Police and the Criminal Court

We are attempting to turn the police against the courts, or at least to make the police realize that they are not within a common system with the courts, a system known as 'law-enforcement.' We start from the belief that it is the police which is the better organ, more justly in service of society, but the courts put it into a lot of troublesome scenarios. We must not take the relationship between the police and the courts for granted, meaning that we must not assume that both originated together and are in fact a part of same law-enforcement system. It is only today that the police and the courts have been so close to one another. In this relationship, the police has always come out secondary. It always seems that it is the police which is borrowing from the courts the terminology and tactic in how it should do its work. One consequence is how rigid the police system seems, the level of policing seems, today overburdened by its own call for discipline...its disciplining of another is often turned upon itself to become an act of self-discipline. The courts themselves have more flexibility, and seem to treat the law as something which is blurry in conception and in their execution of it. The police being the chief authority, because of its guns and badges, is in fact an illusory assumption; the real authority are the courts, the lawyers, the judges.

There are many concrete manifestations of the influence of the courts upon the police. The courts have a freedom of shaping the criminal. “The suspect was too violent” the courts may assert, and in the subsequent pursuit of suspected murderers, the police focuses on those which are “too violent”. In the character sketch of the criminal, the courts point to those traits of the criminal that selectively make some things sound more problematic over others; the criminal is made in the court and then found in the street by the police. The police understands what to look for depending on what the lawyer speaks, the lawyer who has private agendas, who has political agendas, who has biases...And borrowing from the courts, in the police's job too the issue becomes less to do with the truth and more to do with the more convincing argument. And the first step here is the intellectualization of the police, the making of the police into an enforcer of law. In this and many other ways, the courts influence the police in the process of criminalization. And what is the issue? Precisely that the private lawyer dominates the court, and therefore what is meant for public service is in fact for the private good. With its influence to the police force, the courts manage to steer what is supposed to be purely for the public/social good towards private agendas. The police finds inspiration from the courts in many ways: the treatment of the criminal in the courts, the way he is judged, the scenarios which are highlighted around him, and the degree of punishment he gets as a form of justice all have direct influences on the police when he/she is on duty. The police is a silent observer in the courts; it is supposed to watch and learn about the process of making a criminal.

It is true that it is difficult to truly note the foreign influence upon the police force. The police force, by itself, seems to demonstrate a great distance from any type of foreign influence, and seems to be a national organ through and through. But the foreign influence is in the courts: through a law education abroad, through the study of Western ethics etc. It would be fine if only the influence was foreign, but, in the contact points between the police force and the courts, there is often direct foreign intervention. Where the foreign law and the domestic police meet, where they have their most meaningful and productive contact is indeed obvious: it is nothing other than the prison. We must not consider the prison to be a backward place, a place that seamlessly integrates with the rest of Nepal in its lack of development...rather, the prison is a place of advanced knowledge, intelligent subjects, and a place with the continuous monitoring from foreign interests. The prison is not under the authority of the police, it seems so only because such an image has been crafted. Rather, the courts too have their presence in the prison, and their influence in the prison is quite deep. It is these courts that may facilitate the conversion of a prison into a mass prison system, and the criminalization of the population is already underway here. This mass imprisonment is possible thanks to the lawyers' equation between words “reckless,” “undisciplined” and others which the police is then allowed to associate with its suspects.

The Elites and Kathmandu's Urbanization

We notice the process of rapid and unplanned urbanization in Kathmandu, which indicates that urbanization does not have as its basis a willingness to make everyone live and work equally comfortably. Urbanization is a political-(monetary)-economic issue. Urbanization is the result of policies as conducive to the short term interests of elites. And what is the primary interest of the elites in this regard? What is the chief motive propagating urbanization in Kathmandu? To balance the power of the entrepreneurial class, meaning that, to make only a certain level and intensity of politics and political access available to the entrepreneurs. Historically, the local elites, perhaps from advice of their foreign counterparts, succeeded on one count: to separate the political class and the entrepreneurial class. To maintain such a separation of business and politics is obviously in their interest, since the elites do not only want to keep a hold of their wealth, but also of their political power. And the urbanization phenomenon is constructed so that it figures into an appeasement and an aggravation of the entrepreneur's political potential.

At the center of this relationship between the elite and the entrepreneur is money. Money is able to shorten the gap between the elite and the entrepreneur: the entrepreneur wants money in order to start his business, and the elite is willing to give it to him/her because money appeases the entrepreneur and buys his depoliticization. The flows of money is, in many ways, able to counter the gap between the elite and the middle class felt culturally, and felt in the field of other assets such as land. The transaction of money between the elite and the entrepreneur signifies that both are equal insofar as they both trade in money. Whereas money equalizes, on the side of the elite is land and on the side of the entrepreneur is politics, which cannot be traded as conventionally as money and goods valued with money. Today, politics does not have as much a price tag as land does (even when politicians can be bought and sold, this type of transaction is deemed a 'corrupt' practice and therefore becomes a secret and marginal practice), which signifies that the entrepreneur is gaining in power and ascendancy with the decline of elite feudalism. Feudalism was nothing other than the resistance of land towards monetary valuation. (The movement from land onto money is much smoother, and hence the transition from feudalism to post-feudalism was smooth, whereas the movement from land directly to politics, that is, the politicization of land, is much more violent, as is demonstrated by the Maoist struggle for land occupancy. As such, it seems the Maoists do not care for money ideologically, but want to occupy land directly as a expression of their political orientation, and this, for them, is true post-feudalism. And how can we begin to equate the Maoists with entrepreneurs? Because of their 'inventiveness' and 'innovation,' for one, which transmit from economic concerns to political ones.) 

The elites are the ones with the money available for investment and loaning. This is their monetary value, but they have a form of power as well, which is controlling the amount of money available for the entrepreneur. When the elite has his wealth in money, it becomes available to the entrepreneur. When money is available from the elites, the entrepreneur becomes depoliticized and interested in his business and in making more of his own money. This helps the elites cement their power. But, to make the picture more nuanced, in the short term when the money supply is reduced, the entrepreneurs are involved in the act of trying to persuade the elites to make more money available. There is, in the short term of the reduction of the money supply, a politicization favorable towards the elites. The elites can entrench their power further in the short term. But, in the longer term, there is inevitably unrest and more radical politicization when money is not available. With the supply of money low, the entrepreneurs attempt to take power from the elites, to take the land itself from the elites.

Thus, in Kathmandu, the politics surrounding land and money makes urbanization not a straightforward issue of people moving into the cities for better opportunities etc. People have been made to move into the cities by the power play; the land brokers are in the pockets of the elites, and so are the builders etc. The quality of life in the city is degrading, not just in Kathmandu, but in Beijing and Paris as well (pollution being the indicator)...The continuous growth of unplanned urbanization points to the fact that the elites are now more so than ever interested in reducing the supply of money in the market and transacting wealth in land, and the inevitable result will be widespread politicized unrest from the entrepreneurial class. The question is, why do elites want to restrict the supply of money when they know it causes political unrest? As will be elaborated in the next paragraph, this has to do with the fact that, because of 'wealth loss,' the elites are now not only in the process of preserving their wealth, but also of attempting to become really wealthy again. In this case, political unrest is the outcome of an political-economic incentive of creating more wealth to cement power.

Why is there such power play? What makes urbanization a phenomenon of recent history? In older times, the elites had significantly more wealth and power such that they could provide the entrepreneur population with money while maintaining other wealth as land. Today, the elites do not have as much wealth to go to all members of the much higher number of entrepreneur population. Some wealth is in the form of 'slippery' money, while other wealth is in the form of more sturdy land. Therefore, the elites play with the supply of money in the market, not to determine the amount of money available to all the entrepreneurs, but to determine the access of such money to a select few. To reiterate, the short term outcome will be more appeasement towards the elites to persuade them to give more, but in the long term there will be politicization and unrest. 

Paranoid Authority's Marginalizing of the Micro-Political

The micro-political level is understood here as the segments of population into small units (the family and the friend circle for example) in which the political opinion and view is expressed. It is 'micro' both in the number of bodies involved in each political unit, and in the intensity of application of any political agenda as developed by these small groups. The family, for instance, may be, through the authority of the father, a communist family or a capitalist family, but ultimately, the political orientation of such a family does not really matter in the national political realm, because the family's access to the making or shaping of national political decisions is minimal. At the same time, the family seeks to continue to express its own political voice and orientation, as if it chooses to ignore the fact that it does not have as much of a political clout as a macro-political level (workers, women etc) identity. What, then, is the function of the micro-political?

The micro-political is about the authority of the father (which is the chief authority in democracy) while the macro-political is about the authority of the politician (which is the chief authority in fascism and other forms of authoritarianism).  Sometimes it is beneficial for the political parties to see politics expressed in the family level more, and sometime it is better if the politics is expressed at a more macro level, as workers or women. It is all about balancing authority, and moving authority along a scale of paranoid to non-paranoid (in our understanding, in Deleuze and Guattari's conception, the non-paranoid limit is 'schizophrenic'). Sometimes paranoid authority is more useful, and the desired political orientation is fascism. At other times, democracy is more desired, and so non-paranoid authority is also desired. In this way, we may begin to contextualize the role of micro-politics and equate it with non-paranoid authority.

The family (the micro-political) is quite evidently non-paranoid in its political participation. Its political participation is limited to views and opinions within the family enclosure, and the political usually takes a second priority to other worries and responsibilities. I will share my political opinions freely, for only my father and mother are listening...It depends, however, also on the intensity of political participation desired by the father. The father may be intensely drawn towards public debate regarding politics, in which case the family may be more political than not. However, there is another type of loyalty within the family which overshadows loyalty towards politics, and this may have to do with the authority of the mother. Her participation in the family has very less to do with politics, indeed, she is the representative that resists the political participation of the family. When the mother's anti-political authority over the family takes precedence, then the micro-political level gives way to the macro-political where the family no longer has a political orientation and participation. The children are drawn towards more macro-level political debate, but at the same time are overtly cautious and paranoid...I have to be careful about my political views, for I do not know who is listening...Therefore, the mother has a key role to play in the onset of paranoid macro-politics in the national level, and in the general manifestation of authoritarianism in politics. The mother must come to realize that politics and political participation within the family, that is, the conversion of the family space into Habermas' public sphere is healthy and positive in order to reduce paranoid authoritarianism.

But the mother is not directly to blame. It all begins when the politician begins to pose as a paternal, father-figure, which replaces the (democratic) authority of the real father for a 'better father' who is the politician himself. This father-like politician is a really ploy to inspire authoritarian fascism or authoritarian communism. And so we may begin to see why, in the discourse of 'divorces,' 'problem children,' and 'single parent households' in the US (which is moving towards fascism), we see a problematization of the real father rather than the mother. With this problematizing, the real father may be replaced by the political father, and the family as a healthy political unit may come to seem weak...and the politician begins speaking of the nation itself as a family, at the same time making the real family more and more depoliticized and crafting this depoliticization as development, prosperity etc. So, what is the way of countering this marginalizing of the micro-political family unit over the macro-political? In the case of the family, it means that the mother should be more political, and replace the real father as the voice of political expression within the family, leading the political debate within the family. The politician must not replace the father, but the mother should. But, the friend circle, because the bonds are not quite so strong, is more problematic and yields more easily to authoritarianism.

The Style of Student Politics

The questions are: how should the student body be organized to make proper demands from the political sphere, and what type of demands should the student body make? What is the style in which the student body appears as a political body? How will the student body become more influential politically? We are concerned in this post in attempting to explore ways in which the student body can be made a stronger force in politics, but also not to play into the political apparatus and arena as it exists, but rather be more original in youthful political expression, voice and actions. Among other things, we will attempt to see a shift from the student body's ego being modeled on the older politician, to the youthful ego itself being the ideal ego for all types of politicians. 'Youth as ideal ego,' insofar as it elicits real identification from older members and styles in politics, is precisely the more positive identity of the student body in the political apparatus.  

We must first situate the problem of the student body in terms of its lack of self-identity and its faulty mobilization. The student body does not come forward as a group of youth, it does not highlight and emphasize the subjective experiences of youth in its approach towards the political level. Rather, the student body has been depoliticized in a certain mode, and has been 'made labor,' meaning that it is made into a labor force for the purposes of the usage of its energy for the vocalization of political demands. On the flip-side of 'sexual frustration,' for instance, is asexual and political energy...the libido as sex-drive channeled towards a protest movement...the organization of politics depending on one's orientation towards sexuality...the perverted student as the leader of the political sphere, for he enjoys the beatings. All of this shows not too little investment towards the political (we do not, like the West, suffer from apathy towards politics among the youth), but too much investment, beyond a 'spiritual' investment towards a physical investment; politics becomes means of subsistence in life, it begins to give life substance and structures life with a meaning. Enabling this is a wide plethora of books and other materials, romanticizing the political struggle over the political gain...the student body has no history, no legacy...and so, the student body is only important as a resistive force in politics, it is prized for its physicality, it is exploited for its youthfulness in terms of the energy available to expend; but once one party is truly powerful, there is no need for the student body. One reason for its lack of access to power is because the student body is forever the object of education and therefore will be educated differently, or problematized to such a degree that a different education is demanded as a solution; the party acts upon the student to problematize it, indeed, it is only the student body which has become the object of self-criticism from the party. Additionally, what is important is the issue of identification: the student's ego, always looking for education, a model, an ideal, identifies with the ego of the politician, and attempts to replicate the archaic life-path of the older politician: old fashioned street protests are mimicked for this reason. There is a generational similarity between the old and new where the younger imitates the older as an ideal ego. The student body should break off with this image of the older ideal ego. And the older politician is satisfied with this idealization, precisely because he/she confuses this basic level identification with actual political influence.   

What the students lack is a maturity in the formal political game. And to counter this, the components of its organization need to be well developed: beneath a leader should be sub-leaders and beneath them more sub-leaders, in other words, an entire hierarchical organization of the members; an institutionalization of the student body; a delegation  of responsibility and authority, but even more so a predictability within the political apparatus so that other political actors start to believe that the student body has actual political clout...the politicized student body is too fragile and temporary today. Even more so, the romanticizing of politics must be ignored, it has led the student body to take to the protest movement too easily, while the arena of more important politics, such as global-level politics, is more favorable to keeping an image of order; the goal of global politics being not so much to maintain peace, but to maintain an image of peace, to keep the streets peaceful even if the policies are causing much conflict 'in private' rooms; 'peace' has become a sign of maturity rather than power. What is most important to understand is that, in such a scenario, it is not so much that the student finds too much enemy on the streets, but that the student finds no one there to oppose it, it is rather alone in the streets, and its protests do not fall on the ears of those that are alienated from that type of political organization. In this sense, the student body is an immature political organization, for even when it is in full volume, nobody cares for it, nobody is willing to hear it...the movement of vehicles and people in the recent strike in Nepal showed how the students protesting were ignored, as if their political voice and will didn't exist; but people generally assume that the students are harboring ways of doing politics which are today a thing of the past. But, as we have tried to explain, they weren't ignored because they are weak politically, but that they come off as too strong, they demonstrate an intensity in reality which is inspired by their political and politicized fantasies.

In a sense, we are looking at the style of doing politics. We understand that this style has shifted, that the world does politics differently these days. First, the student body must find an original voice underlined by its unique subjective position of being the youth of this world; the student, related to the ideology heavy school, must instead understand and address himself/herself and others of his/her age as youth. Youth are not the object of the same level of intense discipline as students are. Youth are not immature, but rather in the cusp between maturity and immaturity, where there is a general disinterested distance towards the mature world. There is a hesitation in action. Most importantly, as a semblance, the youth would be more of an image of the political than reality. In one sense, then, the reading of distance from politics as apathetic is incorrect, because the youthful political agents are more careful and aware even in their distance from politics; they are going towards the post-political with an awareness of the political as problematic. Indeed, from the recent strike in Nepal, we do have an example of what youthful politics looks like: the empty bag that was suspected of being a bomb proved how the youth are borrowing from other struggles in the world, but only in the realm of distance and images, because the bag is empty...as if to say the student is not a student because there were no books in the school bag, but a member of the youth, who will play with the conception that we associate with a bag on the street. Say No to bombs? OK...but I will say No to books too as a Nepali youth! It is a borrowing of the style of doing politics from abroad rather than being too seriously involved. It is a way of saying that if elements of the global-level political have been kept away from the youth, the youth will themselves mysteriously inaugurate signs, such as the empty bag signifying terrorism, to play with the global-level political.

How do the Powerful allow Resistance?

It would seem, following conventional wisdom, that power would not allow for resistance to thrive in any form. This freedom to resist goes precisely against the logic of power. But, no matter the amount of repression, power indeed cannot weed out all forms and elements of resistance to it. What is the mechanism of power, and power exclusively, such that resistance is allowed? Here, we begin in a way in which we defy Foucault, who always posits 'power' and 'resistance' elements to emerge together. We believe that power emerges independently of resistance, but here resistance is defined precisely as a human being, as a resisting subject, and henceforth, as a 'resistor' (which is positive here) or revolutionary (which is negative here). 

We will forward here one hypothesis: that power and resistant-human-beings do not arise at the same time. There are two types of resistance, the resistance composed of subversive knowledge elements, and the resistance composed of bodies of human beings. The hypothesis that we put forth is that in a bid to counter the knowledge based resistance, power also inadvertently creates and then counters the resisting subject, or the subject as resistor/revolutionary. What we mean is that the revolutionary figurehead of a political struggle is not the final, end-point of repression, but rather, the subversive knowledge elements which have enabled the labeling of him as revolutionary is what repressive mechanisms are after. A 'problematic' revolutionary appears such that he himself becomes the site of both the performer of a subversive knowledge and the protector of that knowledge; he aggravates the problem by eliciting the confusion between subversive knowledge and socialized bodies. In the eyes of power, when knowledge becomes seen as subversive, the subject becomes seen as revolutionary. The revolutionary is not even an effect of the knowledge he himself subscribes to, but an effect of the way this knowledge has been interpreted as 'subversive' by power.

We have started to define the subject in such a way that his/her resistive character or quality is performed; that he/she performs his/her resistance. This is the truth we have observed in Nepal, where resistance is seldom organized into a solid group, but seems to appear spontaneously depending on the policies enacted which need to be resisted; people perform the role of revolutionaries when they take to the street without realizing or having read the texts on which their resistive actions are based. The first thing we say, therefore, is that resistance is not something internalized by the subject, but rather, that the subject is called/commanded to resist, and acts as a resistor. It is precisely the dominant power which commands the resistor to resist, to act subversive, whereas the knowledge which he/she subscribes to is the only thing which is truly subversive. This performative dimension of the resistor means that he/she is not always directly interested in the struggle against power, but rather, to flip the argument, that power creates the subject as a resistor in its attempt to uncover and repress subversive knowledge. We do not have the powerless always trying to take power, but sometimes only interested in the immediate policies that they disagree with. Foucault's conception of the power-resistance dynamic only applies in radicalized settings; in non-radical settings, subjects are not interested in taking power, but are more interested in seeing the powerful do their duties properly. In fact, the resistance of the subject may come after the repression of the subject, insofar as this repression by the powerful itself is developed for subversive knowledge and the subject simply 'gets in the way.'

The subject 'gets in the way' of precisely the repression as applied to subversive knowledge. It is first knowledge which is resisted and only then, in particular cases, the subject. Why is knowledge resisted first? Because knowledge is more threatening as it attempts to change the lifestyle of power. A certain order which power maintains is threatened by knowledge. Knowledge has the ability to get too close, to get unconsciously internalized even...whereas the resistor-as-subject is further away. The subject is an indirect effect of the problematic knowledge ...it does not threaten power in the same way that direct knowledge does; the subject is an isolated case of the application of subversive knowledge and not the free flowing knowledge itself. For example, it is not of a concern for the powerful capitalist nation to really repress those who are communists, the communist subjects, but rather, to repress the knowledge of communism, the knowledge constituted as communism, because this knowledge has the potential to impact power, to get too close to power. So, it is the subject-as-resistor who gets caught up in the process of repression not as an end-point of the repressive processes but as somewhere before the end-point, with subversive knowledge being the absolute end-point. The subject is a 'resistor' or revolutionary only through a classification by mistaken power which believes the resistor as embodied in a person is the more dangerous threat. There is no resistor from which the knowledge to be resisted comes forth, rather all forms of human resistors are caught up in the game between subversive knowledge and power. It is the books, the writings, the concepts that are dangerous because they can infiltrate. This is precisely what is problematic for revolutionary struggle: that the revolutionary person believes himself to be the site of all forms of repression, and invites it towards him, but these repressive mechanisms and forces are more interested in the subversive knowledge which has shaped him, the subversive knowledge of which the resistor himself is only an effect. The subject is a 'double effect': once the effect of subversive knowledge, and second the effect of repressive mechanisms acting upon the subversive knowledge to which he/she is connected as a resistor.

In a post-Marxist era, we must not only problematize the Soviet Union and the problems of Marxism once it has been successfully turned into a powerful political movement, but also problematize the revolutionary struggle that Marxists pursue itself; Marxism is a problem even when it is not certain. In a post-political vein, we must say that the protest movement, the revolution, the guerrilla revolutionary are all in crisis, because we have realized that the subject who claims to be resisting is not in charge of resistance and the subject is never directly the concern of power. This desubjectivized, automatic character of resistance is very problematic as it may discourage resistive political participation completely. Let us end with an example of what seems true for resistors of today, such as for the Zapatista. Their goal is not to be fully vocal and revolutionary in character, to go out on the streets and take power, but rather, they realize that resistance to power only invites more repression, more violence, more negativity...what the Zapatista want is to be left alone, to be true resistance-actors, to perform an act, a theatrical performance, of resistance. They have realized that they are not what power is after, that they are only marked with the subversive knowledge which power considers infectious to its own territory...so they do not act, rather, if power wants to, it can act on them. Their main goal is to be resistive without attempting to spark a revolution; they want to be resistive in their own space, and not be overtly influential on other spaces. Today, the Americans do not want to see communism come too close to them, but they are happy to let if thrive among other people; people are further away, they occupy their own spaces and they only become problematic when power itself begins labeling them as subversive resistors, once they become embroiled in the game between power and subversive knowledge. This is how capitalism has attempted to be responsible today. 

“Nepal”: The Voyeur's Territory

The Nepali common social space (going forward, just the 'Nepali common') has been increasingly sexualized, which could be the overt final step in the sexualization of the whole nation. What we imply by the term 'sexualization' is not an always positive direction towards more and more sexual freedom, but an alignment of sexual expression with other identity markers, such as ethnicity, class and gender in ways that marginalize certain subjects. Sexualization is the 'making systematic' of sexuality which only allows it to be expressed in certain ways and types and instances. We see in the sexualization of the society not the revolution of sexuality, but the freezing of sexuality and its sinister expressions, and most importantly its combination with power/control, most evidently in the logic of the pervert. One of the ways the pervert has determined the social space is by sexualizing the police; in other words, the police's uniform is a fetish for the pervert. But whereas in developed societies the pervert confines his police fantasies to the enclosures that are personal to him, in Nepal the social common itself has been privatized for the pervert, and the public police officer is his private sexual friend/object; he does not dress his friend as a police officer, but considers the police officer himself as already a sexual object. The perverted voyeur finds in the public sexually arousing traits; and the Nepali common has become increasingly more defined by sexual attributes, if we are to judge it with the voyeurism within all of us: the exhibition of skin is an example (but we can also look at the types of interactions between Nepali subjects, all of which have been more sexualized-for-the-voyeur). As such, Nepal operates in the pervert's logic as a private territory, where he can exhibit himself or be a voyeur; and in the process of his exhibition or his voyeurism he inaugurates the privatization of the territory; he is the privatizing impulse of global capitalism. For the voyeur, this privatization is on the part of the other, it is the other's private property, which means that at the logic of perverted capitalism, it does not matter whose territory or asset it is, it only need be privatized, or made anyone's property; and so the pervert may appear neutral, may appear 'for the people' by advocating for private property for the people, but this is not really something that is truly selfless and completely for the people. The pervert is the advocate of privatization in capitalism, but his agenda does not end there, rather he is to make private as much as doing so is an expression of his power and an occasion for a pleasure exclusive to him.

“Nepal,” as a concept denotes a private territory, private to Nepalis. As a particular nation-state, it is a territory which has been made private not by the agency of fellow Nepalis, not by the struggles, conflicts and histories that Nepalis have conducted to make a territory their own, but by the sustained and fixated gaze of the outside voyeur. It is the voyeur which demarcates the territories of states, and this is starkly evident in the sexualization of the process of territorialization: how it is focused on attributes such as the color of skin, the types of eyes of the different races, the different 'cultural practices'...the entire discourse of nation-building has a particular affinity with the sexualized thoughts of the voyeur; it is too focused on looking at sexual/sexualized attributes of a people. As such, within this logic of perverted capitalism, it seems one does not build a nation based on very deep and personal shared values between people, but rather based on external, superficial, sexual characteristics that seem to unite people together at the level of their flesh. But when we get to ever more narrower territories of privatization, such as our own small piece of land, then we have deep reasons why we think that that piece of land is ours, and we have more of a will to protect it and feel for it than we do for Nepal. Thus, to resist the pervert's voyeurism, there are two options: either ditch the primacy of the nation-state of Nepal completely and think of other forms of territorializing (which is problematic because it is too exhibitionist, that is, perverted in its own right), or express a deep affinity to Nepal, a deep relationship to it and with its people, truly personalize it (and not just privatize it) in other words, to not play into the pervert's logic and sexualize one's own people. 

That the Nepali government bureaucratic officials wear uniforms, a fetish, posits the government official strictly within the fetishizing logic of the pervert and not above or beyond it, which implies that national level government is not really in control because the pervert escapes it, and that, indeed, the pervert is the most accurate representative of international/transnational Law as it applies to a nation; the pervert is one such chief agent of the international superpower in the national space, putting government within uniforms in order to fetishize it. This locating of the pervert within a national space is because the pervert has a highly intimate link between control and pleasure; because control gives the pervert pleasure, he is ready to control more than others for whom controlling is only a duty. As such, not everyone is able to enjoy in capitalism and neo-imperialism, rather, the pervert is given the duty to enjoy and feel pleasure; he is the representative of pleasure in neo-imperialism. As such, the 'Nepali' pervert is not a national identity, and it is never nationalist. It always operates for the international superpower because it is such a keen and willing observer. This, however, does not mean that the voyeur acts simply as a messenger, someone who reports to the superpower what is going on here, someone who relays messages without actual interventions into the nation. Rather, the pervert is what proves that the gaze itself has agency, that the gaze is enough to enact change in the social. Just from a look, the pervert does something vital for the superpower. And it is precisely because the pervert does not need to act outside of looking that it is so vital: it is almost imperceptible but also very influential.

The voyeur demonstrates a quite disturbing truth about power relations. It demonstrates that when it comes to a territory like Nepal, not an entire force, not an entire army, is really in charge, but actually one single figure of authority is in charge and makes the most relevant decisions regarding Nepal. This figure is the voyeur, who operates with his own eyes, his own stature, that is, he is life size and not bigger than a single individual; the gap through which the voyeur looks is meant for his eye because it is precisely the gap through which the eye escaped after privatizing the other. This means that if we are to trace the path of power relations as it pertains to Nepali common territory, we are inevitably led to a single figure of authority, and thus, to authoritarianism. In the formation of a territory, in the struggle towards such a formation, then, there is no democratic solidarity among the people, but a voyeur who is in charge of the populace, making it sovereign. Of course at the national level there appears to be democracy, but at the international level there is only a single person (or a few people, a very small group of voyeurs) in charge of controlling Nepal. These voyeurs are never situated atop a tower and thus able to see everything below them, but they move about among people, they see directly with their eyes people up close and personally...they utilize the mobility of their legs, the agility of their bodies, the vision of their eyes and other senses...they walk about as people without tools, without enforcement, without symbolic power but with real power expressed through their bodies. The perverts do not utilize others, they utilize the structural gap in the symbolic order, the gap which inevitably has to be left there for the maker of the order, the primordial Father, to exit.  And it is precisely the gap which facilitates perversion, the gap which makes a pervert, who through this knowledge appears disarming and outside of law and criticism....my perversion is a disease or it is a gap in the symbolic, it comes from outside of me and I do not control it, he says, or even more frequently, I am looking at the gap, and not at the sexual action within it, I am only concerned with the gap, something which is meaningless to normal citizens...Going back, this is how power relations operate at levels of nuanced control and large territory, as relations between people as individual figures of authority, not between a person and the disciplined masses. Indeed, we cannot even call the relationship between the powerful and the powerless a power-relation, simply because the powerless never get to the possibility that they will get their own power...'the powerless don't deserve the term 'power,'' the perverted powerful will say.

Contrary to what we believe, exhibition/exposure is not the opposite of voyeurism; exhibitions do not solve the problem of the international gaze within one's own space. We cannot deliberately exhibit to solve a violation. Rather, it is when voyeurism is confused with sexual freedom and liberalism that exhibitionism is offered as a response. Nepali exhibitionism must be contextualized in the voyeurism of the superpower. But voyeurism must be problematized: it is the adding of a power component in sexual relations, meaning that the pervert only enjoys when there is a power component involved, he is power hungry. He doesn't, in the sexualizing act, make the other powerful, but rather makes the other powerless; his logic is to consume whatever power there is in the other. He knows all the ways in which power is present and is sustained/managed by the other; he knows of the other's good conduct. He therefore exhausts the other, taking from the other the power which was territorialized within the other and therefore eliciting the collapse of territorial boundaries/demarcations of the other; not just corrupting the other but making the other dysfunctional. He does not respect private property as it is but is the constant forward movement of the logic of privatization; newer and newer territories must continue to emerge and then collapse for him...it is (perverted) capitalism's process of continuously 'coding and decoding of territories,' as highlighted in Deleuze and Guattari, and of not oneself being within a private territory, but always being outside of it looking in. Therefore, the pervert, when it is engaged in the sexual act, cannot be considered a subject enjoying the other, but a subject draining the other, and as such, every response to the pervert's sexualization must be made at the level of power and power-relations rather than as a pure sexual act/attitude.