:: Saturday, August 03, 2002 ::

My Son the Fanatic:

What is it that drove the Tipton Three to join Al-Qaeda? How did these young Brits end up in Camp X-ray. How did they become "The Lost Boys"? These questions have been presented as a paradox to British and American audiences who were harboring impressions that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are the fruits of impoverishment, radical Islam, and lack of job opportunities in the Middle East. The case of Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqubal, and Ruhal Ahmed is a challenge for any conventional explanation which looks to the Middle East for answers. The story of these boys cannot be dismissed as a freak anomaly like the case of the "American Taliban," John Walker Lindh.

My thoughts on this subject have led me back to re-viewing Hanif Kureishi's "My Son the Fanatic" (1999), a poorly marketed, arthouse drama, starring Om Puri that did not do so well in the US. The story is about an immigrant taxi driver working in an post-industrial Northern English town who falls in love with a prostitute while his son turns fanatically religious. The story operates within a Western framework that humanizes the father despite his affair with a prostitute while painting the son as misguided, sexist, and anti-semitic. Although we see the son turn toward Islam, the story does not really help us to understand and appreciate why a kid who grew up in Britain would want to move out of that country and "return" to his faith. There are glimpses of the pervasive racism that currently grips British society, but it is certainly not sufficient for most American audiences to understand what life is like in Britain for its minority communities. One must keep in mind that most American's have only an iconic image of the UK and the icons are generally restricted to the royal family and perhaps the Sex Pistols or Clockwork Orange. Despite the common tongue, Americans probably know less about the UK than they do about any other part of the world -- and that equals an astounding amount of ignorance. The grafitti on the walls that say "Pakis Go Home" are like so many hieroglyphics to the American tourist. To the Americans of European extraction it also does not quite make sense that Indians and Pakistanis are treated worse in the UK than they treat African-Americans in the US. Most Americans see South Asian-Americans as "white," at least in terms of day to day affairs, while most Brits see South Asians as the gangsters/dossers/hooligans.

What I sought from the film remained unanswered. The "fanatic son" only recites slogans filled with invective but there is no catharsis. I hope one day this film will be rewritten so that the son's perspective and indictment of the society he grew up in is made more clear and coherent. What fascinated me was the desire to start fresh to find the city on the hill by returning to the subcontinent. I would agree that much of this quest is misguided; it is the fantasy of the diaspora that the homeland is pure or can be made more pure than the current land in which they live. It is also the exuberance of youth to believe that self-mastery leads to mastery of the world around them. Nevertheless, as a bystander in the movie says, "... these kids stand for something, we never did that." In essence, the children of the diaspora are no longer content to ape their former colonial masters, nor are they willing to accept quietly the daily insults of life as a "person of color" in Western societies.

Although, I think I can understand some of the frustration and anger of the South Asian community in the UK, I still cannot quite fathom how this frustration leads to joining para-military organizations. Given that the American government is holding these boys under indefinite detention, we will probably never know their stories. We will also never know if they are being held legitimately or not. (I should add here that the suspension of habeus corpus by the US represents a failure of constitutional democracy and reveals the extent to which the republic has been eclipsed by the desire for empire.)

Nevertheless, I think that the ultimate horror that Americans and the West will have to face is that many of those who are currently fighting to reinvigorate Islam are not ignorant of the West and modernity, but products of it. They are the post-moderns. They "hate" the West because they know it. They are the intimate enemy, the are the fruits of domestic racism.

:: Vikash Yadav 7:46 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Violence and the Foundational Moment:

Conrad, thanks for your comments on the role of violence in the foundational moment. I really found the discussion on "repetition, misrecognition, and historical necessity" (also known as the "figure-fulfillment" model of history) to be quite useful. I am glad that we both see the merit in theorizing/problematizing the foundational moment as a means to distinguish amongst acts of violence (e.g., terrorism and nationalist struggle). Let me tie up a few loose strings before addressing your main "devil's advocate" argument about the role of violence in the foundational moment.

Malthus, Marx, and Darwin:

Let me begin by saying that my attempt to link the work of Malthus to Marx and Darwin is hardly original and I would be quite willing to acknowledge the many ruptures in the patterns of thought exhibited by these theorists. The link between Malthus and Darwin is best credited to the work of R.M. Young, P. Vorzimmer, and P. Bowler (see also the work of Anthony Flew). Darwin himself notes the importance of Malthus in his Autobiography (1838). Apparently Darwin began reading Malthus shortly after he began his systematic inquiry. It is also evident that Malthus had a strong influence on the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, the man who independently "discovered" the theory of evolution of species by natural selection at nearly the same time as Charles Darwin. Alfred Wallace wrote in his autobiography, My Life (1905), how Malthus' Principle of Population was the first work he had read on the problems of "philosophical biology."

The link between Malthus and Marx is more difficult to establish, especially because of the explicit rejection by both Marx and Engels of the work of the "mountebank-parson." (To be honest, the comments by Marx and Engels concerning Malthus reveal both communist thinkers to be either incredibly shallow and stupid or simply unwilling to acknowledge a great intellectual debt. I tend to think the latter is a more convincing explanation of their hostility to the parson). However, as I think you are willing to acknowledge the traces of a Malthusian theory of poverty within the Marxist logic, we can set this issue aside. I think we can also agree that Marx would have read Malthus in conjunction with Ricardo. I am, however, less willing to concede that Ricardo assembled a more coherent model of economic change -- thereby exerting a greater influence on Marx. Malthus' Book III of the Essay on the Principle of Population was an attempt to question Smith's assertions about the ability of economic growth to improve the well being of the working class. Malthus exhibited a great degree of skepticism about the self-correcting mechanisms of the market, which I believe must have left some impression on Marx (as it most certainly did on Lord Keynes).

I should add that Marx's observation that Malthus' ideas were not original (especially in reference to the work of Robert Wallace) is rather unfair. In fact, Malthus widely credited three men with influencing his own work: Adam Smith, David Hume, and Robert Wallace. If I am not mistaken, Malthus has an extensive discussion of Wallace and Condorcet somewhere near the begining of his Essay.

To be honest one could also profitably trace a thread of Newtonian mechanics that runs through all of the authors mentioned, including and especially Hobbes. But my main point was that these authors tend to emphasize struggle and often violence as the engine of systemic change. (I would agree with you completely that Malthus and his intellectual interlocutors were certainly not anti-natalists. Although I should add that Engels did come to advocate some forms of fertility "planning" toward the end of his life). With all this being said, let us turn the idea of violence.

Physical and Psychic Violence

I am not sure that I establish a metaphysics of presence in my discussion of the foundational moment. As you correctly note, I argue that foundational moments are often based on (1) deferral of meaning; (2) they involve self-deception; and (3) that foundational moments are conceptualized retroactively. This does not seem like a theory that foregrounds the strategies that deconstructionists generally critique. In fact, I think most deconstructionist would agree with my description of the mechanics of the "foundational" moment(s), particularly because I show how the signified is always already displaced and deferred.

Nevertheless, I should note that I am simply unconvinced by the Derridean equivalence of silence and violence that haunts/possesses your argument. The Derridean logic seems to be grounded on his famous slogan that there is nothing outside of the text. This strikes me as slightly hegemonic and imperial in its disciplinary intent. I would rather maintain some distinction between the silencing/silences of bodies and the silencing/silences of texts. I do not want to replicate the heated debates between Foucault and Derrida on this subject, but suffice it to say that I would like to maintain a distinction between the ideas of silence and violence, even though I will admit that each concept haunts the other to some degree and thereby giving each concept its meaning.

It is certainly the case that past instances of violence haunt the present and predetermine much of the actions available to us. I also agree with you that the we use the (Christian) figure-fulfillment narrative to provide meaning to past and contemporary episodes of violence. However, it is also the case that if we see the trace of violence in every action, then we can no longer conceptualize a world in which there is anything buy violence and its traces -- thereby rendering the conception of violence rather meaningless. I would prefer not to argue in such an ad absurdum manner, but I believe it is necessary when one seeks to counter a perspective that erases conceptual differences. What is most startling about the erased difference between silences/fossilized violence and violence on bodies is that the entire impetus for deconstructivist approaches is to open intellectual space for argumentation and conceptual specification.

Overall, I think we are both aiming at a nuanced position that admits the presence of violence and its traces in the reconstruction of the foundational moment, but which also emphasizes that there is a rupture in the actual foundational moment in which deferral opens spaces rather than physical conquest or overcoming. The point is ultimately to look not for a military conquest but a decision to defer certain conflicts within groups and with their rivals as the moment in which struggle is transformed into the foundation of a new regime.

:: Vikash Yadav 6:08 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Re: Violence as the Mid-Wife of the Nation:

Vikash, I thought I should respond to your clarifications on the role of violence and the foundational moment. I should say that I am in two minds about the violence and its significance in the foundational moment and it is an association that I find troubling on several levels; I remain willing to be convinced that such a link is not a rigid or ubiquitous one but let me put the case for the opposition and react to your penetrating comments.

Marx’s Malthusian Inheritance:

I like your re-interpretation of Marx’s debt to Hobbes and the Malthusian element in his concept of social struggle. Though I wonder whether such an allusion could not be pushed too far for both him and Darwin. There are some fundamental differences between Malthus and Marx in their conceptions of society, which reveal a deeper fault line in theories of poverty in general. Such theories fall in to two broad camps: one regards poverty as socio-genic in nature or the outcome of particular economic and historical processes rendering amelioration or structural transformation and the second assumes that it is the outcome of circumstances beyond their control and because those circumstance refer to innate physical/genetic features of the population in question, intractable cultural or psychological characteristics or aspects of their environment which seem to impede economic and social development. Malthus’s theory of population increase obviously fall into the latter camp and like all explanations which tend to naturalise poverty and underdevelopment and thereby neutralising the influence of alterable economic and social conditions and like all such arguments they are not discrete or separate, but intermingle in practise mutually reinforcing each other. Marx’s and I would argue Darwin (though the latter is less concerned with poverty as a social issue) argument follows more closely the first pattern where the socio-historical production of poverty and social relations renders it both: less a natural outcome of society that is inevitable and therefore has to be tolerated and one which will change over time as structural changes in social structure are effected.

Another specific point of divergence that with Malthus is the belief that wholly different laws of nature applied to the rich and the poor, For Malthus and his sympathisers of the time, poverty may have been the inevitable fate of most of the people but it certainly was not the fate of all. This is apparent when Malthus considers that what he calls “preventive checks” on population growth such as delayed marriage and “moral restraint”, depended on the poor acquiring the middle-class habits of prudence and self-discipline; the problem was that it was the very absence of these habits which made them poor in the first place, it was never likely that such traits could ever be really developed except through stern draconian measures imposed from above.

I think that some aspects of Malthus’s theory have been misappropriated by modern day neo-Malthusians, as there were possibilities for curbing population growth and if Malthus was really the anti-natalist we are told he was his consideration of them would have been more serious and positive. For if Malthus’s conviction that the root cause of pauperism was the excessive procreative tendencies of the lower orders, then he should have welcomed any reasonable plan to limit population growth through birth control. The particular methods of coitus interruptus, non-coital sex, abortion and contraception were branded as “vice” and as “improper arts “ by Malthus; even though historians now see coitus interruptus as one of the main brakes on fertility in pre-industrial Europe and one of the most popular forms of contraceptive until the 20th century remarkable for it’s relative effectiveness and safety (not to mention being free).

Instead of these methods Malthus preferred a recourse to what he called “laws of Nature” and the seeming puzzling aspect of his theory can be understood we realise the fact that Malthus’s never aimed at a theory of fertility regulation – on the contrary it not only suggested that the fertility regulation of the poor was the main source of their poverty, but also implied that it was best if fertility was not significantly controlled by human intervention, because that would reduce poverty and with it the stimulus of the poor to seek work. Up until the 18th century most thinkers tended to see population growth as a major source of political and economic strength as well as innovation. Thomas Hobbes exemplifies this approach when he wrote:

"Concerning multitude it is the duty of them that are sovereign in authority to increase the people, in as much as they are governors of mankind under God Almighty, who having created but one man, and one woman, declared that it was his will they should be multiplied and increased afterwards. And seeing this to be done by ordinances concerning copulation, they are by the law of nature bound to make such ordinances concerning the same, as may tend to the increase of mankind.”

This view gradually shifted in the 18th century under the influence of Malthus’s views. But as noted above Malthus was not an anti-natalist, and while he is famous for his view that poverty was the result of – “the natural tendency of the labouring classes of society to increase beyond the demand for their labour, or the means of adequate support”, he also viewed population growth and competition amongst workers as a “necessary stimulus to industry”. I would argue that Malthus was not in favour of removing population pressure/increases as modern neo-Malthusians argue they are, but in reducing the material obligation of the rich to mitigate the human misery caused by chronic or periodic unemployment. Such an obligation for him was incompatible with private property rights – his supposed law of population acquitted the property owning classes of any such accountability, by arguing that poverty was the “natural” product of the fertility of the poor, rather than of the social or economic system. The solution therefore was a matter of individual, not systemic, responsibility. Thus many of Malthus’s inconsistencies and contradictions can be explained by reference to his political agenda – the defence of private property rights as a means of organising that system and the removal of accountability by that system.

Marx himself observed that the Malthusian theory was not new – Robert Wallace another cleric had published a book called Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence in 1761 which had also described a disproportionate relationship between population and the means of subsistence, the main difference between Wallace and Malthus being that the former regarded this as a future problem and did not seek to explain contemporary poverty in terms of population growth/pressure, while for the latter the problem was a both a current one and was responsible for the poverty of the poor at a generic level. It is difficult not to make the link with the debates over the Poor Law taking place at the time, and the mounting demand by employers for the creation of a cheap labour market, which required a working population that would not be too costly to maintain and neither too modest in its reproductive habits. In particular, Malthus’s views come very close to explicitly saying that the poor and the rich were governed by different social laws and class differences are articulated in such a way that the poor are seen as almost a different race or people distinct from the middle-classes and the aristocratic/industrial elites, recurring trope in Victorian thought, for example Benjamin Disraeli that guiding light of so much of 19th and 20th century Toryism on the British political scene, in his book Sybil subtitled it as “ a Story of two nations” the two nations of course being the rich and the poor – this also accounts for the left wing of the Conservative party in Britain today articulating their type of Conservatism by self-references as “One-nation Tories”, they leave unclear as to which nation (of the poor and the rich) this refers to.

Even if the poor wished to control or limit their fertility, Malthus counselled against any expectation that human effort could be effective – “It is to the laws of nature and to the conduct and institutions of man, that we are to attribute the necessity of a strong check on the natural increases in population.” It is not surprising that Malthus did not wish to advocate any really effective attempt to regulate population growth; as the reproduction of the poor was necessary for the production of wealth and if poverty was necessary to make the poor work cheaply, the pressure of population on the means of subsistence was, as Marx argued part of the fundamental and necessary dynamic of the capitalist ideology. One of the more appalling legacies is how in the wake of social unrest in many Third World countries, the propertied classes seem to have conflated the notion of “over-population” with that of the “majority”, a world-view which has been suspicious and wary of democracy and the potential lack of respect for property rights that a democratic system where the majority are poor could imply.

The differences between such an approach and that of Marx is not hard to discern, though I think that your point about the degree to which Malthus’s theory of over production and crisis is incorporated into his own is very path and too often overlooked point. In any case I would argue that Marx would have had to read Malthus in conjunction with Ricardo who not only disagreed with many of Malthus’s assumptions but put forward a more internally coherent model of economic change. It is interesting how the Malthus-Ricardo debate over overproduction, under consumption, poverty + industrial recession was adapted by radical Liberals such as JA Hobson in their criticism of the negative effects of Empire: in the British case of over capital flowed to more profitable but less socially productive uses overseas in the colonies as opposed to being invested in lower return but more beneficial expenditure at home such as an expansion of housing for the growing urban working classes. This classic critique was the inspiration for Lenin’s own theory of Imperialism, which many deem an inferior exposition. Interesting how radical critiques from non-Marxist sources can mirror Marxist Critiques themselves.

Violence and the Foundational Moment:

I appreciate your corrections on Hobbes and Foucault’s theory of the foundational moment; I suppose I should try to formulate a clearer idea of why the foundational moment may always be one of violence. I don’t hold with such a view myself, but I think it deserves to be taking seriously and repudiated comprehensively. In this vein I will outline some of the defences that could be put forward for such a view.

At the most basic level, the reason why I say that it is a cliché to talk of the foundational moment being a moment of violence is Derrida’s critique of foundational moments of systems of thought such as Cartesian philosophy or Hegel’s phenomenology. Such moments at the philosophical and epistemological level, on the way in which they establish ways of “seeing” or a particular vantage for the Gaze, do violence to the nature of unmediated reality – they impose limits, introduce distortions and that most unforgivable of all sins for Derrida (and deconstructivists) they implicate all within such a thought-system in the metaphysics of presence. This is done by the theory of the sign which is implicit in all foundational moments – which institutes a project of mastery at the conceptual level and beyond as all foundational moments within the Western thought and the project of modernity is thought within a confines of a philosophical language that pretends to be what it refers, a pretence that seeks to install plenitude, the principle of identity and a metaphysics of closure and presence. Therefore the theory of the sign implicit in the foundational moment, or rather the rhetoric in which such theory is cast, is one that tends to pre-empt the signified, to be an act of symbolic enclosure and constitution, and so to forbid reference to anything that is not always already itself. Against the symbolic relation of the sign to the signified, Derrida asserts that the reference to the signified is always displaced, and that such a “reference” is internally paradoxical. Therefore for him, the limits of signification (the difference of the sign from what is signifies) emerges time and again wherever language purports to cross the ontological rift between itself and a pure referent. The impossibility of referring to the pure referent makes such linguistic acts into paradoxical endeavours, whereby every act of referral becomes a kind of display of linguistic inadequacy. The implications I will draw from this is that there is a failure of the sign in the Foundational moment, and this failure reflects the broader epistemological failure which reveals that the subject or subjects produced as a consequence of the foundational moment have an inherent metaphysical ambition/longing yet the very failure of the sign means that they are helpless to realise this ambition and indeed that the “subject” is itself the fiction of a linguistic practise that seeks to deny the absolute difference between the sign and the signifier. Hence all foundational moments have really a theory of the efficiaous sign at the heart of the semiology – namely one that creates the conditions of necessary self-deception of sign for it to produce language itself. The foundational moment becomes a theoretical fiction that historians and philosophers of history employ as a defence against the essentially arbitrary and multiplicitous (non)foundations of historical experience, which resist conceptual categorisation. Turning to your comments on language generating the commonwealth – I would say that language was never pure, therefore it cannot become corrupt and the ‘corruption’ of the commonwealth (in so far as one can really claim that there was a period when the commonwealth wasn’t corrupt) cannot be blamed on the corruption of language. To try an apply this to what we are interested in, what this would suggest is that there is a strong element of deception built into the foundational moment, a deception which is a self-deception; as you note agreement can often be based on mutual misunderstanding. Yet the next step would be to say that in so far as subjects who engage or are present at the foundational moment are necessarily involved in a degree of self-deception that the foundational moment is always one that is retroactively seen and one that cannot be seen in the process of its formation – this accord well with your interpretation about how such moments are always interpellated by those in the present back into the past. I will illustrate this through the concept of repetition and misrecognition in Lacan’s thought.

Retroactive Nature of the Sign:

For Lacan the sign within the symbolic sphere of language cannot yield its meaning by a sort of archaeological excavation of the past but is constructed retroactively – the analysis precedes the signifying frame that gives signs their symbolic place and meaning. As soon as we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given straightforwardly and consistently, it changes continually with the transformations of the signifier’s network. Every historical rupture, every new advent of a new master-signifier, changes retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the narration of the past, makes it readable in another, new way.

The past exists as it is already encoded in the current symbolic order and is textualised in the historical memory, that is why we can speak of always “rewriting history”, retroactively giving signs their symbolic weight by including them in new configurations and retroactively deciding their meaning. Lacan sees the symbol/sign as a “return of the repressed” which precedes its cause (the hidden kernel) and in working through the meaning of the symbol/sign we bring about the past – produce the symbolic reality of past long-forgotten traumatic events. The paradoxical element in al this is that only through a detour or a form of misrecognition can the “objective” or true state of things be revealed. Transference may be an illusion but it is not one we can bypass in the search for truth, as it is the truth itself, which is constituted through the illusion – Lacan’s dictum “the truth arises from misrecognition” should be kept in mind. To illustrate this paradox, theorists who seek to apply Lacan’s work to social theory have use narrative structures found in film, popular culture; one particularly apt one used is the short story by William Tenn, The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway. The story starts with a distinguished art historian in the future, who is an expert on the famous artist Morniel Mathaway a painter not appreciated in his own time (the 20th century) but recognised as one of the great geniuses of art in the future time of the historian – the 25th century. The art historian’s personal obsession and area of expertise is the life and work of Mathaway and his knowledge of the subject makes him an authority on the period and on art in general: he is awarded prestigious professorships, academic posts etc. however the only thing that interests the historian is his subject and when given the chance to undertake time travel and go back to meet the artist he does so. Travelling back to the to our time, he encounters Mathaway, only to find that far from a visionary painter, what he actually encounters is an impostor, liar, thief and megalomaniac who steals the time machine form the historian and escapes into the future, leaving the poor art historian stranded in our time. After an initial period of despair the art historians, recovers and does the only thing he knows well to survive – he starts to paint all the remembered masterpieces of Mathaway that he studied and taught as an academic – what we then as readers realise is that it was the art historian himself who was the misrecognised genius he was looking for!

This is the basic paradox which we can apply to the foundational moment – the subjects are confronted with a concept/vision of the past which they wish to change, to intervene in; yet in to process of taking a journey into the past and intervening, they change nothing – but to the contrary it is in their very intervention that past becomes what they understood it to be – their interventions from the beginning were included, only this act was not visible to themselves as they in the manner of the Althusserian agent, supposed themselves to be free agents but realising that ideology/structure already dominated them through their very assumption of freedom. The initial inclusion of a subject consists in simply forgetting to include in the scene their own presence and actions and we can apply this to the idea of the foundational moment and expand the concept of the subject to includes a collectivity – who ignore/forget their (or the previous generation’s) role in constituting the foundational moment in forming a new order.

Myths are founded upon the same structure: e.g. in the myth of Oedipus it is predicted to his father that his on will kill him and marry his mother and the “prophecy realises itself” becomes true, through the father’s attempt to evade it (exposing Oedipus on the hillside). In other words a prophecy become true by means of it being communicated to the persons it affects and by her/his attempts to elude it, Oedipus on learning of his fate resolves to escape it by leaving his adopted parents and travelling far away from them, unwittingly thereby going towards his real parents and his awaiting doom: the narrative structure thus can be described as one where one knows in advance one’s destiny, one tries to evade it and it is by means of this very attempt that the predicted destiny realises itself.

The Repetition in the rupture:

The historical transposition of this myth can be seen if we look at Hegel’s theory of repetition from his Reflections on the Philosophy of History. Hegel used the example of Julius Caesar to demonstrate his theory of historical repetition: When Caesar consolidated his personal power strengthening it: he acted ‘objectively’ in the sense that this was in accordance with historical conditions as the Republic was losing its validity, the only form of government which could preserve the unity of the roman state as seen to be a monarchy, based upon the leadership of a single individual; but the Republic had one last dying gasp to reassert itself in the murder of Julius Caesar, but it was this very superficial victory that proved that the Republic was already dead. To the consciousness at the time, which still believed in the Republic, Caesar’s amassing of personal power was contrary to the spirit of the Republic and appeared as an arbitrary act and a perverse expression of individual self-will; the conclusion draw from this was that if this individual was to be removed then the Republic would regain its full vigour. However, it was precisely through such an attempt to revive the Republic, that Caesar’s murderers succumbed to the “cunning of reason” as this led to the historical necessity of Caesar’s premature grab for power as it was Caesar’s murder which led to the reign of Augustus the first Caesar. Thus the eventual outcome arose from a failure itself; in achieving its superficial goal but missing its deeper one the murder of Caesar fulfilled the task which was, in a Machiavellian way, assigned to it by history: to exhibit the historical necessity by exposing its own non-truth – it own arbitrary contingent character.

This is the essential problem of repetition, also shown quite nicely in word terms how we move from Caesar to caesarism. How the murder of Caesar-person the historical personality, leads to caesarism the installation of a ruler who the holder of the Caesar-title. The initial reading of this might be the delay that consciousness (in the form of the people) has to historical necessity. A certain act which breaks historical necessity is perceived by the consciousness as arbitrary, as something which also could not have happened; because of this perception people try to do away with it consequences, to restore the old state of things, but when this act repeats itself it is finally perceived as an expansion of the underlying historical necessity. In other words repetition is the very vehicle by which what Hegel would call historical necessity asserts itself in the gaze of consciousness.

The problem is that this rests on an epistemological theory that presupposes an objective historical necessity, which persists independently of consciousness and then asserts itself through repetition. What is overlooked here is the way in which the so-called historical necessity itself is constituted through misrecognition, through the initial failure of consciousness to recognise its “true” character – how as Lacan has pointed out truth arises out of mis-recognition. The crucial point here is the charged symbolic status of the event (or the Sign): when it occurs for the first time it is experienced as a real contingent trauma, as an intrusion of a certain non-symbolised form of the Real; only thought repetition is the event recognised as part of the symbolic order.

Repetition therefore announces the advent of the Law or what Lacan calls the Name-of-the-Father in the name of the assassinated figure: the event, which repeats itself, receives its law retroactively, through repetition. The passage of the Hegelian repetition is one from a lawless series to a lawlike series: one where the inclusion of a lawless series takes place as a gesture of interpretation, a symbolic appropriation of the traumatic, non-symbolised event. Hegel was truly original in articulating how the delay is constitutive of the act of interpretation – interpretation always sets in too late, with an inevitable gap of time, when the event which is to be interpreted repeats itself – the event cannot be lawlike in its first occurrence. This is why the Owl of Minerva in Hegel, is one which takes flight only in the evening – after the epoch has already come to end.

The Problem of the Revolutionary Moment:

The nature of the time structure we are concerned with here is one that itself is mediated through subjectivity: the subjective “mistake” or “fault”, arrives paradoxically before the truth in relation to which we are designating it as “error” because this ‘truth’ itself becomes true only through, or as Hegel would say when it is mediated by, the error. This is the logic of the unconscious “cunning” which deceives: following Lacan the unconscious should not be understood as a kind of transcendent, unattainable thing of which we are unable to take cognisance (this comes close to what Jung defined as the true nature of the unconscious) but it is rather a form of overlooking: we overlook the way our act is already part of the state of things we are looking at, in other words the way our error is part of the Truth itself. This is an unavoidable aspect of our subjectivity, as our Gaze is structured in such a way as to make us mis-recognise our own actions within the symbolic order, to paraphrase Wittgenstein: the eye of the beholder can perceive everything except its own gaze.

An interesting example given by Slavoj Zizek in his Lacanian approach to political theory is in the dilemma of the revolutionary moment. Alluding to the debate between Rosa Luxembourg and Eduard Bernstein over the appropriate tactics to be used by the Social Democratic/Communist movement in Germany; he describes how Luxembourg argued against Bernstein’s “revisionist” fear of seizing power “too soon”, before the supposedly “objective conditions” had ripened; in Bernstein’s view the revolutionary wing of the Social Democratic movement was that they were too impatient, that they wanted to hasten, to outrun the objective logic of historical development and therefore would embark on a premature revolution that would collapse as the social conditions to sustain it were not present. Luxembourg’s response was that the first seizures of power are necessarily premature: the only way for the working class to reach its maturity, to await the arrival of the “appropriate moment” for the seizure of power, is to form itself, to educate itself for this act of seizure, and the only possible way of achieving this education is exactly the “premature revolution”. For is the revolutionary merely wait for the “appropriate moment” we will never live to see it, because this appropriate moment cannot arrive without the subjective conditions of the maturity of the revolutionary force (or the subject) being fulfilled – it can only arrive after a series of “premature” and failed attempts. The opposition to the seizure of power is seen as an opposition to the seizure of power as such in general; hence Robespierre’s famous phrase: the revisionists want “a revolution without a revolution”.

What Rosa Luxembourg’s argument reveals is the impossibility of metalanguage in the revolutionary process: the revolutionary subject does not “conduct” or direct this process from an objective distance, he is constituted through this process and because of this, because of the temporality of the revolution passes through subjectivity, we cannot make the revolution at the right moment without the premature failed attempts. As the example of repetition in Hegel outlined earlier shows “a political revolution in History is generally sanctioned by the will of the people only when it is renewed” – only when it is repeated after a first failed attempt can it succeed.

The theme of the revolution as repetition also occurs in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History; where Benjamin expounds his own peculiar version of history within a broader Marxist framework. For Benjamin history is the story of class struggle. For the ruling class the perspective is one of conflict where the struggle is an ongoing one to determine which of the two classes: the masters or the oppressed will be in the winners’ position to write history. This is the Gaze of traditional historiography which confines itself to seeing things the “way they really were” and conceive of the flow of events as a closed, linear and continuous course, this is the gaze of those who have already won and lead into the reign of those who rule today. It leaves the consideration of those who have failed in history, what has been denied so that continuity of what really happened could establish itself. The very course of this version of history has hidden within it the silenced defeats of those subordinated to the current order, allowing Benjamin to claim that “there is no document of Civilisation which is not at the same time a document of Barbarism”.

In contrast to the triumphal procession of victors exhibited by official historiography, the oppressed class appropriates history to itself only in the yearning for change and for redemption – remembering in the form of what has failed and what has been destroyed. To accomplish the appropriation of this stifled dimension of the past in so far as it already contains the future – the future of our own revolutionary act, which by means of repetition redeems retroactively the past. Any contemporary revolutionary situation conceives of itself as the repetition of that past failed situation, and sees the retroactive redemption of these failures through its own success. The past itself here is “filled out with the present” the moment of the revolutionary chance decides not only the lot of the actual revolution but also the lot of the past failed revolutionary attempts. The risk of defeat of the actual revolution endangers the past itself because the actual revolutionary conjunction functions as a condensation of past missed revolutionary chances repeating themselves in the actual revolution:

“ History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time but time filled with the presence of the now. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashions evokes costumes of the past. (Thesis XIV)”

This differs from the traditional Communist views of history. Merleau-Ponty, who in his Humanism and Terror, defended the Stalinist political trials on the basis that although their defendants were undoubtedly innocent, they would be justified by the subsequent social progress made through them. In this evocation of the Last Judgement, no act, no event falls empty; there is no pure expense or pure loss in history, everything we do is written down registered somewhere, as a trace which for the time being remains meaningless but which in the moment of the final accounting will receive the proper recognition. Benjamin’s theory of the Last Judgement cleverly inverts this view of history as the march of “progress” and did so by linking the notion of history as progress as inevitably the temporal view of the ruling class.

The Stalinist perspective, for example of the Last Judgement, is that of a victor whose victory is already guaranteed in advance by the “objective necessity of history” which yields an evolutionary view of history. History is conceived of as the continuous replacing of old masters with the new: each victor played a “progressive role”(!!) in his time, then lost his purpose because of unavoidable developments, before it was the capitalist who performed this role, today it is the Stalinist. In Stalinist accounting “objective guilt” is measured by reference to the laws of historical development – in this case a continuous evolution towards the Supreme Good, Communism. Benjamin’s view of the Last Judgement reverses this, as his perspective is the perspective of those who have paid the price of a series of great historical triumphs; the perspectives of those who had to fail, to miss their moment, so that the series of great historical moments could be accomplished; the perspective of those who had their hopes denied and deceived, of all that have left in the text of history nothing but scattered, anonymous, meaningless traces on the margin of those whose “historical greatness” was attested to by the gaze of official historiography. So, rather than seeing the really revolutionary revolution as one without leaders I would argue that the truly revolutionary revolution is one that already anticipates it’s failure. This may seem counterintuitive, but as all revolutions has the memory of past revolutions inscribed into them – the 1917 revolution had the memories of the earlier failed revolutions such as the Decembrist uprising in the previous century, the French Revolution bore the mark of the Frondes etc. as following Luxembourg’s argument any revolution that runs a high chance of failure, is always “premature” in the sense that it will be the base for future revolutions but will not succeed in itself. Like Frank Knight’s capitalist entrepreneur the revolutionary leader is always an irrational optimist – he systematically assumes the success of revolution to be much higher than it actually is (just as Knightt sees the dynamism in the capitalist system arising out of the irrational optimism of the risk-taking entrepreneur – otherwise realistic calculations of probabilities would probably show that the chances of success are very low and this would depress business confidence and investment damaging production) for while this might be objectively be untrue it is the basis for future revolutionary change.

Violence and the Foundational Moment:

So to conclude we can return to how violence can be embodied in the foundational moment. To clarify I am talking primarily of the foundational moment of a state or a nation not civil society or a commonwealth, as Hobbes and Foucault do. Though even in their accounts of the foundational moment violence plays a role as for Hobbes it is the deferment of dissent which leads to agreement – is not violence implicit in the dissent that pre-dates the foundational moment and for Foucault even if the foundational moment arise out of “a calculation that allows war to be avoided” violence is present in the desire to avoid it. For both Foucault and Hobbes, violence may not be explicitly embodied in the foundational moment itself but it surrounds and permeates it and is inseparable from it. Both theories presuppose the existence of dissent, conflict or struggle that involves some level of violence and it is only after the experience of this that a deferral/agreement can be reached – the memory of past violence is written into the foundational moment.

Looking more closely at the Third World I am tempted to paraphrase Fanon and say that decolonisation is always and everywhere a violent phenomenon. A quick survey of the decolonisation process in Asia should be enough: Vietnam and Indonesia were only released after an armed struggle, in India there was a non-violent movement but the Quit India protest involved substantial levels of violence against even Satyagrahis. In any case the Extremists did not abdicate the use of violence and continued their campaign until the end of colonial rule, the narrative lead up to independence makes much of the trial of the three Indian National Army (INA)officers in Red Fort for treason, the fact that the trial attracted so much attention and the defendants were defended by Nehru himself in an atmosphere of heightened emotions and tension again emphasise the role the threat of violence could do in destabilises one order before establishing another. The British were paranoid about INA prisoners coming into contact with the regular British Indian army and their example undermining the loyalty of the troops upon which British rule ultimately depended – the Naval Ratings revolt in Bombay in 1946 only added to the British feeling that even the army could no longer be relied upon to maintain control and led to Field Marshal Wavell's telegram to the Cabinet in London that de-colonisation should be speeded up as the loyalty of the military/police forces could no longer be taken for granted.

Not that there is any simplistic connection between violence and the foundational moment – but as any such event replaces one order with another and silences some so that others can speak it embodies violence at some level. I agree that the British Imperial will had been sapped beyond resuscitation by World War II but this only supports the argument that it is the violence of war which can exhaust an occupying power to release its colonies –the violence takes place elsewhere at the margins but it still underpins the foundation moment. Without the debilitating effects of World War II I have no doubt that Britain would have put up a tougher fight to retain their colonies especially India – the Jewel in the Crown. As noted earlier as a moment of revolution the foundational moment has inscribed in it the failures of the past insurrections – the failure of the FLN guerrilla campaign and the liquidation of the major FLN units within Algiers lead to a military victory for the French but still meant political defeat as nationalist forces were able to gain independence. Similarly it was the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, which though put down fiercely by the British, led to the realisation in London that it could no longer retain it settler colonies in East Africa. The Ian Smith government in Rhodesia vainly tried to fend off ZANU-PF campaign and though militarily undefeated had to give in and release power from the white minority. South Africa offers another good example, the military wing of the ANC the Umkhonwto Me Sizwe never offered a serious threat of armed uprising that could challenge the apartheid order from within, but civil disobedience, non-cooperation, sporadic violence and political resistance combined with a draining war in Namibia and other frontier states (not to mention bloody encounters such as Sharpeville and Soweto)and international pressure finally forced the end of the apartheid state. Violence can precede or accompany the foundational moment but it can never be absent. The birth of Latin American nationalism, is also tied to mythologies of violence with the important role played by iconic symbols such as the Sword of the Liberator an important political tool and part of the imaginary in many countries, the most recent turbulence in Venezuela saw the President Hugo Chavez, appearing in the Presidential Palace under a picture of Bolivar the great Liberator, invoking the mythic struggles of the past embodied with the imaginary of the nation. We should not overlook the fact that the establishment of settler societies in all of the new World (North America, South America and Australasia) involved the dispossession, confinement and in some cases eradication of indigenous peoples such as the Native Amerindians, Aborigines and Maoris. White settler societies still have an uneasy guilty relationship with the aboriginal communities and like North America there is no escaping the fact that to make room for the new settler societies the older inhabitants of the land had their land rights taken away from the – of the over 360 treaties conducted between the US government and various Native Amerindian tribes over two-thirds were violated by the US government itself. Violence is always present in the foundational moment even if it is the remembered violence of the past that has allowed the agreement/deferral of the present..

Regarding our earlier discussion about the subaltern and voice; we should ask in whose name the foundational moment was based and by whom. Every foundational moment contains the silenced memory of hundreds of little incidences of violence. The establishment of the new order following the foundational moment exposed the true role of violence in the way it was used against the very groups that enabled it. Both Fanon and Ranajit Guha have extensively criticised the notion that the national-colonial bourgeoisie could ever want to or be able to speak for the nation. As the story quoted from Maheswati Devi shows, the nationalist character of the foundational moment necessarily ignores those at the margin who still suffer both physical and economic violence. The first piece of free legislation that was passed in the Indian parliament was one that curtailed the freedom of trade unions to organise and strike, as Vijay Prasad notes in his excellent book, Untouchable Freedom, many Dalits were uneasy about the direction of the Congress-led nationalist movement, his study of the Bhangi community notes how within three months of gaining independence a police firing on Bhangis protesting poor working conditions and inadequate pay led to thirteen of them being killed, the police firing took place only a few hundred metres from the Lok Sabha building where the first parliament of Independent India was meeting. In his rural reporting journal Everybody Loves a Good Drought, the journalist P. Sainath observes a struggle for land rights and forest cultivation taking place against illegal logging companies and bonded labour by contractors by the local Parharia tribal community in Madhya Pradesh, while watching the leaders of the protest being arrested and roughed up on the way to prison, he sees a monument in the form of an arch over the road leading out of the district. The arch commemorates the memory of seventeen Congress activists killed by police in the 1942 Quit India movement; all of those killed were Parharias, as Sainath himself bitterly observes it is frequently those who are the first to risk and give up their lives for freedom, who are the last to receive it.

:: Conrad Barwa 8:47 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Eqbal Ahmed Archive:

The Eqbal Ahmad Archive is a good collection of this famous author's articles and interviews ("Roots of Violence in Pakistani Society" is especially good and well written). This collection is important not only because he is a good writer and thinker but he has hardly written any books of late and tends only to have written scattered articles and newspaper columns due to his political activism.


:: Vikash Yadav 12:21 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Teething Troubles for Hyderabad's Harvard:

The Far Eastern Economic Review has an interesting article on the post-dotcom difficulties of the fledgling Indian School of Business, which has been supported in large part by the diasporic community. The article is available on the FEER webiste.

:: Vikash Yadav 11:52 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Does India have a vision for South Asia?:

This week has seen President Musharraf on the diplomatic offensive. He has made great strides in healing the rift between Pakistan and Bangladesh by expressing regret for the excesses of the Pakistani military during the Civil War between East and West Pakistan. Moreover, last month Pakistan granted duty concession on over 600 items to India and other SAARC countries under South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement (SAPTA). Pakistan granted even greater concessions for imports from the "Least Developed Countries" (which does not include India -- of course).

These overtures indicate that Pakistan is beginning to form a grand strategy for South Asia as an economic block. Which naturally begs the question of why India has failed to articulate and implement such a vision. To be fair, Pakistan has yet to reciprocate Most Favored Nation (MFN) status to India. Nevertheless, as India currently has a $500 million balance of trade surplus with Pakistan, it is understandable that Pakistan is hesitant to lower all of its tarriff barriers.

It is often said that there is not much scope for intra-regional trade within the South Asian countries and that the persistence of hostility in the region makes the plans for an eventual South Asian Free Trade Arrangement (SAFTA) leading to a South Asian Economic Union (SAEU) seem wholly unrealistic. I would beg to differ with this pessimism. It is estimated that there is almost a $1 billion trade between Indian and Pakistan that passes through third parties. In other words, there is already a huge potential market that could be exploited (and the failure to create direct trade linkages only increases costs to consumers and governments in the two main countries). Second, it should be noted that Pakistan has been making economic overtures to India during a period of intense hostility. As Jason has appropriately noted, much of the chest pounding over Kashmir is for Western audiences only. I do not believe that there is a serious likelihood of another war between India and Pakistan at the moment. If one looks beyond the headlines, one sees that there is a continuity in terms of cooperation over water resource sharing and other important issues. Furthermore, Musharaff has at least attempted to stop cross border infiltration into Kashmir. Given the constraints faced by any Pakistani leader who appears to be giving up on "Occupied Kashmir" Musharaff's initiatives are remarkable. Obviously, India should continue with a wait-and-see attitude on the military issues, however, there is little excuse not to at least match Pakistan's initiatives on the economic front.

In order for India to take the initiative, it must be willing to give more than it gets. The problem may not be completely at the political level. At the SAARC meeting in January, PM Vajpayee had already expressed the desire to extend the economic arrangements already in place with Nepal and Bhutan to the rest of the "South Asian Quadrangle." In fact, he even suggested that India would undertake a concessional duty regime with its neighbors and proposed that the Commerce Secretaries of the SAARC nations meet to begin negotiations. Some of the Indian officials that I have talked to have told that it is the bureaucrats who negotiate the agreements that are the problem. Indian bureaucrats, like all civil servants, are trained to protect the national interest. The problem is that Indian politicians have yet to articulate a vision of why free trade with neighboring countries is in India's national interest.

Although it is clear that intra-regional trade can be an important buffer against global economic downturns, there is much more riding on regional cooperation than economic prosperity. Despite the teachings of "Realism" in International Relations theory, I believe that economic cooperation can bind states together and serve the foundation for military cooperation. Perhaps it seems impossible at the moment to imagine that South Asia could become a large free trade zone, especially due to the continuing conflict between India and Pakistan. However, I would remind pessimists of the Alsace/Lorraine conflict between Germany and France. One would be hard pressed to find a place on Earth that engendered more hatred and violence than that mineral rich region. Yet we now see Germany and France increasingly bound together as the heart of the European Union. The origins of the EU demonstrate that a vision of an alternative future can triumph over present stalemated conflicts.

:: Vikash Yadav 4:06 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Nature of Power and the existence of Social Machines:

Vikash’s stimulating thoughts on the neo-Foucauldian concept of power have forced me to try and re-think and theorise my own treatment of power and how as social scientists and observers we use such a theory of power in our own thinking. In this I have been interested by the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, in particular, Thousand Plateaux, which I am working my way through at the moment. In thinking about both different conceptualisations of power and Jason’s post about Kashmir I wondered whether I could attempt a synthesis between the two discussions. I hope my effort below will be of some interest to you both.

The Analytic of Power:

From his work on regimes of incarceration and the history of Sexuality, I would argue that Foucault understands power as the effort of relations between different forces; the power of a body resides “not in a certain strength we are endowed with”, but rather in the fluctuating field of relations to other bodies. The power of even a single body is dispersed in such a manner that “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (The History of Sexuality, vol.1). Within these terms of definition power relations can take a variety of forms: attraction, repulsion, decomposition of one force by another and so on. Foucault subsequently proposed a definition of power relations, which limited the field to interactions between human forces, suggesting that he was only concerned with power relations as understood as the “set of actions upon other actions”. However, even within these limits there are still many ways in which individual or collective agencies can act upon the actions of others: they can provoke, incite, prohibit etc.

Of all the many ways we have of acting upon others, only some will have the effect of limiting or diminishing their capacities for action. Conversely, there are many ways in which we can act to enhance or assist others in the exercise of their powers. Foucault does not offer many accounts of such ways of being or acting outside the relations of government and domination as that is not the primary focus of his interest but his theory of power does not preclude them, his own studies of power tended to focus on those relatively fixed or congealed relations of force which enable some to govern the conduct of others. However, Foucault’s theory of power formed an important challenge to Marxist theories of power in that he argued that power was not localised in the state but diffused throughout the social field: that power is not the property of a class nor does it operate by violent or ideological means; that there is no economic essence of power but only purely functional relations involving the dominated as well as the dominating force. According to Deleuze and Guattari this allowed Foucault to develop a new typology of power without the need for any principle of “transcendent unification” such as a centralisation of the figure of the State or totalised notions of a closed system of economic relations.

Contrary to the Marxist view, it is argued there is no single logic of development which governs the direction of history, as all events are the interplay of forces, as things are transformed or reinterpreted to serve new ends. It therefore follows that there is no longer an enduring essence within social phenomena than there is within biological phenomena – “the eye was not always intended for seeing, and punishment has other purposes than setting an example”. Foucault’s account of the prison regime illustrates this. The fact that prisons became the predominant form of punishment in the early 19th century represented a convergence between two quite different force-fields: the political economy of punishment in late 18th century society and the political technology of disciplinary power, which involved which involved specific techniques for distributing individuals in space and controlling their activities over time. Yet as Foucault points out, imprisonment was neither envisaged nor implied by the 18th century projects for reform of the penal system. While the acceptance of imprisonment as the primary form of punishment makes sense against the background of the spread of disciplinary techniques, Foucault’s account of the “birth” of the prison nevertheless appears incomplete – namely how does his genealogy acquire the force of explanation with regards to the modern period of punishment?

Deleuze and Guattari point towards an element in Foucault’s analysis which enables a complete explanation: this is the suggestion of a generasible “diagram” of power which was embodied in the prison and other social institutions such as factories, barracks, schools, and hospitals. Foucault called this generisable form of disciplinary power “panopticism” (I still haven’t seen Minority Report so I don’t know whether this gives any insight into some of the film, though I have heard about the spider robots with their eye-scanners – interesting link between the eye and the power of the State to monitor, code and control: the eye which is meant to be the purveyor of the Gaze is now itself gazed at) after Bentham’s design for prisons, schools etc. on such a model. This is the application of a pure function applied to an unspecified matter and is what appears in Deleuze and Guattari’s work as the “abstract Machine” capable of unifying smaller units into larger bodies which they call “assemblages”. The abstract machine functions as an immanent cause, which explains the mutually supportive interactions between forms of content and expression in any given assemblage. It is both a condition of the effects realised in a given assemblage and an abstraction that exists only in those effects – in a manner that parallels the relationship of the will to power to the relations between the particular forces in which it is expressed. In this case the abstract machine of panopticism accounts for the convergence of the discourse of delinquency and the disciplinary techniques which together make up the social assemblage which Foucault had called the carceral dispotif.

The conception of power in Deleuze and Guattari builds on the notion s found in Foucault, that modern society is disciplinary by proposing the diagram of a new form of power which has taken hold in the course of the 20th century and which they define as control or modulation. The principles of control power are contrasted with those of disciplinary power: Control involves continuous modulation rather than discontinuous moulding of individuals or activities and competition rather than normalisation. As they outline ”in disciplinary societies on always starts over again (going from schools to barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in control societies one never finishes anything – business, training and military service being coexisting states of a single modulation, a universal transmutation.”

The digital language of control operates by means of codes rather than identifying signatures, passwords rather than orderwords. Just as disciplinary techniques developed alongside industrial capitalism, so the mechanisms of control correspond to the transformation of capitalism into a system dominated by metaproduction, marketing and financial services. The task Deleuze and Guattari arrogate themselves is to map this “social cartography” where abstract machines work within a social field. Every society has its own diagrams or abstract machines and different kinds of diagrams or abstract machines will correspond to different kinds of social formation. In Thousand Plateaux, they provide and descriptive analysis of abstract machines that of desire, thought, social space and segmentarity.

The Approach to Power:

As is already established, power in the Foucauldian sense is not always repressive or hostile to the interests of those over who it is exercised and in some cases it is the exercise of power that shapes and determines these very interests at stake. This concept of power is non-normative in the sense that it includes all the ways in which agents are able to act, upon others or themselves. There is no point in asking whether a new form of power, such as those embodied in mechanisms of control are better or worse than the ones they replace as in each case there is a conflict over the ways in which they free and enslave us.

The resistance by liberal and reformist critics, influenced still by Enlightenment modes of thought, to this philosophy of power lies in this respect – the lack of criteria for any which would allow for normative discrimination between the ways of exercising power, concerns over liberal political theory and the social contract tradition with when and in what ways power, especially State power justified. My concern is not to respond to these criticisms in Foucault’s work (indeed I don’t think I am competent to do so, Vikash I would request you to pen your thoughts here as one who is a practitioner of Foucauldian theory) but to discern whether there is a possible solution within the bounds of Deleuze and Guattari’s work.

Examining Nietzsche concept of the will to power, they argue that Nietzsche theory is the completion and radicalisation of Kant’s critique. For Nietzsche it is values themselves, which must be evaluated, in contrast to the uncritical acceptance of established values, which characterises Kantian critiques. As for them, within Nietzsche they find an explicit qualitative distinction between active and reactive modalities of power, and it is this qualitative dimension of the will to power, which enables the evaluation of values. There is a distinction drawn between “active” and “reactive” force which finds its clearest expression in Nietzsche's account of differences between master and slave morality: the difference between those who distinguish the good (themselves and their like) and those who distinguish the evil (the others) from the good (themselves), in other words the difference between what Nietzsche calls the self-directed action and other-directed action:

In order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all – its action is fundamentally reaction. The reverse is the case with the noble mode of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously. (The Genealogy of Morals).

The systematic interpretation by Deleuze and Guattari sees this distinction drawn in the first instance with reference to the relative strength of the forces present: the superior force, by which they mean the one that dominates in a given encounter with another force, is active, while the inferior or dominated force is reactive. The difference between these two kinds of force is thus a difference in their manner of action. Reactive forces are those whose activity is conditioned or constrained by superior forces. They are forces of adaptation of conservation, regulative forces whose mechanical and utilitarian accommodations express all the power of inferior and dominated forces. By contrast since active forces are those, which appropriate, dominate or impose forms of activity on others. While the latter are to some degree constrained by their own nature, even this constraint is relative, since active forces are essentially transformative.

As Nietzsche repeatedly argues the weak may triumph over the strong, in the Genealogy of Morals he analyses acme of the principal forms of reactive force which have influenced human nature, namely ressentiment, bad conscience and the ascetic ideal. Reactive forces may get the better of active ones, but they do not thereby become active, as their mode of operation is not the same. The first element in this difference is that of quantity: active forces are those that dominate while reactive forces are those, which are dominated. But this difference in the quality of forces cannot be reduced to quantitative differences alone – if it could then the distinction would be undermined as a critical tool, which is not the intention of Deleuze or Guattari. They therefore separate the two types of forces by the way they function: active forces are those which act of their own accord and in doing so impose forms upon lesser forces or otherwise appropriate them to its own ends. Reactive forces are forces of limitation or decomposition, which resist the activity of other forces – they separate active force from what it can do.

Now although the difference in the mode of operation between active and reactive forces may seem to stem from the original quantitative difference – where dominant forces are those in a position to pursue their own activity while dominated forces are constrained to respond, and further constrained in their possible responses – the difference also corresponds to a difference between affirmation and negation. Active force affirms its own nature rather than seeking to oppose or limit that of the other. Affirmation and negation are the primordial expressions of the will to power – they are what Deleuze and Guattari call the very “qualities of becoming itself”. Given that in all events a will to power is operating, it follows that every phenomenon expresses a certain combination of forces and therefore a certain type. Conversely, while the will to power is expressed in every type of body, it does nevertheless take higher and lower forms. Power in the sense that is praised above all other by Zaruthustra is active and creative. It is especially manifest in the “bestowing virtue” as for Deleuze and Guattari: “the will to power is essentially creative and giving: it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power”.

What the pair seek to do is to reach a method by which there is a basis for a form of critical evaluation which can judge the present – the distinction between the qualities of force and those of will to power is not one that can be simply read off from the relative strength of the forces in play on a given occasion. This is not a moral form of critique which judges what is by determining the quality of forces present and their affinity with one or another aspect of the will to power. This result is a complex and intricate system of judgement, which does not allow for a simple priority of active over reactive.

Taking the example of Christianity as Nietzsche does, and its roots in what he calls “slave revolt in morality”, he argues that it has a strong affinity with the negative side of the will to power. This apparently negative phenomenon has produced some remarkable results: it is both at the same time what Nietzsche described as a “rigorous and grandiose stupidity” but also the principal means by which the Human (what he really means here is the European) spirit has been educated and developed to its present state of sensibilities and possibilities. At issue here is the historical diversity of the forms, which this religion has assumed, the different character (active or reactive) and element (affinity with affirmation or negation) of the forces, which have held sway in different contexts. The reactive consciousness of sin that becomes evangelistic and denunciatory is not the same as active abstention from all that is sinful. There are forms of religious life that display an inner strength of affirmation and enjoyment with themselves. The reactive forces of shirttail discipline and self-denial may acquire an affinity with the affirmative aspect of the will to power. Another example could be an injury, which separates a person from the full exercise of her/his powers and reduces the possibilities for action. While this is a reactive force, its value depends on the nature of the subject and how they respond to the injury, which acts upon them. The same physiological state may weaken some powers but also open up new possibilities of feeling or bring about new capacities for acting and being acted upon. Nietzsche spoke of his own illness in these terms when he suggested that it enabled him to discover life and himself anew. Depending on how the illness is lived we must ask ourselves whether it is the same condition or the same illness in each case as it is the relationship between the illness and the patient which determines the affirmative or negative quality of this reactive force.

The dynamic aspects of these qualities of the will to power and forces mean that the evaluation of any particular phenomena for Deleuze and Guattari is no simple matter. The internal complexity that is introduced by the possibility that active forces may become reactive, and acquire an affinity with the negative rather than the affirmative quality of the will to power, or the possibility that such reactive forces may become active and acquire an affinity with the affirmative dimension of the will to power, implies that the meaning and value of particular phenomena can only be assessed by what they describe as a patient and meticulous practice of genealogy (of course this is old hat to Foucauldians). There is no algorithm by which we can read off the quality of a given event or process. Indeed as Nietzsche's own conception of history as a series of successive events of subduing and becoming master suggests, philosophy conceived as the interpretation of the meaning of things must be an art. The defenders of the Enlightenment tradition still clamour for the possibility of objective judgement and demand the grounds for such a practise. Their own internal philosophies demand that despite the torturous path of historical development and the complexity of phenomena there must be an objective value, which can be reached in the end and whereby any event or phenomenon can be given a single if complex value.

The Nietzschean response would be to point out that at the level of empirical acts of judgement by particular and historically constituted subjects, there can be no transcendental point or uniform standard of judgement. Ultimately it is the will to power, which evaluates and the will to power is divided. Values cannot be abstracted from the standpoint from which they draw their value, and that standpoint is ultimately the affirmative or negative character of the will to power. In this level, evaluations/judgments reflect the quality of the forces, which make them, and there will be as many evaluations of a given phenomenon as there are subjects of evaluation. There is no transcendent standard or God-point from which to mount an objective evaluation or judgment. Any particular judgment will be an expression of the nature of that which judges. In this way the Nietzschean philosophy of power supports Foucault’s refusal to get caught up in the play of justifications, since it shows why there is no possible accommodation between conflicting points of view.

The Evaluative Possibility in Power:

However, Deleuze and Guattari open up a possible critical perspective on values from within their Nietzschean understanding of power. The will to power is not only divided but is ordered such that the affirmative quality and active forces are primary. For Nietzsche, the will to power is ultimately affirmative – wherever it assumes a negative character this can only be understood in relation to the more affirmative character. There is also an important sense in which the active force is the primary quality of force: while the reactive is no less present at the origin, it can only be understood as reactive in relation to and on the basis of the active.

In this way, we can see that the will to power is already a partisan principal, one that cannot claim neutral status of an “objective truth” but only consistency with its own fundamental nature. There can be no answer to the question as to why the active is superior to the reactive, as there is no external justification for the pre-eminence of the affirmative and the active. It is not enough to point out the logical pre-eminence of the active over the reactive, the affirmative over the negative, since if the will to power only exists in its determinate and qualified forms, then it is no less present on the side of the negative and the reactive. There is also the concept of the eternal return. Much of Deleuze’s philosophy relies on a selective concept of being: where it is only the active and the affirmative which return and where the negative must eventually transmuted into the affirmative. Because it implies a principle of selection Deleuze’s Nietzschean approach is no less moral than the philosophy of Plato. But it does involve a different principle of selection – as it allows only the return of excessive and transmutative forms, those that go to the limit of their capacities and transform themselves into something else. Since being is conceived of in terms of power, this amounts to the selection of the higher forms: those with the greatest capacity to act and be acted upon and those with the greatest sensibility. The eternal return, thus defines and selects that which is “noble” in Nietzsche’s sense of the term: “Eternal Return alone effects the true selection, because it eliminates the average forms and uncovers the ‘superior form of everything that is’.

Deleuze and Guattari’s social and political analysis relies on an equally selective and partisan conceptual framework of evaluation. For example they challenge the idea that the social space of “civilised” societies is centralised and hierarchical in contrast to the supposed segmentary space of “primitive” societies. They point out that the social fabric of modern capitalist society is no less segmented in economic and political organisation, in its uses of language and in its organisation of desire. Both so-called primitive and civilised societies are segmentary in nature: but there are two different kinds of segmentarity one supple and molecular and the other one rigid and molar. They are different, as they do not have the same way of organising spatial relations or the same nature. At the same time they tend to coexist and frequently inhabit neighbouring social spaces. They link this formulation to simultaneous states in social space: an abstract machine of overcoding which defines a rigid segmentary space and which is linked to the state and its apparatus of government and an “abstract machine of mutation which operates by decoding and deterritorialisation”. Within this framework different types of social space result in different “lines”: molar lines which correspond to the form of rigid segmentation found in bureaucratic and hierarchical institutions and molecular lines which correspond to the fluid and overlapping forms of divisions characteristic of primitive territoriality. For Deleuze and Guattari we as individuals and as collectives are composed of different forms of “lines” and what they call micro-politics is the study of these different lines and their interactions in a given social field. Molecular and molar lines correspond to different ways of organising or occupying social space. From an evaluative point of view each has its own advantages and its own dangers.

Mention should be made of another concept of Line that appears in their analysis: the Line of Flight or Deterritorialisation, which traces the path along which things change or become transformed into something else. The Line of Flight is a privileged concept in the Thousand Plateaux. Preference is usually given to those processes or modes of existence that exhibit the greatest possible degree of creativity or life: Lines of Flight is one such concept. There is however, an ambiguous nature to many of these figures of thought: nothing in a Thousand Plateaux is unambiguously good or bad and the Line of Flight is no exception. It is both the line of maximal creative potential ands the line of greatest danger, offering at once the possibility of the greatest joy and that of the most extreme anguish.

As well as being creative these Lines of Flight have their own dangers. The danger is that once having broken out of molar forms of segmentarity and subjectivity, a line of flight may fail to connect with the necessary conditions of creative development or be incapable of so connecting and turn instead into a line of destruction. When this occurs the outcome can be a “passion of abolition” or suicide and worse. The potential danger and unpredictability associated with Lines of Flight are the reason for the essential prejudices of Deleuze and Guattari’s politics. It is because we never know in advance which way a Line of Flight will turn, or whether a given set of heterogeneous elements will be able to form a consistent and functional multiplicity, that caution is necessary. At the same time “it is always because on a line of flight that we create”, that must continue to experiment with such lines.

The Concept of Critical Freedom:

Vikash, in response to your post on the possibility of freedom I thought I would explore the concept of Critical freedom found in Deleuze and Guattari. Here, Critical Freedom is understood not as something related to criticism or judgement but in the technical sense which relates to an extreme limit or case - appoint at which some state or condition of things passes over into a different state or condition. Critical freedom differs from the standard liberal concepts of positive and negative freedom by its focus on the conditions of change or transformation in the subject, and by its indifference to the individual or collective nature of the subject.

I will use Isaiah Berlin’s example of positive and negative liberty (as provided in his essay Two Concepts of Liberty) and Charles Taylor’s criticism of it. In both these definitions the focus is upon the preservation or continuity of the individual subject of freedom rather than its transformation. Berlin defines negative liberty in terms of “the area of non-interference” within which subjects are left to do or be what they can do or be. His concept of freedom involves two elements: first a majoritarian subject of action, which he calls a “normal human being” with desires, goals and capacities for action which fall within the range of normality for a given time and place. Second, the presence of external limits to the individual’s sphere of action. The implication of his spatial metaphors is that freedom lies in between agents and the constraints upon their action. While the boundaries of that space may vary over time, freedom is seen to be a matter of where the line is drawn at any given moment. Therefore, at any particular historical moment, freedom presupposes a static subject with given capacities and interests.

In contrast Taylor’s concept of positive freedom is based upon a more complex concept of the subject as an individual capable of what he calls “strong evaluation”. The resulting concept of freedom thus includes an element absent from Berlin’s concept namely the concept of internal limits to freedom. Taylor defends the view of freedom as a way of exercising control over one’s own life. This control demands that one have a sense of one’s identity, of who or what one is, on the basis of which one can discriminate between one’s authentic or essential desires and those that are inauthentic or non-essential. Such discrimination is what Taylor means by strong evaluation and his argument is that even negative liberty presupposes this kind of qualitative judgement about the purposes or kinds of action that are significant to persons. However, Taylor’s concept of freedom still remains tied to the concept of the subject as a given, determinate structure of interests, goals or desires. Freedom still refers to the capacity of the subject to act in pursuit of a given set of fundamental interests, rather than the capacity to alter those interests. In other words, Taylor’s concept of positive freedom overlooks the important sense in which the person is deemed only free to the extent that they are able to distance themselves from the structure of values with which they grew up and acquire others. Any defensible account of freedom must allow for the possibility that agents will act in ways that lead them to alter their desires, preferences or goals and even for the possibility, that they might consciously question certain forms of self-understanding which sustain their accepted goals. Such questioning may occur in isolation, but is more likely to arise in the course of a movement for change in the relevant area of social life, or in the context to exposure of other ways of thinking and acting. An instance would be the encounter with Western modernity that India faced under colonialism and the rise of Nationalist sentiments.

In contrast to the traditional concepts of negative and positive freedom, critical freedom concerns itself with these moments in a life when one is no longer the same person. It is the freedom to transgress the limits of what one is presently capable of being or doing, rather than just the freedom to be able to do those things and it is a concept of freedom that is usually found beyond the pale of liberal thought. In the course of their lives individuals frequently make choices which may affect the range, course or nature of their future actions; e.g. the decision to become a parent, to leave one’s country of birth and live in another culture etc. are all cases of significant action upon one’s future actions. To the extent that these events may have the effect of opening up certain paths and closing off others, and to the affect that the person’s capacities to affect and be affected will change as a result, these are possibly occasion of “becoming” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the term. They are limits beyond which an individual's desires, preferences or gaols may be irrevocably changed. It is not an objection to point out that all moment in life carry this potential, since for them the possibility of becoming-other is indeed present at every moment. It is realised in those moment when a qualitatively different kind of transition is achieved.

They further use the concept of assemblage rather than persons; assemblages can be applied equally to personal or social identities. As individuals or collectivities they argue, we are composed of different kinds of “lines”: molar lines that correspond to the forms of rigid segmentation found ion bureaucratic and hierarchical institutions; molecular line that correspond to the fluid or overlapping forms of division characteristic of “primitive” territoriality; and finally lines of flight that are paths along which things change or become transformed into something else. They demonstrate how the concepts of difference between lines can be used to express different kinds of personal transformation by examining F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella The Crack Up. Fitzgerald distinguishes three kinds of transition from one state/stage in life to another: first, there are the large breaks between youth and adulthood, between poverty and wealth, between illness and good health and between success and failure in a chosen profession. These Fitzgerald writes are the “big sudden blows that come or seem to come from outside”. In his own life they include and adolescent illness, which affected his college career, an encounter with class, difference in the form of a failed relationship and the onset of alcoholism. But these are not the most significant breaks: the important breaks almost imperceptible cracks, which affect a person’s concept of self. These are subtle shifts of feeling or attitude, which distance the person from his or her former convictions. They involve molecular changes in the structure of a person. They are in Fitzgerald’s words “the sort of blow that comes from within – that you don’t feel until it is too late to do anything about it”. A person does not recover from blows of this sort he writes, “he becomes a different person and, eventually the new person finds new things to care about”.

In the autobiographical case in the novella, the subject is confronted with a particularly severe breakdown, which involved a loss of faith in all his former values and a dissipation of his convictions. He needs to effect what he calls “clean break” with his past self. He seeks to become “a writer only” and to “cease any attempt to be a person, to be kind, just or generous”. Fitzgerald’s novella recounts an experience of what Deleuze and Guattari call “becoming-imperceptible”. The desire to be like everyone else and to go unnoticed is connected to a desire to reduce oneself to a minimal set of traits on the basis of which to forge new connections with the world. Of course in many senses Fitzgerald’s subject remains the same person after as before, but not in the senses that matter for the liberal concept of freedom. The subject of Fitzgerald’s novella no longer has the same interests nor the same desires or preferences. His goals are not the same, nor are the values that underpin his strong evaluations. As a result the kind of freedom that is manifest in a break of this kind cannot be captured in the definitions of negative and positive freedom. By contrast, Fitzgerald’s experience of the “clean break” is precisely what interests Deleuze and Guattari. Such a break amounts to a redistribution of desire such that “when something occurs, the self that awaited it is already dead, or the one that would await it has not yet arrived”. This kind of sudden shift towards another quality of life or towards a life, which is lived at another degree of intensity, is one possible outcome of what they call a line of flight. It is one this kind of line that critical freedom is manifest. In conclusion, we can say that while there are dangers associated with the line of flight, where in the absence of productive connections with other forces or in the aftermath of an all-encompassing or too-abrupt refusal of one’s past self the assemblage breaks down. The nature of critical freedom is such that it is indifferent to the desires, preferences or goals of the subject in the sense that it may threaten as much as advance any of these. As a result whereas the normative status and the value of liberal notions of freedom is straightforwardly positive, critical freedom is a much more ambivalent and risky affair; more ambivalent since it involves leaving behind existing grounds of value, with the result that it is not always clear that it is a good, or indeed by what standards it could be evaluated as good or bad; risky because there is no telling in advance where such processes of mutation and change might lead, either at the level of individual or collective assemblages. This is inherent in the nature of Foundational moment which I think can be approximated to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of critical freedom – the shift in meaning and values is such a drastic one that violence is present at least at an epistemological and symbolic level.

In the interest of brevity, I will cut this post short, I would like to take the opportunity to look at the imagining figurations of the sub-continent outlined by Vikash and the issue of Kashmir using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of different kinds of social space and the War-Machine at a later date.

:: Conrad Barwa 7:32 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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War as the Womb / Violence as the Midwife of Nations:

Conrad, thanks for your earlier post on the role of violence as midwife to the nation. I found the arguments interesting, but I do not accept the cliche that the foundational moment is always one of violence. In fact, I do not believe that violence or non-violent struggle is the basis for the foundational moment. I want to articulate aspects of my theoretical position, as it may be helpful in advancing the theory of the foundational moment which is critical to distinguishing between categories of political violence, specifically terrorism and nationalist struggle -- and hence a necessary tool in creating an economy of violence between the State and its discontents.

Marxist approaches are fascinated by the ways in which struggle and conflict is productive. This is not surprising as the Malthusian twins, Marx and Darwin, and their interlocutors have always viewed conflict and struggle as necessary for survival and adaptation/progress. For Marx this conflict is between classes, while Darwin explains the conflict amongst and within biological species. Both theorists failed to emphasize properly the role of cooperation, (bio-)symbiosis, and deferment in their explanations of struggle and sublation. The Malthusian twins ultimately trace their patrimony not to their intellectual father, Thomas Malthus, but (like all of us) to the patriarch of modernity, Thomas Hobbes. However, I would argue that Marx misread Hobbes; he inherited a false patrimony. Hobbes did not believe that the war of all against all would result in the social contract. Hobbes argued that it was the deferrement of dissent, produced through a consensus on language, that allowed men to reach a social contract. In the state of nature there is no speech; language generates the commonwealth and the corruption of language destroys the commonwealth.

The foundational moment occurs when there is agreement to defer contestation over a particular range of issues so as to limit the range of contestible issues. To quote Foucault,

"Sovereignty--whether it inovlves a "commonwealth by institution" or a "commonwealth by acquisition"--is established not by an act of bellicose domination but, rather, by a calculation that allows war to be avoided."

This agreement is not the product of consent (as the ritual of consent is usually manufactured ex post facto), in fact agreement may be based on mutual misunderstanding. The sovereign moment cannot emerge from a referendum; the birth of the sovereign precedes the ritual that legitimates it.

The foundational moment is not brought forth by the struggle of the protagonists/antagonists. Nationalist martyrs and leaders, like their counterparts, are interpellated by the movement, they occupy a pre-existent subject position. The only "revolutionary" revolution would be one in which there are no "leaders." The tactics employed have already been rehearsed; the tactics are a function of what the structure of relations permits and forbids. As Conrad notes, even Gandhi's non-violent tactics were a tool that he appropriated from a range of pre-existent tactical options in the Congress arsenal.

The foundational moment is brought forth by internal and external economic and strategic contradictions. The State is born when groups of subjects are able to defer internal conflict and rival forces are unable or unwilling to continue the expenditure of resources to secure the pacification/domination of the "rebel" forces. The State is born where desire lapses or changes. The mystery is why desire lapses or changes its object. If desire and economy were constants or simply irrelevant, then nationalist struggles would be unending.

:: Vikash Yadav 10:51 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Problems of the Foundational Moment:

I think that Vikash, has an important point when he notes the problems of deferment and path dependence in using referendums to base major political decisions. As regards Partition this conceals a lot of murky issues. For example, the two major Muslim majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal were never a stronghold for the ostensibly separatist Muslim League, whose support came mainly from the elite and educated Muslim intelligentsia in the United Provinces. The Punjabi legislature was controlled by the Punjab Unionist Party under the leadership of the renowned Humayun Kabir, while the Bengal government was formed by Fazlul Haq, leader of the Krishak Praja Party (roughly translatable as Peoples' Peasant Party). The Muslim League was not even present as a political organisation in these two key provinces; and the untimely death of Humayaun Kabir before 1947 and Haq's agreement to join Jinnah brought these two provinces in line with the separatist Muslim movement. The Punjab Unionist Party was a relatively broad coalition of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim landlords and notables which had a decidely unionist agenda and the Praja Krishak Party as the name implies was more concerned with socio-economic issues than communal separatism (though there were overlaps between class and religious divisions in Bengal which added to the worsening relations between the different religious communities). A counterfactual with Kabir remaining alive and Haq refusing to join Jinnah raises interesting questions, though would be a purely speculative speculative exercise.

Moreover, the franchise in the elections which gave the political formations jostling for power in the lead-up to Partition was extremely limited, being hedged by property and educational qualifications which reduced the size of the electorate, I think less than 10% of the population was eligible to vote on these crucial matters that so deeply affected the course of history in the region. Even if we accept the necessity of a foundational moment that contains contradictions and silences voices at the margins, no democrat can accept such a small mandate as a viable base for making political judgments that affects so many lives. It is ironic therefore, that so much of the political posturing and thought on the topic ignores the reality that most Indians did not have a voice when it came to determining the nature of an independent India - would a general referendum with universal adult suffrage, including the Princely states have supported a Partition? The point is debatable though I think not. Moreover, people felt betrayed by the consequences - the Muslim League campaigned for a Pakistan on the understanding that such an entity would include ALL of Bengal and Punjab (which today would mean that the Indian states of West Bengal, Punjab, Haryana and Assam would have been included in such a formation); if the bloodshed and the division of the provinces of Punjab and Bengal leading to what Jinnah referred to as the "moth-eaten Pakistan" how many would have supported such an outcome. In any case there is debate amongst historians about what popular understandings of Pakistan actually meant - to take one instance Delhi then a predominantly Muslim city was assumed by many Muslims to be included in the proposals for the creation of Pakistan.

All this also ignores the argument put forward by scholars like Ayesha Jalal, who in her controversial book, Jinnah the Sole Spokesman, argues that Jinnah intended to use Pakistan as a bargaining chip for a loose Federation where the individual provinces had a substantial element of autonomy from the centre; and was called on his bluff by Congressmen who wanted a strong central government. In this worldview, Jinnah emerges as a moderate politician who though disliking religion used to try and negotiate a favourable deal for Muslims in a Hindu majority India, the concept of Pakistan was very much a weapon of last resort, which he was forced to use unwillingly. I have some sympathy for this view as Jinnah was hardly an Islamisicst - his outlook was very much that of an Anglicised, middle-class liberal; and his attitude towards religion, unlike that of Gandhi was in purely instrumental terms and he had little use for spiritual or moralising thinking wither in his political thought or personal life. Note how his dress changes: photographs of Jinnah before the mid-1930's always portray him in a suit and tie, as Independence approaches there is a gradual adoption of the Islamic Sherwani dress, indicating the gradual adoption of a more overtly Islamic identity in reaction to other political developments. This should caution any simplistic direct links between religion and politics made by analysts of the region as well as making us aware of the constructed nature of religious politics which always had had an articfical aspect to its formation - something conveniently forgotten by activists and proponents today.

Jinnah's main fear that an undivided India would become a difficult place for minorities who would be plagued by one form of Hindu majoritarian politics or another, might sound a little strained but recent events have given a lot of credence to some of his fears. When I was in India I put the argument forward to critics of Partition who liked to turn the whole episode into a morality play with Jinnah in the role of a villain and Nehru as the hero; that Jinnah actually in the long-term has been proved right and foresaw the rise of Hindutva Fundamentalism and its threat to other religious minorities, especially Muslims. This never went down well with either old style-Nehruvian secularists or Hindutva supporters. What I think we need to remember is that much of the Congress was an unabashedly pro-Hindu organisation at the time. The paeans sung in praise of Congress secularism today ignore the fact that much of this was imposed top-down by Nehru, whose personal commitment to secularism has generally remained unquestioned. I would argue that a far more representative leader of the Congress at the time was Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the “iron man of India” who was known for his strong views on minorities and Hindu sympathies. Some of what I say can be substantiated by the fact that large numbers of Congress party workers and politicians, in fact entire wings of the Congress party in states such as Uttar Pradesh have gone over to the BJP. While some of this no doubt reflects the opportunism of many contemporary Indian politicians I think it also points towards how shallow the commitment to secularism by the Congress actually was.

I think that many would agree that it is a shame that such a crucial issue in the sub-continent’s history was decided by what Vikash, has very accurately called a “crude” instrument of democracy. At the very least the groundwork for a referendum must be conducted under certain minimum conditions: the basic of which must include a freedom from intimidation and violence. I still remember photographs in the last state-level elections in Kashmir of soldiers forcing Kashmiris at gunpoint to go to the polling stations and vote – a slightly new spin on Rousseau’s “being forced to be free” if one accepts as Rousseau did that in a representative democracy one is only free when electing the representative. In an atmosphere vitiated by fear and where people are terrified by the consequences of casting their vote cannot form the basis of adequate mandate – just looking at the opportunistic attempt to call elections in Gujarat in the aftermath of the Godhra situation should alert us to the need of creating the stable conditions for a free, and fair exercise of the right to vote.

But Vikash also points to a deeper concern about how voting has inter-generational consequences, in the way that we are constrained by the decisions exercised on our behalf by previous generations. There is no easy answer to this and the fact that a view is popular or widely held does mean that it is valid or should be enforced – I think that both of you may know better than me but isn’t it true that polling and opinion surveys conducted in the past (especially beforte the full impact of the Civil Rights movement was felt in the USA) in the USA showed that most of the population were against mixed race marriages etc. Attitudes change, the rights of groups such as sexual minorities, women and ethnic groups that were ignored or denied before and which were socially stigmatised before have now become more acceptable: I think this raises deeper questions of freedom and how our personal and social identities are constructed – I would need to give these issues some more thought before I could respond to them but I think the concerns that Vikash raises are serious ones that all those who support democratic and egalitarian approaches to political situations need to address. The open ended nature of the democrastic process dow give scope for redressing errors made in the past and nothing is usually written in stone: who can forget the example of Athenian radical democracy during the Peleponnesian War and the sudden reversal over the decision to raze the rebel city of Mytilene and sell its population into slavery: surely this episode shows democracy both at its worst and at its best.

:: Conrad Barwa 7:39 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Re: Public Opinion on Kashmir and the Foundational Moment

I am intrigued by Vikash’s post on the issue of the foundational moment and I think it raises some key issues to the politics of identity formation in South Asia. It is already a cliché to say that the foundational moment is always one of violence, at the epistemological level at the very least. With regards to democracy, as Benedict Anderson, noted this has meant that there has been an uneasy relationship with nationalism. Democracy has very frequently had undemocratic origins: the Declaration of liberty by the American colonists against Britain while asserting the right to liberty on behalf of some was negligent towards the status of Slaves, freedmen and women. In Britain, the Whig march towards universal suffrage was a slow and gradual process with the franchise only being expanded very slowly, with much resistance and only when the propertied classes were assured that they would not be handing power over to a bunch of jumped up revolutionaries. Universalist declarations of democracy and liberty were even more steeped in violence as the events of the French Revolution and the 1848 uprisings show.

When I hear or read about India’s “non-violent” and peaceful” freedom struggle, my reaction is always one of amusement and despair. The Nationalist movement in India was anything but “peaceful”, where I do agree with these sentiments