Note: This is a work in progress, so you’ll have to accept that it’s a little rough around the edges. Any thoughts and opinions are appreciated in the comments section.

In my time in India thus far, one conversation seems to just keep popping up, over and over again. Actually, this conversation is one I’ve been having since about sophomore year in college, the year the financial crisis hit. The conversation is not unfamiliar to anyone who pays attention to the academic currents of our time: It is, in short, the conflict between objectivism and relativism. This conflict is borne out in all facets of human enquiry; in Physics, it is the quantum-mechanical paradox which prevents us from ever observing something without somehow influencing it by our observations. In literary theory, it is the idea that no sentence can be uttered which contains any content or meaning separable from its syntactical and metaphorical composition.

My friend is editing a collection of essays relating to Deleuze and act-network theory. I cannot even pretend to have a theoretical grasp on Deleuze’s work (and, particularly, its reception in continental and asian academic circles). But the problem Som explained to me seems largely similar to the one Wittgenstein attempted to resolve in 1914 with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The problem in philosophy today (as it was then) seems to be certain extant deficiencies in our language, especially with regard to issues of social and political importance. Modern theorists have arrived at an impasse between language and reality: it is not because of weaknesses on our own part that we cannot seem to achieve a more just world (there is no lack of examples of us trying to bring it about), but because of some incapacity on a collective-mental level which prevents us from even conceptualizing such a world. Although there does not seem to be any rationally satisfiable diagnosis of the problems of modern politics, economics, etc., it is undoubtedly the language which describes and props it up which is the root of today’s problems of inequality and injustice.

Witness the financial crisis: here we are given a cataclysmic event in U.S. and (to a lesser extent) international economics. Those in power and even those who would criticize those in power seem paralyzed by the deficiency of their words to describe the problems that undoubtedly affect the systems of control existing in the human-world. The only possible solution for Som is to distend and ultimately explode the discourse which is the root of our social-political dystopia. But this entire course of action stems from a false equivocation of speech to ontology. Wittgenstein had some sense when he said that there was truly no use in attempting to refer to what lay outside of our linguistic-social boundaries.

Thus the paradox is elicited by this thought: if action requires foreknowledge, then the need to act against a fundamentally unknowable stasis is preempted by this requirement. Thus the decision between positivism and realism is both false and true: we know (ontologically) that action will be required in order to blast apart the inequality and imbalance which has metastasized from physics to all areas of human discourse and understanding. But this fundamentally unknowable nature of the imbalance requires that action be made without foreknowledge.

How do we continue, then?

Thus the “crisis of long keynsianism” reported in the “Economic Quarterly” does not offer a solution to the current consumption-based model of human economics: keynes, by his own recognition, is binding economics to mere laws of necessity: wealth exists in point A; to encourage economic prosperity and relative political stability in points a & b, B must structure its economy in order to satisfy the demands made by wealthy members of A. Therefore the only conceivable alternative to the current western-style economic model is one which transfers the burdens of consumption to China and India. But since we know that consumerism is a philosophy bereft of any ideological grounding, and still worse completely dependent upon the exploitation of the south’s labor, we are left wanting for an economic philosophy which can point us forward while affirming our ability to take concrete action towards making future progress.