I was meant to speak at an event organized by Moishe Postone's students in the Social Theory

workshop that he captained for many years, shortly after his passing. Due to some unfortunate events
at the time, I was very sadly unable to attend. I recently realized however that I had, in fact,
composed some remarks for the occasion. I had forgotten about them. I'm copying them below, in
case they are of interest.

Office hours with Moishe Postone:

Time, Labor, and Social Domination, and the history of modern South Asia

Dwaipayan Sen
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Like several other historians of modern South Asia who have passed through these hallways,
I encountered Moishe Postone, and the particular tradition of critical theory that he represented as a
powerful antithesis to the kinds of intellectual currents through which I myself emerged first, as a
student at Oberlin College, and then, a graduate student at this institution. It was not readily obvious
that I would work with him, and like many students of that generation, my first impressions were a
curious mixture of awe, a mild intimidation, being disarmed by his smile and many kindnesses, and,
of course, an intellectual fascination with his scholarship, all rolled into one; perhaps one of the
reasons his course on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital drew such, maybe all too, robust enrollments.
I had arrived at The University of Chicago to work with Dipesh Chakrabarty, one of the great
proponents of the scholarly amalgam that came to be identified as postcolonial theory – a body of
thought that articulated in condensed form the intellectual moods of disenchanted anticolonial
nationalism and anti-Eurocentrism within the space of the Anglo-American university – indeed, in
large part the ethos within which many of us late 20th century émigrés of the global south were
raised, and with which we all, with varying degrees of fervor, identified. The well-known tensions
between Postone’s and Chakrabarty’s views on capitalism, were not easy to mediate, and in a certain
sense, it remains that way.
In these remarks, I wish to briefly sketch the “anti-thesis,” such as I understood it, that
Postone’s work represented for the kind of cultural Marxism espoused by proponents of postcolonial
historiography.
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Although it bears no repeating in this context, Moishe Postone’s central provocation went
something to this effect: in contrast to all previously contending Marxisms that understood the
defining contradiction of capitalism as consisting of the perennial cycles of struggle between the
historical agents represented by “labor” and “capital”, Postone posited capital itself as the defining
contradiction. His approach rejected the notion that the proletariat represented a social counter-
principle to capitalism, and instead argued that the phenomenon he termed “abstract social
domination” was the tension characteristic of this political-economic system.
The implications of Postone’s social-theoretical analysis were many, depending on the
disciplinary vantage one worked from, and the particular themes one engaged. Of particular note for
historians I would venture, was the claim that “subjectivity” and “objectivity” under the historical
conditions where some form of capitalism obtained, were intimately, even dialectically inter-related.
Of the many critical paragraphs that speak to this relationship in his masterpiece, let me cite but one:
“The categories of Marx’s critical theory, when interpreted as categories of structured forms of
practice that are determinations of both social “objectivity” and “subjectivity”, can provide the basis
for such a historical theory of subjectivity. In such a reading, the analysis of the dynamic character of
capitalism is also, potentially, an analysis of the historical transformations of subjectivity.” (TLSD,
37)
 I would submit that it is the theory of history contained in these passages/words, which have
proved most promising, while simultaneously challenging, for the dominant historiographical moods
that have governed the sub-field of South Asian history-writing over the past three decades. They
have, in brief, offered provocation for perceiving the old binaries and distinctions of that historical
conversation afresh, and in a rather curious manner, have also anticipated several of the changes
through the field is currently undergoing.
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Such a critical theory of capitalism was clearly at odds with the kind of Marxist
historiography that dominated much modern South Asian history-writing for much of the field’s
existence, and certainly during the 1970s – the decade roughly contemporary with Postone’s coming-
of-age – that largely subscribed to the old “base-superstructure” model of conceiving society, and
colonial Indian society in particular. Historicizing British colonialism and its counterpart, Indian
nationalism, constituted the bulk of scholarly debate in Indian historical circles, and even as a
profound skepticism had set in about the possible gains of Indian nationalism amongst some Marxist
historians, this remained tethered to a framework whereby material circumstances were primarily, if
not solely, determinative of the scope of the possible within the realms of thought and consciousness.
The kind of culturalist Marxism that became ascendant in the following decade mainly
through the emergence of the Subaltern Studies collective, and the ferment generated by the
linguistic turn more generally, meant that questions of representations, discourse analysis, and
intellectual history of various kinds emerged to the forefront of historians’ attention over the 1980s
and 1990s, and those concerning society and economy receded to the background. This was indeed
the context of my own formation, and the contrast from the previous generation could not have been
starker. The twin-themes of colonialism and nationalism were re-apprehended through the textual-
analytical lenses of derivative discourses, social constructionism, colonial modernity, and historical
difference. As many gathered are undoubtedly aware, this was the expression of the celebrated
“cultural-turn” within the particular sub-field of South Asian history-writing, whose logic was tightly
condensed in Partha Chatterjee’s formulation: the rule of colonial difference.
One of my lasting impressions of Moishe involve the innumerable conversations with him in
his various offices about how to reconcile his theory and vision of history, with those with which I
myself was acquainted through the accidents of my own upbringing and intellectual sympathies.
These were always cordial conversations, if mildly strained, on occasion. Perhaps the point he
seemed entirely unwilling to concede, leading to an explosion of sorts during an afternoon office-
hours session, was the possibility of what has been called the relative autonomy of the culture-
concept over the course of history. We had been debating this possibility on-and-off for some time,
especially with respect to my understanding of caste and casteism, and race and racism, and he didn’t
seem too willing to entertain the notion that such behaviors and practices could operate independent
of the social structures within which they were situated. The ability to perceives attitudes as
prejudicial were themselves the outcome of particular, and historically-specific, circumstances.
This said, it was not always easy for me to understand how one might effectively deploy the many
striking insights contained in Time, Labor, and Social Domination within the generally understood
disciplinary protocol of history. How, for instance, can one illustrate, demonstrate, or show, (some of
the historian’s favorite verbs) “abstract social domination”? How can a historian effectively and
meaningfully “think” Moishe’s meso-level insights about the nature of capitalist society, alongside
the immediacy of an archive?
To my mind, one of the most compelling, if nonetheless challenging, engagements by an
historian has undoubtedly come from Andrew Sartori’s work in intellectual history of Bengal and the
world that in turn, has opened up a series of possibilities and dilemmas for historians of modern
South Asia. Primarily a work of intellectual history, Sartori’s analysis of the culture-concept in
Bengal was creatively grounded in a Postonian reconceptualization of capitalist society under the
historically specific conditions of colonial rule in eastern India. The Bengali turn to culturalism from
liberalism, was not so much an escape from the ideological terrain of colonial capitalist society, but
rather critically enabled by its emergence and development, that moreover shared kinship with
similar roughly co-terminus transformations in the intellectual histories of Germany, Russia, and
Japan. As Sartori put it rather pithily in his conclusion: “The universalistic categories of capitalist
modernity do not occupy some global stratosphere that confront the particularity of regional life-
worlds from the outside, but are constituted in dialectical intimacy with those regional
particularities.” A profoundly Postonian insight, one might say.
All the same, even as Postone’s understanding of capitalist society enabled new and
provocative ways of reconceptualizing the transformations that took place under colonial rule in
India, there have remained concerns about the applicability of his theory to such a context. As a
sympathetic reviewer of Sartori’s book wondered, were his central claims rather more posited, than
being effectively illustrated and explained? More critically still, others have wondered whether the
logic of capitalist social forms as conceived by Postone and Sartori, are much too analytically
capacious, and flattening of substantive differences, to offer meaningful historical insights.
Notwithstanding such concerns, Postone’s and through him, Sartori’s works, have indeed raised a
number of pressing questions for those of us invested in modern South Asian history that remain to
be worked through. To my mind, the critical issue is one of whether historical analysts can only
perceive radical difference and irreducible particularities in modern South Asia’s past, or whether
similarities obtain with other parts of the world, despite, perhaps because of these seemingly unique
features. Even if not entirely directly, Postone’s remarkable insights have helped me, and others in
my particular subfield, contend far more seriously with the latter possibility.
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Postscript:

It was precisely by virtue of having to negotiate intellectual tension described above however, that I
was able to observe some of the points of curiously implicit agreement between the two traditions of
thought, as well as interrogate the zones of widely agreed upon, and stark, contrast. I do not
presuppose any possible “reconciliation” between Time, Labor, and Social Domination and say,
Provincializing Europe, but am struck by the fact that both, indeed, contain the germ of a certain
impossibility built into the analytical optics of each when confronted with the question of “how to
overcome?” The “impossible” then, seems to operate in important ways in both frames of analysis, as
well as the notion of what, at the same time, might in fact be possible. [As an aside, I don’t think it’s
mere coincidence that both Moishe and Dipesh were deeply concerned, and affected by, what the
former called “helplessness” and the latter, the “politics of despair”. Nor that both ultimately
resolutely and respectively rejected both as genuine possibilities, even as they acknowledged the
powerful analytical seductions they offered in different contexts.