Sunday, January 25, 2015

Thamel and Lakeside: Nepal's Good 'Societies of Spectacle'

If we live in a 'spectacle society' as thinkers like Guy Debord believe, then we live in a society dominated by the need for cultural engagement, and we must be aware that cultural practices and products play important roles in managing society and economy. The division of labor force in society is a division of people between those who enjoy high culture and those who enjoy low culture; division of labor no longer has to do with socioeconomic stature, but we are divided as regards our tastes and preferences of various cultural products and practices.

The enjoyment of culture is possible today through an expending of labor and energy. Zizek writes that the super-ego's forced imperative to “Enjoy!” dominates today's subjects, and by enjoying, the laborer becomes productive, or, he/she expends labor in order to enjoy. What is needed, however, is the opposite: in both high-cultural and low-cultural activity in Nepal, there should be an enjoyment of laboring itself, there should be a 'making enjoyable' of the time one spends in one's office or factory floor. This enjoyment of work must be what culture facilitates, rather than culture standing as an escape or as the only point of enjoyment for the laborer.

Problematically in Nepali society, the wages that laborers earn are immediately and directly routed to cultural enjoyment; it is a frantic transfer of wages into consumption because only designated cultural practices, places and products can be enjoyed here. The laborer only thinks of cultural enjoyment when he/she earns money via expending his/her labor. Even though it has some psychological implications, this immediate enjoyment is not a genuine enjoyment of cultural objects, rather, it is a form of management of money within an economy, where money swiftly flows through the economy because of the rapid consumption of cultural objects; whereas in the Western societies consumption of industrially produced goods takes place, in Nepal it is (handcrafted) cultural objects that are the things causing consumerism. Engaging in culture turn out to be necessary for managerial purposes of the economy and society.

But there are some positives in Nepali society regarding cultural enjoyment. Tourist places of Nepal, Thamel and Lakeside, line up sophisticated jewelry in the public street in front of their stores to enable all people to enjoy these cultural products regardless of purchasing power and socioeconomic stature (all can enjoy the beauty of jewelry); these places are a part of Nepal's effort to erase the division of labor along culture lines, to erase the division between high-culture expats and the low-culture sweepers in these tourist places. Additionally, the lowly laborer's location within a cultural community enables his/her work to become enjoyable compared to a non-cultural workplace, because in a cultural community, a relaxed tourist occupies the gaze/place of power observing how work is being done.

Thamel and Lakeside foster true leisure for the lowly worker via the erasure of barriers between high and low cultures and also through the situating of the worker in a culture-centered workplace. Leisure is not an absence of work, rather leisure and work must operate at the same time, and ultimately leisure enables the investment in work of more energy developed due to the enjoyment of that work, in that, the true object of leisure is to make work better; a laborer's work-related energy and productivity are not constants, but change depending on leisure (work is dependent not just on leisure time, but also on the quality of leisure: the Marxist habit of equating the value of things with their time/duration must be countered because such a reduction to time does not give much substance to cultural activities which are important but of short duration, such as a fleeting look at a jewelry item). Leisure is possible for a laborer immersed in a community dismantling high culture-low culture divisions of a populace and if the dismantling of barriers makes possible a contact with diverse cultural objects.    

Monday, January 19, 2015

Private Police vs. Policing Communities in Kathmandu

We see private companies offer security services to elite interests in Kathmandu. One reason why the private policing companies are today more apparent and prominent is that the mobility of elites has increased; it is unknown where elites may find themselves in Kathmandu, and so the regular police is incapable of providing the same kinds of protection and necessary surveillance as a private unit in direct contact with the elites would. The mobility of elites in Kathmandu, their loss of direction, place and purpose, signals a weakened position of elites as they traverse the streets looking for opportunities to make money, or to re-kindle their desire for investment. But re-kindling desire may take very long, even though it is an integral part of a slow process of economic recovery. In Lacan we see plenty of writing on desire, but even he is unable to offer a quick, short-run solution as to how precisely desire may be born or re-kindled once it has been lost. It seems re-kindling desire is a long-term concern for the economy, which means that its loss becomes a major problem. 

Nevertheless, absent of desire, a 'scavenging attitude' in the weakened elites is in play (they become like vultures), the elites have become today more desperate, and so their encroachment is now into more riskier terrain, their constant look for opportunities leading them to more criminal places. The regular ways of making money cease to be reliable, and the elites are led towards criminal places and even participating in criminal activities, becoming the target of crime themselves and hence needing protection. The knowledge objects (reports, surveys, video files) formed in the surveillance of the community will be very valuable for elites who seek to invest into Kathmandu, meaning that the private police force is utilized as a research arm of an elite capitalist endeavor. The private police force is nothing other than a morphing of economic interests with security concerns. 

On the other hand, we also have in Kathmandu's communities the development of a 'policing community' of actors aware of the persistent threats in their communities; the 'community-turned-police' is evident in some Kathmandu communities today and could become a trend among more communities. The evidences of the policing community are the prominent message-posts on public walls that say that a certain community has a “safety siren” in place, meaning that the community is policing and protecting itself through multiple panopticons, that is, with all houses in a neighborhood becoming a panopticon with its own local area of monitoring. A policing community is a commendable step towards realizing that the state police's harsh punishments are not desired in close-knit communities. In a policing community, the punishment administered for an 'internal' deviant would not be imprisonment or fines, but cultural ostracizing and dialogue-based confrontation.


In a policing community, root social and psychological causes of crime are more easily addressed than in state police prisons, effort and funds are not expended on solving the crime but on the rehabilitating of the deviant who has quickly been discovered because his/her signature habits are known; the policing role utilizes psychology and sociology more than the state police in order to get a grasp of the deviant behaviors, habits and potential plans that can then be addressed. Indeed, even the study of 'micro-economics' of the community becomes important, as the study of the rise and fall of the fortunes of the small community can help identify when a criminal activity is likely to occur. In this way, a more complete knowledge of the community is developed, but such a knowledge is not centralized to one authority figure, there is no central male patriarch of the community in charge, but, in a very important revolution, housewives, the unemployed, the unwell have all become the most important members of a policing community, observing as they can from their windows and becoming important as witnesses to criminal activity. When a crime does occur, for the community police the crime becomes a signal that a lot of things in the entire community are amiss, and each particular feature of the community is brought up to evaluation in the aftermath of a crime, and so once again a type of 'maternal involvement' with the community is evident, with the key motive being concern and not suspicion. What is at stake for the community police is not just this or that minor law which the state police is concerned with, but Law as such, the combination of all laws (a murder reveals a frustrating littering problem which could be connected to the murder...), which is the combined 'Law' in the sense of the Lacanian "Name of the Father," the Law of the need to protect the whole symbolic order from all kinds of threats, in other words, the Law of having to submit to other lesser laws, to submit to castration in the name of law if one is to continue to live in society. 

But what is important to note, in conclusion, is that the private police of the elites and the community-level policing activities of the rest are not to be understood as a part of a single increase in police activity, inspired by the perception of a common threat, but rather, private police and community police can be in opposition to one another. The elites, desperate and scavenging for ways to do business, are on the offensive in the communities, where their striving for knowledge knows no bounds, their desire for investment once again slowly re-kindled by the empty neighborhoods signalling potential, emptied not by their own private police's presence but because of the community police. The communities, on the defensive, are ever alert towards any sign of disturbance to their independence. The investment process works precisely by the nullifying of threats over a certain territory, for it is clear in warfare that the standing army is only a concern for a limited period of time, after which the job of nullifying other criminal elements in the conquered territory takes effect so that the territory can become economically viable. But the problem is that elite investment, and the drive towards investment, disturbs the independence of the communities. 

Thursday, January 8, 2015

The Nepali Madman: A Writer of Anti-Encyclopedia Nepali Texts

A look at Kathmandu's streets, and it becomes apparent that ways of treatment of mad people are not working. For the mad are there present in the street for years and years. Neither the criminal system nor psychiatry has worked to treat them, nor to confine them. The state does not treat all of them well, for they could be better clothed and given other adequate and basic materials. One of the places where the failure of treatment can be located is in the difficulty to account for the madman in normal writing. The mad elicit an abnormality not just in their behavior, but in the written material about them. How then does madness appear in writing? Madness is long descriptions in biographies in historical writing, madness is over-poetic language in the confessions and dialogue-remarks, madness is too lengthy and complex sentences...many forms of errors in writing are in fact also errors of madness; madness is what is "unsuitable" for serious and official writing, such as historical writing. An understanding of madness must be concerned with the formal writing on the mad and on those rare and special moments when the madman is asked to fill out a form, if that happens at all...madness, in other words, has a lot to do with writing, and this aspect of madness must be given attention. In illiterate Nepal, the madman can be considered, ironically, the hope to give Nepal the richness and substance in the written word where other normal writers may be lacking. But, on the other hand, in a place with illiteracy, including the madman's style of writing and brand of literature within the national narrative will indeed be difficult. In short, it is uncomfortable for us Nepalis not suited to the written word to digest the madman's writings. 

A quality of resistance to confinement is present in a madman's writing. It is testament to the fact that imprisonment or confinement is evident as much in the written word as in the confinement of the physical body. For the mad, the confinement via the text may be more disturbing than the confinement of the body, this may be precisely what differentiates the mad from other criminals. A constant worrying over the written word of a form/survey as an author would over his/her book: “How do I appear in that form I just filled?” over and above the concern with the body now being located within a ward. The mad does not mind surveillance of the location and distortions of the body, but is always concerned with the archive room, that one location in the ward which is in fact not surveyed as meticulously as everywhere else. Today, the ward's constant and obsessive awareness of the knowledge it produces, indeed, the very process of meticulous archiving, folder-ing, labeling, organizing, etc is a result of the interest shown by the potentially-dangerous madman towards the forms he/she had to fill. The madman converted the written forms into objects of interest and objects needing protection. (And indeed, the serious consultation of such forms by a warden rely on the very important question of what exactly a madman would see in them, so that the level of security to which these forms are submitted can be judged.) 

If Nepal is to treat madness in the right way, then it should consider major revisions to the way it writes official history, such as those found in government textbooks for school. The writing in these textbooks is inspired by the writing found in old encyclopedias, and this does practice will never include the madman, whose biography is full of minute details rather than major brush-strokes (“In 1984, the madman broke the smallest bone in his foot when he was trampled by a auto-rickshaw with the number 1882....”), whose social relations are too intricate to fit one sentence ("In 1988, the madman had an affair with a neighbor's sister, who happened to be a friend's cousin of his sister's husband, who happened to be a.....”), whose achievements are based on the conquest of micro-territories which are constantly in change rather than entire states, and so on. The madman's texts are anti-encyclopedia, and they are not fictional or made for more popular and leisurely consumption, and we are not speaking of those writers who write literature experimentally or "as a madman would write it," rather, we believe that it is in those protected forms of the psychiatric wards that the madman's literature is, his 'book' his and his whole oeuvre is. What must occur is a publication of the archives of the mad, if such archives are indeed written in Nepali wards, and if not, then the deliberate formalization of the ward's forms in the future, for it is in challenge of rigid formality that the madman can express. 

The Foucauldian notion of the 'death of the author' does not seem to apply to the madman, for the psychiatric forms which a madman fills out are of such a nature that they are precisely there to record the life of the author, to contain the evidence that the madman as author is alive and responsive: "What is your name?" "What is your date of birth?" "What happens to you?" and so on, the answers of all of which are signs of life. In a sense, the madman writes his autobiography through the help of the ward's form. Indeed, isn't the autobiography, that very important historical text, precisely the form of writing which would enable the madman to be most expressive in his/her own way? A study on how autobiography writing would help the mad should be conducted. And, the habit of including the madman in a biography or other types of historical texts, such as those on historical occurrences, must be discouraged.