Himani Bannerji, "The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender" (Brill, 2020)

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Welcome to new books in historical materialism. I am your host, Stephen Doseman. How should we understand identity? What sort of politics are needed to address various forms of oppression and marginalization?

Our knowledge and practice untainted by ideological obfuscation possible. These questions and many more are what animate my guest today, Imani Bonerjee. You have to discuss her book, The Ideological Condition, selected essays on history, race, and gender, clocking in at close to 800 pages and spanning several decades of research and writing, this volume brings a number of themes together. Following Mark's Bonerjee argues that social inquiry and critique must start with everyday life as it is lived, with the various social formations and relations generating various forms of consciousness.

From this rather humble starting point, Bonerjee has poised to enter into a productive dialogue with various other thinkers, particularly Lukach, Gramsci, and Dorothy Smith. She is also able to tackle questions of education, economics, race, gender, narrative, history, colonialism, and emancipation. Tying these threads together is no easy to ask, but in working her way through an assortment of different themes and thinkers, Bonerjee helps clarify the ways in which disparate elements of reality are tied to one another and cannot be understood in isolation. Readers will find this book to be overflowing with insights and endlessly clarifying in the struggle to understand who we are, what we know, and what we can do.

Shortlisted for the Isaac O'Sheer Memorial Prize, the book was published as part of the Historical Materialism Book Series, and was published first by Beryl and then by Haymarket. Imani Bonerjee is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at York University. Her many publications include Demography and Democracy, Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology, Inventing Subjects, Studies in Hijemini, Patriarchy and Colonialism, The Dark Set of the Nation, Essays in Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Racism, and Thinking Through Essays on Feminism, Marxism, and Anti-Racism. Imani Bonerjee, welcome to the new book's network.

Thank you and I'm very glad to be here and I was looking forward to coming to this for today. Yeah. Very excited to have you here. I always like to kick things off by having guests introduce themselves.

Could you maybe tell listeners a bit about your work in research and what your main research interests are that you find yourself writing about? I'm a retired faculty, Professor Emeritus at York University and Department of Sociology, and I have also worked quite a bit in India, part of the time in the Women's Studies programs in the university setting them up, and also in the Development Studies, Institute of Development Study in Galgata. I've been teaching for a very long time, but my interest has been more or less connected to the similar kind of things that I'm working on now, which is I started as a scholar in Marxism and here mainly, but in India I also did Marxist Literary Theory in the university there for a few years, and my background then was in English and competitive literature. In Canada I shifted to sociology after a few years and I've been teaching at York since 1974, and then in those days they were of great interest and they were not academic in those times, so I was about issues around race and black movements, civil rights movements, Vietnam, and at the same time women's movement was also rising.

So I came to Canada in 1969, right in the middle of very exciting changes taking place, but they were not inside the university. The university that I took a degree in University of Toronto, or where I taught, we didn't have women's studies, we didn't have Marxist studies, we didn't even have Afro-American or Black studies, nothing like that. So it came from social movements and popular various kinds of political uprisings and took over our imagination and our enthusiasm, and from the 70s onwards the anti-imperialist movements, starting with the killing of I.N. there in Chile in 1973, the first September 11th that happened in 1973.

I have been very connected with doing what would be called one-time third-world studies, but I would generally call the anti-billedist studies with Marxist orientation. So these subjects eventually became part of the university, and now we behave as the we've always had them, but we forget that this all came from social movements and political struggles, and we were a part of that and tried to bring it to the university. So that's really the main lead the background to what I've been doing, but ever since I've come here, in Toronto in 1969, most of the years I've spent part of the year in India, and there I was very interested in helping to set up a women's studies program, and actually also talking about Marxist sociology, particularly in relation to caste, race, gender, and development, and studies of modernity and distinguishing it from modernization, which was the so-called development theorists of being tooled from MIT, Harvard and so on, which Indian Planning Commission and Indian Economics were interested in. But we were more interested in political economy or critical political economy, and from that point of view, my background is partially development studies as well, and my contact with India continued.

I shifted from the English department at U of T, from a PhD, A B D status, and stayed dropped out for a while, and then I joined the Inter-Oterio Institute for Studies in Education and worked with Dorothy Smith, now a very famous, very well-known Marxist feminist sociologist. So that being the case, I tried to bring into my compass study of India, study of literature or culture, as well as class, gender, caste, race, colonialism, and so on. So it's been an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary enterprise, and I've carried on with it to this time, but depending on what time of history and society or politics I was present in, I tried to in that sense, bear my research in that direction. I've never really done academic work for its own sake.

So when I started doing the work on my first book, came out of my thesis, The Mirror of Class, this collection, the ideological conditions, as actually in a way is chronological. It's the last part set in a way, the first parts of my work. And I tried to talk about representation of class in political theater, in the Indian People's Theater Association. And there, and at that time was quite influenced by too many people, but too many figures.

One is William's, Raymond Williams, and the other was a girl Glucash, whose history and class consciousness, as well as his book on historical novel, his theory books on critical realism and so on, which literary people always used at that time was very important. But it broadened me out into thinking more about literature, in terms of history, sociology and class as a material factor in life and cultural, too. And I suppose from then on, with my connection with the Indian Communist Party Marxist, I've been interested in trying to put together cultural critique, if you like, or analysis with the critique of economy, without kind of saying that all Marxists and classes is economic, or all classes is cultural, and there's a working class cultural, and so on. I've tried hard to put it together and talk about an integrated kind of analysis that does not actually take an either opposition on these issues.

And I think there's been a long tradition of dividing them, and particularly economists, Marxian economists, but political economists, neglecting culture to a large extent. And I thought that whereas with culture it's not enough, no one can do emancipatory work without it. And so that's where I come from. I have written a few books on these issues, and in the last few decades, with the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, right to Hindu extremism in India, and it's political, coming to power politically, it became imperative that we all got interested in trying to understand the role of religion, nationalism, cultural nationalism, and so on, in understanding kind of a form I would call not just authoritarian, but fascist.

And so this has been the main enterprise. In the last few years, I've been preparing a book which is going to be published soon on Rabindranath Tagore, it's on the whole problematic of decolonization, and how in spite of his being an anti-nationalist, he proposed decolonization for India. How is it possible to be decolonial? This I brought in my interest in a non-snotion of decolonization and tried to show how somebody who lived between 1861 to 1941, and was part of India's freedom struggle, articulated the project of decolonization in a certain way that I thought is very important now, when very small blocks of political identities are working against each other to introduce a kind of an overall notion of revolutionary humanism, if you like, or a resistant humanism, but I have brought back into my language and analysis an interest in humanism as well.

So my last work has been on Mark's side to go in a comparative analysis on alienation and not so much, because the board didn't talk about it, but he did talk about alienation and political nationalism and narrowness. So that's about all I can tell you. Yeah, you've got a lot going on in your background. We'll unpack some of what you were just talking about in more detail as we go on.

To kick things off with discussing this book, I think it would be good to start with a term many people are familiar with by now, intersectionality, which in this day is often brought up as a description of, or a category or important part of emancipatory social movements, but a theme running through much of your work here is the limits of how it is often brought up. You write, quote, speaking of experience, both non-white and white people living in Canada or the West know that this social experience is not as lived a matter of intersectionality. There's sense of being in the world, textured through myriad social relations and cultural forms, is lived or felt or perceived as being altogether and all at once, end quote. Can you explain and give us an introductory sense of the limitations of intersectionality as is often brought up in contemporary social inquiry and what sort of methodological orientation is needed to attend to the various dynamics of oppressed and marginalized experience?

Very good question, but again, very profound and I really cannot do justice to it in all these things. But I will begin by saying that I can understand the popularity of the concept because it rose at a time when there was a crisis happening, particularly both legally and within women's movement, when there was very little recourse to bringing together the actual lived experience of people, in terms of being women of colour as we used to say then, or black women, and as well as being marginalized or what a glass or pour. And Kimberly Crenshaw, when she brought it up, actually did it for a case, court case, as you know. And since there are very few laws pertaining to these social relations that we daily live but don't have many actual laws for, it became a popular notion and it has got its own meaningful pragmatic use of it.

I personally would not neglect it as a term or look down upon it or but I think to stay with it as an analysis is a bit of a problem because it's really more, it's more a heuristic device, let's put it this way, which puts these social relations, their experiences in their subjective connotation but doesn't tell you why and where they particularly arise from. So I would say that the difficulty for me is to talk about intersectionality as an actual experience of people, because when I am present in front of you, you do not divide me up into being a woman, being a woman of colour, being a certain age, etc. You see me as a whole and I respond as a whole. And this sort of experiential being in the world always at once is very hard to put it even in words.

What that is, how to talk about it even in a certain kind of analytic fashion. So we can approximate that through analysis but we cannot reproduce that exponential part of it, which is always already there for us in any given society. And so trouble is as far as I can see is that the nature of this concept makes us aggregated, something we don't experience. That is, it adds class, race, gender, but could do many other things as well because of that, because they just have to be added on, but do not show themselves in a formative, constitutive relation with each other.

And what we then have is this race, gender and class as a set of objective relations, they're out there and then there's me in here. And how these objective and subjective relations and experiences come into being has not been really sufficiently understood or even admitted, leading us therefore to think sectionally on class by some Marxist, on gender by some feminist, on race by others. And though a kind of a lip service is rendered to them in talking about intersectionality, actually the entry point of it is never a kind of an intersectional or interconstitutive entry point. So I think that subjects experience here has been substituted by these objective relations that we face in developed capitalism, and particularly in North America in the context of colonialism, slavery and colonialist imperialism.

So, then here we have the danger of falling into a subject versus object in a dualistic kind of thinking out there in the world, the world is objectively structured by gender risk class relations subjectively I'm present in it. And I could be somewhere else going through other relations, but we don't really have here the mediating midpoint that is a copula that transformatively connects the subject and the object experience and the world in that sense. So intersectionality then becomes a descriptive provisional attempt, not an analytical work. And experiential life then is really kind of at a distance from it, though collectively draws us all in.

But the idea of personal is the political which is women's movement or from Marx, the notion of social self emancipation as part of social emancipation, the subjects world and change cannot be adequately provided for by this kind of notion. And so this lack of eternal relations is a problem. And I think that that is basically what I have to say about that, and I would say that it lends itself well to many, many different standpoints, which is liberals could use it very easily without any critique of capitalism. And on the other hand, those who are aware of capitalism sometimes use it in heuristic form to show how it is done.

So in my mind intersectionality is needs to be activated by an agent from outside, and that agent is a political agent. I don't mean one person, but I mean agency, a political stance towards it. And otherwise it's simply good for describing a kind of a story or that difference, but it doesn't really do the work of showing how it's actually a concept needing a door, an activation to set it in motion. So that's my view on it.

Yeah, you're setting up my next question perfectly here. Speaking to that, class is often seen as another thing one can add on to the other forms of one's identity or place within a constellation of marginalizing and oppressive social dynamics. What's more liberals, as you say, have often ignored class, while some on the left have adopted a very productive reading of Marxism that says classes primary and other forms are pejoratively referred to as identity politics and ought to just be cast aside. But you argue that liberals prioritization of identity should not lead to Marxist casting it aside, but instead that class should be made a fundamental part of identity and the politics of identity.

Can you explain your own approach? Yeah, and I think that we can do that. I don't know how adequately I can. I would like to write a book on it, but that aside, it's a very important question because right now there's a kind of degree of dismissiveness that is really used with the notion of identity.

Now, in my essay in my book called the Passion of Naming, I talk about the need for identity because there is really no political subject agency without some name associated with it. Naming is not simply arbitrary and useless, so to speak. People do need an identity. Now, I don't think that working class in Proletarian identity in a very strict sense, but yet they do give a kind of a description of the way of being in the world and location in the world, which I think are very needed in order for any movement to be organized.

And we can see which direction is going in. But therefore, the desire to be named and naming oneself is a very important part of it. When I was teaching as a young woman at York and some of the earliest courses on race, there was a trend among black students, particularly men, to say to me when I asked what their name was, that there was a name was Ibrahim or Abdullah or what have you, while I was giving the grade to somebody, some Eric Johnson or some other name like that. And I would say, well, you've got this one name here and you're telling me another what's going on.

And they would often say, well, that's my slave name. My real name is the one I chose for myself is Ibrahim. Now, what does that mean? It means that there are people among us who have lost their history, their languages, their religions, everything with which they were identified a long time in another social setting or culture from where they were rooted out forcefully violently brought and the other violence was the violence of their names.

So these name taking devices became very important and almost became a banner for proclaiming an anti racist and historically retrieving project, because those who have lost need to retrieve it. So we must make a distinction between that and name people who are in a position to name others as something they can, because they're in a position to control and rob them and loop them and plunder them and bring them over as unfree labor and everything. So we know now the N word, for example, or several other words, the stereotypes, the characteristics, the perils that they're supposedly indicate to us that too is naming. So these are white identity politics here.

Now, what is called education, you know, is actually an elite European set of ideas and, you know, and practices that academic and intellectual artists, practices that qualify as being the right kind of knowledge, and those who do not have it are not part of any knowledgeable world. Now, what doesn't have to be a Foucaultian person talking about marginalize knowledge is one, you know, without that one already knows Foucault was not the first person to tell many, many people have told us in the struggle with it. They have told us in the struggle of for freedom, how they have been robbed and how Europe has substituted another name, another project and European project is an identity project as well. Today that centralized identity so central that we don't even need to name it as identity politics, but is there not an elite European capitalist colonial slavery oriented identity that we now advance as normal identity.

So I think that that is the important thing and that's why I feel that that identity politics is more complicated than we are ready to, you know, give credence to. I have a book called Writing on the Wall, which has got more literary kinds of things, but also passion of naming. I talk about Sojourner Truth and the fact that she took on the name of Sojourner Truth, which was not the slave name given to her. You know, this distinction is very important to make the aggressors, self identity and identification of others and the oppressed retrieval of identity and giving oneself the name that one wants to.

So we have to really keep that in mind. Now, when we want to talk about class then to what extent is class and identity. Now, I don't think class is an identity. I think class in its modern sense is really quite fitted to capitalism and it develops, I think, 17th century onwards.

Before that in feudalism, I think we have more of a status orientation with strong hierarchic relations and oppression, but class, as we call it now, for me, is part of the social realization process of capitals, capitals, mode of production, and the extraction of surplus value is really deeply connected to these social relations and their cultural connotations that come to decide whose work is worth what and you know, it's part of the entire realization process. And it doesn't happen only in the site of production. It has to be socially organized as what we call a mode of production, a historical social formation, which gets all its gives its resources and to how capital is organized. So, whereas in so we can make a distinction, therefore, between the use of word class made in Marxist sense in which I'm trying to see as an internal relation in capital in the process of exploitation and in Weber's stratification, which is a kind of social description, hierarchical and so on.

And not a socially active notion. And I think that this very approach of stratification and hierarchy can also be the source and I think is a Foucault's concept of power, the all aggressive, you know, all the grandizing and all that kind of all encompassing notion of power. When you say what makes power power neither Foucault even Weber doesn't have any idea or doesn't tell us what makes stratification stratification or possible. So I think that that you know for Marx, of course, as we know, it's a formative relation and it's only to be found in this particular mode of production, which is itself however is uneven and articulates within itself, very many kinds of modes of production, but also like Sumir Amin and others in critical development studies have spoken about.

So I don't know if that makes any sense, but in an article I wrote recently and published called factory and the family spaces of capital, which is not in this text, but published by much a lumuso, but alternatives with Marx and beyond or something like that. So I would say that collective identity is therefore not just a personal question, who am I, but it's a social experience, it's a collective social experience and it begins from a small point of recognition and reflection in the immediate world, class as identity, for example, the difference between class in itself and for itself in in Lukas. Where I mean Hegel, it can serve as a kind of an identity market when you become conscious of himself as a member of the proletariat, but this identity is a core in its broadest sense of a collective political agency and economic Marxism misses the full meaning of class, political subjectivity and agency by trivializing it as mere experience and culture and interprets class simply as a narrow phenomenon of just a limited moment in the process of modern production, and sometimes even as a technology of production. And this is a mistake because it ignores the full understanding of modern production itself, something I'm working on, you know, what I'm doing work on is really redefining modern production and see what my logic can get out of it, how I can take in all these elements into understanding that.

And so the struggle is against dualism, the struggle is against a kind of productive understanding or fragmentary understanding of modern production. And then therefore identity is connected with it in those who experience that as well as those who extend that oppression to others. Moving along and turning to Marx's theories of ideology, which form much of your own theoretical foundations, it might be worth starting out with Marx's own theoretical starting point. as it is lived, the various forms of social intercourse and their attendant forms of consciousness.

Can you unpack and explain the starting point and the difference it has with political liberalism, which at numerous points in the book you say, lacks the proper starting point or the self-reflective methods of inquiry that Marxism has? Yeah, well, all these are very deep questions. You're asking me all historical questions about actually, but I'll just make a very simple rendition of it, that it marks, let's say in German ideology, but also in capital, also in communist manifesto, also in 1859, critique of political economy or whatever, directs us to begin from lives of people, not from ideas to people, people's lives as illustrations of theories, but from people to the ideas and theory. It sounds very simple and very, very, in a common sense, a girl, but the difficulty of getting people to actually programatize it and make it into a methodology for research has been very, very difficult to actually do.

Either it ends up by adding all kinds of phenomenal empirical circumstances and calls it analysis, or it just ignores the lives of people and just treats lives of people as examples of Foucault's theory or Hegel's theory or somebody's theory bending people to fit that. So I think the more educated people have become in the university as thinkers in the process of intellectual production or producers of ideas, the harder it is for them not to see, that these ideas, even though some preexisting of course, but did not come from just ideas themselves, that is neither Plato nor Hegel actually becomes our path into this critical thinking. So as you know, Marx says, we begin with real lives of people and our point of departure is an ordinary human existence and it is the survival, the continuity of this existence from the time of the emergence of homo sapiens, I don't know what to call them, very early stage human beings to now, people have not been wiped out, though individually people always die, generation after generation, or sapen cataclysmic things happen in nature, but human beings continue. And it is by them and for them, that everything that happens in the world happens.

And therefore, to think that Marx has tried, and I think a good book piece to read, it is in my methodology section, I have a few essays where I try to talk about that, that the complexity of their existence under different social historical regimes, Marx, the humanity at what stage, if you don't like stage at what point of social cognition and development they are. And therefore, social, sexual divisions of labor, economic and cultural divisions of labor, et cetera, make for what enter into the theorization that Marx makes in the end about ideology. And particularly with manual and mental division of labor, which happens really much later in human history, then let's say the earlier, even early feudal period, that makes us recognize that human beings and human lives have been the central categories for points of departure for theorization. So I think that in this context, the essays I did on ideology, and the whole book is really guided by this concept of ideology, one has to begin by realizing that Marx makes no separation between conscious and active life practices and consciousness and general ideas that people have in the world.

It is absurd to think of unconscious life practices as well as unactive, unproductive physical manifestations of practices of consciousness. So where there is consciousness, there's practice where there's practice, there is consciousness. But our all consciousness are all practices, they say. And that is where I think that there is a tradition in Marxist work between different types of consciousnesses.

One being a practical consciousness that I talk about, and where he talks about language as being the biggest example of that, that if it doesn't make sense to somebody else, it doesn't make sense to me. We didn't invent language by ourselves. But also what we learn about making a house is doing all sorts of life things, clothes, medicine, et cetera, et cetera. And so long, at Christians and rejections and so on, of practices that people have done.

And practical consciousness may be said to be the basis of what something like Grumshu talked about, the organic kind of intelligentsia's work, for example engineers' work in developing capitalism. So that is why I think that we have to really think about the fact that practical consciousness is something which is really underdeveloped in the realization we have. Some who are revolutionary consciousness has to do with practical consciousness. The fact that people go and work together, know this meaning of it, and know how the technique of it, and so on, feeds into people's sense of identification if you like with each other.

And at the same time, they do absorb something from above, which is created from above for his demonic reasons of capitalist production, for example. And these two come into a head-on collision between our, in our psyches and collective experiences. And women's movement became very big in this kind of taking and anti-racial movements is that what we told, we are told we are, and who we feel we are, create a contradiction with each other. And that becomes the entry point, that fisher, that contradiction becomes the entry point through which a struggle is set in motion, not blueprinted from beginning to end about how it's going to go, but it's still that moment of entrance.

So I would like to give a historical background by saying that until the arrival of the fuller development of capitalism, and it seems almost all historians agree in the 17th century as the fuller development of capitalism, we notice that social consciousness and divisions of labor tend to be less distinctive. For example, religion and state function are very, very implicated, let's say in the King's body as being an anointed body or the church, the canonical laws that also take care of or inheritance, cultivation and tax and red giving and everything else. And we say thereby given to Caesar what Caesar sent unto God, what is God's. So this is a kind of, they're inextricably tied with each other, therefore, prist kings, canon laws, monarchy, early feudalism and relative absence of secular and intellectual pursuits, we date it to the days of Renaissance feminism in the West, when we talk about other parts.

So in the case of ideology, I think, we have to recognize that intellectual production has become something by itself. That is, it's got itself a kind of a niche, a productive enterprise, which is, you know, which is the goal of those of us who are involved in the mental division of labor with our own productive theories, disciplines and techniques involved with modes of ruling and legitimation functions. Education you talk about later, and I would say that this makes education, for example, a branch unto itself because we no longer connect education unless it's vocational to do work or repeat in life and what can be trained. So unconnected to material forms of life, ideology as a form of knowledge is a way of seeing where life and knowledge are at variance with each other.

And in this scheme, ideology being integrated in the ruling apparatus affects or interpolates people, as Althusser says, within the state of capital and the reproduction of capitalist mode of production and normalizes capital as our only way of life. So I think that's about all I can say, and the first essay is in the book, actually directly addressed this. Yeah, moving along, you describe ideology as a rupturing epistemology, one that performs several functions of severing knowledge from the context in which it was produced. Ideology then is not simply content that happens to be false, but content that has been de-historised, de-socialized and depoliticized.

What is this rupturing function that ideology performs? I think that ideology, let's see how it ruptures. I don't know if it ruptures, I guess it does. It ruptures our practical everyday consciousness and interjects within it, categorical forms of thinking through very practical processes.

If you look at, for example, the bureaucracies of the governments. In these huge capitalist bureaucracies, we need categories in order to enter people into the ruling or distributive social mechanism. There are categories such as single mother. There is category like family violence.

There are categories of, well, even women of color and so on. Interestingly, working class is not a category in the middle of all this, but there is poverty. These categories actually are ways of in taking people, as I would say, Altozerian in a way. Here Altozer is right that the ruling apparatus itself is an ideological apparatus of the state.

And through it, people learn to self-name themselves. As immigrants, refugees, women of color, I can multiply all these instances, you get the idea, that it kind of ruptures our daily perception and experiences of the world that we live in. And it makes invisible through other intellectual, for us who are tied up with books and intellect, makes invisible the connection between life and knowledge, and gives knowledge and origin solely in the realm of ideas. And to the extent that we are adhered to the kind of ramifications of certain ideas and their logical organization, we are theoretically, you know, right, and we become the great thinkers.

We do not want this to be interrupted by experiential forms of thinking that arises from our own recognition of what is going on in our lives and the contradictions that we feel. And there is really nobody that lives in the world that doesn't feel a sense of contradiction. White or Black, man or woman, day on straight to take some examples. Because the organization of the world that we live in is not parallel or it's not unidimensional and unidirectional.

It's a three-dimensional world where all these relations enter this contradictions work, like weaving of a piece of cloth, where going vertically and horizontally at once, we create this web or piece of fabric, the social fabric. And people do have an experience of this kind, no matter where and what they are as long as they live in the world, but they have not been taught to respect that as a source of knowledge, you know, this contradiction, this feeling that I am not only who say others say we are. And here I may be white and, you know, I'm in India equivalent to let's say being white. I'm upper-cast, upper-class female, right?

And my whiteness in India manifests itself in a different way, but still has a power relationship with those who are not upper-cast and poor and female, but of a very low, untouchable or caste organized society. Does that mean that I don't feel any contradiction in my life? I do. I feel it, both in being how I'm treated as a woman within a feminist perspective.

I feel it also in how I'm taught or have learned how to treat servants in a very different kind of way than I would treat my peers. I may try very hard consciously not to do it, but I know how to do it if I want to. I refuse to do it. And here, the top of one society becomes the bottom of another and I'm not special pleading for myself, but on a street, I have an existence that is actually of just a brown, non-white, small, you know, 80-year-old woman and anyone, but anyone, not only, you know, can, particularly even street people who are white, talk to me in a very, very harsh and negative way, because there's one thing they think they have, though they have nothing, they're white and I'm not.

So whereas in the university, I have a relative amount of power because I have students that I can actually quite mess up if I want to, I have a limited kind of power, but I do. And on the street, I have none, right? So I have a double existence and I have an existence in India and here. So when I look at the many dimensions of my existence, then I can really see that ideology makes, tells me, talking about everybody being democratic in a participatory in a democracy.

Well, it's a lie. Unless there is just formal democracy, unless the real social relations are distributed and participatory and real democracy is possible, we are not actually living very equal lives, no matter even if we are some of us better paid than people who work in a factory. So that is my claim that this is how the rupture, I mean, I called it that at time, is made. And this is how we're pulled into.

And if we consciously look at these different levels of being in society, we don't only have to be alloys to each other, we can actually look at how certain things affect us, the same thing that makes somebody black, makes somebody white. And the white is uninunciated, but the black is uninunciated. And so that is really one thing. And here it's very important to say that there must be an acknowledgment, that while some ideas are ideological, which I've been trying to say, others are not.

So not all ideas are ideology. That's a mistake that a lot of people make when they say everything is ideological. I don't think everything is ideological. Ideology is a special kind of thing.

It can crumble down into daily life, through government and other practices, academic educational practices, but it's still not the same as a kind of knowledge that comes from how we live, comparing with our way and what we should live. So ideas that generate from every day interactions and experiences of people do have, as I say, these elements, but they contain much more than that in their quotidian life. Since any mode of production is a formation complex of multiple differences, and I'm reading directly, and determination, you know, idea of the concrete, and they say that I have one Marxist idea of building from Marx. In their different combinations, these determinations produce different forms of consciousness.

Now, for example, if you look at the idea of building from Marx and you look at Grundre's set, which it relies on mostly for its development, any mode of production implies production and consumption, distribution, and exchange. I mean, very old, very current. They later, too, however, developed in highly mediated forms through value repositories such as money and market over a very long period of time. We no longer only produce for what we use.

We no longer produce for whoever is near us, but this general production that we do for the market and money as a repository of value in that exchange value becomes really a very high form of mediation until it can actually put up a wall between those who produce and those who consume. The same producer will not know when they're consuming that they're consuming products made by somebody else. For example, classrooms. I mean, I look at my classroom.

It's filled with plastic product. Now, what is plastic? Beginning with the mining of oil, fossil fuel industries, all the way to the producing of this large to everything else that happens. My world is covered in plastic.

But do I, when I come into a classroom, think that I'm surrounded by the labor of other people and everything I have, right there, really, is some people are present in it. Do I see somebody fighting in a cube of sugar when I put that sugar in a cup of coffee? What happens then is that the disdentiation of these forms of mediation actually put up this wall and it becomes a practical ideology which Marx talks about in capital as the foundation, I think, of quantitative fetishism. It's not that people are stupid and have false consciousness.

It is that the organization is such, the mediation is so extreme that experientially it is never available to us from here to Saudi Arabia, how might be subplastic is produced. So I think that that's very important to keep in mind. And in this formative reality, then social relations are generated through in which people relate in two different ways. They relate as consumers in the market in a competitive fashion, competitors or sellers of their labor and the recognition of having to be subordinated to a money society in poverty and so on, and having to sell their labor to get what they need.

And this double-headedness of our existence makes it very important for us to think about this kind of consciousness that can become an active consciousness of ideology. And I think I should expand on it just a little if you let me, or am I done? If you have one more thing you wanna say, otherwise we can move on. Okay, just want to say a couple of things, which is that the knowledge function of ideology has stated before obscures this connection by training us particularly through intellectuals and integration systems, we've talked about that, but also that these different moments of the activities in a model production are perceived phenomenologically as self-contained spheres and thereby occlude their formative relations to each other.

And I think that is important, that and that is why we can take from Marx again, from Prunh, that we hide the fact that not only is production necessary for consumption, but in itself it's a process of consumption of human energy capacities and labor and means of production nature and so on. Therefore, consumption is not a self-sufficient act because it is both a motive force and a realization of the objective color production. So that is why I want to do that. And I just want to say also that ordinary words and you pointed out very well, such as women, women, black and so on, they are in their general noun or adjectiveized form like whiteness, blackness and so on.

It's transformed into an ideological category through this process because it's rather than a connotative and referential term. In the women's movement, this became very important because the word woman, when not adjectivized with which woman, what is this location, that's the idea of grounded theory and so on, now they've been thrown out a lot and stand point theory, but they came from the fact that the word woman helped to hide rather than reveal what is going on. I mean, my essay, but who speaks for us, I have an extensive discussion on that. I'm done.

Yeah, moving along and continuing on with this, you talked a bit about education, which can produce different forms of consciousness or subjectivity, either offering up content to passive receptacles who might continue to serve the status quo or revolutionaries who might be capable of questioning and overturning it. How does education function within a particular hegemonic constellation and how might education be used to turn against certain situations? Some of it I've already indicated, right, hegemonic aspect of education. Paul Willis in a book called Learning to Labor, once very popular, did a lot of good work about that, about how practice makes children understand that they have to neighbor it our city.

When you look at grade one, two, three, they still have six to eight hours of classes. They have to raise their hand and take permission for vital physical functions. They have to be quiet and subordinated to authority. And people like Willis and others who have sent their children to school, been in school know that the education system, even practically, without telling us that thou shalt be a neighbor and seller of your labor, has actually given a pathway education for working within a productive system, whether it's bureaucratic or direct production or anything of that kind.

So that's one thing that ideology is really not only that, but the ideology as content, for Colleans have told us about it and I think it's true, that why do you consider something to be knowledge and something to be not knowledge? That's really a question. Usually the gold standard is science. Can you prove it?

Is that the, have you an evidence, et cetera? But in humanities, you know, philosophy arts and liberal arts and so on, we don't have to have any so-called proof or gold standard. People are constantly thought through that sort of mode about what is the right way of being in the world. So when women's movement became important and now with many years of anti-racist work being done by educators, we saw how much of the textbooks or what is readable and not readable becomes important when they are curriculum of anything is decided.

And so why is it that books, for example, boys are not blue, the recent controversy about that book by a black queer writer is not, is going to be taken out of the slivers of other people. And other books of this nature are being constantly banned and so on, it's because some books, there are books and books and some books speak to what the people are receiving in, the neglected end, the oppressed end, the violated end, when they get enough boys to talk about their experience. And this is where also experiences a source of knowledge. Now there has been a real problem with sociology, where knowledge is not connected with experience whatsoever.

Experience is seen as very subjective and of course being subjective is not being scientific and objective and unless somebody decides my work is objective by certain procedures dedicated to law production of positivist, utilitarian knowledge production, which is actually a simulation of natural science procedures in socialology and history. My knowledge is not valid. So it would appear to me that this objectification that you can see the world, not from yourself, but some kind of a God's eye view of the universe that comes from major intellectuals and so on, is really something that changes education into a form of ideology, but also counter ideological, counter hegemonic in the fact that those who are, there's a struggle, not a daily struggle, you could call it class struggle, it's a cultural class, daily political struggle, we are in the heart of, we're never free of it, we're all this fighting for, against something and for something. And it's not certainly, to me, it's not a painful thing.

I kind of think we have to take a pleasure to struggle and I do, to be able to see how actively we can become readers. So education and activity, and knowledge as an active process of knowledge would be a very important thing for us to use as a counter organizational knowledge. And you see if we didn't fight, we would never have the kind of curriculum these days that we're fighting to retain now because we fought for them in the first place to put them in place. We did develop black studies, women's studies, queer studies, they were not part of our curriculum, they were not objective or classical, but we have expanded knowledge moves through our struggle.

So I think it is that, and also, you know, why this is so difficult for people to realize and why Marx is so interesting, is that that Marx, of all people, saw everyday life, common people's life, that is buried in the heart of economic activity, provision, and so on, in civil society, as the ground for world historical struggle for revolution. Right, I mean, he did not invent an ideology separately for classical, he took our life, our daily life, as the life source for struggle for change, and the necessity for that struggle. Why is not everyday life, everybody's experience legitimate? Why have theorists, Marxists, including neglected, experienced so much that they truly is thrown out as a source for knowledge?

So I think that this education issue has to be broadened into a kind of larger social education that Marx really read, from the standpoint of everyday life, not beginning with the idea and then going to Marx, from exchange value to Marx, but from what is going on in our daily life, to using Marx as a way of understanding it. Marx did not invent class. Whatever came to be called class came from what he saw, he's going on, so naming again, yeah, he did that. But that's what I think.

Yeah, moving along and switching gears, turning to another one of your major influences, Dorothy Smith, you mentioned earlier, she gives you the notion of the problematic in which you detected dual meaning. You write, quote, there can be a word play on the notion of problematic as applied in a critical sense, as applied in a critical sense, our everyday world is problematic. But also that everyday world is not just a descriptive expression, but as itself a sociological problematic, in the sense that it presents us a field of investigation, comprises a space of inquiry, and quote, can you unpack this understanding? What it means to say that our world is not simply problematic, but is a problematic.

Well, you know, I can unpack it to some extent. I think people should go directly to two or three books of Dorothy. She's been my teacher and she continues to be. I learned in some ways how to think in this way that I have, by studying with her, I wouldn't have actually, perhaps I would have eventually stumbled against the notions I did.

But if I hadn't read everyday world as problematic, or if I hadn't read her book, The Conceptual Practices of Power, if I had not read writing the social, these three books that I think have been very crucial to my formation, I would not have actually known how to valorize knowledge that is produced in the daily course of reading, nor given up the search for fitting all reality into the box of theory. We get some theoretical issue and then we take 100 illustrations and try to packet it. If it doesn't fit, we mutilate it, but we manage to packet it in all the same with arms and legs missing. Now from her, I really learned that that cannot be done, that you have to really look at what's happening in all around you and without a preformed categorical idea, not any old idea, because ideas are not necessarily all ideological, but a sense of something, an idea of something, you actually look at what's happening around you.

And with some what she would call a sensitization towards these sorts of social organizations of power and some relations of patriarchy, race and so on, you just take it as you see it and try to see what helps you most methodologically, who makes sense the broadest sense of the word that you live in. And she herself did that beautifully by really first teaching us, you know, she didn't even have a book at that time, she had articles by teaching us something called social organization of knowledge as opposed to manhimes, sociology of knowledge. You see the difference, they're really different concepts. That knowledge is socially organized and she didn't take it from Foucault, because she also thought that there are different kinds of knowledges, that not all knowledge in the end is coming from, you know, some kind of government, faculty and power source, but that they're resistant from some knowledges and from the standpoint of women, not because we're women, but also because we are standing in a social topography on a very uneven surface.

And from there, some things are visible that are not when you're standing somewhere else, like, you know, who looks, if you wear a pair of boots and someone looks at your boots from above, they only see the glossy top. They don't see the bottom of the pair of boots coming down on the ground. Now, lots of people have thanks to the police feeling and everything else, generationally have seen the underside of these boots of power. And that's a very, very valuable thing that she taught us.

And that knowledge, what is even qualified as knowledge, is socially organized and the society is after all the dominant society riding on the back of the general mode of production, capitalism. And so I think that that was one of the things that, sincerely, in that we have to really make a distinction between our reliance on Marx, you know, starting from people's lives. And let's say I told you about Vanheim, but also Max Weber. Vanheim's collection with Max Weber of development is from Max Weber.

And Max Weber also, therefore, could only talk about stratification, but he didn't have much of an idea of how this stratification is actually an active, productive and reproductive process. He just saw them as existing, which it does. And status-like categories were articulated into making some sort of an interpretation of class by many people, and that being used right now. So that is something that she taught us.

The other contribution she made to my life and many others' life of thought is institutional ethnography. Now, you know, anthropologists do ethnography of people, societies. You know, sociology looks at the larger framework and the relations and growth set things. Anthropologists directly go to people and dance daily life and culture, this and that and the other.

But how can an institution have an ethnography? She brought that through the mediation of work of Garfinkel and others about institutions as being a set of practices. And that these practices are categorically determined, that large societies like societies of capitalism, something I was telling you earlier, are actually standardized societies. And this standardization is not the wickedness of any particular person, but societies of scale and capitalist societies in particular do need a level playing field.

And this level playing field and administrative field and activity field is really organized through categorical deployments and concatenation in institutions. So we studied with her something called the ideological circle. Might interest you. If you go, if a researcher goes to a woman that lives on welfare, or you know, and not one woman, but quite a lot and says to them, you know, what's your experience and how do you feel and so on.

She will mostly self-define herself as single mother, as a domestic victim of domestic violence and various other categories that she knows about and will discuss that with her. You go to the social worker, they are told and but and mental hospitals to use categories such as schizophrenia, psychosis, you know, various categories of mental illness, and immediately produce a construct or a reality through this category, they will be served. So the experiences these people are having are experiences through these categories. The collection of the researchers, so-called data, somewhat interpreted, will go to the policymakers and they will read them and interpret them in the same way.

And they will be fed into various other legal apparatuses, legislations will come about. And one more time, the cycle will go on producing the same categorical recycling that goes off. And that is really very important to keep in mind that this is where some of the divisions arise between what we actually live and how we are forced to be categorized in order to receive something that is ours through the various bureaucracies and branches of the state. It's not because those people are bad people, but institutions are categorical functioning bodies.

And she taught that beautifully and she has a book called Institutional Ethnography and Sociology for People. And I think it would be interesting for people to eat. Yeah, moving along, you give a story of the 20th century where Marxism and critical theory have found themselves split and fragmented into several different spheres of inquiry, where some Marxists have turned to simply studying economics. Many liberals have emphasized ideas about personal identity, which without much, if any, mention of economics at all.

The result has been an emphasis on exploring personal experience as the alpha and omega of critical sociological inquiry. Can you explain this development and the sort of politics engendered by such a strong emphasis on personal experience? Hmm. We.

Yeah, let's see what I have. I might actually say that this throws me back a little bit into your earlier notion of the problematic. How does personal experience or collective personal body of personal experience offer us a problematic, which is a conventional way as you explained, organizing a field of research for general social historical economic life of society from them into an academic discipline? So fields of research have to be designed with the focus and the goal because we don't research in general, but in particular.

But we use it to say something about society at large. So it becomes a window into what the components of a society are, how people live in it, how they experience it. So this kind of thinking, which we find also in the work of Alfred Schutz and George Herbert Mead and others, actually brings you to the question of personal experience as a very important one. Because I cannot personally experience something which is not generally experiential.

If I grew up in the tropics, I said it. I did not experience the art pick of the snow. There are things that are thinkable or now transmissible through films and various other things that are really possible somewhere and not possible in other places. Some experiences wouldn't, for God's sake, happen if the social organization, the history, material form of life wasn't there within which it could arise.

For example, one of my surprises in Canada was someone calling me an F word, Paki. Fing, Paki. Now I didn't even know what Paki meant at that stage because it's a word that had traveled from England to Canada, which meant Paki's honey, but not really. It meant a certain kind of pejorative way of turning people from coming from my part of the world.

And I got spat upon throwing things at, things were really hard. They were not that many nonwhite people in the city in those days. And I asked myself, how is this possible? These people don't really know me at all.

And I know nothing about them. I'm standing in the subway station or beside a bus line queue. Why would somebody get so angry with me and say, these things to me and make me frightened? Why would I be scared after that when I got into the bus, to ask the driver if he can let me off at a certain stop?

Because by now, I'm like terrorized into that kind of a situation. Now, that made me think a lot. And I thought that this personal experience, which is local, immediate, cannot just take place if there wasn't anything behind it historically. It took me at least 10 years of reading about world history and colonialism and particularly Canada to get the sense of where all this was coming from.

That just me poor old one, me on the street, had an experience because I didn't even know what it was an experience of, because they're feeling violated. I couldn't name it. I couldn't say it's a racist experience because I didn't come from a country where race was a dominant category. I came from a casteist country.

I hadn't gone through it. So I learned to name these things and experience of one person, as I say, it doesn't happen without the historical social and material crown being ready for it. And we embody in ourselves historically all kinds of things that Marx talks about when he talks about the story of Robinson Crusoe, the myth of being alone on an island when Crusoe in his own personality brought in in his techniques and technique how to really build a house, how to make, you know, stairs, how to cook food, et cetera, et cetera, and including how to have a slave. So is that Crusoe's personal experience not also the history of the world history's experience too?

But we can actually mess up majorly if we stop only at the door of the house. If experience is our entry point, right, then what lies behind it? We use an experience. I have this technique I have used in my essays, particularly in earlier phase, for example, in the essays from Dark Side of the Nation, where I collage a story, an event that happened to me, and the rest of the essays about explaining how it got to be like that, right?

So then I had to say to myself that how did I know where I was coming, when I was coming, how did I know what kind of impact would be interpreted? How I knew people would do bad things to each other, but I didn't know it was patriarchy or racism. I mean, I didn't go, I grew up with a lot of criticism of remarks and angles, yes, so far through the, you know, family, private property and the state, but that the personal relationship between me and my partner would be one of patriarchy. So feminist theory and other forms of historical critical methodological knowledge I acquired, bit by bit, allowed me to see that stopping at just that event wouldn't help.

I could just go from it and elaborate a kind of description of the mapping of the city of, and how white people are not white people approach each other and are treated. Or I could go further than that and go to the social organization history and political economy as a whole to be cognizant of where my experience can take me. So experience, taking an a shallow version of phenomenology might actually be a problem for us, but in a more profound sense, the notion of experience can actually be a very good help. And so I just end up this section by saying that, that experience is not possible.

If no one, except with an alive and existing person who could experience whatever is surrounding them, they're not in the void because it is somebody's. And if it doesn't mean something to somebody, then it doesn't mean anything for anybody. Now I end up by saying it would be absurd to talk to talk people without society equally as much as society without people. The entire enterprise of analyzing and understanding would be inconceivable without there being actual human beings to experience something.

And there's no need to change anything if experience doesn't matter. If I didn't care what happened to me, and if I, you know, I wasn't even there to experience it, why do we need to change and get rid of some racism and sexist racism in my case and ageism and so on at the present time? So I think that's basically what I have to say. Is that makes sense?

So as you've been alluding to, you don't think that personal experience or narrative is useful or useless, I should say for critical inquiry about society and even bring up elements of your own personal narrative at certain points in the book, but you do it in a way that encourages contextualizing, historicizing, politicizing, pushing against all the ways in which ideology tries to rupture and split our knowledge up. Can you tell us a bit about what the use is in personal reflection, on personal identity as a form of ideological critique and demystification? As I said, if you only stop at the event itself and a very shallow understanding of it without being contextualizing it historically and so on, you put it better than I did. And I think that that would be kind of fragmentary and it would create islands without connection among people.

But if we were ready to jump into the society history of the social organization, the social moment we are in, in any country, under any circumstances and track our way back in time to see why such an experience could be possible, then I think we could get a lot of political, political activation, activism out of it, but alongside with it, a depth of critical understanding because nothing could be what it is without its formativeness, things form and personalities form, identity is form, and they are not solipsistic. The minute a person comes into the world, the person enters into the social, you know, doctors, midwives, mothers, whatever, but you are not anymore just only introvertively engaged with yourself, yourself and the other are mutually creative. And one should not therefore say that what is, you are getting from the other will be exactly the same as the other, but actually could be a response. Yes and no, but positive or negative response, but even the social is after all negative response, also as much as positive response, right?

I mean, the social is never only a good thing, like having a good time and a party, labor capital relationship as Marx would say is a social relation, but it's one of antagonism. So I would say that taking an experience into that level and tracking it back into, situating it in historical materialism, I suppose is the methodological word that I should have used, but I follow really allows me to get something out of that experience that leaves me included, but brings in many other things. So that's all I would have to say, and that this would actually free me from having to do a subject object, right? We would not enter this kind of a dualistic thing of seeing us and the world in separation because the social is an interactive, activating, saturating concept.

And there would be therefore, if we didn't think of the social experience show, subject person, there would be neither questioners, nor answers, nor any action possible. Why would we act if we, you know? Why would we ask a question? So the problem is in this dualism, which I think is a ideological way of thinking, and trying to understand experience and existence as being connected.

And therefore, not reproducing, the Cartesian dichotomy between mind, body, or the material world, or the Kantian form of a substantive subject and object in itself, the thing in itself. So the cogito that I think cogito has, in order to see itself as ergo soon, some of it all has to be an experience in cogito. Otherwise, we'll not get it there if we want it. So that's it.

Yeah, moving along and tying together a number of the threads you've been developing against the reductionistic forms of Marxism, that we discussed a bit earlier, you argue that capitalism cannot ever be understood in a purely abstracted economic form. Instead, you write, quote, the actual realization process of capital cannot be outside a given social and cultural form or mode. There is no capital that is a universal abstraction. Capital is always a practice, a determinate set of social relations, and a cultural one at that.

Those race, gender, and patriarchy are inseparable from class as any social organization rests on intersubjective relations of bodies and minds marked with socially constructed difference on the terrain of private property and capital, end quote. Can you explain what Marxists miss when they ignore cultural forms as fundamental to capitalism's functioning, and instead see it as a purely epiphenomenal illusion that needs to be circumvented? Yeah, Stephen, it's, I've been saying that more or less all along in the sense that it depends on what you mean by culture, no? If you mean by culture, simply fine arts and elite culture and so on, that too is very relevant, and a love of beauty is very innate to people, I think.

You know, when Marx was asked, why do we read Eschylist? Why do we read Look at Greek drama on old art? He said, well, because there's something in us that loves beauty and creativity, beauty, imagination, and the fact that he says also that something created in the childhood of civilization continues to attract us. I agree with him, but I think that that childhood of civilization of Eschylist is, or ST and trilogy is not over, because a figure like quite a mestra in Eschylist becomes meaningful to us because quite a mestra follows the law of a matrilineal society, and as a mother of a child that her husband kills, Epigenia, in order to sail to Troy, to get Ellen back, she actually follows the law of her time.

But this law of her time indicates matriline, but when her son urged to skills her, and they are pursued by the Furies in order to punish him, he takes refuge in the altar of Apollo, and there the Furies can't get him, so they circle around him. And then comes the need to create a patriarchal matrilineal law, which has to be voted upon, and so-called democratic means of voting appears for the first time in the Eschylian tragedy, and there they find that God's are equality, both divided. If they kill, you know, Oristis's crime of killing his mother, they think it's not a crime, but Agamemnon's crime of killing his daughter, he's a crime, and quite a mestra is not a criminal because she's a venging for a daughter. But now we need a law where Oristis becomes free, and the death of quite a mestra doesn't really matter.

And on that law, there's one vote, they're equal, one extra vote will cut the tie, and zero cinvents out of his forehead. Athena, not a woman born fully armed from it to two who cast some vote with the men. So there we have an extremely interesting example of how art and culture, for example, no matter how far away and how far ago, retains some things that is actually indeligible to us. We no longer think in these kinds of Athenian terms, and we do punish killing of mother and killing of father, but there's a way of looking at it in that, where maybe even our understanding of violence against women is somewhat tarnished, but influenced by that kind of thinking.

What is the normal about a woman's life with her partner? Where is the line drawn where somebody would say he's been violent? And what all these things, really they continue from before to now, and culture is very much an art of showing us, giving us an entry into expressiveness and organization of an entire society. Culture, that way is the principle of intelligibility, because it very as a culture is linguistic, not just written language, but practical culture, artistic culture, technological culture, and it makes it intelligible, communicative, transmissible.

But if we fetishize only certain kinds of activities and kind of call them our tradition and make a kind of civilizational, essential arguments, saying Europeans are civilizational, and the rapsional Africans are not, then we're using culture in a de-sluorized frame. And as a useless kind of form, for showing how culture is a social form and a social phenomenon as similarly society itself is a cultural form, and it's not uniform. In the same world, there are people at different locations of society who actually are culturally against each other, who maintain simultaneously certain practices that could actually be antagonistic in the practices of others. So if we didn't want to get into really a bad, based on super structure argument, and didn't want to talk about false consciousness, and mere culture and that kind of thing would be in great trouble, but equally if culturalist people did not notice that economy in the market is the world that we live in is really the heart of our physical existence that no one can be sexual and make love and do things unless their bodies are developed and nutrition is given.

Right, I work in India, I work with a lot of poverty, and there are people, sleeping six people, 10 people to a room, alternating in a room. How does sexuality happen in that world? What is the space? Where is the body?

Where is the nutrition? Where is the joy of life with which people can be sexual under these circumstances? So if we, as I'm from literature, and to me that part is very important, but I still think that if that's what we want to stay, then we are, and talk about mere economy, and not talk about people in US right now or everywhere in the world, dying of lack of healthcare, you know, housing, food, all sorts of provisions that it's needed in order to be human, you know. How talk about mere economy?

Economy in its old use used to mean allocation of resources. People used to talk about household economy, right? They used to have, I read a book when I was in my English department called Economy of Charity. And you know, it's an 18th century Sunday school book.

Now, all these kinds of moralities that had involved in economy, the fact that people like Adam Smith and others are moral philosophers, should bring us, make us aware of the fact that neither culture nor economy, be in anything if they're raved, while they accept a destructive thing politically, and they didn't kind of the situation. If you can't interweave them and give them a kind of activation of life through social movements and political organization. Moving along and turning to the nature of history, and I mean here history with a big capital H, you look at James Mills' early 19th century book, The History of India, which you argued doesn't teach us much about India, but it does teach us a lot about the ideological function of academic research. A particular interest is the way Mill views himself as being in a particularly privileged position to write on the topic, congratulating himself for a lack of familiarity with the text produced by indigenous Indians or their own language, instead relying on other accounts.

Shockingly, he claims this critical distance allows him to maintain a lack of bias in his account, something that scholars of India cannot have due to their interest in the region, to say nothing of indigenous people's ability to write their own history or participate in it. What is Mill unwittingly teaching us here? Stephen, he's not unwitting, he's very waiting, and he's teaching us something double edged, because he's fighting not just Indians, he's actually fighting the merchant company, East India Company administrators. What, I mean, other than the fact that this phenomenon has been very beautifully discussed by Edward Said in his book on Orientalism, as well as various other texts that he produced at that time, helped me to understand the Wpei coil crisis, but going away from there, Orientalism and Orientalism or racist discourse has discussed by David Theo Goldberg in a very substantial text on discourse as a very useful book.

We can talk about also the fact that colonialism is not the same colonialism everywhere. Even though it is done at the behest of expansion of capital, because if it doesn't move, then it dies. It's eternal expansiveness is very apparent in its need for colonies, but not all colonies were treated the same way, not all colonial rule, received the same kind of education. So in India, before the British came, there was actually at least 3,000 years of tradition of writing.

Not by everybody, very much tightly held by the top cast, the Brahmin's and maybe two or three men who cast by the time we come to 18th century, but written literature and elite literature, influenced by old Indian, you know, the Islamic too post-Pursu Arabian presence. And I don't call it, Islamic. What I see in India from 12th or 13th century on is an influence of original nature, Perso-Arabic. So Perso-Arabic mixing with the Indian languages and practices of not West India really, India is a huge country, created a kind of whole mystique of the Orient, right?

During the 16th century England, they talked of the realm of Presto-Chao. There was a real desire to, perhaps, fight the Moors, because the Crusades and all that, because they once lived in Europe and ruled it for 500 years, but also at the same time, there's a lot of respect towards these civilizational histories, like Middle East and what we call West Asia. From India, we call it West Asia and South Asia and so on. So when the East India Company comes to rule, at its head comes a great scholar, whose name is William Jones.

And I have an essay in that book called Writing, Doing Ideology and Writing India or something like that, on Jones and then the one on Mill. And they're opposite, they're bookends, but they're opposites of each other. Jones knew Persian, and he got a Persian grammar. He was trained in Cambridge and so on.

There was a humanist scholar. And the whole gang of them that came with them, people called names like Harold Hyman Wilson, Coldbroke, these are great scholars who wanted to rule India through Indian laws, believe it or not. They got themselves 12 Molanas, Islamic scholars, and 12 pundits, Sanskritist in those scholars, and got them to write some kind of compendium through which to rule India. They only kept up on themselves the right to squeeze revenue out of India, loot, essentially, but they let Indian laws rule the wrongs for rolling India.

In those days, they learned Indian languages. They're still a college in London, called Hailbury, which was founded then in 18th century, where British administrators learned Bengali, Tamil, India and so on in order to come. Indians are not supposed to learn English. It's much been forgotten that people do not do that.

Didn't do that then. So the orientalism of the orientalists was challenged by the weak pre-enterprise government of the 1820s who wanted to put an end to East India Company, and they did. They brought, they are the James Mill and his son John Stewart, were wigged in their persuasion, utilitarian in their philosophy, and certainly anti-democratic in their understanding of India as a colony. So here we have a situation where then we see that a construct is created in each case for the orientalist, India becomes equal to some text, and the Germans follow it through people like Max Miller, who never went to India, but became a great scholar of Sanskrit and its true he was, but he constructed in India.

And the orientalists thought of it as a ruling category. Similarly, the Stewart Mills and James Mill, these people are also constructed in India, which is not missionary either, though there was a strong Methodist influence, but there wasn't such so strong. It was very utilitarian and a believer in one free trade, whereas East India Company was a monopolistic thing, like Hudson's Bay Company, Virgin's Capital. They were the British government, the one following orientalism.

They were actually directly utilitarian, and they did want to teach some English, and though local people wanted to learn English more, then the government wanted to teach them. That's another story that is not true, that Indians paid money personally, private sector, to bring missionaries and scholars and others, and tradesmen like Kabbler, someone called David Hare, to start English schools in Tarkata, which is a British city only. And in order to take part in the rule, they didn't want to be left out of the rule, they wanted to be the ruling class, they were not populist, they didn't want to be like peasants or anything, they wanted to be equal to the English, in doing free trade and doing, you know, ruling and learning English in order to do that. So here then we have a very weird situation.

And in fact, what has stuck with us in modern times is both. So one of it is the inferiority of the colonized people, not humanity, and the other is the orientalism of it. Seeing all Muslims as believing in Parda, all Hindus as being cast believers, communism as being something alien to the mentality of Indians, contrary to all the history that we know from those parts of the world. A thriving communist movement was in the South Asia, in South Asia, in Southeast Asia, yet if you really go by the description of the orientalist construct, they're incapable of that kind of thing.

They only think of Hinduism, Ramanism, caste, tradition, hate, modernity and so on. And on the other hand, if you go by, what the stereotypes are about Africa, the language of savagery would be the language that they would use at that time. And they never talk about African empires, about Benin or whatever that Bernal talked about in Black Athena, right, the book like that. Or that Picasso learned some of his best modernist forms by looking at mosques coming from Senegal so I think that this is the thing that this guy who spat at me when he didn't know me, he knew something.

He didn't know me, I didn't know him, but he knew the stereotypes, he knew the constructs. He lived as much in that history into which I was then inducted. So I would say that to me is how ideology works. It makes countries, the historic sites, societies, asocialized and politicized.

And in the end, people end up by making them into a state of mind, not a place in history. You know, and that's how it, I think it works. Continuing along with similar themes, one way Mill and other Orientalists often approach cultures that are foreign to them is to impose certain ideals onto them. These communities are considered to be ancient and contain a mysterious depth to them oftentimes.

So aside from connecting with young men in college such as myself when I was going through a new age phase, what is the political or ideological function of imposing this mysteriousness on foreign cultures and societies? Well, you know, the much used word, the other, the creation of the other, who is somehow dangerous, exotic, dirtier-errest, you know, that sort of creation of constructs happen. And it legitimizes something like war in Iraq. The reason why these people give themselves kudos for going in to democratize everybody.

America's self declared role as world teacher of democracy has only led to a huge loss of life, you know, livelihoods, landscape, property, et cetera, a destruction, a wasteland in so many parts of the world in the last 2001 on. The after effects of it are reverberating in our world and in their world by millions of people displaced, refugees and so on. And here we sit at a distance and it puts an an anodyne kind of a touch to our not connecting. Like many people do, in spite of it all, majority of people would decry the destruction of people all over the world.

But the fact is, there's still a patina of meaning or loss of meaning in lives of other people, the others, because they quote unquote, don't feel like what we feel like. I am not you and you are not me. You and I are not we together under these circumstances. And yet we know that we work together, we think together, there are different aspects of life and relations, social relations on which our comprehension and our politics is built.

So this is really the thing that it helps, works as a kind of a hegemonic umbrella. And actually very quickly wipes out all the kind of similarities that we can identify with each other in terms of life, needs, love of beauty, humanity as it were. And the word human is either meaningless when spoken in this kind of white discourse or it becomes limited to only post-colonial world to only Europe as human and others are not. But at the same time, there are both in non-European and European countries, people who are able to see how history operates, society operates and give a content to the world for human.

That is actually something, a set of capacities and desires that we share with each other. So in old days, I think I'm becoming something of a humanist, not minus struggle, but struggling towards a kind of evolutionary humanism. Moving along and continuing with the questionable use of concepts such as community or tradition, you point out that some indigenous people often use these terms on themselves for their own anti-colonial political purposes as a way of pushing against modernities imposed by imperialism. However, this ends up vindicating the marginalization of certain groups within that community, often women, but also often LGBTQ folks or followers of some other religion.

How does this anti-colonialism end up erasing tensions within societies as vindicating injustice against its own members? Yes, well, that's again a million dollar question, just as patriotism seduces people into thinking that the poor whites and rich whites have the same interest. Just as whiteness as a prerogative for a privilege does that among white people, so among the asporic people like us being of Hindus together, being Muslims together, could serve that purpose. Or even blackness could serve that purpose if that notion of being black was really phenotypical and color-typical kind of language.

Now, with the rise of indigenous politics in North America, for the first time after a long time, when I came here at Leonard Pelschier went to prison a little after that, he's still in prison now, people are begging, fighting to release him, as close to my age. And there was an American Indian movement, another movement at that time when black power and other movements were happening. But for a while there was a big lung, and there was a kind of bureaucratization and so on of the indigenous politics that happened. But now again, a new force has come into it.

And I would say that this new force is a very complicated phenomenon. It may have a nostalgia for the future, in the sense that this nostalgia for the past, is becoming the past we would like to path now and in the future. And the idea being that the past was one of equalist nature, past was not racist, sexist, unequal and democratic. Now, whether or not that is true or not is one issue.

So I'll make two distinctions about this, that it depends on what kind of Indian intercolonialism can become directly nationalism and which has its own pitfalls or parents as Fanon talks about, but it doesn't negate nationalism. It's still a bigger concept than a group or an individual's interests and life being held together. So I would say that for these people, they may be inventing this something, or maybe it is true, that before the idea of private property was introduced in the North American sphere. And I'm sure it's true that it really made, was a very different kind of society.

I don't know what exactly their relationships were between tribes, whether wars or prevalent or not, whether there was any kind of private property, whether agricultural tribes are different or hunters and gatherers. These are things for me to learn instead. But I could say that if the tradition, let's say in books by people like Andreas Smith or Leanne Meterson-Makke Simpson and others, is that it was a past of equality, this is what we strive to. I would think that these are progressive myths of history.

Making history in order to create an equalist society, a socialist society of some kind, does not at all meditate against socialism of any kind. What would we have against it? If we were to say this tradition of being equal, having pot large, sharing food, it's our tradition, that's why we want to go back. That being too spirited was acceptable and even normalized.

What would we have against that? Nothing. So let us say that it is even a myth of history, creative design to make history and what I called following Ernesto Cardenal, the nostalgia for the future, the past that we had, the unfallen primordial past, maybe the unfallen past will take us to a less divisive society. So I have that much, I can accept.

What I cannot accept is that there's also very retro-aggressive views of this sorts of notion, which I can best speak to about my religion, Hinduism, which is in the right being in power in India, completely using the name of God to oppress Muslims and other social groups. And creating a culture of violence, of all kinds, social, sexual, economic violence, I cannot accept all this in the name of tradition. I cannot say that caste is my tradition, that the greatest knowledge in the world is nothing compared to the ancient Indian texts of the Vedas written in thirds and three million LPC. This is not true and this is not good.

And this does promote, horrifically patriarchy, violent sexism, masculineism, and class caste domination, and creation of the other, if they didn't exist, they would have to be invented. Just as the Jews were created by the Nazis, they were not Jews as Jews are, or were in Europe, but a construct to be destroyed. Similarly, Muslims in India are undergoing that. So that in the name of tradition, rejecting science in the name of tradition, rejecting socialism in the name of tradition.

This really creates an extremely problematic thing. And my article in that book called Making in India, Hindu and Male, for example, in the book that you read so carefully talks about that and talks about the contradiction between a demographic state and a democratic state. You see, that's what the problem is. When you say that the demography of a state must be unidimensional, uni local demography, then you are really talking a massive anti-democracy, in fact a fascist proposal.

And what is very curious, you see, is that this religious ideology that is used in order to create unification of patriots as Hindus and Hindus as patriots, then creates a problem of constant minoritization, proliferating in those parts of whatever it is being used. And I think race is something like that. That we've already, the fact that American, not just the Trump following population, but even others would think in terms of what is really American history and then stand in the way of teaching history of US as it is and has been on the ground, comes from the same kind of impulse. And there's a large quota of Christianity in it.

What is Christian evangelism, I guess, forms a large segment of it. But it's curious, or not so curious, about India, South Arabia, Iran, US, all these countries is that it's really very easily bonded to neoliberalism. The fact that people have any right to ask back from the state what they gave to the state is wiped out. They're left to their own resources and to the resources of God.

They are left to their own community, which is actually making massive class formation happening through the identification with the corporates, for example, and creating terrible inequality justice in those countries. It's really something that we should be mindful because under the cover of all this patriotism and demonization of people as savages, terrorists and so on and so forth. And in the case of India, Muslims as basically terrorists and also unintellectual and intellectual masculinists prone to many marriages and sexuality overactive, all those sorts of images actually, which are present in Canadian and American Islamophobia as well, really then becomes a very destructive thing for us. So when we talk about anti-colonialism, we must actually expand that notion to not just being anti the foreign force alone, but actually internal to the country.

What are the social relations, economic and cultural relations? And we can't bury it in the name of civilization and tradition. What's the book? Yeah, you're speaking to the final question I have for you.

So in closing, when reading your essay in this book, Pygmalion Nation, I noticed it was published in 2000, so shortly before the September 11 attacks and the retaliatory invasions of the Middle East, which were often justified by pointing towards the oppression of women and LGBT folks. This is obviously a cynical use and abuse of justice to justify imperial domination, but it does raise a difficult problem of how to speak against imperialism without surrendering those still stuck in such situations. So in closing, what sort of politics is needed to fight for international emancipation of all peoples that neither falls for the nostalgia of some organic community or imperial invasion disguised as emancipation? Well, you know, though I'm not born a Christian, I could tell you that the devil quotes the scripture.

The devil is as familiar with the scripture as all believing Christians are. So I would say that talking about being good to queer people being good to women in third world countries, damming all the population, culture and civilization there is a very, very convenient slate of hand, right? Bush's war against Afghanistan, we used to call it a Bush's feminist war, because his wife Laura Bush and Sheri Blair together became a big strong force and drew glorious dynam and others in and they went to rescue the woman, which the Brits thought that they were doing too in relation to India, rescuing the brown woman as God please speak up, put it in canvas, I'll also speak from brown men. So that our recourse is to such, you know, rescuers, ours, you know, they bring our salvation.

But just as that is a problem, it is also a justification given to people at large through the kind of ideological devices we have so far talked about that I've spoken about in my book to justify attacking, let us say it up. If you remember in the after the first Gulf War that terrible grandmother, Madeline Albright, was asked whether or not it was really worthwhile to kill so many children and destroy a country like that, you know, to save it up for democracy, was it worthwhile? She said on consideration, yes, it was. Similarly, Afghanistan, you see now, they nearly never cared for the enough these Syrians of guns, nobody, some other bigger Imperial agenda was taking place.

So if we are going to fight this attempt, well, not attempts, fully realized adventure self destruction in the world, we have to deemeth his eyes and unveil the kind of social historical struggle that these things help to cover up. And on the other hand, in the countries themselves, we should also unveil what the social and class formation sent in there. History has not stood still because some stereotypical thinkers think in colonial discourse, these places are outside of history. They are not, you know, I mean, Iran, for example, before the coming of the, you know, Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution had a thriving communist left wing culture.

And so that is something that we have to think about as well. And we must sympathize if we want to be social solidarity, to the social political movements in those parts of the world, not to a kind of a civilization and a cultural block. India, for example, recently had a massive year long struggle of farmers against Modi to push back from corporate agricultural policies and selling of land, agricultural land to foreign, vertically organized corporations from the West. And they actually struggled and pushed Modi back from being able to put the bill, carry this bill and they made it, it became an act and they unrolled the act back.

Now we have to sympathize with them. We have to have a better direct knowledge of who's doing what politics in our parts, my part of the world, or I would say our in the sense of the third world, parts of the world. And there we will find as much division of opinion, as much division of interests, of class, of race and gender, of caste, and you know who to sympathize with. Just whoever you will sympathize with in your own world, you will in those parts of the world.

So our anti-imperialism will only gain by supporting their anti-imperialism. Otherwise, if we just sort of say, well, all right, I take India under my wing and anything, my country, good or bad, my mother drunk or sober, if that is the politics we adopt, then we are falling into a total ideological vision of the world, not what is going on, not what is actually happening, but what is actually a fabrication in the course of legitimacy establishment. So my invitation to my left comrades, you know, you and all others is that you find out more, force the media to give more news about what's going on in different parts of the world. And get rid of this missionary impulse by people of color and white people, let's say from Canada and the US, to go and rescue people in other parts of the world.

They don't need rescuing, they need solidarity. And on that, I mean. Yeah, that's a great note to end on. So we're at just a little over two hours.

So I wanted to say, Amani Bonerjee, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and coming on and talking with me. Well, I want to thank you very much for taking the trouble of doing this. It's actually a privilege to be able to talk to someone like you who read, who understood and ask me very good questions without standing in my way, but at the same time prompting me to speak. So I really want to thank you.

I don't think I've ever gotten this opportunity. So thank you for that. My pleasure.