Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy

by Vinay Lal

Overview

During the media frenzy over the Millennium celebrations, there was little mention of the fact that, for the majority of the world, there was no Millennium at all. This linear understanding of time is a specifically Western - and Christian - concept. This is just one example of the homogenization of knowledge that Vinay Lal uses to demonstrate that nearly every idea which we take for granted in the west is part of a politics of ideas. Oppression is usually associated with class struggle, military power, and other forms of economic monopoly. Lal looks beyond this, deconstructing the cultural assumptions that have emerged alongside capitalism, to offer a devastating critique of the politics of knowledge at the heart of all powerbroking.Other topics examined are the concept of "development", which has created a generally accepted hierarchy of "developed" and "developing" countries, providing a mandate for surreptitious colonization; and the idea of the 'nation state', something we have lived with for no more than two centuries, yet is accepted without question. Linking this to the emergence of 'international governance' through the United Nations, the US, and imperial economic bodies (such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization), Lal explains how such universalisms came to dominate the trajectory of Western thought. "No More Requiems" is an impassioned account of the need to move towards an emancipatory politics of plurality and democracy that reveals which competing categories of knowledge can claim our allegiance for the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745317366
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	10/20/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.32(w) x 8.47(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Vinay Lal is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at UCLA. He writes widely on the history and culture of colonial and modern India, popular and public culture in India (especially cinema), historiography, the politics of world history, the Indian diaspora, global politics, contemporary American politics, the life and thought of Mohandas Gandhi, Hinduism, and the politics of knowledge systems.

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CHAPTER 1

Reckoning with the Millennium

The twenty-first century is upon us. While the greater number of millennium-mongers squandered their energies on the "Y2K" problem, often indulging in more esoteric apocalyptic visions, and others were detained by the more pedestrian, though not meaningless, exercise of determining whether 1 January 2000 or 1 January 2001 marked the decisive moment in this turn of history, few paused to consider how "millennium" and even "century" came to constitute such ubiquitous categories of our experience. Like a great many other things, the categories by which time is calculated – hour, week, month, year, decade, century, and millennium – have been naturalized, but there is nothing self-evident about how a week of seven days became the unit by means of which time flows into our lives, or about the calendar that dominates much of the modern world system. Almost nothing is as cliched as the observation that "we are all the slaves of time," though that "we" is at times thought to exclude those of the non-Western world whose management skills at time still fall far short of minimally desirable standards; moreover, this enslavement not only does not evoke much resistance, it is welcomed as the most decisive marker of progress in human affairs and the orderliness of a world always on the verge of slipping into chaos and the chasm of discontent.

The schedule and calendar rule most lives, but there is nothing inevitable about this course of history. It is only in the mid-eighteenth century, with the emergence of industrialization and the factory clock, that the tyrannical discipline of time became a reality for the working classes. Another 100 years were to elapse before the standardization of time was achieved in the West itself, while in much of the rest of the world the Gregorian calendar was becoming paramount, though the "natives" had still to learn the lessons of the clock. If by some accounts the inhabitants of the underdeveloped countries still do not make good use of their time, they are nonetheless largely captive to the norms of the Western calendar. Birthday celebrations, for instance, are one of the most iconic measures of how far modernity and secularism have crept into the sensibility of all cultures, though doubtless the birthday party has been molded and transformed by the idioms of local cultural practices. Doubtless, too, some cultures have retained their own calendars, but from the point of view of the moderns, that is no more than the churlish resistance of tradition-bound nativists and primordialists, or – considering the profound association of many calendrical systems with religion – an attempt to retain a religious space within the secular domain of modernity.

Having entered the new millennium, should we not stop to ask for whom it is that the millennium struck and continues to strike, and by what sleight of hand the Christian millennium became the benchmark for all peoples? What meaning can the millennium possibly have for (say) Muslims, if not to remind them that the entire world now lives in the thralldom of the West, and that no one is safe from the ambitions, to use that phrase fraught with ominous consequences, of the world's sole superpower? Is it the imminence of the new millennium that, in the 1990s, appeared to have generated a certain melancholia in Islamic countries, and which formed the substratum of unease and anxiety among Muslims, whether in Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, or elsewhere? A thousand years ago, a large swathe of the world, from the Atlantic extending across North Africa and the western Mediterranean to west Asia and Afghanistan, was under the sway of Muslim rulers. Today, by contrast, Western domination is supreme, and the derisive term "Islamic fundamentalism" has become commonplace.

Or, to ask questions in a different vein, though we have long understood how European powers effected spatial colonization, are we sufficiently cognizant of the dimensions of temporal colonization? The recent postcolonial incursions into museum studies have alerted us to the exhibitionary complex of colonialism, and the epistemological significance and political thrust of the various "world fairs" that began to proliferate in Europe and North America in the second half of the nineteenth century, but much less has been written on the manner in which museums colonize time. The railroad timetable, the Gregorian calendar, the weekly schedule, the factory clock, and the office timecard inserted themselves with considerable virulence and bloodthirstiness into the culture of colonized peoples, and yet the imperialism of time may well have more deleterious consequences in the years to come. The homogenization of time has not only facilitated the emergence of globalization and a worldwide culture of corporate business and management distinguished only by its extraordinary mediocrity and greed, it has also greatly assisted in narrowing the visions of the future. To speak of the resistance to clock and corporate time, which betoken a mentality nowhere better expressed than in the predictably American formulation that "time is money," is to point not merely to what some may deride as utopian thoughts, but to a cultural politics of time that would enable us to reterritorialize temporality.

MONOLITHIC TEMPORALITY

It is with remarkable prescience that Lewis Mumford, more than 50 years ago, observed that

the clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the industrial age ... In its relationship to determinable quantities of energy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing, the clock has been the foremost machine in modern technic; and at each period it has remained in the lead: it marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire.

Our sensibilities in late modernity are marked by an extraordinary but deadened awareness of time: it has become habitual to speak of having no time, of being too busy, and of being harried by time. Though industrialization and the age of cyberspace are associated with time-saving devices, the overwhelming number of people appear to be extremely short on time, and in countries such as the United States, the working week appears to have become longer for the laboring and corporate class alike. Juliet Schor's acclaimed study, The Overworked American, suggests that the working day over the last 50 years has become increasingly longer, and in the two decades between 1970 and 1990, an average of nine hours of extra work were added to most working lives each year.

"What kind of rule is this?" asks Sebastian de Grazia: "The more timesaving machinery there is, the more pressed a person is for time." What does it mean to save time? Or, indeed, to waste time? Is time saved when a phone conversation is conducted from the wheel of a car, and are those who resolutely fail to embrace this innovation thereby wasting time? Is leisure time wasted, or time well-spent? And if well-spent, when does it shade into squandered time, idleness, anomie? What kind of investment does saved time represent, and why is it that this investment has had, demonstrably, such strange and poor returns? More so than in any previous age, lives appear to be tyrannized by clocks, office and airline schedules, and calendars. The story of temporal colonization has been told inadequately. "The invention of the mechanical clock was one of a number of major advances that turned Europe," David Landes remarks, "from a weak, peripheral, highly vulnerable outpost of Mediterranean civilization into a hegemonic aggressor." The pervasive assumption of technological determinism behind this assessment should not obscure the fact that Europe at this juncture of history displayed considerably more interest in the scientific and mechanical keeping of time than most of the Asian, African, and other cultures that Europeans encountered, and both timekeeping and calendrics were among the many domains of social activity in which they claimed superiority. The infamous "lazy native" of colonial discourse, it need not be said, had no use for the watch and seldom kept time, and the clock-towers that are now found in the towns and cities of many formerly colonized nations were built under the dispensation of colonial regimes. European powers colonized, penalized, and traumatized their own dissenters and religious, ethnic, racial, and intellectual Others before proceeding to colonize the non-Western world, and in the matter of how time was reckoned with, the homogenization of the Western world was similarly to precede the entry of a uniform clock-time in the rest of the world.

The Pattern of the Week

Though seconds, minutes, hours, and days – the rising and setting of the sun furnishing the divisions of day and night – constitute the basic units of time, the pre-eminent centrality of the week to the modern organization of time, odd as it is, must be underscored. Patterns of life are generally framed around the week: think of the weekly shopping day, the weekly magazine, the working week (and the ensual of Monday blues), the weekend, the weekly change of films, and so on. It is the weekly schedule which determines the shape of appointments. A year may equally be thought of as 12 months, or 52 weeks; but since recurrent events, such as winter, spring, and summer holidays, or school terms, seldom coincide with an entire calendrical month, one is more likely to think of a one-week vacation or a school term that lasts 10 or 15 weeks. Sociologist Pritrim A. Sorokin has written,

Imagine for a moment that the week suddenly disappeared. What a havoc would be created in our time organization, in our behavior, in the co-ordination and synchronization of collective activities and social life, and especially in our time apprehension ... We think in week units; we apprehend time in week units; we localize the events and activities in week units; we co-ordinate our behavior according to the "week"; we live and feel and plan and wish in "week" terms. It is one of the most important points of our "orientation" in time and social reality.

The precise origin of the seven-day week has never been established with absolute certainty. It is sometimes conjectured that the seven-day week may have been inspired by the lunar cycle, which in fact is not a 28-day or four-week cycle. In the Judaeo-Christian world, the Creation is described as having taken place over six days; "And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done." Thus the seventh day, which God "blessed," was "hallowed" because 'on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation' (Genesis 2:1-3). The observance of the holy day, the Sabbath, was to be the sign that would differentiate the Jews from the non-Jews (Ezekiel 20:12), and it was to assist them in the preservation of their Jewishness amidst the hostile gentiles, particularly during the period of Exile. When Christianity arose out of Judaism, the seven-day cycle was not dispensed with, but rather the Christians tried to mark out their own sphere by eventually electing Sunday rather than Saturday as the day of the Sabbath. Initially, as a persecuted minority, Christians sought to establish a day when they could all congregate in common.

That the Christian Sabbath was deliberately established on Sunday, to help distinguish the Christians from the Jews, is demonstrated by the history of the conflict over Easter, the most important moveable feast in Christianity. In the Eastern churches, the celebration of Easter coincided with the Jewish celebration of Passover, and at the meeting of the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325, it was declared a heresy to celebrate Easter on the same day as Passover. By ruling that Easter be celebrated on the Sunday following the full moon, the two auspicious occasions were severed from each other, since Passover is always celebrated on a full moon. Similarly, though the Nativity, or birth of Christ, was originally celebrated on January 6th, it was only in AD 354 that Christmas was first celebrated on December 25, though the choice of that day was scarcely innocuous. Since Epiphany, which marks the appearance of Jesus as the Christ to the gentiles, was also celebrated on January 6, the Church came to the realization that it was very unlikely that both the birth of Christ and Epiphany had occurred on the same day. In choosing December 25 as Christ's birthday, the Church could not claim to be motivated by biblical evidence or customary practice, if only because the time of the year when Christ was born is nowhere indicated; but since December 25 marked the celebration of winter solstice, it was a day on which the Church marked its determined opposition to pagan rites. In the nexus between religion and the politics of temporality, however, Christianity is scarcely unique. When, in the seventh century, Islam was founded, again the primacy of the seven-day week was not questioned, but Friday, rather than Saturday or Sunday, was chosen as the holy day of the week; indeed, Saturday and Sunday were seen as days of bad omens. In this manner, the Prophet sought to signify the singularity of Islam, and weld the adherents of the faith into a distinct community. If in Christianity Sunday marks the principal day of church attendance, in Islamic countries the importance of Friday is perhaps even more salient: cities with large Muslim populations give pride of place to the Friday Mosque. The singularity of Friday in Islamic countries, it has less often been noticed, resides in the circumstance that it is not, unlike the Jewish Sabbath and Christian Sundays, a day of rest as such, but rather a day on which Muslims are called forth to offer public worship at noon.

Elsewhere, for instance among the Hindus, the seven-day week may have arisen out of the seven planets of ancient astrology Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, Mars – and it is altogether possible that even in the Western world, the astrological influence was predominant. As one scholar has noted, "the Indian days of the week (varas) had already matched their European counterparts many centuries before regular contact between India and the West was established," and today only places which are outside the orbit of any of the world's major religions, or have arrived at a particular accommodation between a world religion and a vernacular tradition of faith, are likely to have a conception of social organization of life in which the notion of the seven-day week does not play a critical role. However, speaking historically, the week has not always comprised seven days. In many societies, the week generally revolved around the market day, and in societies as varied as those of Peru, Colombia, Indochina, southern China, and Mesoamerica, the week could extend anywhere from three to ten days. Among the Khasis of northeast India, the market was held every eighth day, and the week was accordingly seen as consisting of eight days; in Togo, the market was held every six days, which became the length of the week.

In the modern period, there have been two notable, but strikingly unsuccessful, attempts to alter the seven-day week, both inspired by the desire to escape what was deemed to be the nefarious influence of bourgeois Christianity. The revolutionary calendar introduced by the French Republic, which marked the year 1792 as Year One, was composed of twelve months, and each month was made up of three ten-day periods of time called decades. This calendar eliminated the traditional Sabbath day, and the weekly rest day, Sunday, was replaced by one rest day every ten days. Much later, the Bolshevik regime, in September 1929, instituted the five-day – and then the six-day – week, in the hope that the illusion of a shorter working week would spur the laboring classes to increased productivity. Both calendar reforms failed, and in France and the Soviet Union alike the seven-day week was restored. It is a mark of the resilience of the seven-day week that the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe, fearful that he would lose his "Reckoning of Time for want of Books and Pen and Ink," and "even forget the Sabbath Day from the working Days," used his knife to etch on to wood the date of his arrival upon the island of which he imagined himself to be the sole inhabitant, and then for every day made a notch with his knife, '"every Seventh Notch" being "as long again as the rest." When, at long last, Crusoe encountered a native, he named the man "Friday" after the day of the week when he chanced upon him.

The Christian Era and the Gregorian Calendar

The present primacy of the Gregorian calendar has obscured the recognition that different calendrical systems have vied with each other over the greater part of history, and that the Gregorian calendar, a product of the Christian West, has only in the relatively recent past established a nearly worldwide hegemony. Not to speak of the civilizations of China and India, which developed various calendars and complex systems for the measurement of time over long periods, and were fertilized by contact with each other as well as with the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and Asia, even the Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs, which developed in isolation from other civilizations, certainly that of the West, invented elaborate systems of timekeeping. The first Egyptian calendar, which remarkably had 365M days, dates back to 4236 BC, which is also the earliest recorded date in history. Some recent estimates still speak of 40 different calendars presently in use, if only for strictly religious reasons, around the world. Even this number may be vastly understated, when we consider that the Calendar Reform Committee, appointed by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1952, found 30 distinct and well-developed calendars in use in India alone.

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 2002 Vinay Lal.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Reckoning with the Millennium
2. Politics in Our Times
3. Governance in the Twenty-First Century
4. Modern Knowledge and Its Categories
5. Ecology, Economy, Equality
6. Dissenting Futures
Postscript: 911, or the Terrorism That Has No Name
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
Index

Editorial Reviews

Vinay Lal is a new and important presence in the world of scholars who question the intellectual and cultural assumptions that accompany the processes of modernization, development and globalization.

Dipesh Chakrabarty

'Vinay Lal is a new and important presence in the world of scholars who question the intellectual and cultural assumptions that accompany the processes of modernisation, development and globalization.' --Dipesh Chakrabarty, The University of Chicago

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