Subject: continued:post-colonial condition of knowledge.
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 21:29:31 +0500


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		Dear Saeed urrehman and Mohammad Ben Jelloun,


	It is not only a set of statements, which is invalidated or marginalized through the colonial enounter, but also the whole mindset and the underlying cognitive structures, which generate those statements. But the process is never complete; pre-colonial epestimologies, world views, theories of meaning and of value, continue to survive (may be like endangered species), by posing resistence, both at the level of conscious individual efforts, and also at the level of that diffused collective posture of the colonized culture towards the alien discourse of power/knowledge. The phenomenology of this epistemic resistance, on the part of the colonized is fraught with, strange cognitive adjustments, heuristic compromises, and semantic evasions Just consider the all too familiar scenario of the 'hybridization' of the empirco-materialistic/, hypothetico-deductive model of knowledge of the colonizing West, with the religio-deterministic and idealistic sensibility of the Muslims of the south Asia. The mental strategies, often unconscious, developed to preserve something of  'them' and something of 'us', in the world of knowledge, end up very often as sterile ratiocinations, or paralyzed mobilities
I think, any attempt to understand the hidden and also not hidden dynamism of these mental processes can lead to some understanding of the post-colonial condition of knowledge in a particular culture. It is something like determining the zero error of a measuring instrument first and then going for the measurement. The post-colonial knower, first had to know his ground level, otherwise the figure-ground confusion will be the inevitable result.
Some of the features of the post-colonial condition of knowledge can be tentatively phrased as: The 'no-way-out' syndrome of the post-colonial intellectual, and the second being the  'me -and -the -West-in -silence' component of the post-colonial psyche. But I guess I shouldn't hazard anything more, might already be sounding rather fanciful.
Saeed Sahib, I don't know much about Michel de Certeau and his la perruque, kindly enlighten me about it.
Dear Mohammad, I absolutely accept the legitimacy of your questions, though I am not very sure about my answers, but will you kindly make your question about 'global melting pot, and global homogenization more explicit=09



Mirza Athar Baig.

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