Transition, Telos, and Taxonomy

Abstract

Anjan Chakrabarti and Stephen Cullenberg's Transition and Development in India provides a thorough critical discussion of Marxist debates about transition and development. Taking on board recent poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques, it builds an innovative alternative, using the concept of class sets, which avoids assuming that a society is dominated by a single mode of production. But while their approach successfully meets critiques about totalization and telos raised by metropolitan poststructuralist and postmodern scholars, its engagement with the subaltern studies school and postcolonial thought is less conclusive. The authors offer acute critical discussion of the postcolonial literature on subaltern subjectivity. But their class sets approach, by its nature, ultimately avoids the question of subjectivity altogether. This essay suggests that on-going difficulties in our approaches to subaltern subjectivity may be rooted in long-standing definitional problems with the detritus category “feudal” itself.