The Westernized Hospital's Research Arm

The hospital is a relic, a product of a certain moment in the past, which is why it had to be replaced by the research hospital, which is relatively less weak. The hospital is no longer an institution where power circulates, but rather is a powerless institution due to its passivity in the field of knowledge. Even as a research hospital, the hospital is not necessarily anything other than an outdated institution; for this "hospital research" is not as we imagine scientific research to be. Medical-science research is governed by a certain structure which makes it treat a certain body of text (“body of text” includes the rules and regulations, medical procedures, the documentation of what takes place etc) as essential and original. We say so because, even with the forward movement of research, the hospital relies on a static body of texts as its foundation; it relies on individuals who have already finished their formal education, and this formal education itself has not been significantly updated. As soon as one enters a hospital, one is in rigid territory fully controlled by a body of texts. Even the research such a hospital carries out is nothing more than a way to legitimize the unchanging body of texts that prefigures the hospital's activities; we may speculate, for instance, that much of the research is done by an aloof group of hospital staff reliant on medical-scientific methodology hundreds of years old. The hospital as an institution exists only in order to justify bodies of texts upon which it stands. In short, the hospital is a point of failure in research and science.

We are interested in the hospital because it represents, as "medical-science," an institution between science and reality. It seems to us that the hospital performs well in its administration of established science on the populations, but it seems weak in engaging the population in the scientific endeavors that it espouses; it remains secretive about its research arm, to say the least. Without the support of the population, a certain obsolete body of texts within science dominates the hospital. Moreover, the hospital does not espouse the research endeavors within science, rather, it places itself in that safe space away from research, utilizing only those “trusted” methods circulating in society and the other hospitals at large. It cannot implement and critically evaluate radically new techniques and new modes of treatment, but must rely on what society considers to be effective and appropriate. Without the support of science, the hospital becomes a dangerous place that gives rise to what can be characterized as a legitimate culture. This legitimate culture is the hospital as subscribing to a certain image, an ideal image of the doctor or the nurse. It is this ideal image of doctors and nurses, and not the scientific endeavor, which gives the hospital its legitimacy in the eyes of laypersons today.

This criticism of the hospital has to be considered because of the changing nature of the human subject today. The human subject has, in most of his/her endeavors, given up the tag of “patient” and has become more out of control. The hospital was a firm establishment when the activities of the human subject usually relied on his/her becoming safe from harm, and when there was a willingness on the part of the patient to be under the complete control of a hospital for the duration of the treatment. Today, harm is often actively sought and the hospital visit has become a regular activity in a subject's life. The demarcations between society and hospital have been made so rigid that the hospital cannot influence behaviors in wider society at all. And in one sense, the hospital is too reliable, it is almost a paradise when compared to the rest of society. The subject is not to be taken as a patient, but has become more and more, in Lacanian terms, the “subject supposed to know,” the subject who wishes to participate within research under development rather than remain under control by a rigid body of rules and regulations that govern treatment. The subject wishes to offer to his/her treatment rather than passively spending time on a hospital bed. he/she has often actively sought western medical-science from a range of choices. Additionally, the patient "calls out" to the doctor to participate in the treatment, to encourage in the doctor a willingness to treat, especially in Nepal, where neglect during treatment has caused deaths; and isn't it a proper research component which would encourage doctors not to neglect? In order to rebel against the hospital, the subject uses the cultural sphere, in the form of medical advertisements and TV shows on alternative, non-western treatments, to demonstrate how it wants to participate in its own treatment. 

These observations do not prove that the hospital has to be given up entirely. But, in order to adapt, the hospital does need to change some things: first, it must give the tag of research hospital more weight in order to more actively participate in research (this does not mean that patients are to be converted to lab mice, but the ways in which the patient information is recorded and elicited may have to change; the machines used in a hospital may have to updated, given that these machines do represent scientific progress), second, the hospital must remove itself from the influences of the culture industry: it cannot ride on the image of the serious, concerned and thoughtful doctor as created in popular TV shows. By projecting its ideal image onto the screen, the doctor will soon look even more untrustworthy to patients. In short, the movement of the hospital should be towards 'research-oriented' rather than 'service-oriented.'

Global Capitalism's Function Today: To Monitor Displaced Populations

The prevalence of all kinds of warfare (civil war, international war, rebellions) today might imply that there are certain global capitalist institutions which benefit from the ongoing wars. From the 'rubble and ruin' of war, a new desiring subject may emerge, and this is an ideal scenario for global capitalist institutions that wish to create a consumerist society from ruins. In this post, we will look at the possibility that the traumatized refugee could potentially benefit global capitalist institutions. We will look at the possibility that the flows of knowledge and information in globalization do not stop at warfare, and indeed, as risky as it may be, these flows of information perform an important function to enable the perpetuation of conflict, even if they may prevent outright violence.

The traumatized refugee is mobile but without a destination; he/she is a transient, temporary subject, existing between two ruined destination...travelling from one ruins to the next. It is precisely because the refugee cannot do anything about where he/she will end up that he/she is a pure consumer: helplessly reliant on external forces to devise a permanent settlement; consuming whatever the outside help provides in the form of housing and food. Additionally, this traumatized refugee is the central character in the process in which new towns and new settlements are made: sooner or later, it is thought, that the Syrian tent city for instance will be replaced by an actual city. In a Lacanian sense, the traumatized subject is a pure subject of desire, he/she does not only want a safe place, but is ready to continuously travel, and travel without care (without food and shelter) till it arrives at the object of its desire...in Lacanian language, this type of subject who moves without destination or the concern for survival is someone “who does not give room to one's desire,” who is ready to pursue the impossible desire (for permanent peace and resolution) till the end of his/her life.

It is in the re-construction effort of building new towns and cities that we locate global capitalism's entry into the civil war of Syria and other wars elsewhere. Entire symbolic networks of people, systems of food provision and health care, among many other things, will have to be fabricated from the ground up, and that too by external powers. Global capitalist institutions want to enter into the war-torn territory because the traumatized refugee is a pure consumer: he/she wants a complete lifestyle change, longer-lasting peace etc and also must be provided with new things such as housing. At the stage of displacement in a warfare, capitalism works via encouragement: it encourages people to keep moving, to keep going towards what is thought to be safe—and at the end of this process is the creation of a “peaceful territory.” This peace via a new territory is just a fantasy: it is not actual resolution of the conflict but an escape from it. And what is the organ encouraging people to keep escaping war? Precisely the humanitarian aid agencies that help the refugees carry on by providing food and water. 

War is like a permanent scar for the refugees: usually it is not the case that when a war is over, the population may return back to its 'original' territories. Rather, the population is permanently displaced, unsettled, traumatized...it needs a new territory to fully recover from the trauma of war. Revisiting the sites of trauma is not to anyone's benefit, not because the ruins and rubble is disturbing, but because, quite concretely, the revisit to one's own ruins may cause another war, another disturbance, and another traumatic encounter with the victors who have already built their own territories over the previous ones. It is the possibility of another war, the permanent irresolution of the first conflict, which is most traumatic for a refugee. The war itself may not be traumatizing, but the underlying conflict causing the war suddenly becomes traumatic during the event of warfare.

In all this warfare, global capitalist institutions are monitoring and researching. They face the crises through the lens of the media and the on-the-ground presence of humanitarian aid agencies. In true globalizing fashion, the flows of people are followed by flows of knowledge and information (and out come research papers detailing the state of the humanitarian crisis etc.) Wherever refugees go, global capitalism follows, for it wants a stake in the new territories created for refugees, it wants a say in the post-traumatic new subjectivity. It wants to create people as consumers and it sees great value in people "starting all over again." Therefore, we should conceive global capitalism as the flows of money and knowledge following the flows of people.

But in the midst of all this is the refugee's persistent trauma...trauma which makes of the refugee a completely passive subject, who only wishes to consume rather than produce, who needs to find, with each act of consumption, a re-confirmation of the fact that life has positives. The trauma is what makes unexpected the outcome of the refugee's movement. With the traumatized subject, it is never certain what he/she desires. The traumatized refugee is not duped by lesser objects of desire, but knows his/her desire is the quite impossible desire for resolution, yet still he/she desires it. What all this means is that the flows of capital behind refugees may have to be given up, and outright intervention on the part of bigger powers may be necessary. The objective must be to stop the cause of trauma rather than any attempt to 'cure' the traumatized. Indeed, the role of watchdog goes to show the permanence of the underlying conflict and only goes to strengthen the refugee's trauma. Global capitalism must realize that what the refugee desires is resolution to conflict and not a new territory/consumable object.

The Full Value of a Commodity in the Post-Industrial Age

We have relied on Marx and others for their idea of 'commodity fetishism' to enable a critique of capitalism. We believe that with the idea of commodity fetishism, Marx wanted to highlight that the amount of labor expended for the production of a commodity had to be included in the price/value (we use price and value interchangeably) of the commodity. In the industrial age, this meant that the value of the workers in a factory had to be included in the commodity they produced. But how can we take this idea forward and speak of the need to address a new kind of commodity fetishism? How is the idea of commodity fetishism relevant in the post-industrial age, when the labor work force is slowly getting diminished?

What is assumed in the production process of the commodity is that the flows of information regarding the commodity goes in one direction: in theory, from the laborer to the capitalist to the investor. However, such a flow is not necessarily what defines the commodity value today. We have to look at the opposite of the flow laborer-to-investor and look at the flow investor-to-laborer. In short, we must consider how the investor shapes the value of the commodity. It is the demographics of the investor body which also determines the value of a commodity today.

We arrive at such a conclusion because we have witnessed today that the capitalist-investor interaction is itself getting much hype and attention (imagining someone like Steve Jobs as the capitalist and thinking of his presentations of Apple products to the investor body). For instance, it seems that the investor himself/herself is now a part of the media frenzy surrounding a product. The investor is today present to the process of production in a more apparent way. So, it seems to us that this means the investor is also a component in the production and subsequent valuation of the commodity. The investor does not arrive at the end of a production cycle, but intervenes in the process of production during its various points. The investor's behavior, agendas, whims...in short, a type of investor knowledge determines the value of the commodity.

The steady increase in the involvement of the investor, who usually remained behind the scenes for the most part and then performed as the audience for a capitalist's product, might mean something positive for Marxists: that the capitalist is getting marginalized, and the dominating logic is not that the product is produced, but the whys and hows of the production of the product; in short, the investor's questions regarding the product. The capitalist is involved directly with the material product, and disregards questions of its value (because for the capitalist, in a somewhat Lacanian-Zizekian sense, the value of a product is not possible to determine, for the product occupies the position of a lack, a lack which is here understood as the lack of a coexistence of interests to form the relation investor-capitalist-laborer...the capitalist believes in this non-relation of the parties of the production cycle; in a sense, the capitalist disregards the investor and the laborer in the production process). Whereas for the investor, the questions on value are very important, as are the same questions important for the laborer because the value of a product determines the laborer's wages.

Let us end with an example of the reversal of the production cycle. It occurs in Fair Trade products, which do not rely on the capital and labor intensity for the product's value, but rather rely on something more intangible, such as the ethics behind the production process. Ethics is an example of a factor by which the investor values the product. But we cannot only see the positives of such a process, for we must also ensure, in Fair Trade, that the laborer gets as much of a say in the valuation of his/her product as the investor does. In short, the marginalization of the capitalist should not only imply more power for the investor, but the laborer should also get more power in the valuation process. Fair Trade cannot be reduced to a singular, historical moment where the investor and the laborer's valuation align. The post-industrial age cannot signal the return of a new protocol of commodity fetishism, as practiced by the investor rather than the capitalist.

"Mediated International Relations"

What is the relationship between North Korea and Nepal? In the globalizing world, is this such a absurd question? The absurdity is rather the fact that there is a 'non-relation' between these two nations when both are small, both can inform one another etc. There indeed must be some kind/level of flow of information, bodies, communication between the two countries, but, at least in the popular media, the nature of the relationship remains mysterious. Rather, what we seem to have is bursts of North Korean images suddenly coming through to us, on the day of some particular occasion. These images are of such a nature that we cannot seem to understand them, they are not invested with that much meaning (for us), but rather seem to be pure semblances that show us how the North Koreans live their lives...it is not a question of us understanding and connecting, but rather serving only as an audience. Why is there such detachment? 

The main assumption here is that there is such a thing as a North Korea (NK)-Nepal relationship, but that this relationship is mediated by Western powers who dominate the scene of geopolitics in different garbs: either as nations, or as organizations etc...We are at a model of international relations which emphasizes mediated international relations, which governs the relationships between two small countries by a (third) superpower.

This third superpower which dominates the relationship has access to streams of information and flows from both nations, but does not allow such a stream to flow to the other country directly. Rather, these flows pass through significant filters before they are seen in a third country. (And why particularly NK and Nepal? Perhaps because the dominoes theory is still in effect, that the superpower believes one 'troublesome' nation could influence the other...)

The Lacanian declaration that “there is no such thing as a sexual relation” applies here. There is no relationship between NK and Nepal, precisely because any type of information or statement from one towards the other never reaches the other, but reaches the superpower in between. There are not just two parties, but always a third party which performs the function of a mediator.

This mediating third party may not even be a nation-state, but rather something bigger and more faceless, something which can only be referred to as the “master signifier,” the signifying actor in control of all signs that flow from one nation to the other, which thrives in the cracks between two actors which desire to have relations with one another. And what is the nature of the master signifier? That it is absent from the scene, it is behind the scenes, pulling the strings of the lesser powers. The study of international relations as relationships between two nations never works if both the nations are small: in this case there is the need to realize what we call mediated international relations; a “non-relation” between two small nations as soon as there enters a mediating third party. The question we should ask is not “What is the real North Korea?” but rather “What is North Korea as seen by the North Koreans themselves?” This allows us to conceive of the role of the mediating third party in the NK-Nepal non-relation.

Enjoying the Irrational Social Contract in Late Capitalism

Studies of capitalism have focused on the economics of capitalism, and within economics the dominant object of study has been the theory of demand and supply. In this theory, it is assumed that social forces fix prices without intervention (or regulation) through the “natural” play of demand and supply of the goods produced in the economy. What we will be arguing is that such a theory is now completely outdated in “late capitalism,” which implies a more intense focus on populations demanding and supplying the goods rather than on the goods themselves. Indeed, we may even see that the notion of there being a good or product at the center of capitalism is itself an illusion. Rather, there is something like the Lacanian Real at the center, a lack of symbolization (a set of social relations without objectives or goods), or even more radically a void, at the contours of which is the service oriented capitalism of today. There is no such thing called a service-based capitalism; the concept has only arisen to show that capitalism can still be rational, progressive, innovative, enterprising etc. There is only what can be called “social capitalism,” a capitalism of the irrational social contract.

Let us first look at the model of demand and supply in a more contextual manner. It is assumed that demand for a good comes when there is a felt necessity or need of that good. The good is produced first, but exists outside of social relations, and at this moment it is enriched with all forms of knowledge, making the good sacred rather than demanded; the supplier itself special/exclusive rather than a subject of mechanical production. Then comes the demand, at which point the knowledge around the good undergoes a transformation...the good becomes defined for its “use value” . The good becomes necessary for some purpose. It is with such a demand that we first have the notion of a supply, that is, more than one good; mass production. The things operating behind the supply of a good bring about the good's availability and shortage. Such is the dynamic of demand and supply of interest here...

However, we have come to a period of capitalism which is defined by a more sturdy/permanent shortage of the good, or the overwhelming of the good by its demand, known as mass consumerism. No matter how many goods there are, and no matter what the price of the good, there is never enough of it. Advertisement, as the excess production of only the essence of a good (the advert as only the essence of the real thing), is everywhere, yet people are never tired of it, never sick of it. Advertisement, as the alternative fantasy to the real good, is all around us, telling us that we will get the goods, but in the future...right now we have to make do with advertisements of the good. In short, there are testaments to the fact that the good itself is now dead...there is no real good for us today; something has gone wrong in the supply mechanism and mass consumerism has not been reflected by an adequately performing supply mechanism.

One would tend to think that this end of goods-based capitalism entails the arrival of service-based capitalism. But, with an example, let us show that this is not so. In Nepal, there is a superstitious belief among families that when they cut their nails, they mustn't throw the nails in their own home because it brings bad luck. As part of a social contract, then, one family throws its nails in the neighbor's compound and the other family does the same to another neighbor. Everyone is getting everyone else's nails. What is most important to understand is that, as things stand, it is a “consumer” of a capitalist economy himself who is actively expending labor by cutting his nails, but all the while getting privileges for it by bringing himself good luck. He is shedding something of his and getting lucky for it. As long as nails grow on his fingers (for which he may or may not have to labor, it does not matter whether the person cuts his nails once or a hundred times in this logic of good luck with shedding), he will throw them in another's land and ensure his good luck. To make a quick generalization, capitalism has gotten so efficient that it no longer actually enslaves you or occupies you with work, rather, it pays you for doing something ultimately good for your own self. The circuitry of supply-demand has also been localized to small clusters, neighborhoods, small communities, small villages...Gone are the days when capitalism meant the whole city doing something productive under a capitalist model of demand and supply. Today, the imperative, as Zizek would say, is to enjoy, in other words, to do something (expend labor) which benefits yourself only and yet get paid (in 'good luck') for it. And what allows this imperative to enjoy to function is the social contract between people with an irrationality in the middle of it.

There is neither good nor service in late capitalism. So what is the location of the service? The service is next to the void (the Real) left by the absence of the good; it is capitalism's last-ditch attempt at rationality. The service-centered, rational capitalism operates when people pay for their hair to be cut, but, to be truthful to ourselves, we have to imagine a set of social relations, a social contract, today, where the person is paid by the barber to have his hair cut...no longer is the accurate model of capitalism prostitution (where you get paid to work) but rather the accurate logic is promiscuity (where you get satisfaction/"payment" for enjoying, payment for having the other do work).