The Enduring Enchantment (Or the Epistemic Privilege of Modernity and Where to Go from Here)

Saurabh Dube's invitation to participate in this collection called my attention to enduring enchantments that, created by the self-defining discourse of modernity, acquire an ontological dimension beyond the discourse itself. "Modernity" has, in these enduring enchantments, a double role. On the one hand, it is part of a series of oppositions (modernity/tradition, colony/modernity) and, on the other, modernity names the paradigm in which the enchantment of enduring oppositions is reproduced and maintained. Dube stated that

this issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly does not propose a general solution to questions of the oppositions between tradition and modernity, ritual and rationality, myth and history, community and state, emotion and reason, and East and West. Indeed, it eschews immanent readings that relentlessly seek the "foundations" and "origins" of these binaries in Enlightenment principles and post-Enlightenment traditions only to cast out from imagination and understanding diverse human energies and enormous historical passions—from the first world through the fourth world—that have laid claim on these oppositions and animated these antinomies. Rather, "Enduring Enchantments" will work toward critical readings and substantive discussions of the key categories of tradition, community, colony and modernity—and, when they bear on this dialogue, the crucial constructs of the subaltern and nation—in view of the place and the persistence of overwrought oppositions that have ordered cultures and pasts in academic analyses and everyday understanding.

My thesis is that the self-conception of the European Renaissance was, basically, expressed in a temporal and spatial matrix that corresponded to a religious and alphabetic/historiographic imaginary supported by the invention of the printing press. This matrix was transformed in the late eighteenth century as the alphabetic-historiographic imaginary was replaced by the emergence of a new type of discourse, political economy. ¹ Political economy came into the picture with a geopolitical concept of time that displaced, in the West, the hegemony of the Christian idea of time and of space. Christianity told the story of humankind from its origins in God's creation and distributed space in three continents, each of them attributed to one of Noah's sons (Asia to Sem; Africa to Ham and Europe to Japheth). ² The secularization of time was, interestingly enough, parallel to the emergence of political economy. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Adam Smith had no doubt about the "advancement" of colonized sites (places) with the help of the colonial countries. If today, the rhetoric is that "technology will lift poverty," at the end of the eighteenth century the rhetoric was the following:

The colony of a civilized nation which takes possession either of a waste country, or of one so thinly inhabited, that the natives easily give place to the new settlers, advances more rapidly to wealth and greatness than any other human society. The colonists carry out with them a knowledge of agriculture and other useful arts, superior to what can grow up of its own accord in the course of many centuries among savage and barbarous nations. They carry out with them too the habit of subordination, some notion of the regular government which takes place in their own country, of the system of laws which supports it, and of regular administration of justice, and naturally establish something of the same kind of the new settlement. ³

Thus, the colonists not only "carried with them" all those aspects that Adam Smith enumerated but, most importantly, they carried with them the conceptualization of what they carried with them, that is, the conceptualization that Smith puts forward here but that became naturalized. It was then natural for Karl Marx, a little more than half a century after Adam Smith, to understand the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries as a period of primitive accumulation. By doing so, he reinforced both the temporal direction of the history...