A Statement on German studies and the Humanities

Published in: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte DVjs 89.Jg., 4 (2015), 630-636. A Statement on German studies and the Humanities. Anil Bhatti (New Delhi) I As in other countries the situation of the humanities in India is characterized by contradictions which stem from the general politicaleconomic direction of national neo-liberal policy making. In the field of education this means that privatization is actively encouraged by the government at all levels and there is a general shift in the weightage of state financing for education accompanied by an abdication of the state from crucial social sectors such as health, education and other public services. Instead of a comprehensive policy of development in all sectors of society, policy making under globalization leads to the instrumentalisation of the educational sphere which in turn favors the unidimensional investment in programs which are geared to the interests of the job market. There is an intense commodification of education. This commodification affects both students and teachers and it thus has a dual character. As many observers have pointed out, students have now increasingly to become primarily a subject for the job market and they have to be ready to pay a high fee for corporate market oriented courses. Scholarships do not keep pace with the increase in expenditure for a comprehensive education. The other aspect of commodification concerns teachers. Increasingly they are being relegated to contract appointments with fewer chances of getting permanent positions. The teaching profession becomes part of the precariat. Further, the long term effect of the commoditization of education concerns the social character of the university. It is no longer a place where critical thought can develop and social commitment nurtured. The crucial criterion becomes the ability to exercise command over money. Commodification means that education is primarily seen in terms of its exchange value and utility within a market economy and only after that there may be space and time for developing critical social perspectives. The processes of restructuring universities and making them function like corporate entities involving increased bureaucratization is part of the current scenario. However, the bureaucratic dream of a technocratically controlled sector of education which functions on principle of supply and demand and which is completely controlled founders on the inner contradictions of the situation. The university itself can generate the intellectual opposition to the system of control. Further, the state has a vast administrative apparatus which needs bureaucrats who are selected on the basis of an examination system in which the curricula include the social sciences and the humanities. The social sciences and humanities thus continue to have a secure structural place in the educational system so that the real struggle is over the contents and methods of these social sciences. This then becomes the contested terrain of ideology where there is a concerted effort to change curricula, teaching programs, scholarly choices to suit the ideological preferences of the current political dispensation. This also applies to the field of foreign language teaching and the place of culture studies. Though English has become an Indian language and has become a part of the multilingual world of India it has been repeatedly emphasized that exclusive dependence on it is not enough in an increasingly interconnected world where there are many windows to other traditions and cultures. This also secures the structural position of studies in foreign languages and cultures where again the struggle is between the exclusive emphasis on market oriented teaching and seemingly unnecessary emphasis on the emancipatory potential of literary and culture studies. The utilitarian study of foreign languages (DAF for instance) does not have to justify itself. Theory, literature and culture studies need to constantly find some legitimation. We must thus note that the state in India today does not marginalize the humanities as such. Rather, it attempts to forcefully transform them functionally. Market orientation is emphasized and simultaneously the there is an attempt to refashion them along the ideological lines of what may be termed a form of right wing homogenized Hinduism –“Hindutva” – which is at variance with the loose unstructured nature of traditional varieties of Hinduism. ‘Hindutva’is a homogenized version of Hinduism which is used to connote an essential form of Indianness (corresponding to Englishness or Deutschtum) which functions as a kind of Leitkultur for an intensely diverse, multireligious, plurilingual society. This involves large scale interference in the governance of educational institutions. Some recent appointments of Heads of institutions and research bodies crucially affect independent critical and artistic engagement on issues faced by the country which leads to resisting governmental interference in academics and governance. There is a national protest against this and calls have been given to protect academic endeavour and the universal principles of freedom of thought, expression and the right to dissent. II Education in general and the Humanities in particular are therefore a contested terrain where state control and surveillance are in conflict with a critical humanistic perspective. This is in effect an ideological struggle between a secular world view which defends open, syncretic life worlds based on commonalities against closed, homogenized worlds. The process of homogenization of complex societies like India leads to the creation of parallel multicultural universes which exist next to each other like monads which can interact but not intersect and transform themselves through metamorphosis. This should be seen in the context of a basic struggle between the contradictory processes of homogeneity and heterogeneity in India. The defence of heterogeneity is characterised by an acceptance of pluricultural, plurilingual, translational, overlapping orders of similarities which look upon complex cultures as palimpsests and thus differ from models of homogeneity which are based on the drive towards a singular cultural identity. In metaphorical terms, the multicultural society is a mosaic with distinct parts in a frame, whereas the pluricultural society is a woven fabric or a web characterized by interwoven, inseparable strands. Seoarating the strands will lead to tearing and destroying the weave. Comparative thought based on non-hierarchical thinking in similarities emphasizes relational thinking, entangled histories and the connectedness and overlaps across cultural borders. In contrast, programs which search for authenticity are based on the obsession with purity and origins. This leads to the desire for erasure historical accrual of memory and the overwriting given by cultural palimpsest. As against this, a pluricultural perspective is based on the development of the critical relationship to the past in order to find, rehabilitate, critically inherit and appropriate cultural heritages, combining past and present, establishing links and out of the plenitude of the world deriving that critical assemblage which will enable us to shape a better world. This is based on mingling, mixing, emphasizing affiliations, alliances and similarities in the complex search for a possible united front of aesthetics against the rise of authoritarian regimes. In this sense pluricultural and heterogeneous societies can be viewed as complex webs and palimpsests of overlapping similarities. Similarity (Ähnlichkeit) with diversity would then be the goal of the historical process based on a Universalist humanist perspective. It is based on solidarity which ignores particularistic bonding in order to project a pluricultural society of communication characterized by fuzzy borders and transcended boundaries. We could indeed see the signature of the pluricultural form of life in the affirmation of similarity in diversity as against the absolutisation through homogenization. In effect the ideological struggle over the humanities in our contemporary neo-liberal societies attempts to prevent the development of this kind of pluricultural perspective in order to establish a unidimensional market oriented program. III Another crucial aspect of diversity concerns language. India’s linguistic diversity and complexity remains as part of a general fuzzy cultural, social and religious practice resisting the homogenization of classificatory order. A substantial part of India’s ‘communities’ are bilingual and many are plurilingual. The type of functioning performative plurilingualism in India, for instance, with the simultaneous presence of many languages in the immediate life world is difficult to define and a behaviorist model of ‘code switching’ would hardly help in comprehending it. There is no mechanical switch which is turned on and off in plurilingual situations. There are more helpful metaphors. Many languages co-exist and merge, float, glide into each other. They are part of a repertoire which one can draw upon depending on the situation. And, as in all repertoires the relative competence in each component can vary and again, depending on the requirement and circumstances, it can be refined and improved upon. There can also be an element of play in this. Perhaps one could use a musical metaphor to comprehend plurilingualism. The ability to deal with musical material allows a musician to play freely. S/he can improvise, create variations, change styles and tonalities. Linguistic diversity is something similar. It allows one to function with a language repertoire in an environment where the purity of essentialised language is not privileged. All attempts to sabotage plurilingual situations (movements for linguistic purification) wish to establish homogenized languages which can negotiate between the ‘own’ language and ‘foreign’ languages. The relationship between languages in a plurilingual repertoire is not the relationship between a so called mother tongue and foreign languages. The various languages are just different. This has by now become obvious. German or French can be foreign languages in India, but in a polyglot city like Delhi the relationship between the Indian languages Hindi, Urdu, English, Punjabi, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali and so on is not that between separate foreign languages. This plurilingual landscape is a historical consequence in India and is related to the shared history of colonialism. In Europe the historical model, which could have been compared to India, namely the Habsburg Monarchy, lost out against the romantic model which preferred the unity of language, Volk and nation. Recovery of the hidden traditions of polyglossia in Europe (especially in Central Europe and the former parts of the Habsburg Monarchy) is part of the comparative study across borders and boundaries in culture studies. IV How does this affect the humanities in general and our perspectives in German Studies in particular? The renewal of German Studies in India is based on interdisciplinary perspectives through which new disciplinary affiliations are established. The significant point is that there was little need in a pluricultural country like India to be dominated by the western paradigm of monolingual national philology. A purely National philology long ago lost much of its legitimation as a result of being placed in contexts of globalization, migration, performative plurilingualism and pluriculturalism. But, it is not surprising that our various streams of philology suffered from an inability to be naturally comparatist and plurilingual. There is little support within the disciplines for crossing borders and boundaries. The European nation state survives as an analytic category in foreign language departments for transparently selfish reasons. Scholarships and fellowships are channeled by nationalist agencies. A critical comparative literature which overcomes its origins in nationalist and colonial approaches becomes possible only through greater contact with other philological disciplines and the social sciences and also an openness towards precisely those new technologies (including to Digital media) which were seen as threats to passive Bildung and which we know are now the source of revolutionary change, aesthetic innovations and the transformations in the public spheres (Öffentlichkeit). The overall contradictions in the world have also led to a reorientation in the methodological perspectives of philology. The humanities have to rethink their function in society and they have to find ways of changing their roles. Instead of being suppliers to the system they have to find new ways of providing the critical base for interventions out of the discipline itself. A critical program of German Studies has the potential to become almost naturally an inseparable part of the defense of humanities against the technocratic attack on critical humanities. The theoretical discussion in this field has opened up new comparative spaces between India and Europe in which the aporia of enlightenment and the German philosophical tradition from Kant and Hegel via Marx and thinkers like Ernst Bloch to the Frankfurt School are involved. This constitutes the invaluable dimension of what, appropriating a term from Bourdieu, we could call the symbolic capital of the German and Central European traditions. A few examples may illustrate this. In a seminar on Schillers „Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts“ organized by the Goethe Society of India a situational relevance could be established between German and Indian perspectives on the marginalization of the humanities. Based on the demand that we have to „reinvent” liberal education in order to challenge the state supported drive towards the commodification of education the opposition to the results of globalization can be articulated as resistance which captures the unease over the results of globalization. Scholars from other disciplines formulated this as the need to develop an aesthetics of resistance along the lines of the perspective opened up by Peter Weiss in his novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands. New juxtapositions and configurations emerge out of comparative constellations. We remember that the significance of Goethe’s Westöstlicher Divan lies in the attempt to establish connections between Europe and the Orient at a time when colonialism was blocking these connections by erecting essentialised boundaries and borders. The Divan is a radical piece of work, created in an age in which colonialism constructed differences and borders. Reading the Divan in this way becomes important. It marks the beginning of the possibility to take seriously a form of literature that brings aesthetic production across borders and speaks about this movement aesthetically. This has been a perspective of migration literature everywhere, not only in Europe, also in India and other parts of the world — everywhere, where there were writers with a corresponding background, they tried to express and order their topics through the figure of migration, contributing thus to the emergence of 'world literature', which Goethe, among others, introduced as an idea. Goethe’s concept of World literature as a vison bases itself on solidarity directed against the order of colonialism and it is not surprising that Marx and Engels could imagine a development where world literature would arise out of the increasing interconnectedness of the world. World Literature, it must be emphasized, never meant a collection of ‘great books’. The idea refers to the emergence of a new quality of literary production which is liberated from national bondage. It challenges the assumed inevitability of the fusion of language, myth, territory in a nationalist configuration and thus makes us see the possibility of a utopian universal emancipation. This makes it possible to read past literatures against the grain, realize the force of translation and grasp the inherent interconnectedness wholeness of the creative enterprise of literary and artistic production. This also makes it possible to resist the fundamentalist drive towards rewriting history to suit ideological purposes. The dialectical understanding of colonialism is again a possibility through which critiques of orientalism can be developed and Universalist positions can be formulated. Colonialism created borders and boundaries and functioned through essentialism. However the process of colonialism also uncovered overlapping lines of communication and contact which pointed to the new networks of world history. V These preliminary remarks belong to the general debate on the necessity of breaking out of the nationalist paradigm in order to seek fluid overlapping possibilities of new affiliations for relevant critical reflections in the humanities. We remember that job oriented programs require no legitimation or justification. But critical positions in the humanities have to achieve a legitimacy through such arguments in an atmosphere of technocratic dominance. The surprising topicality of the perspective on world literature as a process, or the chord which is struck by a discussion on questions of aesthetic education reinforces the insight that economic and technological rationality does not exhaust the potential of the human imagination. This is the source of a critical utopian perspective. Critical studies in the humanities then means thinking in analogies, comparison, seeking affiliations, commonalities and looking upon cultures as interwoven, shared, ‘entangled’. This also means that we attempt to recover a political-ethical dimension in our argument against the reduction of the meaning of a university to a technocratic structure which exhausts its function by training programs serving the interests of an anonymous market and leaving out the extraordinary adventure of exploring ideas and visions.