Double Analogy
1
- Initial Disquietude.
- How easily people claim their actions are directed by the will of God.
- Initial Question.
- Why do people so abuse this phrase?
- Second Question.
- What was wrong with Adam and Eve eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge?
- Initial Error.
- Adam and Eve thought they could know. The Tree of Knowledge gave them, they thought, true vision. Seeing is knowledge. Knowledge is power. It is control. Seeing gives you the impression that you have a method for control, for obtaining power.
- Analogy #1.
- This is the mode of the Panopticon. If you keep prisoners constantly visible, then you have complete control over them. A prisoner completely visible is one that you perfectly know and so can perfectly control.
- Analogy #2.
- In India, the British colonial authorities maintained control over the subcontinent not just, or merely, by arms but also through records. The British were prodigious record-keepers. A prime example of this is Phillip Sleeman and his successful prosecution campaigns, most importantly in 1829-30, against highway robbers loosely known as Thugs.
- Sleeman was able to almost eliminate highway murders after he began taking profuse notes on the criminals brought into custody. Through his note-taking, the scope of the crimes became visible.
- Through his informants, he compiled information (reality made visible through notation) that he used to suppress crime. This sort of documenting was among the important means the British used for controlling colonial India: note-taking making visible, the visible being categorized, then these categories being controlled through effective administration.
2
- Analogical Error #1.
- If in the case of Adam and Eve, this presumption to know was an error as it created a false confidence about knowing something, the will of God, which remains rationally unknowable (this is, however, the paradoxical power of the idea of the will of God—its unknowability), so how does this error reconcile with the British success as colonial administrators? How does it reconcile with the apparent success of the Victorian Panopticon as a mode of controlling criminals?
- Concession #1.
- It doesn’t reconcile. British colonialism and the Victorian Panopticon were successful in ways that Adam and Eve’s eating of the Tree of Knowledge was not.
- Will of God Analogy #1.
- If the will of God is always unknowable, even if to subjects it seems apparent, even if it maintains the illusion of appearance, then the objects within the two analogies, the criminals and the Indian populace, who are treated as though fully seen by the Panopticon’s wardens and by the British in their respective cases, are never fully grasped.
- The seer misapprehends their vision because the criminal, though fully apparent, cannot be known by outward means alone. Likewise, the Indian populace, despite whatever exhaustive notation may be used to describe it, cannot be contained by categorical representations.
- Orientalism Quotes #1 and 2, Edward Said.
- “[...] the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambiance of the representer.” 272
- “[...] the role of positive knowledge is far from absolute. Rather, ‘knowledge’—never raw, unmediated, or simply objective—is what [...] Orientalist [thought] distribute[s] and redistribute[s].” 273-4
- Will of God Analogy, Cont’d.
- The criminal is never fully suppressed.
- India is never truly understood. It would not be understood even on its own terms, as no terms can ever be fully representative of such a large and various country.
3
- Perversion, Linking to Initial Disquietude.
- Those who claim to know the will of God are always wrong. After winning a sporting event, those who claim it was the will of God are wrong, though this claim does have its comic rewards. This is the original delusion, the primary human flaw, the presumption of knowing what by definition is meaningful only when not known.
- Answer to Second Question.
- It’s not wrong intellectually to aspire toward knowing the unknowable, but spiritually, it might prove fruitless or worse.
- Deleterious Consequences, Analogies Revisit’d.
- In the Panopticon, the warden enforces his claim to knowledge. Believing himself fully knowledgeable about the criminal, he treats the criminal as he imagines he must be treated, and yet this is always wrong. This action is always premised on a false conception of who the criminal is. And yet the criminal, from being treated in a particular way, begins to act that way. The criminal has changed. He has partially lost sense of his secret, unknowable identity and has been co-opted into becoming what he is not.
- So too the Indian populace. Never fully understood by the British, the Indian populace changed under the British gaze, changed due to the categorical adumbrations of Orientalist scholarship and colonial bureaucracy. This perverted what was real into a new order conducive to being ruled by a colonial power, indifferent or ambivalent to Indian self-determination.
- Postscript.
- So the first, practical efficacy of seeing, though in time its categorizing dimensions become a corrupting lens that eventually returns the seers to themselves.
- Result.
- Postcolonial reflux syndrome.
