We
have arrived at an observation of rural Nepali society and wish to
dig deeper into the phenomena we have seen. The thing in question is
the high number of children Nepali families used to conceive up until
the recent past. In this post, we believe that rural Nepali society
is at a juncture, it is at a moment between the nomadic forms of the
social and the sedentary forms of the social. The high but reducing
number of children conceived implies that the movement is from a
nomadic lifestyle to a sedentary (and nuclear family) lifestyle. Nomadic lifestyle had a productive impulse propelling it, and so, given this positivity, it was motivated to be more invested in the world, and produce more...In any case, this juncture between nomadic and sedentary is what has consequences on the number of children conceived, and
also eventually on the life styles of these children, and on other
related things. In an idealistic vein, we can perhaps say that the
movement towards a nomadic society may indeed be possible, since we
aren't completely in a sedentary lifestyle yet, but, in reality such
a movement looks very impossible.
The
nomadic father is a figure which is not present to the world anymore. Perhaps
its disappearance owes to the limitations in space for the nomad to
travel to, since the world's political orientation has caused space
to be divided up among populations which have a strong claim to that
space, restricting the nomad his/her mobility. But, the nomadic
aspects of life have had an effect on capitalism. Before we say what
these effects are, we have to say that we distinguish from other
studies of capitalism our study for the following reason: whereas
other studies of capitalist society begin with a very basic form of
sedentary society as beginning capitalism, we go a step further in
believing that not any basic sedentary society, but nomadic society before that
was the true originator of capitalism, even given the sheer
difference between capitalist societies of today and nomadic
formations of before.
The
nomadic father figure is known for one thing as it pertains to his/her body:
production. We have always associated the nomad with exploitation and
movement in the world of things, but this has not been an accurate
explanation. Specifically, the nomad's processes of child rearing are
special and it is these that gave rise to the productive mentality of
society today. First, we have realized that production was not the
production of things, but rather the production of children. So what
does the nomad do that makes him productive? Precisely that he
produces children but 'lets them go'...they are true object small
a in the Lacanian sense because they are 'lost objects', they
become lost after the nomad conceives them. The nomadic man does not
have an enclosure whereupon he can domesticate his children...rather,
his children are mobile, and travel to different points in a piece of
land, not only, as may be assumed, around sources of water or food,
but also to points of beauty, points of significant subjective
contemplations etc. In this way, there is a form of productivity to
the nomad because he lets his children-as-producers walk the land,
and produce from the land, but after that, keep walking, engendering
the productivity of the land wherever they go, being a pure producer without concern for
the product.
In
sharp contrast, the sedentary lifestyle, of which the nuclear family
of today is a prime example, is not productive like the nomadic
lifestyle. The sedentary lifestyle does not produce signifiers (or
signifying actors), those agents that represent what they have to the wider world, take part in the world's symbolic order and produce signs. Rather, the sedentary lifestyle has a single, authoritative signifier, who is the father figure. An appropriate example of the father-as-signifier is the spider, which produces a web to entrap other flies (signs); this laying out of a web of rules is precisely what the function of the father as signifier is, and the objective is precisely accumulation (and accumulation first and only then consumption, meaning that the spider (father) is not concerned with what he eats to survive primarily but is concerned rather with what he can accumulate...it is accumulation first and consumption second)). The father is the signifier and his
children are signs, that is, true objects to be manipulated,
constructed, designed and arranged a certain way; enclosed via discipline. The sedentary mode
of living is accumulative, in the sense that it accumulates children
together, and produces children as signs and not as signifiers
themselves. The signs come together, as in a sentence composed of
words, to give meaning to a signifier, the father. This means that all the
children in a sedentary, nuclear family are only important insofar as
they provide meaning and significance to the father figure. The
nomadic father does not produce object small a (object small a
implies both the child and other more general objects) as a sign,
as determined, as destined to be a certain way, but rather, produces
object small a as a signifier, as something mobile (like himself), and
independent, moving, productive but not accumulating. This nomadic child is productive in his/her subjective experiences,
in his/her energy expended, and not in the crops he can produce for accumulation, or
the children he can produce for accumulation etc.
Capitalism
arrives to synthesize both the nomadic and the sedentary. It applies an
alternation between accumulation and production, between being mobile and being stationary. Both styles of life
are important in capitalism: one has to keep nomadically moving (not just physically but also
mentally) but one also has to keep accumulating energy in order to
keep moving. But what does this mean for the children and the father
figure in capitalism? The children of capitalism are not pure signs, since at one point they can
become father figures themselves (through the institutionalization of
sexuality) and thereby they get the opportunity to treat their own
children as signs. But neither has sexuality made children pure signifiers,
pure subjects, they still maintain an element of the sign in them, in their will to collect together, in the cries for unity, in the constant wish for a uniting father figure. There is a trade off
between productive sexuality, if it can indeed be called that, and
unproductive accumulation of children and wealth. But, can there ever
be a return to the nomadic? Can the hilly regions of Nepal, with its independent actors, spread out houses, distributed populations, be called semi-nomadic in one sense? The answer, it seems, is 'no'...the
nomadic is alive in the imaginary but not in reality. But lessons can
be learned from it: the ways of productive child-rearing and imagining
the mother as a nomadic figure who can be allowed more independence
in raising children.
However, having said all this, crucially, in anti-capitalist vein, what we are arguing is not that
everyone must be a signifier as nomadic children are, but rather that everyone, including the father figure, must be a
sign, that there should be no signifying authority. Turning
people, animals and other things into signs is an accumulative act
rather than a productive act. Everyone must be a sign but without there being a signifying authority or a father figure (if that is at all possible). The question is: is there a sign without a signifier? Nevertheless, even the nomad must (symbolically) 'kill' the father figure insofar as this father figure is himself a signifier, the figure of authority and agency. The nomad must not just evade the father figure and think that he is free from the father.
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