Note from the editors: Our correspondent was asked to write a report on the lecture, but somewhere along the line, this becomes a commentary. The views expressed in this article are the author’s.
INTRODUCTION AND SOME CONTEXT
As students of the humanities and social sciences, epistemology is of special relevance to us. Understanding what constitutes knowledge and the ways in which knowledge is produced is of fundamental importance to us, given that these define how we understand the world. Understanding these, however, requires us to understand the relation between power and knowledge, and in this, Foucault’s concept of power-knowledge becomes critical. Ransome understands the concept of power-knowledge to mean “control over the construction and operation of the codes of meaning or frames of reference that define objects, ideas and meanings as knowledge”. Knowledge is a discursive practice: it controls and constitutes the world as we know it. Dominant groups exercise power by controlling the production and usage of knowledge, and in turn, these ways of producing and using knowledge constitute the power of the dominant groups.
In an article titled ‘How Egalitarian are the Social Sciences in India?’, Gopal Guru raised questions that set off a debate on the role of theory and experience in social science practice in India. Arguing that social science practice in India harboured a cultural hierarchy that divided social science practitioners into a vast, inferior mass of academics who pursue empirical social sciences, and a privileged few theoretical pundits with reflective capacity that made them intellectually superior to the former, Guru cast this hierarchy as one between theoretical brahmins and empirical shudras. According to Guru, caste, for the most part, determined the type of knowledge production that one engaged in. Positing that dalit scholars prefered empirical social sciences over theoretical ones, Guru argued that the reason for the same was not that dalits were in any manner inferior, but that “dalits have not been able to develop the ambition for ideas and theory because of certain structural and socio-historical reasons that have provided an unprecedented advantage to the twice-born in this country.” Guru posited that there was an urgent need for dalits and the oppressed to build a ‘moral stamina’ for doing theory: dalits would have to resist the temptation for temporal gains and overcome the sense of anxiety that compelled them to ‘perform’ for the audience if they wanted to engage in theory. Despite agreeing that the lived experiences of dalits was rich, Guru did not believe that experience alone could stand on its own authentic terms without any theoretical representation: dalits had a moral responsibility to theorize and accord respectability to their experiences so as to prevent the the same from being caricatured by snobbish theorists and politicians from the Top of the Twice Born (TTB).
Guru’s observations raised important questions regarding the authenticity of theory and the role of authority in theorizing. Responding to these observations, Sundar Sarukkai, in an article titled Dalit Experience and Theory, attempted to grapple with the implication of Guru’s observations and framed the questions of authority and authenticity in terms of the right to theorize. Despite sympathizing with Guru’s anger at non-dalits theorizing dalit experience, Sarukkai observed that all communities exhibited a strong dislike to being objects of study by those who did not belong to the community mostly when the study portrayed the community in a poor light. Sarukkai observed that it was only in such situations that the lack of lived experience of the outsider was assiduously pointed out. For him, such a position was untenable: after all, there were many human activities where obtaining lived experience was not possible, a case in point being history. This lead Sarukkai to conclude that lived experience could not be a necessary condition for theorizing. To Guru’s credit, Sarukkai’s view was one that Guru agreed with: Guru noted that subscribing to the view that lived experience was necessary for theorizing would involve his own inability to theorize about non-dalits. What then was Guru stating? Sarukkai posited that Guru was stating something stronger, that non-dalits did not have any moral right to theorize dalit experience, that it was ethically wrong to theorize about an experience when one had not experienced the same oneself. According to Sarukkai, Guru wanted lived experience to form the foundation of theory and not just validate it. This was something Sarukkai found problematic, given that “lived experience as essentially related to theory is only one part of the theoretical element of an experience”. In a rather lucid and beautiful manner (reading the original article is highly recommended at this point), Sarukkai problematized Guru’s position by drawing on Habermas and pointing to the tension between theorizing without any experience, and believing that one’s experience validated one’s right to have a say about the conceptual world which described that experience. As Sarukkai has beautifully elucidated, Habermas advocated maintaining a distance between experience and theory, while Guru sought to bridge this distance. How could one resolve this tension? This question led Guru and Sarukkai to author the The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory.
THE LECTURE
Enter Dr. Hegde and standpoint theory. Responding to the debate between Guru and Sarukkai, Sasheej Hegde concentrated on the ‘epistemics’ of situated knowledge in his lecture by drawing on standpoint theory, which, according to him, is one of the many ways in which the theory-experience debate could be understood. Starting off the lecture by explaining the main features of standpoint theory, Hegde drew a distinction between ethnographies and standpoint. Drawing from Sandra Harding, Hegde considers the standpoint approach as a way of ‘studying up’: it entails studying the institutions and the social structures that lead to oppression, in addition to studying the life of the oppressed. Standpoint theory considers diversity amongst the social positions of enquirers to be an epistemic advantage to the community of enquirers, with particular views from certain social positions producing better knowledge. Hegde then proceeded to broadly categorise standpoint theory into two theses: the thesis of epistemic privilege and the situated knowledge thesis. The thesis of epistemic privilege posits that those who are unprivileged with respect to social positions are likely to generate perspectives that are less distorted and which better grasp the social world. The situated knowledge thesis, on the other hand, posits that all knowledge is socially situated. Hegde claimed that this leads to a tension, with the thesis of epistemic privilege undermining the situated knowledge thesis.
Moving on to the actual debate, Hegde started by examining Guru’s position and found it a travesty for Guru’s original essay to be remembered solely for its claim of theoretical brahmins and empirical shudras. Giving an overview of the argument that Guru made, Hegde dwelt on the fact that dalits used metaphors and poetry, rather than theory, to make connections. This emphasis on empiricism, according to Hegde, pointed to the thesis of epistemic privilege in action: when dalits claim that their lived experiences suffice and more than compensate for the lack of theory, they are considering themselves to be privileged due to their social positions. Hegde also quoted from Guru’s article to show that Guru did not subscribe to this view: the people who subscribed to this view suffered from an ontological blindness according to Guru. Turning to Sarukkai’s response to Guru, Hegde understands Sarukkai’s argument as one that accords priority, but not authenticity to those who have experience (again, do read the original article!). Hegde, following Sarukkai, placed considerable emphasis on the difference between lived experience and mere experience. Lived experience, in Hegde’s words, is the experience that a subject has without any control over whether s/he wants that experience or not, and in this way, is qualitatively different from mere experience. Talking about the tension that Sarukkai exposes, Hegde posited that standpoint theory could be used to resolve the tension. Standpoint theory agrees that there can be multiple perspectives about the world while maintaining that some perspectives produce better knowledge than others. Hence, while it is perfectly plausible for non-dalits to theorize about dalits, standpoint theory maintains that dalit theorization about their experience leads to better knowledge, but not the only authentic knowledge.
Hegde then proceeded to point out an important relation between theory and concepts. Usually, we understand concepts to be intrinsic to theory, but that needn’t be the case. Just as there are multiple concepts in a theory, it is possible to have multiple theories about a concept, and it is important to engage in the exercise of producing concepts based on one’s experience (Bhrighupati Singh’s Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India: click here for a short summary and book review of the same that I had written for a course). According to Hegde, doing this is critical in the Indian context: an urgent need exists to decolonize the Indian social sciences and come up with concepts that can explain and capture Indian experiences better. Engaging with experiential concepts would necessarily entail an engagement with the politics of categories, which would raise questions regarding which categories we choose to explain a particular experience, the relationship that persists between theory and experience et cetera. In this, standpoint theory would prove to be useful. However, if, following the ontological turn in the social sciences, we accept that there are multiple realities and not just multiple perspectives of a reality (which is what politics of categories would imply), then it is necessary to break with standpoint theory. Without a single reality, the basic principle of standpoint theory — that some social positions produce better knowledge of the world than others — collapses. Hegde posited that engaging in politics of reality will hence lead to a different kind of investment in concepts, and with that, proceeded to conclude the lecture by reiterating the need for engaging with concepts.
CONCLUSIONS AND THOUGHTS
The lecture served as an introduction to the theory-experience debate and introduced ideas that have practical and political consequences, especially for our department. How can we apply standpoint theory in our daily lives? Our department is a heterogeneous mixture, with students coming from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds. All too often, discussions on multiple topics, especially feminism, are brought to a stand-still by pointing to a student’s privileged upbringing and gender. When interacting with one another, how do we deal with the question of privilege? Standpoint theory would mean that the challenge before us lies in making students cognizant of their privilege without descending into arguments that promote absolute epistemic privilege. To provide a concrete example, the challenge lies in making male students understand that they are privileged while allowing them a free and thoughtful engagement with women’s experiences and lives. To argue that women’s experiences of harassment can never be understood by men would be descending into an argument of absolute epistemic privilege.
On a macro-level, standpoint theory holds important implications for policy-formulation and decision making. It provides a useful theoretical framework for looking at the question of reservations for minorities in a legislature, especially in the context of Anne Philips’ emphasis on the politics of presence over the politics of ideas. Philips argues that having minority representation in the legislature is the only way in which the needs of minorities can be addressed (politics of presence) – it is impossible, according to Philips, for the majority to represent the minorities effectively (politics of ideas believes that physical representation of minorities is not necessary as long as the ideas of the minorities are conveyed). How will standpoint theory deal with this tension? In my opinion, standpoint theory will not be dismissive of the politics of ideas, and further engagement with this and related topics from the standpoint framework seems to be promising.
To conclude this long report/article/essay, I believe that it would be better if the organizing team of the lecture series could also organize a introductory lecture that shall cover basic concepts that are necessary for understanding the R&D lecture. A bit of spoon-feeding could actually save quite a bit of time and effort for participants – things are really too painful otherwise, both to write about and understand. 🙂
Venkataraman Ganesh
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