Democratisation, decolonisation, and the dialectics of culture
Azfar Hussain*, NewAge Sixth Anniversary Issue, September 2009
Democracy is impossible without destroying native oppressors parasitic on imperialism. Maulana Bhashani
Democracy cannot consist solely of elections that are nearly always fictitious and managed by rich landowners and professional politicians. Che Guevara
‘Democracy,’ in a way, names the political figures of the conjunction between particular situations and politics. In this case, and in this case only, ‘democracy,’ can be recaptured as a philosophical category. Hereafter democracy will designate what can be termed as the effectiveness in politics. Alain Badiou
IF CULTURE is political and politics is cultural—as they surely are in ways in which they are dialectically envisaged and enacted not only by the Italian theorist-activist Antonio Gramsci, but also by our Maulana Bhashani—we might try to seek certain crucial connections between Qazi Nazrul Islam and Bhashani himself, between poetics and politics, to address and even reconfigure the question of democracy in our part of the world. And we might make those connections at a time when democracy itself turns out to be a concept in crisis not only in Bangladesh but also on a global scale. True, Nazrul can by no means be reckoned a hard theorist of democracy as such; but his poetic insights into the question of total emancipation from colonialism and imperialism—as articulated boldly and even repeatedly in the pages of Dhumketu—can be fruitfully yoked together with Bhashani’s principle and praxis of a mass-line in both politics and culture to frame our discussion surrounding the question ‘Whose democracy is it, any way?’
Admittedly, the question posed above is an old one—and we might even detect Leninist registers in this question, while remaining attentive to the difference between what Lenin calls ‘proletarian democracy’ and ‘bourgeois democracy’—but the question keeps returning with a vengeance in the era of what some political theorists have meanwhile called ‘over-democratisation.’ This idea of over-democratisation does not, however, suggest that we have already begun to inhabit a topographically even democratic landscape as such—in fact, we are far from it—but over-democratisation is an idea predicated on the phenomenon that everyone today wants to speak and act in the name of the ‘people’ themselves. So the epistemologically and politically enabling questions for me always are: The people? Which people? What people? Whose people? The people as subjects? Or the people as objects? The people as a mobilising trope? Or the people as even sheer fiction? The tropological or fictional or rhetorical people? Or the people within the horizon of the materiality of class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality, for instance? It is this particular constellation of questions that I intend to keep in mind and even mobilise while thinking and talking about the political culture and cultural politics of democracy in Bangladesh.
Let me then return to the question of the invocation and appropriation of the people. We know that even theocratic and fundamentalist politics have long justified their raison d’être in the name of the people. And, of course, what has come to be known as ‘bourgeois democracy’ has routinely rehearsed the so-called Lincolnesque prepositional principle of ‘a government of, by, and for the people.’ Even colonial governances, imperial rule, and military dictatorships have all historically justified and legitimised their theories and practices in the name of the people or the dêmos—the Greek for ‘people,’ one of the etymological roots of the Greek word d?mokratía or democracy. Of course, the politics of nationalism—its converging and conflictual versions notwithstanding—cannot simply ontologise or reproduce itself without invoking the people as a collective.
There is, then, the case of socialism, whose entire theoretical horizon decisively embraces, and continues to re-constellate, the question of the people, positing that it is nothing short of ‘radical democracy’, or ‘people’s democracy’, or ‘proletarian democracy’—these terms themselves have a history of interesting variations and nuances within the Marxian tradition itself—which comes to constitute the initial stage of socialism. For a number of socialists, if not all, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’—to the degree that the figure of the ‘proletariat’ here names the majority of the people as well as the most advanced and conscious section of them—is itself democracy radicalised, and democracy certainly rescued from the bourgeoisie, while marking the first stage of socialism. This is an idea that is by no means dead yet, the equation of ‘socialism’ and ‘dictatorship’ manufactured by bourgeois hegemony notwithstanding.
For instance, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez—taking his cues from none other than Lenin himself (given Chavez’s own account)—keeps that idea alive. Although Chavez is no Leninist in the strictest sense of the term, his Lenin-inspired experimentations with both democracy and socialism—and their mutual imbrication—have inaugurated a specifically promising chapter in the history of democratic and socialist movements in Latin America, as Tariq Ali rightly points out in his influential book on Latin America called Pirates of the Caribbean. Also, at a very recent festival called ‘Marxism Festival’ held in England—a festival that, among other things, renewed hope about our ‘new Marxian times’ at a moment when the current stage, and for that matter, the most advanced stage, of capitalism has reached its unprecedented dead-end, even in Francis Fukuyama’s version—there was this rhetorical question gathering the force of a gripping idea: ‘How can there be even a semblance of socialism without democracy itself?’ But, then, democracy itself is to be re-invented.
Thus, it is not for nothing that the young Australian philosopher and film-maker Daniel Ross—also the author of a relatively recent and sensational book called Violent Democracy, and one whose pet project seems to be a critique and a rehabilitation of the German high-priest of ontology Martin Heidegger by way of re-reading the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben—goes on to identify a paradoxical condition in which democracy finds itself. Taking cues and clues from Agamben, Ross suggests that democracy on the one hand remains ‘the unsurpassable horizon of our time’ and, that, on the other, democracy remains ‘a concept in crisis.’ I don’t disagree at all with Ross here, while I also enthusiastically follow the heterologics of democracy Ross tends to chart out in the global context, maintaining that ‘from the Left to the Right “democracy” is the concept governing political imagination.’
What, however, Ross and Agamben both leave out are the complex and interconnected configurations of class struggle, national liberation, and decolonisation, as they have variously informed and affected and even renewed the struggles for democracy in the ‘third world’—in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—within the larger contexts of capitalism and imperialism—those structures of production relations and power relations that influence, inflect, implicate, and even produce the practice of everyday life in today’s world.
In fact, Agamben and Ross—both—are not even ready to get this simple but crucially dialectical idea, a global calculus of political economy in fact: no discussions of the advanced zones of capital can be reckoned adequate today without a rigorous engagement with the peripheral formations in the world.
But let me now at least briefly dwell on democracy-as-a-concept-in-crisis in the Western context. It is important that we make sense of this crisis unfolding in the West, because it is still the West that continues to inform and even jazz up the so-called civil-societal concept of democracy in peripheral formations like ours—the kind of democracy that was exemplarily rehearsed by the last interim government in Bangladesh, a military-backed government that came to impose itself on the people without their mandate, a government that also invoked the ‘people’, thereby forging an unprecedented historical irony. It is instructive to remind ourselves that Fakhruddin’s military-backed interim government even slavishly adopted and mobilised the discursive practices of the US establishment in an attempt to promote ‘democracy’ in Bangladesh: ‘one-eleven’, ‘roadmaps’, ‘ID’, and so on. On the other hand, our traditional national ruling classes and their ideologues or intellectuals have hardly grappled with the question of democracy vis-à-vis the West at the theoretical and ideological—let alone practical—levels, while their role as the lumpen-bourgeoisie has not even enabled them to attain the level of bourgeois democratic consciousness in our part of the world.
Yet there have been both material and ideological ties—both conjunctural and organic as they are—between foreign capital and the national ruling classes, or between US imperialism and the national ruling classes, the history of which can certainly be traced as further back as the days of even Sheikh Mujibur Rahman himself, one who was known for his almost consistent pro-American stance (subsequently enacted by Ziaur Rahman, of course). Indeed, like the uneven development of capitalism itself, there has been an uneven development of democratic consciousness in Bangladesh. Against this background, then, the struggle for democracy in our country today cannot meaningfully move forward by remaining narrowly or merely political—a point that was anticipated long ago by a poet like Qazi Nazrul Islam, whose repeated and rebellious invocation of the ‘equality of the people’ fiercely foregrounds the questions of class, race, gender, and nationality underlying imperialist-capitalist domination, while underscoring the need for ‘decolonising the mind,’ to use the Kenyan writer-theorist-activist Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Fanon-inflected phrase. It is from Nazrul that I derive this crucial formulation: without decolonisation there is no democratisation in our part of the world. And it is from Bhashani that I derive this dialectical injunction: the struggle for democracy must, then, be cultural in the best political sense of the term.
Before I unpack further some of the loaded ideas that I have relatively quickly enunciated above, let me briefly point out certain aspects of the crisis of democracy in the West. It is significant that the most formidable and influential contemporary trinity of European or continental philosophers—the French philosopher Alain Badiou, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and the Slovenian philosopher Salvoj Žižek—all have been fiercely critical of liberal democracy in the West, whose contemporary crisis is today starkly evident in the crisis of capitalism itself for the simple reason that liberal democracy has continued to equate ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’ for quite some time now. It is this equation that is now backfiring for ‘democracy’ itself, suggests Alain Badiou in a recent interview, while Agamben suggests that as the French revolution marks the beginning of modern democratic thought in the West, modern democracy itself since then has been undermining its radical character and content by embracing, reproducing, and legitimising the thoughts of ‘necessity’ and ‘emergency’. Daniel Ross provides a gloss on this: ‘Whatever pockets of democratic radicalism have flourished momentarily here and there in the West, the tendency has not been an increase of popular control over government, but rather of increasing governmental control over populations.’ One might certainly say that today’s US imperialism remains hell-bent on globalising the thoughts of ‘necessity’ and ‘exception’ and ‘emergency’ in the name of democratising Iraq, Afghanistan, and by extension, the entire ‘third world’, targeted for nothing short of re-colonisation.
Now Žižek on liberal democracy: ‘“Democracy” is not merely the “power of, by, and for the people,” it is not enough just to claim that, in democracy, the will and the interests (the two in no way automatically coincide) of the large majority determine the state decisions. Democracy—in the way this term is used today—concerns, above all, formal legalism: its minimal definition is the unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic game. “Democracy” means that, whatever electoral manipulation took place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the US presidential elections of 2000 were effectively “democratic”: in spite of obvious electoral manipulations, and of the patent meaninglessness of the fact that a couple hundred of Florida voices will decide who will be the president, the Democratic candidate accepted his defeat.’
I have numerous local disagreements with Žižek, but I quote him here at some length because I think he symptomatically exposes the hollowness of today’s liberal democracy in the West—one that all three of them, Badiou-Agamben-Zizek, want us not only to critique but also to reject once and for all, while cautioning us that the entire circuits of NGOs-civil society-the World Bank/the IMF/the WTO are continuing to bury politics—and the ‘politics of the people’—beneath the ideas of good governance and effective administration and efficient management in an attempt to inaugurate a post-political society. It is this model of what might also be called ‘post-political democracy’ that the past ‘emergency’ government and the members of our so-called civil society have hitherto unabashedly privileged, while evincing clear signs of what the Chicana feminist theorist Emma Perez calls ‘ideological slavery’.
Of course, Badiou, Agamben, and Žižek make sense with regard to their trenchant critiques of liberal democracy in their parts of the world, but a whole host of ‘third-world’ theorists from the African American WEB Du Bois and the Caribbean CLR James, through the Latin American Jose Carlos Mariategui and the African Kwame Nkrumah, to our Maulana Bhashani—in their different ways and contexts—emphasise the need for re-inventing both politics and democracy in the land of the natives themselves. But how do we re-invent them? First of all, we need to reject completely the tradition of mainstream politics in Bangladesh that has routinely invoked the people without radically centring them and their agendas—a tradition that has never made decolonisation one of their central tasks, a tradition that has long been known for its ideological slavery, a tradition that continues to equate democracy with ‘free and fair elections’ instead of taking democracy as the equality of rights and opportunities, a tradition that remains tied to and even dictated by corporate interests and US imperialism, and, in short, a tradition that has reached its creative dead-end.
This tradition can never offer democracy for the people—for the majority who are working-class people and peasants in Bangladesh. The rejection in question then constitutes an indispensable condition for the re-invention of democracy—a re-invention that further calls for a permanent cultural struggle against capitalism, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy, profoundly interconnected as they are. There can never be a real democracy for the exploited and the oppressed under conditions of today’s late capitalism and late imperialism that routinely reduce the ‘people’ to ‘bare lives’ or even statistical numbers in the name of necessity and emergency, while also re-forging new hegemonic and oppressive blocs in the interests of both profit and power. And there can never be a democracy for the majority of our people in Bangladesh, when our legal system, our administrative system or our bureaucracy, our police and military systems, and, no less significantly, our educational system all remain still colonialist in character and content. And there can never be a real democracy in our country, if its people cannot claim and access their own national and natural resources. And there can be no democracy under the conditions of patriarchy—patriarchy that obtains and operates both micro-structurally and macro-structurally in our lives. Our permanent cultural struggle for democracy needs to target all those hegemonic blocs, even destroy them, through the production of new knowledges, new consciousness, and even new democratic beings in the interest of the total emancipation of the people. As our Maulana Bhashani—like the Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti—put it once: ‘The telling is in doing.’
Indeed, every moment can be a moment of rebellion and creation in the service of democracy.
*Azfar Hussain is currently a visiting professor of liberal studies/interdisciplinary studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, while he has recently taught English and world literature at Oklahoma State University, USA. His email: azfarhussain1@gmail.com
Digitizing Desires, Imagining Identities
Nina Somera*, Manila, 11 September 2009
Two years ago, I rolled over Quezon Avenue as I jumped from an FX that was being held up. I did not have valuables in terms of cash and jewelry that can immediately benefit those thieves. In my knapsack were clothes, toiletries, a notebook, a few pens and an empty-bat mobile phone and a charger – the basics for an immersion in a riverside community of Talayan. It did not occur to me to surrender my belongings to the thieves as colleagues and friends would have advised. For me, it was just too unfair. Besides in my mobile phone were the last photos that I took of my dearest grandmother.
Fast forward: After I was treated in the hospital, I dropped by the police station to have the incident blottered. As in the past, the desk officers showed me some photos. But unlike before when our jeep was held up along Katipunan Avenue, they did not bring out their humongous albums but a shiny digital camera. I was not really expecting a development in my case by looking at those pictures but I was surprised nonetheless: I first saw successive pictures of a group of men and maybe their families in a swimming outing. The rest focused on faces of men, who were detained in the station and had no reason to be at Quezon Avenue that morning.
Bruised and scared, I was left wondering, how some images could be worth risking one’s life for and how such risk could be made so trifling by another set of images.
Digital cameras have become quite handy recorders of life’s various moments of performance: from triumphant to tragic, from momentous to trivial. But like us, digital cameras operate within particular contexts. Like us, their use value is based on their co-functioning with other tools, which are products of the same social relations of power. And like us, their fresh and sleak appearance cannot betray a historical legacy of struggles in communicating ideas, identities, discourses and desires.
New Lens, New Messages?
The advent of digital cameras has heralded a new era of capturing images that we make of ourselves and others. To begin with, the digital camera has managed to combine the multiple functions of what would have been a mid-range analogue camera as well as a video camera into a small silvery shell which one may carry the way she would a mobile phone. Its price is relatively more democratic, that the older the model becomes, its price tag also lowers but still remains fair given the fast replacement of models. It is most probably for this reason that more individuals rather than families own a digital camera.
Yet the digital camera must also be appreciated in relation to Web 2.0, particularly some of its more known applications such as blogging, websites, social networking sites, online petitions, online surveys and many others. The latter has given rise to individual-driven communications, which places more premium on images, rather than words and even sounds.
Prior to the creation of the World Wide Web in the early 90s, the more progressive social Western theorists thought of introducing the concept of the “text” far beyond the written word as the limits of formalism, linguistics, post-structuralism became more and more manifest. Hence, for Terry Eagleton, the “text” became anything that communicates, given the “web-like complexity of signs.”
Eagleton may have been quite forward looking but he and others may not have imagined the comprehensive development of the internet, its applications and the applications’ graphical user interface (GUI) – that from the flashiness reserved for MTV could be done at the level of the user who can be both the spectator and spectacle at the same time.
Through platforms such as blogger, wordpress, multiply, friendster, flickr and more recently facebook, digital photos have become more of a staple rather than a side dish, especially for those who are not so inclined to write but who are equally interested in having their lives documented. The orientation of these platforms as well as contents towards the individual at once facilitates and regulates the pleasures of seeing and being seen.
Seeing Stories
But more than the cost, the uniqueness of the digital camera can be appreciated through the impact of the images and sense of immediacy. True, photos for news services are still paid and sold, the way they were during the analogue era but certainly not in today’s speed and scale.
As the Web 2.0 has paved the way for citizen journalism or that which allows individuals to write their own personal stories and upload photos that can feed into the more political information gathering and broadcasting, more and more diverse images have become available to the internet. While some social networking sites include usage provisos that technically grant platforms partial ownership of any posted content, the number of users are just too many for strict regulation.
In fact on many occasions, such sites have become spaces for the promotion of the commons as in the case of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), whose library of cover-quality photos on flickr are made available the public.
Drik is also a repository of fantastic images of ordinary people who found themselves in extraordinary situations. Its founder, Shahidul Alam has not only depicted the scale of wars and calamities but has also humanized their subjects in the midst of tragedies.
Aside from contributing in the production of news, some images have also bolstered social action on an international scale. Early this year, the flames of opposition against Israel’s aggression in Gaza were further fanned by very disturbing photos circulated on the internet. These showed Israeli soldiers taking photos of themselves beside tortured and lifeless corpses; Israel soldiers ordering a man to strip naked in public apparently in the pretext of surveillance; activists being run through by bulldozers in a Palestinian farmland and many more.
In the Philippines, the blogs of some journalists, when combined, can perhaps compensate for several newspaper and magazine issues. This, as their contents include stories behind the stories that they report on television and radio or even those which were not broadcast, along with some pictures. An example is the entry “Mayhem in May” which showed the panic of the crowd as a water buffalo went berserk during the Carabao Festival in Pulilan Bulacan.
Arkibong Bayan is another interesting repository of articles, photos and other materials related to the country’s social movements, aligned with the National Democratic Front. Their photos are taken during mobilisations, many of them rallies on human rights issues such as involuntary disappearance.
(Re)Making Memories and Realities
Because digital photos are so easy to produce, more people are able to document their lives and organise their memories. When before diaries were a purview of the bourgeoisie or at least people who had the luxury of time and the skill to write, digital cameras have now become the most accessible and convenient way to capture not just events but every day realities.
Such accessibility and convenience can be attributed to the nature of a digital photo: It is digital and it can be stored in memory cards and later on, hard drives with a gargantuan capacity. The sheer size of memory storage allows users and their subjects to be more carefree behind and before a digital camera. As bad and blurred photos can easily be trashed even while the camera is in use, users become much more comfortable while for the subjects, there is less pressure to perform. There can always be a take two or even more. It is probably for this reason that digital cameras tend to be empowering.
Alam shares that during his visit in a Sri Lankan town that was devastated by the 2004 tsunami, his digital camera had helped him warm up with the survivors. As he notes about a girl, Shanika, who lost her mother and sisters and who became so afraid of the sea: “It was my digital camera which changed things. Most people in the sub-continent love being photographed. The joy of seeing her own image instantly brought a smile to Shanika’s face, and soon we were friends. She took photographs of her dad, her aunt and of me. Soon she was taking photographs of me by the sea, but telling me to be careful!”
To a certain extent, it can be said that it is a raw medium of documenting history for images are more difficult to contest than words. Yet the outputs of a digital camera can also be altered, with the help of editing tools or by merely deleting unwanted pictures that the pictures would no longer be as honest and complete as they seem.
It can also be said that the digital camera has placed narcissism and voyeurism to the next level. Those who have accounts on facebook will not miss the dozens and hundreds of pictures (depending on the number of her or his friends) posted throughout the day. Many of them consist of the same people in the same location or event. But for some theorists, such redundancy and amateurism are unimportant, that what matters instead is the very freedom of people in defining fun, love, friendship and others in their own terms.
As Beck Jorgensen asserts, “The point is to recognize that the everyday, on the one hand, is the site of the utterly superficial and repetitive that we need to respect for the sense of security it gives and on the other hand, potentially is the site major personal and societal change.”
New Lens, Old Eyes
Despite the potentials of digital cameras in effecting personal and social changes more conveniently and democratically, the very production, consumption and dissemination of photos are not free of personal biases and social dimensions such as gender, class, ethnicity, especially as the accessibility of this medium has heightened those desires and pleasures that operate in societies of spectacles.
In 2007, the country was wracked by the so-called “kissing scandal” involving two actors, a woman who was in a relationship and a man. Albeit the latter took the photo using his mobile phone’s camera, the woman received more than a fair share of backlash especially as she was living with a married billionaire who is old enough to be her father.
Digital or not, such photos are indeed considered trophies of manliness or as film critic Laura Mulvey describes, the first type of scopophilia or that which happens as another person is used as “an object of sexual stimulation through sight.” By themselves the photos of the “kissing scandal” would not have so much value, that it was not imperative to take them in the first place, had it not for a desiring ego and an equally desiring group of spectators – including those who for some reason, were awaiting the woman’s ultimate fall from grace.
The photos can be likened to the otherwise unnecessary erotic scenes in certain films. Bed scenes may not relevant in an adreline-packed action movie as the former merely slow down the momentum of the story.
As Mulvey explains: “The presence of [a] woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.”
The experience of desire and pleasure is also facilitated by the very mode of their distribution, the internet. The wider the images are disseminated, the more meanings they can assume and the more pleasure they can generate. As Annette Kuhn points out, “Meanings do not reside in the images…: they are circulated between representation, spectator and social formation.”
Ownership of digital cameras is also a matter of class. Although a digital camera may now be purchased for as P8,995 (For Olympus FE-20 and Olympus FE 310), it is still a luxury for a minimum wage earner who is based in Metro Manila and who earns P8,404 a month, at the most.
Class likewise informs the images in a digital camera. Although it can be said that much of personal photos are centered on the owners of the digital camera, it cannot be denied that such gadget has facilitated a touristic voyeur, allowing “other” cultures to be in “fixity” as Homi Bhabha puts it or simply, stereotyped.
Moreover, it can be a tool of capturing “monstrosities” that are in abundance in rural areas or in the developing world in general. Images of people sleeping in card board boxes or a child defecating outside the makeshift house perched on a river riprap or children salvaging pagpag out of a mountain of trash are just some images, which for American photographer Jacob Riis, remind the elite of their social responsibility but for Southern feminist Gayatri Spivak, too insulting to be a source of spiritual nourishment for the First World.
*Nina Somera is post-graduate student of Comparative Literature in the University of the Philippines. The essay is a paper she wrote for her Anthropology class on media and culture.
She is also a resident editor of praxis books. Nina Somera is a feminist activist and works for Isis International, a feminist NGO committed to creating spaces within information and communications structures and systems, that promote the many voices of women, particularly those from the South. However, this paper reflects her personal views and analysis.
She can be reached at: nina.somera@gmail.com
Sources:
Alam, Shahidul. (2005). “The Human Spirit.”
Arkibong Bayan.
Bhabha, Homi. (1996) “The Other Question” in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Edited by Padmini Mongia. London and New York: Hodder Headline Group.
Drik
DOLE (2008). “TABLE 20 – Minimum Wage Rates by Sector and Region,
Philippines: As of March 2009.”
Eagleton, Terry. (1996). Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Goldberg, Vicki (1995). “Photographic View: Looking at the Poor in a Gilded Frame.”
Hermes, Joke. (2005). “Media, Meaning and Everyday Life.” in Media Studies: A Reader. Edited by Paul Marris and Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
IRRI Images Photostream.
Kuhn, Annette. (2005). “The Power of the Image” in Media Studies: A Reader. Edited by Paul Marris and Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Mulvey, Laura. (1975). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
Philippine Entertainment Portal. (2007). “Claudine Barretto, Reacted about John and Gretchen Kissing Picture.”
Severino, Howie (2009). “Mayhem in May.”
Spivak, Gayatri (1988). In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York and London: Routledge.
Villman. (2009). Prices of Digital Cameras.
Zone Zero. (2005). “Shahidul Alam.”
Carnival of Resistance, 2010
Carnival of Resistance, June 2009
Event, space, moment, process!
An annual three day convergence of souls striving for nirvana!
When? How about January 2010?
Keywords: Lets see if you guess it right! ………………..feminism, capitalism, neo-liberalism, obamaism, consumerism, TNCs, corporate grooms and slaves (only if they knew!), text book marxism, love, phulbari, coffee, rivers, dating, climate change, new politics, sex, butterflies, jeans, commodity, palestine, coke, Subcommander Marcos, rain, facebook, war on terror, militarization of CHT, remittance, dejuice, LGBT, profit, exploitation, accumulation, rights, water, kalpana chakma, RMG, responsibilities, english medium, pleasure, China, private universities, Lalon, Israel, YouTube, madrasa, empathy, rock, folk, pants, Iraq, lungi, war crimes trial, saree, Tv, theater, protest, solidarity, patriarchy, sexism, racism, militarism, masculinity, yasmin, India, friendship, solidarity, KFC…………………….fill in the blanks!
City: Dhaka, this time. Next? Invite us to your cities (we have a bit of urban bias) and brinndabons!
Visuals and spectators: Ok, we are talking about film screening! Don’t only be an onlooker! How long do you want to keep on purchasing “pirated” DVDs? Make your own film and send to us (we don’t mind receiving grainy clips made by cell phone cams…take command of your gadgets).
Concert: Noise is political! Shouts and murmurs! Guitars and ektars! Be yourself, don’t just try to imitate bauls. Warning: MTV clones go somewhere else!
Theatre: Bodies, space, lights and shadows!
Exhibitionism (a little bit of it isn’t that bad): photo, cartoon, posters, subversive art, and effigies (should be fun to burn it afterward, if its George the Bush…we have to wait a couple of years before we can safely burn Obama effigies…hope is so infectious)!
Rally: Don’t worry, we won’t do it on a sunny day when the city is on boiling point. Its not our fault if you forget to bring your raincoats! Disclaimer: fossil fuel fumes emitted by Japanese cars may cause respiratory and other health complications.
Talk-shop: Come out of your cocoon! Leave your stage fright behind, talk, just talk! We will listen, promise!
Fellow conspirators: YOU, and , Leela, Solidarity Workshop, Lokoj Institute, Binirman Andolon, praxis books, Gramsci Institute, Leela School of Cultural Studies…who said we are a bunch of closed door geeks?
Just appear, reclaim your space!
praxis books looking for translators
Interested to translate (english to bangla) books and essays of critical importance? We are looking for people who have an interest in politics.
Flexible timeline and generous compensation package promised.
Interested? Please drop us a line: readwriteresist@gmail.com
Read, write, translate, resist!
Eduardo Galeano’s new book: “Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone”
Democracy Now, May 29, 2009
Fresh Off Worldwide Attention for Joining Obama’s Book Collection, Uruguayan Author Eduardo Galeano Returns with “Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone“
Democracy Now spends the hour with one of Latin Americas most acclaimed writers, Eduardo Galeano. The Uruguayan novelist and journalist recently made headlines around the world when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave President Obama a copy of Galeanos classic work, The Open Veins of Latin America. Eduardo Galeanos latest book is Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. Democracy Now speaks to Galeano about his reaction to the Chavez-Obama book exchange, media and politics in Latin America, his assessment of Obama, and more. [read rush transcript]
Part # 1
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Part # 4
Alain Badiou: Philosophy like Love is Never Enough?
Notes from Azfar Hussain*, Department of English, Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA
I have been reading the French philosopher-activist Alain Badiou with great interest. He has already made massive, even groundbreaking, interventions in what he himself has rigorously theorized as the four conditions of philosophy (four is my favorite number as well)–or four “truth-procedures,” as he also calls them–art, love, politics, and science. I’ve plans to write a full-length essay on Badiou. But meanwhile I thought I’d share with you a few quick reactions. Yes, just a few reactions.
The more I read Badiou, the more I keep thinking of those revolutionary pronouncements made by two of my favorite figures–one from the domain of art and the other one from the domain of politics–James Baldwin and Che Guevara. So thus speaks Baldwin (memorably characterized as “God’s revolutionary mouth” by Amiri Baraka): “In our time, as in any time, the impossible is the least one can demand.” And here is Che: “We are realists…because we dream the impossible.”
Image: PSIKEBA
And Badiou’s work militantly pursues the impossible with unflagging fidelity, even pushing the Lacanian Real to its limits, while taking to task–you bet–almost all versions of “other”-fetishizing or feel-good multiculturalism or cultural relativism, truth-pooh-poohing postmodernism-poststructuralism, false universalism of human rights, and all configurations and constellations of parliamentarian-democratic-statist politics. Moreover, Badiou creatively and energetically draws on certain versions of Marxism–including the works of Marx, Lenin, and Mao–while also pointing up certain saturated spaces within that very tradition. In his major, massive work _Being and Event_ (first published in France in 1988), for instance, Badiou critically traverses the entire history of Western philosophy (and “anti-philosophy”) from Plato to Pascal, from Aristotle to Althusser, from Hegel to Heidegger, from Leibniz to Lacan, and so on.
Even reminding us of Marx’s sustained interest in mathematics–exemplified as it is in his 900-page manuscripts on mathematics in which Marx tends to range beyond the Enlightenment tradition of structural algebra and calculus to frame and fashion something like “dialectical” mathematics–Badiou seems to be revolutionizing the very use of mathematics itself, represented by his colossal mobilization of set theory: Badiou posits mathematics as nothing short of ontology in the service of his theorization of the subject–one of Badiou’s major tasks or preoccupations in my reckoning. In many instances, mathematics and poetics–mathemes and poems–tend to gain equal resonance or equal ’singularity’ as truth-procedures in his scheme of what Badiou calls “thought-praxis.” In his view, yes, “philosophy is an action” or “philosophy is like a political struggle” (although philosophy is by no means to be conflated with politics-in-itself). When, however, philosophy tries to be politics itself, philosophy turns out to be a “disaster,” to use Badiou’s own term; or, philosophy–should we say?–morphs into “follysophy.”
If I have to categorically mark out three broad areas (“three” is also Badiou’s favorite number as much as his “four”)–apart from his aforementioned four philosophical conditions–on which Badiou keeps relentlessly focusing in his work from, say, _Being and Event_, to _Ethics_, to _Metapolitics_ , to _Handbook of Inaesthetics_, those areas are, of course: 1) Truth, 2) Event, and 3) the Subject. And if I have to spell out one goal of Badiou’s work (“one-that-counts,” to use Badiou’s term), it is nothing short of a “strictly incalculable emergence” of a militant but new politics in the interest of an absolute emancipation of humanity.
Finally, a passage from Badiou’s _Being and Event_, one that in my view exemplarily and quickly contours some of the crucial coordinates of Badiou’s philosophical-activist work: “A subject is nothing other than an active fidelity to the event of truth. This means that a subject is a militant of truth. I philosophically founded the notion of ‘militant’ at a time when the consensus was that any engagement of this type was archaic. Not only did I found this notion, but I considerably enlarged it. The militant of a truth is not only the political militant working for the emancipation of humanity in its entirety. He or she is also the artist-creator, the scientist who opens up a new theoretical field or the lover whose world is enchanted.”
You bet–we need militants in our time to make possible that “strictly incalculable emergence” of another world, a new world. Finally, a poem by the Nicaraguan militant feminist poet Daisy Zamora:
Tenacious, we keep on searching corners
reading signs wanting to be the first
to reach the end of the story when
what’s real what’s true what we know
is there is no end it doesn’t exist
we will never get there.
Admittedly, I just scratched the surface of Badiou’s work–oh yes! But more on Badiou later. And–friends!–I’d have some harsh things to say about his unexamined Eurocentrism and other theoretico-aesthetic preoccupations. Thanks for your time.
*Contact: azfarhussain1@gmail.com
‘Still pictures are not still…’: Fore-seeing the effect of visual images
By Rahnuma Ahmed* NewAge, February 16, 2009
‘Still pictures are not still…,’ said Mahasweta Devi. She was in Dhaka to inaugurate Chobi Mela V and, fortunately for us, had expressed her wish to put up with Shahidul Alam, the director of Chobi Mela. Having Mahasweta Devi, and Joy Bhadra, a young writer and her companion, as house guests, was a ‘happening’. I will write about that another day.
Mahasweta Devi consistently used the words stheer chitro (exact translation is, ‘still images’). Still pictures, she went on, inspire us. They move us. They make us do things.
However, I thought to myself, many who are working on visual and cultural theory may not agree. Some would be likely to say, things are not as simple as that.
Palestinians wait to cross the Israeli checkpoint of Beit Eiba, outside the Nablus, in the occupied West Bank on February 9. — AFP photo
The effect of visual images needs to be investigated
THE debate about the power of visual images has become stuck on the point of the meaning of visual images, on the truth of images. This, said David Campbell, a professor of cultural and political geography, doesn’t get us very far. He was one of the panellists at the opening night’s discussion of Chobi Mela V, held at the Goethe Institut auditorium (‘Engaging with photography from outside: An informal discussion between a geographer, an editor and a curator/funder of photography’, January 30).
David went on, it is much better to focus on the effect of images, on the function of images, on the work that images do – and that, is how the debate should be framed. At present, attention is overly-focused on the single image, and what we expect of the single image. By doing this we have invested it with too much possibility, we place too much hope on its ability to bring about social change. The effect of visual images needs to be investigated, rather than assumed.
Amy Yenkin, another panellist in the programme, and head of the Documentary Photography project at the Open Society Institute asked David, Why do you think this happens? Is it because people look back at certain iconic images, let’s say images from the Vietnam war that changed the situation, that they try to put too much meaning in the power of one single image…? David replied, ‘In a way, I am sceptical of the power of single images, a standard 6 or 7 in the western world, that are repeated all the time. I was personally affected by the Vietnam war images, by the image of the young Vietnamese girl fleeing from a napalm bomb, but I don’t know of any argument that actually demonstrates that Nick Ut’s photograph demonstrably furthered the Vietnam anti-war movement.’ He went on, ‘Now, I don’t regard that as a failure of the image, but a failure of the interpretation that we’ve placed on the image. It puts too much burden on the image itself.’
The discussion was followed by Noam Chomsky and Mahasweta Devi’s video-conference discussion on Freedom (Chobi Mela V’s theme), and I became fully immersed in watching two of the foremost public intellectual/activists of today talk about the meanings and struggles of freedom, and of imperialism and nationalism’s attempts to thwart it in common people’s lives.
But the next day, my thoughts returned to what David had said, and to the general discussion that had followed. On David’s website, I came across how he understands photography, ‘a technology through which the world is visually performed,’ and a gist of his theoretical argument. I quote: ‘The pictures that the technology of photography produces are neither isolated nor discrete objects. They have to be understood as being part of networks of materials, technologies, institutions, markets, social spaces, emotions, cultural histories and political contexts. The meaning of photographs derives from the intersection of these multiple features rather than just the form and content of particular pictures.’ (http: //www.david-campbell.org/photography/).
In other words, to understand what happens within the frame, we need to go outside the frame.
Abu Ghraib photographs: concealing more than they reveal
A GOOD instance is provided by the Abu Ghraib prison torture and abuse photographs taken by US military prison guards with digital cameras, which came to public attention in early 2004. The pictures, says Ian Buruma, conceal more than they reveal. By telling one story, they hide a bigger story.
Images of Chuck Graner, Ivan Frederick and the others as ‘gloating thugs’ helped single out, and fix, low-ranking reservist soldiers as the bad apples. As President Bush intoned, it was ‘disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonoured our country and disregarded our values.’ None of the officers were tried, though several received administrative punishment. As a matter of fact, the Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defence Detention Operations specifically absolved senior US military and political leadership from direct culpability. Some even received promotions (Major General Walter Wodjakowski, Colonel Marc Warren, Major General Barbara Fast).
The gloating digital images, no doubt embarrassing for the US administration, probably helped ‘far greater embarrassments from emerging into public view.’ They made ‘the lawyers, bureaucrats, and politicians who made, or rather unmade, the rules—William J Haynes, Alberto Gonzales, David S Addington, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Douglas J Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney—look almost respectable.’
But there is another aspect to the story of concealing-and-revealing. Public preoccupation with Abu Ghraib pornography deflected attention from the ‘torturing and the killing that was never recorded on film,’ and from finding out who ‘the actual killers’ were. By singling out those visible in the pictures as the ‘rogues’ responsible, it concealed the bigger reality. That the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, as Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris point out, ‘was de facto United States policy.’
Lynndie England, who held the rank of Specialist while serving in Iraq, expressed it best I think, when she said, ‘I didn’t make the war. I can’t end the war. I mean, photographs can’t just make or change a war.’
True. Photographs can’t just make or change a war. But surely they do something, or else, why censor images of the recent slaughter in Gaza? To put it more precisely, surely, those who are powerful (western politicians, journalists, arms manufacturers, defence analysts, all deeply embedded in the Zionist Curtain, one that has replaced the older Iron Curtain) apprehend that the visual images of Gaza will do something? That they will, in all probability, have a social effect upon western audiences? And therefore, these must be acted upon, i.e. their circulation and distribution must be prevented.
At times, their apprehension seems to move even further. Images-not-yet-taken are prevented from being taken. Probable social effects of unborn images are foreseen, and aborted.
Censoring Gaza images, for what they reveal
ALL of this happened in the case of Gaza. But before turning to that, I would like to add a small note on the notion of probability. I am inclined to think that it’ll help to deepen our understanding of the politics of visual images.
As the organisers of a Michigan university conference on English literature remind us (‘Fictional Selves: On the (im)Probability of Character’, April 2002), the notion of probability went through a major conceptual shift with the emergence of modernity. What in the seventeenth century had meant ‘the capability of being proven absolutely true or false’ as in the case of deductive theorem in logic, gradually altered in meaning as practitioners searched for rhetorical consensus, and the repeatability of experimental results, leading to its present-day meaning: ‘a likelihood of occurring.’
What might have occurred if Israel had allowed journalists into Gaza? What might have occurred if the BBC instead of hiding under the pretence of ‘impartiality’ had agreed to air the Disasters Emergency Committee’s Gaza Aid Appeal aimed at raising humanitarian aid for (occupied and besieged) Gazans? What might have occurred if the USA’s largest satellite television subscription service DIRECTV had gone ahead and aired the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation of Palestine’s ‘Gaza Strip TV Ad’?
Could pictures of Israel’s 22-day carnage in Gaza, which killed more than 1,300 Palestinians, have sown doubts in western minds about the Israeli claim of targeting only Hamas, and not civilians? Could photos of bombed UN buildings, mosques, schools, a university, of hospitals in ruins, ambulances destroyed, of dismembered limbs and destroyed factories have forced the BBC’s viewers to question whether both sides are to blame? Could pictures of the apartheid wall, the security zone, the checkpoints controlling entry of food, trade, medicine (for over two years) make suspect the Israeli claim that it had withdrawn from Gaza? Could photos depicting the effects of mysterious armaments that have burned their way down into people’s flesh, eaten their skin and tissue away, have given western viewers pause for thought? Could the little story of Israel acting only in self-defence, begin to unravel? Could pictures of Gaza in ruins have led American viewers to wonder whether there is a bigger story out there, and could it then lead them to ask why their taxes are being spent in footing Israel’s military bill (the fourth largest army in the world), to ask why they should continue to sponsor this parasitical state, even when its own economy is in ruins?
May be.
After all, as Mahasweta Devi had said, still pictures are not still. Still pictures (may) move us. They (may) make us do things.
The powerful, know this.
*Rahnuma Ahmed is an anthropologist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Contact: rahnuma@drik.net
Doing Political Economy in Poetry
Notes from Azfar Hussain*, Oklahoma State University
This is in the spirit of sharing and solidarity.
When I first read the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal’s _Zero Hour_, I was immediately intrigued by the ways in which Cardenal uses in his poems an entire range of the terms and tropes of political economy, while enacting a superb dialectic between the metaphoricity and materiality of the world and the word. I think Cardenal comes to share the same position from which poets such as Pablo Neruda and Roque Dalton have always wanted the hands of people to be seen in poetry. Yes, they have always preferred a poetry where the fingerprints show: “a poetry of loam, where water can sing. A poetry of bread, where everyone may eat,” to quote Neruda himself. And of course that famous line of Roque Dalton–”poetry, like bread, is for everyone”–keeps resonating with a whole host of politically engaged poets in Asia, Africa, Latin America, while providing energy and inspiration to what might be called–after Che Guevara–a “tricontinental poetics,” the kind of “militant poetics” (Dalton’s own term) that remains concerned with and even celebrates, among other things, the daily, the “dull,” the “dirty,” the “crude,” the “vulgar,” and the kind of poetics that tends to transform Marx’s pronouncement–”Rub your words so that they catch fire”–into a material force.
Back, then, to the question of doing political economy in the space of poetry itself. As I am in the middle of writing two essays in Bangla–one is just called “Work” and the other one is titled “Things”–essays that intend to theorize, among other things, an anti-colonial counterpoetics of political economy (something that I think I have done only partially in my book _The Wor(l)d in Question_)–I have just come across a poem called “work” by the kick-ass Nuyorican poet Peter Spiro. I can’t help placing him in the tradition of Neruda-Dalton-Cardenal– a poet who does political economy in poetry. And he is the one who impressively poeticizes Marx’s “The Prolonged Day” in a poem; one who shows how the micrologics and macrologics of capital continue to inform and inflect lived human practices; one who wants the abolition of “work” or “employment” itself in reaction against the very system that has created and perpetuated “work;” and one who seems to be rehearsing that famous invocation once boldly crafted by Bob Holman: “Do not read this poem! You don’t have to. This poem reads to you. This poem is a SHOUT for all those who have heard the poem’s direct flight from mouth to ear. Hear this poem with your eyes! When the Mouth marries the Eye, the Ear officiates…The poem is not written until you read it!” So, yeah, let me share with you the poem “Work” (I’m providing it below).
[And this parenthetical segment is intended for folks in Bangladesh: Just wondering if our JanaSanskriti Mancha can organize an activist poetry festival or a conference on activist poetry and poetics. A number of poets writing in Bangla today--with whom, of course, I have closely interacted over the last two years--remain high on colonialist aesthetics and epistemologies, ones who continue to propagate that theory and politics "dirty" poetry, ones who thus don't have any goddamn clues about our theoretically and politically engaged poetic tradition from the Charyapada to Lalon Fakir, for instance.]
So here’s the poem. Thanks for your time.
WORK
They say,
What would you like to do
or where would you like to work
they chop my solid twenty-four into segments.
You get two hours for waking, showering, eating.
One to two traveling then at least
eight there.
One to two more traveling home
supper a quick fuck or three beers
then sleep eight and
wake up again to shower, eat, travel, work, travel, quick fuck,
sleep, wake, shower until they merge and flow like
molten lava and I say,
Yes, but I get two weeks vacation
per year, ten holidays, twelve
sick days and one floating personal
day to live and I feel
like the negative face between the bars of a jail cell
that farts freedom in your face.
These men, shelling our salaries
of death sandwiches
for our half hour lunch break.
2
They say,
What would you like to do
or where would you like to work.
I think, Earth, I’d like to work
on Earth, third in from the sun.
Does the bear say,
I work in this section of the forest.
Does the eagle say,
I work in this part of space.
Does the shark say,
I swim only here.
Does the shark say,
I swim only here.
Does the air work or wind.
And what kind of work do I want to do?
I say,
I want to eat and sleep and explore
like the bear and the eagle and the shark.
I want to speak like the wind and breathe air
period.
I want to hang a sign on my door:
Do not disturb when I’m at work
dreaming.
They say,
this is lazy.
They say,
you are worthless.
They say,
you have no ambition.
And I tell them,
I am an unambitious worthless problem
like the air and the wind.
I will sleep and dream like the air and
move in passion like the wind
when it pleases me and for
no one.
3
They say,
What would you like to do
or where would you like to work.
They tell me,
Do something you like to do
life is wonderful when you
like your job.
I tell them,
It is an oxymoron to like
your job
as if a convict ever loves
his cell.
They say,
Learn to drive a tractor trailer or fix
automobile transmissions or
learn to weld or fix toilets
or serve drinks with paper umbrellas to people under the
shade and I think,
No one likes to work
the name itself implies
contempt, a comfortable
contempt like the old convict who
after years
accepts his cell as home.
Some people like their jobs,
they say
and I think,
Who?
Who likes their job?
Does the garbageman really like picking up shit all day?
Do tellers like to sit all day behind a bullet proof
glass wall?
Even poets don’t really like to teach workshops.
(I have heard them say this.)
Fill ketchup bottles, stuff sausages, clean pots
or sell hot dogs and cigarettes.
And if you say,
Doctors love their work or dentists love
their work or lawyers or engineers or stock brokers
then why,
why do they value
vacations as much as the
garbageman and the teller and the sausage stuffer and
the pot cleaner?
Baseball players like their work
some actors and poets and
all sleepers
who dream.
4
What kind of things perpetuate work?
Cancer,
yes cancer makes work.
It makes works for surgeons and people who run
self-examination breast programs.
It makes work for social workers and therapists
and nurses and chemical manufacturers and the people
who clean the floors in hospitals
and those who make the paper cups in hospital
bathrooms and makers of
high fiber cereal
and companies who advertise for
high fiber cereals and
morticians and casket makers and
people who supply the metal for
ash carrying urns and for the miners
of iron ore used for metal
ash carrying urns
and for florists and greeting card companies.
It makes work for
wig makers and sellers of wigs
and for plastic tube markets
and journalists and typesetters
and single parent rap group organizer
and ecologists and environmentalists
and lab technicians
and surgeons and people who run
self-examination breast programs.
Oh, I’ve said that already.
5
Factories would close without
workers
but plants would still grow
wind would still blow
mountains would still fold.
Without prison guards there would be
no prisons.
And doctors could not work without
orderlies and secretaries
the dry cleaners
the house cleaners
the supermarket stock boys
the tellers
the mechanics and the fixers of
automobile transmissions and toilers.
Armies could not function without
foot soldiers.
We have set this nightmare into motion and
we can stop it.
QUIT!
FIGHTING FOR FULL EMPLOYMENT IS NOT THE ANSWER
FIGHT FOR FULL
UNEMPLOYMENT.
Everybody,
set your alarm for noon or turn it off and sleep
until you want to get up,
Bears do this, cats do this, birds do this
so why should we be any different
inhabitants on this third planet in
from the sun
somewhere spinning and revolving in the
universe
yes, the universe is not up there
its here
and we’re in it.
Quit and sleep.
Sleep and dream.
Stop it
stop it
you’re killing me.
Thanks again, folks, for your time.
*Azfar Hussain
Department of English
Oklahoma State University
USA
Email: azfarhussain1@gmail.com
Conversation with Talal Asad: Thinking About Religion, Secularism and Politics
Conversations with History, University of California-Berkeley
Recorded October 2, 2008
Talal Asad, Professor of Anthropology, Graduate Center of the City University of New York Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Professor Talal Asad who reflects on his life and work as an anthropologist focusing on religion, modernity, and the complex relationships between Islam and the West.
