Interview

Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Change Myself. An Interview with Shiv Visvanathan & Chandrika Parmar

Amit Prasad (AP): Thank you, Shiv and Chandrika, for the interview! This interview, we hope, will further elaborate on the arguments that you have presented in your article. Though I must add that Shiv’s extensive, decades long, work on reimagining the role and place of ‘modern science’, in particular, that of the laboratory, already provides the broader context within which this recent paper needs to be situated. Let me start with your provocative and important claim: Drawing on the scientist C. V. Sehsadri, you argue ‘that his laboratory in the slum would one day rewrite the Indian constitution’. Can you clarify/elaborate on how you, and Sehsadri, define the laboratory and the constitution, and can you also situate (socially and historically) Sehsadri’s ‘laboratory in the slum’?

Shiv Visvanathan and Chandrika Parmar (SV and CP): Shiv worked with C. V. Seshadri and Seshadri’s framework of the laboratory guides our response. We think the best way to articulate Seshadri’s framework is to contrast it with that of Bruno Latour. In an Archimedean moment, Latour claimed, ‘Give me a laboratory and I will change the world’. The laboratory was still a promethean site for Latour. Seshadri in response said, Give me a laboratory and I will change myself, and maybe the way I look at the world. In a Gandhian sense, for Seshadri, a laboratory and the body were sites for experiments with truths. Both laboratory and constitution were collections of hypotheses, experimental sites, and visions which could transform society: both with social constructs deeply embedded in culture. For Seshadri, the slum was a microcosm of the city. It was an organic part of the city where the slum dweller as migrant was a master craftsman of waste. For Seshadri, waste was the only resource of the wasted people. A slum represented a poor man’s laboratory of the city. Seshadri focused on this laboratory, which was located within Chennai. It provided a running commentary on the richer and more conspicuous sites like Guindy, Film City, Adyar spread around it. Seshadri’s photosynthesis research centre was active for over two decades from the 1970s, creating a way through which science read and transformed the democratic process. The experiments range from algae as food to housing as new idea of comfort. For Seshadri, the slum provided civic ideas for testing. Slum and Laboratory were, thus, reciprocal sites to help create new ways of thinking about food, housing, work, and citizenship. A moral, cognitive, and political economy for which the laboratory provided an exegesis. It was an attempt to link the imagination of energy and waste in thermodynamics to the urban process of consumption and production.

AP: Michael Polanyi’s idea of tacit knowledge has been widely used in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). However, the focus of STS in this regard has been limited to the study of taken-for-granted norms and practices of knowledge-making in the laboratory that remain tacit. Your interest seems to be radically different. As you argue, ‘One needs the Tacit Constitution as a lens to read the formal constitution,’ which forces us out of the lab and directs our attention to the constitution and through it to the nation-state’s functioning. Can you explain for our readers why this is important and how it extends and transforms the goals of STS?

SV and CP: Seshadri referred to a Peter Drucker’s book ‘Adventures of the Bystander’ in which Drucker devotes entire passages of the book to the three Polanyi’s – Karl, Michael, and their sister Laura, who was a brilliant anarchist. He suggested that Michael’s idea of tacitness and Karl’s notion of embeddedness had to be read together. Seshadri claimed that the tacit, the embedded, and the unconscious provided a new hermeneutic of knowledge and as such knowledge played out its dynamics at three levels/three depths. STS was no longer an overt exercise in management and cost benefit analysis. It was an exploration of knowledge where the obvious and the unreflected rubbed shoulders. Seshadri said, his goal was to combine Gandhian and thermodynamic truths in a theory of life, livelihood, and lifestyle. Time had to unfold itself for thought to be visible. For Seshadri, telegraphic words like long run and short were illiterate ways of linking time and thought one needed the idea of cyclical time. Science in that sense becomes an unravelling of different levels of the democratic imagination. Science reads the Laboratory, the Constitution, and the National State as three levels of the dynamic imagination (see also, ‘Between Cosmology and System: The Heuristics of a Dissenting Imagination’ – Shiv Visvanathan).

AP: You suggest: ‘Scientists and activists I study and keep talking to, repeatedly emphasized that the constitution needs an unconscious, even an informal economy of metaphors and imaginations, it can dip into.’ And, following Sehsadri, you argue for a ‘“cosmocomics” of narratives’. You use the word ‘unconscious’ and there is also a reference talking to scientists and activists as the source of the ‘tacit knowledge’. Can you elaborate on how you analytically and socially locate these ‘narratives’ in relation to the constitution? I ask because intrinsic to such ‘locating’ of the place of such tacit knowledge is whose narratives count and how we access them.

SV and CP: A constitution is an exercise at three levels. It is a frozen piece of storytelling as a Social Contract. It is an exegesis linking word and lifeword. It is a textbook paradigm of economics and politics, as is the current idea of development. One has to enact a constitution as a cognitive and political performance at all three levels. India has the Directive Principles of State Policy, borrowed from the Irish Constitution, where dreams of the future from Socialism to Gandhi could be listed as future projects. Our constitution was a mix of the obvious, the formal, the tacit, and the unconscious. One example one can think of is the battle between catamarans and trawlers. The trawlers were technologically indifferent to ecology, while the fishermen would now fish during its spawning time; the constitution had to mediate between different sense of livelihood, belief and competence. The formal, our makers realized, was too skeletal and impoverished and needed the revery of the tacit and the dreamtime of the unconscious. A few days back, we met Bezwada Nelson, the Dalit activist. He told us that a Dalit theory of the city can be reworked constitutionally if we redo the sensorium. The Constitution needs the sociology of smell to understand the politics of sewage in the city. City planning, he said, deodorises the constitution and the city.

AP: Inherent to your argument is the ‘laboratory’ and ‘science’ as the source and site to read and act in relation to the constitution. Your earlier work (e.g., on vivisection) conceptually and spatially extended the laboratory. In this paper, you return to science and, among other elements, use them to, for example, add reverie as a way to practice science (and as a source of tacit knowledge to animate the constitution). You argue, ‘[s]cience stems more from reverie than dream’ and call for the need of ‘a psychology of primitiveness in modern man.’ STS, while opening the black-box of science, has moved to investigate the sociality of knowledge production, rather than the psychology of individuals. Can you explain how you see the interplay between these two domains of knowledge/narrative making?

SV and CP: The three levels, formal, tacit, and unconscious, are transformed into three levels of a complex world. The latter two become defining moments of reform and healing. We can see them operate as such in the South African commission where the idea of Ubuntu, a fork lord sense of community, replaces the Anglo-Saxon idea of formal punishment. They are therapeutic and often located in myth, ecology, and metaphor. Seshadri cited an example. He said, consider the transfer of technology model. One has to cover three domains of reality as invention, innovation, and diffusion. Invention is to be understood in terms of the esoteric and the exoteric. The internalist and the externalist. Innovation has to be understood in terms of time and scale, and diffusion in terms of the dreams of plurality. Seshadri also added that sometimes method alone is not enough. Indian Nationalism used autobiographies as an attempt to combine life and method. We can think of Gandhi and P. C. Ray in this context. Science as a mode of learning cannot operate without the tacit of unconscious. The formal is only the outer sign of scholarship.

AP: You argue: ‘One needs to reconstruct a primordial sense of the constitution where the concept of order is as mysterious as fire and where order mediates between nature and culture, between stability and violence’ (emphasis added). Interestingly, reference to primordiality has implied very different political ends. For example, in the United States a reference to primordiality has been seen as regressive and as a way to thwart the changes being called for, for example, by the Black Lives Matter activists and in India Dalit activists have used it to assert their rights and calls for further political change. Can you elaborate on what you mean by the ‘primordial sense of the constitution’ and the ‘concept of order’ and its mediating role? (In relation to the latter―role of order― I ask also because, as Zygmunt Bauman argued, the concern for order in Europe is the source of exclusion and even genocide.)

SV and CP: We used the idea of primordial because it weaves the body, sensorium, and time into a canvas of culture. The primordial captures the deep ecology of man, and the word ‘wild’ has become too domesticated and antiseptic. We confront it in the Indigenista movement, where the Shaman says you need a mystical, primordial sense of the forest to counter monocultural forestry. Oppressed groups summon the primordial to capture the purity of dreams, and ancestors remain a part of you. It is like Mahasweta Devi’s story of the Pterodactyl [a flying reptile that lived between 163.5 and 66 million years ago]. A strange bird lands in a cave in famine-stricken Bihar; it has come home to die. A young tribal recognises the pterodactyl as his kinsman and ancestor, keeping a vigil. It is such deeper affinities which modern genealogists cannot recognise. It is a sense of community which goes beyond contract and citizenship. Citizenship is embedded in certificates. The primordial reflects a deeper poetry of humanity and animality. It is also a reminder that the explosiveness of the primordial is a counter to the artificial orders, the fetishism for control that science enacts in triage and genocide.

AP: A very important element of your discussion is the role you give to dialogue, which you argue, ‘is not a result of technique but of a related non-judgemental curiosity.’ This is useful because, as you suggest, it ‘links a formal and tacit constitution together.’ However, how are we to define and understand the term ‘non-judgemental.’ For example, intrinsic to idealized versions of science has been the claim of ‘non-judgemental curiosity’ and such claims have been made even while practising eugenics, for example. More broadly, the call for ‘non-judgmental curiosity’ enfolds a social and psychological imaginary of the self and the other. Can you elaborate on what you mean by ‘non-judgemental curiosity’ and how it can be actualized or, rather, what you consider is, or could be, the architecture of its articulation and practice?

SV and CP: One can illustrate it in two ways. The western idea of liberty, equality, and fraternity left fraternity bare. Tolerance was a lazy concept. One needed an active notion of plurality as non-judgmental curiosity. Seshadri dreamt of a constitution of liberty, equality, and plurality. Plurality is engagement with the other. It is celebration of the other. Raimon Panikkar put it best. He said, a pilgrimage is an exploration of the other to discover the intensity of the self. Science often provides such opportunity. In that sense science is reciprocal and dialogic.