Indian Sociology-Land

'So long as thought does not relinquish its claim to a place in the traditions of a particular people, its claim to found an anthropology other than as estimation, an evaluation, a judgement! remains dubious and will not bear scrutiny. It is in this sense that an identity in thought, rather than a tradition of thought marks a radical departure'  - Rabdinra Ray, Analytical reason and the project of a philosophical anthropology'   ' Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If...

It is my argument here that social networks are organized on the basis of exchanges structures by the logic of 'games' in the GH Mead sense. While modern political organization (examined in detail in the second blog in this series) is made on the basis of platonic virtues like equality which are applicable only to the radical who's political subjectivity divorces him from immediate sociality and normalcy.  Moreover, sociological analysis is contingent on a discursive form of social analysis that is contained within society itself. It is close to a reflexive function of society as a whole. Such analysis speculates on cultural and linguistic capital, but treats of capital as a larger and considerably differentiated form of accumulation and exchange: as the exchange and speculation on the value of values. Indeed value can be seen as a concenpt native to sociology and social anthropology, defining the limits of the speculation these disciplines can pursue, but also the limits o...

The use of the word alienation has a conventional sense that precedes Marx: Aleination as the alienation from the world produces by language. This is the heritage of Schelling in the larger milleu of German romantic thought. This shifts and becomes far more complex in Marxist Philosophy. What I have been describing in this blog however, and this is my central argument, goes beyond the commodification of social relations, and the fetishistic animation of commodities. While on thhe one hand the commodification of social relations through meta-corporations that colonize certain parts of the social fabric is very concerning, its after effect, a solitary individual simply determined by his exposure to violence of capital, is truly chilling.  It is precisely this interplay of factors that makes Lous-Ferdinand Celine's historico-surrealist novel 'Journey to the end of the night' invaluable to understand political formations and possiblities under circumstances of 'exposure...

  The question of grief and how we allow or disallow certain griefs (necesarily) is socially one of empiricism. We allow ourselves to grieve at times removed, sometimes, from the very cause of our grief. And in this way, amongst others, we might find even the slightest infraction of space and emotion, unbearable. Another empirical question: individual and collective grief, that is thinking through the last post in this series, personal and public grief. In a common sensical way one assumes that one needs to censor individual grief so that we don't burn black holes through the social fabric. Another convention might be: without individual pressure releases, the social fabric itself becomes fissionable, given to many minor combustions, not unlike historical periods across the globe where public lynchings and other forms of vigilante justice have dominated. The extimate sociality produced in the wake of events like COVID speak however of even more differentiation and granularity in th...

I interpret the Tardean idea that we can only get a clear sense of events, political or natural, through mimesis building from the smallest point of the events occurence, ('the first serf to put down his spade'), to mean that we can study the unsaid in discourse quite directly through jurisprudical change. What for example did the ban around 2006 of cigarettes around campuses say about society in general and its possible evolution. It is curious to imagine this new form of extimate sociality (sociality beyond intimacy) also from a jurisprudical point of view, keeping in mind that the jurisprudical is not linear, consider the repeal of the entire edifice of American law constructed through the Roe vs Wade decision. While in the previous post on the matter I traced the emergence of extimate sociailty through a series of large events, notebandi, metoo and the lockdown, here I argue that the extimate politically is represented well by the incursion of the legal upon the private and...