The
Owl and Dawn
Probal
Dasgupta
Abstract
One
aspect of the widely acknowledged contemporary crisis, I suggest here, is the
exhaustion of Experience, which therefore needs to renew its partnership with
Innocence. I unpack this thought in terms of a model of discourse reproduction.
In this model, a child is born into her _milieu_, and begins to _recognize_
proximate persons and places in her _landscape_, which the model
idealizes as a set of names. Subsequent instruction initiates the child into
her _structures_, and she then begins to _acknowledge_ remote persons,
places and institutions on her society’s _cloudscape_, which the model
idealizes as another set of names. This discourse reproduction model stresses
the importance of the ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) – a dyadic relation
between the child and her Educator E. E renders the cloudscape’s textbooks
vivid to the child by intersemiotically translating from the structure’s
discourses into the milieu’s discourses that the child can perceive. It is
argued here that the narrative is the optimal mode for such intersemiotic
translation, and that all cloudscape names count as fictional for semiotic
purposes, regardless of the empirically demonstrable historicity of some of the
names. In this context, this paper asks how pedagogues are to reconcile the ability
of certain established ‘true classics’ to elicit a deep response from everybody
with the need to counter cloudscape colonization by highlighting new classics
from marginalized cultures. This is articulated as the question of how to steer
the work of such reconciliation away from the trap of bureaucratically
defensible massive anthologies for all that become pedagogic nightmares. One answer
is that the practices of Esperanto literary translation provide a model worth
emulating: one tries to attain a balanced basket of classics sourced from as
diverse a set of cultures as one can, paying special attention to smaller
speech communities to counteract the hegemonic forces of the market. This
answer is contextualized by tweaking the discourse reproduction model in order
to offer a new characterization of ‘true classics’ that extends the
‘cloudscape’ metaphor. Readers clued into earlier substantivist work on
diglossia will recognize some abiding themes expressed in slightly different
terminology here.
When
I am told that a major philosopher enjoys reading crime fiction, I take it that
she enjoyed the suspense. Philosophers are centrally concerned with
scrutinizing claims to the effect that this or that statement is true. But the
final determination of the status of these truth claims is kept pending.
That a particular statement has been put forward as true gives it the status of
a candidate proposition, waiting to be confirmed, keeping us in suspense
until it is. Confirmation will become available only after due scrutiny removes
those impediments of which some Indian philosophers have said that a cognition
free of impediments is a valid cognition, a pramā. Till then, we wait.
I’m
here to explore some questions connected with suspense, with having to wait. Just
how somebody’s doctrine technically characterizes impediments is not my concern.
I look first at some impediments affecting the scrutiny of statements about a human
individual HI, pronounced ‘hi’. In some accents of English, HI is pronounced ‘your
highness’. If HI elicits strong feelings of love or hate among others whose
perceptions are influential, their intensity cannot but impede due scrutiny during
her lifetime. Does it help the cause if HI dies? Well, if she continues to be
adored or despised, the obstruction remains in place, keeping the scrutiny of truth
claims in suspense.
What
if we wait for even those posthumous associations to weaken? Waiting
interminably places you in the predicament dramatized in an Esperanto poem by
Edwin De Kock (1982: 6). At such a huge distance, the poem shows, you don’t
care, you can’t care what the facts are. For you have no clue who on
earth these facts are about. Cluelessness impedes comprehension. You can’t ask
if a proposition is true or false when you don’t even understand what it’s
saying. Here is De Kock’s poem, followed by my very rough English rendering:
identeco identity
En
Ekbatano Top
banker from Babel,
ĉefbankisto
fro Babel, based in Ekbatan –
kiu
vi estis, who
were you,
negocante
kun Kuraŝ, Itti-Marduk-balatu,
Itti-Marduk-balatu? doing business with
Kurash?
From
what optimal distance should we look at a body of statements about HI if we
want to check whether they are true? One influential answer to this question
was formulated by Hegel, who wrote: The
owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering. My label for this answer, crepuscularism, is based
on the Latin word crepusculum, ‘twilight’; it serves my purpose as it is
crucially ambiguous between dusk, which Hegel had in mind, and dawn. In the
present lecture, I offer some reasons for comprehensively revising
crepuscularism, shifting our attention from dusk to dawn, reflecting on such a
shift’s antecedents and consequences, keeping the essential unclarity of
twilight in view.
Consider the interpersonal milieu
in which an individual’s biography is situated. Contrast it with the
institutional structures whose vicissitudes historians are expected to
watch. Now, a child born into society and acquiring her first language – I
shall imagine the mainstream philosopher’s typical monolingual child,
minimizing the number of wrinkles to consider – is born into her milieu.
She learns words and names for her parents or other care-givers, for her
play-mates and other companions, for the places and sights and sounds of her
immediate environs. Once she has been immersed in her milieu, exposure to her structures
follows. Instruction of some kind introduces her to her head of state, her
national and international maps, the party her well-wishers urge her to vote
for, and other institutional coordinates that she grows into as she adjusts her
rationality settings to the norms of others.
Now imagine a boy called Utti,
growing up in the Babylonian elite as a son of Itti-Marduk-balatu, the gentleman
mentioned in De Kock’s poem. In Utti’s infancy, he encounters his father as
part of his milieu. Formal instruction later superimposes Itti-Marduk-balatu’s
structural identity on Utti’s initial picture of him. Generalizing from this
vignette, as a metonym for the way any child grows into full access to her
milieu and her structures, I focus on the names of the persons and
places she gets acquainted with. I thus idealize the milieu and the structures
as sets of names.
Do the bits of discourse
encyclopaedically associated with each name formally appear in this
idealization? No, they don’t, but they are the reason for setting it up. To imagine
discourse as homogeneous would be a mistake. The personal discourse
surrounding names in our milieu is opaque to outsiders who share our
language but not our milieu. In contrast, the bits of institutional
discourse attached to names in the structures are disseminated among all
adults in the community, although the manner of such dissemination is hardly
uniform.
We familiarize young children with
the personal discourse in our milieu when they learn how to talk. In a literate
context, older children are initiated into the institutional discourse of their
structures as they learn how to read and write, especially at secondary school.
In contexts where formal schooling is rudimentary or missing, children make do
with whatever initiations they can get. Deprived of rituals supervised by
tribal elders, excluded from serious secondary schools, these adolescents do
become citizens of history nonetheless – under conditions imposed by displacement,
disenfranchisement and worse.
Why emphasize the messy heterogeneity
of the ways in which discourse is associated with milieux and structures? I am
making two points. First, the milieu/structure distinction is robust even in
non-canonical contexts, and functionally corresponds to the speech/writing
binary of a normative childhood. Second, the discourses of experience,
or structures, are sustained across generations, but they undergo
reconstruction every time, making even the normative process essentially messy.
Experience is reconstructed through every fresh generation’s innocence.
Young children learn how to talk. They get acquainted with the names and faces
in their milieu. Only then do they find that there is a structural discourse to
get initiated into. They have to access those structures of yours, which
therefore need to have an exterior accessible to young children at a milieu
level. Only structures with this property can survive across generations.
Aware of this challenge, some
institutions explicitly try to secure flawless transmission. They set up a
precaution-laden, perfection-seeking pedagogy. One iconic idealization of such norms
of pedagogy and governance appears in Plato’s Republic. Hegel’s
elaboration of the notion of the state inherits that enterprise. But philosophers
today cannot identify with the Plato-Hegel project – for at least one reason
relevant in our context. Why, we wonder, did Plato, who wrote the Meno,
also write the Republic? How can we assent to these models that
rationally reconstruct institutional pedagogy but ignore the non-formal transmission
of the pervasive pre-institutional performative basis of humanity?
It is the cross-generational transmission
of this performative basis that underwrites the systematic pedagogies. Explicit
teaching systems take a free ride on that tacit transmission, for which
language acquisition is our obvious metonym. Wherever we may stand on
nature-nurture debates surrounding this transmission, it certainly is a tacit
process. Unable to perform an adult reconstruction of our philosophically
unintelligible childhood, we fail to find a launching pad for the Hegelian rocket
we secretly wish to launch. This is one reason that we refuse to launch it at
all.
In other words, many of us have been
struggling with the challenge of shifting philosophy from the comprehensive
dusk summating all experience into a pre-prehensive dawn that keeps faith with
innocence. Before giving innocence primacy in philosophizing, however, our
reflexes lead us to expect experience to clean up its act and resolve to make
sense of its partnership with innocence. But that would be an oxymoronic
expectation. Cleaning up its act is something experience can only do with ample
aid from innocence.
Furthermore, in modern times, experience
is in crisis. You all have a take of your own on the crisis besetting the state
and its incarnations as the school the church the family usually called the
ideological state apparatuses yes I know I’m speaking breathlessly but that’s
the way your critical discourses are standardly conducted sorry if my mimicry
gets under your skin.
I now proceed to inflict on you my
own take on the crisis of experience. Experience has been busy learning how to
win. Even getting something right is seen in terms of defeating rivals. This
assiduous pursuit of victory has left experience incapable of inter-experiential
communication or action. More concretely, the obsession with refereeing
arrangements that certify victory and defeat has promoted discourses that
explicitly privilege propositional claims amenable to technical adjudication –
call them proceduralist discourses. Society has come to let proceduralism drive
its operative structures. What does this mean for an individual adult facing a
whole network of master institutions in her society and wondering whether to
accept them?
It means that the decision by a typical
educated adult to accept certain bodies of discourse involves her assenting to an
intricate set of co-articulated networks of propositional claims. Recall that
the cult of victory means that there are competing networks of this type,
called Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, or the Republicans and the Democrats. Your typical
informed adult is called upon to take sides in such centuries-long
twiddledum-twiddledee battles, and to rejoice when ‘her side’ triumphs. In
order to root for ‘her team’, she has to accept one bunch of discourses, which
involves granting the credibility of many propositional claims she will never
have the resources to check.
Once upon a time, your typical informed
adult was indeed willing to assume those claims to be credible. Why? Because
she believed that the systems of refereeing – for whose sake the whole
proceduralist game was put in place, celebrated as rational, separated from
emotions and ethical intuitions – would function as fair adjudication systems. The
whole point of separating propositional claims from feelings and ethics had
been that the procedures would deliver verifiable justice. But even the publicized
cases of major cheating were so egregious, ubiquitous and preponderant that that
point lost any residual validity long ago. This disappointment made many
informed adults stop cheering for the usual teams. They stopped making
allowances for the usual persons and institutions. They stopped believing that structures
can ever deliver on their tired promises.
My rhetoric makes you think, doesn’t
it, that I’m about to attack proceduralism? Defend feeling and ethical
intuitions? Advocate some fresh synthesis of cognition and affect? Persuade
people to listen to the margins and reverse entrenched patterns of exploitation
and domination? A nice wish list, I’m sure. But you can’t uproot proceduralism
through proceduralist practices. To propose to defeat the culture of victory
would be oxymoronic. I’d like to try a very different tack.
Let’s step back and look again at
those objectivity-seeking adjudication systems – which underwrote the whole
proceduralist enterprise, you know, of separating publicly inspectable
propositional claims from the more subjective type of claim for which
adjudication can never be fair. Now, exactly what did the failure of those
systems have to do with the culture of victory?
My short answer to this
question is: sovereignty. A sovereign system seeks closure (victory and closure
are related notions), which left unchecked will freeze into permanence any lies
you may have told when a king was alive to avoid offending him, and
correspondingly won’t have the resources for correction that openness would
have made available. Modern claims about transparency, openness, accountability,
however well-meant, always give way to the imperatives of a sovereign system
when the chips are down.
I can only unpack my short answer
properly if you let me finish setting up my little model. That child Utti
(remember him, Itti-Marduk-balatu’s son in Babylon?) is born into his milieu
and encounters what my model calls his landscape – a small set of proximate
names whose bearers he can recognize, with private encyclopaedia
entries attached. Educators later initiate Utti into his cloudscape – a large
set of distal names whose bearers he acknowledges, with public
encyclopaedia entries attached. Now, I want you to focus on Educator E, call
him Eturuk, who has formed a bond with Utti. E serves as the structure’s
ambassador, but E belongs to Utti’s milieu. Utti recognizes E
personally, while he will only intellectually acknowledge the countless
figures to whom E is introducing him. Utti concretely trusts E and
others in his landscape, but can only abstractly believe propositions
about the faces dotting the cloudscape.
Now, the cloudscape reaches Utti
through Babylon’s textbooks. These books are compelled to bend many truths in
favour of the state’s greater glory, thanks to the culture of victory. Cutting
to the chase, we are living in a world where it is still an exceptional event
that forty-two historians from China, Japan and Korea should spend years
jointly writing a secondary school modern history textbook that portrays the
events neutrally and is usable in all three countries. Their 2005 product,
published simultaneously in the three languages, is confined to a niche market,
but activists from their three countries have translated the book into
Esperanto (Historio por malfermi la estontecon, ‘A history that opens up
the future’, Beijing: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 2007). This is an
exceptional attempt to clip the wings of national glory in the context of
history textbooks. Mainstream opinion everywhere still takes it for granted
that cloudscapes shall feature exaggerated formulations maximizing national
glory, even if modern fashions require authors to exaggerate less flamboyantly
than in classical antiquity.
Now notice that the boy Utti in my
model concretely trusts his educator E and will accept E’s
judgment as to which historical descriptions Utti should abstractly believe.
My point is not that E tells Utti to accept what the textbooks say, and to
respect the figures exactly as portrayed. The point is that Utti’s developing
intellect functions not in the isolated brain of an individual child called
Utti, but interpersonally, in a special dyadic relationship with E’s pedagogy,
in what is technically called Utti’s ZPD, his Zone of Proximal Development,
which my model sees as a zone of intersemiotic translation. If Eturuk is a
gifted teacher, he makes the heroes come to life in Utti’s admiring eyes. Utti
grows to admire the nation’s heroes and yet see them as human, with feet of
clay that don’t detract from their worth. Utti also learns that the discourse
surrounding national heroes is expected to be grandiose, not to be taken
literally.
Please focus on this mediation
between the structure’s cloudscape and the milieu’s landscape by the gifted
teacher in the ZPD where Eturuk the teacher and Utti the student engage in
intersemiotic translation. A secondary schoolchild is exposed to truths and
falsehoods of one kind at the level of scraps of conversation in the milieu,
and to true and false propositions of another order in the structure’s
discourses. Thus, no general answer can be given to questions like whether the
intersemiotic translation provided by this trustworthy educator E purges the
discourse of its lies while making its heroes vivid on the student Utti’s
screen. What is at stake is not the truth or falsity of propositions, but vivid
perceptibility. As a Bengali poet once wrote, tumi jaa alash haate phele
daao kaanaakori mullo nei taar, ‘what you casually throw away is not worth
a red cent’.
Recall that my model formalizes landscapes
and cloudscapes as sets of names. Effective teaching by Eturuk makes the
discourses of his cloudscape vividly available to our Utti through fictional
narratives, featuring fictitious names. Thus, in the process of
translating from abstract objects of acknowledgement to concrete objects of
recognition, the teacher-student dyad in the ZPD imagine persons, prescinding
from whether they exist. Adding an imaginary court jester called Birbal to the
story of the real emperor Akbar may help certain students to visualize Akbar
and his court. But Akbar is an abstract name as well, and belongs to the
plane of fiction. Although Akbar did exist, any story we tell about him or
other cloudscape figures is imagined. There is no such thing as a real story. The
telling makes the tale.
To be sure, this holds of landscape names,
too: stories about people you know personally are also narratives woven by the
narration. However, when your aunt Shipra spins a yarn about herself, you hear
it as her story. It becomes part of your acquaintance with your aunt. This makes
the story irreducibly concrete. In contrast, your experience of narrative places
a historical cloudscape figure like Akbar and an invented add-on like Birbal on
the same abstract plane, accessible through the imagination. A gifted teacher
intersemiotically translates from the structure’s discourse into the milieu’s
vividness, enhancing the student’s access to the stories. Despite this, Akbar
and Birbal remain imaginary, unlike the student’s Aunt Shipra.
When a secondary schoolchild goes
through the hoops of higher education, in the highest echelons of inquiry, she
finds fellow scientists calling theoretical or empirical hypotheses ‘stories’.
She experiences the fact that, indeed, scientific stories have to hold the
interest of the audience exactly the way ordinary narratives do. It is not only
when Utti’s teacher Eturuk intersemiotically translates from Babylon’s
structures into Utti’s milieu that narration is called for. Stories travel well
across all discourse boundaries, all genre boundaries. When scientist S – call
her Sheela – and her colleagues share a hypothesis packaged as a story, they go
into a mutual pedagogic huddle, forming a ZPD. They depend on each other for
the intellectual incubation to bear fruit. We expect Sheela and her colleagues
to be social and intellectual equals acknowledging each other’s calibre. In
contrast, we expect Eturuk and his pupil Utti to be in an asymmetric
teacher-student relationship. When we draw a sharp boundary between the
equality-laden ZPD’s in Sheela’s research team and the hierarchical ZPD in Babylon,
we miss the point that only the items that Eturuk manages to get across to
Utti, in at least some preliminary form, are going to count as the set of
Babylon’s transmissible discourses. To misquote Tagore slightly, shei shotto
jaa bujhibe tumi, ‘only what you understand is true’. Both in Sheela’s team
and in the mansion where Eturuk tutors Utti, it is stories that carry the crucial
cargo; for the cargo to get across, the stories have to click.
Some works of the imagination click
really well. Such songs and films are called hits. Such scientific analyses are
called paradigm cases and have given the Kuhnian paradigm its name. Works of
art that persistently seem to discriminating judges to really click are called
classics. We return to classics and equivalents. Our first order of business
now is to ask how this constellation of ideas helps address the crisis of the
dusk’s Experience and helps forge a lasting relationship with the dawn’s
Innocence. We shall also touch base with the CJK textbook, our acronym for the
tri-national history book. Then we are ready for the little matter of classics.
This discussion of intersemiotic
translation in a ZPD has stressed the point that stories are the main vehicle
of such translation. Stories are not just a format particularly suited for
translation at the cloudscape-landscape interface. If we look closely at the
way stories work in this context, we begin to grasp how they become a resource
for addressing the crisis of Experience. What we grasp, expressed briefly, is
that the crisis stems from structures that take themselves too seriously and
lapse into sovereigntist solipsism expressible as a triumphalist slogan “there
is no game but this game”. A story addresses this malady by pressing the key
“there is no play but play”. We can unpack this as follows: “All non-landscape
names count as fictional, even the ones labelled as ‘real’; please suspend belief
and disbelief in favour of the trust that drives the listener’s
attention to the story”.
Every time a story elicits this
trust, it creates a sovereignty-free enclave where the structure’s absolutist
regime stands suspended. To address the crisis of Experience involves creating
many such enclaves and devoting much of their ZPD-pedagogic energy to
boundary-crossing ventures. It is in this context that the CJK textbook becomes
an enabling resource even though thousands of schools in China, Japan and Korea
haven’t carved it on the doors of their history classrooms. Given the
fact that CJK exists, history teachers in those countries can personally use it
to open windows. Teachers can, in their ZPD dyads with students, take
them on a trip or two across cloudscape boundaries, so that the children find
out how exciting, how intellectually and morally adventurous such trips can be.
Vapid, unexamined celebration of CJK
won’t do, however. We must face the fact that that textbook is a response to
the troubled aftermath of Japanese colonization. Facing that fact in terms of
our model involves formally acknowledging that one cloudscape can colonize
another. This move leads us to inquire: How are we to complete the
decolonization of formerly colonized cloudscapes that have not yet overcome the
effects of that violence?
This is obviously an unsolved
problem in practice. The British and French educational systems to this day tell
their children with a straight face that their ancestors administered colonial
regimes as a benevolent enterprise whose main purpose was philanthropy and
foreign aid, with only minor aberrations. Now, if the reason cultural decolonization
is advancing so slowly is that formal imperialism ended only recently, then philosophical
inquiry should not waste time on these contingent troubles. My take, however,
is that reversing cloudscape colonization is an unsolved problem not just in
practice, but in principle.
To see this, consider the fact that we
are overwhelmed when we encounter classics like Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, Goethe’s Faust. Imagine an organization seeking
inter-cultural dialogue, like Unesco, trying to compile an equitable global
collection of classics that seriously represents all cultures to all students. Such
an enterprise will want to take on board both the fact that minority
communities do want to see their cultures duly represented and the
ability of certain texts, ‘true classics’, to elicit an extraordinary response
from all audiences. How can Unesco – or anyone else engaged in this enterprise
– respect both the equitable representation imperative and the intrinsic value
of true classics?
Some obvious bureaucratic responses
are readily available, as are their conceptual equivalents; these only evade
the question. But there is at least one site of conceptual, cultural and
linguistic labour where an entire community has been concretely responding to this
question at a level that seems to me to deserve your attention. I am referring
to authors who translate literature into Esperanto, their readers whose
interest keeps such publications on the physical or virtual shelves, and the
publishers, reviewers and others who mediate between translators and readers.
In
order to see clearly what stands out in the production and reception of
literary translation into Esperanto, try contrasting it with the state of
affairs in English and French. The readership exposed to world literature
through English and French does not run into Lord Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz
of Poland, or Seven Brothers by Aleksis Kivi of Finland, or The
Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách of Hungary. But adult readers in Esperanto count
as illiterate if they are unfamiliar with these major nineteenth century
classics, translated by iconic Esperanto authors like Grabowski, Setälä and
Kalocsay.
What
is at stake is not a few token peaks. The ‘east-west series’, whose items are
tracked by the world Esperanto association but are published by dozens of
publishers working independently of each other, is just official applause for a
fraction of the extensive material routinely translated and published. Catalan
author Abel Montagut has done a systematic survey and found that the Esperanto
translation basket is significantly more equitable in terms of cross-regional
representation than the baskets in English or other major translation vehicles.
Of course Esperanto translators have
done Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare and other widely acclaimed ‘true classics’. What
is the point of trying to persuade the public to look also at literatures
associated with smaller speech communities, such as Finnish or Croatian or
Slovenian? Does the Esperanto translation enterprise strike any identifiable
balance between keeping faith with ‘true classics’ and this inclusivity
enterprise? How is Esperanto’s equitable classics basket not a variant of a
bureaucratic attempt to force everybody to read far too much?
My answer to this triple question
turns on the ZPD formed by Utti’s gifted educator E. When I urge you to take
educator E seriously and draw a parallel between teaching and translating, this
is a metonym for asking you to watch not just how translations are produced but
their dissemination and reception as well. The focus on children is a metonym
for a wider emphasis on newcomers, especially ex-marginal new entrants into
serious literate discourse and its political penumbra. The Esperanto enterprise
works on the basis of actual contact and ZPDs, not politically correct
production quotas that somebody has to meet for statistical reasons. Iconic
authors also translate on the side, the way Buddhadeva Bose translated
Baudelaire, Hölderlin and Rilke into Bangla, and their pedagogy makes an
idiographic point that nomothetic rational reconstructions cannot construct a
generalized conceptual equivalent for. That is the point, one has to
answer the triple question by ostension, not by a verbal replication in
some other language.
But you will rightly press me for a
more articulate answer to the triple question. How does my little model
respond, you will rightly ask, to the conundrum of balancing the intrinsic
value of true classics with the inclusivity imperative. A fair question. By way
of response, let’s try the following characterization of ‘true classics’. When
an author leaps out of the book and stands before the reader as a gifted
performer who makes the cloudscape figures extremely vivid, the cloud bursts
into rain and drenches the reader, dissolving the boundary separating ground
from sky. That kind of book is a true classic.
Establishing as they do a direct
connection with the relation of trust that makes ZPDs special places where dusk
and dawn can join hands, classics cut some of the red tape of institutions and
bypass some of the ill-effects of cloudscape colonization. But love doesn’t
wish war away. Classics can’t wish colonization away. The independent need for
fair representation of the world’s smaller cultures remains an urgent need.
Hence the unending search for unfamiliar classics.
What stops this from morphing into a
wooden bureaucratic venture that just gets the numbers right? Well, Esperanto
is a language that relays from ZPD to ZPD. Its very architecture, as some of
you know, grapples with the question of how the simple constituents of a formal
semantic decomposition can or cannot do double duty as the easy elements of a
real life learner’s agenda. The actions and responses that drive the traffic in
Esperanto are anchored in contexts of pedagogic need. These contexts are
situated at liminal sites where newcomers are introduced to cloudscapes through
the medium of narrative. Recall, from an earlier juncture of this discussion,
that the flexibility of stories provides an escape hatch from the tyranny of a
cloudscape’s institutional bureaucracy.
Just as my highlighting CJK was not
an invitation to write a South Asian history textbook, this highlighting of the
practices in Esperanto literary translation is not a unique validity claim or
an exact replicability claim. The strong claim I’m making is that the unaided
evening is exhausted as a theoretical itinerary. It needs the dawn as an
explicit partner, and we need to understand the ZPD – perhaps intuitively rather
than formally, but probably also with a formal component to this understanding
– in order to work out optimal forms of such partnership in a variety of
contexts. Since not all dawn-partners are children in terms of physical age,
those of us who are rooting for this redirection of philosophical energies have
many contexts to consider, and many genres of negotiation to grapple with.
But I have to address some loose
ends in the little story I’ve been telling. Stories travel well, I’m saying; across
discourse boundaries; importing chunks of foreign structure into domestic
structure, and the other way round. Fine, but why should narrative be hyped as
a hero capable of turning the tide, capable of undermining the credibility of
the culture of victory and hegemony? What is it about stories that bears on
what I’ve called the crisis of Experience?
If a classic story brings an
attentive audience to catharsis, if catharsis puts us in touch with universality,
if universality is experience regaining access to innocence, then I can plug
all the holes in my narrative, giving you something approaching a connected
sequence of propositions, and remove whatever sense of suspense you have left.
But these are wild propositions,
which don’t add up to a doctrine that can be defended seriously. By this point
you must have gathered that my whole purpose is to shower you with a series of
wild propositions and to discourage you from trying to tame them. I do hope
that your response to all this is not going to be: “Seriously?”
Hegelian owls were serious.
Seriousness has reached a dead end. Adult faith is gone. But the trustingness
of an audience listening to stories is not entirely gone. Some friends who know
vastly more than I ever hope to learn once told me that a trusting audience
imagines truth, justice and equality into reality in the context of listening
to fiction. They were thinking specifically of children, which may or may not
be a romanticizing move. Please tweak that move in whatever sophisticated
direction you prefer. All I’m saying is that perhaps pinning our hopes on the
liminal zone afforded by story-telling, the great deflater of rigid systems, is
not such a terrible idea after all. Goodbye to the owl of wisdom, our old totem
animal. Welcome to philosophy’s new mascot, whoever it is, my candidate is the fiction-laden
figure of the hāṭṭimāṭimṭim;
please tell stories vividly presenting your mascot candidates, and make sure
the best candidate doesn’t win, remember that we are uncelebrating the culture
of victory. Where does that leave you? In suspense again! So suspended between
experience and innocence, let us all cheer for theory: theory mātā ki jai!
Colophon
This
paper was presented as the Pranab Kumar Sen Memorial Lecture on 26 June 2016 at
Jadavpur University, Kolkata. I thank Rama Sen, Manidipa Sen and Madhucchanda
Sen for giving me the opportunity to present this text at such a forum. I thank
the audience for comments and questions. The usual disclaimers apply.
References
De
Kock, Edwin. 1982. Japaneskoj. Pretoria: Pyramid.
Abstract
in Esperanto
La
strigo kaj la tagiĝo
Unu
aspekto de la vaste agnoskata aktuala krizo en la mondo – mi sugestas en ĉi tiu
prelego – estas la fakto, ke la t.n. maturaĝo trovas sin elĉerpita. Ĝi bezonas
forĝi novan pakton kun la tagiĝo – kun la t.n. infanaĝo. Ĉi tiun penson mi
dismetas en la formo de konkreta modelo pri la reproduktiĝo de la diskursoj
trans la generacioj. Laŭ mia modelo, ĉiu infano naskiĝas en sian medieton
kaj tie, en sia pejzaĝo, ekkonas konkretajn personojn kaj lokojn; tiujn
mia modelo idealigas kiel aron da nomoj. Poste la instruado inicas la infanon
en ties mediegajn strukturojn, kie li aŭ ŝi ekagnokas abstraktajn
personojn, lokojn kaj instituciojn sur la nubzaĝo de sia socio; tiujn
mia modelo idealigas kiel alian aron da nomoj. Mia modelo de la reproduktiĝo de
diskursoj substrekas la gravecon de la ZPD (Zono de Proksimula Disvolviĝo) –
duopa rilato inter la infano kaj ties edukanto E. E prezentas la diskursojn de
la strukturoj videblige al la infano per intermedia tradukado el la strukturaj
diskursoj en la medietajn diskursojn vive percepteblaj por la infano. Mi hipotezas,
ke la rakontado estas la optimuma modo de tia intermedia tradukado, kaj ke ĉiuj
nubzaĝaj nomoj kalkulendas kiel fikciaj por la celoj de la modelo, senkonsidere
pri la empirie pruvebla historieco de iuj el la nomoj. Akceptante la ĵus
skizitan fonon, la nuna referaĵo demandas, kiel do la pedagogoj kongruigu la kapablon
de iuj establitaj ‘veraj klasikaĵoj’ elvoki profundan reagon ĉe ĉiuj kun la
neceso diskonigi malpli establitajn klasikaĵojn el malgrandaj kulturoj por
malfari la efikojn de la kultura koloniismo de iuj nubzaĝoj kontraŭ aliaj. La demando
do estas, kiamaniere forstiri la laboron de tia kongruigo for de la kaptilo de
burokratiecaj antologiegoj trudlegigotaj al ĉiuj kaj minacontaj la verajn
bezonojn de pedagogio al vivantaj infanoj. Unu respondo estas, ke la praktikoj
de la Esperanta beletra traduko konsistigas modelon serioze esplorindan kaj
sekvindan: en tiu medio la tradukistoj strebadas krei ekvilibran korbon de
klasikaĵoj prenitaj el kiel eble plej diversaj kulturoj, aparte atentante la
malgrandajn parolkomunumojn por rezisti la hegemoniajn fortojn de la merkato. Por
doni taŭgan teorian kadron al tiu ĉi praktika respondo, mi reagordas la modelon
de reproduktiĝo de diskursoj per livero de nova karakterizo de ‘veraj klasikaĵoj’;
tiu karakterizo frukte uzas la ‘nubzaĝan’ metaforon. Legantoj konantaj la pli
fruan verkaron pri la substancismo kaj la diglosio rekonos iujn konstantajn
fadenojn, kiujn mi nun aplikas al iom nova materialo.
