism, 24–25.
29. Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?” trans. Kevin Paul Geiman, in
What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Ques-
tions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 384.

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