Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.

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Why Post-Colonial Theory doesnt exist In a panel chaired by J.F. Lyotard at Emory University in Spring 1997, the somewhat belabored theme of "Literature as Estrangement" was discussed. Summing up the day's proceedings, Lyotard observed and agreed with the panelists's presupposition that estrangement ontologically resides or dwells in language itself, and that this language or tongue (langue) is already divided from itself. The function of literary work, then, is to intervene in this divide or fissure and "extract through its passage from the secreta of the tongue a new idiom; literature is a "paroxysm" between the locuteur and the language or tongue." This formulation prompted Lyotard's suggestion that "one constant" exists in all literatures, namely, that literature contains a "mystery" which must be approached but always missed by the writing. He implied a "mysticism" in the writing of literature, by which "the writing must always respect the unknowable mystery and treat it not with devotion but with modest reverence." Why make this ever unknowable "mystery" the cause of an estrangement in literature? Why not let it be the cause of a celebration, that is, why not celebrate this "mystery" which seems suspiciously close to the eternal mystery of Life? It is ever unknowable, it resides in our very language or tongue--but instead of harboring an estrangement through language's inability to capture, or express, or even "solve" the mystery, why not conceive of it and receive it as the site and exemplum that celebrates the ever unknowable? In Hindu terms, then, a conception of both the literary composition and reception as works performed as a Sacrifice or yagna to the divine self and the eternal mystery. Literature as Works and not Literature as Estrangement; let literature performed as yagna/sacrifice be the site of Self revelation instead of alienation and estrangement. Let literature, then, be engagement with the spirit of eternity. The panel was non-plussed by this Hindu formulation, primarily because they could not conceive of "sacrifice" as anything outside of the violence of dying. We had reached an impasse. It is of greatest import that death does not exist in Hinduism, a truth succinctly expressed in the Bhagvada Gita: that which exists, exists; that which does not exist, does not exist--nasato vidyate bhavo / nabhavo vidyate satah...It is found that there is no coming to be of the non-existent; It is

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found that the not non-existent constitutes the real...(II-16, WBG 101). The negation and effacement of death carries over to an inevitable negation and effacement of the Other. The panel's reaction, and the consequent end of dialogue, indicates a two-fold operation that structures a crisis in academic discourse today which is repeatedly signaled whenever the "post" marker is employed. The first consists of the very necessary operation of exposing the fiction of all Western epistemic and ontologic certitude and depends fundamentally resisting and subverting rationality which is at the heart of both the technological "progress" and the globally transformative process of the history and legacy of European Imperialism. The second, as a consequence of the first, concerns the resulting inability to replace with a cohesive formation that which has been exploded: chiefly, the intentional "human" of the enlightenment, but also the certitude of projects based on transparent methods and aims and hoping to grasp completely the essence of their objects, and complicities of power and knowledge. One of the goals of this essay is to bridge this ontological divide (the necessity of the Other in Western thought, the impossibility of the Other in Hindu thought) by deploying together Eastern and Western frameworks for reading literature. Nowhere is this crisis more evident than in post-colonial and post-modern studies. Whereas post-colonialism is the bastard child of post-modernism, it is yet to live up to its disruptive potential. Post-colonialism needs to disrupt the economy of Western discourse of which it is a part but to which it doesn't owe allegiance, nor sole responsibility, for it has the option to discover, reclaim, and assert the unspoken heritage. It is the heritage that precipitated the modernist crisis in the West, that was silenced but remains the underside of all postmodernist expression; it is the multi-faceted nemesis of all rational epistemology and ontology. It is the option that has not yet been adequately taken up by post-colonialism, suggesting either that the option is forbidden or that post-colonialism is to forever remain the castrated bastard of Western thought. This might seem an atavistic and perhaps mysterious description of an enormous textual terrain, but it serves my point: textuality itself needs to be rethought in the name of ethics. The

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system with which I intend to effect this ethical injection is, as I have discussed in a previous discussion (see No other for Abraham but Brahma), conceptualized primarily through a Hindu ontology in which there is no ontological Other. In adopting this "nativist" approach, I must make two things clear. It is as valid as Western approaches founded of the Self/Other dichotomy, and is perhaps more urgent if one agrees that Post-colonialism is valid in Western academia. At this turn of the millennium juncture, a nativist approach can be engaged with in a domain inundated by Western native voices, to which even today most voices in post-colonialism belong. Second, my approach is not motivated nor akin to the supposedly commonplace nativist position Robert Young describes in White Mythologies : those who evoke the "nativist" position through a nostalgia for a lost or repressed culture idealize the possibility of that lost origin being recoverable in all its former plenitude without allowing for the fact that the figure of the lost origin, the other that the colonizer has repressed, has itself been constructed in terms of the colonizer's own self-image. (WM 168). I must assert to the contrary that my "nativist" position that is described by Hinduism (and can be extended as being "Indian") is not marked by nostalgia for a lost culture. To believe that Indian culture was lost or radically transformed by the British experience is to abet a Western colonialist delusion of its own aggrandizement. It will be instructive here to turn to Ashis Nandy's "alternative mythography of history which denies and defies the values of history," in The Intimate Enemy. Nandy makes an important contribution against the predominantly Western bias informing most if not all of postcolonial discourse in academia by turning to the "non-modern" tradition of ethnic universalism that has remained vibrant before, during, and after the experience of Imperial colonization. India, Nandy emphasizes throughout, is not "non-West; it is India." Granting the transformation that "mimics' Western structures and attitudes, Nandy reminds us that this "modern" section of India is a small minority compared to the "ordinary Indian [who] has no reason to see himself as a counterplayer or an antithesis of the Western man" (73). Textual critics of the Spivakian trend will, of course, focus on the status of "ordinary" and have a deconstructive field day, but more

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importantly for the argument at hand, Nandy claims that the pre-colonial India has neither been lost nor repressed but has always existed in its own peculiar indigenous fashion of accommodation and adjustment: This is the underside of non-modern India's ethnic universalism. it is a universalism which takes into account the colonial experience, including the immense suffering colonialism brought, and builds out of it a maturer, more contemporary, more self-critical version of Indian traditions...India has tried to capture the differential of the West within its own cultural domain, not merely on the basis of a view of the West as politically intrusive or as culturally inferior, but as a subculture meaningful in itself, though not allimportant in the Indian context. (75-76) I am arguing, of course, that the reason this ethnic universalism exists and operates as Nandy describes it is due to the nature of a culture whose traditional self-definition has not been premised on the tyranny of the Other but on the love of the Self. In my effort to mobilize an "indigenous theory," I must also state that I find problematic Spivak's dismissal of the like with her statement that, "I cannot understand what indigenous theory there might be that can ignore the reality of nineteenth century history...To construct indigenous theories one must ignore the last few centuries of historical involvement" (PC 69, emphasis mine). Spivak's belief that indigenous theory would need to be "constructed" is perplexing given the vast and extant theoreticophilosophical texts within the Indian tradition. Are we to believe that they are de facto inadequate to explain the meaning of "human" events in the last four hundred years of the experience of Imperial colonization? Or worse yet, in what seems implicit in the previous question, are we to believe that there has been such a radical schism in our constitutive beings that the old categories and explanations can no longer be applied in good faith? Certainly not, I will aver, unless there is something that I have missed in the processes of alienation. But more seriously, the nature of Spivak's dismissal resides in her valorization of textual practices which inform the various narratives of our subjecthood. Her project signals the urgency for initiating strategies of deconstructive resistance against all resultant systems whose proclivity is absolutism of one kind or another. The texts which she investigates, without ever forgetting the textual moment of her own engagement itself, cross over not only the boundaries of history,

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Marxism, Western philosophy, literature, feminism, and imperialism and colonialism, but are part of a "network" or "weave"--"politico-psycho-sexual-socio, you name it"--whose fabric is not simply language but which is the textual inescapability of our reality: "that notion that we are effects within a much larger text/tissue/weave of which the ends are not accessible to us is very different from saying that everything is language" (PC 25). But what is the thread of the weave? I argue that it is ethics as primary sociality, and further, that such an ethics is what is generally ignored by most post-structuralist textual discourses, including Spivak's. My assertion may seem grossly mistaken, especially if one considers that Spivak is held in high regard by her colleagues for being "one of the few intellectuals actually carrying out the suggestions made by the post-Enlightenment ethical movement associated with Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas" (SR 9). In fact, I find myself agreeing with Landry and Maclean's statement; what I disagree with (see my first chapter) is the privileging of the Derridean and Levinasian schemas for ethical inquiry and understanding. In other words, insofar as Spivak's itinerary is concerned, it is the universalization of the deconstructive project, of deconstruction as the dominant or recommended mode of critique that I find erroneously limited in understanding the "truth," truth as a construction, of our ontological being. Deconstruction is a Western phenomenon born of a Western tradition; its application allows the statement that "ethics is the experience of the impossible" to be meaningfully representative of the aporia (aporific?) nature of our all our discursive certitudes, laws, systems, and experiences. Not to say that this representation can be expressed across all cultures that have discursive realities. But the aporia and absence that deconstruction uncovers time and time again is nothing other than another form of "the mystery" which Lyotard addressed in his talk. What becomes obvious is that there are various forms and disguises for the eternal return of this Mystery. It makes contradictions, aporias, paradoxes, moral dilemmas abound. But above all this Mystery is, I will reiterate, the Eternal mystery of life whose truth (at least in Hindu thought) is the prediscursive ethical sociality of the self and Self. Ethical sociality is the fabric of an interconnected physical and, for the Hindu mind, spiritual existence. Ethical sociality is in fact God and it exists properly speaking, au-dela

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de la langue. Perhaps the following claim can be excused its boldness for the sake of bringing home my point: discourses privileging discourse as the site of ethics are unethical. In various more or less intelligible ways--such as "Pouvoir-Savoir is the onto-phenomenological truth of ethics, to the very extent that it is its contradiction in subjecting" (SR 154)--they point to the fact that there is an absence at the beginning and, equally, that the beginning is absent. The question is what to do with this absence since times immemorial, and the records of history have provided us with two opposed principles: the (Western) Self and Other, and, the (Hindu) self and Self. The tradition, culture, and history of the Self and Other has led ultimately to an enterprise called Deconstruction which incessantly forefronts the unknowable mystery, albeit in disguise, in every construction; the tradition, culture, and history of the self and Self, on the other hand, has kept the unknowable mystery at the forefront of all its constructions. A fundamental difference. To say all this is not to make an outright dismissal of all Western discourse. It is rather to signal a redundancy in the operation of the critical enterprise within a certain sector of Academia. In particular, I am expressing dissatisfaction over the fact that there seems to be an exponential proliferation of engagement invested in playing language games armed with the tools of deconstruction within the domain of post-colonial and post-modern studies. Each field, individually, has undergone extensive and often rigorous theoreticizations. On the side of the post-colonial, theoretical positions have been articulated in a domain that has provided the security of its immanent marginalization, whether in socio-economic, politico-historical, or identity-racial terms. This fact has enabled the post-colonial enterprise to adopt a self-righteous attitude vis a vis questions that address the overlap between it and the post-modern. Indeed, the following statement, that serves as an introduction to a recent selection of essays addressing the Post-colonial/Postmodern issue in The Post-colonial Reader, is symptomatic of a certain type of critical sleight-of-hand: "For in the final analysis, the problems of representation in the postcolonial text assume a political dimension very different from the radical provisionality now accepted as fundamental to postmodernism" (117). Such a formulation harbors a prejudice which signifies two difficulties. First, The "problems of representation" in the postcolonial assume their

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political dimension by rights, that is, by the right of historical contingency. This means that all literature in that area of the world referred to as the "Third World" must be informed by its Colonial past, and must confront at various level(s) its National present. The textual engagement with concepts of representation, (National) identity formation, and self-definition automatically attain a "political" urgency, and entail a critical reading that is above and beyond relativistic or ambivalent redactions of the postmodernist kind. This prohibition functions due to a paradoxical reversal--even though the "Third World" is criticized for being a pejorative (neo)Imperial label as it "both signifies and blurs the functioning of an economic, political, and imaginary geography able to unite vast and vastly differentiated areas of the world into a single "underdeveloped" terrain" (143), and presents that which must be erased, it is its very preservation that unifies the postcolonial critical discourse under one rubric. In this sense, then, it can be argued that the Postcolonial enterprise is reactionary in its most fundamental component. Second, the postmodern is credited with a "radical provisionality" that strips its textual message of any power for "action," or for "change," according to a specific yet spurious line of reasoning which assumes that the postmodern enterprise--"the deconstruction of the centralized logocentric master narratives of European culture" (117)--is content simply with the highlighting of fissure, fragmentation, ambivalence, and does not extend its deconstruction to any meaningful political agenda. It is thus that we come across opinions such as Diana Brydon's which attach onto postmodernism the stigma of New Criticism: "[Postmodernism] updates the ambiguity so favored by the New Critics, shifting their formal analysis of the text's unity into a psychoanalysis of its fissures, and their isolation of text from world into a worldliness that cynically discounts the effectiveness of any action for social change." (137). Implicit in this view of the postmodern is the functioning of the label "First World;" also implicit is the belief that the post-colonial enterprise is not similarly debilitated by the cynical discounting endemic to post-modernism. Being FirstWorld products, postmodern texts end up being radically provisional since they are articulated in a zone of socio-politico-economic superiority, a zone that remains "First World" regardless of the alternatives suggested by the postmodern, since neither of these alternatives seeks to undermine

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the hegemony of the dominant power base that is the "First World." It can be argued that according to this viewpoint the postmodern enterprise is conservative in its most fundamental component. However, this assertion of fundamental difference erases the enabling condition that is common to both post-modernism and post-colonialism. Even in the Post-Colonial Reader, which represents a sustained dismissal of post-modernism in favor of post-colonialism (as discussed above), we are told that the postmodern, "the deconstruction of the centralized, logocentric master narratives of European culture," is "very similar" to the post-colonial, "[the] project of dismantling the Centre/Margin binarism of Imperial discourse." (117). Similar, but for some inexplicable reason, not identical. For what else is the logocentric master narrative if not the Centre/Margin binarism of Imperial discourse? And isn't "deconstruction" being opposed per force to "dismantling"? That which allows a reading of postmodern "deconstruction" and that which allows a reading of postcolonial "dismantling" employ the same philosophico-theoretical machinery: Post-Structuralism. Indeed, the leading postmodern as well as the leading postcolonial critics rely heavily on the conceptual positions played out by the post-structuralist philosophers. How is it, then, that the prevalent viewpoint supports the idea of an apolitical ambivalent flux, on the postmodern hand, and simultaneously supports political univalent blocks, on the postcolonial hand? What are "the problems of representation" in the post-colonial texts? Who determines it, what readings are encouraged? Why is it "accepted" and by whom, that postmodern texts are apolitical and provisional? But more importantly, what is the socio-political nature and the hidden academic agenda or impetus of such criticism that reduces, as we have seen, the post-structuralist machine itself into a machine capable of producing only the conservative postmodern or the reactionary postcolonial? The answer I propose addresses two inter-twined concerns; one deals with ethics, the other deals with the nature of the discipline called "post-colonialism" within academia. I propose, further, that the operations within the two fields are indicative of a containment operation within academia which seeks to neutralize the disruptive potential that is the proper charge generated by

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the post-structuralist critique. The academic sanction issued for interdisciplinary "post" discourses abets the elision of ethics and does so for the specific purpose of a containment that is the sign of a last-ditch conservatism. This elision at one end serves the reinforcement and prolongation of outmoded turn-of-the-twentieth-century structures and categories of knowledge, whose principle, by definition almost, is compartmentalization. And while the "post" disciplines have exploded compartments of all sorts, they have been allowed to do so at the cost of burying ethics under the resultant rubble. As a result, the open field has become one without a cohesive direction in sight since there is no ethical imperative or motive. As a result, "post" criticism has become a cannibalistic reflection onto itself, becoming the insatiable consumer of its own text and textuality, feeding on itself and regurgitating its material ad infinitum. Meanwhile, the powerknowledge base is held intact, patting itself on the back behind the scenes for having had and still having a sound ethical raison d'tre. This somewhat paranoiac description is meant to suggest conspiracy, for the powers-thatbe, I feel, do conspire and collude together against deterritorializing transformations. Transformation is always a process of inter and extra-disciplinary operations; transformation is also the rule of the universe. But as a witness to transformation, one must first and foremost be grounded ethically--a Hindu agent, for example, is always already is part of the network of the sociality of the Self; as a participant in the perpetual processes transformation one must base one's actions--criticism is an action--in accordance with those ethics. Here, a short exposition of the function of the "Zone" and the "knower of the Zone" would be apposite to my discussion. At one level it helps reinforce the conception of an of an Other-less universe which is the sum of the processes + witness, Prakriti + Purushottama, Nature + Conscience. At an another level, it aids my endeavor of fore-fronting a dharmic ethical consideration to the field of literary criticism in general, and the fields of post-colonialism and post-modernism in specific. In simple terms, "the Gita explains the ksetram, Zone, by saying that it is this body which is called the Zone of the spirit, and in this body there is someone who takes cognizance of the Zone, Ksetrajna, the knower of Nature" (EG 398). The Gita teaches that true

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knowledge is knowledge of both the Zone and the knower of the Zone, the ksetra and the ksetrajna. The Zone or body comprises of the following elements: "The great elements, the consciousness of "I," the intelligence and the unmanifest, the senses, ten and one, and the five Zones of action of the senses, Desire, aversion, pain, the organic whole, consciousness, steadfastness, This briefly is described as the Zone with its modifications" (XIII:5-6; WBG 53435).1 In such a ksetra, the ksetrajna must strive to attain true knowledge, which is "constancy in knowledge of the Supreme [Self], observing the goal of the knowledge of truth" (XIII:11; WBG 539). It is interesting that the object of knowledge, as it is declared by Krishna to Arjuna, is a non-rational proposition which defies dualism and exceeds binarism, and sounds suspiciously like a deconstructive principle: "That which is the object of knowledge, I shall declare, knowing which, one attains immortality; it is the beginless supreme Brahman which is said to be neither existent nor non-existent" (XIII:12; WBG 540). Finally, sociality is reaffirmed as the primary condition of all existence: "Any being whatever, standing still or moving, Inasmuch as it is born, Arises from the union of the Zone and the Zone-knower" (XIII:26; WBG 554); I have insisted on calling this union sociality since this union of Zone and spirit is traversed throughout by the same Self. True knowledge, then, begins when the knower of the Zone supplements knowledge of the Zone itself by turning into herself to learn of herself within the Zone. Knowledge of either one aspect is insufficient and incomplete; it is the simultaneous engagement of both aspects of knowledge and their unification into a celebration of Brahman which is true knowledge, that is, "it is the knowledge at once of the Zone and its knower...a united and even unified self-knowledge and world-knowledge, which is the real illumination and the only wisdom" (EG 400). The intriguing question of the moment becomes to what extent does the literary critic, the postcolonial or the post-modern theorist, perhaps even the post-structuralist philosopher, fulfill the condition of knowing not only the Zone but knowing also his or her own self within the Zone? It seems clear that only one half of the equation is fulfilled by discourse-privileging knowers; and if any claim can be made that such a knower is aware of his or her complicity or implication within

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the Zone, I hold it to be insufficient process to properly fulfilling the dharmic-ethical condition of self-knowledge because it means only that the knower is aware at a discursive level.2 The problem is that the discursive reign tells only half the story, and discourse criticism--or knowledge of the Zone as discourse--duplicates the conditions of a scientific knowledge akin to physics, mathematics, and the like. Here Lyotard's distinction between scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge is useful. It can be said that the theorist or critic as knower of the Zone has fallen prey to the institutional legitimation of knowledge at a local level. To add what is missing in Lyotard's discourse, it can be said that the petit-rcits are the signal of a knowledge in which knowledge of the knower of the Zone has been covered over, that their legitimation purely through the fulfillment of their performative function is telling of a world in which discourse is purely scientific and masquerades as the truth. What is needed to fulfill the dharmic-ethical condition of the knowledge of the knower of the Zone is very much the non-discursive and prediscursive reality of the primary sociality of ethics, of existence, of being. For the Gita says that the object of knowledge which is Brahman is beyond logic, rationality, and comprehension: "Outside and inside beings, those that are moving and not moving, because of its subtlety this is not to be comprehended. ..remote and also near. Undivided yet remaining as if divided in all beings, And the sustainer of beings, this is the object of knowledge, their devourer and creator" (XIII:15-16; WBG 544, emphasis mine). Knowledge of the knower of the Zone must combine with knowledge of the Zone itself to reach its "subtle" object of non-comprehension--avijneyam: not to be known, not to be understood, not to be comprehended. Only such a unified knowledge can impart a dharmic-ethical meaning to action in the world, including the action of theoreticization or the action of criticism.3 My project seeks not only to effect a transformation in the nature of institutionalized postcolonial discourse, but insofar as post-colonialism is intimately imbricated with post-modernism, it aims at centralizing ethics without detracting from or negating the value of discourse criticism. In other words, if I do indeed wish to suggest and perform a transformation in the action of criticism, this transformation is an additive process, one of completion and complementation. Not

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just the Zone henceforth, but also always the knower of the Zone. Not just discourse and textuality, but also always non-discursive (as well as discursive)dharmic-ethics. Not just redundant reflections of the legitimized institutional terms of engagement sanctioned by the establishment, but also an explosion of ethical and universal difference onto reductive slots that try to "contain" post-colonialism as well as post-modernism. Symptomatic of this espousal of discourse-without-ethics and its meaningless relativism is the contribution of the eminent post-colonial critic Homi K. Bhabha in his essay entitled "The Commitment to Theory." It is by intervening in Bhabha's argument that the urgency of a reinvestment in ethical positioning is revealed. Though at times incisive and provocative, Bhabha's thinking finds itself time and again unable to anchor itself to any ethical ground from which it could then crystallize a reading beyond the easy conceptual impasse offered up by his brand post-structuralist rhetoric. This is why Bhabha formulates his commitment thus: "I want to take my stand on the shifting margins of cultural displacement--that confounds any profound or "authentic" sense of a "national" culture or an "organic" intellectual--and ask what the function of a committed theoretical perspective might be, once the cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world is taken as the paradigmatic point of departure" (LC21). Bhabha consciously positions himself in the fluctual and transformative moment of migration. Notably, this position is played out entirely in the realm of academic discourse, nay, more so in the realm made available by the indubitable conceptual space between the signifier and signified--in the "vicissitudes of the movement of the signifier" (23). From such a vantage point, Bhabha subordinates political action and the possibility of social transformation to the apparently exhilarating "discursive ambivalence [in rhetoric and writing] which makes the political possible" (24). It is clear that Bhabha as the knower of his discursive Zone is ignorant of the non-discursive reality informing him as knower within the Zone and enabling the "discursive ambivalence" he so cherishes. In constructing his theoretical commitment Bhabha attempts to break down the binarism of theory versus politics, a relationship in which clearly, for him, "critical theory" functions as the

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"Other." As always fidel to the post-structuralist wont, Bhabha focuses on the "language of political economy," on the scene of "writing" politics, and proceeds to discuss the ramifications of analyzing the discursive structures informing geo-political articulations. This process conveniently allows for him to disavow himself from providing a putative "object" to his commitment. Answering his own question, "commitment to what?", Bhabha can be glib in saying that "I do not want to identify any specific "object" of political allegiance...It is a sign of political maturity to accept that there are many forms of political writing whose different aspects are obscured when they are divided between the "theorist" and the "activist"" (21). Really? Is not Bhabha's rhetoric rather a sign of political escapism in the name of discourse? Is it not rather a sign of political immaturity to suppose that by locating himself in the interstitial space between theory and politics, he can "intervene ideologically" in any meaningful manner, that is, influence or effect the processes of "social transformation?" Bhabha's project seems no more than a subservient accommodation to the institutional delimitations of what may be said by the "marginal" critic; for what Bhabha is in effect saying is that everything is margin or boundary! A pleasing exercise in discourse perhaps but if there is a commitment in his theory it is one that aims to postpone any substantive change in the power nexus of academic discourse. A fundamental problem lies in the valorization of the binarism of theory and politics. In Bhabha's discussion, "politics" slides into the slot traditionally occupied by "praxis." A probable reason for this sleight of hand is that in using the term "politics" Bhabha is able to distance himself more easily from ethics than he would be if he was to remain in the domain of praxis. Indeed, it is hard to replace the word "political" with "practical" in the following statements: "the political subject--as indeed the subject of politics--is a discursive event..." (23), and, "What the attention to rhetoric and writing reveals is the discursive ambivalence that makes the "political" possible" (24). The erasure of praxis is further complicated by the absence of an ethical basis for his own writing. Having done away with the need of committing his theoretical engagement to any object, Bhabha is content to uncover the "abstract free play of the signifier" that reveals "an ambivalence at the point of the enunciation of a politics" (24-25). Employing the discursive

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transcriptions of Foucauldian power/knowledge and the iterative slippages of Derridean diffrance, Bhabha digs himself into a hole he is satisfied to call the "space of translation" and from which he constructs the non-object of his theoretical commitment: "a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienat[ing] our political expectations, and chang[ing,] as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics" (25 emphasis original). I would go so far as saying that Bhabha's new object is neither the one nor the other nor anything at all. What I would ask of Bhabha is that he climb out of the "space of translation" and survey the actuality of Zones where concrete and non-discursive objects exist, where all Zones and knowers are interwoven with an ethical thread, and where to gain and impart true knowledge he must tear the veil of discourse. A further problem arises when we are led to believe that history properly happens only in this space of translation made available in theory by a critique engage. This then allows for the conception of a "discursive temporality" in which a true "negotiation" between existing power structures and emergent ones is possible, a negotiation which is happily oblivious to the necessity of looking beyond its theoretical moment to any teleological or transcendent History, to any future as such. Instead, it is a moment of such radical import that it even "destroy[s] those negative polarities between knowledge and its objects, and between theory and practical-political reason" (25); and it is a space in which Bhabha can wholesomely assert that "there is no given community or body of the people whose inherent, radical historicity emits the right signs" (27 emphasis original). This is well and good in the realm of Derridean discourse, but in the realm of social praxis it difficult to see how activism and struggles for social transformation are to benefit by putting their objectives under erasure: "Each objective is constructed on the trace of that perspective that it puts under erasure; each political object is determined in relation to the other, and displaced in that critical act" (26). Again, this is a masterful deconstructive if not obfuscatory way of saying that life exists in a vast interconnected network fueled by absence and without beginning. But Bhabha's statement is also redundant for it basks in its discourse without engaging the dharmic-

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ethical conditions in which the "displacing," the "erasure," the "trace," etc. operate. In the case of the Naxalite struggle in India, for example, it makes little sense to adopt a commitment which urges reflection on the textual determinations for a group of people who live the unique and abysmal poverty of the Indian dispossessed and whose existential lives are always already informed by ethics and are certainly not the resulting object of reflexive theory or writing; in fact, their espousal of a Maoist-Leninist ideology is theorizable only through and after the existential violence of their commitment to social revolution. This commitment is not discursive but ethical. The point I am making is that events in history are precipitous and are always on the other side of the space of translation which Bhabha valorizes. Bhabha makes the Derridean zone of theory a primordial locus for understanding the constructedness, differential and deferential, of all structures; in this zone, however, ethics can be ignored or subordinated to discursive effects--a dangerous and irresponsible maneuver. It is on the other side, the pragmatic side where objects and subjects exist, where they are interpellated through various structures, and most importantly, where they are animated only in ethical Zones that the theorist needs to make his or her commitment. Bhabha's is a case of misplaced emphasis, then: the problem is not that one needs a Derridean commitment to theory but that theory needs a commitment to ethics. And such a commitment, finally, is impossible in the space of "the translation of theory." There are two additional interrelated concerns which need to be taken up here. The first deals with the difference between "cultural difference" and "cultural diversity," the second with the "Third Space of enunciation." Though Bhabha's call for a relocation of the demands made of theoretical work in the Zone of cultural difference is salubrious, his immediate and constant will to assert the hybridization of the practice of language at the site of its enunciation negates theory's possibility of an ethical-pragmatic project or thrust. By valorizing the splitting effect of the enunciative process, a splitting between "a stable system of reference" and "the necessary negation of the certitude in the articulation of new demands" (35), Bhabha glorifies the poststructural space, the "zone of occult instability" where formations such as authority, resistance, tradition, culture are "neither the one nor the other."

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I do not take issue with the post-structural deconstruction of terms that are invested with the sanction of legitimation; what is problematic in Bhabha's "location" is the fact that he uses the post-structuralist tools to remain firmly quagmired in the space, or more precisely the moment, of the instability, of the "vicissitudes" of the sign. In doing so, he fixates on the "Third space" in the semiotic structure of signification inspired by Saussurian and Lacanian principles: The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot "in itself" be conscious. What this unconscious relation introduces is an ambivalence in the act of interpretation. (36) Apart from providing a useful if veiled summary of the founding principles of semiotics in the second section of his essay on the commitment to theory, Bhabha does not instantiate any productive reorientation in the exercise of interpretation. By prioritizing the third space, the perfunctory ambivalence in any act of enunciation, the unconscious terrain of utterance, Bhabha shirks away from taking a stand, one that is situated in domain of pragmatics and one that is ethically situated in the world of concrete events. In making statements such as, "the meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the one nor the other" (36), Bhabha only provides an affirmative answer to the very question he consciously wishes to negate--"Is the language of theory merely another power ploy of the culturally privileged Western elite to produce a discourse of the Other that reinforces its own power-knowledge equation?" (20-21). Bhabha's third space seems just such a ploy. But Where is Bhabha located? Needless to say, the site of Bhabha's production is that territory marked by the overlap between the disciplines of post-modernism and post-colonialism. It is a territory where, discursively speaking, the subject is split, legitimation and authority are never whole, and ambivalence mocks the certitude of all enterprise. But more importantly, it is a terrain in which the critic as Bhabha divests responsibility by playing the diffrance game of infinite deferrals

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without having to present any ethical referrals to or for his enterprise. To his credit, Bhabha is truly a master sans pareil in the Zone of theoretical obfuscation, that is, "in the substitution of post-structuralist linguistic manipulation for historical and social explanation" (Dirlik 333). In brief, then, I am criticizing Bhabha's brand of post-colonial theory for lacking a firm ethical foundation that is committed to mobilizing a cohesive political action, or indeed, a project of social transformation. It must be noted here that Bhabha's commitment to theory, though, is not explicitly presented in the trappings of post-colonial discourse--it is self-consciously a poststructuralist statement inserted in, as the title of his book The Location of Culture suggests, theoretical debates informing cultural studies in general. As such, its commitment is purely Western in its implicit and often explicit espousal of the Self/Other dichotomy as fundamental structuring principle. Robert Young's White Mythologies provides an excellent account of the Hegelian reign of the Self and Other dialectic in Western metaphysics, and also locates some key problems in Bhabha's discourse, specifically his recourse to the "static concepts" of mimicry, hybridity, etc., which succeed each other without articulating any relationship or continuity between each other. Young finds Bhabha's concepts "curiously anthropomorphized so that they possess their own desire, with no reference to the historical provenance of the theoretical material from which such concepts are drawn, or to the theoretical narrative of Bhabha's own work, or to that of the cultures to which they are addressed" (146). As a result, a considerable portion of Young's energy in this essay is devoted to retrieving Bhabha's "theoreticist anarchism" in a positive light, by lauding its strategic refusal to reify mastery, and seeing his eclectic use of theory as an ironic and selfconscious "colonial mockery:" "A teasing mimicry of certain Western theorists and discourses that is like, but not quite?" (155). Though Young makes an important contribution to understanding some of the key discursive processes that have gone into "Writing history and the West," his critique itself remains limited by the range of possibilities dictated by the pervasive Western Self and Other dialectic, and is unable to conceptualize a positive "universality" outside of the Self and Other structure. Consequently, he applauds both Foucault and Lyotard for their

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quest to foreground singularity over universality (10). His statement, "this quest for the singular, the contingent event which by definition refuses all conceptualization [here we find ourselves contemplating the eternal non-discursive mystery!] can clearly be related to the project of constructing a form of knowledge that respects the other without absorbing it into the same" (10, emphasis mine), indicates a symptomatic Western imaginative failure to conceive a form of knowledge which does away with the Other altogether and ushers in a knowledge of the Self. Once this is done, as I attempt to do with the philosophy of the Gita, then we can talk about and through a properly new universality. To Young et al I say that the standard of measure doesn't have to be the rule of the Self and Other. In this respect, I find it useful to reiterate Cixous's discontent with the Other (though in doing so I give it an unintended twist) in the The Newly Born Woman: What is the Other? If it is truly the "other," there is nothing to say, it cannot be theorized. The "other" escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside: absolutely other. it doesn't settle down. But in History, of course, what is called the "other" is an alterity that does settle down, that falls into the dialectical circle. It is the other in a hierarchically organized relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines, and assigns "its" other [70-71]. (in Young 2) Cixous' complaint is powerful and resonates with my critique, for it exposes the absolute fiction of the Self and Other dialectic as the necessary condition for explaining lop-sided Western relationships and projects such as Imperialism and Nazism, to name but a couple. Let us remember in counter-point here Nandy's assertion that the ordinary Indian's ethnic universalism remained impervious to the colonizer's Self and Other chicanery. I can now return to the earlier discussion regarding the status of and false divide between post-colonialism and post-modernism. And it is with a view of reinvesting ethics into not only an appraisal of the Zone but also into an appraisal of the knower of the Zone. This task must begin with the reconceptualization of the unique individual whose constitution is not just through and within the structures of a technologically transformed Zone but also through the unchanging structures of spirituality. At this point it is necessary to emphasize that it is the absence of an

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ethically responsible position that deprives Bhabha's text a geopolitical thrust and a meaningful political agency. His discourse as post-colonial discourse is exemplary in demonstrating the kind of "dubious spatiality" and "problematic temporality" that invalidates theory and criticism falling under the category of "post-colonial" (Shohat). Although I think that Shohat is right in suggesting the deployment of the terms "neo-colonialism" and "post-independence" against the debilitating ambivalences of the term "post-colonial" as terms that are more stringently defined to the on-going processes of political and cultural negotiations which are affected by the legacy and history of Imperial colonization--and are under the insidious attack of the New World hegemony as defined by the United States--the answer to her crucial question lies first and foremost in the domain of ethics: "Who is mobilizing what in the articulation of [post-colonial criticism], deploying what identities, identifications and representations, and in the name of what political vision and goals" (110)? Arif Dirlik has undertaken the task of responding to another important question posed by Shohat, "when exactly...does the post-colonial begin?", by aligning the conditions of the emergence of the post-colonial as a social practice and institutionalized inquiry with the moment, however extended and fragmented, of the emergence of global capitalism. Accordingly, the postcolonial critic speaks from a position of "newfound power" within the fabric of transnational societies propelled to localized recuperations of meaning. There is a certain sense of hypocrisy, however, in the articulations made by such a post-colonial critic located within the Western academy: there is usually no acknowledgment of the fact that it is the ubiquitous processes of capitalism, experienced today in its late or global or transnational stage, which is the enabling condition of the post-colonial discourse (which is vying for, if it has not already done so, to supersede the older categories of the Third World and of the three words theory), and more concretely, of the institutionalized post in academia for the post-colonial critic. This means that the "newfound power" lacks an ethical and dharmic-ethical agency and therefore remains compartmentalized in spite of all its aspirations towards effecting deconstruction.

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A fundamental criterion which fuels postcolonial discourse is the invalidation of the Nation as the hegemonic "global unit of political organization," especially for the migrant postcolonial critic situated at the spatio-temporal "in-between." It thus not by accident that both the content addressed and the strategies adopted by the post-colonial critic resonate with "the conceptual needs presented by transformations in global relationships caused by changes within the capitalist world economy" (331). Having centralized the importance of global capitalism as the structuring principle of culture today, a move that necessarily erases the distinction between the enterprises of postmodernism and postcolonialism, Dirlik pointedly suggests that "if a crisis in historical consciousness, with all its implications for national and individual identity is a basic theme of postcoloniality, then the First World itself is postcolonial" (337, emphasis mine). The conceptual framework dealing with the death of the post-Enlightenment metanarratives has, of course, been explored at greater length by Lyotard in his discussion of the postmodern condition. In the postmodern age of performative societies, legitimation occurs through petit-rcits at the institutions. In such a condition, one can see how the postcolonial critic is performing nothing beyond the truth of the possibility of postcolonial discourse. Put another way, the postcolonial critic is yet another mask in the series of roles written by the processes of a global capitalist economy whose only impetus is towards maximizing the efficiency of its production-consumption ratio on the globe. The role played by the postcolonial critic is to act as an antagonist to Eurocentric ideology, to suppress his or her own conditions of birth in the powernexus of the material relationships of global capitalism, and finally, to divert attention from the fact that global capitalism is rapidly reconfiguring the geo-political map of the planet through a movement of national and intra-national fragmentation along the lines of flight of transnational capital. What is a viable resistance that can be offered up in the face of such a relentless and speedy process? Or, to raise the question with which Dirlik closes his statement, "the question,then is...whether, in recognition of its own class-position in global capitalism, ["this global intelligentsia"] can generate a thoroughgoing criticism of its own ideology and formulate

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practices of resistance against the system of which it is a product" (356). The resistance against any contemporary ideological apparatus must consist in taking up options which have been covered up or devalued in the march of modernity and technological progress during at least the twentieth century. My general argument, of course, seeks to revalue a discourse of ethical action and orient it towards both the theory and the culture that is structured according to the textual and cultural logic of late capitalism. This logic has been interrogated at length by Frederic Jameson, who in his study rightly links postmodern culture with America, as the exemplary post-industrial society whose global cultural domination is a sign of the power of media and also the "internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination" (5). Jameson is also quick to employ the "surface/depth" model to account for the interpellation of the postmodern subject in a world of simulacra. This subject, akin to the Baudrillardian subject of jouissance, finds itself without the succor of interiorizable justification or morality; that is, it is no longer the centered, bourgeois monad capable of feeling modernist anxiety of the type emblematized by Edward Munch's The Scream. This subject is no longer a container of affect but a euphoric surface for the bombardment of free-floating signifiers. Having set up this model for the postmodern subject, Jameson is content to conclude that moralistic criticism of life as the experience of the hyperreality of postmodern space is a "category mistake," since as a historical phenomenon postmodernity has already exposed the fictionality of any collective project or progressive Utopianism. The only viable option for the cultural critic or moralist, then, is to embrace a liberating materialist dialectic proposed by Marx, one that is able to "think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together" (47). There are, however, a couple of fundamental problems in the way that Jameson, as a representative postmodernist, construes his subject. First, by categorically denying any presence of depth in his subject he reiterates the prevalent misunderstanding of what Derrida-after-Patocka calls the conception of the "unique self." The individualism of technological civilization is related

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to the mask, to role-playing, in other words to Jamesonian surfaces, and has effectively obfuscated the mystery of the unique person "whose secret remain hidden behind the social mask" (GD 36). Such an individualism is lived precisely in its relation to a metaphysics of force: "Force has become the modern figure of being. Being has allowed itself to be determined as a calculable force, and man instead of relating to the being that is hidden under this figure of force, represents himself as quantifiable power" (GD 37). Although premised on an originary authenticity, this criticism of the technological individual holds merit for the purposes of interrogating the contours of an ethics which is not disabled as it were in the confusion in which "individualism becomes socialism or collectivism [and] simulates an ethics or politics of singularity" (GD 36). A second and related problem emerges once we juxtapose postcolonialiaty with postmodernity. As seen above, the postcolonial is properly a global reflection of the processes of late capitalism. Though the signifier "postcoloniality" is temporally belated as opposed to the term "postmodernity" in gaining currency in World-systems discourses, once activated it is arguably a term which enables an analysis of global capitalism that is truly more "global" than the more restricted postmodernism. This is to say that Jameson's cultural critique relies on a narrowly defined terrain--one which uses Gibson's cyberpunk and Portman's Bonaventure Hotel as examples to conceive of the subject as surface, fragmentation, and so on. Obviously, an analysis restricted by such post-technological parameters cannot be extended in any meaningful way to reflect the cultural processes in other territories which are not only those outside the United States but also those outside the narrow band of cyberpunkism and bonaventurial lack of conceptual mapping within the United States itself. That this is a short-coming of Jameson's discourse is evident considering that the pathways of global capitalism, by his own admission even, intersect and network across the entire planet today. Why does Jameson base his understanding of postmodernism on such a local and unrepresentative territory? Because, it is only on this space that he can convince himself that the postmodern subject is beyond the category of depth. Not only does Jameson's thinking do away completely with the category of the subject that is responsible but it demonstrates the primacy of

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the Self and Other dichotomy as the structuring principle for his Americo-Eurocentric discourse. In his somewhat infamous intervention in the arena of post-colonialism in "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," the Self/Other relationship is recast in the guise of a First World/Third World binary. Under such a configuration, Jameson's gesture can be seen principally as stemming from the sympathetic desire of a privileged member of the First World community to listen to the marginalized difference of a distanced and homogenized Third-World Other. It is this reductive approach from a benign First-worldly Father which leads to the conscriptive and disempowering formulation of his thesis: All third world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel. (69) The First World/Third World binary is also compatible with Jameson's Postmodernism/Nationalism binary, for the First World's logic of late capitalism has supposedly made obsolete the forms of representation, such as realism and naturalism, which still abide in the nations of the Third World. Aijaz Ahmad, who has exposed the many prejudices which circumscribe the limited scope of Jameson's conception of the Third World, is right on the money when he shows the theoretical, historical, and cultural inadequacy of the First and Third worlds bifurcation, and urges instead a model that considers not three but one world structured everywhere by the processes of transnational capitalism, "by the global operation of a single mode of production, namely the capitalist one, and the global resistance to this mode, a resistance which is itself unevenly developed in different parts of the globe" (103). Ahmad's model is certainly closer to the truth than Jameson's, though his general critique of the irresponsibility of poststructuralist theories and post-modernist discourse, effected by his socialist leaning, sounds misinformed and bilious in its wholesale dismissal and does not end up offering an alternative and viable theoretical mechanism. An interesting moment occurs in Ahmad's text as he underlines the ambiguity operative in Jameson's employment of the First and Third worlds divide (106-110). The First World refers

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variously to postmodernity, to the capitalist mode of production, and even to the "Graeco-Judaic" entirety of Western civilization; there is a similar slippage and inflation of the category of the Third World. This all-encompassing proliferation leads Ahmad to "the alarming feeling that the Bhagvada-Gita, the edicts of Manu, and the Qur'an itself are perhaps Third World texts" (106). Whereas Jameson's categories are slippery in an effort to mystify the connivance of his text with a reiteration of the privileged enunciatory position of Americo-Eurocentrism within Academia, Ahmad's critique remains trapped within the conceptual confines of Self and Other, with the notable exception of proposing capitalism as a global process (and he also hints at an interpenetration of the purported self and other when he points to the Judaic elements in the Qur'an and the Graeco-Indic elements of ancient Harrapan art). The ethical motive for Ahmad's project comes from his Marxist-socialist philosophy, but this only prompts his situating himself and his cause as the suppressed Other of capitalism. His critique stops short of suggesting an alternative for effecting substantive change in academic power structures, but it does have the merit of reminding us to keep an acerbic vigilance against the unethical reign of post-structuralist textuality. His discourse remains as equally limited as Jameson's as the demonstration of a knowledgeable exposition of the Zone at the expense ignoring completely knowledge of the nondiscursive self. As knowers of only their Zones, then, Jameson and Ahmad truly remain comrades-in-arms. Though this is not the moment to begin explicating the ramifications of adding knowledge of the knower of the Zone in the equation of true Knowledge to invest criticism and theory with a dharmic-ethical thrust (which I intend to do in my subsequent chapters as I read selected twentienth century fiction), I must point out that to do so means a necessary erasure the First World/Third World binarism which is as a concept is ethically sanctioned by what Derrida has called the religions of the Book, religions that describe an ethical universe premised on an unequal binarism, on God as the Absolute Other. Both Ella Shohat and Arif Dirlik are right in noting that the signifier "postcolonial" has gained acceptance and circulation in academic discourse because of its ambivalence--as opposed

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to more stringent terms such as neo-colonialism, neo-Imperialism, and even Third World--and because of its mystification of agency: the term mystifies both politically and methodologically a situation that represents not the abolition but the reconfiguration of earlier forms of domination. The complicity of postcolonial in hegemony lies in postcolonialism's diversion of attention from contemporary problems of social, political, and cultural domination, and in its obfuscation of its own relationship to what is but a condition of its emergence, that is, to global capitalism that, however fragmented in appearance, serves as the structuring principle of global relations. (Dirlik 331). Neither of them, however, extends their critique to constructing an alternative discourse which would not only combat this complicity--for to signal is a preamble to combat--but would also reorient the post-colonial project to effectively transgress its compartmentalization. As such, then, both Shohat and Dirlik remain firmly within the parameters of the postcoloniality; theirs is an exemplary post-colonial discourse which strains against the bounds of its own compartment without breaking through and getting "outside," and without effecting a reconfiguration or reshaping. There are moments in Dirlik's writing that which would lead him to such a reshaping but they are not pursued. First, why is it that post-colonial discourse and intellectuals gained validity and respectability in the 1980's, that is, concurrently with Reaganomics in the United States and Thatcherism in the United Kingdom? My immediate answer as hasty gloss is because this is when the ethical as base was erased from the function of capitalist expansion, when politics overtly ceased to be "responsible," and when, therefore, postcolonial discourse could begin to speak itself without disturbing the emergent New World order. Second, even though it may true that postcolonial discourse, far from being a representation of the agony of loss and displacement, is an expression of "newfound power" for the migrant intellectual, it is a power that is already stripped of any agency for effecting meaningful social change or transformation. It is a discourse severed from the ethical reality of non-discursive life, a discourse--symptomizing all the ills of post-modernism-- that is unable in its very constitutive structures to address the world outside its textual Western tower. In this respect, Spivak's "catachresis," for all its good intentions, accomplishes nothing if it simply reverses, displaces, and seizes "the apparatus of value-coding,"

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for this apparatus which allows itself to be seized is a Western apparatus--it keeps postcolonialism furiously running in the same place. An excellent example of the fact that, without thinking about the non-discursive ethical reality present in and informing all actions, all critiques remain firmly ensconced in reiterating the power structures that make post-modernist and post-colonialist articulations within academia possible, is to be found in Arun Mukherji's highly problematic article entitled "Whose PostColonialism and Whose Postmodernism?". There is one instance when the non-discursive is mentioned, but never can it become an important point in Arun's thinking that seeks a solution without changing the rules of the game. This occurs when he cites Cornel West's reminder of a reality which cannot be known discursively: "a reality that one cannot know. The ragged edges of the Real, of Necessity, of not being able to eat, not having shelter, not having health care..." (5). West's emphasis on the lived experience is invoked by Mukherji as an example of that which is elided in "postmodernism's eternal fascination with language's imperfect access to the "real"" (45). But the space which is opened up for a reflection on the non-discursive as it pertains to postcolonial and post-modern projects is promptly closed up by Mukherji in the name of discourse, here faulting postmodernists for their supposedly eclectic discursive bricolage--"postmodernist texts that "use and abuse" everything" (5)--while simultaneously "forget[ting] that literary discourse is deeply implicated with all other discourses current in society" (5). How can postmodernism use and abuse all discourses and at the same time forget that all these discourses are implicated with one another? This contradictory indictment of postmodernism is emblematic of the artifice Mukherji has to employ in order to claim separate spaces for post-colonialism and post-modernism. Contrary to his stated intention, Mukherji's article in fact provides an exemplary instantiation of the false divide between post-colonialism and post-modernism. In his effort to polarize one against the other, Mukherji requisitions definitions of post-modernism which in their reductive formulation simply contradict the interpenetration of discourses and events he holds as factual truth for both post-modernity and for post-coloniality. In other words, postmodernism is

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variously defined as having "a White European male genesis," as being "largely a white European cultural phenomenon," of having "assimilationist and homogenizing tendencies" when "it refers to the texts of non-Europeans in the company of texts of Euro-Americans as though no racial cultural, historical, political, epistemological and ontological differences separated them" (3). Clearly, postmodernism for Arun Mukherji has to be severed from the global processes of transnational capitalism, from the history and legacy of Imperialism, as if the White European male came up with the idea all by himself! What we see happening in Mukherji's text is an act of postmodernism--in his definition of it--in its defense of post-colonialism: post-colonialism becomes a complex weave of discursive and historical events and a heterogeneous Zone, whereas post-modernism becomes an insular homogenizing mistake. In the end, one can say that Mukherji's essay deconstructs itself proving only that post-modernism and post-colonialism are interchangeable terms, synonyms designating a similar critical action being performed in the academic Zone. Their separateness is artificial and a necessary fiction which is kept in place by forbidding a consideration of non-discursive ethical and dharmic-ethical motives of the knower of this Zone. Having set-up some of my concerns in post-modernism and post-colonialism, I will now turn to a reading of some contemporary fictions, that belong either one or both the academic Zones, in order exemplify the kind of dharmic-ethical criticism that I have been clamoring about in these two chapters. Specifically, the fictions which I examine through my framework have been chosen for their prominent status in recent post-colonial and post-modern discussions and include: Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon), The Moor's Last Sigh (Rushdie), Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee), andDraupadi (Mahasweta Devi). I discuss individual commitment to ethics and also concentrate on the proliferating technologies which impact subject determination and being in contemporary cultures and societies. As such, my investigation is both textual and dharmic-ethical, for I believe that only in unison will the two generate an alternative understanding of the ethical domains of the various actions and individuals represented in the fictions, and also of the various critical actions performed on those fictions, including mine.

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In conclusion, I would like to make explicit the prime motivation for this project: that in my personal experience I have seen a culture that remains highly spiritual even as it partakes in and enjoys the global processes of capitalism and technology; I refer specifically to the culture of modern India today. It is a culture which has two competing traditions, one which embraces modern civilization and its technological forces, the other which has been and continues to remain non-modern in its ethnic universalism: Arguably, this latter is a tradition which is not in crisis, and its civilization is not weighed down by the failure of responsibility in any sense similar to the one Derrida analyzes. But what about the West? Are there competing traditions, or has the drive toward technology won out as J.F. Lyotard maintains? Has faith in meta-languages really ebbed to the extent that the only legitimation in post-modern technocratic cultures is to be found locally, through institutions and petit-rcits? It is quite clear that the Meta-narrative is alive and kicking in the dominant tradition in India today. Taking the non-modern Indian experience of ethical action and universalism marks a provocative site for entry into a discussion of the erasure of ethical values in the West and an interrogation of the repression of ethical sanction in academic discourse of post-coloniality and post-modernity.
1The

"great elements" are: ether, air, fire, water and earth. The "consciousness of the "I,"" is the translation of the Sanskrit ahamkaras which also means consciousness of self and of self-making. The ten senses refer to the eye, ear, skin, tongue, nose, and the five organs of action, the hand, foot, mouth, anus, and genital organ. the "one" sense is the mind, and finally, the five fields of action of the senses are sound, touch, color, taste and smell. Sargeant reminds us that these are all Sankhya concepts.
2Psychiatric

and psychoanalytic studies may be held up here as a contradiction to my argument, but I find them also to be a function of discourse. The schizoanalysis project envisioned in AntiOedipus is perhaps closer to reaching a truth about the field and the knower of the field, but as I proposed in my previous chapter, it erases the Witness, the Conscience, and is ultimately also an incomplete model.
3As

a consequence of my discussion, an intriguing corollary, so to speak, presents itself. Only narrative knowledge, in this sense, can be ethical, whereas all systematic discourse which manage to suppress in one form or another the pre and non discursive conditions of the knowledge of the knower of the field are ipso facto unethical and non-dharmic. This takes us to the opposite end of the

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claim made by Levinas regarding the unethical nature of tropic language. A strong argument presents itself in my account here for the unethical nature of all language that suppresses its tropic nature--for all language, is after all, trope.