In
Nepal, power relations have (temporarily) changed from what they were
during the monarchy. Let us map the power relations during the time
of the king with a set of lines perpendicular to one another, as
shown in this figure:
The
top most point in the vertical line in the figure above is occupied
by the monarch. The only point where there is any sense of a power
relation is in the point of intersection between the two lines,
meaning that the place the
subject to the king occupied was at the point of intersection of the
two lines. A defined
position was thus occupied by the subject, a position limited by a
kind of unspoken law: the subject must be 'perpendicular'
to the king. Only certain
subjects occupied such a position, and the collection of all such
privileged subject were considered a part of the kingdom (which
implies that kingdoms have nothing to do with territorial expansion,
but kingdoms are simply the territories that the king's subjects
inhabit.) The mobility of the subjects in this kind of structure was
from the edges of the horizontal line towards the point of
intersection: everyone wanted a relationship with the king, and hence
everyone attempted to move towards those sets of identity traits,
behaviors, characteristics and practices which would be recognized by
the king, which would be found among people who had a certain power
relation with the king. The movement towards the set of things which
a subject must do or occupy in order to be recognized by the king was
the theme to this kind of power relation. Another theme was the
violence shown to those who voluntarily or involuntarily did not move
towards these recognized kinds of identities and practices. The
violence shown by the powerful towards the kingdom's own
non-conforming subjects are higher in this type of power structure.
Moving
to the type of power relation that exists today, we may note the
different way it can be imagined, as in the figure in the left. The
contact between the top (the powerful) and the bottom of the pyramid
is now at the edges of the horizontal line, rather than at a fixed
point within it. There is no longer the need to conform to a narrow
identity or practice, for power is not concentrated to a
point in the base, but stretched across a line. A
spread of identities and practices are in contact with power. There
is a lessening of violence towards the subjects and a logic of
inclusion pervades the territory.
Using
Deleuze and Guattari's terms, the difference between the two power
structures could be called a movement from “territorializing”
power, which produces a body of rules or “codes” that allow a
subject to come to a relationship with the king if the subject conforms to
certain identity markers and cultural practices, to a
“deterritorializing” power, where the subjects are not concerned
about their obedience of the law regarding their identity, and where
power itself becomes more accountable towards them and approaches
them, at the borders, at the margins/edges. We are slowly moving to
the point where the crafting of one's identity and the subscription
to 'official'/state sanctioned cultural practice is not as important
in the composition of society as it was under the figure of the king.
In Deleuze and Guattari, coding and decoding come one after the other
in a cycle, and so we may expect a kind of resurgence in the
perpendicular relationship as evident in the strong focus on social
mobility, the growing exclusivity of power, the resurgence in the
official sanctioning of the right behavior, right culture and right
identity, and the receding of the expansive, Foucauldian “science
of government” for a careful and meticulous attention to the select
few within the power relation. However, one should note that the decoded and
deterritorialized power scheme of today is only a kind of image of
the real thing, since it will also give way without resistance.
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