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Rethinking the West

A. Raghuramaraju

To cite this Article Raghuramaraju, A.(2005) 'Rethinking the West', Third Text, 19: 6, 595 — 598
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09528820500381343
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1. Originally published in The
Future of Knowledge &
Culture: A Dictionary for
the 21st Century, eds
Vinay Lal and Ashis
Nandy, Penguin, New
Delhi, 2005, pp 347–52.
2. The Compact Edition of
the Oxford English
Dictionary, Oxford
University Press, Oxford,
1971, reprinted in 1979,
vol 2, p 321.
3. Anthony Giddens, Profiles
and Critiques in Social
Theory, Macmillan,
London, 1982, p 14.
Third Text, Vol. 19, Issue 6, November, 2005, 595–598
Rethinking the West1
A Raghuramaraju
Modern cultural and political discourse binds a historically extended
Third
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sense, dating back to the classical era, to the term ‘West’. This concedes
more antiquity to the term than is perhaps deserved. According to the
OED, its use other than as an adverb – as a noun or as an adjective – is a
‘later development’ that gained currency during the Great War, although
the immediate source of such usage ‘has not been established’.2 The
processes that culminated in the formation of homogeneous nation-
states, together designated as the West, date back to the advent of
modernity, even though the term itself came into vogue much later. In
fact, this process of formation – actually an act of self-transformation
which undid in its wake its own diverse premodern basis – provides
content to the term ‘West’. Notwithstanding its modern use, which is
roughly only three centuries old, the term is employed definitively to
designate Western civilisation, culture, society, philosophy, literature
and music – cardinal aspects of which antedate the contemporary use of
the term. The ‘West’ is coterminous with modernity, but not in the sense
that some critics of the West and modernity insist.
The term subsequently acquires a clearer meaning when it impacts on
the outside world as colonialism. Perhaps, in line with Buddhist episte-
mology, according to which knowledge consists of not only knowing
what it is but also what it is not, the term in its outbound colonial jour-
ney becomes sharply conscious of what it is not. It is this epistemological
need for identity consolidation, rather than the political programme of
colonial expansion, that seems to necessitate the postulation of the
‘other’ as different from ‘self’: materialistic ‘self’ versus spiritual ‘other’;
non-despotic ‘self’ in relationship to the despotic ‘other’, and so on.
These contrasts, mediated through constructs like ‘Orient’ and ‘East’,
aided this consolidation by providing a broader consensus and wider use
of the term. The postcolonial exaggeration that the West is known only
through its ‘other’ derives from mistaking this shift in identity formation
for the identity itself.
A look at the whole process yields some interesting insights. First, the
premodern, inasmuch as it is destroyed in reality, is available to the
modern self only in ‘sociological imagination’, that is, in an imagination
that seeks an ideational desideratum (à la Anthony Giddens).3 This
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © 2005 Third Text/Black Umbrella
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596
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4. Susan Bordo, The Flight to
Objectivity: Essays on
Cartesianism and Culture,
State University of New
York Press, Albany, 1987,
p 29.
5. Michel Foucault, ‘What is
Enlightenment?’, in The
Foucault Reader, ed Paul
Rabinow, Pantheon Books,
New York, p 39.
6. Ernest Gellner, Nations
and Nationalism, Basil
Blackwell, Oxford, 1983,
p 40.
7. René Descartes, ‘Discourse
on Method’, in The
Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, vol 1, trans John
Cottingham, Robert
Stoothoff and Dugald
Murdoch, Cambridge
University Press,
Cambridge, 1985,
pp 113–20.
8. Ashis Nandy, ‘The
Twilight of Certitudes:
Secularism, Hindu
Nationalism, and Other
Masks of Deculturation’,
Alternatives, 22:2, 1997,
p 157.
9. Edward Said, Orientalism,
Vintage Books, New York,
1979, p 59.
search is conducted primarily in ‘art, literature, language, and the
cultural artefacts’.4 Perhaps to critique ‘the modern’ from a vantage
point that offers both hindsight and foresight, Michel Foucault seems to
suggest the need to conflate ‘premodern’ and ‘postmodern’ as ‘counter-
modernity’.5 This new domain, along with anthropology (the study of
inhabited spaces) and history (the study of time) delimits the political
programme of dissent to modernity in the West.
Second, this process of radical transformation within the West was
not a smooth affair. It involved wholesale violence and oppression. The
transformation from the agrarian ‘low culture’ to the ‘high culture’ of
homogenised modern nation-states, according to Ernest Gellner, is not
smooth, neither governed by sympathy nor by an understanding of
what is being transformed.6 Foucault’s work bears testimony to how
modern knowledge systems disempowered their human subjects within
the West.
Next, the project of modernity, consisting of a new form of universal-
ism, instrumental rationality and autonomous abstract individualism,
decultured the embedded individual and turned him into what the
philosopher René Descartes was to call cogito. Its universalism is
premised on the emptying of differentiating cultural sediments.7 The
social contract philosophers later stationed these cognitive nudes on an
imaginary solitary island called ‘the state of nature’. Subsequently, the
modernised West extended the project outwards into other premodern
realms, listing the jobs accomplished and those yet to be accomplished:
its own past fell under the first category and that of the non-West under
the second. It is not the case of an imperial culture transforming another,
but one decultured worldview, after emptying itself of its own cultural
contents, attempting to universalise its project. It is a case of self-
transformation preceding the transformation of the ‘other’.
This inevitable structural dependency on the ‘other’ explains why, to
use an observation made by Ashis Nandy, modernity/West ‘as an ideol-
ogy can thrive only in a society that is predominantly’ non-modern. And,
once ‘a society begins to become’ modern, ‘or once the people begin to
feel that their society is being cleansed of religion and ideas of transcen-
dence’,8 the political status of modernity changes. The insecurity of the
displaced, modern, atomised self seems to underlie its attempt to reach
out in desperation to the ‘other’. Shrouded in this desperation is both the
fear of and contempt for the ‘other’. This psychological state, to use
Edward Said’s words, vacillates between its ‘contempt of what is familiar
and its shivers of delight in – or fear of – novelty’.9
Finally, an important feature of the West is the invariance of its inten-
tionality. It has done to the non-West only what it has done, and is
doing, to itself. The ideals of modernity were first lab-tested and experi-
mented upon within the West before they were unleashed elsewhere. For
instance, colonialism attempted to homogenise the intrinsic pluralism of
Indian society by integrating diverse legal, economic and administrative
systems of the ‘natives’ in an image of the British system. This helped
crystallise the modern Indian nation and its nationalism, and while the
positive local laws were not annulled wholesale, their subservience to the
overall laws of the colonial state was clearly enunciated, and this led to
their gradual fading out. This whole project simply mimicked the earlier
British process.
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10. Aimé Césaire, Discourse
on Colonialism, trans Joan
Pinkham, Monthly Review,
Press, London, 1972,
pp 18–19.
11. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate
Enemy: Loss and Recovery
of Self Under Colonialism,
Oxford University Press,
New Delhi, 1994, p xv.
12. Krishna Chandra
Bhattacharyya, ‘The
Concept of Philosophy’, in
Studies in Philosophy,
Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi,
1983, p 462.
597
Modernity is Janus-faced. It both internalising and thus incorporates
the other, while also trespassing into the other. So it is necessary to pref-
ace our discussion of what the West did through colonialism to non-
Western societies by the question, ‘What did modernity do to its own
premodern societies?’
Despite these turbulent tensions, internal discontinuities, and the
recent origin of the term ‘West’, many thinkers, for example Hegel (who
used the term positively) or Oswald Spengler (even while declaring its
decline), built a huge edifice called the ‘West’. Paradoxically, even the
staunchest critics of the West, like Edward Said, often fail to recognise
its recent origin and its internal tensions, and author anti-climactic
views wherein they credit their adversary, the West, with more strength
than it actually has. This conceptual laxity has permeated deep into
postcolonial discourse, leading to considerable misunderstanding and
misinterpretation. Though Said disregarded the internal project of
modernity, the poet Aimé Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism
(1972), at least partly captures its nature and suggests that ‘no one colo-
nizes innocently … a nation which colonizes… a civilization which justi-
fies colonization … is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is
morally diseased…’10 Rather than sickness, it is the dynamics of the
internal project of modernity that can better ground a postcolonial criti-
cism of the ‘West’. Nandy, whose position is closer to Mahatma
Gandhi’s, aptly describes the psychological state of the coloniser when
he says that he is ‘not the conspiratorial dedicated oppressor that he is
made out to be, but a self-destructive co-victim’.11 Here let us stretch
the temporal phases of the phrase ‘co-victim’ a little. The oppressor
does not become a ‘co-victim’ in the process of victimising the ‘other’.
In fact, as already pointed out, victimising the ‘other’ is preceded by or
springs from self-victimisation. Hence the need to replace the term ‘co-
victim’, as it carries the sense of simultaneity instead of the sense of a
sequence.
The ‘West’ has become, like the Kantian self, a source of knowledge,
but something that cannot know itself. This, says the philosopher
Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya, might either ultimately relapse the
Kantian self into agnosticism or be merely postulated as a necessity of
thought or as moral faith.12 To avoid this, it is necessary for this self to
have self-knowledge. The West too needs to become aware of itself, partic-
ularly of its recent origin and its modern form, and not claim antiquity.
The antidote to the construction of the ‘other’ will thus be the deconstruc-
tion of itself through this act of looking within. Without this self-aware-
ness, the West might gain political mileage, but it will face serious
problems with regard to its own existence. It may be that the West, like
the proverbial eye, needs a mirror to be able to carry out the task of looking
at itself. For that, the only option is to turn to gaze from the non-West to
the West’s own premodern self. This realignment of gaze has to be in an
epistemological and not moralistic sense; otherwise the central point made
above may be misread as the valorisation of the premodern West. Such
an epistemological exercise will confirm that the West is not a monolith.
These internal tensions between modernity and premodern plural
social realities, the recent origin of the West, the invariance of its
intentionality and the internal process of modernisation preceding the
external process of colonialism are all important, particularly in the
 CTTE_A_138117.fm Page 598 Saturday, January 7, 2006 7:41 AM

598

present context when the West or modernity claims to be ‘everywhere’.

Though everywhere, it is not all over: it is confined to certain pockets
from where it continues to give a deceptive, spectral feeling of being
everywhere. Within the present non-Western societies, it is possible to
locate and identify its absences, pockets of resistance to it, as well as its
ineffectiveness, along with, of course, its presences and success. Together
they can provide a site actively to negotiate neither a pure modernity/
West nor even a pure non-West but a simultaneous combination of both.
The possibility of simultaneity, which is available in the non-Western
societies, is to be contrasted with their ordering, which is sequential
within the West. This is also the occasion to recognise the West-centred-
ness of Foucault’s plea to conflate the premodern and the postmodern.
This active negotiation between the modern and the premodern outside
the West, and not a tame surrender of the premodern to the modern
within the West, should significantly limit modernity’s claim of being
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everywhere.
To conclude, the destruction of its own premodern self and contrast-
ing it with its own constructions such as the ‘Orient’ are the two histori-
cally significant resources that shaped the formation of the term ‘West’.
Given these dimensions of the term, it may be a worthwhile exercise to
do some sorting of its various uses in the writings of modern thinkers
such as Hegel, Spengler, A J Toynbee, Said and others to arrive at new
insights and possibly identify the limitations of their historiography.

I wish to sincerely thank Ashis Nandy, Vinay Lal, Ajay K Raina and M
Sridhar whose constant interrogation and suggestions have helped me in
shaping this essay.