Beyond the Walls

Corruption, Ethics and Politics: The Reproduction of Capital and a Ruse of History

2011-10-07T05:27:00.000-07:00

Paresh Chandra

Capitalism and Legality I: Corruption, Ethics and Reification

The notion of 'corruption' is an essentially ethical one; the terms in which the issue is judged are 'good' and 'evil'. The problem with raising an ethical issue, as one can guess, is that it stays, as does its solution, within the system that defines ethical standards. Corruption is also, simultaneously, a legal issue. In fact, the legal question is in itself ethical, just as the ethical one is legal – the legal and the legitimate intertwine. In the final analysis, the legal structure of a society is defined in terms of what the socio-political order deems legitimate and what it does not. The obvious corollary being that a legal question, by definition, never goes into a questioning of the law itself. Anti-corruption crusaders are asking for more laws, stronger laws, or different laws. There is a difference between the old and the new law/setup, but they are also, to give the matter a Hegelian twist, identical. Fundamentally the system remains the same. In fact, these changes intend to make the system more entrenched and foolproof.

Such changes, and demands for such changes are not new. In fact we find that people out to change the world in capitalist times repeatedly make demands of precisely this sort: legal and ethical ones. Why is that? What follows is an attempted explanation.

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A Review of "State Power and Democracy"

2011-04-22T09:51:00.000-07:00

Paresh Chandra

Andrew Kolin, State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W. Bush, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

It is not hard to find texts that defy the lies of the state by presenting facts that contradict them. This method of 'uncovering' the status quo, which can be called Chomskyan (the political Chomsky, not the linguistic one), works by trying to shock its reader out of their ideological slumber. Unfortunately, the vast array of ugly facts that these texts bring out usually remains ungrounded in a unified, alternative perception of reality. The attempt is to falsify particular claims of the state, by producing facts to the contrary, without trying to understand the 'deep structure' that gives birth to this state of affairs. The reader, not drawn out into a critique of present-day life in its entirety, is able to go back to that life, as if what these books uncover is simply another aspect of reality that s/he need not be concerned with.

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A Review of "State Power and Democracy"
Radical Notes - Friday, 22 April 2011

Liberal or Radical: A Dialectical Appraisal of Students’ Politics

2010-09-08T10:35:00.000-07:00

Paresh Chandra

Even though my participation in the current debate puts me incontrovertibly in the same “camp” as the KYS (Krantikari Yuva Sangathan), in fact precisely because this is so, it is important that I flesh out my differences with the way the KYS pamphlet formulates its critique of the UCD (University Community for Democracy). Without going into details, and without bothering to censure them for their aggressive style I will try to get at the definitive concept of their problematic and then proceed to show how I differ.

The KYS pamphlet clearly brings out the organization’s commitment to a genuinely transformative politics that unequivocally upholds the position of the working class as the only possible agent of systemic change. In an identifiably Zizekian phraseology they have argued that the working class, instead of being one of many of identities, is the terrain which allows, or rather, determines, the way identities assert themselves. So far I have no disagreements with the pamphlet. My disagreement begins when the pamphlet fails to complete the dialectic hence begun. After having argued thus, the pamphlet goes on to say:

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Liberal or Radical: A Dialectical Appraisal of Students' Politics
Radical Notes - Wednesday, 08 September 2010

Toiling for the Commonwealth

2010-08-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

Ankit Sharma and Paresh Chandra

In the 19th century, the one time British Prime Minister, and renowned novelist, Benjamin Disraeli, wrote a novel called Sybil: The Two Nations; this was one of the first explorations of the polarisation of wealth and power that capitalism breeds, how inside a single country, coexist the fabled halls of plenty and extreme hunger. Today, in India, one does not even need to compare the metropolis and the margin (the “Maoist afflicted territories”) to comprehend the existence of two such nations – it is to be seen in the Capital itself.

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Toiling for the Commonwealth
Radical Notes - Friday, 06 August 2010

Through and Beyond: Identities and Class Struggle

2010-05-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

The New and the Primitive: the New is the Primitive

I

In India, the effectuation of the New Economic Policy in 1991 is seen as a move forward, a move out of the "mires" of public sector enterprise, a "mandate" for privatization and against public and state ownership of industries. It is a short-sightedness characteristic of our times, our inability, Fredric Jameson would say, to historicize, which speaks when we make such utterances. Unable to look beyond the immediate we are unable also to make logical generalizations and connections that are needed to contextualize what occurs. Before putting forth my arguments I feel the need to make two assertions: (a) The NEP was not adopted because 'Plan 1, public sector,' failed and (b) state ownership does not mean public ownership, hence the seeming failure of public sector enterprises is by no means evidential of the problems of truly collective ownership of means of production.

Historians have noted that 'at the eve of Independence' the Indian bourgeois class was much more developed than that of most third world nations. Post 1910 the British government had begun to include the interests of this class in its policies, partly because of its own compulsions (the British needed the support of the Indian bourgeoisie in World War I) and partly because of strength of this class (Mukherjee, 2002). Subsequently, the plan of development that was charted out centrally after Independence had to accommodate the said interests as well. In 1944-45 when prominent capitalists sat down to ponder the possibilities facing an Independent India, and divined the Bombay Plan, they knew that they were going to have a very big say in the path the country takes. As a result of underdeveloped infrastructure, it seemed convenient to Tata, Birla and Co. to lay out an arrangement which required the state to make all necessary large investments, before they take over. To overstate for rhetorical effect, the next thirty years fulfilled the wishes of the Indian capitalist class. Of course, the Bombay Plan was never actually followed, but the 'development' that ensued in these years was more or less in concert with it. In the 80s, even as the judiciary's earlier attempts to strengthen labour laws and expand the purview of Constitutional provisions like the "Right to Life" took a down turn, the state continued with this construction of infrastructure, at the same time beginning to prepare for the change of hands that was finalized in 1991. From state capitalism to privatization in the age of neoliberalism - this has been the movement of the Indian socio-economic formation. So, we might as well stop arguing about this "development paradigm", for its "theoretical underpinnings" and its genealogy are clear enough: contesting this development is without a doubt, contesting capitalism.

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Through and Beyond: Identities and Class Struggle
Radical Notes - Saturday, 29 May 2010

On Lyotard's appendix to "The Postmodern Condition"

2010-05-11T05:03:00.000-07:00

Lyotard’s appendix to the postmodernism book raises some issues which are much debated these days. Before getting to these, I will layout the background.

He distinguishes between Freud’s idea of “sublimation” and Kant’s sublime, (notions he charges Habermas of conflating). Although he leaves these references unexplained, making them unfold could be profitable.

Sublimation is a mental process to re-direct energy directed, to begin with, towards a forbidden object onto a more accepted one. For instance where actually a boy wants to fuck his mother, he ends up writing a book. Sublimation presumes repression. When the self is ‘born,’ the ‘original’ organism breaks into the id, the ego and the superego. The Id is the source of repressed desires asking for release. The actual object remains invisible to the conscious part of the mind, and it seizes some acceptable object. The Id desires release, but it desires release precisely because it is repressed. Repression is the condition of its being, and of its desire (as far as we are concerned, of desire per se).

Kant’s notion of the sublime is to be understood through the distinction between ‘noumena’ and ‘phenomena.’ The noumenal, to continue with the language I had used while explicating the Freudian idea, is the ‘original’. But this original is never competently present for us – what is present is the phenomenal. We seek to access the original, but owing to our ontological dualist affliction, get only incomplete embodiments. The phenomenal seeks to be the noumenal, but always falls short.

When a modern metropolitan student says that he wants to get out of these lame norms, and release her/his true self, s/he makes the mistake which Lyotard charges Habermas of making. When this student goes around sleeping with people, because social norms demands that s/he sleep with (n)one, s/he thinks that s/he’s releasing her/his ‘real’ (‘original’), where it’s only another residue of the broken self expressing itself. As Lacan said, the unconscious too is structured by language.

This, to my mind, is an important distinction to make. Lyotard goes on to say that the noumenal is that which shows us the insufficiencies of all totalizing gestures. The noumenal can never really become the phenomenal, and at each moment shows the phenomenal to be lacking – and this lack implies possibility, and open-endedness.

This was the background.

Now the debate.

Side 1)

Then he moves onto the debate – his critique of Hegel’s “transcendental illusion.” Lyotard’s says that Hegel’s notion of a concrete universality is a transcendental illusion, because it tries to side-step the fact that this universality, is, as Kierkegaard would say a “universality-in-becoming.” It never truly becomes, and this radical unfinalizability is its defining feature. By giving us an illusion that the noumenal can become completely embodied, Hegel opened the doors to totalitarianism. Any attempt to form a concrete universality, a true totality, is a false gesture, a lie. True immanence is impossible, and the unity of wills is nothing but the imposition of one will upon others, in as complete a manner as possible. You can only create Robespierres and Stalins here. This is Lyotard’s side (and Laclau’s, one could add). Because Lyotard is in this piece siding with Kant, he would have no qualms accepting the ontology he creates – the distinction between noumena and phenomena and the distance between them is embossed in the nature of being.

Side 2)

The other side would argue that concrete universalities can be and have been created – but institutionalization happens; the state returns; immanence loses itself in a congealed form, or a congealed form loses the immanent. Robespierre came, but after Danton. The state only follows the carnival; it cannot deny the existence of the carnival.

Within Side 2, there are two further possible interpretations.

2a) The carnival inevitably follows the state, and the new state the carnival and so on. This can be called the cyclical model. But this interpretation, except for certain literary critics, who are not powerful contenders in this debate, does not have many takers.

2b) The carnival is the true nature of being (this side 1 would accept too, perhaps calling it the noumenal). The state came as an act of violence. Due to revolutionary action, the state is destroyed, and the carnival re-emerges. But so far, whenever this has happened, due to concrete, historical situations, the carnival does not unfold, and the old state reconstitutes itself in the form of a new state. The re-emergence of the state is the result of historical problems (one could of course argue, and the upholders of this side will agree that historical moments gain ontological moorings, but for the sake of drawing neater distinctions I leave this out).

Lyotard, following on the earlier distinction between the sublime and sublimation makes another one – the essay and the fragment. He upholds the essay and rejects the fragment. Now, Side 2 would disagree with any fetishization of the fragment, as Lyotard does too, but a fundamental difference in optics also emerges, insofar as the standpoints from which rejection takes place are different. Kant would say the phenomenal always, by definition falls short of the noumenal. Side 2 would say that the phenomenal is the ground at which the noumenal is sought. The fragment is needed for the mind to imagine the noumenal towards which we assay. Lyotard (and Kant) would say that the ‘essay’ takes its unfinalizability as a given – Side 2 say that the ‘essay’ has its moments of completion. In the Kantian act of taking cognizance of the fragment is implicit a rejection. For side 2, the boundary between the fragment and essay keeps blurring – and to a large extent the difference is of how you look at it. This blurring can, I think be seen in the Benjaminian fragment; in Benjamin’s own form, and in his observations about other writers. For instance in his essay on Kafka he remains ambivalent throughout – is Kafka’s work a fragment of the lost Script or is it the beginning of a new one?

Thinking Through Theory: Thinking Theory Through

2010-03-11T10:39:00.000-08:00

Baby with the Bathwater: Is everything Ideological?

One of the things that we study in literature classrooms these days is ‘ideology’. It’s a funny sort of study, during which we learn to ‘problematize’ – after years of thinking that life was about solving problems, we learn to reconvert solutions back into problems. Ideas tend to reveal themselves as ideologies in literature and we learn to ‘deconstruct’ them (whether we are able to or not is irrelevant). When done in seriousness, this exercise can turn into true soul-searching, highly self-reflexive and by extension uncomfortable. Every presumption is problematic and as we learn our lives function through a lot of presumptions. More specifically, however, we learn to question the ideological underpinnings of culture.

After having gotten used to such strangeness – for we do get used to it – (for the study of our remarkably thick skins one can refer to Beyond the Pleasure Principle), we are initiates into the understanding of an age old motif in cultural criticism, that of the lie. Culture hides its roots. It covers the lack. It is in other words ideological. Culture is a result of an imperfect world and it tries to mask this imperfection, deceiving consumers into believing that society is worth human beings, when it actually is not. Here one is speaking not of ideology in the content of a cultural text, but in its form, for it is here that ideology functions in truly insidious ways, sending subliminal messages that Adorno taught us to interrupt and interpret. The Culture Industry has become symbolic for this approach to the study of culture, and sadly it is also considered symbolic of the ‘Frankfurt School approach’ in general. It is sad because The Culture Industry as a symbol is not quite the same as The Culture Industry the book. The nuances of Adorno’s method get lost as the symbolic weight of the phrase overpowers interpretation.

How far can we take this method? Does saying ‘everything is ideological’ leave us anything to fight for or fight on? In a short piece in Minima Moralia, called ‘Baby with the Bathwater,’ Adorno address this problem and warns us against going too far with this line of thought. Adorno:

To identify culture solely with lies is most disastrous at the moment when it really becomes absorbed by such, and this identification is enthusiastically lauded in order to compromise every thought which resists such. If one calls material reality the world of exchange-value, and culture, that which refuses to accept the domination of such, this refusal is indeed illusory so long as the existent continues to exist. But since the free and equal exchange is itself a lie, whatever denies it stands at the same time for the truth: lies accordingly become a corrective on the lie of the world of commodities, and consequently denounce such.

It is this idea that Jameson uses in his analysis of Jaws in The Cultural Turn, and makes the observation that if culture masks a lack, possibly through displacing it onto another problem solvable within the hegemonic paradigm, it also implicitly accepts it. Even if ideological meta-narratives seem invariably mapped onto cultural artefacts, it does not imply that these artefacts are ‘lost’. In fact, we often observe that seeming meta-narratives are only pin-up pigtails that can be removed or added with readings, and works actually help reveal fissures within the hegemonic body. To presume that everything is ideological is to stifle oneself; it becomes itself an ideology and the entire edifice collapses. We have thrown the baby with the bathwater. If everything is lost to begin with, then there is no point doing anything – might as well ‘enjoy one’s condition’. Such acceptance of one’s condition is not like the Heideggerian acceptance of death as a condition of being, which leads to authentic existence. It implies instead, consumerism, the most irresponsible of existences; it is the herd existence of das man. Adorno is aware of the logical culmination of this path, and says:

The fear of the powerlessness of theory yields the pretext of declaring fealty to the almighty production-process and thereby fully concedes the powerlessness of theory...That culture has hitherto failed is not a ground for demanding its failure, by strewing the store of milled flour on spilled beer like Katherlieschen [reference to fairy-tale]. Human beings who belong together should neither be silent about their material interests nor reduce themselves to their lowest common denominator, but should reflectively grasp their relationship and thereby move beyond such.

The Base-Superstructure Metaphor

This discussion signals us to another contentious issue in critical theory – that of base and superstructure. The problematic thesis is: base determines superstructure. Base presumably being the material, economic base of a social formation, while the superstructure being the social, cultural, political edifice that rises from it. In the context of the above discussion, this thesis translates into the ‘everything is ideological’ logic; since culture and hence critique of culture are superstructural phenomena they can only be replications of, or at best deliberations upon the basal design.

In an essay on Raymond Williams, Eagleton explores this problem in the context of Williams’s own objection to the base/superstructure duality, and goes back to Marx’s ‘Preface to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy,’ as a possible source of a misunderstanding that feeds this problem. In this piece Marx attempts to put into words two fundamental relations through which he would try to understand social phenomenon. The being/consciousness relationship is an ontological one, “consequent upon the material structure of the human body, the material nature of its environment, the necessity for a mediatory labour between the two, and the fact that consciousness is therefore always in the first place, as Marx says elsewhere, ‘practical consciousness’.” The base/superstructure doctrine, on the other hand, is bound by and is valid within a particular historically framework. Eagleton tries to reformulate this model not as a statement of fact but a problem as such. “The question we need to pose, and which is left unanswered by Marx in his Preface, is why certain political, legal and other institutions, and certain definite forms of social consciousness, ‘rise...on the real foundation’ of a mode of production...it is not, of course ‘economic activity’ which Marx claims gives rise to such superstructures; it is economic activity conducted within relations of exploitation, social relations which for Marx are the dominant feature of the ‘base’. The answer then is that such superstructures are necessary to regulate and ratify those forms of exploitation. Superstructures are essential because exploitation exists.”

If we say that a truth is ontological then we imply that it is a fact of existence and cannot be questioned, but when we say that something is historical, it is immediately brought into the domain of change through human intervention. Because he spoke of these two doctrines in the same breath, Marx imparted onto the base-superstructure dualism a universal, eternal given-ness it does not actually possess. As that famous thesis on Feuerbach shows, Marx was not interested in theoretical abstraction for its own sake. Therefore, a premise which undermines political action through confusion of historical and ontological would appeal little to him.

If we take the base-superstructure model too literally, then we run into theoretical problems. All our activities that lie outside the ‘work place’ are part of this superstructure. So they too are determined, even when anti-hegemonic, by the hegemonic basal logic. If they are so compromised, then the ideas of criticism and change are lost. This is not to say that one must eject from consciousness the idea of the highly pervasive nature of the hegemonic logic, which can indeed undermine our actions. Experience has taught us that not only cultural texts, but even anti-hegemonic theory and practice can be reduced to cathartic spectacles which in the last analysis help the perpetuation of hegemony. Our actions (whether we practice theory or theorize practice, or do both) reveal themselves as ‘superstructural’ when they allow themselves to be reduced to mere spectacles and do not affect the base. ‘The base might then emerge as the future: that is to say, that which is still to be done in any process of revolutionary political change...The base is that outer horizon or final obstacle against which a transformative politics continually presses up, that which resists its dynamic and exposes it as lacking.’

With alienation in workplace, that which is not the workplace also becomes alienated. In political activity we transcend alienation, by removing this division of work and not-work, and attempt to remove the structure that creates this division. Authentic political praxis is in that sense neither of the superstructure nor of the base, but exists in a state of anticipation, one step in this divided world, the other in an undivided realm that it seeks to create. When we practice theory, we critique, not criticise, precisely because it is a creative vision that we try to articulate. Theory then is capable of being the mediatory ‘utterance,’ between the present and the anticipated future, and also between abstract and the concrete. It is not abstraction only, but also the enactment of abstraction and a move to the possibility of concretion.

On ‘Inglorious Basterds’, its reviews and its reviewers

2009-12-11T20:22:00.000-08:00

Paresh Chandra

Author: Ubaldo Martinez from United States
A fun, engrossing, beautifully crafted piece of nonsense, the likes of which we hadn’t seen in a long, long time. The silliness of the story is marvellously camouflaged with great dialogue and some superb performances….What is already one of Tarantino’s trademarks is his sure step along the most immediately recognizable bits of pop culture. He’s clearly not a cultured man but a pop expert, king in a world where people get their news from TV, don’t read, other than magazines and comics, etc. That’s how it happens, to be in the right place at the right time. For better or worse these are Tarantino times.

Author: borromeot from United States
Very entertaining, that’s for sure. Great little moments “inspired” by other movies. “The Guns Of Navarone”, “Operation Crossbow” and a myriad of 70’s B exploitation Italian movies. Tarantino is certainly clever and knows how to use the camera but then, I have to say it, nothing. The childish “divertimento” dressed in smart ass dialog remains there. The entertainment value is, perhaps, the most one should expect from a movie but it seems a damn shame that such a talent should be put at the service of something so one dimensional.

Author: namashi_1 from India
Quentin Tarantino is according to me, the finest Filmmaker of this generation. and if there’s any doubt in you about that fact, watch ‘Inglorious Basterds’ and you’ll understand what I am talking about…This film is a work of fiction, over here Hitler is brutally killed. The biggest plus point of this film is that ‘The Basterds’ win, ‘The Audience’ win. Over here, our revenge-full heroes bash up the baddies brutally, leaving us satisfied.
Source: IMDB

Jonathan Swift (on infectivity of satire) in ‘A Tale of a Tub’
…there is not, through all Nature, another so callous and insensible a Member as the World’s Posterior, whether you apply to it the Toe or the Birch.

On whom is the joke? Nazis being the ultimate bad guys of history, any film that is based around World War II is usually ‘figured out’ with black and white categories rather uncharacteristic of criticism/theory these days. In Tarantino’s film the Nazis are portrayed unequivocally as comic, stupid, and inhuman. The only exception is Landa, who is comic, clever and inhuman. Since the film is named after them, it can be assumed that ‘The Basterds’ are the ‘heroes.’

It is the ill luck of all good parody that most mistake it for what it parodies. What happens in the film? The US plays saviour again. This is, in fact, a retelling of the origins of Saviour US. The first time it took what has now become its most characteristic avatar, was in World War II. The tale of how the US entered the War, or of how US citizens kept flying in to fight in battles even when the US had not officially entered, has been told way to many times to keep track. The same happens this time – here Saviour US also manages to keep its politically correct ‘multicultural’ identity; the Basterds are black-haired Jews (the anachronism is a nice indication of how the past is retold in terms that suit the present). So, these American heroes go into Nazi occupied territory and ostensibly ‘scare the shit out of’ the Nazis.

All the Nazi big-shots are going to attend the first screening of a film (made especially on Hitler’s orders) about a Nazi sniper who killed over a hundred Allied soldiers all alone. The film is to raise the spirits of the Nazi troops. The Basterds, with some help from ‘Command,’ plan to burn down the theatre in which the film is being screened. The theatre is owned by a French Jew (Shosanna) who is undercover and whose parents were killed by Landa (the Jew Hunter). The film is being screened here because Shosanna is the crush of the German sniper-hero, who persuades those in charge to screen the movie in her theatre. Shosanna too, with her black boyfriend, hatches a plot to kill the Nazi leadership.

This assumption that the Basterds are the protagonists is punctured easily by observation of the amount of actual screen time they get. This aside, their plan, and each improvisation they make fails. The original plan fails because an American disguised as a German officer is caught because of his accent, the improvisations because of Landa’s detective work. Landa kills Bridget (the German actress who was in the plan with the Americans) and arrests Aldo (Brad Pitt), the leader of the Basterds. Landa, gives Aldo a choice – either Aldo gets for him, from the American state, a house in Hawaii and lots of money to go with it, in which case Landa would let the plan proceed, or Landa would arrest the remaining Basterds who are at this point in the theatre, plotting. Aldo agrees, the American state agrees, the plan is allowed to go on. However, neither Landa nor Aldo have taken Shoshanna into account, and it is she who locks the doors and sets the theatre on fire. It was her plan that actually worked.

That they were unable to get hold of Hitler must have really pissed the Saviours off. They tried to make up by getting Saddam (in addition to many, many others). With Hitler, his distinction automatically implied that the Americans were on the side of right. By the time Saddam came along, everybody knew that the Americans were decidedly on the side of right, and so the former was automatically all wrong. This movie offers a Freudian wish-fulfilment to the Saviour’s consciousness. The Americans in the theatre, make sure that they shoot Hitler (who would have died in any case), and as many other Nazis as possible (who would have died in any case as well). Of course, unlike the wish fulfilments of the culture industry, this one is not subliminal. In being only too manifest, it signifies that it is not the latent thought underlying the film. As often in Tarantino movies, art’s subject is art itself. He offers us that, which is offered to us by many American war movies, and many more ‘Westerns,’ but the tonality of the offer is markedly different. The matter of fact way in which heroism is posited in the original genres, makes the message too obvious to question. In Tarantino’s parody, the comical side of that heroism is shown to us. Because of the change of tone, one is allowed space to think, and question, and reject.

The Nazis die because of Shoshanna, and Aldo lives because of Landa. Of course, the Americans don’t know about Shoshanna, so for them Landa was also responsible for the end of the Nazi leadership, and the War in Europe. Typically, Aldo, the drawling American must have the last word, and so carves the Swastika on Landa’s forehead before the latter gets his rewards from the American government. It’s a very solid last word, as last words go, and Aldo is able to regain his lost cockiness. Usually, however, it is an icing on the cake after the hero wins (“Hasta la vista, baby!”). This time, its only virtue is that it’s funny and seems like a grand thing to do. But it has nothing grand to back it up. Of course, then it makes one wonder if there is anything really grand about any of these gestures. Viewers often recognise pop culture references in Tarantino movies but don’t see what these do. By parodying them Tarantino’s reveals the lie of a lot of pop culture, and manages to do it even as he seems to be placed inside it.

While talking of this film, it occurs to me, that the transition from talking about it in relation to politics, in the narrow sense, to talking about it as a film, is quite smooth. It could, of course, be that these are my private preoccupations that allow this seemingly smooth transition. But I would argue that this is not a matter of idiosyncratic hermeneutics, but is the reflection of an important quality of the film. In parodying earlier films, Tarantino is taking on the meta-narrative of American imperialism, and the sugar-coated justifications for a US led unipolar world, that Hollywood has fed, and continues to feed the world on. In his famous essay, ‘The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, Jameson argued: 1) with postmodernism the distinction between pop culture and high art begins to vanish, and 2) the link between art and the market becomes more direct than ever. This, however, does not imply that Adorno’s observations about pop culture cease to be relevant. They are as relevant as ever – pop culture continues to lie. A work that takes on pop culture takes on the lie. When Conrad had parodied the adventure novel, and put forth an extremely powerful critique of colonialism, he was still producing ‘high art’ (there were times when he failed, and it became impossible to extricate his work from the larger mass of adventure novels). Tarantino manages to be indisputably popular and yet deconstructs popular myths that constitute the biggest confidence tricks.

A Review of "Sea of Poppies"

2009-11-14T10:58:00.000-08:00

Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, Viking-Penguin, New Delhi, 2008.

"Back then, a few clumps of poppy were enough to provide for a household's needs, leaving a little over, to be sold: no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies...Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies...but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there was better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But those toothsome winter crops were steadily shrinking in acreage: now the factory's appetite for opium seemed never to be sated". (29)

"As a family, their experience lay in the managing of kings and courts, peasants and dependents: although rich in land and property, they had never possessed much by way of coinage; what there was of it they disdained to handle themselves, preferring to entrust it to a legion of agents, gomustas and poor relatives. When the old zemindar's coffers began to swell, he tried to convert his silver into immovable wealth of the kind he best understood - land, houses, elephants, horses, carriages and, of course, a budgerow more splendid than any other craft then sailing on the river. But with new properties there came a great number of dependants who had all to be fed and maintained; much of the new land proved to be uncultivable, and the new houses quickly became an additional drain since the Raja would not suffer them to be rented". (86-87)

A Review of 'Waiting for Renée'

2008-12-26T05:48:00.000-08:00

Paramita Ghosh, Waiting for Renée, Writers Workshop, Kolkata, 2008, ISBN:978-81-8157-770-2, pp. 70, Price (HB) Rs 150.

Two usual questions asked about a piece of writing: 1) Is it fun? (This often translates into: does it take effort? If it does then it is not fun.) and 2) Does it give a good representation of reality? As a critic, I can afford to snobbishly disregard the first and the second I will try to rescue since it is after all, a result of years of reading of books that ‘reflect life’ and is closer to the canon. In fact there is still nothing wrong with demanding a piece of writing to be a ‘representation of reality’, if we only complicate our understanding of the phrase. ‘Representation of reality’ does not imply verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is one avatar that this phrase took and its age to my mind seems gone. If truth be told some of my favourite writers never tried to achieve this effect in their writing. Descriptions became outdated since Dostoyevsky (even though naturalism had just emerged). If you are looking for easy fun, find another book. Reality is there, not much verisimilitude.

The introduction that the writer wrote for this collection suggests that “The Story of Renée” captures the tussle between a woman and a man about the telling of stories and 'construction of narratives'. Maybe she wants the reader to believe that. In a sense it is true, but I don’t know if she has done the story much good by writing that. It is not just that. Yes, there is the woman and there is the man, and the woman seems imaginative and (pardon me for using such passé terms) spontaneous and the man is all about the facts and there is tussle. Some may find it strange that the names that come up in the tussle are all French - Sartre, Simone, Napoleon (Renée?) - even though as the author points out in the introduction it is about India. Keeping in mind all the hullabaloo surrounding the discourse of ‘Indian Writing in English’, the author seems to be living on a knife’s edge, using such references and yet trying, it appears to pay her way out of strife, bribing her Indian readers with that introduction of hers.

Remember Freud’s dream book? Remember what he said about dream content and latent thought? What you think you see is not the real thing, though you see the real thing as well. The tussle is what you think you see, but it is not the real thing. The real thing is something else, which you also see. To me it seems the more important idea is the seemingly marginalized (repressed?) one. In a subtle way, does the story suggest that Sartre and Simone are Indian? If feminism can be Indian, and if an Indian woman can write about a tussle between a woman and a man, then aren’t they Indian? Is the only way of writing available to the Indian writer (writing in English) one that ignores these experiences that are definitive of her/his aesthetics and reality in favour of descriptions of some ‘Indian reality’ that would get her/him the Booker Prize? Maybe not, says the story. ‘You tell me’, also says the story. The woman in the story, who ‘sang a French chanson’ dreams of writing a European story and the Indian reader might laugh at her inauthenticity but the story has already been written and the reader without knowing has been roped in, into the bargain.

The story tries to negotiate the situation of the Indian writer writing in English, the guilt of being privileged and writing for the privileged, and the anxiety of representing also the one who is not privileged. As ‘post-colonial’ subjects, we like to think of ourselves as special. But in point of fact this problem is universal, in this case more pronounced maybe. The experience of art in a class society is inevitably one of leisure and class privilege. To somehow negotiate this anxiety, this ‘guilt of art’ is the attempt of every artist. The most that a piece of art can do is accept this guilt and bring it out in its relation with the social. If it doesn’t do that the repressed will return in uncomfortable ways and if it does that, the situation remains uncomfortable all the same.

The ‘presenting a slice of life’ approach does not seem to be working for many of these writers; the pressure of negotiating a landscape of which they aren’t a part, always proves overpowering and instead of ‘breaking the landscape’, they often end up ‘exoticising’ it, or reducing it to stereotypes (the two are pretty much the same thing). Ghosh, it appears, tries to do something different. Something, possibly not completely original, but then imitation in art as Vargas Llosa says somewhere, is not a moral but an artistic problem and Ghosh seems enough of an artist to personalize this ‘plagiarism’. In ‘The Kites’ for instance, she is able to handle the antinomy of social discontent pretty well through the boy who wants to destroy the houses so that he can make a long board to iron more clothes only to realize that with the houses gone there would be no more clothes to iron. Some snapshots in this story might actually be a part of her lived experience, for instances that of presswallas having to hurry up and down the stairs to collect clothes in ones and twos. The story is indeed an urban one and is able to encompass nicely the experience of the writer as well as the characters. But she wisely decides not to offer a last word, or at least not an easy one. The enigmatic last paragraph is where the answer to whatever question the reader might ask lies, but it has to be found; it does not give itself up as Adiga’s false ones do.

Ghosh remoulds and brings to life seemingly dated motifs by adding strange perspectives. One cannot be sure if the woman in red is sad or if it’s right to think that she’s. The imaginary stenographer takes her notes, deferring judgement. To express the strangeness of everyday situations, words themselves become strange in their relation to each other. In an uneasy situation of a domestic battle, time becomes ‘uncertain’. Short sentences become narratives and the longer ones mere frames.

‘The time is uncertain. The lamp posts are so tall that this evening who knows if a bulb or a star will hang itself.’ (23)

Everydayness slips into the metaphysical through the word ‘uncertain’. Drab reality lit by strange but smooth writing presents a similar chiasmatic structure, possible only in the in-between state where matter and anti-matter coexist and nothing is quite final—there is a promise of stability but the promise exists because it was not kept. In openly choosing typical urban images, the text seems to accept that it has come late in the day, but this acceptance does not imply that it has nothing to add. Difference in form is often a sign of fundamental change, though I wouldn’t throw in all my money yet; I would wait and watch.

The feeling of being in limbo that she preserves, well most of the time, does fade a little on occasions when I think she becomes uncharacteristically eager to cut the Gordian knot. ‘A writer trying to find words’ has been done before, but that has been the fate of most things. And each writer finds words differently and each could be put into a story. In any case, till a point the story seemed to be going in one direction and then it changed route. Maybe the author chose a male persona to distance herself or to give an appearance of distance, but another likely reason seems to be good old verisimilitude—maybe somewhere in the back of her mind, Ghosh thought it would be more believable if a guy gets the call to revolution. I say that because I find this part of the story somewhat bewildering and I can’t imagine why this episode, if it had to be there, had to be there in this fashion unless she wants to give us a taste of ‘bitter’ reality. The revolutionary as a windbag with a beard is a stock image now and in such circumstances when faced with the unsure, a dreamy artist seems more of an ass. It seems that this one time in her desire to present the sad face of reality, she gives in to the old way and instead of giving us a type gives us a stereotype. Her style in this part loses its characteristic ease and allows out of place sarcasm to creep in. (‘While my friend fills in the picture, I learn that I am a hidden radical.’) The change in style makes me unsure of whether I should give her the benefit of the doubt and suggest that these feelings are not recommended or valued, though if her intention in choosing a male character was distance, this is possible as well.

The thing about anticipation is that it allows you to keep one foot into what you are waiting for without allowing the complacency of ownership. It keeps you on your toes and never allows you to become comfortable. It tells you that it is not the perfect world. You should not become complacent because there is unhappiness, inequality, injustice (class?). You are insignificant and you cannot afford to become complacent. You can change things but you haven’t yet. You can create meaning but you haven’t yet. You think you can do these things but you can’t be sure. A work that does not preserve or recreate this uncertainty has no siblings in the realm of philosophy and is by extension not art. At the very least, Waiting for Renée tries to be art.

I think the volume is pretty. The binding could be better though. ‘A Credo by P. Lal’, on the last page in spite of the wry tone makes me feel good about possessing a ‘limited edition’ object.

Failure, Consumerism and a Counter Strategy The IP College Protests: an Insider’s Diagnosis

2008-12-07T09:41:00.000-08:00

The Protest in Perspective

Almost all theorists of our times have spoken of the trespass of consumerism in all spheres of modern existence; some may seem to like it while others may seem to dislike it, some may like it while others may dislike it, but they do not deny it. Instead of locating signs of this trespass on television or in the mall, which are typical instances used for the criticism of consumerist culture, one needs to spare a glance for what seems to lie at the opposite end of the line. Instead of regurgitating what we as part of this resistance have swallowed from books and essays, we must try something different; we have been walking on feet for too long, it is time to walk on our hands (as some like Slavoj Zizek have tried to do). The observer needs to observe and understand how resistance to consumerism changes into consumerism of resistance—like in all times one must not underestimate the stubbornness of capital, a system that has been able to survive for decades apparently in a moribund state surely has great capacity to integrate all resistance into its folds.

The following paragraph is a somewhat passionate report a propos the recent protests that followed an incident of sexual molestation of girls from Delhi University, published in a hypothetical daily.

A Sunday morning saw the future law keepers of the country participate in a private pogrom. A group of men who had come to that area to attend a police examination decided that they deserved to celebrate the end of exam by molesting a few hundred girls. Such ‘celebrations’ made the students angry and their souls rose against such injustice. The result was discerned in the series of protests in and around the university. A memorandum was brought that asked for the exam to be annulled. Various other demands were also on the list. Delegates visited the vice-chancellor, the commissioner of police, the NCW, the Home Ministry and even Arjun Singh. What went wrong then? If such was the anger in their hearts then why did it stop? And what came out of it? At least we tried—somebody replies; our hearts can be easier.

It would be stupid to explain the short-lived-ness of this agitation purely with reference to conditions specific to it. So before going into a discussion of those specificities I will try to locate the failure of this movement into what has become a tradition of failed protests—the easy acceptance of the failure of agitations that seem astonishingly effervescent to begin with is not uncommon these days. Did the massive anti-war demonstrations in New York and London stop the war in Iraq? An acquaintance of mine who returned from the US recently had me understand that many protests in the US take place on Sundays for matters of convenience. It is strange because these demonstrations supposedly signify a motion against the establishment and yet clearly the principal interests of both the establishment and resistance coincide—workdays and workday traffic cannot be interrupted. In this light the demonstrations were not failures at all, in fact both sides came out of it satisfied—it is a “strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance” [Zizek], to use Zizek’s words. “The protestors saved their beautiful souls”—they made it clear that they did not accept such attitude from the administration. It is a perverse (and the usual) form of consumerism, the commodity bought and consumed is “peace of mind” and the cost is a few days out in the sun. Such battles are fought not to change the world, but achieve a sense of satisfaction that I have done my part—and now that my conscience is at ease the world can go to hell. Every advertisement on televisions tells me that I am not a perfect person unless I consume that product; similarly “resistance” becomes a product advertised in politically correct classrooms.

In the last analysis the interests of the agitators and the administration were the same. During the IP College protests this fact came out in the open most blatantly when on one of the days of demonstrations the students from IP College became rather disconcerted on hearing a rumour that the college would be sealed if the protest continued. It might have been due to the highly institutionalised setup of that college that kept the students in a convent like state of innocent ignorance that they were unable to see through the joke. They were unable to realise that the fight was not between the college and the university; it was hard for them to perceive that the smaller as well as the larger entity were seats of the same central power that the students needed to fight. But more importantly, it became clear that the prospect of really shaking things up had never occurred to them.

At no point are such protests directed at the base of power; rather the people in power are accused of betraying their own professed principles. The protests in this case were directed against the “unsympathetic attitude of our vice-chancellor and our police”; as if the entire episode was an aberration and not the rule. A strange but expected conjecture entirely in observance of the customary practice of complaining about the ever-increasing number of “injustices” and not questioning the status quo. The “solution” that was proposed by the students—nullification of the exam—was more a form of appeasement than anything else. What if this demand had been met? Would that have led anywhere? It is a strange situation—if a movement like this fails in achieving the goals it sets then it gets buried, since all that could have been done is done and nothing came out of it. In future agitations of the sort, those who participated this time would opt out since they know that it would not work. If the demands are by any chance met, even then it gets buried. Mission accomplished. Either way the eventual result had to be the same, so in a fashion logical enough, the easier way was taken. It cannot be denied that each battle has its particular aims and large distant goals alone cannot keep things going, but the strange part is that since this battle was fought only to wear the armour and get a photo clicked, warriors returned home after the horn was sounded. Because of the lack of a larger anti-establishment perspective the demands became ends-in-themselves, incidental to the desire of putting up a show and effectively inconsequential to the agitators; the administration knew that they did not need to satisfy the former. The demands need not be met for in the act of putting forth demands the demanders had been satisfied.

That under all circumstances we stay a part of this system remains the single most important idea that governs our actions. It defines our interactions with the system, whether the interactions are friendly or antagonistic. What we observed above was that even those interactions, which are apparently antagonistic, are often undercut by“faithfulness” to the system. However the dialectical contrary of this understanding, which is that even when our interactions are on surface friendly, underlying it is a deep antagonism, escapes us. I will come to the nature of this antagonism at the end of the essay. Meanwhile I will move on to an analysis of the specificities of the protest that made it so short-lived.

A Digression and a Return

Jean-Paul Sartre differentiates between two modes of existence for an individual as a part of society. In one case persons perform roles that can be describe as being those of “we-subjects” while the in other case they can be described as “we-objects”. The role of persons as “we-subjects” corresponds to a way of associating with other people that Sartre calls “seriality”. Sartre uses the concept of seriality to describe circumstances in which a person’s relation to others is limited to a uniformity of behaviour and isolation otherwise [Jameson 238]. Each person models her/his mode of being after what s/he thinks is the mode of being of the Other, or individuals inhabiting society at large, but any real association with them is lacking as the others don’t really exist, except as a “vast optical illusion, a kind of collective hallucination projected out of individual solitude onto an imaginary being thought of as”public opinion” or simply “they”” [Jameson 239]—such a relation has no real meaning for individuals. For instance when one is in a theatre one feels a part of some sort of community (of viewers); however this feeling of community has no consequence for anyone, self or the other. The situation of those involved in the protest that is being analysed remained by and large a serial situation—being part of the demonstrations had no real consequence for an overwhelming majority of the people that included most of those who stood at the forefront. The aspect of conscience easing is included in this concept; for in this case too the person in question enters the demonstration to fulfil what s/he thinks is the duty of every responsible person—an idea that is defined once again by the clause of public-opinion. Here too then genuine association with others that is required for continued participation is lacking.

The second mode of existence, that as “we-objects” depends upon the formation of genuine groups to get over the helplessness of a serial situation. Such a group is formed only when “I feel myself become an object along with someone else under the look of such a “third” that I experience my being as a “we-object”; for then, in our mutual interdependency, in our shame and rage, our beings are somehow mingled in the yes of the onlooker, for whom we are somehow “the same”…” [Jameson]. How a group maintains its authentic existence (an existence of this mode i.e.) is not our concern here—but it comes into existence against some common enemy and is defined by the vision of the Other. On this occasion the common opponent eludes all concrete formulations and the concept stays limited to a faceless crowd. If this protest had been connected to a larger anti-establishment perspective it would have been easier to sustain, and the demands might have been formulated in a more fruitful manner. It is not strange to find that it was because of a few individuals who formed such a group that held such an anti-establishment that the movement survived for whatever length of time it survived.

The larger question at stake in this entire episode was that of sexual harassment and gender and the shared identity that had to be interpreted in a manner to allow for the construction of an authentic group – that of students. This article is an attempt at analysing this protest and the reason behind its short-lived-ness. So the larger question of gender would be a pointless digression; it might also prove a question too large to cope with in an essay like this. When I call it a digression I refer to the fact that in this essay my attempt is to analyse the construction of authentic student groups. The fight against sexual harassment can also allow for the construction of such groups. Further on I will attempt to locate the identity of being anti-sexual harassment fighters in the scheme of things, but I feel the need to warn the reader that this attempt might seem half-hearted owing to its contingency as far as this article is concerned.

For now however this leaves us with the identity of being students. Many locate this identity in a vague notion of a shared journey through the realm of knowledge. Another popular perspective would place the experience of being students in the set of consumer experiences that constitutes modern existence; education being the commodity consumed. Both these notions and most others still remain stuck in definitions of persons as “we-subjects” and a genuine group identity (defined in opposition to something) is denied. I shall proceed to propose one possible definition of a student that could allow for the formation for a genuine group (this would take us to the idea that was left undeveloped at the end of the first section).

We as students are workers-in-making. This statement needs to be qualified for the understanding of who is a “worker” might be different for the reader and the writer of this article. “Worker” here refers to every person whose participation in production is as a wage earner. A worker is a person who owns no “means-of-production” and depends upon his “labour power” to earn his livelihood; in this sense a worker could be a factory “hand” earning a few hundreds a week or a CEO earning in millions or for that matter a college professor earning a few thousand. If this is the definition of a worker most students are workers-in-making. This agreed upon, it is not hard to see that the basis of an authentic student identity that will allow for the formation of genuine groups, genuine students’ organisations that is, will have to depend upon an understanding of the fact that our current relationship with the system remains one defined by class struggle; the aspect of our existence in the eye of the system that we oppose will be our existence as workers-to-be.

Another digression would allow us to look at the role of groups formed against sexual harassment or for that matter all sexuality/gender related questions. Duncan Foley says somewhere that there is never a “democracy of determinants”. In a capitalist society the system of class and the process of class struggle are the determinants that sit on top of the hierarchy of determinants. All other determinants (or structures of exploitation—for all societies till now have structured themselves so as to base themselves on exploitation) form the guard that surrounds this determinant. Race, gender, and caste—all of these are systems that capitalism uses to run its show. However it is important to note that capitalism does not depend upon these structures to reproduce itself. As a result whenever a stage is reached where these structures become hindrances to capitalism, they are questioned—which is not to say that feminist struggles are an offshoot of this tendency, but merely to suggest that the development of capitalism in its industrialized form facilitated, or made it relatively (when compared to earlier modes of production) easier for these struggles to be waged with great success.

All movements and all groups need a degree of self-reflexivity to maintain their revolutionary potential. At this point in history feminist movements need to understand the manner in which capitalism has been able to bottle the revolutionary potential of feminism in revolutionary moments that are past. To free this potential of the chains it has been bound by the fight against patriarchy and harassment made possible by the system of patriarchy needs to be combined with struggle against capitalism. If the power equation in society is decided on the ownership of means of production then the social location of the proletariat provides the proletarian identity a revolutionary potential that is unique among all identities. Our fight against sexual harassment and gender discrimination will become all the more potent if combined with our struggles as workers-to-be and subsequently workers.

In all circumstances a student, consciously or unconsciously understands this relation in whom s/he is bound to the system, what is lacking is the clause of class-consciousness that would make the connection between career and exploitation plain. In the above case, as in most cases this connection is not perceived and the result is submissiveness that exists under the facade of resistance. If and only if this submission is transformed into struggle, would any agitation succeed for the success of all agitations would lie in the manner in which they fit into the battle against the system. Until a vision of this larger battle informs our actions our attempts would be directed towards reform, and the discourse of reform is pointless in a system that cannot exist without inequity. The pointlessness of the demand of increasing police security in the campus, when the people who committed the crime were aspiring policemen is a remarkable instance of the uselessness of reform unconnected from a larger logic of struggle. A system that is defined on the leitmotif of profit cannot be reformed into being a “considerate” system—it can of course sell “consideration” in the market.

Bibliography

1. Žižek, Slavoj, Resistance Is Surrender,[ http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/zize01_. html], accessed on 16th August, 2008
2. Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1974

Fun is good?

2008-12-07T09:37:00.000-08:00

It is very hard to have convictions and harder still to accept that you have any, these days. The anxiety of ‘whether anything has any point’, which used to keep ideologues on their toes, in a state of constant self-reflexion, has now become a teddy bear to comfort those who want to ‘do something (to save the world)’ without going out of their way. I could here be speaking of those, who realize their ‘responsible citizen-ness’ after terrorist attacks and for short periods feel enlightened enough to take out time for ‘candle-light vigils’ between MBA classes and Roadies. But I am not speaking of them. I have in mind those who on most occasions I would put on my own side, whose lives seem to define themselves in circles of non-conformity but somehow not anti-hegemony. For them, the only safe reason for doing things is fun (success and money are out due the clause of non-conformity and political action is ousted by what passes off as ‘what’s the point?’ or ‘I’m not sure if that’s the right way.’). Fun is good because it is fun and allows space for non-conformity.