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.