Ideology Critique/Discourse Analysis

Despite the Barthesian pronouncement of the ‘death of the author’ and the Foucaultian incision into the whatness of the author and the final dissolution of it into a multitudinous rubric of contingently indeterminate/determined historical elements, the ‘whoness’ or the author as being authorised, personalised and individuated continues to haunt or at least tends to make its re-incarnation through new garbs in the discussions on the nature and function of literature in Kerala. This I, provisionally, attribute to the clubbing of postist psychoanalysis with the moribund dialecticism of Kerala Marxism. However to start with it is to be highlighted that the practice, genre and institution of conceiving, imagining and “writing” literary words and worlds through the medium of aesthetic contemplation and mediation is yet to be acknowledged as a category of both technology and labour and at the same time, the accessibility to these two interrelated but autonomous domains also needs special attention. 
In Kerala, all discourses in the filed of human and social sciences seem to inherit and perpetuate two different strands of modernity which belong to the early and late phases of our encounters with colonial modernity. First among them is the missionary rhetoric of social reform and the other is the progressive paradigm of Marxist dialectics. The former is having its appearance in the mid nineteenth century when the missionary activists in Kerala put forward the idea of reform as a social ingredient of mass mobilisation, propagandist agenda and political praxis. However the latter is having only a recent past that dates back to the formation of progressive literary movement as a forum for seeking out and fixing up the degrees of negotiability between two incompatible domains, aesthetics and politics. Unconsciously knowing, the ideologues and practitioners of this forum have heavily extracted and bequeathed many a moribund ideals from western philosophy.
The same thematic-problematic can be re-deployed as a dichotomous relational entity between two different streams of post-structuralist thought; namely, ideology critique and discourse analysis. Ideology critique’s functional dynamics may be rendered somewhat equal and akin to the working hypothesis of second-law of thermo-dynamics; according to which in spite of any extraneous intrusion-infiltration into the force field, the matter would remain constant and unchanging. Despite such and such temporary instances of disequilibrium, the system would ultimately recover and restore the state of equilibrium. So its parameters are so obvious; the second law of thermo-dynamics envisages a restricted system or closed economy where the notions of centrality and certainty are clearly safeguarded. Notwithstanding any changes or ruptures with regard to the form, the content of the system will remain on an everlasting base. But the instrument of discourse analysis deviates from these propositions and hence, it takes a different trajectory. It always skims forward into the terrains of the outside which is more or less dis-regulated by the rule of openness. It is claustrophobic to the very core. Unlike the system of ideology critique, the habitus of discourse analysis would be fragmented if any external force happens to transgress into its field. It has no centre as such and so it is soulless, spiritless and psycheless. It has no essence at all!!! It has only appearances which may change and differ in accordance with various, different, divergent and heterogeneous circumstances, milieus, conditions and forces. Its law is not transition but transformation. It has bid farewell to the kingdom of flora and fauna. But it may unfaithfully follow the transformative trajectories and footsteps of mimosa pudica and may even differentially repeat its processes just to out step the laws of identity, unity and homogeneity.       

 


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