Ravi Chakraborty

An attempt to make the timelessly insightful thoughts of Gilbert Simondon particularly relevant for unpacking the hackneyed buzzword of our times: innovation. As a theorist of the being of technology, Simondon notes the deep connection between the existence and evolution of technological entities. Logically, he ends up contributing to a theory of technological innovation.

Independent India confronted the vacuum generated by the fading away of the Gandhian charkha , a potent symbol of an anti-colonial sociotechnical imaginary. This paper argues that the technological imaginary that followed ,while not being collectively operationalized enough, was crucial in filling up the vacuum. This was a particularly technological understanding of statistics in the vision of the pioneer of statistical planning in India- P.C. Mahalanobis.

In spite of the ample amount of self-relfexivity he practiced about the fundamental implications of statistical planning as an important component of nation-building, there has hardly been any effort to do proper justice to the ideas of Mahalanobis as a philosopher of consequence. Mahalanobis was engaged with a more well-known philosopher-statistician: the maverick scientist Norbert Wiener. Greg Adamson admirably wrote about the interaction between Wiener and Mahalanobis and provided extremely fleeting speculations about Wiener’s views on the nature of industrialization in India.

While the archives do not retain a proper historical record of the influence that Norbert Wiener had on Mahalanobis , one cannot restrict the search for an imaginary to empirical evidence alone. It is worthwhile to speculatively employ Wiener’s cybernetic worldview to elucidate the technological imaginary that empowered the statistical machinery driving a fledgling Indian state. Mahalanobis makes a pertinent remark in this context:

“statistics is not a branch of mathematics but is a technology which is essentially concerned with the contingent world of reality … as distinguished from a world of abstraction” (Rudra, 176)

Statistics individuates as a technology that is exclusive to the state even as it embodies an acknowledgement of the limits of state control (of the contingency of reality). The cybernetic perspective allows one to recast critical readings of Mahalanobis’s use of anthropometry as enabling casteism even as it speaks to the Indian political leadership’s manifest desire for an alternative view of industrialization that considered both the value of the dignity of the individual human body as well as the task of turning a large population into a productive labour force.



Selected References:

A. Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: A biography. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.

G. Adamson, "Norbert Wiener and Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis," 2012 IEEE Conference on Technology and Society in Asia (T&SA), Singapore, 2012, pp. 1-5

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAoCMeGA_Uc

We argue that the recent developments of the dialogical framework towards the incorporation of materiality within dialogues certainly enables one to extend its possible applications beyond the domain of logic. We ask the question of linking Bakhtin’s criticism of literary formalism, based on advocating dialogical features within novels, and the dialogical sight on formalism, in order to assess the program of constituting a dynamical formalism as a means towards literary analysis, enabling to speak of subjectivity without falling into psychologism. By the way, we propose a dialogical reading of the alleged non constructivity of Kripke’s schema in (Sundholm Constructivity and computability in historical and philosophical perspective, logic, epistemology, and the unity of science. Springer, Dordrecht, 2015) and we indicate a new path towards another understanding of its constructive content.