Deliberate Exposure: Banks as Risk-Sensors

One of the most noticeable trends in the normal way in which financial crises have been problematized has been to put the blame of banks, bankers and the financial system with the investment banks as the end-point. The bank is the main culprit, the system of finance is the main culprit, according to critics. However, we must begin to posit the investor himself as the culprit if we are to deal with the problem of the financial system today; we have to consider that the investor did not suffer from the crisis not because of his money but with his continuous intervention and dialogue with the financial system; the investor has replaced the government as an intervening force in the financial system, but his interventions are even more overbearing than the government's. Rather, we cannot even say that there ever existed a financial system without the investor accounted as being in dialogue with it. We usually associate the investor only with his money, but he also makes strategic decisions with regards to how his money transmits through the system. In other words, we have to look at the strategic position of banks, their evolution in time with regards to these positions, and thereby begin to see how the investor himself is in charge of finance by commanding the different functions and positions of banks. No matter if the finance market these days is worth trillions, it is still the big investor who is in control of the whole financial system; the trillions are a systemic generation with no real value while the investor's billions matter. Even if the complexity in which the financial system has been publicized to us in the media may make it seem that no one is really in charge, and the closest thing to authority is the investment banker himself, this may well be a way in which the investor has deliberately cast himself in the shadows, safe from the spotlight. Also, for the gaze of the big investor, the financial system may not look as complex as it does to the rest of us. And when we consider those media documents which have simplified the crises and the system for us, then we know that there are those big investors with accurate and long-term models of the financial system which can quite accurately predict crashes and failures. In the logic of the investor, investment banks are the nodes in the network through which the entire financial and 'main street' system is controlled...the investor seeks the control of many main street institutions through the medium of the financial system. Different entities within a social system aren't 'just connected' because we live in a 'inter-connected world,' but, they are connected because of the investor's decisions and strategies, the investor is the linkage between the financial system and the social system. When unemployment occurs as a result of a financial crisis, it is not because there is an abstract connection between the financial and the non-financial, but a very real connection facilitated by the investor, who has sought to encroach upon the non-financial through the financial. 

One way to understand how the investor is still in charge is to account for his fluid mobility. The investor is a person (and not a numerical equation), with real movement in and out of the bank, with real demands, real worries, and unpredictable actions/decisions. It can never be known whether he will decide to pull his money out, for instance, and potentially losing billions from an investor is still a big deal. Another important component of the investor is that he can be strategic. As a more powerful man among powerful men, he can move about entire institutions to suit his interests; he even has political clout, cultural clout etc. The making of trillions can thereby be contextualized within the logic of the investor, whose billions are actual wealth in the sense that they can be actually spent by the person (and here we also begin to see that spending wealth, primarily in the form of consumption, is important to keep the financial institutions in check). It is not for protecting the bank against the investor that new, more complex ways of generating money are being developed, but rather, the investor is in charge even of these operations. Indeed, it is in his name, ultimately, that trillions are made. Trillions are only measures to justify certain financial institutions and instruments for the big investor to be assured of investing his money through that bank. Trillions are made to keep the channels lubricated, to keep the staff in check, and, most importantly, to show that the risky is not an occurrence to the bank just yet...to inspire confidence in the investor. Another thing is that the investor makes what can be called 'affirmative decisions': he does not need to act ostentatiously as controlling the financial system, but his money, the way he places his money, does the talking for him. In a simple example, if he puts a billion in a bank and five hundred million in another one, he has connected the two banks without saying a word. It is how he invests his money that controls the financial institution, as well as his direct commands and non-money decisions. 

The big investor is ever aware of the fact of risk, but he may not be aware of the level of activity which animates the risky, or what the implications of risk are to his money; there are a lot of components to the risky which are not known, but risk as it is is inevitable; the financial system inevitably brushes against the risky. We define the risky as anything which is not created by the financial institution and the investor; as everything which the investor cannot control for in his financial model...the unpredictable and the external, but, at the same time, assumed to be static and stable, in the sense that it is considered to be a enclosed entity with the same observable reactions to similarly located institutions. The investor does not so much have faith in those components of the financial system which identify and study risk, but the investor positions those with the most knowledge about risk right next to the risky itself; or rather, those who are next to the risk continuously develop more knowledge regarding it, and continue to demonstrate symptoms due to their exposure. These components of the financial system are to be deliberately exposed, even if there is protection available; indeed, the investor spends as much of his time making sure that these institutions do not get protection as much as others do; there is a great rivalry between the big investor and the investment banker of an exposed bank on this issue. The investor has a motto: one way to avoid risk is to go towards it, to know and feel it, before it can act on oneself. The simplified strategy for the big investor is risk-avoidance (rather than capitalization on risk): how to invest your money, get as close to the risky threshold, but avoid losing money. What we mean is that the risky is an inevitable occurrence in time, it will inevitably come up time and again. Due to this inevitability of risk, the investor has been steadily involved in the compartmentalizing of the world based on risk: for instance, some territories are promising and risk free, but others are riskier. He has studied and looked at risk, but always from a distance, without coming into real contact with it. The investor's main expertise is to anticipate risk and then act in ways in which to completely avoid it. Anticipation and complete avoidance imply two things: that the risk should in some ways be known through contact with an institution of the investor, but that 'the risky' should be localized to that institution only.

It is because of the need for anticipation and avoidance that one of the most important institutions regarding a risky environment is the investment bank. We have always felt that the investment bank has a high degree of autonomy, but we do not consider that investment banks are also highly limited institutions because of their positions with regards to risk; their movements are more carefully monitored than one may think; they do not gamble as much as one would assume.  We come to believe the media which posits the investment bank itself as protected from risk. But, if the investment bank is protected, then what is in contact with the risky? How does the financial system know when it is close to the risky? Basically, the theory we propose here is that there are a few investment banks in the world which have been deliberately positioned in such a way as to have maximum exposure to the risky. They are to have this exposure to the risky so that they become indicators and alarms for when risk levels get too high. It is equivalent to a small part of the investor's institutions committing a gradual suicide to save the rest; or, certain investment banks walk a tight rope. This would have been quite fine, but for the fact that the recent financial crisis will make more and more banks deliberately exposed, as the investor gets more wary of risk, but less aware of how to avoid it. We predict a lot of mini-crises to come in the future frequently, as more and more exposed banks sound their alarms, or rather more banks are deliberately posited beside exposure, and the investor gets closer to the risky but  is overdependent on the model of risk-sensing...what this could do, however, is discourage a lot of potential investors, smaller investors, even entrepreneurs, from having faith in the financial system. There is the possibility of collapse of the financial system as people seek more direct ways towards the investor. There is a lack of trust in banks; people do not know which ones are exposed and generally are disappointed by any degree of exposure. We do not have financial crises because one crises triggers another one 'naturally' as part of a domino effect, but because of real investor decisions that take place between the two crises. People assume that nothing takes place in between the nodes of a financial system, but the investor is continuously transforming the system, so much so that what appears as a system has only been marketed as such for the people to let them feel a sense of security.    

Investors control the strategic position of banks, regardless of national boundaries that delineate which banks belong to what populations. The investor is not interested in sharing the accumulation of wealth between banks, but each bank occupies a different symbolic position, a fact which does not become clear to the public who hears only the words 'investment bank' attached to each bank; each bank is in fact particularized and unique. Moreover, each bank or financial institution, in isolation, is more important to preserve because it is a micro-model of a working system. So, the investor does not want to have a exposed arm/entity within a bank, which when lost will fragment the bank and never give the bank a sense of stability, but he will rather have a whole bank, a whole institution, as exposed to the risky. The investor's role in connecting banks could explain a peculiar occurrence in the 2008 financial crisis: when the American bank Lehman Brother's was failing, the bank Barclay's from England was around to supposedly buy the bank and save it from collapse. Why was Barclay's in a boardroom comprised of bankers from the American financial system? What allowed Barclay's, a bank all the way across the world in England, this unprecedented access to knowledge that Lehman was failing? Precisely the investor, who had linked the two banks. (Any system is in contact with non-systemic elements, such as the investor, who facilitates a process between the elements of that system...the non-systemic, the investor, is partially within the system, not as a node but as a distortion of the lines) Lehman's failure was only expected due to its exposure, designed deliberately, to the risky. Barclay's wasn't going to buy Lehman's, we believe, but only check to see what the risky exactly was, that is, to know the content of the risky, and then to act accordingly to save the investor his money. The investor who had connected two banks, now disconnected them, and in this act of using his agency, the financial crisis contained a human element which many do not account for. The important thing for the future is that the investor will once again form financial institutions that are deliberately exposed to risk, to serve as risk sensors, but the problem is that risk sensors themselves are becoming very big and perhaps even more sensitive. The financial system, in an ironic way, has become more fragile the more risk-sensors that are in place.  

VacciNation

Global capitalism, in the form of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), produces and markets 'immunity' to facilitate its work in the more dangerous ('diseased') areas of the world. This logic of immunity first suggests a comparison between the hospital and the NGO, which perhaps means that the global superpower believes the hospital to be the most relevant model for the transmission of the capitalist model to other places in the world. Like the hospital, NGOs often attempt to be depoliticized, but in actual fact, the NGO is a 'pre-political' institution in society because it ignores the fact that its work could be political rather than turning a continuous, critical gaze towards itself regarding its politics; the NGO lacks political consciousness. It claims to ignore capitalist political agendas but in the end it is just hiding it or censoring it. It is as effective as a hospital in hiding its ideological background, and like the hospital it wants to establish itself as an institution for the long term, borrowing from a universalizing impulse which suggests that all humans are equal and hence need equal treatment. These global capitalist institutions claim that this 'depoliticization' is to do better work and to not be involved in the internal affairs of a nation, for they want to preserve the independence and sanctity of the nation. First, this ignoring of politics only seems to imply that politics of developing nations do not matter, that a new macro-level of politics is now at play where lesser developed nation-states are losing value and control. Rather than establishing direct connections between two nations, the logic in global capitalism is to export politics to another level, to make of the normal national political affairs something else, to give forth a different interpretation entirely of the national-level political. But what makes this so effective is that this new superpower is quite hidden: it is not another nation, such as the US, but a group of decisions: it has no 'private' agenda, the age of privatization in capitalism is now gone, rather, global capitalism is about the control of the public sphere, the reaching out into territories which are not to be converted to one's own, and also a 'turning oblivious' of the global populace with regards to what goes on in the developed world; the public sphere is not a sphere of knowledge, control and politics, but a sphere of freedom to enjoy life without these things. The question is: does this depoliticized 'being public' give life any worth and real quality? 

Depoliticization is the NGOs' attempt at 'immunity;' it is within the logic of immunity that depoliticization is operative, meaning that the political is secondary to the overall immunity and health of a community. The political is no longer considered an indicator of the community's health in the current global capitalist environment, for it could very well be the case that politics has been posited as the end-point of a community's expression; it is not a concern today when the health of the community is not strong, it is considered excessive to life today. In complete developed world fashion then, the political has been implicated within culture, and politics becomes matter of the expression of the culture and cultural health of a community rather than having an independent identity which implicates culture, economy, health care etc; politics is something people in the developing world do in their idle time (and it is considered a cause of disease because of its association with idleness and laziness; the clogging disease's impeding of flows of immune people and ideas is even more problematized by NGOs.) Furthermore, the overarching national-political, the macro-political, is considered as a virus, which began infecting all the interconnected institutions of Nepali society. What we have established here is that for the logic of immunity to function there needs to be a problematization of a certain type: a viral disease has infected the nation (but there is a cure). The political is to be solely considered a problem: the MDG does not mention politics; the UN, World Bank do not mention the political in their development indexes. But the political itself is not important for another important reason, as we have pointed out: the overarching logic of global capitalism is that of immunity, and in the logic of immunity, there is no (political) enemy, there is only disease and its symptoms.  

In the usual sense, we associate immunity with 'diplomatic immunity,' which is a concept which has quite effective uses in the developing world. In the most obvious example, it allows white-colored vehicles with developmental actors in them to travel to places which cannot be reached by other civilians; the vehicle makes one safe to an unprecedented degree, as the word immune implies, from the real dangers posed by a certain historical period or community. But we believe such an amount of safety itself has consequences on how the developing world is perceived and how developmental work is administered. Immunity implies that NGOs want to conduct their own activities in a scenario where they are not distracted or effected by the surroundings, but even more so, where they are completely oblivious to the surroundings, where they ignore the diseased elements of the social, these elements do not exist at all, and only focus on the non-threatened elements. Importantly, in the political interpretation of it, immunity is the strategy facilitating the smooth transition from Nepali Maoism to an 'NGO culture,' which means that at this moment in time the logic of immunity is important since the nation is going through instability and actors with vested interests in Nepal need to be protected and made to feel safe. Therefore, as a transit point, the logic of immunity has contact with Maoism of the past, considered as the disease, and the NGO culture which will come up in the near future, considered as the vaccination or the cure. The cure or the vaccine cannot be considered as something which is administered at one moment, but its effects are more continuous, always present, bound to the body and fluctuations of the nation, just as the disease is always 'out there,' only we are oblivious to it. And, like the vaccine, global capitalism is also to always be present, to continuously be over concerned with internal issues; the model today is a professionalized nurse at every beck and call at close proximity and not the paternal figure who supervises sympathetically.   

In the developed world, immunity first has implications for the mobilization of labor. Immunity is a very big incentive to all types of actors with vested interests. It means that the dangerous foreign can be experienced, can be touched, but it will not touch you back and infect you; it facilitates the perfect environment for encroachment, investment etc. Therefore, immunity allows for a lot of impact in the work done, but we also feel that looking for impact is itself a developed world concern. But how does immunity work, given that there is no actual, biological vaccine to make one immune from the dangers of the developing world? One answer can be found in the social science disciplines in schools: they demarcate the lines between two worlds, one which is safe and one which is diseased. They then position the NGO as an organization that does not so much bridge this gap, but makes one immune to the diseased part of the world. The diseased world is not so much a matter of entering but only of encountering from a distance, and any 'rational' individual would not want to enter it, simply because disease is not something you want to have. The possibility/threat of infection, however, is quite heavily marketed: the infection will be imperceptible, beyond understanding...it is not the 'domino effect' where communities fall one after the other, but the free movement of a virus which can infect anyone who is susceptible; therefore being able to work for an NGO is a matter of having strength, vitality, good (mental and physical) health and many other soldier-like traits; caring for one's society has been professionalized. One is to be strong and healthy, ultimately working in the developing world cannot be taught, but it is more ingrained, it is about having a stronger heart, composure etc. However, in the mentality of this NGO workforce, one can even locate a 'tourist mentality': that the foreign is to be experienced temporarily but not lived in, and while this experience is going on, a change can be enacted upon the foreign because one is stronger than the foreign, not by any innate natural strength, but by the injection which immunized one, the injection which came from one's caring government, one's strong nation etc. This association between tourism and NGOs may well be the reason that Nepal is attempting to make the tourist's experience better so that the tourist eventually returns as an NGO worker. In any case, there are agendas to align the tourist with the NGO worker, increasing their contact, inevitably promoting the NGO side of the equation, which means tourism itself could lose out eventually in Nepal as it becomes a part of a more important agenda. 

But, most importantly, immunity is not just for the NGO's worker; his entire logic in the work he does is 'making immune' of the community where he works, meaning that he himself is 'vaccinated' but that he also works as the vaccine, or as white blood cells, 'belonging' even more to the community than a foreign vaccine does. The logic is thoroughly borrowed from the biological workings of a vaccine, indeed some of the first NGOs must have been those that provided medicinal vaccines to communities. First, the NGO isolates clusters and communities which are prone to infection but not yet there, which means that the NGO does not touch the parts already infected, meaning that the logic is not to fix something which is diseased but to prevent the disease from spreading at all, to cut off the non-diseased community, identity, part from the rest of the diseased parts. For instance, this 'infection' can be both a national level threat or a local level threat. The threat can be any sign of under-development, but in the final analysis it is most likely political, and the most obvious threat to which one is to be made immune is the threat of anti-capitalism; we have essentially entered a more germophobic phase of Cold War capitalism. After isolating a cluster that could be turned against capitalism, the NGO operates by establishing programs that are perpetually distanced from the local realities of the infected populace; the tactic is to wean the populace into a new lifestyle, a new institution, a new school, so that it ceases to contact the diseased bits of the community. It is not so much the politics of the infected populace which is the target, but the whole lifestyle and life in the full which becomes an object to be changed for the chosen community. 

For instance, an NGO does not disseminate the message that X should not communicate with Y for political reasons, but it provides programs that progressively make the communication between X and Y impossible, it is about building a strong wall, a radical separation between the healthy and the diseased. There is no preservation of the will of the local community member under threat, but the cure for him is based on universal principles not based on his tastes, preferences, opinions etc. Essentially, we are in a 'post-political' realm because the political implies fixating on the disease, letting the disease infect you more, letting the infection spread, all for more knowledge regarding the disease, so that the disease evolves into an external problem, or one begins to accommodate it as a symptom of the times and so on...but today the disease must be efficiently and quickly destroyed, with no question about understanding the disease and the diseased perspective. And like how any vaccine works, this immunization vaccine first has a foreign element to it, but then it enlists the help of the community's own entities to act upon the threat. This means that there is no longer the need for perpetual foreign control to make a community immune, but local elements to a community continuously work to make itself immune from a threat. The local threat itself is first externalized, that is, it is made external, as if it does not belong to the history or the narrative of that community. Soon, there will be no need for a well-established and huge NGO like the UN to provide immune vehicles to access dangerous communities, our own Nepali development actors and volunteers will facilitate this type of access to foreigners and to themselves; we are learning to discard others and become immune ourselves. Smaller NGOs will themselves work for the logic of making immune. The rise of big international NGOs will give rise to smaller INGOs and national NGOs. The making impossible of contact between diseased and healthy is the logic of immunity: it is all about attempting to reduce to zero the probability of infection by reducing to zero the coexistence between the disease and the healthy elements. This is, inevitably, a violent notion, for it means that the NGO will work to annihilate the diseased elements if they begin to infiltrate the healthy elements. This aggression may often be misinterpreted as passion for social work.

Finally, let us demarcate between NGO-capitalism and broader global capitalism: whereas the NGO works to rehabilitate, strengthen and make healthy a suffering population, global capitalism provides precisely that terrain of the healthy. The healthy is interpreted as precisely those that can participate in the global capitalist order, and the NGO does an important job helping out by making a part clean and turning that part itself against the diseased element. What does immunity mean for global capitalism? It means that capitalism has now begun to ignore the possibility of changing the whole world. It focuses, rather, on those small elements that can be 'saved' from the disease and ignores the rest. It provides immunity to an exclusive population, and it uses cultural mediums to transmit the message about their immunity to market it very precisely to other locations where it wants to spread, it is about strategic and pointed immunization rather than broad strokes. Another important facet is the smooth mobility of these immunized entities: like white blood cells flowing in blood, they will flow to make other places and people immune after they themselves are protected. The logic is no longer to promise progress and capitalism and then have failure, but it is about direct administration ('injection') of capitalism, to sustain capitalism in a certain mode. It is about disseminating capitalism in strategically important places, and stealthily attacking those other ideologies that may be around it. The logic of immunity means capitalism thinks itself strong, and first this strength is manifest in the developed world, where the immunity against threat gives one the belief that one has 'super-strength.' In Nepal, there may still be caution, but immunization is effectively a guarantee that certain capitalist elements will not be diseased, and therefore one problem with immunity is that the NGOs may facilitate an emergence of extreme forms of capitalism, full of confidence and strength, which are more capitalist than the developed world itself. This is essentially a cancerous development, where the protective layer itself can be considered a disease. 

Intellectualism in the Police: Detectives and Forensic Scientists in Nepal

In this post, we will look at the police from a political angle, but that does not mean we will have to focus only on the political types of work done by the police. To be 'post-political,' we will involve our political look on non-political activities of the police, and as such, post-politics does not imply ignoring one's own politics, but rather ignoring the tendency to see the other as simply political. The police is no longer a regulatory mechanism, characterized by acting at certain times and receding at other times, but it must be always present, always actively formulating tactics and strategies in real time, it is now more so than ever at an intellectual (which is close to the word “intelligent,” but we believe that the word 'intellectual' and its synonyms are kept hidden from the discourse surrounding the police and criminal for a variety of reasons, and so we deliberately use the word intellectual) level that the police manifests itself, right down to the lowest ranks. The police vs. criminal war is more about the utilization of intellect in real time than other types of wars have been. There is now a stoic and soldier-like acceptance of the power of the intellect and the binding of intellect and controlling action in the social. The police is in a post-political but not post-intellectual world. This society is not simply a society of 'control,' in Deleuzian conception, which perhaps implies a political control as well, but, more properly, this society is a society of 'intellectual control,' where what is important is not which political side one is on, but who is smarter in making decisions to capture and criminalize a citizen. It is intellect which has been formulated in a close relationship with controlling mechanisms, and it is the wresting control of intellect which is what is paramount for the police. In a somewhat related vein, the crime is not a stealing of physical property, but a stealing of 'intellectual property,' and the police is about controlling as well as utilizing this intellectual property. The police itself has formulated and constructed the property worthy of stealing. People do not steal and the police intercepts, anymore, rather, people wish to steal the intellectual property from the police itself. The police does not only mark the intellectual property with its safety seal, but it owns the property, it manipulates it, and it utilizes the sources of such property for its own uses. In a sense, what is at stake, that is, why the police is intellectual today, has not to do with any realization of the humility, common sense etc we associate with intellect, but rather, it is a short-term ploy to investigate whether authority in the style of schools and the school system really works for the type of work the police does.  Focusing on the 'short term' and experimental agenda of the police, we are taking a more 'microscopic' look at the police and we are being micro-political in our critique of the police. 

When one moves through inhabited social spaces today, one is not just confronted by police, one is not just protected by police, but one is made police, one is schooled into police work. The police have become role models; the police have become the ideal citizens, the ideal egos, with which we identify. In Indian cities, the loudspeaker informs the public of the threat of suspicious activity, in the process erecting the police above us, as the source of proper information and knowledge. In the streets of Kathmandu, the citizen's ego begins to imagine its own machines as violent guns (and motorcycles became weapons), the ego identifies with the policeman's ego and uniform; the police is schooling our egos with this logic of information and uniforms, we are to subscribe to a 'school student mentality' because of the presence of the police in uniforms; they are students and we too are to be learners like them. The police does not perform violent interjections into society in the name of safety, but it learns from society and makes subtle, calculated decisions; when it is not moving, it is thinking of how to control. It is the appropriate model of identification for the sophisticated citizen of today. One has thus internalized the policing mentality because of the mere presence of police patrolling the streets. The mere presence of the police, the mere observation that the police is there in a social space elicits in our citizens a policing mentality. And it is this internalization of the policing mentality by us which ultimately helps the police itself move on to a more intellectual plain, aloof from its duties of physically policing; gone are the days when it will imprison and rehabilitate, but even imprisoning and rehabilitating has to be contextualized within the logic of the police's own intellectualism: think of the information sessions on drinking and driving prevalent in Kathmandu these days, where intellect has been used to effectively distract us from the fact that we are being imprisoned. Indeed, isn't the first step of police education the converting of a prisoner into a policeman? The idea is not rehabilitating to the middle ground of 'normal citizenry,' but the oscillating from 'criminal' to 'enforcer.'  

It seems that the police has been enlisted by the school in doing its classroom work, but this too is a temporary alliance, because what the police is really going towards, it seems, of which schooling is a step on the way, is the formation of a micro-level but thriving prison-industrial complex in Kathmandu, a micro-industry where imprisonment is a matter of days and hours rather than months and years. And just as 'education' is the first step towards a micro-enterprise, education, awareness and good publicity is the first step towards the police's micro-industry. The police seeks to administer a type of education by itself, thereby fractioning off the school system. The benefits of a prison industry are not that obvious: we are not being quickly rehabilitated to be better citizens, but we are to learn the police's thinking, we are to think like the police, we are to be the students of the police, for it is in the school's system and environment that we are most likely to accept authority. Another possible reason for this prison industry is that the police has realized that citizens of Nepal are no longer always everpresent to its jurisdiction and to its authority: many people leave the country and the police's sphere of influence. The police modifies its role to school the citizens to prepare for another authority, which establishes a connection and relation between the two police forces, forming a global network of 'cooperation and friendship' between forces of authority. The goal is to create 'plastic products' that do not bend or melt or break; industry is known for strong, disciplined products. In the police's alliance with schools and the tactics of schools, the police is appearing responsible, thoroughly borrowing from the images that schools have in our societies, and at the level of tactics, it is beginning to have a stake in the development of life's trajectory of its citizens: as a 'police academy,' and not police force, the police wants to create a particular type of citizen student, namely, an informal policeman. This is just its latest tactic in countering crime. In the end, we as responsible citizens are not just to help the police by informing it, for we are not smart enough to inform it, but we are to accept its intellect/intelligence and act directly as its lowest level officers. We have all become policemen, while the uniformed policemen themselves do the work of students, which means that they use their mind more than their guns in the streets today.

When the police leaves the barracks, it is directly immersed into conflict, every decision it makes is directly related to its conflict with criminals and crime. The criminal's actions are not of chief importance, what is more importance is the criminal's thoughts, his/her quickness. The police man himself is therefore to act quickly, in real time, make quick and clever decisions, be smart, be alert and aware, but all in a peculiar way which ultimately shows its distance from the reality it inhabits. In other words, the police is totally immersed in fantasy-production at all moments and places, it traverses social spaces inasmuch as in its head there is the continuous process of fantasy production. In a sense, the fantasy's core theme is as such: that society is full of crime, and crime is now becoming smarter and strategic. As he patrols the dark and empty streets at night, the police turns his eyes into a camera, enabling his mind to produce fantasies of illegal activity and corruption. He himself has to be made continuously foreign, a process facilitated by his hostel life in the barracks, by the 'making-archaic' of his social life, by the outdated nature of the cultural products he had...he was a figure of the past in a society moving forward. Today, he is the figure of the future, in his sophisticated instruments, knowledge and the intellectual action hero with which he identifies, in a society which is itself in the present moment. Whatever the case, he is never of the time, he is never of this moment of history, but of real time, of a radical detachment from the moment in order to find a free time where he himself can thrive...which enables him to create fantasies. But one could argue that fantasies are distracting and too impractical, while the policeman himself appears so efficient. The fantasy of the police is different from the fantasy of the action hero: the hero has a 'female lead' to be saved from threat, and his fantasy is distracting, but the police finds the female lead itself as also corrupted. It doesn't save one and destroy the other, but it imprisons both because both are at fault for it, and it is this quality in its fantasy that makes it seem so efficient. It no longer does the job of judgment, it no longer faces the law, but it acts, in real time, with direct decisions because nothing indicates the endpoint of conflict and crime for it. There is no time for the law mechanism (the courts) for it, it is continuously immersed in the ending of conflict and crime. This implies that crime in Kathmandu are not really 'white collar' in nature which recourse through the law mechanism, but they are more 'blue collar' and 'require' the direct administration of discipline and control upon the citizen. 

Within the barracks and the offices, there are mental examinations: one policeman tests the other officer's intellect, and hierarchies and perks are administered according to intellect rather than post, countering the previous politicization of the police, where identity-politics was an important component in how it was composed and evolved. No longer is the movement beyond one's fellow officer in rank important, but, in Deleuzian conception, a competition and rivalry with this officer, standing next to the officer and mocking him, angering him rather than frustrating him. Today, the intellectual officer is the most powerful member of the police force, but he cannot just demonstrate a bookish smartness, he has to be 'street smart' to think like a criminal; he has to comprehend situations and scenarios, but not as a permanent, established entity within these situations, but something who, like the criminal, must interact with it as if he is foreign to it. He is always a temporary presence in the social, and we see this in the continuous mobility of the police in their vehicles...they do not stick around and establish themselves in one place but keep moving so as to be foreign; patrolling is to become foreign. And he has been made so foreign to the social scenario that he can completely fantasize about it and exercise his intellect therein. No amount of barrack practice is enough, and slowly, the need for practicing police work, for 'training' a policeman, is receding, which ultimately points to the police as an organization being in crisis. It is the needs of the time that the police itself has to be anarchic, that is, without a political organization proper and out of political control, that is, thriving at an intellectual level. It is just as well that a brand new, young officer gets directly involved in a large conflict, for the unpredictability of such conflicts cannot be taught. This points to a crisis in the police force at the top of the hierarchy: their authority has been reduced to making the police present to situations, while they cannot command on how the police should act in these situations. In other words, the police has a form of freedom to articulate decisions in real time, but what is not understood by them is how these decisions are limited by what they have: their guns, their uniform, their vehicles; in short, they do not understand how direct physical authority is still the end-point of their intellect. Intellect has been used as a rationalizing force to reason and 'prove' the need for violence mathematically. One becomes both the actor and the critic. Each individual officer acts based on what he has learned, he speaks with himself and not with his superior, in that, he thinks, orders and then contemplates himself rather than obeying orders from someone else. The ordering about of citizens has been facilitated by the policing mentality in each one of us. As informal policemen, we have each become dual in our 'becoming': to order and to be ordered both with the same authority. 

When this new officer, hired for his supposed intellect, gets involved in a situation, what matters in the resolution of the conflict is not the casualties or the image of the police going forward, but how the new officer can rationalize and reason his contributions, how he thought rather than acted, and how he manages to articulate his thoughts before his superiors...as if it was only an examination, an 'on-the-job training'...he is himself as a criminal, engaged often in crime such as sexual assault, but only in order to think like the criminal thinks; his study, his education has now been taken to the extremes, he is to learn something at all costs. And what is the problem with this intellectualization of the police? The problems are many: that it gives authority a reason to exist and thrive, that emotion and a moral compass are not important, that crime itself begins to appear like an issue of intellect rather than a manifestation of class-based issues, that mechanisms of control are always a step beyond the understanding capacity and the educational systems geared towards the masses of citizens. The police is playing with the education system of the citizens, keenly observant of where it goes to change its own directions accordingly. But we, the citizens, continue to subscribe to morality as much as possible when it comes to judging the police. This moral compass is precisely what is problematic for the police. They, as our models, want to show to us how we ourselves must replace a moral compass with an intellectual drive.  

The myth supporting the police's assault on society is that the mind of the policeman, his conscience, is always pure and clean, but today this has less to do with him being a good person and more to do with him reasoning his crime away as a part of the job, in that, the police has contributed to how we see conscience and the 'pure mind' differently today, namely, that we have detached the mind from the actions of the body. But we must not subscribe to the supremacy of the mind, we must not even begin to think that the 'pure mind' is all that matters; indeed, what is not true is that the mind is hard to develop and shape, because in fact the mind is the easiest thing to shape. The policeman is not judged for his actions but for his thoughts, it is intellect which takes the upper hand over his practical actions. This too shows similarity with the events of disciplining in the school system, when the student is punished, it is his intellect which is also considered. Of course his identity, whether he is male, female, black, white, is also an issue, but this persecution of the population according to identity is a thing of the past; the most important issue about the criminal is his/her intellect, it is intellect which makes a case in the law-making mechanism. Indeed, conscience is not even important, for conscience itself is derived from politics and the political, but the policing mind is stoic and mechanical at all times, driven by intellect and nothing else.  

So, a governing logic of the police is 'drive-of-thought-without-planning,' and the logic is especially about: how can a policeman 'invent' knowledge out on the street, how can he act as a free thinker and not as a learner of the establishment, how can he get further and further away from reality and within fantastical constructions. To answer all of these concerns, the policeman is being modeled on the Socrates-like 'street philosopher,' who moved forward in the social out of intellectual drive rather than authority, who not only passively and privately writes his philosophy, but shares it in the social field through his actions; he has to think first and then follow it up with an act, and the act itself is not always physical in nature, but only a proclamation of thought, the verbal and visual signifying of the possibility of a threat. Like in the West, the most important police men in Nepal will soon be the detectives, the investigative ones with the badge, the forensic ones with the lab, the rebellious-intellectual ones, and not the sheriff with the gun. They will be given time to think and mingle in the populace, they will then act on their ideas. The street police will be most important, for he often does not need to answer to anyone, and even if he does, it is only to the authority one step above him. The street is getting aloof from the top-levels in the police, which has anarchic implications, and which also points to the divergence of intellectual drives within the police, one fixated on the 'bookish' and the other on the street. Indeed, the problem of today is the criminal positioning itself within this empty space between the street level and the top-level in the police mechanism. The police mechanism constantly undergoes internal rebellion which is becoming part of the work it does.  

We must compare the police's uniform with the uniforms of an eager school student, both are symbols today of progressive intellectual curiosity and the intellectualization of the curiosity regarding one's own authority. Because the police is so driven by intellect all the time, it is difficult to engage with his thoughts for the citizen; the citizen is getting alienated from the police in a different way today: not at the level of authority but at the level of knowledge. How, then, can the police think like this, or rather, what allows him the space and freedom to become a street philosopher? A chief factor is the metaphors, the seemingly timeless code words the policing conversations are littered with, all of which point to the police that things can be invented, that reality itself is comfortably out of reach and therefore what is manipulated is only an illicit component within reality. The metaphors in the police are quite particular: they are not metaphors of common history and common names, spaces and events, which is the symbolic form of truth and law, but 'meta-metaphors,' which are metaphors of proper names (the police gives the name "Alpha" for a person named 'X') and specialized knowledge, which is the symbolic form of the symbolic itself, and is untouched by law. This is the logic of the police: to act upon the symbolic/particular itself from the common rather than acting from the symbolic/particular on the common, and in this regard it is illicit, it is not governed, it is kept exempt, it is the 'primordial father' of today who alone claims the satisfaction from the exercising of law. It so often is true that fantasy is composed upon the 'illicit' components of reality, and police work is not different in this regard. 

The Image of a Nepali Apartment Building

The biggest issue of Nepal in the recent past has been the Maoist insurgency. Since it was quite a drawn out struggle, it can be considered that established political parties and other institutions with a stake in politics (media, schools etc) were considerably influenced in their actions and decisions by this conflict. One way in which such an influence can be analyzed is by saying that these different entities in society were ‘radicalized’ by the Maoist struggle. Radicalized means that they became determined and constructed by the violence of the Maoist insurgency; they became defined in their roles in response to the insurgency. They took strict actions either opposing or accepting the Maoists. They were strongly attached to ideology (as opposed to personal gain) in their response to the insurgency; each political party gained a lot of power and control, and other non-political organizations were encouraged to have a stake in politics. Violence became an important component within politics, and violent politics more and more asserted the role and importance of the political mechanism in Nepal. Thus, politics became the main agenda for all sorts of organizations. No politicized entity in Nepal was thoroughly insulated from the Maoist insurgency; rather, all of these entities were restructured and modified by the conflict. In a sense, the whole of Nepali politics and society was radicalized by the Maoist insurgency. Every decision and event in Nepal had to recourse through politics, and in this course through politics, they became influenced by the radicalized elements within the political sphere. 

Because of this involvement of the whole of Nepali society in the conflict, in its aftermath certain powers want to see the 'slate wiped clean' and the Maoist insurgency to have nothing to do with the forward movement of Nepal. These powers believe that the Maoist insurgency should be isolated as a unique historical event, and then the influence of this conflict among all Nepali political entities weeded out. In a way, they are actively pursuing a policy of ‘insurgency denial’ where they want that period of history to not be representative of Nepal in general; a ‘new Nepal’ is disconnected from its past and is not willing to accept its transitional phase. These powers also want to claim a say in the resolution of the conflict, as being peace-makers really legitimizes any power to continuously involve in the affairs of the newly peaceful country; if one country brought peace to another, it is welcomed rather than rejected. Quickly moving away from the conflict, its resolution has become the main political agenda today. It is in this context that the Nepali skyline emerged, it seemed, out of nowhere (that is, without media anticipation or attention), in the form of high rise apartment buildings that are yet to be occupied well and that seem to be losing money. These buildings are just an image for almost all Nepalis, a distant reality, buildings which cannot be lived in. Rather than analyzing their importance as buildings, or as entities within an economic logic, or within the logic of urbanization, we are considering here that they are simply images in their foreignness from ordinary Nepalis.

Why were the high-rise buildings built if there was no one to live in them? In a sense, the reason was more political than economic: these buildings seek to show that Nepal has made strides forward from the Maoist insurgency, namely that it is no longer a conflicted society. They are not built based on economic calculations and speculation. They are not built with the expectancy that one day they will be occupied. They are not built to create jobs. They are not built with the expectation of making money. They were not produced with traditional economic tenets and knowledge in mind, such as speculation, investment etc. This ‘non-economic’ but economic initiative of Nepal represents how Nepal seems to escape traditional research and knowledge-building, because what seems built out of economic purposes and based on economic rationality seems to be influenced rather by politics. It is this type of instability in knowledge-building which radicalism produces. Nepal is just incompatible in knowledge building exercises that associate houses with economics.

In a peculiar fashion, there is more political value to these apartment buildings being empty than occupied today. In the eyes of the foreigner, the Nepali population as a whole is associated with radicalism because of the recent Maoist insurgency. There is therefore nothing more non-radical, more obedient and more pacifist than buildings and investment in Nepal devoid of Nepalis themselves. In a bid to wipe the slate clean of radicalism, there is a desire among some to see Nepal build buildings without their population in them. No one lives in them, so there will be no conflicts coming forth from them. They are, in a sense, pure images, with nothing animating them at the moment. What this displays to us, however, is a dangerous truth about radicalism: that radicalism is difficult to truly weed out of the population, that it is highly persistent, and that when it has been fuelled to such a high extent, it can emerge at any moment to once again shape politics in a more radical vein. To really remove radicalism is to have to remove the population which is radical, to exclude the radicalized population.

Even though we are speaking of the image of an apartment building, we have to consider that effects of the photographic image are weak in Nepal, so the image has to be made more real, more concrete. The photographic medium of traditional newsprint is caught in between: we are living in the era of the too real (the apartment building) or the too virtual (a video). Moreover, the traditional media is truly helpless against the face of radicalism, precisely because radicalism is seldom mediated through photographic images and print, it seems to emerge rather from something one really saw in front of their eyes, from an injustice felt by someone, from a direct personal suffering in the history of the time. Radicalism does not emerge directly through speeches and pamphlets, but what is first advertised through media is something else, a ‘normal’ political struggle or initiative. Radicalism is progressively built upon this initial batch of population that enlists. Radicalism comes in different intensities, and during the Maoist insurgency, the most radical elements of any political entity had the most power and control. Images and media did not have a big role in facilitating the emergence of radicalism. In the Maoist insurgency, people’s lives were directly influenced and the media did not seem to mediate between politics and real life. Indeed, it pointed towards a crisis of the media in its inability to mediate between real life and politics.

To combat the radicalism of the insurgency, then, we have to find a substitute for directly felt suffering. Photographic images of pleasure do not suffice. Printed messages are also not enough when the radical revolutionary fervor is too high. Powers today have resorted to theatre and the ‘image in the real.’ What the ‘image in the real’ shows is that Nepali populations at times of radicalism may not be able to fantasize based on photographs and words, that is, based on traditional media, and therefore may need to create fantasies  from real-life constructions, from a theatricality of the everyday real as unmediated by the printed and edited photographic image. The strategy for building peace among Nepalis seems thus: a movement from one advertisement in the real to the next, a ‘making theatre’ of the Nepali social space, a reliance on the attractive lifelessness of sets and props to put forward an image of peace and silence. It seems to point to one thing: that beyond a heavy submersion in radical politics is a form of theatre constructed by a superpower, meaning that a totally new, wholly more powerful ‘superpower’ starts to build itself and manifest itself to make of the Nepali social space a theatre. This is why the apartment buildings have the character of having appeared out of nowhere; without any real resistance (because the insurgency radicalized the political entities one against the other...whereas the traditional media asserts that the radicalization was one between politics and non-political organizations, radicalization was rather between non-political organizations themselves...it was a radical approach to  the 'other' mediated through politics where politics became the ideal representative of radicalism that every group aspired to), the superpower entity enters Nepal out of the blue and unchecked. Power is not always already there as powerful, but historical events cause its formation and ascendancy. This does not mean that historical events construct power, but that power is something wary of historical events to facilitate its own construction. Power can exist and operate in isolation and independently as a small kernel but then utilizes a historical event to grow.  

The Police at a Turning Point

The army has always been identified as a major institution in any state. Perhaps this essentially began with the international and inter-state affairs of much of history in the past: states were likely to invade one another, and so the army was important as a unit of defense for a state. In developing countries in today's times however, conventional and formal wars with standing armies are seldom fought, and the army exists as a thoroughly politicized entity. In a globalizing world, any institution that exists only as a political mechanism, that is, only in order to play into a power-relation of other political entities which are actually dedicated to something outside of political formalism (non-army political institutions are political for a reason and a cause), should actually quickly fade away. Each political party has a nationalist agenda, and the army fits into the agendas of all parties. It is no longer solely the expression of one particular political party or ideology. The army is getting integrated into the political arena as a 'pawn,' and it is a deliberate tactic in the state that each party includes the army component within its agenda, dividing the generals along political lines and thereby internally fragmenting the army. This fragmentation is the final condition of the army. The political apparatus as a whole, including all parties, works to stretch the army out and divide it politically in order that it not arrive under control of one particular political party or ideology; it is under broad consensus to so divide the army.  The globalizing world is a world where traditional wars for territory are no longer fought the same way, and hence the army as an institution is getting infected with and divided by politics and should eventually weaken considerably. But where the army is 'divided and controlled,' the police seems to escape, as we will see.

We begin with this prediction regarding the army because the army is never an institution made for the forward movement of globalizing societies. The developing country's army does not get foreign aid, support in weapons, or any significant tactical guidance without an accompanying political agenda, and any time there is a political agenda coming from foreigners attached to the army, the crowd thinks it is a form of foreign intervention and imperialism. If the objective is to maintain stability and peace, the army has to remain untouched, and this isolation from the global sphere of influence is beginning to form an obstacle for its contextualization in the globalizing world. Furthermore, any help to the army simply goes against the logic of conquest, where the more powerful state wishes to see the weaker state's army weak and get even weaker relatively. This also leads us to see something positive about the army: it was a representative of the nation's progress (if the army does well, it means we are doing well as a nation) and it therefore inspired nationalism among the nation's subjects. Perhaps its legacy as such an institution inspiring nationalism also lives on, but a positive nationalism is no longer a spirit which requires the use of weapons. In fact, the armies of third world countries were never more than politicized entities, previously important as symbols and indicators of national progress, but today no longer important as such. Perhaps they will attempt to redefine their role and re-situate themselves, but in this transitional process they may well lose a lot of appeal to young recruits. 

The decline of the army as an institution has also to do with the nature of wars and the relationship of conflict to differences in identity. Wars are no longer fought because some undesired identity claims their own land and independence (partly because the construction of identities is today in free flow, with sub-identity upon sub-identity being formed in each national territory precisely because the superpower no longer worries about identity politics causing problems), but wars are fought more for economic resources and strategic gains in the globalizing world. Wars are no longer about direct invasion of territory to bring within a common, governing logic of the superpower, but, deliberately an attempt to maintain a separate entity that can trade; war is necessary for the establishing of conditions of trade between two different entities. In all of these cases and more, the police is the more important 'offense-and-defense'-oriented institution in a state. The foreign enemy in today's warfare is seldom present in bodies, or even in the minds, of the politicians, for the politicians have already been completely indoctrinated to the point that the presence of the indoctrinating superpower is no longer necessary. The politicians act as automatic machines, not as puppets guided by strings. So, the enemy is within the nation, the nation's own subjects, rather than people outside of it, which is why the police as a repressive instrument is more important than the army of traditional international relations of war and conquest. 

Today, the (riot) police acts by repression of political events. What the connection between police and repression essentially shows is that repression is not necessary against an uprising or protest, but it has been deemed important in order to legitimize the police as an important institution in a state today. In other words, the police, being a new institution in the state-level control mechanism (we believe its previous duties were never to stop political uprisings and rebellions; it was never before involved in the criminalizing of people based on their political standpoints) needs to be tested for its strength, to see if it can withhold and endure the onslaught of resistance aimed at it. As the police institution is at such a new stage in relation to other controlling and repressive institutions in the state (the hospital in particular is a very well established controlling institution and so is the media), it is being tested more and more as a 'weak link' primarily by the design of protest movements and struggles. The ease with which protest movements enter the streets as a form of protest shows that the instincts of the resistors points to a weakness in the police as a political force because it has just begun to get embroiled in the political arena in a significant way. That the police is embroiled in politics does not mean that the police is a political party, but it definitely is a significant agenda for a party or politician to consider.

The police is the direct object of the politically rebellious acts and events today. Gone are the days when political rebellions were aimed at the political elites and the police stood in the way. Today, the people come to the streets to confront the police themselves, because they understand that the police are a dominant institution of control in their own right. This will only make the rebellions more violent, as it will be aimed directly at the police and therefore will not let go for any other demands but only express victory in the reclamation of the street. A weakness of the protests in this regard, however, is that they will be more sporadic, more particular, more individualized, for people are only concerned of the bodies of the policemen before them, and not seriously contemplate the political agenda they are fighting for; it is a truly 'post-political' revolutionary fervor. The police are no longer considered bystanders in the political struggle, but they are identified as beneficiaries of foreign aid, tactical support, weapons, and political clout. Whereas previously the police's ambiguous role in politics meant that it shied away from taking action in the social and cultural sphere, today the police acts precisely because it cannot be categorized in any political agenda; the police's actions become a thing contested among different political parties for a claim over policing power, but in its application of policing power it always appears outside of politics. The turning point of today is the police attempting to establish itself precisely as this force at work in globalization in its own right, and unlike the media and the health-care system which smoothly integrates with the global, the police's transition from local to global looks more shaky. This is what invites more repression and the use of physical force in the streets out of frustration and to demonstrate that the police is an institution ready to work for the global capitalist logic. The police no longer operates for other politicians and political agendas (it is no longer the security guard), for the first time it is free to operate by its own logic and for its own legitimacy and longevity. This autonomy speaks of a negative character in imperialism: to give an institution a duration of time to 'prove itself' means that it will compete with other institutions harshly and it will corrupt itself to falsify its actual achievements. Indeed, the troubling scenario is that the police will actually invite political unrest and subsequent riots just to prove its might. The police is that standardized unit which comes to face all types of political struggles, and as such, it is the common 'other' of all political struggles, understanding which the rebel needs to realize that all struggles now have been reduced to a common goal, that of addressing the police. With the police as the common enemy, all types of struggles are interconnected.  

Whenever a decision is made, or an event takes place, due to the result of power-relations, it takes place when every single institution within the power relation gets something positive out of the decision or event. The police will not simply utilize itself in the controlling of riots without benefits from the event, but it speculates the benefits and the costs. The police makes demands to some force; it only works for a price. In the globalizing world, these 'demands' of the police are directly addressed to the superpower because the police is not really a nationalist institution, existing as the army did under a national political agenda and nationalist ideology; the police is an institution of power in the 'post-national' (but not 'post-nationalist,' which implies that a nation's subjects are themselves no longer dedicated to the nation) world. The police exists on par with the political apparatus as another institution of control, it is a apolitical entity but still has to manage and control the politics of others and hence manages to get embroiled therein. It does not exist completely under politics, but encroaches upon the political, intervenes into it. It does not defend anyone in the developing world, it only attacks (and represses). Those that are disciplined by the police's weapons are simply those through which the police expresses a repression meant for the whole of society. In the developing world, the police does not act for side A against side B, but when it utilizes its force, it acts to silence both sides. The police is that institution that must demonstrate most to us the 'formality' and triviality of politics in the developing world, for both sides are essentially being beaten into discipline, discipline as articulated by the external superpower. In the developing world, the police acts as a silencing of politics as such.

The Encounter Between Marxism and Developmentalism

We have moved from classifying societies as 'third world and first world' to 'developing and developed.' Today, the 'third world' sees itself as 'developing,' or, the 'proletariat' sees himself as someone who is a part of a population with a low but improving literacy rate. Within this movement of observing societies and oneself differently, two trends can be noted: the marginalization of Marxism as a body of knowledge and the rise of what can be termed a 'neo-imperialist' body of knowledge, called 'developmentalism.' In the educational institutions of our societies, and particularly in the social science disciplines, we have moved from Marxist ways of analyzing (based on the words 'bourgeoisie' and 'proletarian' etc) to more contemporary modes of analyzing ('infant mortality rates', 'death rates', 'literacy rates' etc). It appears that developmentalism, as a body of knowledge, is contesting with Marxism in appealing to the student who is concerned about society.However, it may be the case that, if not already, we are in the cusp of the emergence of a 'developmentalist Marxism':  a Marxist analysis based on the new terminologies that neo-imperial thought has created. This claim that we are at the cusp of a developmentalist Marxism can be supported by real life examples, such as the potential interactions between China and the UN in Africa. 

We must first understand that the movement from Marxism to developmentalism is not wholesale or total, that there is plenty of room for both viewpoints. It seems that certain locations, particularly in the developing world, become places where there is an intermingling and competition between these two ways of looking at one's world. It is a competition between these two types of knowledge which is at stake, and we need to look at these two bodies of knowledge with proper historical context of the current moment: why is Marxism on the decline and what are the problems of developmentalism, which is on the rise? The developing world is full of examples where Marxist leaning political activists resist developmentalist actors such as the UN. And although Marxism seems to come out second best in this encounter, developmentalism has its own serious problems. Why was the movement from Marxism to developmentalism necessary? What are the consequences of developmentalism in the developing world today? What have been the consequences of developmentalism as a body of knowledge in the developed world in the past?

Marxist analysis as a way of viewing the population had its 'golden age' in the first world, both in its intellectual formations in the Western European nations and its political manifestations in the 'second' (but still 'first) world Soviet Union. In these societies, the concepts of proletarian and bourgeoisie made sense. That was because these societies tended to have stability and homogeneity: the population could be collectivized under the heading proletarian because it tended to live in similar places, work in similar places and had similar quality of life. Their relative wealth and relative quality of life with respect to the rest of the population was also stable for long amounts of time. But, the same terms, the same Marxist analysis, did not apply to the third world population. This is not necessarily always because of the incompatibility of third world populations to Marxist analysis, but rather because the export of Marxism did not occur till quite recently in history. One of the reasons was that the third world was not implicated in Marxist analysis because it had yet to be recognized by Marxism influenced social sciences. The third world was not a part of the political agenda of Marxism either. 

At the same time, and ongoing till today, the third world began to gain prominence and needed to be reckoned with by the bodies of knowledge in the first world. Marxism, like any dominant Western body of thought, needed to address the growing prominence of the third world. Indeed, it seemed quite easy to apply Marxist terminology to the third world, for the third world was full of exploited, poor people. But, at the same time, unlike the first world, the third world is more unpredictable, smaller, unstable politically, poorer etc. For instance, there may be periods of rapid social mobility in the third world (with a significant portion of the population going abroad for employment), so a sustained proletarian struggle does not seem possible, and hence, the term proletarian as a term denoting political urgency and romantic appeal cannot be applied.

But the most important problem is that Marxism, although a body of knowledge seemingly dedicated to the poor and the oppressed, is in fact a euro-centric, dominant body of knowledge in its own right. The amount of attention it pays to the populations of the developed world is seldom afforded to the populations of the developing world, precisely because the final analysis of Marxism still occurs in the developed world and therefore to gain itself legitimay the developed world must critique its own population rather than foreign societies. To put it bluntly, Marxism seems to point to what can be called 'first world problems': a population preoccupied with itself and therefore erecting romanticized terms such as proletarian and bourgeoisie to characterize itself. The terms speak of a large degree of narcissism mediated by bodies of knowledge, something which is not afforded in the developing world. 

Today, through the influence of the UN, World Bank and others, the developing world is rather a place of numbers, a place for 'developmental' activities. Developmentalism is the body of knowledge constructed in such a way as to be relevant more to the developing world than to the developed world. The concern ceases to be for a revolutionary struggle but becomes more of a mission based on certain concrete goals, such as reducing the infant mortality. There are what seem to be realistic ideals and goals, such as the UN Millennium Development Goals, which can, on the face of it, quite rapidly increase one's quality of life. The apparent objective of these development indicators is to provide any nation or region with data in order to facilitate the progress towards meeting the development goals.

In actual fact, however, the indicators do not really facilitate development at all, but have instead facilitated a way of observing the population which seems to take the collective to be more important than the individual, and the data more important than reality. Developing countries' governments are more and more likely to see their population today as numbers, as something that can be manipulated, rather than as real people. They are therefore ready to kill and beat their populations quite easily. As such, 'neo-imperialism' is not about an external superpower directly and physically intervening in a more weaker state, but it is about the stronger state providing the fodder and incentive to the weaker state to control and police its own subjects by itself. Through these numbers and rates, proper and efficient knowledge for state-level control has been made readily available to the governments of developing countries. In Foucauldian terms, these objective numbers and precise rates signify the 'science of government.' 

Meeting the development goals is so important that strands of 'undeveloped' thought are ruthlessly weeded out. Further, if there is a problem with the population, it is no longer considered a crisis for the state, rather, it becomes an international, humanitarian crisis, which gives the state itself a degree of autonomy to ignore the population, thinking the UN will take care of the problem eventually. In the future, a population may be ignored because of its high infant mortality rate rather than being persecuted because of its race or class identity. Homogeneity of populations, so desired by state power, will be articulated on the new numbers and rates rather than on old concepts of identity. When class  is no longer relevant in policies that exclude, Marxist analysis itself will begin to lose its appeal. 

What this problem with developmentalism shows is the truth regarding the history and politics behind development in the world today. The historical myth supporting developmentalism is entirely fabricated and faulty. In a bid to display the ideals of equality, democracy and freedom, the developed world appears as if it included all populations in its development work (we are assuming that the 'developed' states were at one point in time themselves 'developing' states). For instance, it paints a picture which says that it treated everyone equally in trying to eradicate child mortality. However, countries in the developed world have themselves excluded populations throughout their history from their activities of development. What is eradicated is not child mortality but the population with a high child mortality rate, just as there is the Foucauldian 'construct live,' (where the word 'construct' really implies the scientific ways of making life possible) there is the 'policy' of 'let die'. The object of concern for states is 'population' as a flexible number/entity, a number which can be increased or reduced, rather than assuming a static, fixed, real population which must be developed at all costs. This is how 'development' worked in the developed societies, but these societies today unsuccessfully preach an alternative mode of development to the rest of the world. (Development itself, as a concept that we traditionally associate with the UN and the World Bank, in fact has been going on in the developed world for a long time, since the beginning of the histories of nations there have been developmental activities and organizations dedicated to social welfare; development is a new concept only for the developing world.) Developmentalism works not by attempting to develop everyone, but by excluding certain 'others' from the projects of development. Development is a prioritized activity for certain populations that have important roles to play in the world order rather than being open for all marginalized populations. 

In the world today, in the contest between Marxism and Developmentalism, we are at an interesting juncture: we have China which is investing in Africa in infrastructure in an old style state-sponsored Marxism (without the revolutionary fervor at the official level, without the terms proletariat and capitalism in use), and we have the United States using developmental bodies such as the UN to attempt to eradicate poverty, AIDS etc in the same continent, often sending its 'actors' to portray the US as a good state itself with a positive history of developmental work. In any case, what becomes clear is that American developmentalism will not go unimpeded by China's own ambitions and body of knowledge. The smooth, apolitical state desired by developmentalism may in fact face a stern test from the Marxist political actors in Africa. On the other hand, developmentalism may ignite a revolutionary fervor among Africans that the Marxists in China do not want to see. That is why the US and China attempt to be aware of each other's moves, and they will try to avoid the 'battle' between their two bodies of knowledge as much as possible.   

Apart

Apart they went, each their own way, and as we are to observe them, we can give more details...and we feel that one of them is going away quite fast, so fast that it seemed he did not want to be close to the other, and he didn't want to remember. And indeed sometimes we all want to go fast to that place, to that other, special place, where we will encounter new things which will make us forget about our memories, those memories, in particular, which are so hard to forget when one goes about in one's own pace. But one can never know how experienced that man is, that man in the street, and so it is not possible to tell whether he is going fast because he wants to lose his memories or whether that is just his normal pace in his life. At least in the face of it, this man of the street seems to be enjoying a lot, not just, as one is inclined to think, enjoying his own actions, but also enjoying the surrounding, the life that in this quick pace is fading away before his eyes. 

A peculiar moment followed. First, a part of this moment played out within us: we realized that things are not meant to fall apart in this way, that things are not meant to reveal newness...what followed this realization was a moment when there was an attempt to find a way, via a 'performance' to show the case of falling apart was against an order, and not of the norm. Spirits were called upon to put on a show, a show of unity and pride and equality and struggle, a show with very many political overtones, a deft show...but then, the show's ending really put a peculiar character to the whole of it. Rather than all the characters going about their own ways after the show was over, it rather seemed that the characters all mingled together too much, that they did not break apart, and out came a voice, full of positive message, but which ultimately signified that some type of death had taken place which nobody was aware of. 

And after the fog has finally gone away, our eyes catch him again. Out of nowhere, a fast, inexplicable moment arises: he turns to us, he looks at us for a while as if he is seeing us for the first time, and it is the first time that we have seen him this way. So, something makes us helpless, and we mingle with him, and then new memories come in, and then the memory of the show comes in, the inexplicable show, and we understand.  

Automatic Mirror Relations Among Nations Today

We usually hold the cause-effect relationship in high regard when we are discussing history and historical writing. Historical writing is essentially a searching of causes: the cause of this revolt, the cause of that uprising etc. A town in nation A may be suffering from food shortages, which is a cause, and the effect of which is a revolt among the working-class population. This is a traditional form of historical reasoning that we encounter in text books. However, it is our assertion here that the cause-effect relationship is not accurate to explain the internal dynamics and events in a country's history, especially given that we are living in times where the interactions between nations in the globe is more frequent and more fluid. We have to do away outright with the cause-effect relationship because it tends to explain a country's history in isolation, and it tends to arbitrarily fix some events as important causes and others as important effects. A lot of other more minor events are left out in this traditional understanding of a nation's history through the cause-effect model.

A cause-effect model exists in isolation, meaning that, it assumes a chain of events can be explained without any reference to an outside event. The 'cause' seems to be inexplicable, in that, it arises out of something which cannot be captured or explained by the historical document at hand...in some ways the cause is 'natural' or outside of a nation's history, but something which determines the nation's historical path. The 'effect', on the other hand, is totally explained with reference to the cause. The model is tight, it does not allow for external events. History is taken to be composed of two important points, with other events that occur before, after and in between as being deemed unnecessary and insignificant. Not all events are considered important, and history as a smooth flow, where all events have their determining impact, is not produced in the history books. This is incompatible with how we usually experience history, where every moment seems to be important, where many, many events determine the importance of the 'effect,' and where there is no real single cause.

Similarly, the cause-effect model is an isolating model. In traditional history, it assumes that the cause of an event can be found within a nation itself. It isolates the nation against external influence, it assumes that a nation does not get influenced by external forces at all. If there is a revolt in A, then the cause is to be found within A. The cause is located within the country inasmuch as the effect is always manifested within the country. This gives strength to a form of nationalism and national unity and shrouds the fact that outside influence is quite heavy upon a country. We must understand that this outside foreign influence cannot be isolated to a single event, but must be seen as being more continuous.

In contrast to this model of the isolated cause and effect, let us put forward the model of mimicry. Mimicry means in this context the act of imitating. In the globalized world of exposure to the actions and events of other nations, it seems that mimicry/imitation is a dominant mode of international relations. One seems to know more about the other than one does of oneself, and even more so, one sees the other more than one sees oneself. Plus, mimicry also implies a rapidity in influence between two nations which seems more attuned to how relations in the globalized era are manifest. Like in a mirror, the complete action of one's doing is completely imitated by the image. It is our assertion that nations, and within them the institutions and national subjects, mimic to a great degree.

This mimicking happens to such a great degree that the cause, that which is considered in the history books to be inexplicable and outside of human control, is itself mimicked. For instance, we have the rise in food prices as a cause. In traditional historical writing, it is written in such a way as to make us believe that this was an event that was outside of determination, in other words, it was not the result of human action. But, in the logic of mimicry and imitation, the cause itself is mimicked, meaning that the cause is not something that happens and can only be observed, but that the conditions for the emergence of the cause are created. So, the rise in food prices is mimicked in order for there to be a revolution after, in that, the whole cause-effect model in this specific context is mimicked. We have the scenario where not so much the cause-effect model as to its imitation and replication is more important in today's context. There is, therefore, nothing original to a nation, but everything has been imitated from one nation to the other wholesale. This is a way of looking at international relations: rather than understanding that each nation has a unique cause which initiates its historical events, not only the events, but even the causes, have been mimicked from one nation to another.

Just as we have de-emphasized the cause in the globalized era, there is no question of the distinction between macro-level and micro-level in the logic of mimicry. There is no question of the dominance of ideology, of big government or big industries. Rather, mimicking is wholesale replication of events that may otherwise be considered bizarre: the mimicking of food shortages, the mimicking of the rises and falls in wages, the mimicking of big things and small things, the mimicking of insignificant details, in other words, what are traditionally considered studied and calculated decisions are in fact taken because a more successful nation has taken them. Mimicking drives a wedge between cause and effect: the food shortage is mimicked as the cause and the revolt is mimicked as the effect, there is no 'natural' flow from cause to effect. In the age of mimicry, a revolution may not necessarily follow a food shortage, but it is made to do so if that is how a dominant nation's history operates. Also, government intervention is becoming increasingly invisible in the relationship between images, even if the government component is the mimicking agent, the ego...But, even beyond, the government elicits the mimicking of anti-government protests if this is what occurs in a dominant nation, in a sense, the ego will even mimic its own overturning and 'death,' even death does not escape this logic of superficial spectacle. This logic is not there to produce some necessary effect or outcome, rather, it is the absolute imperative logic due to the proximity and contact between two nations in the globalized era, meaning that it is an automatic process.

Where is the nation to find value? Precisely in the fact that what is not reflected in the image is the true substance and being of the nation. The nation must operate via a negative and 'reductive' logic, what is not there, what is absent, is mine. But this does not mean there is a method of escaping the mimicry; there is no escaping the mirror in the globalized era. If a reflective surface has been stood between nations, then it is the job of each to realize that the image is not the complete picture. Making one's image elaborate, creative, complex and excessive is a method of countering the inevitability of replication and imitation in the globalized world. In today's age, style and substance may really not be enemies of one another.